Oxford Philosophy Research Articles

ВИНИКНЕННЯ ТА РОЗВИТОК ОКСФОРДСЬКОЇ ФІЛОСОФІЇ ЯК ПЕРЕДУМОВА ФОРМУВАННЯ ФІЛОСОФІЇ ПОВСЯКДЕННОЇ МОВИ

B a c k g r o u n d . According to a common prejudice, especially prevalent among philosophers in the continental tradition, the philosophy of everyday language (sometimes referred to as Oxford philosophy), with its focus on what we usually say and mean, fundamentally expresses a positivist attitude. Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), who significantly contributed to the spread of this view, interprets the appeal to the concept analysis in these philosophers' writings as purely ideological: it fails to recognize the constructed nature of the social and views the social as a domain of brute facts where critical thinking should cease. Therefore, to grasp the essence of the ordinary language philosophy, it is crucial to identify the prerequisites for the emergence of this philosophical style and delve into its historical context. M e t h o d s . In this article, the author employs the method of historical-philosophical reconstruction to clarify the conditions of the formation and genesis of Oxford philosophy. General scientific methods of cognition – such as analysis, synthesis, and generalization – are used to elucidate key ideas and concepts that influenced the development of Oxford philosophy's method. Additionally, methods of systematization and comparison are applied. R e s u l t s . The article identifies the historical prerequisites for the formation of Oxford philosophy, specifying the key ideas and concepts that impacted the development of the ordinary language philosophy. It clarifies the distinctions and interconnections between the concepts of the philosophy of everyday language and Oxford philosophy. C o n c l u s i o n s . For ten years following the end of the Second World War, the University of Oxford became a hub of exceptionally productive philosophical activity. This period laid the groundwork for the emergence of a new and original philosophical movement known as the "Ordinary language philosophy" or "Oxford philosophy". However, equating the ordinary language philosophy entirely with Oxford philosophy is not accurate. The former term pertains specifically to the methodology of analyzing natural language expressions in the post-World War II era. In contrast, Oxford philosophy encompasses a broader historical context, including the pre-war period of philosophical activity at the University of Oxford. Thus, Oxford philosophy should be understood as a historical-philosophical stage that ultimately led to the formation of the philosophy of everyday language.

Graphs in the 1680s: Martin Lister, Robert Plot, William Molyneux and John Warner

In late 1683, the physician and F.R.S. Martin Lister displayed to the Royal Society a new way of recording barometric observations, which amounted in all but name to the construction of line graphs. The innovation was communicated to the Oxford Philosophical Society, where Robert Plot used the method to display a year’s observations, published in the Philosophical Transactions early in 1685. At the Dublin Philosophical Society, William Molyneux displayed a month’s worth of observations kept in the same way during May 1684. Lister’s own engraved forms—what amounted to graph paper—circulated among these groups but are not known to survive; Molyneux had forms of his own engraved. Finally, the London instrument maker John Warner engraved his own version of a similar form for recording weather observations and offered it to Plot. Two exemplars survive, but neither Warner’s offer nor this graphical method itself seem to have been more widely taken up in this period. This paper reviews the evidence for this early interest in and promotion of line graphs and graph paper, a century before the wider uptake of these technologies.

The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe edited by Roger Teichmann, (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2022); pp. 520, £ 97.00, hbk

The Oxford Handbook of Elizabeth Anscombe edited by Roger Teichmann, (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2022); pp. 520, £ 97.00, hbk

The New Science and the Virtuoso Reader in Thomas Creech’s Lucretius

Thomas Creech’s 1682 translation of Lucretius, the first complete English version printed, earned its author praise from the likes of Aphra Behn, John Evelyn, and Nahum Tate. Creech’s work has recently attracted renewed attention from scholars of Lucretius’s reception, who have situated his translation within the context of Restoration intellectual culture. This article argues that Creech’s Lucretius cannot be understood without reference to the new science of the seventeenth century, particularly the experimentalism of Robert Boyle, which forms a more important context to the conception and reception of the translation than has previously been supposed. The first section following the introduction assembles information about Creech’s institutional context in the late 1670s and early 1680s, with a focus on the scientific interests that preoccupied his contemporaries at Wadham College, Oxford, and the Oxford Philosophical Society. The next section examines the Lucretius translation itself and the appended notes, demonstrating Creech’s close engagement with the Boyle-Hobbes controversy on the existence of vacua. The final section concludes that Creech addressed his translation especially to readers among the “virtuosi,” the fellows and fellow travelers of the Royal Society, and perhaps even more specifically to Boyle himself. Creech’s Lucretius is thus shown to offer an illuminating case study of the intersections of literature, classical scholarship, and science in Restoration England.

Thomas Willis - His life and times

2021 marks the quatercentenary of the birth of Thomas Willis on 27 January 1621. As a physician in Oxford, Willis's work in the 1650s provides an example of rural medical practice in early modern England. As a member of the Oxford Philosophical Club that met from the 1640s, he was central to the move from classical scholasticism to accounts of anatomy and physiology based on observation and experiment. As Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy in Oxford, the surviving records of his lectures from the 1660s provide an example of pedagogy in medicine at that time. And, after moving to London in 1667, Willis continued to interact with a community of scientists and physicians who transformed ideas on respiration, muscular movement, and the nervous system. Despite a busy clinical practice, Willis found time to write fourteen treatises on anatomy and physiology, clinical medicine, and therapeutics. These were published between 1659 and 1675, the year in which he died. Willis's method was to replace dogma with empirical evidence: ‘I determined to believe Nature and ocular demonstrations [and] did chiefly inquire into the offices and uses of the Brain and its nervous Appendix. I addicted myself to the opening of Heads on which a more certain Physiologie [and] Pathologie of the Brain and nervous stock, might be built’. This celebratory lecture will set Willis's ideas in the context of the times in which he worked and assess their legacy for the subsequent accumulation of knowledge relating to the nervous system.

TobyOrdThe Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of HumanityHachette Books, 2020, 480 p., $30.00

By existential risk the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord means the “permanent destruction of human potential.” Actual human extinction is existential, but so would be the irreversible collapse of civilization. In the latter category, for example, catastrophic climate change through a runaway greenhouse effect could yield such a future, with human population reduced to a remnant left clinging to life; a world-wide totalitarian regime, self-perpetuating through “technologically enabled indoctrination, surveillance, and enforcement,” would also count. In this book, Ord lays out the range of existential threats, both familiar and novel, and offers a well-documented and (where documents fail) well-reasoned assessment of their various likelihoods. His bottom line: “Given everything I know, I put the existential risk this century at around one in six: Russian roulette” (p. 30). Alarming enough, and if continued, as he says, an unsustainable level of risk, “unlikely to last more than a small number of centuries.” For humans to survive over the longer term it will have to be greatly lowered. The period we are living in now, with humanity at high risk of destroying itself, Ord calls the Precipice. Others have trod this ground. John Leslie's The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction (1996)—reviewed in PDR 23 no. 4—was an early entrant in the genre. Leslie's treatment, more casual than Ord's, arrived at a roughly 70 percent overall chance of avoiding extinction over the next five centuries, somewhat higher than Ord but in the same ballpark. In Ord's enumeration, anthropogenic risks are the main threat to survival, vastly exceeding natural risks. The largest natural existential risk is eruption of a supervolcano like the ones that created the Yellowstone caldera in Wyoming and Lake Toba in Sumatra, which is put at a one in 10,000 chance over the next century. (Existential risk from an asteroid collision is far smaller.) In contrast, anthropogenic risks are one or even two orders of magnitude greater. An existential catastrophe this century through nuclear war or from climate change are both assessed at one in 1,000; from a human-engineered pandemic, one in 30. Without the condition of irreversibility, of course, these risks would be much greater. Most threatening of all in Ord's account, though also the most speculative, is the possible malign consequence of the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to a degree that exceeds human levels, a prospect the “expert community” on average evidently considers achievable, more likely than not by the end of the century. An AGI system “optimized toward inhuman values,” could arrogate an ever-increasing share of power, with humanity, in effect, ceding its control. We may then face “a deeply flawed or dystopian future locked in forever.” The judged risk for the century: one in ten. The risk assessment exercise points to where remedial efforts need to be directed, and to their urgency. The agenda is straightforward, calling for improvements in international coordination on security, devising institutions that take greater account of the interests of future generations, and strengthening the governance of potentially dangerous new technologies. Such efforts are grossly underresourced: “we can state with confidence that humanity spends more on ice cream every year than on ensuring that the technologies we develop do not destroy us” (p. 58). That might seem to wrap up the author's task. But Ord's vision, spelled out in a final chapter, is more expansive. With existential security attained and humanity's potential secured, “we will be past the Precipice, free to contemplate the range of futures that lie open before us… the grand accomplishments our descendants might achieve with eons and galaxies as their canvas” (pp. 190–191). The time horizon is unlimited: mammal species in the fossil record typically last a million years. For us, therefore, “almost all humans who will ever live have yet to be born” (p. 43). (Interestingly, this directly contradicts an argument of Leslie, who applied a version of the so-called anthropic principle—that we today should be seen as temporally average, not exceptionally early, observers among all humans past and future—to conclude that an ultra-long human future is highly improbable.) Ord's future has no place for mundane demography, which might worry about sustainable net reproduction rates, or for regional differentiation, which might bring in geopolitics. Indeed, a radical impartialism prevails: all lives matter, and not just spatially, as in Peter Singer's One World: The Ethics of Globalization (2002) or in Ord's own innovative project on “effective altruism,” but also over time: “people matter equally regardless of their temporal location” (p. 44). Ethical purism accords massive weight to future generations. The book ends with seven meaty appendices, on topics such as the purported inadmissibility of time discounting, past nuclear weapons accidents, and the value of protecting humanity (with existential risk formalized as a hazard rate, r).

Space: A History ed. by Andrew Janiak

Reviewed by: Space: A History ed. by Andrew Janiak Marius Stan Andrew Janiak, editor. Space: A History. Oxford Philosophical Concepts. Series editor, Christia Mercer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xiii + 351. Paper, $24.95. This is a book with a purpose: it aims to chronicle the life of a concept (space) from its birth in ancient Greece to its growth into centrality for early modern metaphysics, and its end with Kant, after whom classical space got displaced to a marginal position. The volume is commendable for its good balance of broad scope, depth of insight, and careful exposition. Its chapters impressively combine analytic sharpness with sensitivity to historical context and philological nuance. Moreover, the gender balance among contributors is admirably even. [End Page 343] Barbara Sattler lucidly teaches us how the Greeks juggled a number of related ideas (roughly corresponding to our notions of place, region, position, and interval) yet without arriving at a concept of space qua global carrier of metric structure. Marije Martijn gives a novel account of Proclus's elusive notions, imagination and intelligible matter. That greatly helps us see his enormous influence on posterity. He anticipated strikingly key parts in the space doctrines of Descartes, Newton, and Kant; and his kinematic foundations for geometry overlap much with the analogous views of Hobbes and Kant, who also thought that geometric figures are generated by the motion of points and lines. Medieval doctrines of place and void span some twelve centuries, and presenting them usefully in one chapter would be hopeless. Edith Dudley Sylla wisely restricts her focus to Nicole Oresme and his milieu, but her account teaches a broader lesson. As they grappled with Aristotle's physics, fourteenth-century figures produced doctrines that anticipate visibly the early moderns' absolutism and relationism; strikingly, medieval distinctions and heuristics formed the background to debates about space and place well into the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence. And yet, as Andrew Janiak points out in his chapter, from Plato to Suarez, the concept of space remained marginal; that began to change with Cartesian science. Experiments suggesting that vacua might exist; efforts to rethink the nature of geometry; and a new science of motion that (by the Law of Inertia) appealed to preferred directions in space—all these developments conspired to make space-concepts explanatorily fundamental, and central to theoretical philosophy: "thinkers such as Leibniz and Newton begin to treat space and its structure as worthy of philosophical analysis in a new way" (247). Before Einstein, cognitive access to space was by two channels: geometry and vision. The latter posed serious challenges. It required theorists to reconcile two things: a metaphysics of how material facts (about the size, shape, and distance of things) make cognitive contact with an immaterial mind; and an epistemology of the mysterious inferential processes whereby the mind passes from two-dimensional evidence (patterns on a screen-like retina) to knowledge of three-dimensional spatial relations. Many took these challenges on between Euclid and Berkeley; thus, explaining them well is far from easy. Gary Hatfield does it with admirable skill: he presents the very indispensable elements and key historical junctures in the long quest for a coherent theory of vision. Kant saw himself as the last early modern—the one who moved past difficult dilemmas by a third, better way. Michael Friedman's chapter vindicates that image. He gives a sharp reading of Kant's difficult thought that his doctrine of space fares better than Leibniz's or Newton's, and a quite novel account of God's relation to space (another early modern conundrum). Also difficult, though not for Friedman, was Kant's claim that space does not obtain for the things-in-themselves. This volume will make an excellent companion textbook to a number of courses, especially surveys of the major periods in the history of philosophy, and introductions to the philosophy of space and time. It has two other virtues beyond its pedagogical merits. First, by spanning two millennia of doctrines, it shows nicely how metaphysical reflection feeds off of sources as diverse as basic physics, natural theology, and the physiology of vision—which in turn gave epistemology a chance to reflect on how we reconcile such...

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF J. L. AUSTIN’S SATURDAY MORNING MEETINGS FOR «CONTINUITY» OF OXFORD PHILOSOPHY

I will try to focus in my talk on the history and significance of the so-calledSaturday Morning Meetings—a scien-tific seminar that John Langshaw Austin (President of the Aristotelian society 1956-1957) organized in 1947 at the University of Oxford—forthe development of Oxford philosophy. The ideas that were discussed at these informal meetings were subsequently seriously developed within the philosophy literature, and many participants of the seminar became world-famous philosophers. The success of the Saturday Morning Meetings can be explained by the fact that it was not a formalized University institution, but a community of like-minded people who believed that only through joint discussion philosophical problems could be clarified.

Continuous Time and Instantaneous Speed in the Works of William Heytesbury and Richard Swineshead

Abstract The term ‘instantaneous speed’ that appears explicitly in the works of famous Oxford fourteenth-century natural philosophers, William Heytesbury and Richard Swineshead (nicknamed The Calculator), seems odd in the context of the then accepted Aristotelian worldview for at least two reasons. First, Aristotle himself stated unambiguously that no motion can occur in an instant. Second, after fourteenth-century atomism was rejected, the majority of thinkers denied the existence of instants, understood as indivisibles. Nevertheless, both Oxford philosophers describe instantaneous speed, also in the context of the mean-speed theorem, in a way that allowed them to preserve the continuity of time. This description may seem similar to the one formulated by Newtonians in the seventeenth century, but is so only superficially, however, as their backgrounds and contexts were different.

The Language of "Political Science" in Early Modern Europe.

Historians of early modern "scientia civilis" focus on two main understandings of that concept: the juridical and the rhetorical. This article focuses on another way of thinking about civil science in the early modern period, the origins and development of which are in the Aristotelian commentary tradition. This article begins with political science in Aristotle then turns to the works of commentators from Albert the Great in the thirteenth century, to the Oxford philosopher John Case in the late sixteenth. It ends on ways that this history offers new perspectives on Hobbes's science of politics, and on the broader historiography.

Емуляція і жертва (до аналізу ціннісного аспекту створення штучного інтелекту в моделі Ніка Бострома)

The article marks that in a newest period of history when the prospect of achievement of technological singularity need ake effectiveness of traditional cognitive models, special actuality consideration of ethic-philosophical аnd socio-anthropogenic acquires and aspects of creation of artificial intelligence to be revised (AI). Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom tells about "loading of value" in the intelligence system, but does not examine emulation of experiencing as its basic condition. Attention to this problem predetermines introduction to the research field of the valued vector as a "victim" concept. It is reasonable, that general basis of ordinary human logic and developers of the systems of the calculated machines programming is a concept of sense, and one of key elements that form sense, there is a value that exists in a transition from its embodiment to the loss. Embodiment and loss of value form experiencing and become an event. Transition from the processes of reflection, that is imitated during creation of AI to the "event" concept as field and kernel of axiology of "experiencing" concept is the general element of research of psychology, axiology and to development of the systems of AI . It also contains sense of "victim" concept as passing from external to internal. If consciousness can be presented as ability of reflection, and appearance of life is impossible without replication id est self - copying then development of such presentation provides, for that a printing-down takes place over and over, but not fully, not quite, id est on other basis. The change of this basis means possibility of loss of present existence as to the result of action of mechanism self-copying and outlines possibility of introduction of "victim" concept. At the same time, a victim as a mechanism of natural selection differs from a victim in the human understanding. The feature of human form of value existence appears in its description of oblatoryness, where transformation of the last on new is the act realized and voluntarily from the side of man. A conclusion is grounded in the article, that it follows to give possibility to develop freely and without limitations, that will allow it (id est AІ) to investigate itself research of AІ and AІ, and it follows to provide the terms of such research a man, that in a regenerate form demonstrates the stages of oblatory motion of man to the inevitably result of "loading of value" in a certain imitation system.

A State Like Any Other State or a Light Unto the Nations?

A State Like Any Other State or a Light Unto the Nations? Michael Brenner (bio) At the height of his career, David Ben-Gurion wrote in Israel's Government Year Book: Two basic aspirations underlie all our work in this country: to be like all other nations, and to be different from all the nations. These two aspirations are apparently contradictory, but in fact they are complementary and interdependent. We want to be a free people, independent and equal in rights in the family of nations, and we aspire to be different from all other nations in our spiritual elevation and in the character of our model society, founded on freedom, cooperation, and fraternity with all Jews and the whole human race …1 These two contrasting and often conflicting aspirations have characterized the Zionist movement from its very outset and the State of Israel during the last seventy years. On the one hand, there was the desire that a Jewish state would put an end to viewing the Jews as the eternal "others" and return them to the "normal course of history". To be a nation like any other nation, ke-khol am ve'am—this phrase even entered Israel's Declaration of Independence. On the other hand, there was the striving for the prophetic ideal to be a "light unto the nations"—or la-goyim.2 A Jewish state, the logic went, had to reach for higher ideals than other nations, and to be a model state. The conflict between normalcy and uniqueness was not a brainchild of Ben-Gurion, but deeply engrained in the Zionist idea. Theodor Herzl believed that only when the Jews, "like all other nations" had their own state, antisemitism would cease and they would be respected by the world. He was supported by other Zionists in this longing for a normal existence. Addressing the fifth Zionist Congress in 1901, his closest associate, Max Nordau, demanded an end to the peculiar situation of the Jews especially with respect to their occupational structure, and proclaimed the beginning [End Page 3] of a normal existence, similar to that of all other nations: "The Jewish people can only be redeemed from its bitter misery once it leads a normal economic life on its own soil."3 Jacob Klatzkin formulated the tasks of Zionism as follows: "In Eretz Israel the Jewish people will regain their normality. … Only by being rooted in its own soil will they leave behind their elitist Jewish traits and become a real people."4 A prominent example of the Zionist longing for normality was the long-time leader of the Zionist movement. Chaim Weizmann is reported to have responded with great pride, when asked by an aristocratic British lady admirer if the Jews really wanted to give up all that made them special over the millennia, just to become another Albania: "Yes! Albania! Albania!"5 The eminent Oxford philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, who told this story, was later asked a similar question by the Russo-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève: "Jews … with their rich and extraordinary history, miraculous survivors from the classical age of our common civilisation—that this fascinating people should choose to give up its unique status, and for what? To become Albania! How could they want this?" Berlin's reply was sharp: However it might look to the world in general, to condemn the oyster for wishing to avoid the sufferings that led to the disease that might, in some cases, result in a pearl, was neither reasonable nor just. The oyster wished to live an oyster's life, to realize itself as an oyster, not solely to serve as the unhappy means of enriching the world with masterpieces of art or philosophy or religion that sprang from its sufferings.6 The concept of a normal nation, or a fictitious "Albania", however, always competed with the claim to be and to remain a special nation with a unique state, based on divine promises and their secular transformations. Rather than regarding his new movement merely as a means to liberate Jews from oppression and to lead them back to their old homeland, Herzl had much more ambitious plans of an "experiment...

Geach and Ascriptivism: Beside the Point

This paper discusses the first incarnation of what came to be known as the “Frege-Geach” point. The point was made by Peter Geach in his 1960 essay “Ascriptivism”, and developed in “Assertion”, a 1965 piece. Geach’s articles launch a wholesale attack on theories of non-descriptive performances advanced by “some Oxford philosophers” whom he accuses of ignoring “the distinction between calling a thing ‘P’ and predicating ‘P’ of a thing”. One view that Geach specifically targets is H. L. A. Hart’s claim (in the 1949 essay “The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights”) that sentences of the form “X φ-ed” are not primarily descriptive but ascriptive of responsibility for actions. Hart explicitly accepted Geach’s criticism, and disowned his essay. I argue that he was wrong to do so. Perhaps the essay was worth retracting, but not because of Geach’s objections. I begin by restating and refining Geach’s arguments, in order to bring out the flaw he claimed to have detected in the “pattern of philosophising” that he took Hart’s essay to exemplify. I go on to argue that Geach’s original point poses no obstacle either to non-descriptivism in general, or to Hart’s sui generis non-descriptivist claim in particular.

Royal Patronage and Anti-Papalism from Ockham to Wyclif

Oxford scholarship in the fourteenth century, focusing on Ockham and Wyclif, is a topic which might have been ideally chosen to appeal to the late and much lamented Beryl Smalley and, had she lived to participate in the Oxford Conference proceedings, it is hard to imagine that this would not have been in a very real sense her conference. Regretfully however, it had to become the occasion for the publication of her volume of memorial essays, to which the present collection must appear in some sense as a sequel. I hope that the following pages can be seen as my own personal tribute to a great scholar who, unlikely as it may seem, I was privileged for a quarter of a century to be able to regard as a friend and correspondent. Her immediate and instinctive kindness to a very awkward young student is something to be remembered with very warm personal gratitude. I had been working on the publicists of the first half of the fourteenth century, and had been inclined to draw a line after Ockham: she encouraged me to continue into the later part of the century and attempt to deal with Wyclif. He became a common bond between us, despite the great differences in our particular interests, attitudes and approach. She would occasionally remind me that someone whose working life was spent in Cambridge and London had no business to be dealing with Oxford scholarship and had little hope of understanding it properly. This is, of course, very true. Oxford philosophy tended to be Aristotelian and nominalistic: its theology, we are told, neoplatonic, Augustinian, realist. Yet when they left Oxford to find positions at the royal and papal courts, the Aristotelian nominalists might end up as exponents of papal supremacy, whereas it was the allegedly Augustinian realists who are to be found maintaining the rights of the crown. It is all very mysterious, very Oxford, and I shall not attempt to solve these problems here. Instead, I shall turn to the safer prospect of comparing and contrasting an aspect of the political theory of the more mature Ockham and the not so young Wyclif.

Arthur MacIver’s Diary: Cambridge (October 1929 – March 1930)

Abstract This article consists of extracts from a young Oxford philosopher’s diaries recounting his visit to Cambridge in his first postgraduate years and some subsequent revivals of contact. These extracts shed fascinating light on the social and academic situation in Cambridge shortly after Wittgenstein’s return there in the Lent Term 1929 and permit readers to see him from a fresh perspective. An introduction helps to view these extracts in their proper context.

Book Review: Memory: A History

Book Review: Memory: A History

Superintelligence: Fears, Promises and Potentials

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, in his recent and celebrated book Superintelligence, argues that advanced AI poses a potentially major existential risk to humanity, and that advanced AI development should be heavily regulated and perhaps even restricted to a small set of government-approved researchers. Bostrom’s ideas and arguments are reviewed and explored in detail, and compared with the thinking of three other current thinkers on the nature and implications of AI: Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly Singularity Institute for AI), and David Weinbaum (Weaver) and Viktoras Veitas of the Global Brain Institute.
 
 Relevant portions of Yudkowsky’s book Rationality: From AI to Zombies are briefly reviewed, and it is found that nearly all the core ideas of Bostrom’s work appeared previously or concurrently in Yudkowsky’s thinking. However, Yudkowsky often presents these shared ideas in a more plain-spoken and extreme form, making clearer the essence of what is being claimed. For instance, the elitist strain of thinking that one sees in the background in Bostrom is plainly and openly articulated in Yudkowsky, with many of the same practical conclusions (e.g. that it may well be best if advanced AI is developed in secret by a small elite group).
 
 Bostrom and Yudkowsky view intelligent systems through the lens of reinforcement learning – they view them as “reward-maximizers” and worry about what happens when a very powerful and intelligent reward-maximizer is paired with a goal system that gives rewards for achieving foolish goals like tiling the universe with paperclips. Weinbaum and Veitas’s recent paper “Open-Ended Intelligence” presents a starkly alternative perspective on intelligence, viewing it as centered not on reward maximization, but rather on complex self-organization and self-transcending development that occurs in close coupling with a complex environment that is also ongoingly self-organizing, in only partially knowable ways.
 
 It is concluded that Bostrom and Yudkowsky’s arguments for existential risk have some logical foundation, but are often presented in an exaggerated way. For instance, formal arguments whose implication is that the “worst case scenarios” for advanced AI development are extremely dire, are often informally discussed as if they demonstrated the likelihood, rather than just the possibility, of highly negative outcomes. And potential dangers of reward-maximizing AI are taken as problems with AI in general, rather than just as problems of the reward-maximization paradigm as an approach to building superintelligence. If one views past, current, and future intelligence as “open-ended,” in the vernacular of Weaver and Veitas, the potential dangers no longer appear to loom so large, and one sees a future that is wide-open, complex and uncertain, just as it has always been.

In whose best interests?

After 13 years caring for parents who both had dementia, one Oxford philosopher debates the ethics of making decisions for those who can no longer make them themselves.

Atonement in Theology and Literature

Some theology of atonement and “at-one-ment” has talked in terms of love rather than justice or punishment, and the Oxford philosopher J. R. Lucas said that we need to be led out of our egocentric predicament by love. A study of George Eliot’s Silas Marner , Jane Austen’s Emma , Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment , and Ian McEwen’s Atonement reveals only partial truth in that adage, for human complexity resists being encapsulated in a neat theological formula. C. S. Lewis’s distinction of four kinds of love proves helpful in dealing with our ambiguities.

Booker Prize 2014*

Booker Prize 2014* Merritt Moseley Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. Little, Brown, 2014. 337 pages. $26; Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Knopf, 2014. 334 pages. $26.95; Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Putnam, 2013. 308 pages. $26.95; Howard Jacobson, J. Hogarth, 2014. 342 pages. $25; Ali Smith, How to Be Both. Pantheon, 2014. 384 pages. $25.95; Neel Mukherjee, The Lives of Others. Norton, 2014. 514 pages. $26.95. The 2014 Man Booker Prize was awarded, and the Empire yet stands. The major talking point around this historic award in 2013 was the decision of its organizers to admit American novels to the competition, when previously it had been limited to any novel published in England and in English by nearly anybody, so long as the author was not from the United States. A broad stretch of UK literary opinion opposed any change, either because it was inequitable (the National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prize not being open to their books); because it was inevitable that US novelists would come to dominate; because the judges would be overworked; because the character of the prize would change (though how specific that character could be to include cultures as diverse as those of Canada, Nigeria, Hong Kong, and India, but vulnerable to an American taint, no one could say); because it would become harder for Australians to win; or because the US already exercises too much influence through the mfa programs in which many Commonwealth authors have been educated. The Australian Peter Carey, one of only three two-time winners, added his protest in October, mentioning the exclusivity of the Pulitzers and National Book Awards, some ill-defined “particular cultural flavour” inhering in Commonwealth fiction, and his distaste for global marketing. Some of these fears may have seemed realized when the longlist of thirteen titles appeared in July. There were five Americans on it, but the inclusion of six British authors also helped to squeeze the Commonwealth representation down to one Australian and one Indian (resident in London). As usual the reaction was largely about who was not on the list—or in the usual term, who was snubbed. Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Edward St. Aubyn, and Philip Hensher—previous winners or nominees, all British, of whom Hensher is the most vehement opponent of American eligibility—all had new books out and failed to make the longlist, as did the American Donna Tartt. The judging panel consisted of four men and two women, half of them employed at Oxford University (which seems very narrow). The chair was A. C. Grayling, an Oxford philosopher. There was also a neuroscientist, a former literary editor of the Times, two well-known literary scholars, and [End Page 286] a former director of Literature at the Arts Council, now an Oxford don. It became known that the voting was not unanimous and that the chair, Grayling, used his deciding vote to unblock the decision. In the end, fears of automatic American dominance, or Australian helplessness, proved empty. The winner, announced on October 14, was the Australian novelist Richard Flanagan, for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Flanagan is a Tasmanian, and a veteran writer with five previous novels to his credit. Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others, the only other Commonwealth book to make even the longlist, is but his second novel. One clever bettor—who (like the bookmakers themselves) did not read any of the entries but worked out who would win and did well betting on Flanagan at 5-1—explained his “process.” He read reviews of the books, but he spent more time reading reviews of the judges, reasoning that, though the two women would not ordinarily favor a war book, the love story would rescue Flanagan for them and particularly that Grayling, a well-known atheist, would favor a book suggesting that life was chaotic and without direction. Grayling’s vote delivered the win to Flanagan. The six shortlisted novels were, in addition to Flanagan’s and Mukherjee’s, Howard Jacobson’s J and Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, and the two American entries, Karen Joy...