C. James

Every statistical operation is a projection through an information bottleneck, and every statistical result is jointly a property of the data and the bottleneck's geometry. This paper argues that the classical "paradoxes" of statistics — Simpson's paradox, the base rate fallacy, regression to the mean, the misinterpretation of p-values — are all instances of a single error: confusing a property of the compression for a property of the world. The same bottleneck/world confusion is shown to operate in adversarial attacks on AI safety classifiers (where attackers characterize and exploit the defender's projection geometry) and in institutional risk assessment (analyzed through Anthropic's Sabotage Risk Report for Claude Opus 4.6). The contribution is not the information bottleneck concept itself, which has formal precedent in Tishby et al. (2000), but the claim that it constitutes the generative grammar of inferential epistemics — and that recognizing this reveals the analyst's cognitive topology as legibly as it reveals properties of the data.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics and the Allocation of Organs for TransplantationJames F. Childress (bio)A quarter of a century ago, in my second year of teaching at the University of Virginia, I began to explore the emerging field of biomedical ethics through a seminar on “Artificial and Transplanted Organs,” which included both faculty and students from law, medicine, and the humanities. My paper for the seminar was entitled “Who Shall Live When Not All Can Live?” This experience drew me into biomedical ethics, because of the complex mix of ethical, legal, and medical issues and the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary and interprofessional dialogue.Several of the major problems confronting that seminar have persisted, often in altered form. In the area of organ transplantation, two significant issues continue to require society’s attention: (1) how can the organ supply be increased, and (2) how should the available organs be allocated? I want to make a few points about ethical criteria in the allocation of donated organs, as a way to indicate some directions for organ allocation policies in the twenty-first century. I will focus on the second question because I believe that a tremendous and ever-widening gap will persist between the need for transplantable organs and the supply of human cadaveric organs.Community Ownership of Donated Organs and Public ParticipationSince the mid-1980s, the operative conception of the ownership of donated organs has shifted, with major implications for the procedures used to formulate policies for organ allocation. As vice-chair of the federal Task Force on Organ Transplantation in the mid-1980s, I did not immediately realize that debates about allocation policies often reflected different conceptions of the ownership of donated organs. More specifically, organ allocation policies largely presupposed that donated organs belonged to, or were under the dispositional authority of, transplant surgeons, with only limited public accountability. However, the Task Force (1986) held that donated organs belong to the community, and that transplant professionals are only trustees and stewards of those organs for the [End Page 397] community’s welfare. This conception of ownership implies that the public should participate in setting the criteria for organ allocation.According to Jeffrey Prottas (1994), another member of the Task Force, these shifts represent the “socialization” of organ transplantation. Although professional dominance, through knowledge and power, continues in the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS)—the national organ procurement and transplantation network that was established in the late 1980s—that dominance is now more circumscribed and accountable, particularly because UNOS, in developing any allocation policy, has to respond “to public criticisms with public answers.” Not only is organ allocation policy now in the public domain—and thus a matter of public ethics rather than medical ethics—the terms of the debate have changed, as Prottas further notes, so that equity must be considered along with efficiency.Balancing Several Ethical Principles or ValuesThe main ethical criteria for organ allocation express principles that are prominent in the major competing theories of justice, particularly libertarian, egalitarian, utilitarian, and communitarian theories. The principles of liberty, equality, utility, and community all play important roles, and organ allocation policies often seek to balance these competing principles, which frequently are specified or circumscribed—for instance, utility is specified as medical utility. Just or equitable policies are found in the process of balancing.UNOS (1994) attempts to develop an equitable organ allocation system in light of a “set of basic principles” and “specific measurable objectives” that have been derived from these principles. It uses the metaphor of “balance” for its efforts to relate these different principles and objectives. For instance, it holds that balancing requires that “equal consideration” be given to both medical utility and to justice, so that neither can be ranked a priori over the other. However, it may not be possible to “give equal weight to [both] medical utility and justice” (UNOS 1994, p. 123) because trade-offs appear to be unavoidable in many policies and are consistent with the metaphor of balancing.Medical Utility and EqualityMedical utility—maximizing the welfare of patients suffering from end-stage organ failure—includes, at a minimum, attention to the factors that influence both graft and patient survival, as well...

ConclusionsFrom all this some unexpected results become apparent:Labriola is not the father of Italian Eurocommunism, but rather a thorough-going internationalist.Labriola might reasonably be called a Marxist humanist. In the light of his acknowledged dependence on Engels, this would seem directly to challenge the post-Lukács tendency variously to blame Engels for dialectical materialism, the Soviet scholastic spirit, or even Stalin.Croce's critique of Labriola is telling and Gramsci's direct response is ineffective in so far as he simply tries to revindicate Labriola the classical Marxist.It is at least curious that Gramsci attacks primarily Croce, the liberal idealist, rather than Gentile, the fascist idealist. Much of the criticism is that Croce does not go far enough, is not immanentist and historicist enough.This, in turn, suggests that one should look for Gramsci's original contribution and his overriding concern in political philosophy and not at all in metaphysics.

This essay analyzes the principle of double effect and, to a lesser extent, the distinction between killing and letting die in the context of the Pittsburgh protocol for managing patients who may become non-heart-beating donors or sources of organs for transplantation. It notes several ambiguities and unresolved issues in the Pittsburgh protocol but concludes that neither the principle of double effect nor the distinction between killing and letting die (with the prohibition of the former and the allowance of the latter under some circumstances) erects insurmountable obstacles to the implementation of the protocol. Nevertheless, the requirement of the principle of double effect that the intended good effects outweigh the unintended side effects necessitates careful attention to the probable overall impact of the proposed policy on organ procurement, particularly because public mistrust plays such a significant role in limiting the number of organ donations.

In this article, I pay special expository attention to two pieces of philosophically relevant Wittgenstein–Russell correspondence from the period leading up to the ultimate demise of Russell's Theory of Knowledge manuscript (in June 1913). This is done in the hopes of shedding light on Wittgenstein's notoriously obscure criticisms of Russell's multiple relation theory of judgement. I argue that these two pieces of correspondence (the first, a letter from Wittgenstein to Russell dated January 1913, and the second, a letter from Russell to Ottoline Morrell, reporting a tense confrontation with Wittgenstein on 26 May 1913) each refer to what is more or less the same approach to problems concerning the unity and well-formedness of propositions or judgements. However, the view advanced in Wittgenstein's January letter to Russell nevertheless differs in a key respect from the view of Russell's referred to in the May letter to Morrell. The difference involves Wittgenstein's incorporating qualities and relations as unsaturated parts of the copulae of atomic complexes, where these copulae are in turn conceived as logical forms. Because such an approach to logical form (and more specifically, to relations) was philosophically unpalatable to Russell, he undertook an alternative theoretical correction in the context of his 1913 Theory of Knowledge manuscript. This theoretical correction was discussed with Wittgenstein during the tense confrontation on 26 May, and involved deploying a supplemental significance constraint on judgements. It was this significance constraint on judgements, moreover, which was the ‘premiss’ alluded to by Wittgenstein in the context of a June 1913 letter to Russell, wherein he claims to express his objection to Russell's theory ‘exactly.’

To teach art well clearly requires considerable understanding of autonomy in art. Some theorists with autonomy in mind have argued that art must be without constraint. I challenge aspects of this view because it is unrepresentative of the art world, it is not necessarily good for art, it is an inadequate concept of autonomy in general, and it is very naïve about teaching responsibilities in art. For reasons to be explained, the restorative notion that I present is that art education requires the teaching contributions of art lessons that are appropriately aware of variable moral-ethical assessment issues1 in order to be able to facilitate, in an autonomous manner, more of the enigmatic and the venerable that is...

This book brings together an exceptional group of renowned scholars in philosophy and sociology, offering deep and insightful engagements with Jürgen Habermas’s thought. With contributions from some of the most prominent figures in contemporary social theory, the volume delivers authoritative analyses that highlight Habermas’s enduring influence on critical discourse. The essays examine key dimensions of Habermas’s work, from his genealogy of moral reasoning and critiques of postmetaphysical ethics to his dialogues with intellectual giants like Marx, Mead, Husserl, and Rawls. Contributors interrogate his theories of communicative action, democratic statehood, and ideology critique, applying them to urgent contemporary challenges—including the rise of authoritarian populism and transformations in the digital public sphere. This volume not only deepens our understanding of Habermas’s legacy but also reaffirms his relevance for contemporary debates on modernity, democracy, and rationality. With contributions from the most respected voices in the field, this volume is a vital publication—one that promises to inspire and shape scholarly discourse across philosophy, sociology, and political theory.

The Princeton Theological Seminary Dead Sea Scrolls Project provides critical editions of the Dead Sea Scrolls which are not copies of books in the Hebrew Bible (the so-called "Old Testament"). The format of the series is unique; each manuscript is presented with Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek text on the left page with facing English translation on the right. The series intends to be a standard reference work. An introduction with selected bibliography precedes each document.Volume 8A brings together Dead Sea Scrolls that develop stories in Genesis along with other texts. The Genesis Apocryphon (1Q20, 3Q14 frg. 8) is a creative, interpretive, and theologically driven rewriting of a portion of Genesis. Several other documents provide traditions about Noah and his sons, including the Book of Noah, Admonitions Based on the Flood, and a composite text of the Birth of Noah manuscripts (4Q534-536). The collection also provides the manuscript witnesses to A Joseph Apocryphon found on Masada.

Totalitarianism theory was one of the ratifying principles of the Cold War, and remains an important component of contemporary political discourse. Its origins, however, are little understood. Although widely seen as a secular product of anticommunist socialism, it was originally a theological notion, rooted in the political theory of Catholic personalism. Specifically, totalitarianism theory was forged by Catholic intellectuals in the mid-1930s, responding to Carl Schmitt's turn to the in 1931. In this essay I explore the notion's formation and circulation through the Catholic public sphere in both France and Austria, where was born as a new form of the traditional Catholic animus against the nation state project.