Emerson Bodde

Contributing to the burgeoning philosophical aesthetics of video games, especially the ontology of video games, this paper argues that the medium is capable of a unique form of class-based discrimination. Building on C. Thi Nguyen’s framework of agential aesthetics, a central element of video game art is the scenario for practical reasoning set up by the goals, abilities, and obstacles presented to the player. However, when ‘microtransactions’—the opportunity to use real-world money to effect in-game conditions—are included, the real-world properties of the player—i.e. one’s access to financial resources—determine the kind of practical scenario one is presented with. The poor and the rich ‘see’ different artworks, and in ways not easily circumvented because this discrimination is intrinsic to the artwork itself, rather than due to social context. It is demonstrated that this lack of circumvention makes this discrimination unlike the kinds of classist discrimination seen in traditional artforms like painting, theater, or film, which are either reducible to some kind of propositional claim about class made by the artwork, or discriminating constraints on the accessibility of the artwork attributable to social organization rather than the artwork itself. The paper concludes by showing how this account further satisfies more demanding definitions of classist aesthetic objects, since the choice to include microtransactions expresses an affirmation of classist discrimination and potentially induces aesthetic cultivation which inclines the players to accept hierarchized political economic relations and dull, unsatisfying, and ‘grindy’ labor.

Contributing to the burgeoning philosophical aesthetics of video games, this paper argues that the medium is capable of a unique form of class-based discrimination. Following C. Thi Nguyen’s framework of agential aesthetics, a central element of video game art is the scenario for practical reasoning set up by the goals, abilities, and obstacles presented to the player. However, when ‘microtransactions’—the opportunity to use of real-world money to effect in-game opportunities—are included, the real world properties of the player—i.e. one’s access to financial resources—determine the kind of practical scenario one is presented. The poor and the rich ‘see’ different artworks, and in ways not easily circumvented because this discrimination is intrinsic to the artwork itself, rather than due to social context. I show that this lack of circumvention makes this discrimination unlike the kinds of classist discrimination seen in traditional artforms like painting, theater, or film.

In this paper, I argue that Katharine Jenkins’s concept of ontic injustice can be extended to apply to the case of social class, thereby helping to address the abiding class-ignorance of the social ontology field that Åsa Burman has recently diagnosed. Ontic injustice, as a moral wrong inflicted on a person in being socially constructed as a certain kind, requires both an account of the ontology of that kind and of the specified normative entitlement infringed. This paper satisfies both of these by supplying a social ontology of class as an embodied social identity centered on group-defining differential relationships towards work. Through an analysis of the necessary preconditions for class-differentiated work, I derive a normative standard of the human as a being capable of rationally coordinating and developing itself in multiple distinct ways. Combining these elements results in what I dub the Anthropological Critique of the ontic injustice of social class which applies to the wrong perpetrated in any sort of class society. In carrying out this exercise, several minor incongruencies motivate proposing further modifications to the ontic injustice concept as Jenkins sketches it. These include softening the emphasis on the wrong of ontic injustice being adequately elaborated in property and rights terminology and acknowledging that consideration for factors like the epigenetics of social kinds defined by ontic injustice sometimes entails that the injustice consists of both an abstract moral injury and an effect upon the life of those included in the relevant social kind.

Much recent work in the value theory of autonomous and intelligent systems (AIS) revolves around three issues. First is the alignment problem: the problem of producing AIS whose values align with humanity's interests. Second, superintelligence: the potential for AIS to develop intelligence which would surpass even the most intelligent humans. An increasing number of authors argue that superintelligent AIS could emerge overnight because of a recursively improving process-this is the singularity hypothesis. Further, many of the same authors believe that the concatenation of these problems should direct interest to the long-term potential for misaligned and superintelligent AIS which could pose risks of existential proportions to human interests. Therefore, they argue for a policy stance which we describe as “hard alignment,'’ the proposal of cooperation with technological experts to avoid hypothetical scenarios where AIS disempower humanity. On the other hand, we describe our view as “soft alignment.'’ Considering the lack of adequate evidence for hard alignment's radical claims, the finite resources and attention of policymakers and technological experts are best served by devoting, at best, a modest amount of time, attention, and resources towards policies regarding AIS which manage the moral risks involved in misaligned, already-existing AIS, and regarding misaligned potential AIS relative to the evidentiary basis for their possible realization. Therefore, we argue for the adoption of policies towards alignment which manage the everyday risk involved in misaligned AIS rather than long-term existential risks, which are difficult to quantify.

Motivated by increasingly superstitious usage and socially corrosive scandals surrounding the generative artificial intelligence models (e.g., GPT-4) of today, this paper draws on the work of canonical philosophical diagnostician of superstition, Baruch Spinoza, to develop a political-psychological accounting of AI minds and their consequences. Elaborating Spinoza’s naturalism and panpsychism, we show that the Spinozian view affirms that LLMs have minds which are fundamentally similar to human minds. However, following Spinoza’s epistemology, these minds are composed of broadly inadequate ideas, lacking any sort of comprehensive accounting of their causal generation. We then relate Spinoza’s account of how inadequate ideas generate ethically vicious relationships between entities dovetails with contemporary empirical studies of LLM’s racism and their capacity to shape human minds in biased ways, concluding that only a mind sufficiently like ours could effectively promulgate such vice and superstition. We conclude by proposing several policy recommendations which follow from this account of LLMs.

In this essay, Emerson Bodde argues that class ought to be viewed as a “real social identity” in the sense developed by Linda Alcoff to describe race and gender as bodily, hermeneutic, and historically shaped social categories. Taking inspiration especially from Alcoff's arguments concerning gender, Bodde argues class is just as “real” and “embodied” while rejecting Alcoff's own anti-realist evaluation of class. In the same way that the differential relationship to sexual reproduction anchors the social category of gender as an underdetermining element for a social identity, work and its effect upon the embodied subject does the same for class. The anthropological necessity of work, the wracking of the body by work, and the determinate autonomy one exercises in “dealing with” exhaustion—these all situate work as a subjectivity-forming phenomenon that forms differential groupings. The argument is further defended by linking this account with Shannon Sullivan's argument that epigenetic inheritance serves as a key element of the transgenerational dimensions of anti-black racism and racial injustice. Bodde concludes by suggesting that a fully sufficient elaboration of social class as a real social identity must be supplemented by an account of society and the reproduction of such identities over time.

Within discussions of deliberative democracy, the role of facilitator is ever‐present: they gather participants, introduce expert information, correct for discursive prejudices, and more. Few recognize, however, that facilitators therefore exercise substantive, normative control over the process, thereby constituting a threat to the legitimacy and reliability of deliberation outcomes when those norms themselves are not subject to political regulation. This issue—the Facilitator Problem—is especially profound for epistemic democrats, who offload many of the presumptions for the reliability and discursive virtue of citizen deliberators onto their being moderated by these innocuous agents. While existing literature has yet to fully appreciate the Facilitator Problem, by focusing almost exclusively on Western democratic experiences, it has also failed to see that there may be a better way forward. Applying a comparative lens, this paper draws insights from contemporary Chinese political practices—specifically Democratic Centralism—to show how an institutionalization of the facilitator as a political office, exposed to public scrutiny via constitutional ideals like the mass line and party‐state structure, better realizes deliberation's epistemic virtues while answering the Facilitator Problem. The gap between this theoretical ideal and political reality is empirically reviewed and the modest feasibility of deliberative reforms in China is demonstrated.

Following Santiago Slabodsky’s articulation of a tradition of decolonial Judaism and his suggestion that Spinoza might be considered a part of it, I argue that Spinoza may be considered a decolonial thinker. While outlining the historical context in which the Jewish Spinoza wrote, I present an interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy—in particular, the political implications of his substance monism and naturalism—and demonstrate how it satisfies general standards for a decolonial theory. In addition to highlighting relevant topics in Spinoza’s corpus, including the notion of servitude and his passing comments on Islam, I rebut several potential objections to this reading. While accepting points of tension, I claim a generally consistent, decolonial character may define the overall system of Spinoza’s philosophy. I conclude the paper by considering the relationship between this interpretation and the only proper mention of colonialism in Spinoza’s corpus, i.e., his waking dream of a silent Afro-Brazilian man.

In this paper, drawing upon Tosaka Jun’s response to Interwar debates on historicism and his account of everydayness, I offer an explanation for why contemporary secular apocalyptic claims lack convergence by focusing on the historical dimension of such claims. Everydayness, organized the routines of work and rest, is shown to be the basis for a sense of historical time, and theoretical journalism is outlined as the kind of collective epistemic procedure needed to produce a collective sense of a community’s place in historical time. I defend the claim that the cause of starkly opposed responses to apocalyptic claims is due to qualitative differences in the work and rest that organize the everyday temporality. In the absence of a theoretical journalism, whether one subscribes to an apocalyptic claim will be contingent on heterogeneous personal circumstance. I conclude by outlining a limit case of indigenous post-apocalyptic claims under settler-colonialism.

In this article, I argue for the necessary organicism of immanent critique and the resulting limits and applicability of immanent critique as elaborated in Rahel Jaeggi’s account of Lebensformen. Through a historical review of the problem of natural purposiveness between Kant, Schelling and Hegel, I show that the notion of immanent critique that Hegel produced, and Jaeggi adopts, was an intrinsically organic notion. With this conceptual connection, I demonstrate that Jaeggi’s elaboration of Lebensformen is consistent with this organicism, but also explicate how this property limits critique where the criterion is the long-term stability of Lebensformen. Aligning the organicism of immanent critique with similar projects of social criticism citing the organic, namely eco-Marxism and cybernetics, I show that the cases of capitalism and bureaucracy are not practically vulnerable to immanent critique without supplement. I conclude by suggesting further research requires articulating a hybrid external-immanent form of criticism.

The Interwar period, inflected with crisis, produced "radical" philosophies of many kinds. In this article, I attempt to demonstrate not just a conceptual compatibility, but complementarity, between the political philosophies of John Dewey and Carl Schmitt. Proceeding from an explication of each separately as thinkers of "the political," I argue that Dewey's model of politics and his ideal of the method of inquiry are dependent on, and made more coherent through, a Schmittian understanding of politics centered on existential conflict between friends and enemies; the same holds true for Deweyan inquiry clarifying the ambiguities of Schmitt's concepts of friend and enemy. After replying to possible criticisms that the view of politics proposed by this synthesis is too subjective, I conclude by considering the democratic, yet agonistic values and contemporary relevance of such a political theory.

In this paper, I seek to clarify, criticize, and expand upon the ambiguous-yet-influential concept of divine violence introduced by Walter Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”. I proceed in three parts: in the first, I outline Benjamin’s argument about the cycle of mythical violence and divine violence’s special role as an interruption of that cycle. Next, I explicate Spinoza’s key concepts of potentia and potestas, which can be used to more clearly define what ought to instead be translated as “divine force”. In the third part, through Benjamin’s brief discussion of Sorel’s theory of the anarchist general strike, I equate potentia as a determinate power of aggregative individuals to divine force, both as a collective action and as an idea itself. I use this renewed and more sophisticated concept of divine force to oppose several interpretations of Benjamin’s concept, including Benjamin’s own quietist stance toward divine force.