John Lachs, Stoic Pragmatism

Clinical pragmatism: John Dewey and clinical ethics.

Stoic Ethics for Artificial Agents

We present a position paper advocating the notion that Stoic philosophy and ethics can inform the development of ethical A.I. systems. This is in sharp contrast to most work on building ethical A.I., which has focused on Utilitarian or Deontological ethical theories. We relate ethical A.I. to several core Stoic notions, including the dichotomy of control, the four cardinal virtues, the ideal Sa...

Galen and Stoic rhetoric.

T SOPHISTS are at dinner, and among them Athenaeus places Galen as well as the less identifiable physicians 'Daphnus of Ephesus' and 'Rufinus of Nicaea'.l The connection between rhetoric and medicine is in fact an old one, going back to the beginnings of both in the first sophistic period.2 We might expect, however, that the connection would be especially well marked in the second century A. D....

Two Interpretations of Two Stoic Conditionals

Four different conditionals were known to the Stoics. The so-called 'first' (Philonian) conditional has been interpreted fairly uncontroversially as an ancient counterpart to the material conditional of modern logic; the 'fourth' conditional is obscure, and seemingly of little historical interest, as it was probably not held widely by any group in antiquity. The 'second' (Diodorean) and 'third'...

Volitional Pragmatism

I seek here to develop the general outlines of a theory of environmental policy. It is a theory that will stand in stark contrast to the tendentious and normative welfare economics that now dominates the policy dialogue in applied economics. In this standard approach, economists place " …exclusive reliance on individual utilities to judge social goodness and right actions [Sen 1993, p. 521]. " ...