Philosophers have questioned the very existence of weakness of will. Yet, many of us perceive it as a concrete phenomenon causing considerable psychological discomfort. We do not always follow up on our intentions, are not always faithful to our plans and generally sometimes find ourselves doing things we did not want to do. One very interesting way in which we try to increase the success rate of our intentions is by orchestrating our physical and social environments in ways that help us realise our proximal and distal intentions: Heavy drinkers or smokers ask their friends to remind them about their intentions to quit, obese stick notes on the fridge reminding them of what they should not eat, and procrastinators ask their colleagues to coach them to deliver in time. However, often the environment that is doing the scaffolding is either passive or human. We explore how modern artificial intelligence can be used to enhance a subject’s goal autonomy by monitoring its behaviour, learning its habits and providing reports on how some of them stand in the way of reaching predefined goals. Candidates for a language in which such reports and goals could be stated, are studied in philosophical logic. This project aims (1) to provide a logic model for intention formation and realization; and (2) to empirically test how this model is supported by personalizing scaffolding knowledge to a human subject through modern machine learning techniques. This positions this research right at the intersection of philosophy, AI and psychology.

In post-9/11 Western societies and academic debates, the notion that religion and women?s emancipation are fundamentally conflicting has regained plausibility. Consequently, women?s deliberate religious conversions are a pertinent academic, religious and socio-political issue. In face of this religion/emancipation paradox, this research project will apply interdisciplinary methods to study women?s processes of conversion as the acquisition of new religious subjectivities in which gender and sexuality play a formative role. The project hypothesises that gender equality and women?s sexuality are ?battlefields? on which converting women negotiate their position and subjectivity. It assumes that the conversion process is notably acted out in the context of public debates and religious prescriptions that highlight women?s positions and sexualities in adversative directions. By studying female conversion as an ongoing and multi-layered negotiation between secular and religious gender discourses, the project develops an innovative model of interpretation, based on a diversification of notions of choice, embodiment and religion. Its operationalisation takes place through three subprojects: a qualitative empirical PhD research on women?s embodied conversion processes in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; a postdoctoral cultural analysis of British, Dutch and Flemish public debates on controversies about traditional religious groups, gender and sexuality; and a postdoctoral religious studies approach investigating women?s positions and practices as narrated and regulated within Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. This comparative interdisciplinary project will contribute substantially to the public and academic understandings of tensions between religious and secular gender discourses through in-depth analysis of the experiences of women positioned at the intersection of both.

Cultural identity is related closely to how the sensorium is calibrated: what is or is not seen, heard, smelled, tasted and touched. This project examines the sensory styles that were current in the three ‘gunpowder empires’ of the Turkish Ottomans (1281–1924), the Persian Safavids (1501–1722) and the Indian Mughals (1526–1858). By studying how the sensorium was conceived and disciplined, both in texts and through objects, the project sheds light on fundamental but hitherto neglected aspects of Islamic history, thereby challenging common assumptions about Islam and Islamic culture.

In the past decades, research in ethics and philosophy of technology has flourished, and Dutch scholars have been at the forefront, ethically and philosophically assessing new technologies and their impact on society and developing frameworks for responsible innovation. The applicants of this proposal have done pioneering work in shaping the field, both in their theoretical work and by initiating and leading international collaborations, academic societies and key journals. We are now at the beginning of a new era of technological innovation in which new generations of the technologies that have emerged since the second world war are converging and undergoing widespread integration, making whole new fields possible, including artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, nanomedicine, next-generation genomics, neurotechnology and geo-engineering. These are socially disruptive technologies (SDTs) that have the potential to radically alter everyday life, cultural practices and social and economic institutions. Societal disruption may well be necessary and desirable for responding to pressing global problems such as climate change and depletion of natural resources. But the technologies also raise tough moral questions that are in need of ethical evaluation. A complication is they may affect the basic concepts and values that we normally appeal to in our ethical thinking, such as the distinction between nature and artifact or our conceptions of freedom and responsibility. A reflective turn in the ethics of technology is therefore necessary. This research programme in ethics and practical philosophy of technology seeks to realise that reflective turn. Our aim is to reorient the field of ethics of technology. Specifically, we aim to develop new theories and methods that are necessary to understand, morally assess and intervene in the development and implementation of this new generation of socially disruptive technologies. Achieving these improvements will involve major innovations to our field. First, our aim is to develop general, comprehensive approaches for the ethical and philosophical study of SDTs in general, and the new generation of SDTs in particular, which include methods of analysis, moral evaluation and intervention that can be applied to different spheres of technology. This has never been done before. It will address the current fragmentation of our field. Second, by seeking systematic interaction between ethics of technology and practical philosophy (a division of philosophy that includes ethics and social and political philosophy) we aim to innovate both fields. The central idea of the programme is that SDTs like artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and geo-engineering do not just transform society and human practice, but also challenge the basic categories and concepts by which we understand and evaluate our world: concepts like autonomy, responsibility, democracy and naturalness. We cannot unproblematically use these concepts in ethical analysis, thus we must rethink them. We will therefore engage in a major reflective study of key philosophical concepts challenged by SDTs, thereby innovating the ethics and philosophy of technology and the field of philosophy as a whole. Third, we aim to innovate our field by repositioning its relation to the engineering sciences. Our programme will involve a unique collaboration between leading ethicists/philosophers and leading scientists and engineers, aimed at better ethical and philosophical studies of technology and new collaborative models between philosophers and engineers aimed at responsible innovation. The programme has four research lines. The first three cover the three key domains which will be impacted by the new generation of SDTs: human beings, nature and society. In a fourth research line, we will engage in synthesis of the approaches and methods developed in the first three lines, and will develop and assess implications for the field of ethics and philosophy and technology, for ethics and philosophy as a whole and our collaboration with other fields. Several unique outcomes are projected as results of our programme: (1) new comprehensive approaches for the philosophical analysis, moral evaluation and responsible innovation of SDTs, in particular for its new generation; (2) philosophical analyses and reconceptualisations of core philosophical and moral concepts that will transform the field of ethics of technology and possibly the field of philosophy as a whole; (3) new approaches for collaboration between philosophy and engineering; and (4) innovative studies of the new generation of SDTs that is the subject of this programme, in which we apply our new approaches and come to new understandings of and ethical frameworks for these technologies.