Professor of Religious Studies Heidi Ravven was elected recently to the governing board of the North American Spinoza Society. She also gave an invited paper on "Spinoza's Systems Theory of Ethics" at the 16th International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics and Cybernetics of The International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research & Cybernetics in Baden-Baden, Germany. The conference was interdisciplinary and included sessions on such widely varying issues as sustainable development and global community, systems research in medicine, systems theory in science and religion, quantitative modeling of human-market interactions, and environmental research and ecoinformatics.
Iva Smith and Wendell Wallach, the organizers of the Ethics section of the Baden Baden Advanced Systems Research conference, and with George Lasker, the editors of the volume of papers that came out of the sessions, describe the focus of the work as follows: "The authors featured in this volume address issues related to ethical dilemmas arising from Artificial Intelligence Design criteria, ethical aspects in decision support systems, machine intelligence, hierarchical intelligent simulation, artificial consciousness, artificial morality, living with self-aware systems, agents for trustworthy ethical assistance, construction of artificial persons, the ethics of relational intelligence, predictors of ethical behavoir across various cultures, group diversity dynamics and decision quality, A.I. ethics and the philosophy of language, serendipity and the creation of the unexpected, aspects of the natural phenomenon of consciousness, a protobiological systems theory of ethics, the cognisphere, and ethical considerations related to the WWW as a modern market place."
The paper on Spinoza's ethics as a systems theory which she gave at the conference has also been published as an invited article in the conference volume Cognitive, Emotive, and Ethical Aspects of Decision Making in Humans and in Artificial Intelligence Volume III. Ravven also published an invited review of Adam Sutcliffe's Judaism and Enlightenment in The Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2004.
