Existing indexing systems used to arrange philosophical works have been shown to misrepresent the discipline in ways that reflect and perpetuate exclusionary attitudes within it. In recent years, there has been a great deal of effort to challenge those attitudes and to revise them. But as the discipline moves toward greater equality and inclusivity, the way it has indexed its work has unfortunately not. To course correct, we identify in this article some of the specific changes that are needed within (...) current indexing systems and propose a new model that could embody them. We use the Diversity Reading List in Philosophy as a case study and PhilPapers as a basis for comparison. The model we propose not only represents the discipline in a more inclusive and fair way, but it is also efficient, easy to use or implement, and adaptable for a variety of contexts. (shrink)

The cluster account, one of the best attempts at art classification, is guilty of ahistoricism. While cluster theorists may be happy to limit themselves to accounting for what art is now rather than how the term was understood in the past, they cannot ignore the fact that people seem to apply different clusters when judging art from different times. This paper shows that while allowing for this kind of historical relativity may be necessary to save the account, doing so could (...) result in incorporating an essentially institutional component or making the theory extremely complex and virtually impossible to use. (shrink)

Most modern definitions of art fail to successfully address the issue of the ever-changing nature of art, and rarely even attempt to provide an account that would be valid in more than just the modern Western context. This article develops a new theory that preserves the advantages of its predecessors, solves or avoids their problems, and has a scope wide enough to account for art of different times and cultures. It argues that an object is art in a given context (...) iff some person culturally competent in this context have afforded it the status of a candidate for appreciation for reasons considered good in this context. This weakly institutional view is supplemented by auxiliary definitions explaining the notions of cultural contexts, competence, and good reasons for affording the status. The relativisation to contexts brings increased explanatory power and scope, and the ability to account for the diversity of art. (shrink)

Moderate formalism is the view that all artworks which have aesthetic properties have formal aesthetic properties, and some but not all of those works also have non-formal aesthetic properties. Nick Zangwill develops this view in his Metaphysics of Beauty after having argued against its alternatives – extreme formalism and anti-formalism. This article reviews his arguments against the rivals of moderate formalism, and argues that the rejection of anti-formalism is unjustified. Zangwill does not succeed in proving that the broadly determined (context-determined) (...) properties of artworks are in some cases irrelevant to their aesthetic properties – and following that, interpretation and assessment. A historical argument presented here shows how aesthetic properties of every work must partly supervene on this work’s contextual properties. In particular, this disproves Zangwill’s claim that epistemological matters are unessential in determining the artwork’s properties, and exposes some problems his account has with explaining relations between nonaesthetic and aesthetic properties. (shrink)

Interpretational monists and pluralists most often accept contextualism. At the same time, most of them resist constructivism, which takes all interpretations of artworks to be separate artworks. However, one of the central arguments to establish contextualism, based on Borges’ story of Pierre Menard, is so formulated that using it can force all contextualists into accepting constructivism. This paper points out the under-specification present in the philosophical use of the Pierre Menard example to then combine it with arguments presented by contextualists (...) themselves and show that without a more careful look at the example discussed, accepting all those arguments entails constructivism. (shrink)

Artists rarely shy away from a drink and other psychoactive substances, yet it seems that there has never been much discussion on what aesthetic or artistic relevance this has to their works and their reception. I outline the scale of the phenomenon focusing on some prominent examples and distinguish a subset of what I call ‘high artworks’. In such artworks, I argue, drug experiences are encoded: their drug-related contextual and intrinsic properties or content are aesthetically or artistically relevant and should (...) be mentioned in any in-depth analysis. I then further argue that it is impossible or at least very difficult to fully appreciate or produce optimal evaluations of a high artwork, unless one has oneself had drug-induced experiences of the kind encoded in the work. This is because such experiences afford one the relevant phenomenal knowledge that is otherwise inaccessible, yet required to gain an adequate level of competence allowing one to fully grasp the work. (shrink)

Richard Wollheim threatened George Dickie's institutional definition of art with a dilemma which entailed that the theory is either redundant or incomprehensible and useless. This article modifies the definition to avoid such criticism. First, it shows that the definition's concept of the artworld is not vague when understood as a conventional system of beliefs and practices. Then, based on Gaut's cluster theory, it provides an account of reasons artworld members have to confer the status of a candidate for appreciation. An (...) authorised member of an artworld has a good reason to confer the status on an object if it satisfies a subset of criteria respected as sufficient within this artworld. The first horn of the dilemma is averted because explaining the reasons behind conferral cannot eliminate references to the institution, and the second loses its sharpness, as accepting partial arbitrariness of the conferral does not deprive the theory of its explanatory power. (shrink)

While pluralism in ontology of art improves on various monistic views, through its eclectic approach it lost a lot of their simplicity, parsimony, unity and intuitiveness. The dualistic theory presented in this paper offers an alternative – it shares the advantages of the monistic views while retaining the wide scope of pluralism, and thus should be preferred for methodological reasons. On this view all artworks are at the same time abstract universals which are called recipes, and particular physical objects – (...) realisations. The fact that various artworks seem to differ in their ontology is due to certain fairly consistent culturally determined biases which cause people to prioritise the above compounds differently in cases of different arts. Thus the diversity of arts should not be considered on the level of ontology, as the pluralists would hold, but epistemology, or even further – socially determined phenomena concerning customary perception of various artworks. (shrink)

On the whole, neither those who hold that pornography can never be art nor their opponents specify what they actually mean by ‘art’, even though it seems natural that their conclusions should vary depending on how the concept is understood. This paper offers a ‘definitional crossword’ and confronts some definitions of pornography with the currently most well-established definitions of art. My discussion shows that following any of the modern definitions entails that at least some pornography not only can be, but (...) actually is, art. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley argue that relational theories of art are rooted in a misunderstanding of what it would take to falsify the family resemblance theories they are meant to supplant, and are incapable of meeting all the requirements a successful theory of art must meet. Hence, they are doomed to failure. We show that the arguments Neill and Ridley offer are rooted in misunderstandings about relational theories and the requirements for a (...) successful theory of art. If relational theories must fail, it will not be for the reasons identified by Neill and Ridley. (shrink)

Which political principles should govern global politics? In his new book, Simon Caney engages with the work of philosophers, political theorists, and international relations scholars in order to examine some of the most pressing global issues of our time. Are there universal civil, political, and economic human rights? Should there be a system of supra- state institutions? Can humanitarian intervention be justified?

Simon Cushing conducted the following interview with Elizabeth Anderson on 18 June 2014.

This paper develops an information-sensitive theory of the semantics and probability of conditionals and statements involving epistemic modals. The theory validates a number of principles linking probability and modality, including the principle that the probability of a conditional If A, then C equals the probability of C, updated with A. The theory avoids so-called triviality results, which are standardly taken to show that principles of this sort cannot be validated. To achieve this, we deny that rational agents update their credences (...) via conditionalization. We offer a new rule of update, Hyperconditionalization, which agrees with Conditionalization whenever nonmodal statements are at stake but differs for modal and conditional sentences. (shrink)

Although the relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is, this is the first full-length study of this key concept. Showing that mereology, or the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology, Simons surveys and critiques previous theories--especially the standard extensional view--and proposes a new account that encompasses both temporal and modal considerations. Simons's revised theory not only allows him to offer fresh solutions to long-standing problems, but also has far-reaching consequences for (...) our understanding of a host of classical philosophical concepts. (shrink)

According to one tradition, uttering an indicative conditional involves performing a special sort of speech act: a conditional assertion. We introduce a formal framework that models this speech act. Using this framework, we show that any theory of conditional assertion validates several inferences in the logic of conditionals, including the False Antecedent inference. Next, we determine the space of truth-conditional semantics for conditionals consistent with conditional assertion. The truth value of any such conditional is settled whenever the antecedent is false, (...) and whenever the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. Then, we consider the space of dynamic meanings consistent with the theory of conditional assertion. We develop a new family of dynamic conditional-assertion operators that combine a traditional test operator with an update operation. (shrink)

The descriptions 'good' and 'bad' are examples of thin concepts, as opposed to 'kind' or 'cruel' which are thick concepts. Simon Kirchin provides one of the first full-length studies of the crucial distinction between 'thin' and 'thick' concepts, which is fundamental to many debates in ethics, aesthetics and epistemology.

Many defend the thesis that when someone knows p, they couldn’t easily have been wrong about p. But the notion of easy possibility in play is relatively undertheorized. One structural idea in the literature, the principle of Counterfactual Closure (CC), connects easy possibility with counterfactuals: if it easily could have happened that p, and if p were the case, then q would be the case, it follows that it easily could have happened that q. We first argue that while CC (...) is false, there is a true restriction of it to cases involving counterfactual dependence on a coin flip. The failure of CC falsifies a model where the easy possibilities are counterfactually similar to actuality. Next, we show that extant normality models, where the easy possibilities are the sufficiently normal ones, are incompatible with the restricted CC thesis involving coin flips. Next, we develop a new kind of normality theory that can accommodate the restricted version of CC. This new theory introduces a principle of Counterfactual Contamination, which says roughly that any world is fairly abnormal if at that world very abnormal events counterfactually depend on a coin flip. Finally, we explain why coin flips and other related events have a special status. A central take home lesson is that the correct principle in the vicinity of Safety is importantly normality-theoretic rather than (as it is usually conceived) similarity-theoretic. (shrink)

This paper models knowledge in cases where an agent has multiple experiences over time. Using this model, we introduce a series of observations that undermine the pretheoretic idea that the evidential significance of experience depends on the extent to which that experience matches the world. On the basis of these observations, we model knowledge in terms of what is likely given the agent’s experience. An agent knows p when p is implied by her epistemic possibilities. A world is epistemically possible (...) when its probability given the agent’s experiences is not significantly lower than the probability of the actual world given that experience. (shrink)

Recent advances in natural language processing have given rise to a new kind of AI architecture: the language agent. By repeatedly calling an LLM to perform a variety of cognitive tasks, language agents are able to function autonomously to pursue goals specified in natural language and stored in a human-readable format. Because of their architecture, language agents exhibit behavior that is predictable according to the laws of folk psychology: they function as though they have desires and beliefs, and then make (...) and update plans to pursue their desires given their beliefs. We argue that the rise of language agents significantly reduces the probability of an existential catastrophe due to loss of control over an AGI. This is because the probability of such an existential catastrophe is proportional to the difficulty of aligning AGI systems, and language agents significantly reduce that difficulty. In particular, language agents help to resolve three important issues related to aligning AIs: reward misspecification, goal misgeneralization, and uninterpretability. (shrink)

According to the B-theory, the passage of time is an illusion. The B-theory therefore requires an explanation of this illusion before it can be regarded as fullysatisfactory; yet very few B-theorists have taken up the challenge of trying to provide one. In this paper I take some first steps toward such an explanation by first making a methodological proposal, then a hypothesis about a key element in the phenomenology of temporal passage. The methodological proposal focuses onthe representational content of the (...) element of experience by virtue of which time seems to pass. The hypothesis involves the claim that the experience of changeinvolves the representation of something enduring, rather than perduring, through any change. (shrink)

Here I propose an interpretation of the ancient Stoic psychological theory on which (i) the concepts that an adult human possesses affect the content of the perceptual impressions (φαντασίαι αἰσθητικαί) she forms, and (ii) the content of such impressions is exhausted by an ‘assertible’ (ἀξίωμα) of suitable complexity. What leads the Stoics to accept (i) and (ii), I argue, is their theory of assent and belief formation, which requires that the perceptual impression communicate information suitable to serve as the content (...) of belief. In arguing for (i), I reject a rival interpretation on which conceptualization occurs subsequently to the formation of a perceptual impression. In arguing for (ii), I deny that perceptual impressions have two kinds of content: one formulated in an assertible, the other sensory, featuring independently of this assertible. I explore the implications of (i) and (ii) for the Stoic theory of emotions, expertise, and rationality, and argue that they shed new light on the workings of impression, assent, and belief. (shrink)

In this commentary, we engage with Almaas’s contribution from the perspective of phenomenology and its idea of a ‘minimal self’. We attempt to clarify Almaas’s claims about ‘phenomenological givens’ and ‘non-dual’, ‘pure consciousness’, and then show how they might be reconciled with phenomenological approaches to consciousness and self. We conclude by briefly indicating some of the ways a comparative analysis of this sort is mutually beneficial.

This article argues that pseudoscience lacks an adequate philosophical analysis. Using conspiracy theories as a case study, it is claimed that such an analysis needs to go beyond a mere epistemological approach. In the first part, it is shown that the existing philosophical literature shares the assumption that conspiracy theories are primarily deficient scientific hypotheses. This claim is contested, because such an approach can only understand what conspiracy theories fail to be, but not what they are and why people tend (...) to endorse them. To develop an alternative, the second part starts from recent sociology of science, applied to conspiracy theories, that claims that both true and false theories are in need of a symmetrical social explanation. However, this opens the path to relativism because it does not allow for a significant distinction between scientific and conspiracy theories. In the third section an alternative analysis of conspiracy theories is offered, which does not abandon this distinction. Moreover, it is claimed that the most important element of conspiracy theories is not their truth value but rather their symbolic structures of meaning. The aim of conspiracy theories, and perhaps of pseudoscience in general, is then not to know facts about the world, but rather to offer a meaningful framework within which to live. (shrink)

I explore the process of changes in the observability of entities and objects in science and how such changes impact two key issues in the scientific realism debate: the claim that predictively successful elements of past science are retained in current scientific theories, and the inductive defense of a specific version of inference to the best explanation with respect to unobservables. I provide a case-study of the discovery of radium by Marie Curie in order to show that the observability of (...) some entities can change and that such changes are relevant for arguments seeking to establish the reliability of success-to-truth inferences with respect to unobservables. (shrink)

This paper explores the principle that knowledge is fragile, in that whenever S knows that S doesn’t know that S knows that p, S thereby fails to know p. Fragility is motivated by the infelicity of dubious assertions, utterances which assert p while acknowledging higher-order ignorance whether p. Fragility is interestingly weaker than KK, the principle that if S knows p, then S knows that S knows p. Existing theories of knowledge which deny KK by accepting a Margin for Error (...) principle can be conservatively extended with Fragility. (shrink)

The rapidly growing transdisciplinary enthusiasm about developing new kinds of Anthropocene stories is based on the shared assumption that the Anthropocene predicament is best made sense of by narrative means. Against this assumption, this article argues that the challenge we are facing today does not merely lie in telling either scientific, socio-political, or entangled Anthropocene narratives to come to terms with our current condition. Instead, the challenge lies in coming to grips with how the stories we can tell in the (...) Anthropocene relate to the radical novelty of the Anthropocene condition about which no stories can be told. What we need to find are meaningful ways to reconcile an inherited commitment to narrativization and the collapse of storytelling as a vehicle of understanding the Anthropocene as our current predicament. (shrink)

The nature of experience has been held to be a major reason for accepting the A-theory of time. I argue, however, that experience does not favour the A-theory over the B-theory; and that even if the A-theory were true it would not be possible to perceive the passage of time. The main argument for this draws on the constraint that a satisfactory theory of perception must explain why phenomenal characters map uniquely onto perceived worldly features. Thus, if passage is perceived, (...) it must be explained what makes one phenomenal character rather than another a perception of passage; and it must also be explained why that phenomenal character is a perception of passage rather than of some other feature of the world. I argue that no such explanation can be given, and consequently that passage cannot be perceived. I conclude that the A-theory is rendered unintelligible, and should therefore be rejected. (shrink)

Under what conditions would an artificially intelligent system have wellbeing? Despite its clear bearing on the ethics of human interactions with artificial systems, this question has received little direct attention. Because all major theories of wellbeing hold that an individual’s welfare level is partially determined by their mental life, we begin by considering whether artificial systems have mental states. We show that a wide range of theories of mental states, when combined with leading theories of wellbeing, predict that certain existing (...) artificial systems have wellbeing. Along the way, we argue that there are good reasons to believe that artificial systems can have wellbeing even if they are not phenomenally conscious. While we do not claim to demonstrate conclusively that AI systems have wellbeing, we argue that there is a significant probability that some AI systems have or will soon have wellbeing, and that this should lead us to reassess our relationship with the intelligent systems we create. (shrink)

Despite well-established results in survey methodology, many experimental philosophers have not asked whether and in what way conclusions about folk intuitions follow from people’s responses to their surveys. Rather, they appear to have proceeded on the assumption that intuitions can be simply read off from survey responses. Survey research, however, is fraught with difficulties. I review some of the relevant literature—particularly focusing on the conversational pragmatic aspects of survey research—and consider its application to common experimental philosophy surveys. I argue for (...) two claims. First, that experimental philosophers’ survey methodology leaves the facts about folk intuitions massively underdetermined; and second, that what has been regarded as evidence for the instability of philosophical intuitions is, at least in some cases, better accounted for in terms of subjects’ reactions to subtle pragmatic cues contained in the surveys. (shrink)

This paper develops a semantic solution to the puzzle of Free Choice permission. The paper begins with a battery of impossibility results showing that Free Choice is in tension with a variety of classical principles, including Disjunction Introduction and the Law of Excluded Middle. Most interestingly, Free Choice appears incompatible with a principle concerning the behavior of Free Choice under negation, Double Prohibition, which says that Mary can’t have soup or salad implies Mary can’t have soup and Mary can’t have (...) salad. Alonso-Ovalle 2006 and others have appealed to Double Prohibition to motivate pragmatic accounts of Free Choice. Aher 2012, Aloni 2018, and others have developed semantic accounts of Free Choice that also explain Double Prohibition. -/- This paper offers a new semantic analysis of Free Choice designed to handle the full range of impossibility results involved in Free Choice. The paper develops the hypothesis that Free Choice is a homogeneity effect. The claim possibly A or B is defined only when A and B are homogenous with respect to their modal status, either both possible or both impossible. Paired with a notion of entailment that is sensitive to definedness conditions, this theory validates Free Choice while retaining a wide variety of classical principles except for the transitivity of entailment. The homogeneity hypothesis is implemented in two different ways, homogeneous alternative semantics and homogeneous dynamic semantics, with interestingly different consequences. (shrink)

Sentada en un bar, mientras Simone de Beauvoir lee mi artículo de la semana pasada, la miro. Ninguna madre burguesa tendría de qué quejarse: la señora Beauvoir tiene una blusa cuidadosamente planchada; está fresca como una rosa, su rostro es terso y limpio, de ella emana un discreto perfume, es verdaderamente perfecta. Su rebelión contra su familia y su entorno, tan bien descrita en las Memorias de una joven formal, no se muestra en los detalles de la vestimenta. No, definitivamente, (...) Simone de Beauvoir no tiene la agresividad "amazónica" al límite. (shrink)

According to a well-known problem in climate ethics, individual actions cannot be wrong due to their impact on climate change since the individual act does not make a difference. By referring to the practical interpretation of the categorical imperative, the author argues that certain actions lead to a contradiction in conception in light of the climate crisis. Universalizing these actions would cause foreseeable climate impacts, making it impossible to pursue the original maxim effectively. According to the practical interpretation, such actions (...) are morally wrong. The wrongness of these actions does not depend on making a difference, rather these actions are wrong because they make it impossible for others to act accordingly. Thus, apart from imperfect duties, for which has been argued convincingly elsewhere, we also have perfect duties to refrain from certain actions in the face of the climate crisis. (shrink)

One Stoic response to the skeptical indistinguishability argument is that it fails to account for expertise: the Stoics allow that while two similar objects create indistinguishable appearances in the amateur, this is not true of the expert, whose appearances succeed in discriminating the pair. This paper re-examines the motivations for this Stoic response, and argues that it reveals the Stoic claim that, in generating a kataleptic appearance, the perceiver’s mind is active, insofar as it applies concepts matching the perceptual stimulus. (...) I argue that this claim is reflected in the Stoic definition of the kataleptic appearance, and that it respects their more general account of mental representation. I further suggest that, in attributing some activity to the mind in creating each kataleptic appearance, and in claiming that the expert’s mind allows her to form more kataleptic appearances than the amateur, the Stoics draw inspiration from the wax tablet model in Plato’s Theaetetus (190e–196d), where Socrates distinguishes the wise from the ignorant on the basis of how well they match sensory input with its appropriate mental ‘seal’ (σφραγίς). (shrink)

Following recent arguments that cultural practices in wild animal populations have important conservation implications, we argue that recognizing captive animals as cultural has important welfare implications. Having a culture is of deep importance for cultural animals, wherever they live. Without understanding the cultural capacities of captive animals, we will be left with a deeply impoverished view of what they need to flourish. Best practices for welfare should therefore require concern for animals’ cultural needs, but the relationship between culture and welfare (...) is also extremely complex, requiring us to rethink standard assumptions about what constitutes and contributes to welfare. (shrink)

In his 2018 essay Down to Earth, the French philosopher Bruno Latour proposes a hypothesis that connects a number of contemporary issues, ranging from climate denialism to deregulation and growing inequality. While his hypothesis, namely that the elites act as if they live in another world and are leaving the rest of the world behind, might seem like a conspiracy theory, I will argue that there is a way to make sense of it. To do so, I will turn to (...) two other authors, Timothy Mitchell and Shoshana Zuboff, to highlight the kind of logic that Latour seems to have in mind. In the final section, I will propose to capture the commonalities of these authors through the concept of shifting reciprocities and will return to Latour’s political plea to define one’s territories, reinterpreted as reciprocities. (shrink)

A mental state is luminous if, whenever an agent is in that state, they are in a position to know that they are. Following Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits, a wave of recent work has explored whether there are any non-trivial luminous mental states. A version of Williamson’s anti-luminosity appeals to a safety- theoretic principle connecting knowledge and confidence: if an agent knows p, then p is true in any nearby scenario where she has a similar level of confidence (...) in p. However, the relevant notion of confidence is relatively underexplored. This paper develops a precise theory of confidence: an agent’s degree of confidence in p is the objective chance they will rely on p in practical reasoning. This theory of confidence is then used to critically evaluate the anti-luminosity argument, leading to the surprising conclusion that although there are strong reasons for thinking that luminosity does not obtain, they are quite different from those the existing literature has considered. In particular, we show that once the notion of confidence is properly understood, the failure of luminosity follows from the assumption that knowledge requires high confidence, and does not require any kind of safety principle as a premise. (shrink)

This paper offers a new defense of the externalist interpretation of the kataleptic impression. My strategy is to situate the kataleptic impression within the larger context of the Stoic account of expertise. I argue that, given mastery in recognizing the limitations of her own state of mind, the subject can restrict her assent to kataleptic impressions, even if they are phenomenologically indistinguishable from those which are not kataleptic.

This paper considers the question of whether chimpanzees possess at least a primitive sense of normativity: i.e., some ability to internalize and enforce social norms—rules governing appropriate and inappropriate behaviour—within their social groups, and to make evaluations of others’ behaviour in light of such norms. A number of scientists and philosophers have argued that such a sense of normativity does exist in chimpanzees and in several other non-human primate and mammalian species. However, the dominant view in the scientific and philosophical (...) literature is that psychological capacities for social norms evolved uniquely in the human lineage, after our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobos. After reviewing some of the existing evidence for normative capacity in chimpanzees, I defend the thesis of chimpanzee normativity against three key theoretical objections that have been presented in the literature, each of which have played a part in motivating the dominant sceptical position. I argue that, while we still have much to learn about the nature and extent of the normative capacities of other animals, there is strong prima facie evidence for social norms and normative evaluation in chimpanzees and the main theoretical objections to chimpanzee normativity are not at all compelling. (shrink)

Recent research has identified a tension between the Safety principle that knowledge is belief without risk of error, and the Closure principle that knowledge is preserved by competent deduction. Timothy Williamson reconciles Safety and Closure by proposing that when an agent deduces a conclusion from some premises, the agent’s method for believing the conclusion includes their method for believing each premise. We argue that this theory is untenable because it implies problematically easy epistemic access to one’s methods. Several possible solutions (...) are explored and rejected. (shrink)

Education as identity formation in Western-style liberal-democracies relies, in part, on neutrality as a justification for the reproduction of collective individual identity, including societal, cultural, institutional and political identities, many aspects of which are problematic in terms of the reproduction of environmentally harmful attitudes, beliefs and actions. Taking a position on an issue necessitates letting go of certain forms of neutrality, as does effectively teaching environmental education. We contend that to claim a stance of neutrality is to claim a position (...) beyond criticism. In the classroom this can also be an epistemically damaging position to hold. To further explore the problem of neutrality in the classroom, and to offer a potential solution, we will look to the philosophical community of inquiry pedagogy, and advocate for the addition of place-based education; a form of experiential education that promotes learning in local communities in which the school is situated, each with its own history, culture, economy and environment. However, how we understand ‘place’ is fundamental to understanding the potential of place-based education in giving students a ‘sense of place’—how they perceive a place, which includes place attachment and place meaning. To this end, we look to Indigenous understandings of Place and social reconstruction learning to inform place-based pedagogies. Doing so, we hold, opens a pathway to ethical education. (shrink)

Intentionalism is the view that the phenomenal character of a conscious experience is wholly determined by, or even reducible to, its representational content. In this essay I put forward a version of intentionalism that allows (though does not require) the reduction of phenomenal character to representational content. Unlike other reductionist theories, however, it does not require the acceptance of phenomenal externalism (the view that phenomenal character does not supervene on the internal state of the subject). According the view offered here, (...) phenomenal characters essentially represent subject-environment relations that are relevant to the possibilities for causal interaction between the subject and the environment; relations of the kind that J. J. Gibson dubbed affordances. I argue for this view chiefly through an examination of spatial perception, though other cases are also considered. The view assumes that a phenomenal character has an essential functional role; though it need not be assumed that a functional role is sufficient for a phenomenal character. (shrink)

I explore the interrelations between the ontological and aesthetic issues raised by ready-mades such as Duchamp’s Fountain. I outline a hylomorphic metaphysics which has two central features. First, hylomorphically complex objects have matter to which they are not identical. Secondly, when such objects are artefacts (including artworks), it is essential to them that they are the products of creative work on their matter. Against this background, I suggest that ready-mades are of aesthetic interest because they pose a dilemma. Is there (...) really an object, a sculpture, that is distinct from its matter, a urinal, which object is created merely by the artist’s choice of the urinal? Or are we dealing with a case in which an artist passes off something, a urinal, as if it were a sculpture, even though it is not one? (shrink)

Two views on the nature and location of pain are usually contrasted. According to the first, experientialism, pain is essentially an experience, and its bodily location is illusory. According to the second, perceptualism or representationalism, pain is a perceptual or representational state, and its location is to be traced to the part of the body in which pain is felt. Against this second view, the cases of phantom, referred and chronic pain have been marshalled: all these cases apparently show that (...) one can be in pain while not having anything wrong in her body. Pain bodily location, then, would be illusory. I this paper I shall defend the representational thesis by presenting an argument against experientialism while conceding that the appearance / reality distinction collapses. A crucial role in such identification is played by deictics. In reporting that we feel pain here, the deictic directly refers to the bodily part as coinciding with the part as represented. So, pain location is not illusory. The upshot is that the body location is part and parcel of the representational content of pain states, a representation built up from the body map. (shrink)

Triviality results threaten plausible principles governing our credence in epistemic modal claims. This paper develops a new account of modal credence which avoids triviality. On the resulting theory, probabilities are assigned not to sets of worlds, but rather to sets of information state-world pairs. The theory avoids triviality by giving up the principle that rational credence is closed under conditionalization. A rational agent can become irrational by conditionalizing on new evidence. In place of conditionalization, the paper develops a new account (...) of updating: conditionalization with normalization. (shrink)

Der Artikel diskutiert Niklas Luhmanns Konzeption von Kommunikation als emergentem Phänomen. Erstens soll gezeigt werden, dass sich Luhmann, entgegen jüngster Einwände, in der Tat als sozialer Emergentist rekonstruieren und als solcher in die aktuelle Debatte um Reduktion und Emergenz des Sozialen einordnen lässt. Zweitens soll dadurch Licht auf die generellen Probleme und Voraussetzungen einer emergentistischen Soziologie geworfen werden. Um diese Ziele zu erreichen, wird zunächst geklärt, welche Positionen sich in der Soziologie grundsätzlich gegenüber stehen und auf welcher Grundlage Luhmann als (...) Emergentist einzuordnen ist. Anschließend soll die Emergenz der Kommunikation als eigenständiges soziales Phänomen erläutert und ins Verhältnis zum Individuum gesetzt werden. Schließlich wird Luhmanns Konzeption mit Hilfe einiger Adäquatheitsbedingungen aus der allgemeinen Wissenschaftsphilosophie als unzureichend kritisiert. Ziel ist dabei auch die Klärung der Bedingungen für eine plausible Emergenztheorie innerhalb der Soziologie. Nach einer abschließenden Zusammenfassung der wesentlichen Ergebnisse soll ein Ausblick auf eine aussichtsreiche soziologische Emergenzkonzeption geboten werden. (shrink)

This special issue aims to redress the balance and to open up Gaston Bachelard's work beyond a small in-crowd of experts and aficionado’s in France. It aims to stimulate the discovery of new and understudied aspects of Bachelard’s work, including aspects of the intellectual milieu he was working in. Fortunately, for this purpose we were able to rely both on renowned Bachelard specialists, such as Hans-Jörg Rheinberg-er, Cristina Chimisso and Dominique Lecourt, as well as on a number of younger scholars (...) who are discovering their work in a different intellectual context. At the same time we also want to reassess the value of this oeuvre, which also entails examining the reasons and causes of the relative neglect of Bachelard’s work in recent times. Has it exhausted its possibilities? Does it have intrinsic limitations that have contributed to the eclipse, as some influential, mainly French, philoso-phers have more or less explicitly suggested? (shrink)

Saying ┌ that ψ is F ┐ when one should have said ┌ that φ is F ┐ involves making one of two different kinds of error. Either the wrong nominal term (┌ ψ ┐ instead of ┌ φ ┐) is ascribed to the right object or the right nominal term is ascribed to the wrong object. Judgments susceptible to one kind of error are immune to the other. Indexical terms such as ‘here’ and ‘now’ exhibit a corresponding pattern of (...) immunity and susceptibility to error, which suggests that they are complex demonstratives. This should also apply to ‘I’. (shrink)

What's of our identity in the contemporary age? One of the most original frameworks to rebuild the human condition from the beginning to the present is the Mumford anthropological theory on urbanism. In this work my ambition is not only to present the most important conclusions of Mumford research but to expand them in the actual present time, claiming that the hyperbolic evolution of technology causes a pervasive and pernicious depersonalization.