Proceedings of the annual congress of the Finnish Philosophical Association in 2013. Theme: memory.

Funding: Research funded by Canadian Institutes of Health Research, NNF 80045, States of Mind: Emerging Issues in Neuroethics. While there are those who object to the prospective use of propranolol to prevent or treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), most obstreperous among them the President’s Council on Bioethics, the use of propranolol can be justified for patients with severe PTSD. Propranolol, if effective, will alter the quality of certain memories in the brain. But this is not a serious threat to the (...) self understood in terms of narrative identity. A narrative identity framework acknowledges that memory is always being subtly altered or modified. For severe cases of PTSD propranolol may help victims who don’t respond to any other therapy or therapy combination regain their authentic self-narrative and engage once more in life activities. For those whose symptoms are not so severe the potential risks and side-effects of the drug may outweigh the benefits. Patients and family members should be allowed to decide, in consultation with their physician, whether this drug is appropriate in their case. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a number of issues related to a life lived with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Primarily, I am interested in discussing how one unwillingly changes their personal identity by forced medicating—demanded by others implicitly and explicitly. My motivation is something deep and invasive in me. I want to know, I have always wanted to know, why others want me to not be Me so badly. I have thought about this question for years, and though others may (...) simply chalk it up to just one of the standard paranoid or narcissistic traits of borderline personality disorder, there is something more to this question that many of us agonize over most of our lives. There is a deeply normative component to this question that extends beyond the mere fear of abandonment; it is tied to a desire by others to erase—literally—who we are for their own comfort. In this sense, then, I invite you to travel along a path of what it can mean to be a BPDer, from a narrative, phenomenological, and cognitive lived, embodied perspective. My purpose is to show that the treatments for us that others desire cannot avoid (and usually do not want to avoid) the unraveling of who we really are. Whether we want to or not, we give up our self to keep other people with us. And for many, this is too much to ask, and can be one, though not the only, reason suicide and self‐harm seem to be necessary recourses. One in 10 people with BPD commit suicide. So this is a serious matter, indeed. (shrink)

Although there is now some recognition that sexual abuse, particularly that which occurs in religious settings, has spiritual implications for women who have been abused, the spiritual implications of sexual abuse which occurs beyond the confines of specific religious practices and beliefs tend not to be acknowledged. Taking a stance that all people, irrespective of their involvement in a formal religion, are inherently spiritual, this paper identifies the key concepts associated with spirituality as meaning, identity, connectedness, transformation and transcendence. Examples (...) as to how each of these may be issues following the experience of sexual abuse are provided. This approach challenges prevailing notions that sexual abuse only has spiritual implications for women who identify with a particular religious tradition. Instead it is argued that an experience of sexual abuse can be critical for the spiritual life of any woman who is subjected to abuse. (shrink)

The paper deals with a perspective of Christian philosophy on artificial memory erasuse for psychotherapeutic purposes. Its central question is whether a safe and reliable technology of memory erasure, once it is available, would be acceptable from a Christian ethics point of view. The main facet of this question is related to the Christian ethics requirement of contrition for the past wrongs, which in the case of memory erasure of particulary troubling experiences and personal choices would not be possible. The (...) paper argues that there are limits to the ethical significance of contrition in the writings of the leading Christian fathers on the theme, where excessive suffering and inability to forgive oneself for one’s actions is an impediment to the achivement of tranquility of mind and spiritual redemption, rather than a prerequisite for it. The paper thus concludes that there is no hindrance in principle from the Christian ethics point of view to pursuing a voluntary and selective memory erasure as a psychotherapeutic technique once a fully adequate technology is available. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the following questions: How should epistemologists conceptualize testimony? What do people use testimony to do? And why does ‘what people do’ with testimony matter epistemically? In response to these questions I both define and characterize testimony. While doing so I argue for the following answers, given here very briefly: What do people do when they testify? They tell each other things and avow that those things are true, offering their statements to others as reasons to believe. More (...) importantly, they interact with each other in order to negotiate about significance. Why do these activities matter epistemically? Because by engaging in them people generate understanding, as well as knowledge, that no one involved may have had prior to negotiation. Not only that, but they generate collective hermeneutic resources—conceptual tools with which to interpret and understand. In so doing, they not only learn, they create significance and (re)construct social worlds, living together as epistemic, moral, and political agents. So, how should epistemologists conceptualize testimony? They should treat it as a particular speech act that most often occurs as part of a testimonial exchange—an interactive, interpretive, dialogical activity that people use in order to negotiate about significance and generate understanding. This characterization of testimony is an important contribution because it: reveals some of the distinctively social aspects of testimonial knowledge and understanding; suggests better answers to epistemic questions about testimony than those based on typical characterizations in the literature; leads discussion on the topic in a number of new directions; and it lays a foundation for an ethics of testimony that cannot be separated from epistemic concerns. Neither can those concerns be separated from social, moral, and political considerations. The position thus pushes epistemologists to investigate the intertwining of epistemic, moral, and political agency. (shrink)

The existence of evil is often held to pose philosophical problems only for theists. I argue that the existence of evil gives rise to a philosophical problem which confronts theist and atheist alike. The problem is constituted by the following claims: (1) Successful human beings (i.e., those meeting their basic prudential interests) are committed to a good-enough world; (2) the actual world is not a good-enough world (i.e., sufficient evil exists). It follows that human beings must either (3a) maintain a (...) state of epistemic ignorance regarding the nature of the actual world or (3b) abandon their basic prudential interests. Theists resolve this problem by rejecting (2), only to confront the problem of evil as it is traditionally understood. Successful atheists also reject (2), but without adequate grounds for doing so. (shrink)

Genocide remembrance is a complex epistemological/ethical achievement, whereby survivors and descendants give meaning to the past in the quest for both personal-historical and social-historical truth. This paper offers an argument of epistemic injustice specifically as it occurs in relation to practices of (individual and collective) genocide remembrance. In particular, I argue that under conditions of genocide denialism, understood as collective genocide misremembrance and memory distortion, genocide survivors and descendants are confronted with hermeneutical oppression. Drawing on Sue Campbell’s relational, reconstructive account (...) of remembering, I argue that genocide denialism involves disrespectful challenges to memory, which systematically misrecognize rememberers. Adopting the case of Turkey’s denialism of the Armenian genocide, I discuss two interrelated mechanisms through which this can happen: i) through the systematic portrayal of survivors and descendants as vicious rememberers, and ii) through distortions of the very concept of ‘genocide’. Based on this, I show how hermeneutical and testimonial injustice are crucially interrelated when it comes to “contested” memories of historical injustice and the biographical testimony it gives rise to. (shrink)

A recurrent theme in contemporary narratives of grieving is that there is a gap between the griever’s more or less consciously chosen expression of, and acting out of, grief and loss and other people’s seeming lack of acceptance. Starting from the view that the social context of feelings and emotions are constitutive in making an emotional experience what it is, this article explores what is done and experienced in acts of grief. A phenomenological perspective is applied to analyze the conditioning (...) of these experiences, and what the acts of grieving may accomplish in relation to various aspects of the self, indeed selves—that is, in relation to the surviving relative as well as the deceased. (shrink)

Principles are static; narratives move. They show us how people change; they depict character development and moral growth (or decline). They do this by pulling us inside lived time, where we empathize with a character's dilemmas about, and responsibility for, his or her future. This feature of narratives fits well with ethics, for ethics begins with practical questions about what to do or how to be (or even whether to be). Such questions require that one view the future as something (...) one has some freedom to shape. Narrative and principle‐based ethics support each other, and both are necessary, but in this essay I will focus on one side and consider how narrative dynamism enlivens a static bioethical principle, opening up new possibilities for moral action. (shrink)

The feminist literature against the commodification of embryos in human embryo research includes an argument to the effect that embryos are “intimately connected” to persons, or morally inalienable from them. We explore why embryos might be inalienable to persons and why feminists might find this view appealing. But, ultimately, as feminists, we reject this view because it is inconsistent with full respect for women's reproductive autonomy and with a feminist conception of persons as relational, embodied beings. Overall, feminists should avoid (...) claims about embryos’ being inalienable to persons in arguments for or against the commodification of human embryos. (shrink)

I analyze the potentially self-destructive tension inherent in liberalism between conceptions of negative liberty and positive liberty. In doing so, I utilize Aristotle’s theory of virtue to show that virtue is the best method of resolving this tension. In addition, I demonstrate that liberal virtues are best construed as virtues of intellect to be exercised in the public sphere. In particular, I show the importance of not construing liberal virtues as virtues of character, because advocating such virtues is, in fact, (...) contrary to the central tenets of liberalism. That is, I argue that it is illiberal to ask liberal citizens to develop a certain moral character, and that it is, instead, essential for said citizens to develop intellectual virtues as a method of resolving this tension within liberalism between the virtues needed to sustain liberalism and liberalism’s resistance towards promoting those virtues. (shrink)

Americans cherish the idea that good eventually triumphs over evil. After briefly arguing that a proper understanding of the moral harm of cruelty calls into question the credibility of popular American idioms of redemption, I argue that the epistemic dynamics of horror help account for the commanding grip of this rhetoric on the popular imagination, and I suggest that this idiom has morally problematic features that warrant the attention of feminists.

In the Nordic countries, at a time when women have only recently won the right to their own bodies and to a sexuality of their own and for themselves, women nevertheless fake orgasms. Moreover, a .

In this paper, I outline the cumulative network model of the self. This model articulates the self as relational, recognizing social relations as constitutive of the self. The theory arises out of concerns about the individualistic paradigms of two main frameworks in the analytic philosophical literature on personal identity, namely, the psychological and the animalist approaches to personhood and is explicitly inspired by feminist theories on relational autonomy and self. I argue that “relationality” is not only social, but that the (...) self is relational throughout, psychologically, physically, biologically, culturally, semantically, as well as socially. Hence, the self is a network of relations. The model also aims to recognize that temporality or historicity is constitutive of the self, that the self is a process, not a static three-dimensional thing. Hence, the self is a cumulative network. (shrink)

Sexual assault is a common experience for women and a significant topic for feminist scholarship. However, discussions of forensic evidence collection have been largely neglected. This paper considers the ethics of forensic evidence collection by situating the conversation in the context of the experience of sexual assault. The power of patriarchal norms and rape myths, the impact of trauma, and the systemic sexism in the medical and legal systems are also discussed. With this literature in mind, recommendations are made to (...) improve the medical response to sexual assault survivors and the procedures of forensic evidence collection. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the structure of knowing, and it argues that existential trust is an epistemological category. The aim of the dissertation is to develop a view according to which all human activity is seen as an activity of a lived body, and in which the understanding of the structure of such activity is regarded as central for the solution even of epistemological problems. This view is not rooted in any one philosophical tradition, but circles around activity of the lived (...) body. It connects thinkers who in other respects belong to different "isms" in philosophy. Central to the dissertation are Aristotle, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Anscombe, Polanyi, and Grene. Michael Polanyi's concept of tacit knowledge, and connected concepts like attend to, attend from, and subsidiary awareness, are presented. Different kinds of subsidiary awareness, not noted by Polanyi, are distinguished. It is also argued that Polanyi has not seen all the implicatons of his view that instruments can be interiorized and be part of the lived body. Conversely, parts of the normally lived body can be exteriorized. Nor has Polanyi seen that one has subsidiary awareness of oneself as a certain kind ofperson. This fact, in turn, is shown to have implications for the way we constitute ourselves as agents. Since we are engendered agents, we always attend from gender. In the last decade, the concept of trust has definitely entered epistemology. Mostly, it has been in terms of trusting testimony and/or testifier. This thesis wants to deepen that account. There is a more fundamental kind of trust, namely trust in oneself and trust in the world. It is called existential trust, and it is of epistemological importance, too. Existential trust, it is claimed, is necessary in all acts of knowing. Probably, this fact is hard to discover without having recourse to a distinction like that between attending from and attending to. Existential trust is shown in the way we attend from something. Observation and thinking are central epistemological categories, of course, but they should be supplemented by trust. Without trust they cannot perform any epistemological work. Linguistically, 'to know' is a state verb. Superficially, it describes only a state, not an activity. This fact, however, does not contradict the view of knowledge put forward in the dissertation. To know is to have a disposition to perform successfully either some kind of action, or to perform some kind of true assertive speech act. Basically, knowing is an activity. (shrink)

A recurrent theme in contemporary narratives of grieving is that there is a gap between the griever’s more or less consciously chosen expression of, and acting out of, grief and loss and other people’s seeming lack of acceptance. Starting from the view that the social context of feelings and emotions are constitutive in making an emotional experience what it is, this article explores what is done and experienced in acts of grief. A phenomenological perspective is applied to analyze the conditioning (...) of these experiences, and what the acts of grieving may accomplish in relation to various aspects of the self, indeed selves—that is, in relation to the surviving relative as well as the deceased. (shrink)