Meaning in life is too important not to study systematically, but doing so is made difficult by conceptual indeterminacy. An approach to meaning that is promising but, indeed, conceptually vague is Jonathan Haidt’s ‘cross-level coherence’ account. In order to remove the vagueness, I propose a concept of ‘good fit’ that a) captures central aspects of meaning as it is discussed in the literature; b) brings the subject of meaning under the survey of the dynamicist or ‘embodied-embedded’ philosophy of cognition; and (...) c) allows the theoretical discussion on meaning to become more focused and systematic. The article addresses two apparent problems with the idea of ‘good fit,’ namely the fact that both challenges and relations of an agent with the outside world are central to meaning. It is finally pointed out which implications adopting the concept of ‘good fit’ instead of ‘meaning’ would have. (shrink)

Meaningful work is an important ideal, but it seems hard to give an adequate account of meaningful work. In this article, I conduct a revisionary conceptual analysis of ‘meaningful work’, i.e. a conceptual analysis that aims at finding a better and more useful way to use this term. I argue for a distinction between cases where work itself is meaningful and cases where other sources of meaning are found at work. The term ‘meaningful work’ is most useful for the former (...) cases. I then argue for the reasons account of what makes work itself meaningful: work is meaningful if (and to the extent that) there are good reasons to do it. I compare this to established accounts of meaningful work, such as subjective meaningfulness, self-realization, alienation, the unity of conception and execution, autonomy, social contribution, and Veltman’s four-dimensional account. None of these capture the distinct concern that the concept ‘meaningful work’ should capture, or they do so less well than the reasons account. This also shows that work can be meaningful regardless of whether it is good in other respects, such as in inherent interest or opportunities for self-realization. (shrink)

Gibt es überzeugende Überforderungseinwände gegen anspruchsvolle moralische Auffassungen? In diesem Buch werden Überforderungseinwände präzise charakterisiert, systematisch eingeordnet und argumentativ verteidigt. Unter Berücksichtigung der wichtigsten philosophischen Beiträge zum Thema wird gezeigt, weshalb gewisse Moraltheorien und -prinzipien dafür kritisiert werden können, dass sie zu viel von einzelnen Personen verlangen.

Resumen Es muy conocida la opinión de Kant en relación con la inmoralidad del suicidio. De ahí que, muchos autores lo consideren como un prohibicionista absoluto. Sin embargo, no hay hasta el momento un análisis puntual sobre la definición metafísica-conceptual del suicidio en la teoría kantiana. En este artículo propongo entender el suicidio en Kant como una muerte física, total, autorreferencial, voluntaria e inmoral. Esta definición contrastará con la privación de la vida, la cual no implica inmoralidad. Al ser voluntarios, (...) tanto la privación de la vida, como el suicidio son actos racionales y entendibles a partir de las máximas de acción. La inmoralidad del suicidio sólo surgirá al considerar la primacía de las razones morales por encima de razones no morales.It is common knowledge theposition of Kant regarding the immorality of suicide. Several authors attribute him an absolutist-forbidden criterion. Nerveless, there is no extended analysis about the metaphysical-conceptual definition of suicide in Kantian theory. In this paper I hold that suicide in Kant can be defined asphysical death, full, self-referential, voluntary, and immoral. This definition conflicts with the definition of deprivation of life which is not immoral. As voluntarily acts, both suicide and deprivation of life are rational acts that can be understood as maxims of action. The immorality property of suicide is due to the primacy of moral over non-moral reasons. (shrink)

Several philosophers, both in Buddhist and Western philosophy, claim that the self does not exist. The no-self view may, at first glance, appear to be a reason to believe that life is meaningless. In the present article, I argue indirectly in favor of the no-self view by showing that it does not entail that life is meaningless. I then examine Buddhism and argue, further, that the no-self view may even be construed as partially grounding an account of the meaning of (...) life. (shrink)

In this article, I address problems associated with ‘Modernity’ and those encountered at the impasse of post-modernity and the newly named phenomenon of ‘post-secularism’. I consider more specifically what I call ‘moral emotions’ or essentially interpersonal emotions can tell us about who we are as persons, and what they tell us about our experience and concepts of freedom, normativity, power, and critique. The moral emotions, and retrieving the evidence of the ‘heart’, point to the possibility of contributing to the social (...) imaginary of the Modern and its post-modern variants, playing a significant role in shaping civic life and relations of power. (shrink)

In some recent discussions the implications of postmodernism for education have been wrongly conceived. An alternative approach is offered and this is used as a means for challenging any grand design in the provision of schooling and in the conception of education. Through this, ideas of the whole person implicit in much educational theory and practice (including personal and social education) are questioned. With some reference to the work of Stanley Cavell an attempt is made to show the sort of (...) thinking which might inform education, avoiding both the relativistic and complacent excesses of postmodernism and the explicit systematic planning of the grand design. (shrink)

Though it has gone unnoticed so far in Beauvoir Studies, the term “singularity” is a technical one for Simone de Beauvoir. In the first half of the essay I discuss two reasons why this term has been obscured. First, as is well known Beauvoir has not been read in the context of the history of philosophy until recently. Second, in The Ethics of Ambiguity at least, singularité is translated both inconsistently and quite misleadingly. In the second half of the essay (...) I attempt to demonstrate the importance of this term in The Ethics. The will to disclose being is the will to disclose the singularity of the other, whether human, land, sky or painting. Ambiguity, which Beauvoir distinguishes from absurdity in Camus, is an image suggesting this necessarily mutual disclosure of singularity. (shrink)

Kantians may be unable to derive all of benevolence from reverence for rational agency, but the remaining lacuna is not as extensive as Arpaly thinks. For while we should take seriously Kantian worries about separating benevolence from reverence, a considerable part of benevolence can be explained in terms of reverence for rational agency on a plausible intepretation of the latter. Furthermore, Kantians have an irreducible role for benevolence within their ethics, which is different from the role of a self-standing virtue.

The ArgumentDagognet's work shows that making algorithmic compressions seems to be one of the major targets of scientific progress. This effort has been so successful that until recently one might have thought everything could be algorithmically compressed. Indeed, this statement, which might be seen as a scientific translation of the Hegelian thesis in its strong form, admits to some objective limits in computer science. Though a lot of algorithms are successful, there exist today, and perhaps forever, logical and physical limits (...) that cannot allow us to cherish the dream of a “theory of everything.” Moreover, a complete mastery of complexity does not seem possible — because some domains of reality are too complicated to be computable, because the human brain is too limited, because computers cannot do that much better than the human brain, and because, ultimately, there are some kinds of things it would make no sense to compress. This paper shows that Dagognet's work came to recognize what a glance at the history of algorithmics has made evident. (shrink)

The existence of superstition and religious beliefs in most, if not all, human societies is puzzling for behavioral ecology. These phenomena bring about various fitness costs ranging from burial objects to celibacy, and these costs are not outweighed by any obvious benefits. In an attempt to resolve this problem, we present a verbal model describing how humans and other organisms learn from the observation of coincidence (associative learning). As in statistical analysis, learning organisms need rules to distinguish between real patterns (...) and randomness. These rules, which we argue are equivalent to setting the level of α for rejection of the null hypothesis in statistics, are governed by risk management as well as by comparison to previous experiences. Risk management means that the cost of a possible type I error (superstition) has to be traded off against the cost of a possible type II error (ignorance). This trade-off implies that the occurrence of superstitious beliefs is an inevitable consequence of an organism’s ability to learn from observation of coincidence. Comparison with previous experiences (as in Bayesian statistics) improves the chances of making the right decision. While this Bayesian approach is found in most learning organisms, humans have evolved a unique ability to judge from experiences whether a candidate subject has the power to mechanistically cause the observed effect. Such “strong” causal thinking evolved because it allowed humans to understand and manipulate their environment. Strong causal thinking, however, involves the generation of hypotheses about underlying mechanisms (i.e., beliefs). Assuming that natural selection has favored individuals that learn quicker and more successfully than others owing to (1) active search to detect patterns and (2) the desire to explain these patterns mechanistically, we suggest that superstition has evolved as a by-product of the first, and that belief has evolved as a by-product of the second. (shrink)

The philosophical argument between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus can be summarised in their conflicting accounts of skiing and swimming. For Sartre skiing exemplifies the struggle of existence and the angst of the alienated ego. For Camus, swimming represents some glimmering of collective harmony, the possibility of transcendence. Sartre's thinking is inflected by quantum theory and the 'steady state', whereas Camus is more of a wave theorist, with a lingering nostalgia for the 'primeval atom' and a fondness for peak experiences. (...) Put together their separate ways of analysing consciousness suggest a two-phase account of cognition. (shrink)

The "anthropology of moral life", or "moral anthropology", is an approach to moral philosophy which I take to have been initiated by Peter Strawson, and developed, independently and in different ways, by David Wiggins and Daniel Dennett. I take the respective moral anthropologies of Wiggins and Dennett to be complementary, and I propose to synthesize them within a Dennettian framework. The framework involves the definition of a "rationally acceptable language". Descriptions and accounts stated in that language are ontologically interpreted in (...) the light of Dennett's ontology, and the knowledge claims made in the language are assessed in the light of his epistemology, which I take to include a "thesis of anthropocentricity". That thesis, also propounded by Wiggins, confers a vindicatory character to those philosophical accounts to which it is directly related. Thus, both Wiggins' and Dennett's respective moral anthropologies have a strong vindicatory character in regard to common moral life. Moral anthropology shows how the dispositional constitution of the human species "underdetermines" the standards of correctness by reference to which we morally assess conduct, sentiments and judgments, including judgments about what is "morally meaningful". Wiggins' moral anthropology proposes a largely Humean theory of human nature, as well as an insightful description of morality, and of the "unforsakeable" concerns, motives, purposes, needs, aspirations and expectations that are attached to it, and which as such vindicate it. Dennett's moral anthropology proposes an evolutionary theory of human nature, and relates it to a compatibilist account of moral responsibility, free will, and moral decision-making. Regarding the latter, Dennett emphasizes, given our predicament as limited but committed beings, the importance of deliberation-stopping maxims, which I take to play in his moral anthropology a role similar to that. (shrink)

This article discusses the dual interpretation of the Jeffreys-Lindley paradox associated with Bayesian posterior probabilities and Bayes factors, both as a differentiation between frequentist and Bayesian statistics and as a pointer to the difficulty of using improper priors while testing. I stress the considerable impact of this paradox on the foundations of both classical and Bayesian statistics. While assessing existing resolutions of the paradox, I focus on a critical viewpoint of the paradox discussed by Spanos in Philosophy of Science.