Between formal propositional knowledge and embodied skill lies ‘interactional expertise’—the ability to converse expertly about a practical skill or expertise, but without being able to practice it, learned through linguistic socialisation among the practitioners. Interactional expertise is exhibited by sociologists of scientific knowledge, by scientists themselves and by a large range of other actors. Attention is drawn to the distinction between the social and the individual embodiment theses: a language does depend on the form of the bodies of its members (...) but an individual within that community can learn the language without the body. The idea has significance for our understanding of colour-blindness, deafness and other abilities and disabilities. They say that love's a word. (shrink)

Mind, it is increasingly fashionable to assert, is an intrinsically embodied and environmentally embedded phenomenon. But there is a potential tension between two strands of thought prominent in this recent literature. One of those strands depicts the body as special, and the fine details of a creature’s embodiment as a major constraint on the nature of its mind: a kind of new-wave body-centrism. The other depicts the body as just one element in a kind of equal-partners dance between brain, body (...) and world, with the nature of the mind fixed by the overall balance thus achieved: a kind of extended functionalism (now with an even broader canvas for multiple realizability than ever before). The present paper displays the tension, scouts the space of possible responses, and ends by attempting to specify what the body actually needs to be, given its complex role in these recent debates. (shrink)

This paper takes an evolutionary approach to what we are, namely autopoietic systems with a first person perspective on our surroundings and ourselves. This in contrast with Thomas Metzinger.

The Anscombean conception of intentional action endorses that an action's being intentional is in virtue of its internal structure, rather than any extra ingredient. Anscombe (2000) calls it the calculative order "that is there whenever actions are done with intentions," which features its teleological aspect. In his work reviving this tradition, Thompson (2008) highlights its temporal aspect. With the help of the concept "compound action," we shall see that typical intentional action attends to both aspects. The synthesis is met by (...) shifting from the aspect of action to agency. To act intentionally, an agent needs not only the capacity for calculating from a general end to a specific means, but also the capacity for planning: coordinate stages of different actions over time hierarchically, by occupying a certain kind of slots. (shrink)

This is the first book on the role of cognition in the aesthetic theory of Li Zehou (1930–2021), one of China's most important and influential contemporary philosophers. The cognitive dimension and its integration with practice is discussed by examining one of Li's pivotal concepts: "subjectality," a human subject shaped by the world in which they live, including beauty and aesthetic experience. Li's theory is also contextualized in the threefold inspiration coming from Confucian, Kantian, and Marxist philosophies, which differently conceptualize the (...) aesthetic and cognitive dimensions in humans. By referring to different aesthetic theories and interdisciplinary approaches to cognition, the book aims to show how Li's cognitively oriented project can contribute to contemporary research into aesthetics. Although primarily written for philosophers working in aesthetics, Chinese, and comparative philosophy, the book is also addressed to anyone interested in contemporary Chinese thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a Buddhist treatise from around the fourth century CE there is a very remarkable story which serves as a thought experiment calling us to question the nature of self and the identity of persons. Lost in Sanskrit, the passage is fortunately preserved in a Chinese translation, the Dà zhìdù lùn. We here present the first reliable translation directly from the Classical Chinese, and discuss the philosophical significance of the story in its historical and literary context. We emphasise the (...) philosophical importance of embedding the story in two framing narratives, and demonstrate that the story taps a range of intuitions, and indeed fears, about the survival of the self which have also played a large role in the history of the topic in the West, and which continue to be of great contemporary concern. (shrink)

The Cartesian thinking self may seem indisputably real. But if it is real, then so thinking, which would undercut mental fictionalism. Thus, in defense of mental fictionalism, this paper argues for fictionalism about the thinking self. In short form, the argument is: (1) If I exist outside of fiction, then I am identical to (some part of/) this biomass [= my body]. (2) If I die at t, I cease to exist at t. (3) If I die at t, no (...) part of this biomass ceases to exist at t. (4) Therefore, no part of this biomass is identical to me. [From (2), (3)] (5) Therefore, I do not exist outside of fiction. [From (4), (1)] One reply to the argument is that the self is an aggregate of electricity in the brain which disperses upon death. The rejoinder is that this, at best, describes the thoughts realized in the brain, and not the subject who thinks the thoughts. A second objection stresses the undeniable sense that the thinking self has a location. In reply, the extended thought-experiment from Dennett’s “Where Am I?” is used to show that the sense of self-location may well be illusory. (shrink)

The biophilosophic justification for the idea that “brain death” is death needs to support two claims: that what dies in human death is a human organism, not merely a psychological entity distinct from it; that total brain failure signifies the end of the human organism as a whole. Defenders of brain death typically assume without argument that the first claim is true and argue for the second by defending the “integrative unity” rationale. Yet the integrative unity rationale has fallen on (...) hard times. In this article, I give reasons for why we should think of ourselves as organisms, and why the “fundamental work” rationale put forward by the 2008 President’s Council is better than the integrative unity rationale, despite persistent objections to it. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is the role of subjectivity in the pursuit of the good. I propose that subjective thought as well as a subjective mental process underappreciated in philosophical psychology – contemplation – are instrumental for discovering and apprehending a whole range of value. In fact, I will argue that our primary contact with these values is through experience and that they could not be properly understood in any other way. This means that subjectivity is central to our (...) evaluative lives. (shrink)

This thesis explores the possibility of composite consciousness: phenomenally conscious states belonging to a composite being in virtue of the consciousness of, and relations among, its parts. We have no trouble accepting that a composite being has physical properties entirely in virtue of the physical properties of, and relations among, its parts. But a long­standing intuition holds that consciousness is different: my consciousness cannot be understood as a complex of interacting component consciousnesses belonging to parts of me. I ask why: (...) what is it about consciousness that makes us think it so different from matter? And should we accept this apparent difference? (shrink)

Some strange cases have gripped philosophers of mind. They have been deployed against materialism about human persons, functionalism about mentality, the possibility of artificial intelligence, and more. In this paper, I cry “foul”. It’s not hard to think that there’s something wrong with the cases. But what? My proposal: their proponents ignore questions about composition. And ignoring composition is a mistake. Indeed, materialists about human persons, functionalists about mentality, and believers in the possibility of artificial intelligence can plausibly deploy moderate (...) theories of composition in defense of their views. And as it turns out, these strange cases are an interesting source of evidence for moderate theories of composition. (shrink)

I discuss an aspect of the relation between accounts of de se thought and the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. I will argue that a deflationary account of the latter—the Simple Account, due to Evans —will not do; a more robust one based on an account of de se thoughts is required. I will then sketch such an alternative account, based on a more general view on singular thoughts, and show how it can deal with the problems I (...) raise for the Simple Account. (shrink)

Philosophical work on explanation has focused on the following two topics: theories of explanation, intended to enumerate necessary and sufficient conditions for explanation, and inference to the best explanation as the strongest form of justification for ontological or metaphysical claims. I critically examine the most important philosophical work in both of these areas and defend my own conclusions about the connections between explanation and ontology. I argue that all of our inferences about the nature of the world, in ontology or (...) metaphysics, presuppose criteria for acceptable explanation. I first examine the metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, and Leibniz, arguing that their metaphysical reasoning was guided by assumptions about the nature of explanation. I also survey some recent work in ontology and find inference to the best explanation offered as the strongest available method of defending existence claims. To conclude this discussion, I offer an original argument for the thesis that all reasoning about existence claims, being nondeductive, presupposes some criteria for acceptable explanations, or a theory of explanation. Carl Hempel and Wesley Salmon have been two of the most influential philosophers offering theories of explanation, and I examine their work with the intention of discovering ontological or metaphysical assumptions shaping their theories of explanation. I argue that Hempel's theory rests on deterministic assumptions, and I argue the Salmon's theory of causality, which he admits supports his theory of explanation, is subject to empiricist criticisms. Theories of explanation typically rest on assumptions about the nature of the world, I argue, and I explain why this is so with an original theory of explanation connecting it to the psychological phenomenon of understanding. We rely on understanding in the identification of explanations, and understanding requires establishing a metaphysical context for an explanandum-event. I end by indicating the possibility of generating vicious justificatory circles through the reciprocal relationship of support between explanation and ontology, and I argue that vicious circles can be avoided only by grounding all ontological reasoning in a fundamental explanatory task of giving order to experience through a system of categories. (shrink)

Castañeda, Perry and Lewis argued in the 1960’s and 1970’s that thoughts about oneself “as oneself” – de se thoughts – require special treatment, and advanced different accounts. In this paper I discuss Ernest Sosa’s approach to these matters. I first present his approach to singular or de re thought in general in the first section. In the second, I introduce the data that need to be explained, Perry’s and Lewis’s proposals, and Sosa’s own account, in relation to Perry’s, Lewis’s, (...) and his own views on de re thought. In the third section I present the account I prefer – a “token-reflexive” version of Perry’s original account that Perry himself came to adopt in reaction to Stalnaker’s criticisms. In the final section I take up Recanati’s recent arguments, from a viewpoint on de se thought very similar to Sosa’s, to the effect that such an account is in a good position to explain the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. I argue there that that is not the case, and I conclude by suggesting that the token-reflexive account fits better both with the data and with Sosa’s Fregean take on de re thought in general. (shrink)

It has recently been proposed that the framework of semantic relativism be put to use to describe mental content, as deployed in some of the fundamental operations of the mind. This programme has inspired in particular a novel strategy of accounting for the essential egocentricity of first-personal or de se thoughts in relativist terms, with the advantage of dispensing with a notion of self-representation. This paper is a critical discussion of this strategy. While it is based on a plausible appeal (...) to cognitive economy, the relativist theory does not fully account for the epistemic profile that distinguishes de se thinking, as some of its proponents hope to do. A deeper worry concerns the reliance of the theory on a primitive notion of “centre” that hasn’t yet received enough critical attention, and is ambiguous between a thin and a rich reading. I argue that while the rich reading is required if the relativist analysis of the de se is to achieve its most ambitious aims, it also deprives the theory of much of its explanatory power. (shrink)

Is consciousness all in the head, or might the minimal physical substrate for some forms of conscious experience include the goings on in the (rest of the) body and the world? Such a view might be dubbed (by analogy with Clark and Chalmers’s ( 1998 ) claims concerning ‘the extended mind’) ‘the extended conscious mind’. In this article, I review a variety of arguments for the extended conscious mind, and find them flawed. Arguments for extended cognition, I conclude, do not (...) generalize to arguments for an extended conscious mind. (shrink)

This paper argues that self-consciousness and moral agency depend crucially on both embodied and social aspects of human existence, and that the capacity for practical wisdom, phronesis, is central to moral personhood. The nature of practical wisdom is elucidated by drawing on rival analyses of expertise. Although ethical expertise and practical wisdom differ importantly, they are alike in that we can acquire them only in interaction with other persons and through habituation. The analysis of moral agency and practical wisdom is (...) framed by Dennett's proposal that moral personhood requires satisfaction of six conditions, including self-consciousness. (shrink)

When does a human being cease to exist? For millennia, the answer to this question had remained largely unchanged: death had been diagnosed when heartbeat and breathing were permanently absent. Only comparatively recently, in the 1950s, rapid developments in intensive-care medicine called into question this widely accepted criterion. What had previously been deemed a permanent cessation of vital functions suddenly became reversible. -/- A new criterion of death was needed. It was suggested that the destruction of the brain could indicate (...) the death of the organism in the presence of external life support. Soon the so-called brain death became the new worldwide standard. In recent years, however, doubts about this neurological criterion have been growing. Is brain death really our death? -/- This is the question that this thesis seeks to answer. To this end, we shall connect the medical debate about the definition of death to the philosophical debate about personal identity. While we will find that the destruction of its brain does in fact not correspond to an organism’s death, we shall also ask whether the assumption that we are essentially organisms is correct. May brain death be the ceasing to exist of a different entity? -/- Substituting clinical case reports and considerations about human physiology for the use of thought experiments, the thesis takes a novel and philosophically unconventional approach to the problem of what we essentially are. We shall analyse various pathological conditions and their respective effects on the bodily and mental characteristics of our existence. We will conclude that brain death is indeed our death – but for reasons entirely different from those cited in the original justification of this criterion. (shrink)

We are responsible for some things but not for others. In this thesis, I investigate what it takes for an entity to be responsible for something. This question has two components: agents and actions. I argue for a permissive view about agents. Entities such as groups or artificially intelligent systems may be agents in the sense required for responsibility. With respect to actions, I argue for a causal view. The relation in virtue of which agents are responsible for actions is (...) a causal one. I claim that responsibility requires causation and I develop a causal account of agency. This account is particularly apt for addressing the relationship between agency and moral responsibility and sheds light on the causal foundations of moral responsibility. (shrink)

We argue that the minimal biological requirements for consciousness include a living body, not just neuronal processes in the skull. Our argument proceeds by reconsidering the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. Careful examination of this thought experiment indicates that the null hypothesis is that any adequately functional “vat” would be a surrogate body, that is, that the so-called vat would be no vat at all, but rather an embodied agent in the world. Thus, what the thought experiment actually shows is that the (...) brain and body are so deeply entangled, structurally and dynamically, that they are explanatorily inseparable. Such entanglement implies that we cannot understand consciousness by considering only the activity of neurons apart from the body, and hence we have good explanatory grounds for supposing that the minimal realizing system for consciousness includes the body and not just the brain. In this way, we put the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment to a new use, one that supports the “enactive” view that consciousness is a life-regulation process of the whole organism interacting with its environment. (shrink)

In this paper I will analyse the relationship between metaphor and imagination. This issue has been recently studied by cognitive linguists who appreciate its importance, while other semantic perspectives neglect it. I will analyse the thesis which affirms that metaphors are based on cognitive components which are not logical-propositional but imaginative: the “image schemata” are recurrent models of corporeal experiences, centres of knowledge organization which structure – in a non-propositional form – an amount of salient information. This information emerges from (...) the sensorimotor activities such as: manipulation of objects, spatial orientation and focusing perceptive attention on different goals. According to this theory, imagination is the drive of the entire cognitive experience and, through metaphorical projection, it activates and coordinates the schemata from which the very linguistic activity originates. Starting with empirical studies about the cognitive and neurobiological plausibility of image schemata, I will assert the function of imagination as the trait d’union between experience and cognitive use of the metaphor, through the use of sensory and synesthetic metaphors as mediators among perceptive, physical and linguistic dimensions. I hope future research will concentrate on the relationship between synesthesia and image schemata because of their strong connection with human perceptive, cognitive and neural structures. (shrink)

In Foundations for Moral Relativism, J. David Velleman shows that different communities can indeed be subject to incompatible moralities, because their local mores are rationally binding. At the same time, he explains why the mores of different communities, even when incompatible, are still variations on the same moral themes. The book thus maps out a universe of many moral worlds without, as Velleman puts it, "moral black holes”. The five self-standing chapters discuss such diverse topics as online avatars and virtual (...) worlds, lying in Russian and truth-telling in Quechua, the pleasure of solitude and the fear of absurdity. Accessibly written, Foundations for Moral Relativism presupposes no prior training in philosophy. (shrink)

My responses to seven critical reviews of my book *Mental Files* published in a special issue of the journal Disputatio, edited by F. Salis. The reviewers are: Keith Hall, David Papineau, Annalisa Coliva and Delia Belleri, Peter Pagin, Thea Goodsell, Krista Lawlor and Manuel Garcia-Carpintero.

The Church–Turing Thesis (CTT) is often employed in arguments for computationalism. I scrutinize the most prominent of such arguments in light of recent work on CTT and argue that they are unsound. Although CTT does nothing to support computationalism, it is not irrelevant to it. By eliminating misunderstandings about the relationship between CTT and computationalism, we deepen our appreciation of computationalism as an empirical hypothesis.

In this paper we develop a novel argument against the extended mind hypothesis. Our argument constitutes an advance in the debate, insofar as we employ only premises that are acceptable to a coarse-grained functionalist, and we do not rely on functional disanalogies between putative examples of extended minds and ordinary human beings that are just a matter of fine detail or degree. Thus, we beg no questions against proponents of the extended mind hypothesis. Rather, our argument consists in making use (...) of the following necessary condition on holding a belief for a reason: To believe something for a reason, one must come to believe it in virtue of attitudes that epistemically rationalize the belief that is formed, and one must come to believe in virtue of the fact that these attitudes epistemically rationalize the new belief. We show that many external objects that defenders of the extended mind hypothesis have claimed are beliefs cannot constitute a belief had for a reason, as they necessarily fail to satisfy the necessary condition. Our first thesis, then, is that beliefs had for reasons cannot be extended in the most interesting way specified by the extended mind hypothesis. Furthermore, if we add to our argument the premise that every token belief is something that could have been had for a reason, we can derive the stronger thesis that no beliefs can be extended in this way. (shrink)

. The extended‐mind thesis is the claim that mentality need not be situated just in the brain, or even within the boundaries of the skin. Some versions take “extended selves” be to relatively transitory couplings of biological organisms and external resources. First, I show how EM can be seen as an extension of traditional views of mind. Then, after voicing a couple of qualms about EM, I reject EM in favor of a more modest hypothesis that recognizes enduring subjects of (...) experience and agents with integrated bodies. Nonetheless, my modest hypothesis allows subpersonal states to have nonbiological parts that play essential roles in cognitive processing. I present empirical warrant for this modest hypothesis and show how it leaves room for science and religion to coexist. (shrink)

One might expect functionalism to imply that personal identity is preserved through various operations on the brain, including transplantation. I argue that this is not clearly so even where the whole brain is transplanted. It is definitely not so in cases where only the cerebrum is transplanted, a conceivable kind of hemispherectomy, and even certain cases in which the brain is "gradually" replaced by an inorganic substitute. These results distinguish functionalism from other accounts taking what Eric T. Olson calls the (...) "Psychological Approach" to personal identity, enabling it to avoid some of his objections to them. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I examine the nature and structure of consciousness. Conscious experience is often said to be phenomenally unified, and subjects of consciousness are often self-conscious. I ask whether these features necessarily accompany conscious experience. Is it necessarily the case, for instance, that all of a conscious subject's experiences at a time are phenomenally unified? And is it necessarily the case that subjects of consciousness are self-conscious whenever they are conscious? I argue that the answer to the former is (...) affirmative and the latter negative. In the first chapter, I set the stage by distinguishing phenomenal unity from other species of conscious unity. A pair of conscious states is phenomenally unified if they are experienced together as part of a single experience that encompasses them both. In this and the next two chapters I defend the thesis that, necessarily, for any subject (of conscious mental states) at any time, all of that subject's conscious mental states (at that time) are part of a single, maximal state of consciousness. I call this thesis the "Unity Thesis." I proceed by considering some preliminary questions that might be raised about the Unity Thesis. For instance, the thesis presupposes that it is coherent to talk about parts of mental states. I consider objections by Tye and Searle and argue that the notion of an experiential part is unproblematic. In the remaining pages of the chapter, I present the source of the biggest challenge to the Unity Thesis: the data gathered from split-brain subjects. The Unity Thesis is formulated using the notion of a maximal state of consciousness. In the second chapter, I attempt to precisify this notion in a way that does not pre-emptively decide the debate over the Unity Thesis. In informal terms, a maximal state of consciousness is a sum of conscious states that are i) simultaneous, ii) have the same subject, and iii) all have a conjoint phenomenology. I call this the Consensus View. I then consider two unorthodox views that the Consensus View does not take off the table: the views that a "collective consciousness" and a "spread consciousness" are possible. A collective subject is one that can enjoy the experiences of an indeterminate number of "lesser" subjects of consciousness by sharing them together with those subjects. A spread subject is one that can enjoy the experiences of an indeterminate number of lesser subjects of consciousness, but it does so, not by sharing those experiences with the lesser subjects, but by absorbing the lesser subjects of experience into itself, thereby erasing the traditional boundaries between the entities we intuitively think of as subjects of experience. I argue that, although the Consensus View does not decide against them, these views stretch the bounds of coherence and should not, therefore, be accepted. Having presented an account of what maximal state of consciousness is, I define a stream of consciousness in terms of a maximal states of consciousness. In the rest of chapter two, I consider and argue against a number of different ways of interpreting the split-brain data that are either inconsistent with the Unity Thesis or attribute more than one subject of consciousness to split-brain subjects. Among the views I consider are Lockwood's partial-unity view and the views, by theorists such as Sperry, Koch, Puccetti, Marks, and Tye, that split-brain subjects have two non-overlapping streams of consciousness. In chapter three, I consider a recent attempt by Bayne to account for the split-brain data in a way that does not attribute two streams of consciousness to them. According to Bayne's Switch Model, the consciousness of split-brain subjects can be likened to that of a ball that is passed back and forth between the two hemispheres of the upper-brain. The hemispheres take turns supporting a single stream of consciousness. I consider the empirical data in some detail and argue that the data is not as compatible with the Switch Model as Bayne claims. I close the chapter by presenting the rough outline of an interpretation of the split-brain data that is consistent with both the Unity Thesis and the split-brain data. In chapter four, I turn from defending the Unity Thesis to examining an attempt to account for conscious unity. Rosenthal has offered a theory of conscious unity as an extension of his higher-order theory of consciousness. I consider his account of conscious unity in light of a well-known objection to his theory: the (Representational) Mismatch Objection. It can be asked what it is like for a subject of experience when a higher-order state misrepresents its target first-order state. If what it is like for the subject corresponds to the content of the higher-order state, then it appears as though higher-order representation is unnecessary for conscious experience, for it would appear as though it is possible for a state to be conscious without being represented by a higher-order state. If what it is like corresponds to the content of the lower-order state, then it would again seem as though representation at the higher-order level is unnecessary for conscious experience, for the higher-order state would not seem to be doing any work in generating the experience. I consider and argue against two recent defences of Rosenthal's higher-order theory from the Mismatch Objection. Then I turn to Rosenthal's account of conscious unity. Rosenthal's account posits two mental mechanisms. I refer to the ways of accounting for conscious unity via these two mechanisms as the "gathering strategy" and the "common-ascription strategy" respectively. Both of these strategies, I argue, appear to locate the basis for certain phenomenal facts in higher-order representational facts. This raises a prima facie question: does Rosenthal's account of conscious unity land him square within the sights of the Mismatch Objection? Although the gathering strategy may ultimately be understood in a way that does not make it subject to the Mismatch Objection, Rosenthal has certain commitments that bar this strategy from serving as a complete account of conscious unity. This is problematic for Rosenthal, I argue, because his common-ascription strategy faces some difficult questions. This strategy makes conscious unity due to an implicit expectation a subject of consciousness has that, whenever he or she engages in introspection, an explicit sense of conscious unity will be generated. I argue that it is very difficult to see how such an implicit sense could both avoid the Mismatch Objection and do the work it needs to do in order to account for conscious unity. In chapter five, the discussion turns from the unity of consciousness to self-consciousness. The question that is considered in this and the last chapter is the question whether conscious experience is necessarily accompanied by self-consciousness. The affirmative answer to this question I call the Ubiquity Thesis. I spend some time distinguishing robust conceptions of self-consciousness from minimal conceptions of self-consciousness. The notion of self-consciousness invoked by the Ubiquity Thesis is a minimal one. In spite of the fact that the Ubiquity Thesis invokes only a minimal or thin conception of self-consciousness, I believe the thesis to be false and argue against it. In this chapter I take up the views of Husserl. Husserl is often regarded as the progenitor of the phenomenological tradition, a tradition in which many philosophers affirm the Ubiquity Thesis. I examine and argue against an interpretation of Husserl's work, one defended by Zahavi, according to which Husserl could be seen to defend the Ubiquity Thesis. One claim that Husserl makes is that, in order for an object to become the intentional target of a conscious state, it must be given to consciousness beforehand. It is possible, during acts of deliberate introspection, for consciousness to take itself as its object. On Husserl's view, this requires consciousness to be given to itself beforehand. This self-givenness of consciousness, argues Zahavi, can be seen as a kind of minimal self-consciousness. Husserl has also offered an account of this self-givenness of consciousness and it appears in his discussion of inner time-consciousness. I attempt to argue, using some of Husserl's other views regarding psychological stances (or standpoints), that consciousness is not given to itself outside of the adoption of a certain psychological standpoint. I also offer an alternative way of accounting for inner time-consciousness, one that does not have, as a built-in feature, that consciousness always has itself as a secondary object. In the sixth and final chapter, I take up a contemporary defence of the Ubiquity Thesis. Kriegel, a higher-order theorist like Rosenthal, has argued that every conscious state is conscious in virtue of the fact that it represents itself. This self-representation is understood as a kind of self-consciousness and, thus, his theory can be seen as affirming the Ubiquity Thesis. In the first part of the chapter, I take issue with the way in which Kriegel lays out the conceptual terrain. In particular, Kriegel countenances a property he calls "intransitive state self-consciousness." I argue that this way of speaking is confused. I then turn to considering Kriegel's account. Kriegel identifies the species of self-consciousness that pervades all of conscious experience with a peripheral awareness of one's own mental states. I argue that such a peripheral inner awareness does not accompany all of our mental states and, thus, that Kriegel's views do not give us reason to accept the Ubiquity Thesis. (shrink)

I argue that beliefs about what appears possible are justified in much the same way as beliefs about what appears actual. I do so by chisholming, and then modalizing, the epistemic principle associated with phenomenal conservatism. The principle is tested against a number of examples, and it gives the intuitively correct results. I conclude by considering how it can be used to defend two controversial modal arguments, a Cartesian argument for dualism and an ontological argument for the existence of God.

The central doctrine of traditional Christianity, the doctrine of the Incarnation, is that the Second Person of the Trinity lived a human existence on Earth as Jesus Christ for a finite period. In the words of the Nicene Creed, the Son is himwho for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.

Argumentation that uses the beliefs of one’s opponents to refute them is well known. This paper proposes that there is a hitherto unnoticed counterpart to it, to be called ab homine, in which speakers/writers argue through the manner in which they deliver a message. Since the manner of delivery can never be turned into a premise or premises, this form of argumentation—although somewhat resembling Aristotle’s ethos—is much closer to the peculiar force of Socratic elenchos.

French surrealist author Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus solus depicted a brain-in-a-vat apparatus in which the head of the revolutionary orator Georges Danton was reanimated and made to speak. This scene of mechanically-produced language echoes Roussel’s own method of quasi-mechanical literary production as presented in How I wrote certain of my books. Roussel’s work participates in a wider fascination in modern French thought with the fragile connection, or violent disjuncture, between the body and mind. This paper discusses a number of instances (...) in which bodiless and reanimated heads played a central role in reflections on knowledge, art, and individuality. Roussel’s works offer a sidelong commentary on the notion of explanation in the sciences and the cult of reason in a technocratic society. (shrink)

Recanati’s (2007, 2009) argues for a Lewisian subjectless view of the content of “implicit” de se thought, on the basis that we can thus better explain the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. The paper argues that this is not the case, and suggests that such a view is in tension with Recanati’s mental files approach to de re thought in general and the SELF concept in particular.

This paper is prompted by the charge that the prevailing Western paradigm of medical knowledge is essentially Cartesian. Hence, illness, disease, disability, etc. are said to be conceived of in Cartesian terms. The paper attempts to make use of the critique of Cartesianism in medicine developed by certain commentators, notably Leder (1992), in order to expose Cartesian commitments in conceptions of disability. The paper also attempts to sketch an alternative conception of disability — one partly inspired by the work of (...) Merleau-Ponty. In particular, three key Cartesian claims are identified and subjected to criticism. These are as follows: (a) The claim that the body is an object, (b) what is termed here ‘the modularity thesis’, and (c) the claim that the body cannot be constitutive of the self (i.e. since the soul/mind/brain is). In opposition to these claims, it is argued that the body is properly viewed as a subject; that there are neither purely mental, nor purely physical disabilities; and that selves are constituted, at least in part, by their bodies. (shrink)

There have been monumental advances in the study of the social dimensions of knowledge in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But it has been common within a wide variety of fields--including social philosophy, cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of science--to approach the social dimensions of knowledge as simply another resource to be utilized or controlled. I call this view, in which other people's epistemic significance are only of instrumental value, manipulationism. I identify manipulationism, trace its manifestations in (...) the aforementioned fields, and explain how to move beyond it. The principal strategy that I employ for moving beyond manipulationism consists of synthesizing enactivism and neo-Kuhnian social epistemology. Specifically, I expand the enactivist concept of participatory sense-making by linking it to recent conceptual innovations in social epistemology, such as the concept of immanent cogent argumentation. (shrink)

Earl Conee and Richard Feldman claim that mentalism identifies the core of internalist epistemology. This is what I call identifying ur-internalism. Their version of ur-internalism differs from the traditional one ? viz., accessibilism ? by not imposing requirements stipulating that subjects must have reflective access to facts which justify their beliefs for these beliefs to be justified. Instead, justification simply supervenes on the mental lives of subjects. I argue that mentalism fails to establish itself as ur-internalism by demonstrating that the (...) strong supervenience claim used by Conee and Feldman is consistent with cognitive externalism (often called ?the extended mind hypothesis?). Briefly, cognitive externalism claims that the mental states themselves (rather than their contents) constitutively depend on factors outside the bodily individual. Given this possibility, I claim Conee and Feldman's supervenience principle no longer suits the purposes to which they put it. (shrink)

Brain in a vat scenarios in analytic philosophy feature both brains and technological apparatus. The relation between specimens and technology is an interesting aspect of these scenarios, and in order to explore this relation, I contrast here two kinds of scientific collecting practices: the collection of post-mortem brains versus the compilation of digital brain atlases. This contrast highlights a novel configuration of the relation between brains and new information technologies. This new configuration is traced back to the late 1980s, which (...) saw the rise of a new kind of collection of brains, with a markedly different scope and nature: the neuroscience database. Brains are now easily captured in vivo, so that while post-mortem brains were precious and few, scanners provide an embarrassment of riches in the form of terabytes of data. The rise of the virtual brain as a new digital object for research is reliant on the development of new imaging technologies, but also on the growth of computerised tools, informatics, and electronic networks in this field. These developments contribute to an informational turn in scientific research. This article considers what is involved in the shift in type of object, from the scarce, wet, biological brain to a plentiful, digital, virtual one. It discusses the significance of this new object in terms of collections, institutions, and research practices. (shrink)