As McDowell makes clear in ‘On Pippin’s Postscript’ and in many other works, the interpretive question at issue in this exchange—how to understand the relation between Kant and Hegel, especially as that concerns Kant’s central ‘Deduction’ argument in the Critique of Pure Reason1—brings into the foreground an even larger problem on which all the others depend: the right way to understand at the highest level of generality the relation between active or spontaneous thought and our receptive and corporeal sensibility and (...) bodily embodiment. From Mind and World on, McDowell has indicated that this is in fact a problem so inclusive as to be common to theoretical and practical philosophy; that the issue of how thought informs our sensibility is at bottom the same (raises the same logical or conceptual issue) as the issue of how thought could be said to inform, to be active ‘in’, bodily action; that we can be in the grip of the same bad, misleading picture in accounting for executing an intention as in accounting for acquiring perceptual knowledge.2 I agree with, and follow his lead in, setting the basic framework for the particular issues in just this way. With matters so set out, there are two main areas of disagreement: (i) how to state the role of concepts and especially conceptual activity in the sensible uptake of the world and (ii) what to make of Hegel’s claim for a speculative ‘identity’ between inner and outer in action, or how to state the role of intentions ‘in’ bodily activity. In both cases, McDowell thinks I go too far; too far in terms of what is philosophically correct, and too far in attributing those positions to Hegel. It is the former topic that is in play in this exchange, although elements of the latter arise as well. There is first an issue lingering from the first exchange in Reading McDowell. (shrink)

Ethical pluralists hold that moral values and systems are irreducibly diverse and incommensurable according to a common scale. One criticism of the view is that accepting such incommensurability renders them unable to criticize values, practices, institutions, and so forth that are genuinely bad. This paper considers two ways that pluralists have appealed to human nature to answer this criticism. One way appeals to nature to ground a positive conception of human flourishing, whereas the other appeals to nature as a source (...) of constraints. I argue that both views fail to meet the criticism in a satisfactory way and then advance a view that improves upon the existing options. Specifically, I argue that human nature is the standard by which it is possible to assess humaneness, which is a kind of beauty that represents the elevation or refinement of human nature. Accordingly, pluralists can deploy judgments of humaneness to criticize practices, institutions, and so forth that are not worth tolerating without violating the spirit of pluralism. (shrink)

A fundamental aim in caring practice is to understand patients' experiences of ill‐health. These experiences have a qualitative content and cannot, unlike thoughts and beliefs with conceptual content, directly be expressed in words. Nurses therefore face a variety of interpretive challenges when they aim to understand patients' subjective perspectives on disease and illness. The article argues that theories on social simulation can shed light on how nurses manage to meet these challenges. The core assumption of social simulationism is that we (...) do not understand other people by forming mental representations of how they think, but by putting ourselves in their situation in a more imaginative way. According to simulationism, any attempt to understand a patient's behavior is made on the basis of simulating what it is like to be that patient in the given context. The article argues that this approach to social interpretation can clarify how nurses manage to achieve aims of patient understanding, even when they have limited time to communicate and incomplete knowledge of patients' perspectives. Furthermore, simulation theory provides a normative framework for interpretation, in the sense that its theoretical assumptions constitute ideals for how nurses should seek to understand patients' experiences of illness. (shrink)