Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 56, Issue 1, Page 129-138, February 2022.

Conceptual confusions permeate all forms of intellectual pursuit. Many have contended that multilingual legislation, i.e., one law enacted in different languages, is unviable when carried out by means of translation. But not many have realized that the same would also be true of drafting if their contention could be justified. My involvement in the translation of Hong Kong laws into Chinese in the run-up to 1997 exposed me to a whole world of myths and misconceptions about legal translation arising from (...) our failure to command a clear view of the workings of language. Over the years I have endeavoured to come to grips with the problems inherent in legal translation, showing that the arguments against the possibility of exact translation, against the possibility of achieving equivalence between different language texts of the law, and against the possibility of bridging the conceptual gap between legal terminologies in different languages, are all ill-grounded and misguided. There are indeed enormous difficulties in drafting and translating multilingual law, but they are essentially of a technical nature, by no means theoretically irresolvable. The viability of multilingual legislation is simply grounded in our innate communicative intention to use signs and symbols to convey meaning. As language users, we are capable of making language work for us for any particular purpose. Just as we can translate the rules of chess from one language to another whereby players speaking different languages can play the same game called “chess”, we don’t see why we can’t do the same with multilingual legislation. The door has always been open! (shrink)

Anger is often an appropriate reaction to harms and injustices, but is it a politically beneficial one? Martha Nussbaum (Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (1), 41–56, 2015, Anger and Forgiveness. Oxford University Press, 2016) has argued that, although anger is useful in initially recruiting agents for action, anger is typically counterproductive to securing the political aims of those harmed. After the initial shockwave of outrage, Nussbaum argues that to be effective at enacting positive social change, groups and individuals (...) alike, must move quickly out of the state of anger. Feminist theorists (Frye, The Politics of Reality. Crossing Press, 1983; Lorde, 1997; Narayan, Hypatia 3 (2): 31–48, 1988) on the other hand have for long highlighted the efficacy of anger, as well as its moral and epistemic value, in fighting against the oppressive status quo. It might be thought therefore that for political action to be effective, a continued state of anger is preferable. Protestors must after all create and sustain a sense of moral obligation and justice. A main way of doing so is to promote successive moral shocks that trigger outrage (Jasper, Emotion Review 6 (3): 208–213, 2014). I present a novel, empirically informed defense of anger’s efficacy in political action. Nussbaum holds a traditional view on the nature of anger, inherited from Aristotle and the Stoics, which holds that anger constitutively involves a desire for retribution. The view that anger is counterproductive falls out of this and is dominant in academic work as well as in our personal and political lives. Based on work in social psychology, I argue that we need to reconsider this. In doing so, I highlight anger’s aim for recognition, rather than retribution, as key. Furthermore, I uncover conditions for anger’s political efficacy, as well as reasons for why the traditional view of anger has been so pervasive. (shrink)

NeoFregeanism is an intriguing but elusive philosophy of mathematical existence. At crucial points, it goes cryptic and metaphorical. I want to put forward an interpretation of neoFregeanism—perhaps not one that actual neoFregeans will embrace—that makes sense of much of what they say. NeoFregeans should embrace quantifier variance.

Those of us who are captivated by new television, often find ourselves rewatching episodes or whole series. Why? What is the philosophical significance of the phenomenon of rewatching? In what follows, I engage with the ontology of television series in order to think about these questions around rewatching. I conclude by reflecting on what the entire discussion might suggest about the medium of new television, about ourselves, and also about our world and the possibilities of art in it.

Although the ethics of humor is a relatively new field, it already seems to have achieved a consensus about ethics in general. In this paper, I implicitly (1) question the view of ethics that stands behind many discussions in the ethics of humor; I do this by explicitly (2) focusing on what has been a chief preoccupation in the ethics of humor: the evaluation of humor. Does the immoral content of a joke make it more or less humorous? Specifically, I (...) analyze whether a sexist joke is more humorous because of its sexism. Contra recent trends in the ethics of humor, I answer this question affirmatively. To this end, the paper presents a detailed and novel reading of Bergson's philosophy of humor, which I argue connects most easily and significantly to the alternate view of ethics I have in mind. (shrink)

Because of the problems associated with ecological concepts, generalizations, and proposed general theories, applied ecology may require a new "logic" of explanation characterized neither by the traditional accounts of confirmation nor by the logic of discovery. Building on the works of Grunbaum, Kuhn, and Wittgenstein, we use detailed descriptions from research on conserving the Northern Spotted Owl, a case typical of problem solving in applied ecology, to (1) characterize the method of case studies; (2) survey its strengths; (3) summarize and (...) respond to its shortcomings; and (4) investigate and defend its underlying "logic". (shrink)

What is special about all our living exchanges with our surroundings is that they occur within the ceaseless, intertwined flow of many unfolding strands of spontaneously responsive, living activity. This requires us to adopt a kind of fluid, process thinking, a shift from thinking of events as occurring between things and beings existing as separate entities prior to their inter-action, to events occurring within a continuously unfolding, holistic but stranded flow of events, with no clear, already existing boundaries to be (...) found anywhere (Mol & Law, 1994)—a flow of events within which we ourselves are also immersed. We thus become involved in activities within which we find things happening to us, as much as we make things happen in our surroundings—in other words, our surroundings are also agentive in that they can exert “calls” upon us to respond within them in appropriate ways. Consequently, what we can learn in such encounters is not just new facts or bits of information, but new ways of relating or orienting ourselves bodily to the others and othernesses in the world around us—although much can “stand in the way” of our doing this. My concern below is to explore events happening on the (inter)-subjective side of the Cartesian subject/object divide which “shape” our spontaneous ways of acting in, and reflecting on, the “worlds” within which we live out our lives. (shrink)

Tom Stoppard is justly praised by many for what are perceived as his technical skills as a dramatist—his wit, his seriousness, his mastery of parody and pastiche, his impressive control of dramatic structure. Stoppard earns his place as a giant of modern drama from these qualities. They, however, are not what concern me here. His plays are also in various ways riddled with philosophy. My purpose in this paper is to examine the claim that he is a philosopher's dramatist, rather (...) than a dramatist's dramatist or an ordinary thinking man's dramatist. I am not concerned with how far Stoppard himself as a matter of biographical fact may wish to make this claim, although Stoppard has made no secret of his fascination with Philosophy. I make the claim myself in order both to offer an interpretation of certain dramatic texts and to raise certain questions about philosophical method. I hope to show that to understand certain ways in which Stoppard's plays are philosophical is to appreciate something profound about the way in which philosophy and drama are akin—that is, I hope to make critical and philosophical points, not historical or biographical points. (shrink)

Abstract.Legal philosophy must consider the way in which laws function as reasons for action. “Simple positivism” considers laws as merely reasons in the balance of reasons. Joseph Raz, as a representative of “sophisticated positivism,” argues that laws are exclusionary reasons for action, not merely reasons in the balance of reasons. This paper discusses Raz's arguments for his view. The Functional Argument provides no more reason for positivism than against it. The Phenomenological Argument is best supported by an account of how (...) character traits function in explaining behaviour. But then the distinction between exclusionary reasons and expressive reasons is obliterated. Legal positivism cannot absorb laws as expressive reasons for action. Raz's positivism implies the correctness of an anti‐positivistic legal theory. (shrink)

The costliness of disrupting a pattern may not be a useful criterion for distinguishing between acts and patterns; there are instances in which omitted components of patterns are hard to detect (e.g., typographical errors), or in which distortions are easily introduced (e.g., slurred words in a trite phrase). Are there behavioral criteria for distinguishing between acts and patterns?

It is something of a commonplace of Butlerian interpretation that the main interest and achievements of Butler's moral philosophy are in normative ethics, and not metaethics. He wishes to bring moral enlightenment to citizens and not, to philosophers, epistemological enlightenment. Nonetheless for that he makes a number of remarks which, if we were collecting for some bizarre purpose metaethical forms of words, we would note down and include in our collection. Thus he makes some progress towards the development of a (...) moral epistemology, a theory of moral judgment. My purpose here is to assess those steps, and to see how far the structure which results can be called a theory. I have the impression that much of the reluctance among scholars to allow that Butler does have a theory of moral judgment is caused by the metaethical blinkers that they themselves wear; what is in fact the beginnings of an unfashionable and unconventional theory is seen as unsophisticated confusion. But I shall not overdo praise of Butler. I shall suggest that Aristotle does a somewhat better job of developing this type of theory. (shrink)

It is something of a commonplace of Butlerian interpretation that the main interest and achievements of Butler's moral philosophy are in normative ethics, and not metaethics. He wishes to bring moral enlightenment to citizens and not, to philosophers, epistemological enlightenment. Nonetheless for that he makes a number of remarks which, if we were collecting for some bizarre purpose metaethical forms of words, we would note down and include in our collection. Thus he makes some progress towards the development of a (...) moral epistemology, a theory of moral judgment. My purpose here is to assess those steps, and to see how far the structure which results can be called a theory. I have the impression that much of the reluctance among scholars to allow that Butler does have a theory of moral judgment is caused by the metaethical blinkers that they themselves wear; what is in fact the beginnings of an unfashionable and unconventional theory is seen as unsophisticated confusion. But I shall not overdo praise of Butler. I shall suggest that Aristotle does a somewhat better job of developing this type of theory. (shrink)

If phenomenal consciousness is distinct from the computationally based access-consciousness that controls overt behavior, how can I tell which things (other than myself) enjoy phenomenal consciousness? And if phenomenal consciousness 'plays no role in controlling overt behavior, how do human bodies come to write target articles arguing for the existence of phenomenal consciousness?

Substantivism is a general philosophical methodology advocating a substantive approach to philosophical theorizing. In this article, I present an overview of this methodology with a special emphasis on the field of truth. I begin with a framework for understanding what is at stake in the substantivist–deflationist debate and describe the substantivist critique of deflationism. I then proceed to discuss contemporary substantivism as a positive methodology, present examples of recent substantivist theories of truth, delineate several principles of philosophical substantivism, and connect (...) it to contemporary thought about the nature and methods of philosophy. Due to limitations of space, I am unable to discuss all the forms contemporary substantivism has taken. But I try to give a clear sense of the central principles, challenges, and promise of this methodology. (shrink)

In this article the standard philosophical method involving intuition-driven conceptual analysis is challenged in a new way. This orthodox approach to philosophy takes analysanda to be the specifications of the content of concepts in the form of sets of necessary and sufficient conditions. Here it is argued that there is no adequate account of what necessary and sufficient conditions are. So, the targets of applications of the standard philosophical method so understood are not sufficiently well understood for this method to (...) be dependable. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper is a study of the role of language in scientific activity. It recommends that language be viewed as a community's means of patterning its affairs. Language represents where the boundaries of the community are and who is entitled to speak within it, and it displays the structures of authority in the community. Moreover, language precipitates the community's view of what the world is like, such that linguistic usages can be taken as referring to that world. Thus, language (...) connects on the one side to a community's practical life, and, on the other, to the reality on which it “reports.”The example treated is Robert Boyle's view of the language proper for experimental practice, and his arguments against the value and legitimacy of mathematical representations within the experimental community. Boyle argued that the use of mathematics was inappropriate because (i) it would restrict the number of potential participants; (ii) it would give rise to unwarranted expectations of the certainty and accuracy to be expected of real physical inquiries; (iii) it would suggest views of natural law and God's relations with the natural world which were incorrect and possibly dangerous; and because (iv) the world upon which the experimentalist operated was not such as was represented by mathematical idealizations. I try to establish that decision about the appropriate language for the experimental community was a moral choice. (shrink)

This article elucidates Márkus’ new Marxist philosophy of language based on his critique of the paradigm of language represented by Popper, Wittgenstein, Lévi-Strauss, and Gadamer. His critique suggests that instrumental rationality, pure reason, alienated reason, and objective and idealistic rationality of the paradigm of language are elements that should be overcome. From his critical perspective, value rationality, practical reason, personal reason, and historical materialism are advocated instead. He not only critically develops the philosophy of language but also adds new levels (...) of meaning to Marxism. (shrink)

The primary focus here is romantic love, but it may be applied to other cases of love such as those within a family. The first issue is whether love is a non-rational occurrence leading to a state of affairs to which the normative constrains of reason do not apply. If one assumes that reasons are relevant to determining love, then the second issue is the manner in which love is and should be reasonable and governed by the indications of reason. (...) It is contended that our conception of love is inherently contradictory. Depending on circumstances, we want love to be both a non-rational occurrence beyond reason and something normative such that the indications of reasons are relevant to determining and assessing it. We alternate between the two treatments of love and in so doing love can function in our lives. The incoherence is accommodated by each treatment or view of love being one of as if. This allows us to live with love in a manner whereby we do not have to definitively commit to either alternative, so we have a dipolar as if concept of love. Sometimes we view love as if reasons were beside the point and at others we view love as if it were rightly subject to the indications of reason. (shrink)

In this paper I evaluate embodied social cognition, embodied cognition’s account of how we understand others. I identify and evaluate three claims that motivate embodied social cognition. These claims are not specific to social cognition; they are general hypotheses about cognition. As such, they may be used in more general arguments for embodied cognition. I argue that we have good reasons to reject these claims. Thus, the case for embodied social cognition fails. Moreover, to the extent that general arguments for (...) embodied cognition rest on these premises, they are correspondingly uncompelling. (shrink)

Gray's comparator model fails to provide an adequate explanation of consciousness for two reasons. First, it is based on a narrow definition of consciousness that excludes basic phenomenology and active functions of consciousness. Second, match/mismatch decisions can be made without producing an experience of consciousness. The model thus violates the sufficiency criterion.

Cet ouvrage de Pascal Engel doit être fortement recommandé pour plusieurs raisons. On est d'abord frappé par l'ampleur du travail accompli et l'étendue du domaine couvert. La documentation est fouillée, l'exposé est clair et un équilibre est toujours maintenu entre les questions générales et les questions de détail. Engel ne perd jamais de vue la perspective d'ensemble qu'il s'est donnée et qui concerne la nature de la logique, y compris lorsqu'il s'emploie à faire certaines nuances ou à proposer une distinction (...) subtile. Il aurait été facile en pareille matière de proposer un mauvais choix de thèmes. Là encore, Engel s'est bien acquitté de sa tâche. On a affaire à un ouvrage dans lequel l'auteur va toujours droit à l'essentiel. Plusieurs sujets sont à peine effleurés, mais cette décision est très souvent heureuse puisqu'elle permet à l'auteur d'établir des liens entre des problématiques qui, de prime abord, semblent très éloignées les unes des autres. L'auteur fait montre d'un étonnant esprit de synthèse et plusieurs thèmes font, à ma connaissance, une première apparition dans la littérature philosophique francophone. Il s'agit donc d'une contribution à la philosophie de la logique qui mérite d'être signalée. On regrettera peut-être la présence d'un assez grand nombre d'erreurs typographiques. Dans la plupart des cas, il ne s'agit que de coquilles mais, dans d'autres cas, elles risquent de nuire à la compréhension du texte surtout lorsqu'elles interviennent dans des formules ou des définitions. (shrink)

I first met Norman Malcolm in the fall of 1963 when, as a terrified sophomore, I took his course in Free Will and Determinism at Cornell. I believe I had already heard that Malcolm was a figure of almost legendary proportions.

I first met Norman Malcolm in the fall of 1963 when, as a terrified sophomore, I took his course in Free Will and Determinism at Cornell. I believe I had already heard that Malcolm was a figure of almost legendary proportions.

How should sociologists use the word theory? Gabriel Abend’s recent insistence that this question should be tackled politically raises two important issues: Is sociology political? And if so, what normative implications follow for its organization? Drawing on Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance and post-Gramscian theories of hegemony, I argue that Abend’s proposal that semantic questions about theory can be addressed separately from ontological, evaluative, and teleological ones is untenable. Disagreements about the latter are constitutive, not merely supplementary to the meaning (...) of theory. Against Abend’s deliberative-democratically oriented vision, I propose an agonistic politics of theory. In doing so, I consider both the internal inconsistencies of deliberativism and the practical advantages and sociological relevance of agonism. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a conception of individual religiousness in terms of religious experience. Using ideas of the early Friedrich Schleiermacher, I will claim that religious experiences are contemplative experiences of the totality of being. This understanding of religious experiences presents an alternative to how religious experience is often epistemologically thought about in the more contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Furthermore, it has systematic advantages: It can construe religious plurality in terms of different ways to experience the totality of (...) being, it stays neutral to metaphysical and moral debates such as whether there is a God whose laws we should obey, and it allows for an explanation of how religious intuitions and religious emotions relate to one another as well as of why religiousness and art often go hand in hand. Even though understanding religiousness in terms of contemplative experience also bears revisionary potential, I will discuss how more doxastic elements of religious people’s lives can be reintegrated into this picture. (shrink)