The Absent World is an essay about the operation of language and thought concerning the gap between sense and referent. Due to variations in the structure of this gap, when we speak or think about the absent world, without the present object to supplement our meaning, unique psychological and ethical dimensions arise as we try to understand a world that surpasses us. As opposed to phenomenology, where the concept of absence structures our understanding of the absent world, (...) this work will posit the actuality of the absent as the basis of another relationship between ourselves and a world that is unseen. This thought of actuality will be developed through an exploration of empathy and a particular thought of death. Then it will be shown how it provides an aspect of a re-imagined concept of depth which, as it refers to a world that overflows any generality, will manipulate the gap between sense and referent in such a way that the usually silent operations of generalisation become not only manifest but pushed towards new extremes. This conceptual movement will be shown to be operative in our understanding of the absent, altering the way a subject’s world can be transformed by its interaction with the unknowns that surpass it. (shrink)

The Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus quoted an ancient Greek proverb, “Absent while present.” This paper argues that social technology, which makes us present to those absent, also makes us absent to those present. That is, technology connects our attentions to our virtual community of friends but in doing so it disconnects our attentions from those about us. Because we are finite beings, who dwell wherever our attentions reside, there is a real conflict between the connectivity of social technology (...) and bodily communion with those about us. The interpersonal presence afforded by social technology is a presence purchased at a price: the absence of the body. What social technology is incapable of achieving is bodily presence, and bodily presence is needed for intimacy and friendship. (shrink)

Discussions of psychiatric nosology focus on a few popular examples of disorders, and on the validity of diagnostic criteria. Looking at Anorexia Nervosa, an example rarely mentioned in this literature, reveals a new problem: the DSM has a strict taxonomic structure, which assumes that disorders can only be located on one branch. This taxonomic assumption fails to fit the domain of psychopathology, resulting in obfuscation of cross-category connections. Poor outcomes for treatment of Anorexia may be due to it being pigeonholed (...) as an Eating Disorder, when a disturbance of body perception may be a more central symptom than food restriction. This paper explores the possibility of restructuring the DSM taxonomy to allow for a pluralist classification of disorders. This change could improve treatment and research without requiring any changes to diagnostic criteria. (shrink)

For Heidegger, the fundamental “rationality” of Western metaphysics lies in the fact that its “leading question” concerning beings as beings constantly refers back to the question concerning the ground (arche, ratio, Grund) of beings. Whereas metaphysics has sought to ground beings in ideal beingness, Heidegger attempts to think beingness as itself based on the withdrawing “background” dimension of no-thing-ness that grounds finite presence by differing from it. In Heidegger’s earlier work, the structure of this “grounding” is considered in terms of (...) Dasein’s temporal transcendence; later, it is rearticulated through the fourfold dimensionality of meaningfulness (Geviert), converging in a concrete thing. (shrink)

This work is based on correspondence with an academic during December 2019, regarding the first three sections of The Absent World.

A mesure qu'ils avancent dans leur œuvre de prospection, les sémioticiens s'aperçoivent que tout est communication, la langue bien sûr, mais aussi les images, les sons, les objets, les gestes, et que tous ces phénomènes constituent des systèmes de signes qui doivent être étudiés en ramenant chaque message aux codes qui en régissent l'émission et la compréhension. Comprendre les systèmes de signes impose toutefois d'envisager les codes comme des structures, puis de recouvrir à des structures toujours plus vastes, dans un (...) mouvement de régression vers la matrice originelle de toute communication possible, vers un prétendu Code des Codes qui devrait représenter la détermination " naturelle " précédant toute culture. Mais si la sémiotique s'engageait dans cette voie, elle ne pourrait qu'aboutir à la " source " de toute structure possible, forcément non structurée, à ce qu'Umberto Ecco appelle la structure absente. Son livre, tout en refusant ce Code des Codes, essaie de montrer que tout acte communicatif est dominé par la présence massive de codes socialement et historiquement déterminés. La sémiotique découvre ainsi dans la dialectique entre code et message les rapports entre l'univers de signes et l'univers des idéologies, qui se reflètent dans les modes communicatifs préconstitués, et elle relie le monde des choses au monde de la culture, qui formalise les choses non pas pour les reconnaître comme elles sont mais afin de les transformer. Après avoir étudié dans L'œuvre ouverte (1965) les structures des langages expérimentaux de l'art contemporain, Umberto Ecco traite ici l'ensemble des problèmes sémiotiques et ce livre constitue à la fois sa contribution à la recherche en cours et le panorama actuellement le plus vaste et le plus complet sur les préalables constitutifs à toute sémiotique et sur l'état présent du structuralisme. (shrink)

The world provides us with an ocean of opportunities for fitting emotion. But we are beings with limited emotional resources, so missed opportunities are common. This chapter argues that these failures to take up fitting emotions are very frequently unfitting in their own right—so frequently, in fact, that most of us lead lives replete with unfitting absences of emotion. It begins by showing that, whenever an emotion can be unfitting in virtue of being too weak, the absence of that emotion (...) can also be unfitting, and for just the same reason. But emotional responses to a host of everyday objects—a funny joke, a nasty insult, and so on—can be unfittingly weak. This means that failures to respond emotionally to an enormous host of everyday objects are similarly unfitting. (shrink)

What is a moral argument? A straightforward answer is that a moral argument is an argument dealing with moral issues, such as the permissibility of killing in certain circumstances. I call this the thin sense of ‘moral argument’. Arguments that we find in normative and applied ethics are almost invariably moral in this sense. However, they often fail to be moral in other respects. In this article, I discuss four ways in which morality can be absent from moral arguments (...) in the thin sense. If these arguments suffer from an absence of morality in at least one of these ways, they are not moral arguments in what I will call the thick sense of ‘moral argument’. Because only moral arguments in the thick sense could possibly qualify as proper responses to moral problems, the absence of morality in thin arguments means that these arguments will fail to give us a reason to do whatever they claim that we ought to do, even if we see no independent reason to question the truth of the premises or the logical validity of the argument. (shrink)

In this paper I draw together the notion of the absent referent as proposed by Carol J. Adams, and the notions of literal and symbolical sacrifice by eating the other — or ingestion — advanced by Jacques Derrida, to characterize how animals are commonly perceived, which ultimately forbids productive arguments for vegetarianism. I discuss animals as being literally and definitionally absent referents, and I argue, informed by Derrida’s philosophy, that it is impossible to aim at turning them into (...) present referents without reinforcing symbolic ingestion by linking symbolic ingestion to epistemic appropriation or conceptualization. With this, I highlight the ethical importance of discussing symbolic ingestion in animal philosophy. (shrink)

A large part of the contemporary phenomenology of medicine has been devoted to accounts of health and illness, arguing that they contribute to the improvement of health care. Less focus has been paid to the issue of prevention of disease and the associated difficulty of adhering to health-promoting behaviours, which is arguably of equal importance. This article offers a phenomenological account of this disease prevention, focusing on how we—as embodied beings—engage with health-promoting behaviours. It specifically considers how we engage with (...) oral hygiene regimens to prevent periodontitis and why we are not good at it. The article suggests that poor adherence to health-promoting behaviours can be explained with reference to the concept of the absent body, because prevention of disease is generally concerned with pre-symptomatic illness experience. The final section contains a discussion of some strategies for the improvement of disease prevention based on this viewpoint. (shrink)

Through a study of nature and paternal power, this paper sheds light on the neglected theme of the relation between language and justice in Plato’s Cratylus. The dialogue inquires after the correctness of names, and it turns out that no lineage leads us back to a natural ground of names. Every lineage breaks; nature is always disrupted by the monstrous. It does not follow, however, that names are mere conventions without significance: on the contrary, naming is best understood as a (...) prayer to and for the just. The Cratylus reveals the insufficiency of language not to lead us to despair but to call us to the humility and the hope in which we must pray for justice. (shrink)

I argue that consideration of certain cases of severe depression reveals a problem for desire-based theories of welfare. I first show that depression can result in a person losing her desires and then identify a case wherein it seems right to think that, as a result of very severe depression, the individuals described no longer have any desires whatsoever. I argue that the state these people are in is a state of profound ill-being: their lives are going very poorly for (...) them. Yet desire theories get this case wrong. Because no desires are being frustrated, the desire theorist has no grounds for ascribing ill-being; indeed, because the individuals described seem utterly without desire, the desire theorist has no grounds for treating these people as subjects of welfare ascription at all. I argue that these results are unacceptable; therefore, we should reject desire-based theories of well-being and ill-being. (shrink)

This comment text brings, at the end, a part of Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish), which has not been translated into Portuguese and does not appear in more than 40 editions of the Brazilian translation. It is on the back cover of the original in French, as if it were an afterword, signed by the author himself, Michel Foucault, which more than 40 years ago published by Editions Gallimard, his first copies in February 1975. Two years later, the Brazilian (...) version was published, but without this part which contains the reflection that Foucault invites us to think about at the end of his work:“Can the genealogy of modern morality be drawn from a political history of bodies?”(Foucault, 1975, p. 318, my translation). In addition to this absence, in the text in Portuguese, we have to think about why Foucault chose to put it in the final part of the book? (shrink)

Some, if not most, philosophy program admissions committee members assume that they can determine that one applicant will likely manifest a higher degree of philosophical skill than another applicant on the basis of differences between their materials. I challenge this assumption by explaining how applicants’ materials in significant measure reflect the racially unjust environment in which they manifest their philosophical skill. I explain how applicants’ racial-group membership in similar measure determines what these materials consist in.

According to a standard representationalist view cognitive capacities depend on internal content-carrying states. Recent alternatives to this view have been met with the reaction that they have, at best, limited scope, because a large range of cognitive phenomena—those involving absent and abstract features—require representational explanations. Here we challenge the idea that the consideration of cognition regarding the absent and the abstract can move the debate about representationalism along. Whether or not cognition involving the absent and the abstract (...) requires the positing of representations depends upon whether more basic forms of cognition require the positing of representations. (shrink)

This paper shows why qualia constitute a problem for any theory of mental phenomena. We use the term ‘qualia’ in reference to non-intentional features of mental states which are eminently qualitative, i.e. perceptions, emotions, moods and body sensations. These non-intentional features are usually described as intrinsic, ineffable, infallible, atomic, private, direct and irreducible to the physical. The paper also explains the absent qualia argument which is addressed as a critique to functionalism.

A growing number of linguistic attempts to explain how languages change use cultural-evolutionary models involving selection or drift. Developmental constraints and biases, which take center stage in evolutionary developmental biology or evo-devo, seem to be absent within this framework, even though linguistics is home to numerous notions of constraint. In this paper, we show how these evo-devo concepts could be applied to linguistic change and why they should. This requires some conceptual groundwork, due to important differences between linguistic and (...) biotic evolution. In biological evolution, development generates the organism's variable traits on which selection and drift act. In linguistic evolution by analogy, we say development generates the linguistic variants on which selection and drift can act. “Linguistic development” then picks out how individual speakers produce and comprehend language. It involves much more than just learning. Using this broad notion of development, we distinguish between different types of bias that could operate in the processes of linguistic innovation and transmission, which correspond to genetic mutation and biological reproduction, respectively. Having thus sharpened our conceptual toolbox, we then reanalyze two well-documented cases of linguistic change and show that, in both these cases, linguists have only considered Neo-Darwinian evolutionary explanations, falsely deploying an exclusive disjunction of selection and drift. We show that there is at least a third relevant alternative in these examples, namely developmental constraint or bias in the sense we explicate here. (shrink)

Pregnancy has a profound impact on individuals’ lives, yet the subjective experience is often absent from the discourse on reproductive rights and ethics. Although pregnancy is an epistemically transformative experience, phenomenology can help us describe common structures in the many different subjective experiences of pregnancy. Doing so shows us that the effects of pregnancy go beyond the physical symptoms; they invade the experience of the self and the world and transform identity. If someone wants to formulate an argument against (...) abortion, they will have to include the existential impact of pregnancy. In this paper I will further explore the impact of pregnancy through a phenomenological analysis of birth and birthmothers and show that the existential impact of pregnancy does not cease to exist after birth. Giving birth fundamentally changes the world of the pregnant person and leads to irreversible changes in identity. Their world will never return to the way it was before pregnancy. Arguments against abortion would have to take these existential implications into account as well. Finally, I will argue that a similar argument will also become relevant in the discourse on ectogenesis. (shrink)

The focus on this contribution is on the ‘late-learners’ digression. In Sph. 251a8-c6, the Eleatic Stranger briefly discusses the view of some ‘young and old late-learners’ who hold that, from a logico-metaphysical point of view, unlike ‘a man is a man’ or ‘a good is good’, the statement ‘a man is good’ is neither a well-formed nor a grammatical sentence. Usually, modern commentators devote little energy to interpreting this passage since they are content to note that it suffices to discriminate (...) identity and predication to avoid the sophism. The aim of this paper is to show that the position of the ‘late-learners’ is in fact more subtle than it seems, since it is widely open to many readings, and that the chosen reading of the digression has a direct impact on the general interpretation of the rest of the dialogue (communication of kinds, semantic distinction between names and verbs, etc.). To this end, the view of the ‘late-learners’ will be compared with a similar position discussed in a quite different philosophical ecosystem: the White-Horse Paradox forged by Gōngsūn Lóng, a dialectician of the ‘School of Names’. This paradox states that the sentence ‘a white horse is not a horse’ is true. Many readings of the White-Horse Paradox have been offered: some of these readings are the same as those suggested for the ‘late-learners’ view, but others are absent from the scholarly literature, although they provide interesting insights into the interpretation of Sph. 251a8-c6. (shrink)

RESUMEN (ES): ¿Es posible una moral sin Dios (Jean-Paul Sartre) o con un dios que existe en una dimensión suprahumana (Viktor Frankl)? La famosa "cita" de Dostoyevski ("Si Dios no existe, todo está permitido") no fue escrita así por Dostoyevski. El Holocausto, como punto de inflexión e interrupción en la historia, la filosofía y la teología, abre nuevos interrogantes "después" de Auschwitz. En el presente artículo discuto la moral sartreana y la frankleana, analizando la famosa "cita" de Dostoyevski y preguntándome (...) si acaso una moral con un dios ausente es capaz de prevenir futuras barbaries. /// ABSTRACT (EN): Is it possible a morality without God (Jean-Paul Sartre) or with a God that exists in a suprahuman dimension (Viktor Frankl)? The famous «quote» by Dostoevsky («If God does not exist, everything is permitted») was not written like that by Dostoevsky. The Holocaust, as a turning point and as an interruption in history, philosophy, and theology, opens new questions «after» Auschwitz. In this paper, I discuss Sartrean and Franklean morality while analyzing the famous «quote» by Dostoevsky and wondering if a morality with an absent God can prevent future barbarities. (shrink)

Nietzsche is absent from today’s growing debate on slavery past and present. In this article I argue that his views on the subject add a pertinent, if challenging, dimension to this wide-ranging discussion. Nietzsche’s analysis is capable of contributing to our understanding of this multifaceted phenomenon in a number of respects. I look at Nietzsche’s use of the controversial notions of slavery, understood both historically and in the context of modern society, to explore such central concerns of political anthropology (...) as the nature and role of leadership, and the questions of development and inequality. The key focus of Nietzsche’s examination concerns slavery as an enduring facet of human existence. He sees it becoming an important hallmark of the industrial culture as a barometer of modern society’s physiological well-being, as well as acting as the repository for its externalities. Nietzsche’s genealogical inquiry leads him to explore the psychological content of slavery and to conceptualise it in terms of human vulnerability, which increases susceptibility to exploitation. In these respects, Nietzsche’s views resonate with pertinence today and deserve closer critical attention and scrutiny – something Nietzsche would undoubtedly welcome. (shrink)

A woman is listening to Sinatra before work. As she later describes it, ‘suddenly from nowhere I could hear my mother singing along to it … I was there again home again, hearing my mother … God knows why I should choose to remember that … then, to actually hear her and I had this image in my head … of being at home … with her singing away … like being transported back you know I got one of those (...) … like shivery feelings really suddenly’ (Anderson 2004, 9-10). An older couple, discussing their honeymoon forty years ago, each say that they can’t remember the show they saw, until through iterative, puzzled cross-cuing they finally get there – ‘Desert Song, that’s it’ (Harris et al 2011, 292). An elderly English veteran of a prisoner of war camp in Japan, finishing up morning tea with a young Japanese social scientist interested in reconciliation, suddenly calls out loudly - in Japanese - ‘stand to attention’. He stands to attention in front of her: like many of the men she interviews, he physically re-enacts fragments of that long-past world of the camp, bringing that absent past into this new present context with a visceral shock (Murakami 2001, 2012; Middleton & Brown 2005, 133-136). (shrink)

Killing in War presents the Moral Equality of Combatants with serious, and in my view insurmountable problems. Absent some novel defense, this thesis is now very difficult to sustain. But this success is counterbalanced by the strikingly revisionist implications of McMahan’s account of the underlying morality of killing in war, which forces us into one of two unattractive positions, contingent pacifism, or near-total war. In this article, I have argued that his efforts to mitigate these controversial implications fail. The (...) reader is left stranded: to reach plausible conclusions, Walzer deployed an implausible conception of our rights to life; McMahan’s more rigorous account of those rights generates untenable conclusions. Absent new developments, it seems that the prospects for grounding the ethics of war in individual rights are poor: any theory of our rights to life that is sufficiently indiscriminate to work in the chaos of war is not discriminating enough to be a plausible theory of our rights to life. Perhaps by rejecting the ideal of the rights-respecting war altogether we might develop an alternative theory of justified warfare, which marries theoretical soundness with conclusions that we can more confidently support. (shrink)

Does self-control require willpower? The question cuts to the heart of a debate about whether self-control is identical with some psychological process internal to the agents or not. Noticeably absent from these debates is systematic evidence about the folk-psychological category of self-control. Here, we present the results of two behavioral studies (N = 296) that indicate the structure of everyday use of the concept. In Study 1, participants rated the degree to which different strategies to respond to motivational conflict (...) exemplify self-control. Participants distinguished between intra-psychic and externally-scaffolded strategies and judged that the former exemplified self-control more than the latter. In Study 2, participants provided various solutions to manage motivational conflict and rated their proposals on effectiveness. Participants produced substantially more intra-psychic strategies, rated them as more effective, and advised them at a higher rate than externally-scaffolded strategies. Taken together, these results suggest that while people recognize a plurality of strategies as genuine instances of self-control, purely internal exercises of self-control are considered more prototypical than their externally-scaffolded counterparts. This implies a hierarchical structure for the folk psychological category of self-control. The concept encompasses a variety of regulatory strategies and organizes these strategies along a hierarchical continuum, with purely intra-psychic strategies at the center and scaffolded strategies in the periphery. (shrink)

New mechanistic philosophy has not examined explanations in ecology although they are based extensively on describing mechanisms responsible for phenomena under scrutiny. This chapter uses the example of research on the shrub Lonicera maackii (Amur honeysuckle) to scrutinize individual-level mechanisms that are generally accepted and used in ecology and confronts them with the minimal account of mechanisms. Individual-level mechanisms are for a phenomenon, are hierarchical, and absent entities play a role in their functioning. They are distinguished by the role (...) played by properties in determining activities and organization. The chapter also considers the experimental methods for discovery of individual-level mechanisms, the possibility of group-level mechanisms in ecology, and suggests further research problems. (shrink)

Driven by technological innovations, newborn screening (NBS) panels have been expanded and the development of genomic NBS pilot programs is rapidly progressing. Decisions on disease selection for NBS are still based on the Wilson and Jungner (WJ) criteria published in 1968. Despite this uniform reference, interpretation of the WJ criteria and actual disease selection for NBS programs are highly variable. A systematic literature search [PubMED search “Wilson” AND “Jungner”; last search 16.07.22] was performed to evaluate the applicability of the WJ (...) criteria for current and future NBS programs and the need for adaptation. By at least two reviewers, 105 publications (systematic literature search, N = 77; manual search, N = 28) were screened for relevant content and, finally, 38 publications were evaluated. Limited by the study design of qualitative text analysis, no statistical evaluation was performed, but a structured collection of reported aspects of criticism and proposed improvements was instead collated. This revealed a set of general limitations of the WJ criteria, such as imprecise terminology, lack of measurability and objectivity, missing pediatric focus, and absent guidance on program management. Furthermore, it unraveled specific aspects of criticism on clinical, diagnostic, therapeutic, and economical aspects. A major obstacle was found to be the incompletely understood natural history and phenotypic diversity of rare diseases prior to NBS implementation, resulting in uncertainty about case definition, risk stratification, and indications for treatment. This gap could be closed through the systematic collection and evaluation of real-world evidence on the quality, safety, and (cost-)effectiveness of NBS, as well as the long-term benefits experienced by screened individuals. An integrated NBS public health program that is designed to continuously learn would fulfil these requirements, and a multi-dimensional framework for future NBS programs integrating medical, ethical, legal, and societal perspectives is overdue. (shrink)

Living agency is subject to a normative dimension (good-bad, adaptive-maladaptive) that is absent from other types of interaction. We review current and historical attempts to naturalize normativity from an organism-centered perspective, identifying two central problems and their solution: (1) How to define the topology of the viability space so as to include a sense of gradation that permits reversible failure, and (2) how to relate both the processes that establish norms and those that result in norm-following behavior. We present (...) a minimal metabolic system that is coupled to a gradient-climbing chemotactic mechanism. Studying the relationship between metabolic dynamics and environmental resource conditions, we identify an emergent viable region and a precarious region where the system tends to die unless environmental conditions change. We introduce the concept of normative field as the change of environmental conditions required to bring the system back to its viable region. Norm-following, or normative action, is defined as the course of behavior whose effect is positively correlated with the normative field. We close with a discussion of the limitations and extensions of our model and some final reflections on the nature of norms and teleology in agency. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on four varieties of shame absence. My hope is that re-flection on these varieties of shame-absence will go some way to giving us a more complete picture of the role that shame plays in our moral character and in discussions of atrocity. I note that the shame that emerges from an exposure to atrocity can be in part what leads us to identify the event as atro-cious. I progress to argue that when shame is (...) class='Hi'>absent, this absence can serve to blind us to the atrocity that is before us and that is ours to work to prevent. Feeling shame is part of seeing the atrocity for what it is in an appropriate emotionally-engaged manner. It is thus a vital part of being human, and its absence in certain cases is an all-too-human failure of humanity. (shrink)

If there are fundamental laws of nature, can they fail to be exact? In this paper, I consider the possibility that some fundamental laws are vague. I call this phenomenon 'fundamental nomic vagueness.' I characterize fundamental nomic vagueness as the existence of borderline lawful worlds and the presence of several other accompanying features. Under certain assumptions, such vagueness prevents the fundamental physical theory from being completely expressible in the mathematical language. Moreover, I suggest that such vagueness can be regarded as (...) 'vagueness in the world.' For a case study, we turn to the Past Hypothesis, a postulate that (partially) explains the direction of time in our world. We have reasons to take it seriously as a candidate fundamental law of nature. Yet it is vague: it admits borderline (nomologically) possible worlds. An exact version would lead to an untraceable arbitrariness absent in any other fundamental laws. However, the dilemma between fundamental nomic vagueness and untraceable arbitrariness is dissolved in a new quantum theory of time's arrow. (shrink)

Consider the sentence “Lois knows that Superman flies, but she doesn’t know that Clark flies”. In this paper we defend a Millian contextualist semantics for propositional attitude ascriptions, according to which ordinary uses of this sentence are true but involve a mid-sentence shift in context. Absent any constraints on the relevant parameters of context sensitivity, such a semantics would be untenable: it would undermine the good standing of systematic theorizing about the propositional attitudes, trivializing many of the central questions (...) of epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of action. In response to this problem, we prove a series of tenability results. We show that, given certain constraints on the parameters of context sensitivity, there is a broad class of principles of propositional attitude psychology whose good standing follows from corresponding claims about people’s mental representations. But these constraints also have some surprising consequences: they are jointly incompatible with coarse-grained theories of propositions, and they are in tension with a natural picture of how speakers and hearers coordinate on the interpretation of attitude ascriptions. In light of these consequences we explore different ways in which the contextualist picture might be developed, and argue that our preferred way compares favorably with Fregeanism and neo-Russellianism. (shrink)

I develop several new arguments against claims about "cognitive phenomenology" and its alleged role in grounding thought content. My arguments concern "absent cognitive qualia cases", "altered cognitive qualia cases", and "disembodied cognitive qualia cases". However, at the end, I sketch a positive theory of the role of phenomenology in grounding content, drawing on David Lewis's work on intentionality. I suggest that within Lewis's theory the subject's total evidence plays the central role in fixing mental content and ruling out deviant (...) interpretations. However I point out a huge unnoticed problem, the problem of evidence: Lewis really has no theory of sensory content and hence no theory of what fixes evidence. I suggest a way of plugging this hole in Lewis's theory. On the resulting theory, which I call " phenomenal functionalism", there is a sense in which sensory phenomenology is the source of all determinate intentionality. Phenomenal functionalism has similarities to the theories of Chalmers and Schwitzgebel. (shrink)

Whereas many philosophers take backwards causation to be impossible, the few who maintain its possibility either take it to be absent from the actual world or else confined to theoretical physics. Here, however, I argue that backwards causation is not only actual, but common, though occurring in the context of our social institutions. After juxtaposing my cases with a few others in the literature and arguing that we should take seriously the reality of causal cases in these contexts, I (...) consider several objections. These objections involve whether the cases should be reinterpreted, whether they are properly within the institution, whether they involve necessitation or else Cambridge changes, whether and how they involve changing the past, and whether this should call us to question institutional reality. I end by suggesting that it is a virtue of our institutions that they allow backwards causation, that this is a kind of technology that they are often built to incorporate. (shrink)

This thesis introduces the "method of structural refinement", which serves as a means of transforming the relational semantics of a modal and/or constructive logic into an 'economical' proof system by connecting two proof-theoretic paradigms: labelled and nested sequent calculi. The formalism of labelled sequents has been successful in that cut-free calculi in possession of desirable proof-theoretic properties can be automatically generated for large classes of logics. Despite these qualities, labelled systems make use of a complicated syntax that explicitly incorporates the (...) semantics of the associated logic, and such systems typically violate the subformula property to a high degree. By contrast, nested sequent calculi employ a simpler syntax and adhere to a strict reading of the subformula property, making such systems useful in the design of automated reasoning algorithms. However, the downside of the nested sequent paradigm is that a general theory concerning the automated construction of such calculi (as in the labelled setting) is essentially absent, meaning that the construction of nested systems and the confirmation of their properties is usually done on a case-by-case basis. The refinement method connects both paradigms in a fruitful way, by transforming labelled systems into nested (or, refined labelled) systems with the properties of the former preserved throughout the transformation process. To demonstrate the method of refinement and some of its applications, we consider grammar logics, first-order intuitionistic logics, and deontic STIT logics. The introduced refined labelled calculi will be used to provide the first proof-search algorithms for deontic STIT logics. Furthermore, we employ our refined labelled calculi for grammar logics to show that every logic in the class possesses the effective Lyndon interpolation property. (shrink)

Since the 1990s the so-called transparency of experience has played a crucial role in core debates in philosophy of mind. However, recent developments in the literature have made transparency itself quite opaque. The very idea of transparent experience has become quite fuzzy, due to the articulation of many different notions of transparency and transparency theses. Absent a unified logical space where these notions and theses can be mapped and confronted, we are left with an overall impression of conceptual chaos. (...) This is a problem, given the constant and ubiquitous references to transparency in the literature and its prominent position in the contemporary philosophy of mind. My goal in this paper is to restore clarity through proper analysis of the mutual relations between the different transparency theses. This allows me to uncover a unitary multidimensional logical space where existing (as well as possible) views can be properly singled out and located. (shrink)

Vigorous debate over the moral propriety of cognitive enhancement exists, but the views of the public have been largely absent from the discussion. To address this gap in our knowledge, four experiments were carried out with contrastive vignettes in order to obtain quantitative data on public attitudes towards cognitive enhancement. The data collected suggest that the public is sensitive to and capable of understanding the four cardinal concerns identified by neuroethicists, and tend to cautiously accept cognitive enhancement even as (...) they recognize its potential perils. The public is biopolitically moderate, endorses both meritocratic principles and the intrinsic value of hard work, and appears to be sensitive to the salient moral issues raised in the debate. Taken together, these data suggest that public attitudes toward enhancement are sufficiently sophisticated to merit inclusion in policy deliberations, especially if we seek to align public sentiment and policy. (shrink)

Here I explore a new line of evidence for belief–credence dualism, the thesis that beliefs and credences are distinct and equally fundamental types of mental states. Despite considerable recent disagreement over this thesis, little attention has been paid in philosophy to differences in how our mindreading systems represent the beliefs and credences of others. Fascinatingly, the systems we rely on to accurately and efficiently track others’ mental states appear to function like belief–credence dualists: Credence is tracked like an emotional state, (...) composed of both representational and affective content, whereas belief is tracked like a bare representational state with no affective component. I argue on a preliminary basis that, in this particular case, the mechanics of mentalizing likely pick out a genuine affective dimension to credence that is absent for belief, further strengthening the converging case for belief–credence dualism. (shrink)

Slurs have become a big topic of discussion both in philosophy and in linguistics. Slurs are usually characterised as pejorative terms, co-extensional with other, neutral, terms referring to ethnic or social groups. However, slurs are not the only ethnic/social words with pejorative senses. Our aim in this paper is to introduce a different kind of pejoratives, which we will call “ethnic/social terms used as insults”, as exemplified in Spanish, though present in many other languages and mostly absent in English. (...) These are ethnic terms like gitano, ‘Romani’, which can have an extensional and neutral use, but also a pejorative meaning building on a negative stereotypical representation of the Romani community. (shrink)

When is a testimony-based belief justified? According to so-called "Anti-Reductionism," the principle that a hearer is prima facie justified to take what another tells them at face value is true. I call this position "Liberal Foundationalism." I call it "liberal" for it is more liberal than "Moderate Foundationalism" that holds that perception-based beliefs are prima facie justified but testimony-based beliefs are not. Liberal Foundationalism has two interpretations: the principle is a contingent empirical truth, or an a priori necessary truth. I (...) call the view that the principle is a priori necessary "Liberal Fundamentalism." This chapter defends Liberal Fundamentalism against objections in the first half, and then in the second half it introduces "Weak Liberal Fundamentalism," the view that it is a priori necessary that testimony provides some epistemic support, but perhaps not enough, absent defeat, for knowledge. In later work I abandon the view that the principle is a priori necessary, but I still maintain the distinction between Strong and Weak variants of the principle, and the replies to many of the objections to the principle. (shrink)

We present a dynamic model of the evolution of communication in a Lewis signaling game while systematically varying the degree of common interest between sender and receiver. We show that the level of common interest between sender and receiver is strongly predictive of the amount of information transferred between them. We also discuss a set of rare but interesting cases in which common interest is almost entirely absent, yet substantial information transfer persists in a *cheap talk* regime, and offer (...) a diagnosis of how this may arise. -/- . (shrink)

Theories of epistemic justification are commonly assessed by exploring their predictions about particular hypothetical cases – predictions as to whether justification is present or absent in this or that case. With a few exceptions, it is much less common for theories of epistemic justification to be assessed by exploring their predictions about logical principles. The exceptions are a handful of ‘closure’ principles, which have received a lot of attention, and which certain theories of justification are well known to invalidate. (...) But these closure principles are only a small sample of the logical principles that we might consider. In this paper, I will outline four further logical principles that plausibly hold for justification and two which plausibly do not. While my primary aim is just to put these principles forward, I will use them to evaluate some different approaches to justification and (tentatively) conclude that a ‘normic’ theory of justification best captures its logic. (shrink)

In this paper I take up the task, begun by Lewis and Lewis in their seminal paper on the topic, of offering a theory of holes according to which a hole is simply its hole-lining. I begin by motivating the theory, arguing that it holds interest even absent its original animating concerns of nominalism and materialism, and present desiderata any such theory must satisfy. With this in place, I offer a definition both of a lining and of hole sameness, (...) arguing that these can overcome the most prominent standing objections to identifying holes with linings. Finally, I present a more powerful counterargument in the spirit of Casati and Varzi, and conclude with an emended version of the theory meeting all our earlier desiderata. I conclude by dispelling some possible worries about the nominalist and materialist credentials of my theory. (shrink)

Loneliness is a near-universal experience. It is particularly common for individuals with (so-called) psychopathological conditions or disorders. In this paper, we explore the experiential character of loneliness, with a specific emphasis on how social goods are experienced as absent in ways that involve a diminished sense of agency and recognition. We explore the role and experience of loneliness in three case studies: depression, anorexia nervosa, and autism. We demonstrate that even though experiences of loneliness might be common to many (...) psychopathologies, these experiences nevertheless have distinctive profiles. Specifically, we suggest that: (i) loneliness is often a core characteristic of depressive experience; (ii) loneliness can drive, and even cement, disordered eating practices and anorectic identity in anorexia nervosa; iii) loneliness is neither a core characteristic of autism nor a driver but is rather commonly experienced as stemming from social worlds, environments, and norms that fail to accommodate autistic bodies and their distinctive forms of life. We aim to do justice to the pervasiveness of loneliness in many — if not all — psychopathologies, while also highlighting the need to attend to psychopathology-specific experiences of loneliness, agency, and (non-)recognition. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to understand the concept of poetry in the broad context of Heidegger’s “early” thought, around 1919 and 1930. To that end, we seek to disclose a relation that in Heidegger remains implicit and in the secondary literature absent. This is the relation between poetry and the ways of Being (existence, ready-to-hand, present-at-hand, etc.). Since Heidegger did not explicitly thematize poetry in this broad context, the setup of this article consists of three main steps, (...) in which we make explicit the implicit ontological notion of Heidegger about poetry and, we shall argue, the ontological status of the poeticized. First, we distinguish between the theoretical and the pre-theoretical dimensions of existence, which enable us to explain that for Heidegger poetry is a pre-theoretical letting-see of the various entities that we encounter in the immediate everyday life that is mostly overlooked because of their “self-evident” and “obvious” presence. In this first step we argue that for Heidegger poetry is partially an explicit ontic letting-see. Second, we address the ways of Being in order to secure the systematic horizon for our interpretation regarding the relationship between the ways of Being and poetry. Third, we discuss that an indicative and non-conceptual letting-see of pre-theoretical ways of Being takes place in poetry through the respective poetized entity. In the second and third steps, we exhibit that according to Heidegger poetry results ultimately in an implicit ontological letting-see of the ways of Being. (shrink)

My first paper on the Is/Ought issue. The young Arthur Prior endorsed the Autonomy of Ethics, in the form of Hume’s No-Ought-From-Is (NOFI) but the later Prior developed a seemingly devastating counter-argument. I defend Prior's earlier logical thesis (albeit in a modified form) against his later self. However it is important to distinguish between three versions of the Autonomy of Ethics: Ontological, Semantic and Ontological. Ontological Autonomy is the thesis that moral judgments, to be true, must answer to a realm (...) of sui generis non-natural PROPERTIES. Semantic autonomy insists on a realm of sui generis non-natural PREDICATES which do not mean the same as any natural counterparts. Logical Autonomy maintains that moral conclusions cannot be derived from non-moral premises.-moral premises with the aid of logic alone. Logical Autonomy does not entail Semantic Autonomy and Semantic Autonomy does not entail Ontological Autonomy. But, given some plausible assumptions Ontological Autonomy entails Semantic Autonomy and given the conservativeness of logic – the idea that in a valid argument you don’t get out what you haven’t put in – Semantic Autonomy entails Logical Autonomy. So if Logical Autonomy is false – as Prior appears to prove – then Semantic and Ontological Autonomy would appear to be false too! I develop a version of Logical Autonomy (or NOFI) and vindicate it against Prior’s counterexamples, which are also counterexamples to the conservativeness of logic as traditionally conceived. The key concept here is an idea derived in part from Quine - that of INFERENCE-RELATIVE VACUITY. I prove that you cannot derive conclusions in which the moral terms appear non-vacuously from premises from which they are absent. But this is because you cannot derive conclusions in which ANY (non-logical) terms appear non-vacuously from premises from which they are absent Thus NOFI or Logical Autonomy comes out as an instance of the conservativeness of logic. This means that the reverse entailment that I have suggested turns out to be a mistake. The falsehood of Logical Autonomy would not entail either the falsehood Semantic Autonomy or the falsehood of Ontological Autonomy, since Semantic Autonomy only entails Logical Autonomy with the aid of the conservativeness of logic of which Logical Autonomy is simply an instance. Thus NOFI or Logical Autonomy is vindicated, but it turns out to be a less world-shattering thesis than some have supposed. It provides no support for either non-cognitivism or non-naturalism. (shrink)

The idea that our epistemic practices can be wrongful has been the core observation driving the growing literature on epistemic injustice, doxastic wronging, and moral encroachment. But, one element of our epistemic practice has been starkly absent from this discussion of epistemic morality: attention. The goal of this article is to show that attention is a worthwhile focus for epistemology, especially for the field of epistemic morality. After presenting a new dilemma for proponents of doxastic wronging, I show how (...) focusing on attention not only allows us to defuse that dilemma, but also helps to substantiate accounts of what goes wrong in cases of doxastic wronging. (shrink)

Cases of past absence involve agents noticing in retrospect that an object or property was absent, such as when one notices later that a colleague was not at a talk. In Sanskrit philosophy, such cases are introduced by Kumārila as counterexamples to the claim that knowledge of absence is perceptual, but further take on a life of their own as a topic of inquiry among Kumārila’s commentators and their Nyāya interlocutors. In this essay, I examine the Nyāya philosopher Gaṅgeśa’s (...) epistemology of past absence, according to which agents learn that a recollectable object or property was absent by inferring its past absence from failing to recall that object or property. Gaṅgeśa’s account is best appreciated against the backdrop of earlier theories and their shortcomings, and I begin by presenting historical views leading up to his. I identify two groups of views about the epistemology of past absence: recollection views, according to which cases of past absence involve agents recalling negative information; and recollection failure views, according to which cases of past absence involve agents failing to recall positive information. I reconstruct two early recollection views: a Bhāṭṭa view belonging to Uṃveka, and a competing Nyāya view belonging to Jayanta and Bhāsarvajña. I then examine Śālikanātha and Sucarita’s critiques of recollection views, following which I reconstruct a Bhāṭṭa recollection failure view belonging to Pārthasārathi. I then examine Gaṅgeśa’s critiques of Pārthasārathi’s account and the recollection failure view he constructs out of its shortcomings. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore a pragmatic approach to hope and the ethics of belief that allows rational hope against hope. Hope against hope is hope that goes beyond what the evidence supports by hoping for something that is both highly unlikely and highly valuable. However, this could take different forms. One could either hope against the evidence or merely go beyond it; the evidence could be inconclusive or conclusive, conflicting or clear, misleading or plain, absent (...) or neutral. Hope against hope then covers everything from hoping for something that appears unlikely to hoping for something that appears impossible, judging by the available evidence. However, there is a very long tradition of criticizing hope for being false or irrational. But hope can only be false or irrational if it is subject to rational assessment. This presupposes that it is appropriate to ask for a reason or a justification for hoping, since one can be answerable or responsible for hoping. Moreover, this typically assumes that hopes can be changed in response to reasons. False hopes, notably, should be given up (if possible). However, if hope is subject to rational assessment, it is also possible for hope to be rational or justified. Indeed, I will explore how practical reasons or pragmatic considerations may justify hope against hope, sketching criteria for rational hope that allow hope against hope. Section I introduces evidentialism and pragmatism regarding belief. Sections II and III discuss whether or not rational hope against hope is compatible with evidentialism, favoring a pragmatist approach to hope and belief. Section IV discusses evidentialism and pragmatism, whereas sections V-VII sketch constraints on pragmatism and rational hope. (shrink)

Our prominent definitions of cognition are too vague and lack empirical grounding. They have not kept up with recent developments, and cannot bear the weight placed on them across many different debates. I here articulate and defend a more adequate theory. On this theory, behaviors under the control of cognition tend to display a cluster of characteristic properties, a cluster which tends to be absent from behaviors produced by non-cognitive processes. This cluster is reverse-engineered from the empirical tests that (...) comparative psychologists use to determine whether a behavior was generated by a cognitive or a non-cognitive process. Cognition should be understood as the natural kind of psychological process that non-accidentally exhibits the properties assessed by these tests (as well as others we have not yet discovered). Finally, I review two plausible neural accounts of cognition's underlying mechanisms?one based in localization of function to particular brain regions and another based in the more recent distributed networks approach to neuroscience?which would explain why these properties non-accidentally cluster. While this notion of cognition may be useful for a number of debates, I here focus on its application to a recent crisis over the distinction between cognition and association in comparative psychology. (shrink)

A common kind of explanation in cognitive neuroscience might be called functiontheoretic: with some target cognitive capacity in view, the theorist hypothesizes that the system computes a well-defined function (in the mathematical sense) and explains how computing this function constitutes (in the system’s normal environment) the exercise of the cognitive capacity. Recently, proponents of the so-called ‘new mechanist’ approach in philosophy of science have argued that a model of a cognitive capacity is explanatory only to the extent that it reveals (...) the causal structure of the mechanism underlying the capacity. If they are right, then a cognitive model that resists a transparent mapping to known neural mechanisms fails to be explanatory. I argue that a functiontheoretic characterization of a cognitive capacity can be genuinely explanatory even absent an account of how the capacity is realized in neural hardware. (shrink)

Over the past 25 years, UK government policy exhortations to promote and increase exercise and physical activity levels in the population have increased in volume. In recent years, too, there has been growing sociological interest in exercise and physical activity embodiment issues, including within phenomenologically-inspired research into lived-body experiences. This article contributes original insights to a developing body of phenomenological-sociological empirical work in this domain, in addressing the lived experience of organised exercise in outdoor environments, and specifically in theorising the (...) role of ‘lived weather’ in contouring these experiences. It thus addresses the call by Vannini et al. (2012) to remedy the notable ‘absent-presence’ of weather in much social science research. Drawing upon data from a two-year multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional ethnographic study of a nationwide exercise programme in Wales, UK, this article examines participants’ (n = 146) lived experience of weather, and theorises their ‘weather learning’, and ‘weather work’, both of which emerged as highly salient in the findings. (shrink)