In his remarks on L’Homme, La Forge aims at a rigid separation of the functions of the body from the activity of the soul. This project looks authentically Cartesian, but some critical issues reveal how difficult it is taking away any activity of the soul in sensitive experience. In the Traité de l’esprit de l’homme, La Forge explicitly limits the cognitive capability of the memory without the active presence of the mind.

Descartes, Divine deception, First Meditation, Suarez.

Adrian Piper argues that the Humean conception can be made to work only if it is placed in the context of a wider and genuinely universal conception of the self, whose origins are to be found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This conception comprises the basic canons of classical logic, which provide both a model of motivation and a model of rationality. These supply necessary conditions both for the coherence and integrity of the self and also for unified agency. (...) The Kantian conception solves certain intractable problems in decision theory by integrating it into classical predicate logic, and provides answers to longstanding controversies in metaethics concerning moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification that the Humean conception engenders. In addition, it sheds light on certain kinds of moral behavior – for example, the whistleblower – that the Humean conception is at a loss to explain. (shrink)

The physician Louis de La Forge built his entire work upon the promotion, defensce, and completion of Descartes’ thought. In the course of this endeavor, he sought to refute the notion that knowledge of the mechanisms of the living body is the necessary condition for producing such mechanisms. Around the same time, Arnold Geulincx formulated the principle Quod nescis quomodo fiat id non facis, according to which an effect can only be produced only by someone who knows how it is (...) produced. Geulincx developed this principle within a Cartesian framework, and it soon became a cornerstone of arguments supporting oOccasionalism from a Cartesian perspective. La Forge instead upheld the opposite thesis, yet still on the basis of ideas drawn from Cartesian philosophy. In doing so, La Forge intended to defend Descartes’ physiology against a form of vitalism which was fueling the opposition to Cartesian science in Parisian philosophical and scientific circles, and which found a prominent champion in the physician Cureau de La Chambre. (shrink)

Post-Cartesian Occasionalism argues that the power of causing an effect depends on knowledge of the means by which the effect is produced. The argument is used to deny finite beings the power to act. Arnold Geulincx expresses this thesis in the principle Quod nescis quomodo fiat id non facis. Here, my purpose is to show that: 1. The philosophical problem that is at the origin of the principle Quod nescis quomodo fiat id non facis originates in Galen’s De foetuum formatione, (...) a work translated into Latin only in 1535. 2. Important works of early modern philosophy, such as Campanella’s Del senso delle cose e della magia, discuss Galen’s text. 3. Due to their rejection of teleology, Descartes’ physics and metaphysics are completely foreign to the Quod nescis principle. Comparing the Cartesian theory of animal-machines with the theory of animal behavior of Pierre Chanet, a philosopher who adopts the principle, confirms this claim. (shrink)

Commentary on: Olaf Blanke, Thomas Metzinger, Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 13, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 7-13, ISSN 1364-6613, DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2008.10.003.

Political realists have argued that ‘the political’ is an autonomous domain with its own distinctive concepts, distinctive methodology, and distinctive ‘source of normativity’. I here explore the metanormative commitments of realism (of the radical realist branch, in particular) and question the viability of exploring the ontology of the normative altogether. I argue that the escape into the metanormative realm was something of a wrong turn within the realism debates – an intellectual error. My central argument, building on recent metatheoretical work (...) on normativity, is meant to discredit the sheer possibility of metanormative distinctness. If realists can neither prove metanormative, nor traditional, nor methodological distinctness, there is a valid question as to its standing. I speculate, perhaps realism is little more than a new semantic label for ‘continental’ practices of social analysis as they leak into the analytic tradition. But then again it can be argued that most contemporary continental thought, and certainly much of what passes as critical theory these days, is thoroughly moralist, anti-positivist, and postmodern, and those sentiments are not shared by radical realists, who are, or so I’ll argue, far more faithful to the modernist tradition of social theory. (shrink)

The present paper endeavors to trace the sketch of a possible epistemology of the human sciences. In this sense it begins with the determination of the object ofknowledge in the human sciences through a careful examination of the reality of history and of the human world. Then, considering the peculiarity of the domain of the human sciences the paper proceeds to show that their object of knowledge is best understood as “event” in the sense of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. (...) And, in the end, it circumscribes two modes of knowledge of this object of the human sciences understood as event. (shrink)

I want to examine critically a certain strategy of moral justification which I shall call instrumentalism. By this I mean the view that a moral theory is rationally justified if the actions, life-plan, or set of social arrangements it prescribes can be shown to be the best means to the achievement of an agent's final ends, whatever these may be. Instrumentalism presupposes a commitment to what I shall call the Humean conception of the self. By this I mean a certain (...) way of conceiving the motivational and structural constituents of the self. Briefly, the self on this conception is motivated by its desires for states of affairs that are temporally or spatiotemporally external to the self. And it is structured by the normative requirements of instrumental rationality: The self is conceived as rationally coherent to the extent that theoretical reason calculates and schedules the satisfaction of as many of its desires as possible, with the minimum necessary costs. The motivational and structural elements of the Humean conception of the self combine to form a familiar explanatory model of human agency: We make sense of an agent's behavior by ascribing to her the desire to achieve the ends that she does in fact achieve, and the theoretically rational belief that, given the information and resources available to her, behaving as she did was the most efficient way to do so. I shall want to argue that to the extent that instrumentalism is successful in providing an objective justification of a moral theory - and I shall contend that it cannot be completely successful - it cannot provide a moral justification. But when we attempt to modify it so as to produce a specifically moral justification, we see that either it is impossible to do this, or else the Humean notion of instrumental rationality is doing no justificatory work. (shrink)

THE MAIN OBJECTIVES of the following discussions are, first, to show the logical inconsistency of Hegel’s theory of the necessity of private property and, second, to show its exegetical inconsistency with the most plausible and consistent interpretations of Hegel’s theory of the self and its relation to the state in Ethical Life. I begin with the latter objective, by distinguishing three basic conceptions of the self that can be gleaned from various passages in the Philosophy of Right. I suggest viable (...) connections between each of these three conceptions and three respective interpretations of what I call the Hegelian requirement, i.e., that the individual be able to identify his personal interests and values with those of the state [141, 147, 147r, 151, 155].1 This can be understood as the requirement that the individual be capable of transcending certain limits of individuality in the service of broader and more inclusive political goals. I argue that Hegel’s theory of Personality and the requirements of Ethical Life in the state commit him to a conception of the self as capable of achieving such selftranscendence through action, despite appearances to the contrary that suggest that self-transcendence is to be primarily achieved through acquisition of various kinds. I then try to demonstrate the logical inconsistency of Hegel’s theory of the necessity of private property. I argue that the fallacies inherent in his exposition of this theory can be explained by his presupposing a conception of the self which both is inadequate to meet the criteria of Hegel’s theories of Personality and Ethical Life and also, therefore, fails the Hegelian requirement. (shrink)

An understanding of the factors behind the evolution of multicellularity is one of today’s frontiers in evolutionary biology. This is because multicellular organisms are made of one subset of cells with the capacity to transmit genes to the next generation and another subset responsible for maintaining the functionality of the organism, but incapable of transmitting genes to the next generation. The question arises: why do somatic cells sacrifice their lives for the sake of germline cells? How is germ/soma separation maintained? (...) One conventional answer refers to inclusive fitness theory, according to which somatic cells sacrifice themselves altruistically, because in so doing they enhance the transmission of their genes by virtue of their genetic relatedness to germline cells. In the present article we will argue that this explanation ignores the key role of policing mechanisms in maintaining the germ/soma divide. Based on the pervasiveness of the latter, we argue that the role of altruistic mechanisms in the evolution of multicellularity is limited and that our understanding of this evolution must be enriched through the consideration of coercion mechanisms. (shrink)

This article presents a new approach to studying aesthetics by weaving together a thread of ideas based on investigating the problematics of the philosophy of art from a behavioral paradigm in order to exceed the margins of aesthetics. I claim that it makes no sense to ask if something is art, but rather we should be looking out into the manners in which art subsists, consists, and insists itself. Several notions of what I call behavioral aesthetics are proposed such as (...) observation, aesthetic experience and aesthetic conditioning, behavioral materialism, out-comes, behavioral memory and replication or acquisition, interaction and intra-action, emotional engineering, artificial instincts, aesthetic dissonance, and the problem of measurement. The proposed goal of behavioral aesthetics consists in studying the process of individuation as constitutive of art with the methods of Bernard Stiegler’s general organology and genealogy of the sensible. The article presents a behavioral stance as a borderline mode for approaching the genealogy of aesthetics. I mostly refer to Tania Bruguera’s Behavior Art School and Wright Judson’s Behavioral Art, and the paradigm of new materialism, notably agential realism of Karan Barad. (shrink)

This chapter offers an indirect defence of the Evansian conception of egocentric space, by showing how it resolves a puzzle concerning the unity of egocentric spatial perception. The chapter outlines several common assumptions about egocentric perspectival structure and argues that a subject’s experience, both within and across her sensory modalities, may involve multiple structures of this kind. This raises the question of how perspectival unity is achieved, such that these perspectival structures form a complex whole, rather than merely disunified set (...) of individually, distinctively structured experiences. The shortcomings of variety of accounts are considered: switch accounts ; sensory accounts; transformation accounts; and ultimate accounts. These shortcomings are addressed by a further kind of account provided by the Evansian conception – an agentive account – according to which egocentrically structured experiences present the world in relation to parts of a single thing, the body as a dynamic unity. (shrink)

We need modal imagination in order to extend our conception of reality - and, in particular, of human beings - beyond our immediate experience in the indexical present; and we need to do this in order to preserve the significance of human interaction. To make this leap of imagination successfully is to achieve not only insight but also an impartial perspective on our own and others' inner states. This perspective is a necessary condition of experiencing compassion for others. This is (...) the primary thesis I will try to defend in this discussion. (shrink)

A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that folk knowledge attribution practices regarding some epistemological thought experiments differ significantly from the consensus found in the philosophical literature. More specifically, laypersons are likely to ascribe knowledge in the so-called Authentic Evidence Gettier-style cases, while most philosophers deny knowledge in these cases. The intuitions shared by philosophers are often used as evidence in favor (or against) certain philosophical analyses of the notion of knowledge. However, the fact that these intuitions are not universal, (...) as non-philosophers do not sympathize with verdicts made by philosophers, is problematic and requires some explanation. Recently, a promising theoretical approach emerged that could be used to explain away unexpected folk knowledge attributions. According to the protagonist projection hypothesis, when subjects answer questions about some hypothetical scenario, their judgments might result from adopting the cognitive perspective of the protagonist in the given scenario. Previous experimental findings suggest protagonist projection might be responsible for problematic knowledge attributions in Gettier-style cases. This paper reports data collected in an experiment which focused on five different Authentic Evidence Gettier-style scenarios and investigated the impact of protagonist projection on folk knowledge ascriptions in such cases. The results bring some support to the protagonist projection hypothesis, but do not allow to explain away a substantial number of problematic folk knowledge attributions. (shrink)

Multicellular organisms contain numerous symbiotic microorganisms, collectively called microbiomes. Recently, microbiomic research has shown that these microorganisms are responsible for the proper functioning of many of the systems (digestive, immune, nervous, etc.) of multicellular organisms. This has inclined some scholars to argue that it is about time to reconceptualise the organism and to develop a concept that would place the greatest emphasis on the vital role of microorganisms in the life of plants and animals. We believe that, unfortunately, there is (...) a problem with this suggestion, since there is no such thing as a universal concept of the organism which could constitute a basis for all biological sciences. Rather, the opposite is true: numerous alternative definitions exist. Therefore, comprehending how microbiomics is changing our understanding of organisms may be a very complex matter. In this paper we will demonstrate that this pluralism proves that claims about a change in our understanding of organisms can be treated as both true and untrue. Mainly, we assert that the existing concepts differ substantially, and that only some of them have to be reconsidered in order to incorporate the discoveries of microbiomics, while others are already flexible enough to do so. Taking into account the plurality of conceptualisations within different branches of modern biology, we will conduct our discussion using the developmental and the cooperation–conflict concepts of the organism. Then we will explain our results by referring to the recent philosophical debate on the nature of the concept of the organism within biology. (shrink)

[A. W. Moore] Criteria of ineffability are presented which, it is claimed, preclude the possibility of truths that are ineffable, but not the possibility of other things that are ineffable—not even the possibility of other things that are non-trivially ineffable. Specifically, they do not preclude the possibility of states of understanding that are ineffable. This, it is argued, allows for a reappraisal of the dispute between those who adopt a traditional reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and those who adopt the new (...) reading recently championed by Cora Diamond, James Conant, and others. By maintaining that what the nonsense in the Tractatus is supposed to convey is ineffable understanding, rather than ineffable truth, we can do considerable justice to each of these readings. We can also do considerable justice to the Tractatus. /// [Peter Sullivan] Moore proposes to cut between 'traditional' and 'new' approaches to the Tractatus, suggesting that Wittgenstein's intention is to convey, through the knowing use of nonsense, ineffable understanding. I argue, first, that there is indeed room for a proposal of Moore's general kind. Secondly, though, I question whether Moore's actual proposal is not more in tune with Wittgenstein's later thought than with the attitude of the Tractatus. (shrink)

The history of economic thought witnessed several prominent economists who took seriously models and concepts in physics for the elucidation and prediction of economic phenomena. Econophysics is an emerging discipline at the intersection of heterodox economics and the physics of complex systems, with practitioners typically engaged in two overlapping but distinct methodological programs. The first is to export mathematical methods used in physics for the purposes of studying economic phenomena. The second is to export mechanisms in physics into economics. A (...) conclusion is drawn that physics transfer is often justified at the level of mathematical transfer but unjustified at the level of mechanistic transfer. (shrink)

Most moral theories share certain features in common with other theories. They consist of a set of propositions that are universal, general, and hence impartial. The propositions that constitute a typical moral theory are (1) universal, in that they apply to all subjects designated as within their scope. They are (2) general, in that they include no proper names or definite descriptions. They are therefore (3) impartial, in that they accord no special privilege to any particular agent's situation which cannot (...) be justified under (2) and (3). These three features do not distinguish moral theories from other theories, nor indeed from most general categorical propositions we assert. Yet, in recent years, these features of moral theories have been the target of a certain concerted and sustained criticism, namely, that to be committed to such a moral theory, or to aspire to act in accordance with its requirements, results in what has come to be known as moral alienation. Moral alienation, according to this criticism, consists in (i) viewing one's ground projects from an impersonal, "moral point of view" engendered by one's acceptance of the theory; (ii) being prepared to sacrifice these projects to the requirements of moral principle; and (iii) making such a sacrifice specifically and self-consciously in order to conform to these requirements. Moral alienation is said to manifest itself in one (or both) of two ways, depending on the nature of the project thus susceptible to sacrifice. One may be alienated from oneself, if the project consists of tastes, convictions, or aspirations that are centrally definitive of one's self. In this case one's commitment to the project can be at best conditional on its congruence with one's moral theory. It is claimed that this must make for a rather tepid and unenthusiastic commitment indeed. Alternatively, one may be alienated from others, if the project is an interpersonal relationship such as a friendship, marriage, or collegial relationship. In this case one's responses to the other are motivated by one's awareness of what one's moral theory requires. It is claimed that this obstructs a genuine and unmediated emotional response to the other as such. My aim here will be to argue that this very compelling criticism - call it the moral-alienation criticism - is nevertheless misdirected. The real culprit is not any particular moral theory, but rather a certain familiar personality type that may or may not adopt it. (shrink)

Aesthetics is thought of as not only a theory of art or beauty, but also includes sensibility, experience, judgment, and relationships. This paper is a study of Bernard Stiegler’s notion of Aesthetic War (stasis) and symbolic misery. Symbolic violence is ensued through a loss of individuation and participation in the creation of symbols. As a struggle between market values against spirit values human life and consciousness within neoliberal hyperindustrial society has become calculable, which prevents people from creating affective and meaningful (...) attachments to symbols in relation to our retentional apparatuses, technology and memory. Such tension can be thought of as a dissonance between overlapping domains of social life, private and public. New Media is a reflection of aesthetic dissonance, an experience such as being bored and entertained at the same time, between antagonistic experiences, values, and behavior. Moreover, new media is at once a medium of customizing aesthetic experience individually as well as the threat and practice of prioritizing calculability and modeling of consumer behavior in favor of capitalistic effectiveness, which results in the simultaneous categorization of an individual as a data point, putting those who do not fit an algorithm’s premises at a disadvantage. (shrink)

According to the No-Luck-Thesis knowledge possession is incompatible with luck – one cannot know that p if the truth of one’s belief that p is a matter of luck. Recently, this widespread opinion was challenged by Peter Baumann, who argues that in certain situations agents do possess knowledge even though their beliefs are true by luck. This paper aims at providing empirical data for evaluating Baumann’s hypothesis. The experiment was designed to compare non-philosophers’ judgments concerning knowledge and luck in one (...) case that Baumann takes to be in favor of his claim and other cases where, according to him, absence of knowledge coincides with luck. The results show that the cases do not differ in a significant way between each other with respect to verdicts regarding knowledge and luck. In all cases subjects were more reluctant to judge that the ‘Gettierized’ belief is knowledge and more likely to judge that it is true by luck in comparison to a belief that is an uncontroversial instance of knowledge. However, the negative relationship between knowledge and luck ascriptions predicted by the No-Luck-Thesis was almost absent. The data raise some doubts about the No-Luck-Thesis, but the reasons for doubt are different than what Baumann expected. (shrink)

I want to argue that self-deception is a species of a more general phenomenon, which I shall call pseudorationality, which in turn is necessitated by what I shall describe as our highest-order disposition to literal self-preservation. By "literal self-preservation," I mean preservation of the rational intelligibility of the self, in the face of recalcitrant facts that invariably threaten it.

In this paper, we discuss the ethical concerns that may arise from the synthesis of human DNA. To date, only small stretches of DNA have been constructed, but the prospect of generating human genomes is becoming feasible. At the same time, the significance of genes for identity, health and reproduction is coming under increased scrutiny. We examine the implications of DNA synthesis and its impact on debates over the relationship with our DNA and the ownership of our genes, its potential (...) to disrupt common understandings of reproduction and privacy, and the way in which synthetic DNA challenges traditional associations between genes and identity. We explore the degree to which synthetic DNA may further undermine overgeneticised accounts of identity, health, reproduction, parenthood and privacy that are prevalent in the public domain and in some areas of policy-making. While avoiding making normative claims of our own, we conclude that there is a need for reflection on the ethical implications of these developing technologies before they are on us. (shrink)

In an earlier discussion, I argued that Kant's moral theory satisfies some of the basic criteria for being a genuine theory: it includes testable hypotheses, nomological higher-and lower-level laws, theoretical constructs, internal principles, and bridge principles. I tried to show that Kant's moral theory is an ideal, descriptive deductive-nomological theory that explains the behavior of a fully rational being and generates testable hypotheses about the moral behavior of actual agents whom we initially assume to conform to its theoretical constructs. I (...) argued that the moral "ought" is best understood as the "ought" of tentative prediction expressed in the range of uses of the German sollen; and that the degree to which such a theory is well-confirmed is a function of the degree to which we actually judge individual human agents, on a case-by-case basis, to be motivated by rationality, stupidity, or moral corruption in their actions. I assume that a similar case could be made for other major contenders, such as Utilitarianism or Aristotelianism. But there still remains unanswered the question of which of these theories is the best among the available alternatives. To answer this question, further criteria of selection must be invoked. Among these are structural elegance and explanatory simplicity, but even these do not exhaust the desiderata for an adequate moral theory. More pressing in the case of moral theory is the requirement that the theory enable us to understand all the available data of moral experience; that the theory be sufficiently inclusive that in the formulation of its descriptive laws and practical principles, it be capable of identifying as morally significant all the behavior to which moral praise, condemnation, or acquittal is a relevant and appropriate response. (shrink)

Much recent cognitive neuroscientific work on body knowledge is representationalist: “body schema” and “body images”, for example, are cerebral representations of the body (de Vignemont 2009). A framework assumption is that representation of the body plays an important role in cognition. The question is whether this representationalist assumption is compatible with the variety of broadly situated or embodied approaches recently popular in the cognitive neurosciences: approaches in which cognition is taken to have a ‘direct’ relation to the body and to (...) the environment. A “direct” relation is one where the boundaries between the body and the head, or between the environment and the animal are not theoretically important in the understanding of cognition. These boundaries do not play a theoretically privileged role in cognitive explanations of behavior. But representationalism appears to put a representational veil between the locus of cognition and that which is represented, making cognitive relations to the body and to the environment be indirect, with a high associated computational load. For this reason, direct approaches have tried to minimize the use of internal representations (Suchman 1987; Barwise 1987; Agre and Chapman 1987; Brooks 1992; Thelen and Smith 1994; van Gelder 1995; Port and van Gelder 1995; Clark 1997, 1999; Rupert 2009, p. 180). Does a cognitive neuroscience committed to direct relations rule out a representationalist approach to body knowledge? Or is direct representationalism possible? (shrink)

Most published discussions in contemporary metaethics include some textual exegesis of the relevant contemporary authors, but little or none of the historical authors who provide the underpinnings of their general approach. The latter is usually relegated to the historical, or dismissed as expository. Sometimes this can be a useful division of labor. But it can also lead to grave confusion about the views under discussion, and even about whose views are, in fact, under discussion. Elijah Millgram’s article, “Does the Categorical (...) Imperative Give Rise to a Contradiction in the Will?” is a case in point. In it, he takes the New Kantians to task for various flaws in their interpretation of Kant’s moral theory, to be detailed shortly. He concludes with a question and a suggestion. In order to properly dissect the first, “universal law” formulation of the Categorical Imperative, he argues, we first need to understand “why an agent wills the universalization of his maxim” (549). He also suggests that in order to answer this question, we must recur to what Kant himself actually says (550). His question is a good one, and his advice on how to go about answering it is sound. But to take Millgram’s advice is to call this division of labor into question, at least for this case. For it demands close and sustained exegesis, not only of his argument against the New Kantians, but also – in order to assess whether and where they go wrong – of Kant’s text itself. (shrink)

In our dealings with young children, we often get them to do or think things by arranging their environments in certain ways; by dissembling, simplifying, or ambiguating the facts in answer to their queries; by carefully selecting the states of affairs, behavior of others, and utterances to which they shall be privy. We rightly justify these practices by pointing out a child's malleability, and the necessity of paying close attention to formative influences during its years of growth. This filtering of (...) influences is necessary, we point out, if children are ever to reach a degree of maturity and inner stability that will enable them to understand and cope adequately with the complexities, contradictions, and difficulties of the world from which we now seek to shield them. Thus a child's eventual state of competence, maturity, and autonomy adequately justifies our current practices of manipulation and selection of his environment: such practices are rightly held to be ultimately in the child's best interests as an adult. There is no future state of things with reference to which the Utilitarian night justify his policy of secrecy and manipulation, and in light of which this policy night eventually be dispensed with and commonly validated, in retrospect, as a means to the worthwhile goal of moral maturity. That is, there is no point at which the attitude of the Utilitarian to the rest of the community can develop past the analogous attitude of the parent towards the child; no point at which the Utilitarian might eventually bear to others a relationship of mutual acknowledgement and respect as mature, autonomous, moral adults. The consistent Utilitarian, then, largely regards himself as if he were the only adult in a community of children. (shrink)

O privire fugitivă asupra unora dintre religiile lumii antice scoate la iveală faptul că, indiferent de structura sa și de teritoriul în care s-a răspândit, credința într-o viață fără boli și suferințe a fost idealul permanent al omului. Astfel că, alături de nădejdea în viața de apoi, încrederea într-un trai mai bun încă de pe pământ a reprezentat o constată a vieții private și publice. În acest sens, au existat divinități, dar și specialiști, care s-au îngrijit de întreținerea speranțelor oamenilor. (...) „Într-adevăr, cultura indo-europeană cunoștea un singur tip de intelectual, cel care se îngrijea de toate activitățile legate de cuvânt: era preot (cunoscând rugăciunile și formulele rituale), era istoric (știind să povestească tradițiile și istoria străveche a tribului său), era jurist (cunoscând pe de rost formulele dreptului cutumiar), era poet (stăpânind tehnica dificilă a compunerii), era povestitor (știind să recite pentru delectarea auditoriului o cantitate însemnată de texte și tradiții orale), era medic (cunoscând formulele magice vindecătoare)”.24 Cu toată această diversificare, oamenii au așteptat în continuare venirea unui Mântuitor dintr-o altă lume, Care să le vindece bolile, să le ierte păcatele și să le aducă învierea din morți. Acest lucru s-a întâmplat prin Întruparea Fiului lui Dumnezeu „la plinirea vremii” (Galateni 4, 4-5). (shrink)

Various data from communication that does not occur face-to-face are taken to be problematic for Kaplan’s account of indexical expressions, as is the case with the so-called answering machine paradox. One fix, developed by Sidelle (1991) and Briciu (2018), is the remote utterance view: recording artifacts are means by which speakers perform utterances at a distance, just as by means of other artifacts agents performs other types of actions at a distance. This view has faced an important objection, namely that (...) remote utterances lead to Moorean paradoxes. In this paper, I defend the remote utterance view against this objection and further develop the view. I argue that worries about Moorean paradoxes can easily be dispelled if we take into consideration the artifactual nature of recording devices, their materiality, and the communicative affordances they bring about. In the first section, we’ll present the answering machine paradox and give a brief overview of the remote utterance view. The second section presents the objection against the view, while the third gives a detailed rejoinder to the objection. Answering this objection is important also because it allows us to explore some underdeveloped aspects of the remote utterance view. First, I will discuss how the theorist calibrates her model with the data she seeks to explain and predict. Secondly, I will argue that speech acts performed via recording devices have different felicity conditions than their oral counterparts. I conclude with a short discussion of some semantic and pragmatic consequences of the view. (shrink)

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth’s unduly neglected monograph New and Old Methods of Ethics (1877) advances a highly sophisticated and mathematized account of social well-being in the utilitarian tradition of his 19th-century contemporaries. This article illustrates how his usage of the ‘calculus of variations’ was combined with findings from empirical psychology and economic theory to construct a consequentialist axiological framework. A conclusion is drawn that Edgeworth is a methodological predecessor to several important methods, ideas, and issues that continue to be discussed in (...) contemporary social well-being studies. (shrink)

The purpose of this discussion is twofold. First, I want to shed some light on Kant's concept of personhood as rational agency, by situating it in the context of the first Critique's conception of the self as defined by its rational dispositions. I hope to suggest that this concept of personhood cannot be simply grafted onto an essentially Humean conception of the self that is inherently inimical to it, as I believe Rawls, Gewirth, and others have tried to do. Instead (...) I will try to show how deeply embedded this concept of personhood is in Kant's conception of the self as rationally unified consciousness. Second, I want to deploy this embedded concept of personhood as the basis for an analysis of the phenomenon of xenophobia. (shrink)

In a recent reply to our article, “What is Interpretability?,” Prasetya argues against our position that artificial neural networks are explainable. It is claimed that our indefeasibility thesis—that adding complexity to an explanation of a phenomenon does not make the phenomenon any less explainable—is false. More precisely, Prasetya argues that unificationist explanations are defeasible to increasing complexity, and thus, we may not be able to provide such explanations of highly complex AI models. The reply highlights an important lacuna in our (...) original paper, the omission of the unificationist account of explanation, and affords us the opportunity to respond. Here, we argue that artificial neural networks are explainable in a way that should satisfy unificationists and that interpretability methods present ways in which ML theories can achieve unification. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the ethical dimensions of same-sex reproduction achieved through epigenome editing—an innovative and transformative technique. For the first time, I analyse the potential normativity of this disruptive approach for reproductive purposes, focusing on its implications for lesbian couples seeking genetically related offspring. Epigenome editing offers a compelling solution to the complex ethical challenges posed by traditional gene editing, as it sidesteps genome modifications and potential long-term genetic consequences. The focus of this article is to systematically analyse (...) the bioethical issues related to the use of epigenome editing for same-sex reproduction. I critically assess the ethical acceptability of epigenome editing with reproductive purposes from multiple angles, considering harm perspectives, the comparison of ethical issues related to gene and epigenome editing, and feminist theories. This analysis reveals that epigenome editing emerges as an ethically acceptable means for lesbian couples to have genetically related children. Moreover, the experiments of a reproductive use of epigenome editing discussed in this article transcend bioethics, shedding light on the broader societal implications of same-sex reproduction. It challenges established notions of biological reproduction and prompts a reevaluation of how we define the human embryo, while poses some issues in the context of gender self-identification and family structures. In a world that increasingly values inclusivity and diversity, this article aims to reveal a progressive pathway for reproductive medicine and bioethics, as well as underscores the need for further philosophical research in this emerging and fertile domain. (shrink)

Recording devices are generally taken to present problems for the standard Kaplanian semantics for indexicals. In this paper, I argue that the remote utterance view offers the best way for the Kaplanian semantics to handle the recalcitrant data that comes from the use of recording devices. Following Sidelle I argue that recording devices allow agents to perform utterances at a distance. Using the essential, but widely ignored, distinction between tokens and utterances, I develop the view beyond the initial sketch given (...) by Sidelle, and I answer the main objections raised against the view. The paper is structured as follows. Section 1 gives a succinct presentation of Kaplanian semantics and of the problem raised by the use recording devices, Section 2 presents the remote utterance view and Section 3 answers the objections put forward against the view and further develops it. I conclude that the remote utterance view can handle the data that comes from the use of recording devices with only modest modifications of the Kaplanian semantics. (shrink)

‘Performative’ transcendental arguments exploit the status of a subcategory of self-falsifying propositions in showing that some form of skepticism is unsustainable. The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between performatively inconsistent propositions and transcendental arguments, and then to compare performative transcendental arguments to modest transcendental arguments that seek only to establish the indispensability of some belief or conceptual framework. Reconceptualizing transcendental arguments as performative helps focus the intended dilemma for the skeptic: performative transcendental arguments directly confront the (...) skeptic with the choice of abandoning either skepticism or some other deep theoretical commitment. Many philosophers, from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas to Jaakko Hintikka, C.I. Lewis, and Bernard Lonergan, have claimed that some skeptical propositions regarding knowledge, reason, and/or morality can be shown to be self-defeating; that is to say, they have claimed that the very upholding of some skeptical position is in some way incompatible with the position being upheld, or with the implied, broader dialectical position of the skeptic in question. Statements or propositions alleged to have this characteristic also sometimes are called ‘self-falsifying,’ ‘self-refuting,’ ‘self-stultifying,’ ‘self-destructive,’ or ‘pointless.’ However, proponents of the strategy of showing skepticism to be self-defeating have not in general adequately distinguished between two types of self-defeating proposition: self-falsifying and self-stultifying. In the first part of this paper I distinguish between self-falsifying and self-stultifying propositions, and introduce the notion of performative self-falsification. In the second part I discuss classical transcendental arguments, ‘modest’ transcendental arguments, and objections to each. In the third part I introduce two types of transcendental argument—each labeled “performative”—corresponding to two types of performatively self-falsifying proposition, and I compare them to modest transcendental arguments. (shrink)

A book review of Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). I will pass over her compelling critiques of cost-benefit analysis, rational desire theory, and "consequentialist" moral theories, among many topics she dispatches successfully, with fierce intelligence and wit. Instead I want to focus on the central justificatory strategy that underpins her defense of her pluralist, nonconsequentialist, rational attitude theory of value. Anderson states at the outset that she is not that interested in such (...) metaethical questions as whether value judgments express beliefs or emotions or other attitudes (p. xiii). But I think her own answers to these questions might have implications for normative and pragmatic issues of concern to her. So I want to try tinkering with the metaethical arguments in ways that might streamline her treatment of the normative and pragmatic ones somewhat. (shrink)

The interreligious dialogue has a very important place in all the meeting agendas from all over the world, regardless the topic addressed. Having a concrete dynamic, this kind of theological problematic follows the general spiritual movement of communities and their unresolved necessities. Although the interreligious dialogue has an old history, it developed today on the basis of actual issues of violence and disagreements between peoples. Therefore, because religion has an essential place in the life of human communities from all over (...) the world, the dialogue with people of other faiths and ideologies must be necessarily promoted. In this context, the Orthodox Church representatives participated at many meetings in the purpose to promote and sustain the interreligious dialogue, bringing in actuality their bi-millenaries theological experience, based on the Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. From the orthodox point of view, the liberty is the greatest gift which God has given to man and also a free world cannot exist without love between people. This love has its fundament and purpose in the Holy Trinity. (shrink)

My intellectual journey in philosophy proceeded along two mountainous paths that coincided at their base, but forked less than halfway up the incline. The first is that of my philosophical development, a steep but steady and continuous ascent. It began in my family, and accelerated in high school, art school, college, and graduate school. Those foundations propelled my philosophical research into the nature of rationality and its relation to the structure of the self, a long-term project focused on the Kantian (...) and Humean metaethical traditions in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. It would have been impossible to bring this project to completion without the anchor, compass, and conceptual mapping provided by my prior, longstanding involvement in the practice and theory of Vedic philosophy. The second path is that of my professional route through the field of academic philosophy, which branched onto a rocky detour in graduate school, followed by a short but steep ascent, followed next by a much steeper, sustained descent off that road, into the ravine, down in flames, and out of the profession. In order to reach the summit of the first path, I had to reach the nadir of the second. It was the right decision. My yoga practice cushioned my landing. (shrink)

The recent literature on Nāgārjuna’s catuṣkoṭi centres around Jay Garfield’s (2009) and Graham Priest’s (2010) interpretation. It is an open discussion to what extent their interpretation is an adequate model of the logic for the catuskoti, and the Mūla-madhyamaka-kārikā. Priest and Garfield try to make sense of the contradictions within the catuskoti by appeal to a series of lattices – orderings of truth-values, supposed to model the path to enlightenment. They use Anderson & Belnaps's (1975) framework of First Degree Entailment. (...) Cotnoir (2015) has argued that the lattices of Priest and Garfield cannot ground the logic of the catuskoti. The concern is simple: on the one hand, FDE brings with it the failure of classical principles such as modus ponens. On the other hand, we frequently encounter Nāgārjuna using classical principles in other arguments in the MMK. There is a problem of validity. If FDE is Nāgārjuna’s logic of choice, he is facing what is commonly called the classical recapture problem: how to make sense of cases where classical principles like modus pones are valid? One cannot just add principles like modus ponens as assumptions, because in the background paraconsistent logic this does not rule out their negations. In this essay, I shall explore and critically evaluate Cotnoir’s proposal. In detail, I shall reveal that his framework suffers collapse of the kotis. Furthermore, I shall argue that the Collapse Argument has been misguided from the outset. The last chapter suggests a formulation of the catuskoti in classical Boolean Algebra, extended by the notion of an external negation as an illocutionary act. I will focus on purely formal considerations, leaving doctrinal matters to the scholarly discourse – as far as this is possible. (shrink)

Do salient normative claims about politics require moral premises? Political moralists think they do, political realists think they do not. We defend the viability of realism in a two-pronged way. First, we show that a number of recent attacks on realism, as well as realist responses to those attacks, unduly conflate distinctively political normativity and non-moral political normativity. Second, we argue that Alex Worsnip and Jonathan Leader-Maynard’s recent attack on realist arguments for a distinctively political normativity depends on assuming moralism (...) as the default view, which places an excessive burden on the viability of realism, and so begs the question. Our discussion, though, does not address the relative merits of realism and moralism, so its upshot is relatively ecumenical: moralism need not be the view that all apt normative political judgments are moral judgments, and realism need not be the view that no apt normative political judgments are moral judgments. (shrink)

I wish to defend the claim that given the content and structure of any moral theory we are likely to find palatable, there is no way of uniquely breaking down that theory into either consequentialist or deontological elements. Indeed, once we examine the actual structure of any such theory more closely, we see that it can be classified in either way arbitrarily. Hence if we ignore the metaethical pronouncements often made by adherents of the consequentialist-deontological distinction, we are quickly led (...) to the conclusion that this distinction contributes nothing of consequence to an understanding of moral theory. I will try to show that there are basically two reasons for this. First, what we mean by the terms endemic to the consequentialist-deontological distinction have no unique references to particular states of affairs in actual cases of moral decision making. Hence we may justify any such concrete moral decision by reference to typically consequentialist or deontological reasoning indifferently. Second, scrutiny of actual and viable moral theories reveals a much finer-grained structure than the consequentialist-deontological taxonomy can capture. And it is this structure, rather than simple attention to consequences or principles, that determines practical moral decision making. We would thus do better to develop the richer vocabulary of causes and constituents, goals and effects, states and events (mental, social, or physical). So in the end, the consequentialist-deontological distinction is irrelevant at the normative level of actual moral reasoning, whereas at the metaethical level it crudely schematizes two opposing types of dummy theory, neither of which is convincing, upon reflection, to any practicing moral philosopher. (shrink)

Artykuł poruszać będzie zagadnienia dotyczące sposobu definiowania artysty oraz istnienie artystów w kontekście historycznym, ontologicznym i filozoficznym. Autor rozważy także dylematy moralne i etyczne, dotyczące statusu dzieła, jak i problemy estetyczne odniesione do „standaryzacji” dzieł według wzorca produktów i języka biznesowego. Udowodni, że żaden współczesny człowiek w istocie nie potrafi zrobić „kanapki” jako jednostka. Wytwory artystyczne są w podobnej sytuacji. Status quo jest w procesie przewartościowania. W artykule postawiona będzie teza, że współczesny artysta jest nauczycielem, który stymuluje bądź angażuje działalność (...) osób – korzystając z nowych rozwiązań technologicznych – do powstających w sposób zbiorowy dzieł sztuki. Te nowe realia wymagają ogólnego dostępu do zasobów koniecznych dla nowego społeczeństwa. Rozwój technologii spowodował, że wśród artystów i odbiorców znacznie zradykalizował się sposób tworzenia i recepcji sztuki. Nie jest to bynajmniej tajemnicą, szczególnie biorąc pod uwagę konflikty między własnością autorską a prywatną (piractwo) oraz historię tego „problemu” – począwszy od pojawienia się prasy drukarskiej. W świetle nowej technologii nasuwa się pytanie, czy usiłujemy utrzymać przestarzały model? Czy komputer może być artystą? Czy może nim być tłum? A zwierzęta? Czy twory sztuki mogą być własnością publiczną? Co w przypadku powszechnego dostępu do edukacji artystycznej? Jaki paradygmat wprowadzić? Jaka powinna być polityka wobec zasobu energii kreatywnej? (shrink)

One of the insights of dynamic semantics in its various guises (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982, Groenendijk & Stokhof 1991, Kamp & Reyle 1993 among many others) is that interpretation is sensitive to left-to-right order. Is order sensitivity, particularly the default left-to-right order of evaluation, a property of particular meanings of certain lexical items (e.g., dynamically interpreted conjunction) or is it a more general feature of meaning composition? If it is a more general feature of meaning composition, is it a processing (...) ‘preference’ or should it be captured as a ‘harder’ constraint on the type of meanings and operations over meanings involved in natural language interpretation? This squib draws attention to the symmetrical A-too B-too construction (found in a variety of languages, e.g., Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian) in this context. It argues that any semantic analysis of its main ‘symmetrical-meaning’ characteristic should also allow for subtler interactions between this construction and items that are clearly sensitive to evaluation-order effects, e.g., anaphoric adjectives like next and other. We suggest that the notion of postsupposition embedded in a broader dynamic framework is better able to account for both the symmetric nature of this construction, its non-symmetric variant A-too, and its interaction with items that are evaluation-order sensitive. We briefly compare this proposal with a couple of possible alternative accounts. (shrink)

The theorist who denies the objective reality of non-relational temporal properties, or ‘A-series’ determinations, must explain our experience of the passage of time. D.H. Mellor, a prominent denier of the objective reality of temporal passage, draws, in part, on Kant in offering a theory according to which the experience of temporal passage is the result of the projection of change in belief. But Mellor has missed some important points Kant has to make about time-awareness. It turns out that Kant's theory (...) of time-awareness also involves projection – but for him, the projection of temporal passage is necessary to any coherent experience at all, and for this reason events in the world cannot be represented except as exhibiting real tensed change. Consequently we cannot intelligibly suppose the world we know to be without the passage of time. This fact would permit a modest transcendental argument the conclusion of which is that we are entitled to describe the world in terms of temporal passage. (shrink)

According to contextualism, vast majority of natural-language expressions are context-sensitive. When testing whether this claim is reflected in Folk intuitions, some interesting methodological questions were raised such as: which experimental design is more appropriate for testing contextualism – the within- or the between-subject design? The main thesis of this paper is that the between-subject design should be preferred. The first experiment aims at assessing the difference between the results obtained for within-subjects measurements (where all participants assess all contexts) and between-subject (...) measurements (where respondents evaluating different contexts are distinct groups). It is shown that the within-subject design provides data that seems to support contextualism. However, I present an alternative, invariantist interpretation of these results, therefore showing that the within-subject design does not allow to empirically distinguish between contextualism and invariantism. The second experiment further elaborates the issue of how perceiving the contrast between contexts can affect subjects’ judgments – I show that certain kinds of contexts may elicit opposite intuitions when contrasted with different contexts. (shrink)