I argue that 'deep' ecology (as exemplified by the work of Arnie Naess) involves three inter-related commitments: (1) to an ethics of nature or axiological anti-humanism in which natural entities, processes or systems can possess intrinsic value independently of human beings; (2) a metaphysical naturalism or anti-humanism in which human beings are themselves conceptualized as natural products; (3) a transformative aspect. Although (3) is sometimes cast in personal or psychological terms, I think the idea can be given a properly philosophical (...) reconstruction along the lines of a kind of Ideologiekritik. I give the examples of Heidegger and Adorno to show how deeply our understanding of nature has been corrupted, and hence the depth of conceptual transformation required correctly to conceive nature. But both these thinkers simultaneously demonstrate a hostility to metaphysical naturalism and therefore have ultimately limited value for deep ecology. I then outline three possible relations of axiological to metaphysical commitments: (a) the abandonment of naturalism about values; (b) a projective or transcendentally idealist account of values; (c) an account of values as themselves lodged within the operation of natural systems. My reconstruction of the Ideologiekritiker shows them belonging to (b). So that if deep ecology is to avoid (a), it must embrace (c). Deleuze is much touted by environmental philosophers as contributing to (c). I argue that this is correct, but that the axiological commitments Deleuze manifests in his account of nature are ultimately quite different from those to which deep ecologists appear sympathetic. (shrink)

Many of those working on moral responsibility assume that "once blameworthy, always blameworthy." They believe that blameworthiness is like diamonds: it is forever. We argue that blameworthiness is not forever; rather, it can diminish through time. We begin by showing that the view that blameworthiness is forever is best understood as the claim that personal identity is sufficient for diachronic blameworthiness. We argue that this view should be rejected because it entails that blameworthiness for past action is completely divorced from (...) the distinctive psychological features of the person at the later time. This is because on none of the leading accounts of personal identity does identity require the preservation of any distinctive psychological features, but merely requires some form of continuity. The claim that blameworthiness is forever should therefore be rejected. We then sketch an account of blameworthiness over time, and consider two objections. (shrink)

Extremism is a perennial problem in our civilisation. It has constantly impeded our progress by leading to unnecessary wars, conflicts, enmity and hatred. Understanding the middle way between these two extremes helps us to clarify what extremism is and how it arises. Such an understanding can be made part of the education system so that children are taught from an early age to detect extremist tendencies in their own thinking and to control them for their own good and the good (...) of society. This paper extends the views expressed in my book, The Promise of Dualism (Almostic Publications) and other papers on the subject of extremism. It is focused on the following table which shows how the middle way stands between the extremes of too much power and too much belief. After the introduction, the rest of this paper explicates this table’s contents in considerable detail – line by line and word by word – in explanatory notes. (shrink)

A discussion of a number of ways that information can be present in a computer program without being explicitly represented.

We discuss at some length evidence from the cognitive science suggesting that the representations of objects based on spatiotemporal information and featural information retrieved bottomup from a visual scene precede representations of objects that include conceptual information. We argue that a distinction can be drawn between representations with conceptual and nonconceptual content. The distinction is based on perceptual mechanisms that retrieve information in conceptually unmediated ways. The representational contents of the states induced by these mechanisms that are available to a (...) type of awareness called phenomenal awareness constitute the phenomenal content of experience. The phenomenal content of perception contains the existence of objects as separate things that persist in time and time, spatiotemporal information, and information regarding relative spatial relations, motion, surface properties, shape, size, orientation, color, and their functional properties. (shrink)

These essays draw on work in the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and language, the development of concepts in children, conceptual..

Badiou claims Deleuze’s thinking is pre-critical metaphysics that cannot be understood in relation to Kant. I argue that Deleuze is indeed a metaphysical thinker, but precisely because he is a kind of Kantian. Badiou is right that Deleuze rejects the overwhelmingly epistemic problematics of critical thought in its classical sense, but he is wrong to claim that Deleuze completely rejects Kant. Instead, Deleuze is interested in developing a metaphysics that prolongs Kant’s conception of a productive synthesis irreducible to empirical causation. (...) Where Badiou’s criticism might tell however is in the risk that Deleuze’s strategy runs of contaminating his new metaphysics with a new kind of transcendental idealism. This reading has recently been developed by Ray Brassier and I explore and evaluate it, concluding that in Difference and Repetition this accusation may be correct, but that by the time of Anti-Œdipus, Deleuze (now with Guattari) has the intellectual resources to resist it. (shrink)

Cognitive agents, whether human or computer, that engage in natural-language discourse and that have beliefs about the beliefs of other cognitive agents must be able to represent objects the way they believe them to be and the way they believe others believe them to be. They must be able to represent other cognitive agents both as objects of beliefs and as agents of beliefs. They must be able to represent their own beliefs, and they must be able to represent beliefs (...) as objects of beliefs. These requirements raise questions about the number of tokens of the belief representation language needed to represent believers and propositions in their normal roles and in their roles as objects of beliefs. In this paper, we explicate the relations among nodes, mental tokens, concepts, actual objects, concepts in the belief spaces of an agent and the agent's model of other agents, concepts of other cognitive agents, and propositions. We extend, deepen, and clarify our theory of intensional knowledge representation for natural-language processing, as presented in previous papers and in light of objections raised by others. The essential claim is that tokens in a knowledge-representation system represent only intensions and not extensions. We are pursuing this investigation by building CASSIE, a computer model of a cognitive agent and, to the extent she works, a cognitive agent herself. CASSIE's mind is implemented in the SNePS knowledge-representation and reasoning system. (shrink)

One of the most serious challenges (if not the most serious challenge) for interactive psycho-physical dualism (henceforth interactive dualism or ID) is the so-called ‘interaction problem’. It has two facets, one of which this article focuses on, namely the apparent tension between interactions of non-physical minds in the physical world and physical laws of nature. One family of approaches to alleviate or even dissolve this tension is based on a collapse solution (‘consciousness collapse/CC) of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics (...) (QM). The idea is that the mind brings about the collapse of a superposed wave function onto one of its eigenstates. Thus, it is claimed, can the mind change the course of things without violating any law figuring in physical theory. I will first show that this hope is premature because energy and momentum are probably not conserved in collapse processes, and that even if this can be dealt with, the violations are either severe or produce further ontological problems. Second, I point out several conceptual difficulties for interactionist CC. I will also present solutions for those problems, but it will become clear that those solutions come at a high cost. Third, I shall briefly list some empirical problems which make life even harder for interactionist CC. I conclude with remarks about why no- collapse interpretations of QM don’t help either and what the present study has shown is the real issue for ID: namely to find a plausible integrative view of dualistic mental causation and laws of nature. (shrink)

This paper investigates the prospects of Rodney Brooks’ proposal for AI without representation. It turns out that the supposedly characteristic features of “new AI” (embodiment, situatedness, absence of reasoning, and absence of representation) are all present in conventional systems: “New AI” is just like old AI. Brooks proposal boils down to the architectural rejection of central control in intelligent agents—Which, however, turns out to be crucial. Some of more recent cognitive science suggests that we might do well to dispose of (...) the image of intelligent agents as central representation processors. If this paradigm shift is achieved, Brooks’ proposal for cognition without representation appears promising for full-blown intelligent agents—Though not for conscious agents. (shrink)

The objects of science education are transformed, degraded and disappeared for many reasons, and sometimes take other things with them when they go. This close reading of an undergraduate physiology laboratory report demonstrates how the kymograph was never a stand-alone instrument, but intertwined with conceptual frameworks and technical skills, laboratory amenities, materials, animal supply, technicians. Replacing the obsolete kymograph entails changing all of that, though our usual stories are focussed on progress associated with better measurements with fewer complications, not complications (...) themselves. Such interconnectedness between progress and demise raises uncomfortable challenges for laboratory pedagogy, and for museum practice: what is laboratory education really about, and what kinds of heritage should museums, libraries and archives preserve to document it? (shrink)

In "Evil and the Justice of God", N.T. Wright presses the point that attempting to solve the philosophical problem of evil is an immature response to the existence of evil--a response that belittles the real problem of evil, which is just the fact that evil is bad and needs to be dealt with. As you might expect, I am not inclined to endorse this sort of sweeping indictment of the entire field of research on the philosophical problem of evil. (I (...) sort of doubt that Wright really meant to either.) But I do think that there is a kernel of truth in what I take to be Wright's fundamental objection to attempts to solve the philosophical problem of evil. In the first section of what follows, I will try briefly to explain why. I will then go on to argue that, despite this fact, certain efforts at solving the problem of evil avoid Wright's objection. Indeed, drawing on recent work by Elenore Stump, I will argue that one perfectly legitimate way to try to solve the philosophical problem of evil is to follow precisely what seems to be the main piece of advice in "Evil and the Justice of God": namely, to look more seriously than we have at the attitudes taken toward evil by human authors of and characters in the Bible, and to attend more carefully to what the Bible says about how God deals with evil. (shrink)

Much has been written about Schopenhauer’s use of Kant’s aesthetics as well as Schopenhauer’s adherence to and departures from Kant’s theoretical philosophy, not least by Schopenhauer himself. The hypothesis I propose in this paper combines these two research trajectories in a novel way: I wish to argue that Schopenhauer’s main theoretical innovation, the doctrine of the will, can be regarded as the development of an aspect of Kant’s aesthetic theory, specifically that the intransitive, goalless striving of the will in Schopenhauer (...) is the intellectual air to Kant's understanding of the mental processes required for the appreciation of beauty as 'conforming to law without a law'. (shrink)

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a system philosopher in the grand tradition of classical German idealism. Broadly an adherent of Kant’s transcendental idealism, he is now most noted for his belief that Kant’s thing in itself can best be described as ‘will’, something he argued in his 1819 work The World as Will and Representation (WWRI 124/H 2:119). Schopenhauer’s term ‘will’ does not refer primarily to human willing, that is, conscious striving towards a goal. Following Kant he argues that willing remains (...) conditioned by the forms of representation and therefore cannot be identified with the thing-in-itself. To reach the thing-in-itself, all forms of representation must be removed to arrive at a conception of will as striving without a goal. This conception is at the root of Schopenhauer’s pessimism: willing is experienced by conscious beings as suffering; and the world, including each of us, is in-itself endless willing without the possibility of satisfaction. Only two things hold out the prospect of any relief: the disinterested contemplation of works of art provides temporary respite from the striving will for the many; and a very few saintly beings may be able to still or quiet the will completely and achieve a state that Schopenhauer identifies as nirvana. These concerns—with suffering, meaning, asceticism and renunciation—are already problems in moral philosophy in a wide sense. But Schopenhauer also has a moral philosophy in the ‘narrower’ sense (WWRII 589/H 3:676; Cartwright 1999) that addresses questions such as freedom of the will, moral responsibility, the proper criterion for right action, moral motivation, and the virtues and vices. Indeed Schopenhauer makes a distinctive and quite contemporary contribution to virtue theory, advocating compassion (Mitleid) as the source of all human virtues. (shrink)

Schopenhauer positions himself squarely within the tradition of Kant’s transcendental idealism, and his first sense of the metaphysical comprises the synthetic cognition a priori that makes experience possible within transcendental idealism. This is Schopenhauer’s transcendental metaphysics. As he developed philosophically however, Schopenhauer devised a second sense of the metaphysical. This second sense also depends, albeit negatively, on transcendental idealism because its central claim—that the thing in itself should be identified with will—looks like precisely a species of transcendent metaphysics, a claim (...) that goes beyond the possibility of experience into the cognitively forbidden realm of things in themselves. I shall argue however that this second sense of the metaphysical can be formulated much more independently of transcendental idealism, following a recent similar interpretation of Kant due to Rae Langton, and that this makes for some surprising connections to contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

In his Meditations Descartes concludes that he is a res cogitans, an unextended entity whose essence is to be conscious. His reasoning in support of the conclusion that he exists entirely distinct from his body has seemed unconvincing to his critics. I attempt to show that the reasoning which he offers in support of his conclusion. although mistaken, is more plausible and his mistakes more interesting than his critics have acknowledged.

his paper argues that we will never get rid of the extremist mentality unless the dualist view prevails and is taught as part of the educational system. The dualist view takes account of both sides of an argument whereas the extremist view promotes one side unequivocally without considering the merits of the opposing view. The merits of the dualist view can be taught in schools so that everyone learns to recognise that mentality when it is evident not only in other (...) people’s behaviour but also in their own thinking about things. The dualist view is a flexible one involving trial-and-error processes as we work our way through life. That view is contrasted with the monist view that focuses on one point of view to the exclusion of all others. The extremist’s view is usually monistic and is intolerable of views that contradict or dispute their dogmatic view of things. This paper therefore examines these two contrasting views. It outlines the spectrum between monist and dualist ways of thinking, and it concludes that systematic form of dualism is possible that takes the middle way between the extremes of dogmatic and sceptical thinking. Only through dualist studies will the dualist view be more thoroughly developed, as is outlined here. (shrink)

Schopenhauer is famously abusive toward his philosophical contemporary and rival, Friedrich William Joseph von Schelling. This chapter examines the motivations for Schopenhauer’s immoderate attitude and the substance behind the insults. It looks carefully at both the nature of the insults and substantive critical objections Schopenhauer had to Schelling’s philosophy, both to Schelling’s metaphysical description of the thing-in-itself and Schelling’s epistemic mechanism of intellectual intuition. It concludes that Schopenhauer’s substantive criticism is reasonable and that Schopenhauer does in fact avoid Schelling’s errors: (...) still, the vehemence of the abuse is best perhaps explained by the proximity of their philosophies, not the distance. Indeed, both are developing metaphysics of will with full and conflicted awareness of the Kantian epistemic strictures against metaphysics. In view of this, Schopenhauer is particularly concerned to mark his own project as legitimate by highlighting the manner in which he avoids Schelling’s errors. (shrink)

Thomas Reid launched a scathing attack on David Hume in his first book: "An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense" published in 1764. But this was ineffective and his arguments failed to persuade Hume to rethink his philosophy. Till the end of his life Hume remained unconvinced by Reid's criticisms of him. In this paper I examine: (1) what Hume thought of Reid's book, (2) why Hume was unshaken by Reid's arguments against him, (3) whether (...) the arguments of Reid's later book published after Hume died in 1776 were any stronger, and (4) why Reid failed to confront Hume with better arguments before 1776. (shrink)

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) is often thought of as a “philosopher’s philosopher,” with a specialist rather than generalist appeal. One reason for Schelling’s lack of popularity is that he is something of a problem case for traditional narratives about the history of philosophy. Although he is often slotted in as a stepping stone on the intellectual journey from Kant to Hegel, any attention to his ideas will show that he does not fit this role very well. His later (...) philosophy suggests a materialism and empiricism that puts him outside of idealism proper; his connection with the romantic movement suggests an aestheticism that challenges traditional philosophy as such; and his mysticism allies him with medieval, pre-critical philosophies considered antiquated by the 19th century. And if Schelling was not entirely at home with his contemporaries, he seems, on the face of it, to have fared little better with his future: there has been no Schelling school, he has had no followers. No historical trajectory announces Schelling as its point of departure. -/- And yet Schelling’s influence has been an extraordinary one. He has inspired physicists, physicians, theologians, historians and poets. A wildly diverse set of philosophers have claimed that their ideas have resonance with his. Perhaps the question of Schelling’s influence can be approached by looking at what Kant says about works of genius -- that they should give rise to inspiration, not imitation. Paradoxically, to imitate genius is not to produce an imitation but a new creative work. Whether or not Schelling should be strictly viewed as a genius, Kant’s notion suggests a sense in which Schelling should be understood as a “philosopher’s philosopher”; he inspired creativity, not repetition. In this perspective, the lack of a “Schelling school” is a sign of strength; Schelling is continually being rediscovered, and his works have retained a fresh and untimely character. If Schelling does not have any obvious historical successors, it is because his influence cannot be charted by the usual methods. New philosophical tools are needed in order to understand his philosophical significance, his impact on contemporary thought and relevance for contemporary concerns. (shrink)

In the past decade UNESCO has pursued a leadership role in the articulation of general principles for bioethics, as well as an extensive campaign to promulgate these principles globally.1 Since UNESCO's General Conference adopted the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights in 2005, UNESCO's Bioethics Section has worked with member states to develop a "bioethics infrastructure." UNESCO also provides an "Ethics Teacher Training Course" to member states and disseminates a "core curriculum," primarily targeting medical students. The core curriculum orients (...) itself by the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights and aims to articulate a set of "bioethical principles" that provide a "common global . (shrink)

The idea that we may continue to exist in a bodiless condition after our death has long played an important role in beliefs about immortality, ultimate rewards and punishments, the transmigration of souls, and the like. There has also been long and heated disagreement about whether the idea of disembodied existence even makes sense, let alone whether anybody can or does survive dissolution of his material form. It may seem doubtful that anything new could be added to the debate at (...) this late date, but I hope to show that this is not so. I will explore the problem of disembodiment from a somewhat different direction than has been tried before, one that leads to what seem to me more interesting and more definite conclusions about its unintelligibility. Furthermore, the approach I will be taking puts both the traditional mind-body problem and the competing claims of dualism and physicalism in a fresh light that can help us to understand better the nature of our embodied existence. (shrink)

This thesis is an interrogation of the viability of transitive production, which I associate with the Aristotelian term hylomorphic. The central axiom of hylomorphic production that will be targeted for critique is that the agent of production must be distinguished absolutely from the product. The thesis follows the thought of production primarily-but not exclusively-in its characteristically modem instantiation in the Kantian transcendental. The argument seeks to demonstrate that the productive aspect of the operator of transitive production is incompatible with the (...) transcendental element, and that Kant was himself increasingly aware of this problem. The Third Critique, under the rubric of an aesthetics, it will be argued, manifests this awareness in its problematic of a manifold of empirical laws. That this constitutes a difficulty for transcendent idealism means that the transcendental operators of the First Critique have failed to constitute experience in a relevant and important way. Furthermore, it is possible to see in some of the famous slogans of the Third Critique, an indication of another mode of production which is immune to the difficulties of the axiom of transitive production. In conclusion I suggest that the consequences of this new mode of intransitive production, associated with materiality, is destructive of the thought of the axiomatic otherworldliness of production operators. Production is not operated at all. Some suggestions are then made as to the explanation of the error embodied in the axiom of transitivity. (shrink)

Daniel Dennett has offered a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something's being the proper object of our moral commitment, that is, for something's being a person. Strict application of these largely pragmatic conditions, however, would result in a moral community with quite a surprising membership roster, because of both who is on it and who isn't. The problem is that "your" being a person should amount to more than a function of "my" goals and cleverness.

Over three decades ago, in a brief but provocative essay, Paul Ziff argued for the thesis that robots cannot have feelings because they are "mechanisms, not organisms, not living creatures. There could be a broken-down robot but not a dead one. Only living creatures can literally have feelings."[i] Since machines are not living things they cannot have feelings. In the first half of my paper I review Ziff's arguments against the idea that robots could be conscious, especially his appeal to (...) our linguistic usage. In the second half of the essay I try to provide a deeper ontological understanding of why we ought not attribute minds to nonliving artifacts. I argue that inanimate mechanisms are incapable of genuinely active and purposive behavior. They are importantly different in kind from living human beings and animals. (shrink)

Recent work in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2010a; Clark 2010b; Palermos 2014) can help to explain why certain kinds of assertions—made on the basis of information stored in our gadgets rather than in biological memory—are properly criticisable in light of misleading implicatures, while others are not.

One of the goals of physiologists who study the detailed physical, chemical,and neurological mechanisms operating within the human body is to understand the intricate causal processes which underlie human abilities and activities. It is doubtless premature to predict that they will eventually be able to explain the behaviour of a particular human being as we might now explain the behaviour of a pendulum clock or even the invisible changes occurring within the hardware of a modern electronic computer. Nonetheless, it seems (...) fair to say that hovering in the background of investigations into human physiology is the promise or threat, depending upon how one looks at the matter that human beings are complete physical-chemical systems and that all events taking place within their bodies and all movements of their bodies could be accounted for by physical causes if we but knew enough. I am not concerned at the moment with whether or not this ’mechanistic’ hypothesis is true, assuming that it is clear enough to be intelligible, nor with whether or not we could ever know that it is true. I wish to consider the somewhat more accessible yet equally important question whether our coming to believe that the hypothesis is true would warrant our relinquishing our conception of ourselves as beings who are capable of acting for reasons to achieve ends of our own choosing. I use the word ’warrant’ to indicate that I will not be discussing the possibility that believing the mechanistic hypothesis might lead us, as a matter of psychological fact, to think of human beings as mere automata, as objects whose movements are to be explained only by causes rather than by reasons, as are the actions of a personal subject. I intend to consider only whether the acceptance of mechanism would in fact justify such a change in conception. (shrink)

This essay series explores the human costs and policy challenges associated with the displacement crises in the Mediterranean and Andaman Seas. The essays explore the myths or misconceptions that have pervaded discussions about these two crises, as well as the constraints or capacity deficiencies have hampered the responses to them.

The story of eternity is not as simple as a secularization narrative implies. Instead it follows something like the trajectory of reversal in Kant’s practical proof for the existence of god. In that proof, god emerges not as an object of theoretical investigation, but as a postulate required by our practical engagement with the world; so, similarly, the eternal is not just secularized out of existence, but becomes understood as an entailment of, and somehow imbricated in, the conditions of our (...) practical existence. -/- The sections that follow discuss some of those central figures in modern European philosophy whose views prominently feature some consideration of eternity. I start with Kant in section I. Kant’s critique of speculative theology is well-known, and this hostility would appear to make it unlikely that the eternal, with all its theological baggage, would feature prominently in Kant’s critical philosophy. But in fact Kant’s transcendental idealism endorses no fewer than three different concepts of the eternal, including what turns out to be the most historically influential idea: that practical reason involves a kind of eternal, non-temporal action. Kant shifts this notion of a non-temporal act from its original theological context of god’s actus purus to a practical context, setting the stage for Schelling’s and Kierkegaard’s later development of this theme. Before detailing this trajectory however, section II is devoted to Hegel, the philosopher whose radical historicism is perhaps more than any other thinker responsible for making “the nineteenth century preeminently the historical century.”4 Hegel is not fertile soil for the concept of the eternal, but his historicism does turn out, at a crucial moment in the philosophy of nature, to presuppose a certain conception of eternity as an eternal present. Perhaps more importantly for the further development of eternity in nineteenth century thought however is that both Schelling and Kierkegaard situate their views of the eternal in the context of a collective rejection of Hegel. Section III discusses Schelling, who returns to Kant’s conception of non-temporal choice, seeing human capacities for free eternal self-creation as rivaling god’s. Such powers are required, Schelling argues, to resist the sublimation of the individual human person into the blankness of the Absolute. Section IV briefly consider Schopenhauer’s view that the in-itself of everything is an endlessly striving will. Section V concerns Kierkegaard who is strongly committed to the eternal, and indeed criticizes Hegel for compromising his conception of the eternal by thinking it temporally; but he is obsessed by the paradoxical question of our practical “access” to the eternal within a particular temporal moment: the decisive moment, imbued with significance that can turn life around and create a new person, pushing Schelling’s concerns even further. The remaining, shorter sections, present briefer accounts of more recent figures who make important use of some conception of the eternal: Nietzsche’s eternal return (section VI), Agamben’s (1942-) theory of sovereignty (section VII) and finally Alain Badiou’s unapologetic attempt to resuscitate eternity as the condition of revolutionary political change (Section VIII). I end with a concluding meditation (Section IX). (shrink)

Cushman, Young, & Greene (2010) urge the consolidation of moral psychology around a dual-system consensus. On this view, a slow, often-overstretched rational system tends to produce consequentialist intuitions and action-tendencies, while a fast, affective system produces virtuous (or vicious) intuitions and action-tendencies that perform well in their habituated ecological niche but sometimes disastrously outside of it. This perspective suggests a habit-corrected-by-reason picture of moral behavior. Recent research, however, has raised questions about the adequacy of dual-process theories of cognition and behavior, (...) which tend to distinguish categorically between fast, affect-laden, automatic, sometimes-unconscious, nearly-incorrigible mental processes and slow, rational, effortful, conscious, corrigible mental processes. Processes of one alleged type often have properties associated with the contrary type. For instance, rational processes can be emotional, and fast thinking can perform logical operations. In addition, the fast-slow binary transforms a continuous temporal scale into a dichotomous one, losing potentially important information along the way. While these problems are beginning to be addressed in some subfields of psychology, moral psychology has yet to grapple with them. In this theoretical paper, we argue that moral psychology needs a framework that accounts for our knowledge of both temporal and spatial (anatomical) dimensions of the brain basis of moral cognition and virtuous decision-making. We argue that methodologies with very fine-grained temporal granularity, such as electroencephalography (EEG), should be used to complement more frequently used methodologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We outline how this might be accomplished using generosity, gratitude, and integrity as a case study. (shrink)

The liberal enlightenment as well as the more radical left have both traditionally opposed religion as a reactionary force in politics, a view culminating in an identification of the politics of religion as fundamentalist theocracy. But recently a number of thinkers—Agamben, Badiou, Tabues and in particular Simon Critchley—have begun to explore a more productive engagement of the religious and the political in which religion features as a possible or even necessary form of human emancipation. The papers in this collection, deriving (...) from a workshop held on and with Simon Critchley at the University of Texas at San Antonio in February 2010, take up the ways in which religion’s encounter with politics transforms not only politics but also religion itself, molding it into various religions of politics, including not just heretical religious metaphysics, but also what Critchley describes as non-metaphysical religion, the faith of the faithless. Starting from Critchley’s own genealogy of Pauline faith, the articles in this collection explore and defend some of the religions of politics and their implications. Costica Bradatan teases out the implications of Critchley’s substitution of humor for tragedy as the vehicle for the minimal self-distancing required for any politics. Jill Stauffer compares Critchley’s non-metaphysical religiosity with Charles Taylor’s account of Christianity. Alistair Welchman unpacks the political theology of the border in terms of god’s timeless act of creation. Anne O’Byrne explores the subtle dialectic between mores and morality in Rousseau’s political ethics. Roland Champagne sees a kind non-metaphysical religion in Arendt’s category of the political pariah. Davide Panagia presents Critchley’s ethics of exposure as the basis for a non-metaphysical political bond. Philip Quadrio wonders about the political ramifications of Critchley’s own ‘mystical anarchism’ and Tina Chanter re-reads the primal site in the Western tradition at which the political and the religious intersect, the Antigone story, side-stepping philosophical interpretations of the story (dominated by Hegel’s reading) by means of a series of post-colonial re-imaginings of the play. The collection concludes with an interview with Simon Critchley taking up the themes of the workshop in the light of more recent political events: the Arab Spring and the rise and fall of the Occupy movement. (shrink)

Klein’s account of epistemic justification, infinitism, supplies a novel solution to the regress problem. We argue that concentrating on the normative aspect of justification exposes a number of unpalatable consequences for infinitism, all of which warrant rejecting the position. As an intermediary step, we develop a stronger version of the ‘finite minds’ objection.

Attempts to evaluate a belief or argument on the basis of its cause or origin are usually condemned as committing the genetic fallacy. However, I sketch a number of cases in which causal or historical factors are logically relevant to evaluating a belief, including an interesting abductive form that reasons from the best explanation for the existence of a belief to its likely truth. Such arguments are also susceptible to refutation by genetic reasoning that may come very close to the (...) standard examples given of supposedly fallacious genetic reasoning. (shrink)

Deleuze does not mention Schopenhauer very frequently. Certainly Schopenhauer does not appear to be in the counter-canon of life-affirming philosophers that Deleuze so values – indeed, far from it. Nor does he appear to be even a favoured ‘enemy’ as he describes Kant, or as he sometimes appears to view Hegel. Nevertheless, I think Schopenhauer’s break from Kant is crucial for understanding not only Deleuze’s account of Nietzsche, but also for a proper grasp of the core Deleuzian distinction between the (...) actual and the virtual, at least in its guise as the distinction between desiring-production and social production in Anti-Oedipus. (shrink)

In this paper I argue, in the first section, that Schopenhauer was a direct perceptual realist. I think Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant in the Appendix to WWR 1 is largely bound together by his view that Kant was still welded to a pre-critical indirect perceptual realism which creates the various points of tension or compromise formations that Schopenhauer enumerates. In the second section I go on to argue that this perceptual direct realism sheds light on his account of compassion, in (...) particular making it more plausible that he is a direct realist about our perception of the emotions, or wills, of others (at least in the appropriate circumstances). This helps to resolve a problem identified in the literature, especially by David Cartwright. In the last section I address an objection, and show that far from being an objection, it in fact strengthens my position. (shrink)

The paper presents a paradoxical feature of computational systems that suggests that computationalism cannot explain symbol grounding. If the mind is a digital computer, as computationalism claims, then it can be computing either over meaningful symbols or over meaningless symbols. If it is computing over meaningful symbols its functioning presupposes the existence of meaningful symbols in the system, i.e. it implies semantic nativism. If the mind is computing over meaningless symbols, no intentional cognitive processes are available prior to symbol grounding. (...) In this case, no symbol grounding could take place since any grounding presupposes intentional cognitive processes. So, whether computing in the mind is over meaningless or over meaningful symbols, computationalism implies semantic nativism. (shrink)

In this essay I take issue with the ease which the work of Sade has been, since Roland Barthes, integrated into academic discourse and try to reawaken a sense for what is unacceptable in Sade, but without lapsing into moralism. I try to give a reinvigorated account of the materialism of Sade's writing (as opposed to formalist appropriations of Sade like Barthes') which I then apply to the two characteristic Sadian devices: first, the encyclopedic enumeration and the (quite separate) philosophical (...) discourse. The encyclopedic enumeration is not only a kind of anti-literature but also comprises an irreducibly counter-conceptual geometry of affect whose structure I explore. I evaluate Bataille's claim that at the philosophical and discursive level Sade is primarily a thinker of transgression and defend, using the special case of blasphemy, the notion against critics who view it is puerile or self-defeating. In so doing, I unearth a profound pragmatism in Sade aimed at 'deprogramming' him from Western, Christian values, a move that anticipates Nietzsche in crucial and interesting ways. (shrink)

This paper argues that the transcendence (most obviously theological) has skewed much of Western thinking by forcing material complexity to be interpreted as the intervention of something immaterial. Contemporary terms in the anglophone world that can play this role are: intentionality (privatised teleology), representation and semantics. Deleuze launches a powerful critique of residually theological reasoning that has wide application in both philosophy and science. This critique converges with and deepens, perhaps surprisingly for a French philosopher, similar critiques that are being (...) offered today in evolutionary biology, cognitive science and robotics. (shrink)

Schelling and Schopenhauer both operate in the German idealist tradition initiated by Kant, although both are critical of some of its developments. Schelling's interest in evil – which is at its most intense in his 1809 Freedom essay – stems from his belief that Kant's account of morality. In the Freedom essay Schelling links these theories with the traditional Christian conception of evil as a privation, and attempts by contrast to develop a concept of "radical" or "positive" evil that grounds (...) both our freedom and individual personality. Evil as folly is a corollary of the Socratic identification of virtue with knowledge. The distinguishing feature of the free-will defenses is that god is logically constrained to permit moral evil if God creates a world with moral freedom. It is consistent with such defenses that God is (in some sense) responsible for creating evil, but God's actions are all things considered justified. (shrink)

Schelling’s middle period works have always been a source of fascination: they mark a break with the idealism (in both senses of the word) of his early works and the Fichtean and then Hegelian tradition; while they are not weighed down by the reactionary burden of his late lectures on theology and mythology. But they have been equally a source of perplexity. The central work of this period, the Essay on Human Freedom (1809) takes as its topic the moral problem (...) of freedom, but spends much of its time telling a mystical-metaphysical story about the creation of the world that attempts to paint a picture of a kind of irreducible metaphysical contingency in nature. What is the relation between the moral and the metaphysical elements of the Freedom essay? It has never been obvious. But some recent Anglophone scholarship suggests an answer. In her Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling and Kierkegaard (2006) Michelle Kosch presents a strong case for the view that Schelling’s Freedom essay is motivated by a critique of Kant’s conception of autonomy in ethics. The idea is that Kant’s problems start not if he fails to show that it is rational to be moral, but if he succeeds. For if he does, then it is irrational to be immoral, and hence it is impossible for a rational agent to act immorally: an act not in conformity with duty is evidence of irrationality (perhaps one’s rational agency has been thwarted by pathological inclinations). This is broadly the Socratic position: evil, as a knowing immoral act, is not possible. Officially Kant rejects the classical view, most explicitly in his 1793 Religion with the Bounds of Mere Reason, for a Christian position in which freedom is understood as the freedom to choose between good and evil without thereby abandoning one’s agency. But he has no obvious means for doing so. Kosch attempts to show that Schelling comes, by 1809, to identify his early work with something like this Kantian dilemma: we are as badly off when it comes to our freedom if we are pushed around by reasons as if we are pushed around by causes: the Hegelian ruse of reason is as inimical to our agency as phenomenal determinism. The Freedom essay is the result of Schelling’s attempt to defend a muscular, Christian conception of the possibility of evil. Nevertheless, for Kosch, Schelling’s move to the metaphysical level is still problematic: just where one would expect an account of norms that does not infer them from our rational autonomy, we get, puzzlingly, a cosmology. I will argue that Kosch’s matrix for interpreting Schelling in fact does give us a way of understanding Schelling’s metaphysics of contingency. In broad outline, Schelling’s argument is that our choice of metaphysical schema is constrained by a correct understanding of agency: the world cannot be causally determined because that is inconsistent with our understanding of ourselves as agents; but equally the world cannot be rationally determined, and for the same reason. Schelling’s metaphysics of contingency is an unpacking of the consequences of this inference, and not a botched attempt to ground values outside of rational autonomy. (shrink)

‘Romanticism’ is one of the more hotly contested terms in the history of ideas. There is a singular lack of consensus as to its meaning, unity, and historical extension, and many attempts to fix the category of romanticism very quickly become blurry. As a result, the great historian of ideas, Arthur Lovejoy, famously concludes that: ‘the word ‘romantic’ has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of a verbal (...) sign’ But his pessimistic advice has not stopped scholars from trying to define romanticism. If anything, it has brought renewed vigour to the determination with which critics try to pinpoint the term. There are several approaches to take, for those who attempt to do so. One class of critics tries to enumerate the features shared by the authors and texts generally considered romantic. An alternative approach would try to identify the fundamental unity that informs romanticism and gives rise to the empirical commonalities. But what would this essential feature be? Both of these approaches take an external perspective on romanticism, seeing it as the object of inquiry. An alternative approach, which we will pursue, looks at romantic subjects, and romanticism as a self-constituting category, rather than merely as an externally imposed one. In other words, we will take as basic neither an (empirical) array of candidate properties constituting romanticism, nor a supposed underlying (rationalist) essence from which properties can be derived, but rather we will focus on how the romantics themselves took up the idea of romanticism and transformed it into a self-conscious movement. We will treat the question of romanticism with respect to England, but above all Germany. Although romantic movements arose and flourished elsewhere in Europe (and in France in particular), German and English romanticism were uniquely theoretically sophisticated and philosophically nuanced. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a reading of the 1790 Introduction to the Critique of Judgement intended to show that the Critique of Judgement itself attempts to make good a serious deficit in the argumentation of the Critique of Pure Reason. In effect, the conditions outlined in the Critique of Pure Reason could be fulfilled without experience being constituted. There must therefore be additional conditions for the possibility of experience. And an account of these is to be found in the (...) Critique of Judgement, despite the repeated insistence in the text itself that its strictures operate on the level of a merely 'reflective' judgement, quite distinct from the 'determinant' judgements underwriting the time-determination of logical operations in the first Critique. The new transcendental elements for the condition of possibility of experience turn out, through an analysis of the concept of affinity, to table a novel, transcendental, conception of matter irreducible to the experiential understanding of matter and conditioning its possibility. In conclusion, I suggest that the structure of reflective judgement can itself be understood as a description of the operation of this transcendental matter in the special case of the transcendental spontaneity required by the Kantian subject to constitutive experience. (shrink)

n Part I of this essay I take a canonical case of political theology, Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty (1985; 1922), and show how Agamben derives his account of sovereignty from an interpretation of Schmitt that relies on the interesting theological premise of an atemporal act or decision, one that is traditionally attributed to god’s act of creation, and that is only ambiguously secularized in the transcendental moment of German Idealism. In Part II I show how this reading of Schmitt can (...) be used to avoid a certain kind of negative political theology associated with deconstruction because Agamben’s reading of Schmitt explains the emergence of certain specific temporal structures associated with the sovereign political decision: the sovereign political decision cannot be represented as having a beginning, and hence recedes phenomenologically into a kind of a priori past; and the sovereign decision cannot be represented as completed, and hence it is experienced as a ‘perpetual expenditure of energy’ that lacks comprehensible relation to a goal. In Part III I defend Agamben’s interpretation of sovereignty as a transcendental act from Negri’s objection that Agamben simply equates without argument Negri’s radically democratic conception of revolutionary constituent power with Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty (1999, p. 13). My defense relies on identifying Agamben’s ‘paradox of sovereignty’ (Agamben 1998, pp. 15ff.) with a ‘paradox of democracy.’ (Mouffe 2000; Whelan 1983) In Part IV I realize a corollary of the identification of the two paradoxes, of sovereignty and democracy: that political borders are the spatial site of the application of the act of political sovereignty, and possess a kind of transcendental spatiality akin to the special temporality associated with sovereignty. I apply this understanding to the privileged special case of the US-Mexico border: the structures implicit in Agamben’s analysis explain some crucial features of this case of walling: its manifest failure to achieve, even in principle, the purpose for which it is allegedly intended; the failure of democratic polity to address those affected by the wall; the appeal to sovereign powers in the legal legitimation of border policy. I defend Agamben’s analysis against other apparently competing views, especially those of Wendy Brown (2010) and argue that the transcendental act of sovereignty comprises a kind of primary political repression that opens up the space for ideological understandings of the wall, but does not itself comprise one. In Part V I address the question whether Agamben’s derived category of ‘bare life’ can also be used in the context of the border, arguing that it can. I conclude with some critical remarks about the limits of Agamben’s view. (shrink)

Citizen Satisfaction Index System (CSIS) was used to assess the delivery of support to education initiatives in the municipality of Banga, Aklan, Philippines. The samples were determined using multiple application of stratified random sampling approach. In accordance with the Philippine Statistical Authority's Data on Census Population and Housing for 2015, barangays having a bigger share of the population contributed more respondents to the 150 targeted participants. Following the inclusion criteria, the probability respondents were chosen using the Kish Grid. Pre-numbered questionnaires (...) were distributed, with odd numbers targeting male responders and even numbers targeting females. The following criteria were used to evaluate the respondents' assessments: awareness, availment of the program/service, satisfaction, and need for action. Furthermore, interviews were conducted to better understand and investigate the respondents' thoughts, behavior, and perspectives. The reasons for their reaction were also obtained. The data was provided in percentage as well as frequency distributions. The study inferred that awareness on alternative learning system and/or special education program should be improved since it is the only program that attained low rating for awareness. Most of the residents were not able to avail education programs because they have no household member who attends school. Majority of the respondents who availed the services were satisfied. However, scholarship and other assistance programs to students may be enhanced to improve service delivery. It is highly recommended by the citizens to improve accessibility to scholarship programs and other forms of financial assistance to students. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze was born in 1925, and died by his own hand 70 years later. He taught philosophy in the French lycée system, at the University of Lyon, and then—after the institutional fragmentation that was the government‟s response to the student-driven near-revolution of 1968—at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes). Although his work is only now coming to prominence in the Anglophone world, he has achieved great notoriety in France: he is widely credited with inaugurating the post-structuralist movement with his (...) 1962 Nietzsche and Philosophy, as well as with providing its definitive text, the 1972 Anti-Oedipus (co-written with Félix Guattari). His colleague and friend, Michel Foucault, has gone so far as to suggest that 'perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian'. (shrink)

Three thoughts of culture: (1) the logogram: high-level software, the ROM BIOS of civilisation, the ‘best that has ever been thought and written’ (Matthew Arnold), secular theology, social phylum, explicitly ideal rampart against philistine disaggregation and the entropy of commodification, desperate and universal cognitive erection in the face of the massive loss of integrity brought about by capital; (2) the decay of the logogram: low-level shoring-up routine, localised resistance mediated through patchy and fragmented attempts at reconstitution, quotidian custom and regional (...) habit nostalgically valorised at the point of their historical evaporation, instantly fit only for museums, tourists and markets; (3) the death of the logogram: evacuation of the hard-wired constraint of organic programming, reinterfacing of cognition and culture with the machine, technological reprogramming of consciousness driven by intensive economic shifts. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze was born in 1925, and died by his own hand 70 years later. He taught philosophy in the French lycée system, at the University of Lyon, and then—after the institutional fragmentation that was the government‟s response to the student-driven near-revolution of 1968—at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes). Although his work is only now coming to prominence in the Anglophone world, he has achieved great notoriety in France: he is widely credited with inaugurating the post-structuralist movement with his (...) 1962 Nietzsche and Philosophy, as well as with providing its definitive text, the 1972 Anti-Oedipus (co-written with Félix Guattari). His colleague and friend, Michel Foucault, has gone so far as to suggest that 'perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian'. (shrink)