Does the notion of ground, as it has recently been employed by metaphysicians, point to a single unified phenomenon? Jonathan Schaffer holds that the phenomenon of grounding exhibits the unity characteristic of a single genus. In defense of this hypothesis, Schaffer proposes to take seriously the analogy between causation and grounding. More specifically, Schaffer argues that both grounding and causation are best approached through a single formalism, viz., that utilized by structural equation models of causation. In this paper, I present (...) several concerns which suggest that the structural equation model does not transfer as smoothly from the case of causation to the case of grounding as Schaffer would have us believe. If it can in fact be shown that significant differences surface in how the formalism in question applies to the two types of phenomena in question, Schaffer’s attempt at establishing an analogy between grounding and causation has thereby been weakened and, as a result, the application of the Unity Hypothesis to the case of grounding once again stands in need of justification. (shrink)

This essay provides an opinionated survey of some recent developments in the literature on ontological dependence. Some of the most popular definitions of ontological dependence are formulated in modal terms; others in non-modal terms (e.g., in terms of the explanatory connective, ‘because’, or in terms of a non-modal conception of essence); some (viz., the existential construals of ontological dependence) emphasise requirements that must be met in order for an entity to exist; others (viz., the essentialist construals) focus on conditions that (...) must be satisfied in order for an entity to be the very entity it is at each time at which it exists; some are rigid, in the sense that they concern a relation between particular entities; others are generic, in the sense that they involve only a relation between an entity and some entities or other, which bear certain characteristics. I identify three potential measures of success with respect to which these different definitions of ontological dependence can be evaluated and consider the question of how well they in fact meet these desiderata. I end by noting that certain challenges face even the most promising essentialist construals of ontological dependence. (shrink)

In his excellent book, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time (Sider, 2001), Theodore Sider defends a version of four-dimensionalism which he calls the ‘stage-theory’. This paper focuses on Sider's argument from vagueness and argues that, due to the problematic nature of the argument from vagueness, Sider’s case in favor of four-dimensionalism is in the end not successful.

It is common to think of essence along modal lines: the essential truths, on this approach, are a subset of the necessary truths. But Aristotle conceives of the necessary truths as being distinct and derivative from the essential truths. Such a non-modal conception of essence also constitutes a central component of the neo-Aristotelian approach to metaphysics defended over the last several decades by Kit Fine. Both Aristotle and Fine rely on a distinction between what belongs to the essence proper of (...) an object and what merely follows from the essence proper of an object. In order for this type of approach to essence and modality to be successful, we must be able to identify an appropriate consequence relation which in fact generates the result that the necessary truths about objects follow from the essential truths. I discuss some proposals put forward by Fine and then turn to Aristotle’s account: Aristotle’s central idea, to trace the explanatory power of definitions to the causal power of essences has the potential to open the door to a philosophically satisfying response to the question of why certain things are relevant, while others are irrelevant, to the nature or essence of entities. If at all possible, it would be desirable for example to have something further to say by way of explanation to such questions as ‘Why is the number 2 completely irrelevant to the nature of camels?’. (shrink)

This inaugural lecture, delivered on 17 November 2021 at the University of Neuchâtel, addresses the question: Are material objects analyzable into more basic constituents and, if so, what are they? It might appear that this question is more appropriately settled by empirical means as utilized in the natural sciences. For example, we learn from physics and chemistry that water is composed of H2O-molecules and that hydrogen and oxygen atoms themselves are composed of smaller parts, such as protons, which are in (...) turn composed of yet smaller parts, such as quarks, and so on. While the question at the center of this lecture might thus appear to fall more appropriately into the empirical domain of natural science, I argue that metaphysics in fact has an important role to play in determining how best to answer the question before us. More concretely, I propose that the Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism, when appropriately interpreted, provides the best metaphysical answer to the question of whether and how material objects are analyzable into more basic constituents. Hylomorphism holds that those entities to which this doctrine applies are, in some sense, compounds of matter (“hylē”) and form (“morphē” or “eidos”). Thus, the title of this lecture, “Form, Matter, Substance”, refers to the claim that lies at the center of the doctrine of hylomorphism, as applied to the domain of material objects, namely that sensible substances are the result of combining matter and form in the right sort of way; or, for short, “form + matter = substance”. I begin in Section II by providing some historical background which brings out Aristotle’s motivations for proposing the doctrine of hylomorphism in the context of his analysis of change. Section III turns to some of the main features of the contemporary hylomorphic theory I have defended especially in Koslicki (2008) and Koslicki (2018). Section IV discusses some challenging questions concerning artifacts which arise for both hylomorphic and other approaches to the metaphysics of concrete particular objects. Section V concludes by summarizing why, as contemporary metaphysicians, we should prefer a hylomorphic theory over its competitors as an analysis of concrete particular objects that is compatible with our current scientific understanding of the world. (shrink)

Along with many other languages, English has a relatively straightforward grammatical distinction between mass-occurrences of nouns and their countoccurrences. As the mass-count distinction, in my view, is best drawn between occurrences of expressions, rather than expressions themselves, it becomes important that there be some rule-governed way of classifying a given noun-occurrence into mass or count. The project of classifying noun-occurrences is the topic of Section II of this paper. Section III, the remainder of the paper, concerns the semantic differences between (...) nouns in their mass-occurrences and those in their count-occurrences. As both the name view and the mixed view are, in my opinion, subject to serious difficulties discussed in Section III.1,I defend a version of the predicate view. Traditionally, nouns in their singular count-occurrences are also analyzed as playing the semantic role of a predicate. How, then, does the predicate view preserve the intuitive difference between nouns in their mass- and those in their count-occurrences? I suggest, in Section III.2, that there are different kinds of predicates: mass-predicates, e.g. ‘is hair’, singular count-predicates, e.g. ‘is a hair’, and plural count-predicates, e.g. ‘are hairs’. Mass-predicates and count-predicates, in my view, are not reducible to each other. The remainder of Section III takes a closer look at the differences and interrelations between these different kinds of predicates. Mass-predicates and count-predicates differ from each other truth-conditionally, and these truth-conditional differences turn out to have interesting implications, in particular concerning the part-whole relation and our practices of counting. But mass- and count-predicates are also related to each other through systematic entailment relations; these entailment relations are examined in Section III.4. (shrink)

According to the account of artifacts developed by Lynne Rudder Baker, artifacts have a certain “proper function” essentially. The proper function of an artifact is the purpose or use intended for the artifact by its “author(s)”, viz., the artifact’s designer(s) and/or producer(s). Baker’s account therefore traces the essences of artifacts back indirectly to the intentions of an artifact’s original author (e.g., its inventor, maker, producer or designer). Like other “author-intention-based” accounts (e.g., those defended by Amie Thomasson, Simon Evnine, and others), (...) Baker’s treatment, or so I have argued, is subject to the concern that, when stated in its most general form, human creative intentions are not nearly as powerful and discriminating as proponents of author-intention-based accounts make them out to be (see Kathrin Koslicki, Form, Matter, Substance, Oxford University Press, 2018, Chapter 8). When Baker responds to a version of this objection launched against her account by Theodore Sider and Dean Zimmerman, she proposes that we cannot simply think things into existence for which “our conventions and practices do not have a place” (Lynne Rudder Baker, The Metaphysics of Everyday Life: An Essay in Practical Realism, 2007, p. 44). For example, I cannot, according to Baker, make up the word, “bonangle”, apply it to a piece of driftwood and thereby succeed in bringing into existence a new artifact, viz., a bonangle, merely by thinking to myself “It would be nice if the world contained bonangles; I hereby make that piece of driftwood a bonangle”. In order for this response to be effective, however, more needs to be said about how our conventions and practices support the creation of some artifacts and artifact kinds, while disallowing the attempted creation of others. In this paper, I examine the effectiveness of Baker’s response in addressing the challenges posed by the inclusion of artifacts in Baker’s practical realist ontology. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that, in order to account for the apparently substantive nature of definitional disputes, a commitment to what we call ‘Socratic essentialism’ is needed. We defend Socratic essentialism against a prominent neo-Carnapian challenge according to which apparently substantive definitional disputes always in some way trace back to disagreements over how expressions belonging to a particular language or concepts belonging to a certain conceptual scheme are properly used. Socratic essentialism, we argue, is not threatened by the possibility (...) that some apparently substantive definitional disputes may turn out to be verbal or conceptual, since this pluralist strategy, in our view, requires a commitment to more, rather than fewer, essences. What is more, a deflationary, metaphysically ‘light-weight’ construal of the essence-ascriptions in question leads to a peculiar conception of the pursuit of metaphysicians as behaving like deceptive (or self-deceived) grammarians pretending to be scientists. Moreover, this deflationary attitude, we argue, spreads beyond metaphysics and philosophy more broadly to apparently substantive definitional disputes in the sciences as well as other in other disciplines, such as art criticism. (shrink)

Non-modalists about essence reject the idea that metaphysical modality is prior to essence, e.g., in the sense that the latter can be reduced to or defined in terms of the former. On the contrary, according to these theorists, the explanation, if anything, proceeds in the opposite direction: metaphysical modality does not explain, but is instead explained in terms of, essence. Thus, for non-modalists like Aristotle, Kit Fine and E. J. Lowe, one of the primary theoretical roles of essence is to (...) provide an explanatory basis for metaphysical necessity and possibility. This chapter explores a range of different types of explanatory connections which raise the question of how the non-modalist’s program of explaining metaphysical modality in terms of essence is best carried out. The considerations advanced in this chapter suggest that non-modalists must proceed by way of a non-logical case-by-case engagement with specific cases, since no logical “one-size-fits- all” strategy appears to be available. (shrink)

Social phenomena—quite like mental states in the philosophy of mind—are often regarded as potential troublemakers from the start, particularly if they are approached with certain explanatory commitments, such as naturalism or social individualism, already in place. In this paper, we argue that such explanatory constraints should be at least initially bracketed if we are to arrive at an adequate non-biased description of social phenomena. Legitimate explanatory projects, or so we maintain, such as those of making the social world fit within (...) the natural world with the help of, e.g., collective intentionality, social individualism, and the like, should neither exclude nor influence the prior description of social phenomena. Just as we need a description of the mental that is not biased, for example, by (anti)physicalist constraints, we need a description of the social that is not biased, for example, by (anti)individualist or (anti)naturalist commitments. Descriptive social ontology, as we shall conceive of it, is not incompatible with the adoption of explanatory frameworks in social ontology; rather, the descriptive task, according to our conception, ought to be recognized as prior to the explanatory project in the order of inquiry. If social phenomena are, for example, to be reduced to nonsocial (e.g., psychological or physical) phenomena, we need first to understand clearly what the social candidates for the reduction in question are. While such descriptive or naive approaches have been influential in general metaphysics (see Fine 2017), they have so far not been prominent in analytic social ontology (though things are different outside of analytic philosophy, see esp. Reinach (1913). In what follows, we shall outline the contours of a descriptive approach by arguing, first, that description and explanation need to be distinguished as two distinct ways of engaging with social phenomena. Secondly, we defend the claim that the descriptive project ought to be regarded as prior to the explanatory project in the order of inquiry. We begin, in Section 2, by considering two different ways of engaging with mental phenomena: a descriptive approach taken by descriptive psychology and an explanatory approach utilized in analytic philosophy of mind. We take these two ways of approaching the study of the mind to be analogous to the distinction we want to draw in social ontology between a descriptive and an explanatory approach to the study of social phenomena. We consider next, in Section 3, how our approach compares to neighboring perspectives that are familiar to us from general metaphysics and philosophy more broadly, such as Aristotle’s emphasis on “saving the appearances”, Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics, as well as Fine’s contrast between na¨ive and foundational metaphysics. In Section 4, we apply the proposed descriptive/explanatory distinction to the domain of social ontology and argue that descriptive social ontology ought to take precedence in the order of inquiry over explanatory social ontology. Finally, in Section 5, we consider and respond to several objections to which our account might seem to be susceptible. (shrink)

This chapter reviews several varieties of grounding skepticism as well as responses that have been proposed by grounding enthusiasts to considerations raised by grounding skeptics. Grounding skeptics, as I conceive of them here, are theorists who belong to one of the following two schools of thought. “Old-school” grounding skeptics doubt the theoretical utility of the grounding idiom by denying one of its presuppositions, viz., that this notion is at least intelligible or coherent. “Second-generation” grounding skeptics call into question the theoretical (...) utility of the grounding idiom for other reasons; their skeptical doubts tend to focus on one of the following three purported theoretical virtues grounding enthusiasts ascribe to their idiom: (i) its alleged power to unify an apparently heterogeneous collection of phenomena; (ii) its alleged power to capture and/or elucidate the distinction between the fundamental and the non-fundamental; or (iii) the alleged metaphysical (as opposed to mind-dependent, epistemic, or psychological) utility of grounding claims. Grounding enthusiasts have already formulated responses to many of the objections described in this chapter. At this point, however, it is fair to say that the state of the literature is still evolving, and no conclusive judgment can therefore be reached as of yet as to whether grounding enthusiasts or grounding skeptics have gained the upper hand in these debates. In the meantime, though, grounding skeptics continue to maintain that the classification of factual and/or nonfactual connections under the rubric of grounding does not really help us illuminate the nature of the connections at issue; instead, from the view of the grounding skeptic, we are better off studying these various connections separately and in their own right. (shrink)

This paper evaluates six contenders which might be invoked by essentialists in order to meet Quine’s challenge, viz., to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the crossworld identity of individuals: (i) an object’s qualitative character; (ii) matter; (iii) origins; (iv) haecceities or primitive non-qualitative thisness properties; (v) “world-indexed properties”; and (iv) individual forms. The first three candidates, I argue, fail to provide conditions that are both necessary and sufficient for the crossworld identity of individuals; the fourth and fifth criteria are (...) open to the charge that they do not succeed in meeting Quine’s demand in an explanatorily adequate fashion. On balance, then, individual forms, or so I propose, deserve to be taken very seriously as a possible response to Quine’s challenge, especially by neo-Aristotelians who are already committed to a hylomorphic conception of composite concrete particular objects for other reasons. Theorists who also accept a non-modal conception of essence, i.e., a conception according to which essence is not reducible to modality, in addition face the further difficult task, over and above what is required to meet Quine’s challenge, of having to explain how an object’s de re modal profile in some way follows from facts about its essence. Haecceities and world-indexed properties, as I indicate, are unlikely to be of much help with respect to this second challenge, while the forms of hylomorphic compounds are in fact well-suited for this purpose. (shrink)

Concrete particular objects (e.g., living organisms) figure saliently in our everyday experience as well as our in our scientific theorizing about the world. A hylomorphic analysis of concrete particular objects holds that these entities are, in some sense, compounds of matter (hūlē) and form (morphē or eidos). The Grounding Problem asks why an object and its matter (e.g., a statue and the clay that constitutes it) can apparently differ with respect to certain of their properties (e.g., the clay’s ability to (...) survive being squashed, as compared to the statue’s inability to do so), even though they are otherwise so much alike. In this paper, I argue that a hylomorphic analysis of concrete particular objects, in conjunction with a non-modal conception of essence of the type encountered for example in the works of Aristotle and Kit Fine, has the resources to yield a solution to the Grounding Problem. (shrink)

Following W.V. Quine’s lead, many metaphysicians consider ontology to be concerned primarily with existential questions of the form, “What is there?”. Moreover, if the position advanced by Rudolf Carnap, in his seminal essay, “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology ”, is correct, then many of these existential ontological questions ought to be classified as either trivially answerable or as “pseudo-questions”. One may justifiably wonder, however, whether the Quinean and Carnapian perspective on ontology really does justice to many of the most central concerns (...) of this discipline. This chapter argues, by considering a particular ontological dispute between two different kinds of trope theorists, that some of the most interesting and important debates which properly belong to the study of being, whether we call it “metaphysics” or “ ontology ”, do not concern existential questions at all; rather, such disputes in some cases focus on non-existential disagreements over questions of fundamentality. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider particular attempts by E. J. Lowe and Michael Gorman at providing an independence criterion of substancehood and argue that the stipulative exclusion of non-particulars and proper parts (or constituents) from such accounts raises difficult issues for their proponents. The results of the present discussion seem to indicate that, at least for the case of composite entities, a unity criterion of substancehood might have at least as much, and perhaps more, to offer than an independence criterion (...) and therefore ought to be explored further by neo-Aristotelians in search of a defensible notion of substancehood. I indicated briefly how such a unity criterion might be used by neo-Aristotelians to support the inclusion of hylomorphic compounds in the category of substance, given the traditional role of form as the principle of unity within the compound. (shrink)

In this reply, I respond to points raised in Christian Kanzian's „Kommentar zu Kathrin Koslickis Form, Matter, Substance” in connection with a book-symposium on _Form, Matter, Substance_ held at the University of Innsbruck in May 2019.

Humans are prone to producing morally suboptimal and even disastrous outcomes out of ignorance. Ignorance is generally thought to excuse agents from wrongdoing, but little attention has been paid to group-based ignorance as the reason for some of our collective failings. I distinguish between different types of first-order and higher order group-based ignorance and examine how these can variously lead to problematic inaction. I will make two suggestions regarding our epistemic obligations vis-a-vis collective (in)action problems: (1) that our epistemic obligations (...) concern not just our own knowledge and beliefs but those of others, too and (2) that our epistemic obligations can be held collectively where the epistemic tasks cannot be performed by individuals acting in isolation, for example, when we are required to produce joint epistemic goods. (shrink)

The relative merits of standard mereology have received quite a bit of attention in recent years from metaphysicians concerned with the part/whole properties of material objects. A question that has not been pursued to the same degree, however, is what sort of semantic repercussions a commitment to mereological sums in the standard sense might have in particular on the predicted behavior of singular terms and our practices of using such terms to refer to objects. The apparent mismatch between our actual (...) referential practices and the persistence conditions attributed to material objects by the supporters of standard mereology puts these philosophers, other things being equal, at a disadvantage compared to those whose ontology matches more closely the observed behavior of singular terms, as they are commonly used in ordinary discourse. To alleviate this problem, David Lewis leans heavily on his distinction between natural and non-natural properties. I argue in this paper that Lewis’ already heavily burdened natural/non-natural distinction among properties is not enough to avoid Quinean indeterminacy for singular terms. Those who are in the business of giving an analysis of constructions involving full-fledged predication, as opposed to the mere spatial overlap of denotations, will thus want to go in for an ontology that places more stringent structural constraints on the referents of singular terms than would be supplied by standard mereology. (shrink)

In his “Farewell to Substance: A Differentiated Leave-Taking”, Peter Simons reaches the provocative conclusion that the concept of substance, as it is employed by metaphysicians, has become obsolete, since in the end there may be nothing at all which answers to it. No harm is done, Simons allows, if we continue to retain an everyday notion of substance, as long as we are aware of the limitations of this practice: there is no reason in general to expect that what is (...) salient from our specifically human point of view will retain a special place in light of our most considered scientific and metaphysical theories of the world. In this paper, I argue that, contrary to Simons’ pessimistic outlook, the concept of substance continues to retain its importance for metaphysics. Among the primary explanatory roles played by the concept of substance in metaphysics is its use in designating certain kinds of entities as occupying a privileged position relative to a particular ontology. But disputes over substancehood can also target the criteria themselves relative to which an ontologically privileged position is awarded to certain taxonomic categories. In these uses, we see the concept of substance employed in an absolute, a relational and a comparative sense, to designate items as substances simpliciter, as the substances of something else, or as more or less deserving of substance status. (shrink)

In this reply, I respond to points raised by Uwe Meixner in “Koslicki on Matter and Form” in connection with a book symposium on _Form, Matter, Substance_ held at the University of Innsbruck in May 2019.

In this reply, I respond to points raised in Winfried Löffler's „Koslickis Metaontologie“ in connection with a book-symposium on _Form, Matter, Substance_ held at the University of Innsbruck in May 2019.

Together we can achieve things that we could never do on our own. In fact, there are sheer endless opportunities for producing morally desirable outcomes together with others. Unsurprisingly, scholars have been finding the idea of collective moral obligations intriguing. Yet, there is little agreement among scholars on the nature of such obligations and on the extent to which their existence might force us to adjust existing theories of moral obligation. What interests me in this paper is the perspective of (...) the moral deliberating agent who faces a collective action problem, i.e. the type of reasoning she employs when deciding how to act. I hope to show that agents have collective obligations precisely when they are required to employ ‘we-reasoning’, a type of reasoning that differs from I-mode, best response reasoning, as I shall explain below. More precisely, two (or more) individual agents have a collective moral obligation to do x if x is an option for action that is only collectively available (more on that later) and each has sufficient reason to rank x highest out of the options available to them. (shrink)

It is often argued that our obligations to address structural injustice are collective in character. But what exactly does it mean for ‘ordinary citizens’ to have collective obligations visà- vis large-scale injustice? In this paper, I propose to pay closer attention to the different kinds of collective action needed in addressing some of these structural injustices and the extent to which these are available to large, unorganised groups of people. I argue that large, dispersed and unorganised groups of people are (...) often in a position to perform distributive collective actions. As such, ordinary citizens can have massively shared obligations to address structural injustice through distributive action, but, ultimately, such obligations are ‘collective’ only in a fairly weak sense. (shrink)

WINNER BEST SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY BOOK IN 2021 / NASSP BOOK AWARD 2022 -/- Together we can often achieve things that are impossible to do on our own. We can prevent something bad from happening or we can produce something good, even if none of us could do it by herself. But when are we morally required to do something of moral importance together with others? This book develops an original theory of collective moral obligations. These are obligations that individual moral (...) agents hold jointly, but not as unified collective agents. To think of some of our obligations as joint or collective is the best way of making sense of our intuitions regarding collective moral action problems. Where we have reason to believe that our efforts are most efficient as part of a collective endeavor we may incur collective obligations together with others who are similarly placed as long as we are able to establish compossible individual contributory strategies towards that goal. The book concludes with a discussion of “massively shared obligations” to large-scale moral problems such as global poverty. (shrink)

Do essence-based accounts of necessity and Vetter’s potentiality-based account of possibility in fact lead to the same result, viz., a single derived notion of necessity that is interdefinable with possibility or vice versa? And does each approach independently have the ability to reach its desired goal without having to rely on the primitive notion utilized by the other? In this essay, I investigate these questions and Vetter’s responses to them. Contrary to the “separatist” position defended by Vetter, I argue that (...) there are reasons to favor “Combination”, according to which an essence-based account of necessity should be combined with a potentiality-based account of possibility, or vice versa. According to this alternative approach, essentialism and potentialism should be regarded as allies, rather than as competitors, in a theory of derived modality, since both notions are needed in order to give a full account of necessity and possibility. Keywords: possibility, necessity, potentiality, essence, interdefinability, actuality, dependence, artifact-functions. (shrink)

While many scholars join in the call for an experiential shift in thinking and living, it is not always clear how it could be done. Recent environmental philosophy has illuminated the significance of re-animating human–environment relations on an experiential level for endeavouring a new (or renewed) ethical, experiential, and, indeed, existential stance of the human as part of the environed embodiment. In relation to this call, I explore embodied critical thinking (ECT) as a tool for recognising, revitalising, and reflecting embodied, (...) enactive, and embedded thinking that comes from a felt sense. Thus, this chapter employs some of the TAE (Thinking at the Edge) steps for ECT research as a practical approach to facilitating and embracing a new way of thinking that is crucial for reconnecting humans with their lived environments, but also for emancipating research practices to enable research that goes out from such a renewed connectivity. In particular, the chapter traces the application of Eugene Gendlin’s move of instancing to showcase the use of embodied knowing and felt sense in environmental contexts. Thus, it showcases how, in fundamental ways that speak directly to and from our embodied embeddedness, ECT has an emancipatory impact in ways that resonate with lived experiences. (shrink)

We can often achieve together what we could not have achieved on our own. Many times these outcomes and actions will be morally valuable; sometimes they may be of substantial moral value. However, when can we be under an obligation to perform some morally valuable action together with others, or to jointly produce a morally significant outcome? Can there be collective moral obligations, and if so, under what circumstances do we acquire them? These are questions to which philosophers are increasingly (...) turning their attention. It is fair to say that traditional ethical theories cannot give a satisfying answer to the questions, focusing as they do on the actions and attitudes of discreet individual agents. It should also be noted that the debate surrounding collective moral obligations is ongoing and by no means settled. This chapter discusses and compares the different attempts to date to answer the above questions. It proposes a set of meta-criteria—or desiderata— for arbitrating between the various proposals. (shrink)

In the light of Philipp Sarasin's work in Darwin und Foucault: Genealogie und Geschichte im Zeitalter der Biologie, the article delineates a genealogically articulated naturally produced culture and a cultured nature and discusses the genealogical implications of a carnal, becoming self in a world that could rightly be justified "as an aesthetical phenomenon." The article demonstrates the historicity and processual materiality as a conceptual platform for a combination of the notions of experienced carnality and a socially constructed body, demonstrating such (...) a historically embedded carnal body as a binding agent for the "social constructivist" and "biologist" approaches in sciences. Thus, the article builds a framework for the articulation of senseful, processual materiality on the backdrop of a nature-culture continuum via genealogy, suggesting the necessity for change of tone in the communication of human and life sciences via the understanding of a culturally endowed biology. (shrink)

This article explores the ‘lack of meaning’ in contemporary society as a consequence of Western dualist thought paradigms and ontologies, via Gilles Deleuze’s concept of ‘reactive nihilism’ following the colloquial murder of God. The article then explores processual and new materialist approaches in the understanding of the lived and carnal self, arguing for immanent and senseful materiality as an ethical platform for religious, environmental, and societal solidarity for tomorrow. For the theoretical justification of the processual approach in understanding the enfleshed (...) self, the article employs John Dupré’s processual approach in the philosophy of biology, as well as Astrida Neimani’s critical posthumanism, and contextualizes these considerations with Erich Fromm’s ethical distinction of being and having. (shrink)

This research explores the carnal, experienced self as processual and becoming, situating life as zoe (as per Braidotti) in the context of the Western culture, characterized by alienation (Fromm, Foucault). The study first addresses the ontological disposition of the carnal self and then turns to the concepts of life and death (Freud, Fromm), to explicate the tie between materiality and discourse conditions. Erich Fromm’s classical distinction of having and being is restated as a distinction of having and becoming, which are (...) then explored as complimentary ontological, cultural, and characterological directionalities. A genealogy of their mutual dynamics then allows situating the relations of carnal bodies and inorganic prosthesis (e.g. technologies) in the light of life considered as the necessary synthesis of forces of preservation and perpetual change, beyond subject-object duality. (shrink)

The statement that we are currently failing to address some of humanity’s greatest challenges seems uncontroversial—we are not doing enough to limit global warming to a maximum of 2 °C and we are exposing vulnerable people to preventable diseases when failing to produce herd immunity. But what singles out such failings from all the things we did not do when all are unintended? Unlike their individualist counterparts, collective inaction and omission have not yet received much attention in the literature. collective (...) inaction, I argue, can be attributed to a group of agents where a collective action x that the agents did not perform was collectively feasible at time t where each agent in that group had sufficient reason to contribute to performing x or others had a reasonable expectation that they would perform x. I show that, perhaps surprisingly, we can speak of collective inaction even where only one member of the group fails to act. However, where large and dispersed groups of agents are concerned, there is often no meaningful way of attributing collective failings. Still, I contend that the failure to close the global emissions gap and—in some cases—to generate herd immunity are indeed on us. (shrink)

Marine ecosystems are under increasing pressure from human activity, yet successful management relies on knowledge. The evidence-based policy (EBP) approach has been promoted on the grounds that it provides greater transparency and consistency by relying on ‘high quality’ information. However, EBP also creates epistemic responsibilities. Decision-making where limited or no empirical evidence exists, such as is often the case in marine systems, creates epistemic obligations for new information acquisition. We argue that philosophical approaches can inform the science-policy interface. Using marine (...) biosecurity examples, we specifically examine the epistemic challenges in the acquisition and acceptance of evidence to inform policy, discussing epistemic due care and biases in consideration of evidence. (shrink)

According to the received view the later Wittgenstein subscribed to the thesis that speaking a language requires being guided by rules (thesis RG). In this paper we question the received view. On its most intuitive reading, we argue, (RG) is very much at odds with central tenets of the later Wittgenstein. Giving up on this reading, however, threatens to deprive the notion of rule-following of any real substance. Consequently, the rule-following considerations cannot charitably be read as a deep and subtle (...) defense of (RG) against the threat of paradox, as proponents of the received view are wont to do. Instead, we argue, the rule-following considerations provide Wittgenstein's deep and subtle reasons for rejecting the very idea that speaking a language involves rule-guidance. Although Wittgenstein subscribed to (RG) during his middle period writings, his later remarks on rules, far from being a clarification and elaboration of his earlier views, are directed against the claim of the middle period that speaking a language is an essentially rule-guided activity. (shrink)

Our moral obligations can sometimes be collective in nature: They can jointly attach to two or more agents in that neither agent has that obligation on their own, but they – in some sense – share it or have it in common. In order for two or more agents to jointly hold an obligation to address some joint necessity problem they must have joint ability to address that problem. Joint ability is highly context-dependent and particularly sensitive to shared (or even (...) common) beliefs. As such, joint ability can be deliberately generated in a given collection of agents by providing information related to collective goals and contributory actions. As moral agents, we regularly face problems wherein the outcome of our actions depends on how others choose. There are two ways of deliberating about our own choices in such cases. We can either think of our choices as best responses to others’ choices (I-mode reasoning). Or we can think of our own choices as contributions to the collectively best option (even when we do not know how others are (likely) to choose) (we-mode reasoning). In deliberating about the right (individual) course of action vis-à-vis collective action problems, agents regularly we-frame the case at hand, that is, they include options in their deliberation that are only collectively available, and they we-reason with regard to their individual contributory actions. It is a necessary condition for collective obligations that potential collaborators facing a joint necessity case have grounds to privilege we-reasoning over reasoning in I-mode. (shrink)

Democracy is the central political issue of our age, yet debates over its nature and goals rarely engage with feminist concerns. Now that women have the right to vote, they are thought to present no special problems of their own. But despite the seemingly gender-neutral categories of individual or citizen, democratic theory and practice continues to privilege the male. This book reconsiders dominant strands in democratic thinking - focusing on liberal democracy, participatory democracy, and twentieth century versions of civic republicanism (...) - and approaches these from a feminist perspective. Anne Phillips explores the under-representation of women in politics, the crucial relationship between public and private spheres, and the lessons of the contemporary women's movement as an experience in participatory democracy. (shrink)

This article explores the negative framing of environmental concern in the context of food procurement and consumption, through the lens of the myth of Eden considering the ontological and genealogical aspects of the experienced exile from nature. The article first considers the theoretical context of the negative framing of food ethics. Demonstrating the consequences of the experience of food as abject, the article then goes on to discuss the exile from Eden as an explanatory myth for the perceptual inbetweenness of (...) humankind. The aim of the article is to outline the genealogical markers of the negative framing of food ethics via the discussion of the exile from Eden. In the context of a new materialist understanding of the nature–culture continuum, the article depicts the exile as a perceptual rather than ontological divide that does not reflect a factual human inbetweenness but mirrors the objectification of nature by stripping the flesh of its spirit. Such reenvisioning is thought to be a pivotal aspect for mitigating the affectual abjectivity of food and recapturing the factual entanglement of body–environment to enable affirmative environmental ethics. (shrink)

In Group Duties, Stephanie Collins proposes a ‘tripartite’ social ontology of groups as obligation-bearers. Producing a unified theory of group obligations that reflects our messy social reality is challenging and this ‘three-sizes-fit-all’ approach promises clarity but does not always keep that promise. I suggest considering the epistemic level as primary in determining collective obligations, allowing for more fluidity than the proposed tripartite ontology of collectives, coalitions and combinations.

In order to make sense of collective doxastic reasons we need an account of group belief. Once we arrive at a more nuanced understanding of group belief it turns out that for some group beliefs we need not invoke collective epistemic reasons. However, we do need them for better understanding how and why different social identity groups will hold beliefs whose evidence-base is irreducibly social and tied to them being that kind of group. This short article is a commentary on (...) Veli Mitova's 2022 article "The collective epistemic reasons of social-identity groups". (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed an increase in bear sightings in Latvia, causing a change of tone in the country’s media outlets, regarding the return of “wild” animals. The unease around bear reappearance leads me to investigate the affective side of relations with beings that show strength and resilience in more-than-human encounters in human-inhabited spaces. These relations are characterized by the contrasting human feelings of alienation vis-à-vis their environments today and a false sense of security, resulting in disbelief to encounter beings (...) capable of challenging human exceptionalism. In a broader sense, the unease connects to human self-constitution and the fragility of the self, fueled by the domination of substance ontologies. This article considers bears as beings “in exile,” as potential threats to human self-pronounced exceptionality, and thus, examples of experienced abject regarding human subjectivity. The article aims to analyze the way the constitution of human selfhood is tied to the alienation of wildlife and its genealogical and biopolitical context and to question if a reconceptualization of the human/nonhuman relations via process, instead of substance ontology, is needed. (shrink)

Moral duties concerning climate change mitigation are – for good reasons – conventionally construed as duties of institutional agents, usually states. Yet, in both scholarly debate and political discourse, it has occasionally been argued that the moral duties lie not only with states and institutional agents, but also with individual citizens. This argument has been made with regard to mitigation efforts, especially those reducing greenhouse gases. This paper focuses on the question of whether individuals in industrialized countries have duties to (...) reduce their individual carbon footprint. To this end it will examine three kinds of arguments that have been brought forward against individuals having such duties: the view that individual emissions cause no harm; the view that individual mitigation efforts would have no morally significant effect; and the view that lifestyle changes would be overly-demanding. The paper shows how all three arguments fail to convince. While collective endeavours may be most efficient and effective in bringing about significant changes, there are still good reasons to contribute individually to reducing emission. After all, for most people the choice is between reducing one’s individual emissions and not doing anything. The author hopes this paper shows that one should not opt for the latter. (shrink)

Most current techniques to deal with invasive species are ineffective or have highly damaging side effects. To this end suppression-drives based on clustered regularly inter-spaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR/Cas9) have been touted as a potential silver bullet for the problem, allowing for a highly focused, humane and cost-effective means of removing a target species from an environment. Suppression-drives come with serious risks, however, such that the precautionary principle seems to warrant us not deploying this technology. The focus of this paper (...) is on one such risk – the danger of a suppression-drive escaping containment and wiping out the target species globally. Here, I argue that in most cases this risk is significant enough to warrant not using a gene-drive. In some cases, however, we can bypass the precautionary principle by using an approach that hinges on what I term the ‘Worst-Case Clause’. This clause, in turn, provides us with a litmus test that can be fruitfully used to determine what species are viable targets for suppression-drives in the wild. Using this metric in concert with other considerations, I suggest that only three species are currently possible viable targets – the European rabbit, ship rat and Caribbean Tree Frog. (shrink)

Dog whistling—speech that seems ordinary but sends a hidden, often derogatory message to a subset of the audience—is troubling not just for our political ideals, but also for our theories of communication. On the one hand, it seems possible to dog whistle unintentionally, merely by uttering certain expressions. On the other hand, the intention is typically assumed or even inferred from the act, and perhaps for good reason, for dog whistles seem misleading by design, not just by chance. In this (...) paper, I argue that, to understand when and why it’s possible to dog-whistle unintentionally (and indeed, intentionally), we’ll need to recognize the structure of our linguistic practices. For dog whistles and for covertly coded speech more generally, this structure is a pair of practices, one shared by all competent speakers and the other known only to some, but deployable in the same contexts. In trying to identify these enabling conditions, we’ll discover what existing theories of communicated content overlook by focusing on particular utterances in isolation, or on individual speakers’ mental states. The remedy, I argue, lies in attending to the ways in which what is said is shaped by the temporally extended, socio-politically structured linguistic practices that utterances instantiate. (shrink)

This commentary is part of a symposium on my book 'Getting Our Act Together: A Theory of Collective Moral Obligations' (Routledge, 2021). Here, I respond to the members of the North American Society for Social Philosophy’s 2022 Book Award Committee. I discuss whether most moral theory is individualistic, arguing that “traditional ethical theories” - meaning the traditions of Virtue Ethics, Kantian ethics as well as consequentialist ethics - certainly are. All of these focus on what individual agents ought to do (...) or how they ought to be. The commentators wonder whether any substantive moral theory can accommodate the idea of collective obligations? I suggest that one of my conditions for collective moral obligations is incompatible with objectivist versions of act-utilitarianism, which require moral agents to choose the option that actually maximises utility. Having said that, core elements of my account of collective moral obligations can be used with any substantive theory. Further, the theory—in its entirety—can be used with several substantive theories, including versions of all the major types of moral theory. How common are collective obligations? On my understanding, as fundamentally social thinkers, we are fairly flexible at switching between the we-mode and the I-mode, and will regularly respond to contextual cues for framing collective action scenarios. As such, I am not worried that there would be too few circumstances under which we have all-out collective obligations. What is more, we can generate such obligations by providing contextual cues for others that prompt them to frame situations as opportunities for joint action and to perform contributory actions. Another question raised by the commentators was if for having collective obligations it is crucial that we believe others will contribute? My answer is that such obligations do not necessarily depend on having positive evidence that concrete others are or will be contributing. Having said that, where we have positive evidence that others will not contribute and in particular where we know that their failure to contribute will unilaterally undermine the possibility of success of any collective action (as in strict joint necessity cases) this may undermine collective obligations. On my theory, what happens if people disagree on what is morally best? On my view, where such divergence between moral positions comes as a result of disagreement between morally motivated, reasonable, and well-informed people it undermines their collective obligation. Finally, are there “negative” collective duties? Yes, in fact collective harm cases can be conceived of as generating “negative” duties to collectively refrain from generating these kinds of harms, including our obligations to mitigate climate change through reducing greenhouse emissions. (shrink)

The article explores the concept of ‘life’ via processual ontology, contrasting the approaches of substance and processual ontologies, and investigates the link between ontological assumptions and sociopolitical discourses, stating that the predominant substance ontologies also promote an objectifying and anthropocentric framework in sociopolitical discourses and ethical approaches. Arguing for a necessary shift in the ontological conceptualization of life to enable environmentally-minded ethics for the future, the article explores the tie between the sociopolitical discourses embedded in a worldview that is grounded (...) in substance ontology and ethical frameworks. Whilst affirming this tie, this study also explicates the limitations and potential feasibility of a processual understanding of life, in the context of the existential disposition of the self-alienated lived-body self that is ontologically predisposed to objectification as a necessary pre-condition to human self-awareness. (shrink)

In recent decades, concepts of group agency and the morality of groups have increasingly been discussed by philosophers. Notions of collective or joint duties have been invoked especially in the debates on global justice, world poverty and climate change. This paper enquires into the possibility and potential nature of moral duties individuals in unstructured groups may hold together. It distinguishes between group agents and groups of people which – while not constituting a collective agent – are nonetheless capable of performing (...) a joint action. It attempts to defend a notion of joint duties which are neither duties of a group agent nor duties of individual agents, but duties held jointly by individuals in unstructured groups. Furthermore, it seeks to illuminate the relation between such joint duties on the one hand and individual duties on the other hand. Rebutting an argument brought forward by Wringe, the paper concludes that it is not plausible to assume that all humans on earth can together hold a duty to mitigate climate change or to combat global poverty given that the members of that group are not capable of joint action. (shrink)

The article analyzes the significance of situated knowledges for going beyond dominating conceptual dichotomies that a) establish status quo dialectics, b) proliferate homogenization of the Global Northern experienced materialities, and c) conceal and suppress alternate affectual body-environment experiences and materializations. With the example of postsocialist ontogenealogies, the article analyzes the potential blind spots when failing to consider both sides of a status quo dialectic in their interconnectedness. To conclude, the article suggests the potential of situated knowledges as a vehicle for (...) future environmental ethicalities. (shrink)

There are countless circumstances under which random individuals COULD act together to prevent something morally bad from happening or to remedy a morally bad situation. But when OUGHT individuals to act together in order to bring about a morally important outcome? Building on Philip Pettit’s and David Schweikard’s account of joint action, I will put forward the notion of joint duties: duties to perform an action together that individuals in so-called random or unstructured groups can jointly hold. I will show (...) how this account of joint duties is preferable to one which defends individual duties to cooperate. I then discuss the limits of joint duties and the ways in which one can fail to comply with them. It will become apparent that the circumstances under which individuals in random collectives acquire such joint duties are rare. (shrink)

Duties to reduce global poverty are often portrayed as collective duties to assist. At first glance this seems to make sense: since global poverty is a problem that can only be solved by a joint effort, the duty to do so should be considered a collective duty. But what exactly is meant by a ‚joint‘ or ‚collective‘ duty? This paper introduces a distinction between genuinely cooperative and cumulative collective actions. Genuinely cooperative actions require mutually responsive, carefully adjusted contributory actions by (...) cooperating agents, while contributions to cumulative actions are largely independent. The global affluent’s obligation to combat global poverty is not an obligation to perform a genuinely cooperative action. Instead, for most of us the morally best response is to contribute to existing cumulative endeavours. Our obligation to donate money to suitable organisations is a duty to contribute to cumulative action. Collective actions can produce fixed-sum or incremental goods. A collective obligation to produce a fixed-sum good is not distributive, that is, it is an obligation of the plurality of agents as such. This applies to obligations requiring both genuinely cooperative and cumulative actions. I call these kinds of obligations strongly collective obligations. However, for incremental goods the implications are less clear. There, the parameters for moral compliance are not dictated by problem for remedy as such. Rather, the magnitude of the required good is the sum of individually adequate contributions. What is collectively required depends on what is individually required. I propose to call these kinds of obligations weakly collective obligations. It turns out that we – the affluent – have a collective obligation to combat global poverty only in the weak sense. The obligation is collective in the sense that there is joint necessity and that we must contribute to a collective endeavour. Our donations are intended as contributions to a shared goal. But our duty to combat poverty is not a collective duty in the non-distributive, strong sense. This means that we need not necessarily take up the slack left by others or else stop contributing when others do more than their fair share. (shrink)

Philosophical discussion about the reality of sensory perceptions has been hijacked by two tendencies. First, talk about perception has been largely centered on vision. Second, the realism question is traditionally approached by attaching objects or material structures to matching contents of sensory perceptions. These tendencies have resulted in an argumentative impasse between realists and anti-realists, discussing the reliability of means by which the supposed causal information transfer from object to perceiver takes place. Concerning the nature of sensory experiences and their (...) capacity to provide access to reality, this article challenges the standard categories through which most arguments in this debate have been framed to date. Drawing on the underexplored case of olfaction, I first show how the details of the perception process determine the modalities of sensory experiences. I specifically examine the role of measurement and analyze its influence on the characterization of perceptions in olfaction. My aim is to argue for an understanding of perception through a process view, rather than one pertaining to objects and properties of objects. (shrink)