The idea the New Zealand Māori once counted by elevens has been viewed as a cultural misunderstanding originating with a mid-nineteenth-century dictionary of their language. Yet this “remarkable singularity” had an earlier, Continental origin, the details of which have been lost over a century of transmission in the literature. The affair is traced to a pair of scientific explorers, René-Primevère Lesson and Jules Poret de Blosseville, as reconstructed through their publications on the 1822–1825 circumnavigational voyage of the Coquille, a French (...) corvette. Possible explanations for the affair are briefly examined, including whether it might have been a prank by the Polynesians or a misunderstanding or hoax on the part of the Europeans. Reasons why the idea of counting by elevens remains topical are discussed. First, its very oddity has obscured the counting method actually used—setting aside every tenth item as a tally. This “ephemeral abacus” is examined for its physical and mental efficiencies and its potential to explain aspects of numerical structure and vocabulary (e.g., Mangarevan binary counting; the Hawaiian number word for twenty, iwakalua), matters suggesting material forms have a critical if underappreciated role in realising concepts like exponential value. Second, it provides insight into why it can be difficult to appreciate highly elaborated but unwritten numbers like those found throughout Polynesia. Finally, the affair illuminates the difficulty of categorising number systems that use multiple units as the basis of enumeration, like Polynesian pair-counting; potential solutions are offered. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to survey some of the most important developments in thinking about essence in the early modern period, highlighting ways in which thinkers in the period gradually depart from the medieval Aristotelian tradition. In this tradition, essence is thought of as selective, explanatory, and kind-determining. Whereas in the beginning of the early modern period some figures (such as René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, and Anne Conway) still adhere to this traditional view, later figures (...) (including Benedict de Spinoza, G.W. Leibniz, and John Locke) reject it. (shrink)

Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics takes a fresh look at the history of aesthetics and at current debates within the philosophy of art by exploring the ways in which gender informs notions of art and creativity, evaluation and interpretation, and concepts of aesthetic value. Multiple intellectual traditions have formed this field, and the discussions herein range from consideration of eighteenth century legacies of ideas about taste, beauty, and sublimity to debates about the relevance of postmodern analyses for feminist aesthetics. Forward (...) by Arthur C. Danto, 20 authors include Paul Mattick, Jr., Caroline Korsmeyer, Timothy Gould, Christine Battersby, Mary Devereaux, bell hooks, REnee Lorraine, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Elizabeth Ann Dobie, Adrian Piper, Anita Silvers, Susan Feagin, Mary D. Garrard, Ellen Handler Spitz, Noel Carroll, Joanne Waugh, Joseph Margolis, Rita Felski, and Hilde Hein, as well as Peg Brand's essay, "Revising the Aesthetic-Nonaesthetic Distinction: The Aesthetic Value of Activist Art.". (shrink)

This is the co-authored--with Carolyn Korsmeyer--Introduction to the first published feminist scholarship in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (Volume 48, Number 4, Fall 1990). Contributors included Hilde Hein, Paul Mattick, Jr., Timothy Gould, Joanne B. Waugh, Joseph Margolis, Mary Devereaux, Noel Carroll, Flo Leibowitz, Anita Silvers, Elizabeth Ann Dobie, Renee Cox, and Ellen Handler Spitz. All essays were subsequently published in an expanded book version entitled, Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics by Penn State Press (1995).

About death, grief, mourning, life after death and immortality. Why should we die like humans to survive as a species. -/- "No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears (...) out the old to make way for the new." (Steve Jobs) -/- CONTENTS: -/- Death - Philosophy of death - Religions - - Animism - - Atheism - - Buddhism - - Christianity - - Hinduism - - Islam - - Jainism - - Jehovah's Witnesses - - Judaism - - Latter-day Saints - - Spiritism - Symbolism - Personification of Death - - Notable personifications - - In mythologies - - - Hindu mythology - - - In Japan - - - Slavic paganism - - - Lithuanian paganism - - In the three monotheistic religions - - - Judaism - - - Christianity - - - In Mexico - - - Islam - Axiochos - - The characters of dialogue - - Dialogue - - Prologue - - Arguments - - Citations - Paradise - - Greco-Roman mythology - - Mesopotamian mythology and influences - - According to Judaism - - According to Christianity - - - According to Catholicism - - - According to Protestantism - - - According to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - - According to Islam - - According to Hinduism - - According to modern spiritualities - - - According to the esoteric - Hell - - Mesopotamian origins - - According to Christianity - - - Names appearing in the biblical texts - - - Medieval artistic representations - - - Concepts according to Christian movements - - According to Judaism - - According to Islam - - According to Buddhism - - According to Hinduism - - According to modern esotericism - - - According to Aïvanhov - - - According to Allan Kardec - - Philosophy - - - Jewish Kabbalah - - - Sartre - - - Popular wisdom Funerals - The funeral ritual: a rite of passage - Prehistory - Ancient death customs - - The family bereavement - - Mummification - - Sarcophagi - - Funerals - - Ancient Greece - - Ancient Rome - - Celts, Germans and Scandinavians - Religious funeral rites - - Buddhism - - Judaism - Christianity - - Protestantism - - Islam - Funeral rites by continent - - In Africa - - In Europe - The contemporary era - Mourning (Grief) - - Steps - - - Death of a close - - Loss events without mourning value (white factors) - - Duration and manifestations - - Risks - - Colors - Graveyards (Cemeteries) - - First cemeteries - - Cemeteries today - Funerary art - Dolmens - - Types of dolmens - - Function - - Location - Passage graves - Cenotaphs - - Famous cenotaphs - Lanterns of the Dead Afterlife - History - Questions about death and immortality - Testimonials - - Spiritualistic experiences - - Popular literature on the afterlife - - "Memories" and reminiscences - - Early studies of the science of the 19th century and early 20th century - Types of scenarios - Some religious and philosophical concepts - - Afterlife in Buddhism - - Afterlife in Christianity - - According to Hinduism - - According to Islam - - According to Judaism - - According to Mormonism - - According to the ancient philosophies - - According to Spiritism - - According to Native American traditions - - According to Vedism - - According to Esotericism - In science - Near-death experiences - - Clinical death - - NDE frequency - - Effects of depth of NDE on survival - - Near-death experiences and shared-death experience - - - The first contemporary testimonials - - - Experience according to Moody - - - The concept of "shared death" - - - The NDE scales - - The study of Pim van Lommel - - Spiritual and patient point of view - - - Survivalists studies - - - The religious understanding of the phenomenon - - Scientific views - - - Physiological explanation - - - Psychological explanation - Reincarnation - - Religions - - - In Hinduism - - - In Jainism - - - In Buddhism - - - In Judaism - - - In Christianity - - - In Islam - - In contemporary times - - - Esotericism - - - Works of the psychiatrist Ian Stevenson - - - Radical increase in life expectancy and artificial reincarnation - - Criticism - - - Arthur Schopenhauer - - - Ramana Maharshi - - - Rene Guenon - - - Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy - Metempsychosis - - Theories - - Ideas - Maschalismos Immortality - Immortality of the soul and religious traditions - - Buddhism - - Christianity - - Islam - - Mormonism - Contemporary perception of the immortality of the body - - Observation in the animal kingdom - - Perspectives for mankind - Immortality in science - - Alexis Carrel - - Jean Rostand - - Hayflick limit - - Étienne-Émile Baulieu and DHEA - - Aubrey de Grey - - Professor Skulachev - - Regenerative medicine - - Professor Christopher Jaeger - Eternal Return - - According to the Mesopotamians - - According to Heraclitus and the Stoics - Fountain of Youth - - History of myth and relatives myths - - - In Roman mythology, Germanic, Celtic and Irish - - - In the Middle-East - - - In Spain - - - In the Bible - - The fountain in art and literature - - Painting - - - Literature and cinema - - Persistent of the myth until today - Senescence - - Why do we age? - - Gene regulation - - Cellular senescence Undead - Ghoul - Lich - Mummy - Skeleton - Vampire - Zombie - Other legendary creatures - Creatures specific to a particular universe - Spiritism - - Point out - - Origins of spiritism - - - The traditions through the ages - - - Advent of Christianity in Europe - - - The survival of necromancy - - - The precursors - - - Relations of spiritualism to science - Mediumship - - History - - Skeptical point of view - - Favorable doctor's viewpoint - Ghosts - - Appearance - - Belief in ghosts - - Origin - - - Duality and return dead - - - Ancient roots - - Typology - - - Poltergeists - - - Revenants - - - Ghosts - - - Banshees - - - Apparitions of crisis - - - Phantasms of the living - - - Vision of his own double - - - Ghost armies - - - Ghosts of animals - - - Means of transport - - Science perspective - - - Hallucinations - - - Sleep paralysis - - - Induced ghosts - - - Aches and infrasounds - - - Magnetic fields - Vampires - - Characteristics - - - Vampire transformation - - - Identification - - - Faculties - - Protection against the vampires - - - Precautions at death and burial - - - Apotropaic objects and places - - Destruction of vampires - Zombie - - The concept - - Africa and voodoo - - - West Africa - - - South Africa - - - In Haiti (and the Caribbean) - - - Scientific research - - The "revenants" in the Western imaginary Death in art - Memento mori - - History - - - Antiquity - - - Christianity - - - Mexican syncretism - - Performing arts - - - In painting - - - In literature - - - In movies - - - In video games - - - In Japanese animation - - - In music - The iconography of Weighing of souls (Particular judgment) - - Origin - - Written sources - - Weighing in Romanesque art - - Weighing in Gothic art - - Weighing in the late Middle Ages: to a new iconography - - Weighing of souls or actions? - Poems - - Charlotte Brontë, “On the Death of Anne Brontë” - - Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee” - - Edna St. Vincent Millay, “And you as well must die” - - Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death” - - Emily Dickinson, “If I Should Die” - - Lord Byron, “Epitaph to a Dog” - - Pablo Neruda, “Only Death” - - Stephen Crane, “God Lay Dead in Heaven” - - W. B. Yeats, “He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead” - - Rainer Maria Rilke, “Death” - Paintings - - The Three Dead Kings - - The Death of Nelson - - Beata Beatrix - Sculptures - - The Kiss of Death - - Background - - Imagery - - Angel of Grief - - Fallen Astronaut - Quotes References About the author - Nicolae Sfetcu - - By the same author - - Contact Publishing House - MultiMedia Publishing -/- DOI: 10.58679/TW44411. (shrink)

I argue that the offense generation pattern of slurring terms parallels that of impoliteness behaviors, and is best explained by appeal to similar purely pragmatic mechanisms. In choosing to use a slurring term rather than its neutral counterpart, the speaker signals that she endorses the term. Such an endorsement warrants offense, and consequently slurs generate offense whenever a speaker's use demonstrates a contrastive preference for the slurring term. Since this explanation comes at low theoretical cost and imposes few constraints on (...) an account of the semantics of slurs, this suggests that we should not require semantic accounts to provide an independent explanation of the offense profile. (shrink)

In addition to protecting agents’ autonomy, consent plays a crucial social role: it enables agents to secure partners in valuable interactions that would be prohibitively morally risk otherwise. To do this, consent must be observable: agents must be able to track the facts about whether they have received a consent-based permission. I argue that this morally justifies a consent-practice on which communicating that one consents is sufficient for consent, but also generates robust constraints on what sorts of behaviors can be (...) taken as consent- communicating. (shrink)

Law-enforcement agencies are increasingly able to leverage crime statistics to make risk predictions for particular individuals, employing a form of inference that some condemn as violating the right to be “treated as an individual.” I suggest that the right encodes agents’ entitlement to a fair distribution of the burdens and benefits of the rule of law. Rather than precluding statistical prediction, it requires that citizens be able to anticipate which variables will be used as predictors and act intentionally to avoid (...) them. Furthermore, it condemns reliance on various indexes of distributive injustice, or unchosen properties, as evidence of law-breaking. (shrink)

The problem of moral disagreement has been presented as an objection to contextualist semantics for ‘ought’, since it is not clear that contextualism can accommodate or give a convincing gloss of such disagreement. I argue that independently of our semantics, disagreements over ‘ought’ in non-cooperative contexts are best understood as indirect metalinguistic disputes, which is easily accommodated by contextualism. If this is correct, then rather than posing a problem for contextualism, the data from moral disagreements provides some reason to adopt (...) a semantics that allows contextual variance in the meanings of ‘ought’. (shrink)

Some, but not all, of the mistakes a person makes when acting in apparently necessary self-defense are reasonable: we take them not to violate the rights of the apparent aggressor. I argue that this is explained by duties grounded in agents' entitlements to a fair distribution of the risk of suffering unjust harm. I suggest that the content of these duties is filled in by a social signaling norm, and offer some moral constraints on the form such a norm can (...) take. (shrink)

Sometimes speakers within a linguistic community use a term that they do not conceptualize as a slur, but which other members of that community do. Sometimes these speakers are ignorant or naïve, but not always. This article explores a puzzle raised when some speakers stubbornly maintain that a contested term t is not derogatory. Because the semantic content of a term depends on the language, to say that their use of t is semantically derogatory despite their claims and intentions, we (...) must individuate languages in a way that counts them as speaking our language L, assigns t a determinately derogatory content in L, and still accommodates the other features of slurs’ linguistic profile. Given the difficulty of doing this, there is some reason to give a non-semantic analysis of the derogatory aspect of slurs. The author suggests that rather than dismissing the stubborn as semantically incompetent, we would do better to appeal to expected uptake as moral reasons for the stubborn to adjust their linguistic practices. (shrink)

In some cases, there appears to be an asymmetry in the evidential value of statistical and more individualized evidence. For example, while I may accept that Alex is guilty based on eyewitness testimony that is 80% likely to be accurate, it does not seem permissible to do so based on the fact that 80% of a group that Alex is a member of are guilty. In this paper I suggest that rather than reflecting a deep defect in statistical evidence, this (...) asymmetry might arise from a general constraint on rational inquiry. Plausibly the degree of evidential support needed to justify taking a proposition to be true depends on the stakes of error. While relying on statistical evidence plausibly raises the stakes by introducing new kinds of risk to members of the reference class, paradigmatically `individualized' evidence---evidence tracing back to A's voluntary behavior---can lower the stakes. The net result explains the apparent evidential asymmetry without positing a deep difference in the brute justificatory power of different types of evidence. (shrink)

A popular informal argument suggests that statistics about the preponderance of criminal involvement among particular demographic groups partially justify others in making defensive mistakes against members of the group. One could worry that evidence-relative accounts of moral rights vindicate this argument. After constructing the strongest form of this objection, I offer several replies: most demographic statistics face an unmet challenge from reference class problems, even those that meet it fail to ground non-negligible conditional probabilities, even if they did, they introduce (...) new costs likely to cancel out any justificatory contribution of the statistic, but even if they didn’t, demographic facts are the wrong sort to make a moral difference to agents’ negative rights. I conclude that the popular argument should be rejected, and evidence-relative theories do not have the worrisome implication. (shrink)

​I evaluate a suggestion, floated by Kimberly Ferzan (this volume), that the twitter hashtag campaign #BelieveWomen is best accommodated by non-reductionist views of testimonial justification. I argue that the issue is ultimately one about the ethical obligation to trust women, rather than a question of what grounds testimonial justification. I also suggest that the hashtag campaign does not simply assert that ‘we should trust women’, but also militates against a pernicious striking-property generic (roughly: ‘women make false sexual assault accusations’), that (...) distorts our evaluation of women’s testimony concerning sexual assault. I conclude #BelieveWomen does not demand that we believe against the evidence, or uncritically, or be more trusting than we have evidential justification to be. Rather, it aims to bring our trust closer to what is merited by the base-rate of reliable testimony from women concerning sexual assault. (shrink)

Richard Wollheim famously argued that figurative pictures depict their scenes, in part, in virtue of their ability to elicit a unique type of visual experience in their viewers, which he called seeing-in. According to Wollheim, experiences of seeing-in are necessarily twofold, that is, they involve two aspects of visual awareness: when a viewer sees a scene in a picture, she is simultaneously aware of certain visible features of the picture surface, the picture’s design, and the scene depicted by the picture. (...) Even though Wollheim’s notion of twofoldness has been very influential, a number of philosophers have put forward powerful arguments against it. In this paper, I defend the claim that some pictorial experiences are twofold in Wollheim’s sense. My argument has two parts. In the first part, I provide a phenomenal contrast argument in favor of twofoldness. In the second part, I respond to what I take to be the most important objections against twofoldness. I believe that both parts together provide strong support for the claim that some pictorial experiences are twofold in Wollheim’s sense. (shrink)

A ‘vestigial social practice' is a norm, convention, or social behavior that persists even when few endorse it or its original justifying rationale. Begby (2021) explores social explanations for the persistence of prejudice, arguing that even if we all privately disavow a stereotype, we might nevertheless continue acting as if it is true because we believe that others expect us to. Meanwhile the persistence of the practice provides something like implicit testimonial evidence for the prejudice that would justify it, making (...) it rational for members of the next generation to acquire the corresponding prejudiced beliefs. This paper distinguishes between three different types of vestigial social practice in terms of the underlying explanatory mechanisms, and argues that the persistence of prejudicial social stereotypes is most tightly linked not to others’ beliefs or expectations, but to the ways that material infrastructure constrains options shapes social outcomes. Given that, the persistence of a practice only provides grounds to infer that most people endorse the corresponding prejudiced belief only if we are in a position to dismiss relevant alternative explanations. (shrink)

Recently, an increasing number of scholars have been showing interest in old-fashioned racism again. While recent studies on old-fashioned racism apparently increase our knowledge of this psychological theory of racism, the studies actually shed light on a different type of racism, namely offensive racism. The aim of this text is to argue that psychological theories of racism, like old-fashioned racism and modern racism, depend on societies’ social norms. I will show that questionnaires are highly sensitive to social norms, and if (...) there is change in social norms, the original measurement object alters. The theory of old-fashioned racism implicitly assumes agents that follow (or conform to) the social norm to behave prejudiced. Today, however, this social norm does not exist in Western societies. If agents express the same prejudices today, they indicate their willingness to breach the social norm to behave unprejudiced. Thereby, classic old-fashioned racism measures reflect a new kind of racism today. (shrink)

Whether anorexic patients should be able to refuse treatment when this potentially has a fatal outcome is a vexed topic. A recent proposal for a new category of ‘terminal anorexia’ suggests criteria when a move to palliative care or even physician assisted suicide might be justified. I argue that this proposed diagnosis presents a false sense of certainty of the illness trajectory by conceptualizing anorexia in analogy with physical disorders and stressing the effects of starvation. Furthermore, this conceptualization is in (...) conflict with the claim that individuals who meet the diagnostic criteria for terminal anorexia have decision making capacity. It should therefore be rejected. (shrink)

A type of argument occasionally made in metaethics, epistemology and philosophy of science notes that most ordinary uses of some expression fail to satisfy the strictest interpretation of the expression, and concludes that the ordinary assertions are false. This requires there to be a presumption in favour of a strict interpretation of expressions that admit of interpretations at different levels of strictness. We argue that this presumption is unmotivated, and thus the arguments fail.

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)

This paper surveys some philosophical issues with the language surrounding mental illness, but is especially focused on pejoratives relating to mental illness. I argue that though 'crazy' and similar mental illness-based epithets (MI-epithets) are not best understood as slurs, they do function to isolate, exclude, and marginalize members of the targeted group in ways similar to the harmfulness of slurs more generally. While they do not generally express the hate/contempt characteristic of weaponized uses of slurs, MI-epithets perpetuate epistemic injustice by (...) portraying sufferers of mental illness as deserving minimal credibility. After outlining the ways in which these epithets can cause harm, I examine available legal and social remedies, and suggest that the best path going forward is to pursue a reclamation project rather than aiming to censure the use of MI-epithets. (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)

It is often assumed that trolling is an intentional action. The aim of the paper is to argue for a form of unintentional trolling. Firstly, we outline minimal conditions for intentional actions. Secondly, an unintentional trolling example is introduced. Thirdly, we will show that in some cases, an utterance can be expressive, while it is perceived as descriptive. On the basis of the justification-suppression model, we argue that the introduced trolling example is such a case. In order to bypass social (...) sanctions for expressing prejudices, agents unintentionally express their prejudices through stories that appear to be descriptive. Thereby, the characterized behavior does not fulfill the minimal conditions for intentional action. Fourthly, we give criteria that can be used to identify unintentional trolls. Finally, after unintentional trolling is analyzed, the trolls’ behavioral goals are considered. In conclusion, an analysis of unintentional trolling is given, which has explanatory benefits in contrast to the classic intentional trolling concepts. (shrink)

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)

How is it possible for a picture to depict a picture? Proponents of perceptual theories of depiction, who argue that the content of a picture is determined, in part, by the visual state it elicits in suitable viewers, that is, by a state of seeing-in, have given a plausible answer to this question. They say that a picture depicts a picture, in part, because, under appropriate conditions of observation, a suitable viewer will be able to see a picture in the (...) picture. In this article, I first argue that this answer is in conflict with the way in which some of the most influential perceptual theories of depiction – Robert Hopkins's version of the experienced resemblance theory and Dominic Lopes's version of the recognition theory – construe seeing-in. I then formulate a version of the recognition theory that avoids this conflict and show how it can explain the depiction of pictures. (shrink)

The mathematician Georg Cantor strongly believed in the existence of actually infinite numbers and sets. Cantor’s “actualism” went against the Aristotelian tradition in metaphysics and mathematics. Under the pressures to defend his theory, his metaphysics changed from Spinozistic monism to Leibnizian voluntarist dualism. The factor motivating this change was two-fold: the desire to avoid antinomies associated with the notion of a universal collection and the desire to avoid the heresy of necessitarian pantheism. We document the changes in Cantor’s thought with (...) reference to his main philosophical-mathematical treatise, the Grundlagen (1883) as well as with reference to his article, “Über die verschiedenen Standpunkte in bezug auf das aktuelle Unendliche” (“Concerning Various Perspectives on the Actual Infinite”) (1885). (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)

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)

In the recent epistemological literature much has been written about the nature of suspending judgement or agnosticism. There has also been a surge of recent interest in the nature of ignorance. But what is the relationship between these two epistemically significant states? Prima facie, both suspension and ignorance seem to involve the lack of a correct answer to a question. And, again prima facie, there may be some intuitive attraction to the idea that when one is ignorant whether p, one (...) ought to suspend judgement whether p. In this paper we will explore a range of different possible normative connections between ignorance and suspension of judgement. We will also discuss how both ignorance and suspension are related to having inconclusive evidence. As we will see, the issues can become quite complex due to the fact that there are different, competing views about the nature of ignorance and also about the nature of suspension. Moreover, there are importantly different kinds of epistemic norms. Our overall aim then will be to systematically chart how these different choices will impact the possible normative connections between ignorance and suspension. (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)

A fallibilist theory of knowledge is employed to make sense of the idea that agents know what they are doing 'without observation' (as on Anscombe's theory of practical knowledge).

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)

COVID-19 vaccine refusal seems like a paradigm case of irrationality. Vaccines are supposed to be the best way to get us out of the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet many people believe that they should not be vaccinated even though they are dissatisfied with the current situation. In this paper, we analyze COVID-19 vaccine refusal with the tools of contemporary philosophical theories of responsibility and rationality. The main outcome of this analysis is that many vaccine-refusers are responsible for the belief that (...) they should not be vaccinated and epistemically rational in holding it. This is an important result because it provides insights into the legitimacy of certain public health policies. In particular, this result shows that a public health policy that would abandon the project of convincing certain vaccine-refusers with reasons – e.g., by simply making vaccination compulsory – is prima facie illegitimate. (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)

ABSTRACTIn this paper I defend a form of epistocracy I call limited epistocracy – rule by institutions housing expertise in non-political areas that become politically relevant. This kind of limited epistocracy, I argue, isn't a far-off fiction. With increasing frequency, governments are outsourcing political power to expert institutions to solve urgent, multidimensional problems because they outperform ordinary democratic decision-making. I consider the objection that limited epistocracy, while more effective than its competitors, lacks a fundamental intrinsic value that its competitors have; (...) namely, political inclusion. After explaining this challenge, I suggest that limited epistocracies can be made compatible with robust political inclusion if specialized institutions are confined to issuing directives that give citizens multiple actionable options. I explain how this safeguards citizens’ inclusion through rational deliberation, choice, and contestation. (shrink)

There seems to be a striking parallel between the features of psychopaths and those of agential groups, including states and corporations. Psychopaths are often thought to lack some of the capacities that are constitutive of moral agency. Two features of psychopaths are commonly identified as grounds for limiting their moral responsibility: (i) their lack of relevant emotional capacities and (ii) their flawed rational capacities. Roughly, the first argument is that the lack of moral emotions such as sympathy, guilt, or shame (...) negatively impacts moral perception and therewith an agent's capacity for moral reasoning. The second argument is that psychopaths are diminished in their agency as such, not just in their moral agency; they are erratic and impulsive and show other significant failures of rationality. Using the 2020 Juukan Gorge disaster in Western Australia as a case study, I conclude that deliberate or reckless corporate irrationality cannot be grounds for diminished corporate moral responsibility. Corporate agents are chiefly responsible for core aspects of their moral agency, including their internal epistemic structures and decision-making processes. They have obligations to establish or maintain internal epistemic integrity and consistency. (shrink)

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)

There has been recent discussion of a puzzle posed by emotions that are backward looking. Though our emotions commonly diminish over time, how can they diminish fittingly if they are an accurate appraisal of an event that is situated in the past? Agnes Callard (2017) has offered a solution by providing an account of anger in which anger is both backwards looking and resolvable, yet her account depends upon contrition to explain anger’s fitting diminishment. My aim is to explain how (...) anger can fittingly diminish even when there is lack of contrition. I propose a permissivism about fittingness by showing that both anger and compassion are fitting responses to blameworthy behaviour. I argue that anger is rendered fitting because it accurately appraises the behaviour, whereas compassion becomes fitting as a valuational response to what the behaviour reveals about the lived experience of the offender. I then respond to some worries my account raises, and I clarify details of my account to show that it is not unrealistic to the way some of our anger actually does diminish. I end with a proposal that our anger can fittingly diminish through the act of forgiveness when compassion is not a forthcoming affective response. (shrink)

This paper describes an undergraduate course in metaphilosophy for philosophy majors and argues that there are four potential benefits to students; namely that doing metaphilosophy (1) allows students to draw their own conclusions about what philosophy is, (2) develops students’ metacognitive skills to promote learning, (3) establishes students as members of the philosophical community, and (4) disposes students to live lives that reflect their philosophical education. It describes issues of transparency of course design and the particulars of the course, including (...) course content, and provides excerpts of student work to demonstrate student learning outcomes. Finally, it will suggest that even if it is not possible to offer a stand-alone course in metaphilosophy, instructors should provide opportunities to reflect on metaphilosophical issues in their other philosophy courses. (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)

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 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)

Recent global efforts of the United States and England to withdraw from international institutions, along with recent challenges to human rights courts from Poland and Hungary, have been described as part of a growing global populist backlash against the liberal international order. Several scholars have even identified the recent threat of mass withdrawal of African states from the International Criminal Court (ICC) as part of this global populist backlash. Are the African challenges to the ICC part of a global populist (...) movement developing in Africa? More fundamentally, how are the African challenges to the ICC examples of populism, if at all? In this paper, I show that, while there is considerable overlap between the strategies used by particular African leaders to challenge the ICC and those typically considered populist, as well as a discernible thin populist ideology to sustain them, there is insufficient evidence of a larger anti-ICC populist movement in Africa. Although Africa is not as united against the ICC as the populist narrative suggests, the recent challenges to the Court from Africa pose a significant challenge to the Court, as the institution is still in the early stages of building its legitimacy. (shrink)

A common view in the philosophy of perception holds that states of seeing objects face to face have particular contents. When you see, say, a dog face to face, your visual state represents the particular dog that is in front of you. In this paper, I argue for a related claim about states of seeing objects in conventional photographs. When you see a dog in a photograph, for example, your visual state represents the particular dog that was in front of (...) the camera when the photograph was taken, that is, the photograph's depictum. The argument in this paper proceeds in two steps. In the first step, I discuss states of seeing objects face to face. I argue that such a state represents the particular object whose surface is responsible for the optical information that the visual system uses to construct the state's attributive representational content. In the second step, I apply the result of this discussion to states of seeing objects in photographs. I argue that a state of seeing an object in a photograph has a particular content that represents the object that was in front of the camera when the photograph was taken. (shrink)

Termed the 'Made-by-Human Hypothesis,' I challenge the commonly accepted notion that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is exclusively crafted by humans, emphasizing its impediment to progress. I argue that influences beyond human agency significantly shape AI's trajectory. Introducing the 'Hybrid Hypothesis,' I suggest that the creation of AI is multi-sourced; methods such as evolutionary algorithms influencing AI originate from diverse sources and yield varied impacts. I argue that the development of AI models will increasingly adopt a 'Human+' hybrid composition, where human expertise (...) merges with AI's intrinsic mechanisms, which themselves are influenced by non-human sources. The Hybrid Hypothesis posits that the origin of AI extends beyond human influence, prompting a thorough exploration of unresolved issues in the field of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

In this article, I contribute to the debate between two philosophical traditions—the Kantian and the Aristotelian—on the requirements of criminal responsibility and the grounds for excuse by taking this debate to a new context: international criminal law. After laying out broadly Kantian and Aristotelian conceptions of criminal responsibility, I defend a quasi-Aristotelian conception, which affords a central role to moral development, and especially to the development of moral perception, for international criminal law. I show than an implication of this view (...) is that persons who are substantially and non-culpably limited in their capacity for ordinary moral perception warrant an excuse for engaging in unlawful conduct. I identify a particular set of conditions that trigger this excuse, and then I systematically examine it as applied to the controversial case of former-child-soldier-turned leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Dominic Ongwen, who is currently at trial at the International Criminal Court. (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)

Do sensory measurements deserve the label of “measurement”? We argue that they do. They fit with an epistemological view of measurement held in current philosophy of science, and they face the same kinds of epistemological challenges as physical measurements do: the problem of coordination and the problem of standardization. These problems are addressed through the process of “epistemic iteration,” for all measurements. We also argue for distinguishing the problem of standardization from the problem of coordination. To exemplify our claims, we (...) draw on olfactory performance tests, especially studies linking olfactory decline to neurodegenerative disorders. (shrink)

Recently, psychologists have developed indirect measurement procedures to predict suicidal behavior. A prominent example is the Death/Suicide Implicit Association Test (DS-IAT). In this paper, I argue that there is something special about the DS-IAT which distinguishes it from different IAT measures. I argue that the DS-IAT does not measure weak or strong associations between the implicit self-concept and the abstract concept of death. In contrast, assuming a goal-system approach, I suggest that sorting death-related to self-related words takes effort because death-related (...) words trigger avoidance-impulses, which suicide ideation weakens. The DS-IAT taps into weakened automatic responses from the self-preservation system. Additionally, the suggested cognitive structure, illuminated with the selfish-goal theory, explains predictable suicidal behavior. (shrink)

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)