This article argues that Brentano’s classification of mental phenomena is best understood against the background of the theories of natural classification held by Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill. Section 1 offers a reconstruction of Brentano’s two-premise argument for his tripartite classification. Section 2 gives a brief overview of the reception and historical background of the classification project. Section 3 addresses the question as to why a classification of mental phenomena is needed at all and traces the answer back to (...) Mill’s view that psychological laws are class-specific. Section 4 and 5 connect the second premise of Brentano’s argument to Comte’s principle of comparative likeness and Mill’s insistance that class membership is determined by the possession of common characteristics. And section 6 briefly discusses the evidence Brentano provides for the first premise. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Gilbert Ryle’s account of misleading expressions, which is rightly considered a milestone in the history of analytic philosophy, is continuous with Brentano’s. Not only did they identify roughly the same classes of misleading expressions, but their analyses are driven by a form of ontological parsimony which sharply contrasts with rival views in the Brentano School, like those of Meinong and Husserl. Section 1 suggests that Ryle and Brentano share a similar notion of analysis. Section 2 spells (...) out the notion of misleading expression by means of the surface-grammar/truth-conditions distinction, which I argue is implicit in their accounts. Section 3 zooms in on a specific class of misleading expressions, namely expressions about ficta. Finally, Section 4 draws the consequences of what precedes for a correct understanding of the notion of meaning. (shrink)

The civilization of the world has become a threat and distorted environmental integrity in the 20th century. Therefore, environmental ethics is currently getting important in academic considerations. Various public and private institutions such as universities and research centers output throughout the world are now paying attention and seriousness to the environment. This paper focuses on what mankind ought to do regarding the cross-cuttingness of environmental problems.

In this article I want to create a presumption in favor of a nonreductive analysis of emotional phenomenology. The presumption relies on the claim that none of the nonemotional elements which are usually regarded as constitutive of emotional phenomenology may reasonably be considered responsible for the evaluative character of the latter. In section 1 I suggest this is true of cognitive elements, arguing that so-called ‘evaluative’ judgments usually result from emotional, evaluative attitudes, and should not be conflated with them. In (...) section 2 I argue the same holds true for conative attitudes. And in section 3 I briefly mention some salient aspects of the version of nonreductive analysis I lean toward. (shrink)

This chapter offers a phenomenological interpretation of Brentano’s view of mentality. The key idea is that mental phenomena are not only characterized by intentionality; they also exhibit a distinctive way of appearing or being experienced. In short, they also have a distinctive phenomenology. I argue this view may be traced back to Brentano’s theory of inner perception. Challenging the self-representational reading of IP, I maintain the latter is best understood as a way of appearing, that is, in phenomenological terms. Section (...) 1 addresses Brentano’s claim that IP is one mark of the mental alongside intentionality. Sections 2 and 3 present support for a phenomenological interpretation of IP. And Section 4 briefly discusses two objections. (shrink)

Call metaphysical optimism the view that this world is the best of all possible worlds. This article addresses Franz Brentano’s case for metaphysical optimism. I argue that, although Brentano does not offer any conclusive argument in favour of the latter, he disentangles many related issues which are interesting in their own right. The article has five sections corresponding to five claims, which I argue are central to Brentano’s view, namely: metaphysical optimism is best spelled out as the view that this (...) world is the only good among all possible worlds; the notion of “correct”—or “fitting”—love offers a criterion of the good and the test of inverted love offers a means to identify that which is good; pessimism has to be distinguished from pejorism, viz. the view that the non-existence of this world is preferable to its existence; there is something good involved in every “bad” thing, to the effect that pejorism is false; it is wrong to consider the value of something in isolation. (shrink)

Dans ce texte, nous tentons de montrer qu’à partir de son traitement de l’altérité d’autrui, la philosophie de Lévinas peut être présentée comme le dépassement intérieur de la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty développée dans la Phénoménologie de la perception. Nous commençons par exposer la conception de l’altérité exposée dans la Phénoménologie en éclairant l’intersubjectivité corporelle au fondement de la socialité. Nous tentons ensuite d’en dégager les possibles fondements d’une éthique merleau-pontienne axée sur l’expression-responsive, éthique qui ferait preuve d’une considération importante envers (...) l’altérité d’autrui. Puis, après avoir exploré les limites de cette conception, nous dégageons les concepts de trace et d’an-archie comme les points d’appui autorisant un dépassement intérieur de cette phénoménologie vers ce que Lévinas appelle l’éthique. Enfin, tout en présentant les grandes lignes de celle-ci grâce aux concepts clé de responsabilité et de substitution, nous tentons de mettre en relief un avantage qu’elle comporte eu égard à un problème rencontré par Merleau-Ponty en 1945. (shrink)

This article compares and contrasts the reception of Comte’s positivism in the works of William Whewell, John Stuart Mill and Franz Brentano. It is argued that Whewell’s rejection of positivism derives from his endorsement of a constructivist account of the inductive sciences, while Mill and Brentano’s sympathies for positivism are connected to their endorsement of an empiricist account. The mandate of the article is to spell out the chief differences between these two rival accounts. In the last, conclusive section, Whewell’s (...) anti-positivist argument is briefly assessed, and rebutted. (shrink)

According to the transparency thesis, some conscious states are transparent or “diaphanous”. This thesis is often believed to be incompatible with an inner‐awareness account of phenomenal consciousness. In this article, I reject this incompatibility. Instead, I defend a compatibilist approach to transparency. To date, most attempts to do so require a rejection of strong transparency in favor of weak transparency. In this view, transparent states can be attended to by attending (in the right way) to the presented world: that is, (...) they are merely translucent. Here, I first argue that this understanding of transparency is too weak to qualify as a compatibilist view. Drawing on insights from Franz Brentano, I then describe a middle road between strong and weak transparency. The crucial idea is that, although transparent states cannot be attended to, they can be noticed (under suitable conditions). This view, I submit, allows supporters of inner awareness to commit themselves to a more interesting understanding of transparency—moderate transparency—that preserves the initial intuition underlying the transparency metaphor. (shrink)

This article argues that Meinong’s analysis of assumption, while exploring the variety of phenomenological primitives in a more promising way than Brentano did, nevertheless fails to adequately account for the noncommittal character of assumptive attitudes and the difference between assumptive and other neighbouring attitudes. Section 1 outlines an overall framework for the philosophical analysis of assumptions and cognitive attitudes. Section 2 gives an overview of Brentano’s analysis of cognitive attitudes and some difficulties thereof. Section 3 offers a critical examination of (...) Meinong’s rival analysis. Eventually, Section 4 suggests an alternative route, according to which assumptive attitudes are best analysed in taking as a phenomenological primitive besides. (shrink)

To Occamize a nominal expression N is to show that, despite grammatical appearances, N does not name, or denote, an entity. This article argues that the Occamization of ‘meaning,’ which was central to Gilbert Ryle’s meta-philosophy, had already been advanced by Franz Brentano. The core thesis of the article is that Brentano’s notion of ‘content,’ albeit different from that of linguistic rules, does a similar job of eliminating expendable entities. If the meaning of a linguistic expression is not an entity (...) at all, then the question as to what kind of entity it is—what I shall call the Locke-Frege problem—turns out to be a pseudo-problem and is better dispensed with. (shrink)

Franz Brentano’s works are not just full of deep and innovative insights into mind, world and values. His views also turned out to be highly influential upon several generations of students, who made them the basis of their own philosophical investigations, giving rise to what is known as the Brentano School (Albertazzi et al. 1996; Fisette & Fréchette 2007). In this chapter, I give a bird’s eye view of the Brentano School from a rather historical perspective. My leading hypothesis is (...) that one crucial factor explaining the rise of the school is Brentano’s unique strategy, within the academic context of the time, to promote the revival of philosophy as a rigorous science. After a brief introduction, I reconstruct the three main phases in the school’s development, namely Brentano’s teaching in Würzburg (1866-73), his teaching in Vienna (1874-95), and Anton Marty’s teaching in Prague (1880-1913). (shrink)

In this paper, we apply the perspective of intra-organismal ecology by investigating a family of ecological models suitable to describe a gene therapy to a particular metabolic disorder, the adenosine deaminase deficiency (ADA-SCID). The gene therapy is modeled as the prospective ecological invasion of an organ (here, bone marrow) by genetically modified stem cells, which then operate niche construction in the cellular environment by releasing an enzyme they synthesize. We show that depending on the chosen order (a choice that cannot (...) be made on \textit{a priori} assumptions), different kinds of dynamics are expected, possibly leading to different therapeutic strategies. This drives us to discuss several features of the extension of ecology to intra-organismal ecology. (shrink)

This paper offers a reconstruction of Franz Brentano’s mereological solution to the problem of the unity of consciousness and explores some implications of this solution for the ontology of the mind. In section 1 I sketch Brentano’s ontological distinctions between things, collectives, and divisives. In section 2 I present Brentano’s mereological solution and in section 3 I review his main pro-arguments. Eventually, in section 4 I consider some Jamesian objections to the mereological approach. I argue the notion of ‘mental parts’ (...) can be given a rather innocuous meaning by being conceived of as the expression of conceptual distinctions grounded in similarity and contrast relations between total mental phenomena. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the perspective of intra-organismal ecology by investigating a family of ecological models. We consider two types of models. First order models describe the population dynamics as being directly affected by ecological factors (here understood as nutrients, space, etc). They might be thought of as analogous to Aristotelian physics. Second order models describe the population dynamics as being indirectly affected, the ecological factors now affecting the derivative of the growth rate (that is, the population acceleration), possibly (...) through an impact on non-genetically inherited factors. Second order models might be thought of as analogous to Galilean physics. In the joint paper, we apply these ideas to a situation of gene therapy. (shrink)

Misophonia is a disorder of tolerance to specific sounds (i.e. trigger sounds), such as chewing, throat clearing or breathing sounds, produced by humans, which can trigger intense emotional reactions (anger, disgust). This relatively prevalent disorder can cause a reduction in the quality of life. The causes of misophonia are still unclear. In this article, we develop a “social” hypothesis based on the work of Norbert Elias. Misophonia would be an exaggerated reaction to behaviours (of others) that have been subject to (...) rigorous social conditioning, which are supposed to be strictly regulated and repressed. The social rules imposed by society, accompanying the long process of pacification and increasing interdependence between individuals over the centuries, would be at the origin of this conditioning. The function of this conditioning, achieved mainly through shame and disgust, would be to preserve social cohesion, through the strict training of behaviour. It is indeed imperative to control oneself, to act in a thoughtful and balanced way, to spare others by taking into account their expectations, in short to behave in a “courteous” way. Imposed and less spontaneous behaviour creates a sense of modesty and distance between individuals. The obligation to strictly regulate behaviour and affect in public contributes to the creation of an interiority, an "inner self". The feeling of intrusion by others is a collateral effect of this process of distancing and individualisation. The rigorous integration of the social rule by the misophonic subject may account for the fact that any violation of the rule is considered unacceptable. In order to put an end to the unpleasant situation, i.e. to the intrusion generated by the “encroachment” of others, the subject has no other choice but to flee or to attack the author of the sound. (shrink)

Objectophilia (also known as Objectum-Sexuality) involves romantic and sexual attraction to specific objects. Objectophiles often develop deep and enduring emotional, romantic, and sexual relations with specific inanimate (concrete or abstract) objects such as trains, bridges, cars, or words. . The determinants of objectophilia are poorly understood. The aim of this paper is to examine the determining factors of objectophilia. We examine four hypotheses about the determinants of objectophilia (pertaining to fetishism, synesthesia, cross-modal mental imagery, and autism) and argue that the (...) most likely determining factors of objectophilia are the social and non-social features of autism. Future studies on the determinants of objectophilia could enhance our understanding and potentially lessen the marginalization experienced by objectophiles. (shrink)

Dans son plus récent ouvrage, Figures du communisme, l’économiste et philosophe Fréderic Lordon s’attaque au problème brûlant de la double crise, économique et environnementale, actuelle. Lordon désigne le coupable : le capitalisme, qui détruit la planète par son exploitation sans vergogne de la nature, et qui détruit la vie par son exploitation des êtres humains. Face à ce système mortifère, une sortie du capitalisme s’impose. Sortir du capitalisme, certes, mais pour le remplacer par quoi ? Lordon nous présente ici son (...) alternative. Contre le capitalisme destructeur de monde, Fréderic Lordon veut la figure du communisme. En s’inspirant des travaux de Bernard Friot, Lordon nous expose son idéal de société communiste : salaire à vie, garantie économique générale, abolition du marché et de la finance, réduction du travail et accès généralisé à la culture et à l’éducation. Il s’en prend également aux obstacles de la révolution communiste, qu’il s’agisse de la bourgeoisie, des grandes institutions financières, des banques, des multinationales, des médias, de l’État, de son armée et de sa police, mais aussi de ceux que Fréderic Lordon appelle « les scouts », les Piketty et consorts, qui espèrent sauver l’humanité et la planète tout en sauvant le capitalisme. Une critique sans concession d’une actualité brûlante. (shrink)

Collection of essays, literature and first-person accounts on death, dying and bereavement.

Recent work by Brian Skyrms offers a very general way to think about how information flows and evolves in biological networks — from the way monkeys in a troop communicate, to the way cells in a body coordinate their actions. A central feature of his account is a way to formally measure the quantity of information contained in the signals in these networks. In this paper, we argue there is a tension between how Skyrms talks of signalling networks and his (...) formal measure of information. Although Skyrms refers to both how information flows through networks and that signals carry information, we show that his formal measure only captures the latter. We then suggest that to capture the notion of flow in signalling networks, we need to treat them as causal networks. This provides the formal tools to define a measure that does capture flow, and we do so by drawing on recent work defining causal specificity. Finally, we suggest that this new measure is crucial if we wish to explain how evolution creates information. For signals to play a role in explaining their own origins and stability, they can’t just carry information about acts: they must be difference-makers for acts. (shrink)

The Planteome project provides a suite of reference and species-specific ontologies for plants and annotations to genes and phenotypes. Ontologies serve as common standards for semantic integration of a large and growing corpus of plant genomics, phenomics and genetics data. The reference ontologies include the Plant Ontology, Plant Trait Ontology, and the Plant Experimental Conditions Ontology developed by the Planteome project, along with the Gene Ontology, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest, Phenotype and Attribute Ontology, and others. The project also provides (...) access to species-specific Crop Ontologies developed by various plant breeding and research communities from around the world. We provide integrated data on plant traits, phenotypes, and gene function and expression from 95 plant taxa, annotated with reference ontology terms. (shrink)

The richer you are, the less equally rich or richer people. The richest is only one (=unique). Maximization of richness or leisure (=classic utility), maximizes the uniqueness (=improbability) that can be maximized also by: extreme sport, suicide, tattoo, count of views... The richest seem unique as the poorest, but the rich can easily become poor, while the poor can hardly get rich. So the aim of maximization reflects IQ and options. Few options increase irrationality, regardless of IQ. I (...) also present the law of values' equality, Utility of Suicide, motivation to support the better, and overview the economics as such. Presented as PhD thesis at CERGE-EI, 2000, exhibited in Holland Park, W8 6LU, 2013, presented at conferences in Santorini 2016, Daejon 2016, Adelaide 2016. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In the current study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task (Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, & Bodley Scott, 2010) are the product of domain-specific perspective-taking processes or of domain-general “submentalizing” processes (Heyes, 2014). Previous attempts to address this question have done so by implementing (...) inanimate controls, such as arrows, as stimuli. The rationale for this is that submentalizing processes that respond to directionality should be engaged by such stimuli, whereas domain-specific perspective-taking mechanisms, if they exist, should not. These previous attempts have been limited, however, by the implied intentionality of the stimuli they have used (e.g. arrows), which may have invited participants to imbue them with perspectival agency. Drawing inspiration from “novel entity” paradigms from infant gaze-following research, we designed a version of the dot-perspective task that allowed us to precisely control whether a central stimulus was viewed as animate or inanimate. Across four experiments, we found no evidence that automatic “perspective-taking” effects in the dot-perspective task are modulated by beliefs about the animacy of the central stimulus. Our results also suggest that these effects may be due to the task-switching elements of the dot-perspective paradigm, rather than automatic directional orienting. Together, these results indicate that neither the perspective-taking nor the standard submentalizing interpretations of the dot-perspective task are fully correct. (shrink)

An outstanding group of leaders left evidence that a richer and more sustainable democracy could be achieved with American independence and democratic principles integrated into a new republican form of government. They were moved by principles that are the very spirit of democracy. These principles are needed to enhance democracy and improve well-being. Using the constructivist tradition of grounded theory and Aristotle’s conception of abstraction, the article proposes a theory of the first principles of democracy based on substantive data: (...) the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, The Federalist Papers, and the United States Constitution. Knowledge, fairness, human dignity, hope, unity, and security are the first principles of democracy and are regarded as the bedrock of democracy and a government framework for the people. This theory contributed to a formal model of democratic social change. It also contributes a conceptual framework that supports Solum’s semantic originalism, a theory of constitutional interpretation. The principles of democracy can revitalize democracy and provide new possibilities by protecting education as an innate human right, abolishing capital punishment, criminalizing private prisons on the stock market, and reevaluating the proportionality of prison sentences. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell’s account of aesthetic judgment has two components. The first is a feeling: the judge has to see, hear, ‘dig’ something in the object being judged, there has to be an ‘emotion’ that the judge feels and expresses. The second is the ‘discipline of accounting for [the judgment]’, a readiness to argue for one’s aesthetic judgment in the face of disagreement. The discipline of accounting for one’s aesthetic judgments involves what Nick Riggle has called a norm of convergence: the (...) judge aims to get one’s audience to taste see or hear what the judge tastes or sees or hears in the object being judged. Because of the unmistakable difficulty in reaching agreement in aesthetic judgment, Riggle has denied that aesthetic judgment requires a convergence norm and has proposed instead that it requires ‘a kind of harmony of individuality’ (which Riggle calls ‘vibing’). We argue that Cavell offers a version of the convergence norm that is distinct from those that Riggle criticizes, namely Kant’s demand for agreement and Andy Egan’s presupposition of similarity in dispositions in ‘non-defective’ aesthetic conversations. Cavell’s version of the convergence norm is ‘the hope of agreement’. One can hope that one’s audience will agree with one’s aesthetic judgments even when one isn’t in a position to demand agreement or to presuppose similarity in the dispositions that would make agreement more likely. Cavell’s distinct convergence norm avoids Riggle’s criticisms and contributes to a richer account of what’s going on when we disagree about aesthetic matters. (shrink)

From Joan Lindsay and cinematic master Peter Weir to Ted Kotcheff and Warwick Thornton, over past decades authors, screenwriters and filmmakers have produced films that depict the vast Australian landscape—simply referred to as terra nullius during colonial times by settlers literally confronting a continent vastly different from anything they were culturally and geographically accustomed to—as mysterious, impenetrable and ominous. Just like the dark cold of Scandinavia lends itself perfectly to contemporary Nordic Noir, the Australian New Wave or Australian Film Revival (...) of the 1970s and 1980s saw the release of films that encapsulated the eeriness of this largely rugged, arid and windswept continent, which opens up possibilities for anything to happen within those very, limitless, territories. This article analyses Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Kotcheff’s horror flick par excellence Wake in Fright (1971); "the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence" and with a TV-series remake in 2017, and Thornton’s more recent portrayal of Aboriginal misery and poverty Samson and Delilah (2009) set against a hostile urban backdrop, from a Foucauldian perspective. In its theoretical framework it also draws primarily on Freud. Heterotopia is used as a term to refer to strange, bewildering spaces that are disturbing and undecipherable—also described as “an unimaginable space, representable only in language, and as a kind of semimythical real site” (as articulated in Knight, 2017, 141). Foucault’s concept is applied in a cinematic context and used in conjunction with Freud’s notion of the uncanny as a feeling of uneasiness; or, as has been explained in his seminal text “The Uncanny” (1919), “that class of the terrifying that leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” We argue that these eerie, fear-induced screened narratives represent a nation whose weather-beaten, freedom-loving yet at heart anxiety-ridden people are most definitely a product of their environment. (shrink)

One way of being responsible for an action is being praiseworthy for it. But what is the “praise” of which the praiseworthy agent is worthy? This paper provides a survey of answers to this question, i.e. a survey of possible accounts of praise’s nature. It then presents an overview of candidate norms governing our responses of praise. By attending to praise’s nature and appropriateness conditions, we stand to acquire a richer conception of what it is to be, and to (...) regard another as, a responsible agent. (shrink)

This paper addresses some apparent philosophical tensions between realism and enactivism by means of Charles Peirce’s pragmatism. Enactivism’s Mind-Life Continuity thesis has been taken to commit it to some form of anti-realist ‘world-construction’ which has been considered controversial. Accordingly, a new realist enactivism is proposed by Zahidi (_Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,_ _13_(3), 461–475, 2014 ), drawing on Ian Hacking’s ‘entity realism’, which places subjects in worlds comprised of the things that they can successfully manipulate. We review this attempt, and (...) argue that whilst Zahidi rightly urges enactivists towards ‘internal realism’, he cannot sustain a non-negotiable aspect of realism that is crucial for scientific progress – the claim that multiple subjects inhabit _the same world_. We explore Peirce’s pragmatism as an alternative solution, foregrounding his distinction between existence and reality, and his inquiry-based account of cognition. These theoretical innovations, we argue, fruitfully generalize Zahidi’s _manipulation-based_ enactivist realism to a richer, _inquiry-based_ enactivist realism. We explore how this realism’s pan-species monism about truth encourages and supports the investigation of non-human animal cognition, and conclude by considering some implications of our discussion for long-standing realism debates within pragmatism. (shrink)

Endocrinologists apply the idea of feedback loops to explain how hormones regulate certain bodily functions such as glucose metabolism. In particular, feedback loops focus on the maintenance of the plasma concentrations of glucose within a narrow range. Here, we put forward a different, organicist perspective on the endocrine regulation of glycaemia, by relying on the pivotal concept of closure of constraints. From this perspective, biological systems are understood as organized ones, which means that they are constituted of a set of (...) mutually dependent functional structures acting as constraints, whose maintenance depends on their reciprocal interactions. Closure refers specifically to the mutual dependence among functional constraints in an organism. We show that, when compared to feedback loops, organizational closure can generate much richer descriptions of the processes and constraints at play in the metabolism and regulation of glycaemia, by making explicit the different hierarchical orders involved. We expect that the proposed theoretical framework will open the way to the construction of original mathematical models, which would provide a better understanding of endocrine regulation from an organicist perspective. (shrink)

Commentators have shown a steady interest in the role of feeling in Kant’s moral and practical philosophy over the last few decades. Much attention has been given to the notion of ‘moral feeling’ in general, as well as to what Kant calls the ‘feeling of respect’ for the moral law. My focus in this essay is on the role of feeling in practical judgment. My claim in what follows is that the act of judging in the practical domain—i.e., determining what (...) one ought to do, or what action one ought to perform, in a specific case—crucially involves feeling. Put more simply: I argue that practical judgment has an essentially affective dimension. The upshot of the account I will give is that it provides us with a richer and more complex account of moral feeling than has previously been appreciated in the literature. While it is recognized that feeling plays a certain role in moral motivation, what I hope to demonstrate here is that feeling is involved much earlier in the exercise of moral agency. Far from entering only at the point at which we are trying to muster the strength of will to carry out what we know we ought to do, feeling is present the moment we begin to deliberate about what it is that we ought to do. (shrink)

What do we do with Judges? This two-edged word? This ambidextrous book? These ambivalent heroes? The Judges were drawing their last fleeting breaths shipwrecked and scattered upon the shores of historical-critical-grammatical-linear-modernist-masculine interpretation. "The narrative is primitive," they said. "The editors have made a mess," they exclaimed. "The conclusion is really an appendix," another said. Then the bible-acrobats jumped in pretending there was no literary carnage while at the same time drawing our eyes away from the literary carnage. "No, no, there (...) is an order to this disorderly book!" "Gideon is a man of faith," they explained. "Gideon is a sham," others retorted. "Long live the king," they cried. "Oh no, the king will bring down the nation," others said. Enter the latest literary critics and the fresh feminist readers to save the day. And save they have. Barry noted the irony. Cheryl called attention to the elaborate, spiraling labyrinth. Phyllis remembered the forgotten. Mieke heralded the incoherence. Deborah the Bee slings Barak with irony. Cowardly Jephthah sacrifices his virgin daughter immediately after he is filled with the spirit. Blind Samson remains stuck in some adolescent, Pinnochio-like stage milling around the same old vices. The Levite, the man of word and sacrifice, lies to the people and dismembers his wife. To beat it all the myopic narrator joins in lock step with the other blind characters stumbling around in the narrative. What manner of text is this? These Judges, these stories, are even more troubling now that we take them seriously. Now what do we do with Judges? The recent scholarship is most promising, but I think we must press forward, or is that backward, or perhaps to another plan. Perhaps Judges hearkens forward to the postmodern. What would Judges look like if we viewed the story through a postmodern lens? Would we see the text in another dimension? Would we let the characters live and breathe as confusing, confounding, intricate characters? Judges speaks to me. These judges, they teach me. How can I ever forget my reading of Judges? For once I found a text reflecting the madness of faith in my maddening world. For once I saw a text like Pablo. I heard the echo of Umberto. I noted the faint murmurings of Jacques. I danced a most joyous jig with Julia. I saw, up ahead, or was that behind me, or over to the side, Martin's flickering candle. Mieke, meet Jael. Barak, meet Barry. Jacques, meet Gideon. Samson, meet Martin. Umberto, meet the narrator or two or three. Pablo, meet the Levite's wife---sorry, she has no name. (shrink)

Our understanding of body–world relations is caught in a curious contradiction. On one side, it is well established that many concepts that describe interaction with the outer world – ‘plasticity’ or ‘metabolism’- or external influences on the body - ‘environment’ or ‘milieu’ – appeared with the rise of modern science. On the other side, although premodern science lacked a unifying term for it, an anxious attentiveness to the power of ‘environmental factors’ in shaping physical and moral traits held sway in (...) nearly all medical systems before and alongside modern Europe. In this article, I build on a new historiography on the policing of bodies and environments in medieval times and at the urban scale to problematize Foucault’s claim about biopolitics as a modern phenomenon born in the European eighteenth-century. I look in particular at the collective usage of ancient medicine and manipulation of the milieu based on humoralist notions of corporeal permeability (Hippocrates, Galen, Ibn Sīnā) in the Islamicate and Latin Christendom between the 12th and the 15th century. This longer history has implications also for a richer genealogy of contemporary tropes of plasticity, permeability and environmental determinism beyond usual genealogies that take as a starting point the making of the modern body and EuroAmerican biomedicine. (shrink)

We aimed to identify the critical insights from empirical peer-reviewed studies on online romance fraud published between 2000 and 2021 through a systematic literature review using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol. The corpus of studies that met our inclusion criteria comprised twenty-six studies employing qualitative (n = 13), quantitative (n = 11), and mixed (n = 2) methods. Most studies focused on victims, with eight focusing on offenders and fewer investigating public perspectives. All the (...) victim-focused studies relied on data from the Global North, except for Malaysia. Five offender-focused studies used online data available in the public domain, and three derived their data from West Africa. Our review highlights offenders' techniques to deceive and manipulate victims, as revealed in these studies, and highlights some limitations of offender- and victim-focused studies. The dominant framework used across the studies was found to be the “Scammers Persuasive Techniques Model.” While this framework provides a helpful way of considering the stages of victim involvement, it also faces some limitations, which we highlight. Our study reviews the current state of empirical knowledge on romance fraud and identifies certain gaps and biases in the literature. We argue there is a need for further research into online romance fraud to enhance our understanding of it both from the perspective of the offender as well as the experience of the victim. We also highlight the need for a more inclusive and greater range of regional and global diverse range of data sources and perspectives. Given the scale and impact of online romance fraud, we conclude that its study would benefit from a richer empirical engagement that recognizes it as both a regional and global phenomenon. (shrink)

Hutto and Myin claim that teleosemantics cannot account for mental content. In their view, teleosemantics accounts for a poorer kind of relation between cognitive states and the world but lacks the theoretical tools to account for a richer kind. We show that their objection imposes two criteria on theories of content: a truth-evaluable criterion and an intensionality criterion. For the objection to go through, teleosemantics must be subject to both these criteria and must fail to satisfy them. We argue (...) that teleosemantics meets the truth-evaluable criterion and is not required to meet the intensionality criterion. We conclude that Hutto and Myin’s objection fails. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good—especially the first essay, “The Idea of Perfection”—is often associated with a critique of a certain picture of agency and its proper place in ethical thought. There is implicit in this critique, however, an alternative, much richer one. I propose a reading of Murdochian agency in terms of the continuous activity of cultivating and refining a distinctive practical standpoint, and I apply this reading to her account of moral progress. For Murdoch moral progress depends (...) on transcending egoism and achieving clear perception of a normatively-saturated reality, but it would be a mistake to think of egoism in terms of selfishness, or clarity in terms of altruism. Rather, I argue, Murdochian moral progress requires overcoming socially-conditioned and often ideological forms of alienation, and making the social conditions that inform our practical standpoints self-conscious. (shrink)

This chapter argues that emotion recognition is a skill. A skill perspective on emotion recognition draws attention to underappreciated features of this cornerstone of social cognition. Skills have a number of characteristic features. For example, they are improvable, practical, and flexible. Emotion recognition has these features as well. Leading theories of emotion recognition often draw inadequate attention to these features. The chapter advances a theory of emotion recognition that is better suited to this purpose. It proposes that emotion recognition involves (...) scripts. Emotion scripts describe how people are likely to behave in different emotional contexts. Scripts can be improved with the addition of richer social knowledge, they are practical in that they describe and guide social interaction, and they are flexible because they must accommodate the fact that emotions have different behavioral impact depending on the agents involved and the circumstances at play. Learning to recognize emotions through scripts qualifies as a skill. (shrink)

Kyle Stanford has recently claimed to offer a new challenge to scientific realism. Taking his inspiration from the familiar Pessimistic Induction (PI), Stanford proposes a New Induction (NI). Contra Anjan Chakravartty’s suggestion that the NI is a ‘red herring’, I argue that it reveals something deep and important about science. The Problem of Unconceived Alternatives, which lies at the heart of the NI, yields a richer anti-realism than the PI. It explains why science falls short when it falls short, (...) and so it might figure in the most coherent account of scientific practice. However, this best account will be antirealist in some respects and about some theories. It will not be a sweeping antirealism about all or most of science. (shrink)

That technologies may raise ethical issues is now widely recognised. The ‘responsible innovation’ literature – as well as, to a lesser extent, the applied ethics and bioethics literature – has responded to the need for ethical reflection on technologies by developing a number of tools and approaches to facilitate such reflection. Some of these instruments consist of lists of questions that people are encouraged to ask about technologies – a methodology known as the ‘Socratic approach’. However, to date, these instruments (...) have often not adequately acknowledged various political impacts of technologies, which are, I suggest, essential to a proper account of the ethical issues they raise. New technologies can make some people richer and some people poorer, empower some and disempower others, have dramatic implications for relationships between different social groups and impact on social understandings and experiences that are central to the lives, and narratives, of denizens of technological societies. The distinctive contribution of this paper, then, is to offer a revised and updated version of the Socratic approach that highlights the political, as well as the more traditionally ethical, issues raised by the development of new technologies. (shrink)

his article develops a framework for addressing racial ontologies in transnational perspective. In contrast to simple contextualist accounts, it is argued that a globally engaged metaphysics of race needs to address transnational continuities of racial ontologies. In contrast to unificationist accounts that aim for one globally unified ontology, it is argued that questions about the nature and reality of race do not always have the same answers across national contexts. In order address racial ontologies in global perspective, the article develops (...) a framework that accounts for both continuities and discontinuities by looking beyond the referents of narrowly defined core concepts. By shifting the focus from narrow concepts to richer conceptions of race, racial ontologies become comparable through globally related but nonetheless distinct mappings between conceptions and property relations. The article concludes by showing how this framework can generate novel insights in case studies from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. (shrink)

We introduce two notions–the shadows and the shallows of explanation–in opening up explanation to broader, interdisciplinary investigation. The shadows of explanation refer to past philosophical efforts to provide either a conceptual analysis of explanation or in some other way to pinpoint the essence of explanation. The shallows of explanation refer to the phenomenon of having surprisingly limited everyday, individual cognitive abilities when it comes to explanation. Explanations are ubiquitous, but they typically are not accompanied by the depth that we might, (...) prima facie, expect. We explain the existence of the shadows and shallows of explanation in terms of there being a theoretical abyss between explanation and richer, theoretical structures that are often attributed to people. We offer an account of the shallows, in particular, both in terms of shorn-down, internal, mental machinery, and in terms of an enriched, public symbolic environment, relative to the currently dominant ways of thinking about cognition and the world. (shrink)

The sentence "The boss fired the employee who is always late" invites the defeasible inference that the speaker is attempting to convey that the lateness caused the firing. We argue that such inferences cannot be understood in terms of familiar approaches to extrasemantic enrichment such as implicature, impliciture, explicature, or species of local enrichment already in the literature. Rather, we propose that they arise from more basic cognitive strategies, grounded in processes of coherence establishment, that thinkers use to make sense (...) of the world. Attention to such cases provides a richer and more varied landscape of extrasemantic enrichment than has been appreciated to date. (shrink)

Recently, there’s been a lot of interest in a research program that tries to understand propositional representation in terms of the subject’s performance of sub-propositional mental acts like reference and predication (e. g. Burge 2010, Hanks 2015, Soames 2010, 2015). For example, on one version of the view, for a subject to predicate the property of being a composer of Arvo just is what it is to perform the to the basic propositional act of judging that Arvo is a composer (...) (e. g. Hanks 2015). In this paper I first present my own version of this view and contrast it with alternatives. I then argue that we must clearly separate the thin predication-resultant notion of judging (S(emantic)-judgment) from a much richer notion used in epistemology (E(pistemic)-judgment). The former is just the act of thinking a forceful thought. The latter is the act of making up one’s mind about how things are, a way of concluding theoretical or doxastic deliberation. I argue that these two acts differ in three ways: levels of propositional attitude, objective vs. subjective norms, and the possibility of sub-personal occurrence. (shrink)

What experimental game theorists may have demonstrated is not that people are systematically irrational but that human rationality is heavily scaffolded. Remove the scaffolding, and we do not do very well. People are able to get on because they “offload” an enormous amount of practical reasoning onto their environment. As a result, when they are put in novel or unfamiliar environments, they perform very poorly, even on apparently simple tasks. -/- This observation is supported by recent empirically informed shifts in (...) philosophy of mind toward a view of cognition as (to cite the current slogan) “embodied, embedded, enactive, extended.” Andy Clark and others have made a very plausible case for the idea that a proper assessment of human cognitive competence must include environmental components. To limit our attention to what lies within the skin-skull boundary is, in effect, to miss the big story on human rationality. Insofar as we are rational, it is often because of our ingenuity at developing “work-arounds” to the glitches in the fast-and-frugal heuristic problem-solving capabilities that natural selection has equipped us with. And these work-arounds often involve a detour through the environment (so-called offloading of cognitive burdens). -/- When it comes to practical rationality, things are no different. Yet in many discussions of “the will,” there is still a tendency to put too much emphasis on what goes on inside the agent’s head. Our objective in this chapter is to articulate this conception of “the extended will” more clearly, using the strategies that people employ to overcome procrastination for the central set of examples. Procrastination, in our view, constitutes a particular type of self-control problem, one that is particularly amenable to philosophical reflection, not only because of the high volume of psychological research on the subject but also because of the large quantity of “self-help” literature in circulationa literature that provides an invaluable perspective on the everyday strategies that people use in order to defeat (or, better yet, circumvent) this type of self-defeating behavior pattern. In general, what we find is that the internalist bias that permeates discussions of the will gives rise to a set of practical recommendations that overemphasize changing the way one thinks about a task, while ignoring the much richer set of strategies that are available in the realm of environmental scaffolding. In the concluding section, we highlight some of the policy implications of this, particularly regarding social trends involving the dismantling of support structures. (shrink)

In this chapter we argue that emotions are mediated in an incomplete way in online social media because of the heavy reliance on textual messages which fosters a rationalistic bias and an inclination towards less nuanced emotional expressions. This incompleteness can happen either by obscuring emotions, showing less than the original intensity, misinterpreting emotions, or eliciting emotions without feedback and context. Online interactions and deliberations tend to contribute rather than overcome stalemates and informational bubbles, partially due to prevalence of anti-social (...) emotions. It is tempting to see emotions as being the cause of the problem of online verbal aggression and bullying. However, we argue that social media are actually designed in a predominantly rationalistic way, because of the reliance on text-based communication, thereby filtering out social emotions and leaving space for easily expressed antisocial emotions. Based on research on emotions that sees these as key ingredients to moral interaction and deliberation, as well as on research on text-based versus non-verbal communication, we propose a richer understanding of emotions, requiring different designs of online deliberation platforms. We propose that such designs should move from text-centred designs and should find ways to incorporate the complete expression of the full range of human emotions so that these can play a constructive role in online deliberations. (shrink)

The senses present their content in the form of images, three-dimensional arrays of located sense features. Peacocke’s “scenario content” is one attempt to capture image content; here, a richer notion is presented, sensory images include located objects and features predicated of them. It is argued that our grasp of the meaning of these images implies that they have propositional content. Two problems concerning image content are explored. The first is that even on an enriched conception, image content has certain (...) expressive limitations. In particular, it cannot express absolute location and time (as opposed to spatiotemporal relations) or logical complexity. Yet, perceptual experience does seem to express certain absolute locations—namely, here and now. How can it do so? Secondly, image content cannot exhaust the significance of perceptual states. This is proved by noting that perception, memory, and anticipation can have the same image content. Yet they have different significance. These problems show that some of the significance of sensory states comes from outside the image. (shrink)

Complex technology has become an essential aspect of everyday life. We rely on technology as part of basic infrastructure and repeatedly for tasks throughout the day. Yet, in many cases the relation surpasses mere reliance and evolves to trust in technology. A new, disruptive technology is blockchain. It claims to introduce trustless relationships among its users, aiming to eliminate the need for trust altogether—even being described as “the trust machine”. This paper presents a proposal to adjust the concept of trust (...) in blockchain applications with the tools provided by conceptual engineering. Its goal is to propose a concept of trust, that offers more than a halo term, devoid of the normative depth that the original, philosophical term actually carries. To evaluate possible concepts of trust in blockchain applications, five criteria are proposed: These criteria ensure that the conceptual relation indeed embodies trust, thereby being richer than mere reliance, and that the chosen concept highlights the active role of the trustor. While the concepts of trust in engineers and trust in algorithms have to be discarded, institutional trust emerges as a viable candidate, given some refinements. Ultimately, the concept of trust by normative expectations and attribution is suggested to capture the essence of trust in blockchain applications. (shrink)

East Asia’s economy is leading the world into the new Asian century. While meritocratic practices in the educational and private sectors are often considered pivotal conditions for East Asia’s economic success, experts have pointed out that the path ahead requires new approaches to ensure social cohesion and stability, which depend on the quality of relations across social divides. These considerations raise multiple questions for philosophers: What forms of social meritocracy are necessary to sustain social cohesion? Moreover, how can the detrimental (...) effects of meritocratic practices be contained? Is it possible to utilise some of the intellectual resources indigenous to East Asia to generate innovative solutions? This paper argues that the answers to these questions lie in the indigenous Confucian conceptual resources. Confucian ideas can inspire a more desirable societal ideal for the future of East Asia. In particular, the Confucian emphasis on cultivating reciprocal harmonious human relationships and others’ morality can guide new approaches to fostering social cohesion. As Confucian personal cultivation through harmonious relations is a process of social cohesion, these ideas inspire a) a multiple approach to policymaking that is not only grounded in economic redistribution, b) a richer understanding of societal progress, and c) a democratic approach to fostering social cohesion. Unlike Confucian meritocrats and scholars who defend the Confucian roots of East Asian forms of political and social meritocracy, this paper proves that Confucian conceptual resources can help formulate a societal vision that strengthens cohesion and mitigates the adverse effects of meritocratic practices. (shrink)

The claim that the having of aesthetic properties supervenes on the having of non-aesthetic properties has been widely discussed and, in various ways, defended. In this paper, I will show that even if it is sometimes true that a supervenience relation holds between aesthetic properties and the 'subvenient' non-aesthetic ones, it is not the interesting relation in the neighbourhood. As we shall see, a richer, asymmetric and irreflexive relation is required, and I shall defend the claim that the more-and-more-popular (...) relation of grounding does a much better job than supervenience. (shrink)

Jonathan Kvanvig has proposed a non-cognitive theory of faith. He argues that the model of faith as essentially involving assent to propositions is of no value. In response, I propose a Thomistic cognitive theory of faith that both avoids Kvanvig’s criticism and presents a richer and more inclusive account of how faith is intrinsically valuable. I show these accounts of faith diverge in what they take as the goal of the Christian life: personal relationship with God or an external (...) state of affairs. For this reason, more seriously, the non-cognitivist project likely requires rejecting traditional Christianity and its picture of salvation. (shrink)