This qualitative case study investigates the environmental implications of tourist arrivals in Matabungkay Beach, Lian, and their impact on the destination image. Through in-depth interviews with seven key stakeholders, including local residents, business owners, and environmental activists, the study explores perceptions, concerns, and potential solutions regarding the intersection of tourism and environmental sustainability. Findings reveal a complex relationship between tourism and environmental degradation, with participants expressing concerns about poor waste management, impacts on destination image, and health concerns. These challenges not (...) only threaten the natural beauty and biodiversity of the area but also tarnish the destination's image, affecting its appeal to tourists and potential investors. Despite these challenges, participants highlight existing initiatives and potential solutions, including community-based conservation efforts, sustainable tourism practices, and enhanced regulations. Collaboration among stakeholders is emphasized as crucial for achieving a balance between tourism development and environmental preservation. The study underscores the need for comprehensive strategies includes formulated an ordinance for comprehensive waste management and pollution control ordinance to optimize the destination image of Matabungkay Beach while addressing its environmental challenges. By integrating sustainable practices and fostering community engagement, the destination can enhance its appeal while safeguarding its natural resources for future generations. (shrink)

Arrival offers a useful thought experiment in the philosophy of mind and language. Assessing human linguists' interpretive efforts to understand the alien heptapod form of life in both the movie and the novella from which it was adapted (Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”) teach us how our understanding of selfhood shapes our conception of agency. Arrival’s reflexive commentary on the cinematic experience is also an argument for the value of learning to communicate in cinematic language.

The great advances of the last decades both in cognitive theories and in evolutionary biology have not yet fully merged. Most evolutionary hypotheses around the mind still rely on classical cognitivism, while most theories of cognition still look for adaptive explanations. We believe that the merging of novel cognitive theories into a pluralistic account can greatly improve our understanding of both what cognition is and how it evolved.

Within the philosophy of language, contextualists typically hold (and semantic minimalists deny) that pragmatic elements of an utterance can affect its semantic content. This paper concretizes this debate by analogizing both positions to different kinds of time-travel stories: contextualism is akin to Ludovician narratives that deny the possibility of temporal editing (or “the changing of past events”) while semantic minimalism is aligned with stories that allow the past to be literally altered. By focusing particularly on Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film (...) class='Hi'>Arrival, which portrays a Ludovician model of temporality that firmly denies the possibility of temporal editing, this paper defends the strength of the contextualist position. (shrink)

Sport is a global phenomenon, which can make sport an important arena for integration into new societies. However, sport is also an expression of national culture and identities. The aim of this study is to explore images and experiences that newly-arrived immigrant children in Sweden have about sport in their country of origin, and challenges that can arise in processes of integration through sport. We asked 20 newly arrived children aged 10 to 13 to make drawings about sporting experiences from (...) their countries of origin. Three themes emerged: sport as feeling joy, where activities were performed with friends during leisure time; sport as acting formally, where activities were carried out in clubs; and sport as a spectator, where children were non-participants. We emphasise that development of sport should be two-way processes, where cultural learning should be mutual processes. Immigrant children’s experiences should be foregrounded when utilising and developing sports programmes. (shrink)

This paper argues that Carnap both did not view and should not have viewed Frege's project in the foundations of mathematics as misguided metaphysics. The reason for this is that Frege's project was to give an explication of number in a very Carnapian sense — something that was not lost on Carnap. Furthermore, Frege gives pragmatic justification for the basic features of his system, especially where there are ontological considerations. It will be argued that even on the question of the (...) independent existence of abstract objects, Frege and Carnap held remarkably similar views. I close with a discussion of why, despite all this, Frege would not accept the principle of tolerance. (shrink)

We arrived at the neighborhood in Antwerp where our accommodation, Adagio Aprthotel, was located. The presence of immigrants was the one of the first things that caught my attention. They are everywhere. Enroute to the shops past the train station after dropping off our bags, Amiel and I passed a synagogue, and at McDonald’s (yup, my first meal in Belgium was french fries!), seated at the next table were two Filipinos. Overhearing their chatter, I surmised that they have been living (...) in Antwerp for some time. While intently exploring the surrounding streets, it became obvious that there is a profusion of migrant communities in Antwerp offering a multifaceted panorama of cultural diversity. This iss underscored by the conspicuous presence of Orthodox Jews, Arabs, Africans, and Chinese, the latter ensconced in their own Chinatown. Our neighborhood afforded immersion within a milieu teeming with migrant-owned enterprises, from butcher shops and corner stores to quaint cafés and eateries, predominantly overseen by Middle Easterners and Jews. Our first communal meal was, in fact, at an Arabic restaurant just across our accommodations. (shrink)

The arrival of synthetic organs may mean we need to reconsider principles of ownership of such items. One possible ownership criterion is the boundary between the organ’s being outside or inside the body. What is outside of my body, even if it is a natural organ made of my cells, may belong to a company or research institution. Yet when it is placed in me, it belongs to me. In the future, we should also keep an eye on how (...) the availability of synthetic organs may change our attitudes toward our own bodies. (shrink)

Ours arrived under mysterious circumstances in Wuhan, China sometime in the last quarter of 2019. In the memorable words of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, the Covid-19 virus then “got on a plane” and became a super-spreading global pandemic in a matter of months. The human toll is devastating — over 80 million infected and over 1.7 million deaths as I write this. Over a century ago and during World War I no less, the world witnessed the devastating “Spanish flu” (...) pandemic, which according to the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention infected 500 million people and killed over 50 million, with an estimated 20 million in Asia alone, although precise numbers are hard to come by. Pandemics are named pandemics because their human toll is on a global scale and devastating. (shrink)

Arriving at definitions in philosophy is as time-honored as it is controversial. Although learned reflection in the west about sport goes back at least to the time of ancient Greece, the sub-discipline of the philosophy of sport emerged in the world of Anglophone analytic philosophy in the 1970s. Shawn Klein’s edited volume, Defining Sport: Conceptions and Borderlines, is both the fruit of and a valuable contribution to such an emerging field (indeed, it is the first book-length study of its topic (...) within philosophy of sport). Although Huizinga had sought to define the phenomenon of play very broadly in his Homo Ludens (1938), investigation of the overlapping questions of what is sport? what is a game?, and what is play? were central to the sub-discipline at its inception. Foundational was the work of Bernard Suits, whose Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (1978) sought to refute Wittgenstein’s claim that the notion of game was indefinable. In order to refute Wittgenstein, Suits sought to establish the conditions or properties both necessary and sufficient of the concepts of game and sport such that all instances of those concepts share such properties. (shrink)

When Sartre arrives late to meet Pierre at a local establishment, he discovers not merely that Pierre is absent, but Pierre’s absence, where this depends, or so Sartre notoriously supposes, on a frustrated expectation that Pierre would be seen at that place. Many philosophers have railed against this view, taking it to entail a treatment of the ontology of absence that Richard Gale describes as ‘attitudinal’ – one whereby absences are thought to ontologically depend on psychological attitudes. In this paper, (...) I aim to make Sartre’s intuition respectable. What Sartre perceives is an absential location, only the boundaries of which are circumscribed by what Sartre is doing at that place: meeting Pierre. I explain how this Sartrean view, though not specifically attributable to Sartre, nonetheless honours some of the phenomenological data described, if a little opaquely, in Being and Nothingness. (shrink)

Davidson and Husserl both arrived independently at a startling conclusion: that we need to interact with others in order to acquire the concept of objectivity, or to realize that the world we are in exists independently of us. Here I discuss both of their arguments, and argue that there are problems with each. However, I then I argue that each thinker provided us with one key insight that can be combined to provide a more compelling argument for the claim. Finally (...) I discuss some recent work in developmental psychology that may lend support to the view that emerges. (shrink)

Canonical defenders of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), such as Leibniz and Spinoza, are metaphysical foundationalists of one stripe or another. This is curious since the PSR—which says that everything has a ground, cause, or explanation—in effect, denies fundamental entities. In this paper, I explore the apparent inconsistency between metaphysical foundationalism and approaches to metaphysical system building that are driven by a commitment to the PSR. I do so by analyzing how Indian Buddhist philosophers arrive at foundationalist and anti-foundationalist (...) positions motivated by implicit commitments to different versions of the PSR. I begin by introducing the Buddhist principle of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) as a proto-PSR that is restricted to causal explanation. Next, I show how Vasubandhu’s Sautrāntika Abhidharma metaphysics is shaped by a qualified commitment to both causal and metaphysical grounding versions of the PSR. I then reveal how Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka metaphysics is driven by an unrestricted and exceptionless commitment to causal and metaphysical grounding versions of the PSR. Finally, I consider how Nāgārjuna’s account may put him in a unique position to respond to a common contemporary objection to the PSR from necessitarianism. I conclude by addressing a competing interpretation on which Nāgārjuna is best understood as an anti-rationalist rather than an uber-rationalist, as I characterize him. (shrink)

Famously, in the essay Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (Prize Essay), Kant attempts to distance himself from the Wolffian model of philosophical inquiry. In this respect, Kant scholars have pointed out Kant’s claim that philosophy should not imitate the method of mathematics and his appeal to Newton’s “analytic method.” In this article, I argue that there is an aspect of Kant’s critique of the Wolffian model that has been neglected. Kant presents a powerful (...) attack of the idea that philosophy should proceed through the analysis of concepts and argues that we should give up the aim of arriving at “complete” concepts as one of its fundamental desiderata. Importantly, this attack of philosophy conceived as conceptual analysis is distinctive and original if one compares it with Kant’s critique of analysis in the Critique of Pure Reason, which rests on the idea that analysis is insufficient to ground substantial metaphysical truths. I also make an additional point: Scholars have debated whether the appeal to Newton’s analytic method involves a form of empiricism. I submit that this debate is ill-conceived because Kant uses a notion of “given concepts” that is indeterminate with respect to their a priori or a posteriori status. (shrink)

Abstractionism in the philosophy of mathematics aims at deriving large fragments of mathematics by combining abstraction principles (i.e. the abstract objects $\S e_1, \S e_2$, are identical if, and only if, an equivalence relation $Eq_\S$ holds between the entities $e_1, e_2$) with logic. Still, as highlighted in work on the semantics for relevant logics, there are different ways theories might be combined. In exactly what ways must logic and abstraction be combined in order to get interesting mathematics? In this paper, (...) we investigate the matter by deriving the axioms of second-order Peano Arithmetic from Frege's Basic Law V (the extension of $F$ is identical with the extension of $G$ if, and only if, $F$ and $G$ are extensionally equivalent) in the presence of a relevant higher-order logic. The results are interesting. Not only must we take on logic as true, and not only must we apply our logic to abstraction principles, but also we have to apply our theory of abstraction back to the logic in order to arrive at arithmetic. Thus, what Abstractionism gives us is not simply what we get from abstraction via logic, but also what we get from logic via abstraction. (shrink)

We paraphrase Descartes’ famous dictum in the area of AI ethics where the “I doubt and therefore I am” is suggested as a necessary aspect of morality. Therefore AI, which cannot doubt itself, cannot possess moral agency. Of course, this is not the end of the story. We explore various aspects of the human mind that substantially differ from AI, which includes the sensory grounding of our knowing, the act of understanding, and the significance of being able to doubt ourselves. (...) The foundation of our argument is the discipline of ethics, one of the oldest and largest knowledge projects of human history, yet, we seem only to be beginning to get a grasp of it. After a couple of thousand years of studying the ethics of humans, we (humans) arrived at a point where moral psychology suggests that our moral decisions are intuitive, and all the models from ethics become relevant only when we explain ourselves. This recognition has a major impact on what and how we can do regarding AI ethics. We do not offer a solution, we explore some ideas and leave the problem open, but we hope somewhat better understood than before our study. (shrink)

In general, Confucians have taken a dim view of the law. They have felt warranted in this view by a reading of Confucius’ Analects 2.3 in which the Master apparently disparages law-centered governance. Two great Confucian philosophers, however, Zhu Xi and Jeong Yakyong (widely known by his pen name, Dasan), view the role of law in society differently. Like all Confucians, they teach the cultivation of virtue, but alongside building social harmony through ritual and good character, these two philosophers perceive (...) that social order also requires the penal law. In this paper, I argue that Zhu Xi and Dasan, and Dasan in particular, follow the evidentiary lead of the classical Chinese philosopher Mozi to support their legal philosophy. Mozi offered three standards for establishing truth claims: empirical evidence from common life, authoritative evidence, and evidence of outcomes. Mozi’s empirical standard takes evidence of common life from what ordinary people have seen. Zhu Xi and Dasan take the evidence of common life, not from what the people have seen, but from common understandings contained in the written language. They use this approach to arrive at a different understanding of Analects 2.3 than other Confucians, one that relates the content of that passage to Analects 12.17. They interpret the passage on a philological basis that supports the presence of penal law from a perspective of ordinary life. For authoritative evidence, Zhu Xi and Dasan like Mozi appeal to the authority of the ancient sages, who register their support for penal law. Dasan also follows Mozi’s evidentiary lead in the evidence of outcomes by fully developing a consequential picture of how the absence of law detrimentally affects society. On this point, Dasan establishes a new and revolutionary legal outlook that differs from that of Zhu Xi. I show Dasan taking lessons from the classical Legalists to arrive at this position warranted by the evidence of outcomes. Having satisfied the three evidentiary standards, Dasan thus establishes the importance of the penal law from a Confucian perspective. (shrink)

A 2017 Nature report was widely touted as hailing the arrival of the artificial womb. But the scientists involved claim their technology is merely an improvement in neonatal care. This raises an under-considered question: what differentiates neonatal incubation from artificial womb technology? Considering the nature of gestation—or metaphysics of pregnancy—(a) identifies more profound differences between fetuses and neonates/babies than their location (in or outside the maternal body) alone: fetuses and neonates have different physiological and physical characteristics; (b) characterizes birth (...) as a physiological, mereological and topological transformation as well as a (morally relevant) change of location; and (c) delivers a clear distinction between neonatal incubation and ectogestation: the former supports neonatal physiology; the latter preserves fetal physiology. This allows a detailed conceptual classification of ectogenetive and ectogestative technologies according to which the 2017 system is not just improved neonatal incubation, but genuine ectogestation. But it is not an artificial womb, which is a term that is better put to rest. The analysis reveals that any ethical discussion involving ectogestation must always involve considerations of possible risks to the mother as well as her autonomy and rights. It also adds a third and potentially important dimension to debates in reproductive ethics: the physiological transition from fetus/gestateling to baby/neonate. (shrink)

Kimberlé Crenshaw arrived at her famous phrase “intersectionality” by carefully thinking through speeches and writings given to us by early Black feminists, such as like Sojourner Truth and Anna J. Cooper. In this paper, I expand on this groundbreaking work in two somewhat surprising ways. First, I bring the ideas of these early Black feminists together with important, related proposals from W.E.B. Du Bois, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Simone de Beauvoir. Second, I relate these works to central ideas in (...) Kant’s practical philosophy in an effort to develop a Kantian theory of intersectionality. In addition to grasping the distinctive, destructive directions of oppressive forces aimed at women, the poor, and minorities, I seek to understand better the new, violently destructive elements found in European modernity, as evidenced both in European colonialization as well as the Holocaust. -/- This book is published under the OA CC-BY 4.0 license. (shrink)

It has been known for long time that the cosmic sound wave was there since the early epoch of the Universe. Signatures of its existence are abound. However, such an acoustic model of cosmology is rarely developed fully into a complete framework from the notion of space, cancer therapy up to the sky. This paper may be the first attempt towards such a complete description of the Universe based on classical wave equation of sound. It is argued that one can (...) arrive at a consistent description of space, elementary particles, Sachs-Wolfe acoustic theorem, up to a novel approach for cancer therapy, starting from this simple classical wave equation of sound. We also discuss a plausible extension of Acoustic Sachs-Wolfe theorem based on its analogue with Klein-Gordon equation to become Acoustic Sachs-Wolfe-Christianto-Smarandache-Umniyati (ASWoCSU) equation. It is our hope that the new proposed equation can be verified with observation data. But we admit that our model is still in its infancy, more researches are needed to fill all the missing details. (shrink)

On what basis should we embrace a religious belief? In this article I argue that religious faith should be viewed, not as a conclusion we arrive at after reviewing the evidence, but as an existential decision we make through which we define ourselves.

This book is a general defence of Donald Davidson's and G.E.M. Anscombe's 'unifying' approach to the individuation of actions and other events against objections raised by Alvin I. Goldman and others. It is argued that, ironically, Goldman's rival 'multiplying' account is itself vulnerable to these objections, whereas Davidson's account survives them. Although claims that the unifier-multiplier dispute is not really substantive are shown to be unfounded, some room for limited agreement over the ontological status of events is indicated. Davidson's causal (...) criterion of event identity is then defended against charges of triviality or inadequacy. It is concluded that Davidson's criterion is not primarily a criterion for arriving at particular judgments of individuation, but a metaphysical standard for the correctness of such judgments, however arrived at. Contents: Unifiers vs. Multipliers - Davidson's individuation of events - Goldman's act generation - causal, 'by'-relational, and temporal problems - ontology and event constituents - Davidson's causal criterion. This book is unique in providing a detailed survey and analysis of the recent unifier-multiplier dispute, and will be of interest to all researchers in action theory, as well as those working more broadly in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

A Benacerraf–Field challenge is an argument intended to show that common realist theories of a given domain are untenable: such theories make it impossible to explain how we’ve arrived at the truth in that domain, and insofar as a theory makes our reliability in a domain inexplicable, we must either reject that theory or give up the relevant beliefs. But there’s no consensus about what would count here as a satisfactory explanation of our reliability. It’s sometimes suggested that giving such (...) an explanation would involve showing that our beliefs meet some modal condition, but realists have claimed that this sort of modal interpretation of the challenge deprives it of any force: since the facts in question are metaphysically necessary and so obtain in all possible worlds, it’s trivially easy, even given realism, to show that our beliefs have the relevant modal features. Here I show that this claim is mistaken—what motivates a modal interpretation of the challenge in the first place also motivates an understanding of the relevant features in terms of epistemic possibilities rather than metaphysical possibilities, and there are indeed epistemically possible worlds where the facts in question don’t obtain. (shrink)

I argue that Sarah Sawyer's and Herman Cappelen's recent accounts of how speakers talk and think about the same concept or topic even when their understandings of that concept or topic substantially diverge risk multiplying our metasemantic categories unnecessarily and fail to prove explanatory. When we look more closely at our actual practices of samesaying, we find that speakers with seemingly incompatible formulations of a subject matter take one another to samesay when they are attempting to arrive at a correct (...) understanding of that subject matter. These speakers adopt what I call a prospective externalist perspective on the subject matter in question. I then argue that there are contexts where judgments of samesaying are more routinely defeated because speakers are taking up a perspective I call retrospective internalism. From this perspective, speakers are aiming to render maximally intelligible the linguistic behavior of other speakers that appear to them to deviate from their own. Whether or not we count speakers as samesaying with us will therefore depend on the kind of the perspective we adopt. Different perspectives, it will turn out, often yield different verdicts. On my perspective-based approach, there is no need to hypostatize or inflate our metasemantic taxonomies. (shrink)

When Katniss first arrives in the Capitol, she is both amazed and repulsed by the dramatic body- modifications and frivolous lives of its citizens. “What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol,” she wonders, “besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to roll in and die for their entertainment?” In this paper, I argue that the more time and energy the Capitol citizens focus on body-modification and their social lives, the more (...) self-focused they become and the less likely they are to notice or care about political injustices that don’t directly affect them. A further examination of how the frivolity of the citizens is actually used by the Capitol to strengthen its power also provides insight into what seems most troubling about the lives of the citizens not just of the Capitol but of District 13 as well—namely, their lack of self-directed significance. (shrink)

Scientists have the ability to influence policy in important ways through how they present their results. Surprisingly, existing codes of scientific ethics have little to say about such choices. I propose that we can arrive at a set of ethical guidelines to govern scientists’ presentation of information to policymakers by looking to bioethics: roughly, just as a clinician should aim to promote informed decision-making by patients, a scientist should aim to promote informed decision-making by policymakers. Though this may sound like (...) a natural proposal, I show it offers guidance that conflicts with standard scientific practices. I conclude by considering one cost of the proposal: that it would prevent scientists from acting as advocates in a way that is currently common in certain fields. I accept that the proposal would restrict scientists’ political advocacy rights, but argue that the benefits of adopting it — promoting democratic governance — justify the restriction. (shrink)

One reason to think that names have a predicate-type semantic value is that they naturally occur in count-noun positions: ‘The Michaels in my building both lost their keys’; ‘I know one incredibly sharp Cecil and one that's incredibly dull’. Predicativism is the view that names uniformly occur as predicates. Predicativism flies in the face of the widely accepted view that names in argument position are referential, whether that be Millian Referentialism, direct-reference theories, or even Fregean Descriptivism. But names are predicates (...) in all of their occurrences; they are predicates that are true of their bearers. When a name appears as a bare singular in argument position, it really occupies the predicate position of what in this essay is called a denuded definite description: a definite description with an unpronounced definite article. Sloat provided good evidence for this. The definite article is sometimes pronounced with names in the singular: ‘The Ivan we all love doesn't feel well’. Sloat proposed a disjunctive generalization of when the definite article must be pronounced with a singular name. This essay shows that by slightly revising Sloat's generalization, we arrive at a simple, nondisjunctive, syntactic rule that governs the overt appearance of the definite article with singular names. But Ivan does not necessarily bear the name ‘Ivan’, so one might worry that the sentence “Ivan might not have had ‘Ivan’ as a name” would incorrectly be predicted false. This essay shows that Predicativism does not have this consequence by showing that incomplete definite descriptions in general and incomplete denuded descriptions, such as ‘Øthe Ivan’, in particular are rigid designators. (shrink)

Persons and nations agree on the importance of justice but disagree on its requirements. In The End of History and the Last Man Francis Fukuyama argues that human history moves towards liberal democracy as the final ideal for all societies. It is conceivable that liberal democratic societies will converge to similar conceptions of justice and that global spread of liberal democracies will promote consensus. This paper tries to show that consensus on justice is, nevertheless, unlikely, due to reasonable disagreement. Reason (...) does not give a single rational or reasonable solution to conflicting demands of justice. This means that apart from reason, other factors play a role in what is regarded as just. Jurisdiction is influenced by tradition and zeitgeist. This explains why also liberal democracies, which may recognize similar principles of justice, still arrive at differing rankings of these principles and divergent results of jurisdiction in time and place. (shrink)

Intuitively, there is a difference between knowledge and mere belief. Contemporary philosophical work on the nature of this difference has focused on scenarios known as “Gettier cases.” Designed as counterexamples to the classical theory that knowledge is justified true belief, these cases feature agents who arrive at true beliefs in ways which seem reasonable or justified, while nevertheless seeming to lack knowledge. Prior empirical investigation of these cases has raised questions about whether lay people generally share philosophers’ intuitions about these (...) cases, or whether lay intuitions vary depending on individual factors (e.g. ethnicity) or factors related to specific types of Gettier cases (e.g. cases that include apparent evidence). We report an experiment on lay attributions of knowledge and justification for a wide range of Gettier Cases and for a related class of controversial cases known as Skeptical Pressure cases, which are also thought by philosophers to elicit intuitive denials of knowledge. Although participants rated true beliefs in Gettier and Skeptical Pressure cases as being justified, they were significantly less likely to attribute knowledge for these cases than for matched true belief cases. This pattern of response was consistent across different variations of Gettier cases and did not vary by ethnicity or gender, although attributions of justification were found to be positively related to measures of empathy. These findings therefore suggest that across demographic groups, laypeople share similar epistemic concepts with philosophers, recognizing a difference between knowledge and justified true belief. (shrink)

When painter Fritz Janschka arrived from Vienna to teach at Byrn Mawr College in October, 1949, he entered a culture seemingly as alien to his art as one can imagine. Janschka is one of the co­founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, a group of painters who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna shortly after World War Two. The fantastic realists cultivated a precisely controlled craft informed by traditional methods and modernist sensibilities, incorporating collectively the entire (...) range of Western painting, past and present, in their attempts to come to grips with a shattered world. New York Abstract Expressionism and Viennese Fantastic Realism, two mid-twentieth century art movements, represent diametrically opposed ways of painting, yet both schools sprang out of surrealism. The Fantastic Realists were widely known in Europe and hardly known in America. Given the dominant abstractionist tendencies of post-World War Two art this is understandable. For these reasons Janschka’s openness to the techniques of the New York School in the early 1950s forms an unlikely meeting point of seemingly irreconcilable positions, one suggestive of possibilities for the meeting of abstraction and figuration, and more broadly, for addressing contemporary dehumanizing abstractionism, which I discuss in this essay. (shrink)

Two great problems of learning confront humanity: learning about the nature of the universe and about ourselves and other living things as a part of the universe, and learning how to become civilized or enlightened. The first problem was solved, in essence, in the 17th century, with the creation of modern science. But the second problem has not yet been solved. Solving the first problem without also solving the second puts us in a situation of great danger. All our current (...) global problems have arisen as a result. What we need to do, in response to this unprecedented crisis, is learn from our solution to the first problem how to solve the second one. This was the basic idea of the 18th century Enlightenment. Unfortunately, in carrying out this programme, the Enlightenment made three blunders, and it is this defective version of the Enlightenment programme, inherited from the past, that is still built into the institutional/intellectual structure of academic inquiry in the 21st century. In order to solve the second great problem of learning we need to correct the three blunders of the traditional Enlightenment. This involves changing the nature of social inquiry, so that social science becomes social methodology or social philosophy, concerned to help us build into social life the progress-achieving methods of aim-oriented rationality, arrived at by generalizing the progress-achieving methods of science. It also involves, more generally, bringing about a revolution in the nature of academic inquiry as a whole, so that it takes up its proper task of helping humanity learn how to become wiser by increasingly cooperatively rational means. The scientific task of improving knowledge and understanding of nature becomes a part of the broader task of improving global wisdom. The outcome would be what we so urgently need: a kind of inquiry rationally designed and devoted to helping us make progress towards a genuinely civilized world. We would succeed in doing what the Enlightenment tried but failed to do: learn from scientific progress how to go about making social progress towards as good a world as possible. (shrink)

The pragmatist faces the challenge of accounting for the possibility of rational conceptual change. Some pragmatists have tried to meet this challenge by appealing to Neurathian imagery—imagery that risks being too figurative to be helpful. I argue that we can develop a clearer view of what rationally constrained conceptual revision looks like for the pragmatist. I do so by examining the work of the pragmatist who in recent years has addressed this issue most directly, Richard Rorty. His attempts to solve (...) the puzzle ultimately fall short, but prove instructive. Rorty characterizes inter-language transitions in exclusively causal terms because, along with the very philosophical traditions he criticizes, he uncritically privileges the role of truth claims or assertions in our pragmatics. I show that if we instead broaden our pragmatic imaginations, we encounter various non-assertoric speech acts involved in speakers aiming to change how we make sense of our language and concepts. With these acts in view, we are able to arrive at a demystified view of rational conceptual change from a pragmatist perspective and identify future lines of inquiry for pragmatist projects. (shrink)

The standard of care in the United States favors stabilizing any adult who arrives in an emergency department after a failed suicide attempt, even if he appears decisionally capacitated and refuses life-sustaining treatment. I challenge this ubiquitous practice. Emergency clinicians generally have a moral obligation to err on the side of stabilizing even suicide attempters who refuse such interventions. This obligation reflects the fact that it is typically infeasible to determine these patients’ level of decisional capacitation—among other relevant information—in this (...) unique setting. Nevertheless, I argue, stabilizing suicide attempters over their objection sometimes violates a basic yet insufficiently appreciated right of theirs—the right against bodily invasion. In such cases, it is at least prima facie wrong to stabilize a patient who wants to die even if they lack a contrary advance directive or medical order and suffer from no terminal physical illness. (shrink)

Illicit arms availability in neighbourhoods are always a threat to external and internal security. Due to the geopolitics of Afghanistan, superpowers and non-state actors were active in that region for decades .Consequently, the FATA area of Pakistan and Adam Khel in particular became an oasis for arms Producers and traders as well as terrorists and drug traffickers. America and the former Soviet Union poured Afghanistan with the latest weapons from 1979 to 1989. A major part of that stockpile came to (...) the grey market of Darra Adam khel . Same thing happened when America and Nato arrived in Afghanistan after 9/11. Pakistan army and ISI a major and decisive player in this illicit arms trade which poses a big security concern for Indian policy makers. (shrink)

Schelling’s Principle of Art returns us to an ancient epic sensibility, laying the foundations for reversing the unrealistic ‘modern mythology’ arguably at the core of humanity’s ecological/existential crisis. This contribution examines how, by detailing his systematic approach to constructing art ‘in the particular’ (art-forms/works). ‘Particularity’ is subject only to the reason inherent in the potences (or consequences) of the affirmation of the whole unity (Principle). Hence Schelling’s ‘affirming principles’ determine boundary conditions for his ‘mythological categories’, revealing why their generalities inform (...) a ‘scientific sequence’ for explaining the features of the Formative and Verbal arts (ie., all artforms, ‘for all time’). Examining specific examples shows how Schelling resolves key difficulties (appearance/reality, form/non-form, intentionality, and purpose) for assessing art’s higher meaning-value directionality; why phenomenology is key to understanding it; and how we arrived at the problematic modern ‘epic’ reversal of ancient universalising focusing our attention on ‘efficient’ over ‘final’ causes in art-making/admiring. Explaining practical application of the Principle-in-action expands on why Schelling’s ‘dialectical aesthetics’ presents a hitherto unrecognised radical advance on Kant’s. My conclusion summarises what shifts in attendance to the art object Schelling’s system demands, and why his Philosophy of Art offers a suitable framework for collectively re-worlding the world. (shrink)

Reshaping our methodological research tools for adequately capturing injustice and domination has been a central aspiration of feminist philosophy and social epistemology in recent years. There has been an increasingly empirical turn in recent feminist and political theorization, engaging with case studies and the challenges arising from conducting research in solidarity with unequal partners. I argue that these challenges cannot be resolved by merely adopting a norm and stance of deference to those in the struggle for justice. To conduct philosophical (...) research in an engaged and solidaristic manner, I suggest that deference be supplemented by three methodological and normative principles: 1) epistemic humility, 2) accountability, and 3) co-producing knowledge. I situate these principles within contemporary philosophical work on solidarity, and show how they might help confront power imbalances and other methodological hazards that arise when conducting research in solidarity with others. I arrive at these principles in part by critically reflecting on my own attempt to conduct research in solidarity with women’s rights activists in Senegal. (shrink)

There seems to be a deep tension between two aspects of aesthetic appreciation. On the one hand, we care about getting things right. On the other hand, we demand autonomy. We want appreciators to arrive at their aesthetic judgments through their own cognitive efforts, rather than deferring to experts. These two demands seem to be in tension; after all, if we want to get the right judgments, we should defer to the judgments of experts. The best explanation, I suggest, is (...) that aesthetic appreciation is something like a game. When we play a game, we try to win. But often, winning isn’t the point; playing is. Aesthetic appreciation involves the same flipped motivational structure: we aim at the goal of correctness, but having correct judgments isn’t the point. The point is the engaged process of interpreting, investigating, and exploring the aesthetic object. Deferring to aesthetic testimony, then, makes the same mistake as looking up the answer to a puzzle, rather than solving it for oneself. The shortcut defeats the whole point. This suggests a new account of aesthetic value: the engagement account. The primary value of the activity of aesthetic appreciation lies in the process of trying to generate correct judgments, and not in having correct judgments. -/- *There is an audio version available: look for the Soundcloud link, below.*. (shrink)

It has often been noticed that conciliatory views of disagreement are "self-undermining" in a certain way: advocates of such views cannot consistently maintain them when other philosophers disagree. This leads to apparent problems of instability and even inconsistency. Does self-undermining, then, show conciliationism untenable? If so, the untenablity would extend not only to almost all views of disagreement, but to a wide range of other views supporting what one might call epistemic modesty: roughly, the idea that getting evidence that one (...) has made an epistemic error in arriving at one’s opinion may require adjusting that opinion. This paper argues that the phenomenon of self-undermining does not disclose any defect in views mandating epistemic modesty. Instead, it highlights an uncomfortable but natural consequence of reflecting on one's own possible epistemic imperfections, a sort of reflection that tends to cause epistemic ideals to conflict. (shrink)

What is a normative reason for acting? In this paper, I introduce and defend a novel answer to this question. The starting-point is the view that reasons are right-makers. By exploring difficulties facing it, I arrive at an alternative, according to which reasons are evidence of respects in which it is right to perform an act, for example, that it keeps a promise. This is similar to the proposal that reasons for a person to act are evidence that she ought (...) to do so; however, as I explain, it differs from that proposal in two significant ways. As a result, I argue, the evidence-based account of reasons I advance shares the advantages of its predecessor while avoiding many of the difficulties facing it. (shrink)

In non‐literal uses of language, the content an utterance communicates differs from its literal truth conditions. Loose talk is one example of non‐literal language use (amongst many others). For example, what a loose utterance of (1) communicates differs from what it literally expresses: (1) Lena arrived at 9 o'clock. Loose talk is interesting (or so I will argue). It has certain distinctive features which raise important questions about the connection between literal and non‐literal language use. This paper aims to (i.) (...) introduce a range of novel data demonstrating certain overlooked features of loose talk, and (ii.) develop a new theory of the phenomenon which accounts for these data. In particular, this theory is motivated by the need to explain minimal pairs such as (2)-(3): (2) Lena arrived at 9 o'clock, but she did not arrive at 9 o'clock exactly. (3) ?? Lena did not arrive at 9 o'clock exactly, but she arrived at 9 o'clock. (2) and (3) agree in their truth conditions. Yet they differ in felicity. As such, they constitute a problem for any account which hopes to predict the acceptability of the loose use of a sentence from its truth conditions and the context of utterance alone. Instead, it will be argued, to explain loose talk phenomena we must posit an additional layer of meaning outstripping truth conditions. This layer of meaning is shown to exhibit a range of properties, all of which point to its being semantically encoded. Thus, if correct, the theory provides a new example of how semantic meaning must extend beyond literal, truth‐conditional content. (shrink)

In the concept of European citizenship, public and international law intersect. The unity of the European polity results from the interplay between national and European loyalties. Citizens’ allegiance to the European polity depends on how much they see the polity’s identity as theirs. Foundational ideals that shaped the European project’s identity included social reconciliation and peaceful coexistence, economic reconstruction and widespread prosperity, and the creation of supranational structures to rein in nationalism. A broad cultural consensus underlay the first impulse for (...) integration. Europeans had little trouble giving explicit or tacit allegiance to such a project, which resulted in an unparalleled success. However, roughly 60 years and 20 Member States later, social integration is being challenged as immigrants with diverse cultural backgrounds arrive, while far-right political parties surge in reaction; economic integration is confronted with a faltering euro and countries struggling to meet financial commitments; and political integration weakens as the EU seems to fail the democratic test. Cultural assumptions are no longer shared by all. Allegiance to today’s EU is problematic for the ordinary European citizen. This paper submits that careful attention to the spirit of the foundational ideals sheds light on how the present problems as well as future integration could and should be approached. (shrink)

In his Posterior Analytics Aristotle confronted a problem that threatened his vision of scientific knowledge as an axiomatic system: if scientific knowledge is demonstrative in character, and if the axioms of a science cannot themselves be demonstrated, then the most basic of all scientific principles will remain unknown. In the famous concluding chapter of this work (II 19), he claimed to solve this problem by distinguishing two kinds of knowledge: we cannot have epistêmê of the first principles, but we can (...) have nous of them. This ‘solution’ has struck many students of his thought as hopelessly ad hoc and unpersuasive. And nowhere is Aristotle less persuasive than when he appeals to a faculty of intuition or a priori insight which arrives on the scene precisely when it is most needed. I defend Aristotle’s account by showing how nous is not properly characterized as a faculty of intuition which operates independently of sense experience. Rather, nous is a kind of knowledge that is available to us whenever our mind advances from the perception of particular individuals to grasp the relevant universal concept or general principle. (shrink)

This essay critically assesses Roman Ingarden’s 1915 review of the second edition of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations. I elucidate and critique Ingarden’s analysis of the differences between the 1901 first edition and the 1913 second edition. I specifically examine three tenets of Ingarden’s interpretation. First, I demonstrate that Ingarden correctly denounces Husserl’s claim that he only engages in an eidetic study of consciousness in 1913, as Husserl was already performing eidetic analyses in 1901. Second, I show that Ingarden is misguided, (...) when he asserts that Husserl had fully transformed his philosophy into a transcendental idealism in the second edition. While Husserl does appear to adopt a transcendental phenomenology by asserting–in his programmatic claims–that the intentional content and object are now included in his domain of research, he does not alter his actual descriptions of the intentional relationship in any pertinent manner. Third, I show Ingarden correctly predicts many of the insights Husserl would arrive at about logic in his late philosophy. This analysis augments current readings of the evolution of Ingarden’s philosophy, by more closely examining the development of his largely neglected early thought. I execute this critical assessment by drawing both from Husserl’s later writings and from recent literature on the Investigations. By doing so, I hope to additionally demonstrate how research on the Investigations has matured in the one hundred years since the release of that text, while also presenting my own views concerning these difficult interpretative issues. (shrink)

In this chapter, I examine how Dewey circumnavigated debates between empiricists and a priorists by showing that active bodies can perform integrative operations traditionally attributed to “inner” mechanisms, and how he thereby realized developments at which the artificial intelligence, robotics and cognitive science communities only later arrived. Some of his ideas about experience being constituted through skills actively deployed in cultural settings were inspired by ancient Greek sources. Thus in some of his more radical moments, Dewey refined rather than invented (...) the wheel, and I suggest that prominent embodiment figures have done the same, Dewey having anticipated them, particularly Noë and his version of enactivism. I urge that cognitive science may progress into relatively unexplored territory by traveling Dewey’s historically sensitive path. (shrink)

It is astonishing that we humans are able to have, act on and express moral beliefs. This dissertation aims to provide a better philosophical understanding of why and how this is possible especially when we assume metaethical expressivism. Metaethical expressivism is the combination of expressivism and noncognitivism. Expressivism is the view that the meaning of a sentence is explained by the mental state it is conventionally used to express. Noncognitivism is the view that the mental state expressed by a moral (...) sentence is a noncognitive, desire-like state. The central question of this dissertation is this: "How can metaethical expressivists explain that we are able to express moral beliefs?" The shortest answer this dissertation will give is the following: "by becoming `dispositional expressivists´." Dispositional expressivists hold that moral beliefs are dispositions to be in certain mental states that resemble desires. More precisely, a central thesis of this study is that to hold a moral belief is to be disposed to be in a desire-like, noncognitive state where this state has some specific structure. This dissertation arrives at and justifies this thesis by making a number of steps. It starts with preparing the ground by developing a general theory of what it is for a sentence to express a mental state. Roughly, this theory states that for a sentence to express a mental state is for that sentence to be conventionally used to perform a speech act which counts as sincere only if the user or speaker is in that mental state. This theory of expressing satisfies all the constraints that must be satisfied for it to be compatible with the purposes of metaethical expressivism. The next step is to provide a solution to the most notorious semantic problem confronting metaethical expressivism, the problem of explaining how sentences containing moral words can have compositional meaning and stand in logical relations also known as the Frege-Geach or embedding problem. Building on the research of Mark Schroeder, a new expressivist semantics, called `Attitude Semantics´, will be developed for a first-order language. The motivating idea underlying attitude semantics is that expressivists can avoid the problematic feature of so-called `biforcation´ if they treat the structures of the mental states expressed by moral sentences as well as that expressed by non-moral sentences as being isomorphic. In order to give those structures a philosophically interesting interpretation, it will be suggested that we treat sentences as expressing dispositional states. As a toy example we will treat the sentence `murder is wrong´ as expressing the disposition to be for blaming for murder. After dealing with the Frege-Geach problem, I turn to the metaethical expressivists' project of quasi-realism. Two major goals of this project are to explain how moral sentence can be truth-apt and how the states expressed by them can be regarded as moral beliefs. In order to establish those goals I critically examine a number of theories of truth-aptness by providing counterexamples to them. I then present my own theory which says that a sentence is truth-apt iff and because there is a conventional way to use it to express a belief. What is new about this theory is that it treats expressing a belief as being explanatorily more basic than being truth-apt. Belief, according to this theory, explains truth-aptness, not vice versa. This has the important consequence that it shows that what I call the `orthodox strategy´ of quasi-realists is mistaken and needs to be inverted: expressivists must `earn the right´ to moral belief before they can establish that moral sentences are truth-apt, and not the other way round. The second part of this dissertation is then concerned with the question of what it is to hold a moral belief and how they can figure in rational reasoning. In short: it is concerned with earning the right to moral belief. After discussing the major problems confronting a noncognitivist theory of belief, most importantly what I call the `tightrope problem´, I argue for a dispositional form of noncognitivism about moral belief that combines elements from Eric Schwitzgebel's dispositionalism about belief and Sebastian Köhler's `conceptual role expressivism´. This dispositional noncognitivism perfectly matches and justifies the dispositionalist interpretation of the expressivist semantics developed before. In order to fully earn the right to moral belief, however, metaethical expressivists must also deal with several epistemological objections concerning the rationality of moral belief. The first objection I deal with comes from Derek Baker and is directed against Mark Schroeder's specific development of expressivism. I deal with this objection because my own theory bears close resemblance to Schroeder's theory and so it might be worried that it confronts the same issues. Fortunately, we will see that Baker's objection rest on a number of mistaken assumptions and so neither applies to Schroeder's expressivism nor to the version which I defend in this study. The other epistemological objection to metaethical expressivism I deal with is Cian Dorr's famous wishful-thinking objection. In contrast to previous replies to this objection I attack it by directly questioning the central assumption on which it rests, namely that reasoners can never be justified in basing a factual belief on a desire-like state. I argue that this is false, and that under certain conditions reasoning from desire-like mental states to factual beliefs is justified. My argument shows that even if holding a moral belief is being in a desire-like noncognitive state, basing factual belief on a moral belief can give one an epistemic reason for the factual belief. Hence, even if moral thoughts are wishes, moral thinking is not wishful thinking. I take my arguments to earn the dispositional expressivist the right to moral belief. By the previously defended theory of truth-aptness in terms of belief, this allows the dispositional expressivists to conclude that moral sentences are also truth-apt. This finishes the quasi-realist project of this dissertation. In the last part of this dissertation I switch gears and present two unnoted problems for metaethical expressivists having to do with explaining moral motivation. Both arguments are surprisingly simple. The first one is this: if motivation requires a belief as well as a desire (Humeanism), and moral judgments motivate by themselves (internalism), then moral judgments cannot be desires only. If this argument is sound, it shows that the famous `motivation argument´ not only entails the falsity of cognitivism, but also the falsity of noncognitivism. The second argument is the following: moral judgments when combined with suitable external desires motivate to act (externalism), but if motivation requires belief as well as desire (Humeanism), then moral judgments cannot be desires only. I discuss several ways in which noncognitivists might want to deal with those problems, but leave it as an open question whether those solutions will ultimately be viable. Overall, this dissertation makes serious contributions to the research program of metaethical expressivism. It makes proposals for how to solve a number of notorious problems, such as the Frege-Geach problem in semantics and the wishful-thinking problem in epistemology. Besides this, however, it also raises two new problems for metaethical expressivism in the philosophy of action. For those reasons this dissertation will be of interest for anyone who wants to defend or criticize expressivism in metaethics, and more generally, anyone who wants to better understand our astonishing ability to express moral beliefs. (shrink)

This work is the transcript of a theological dialogue I had with ChatGPT that spanned a couple of days. I began it merely out of curiosity over how ChatGPT might respond to questions and challenges I posed. As it progressed, I became increasingly impressed with the nuance, depth, and relevance of its responses. The dialogue became, for me, something of a contemplative exercise. I still don’t know quite how to understand the ability of generative A.I. to respond with such (apparent) (...) understanding and even insight. -/- I’ve decided to post this dialogue, not only because of the puzzle it poses concerning A.I, but even more, because I believe that the theological conclusions ‘we’ arrived at have real merit. -/- In the end, the theological views expressed here echo those that I’ve expressed in other works of mine, but the expression of these views are enhanced by the way ChatGPT picks up on them, rephrases them, elaborates upon them, and often places them in the context of the classical theological tradition. -/- I might add that I have been an A.I. skeptic for some time now, concerned over the potential dangers of A.I. in general. But this dialogue, anyway, reveals its potential use as a vehicle for reflection, even profound reflection. -/- . (shrink)

Focusing on Descartes’ conclusion in the second Meditation that bodies are strictly perceived through the intellect alone, I contextualize, outline, and elucidate Descartes’ first two Meditations. I begin with a summary of key themes from the first Meditation and outline the reasons for Descartes’ radical doubt. I then provide a detailed explication of Descartes’ argumentitive journey in the second meditation, wherein Descartes arrives at the hypothesis that he is a thinking thing, and demonstrates the plausibility of this hypothesis by scrutinizing (...) a piece of wax until he is able to clearly and distinctly perceive it. I elaborate on Descartes’ conclusion that bodies are perceived through the intellect alone by discussing how abstraction can be used to understand any external body clearly and distinctly, before explaining the overall significance of the conclusion as an affirmation of Descartes’ existence, which gives him profound knowledge of the self. (shrink)

A child arrives as a new world because in her and with her we feel that the whole world can start over. But that is not the only reason. A child also arrives as a new world because her arrival tells us what, being so simple, we had almost forgotten: that the world is not just old and unquestionable. The child doesn’t let us be indif-ferent; she breaks with conformity and arrives as hope, reeking of the unpredictable. Of questions. (...) A similar arrival to that of a child is that of certain childlike ideas, such as the idea offered by Matthew Lipman when he created “philosophy for children.” We cele-brate his childlike, daring, irreverent, inquiring character, commemorating his birth nearly 50 years ago. With this childlike idea, a new world began—or at least it be-came possible to start—in worlds which were already a little old and stuck in con-formity. When those in institutionalized philosophy and education heard about the audacity of welcoming children among their reputable interlocutors in dialogue and thought, they frowned and turned up their noses. Philosophy for children? How come? Childhood in philosophy? (shrink)

Should we believe our controversial philosophical views? Recently, several authors have argued from broadly conciliationist premises that we should not. If they are right, we philosophers face a dilemma: If we believe our views, we are irrational. If we do not, we are not sincere in holding them. This paper offers a way out, proposing an attitude we can rationally take toward our views that can support sincerity of the appropriate sort. We should arrive at our views via a certain (...) sort of ‘insulated’ reasoning – that is, reasoning that involves setting aside certain higher-order worries, such as those provided by disagreement – when we investigate philosophical questions. (shrink)

Can quite different values be rationally weighed against one another? Can the value of one thing always be ranked as greater than, equal to, or less than the value of something else? If the answer to these questions is no, then in what areas do we find commensurability and comparability unavailable? And what are the implications for moral and legal decision making? This book struggles with these questions, and arrives at distinctly different answers.".