Abstract: If anger is the emotion of injustice, and if most injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? Despite the question my task is not to account for the lack of attention to anger in epistemic injustice discussions. Instead, I argue that a particular texture of transformative anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice. I begin by making visible the anger that saturates the silences (...) that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious: silencing practices produce angry experiences. I focus on tone policing and tone vigilance to illustrate the relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. Next, I use María Lugones’s pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to their histories and felt textures. The final section draws on feminist scholarship about the transformative power of angry knowledge to suggest how it might serve as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a new interpretation of Stoic ontology. I aim to explain the nature of, and relations between, (i) the fundamental items of their physics, bodies; (ii) the incorporeal items about which they theorized no less; and (iii) universals, towards which the Stoic attitude seems to be a bizarre mixture of realism and anti-realism. In the first half of the paper I provide a new model to explain the relationship between those items in (i) and (ii). This (...) model clears up several problems in Stoicism and gives a precise answer to the question of how bodies and incorporeals differ in their mode of being. The second half of the paper considers the vexed issue of the status of those items in (iii), Stoic universals. (shrink)

In this article, we describe what cryptocurrency is, how it works, and how it relates to familiar conceptions of and questions about money. We then show how normative questions about monetary policy find new expression in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. These questions can play a role in addressing not just what money is, but what it should be. A guiding theme in our discussion is that progress here requires a mixed approach that integrates philosophical tools with the purely technical results (...) of disciplines like computer science and economics. Note: this article is the first entry within a two-part sequence on the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of Cryptocurrency. (shrink)

Alison Bailey’s The Weight of Whiteness: A Feminist Engagement with Privilege, Race, and Ignorance examines how whiteness misshapes our humanity, measuring the weight of whiteness in terms of its costs and losses to collective humanity. People of color feel the weight of whiteness daily. The resistant habits of whiteness and its attendant privileges, however, make it difficult for white people to feel the damage. White people are more comfortable thinking about white supremacy in terms of what privilege does for (...) them, rather than feeling what it does to them. The first half of the book focuses on the overexposed side of white privilege, the side that works to make the invisible and intangible structures of power more visible and tangible. Bailey discusses the importance of understanding privileges intersectionally, the ignorance-preserving habits of “white talk,” and how privilege and ignorance circulate in educational settings. The second part invites white readers to explore the underexposed side of white dominance, the weightless side that they would rather not feel. The final chapters are powerfully autobiographical. Bailey engages readers with a deeply personal account of what it means to hold space with the painful weight of whiteness in her own life. She also offers a moving account of medicinal genealogies, which helps to engage the weight she inherits from her settler colonial ancestors. The book illustrates how the gravitational pull of white ignorance and comfort are stronger than the clean pain required for collective liberation. The stakes are high: Failure to hold the weight of whiteness ensures that white people will continue to blow the weight of historical trauma through communities of color. -/- All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher. -/- -/- . (shrink)

I examine two startling claims attributed to some philosophers associated with Megara on the Isthmus of Corinth, namely: Ml. Something possesses a capacity at t if and only if it is exercising that capacity at t. M2. One can speak of a thing only by using its own proper A6yor;. In what follows, I will call the conjunction of Ml and M2 'Megaricism' .1 The lit­ erature on ancient philosophy contains several valuable discussions of Ml and M2 taken individually .2 (...) But there is no discussion of them together, much less of their logical relations. I intend to remedy that lack, and to show why it is a lack worth remedying. My aims are both philosophical and historical. Inevitably, in saying anything new and interesting about Megaric views, I will be adopting assumptions scarcely free from controversy, and indulging in quite a bit of charitable recon­ struction. But the resulting picture is of considerable interest. For it explains why, although Ml and M2 seem to have little to do with one another, it is in fact small wonder that anyone who held one would hold the other, for, as I attempt to show, they entail each other. It explains why the Megarics are associated in the primary literature with the names of such diverse philosophical ancestors as Parmenides and Protagoras. And it explains why, although they are both false, Ml and M2 were claims taken seriously by both Plato and Aristotle, who in developing their own views on modality and language saw reason to mention Megaricism, and to argue against it. (shrink)

Pronouns often convey information about a person’s social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender non-binary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode and why. Across four studies, participants were asked to evaluate different (...) types of real and hypothetical pronouns, including binary gender pronouns, race pronouns, and identity-neutral pronouns. We sampled participants from two languages with different pronoun systems: English (N = 1,120) and Turkish (N = 260). English pronouns commonly denote binary gender (e.g., he for men), whereas Turkish pronouns are identity-neutral (e.g., o for anyone). Participants’ reasoning about pronouns reflected both a familiarity preference (i.e., participants preferred the pronoun type used in their language) and—critically—participants’ social ideologies. In both language contexts, participants’ ideological beliefs that social groups are inherently distinct (essentialism) and should be hierarchal (social dominance orientation) predicted relatively greater endorsement of binary gender pronouns and race pronouns. A preregistered experimental study with an English-speaking sample showed that the relationship between ideology and pronoun endorsement is causal: Ideologies shape attitudes toward pronouns. Together, the present research contributes to linguistic and psychological theories concerning how people reason about language and informs policy-relevant questions about whether and how to implement language changes for social purposes. (shrink)

Classrooms are unlevel knowing fields, contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are produced and circulate with equal vigor, and where members of dominant groups are accustomed to having an epistemic home-terrain advantage. My project focuses on one form of resistance that regularly surfaces in discussions with social-justice content. Privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when asked to consider both the lived and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups experience (...) daily. I argue that this dominant form of resistance is neither an expression of skepticism nor a critical-thinking practice. I suggest that standard philosophical engagements with these expressions of resistance are incapable of tracking the harms of privilege-preserving epistemic pushback. I recommend treating this pushback as a “shadow text,” that is, as a text that runs alongside the readings in ways that offer no epistemic friction. I offer this as one critical philosophical practice for making students mindful of the ways they contribute to the circulation of ignorance and epistemic violence during the course of their discussions. (shrink)

This is a creative-commons licensed guide. Its purpose is to provide students with an understanding of some ways in which they might contribute to philosophical conversation. It is also available for free use via my website.

Many say that ontological disputes are defective because they are unimportant or without substance. In this paper, we defend ontological disputes from the charge, with a special focus on disputes over the existence of composite objects. Disputes over the existence of composite objects, we argue, have a number of substantive implications across a variety of topics in metaphysics, science, philosophical theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Since the disputes over the existence of composite objects have these substantive implications, they are (...) themselves substantive. (shrink)

According to contemporary ‘process ontology’, organisms are best conceptualised as spatio-temporally extended entities whose mereological composition is fundamentally contingent and whose essence consists in changeability. In contrast to the Aristotelian precepts of classical ‘substance ontology’, from the four-dimensional perspective of this framework, the identity of an organism is grounded not in certain collections of privileged properties, or features which it could not fail to possess, but in the succession of diachronic relations by which it persists, or ‘perdures’ as one entity (...) over time. In this paper, I offer a novel defence of substance ontology by arguing that the coherency and plausibility of the radical reconceptualisation of organisms proffered by process ontology ultimately depends upon its making use of the ‘substantial’ principles it purports to replace. (shrink)

This Paper Offers A New Interpretation of Phaedo 96a–103a. Plato has devoted the dialogue up to this point to a series of arguments for the claim that the soul is immortal. However, one of the characters, Cebes, insists that so far nothing more has been established than that the soul is durable, divine, and in existence before the incarnation of birth. What is needed is something more ambitious: a proof that the soul is not such as to pass out of (...) existence. According to Socrates’s initial response to Cebes at 95e8–96a1, giving such a demonstration requires a thorough investigation into “the reason for coming to be and passing away in general” (ὅλως γὰϱ δεῖ πεϱὶ γενέσεως ϰαὶ Φθοϱᾶς τὴν αἰτίαν διαπϱαγματεύσασθαι .. (shrink)

My engagement with Dotson’s essay begins with an overview of first- and second-order epistemic exclusions. I develop the concept of an "unlevel knowing field." I use examples from the epistemic injustice literature, and some of my own, to highlight the important distinction she makes between reducible and irreducible forms of epistemic oppression. Next, I turn my attention to her account of third-order epistemic exclusions. I offer a brief explanation of why her sketch of at this level makes an important contribution (...) to the literature on epistemic injustice. In closing I suggest that Dotson’s account of third-order epistemic exclusions has a cognitive bend that limits the resources she might use for bringing about change, and suggest opening up the conversation to include affective, aesthetic or mystical resources. (shrink)

Social justice demands that we attend carefully to the epistemic terrains we inhabit as well as to the epistemic resources we summon to make our lived experiences tangible to one another. Not all epistemic terrains are hospitable—colonial projects landscaped a good portion of our epistemic terrain long before present generations moved across it. There is no shared epistemicterra firma,no level epistemic common ground where knowers share credibility and where a diversity of hermeneutical resources play together happily. Knowers engage one another (...) on a politically saturated,unlevel knowing fieldwhere members of dominant groups work to forcibly maintain their epistemic home-terrain advantage. I use the metaphor of the unlevel knowing field to capture these oppressive epistemic structures. The unlevel knowing field is a hungry place where all knowledge that fails to nurture and sustain dominant ways knowing risks being dragged onto the dominator's epistemic home turf to be mined, coopted, consumed, or destroyed. Knowledge and willful ignorance circulate with equal vigor in this hungry world. From the standpoint of oppressed/resisting peoples, the unlevel knowing field is a minefield, an epistemic twilight zone, which must be traversed with considerable care and endless attention. The harms epistemic injustice produces are not disembodied harms. Repeated acts of injustice weather our bodies, dull our minds, weaken our hearts, and traumatize the spirit of our communities. They create public-health precarities and invite mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual illness into our being. Epistemic oppression is a cruel thief. It is disorienting, exhausting, and deadly. It triggers anger, anxiety, depression, and resistance. It steals our time, energy, and attention away from more beautiful things. (shrink)

In the Republic Plato contrasts dialectic with mathematics on the grounds that the former but not the latter gives justifications of some kind for its hypotheses, pursuing this process until it reaches ‘an unhypothetical principle’. But which principles are unhypothetical, and why, is rather dark. One reason for this is the scarcity of forms of that precious word, ‘unhypothetical’ (aνυπoθετος), used only twice by Plato (Rep. 510 b 7, 511 b 6) and just once by Aristotle (Metaph. 1005B14). But that (...) very scarcity also suggests the intriguing possibility that Aristotle has Plato’s text in mind when he uses the word, so we might expect to understand Plato better by grasping how Aristotle took him. That is a notoriously defeasible assumption since plenty of modern accounts of Plato want to save him from Aristotle’s numerous critiques, and hence imply that the master of them that know frequently missed the point when it came to his own master. But surely we can be more confident that Aristotle will give us access to Plato when it appears not merely that he is dealing with the same topic, but using the same rare vocabulary to boot. Hence the understandable temptation to turn to Metaphysics Γ for help in identifying Platonic unhypothetical principles. I shall argue that Aristotle is indeed thinking of Plato’s text when he uses the word for ‘unhypothetical’, and further that what is explicitly an unhypothetical principle for Aristotle might well have been one for Plato too. But later I shall claim that their joint use of a much more common word in the same philosophical context is either coincidence or misunderstanding on Aristotle’s part, for he must mean something different by it from what Plato means. (shrink)

My project is to explain why the question ‘How does it feel to be a white problem?’ cannot be answered in the fluttering grammar of white talk. The whiteness of white talk lies not only in its having emerged from white mouths, but also in its evasiveness—in its attempt to suppress fear and anxiety, and its consequential [if unintended] reinscription and legitimation of racist oppression. I White talk is designed, indeed scripted, for the purposes of evading, rejecting, and remaining ignorant (...) about the injustices that flow from whiteness and its attendant privileges. I want to suggest a new point of entry—a way to flip the script, so to speak. -/- I begin with some observations about the basic advantages and disadvantages of using white talk as a route into the white problem. My account develops an expanded version of Alice MacIntyre’s definition of white talk that is attentive to the racialized bodily scripts that accompany white talk. I argue that white talk persists because it has an enduring and powerful moral, ontological, and epistemic pay off for white folks. I explore each payoff with an eye towards clarifying how white talk functions to maintain the illusion that we are invulnerable beings. Next, I pause to reply to the popular objection that this particular critique of white talk silences white people in conversations on race. If we cannot address the question ‘how does it feel to be a white problem’ in the fluttering grammar of white talk, then how shall we begin? In closing, I suggest that we might reduce fluttering by replacing white talk with a discourse of vulnerability, where vulnerability is defined not as weakness, but as a condition for potential. I offer some brief guidelines for how we might start this conversation. (shrink)

This chapter weighs a challenge to the attractive notion that by enabling empathy, fiction affords wide-ranging knowledge of what others’ experiences are like. It is commonly held that ‘seeing the world through others’ eyes’ often requires the empathizer to undergo an imaginative shift in sensibility, and we might naturally think that fiction helps us to effect that shift. However, some recent work on empathy and imagination encourages the conclusion that we are actually rigidly restricted to our own sensibilities even in (...) the wildest flights of imagination great literature can inspire. Drawing on the work of the novelist Zadie Smith, the chapter argues that while our imaginative capacities are not entirely unconstrained by our sensibilities, fiction can still help us to learn about a wide range of human experiences, including the experiences of people whose sensibilities substantially diverge from our own. Notably, fiction can work on our patterns of attention in such a way that we become temporarily ‘not ourselves.’. (shrink)

Terence Horgan, George Graham and John Tienson argue that some intentional content is constitutively determined by phenomenology alone. We argue that this would require a certain kind of covariation of phenomenal states and intentional states that is not established by Horgan, Tienson and Graham’s arguments. We make the case that there is inadequate reason to think phenomenology determines perceptual belief, and that there is reason to doubt that phenomenology determines any species of non-perceptual intentionality. We also raise worries about the (...) capacity of phenomenology to map onto intentionality in a way that would be appropriate for any determiner of content/fixer of truth conditions. (shrink)

As there is currently a neo-Aristotelian revival currently taking place within contemporary metaphysics and dispositions, or causal powers are now being routinely utilised in theories of causality and modality, more attention is beginning to be paid to a central Aristotelian concern: the metaphysics of substantial unity, and the doctrine of hylomorphism. In this paper, I distinguish two strands of hylomorphism present in the contemporary literature and argue that not only does each engender unique conceptual difficulties, but neither adequately captures the (...) metaphysics of Aristotelian hylomorphism. Thus both strands of contemporary hylomorphism, I argue, fundamentally misunderstand what substantial unity amounts to in the hylomorphic framework – namely, the metaphysical inseparability of matter and form. (shrink)

Side effects are ubiquitous in medicine and they often play a role in treatment decisions for patients and clinicians alike. Philosophers and health researchers often use side effects to illustrate issues with contemporary medical research and practice. However, technical definitions of ‘side effect’ differ among health authorities. Thus, determining the side effects of an intervention can differ depending on whose definition we assume. Here I review some of the common definitions of side effect and highlight their issues. In response, I (...) offer an account of side effects as jointly (i) unintended and (ii) effects due to the causal capacities or invariances of an intervention. I discuss (i) by examining the intentions or reasons behind therapeutic interventions, and I discuss (ii) by appealing to a manipulationist model of causation. The analysis here highlights that side effects are conceptually distinct from related outcomes like adverse events, adverse drug reactions, and placebo effects. The analysis also allows for reflection on the utility of ‘side effect’ as a technical term in medical research and practice. (shrink)

George Yancy's interview with Alison Bailey addresses what it means for Whites to be "privilege-cognizant but metaphysically comfortable.” .

Alors que les phénoménologues prétendent avoir dépassé le solipsisme, la plupart n’ont en fait que repousser les frontières de l’intersubjectivité des individus humains aux individus des autres espèces. Pourtant, Husserl reconnaît l’existence d’une intersubjectivité interspécifique, c’est-à-dire d’une intersubjectivité dépassant les limites de l’espèce. Il va même jusqu’à affirmer qu’on comprend parfois mieux un animal familier qu’un humain étranger. Toutefois, même s’il admet que plusieurs animaux sont capables d’une vie de conscience subjective et qu’ils vivent dans un monde de sens partagé, (...) il ne les considère pas comme des « personnes » selon sa conception exigeante de la « personne » associée à la rationalité, à la maturité, la normalité et l’historicité. Reste qu’être une « personne », en son sens le plus primordial – et plus décisif puisque c’est celui sur lequel s’édifient des conceptions politiques,juridiques et éthiques – signifie simplement être le sujet d’un monde environnant, d’un monde commun et d’une existence biographique. Distinguer deux sens du concept de personne permet de reconnaître que les animaux ont part à la transcendantalité, qu’ils ne sont pas simplement en vie mais ont une vie à la fois biographique et communautaire, même s’ils ne sont pas en mesure de réfléchir à cette vie de conscience qui est la leur pour considérer leur place dans l’enchaînement des générations et pour adopter ce que Husserl appelle une « vocation ». La phénoménologie husserlienne des anomalies permet ainsi de reconnaître que les animaux ressortissent bien de la figure d’autrui, qu’ils sont des alter ego sujets d’une vie de conscience, et qu’à ce titre ils participent pleinement, comme les enfants, les fous et les étrangers, à la co-constitution du monde de l’esprit. (shrink)

According to the proponents of Developmental Systems Theory and the Causal Parity Thesis, the privileging of the genome as “first among equals” with respect to the development of phenotypic traits is more a reflection of our own heuristic prejudice than of ontology - the underlying causal structures responsible for that specified development no more single out the genome as primary than they do other broadly “environmental” factors. Parting with the methodology of the popular responses to the Thesis, this paper offers (...) a novel criterion for ‘causal primacy’, one that is grounded in the ontology of the unique causal role of dispositional properties. This paper argues that, if the genome is conceptualised as realising dispositional properties that are “directed toward” phenotypic traits, the parity of ‘causal roles’ between genetic and extra-genetic factors is no longer apparent, and further, that the causal primacy of the genome is both plausible and defensible. (shrink)

Though the realm of biology has long been under the philosophical rule of the mechanistic magisterium, recent years have seen a surprisingly steady rise in the usurping prowess of process ontology. According to its proponents, theoretical advances in the contemporary science of evo-devo have afforded that ontology a particularly powerful claim to the throne: in that increasingly empirically confirmed discipline, emergently autonomous, higher-order entities are the reigning explanantia. If we are to accept the election of evo-devo as our best conceptualisation (...) of the biological realm with metaphysical rigour, must we depose our mechanistic ontology for failing to properly “carve at the joints” of organisms? In this paper, I challenge the legitimacy of that claim: not only can the theoretical benefits offered by a process ontology be had without it, they cannot be sufficiently grounded without the metaphysical underpinning of the very mechanisms which processes purport to replace. The biological realm, I argue, remains one best understood as under the governance of mechanistic principles. (shrink)

It is no accident that white privilege designed to be both be invisible and weightless to white people. Alison Bailey’s “On White Privilege and Anesthesia: Why Does Peggy McIntosh’s Knapsack Feel Weightless?” extends a weighty invitation white readers to complete the unpacking task McIntosh (1988) began when she compared white privilege to an “invisible and weightless knapsack.” McIntosh focuses primarily making white privilege visible to white people. Bailey’s project continues the conversation by extending a ‘weighty invitation’ to white (...) readers to explore why the metaphorical knapsack, despite the weight of its contents, feels weightless. Here’s the short answer. The knapsack only feels weightless because white people have become anesthetized us to our own brokenness. We are more comfortable considering what white privilege does for us than what it does to us. People of color feel the weight of whiteness every day. The weighty invitation invites white readers to become sensitive to our own insensitivity. To do this Bailey (1) explores white resistance to unpacking the weight; (2) people of color’s testimonies to the daily impact of the weight on their bodies; and (3) how the anesthesia of white privilege distorts our humanity. The article concludes with a McIntosh style list of that the anesthesia of privilege distorts white people’s humanity. (shrink)

The advent of contemporary evolutionary theory ushered in the eventual decline of Aristotelian Essentialism (Æ) – for it is widely assumed that essence does not, and cannot have any proper place in the age of evolution. This paper argues that this assumption is a mistake: if Æ can be suitably evolved, it need not face extinction. In it, I claim that if that theory’s fundamental ontology consists of dispositional properties, and if its characteristic metaphysical machinery is interpreted within the framework (...) of contemporary evolutionary developmental biology, an evolved essentialism is available. The reformulated theory of Æ offered in this paper not only fails to fall prey to the typical collection of criticisms, but is also independently both theoretically and empirically plausible. The paper contends that, properly understood, essence belongs in the age of evolution. (shrink)

Although they are continually compositionally reconstituted and reconfigured, organisms nonetheless persist as ontologically unified beings over time – but in virtue of what? A common answer is: in virtue of their continued possession of the capacity for morphological invariance which persists through, and in spite of, their mereological alteration. While we acknowledge that organisms‟ capacity for the “stability of form” – homeostasis - is an important aspect of their diachronic unity, we argue that this capacity is derived from, and grounded (...) in a more primitive one – namely, the homeodynamic capacity for the “specified variation of form”. In introducing a novel type of causal power – a „structural power‟ – we claim that it is the persistence of their dynamic potential to produce a specified series of structurally adaptive morphologies which grounds organisms‟ privileged status as metaphysically “one over many” over time. (shrink)

In this paper, I use a comparative analysis of mysticism in Zen and the Abrahamic faiths to formulate a phenomenological account of mysticism “as such.” I argue that, while Zen Buddhism is distinct from other forms of mystical experience in important ways, it can still be fit into a general phenomenological category of mystical experience. First, I explicate the phenomenological accounts of mysticism provided by Anthony Steinbock and Angela Bello. Second, I offer an account of Zen mysticism which both coheres (...) with and problematizes these accounts, arguing that Zen demonstrates the inadequacy of these accounts as descriptions of mysticism as a universal religious category. Lastly, I use this investigation to propose that Zen mysticism does generally cohere with the mystical experiences of other religions, but only if we devise a new formula for speaking phenomenologically about mystical experience as such which captures this phenomenon in all of its manifestations. (shrink)

Although contemporary metaphysics has recently undergone a neo-Aristotelian revival wherein dispositions, or capacities are now commonplace in empirically grounded ontologies, being routinely utilised in theories of causality and modality, a central Aristotelian concept has yet to be given serious attention – the doctrine of hylomorphism. The reason for this is clear: while the Aristotelian ontological distinction between actuality and potentiality has proven to be a fruitful conceptual framework with which to model the operation of the natural world, the distinction between (...) form and matter has yet to similarly earn its keep. In this chapter, I offer a first step toward showing that the hylomorphic framework is up to that task. To do so, I return to the birthplace of that doctrine - the biological realm. Utilising recent advances in developmental biology, I argue that the hylomorphic framework is an empirically adequate and conceptually rich explanatory schema with which to model the nature of organisms. (shrink)

According to dispositionalism, de re modality is grounded in the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties. Those properties are able to serve as the ground of de re modal truths, it is said, because they bear a special relation to counterfactual conditionals, one of truthmaking. However, because dispositionalism purports to ground de re modality only on the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties, it had better be the case that they do not play that truthmaking role merely in virtue of their being (...) embedded in some particular, extrinsic causal context. This paper examines a recent argument against dispositionalism that purports to show that the intrinsicality of that relation cannot be maintained, due to the ceteris paribus nature of the counterfactuals that dispositions make-true. When two prominent responses are examined, both are found wanting: at best, they require unjustified special pleading, and at worst, they amount to little more than ad hoc conceptual trickery. (shrink)

Evolutionary developmental biology represents a paradigm shift in the understanding of the ontogenesis and evolutionary progression of the denizens of the natural world. Given the empirical successes of the evo-devo framework, and its now widespread acceptance, a timely and important task for the philosophy of biology is to critically discern the ontological commitments of that framework and assess whether and to what extent our current metaphysical models are able to accommodate them. In this paper, I argue that one particular model (...) is a natural fit: an ontology of dispositional properties coherently and adequately captures the crucial casual-cum-explanatory role that the fundamental elements of evo-devo play within that framework. (shrink)

Exploratory experiments are widely characterized as experiments that do not test hypotheses. Experiments that do test hypotheses are characterized as confirmatory experiments. Philosophers have pointed out that research programmes can be both confirmatory and exploratory. However, these definitions preclude single experiments being characterized as both exploratory and confirmatory; how can an experiment test and not test a hypothesis? Given the intuition that some experiments are exploratory, some are confirmatory, and some are both, a recharacterization of the relationship between exploratory and (...) confirmatory experimentation is needed. I discuss ‘phase IV’ trials to show what this recharacterization could look like. Phase IV trials can be exploratory and confirmatory insofar as they concurrently test hypotheses and explore for unforeseen phenomena. Even if it is uncontroversial that a single experiment can have multiple aims, the recharacterization of the relationship between exploratory and confirmatory experimentation is still required for these aims to be held together coherently. I offer an alternative characterization of the relationship between exploratory and confirmatory experimentation where the former remains a distinct kind of experimentation but is not characterized as non-hypothesis-testing. (shrink)

Book Panel on Zoopolis including articles by Clare Palmer, Dinesh Wadiwel and Laura Janara and a reply by Donaldson and Kymlicka.

Dispositional properties are often referred to as ‘causal powers’, but what does dispositional causation amount to? Any viable theory must account for two fundamental aspects of the metaphysics of causation – the causal complexity and context sensitivity of causal interactions. The theory of mutual manifestations attempts to do so by locating the complexity and context sensitivity within the nature of dispositions themselves. But is this theory an acceptable first step towards a viable theory of dispositional causation? This paper argues that (...) the reconceptualization that the theory entails comes at too high a price, and is an unnecessary step in the wrong direction: these two central aspects concerning the metaphysics of causation can and should be accounted for in a dispositional account of causation without it. (shrink)

In this paper I address a tension in Samantha Vice’s claim that humility and silence offer effective moral responses to white shame in the wake of South African apartheid. Vice describes these twin virtues using inward-turning language of moral self-repair, but she also acknowledges that this ‘personal, inward directed project’ has relational dimensions. Her failure to explore the relational strand, however, leaves her description of white shame sounding solitary and penitent. -/- My response develops the missing relational dimensions of white (...) shame and humility arguing that this strand, once visible, complicates Vice’s project by (1) challenging her unitary and homogenous view of white identity, and (2) demonstrating the important role vulnerability plays in our understandings of white shame. (shrink)

My contribution to this conversation sets out to accomplish two things: First, I offer a definition of epistemic pushback. Epistemic pushback is an expression of epistemic resistance that occurs regularly in classroom discussions that touch our core beliefs, sense of self, politics, or worldv iews. Epistemic pushback is structural: It broadly characterizes a family of cognitive, affective, and verbal tactics that are deployed regularly to dodge the challenging and exhausting chore of engaging topics and questions that scare us. It can (...) take such forms as direct deep hostility, knee jerk skepticism, or silence. Good teaching should not only track the production of knowledge, but also the production of ignorance. There are forms of epistemic pushback that are ignorance producing, so I work with students to cultivate a mindfulness around epistemic pushback by treating it as a ‘shadow text.’ The remainder of the paper explains the nature of shadow texts, and offers suggestions for how to navigate them. (shrink)

Precision medicine functions by grouping patients along genetic, molecular, and related ‘-omics’ factors. This stratification relies on large, growing databases of patient-volunteered information. Both private companies and government bodies incentivize patients to volunteer this genetic information appealing to the creation of collaborative patient partnerships and the concept of empowerment. This paper aims to address two related questions: (1) what is the actual nature of patient participation in precision medicine research? And (2) is this participation in precision medicine research really that (...) empowering for the average patient? I contend that firstly, the nature of this participation is best conceived of as merely contributory. Contributory participation, as it will be shown, falls short of collaboration. The partnership created by participation in precision medicine research is not one of sharing values, equal say in decisions, or shared benefit. Secondly, I contend that there are important caveats to claims that patient participation in precision medicine is empowering. Empowerment is hindered by the type of participation, the practical use or actionability of genetic data, genetic literacy, the cost of precision drugs for patients that qualify for them, and bioethical considerations of informed consent. (shrink)

The underreporting of suspected adverse drug reactions remains a primary issue for contemporary post-market drug surveillance or ‘pharmacovigilance.’ Pharmacovigilance pioneer W.H.W. Inman argued that ‘deadly sins’ committed by clinicians are to blame for underreporting. Of these ‘sins,’ ignorance and lethargy are the most obvious and impactful in causing underreporting. However, recent analyses show that diffidence, insecurity, and indifference additionally play a major role. I aim to augment our understanding of diffidence, insecurity, and indifference by arguing these sins are underwritten by (...) value judgments arising via epistemic risk. I contend that ‘evidence-based’ medicine codifies these sins. (shrink)

This paper aims to achieve a better understanding of what Socrates means by "συμφωνε[unrepresentable symbol]ν" in the sections of the "Phaedo" in which he uses the word, and how its use contributes both to the articulation of the hypothetical method and the proof of the soul's immortality. Section I sets out the well-known problems for the most obvious readings of the relation, while Sections II and III argue against two remedies for these problems, the first an interpretation of what the (...) συμφωνε[unrepresentable symbol]ν relation consists in, the second an interpretation of what sorts of thing the relation is meant to relate. My positive account in Section IV argues that we should take the musical connotations of the term seriously, and that Plato was thinking of a robust analogy between the way pitches form unities when related by certain intervals, and the way theoretical claims form unities when related by explanatory co-dependence. Section V surveys the work of IV from the point of view of the initial difficulties and suggests further consequences for the hypothetical method, including the logical relation between the συμφωνν[unrepresentable symbol]ν and διαφωνε[unrepresentable symbol]ν relations, and the need for care in ordering the results of a hypothesis. (shrink)

Sara Ruddick's contemporary philosophical account of mothering reconsiders the maternal arguments used in the women's peace movements of the earlier part of this century. The culmination of this project is her 1989 book, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Ruddick's project is ground-breaking work in both academic philosophy and feminist theory. -/- In this chapter, I first look at the relationship between the two basic components of Ruddick's argument in Maternal Thinking: the "practicalist conception of truth" (PCT) and feminist (...) standpoint theory (FST). I argue that Ruddick is never clear about the exact relation between the two components. These tensions point to a deeper problem in Ruddick's discussion of the critical power of maternal thinking. -/- The diversity of maternal practices presents a genuine challenge to Ruddick’s account. I argue that neither of the components she explores can adequately ground a feminist peace politics without first answering the question of who speaks for mothers. While I can suggest ways to make Ruddick's argument consistent, she still faces-despite her claims of universality- the deeper problem of reconciling her account of maternal practice with the genuine diversity of actual maternal practices. (shrink)

The underreporting of suspected adverse drug reactions hinders pharmacovigilance. Solutions to underreporting are oftentimes directed at clinicians and health care professionals. However, given the recent rise of public inclusion in medical science, solutions may soon begin more actively involving patients. I aim to offer an evaluative framework for future possible proposals that would engage patients with the aim of mitigating underreporting. The framework may also have value in evaluating current reporting practices. The offered framework is composed of three criteria that (...) are bioethical, social-epistemic, and pragmatic: (i) patients should not be exposed to undue harms, e.g., nocebo effects; (ii) data should be collected, analyzed, and communicated prioritizing pharmacovigilance’s aims, i.e., free from industry bias; and (iii) proposals should account for existing and foreseeable pragmatic constraints like clinician ‘buy in’ and existing reporting infrastructure. Proposals to engage patients in pharmacovigilance that fulfil or address these criteria are preferable to those that do not. (shrink)

In this essay, we aim to provide an overview of the political and philosophical issues pertaining to asexuality. The first section, “What Is Asexuality?,” offers an account of asexuality. The second section, “Asexuality as a Unique Sexual Orientation,” argues that asexuality should be understood as a unique sexual orientation. The third section, “Asexuality and Oppression,” discusses the various forms of oppression facing asexual persons today. The fourth section, “The Goods of Asexuality,” articulates some goods that asexuality brings to human lives, (...) and we do this with an eye toward conceiving of asexuality as something other than a mere deficit. (shrink)

Paper presented at the Heidegger Circle 2011. Although Aristotle’s influence on young Heidegger’s thought has been studied at length, such studies have almost exclusively focused on his interpretation of Aristotle’s ethics, physics and metaphysics. I will rather address Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle’s ontology of life. Focusing on recently published or recently translated courses of the mid 20’s (mainly SS 1924, WS 1925-26 and SS 1926), I hope to uncover an important aspect of young Heidegger’s thought left unconsidered: namely, that Dasein’s (...) existential structures – Befindlichkeit, Understanding and being-with-one-another through language – arose from his close reading of Aristotle’s ontology of life, of animal life. (shrink)

In identifying intrinsic molecular chance and extrinsic adaptive pressures as the only causally relevant factors in the process of evolution, the theoretical perspective of the Modern Synthesis had a major impact on the perceived tenability of an ontology of dispositional properties. However, since the late 1970s, an increasing number of evolutionary biologists have challenged the descriptive and explanatory adequacy of this “chance alone, extrinsic only” understanding of evolutionary change. Because morphological studies of homology, convergence, and teratology have revealed a space (...) of possible forms and phylogenetic trajectories that is considerably more restricted than expected, evo-devo has focused on the causal contribution of intrinsic developmental processes to the course of evolution. Evo-devo’s investigation into the developmental structure of the modality of morphology – including both the possibility and impossibility of organismal form – has led to the utilisation of a number of dispositional concepts that emphasise the tendency of the evolutionary process to change along certain routes. In this sense, and in contrast to the perspective of the Modern Synthesis, evo-devo can be described as a “science of dispositions.” This chapter discusses the recent philosophical literature on dispositional properties in evo-devo, exploring debates about both the metaphysical and epistemological aspects of the central dispositional concepts utilised in contemporary evo-devo and addressing the epistemological question of how dispositional properties challenge existing explanatory models in evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Drawing upon Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological constitution of the Other through Einfülhung, I argue that the hierarchical distinction between higher and lower animals – which has been dismissed by Heidegger for being anthropocentric – must not be conceived as an objective distinction between “primitive” animals and “more evolved” ones, but rather corresponds to a phenomenological distinction between familiar and unfamiliar animals.

The biological sciences have always proven a fertile ground for philosophical analysis, one from which has grown a rich tradition stemming from Aristotle and flowering with Darwin. And although contemporary philosophy is increasingly becoming conceptually entwined with the study of the empirical sciences with the data of the latter now being regularly utilised in the establishment and defence of the frameworks of the former, a practice especially prominent in the philosophy of physics, the development of that tradition hasn’t received the (...) wider attention it so thoroughly deserves. This review will briefly introduce some recent significant topics of debate within the philosophy of biology, focusing on those whose metaphysical themes (in everything from composition to causation) are likely to be of wide-reaching, cross-disciplinary interest. (shrink)

This paper takes up the question of knowing one's general mental traits, including one's goals, beliefs, and motives. One conclusion is that this is a difficult project. The issue of attributing to oneself ulterior or hidden motives is considered.

A brief analysis of the conceptual form and applications of "metamodels". The main intent is to explore the consequences of treating knowledge models as objects in themselves, for the purpose of creating a subsequent model of those objects. This process is mirrored in the nature of category theory, which aims to treat mathematical systems and structures as point-like objects for the purpose of meta-analysis.

This essay critiques the return to objects posited by certain new materialisms, most specifically the speculative realism of Harman, Meillassoux and Brassier. It argues that their “non-relational” and “autonomous” ontology represents a neo-positivist conception of reality. In place of such an atomistic ontology, I will suggest that the new materialisms develop a more productive, “non-reductive materialism”—a term drawn from analytic philosophy of mind. I will interpret Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy as crucial examples of such a materialism on the continental side. (...) Rather than being based on the non-relational innerness of an object, this position instead takes into account matter’s fundamentally extended nature. Confirmed by examples such as the growing evidence for neuroplasticity, the externalist, non-reductive view advances the new materialist argument that matter is “agentive” and “active” rather than “mechanic” and “passive,” without slipping into an anti-social-constructionist biologism or behaviorism. (shrink)