In this paper I borrow from Maria Lugones’ work on playful “world-traveling” and W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of “double consciousness” to make the case that humor can facilitate an openness and cooperative attitude among an otherwise closed, even adversarial audience. I focus on what I call “subversive” humor, that which is employed by or on behalf of those who have been continually marginalized. When effectively used, such humor can foster the inclination and even desire to listen to others and, if (...) only for brief moments, adopt their point of view. To be able to see oneself as others see you can also be a desirable capacity, because along with such multidimensional seeing comes an epistemic advantage lacking in those who have no need nor desire to see as others do, especially if the vision of the others happens to be from below where one perceives that the promises of our explicit ideals are constantly being implicitly broken. Such humor is aesthetic, pleasurable in and of itself, and not amenable to scientific dissection. But it is also a skill that can be honed into a powerful tool of persuasion in circumstances where straightforward arguments are less effective. It can raise consciousness about the lived experiences of those suffering under systemic oppression and foster world travelling. Subversive humor encourages audiences, especially those who contribute to what Jean Harvey calls “civilized oppression”, to playfully travel across worlds and “tarry along” with the perspectives of the marginalized. (shrink)

Some of Dave Chappelle’s uses of storytelling about seemingly mundane events, like his experiences with his “white friend Chip” and the police, are examples of what W.E.B. Du Bois calls “Positive Propaganda.” This is in contrast to “Demagoguery,” the sort of propaganda described by Jason Stanley that obstructs empathic recognition of others, and undermines reasonable debate among citizens regarding policies that matter: the justice system, welfare, inequality, and race, for example. Some of Chappelle’s humor, especially in his most recent Netflix (...) specials, but also in his earlier standup performances and his series The Chappelle Show, is akin to art that appeals to emotion in the ways suggested by Du Bois in “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926). Beauty is essential to art, but, “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent” (p. 22). The “one side” is that which appears to extoll American ideals, but in reality undermines them, perpetuating the subordinate status of “the other”--black citizens. Replace “beauty” with “humor” or “funny”, and we see striking parallels between Chappelle’s socio-political performances and Du Bois’ call for positive propaganda, each of which constitute “civic rhetoric” broadly construed. We no longer live in Du Bois’ America of explicit denial of rights. In many ways our situation is worse, as the mechanisms of exclusion are implicit, difficult to dislodge, because they are invisible. Chappelles’ humor draws attention to subtle undermining-propaganda in our liberal democracy, transforming it through his counter-propaganda into the spectacle that it should be; ubiquitous democracy-denying propaganda should be as obvious to whites as it is to minorities. In his words, we should all see that “that shit is fucking incredible” (Killin’ Them Softly). (shrink)

H. L. A. Hart’s (1907-1992) influence on contemporary philosophy is not restricted to the philosophy of law. As the book’s sub-title suggests and the table of contents confirm, he wrote widely on matters social, political and moral, not just legal. Probably best known for The Concept of Law (1961), Hart also authored a collection of essays on Jeremy Bentham (Essays on Bentham,1982), two books on the morality of criminal law based on his exchange with Lord Patrick Devlin (Law, Liberty and (...) Morality, 1963) and The Morality of the Criminal Law, 1965), one on punishment (Punishment and Responsibility, 1968), a treatise as well as a collection of essays on jurisprudential theory (Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence, 1953, and Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy, 1983), and finally a volume on legal causation, co-authored with Tony Honoré (Causation in the Law, 1959). The book under review here, on Hart’s legacy, is divided into six sections: the first is devoted to Hart’s general jurisprudential theory; the second to his writings on criminal law; the third to legal causation; the fourth to concerns of justice; the fifth to legal, political and moral rights; and the sixth and final section to matters of toleration and liberalism. (shrink)

This article investigates the relationships between forms of humor that conjure up possible worlds and real-world social critiques. The first part of the article will argue that subversive humor, which is from or on behalf of historically and continually marginalized communities, constitutes a kind of aesthetic experience that can elicit enjoyment even in adversarial audiences. The second part will be a connecting piece, arguing that subversive humor can be constructed as brief narrative thought experiments that employ the use of fictionalized (...) scenarios to facilitate an open, playful attitude, encouraging a space for collaborative interpretation. This interaction between humorist and audience is an aesthetic experience that is enjoyable in and of itself, as the feelings of mirth are intrinsically valuable. But connected to the “Ha-ha!” experience of these sorts of humorous creations is an “Aha!” or potentially revelatory experience that is a mixture of cognitive comprehension and motivated (emotional) response. The third part of the article will attempt to go beyond the consciousness-raising element with an account of how such possible worlds created in the realm of imagination through subversive humor can bleed into the real world of flesh and blood people. Finally, an example of subversive humor will be analyzed. (shrink)

A "good" arguer is like an architect with a penchant for civil and civic engineering. Such an arguer can design and present their reasons artfully about a variety of topics, as good architects do with a plenitude of structures and in various environments. Failures in this are rarely hidden for long, as poor constructions reveal themselves, often spectacularly, so collaboration among civical engineers can be seen as a virtue. Our logical virtues should be analogous. When our arguments fail due to (...) being uncivil and demagogic, since we inhabit the arguments we build, we are all crushed beneath our flawed reasoning. This mixed metaphor takes us to a self-referential analysis of argumentation, analogy, and humor. I argue that good argumentation strives to collaboratively convince rather than belligerently persuade. A convincing means toward this end is through humorous analogical arguments, whether the matter at hand is ethical, logical, theological, phenomenological, epistemological, metaphysical, political, or about baseball. (shrink)

What is personhood? What do we want it to be? Blumenthal-Barby (2024) offers an answer to the first question: personhood is an unhelpful, harmful, and pernicious concept in the bioethical setting....

This short article is a “conversation” in which an android, Mort, replies to Richard Marc Rubin’s android named Sol in “The Robot Sol Explains Laughter to His Android Brethren” (The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook, 2022). There Sol offers an explanation for how androids can laugh--largely a reaction to frustration and unmet expectations: “my account says that laughter is one of four ways of dealing with frustration, difficulties, and insults. It is a way of getting by. If you need to label (...) my conception of humor, you might call it an adjustment theory, or perhaps an accommodation theory” (Rubin 256). Mort is intrigued but has his doubts. Mort contends that synesthesia likely has something to do with how humans develop humor. Perhaps, he considers, human designers crossed the androids' sensory wires, allowing them to be able to smash up concepts that do not otherwise seem to fit together, reconstruct incongruities in a manner that is not nonsensical, express the aha-eureka moment of a serendipitous discovery, and even feel blue when they fail at a given task that we were expected to complete. (shrink)

The discovery of mirror neurons in both primates and humans has led to an enormous amount of research and speculation as to how conscious beings are able to interact so effortlessly among one another. Mirror neurons might provide an embodied basis for passive synthesis and the eventual process of further communalization through empathy, as envisioned by Edmund Husserl. I consider the possibility of a phenomenological and scientific investigation of laughter as a point of connection that might in the future bridge (...) the gap Husserl feared had grown too expansive between the worlds of science and philosophy. Part I will describe some implications of the discovery of mirror neurons. Part II will address Husserl’s concept of embodiment as it relates to neuroscience and empathy. Part III will be a primer to investigating laughter phenomenologically. Part IV will be a continuation of the study of laughter and empathy as possible elements helpful in broadening the scope of what Husserl calls the Life-World. (shrink)

This paper seeks to clarify and defend the proposition that moral realism is best elaborated as a moral doctrine. I begin by upholding Ronald Dworkin’s anti-Archimedean critique of the error theory against some strictures by Michael Smith, and I then briefly suggest how a proponent of moral realism as a moral doctrine would respond to Smith’s defense of the Archimedeanism of expressivism. Thereafter, this paper moves to its chief endeavor. By differentiating clearly between expressivism and quasi-realism, the paper highlights both (...) their distinctness and their compatibility. In so doing, it underscores the affinities between Blackburnian quasi-realism and moral realism as a moral doctrine. Finally, this paper contends—in line with my earlier work on these matters—that moral realism as a moral doctrine points to the need for some reorienting of meta-ethical enquiries rather than for the abandoning of them. (shrink)

Many theorists have defended the claim that collective entities can attain genuine agential status. If collectives can be agents, this opens up a further question: can they be conscious? That is, is there something that it is like to be them? Eric Schwitzgebel argues that yes, collective entities, may well be significantly conscious. Others, including Kammerer, Tononi and Koch, and List reject the claim. List does so on the basis of Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. I argue here that (...) List’s rejection is too quick, and that groups can, at least in principle, display the kind of informational integration we might think is necessary for consciousness. However, group consciousness will likely differ substantially from the individual experiences that give rise to it. This requires the defender of group consciousness to face up to a similar combination problem as the panpsychist. (shrink)

Experiments in particle physics have hitherto failed to produce any significant evidence for the many explicit models of physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) that had been proposed over the past decades. As a result, physicists have increasingly turned to model-independent strategies as tools in searching for a wide range of possible BSM effects. In this paper, we describe the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SM-EFT) and analyse it in the context of the philosophical discussions about models, theories, and (bottom-up) (...) effective field theories. We find that while the SM-EFT is a quantum field theory, assisting experimentalists in searching for deviations from the SM, in its general form it lacks some of the characteristic features of models. Those features only come into play if put in by hand or prompted by empirical evidence for deviations. Employing different philosophical approaches to models, we argue that the case study suggests not to take a view on models that is overly permissive because it blurs the lines between the different stages of the SM-EFT research strategies and glosses over particle physicists' motivations for undertaking this bottom-up approach in the first place. Looking at EFTs from the perspective of modelling does not require taking a stance on some specific brand of realism or taking sides in the debate between reduction and emergence into which EFTs have recently been embedded. (shrink)

In two very influential papers from 2008, Tamar Gendler introduced the concept of “alief” to describe the mental state one is in when acting in ways contrary to their consciously professed beliefs. For example, if asked to eat what they know is fudge, but shaped into the form of dog feces, they will hesitate, and behave in a manner that would be consistent with the belief that the fudge is really poop. They alieve that it is disgusting, while they believe (...) it is not. This paper investigates laughter from self-proclaimed egalitarian, tolerant folk, in response to oppressive jokes that might fit the alief-model. If I merely alieve the content of a joke at which I laugh, will that constitute morally exculpating reasons for such laughter? And what else might it imply? This paper will provide insights at the intersections of humor studies, ethics, epistemology, phenomenology, and the philosophy of mind, all while being moderately and appropriately amusing. (shrink)

This paper begins by taking seriously former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ response in his What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? to systematic violence and oppression. He claims that direct argumentation is not the ideal mode of resistance to oppression: “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.” I will focus on a few elements of this playful mode of resistance that conflict with the more straightforward strivings for abstract, universal, objective, convergent, absolute (...) thinking that champions reason over emotion, logic over narrative, and science over lived experience. In contrast, the type of protest employed by people like Douglass can utilize aesthetics and logic, playfulness and seriousness, emotion, even anger, and reason. Douglass provides examples of humorous, sincere parrhesia, oscillating between the lexicon of the dominant sphere and the critical reflection from a trickster on the margins. This will require an analysis of Michel Foucault’s conception of parrhesia: courageous truth-telling in the face of powerful people or institutions. It is a study of humor in the parrhesiastes, an element I think neglected by Foucault. I argue that the humorous parrhesiastes offers a mode of resistance which can subvert oppressive power structures that perpetuate injustice, revealing the fact that humor can be integral in courageous truth-telling. (shrink)

In Legality Scott Shapiro seeks to provide the motivation for the development of his own elaborate account of law by undertaking a critique of H.L.A. Hart's jurisprudential theory. Hart maintained that every legal system is underlain by a rule of recognition through which officials of the system identify the norms that belong to the system as laws. Shapiro argues that Hart's remarks on the rule of recognition are confused and that his model of lawis consequently untenable. Shapiro contends that a (...) new approach is vital for progress in the philosophy of law and, with his lengthy presentation of his own Planning Theory of Law, he aspires to pioneer just such an approach. Except for a very terse observation in the final main section, this article does not directly assess the strengths and shortcomings of Shapiro's piquant planning theory. Instead, I defend Hart against Shapiro's charges and thereby undermine the motivation for the development of the planning theory. (shrink)

Oppression is easily recognized. That is, at least, when oppression results from overt, consciously professed racism, for example, in which violence, explicit exclusion from economic opportunities, denial of adequate legal access, and open discrimination perpetuate the subjugation of a group of people. There are relatively clear legal remedies to such oppression. But this is not the case with covert oppression where the psychological harms and resulting legal and economic exclusion are every bit as real, but caused by concealed mechanisms subtly (...) and systematically employed. In many cases, those with power and privilege use cultural stereotypes in order to sustain an unjust status quo. This is so even if the biases are implicit, automatic, and contrary to the consciously professed beliefs of the stereotyper. Furthermore, since many of these biases are not consciously reasoned into one's system of beliefs, and since they are notoriously difficult to bring to consciousness and dislodge via direct, logical confrontation, some other creative means of resistance is needed. I argue that an indirect and imaginative route through subversive humor offers a means to raise consciousness about covert oppression and the mechanisms underlying it, reveal the errors of those with power who complacently sustain systematic oppression, and even open those people up to changing their minds. Subversive humor confronts serious matters, but in a playful manner that fosters creative and critical thinking, and cultivates a desire and skill for recognizing incongruities between our professed ideals and a reality that does not meet those standards. Successful subversive wits create fictional scenarios that highlight such moral incongruities, but, like philosophical thought experiments, they reveal a moral truth that also holds in the real world. Such humor offers opportunities for "border crossing" where the audience is encouraged to see from the perspectives of marginalized people who, because they inhabit ambiguous spaces in between the dominant and subordinate spheres, are in an epistemically privileged position with respect to matters of oppression. Subversive humorists open their audiences to the lived experiences of others, uncover the absurdities of otherwise covert oppression, and appeal to our desire to be truthful and just. (shrink)

Many social situations require a mental model of the knowledge, beliefs, goals, and intentions of others: a Theory of Mind (ToM). If a person can reason about other people’s beliefs about his own beliefs or intentions, he is demonstrating second-order ToM reasoning. A standard task to test second-order ToM reasoning is the second-order false belief task. A different approach to investigating ToM reasoning is through its application in a strategic game. Another task that is believed to involve the application of (...) second-order ToM is the comprehension of sentences that the hearer can only understand by considering the speaker’s alternatives. In this study we tested 40 children between 8 and 10 years old and 27 adult controls on (adaptations of) the three tasks mentioned above: the false belief task, a strategic game, and a sentence comprehension task. The results show interesting differences between adults and children, between the three tasks, and between this study and previous research. (shrink)

This entry investigates the connections between neo-populism and neo-conspiracism in the USA. One central thread is the rhetoric of purity that fosters rigid dichotomies of thought about identities, contributing to both populism and conspiracism, eliciting a neologism: conspirapopulism.

This chapter will evaluate humor used with the specific intent to reveal glaring epistemic errors that lead to injustice; flaws in reasoning so transparent that straightforward logic, argument, and evidence seem ineffectual against them, and in some cases, just silly to think such tools would be needed. Laughter seems to be one of the only sane responses. In particular, I will assess how humor can combat conspiracy theories, propaganda, lies, and bullshit. The last one I view in Harry Frankfurt's sense (...) of a complete lack of concern for truth or reality, which I think sums up former President Donald Trump's epic lack of curiosity which has a trickle-down effect on his ardent followers. The sort of conspiracy theories I will focus on are an intermingling of propaganda, well defined and analyzed by Jason Stanley in his work How Propaganda Works, and the "new conspiracism", outlined by Muirhead and Rosenblum in A Lot of People are Saying: The New Conspiracism and The Assault on Democracy. There are perils with this potency of pugilistic comedy. It is easy to punch up, humorously fume at the foibles and fantastical blunders of a world leader who seriously considers ingesting bleach to combat the plague, who also, without irony, regales us of his capacious mnemonic prowess in recalling the following words on a cognitive test: "Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV." The self-proclaimed "stable genius" aced it. But when Trumpism and QAnon e.g., spreads among many who are impoverished and disempowered, the very people to whom Trump and others in his powerful orbit have incessantly lied, it becomes less clear how to wield truth-and justice-seeking wit. Are consciousness-raising comedians seeking to uncover and undermine obvious and dangerous falsehoods punching in the morally correct direction, and how can we tell? (shrink)

What is it to be a woman? What is it to be a man? We start by laying out desiderata for an analysis of 'woman' and 'man': descriptively, it should link these gender categories to sex biology without reducing them to sex biology, and politically, it should help us explain and combat traditional sexism while also allowing us to make sense of the activist view that gendering should be consensual. Using a Putnam-style 'Twin Earth' example, we argue that none of (...) the existing analyses in the feminist literature succeeds in meeting all of our desiderata. Finally, we propose a positive account that we believe can satisfy all the desiderata outlined. According to our theory, the genders 'woman' and 'man' are individuated not by their contemporary connections to sex biology, but by their historical continuity with classes that were originally closely connected to sex biology. (shrink)

The New Evil Demon problem has been hotly debated since the case was introduced in the early 1980’s (e.g. Lehrer and Cohen 1983; Cohen 1984), and there seems to be recent increased interest in the topic. In a forthcoming collection of papers on the New Evil Demon problem (Dutant and Dorsch, forthcoming), at least two of the papers, both by prominent epistemologists, attempt to resist the problem by appealing to the distinction between justification and excuses. My primary aim here is (...) to critically evaluate this new excuse maneuver as a response to the New Evil Demon problem. -/- Their response attempts to give us reason to reject the idea that victims of the New Evil Demon have justification for believing as they do. I shall argue that this approach is ultimately unsuccessful, however much of value can be learned from these attempts. In particular, progress in the debate can be made by following those who advance the excuse maneuver and make explicit the connection between epistemic justification and epistemic norms. By doing so, the questions being debated are clarified, as is the methodology being used to attempt to answer them. (shrink)

People can laugh at almost anything. What’s the deal with that? What makes something funny? -/- This essay reviews some theories of what it is for something to be funny. Each theory offers insights into this question, but no single approach provides a comprehensive answer.

I argue that the overt subjugation in the system of American slavery and its subsequent effects offer a case study for an existentialist analysis of freedom, oppression and humor. Concentrating on the writings and experiences of Frederick Douglass and the existentialists Simone De Beauvoir and Lewis Gordon, I investigate how the concepts of “spirit of seriousness”, “mystification”, and an existentialist reading of “double consciousness” for example, can elucidate the forms of explicit and concealed oppression. I then make the case that (...) subversive humor is an effective means to bring to consciousness the inconsistencies and incongruities of the serious oppressors. I also illustrate how humor can act as a bulwark against the rise and persistence of oppression by (non-violently) attacking the absolutist stance on human nature maintained through the use of dominating and “authoritative” language and action. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper, I will briefly introduce the concept of incongruity and its relation to humor and seriousness, connecting the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and the contemporary work of John Morreall. I will reveal some of the relations between Schopenhauer's notion of "seriousness" and the existentialists such as Jean Paul Sartre, Simone Be Beauvoir, and Lewis Gordon. In section II, I will consider the relationship between playfulness and incongruity, noting the role that enjoyment of incongruity plays (...) in creative, non-dogmatic thinking. In section III, I will critique Morreall's arguments against the efficacy of humor as a means of serious protest, analyzing the complex relationship between the ambiguous terms "seriousness" and "playfulness". In the final section, I contend that Morreall's conception of humor, with which I generally agree, fails to adequately address subversive humor. He is cognizant of the benefits of a humorous attitude and of the work of rebellious groups who use humor, but his insistence that the play mode of humor precludes emotional attachment and practical concern, renders his philosophical analysis of humor far less comprehensive than his title suggests. I will make the case, contra Morreall, and he is the most prominent of many humor theorists who make similar points, that some humor in play mode is non-existentially, non-gravely serious, and intends to do more than simply "delight" audiences; the subversive humorist, in particular, is attempting to disclose and transmit information in such a way as to create change in both attitudes and practical social interactions. (shrink)

(Runner-up, Royal Institute of Philosophy 2020 Philosophy Essay Prize) Technological developments have led to the digitization of certain sectors of the economy, and this has many authors looking ahead to the prospects of a post-work society. While it is valuable to theorize about this possibility, it is also important to take note of the present state of work. For better or worse, it is what we are currently stuck with, and as the COVID-19 pandemic has ensured, much of that work (...) is now taking place online. Though a ‘return to normalcy’ is on the horizon, part of that normalcy involves online work, which is itself a significant change in the lives of many workers. Here I develop an account of work on which work is teleologically structured. This gives the result that working is something we can fail at doing, even when we try, and we can also be unsure of whether we’ve succeeded or failed. The shift of certain work from in-person to online modes generates a persistent uncertainty for workers in affected professions. Because our ability to work is something we typically value, this uncertainty has significant negative consequences for a worker’s self-conception. Indeed, it is analogous to disorders of agency and generates a kind of alienation. (shrink)

“ A man orders a whole pizza pie for himself and is asked whether he would like it cut into eight or four slices. He responds, ‘Four, I’m on a diet ”’ (Noël Carroll) -/- While not hilarious --so funny that it induces chortling punctuated with outrageous vomiting--this little gem is amusing. We recognize that something has gone wrong. On a first reading it might not compute, something doesn’t quite make sense. Then, aha! , we understand the hapless dieter has (...) misapplied general rules of thumb, mental short-cuts, or heuristics, that we were also initially committed to and that would usually be good enough to rely upon— fewer slices equals fewer calories; diets require fewer calories, etc—but in this particular case they fail, and the feeling of mirth is our reward for making this discovery. We don’t say all of that after a punchline, of course, but that’s what is happening according to the Humor as Error-Detection Theory : our sense of humor can sense our errors. This chapter will focus on the overlap and benefits of a humorous and philosophical attitude toward the world and our place in it. The historian of philosophy Will Durant tells us that genuine philosophy begins when one learns to doubt; we can say something similar with humor--trust me. (shrink)

"The Mind is not a Vessel to be Filled but a Fire to be Kindled", and "Education is Not the Filling of Pail But the Lighting of a Fire", and ... Something About a Horse ... You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it smile? Because of the long face and all? (No, that can’t be it). Anyway, borrowing a bit from Plutarch and Yeats (maybe, there is no agreement on whether he said that about pails (...) and fires), and some idiom from 12th Century Old English about horses walking on water, I assume, we can glean the following gem: learning requires active participation by learners. It is almost embarrassing to have to write that, but here we are with education today, mostly unloading facts into unlit receptacles. This doesn’t work, and not just because the metaphor is mixed. Genuine learning requires focus, which requires motivation, which is cultivated by interest, which needs curiosity, which is not something teachable through the typical educational curricula. I can, as Aristotle tells us, teach students the basics of some ethical theory, but I cannot make them virtuous. Ah-ha! I can lead a horse to water, but I can’t make it abide by the categorical imperative (No, that’s not quite right. Although it’s true--most horses are utilitarians). One way that seems to work in piquing student interest in learning philosophy is to use humor as you make the case that a philosophical attitude is very similar to a humorous attitude. Both rely heavily on questioning our collective presuppositions, both cultivate rational skepticism, and both are never content with accepting traditions and values that are mindlessly received. I’ve got it now: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it an iconoclast! (still not it). Friedrich Nietzsche published a book in 1889 titled Twilight of the Idols: Or How to Philosophize with a Hammer. This was during his most frenetic and fecund period, just before the syphilis set in rendering him somewhat less than his lauded Ubermensch. The “Idols” for Nietzsche were “false gods” or the ubiquitous errors that philosophy should expose. He is likely borrowing (without citation!) from sir Francis Bacon, whose “idols” are fetishes which can divert us from the pursuit of truth. Learning is hard, but it doesn’t have to be gloomy, hence, I advocate for a different sort of hammer to act as a “tuning-fork” sounding out the hollow and dangerous idols handed down to us that have passed for sagacity. (shrink)

The majority of philosophers of religion, at least since Plantinga’s reply to Mackie’s logical problem of evil, agree that it is logically possible for an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God to exist who permits some of the evils we see in the actual world. This is conceivable essentially because of the possible world known as heaven. That is, heaven is an imaginable world in a similar way that logically possible scenarios in any fiction are imaginable. However, like some of the (...) imaginable stories in fiction where we are asked to envision an immoral act as a moral one, we resist. I will employ the works of Tamar Gendler on imaginative resistance and Keith Buhler’s Virtue Ethics approach to moral imaginative resistance and apply them to the conception of heaven and the problem of evil. While we can imagine God as an omnibenevolent parent permitting evil to allow for morally significant freedom and the rewards in heaven or punishments in hell (both possible worlds), we should not. This paper is not intended to be a refutation of particular theodicies; rather it provides a very general groundwork connecting issues of horrendous suffering and imaginative resistance to heaven as a possible world. (shrink)

Does the recent success of Podemos and Syriza herald a new era of inclusive, egalitarian left populism? Because leaders of both parties are former students of Ernesto Laclau and cite his account of populism as guiding their political practice, this essay considers whether his theory supports hope for a new kind of populism. For Laclau, the essence of populism is an “empty signifier” that provides a means by which anyone can identify with the people as a whole. However, the concept (...) of the empty signifier is not as neutral as he assumes. As I show by analyzing the role of race in his theory, some subjects are constituted in a way that prevents their unmediated identification with the people. Consequently, Laclau’s view should be read as symptomatic of the problems with populist logic if its adherents are to avoid reproducing its exclusions and practice a more inclusive politics. (shrink)

In A Philosophy of Humour, Alan Roberts presents a brief but extremely well-resourced overview of the history of the philosophy of humor (I will omit “u” for brevity, the soul of wit), and offers a new theory of humor focusing on the role of amusement. This text does not assume any prior acquaintance with theories of humor or philosophy, and in light of this, Roberts does well to define, either in the text or a brief note, the philosophical concepts necessary (...) to help the reader follow along. Even though the text is relatively short, Roberts covers a surprising amount of philosophical ground on humor including a considerable number of counterarguments from multiple disciplines. This is important as humor is not explicable from a single field of study, as it is a subject that is interwoven in just about every intellectual (and non-intellectual) domain. (shrink)

This chapter first surveys general issues in the epistemic internalism / externalism debate: what is the distinction, what motivates it, and what arguments can be given on both sides. -/- The second part of the chapter will examine the internalism / externalism debate as regards to the specific case of the epistemology of memory belief.

In the wake of the advent of genome editing technology CRISPR-Cas9 (clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeat (CRISPR)-associated protein 9), there has been a global debate around the implications of manipulating the human genome. While CRISPR-based germline gene editing is new, the debate about the ethics of gene editing is not – for several decades now, scholars have debated the ethics of making heritable changes to the human genome. The arguments that have been raised both for and against the use of (...) genetic technologies in human reproduction reiterate much of the arguments made in the pre-CRISPR debate. As such, it is instructive for South Africa to reflect on these arguments now, in considering our position on the regulation of the use of this novel biotechnology. There are two dominant schools of thought in this area, bioliberalism and bioconservatism. Bioconservatives raise concerns about the risks of genetic manipulation, and argue that it ought to be limited or prohibited to avert these risks to human health and human nature. Bioliberal scholars are more open to the prospect of genetic manipulation, because of its potential utility. In this article, I conclude that in liberal democracies such as our own, bioliberal arguments ought to be seriously considered when formulating policy on human genome editing because of the extent to which they resonate with our Constitutional values and human rights. I further suggest that there is a need for an enquiry into the relevance of African perspectives on the ethical questions that arise concerning germline genome editing. (shrink)

In common with traditional forms of epistemic internalism, epistemological disjunctivism attempts to incorporate an awareness condition on justification. Unlike traditional forms of internalism, however, epistemological disjunctivism rejects the so-called New Evil Genius thesis. In so far as epistemological disjunctivism rejects the New Evil Genius thesis, it is revisionary. -/- After explaining what epistemological disjunctivism is, and how it relates to traditional forms of epistemic internalism / externalism, I shall argue that the epistemological disjunctivist’s account of the intuitions underlying the New (...) Evil Genius thought experiment is at best incomplete. As presented, therefore, epistemological disjunctivism is unable to accommodate the core guiding intuitions of epistemic internalism. Given the stated aim of not being revisionary on this score, the view is at a dialectical disadvantage over the traditional forms of epistemic internalism the position is meant to replace. Unfortunately, therefore, at present, the impasse between internalism and externalism remains. (shrink)

The current resurgence of interest in cognition and in the nature of cognitive processing has brought with it also a renewed interest in the early work of Husserl, which contains one of the most sustained attempts to come to grips with the problems of logic from a cognitive point of view. Logic, for Husserl, is a theory of science; but it is a theory which takes seriously the idea that scientific theories are constituted by the mental acts of cognitive subjects. (...) The present essay begins with an exposition of Husserl's act-based conception of what a science is, and goes on to consider his account of the role of linguistic meanings, of the ontology of scientific objects, and of evidence and truth. The essay concentrates almost exclusively on the Logical Investigations of 1900/01. This is not only because this work, which is surely Husserl's single most important masterpiece, has been overshadowed first of all by his Ideas I and then later by the Crisis. It is also because the Investigations contain, in a peculiarly clear and pregnant form, a whole panoply of ideas on logic and cognitive theory which either simply disappeared in Husserl's own later writings or became obfuscated by an admixture of that great mystery which is 'transcendental phenomenology'. (shrink)

The acquisition of a new skill usually proceeds through five stages, from novice to expert, with a sixth stage of mastery available for highly motivated performers. In this chapter, we re-state the six stages of the Dreyfus Skill Model, paying new attention to the transitions and interrelations between them. While discussing the fifth stage, expertise, we unpack the claim that, “when things are proceeding normally, experts don’t solve problems and don’t make decisions; they do what normally works” (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, (...) 1988, pp. 30 – 31). This leads us to offer an account of the “perspectival deliberation” that arises for experts and masters and that is distinct from the calculative deliberation characteristic of the lower stages of skillfulness. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the value of epistemic justification cannot be adequately explained as being instrumental to truth. I intend to show that false belief, which is no means to truth, can nevertheless still be of epistemic value. This in turn will make a good prima facie case that justification is valuable for its own sake. If this is right, we will have also found reason to think that truth value monism is false: assuming that true belief does (...) have value, there is more of final epistemic value than mere true belief. (shrink)

(Added April 2023: This draft is superseded by Briggs, R.A., & George, B.R. (2023). 'What Even Is Gender?'. Routledge. DOI 10.4324/9781003053330, and in particular by the first three chapters thereof. While this much earlier draft remains available for archival purposes, you are encouraged to read and cite the 2023 book and to use its terminology.) -/- This paper presents a new taxonomy of sex/gender concepts based on the idea of starting with a few basic components of the sex/gender system, and (...) exhausting the possible types of simple associations and identities based on these. The resulting system is significantly more fine-grained than most competitors, and helps to clarify a number of points of confusion and conceptual tension in academic and activist conversations about feminism, transgender politics, and the social analysis of gender. (shrink)

This is a description and analysis of the intellectual culture of the eighteenth-century Church of England. Challenging conventional perceptions of the Church as an intellectually moribund institution, the study traces the influence of thinkers such as Locke, Newton, Burke, and Gibbon on theological debate in England during this period.

What makes an intellectual virtue a virtue? A straightforward and influential answer to this question has been given by virtue-reliabilists: a trait is a virtue only insofar as it is truth-conducive. In this paper I shall contend that recent arguments advanced by Jack Kwong in defence of the reliabilist view are good as far as they go, in that they advance the debate by usefully clarifying ways in how best to understand the nature of open-mindedness. But I shall argue that (...) these considerations do not establish the desired conclusions that open-mindedness is truth-conducive. To establish these much stronger conclusions we would need an adequate reply to what I shall call Montmarquet’s objection. I argue that Linda Zagzebski’s reply to Montmarquet’s objection, to which Kwong defers, is inadequate. I conclude that it is contingent if open-mindedness is truth-conducive, and if a necessary tie to truth is what makes an intellectual virtue a virtue, then the status of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue is jeopardised. We either need an adequate reliabilist response to Montmarquet’s objection, or else seek alternative accounts of what it is that makes a virtue a virtue. I conclude by briefly outlining some alternatives. (shrink)

Influential cases have been provided that seem to suggest that one can fail to have knowledge because of the social environment. If not a distinct kind of social defeater, is there a uniquely social phenomenon that defeats knowledge? My aim in this paper is to explore these questions. I shall argue that despite initial appearances to the contrary, we have no reason to accept a special class of social defeater, nor any essentially social defeat phenomenon. We can explain putative cases (...) of social defeat with our existing epistemological apparatus. (shrink)

We presuppose a position of scientific realism to the effect (i) that the world exists and (ii) that through the working out of ever more sophisticated theories our scientific picture of reality will approximate ever more closely to the world as it really is. Against this background consider, now, the following question: 1. Do the empirical theories with the help of which we seek to approximate a good or true picture of reality rest on any non-empirical presuppositions? One can answer (...) this question with either a 'yes' or a 'no'. 'No' is the preferred answer of most contemporary methodologists -- Murray Rothbard is one distinguished counterexample to this trend -- who maintain that empirical theories are completely free of non-empirical ('a priori') admixtures and who see science as a matter of the gathering of pure 'data' obtained through simple observation. From such data scientific propositions are then supposed to be somehow capable of being established. (shrink)

Both Martin Heidegger and Harry Frankfurt have argued that the fundamental feature of human identity is care. Both contend that caring is bound up with the fact that we are finite beings related to our own impending death, and both argue that caring has a distinctive, circular and non-instantaneous, temporal structure. In this paper, I explore the way Heidegger and Frankfurt each understand the relations among care, death, and time, and I argue for the superiority of Heideggerian version of this (...) nest of claims. Frankfurt claims that we should conceive of the most basic commitments which practically orient a person in the world and define his identity (“volitional necessities”) as naturalistic facts, foundational for and located completely without the normative space of reasons. In support of this he appeals to the supposedly foundational role played in human life by the instinct for self-preservation, what Frankfurt calls the “love of living.” The claim is that in questions of practical identity there is a definite priority of the factual over the normative. Frankfurt’s naturalistic model of volitional necessity is motivated by a misunderstanding of the temporal structure of care, a misunderstanding that helps lead him to an implausible conception of the basic structures of human identity. Heidegger advances an anti-naturalistic conception of caring, one bound up with his way of understanding how human beings relate to their own future. I argue that the existential, temporal, and normative significance that Frankfurt attributes to the naturalized “love of living” is better captured by the Heideggerian claim that human identity is defined by being “for-the-sake-of” certain projects and commitments, a way of being lived out in the way Heidegger calls “being-towards-death.”. (shrink)

In general, epistemic internalists hold that an individual’s justification for a belief is exhausted by her reflectively accessible reasons for thinking that the contents of her beliefs are true. Applying this to the epistemology of testimony, a hearer’s justification for beliefs acquired through testimony is exhausted by her reflectively accessible reasons to think that the contents of the speaker’s testimony is true. A consequence of internalism is that subjects that are alike with respect to their reflectively accessible reasons are alike (...) with respect to what they have justification to believe. Testimony should be thought no different: hearers that are alike with respect to reflectively accessible reasons to think that a speaker’s testimony is true are alike with respect to their justification for beliefs based upon that testimony. But it has been recently argued that this view faces powerful counterexamples. So the central question is this: assuming that a hearer can acquire justification to believe a proposition through the testimony of a speaker, can epistemic internalism provide the resources to explain how such justification is possible? My aim in this paper is to address these counterexamples, and in so doing, defend epistemic internalist accounts of testimony. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that self-awareness is intertwined with one's awareness of possibilities for action. I show this by critically examining Dan Zahavi's multidimensional account of the self. I argue that the distinction Zahavi makes among 'pre-reflective minimal', 'interpersonal', and 'normative' dimensions of selfhood needs to be refined in order to accommodate what I call 'pre-reflective self-understanding'. The latter is a normative dimension of selfhood manifest not in reflection and deliberation, but in the habits and style of a person’s (...) pre-reflective absorption in the world. After reviewing Zahavi's multidimensional account and revealing this gap in his explanatory taxonomy, I draw upon Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Frankfurt in order to sketch an account of pre-reflective self-understanding. I end by raising an objection to Zahavi’s claim for the primitive and foundational status of pre-reflective self-awareness. To carve off self-awareness from the self’s practical immersion in a situation where things and possibilities already matter and draw one to act is to distort the phenomena. A more careful phenomenology of pre-reflective action shows that pre-reflective self-awareness and pre-reflective self-understanding are co-constitutive, both mutually for each other and jointly for everyday experience. (shrink)

This paper investigates a well-known case of simultaneous discovery in twentieth-century chemistry, the origins of the concept of hybridisation, in the light of Kuhn's insights. There has been no ambiguity as to who discovered this concept, when it was "rst in print, and how important it was. The full-#edged form of the concept was published in 1931 independently by two American scientists John C. Slater (1900}1976) and Linus Pauling (1901}1994), although both of them had made their ideas public earlier: Slater (...) at the American Physical Society meetings in 1930, and Pauling in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1928. Slater and Pauling both argued for the necessity of using an s orbital as well as three p orbitals in the carbon atom in order to explain carbon's four valences and the tetrahedral structure of methane. The metaphor &hybridisation' for denoting this mix of s and p orbitals was "rst used by Robert S. Mulliken and J. H. Van Vleck before gaining currency with the scienti"c community around 1935.2 The concept of hybridisation was indeed indispensable for extending the quantum-mechanical interpretation of the chemical bond as an electron pairing from diatomic molecules to polyatomic ones. To be sure, the emergence of hybridisation attests to scientists' growing interest in exploring the borderland between physics and chemistry, a trend that led to the creation of physical chemistry in the late nineteenth century and of chemical physics and quantum chemistry in the 1920s and 30s. Slater and Pauling themselves experienced and on many occasions talked about the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary research; and historians have legitimately illuminated their works by examining them in this broad context.3 Yet the careful analysis of their research notes and published papers reveals that Slater and Pauling were working in quite disparate disciplinary traditions, with di!erent approaches, for di!erent audiences, and towards di!erent goals. The aim of this paper is to explore their di!erent routes to a common destination*hybridisation*and thereby to explicate tensions existing between physics and chemistry amidst the institutional and conceptual overlapping of the two disciplines. (shrink)

According to Heidegger's Being and Time, social relations are constitutive of the core features of human agency. On this view, which I call a ‘strong conception’ of sociality, the core features of human agency cannot obtain in an individual subject independently of social relations to others. I explain the strong conception of sociality captured by Heidegger's underdeveloped notion of ‘being-with’ by reconstructing Heidegger's critique of the ‘weak conception’ of sociality characteristic of Kant's theory of agency. According to a weak conception, (...) sociality is a mere aggregation of individual subjects and the core features of human agency are built into each individual mind. The weak conception of sociality remains today widely taken for granted. I show that Christine Korsgaard, one of the most creative contemporary appropriators of Kant, operates with a weak conception of sociality and that this produces a problematic explanatory deficiency in her view: she is unable to explain the peculiar motivational efficacy of shared social norms. Heidegger's view is tailor made to explain this phenomenon. I end by sketching how Heidegger provides a social explanation of a major systematic concern animating Korsgaard, the concern with the importance of individual autonomy and answerability in human life. (shrink)

Epistemic internalism, by stressing the indispensability of the subject’s perspective, strikes many as plausible at first blush. However, many people have tended to reject the position because certain kinds of beliefs have been thought to pose special problems for epistemic internalism. For example, internalists tend to hold that so long as a justifier is available to the subject either immediately or upon introspection, it can serve to justify beliefs. Many have thought it obvious that no such view can be correct, (...) as it has been alleged that internalism cannot account for the possibility of the justification of beliefs stored in memory. -/- My aim in this paper is to offer a response that explains how memory justification is possible in a way that is consistent with epistemic internalism and an awareness condition on justification. Specifically, I will explore the plausibility of various options open to internalists, including both foundationalist and non-foundationalist approaches to the structure of justification. I intend to show that despite other difficult challenges that epistemic internalism might face, memory belief poses no special problems that the resources of internalism cannot adequately address. (shrink)

Die analytische Philosophie ist nicht dafür bekannt, dass ihre Vertreter*innen sich in ihrer Rolle als Philosoph*innen an radikaler Politik beteiligen . Progressive Politik links des Liberalismus bezieht ihr philosophisches Verständnis hauptsächlich aus der marxistischen und post-strukturalistischen Tradition. Nach einem kurzen Überblick über die Geschichte der analytischen Philosophie, zeige ich, warum sie bisher keine Grundlage für radikale Politik liefern konnte. Alternativ schlage ich eine Form des liberalen Naturalismus als Basis für einen kritischen, interdisziplinären Materialismus vor. Analytic philosophers are not known for (...) taking part in radical politics. Radical left-wing politics takes its philosophical inspiration mainly from Marxist and post-structuralist traditions. After giving a short overview of Analytic philosophy’s history, I will show why this approach could not deliver a foundation for radical politics. Alternatively, I outline a form of liberal naturalism, which could serve as a basis for a critical, interdisciplinary materialism. (shrink)