In this paper, we argue that, barring a few important exceptions, the phenomenon we refer to using the expression “being moved” is a distinct type of emotion. In this paper’s first section, we motivate this hypothesis by reflecting on our linguistic use of this expression. In section two, pursuing a methodology that is both conceptual and empirical, we try to show that the phenomenon satisfies the five most commonly used criteria in philosophy and psychology for thinking that some (...) affective episode is a distinct emotion. Indeed, being moved, we claim, is the experience of a positive core value (particular object) perceived by the moved subject as standing out (formal object) in the circumstances triggering the emotion. Drawing on numerous examples, we describe the distinctively rich phenomenology characteristic of the experience as well as the far-reaching action-tendencies and functions associated with it. Having thus shown that the candidate emotion seem to satisfy the five criteria, we go on, in section three, to compare it with sadness and joy, arguing that it should not be confused with either. Finally, in section four, we illustrate the explanatory power of our account of “being moved” by showing how it can shed light on, and maybe even justify, the widespread distrust we feel towards the exhibition of ‘sentimentality’. On the whole and if we are right, we have uncovered an emotion which, though never or rarely talked about, is of great interest and no small importance. (shrink)

This article integrates John Dewey’s _Art as Experience_, Mikel Dufrenne’s _Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience_, and phenomenological interviews with museum visitors to answer what it means to be ‘moved by art’. The interviews point to intense affective and existential experiences, in which encounters with art can be genuinely transformative. We focus on Dufrenne’s notion of ‘adherent reflection’ and Dewey’s notions of ‘doing and undergoing’ to understand the intentional structure and dynamics of such experiences, concluding that being moved contains (...) two merged forms of intentionality: one overt aspect of perceptual intentionality directed at the work, and a covert affective intentionality directed back at oneself in one’s situated existence. These are operational simultaneously but can work in loops, one leading to an intensification of the other and vice versa. As such, these analyses emphasize the value of phenomenological interviews and advance the integration of phenomenological and pragmatist thinking in the context of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

In a chapter that hones in on certain Renaissance portraits by Hans Holbein, Giorgione, and Jan van Scorel, Hans Maes examines how it is that we can be deeply moved by such portraits, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that we don’t know anything about their sitters. Standard explanations in terms of the revelation of an inner self or the recreation of a physical presence prove to be insuffi cient. Instead, Maes provides a more rounded account of what (...) makes said portraits moving and memorable, thereby relying on Barthes’ notion of ‘punctum,’ James Elkins’ account of why people cry in front of paintings, and a phenomenological exploration of the parallel between portraiture and the tradition of the Vanitas painting. (shrink)

Zeno’s Arrow and Nāgārjuna’s Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way Chapter 2 contain paradoxical, dialectic arguments thought to indicate that there is no valid explanation of motion, hence there is no physical or generic motion. There are, however, diverse interpretations of the latter text, and I argue they apply to Zeno’s Arrow as well. I also find that many of the interpretations are dependent on a mathematical analysis of material motion through space and time. However, with modern philosophy and physics (...) we find that the link from no explanation to no phenomena is invalid and that there is a valid explanation and understanding of physical motion. Hence, those arguments are both invalid and false, which banishes the MMK/2 and The Arrow under this and derivative interpretations to merely the history of philosophy. However, a view that maintains their relevance is that each is used as a koan or sequence of koans designed to assist students in spiritual meditation practice. This view is partly justified by the realization that both Nāgārjuna and Zeno were likely meditation masters in addition to being logicians. The works are, therefore, not works that should be assessed as having valid arguments and true conclusions by the standards of modern analytic philosophy—contrary to some of the literature—but rather are therapeutic and perhaps more appropriately considered as part of an experientially focused philosophy such as existentialism, phenomenology or religion. (shrink)

Some have suggested that images can be arguments. Images can certainly bolster the acceptability of individual premises. We worry, though, that the static nature of images prevents them from ever playing a genuinely argumentative role. To show this, we call attention to a dilemma. The conclusion of a visual argument will either be explicit or implicit. If a visual argument includes its conclusion, then that conclusion must be demarcated from the premise or otherwise the argument will beg the question. If (...) a visual argument does not include its conclusion, then the premises on display must license that specific conclusion and not its opposite, in accordance with some demonstrable rationale. We show how major examples from the literature fail to escape this dilemma. Drawing inspiration from the graphical logic of C. S. Peirce, we suggest instead that images can be manipulated in a way that overcomes the dilemma. Diagrammatic reasoning can take one stepwise from an initial visual layout to a conclusion—thereby providing a principled rationale that bars opposite conclusions—and the visual inscription of this correct conclusion can come afterward in time—thereby distinguishing the conclusion from the premises. Even though this practical application of Peirce’s logical ideas to informal contexts requires that one make adjustments, we believe it points to a dynamic conception of visual argumentation that will prove more fertile in the long run. (shrink)

It has been hypothesized that our believing that, or its seeming to us as though, the world is in some way dynamical partially explains (and perhaps rationalizes) future-bias. Recent work has, in turn, found a correlation between future-bias and near-bias, suggesting that there is a common explanation for both. Call the claim that what partially explains our being both future- and near-biased is our believing/it seeming to us as though the world is dynamical, the dynamical explanation. We empirically test (...) two versions of the dynamical explanation. The first is the moving ego explanation—according to which it is our belief that the ego moves, or our phenomenology as of the ego moving, that jointly (partially) explains future- and near-bias. The second is the moving time explanation—according to which it is our belief that time robustly passes, or our phenomenology as of robust passage, which jointly (partially) explain future- and near-bias. We found no evidence in favour of either explanation. (shrink)

What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G. E. M. Anscombe and David Velleman, among others, holds that agency depends on practical rationality—the ability to act for reasons, rather than being merely moved by causes. Over the past 25 years, Velleman has argued compellingly for a distinctive view of agency and the practical rationality with which he associates it. On Velleman’s conception, being an agent consists in having the capacity to (...) be motivated by a drive to act for reasons. Your bodily movements qualify as genuine actions insofar as they are motivated in part by your desire to behave in a way that makes sense to yourself. However, there are at least two distinct ways of spelling out what this drive towards self-intelligibility consists in, both present in Velleman’s work. It might consist in a drive towards intelligibility in causal-psychological terms: roughly, a drive to maximize the rational coherence of your psychological states. Alternatively, it might consist in a drive towards narrative intelligibility: a drive to make your ongoing activity conform to a recognizable narrative structure, where that structure is understood emotionally. Velleman originally saw these options as basically equivalent, but later came to prioritize the drive towards causal-psychological intelligibility over that towards narrative intelligibility. I argue that this gets things the wrong way round—we should instead understand our capacities to render ourselves intelligible in causal-psychological terms as built upon a bedrock of emotionally suffused narrative understanding. In doing so, we resolve several problems for Velleman’s view, and pave the way for an embodied, embedded and affective account of practical rationality and agency. According to the picture that emerges, practical rationality is essential to agency, narrative understanding is essential to practical rationality, and the rhythms and structures patterning the ebb and flow of our emotional lives are essential to narrative understanding. (shrink)

The moving spotlight account (MS) is a view that combines an eternalist ontology and an A-theoretic metaphysics. The intuition underlying MS is that the present time is somehow privileged and experientially vivid, as if it were illuminated by a moving spotlight. According to MS-theorists, a key reason to prefer MS to B-theoretic eternalism is that our experience of time supports it. We argue that this is false. To this end, we formulate a new family of positions in the philosophy of (...) time, which differ from MS in that, intuitively, they admit a plurality of moving spotlights. We argue that these ‘deviant’ variants of MS cannot be dismissed as conceptually incoherent, and that they are as well-supported by our experience as is MS. One of these variants, however, is consistent with the B-theory. Thus, if our experience of time supports MS, then it supports the B-theory as well. (shrink)

Here is something puzzling. Still Lifes can be expressive. Expression involves movement. Hence, (some) Still Lifes move. This seems odd. I consider a novel explanation to this ‘static-dynamic’ puzzle from Mitchell Green (2007). Green defends an analysis of artistic expressivity that is heavily indebted to work on intermodal perception. He says visual stimuli, like colours and shapes, can elicit experienced resemblances to sounds, smells and feelings. This enables viewers to know how an emotion feels by looking at the picture. The (...) hypothesis is intriguing, but I show that his suggestion that we empathize with the pictorial content is implausible and that this exposes a flaw in the way his argument moves from experiential mappings to experiential-affective mappings. Consequently, I register some reservations about the way Green supposes we detect these cross-modal qualities. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce the notion of ‘philosophy moves’: prominent tropes featured in contemporary academic philosophy. Moves are more than patterns – they are tools for advancing and enriching philosophical debates. By recognizing these patterns in the philosophical literature, we collect an ensemble of moves for deployment in novel contexts, each with the potential to forge new paths of philosophical investigation through a given topic. The moves featured in this paper are constructive and progressive, with the potential to push (...) past stalemates and open up a wider conceptual landscape. Following a presentation of five exemplars taken from the philosophy of biology literature, I show how different moves could be made within a current interdisciplinary debate. Overall, I aim to demonstrate that recognizing these patterns is insightful pedagogically and potentially useful when put to use as part of one’s philosophical methodology. (shrink)

In this peer commentary on Maura Priest's "Transgender Children and the Right to Transition: Medical Ethics When Parents Mean Well but Cause Harm", I argue against the "mismatch" model of trans identity. On this model, which is prevalent in institutional and medical contexts, to be trans is to have one's gender identity "mismatch" with one's sexed body.

This paper offers a brief analysis of what it is to be moved by a death. It is written as an imitation of a famous European writer and it has an analysis of some newspaper material as well, which was just some gentle fun, if it be permitted.

Empirical evidence suggests that people naïvely represent time as dynamical (i.e. as containing robust temporal passage). Yet many contemporary B-theorists deny that it seems to us, in perceptual experience, as though time robustly passes. The question then arises as to why we represent time as dynamical if we do not have perceptual experiences which represent time as dynamical. We consider two hypotheses about why this might be: the temporally asperspectival replacement hypothesis and the moving open future hypothesis. We then empirically (...) test the moving open future hypothesis. According to that hypothesis we represent the past as objectively fixed and the future open. And we represent that this objective openness moves as events that were open, become fixed such that in doing so we represent a privileged moving present. We found no evidence for the moving open future hypothesis, which suggests that further investigation of the temporally asperspectival replacement hypothesis is called for. Our results also shed further light on our understanding of the respects in which we represent the future to be open, which, in turn, has implications for our theorising about the open future. (shrink)

The study primarily aimed at determining and utilizing extent of the Social Science instructors on instructional materials, and framing a capacity development framework to secure the quality of instructional delivery in the changing times. It employed the descriptive design undertaking the purposive sampling which resulted in obtaining 26 respondents from the total population, thus descriptive statistics had been used in analyzing and interpreting the collected data. The results reflected how social sciences are being taught by the 26 purposively sampled (...) respondents and showed that the underlying instructional materials or the non-technological ones remained as top materials that are often and occasionally being utilized, collectively implying that regardless that these are categorized as traditional and commonly used, are still being perceived as efficient and effective, such that optimizing and redesigning them to adapt to the changing landscape of instruction is elucidated in this paper through a capacity development program paradigm, in which the implementation is urgently recommended. (shrink)

The neurocognitive structure of the acting self has recently been widely studied, yet is still perplexing and remains an often confounded issue in cognitive neuroscience, psychopathology and philosophy. We provide a new systematic account of two of its main features, the sense of agency and the sense of ownership, demonstrating that although both features appear as phenomenally uniform, they each in fact are complex crossmodal phenomena of largely heterogeneous functional and representational levels. These levels can be arranged within a gradually (...) evolving, onto- and phylogenetically plausible framework which proceeds from basic non-conceptual sensorimotor processes to more complex conceptual and meta-representational processes of agency and ownership, respectively. In particular, three fundamental levels of agency and ownership processing have to be distinguished: The level of feeling, thinking and social interaction. This naturalistic account will not only allow to “ground the self in action”, but also provide an empirically testable taxonomy for cognitive neuroscience and a new tool for disentangling agency and ownership disturbances in psychopathology. (shrink)

Cis moves to innocence are rhetorical moves by which cisgender feminists falsely position their failure to engage with structures of transmisogyny as epistemically and morally virtuous. The notion derives from Tuck and Yang’s (2012) concept of settler moves to innocence and Mawhinney’s (1998) concept of white moves to innocence. This piece considers the case study of Manne’s (2017) work, in which she purports to offer a unified account of misogyny while explicitly refusing to consider transmisogyny. The justification she provides is (...) that she lacks the “requisite authority to do so.” I identify three functions of Manne’s cis move to innocence: i) to allow her to appear to be in solidarity with trans women and transfeminine people without taking on any of the obligations that requires, ii) to structurally reproduce the epistemic exploitation of trans women and transfeminine people, and iii) to reduce the obligations of allies to affect rather than action. (shrink)

Justified by spectacular achievements facilitated through applied deep learning methodology, the “Everything is possible” view dominates this new hour in the “boom and bust” curve of AI performance. The optimistic view collides head on with the “It is not possible”—ascertainments often originating in a skewed understanding of both AI and medicine. The meaning of the conflicting views can be assessed only by addressing the nature of medicine. Specifically: Which part of medicine, if any, can and should be entrusted to AI—now (...) or at some moment in the future? AI or not, medicine should incorporate the anticipation perspective in providing care. (shrink)

The central issue here concerns whether Being as explored by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time is constituted spatiotemporally. As such this project has two interlinked objectives. One objective is to supply conceptually plausible answers to Heidegger’s unanswered questions regarding the temporality of Being, which he raised at the very end of Being and Time. In response I argue that each individual human being is constituted as a Space-Time-Event-Motion (STEM) containment-field embodied entity. Heidegger situates Dasein (...) (human existence) in a temporal stream moving towards the nothingness of death but all the while separating being and time as two distinct phenomena rather than coexistent. I demonstrate why this was a crucial error in Heidegger’s thinking. The second objective deals with the sense of authentic being developed by Heidegger. The spatiotemporal nature of one’s life for Heidegger is understood from the standpoint of Being-in-the-world, as an engaged participant, coexistent with the world, so that contextually it is through this engagement in recognition of this facticity or thrownness that one comes to recognise one’s own authentic self. Somewhat problematic is the coexistent phenomenological recognition that one does not live in isolation and as such one may question what of the contingent, constraining and influencing factors that shape one’s sense of self particularly against the backdrop of self-other relations. This project is situated methodologically within Process Philosophy, and it is from this perspective that draws attention to the role of human agency in which individuals are spatiotemporally construed in terms of Space-Time-Event-Motion (STEM) entities. (shrink)

For centuries, it has been recognized that beauty can move. My aim in this paper is to understand how beauty moves. One suggestion is that beauty moves in a causal way, for example, by causing us to have certain feelings. Four objections to this suggestion are considered, but none is found convincing in the light of how causation tends to be understood. Moreover, it turns out that there is positive reason for thinking that beauty is causally efficacious, not just once (...) it has been experienced, as John Hyman has suggested, but even in bringing about the experience on which all other effects of beauty depend. (shrink)

In this paper I present an account of musical arousal that takes into account key demands of formalist philosophers such as Peter Kivy and Nick Zangwill. Formalists prioritise our understanding and appreciation of the music itself. As a result, they demand that any feelings we have in response to music must be directed at the music alone, without being distracted by non-musical associations. To accommodate these requirements I appeal to a mechanism of contagion which I synthesize with the expectation-based (...) arousal mechanism proposed by Leonard Meyer. This account connects musical expressivity and arousal in a way that formalists have rejected, but I argue that it provides the best explanation of our observations of listener responses while also focusing on the music itself. (shrink)

This paper explores the ethical insights provided by Anne Truitt's minimalist sculptures, as viewed through the phenomenological lenses of Hannah Arendt's investigations into the co-constitution of reality and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's investigations into perception. Artworks in their material presence can lay out new ways of relating and perceiving. Truitt's works accomplish this task by revealing the interactive motion of our embodied relations and how material objects can actually help to ground our reality and hence human potentiality. Merleau-Ponty shows how our prereflective (...) bodies allow incompossible perceptions to coexist. Yet this same capacity of bodies to gather multiple perceptions together also lends itself to the illusion that we see from only one perspective. If an ethical perspective becomes reified into one position, it then becomes detached from reality, and the ethical potential is actually lost. At the same time, phenomenologically understood, the real world does not exist in terms of static matter, but is instead a web of contextual relations and meanings. An ethics that does not take embodied relations into account—that allows for only one perspective—ultimately loses its capacity for flexibility, and for being part of a common and shared reality. (shrink)

Open science has been a feature of academia in Vietnam for more than a decade, along with open education which has been in place since the late 2000s. Since then, with the assistance of numerous bottom-up initiatives, open science has flourished and permeated a variety of academic fields in Vietnam. However, it is still positioned on the periphery and there are avenues that could be explored to promote it and move it to the centre.

The basic human ability to treat quantitative information can be divided into two parts. With proto-arithmetical ability, based on the core cognitive abilities for subitizing and estimation, numerosities can be treated in a limited and/or approximate manner. With arithmetical ability, numerosities are processed (counted, operated on) systematically in a discrete, linear, and unbounded manner. In this paper, I study the theory of enculturation as presented by Menary (2015) as a possible explanation of how we make the move from the proto-arithmetical (...) ability to arithmetic proper. I argue that enculturation based on neural reuse provides a theoretically sound and fruitful framework for explaining this development. However, I show that a comprehensive explanation must be based on valid theoretical distinctions and involve several stages in the development of arithmetical knowledge. I provide an account that meets these challenges and thus leads to a better understanding of the subject of enculturation. (shrink)

One argument for the moving spotlight theory is that it better explains certain aspects of our temporal phenomenology than does any static theory of time. Call this the argument from passage phenomenology. In this paper it is argued that insofar as moving spotlight theorists take this to be a sound argument they ought embrace a new version of the moving spotlight theory according to which the moving spotlight is a cresting wave of causal efficacy. On this view it is more (...) than just presentness that is temporary: a range of other fundamental properties are also temporary because presentness synchronically changes the fundamental properties that are instantiated in the present moment, from those instantiated when that moment is future, or past. On this view having experiences as of presentness co-varies with the presence of presentness, allowing the moving spotlight theorist to provide a compelling explanation for why we have the temporal phenomenology we do, and to explain how we can know that we are present by reflecting on the nature of said phenomenology. (shrink)

There is a way of teaching philosophy as a way of life that is focused on delivering content. In this paper, I consider a different way. It is focused on giving students the experience of philosophy as a way of life—in particular, the experience of being in love with wisdom. The main question of my paper is what it might be to teach philosophy in a way that prioritizes giving students the chance to fall in love with wisdom. I (...) do not so much argue for an answer as invite the reader to follow me along a path of metaphor, reflections on teaching philosophy, and quotations. (shrink)

In this chapter, I philosophically reflect on the management of corporate responsibility in the case of innovation. I first set the scene by contrasting responsibility in corporate social responsibility and innovation ethics, and arguing that classical conceptualizations of backward and forward looking responsibility are inappropriate in the case of innovation. Next, I introduce the concept of responsible innovation as a lens to understand the management of corporate responsibility in the case of innovation and show that the notions of virtue ethics (...) and practical wisdom are inappropriate for understanding what is at stake in innovation ethics, because the notion of practical wisdom is at odds with the nature of innovation. I conclude this chapter by proposing a concept of action-based responsible management of corporate innovation, which will be framed in terms of innovation as ethos. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that true belief is of epistemic value, but that knowledge is of even more epistemic value. Some claim that this surplus value is instrumentally valuable to the value of true belief. I call the conjunction of these claims the Instrumentalist’s Conjunction. The so-called “Swamping Problem” is meant to show that Instrumentalist’s Conjunction is inconsistent. Crudely put, the problem is that if knowledge only has surplus value to the value of true belief, and a belief is true because (...) known, then knowledge cannot be of any more value than true belief. Given the inconsistency, most philosopher reject the claim the surplus value of knowledge is instrumental to the value of true belief. This paper argues that the Swamping Problem is illusory. Once we clean up the problem and pay attention to the distinction between token/type properties, we can see that Instrumentalist’s Conjunction is perfectly coherent. (shrink)

Part of a special issue of Parallax on 'Field Philosophy and other experiments'. In a number of accounts, field philosophy has been described as providing freedom from disciplinary constraints. In this paper, however, I suggest the importance of paying closer attention to the strength of philosophy’s boundary policing and the consequences this might have for those interested in the approach. Discussing field philosophy in terms of disturbance, I highlight some of the difficulties and opportunities it produces. In particular I focus (...) on the labour involved in adopting new methods and working in new sites of enquiry. I suggest that reconstituting the ‘philosopher’ outside of their traditional habitats is no simple task. Still, I argue that field philosophers should lay claim to the boundary policing question ‘how is this philosophy?’ in order to proliferate accounts of what philosophy is and can be, with the hope that the discipline’s future might be turned more strongly towards supporting diversity rather than defending purity. Keywords: field philosophy; feminist philosophy; inclusion; methods; field research. (shrink)

Animal research has long been a source of biomedical aspirations and moral concern. Examples of both hope and concern are abundant today. In recent months, as is common practice, monkeys have served as test subjects in promising preclinical trials for an Ebola vaccine or treatment 1 , 2 , 3 and in controversial maternal deprivation studies. 4 The unresolved tension between the noble aspirations of animal research and the ethical controversies it often generates motivates the present issue of the Cambridge (...) Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. As editors of this special section, we hope that these original and timely articles will push the professional discussion of animal research ethics in a positive direction that will benefi t research scientists and others interested in moral problems in animal research. We also look forward to a day when animal research will genuinely meet both appropriate scientifi c and appropriate ethical criteria—criteria that themselves can be improved by critical scrutiny. Animal research—that is, the use of live animals as experimental subjects in biomedical and behavioral fi elds of learning—has been deeply entrenched for well over half a century. One signal development was the enactment in the late 1930s of federal product safety legislation in the United States and other nations that required animal testing of food, drugs, and medical devices prior to use by human subjects or consumers. 5 Another development was the publication of codes of research ethics that called for animal research prior to human research. The Nuremberg Code, published by an American military tribunal in 1947–48 after scrutiny of Nazi medical atrocities, stated that experiments involving the use of human subjects should be " based on the results of animal experimentation. " 6 The Declaration of Helsinki, fi rst published in 1964, reaffi rmed this assumption and added, rather imprecisely, that " the welfare of animals used for research must be respected. " 7 Against the background of such statements, the institutionalization and widespread acceptance of animal research in the twentieth century rested on two basic assumptions, one factual and one moral. The factual assumption was that animal research is suffi ciently reliable as a basis for predicting the effects of drugs, products, and other materials on human beings that animal trials can be expected to yield signifi cant scientifi c conclusions and medical benefi ts to humanity. (shrink)

Causal platonism asserts that mathematical objects cause neural states in human brains. I raise the following four objections to it. (i) Quantum entanglement does not show that one object can causally affect another, although one is nontemporal, nonspatial, and unchanging. (ii) Causal platonism can neither be justified a posteriori nor a priori. (iii) To postulate mathematical media to flesh out mathematical causation is to multiply mysteries beyond necessity. (iv) To say that mathematical causation is unintelligible and inexplicable is not to (...) complain about causation in general. (shrink)

Current debate and policy surrounding the use of genetic editing in humans often relies on a binary distinction between therapy and human enhancement. In this paper, we argue that this dichotomy fails to take into account perhaps the most significant potential uses of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in humans. We argue that genetic treatment of sporadic Alzheimer’s disease, breast- and ovarian-cancer causing BRCA1/2 mutations and the introduction of HIV resistance in humans should be considered within a new category of genetic protection (...) treatments. We find that if this category is not introduced, life-altering research might be unnecessarily limited by current or future policy. Otherwise ad hoc decisions might be made, which introduce a risk of unforeseen moral costs, and might overlook or fail to address some important opportunities. (shrink)

Everyday media consumption leaves no doubt that the perception of moving images from various media is characterized by experience and understanding. Corresponding research in this field has shown that the stimulus patterns flooding in on us are not only processed mentally, but also bodily. Building on this, the following study argues that incoming stimuli are processed not only visually, but multimodally, with all senses, and moreover affectively. The classical binding of a sensory organ to a medium, on whose delimitation the (...) common understanding of multimodality is based, is thus abolished. Can arguments for this assumption be found? Building on the research of cultural anthropologist Ernst Cassirer and his successors, the two American philosophers Susanne K. Langer and John M. Krois, and supported by research from the life sciences in which, in parallel, the arts also play an important role in understanding image formation, as in the work of Heinz Werner and, following on from this, in the more recent research of the child psychologist Daniel N. Stern in collaboration with mirror neuron research by the group of neuroscientists around Giacomo Rizzolatti in Parma, justifications for this will be provided. What the multimodal processing of film images is concretely based on will finally be made clear by means of an exemplary analysis of a video film by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. It aims to prove, that the prerequisites for the thesis can only lie in the fact, that both the modes of perception (visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, gustatory) as well as the medially conditioned modes of image formation are based on non-discursive, formal-abstract structures that are also processed affectively. At the same time, the analysis thus shows how the selection and composition of the vital experienced forms can provide information about the socio-culturally shaped self-image of the producer and the viewer. (shrink)

Despite widespread evidence that fictional models play an explanatory role in science, resistance remains to the idea that fictions can explain. A central source of this resistance is a particular view about what explanations are, namely, the ontic conception of explanation. According to the ontic conception, explanations just are the concrete entities in the world. I argue this conception is ultimately incoherent and that even a weaker version of the ontic conception fails. Fictional models can succeed in offering genuine explanations (...) by correctly capturing relevant patterns of counterfactual dependence and licensing correct inferences. Using the example of Newtonian force explanations of the tides, I show how, even in science, fiction can be a vehicle for truth. (shrink)

An examination of conceptually and rhetorically equivocating positions among academic philosophers and other theorists who are sympathetic to constructivist epistemological developments but unwilling to relinquish key aspects of traditional understandings of truth and knowledge and/or anxious to avoid charges of relativism. A major problem with the resulting hybrid formulations is that, seeking, as they often claim, to “steer a course between Scylla and Charybdis” and being composed of essentially incompatible elements, they can do little theoretical work. While the personal-intellectual (...) and professional-institutional pressures leading to such dubious navigations are substantial, so also, it is argued, are their intellectual costs. (shrink)

How Moore’s open question argument works, insofar as it does, remains a matter of controversy. My purpose here is to construct an open question argument based on a novel interpretation of how Moore’s argument might work. In order to sidestep exegetical questions, I do not claim here to be offering Moore’s own argument. Rather, I offer a reconstruction making use of important elements of Moore’s methodology and assumptions that could be reasonable within a Moorean viewpoint. The crucial role within the (...) argument is played by what I call the real thought move. I show that the reconstructed argument is more defensible from some standard objections than the common construction. I finish by drawing attention to a neglected objective that would make sense within Moore’s viewpoint, showing that it fits with a major commitment of Bonjour’s moderate rationalism, and show how the package might be important for the non-naturalist today. (shrink)

You may remember that a document circulated amongst University of Manchester staff asks, “Can top down management make our university great?” I suspect there is a difficulty with solving this problem by increasing the admission requirements, in terms of the grades you need to get in. At a certain level, one encounters a widespread and strong preference not to be the bottom level.

I examine the reasons Aristotle presents in Physics VIII 8 for denying a crucial assumption of Zeno’s dichotomy paradox: that every motion is composed of sub-motions. Aristotle claims that a unified motion is divisible into motions only in potentiality (δυνάμει). If it were actually divided at some point, the mobile would need to have arrived at and then have departed from this point, and that would require some interval of rest. Commentators have generally found Aristotle’s reasoning unconvincing. Against David Bostock (...) and Richard Sorabji, inter alia, I argue that Aristotle offers a plausible and internally consistent response to Zeno. I defend Aristotle’s reasoning by using his discussion of what to say about the mobile at boundary instants, transitions between change and rest. There Aristotle articulates what I call the Changes are Open, Rests are Closed Rule: what is true of something at a boundary instant is what is true of it over the time of its rest. By contrast, predications true of something over its period of change are not true of the thing at either of the boundary instants of that change. I argue that this rule issues from Aristotle’s general understanding of change, as laid out in Phys. III. It also fits well with Phys. VI, where Aristotle maintains that there is a first boundary instant included in the time of rest, but not a “first in which the mobile began to change.” I then show how this rule underlies Aristotle’s argument that a continuous motion cannot be composed of actual sub-motions. Aristotle distinguishes potential middles, points passed through en route to a terminus, from actual middles. The Changes are Open, Rests are Closed Rule only applies to actual middles, because only they are boundaries of change that the mobile must arrive at and then depart from. On my reading, Aristotle argues that the instant of arrival, the first instant at which the mobile has come to be at the actual middle, cannot belong to the time of the subsequent motion. If it did, the mobile would already be moving towards the next terminus and thus, per Phys. VI 6, would have already left. But it cannot have moved away from the midpoint at the very same moment it has arrived there. This means that the instant of arrival must be separated from the time of departure by an interval of rest. I show how Aristotle’s reasoning applies generally to rule out any continuous reflexive motion or continuous complex rectilinear motion. On my interpretation, however, the argument does not apply to every change of direction. When, as in the case of projectile motion, multiple movers and their relative powers explain why the mobile changes directions, distinct sub-motions are not involved. Aristotle holds that such motions cannot be continuous, not because they involve intervals of rest, but because they involve multiple causes of motion. My interpretation of the Changes are Open, Rests are Closed Rule allows us to make better sense of Aristotle’s argument than any previous interpretation. (shrink)

The field of this research is the area of Thrace in Greece, in which people from various ethnic groups coexist for almost a century. Most of these ethnic groups moved to the area, after voluntary migrations in 1923. The newcomers were classified as "refugees" and were treated hostilely by the locals. One of these ethnic groups that was treated hostilely was the Gagauz, a Turkish-speaking ethnic group. The aim of this research is to study the acculturation strategies of the (...) Gagauz in their attempt to be accepted in Greek society. This study attempts to investigate the way in which the Gagauz construct and reconstruct their ethnic identity through dance. Data was gathered through the ethnographic method as this is applied to the study of dance. The interpretation of the research data in order to approach the ethnic identity of the Gagauz was based on the theoretical perspective of cultural and social construction or constructivism. This theory, in order to highlight the ethnic identity of the Gagauz, is used under the analytical terms of "acculturation" according to the multicultural model proposed by Berry. From the analysis and interpretation of the ethnographic data, it was found that the construction of the ethnic identity of the Gagauz in Greece is a fluid process, in the reconstruction of which an important factor is the degree of its acculturation. The Gagauz, experiencing a social reality that seeks to have multiple identities at the same time, change the meanings of their actions always in relation to their social environment. Thus, on the one hand, they choose to have a Greek Thracian ethnic identity, on the other Gagauz ethnic identity, and on a third level they self-identify as Greek Gagauz. So, depending on their circumstances and feelings, they choose a different ethnic identity. (shrink)

When the NCAA adopted new rules allowing athletes to profit off their name, image, and likeness (NIL), few people took more interest than Reggie Bush who famously relinquished the Heisman trophy after being ruled retroactively ineligible for receiving "impermissible benefits." Bush has argued for his reinstatement and the "return" of his Heisman. In this paper, I argue that, while the NCAA never should have required players to be amateurs in the first place, Bush should not be reinstated or have (...) the Heisman "returned." Properly understood, Reggie Bush never won the Heisman Trophy in the first place, so "returning" it would be to rewrite history — almost literally, to move the goalposts. -/- Forthcoming in "College Sports and Ethics" by Lexington Books. (shrink)

This paper defends a view that falls somewhere between the two extremes of inflationary and deflationary accounts of holes, and it does so by rejecting the initial conceptualisation of holes in terms of absences. Once we move away from this conception, I argue, we can see that there are no special metaphysical problems associated with holes. Rather, whatever one’s preferred metaphysics of paradigm material objects, that account can equally be applied to holes. This means that like the deflationist, I am (...) entity monist: I reject the idea that there are any immaterial beings. On the other hand, like the inflationist I reject the idea that we should identify holes with parts or surfaces of paradigm objects. Like the inflationist, I hold that there exist entities in roughly the regions of space-time where pre-theoretically we would say there exist holes, and those entities are holes. Call this latter part of the view—that where the folk are apt to claim there is a hole, that hole has roughly the dimensions that the folk attribute to it—hole-instinctivism (the view that our instincts about hole location/dimension are roughly right). Ultimately I embrace hole conventionalism, a view that includes commitment to both entity monism and hole-instinctivism. According to hole conventionalism, holes are no more ontologically problematic than statues, nor are they of a fundamentally different ontological kind from statues. (shrink)

This paper defends a view that falls somewhere between the two extremes of inflationary and deflationary accounts, and it does so by rejecting the initial conceptualisation of holes in terms of absences. Once we move away from this conception, I argue, we can see that there are no special metaphysical problems associated with holes. Rather, whatever one’s preferred metaphysics of paradigm material objects, that account can equally be applied to holes. This means that like the deflationist, I am entity monist: (...) I reject the idea that there are any immaterial beings. On the other hand, like the inflationist I reject the idea that we should identify holes with parts or surfaces of paradigm objects. Like the inflationist, I hold that there exist entities in roughly the regions of space-time where pre-theoretically we would say there exist holes, and those entities are holes. Call this latter part of the view—that where the folk are apt to claim there is a hole, that hole has roughly the dimensions that the folk attribute to it—hole-instinctivism (the view that our instincts about hole location/dimension are roughly right). Ultimately I embrace hole conventionalism, a view that includes commitment to both entity monism and hole-instinctivism. According to hole conventionalism, holes are no more ontologically problematic than statues, nor are they of a fundamentally different ontological kind from statues. (shrink)

On the shared-­ends account of close friendship, proper care for a friend as an agent requires seeing yourself as having important reasons to accommodate and promote the friend’s valuable ends for her own sake. However, that friends share ends doesn't inoculate them against disagreements about how to pursue those ends. This paper defends the claim that, in certain circumstances of reasonable disagreement, proper care for a friend as a practical and moral agent sometimes requires allowing her judgment to decide what (...) you are to do, even when you disagree with her judgment (and even when her judgment is in fact mistaken). In these instances, your friendship can make it the case that you may not act on your own practical and even moral judgments because, at those times, you have a duty as her close friend to defer to her judgments. As a result, treating your friend properly as a responsible agent can require that you assist her in committing what may in fact be serious moral wrongs. (shrink)

The prospective introduction of autonomous cars into public traffic raises the question of how such systems should behave when an accident is inevitable. Due to concerns with self-interest and liberal legitimacy that have become paramount in the emerging debate, a contractarian framework seems to provide a particularly attractive means of approaching this problem. We examine one such attempt, which derives a harm minimisation rule from the assumptions of rational self-interest and ignorance of one’s position in a future accident. We contend, (...) however, that both contractarian approaches and harm minimisation standards are flawed, due to a failure to account for the fundamental difference between those ‘involved’ and ‘uninvolved’ in an impending crash. Drawing from classical works on the trolley problem, we show how this notion can be substantiated by reference to either the distinction between negative and positive rights, or to differences in people’s claims. By supplementing harm minimisation with corresponding constraints, we can develop crash algorithms for autonomous cars which are both ethically adequate and promise to overcome certain significant practical barriers to implementation. (shrink)

This transcription of a keynote for the Speculative Art Histories conference in May 2013 is a mixture of the main argument of The Sympathy of Things and some new insights. The text might be helpful for those who have not read the Sympathy book, which has been sold out for a number of years. This essay will appear as a chapter in Sjoerd van Tuinen's Speculative Art Histories, to be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2017.

This transcription of a keynote for the Speculative Art Histories conference in May 2013 is a mixture of the main argument of The Sympathy of Things and some new insights. The text might be helpful for those who have not read the Sympathy book, which has been sold out for a number of years. This essay will appear as a chapter in Sjoerd van Tuinen's Speculative Art Histories, to be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2017.

Can there be a global demos? The current debate about this topic is divided between two opposing camps: the “pessimist” or “impossibilist” camp, which holds that the emergence of a global demos is either conceptually or empirically impossible, and the “optimist” or “possibilist” camp, which holds that the emergence of a global demos is conceptually as well as empirically possible and an embryonic version of it already exists. However, the two camps agree neither on a common working definition of a (...) global demos, nor on the relevant empirical facts, so it is difficult to reconcile their conflicting outlooks. We seek to move the debate beyond this stalemate. We argue that existing conceptions of a demos are ill-suited for capturing what kind of a global demos is needed to facilitate good global governance, and we propose a new conception of a demos that is better suited for this purpose. We suggest that some of the most prominent conceptions of a demos have focused too much on who the members of a demos are and too little on what functional characteristics the demos must have in order to perform its role in facilitating governance within the relevant domain. Our new proposal shifts the emphasis from the first, “compositional” question to the second, “performative” one, and provides a more “agency-based” account of a global demos. The key criterion that a collection of individuals must meet in order to qualify as a demos is that it is not merely demarcated by an appropriate membership criterion, but that it can be organized, democratically, so as to function as a state-like agent. Compared to the existing, predominantly “compositional” approaches to thinking about the demos, this agency-based approach puts us into a much better position to assess the empirical prospects for the emergence of a global demos that can facilitate good global governance. (shrink)

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

Given that one-million species are currently threatened with extinction and that humans are undermining the entire natural infrastructure on which our modern world depends (IPBES, 2019), this dissertation will show that there is a need to provide an alternative approach to wildlife conservation, one that avoids anthropocentrism and wildlife valuation on an instrumental basis to provide meaningful and tangible success for both wildlife conservation and human well-being in an inclusive way. In this sense, The Value of Being Wild (...) will showcase the concept of eco-phenomenology as an important non-anthropocentric alternative to the current approach to wildlife conservation, namely sustainable development. The problem with this dominant paradigm, as Chapter Two will reveal, is that sustainable development has not only failed to provide humans and future generations of humans with their own needs but, as per the latest IPBES report, failed in arresting the freefall decline of wild species. The situation currently requires a radical overhaul of the current system. As emerged from the later work of French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), eco-phenomenology is particularly well-suited as a practical alternative to sustainable development. The core reason is that eco-phenomenology moves away from a human-centred framework toward a far more inclusive approach that embraces the conservation of wild animals as well the wild environment they dwell in, beyond any human needs (although humans are embraced within the approach too). Merleau-Ponty helps us to move away from anthropocentrism to a more inclusive approach in conserving wildlife, since his phenomenology does not consider the human animal’s relationship in the world as exclusive (to use and exploit wild animals solely for their benefit), but inclusive (as an interconnected biological component in a broad ecological system). The strength of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of phenomenology is that it facilitates an understanding of all living and even non-living entities, such as air, water and soil, as interconnected and interrelated within a broad biosphere. While Merleau-Ponty did not address the concept of wild animals or the biosphere directly, his later work points to the fact that human animals cannot exist outside a world that provides life-giving force to all living beings. Phenomenology, as developed by Merleau-Ponty, is a concept that recognises the axiological qualities of the natural world are inherent and ineliminable from the discipline of traditional phenomenology, hence the term ‘eco-phenomenology’, developed in one reception of his thinking. Eco-phenomenology offers a return to a world that humans have tried hard to alienate themselves from, in that it approaches the natural environment and wild animals, not as a complex set of objects and objective processes, but rather as they are experienced and lived from within by the attentive animal who is entirely a part of the world that he or she experiences. Merleau-Pontian eco-phenomenology thus emphasises a holistic dialogue within a more-than-human world (Abram, 1996: 65). Eco-phenomenology is a concept that points toward an applied strategy but so far this has not been attempted in earnest. This is specifically true when it comes to wildlife conservation. The Value of Being Wild, therefore, sets out to employ the concept of eco-phenomenology in order to provide a new practical wildlife conservation approach that challenges, and potentially replaces, the current prevailing policies as employed by global governmental and inter-governmental agencies. In particular, this alternative frame is posed as a replacement for the failing anthropocentric conservation practices currently in place in South Africa. This dissertation will therefore conclude by exploring strategies where conservation of wildlife is not taken as instrumentally-valued, or even intrinsically-valued, but rather as wild-valued in that the existence of wild animals as wild is conserved within a broader, more inclusive overall ecology that supports the survival and flourishing of all living beings that include plants, wild animals and human beings. (shrink)

This book on the topic of ethics and poetry consists of contributions from different continents on the subject of applied ethics related to poetry. It should gather a favourable reception from philosophers, ethicists, theologians and anthropologists from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America and allows for a comparison of the healing power of words from various religious, spiritual and philosophical traditions. The first part of this book presents original poems that express ethical emotions and aphorism related to a philosophical questioning (...) of the grounding of our values for life. The poems are written by twelve authors coming from four continents, for whom poetic emotions are sources of artistic inspiration and that can be used for conflict resolution. In the second part, which features short essays, nine authors tackle how poems, symbolic representations, metaphorical narratives and lies impact the space of possibilities, in which we are moved to action, knowledge formation, and how we imagine the world together. (shrink)