Experimental philosophy’s much-discussed ‘restrictionist’ program seeks to delineate the extent to which philosophers may legitimately rely on intuitions about possible cases. The present paper shows that this program can be (i) put to the service of diagnostic problem-resolution (in the wake of J.L. Austin) and (ii) pursued by constructing and experimentally testing psycholinguistic explanations of intuitions which expose their lack of evidentiary value: The paper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of paradoxical intuitions that are prompted by verbal case-descriptions, and presents two (...) experiments that support the explanation. This debunking explanation helps resolve philosophical paradoxes about perception (known as ‘arguments from hallucination’). (shrink)

Empirical evidence shows that people have multiple time-biases. One is near-bias, another is future-bias, and a third is present-bias. Philosophers are concerned with the normative status of these time-biases. They have argued that, at least in part, the normative status of these biases depends on the extent to which they tend to promote, or frustrate, wellbeing, where “wellbeing” is taken to be of fundamental value. Since near-bias is thought to be associated with impulsivity, lack of self-control, and poor long-term health (...) and financial outcomes, it has often been supposed that it is associated with lower wellbeing. On those grounds, philosophers have argued that near-bias is rationally impermissible. By contrast, philosophical views about the normative status of future-bias have been mixed, with some arguing that future-bias is impermissible because, they think, it frustrates wellbeing, and others arguing that it is at least permissible (and perhaps obligatory) because it is the product of mechanisms whose functioning can be expected to promote wellbeing. However, to date there are no studies that have directly probed how time-biases correlate with wellbeing. Since it's not a settled matter which psychological mechanisms underlie time-biases, it is not uncontroversial which things serve as proxies for these preferences. We directly empirically investigate the connection between time-biases and measures of wellbeing, to see which of these biases is associated with promoting, or frustrating wellbeing. Contrary to expectation, we found no evidence that near-bias or present-bias are associated with frustrating wellbeing on any of the constructs we measured. On the other hand, and contrary to what some philosophers have supposed, we found that future-bias was associated with higher measures of wellbeing on several measures. We consider the implications of these findings for the evaluation of the normative status of these time biases. (shrink)

In philosophical thought experiments, as in ordinary discourse, our understanding of verbal case descriptions is enriched by automatic comprehension inferences. Such inferences have us routinely infer what else is also true of the cases described. We consider how such routine inferences from polysemous words can generate zombie intuitions: intuitions that are ‘killed’ (defeated) by contextual information but kept cognitively alive by the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic salience bias. Extending ‘evidentiary’ experimental philosophy, this paper examines whether the ‘zombie argument’ against materialism (...) is built on zombie intuitions. We examine the hypothesis that contextually defeated stereotypical inferences from the noun ‘zombie’ influence intuitions about ‘philosophical zombies’. We document framing effects (‘zombie’ vs ‘duplicate’) predicted by the hypothesis. Findings undermine intuitions about the conceivability of ‘philosophical zombies’ and address the philosophical ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Findings support a deflationary response: The impression that principled obstacles prevent scientific explanation of how physical processes give rise to conscious experience is generated by philosophical arguments that rely on epistemically deficient intuitions. (shrink)

This paper empirically raises and examines the question of ‘conceptual control’: To what extent are competent thinkers able to reason properly with new senses of words? This question is crucial for conceptual engineering. This prominently discussed philosophical project seeks to improve our representational devices to help us reason better. It frequently involves giving new senses to familiar words, through normative explanations. Such efforts enhance, rather than reduce, our ability to reason properly, only if competent language users are able to abide (...) by the relevant explanations, in language comprehension and verbal reasoning. This paper examines to what extent we have such ‘conceptual control’ in reasoning with new senses. The paper draws on psycholinguistic findings about polysemy processing to render this question empirically tractable and builds on recent findings from experimental philosophy to address it. The paper identifies a philosophically important gap in thinkers’ control over the key process of stereotypical enrichment and discusses how conceptual engineers can use empirical methods to work around this gap in conceptual control. The paper thus empirically demonstrates the urgency of the question of conceptual control and explains how experimental philosophy can empirically address the question, to render conceptual engineering feasible as an ameliorative enterprise. (shrink)

Dematerialization can be taken variously as meaning less materials used in objects technically, a less materialistic outlook on consumption, or as the virtualization of communication and interaction. These ideas are reviewed here. Considering material culture and technoculture in this light raises questions about contemporary materialism and technology more generally as well, where smaller is not necessarily simpler, and where smaller may not even be less.

How does experimental philosophy address philosophical questions and problems? That is: What projects does experimental philosophy pursue? What is their philosophical relevance? And what empirical methods do they employ? Answers to these questions will reveal how experimental philosophy can contribute to the longstanding ambition of placing philosophy on the ‘secure path of a science’, as Kant put it. We argue that experimental philosophy has introduced a new methodological perspective – a ‘meta-philosophical naturalism’ that addresses philosophical questions about a phenomenon by (...) empirically investigating how people think about this phenomenon. This chapter asks how this novel perspective can be successfully implemented: How can the empirical investigation of how people think about something address genuinely philosophical problems? And what methods – and, specifically, what methods beyond the questionnaire – can this investigation employ? We first review core projects of experimental philosophy and raise the question of their philosophical relevance. For ambitious answers, we turn to experimental philosophy’s most direct historical precursor, mid-20th century ordinary language philosophy, and discuss empirical implementations of two of its research programmes that use experimental methods from psycholinguistics and corpus methods from the digital humanities. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom holds that the von Neumann entropy corresponds to thermodynamic entropy, but Hemmo and Shenker (2006) have recently argued against this view by attacking von Neumann's (1955) argument. I argue that Hemmo and Shenker's arguments fail due to several misunderstandings: about statistical-mechanical and thermodynamic domains of applicability, about the nature of mixed states, and about the role of approximations in physics. As a result, their arguments fail in all cases: in the single-particle case, the finite particles case, and the (...) infinite particles case. (shrink)

Traditional approaches to conflict are oriented towards establishing consensus, either in the form of a resolution of the conflict or in the form of an ‘agree-to-disagree’ standstill between the stakeholders. In this paper, we criticize these traditional approaches, each for specific reasons, and we propose and develop the agonistic approach to conflict. Based on Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic democratic theory, the agonistic approach to conflict is more welcoming of dissensus, replacing discussion stoppers with discussion starters and replacing standstills with contestation. We (...) illustrate such replacements and develop this approach, we analyse technological conflicts in a concrete R&D setting: the global hydrogen economy. From this context, we focus on the conflict between the proponents of blue hydrogen and those of green hydrogen. We conclude by highlighting the advantage of the agonistic approach but also drawing attention to its own specific risk, namely, antagonism. (shrink)

Dark matter in astrophysics offers a rare treat for philosophers of science. When they look at the contemporary science of dark matter, they see reports of a widely accepted theoretical posit indispensable to our best theories and models but without an accepted experimental confirmation of its existence. Nearly all astrophysicists and cosmologists believe that dark matter exists and makes up approximately a quarter of the mass-energy content of the universe. However, they seem to know almost nothing about its nature, cannot (...) directly observe it, and have been unable to detect the products of any interactions with any of the candidate dark matter particles. This project addresses the apparent tension between the impressive knowledge taken to have been obtained in contemporary sciences of the cosmos and the methodological and theoretical limitations in obtaining such knowledge. To do so, this dissertation investigates the ways in which astronomers and astrophysicists are making progress by looking more closely at their experimental practices and actual theoretical commitments. More specifically, the goal is to determine how this bears on longstanding philosophical questions of scientific realism and the nature of scientific experimentation. Ultimately, I argue that astronomers do conduct traditional, interventionist experiments and that we can be realists about dark matter. These two views offer a way of thinking differently about how scientists can and do obtain knowledge about inaccessible and unobservable targets systems. -/- . (shrink)

Future-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for positive states of affairs to be located in the future not the past, and for negative states of affairs to be located in the past not the future. Three explanations for future-bias have been posited: the temporal metaphysics explanation, the practical irrelevance explanation, and the three mechanisms explanation. Understanding what explains future-bias is important not only for better understanding the phenomenon itself, but also because many philosophers think that which explanation is (...) the correct one has implications for our evaluation of the normative status of future-bias. In this paper we focus on the connection between future-bias and the temporal value asymmetry. The latter refers to the fact that people tend to assign more value to a state of affairs when it is located in the future, as opposed to being equidistant in the past. All three candidate explanations offered for future-bias proceed by explaining the temporal value asymmetry, and then supposing that future-bias is simply a manifestation of that asymmetry. Recently, however, it has been argued that the conditions under which people display the temporal value asymmetry and future-bias are different, and that this is reason to doubt that the latter is a manifestation of the former. In this paper we empirically test one response to this argument against the manifestation thesis—the simulation response—according to which once we control for the degree to which people can simulate the object of their preference, we find that people display future-bias and the temporal value asymmetry in the same conditions. We find no evidence in favour of the simulation response. Moreover, our results support some previous research that suggests that the temporal value asymmetry is less robust than previously thought, and this in itself casts doubt on the idea that future bias is just a manifestation of this asymmetry. (shrink)

The article deals with currents and tides. We look at the history of their observation in antiquity as well as alternative theories, designed to explain their nature. Major theories accessed are those by Aristotle, Posidonius and Seneca. Special attention is given to ancient explanation of the phenomenon of the periodical change of the stream in Euripus’ channel. Throughout we refl ect on an analogy between natural phenomena and the processes occurring in living organisms, common to our philosophers of nature, as (...) well as the peculiarities of their interpretation of the theory of mutual transformation of the elements. Besides, it is important to note the place of the method of analogy in their observations and theoretical constructions. (shrink)

Stereotypes shape inferences in philosophical thought, political discourse, and everyday life. These inferences are routinely made when thinkers engage in language comprehension or production: We make them whenever we hear, read, or formulate stories, reports, philosophical case-descriptions, or premises of arguments – on virtually any topic. These inferences are largely automatic: largely unconscious, non-intentional, and effortless. Accordingly, they shape our thought in ways we can properly understand only by complementing traditional forms of philosophical analysis with experimental methods from psycholinguistics. This (...) paper seeks, first, to bring out the wider philosophical relevance of stereotypical inference, well beyond familiar topics like gender and race. Second, we wish to provide philosophers with a toolkit to experimentally study these ubiquitous inferences and what intuitions they may generate. This paper explains what stereotypes are, and why they matter to current and traditional concerns in philosophy – experimental, analytic, and applied. It then assembles a psycholinguistic toolkit and demonstrates through two studies how potentially questionnaire-based measures can be combined with process measures to garner evidence for specific stereotypical inferences and study when they ‘go through’ and influence our thinking. (shrink)

In Everettian quantum mechanics, justifications for the Born rule appeal to self-locating uncertainty or decision theory. Such justifications have focused exclusively on a pure-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a wave function. Recent works in quantum foundations suggest that it is viable to consider a mixed-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a (mixed-state) density matrix. Here, we develop the conceptual foundations for decoherence and branching in a mixed-state multiverse, and extend the standard Everettian justifications for the Born rule to this setting. This (...) extended framework provides a unification of 'classical' and 'quantum' probabilities, and additional theoretical benefits, for the Everettian picture. (shrink)

I argue that influential recent discussions have whitewashed blame, characterizing it in ways that deemphasize or ignore its morally problematic features. I distinguish “definitional,” “creeping,” and “emphasis” whitewash, and argue that they play a central role in overall endorsements of blame by T.M. Scanlon, George Sher, and Miranda Fricker. In particular, these endorsements treat blame as appropriate by definition (Scanlon), or as little more than a wish (Sher), and infer from blame's having one useful function that it is a good (...) practice overall (Fricker). I use an analogy with revenge to illustrate the mechanisms of whitewashing, including broadening a concept to include available alternatives to it and inference from one feature of a practice to an overall conclusion about that practice. Several features of blame make it particularly prone to whitewashing, including blamers' personal or emotional stake in blaming and widespread disagreement about the nature of blame. I argue that a non‐whitewashing treatment of blame must pay closer attention both to blame's harms, and to comparisons between blame and alternative, non‐blaming reactions. (shrink)

The author criticizes ways in which academic disciplines can be viewed as skewed toward bureaucratized intellect and its requirements and rewards, rather than toward scholarly intellectual life and research. Drawing from the Chicago traditions of sociology and philosophical pragmatism, as well as his own experience of them, Halton goes on to appraise ways in which these traditions have tended to become contracted to limited textbook canons. Donald Levine’s Visions of the Sociological Tradition provides a case in which the broad influences (...) of European intellectual traditions, for example, Nietzsche, are included in his sociological history of European sociological traditions, whereas similar influences, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thorstein Veblen, Jane Addams, Lewis Mumford, or even C. Wright Mills, are excluded from his account of the American and Chicago traditions. Admitting that academic disciplines represent skewed forms of bureaucratized intellect rather than progressive traditions allows one to admit those who are not members of the club into the dialogue of social thought and the social sciences. (shrink)

: Two common ways of explaining akrasia will be presented, one which focuses on strength of desire and the other which focuses on action issuing from practical judgment. Though each is intuitive in a certain way, they both fail as explanations of the most interesting cases of akrasia. Spinoza 's own thoughts on bondage and the affects follow, from which a Spinozist explanation of akrasia is constructed. This account is based in Spinoza 's mechanistic psychology of cognitive affects. Because Spinoza (...) 's account explains action asissuing from modes of mind that are both cognitive and affective, it captures the intuitions that motivate the two traditional views while avoiding the pitfalls that result from their one‐sided approaches. This project will allow us a fuller understanding of Spinozist moral psychology. In addition to this historical value, the Spinozist theory may offer a satisfactory explanation of certain hard cases of akrasia while avoiding the problems be set by other theories. For this reason, the Spinozist account could also be seen as a useful contribution to our philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of akrasia. (shrink)

This paper provides new tools for philosophical argument analysis and fresh empirical foundations for ‘critical’ ordinary language philosophy. Language comprehension routinely involves stereotypical inferences with contextual defeaters. J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia first mooted the idea that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from verbal case-descriptions drive some philosophical paradoxes; these engender philosophical problems that can be resolved by exposing the underlying fallacies. We build on psycholinguistic research on salience effects to explain when and why even perfectly competent speakers cannot help making (...) stereotypical inferences which are contextually inappropriate. We analyse a classical paradox about perception, suggest it relies on contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance-verbs, and show that the conditions we identified as leading to contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are met in formulations of the paradox. Three experiments use a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to document the predicted inappropriate inferences, in English, German, and Japanese. The cross-linguistic study allows us to assess the wider relevance of the proposed analysis. Our findings open up new perspectives for ‘evidential’ experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Preparing general relativity for quantization in the Hamiltonian approach leads to the `problem of time,' rendering the world fundamentally timeless. One proposed solution is the `thermal time hypothesis,' which defines time in terms of states representing systems in thermal equilibrium. On this view, time is supposed to emerge thermodynamically even in a fundamentally timeless context. Here, I develop the worry that the thermal time hypothesis requires dynamics -- and hence time -- to get off the ground, thereby running into worries (...) of circularity. (shrink)

"Our literature is replete with complaints about the chaotic state of the systematics of psychoses and every psychiatrist knows that it is impossible to come to any common understanding on the basis of the old diagnostic labels. ... Thus, not even the masters of science can make themselves understood on the basis of the old concepts and with many patients the number of diagnoses made equals the number of institutions they have been too. ... Errors are the greatest obstacles to (...) the progress of science; to correct such errors is of more practical value than to achieve new knowledge. We have here eliminated chaos of terms behind which useful concepts of disease were mistakenly sought; we have eliminated a veritable forest of boundary posts, not one of which indicated any natural line of demarcation. ... By the term „dementia praecox“ or „schizophrenia“ we designate a group of psychoses whose course is at times chronic, at times marked by intermittent attacks, and which can stop or retrograde at any stage, but does not permit a full restitutio ad integrum. The disease is characterized by a specific type of alteration of thinking, feeling, and relation to the external world which appears nowhere else in this particular fashion." Eugen Bleuler. Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias. Translated by Joseph Zinkin. International Universities Press, New York, 1950. (shrink)

Until recently, experimental philosophy has been associated with the questionnaire-based study of intuitions; however, experimental philosophers now adapt a wide range of empirical methods for new philosophical purposes. New methods include paradigms for behavioural experiments from across the social sciences as well as computational methods from the digital humanities that can process large bodies of text and evidence. This book offers an accessible overview of these exciting innovations. The volume brings together established and emerging research leaders from several areas of (...) experimental philosophy to explore how new empirical methods can contribute to philosophical debates. Each chapter presents one or several methods new to experimental philosophy, demonstrating their application in a key area of philosophy and discussing their strengths and limitations. Methods covered include eye tracking, virtual reality technology, neuroimaging, statistical learning, and experimental economics as well as corpus linguistics, visualisation techniques and data and text mining. The volume explores their use in moral philosophy and moral psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and the history of ideas. Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy is essential reading for undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such ‘antinomic problems’ that proceeds from an examination of ‘ordinary language’ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and ‘common sense’ (what they commonly think about it), and deploys findings to show that the problems at issue are artefacts of (...) fallacious reasoning. The approach is capable, and in need of, empirical development. Proceeding from a case-study on Austin’s paradigmatic treatment of the problem of perception, this paper identifies the key empirical assumptions informing the approach, assesses them in the light of empirical findings about default inferences, contextualisation failures, and belief fragmentation, and explores how these findings can be deployed to address the problem of perception. This facilitates a novel resolution of the problem of perception. Proceeding from this paradigm, the paper proposes ‘experimental critical OLP’ as a new research program in experimental philosophy that avoids apparent non-sequiturs of OLP, extends and transforms experimental philosophy’s ‘sources program’, and provides a promising new strategy for deploying empirical findings about how people ordinarily talk and think about phenomena, to address longstanding philosophical problems. (shrink)

Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments involve unusual cases. We present empirical reasons to doubt the reliability of intuitive judgments and conclusions about such cases. Inferences and intuitions prompted by verbal case descriptions are influenced by routine comprehension processes which invoke stereotypes. We build on psycholinguistic findings to determine conditions under which the stereotype associated with the most salient sense of a word predictably supports inappropriate inferences from descriptions of unusual (stereotype-divergent) cases. We conduct an experiment that combines plausibility ratings (...) with pupillometry to document this “salience bias.” We find that under certain conditions, competent speakers automatically make stereotypical inferences they know to be inappropriate. (shrink)

When a technology is seen as the right solution to a recognized problem, the development of alternative technologies comes under threat. To secure much-needed resources, proponents of alternative technologies must, in these conditions, restart societal discussion on the status quo, a process at once technological and discursive known as ‘path creation’. In this article, we investigate discussion-restarting strategies employed by supporters of emerging technologies in the field of solar fuels, particularly the advocates of a technology referred to as ‘artificial photosynthesis’. (...) For illustrative purposes we explore four such strategies: revisiting weak spots, resizing the problem, redefining the game, and renegotiating labels. We conclude with a methodological reflection on the empirical study of discursive strategies in a socio-technical system. We further suggest a more systematic application of discourse-analytical and argumentation-theoretical insights that can complement current scholarship on path dependence and path creation. (shrink)

This essay from 1999, republished in Notre Dame Magazine online in July 2023, explores how the 1950s were a time of fundamental transformations in American society, a time when the United States went fully megatechnic. The hugely increased power of military, corporate-industrial and “big science” institutions developed during the 1950s signaled the transformation to megatechnic America, with atomic bombs and nuclear testing, automobiles and televisions as key symbols of that transformation. Figures such as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller illustrated (...) the battle between national security dictates controlling nuclear bomb testing and responsible science. -/- Since the Second World War the United States has been problematically guided by a power-oriented culture, which, in the names of national security and convenience, has tended to reshape America toward an increasingly hierarchical model of society based on the system requirements of a machine. This same era gave birth to a generalized economic prosperity in the United States, to the civil rights movement, to feminism, literary and artistic innovations, and to other openings of public equality and freedom. Yet the magnification of bureaucratic-corporate structures in that postwar, cold war prosperity has ultimately tended to restructure America against the basic requirements of democratic community. (shrink)

Taking the formal analogies between black holes and classical thermodynamics seriously seems to first require that classical thermodynamics applies in relativistic regimes. Yet, by scrutinizing how classical temperature is extended into special relativity, I argue that the concept falls apart. I examine four consilient procedures for establishing the classical temperature: the Carnot process, the thermometer, kinetic theory, and black-body radiation. I argue that their relativistic counterparts demonstrate no such consilience in defining the relativistic temperature. As such, classical temperature doesn’t appear (...) to survive a relativistic extension. I suggest two interpretations for this situation: eliminativism akin to simultaneity, or pluralism akin to rotation. (shrink)

The second article, in which the author suggests an analysis of other three authors' state of nature models and tries to define the role of the models in their respective law concepts. The analysis demonstrates that all three models share same basic idea, which is the concept of an independent reasonable individual; this very idea is what these different models are based upon. The concept of an individual itself does not have a substantiation.

Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We demonstrate how plausibility (...) ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential ‘salience bias’. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox (‘argument from hallucination’). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods’ philosophical usefulness. (shrink)

Intuitive judgments elicited by verbal case-descriptions play key roles in philosophical problem-setting and argument. Experimental philosophy's ‘sources project’ seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions which help us assess our warrant for accepting them. This article develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitions prompted by philosophical case-descriptions. For proof of concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradox about perception, trace them to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executed in verb comprehension, and employ a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to elicit the relevant (...) stereotypical associations of perception- and appearance-verbs. We obtain a debunking explanation that resolves the philosophical paradox. (shrink)

Current conceptions of meaning and culture tend toward extreme forms of disembodied abstraction, indicating an alienation from the original, earthy meaning of the word culture. I turn to the earlier meanings of the word and why the “cultic,” the living impulse to meaning, was and remains essential to a conception of culture as semeiosis or sign-action. Culture and biology are often treated by social scientists as though they were oil and water, not to be mixed. I am fully aware of (...) the assumed nature-culture dichotomy, but I reject it, not because I am a sociobiologist, quite the contrary, but rather because I am a semiotician, and my studies of signs have led me toward a critical reconstruction of the concepts of nature and culture. In my perspective, culture is a living, social metaboly of signs, not limited to a convention but in transaction with the inmost recesses of the person, and with the qualitative, physical, and significant environment. The question is not whether culture is a “system” or not, but whether we shall continue to conceive of culture as an inert, mechanical system or code, incapable of self-critical cultivation, or as a “living system”--a way of living--fully open to contingency, spontaneity, purposive growth and decay. Putting the “cult” back into culture requires a reconception of the relations between human biology and meaning, and between non-discursive, non-rational reason and modern rationality. Such a reconception involves considering how the technics of the biosocial human body itself form the primary source of culture. (shrink)

We blame faulty brakes for a car crash, or rain for our bad mood. This “merely causal” blame is usually seen as uninteresting. I argue that it is crucial for understanding the interpersonal blame with which we target ourselves and each other. The two are often difficult to distinguish, in a way that plagues philosophical discussions of blame. And interpersonal blame is distinctive, I argue, partly in its causal focus: its attention to a person as cause. I argue that this (...) causal focus helps explain several central characteristics of interpersonal blame: its tendency to exaggerate a person’s causal role, its weakening through attention to personal history or thoughts about determinism, its characteristic ‘force’ or ‘sting’, and our sense that blame is often harmful or unfair. I conclude by drawing out one implication of blame's causal focus: in a certain range of cases, blame is partly under our voluntary control. (shrink)

Some conceptions of the role of philosophers in climate change focus mainly on theoretical progress in philosophy, or on philosophers as individual citizens. Against these views, I defend a skill view: philosophers should use our characteristic skills as philosophers to combat climate change by integrating it into our teaching, research, service, and community engagement. A focus on theoretical progress, citizenship, expertise, virtue, ability, social role, or power, rather than on skill, can allow for some of these contributions. But the skill (...) view, I argue, uniquely captures the breadth of philosophers’ role in climate change; promises to make us more effective in practice; and offers a compelling way to overcome our own lingering climate denial by integrating climate change into all aspects of philosophical activity. (shrink)

Responsible innovation is centered around the ideal that societal stakeholders are entitled to participate in scientific and technological decision-making by voicing their needs and worries. Individuals who believe in science conspiracies (referred to here as ‘science conspiracists’) pose a challenge to implementing this ideal because it is not clear under what conditions their inclusion in responsible innovation exercises is possible and advisable. Yet precisely because of this uncertain status, science conspiracists constitute an instructive case in point to travel towards the (...) edges of inclusion and understand how we draw the line between ‘includables' and ‘unincludables’. In this paper, we seek to explore this relationship between responsible innovation and science conspiracism by using the method of thought experimentaiton. We test four possible exclusion criteria for science conspiracists. We conclude by revisiting the relationship between conspiracism and responsible innovation and sketching a novel perspective on the ideal of stakeholder inclusion. (shrink)

Qualitative immediacy (also termed quality in its philosophical sense and aesthetic quality) is of fundamental importance within the pragmatic conception of meaning as interpretive act, and yet it has been virtually ignored by social scientists. The concept is traced through its foundations in Peirce's philosophy, its development in Dewey's theory of aesthetic experience, and its relation to the general pragmatic conception of the self. The importance of the "I" in Mead's view of the self is seen as similar to Firstness (...) in Peirce and aesthetic experience in Dewey. Those turning to qualitative approaches ought to consider qualitative immediacy as a genuine addition to our understanding of human communication. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze a view that is increasingly spreading among philosophers and even physicians. Many of them believe that it is right to apply the principle of responsibility for illness in the allocation of health care. I attempt to show that this idea is unacceptable.

Drawing on recent work in psychology, I argue that there are not one but several distinct virtues pertaining to willpower or strength of will: (1) the disposition to exercise willpower; (2) a distinctively volitional kind of modesty, or moderation in exposing oneself to volitional strain; and (3) a distinctively volitional kind of confidence, or proper inattention to the possibility of volitional failure. A multiple-virtue conception of willpower, I argue, provides a useful framework for cultivating a good relationship to one’s own (...) volitional limitations; resists an unhealthy emphasis on ‘powering through’ volitional obstacles; and avoids controversial empirical assumptions without giving up on making progress in ethical thought about willpower. I answer objections that the latter two virtues are incompatible, and that they add little of value to hope or belief in success. I then argue that combining these virtues requires a kind of flexible attention which, while difficult, is both psychologically possible and desirable. (shrink)

Notes on and excerpted quotations from Eugene Halton’s theory of the self (and mind) as continuous with and involved in its objective surroundings as extensions of the self. These notes provide evidence for Halton’s multiple works as the earlier basis for what Russell Belk later called "the extended self" in 1988, for which he got credit while Halton’s original ideas were marginalized or excluded. In addition, Halton also developed some of these ideas as "critical animism," (see text) a predecessor (...) to what is now termed, "the new animism." First example: "We create environments that are extensions of our selves; that serve to tell us who we are, and act as role models for what we can become." Eugene Halton, quoted in Joan Kron, Home Psych, 1983. (shrink)

This chapter examines the lost legacy of John Stuart-Glennie (1841-1910), a contributor to the founding of sociology and a major theorist, whose work was known in his lifetime but disappeared after his death. Stuart-Glennie was praised by philosopher John Stuart Mill, was a friend of and influence upon playwright George Bernard Shaw, and was an active contributor to the fledgling Sociological Society in London in the first decade of the twentieth century. Stuart-Glennie’s most significant idea in hindsight was his theory (...) of what he termed in 1873, “the moral revolution,” delineating the revolutionary changes across different civilizations in the period 2,500 years ago, roughly centered around 500-600 BCE. This is the era currently known as “the axial age,” after Karl Jaspers coined that term in 1949. Stuart-Glennie’s theory of the moral revolution is framed within a three-stage view of history, the first of which involved an outlook he characterized as “panzooinism,” and sometimes as “naturianism.” This theory of aboriginal and early civilizational outlooks is also notable and worthy of consideration in contemporary context, and as a contribution to “the new animism.” The chapter concludes by considering whether the moral revolution/axial age, whose effects have continued for the past 2500 years, is sustainable in the age of the unsustainable Anthropocene. (shrink)

Lately, more and more authors have asserted their belief that one of the criteria which, together with the medical ones, can and should be applied in the policy of selecting and/or prioritizing the patients in need for the allocation of medical resources with limited availability, is the principle of individual responsibility for illness. My intention in this study is to highlight some very serious obstacles looming against the attempt to apply this principle in the distribution of the medical services with (...) limited availability. Although there are numerous such obstacles, I shall only discuss five of them (the most important, in my opinion). These are: 1) the impossibility to establish with certainty whether a patient got ill due to his lifestyle; 2) the lack of a feasible and reliable method of establishing an individual’s responsibility for his lifestyle; 3) a patient’s right to privacy; 4) some moral requirements and principles and, last but not least, 5) the ethics of the medical profession. (shrink)

I claim that the underlying premises of the modern era - e-r-a - are false in a way that carries catastrophic consequences. Despite the many genuine achievements of the modern world—which I for one would not want to live without—the spirit of modernity has been one which denigrated the basic conditions of human being. In the name of freedom and knowledge, the modern era gave birth precisely to the non-empathically responding world, the schizoid ghost in the machine, which now threatens (...) to dissolve both humanity and the natural world. We must find the means to correct the mistaken premises which form the modern error. The time has come to find a new way of renewing reason, a project requiring a transformation of values and outlook as vast as those which took place in the axial age or the modern age. The renewal of reason will involve opening the gates to the entire historical and prehistorical heritage of humankind, to renew the archaic values of family, household, neighborhood and local community and the sympathetic relations they engender, to renew those organic and communicative essences of play, dreaming and mother-infant nurturance which are our human-mammalian legacy and crucial for the development of the spontaneous self, and also making a life-sustaining world culture with self-critical institutions capable of supporting and protecting the vitality of local ways. Without the hope of such a thoroughgoing transformation, we are likely to continue to go the way of the earth’s ozone shield into corrosive self-extinction . (shrink)

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

Conceptul de dreptate socială este unul dintre cele mai controversate concepte ale filosofiei politice. Foarte puține aspecte legate de acest concept nu sunt înconjurate de controverse și dezbateri argumentative. Unele dintre cele mai importante astfel de controverse sunt cele legate de definirea, de specificarea și de legitimitatea lui. Prima este, în esență, o controversă în privința răspunsului la următoarea întrebare: care este conceptul care surprinde cel mai bine trăsătura fundamentală a dreptății și nedreptății sociale? A doua este o controversă în (...) privința exigențelor sau a principiilor „corecte” ale dreptății sociale. În sfărșit, a treia este o controversă pe marginea acceptabilității conceptului de dreptate socială. În studiul de față prezint pe scurt principalele idei, poziții și argumente invocate de filosofii politici recenți în cadrul fiecăreia dintre aceste controverse. (shrink)

An important strand of current experimental philosophy promotes a new kind of methodological naturalism. This chapter argues that this new ‘metaphilosophical naturalism’ is fundamentally consistent with key tenets of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy, and can provide empirical foundations for therapeutic conceptions of philosophy. Metaphilosophical naturalism invites us to contribute to the resolution of philosophical problems about X by turning to scientific findings about the way we think about X – in general or when doing philosophy. This new naturalism encourages us to use (...) resources from psychology that can empirically vindicate precisely some of the most controversial aspects of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy: They can establish the need, and provide key tools, for something worth calling ‘therapy’, in philosophy. As ‘pudding proof’ this chapter shows how methods and findings from psycholinguistics motivate and facilitate a therapeutic approach to a characteristically philosophical problem: ‘the problem of perception’. (shrink)

The conditions of hunting and gathering through which one line of primates evolved into humans form the basis of what I term the wild self, a self marked by developmental needs of prolonged human neoteny and by deep attunement to the profusion of communicative signs of instinctive intelligence in which relatively “unmatured” hominids found themselves immersed. The passionate attunement to, and inquiry into, earth-drama, in tracking, hunting, foraging, rhythming, singing, and other arts/sciences, provided the trail to becoming human, and provide (...) external grammatical structures that became the basis of human language and animate mind. I outline my new philosophy of history as a progress in precision, counteracted by a regressive contraction of mind. The progress associated with history since the beginning of agriculturally-based civilizations can be considered as a regressive contraction from animate mind of our hunter-gatherer evolutionary past, to anthropocentric mind, and finally to the ghost in the machine world-view of mechanico-centric mind. Contemporary consumption culture represents an inversion of the original conditions of the human self, and indeed, targets aspects of developmental neoteny to condition conformity to its rational-mechanical system imperatives. (shrink)

The revolutionary outbreak in a variety of civilizations centered around 600 B.C.E., a period in which the great world religions as well as philosophy emerged, from Hebrew scriptures and the teachings of Buddha to the works of Greek and Chinese philosophers, has been named the Axial Age by Karl Jaspers. Yet 75 years earlier, in 1873, unknown to Jaspers and still unknown to the world, John Stuart Stuart-Glennie elaborated a fully developed and more nuanced theory of what he termed The (...) Moral Revolution to characterize the period. This book also brings to light the previously undiscussed ideas of D. H. Lawrence on the phenomenon from 20 years before Jaspers, the seldom mentioned contributions of Lewis Mumford, and proposes a new context for understanding the phenomenon. Halton rewrites the history of this fascinating theory and opens new ways of conceiving the meaning of The Moral Revolution for today. (shrink)

This book advances an examination of the main arguments and counter-arguments put forward by the advocates of realism in political philosophy in support of the two methodological theses they defend: 1) that political philosophy is not and cannot be understood (just) as a branch of ethics or as „applied moral philosophy” (as moderate realists claim); and 2) that political philosophy should be done completely “outside ethics”, i.e., that it should stop using arguments based on “pre-political” moral principles or values (as (...) radical realists claim). The book pleads for four main conclusions: 1) that radical realism is nothing but moralism in disguise and that its methodological request – giving up moral principles or values in political philosophy – is „unrealistic” (unfeasible), as long as no plausible (i.e., egalitarian) account of political legitimacy or authority can be grounded without appeal to the principle of basic human equality or the principle of treating people as (free and) equals; 2) that political philosophy is not quite accurately described as a branch of ethics, as moralist political philosophers usually do, but this is not because of the reasons usually offered by moderate realists, but because political philosophy includes at least one project that cannot be unquestionably subsumed to this characterization (i.e., the project of the purely epistemic justification of liberal democracy); 3) that moralism is a methodology that political philosophy is perfectly justified to use and no (radical) realist counter-argument touches its validity and necessity; and 4) that all objections brought in the realists’ crusade against moralism are not tenable (most of them being the fruit of serious misunderstandings or distortions of the positions the philosophers accused of this “methodological vice” endorse, the result of sophistic reasoning or of confusions, such as the confusion between political philosophy and political science, between normative and descriptive, between political philosophy and motivational speech for citizens or politicians, or the confusion between moralism as a methodology of political philosophy – or as a thesis about the proper methodology of political philosophy – and moralism as a theory or an evaluative practice concerning politics and political behavior). The four conclusions can be synthesized in the general conclusion that realists – be they radical or moderate – are wrong when they argue (and believe they have good reasons for the thesis) that political philosophy is not (just) a branch of ethics or for the thesis that it should be done completely “outside ethics”. The most central questions of political philosophy are, in their overwhelming majority, moral questions (about the political). In addition, the recourse to “pre-political” moral principles or values is imperative and inescapable for political philosophy. Therefore, political philosophy has no other option than remaining what, essentially, it has ever been: an area of moral philosophy, a discipline whose research interests are continuous with those of ethics. As its title suggests, this book can be described, as well, as a (new) defence of this general conclusion concerning the specific of and the path to follow by political philosophy. (shrink)

In its most part, this article is a critique of three of the most common ways of defining egalitarianism: 1) egalitarianism is a trend of thought in political philosophy to which belong (all) philosophers who support a form of equality, whatever it may be, between all members of a community; 2) egalitarianism is a trend of thought in political philosophy which has as a ultimate or foundational value equality in the abstract sense of treating all people as equals; and 3) (...) egalitarianism is a trend of thought in political philosophy that defends equality in the distribution of certain goods or resources. In the last part of the article I defend the idea that egalitarianism is much better described as a trend of thought in political philosophy that defends a substantial equality between all members of a community as a ultimate principle of social justice. (shrink)