The opposition between a rational and an irrational behavior or thought poses difficulties in understanding: what do we really mean by «irrational»? A behavior or a thought that adheres to emotions and does not arise from slow reflection can be considered irrational; on the other hand, can we state that emotional reactions and intuitions are «irrational»? I draw from Aristotle’s De Anima the idea of bringing emotions, sensations and intellect back to a unitary movement and placing them in a certain (...) distinction with respect to dianoetic reason; Aristotelian’s bestowal of cognitive value on emotions was then lost, in Western gnoseology, in parallel with the devaluation of the prerogatives of the intellect. An analysis of the psychological literature on emotions and a summary of the history of the relationship between intellect and reason allows us to propose a new point of view on these issues. (shrink)

Not only defi ning the nature of schizophrenia, but even defi ning schizophrenia as a diagnostic entity is still a challenge for psychiatry. The current diagnostic systems and the related approach to psychopathology are of little aid to this purpose, and have inadvertently resulted in an impoverished clinical practice. There is substantial meaning underlying schizophrenic symptoms that would appear bizarre and senseless from the viewpoint of a purely descriptive method. Psychiatry needs to devise an approach that embraces the complexity of (...) the different perspectives of explanation and understanding of mental illness, examining the interplay of each element in the subjective experience. Symptoms such as delusion and hallucinations cannot merely be conceptualized as false judgment or lacking of external object, respectively, as they refl ect the fact that patients try to make sense of their different, globally altered experience of the self, of others and of the world. This line of reasoning builds on previous work in the phenomenological tradition postulating a disturbance in sensorimotor processes, which bond human beings with one another while remaining imperceptible to consciousness. This suggestion is consistent with a large body of research highlighting impairment in sensory processing in schizophrenia. Other authors underscored the importance of subtle alterations of functions other than sensorimotor processes, such as experiential anomalies of affectivity, cognition-perception and body-motor experience, alterations of self-awareness, and disturbances in reciprocal attunement leading to disconnection from a common register of meanings and loss of common sense. Heidegger refers to a human being as Being intrinsically selfrevelatory in the unity of physis and logos. He refers to the lived experience of being constantly in the everyday situation as being located, “thrown” into the world. The existence is always ‘in the world’, ‘near the things’ and ‘with the others’ for everybody, in the ways of ‘attunement’, ‘understanding’ and ‘discourse’, that are always together, in the unity of the Dasein. This conception of human existence may help understand the subjective experience of a schizophrenic patient and increase diagnostic accuracy and treatment adequacy. (shrink)

The determination of philosophy is the work of those who cooperate in the construction of knowledge, in its disparate fields, and at the same time preserve the very sense of indeterminacy. There are no areas of knowledge that cannot be also philosophical, nor can the themes, lines of research and styles of thought be limited a priori. The philosophy, it is said, is the search for truth. This is the most common definition, and therefore also the more covering than a (...) possible new point of view, which could have its roots in the ancient tradition. Philosophy is that search for truth which gave rise to our science and that critical attitude which it brings in doubt, limits and determines this same spirit of research. (shrink)

Beyond Dordt and ‘De Auxiliis’ explores post-Reformation inter-confessional theological exchange on soteriological topics including predestination, grace, and free choice. These doctrines remained controversial within confessional traditions after the Reformation, as Dominicans and Jesuits and later Calvinists and Arminians argued about these critical issues in the Augustinian theological heritage. Some of those involved in condemning Arminianism at the Synod of Dordt (1618-1619) were inspired by Dominican followers of Thomas Aquinas in Spain who had recently opposed the vigorous defense of free choice (...) by Jesuit Molinists in the Congregatio de auxiliis (1598-1607). This volume, appearing on the 400th anniversary of the closing of the Synod of Dordt, brings together a group of scholars working in fields that only rarely speak to one another to address these theological debates that cross geographical and confessional boundaries. (shrink)

In this paper we have shown how the consideration of a chaotic mechanics supplies a redefinition of special-relativistic space-time. In particular chaotic time means no possibility of defining temporal ordering and implies a breakdown of causality. The new chaotic transformations among "undetermined" space-time coordinates are no more linear and homogeneous. The principles of inertia and of energy-impulse conservation are no longer well defined and in any case no more invariant.

A long historiographical tradition has claimed that the famous Pietro Pomponazzi’s Tractatus de immortalitate animae had been inspired by Tommaso de Vio’s Commentary on De anima – whose basic thesis was that, according to the principles of Aristotelian philosophy, the human soul was mortal – even though Pomponazzi in his entire work never mentioned Caietanus as a model. Firstly, this article frames the status quaestionis focusing on affinities and divergences between the two books and on the possible relationship and exchange (...) between the two authors, especially on the topic of the Aristotelian psychology. Secondly, the present study shows what emerges from a cross-reading of the sources which includes the collection of the Opuscula published in 1519 by the Dominican friar Bartolomeo Spina, who explicitly accused Caietanus of having paved the way for the scandalous and anti-Christian Pomponazzi’s position. The important gain of this collation of texts is the discovery of an unseen moment of debate with Caietanus inside Pomponazzi’s Tractatus. (shrink)

This paper is focused on the possibility of a dialogue between Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and phenomenology, a dialogue concerning the problem of objects and relations. In the first part, the author shows what is interesting in OOO from a phenomenological perspective and why it should be considered as a challenge for contemporary philosophy. The second part develops the phenomenological perspective of the author, a perspective based on Merleau-Ponty’s “carnal” phenomenology, as well as some suggestions coming from the Italian school of (...) Gaetano Kanizsa. The third part is dedicated to the objections of the author to the OOO view regarding the separation between objects and relations: a separation which leads to Harman’s quadruple object. In the concluding portion, the author shows that, despite evident differences between phenomenological and OOO’s views of relations, OOO offers new starting points for phenomenological reflections, thanks to its specific focus on objects and its pluralistic view of reality. (shrink)

Gaetano commented on the problems that exist in diagnosing schizophrenia and argues that more effort should be devoted to understanding relevant subjective experiences. I am not convinced that this is necessarily so. I have argued previously that diagnosis of clinical disorders is unlikely to work well in the absence of a theory on which the diagnostic system can be based. At present, there is very little theory concerning schizophrenic disorders, or at least very little theory that elicits wide agreement (...) and has definitive empirical support. (shrink)

A partir do século XIX, a teoria democrática foi desenvolvida com base no confronto entre duas doutrinas políticas: o liberalismo e o socialismo. O liberalismo é um projeto que defende as limitações dos poderes governamentais, buscando a proteção dos direitos econômicos, políticos, religiosos e intelectuais dos membros da sociedade. Ou seja, para os liberais o poder do Estado deve ser limitado, pois eles acreditam que a verdadeira liberdade depende da menor interferência possível do Estado e das leis nesses direitos. A (...) defesa do liberalismo tem como principal representante Benjamin Constant. Membro da Assembleia Nacional Francesa, escreveu a obra A liberdade dos antigos comparada com a dos modernos, na qual afirma que a liberdade dos modernos, que deve ser promovida e desenvolvida, é a liberdade individual na relação com o Estado (ou seja, as liberdades civis e políticas), enquanto a liberdade dos antigos, que se tornou impraticável, é a liberdade de participação direta na formação das leis.1 Outros autores como, como o francês Alexis de Tocqueville2 e o inglês John Stuart Mill3 , defenderam a ideia de que a única estrutura democrática compatível com o Estado liberal seria a democracia representativa. Uma passagem interessante para o nosso debate sobre a democracia é o princípio do dano, de Stuart Mill. Por esse princípio, cada indivíduo tem o direito de agir como quiser desde que suas ações não prejudiquem outras pessoas. Se a ação afeta diretamente apenas a pessoa que a está realizando, a sociedade em tese não tem o direito de intervir, mesmo que o indivíduo esteja prejudicando a si próprio. Contudo, se os indivíduos fizerem algo ruim para si mesmos ou para sua propriedade podem indiretamente prejudicar a coletividade, já que ninguém vive isolado, devendo por isso ser impedidos de fazê-lo. Stuart Mill isenta desse princípio aqueles que são incapazes de se governar. Em síntese, todo o processo de democratização, como se deu nos Estados liberais democráticos, consiste numa transformação mais quantitativa do que qualitativa do regime representativo. Ou seja, o avanço da democracia nesses regimes ocorre em duas direções: no alargamento gradual do direito do voto e na multiplicação dos órgãos representativos. Para a doutrina socialista, o sufrágio universal é apenas o ponto inicial do processo de democratização do Estado, enquanto para o liberalismo é o ponto de chegada. Alguns dos principais teóricos do socialismo, como Antonio Gramsci4 e Rosa Luxemburgo5 , afirmam que o aprofundamento do processo de democratização na perspectiva das doutrinas socialistas ocorre de dois modos: por meio da crítica à democracia representativa (e da retomada de alguns temas da democracia direta) e pela ampliação da da participação popular e do controle do poder por meio dos chamados “conselhos operários”. Em outras palavras, a diferença crucial entre a democracia dos conselhos e a democracia parlamentar é que a primeira reconhece ter havido um deslocamento dos centros de poder dos órgãos tradicionais do Estado para a grande empresa, na sociedade capitalista. Por isso, o controle que o cidadão pode exercer por meio dos canais tradicionais da democracia política não é suficiente para impedir os abusos de poder. Logo, o controle deve acontecer nos próprios lugares de produção, e seu protagonista é o trabalhador real, não o cidadão abstrato da democracia formal. Mais recentemente, na metade do século XX, surgiu a corrente pluralista. Os pluralistas, em particular Robert Dahl6 , cientista político estadunidense, não procuravam estabelecer uma definição abstrata e teórica acerca da democracia, mas, por meio da observação das experiências de sistemas políticos, estipularam alguns requisitos mínimos: funcionários eleitos, eleições livres justas e frequentes, liberdade de expressão, fontes de informação diversificadas, autonomia para associações e cidadania inclusiva. Com base nesses critérios são caracterizadas quatro estruturas de governo: hegemonias fechadas, que são regimes em que não há disputa de poder e a participação política é limitada; hegemonias inclusivas, regimes em que não há disputa de poder, mas ocorre participação política; oligarquias competitivas, regimes nos quais há disputa de poder, mas com limitada participação política; e poliarquias, regimes em que não há disputa de poder e participação política ampliada. Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), economista austríaco, criticou as teorias clássicas de democracia, especialmente na relação estabelecida entre a democracia e a soberania popular7 . Para o autor, a definição clássica de democracia supõe duas ficções incapazes de resistir a uma análise realista: a existência do bem comum e a universalidade da racionalidade dos indivíduos. Para Schumpeter, a unidade da vontade geral, que constituiria o bem comum, e a racionalidade dos indivíduos seriam mitos, porque, para ele, esses elementos se tornaram irracionais por não conseguirem definir coerentemente suas preferências diante da influência da propaganda e de outros métodos de persuasão. Dessa forma, Schumpeter rompe com a ideia de democracia como soberania popular para propô-la como método, um tipo de arranjo institucional (de governos) para alcançar decisões políticas. Assim, sugere a superação do impedimento provocado pela irracionalidade das massas, reduzindo sua participação na política ao ato da produção de governos (ato de votar). As atribuições político-administrativas ficariam a cargo das elites eleitas. Essa é uma postura polêmica, na medida em que propõe uma redução da participação popular. Contrário a essa visão, o cientista político canadense C. B. Macpherson8 , sustenta que a liberdade e o desenvolvimento individual só podem ser alcançados plenamente com a participação direta e contínua dos cidadãos na regulação da sociedade e do Estado. Macpherson defende uma transformação estruturada em um sistema que combine partidos competitivos e organizações de democracia direta, que criam uma base real para a existência da democracia participativa. Mas, para que esse modelo pudesse se desenvolver, seria necessário que os partidos políticos se democratizassem, com princípios e procedimentos de democracia direta, complementada e controlada por organizações geridas por pessoas comuns, em seus locais de trabalho e nas comunidades locais. Na teoria das elites, o poder político pertence ao restrito círculo de pessoas que toma e impõem decisões a todos os membros que tenha de recorrer, como ação radical, à força. Ainda na doutrina liberal, mas opondo-se ao pluralismo, existem os elitistas, que utilizam o termo “elite” como referência a grupos sociais superiores de vários tipos. O termo seria empregado no pensamento social e político somente no final do século XIX. Essas teorias sociológicas, propostas pelos pensadores Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), sociólogo e economista francês; Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941), cientista político italiano, e Robert Michels (1876-1936), sociólogo alemão radicado na Itália, defendem que em toda sociedade existe apenas uma minoria, que, por diversos motivos, vem a se tornar detentora do poder. Pareto afirmava que existe uma “circulação das elites”, ou seja, uma minoria de pessoas que se alternam no poder. Mosca justifica o poder das elites governamentais pelo fato de serem uma minoria articulada e organizada, enquanto os governos seriam uma classe numerosa, mas dividida e desorganizada. Ao estudar as formações partidárias, Michels destacou como a própria estrutura das organizações favorecia o surgimento das elites e sua longa permanência no poder. Nas palavras de Michels, essa estabilidade das elites no poder é a “lei de ferro das oligarquias”. Ao longo dos últimos séculos foram construídas diversas interpretações e teorias acerca dos objetivos e conteúdos da democracia. Na prática, a democracia pode ser um modelo de governo que amplia as capacidades de desenvolvimento social, político e econômico, com base em princípios de igualdade e cidadania, ou se tornar uma simples “regra” para formar governos que não priorizem necessariamente o atendimento das demandas sociais. REFERÊNCIAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS CONSTANT, B. A liberdade dos antigos comparada à dos modernos. 1. ed. São Paulo: Atlas, 2015. DAHL, R. Poliarquia: participação e oposição. São Paulo: Edusp, 1987. ________. Um prefácio à teoria democrática. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1989. LUXEMBURGO, R. Têxteis. Paris: Editions Socieles, 1982. MACPHERSON, C. B. A teoria política do individualismo possessivo, de Hobbes e Locke. Tradução de Nelson Dantas. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1979. MICHELS, R. Sociologia dos partidos políticos. Brasília: Ed. da UnB, 1982. MILL, J. S. Sobre a liberdade. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1991. SCHUMPETER, J. A. Capitalismo, socialismo e democracia. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1984. SILVA, A. et. al. Sociologia em movimento. 2. ed. São Paulo: Moderna, 2016. TOCQUEVILLE, A. A democracia na América: leis e costumes. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1998. -/- . (shrink)

Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche, the function of biological dialectic and the symbolic value of sign and writing in “Also sprach Zarathustra”. Sexual difference and Derridian interpretation of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

Bisogna stabilire innanzitutto se parlare di differenza fra essere e linguaggio è in termini heideggeriani possibile.

It seems natural to choose whether to have a child by reflecting on what it would be like to actually have a child. I argue that this natural approach fails. If you choose to become a parent, and your choice is based on projections about what you think it would be like for you to have a child, your choice is not rational. If you choose to remain childless, and your choice is based upon projections about what you think it (...) would be like for you to have a child, your choice is not rational. This suggests we should reject our ordinary conception of how to make this life-changing decision, and raises general questions about how to rationally approach important life choices. (shrink)

Disagreement is common: even informed, intelligent, and generally reasonable people often come to different conclusions when confronted with what seems to be the same evidence. Can the competing conclusions be reasonable? If not, what can we reasonably think about the situation? This volume examines the epistemology of disagreement. Philosophical questions about disagreement arise in various areas, notably politics, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion: but this will be the first book focusing on the general epistemic issues arising from informed (...) disagreement. Ten leading philosophers offer specially written essays which together will offer a starting-point for future work on this topic. (shrink)

Two studies demonstrate that a dispositional proneness to disgust (“disgust sensitivity”) is associated with intuitive disapproval of gay people. Study 1 was based on previous research showing that people are more likely to describe a behavior as intentional when they see it as morally wrong (see Knobe, 2006, for a review). As predicted, the more disgust sensitive participants were, the more likely they were to describe an agent whose behavior had the side effect of causing gay men to kiss in (...) public as having intentionally encouraged gay men to kiss publicly— even though most participants did not explicitly think it wrong to encourage gay men to kiss in public. No such effect occurred when subjects were asked about heterosexual kissing. Study 2 used the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2006) as a dependent measure. The more disgust sensitive participants were, the more they showed.. (shrink)

Recent philosophical attention to climate models has highlighted their weaknesses and uncertainties. Here I address the ways that models gain support through observational data. I review examples of model fit, variety of evidence, and independent support for aspects of the models, contrasting my analysis with that of other philosophers. I also investigate model robustness, which often emerges when comparing climate models simulating the same time period or set of conditions. Starting from Michael Weisberg’s analysis of robustness, I conclude that his (...) approach involves a version of reasoning from variety of evidence, enabling this robustness to be a confirmatory virtue.. (shrink)

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)

I demonstrate that a "speech act" theory of meaning for imperatives is—contra a dominant position in philosophy and linguistics—theoretically desirable. A speech act-theoretic account of the meaning of an imperative !φ is characterized, broadly, by the following claims. -/- LINGUISTIC MEANING AS USE !φ’s meaning is a matter of the speech act an utterance of it conventionally functions to express—what a speaker conventionally uses it to do (its conventional discourse function, CDF). -/- IMPERATIVE USE AS PRACTICAL !φ's CDF is to (...) express a practical (non-representational) state of mind—one concerning an agent's preferences and plans, rather than her beliefs. -/- Opposed to speech act accounts is a preponderance of views which deny that a sentence's linguistic meaning is a matter of what speech act it is used to perform, or its CDF. On such accounts, meaning is, instead, a matter of "static" properties of the sentence—e.g., how it depicts the world as being (or, more neutrally, the properties of a model-theoretic object with which the semantic value of the sentence co-varies). On one version of a static account, an imperative 'shut the window!' might, for instance, depict the world as being such that the window must be shut. -/- Static accounts are traditionally motivated against speech act-theoretic accounts by appeal to supposedly irremediable explanatory deficiencies in the latter. Whatever a static account loses in saying (prima facie counterintuitively) that an imperative conventionally represents, or expresses a picture of the world, is said to be offset by its ability to explain a variety of phenomena for which speech act-theoretic accounts are said to lack good explanations (even, in many cases, the bare ability to offer something that might meet basic criteria on what a good explanation should be like). -/- I aim to turn the tables on static accounts. I do this by showing that speech act accounts are capable of giving explanations of phenomena which fans of static accounts have alleged them unable to give. Indeed, for a variety of absolutely fundamental phenomena having to do with the conventional meaning of imperatives (and other types of practical language), speech act accounts provide natural and theoretically satisfying explanations, where a representational account provides none. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay offers a reconfiguration of the possibility‐space of positions regarding the metaphysics and epistemology associated with historical knowledge. A tradition within analytic philosophy from Danto to Dummett attempts to answer questions about the reality of the past on the basis of two shared assumptions. The first takes individual statements as the relevant unit of semantic and philosophical analysis. The second presumes that variants of realism and antirealism about the past exhaust the metaphysical options . This essay argues that both (...) of these assumptions should be rejected. It develops as an alternative an irrealist account of history, a view based in part on work by Leon Goldstein and Ian Hacking. On an irrealist view, historical claims ought to be treated as subject to the same conditions and caveats that apply to any theory of empirical or scientific knowledge. Irrealism argues for pasts as made and not found. The argument emphasizes the priority of classification over perception in the order of understanding and so verification. Because nothing a priori anchors practices of classification, no sense can be attached to claims that some single structure must or does determine what events take place in human history. Irrealism denies to realism the very intelligibility of any imagined view from nowhere, that is, a determinately configured past subsisting sub specie aeternitatis. A plurality of pasts exists because constituting a past always depends to some degree on socially mediated negotiations of a fit between descriptions and experience. (shrink)

This paper considers ten questions that those puzzled by or skeptical of extended cognition have posed. Discussion of these questions ranges across substantive, methodological, and dialectical issues in the ongoing debate over extended cognition, such as whether the issue between proponents and opponents of extended cognition is merely semantic or a matter of convention; whether extended cognition should be treated in the same way as extended biology; and whether conscious mental states pose a special problem for the extended mind thesis. (...) Lethocerus, the giant water bug, will be a recurrent reference point for much of the discussion. (shrink)

Excellence in sport performance is normally taken to be a matter of superior performance of physical movements or quantitative outcomes of movements. This paper considers whether a wider conception can be afforded by certain kinds of nature based sport. The interplay between technical skill and aesthetic experience in nature based sports is explored, and the extent to which it contributes to a distinction between different sport-based approaches to natural environments. The potential for aesthetic appreciation of environmental engagement is found to (...) be strongly dependent on whether or not environmental engagement is exploited for the end of producing a quantifiable result or enhancing technical skill. It is also argued that an existential rather than spectatorial attitude to aesthetic experience is offered by specifically nature oriented sport. Aesthetic experience achieved in this way is therefore neither passive nor detached, but extends Berleant's concept of participatory environmental aesthetics and underpins both an alternate (wide) conception of excellence in sport activity and a richer experience of aesthetic engagement than more objectivised standpoints. (shrink)

This article makes a case for the capacity of "social practice" accounts of agency and freedom to criticize, resist, and transform systemic forms of power and domination from within the context of religious and political practices and institutions. I first examine criticisms that Michel Foucault's analysis of systemic power results in normative aimlessness, and then I contrast that account with the description of agency and innovative practice that pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom identifies as "expressive freedom." I argue that Brandom can (...) provide a normative trajectory for Foucault's diagnoses of power and domination, helping to resolve its apparent lack of ethical direction. I demonstrate that Foucault, in turn, presents Brandom with insights that might overcome the charges of abstraction and conservatism that his pragmatic inferentialism frequently encounters. The result is a vindication of social practice as an analytical lens for social criticism that is at once both immanent and radical. (shrink)

There are many things—call them ‘experts’—that you should defer to in forming your opinions. The trouble is, many experts are modest: they’re less than certain that they are worthy of deference. When this happens, the standard theories of deference break down: the most popular (“Reflection”-style) principles collapse to inconsistency, while their most popular (“New-Reflection”-style) variants allow you to defer to someone while regarding them as an anti-expert. We propose a middle way: deferring to someone involves preferring to make any decision (...) using their opinions instead of your own. In a slogan, deferring opinions is deferring decisions. Generalizing the proposal of Dorst (2020a), we first formulate a new principle that shows exactly how your opinions must relate to an expert’s for this to be so. We then build off the results of Levinstein (2019) and Campbell-Moore (2020) to show that this principle is also equivalent to the constraint that you must always expect the expert’s estimates to be more accurate than your own. Finally, we characterize the conditions an expert’s opinions must meet to be worthy of deference in this sense, showing how they sit naturally between the too-strong constraints of Reflection and the too-weak constraints of New Reflection. (shrink)

Next SectionThis article argues against two dominant accounts of the nature of nostalgia. These views assume that nostalgia depends, in some way, on comparing a present situation with a past one. However, neither does justice to the full range of recognizably nostalgic experiences available to us – in particular, ‘Proustian’ nostalgia directed at involuntary autobiographical memories. Therefore, the accounts in question fail. I conclude by considering an evaluative puzzle raised by Proustian nostalgia when it is directed at memories that the (...) nostalgist herself regards as non-veridical. (shrink)

Kant's notion of ‘discipline’ has received considerable attention from scholars of his philosophy of education, but its role in his theoretical philosophy has been largely ignored. This omission is surprising since his discussion of discipline in the first Critique is not only more extensive and expansive in scope than his other discussions but also predates them. The goal of this essay is to provide a comprehensive reading of the Discipline that emphasizes its systematic importance in the first Critique. I argue (...) that its goal is to establish a set of rules for the use of pure reason that, if followed, will mitigate and perhaps even eliminate our tendency to make judgments about supersensible objects. Since Kant's justification for these rules relies crucially on claims he has defended in the Doctrine of Elements, I argue further that, far from being a dispensable part of the Critique as commentators have tended to claim, the Discipline is, in fact, the culmination of Kant's critique of metaphysics. (shrink)

A plausible explanation of the wrongfulness of threatening, advanced most explicitly by Mitchell Berman, is that the wrongfulness of threatening derives from the wrongfulness of the act threatened. This essay argues that this explanation is inadequate. We can learn something important about the wrongfulness of threatening (with implications for thinking about coercion) by comparing credible threats to some other claims of impending harm. A credible bluff threat to do harm is likely to be more and differently wrongful than making intentionally (...) false warnings about other sources of harm. This essay surveys some examples to secure this point, shows that Berman's moralized account of their wrongfulness is wanting, and offers the outline of an approach better suited to explain the wrongfulness of threatening.1. (shrink)

In a world that is overflowing with journals and other outlets for scientific publication, the appearance of any new periodical requires some justification. There are already more journals than we can read and more conferences than we can attend. In the case of applied Ontology, we believe that the creation of anew journal not only is completely justifiable, it is downright exciting. For too long, workers in computer science have assumed that content comes for free. “Theory” in computer science has (...) always meant the theory of processes and of computation. We measure the complexity of computer programs in terms of how long it takes machines to execute them, not in terms of how long it takes people to understand and to represent the data on which those programs might operate. We typically describe computer code in terms of algorithms that operate on formal parameters, often without pausing to discuss where the data that might satisfy those parameters come from. This journal was founded on the premise that workers in computer science, informatics, and information science are overdue in paying as much attention to contents as they do to algorithms. (shrink)

The sense of smell occupies a peculiar intermediate position within Aristotle's theory of sense perception: odours, like colours and sounds, are perceived at a distance through an external medium of air or water; yet in their nature they are intimately related to flavours, the proper objects of taste, which for Aristotle is a form of touch. In this paper, I examine Aristotle's claims about odour and smell, especially in De Anima II.9 and De Sensu 5, to see what light they (...) shed on his theory of sense perception more generally. In the first half, I argue that neither of the two most influential recent ways of understanding Aristotle's theory of perception can adequately account for what he says about the sense of smell. In the second half, I offer my own positive account, considering and resolving various puzzles raised by Aristotle's claims about the nature of odour and its relation to flavour. Finally, I conclude that Aristotle's discussions of odour and smell suggest a plausible and interesting way of understanding the relationship, on his view, between ordinary, material changes in the sense organs and the activation of the capacity to perceive, considered merely as such. (shrink)

In this paper I consider two related issues raised by Aristotle 's treatment of hearing and sounds. The first concerns the kinds of changes Aristotle takes to occur, in both perceptual medium and sense organs, when a perceiver hears a sounding object. The second issue concerns Aristotle 's views on the nature and location of the proper objects of auditory perception. I argue that Aristotle 's views on these topics are not what they have sometimes been taken to be, and (...) that when rightly understood they compare favourably in many respects with leading contemporary accounts. (shrink)

this requirement for adaptations. Emergent characters are always potential adaptations. Not all selection processes produce adaptations, however. The key issue, in delineating a selection process, is the relationship between a character and fitness. The emergent character approach is more restrictive than alternative schemas that delineate selection..

Carl Gillett has defended what he calls the “dimensioned” view of the realization relation, which he contrasts with the traditional “flat” view of realization (2003, 2007; see also Gillett 2002). Intuitively, the dimensioned approach characterizes realization in terms of composition whereas the flat approach views realization in terms of occupiers of functional roles. Elsewhere we have argued that the general view of realization and multiple realization that Gillett advances is not able to discharge the theoretical duties of those relations (Shapiro (...) 2004, unpublished manuscript; Polger 2004, 2007, forthcoming). Here we focus on an internal objection to Gillett’s account and then raise some broader reasons to reject it. (shrink)

The evidential value of moral intuitions has been challenged by psychological work showing that the intuitions of ordinary people are affected by distorting factors. One reply to this challenge, the expertise defence, claims that training in philosophical thinking confers enhanced reliability on the intuitions of professional philosophers. This defence is often expressed through analogy: since we do not allow doubts about folk judgments in domains like mathematics or physics to undermine the plausibility of judgments by experts in these domains, we (...) also should not do so in philosophy. In this paper I clarify the logic of the analogy strategy, and defend it against recent challenges by Jesper Ryberg. The discussion exposes an interesting divide: while Ryberg’s challenges may weaken analogies between morality and domains like mathematics, they do not affect analogies to other domains, such as physics. I conclude that the expertise defence can be supported by analogical means, though care is required in selecting an appropriate analog. I discuss implications of this conclusion for the expertise defence debate and for study of the moral domain itself. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider how each of the four main kinds of corrupt person described in Plato's Republic, Books 8-9, first comes to be. Certain passages in these books can give the impression that each person is able to determine, by a kind of rational choice, the overall government of his/her soul. However, I argue, this impression is mistaken. Upon careful examination, the text of books 8 and 9 overwhelmingly supports an alternative interpretation. According to this view, the eventual (...) government of each person’s soul is decided by a struggle for power occurring within the person, among the soul’s parts, the outcome of which is determined by the relative strength and alignment of the competing parties. If this interpretation is correct, Plato adheres more closely to the city-soul analogy in these passages than has sometimes been thought. The ultimate origins of vice in the soul are also seen to lie squarely in upbringing and education, not in a mistaken choice of life. (shrink)

Kant's response to scepticism in the Critique of Pure Reason is complex and remarkably nuanced, although it is rarely recognized as such. In this paper, I argue that recent attempts to flesh out the details of this response by Paul Guyer and Michael Forster do not go far enough. Although they are right to draw a distinction between Humean and Pyrrhonian scepticism and locate Kant's response to the latter in the Transcendental Dialectic, their accounts fail to capture two important aspects (...) of this response. The first is that Kant's response to Pyrrhonian scepticism is also a response to Hume. The second is that aspects of this response are decidedly positive. In particular, I argue (1) that Kant believed Hume's scepticism manifested important elements of Pyrrhonian scepticism and (2) that both Pyrrhonian scepticism and Hume had a significant positive influence on the development of the Transcendental Dialectic. (shrink)

Hume’s account of causation is often regarded a challenge Kant must overcome if the Critical philosophy is to be successful. But from Kant’s time to the present, Hume’s denial of our ability to cognize supersensible objects, a denial that relies heavily on his account of causation, has also been regarded as a forerunner to Kant’s critique of metaphysics. After identifying reasons for rejecting Wayne Waxman’s recent account of Kant’s debt to Hume, I present my own, more modest account of this (...) debt, an account that seeks to unite the two very different pictures of Kant’s relationship to Hume sketched above. (shrink)

Eric Watkins has argued on philosophical, textual, and historical grounds that Kant’s account of causation in the first Critique should not be read as an attempt to refute Hume’s account of causation. In this paper, I challenge the arguments for Watkins’ claim. Specifically, I argue (1) that Kant’s philosophical commitments, even on Watkins’ reading, are not obvious obstacles to refuting Hume, (2) that textual evidence from the “Disciple of Pure Reason” suggests Kant conceived of his account of causation as such (...) a refutation, and (3) that none of Hume’s early German critics provided responses to this account that would have satisfied Kant. Watkins’ reading of Kant’s account of causation is thus more compatible with traditional views about Kant’s relationship to Hume than Watkins believes. (shrink)

There is a tendency in contemporary jurisprudence to regard political authority and, more particularly, legal intervention in human affairs as having no justification unless it can be defended by what Laing calls the principle of modern liberal autonomy (MLA). According to this principle, if consenting adults want to do something, unless it does specific harm to others here and now, the law has no business intervening. Harm to the self and general harm to society can constitute no justification for legal (...) regulation or prohibition. So pervasive is this understanding of legal intervention in human affairs, that it is common now to encounter arguments in favour of permissive laws on, for example, private drug use, pornography, sexual and reproductive choice, based on the idea that to intervene in these areas would constitute a breach of the liberal ideal. The only alternative to modern liberal autonomy is assumed to be radical oppression, in which the State intervenes in the individual’s life to impose unwarranted measures designed to further its own ends. The legacy of Stalin, Hitler and other modern tyrants has undermined conceptual appeals to the common good. So widespread is this liberal assumption in the Western, English-speaking world that critics of the outlook embodied by MLA are customarily regarded with suspicion and charged with paternalism, narrow-mindedness and intolerance. Laing highlights contradictions inherent in the modern liberal tradition. She argues that there is a certain reliance on the notion of the common good within the natural law tradition that is instructive. According to this view, the common good constitutes a mean between two extremes: on the one hand, contemporary liberalism’s over-insistence on radical individual autonomy and, on the other hand, totalitarianism’s over-emphasis on collective social benefit. There is, I will argue, substantial terrain between the conceptual excesses of modern liberalism and oppressive tyranny that needs to be acknowledged and discussed. (shrink)

The case is discussed for the doctrine of hell as posing a unique problem of evil for adherents to the Abrahamic religions who endorse traditional theism. The problem is particularly acute for those who accept retributivist formulations of the doctrine of hell according to which hell is everlasting punishment for failing to satisfy some requirement. Alternatives to retributivism are discussed, including the unique difficulties that each one faces.

In four experiments, we offer evidence that virtues are often judged as uniquely important for some business practices (e.g., hospital management and medical error investigation). Overall, actions done only from virtue (either by organizations or individuals) were judged to feel better, to be more praiseworthy, to be more morally right, and to be associated with more trustworthy leadership and greater personal life satisfaction compared to actions done only to produce the best consequences or to follow the correct moral rule. These (...) results accord with claims made by some virtue ethicists. The current data contribute to a small but growing body of literature emphasizing both empirical soundness and philosophical rigor in the scientific study of virtue. Results also offer some guidance concerning how businesses, employees, and executives are evaluated and perceived. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Previous discussions on the value of sport in remote locations have concentrated on 1) environmental and process concerns, with the rejection of competition and goal-directed or use oriented activity, or 2) the value of risk and dangerous sport for self-affirmation. It is argued that the value of risk in remote sport is in self-knowledge rather than self-affirmation and that risk in remote sport, while enhancing certain kinds of experience, is not necessary. The value of remote sport is in offering the (...) opportunity for experience that enhances the participants’ knowledge both of self and of the environment with which they interact. (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)

The representation of propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.) and the analysis of natural-language, propositional-attitude reports presents difficult problems for cognitive science and artificial intelligence. In particular, various representational approaches to attitudes involve the incorrect “imputation,” to cognitive agents, of the use of artificial theory-laden notions. Interesting cases of this problem are shown to occur in several approaches to attitudes. The imputation problem is shown to arise from the way that representational approaches explicate properties and relationships, and in particular from the (...) way they explicate propositional attitudes themselves. Another factor contributing to imputation is the compositional nature of typical semantic approaches to propositional-attitude reports. Some strategies for avoiding undesirable imputation are examined. One of the main conclusions is that the importance of imputations that arise in a representation scheme depends strongly on the use to which the scheme is put -- on whether, for instance, the scheme is used as part of a formal, objective account of natural language, or is used rather as a representational tool within an agent. (shrink)

The chapter presents Anselm’s incompatibilist account of human freedom within the context of his theodicy and presents two arguments against his account. Both arguments aim to show there is a genuine conflict between his account of freedom and the role of God’s grace in making agents just. The first argument, the problem of harmonization, highlights the conflict within the soteriological context where an agent changes from being unjust to being just. The second argument, the problem of just creation, highlights the (...) conflict within the context of the creation of agents prior to the presence of evil. Holding fixed his incompatibilist account and the necessity of divine grace, the upshot of both arguments is that Anselm must endorse a version of Pelagianism. (shrink)

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

Understanding the folk notion of free will and moral responsibility is important for a host of applied and theoretical issues in psychology, philosophy, and ethics. The bulk of experimental research has focused on folk intuitions concerning determinism's relation to free will and moral responsibility. However, determinism is a difficult term for many folk to understand. Accordingly researchers often use comprehension questions to identify and exclude large proportions of participants who seem to struggle with relevant concepts. Here, we document some of (...) the cognitive mechanisms involved in folk judgments related to comprehension of determinism, and its relations to free will and moral responsibility. Results provide prescriptions for experimental designs that can increase comprehension, potentially decreasing sampling biases. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed. (shrink)

It has become evident that mind–body supervenience, as merely specifying a covariance between mental and physical properties, is consistent with clearly non-physicalist views of the mental, such as emergentism. Consequently, there is a push in the physicalist camp for an ontologically more robust supervenience, a “superdupervenience,” that ensures that properties supervening on physical properties are physicalistically acceptable. Jessica Wilson claims that supervenience is made superduper by Condition on Causal Powers (CCP): each individual causal power associated with a supervenient property is (...) numerically identical with a causal power associated with its base property. Furthermore, according to Wilson, a wide variety of physicalist positions, both reductive and non-reductive, can be seen as relying on CCP to ensure that properties supervening on physical properties are physicalistically acceptable. I argue that imposing CCP on mind–body supervenience fails to ensure that mental properties are physicalistically acceptable. The problem, I contend, is that while CCP may guard against supervenient mental properties being insufficiently grounded in their physical bases it fails to guard against supervenient mental properties being too deeply grounded in their physical bases. (shrink)

Kierkegaard shows two contrary attitudes to woman and the feminine: misogyny and celebration. The Kierkegaardian structure of selfhood, because combined with a hierarchical assumption about the relative value of certain human characteristics, and their identification as male or female, argues that woman is a lesser self. Consequently, the claim that the Kierkegaardian ideal of selfhood is androgynist is rejected, though it is the latter assumptions alone that force this conclusion.

We argue that C. Darwin and more recently W. Hennig worked at times under the simplifying assumption of an eternal biosphere. So motivated, we explicitly consider the consequences which follow mathematically from this assumption, and the infinite graphs it leads to. This assumption admits certain clusters of organisms which have some ideal theoretical properties of species, shining some light onto the species problem. We prove a dualization of a law of T.A. Knight and C. Darwin, and sketch a decomposition result (...) involving the internodons of D. Kornet, J. Metz and H. Schellinx. A further goal of this paper is to respond to B. Sturmfels’ question, “Can biology lead to new theorems?”. (shrink)

According to the fitting attitude (FA) analysis of value concepts, to conceive of an object as having a given value is to conceive of it as being such that a certain evaluative attitude taken towards it would be fitting. Among the challenges that this analysis has to face, two are especially pressing. The first is a psychological challenge: the FA analysis must call upon attitudes that shed light on our value concepts while not presupposing the mastery of these concepts. The (...) second challenge is normative: the FA analysis must account for the fittingness of the relevant attitudes in terms of a kind of normativity intimately related to these attitudes, but again without presupposing the mastery of the relevant value concepts. In this paper, we show that real progress is possible if we pay close attention to the nature of the attitudes recruited by the analysis. More specifically, we claim that an FA analysis that appeals to emotions conceived as evaluative attitudes — as opposed to, for instance, evaluative judgements or evaluative perceptions — has the best prospects of meeting the two challenges and of putting the FA analysis on a strong footing. (shrink)