It has been claimed that the recent wave of neuroscientific research into the physiological underpinnings of our moral intuitions has normative implications. In particular, it has been claimed that this research discredits our deontological intuitions about cases, without discrediting our consequentialist intuitions about cases. In this paper I demur. I argue that such attempts to extract normative conclusions from neuroscientific research face a fundamental dilemma: either they focus on the emotional or evolved nature of the psychological processes underlying deontological intuitions, (...) in which case the arguments rely on a blatantly fallacious inference, or they appeal to the (alleged) moral irrelevance of the factors to which deontological intuitions respond, in which case the neuroscientific results end up playing no role in the overall argument. (shrink)

When it comes to epistemic normativity, should we take the good to be prior to the right? That is, should we ground facts about what we ought and ought not believe on a given occasion in facts about the value of being in certain cognitive states (such as, for example, the value of having true beliefs)? The overwhelming answer among contemporary epistemologists is “Yes, we should.” This essay argues to the contrary. Just as taking the good to be prior to (...) the right in ethics often leads one to sanction implausible trade-offs when determining what an agent should do, so too, this essay argues, taking the good to be prior to the right in epistemology leads one to sanction implausible trade-offs when determining what a subject should believe. Epistemic value—and, by extension, epistemic goals—are not the explanatory foundation upon which all other normative notions in epistemology rest. (shrink)

I argue—contra moderate grounding pluralists such as Kit Fine and more extreme grounding pluralists such as Jessica Wilson—that there is fundamentally only one grounding/in-virtue-of relation. I also argue that this single relation is indispensable for normative theorizing—that we can’t make sense of, for example, the debate over consequentialism without it. It follows from what I argue that there is no metaethically-pure normative ethics.

Once upon a time, coherentism was the dominant response to the regress problem in epistemology, but in recent decades the view has fallen into disrepute: now almost everyone is a foundationalist (with a few infinitists sprinkled here and there). In this paper, I sketch a new way of thinking about coherentism, and show how it avoids many of the problems often thought fatal for the view, including the isolation objection, worries over circularity, and concerns that the concept of coherence is (...) too vague or metaphorical for serious theoretical use. The key to my approach is to take a familiar tool from discussions of the regress problem -- namely, directed graphs depicting the support relations between beliefs -- and to use that tool in a more sophisticated manner than it is standardly employed. (shrink)

A quasi-sequel to "Epistemic Teleology and the Separateness of Propositions." Covers some of the same ground, but also extends the basic argument in an important way.

I argue that Alvin Goldman has failed to save process reliabilism from my critique in earlier work of consequentialist or teleological epistemic theories. First, Goldman misconstrues the nature of my challenge: two of the cases he discusses I never claimed to be counterexamples to process reliabilism. Second, Goldman’s reply to the type of case I actually claimed to be a counterexample to process reliabilism is unsuccessful. He proposes a variety of responses, but all of them either feature an implausible restriction (...) on process types, or fail to rule out cases with the sort of structure that generates the worry, or both. (shrink)

Suppose we grant that evolutionary forces have had a profound effect on the contours of our normative judgments and intuitions. Can we conclude anything from this about the correct metaethical theory? I argue that, for the most part, we cannot. Focusing my attention on Sharon Street’s justly famous argument that the evolutionary origins of our normative judgments and intuitions cause insuperable epistemological difficulties for a metaethical view she calls "normative realism," I argue that there are two largely independent lines of (...) argument in Street’s work which need to be teased apart. The first of these involves a genuine appeal to evolutionary considerations, but it can fairly easily be met by her opponents. The second line of argument is more troubling; it raises a significant problem, one of the most difficult in all of philosophy, namely how to justify our reliance on our most basic cognitive faculties without relying on those same faculties in a question-begging manner. However, evolutionary considerations add little to this old problem, and rejecting normative realism is not a way to solve it. (shrink)

The linchpin of Williamson (2000)'s radically externalist epistemological program is an argument for the claim that no non-trivial condition is luminous—that no non-trivial condition is such that whenever it obtains, one is in a position to know that it obtains. I argue that Williamson's anti-luminosity argument succeeds only if one assumes that, even in the limit of ideal reflection, the obtaining of the condition in question and one's beliefs about that condition can be radically disjoint from one another. However, no (...) self-respecting defender of the luminosity of the mental would ever make such an assumption. Thus Williamson can only secure his controversial claims in epistemology by taking for granted certain equally controversial claims in the philosophy of mind. What emerges is that the best bet for defending an internalist epistemology against Williamson's attack is to take there to be a tight, intimate connection between (to take one example) our experiences and our beliefs upon reflection about the obtaining of those experiences, or between (to take another example) the rationality of our beliefs and our beliefs upon reflection about the rationality of those beliefs. (shrink)

Quasi-realists aim to account for many of the trappings of metanormative realism within an expressivist framework. Chief among these is the realist way of responding to the Euthyphro dilemma: quasi-realists want to join realists in being able to say, "It’s not the case that kicking dogs is wrong because we disapprove of it. Rather, we disapprove of kicking dogs because it’s wrong." However, the standard quasi-realist way of explaining what we are up to when we assert the first of these (...) two sentences rests on a mistaken identification of metaphysical dependence (or grounding) with counterfactual covariation. This chapter proposes a better way for expressivists to understand such sentences, on which they serve to express complex states of mind in which an attitude bears a relation of psychological dependence (or basing) to another state of mind. It is argued that this proposal is a natural, versatile, and fruitful approach for expressivists to take that helps them secure the first half of the Euthyphro contrast—but at the cost of making it difficult to see how expressivists can make sense of that contrast’s second half. (shrink)

I defend the normativity of meaning against recent objections by arguing for a new interpretation of the ‘ought’ relevant to meaning. Both critics and defenders of the normativity thesis have understood statements about how an expression ought to be used as either prescriptive or semantic. I propose an alternative view of the ‘ought’ as conveying the primitively normative attitudes speakers must adopt towards their uses if they are to use the expression with understanding.

Moral particularists argue that because reasons for action are irreducibly context-dependent, the traditional quest in ethics for true and exceptionless moral principles is hopelessly misguided. In making this claim, particularists assume a general framework according to which reasons are the ground floor normative units undergirding all other normative properties and relations. They then argue that there is no cashing out in finite terms either (i) when a given non-normative feature gives rise to a reason for or against action, or (ii) (...) how the reasons that are present in a given context play off each other to determine one’s overall duties. However, the conjunction of these two theses leaves particularists without a coherent notion of a reason for action: posit too much irreducible context-dependence in the behavior of reasons, and the reasons-based framework breaks down. One upshot is that the particularists’ challenge to principle-based approaches to ethics has not, at present, been successfully made out; another upshot is that perhaps the best way to formulate that challenge involves renouncing the reasons-based framework all together. (shrink)

After summarizing the essential details of Anil Gupta’s account of perceptual justification in his book _Empiricism and Experience_, I argue for three claims: (1) Gupta’s proposal is closer to rationalism than advertised; (2) there is a major lacuna in Gupta’s account of how convergence in light of experience yields absolute entitlements to form beliefs; and (3) Gupta has not adequately explained how ordinary courses of experience can lead to convergence on a commonsense view of the world.

Kant’s derivation of the table of categories from logical functions of judgments in the metaphysical deduction remains one of the least convincing arguments of the Critique of Pure Reason. This article presents an alternative approach to the question of the a priori origin of the table of categories. By circumventing the metaphysical deduction, I show the possibility of demonstrating the exact functions and necessity of the twelve categorial forms as emerging from the interaction of the synthetic unity of apperception with (...) the manifold content of the a priori intuition of space and time. I argue that this a priori material of cognition imposes a constraint on the spontaneity of understanding, thus giving rise to the specific rules of synthesis that make up the table of categories. On the reading I suggest, the table of categories can be understood as expressing the a priori form of self-consciousness in the face of space and time. (shrink)

Kant’s derivation of the table of categories from logical functions of judgments in the metaphysical deduction remains one of the least convincing arguments of the Critique of Pure Reason. This article presents an alternative approach to the question of the a priori origin of the table of categories. By circumventing the metaphysical deduction, I show the possibility of demonstrating the exact functions and necessity of the twelve categorial forms as emerging from the interaction of the synthetic unity of apperception with (...) the manifold content of the a priori intuition of space and time. I argue that this a priori material of cognition imposes a constraint on the spontaneity of understanding, thus giving rise to the specific rules of synthesis that make up the table of categories. On the reading I suggest, the table of categories can be understood as expressing the a priori form of self-consciousness in the face of space and time. (shrink)

In a famous passage from the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein describes a pupil who has been learning to write out various sequences of numbers in response to orders such as “+1” and “+2”. He has shown himself competent for numbers up to 1000, but when we have him continue the “+2” sequence beyond 1000, he writes the numerals 1004, 1008, 1012. As Wittgenstein describes the case: We say to him, “Look what you’re doing!” — He doesn’t understand us. We say “You (...) should have added two; look how you began the series!” — He answers: “Yes! Isn’t it right? I thought that’s how I should [sollen] do it. — Or suppose he were to say, pointing to the series, “But I went on in the same way!”1The passage continues:— It would now be no use to us to say “But don’t you see…?” — and repeat for him the old explanations and examples. — In such a case, we might perhaps say: this person naturally understands our order, once given our explanations, as we would understand the order “Add 2 up to 1000, 4 up to 2000, 6 up to 3000, and so on.”. (shrink)

In this book she describes the perplexing crises which modern society faces as a result of the loss of meaning of the traditional key words of politics: justice ...

Imagination comes with varying degrees of sensory accompaniment. Sometimes imagining is phenomenologically lean (cognitive imagining); at other times, imagining involves or requires sensory presentation such as mental imagery (sensory imagining). Philosophers debate whether contradictions can obtain in fiction and whether cognitive imagining is robust enough to explain our engagement with fiction. In this paper, I defend the Principle of Poetic License by arguing for the Permissive View of fictional truth: we can have fictions in which a contradiction is true, everything (...) is true, or nothing is true. I show that imagination-based worries about impossible, unlimited, and empty fictions can be shown to be about sensory imagination and that sensory imagination isn’t necessary for fictional truth. (shrink)

In a 2020 article in Analysis, Lippert-Rasmussen argues that the moral equality account of the hypocrite’s lack of standing to blame fails. To object to this account, Lippert-Rasmussen considers the contrary of hypocrisy: hypercrisy. In this article, I show that if hypercrisy is a problem for the moral equality account, it is also a problem for Lippert-Rasmussen’s own account of why hypocrites lack standing to blame. I then reflect on the hypocrite’s and hypercrite’s standing to self-blame, which reveals that the (...) challenge hypercrisy poses for accounts of standing is different from the challenge Lippert-Rasmussen articulates. (shrink)

In this article, I aim to do two things: first, introduce Juche, the official philosophy of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (“North Korea”), and second, defend Juche against Alzo David-West’s allegation that it is a nonsensical philosophy. I organize David-West’s complaints into two major strands—that Juche’s axiom is too vague to be of philosophical use and that Juche makes too stark a distinction between human vs. everything else—and offer responses to both strands. My goal isn’t to defend the regime, (...) but to present its ideology in the most charitable way so its merits and demerits can be seen more clearly in future engagements. (shrink)

In a recent essay, Deery and Nahmias :1255–1276, 2017) utilize interventionism about causation to develop an account of causal sourcehood in order to defend compatibilism about free will and moral responsibility from manipulation arguments. In this paper, we criticize Deery and Nahmias’s analysis of sourcehood by drawing a distinction between two forms of causal invariance that can come into conflict on their account. We conclude that any attempt to resolve this conflict will either result in counterintuitive attributions of moral responsibility (...) or will undermine their response to manipulation arguments. (shrink)

Kripke’s thesis that meaning is normative is typically interpreted, following Boghossian, as the thesis that meaningful expressions allow of true or warranted use. I argue for an alternative interpretation centered on Wittgenstein’s conception of the normativity involved in “knowing how to go on” in one’s use of an expression. Meaning is normative for Kripke because it justifies claims, not to be saying something true, but to be going on as one ought from prevous uses of the expression. I argue that (...) this represents a distortion of Wittgenstein’s conception of the normativity of meaning, and that Wittgenstein’s conception is preferable. (shrink)

Davidson claims that nothing can count as a reason for a belief except another belief. This claim is challenged by McDowell, who holds that perceptual experiences can count as reasons for beliefs. I argue that McDowell fails to take account of a distinction between two different senses in which something can count as a reason for belief. While a non-doxastic experience can count as a reason for belief in one of the two senses, this is not the sense which is (...) presupposed in Davidson's claim. While I focus on McDowell's view, the argument generalizes to other views which take experiences as reasons for belief. (shrink)

As most of its readers are aware, the Critique of Pure Reason is primarily concerned not with empirical, but with a priori knowledge. For the most part, the Kant of the first Critique tends to assume that experience, and the knowledge that is based on it, is unproblematic. The problem with which he is concerned is that of how we can be capable of substantive knowledge independently of experience. At the same time, however, the notion of experience plays a crucial (...) role in the central arguments of the Critique. For, again as most readers of the Critique know, Kant aims to show how we can have synthetic a priori knowledge by showing that the categories, or pure concepts of the understanding, are conditions of the possibility of experience. This means that, whether or not Kant is concerned with the notion of experience for its own sake, his account of a priori knowledge carries with it at least some commitments regarding the character of experience. If the account of a priori knowledge is to be successful, then experience has to be the kind of thing for which the categories can, in principle, serve as conditions of possibility. More specifically, experience must involve not only the senses, but also thought or understanding, for otherwise the claim that it presupposes a certain specific set of concepts is simply unintelligible. And indeed at least some parts of the Critique, in particular the so-called subjective deduction in the first edition, and the briefer passages which correspond to it in the second edition, seem to be intended to show how this requirement is met. That is, they are concerned not so much with showing that experience is governed by the categories, as with elaborating a view of experience as involving conceptual activity überhaupt. (shrink)

As Christian List (2021) has recently argued, the increasing arrival of powerful AI systems that operate autonomously in high-stakes contexts creates a need for “future-proofing” our regulatory frameworks, i.e., for reassessing them in the face of these developments. One core part of our regulatory frameworks that dominates our everyday moral interactions is blame. Therefore, “future-proofing” our extant regulatory frameworks in the face of the increasing arrival of powerful AI systems requires, among others things, that we ask whether it makes sense (...) to extend our blaming practices to these systems. In the paper, we argue for the admittedly surprising thesis that this question should be answered in the affirmative: contrary to what one might initially think, it can make a lot of sense to blame AI systems, since, as we furthermore argue, many of the important functions that are fulfilled by blaming humans can also be served by blaming AI systems. The paper concludes that this result gives us a good pro tanto reason to extend our blame practices to AI systems. (shrink)

Davis called for “extreme caution” in the use of non-invasive brain stimulation to treat neurological disorders in children, due to gaps in scientific knowledge. We are sympathetic to his position. However, we must also address the ethical implications of applying this technology to minors. Compensatory trade-offs associated with NIBS present a challenge to its use in children, insofar as these trade-offs have the effect of limiting the child’s future options. The distinction between treatment and enhancement has some normative force here. (...) As the intervention moves away from being a treatment toward being an enhancement—and thus toward a more uncertain weighing of the benefits, risks, and costs—considerations of the child’s best interests diminish, and the need to protect the child’s autonomy looms larger. NIBS for enhancement involving trade-offs should therefore be delayed, if possible, until the child reaches a state of maturity and can make an informed, personal decision. NIBS for treatment, by contrast, is permissible insofar as it can be shown to be at least as safe and effective as currently approved treatments, which are themselves justified on a best interests standard. (shrink)

I defend my ‘one-act’ interpretation of Kant’s account of judgments of beauty against recent criticisms by Paul Guyer. Guyer’s text-based arguments for his own ‘two-acts’ view rely on the assumption that a claim to the universal validity of one’s pleasure presupposes the prior existence of the pleasure. I argue that pleasure in the beautiful claims its own universal validity, thus obviating the need to distinguish two independent acts of judging. The resulting view, I argue, is closer to the text and (...) more phenomenologically plausible than Guyer’s two-acts alternative. (shrink)

In Being Realistic About Reasons,T.M. Scanlon develops a non-naturalistic realist account of normative reasons. A crucial part of that account is Scanlon’s contention that there is no deep epistemological problem for non-naturalistic realists, and that the method of reflective equilibrium suffices to explain the possibility of normative knowledge. In this critical notice we argue that this is not so: on a realist picture, normative knowledge presupposes a significant correlation between distinct entities, namely between normative beliefs and normative facts. This correlation (...) calls for an explanation. We show that Scanlon does not have the resources to offer such an explanation. (shrink)

I argue that Stroud's nonreductionism about meaning is insufficiently motivated. First, given that he rejects the assumption that grasp of an expression's meaning guides or instructs us in its use, he has no reason to accept Kripke's arguments against dispositionalism or related reductive views. Second, his argument that reductive views are impossible because they attempt to explain language “from outside” rests on an equivocation between two senses in which an explanation of language can be from outside language. I offer a (...) partially reductive account of meaning which appeals both to speakers’ dispositions to produce and respond to utterances in naturalistically specifiable ways, and to the normative attitudes they adopt, in so doing, to their own behavior. This account is supported, I argue, by Stroud's early treatment of Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations and in particular of the agreement in primitive judgments or reactions which Wittgenstein takes to be required for linguistic communication. (shrink)

AI systems, like self-driving cars, healthcare robots, or Autonomous Weapon Systems, already play an increasingly important role in our lives and will do so to an even greater extent in the near future. This raises a fundamental philosophical question: who is morally responsible when such systems cause unjustified harm? In the paper, we argue for the admittedly surprising claim that some of these systems can themselves be morally responsible for their conduct in an important and everyday sense of the term—the (...) attributability sense. More specifically, relying on work by Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder (In Praise of Desire, OUP 2014), we propose that the behavior of these systems can manifest their ‘quality of will’ and thus be regarded as something they can be blameworthy for. We develop this position in detail, justify some of its crucial presuppositions, and defend it against potential objections. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that more is true in a work of fiction than explicitly said. In addition to directly stipulated fictional content (explicit truth), inference and background assumptions give us implicit truths. However, this taxonomy of fictional truths overlooks an important class of fictional truth: those generated by literary formal features. Fictional works generate fictional content by both semantic and formal means, and content arising from formal features such as italics or font size are neither explicit nor implicit: not (...) explicit since formal features don’t say anything; and not implicit since content generated from formal features doesn’t rely on other truths or background assumptions. In addition to showing that our current classification is incomplete, the new class of fictional truths provides four further upshots for definitions of fictional truth, story and work identity conditions, and the relationship between literary interpretation and fictional truth. (shrink)

In the history of Chinese philosophy, Mozi calls music a “waste of resources,” considering it an aristocratic extravagance that does not benefit the everyday people. In its defense, Confucians highlight music’s moral and metaphysical qualities, arguing that music aids in moral cultivation and that music’s form mimics the structure of reality. The aim of this paper is to show that Korean philosophers provide yet another reason to think music is important. Music, and art in general, was used to express a (...) national identity at a time Korean philosophers were beginning to develop their own aesthetic consciousness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A cultural movement called Joseonpoong (조선풍), “Joseon wind”, marked a shift away from Sinocentrism and towards Korea’s own unique value and practices. The new attempt to justify art’s value apart from its relationship to morality or metaphysics set Joseon thinkers apart from their Chinese predecessors. Using art for identity expression allowed the Koreans to reconceive art’s value while Sinocentric cosmological and cultural views were being challenged with the introduction of western knowledge. Art also became a tool for reversing hermeneutic injustice as new artistic practices and standards allowed the Koreans to meaningfully engage with previously neglected aspects of their lived lives. (shrink)

Madness can be understood as something sealed off from the intelligible human world, a way of being that has been detached and isolated from the essential elements of normative society. It can represent all that is contrary to what is rational, what is normal and even, what is human. By following this line of thinking, madness cannot be penetrated by the outside nor does it have an established internal structure, and yet it can be used to construct and form its (...) opposite—the rational, normal human. Human rationality then becomes something that can be fully deduced, explained, and understood, and anything that contains mystery or ambiguity can be relegated to the realm of madness.These are the common definitions of... (shrink)

There is ongoing debate on whether Juche (주체/主體), the North Korean state ideology, is indigenous, Marxist-Leninist, or Confucian—or if it’s a real philosophy at all. In this article, I introduce Juche and show how characteristics that philosophers identify to be unique or pronounced in premodern Korean philosophy can be found in Juche as well. Intellectual adaptation, pragmaticism, and an emphasis on continual improvement are prominent in both premodern Korean thought and Juche. Juche should be understood as a politically inflected outgrowth (...) that is embedded within the larger context of Korean philosophy. (shrink)

This paper addresses a problem about aesthetic normativity raised by Kant. Can aesthetic experiences be appropriate or inappropriate to their objects? And, if so, how is that possible given that, according to Kant, aesthetic experience is not objective? Kant thought the answer to the first question was yes. But his official answer to the second question, in terms of the free play of the faculties, is obscure. The paper offers a clearer answer, inspired by Kant, which invokes Wittgenstein’s notion of (...) “knowing how to go on.” Aesthetic normativity is problematic only on the assumption that claims to the normativity of one’s responses to things must be based on the recognition of objective properties of those things. However, Wittgenstein’s discussion shows that we need not accept that assumption. There can be legitimate claims to the normativity of one’s responses which do not rely on those responses’ reflecting appreciation of objective facts. (shrink)

Considering questions at the intersection of time and fiction deepens our understanding of fiction, introduces new questions for philosophy of time, and brings analytic philosophy in discussion with narratology. Philosophers debate whether fictional time can be tensed, whether fictional time can branch, repeat, pause, rewind, or skip and whether fictional time travel is possible. Much of the way we answer these questions will depend on our overall commitment to the nature of fiction. It’s also unclear what, if anything, we can (...) learn about the metaphysics of time from fiction. This chapter will introduce readers to discussions that are shaping the debates in this domain. (shrink)

It is intuitive to think that fiction is more imaginative or creative than nonfiction, and that creating or engaging with fiction involves the imagination in ways creating or engaging with nonfiction doesn't. However, philosophers debate whether imagination has a special connection to fiction. This chapter will argue that fiction is intimately connected to creativity and that creativity's connection to imagination produces the impression that fiction and imagination also share an intimate connection. The key ingredient of fiction that connects fiction to (...) creativity is fabrication. The chapter will also discuss how an author can produce fiction that is creative in content and form, how readers and critics use imagination in a creative manner when engaging with works, and how metaphysical debates about fiction affect the kind of creativity we may attribute to authors. (shrink)

A chapter in an edited volume discussing philosophy and Ted Chiang's short stories. In this chapter, I show how philosophical debates about imaginative resistance and what can/can't be fictionally true influence our interpretation of "Division by Zero.".

Comic is one of the paradigmatic forms of hybrid media, and coming up with a satisfactory definition for it has been difficult. Sam Cowling and Ley Cray (2022) take a functional approach and offer an Intentional Picture-Reading View which defines comics as something that is “aptly intended to be picture-read.” I show that the view is extensionally inadequate as is because formally ambitious prose and concrete poetry, too, are aptly intended to be picture-read. The way forward, I argue, is to (...) look at more medium-specific non-depictive images (such as speech balloons and panels) to set comics apart from other hybrid media. (shrink)

Part of a book symposium for Peter Langland-Hassan's Explaining Imagination (2020).

One of the reasons why GMOs have met public resistance in the past is that they are perceived as “unnatural”. The basis for this claim has, in part, to do with crossing species boundaries, which is considered morally objectionable. The emergence of CRISPR is sometimes argued to be an ethical game-changer in this regard since it does not require the insertion of foreign genes. Based on an empirical bioethics study including individual interviews and focus groups with laypeople and other stakeholders, (...) this article analyses the normative role of appeals to naturalness in discussions about the moral acceptability of using CRISPR in salmon farming. It discusses two dimensions of naturalness found in the material– living by species-specific nature and being unaffected by humans– and argues that these dimensions put down criteria for the application of CRISPR that lead to a conflict between our moral duties towards the farmed salmon and those we hold towards the wild salmon as a threatened species. It also points to a paradox which is likely to gain traction with further climate change and biodiversity loss, namely that while nature, understood as that which is unaffected by humans, is presented as an ideal, conserving nature in its pristine state may rely on technology and human intervention. (shrink)

A metaphor is an effective way to show how something is to be conceived. In this article, I look at two Neo-Confucian Korean philosophical contexts—the Four-Seven debate and Book of the Imperial Pivot—and suggest that metaphors are philosophically expedient in two further contexts: when both intellect and emotion must be addressed; and when the aim of philosophizing is to produce behavioral change. Because Neo-Confucians had a conception of the mind that closely connected it to the heart (心 xin), metaphor’s empathy-inducing (...) and perspective-giving capacities made it an especially helpful mode of philosophizing in the history of Korean philosophy. (shrink)

Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch, Gertrude Anscombe and Philippa Foot studied together in Oxford during the war, at a time when most of the men had left the university, leaving it to them for themselves. These unique circumstances where decisive for the fact that they all went on to become successful philosophers and were able to develop their own original philosophical theories, opposing the philosophical dogmas of their time, Midgley later wrote. This claim is the point of departure for this article. (...) It has three purposes: First I try to say something about the circumstances that made it possible to develop such alternatives, and second, I try to say something about what they consist in. Finally, I ask what this story can teach us about inclusion of women in philosophy today. (shrink)

There are better and worse ways to blame others. Likewise, there are better and worse ways to blame yourself. And though there is an ever-expanding literature on the norms that govern our blaming practices, relatively little attention has been paid to the norms that govern expressions of self-blame. In this essay, I argue that when we blame ourselves, we ought not do so privately. Rather, we should, ceteris paribus, express our self-blame to those we have wronged. I then explore how (...) this norm can contribute to our understanding of the ethics of self-blame as well as the nature of blameworthiness itself. (shrink)