The initial foundations to the notion that Cometan's grandparents, Irene Mary Taylor and Derrick Taylor, should be recognised for their life as laypeople in the Roman Catholic Church first emerged in January 2020 and October 2021 respectively. Irene Mary was well known for her devotion to Catholicism among her family and acquaintances, yet Cometan saw in her icon and life events an opportunity to reinvigorate Catholic fervour in England and abroad. In his own endeavour as a religious figure (...) and philosopher as the founder of Astronism, Cometan had made it clear that his paternal grandmother had played a large role in his religious life from infancy and so Irene Mary's Cause for Beatification was the culmination of this destined religious figureship. The Beatification Story of Irene Mary Taylor holds the responsibility of presenting Irene Mary for the recognition in the Roman Catholic Church in whichever capacity the Church deems suitable. The book explores the major remembered life events of Irene Mary Taylor, relates them to Catholic doctrine, and systematises them to form Irenianism, Irene Mary's eponymous Catholic system of thought. (shrink)

The Shape-of-a-Life phenomenon is widely recognized by philosophers of well-being: an upward life trajectory seems better than its downward equivalent if the sum of momentary well-being is held fixed. But what if we hold fixed the sum of momentary well-being in an upward trajectory, are certain ways to improve from the bad times better than the others? Velleman suggests that a redemptive trajectory is better than a bare upward trajectory. In this paper, I elaborate this proposal by developing a mediating (...) factor account of prudential redemption. I argue that, in redemptive trajectories, there is a mediating factor that bears certain relations with the negative and the positive events respectively, one that does not necessarily appear in bare upward trajectories. Prudential redemption, compared to mere improvement, can enhance a person’s lifetime well-being because a redeemed event is made less bad by virtue of the mediating factor. This result has implications for making decisions in the face of equally good options and for evaluating the rationality of honoring sunk costs. (shrink)

What kind of reference (if any) do terms such as “pencil,” “chair,” “television,” and so on have? On the matter, a de-bate between directly referential theorists and descriptiv-ist theorists is open. It is largely acknowledged that natural kind terms (such as “water,” “gold,” “tiger,” etc.) are directly referential expressions (cf. Putnam,1975). That is, they are expressions whose reference is determined by their refer-ents' nature, independent of whether we know or will ever know what this nature is. However, it does not (...) seem like-wise convincing that all artifactual kind terms (like “pen-cil,” “chair,” “television,” etc.) semantically behave the same. Terms for artifactual kinds seem more likely to be subjected to a descriptivist view, that is, definable not by links to their extensions' nature but in terms of conjunctions or clusters of properties. In his celebrated “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (1975), Hilary Putnam originated the mentioned debate by arguing that artifactual kind terms also refer directly. Thus, the discussion ultimately revolves around establishing whether artifactual and natural kind terms are both directly referential expressions. The authors engaged in this debate have tried to argue in favor of (or against) Putnam's proposal by highlighting the similarities (or differences) between nat-ural vis-à-vis artifactual kind words and their respective ref-erents. This paper aims to provide a thorough and reasoned overview of the debate at stake, pointing out trends and problems associated with each proposed account. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the essential role that public memory plays in the establishment and maintenance of the political arena and its space of appearance. Without this space and the shared memory that allows it to appear, Hannah Arendt argues, transience and finitude would consume the excellence of word and deed—just as the "natural ruin of time" consumes its mortal performer. The modern era displays a kind of mnemonic failure, however, a situation arising not only from technological developments that (...) "outsource" memory but from several normative breakdowns that Arendt describes as characteristic of modernity. The consequence is the individual's loss of personal, living access to the community's memories, and the community's own failure to engage in the difficult choice of what counts as worthy of preservation. In failing to ask this question, however, the community abdicates responsibility for establishing the shared norms by which it will govern itself in times of crisis. (shrink)

He drove a taxi. Now he drives a truck. So, must he be driving the truck right now? Must he, as long as he's working as a truck driver, keep driving his truck all day and all night? What do we speak of, when we speak of "now"? In this talk, some popular conceptions in the philosophy of time will be put under critical scrutiny: (1) The present (the "now") is an instant, a time point with no length; (2) the (...) "content" of the present is always an event, a happening, which constitutes a segment of a larger process; (3) what (time) is now, is determined by the passage of time (itself). The following points will be defended respectively: (1) The present may be a time period. "Now" is not an indivisible time-atom in the substantival sense. (2) What is now can be an event, a process, or a state. "Driving a truck now" – in the sense of being a truck driver – is neither an event nor something happening to him. (3) "Now", among other temporal concepts, is not a name for any thing, but schemata under which we understand ways things being themselves. There are variety of ways of being, and accordingly there are multiple aspects of now-ness. (shrink)

The surface grammar of reports such as ‘I have a pain in my leg’ suggests that pains are objects which are spatially located in parts of the body. We show that the parallel construction is not available in Mandarin. Further, four philosophically important grammatical features of such reports cannot be reproduced. This suggests that arguments and puzzles surrounding such reports may be tracking artefacts of English, rather than philosophically significant features of the world.

There is a long-standing disagreement in the philosophy of probability and Bayesian decision theory about whether an agent can hold a meaningful credence about an upcoming action, while she deliberates about what to do. Can she believe that it is, say, 70% probable that she will do A, while she chooses whether to do A? No, say some philosophers, for Deliberation Crowds Out Prediction (DCOP), but others disagree. In this paper, we propose a valid core for DCOP, and identify terminological (...) causes for some of the apparent disputes. (shrink)

‘Pencil’, ‘Tiger’, ‘Christianity’. What kind of reference (if any) do these terms have? Do they have the same semantics? In his celebrated The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ (1975), Hilary Putnam suggests so when arguing that they have externalist semantics. However, this claim is highly controversial. A lengthy discussion has been going on the matter. So far, neither Putnam’s nor other defenses of Externalism proposed within this debate have actually succeeded in showing that the terms at stake (and their likes) are semantically (...) on a par. Here I examine further options left to the externalist. I conclude that, still, none is a viable alternative for defending that Externalism applies to the mentioned terms (and their likes). (shrink)

Emotion terms such as “sad”, “happy” and “joyful” apply to a wide range of entities. We use them to refer to mental states of sentient beings, and also to describe features of non-mental things such as comportment, nature, events, artworks and so on. Drawing on the literature on polysemy, this paper provides an in-depth analysis of emotion descriptions. It argues that emotion terms are polysemous and distinguishes seven related senses. In addition, the paper applies the analysis to shed light on (...) a long-standing debate in philosophy of music concerning emotion descriptions of music. (shrink)

During the 13th century, several logicians in the Latin medieval tradition showed a special interest in the nature of impossibility, and in the different kinds or ‘degrees’ of impossibility that could be distinguished. This discussion resulted in an analysis of the modal concept with a fineness of grain unprecedented in earlier modal accounts. Of the several divisions of the term ‘impossible’ that were offered, one became particularly relevant in connection with the debate on ars obligatoria and positio impossibilis: the distinction (...) between ‘intelligible’ and ‘unintelligible’ impossibilities. In this article, I consider some 13th-century tracts on obligations that provide an account of the relation between impossibility and intelligibility and discuss the inferential principles that are permissible when we reason from an impossible – but intelligible – premise. I also explore the way in which the 13th-century reflection on this topic survives, in a revised form, in some early 14th-century accounts of positio, namely, those of William of Ockham, Roger Swineshead and Thomas Bradwardine. (shrink)

Zeugmatic oddness is a linguistic intuition of oddness with respect to an instance of zeugma, i.e. a sentence containing an instance of a homonymous or polysemous word being used in different meanings or senses simultaneously. Zeugmatic oddness is important for philosophical debates as philosophers often use it to argue that a particular philosophically interesting expression is ambiguous and that the phenomenon referred to by the expression is disunified. This paper takes a closer look at zeugmatic oddness. Focusing on relevant psycholinguistic (...) literature on homonymy and polysemy processing and representation, I argue that there are two different ways in which zeugmatic oddness can arise. Philosophical upshots concerning zeugmatic oddness are then drawn. (shrink)

Poetry evokes mental imagery in its readers. But how is mental imagery precisely related to poetry? This article provides a systematic treatment. It clarifies two roles of mental imagery in relation to poetry—as an effect generated by poetry and as an efficient means for understanding and appreciating poetry. The article also relates mental imagery to the discussion on the ‘heresy of paraphrase’. It argues against the orthodox view that the imagistic effects of poetry cannot be captured by prosaic paraphrase, but (...) points to features of poetry that can shape aspects of mental imagery that are liable to be lost in paraphrase. (shrink)

As the aim of the responsible robotics initiative is to ensure that responsible practices are inculcated within each stage of design, development and use, this impetus is undergirded by the alignment of ethical and legal considerations towards socially beneficial ends. While every effort should be expended to ensure that issues of responsibility are addressed at each stage of technological progression, irresponsibility is inherent within the nature of robotics technologies from a theoretical perspective that threatens to thwart the endeavour. This is (...) because the concept of responsibility, despite being treated as such, is not monolithic: rather this seemingly unified concept consists of converging and confluent concepts that shape the idea of what we colloquially call responsibility. From a different perspective, robotics will be simultaneously responsible and irresponsible depending on the particular concept of responsibility that is foregrounded: an observation that cuts against the grain of the drive towards responsible robotics. This problem is further compounded by responsible design and development as contrasted to responsible use. From a different perspective, the difficulty in defining the concept of responsibility in robotics is because human responsibility is the main frame of reference. Robotic systems are increasingly expected to achieve the human-level performance, including the capacities associated with responsibility and other criteria which are necessary to act responsibly. This subsists within a larger phenomenon where the difference between humans and non-humans, be it animals or artificial systems, appears to be increasingly blurred, thereby disrupting orthodox understandings of responsibility. This paper seeks to supplement the responsible robotics impulse by proposing a complementary set of human rights directed specifically against the harms arising from robotic and artificial intelligence technologies. The relationship between responsibilities of the agent and the rights of the patient suggest that a rights regime is the other side of responsibility coin. The major distinction of this approach is to invert the power relationship: while human agents are perceived to control robotic patients, the prospect for this to become reversed is beginning. As robotic technologies become ever more sophisticated, and even genuinely complex, asserting human rights directly against robotic harms become increasingly important. Such an approach includes not only developing human rights that ‘protect’ humans but also ‘strengthen’ people against the challenges introduced by robotics and AI [This distinction parallels Berlin’s negative and positive concepts of liberty ], by emphasising the social and reflective character of the notion of humanness as well as the difference between the human and nonhuman. This will allow using the human frame of reference as constitutive of, rather than only subject to, the robotic and AI technologies, where it is human and not technology characteristics that shape the human rights framework in the first place. (shrink)

Can an agent deliberating about an action A hold a meaningful credence that she will do A? 'No', say some authors, for 'Deliberation Crowds Out Prediction' (DCOP). Others disagree, but we argue here that such disagreements are often terminological. We explain why DCOP holds in a Ramseyian operationalist model of credence, but show that it is trivial to extend this model so that DCOP fails. We then discuss a model due to Joyce, and show that Joyce's rejection of DCOP rests (...) on terminological choices about terms such as 'intention', 'prediction', and 'belief'. Once these choices are in view, they reveal underlying agreement between Joyce and the DCOP-favouring tradition that descends from Ramsey. Joyce's Evidential Autonomy Thesis (EAT) is effectively DCOP, in different terminological clothing. Both principles rest on the so-called 'transparency' of first-person present-tensed reflection on one's own mental states. (shrink)

A frequent caveat in online dating profiles – “No fats, femmes, or Asians” – caused an LGBT activist to complain about the bias against Asians in the American gay community, which he called “racial looksism”. In response, he was asked that, if he himself would not date a fat person, why he should find others not dating Asians so upsetting. This response embodies a popular attitude that personal preferences or tastes are simply personal matters – they are not subject to (...) moral evaluation. In this paper, I argue, against this popular attitude, that a personal preference like racial looksism is indeed wrong. A preference like racial looksism is wrong because it is an overgeneralization that disrespects individuality by treating people as exchangeable tokens of one type, and such disrespect denies its objects appreciation that their dignity entitles them to. As it turns out, there is on my account a relevant moral difference between racial looksism and simple looksism. (shrink)

Ad hoc concepts feature prominently in lexical pragmatics. A speaker can use a word or phrase to communicate an ad hoc concept that is different from the lexically encoded concept and the hearer can construct the intended ad hoc concept pragmatically during utterance comprehension. I argue that some philosophical concepts have origins as ad hoc concepts, and such concepts pose a challenge for experimental philosophy regarding these concepts. To illustrate this, I consider philosophers’ ‘what-it’s-like’-concepts and experimental philosophy of consciousness.

(Recipient of the 2020 Everett Mendelsohn Prize.) This article revisits the development of the protoplasm concept as it originally arose from critiques of the cell theory, and examines how the term “protoplasm” transformed from a botanical term of art in the 1840s to the so-called “living substance” and “the physical basis of life” two decades later. I show that there were two major shifts in biological materialism that needed to occur before protoplasm theory could be elevated to have equal status (...) with cell theory in the nineteenth century. First, I argue that biologists had to accept that life could inhere in matter alone, regardless of form. Second, I argue that in the 1840s, ideas of what formless, biological matter was capable of dramatically changed: going from a “coagulation paradigm” that had existed since Theophrastus, to a more robust conception of matter that was itself capable of movement and self-maintenance. In addition to revisiting Schleiden and Schwann’s original writings on cell theory, this article looks especially closely at Hugo von Mohl’s definition of the protoplasm concept in 1846, how it differed from his primordial utricle theory of cell structure two years earlier. This article draws on Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of “ontological metaphors” to show that the cell, primordial utricle, and protoplasm can be understood as material container, object, and substance, and that these overlapping distinctions help explain the chaotic and confusing early history of cell theory. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that perceptual‐motor simulations are often constitutively involved in language comprehension. Call this “the simulation view of language comprehension”. This article applies the simulation view to illuminate the much‐discussed phenomenon of copredication, where a noun permits multiple predications which seem to select different senses of the noun simultaneously. On the proposed account, the (in)felicitousness of a copredicational sentence is closely associated with the perceptual simulations that the language user deploys in comprehending the sentence.

Philosophers debate over the truth of the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing, the thesis that there is a morally significant difference between doing harm and merely allowing harm to happen. Deontologists tend to accept this doctrine, whereas consequentialists tend to reject it. A robust defence of this doctrine would require a conceptual distinction between doing and allowing that both matches our ordinary use of the concepts in a wide range of cases and enables a justification for the alleged moral difference. (...) In this article, I argue not only that a robust defence of this doctrine is available, but also that it is available within a consequentialist framework. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Reuter, Seinhold and Sytsma put forward an implicature account to explain the intuitive failure of the pain-in-mouth argument. They argue that utterances such as ‘There is tissue damage / a pain / an inflammation in my mouth’ carry the conversational implicature that there is something wrong with the speaker’s mouth. Appealing to new empirical data, this paper argues against the implicature account and for the entailment account, according to which pain reports using locative locutions, such as (...) ‘There is a pain in my mouth’, are intuitively understood as entailing corresponding predicative locutions, such as ‘My mouth hurts.’ On this latter account, the pain-in-mouth argument seems invalid because the conclusion is naturally understood as entailing something which cannot be inferred from the premisses. Implications for the philosophical debate about pain are also drawn. (shrink)

Most theories of slurs fall into one of two families: those which understand slurring terms to involve special descriptive/informational content (however conveyed), and those which understand them to encode special emotive/expressive content. Our view is that both offer essential insights, but that part of what sets slurs apart is use-theoretic content. In particular, we urge that slurring words belong at the intersection of a number of categories in a sociolinguistic register taxonomy, one that usually includes [+slang] and [+vulgar] and always (...) includes [-polite] and [+derogatory]. Thus, e.g., what distinguishes ‘Chinese’ from ‘chink’ is neither a peculiar sort of descriptive nor emotional content, but rather the fact that ‘chink’ is lexically marked as belonging to different registers than ‘Chinese’. It is, moreover, partly such facts which makes slurring ethically unacceptable. (shrink)

In "Experience as a Way of Knowing" (this journal), the author tries to create some troubles for philosophers who believe in "qualia" or "what it is like". I think the author has underestimated the complexity of the issues, and I will voice my concerns in five sections. Besides presenting my interpretation of the author's position and challenging it, I will (1) challenge the author's treatment of the knowledge argument, especially the author's treatment of "this is what it is like to (...) see red", (2) challenge the author's interpretation of "what-it-is-like" talk and the author's view that phenomenal properties are theoretical postulates, (3) challenge the author's rejection of "apparent properties", and (4) point out some issues with the author's interpretation of several authors who write about the knowledge argument. (shrink)

This commentary focuses on explaining the intuition of revelation, an issue that Chalmers (2018) raises in his paper. I first sketch how the truth of revelation provides an explanation for the intuition of revelation, and then assess a physicalist proposal to explain the intuition that appeals to Derk Pereboom’s (2011, 2016, 2019) qualitative inaccuracy hypothesis.

The paper Post-Trial Acces To Treatment (PTA) offers an insight into current corporate policies and corporate best practices relating to the provision of PTA in low and middle income countries based on company sources. In these countries there is a greater appeal for pharmaceutical companies to take responsibility for providing PTA. However, the practice of providing PTA is the exception rather than the rule.

This paper is an attempt to improve the practical argument for beliefs in God. Some theists, most famously Kant and William James, called our attention to a particular set of beliefs, the Jamesian-type beliefs, which are justified by virtue of their practical significance, and these theists tried to justify theistic beliefs on the exact same ground. I argue, contra the Jamesian tradition, that theistic beliefs are different from the Jamesian-type beliefs and thus cannot be justified on the same ground. I (...) also argue that the practical argument, as it stands, faces a problem of self-defeat. I then construct a new practical argument that avoids both problems. According to this new argument, theistic beliefs are rational to accept because such beliefs best supply us with motivation strong enough to carry out demanding moral tasks. (shrink)

Since the early nineteenth century a membrane or wall has been central to the cell’s identity as the elementary unit of life. Yet the literally and metaphorically marginal status of the cell membrane made it the site of clashes over the definition of life and the proper way to study it. In this article I show how the modern cell membrane was conceived of by analogy to the first “artificial cell,” invented in 1864 by the chemist Moritz Traube (1826–1894), and (...) reimagined by the plant physiologist Wilhelm Pfeffer (1845–1920) as a precision osmometer. Pfeffer’s artificial cell osmometer became the conceptual and empirical basis for the law of dilute solutions in physical chemistry, but his use of an artificial analogue to theorize the existence of the plasma membrane as distinct from the cell wall prompted debate over whether biology ought to be more closely unified with the physical sciences, or whether it must remain independent as the science of life. By examining how the histories of plant physiology and physical chemistry intertwined through the artificial cell, I argue that modern biology relocated vitality from protoplasmic living matter to nonliving chemical substances—or, in broader cultural terms, that the disenchantment of life was accompanied by the (re)enchantment of ordinary matter. (shrink)

Slurs are derogatory, and theories of slurs aim at explaining their “derogatory force”. This paper draws a distinction between the type derogatory force and the token derogatory force of slurs. To explain the type derogatory force is to explain why a slur is a derogatory word. By contrast, to explain the token derogatory force is to explain why an utterance of a slur is derogatory. This distinction will be defended by examples in which the type and the token derogatory force (...) come apart. Because of the distinction, an adequate theory of slurs must be plausible for both the type and the token derogatory force. However, I will argue that many theories fail to be plausible for both. In particular, Hom’s combinatorial externalism and the conventional implicature theory offer implausible accounts of the token derogatory force, whereas the prohibitionist theory is insufficient to explain the type derogatory force. (shrink)

This paper offers a fine analysis of different versions of the well known sure-thing principle. We show that Savage's formal formulation of the principle, i.e., his second postulate (P2), is strictly stronger than what is intended originally.

In this essay, I consider some logical treatises and commentaries from the first decades of the 12th century (many of which are still unedited) which contain a discussion on modalities and modal logic. After presenting a short catalogue of these sources and a description of their common features, I shall focus on some definitions of the modal term “necessarium” which are provided in them. As we will see, Abelard and logicians of his time advanced three different characterizations of this term: (...) necessity was either defined in terms of unavoidability (ineuitabilitas), or in terms of immutability and omnitemporality (impermutabilitas, sempiternitas), or again in terms of absolute necessity as opposed to conditioned one (necessitas absoluta vs. determinata). I argue that the temporal understanding of necessity in terms of omnitemporality, inherited from ancient sources and extensively used by Abelard and others in the first years of the twelfth-century, started to disappear in texts datable from around the 1120, perhaps due to several difficulties that were related to this definition when applied in logical contexts. I also discuss how the notion of necessitas determinata was used by Abelard’s contemporaries to qualify the modal status of present and past events, which were generally believed to be necessary only in a “weak” and harmless sense that did not prevent them from being contingent. -/- . (shrink)

It is often said that there is no appearance/reality distinction with respect to consciousness. Call this claim ‘NARD’. In contemporary discussions, NARD is closely connected to the thesis of revelation, the claim that the essences of phenomenal properties are revealed in experience, though the connection between the two requires clarification. This paper distinguishes different versions of NARD and homes in on a particular version that is closely connected to revelation. It shows how revelation and the related version of NARD pose (...) a threat to physicalism. Responses from physicalism and their limitations are also considered. (shrink)

The paradox of pain refers to the idea that the folk concept of pain is paradoxical, treating pains as simultaneously mental states and bodily states. By taking a close look at our pain terms, this paper argues that there is no paradox of pain. The air of paradox dissolves once we recognize that pain terms are polysemous and that there are two separate but related concepts of pain rather than one.

This essay examines the way in which the modal concept of necessity was discussed and analyzed in some eleventh- and early twelfth-century sources, such as Peter Damian’s De divina omnipotentia, Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur deus homo and several anonymous commentaries on Aristotle’s De interpretatione that were presumably composed in the first two decades of the twelfth century by logicians connected to William of Champeaux’s and Peter Abelard’s milieu. My aim is to offer a comparison of these different sources with respect (...) to their use of the Boethian distinction between two types or kinds of necessity, namely, the “absolute” or “simple” necessity that is involved in statements like “God is necessarily immortal” or “it is necessary for humans to be animals”, and the “conditional” or “temporal” necessity that is at stake when we say, for instance, that someone necessarily walks when he is walking. (shrink)

Philosophically expanding upon the workings of Chris Land and other notable figures in the field of philosophy, the ideology of Xenoaccelerationism is rooted in the spirit of hermeneutics which supports the holistic nuanced approach to understanding the functionality of the Xenoaccelerationist. In the name of accelerationism “Xeno” meaning alien refers to the use of outside viewpoints and expertise to transcend the limitations of methodological thought processes. Through the successful application of accelerationism given the lens of alienation draws upon abstract methods (...) to pursue economic expansion initiatives. The ideal Xenoaccelerationist is thought to have the characteristics of non-partisan affiliation, diverse thought processes, and a rigorous academic understanding of the world and its various functions. (shrink)

Philosophers disagree about what the folk concept of pain is. This paper criticises existing theories of the folk concept of pain, i.e. the mental view, the bodily view, and the recently proposed polyeidic view. It puts forward an alternative proposal – the polysemy view – according to which pain terms like “sore,” “ache” and “hurt” are polysemous, where one sense refers to a mental state and another a bodily state, and the type of polysemy at issue reflects two distinct but (...) related concepts of pain. Implications with respect to issues in philosophy of pain are also drawn. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of finite versus countable additivity in Bayesian probability and decision theory -- in particular, Savage's theory of subjective expected utility and personal probability. I show that Savage's reason for not requiring countable additivity in his theory is inconclusive. The assessment leads to an analysis of various highly idealised assumptions commonly adopted in Bayesian theory, where I argue that a healthy dose of, what I call, conceptual realism is often helpful in understanding the interpretational value of (...) sophisticated mathematical structures employed in applied sciences like decision theory. In the last part, I introduce countable additivity into Savage's theory and explore some technical properties in relation to other axioms of the system. (shrink)

Research has shown that the construction of visual representations may have a positive effect on cognitive skills, including argumentation. In this paper we present a study on learning argumentation through computer-supported argument diagramming. We specifically focus on whether students, when provided with an argument-diagramming tool, create better diagrams, are more motivated, and learn more when working with other students or on their own. We use learning analytics to evaluate a variety of student activities: pre and post questionnaires to explore motivational (...) changes; the argument diagrams created by students to evaluate richness, complexity and completion; and pre and post knowledge tests to evaluate learning gains. (shrink)

There is a dimension of rationality, known as structural rationality, according to which a paradigmatic example of what it means to be rational is not to be akratic. Although some philosophers claim that aesthetics falls within the scope of rationality, a non-akrasia constraint prohibiting certain combinations of attitudes is yet to be developed in this domain. This essay is concerned with the question of whether such a requirement is plausible and, if so, whether it is an actual requirement of aesthetic (...) rationality. Ultimately, this paper defends the view that aesthetics is no different from other domains in that it requires coherence between a subject’s mental states (in the aesthetic case, between what is judged and what is aesthetically liked). (shrink)

This paper begins with Thomas Nagel's (1970) investigation of the possibility of altruism to further examine how to motivate altruism. When the pursuit of the gratification of one's own desires generally has an immediate causal efficacy, how can one also be motivated to care for others and to act towards the well-being of others? A successful motivational theory of altruism must explain how altruism is possible under all these motivational interferences. The paper will begin with an exposition of Nagel's proposal, (...) and see where it is insufficient with regard to this further issue. It will then introduce the views of Zhang Zai and Wang Fuzhi, and see which one could offer a better motivational theory of altruism. All three philosophers offer different insights on the role of human reason/reflection and human sentiments in moral motivation. The paper will end with a proposal for a socioethical moral program that incorporates both moral reason and moral sentiments as motivation. (shrink)

The notion of comparative probability defined in Bayesian subjectivist theory stems from an intuitive idea that, for a given pair of events, one event may be considered “more probable” than the other. Yet it is conceivable that there are cases where it is indeterminate as to which event is more probable, due to, e.g., lack of robust statistical information. We take that these cases involve indeterminate comparative probabilities. This paper provides a Savage-style decision-theoretic foundation for indeterminate comparative probabilities.

Recent research in psycholinguistics suggests that language processing frequently involves mental imagery. This paper focuses on visual imagery and discusses two issues regarding the processing of polysemous words (i.e. words with multiple related meanings or senses) – co-predication and sense-relatedness. It aims to show how mental imagery can illuminate these two issues.

Slurs are derogatory words and they are used to derogate certain groups. Theories of slurs must explain why they are derogatory words, as well as other features like independence and descriptive ineffability. This paper proposes an illocutionary force indicator theory of slurs: they are derogatory terms because their use is to perform the illocutionary act of derogation, which is a declarative illocutionary act to enforce norms against the target. For instance, calling a Chinese person “chink” is an act of derogation (...) to enforce racist norms that license exclusion of the Chinese, deny their rights to dignity, etc. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it offers a more comprehensive explanation of the features of slurs than earlier speech act approaches. Second, it provides a theory that is immune to the problems faced by existing theories, such as wrong predictions of truth-conditions, explaining unacceptability to non-bigots, and explaining slurs against the dominant groups. (shrink)

The concept of autonomy is central to many debates in aesthetics. However, exactly what it means to be autonomous in our aesthetic engagements is somewhat unclear in the philosophical literature. The normative significance of autonomy is also unclear and hotly debated. In this essay, I propose a method for clarifying this elusive concept by distinguishing three distinct senses or varieties of aesthetic autonomy: experiential autonomy, competence-based autonomy, and personal autonomy. On this taxonomy autonomy is a context-sensitive concept and autonomy applies (...) to several different moments or stages of aesthetic appreciation. Throughout this critical discussion, important issues concerning the nature of aesthetic appreciation are also explored. (shrink)

In the philosophy of mind, revelation is the claim that the nature of qualia is revealed in phenomenal experience. In the literature, revelation is often thought of as intuitive but in tension with physicalism. While mentions of revelation are frequent, there is room for further discussion of how precisely to formulate the thesis of revelation and what it exactly amounts to. Drawing on the work of David Lewis, this paper provides a detailed discussion on how the thesis of revelation, as (...) well as its incompatibility with physicalism, is to be understood. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against a deflationist view that as representational vehicles symbols and models do their jobs in essentially the same way. I argue that symbols are conventional vehicles whose chief function is denotation while models are epistemic vehicles whose chief function is showing what their targets are like in the relevant aspects. It is further pointed out that models usually do not rely on similarity or some such relations to relate to their targets. For that referential relation (...) they reply instead on symbols (names and labels) given to them and their parts. And a Goodmanian view on pictures of fictional characters reveals the distinction between symbolic and model representations. (shrink)

In recent literature on the metaphysics of consciousness, and in particular on the prospects of physicalism, there are two interesting strands of discussion. One strand concerns the so-called ‘thesis of revelation’, the claim that the essences of phenomenal properties are revealed in experience. The other strand concerns the intuition of dualism, the intuition that consciousness is nonphysical. With a particular focus on the former, this paper advances two main arguments. First, it argues that the thesis of revelation is intuitive; it (...) is part of our ordinary, implicit conception of experience. Second, it brings the two strands of discussion together and puts forward a rational explanation of the intuition of dualism in terms of the intuitiveness of the thesis of revelation. (shrink)

The feeling of being offended, as a moral emotion, plays a key role in issues such as slurs, the offense principle, ethics of humor, etc. However, no adequate theory of offense has been developed in the literature, and it remains unclear what questions such a theory should answer. This paper attempts to fill the gap by performing two tasks. The first task is to clarify and summarize the questions of offense into two kinds, the descriptive questions (e.g., what features differentiate (...) offense from similar moral states like anger?) and the normative questions (e.g., what are the conditions for taking offense to be apt?). The second task is to answer these questions by developing what I call ‘the violated norm theory of offense’. According to this theory, feeling offended entails that the norm one endorses is judged to be violated by the offender. Appealing to the violated norm enables this theory to answer the descriptive questions (e.g., taking offense differs from anger because of features like not requiring victims and the difficulty of animal offense) and the normative questions of offense (e.g., taking offense is apt only if the violated norm is universalizable). (shrink)

《政治宗教》是沃格林学术生涯早期的代表作，通过“政治宗教”的理论视角考察了纳粹德国的历史根源、符号特征与世俗宗教本质。学术界围绕“政治宗教”的理论内涵与学术价值展开了大量的争论。然而，若要恰当地评估“ 政治宗教”则需要澄清该理论所遵循的理论基础及其所体现的特征与性质。首先，“政治宗教”的特征体现在其“符号 — 经验”的分析模式中；其次，该理论是沃格林探究纳粹德国政治危机的新视角，也是沃格林“精神政治学”的理论雏形。在明确“政治宗教”的特征与性质之后，进而可以恰当地阐明该研究对当今学界诊断社会政治危机与探索良 善秩序的启迪意义。.

Slurs are both derogatory and offensive, and they are said to exhibit “derogatory force” and “offensiveness.” Almost all theories of slurs, except the truth-conditional content theory and the invocational content theory, conflate these two features and use “derogatory force” and “offensiveness” interchangeably. This paper defends and explains the distinction between slurs’ derogatory force and offensiveness by fulfilling three goals. First, it distinguishes between slurs’ being derogatory and their being offensive with four arguments. For instance, ‘Monday’, a slur in the Bostonian (...) argot, is used to secretly derogate African Americans without causing offense. Second, this paper points out that many theories of slurs run into problems because they conflate derogatory force with offensiveness. For example, the prohibition theory’s account of offensiveness in terms of prohibitions struggles to explain why ‘Monday’ is derogatory when it is not a prohibited word in English. Third, this paper offers a new explanation of this distinction from the perspective of a speech act theory of slurs; derogatory force is different from offensiveness because they arise from two different kinds of speech acts that slurs are used to perform, i.e., the illocutionary act of derogation and the perlocutionary act of offending. This new explanation avoids the problems faced by other theories. (shrink)

This book examines some possible ethical principles to resolve moral dilemmas involving water. Existing problems in current water management practices are discussed in light of these principles. Transformation of human water ethics has the potential to be far more effective, cheaper and acceptable than some existing means of “regulation”, but transformation of personal and societal ethics need time because the changes to ethical values are slow.