Despite its short historical moment in the sun, behaviorism has become something akin to a theoria non grata, a position that dare not be explicitly endorsed. The reasons for this are complex, of course, and they include sociological factors which we cannot consider here, but to put it briefly: many have doubted the ambition to establish law-like relationships between mental states and behavior that dispense with any sort of mentalistic or intentional idiom, judging that explanations of intelligent behavior require reference (...) to qualia and/or mental events. Today, when behaviorism is discussed at all, it is usually in a negative manner, either as an attempt to discredit an opponent’s view via a reductio, or by enabling a position to distinguish its identity and positive claims by reference to what it is (allegedly) not. In this paper, however, we argue that the ghost of behaviorism is present in influential, contemporary work in the field of embodied and enactive cognition, and even in aspects of the phenomenological tradition that these theorists draw on. Rather than take this to be a problem for these views as some have, we argue that once the behaviorist dimensions are clarified and distinguished from the straw-man version of the view, it is in fact an asset, one which will help with task of setting forth a scientifically reputable version of enactivism and/or philosophical behaviorism that is nonetheless not brain-centric but behavior-centric. While this is a bit like “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy, as Shaun Gallagher notes (2019), with the shared enemy of behaviorism and enactivism being classical Cartesian views and/or orthodox cognitivism in its various guises, the task of this paper is to render this alliance philosophically plausible. Doi: 10.1007/s11229-019-02432-1. (shrink)

Mark Eli Kalderon's book boldly positions itself as a work in speculative metaphysics. Its point of departure is the familiar distinction between presentational and representational philosophies of perception. Kalderon notes that the latter has been more popular of late, as it is more amenable to "an account" explicating causal or counterfactual conditions on perception; but he wishes to rehabilitate the former, at least in part. One widely perceived disadvantage of presentationalism has been the way that understanding perception merely as registering (...) the presence of things might seem to leave us vulnerable to error about the nature of what is presented. Kalderon seeks to remedy this not by dealing at length with various disjunctivist positions concerning perception which may be friendly to his position, nor by spending much time criticising opposing views, but by explicating presentationalist perception through a series of tactile metaphors, thereby providing a radically new philosophical view. He claims that we do not just 'stand before' reality, we grasp it-the metaphor survives tellingly in ordinary language-and he thereby seeks to defend a form of realism which is robust, though he admits, "pre-modern". He draws on a remarkably rich variety of thinkers to defend this position, including pre-modern, modern, and various figures from both analytic and continental philosophy-however, although there is plenty of solid scholarship here, the book is aimed at metaphysics more than the history of ideas. (shrink)

This essay considers the catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change in relation to two possible critical-theoretic dispositions. The first, represented by an emblematic passage from Adorno, retains the hope for the realization of a “rational society.” The second, represented by a complementary passage from Foucault, enjoins critical theory to abandon any ambition toward criticizing or transforming society at a totalizing level. We argue that the unfolding climate catastrophe demands a conception of critical theory more in line with the first disposition, and (...) that the relevance of the skeptical disposition is likewise seriously undermined if climate change is taken into account. (shrink)

Despite rarely explicitly thematizing the problem of dirty hands, this essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s political work can nonetheless make some important contributions to the issue, both descriptively and normatively. Although his political writings have been neglected in recent times, his interpretations of Marxism and Machiavelli enabled him to develop an account of political phronesis and virtù that sought to retain the strengths of their respective positions without succumbing to their problems. In the process, he provides grounds for generalizing the problem (...) of “dirty hands” beyond Michael Walzer’s influential understanding that pertains primarily to “emergencies” and singular time-slice actions, and addresses concerns about the coherence of the very idea that there is justified action that one ought to do which remains wrong. Merleau-Ponty does this by emphasizing the diachronic relationship between theoretical principles and concrete political action over a period of time, thus imbuing the problem of dirty hands with a historicity that is not sufficiently recognized in the more static and action-focused discussions. (shrink)

Phenomenology has been described as a “non-argumentocentric” way of doing philosophy, reflecting that the philosophical focus is on generating adequate descriptions of experience. But it should not be described as an argument-free zone, regardless of whether this is intended as a descriptive claim about the work of the “usual suspects” or a normative claim about how phenomenology ought to be properly practiced. If phenomenology is always at least partly in the business of arguments, then it is worth giving further attention (...) to the role and form of phenomenological argumentation, how it interacts with its more strictly descriptive component, and the status of phenomenological claims regarding conditions for various kinds of experience. I contend that different versions of phenomenological reasoning encroach upon argument forms that are commonly thought to be antithetical to phenomenology, notably abductive reasoning, understood in terms of its role in both hypothesis generation and in terms of justification. This paper identifies two main steps to making this case. The first step takes seriously the consequences of the intrinsically dialectical aspect of phenomenology in intersection with other modes of philosophy, the natural attitude, and non-philosophy. The second step focuses on transcendental reflection and arguments about the conditions/structures they contain. Together, these two steps aim to rescue phenomenology from the objection that it has an “ostrich epistemology” with regard to the ostensible purity of description, the intuition of essences, or the “conditions” ascertained through transcendental reflection. (shrink)

As neither a classical naturalist nor a non-naturalist, Merleau-Ponty appears to be a moderate or liberal naturalist. But can a phenomenologist really be a naturalist, even a liberal one? A lot hinges on how we tease this out, both as to whether it is plausible to claim Merleau-Ponty as a liberal naturalist (I argue it is), and as to whether it is an attractive and coherent position. Indeed, despite its important challenges to orthodox naturalism, there are arguably two traps to (...) avoid. If it becomes too liberal, we get: dualism or an ontological pluralism that is difficult to distinguish from a constructivism; or, in seeking to sidestep that metaphysical dilemma, there is sometimes an insistence on an overly neat methodological separation between description/understanding and explanation that is belied in practice (both scientific and philosophical). It is doubtful that such positions can legitimately claim to be naturalist in orientation, liberal or not. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy avoids these traps, however, and it is thus a useful resource for contemporary work trying to navigate between scientific naturalism and non-naturalism. (shrink)

In this paper I return to Hubert Dreyfus’ old but influential critique of artificial intelligence, redirecting it towards contemporary predictive processing models of the mind (PP). I focus on Dreyfus’ arguments about the “frame problem” for artificial cognitive systems, and his contrasting account of embodied human skills and expertise. The frame problem presents as a prima facie problem for practical work in AI and robotics, but also for computational views of the mind in general, including for PP. Indeed, some of (...) the issues it presents seem more acute for PP, insofar as it seeks to unify all cognition and intelligence, and aims to do so without admitting any cognitive processes or mechanisms outside of the scope of the theory. I contend, however, that there is an unresolved problem for PP concerning whether it can both explain all cognition and intelligent behavior as minimizing prediction error with just the core formal elements of the PP toolbox, and also adequately comprehend (or explain away) some of the apparent cognitive differences between biological and prediction-based artificial intelligence, notably in regard to establishing relevance and flexible context-switching, precisely the features of interest to Dreyfus’ work on embodied indexicality, habits/skills, and abductive inference. I address several influential philosophical versions of PP, including the work of Jakob Hohwy and Andy Clark, as well as more enactive-oriented interpretations of active inference coming from a broadly Fristonian perspective. (shrink)

This paper will seek firstly to understand Deleuze’s main challenges to phenomenology, particularly as they are expressed in The Logic of Sense and What is Philosophy?, although reference will also be made to Pure Immanence and Difference and Repetition. We will then turn to a discussion of one of the few passages in which Deleuze directly engages with Merleau-Ponty, which occurs in the chapter on art in What is Philosophy? In this text, he and Guattari offer a critique of what (...) they call the “final avatar” of phenomenology – that is, the “fleshism” that Merleau-Ponty proposes in his unfinished but justly famous work, The Visible and the Invisible. It will be argued that both Deleuze’s basic criticisms of phenomenology, as well as he and Guattari’s problems with the concept of the flesh, do not adequately come to grips with Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. Merleau-Ponty is not obviously partisan to what Deleuze finds problematic in this tradition, despite continuing to identify himself as a phenomenologist, and is working within a surprisingly similar framework in certain key respects. In fact, in the more positive part of this paper, we will compare Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, and Deleuze’s equally infamous univocity of being, as a means to consider the broader question of the ways in which the two philosophers consider ontological thought, its meaning and its conditions. It is our belief that through properly understanding both positions, a rapprochement, or at least the foundation for one, can be established between these two important thinkers. (shrink)

The role of the body in cognition is acknowledged across a variety of disciplines, even if the precise nature and scope of that contribution remain contentious. As a result, most philosophers working on embodiment—e.g. those in embodied cognition, enactivism, and ‘4e’ cognition—interact with the life sciences as part of their interdisciplinary agenda. Despite this, a detailed engagement with emerging findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biology has been missing from proponents of this embodied turn. Surveying this research provides an opportunity to (...) rethink the relationship between embodiment and genetics, and we argue that the balance of current epigenetic research favours the extension of an enactivist approach to mind and life, rather than the extended functionalist view of embodied cognition associated with Andy Clark and Mike Wheeler, which is more substrate neutral. (shrink)

Most readers of Sartre focus only on the works written at the peak of his influence as a public intellectual in the 1940s, notably "Being and Nothingness". "Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts" aims to reassess Sartre and to introduce readers to the full breadth of his philosophy. Bringing together leading international scholars, the book examines concepts from across Sartre's career, from his initial views on the "inner life" of conscious experience, to his later conceptions of hope as the binding agent for (...) a common humanity. The book will be invaluable to readers looking for a comprehensive assessment of Sartre's thinking - from his early influences to the development of his key concepts, to his legacy. (shrink)

This volume celebrates the various facets of Alan Turing (1912–1954), the British mathematician and computing pioneer, widely considered as the father of computer science. It is aimed at the general reader, with additional notes and references for those who wish to explore the life and work of Turing more deeply. -/- The book is divided into eight parts, covering different aspects of Turing’s life and work. -/- Part I presents various biographical aspects of Turing, some from a personal point (...) of view. -/- Part II presents Turing’s universal machine (now known as a Turing machine), which provides a theoretical framework for reasoning about computation. His 1936 paper on this subject is widely seen as providing the starting point for the field of theoretical computer science. -/- Part III presents Turing’s working on codebreaking during World War II. While the War was a disastrous interlude for many, for Turing it provided a nationally important outlet for his creative genius. It is not an overstatement to say that without Turing, the War would probably have lasted longer, and may even have been lost by the Allies. The sensitive nature of Turning’s wartime work meant that much of this has been revealed only relatively recently. -/- Part IV presents Turing’s post-War work on computing, both at the National Physical Laboratory and at the University of Manchester. He made contributions to both hardware design, through the ACE computer at the NPL, and software, especially at Manchester. Part V covers Turing’s contribution to machine intelligence (now known as Artificial Intelligence or AI). Although Turing did not coin the term, he can be considered a founder of this field which is still active today, authoring a seminal paper in 1950. -/- Part VI covers morphogenesis, Turing’s last major scientific contribution, on the generation of seemingly random patterns in biology and on the mathematics behind such patterns. Interest in this area has increased rapidly in recent times in the field of bioinformatics, with Turing’s 1952 paper on this subject being frequently cited. -/- Part VII presents some of Turing’s mathematical influences and achievements. Turing was remarkably free of external influences, with few co-authors – Max Newman was an exception and acted as a mathematical mentor in both Cambridge and Manchester. -/- Part VIII considers Turing in a wider context, including his influence and legacy to science and in the public consciousness. -/- Reflecting Turing’s wide influence, the book includes contributions by authors from a wide variety of backgrounds. Contemporaries provide reminiscences, while there are perspectives by philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, historians of science, and museum curators. Some of the contributors gave presentations at Turing Centenary meetings in 2012 in Bletchley Park, King’s College Cambridge, and Oxford University, and several of the chapters in this volume are based on those presentations – some through transcription of the original talks, especially for Turing’s contemporaries, now aged in their 90s. Sadly, some contributors died before the publication of this book, hence its dedication to them. -/- For those interested in personal recollections, Chapters 2, 3, 11, 12, 16, 17, and 36 will be of interest. For philosophical aspects of Turing’s work, see Chapters 6, 7, 26–31, and 41. Mathematical perspectives can be found in Chapters 35 and 37–39. Historical perspectives can be found in Chapters 4, 8, 9, 10, 13–15, 18, 19, 21–25, 34, and 40. With respect to Turing’s body of work, the treatment in Parts II–VI is broadly chronological. We have attempted to be comprehensive with respect to all the important aspects of Turing’s achievements, and the book can be read cover to cover, or the chapters can be tackled individually if desired. There are cross-references between chapters where appropriate, and some chapters will inevitably overlap. -/- We hope that you enjoy this volume as part of your library and that you will dip into it whenever you wish to enter the multifaceted world of Alan Turing. (shrink)

This paper has two related goals. First, we develop an expressivist account of negation which, in the spirit of Alan Gibbard, treats disagreement as semantically primitive. Our second goal is to make progress toward a unified expressivist treatment of modality. Metaethical expressivists must be expressivists about deontic modal claims. But then metaethical expressivists must either extend their expressivism to include epistemic and alethic modals, or else accept a semantics for modal expressions that is radically disjunctive. We propose that expressivists (...) look to Amie Thomasson’s work for a general strategy for offering a unified expressivist account of modality. Modals in general, we propose, are devices for expressing metalinguistic commitments within the object language, with deontic, epistemic, and metaphysical modals all expressing different kinds of metalinguistic commitments. (shrink)

I revisit my paper, ‘Grace de Laguna’s 1909 Critique of Analytic Philosophy’ and respond to the commentary on it. I respond to James Chase and Jack Reynolds by further analysing the difference between speculative philosophy as de Laguna conceived of it and analytic philosophy, by clarifying how her critique of analytic philosophy remains relevant to some of its more speculative forms, and by explaining what justifies the criticism of established opinion that goes along with her rejection of analytic (...) philosophy’s epistemic conservatism. In response to Andreas Vrahimis, I contextualise my reading of de Laguna’s work in 1909. This clarifies her critique of pragmatism, distinguishes it from her critique of epistemically conservative philosophy, and shows that she was not only already aware of the full scope of the latter critique but is likely to have identified the then incipient analytic philosophy as its primary target. Also, contra Vrahimis, her argument is effective against Bertrand Russell’s later, epistemically conservative approach to philosophy. In response to Cheryl Misak, I point out that her argument that de Laguna is, despite herself, a pragmatist rests on a misunderstanding of the differences between pragmatism and idealism, and I show that de Laguna’s main early influences were Herbert Spencer and her teacher, James Edwin Creighton. I further argue that Misak’s rejection of de Laguna’s critique of pragmatism rests on a misrepresentation of the critique. (shrink)

In Chronopathologies, the Australian philosopher Jack Reynolds gives an exciting analysis of the intimate connection between time and politics in three trajectories of contemporary philosophy: analytic philosophy, poststructuralism and phenomenology. These trajectories are incompatible in the sense that internalizing the norms of any one of them 'makes taking the other(s) seriously very difficult' (p. 225). Given this incompatibility, Reynolds convincingly argues that the only way forward is to draw out the differences between these trajectories, in order to (...) address the problems and limitations of each from the perspective of the others. Reynolds's fruitful approach uncovers that each trajectory is threatened by a disease of time or 'chronopathology' (a key term that is never fully defined). Such a chronopathology can be characterized as a pathological condition that is the result of two factors: the reduction of the plurality of time to only one of its dimensions; a biased and one-sided view on ethics and politics. Reynolds convincingly identifies the root of the threat. He develops his diagnosis in three steps. 1. Analytic philosophy over-emphasizes the synchronic dimension of time, without making any room for its diachronic dimension. 2. Poststructuralism acknowledges the necessity of a reciprocal relation between the synchronic and the diachronic dimension of time, but ultimately privileges the latter (i.e., the relation remains asymmetrical). 3. An embodied phenomenology opens up a way to bring the synchronic and diachronic dimension of time in a reciprocal and symmetrical relation that does not privilege the one over the other. (shrink)

Is it possible to remain a sports fan when prominent sports teams and events are utilized to “sportswash” human rights abuses and other controversies? Indeed, while there is an abundance of analyses critiquing different instances of sportswashing, the exploration of the role of sportswashing and its connection to the “sports fan” presents an essential and necessary area of investigation and theoretical inquiry. To unpick this dilemma, this article proposes the concept of “fetishistic disavowal” to help theorize the impact of sportswashing, (...) as well as its relation to the sports fan and critical sports academic. This argues that, as spectators and fans of sport—and, moreover, as critical academics—we often acknowledge and accept that sport is used to perpetuate and even maintain a variety of social, economic, and political inequalities. Yet, while we are aware of such knowledge, we nonetheless remain fully capable of disavowing this very knowledge as an accepted part of sport. Given this, it is argued that the fetishization of sport can provide a suitable conduit for the fetishistic disavowal that sportswashing requires, with the concept offering a unique way of approaching sport’s inherent contradictions, while also theorizing how subjects relate to these contradictions as part of their involvement in and with sport. Where sportswashing directly implicates the fan in its implementation—relying upon a level of fetishistic disavowal between the fan and their club and proffering a disavowed acknowledgement of the effects of sportswashing and its interpellation through sport—this article outlines how applications of fetishistic disavowal provide a unique theoretical lens through which analyses of sport, and its ethical significance, can be critiqued. (shrink)

While there is a steadily growing literature on epistemic injustice in healthcare, there are few discussions of the role that biomedical technologies play in harming patients in their capacity as knowers. Through an analysis of newborn and pediatric genetic and genomic sequencing technologies (GSTs), I argue that biomedical technologies can lead to epistemic injustice through two primary pathways: epistemic capture and value partitioning. I close by discussing the larger ethical and political context of critical analyses of GSTs and their broader (...) implications for just and equitable healthcare delivery. (shrink)

This short encyclopedia entry defines the concept of the normate.

Beginning with the influential discussion of the dialectic of progress found in Amy Allen’s The End of Progress, this paper outlines some difficulties encountered by critical theories of normative justification drawing on the early Frankfurt School. Characterizing Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical social theory as a dialectical reflection eschewing questions of normative foundations, I relate their well-known treatment of the dialectic of enlightenment reason and myth to their critique of capitalist society as a negative totality. By exploring the concepts of historical (...) development used by Adorno and Horkheimer to describe both the progressive domination of capitalism, and the formation and cultivation of reflective consciousness, I trace the importance of progression and its inseparable relationship to regression in these early versions of critical theory. The dialectical social theory found here recognizes the persistence of social contradictions on both a methodological level and on the level of theory’s development and expression, a connection potentially obscured by a division of historical progress according to its temporal orientation. Particularly in Adorno’s later work, an opposition to the negative social totality requires notions of cultivation and learning which work against the prevailing forms of conceptual thinking, including the concern for the stability of rational foundations. (shrink)

An increasing number of scholars at the intersection of feminist philosophy and critical disability studies have turned to Merleau-Ponty to develop phenomenologies of disability or of what, following Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, I call "non-normate" embodiment. These studies buck the historical trend of philosophers employing disability as an example of deficiency or harm, a mere litmus test for normative theories, or an umbrella term for aphenotypical bodily variation. While a Merleau-Pontian-inspired phenomenology is a promising starting point for thinking about embodied experiences of (...) all sorts, I here draw a cautionary tale about how ableist assumptions can easily undermine accounts of non-normate experience. I first argue that the omission or misguided treatment of disability within the history of philosophy in general and the phenomenological tradition in particular is due to the inheritance of what I call “the ableist conflation” of disability with pain, suffering, and disadvantage. I then show that Merleau-Ponty’s famous reading of the blind man’s cane is problematic insofar as it omits the social dimensions of disabled experiences, misconstrues the radicality of blindness as a world-creating disability, and operates via an able-bodied simulation that confuses object annexation or extension with incorporation. In closing, I contend that if phenomenology is to overcome the errors of traditional philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty once hoped, it must heed the insights of “crip” or non-normate phenomenology, which takes the lived experience of disability as its point of departure. [French translation forthcoming in Pour une phénoménologie critique, ed. Donald A. Landes, Quebec City, Les Presses de l'Université Laval/Paris, J.Vrin]. (shrink)

Insofar as many older adults fit some definition of disability, disability studies and gerontology would seem to have common interests and goals. However, there has been little discussion between these fields. The aim of this paper is to open up the insights of disability studies as well as philosophy of disability to discussions in gerontology. In doing so, I hope to contribute to thinking about the good life in late life by more critically reflecting upon the meaning of the body, (...) ability, and the variability of each. My central argument is that we should conceptualize age‐associated bodily variations and abilities not in terms of individual capacity, but in terms of what I call “the extended body.” It is in light of the meaning of embodiment and ability in general that we must think differently and more capaciously about the meaning of late life in particular. (shrink)

Responding to Danaher et al. on self-tracking technologies, I argue that human lived experience is becoming increasingly mediated by generalized, statistical information, which I term our "infotality." Drawing on the work of Foucault, I argue that infotality is historically novel and best understood as the product of biopolitics, healthism, and informatics. I then critique the authors' "stance of cautious openness,” which misunderstands the aims of the technology in question and the fundamental ambiguity of the role information plays in the achievement (...) of human wellbeing. Self-tracking technologies are not primarily designed to change behavior; they are designed to create and sustain the desire for their use. I conclude by suggesting that infotality names a new way to fall for an old ruse: the promise that more information means more wellbeing. (shrink)

The Life Worth Living investigates the exclusion of and discrimination against disabled people across the history of Western moral philosophy. Building on decades of activism and scholarship, Reynolds shows how longstanding views of disability are misguided and unjust, and he lays out a vision for an anti-ableist moral future. The introduction and first chapter are available to download here. -/- Table of Contents: Introduction: The Ableist Conflation. Part I: Pain. 1. Theories of Pain. 2. A Phenomenology of Chronic Pain. (...) Part II: Disability. 3. Theories of Disability. 4. A Phenomenology of Multiple Sclerosis. Part III: Ability. 5. Theories of Ability. 6. A Phenomenology of Ability. Conclusion: An Anti-Ableist Future. (shrink)

This paper develops an argument against causal decision theory. I formulate a principle of preference, which I call the Guaranteed Principle. I argue that the preferences of rational agents satisfy the Guaranteed Principle, that the preferences of agents who embody causal decision theory do not, and hence that causal decision theory is false.

The paper argues that Spinoza may have deepened his conception of poetry as not only a resource for the understanding but as the highest peak of the understanding. I begin by reviewing selected literature on Spinoza’s views on language and show how Spinoza’s presentation of his philosophy builds on a conception of what language can do. I then make a succinct case for a reading of Ethics Part 5 Proposition 24, where we find an attempt at a poetic expression of (...) thought, as Spinoza explores what he considers the highest form of knowledge: intuitive science. (shrink)

In order to better understand the topic of hope, this paper argues that two separate theories are needed: One for hoping, and the other for hopefulness. This bifurcated approach is warranted by the observation that the word ‘hope’ is polysemous: It is sometimes used to refer to hoping and sometimes, to feeling or being hopeful. Moreover, these two senses of 'hope' are distinct, as a person can hope for some outcome yet not simultaneously feel hopeful about it. I argue that (...) this distinction between hoping and hopefulness is not always observed or fully appreciated in the literature and has consequently caused much confusion. This paper then sketches what theorizing about hope looks like in light of this clarification and discusses some of its implications. (shrink)

Disability has been a topic in multiple areas of philosophical scholarship for decades. However, it is only in the last ten to fifteen years that philosophy of disability has increasingly become recognized as a distinct field. Engaging a range of canonical texts across the Western intellectual tradition, I argue that the foundational question of continental philosophy of disability is the question of the meaning of ability. I then explore three pathways toward this question: the verdict of bodies, the bind of (...) bodies and worth, and the dogma of individual ability. I contend that unlike the question of the meaning of being, the question of the meaning of ability is not simply a problem of forgetting but instead primarily a problem of dehumanization. (shrink)

Covid-19 presents itself as a strange catastrophe. It has neither destroyed the planet nor has it erased humanity… but it has, in many ways, served to upend and alter what was previously considered ‘normal.’ As a result, what is perhaps the most notable characteristic of the Covid catastrophe is the very way it endures. Beyond any notion of catastrophic shock, the Covid catastrophe continues, indeed, it lingers in daily news cycles, changes to working environments and restrictions on travel. It is (...) an enduring presence, from which any determination of its ‘end’ is either nullified by an unending stream of Covid reports, or worse, ignored altogether. On this basis alone, is it even possible to discern an ‘end’ to Covid? (shrink)

The historical relationship between health care professionals and people with disabilities is fraught, a fact all the more troubling in light of the distinctive roles clinicians play in both establishing and responding to that which is considered normal or abnormal by society at large. Those who wish to improve their clinical practice might struggle, however, to keep up with developments across numerous disability communities as well as the ever-growing body of disability studies scholarship. To assist with this goal, I offer (...) an overview of recent disability theory, outline a set of responsibilities clinicians have to disability communities, and provide recommendations for clinicians who hope to justly treat patients with disabilities and improve their care and health outcomes. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the concept of normality in medical research and clinical practice is inextricable from the concept of ambiguity. I make this argument in the context of Edmund Pellegrino's call for a renewed reflection on medicine’s basic concepts and by drawing on work in critical disability studies concerning Deafness and body integrity identity disorder. If medical practitioners and philosophers of medicine wish to improve their understanding of the meaning of medicine as well as its concrete practice, (...) I contend that they should take seriously the import and centrality of ambiguity for biomedicine. (shrink)

Seeking a decision theory that can handle both the Newcomb problems that challenge evidential decision theory and the unstable problems that challenge causal decision theory, some philosophers recently have turned to ‘graded ratifiability’. However, the graded ratifiability approach to decision theory is, despite its virtues, unsatisfactory; for it conflicts with the platitude that it is always rationally permissible for an agent to knowingly choose their best option.

The guiding premise from which this special report begins is the conviction and hope that justice is at the normative heart of medicine and that it is the perpetual task of bioethics to bring concerns of justice to bear on medical practice. On such an account, justice is medicine's lifeblood, that by which it contributes to life as opposed to diminishing it. It is in this larger, historical, intersectional, critical, and ethically minded context that we must approach pressing questions facing (...) medicine, including the question of the import and role of genomic knowledge for human life. The second premise is that, at least in principle, the knowledge generated by genomics can be a gift or a weight, or both at the same time. That is to say that, on the one hand, genomic knowledge is a gift, creating novel insights into the genetic drivers of disease and into the geographical paths of our ancestors. And on the other hand, it is a weight, creating new obligations, new forms of social classification, and new forms of surveillance. Because it is in many ways the “common sense” of the day that genomic knowledge is a gift, this special report, which contains nine essays, concentrates on the ways in which such knowledge can be a weight, a weight that has the potential to thwart—and historically has thwarted—medicine from genuinely advancing justice . (shrink)

In this peer commentary on L. Syd M. Johnson’s “Inference and Inductive Risk in Disorders of Consciousness,” I argue for the necessity of disability education as an integral component of decision-making processes concerning patients with DOC and, mutatis mutandis, all patients with disabilities. The sole qualification Johnson places on such decision-making is that stakeholders are educated about and “understand the uncertainties of diagnosis and prognosis.” Drawing upon research in philosophy of disability, social epistemology, and health psychology, I argue that this (...) educational qualification is insufficient to address systemic ableism and other forms of epistemic bias in quality of life judgments. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good—especially the first essay, “The Idea of Perfection”—is often associated with a critique of a certain picture of agency and its proper place in ethical thought. There is implicit in this critique, however, an alternative, much richer one. I propose a reading of Murdochian agency in terms of the continuous activity of cultivating and refining a distinctive practical standpoint, and I apply this reading to her account of moral progress. For Murdoch moral progress depends on (...) transcending egoism and achieving clear perception of a normatively-saturated reality, but it would be a mistake to think of egoism in terms of selfishness, or clarity in terms of altruism. Rather, I argue, Murdochian moral progress requires overcoming socially-conditioned and often ideological forms of alienation, and making the social conditions that inform our practical standpoints self-conscious. (shrink)

This paper studies the conflict between critical rationalism and critical theory in Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno’s 1961 debate by analyzing their shared rejection of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. Despite the divergences in their respective projects of critical social research, Popper and Adorno agree that Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge is uncritical. By investigating their respective assessments of this research program I reveal a deeper similarity between critical rationalism and critical theory. Though both agree on the importance of critique, they (...) are less concerned with the development of critical consciousness as a focus of this project. In this way, Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, particularly in its formative stages, revolves around a set of problems relatively inaccessible to critical rationalism and critical theory, since it is centrally concerned with identifying and cultivating the possibility of critique in society. In closing, I gesture to the importance of political education in Mannheim’s early work, suggesting that a return to these experimental texts will yield resources for political thought today. (shrink)

It is regrettably common for theorists to attempt to characterize the Humean dictum that one can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ just in broadly logical terms. We here address an important new class of such approaches which appeal to model-theoretic machinery. Our complaint about these recent attempts is that they interfere with substantive debates about the nature of the ethical. This problem, developed in detail for Daniel Singer’s and Gillian Russell and Greg Restall’s accounts of Hume’s dictum, is of (...) a general type arising for the use of model-theoretic structures in cashing out substantive philosophical claims: the question of whether an abstract model-theoretic structure successfully interprets something often involves taking a stand on non-trivial issues surrounding the thing. In the particular case of Hume’s dictum, given reasonable conceptual or metaphysical claims about the ethical, Singer’s and Russell and Restall’s accounts treat obviously ethical claims as descriptive and vice versa. Consequently, their model-theoretic characterizations of Hume’s dictum are not metaethically neutral. This encourages skepticism about whether model-theoretic machinery suffices to provide an illuminating distinction between the ethical and the descriptive. (shrink)

[This piece is written for those working in communication studies and in healthcare writ large, with the aim of bringing insights from disability studies and philosophy of disability to bear on discussion concerning disability in those fields.] Despite being assailed for decades by disability activists and disability studies scholars spanning the humanities and social sciences, the medical model of disability—which conceptualizes disability as an individual tragedy or misfortune due to genetic or environmental insult—still today structures many cases of patient–practitioner communication. (...) Synthesizing and recasting work done across critical disability studies and philosophy of disability, I argue that the reason the medical model of disability remains so gallingly entrenched is due to what I call the “ableist conflation” of disability with pain and suffering. In an effort to better equip healthcare practitioners and those invested in health communication to challenge disability stigma, discrimination, and oppression, I lay out the logic of the ableist conflation and interrogate examples of its use. I argue that insofar as the semiosis of pain and suffering is structured by the lived experience of unwelcome bodily transition or variation, experiences of pain inform the ableist conflation by preemptively tying such variability and its attendant disequilibrium to disability. I conclude by discussing how philosophy of disability and critical disability studies might better inform health communication concerning disability, offering a number of conceptual distinctions toward that end. (shrink)

The COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease of 2019) pandemic has led to intense conversations about ventilator allocation and reallocation during a crisis standard of care. Multiple voices in the media and multiple state guidelines mention reallocation as a possibility. Drawing upon a range of neuroscientific, phenomenological, ethical, and sociopolitical considerations, the authors argue that taking away someone’s personal ventilator is a direct assault on their bodily and social integrity. They conclude that personal ventilators should not be part of reallocation pools and that (...) triage protocols should be immediately clarified to explicitly state that personal ventilators will be protected in all cases. (shrink)

A natural suggestion and increasingly popular account of how to revise our logical beliefs treats revision of logic analogously to the revision of scientific theories. I investigate this approach and argue that simple applications of abductive methodology to logic result in revision-cycles, developing a detailed case study of an actual dispute with this property. This is problematic if we take abductive methodology to provide justification for revising our logical framework. I then generalize the case study, pointing to similarities with more (...) recent and popular heterodox logics such as naïve logics of truth. I use this discussion to motivate a constraint—logical partisanhood—on the uses of such methodology: roughly: both the proposed alternative and our actual background logic must be able to agree that moving to the alternative logic is no worse than staying put. (shrink)

I am grateful to Philip Reed for his article ‘Expressivism at the Beginning and End of Life’. His piece compellingly demonstrates the import of expanding analyses concerning the expressivist thesis beyond the reproductive sphere to the end-of-life sphere. I hope that his intervention spurns further work on this connection. In what follows, I want to focus on what I take to be moments of slippage in his use of the concept of disability, a slippage to which many disability theorists succumb. (...) In short, I argue that there are crucial moments in his argument where Reed runs together cases of disability that should be kept distinct—at minimum for the context in which he discusses them. Namely, forms of disability the suffering of which justice can eliminate versus those that ‘no amount of accessibility and social justice could eliminate’. (shrink)

This piece lays out the framework for a special issue on the topic of "Fits and Misfits," published as volume 7, issue 1 of Puncta: A Journal of Critical Phenomenology. We discuss the relationship between the concept of misfitting, coined by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and debility, coined by Jasbir Puar, in relationship to scholarship on Merleau-Ponty. We then introduce each of the eight articles in the special issue: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's "What Misfitting Makes," Susan Bredlau's "Conversational Accessibility: Healthcare, Community, and the Ethics (...) of Everyday Encounters," Helen A. Fielding's "Being Touched by Wellness: Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, and the Intensive Care Unit," Ann Murphy's "The Spirited Interworld: Caregiving and the Liminal Phenomenology of Dementia," Rachel Elliott's "Sharing Time with Misfits: We-Experience across Bodily Difference," David Morris's "An-Archic Time: Melting the Clock as Hypernorm of the I Can -- and Philosophy," Rebecca Longtin's "Merleau-Ponty's Cézanne as Misfit Artist," and, finally, Laura McMahon's "The Politics of Vulnerability and the School for Peace: Insights from Butler, Merleau-Ponty, and Family Systems Theory.". (shrink)

On September 26th, 2023, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) officially designated disabled people as a health disparity population, marking the most significant event for disabled people's health as it relates to the NIH. In this paper, I discuss the larger socio-political context as well as the clinical import of this historic decision.

In this paper, I argue that for the purposes of ordinary reasoning, sentences about properties of concrete objects can be replaced with sentences concerning how things in our universe would be related to inscriptions were there a pluriverse. Speaking loosely, pluriverses are composites of universes that collectively realize every way a universe could possibly be. As such, pluriverses exhaust all possible meanings that inscriptions could take. Moreover, because universes necessarily do not influence one another, our universe would not be any (...) different intrinsically if there were a pluriverse. These two facts enable anti-realists about abstract objects to replace, e.g. talk of anatomical features with talk of the inscriptions concerning anatomical structure that would exist were there a pluriverse. The availability of such replacements enables anti-realists to carry out essential ordinary reasoning without referring to properties, thereby making room for a consistent anti-realist worldview. The inscriptions of the would-be pluriverse are so numerous and varied that sentences about them can play the roles in ordinary reasoning served by simple sentences about properties of concrete objects. (shrink)

This paper examines the differences and affinities between Karl Popper’s critical rationalism and Theodor Adorno’s critical theory through renewed attention to the original documents of their 1961 debate. While commentaries often describe the Popper-Adorno encounter as a theoretical disappointment, I reveal a confrontation between conceptually opposed programs of social research. Though both theorists are committed to critique as a political and epistemological struggle for human freedom, their conceptions of this struggle are starkly different. In the original seminar papers, we find (...) a conflict between critique as a practice of social rationality (Popper) and a critique of social rationality itself (Adorno). The versions of critical rationalism and critical theory meeting in this debate thus emphasize opposite dimensions of a reflexive practice of immanent critique. In closing, I suggest dissolving this conceptual tension by recovering the educational orientation of critique. (shrink)

Is perception cognitively penetrable, and what are the epistemological consequences if it is? I address the latter of these two questions, partly by reference to recent work by Athanassios Raftopoulos and Susanna Seigel. Against the usual, circularity, readings of cognitive penetrability, I argue that cognitive penetration can be epistemically virtuous, when---and only when---it increases the reliability of perception.

Philosophical debates about the metaphysics of time typically revolve around two contrasting views of time. On the A-theory, time is something that itself undergoes change, as captured by the idea of the passage of time; on the B-theory, all there is to time is events standing in before/after or simultaneity relations to each other, and these temporal relations are unchanging. Philosophers typically regard the A-theory as being supported by our experience of time, and they take it that the B-theory clashes (...) with how we experience time and therefore faces the burden of having to explain away that clash. In this paper, we investigate empirically whether these intuitions about the experience of time are shared by the general public. We asked directly for people’s subjective reports of their experience of time—in particular, whether they believe themselves to have a phenomenology as of time’s passing—and we probed their understanding of what time’s passage in fact is. We find that a majority of participants do share the aforementioned intuitions, but interestingly a minority do not. (shrink)

The paper offers a solution to the generality problem for a reliabilist epistemology, by developing an “algorithm and parameters” scheme for type-individuating cognitive processes. Algorithms are detailed procedures for mapping inputs to outputs. Parameters are psychological variables that systematically affect processing. The relevant process type for a given token is given by the complete algorithmic characterization of the token, along with the values of all the causally relevant parameters. The typing that results is far removed from the typings of folk (...) psychology, and from much of the epistemology literature. But it is principled and empirically grounded, and shows good prospects for yielding the desired epistemological verdicts. The paper articulates and elaborates the theory, drawing out some of its consequences. Toward the end, the fleshed-out theory is applied to two important case studies: hallucination and cognitive penetration of perception. (shrink)

Understandings of play are frequently tied to a sense of instinctual gratification—a something that must be completed, that all humans, young or old, should or need to partake in. Indeed, for many, play is characterised as a unique activity that stands apart from the ordinary and every day. While such assessments prefigure a clear demarcation between the fun of play and the more laborious, boring aspects of profane life, what this distinction alludes to is a greater sense of the creativity (...) that underlies play. Drawing from a Lacanian perspective, the following chapter will determine that an essential aspect of play and sport is the creativity it provides, namely, by considering how the act of creativity is intricately tied to the very lack that constitutes the Lacanian subject. To do so, the concept of sublimation is used to consider how the codified rules and regulations that sport both asserts and requires renders apparent the importance of the limit. Rather than conceiving of this limit as a barrier to creativity, what is revealed in sublimation is how this limit proves constitutive of our very creativity. That is, the ability to sublimate—to creatively perform unique displays of physical or artistic expression— lies in the mundanity and utter importance of the playful and sporting activity and, more importantly, the inherent restrictions and constraints these activities impose. It is in accordance with the limit that one’s creativity can expose an emancipatory potential in the context of play and sport. (shrink)

It is widely known that Black people are significantly more likely to be killed by the police in the United States of America than white people. What is less widely known is that nearly half of all people killed by the police are disabled people. The aim of this paper is to better understand the intersection of racism and ableism in the USA. Contributing to the growing literature at the intersection of philosophy of disability and critical philosophy of race, I (...) argue that theories concerning white supremacy should take more seriously the ways in which it functions as a process and apparatus of making abled and disabled. I conclude by discussing how understanding white supremacy in this manner is a valuable coalitional tool in fights for social justice. (shrink)

Two lines of evidence indicate that there exists a reciprocal inhibitory relationship between opposed brain networks. First, most attention-demanding cognitive tasks activate a stereotypical set of brain areas, known as the task-positive network and simultaneously deactivate a different set of brain regions, commonly referred to as the task negative or defaultmode network. Second, functional connectivity analyses show that these same opposed networks are anti-correlated in the resting state. Wehypothesize that these reciprocally inhibitory effects reflect two incompatible cognitive modes, each of (...) which may be directed towards understanding the external world. Thus, engaging onemode activates one set of regions and suppresses activity in the other.Wetest this hypothesis by identifying two types of problem-solving task which, on the basis of prior work, have been consistently associated with the task positive and task negative regions: tasks requiring social cognition, i.e., reasoning about the mental states of other persons, and tasks requiring physical cognition, i.e., reasoning about the causal/mechanical properties of inanimate objects. Social and mechanical reasoning tasks were presented to neurologically normal participants during fMRI. Each task type was presented using both text and video clips. Regardless of presentation modality, we observed clear evidence of reciprocal suppression: social tasks deactivated regions associated with mechanical reasoning and mechanical tasks deactivated regions associated with social reasoning. These findings are not explained by self-referential processes, task engagement, mental simulation,mental time travel or external vs. internal attention, all factors previously hypothesized to explain default mode network activity. Analyses of resting state data revealed a close match between the regions our tasks identified as reciprocally inhibitory and regions of maximal anti-correlation in the resting state. These results indicate the reciprocal inhibition is not attributable to constraints inherent in the tasks, but is neural in origin. Hence, there is a physiological constraint on our ability to simultaneously engage two distinct cognitive modes. Furtherwork is needed tomore precisely characterize these opposing cognitive domains. (shrink)