David Armstrong (1926-2014) was much the most internationally successful philosopher to come from Sydney. His life moved from a privileged Empire childhood and student of John Anderson to acclaimed elder statesman of realist philosophy. His philosophy developed from an Andersonian realist inheritance to major contributions on materialist theory of mind and the theory of universals. His views on several other topics such as religion and ethics are surveyed briefly.

Genealogies in philosophy can be tricky and even a little dangerous. Lines of influence and inheritance run much more linearly on paper than in reality. I am often reminded of Robert Frost's "Mending Walls" and the attention that must be paid to what is being walled in and what is being walled out. In other words, William James and Emmanuel Levinas are not natural conversation partners. I have always read James as a fellow traveler of Edmund Husserl, and placed both (...) in a line of thought that might share Franz Brentano and Wilhelm Dilthey as forebears. In this genealogy, Levinas appears with an asterisk, or after one. Maurice Natanson described Husserlian phenomenology as an elderly grandparent who comes down to dinner just a little bit too early, making everyone uncomfortable. Seating Levinas next to James brings to mind some similar scene. What basic premises or positions do James and Levinas share? Is Levinas a Jamesian pragmatist? Is he a radical empiricist? Does James offer an ethics that parallels or even complements Levinas's rigorous ethical phenomenology? (shrink)

At this stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, two policy aims are imperative: avoiding the need for a general lockdown of the population, with all its economic, social and health costs, and preventing the healthcare system from being overwhelmed by the unchecked spread of infection. Achieving these two aims requires the consideration of unpalatable measures. Julian Savulescu and James Cameron argue that mandatory isolation of the elderly is justified under these circumstances, as they are at increased risk of becoming severely ill (...) from COVID-19, and are thus likely to put disproportionate strain on limited healthcare resources. However, their arguments for this strategy are contingent on the lack of viable alternatives. We suggest that there is a possible alternative: a mandatory, centralised contact-tracing app. We argue that this strategy is ethically preferable to the selective isolation of the elderly, because it does not target members of a certain group, relying instead on the movements of each individual, and because it avoids the extended isolation of certain members of the society. Although this type of contact-tracing app has its drawbacks, we contend that this measure warrants serious consideration. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

The Louvre Museum is the largest of the world's art museums by its exhibition surface. These represent the Western art of the Middle Ages in 1848, those of the ancient civilizations that preceded and influenced it (Oriental, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman), and the arts of early Christians and Islam. At the origin of the Louvre existed a castle, built by King Philip Augustus in 1190, and occupying the southwest quarter of the current Cour Carrée. In 1594, Henri IV decided (...) to unite the palace of the Louvre with the palace of the Tuileries built by Catherine de Medicis. The Cour Carrée was built by the architects Lemercier and then Le Vau, under the reign of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. The Department of Paintings currently has about 7,500 paintings (of which 3,400 are exposed), covering a period that goes from the Middle Ages to 1848 (date of the beginning of the Second Republic). By including the deposits, the collection is, with 12,660 works, the largest collection of ancient paintings in the world. With rare exceptions, the works after 1848 were transferred to the Musée d'Orsay when it was created in 1986. CONTENTS: Louvre Museum - Variety of exhibited works - The Royal Palace - The collections - - Eastern antiquities - - Arts of Islam - - Egyptian Antiquities - - Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities - - Paintings - - - French school - - - Northern Schools (Flanders, Netherlands, Germany) - - - Italian School - - - Other schools Painting - Definitions - Painting genres - - The landscape - - Still life Paintings - FRANCOIS BOUCHER - - Vulcan presenting arms to Venus for Aeneas - RAPHAEL - - Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione - RUBENS - - Helena Fourment with children - LOUIS DAVID - - Madame Récamier - REMBRANDT - - Portrait of Heindrickje Stoffels - VELAZQUEZ - - Portrait of the Infanta Margarita - SIMONE MEMMI - - Jesus Christ walking on Calvary - JAN STEEN - - The Bad Company - HANS HOLBEIN - - Erasmus - CORREGGIO - - Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine - LANCRET - - Conversation - JAN VAN DER MEER (VERMEER) - - The Lacemaker - VAN DYCK - - Charles I at the Hunt - FRANÇOIS CLOUET - - Elisabeth of Austria (1554-1592), Wife of Charles IX and Queen of France (1570 - 1574) - DELACROIX - - The Barque of Dante - EL GRECO - - Saint Louis, King of France, and a page - REMBRANDT - - Pilgrims at Emmaus (The Supper at Emmaus) - GERARD DAVID - - Marriage at Cana - RAPHAEL - - Portrait of Dona Isabel de Requesens, Vice-Queen of Naples - RUBENS - - La Kermesse (The Village Fête, or Noce de village) - FRANS HALS - - The Gypsy Girl - DECAMPS - - The Sonneurs - HOLBEIN THE YOUNGER - - Anne of Cleves - P. PRUD’HON - - Psyche transported to Heaven - PHILIPPE DE CHAMPAIGNE - - Portrait of Richelieu - LANCRET - - The Autumn - L. DAVID - - Madame Seriziat - COROT - - Recollection of Mortefontaine - LEONARDO DA VINCI - - La belle ferronnière - CORREGGIO - - Venus and Cupid with a Satyr - WATTEAU - - Pilgrimage to Cythera (The Embarkation for Cythera) - NICOLAS POUSSIN - - The Inspiration of the Poet - PRUD’HON - - The Empress Josephine (1763-1814) - FRAGONARD - - The Bathers - H. RIGAUD - - Louis XIV (1638–1715) - TERBURG - - The Concert - LEOPOLD ROBERT - - The Pilgrimage to the Madonna of the Arch - LARGILLIERE - - Family Portrait - MANTEGNA - - Parnassus - MEMLING - - The Virgin and Child between St James and St Dominic - FRAGONARD - - The Music Lesson - JEAN VAN EYCK - - The Virgin of chancellor Rolin - PAOLO VERONESE - - Susannah and the Elders - FRANÇOIS BOUCHER - - Diana leaving her bath - GÉRICAULT - - The Raft of the Medusa - MURILLO - - Assumption of the Virgin - CLAUDE GELLEE (LORRAIN) - - Ulysses returning Chryseis to her father (Marine, setting sun) - INGRES - - Madame Riviere - E. MURILLO - - The Young Beggar - GREUZE - - The Broken Pitcher - PIETER DE HOOCH - - Card players in an opulent interior - POUSSIN - - Et in Arcadia ego - QUENTIN MATSYS - - The moneylender and his wife - ANDREA SOLARIO - - Madonna with the Green Cushion - TITIEN - - Woman with a Mirror - DAVID TENIERS (the Younger) - - The Works of Mercy - LEONARDO DA VINCI - - Mona Lisa (La Gioconda) - Armand Dayot . (shrink)

I defend social media’s potential to support Aristotelian virtue friendship against a variety of objections. I begin with Aristotle’s claim that the foundation of the best friendships is a shared life. Friends share the distinctively human and valuable components of their lives, especially reasoning together by sharing conversation and thoughts, and communal engagement in valued activities. Although some have charged that shared living is not possible between friends who interact through digital social media, I argue that social media preserves the (...) relevantly human and valuable portions of life, especially reasoning, play, and exchange of ideas. I then consider several criticisms of social media’s potential to host friendships, and refute or weaken the force of these objections, using this conception of a distinctively human shared life. I conclude that we should use the shared life to evaluate features of specific social media and norms for users’ conduct. (shrink)

Digital records, from chat transcripts to social media posts, are being used to create chatbots that recreate the conversational style of deceased individuals. Some maintain that this is merely a new form of digital memorial, while others argue that they pose a variety of moral hazards. To resolve this, I turn to classical Chinese philosophy to make use of a debate over the ethics of funerals and mourning. This ancient argument includes much of interest for the contemporary issue at hand, (...) including the use of impersonators of the dead to help the bereaved to deal well with their grief. I connect this historical discussion with a modern trend in clinical psychology that reframes therapeutic interventions with bereaved individuals. The trend directs practitioners away from facilitating detachment and toward affirming continuing bonds. I conclude that these chatbots can offer an important source of support to mourners, but also discuss parameters and features of social context that will be important to avoid the moral hazards identified by sceptics. (shrink)

Must the best friends necessarily be good people? On the one hand, as Aristotle puts it, ‘people think that the same people are good and also friends’. But on the other hand, friendship sometimes seems to require that one behave badly. For example, a normally honest person might lie to corroborate a friend's story. What I will call closeness, which I take to include sensitivity to friends' subjective values and concerns as well as an inclination to take their subjective interests (...) as reasons for action, is characteristic of friendship. But this seems to require that good friends should be morally flexible, more so than is compatible with a virtuous character. This would imply tension between ideals of friendship and ideals of character. But there is an important connection between virtue and friendship which arises precisely from friends' closeness, when concern for wellbeing, another important feature of friendship, is also taken into account. This helps mitigate the tension and shows how friendship and virtue are interconnected. The connection in turn provides friendship-based reason to think the best friends must be good people, even though concerns of friendship may occasionally clash with other moral concerns. (shrink)

The status and functioning of shame is contested in moral psychology. In much of anglophone philosophy and psychology, it is presumed to be largely destructive, while in Confucian philosophy and many East Asian communities, it is positively associated with moral development. Recent work in human-robot interaction offers a unique opportunity to investigate how shame functions while controlling for confounding variables of interpersonal interaction. One research program suggests a Confucian strategy for using robots to rebuke participants, but results from experiments with (...) educational technologies imply a different and potentially opposing account of shame’s role in personal development. By digging deeper into the details of Confucian theorizing about shame, I identify a unifying explanation for these apparently conflicting results. I conclude by offering suggestions for future empirical research in human-robot interactions to further investigate shame’s role in moral development. (shrink)

Editor’s NoteThanks to the initiative of Alan Norrie, we are pleased to present here a symposium on Nick Wilson’s book The Space that Separates: A Realist Theory of Art. Several authors have contri...

In post-Gricean pragmatics, communication is said to be successful when a hearer recovers a speaker’s intended message. On this assumption, proposals for ‘what is said’ – the semantic, propositional meaning of a speaker’s utterance – are typically centred around the content the speaker aimed to communicate. However, these proposals tend not to account for the fact that speakers can be deliberately vague, leaving no clear proposition to be recovered, or that a speaker can accept a hearer’s misconstrual even though the (...) speaker didn’t intend it. In such cases, identifying ‘what is said’ is more contentious, even though communication is arguably no less successful. Building on recent interactionist approaches to meaning, this chapter offers a proposal for ‘what is said’ that can account for cases of ‘imperfect’ communication in which the recovery of a speaker’s intention goes awry. This involves taking ‘what is said’ as the co-constructed meaning that the speaker and hearer jointly agree on, giving ‘grounded meanings’ – those mutually and manifestly accepted into the discourse by speaker and hearer – higher precedence in a theory of communication than simply the speaker’s intended meaning. In such cases, rather than speaker and hearer converging at the level of explicit utterance content, communication is expected to be successful as long as the hearer recovers a proposition which is compatible with the speaker’s higher-order discursive goal. The hearer’s uptake is then allowed to override the content of the speaker’s intended meaning in the process of negotiating ‘what is said’. (shrink)

Zhuangzi suggests that death is a transformation that we commonly and mistakenly think means the end of someone but really just marks a new phase of existence. This metaphysical thesis is presented at several points in the text as an explanation of distinctively Daoist responses to death and loss. Some take a Daoist response to death, as presented by Zhuangzi, to indicate dual perspectives on friendship and death. But I argue that the metaphysical view sketched above is consistent with a (...) unified perspective, allowing the Daoist to enjoy deep friendships without risking some potential for grief typically associated with strong attachment. However, it leaves the Daoist best suited to friendships with those who endorse the same metaphysics. Furthermore, while the grief associated with the death of a friend is somewhat mitigated, the Daoist has reason to mourn even given this thesis. (shrink)

Caregiving robots are often lauded for their potential to assist with geriatric care. While seniors can be wise and mature, possessing valuable life experience, they can also present a variety of ethical challenges, from prevalence of racism and sexism, to troubled relationships, histories of abusive behavior, and aggression, mood swings and impulsive behavior associated with cognitive decline. I draw on Confucian ethics, especially the concept of filial piety, to address these issues. Confucian scholars have developed a rich set of theoretical (...) resources for dealing with beloved but imperfect elders, and navigating the challenges of supporting seniors whose ethical commitments are unreliable. These resources provide a way to reconcile two important but conflicting desiderata: to value and care for seniors, but also to clear-mindedly deal with their moral shortcomings. In particular, they articulate a duty to remonstrate with our elders when they err. Confucian filial piety can helpfully inform robot design and use in geriatric care. They can be used to strengthen and protect emotional connections in important relationships, but should not be used to reinforce patient preferences when doing so damages relationships or their ability to act morally. Rather than conceive of patient wellbeing as in tension with moral behavior, and care as a burden for caregivers, not a source of value and meaning, Confucian accounts of filial piety help identify both new areas of concern and new potential in the development of caregiving technologies, ones which see these goods as complementary. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Central to both James’s earlier psychology and his later philosophical views was a recurring distinction between percepts and concepts. The distinction evolved and remained fundamental to his thinking throughout his career as he sought to come to grips with its fundamental nature and significance. In this chapter, I focus initially on James’s early attempt to articulate the distinction in his 1885 article “The Function of Cognition.” This will highlight a key problem to which James continued to return throughout his (...) later philosophical work on the nature of our cognition, including in his famous “radical empiricist” metaphysics of “pure experience” around the turn of the century. We shall find that James grappled insightfully but ambivalently with the perceptual and conceptual dimensions of the “knowledge relation” or the “cognitive relation,” as he called it—or what, following Franz Brentano, philosophers would later call our object-directed thought or intentionality more generally. Some philosophers have once again returned to James’s work for crucial insights on this pivotal topic, while others continue to find certain aspects of his account to be problematic. What is beyond dispute is that James’s inquiries in this domain were both innovative and of lasting significance. (shrink)

This paper aims to bridge the relationship between metalinguistic if you like as a non-propositional discourse marker and its conditional counterparts. This paper claims that metalinguistic if you like is polysemous between a hedge that denotes the speaker’s reduced commitment to some aspect of the main clause, and an optional yet potential conditional reading that interlocutors can legitimately draw on in interaction which is brought about due to the ‘if p, q’ sentence form. That is, although the metalinguistic reading is (...) most likely obtained automatically by default, it also carries an available conditional reading that is akin to other metalinguistic conditional clauses such as if you see what I mean. Next, a semantic representation of metalinguistic if you like is developed that takes on board a characterization of conditionality that departs from lexico-grammatical conventions, such that conditionals of the form ‘if p, q’ no longer bear a one-to-one correspondence with “conditional” truth conditions. Employing a radical contextualist semantic framework in which the unit of truth-conditional analysis is not constrained to the sentence form, utterances employing metalinguistic if you like are given a semantic representation such that the if-clause does not contribute propositional content, yet they also maintain their status as conditionals as the sentence form gives rise to a potential conditional secondary meaning. (shrink)

Proprioception, a sense of bodily position and movement, is rarely the focus of conscious experience. If we are ordinarily conscious of proprioception, we seem only peripherally so. Thus, evidence that proprioception is present in the periphery of at least some conscious experiences seems to be good evidence that conscious experience is fairly rich. Anosognosia for paralysis is a denial of paralysis of one's limbs, usually in the wake of brain damage from stroke. Because anosognosic patients overlook their paralysis, anosognosia seems (...) be a counter-example to the claim that proprioception exists in the periphery of conscious experience. However, careful consideration of the data shows that anosognosia makes a poor counterexample to a rich theory of consciousness. Thus, we retain reason to believe that proprioception exists in the periphery of conscious experience, and so to conclude that conscious experience is relatively rich. (shrink)

Current challenges in medical practice, research, and administration demand physicians who are familiar with bioethics, health law, and health economics. Curriculum directors at American Association of Medical Colleges-affiliated medical schools were sent confidential surveys requesting the number of required hours of the above subjects and the years in which they were taught, as well as instructor names. The number of relevant publications since 1990 for each named instructor was assessed by a PubMed search.In sum, teaching in all three subjects combined (...) comprises less than two percent of the total hours in the American medical curriculum, and most instructors have not recently published articles in the fields they teach. This suggests that medical schools should reevaluate their curricula and instructors in bioethics, health law, and health economics. (shrink)

Despite the initial promise of social media platforms as a means of facilitating discourse on matters of civic discourse, in practice it has turned out to impair fruitful conversation on civic issues by a number of means. From self-isolation into echo chambers, to algorithmically supported filter bubbles, to widespread failure to engage politically owing to psychological phenomena like the ‘spiral of silence’, a variety of factors have been blamed. I argue that extant accounts overlook the importance of interpersonal relationships to (...) sustaining quality civic discourse on social media. Drawing on an Aristotelian account of friendship with an emphasis on the value of interpersonal difference plus the influence of interactions on individual character, I argue that a common scapegoat for the failure of civic discourse online—the variety of “unfriend” disconnection tools offered on various platforms—actually show promise at promoting better-quality civic conversation and overcoming the obstacles present on social media platforms. (shrink)

According to the view that there is moral encroachment in epistemology, whether a person has knowledge of p sometimes depends on moral considerations, including moral considerations that do not bear on the truth or likelihood of p. Defenders of moral encroachment face a central challenge: they must explain why the moral considerations they cite, unlike moral bribes for belief, are reasons of the right kind for belief (or withheld belief). This paper distinguishes between a moderate and a radical version of (...) moral encroachment. It shows that, while defenders of moderate moral encroachment are well-placed to meet the central challenge, defenders of radical moral encroachment are not. The problem for radical moral encroachment is that it cannot, without taking on unacceptable costs, forge the right sort of connection between the moral badness of a belief and that belief’s chance of being false. (shrink)

When it comes to social robotics (robots that engage human social responses via “eyes” and other facial features, voice-based natural-language interactions, and even evocative movements), ethicists, particularly in European and North American traditions, are divided over whether and why they might be morally considerable. Some argue that moral considerability is based on internal psychological states like consciousness and sentience, and debate about thresholds of such features sufficient for ethical consideration, a move sometimes criticized for being overly dualistic in its framing (...) of mind versus body. Others, meanwhile, focus on the effects of these robots on human beings, arguing that psychological impact alone can qualify an entity for moral status. What both sides overlook is the importance for ordinary moral reasoning of integrating questions about an entity’s “inner life,” and its psychological effect on us. Turning to accounts of relationships in virtue ethics, especially those of the Confucian tradition, we find a more nuanced theory that can provide complex guidance on the moral considerability of social robots, including ethical considerations about whether and how to question this to begin with. (shrink)

Subject-sensitive invariantism posits surprising connections between a person’s knowledge and features of her environment that are not paradigmatically epistemic features. But which features of a person’s environment have this distinctive connection to knowledge? Traditional defenses of subject-sensitive invariantism emphasize features that matter to the subject of the knowledge-attribution. Call this pragmatic encroachment. A more radical thesis usually goes ignored: knowledge is sensitive to moral facts, whether or not those moral facts matter to the subject. Call this moral encroachment. This paper (...) argues that, insofar as there are good arguments for pragmatic encroachment, there are also good arguments for moral encroachment. (shrink)

Recent debates between representational and relational theories of perceptual experience sometimes fail to clarify in what respect the two views differ. In this essay, I explain that the relational view rejects two related claims endorsed by most representationalists: the claim that perceptual experiences can be erroneous, and the claim that having the same representational content is what explains the indiscriminability of veridical perceptions and phenomenally matching illusions or hallucinations. I then show how the relational view can claim that errors associated (...) with perception should be explained in terms of false judgments, and develop a theory of illusions based on the idea that appearances are properties of objects in the surrounding environment. I provide an account of why appearances are sometimes misleading, and conclude by showing how the availability of this view undermines one of the most common ways of motivating representationalist theories of perception. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy brings empirical methods to philosophy. These methods are used to probe how people think about philosophically interesting things such as knowledge, morality, and freedom. This paper explores the contribution that qualitative methods have to make in this enterprise. I argue that qualitative methods have the potential to make a much greater contribution than they have so far. Along the way, I acknowledge a few types of resistance that proponents of qualitative methods in experimental philosophy might encounter, and provide (...) reasons to think they are ill-founded. (shrink)

Naïve realism, often overlooked among philosophical theories of perception, has in recent years attracted a surge of interest. Broadly speaking, the central commitment of naïve realism is that mind-independent objects are essential to the fundamental analysis of perceptual experience. Since the claims of naïve realism concern the essential metaphysical structure of conscious perception, its truth or falsity is of central importance to a wide range of topics, including the explanation of semantic reference and representational content, the nature of phenomenal consciousness, (...) and the basis of perceptual justification and knowledge. One of the greatest difficulties surrounding discussions of naïve realism, however, has been lack of clarity concerning exactly what affirming or denying it entails. In particular, it is sometimes unclear how naïve realism is related to the claim that perceptual experience is in some sense direct or unmediated, and also to what extent the view is compatible with another widely discussed thesis in the philosophy of perception, the claim that perceptual experiences are states with representational content. In this essay, I discuss how recent work on these issues helps to clarify both the central commitments of naïve realism, as well as its relation to representationalist theories of perception. Along the way, I will attempt to shed light on the different ways in which each approach tries to address the various theoretical challenges facing a philosophical theory of perception, and also to assess the prospects for views that attempts to combine features of each approach. (shrink)

In How We Get Along, philosopher David Velleman compares our social interactions to the interactions among improvisational actors on stage. He argues that we play ourselves - not artificially but authentically, by doing what would make sense coming from us as we really are. And, like improvisational actors, we deal with one another in dual capacities: both as characters within the social drama and as players contributing to the shared performance. In this conception of social intercourse, Velleman finds rational grounds (...) for morality, though not a rational guarantee. He maps a middle course between skepticism and rationalism, arguing that practical reasoning is 'pro-moral' without requiring moral action. The result is what he calls a 'Kinda Kantian metaethics'. How We Get Along is the summation of Velleman's thinking to date, incorporating and unifying previous work on agency, the self, the emotions, narrative and Kantian moral theory. (shrink)

An Aristotelian Philosophy of Mathematics breaks the impasse between Platonist and nominalist views of mathematics. Neither a study of abstract objects nor a mere language or logic, mathematics is a science of real aspects of the world as much as biology is. For the first time, a philosophy of mathematics puts applied mathematics at the centre. Quantitative aspects of the world such as ratios of heights, and structural ones such as symmetry and continuity, are parts of the physical world and (...) are objects of mathematics. Though some mathematical structures such as infinities may be too big to be realized in fact, all of them are capable of being realized. Informed by the author's background in both philosophy and mathematics, but keeping to simple examples, the book shows how infant perception of patterns is extended by visualization and proof to the vast edifice of modern pure and applied mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

In What Science Knows, the Australian philosopher and mathematician James Franklin explains in captivating and straightforward prose how science works its magic. It offers a semipopular introduction to an objective Bayesian/logical probabilist account of scientific reasoning, arguing that inductive reasoning is logically justified (though actually existing science sometimes falls short). Its account of mathematics is Aristotelian realist.

Feminized AIs designed for in-home verbal assistance are often subjected to gendered verbal abuse by their users. I survey a variety of features contributing to this phenomenon—from financial incentives for businesses to build products likely to provoke gendered abuse, to the impact of such behavior on household members—and identify a potential worry for attempts to criticize the phenomenon; while critics may be tempted to argue that engaging in gendered abuse of AI increases the chances that one will direct this abuse (...) toward human beings, the recent history of attempts to connect video game violence to real-world aggression suggests that things may not be so simple. I turn to Confucian discussions of the role of ritualized social interactions both to better understand the roots of the problem and to investigate potential strategies for improvement, given a complex interplay between designers and device users. I argue that designers must grapple with the entrenched sexism in our society, at the expense of “smooth” and “seamless” user interfaces, in order to intentionally disrupt entrenched but harmful patterns of interaction, but that doing so is both consistent with and recommended by Confucian accounts of social rituals. (shrink)

Various studies show moral intuitions to be susceptible to framing effects. Many have argued that this susceptibility is a sign of unreliability and that this poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy. Recently, doubt has been cast on this idea. It has been argued that extant evidence of framing effects does not show that moral intuitions have an unreliability problem. I argue that, even if the extant evidence suggests that moral intuitions are fairly stable with respect to what intuitions we (...) have, the effect of framing on the strength of those intuitions still needs to be taken into account. I argue that this by itself poses a methodological challenge for moral philosophy. (shrink)

Mathematicians often speak of conjectures as being confirmed by evidence that falls short of proof. For their own conjectures, evidence justifies further work in looking for a proof. Those conjectures of mathematics that have long resisted proof, such as the Riemann hypothesis, have had to be considered in terms of the evidence for and against them. In recent decades, massive increases in computer power have permitted the gathering of huge amounts of numerical evidence, both for conjectures in pure mathematics and (...) for the behavior of complex applied mathematical models and statistical algorithms. Mathematics has therefore become (among other things) an experimental science (though that has not diminished the importance of proof in the traditional style). We examine how the evaluation of evidence for conjectures works in mathematical practice. We explain the (objective) Bayesian view of probability, which gives a theoretical framework for unifying evidence evaluation in science and law as well as in mathematics. Numerical evidence in mathematics is related to the problem of induction; the occurrence of straightforward inductive reasoning in the purely logical material of pure mathematics casts light on the nature of induction as well as of mathematical reasoning. (shrink)

Most agree that, in some special scenarios, prudence can speak against feeling a fitting emotion. Some go further, arguing that the tension between fittingness and prudence afflicts some emotions in a fairly general way. This paper goes even further: it argues that, when it comes to anxiety, the tension between fittingness and prudence is nearly inescapable. On any plausible theory, an enormous array of possible outcomes are both bad and epistemically uncertain in the right way to ground fitting anxiety. What’s (...) more, the fittingness of an emotion is a demanding, not a permissive, normative status. So the norms of fitting emotion demand a great deal of anxiety. For almost any realistic agent, it would be deeply imprudent to feel anxiety in a way that meets the demands set by norms of fitting emotion. (shrink)

In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions. In a recent paper, Feltz and Millan have challenged this conclusion by claiming that most laypeople are only compatibilists in appearance and are in fact willing to attribute free will to people no matter what. As evidence for this claim, they have shown that an important proportion of laypeople still attribute free will to agents in fatalistic universes. In this paper, we first argue that (...) Feltz and Millan’s error-theory rests on a conceptual confusion: it is perfectly acceptable for a certain brand of compatibilist to judge free will and fatalism to be compatible, as long as fatalism does not prevent agents from being the source of their actions. We then present the results of two studies showing that laypeople’s intuitions are best understood as following a certain brand of source compatibilism rather than a “free-will-no-matter-what” strategy. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen a surge in interest in metaphilosophy. In particular there has been an interest in philosophical methodology. Various questions have been asked about philosophical methods. Are our methods any good? Can we improve upon them? Prior to such evaluative and ameliorative concerns, however, is the matter of what methods philosophers actually use. Worryingly, our understanding of philosophical methodology is impoverished in various respects. This article considers one particular respect in which we seem to be missing an important (...) part of the picture. While it is a received wisdom that the word “ intuition ” has exploded across analytic philosophy in recent decades, the article presents evidence that the explosion is apparent across a broad swathe of academia. It notes various implications for current methodological debates about the role of intuitions in philosophy. (shrink)

The default theory of aesthetic value combines hedonism about aesthetic value with strict perceptual formalism about aesthetic value, holding the aesthetic value of an object to be the value it has in virtue of the pleasure it gives strictly in virtue of its perceptual properties. A standard theory of aesthetic value is any theory of aesthetic value that takes the default theory as its theoretical point of departure. This paper argues that standard theories fail because they theorize from the default (...) theory. (shrink)

This paper is about the similarity between the appreciation of a piece of art, such as a cherished music album, and the loving appreciation of a person whom one knows well. In philosophical discussion about the rationality of love, the Qualities View (QV) says that love can be justified by reference to the qualities of the beloved. I argue that the oft-rehearsed trading-up objection fails to undermine the QV. The problems typically identified by the objection arise from the idea that (...) love-worthy qualities could be coarse-grained, when in fact they must be fine-grained. The analogy with appreciation of aesthetic qualities helps to draw out this point. Once the fine-grained nature of love-worthy qualities is properly understood, it is clear that critics of the QV cannot rely on the trading-up objection to motivate its rejection. Moreover, the paper’s core argument helps to illuminate the persistently aesthetic nature of interpersonal affections. (shrink)

I suggest that the theories of remembering one finds in the philosophy of memory literature are best characterised as theories principally operating at three different levels of inquiry. Simulationist views are theories of the psychofunctional process type remembering. Causalist views are theories of referential remembering. Epistemic views are theories of successful remembering. Insofar as there is conflict between these theories, it is a conflict of integration rather than—as widely presented—head‐on disagreement. Viewed in this way, we can see the previous awareness (...) condition and preservationism as principles applying at only some of the corresponding levels of inquiry. Where either principle has been rejected, it is, I claim, due to arguments which slip between these different levels. While the view of the landscape I offer does not dissolve ongoing disputes about the nature of remembering, it clarifies the dialectical rules of engagement, helping to clear the path for future, collaborative progress to be made. The view enables us to see less conflict in the recent philosophy of memory literature than there seems at face value to be. (shrink)

Scepticism about ought simpliciter is the view that there is no such thing as what one ought simpliciter to do. Instead, practical deliberation is governed by a plurality of normative standpoints, each authoritative from their own perspective but none authoritative simpliciter. This paper aims to resist such scepticism. After setting out the challenge in general terms, I argue that scepticism can be resisted by rejecting a key assumption in the sceptic’s argument. This is the assumption that standpoint-relative ought judgments bring (...) with them a commitment to act in accordance with those judgments. Instead, I propose an alternative account of our normative concepts according to which only ought simpliciter judgments commit one to acting in accordance with those judgments. In addition to answering the sceptical challenge, the proposal offers an independently motivated account of what makes a concept normatively authoritative. (shrink)

Various studies have reported that moral intuitions about the permissibility of acts are subject to framing effects. This paper reports the results of a series of experiments which further examine the susceptibility of moral intuitions to framing effects. The main aim was to test recent speculation that intuitions about the moral relevance of certain properties of cases might be relatively resistent to framing effects. If correct, this would provide a certain type of moral intuitionist with the resources to resist challenges (...) to the reliability of moral intuitions based on such framing effects. And, fortunately for such intuitionists, although the results can’t be used to mount a strident defence of intuitionism, the results do serve to shift the burden of proof onto those who would claim that intuitions about moral relevance are problematically sensitive to framing effects. (shrink)

Recent theories of remembering and of reference (or singular thought) have de-emphasised the role causation was thought to play in mid- to late-twentieth century theorising. According to postcausal theories of remembering, such as simulationism, instances of the psychofunctional kind _remembering_ are not, in principle, dependent on appropriate causal chains running from some event(s) remembered to the occurrence of remembering. Instead they depend only on the reliability, or proper functioning, of the cognitive system responsible for their production. According to broadly reliabilist (...) accounts of _singular thought_, such thought is not, in principle, dependent on causal chains running from the object(s) of thought to the occurrence of thinking. Despite this common trend, accounts of the two phenomena have been pursued separately. In this paper, we argue that the two lines of research can profitably converge to address a neglected question: what enables occurrences of remembering to _refer_ to particular events, and what determines _which_ event a given occurrence of remembering refers to? We motivate and present a reliabilist account of reference-fixing for postcausal theories of remembering, focusing in particular on simulationism. We then show that this account draws attention to the possibility of _referential mnemic confabulation:_ cases where the reliability requirement for reference is met despite the improper functioning of the episodic construction system. We suggest that this makes sense of some underdiscussed phenomena described in the empirical literature on confabulation and argue that our reliabilist account of mnemic reference-fixing accommodates these more naturally than could causal theories of remembering. (shrink)

Three accounts of effective realism (ER) have been advanced to solve three problems for scientific realism: Fraser and Vickers (forthcoming) develop a version of ER about non-relativistic quantum mechanics that they argue is compatible with all the main realist versions (‘interpretations’) of quantum mechanics avoiding the problem of underdetermination among them; Williams (2019) and Fraser (2020b) propose ER about quantum field theory as a response to the problems facing realist interpretations; Robertson and Wilson (forthcoming) propose ER to deal with the (...) dubious ontological status of the entities belonging to superseded theories. This paper argues for the unification of these proposals based on realism about modal structure and the idea of scale relativity of ontology developed by ontic structural realists. This solves problems some or all the accounts of ER face, especially that of making explicit in what way they are realist. Furthermore, we respond to a recent critique that has been raised against the ontic structural realist account of quantum mechanics that we employ. (shrink)

The entry provides an overview of the type-token distinction, including a comparison to other nearby distinctions.

According to desire satisfactionism, well-being consists in getting what you desire. Recently, several theorists have suggested that this view should be extended to claim that ill-being consists in getting what you are averse to. I argue that both of these paradigmatic claims are false. As I show, desire and aversion are indeed both relevant to well-being and ill-being—in fact, perhaps surprisingly, each attitude has unique effects on both our well-being and ill-being. However, these effects are a matter of the unique (...) feelings desire and aversion produce. The paradigmatic desire satisfactionist approach—and, I argue, a surprisingly wide variety of desire satisfactionist views—cannot properly capture the relevance of these feelings, and thus the relevance of desire and aversion, to well-being and ill-being, and should therefore be abandoned. (shrink)

Some reasons are thought to depend on relations between people, such as that of a promiser to a promisee. It has sometimes been assumed that all reasons that are relational in this way are moral obligations. I argue, via a counter example, that there are non-obligatory relational reasons. If true, this has ramifications for relational theories of morality.

This project has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (project number CS170100008); the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science; and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. ACOLA collaborates with the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and the New Zealand Royal Society Te Apārangi to deliver the interdisciplinary Horizon Scanning reports to government. The aims of the project which produced this report are: 1. Examine the transformative role that artificial intelligence may play in (...) different sectors of the economy, including the opportunities, risks and challenges that advancement presents. 2. Examine the ethical, legal and social considerations and frameworks required to enable and support broad development and uptake of artificial intelligence. 3. Assess the future education, skills and infrastructure requirements to manage workforce transition and support thriving and internationally competitive artificial intelligence industries. (shrink)

A polemical account of Australian philosophy up to 2003, emphasising its unique aspects (such as commitment to realism) and the connections between philosophers' views and their lives. Topics include early idealism, the dominance of John Anderson in Sydney, the Orr case, Catholic scholasticism, Melbourne Wittgensteinianism, philosophy of science, the Sydney disturbances of the 1970s, Francofeminism, environmental philosophy, the philosophy of law and Mabo, ethics and Peter Singer. Realist theories especially praised are David Armstrong's on universals, David Stove's on logical probability (...) and the ethical realism of Rai Gaita and Catholic philosophers. In addition to strict philosophy, the book treats non-religious moral traditions to train virtue, such as Freemasonry, civics education and the Greek and Roman classics. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend an epistemic requirement on fitting hopes and worries: it is fitting to hope or to worry that p only if one’s epistemic position makes it rational to suspend judgment as to whether p. This view, unlike prominent alternatives, is ecumenical; it retains its plausibility against a variety of different background views of epistemology. It also has other important theoretical virtues: it is illuminating, elegant, and extensionally adequate. Fallibilists about knowledge have special reason to be friendly (...) to my view; it can help them explain why it can be unfitting to hold on to hope and worry in the face of overwhelming evidence, and it can also help them explain the sense in which knowledge that p and hope that –p are in tension with one another. (shrink)

Do philosophers use intuitions? Should philosophers use intuitions? Can philosophical methods (where intuitions are concerned) be improved upon? In order to answer these questions we need to have some idea of how we should go about answering them. I defend a way of going about methodology of intuitions: a metamethodology. I claim the following: (i) we should approach methodological questions about intuitions with a thin conception of intuitions in mind; (ii) we should carve intuitions finely; and, (iii) we should carve (...) to a grain to which we are sensitive in our everyday philosophising. The reason is that, unless we do so, we don’t get what we want from philosophical methodology. I argue that what we want is information that will aid us in formulating practical advice concerning how to do philosophy responsibly/well/better. (shrink)

Conscious recollection, of the kind characterised by sensory mental imagery, is often thought to involve ‘episodically’ recalling experienced events in one’s personal past. One might wonder whether this overlooks distinctive ways in which we sometimes recall ordinary, persisting objects. Of course, one can recall an object by remembering an event in which one encountered it. But are there acts of recall which are distinctively objectual in that they are not about objects in this mediated way (i.e., by way of being (...) about events in which they featured)? This question has broad implications, not least for understanding the nature and role of imagery in remembering, the requirements of memory-based singular thought about objects, and the sense in which remembering involves ‘mental time travel’ through which one ‘relives’ past events. In this paper, I argue that we sometimes do recall objects from our past without remembering events in which they featured. The positive view of such cases I go on to propose draws on a wide body of empirical work in its support and accommodates a more nuanced picture of the role of imagery in remembering. In a slogan: remembering might essentially involve a kind of ‘re-experiencing’, but it need not involve ‘reliving’. (shrink)