In a Covid-19 world, everyone’s circumstances changed. Most of us are living and or working in quarantine or lockdown. There is evidence that lockdown itself can have serious negative psychological impact (Brooks et al., 2020). Nonetheless, strategies are being proposed which, arguably, mitigate these harms. Artmaking is one such strategy. As ‘art therapy’, it has been usefully deployed to address a wide range of mental health challenges including anxiety, depression, fatigue and post-traumatic stress (Regev & Cohen-Yatziv, 2018). Given that these (...) self-same impacts profile the mental health challenges identified in relation to pandemic isolation, art may be useful in mitigating mental health issues associated with lockdown. This paper does not address how the role art can play in the therapeutic mix for serious mental health disorders. More specifically it is focused on a narrower brief of ills – predominantly those associated with boredom and a loss of stimulation associated with the constrained circumstances of lockdown. The kind of ‘art therapy’ this paper has in mind is more accurately described as ‘art engagement’ as it concerns individuals actively engaging with art. Art engagement is taken as self-administered utilising the time-out imposed by lockdown as an opportunity to take stock and reset. I will argue that to be of optimal benefit to people in lockdown, the art engagement model should support art practices that are easily accessible to a wide range of people, and be broadly scoped regarding areas to explore. Finally, because the benefits flowing from art engagement are central to this quest, our art engagement model will need to be able to track how art enriches or impoverishes its practitioners. This paper will set up a framework for art engagement that provides an apt account of art practices suited to people in lockdown. I will examine how the resolution of two art puzzles point the way forward in developing an art engagement model. Adventitiously, understanding these puzzles will also prove useful for art making in constrained living arrangements. Managing the first of these puzzles requires a rejection of the notion that art can be determinately defined. Instead we opt for a model that privileges practices and products that enrich the lives of practitioners. The second puzzle assumes creativity relies to varying degrees on appropriation and so appropriation acts need to be included in the model. However, this comes at a cost. Appropriation disrupts any notion that art works are stable things situated forever in the realm of art. It will be shown that appropriation causes us to adopt a more expansive view about the fluidity of what counts as an artwork. This fluidity may take us into and out of the realm of what is traditionally thought of as ‘art’ entirely and leads us to abandon any dependency on art masters and art institutions in our artmaking quests. The paper will conclude by using the model described to outline three art engagement examples that demonstrate how sometimes ordinary everyday experiences can be enriched by taking an art-engaging stance even in the highly constrained environment of lockdown. (shrink)

This article identifies and examines a tension in mental health researchers’ growing enthusiasm for the use of computational tools powered by advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). Although there is increasing recognition of the value of participatory methods in science generally and in mental health research specifically, many AI/ML approaches, fueled by an ever-growing number of sensors collecting multimodal data, risk further distancing participants from research processes and rendering them as mere vectors or collections of data points. The (...) imperatives of the “participatory turn” in mental health research may be at odds with the (often unquestioned) assumptions and data collection methods of AI/ML approaches. This article aims to show why this is a problem and how it might be addressed. (shrink)

Semiotics has been making progressively inroads into marketing research over the past thirty years. Despite the amply demonstrated conceptual appeal and empirical pertinence of semiotic perspectives in various marketing research streams, spanning consumer research, brand communications, branding and consumer cultural studies, there has been a marked deficit in terms of consolidating semiotic brand-related research under a coherent disciplinary umbrella with identifiable boundaries and research agenda. -/- The Handbook of Brand Semiotics furnishes a compass for the perplexed, a set of anchors (...) for the inquisitive and a solid corpus for scholars, while highlighting the conceptual richness and methodological diversity of semiotic perspectives. -/- Written by a team of expert scholars in various semiotics and branding related fields, such as John A. Bateman, David Machin, Xavier Ruiz Collantes, Kay L. O’Halloran, Dario Mangano, George Rossolatos, Merce Oliva, Per Ledin, Gianfranco Marrone, Francesco Mangiapane, Jennie Mazur, Carlos Scolari, Ilaria Ventura, and edited by George Rossolatos, Chief Editor of the International Journal of Marketing Semiotics, the Handbook is intended as a point of reference for researchers who wish to enter the ‘House of Brand Semiotics’ and explore its marvels. -/- The Handbook of Brand Semiotics, actively geared towards an inter-disciplinary dialogue between perspectives from marketing and semiotics, features the state-of-the-art, but also offers directions for future research in key streams, such as: -/- · Analyzing and designing brand language across media · Brand image, brand symbols, brand icons vs. iconicity · The contribution of semiotics to transmedia storytelling · Narrativity and rhetorical approaches to branding · Semiotic roadmap for designing brand identity · Semiotic roadmap for designing logos and packaging · Sociosemiotic accounts of building brand identity online · Multimodality and Multimodal critical discourse analysis · Challenging the omnipotence of cognitivism in brand- related research · Semiotics and (inter)cultural branding · Brand equity semiotics Comparative readings of structuralist, Peircean and sociosemiotic approaches to brandcomms . (shrink)

A central debate in philosophy of action concerns whether agential knowledge, the knowledge agents characteristically have of their own actions, is inferential. While inferentialists like Sarah Paul hold that it is inferential, others like Lucy O’Brien and Kieran Setiya argue that it is not. In this paper, I offer a novel argument for the view that agential knowledge is non-inferential, by posing a dilemma for inferentialists: on the first horn, inferentialism is committed to holding that agents have only alienated (...) knowledge of their own actions; on the second horn, inferentialism is caught in a vicious regress. Neither option is attractive, so inferentialism should be rejected. (shrink)

This chapter argues that people have a human right to immigrate to other states. People have essential interests in being able to make important personal decisions and engage in politics without state restrictions on the options available to them. It is these interests that other human rights, such as the human rights to internal freedom of movement, expression and association, protect. The human right to immigrate is not absolute. Like other human freedom rights , it can be restricted in certain (...) extreme circumstances. Outside these circumstances, however, immigration restrictions are unjust. Having presented the argument for a human right to immigrate, the chapter responds to objections from distributive justice, culture and scarcity. (shrink)

This article questions the use of immigration as a tool to counter global poverty. It argues that poor people have a human right to stay in their home state, which entitles them to receive development assistance without the necessity of migrating abroad. The article thus rejects a popular view in the philosophical literature on immigration which holds that rich states are free to choose between assisting poor people in their home states and admitting them as immigrants when fulfilling duties to (...) assist the global poor. Since the human right to stay is entailed by values that feature prominently in the philosophical debate on immigration, the article further contends that participants in that debate have particular reason to reject the popular ‘choice view’ and endorse the alternative position presented in the article. (shrink)

A common argument against lockdowns is that they restrict freedom. On this view, lockdowns might be effective in protecting public health, but their impact on freedom is purely negative. This article challenges that view. It argues that while lockdowns restrict freedom, so too do viruses. Since viruses restrict freedom and lockdowns protect us from viruses, lockdowns can protect us from the harmful effects that viruses have on freedom. The problem we face is not necessarily freedom versus public health. Sometimes it (...) is freedom itself—or its value or distribution—that provides reason for lockdowns. (shrink)

This article considers one seemingly compelling justification for immigration restrictions: that they help restrict the brain drain of skilled workers from poor states. For some poor states, brain drain is a severe problem, sapping their ability to provide basic services. Yet this article finds that justifying immigration restrictions on brain drain grounds is far from straightforward. For restrictions to be justified, a series of demanding conditions must be fulfilled. Brain drain does provide a successful argument for some immigration restrictions, but (...) it is an argument that fails to justify restrictions beyond a small minority of cases. (shrink)

Because the poorest people tend to die from easily preventable diseases, addressing poverty is a relatively cheap way to save lives. War, by contrast, is extremely expensive. This article argues that, since states that wage war could alleviate poverty instead, poverty can render war unjust. Two just war theory conditions prove relevant: proportionality and last resort. Proportionality requires that war does not yield excessive costs in relation to the benefits. Standardly, just war theorists count only the direct costs: the death (...) and destruction wrought by war. This article argues that it can sometimes be appropriate to add the opportunity costs of a failure to alleviate poverty. Last resort is the condition that there must be no better alternative means of achieving the same just end for which the war is waged. This article argues that there are some cases in which alleviating poverty may constitute a better alternative. These are cases in which the most fitting description of the just end for war is sufficiently general that poverty alleviation offers a means to pursue it. The idea that poverty can sometimes render war unjust has, to date, been largely overlooked. It is, nevertheless, an idea with profound implications since, once taken seriously, war becomes much harder to justify. Wars that, in every other respect, seem just may prove disproportionate or unnecessary given the alternative of alleviating poverty. (shrink)

Heidegger’s reimagining of the artwork was instrumental in forcing a re-evaluation of modern aesthetic assumptions in the first half of the twentieth century. Heidegger’s theory of the origin of the work of art derives from a hermeneutic analysis of a single van Gogh masterpiece. On Heidegger’s view, the artwork provides a substantive and practical way of accessing the nature of art even if questions remain about all manifestations of the nature of art in general. This paper turns his analysis to (...) an alternative influential artwork - Duchamp's ‘Fountain’. I argue ‘Fountain’ presents difficulties for Heidegger’s method, some of which can be accommodated. However, the requirement to confine phenomenal engagement to the art object alone leads to problems when the object is appropriated from outside the artworld, not exhibited, and only one photograph bears witness to its existence. The prospect of broadening the focus of our attention from the art object alone to the ‘drama’ of ‘Fountain’ provides for a much richer phenomenal engagement. However, this move runs counter to a second stipulation of Heidegger's approach - that the artist’s intentions and her performative acts in creating the object should be excluded from our engagement with the work. Duchamp's radical move with ready-mades, and ‘Fountain’, in particular, disarms more than Heidegger’s early post-modern conception of an artwork. It also places pressure on aesthetic theories that lack the capacity to reset ontological boundaries when deeper transformative experiences lie beyond the remit of the object alone, or when art-relevant concepts are appropriated into and out of the realm of art. Duchamp points to a richer means of engaging with artworks than the one construed by Heidegger, one that includes consideration of the relevant artmaking acts. (shrink)

Abstract The rapid growth of Indonesian Heavy Metal music, especially the Death Metal subgenre, since around the turn of the millennium, has been quite remarkable. Indonesia is now numerically the largest scene in the world. Man, the vocalist of Jasad, told the author that the provincial West Javanese city of Bandung had 128 active Death Metal bands as at February 2011. This chapter will discuss the cancellation of an April 2012 music festival held in the Bandung hinterland by police halfway (...) through the festival, and explain how and why it took place. Police became nervous and worried about Heavy Metal shows following the deaths of eleven concertgoers, due to a crowd crush, at a Beside album launch in Bandung in 2008. The chapter analyses the “maternal rage” of a band member’s mother (also a policewoman at the scene) from the perspective of grounded gendered cosmopolitanism. Lastly, a short case study of Sickles, a young band from the religiously-conservative Madura Island, shows the problems that young bands experience plus the type of global underground support which they can attract. (shrink)

This article provides a thematic overview of the work of contemporary French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou. It suggests that the notion of violent capture serves as a guiding theme linking Chamayou's work, linking it to his early study of experimental medicine, his genealogy of manhunting and predatory power, as well as his recent study of contemporary predatory or "cynegetic" warfare use of drones.

Whether under the auspices of ‘spirit,’ the ‘Overman,’ or ‘technology,’ the subject of late modernity came to understand itself as 'the willing animal to whom nature must conform.'.

This article evaluates Furio Jesi’s conception of mythic violence, focusing in particular on his theory of revolt as a mode of collective experience qualitatively distinct from that of revolution. Jesi offers both a descriptive phenomenology of how uprisings alter the human experience of time and action, as well as a critique of the “autonomy” these moments afford their participants. In spite of their immense transformative power to interrupt historical time and generate alternate forms of collective subjectivation, the event-like structure of (...) revolt also harbors within it a unique set of dangers. Such creative mutations risk trapping political actors within a relational logic of the exception, a “ban” structure that, although distinct from the atomization that governs normal time, ultimately works to reinforce it in the long run. The article concludes by suggesting that Jesi’s late concept of the “cruel festival” offers a troubling premonition of our current era, in which revolts proliferate in the absence of any ideological horizon of revolution. (shrink)

Drawing on Furio Jesi’s 1979 book "Cultura di destra" [Right Wing Culture], this article sketches a preliminary genealogy of fascist accelerationism, a distinct current of white supremacist militancy responsible for a considerable number of North American mass murder events over the span of four decades. After positioning Jesi’s theory of fascist violence within the broader methodological turn of his late period work, the article proceeds to outline three key features of right-wing thought: a language of wordless ideas, a funerary religion (...) of exemplary deaths, and a repertoire of militant yet militarily "useless" tasks. Resisting the tendency either to over- or under-politicize these deadly events, Jesi’s analysis instead allows us recognize the operation of a mythological machine that animates white supremacist mass murders over the past half century. The aim of this article is to trace the genesis and mutation of this machine, with particular emphasis on the period from 1975 to the present. (shrink)

This article traces a logical and political thread leading from the theory of revolt in Furio Jesi's 1969 Spartakus to his later work on festivity and the “mythological machine model.” It opens by arguing that the humanist model that frames Jesi's early efforts to disarm the allure of insurgent violence, sacrificial mythology, and Manichaean politics generates insoluble aporias that spur the development of a radically different approach to the study of myth and human nature. Next, it shows how Jesi's studies (...) on festivity from the 1970s redound upon and transform the theory of revolt in Spartakus, bringing this theory more in line with current epochal conditions. In doing so, they presage and lay the groundwork for the theory of destituent power developed in recent decades by Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

This book analyses three of the most prevalent illnesses of late modernity: anxiety, depression and Alzheimer’s disease, in terms of their relation to cultural pathologies of the social body. Usually these conditions are interpreted clinically in terms of individualized symptoms and responded to discretely, as though for the most part unrelated to each other. However, these diseases also have a social and cultural profile that transcends their particular symptomologies and etiologies. Anxiety, depression and Alzheimer’s are diseases related to disorders of (...) the collective esprit de corps of contemporary society. Multidisciplinary in approach, the book addresses questions of how these conditions are manifest at both the individual and collective levels in relation to hegemonic biomedical and psychologistic understandings. Rejecting such reductive diagnoses, the authors argue that anxiety, depression and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as other contemporary epidemics, are to be analysed in the light of individual and collective experiences of profound and radical changes in our civilization. A diagnosis of our times, Late Modern Subjectivity and its Discontents will appeal to a broad range of scholars with interests in health and illness, the sociology of medicine and contemporary life. (shrink)

Fichte's philosophy represented one of the first coherent attempts to provide a utopian philosophical foundation for preventative police power, one which anticipated in surprising ways the fundamental logical premises of modern dataveillance or "datapower." This article examines Fichte's proposals for a new system of police passports and the logic of control on which it rests, contextualizing it within the transformation of police practices during his lifetime. It concludes with a discussion of Hegel's criticism of the logical incoherence of securitarian policing, (...) and its relevance for our situation today. (shrink)

Nghiên cứu nhằm xác định các yếu tố ảnh hưởng đến quyết định mua các sản phẩm thân thiện với môi trường của cư dân trong đại đô thị Vinhomes Grand Park. Kết quả nghiên cứu chỉ ra 6 nhân tố: (1) Thái độ hướng đến bảo vệ môi trường; (2) Chuẩn chủ quan; (3) Chất lượng sản phẩm tốt; (4) Giá cả sản phẩm; (5) Truyền thông xã hội đều có ảnh hưởng đến quyết định mua các sản phẩm (...) thân thiện với môi trường. Qua đó, tác giả đề xuất hàm ý quản trị nhằm nâng cao chiến lược phát triển thị trường sản phẩm thân thiện với môi trường của cư dân. (shrink)

Đánh giá chất lượng công chức nói chung và công chức quản lý nhà nước về kinh tế cấp huyện nói riêng là khâu mở đường quan trọng trong các hoạt động quản lý công chức và kết quả thực thi công vụ là tiêu chí cơ bản trong đánh giá. Nghiên cứu tiếp thu kết quả các nghiên cứu đi trước để xây dựng mô hình lý thuyết các nhân tố ảnh hưởng đến kết quả thực thi công vụ (...) của công chức quản lý nhà nước về kinh tế cấp huyện ở TP. Hà Nội gồm 8 nhân tố: (1) Đào tạo, bồi dưỡng công chức; (2) Chính sách đãi ngộ; (3) Đánh giá công chức; (4) Bố trí, sử dụng công chức; (5) Kỷ cương, kỷ luật; (6) Phong cách lãnh đạo; (7) Đổi mới, sáng tạo của công chức; (8) Gắn kết với công việc của công chức. (shrink)

A central debate in philosophy and neuroscience pertains to whether PFC activity plays an essential role in the neural basis of consciousness. Neuroimaging and electrophysiology studies have revealed that the contents of conscious perceptual experience can be successfully decoded from PFC activity, but these findings might be confounded by post- perceptual cognitive processes, such as thinking, reasoning, and decision-making, that are not necessary for con- sciousness. To clarify the involvement of the PFC in consciousness, we present a synthesis of research (...) that has used intracranial electrical stimulation (iES) for the causal modulation of neural activity in the human PFC. This research provides compelling evidence that iES of only certain prefrontal regions (i.e., orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingu- late cortex) reliably perturbs conscious experience. Conversely, stimulation of anterolateral prefrontal sites, often con- sidered crucial in higher-order and global workspace theories of consciousness, seldom elicits any reportable alterations in consciousness. Furthermore, the wide variety of iES-elicited effects in the PFC (e.g., emotions, thoughts, and olfactory and visual hallucinations) exhibits no clear relation to the immediate environment. Therefore, there is no evidence for the kinds of alterations in ongoing perceptual experience that would be predicted by higher-order or global workspace theories. Nevertheless, effects in the orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortices suggest a specific role for these PFC subregions in supporting emotional aspects of conscious experience. Overall, this evidence presents a challenge for higher-order and global workspace theories, which commonly point to the PFC as the basis for con- scious perception based on correlative and possibly confounded information. (shrink)

Each of the standard outlooks in the philosophy of perception --phenomenalism, direct realism, indirect realism, scepticism -- has thus been viewed as Hume's own considered position in the eyes of informed commentators. I argue that Hume does not ascribe univocally to any one of the traditional stances in the philosophy of perception, nor does he leave us only a schizophrenic or 'mood' scepticism. Hume attempted to resolve the traditional philosophical problem (or perhaps more accurately, to set it aside on principled (...) grounds) by transforming the issue from one of theoretical consistency to one of pragmatic coherence. Hume's moderate scepticism and his systematic naturalism entail a reflective 'return' to the vulgar (cp. T 223), a qualified normative endorsement of the directly realist beliefs of common life. The interpretive challenge is to understand the subtle nature of that endorsement, and to explain how it arises out of genuinely Humean doctrines. The account offered here attempts both to capture Hume's own considered position and to explain the attractions and shortcomings of each of the competing interpretations. After laying out the elements of Hume's account of perceptual belief (section I), I proceed to examine in some detail two recent attempts to interpret Hume as a realist (sections II-III). I contend that these revisionary accounts ascribe unHumean doctrines to Hume. The interpretation of Hume as an irreducible 'mood' sceptic or as a phenomenalist are in that respect both closer to the mark, but Hume's reflective return to the vulgar has recast the nature of the problem and leaves us with a position that is not reflected in the more traditional interpretations (section IV). (shrink)

Biomedical diagnostic science is a great deal less successful than we've been willing to acknowledge in bioethics, and this fact has far-reaching ethical implications. In this article I consider the surprising prevalence of medically unexplained symptoms, and the term's ambiguous meaning. Then I frame central questions that remain answered in this context with respect to informed consent, autonomy, and truth-telling. Finally, I show that while considerable attention in this area is given to making sure not to provide biological care to (...) patients without a need, comparatively little is given to the competing, ethically central task of making sure never to obstruct access to biological care for those with diagnostically confusing biological conditions. I suggest this problem arises from confusion about the philosophical value of vagueness when it comes to the line between biological and psychosocial needs. (shrink)

To hold an environmental ethic is to hold that non-human beings and states of affairs in the natural world have intrinsic value. This seemingly straightforward claim has been the focus of much recent philosophical discussion of environmental issues. Its clarity is, however, illusory. The term ‘intrinsic value’ has a variety of senses and many arguments on environmental ethics suffer from a conflation of these different senses: specimen hunters for the fallacy of equivocation will find rich pickings in the area. This (...) paper is largely the work of the underlabourer. I distinguish different senses of the concept of intrinsic value, and, relatedly, of the claim that non-human beings in the natural world have intrinsic value; I exhibit the logical relations between these claims and examine the distinct motivations for holding them. The paper is not however merely an exercise in conceptual underlabouring. It also defends one substantive thesis: that while it is the case that natural entities have intrinsic value in the strongest sense of the term, i.e., in the sense of value that exists independently of human valuations, such value does not as such entail any obligations on the part of human beings. The defender of nature’s intrinsic value still needs to show that such value contributes to the well-being of human agents. (shrink)

This chapter examines the possibility of using AI technologies to improve human moral reasoning and decision-making, especially in the context of purchasing and consumer decisions. We characterize such AI technologies as artificial ethics assistants (AEAs). We focus on just one part of the AI-aided moral improvement question: the case of the individual who wants to improve their morality, where what constitutes an improvement is evaluated by the individual’s own values. We distinguish three broad areas in which an individual might think (...) their own moral reasoning and decision-making could be improved: one’s actions, character, or other evaluable attributes fall short of one’s values and moral beliefs; one sometimes misjudges or is uncertain about what the right thing to do is in particular situations, given one’s values; one is uncertain about some fundamental moral questions or recognizes a possibility that some of one’s core moral beliefs and values are mistaken. We sketch why one might think that AI tools could be used to support moral improvement in those areas, and describe two types of assistance: preparatory assistance, including advice and training supplied in advance of moral deliberation; and on-the-spot assistance, including on-the-spot advice and facilitation of moral functioning over the course of moral deliberation. Then, we turn to some of the ethical issues that AEAs might raise, looking in particular at three under-appreciated problems posed by the use of AI for moral self-improvement: namely, reliance on sensitive moral data; the inescapability of outside influences on AEAs; and AEA usage prompting the user to adopt beliefs and make decisions without adequate reasons. (shrink)

The republican ideal of non-domination identifies the capacity for arbitrary interference as a fundamental threat to liberty that can generate fearful uncertainty and servility in those dominated. I argue that republican accounts of domination can provide a powerful analysis of the nature of legal and institutional power that is encountered by people with mental disorders or cognitive disabilities. In doing so, I demonstrate that non-domination is an ideal which is pertinent, distinctive, and desirable in thinking through psychological disability. Finally, I (...) evaluate republican strategies for contesting domination, focusing on the limits of contestatory democracy, and proposing a participatory alternative which better addresses problems of political agency in the mentally disordered and cognitively disabled. (shrink)

What position on dualism does medicine require? Our understanding of that ques- tion has been dictated by holism, as defined by the biopsychosocial model, since the late twentieth century. Unfortunately, holism was characterized at the start with con- fused definitions of ‘dualism’ and ‘reductionism’, and that problem has led to a deep, unrecognized conceptual split in the medical professions. Some insist that holism is a nonreductionist approach that aligns with some form of dualism, while others insist it’s a reductionist view (...) that sets out to eradicate dualism. It’s important to consider each version. Nonreductive holism is philosophically consistent and clinically unprob- lematic. Reductive holism, however, is conceptually incoherent—yet it is the basis for the common idea that the boundary between medical and mental health disorders must be vague. When we trace that idea through to its implementation in medical practice, we find evidence that it compromises the safety of patient care in the large portion of cases where clinicians grapple with diagnosis at the boundary between psychiatry and medicine. Having established that medicine must embrace some form of nonreduc- tionism, I argue that Chalmers’ naturalistic dualism is a stronger prima facie candidate than the nonreductive alternatives. Regardless of which form of nonreductionism we prefer, some philosophical corrections are needed to give medicine a safe and coherent foundation. (shrink)

This paper addresses ways of arguing fors ome form of economic democracy from within a broadly Rawlsian framework. Firstly, one can argue that a right to participate in economic decision-making should be added to the Rawlsian list of basic liberties, protected by the first principle of justice. Secondly,I argue that a society which institutes forms of economic democracy will be more likely to preserve a stable and just basic structure over time, by virtue of the effects of economic democratization on (...) the development of an active, democratic character among citizens. Thirdly, I argue that a proper understanding of the demands of the difference principle shows that justice demands more than ex post redistribution, but also requires the ex ante redistribution of power and authority in economic life. This connects to Rawls’s discussion of the badness of inequality, and to his endorsement of a “property-owning democracy”. -/- My conclusion is that, even if we may doubt the success of this first Rawlsian argument,the second and third arguments are both successful, and together establish a strong Rawlsian case forseeing economic democratization as a requirement of justice. (shrink)

Philosophers of science discuss whether theory selection depends on aesthetic judgments or criteria, and whether these putatively aesthetic features are genuinely extra-epistemic. As examples, judgments involving criteria such as simplicity and symmetry are often cited. However, other theory selection criteria, such as fecundity, coherence, internal consistency, and fertility, more closely match those criteria used in art contexts and by scholars working in aesthetics. Paying closer attention to the way these criteria are used in art contexts allows us to understand some (...) evaluative and developmental practices in scientific theory selection as genuinely aesthetic, enlarging the scope of the goals of science. (shrink)

This article uses sim-max games to model perceptual categorization with the goal of answering the following question: To what degree should we expect the perceptual categories of biological actors to track properties of the world around them? I argue that an analysis of these games suggests that the relationship between real-world structure and evolved perceptual categories is mediated by successful action in the sense that organisms evolve to categorize together states of nature for which similar actions lead to similar results. (...) This conclusion indicates that both strongly realist and strongly antirealist views about perceptual categories are too simple. (shrink)

It is widely thought that functionalism and the qualia theory are better positioned to accommodate the ‘affective’ aspect of pain phenomenology than representationalism. In this paper, we attempt to overturn this opinion by raising problems for both functionalism and the qualia theory on this score. With regard to functionalism, we argue that it gets the order of explanation wrong: pain experience gives rise to the effects it does because it hurts, and not the other way around. With regard to the (...) qualia theory, we argue that it fails to capture the sense in which pain 's affective phenomenology rationalises various bodily-directed beliefs, desires, and behaviours. Representationalism, in contrast, escapes both of these problems: it gets the order of explanation right and it explains how pain 's affective phenomenology can rationalise bodily-directed beliefs, desires, and behaviours. For this reason, we argue that representationalism has a significant advantage in the debates about pain 's affective phenomenology. We end the paper by examining objections, including the question of what representationalists should say about so-called ‘disassociation cases’, such as pain asymbolia. (shrink)

Appeals to nature are ubiquitous in Epicurean ethics and politics. The foundation of Epicurean ethics is its claim that pleasure is the sole intrinsic good and pain the sole intrinsic evil, and this is supposedly shown by the behavior of infants who have not yet been corrupted, "when nature's judgement is pure and whole." Central to their recommendations about how to attain pleasure is their division between types of desires: the natural and necessary ones, the natural but non-necessary ones, and (...) the vain and empty ones. Elsewhere, the Epicureans talk about the "natural goods" of political power and fame, and they contrast "natural wealth" with wealth as "defined by empty opinion." Finally, in their politics, Epicurus claims that the "the justice of nature is a pledge of reciprocal usefulness, [i.e.,] neither to harm one another nor to be harmed." This paper explores two questions regarding these various appeals to nature. The first is: what is it for these things to be natural, i.e., what notion of "natural" or "nature" is at play here? (Furthermore, is there a single notion being used across these appeals, and if not, how are they related?) The second is: what normative work does a thing's being natural do? That is, what reason, if any, does a desire's being natural give me for pursuing the object of that desire and trying to fulfill that desire, as opposed to not doing so and trying to eliminate it, and similarly for the other appeals to nature? (shrink)

A minimal truthmaker for a given proposition is the smallest portion of reality which makes this proposition true. Minimal truthmakers are frequently mentioned in the literature, but there has been no systematic account of what they are or of their importance. In this article we shall clarify the notion of a minimal truthmaker and argue that there is reason to think that at least some propositions have minimal truthmakers. We shall then argue that the notion can play a useful role (...) in truthmaker theory, by helping to explain the truth of certain propositions as precisely as possible. (shrink)

Cameras, microphones, and other sensors continue to proliferate in the world around us. I offer a new metaphor for conceptualizing these technologies: they are _digital wormholes_, transmitting representations of human persons between disparate points in space–time. We frequently cannot tell when they are operational, what kinds of data they are collecting, where the data may reappear in the future, and how the data can be used against us. The wormhole metaphor makes the mysteriousness of digital sensors salient: digital sensors have (...) brought us to a strange place. If humans are to be capable of making sensible decisions while under observation by digital sensors, we must improve the epistemic position of potential sensor subjects. (shrink)

Overview of the Stoic position. Looks at the roots of their determinism in their theology, their response to the 'lazy argument' that believing that all things are fated makes action pointless, their analysis of human action and how it allows actions to be 'up to us,' their rejection of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, their rejection of anger and other negative reactive attitudes, and their contention that submission to god's will brings true freedom.

Here I consider Georges Canguilhem's remarkable essay ‘On Science and Counter-Science’ (1971) as a reflection on both the life and the philosophy of his departed friend Jean Hyppolite. I begin by suggesting that Canguilhem's essay takes up and critiques Hyppolite's critique of empirical reason in Logic and Existence (1953). Drawing upon materials from the Canguilhem archives, I then demonstrate that Canguilhem composed the 1971 essay by returning to and drawing from a seminar he gave in 1955–56 on ‘Science and Error’. (...) I consider the significance of this ‘return’ as a kind of memento mori. In ‘On Science and Counter-Science’ Canguilhem pursues a vivid account of the significance of error within (scientific) reason, as caught between the twin poles of Cartesian correction and Nietzschean affirmation. In his refusal to choose between these poles, Canguilhem affirms the restless vital quality of the trace of the concept, which destabilises the perfection of death and the absolute. (shrink)

Radical constructivists appeal to self-legislation in arguing that rational agents are the ultimate sources of normative authority over themselves. I chart the roots of radical constructivism and argue that its two leading Kantian proponents are unable to defend an account of self-legislation as the fundamental source of practical normativity without this legislation collapsing into a fatal arbitrariness. Christine Korsgaard cannot adequately justify the critical resources which agents use to navigate their practical identities. This leaves her account riven between rigorism and (...) voluntarism, such that it will not escape a paradox that arises when self-legislation is unable to appeal to external normative standards. Onora O'Neill anchors self-legislation more firmly to the self-disciplining structures of reason itself. However, she ultimately fails to defend sufficiently unconditional practical norms which could guide legislation. These endemic problems with radical constructivist models of self-legislation prompt a reconstruction of a neglected realist self-legislative tradition which is exemplified by Christian Wolff. In outlining a rationalist and realist account of self-legislation, I argue that it can also make sense of our ability to overcome anomie and deference in practical action. Thus, I claim that we need not make laws but can make them our own. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that we are answerable in a special way for our intentional actions. And it is also widely accepted that we are thus answerable because we perform intentional actions for reasons. The aim of this chapter is to argue against this ‘reasons’ view of such answerability. First, reasons are distinguished from practical standards. Then, it is argued that the best interpretation of the practices in which we treat agents as answerable is that they fundamentally concern practical standards (...) rather than reasons. This view shows that we are answerable, not just because we are deliberators, but because we are executive agents whose complex executive capacities open us to criticism. (shrink)

The idea of wage slavery is often regarded with suspicion even among critics of capitalism. Sceptics note the dubious racial politics associated with its use, while recording many differences between the condition of waged workers and chattel slaves. However, these objections are more plausible on some conceptions of wage slavery than others. I look to the history of political thought to recover and reformulate a more defensible account, drawing on a neo-Roman understanding of slavery as subjection to another’s will (rather (...) than as ownership or social death). I demonstrate not only that a neo-Roman vocabulary was taken up by abolitionists, but recount how radical republicans used it to criticise the wage relation and call for the socialisation of property. This neo-Roman approach is shown to represent a break with more paternalistic appeals to wage slavery made by Tory radicals and Southern apologists for chattel slavery. However, in order to avoid cheapening the accusation of wage slavery, I argue that it only obtains when a worker’s ability to meet their most vital material needs is dependent on the will of employers. Thus, wage slavery becomes an extreme form of economic unfreedom, which does not encompass every case of worker domination. (shrink)

Socrates has an implicit argument for his afterlife story that concludes the Gorgias, with two key premises. One is at 527a-c, where he summarizes the ethical position he has been arguing for through most of the dialogue, regarding the intrinsic goodness of justice, the intrinsic badness of injustice, and the desirability of rehabilitative punishments. The second occurs at 507e-508a, where Socrates asserts that the universe is held together by justice. This argument explains why Socrates regards his story as a logos, (...) not merely a muthos. It also helps us understand the nature of the rewards and punishments in his story. (shrink)

Semantic deference is the apparent phenomenon whereby some of -/- our concepts have their content fixed by the minds of others. The -/- phenomenon is puzzling both in terms of how such concepts are -/- supposed to work, but also in terms of why we should have -/- concepts whose content is fixed by others. Here I argue that if we -/- rethink semantic deference in terms of extended mind reasoning -/- we find answers to both of these questions: the (...) minds of others -/- can be understood to play a role in storing the semantic knowledge -/- underpinning our concepts without undermining their -/- functionality, and this ‘outsourcing’ of semantic knowledge greatly -/- expands our overall knowledge-bearing capacity, both at the level -/- of the individual and the community. I conclude that deference in -/- fact affords stronger grounds for a social expansion of knowledge -/- than standard extended mind reasoning permits. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Sellars once remarked on the “astonishing extent to which in ethics as well as in epistemology and metaphysics the fundamental themes of Kant’s philosophy contain the truth of the variations we now hear on every side” (SM x). Also astonishing was Sellars’ 1970 Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association (APA), which borrowed its title from the phrase in Kant’s Paralogisms, “...this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks...” (B404). In its compact twenty-five pages Sellars managed to (...) sketch novel yet plausible reconstructions of central aspects of Kant’s views on self-knowledge, persons, freedom, and morality, along the way suggesting how all of those Kantian views could plausibly be rendered consistent with a naturalistic ontology. In this chapter I focus on Sellars’ APA address as an occasion for reflection on how both Kant and Sellars offer insights into how we ought best to conceive the nature of and the relationships between our thinking selves, our practical agency, and our entirely natural, material embodiment. (shrink)

In this paper, we raise and discuss a puzzle about the relationships among goods, reasons, and deontic status. Suppose you have it within your power to give someone something they would enjoy. The following claims seem platitudinous: you can use this power to reward whatever kind of option you want, thereby making that option better and generating a reason for that person to perform it; this reason is then weighed alongside and against the other reasons at play; and altogether, the (...) reasons determine the deontic statuses of that person’s options. We show, however, that in a certain class of cases at least one of these apparent platitudes must be false. In particular, we show that in a certain kind of case wrongfulness cannot be rewarded. In some cases, if one tries to reward wrongfulness, something surprising must go awry: either what you attempt to give as a reward would not, in fact, be good, or it would not generate a reason, or it would have a surprising effect on the deontic status of the relevant options. The upshot is that the relationships among goods, reasons, and deontic status are complicated in ways that have not previously been remarked. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: It is a familiar story that Kant’s defence of our synthetic a priori cognition in the Critique of Pure Reason suffered sharp criticism throughout the extended philosophical revolutions that established analytic philosophy, the pragmatist tradition, and the phenomenological tradition as dominant philosophical movements in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the most important positive adaptations of Kant’s outlook, however, was the combined analytic and pragmatist conceptions of the a priori that were developed by the American philosophers (...) C. I. Lewis (1883–1964) and Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989), most notably in Lewis’s 1929 classic, Mind and the World Order, followed by Sellars’ critical reworking of Lewis’s outlook in ‘Is There a Synthetic A Priori?’ (1953) and other mid-century articles. Both Lewis and Sellars defended central aspects of Kant’s analysis of our a priori knowledge of mind-independent physical objects and necessary causal connections. But both also radically transformed Kant’s view by defending the idea that there are alternative a priori conceptual frameworks that are subject to an ongoing process of reassessment and replacement on overall pragmatic and explanatory grounds. Furthermore, while Sellars’ answer to his question, ‘Is There a Synthetic A Priori?’ thus represented a partial endorsement of Lewis’s pragmatic relativization of the a priori, I argue that Sellars’ account of meaning diverged from Lewis in ways that constituted a significant improvement upon the previous ‘analytic’ defenses of the a priori, not only in Lewis but in general. This arguably has implications for wider disputes concerning the nature and possibility of a priori knowledge in non-formal domains. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: I contend that Sellars defends a uniquely Kantian naturalist outlook both in general and more particularly in relation to the nature and status of what he calls ‘epistemic principles’; and I attempt to show that this remains a plausible and distinctive position even when detached from Sellars’s quasi-Kantian transcendental idealist contention that the perceptible objects of the manifest image strictly speaking do not exist, i.e., as conceived within that common sense framework. I first explain the complex Kant-inspired sense in (...) which Sellars did not take the latter thesis concerning the objects of the manifest image to apply, at least in certain fundamental respects, to persons. In this primary Kantian sense, I suggest, persons as thinkers and agents exist univocally across both the manifest and scientific images, and this in principle would enable an integration of persons within a multi-leveled naturalistic ontology, one that is independent of Sellars’s quasi-Kantian transcendental idealist thesis. Finally, I examine in some detail how this defensible blend of Kantian and naturalist themes turns out to be what is fundamental in Sellars’s complex and controversial views on the nature and status of epistemic principles. (shrink)

Observers inspected normal, high quality color displays of everyday visual scenes while their eye movements were recorded. A large display change occurred each time an eye blink occurred. Display changes could either involve "Central Interest" or "Marginal Interest" locations, as determined from descriptions obtained from independent judges in a prior pilot experiment. Visual salience, as determined by luminance, color, and position of the Central and Marginal interest changes were equalized. -/- The results obtained were very similar to those obtained in (...) prior experiments showing failure to detect changes occurring simultaneously with saccades, flicker, or “mudsplashes” in the visual scene: Many changes were very hard to detect, and Marginal Interest changes were harder to detect than Central Interest changes. -/- Analysis of eye movements showed, as expected, that the probability of detecting a change depended on the eye’s distance from the change location. However a surprising finding was that both for Central and Marginal Interest changes, evenwhen observers were directly fixating the change locations (within 1 degree),more than 40% of the time they still failed to see the changes. It seems that looking at something does not guarantee you “ see” it. (shrink)

Nghiên cứu xem xét mối quan hệ giữa các thành phần trong mô hình lý thuyết TPB (gồm: Chuẩn chủ quan, Nhận thức kiểm soát hành vi, Thái độ với việc lựa chọn) và Ý định lựa chọn sản phẩm du lịch xanh. Khảo sát trực tuyến được thực hiện với mẫu 185 bạn trẻ sinh sống tại TP. Hồ Chí Minh. Kết quả cho thấy, các thành phần Chuẩn chủ quan, Nhận thức kiểm soát hành vi, Thái độ với (...) việc lựa chọn đều có ảnh hưởng tích cực đến Ý định lựa chọn sản phẩm du lịch xanh. Hơn nữa, kết quả cũng chỉ ra được mối quan hệ trung gian một phần của Thái độ với việc lựa chọn. Từ kết quả nghiên cứu, một số hàm ý quản trị được đề xuất. (shrink)