Wittgenstein’s Tractarian discussion of solipsism opens with the claim that ‘[t]he limits of my language mean the limits of the world’ (TLP 5.6.) According to this paper, Wittgenstein expresses here a thought that the subject makes no sense of her thinking having content going beyond in kind that which she possesses in thinking. What the subject possesses in thinking is furthermore a truth or falsity, so that the idea is ruled out of truth-independent substance to the world. At the same (...) time, however, thinking is an act of the subject given to her only as such – only as something she does, and so only as a determination of herself. Truth is not therefore independent of the subject; rather, as Wittgenstein puts it, ‘the world is my world’ (TLP 5.62). This conclusion threatens an idealism under which the nature of truth is explained by reference to that of the subject; objectivity is grounded in a deeper subjectivity. This threat is deflected by the recognition that the solipsist’s subject is an essentially undistanceable ‘I’ without content or character, so that ‘solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism’ (TLP 5.64). (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new solution to the old problem of how best to understand the meaning of the word ‘logos’ in the extant writings of Heraclitus, especially in fragments DK B1, B2 and B50. On the view I defend, Heraclitus was neither using the word in a perfectly ordinary way in these fragments, as some have maintained, nor denoting by it some kind of general principle or law governing change in the cosmos, as many have claimed. Rather, (...) I argue, Heraclitus deliberately traded on the ordinary use of the word in his time (to refer to a written or spoken presentation of things as ‘thus and so’) to denote the world’s constant presentation of itself as ‘thus and so’ to all of us in our experience – a kind of cosmic self-revelation. I show how this captures the sense in which ‘the logos’ is said to be ‘common’ (xunos) and to be the kind of thing most people fail to comprehend even before hearing Heraclitus’ own account, all without detaching Heraclitus’ use of the word from its ordinary contemporary meaning. This interpretation suggests Heraclitus was a thinker more centrally concerned with human (mis)understanding than with speculative cosmology. (shrink)

This article reconsiders Hannah Arendt’s account of “totalitarianism” in light of the climate catastrophe and the apparent inability of our political-economic system to respond to it adequately. In the last two chapters of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt focuses on the “ideology” of totalitarian regimes: a pathological denial of reality, a privileging of the ideological system over empirical evidence, and a simultaneous feeling of total impotence and total omnipotence—an analysis that maps remarkably well onto the climate zeitgeist. Thus, while Arendt (...) used the concept of “totalitarianism” to foreclose alternatives to liberal capitalist democracy, the climate impasse suggests that the totalitarian label more properly belongs to the prevailing system itself. (shrink)

In book 9 of Plato's Republic, Socrates describes the nature and origins of the ‘tyrannical man’, whose soul is said to be ‘like’ a tyrannical city. In this paper, I examine the nature of the ‘government’ that exists within the tyrannical man's soul. I begin by demonstrating the inadequacy of three potentially attractive views sometimes found in the literature on Plato: the view that the tyrannical man's soul is ruled by his ‘lawless’ unnecessary appetites, the view that it is ruled (...) by sexual desire, and the view that it is ruled by a lust for power. I then present my own account. On the view I defend, the tyrannical man's soul is to be understood as ruled by a single, persistent, powerful desire for bodily pleasure: as much as he can get, and however he can get it. Finally, I show how understanding the tyrannical man's soul in the way I recommend helps resolve some commonly expressed concerns about this part of the Republic. I suggest, on this basis, that Plato's procedure in constructing his catalogue o.. (shrink)

The sense of smell occupies a peculiar intermediate position within Aristotle's theory of sense perception: odours, like colours and sounds, are perceived at a distance through an external medium of air or water; yet in their nature they are intimately related to flavours, the proper objects of taste, which for Aristotle is a form of touch. In this paper, I examine Aristotle's claims about odour and smell, especially in De Anima II.9 and De Sensu 5, to see what light they (...) shed on his theory of sense perception more generally. In the first half, I argue that neither of the two most influential recent ways of understanding Aristotle's theory of perception can adequately account for what he says about the sense of smell. In the second half, I offer my own positive account, considering and resolving various puzzles raised by Aristotle's claims about the nature of odour and its relation to flavour. Finally, I conclude that Aristotle's discussions of odour and smell suggest a plausible and interesting way of understanding the relationship, on his view, between ordinary, material changes in the sense organs and the activation of the capacity to perceive, considered merely as such. (shrink)

An ongoing debate in the philosophy of emotion concerns the relationship between two prima facie aspects of emotional states. The first is affective: felt and/or motivational. The second, which I call object-identifying, represents whatever the emotion is about or directed towards. “Componentialists” – such as R. S. Lazarus, Jesse Prinz, and Antonio Damasio – assume that an emotion’s object-identifying aspect can have the same representational content as a non-emotional state’s, and that it is psychologically separable or dissociable from the emotion’s (...) affective aspect. Some further hold that emotions have no object-identifying aspects of their own, and can properly be said to be about things only in virtue of their associations with other mental states (such as beliefs or perceptions). By contrast, “blenderists” – such as Peter Goldie, York Gunther, and Matthew Ratcliffe – insist that the two aspects are indissociable, because the affective aspect “infuses” the object-identifying aspect, altering the subject’s concept or percept of the object. As a result, an emotion’s object-identifying aspect cannot possibly have the same representational content as any non-emotional state’s. I argue that the strongest blenderist arguments fail to rule out plausible componentialist alternatives, and that the blenderists’ broader motivations are orthogonal to structural issues. (shrink)

In this paper I consider two related issues raised by Aristotle 's treatment of hearing and sounds. The first concerns the kinds of changes Aristotle takes to occur, in both perceptual medium and sense organs, when a perceiver hears a sounding object. The second issue concerns Aristotle 's views on the nature and location of the proper objects of auditory perception. I argue that Aristotle 's views on these topics are not what they have sometimes been taken to be, and (...) that when rightly understood they compare favourably in many respects with leading contemporary accounts. (shrink)

This paper develops an understanding of climate denial as an expression of alienation in the sense described by Marx. We first argue for an expanded and differentiated conception of climate denial, theorizing four distinct types that go beyond the simple rejection of an anthropogenic warming trend: naturalist denialism, technological denialism, gradualist denialism, and politicized denialism. We then claim that these forms of climate denial illustrate and are illustrative of Marx’s concept of alienation from species-being (Gattungswesen). The article is intended as (...) a contribution to the growing literature on climate denial as a social and ideological problem rather than as an individual epistemic or moral issue. (shrink)

In this article, I present some worries about the possible impact of global efforts to aid the needy in some of the world’s most desperate regions. Among the worries I address are possible unintended negative consequences that may occur elsewhere in a society when aid agencies hire highly qualified local people to promote their agendas; the possibility that foreign interests and priorities may have undue influence on a country’s direction and priorities, negatively impacting local authority and autonomy; and the related (...) problem of outside interventions undermining the responsiveness of local and national governments to their citizens. -/- Another issue I discuss is the possibility that efforts to aid the needy may involve an Each-We Dilemma, in which case conflicts may arise between what is individually rational or moral, and what is collectively rational or moral. Unfortunately, it is possible that if each of us does what we have most reason to do, morally, in aiding the needy, we together will bring about an outcome which is worse, morally, in terms of its overall impact on the global needy. -/- The article ends by briefly noting a number of claims and arguments that I made in my 2017 Uehiro Lectures regarding how good people should respond in a world of need. As I have long argued, I have no doubt that those who are well off are open to serious moral criticism if they ignore the plight of the needy. Unfortunately, however, for a host of both empirical and philosophical reasons, what one should do in light of that truth is much more complex, and murky, than most people have realized. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider how each of the four main kinds of corrupt person described in Plato's Republic, Books 8-9, first comes to be. Certain passages in these books can give the impression that each person is able to determine, by a kind of rational choice, the overall government of his/her soul. However, I argue, this impression is mistaken. Upon careful examination, the text of books 8 and 9 overwhelmingly supports an alternative interpretation. According to this view, the eventual (...) government of each person’s soul is decided by a struggle for power occurring within the person, among the soul’s parts, the outcome of which is determined by the relative strength and alignment of the competing parties. If this interpretation is correct, Plato adheres more closely to the city-soul analogy in these passages than has sometimes been thought. The ultimate origins of vice in the soul are also seen to lie squarely in upbringing and education, not in a mistaken choice of life. (shrink)

This article examines the various Liar paradoxes and their near kin, Grelling’s paradox and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem with its self-referential Gödel sentence. It finds the family of paradoxes to be generated by circular definition–whether of statements, predicates, or sentences–a manoeuvre that generates pseudo-statements afflicted with the Liar syndrome: semantic vacuity, semantic incoherence, and predicative catalepsy. Such statements, e.g., the self-referential Liar statement, are meaningless, and hence fail to say anything, a point that invalidates the reasoning on which the various paradoxes (...) rest. The seeming plausibility of the paradoxes is due to the fact that often the sentence used to make the pseudo-statement is ambiguous in that it may also be used to make a genuine statement about the pseudo-statement. Hence, if a formal system is to avoid ambiguity and consequent paradox and contradiction, it must distinguish between the two statements the sentence may be used to make. Gödel’s Theorem presents a further complication in that the self-reference involved is sentential rather than statemental. Nevertheless, on the intended interpretation of the system as a formalization of arithmetic, the self-referential Gödel sentence can only be an ambiguous statement, one that is both a pseudo-statement and its genuine double. Consequently, the conclusions commonly drawn from Gödel’s theorem must be deemed unwarranted. Arithmetic might well be formalized in a proper system that either excludes circular definition or introduces disambiguators. (shrink)

In books 8 and 9 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates provides a detailed account of the nature and origins of four main kinds of vice found in political constitutions and in the kinds of people that correspond to them. The third of the four corrupt kinds of person he describes is the ‘democratic man’. In this paper, I ask what ‘rules’ in the democratic man’s soul. It is commonly thought that his soul is ruled in some way by its appetitive part, (...) or by a particular class of appetitive desires. I reject this view, and argue instead that his soul is ruled by a succession of desires of a full range of different kinds. I show how this view helps us better understand Plato’s depiction of corrupt souls in the Republic more generally, and with it his views on the rule of the soul, appetitive desire, and the nature of vice. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper explores the confrontation of physical and contextual factors involved in the emergence of the subject of color measurement, which stabilized in essentially its present form during the interwar period. The contentions surrounding the specialty had both a national and a disciplinary dimension. German dominance was curtailed by American and British contributions after World War I. Particularly in America, communities of physicists and psychologists had different commitments to divergent views of nature and human perception. They therefore had to (...) negotiate a compromise between their desire for a quantitative system of description and the perceived complexity and human-centeredness of color judgment. These debates were played out not in the laboratory but rather in institutionalized encounters on standards committees. Such groups constitute a relatively unexplored historiographic and social site of investigation. The heterogeneity of such committees, and their products, highlight the problems of identifying and following such ephemeral historical “actors”. (shrink)

Sexual lust – understood as a feeling of sexual attraction towards another – has traditionally been viewed as a sort of desire or at least as an appetite akin to hunger. I argue here that this view is, at best, significantly incomplete. Further insights can be gained into certain occurrences of lust by noticing how strongly they resemble occurrences of “attitudinal” (“object-directed”) emotion. At least in humans, the analogy between the object-directed appetites and attitudinal emotions goes well beyond their psychological (...) structure to include similar ways in which their occurrence can be introspectively recognized, resulting in similar extensions of their functionality and meaningfulness to the subject. I conclude that although further research is needed, given the strength of the analogy, the ability of lust to satisfy some general requirements for being an emotion, and perhaps certain neurological findings, lust may somewhat uniquely straddle the line between appetite and emotion. (shrink)

This article responds to four critics of Democracy in Spite of the Demos and reiterates its central thesis. Christopher Holman and Théophile Pénigaud attempt to maintain the critical value of democracy by invoking different elements of the deliberative tradition, while Benjamin Schupmann answers my charges by appealing to a strong liberal constitutionalism. I argue that these attempts repeat the ambivalence described and criticized in the book: democracy is taken as an end in itself, but with asterisks that introduce conditions and (...) qualifications. As long as democracy is only desirable given certain caveats, the critical weight is placed on these caveats and not on the figure of democracy. Andrew Norris takes a different approach, interrogating the book’s use of ideology critique and the concept of “socially necessary delusion.” This intervention presents difficulties to the concluding suggestion of the book, but I maintain that that these difficulties can be productive and generative rather than limiting or prohibitive. (shrink)

In this essay, I attempt to measure various prevailing democratic theories against an argument that Carl Schmitt advances in the first chapter of his ‘Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy’. In practice, he claims there, democratic politics is compelled to introduce a distinction between ‘the will of the people’ and the behaviour of the empirical people, thus justifying the bracketing and unlimited suspension of the latter in the name of the former, even to the point of dictatorship. I argue that no contemporary (...) approach to democracy as a fundamental value is able to mount a compelling response to this critique and that we should therefore reconsider the status of democracy as a normative commitment. I proceed by carefully and closely reading Schmitt’s chapter and then by juxtaposing various currents of democratic theory (including liberal, deliberative, epistemic and various hybrids thereof) with the trajectory of Schmitt’s argument. This essay is therefore less of a contribution to Schmitt scholarship, in the sense that it does not take a panoramic view of his corpus to determine his final stance on democracy, and more of an intervention into contemporary democratic theory using Schmitt’s argument as a kind of lever. (shrink)

This article is a sequel to ‘The Liar Syndrome’. It answers in detail the various criticisms of the latter expressed by Roy T. Cook in his article, ‘Curing the Liar Syndrome’, appearing in SATS/Nordic Journal of Philosophy, 3 (2): 126-141 (2002).

This essay explores the nature of the most rudimentary form of empathy, interpersonal affective echoing, and attempts to give a cogent assessment of the roles it may play in human interactions. As an investigative background, it briefly sketches phenomenological findings with respect to feelings, to non-linguistic cognition, and to the analogical apperception of others. It then offers a phenomenological account of the basic structures of the experience of echoing another person’s feelings in a face-to-face situation. It also notes how echoing (...) differs from analogical apperception (while presupposing the latter), as well as from having one’s usual feelings and emotions. The relationship of echoing to sharing, caring, and morality is also briefly discussed. (shrink)

Charles Mills adhered to the highest standards of philosophical scholarship, while seeing his work firmly as a contribution to the cause of social justice. He had a deep appreciation for historical context and a history of ideas approach to racial/philosophical questions. He was one of the foremost Rawls interpreters or our time, though only a few years before his passing was he so recognized. He channeled his analytic training in his habit of demonstrating how a view is strengthened when an (...) author shows how objections can be systematically replied to. I wish he had tried to integrate class and race into a larger theoretical system, of both an explanatory and normative character. Class is sometimes an unnoted presence in his explanation of white supremacy. Charles saw himself contributing to a collective scholarly social justice project and was happy to acknowledge the greater expertise of others in allied areas to his. (shrink)

Human subjects seem to have a type of introspective access to their mental states that allows them to immediately judge the types and intensities of their occurrent emotions, as well as what those emotions are about or “directed at”. Such judgments manifest what I call “emotion-direction beliefs”, which, if reliably produced, may constitute emotion-direction knowledge. Many psychologists have argued that the “directed emotions” such beliefs represent have a componential structure, one that includes feelings of emotional responses and related but independent (...) representations of what those feelings are about. I argue that such componentiality may help to explain how emotion-direction knowledge is achievable. I begin by developing a hybrid view of introspection that combines David Chalmers’ phenomenal realism with Alvin Goldman’s “partial redeployment” account of meta-belief content. I then provide a process-reliabilist account of introspectively gained emotion-direction knowledge that outlines the minimum conditions of reliably forming emotion-direction beliefs, and specifies several ways in which the warrant of such beliefs could be defeated by relevant counterfactual alternatives. The overall account suggests how distinct introspective processes might be epistemically synergistic. (shrink)

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

Jesse Prinz (2004) argues that emotional feelings (“state emotions”) can by themselves perceptually represent significant organism-environment relations. I object to this view mainly on the grounds that (1) it does not rule out the at least equally plausible view that emotional feelings are non-representational sensory registrations rather than perceptions, as Tyler Burge (2010) draws the distinction, and (2) perception of a relation requires perception of at least one of the relation’s relata, but an emotional feeling by itself perceives neither the (...) subject’s environment, nor in many cases the relevant subject itself. I then explore two ways in which emotional feelings as non-perceptual sensory registrations might still contribute to significant relation representation when associated with representations of the subject and/or its environment. After briefly discussing some difficulties presented by a multimodal, sensory-perceptual view of such representation, I argue in favor of a “cognitive recognition theory” that holds that significant relation instances are represented during emotion occurrences via applications of emotion-type concepts to "incoming" emotional feelings and their associated mental states. (shrink)

Abstract: Of the five perspectives set forth in this essay, four of them specify obstacles that block experiential understandings of emotions. The obstacles in one way and another subvert the living body, whether presenting it as a mere face or as an ahistorical adult body, as an embodied phenomenon or as a brain unattached to a whole-body nervous system. Such accounts bypass the affective dynamics that move through bodies and move them to move. Being true to the truths of experience, (...) the fifth perspective, requires recognition of our infancy and even of our prenatal lives, both of which are tethered to developmental movement. It furthermore requires recognition of affective realties as subject-world relationships and recognition of the dynamic congruency of emotions and movement. In the end, the perspectives lead us to inquire about “the things themselves.” Keywords: Animate · Dynamic · Brain · Embodied · Infancy. (shrink)

Wittgenstein held that Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment fails to explain an atomic judgment’s representation of entities as combined. He demonstrated this failure as follows. Under the multiple relation theory, an atomic judgment is a complex whose relating relation is judgment, the universal, and whose terms include the entities the judgment represents as combined. Taking such a complex we may arrive through the substitution of constituents at a complex whose relating relation is again judgment but whose terms do not (...) include entities which are logically suited for combination. This second judgment complex will not represent any of its terms as combined, for entities that are logically uncombinable are unrepresentable as combined. Russell’s theory does not, however, explain how the original judgment differs from the complex arrived at by the substitution of constituents such that the former but not the latter represents certain of its terms as combined. (shrink)

Barbara Fried described John Rawls’s response to libertarianism as “the unwritten theory of justice.” This paper argues that while there is no need for a new theory of justice to address the libertarian challenge, there is a need for an additional chapter. Taking up Fried’s suggestion that the Rawlsian response would benefit from a revised list of primary goods, I propose to add employment to the list, thus leading to adoption of a full employment principle in the original position that (...) ensures that anyone who wants to work will be able to do so. I argue that although Rawls famously proposed government as employer of last resort, he never integrated that comment into his theory, which lacks a full employment principle and says nothing about the injustice of involuntary unemployment in its ideal theory. I first refute the received view of Rawls’s treatment of employment as required by its importance for citizens’ self-respect, then show that in fact, the full employment assumption is the result of the role of general equilibrium theory in Rawls’s model of a well-ordered society, and indicate why developments in economic theory and economic policy support the proposed revision. (shrink)

[This paper was presented at the APA Eastern Division Conference in New York City, January 2024] -/- Can one reasonably doubt that one is voluntarily making a commitment, even when one is doing so? Given that one voluntarily makes a commitment if and only if one (personally) knows that one is doing so, the answer appears to be “No.” After all, knowing implies justifiably believing, and it seems impossible that one could (synchronically and from a single personal perspective) reasonably doubt (...) what one justifiably believes. Indeed, assuming that one reasonably doubts that P only if one has sufficient evidence to believe that not-P, traditional epistemologists may hold that such “epistemic ambivalence” entails one’s believing a contradiction, while some Bayesians should hold that it entails violating “probabilism” (the norm that credences must conform to the axioms of probability). However, I argue that in at least some cases of romantic commitment-making, such ambivalence may not only be epistemically permissible, but even required, and perhaps best dealt with pragmatically. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 3, Page 368-378, September 2021.

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, Volume 44, Issue 1, Page 239-259, December 2019: -/- When people speak or write of “embodied” in one form or another, as in embodied mind, embodied cognition, embodied language, embodied self, and so on, they implicitly look past if not outright deny the realities of evolution. Animate life evolves on the basis of different morphologies. Animals with differing morphologies establish not merely different niches but different modes of living, which in the most fundamental sense means establishing (...) distinctive repertoires of movement—different ways of doing everyday things. Certain movements within one species’ repertoire may nevertheless coincide with certain movements within the repertoire of other species, as, for instance, the movement known as presenting, which occurs in multiple primate species in two different contexts: as a sexual invitation and as an aggression deterrent. That certain movements can have the same significance across species does not diminish the distinctiveness of any repertoire but attests to the evolutionary heritage of a species, namely its anchorage in morphology, that is, in bodily templates and possible variations of the same, all of which templates and possible variations translate into distinctive movement possibilities and definitive repertoires of movement. (shrink)

Wittgenstein responds in his Notes on Logic to a discussion of Russell's Principles of Mathematics concerning assertion. Russell writes: "It is plain that, if I may be allowed to use the word assertion in a non-psychological sense, the proposition "p implies q" asserts an implication, though it does not assert p or q. The p and the q which enter into this proposition are not strictly the same as the p or the q which are separate propositions." (PoM p35) Wittgenstein (...) replies: "Assertion is merely psychological. In not-p, p is exactly the same as if it stands alone; this point is absolutely fundamental." (NB p95) Wittgenstein's response is intriguing, not least because of the centrality to his Tractatus of the idea that a proposition says something. This paper will examine that idea, distinguishing it from 'merely psychological' assertion, and explore in this context how we should understand the occurrence of a Tractarian proposition within another. (shrink)

The nuclear engineer emerged as a new form of recognised technical professional between 1940 and the early 1960s as nuclear fission, the chain reaction and their applications were explored. The institutionalization of nuclear engineering—channelled into new national laboratories and corporate design offices during the decade after the war, and hurried into academic venues thereafter—proved unusually dependent on government definition and support. This paper contrasts the distinct histories of the new discipline in the USA and UK (and, more briefly, Canada). In (...) the segregated and influential environments of institutional laboratories and factories, historical actors such as physicist Walter Zinn in the USA and industrial chemist Christopher Hinton in the UK proved influential in shaping the roles and perceptions of nuclear specialists. More broadly, I argue that the State-managed implantation of the new subject within further and higher education curricula was shaped strongly by distinct political and economic contexts in which secrecy, postwar prestige and differing industrial cultures were decisive factors. (shrink)

Among moral philosophers, general disapproval of genetic enhancement has in recent years given way to the view that the permissibility of a eugenic policy depends only on its particular features. Buchanan, Brock, Daniels, and Wikler have extensively defended such a view. However, while these authors go so far as to argue that there are conditions under which parents are not only permitted but also obligated to procure genetic treatments for their intended child, they stop short of arguing that there are (...) conditions under which parents are required to procure enhancements. By contrast, David Heyd argues that parents are required to procure treatments or enhancements for their future child, but only if the intervention would not alter the future child’s personal identity. In this paper I take the case for genetic enhancement a step further by arguing that there are conditions under which parents are morally required to procure genetic interventions for their intended child, regardless of whether the intervention is a treatment or an enhancement, and regardless of whether it would alter the child’s personal identity. (shrink)

Can one’s belief that one romantically loves another be false? If so, under what conditions may one come to reasonably doubt, or at least suspend belief, that one does so? To begin to answer these questions, I first outline an affective/volitional view of love similar to psychologist R. J. Sternberg’s “triangular theory”, which analyzes types of love in terms of the degrees to which they include states of passion, emotion, and commitment. I then outline two sources of potential bias that (...) may cause one to believe that one romantically loves another when one does not. Partly on the basis of those potential sources of bias and partly on the basis of more specific issues, I then argue that at least to the extent that one is aware of these issues, one may reasonably doubt that one is experiencing romantic love’s emotional feelings, and one may reasonably doubt that one is making romantic love’s commitments. Finally, I order by relative dubitability the propositions that must be true about one’s passions, emotions, and commitments toward another in order for one to romantically love them. (shrink)

On intellectual foundations that distinguished chemical engineering from other disciplines.