Il deismo unisce all’attestazione di una “religione naturale” e alla difesa della tolleranza religiosa la critica all’autorità ecclesiastica e il rifiuto di ogni rivelazione divina, secondo un orientamento metodologico di chiara matrice lockiana. Tutti aspetti rinvenibili in questo libro in cui sono tradotti per la prima volta in italiano due pamphlet di Anthony Collins, seguiti in Appendice dalle lettere che John Locke gli scrisse a testimonianza della profonda amicizia tra i due. Il primo, Difesa degli attributi divini, tratta il (...) problema del male proponendo un’etica deista contrapposta alle soluzioni oscure e contraddittorie degli uomini di Chiesa. Il secondo, Il perfetto inganno del clericalismo, colpisce la tradizione in genere, ricostruendo la presunta contraffazione di una clausola dei Trentanove Articoli di religione – le basi dottrinali della confessione anglicana. Si delinea la possibilità di ricostruire sulla base della ragione una teologia laica e una vera religione. (shrink)

Le Quaestiones 2 («Se l’oggetto adeguato della conoscenza divina sia l’essenza di Dio o l’ente universale») e 3 («Se le creature secondo le loro proprie nature e le loro essenze siano vita in Dio e nel Verbo») della Distinctio 35 dello Scriptum di Pietro Aureoli sono importanti per la ricostruzione sia del pensiero del loro autore che della storia della dottrina delle idee divine nel Medioevo. Aureoli rifiuta il modello tradizionale di causalità esemplare, secondo cui Dio avrebbe creato il mondo (...) sulla base di modelli archetipi esistenti dall’eternità nella sua mente. Ricorrendo al concetto di aequivocatio, stabilisce che l’essenza di Dio è in maniera equivoca l’unico esemplare per tutte le creature ed elabora, così, la teoria della causalità esemplare equivoca. (shrink)

What are the most detailed descriptions under which subjects intend to perform bodily actions? According to Pacherie (2006), these descriptions may be found by looking into motor representations—action representations in the brain that determine the movements to be performed. Specifically, for any motor representation guiding an action, its subject has an M‐intention representing that action in as much detail. I show that some M‐intentions breach the constraints that intentions should meet. I then identify a set of intentions—motor intentions—that represent actions (...) in as much detail as some motor representations while meeting the constraints that intentions should meet. (shrink)

Torture is unethical and usually counterproductive. It is prohibited by international and national laws. Yet it persists: according to Amnesty International, torture is widespread in more than a third of countries. Physicians and other medical professionals are frequently asked to assist with torture. -/- Medical complicity in torture, like other forms of involvement, is prohibited both by international law and by codes of professional ethics. However, when the victims of torture are also patients in need of treatment, doctors can find (...) themselves torn. To accede to the requests of the torturers may entail assisting or condoning terrible acts. But to refuse care to someone in medical need may seem like abandoning a patient and thereby fail to exhibit the beneficence expected of physicians. -/- In this paper, we argue that this dilemma is real and that sometimes the right thing for a doctor to do, overall, is to be complicit in torture. Though complicity in a wrongful act is itself prima facie wrongful, this judgment may be outweighed by other factors. We propose three criteria for analyzing how those factors apply to particular cases of medical complicity in torture. (shrink)

Introspection has traditionally been defined as a privileged way of obtaining beliefs about one’s occurrent mental states, and the idea that it is psychologically and epistemically different from non-introspective belief formation processes has been widely defended. At the same time, philosophers and cognitive scientists alike have pointed out the unreliability of introspective reports in consciousness research. In this paper, I will argue that this dissonance in the literature can be explained by differentiating between infallible and informative introspective beliefs. I will (...) argue that the latter are formed similarly to beliefs about the external world, and are therefore susceptible to similar success and failure conditions. Understanding introspection as belief-like will help to locate possible sources of error in regular as well as in pathological cases, carrying relevant implications for the relationship between experience, belief, and delusion. (shrink)

In this Chapter, Maria Kronfeldner discusses whether psychological essentialism is a necessary part of dehumanization. This involves different elements of essentialism, and a narrow and a broad way of conceptualizing psychological essentialism, the first akin to natural kind thinking, the second based on entitativity. She first presents authors that have connected essentialism with dehumanization. She then introduces the error theory of psychological essentialism regarding the category of the human, and distinguishes different elements of psychological essentialism. On that basis, Kronfeldner (...) connects historical, socio-psychological, and philosophical insights in order to show that although essentialism can act as a catalyst for dehumanization, it is not necessary for it. Examples relate to dehumanization in the context of colonialism and evolutionary thinking, to the history of dehumanizing women from Aristotle to 19th-century craniology, and to contemporary self-dehumanization and ‘lesser mind’ attribution. (shrink)

The Catena aurea entium of Henry of Herford is part of the work of re-elaboration of Aristotle’s natural-philosophical corpus, which characterised the European intellectual environment in the Late Middle Ages. In the central books of his encyclopaedia, Henry comments on the works of natural philosophy of Albert the Great, placing himself in continuity with the cultural project started by Albert in Cologne. The present article aims to compare the 5th book of the Catena aurea entium, which consists of a comment (...) per modum quaestionis on the Meteora of Albert the Great, with some meteorological quaestiones composed between the 13th and 15th centuries. This analysis will lead me to grasp the philosophical orientations and interpretation of Henry and also his reception of Albert the Great’s meteorology. In the 5th book, Henry introduces an extensive medical section taken from the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, in which he applies the Galenic medical principles to meteorology. Besides, in the quaestio 105 (V 1 105), he interprets Albert through the theological-poetic explanation of ancient origins on the sacrality of the number three and an excerpt from the Liber proverbiorum. (shrink)

This article probes the visual spatial représentations underlying the creative conceptual design of complex objects.

What more do we need to fully appreciate perfumes, beyond considering them objects for aesthetic appreciation? My contention is that our appreciation of some perfumes would be largely incomplete, unless we acknowledged them as works of art. I defend the claim that some perfumes are works of art from the point of view of different definitions. Nick Zangwill’s aesthetic definition makes it easy to defend the proposed claim, but is not very informative for the purposes of fully appreciating some perfumes. (...) On the other hand, Jerrold Levinson’s intentional-historical definition and Dominic Lopes’s approach to defining art make it more challenging to defend the proposed claim. I show that, even so, the challenge may be met. Moreover, the challenge is well worth engaging with, since tackling it uncovers features of some perfumes that are essential to their full appreciation. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the theory of divine ideas of Walter Burley. The medieval common theory of divine ideas, developed by Augustine, was intended to provide an answer to the question of the order and intelligibility of the world. The world is rationally organized since God created it according to the models existing eternally in his mind. Augustine's theory, however, left open problems such as reconciling the principle of God's unity with the plurality of ideas, the way in which ideas (...) can or cannot be said to be eternal, their ontological status. Medieval authors discussed such questions until at least the late 14th century. By resorting to the semantic tool of connotation, Burley explains both in what way ‘idea' can signify the divine essence as much as the creatures, and in what sense we can say that God has thought them from eternity, without slipping into a necessitarian view that undermines the principle of divine freedom. Moreover, by envisaging the objective mode of being as the only mode of being of ideas, he explains in what way they truly differ from one another on the basis of their different conceptual contents. (shrink)

The basic principle of all realist theories of truth developed in the 13th and 14th centuries was that a proposition is true if and only if it tells us how things are in reality. Walter Burley (1275-1344) interpreted this principle in a more radical way than 13th-century realists did. Burley, in fact, proposed a strong correspondence theory, in which there is a strict biunique correspondence between linguistic and extra-linguistic elements. Now, if the principle of correspondence can be applied to Burley (...) unconditionally to all affirmative statements (both for accidental and essential predications), it cannot be applied in the case of negative propositions, since in reality there can be no negative state of affairs. In order to solve this problem, Burley uses the strategy of introducing a complex mental object or objective entity as the significatum adequatum of negative sentences. It is an object which, although it exists only in the mind, is completely independent of our mental operations and which ultimately refers to the extra-mental world, composed exclusively of positive objects and states of affairs. In fact, the truth of a negative sentence does not depend on it corresponding to some negative fact, but rather on the opposite affirmative sentence failing to correspond to some positive extramental fact. Thus, extramental reality, which is only composed of positive objects, recovers its role as a yardstick for verifying the truth or falsity of all particular sentences, both affirmative and negative. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Paul of Venice’s realist theory of direct knowledge. In the second half of the 13th century human knowledge was standardly viewed as a process of abstraction enabling the human intellect to grasp the essences of corporeal things, regardless of the matter in which they are embodied. This process was achieved thanks to the mediation of mental entities (species intelligibiles) representing the dematerialised objects in the intellect. By the late 13th and early 14th centuries, however, some authors (...) began to regard this account as unsatisfactory. These authors held that assuming the existence of mediating species (considered themselves as objects of knowledge) amounts to thinking that between ourselves and the world there is a barrier preventing us from acquiring knowledge of reality in itself. Paul of Venice is aware of the sceptical accusations made against the theory of species in the 13th and 14th centuries. Nevertheless, he is a firm advocate of the existence of species. He claims that knowledge, despite coming about through species, is not indirect. Quite the contrary: we have immediate access to reality, and the individual objects that constitute it, precisely because our senses (which are purely passive) receive impressions direct from outside, thanks to species. He points out that species are not object of knowledge. They are not known at all during the cognitive process, as they are a mere means (a mechanical means, so to say), not an image nor a representation of anything, and therefore they are no obstacle between ourselves and the world. Thus, we are able to know reality exactly as it is in itself and, under ordinary conditions, our perceptions are practically infallible and cannot produce false knowledge. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the topics of trust and expertise from the perspective of political epistemology. In particular, it addresses four main questions: (§1) How should we characterise experts and their expertise? (§2) How can non-experts recognize a reliable expert? (§3) What does it take for non-experts to trust experts? (§4) What problems impede trust in experts?

In his recent book Bad Beliefs and Why They Happen to Good People, Neil Levy argues that conspiracy theories result from the same rational processes that underlie epistemic success. While we think many of Levy’s points are valuable, like his criticism of the myth of individual cognition and his emphasis on the importance of one’s social epistemic environment, we believe that his account overlooks some important aspects. We argue that social deference is an active process, and as such can be (...) helped or hindered by epistemic virtues and vices. With this in mind, holders of bad beliefs acquire more responsibility than is considered by Levy. (shrink)

In this chapter, I will present an empirical conjecture to the effect that some bodily actions are categorically perceived. These are bodily actions such as grasping or reaching for something, which I am going to call motor actions. My conjecture builds on one recently put forward about how the categorical perception of facial expressions of some emotions works. I shall motivate my own conjecture on the basis of both theoretical and empirical considerations, describe how it could be operationalised and what (...) explanatory gain could be obtained from it. (shrink)

How should we account for the planning and performance of a bodily action in terms of the agent’s intentions? An influential answer invokes two distinct kinds of intention: intentions for the future (also known as prior intentions or distal intentions), responsible for action planning, and intentions for the present (also known as intentions in action or proximal intentions), responsible for action performance. I argue that there is something wrong with this influential answer: the notion of intention for the present is (...) either superfluous (because intentions for the future can exercise functions associated both with action planning and with action performance) or ambiguous (because it conflates temporal, functional, and content-related aspects). Developing this criticism will lead to an alternative account of action planning and performance based on intentions of just one kind. (shrink)

In this chapter, we examine Iris Murdoch’s views about art. We highlight continuities and differences between her views on art and aesthetics, and those of Plato, Kant, and Freud. We argue that Murdoch’s views about art, though traditionally linked to Plato, are more compatible with Kant’s thought than has been acknowledged—though with his ethics rather than his aesthetics. Murdoch shows Plato’s influence in her idea that beauty is the good in a different guise. However, Murdoch shows a more Kantian than (...) Platonic influence in her suggestion that the experience of beauty can be conducive to virtue, and distances herself from Plato in her claim that the enjoyment, as well as the production, of certain kinds of art can be virtuous. We also argue that her view of bad art as self-consoling fantasy is consonant with Freudian thought. Lastly, we question her view of bad art, specifically concerning her identification of bad art as self-consoling fantasy or entertainment, and her separation of the latter and good art. (shrink)

How do we understand other individuals’ actions? Answers to this question cluster around two extremes: either by ascribing to the observed individual mental states such as intentions, or without ascribing any mental states. Thus, action understanding is either full-blown mindreading, or not mindreading. An intermediate option is lacking, but would be desirable for interpreting some experimental findings. I provide this intermediate option: actions may be understood by ascribing to the observed individual proto-intentions. Unlike intentions, proto-intentions are subject to context-bound normative (...) constraints, therefore being more widely available across development. Action understanding, when it consists in proto-intention ascription, can be a minimal form of mindreading. (shrink)

Skilled sportsmen or musicians—more generally, skilled agents—often fill us with awe with the way they perform their actions. One question we may ask ourselves is whether they intended to perform some awe-inspiring aspects of their actions. This question becomes all the more pressing as it often turns out that these agents were not conscious of some of those aspects at the time of performance. As I shall argue, there are reasons for suspecting lack of conscious access to an aspect of (...) one’s action to be incompatible with intending to perform that aspect of one’s action. Subsequently, though, I will also argue that, in some cases, the incompatibility is only prima facie, and can be dispelled by drawing the following distinction: that between aspects of one’s action that are merely temporarily not consciously accessed, versus aspects of one’s action that are permanently inaccessible to consciousness. I will thus remove an obstacle towards saying that skilled agents intended to perform certain aspects of their actions, despite lack of conscious access to those aspects at the time of performance. (shrink)

Readers are awaiting a new encounter with stories united under the common title Why We Are in Need of Tales. Let me remind you that these deep philosophical books were written by Maria daVenza Tillmanns, a professional philosopher dedicated to the study of philosophizing with children, who has gained valuable experience in this field. Maria’s books are inspired by her work with her students at El Toyon Elementary School in National City (California), with whom Maria held philosophy (...) with children classes for three years before COVID-19. With parental permission, the children provided their drawings, which are used as illustrations for the books. I read Why We Are in Need of Tales, Part III with great pleasure. The focus of this book is on making decisions, sometimes very hard decisions. In Part II, the focus is on dreams — hopes and wishes we have for life. This book looks at how we may best decide how to make those hopes and wishes come true. And the answer Huk and Tuk suggest is deceptively easy: by making decisions “with your eyes wide open.” (5, p. ix). The author of this excellent book managed to describe how to make decisions with your eyes wide open through the playful dialogue between Huk and Tuk. The books are written in dialogue so the reader immediately plunges into the context of a lively conversation. Dialogue not only sharpens attention, but also invites the reader to participate in the conversation. In this way, the reader becomes a listener at the same time. (shrink)

Data involving epistemic modals suggest that some classically valid argument forms, such as _reductio_, are invalid in natural language reasoning as they lead to modal collapses. We adduce further data showing that the classical argument forms governing the existential quantifier are similarly defective, as they lead to a _de re–de dicto_ collapse. We observe a similar problem for disjunction. But if the classical argument forms for negation, disjunction and existential quantification are invalid, what are the correct forms that govern the (...) use of these items? Our diagnosis is that epistemic modals interfere with hypothetical reasoning. We present a modal first-order logic and model theory that characterizes hypothetical reasoning with epistemic modals in a principled manner. One upshot is a sound and complete natural deduction system for reasoning with epistemic modals in first-order logic. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss the theory of exemplary causality of Peter Auriol (1280-1322). Until at least the late 13th century, medieval authors claim that the world is orderly and intelligible because God created it according to the models existing eternally in his mind (i.e. divine ideas). Auriol challenges the view of his predecessors and contemporaries. He argues that assuming divine ideas amounts to assuming multiplicity in God and therefore questioning the principle of his absolute simplicity. To (...) avoid this problem, he develops a system that enables him to account for God’s knowledge of creatures (both as individuals and as species) and hence to preserve the theological principle of providence, but at the same time allows him to reject divine ideas as intermediaries for creation. In Auriol’s theory of exemplary causality, divine essence is the only object of God’s knowledge and thus the only exemplar for creation. God’s cognitive act is directed exclusively towards his own essence. However, he knows creatures through multiple connotations, i.e. the multiple ways divine essence is connotated when God knows himself. But these connotations play no role in creation, because imitability is only proper to divine essence. To explain how an object can be the only exemplar for the creation of many different creatures, Auriol has to rethink the concept of imitability and develop a new model of exemplary causality enabling him to account for the relationship between God and his creatures. The traditional model was that of analogy: a cause produces an effect which is partly similar and partly different from it. Auriol relies on the concept of equivocity. He argues that it is unnecessary to assume a particular similarity between a cause and its effect. Quite the contrary: for an object to be the exemplar of multiple different things, it is necessary that it should not be similar to any of them. The concept of aequivocatio allows Auriol to reject the traditional model of creation. Aequivocatio does not entail a resemblance between idea and ideatum. There is no contradiction, then, in claiming that a single object (divine essence) is in an equivocal way (aequivoce) the exemplary cause of multiple different objects. This is Auriol’s new theory of divine exemplarism: the theory of similitudo aequivoca. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Der Aufsatz untersucht die Theorie der exemplarischen Kausalität von Petrus Aureoli (1280–1322). Mindestens bis zur zweiten Hälfte des 13. Jahrhunderts behaupteten mittelalterliche Autoren, dass die Welt geordnet und intelligibel war, weil Gott sie nach aus der Ewigkeit in seinem Intellekt existierenden Modellen (d.h. göttlichen Ideen) geschaffen hatte. Aureoli focht diese traditionelle Ansicht an. In Aureolis Theorie ist die göttliche Essenz das einzige Urbild für die Erschaffung. Um zu erklären, wie ein einziges Objekt allein als Urbilder für die Erschaffung mehrerer (...) verschiedener Kreaturen fungieren kann, muss er den Begriff der Nachahmbarkeit neu überdenken und ein neues Modell der exemplarischen Kausalität entwickeln. Das traditionelle Modell war das der Analogie: Eine Ursache erzeugt einen Effekt, der zum Teil ähnlich wie sie und zum Teil anders als sie ist. Aureoli greift auf den Be-griff von Äquivokation zurück. Er argumentiert, dass keine direkte Ähnlichkeit zwischen Ursache und Effekt notwendig ist. Im Gegenteil: Damit ein Objekt das Urbild für mehrere verschiedene Dinge sein kann, ist es notwendig, dass es für keinen von ihnen repräsentativ ist. Der Begriff der Äquivokation erlaubt es Aureoli, das traditionelle Modell der Erschaffung abzulehnen. Aequivocatio sieht keine Ähnlichkeit zwischen Idee und Ideatum vor. Es be-steht also kein Widerspruch darin, wenn man sagt, dass ein einziges Objekt (göttliche Essenz) aequivoce die exemplarische Ursache für mehrere verschiedene Objekte ist. (shrink)

In 1969 Harry Frankfurt published his hugely influential paper 'Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility' in which he claimed to present a counterexample to the so-called 'Principle of Alternate Possibilities' ('a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise'). The success of Frankfurt-style cases as counterexamples to the Principle has been much debated since. I present an objection to these cases that, in questioning their conceptual cogency, undercuts many of those debates. Such cases (...) all require a counterfactual mechanism that could cause an agent to perform an action that he cannot avoid performing. I argue that, given our concept of what it is for someone to act, this requirement is inconsistent. Frankfurt-style alleged counterexamples are cases where an agent is morally responsible for an action he performs even though, the claim goes, he could not have avoided performing that action. However, it has recently been argued, e.g. by John Fischer, that a counterexample to the Principle could be a 'Fischer-style case', i.e. a case where the agent can either perform the action or do nothing else. I argue that, although Fischer-style cases do not share the conceptual flaw common to all Frankfurt-style cases, they also fail as counterexamples to the Principle. The paper finishes with a brief discussion of the significance of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. (shrink)

La théorie démocratique contemporaine entretient une relation ambivalente avec les élections. Alors que les points de vue agrégatifs et minimalistes les considèrent comme une institution centrale de la démocratie représentative , les conceptions plus riches de la démocratie n’ont pas nécessairement de penchant pour elles. Les théories délibératives ont tendance à négliger les élections pour se concentrer sur la délibération publique, c’est-à-dire sur le processus continu de formation de l’opinion et d’échange de raisons qui se produit entre les élections . (...) Les théories participatives ont également tendance à les écarter en faveur d’une vision moins agonistique et plus coopérative de l’action politique . Par conséquent, peu d’attention normative a été accordée dans la littérature récente à ce moment très distinctif de la vie démocratique, à quelques notables exceptions près . Une conséquence naturelle est que la plupart des théoriciens font appel à des expériences délibératives telles que les jurys de citoyens et les mini-publics comme réponse efficace aux préoccupations démocratiques actuelles . Le tirage au sort peut ainsi être présenté comme une alternative préférable à l’élection, car il garantit une représentation descriptive, évite la capture de l’État par des élites puissantes et promet des résultats substantiellement meilleurs. Alors que de nombreux théoriciens s’intéressent aux moyens de compléter les institutions électorales par des organes délibératifs non électoraux , certains chercheurs se débarrasseraient volontiers des élections . Le moment est-il venu de les abandonner ? Cet article se concentre sur une affirmation spécifique que beaucoup de partisans du tirage au sort ont avancée, à savoir que celui-ci serait plus égalitaire que les élections, et vise à la rejeter. D’autres chercheurs ont déjà critiqué le tirage au sort pour diverses raisons. Landa et Pevnick , ainsi qu’Umbers objectent qu’il ne permet pas d’obtenir les améliorations instrumentales du gouvernement promises par ses promoteurs ; Ceva et Ottonelli , ainsi que Lafont nient que les critiques lotocratiques des élections reflètent une compréhension adéquate de l’autorité démocratique en tant que forme d’autonomie collective ; et Umbers soutient également que la lotocratie est en contradiction avec les principes de justice distributive et d’égalité sociale . En complément à ces critiques récentes, nous soutenons que la vision de l’égalité politique qui sous-tend le tirage au sort est problématique et peu convaincante. (shrink)

Abstract – The basic principle of all realist theories of truth developed in the 13th and 14th centuries was that a proposition is true if and only if it tells us how things are in reality. Walter Burley (1275-1344) interpreted this principle in a more radical way than 13th-century realists did. He proposed a correspondence theory in which there is a strict biunique correspondence between linguistic and extra-linguistic elements. If the principle of correspondence can be applied unconditionally to all affirmative (...) utterances about present entities, it cannot apply in the case of utterances concerning past entities, which no longer exist. In order to maintain the principle of correspondence, Burley argues that such utterances, in order to be true, must not correspond to an extra-mental object, but to a complex mental object or objective entity, a mental proposition with the verb in the present tense which, was true in a past moment. (shrink)

The essay aims to examine possible readings of disability in the context of visual art, especially regarding bodies prosthetised in unexpected ways. To do that, I will analyse two performances, participated/created by Lisa Bu- fano and Aimee Mullins, which employ prosthetics that distance them from the mimicry of human limbs. I will briefly contextualize them in the history of prosthetics. I will observe how their peculiarity and non-human forms can serve aesthetic and destabilizing purposes regarding the contours of disability. I (...) will especially mention their potentiality regarding disabled bodies’ mobility in space and their relationship with tools. The association between a disabled body and non-human traits carries several symbolic meanings and might also produce risks. Generally, they can update the perspectives on the crafting of creative assemblages that start from impaired bodies. In conclusion, I will observe how Bufano’s art entails more promises on an ethico-political level. (shrink)

Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What’s Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to (...) social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development results from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and “looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term “human nature” altogether. (shrink)

In English, discourse reference to time involves grammatical tenses interpreted as temporal anaphors. Recently, it has been argued that conditionals involve modal discourse anaphora expressed by a parallel grammatical system of anaphoric modals. Based on evidence from Kalaallisut, this paper argues that temporal and modal anaphora can be just as precise in a language that does not have either grammatical category. Instead, temporal anaphora directly targets eventualities of verbs, without mediating tenses, while modal anaphora involves anaphoric moods and/or attitudinal verbs.

Reasons can play a variety of roles in a variety of contexts. For instance, reasons can motivate and guide us in our actions (and omissions), in the sense that we often act in the light of reasons. And reasons can be grounds for beliefs, desires and emotions and can be used to evaluate, and sometimes to justify, all these. In addition, reasons are used in explanations: both in explanations of human actions, beliefs, desires, emotions, etc., and in explanations of a (...) wide range of phenomena involving all sorts of animate and inanimate substances. This diversity has encouraged the thought that the term 'reason' is ambiguous or has different senses in different contexts. Moreover, this view often goes hand in hand with the claim that reasons of these different kinds belong to different ontological categories: to facts (or something similar) in the case of normative/justifying reasons, and to mental states in the case of motivating/explanatory reasons. In this paper I shall explore some of the main roles that reasons play and, on that basis, I shall offer a classification of kinds of reasons. As will become clear, my classification of reasons is at odds with much of the literature in several respects: first, because of my views about how we should understand the claim that reasons are classified into different kinds; second, because of the kinds into which I think reasons should be classified; and, finally, because of the consequences I think this view has for the ontology of reasons. (shrink)

Interview with the author of "why We are in Need of Tails." Iguana Books, Toronto, Canada.

The Eskimo language Kalaallisut (alias West Greenlandic) has traditionally been described as having a rich tense system, with three future tenses (Kleinschmidt 1851, Bergsland 1955, Fortescue 1984) and possibly four past tenses (Fortescue 1984). Recently however, Shaer (2003) has challenged these traditional claims, arguing that Kalaallisut is in fact tenseless.

This paper focuses on negative exemplarity-related emotions (NEREs) and on their educational implications. In this paper, we will first argue for the nonexpendability of negative emotions broadly conceived (section 2) by defending their instrumental and intrinsic role in a good and flourishing life. In section 3, we will make the claim more specific by focusing on the narrower domain of NEREs and argue for their moral and educational significance by evaluating whether they fit the arguments provided in the previous section. (...) In section 4, we will propose three educational strategies to foster NEREs’ positive moral role. In conclusion, we will point out that an exemplarist approach to character education would greatly benefit from a more fine-grained account of the emotions involved in the educational process and from a broader perspective on which of these emotions should be taken as valuable for educational purposes. (shrink)

Important empirically informed proposals of virtue cultivation invoke techniques of goal pursuit. This paper argues that these techniques are effective in changing behavior due to the attention narrowing they bring about, and further show that such attention narrowing can threaten the appropriate exercise of phronetic-related capacities. When these phronetic-related capacities are threatened, two derivative problems arise: (1) One can end up acting in morally inappropriate ways, and (2) Even in cases where one performs the morally appropriate action, one nonetheless can (...) fail to notice and appreciate features of moral value. In light of these concerns, such techniques of goal pursuit – at least, by themselves – serve the most good for those who are merely trying to avoid vice, rather than cultivate virtue. And so, I suggest that such accounts of virtue cultivation are incomplete. I then go on to argue that these undesirable effects of attention narrowing brought about by these goal pursuit techniques may be ameliorated by also engaging in certain indirect modifications of cognition, particularly those which broaden attention. The suggestion, then, is that attention narrowing techniques of goal pursuit, along with attention broadening modifications, might best facilitate virtue cultivation when employed together. While the particulars of how we might best go about this are currently unclear, this paper ends by looking at empirical research on Open Monitoring Meditation as providing a hopeful option that might be further investigated. (shrink)

Partee (1973) noted anaphoric parallels between English tenses and pronouns. Since then these parallels have been analyzed in terms of type-neutral principles of discourse anaphora. Recently, Stone (1997) extended the anaphoric parallel to English modals. In this paper I extend the story to languages of other types. This evidence also shows that centering parallels are even more detailed than previously recognized. Based on this evidence, I propose a semantic representation language (Logic of Change with Centered Worlds), in which the observed (...) parallels can be formally analyzed. (shrink)

According to the standard story given by reductive versions of the Causal Theory of Action, an action is an intrinsically mindless bodily movement that is appropriately caused by an intention. Those who embrace this story typically take this intention to have a coarse-grained content, specifying the action only down to the level of the agent's habits and skills. Markos Valaris argues that, because of this, the standard story cannot make sense of the deep reach of our non-observational knowledge of action. (...) He concludes that we therefore have to jettison its conception of actions as mindless bodily movements animated from the outside by intentions. Here we defend the standard story. We can make sense of the reach of non-observational knowledge of action once we reject the following two assumptions: (i) that an intended habitual or skilled action is a so-called basic action—that is, an action that doesn't involve any finer-grained intentions—and (ii) that an agent, in acting, is merely executing one intention rather than a whole hierarchy of more or less fine-grained intentions. We argue that (i) and (ii) are false. (shrink)

One of the challenges related to the discursive practices of argumentative agents is to get to know if those interactions have an institutional effect. In this article, it is argued that in the new institutionalism, theoretical approaches and deterministic analysis are outlined to investigate argumentative practices that take place in processes of legitimation and recognition. Here a double socio-institutional and discursive or constructivist approach to the argumentation theory is defended, and it is argued that this perspective could be extended to (...) a research program aimed at interpreting argumentative processes in the public sphere that act as calculation mechanism and conformation of social capital. (shrink)

Once upon a time, Aesop says, there was a donkey who wanted to be a pet dog. The pet dog was given many treats by the master and the household servants, and the donkey was envious of him. Hence, the donkey began emulating the pet dog. What happened next? The story ends up with the donkey beaten senseless, chased off to the stables, exhausted and barely alive. Who is to blame for the poor donkey’s unfortunate fate? Well, there could be (...) disagreement upon this, but we think emulation is to blame. And it’s on the kinds of envy-related emulation that we focus in this chapter. More analytically, we aim at vindicating the role of envy for moral exemplars within an exemplarist character educational framework. In the first section, we recall the central tenets of an exemplarist account of moral progress, and highlight how negative emotions, in general, have suffered a bad press within character education, with exemplarism being no exception. Then we provide a brief outline of standard strategies of defending envy by appealing to useful taxonomies of envy (e.g., Taylor 1988; Protasi 2016; Fussi 2018). After that, we put forward our 'Donkey Objection' by recalling Aesop’s fable on "foolish imitation", so as to show that when envy triggers mere emulation, it can bear devastating effects such as conformism and a lack of self-worth and personal integrity. In response to this objection, we bring into play a distinction between two rival forms of imitation—emulation and inspiration—and we coin the label of "inspired envy" for those forms of imitation by inspiration triggered by envy that lead to self-improvement avoiding morally detrimental consequences. (shrink)

Rooth & Partee (1982) and Rooth (1985) have shown that the English-specific rule-by-rule system of PTQ can be factored out into function application plus two transformations for resolving type mismatch (type lifting and variable binding). Building on these insights, this article proposes a universal system for type-driven translation, by adding two more innovations: local type determination for gaps (generalizing Montague 1973) and a set of semantic filters (extending Cooper 1983). This system, dubbed Cross-Linguistic Semantics (XLS), is shown to account for (...) various phenomena — including scope relations in English and Greenlandic Eskimo, internally headed relative clauses in Lakhota, serial verbs in Yoruba and VP ellipsis in English. (shrink)

This short paper comments on the connections between epigenetics, responsiveness and embodiment. Epigenetics has solidified a new conception of DNA as “responsive,” and rightfully so. Yet, the discussion too easily falls back to metaphors of agency and can show a tendency to see responsiveness and embodiment as based on epigenetics, which is shown to be wrong.

It is generally agreed that for blame to be appropriate the wrongdoer must be blameworthy. However, blameworthiness is not sufficient for appropriate blame. It has been argued that for blame to be appropriate the blamer must have standing to blame. Philosophers writing on the topic have distinguished several considerations that might defeat someone’s standing to blame. This paper examines the underexplored consideration of how personal relationships can influence who has the standing to express blame. We seem to assume that if (...) we do not stand in the right relation to the wrongdoer, it is not our business to blame them. I identify three challenges to this view. First, we do not know what is wrong with meddling (whether it is morally or prudentially wrong). Second, there are cases where we have no close relation to the wrongdoer, but where we seem to have standing nonetheless – murder and other serious moral offences are examples of this. Third, we don’t seem to have a clear conception of what ‘standing’ means, and this makes it hard to see how discussion on standing can help us determine the propriety of blame. This paper defends the notion of standing as a propriety condition on blame in cases of meddling. I argue that personal relationships influence who has the standing to blame through constitution of relationship-specific norms; and that the role these norms play in developing and regulating our relationships can explain why meddlesome blame is morally wrong. (shrink)

It has long been recognized that temporal anaphora in French and English depends on the aspectual distinction between events and states. For example, temporal location as well as temporal update depends on the aspectual type. This paper presents a general theory of aspect-based temporal anaphora, which extends from languages with grammatical tenses (like French and English) to tenseless languages (e.g. Kalaallisut). This theory also extends to additional aspect-dependent phenomena and to non-atomic aspectual types, processes and habits, which license anaphora to (...) proper atomic parts (cf. nominal pluralities and kinds). (shrink)

Over the last four decades arguments for and against the claim that creative hypothesis formation is based on Darwinian ‘blind’ variation have been put forward. This paper offers a new and systematic route through this long-lasting debate. It distinguishes between undirected, random, and unjustified variation, to prevent widespread confusions regarding the meaning of undirected variation. These misunderstandings concern Lamarckism, equiprobability, developmental constraints, and creative hypothesis formation. The paper then introduces and develops the standard critique that creative hypothesis formation is guided (...) rather than blind, integrating developments from contemporary research on creativity. On that basis, I discuss three compatibility arguments that have been used to answer the critique. These arguments do not deny guided variation but insist that an important analogy exists nonetheless. These compatibility arguments all fail, even though they do so for different reasons: trivialisation, conceptual confusion, and lack of evidence respectively. Revisiting the debate in this manner not only allows us to see where exactly a ‘Darwinian’ account of creative hypothesis formation goes wrong, but also to see that the debate is not about factual issues, but about the interpretation of these factual issues in Darwinian terms. (shrink)

This contribution offers an analysis of the essays gathered and published by François Courtine in 1992 (Phénoménologie et Théologie), and authored by Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur. Attention is paid to the possibility of investigating the phenomena of the ‘religious sphere’, by taking into account the historical-cultural context typical of contemporary society, the role of art, and the problem of intersubjectivity. -/- .