It has been widely reported that women are underrepresented in academic philosophy as faculty and students. This article investigates whether this representation may also occur in the domain of journal article publishing. Our study looked at whether women authors were underrepresented as authors in elite ethics journals — Ethics, Philosophy & Public Affairs, the Journal of Political Philosophy, and the Journal of Moral Philosophy — between 2004-2014, relative to the proportion of women employed in academic (...) ethics (broadly construed). We found that women are indeed underrepresented overall in prestigious ethics journal publishing. Though this is not our focus, we discuss possible causes for this finding, such as top ethics journals’ tendency not to publish much feminist philosophy; the impact of women’s lesser professional status or rank within philosophy on their prospects for, and success in, journal publishing; and the review process itself, which may disadvantage or discourage women authors — perhaps especially when their gender, rank, and affiliation are known to the editor or reviewer, or if their work is explicitly feminist. We discuss possible avenues for future research on the "woman problem" in philosophy, noting how our study relates to existing research on this issue. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on the historiographical fate of Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) and Pedro da Fonseca (1528–1599) in two Iberian journals ran by Jesuits and founded in 1945: the Spanish Pensamiento, and the Portuguese Revista portuguesa de filosofia. I endeavor to show that the discussions of Suárez’s and Fonseca’s ideas on these journal is a two-sided case of constructing the legacies of major figures in late scholasticism, and I emphasize how the demand to identify cultural national heroes intertwines (...) with theoretical and ideological elements, especially the peculiar history of the Iberian Peninsula, and to the historical relationships between Spain and Portugal. With regard to Suárez, the Pensamiento group strives to carve out a specific place for Neo-Suarezianism within Neo-Thomism, also via a substantive reassessment of Suárez’s importance in the history of scholasticism and of philosophy in general. Hence, Suárez’s thought undergoes triumphant reevaluation, which even aims at ousting Aquinas as the ultimate reference of scholasticism, to make Suárez’s Thomism the principal authority of contemporary schools. By contrast, Fonseca remains a rather obscure and neglected figure, dug up by his fellow compatriots on the Revista portuguesa de filosofia, also against this attempt at establishing a Suarezian, Spanish hegemony. (shrink)

It is a common practice for authors of an academic work to thank the anonymous reviewers at the journal that is publishing it. Allegedly, scholars thank the reviewers because their comments improved the paper and thanking them is a proper way to show gratitude to them. Yet often, a paper that is eventually accepted by one journal is first rejected by other journals, and even though those journals’ reviewers also supply comments that improve the quality of the work, (...) those reviewers are not customarily thanked. We contacted prominent scholars in bioethics and philosophy of medicine and asked whether thanking such reviewers would be a welcome trend. Having received responses from 107 scholars, we discuss the suggested proposal in light of both philosophical argument and the results of this survey. We argue that when an author’s work is published, the author should thank the reviewers whose comments improved the paper regardless of whether those reviewers’ journals rejected or accepted the work. That is because scholars should show gratitude to those who deserve it, and those whose comments improved the paper deserve gratitude. We also consider objections against this practice raised by scholars and show why they are not entirely persuasive. (shrink)

Law is ‘sovereign’, it has been said. Since the poet Pindar expressed this fulminating thought in the 6th century B.C., the whole western tradition, from Aristotle to Cicero, from Heidegger to Schmitt, hasn’t stopped raising questions about the ambivalent relationship connecting law, strength and violence...

This paper analyses three centuries of developing German-language philosophy journals, from the first journals published in 1665 to those from the first decade of post-WWII recovery. Relying upon two bibliographies of philosophical journals collected in the 1970s, one by Joachim Kirchner and one by Wolfram Hogrebe, Rudolf Kamp, and Gert König, we attained a dataset of 607 journals. To analyse the population of periodicals, we identified three key components: the longevity of each journal and the (...) growth rate and the continuity of the body of the journal population. The most puzzling finding is that there was a rapid growth in the number of journals at the end of the eighteenth century followed by a long decline in numbers that lasted almost a century. This paper analyses the structure of the boom in philosophical periodicals after 1888, followed by the effects of both World Wars, and identifies the communication crisis that occurred at the height of the Weimar Republic. (shrink)

This review of one in the series of the monumental primary works of Kierkegaard shows him as the champion and, as it were, an inaugurator of the phenomenological turn in both philosophy and literature. The review touches upon serious issues regarding mass culture and Christianity. The review of the eighth volume in this series was published in January 2020, and these two reviews are the first by any Indian Hindu. While discussing Kierkegaard the reviewer touches upon John Caputo's theology (...) derived from Jürgen Moltmann's concept of a weak God. There are inadvertent typos in this review. (shrink)

Episteme is a student-run journal that aims to recognize and encourage excellence in undergraduate philosophy by providing examples of some of the best work currently being done in undergraduate philosophy programs. Episteme is published under the auspices of Denison University’s Department of Philosophy.

During the 2010s, a radical transformation took place in the Spanish philosophical landscape: most philosophy journals started releasing their papers for free under a creative commons licence. Thanks to open access publication, Spanish philosophy has a bigger audience today than never before. Drawing on the authors’ experience as editors of two of these journals, Theoria and Recerca, this paper discusses what made this transformation possible, its consequences for the assessment of the Spanish philosophical output and, finally, (...) how to strengthen Spanish philosophy journals to confront the forthcoming challenges in open access publishing. (shrink)

In anticipation of the journal’s centenary in 2027 this paper provides a citation network analysis of all available citation and publication data of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1923–2017). A total of 2,353 academic articles containing 21,772 references were collated and analyzed. This includes 175 articles that contained author-submitted keywords, 415 publisher-tagged keywords and 519 articles that had abstracts. Results initially focused on finding the most published authors, most cited articles and most cited authors within the journal, followed by (...) most discussed topics and emerging patterns using keywords and abstracts. The analysis then proceeded to apply social network analysis using Kumu© – a visualization platform for mapping systems and relationships using large datasets. Analysis reveals topic clusters both unique to the journal, and inclusive of the journal’s history. Results from this analysis reaffirm the journal’s continuing focus on topics in traditional analytic philosophy such as morality, epistemology and knowledge, whilst also featuring topics associated with logic and paradox. This paper presents a new approach to analysing and understanding the historic and emerging topics of interest to the journal, and its readership. This has never previously been done for single philosophy journal. This is historically important given the journal’s forthcoming centenary. (shrink)

Philosophy and Cosmology is an open access, peer-reviewed and refereed journal that focuses on theoretical and conceptual problems and issues in philosophical and cosmological research. Philosophy and Cosmology is published by International Society of Philosophy and Cosmology. The objective of Philosophy and Cosmology is to promote exchange and collaboration among philosophers, social, technical and natural science researchers throughout the world. In pursuit of this objective the journal not only publishes high quality research papers but also ensures (...) that the published papers achieve broad international credibility. Philosophy and Cosmology publishes original papers, review papers, conceptual frameworks, analytical and simulation models, case studies, empirical research, and book reviews. (shrink)

Two fundamentally different perspectives on knowledge diffusion dominate debates about academic disciplines. On the one hand, critics of disciplinary research and education have argued that disciplines are isolated silos, within which specialists pursue inward-looking and increasingly narrow research agendas. On the other hand, critics of the silo argument have demonstrated that researchers constantly import and export ideas across disciplinary boundaries. These perspectives have different implications for how knowledge diffuses, how intellectuals gain and lose status within their disciplines, and how intellectual (...) reputations evolve within and across disciplines. We argue that highly general claims about the nature of disciplinary boundaries are counterproductive, and that research on the nature of specific disciplinary boundaries is more useful. To that end, this paper uses a novel publication and citation network dataset and statistical models of citation networks to test hypotheses about the boundaries between philosophy of science and 11 disciplinary clusters. Specifically, we test hypotheses about whether engaging with and being cited by scientific communities outside philosophy of science has an impact on one’s position within philosophy of science. Our results suggest that philosophers of science produce interdisciplinary scholarship, but they tend not to cite work by other philosophers when it is published in journals outside of their discipline. Furthermore, net of other factors, receiving citations from other disciplines has no meaningful impact—positive or negative—on citations within philosophy of science. We conclude by considering this evidence for simultaneous interdisciplinarity and insularity in terms of scientific trading theory and other work on disciplinary boundaries and communication. (shrink)

This is the introduction to the inaugural issue of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability.

Ethnobiology has become increasingly concerned with applied and normative issues such as climate change adaptation, forest management, and sustainable agriculture. Applied ethnobiology emphasizes the practical importance of local and traditional knowledge in tackling these issues but thereby also raises complex theoretical questions about the integration of heterogeneous knowledge systems. The aim of this article is to develop a framework for addressing questions of integration through four core domains of philosophy -epistemology, ontology, value theory, and political theory. In each of (...) these dimensions, we argue for a model of “partial overlaps” that acknowledges both substantial similarities and differences between knowledge systems. While overlaps can ground successful collaboration, their partiality requires reflectivity about the limitations of collaboration and co-creation. By outlining such a general and programmatic framework, the article aims to contribute to developing “philosophy of ethnobiology” as a field of interdisciplinary exchange that provides new resources for addressing foundational issues in ethnobiology and also expands the agenda of philosophy of biology. (shrink)

The past eighteen years witnessed the rapid development of experimental philosophy of language. Adopting a bibliometric approach, this study examines the research trends and status quo of this burgeoning field based on a corpus of 237 publications retrieved from PhilPapers. It is observed that experimental philosophy of language has undergone three stages, the initiation stage, the development stage, and the extension stage, across which there is a clear upward trend in the annual number of publications. Michael Devitt, Edouard (...) Machery, John Turri, Nat Hansen, et al., are found to be the most productive philosophers, testifying their leading positions in this field. Journals, instead of books, are the major homes of works in this area. The analysis also yields a list of influential works, including the seminal work “Semantics, Cross-cultural Style” and other significant publications on the semantics of various types of expressions. Relatedly, the major research themes are found to include not only intuitions about the reference of proper names, but also a wide array of philosophically and linguistically interesting issues like the meaning of color adjectives, epistemic modals, and predicates of personal taste, the norms of assertions and the essence of lies, etc. These findings showcase that experimental philosophy of language has broadened the research territory and offered deep insights into central issues of philosophy of language that are beyond the reach of the conventional armchair methodology. (shrink)

Inauthenticity can be understood as following the herd, in line with a metaphor from Nietzsche. The idea of inauthentic philosophy is explored in an analysis of the titles of articles in philosophy journals, particularly those following the general pattern of 'x and the Politics of y'.

This paper shows that during the first half of the 1960s The Journal of Philosophy quickly moved from publishing work in diverse philosophical traditions to, essentially, only publishing analytic philosophy. Further, the changes at the journal are shown, with the help of previous work on the journals Mind and The Philosophical Review, to be part of a pattern involving generalist philosophy journals in Britain and America during the period 1925-1969. The pattern is one in which (...) journals controlled by analytic philosophers systematically promote a form of critical philosophy and marginalise rival approaches to philosophy. This pattern, it is argued, helps to explain the growing dominance of analytic philosophy during the twentieth century and allows characterising this form of philosophy as, at least during 1925-1969, a sectarian form of critical philosophy. (shrink)

This paper examines Hobbes’s criticisms of Robert Boyle’s air-pump experiments in light of Hobbes’s account in _De Corpore_ and _De Homine_ of the relationship of natural philosophy to geometry. I argue that Hobbes’s criticisms rely upon his understanding of what counts as “true physics.” Instead of seeing Hobbes as defending natural philosophy as “a causal enterprise … [that] as such, secured total and irrevocable assent,” 1 I argue that, in his disagreement with Boyle, Hobbes relied upon his understanding (...) of natural philosophy as a mixed mathematical science. In a mixed mathematical science one can mix facts from experience with causal principles borrowed from geometry. Hobbes’s harsh criticisms of Boyle’s philosophy, especially in the _Dialogus Physicus, sive De natura aeris_, should thus be understood as Hobbes advancing his view of the proper relationship of natural philosophy to geometry in terms of mixing principles from geometry with facts from experience. Understood in this light, Hobbes need not be taken to reject or diminish the importance of experiment/experience; nor should Hobbes’s criticisms in _Dialogus Physicus_ be understood as rejecting experimenting as ignoble and not befitting a philosopher. Instead, Hobbes’s viewpoint is that experiment/experience must be understood within its proper place – it establishes the ‘that’ for a mixed mathematical science explanation. (shrink)

In this paper, I survey some recent literature produced by the established Chinese philosophers who regularly publish in Chinese philosophy journals and work in Mainland China. Specifically, I review the recent research of these philosophers in two areas: Chinese Philosophy and epistemology. In each area, I focus on two topics that have caught the attention of a lot of Chinese philosophers. I argue that the Chinese philosophers’ research on these topics has two prevalent problems: (i) a lot (...) of arguments they make are weak; (ii) they tend not to critically engage with others. I discuss a metaphilosophical objection that weak argumentation and disengagement are not vices of philosophical research. I also try to make sense of (i) and (ii) in terms of some cultural factors. (shrink)

Recently, mainstream philosophy journals have tended to implement more and more stringent forms of peer review, probably in an attempt to prevent editorial decisions that are based on factors other than quality. Against this trend, we propose that journals should relax their standards of acceptance, as well as be less restrictive about whom is to decide what is admitted into the debate. We start by arguing, partly on the basis of the history of peer review in the (...) journal Mind, that past and current peer review practices attest to partisanship with respect to philosophical approach. Then, we explain that such partisanship conflicts with the standard aims of peer review, and that it is both epistemically and morally problematic. This assessment suggests that, if feasible, journals should treat all available and proposed standards of acceptance in philosophy as epistemically equal, and that philosophical work should be evaluated in terms of the novelty and significance of its contribution to developing thought in ways that are of value. Finally, we show, in a programmatic way, that improving the current situation is feasible, and can be done fairly easily. (shrink)

Throughout his work, Deleuze not only draws on literature in order to address philosophical problems but he seeks to map out the ‘mobile relations’ between philosophy and literature. After an initial overview, I will focus on A Thousand Plateaus (1980), a book co-authored with Guattari, and in particular, on plateaus “1874: Three Novellas or ‘What happened?’” and “1730: Becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible…” In doing so, I aim to explore: (a) how the relation between literature and philosophy is refracted in (...) Novellas Plateau and (b) the way in which Deleuze and Guattari articulate their key philosophical notion of becoming-imperceptible via Kierkegaard’s knight of faith. The novella as a literary genre by essentially relating to secrecy also advances a distinctive way of relation between the three dimensions of time (the past, present and future). I argue that novella-time could be extended beyond the limits of the literary genre ‘novella.’ To this end, I propose a reading of Kierkegaard’s Repetition (1843) and selected entries from his Journals in order to identify his contribution as a religious writer to the discussion of philosophy as literature. I conclude that time, change and faith stand out as a common problematic of philosophy, literature, and life. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to highlight significant developments in the history of philosophy in schools in Australia. We commence by looking at the early years when Laurance Splitter visited the Institute for the Advancement for Philosophy for Children (IAPC). Then we offer an account of the events that led to the formation of what is now the Federation of Australasian Philosophy in Schools Associations (FAPSA), the development and production of a diverse range of curriculum and supporting (...) materials for philosophy in schools, the making of the Australasian journal, and more recent events. Our purpose is to create further interest in exploring this complex and rich history. This will achieve a better understanding of the possible future directions for classroom practice and research. (shrink)

This study aimed to explore the rhetorical moves of article abstracts in Taiwanese Chinese philosophy journals. The most common theory for the discourse analysis of research abstracts is proposed by Hyland（2000）. Most of the research abstracts in the field of social sciences and natural sciences are composed of Hyland’s five rhetorical moves: introduction, purpose, method, results, and conclusion. Therefore, the question to be explored in this research is how to compose the rhetorical moves of abstracts of Chinese (...) class='Hi'>philosophy journal articles. What is the frequency and order of each rhetorical move in the abstract of each paper? Do they reflect some particular type of distribution? Are there any rhetorical moves that occur exceptionally rarely? Does the abstract of research articles in Chinese philosophy journals apply the framework of the same five rhetorical moves? What are the conventions of the philosophy writing community reflected in the rhetorical moves of abstracts of academic journal articles in philosophy? -/- To answer the above questions, this research collected the abstracts of 18 papers from the representative Chinese philosophy journal "SOOCHOW JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES " in Taiwan in the past five years (2017-2021) and used the five moves of Hyland（2000） one by one to answer the above questions. The rhetorical moves of each abstract were analyzed and presented in tables to show the frequency, order, and type of each rhetorical move. -/- The results of this study found that "method (M)" and "conclusion (C)" are not the rhetorical moves that constitute the abstract of articles in Taiwanese philosophy journals, but the rhetorical move "purpose (P)" is "necessary" to appear. In the Purpose move, the subject is usually "this article"; the verbs are "argue" or "inquire." Although "introduction (I)" is a "conventional" move, the total number of words in the introduction is the highest in the whole abstract. This study also shows rhetorical move variation of the abstracts of philosophy journal articles, reflecting the writing culture and conventions of the academic philosophy community. -/- Finally, this study proposes three teaching guidelines for abstract writing of academic papers in philosophy, which will be useful for philosophy scholars and graduate students to consult when writing and submitting abstracts of philosophy in conference or journal papers. -/- Keywords: philosophy, journal article, abstract, discourse analysis, rhetorical move . (shrink)

A philosophy with children community of inquiry encourage children to develop a philosophical sensitivity that entails awareness of abstract questions related to human existence. When it operates, it can allow insight into significant philosophical aspects of various situations and their analysis. This article seeks to contribute to the discussion of philosophical sensitivity by adducing an additional dimension—namely, the development of a socio-philosophical sensitivity by means of a philosophical community of inquiry focused on texts linked to these themes and an (...) analysis of them with the help of narratival tools that explain the children’s philosophical moves. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the American reception of logical positivism in the early 1930s. I argue that Moritz Schlick (who had visiting positions at Stanford and Berkeley between 1929 and 1932) and Herbert Feigl (who visited Harvard in the 1930-31 academic year) played a crucial role in promoting the *Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung*, years before members of the Vienna Circle, the Berlin Group, and the Lvov-Warsaw school would seek refuge in the United States. Building on archive material from the Wiener Kreis Archiv, the (...) Harvard University Archives, and the Herbert Feigl Papers, as well as a large number of publications in American philosophy journals from the early 1930s, I reconstruct the subtle transformation of the American philosophical landscape in the years immediately preceding the European exodus. I argue that (1) American philosophical discussions about meaning and significance and (2) internal dynamics in the Vienna Circle between 1929 and 1931 significantly impacted the way in which US philosophers came to perceive logical positivism. (shrink)

I offer an alternative account of the relationship of Hobbesian geometry to natural philosophy by arguing that mixed mathematics provided Hobbes with a model for thinking about it. In mixed mathematics, one may borrow causal principles from one science and use them in another science without there being a deductive relationship between those two sciences. Natural philosophy for Hobbes is mixed because an explanation may combine observations from experience (the ‘that’) with causal principles from geometry (the ‘why’). My (...) argument shows that Hobbesian natural philosophy relies upon suppositions that bodies plausibly behave according to these borrowed causal principles from geometry, acknowledging that bodies in the world may not actually behave this way. First, I consider Hobbes's relation to Aristotelian mixed mathematics and to Isaac Barrow's broadening of mixed mathematics in Mathematical Lectures (1683). I show that for Hobbes maker's knowledge from geometry provides the ‘why’ in mixed-mathematical explanations. Next, I examine two explanations from De corpore Part IV: (1) the explanation of sense in De corpore 25.1-2; and (2) the explanation of the swelling of parts of the body when they become warm in De corpore 27.3. In both explanations, I show Hobbes borrowing and citing geometrical principles and mixing these principles with appeals to experience. (shrink)

The debate over whether free will and determinism are compatible is controversial, and produces wide scholarly discussion. This paper argues that recent studies in experimental philosophy suggest that people are in fact “natural compatibilists”. To support this claim, it surveys the experimental literature bearing directly or indirectly upon this issue, before pointing to three possible limitations of this claim. However, notwithstanding these limitations, the investigation concludes that the existing empirical evidence seems to support the view that most people have (...) compatibilist intuitions. (shrink)

Existing indexing systems used to arrange philosophical works have been shown to misrepresent the discipline in ways that reflect and perpetuate exclusionary attitudes within it. In recent years, there has been a great deal of effort to challenge those attitudes and to revise them. But as the discipline moves toward greater equality and inclusivity, the way it has indexed its work has unfortunately not. To course correct, we identify in this article some of the specific changes that are needed within (...) current indexing systems and propose a new model that could embody them. We use the Diversity Reading List in Philosophy as a case study and PhilPapers as a basis for comparison. The model we propose not only represents the discipline in a more inclusive and fair way, but it is also efficient, easy to use or implement, and adaptable for a variety of contexts. (shrink)

An analysis of the issues of the Journal of the History of Philosophy shows that the journal has effectively recorded the changing image of Hobbes over the course of the 20th century, shifting from a strictly political perspective and a marked focus on the internal coherence of Hobbesian thought (with particular reference to the moral/political nexus and the examination of the “naturalistic fallacy”), to an increasing emphasis on the theme of theology and civil religion. Three examples are examined in (...) this article: the theme of moral obligation as the foundation of political obligation as discussed in the 1970s issues of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, the centrality of the contract and the concept of authorisation brought into focus in the 1980s, and the theme of Hobbes’ religious sincerity or atheism at the centre of discussion in the 1990s. (shrink)

Democratic private schools in Israel are a part of the neo-liberal discourse. They champion the dialogic philosophy associated with its most prominent advocates—Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas—together with Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, the humanistic psychology propounded by Carl Rogers, Nel Noddings’s pedagogy of care and concern, and even Gadamer’s integrative hermeneutic perspective. Democratic schools form one of the greatest challenges to State education and most vocal and active critique of the focus conservative education places on exams and achievement. This article (...) describes the dual discourse connected to the schools. The first is the inner dialogical, which is devoted to student freedom and progress, the child being placed at the center. The second is the exterior discourse, which represents the school as a place of counter-education that provides personal and group development and comprises a site of liberty and choice. The schools in Israel are described as test case and indicating the existence of a sophisticated form of deception via the use of alluring terminology. The democratic private schools should be recognized for what they really are—agents of commodification that undermine democracy rather than enhance it. (shrink)

The recent focus of Philip Kitcher’s research has been, somewhat surprisingly in the light of his earlier work, the philosophical analyses of literary works and operas. The aim of this paper is to show that there is no discontinuity between this new direction and Kitcher's earlier work in the philosophy of science: Kitcher’s contributions to the philosophy of science and his more recent endeavors into the philosophy of literature and of music are grounded in the same big (...) picture attitude towards the human mind – and attitude that he would undoubtedly call ‘pragmatic’: one that emphasizes the importance of those mental processes that are not rational. (shrink)

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals[email protected] Other Shoes is a companion to Kendall Walton’s other essay collection, Marvellous Images, published seven years earlier. But careful study reveals considerable coherence; Walton reprises the same motifs throughout, though with different combinations and inflections, the book’s reverse chronology revealing how some of these ideas developed. Moreover, every paper exhibits the same accessible, (...) sometimes homespun, ‘care beans’, ‘gosh’ ) style typical of Walton: unburdened by needless technicality, yet deft. This style’s downside is perhaps that insufficiently careful readers may misread him. A quarter-century of Charles and faithful sidekick The Slime not so much evading critical fire as watching it spray harmlessly across the pages of philosophy journals is testament to this.Some of the papers, especially the... (shrink)

Philosophy’s Artful Conversation draws on Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, and the later writing by Ludwig Wittgenstein to defend a “philosophy of the humanities.” Both because film studies is historically a site of contention and theoretical upheaval and because Rodowick accepts Cavell’s idea that (at least in the American context) film is philosophy made ordinary, bringing philosophical questions of skepticism and perfectionism into filmgoers’ lives inescapably, it makes sense to build this vision for the humanities out of writing (...) on film. Although presented as a monograph with a single argumentative strand, the book may be more profitably read as three partly distinct works: an examination of the boundaries of theory and philosophy that doubles as a defense of a “philosophy of the humanities,” an interpretation of Deleuze’s work on film that intriguingly prioritizes What Is Philosophy?, and an interpretation of Cavell that argues that his epistemological and ontological questions are subsumed under ethics in a way that pairs well with Deleuze’s emphasis on immanence. (shrink)

A few field notes from the philosophy of science meeting in Vancouver.

The exploration of laughter’s philosophical significance within the realm of performing arts, particularly the French classical theatre of the seventeenth century, reveals a profound connection to the comedic genre. This literary form, characterized by its gentle yet satirical nature, aims to critique and amend the behavioral and societal flaws of individuals. It often portrays a protagonist whose moral attributes and actions defy societal norms, depicted on stage in an exaggerated manner, amplified and interwoven with theatrical techniques such as verbal wit, (...) comedic behavior, and the humorous repetition of scenarios. Through this lens, comedic dialogue not only elicits laughter but also conveys an ethical message, emerging from the critique of society’s distasteful customs and pervasive misconceptions. The comic and humorous approach offers a fresh, conciliatory perspective on life, contrasting the somber, oppressive reality presented in tragedy, thus serving as a potent vehicle for engaging diverse social groups. This study briefly touches upon the history and evolution of the laughter element, or the comedic genre, within French literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It delves into the critical issue and examines the techniques and performances that induce laughter in The Miser, extending the discussion to encompass the philosophy of laughter. (shrink)

Philosophy has a language problem. A recent study by Schwitzgebel, Huang, Higgins and Gonzalez-Cabrera (2018) found that, in a sample of papers published in elite journals, 97% of citations were to work originally written in English. 73% of this same sample didn’t cite any paper that had been originally written in a language other than English. Finally, a staggering 96% of elite journal editorial boards are primarily affiliated with an Anglophone university. This is consistent with earlier data suggesting (...) that journal submissions from countries that are outside the Anglophone world and Europe have disturbingly low chances of being accepted. The route forward is not entirely clear. What is clear, however, is that this structural disadvantage deserves closer philosophical and empirical attention. We owe this to current and future members of our philosophical community who speak English non-natively. We also need this if we want to make sure philosophy is enriched by a diverse group of thinkers who have a grasp of different languages, and of the cultures strongly associated with them. (shrink)

So you want to publish some philosophy—preferably, good philosophy in a nice journal. -/- How do you do it?

Philosophy of immunology is a subfield of philosophy of biology dealing with ontological and epistemological issues related to the studies of the immune system. While speculative investigations and abstract analyses have always been part of immune theorizing, until recently philosophers have largely ignored immunology. Yet the implications for understanding the philosophical basis of organismal functions framed by immunity offer new perspectives on fundamental questions of biology and medicine. Developed in the context of history of medicine, theoretical biology, and (...) medical anthropology, philosophy of immunology differs from these related branches of study in its focus on traditional philosophical questions concerning identity, individuality, ecology, cognition, scientific methodology and theory construction. This broad agenda derives from immunology’s multifaceted research program that has developed from its initial clinical challenges of host defense, transplantation, autoimmunity, tumor immunology, and allergy. In addition to these well-established research areas, immunity is now understood to play a central role in other physiological functions, development, ecology, and evolutionary mechanics. Holding together these diverse domains of inquiry lie philosophical commitments oriented by organismal identity. In this regard, pertinent issues are raised concerning cognition (organization of immune perception and information processing), the character of individuality (framed by the ecological context of immune-mediated assimilation and rejection), and the dynamics of complex systems (understood as holistic systems biology). Indeed, immunology, in the context of cognitive science, evolutionary biology, environmental sciences, and development provides multi-focal perspectives for philosophy of science. (shrink)

Cinema is neither neutral nor a universal medium. Particularly in African contexts, cinema contributes to European exceptionalism, imposes European values as the norm, and acts as an instrument of cultural and psychological control. It seems that African cinema is ontologically, politically, and aesthetically Eurocentric. By introducing an intercultural philosophical approach to the realm of cinema, we aim to move away from Eurocentrism in African cinema towards a more intercultural and dialogical orientation as an input for the liberation of humanity. Based (...) on findings from a dramaturgical analysis of five films, we argue that African cinema shows a deficiency in communicating liberation and it often fails to portray African people’s values, will, and interests as it has been alienated from its nature and purpose. Overall, African cinema seems to be either in a state of assimilation or confusion. By exploring aesthetics of liberation in African cinema and art (as described in African and intercultural philosophy,) we search for alternative film aesthetics and a mode of filmmaking that seeks to liberate the image and the minds of the filmmakers and spectators of African cinema. Inspired by Kimmerle’s aesthetic-ethic alternative ‘Living (with) art’, we propose an alternative for critical filmmaking based on aesthetics of liberation with an intercultural orientation: Living cinema. Living cinema is a dialogical and liberational cinema with aesthetics of liberation at its core. Based on aesthetic-ethic principles of African philosophy and interculturality, the liberating function of living cinema can be found in reconnecting the aesthetics and filmmaking with African values. Simultaneously, it might be contributing to the liberation of world cinema as it has an impact on both the hegemonic and the suppressed cinema. (shrink)

From the Philosophies journal program, one of the main aims of the journal is to help establish a new unity in diversity in human knowledge, which would include both “Wissen” (i.e., “Wissenschaft”) and “sc¯ıre” (i.e., “science”). As is known, “Wissenshaft” (the pursuit of knowledge, learning, and scholarship) is a broader concept of knowledge than “science”, as it involves all kinds of knowledge,including philosophy, and not exclusively knowledge in the form of directly testable explanations and predictions. The broader notion of (...) scholarship incorporates an understanding and articulation of the role of the learner and the process of the growth of knowledge and its development, rather than only the final product and its verification and validation. In other words, it is a form of knowledge that is inclusive of both short-term and long-term perspectives; it is local and global, critical and hypothetical (speculative), breaking new ground. This new synthesis or rather re-connection of knowledge is expected to resonate with basic human value systems, including cultural values. Since knowledge tends to spontaneously fragment while it grows, we take existing diversity as a resource and a starting point for a new synthesis. The idea of broad, inclusive knowledge is in fact not so new. From the beginning, natural philosophy included all contemporary knowledge about nature. Newton was a natural philosopher, as were Bohr, Einstein, Prigogine, Weizsäcker, and Wheeler—to name but a few. Today, the unifying picture of the natural/physical world is sorely missing among the isolated silos of particular scientific domains, each with its own specific ontologies, methodologies, and epistemologies. From the profound need for connected and common knowledge, new trends towards synthesis have emerged in the last decades. One major theme is complexity, especially when applied to biology or medicine, which helps us to grasp the importance of connectedness between present-day disparate pieces of knowledge—frameworks, theories, approaches, etc. Related to this is the emergence of network science, which studies structures of nodes (actors) and edges as connections between them. This book is connecting work on contemporary natural philosophy and its connections with existing philosophies, sciences and other knowledge fields. (shrink)

This book aims to apply recent thinking in philosophy to the age-old problem of the meaning of life, and to do so in a way that is useful to atheists, agnostics, and humanists. The book reorients the search for meaning away from a search for purpose and toward a search for what truly matters, and criticizes our society's prevailing theory of value, the preference satisfaction theory of the economists. It next argues that emotions are our best guides to what (...) matters in life, and shows how emotional judgments about what matters can be true. Finally it discusses how a meaningful life can be lived, describes the role of justice, freedom, identity, and culture in its construction, and compares the meaningful with the happy life. Andrew Kernohan has a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Toronto and is an Adjunct Professor at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Liberalism, Equality, and Cultural Oppression (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and various articles in professional philosophy journals. (shrink)

Our world is under going an enormous digital transformation. Nearly no area of our social, informational, political, economic, cultural, and biological spheres are left unchanged. What can philosophy contribute as we try to under- stand and think through these changes? How does digitization challenge past ideas of who we are and where we are headed? Where does it leave our ethical aspirations and cherished ideals of democracy, equality, privacy, trust, freedom, and social embeddedness? Who gets to decide, control, and (...) harness the powers of digitization and for which purposes? Epistemologically, do most of us understand these new mediations – and thus fabrics – of our new world? Lastly – how is the new technological landscape shaping not only our living conditions but also our collective imaginary and our self-identities? (shrink)

In this inaugural lecture I offer, against the background of a discussion of knowledge representation and its tools, an overview of my research in the philosophy of science. I defend a relational model-theoretic realism as being the appropriate meta-stance most congruent with the model-theoretic view of science as a form of human engagement with the world. Making use of logics with preferential semantics within a model-theoretic paradigm, I give an account of science as process and product. I demonstrate the (...) power of the full-blown employment of this paradigm in the philosophy of science by discussing the main applications of model-theoretic realism to traditional problems in the philosophy of science. I discuss my views of the nature of logic and of its role in the philosophy of science today. I also specifically offer a brief discussion on the future of cognitive philosophy in South Africa. My conclusion is a general look at the nature of philosophical inquiry and its significance for philosophers today. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25 (4) 2006: pp. 275-289. (shrink)

I am writing because I am disturbed by the apparent policy of many mainstream philosophy journals toward Chinese and comparative philosophy. The assumption seems to be that such work should be confined to the handful of specialist journals. I believe that this is an antiquated and counterproductive policy. Philosophers have recognized for a long time that any well-educated ethicist needs to know something about Aristotle, Kant, and the secondary work published on them. Because of changes in (...) our society and in the world as a whole, the time has come for us to recognize that an ethicist should also know something about Mo Tzu, Hsün Tzu and Chu Hsi. (shrink)

In this paper, I expand my upon earlier linguistic research (Lian, 2023), which delved into the genre of abstracts from Western philosophical papers. I engage with the philosophical ramifications emanating from the guidelines established for crafting philosophy paper abstracts (Lian, 2023) and underscore their significance in the domain of academic philosophical writing. A pivotal focus of this research is to navigate the intricate philosophical challenges posed by cross-disciplinary investigations bridging applied linguistic statistics with philosophical paper composition, specifically, the nuanced (...) interpretation of linguistic findings in a manner palatable to philosophers. My exploration probes into the dynamics of various concepts within Inter-Disciplinary Research (IDR), highlighting the complexities in reconciling semantic intuitions related to the notions of "Method (M)" and "Conclusion (C)". I delineate three philosophical stances: (1) deferring to scientific authority, (2) recognizing domain-specific terminologies, and (3) interrogating peripheral scientific theories. I posit that these stances significantly influence the ways philosophers engage with and resolve the cross-disciplinary semantic and theoretical contentions stemming from the rhetorical structures of "Method (M)" and "Conclusion (C)". This work proposes avenues to attain either "theoretical coherence" or "disciplinary synthesis", thereby fostering enhanced cross-disciplinary collaboration and fortifying academic discourse across diverse fields. -/- Keywords: Inter-Disciplinary Research (IDR), Applied linguistics, Philosophical writing, Genre Analysis, Rhetorical Moves . (shrink)

Reflections on the role and position of maternal relations within philosophy as a practical discipline, as a metaphor for philosophical practice, and as a subject of philosophical investigation.

ABSTRACTThis paper is concerned with the reasons for the emergence and dominance of analytic philosophy in America. It closely examines the contents of, and changing editors at, The Philosophical Review, and provides a perspective on the contents of other leading philosophy journals. It suggests that analytic philosophy emerged prior to the 1950s in an environment characterized by a rich diversity of approaches to philosophy and that it came to dominate American philosophy at least in (...) part due to its effective promotion by The Philosophical Review’s editors. Our picture of mid-twentieth-century American philosophy is different from existing ones, including those according to which the prominence of analytic philosophy in America was basically a matter of the natural affinity between American philosophy and analytic philosophy and those according to which the political climate at the time was hostile towards non-analytic approaches. Furthermore, our reconstruction suggests a new perspective on the nature of 1950s analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Political philosophy is having a methodological moment. Driven by long-standing frustrations at the fragmentation of our field, as well as recent urges to become more engaged with the ‘real’ world, there is now a boom in debates concerning the ‘true’ nature of our vocation. Yet how can this new work avoid simply recycling old rivalries under new labels? The key is to turn all this so-called methodological interest into a genuinely new programme of ‘methodology’, defined here as the careful (...) identification and evaluation of all the different methods of reasoning available to us as political philosophers. This programme would clarify, for the first time, all the many ways in which we might argue with one another, thus making us less likely to talk past each another, and more likely to work fruitfully together. (shrink)