This paper studies the relationship between consciousness and social existence in Georg Lukács’ early Marxist works through a consideration of his concept of reification. Understanding reification as the process underlying capitalist society’s immediate form of objectivity, I designate dereification as the cultivation of a mediated form of consciousness. In order to better understand the experiential aspects of this cultivation, I supplement my reading of Lukács’ theory of reification with attention to Walter Benjamin’s treatment of experience in capitalist society. (...) I argue that Benjamin’s distinction between experience as the shock of isolated events [Erlebnis] and experience as a long-term practice [Erfahrung] helpfully illuminates Lukács’ conception of dereification, allowing us to see the latter as a long process of cultivation. This account ultimately leads to a consideration of the formal role played by the party—as the facilitator of the working class’s self-education—in Lukács’ philosophy of social praxis. (shrink)

Why does scholarship on transnational labor regulation (TLR) consistently fails to search for improvements in working conditions, and instead devotes itself to relentless efforts for identifying administrative processes, semantics, and amalgamations of stakeholders? This article critiques TLR from a pro-worker perspective, through the philosophical work of Georg Lukács, and the concepts of reification and commodification. A set of theoretically grounded criteria is developed and these are applied against selected contemporary cases of TLR. In the totality that is capitalism, reification (...) of social relations of production conceals completely the experiences of workers. In TLR, managerialist and process-oriented scholarship is dominant, verifiable outcomes and positive improvements in conditions of employment are not sought, and worse, meaningless procedures are celebrated as positive achievements. (shrink)

There is consensus within the chemosciences that olfactory perception is of the molecular structure of chemical compounds, yet within philosophical theories of smell there is little agreement about the nature of smell. The paper critically assesses the current state of debate regarding smells within philosophy in the hopes of setting it upon firm scientific footing. The theories to be covered are: Naïve Realism, Hedonic Theories, Process Theory, Odor Theories, and non-Objectivist Theories. The aforementioned theories will be evaluated based on their (...) explanations of the (a) the olfactory quality of a smell, (b) smells as distal entities, and (c) our experience of smells as intentional objects. The paper concludes with a defense of Molecular Structure Theory that demonstrating its superiority in accounting for each of these three aspects of smell. (shrink)

Common sense suggests that visual consciousness is essential to skilled motor action, but Andy Clark—inspired by Milner and Goodale's dual visual systems theory—has appealed to a wide range of experimental dissociations to argue that such an assumption is false. Critics of Clark's argument contend that the content driving motor action is actually within subjects' experience, just not easily discovered. In this article, I argue that even if such content exists, it cannot be guiding motor action, since a review of current (...) visual neuroscience indicates that the visual brain areas producing conscious representations are distinct from those driving motor action. (shrink)

The present narrative describes and problematizes one year of Educational and philosophical work with illiterate adults in contexts of urban poverty in the Public School Joaquim da Silva Peçanha, city of Duque de Caxias, suburbs of the State of Rio de Janeiro during 2008. The project, “Em Caxias a Filosofia En-caixa?!”, consists of a teacher education program in which public school teachers study and practice the art of composing philosophical experiences with their students, and the realization of actual experiences (...) of philosophy in classrooms with children and students in an adult literacy class. This narrative is concerned with the latter aspect of the project, more specifically experiences working with adult students practicing philosophy. The thirty students and three teachers involved in the course do not study the history of philosophy, nor do they create philosophical systems or theories. Rather they participate in a philosophical experience that might best be able to understand by examining Pierre Hadot’s concept of philosophy “as a way of living”. (shrink)

The conditions animals experience during the early developmental stages of their lives can have critical ongoing effects on their future health, welfare, and proper development. In this paper we draw on evolutionary theory to improve our understanding of the processes of developmental programming, particularly Predictive Adaptive Responses (PAR) that serve to match offspring phenotype with predicted future environmental conditions. When these predictions fail, a mismatch occurs between offspring phenotype and the environment, which can have long-lasting health and welfare effects. (...) Examples include metabolic diseases resulting from maternal nutrition and behavioral changes from maternal stress. An understanding of these processes and their evolutionary origins will help in identifying and providing appropriate developmental conditions to optimize offspring welfare. This serves as an example of the benefits of using evolutionary thinking within veterinary science and we suggest that in the same way that evolutionary medicine has helped our understanding of human health, the implementation of evolutionary veterinary science (EvoVetSci) could be a useful way forward for research in animal health and welfare. (shrink)

This paper explores relationships between environment and education after the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of philosophy of education in a new key developed by Michael Peters and the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia. The paper is collectively written by 15 authors who responded to the question: Who remembers Greta Thunberg? Their answers are classified into four main themes and corresponding sections. The first section, ‘As we bake the earth, let's try and bake it from scratch’, (...) gathers wider philosophical considerations about the intersection between environment, education, and the pandemic. The second section, ‘Bump in the road or a catalyst for structural change?’, looks more closely into issues pertaining to education. The third section, ‘If you choose to fail us, we will never forgive you’, focuses to Greta Thunberg’s messages and their responses. The last section, ‘Towards a new normal’, explores future scenarios and develops recommendations for critical emancipatory action. The concluding part brings these insights together, showing that resulting synergy between the answers offers much more then the sum of articles’ parts. With its ethos of collectivity, interconnectedness, and solidarity, philosophy of education in a new key is a crucial tool for development of post-pandemic education. (shrink)

This paper discusses two thinkers who locate the possibility of revolutionary historical change in political projects oriented toward the formation of subjects and cultivation of sensibility. I begin by considering the relationship between historical violence and education in the works of Walter Benjamin. After introducing the provocative association of education with divine violence found in “Toward the Critique of Violence,” I expand on Benjamin’s conception of pedagogical force. Highlighting the centrality of education in Benjamin’s early work, (...) I argue that his account of learning does not depend on the mastery of students by teachers, nor more generally on the mastery of objective reality by a sovereign subject, but on the mastery of the educational relationship by tradition. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois’ discussion of the abolition of slavery, I close by describing the revolutionary cultivation of sensibility as a dynamic and collectively achieved mode of historical learning. (shrink)

Collected and edited by Noah Levin -/- Table of Contents: -/- UNIT ONE: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY ETHICS: TECHNOLOGY, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND IMMIGRATION 1 The “Trolley Problem” and Self-Driving Cars: Your Car’s Moral Settings (Noah Levin) 2 What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? (David Svolba) 3 Letter from the Birmingham City Jail (Martin Luther King, Jr) 4 A Defense of Affirmative Action (Noah Levin) 5 The Moral Issues of Immigration (B.M. Wooldridge) 6 The Ethics of our (...) Digital Selves (Noah Levin) -/- UNIT TWO: TORTURE, DEATH, AND THE “GREATER GOOD” 7 The Ethics of Torture (Martine Berenpas) 8 What Moral Obligations do we have (or not have) to Impoverished Peoples? (B.M. Wooldridge) 9 Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing (Nathan Nobis) 10 An Argument Against Capital Punishment (Noah Levin) 11 Common Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) 12 Better (Philosophical) Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) -/- UNIT THREE: PERSONS, AUTONOMY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND RIGHTS 13 Animal Rights (Eduardo Salazar) 14 John Rawls and the “Veil of Ignorance” (Ben Davies) 15 Environmental Ethics: Climate Change (Jonathan Spelman) 16 Rape, Date Rape, and the “Affirmative Consent” Law in California (Noah Levin) 17 The Ethics of Pornography: Deliberating on a Modern Harm (Eduardo Salazar) 18 The Social Contract (Thomas Hobbes) -/- UNIT FOUR: HAPPINESS 19 Is Pleasure all that Matters? Thoughts on the “Experience Machine” (Prabhpal Singh) 20 Utilitarianism (J.S. Mill) 21 Utilitarianism: Pros and Cons (B.M. Wooldridge) 22 Existentialism, Genetic Engineering, and the Meaning of Life: The Fifths (Noah Levin) 23 The Solitude of the Self (Elizabeth Cady Stanton) 24 Game Theory, the Nash Equilibrium, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Douglas E. Hill) -/- UNIT FIVE: RELIGION, LAW, AND ABSOLUTE MORALITY 25 The Myth of Gyges and The Crito (Plato) 26 God, Morality, and Religion (Kristin Seemuth Whaley) 27 The Categorical Imperative (Immanuel Kant) 28 The Virtues (Aristotle) 29 Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche) 30 Other Moral Theories: Subjectivism, Relativism, Emotivism, Intuitionism, etc. (Jan F. Jacko). (shrink)

This book is an anthology with the following themes. Non-European Tradition: Bussanich interprets main themes of Hindu ethics, including its roots in ritual sacrifice, its relationship to religious duty, society, individual human well-being, and psychic liberation. To best assess the truth of Hindu ethics, he argues for dialogue with premodern Western thought. Pfister takes up the question of human nature as a case study in Chinese ethics. Is our nature inherently good (as Mengzi argued) or bad (Xunzi’s view)? Pfister ob- (...) serves their underlying agreement, that human beings are capable of becoming good, and makes precise the disagreement: whether we achieve goodness by cultivating autonomous feelings or by accepting external precepts. There are political consequences: whether government should aim to respect and em- power individual choices or to be a controlling authority. Early Greek Thinking: Collobert examines the bases of Homeric ethics in fame, prudence, and shame, and how these guide the deliberations of heroes. She observes how, by depending upon the poet’s words, the hero gains a quasi- immortality, although in truth there is no consolation for each person’s inevi- table death. Plato: Santas examines Socratic Method and ethics in Republic 1. There Socrates examines definitions of justice and tests them by comparison to the arts and sciences. Santas shows the similarities of Socrates’ method to John Rawls’ method of considered judgments in reflective equilibrium. McPherran interprets Plato’s religious dimension as like that of his teacher Socrates. McPherran shows how Plato appropriates, reshapes, and extends the religious conventions of his own time in the service of establishing the new enterprise of philosophy. Ac- cording to Taylor, Socrates believes that humans in general have the task of helping the gods by making their own souls as good as possible, and Socrates’ unique ability to cross-examine imposes on him the special task of helping others to become as good as possible. This conception of Socrates’ mission is Plato’s own, consisting in an extension of the traditional conception of piety as helping the gods. Brickhouse and Smith propose a new understanding of Socratic moral psychology—one that retains the standard view of Socrates as an intellectualist, but also recognizes roles in human agency for appetites and passions. They compare and contrast the Socratic view to the picture of moral psychology we get in other dialogues of Plato. Hardy also proposes a new, non-reductive understanding of Socratic eudaimonism—he argues that Socrates invokes a very rich and complex notion of the “Knowledge of the Good and Bad”, which is associated with the motivating forces of the virtues. Rudebusch defends Socrates’ argument that knowledge can never be impotent in the face of psychic passions. He considers the standard objections: that knowledge cannot weigh incom- mensurable human values, and that brute desire, all by itself, is capable of moving the soul to action. Aristotle: Anagnostopoulos interprets Aristotle on the nature and acquisition of virtue. Though virtue of character, aiming at human happiness, requires a complex awareness of multiple dimensions of one’s experience, it is not properly a cognitive capacity. Thus it requires habituation, not education, according to Aristotle, in order to align the unruly elements of the soul with reason’s knowledge of what promotes happiness. Shields explains Aristotle’s doctrine that goodness is meant in many ways as the doctrine that there are different analyses of goodness for different types of circumstance, just as for being. He finds Aristotle to argue for this conclusion, against Plato’s doctrine of the unity of the Good, by applying the tests for homonymy and as an immediate cons- equence of the doctrine of categories. Shields evaluates the issue as unresolved at present. Russell discusses Aristotle’s account of practical deliberation and its virtue, intelligence (phronesis). He relates the account to contemporary philo- sophical controversies surrounding Aristotle’s view that intelligence is neces- sary for moral virtue, including the objections that in some cases it is unnecessary or even impedes human goodness. Frede examines the advantages and disadvantages of Aristotle’s virtue ethics. She explains the general Greek con- ceptions of happiness and virtue, Aristotle’s conception of phronesis and compares the Aristotle’s ethics with modern accounts. Liske discusses the question of whether the Aristotelian account of virtue entails an ethical-psy- chological determinism. He argues that Aristotle’s understanding of hexis allows for free action and ethical responsibility : By making decisions for good actions we are able to stabilize our character (hexis). Hellenistic and Roman: Annas defends an account of stoic ethics, according to which the three parts of Stoicism—logic, physics, and ethics—are integrated as the parts of an egg, not as the parts of a building. Since by this analogy no one part is a foundation for the rest, pedagogical decisions may govern the choice of numerous, equally valid, presentations of Stoic ethics. Piering interprets the Cynic way of life as a distinctive philosophy. In their ethics, Cynics value neither pleasure nor tradition but personal liberty, which they achieve by self-suffi- ciency and display in speech that is frank to the point of insult. Plotinus and Neoplatonism: Gerson outlines the place of ordinary civic virtue as well as philosophically contemplative excellence in Neoplatonism. In doing so he attempts to show how one and the same good can be both action-guiding in human life and be the absolute simple One that grounds the explanation of everything in the universe. Delcomminette follows Plotinus’s path to the Good as the foundation of free will, first in the freedom of Intellect and then in the “more than freedom” of the One. Plotinus postulates these divinities as not outside but within each self, saving him from the contradiction of an external foundation for a truly free will. General Topics: Halbig discusses the thesis on the unity of virtues. He dis- tinguishes the thesis of the identity of virtues and the thesis of a reciprocity of virtues and argues that the various virtues form a unity (in terms of reciprocity) since virtues cannot bring about any bad action. Detel examines Plato’s and Aristotle’s conceptions of normativity : Plato and Aristotle (i) entertained hybrid theories of normativity by distinguishing functional, semantic and ethical normativity, (ii) located the ultimate source of normativity in standards of a good life, and thus (iii) took semantic normativity to be a derived form of normativity. Detel argues that hybrid theories of normativity are—from a mo- dern point of view—still promising. Ho ̈ffe defends the Ancient conception of an art of living against Modern objections. Whereas many Modern philosophers think that we have to replace Ancient eudaimonism by the idea of moral obligation (Pflicht), Ho ̈ffe argues that Eudaimonism and autonomy-based ethics can be reconciled and integrated into a comprehensive and promising theory of a good life, if we enrich the idea of autonomy by the central elements of Ancient eudaimonism. Some common themes: The topics in Chinese and Hindu ethics are perhaps more familiar to modern western sensibilities than Homeric and even Socratic. Anagnostopoulos, Brickhouse and Smith, Frede, Liske, Rudebusch, and Russell all consider in contrasting ways the role of moral character, apart from intellect, in ethics. Brickhouse / Smith, Hardy, and Rudebusch discuss the Socratic con- ception of moral knowledge. Brickhouse / Smith and Hardy retain the standard view of the so called Socratic Intellectualism. Shields and Gerson both consider the question whether there is a single genus of goodness, or if the term is a homonym. Bussanich, McPherran, Taylor, and Delcomminette all consider the relation between religion and ethics. Pfister, Piering, Delcomminette, and Liske all consider what sort of freedom is appropriate to human well-being. Halbig, Detel, and Ho ̈ffe propose interpretations of main themes of Ancient ethics. (shrink)

The claim that there is “no alternative”, to contemporary neoliberal capitalism is widespread today. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of the notion of reification to scrutinize the alleged necessity of the capitalist social order. Developed by Georg Lukács, the problem of reification refers to the experience of social arrangements as thinglike entities rather than as products of social construction. By addressing the problem of reification within a social ontology of forms of life, the occurrence of reification is understood as (...) resulting from the normatively neutral self-presentation of the capitalist form of life. To de-neutralize social norms that shape the capitalist form of life, this paper argues that social critique should turn to shared standpoints from which reification is experienced as a problem. Such standpoints can be found in social practices that are already involved in shared, normatively imbued forms of life beyond the reified logic of the capitalist form of life. Hence, it is argued that alternative forms of life are positioned to de-reify the norms that guide the capitalist form of life at large. (shrink)

There is a traditional debate in analytic aesthetics that surrounds the classification of film as Art. While much philosophy devoted to considering film has now moved beyond this debate and accepts film as a mass art, a sub-category of Art proper, it is worth re-considering the criticism of film pre-Deleuze. Much of the criticism of film as pseudo-art is expressed in moral terms. T. W. Adorno, for example, critiques film as ‘mass-cult’; mass produced culture which presents a ‘flattened’ version of (...) reality. Adorno worries about the passivity encouraged in viewers. Films are narrative artworks, received by an audience in a context, making the focus on the reception of the work important. The dialogue held between Adorno and Walter Benjamin post-WWII is interesting because, between them, they consider both the possible positive emancipatory and negative politicization effects of film as a mass produced and distributed story-telling medium. Reading Adorno alongside Benjamin is a way to highlight the role of the critical thinker who receives the film. Arguing that the critical thinker is a valuable citizen, this paper focuses on the value of critical thinking in the reception of cinematic artworks. It achieves this by reconsidering Adorno and Benjamin 's theories of mass art. (shrink)

An increasing number of regulations propose the notion of ‘AI audits’ as an enforcement mechanism for achieving transparency and accountability for artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Despite some converging norms around various forms of AI auditing, auditing for the purpose of compliance and assurance currently have little to no agreed upon practices, procedures, taxonomies, and standards. We propose the ‘criterion audit’ as an operationalizable compliance and assurance external audit framework. We model elements of this approach after financial auditing practices, and argue (...) that AI audits should similarly provide assurance to their stakeholders about AI organizations’ ability to govern their algorithms in ways that mitigate harms and uphold human values. We discuss the necessary conditions for the criterion audit, and provide a procedural blueprint for performing an audit engagement in practice. We illustrate how this framework can be adapted to current regulations by deriving the criteria on which ‘bias audits’ for hiring algorithms can be performed, as required by the recently effective New York City Local Law 144 of 2021. We conclude by offering critical discussion on the benefits, inherent limitations, and implementation challenges of applying practices of the more mature financial auditing industry to AI auditing where robust guardrails against quality assurance issues are only starting to emerge. Our discussion as informed by experiences in performing these audits in practice highlights the critical role that an audit ecosystem plays in ensuring the effectiveness of such methodology. (shrink)

The topic of a priori knowledge is approached through the theory of evidence. A shortcoming in traditional formulations of moderate rationalism and moderate empiricism is that they fail to explain why rational intuition and phenomenal experience count as basic sources of evidence. This explanatory gap is filled by modal reliabilism -- the theory that there is a qualified modal tie between basic sources of evidence and the truth. This tie to the truth is then explained by the theory of concept (...) possession: this tie is a consequence of what, by definition, it is to possess (i.e., to understand) one’s concepts. A corollary of the overall account is that the a priori disciplines (logic, mathematics, philosophy) can be largely autonomous from the empirical sciences. (shrink)

This book places Benjamin’s writing on revolution in the context of his conception of historical knowledge. The fundamental problem that faces any analysis of Benjamin’s approach to revolution is that he deploys notions that belong to the domain of individual experience. His theory of modernity with its emphasis on the disintegration of collective experience further aggravates the problem. Benjamin himself understood the problem of revolution to be primarily that of the conceptualization of collective experience (its possibility and sites) under the (...) conditions of modern bourgeois society. The novelty of his approach to revolution lies in the fact that he directly connects it with historical experience. Benjamin’s conception of revolution thus constitutes an integral part of his distinctive theory of historical knowledge, which is also essentially a theory of experience. Through a detailed study of Benjamin’s writings on the topics of the child and the dream, and an analysis of his ideas of history, the fulfilled wish, similitude and communist society, this book shows how the conceptual analysis of his corpus can get to the heart of Benjamin’s conception of revolutionary experience and distil its difficulties and mechanisms. (shrink)

Collected essays consider points of affinity and friction between Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. Despite being contemporaries, Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger never directly engaged with one another. Yet, Hannah Arendt, who knew both men, pointed out common ground between the two. Both were concerned with the destruction of metaphysics, the development of a new way of reading and understanding literature and art, and the formulation of radical theories about time and history. On the other hand, their life (...) trajectories and political commitments were radically different. In a 1930 letter, Benjamin told a friend that he had been reading Heidegger and that if the two were to engage with one another, “sparks will fly.” Acknowledging both their affinities and points of conflict, this volume stages that confrontation, focusing in particular on temporality, Romanticism, and politics in their work. (shrink)

Abstract According to Habermas' colonization thesis, reification is a social pathology that arises when the communicative infrastructure of the lifeworld is 'colonized' by money and power. In this paper I argue that, thirty years after the publication of the Theory of Communicative Action, this thesis remains compelling. However, while Habermas offers a functionalist explanation of reification, his normative criticism of it remains largely implicit: he never explains what is wrong with reification from the perspective of the people whose social relations (...) are reified. As a result, Habermas cannot explain why only some forms of colonization lead to reification effects. In particular, he suggests that reification effects result from the juridification of communicatively structured domains of action but not from the commodification of labour power. I criticize this argument and suggest that if the normative dimension of the colonization thesis is made explicit, a more nuanced explanation of reification becomes possible. (shrink)

We perceive smells as perduring complex entities within a distal array that might be conceived of as smellscapes. However, the philosophical orthodoxy of Odor Theories has been to deny that smells are perceived as having a distal location. Recent challenges have been mounted to Odor Theories’ veracity in handling the timescale of olfactory perception, how it individuates odors as a distal entities, and their claim that olfactory perception is not spatial. The paper does not aim to dispute these criticisms. Rather, (...) what will be shown is that Molecular Structure Theory, a refinement of Odor Theory, can be further developed to handle these challenges. The theory is further refined by focusing on distal perception that requires considering the perceptual object as mereologically complex persisting odor against a background scene conceived of as a smellscape. What will be offered is an expansion of Molecular Structure Theory to account for distal smell perception within natural environments. (shrink)

Olfactory perception provides a promising test case for enactivism, since smelling involves actively sampling our surrounding environment by sniffing. Smelling deploys implicit skillful knowledge of how our movement and the airflow around us yield olfactory experiences. The hybrid nature of olfactory experience makes it an ideal test case for enactivism with its esteem for touch and theoretical roots in vision. Olfaction is like vision in facilitating the perception of distal objects, yet it requires us to breath in and physically contact (...) the sensory object in a manner similar to touch. The paper offers an analysis of the central theoretical components of enactivism, whose soundness and empirical viability are tested using the empirical literature on sniffing. It will be shown that even if sniffing is an essential component of olfaction, the motoric component is not necessary for perceiving smells, which is contrary to the most crucial tenet of enactivism. Thus, the paper concludes that the theory cannot account for olfactory perception. (shrink)

Reductive representationalist theories of consciousness are yet to produce a satisfying account of pain’s affective component, the part that makes it painful. The paramount problem here is that that there seems to be no suitable candidate for what affective experience represents. This article suggests that affective experience represents the Darwinian fitness effects of events. I argue that, because of affective experience’s close association with motivation, natural selection will work to bring affect into covariance with the average fitness effects of types (...) of event, and that this covariance makes fitness effects a promising candidate for what affect represents. I also argue that this account is to be preferred to Cutter and Tye’s recent proposal that affect represents harmfulness, and answer an objection that Aydede and Fulkerson recently offered against representational accounts of affect. (shrink)

According to Milner and Goodale’s dual visual systems (DVS) theory, a division obtains between visual consciousness and motor action, in that the visual system producing conscious vision (the ventral stream) is distinct from the one guiding action (the dorsal stream). That there would be this division is often taken (by Andy Clark and others) to undermine the folk view on how consciousness and action relate. However, even if this division obtains, this leaves open the possibility that con- scious ventral information (...) is often transmitted to the uncon- scious dorsal stream and then used to guide action, a possibility seeming to preserve a significant role for consciousness in action. This article assesses this possibility. In course of doing so, we will review those arguments recently having been made against the DVS view on how visual consciousness and action relate (ones due to, e.g., Briscoe and Schwenkler, or Schenk and McIntosh). What we will find is that, if we properly analyze the data upon which these arguments are based, we are still left with the impression that the DVS view is largely correct; i.e., it is only rarely that visual experience guides action. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy has enjoyed renewed attention as an egalitarian alternative to contemporary inequality since it seems to uncompromisingly reassert the primacy of the state over the economy, enabling it to defend the modern welfare state against encroaching neoliberal markets. However, I argue that, when understood as a free-standing approach to politics, Kant’s doctrine of right shares essential features with the prevailing theories that legitimate really existing economic inequality. Like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, Kant understands the state’s function (...) as essentially coercive and, in justifying state coercion, he adopts a narrow conception of political freedom that formally preserves the right to choose while denying that the range of choices one actually has can be a matter of justice. As a result, Kant cannot identify various forms of social pressure as potential injustices even as he recognizes their power to create and sustain troubling inequalities. For both Kant and the neoliberals, the result is that economic relations almost never count as unjust forms of coercion, no matter how unequal they are. Views that identify coercion as the trigger for duties of justice are thus particularly ill-suited to orient us to contemporary inequality. (shrink)

Our sense of smell pervasively influences our most common behaviors and daily experience, yet little is known about olfactory consciousness. Over the past decade and a half research in both the fields of Consciousness Studies and Olfaction has blossomed, however, olfactory consciousness has received little to no attention. The olfactory systems unique anatomy, functional organization, sensory processes, and perceptual experiences offers a fecund area for exploring all aspects of consciousness, as well as a external perspective for re-examining the assumptions of (...) contemporary theories of consciousness. It has even been suggested that the olfactory system may represent the minimal neuroanatomy that is required for conscious processing. Here, we seek contributions that should serve as the foundation for future research concerning consciousness using olfaction as a model. -/- Given the variegated nature of research on consciousness, we seek original papers including review articles, original research, and theoretical contributions concerning the nature of olfactory consciousness. The scope of the special edition widely incorporates olfaction as it relates to Consciousness, Awareness, Attention, Phenomenal- or Access-Consciousness, and Qualia. Research concerning olfaction and cross-modal integration as it relates to conscious experience is also welcome. -/- As the initial foray into this uncharted area of research, we welcome contributions from across all disciplines contributing to cognitive neuroscience, including neurobiology, neurology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer sciences. It is our hope that this special edition will serve as the impetus for future interdisciplinary research on olfaction and consciousness. (shrink)

More than ever, it is in vogue to argue that no norms either play a role in or directly follow from the theory of mental content. In this paper, I present an intuitive theory of intentionality (including a theory of mental content) on which norms are constitutive of the intentional properties of attitude and content in order to show that this trend is misguided. Although this theory of intentionality—the teleological theory of intentional representation—does involve a commitment to representational norms, these (...) norms are not problematic in the way critics have suggested they would be. In particular, these norms do not guide thinking by motivating intentional agents to (intentionally) accord with them; as a result, no obvious vicious regress threatens the theory. In the final section of this paper, I argue that accepting this teleological theory of intentionality need not commit one to thinking that intentionality is the product of natural selection. (shrink)

Capital punishment—the legally authorized killing of a criminal offender by an agent of the state for the commission of a crime—stands in special need of moral justification. This is because execution is a particularly severe punishment. Execution is different in kind from monetary and custodial penalties in an obvious way: execution causes the death of an offender. While fines and incarceration set back some of one’s interests, death eliminates the possibility of setting and pursuing ends. While fines and incarceration narrow (...) one’s routes to happiness, death eliminates its possibility. Not surprisingly, there is much debate about the moral permissibility of capital punishment. This entry maps the terrain of this debate. The first section discusses justifications of the death penalty as they appear in major theories of punishment. The second section surveys moral objections to execution that apply to most justifications. The third addresses procedural criticisms, which do not target the morality of execution so much as the justice of its implementation. (shrink)

The motivational constraint on normative reasons says that a consideration is a normative reason for an agent to act only if it is logically possible for the agent to act for that reason, or at least to be moved so to act. The claim figures Zelig-like in philosophical debates about practical reasons: on hand, occasionally prominent, but never the focus of discussion. However, because it is entailed by a number of prominent views about normative reasons—including various forms of internalism and (...) some views that closely connect reasons to good practical reasoning—its truth or falsehood has important implications. Mark Schroeder (2007) and Julia Markovits (2014) have recently criticized the Motivational Constraint on the grounds of so-called “elusive reasons”: reasons for some agent to act that are such that it is logically impossible both that they are normative reasons for that agent and the agent is moved to act for those reasons. In response, a number of philosophers (Sinclair 2016; Ridge and McKeever 2012; Paakkunainen 2017) have attempted to reconcile blindspot reasons with the motivational constraint. My aim in this paper is to show that these conciliatory strategies fail to overcome the challenge posed by elusive reasons. First, I examine each strategy and argue that it unsuccessful on its own terms. Second, I adduce another type of elusive reason not heretofore discussed in the literature, and I argue that these strategies also cannot make this kind of reason consistent with the motivational constraint. Finally, I defend the existence of this kind of reason against an important objection. (shrink)

Although the critique of reification is a core commitment of critical theories, there is no widely accepted account of its normative foundation. In Lukács’s original analysis, this foundation is provided by a strong concept of practice which is, however, not acceptable from a contemporary point of view. I argue that the systematic character of reification theory can only be upheld if this concept is replaced by a more intersubjective notion of normative practices. Reification can then be analysed as a (...) second-order pathology of social practices, as an inhibition of reflexivity by their normative shape. The normative justification of such critique, however, turns out to be more context-dependent than it is usually imagined. (shrink)

This article introduces and defends the “pathological complexity thesis” as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins of minimal consciousness, or sentience, that connects the study of animal consciousness closely with work in behavioral ecology and evolutionary biology. I argue that consciousness is an adaptive solution to a design problem that led to the extinction of complex multicellular animal life following the Avalon explosion and that was subsequently solved during the Cambrian explosion. This is the economic trade-off problem of having to (...) deal with a complex body with high degrees of freedom, what I call “pathological complexity.” By modeling the explosion of this computational complexity using the resources of state-based behavioral and life history theory we will be able to provide an evolutionary bottom-up framework to make sense of subjective experience and its function in nature by paying close attention to the ecological lifestyles of different animals. (shrink)

Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about what a person values, whether a person is happy, whether a person has shown weakness of will, and whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain these observed (...) asymmetries based on moral judgment. Using the identical materials from previous studies in this area, a series of five experiments indicate that people show a general tendency to conclude that deep inside every individual there is a “true self” calling him or her to behave in ways that are morally virtuous. In turn, this belief causes people to hold different intuitions about what the agent values, whether the agent is happy, whether he or she has shown weakness of will, and whether he or she deserves praise or blame. These results not only help to answer important questions about how people attribute various mental states to others; they also contribute to important theoretical debates regarding how moral values may shape our beliefs about phenomena that, on the surface, appear to be decidedly non-moral in nature. (shrink)

Contemporary Humeans treat laws of nature as statements of exceptionless regularities that function as the axioms of the best deductive system. Such ‘Best System Accounts’ marry realism about laws with a denial of necessary connections among events. I argue that Hume’s predecessor, George Berkeley, offers a more sophisticated conception of laws, equally consistent with the absence of powers or necessary connections among events in the natural world. On this view, laws are not statements of regularities but the most general rules (...) God follows in producing the world. Pace most commentators, I argue that Berkeley’s view is neither instrumentalist nor reductionist. More important, the Berkeleyan Best System can solve some of the problems afflicting its Humean rivals, including the problems of theory choice and Nancy Cartwright’s ‘facticity’ dilemma. Some of these solutions are available in the contemporary context, without any appeal to God. Berkeley’s account deserves to be taken seriously in its own right. (shrink)

This dissertation aims to analyze, clarify, and reconstruct the concept of class consciousness by developing a dialectical account of political agency at work in the concept. I defend a dialectical account of agency, that includes both the way in which individuals come together to form groups, but also the capacity of a collective to transform social conditions. I argue that this account of political agency is necessary in order to understand the possibility of social transformation or change. I trace the (...) development of the relationship between consciousness and agency in the early tradition of Western Marxism, focusing primarily on the account of class consciousness given by Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness. Against his account of the world historical agency of a unified proletariat, however, I defend Theodor Adorno’s insistence on nonidentity, and the importance of unreconciled groups in capitalist society. In order to understand these groups, such as the vanguard, party, or proletariat, we must understand the way in which individuals form groups, as well as their inherent collectivity. -/- My account of the political agency at work in the concept of class consciousness is broadly speaking pluralist. I argue that a multiplicity of methodologies is needed in order to arrive at a complete picture of the concept. I defend an account of class consciousness that is neither reductive nor deflationary with respect to other dimensions of social domination. This class forward approach seeks to build intersectional political coalitions in order to undertake revolutionary action. Successful revolutionary social transformation is never guaranteed in advance; however, the concept of class consciousness, reconstructed through the lens of political agency, offers conceptual resources to address the problems of today, for the sake of a better tomorrow. (shrink)

Diminishing Marginal Utility is widely accepted as a law of human action, and therefor has become one of the primary premises of ethics, economics, and politics. In popular parlance, “diminishing returns” has entered into the cliches of common sense; in philosophical argument, it has achieved the status of an axiomatic assumption; and indeed, in terms of personal experience or folk psychology, it seems to largely hold true for goods in general over a range of consumption. However, a theory of diminishing (...) marginal utility rests on some assumptions that we ignore at our peril. The a priori and a posteriori proofs of diminishing marginal utility, as developed by the Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises and Hermann Heinrich Gossen, should be reassessed and critiqued from their fundamental principles to illuminate the theory’s pitfalls. Once these premises and their conclusions are not taken for granted, a more comprehensive and conscientious theory of value can be proposed: Complex or Inflecting Marginal Utility. (shrink)

There is a fundamental incompatibility between a developmental orientation to education and instrumental and scientistic conceptions of rationality that dominate educational inquiry. An expanded conception of rationality is provided in the critical theory of Jurgen Habermas. This study draws on Habermas' work to present a theory of inquiry that is consistent with a developmental perspective. I distinguish three interdependent realms of experience--the objective world of nature, the intersubjective world of society and the subjective world of each individual. Then, (...) I argue that current conceptions of rationality tend to reduce personal and interpersonal experience to the objective material realm. Under prevailing conceptions, human action is rational when it pursues valued ends guided by knowledge about the world and effective means-ends relationships. Both theories of knowledge and theories of value in these conceptions are inadequate for a developmental orientation. -/- First, knowledge is defined as justified true belief. Theories of truth are based on the correspondence of beliefs with an external world; theories of justification are based on perceptual certainty. These conceptions objectify experience by making experience an object of natural science and instrumental action separate from and external to the person. Such conceptions reduce experience to the objective material dimension and cannot adequately account for the personal and interpersonal dimensions of human experience and understanding. -/- Second, because value claims are not capable of justification by these standards, they are considered ultimately irrational and treated as subjectively held empirical properties of individuals. The only standard of rationality is efficiency and economy in the selection of means. Ethics is reduced to empirical science. But the removal of practical questions from public discourse divests action of ethical significance. With its strict separation of descriptive and normative domains, empirical-analytic inquiry can neither acknowledge its standard of instrumental efficiency nor reach into the practical arena to guide the selection of values and ends that orient and gude human action. Practical questions that cannot be framed in terms of technical problems cannot be taken seriously. -/- Whereas these conceptions of rationality are generally derived from theories of experienced based on individual consciousness, Habermas looks to language for a more adequate account of the intersubjective nature of experience. This account provides an expanded conception of rationality with theories for justifying beliefs and actions that incorporate the personal and interpersonal dimensions of experience so critical to a developmental perspective. Through an analysis of the universal pragmatic structure of language directed to the resolution of problematic truth claims and moral claims, this study presents a consensus theory of truth (for a more adequate theory of knowledge) and a communicative theory of ethics (based on a more adequate theory of human values). -/- The concept of truth refers to a universal pragmatic convention of the unforced agreement of an ideal community of inquirers. Ethical conduct is guided by norms that reflect a rational general will and that regulate genuine human needs. Problematic truth claims and moral claims are discursively justified by the force of the better argument under the conditions of an anticipated "ideal speech situation" inherent in the very structure of communication. Furthermore, a theory of inquiry is developed in which inquiry processes are represented as historically evolved extensions of developmental process in the three realms of experience. Three interrelated forms of inquiry are derived--empirical-analytic, hermeneutic and critical. I derive each from its respective experiential realm, and indicate the logic of inquiry, object domain, and kind of knowledge gained from each. -/- An exploration of the relationship between inquiry and development provides a foundation for a developmental orientation to education. Finally, the theory is contrasted with prevailing inquiry approaches in education and illustrated with an application to a particular educational problem. (shrink)

In a lengthy review article, C. Anthony Anderson criticizes the approach to property theory developed in Quality and Concept (1982). That approach is first-order, type-free, and broadly Russellian. Anderson favors Alonzo Church’s higher-order, type-theoretic, broadly Fregean approach. His worries concern the way in which the theory of intensional entities is developed. It is shown that the worries can be handled within the approach developed in the book but they remain serious obstacles for the Church approach. The discussion focuses on: (1) (...) the fine-grained/coarse-grained distinction, (2) proper names and definite descriptions, (3) the paradox of analysis and Mates’ puzzle, and (4) the logical, semantical, and intentional paradoxes. (shrink)

The history of philosophy is replete with attempts at invoking rationality as a means of directing and even subduing human desire and emotion. Understood as that which moves human beings to action, desire and emotion come to be associated with human freedom and rationality as a means of curbing that freedom. Plato, for instance, takes for granted a separation between thought and action that drives a wedge between our rational ability to exercise self-discipline and the free expression of desire and (...) emotion. Hobbes, on the other hand, replaces our internal ability for rational self-control with the external authority of the political State. So long as freedom and control are pitted against one another, human beings are incapable of attaining a symbiosis of these two elements of human action so essential to realizing true democracy. Unlike Plato, John Dewey sees in democracy the greatest potential for individual and social life. The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate how the educational philosophy of Dewey, which culminates in an educational aesthetic, appeals to and makes the most of the symbiosis of freedom and self-control, emotion and reason. Dewey’s educational aesthetic not only offers an alternative to traditional methods of education, but also demonstrates how the goal of a democratic way of life is made feasible by means of intelligently guided self-discipline—a form of self-control guided by intelligence that is not a constraint upon freedom, but instead embodies greater opportunity for freedom. I trace the basis for this synthesis, in the social-political and pedagogical principles of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Both Locke and Rousseau offer educational theories that begin turning our attention toward the essential partnership required of rationality and emotion. Dewey's educational aesthetic is then considered as a response to alienating forms of education that continue to pit control and freedom against one another, and which thwart the intellectual and emotional development necessary for autonomy and democratic forms of social organization. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the role that the concept of “presence of mind” (Geistesgegenwart) plays in Walter Benjamin’s thought, deepening lines of interpretation that are connected to other relevant concepts such as “attention” (Aufmerksamkeit) and “now-time” (Jetztzeit). It examines elements of Benjamin’s work that develop the philosophical importance of presence of mind, emphasizing its corporeal dimension and its aesthetic and critical relevance. The analysis covers fve lines of interpretation that intersect in different ways: (i) presence of mind (...) is a form of thought/action that should be cultivated as a way of dealing with the experience of shock; (ii) having presence of mind is an attitude that can be exercised; (iii) “seizing the day” involves the body and presupposes an experience of intensive time; (iv) the conceptual framework of presence of mind integrates elements related to play; and (v) by valuing the present, presence of mind implies a relationship between danger and a critical gesture – in Benjamin’s historical and political reflection, this gesture intertwines the individual and the collective dimensions. (shrink)

Heidegger develops his reading of a-lētheia as privative un-concealment (Unverborgenheit) in tandem with his early phenomenological theory of truth. He is not simply reinterpreting a word, but rather reading Greek philosophy as having a primordial understanding of truth which has itself been concealed in interpretation. After shedding medieval and modern presuppositions of truth as correspondence, the existential truth-experience shows itself, no longer left puzzlingly implicit in unsatisfactory conventional readings of Greek philosophy. In Sein und Zeit §44, Heidegger resolves interpretive difficulties (...) in Parmenides through his interpretation of alētheia and philologically grounds this reading in Heraclitus’s description of the unconcealing logos. Although this primordial sense of the word has already been obscured in Plato and Aristotle, the structural gradation of their theories of truth conserves the primordial pre-Socratic sense of truth as the experience of unconcealment. (shrink)

The study aimed at investigating the relationship between parental involvement and learners’ perceived attitude to their academic performance in Mathematics. To achieve this aim, the researcher used a sample of 134 parents and learners from grades 4-6 at Bungahan Elementary School. The researcher used the descriptive-correlational method of research, which utilized standardized questionnaires from published research. The study clearly revealed that learners’ attitudes toward Mathematics do not affect their academic performance in Mathematics. The result of the correlational analysis is that (...) learners’ perceived attitudes in Mathematics such as (a) Motivation and Support, (b) Anxiety in Learning, (c) Self-Efficacy in Learning Mathematics do not significantly affect their academic performance in Mathematics as these perceived attitudes got a significant level of greater than 0.05, therefore, the null hypothesis was accepted. However, among the different ways of parental involvement stated in the study, only the mentoring strategies provided by the parents during the indicated school year have been effective in increasing their performance in Mathematics. There is a significant relationship between the mentoring strategies of parents and learners’ academic performance; p= 0.016 (<0.05), which means a p-value smaller than 0.05 suggests that the correlation is statistically significant (at the 5 % level). The correlation coefficient for this is -0.253, which is negative. In other words: as the Mentoring Strategies increase, Learners’ Academic Performance decreases. Concerning the strength of the correlation, -0.253 can be said to be weak. Nevertheless, it is critical to investigate how parents can assist and contribute to their children's academic success. Conclusions were drawn and recommendations were offered. (shrink)

Nigeria’s so-called "baby factories" are a booming business, a secret adoption and child trafficking trade in which young women are captured or pressured into selling their newborns after delivery. In these factories, women as young as fourteen are expected to deliver infants for desperate buyers from around the world. The main reasons for the growth of the baby factory in Nigeria include a negative outlook towards sexual education for teenagers, pregnancy outside marriage, and a general distrust and dislike towards (...) open, legal adoption. The paper argues that the Nigerian government needs to take accountability to satisfy the United Nations millennium development goal of ending violence against women. -/- . (shrink)

This goal of this thesis in the philosophy of nature is to move us closer towards a true biological science of consciousness in which the evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity of consciousness are moved from the field’s periphery of investigations to its very centre. Rather than applying theories of consciousness built top-down on the human case to other animals, I argue that we require an evolutionary bottomup approach that begins with the very origins of subjective experience in order to (...) make sense of the place of mind in nature. To achieve this goal, I introduce and defend the pathological complexity thesis as both a framework for the scientific investigation of consciousness and as a lifemind continuity thesis about the origins and function of consciousness. (shrink)

In Religious Experience, Wayne Proudfoot argued that a tout court rejection of reductionism in accounts of religious experience was not viable. According to Proudfoot, it’s possible to distinguish between an illegitimate practice of descriptive reductionism and the legitimate practice of explanatory reductionism. The failure to distinguish between these two forms of reductionism resulted in a protective strategy, or an attempt to protect religious experience from the reach of scientific explanation. Among the theorists whom he accused of deploying this illegitimate strategy (...) Proudfoot included William James and his work in The Varieties of Religious Experience. In this article, I argue that while James does occasionally deploy a protective strategy in Varieties, this is not the only nor most important method of treating religious experience James developed. Implicit in his rejection of medical materialism, James not only deploys the protective strategy Proudfoot criticizes, but the pragmatic method with which he treats all claims. I argue that James’s pragmatic method leads to what James called noetic pluralism, or the view that there is no privileged knowledge practice, but a plurality of knowledge practices, and that this method puts pressure on the explanatory reductionist, who is implicitly committed to noetic monism. (shrink)

Like their contemporary counterparts, early modern philosophers find themselves in a predicament. On one hand, there are strong reasons to deny that sensations are representations. For there seems to be nothing in the world for them to represent. On the other hand, some sensory representations seem to be required for us to experience bodies. How else could one perceive the boundaries of a body, except by means of different shadings of color? I argue that Nicolas Malebranche offers an extreme -- (...) and ultimately unworkable -- attempt to solve this riddle. Most commentators claim that Malebranche defends an adverbial theory of sensation, according to which a sensation is merely a way in which an act of sensing happens. The adverbial reading is wrong, or so I argue. Once we arrive at a more accurate reading, we shall see that his position is much more strange than is currently thought. Nevertheless, Malebranche’s view is similar to the adverbial theory in one respect, albeit it at a very high level of generality. His view thus inherits two of the main problems that afflict adverbial theories. Although Malebranche fails to solve them, his ingenious attempts to do so are instructive. (shrink)

David Shoemaker has recently defended a response-dependent view of moral responsibility. We critically discuss some aspects of Shoemaker's view.

This study determined the effect of online teaching in Physics using the Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) strategy on the academic achievement and conceptual understanding of Grade 9 students. One intact class was subjected to a single-group pretest/posttest pre-experimental research design. Purposive sampling was applied, and selected 48 Grade 9 students for this study. The data gathered were interpreted quantitatively from the validated physics achievement test (PAT) and from the adopted energy-momentum concept test (EMCT), while, the learning experiences survey responses were interpreted (...) thematically. This study was conducted for a period of eight (8) weeks during the 4th quarter of the school year 2020-2021 at Junior High School in District II. The study's findings using descriptive and inferential statistics revealed a significant difference in the students' physics achievement mean scores and a significant difference in the students’ energy-momentum mean scores before and after their exposure to online teaching in physics using the Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) strategy. The class average normalized gain (g) of the 48 respondents on the adopted Energy-Momentum Concept Test (EMCT) resulted in statistically “high” normalized gain (g) in their conceptual understanding before and after their exposure to online teaching in physics using the Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) strategy. Furthermore, the learning experiences survey responses revealed positive results and improvement on the students’ learning experiences in JiTT’s warm-up exercises. Hence, it was concluded that the online teaching in physics using the Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) as a teaching-learning strategy might significantly improve the students' academic achievement and conceptual understanding in grade 9 physics. (shrink)

The various ways whereby spatial conditions afford to monumentalize culture and to appropriate geographically demarcated places in terms of individual and collective meaning structures has been amply documented in urban cultural studies. However, considerably less attention has been paid to how cultural identity is produced against the background of musical temporality. By way of a phenomenological inquiry into the staged spectacle of James Corden’s (the host of CBS Network’s Late Late Show) Carpool Karaoke, this paper addresses the issues of directly (...) lived experience and authenticity as facets of cultural identity. By critically discussing the assumptions of self-presence and auto-affectivity while singing and listening to one’s sung voice against the background of pre-recorded songs, the notion of directly lived musical experience is put to the test. Furthermore, by examining the dramaturgical scaffolding of Carpool Karaoke, the analysis points to wider implications for post-modern cultural studies in terms of an identified ironic reversal of modernist universal criteria of legitimacy in favor of a celebration of postmodern being-with inauthentically. The analysis of the selected Carpool Karaoke corpus utilizes a resourceful blend of phenomenological method, semiotics and interpretive videography while challenging embedded orthodoxies in the extant literature. (shrink)

In this thesis, William Alston’s influential defense of divine command theory is critically evaluated. It is argued that Alston, in positing evaluative particularism, undermines his defense because moral particularism, a rival theory of moral obligation, follows from evaluative particularism. Furthermore, the moral particularist need not deny that God has moral obligations. Even if evaluative particularism did not entail moral particularism, it fails to makes God’s commands non-arbitrary, contrary to Alston’s claims. On divine command theory, God does not make commands for (...) moral reasons, which is a fundamental principle of moral agency, necessary for any moral action to be non-arbitrary. Also, the divine nature does not uniquely pick out particular good actions to be obligatory. It is also objected that Alston’s evaluative particularism posits a God which is either conceptually incoherent or non-existent, demonstrated by an evidential argument from evil given in the paper. (shrink)

William Lane Craig has revived interest in the medieval kalām argument to the point where it is now one of the most discussed arguments for God’s existence in the secondary literature. Still, the reception of Craig’s argument among philosophers of religion has been mostly critical. In the interest of developing an argument that more philosophers of religion would be inclined to support, I will lay the philosophical groundwork for a new kalām cosmological argument that, in contrast with Craig’s argument, (...) does not adopt such controversial positions as the dynamic theory of time and the metaphysical impossibility of an actual infinite. (shrink)

The study aimed at investigating the relationship between parental involvement and learners’ perceived attitude to their academic performance in Mathematics. To achieve this aim, the researcher used a sample of 134 parents and learners from grades 4-6 at Bungahan Elementary School. The researcher used the descriptive-correlational method of research, which utilized standardized questionnaires from published research. The study clearly revealed that learners’ attitudes toward Mathematics do not affect their academic performance in Mathematics. The result of the correlational analysis is that (...) learners’ perceived attitudes in Mathematics such as (a) Motivation and Support, (b) Anxiety in Learning, (c) Self-Efficacy in Learning Mathematics do not significantly affect their academic performance in Mathematics as these perceived attitudes got a significant level of greater than 0.05, therefore, the null hypothesis was accepted. However, among the different ways of parental involvement stated in the study, only the mentoring strategies provided by the parents during the indicated school year have been effective in increasing their performance in Mathematics. There is a significant relationship between the mentoring strategies of parents and learners’ academic performance; p= 0.016 (<0.05), which means a p-value smaller than 0.05 suggests that the correlation is statistically significant (at the 5 % level). The correlation coefficient for this is -0.253, which is negative. In other words: as the Mentoring Strategies increase, Learners’ Academic Performance decreases. Concerning the strength of the correlation, -0.253 can be said to be weak. Nevertheless, it is critical to investigate how parents can assist and contribute to their children's academic success. Conclusions were drawn and recommendations were offered. (shrink)