In May 2021, Alan Bechaz, Racher Du, Will Cailes and Thomas Spiteri interviewed Sandra Leonie Field for UPJA’s Conversations from the Region. A series of discussions that invites philosophers from or based in Australasia to share their student and academic experiences. The segment looks into what inspires people to study philosophy, how they pursue their philosophical interests, and gives our audiences a better idea of philosophy as an undergraduate.

Since approval of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, it has been widely and repeatedly claimed that the GDPR will legally mandate a ‘right to explanation’ of all decisions made by automated or artificially intelligent algorithmic systems. This right to explanation is viewed as an ideal mechanism to enhance the accountability and transparency of automated decision-making. However, there are several reasons to doubt both the legal existence and the feasibility of such a right. In contrast to the (...) right to explanation of specific automated decisions claimed elsewhere, the GDPR only mandates that data subjects receive meaningful, but properly limited, information (Articles 13-15) about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of automated decision-making systems, what we term a ‘right to be informed’. Further, the ambiguity and limited scope of the ‘right not to be subject to automated decision-making’ contained in Article 22 (from which the alleged ‘right to explanation’ stems) raises questions over the protection actually afforded to data subjects. These problems show that the GDPR lacks precise language as well as explicit and well-defined rights and safeguards against automated decision-making, and therefore runs the risk of being toothless. We propose a number of legislative and policy steps that, if taken, may improve the transparency and accountability of automated decision-making when the GDPR comes into force in 2018. (shrink)

Those who wish to defend the role of aesthetic values in science face a dilemma: Either aesthetic language is used metaphorically for what are ultimately epistemic features, or aesthetic language is used literally but it is difficult to see the importance of such values in science. I introduce a new account that gets around this problem by looking to an overlooked source of aesthetic value in science: the relation between form and content. I argue that a fit between the content (...) of a thought experiment, and the way in which that content is formulated, can have important epistemic pay offs through contributing to scientific understanding. (shrink)

To create fair and accountable AI and robotics, we need precise regulation and better methods to certify, explain, and audit inscrutable systems.

Emotional hardcore and other music genres featuring screamed vocals are puzzling for the appreciator. The typical fan attaches appreciative value to musical screams of emotional pain, all the while acknowledging it would be inappropriate to hold similar attitudes towards their sonically similar everyday counterpart: actual human screaming. Call this the screamed vocals problem. To solve the problem, I argue we must attend to the anti-sublimating aims that get expressed in the emotional hardcore vocalist’s choice to scream the lyrics. Screamed vocals (...) help us see the value in rejecting (a) restrictive social norms of emotional expressiveness and (b) restrictive artistic norms about how one ought to express or represent pain in art—namely that if one is going to do so, one must ensure the pain has been ‘beautified’. In developing this second point, I argue that emotional hardcore is well-suited (although not individually so) for putting pressure on longstanding views in the history of aesthetics about the formal relationship between art and human pain. (shrink)

Conceivability is an important source of our beliefs about what is possible; inconceivability is an important source of our beliefs about what is impossible. What are the connections between the reliability of these sources? If one is reliable, does it follow that the other is also reliable? The central contention of this paper is that suitably qualified the reliability of inconceivability implies the reliability of conceivability, but the reliability of conceivability fails to imply the reliability of inconceivability.

This book offers a detailed study of the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza, focussing on their concept of power as potentia, concrete power, rather than power as potestas, authorised power. The focus on power as potentia generates a new conception of popular power. Radical democrats–whether drawing on Hobbes's 'sleeping sovereign' or on Spinoza's 'multitude'–understand popular power as something that transcends ordinary institutional politics, as for instance popular plebsites or mass movements. However, the book argues that these (...) understandings reflect a residual scholasticism which Hobbes and Spinoza ultimately repudiate. Instead, on the book's revisionist conception, a political phenomenon should be said to express popular power when it is both popular (it eliminates oligarchy and encompasses the whole polity), and also powerful (it robustly determines political and social outcomes). Two possible institutional forms that this popular power might take are distinguished: Hobbesian repressive egalitarianism, or Spinozist civic strengthening. But despite divergent institutional proposals, the book argues that both Hobbes and Spinoza share the conviction that there is nothing spontaneously egalitarian or good about human collective existence. From this point of view, the book accuses radical democrats of pernicious romanticism; the slow, meticulous work of organizational design and maintenance is the true centre of popular power. Three minute video summary available via HPBin3. Extended discussion on The Political Theory Review podcast. First chapter open access available via Oxford Scholarship Online. Videos of book talks at National University of Singapore (Centre for Legal Theory) and Universidad de Buenos Aires (Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani) available via YouTube. (See links below.). (shrink)

This chapter begins by sketching an account of morally responsible agency and the general conditions under which it may fail. We discuss how far individuals with psychiatric diagnoses may be exempt from morally responsible agency in the way that infants are, with examples drawn from a sample of diagnoses intended to make dierent issues salient. We further discuss a recent proposal that clinicians may hold patients responsible without blaming them for their acts. We also consider cognitively impaired subjects in the (...) light of related issues in moral and political theory, asking whether they have been unjustly excluded from liberal conceptions of political community due to their presumed lack of agency. (shrink)

Spanish translation of Field, S. L. (2014). 'Hobbes and the question of power'. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 52(1), 61-86. Thomas Hobbes has been hailed as the philosopher of power par excellence; however, I demonstrate that Hobbes’s conceptualization of political power is not stable across his texts. Once the distinction is made between the authorized and the effective power of the sovereign, it is no longer sufficient simply to defend a doctrine of the authorized power of the sovereign; such (...) a doctrine must be robustly complemented by an account of how the effective power commensurate to this authority might be achieved. Nor is this straightforward: for effective political power can fluctuate, sometimes severely. In this light, the prevalent juridical reading of Hobbes’s political philosophy is inadequate. (shrink)

Historically left to the margins, the topics of imagination and creativity have gained prominence in philosophy of science, challenging the once dominant distinction between ‘context of discovery’ and ‘context of justification’. The aim of this chapter is to explore imagination and creativity starting from issues within contemporary philosophy of science, making connections to these topics in other domains along the way. It discusses the recent literature on the role of imagination in models and thought experiments, and their comparison with fictions. (...) It then turns to the importance of constraints on imaginings in the scientific domain, as well as whether constraints can hinder creativity. The second part of the paper focuses on the social dimensions of science. It considers imagination and creativity of scientific communities, asks whether the institution of science promotes creativity (and whether we want it to) or if it encourages conservativeness, and ends with a reflection on the politics of imagination and creativity in science. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Genevieve Lloyd argues that when we follow Spinoza in understanding reason as a part of nature, we gain new insights into the human condition. Specifically, we gain a new political insight: we should respond to cultural difference with a pluralist ethos. This is because there is no pure universal reason; human minds find their reason shaped differently by their various embodied social contexts. Furthermore, we can use the resources of the imagination to bring this ethos about. In my response, (...) I offer a friendly challenge to Lloyd’s characterisation of the lessons of Spinoza’s philosophy. I argue that Lloyd’s Spinoza remains excessively unpolitical, even in the moment that he is brought to bear on contemporary politics. An unpluralistic attitude may well be rationally inferior, but is it really explained by insufficient or inappropriate imagination? To the contrary, a properly Spinozist account of reason must include an account of the concrete determinants of reason’s imperfect realisation in the world. In Spinoza’s own oeuvre, this is carried out through an ever-increasing—and ever more sociological—interest in the political structures within which individual reason flourishes or withers. (shrink)

According to a recent interpretive orthodoxy, Spinoza is a profoundly democratic theorist of state authority. I reject this orthodoxy. To be sure, for Spinoza, a political order succeeds in proportion as it harnesses the power of the people within it. However, Spinoza shows that political inclusion is only one possible strategy to this end; equally if not more useful is political exclusion, so long as it maintains what I call the depoliticised acquiescence of those excluded.

Although high-performance human resource practices do not directly affect corporate social performance strengths, they do positively affect CSP strengths in companies that are highly innovative or have high levels of slack. High-performance human resource management practices also directly and negatively affect CSP concerns. Drawing on the resource-based view and using secondary data from an objective, third-party database, the authors develop and test hypotheses about how high-performance HRM affects a company’s CSP strengths and concerns. Findings suggest that HRM and innovation are (...) important capabilities because they create and enhance other capabilities. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes has been hailed as the philosopher of power par excellence; however, I demonstrate that Hobbes’s conceptualization of political power is not stable across his texts. Once the distinction is made between the authorized and the effective power of the sovereign, it is no longer sufficient simply to defend a doctrine of the authorized power of the sovereign; such a doctrine must be robustly complemented by an account of how the effective power commensurate to this authority might be achieved. (...) Nor is this straightforward: for effective political power can fluctuate, sometimes severely. In this light, the prevalent juridical reading of Hobbes’s political philosophy is inadequate. (shrink)

The central claim of Schopenhauer’s account of human motivation is that ‘cognition is the medium of motives’. In light of motivation’s cognitively mediated structure, he contends that human beings are caused to act by ‘mere thoughts’, what he refers to metaphorically as ‘fine, invisible threads’. Despite this avowedly intellectualist handling of the subject, some commentators remain convinced that Schopenhauer is best read as accepting the ‘Humean truism’ that reason alone never motivates; rather, motivation always has its source in desire together (...) with instrumental belief (Young 1987). Here, I raise some doubts for the Humean reading by arguing that it does not take sufficient account of the transformative effects of cognitive mediation, effects which support cases of non-desiderative motivation. I argue in particular that Schopenhauer permits cases of motivation by the essentially cognitive states of imagination and recognition. Tracing this intellectualist strand in Schopenhauer’s view of motivation has two important results. First, it unmasks an important structural role for Besonnenheit (reflectiveness) in his account of practical agency, thereby revealing a unified thread running throughout his system; second, we alight on a possible ‘expressivist’ picture of his account of motivation, something it shares with his broader theory of action. (shrink)

Hobbes’s science of politics rests on a dual analysis of human beings: humans as complex material bodies in a network of mechanical forces, prone to passions and irrationality; and humans as subjects of right and obligation, morally exhortable by appeal to the standards of reason. The science of politics proposes an absolutist model of politics. If this proposal is not to be idle utopianism, the enduring functioning of the model needs to be compatible with the materialist analysis of human behaviour. (...) In this paper, I argue that Hobbes's attempts to render his science of politics compatible with his materialism are only partly successful; a fuller compatibility is achieved in the political writings of Spinoza. -/- Published with reply: Luke O'Sullivan, 'Sovereigns and citizens: a response to Field', ibid., 221-224. Reprinted as: Sandra Field (2015), 'Hobbes and human irrationality', in T. Nardin (ed.) Rationality in Politics and its Limits, Abingdon: Routledge, 31-44. With reply: Luke O'Sullivan, 'Sovereigns and citizens: a response to Field', ibid., 45-48. (shrink)

Joseph Newhard (2017) argues that a libertarian anarchist society would be at a serious military disadvantage if it extended the nonaggression principle to include potential foreign invaders. He goes so far as to recommend cultivating the ability to launch a nuclear attack on foreign cities. In contrast, I argue that the free society would derive its strength from a total commitment to property rights and the protection of innocent life. Both theory and history suggest that a free society would be (...) capable of defending itself, and indeed that it would probably use other means to avoid military conflict altogether. (shrink)

This paper looks at an argument strategy for assessing the epistemic closure principle. This is the principle that says knowledge is closed under known entailment; or (roughly) if S knows p and S knows that p entails q, then S knows that q. The strategy in question looks to the individual conditions on knowledge to see if they are closed. According to one conjecture, if all the individual conditions are closed, then so too is knowledge. I give a deductive argument (...) for this conjecture. According to a second conjecture, if one (or more) condition is not closed, then neither is knowledge. I give an inductive argument for this conjecture. In sum, I defend the strategy by defending the claim that knowledge is closed if, and only if, all the conditions on knowledge are closed. After making my case, I look at what this means for the debate over whether knowledge is closed. (shrink)

The traditional way of drawing the a priori/a posteriori distinction, bequeathed to us by Kant, leads to overestimating the role that experience plays in justifying ourbeliefs. There is an irony in this: though Kant was in the rationalist camp, his way of drawing the distinction gives an unfair advantage to radical empiricism. I offer an alternative way of drawing the distinction, one that does not bias the rationalist/empiricist debate.

This paper is aimed at understanding one central aspect of Bolzano's views on deductive knowledge: what it means for a proposition and for a term to be known a priori. I argue that, for Bolzano, a priori knowledge is knowledge by virtue of meaning and that Bolzano has substantial views about meaning and what it is to know the latter. In particular, Bolzano believes that meaning is determined by implicit definition, i.e. the fundamental propositions in a deductive system. I go (...) into some detail in presenting and discussing Bolzano's views on grounding, a priori knowledge and implicit definition. I explain why other aspects of Bolzano's theory and, in particular, his peculiar understanding of analyticity and the related notion of Ableitbarkeit might, as it has invariably in the past, mislead one to believe that Bolzano lacks a significant account oï a priori knowledge. Throughout the paper, I point out to the ways in which, in this respect, Bolzano's antagonistic relationship to Kant directly shaped his own views. (shrink)

Spanish translation of Field, S. L. (2012). 'Democracy and the multitude: Spinoza against Negri'. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, 59(131), 21-40. Translated by María Cecilia Padilla and Gonzalo Ricci Cernadas. Negri celebra una concepción de la democracia en la que los poderes concretos de los individuos humanos no se alienan sino que se agregan: una democracia de la multitud. Pero ¿cómo puede actuar la multitud sin alienar el poder de nadie? Para contestar esta dificultad, Negri explícitamente apela (...) a Spinoza. Sin embargo, en este trabajo, sostengo que la filosofía de Spinoza no respalda el proyecto de Negri. Por el contrario, argumento que la multitud spinozista evita la jerarquía interna por medio de la mediación de las instituciones políticas y no a pesar de ellas; de la misma manera, estas instituciones tampoco simplemente emanan de la multitud tal cual es, sino que estructuran, contienen y canalizan sus pasiones. En particular, las instituciones requeridas no son las de la democracia simple y directa. Puede ser que existan otros argumentos no spinozistas en los cuales Negri pueda basar su teoría, pero no puede defender legítimamente su concepción de la multitud democrática apelando a Spinoza. (shrink)

This chapter corrects for Susan Sontag's undeserved neglect by contemporary moral philosophers by bringing awareness to some of the unique metaethical insights born of her reflections on photographic representations of evil. I argue that Sontag's thought provides fertile ground for thinking about: (1) moral perception and its relation to moral knowledge; and (2) the epistemic and moral value of our emotional responses to the misery and suffering of others. I show that, contrary to standard moral perception theory (e.g. Blum 1994), (...) Sontag holds that we can have general moral perceptual knowledge. I then explore Sontag's idea that certain emotional responses, like sympathy and compassion, can sometimes be impertinent, in virtue of their having false or illusory content. I explain why this is so, and show the epistemic and motivational problems it poses for moral sentimentalism. (shrink)

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

Negri celebrates a conception of democracy in which the concrete powers of individual humans are not alienated away, but rather are added together: this is a democracy of the multitude. But how can the multitude act without alienating anyone’s power? To answer this difficulty, Negri explicitly appeals to Spinoza. Nonetheless, in this paper, I argue that Spinoza’s philosophy does not support Negri’s project. I argue that the Spinozist multitude avoids internal hierarchy through the mediation of political institutions and not in (...) spite of them; nor do these institutions merely emanate from the multitude as it is, but rather they structure, restrain and channel its passions. In particular, the required institutions are not those of a simple direct democracy. There may be other non-Spinozist arguments on which Negri can ground his theory, but he cannot legitimately defend his conception of the democratic multitude by appeal to Spinoza. (shrink)

It may be time to question analytic philosophy’s structural ignorance of the methods of ordinary language philosophy. Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? upsets the analytic tradition to this end, pursuing a “linguistic phenomenology” that focuses on ordinary language use as a resource for describing the world. Cavell thereby entrusts the tradition with a more ambitious and concrete philosophical task.

In this paper, I articulate two Hobbesian models of interpersonal power relations that can be used to understand gender relations in society: what I will call the dominion model and the deference model. The dominion model discerns vertical subjection to another's will, whereas by contrast the deference model places individuals in a complex and shifting webs of favor and disfavor. Hobbes himself analyses gender relations through the dominion model. Indeed, more broadly this is the most prominent model of interpersonal power (...) relations throughout his texts. It is this model which is also reflected in the very rich existing feminist literature on Hobbes. However, the deference model, emerging only late in Hobbes's oeuvre, offers a superior general rubric for understanding interpersonal power relations. In particular, in light of its ability to grasp informal and diffuse relations of power, I argue that it offers useful insights for thinking about gender relations in our post-coverture era. (shrink)

It is common to assimilate Marx’s and Spinoza’s conceptions of democracy. In this chapter, I assess the relation between Marx’s early idea of “true democracy” and Spinozist democracy, both the historical influence and the theoretical affinity. Drawing on Marx’s student notebooks on Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, I show there was a historical influence. However, at the theoretical level, I argue that a sharp distinction must be drawn. Philosophically, Spinoza’s commitment to understanding politics through real concrete powers does not support with Marx’s (...) anti-institutional conception of true democracy. And as a matter of social theory, the gap between civil society and the state which so troubles Marx is a development of modernity that has not entered Spinoza's premodern field of view. Marx’s true democracy was also influenced by his study of Rousseau, and theoretically, it is just as close if not closer to Rousseau as to Spinoza. (shrink)

This note evaluates the claim of Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature that the advent of strong states led to a decline in violence. I test this claim in the modern context, measuring the effect of the strength of government in lower-income countries on reductions in homicide rates. The strength of government is measured using Polity IV, Worldwide Governance Indicators, and government consumption as a percentage of GDP. The data do not support Pinker’s hypothesis.

Integrity is often conceived as a heroic ideal: the person of integrity sticks to what they believe is right, regardless of the consequences. In this article, I defend a conception of ordinary integrity, for people who either do not desire or are unable to be moral martyrs. Drawing on the writings of seventeenth century thinker Huang Zongxi, I propose refocussing attention away from an abstract ideal of integrity, to instead consider the institutional conditions whereby it is made safe not to (...) be servile. (shrink)

Political protesters often don’t play by the rules. Think of the Occupy Movement, which brought lower Manhattan to a standstill in 2011 under the slogan, “We are the 99%”. Closer to home, think of the refugee activists who assisted a breakout from South Australia’s Woomera detention centre in 2002. Both are examples of contentious politics, or forms of political engagement outside the institutional channels of political decision-making. The democratic credentials of contentious politics are highly ambivalent. On the one hand, contentious (...) politics appears to have insufficient respect for democratic decision. Protesters are often forceful, uncivil and rowdy, aiming to disproportionately influence policy. But shouldn’t proposals be put forward with civility through the proper channels? And shouldn’t their proponents accept with good grace if they are democratically rebuffed? A closer look at the history of political thought can provide us with the framework to assess the case for and against the democratic reasonableness of contentious politics. (shrink)

In October 2016, the White House, the European Parliament, and the UK House of Commons each issued a report outlining their visions on how to prepare society for the widespread use of artificial intelligence. In this article, we provide a comparative assessment of these three reports in order to facilitate the design of policies favourable to the development of a ‘good AI society’. To do so, we examine how each report addresses the following three topics: the development of a ‘good (...) AI society’; the role and responsibility of the government, the private sector, and the research community in pursuing such a development; and where the recommendations to support such a development may be in need of improvement. Our analysis concludes that the reports address adequately various ethical, social, and economic topics, but come short of providing an overarching political vision and long-term strategy for the development of a ‘good AI society’. In order to contribute to fill this gap, in the conclusion we suggest a two-pronged approach. (shrink)

The European Hobbes Society Online Colloquium featured my book, Potentia: Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics, with critical commentaries from Alissa MacMillan, Chris Holman, and Justin Steinberg. This is my response to their commentaries.

The European Hobbes Society Online Colloquium featured my book, Potentia: Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics. This is a précis of the book.

As effective altruists often point out affluent people can do great good for others without having to make significant self-sacrifices. What is the correct moral assessment of patterns of giving that bring about great good and yet carry little in the way of self-sacrifice? Here I will clarify this question, state why it is important, and argue for an answer to it. After sketching the intuitive category of the morally best acts, I argue that self-sacrifice is not a condition that (...) an act must meet to be among the morally best acts. I argue that self-sacrifice is instead a condition that agents must meet to be deserving of the highest praise. (shrink)

Students often have difficulty connecting theoretical and text-based scholarship to the real world. When teaching in Asia, this disconnection is exacerbated by the European/American focus of many canonical texts, whereas students' own experiences are primarily Asian. However, in my discipline of political philosophy, this problem receives little recognition nor is it comprehensively addressed. In this paper, I propose that the problem must be taken seriously, and I share my own experiences with a novel pedagogical strategy which might offer a possible (...) path forward. Recent scholarship has championed an active learning approach, where students engage in their own research, and deliver outward-facing products that have a meaning and purpose beyond the confines of the student-professor relationship. In this spirit, I have put into practice a strategy of course design, where active learning is used to overcome students' disconnection with the course content. In particular, as a major component of course assessment, students are required to write an 'opinion piece', which is then showcased on a public website. The opinion piece must address a real-world issue which the student himself or herself selects and deems important; furthermore, it must build on the theoretical tools of the course and be written in a style which makes it accessible to a wider audience. I discuss the implementation of this strategy in two political philosophy courses, including strategies to avoid 'dumbing down' and ‘diluting’ the process of critical thinking. While no formal analysis of impact of the strategy on learning outcomes has been conducted, an anonymous pedagogical survey has yielded an overwhelmingly positive response for students' self-reported perceptions of the curricular innovations. (shrink)

Is there something about the deep logic of democracy that destines it to succeed in the world? Democracy, the form of politics that includes everyone as equals – does it perhaps suit human nature better than the alternatives? After all, surely any person who is excluded from the decision-making in a society will be more liable to rise up against it. From ancient thinkers like Seneca to contemporary thinkers like Francis Fukuyama, we can see some version of this line of (...) thought. Seneca thought that tyrannies could never last long; Fukuyama famously argued that liberal democracy is the end of history. I want to focus instead on the person credited with giving the most direct and uncompromising statement of this thought: Benedict de Spinoza. However, in this article, I argue to the contrary that Spinoza’s view of aristocracy should give pause to radical democrats. He does not see a historical movement towards democracy, nor does he see the superiority of democracy as written into human nature. (shrink)

The sensitivity condition on knowledge says that one knows that P only if one would not believe that P if P were false. Difficulties for this condition are now well documented. Keith DeRose has recently suggested a revised sensitivity condition that is designed to avoid some of these difficulties. We argue, however, that there are decisive objections to DeRose’s revised condition. Yet rather than simply abandoning his proposed condition, we uncover a rationale for its adoption, a rationale which suggests a (...) further revision that avoids our objections as well as others. The payoff is considerable: along the way to our revision, we learn lessons about the epistemic significance of certain explanatory relations, about how we ought to envisage epistemic closure principles, and about the epistemic significance of methods of belief formation. (shrink)

The concept of imperium is central to Spinoza's political philosophy. Imperium denotes authority to rule, or sovereignty. By extension, it also denotes the political order structured by that sovereignty, or in other words, the state. Spinoza argues that reason recommends that we live in a state, and indeed, humans are hardly ever outside a state. But what is the source and scope of the sovereignty under which we live? In some sense, it is linked to popular power, but how precisely, (...) and how is this popular grounding to be reconciled with the absolutist elements in Spinoza's texts? Against prominent liberal and radical democratic interpretations, I argue that Spinoza's insistence on linking imperium to the power of the people amounts to a normative attitude towards politics in which the formal features of a political system are less significant than the concrete everyday functioning of that system. Furthermore, I argue that its good functioning is importantly a product of an institutional order which does not simply defer to human individuality or to the primordial multitude, but instead, actively shapes them. While it may be worthwhile railing against monarchy and aristocracy and demanding liberal or radical democracy, the prior and more important challenge is to increase the robustness and resilience of the multitude within whatever form of state presents itself, through boring, meticulous, and incremental institutional design. For Spinoza, it is a robust and resilient political order that truly merits being called absolute. (shrink)

Jusqu'à maintenant, il semble qu'on n'ait pas établi de lien entre le rejet par Bolzano de la notation quantificationnelle des propositions universelles de la logique traditionnelle et l'articulation inédite de sa notion de validité universelle. C'est ce que je veux faire ici. En particulier, dans la mesure où l'analyticité est un cas spécial de la validité universelle, j'ai l'intention de défendre l'idée qui veut que la notion bolzanienne d'analyticité cherche à résoudre des problèmes qui sont intrinsèquement liés à la théorie (...) traditionnelle de la quantification universelle tels qu'ils surviennent, notamment avec le traitement kantien de l'analyticité. It seems that the connection between Bolzano's rejection of the traditional quantificational notation for universal propositions and the articulation of his notion of universal validity has remained, until today, perfectly unnoticed. In this paper, I will show that there is such a connection. Particularly, since analyticity is a special case of universal validity, my intention is to show that the problems to which Bolzano's perfectly original account of analyticity seeks to find an answer are intrinsically related to the traditional conception of universal quantification as it arises in the context of Kant's treatment of analyticity. (shrink)

Letheby’s book is an engaging and crystal-clear exploration of the philosophical issues raised by the use of psychedelic drugs. In this paper, we focus on the epistemological issues Letheby examines in chapter 8 and argue that his analysis requires an agency-first approach to epistemic evaluation. On an agency-first approach, epistemic evaluation is about identifying the skills agents needs to acquire in order to pursue and fulfil their epistemic goals.

In the heyday of linguistic philosophy an experimental philosophy movement was born, and this chapter tells its story, both in its historical and philosophical context and as it is connected to controversies about experimental philosophy today. From its humble beginnings at the Vienna Circle, the movement matured into a vibrant research program at Oslo, and sought adventure at Berkeley thereafter. The harsh and uncharitable reaction it met is surprising but understandable in light of disciplinary tensions and the legacy of antipsychologism—sentiments (...) and arguments which have reemerged today, albeit in modified form. Yet the research at Oslo remained unperturbed and it flourished in both its theory and its applications, which spanned the philosophical domain. The Berkeley years were short but intense, as exemplified by their engagement with ordinary-language philosophy, J.L. Austin, and the theory of communicative significance. (shrink)

A capability approach has been proposed to risk analysis, where risk is conceptualized as the probability that capabilities are reduced. Capabilities refer to the genuine opportunities of individuals to achieve valuable doings and beings, such as being adequately nourished. Such doings and beings are called functionings. A current debate in risk analysis and other fields where a capability approach has been developed concerns whether capabilities or actual achieved functionings should be used. This paper argues that in risk analysis the consequences (...) of hazardous scenarios should be conceptualized in terms of capabilities, not achieved functionings. Furthermore, the paper proposes a method for assessing capabilities, which considers the levels of achieved functionings of other individuals with similar boundary conditions. The capability of an individual can then be captured statistically based on the variability of the achieved functionings over the considered population. (shrink)

On considère souvent, à la suite des ouvrages classiques de J. Bouveresse, que Wittgenstein veut opérer un rejet ou une critique de la subjectivité. Il semble cependant que les derniers textes de Wittgenstein consacrés à la philosophie de la psychologie permettent de modifier partiellement ce point de vue, et défaire place à une conception spécifique de la subjectivité, redéfinissant un sujet dépsychologisé voire désubjectivé, qui n'est plus le point sans étendue du Tractatus, ni le sujet métaphysique, ni le sujet de (...) la psychologie, mais simplement une voix ordinaire. Wittgenstein's later work is often held by critics in France, following e.g. Jacques Bouveresse's insights, to be operating a criticism of both interiority and subjectivity. A reading of Wittgenstein's later writings on the philosophy of psychology might somehow change such a point of view, and redefine a specific view — as a de-psychologized species — of subjectivity in Wittgenstein's writing, thus redefining the wittgensteinian subject in terms of an ordinary voice. (shrink)

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

ABSTRACTThis article offers a novel sceptical argument that the sensitivity-contextualist must say is sound; moreover, she must say that the conclusion of this argument is true at ordinary standards. The view under scrutiny has it that in different contexts knowledge-attributing sentences express different propositions, propositions which differ in the stretch of worlds across which the subject is required to track the truth. I identify the underlying reason for the sceptical result and argue that it makes sensitivity-contextualism irremediably flawed. Contextualists, I (...) conclude, should abandon sensitivity for some other piece of epistemic machinery. (shrink)

El artículo ofrece un panorama del precedente en el Civil Law con el objetivo de distinguir los problemas que pueden presentarse en los sistemas jurídicos que tienen una práctica formal o institucionalizada de precedente, de aquellos en los que no la hay. Se identificó que se introdujo el precedente como una forma de responder a las crecientes demandas de administración de justicia en la materia y delimitar la discrecionalidad del operador jurídico. Por tanto, la tesis de fondo de este trabajo (...) es que, en la operación regular de los sistemas jurídicos del Civil Law, tanto los tribunales constitucionales y la jurisdicción en general identificaron la necesidad práctica de dotar de contornos a los derechos humanos —en tanto disposiciones jurídicas a concretar jurisdiccionalmente—. (shrink)