This essay is an inquiry into John McDowell’s thinking on ‘subjectivity.’ The project consists in two parts. On the one hand, I will discuss how McDowell understands and responds to the various issues he is tackling; on the other, I will approach relevant issues concerning subjectivity by considering different aspects of it: a subject as a perceiver, knower, thinker, speaker, agent, person and (self-) conscious being in the world. The inquiry begins by identifying and resolving a tension generated by the (...) very idea of ‘rational animal’: human beings are at the same time natural and rational. Later the inquiry proceeds by considering how McDowell’s notion of ‘second nature’ enables us to be human subjects with many faces. By going through the diagnoses and responses of McDowell, two central problems in modern and contemporary philosophy – the narrow conception of nature and the Cartesian inner space model – are identified and repelled. In Episode N I first urge that we should leave room for a certain notion of ‘world.’ I further argue that mentality has many aspects, and to understand those aspects is to understand the many faces of human subject. In Episode Ⅰ the Aristotelian notion of ‘second nature’ is discussed in order to resolve the tension in the very idea of ‘rational animal.’ Later I reply to some worries about this maneuver, including the objection from Crispin Wright. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s distinction between world and environment is introduced and related to McDowell’s thinking. Episode Ⅱ discusses perception and knowledge; McDowell’s main target – the Cartesian inner space – is introduced and criticized. Barry Stroud’s and Simon Blackburn’s positions are evaluated. Later I connect the main theme of Mind and World to the present context; in particular, I discuss McDowell’s invocation of Donald Davidson and Immanuel Kant. And then I discuss a common accusation of idealism, and Robert Brandom’s accusation of ‘residual individualism.’ Episode Ⅲ concentrates on Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein, arguing that the master thesis behind the rule-following paradox is a version of the inner space model, and that Kripke’s Wittgenstein is not Wittgenstein. Martin Kusch’s objections are answered; Michael Dummett’s demand of reductionism is rebutted. After this, I turn to Davidson’s ‘no language’ claim, and discuss to what extent McDowell agrees with him. In Episode Ⅳ I evaluate objections from Hubert Dreyfus concerning action and agency. I discuss how Dreyfus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty commit ‘the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect’ identified by McDowell. I answer Michael Ayer’s charge of intellectualism in passing. Later I bring in McDowell’s objections to Derek Parfit on personhood and to Davidson on the mind-body relation. In Episode Ⅴ I focus on consciousness and self-consciousness. McDowell applies his argument against Parfit to Kant, but Maximilian de Gaynesford dissents. I reply to his objections on McDowell’s behalf. I further connect this to McDowell’s attacks on the dualism of scheme and content. This leads to my McDowellian rejection to the existence of qualia, and further brings me to the debate between intentionalism and disjunctivism in the context of the argument from illusion. I argue against Tim Crane’s ways of conceiving issues about intentionalism and the argument from illusion. Varieties of disjunctivism are also discussed. In my Epilogue, I express my worry about McDowell’s notion of ‘self-determining subjectivity.’ According to McDowell, human freedom consists in causations in the space of reason, but as Richard Gaskin points out, a satisfying story of it is yet to be provided. I close this essay with some rough ideas about how to fill in the details of the McDowellian picture. (shrink)

Authors from all over the world unite in an effort to cultivate dialogue between Asian and Western philosophy. The papers forge a new, East-West comparative path on the whole range of issues in Kant studies. The concept of personhood, crucial for both traditions, serves as a springboard to address issues such as knowledge acquisition and education, ethics and self-identity, religious/political community building, and cross-cultural understanding. Edited by Stephen Palmquist, founder of the Hong Kong Philosophy Café and well known for both (...) his Kant expertise and his devotion to fostering philosophical dialogue, the book presents selected and reworked papers from the Kant in Asia conference, held in Hong Kong in May 2009. In addition to keynote essays by Patricia Kitcher (Columbia), Günter Wohlfart (Wuppertal), and Cheng Chung-ying (Hawaii), the book contains 64 contributed essays. The latter include contributions from Andrew Brook, David Cummiskey, Rainer Enskat, Wolfgang Ertl, Hans Feger, Klaus-Gerd Giesen, Ronald Green, Martin Moors, Ulrich Seeberg, Susan Shell, Rein Vos, Günter Zoeller, and numerous Asian philosophers. (shrink)

This article explores the role of second-order anger in the formation of resistant feminist space through the work of María Lugones and Sara Ahmed. I argue that this incommunicative form of anger can operate as a bridge between two senses of resistant spatiality in Lugones, connecting the hangout, which is a collective and transgressive space for alternative sense making, and the cocoon, which is a solitary and germinative space of tense internal transformation. By weaving connections with Ahmed’s concept of feminist (...) fragile sheltering, I demonstrate that the insulating character of second-order anger need not be equated with spatial solitude. Rather, given its orientation toward a future becoming away from oppressed subjectivity, germinative cocooning can be understood as constitutive of collective, feminist, and resistant spaces. I conclude, therefore, that feminist spaces ought to shelter second-order angers and embrace fragility as a condition of resistant transformation. (shrink)

Ray and Cooper (2024) argue that bioethicists should take environmental justice seriously as a matter of health justice; as part of this project, they defend a legal right to a healthy environment....

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 3, Page 606-622, May 2022.

According to Dreyfusian anti-intellectualism, know-how or expertise cannot be explained in terms of know-that and its cognates but only in terms of intuition. Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus do not exclude know-that and its cognates in explaining skilled action. However, they think that know-that and its cognates (such as calculative deliberation and perspectival deliberation) only operate either below or above the level of expertise. In agreement with some critics of Dreyfus and Dreyfus, in this paper, I argue that know-that and (...) its cognates are constitutive of rather than external to know-how and expertise. However, unlike those critics, who argue for this point only from a phenomenological point of view, my argument adopts a (telic) normative point of view. (shrink)

Judith Butler argues for collective liberatory action grounded in ontological vulnerability. Yet descriptive social ontology alone provides neither normative ethical prescriptions nor direction for political action. I believe Butler tries to overcome this gap by appealing to equality as an ethical ideal. In this article, I reconstruct how equality operates in her transition from ontological vulnerability to prescriptive commitments. Then, turning to Sylvia Wynter, I argue Butler's uncritical use of equality constrains the radical direction of her liberatory goals—firstly because it (...) cannot mitigate the coloniality of Being, and secondly because she figures the locus of critique as an anonymous and equally vulnerable body at the limits of the recognizably human. I conclude with Wynter's demand for liberatory critique to arise out of specific decolonial locations of rupture from our historically situated, oppressive, and overrepresented genre of being human. (shrink)

Aryeh Goldberg compellingly argues for a Narrative Coherence Standard (NCS) to bolster existing methods of assessing patients' mental capacity. But his account fails to distinguish between the cognitive abilities of children and adults; consequently, worries may be raised about the scope of the NCS, in particular when we consider child patients. In this article, I argue the NCS cannot plausibly apply to children. Since children's self-conception does not arrive fully formed — but rather is a product of both incomplete cognitive (...) development and socializing factors — I claim children may not possess a sufficiently intimate knowledge of self, and therefore a sufficiently coherent sense of self, as Goldberg demands. Therefore, we should either revise the NCS to accommodate children, adopt an incremental view of consent, or revert to the relevant form of the MacArthur competence criteria to establish children’s capacity to consent. (shrink)

Earthquakes are among the world’s deadliest natural phenomena. On an increasingly crowded Earth, earthquake risk management therefore should be taken seriously as a global policy problem. Thus, this chapter discusses some of the ethical dimensions of earthquakes as a phenomenon of planetary significance in the Anthropocene. I do not attempt an exhaustive survey, but consider one background ethical issue: the kinds of harms that occur when an earthquake impacts human habitation. We may distinguish three categories of human-related harms: personal harms, (...) which accrue to individual humans; social harms, which impact on social relationships between humans; and institutional harms, which compromise the ability of institutions to respond to the quake. This analysis will help us better appreciate the moral salience of earthquakes as a global policy imperative in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Passive frame theory attempts to illuminate what consciousness is, in mechanistic and functional terms; it does not address the “implementation” level of analysis (how neurons instantiate conscious states), an enigma for various disciplines. However, in response to the commentaries, we discuss how our framework provides clues regarding this enigma. In the framework, consciousness is passive albeit essential. Without consciousness, there would not be adaptive skeletomotor action.

Tennis champion Maria Sharapova has a habit of grunting when she plays on the court. Assume that she also has a habit of hitting the ball in a certain way in a certain situation. The habit of on-court grunting might be bad, but can the habit of hitting the ball in a certain way in a certain situation be classified as intelligent? The fundamental questions here are as follows: What is habit? What is the relation between habit and skill? Is (...) there such a thing as intelligent habit? In this paper I expound the nature of habit by developing and defending a Rylean conception of habit, according to which an acquired disposition is a habit if and only if the manifestation of the disposition is repeated, automatic, and uniform. One implication of this conception is that there is no such thing as intelligent habit. A practical application in athletic expertise is that sport coaches can help athletes go beyond repeated, automatic, and uniform dispositions in sport. (shrink)

The question of Who am I?” is the end of philosophy. The famous ancient Greek philosopher Socrates raised three ultimate questions in philosophy when he looked up at the starry sky: “Who am I?” “Where do I come from?” “Where am I going？”. For thousands of years, humans have explored and answered questions about them, including various disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, biology, and neurology etc., but none of them have been recognized. This article starts with the cosmology and worldview (...) of “Who am I?” and elaborates on the origin of “Who am I?” and the concept of “center”. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a virtue-theoretic approach to semantics, according to which the study of linguistic competence in particular, and the study of meaning and language in general, should focus on a speaker's interpretative virtues, such as charity and interpretability, rather than the speaker's knowledge of rules. The first part of the paper proffers an argument for shifting to virtue semantics, and the second part outlines the nature of such virtue semantics.

Phronesis, or practical wisdom, is a capacity the possession of which enables one to make good practical judgments and thus fulfill the distinctive function of human beings. Nir Eisikovits and Dan Feldman convincingly argue that this capacity may be undermined by statistical machine-learning-based AI. The critic questions: why should we worry that AI undermines phronesis? Why can’t we epistemically defer to AI, especially when it is superintelligent? Eisikovits and Feldman acknowledge such objection but do not consider it seriously. In this (...) paper, we argue that there is a way to reconcile Eisikovits and Feldman with their critic by adopting the principle of epistemic heed, according to which we should exercise our rational capacity as much as possible while heeding a superintelligence’s output whenever possible. (shrink)

How can we acquire understanding? Linda Zagzebski has long claimed that understanding is acquired through, or arises from, mastering a particular practical technê. In this paper, I explicate Zagzebski’s claim and argue that the claim is problematic. Based on a critical examination of Zagzebski’s claim, I propose, in conclusion and in brief, a new claim regarding the acquisition of understanding.

The aim of this paper is twofold: First, to generalize Quine's epistemology, to show that what Quine refutes for traditional epistemology is not only Cartesian foundationalism and Carnapian reductionism, but also any epistemological program if it takes atomic verificationist semantics or supernaturalism, which are rooted in the linguistic/factual distinction of individual sentences, as its underlying system. Thus, we will see that the range of naturalization in the Quinean sense is not as narrow as his critics think. Second, to normalize Quine's (...) epistemology, to explain in what sense Quinean naturalized epistemology is normative. The reason I maintain that critics miss the point of Quinean naturalized epistemology is that they do not appreciate the close connection between Quine's naturalistic approach and his holistic approach to epistemology. To show this I shall reconstruct Quine's argument for naturalizing epistemology within his systematic philosophy, and focus specifically on his holism and its applications, on which Quine relies both in arguing against traditional epistemology, and in supporting his theses of underdetermination of physical theory and indeterminacy of translation. This is the key to understanding the scope and the normativity of Quine's epistemology. In the conclusion I will point out what the genuine problems are for Quinean naturalized epistemology. (shrink)

关于人类意识起源和本质问题的探讨由来已久，各领域如哲学、社会学、生物学和心理学等都有不同定义和解释，但是至今为止都没有得到广泛的认同，主要原因是由意识的复杂性导致了各领域都不能全面、合理和充分地认识其 起源和本质，成为千古奇案，所以有必要对其进行深入探讨。 本文根据各学科的知识分析、汇总和归纳，得出如下结论：意识的起源来自自然物质；意识的本质为物质信息；意识的能力是物质信息的复杂度和有序度的利用程度；意识具有先天性、物质性、系统性、复杂性、动态性、差异性 和自我性属性 .

Regulative virtue epistemology argues that intellectual virtues can adjust and guide one’s epistemic actions as well as improve on the quality of the epistemic actions. For regulative virtue epistemologists, intellectual virtues can be cultivated to a higher degree; when the quality of intellectual virtue is better, the resulting quality of epistemic action is better. The intellectual virtues that regulative epistemologists talk about are character virtues (such as intellectual courage and open-mindedness) rather than faculty virtues (such as sight and hearing), since (...) they don’t think that faculty virtues could be cultivated. This article refers to Xunzi’s philosophy, explaining how a regulative faculty-based virtue epistemology is possible. If this explanation works, on the one hand, a new branch of contemporary virtue epistemology is shown, and, on the other hand, a clear theoretical framework of Xunzi’s epistemology is constructed. (shrink)

古代中国明朝哲学家王阳明创立的心学已有七百多年，它继承了中国古代的哲学，比如孔孟之道和宋明理学等的内容，创立了心学。其理念在社会哲学领域深深地影响了中国、日本和朝鲜等东亚国家，甚至于间接地推动了日本的 明治维新运动，成为千年一圣。同时世界各地的学者对心学的研究和探讨也是层出不穷，但是总体而言，缺乏对心学理论体系性的探讨和研究。 本文从体系概念着手，结合心学的内容，经过梳理后整合成一个完整的、逻辑的和全面的心学体系。.

There have recently been various empirical attempts to answer Molyneux’s question, for example, the experiments undertaken by the Held group. These studies, though intricate, have encountered some objections, for instance, from Schwenkler, who proposes two ways of improving the experiments. One is “to re-run [the] experiment with the stimulus objects made to move, and/or the subjects moved or permitted to move with respect to them” (p. 94), which would promote three dimensional or otherwise viewpoint-invariant representations. The other is “to use (...) geometrically simpler shapes, such as the cube and sphere in Molyneux’s original proposal, or planar figures instead of three-dimensional solids” (p. 188). Connolly argues against the first modification but agrees with the second. In this article, I argue that the second modification is also problematic (though still surmountable), and that both Schwenkler and Connolly are too optimistic about the prospect of addressing Molyneux’s question empirically. (shrink)

目前，世界上的哲学简单地可分两类，一是：唯物主义，二是：唯心主义，它们统治了哲学史几千年，相互争斗了几千年，但是都存在着，不分胜负，至少说明都有合理之处，当然也包括不合理之处。 如果把两者进行了升华，就是集合唯心主义和唯物主义各自的合理部分，摈弃了不合理部分，把它们合二为一，统一成一个系统的、合理的和广泛的哲学体系，那就是唯能主义。 .

The overflow debate concerns this following question: does conscious iconic memory have a higher capacity than attention does? In recent years, Ned Block has been invoking empirical works to support the positive answer to this question. The view is called the “rich view” or the “Overflow view”. One central thread of this discussion concerns the nature of iconic memory: for example how rich they are and whether they are conscious. The first section discusses a potential misunderstanding of “visible persistence” in (...) this literature. The second section discusses varieties of attention relevant to this debate. The final section discusses the most prominent alternative interpretation of the Sperling paradigm—the postdiction interpretation—and explains how it can be made compatible with a weaker version of the rich or overflow view. (shrink)

This paper is about compositionality, belief reports, and related issues. I begin by introducing Putnam’s proposal for understanding compositionality, namely that the sense of a sentence is a function of the sense of its parts and of its logical structure (section 1). Both Church and Sellars think that Putnam’s move is superfluous or unnecessary since there is no relevant puzzle to begin with (section 2). I will urge that Putnam is right in thinking that there is indeed a puzzle with (...) a discussion of translation and belief individuation (section 3). Later Salmon (2001/ 2007) reinforces Church’s position, but I will argue that it is still possible to make my case by clarifying the nature of my proposal, i.e., understanding explanations of action from the third-person point of view (section 4). Now, Fine (2007) agrees with Putnam that there is indeed a puzzle to be solved, but he argues that Putnam’s solution of it is problematic, and that his own semantic relationism is a better view. In response to this, I will recast the notion of compositionality based on a certain conception of belief individuation, namely that the semantic content of a sentence is a function of the semantic contents of its parts and of the structure of intensional discourses (sections 3 and 5). Finally the paper will end with a reconsideration of the recalcitrant Kripke’s puzzle about belief (1979/1988), since it might seem to put some pressure on my account. It turns out that my understanding of this puzzle is again different from Fine’s perspective (section 6). (shrink)

The truth table method, natural deduction, and the truth tree method, the three validity proving methods standardly taught in an introductory logic course, are too clumsy for the battlefield of real-life. The “short truth table” test is handy at times, but it stumbles at many other times. In this paper, we set up a general method that can beat all the methods mentioned above in a contest of speed. Furthermore, the procedure can be step-by-step paraphrased in a natural language, so (...) that, unlike the other methods, a real-life logical problem can be analyzed and explained in a real-life language too. (shrink)

It has a long history for the exploration of the origin and essence of human consciousness with different definitions and explanations in various fields such as philosophy, medicine, sociology, biology, and psychology. However, all of them had not been recognized so far. The main reason is that the complexity of consciousness leads to the inability of various fields to understand its essence fully, reasonably, and comprehensively, and there are still significant differences for it, and which have become an eternal mystery. (...) So, it is necessary to delve deeper into it. Here we show that this article concludes that the origin of consciousness comes from natural matter, the essence of consciousness is material information, the ability of consciousness is the degree to which the complexity and orderliness of material information are utilized, and consciousness has the attributes of congenital, materiality, systematicness, complexity, dynamics, difference, and selfness according to the analysis, summary and induction of knowledge from various disciplines. (shrink)

Xinxue （The philosophy of mind） founded by ancient Chinese philosopher Wang Yangming of the Ming Dynasty for over 700 years. Its ideas have deeply influenced East Asian countries such as China, Japan, and Korea in the field of social philosophy, and even indirectly promoted Japan's Meiji Restoration movement. At the same time, scholars from all over the world have conducted numerous studies and explorations on it, but overall, there is a lack of systematic exploration and research on it. This article (...) starts with the concept of a system, combines the content of Xinxue and integrates it into a complete, logical, and comprehensive system of Xinxue. (shrink)

When looking up at the starry sky, Socrates, the famous ancient Greek philosopher, raised three ultimate philosophical questions: "Who am I?" "Where am I from?" and "Where am I going?". For thousands of years, human beings have tried their best to think, research and explore it, involving various disciplines such as philosophy, medicine, psychology, physics, biology, and neurology, but they have not been widely recognized. This paper expounds the concept of "center" from the perspective of cosmology, world outlook and scientific (...) outlook for "I", and answers the question of "who am I?":"I am the center, the center is me". At the same time, it expounds the origin, essence, and attributes of consciousness, and answered the questions of "where do I come from?"："I come from dust" and "where do I go?"："I will return to dust". (shrink)

What is the nature and structure of phronesis or practical wisdom? According to the view widely held by philosophers and psychologists, a person S is wise if and only if S knows how to live well. Given this view of practical wisdom, the guiding question is this: What exactly is “knowing how to live well”? It seems that no one has a clear idea of how to answer this simple but fundamental question. This paper explores knowing how to live well (...) (or “life know-how”) by showing how its nature and structure can be understood through contemporary epistemology of knowledge-how. I will achieve this by doing the following. In Section I, I highlight the two as-yet unanswered “integration questions” about life know-how. In Section II, I explain why the epistemology of knowledge-how has good potential to address the integration questions. In Sections III and IV, I construct two positions—intellectualism and anti-intellectualism—for the epistemology of life know-how and show how they address the two integration questions. In Section V, I show how the epistemology of life know-how established in the previous sections can be used in the philosophy of wisdom and the psychology of wisdom. (shrink)

In this paper, findings from research in neuroscience of morality will be reviewed to consider the purposes of moral education. Particularly, I will focus on two main themes in neuroscience, novel neuroimaging and experimental investigations, and Bayesian learning mechanism. First, I will examine how neuroimaging and experimental studies contributed to our understanding of psychological mechanisms associated with moral functioning while addressing methodological concerns. Second, Bayesian learning mechanism will be introduced to acquire insights about how moral learning occurs in human brains. (...) Based on the reviewed neuroscientific research on morality, I will examine how evidence can support the model of moral education proposed by virtue ethics, Neo-Aristotelian moral philosophy in particular. Particularly, two main aims of virtue ethics-based moral education, the habituation of virtues and the cultivation of phronesis, will be discussed as the important purposes of moral education based on neuroscientific evidence. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce and defend the recurrent model for understanding bodily spatial phenomenology. While Longo, Azañón and Haggard (2010) propose a bottom-up model, Bermúdez (2017) emphasizes the top-down aspect of the information processing loop. We argue that both are only half of the story. Section 1 intro- duces what the issues are. Section 2 starts by explaining why the top- down, descending direction is necessary with the illustration from the ‘body-based tactile rescaling’ paradigm (de Vignemont, Ehrsson and Haggard, (...) 2005). It then argues that the bottom-up, ascending direction is also necessary, and substantiates this view with recent research on skin space and tactile field (Haggard et al., 2017). Section 3 discusses the model’s application to body ownership and bodily self-representation. Implications also extend to topics such as sense modality individuation (Macpherson, 2011), the constancy- based view of perception (Burge, 2010), and the perception/cognition divide (Firestone and Scholl, 2016). (shrink)

The two volumes of _Maus_ composed by Art Spiegelman were the first graphic novels to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. These volumes introduced a new genre of graphic novel in the form of comics. The present study examines the hierarchical content and subtexts of Maus and the unique presentation methods of comics. The researcher employed the concepts of “Threefold mimesis” proposed by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, to see how Maus interpretate the Jewish history of suffering in Holocaust and the (...) postmemory. Spiegelman is the icon of the graphic novel world, however, so far research on his work still seems to be rare in Taiwan. This study starts from Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics, hope to elucidate how the new model of contemporary autobiographical comic was created. (shrink)

In the present article, I attempt to relate Saul Kripke's “sceptical paradox” to some issues about the self; specifically, the relation between the self and its mental states and episodes. I start with a brief reconstruction of the paradox, and venture to argue that it relies crucially on a Cartesian model of the self: the sceptic regards the Wittgensteinian “infinite regress of interpretation” as the foundation of his challenge, and this is where he commits the crucial mistake. After the diagnosis, (...) I attempt to sketch my own model of the self and its mental states and episodes. This tentative picture binds meaning and the self together, stressing the subjective aspect of meaning without committing the same fallacy. The solution ventured here is relatively independent of the secondary literatures on the sceptical paradox of following rules, for it aims to provide a new angle to understand and meet the challenge presented by the sceptic. (shrink)

Some stories of moral exemplars motivate us to emulate their admirable attitudes and behaviors, but why do some exemplars motivate us more than others? We systematically studied how motivation to emulate is influenced by the similarity between a reader and an exemplar in social or cultural background (Relatability) and how personally costly or demanding the exemplar’s actions are (Attainability). Study 1 found that university students reported more inspiration and related feelings after reading true stories about the good deeds of a (...) recent fellow alum, compared to a famous moral exemplar from decades past. Study 2A developed a battery of short moral exemplar stories that more systematically varied Relatability and Attainability, along with a set of non-moral exemplar stories for comparison. Studies 2B and 2C examined the path from the story type to relatively low stakes altruism (donating to charity and intentions to volunteer) through perceived attainability and relatability, as well as elevation and pleasantness. Together, our studies suggest that it is primarily the relatability of the moral exemplars, not the attainability of their actions, that inspires more prosocial motivation, at least regarding acts that help others at a relatively low cost to oneself. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and its Limits has been highly influential since the beginning of this century. It can be read as a systematic response to scepticism. One of the most important notions in this response is the notion of «evidence,» which will be the focus of the present paper. I attempt to show primarily two things. First, the notion of evidence invoked by Williamson does not address the sceptical worry: he stipulates an objective notion of evidence, but this begs the (...) question against his opponent. Second, his related thesis «Evidence equals Knowledge» does not sit well with his own content externalism: he promises to relate epistemology to philosophy of mind, but he fails to live up to this commitment in his crucial chapter on scepticism. Other minor problems concerning evidence will also be discussed in due course. (shrink)

In ‘What Makes Killing Wrong?’ Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller make the bold claim that killing in itself is not wrong, what is wrong is totally-disabling. In ‘After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?’ Giubilini and Minerva argue for allowing infanticide. Both papers challenge the stigma commonly associated with killing, and emphasize that killing is not wrong at some margins of life. In this paper, we first generalize the above claims to the thesis that there is nothing morally wrong with killing per (...) se, so long as it is instant and unannounced. Then, from the perspective of social evolution, we explain why people refrain from killing others, the general guideline being that it is unadvisable to kill someone with whom you associate a Second Person Perspective (SPP). Finally, drawing from a seminal paper of Press and Dyson on the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, we stress that an SPP without an SP (Second Person), or the other way around, can both lead to unwelcome results. (shrink)

In a series of works Hubert Dreyfus argues that phenomenological considerations can show the falsity of John McDowell’s claim that ours actions are permeated with rationality. Dreyfus changes the details of his objections several times in this debate, but I shall argue that there is an implicit false assumption lurking in his thinking throughout his exchanges with McDowell. Originally Dreyfus proposed a distinction between “detached rule-following” and “situation-specific way of coping,” and later he replaces it with the distinction between “subjectivity” (...) and “absorbed coping.” He then uses this framework to interpret some examples, attempting to show that they cannot be accommodated by McDowell’s position. I shall argue that in doing so Dreyfus presupposes too narrow conceptions of “rationality” and “mindedness,” and if these notions are understood appropriately, we can see that phenomenological considerations can be good supplements, rather than objections, to McDowell’s claim that our mindedness is pervasive in actions. (shrink)

The menu-dependent nature of regret-minimization creates subtleties when it is applied to dynamic decision problems. It is not clear whether forgone opportunities should be included in the menu. We explain commonly observed behavioral patterns as minimizing regret when forgone opportunities are present. If forgone opportunities are included, we can characterize when a form of dynamic consistency is guaranteed.

Plakias has recently argued that there is nothing wrong with publishing defences of philosophical claims which we don't believe and also nothing wrong with concealing our lack of belief, because an author's lack of belief is irrelevant to the merit of a published work. Fleisher has refined this account by limiting the permissibility of publishing without belief to what he calls ‘advocacy role cases’. I argue that such lack of belief is irrelevant only if it is the result of an (...) inexplicable incredulity or the result of a metaphilosophical or epistemic stance that is unrelated to the specific claim. However, in many real-life cases, including Fleisher's advocacy role cases, our doubts regarding the claims we defend arise from reasons that have something to do with the insufficiency of the philosophical evidence supporting the claim, and publishing an unconditional defence of a claim without revealing our doubts is impermissible as it involves withholding philosophically relevant reasons. Plakias has also argued that discouraging philosophers from publishing claims they don't believe would be unfair to junior philosophers with unsettled views. I propose that we should change our academic practices that pressure philosophers to publish articles that pretend to be defences of settled views. (shrink)

Visual phenomenology is highly elusive. One attempt to operationalize or to measure it is to use ‘cognitive accessibility’ to track its degrees. However, if Ned Block is right about the overflow phenomenon, then this way of operationalizing visual phenomenology is bound to fail. This thesis does not directly challenge Block’s view; rather it motivates a notion of cognitive accessibility different from Block’s one, and argues that given this notion, degrees of visual phenomenology can be tracked by degrees of cognitive accessibility. (...) Block points out that in the psychology literature, ‘cognitive accessibility’ is often regarded as either all or nothing. However, the notion motivated in the thesis captures the important fact that accessibility comes in degrees (consider the visual field from fovea the periphery). Different legitimate notions of accessibility might be adopted for different purposes. The notion of accessibility motivated here is weaker than Block’s ‘identification’ (2007) but is stronger than Tye’s ‘demonstration’ (2007). The moral drawn from the discussion of Block can be applied to the debate between Dretske and Tye on the speckled-hen style examples. Dretske’s view is even stronger than Block’s, but his arguments from various figures he provides do not support his conclusion since he does not have right ideas about fixation and attention. Tye’s picture is more plausible but his notion of accessibility is so weak that he reaches the excessive conclusion that accessibility overflows phenomenology. Three ramifications might be considered in the final part of the thesis. The first is the relation between this debate and the one concerning higher-order/same-order theories of consciousness. The second is about John McDowell’s early proposal about demonstrative concepts in visual experiences. The third is the relation between the interpretation of the Sperling case proposed here and McDowell new view of experiential contents, i.e., his story about how we carve out conceptual contents out of intuitional contents without falling pray to the Myth of the Given. (shrink)

The essay is a study of phenomenal specificity. By ‘phenomenal’ here we mean conscious awareness, which needs to be cashed out in detail throughout the study. Intuitively, one dimension of phenomenology is along with specificity. For example it seems appropriate to say that one’s conscious awareness in the middle of the visual field is in some sense more specific than the awareness in the periphery under normal circumstances. However, it is difficult to characterise the nature of phenomenal specificity in an (...) accurate way. This essay seeks to do just that. In the introduction, I set up the discussion by invoking a threefold Campbellian framework. Chapter 1 introduces a key notion of the analogue, its roots in sciences, and its applications in philosophy. Chapter 2 focuses on the major case study – the Sperling iconic memory paradigm – and explains how the relevant notion of the analogue can be used to explain phenomenal specificity involved in the Sperling case. Chapter 3 discusses functions of attention, as it is a crucial element in the Sperling case. Chapter 4 extends the project by explaining how visual demonstratives fit into the present picture. Finally chapter 5 discusses several directions for future researches. This essay is not an attempt to discuss all the issues concerning the Sperling case, but to provide a new angle in seeing the issue: most people agree that visual phenomenology is in some sense specific, but there are not enough attempts to model phenomenal specificity explicitly. On this occasion we use a notion of the analogue and related ideas to understand phenomenal specificity and how it applies to certain empirical cases. (shrink)

This paper examines Aristotle’s vocabulary of pain, that is the differences and relations of the concepts of pain expressed by synonyms in the same semantic field. It investigates what is particularly Aristotelian in the selection of the pain-words in comparison with earlier authors and specifies the special semantic scope of each word-cluster. The result not only aims to pin down the exact way these terms converge with and diverge from each other, but also serves as a basis for further understanding (...) Aristotle’s philosophical conception of pain. (shrink)

Many biologists, especially in ecology and evolution, analyze their data by estimating fits to a set of candidate models and selecting the best model according to the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) or the Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC). When the candidate models represent alternative hypotheses, biologists may want to limit the chance of a false positive to a specified level. Existing model selection methodology, however, allows for only indirect control over error rates by setting a threshold for the difference in AIC (...) scores. We present a novel theoretical framework for parametric Neyman-Pearson (NP) model selection using information criteria that does not require a pre-data null and applies to three or more non-nested models simultaneously. We apply the theoretical framework to the Error Control for Information Criteria (ECIC) procedure introduced by Cullan et al. (J Appl Stat 47: 2565–2581, 2019), and we show it shares many of the desirable properties of AIC-type methods, including false positive and negative rates that converge to zero asymptotically. We discuss implications for the compatibility of evidentialist and severity-based approach to evidence in philosophy of science. (shrink)

This paper presents an examination of communitarianism ethics and its emphasis on community and responsibility as an ethical base for public relations. It studies the importance businesses currently place on social responsibility, quality, and stewardship and how these core values fit within a communitarian approach. A communitarian foundation for public relations may enable organizations to respond to crises and other situations appropriately because of the sense of community public relations seeks to build.