(draft) In this chapter, I examine the most significant ethical questions surrounding memory, both at the collective and individual levels, as discussed in the literature. I begin by exploring the values associated with memory, including truth, accuracy, integrity, and broader social and political dimensions. I then address the concept of a duty to remember, particularly in the context of genocide and other human atrocities, and the complex questions this concept raises. Following this, I analyze the ethical challenges posed by forgetting, (...) focusing on its collective implications for forgiveness and its individual dimensions, such as the responsibility for forgetting and the right to be forgotten. After briefly discussing memory virtues—a topic that remains underexplored in the literature—I explore the ethical considerations surrounding the wishes of individuals with severe memory loss, such as those with dementia. Finally, I summarize ethical debates related to current and hypothetical cases of memory modification, erasure, and enhancement, highlighting their potential impacts on personal identity, agency, authenticity, moral responsibility, testimony, and their overall desirability. (shrink)

Memory is not a unitary phenomenon. Even among the group of long-term individual memory representations (known in the literature as declarative memory) there seems to be a distinction between two kinds of memory: memory of personally experienced events (episodic memory) and memory of facts or knowledge about the world (semantic memory). Although this distinction seems very intuitive, it is not so clear in which characteristic or set of interrelated characteristics lies the difference. In this article, I present the different criteria (...) proposed in the philosophical and scientific literature in order to account for this distinction: (1) the vehicle of representation; (2) the grammar of the verb “to remember”; (3) the cause of the memory; (4) the memory content; and (5) the phenomenology of memory representations. Whereas some criteria seem more plausible than others, I show that all of them are problematic and none of them really fulfill their aim. I then briefly outline a different criterion, the affective criterion, which seems a promising line of research to try to understand the grounds of this distinction. (shrink)

It seems natural to think that emotional experiences associated with a memory of a past event are new and present emotional states triggered by the remembered event. This common conception has nonetheless been challenged at the beginning of the 20th century by intellectuals who considered that emotions can be encoded and retrieved, and that emotional aspects linked to memories of the personal past need not necessary to be new emotional responses caused by the act of recollection. They called this specific (...) kind of memories “affective memories” and defended their existence. My aim here is to expound the historical background of this debate as well as the characterization and development of the notion of affective memory since its first inception. I aim to show that although the debate was left unresolved and the term disappeared from academy around 1930, many of the characterizations of the nature of emotions and memory done by the advocates of affective memory have reappeared in the scientific agenda and been further developed during the last decades. (shrink)

(written in 2017) According to Dorothea Debus (2007), all emotional aspects related to an act of remembering are present and new emotional responses to the remembered past event. This is a common conception of the nature of the emotional aspect of personal memories, if not explicitly defended then at least implicitly accepted in the literature. In this article, I first criticize Debus’ arguments and demonstrate that she does not give us valid reasons to believe that all the emotional aspects related (...) to a memory are present and new emotional responses to that past event. I then criticize Debus’ thesis tout court for being a direct consequence of assuming a particular conceptualization of the nature of emotions: emotions as physiological changes. Finally, based on a different conceptualization of emotions that focuses on their relational nature, I propose an alternative framework for analyzing the different possible emotional aspects of our personal memories. This leads me to conclude, contrary to Debus, that some emotional aspects of our memories are not occurrent emotions but are better conceived as quasi-emotions. (shrink)

Despite the popularity that the embodied cognition thesis has gained in recent years, explicit memories of events personally experienced are still conceived as disembodied mental representations. It seems that we can consciously remember our personal past through sensory imagery, through concepts, propositions and language, but not through the body. In this article, I defend the idea that the body constitutes a genuine means of representing past personal experiences. For this purpose, I focus on the analysis of bodily movements associated with (...) the retrieval of a personal memory, which have certain features that make them different from procedural memories, pragmatic actions and common gestures, as well as other forms of embodied memories found in recent literature. I refer to these as “kinetic memories” and analyse their representative nature as well as their adaptive functions. Kinetic memories are bodily movements in which some event or action that took place in the past can be seen, because they are an externalisation of the subject’s inner intention of representing a past personal experience. Kinetic memories represent a past experience sometimes by imitation of a past movement, and other times through embodied symbols and metaphors. Furthermore, although sometimes they present direct pragmatic benefits, such as communicative benefits, they seem to enhance the whole reexperience of the past event and memory recall, which I argue is one important adaptive value. (shrink)

This thesis is intended to analyze a mental phenomenon widely neglected in current philosophical discussions: personal memories. The first part presents a general framework to better understand what personal memories are, how we access our personal past and what we access about our personal past. Chapter 1 introduces traditional theories of memory: direct realism and representationalism in their different versions, as well as some objections. I defend here a particular form of representationalism that is based on the distinction between content, (...) intentional object and ontological object. Chapter 2 explores the possible contents of our personal memories, which prove to be heterogeneous, whereas chapter 3 analyses their possible intentional objects, with a special focus on past events. The second part of the thesis explores an aspect of our personal memories that was omitted in the first part: the senses in which our personal past is apprehended as personal. Chapter 4 examines the way in which the “self” intervenes in the construction of our personal memories. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the analysis of what seems to be the most subjective aspect of our memories, that is, the emotions and feelings of our past experiences. In these last two chapters, I analyze the different interactions that can take place between memories and emotions and defend the idea that there can be emotional memories that are reducible neither to a propositional memory nor an occurrent and present emotion. The overall intention of this thesis is twofold. First, I aim to show to the philosophical community that there is still a lot to be said and discussed about memory as a mental phenomenon. And second, I intend to emphasize the importance of bringing into the philosophical discussions about the mind ideas coming from different philosophical traditions as well as ideas and empirical data coming from scientific research. (shrink)

A post written by Marina Trakas, a philosopher and cognitive scientist interested in the ethical and epistemological aspects of memories of our personal past. -/- .

The notion of epistemic responsibility applied to memory has been in general examined in the framework of the responsibilities that a collective holds for past injustices, but it has never been the object of an analysis of its own. In this article, I propose to isolate and explore it in detail. For this purpose, I start by conceptualizing the epistemic responsibility applied to individual memories. I conclude that an epistemic responsible individual rememberer is a vigilant agent who knows when to (...) engage in different kinds of mental and non-mental actions in order to monitor and update her memories, and who develops and nurture different kinds of virtuous attitudes that guide those actions. These (epistemic) virtuous attitudes are oriented not only towards herself but also towards others. Whereas this conception of epistemic responsibility does not pose a problem to understand shared memories of family members and friends, it may seem suspicious when applied to large-scale collective memories. These memories, which I name historical memories, are memories of events that have a traumatic impact for the community, are permeated by unequal relations of power, keep a complex relationship with historical science, and present other characteristics that distinguish them from individual memories. But despite these differences, the analysis undertaken in this work shows that the general principles that govern the epistemic responsibility of individual and (large-scale) collective rememberers are similar, and are based on similar grounds: pragmatic considerations about the consequences of misremembering or forgetting and a feeling of care. The similarities at the individual and collective scale of the epistemic vigilant attitude that is and should be taken toward our significant past may partially justify the use of the same epithet—“memory”—to refer to these different kinds of representations. (shrink)

La Dra. Marina Trakas, coordinadora del dossier "Memoria y emoción" de la Revista de Psicología de la UNLP presenta los contenidos del mismo: -/- Trakas - Memoria y emoción: introducción al dossier Ramirez, Ruetti et al. - Memoria emocional en niñas y niños de diferentes condiciones socio-ambientales Saive - Reír para recordar: mejora de la memoria en relación con el humor Diaz Abrahan, Justel et al. - Memoria emocional. Una revisión sistemática de la capacidad modulatoria de la (...) música, de la actividad física y del bilingüismo Bonilla, Forcato et al. - Mejora de las memorias maladaptativas durante el sueno y la vigilia: una visión interdisciplinaria Fierro - Eros el memorioso Trakas - Dimensiones de análisis de los recuerdos personales como recuerdos afectivos Vieira Lopes - Sentimientos existenciales y memoria corporal: dos casos en la filosofía de la psiquiatría . (shrink)

Epistemic harms associated with sexual violence, such as rape and sexual assault, are often linked to the distrust of the victim's testimonies or their inability to comprehend their own experiences. This chapter aims to demonstrate that the existing literature has largely overlooked other potential epistemic harms directly stemming from sexual violence. By analyzing the cognitive changes related to the fear and anxiety experienced by many victims of sexual violence, the chapter introduces two distinct types of epistemic harms: targeted epistemic harms, (...) which result in the formation of false beliefs about the dangerousness of certain people and contexts, thereby reducing opportunities for gaining specific knowledge from the feared and avoided individuals and contexts; and structural epistemic harms, which bring about profound shifts in core assumptions regarding one’s safety in the world and the trustworthiness of others. (shrink)

La investigación reciente en psicología cognitiva sobre la memoria emocional ha estudiado las distintas formas en que las emociones afectan a la memoria, sin profundizar no obstante en la comprensión de la manera en que los aspectos emocionales, afectivos y mnemónicos se encuentran estrechamente entrelazados en el contenido mismo de un acto de reminiscencia. En este artículo propongo un marco conceptual de análisis que nos permite entender los recuerdos personales como recuerdos esencialmente afectivos, y que se articula en torno a (...) dos variables continuas e independientes: por un lado, la intencionalidad del recuerdo, es decir, el objeto hacia el cual el recuerdo está dirigido, que puede ser descriptiva o evaluativa; por el otro, la perspectiva afectiva del recuerdo, que puede fluctuar desde la perspectiva de primera persona hasta la perspectiva de tercera persona. Las dos dimensiones son analizadas en profundidad y las limitaciones de este marco y las futuras líneas de investigación son igualmente presentadas. (shrink)

What does it take for a subject to experience a personal memory as being her own? According to Fernández’ (2019) model of endorsement, this particular phenomenal quality of our memories, their “sense of mineness”, can be explained in terms of the experience of the mnemonic content as veridical. In this article, I criticize this model for two reasons: (a) the evidence that is used by Fernández to ground his theoretical proposal is dubious; and more importantly, (b) the endorsement model does (...) not accommodate many non-pathological everyday memories that preserve their sense of mineness, but whose veridicality is explicitly denied, suspected, not automatically endorsed, or neither denied nor endorsed. Finally, I sketch two alternative explanations: one also problematic, the other one more promising, and present some normative advantages of the latter. This also displays the undesirability of the endorsement model from a normative perspective. (shrink)

La metáfora de la memoria como “viaje mental en el tiempo” (“mental time travel” en inglés) ha tenido una gran influencia en la ciencia cognitiva de la memoria así como también en la filosofía de la memoria contemporánea. A pesar de su relevancia, no ha habido ninguna discusión teórica real ni sobre el significado de la metáfora en sí misma ni sobre su adecuación para dar cuenta de los recuerdos de experiencias pasadas. Este artículo trata de llenar este vacío al (...) examinar con más detalle la metáfora del “viaje mental en el tiempo”, centrándose más específicamente en los problemas que dicha noción presenta. Si la metáfora del “viaje mental en el tiempo” pretende referir no solo a una facultad o sistema cerebral sino también a una experiencia subjetiva particular, como así ha sido sugerido en la literatura, no es de por sí evidente que sea compatible con las nociones de (re)construcción y simulación con las que se la asocia frecuentemente, ni que describa de manera fehaciente la fenomenología de todo recuerdo del pasado personal. Si, por el contrario, sólo se refiere a una facultad o sistema cerebral y no pretende dar cuenta de la fenomenología del recuerdo, el uso de dicho término parece perder todo sentido para nombrar dicha facultad. A pesar de su relevancia, la metáfora del “viaje mental en el tiempo” no se ha impuesto como paradigma único: otras metáforas distintas continúan guiando actualmente programas más o menos fructíferos de investigación de la memoria. El artículo concluye que aunque dicha metáfora fue beneficiosa en su momento para la ciencia y la filosofía de la memoria, el examen minucioso de dicha noción sugiere que no constituye realmente una buena metáfora de la memoria sobre las experiencias pasadas, por lo que debería ser abandonada. (shrink)

Taking as starting point Akira Kurosawa’s film, I analyse the tension between the reconstructive nature of memory and the possibility of knowing truths from the past, and I explore if the tendency to align our personal memories to our present interests necessarily leads to an sceptic and relativistic vision of the knowledge from the past.

Observer memories, memories where one sees oneself in the remembered scene, from-the-outside, are commonly considered less accurate and genuine than visual field memories, memories in which the scene remembered is seen as one originally experienced it. In Remembering from the Outside (OUP, 2019), Christopher McCarroll debunks this commonsense conception by offering a detailed analysis of the nature of observer memories. On the one hand, he explains how observer and field perspectives are not really mutually exclusive in an experience, including memory (...) experiences. On the other hand, he argues that in observer memories there is no additional explicit representation of oneself experiencing the event: the self-presence is transparent and given by the mode of presentation. Whereas these are two lines of strategic and original argumentation, they are not exempt of problems. In this critical notice, I focus on the problematic aspects of McCarroll’s account. I show that it presents some issues that affect the internal coherence of the overall framework, and that some aspects and central notions would have needed more development to offer a precise picture of the nature of observer memories. (shrink)

In this Master's dissertation, I try to show that the causal theory of memory, which is the only theory developed so far that at first view seems more plausible and that could be integrated with psychological explanations and investigations of memory, shows some conceptual and ontological problems that go beyond the internal inconsistencies that each version can present. On one hand, the memory phenomenon analyzed is very limited: in general it is reduced to the conscious act of remembering expressed in (...) a propositional format: the idea of an agent who can control his memory reports, in contrast to a passive subject who merely retrieve his encoded memories, is not even considered. Furthermore, the representational function of memory is the only function taken into account; and all the diachronic changes that could entail a dynamic conception of memory are ignored, as is the consideration of context in a broad sense of the term. On the other hand, causal theories make some implicit assumptions that are obviously questionable (e.g., the difference between facts and events) and leave some of their key concepts unexplained, like the nature of the causality, the isomorphism between the memory trace and the memory event, etc. Nonetheless, the principal point that we criticized is the idea of a correspondence between a past event or representation of it, the correspondent memory trace and the memory representation of it. Psychological models of memory, with the exception of the spatial analogy, question some of these assumptions and suggest that memory information is organized in a way other than that implied by the causal theory. But it is distributed connectionism that actually challenges the causal theory of memory, not only through some of its basic postulates, like the superpositional conception of memory traces, their mutual influence and constant state of change, but also because it is compatible with a more situated approach to memory phenomena as well as with the idea that memory in reality accomplishes a variety of functions that go beyond the representational one. The explicit and implicit ideas provided by distributed connectionism, together with the previous criticisms that we made to of causal theory, clearly suggest the possibility of developing another kind of philosophical theory of memory, different from existing theories. This task, nonetheless, implies: (a) A much deeper study of connectionism principles and memory models, as well as of the rival candidate, symbolism, plus the evaluation of these models in the light of psychological and neurophysiological empirical research, which unfortunately I have not dealt with in this work. (b) An analysis of the metaphysical nature of events and facts, in order to see if we should decide in favor of a realist or a non-realist account. It is also clear that this decision can’t be taken without an examination of perception studies (and not exclusively philosophical ones) which would be crucial for determining what is encoded in memory, and studies devoted to language, which, I suspect, plays an important role in the segmentation of reality. (c) A clarification of the notion of causality, because we wouldn’t like to deny any kind entail the complete disappearance of boundaries between memory and imagination. And even if I suspect that my future work will question the existence of absolute boundaries between these two capacities, the notion of causality can’t be completely erase from the theory of memory without erasing the memory phenomenon itself. But this causality, as we’ve already showed, can’t consist in the naïve conception adopted by the causal accounts of memory, nor can it be explained in counterfactual terms. If we think of the reconsolidation concept, of the interdependence between all the memory system, and of the deciding influence of context, it’s almost sure that more than one notion of causality will need to be invoked in order to explain memory. (d) Because I do not want to reduce the study of memory exclusively to cases of remembering, it’s essential to analyze how memory intervenes not only in imagination, but also in perception, reasoning and future projection, for example. In this respect, we could quote the interesting articles of Atance & O’Neill (2001) and Bucker & Carroll (2006), the first concerning the relationship between episodic memory and episodic future thinking, the second concerning the relationship between episodic memory and all kinds of self-projection, such as navigation and theory of mind, relations that would also have to be explored from a philosophical perspective, in particular to overcome the tendency to suppose that representation is the only function of memory. I will also mention the necessity of combining the notion of metamemory with that of memory to some extent; as I have already remarked, it is implausible to suppose that a subject who consciously remembers something is unable to exert any kind of control over his memory reports. (e) Finally, in order to integrate a situated conception of memory into a philosophical account, it will also be indispensable to take into consideration what is known as “everyday memory research” as well as studies in social and collective memory. (shrink)

The notion of affective memory was first introduced by Théodule Ribot (1894), giving rise to a debate about its existence at the beginning of the 20th century. Although Vernon Lee did not directly take part in this discussion, she conceptualized this notion in a quite precise way, mainly in her book Music and Its Lovers (1932), clarifying the sometimes obscure formulations made by previous authors. In this short encyclopedic entry, I present Lee's characterization of affective memory.

The relationship between music and memory is mainly developed in Music and Its Lovers (1932), a book where Lee presents interesting psychological and philosophical insights from the analysis of the responses made by 150 people to a questionnaire about the “expressive and emotional powers of music”. In this short encyclopedic entry, I present Lee's analysis of the many different ways in which musical experience depends on memory.

Théodule Ribot est l’un des premiers à penser les rapports entre mémoire et émotions. Au sein de ce qu’il appelle la « mémoire affective », il décèle une mémoire spécifique des émotions. Il s’ensuit un débat sur l’existence, la définition et le contenu de cette mémoire. Après les propositions initiales de Ribot, on observe l’émergence progressive d’un consensus : même s’il est possible de distinguer la mémoire affective de la mémoire intellectuelle, tout souvenir présente à des degrés variables des éléments (...) intellectuels et des éléments affectifs. Si, dans le cadre académique, ces débats sont tombés dans l’oubli, on peut établir une continuité conceptuelle avec la recherche scientifique actuelle, qui gagnerait à relire cette littérature centenaire. (shrink)

When we dream, we feel emotions in response to objects and events that exist only in the dream. One key question is whether these emotions can be said to be “essentially unfitting”, that is, always inappropriate to the evoking scenario. However, how we evaluate dream emotions for fittingness may depend on the model of dreams we adopt: the imagination or the hallucination model. If fittingness requires a match between emotion and evaluative properties of objects or events, it is prima facie (...) plausible that dream emotions could fail to fit under the imagination model because it is unfitting to have an emotion toward an object we do not believe to be real. Under the hallucination model, dream emotions could be unfitting because their objects do not exist but we believe them to be real. More nuance, however, is required. By comparing dream emotions with the emotions we experience while imagining, engaging with fiction, and hallucinating, we conclude that although there are compelling arguments in support of the claim that dream emotions are essentially unfitting, these arguments are not entirely convincing, and it is more plausible that particular dream emotions can be assessed for fittingness under either model of dreaming. (shrink)

This paper focuses on how experiences of trauma can lead to generalized fear of people, objects and places that are similar or contextually or conceptually related to those that produced the initial fear, causing epistemic, affective, and practical harms to those who are unduly feared and those who are intimates of the victim of trauma. We argue that cases of fear generalization that bring harm to other people constitute examples of injustice closely akin to testimonial injustice, specifically, mnemonic injustice. Mnemonic (...) injustice is a label that has been introduced to capture how injustice can occur via the operation of human memory systems when stereotypes shape what is remembered. Here we argue that injustices can also occur via memory systems when trauma leads to a generalized fear. We also argue that this calls for a reformulation of the notion of mnemonic injustice. (shrink)

Review of Individual and Colllective Consolidation. Analogous Processes on Different Levels.

Review of Bernecker, Sven (2010). Memory. A philosophical Study. OUP, New York.

Spatial models dominated memory research throughout much of the 20th century, but in recent decades, the concept of memory as a form of mental time travel (MTT) to the past has gained prominence. Initially introduced as a metaphor, the MTT perspective shifted the focus from internal memory processes to the subjective conscious experience of remembering. Despite its significant impact on empirical and theoretical memory research, there has been limited discussion regarding the meaning and adequacy of the MTT metaphor in accounting (...) for memory. While previous work has addressed the general limitations of the MTT metaphor in explaining memory (Trakas, 2022), the objective of this article is more focused and modest: to gain a better understanding of what constitutes MTT to the past. To achieve this objective, a detailed analysis of the characteristics of MTT to the past is presented through a comparison with time travel (TT) to the past. Although acknowledging that TT does not refer to an existing physical phenomenon, it is an older concept extensively discussed in the philosophical literature and provides commonly accepted grounds, particularly within orthodox theories of time, that can offer insights into the nature of MTT. Six specific characteristics serve as points of comparison: (1) a destination distinct from the present, (2) the distinction between subjective time and objective time, (3) the subjective experience of the time traveler, (4) their differentiation from the past self, (5) the existence of the past, and (6) its unchangeability. Through this research, a detailed exploration of the phenomenal and metaphysical aspects of MTT to the past is undertaken, shedding light on the distinct features that mental time travel to the past acquires when it occurs within the realm of the mind rather than as a physical phenomenon. By examining these characteristics, a deeper understanding of the nature of mental time travel is achieved, offering insights into how it operates in relation to memory and the past. (shrink)

Fear generalisation is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when fear that is elicited in response to a frightening stimulus spreads to similar or related stimuli. The practical harms of pathological fear generalisation related to trauma are well-documented, but little or no attention has been given so far to its epistemic harms. This paper fills this gap in the literature. It shows how the psychological phenomenon, when it becomes pathological, substantially curbs the epistemic agency of those who experience the fear that (...) generalizes, limiting their ability to respond to evidence, and substantially limiting their epistemic horizons. It is argued that when these epistemic harms are caused by wrongful actions and decisions of individuals or institutions, because the fear is elicited in response to a traumatic experience inflicted by them, the harms should be considered epistemic wrongs. The epistemic wrongs are closely akin to agential epistemic injustice, a variety of distributive epistemic injustice, and sometimes also involve epistemic exclusion. The paper thereby identifies a previously underexplored psychological mechanism that can be a vehicle through which both individuals and institutions can epistemically wrong others. The argument has implications for how both epistemic wrongs and epistemic injustice should be conceived, suggesting that both can occur without being caused by primarily epistemic flaws or errors, or a bad epistemic character. Finally, it highlights the advantage of taking a victim-centred approach to understanding epistemic harm. (shrink)

Against those who dismiss Kant's project in the "Religion" because it provides a Pelagian understanding of salvation, this paper offers an analysis of the deep structure of Kant's views on divine justice and grace showing them not to conflict with an authentically Christian understanding of these concepts. The first part of the paper argues that Kant's analysis of these concepts helps us to understand the necessary conditions of the Christian understanding of grace: unfolding them uncovers intrinsic relations holding between God's (...) justice and grace. Parts two and three provide an analysis of two concepts of grace used by Kant. Getting clear on their differences is the key to understanding why Kant's account is not Pelagian. (shrink)

This paper explores Kant's concept of the highest good and the postulate of the existence of God arising from it. Kant has two concepts of the highest good standing in tension with one another, an immanent and a transcendent one. I provide a systematic exposition of the constituents of both variants and show how Kant’s arguments are prone to confusion through a conflation of both concepts. I argue that once these confusions are sorted out Kant’s claim regarding the need to (...) postulate God’s existence from a moral point of view makes much more sense. (shrink)

In An Inquiry into the Human Mind and in Essays on Intellectual Powers, Thomas Reid discusses what kinds of things perceivers are related to in perception. Are these things qualities of bodies, the bodies themselves, or both? This question places him in a long tradition of philosophers concerned with understanding how human perception works in connecting us with the external world. It is still an open question in the philosophy of perception whether the human perceptual system is providing us with (...) representations as of bodies, or only as of their properties. My project in this article is to explain how, on Reid's view, we can have perceptual representations as of bodies. This, in turn, enables him to argue that we have a robust understanding of the world around us, an understanding that would be missing if our perceptual system only supplied us with representations as of free-floating properties of bodies. (shrink)

Citation: Marina Christodoulou, “I Own therefore I Am. The Ontology of Property”, In Why Does What Exists Exist? Some Hypotheses on the Ultimate “Why” Question, edited by Mariano L. Bianca,Paolo Piccari. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021, pp. 169-182. Contributors: Mariano L. Bianca, Konstantinos Boultzis, Marina Christodoulou, Maurizio Ferraris, Marco G. Giammarchi, Enrico Guglielminetti, Roberta Lanfredini, Fabio Minazzi, Crister Nyberg, Paolo Piccari, Paolo Rossi. ISBN (10): 1-5275-6294-8; ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-6294-3 -/- -------------- -/- The concept of Property is what attaches us (...) to Existence, Property, and Life, instead of non-existence, non-Being and Non-life (or Death). I occupy, I possess, I own, therefore I am, therefore I exist. I own a body, therefore, I am a being; I also own a self, therefore I am. -/- What exists exists because we have the notion, the concept, the idea, the habit of property and of ownership. There is something rather than nothing because we own it. Why private property? Because we have the notion, the concept, the idea, the habit of property and of ownership. There is private property because we need to own things, including ourselves, and we need to own because we need to sign and vice versa. (shrink)

Citation: Christodoulou, Marina. “Philosophical An(n)ales: Laideur Abject Dégoût...comme une allergie à l’Autre (féminin),” (trans. Bertrand Naivin) in Sur la laideur. [Actes du symposium On Ugliness, organizé par Lars Aagaard- Mogensen au Wassard Elea (Ascea, Italie) en juin 2016], edited by d Bertrand Naivin and Lars Aagaard-Mogensen (Paris: Editions Complicités, 20178, 97-109. ISSN: 9782351201435 -/- -------------------- -/- Laideur Abject Dégoût ... comme une allergie à l’Autre (féminin) Sur l’art et l’esthétique sexués. -/- Pourquoi le dégoût est-il (ou peut-il être considéré) (...) comme sexiste (phallocratique et misogyne): Une allergie à l’Autre. (shrink)

The continued development of General Circulation Models (GCMs) towards increasing resolution and complexity is a predominantly chosen strategy to advance climate science, resulting in channelling of research and funding to meet this aspiration. Yet many other modelling strategies have also been developed and can be used to understand past and present climates, to project future climates and ultimately to support decision-making. We argue that a plurality of climate modelling strategies and an equitable distribution of funding among them would be an (...) improvement on the current predominant strategy for informing policy making. To support our claim, we use a philosophy of science approach to compare increasing resolution and complexity of General Circulation Models with three alternate examples: the use of machine learning techniques, the physical climate storyline approach, and Earth System Models of Intermediate Complexity. We show that each of these strategies prioritises a particular set of methodological aims, among which are empirical agreement, realism, comprehensiveness, diversity of process representations, inclusion of the human dimension, reduction of computational expense, and intelligibility. Thus, each strategy may provide adequate information to support different specific kinds of research and decision questions. We conclude that, because climate decision-making consists of different kinds of questions, many modelling strategies are all potentially useful, and can be used in a complementary way. (shrink)

Citation:Christodoulou, Marina. “Technopolis as the Technologised Kingdom of God. Fun as Technology, Technology as Religion in the 21st Century. God sive Fun.” Cahiers d'études germaniques N° 74, 2018. La religion au XXIe siècle - Perpectives et enjeux de la discussion autour d'une société post-séculière. Études reunites par Sébastian Hüsch et Max Marcuzzi, 119-132. -/- -------- -/- Neil Postman starts his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993)1 with a quote from Paul Goodman’s New Reformation: “Whether or not (...) it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.” (Postman 1993: motto; Goodman 2010: 40). I would extend Postman’s Technopoly to Technopolis, to give it more of a presence in time and space. Hence, I will use the term Technopoly when I am referring to Postman; the term Technopolis is my own. -/- In his book From Faith to Fun: The Secularisation of Humour, Russel Heddendorf argues that humour is a technology (Heddendorf 2009: 32-34), as it is understood and theorized by Neil Postman in Technopoly. Russel Heddendorf also argues that “Technopoly” is a term correlated with Wittgenstein’s use of the term “worldview” (Weltanschauung) (Heddendorf 2009: 11). -/- I would like to draw on these thoughts to propose that Technopoly (or Technopolis) could be the secularized Kingdom of God, namely that Technology is the Religion of the 21st century, and that Fun is a paradigm of such a Technology / Technique. God is yet another technique or Technology of and in Technopoly. -/- The godless individual in the 21st century, I will argue, is as much a believer as the faithful in the Sacred Religion (term used in opposition to Secular or rather Technological or Technologized Religion, which is Fun). He believes in Fun (as a post-modern form of pleasure), as much as the believer believes, or more accurately, believed in God. In the 21st century, the faithful in Sacred Religion believes in a fun God, as opposed to the serious God of the past. Fun is turning into the Technologized Religion for all; for the faithful in Godly / Sacred Religion, as well for as the unfaithful. Fun (pleasure, humour) is the definitive qualia of 21st century pleasure. The mechanics of Fun make it absolutely functional for controlling people; as Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World, people “are controlled by inflicting pleasure” (cited in Heddendorf 2009: 158). Now, indulging in pleasure is having Fun. In the 21st century, nobody is unfaithful, nobody disputes God, because God has been manufactured into Fun. We are living in the most religious century of all. -/- The commodity of God, now inextricably blended into work and leisure ethics and culture, is as unavoidable as survival. You don’t work, you don’t survive, you don’t exist. You work, you are entitled to leisure, or free time – the time (“busy-time”) when you are busy is work. The free time of leisure (“fun-time”) is a time for fun (pleasure). The time dedicated to Fun is culturally (capitalistically) pre-defined; no moment is actually free, each moment that is sold as free is to be bought with Work Time tokens –which is money. Believe is Enjoy. Happiness, achieved through pleasure, and pleasure through Fun, and Life as Play, is the recipe for Teleology in the 21st century. -/- The Technological God (Fun), as the Sacred God before him, is sovereignty’s technique or a social “mode of release”: demonstrations, marches, petitions, freedom of speech, citizen and human rights vindications, are “modes of release”, so that the next day, feeling relieved and released that you are working for a better life and a better world, you can wake up cheerfully to walk to your workplace, feeling it will change because of your marching, or your petition, or your speech, or the mass you attended, or the prayer you said yesterday. Thus life continues unchanging, through postponing hope; the tension of the tragedy is always released (lysis) in catharsis: refreshment for the next day of work. Art, especially cinema, (namely, simulated life) follows the same cathartic principles as real life. Thus, you can keep coping, and hoping in the meantime is of much help. Religion, Art, Science, Therapy, and Technology are all technologies used to market life, sell it or lend it, and humans are buying it back. Fun is free to produce, and expensive to buy. (shrink)

Citation: Christodoulou, Marina. “Philosophical An(n)ales: Ugliness Abject Disgust ... as an allergy to the (Feminine) Other”, in Wassard Elea Rivista III, no 3 (giugno12,2016), 119-141. -/- -------- -/- Ugliness Abject Disgust ... as an allergy to the (Feminine) Other -/- Appendix: Towards a Philosophy of Poop The Anti-Aesthetics of Scat, the Philosophy of Disgust and the Scato- Libidinal Economy.

This paper develops a largely neglected parallel between prudence and population ethics. Prudence is generally understood to be concerned with the balancing of well-being over time. How, precisely, well-being ought to be balanced over time, however, is a fervently debated question. I argue that developing a standard guiding such evaluations is exceedingly challenging. This is due to an often overlooked fact about prudence, namely that it shares a structural similarity with population ethics: In both contexts, we assess the comparative value (...) of populations of personstages/people, which may vary in number and level of well-being. Based on this analogy, I show that the development of an adequate theory of prudence runs into very similar impossibility results as obtain in population ethics. In particular, I prove that Arrhenius’ fifth impossibility theorem can be applied to prudence. I develop and compare four possible answers to this challenge. First, I discuss the possibility of accepting the very repugnant conclusion intrapersonally. Second, I present and further develop Donald Bruckner’s Minimax Regret approach, which gives up Transitivity. Third, I apply Jacob Nebel’s Lexical Threshold View to prudence and critically evaluate it. Lastly, I introduce what I call the Negative Lexicality View, which is based on Lexical Threshold View but overcomes some of its problems. (shrink)

Policies that require male-female sex comparisons in all areas of biomedical research conflict with the goal of improving health outcomes through context-sensitive individualization of medical care. Sex, like race, requires a rigorous, contextual approach in precision medicine. A “sex contextualist” approach to gender-inclusive medicine better aligns with this aim.

The present investigation concerns Reid’s explanation of how objects (be they real or nonexistent) are conceived. This paper shows that there is a deep-rooted tension in Reid’s understanding of conception: although the type of conception employed in perception is closely related to the one employed in imagination, three fundamental features distinguish perceptual conception (as the former will be referred to throughout this paper) from imaginative conception (as the latter will be called henceforth). These features would have been ascribed by Reid (...) himself to conception as involved in perception, but not to conception as involved in imagination. He should have recognized them as marking the former as a different kind from the latter, and he should not have hastily lumped perceptual and imaginative conceptions together. (shrink)

El artículo intenta recuperar la figura de Dora Benjamin como referente de la crítica social, reconstruyendo las huellas de aquello que el silencio de su imagen posibilita interpretar.

This paper explores the charge by Bruce Aune and Allen Wood that a gap exists in Kant's derivation of the Categorical Imperative. I show that properly understood, no such gap exists, and that the deduction of the Categorical Imperative is successful as it stands.

El presente trabajo pretende explorar las contribuciones que lecturas y categorías posestructuralistas ofrecen a la conformación de una crítica decolonial. En particular, se orienta a la recuperación del concepto de tercer espacio desarrollado por Homi Bhabha, la reinscripción de una política del reconocimiento en las figuraciones del lenguaje propuesta por Julia Kristeva y la crítica al humanismo de Sylvia Wynter. Lejos de confundir colonialismo y colonialidad o estudios poscoloniales y decoloniales, el artículo intenta dar cuenta de su íntima productividad. Es (...) precisamente en la torsión de la enunciación donde se esboza una apuesta por la subversión de dicha disputa. A partir de estos acercamientos se delinea una propuesta para repensar las subjetividades jurídicas. (shrink)

Jean Luc Nancy (2020) refería a la pandemia como un virus demasiado humano. Esto es un virus ligado a nuestros modos de producción y consumo; al uso ilimitado de todas las fuerzas disponibles, naturales y humanas, con miras a una producción que no tiene otra finalidad más que ella misma. El virus, señala Nancy, viene a señalarnos que hay límites. A partir de esta lectura, el artículo propone tres aportes conceptuales para repensar nuestro modo de habitar el mundo. Mundo no (...) como un concepto autoevidente sino como lo indeterminado que cada nueva generación deberá concebir y crear. Asimismo reflexiona sobre el lugar del derecho en el marco de dicho desafío. (shrink)

¿Qué relación hay entre derecho y lenguaje? Y ¿entre lenguaje y ley? ¿Cómo se inicia la serie de la juridicidad? ¿Qué la posibilita? Una característica hace de lo humano algo aparte de lo vivo: la palabra. El presente trabajo pretende recorrer parte de esta huella, intentando repensar allí la centralidad del lenguaje en la estructuración misma de la juridicidad. Volverse al lenguaje es, en definitiva –como señala P. Sneh– un gesto político.

Abstract: In this paper, I respond to James Sterba’s recent book ‘Is a Good God Logically Possible?’ I show that Sterba concludes that God is not logically possible by ignoring three important issues: (a) the different functions of leeway indeterminism (and the political freedom presupposed by it) and autonomy (the two are very different things, even though both go under the name of freedom), (b) the differences in the conditions of agency in God and in creatures, (there is non-parity in (...) how each must apply the single moral law), and (c) the non-parity between our knowledge and God’s. I provide a brief summary of Sterba’s arguments, and I develop the following points: 1. Sterba’s argument against a Free-Will Defense hinges on his conflation of political freedom and autonomy; 2. Sterba’s crucial premise for his argument against soul-making theodicies (namely, that the “Pauline Principle” should be applied univocally across God and creatures) is false; 3. Sterba’s arguments against skeptical theism depend on his assumption that our knowledge is comparable to that of God. In each case, Sterba either does not recognize non-parity between God and creatures or does not recognize the difference between the profane (e.g., political matters) and the sacred, (e.g., spiritual matters having to do with the inner nature of the soul’s development). (shrink)

Citation: Christodoulou, Marina. “‘To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly’ Reversed Necropolitics and the Death Imaginary.” Lo Sguardo - rivista di filosofia N. 23, 2017 (I) - Reinventare il reale. Jean Baudrillard (2007-2017) a cura di Eleonora de Conciliis, Enrico Schirò, Daniela Angelucci, pp. 127-137. Articolo sottoposto a peer review. Ricevuto il 14/10/2016. Accettato il 12/01/2017. ISSN: 2036-6558 -/- --------- -/- The concept or the theory of Death in the thought of Jean Baudrillard is not given the particular attention (...) it needs. When one speaks of the thought of Baudrillard, one rarely will mention ‘death’ as one of the keywords of his corpus. I think, though, that it deserves such a key place, for three reasons. Firstly, because the theme of Death is a gargantuan concept in the history of Philosophy and it even emerges with the definition of Philosophy itself, since, at least, Plato. Every philosopher, more or less is preoccupied with it, as an archetypical necessity of both human culture and of philosophy in particular. It is always interesting to see how each philosopher or each person thinks on it, as their thoughts on Death are a departure point and an indication of their whole philosophical system or, for non-philosophers, of their whole way of life. Secondly, it is important to examine this theme in Baudrillard because it inseparably interconnects, explains, and is explained by all the other, key, and the less prominent themes in his philosophy. Baudrillard’s thinking might take new dimensions when viewed through his thoughts on Death. Finally, Baudrillard is considered a difficult thinker, because, unlike other philosophers, he grasps themes which people are used to seeing as the pre-occupation or within the realm of fiction, even science-fiction. I would like to show, using simple language, that his philosophy, especially surrounding the subject of Death, is completely naked of any metaphysical, romanticised, fantastic, or fiction-like properties; it is realistic and political. (shrink)

Higginbotham argued that certain linguistic items of English, when used in indirect discourse, necessarily trigger first-personal interpretations. They are: the emphatic reflexive pronoun and the controlled understood subject, represented as PRO. PRO is special, in this respect, due to its imposing obligatory control effects between the main clause and its subordinates ). Folescu & Higginbotham, in addition, argued that in Romanian, a language whose grammar doesn’t assign a prominent role to PRO, de se triggers are correlated with the subjunctive mood (...) of certain verbs. That paper, however, didn’t account for the grammatical diversity of the reports that display immunity to error through misidentification in Romanian: some of these reports are expressed by using de se triggers; others are not. Their IEM, moreover, is not systematically lexically controlled by the verbs, via their theta-roles; it is, rather, determined by the meaning of the verbs in question. Given the data from Romanian, I will argue, the phenomenon of IEM cannot be fully explained starting either from the syntactical or the lexical structure of a language. (shrink)

Los profundos niveles de asimetría, inequidad y exclusión que exhibe nuestra contemporaneidad, las deportaciones masivas de refugiados, la criminalización de la indocumentación demandan más que nunca la necesidad de impulsar nuevos modos de pensar el derecho; modos que permitan forjar un derecho inclusivo, dialógico, abierto y participativo. Llevar adelante esta tarea supone, ante todo, repensar los presupuestos filosóficos sobre los que el pensamiento jurídico se asienta. Resulta así imprescindible deconstruir ciertas categorías medulares en la conformación de la Teoría Jurídica. Esto (...) es, comprender cómo estas se constituyeron a fin de poder reconstruirlas de otro modo. El presente trabajo pretende esbozar diez contribuciones iusfilosóficas que posibiliten estos desarrollos. (shrink)

The essay discusses F. Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto on the centrality of religious experience.