The Eugenic Mind Project is a wide-ranging, philosophical book that explores and critiques both past and present eugenic thinking, drawing on the author’s intimate knowledge of eugenics in North America and his previous work on the cognitive, biological, and social sciences, the fragile sciences. Informed by the perspectives of Canadian eugenics survivors in the province of Alberta, The Eugenic Mind Project recounts the history of eugenics and the thinking that drove it, and critically engages contemporary manifestations of (...) eugenic thought, newgenics. An accessible, original work of scholarship adopting what the author calls a standpoint eugenics, this book focuses on the roots of eugenic thinking past and present. It will provoke and enrich discussions about human nature and human diversity, the social uses of biotechnology, and social policy governing future generations. You can download the preface and acknowledgements here. (shrink)

This is a critical response to "Defending Eugenics", published in MBR in 2018.

Eugenics does not feel so distant from where I stand. This essay explains why.

In the intersection between eugenics past and present, disability has never been far beneath the surface. Perceived and ascribed disabilities of body and mind were one of the core sets of eugenics traits that provided the basis for institutionalized and sterilization on eugenic grounds for the first 75 years of the 20th-century. Since that time, the eugenic preoccupation with the character of future generations has seeped into what have become everyday practices in the realm of reproductive choice. As (...) Marsha Saxton (2000) and Adrienne Asch (2000, 2003) have forcefully argued, the use of prenatal screening technologies to facilitate the selective abortion of fetuses with features that signify disabling traits—the paradigm here being trisomy 21 in a fetus indicating Down Syndrome in the child—express a negative view of such disabilities sufficient to warrant terminating an otherwise wanted pregnancy. The eliminative structure of what Rosemary Garland Thompson (2012) has called eugenic logic persists in contemporary practices governing reproductive choice, social inclusion, and democratic participation and their relationship to disability. The tie between eugenics and contemporary disability studies suggests that eugenics and reflection on its history can also play a more positive role in disability politics. After focusing on eugenics in the first half of the paper, we will shift in the second half of the paper to eugenic resonances in contemporary thought and practice, concluding with some thoughts about ongoing practices of silencing and the very idea of eradicating disability. (shrink)

Projects of human improvement take both individual and intergenerational forms. The biosciences provide many technologies, including prenatal screening and the latest gene editing techniques, such as CRISPR, that have been viewed as providing the means to human improvement across generations. But who is fit to furnish the next generation? Historically, eugenics epitomizes the science-based attempt to improve human society through distinguishing kinds of people and then implementing social policies—from immigration restriction to sexual sterilization and euthanasia—that influence and even direct (...) what sorts of people populate our future. Despite recognition of the horrors of the eugenic extremes of the past and of the subhumanizing of those sufficiently below appearance or ability norms to be viewed as “defective” or “unfit”, many people continue to be drawn to strands of eugenic thinking. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between eugenics, disability, and dehumanization, with a focus on forms of eugenics beyond Nazi eugenics.

In philosophical thought experiments, as in ordinary discourse, our understanding of verbal case descriptions is enriched by automatic comprehension inferences. Such inferences have us routinely infer what else is also true of the cases described. We consider how such routine inferences from polysemous words can generate zombie intuitions: intuitions that are ‘killed’ (defeated) by contextual information but kept cognitively alive by the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic salience bias. Extending ‘evidentiary’ experimental philosophy, this paper examines whether the ‘zombie argument’ against materialism (...) is built on zombie intuitions. We examine the hypothesis that contextually defeated stereotypical inferences from the noun ‘zombie’ influence intuitions about ‘philosophical zombies’. We document framing effects (‘zombie’ vs ‘duplicate’) predicted by the hypothesis. Findings undermine intuitions about the conceivability of ‘philosophical zombies’ and address the philosophical ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Findings support a deflationary response: The impression that principled obstacles prevent scientific explanation of how physical processes give rise to conscious experience is generated by philosophical arguments that rely on epistemically deficient intuitions. (shrink)

Certain traits, such as intelligence and mental deficiency, have been the focus of eugenic research and propaganda. This focus on such eugenic traits builds on three commonsense ideas: (1) People differ with respect to some of their traits, such as eye-colour and height; (2) Many traits run in families, being passed on from parents to their children; (3) Some traits are desirable, while others are undesirable. These three ideas about traits—their variability, heritability, and desirability—fed the much more controversial eugenicist view (...) that some traits make a person of “good stock”, while others reflect the fact that she comes from “inferior stock”. In combination with the power to influence human reproduction, the systematic study of eugenic traits has thus been thought to provide the basis for human improvement across generations. Three sources reveal which traits were considered important to eugenicists, the public, and decision makers: the research publications of eugenicists, discussions of eugenics in public and popular media, and legislation. (shrink)

This paper empirically raises and examines the question of ‘conceptual control’: To what extent are competent thinkers able to reason properly with new senses of words? This question is crucial for conceptual engineering. This prominently discussed philosophical project seeks to improve our representational devices to help us reason better. It frequently involves giving new senses to familiar words, through normative explanations. Such efforts enhance, rather than reduce, our ability to reason properly, only if competent language users are able to abide (...) by the relevant explanations, in language comprehension and verbal reasoning. This paper examines to what extent we have such ‘conceptual control’ in reasoning with new senses. The paper draws on psycholinguistic findings about polysemy processing to render this question empirically tractable and builds on recent findings from experimental philosophy to address it. The paper identifies a philosophically important gap in thinkers’ control over the key process of stereotypical enrichment and discusses how conceptual engineers can use empirical methods to work around this gap in conceptual control. The paper thus empirically demonstrates the urgency of the question of conceptual control and explains how experimental philosophy can empirically address the question, to render conceptual engineering feasible as an ameliorative enterprise. (shrink)

Intuitive judgments elicited by verbal case-descriptions play key roles in philosophical problem-setting and argument. Experimental philosophy's ‘sources project’ seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions which help us assess our warrant for accepting them. This article develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitions prompted by philosophical case-descriptions. For proof of concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradox about perception, trace them to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executed in verb comprehension, and employ a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to elicit the relevant (...) stereotypical associations of perception- and appearance-verbs. We obtain a debunking explanation that resolves the philosophical paradox. (shrink)

Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments involve unusual cases. We present empirical reasons to doubt the reliability of intuitive judgments and conclusions about such cases. Inferences and intuitions prompted by verbal case descriptions are influenced by routine comprehension processes which invoke stereotypes. We build on psycholinguistic findings to determine conditions under which the stereotype associated with the most salient sense of a word predictably supports inappropriate inferences from descriptions of unusual (stereotype-divergent) cases. We conduct an experiment that combines plausibility ratings (...) with pupillometry to document this “salience bias.” We find that under certain conditions, competent speakers automatically make stereotypical inferences they know to be inappropriate. (shrink)

Stereotypes shape inferences in philosophical thought, political discourse, and everyday life. These inferences are routinely made when thinkers engage in language comprehension or production: We make them whenever we hear, read, or formulate stories, reports, philosophical case-descriptions, or premises of arguments – on virtually any topic. These inferences are largely automatic: largely unconscious, non-intentional, and effortless. Accordingly, they shape our thought in ways we can properly understand only by complementing traditional forms of philosophical analysis with experimental methods from psycholinguistics. This (...) paper seeks, first, to bring out the wider philosophical relevance of stereotypical inference, well beyond familiar topics like gender and race. Second, we wish to provide philosophers with a toolkit to experimentally study these ubiquitous inferences and what intuitions they may generate. This paper explains what stereotypes are, and why they matter to current and traditional concerns in philosophy – experimental, analytic, and applied. It then assembles a psycholinguistic toolkit and demonstrates through two studies how potentially questionnaire-based measures can be combined with process measures to garner evidence for specific stereotypical inferences and study when they ‘go through’ and influence our thinking. (shrink)

Mindfulness involves paying attention to the present moment and accepting any thoughts or feelings that might arise without judgment. Mindfulness can influence a number of outcomes. Currently, we are interested if it influences people’s level of mental construal. Two central dimensions of mindfulness (focusing on the present, and Openness to Experience) can lead to diverging predictions. While focusing on the present may produce a concrete construal level, openness to experience may facilitate an abstract construal level instead. We conducted 2 experiments (...) to test the effect of a brief mindfulness induction on construal level. Mindfulness prompted participants to think more abstractly (Experiment 1), which was mediated by Openness to Experience (Experiment 2). Thus, mindfulness may prompt how people process information more broadly. We situate our research in the broader literature on mindfulness and reconcile our findings with previous work. (shrink)

: Two common ways of explaining akrasia will be presented, one which focuses on strength of desire and the other which focuses on action issuing from practical judgment. Though each is intuitive in a certain way, they both fail as explanations of the most interesting cases of akrasia. Spinoza 's own thoughts on bondage and the affects follow, from which a Spinozist explanation of akrasia is constructed. This account is based in Spinoza 's mechanistic psychology of cognitive affects. Because Spinoza (...) 's account explains action asissuing from modes of mind that are both cognitive and affective, it captures the intuitions that motivate the two traditional views while avoiding the pitfalls that result from their one‐sided approaches. This project will allow us a fuller understanding of Spinozist moral psychology. In addition to this historical value, the Spinozist theory may offer a satisfactory explanation of certain hard cases of akrasia while avoiding the problems be set by other theories. For this reason, the Spinozist account could also be seen as a useful contribution to our philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of akrasia. (shrink)

Until recently, experimental philosophy has been associated with the questionnaire-based study of intuitions; however, experimental philosophers now adapt a wide range of empirical methods for new philosophical purposes. New methods include paradigms for behavioural experiments from across the social sciences as well as computational methods from the digital humanities that can process large bodies of text and evidence. This book offers an accessible overview of these exciting innovations. The volume brings together established and emerging research leaders from several areas of (...) experimental philosophy to explore how new empirical methods can contribute to philosophical debates. Each chapter presents one or several methods new to experimental philosophy, demonstrating their application in a key area of philosophy and discussing their strengths and limitations. Methods covered include eye tracking, virtual reality technology, neuroimaging, statistical learning, and experimental economics as well as corpus linguistics, visualisation techniques and data and text mining. The volume explores their use in moral philosophy and moral psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and the history of ideas. Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy is essential reading for undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

This paper provides new tools for philosophical argument analysis and fresh empirical foundations for ‘critical’ ordinary language philosophy. Language comprehension routinely involves stereotypical inferences with contextual defeaters. J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia first mooted the idea that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from verbal case-descriptions drive some philosophical paradoxes; these engender philosophical problems that can be resolved by exposing the underlying fallacies. We build on psycholinguistic research on salience effects to explain when and why even perfectly competent speakers cannot help making (...) stereotypical inferences which are contextually inappropriate. We analyse a classical paradox about perception, suggest it relies on contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance-verbs, and show that the conditions we identified as leading to contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are met in formulations of the paradox. Three experiments use a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to document the predicted inappropriate inferences, in English, German, and Japanese. The cross-linguistic study allows us to assess the wider relevance of the proposed analysis. Our findings open up new perspectives for ‘evidential’ experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy’s much-discussed ‘restrictionist’ program seeks to delineate the extent to which philosophers may legitimately rely on intuitions about possible cases. The present paper shows that this program can be (i) put to the service of diagnostic problem-resolution (in the wake of J.L. Austin) and (ii) pursued by constructing and experimentally testing psycholinguistic explanations of intuitions which expose their lack of evidentiary value: The paper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of paradoxical intuitions that are prompted by verbal case-descriptions, and presents two (...) experiments that support the explanation. This debunking explanation helps resolve philosophical paradoxes about perception (known as ‘arguments from hallucination’). (shrink)

"Our literature is replete with complaints about the chaotic state of the systematics of psychoses and every psychiatrist knows that it is impossible to come to any common understanding on the basis of the old diagnostic labels. ... Thus, not even the masters of science can make themselves understood on the basis of the old concepts and with many patients the number of diagnoses made equals the number of institutions they have been too. ... Errors are the greatest obstacles to (...) the progress of science; to correct such errors is of more practical value than to achieve new knowledge. We have here eliminated chaos of terms behind which useful concepts of disease were mistakenly sought; we have eliminated a veritable forest of boundary posts, not one of which indicated any natural line of demarcation. ... By the term „dementia praecox“ or „schizophrenia“ we designate a group of psychoses whose course is at times chronic, at times marked by intermittent attacks, and which can stop or retrograde at any stage, but does not permit a full restitutio ad integrum. The disease is characterized by a specific type of alteration of thinking, feeling, and relation to the external world which appears nowhere else in this particular fashion." Eugen Bleuler. Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias. Translated by Joseph Zinkin. International Universities Press, New York, 1950. (shrink)

The paper builds on a methodological idea from experimental philosophy and on findings from psycholinguistics, to develop and defend ordinary language analysis (OLA) as practiced in J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia. That attack on sense-datum theories of perception focuses on the argument from illusion. Through a case-study on this paradoxical argument, the present paper argues for a form of OLA which is psychologically informed, seeks to expose epistemic, rather than semantic, defects in paradoxical arguments, and is immune to the main (...) objections to ordinary language philosophising, including those arising from the semantic/pragmatics distinction: A key project in current experimental philosophy is to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions that help us determine what warrant thinkers have for accepting them. Psycholinguistic work on the role of stereotypes in verb-comprehension has shown that intuitive judgments can be generated by automatic cognitive processes that duplicate both semantic and pragmatic inferences and are shaped by dominant uses of words. For systematic reasons, philosophers are prone to unwittingly deviate from such dominant uses. Where this happens, they are liable to automatically infer unwarranted conclusions that strike them as intuitively compelling. OLA helps us to determine those dominant uses, to identify unwitting deviations from them, and thus to expose unwarranted intuitions – e.g., in the premises of paradoxical arguments. Ordinary language does not determine the bounds of sense but shapes our leaps of thought. The paper shows how this enables its ‘Austinian’ analysis to contribute to a novel, epistemic, resolution of philosophical paradoxes and problems. (shrink)

The argument of Julian Savulescu’s 2001 paper, “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children” is flawed in a number of respects. Savulescu confuses reasons with obligations and equivocates between the claim that parents have some reason to want the best for their children and the more radical claim that they are morally obligated to attempt to produce the best child possible. Savulescu offers a prima facie implausible account of parental obligation, as even the best parents typically fail to (...) do everything they think would be best for their children let alone everything that is in fact best for their children. The profound philosophical difficulties which beset the attempt to formulate a plausible account of the best human life constitute a further independent reason to resile from Savulescu’s conclusion. Savulescu’s argument also requires parents to become complicit with racist and homophobic oppression, which is yet another reason to reject it. Removing the equivocation from Savulescu’s argument allows us to see that the assertion of an obligation to choose the “best child” has much more in common with the “old” eugenics than Savulescu acknowledges. (shrink)

In its most part, this article is a critique of three of the most common ways of defining egalitarianism: 1) egalitarianism is a trend of thought in political philosophy to which belong (all) philosophers who support a form of equality, whatever it may be, between all members of a community; 2) egalitarianism is a trend of thought in political philosophy which has as a ultimate or foundational value equality in the abstract sense of treating all people as equals; and 3) (...) egalitarianism is a trend of thought in political philosophy that defends equality in the distribution of certain goods or resources. In the last part of the article I defend the idea that egalitarianism is much better described as a trend of thought in political philosophy that defends a substantial equality between all members of a community as a ultimate principle of social justice. (shrink)

Drawing from Peircean semiotics, from the Greek conception of phronesis, and from considerations of bodily awareness as a basis of reasonableness, I attempt to show how the living gesture touches our deepest signifying nature, the self, and public life. Gestural bodily awareness, more than knowledge, connects us with the very conditions out of which the human body evolved into its present condition and remains a vital resource in the face of a devitalizing, rationalistic consumption culture. It may be precisely these (...) deep-rooted abilities for what I term “self-originated experience” that can ultimately offset automatism. (shrink)

Eugenics is commonly thought of as having endured as science and social movement only until 1945. With the advance of both reproductive and enhancement technologies, however, concern has arisen that eugenics has resurfaced in new forms. In particular, the eugenic potential of the Human Genome Project led to talk of the rise of ‘newgenics’ and of a backdoor to eugenics. This article focuses on such concerns deriving from the practice of prenatal screening and technologies that increase our (...) ability to generate information about the kinds of children we are likely to have. Given individual preferences and social norms concerning what traits are intergenerationally desirable, how should we act and what practices and policies should we endorse or scrutinise? This article will concentrate on key components of eugenic thinking present today and emphasise continuities between the eugenic past and new- genic present in the subhumanisation of people with cognitive or intellectual disabilities. (shrink)

Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We demonstrate how plausibility (...) ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential ‘salience bias’. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox (‘argument from hallucination’). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods’ philosophical usefulness. (shrink)

The conditions of hunting and gathering through which one line of primates evolved into humans form the basis of what I term the wild self, a self marked by developmental needs of prolonged human neoteny and by deep attunement to the profusion of communicative signs of instinctive intelligence in which relatively “unmatured” hominids found themselves immersed. The passionate attunement to, and inquiry into, earth-drama, in tracking, hunting, foraging, rhythming, singing, and other arts/sciences, provided the trail to becoming human, and provide (...) external grammatical structures that became the basis of human language and animate mind. I outline my new philosophy of history as a progress in precision, counteracted by a regressive contraction of mind. The progress associated with history since the beginning of agriculturally-based civilizations can be considered as a regressive contraction from animate mind of our hunter-gatherer evolutionary past, to anthropocentric mind, and finally to the ghost in the machine world-view of mechanico-centric mind. Contemporary consumption culture represents an inversion of the original conditions of the human self, and indeed, targets aspects of developmental neoteny to condition conformity to its rational-mechanical system imperatives. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen and Andrew Mason have recently argued, against many contemporary philosophers, that feasibility is not a legitimate constraint in theorizing about social justice. Their main argument is that principles of justice are logically independent of issues of feasibility and, consequently, feasibility has no bearing on the correctness of these principles. This article is a critical examination of three attempts to show that Cohen and Mason’s argument is unsound. The examined attempts are those of Harry Brighouse, Collin Farrelly, and (...) David Miller. I argue that all these arguments are based on false, unjustified or implausible, premises and/or assumptions. Consequently, they cannot discredit the soundness of Cohen and Mason’s argument and of the thesis that feasibility is not, in fact, a legitimate constraint in theorizing about social justice. (shrink)

Eugenics is often referred to in debates on the ethics of reproductive technologies and practices, in relation to the creation of moral boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable technologies, and acceptable and unacceptable uses of these technologies. Historians have argued that twentieth century eugenics cannot be reduced to a uniform set of practices, and that no simple lessons can be drawn from this complex history. Some authors stress the similarities between past eugenics and present reproductive technologies and practices (...) (what I define throughout the paper as ‘the continuity view’) in order to condemn the latter. Others focus on the differences between past and present practices (what I define throughout the paper as ‘the discontinuity view’) in order to defend contemporary reproductive technologies. In this paper, I explore the meanings of the word ‘eugenics’ and the relationship between its past and present uses in terms of contemporary debates on reproductive technologies and practices. I argue that moral disagreement about present technologies originate in divergent views of condemnable and justifiable features of the past. (shrink)

Philosophy has long become a key term in the study of Buddhism, defining the moral and rational essence of the Buddha’s teaching, emblematic of its Indian origins. In this essay, I suggest that the relation of Buddhism and philosophy, which prior to the mid-nineteenth century was framed as the relation of the Religion of Fo to the cult of voidness, was reformulated in the self-styled language of science in the wake of the study of Buddhism from Sanskrit sources. Specifically, I (...) suggest that the philosophical dimension of Eugène Burnouf’s reading of the Divyāvadāna and his idea of “simple sūtra” played a crucial role in defining Buddhism as a philosophy for the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The idea of a “simple moral philosophy” emerged in Burnouf’s particular reading of the story of the Buddha’s last days in the Divyāvadāna and the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta, as the play of magic and death unfolds in the theme of the master’s denial of the will to live. Burnouf’s philosophical reading rests on the purification, in the theme of the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa, of the foundations of magical power that articulate knowledge of this world and beyond in the Buddha’s discourses. In the conclusion, I reformulate Burnouf’s question about the Buddha’s moral philosophy in his study of the simple sūtras vis-à-vis the historically self-conscious question about the Buddha’s ability to defer death by magic that traces back to the early debate of Buddhist exegetical traditions. (shrink)

În acest capitol prezint neutralismul liberal urmând, în esență, patru pași. Încep cu definirea neutralismului și cu unele precizări și explicații importante pentru înțelegerea adecvată a susținerii lui fundamentale. Al doilea pas este dedicat evidențierii și explicării celor mai importante argumente neutraliste. Mă concentrez apoi asupra caracterizării principalelor versiuni ale acestei teorii politice și a reliefării argumentelor pe baza cărora se legitimează ele. În sfârșit, într-un ultim pas, expun obiecțiile sau argumentele anti-neutraliste și – totodată – replicile neutraliștilor liberali la (...) ele. Și de această dată este vorba, trebuie să precizez, doar despre obiecțiile cele mai importante (și mai „rezonabile”), nu despre toate obiecțiile, mai mult sau mai puțin plauzibile, care au fost aduse neutralismului de criticii săi. (shrink)

An important strand of current experimental philosophy promotes a new kind of methodological naturalism. This chapter argues that this new ‘metaphilosophical naturalism’ is fundamentally consistent with key tenets of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy, and can provide empirical foundations for therapeutic conceptions of philosophy. Metaphilosophical naturalism invites us to contribute to the resolution of philosophical problems about X by turning to scientific findings about the way we think about X – in general or when doing philosophy. This new naturalism encourages us to use (...) resources from psychology that can empirically vindicate precisely some of the most controversial aspects of Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy: They can establish the need, and provide key tools, for something worth calling ‘therapy’, in philosophy. As ‘pudding proof’ this chapter shows how methods and findings from psycholinguistics motivate and facilitate a therapeutic approach to a characteristically philosophical problem: ‘the problem of perception’. (shrink)

In this radical critique of contemporary social theory, Eugene Halton argues that both modernism and postmodernism are damaged philosophies whose acceptance of the myths of the mind/body dichotomy make them incapable of solving our social dilemmas. Claiming that human beings should be understood as far more than simply a form of knowledge, social construction, or contingent difference, Halton argues that contemporary thought has lost touch with the spontaneous passions—or enchantment—of life. Exploring neglected works in twentieth century social thought and philosophy—particularly (...) the writings of Lewis Mumford and Charles Peirce—as well as the work of contemporary writers such as Vaclav Havel, Maya Angelou, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, and Victor Turner, Halton argues that reason is dependent upon nonrational forces—including sentiment, instinct, conjecture, imagination, and experience. We must, he argues, frame our questions in a way which encompasses both enchantment and critical reason, and he offers an outline here for doing so. A passionate plea for a fundamental reexamination of the entrenched assumptions of the modern era, this book deals with issues of vital concern to modern societies and should be read by scholars across disciplines. Robert Bellah: "This is an original, incisive, and badly needed book. In prose as vigorous as his argument, Halton addresses issues urgent in many disciplines, as well as in our common culture." "Halton takes the 'ghost in the machine' as a dominant defining metaphor for modern thought and life, and criticizes it with gusto, wit, wide reading, and philosophical acumen."—Robert J. Mulvaney, _Review of Metaphysics_. (shrink)

Conceptul de dreptate socială este unul dintre cele mai controversate concepte ale filosofiei politice. Foarte puține aspecte legate de acest concept nu sunt înconjurate de controverse și dezbateri argumentative. Unele dintre cele mai importante astfel de controverse sunt cele legate de definirea, de specificarea și de legitimitatea lui. Prima este, în esență, o controversă în privința răspunsului la următoarea întrebare: care este conceptul care surprinde cel mai bine trăsătura fundamentală a dreptății și nedreptății sociale? A doua este o controversă în (...) privința exigențelor sau a principiilor „corecte” ale dreptății sociale. În sfărșit, a treia este o controversă pe marginea acceptabilității conceptului de dreptate socială. În studiul de față prezint pe scurt principalele idei, poziții și argumente invocate de filosofii politici recenți în cadrul fiecăreia dintre aceste controverse. (shrink)

În acest capitol îmi revine sarcina de a prezenta unul dintre cele mai influente și mai dinamice curente din filosofia politică actuală. Este vorba, desigur, despre curentul care dă titlul acestui capitol: egalitarianismul.

Analogical reasoning is often employed in problem-solving and metaphor interpretation. This paper submits that, as a default, analogical reasoning addressing these different tasks employs different mapping strategies: In problem-solving, it employs analogy-maximising strategies (like structure mapping, Gentner & Markman 1997); in metaphor interpretation, analogy-minimising strategies (like ATT-Meta, Barnden 2015). The two strategies interact in analogical reasoning with conceptual metaphors. This interaction leads to predictable fallacies. The paper supports these hypotheses through case-studies on ‘mind’-metaphors from ordinary discourse, and abstract problem-solving in (...) the philosophy of mind, respectively: It shows that (1) default metaphorical interpretations for vision- and space-cognition metaphors can be derived with a variant of the analogy-minimising ATT-Meta approach, (2) philosophically influential introspective conceptions of the mind can be derived with conceptual metaphors only through an analogy-maximising strategy, and (3) the interaction of these strategies leads to hitherto unrecognised fallacies in analogical reasoning with metaphors. This yields a debunking explanation of introspective conceptions. (shrink)

Dreaming is a communicative activity between the most sensitive archive of the enregistered experience of life on the earth, the brain, and the most plastic medium for the discovery and practice of meaning, the mind or culture. Both love and war have been made on the basis of dreams, not to mention scientific discoveries. In ancient Greece dreams were medicinal parts of curative sleeping or "incubation" rites in the temple of Aesculapius, and many psychoanalytic physicians today still consider dreams as (...) possessing therapeutic potential. The ethnographic literature gives ample testimony to the great significance accorded to dreams by all of the world cultures. Dreams form a rich store of ethnographic evidence, and their indigenous interpretations can often illuminate the central issues and conflicts of a people otherwise hidden from obvious view. Given these facts, plus the physiological facts that the dream process itself involves deeply-rooted material brain functions, and that rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, which is the key indicator of human dreaming, is shared by all mammals, it remains strange how little attention is given to dreaming as a formative aspect of human evolution and culture. -/- This essay addresses dreaming as a formative aspect of human evolution and culture by viewing dreaming as a borderland between biology and culture, a thoroughly social, yet private experience. Dreaming not only highlights the "cultic" roots of culture—the spontaneous impulse to meaning—but also illustrates one of the ways in which the technics of the biosocial human body itself form the primary source of culture. I show why dreaming, although private, is a thoroughly cultural, biological, communicative activity. -/- Culture and biology are often treated by social scientists as though they were oil and water, not to be mixed. I should inform the culture theorist at the start that I am fully aware of the assumed nature-culture dichotomy, and that I reject it. I do so not because I am a sociobiologist, quite the contrary, rather because I am a semiotician, and my studies of signs have led me toward a critical reconstruction of the concepts of nature and culture. In what follows I beg the reader's patience, since I will draw from diverse materials and project some speculative hypotheses in places in order to make my argument. -/- . (shrink)

In the words of Charles Peirce from 1901, “man is but a degenerate monkey, with a paranoic talent for self-satisfaction, no matter what scrapes he may get himself into, calling them ‘civilization…’” Peirce’s concept of degenerate monkey draws attention both to our neotenous or prolonged newborn-like nature as “degenerate” in the mathematical sense of a genetic falling away from more mature genomes of other primates, and also to our monkeying around with the long evolutionary narrative of foraging, through the advent (...) of agriculture, settlement, and civilization. -/- Homo sapiens, man the knower, is the way we humans like to distinguish ourselves from the rest of nature. But if we consider ourselves as degenerate monkeys, perhaps homo errans, man the blunderer, would have been a better term, calling attention to our softened instinctive intelligence, in contrast to the “unerring instincts of other races,” as Peirce put it. -/- I take Peirce’s term “degenerate monkey” as not limited to moderns, but applicable to homo sapiens sapiens, anatomically modern humans, generally. Considering humans as degenerate monkeys is a key to understanding human development, in my view, precisely because we need to attune ourselves to the instinctive intelligence of the environment, drawing its intelligence into our dematured, blundering selves through abductive inference, and therein finding our maturity. Without that attunement to the Others, monkey goes mad, monkeying in its mirror of itself, fatally fixated, like Narcissus, and with similar results: planet of the degenerate monkeys, monkeying to mayhem. -/- As Cornelius, the ape archaeologist and historian in The Planet of the Apes stated it, reading from the sacred scrolls: “Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death.” Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it: “The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” . (shrink)

Nu cu foarte mult timp în urmă, grupul de teorie socială şi politică din cadrul proiectului POSDRU 89/1.5/S/56815 „Societatea bazată pe cunoaştere-cercetări, dezbateri, perspective”, a publicat, tot la editura Institutul European, lucrarea Concepte şi teorii social-politice. Volumul de faţă reprezintă un nou pas al grupului nostru de lucru în realizarea proiectului inaugurat prin publicarea acelei lucrări. Este vorba, reamintesc, despre proiectul elaborării unor volume care să-i ajute pe cei interesaţi în iniţierea (lor sau a altora) în teoria (şi în special (...) filosofia) politică, mai ales în dezvoltările sale conceptuale, argumentative şi problematologice recente. Desigur, nu am intenţionat în mod expres ca aceste volume să fie utile doar în această direcţie. Speranţa noastră a fost, dimpotrivă, ca ele să fie interesante şi pentru cercetătorii cu experienţă în investigarea şi dezbaterea temelor abordate în cadrul lor, mai ales pentru că unele capitole prezintă idei, argumente sau perspective originale, care, credem noi, merită atenţia critică a comunităţii cercetătorilor români. Menirea lor fundamentală rămâne totuşi, în intenţia noastră, cea introductivă. Aşa cum recunoşteam în cuvântul său înainte, Concepte şi teorii socialpolitice nu este deloc un volum exhaustiv. Teorii şi ideologii politice reprezintă, în bună măsură, şi o încercare de a compensa cumva acest „defect” al volumului în cauză. Desigur, nici publicarea lui nu ne permite să susţinem că am atins obiectivul oferirii unei introduceri cât mai complete în teoria/filosofia politică actuală. Deşi Teorii şi ideologii politice prezintă câteva dintre cele mai importante teorii sau ideologii politice contemporane, există multe altele care nu sunt prezentate (sau cel puţin nu sunt prezentate atât de detaliat pe cât ar fi meritat) între paginile sale. Mă refer aici, spre exemplu, la libertarianism, comunitarianism, cosmopolitism sau capabilism (ca teorie a dezvoltării umane). Ne consolăm însă în baza a trei argumente. Unul este acela că, aşa cum se poate observa cu uşurinţă din cuprinsul său, cartea de faţă prezintă totuşi un număr important dintre principalele teorii şi ideologii politice recente (unele dintre ele pentru prima dată în literatura românească de specialitate). Al doilea este acela că unele dintre teoriile sau ideologiile politice care nu sunt abordate aici au beneficiat deja de prezentări competente şi atente la noi (unele dintre ele chiar în Concepte şi teorii social-politice). În sfârşit, al treilea argument este acela că sperăm cu toţii că prezentul volum nu reprezintă ultimul nostru pas în realizarea obiectivului menţionat în debutul acestei intervenţii. Sperăm, altfel spus, să putem prezenta acele teorii sau ideologii politice care nu şi-au găsit locul între paginile lui sau ale celui precedent cu o altă ocazie. Ţin să precizez însă că volumul pe care îl introduc prin această intervenţie nu este întrutotul o continuare a celui precedent, deşi între ele există, desigur, destule afinităţi, relaţii şi continuităţi tematice. Mai exact, el nu ar putea fi descris totalmente neproblematic ca reprezentând „al doilea tom” al volumului Concepte şi teorii social-politice. Titlul său este menit să indice acest lucru. Dacă lucrarea anterioară era centrată pe prezentarea unora dintre principalele concepte ale teoriei/filosofiei social-politice contemporane, cartea de faţă prezintă câteva dintre principalele teorii sau ideologii dezvoltate şi apărate de politologii, filosofii, economiştii sau „ideologii” politici contemporani. Nici de această dată nu voi încerca să rezum principalele idei expuse sau metodologii utilizate de către autori în prezentarea teoriilor sau ideologiilor politice care se regăsesc între paginile ce urmează. Temeiul meu este acelaşi: acolo unde au considerat că este cazul, autorii capitolelor şi-au rezumat ei înşişi ideile prezentate sau/şi metodologiile utilizate. În plus, cititorul interesat să-şi facă o idee prealabilă despre conţinutul ideatic şi problematologic al cărţii dispune de un rezumat al ei (în limbile engleză şi franceză) în finalul său. În consecinţă, mă voi mulţumi să închei doar prin a exprima încă o dată speranţa noastră că această carte se va dovedi utilă celor cărora li se adresează cu preponderenţă. Sperăm, în alte cuvinte, ca ea să le fie de ajutor în înţelegerea şi evaluarea adecvată a teoriilor şi ideologiilor pe care le prezintă. Şi mai important, sperăm că ea îi va stimula să caute să aprofundeze cercetarea acestor teorii şi ideologii şi – mai ales – să iniţieze propriile investigaţii sistematice şi riguroase în această privinţă. Dezvoltarea politologiei şi a filosofiei politice în spaţiul românesc, ca să nu mai vorbim despre clarificarea şi fundamentarea cât mai completă şi adecvată a opţiunilor ideologice ale partidelor politice din România, au nevoie de acest lucru. (shrink)

Eugene Afonasin highlights the wealth of information on Pythagoras and his tradition preserved in Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis and presents them against the background of Later Platonic philosophy. He  rst outlines what Clement knew about the Pythagoreans, and then what he made of the Pythagorean ideal and how he reinterpreted it for his own purposes. Clement clearly occupies an intermediate position between the Neopythagorean biographical tradition, rmly based on Nicomachus, and that more or less vague and difuse literary situation (...) which preceded the later developments, and in this respect is a very good source, worth studying for its own sake and as supplementary material which can help to understand the great Pythagorean synthesis attempted by Iamblichus. Developing their variants of the “exhortation to philosophy” (protreptikoi logoi), these men were much concerned with the educational value of the Pythagorean way of life rather than biographical circumstances, designed to place the ancient sage in the proper cultural context. (shrink)

As eugenics is defined, it is very difficult to make a clear distinction between science (medicine, genetic engineering) and eugenics as a included field. And to set a line over which genetic engineering should not go further, according to moral, legal and religious norms. If we accept the help of genetics in finding ways to fight cancer, diabetes, or HIV, we also accept positive eugenics as they are defined now. And if we accept genetic screening, and interventions (...) on the unborn baby, or abortion, we also implicitly accept negative eugenics. In addition, at government level, although eugenics are officially denied, it has been legalized in many countries until recently, and is still accepted and legalized, albeit in subtle forms, even these days. The section Introduction defines the term and classification modes. The section History of Eugenics follows eugenics from the ancient period, the introduction of eugenics by Francis Galton, the practice of eugenics as a state policy in various countries, and the present eugenics (liberal eugenics). I then analyze various issues raised by the Ethics of Liberal Eugenics, and I have developed a special section for the Future of Eugenics, focusing on the human genome project. Finally, in the Conclusions, I express my personal views on the current practice of eugenics. -/- CONTENTS: -/- Abstract Introduction New Eugenics The Future of Eugenics Conclusions Bibliography -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.28662.45120. (shrink)

Charles Peirce claimed that logically "every true universal, every continuum, is a living and conscious being." Such a claim is precisely what hunter-gatherers believe: a world-view depicted as animism. Suppose animism represents a sophisticated world-view, ineradicably embodied in our physical bodies, and that Peirce's philosophy points toward a new kind of civilization, inclusive of what I term animate mind. We are wired to marvel in nature, and this reverencing attunement does not require a concept of God. Marveling in nature proves (...) to be not only a motive source of human evolution, but key to continued development. (shrink)

Despite the fact that the history of eugenics in Canada is necessarily part of the larger history of eugenics, there is a special role for oral history to play in the telling of this story, a role that promises to shift us from the muddled middle of the story. Not only has the testimony of eugenics survivors already played perhaps the most important role in revealing much about the practice of eugenics in Canada, but the willingness (...) and ability of survivors to share their own oral histories makes the situation in western Canada almost unique. Conversely, I also discuss the role that oral history plays in “surviving a eugenic past”, trading on the ambiguity of this phrase to reflect both on the survivorship of those who have been viewed as subhuman via some kind of eugenic lens and on the collective legacy with which Canada’s eugenic past presents us. (shrink)

The relationship of eugenics to science is intricate and many-layered, starting with Sir Francis Galton’s original definition of eugenics as “the science of improving stock”. Eugenics was originally conceived of not only as a science by many of its proponents, but as a new, meliorative science emerging from findings of a range of nascent sciences, including anthropology and criminology in the late 19th-century, and genetics and psychiatry in the early 20th-century. Although during the years between the two (...) World Wars many central claims made by eugenicists were critiqued by scientists in these disciplines, in more recent years forms of eugenics (e.g., liberal eugenics”) have been defended as an inevitable outcome of biotechnologies and respect for autonomous choice. Understanding the shifting and varied roles that science has played in eugenics requires an appreciation of the ways in which science and values are intertwined. (shrink)

I claim that the underlying premises of the modern era - e-r-a - are false in a way that carries catastrophic consequences. Despite the many genuine achievements of the modern world—which I for one would not want to live without—the spirit of modernity has been one which denigrated the basic conditions of human being. In the name of freedom and knowledge, the modern era gave birth precisely to the non-empathically responding world, the schizoid ghost in the machine, which now threatens (...) to dissolve both humanity and the natural world. We must find the means to correct the mistaken premises which form the modern error. The time has come to find a new way of renewing reason, a project requiring a transformation of values and outlook as vast as those which took place in the axial age or the modern age. The renewal of reason will involve opening the gates to the entire historical and prehistorical heritage of humankind, to renew the archaic values of family, household, neighborhood and local community and the sympathetic relations they engender, to renew those organic and communicative essences of play, dreaming and mother-infant nurturance which are our human-mammalian legacy and crucial for the development of the spontaneous self, and also making a life-sustaining world culture with self-critical institutions capable of supporting and protecting the vitality of local ways. Without the hope of such a thoroughgoing transformation, we are likely to continue to go the way of the earth’s ozone shield into corrosive self-extinction . (shrink)

The twentieth-century obsession with meaning often fails to address the central questions: Why are we here? Where are we going? In this radical critique of modernity, Eugene (Rochberg-) Halton resurrects pragmatism, pushing it beyond its traditional formulations to meet these questions head on. Drawing on the works of the early pragmatists such as John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and particularly C.S. Peirce, Meaning and Modernity is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct concepts from philosophical pragmatism for contemporary social theory. Through a (...) vigorous and illuminating dialogue with other perspectives in the social sciences, (Rochberg-) Halton reveals the value of the pragmatic attitude as a mode of thought, one which speaks to the contemporary hunger for significance in a world where rationalized technique has all too often severed subject and object from their living context... Throughout the work is a sustained critique of modern culture in which (Rochberg-) Halton brings his reconstruction of the pragmatic atttude to bear on twentieth-century thought and its counterparts in the expressive arts. His engaging analysis encompasses figures as diverse as Simmel, Freud, Wittgenstein, Schoenberg, Adolph Loos, Mumford, Melville, the "Vienna School of Fantastic Realism," and Doris Lessing. The author's semiotic approach to culture allows him to move freely and easily across many disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, communications, art, literature, and philosophy. This is a work of rare originality and power that is sure to provoke discussion, for Rochberg-Halton creates new premises for understanding the human web of meaning. In a review published in the London Times Literary Supplement, Charles Townshend said that (Rochberg-) Halton's, “answer to the dilemma of modernity is a still more striking synthesis, which he labels ‘critical animism’ (as distinct from primitive animism). Meaning and Modernity belies its conventional exterior: it is a passionate tract against the 'diabolical tyranny of the rational'...He pits his researches into the attitudes of Chicagoans to their household goods and to their city against the abstract semioticians who have emptied signs of their capacity to 'live objectively in the transactions people have with them'...Such humanism will probably strike his fellow social theorists as downright weird, but his work shows that the cracking shell of modernism will provide a rich intellectual agenda.”. (shrink)