David Hume and Simone de Beauvoir agree that human beings have a great deal of control over their moral and political lives, which is well captured in Hume's assertion that "mankind is an inventive species". But Hume argues that the most important thing needed to settle our social lives and determine justice is the agreement on rules of property, while Beauvoir thinks that the rules of property will never be enough to establish the best life, but rather that we should (...) be focusing on freedom. In this article we reconstruct Hume's argument for property, then develop a Beauvoirian critique of Hume that brings out the weakness of any theory of property that does not prevent inequalities of property from interfering with freedom. And then we give the last word to a Humean response to Beauvoir that would insist that there can be no freedom but only violence without rules of property, which she ignores. Both thinkers appeal to humanity as an overriding goal, and perhaps that is the way to reconcile the two: we need both property and freedom to achieve our humanity. (shrink)

Automated influence is one of the most pervasive applications of artificial intelligence in our day-to-day lives, yet a thoroughgoing account of its associated individual and societal harms is lacking. By far the most widespread, compelling, and intuitive account of the harms associated with automated influence follows what I call the control argument. This argument suggests that users are persuaded, manipulated, and influenced by automated influence in a way that they have little or no control over. Based on evidence about the (...) effectiveness of targeted advertising as well as empirical results about the nature of attentional control, I provide reasons to reject this argument. In turn, I use C. Thi Nguyen’s theory of value collapse to develop a new account of the harmfulness of automated influence. (shrink)

The debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists depends in large part on what ordinary people mean by ‘free will’, a matter on which previous experimental philosophy studies have yielded conflicting results. In Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (2005, 2006), most participants judged that agents in deterministic scenarios could have free will and be morally responsible. Nichols and Knobe (2007), though, suggest that these apparent compatibilist responses are performance errors produced by using concrete scenarios, and that their abstract scenarios reveal the folk (...) theory of free will for what it actually is—incompatibilist. Here, we argue that the results of two new studies suggest just the opposite. Most participants only give apparent incompatibilist judgments when they mistakenly interpret determinism to imply that agents’ mental states are bypassed in the causal chains that lead to their behavior. Determinism does not entail bypassing, so these responses do not reflect genuine incompatibilist intuitions. When participants understand what determinism does mean, the vast majority take it to be compatible with free will. Further results indicate that most people’s concepts of choice and the ability to do otherwise do not commit them to incompatibilism, either, putting pressure on incompatibilist arguments that rely on transfer principles, such as the Consequence Argument. We discuss the implications of these findings for philosophical debates about free will, and suggest that incompatibilism appears to be either false, or else a thesis about something other than what most people mean by ‘free will’. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers have identified a number of moral and psychological harms associated with the attention economy (Alysworth & Castro, 2021; Castro & Pham, 2020; Williams, 2018). Missing from many of these accounts of the attention economy, however, is what exactly attention is. As a result of this neglect of the cognitive science of attention, many of these accounts are not empirically credible. They rely on oversimplified and unsophisticated accounts of not only attention, but self- control, and addiction as (...) well. Of note are accounts of the attention economy that rely on the ‘brain disease’ rhetoric of addiction and subsequent control failures (Aylsworth & Castro, 2021; Bhargava & Velasquez, 2021), accounts that rely on a strict dichotomy of top-down vs. bottom-up attention (Williams, 2018; Aylsworth & Castro, 2021), and accounts that construe attention as a limited resource (Williams, 2018). -/- Drawing on recent work from the neuroscience and psychology of attention, I demonstrate the shortcomings of these accounts and sketch a way forward for an empirically grounded account of the attention economy. These accounts tend to uphold strict dichotomies of voluntary control (e.g., compulsion versus choice, dual-process models of self-control, and top-down versus bottom-up) that cannot account for the complexities of attentional control, mental agency, and decision-making. As such, these empirically and conceptually impoverished accounts cannot adequately address the current so-called crisis of attention. To better understand the harms associated with the attention economy, we need an empirically responsible account of the nature and function of attention and mental agency. (shrink)

Moral behaviour, based on social norms, is commonly regarded as a hallmark of humans. Hitherto, humans are perceived to be the only species possessing social norms and to engage in moral behaviour. There is anecdotal evidence suggesting their presence in chimpanzees, but systematic studies are lacking. Here, we examine the evolution of human social norms and their underlying psychological mechanisms. For this, we distinguish between conventions, cultural social norms and universal social norms. We aim at exploring whether chimpanzees possess evolutionary (...) precursors of universal social norms seen in humans. Chimpanzees exhibit important preconditions for their presence and enforcement: tolerant societies, well-developed social-cognitive skills and empathetic competence. Here, we develop a theoretical framework for recognizing different functional levels of social norms and distinguish them from mere statistical behavioural regularities. Quasi social norms are found where animals behave functionally moral without having moral emotions. In proto social norms, moral emotions might be present but cannot be collectivized due to the absence of a uniquely human psychological trait, i.e. shared intentionality. Human social norms, whether they are universal or cultural, involve moral emotions and are collectivized. We will discuss behaviours in chimpanzees that represent potential evolutionary precursors of human universal social norms, with special focus on social interactions involving infants. We argue that chimpanzee infants occupy a special status within their communities and propose that tolerance towards them might represent a proto social norm. Finally, we discuss possible ways to test this theoretical framework. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan's thinking revolutionised the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and had a major impact in fields as diverse as film studies, literary criticism, feminist theory and philosophy. Yet his writings are notorious for their complexity and idiosyncratic style. Emphasising the clinical basis of Lacan's work, _An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis_ is an ideal companion to his ideas for readers in every discipline where his influence is felt. The _Dictionary _features: * over 200 entries, explaining Lacan's own terminology and (...) his use of common psychoanalytic expressions * details of the historical and institutional context of Lacan's work * reference to the origins of major concepts in the work of Freud, Saussure, Hegel and other key thinkers * a chronology of Lacan's life and works. (shrink)

Do our emotions stop us being rational? For thousands of years, emotions have been thought of as obstacles to intelligent thought. This view has been challenged in recent years by both philosophers and scientists. In this groundbreaking book, the first of its kind, leading thinkers from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience challenge this commonly held view of emotion in a series of fascinating and challenging essays.

Within philosophy of action, there are three broad views about what, in addition to beliefs, answer the question of “what to do?” and so determine an agent’s motivation: desires, judgments about values/reasons, or states of the will, such as intentions. We argue that recent work in decision theory vindicates the volitionalist. “What to do?” isn’t settled by “what do I value” or “what reasons are there?” Rational motivation further requires determining how to trade off the possibility of a good outcome (...) against the possibility of a bad one—i.e., determining how much of a risk to take. The risk attitudes that embody this tradeoff seem best understood as intentions: as self-governing policies to weight desires or reasons in certain ways. That we need to settle our risk attitudes before making most decisions corroborates Bratman’s claim that self-governing policies are required for resolving impasses of evaluative and normative underdetermination. Moreover, far from being rare or confined to tie-breakings, cases that are underdetermined but for one’s risk attitudes are typical of everyday decision-making. The will is required for most rational action. (shrink)

The standard view in epistemology is that propositional knowledge entails belief. Positive arguments are seldom given for this entailment thesis, however; instead, its truth is typically assumed. Against the entailment thesis, Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (Noûs, forthcoming) report that a non-trivial percentage of people think that there can be propositional knowledge without belief. In this paper, we add further fuel to the fire, presenting the results of four new studies. Based on our results, we argue that the entailment thesis does not (...) deserve the default status that it is typically granted. We conclude by considering the alternative account of knowledge that Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel propose to explain their results, arguing that it does not explain ours. In its place we offer a different explanation of both sets of findings—the conviction account, according to which belief, but not knowledge, requires mental assent. (shrink)

Was love invented by European poets in the middle ages, as C. S. Lewis claimed, or is it part of human nature? Will winning the lottery really make you happy? Is it possible to build robots that have feelings? These are just some of the intriguing questions explored in this new guide to the latest thinking about the emotions. Drawing on a wide range of scientific research, from anthropology and psychology to neuroscience and artificial intelligence, Emotion: The Science of Sentiment (...) takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the human heart. Illustrating his points with entertaining examples from fiction, film, and popular culture, Dylan Evans ranges from the evolution of the emotions to the nature of love and happiness to the language of feelings, offering readers the most recent thinking on real life topics that touch us all. But Emotion is also a book filled with surprises. Readers will discover, for instance, that the basic emotions are felt the world over--whether we live in the shadow of Times Square or in the depths of the rain forest, we all feel the emotions of disgust, joy, surprise, anger, fear, and distress. We find out that, according to research, winning the lottery does not cause a lasting increase in happiness--a short-lived euphoria is followed in almost every case with a return to our usual emotional state, if not worse. And we meet Kismet, an MIT robot that can express a wide range of emotions, from fear to happiness. Fun to read and based on the latest scientific thinking, here is a stimulating look at our emotions. (shrink)

In a well-known paper, Nick Bostrom presents a confrontation between a fictionalised Blaise Pascal and a mysterious mugger. The mugger persuades Pascal to hand over his wallet by exploiting Pascal's commitment to expected utility maximisation. He does so by offering Pascal an astronomically high reward such that, despite Pascal's low credence in the mugger's truthfulness, the expected utility of accepting the mugging is higher than rejecting it. In this article, I present another sort of high value, low credence mugging. This (...) time, the mugger utilises research on existential risk and the long-term potential of humanity to exploit Pascal's expected-utility-maximising descendant. This mugging is more insidious than Bostrom's original as it relies on plausible facts about the long-term future, as well as realistic credences about how our everyday actions could, albeit with infinitesimally low likelihood, affect the future of humanity. (shrink)

If someone brings about an outcome without intending to, is she causally and morally responsible for it? What if she acts intentionally, but as the result of manipulation by another agent? Previous research has shown that an agent's mental states can affect attributions of causal and moral responsibility to that agent, but little is known about what effect one agent's mental states can have on attributions to another agent. In Experiment 1, we replicate findings that manipulation lowers attributions of responsibility (...) to manipulated agents. Experiments 2–7 isolate which features of manipulation drive this effect, a crucial issue for both philosophical debates about free will and attributions of responsibility in situations involving social influence more generally. Our results suggest that “bypassing” a manipulated agent's mental states generates the greatest reduction in responsibility, and we explain our results in terms of the effects that one agent's mental states can have on the counterfactual relations between another agent and an outcome. (shrink)

The most widely endorsed philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness assume that it contributes a single functional capacity to an organism’s information processing toolkit. However, conscious processes are a heterogeneous class of psychological phenomena supported by a variety of neurobiological mechanisms. This suggests a plurality of functional contributions of consciousness (FCCs), in the sense that conscious experience facilitates different functional capacities in different psychological domains. In this paper, I first develop a general methodological framework for isolating the psychological functions that (...) are associated with conscious experience. I then use this to show that the leading accounts—Global Workspace Theories, Higher Order Thought Theory and Information Integration Theory—all fail to acknowledge this functional pluralism, which limits their applicability as theories of consciousness. (shrink)

I argue that believing that p implies having a credence of 1 in p. This is true because the belief that p involves representing p as being the case, representing p as being the case involves not allowing for the possibility of not-p, while having a credence that’s greater than 0 in not-p involves regarding not-p as a possibility.

Restrictive visitation policies produce inequities in healthcare that have meaningful consequences for patients’ health and well-being. There is a surplus of existing literature exploring the consequences of reduced visitation in the setting of pediatric patients lacking decision-making capacity, but relatively little scholarship addressing visitation restriction for less vulnerable adults possessing capacity. Here, we present the case of a patient who suffered serious complications of childbirth, during the delivery of her healthy newborn, leading to prolonged hospitalization. During her treatment course, she (...) was subsequently denied visitation with her newborn, who had been discharged from the hospital, and this had detrimental effects on her recovery. Hospital policies restricting visitation during the COVID-19 pandemic were intended to reduce the risk of disease exposure for both patients and staff, despite conflicting evidence demonstrating this benefit. In contrast, they often have negative effects on patient stress, mood, and physical recovery. The sequelae of this US-based case study argue the need for more holistic hospital visitation policies, placing a specific lens on adult patients receiving a visitation from their newborn children. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a doctrine I call ?infallibilism?, which I stipulate to mean that If S knows that p, then the epistemic probability of p for S is 1. Some fallibilists will claim that this doctrine should be rejected because it leads to scepticism. Though it's not obvious that infallibilism does lead to scepticism, I argue that we should be willing to accept it even if it does. Infallibilism should be preferred because it has greater explanatory power (...) than fallibilism. In particular, I argue that an infallibilist can easily explain why assertions of ?p, but possibly not-p? (where the ?possibly? is read as referring to epistemic possibility) is infelicitous in terms of the knowledge rule of assertion. But a fallibilist cannot. Furthermore, an infallibilist can explain the infelicity of utterances of ?p, but I don't know that p? and ?p might be true, but I'm not willing to say that for all I know, p is true?, and why when a speaker thinks p is epistemically possible for her, she will agree (if asked) that for all she knows, p is true. The simplest explanation of these facts entails infallibilism. Fallibilists have tried and failed to explain the infelicity of ?p, but I don't know that p?, but have not even attempted to explain the last two facts. I close by considering two facts that seem to pose a problem for infallibilism, and argue that they don't. (shrink)

Scientists disagree about which capacities a functional analysis of consciousness should target. To address this disagreement, I propose that a good functional analysis should target the etiological functions of consciousness. The trouble is that most hypotheses about the etiological origins of consciousness presuppose particular functional analyses. In recent years, however, a small number of scientists have begun to offer evolutionary hypotheses that are relatively theory neutral. I argue that their hypotheses can serve an independent standard for evaluating among theories of (...) consciousness. (shrink)

The use of drones in public healthcare is suggested as a means to improve efficiency under constrained resources and personnel. This paper begins by framing drones in healthcare as a social experiment where ethical guidelines are needed to protect those impacted while fully realizing the benefits the technology offers. Then we propose an ethical framework to facilitate the design, development, implementation, and assessment of drones used in public healthcare. Given the healthcare context, we structure the framework according to the four (...) bioethics principles: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice, plus a fifth principle from artificial intelligence ethics: explicability. These principles are abstract which makes operationalization a challenge; therefore, we suggest an approach of translation according to a values hierarchy whereby the top-level ethical principles are translated into relevant human values within the domain. The resulting framework is an applied ethics tool that facilitates awareness of relevant ethical issues during the design, development, implementation, and assessment of drones in public healthcare. (shrink)

By introducing the concept of “mental data,” Palermos (2023) highlights an underappreciated aspect of data ethics that policymakers would do well to heed. Sweeping artificial intelligence (AI) legi...

For thousands of years, many Western thinkers have assumed that emotions are, at best, harmless luxuries, and at worst outright obstacles to intelligent action. In the past decade, however, scientists and philosophers have begun to challenge this 'negative view of emotion'. Neuroscientists, psychologists and researchers in artificial intelligence now agree that emotions are vital to intelligent action. Evolutionary considerations have played a vital role in this shift to a more positive view of emotion. This book brings together some of the (...) leading thinkers about emotion from a variety of disciplines. In a series of fascinating and challenging essays, they examine the role that evolutionary considerations can play in helping us to understand the role of emotions in rational thought and decision-making. How should we understand the evolutionary role of emotions? And can this explain the relationship between emotions and rationality? (shrink)

I argue for the conditions that eco-sabotage (sabotage involving the protection of animals or the environment) must meet to be a morally permissible form of activism in a liberal democracy. I illustrate my case with Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya’s oil pipeline destruction, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s whale hunt sabotage, and the Valve Turners’ pipeline shut-off, climate necessity-defense. My primary contention is that just as it is permissible to destroy an attacker’s weapon in self- or other-defense, it is permissible (...) to engage in some forms of eco-sabotage. Taking inspiration from just war theory, I use the conditions of just cause, reasonable chance of success, proportionality, necessity, and discrimination to both conceptualize eco-sabotage as defense and illustrate the justificatory burden the eco-saboteur must meet. Often eco-sabotage is doubly pro-tanto wrong because it is illegal and involves property destruction. Overcoming these hurdles is particularly difficult because in seemingly bypassing democratic means of dispute resolution, the eco-saboteur seemingly coerces the other members of society by forcing idiosyncratic views upon them. Non-anthropocentric eco-sabotage grounded in defense of animal rights has mixed results regarding the democratic objection just described. I argue that anthropocentric eco-sabotage, grounded in defense of human rights, has the best chance of overcoming this objection, provided a persuasive case can be made for its reasonable chance of success. Passing a reasonable chance of success also causes problems for non-anthropocentric eco-sabotage grounded in species defense, while non-anthropocentric eco-sabotage grounded in defense against animal suffering has a lighter justificatory burden. (shrink)

Imaginative resistance refers to cases in which one’s otherwise flexible imaginative capacity is constrained by an unwillingness or inability to imaginatively engage with a given claim. In three studies, we explored which specific imaginative demands engender resistance when imagining morally deviant worlds and whether individual differences in emotion predict the degree of this resistance. In Study 1 (N = 176), participants resisted the notion that harmful actions could be morally acceptable in the world of a narrative regardless of the author’s (...) claims about these actions but did not resist imagining that a perpetrator of harm could believe their actions to be morally acceptable. In Study 2 (N = 167) we replicated the findings of Study 1 and showed that imaginative resistance is greatest among participants who experience more negative affect in response to imagining harm and are lower in either trait anxiety or trait psychopathy. In Study 3 (N = 210) we show that this is the case even when the harms assessed include both low-severity (i.e., emotional harm) and high-severity (i.e., killing) cases. Thus, people’s moral beliefs constrain their ability to imagine hypothetical moral alternatives, although this ability systematically varies on the basis of stable individual differences in emotion. (shrink)

Was love invented by European poets in the Middle Ages or is it part of human nature? Will winning the lottery really make you happy? Is it possible to build robots that have feelings? These are just some of the intriguing questions explored in this guide to the latest thinking about the emotions. Drawing on a wide range of scientific research, from anthropology and psychology to neuroscience and artificial intelligence, Emotion: The Science of Sentiment takes the reader on a fascinating (...) journey into the human heart. (shrink)

Scientists disagree about which capacities a functional analysis of consciousness should target. To address this disagreement, I propose that a good functional analysis should target the etiological functions of consciousness. The trouble is that most hypotheses about the etiological origins of consciousness presuppose particular functional analyses. In recent years, however, a small number of scientists have begun to offer evolutionary hypotheses that are relatively theory neutral. I argue that their hypotheses can serve an independent standard for evaluating among theories of (...) consciousness. (shrink)

Concessive knowledge attributions (CKAs) are knowledge attributions of the form ‘S knows p, but it’s possible that q’, where q obviously entails not-p (Rysiew, Nous (Detroit, Mich.) 35:477–514, 2001). The significance of CKAs has been widely discussed recently. It’s agreed by all that CKAs are infelicitous, at least typically. But the agreement ends there. Different writers have invoked them in their defenses of all sorts of philosophical theses; to name just a few: contextualism, invariantism, fallibilism, infallibilism, and that the knowledge (...) rules for assertion and practical reasoning are false. In fact, there is a lot of confusion about CKAs and their significance. I try to clear some of this confusion up, as well as show what their significance is with respect to the debate between fallibilists and infallibilists about knowledge in particular. (shrink)

Die Welt liegt in Scherben, so heisst es. Und sich mit einer Welt anzufreunden, die sich der Anfreundung entzieht, scheint paradox. Christina Thürmer-Rohr kreist in ihren Essays zu Feminismus, Pluralität, Dialog, Aussenseitertum, Vergänglichkeit und zum politischen Denken Hannah Arendts um den Widerstreit zwischen dem Heimatlichen und dem Unheimlichen - und um die Fiktionen vom »heilen« Geschlecht. Sie widerspricht dabei der Annahme, Fremdheit sei das Andere der Freundschaft, Freundschaft das Andere der Fremdheit. So entsteht eine Karte, auf der man sich (...) hin- und herbewegen kann, denn die Nachbarschaft der einzelnen Texte eröffnet Türen zu Lesarten, die nicht in den gewohnten Spuren bleiben, und führt zu unerledigten Fragen, die keine Ruhe lassen." --Back cover. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson's epistemology leads to a fairly radical version of scepticism. According to him, all knowledge is evidence. It follows that if S knows p, the evidential probability for S that p is 1. I explain Williamson's infallibilist account of perceptual knowledge, contrasting it with Peter Klein's, and argue that Klein's account leads to a certain problem which Williamson's can avoid. Williamson can allow that perceptual knowledge is possible and that all knowledge is evidence, while at the same time avoiding (...) Klein's problem. But while Williamson can allow that we know some things through experience, there are very many things he must say we cannot know. Given just how very many these are, he should be considered a sceptic. (shrink)

This article reflects on the way COVID-19 has altered our understanding and experience of everyday life, with a particular focus on the relationship between anxiety and the body. There are a number of ways to think about how anxiety has impacted bodily experience during the pandemic, and I focus on two specific aspects. First, I focus on the transformation of the body from a site of pre-reflective unity to its thematization as a discernible thing. In the process, I argue that (...) this disclosure of the body as a thing renders the body an object of anxiety while also being an expression of anxiety. Second, I consider the role anxiety plays in altering our relationship to other people. Instead of a fluid interplay between oneself and another, I argue that the pandemic has shifted our relationship to other people through concealing the expressivity of the body. I conclude by considering how these aspects can challenge conventional ideas of phenomenology while also underscoring the necessity of a critical approach. (shrink)

Recent experimental studies indicate that epistemically irrelevant factors can skew our intuitions, and that some degree of scepticism about appealing to intuition in philosophy is warranted. In response, some have claimed that philosophers are experts in such a way as to vindicate their reliance on intuitions—this has become known as the ‘expertise defence’. This paper explores the viability of the expertise defence, and suggests that it can be partially vindicated. Arguing that extant discussion is problematically imprecise, we will finesse the (...) notion of ‘philosophical expertise’ in order to better reflect the complex reality of the different practices involved in philosophical inquiry. On this basis, we offer a new version of the expertise defence that allows for distinct types of philosophical expertise. The upshot of our approach is that wholesale vindications or rejections of the expertise defence are shown to be unwarranted; we must instead turn to local, piecemeal investigations of philosophical expertise. Lastly, in the spirit of taking our own advice, we exemplify how recent developments from experimental philosophy lend themselves to this approach, and can empirically support one instance of a successful expertise defence. (shrink)

We distinguish, among other things, between the agent of the context, the speaker of the agent's utterance, the mechanism the agent uses to produce her utterance, and the tokening of the sentence uttered. Armed with these distinctions, we tackle the the ‘answer-machine’, ‘post-it note’ and other allegedly problematic cases, arguing that they can be handled without departing significantly from Kaplan's semantical framework for indexicals. In particular, we argue that these cases don't require adopting Stefano Predelli's intentionalism.

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 36 Heft: 2 Seiten: 392-402.

This paper argues for a particular semantic decomposition of morphological definiteness. I propose that the meaning of ‘the’ comprises two distinct compositional operations. The first builds a set of witnesses that satisfy the restricting noun phrase. The second tests this set for uniqueness. The motivation for decomposing the denotation of the definite determiner in this way comes from split-scope intervention effects. The two components—the selection of witnesses on the one hand and the counting of witnesses on the other—may take effect (...) at different points in the composition of a constituent, and this has non-trivial semantic consequences when other operators inside the DP take action in between them. In particular, I analyze well-known examples of mutually recursive definite descriptions like ‘the rabbit in the hat’ as examples of definites whose referent-introducing and referent-testing components are interleaved rather than nested. I further demonstrate that this picture leads to a new theory of relative superlative descriptions like ‘the kid who climbed the highest tree’, which explains the previously mysterious role of the definite determiner in licensing such readings. (shrink)

In _Did God Care?_ Dylan Burns offers the first comprehensive survey of providence (_pronoia_) in ancient philosophy, from Plato to Plotinus, that takes into full account the importance and innovations of early Christian thinkers, including Coptic Gnostic and Syriac sources.

This book contains a series of essays that explore the concept of unconsciousness as it is situated between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. A leading goal of the collection is to carve out phenomenological dimensions within psychoanalysis and, equally, to carve out psychoanalytical dimensions within phenomenology. The book examines the nature of unconsciousness and the role it plays in structuring our sense of self. It also looks at the extent to which the unconscious marks the body as it functions outside of experience (...) as well as manifests itself in experience. In addition, the book explores the relationship between unconsciousness and language, particularly if unconsciousness exists prior to language or if the concept can only be understood through speech. The collection includes contributions from leading scholars, each of whom grounds their investigations in a nuanced mastery of the traditional voices of their fields. These contributors provide diverse viewpoints that challenge both the phenomenological and psychoanalytical traditions in their relation to unconsciousness. (shrink)

Virtue ethics prescribes cultivating global and behaviorally efficacious character traits, but John Doris and others argue that situationist social psychology shows this to be infeasible. Here, I show how certain versions of virtue ethics that ‘go mental’ can withstand this challenge as well as Doris’ further objections. The defense turns on an account of which psychological materials constitute character traits and which the situationist research shows to be problematically variable. Many situationist results may be driven by impulsive akrasia produced by (...) low-level , emotionally induced ignorance about one’s situation, and some may be driven by a further subtype: modal akrasia. Many subjects in the infamous Milgram experiments, e.g., seem to have recognized what the virtuous thing to do was and that they should do it, and only failed to do it because their emotions prevented them from seeing that they could. If the primary constituents of character traits are higher-level mental dispositions involved in deliberation, though, then the results don’t show that these psychological materials are problematically variable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Virtual GalleryDylan Litchman Click for larger view View full resolutionFront Cover.Photograph by Dylan Litchman. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Photograph by Dylan Litchman. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Photograph by Dylan Litchman. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 3.Photograph by Dylan Litchman. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 4.Photograph by Dylan Litchman. Click for larger view View full (...) resolutionFigure 5.Photograph by Dylan Litchman. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 6.Photograph by Dylan Litchman. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 7.Photograph by Dylan Litchman. Click for larger view View full resolutionBack Cover.Photograph by Dylan Litchman.Copyright © 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Virtual GalleryDylan Litchman Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolutionThe photographs in this issue were taken in and around Ithaca in 1999 by Dylan Litchman. He (...) studied photography at Fordham University and lives in Ithaca.Copyright © 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Eeew! Sucks to be a Porn Star! Get Out Of My Bed! Ways of Valuing Lives Climax: Happy Slaves, Oppression, and Quality of Life Afterglow Notes.

Cartesian skepticism about epistemic justification (‘skepticism’) is the view that many of our beliefs about the external world – e.g., my current belief that I have hands – aren’t justified. I examine the two most influential arguments for skepticism – the Closure Argument and the Underdetermination Argument – from an evidentialist perspective. For both arguments it is clear which premise the anti-skeptic must deny. The Closure Argument, I argue, is the better argument in that its key premise is weaker than (...) the Underdetermination Argument’s key premise. However, it’s also likely that the motivation for accepting both key premises is exactly the same. So there may be a sense in which both arguments provide exactly the same motivation for skepticism. Then I argue that if I I’m right about what the motivation for accepting the arguments’ key premises is, then neither argument succeeds in providing a good reason to accept skepticism. I conclude by explaining why I think epistemologists are right to expend a lot of time and effort on refuting these arguments, even if neither argument provides any motivation for skepticism. (shrink)