The article fits into the debate regarding space, time and nature in dialogue with the world lived by subjects that build up themselves or are built as mythological heroes, source of speech and spacial concrete practices. It's a poorly explored field in Geography that recently approaches to the cultural dynamic debate, to the symbolic field and also to their spacialization processes. The aim is to discuss the possibility of understanding in the present time about the space organization processes related to (...) the society's previous moments, in a space/time dialectics which articulate the present and past times in a complex and non linear way. Methodologically, starting from a literature review about the theme, the present study was linked to the field and documental research about migration to the vicinal ways of Transamazônica Highway (BR-230 Highway), the creation of the "Centro Espírita União do Vegetal", a religion that arises in the Amazon and set up its headquarters in Brasília and the construction of Brasilia as a modern metropolis without a past. The conclusion points at the possibility of space/time nexuses linking the Myth of Nature to the Creation of Heroes, constantly appropriated and with new meanings, in order to support speeches and new actions dialectically throughout the Brazilian contemporaneous space. (shrink)

We analyzed a sample of 356 forms containing information that Colorado law legally requires both licensed and unlicensed therapists to disclose to clients. The majority of forms contained the legally mandated information; fewer forms contained ethically desirable information. The average readability grade level was 15.74, corresponding to upper-level college, and 63.9% of the forms reached the highest (most difficult) readability grade of 17 +. Therapists are obeying the law, but do not appear to be taking advantage of the opportunity to (...) provide their clients useful information in an accessible way. (shrink)

Many persons find it intuitive that being friends with someone with immoral beliefs is wrong as such. I contest this claim, instead I argue that there is nothing necessarily wrong with such friendships. In coming to this conclusion I examine a number of arguments, including two of the most notable contributions put forward by Mason (2021) and Isserow (2018), that attempt to elucidate the wrongness involved in such friendships and find they do not successfully do so. I conclude by (...) offering some arguments as to why such friendships are not necessarily wrong. (shrink)

What’s the difference between those psychological posits that are ‘me” and those that are not? Distinguishing between these psychological kinds is important in many domains, but an account of what the distinction consists in is challenging. I argue for Psychological Constructionism: those psychological posits that correspond to the kinds within folk psychology are personal, and those that don’t, aren’t. I suggest that only constructionism can answer a fundamental challenge in characterizing the personal level – the plurality problem. The things that (...) plausibly qualify as personal are motley. Other attempts at accounting for the personal level either cannot accommodate this plurality, or cannot explain what unifies the personal. Given arguments others have given for a pluralistic conception of folk psychology, constructionism explains and predicts this plurality in a systematic and unified way, thereby solving the plurality problem. (shrink)

Indigenous knowledge and work in social science demonstrates the importance for well-being of people’s relationships with places, but western moral theorists have said little on this topic. This paper argues that there is a neo-Aristotelian virtue associated with forming a relationship with a place or places; that is, human beings can form relationships with places that affect their perceptions, emotions, desires and actions, and such dispositions, when properly developed, increase the chance that people will flourish. As well as discussing the (...) virtue, the paper considers related vices and briefly outlines implications of this virtue for dispossession, pro-environmental action, and education. (shrink)

According to ‘Excluders’, descriptive uncertainty – but not normative uncertainty – matters to what we ought to do. Recently, several authors have argued that those wishing to treat normative uncertainty differently from descriptive uncertainty face a dependence problem because one's descriptive uncertainty can depend on one's normative uncertainty. The aim of this paper is to determine whether the phenomenon of dependence poses a decisive problem for Excluders. I argue that existing arguments fail to show this, and that, while stronger ones (...) can be found, Excluders can escape them. (shrink)

This third edition of the bestselling An Introduction to Sociology: Feminist Perspectives confirms the ongoing centrality of feminist perspectives and research to the sociological enterprise and introduces students to the wide range of feminist contributions to key areas of sociological concern. This completely revised edition includes: · new chapters on sexuality and the media · additional material on race and ethnicity, disability and the body · many new international and comparative examples · the influence of theories of globalization and post-colonial (...) studies. The theoretical elements have also been fully rethought in light of recent developments in social theory. Written by three experienced academics, this book gives students of sociology and women's studies an accessible overview of the feminist contribution to all the key areas of sociological concern. (shrink)

Part One of Montesquieu's Idea of Justice comprises a survey of the currency in philosophical, ethical and aesthetic debate during the second half of the 17th century of the terms rapport and convenance, which are central to the enigmatic definition given to justice by Mon tesquieu in Lettres Persanes LXXXllI. In this survey, attention is concen trated on the way in which the connotations of these terms fluctuate with the divergent development of the methodological and speculative outgrowths of Cartesian ism (...) into two schools of thought, materialist and idealist, often widely at variance in their views of the nature and orga nization of the universe. In Part Two, Montesquieu's definition of justice is set against this background, whose doctrinal conflicts, because of the characteristic as sociations of its key terms, it may be taken to reflect, just as it may be held to epitomize, by virtue of its elaboration in the opening chapter of De l' Esprit des Lois and its close terminological affinities with the defini tion of law there given, an undoubtedly related conflict between the implications of causal determinism and the aspirations of idealist meta physics surviving at the heart of Montesquieu's outlook, and, remaining unresolved, often said to impair the coherence if not the validity of his theory of society. (shrink)

A good number of people currently thinking and writing about reasons identify a reason as a consideration that counts in favor of an action or attitude.1 I will argue that using this as our fundamental account of what a reason is generates a fairly deep and recalcitrant ambiguity; this account fails to distinguish between two quite different sets of considerations that count in favor of certain attitudes, only one of which are the “proper” or “appropriate” kind of reason for them. (...) This ambiguity has been the topic of recent discussion, under the head “the wrong kind of reasons problem.”2 I will suggest that confusion about “the wrong kind of reason” will be dispelled by changing our account of what a reason is. While I agree both that reasons are considerations and that certain.. (shrink)

Many assume that we can be responsible only what is voluntary. This leads to puzzlement about our responsibility for our beliefs, since beliefs seem not to be voluntary. I argue against the initial assumption, presenting an account of responsibility and of voluntariness according to which, not only is voluntariness not required for responsibility, but the feature which renders an attitude a fundamental object of responsibility (that the attitude embodies one’s take on the world and one’s place in it) also guarantees (...) that it could not be voluntary. It turns out, then, that, for failing to be voluntary, beliefs are a central example of the sort of thing for which we are most fundamentally responsible. (shrink)

When we look around us, some things look “alive,” others do not. What is it to “look alive”—to perceive animacy? Empirical work supports the view that animacy is genuinely perceptual. We should construe perception of animacy as perception of agents and behavior. This proposal explains how static and dynamic animacy cues relate, and explains how animacy perception relates to social cognition more broadly. Animacy perception draws attention to objects that are apt to be well‐understood folk psychologically, enabling us to marshal (...) our folk psychological resources efficiently. (shrink)

The popularity and profitability of American gridiron football is beyond dispute. Recent polls put football as the overwhelming favorite of people who follow at least one sport and huge revenues are reported at both the professional and the university level. We know, however, that what is the case tells us little about what ought to be the case, and it is to the latter question that this paper is directed. I offer a three-pronged attack on the ethical acceptability of American (...) football, both amateur and professional, based on harm to the players, objectification of the players, and harm to others done by the players, leading to the conclusion that the sport, as currently constituted, is morally unacceptable. (shrink)

I hope to show that, although belief is subject to two quite robust forms of agency, "believing at will" is impossible; one cannot believe in the way one ordinarily acts. Further, the same is true of intention: although intention is subject to two quite robust forms of agency, the features of belief that render believing less than voluntary are present for intention, as well. It turns out, perhaps surprisingly, that you can no more intend at will than believe at will.

Although theoretically rigorous, the book is comprehensible to the beginning qualitative researcher.

In this paper I consider fairness of blaming a wrongdoer. In particular, I consider the claim that blaming a wrongdoer can be unfair because blame has a certain characteristic force, a force which is not fairly imposed upon the wrongdoer unless certain conditions are met--unless, e.g., the wrongdoer could have done otherwise, or unless she is someone capable of having done right, or unless she is able to control her behavior by the light of moral reasons. While agreeing that blame (...) has a characteristic force, I am skeptical of this charge of unfairness. My skepticism concerns itself less with the particular conditions of fairness proposed than with the idea that blame can be rendered unfair by its characteristic force. If to blame a person were simply to perform certain intentional actions, then, as we will see, blame could be rendered unfair by its force. But to blame a person is not just to act in certain ways. It is, at least in large part, to make certain judgments or adopt certain attitudes. However, it is unclear how these attitudes or judgments carry "force"? and also unclear whether they can be rendered unfair by their force. Examining these issues, I will suggest that much of the force of blame is found in a set of judgments--most centrally, the judgment that one person failed to show proper regard for others. But, I will argue, once it is granted that such judgments are true, their characteristic force cannot render them unfair. (shrink)

I first pose a challenge which, it seems to me, any philosophical account of forgiveness must meet: the account must be articulate and it must allow for forgiveness that is uncompromising. I then examine an account of forgiveness which appears to meet this challenge. Upon closer examination we discover that this account actually fails to meet the challenge—but it fails in very instructive ways. The account takes two missteps which seem to be taken by almost everyone discussing forgiveness. At the (...) end, I sketch an alternative account of forgiveness, one that I think meets the challenge and avoids the missteps. (shrink)

A common line of thought claims that we are responsible for ourselves and our actions, while less sophisticated creatures are not, because we are, and they are not, self-aware. Our self-awareness is thought to provide us with a kind of control over ourselves that they lack: we can reflect upon ourselves, upon our thoughts and actions, and so ensure that they are as we would have them to be. Thus, our capacity for reflection provides us with the control over ourselves (...) that grounds our responsibility. I argue that this thought is subtly, but badly, confused. It uses, as its model for the control that grounds our responsibility, the kind of control we exercise over ordinary objects and over our own voluntary actions: we represent to ourselves what to do or how to change things, and then we bring about that which we represent. But we cannot use this model to explain our responsibility for ourselves and our actions: if there is a question about why or how we are responsible for ourselves and our actions, it cannot be answered by appeal to a sophisticated, self-directed action. There must be some more fundamental account of how or why we are responsible. I replace the usual account with a novel but natural view: responsible mental activity can be modeled, not as an ordinary action, but as the settling of a question. This shift will require abandoning the tempting but troublesome thought that responsible activity involves discretion and awareness—which, I argue, we must abandon in any case. (shrink)

How do we know about other minds on the basis of perception? The two most common answers to this question are that we literally perceive others’ mental states, or that we infer their mental states on the basis of perceiving something else. In this paper, I argue for a different answer. On my view, we don’t perceive mental states, and yet perceptual experiences often immediately justify mental state attributions. In a slogan: other minds are neither seen nor inferred. I argue (...) that this view offers the best explanation of our deeply equivocal intuitions about perception-based mental state attributions, and also holds substantial interest for the epistemology of perception more generally. (shrink)

I argue to a conclusion I find at once surprising and intuitive: although many considerations show trust useful, valuable, important, or required, these are not the reasons for which one trusts a particular person to do a particular thing. The reasons for which one trusts a particular person on a particular occasion concern, not the value, importance, or necessity of trust itself, but rather the trustworthiness of the person in question in the matter at hand. In fact, I will suggest (...) that the degree to which you trust a particular person to do a particular thing will vary inversely with the degree to which you must rely, for the motivation or justification of your trusting response, on reasons that concern the importance, or value, or necessity of having such a response. (shrink)

The Hypothesis of Extended Cognition (HEC)—that many cognitive processes are carried out by a hybrid coalition of neural, bodily and environmental factors—entails that the intentional states that are reasons for action might best be ascribed to wider entities of which individual persons are only parts. I look at different kinds of extended cognition and agency, exploring their consequences for concerns about the moral agency and personal responsibility of such extended entities. Can extended entities be moral agents and bear responsibility for (...) actions, in addition to or in place of the individuals typically held responsible? What does it mean to be autonomous when one’s cognition is influenced and supported by a milieu of environmental factors? To answer these questions, I explore strong parallels between HEC’s critique of individualism in cognition, and feminist critiques of individualist accounts of self, agency, and autonomy. This relational and social conception of autonomous agency, as scaffolded and supported (or undermined and impaired) by a milieu of social, relational, and normative factors, has important lessons for HEC. Drawing together these two visions of distributed and decentralized aspects of personhood highlights how cognition, action, and responsibility are inextricably linked. It also encourages a reconceptualization of all cognition and all concerns about responsibility for actions, not simply as sometimes extended around individuals, but as fundamentally communal, social, and normative, with individual cognition and individual moral responsibility being derivative special cases, not the paradigm examples. Individuals are merely one of many possible loci of cognition, action, and responsibility. (shrink)

This book, originally published in 1989 discusses an issue central to all philosophical argument – the relation between persuasion and truth. The techniques of persuasion are indirect and not always fully transparent. Whether philosophers and theoreticians are for or against the use of rhetoric, they engage in rhetorical practice none the less. Focusing on Plato, Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, this book uncovers philosophical rhetoric at work and reminds us of the rhetorical arena in which philosophical writings are produced (...) and considered. (shrink)

Many now accept the thesis that norms are somehow constitutively involved in people's contentful intentional states. I distinguish three versions of this normative thesis that disagree about the type of norms constitutively involved. Are they objective norms of correctness, subjective norms of rationality, or intersubjective norms of social practices? I show the advantages of the third version, arguing that it improves upon the other two versions, as well as incorporating their principal insights. I then defend it against two serious challenges: (...) (1) If content is constituted by others' normative judgments, how can content be causally efficacious? (2) This account appears to make having contentful thoughts a matter of people having contentful thoughts about your thoughts. That appears to be viciously circular and so can't be naturalistic. (shrink)

This paper examines Hume’s understanding of a third doxastic position distinct from belief and disbelief, arguing that his epistemology presupposes different forms of doxastic neutrality. While Hume does not explicitly discuss this third position, his Treatise of Human Nature and Enquiry concerning Human Understanding offer ideas relevant to contemporary debates on suspension of judgement and inquiry. Hume engaged with Pyrrhonian scepticism, finding its suspension of judgement excessive, yet acknowledging that the Pyrrhonian arguments are theoretically difficult to refute. Based on various (...) interpretations of Hume’s critique of Pyrrhonian ideas, we discuss the relevance of his thoughts on suspension of judgement and inquiry through the lens of modern epistemological discussions. (shrink)

It has seemed to many philosophers—perhaps to most—that believing is not voluntary, that we cannot believe at will. It has seemed to many of these that this inability is not a merely contingent psychological limitation but rather is a deep fact about belief, perhaps a conceptual limitation. But it has been very difficult to say exactly why we cannot believe at will. I earlier offered an account of why we cannot believe at will. I argued that nothing could qualify both (...) as having been done “at will,” in the relevant sense, and as a belief. Thus, no believer could believe at will. If my arguments are correct, our inability to believe at will reveals no genuine lack in our powers of mind, any more than an inability to draw a square circle reveals a lack of artistic skill. My account has been recently criticized by Kieran Setiya, who has provided an account of his own. Here I revisit and defend my account, hopefully in a way that will both make my thought clearer and illumine some of the broader differences between Setiya’s approach and my own. I then briefly consider Setiya’s own argument, in part to further develop the contrast. (shrink)

The paper presents evidence in bacteria for the utility of Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis, using certain kinds of signal transduction systems as proxies for cognitive/behavioral complexity. Microbiologists already accept that the number of signal transduction proteins in a bacterial genome indicates the level of ecological complexity to which the organism is subject: the more signalling proteins, the greater the complexity. Sheer numbers are not always a reliable indicator of behavioral complexity, however. The paper proposes a new, ECT-based procedure for identifying, (...) from genomic sequence and signalling repertoire, novel bacterial candidates likely to exhibit behavioral complexity in response to a complex ecological niche. (shrink)

Bridging the traditionally separate domains of analytic and Continental philosophies, Pamela Sue Anderson presents for the first time, a feminist framework for studying the philosophy of religion.

Donald Davidson opens ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ by asking, ‘What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did?’ His answer has generated some confusion about reasons for action and made for some difficulty in understanding the place for the agent's own reasons for acting, in the explanation of an action. I offer here a different account of the explanation of action, one that, though (...) minimal and formal, preserves the proper role for the agent's own reasons for acting. (shrink)

Many recent philosophers have been tempted by epistemic partialism. They hold that epistemic norms and those of friendship constitutively conflict. In this paper, I suggest that underpinning this claim is the assumption that friendship is not an epistemically rich state, an assumption that even opponents of epistemic partiality have not questioned. I argue that there is good reason to question this assumption, and instead regard friendship as essentially involving knowledge of the other. If we accept this account of friendship, the (...) possibility of epistemic partialism does not arise. (shrink)

I will argue that making a certain assumption allows us to conceptualize more clearly our agency over our minds. The assumption is this: certain attitudes (most uncontroversially, belief and intention) embody their subject’s answer to some question or set of questions. I will first explain the assumption and then show that, given the assumption, we should expect to exercise agency over this class of attitudes in (at least) two distinct ways: by answering for ourselves the question they embody and by (...) acting upon them in ways designed to affect them according to our purposes—in roughly the way we exercise agency over most ordinary objects. (shrink)

Nearly sixty years after its publication, P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” continues to inspire important work. Its main legacy has been the notion of “reactive attitudes.” Surprisingly, Strawson’s central argument—an argument to the conclusion that no general thesis (such as the thesis of determinism) could provide us reason to abandon these attitudes—has received little attention. When the argument is considered, it is often interpreted as relying on a claim about our psychological capacities: we are simply not capable of abandoning (...) the reactive attitudes, across the board, in something like the way we are simply not capable of remembering everything we are told. A different line interprets Strawson as relying on something like a conceptual point: you can neither support nor call into question the whole of a practice using notions that are, themselves, constituted by that practice. Neither interpretation would lead to you to expect what you will find, looking at the central text: Strawson twice accuses his opponent of being caught in some kind of contradiction. So neither interpretation, on its own, is correct. By providing a close reading of the central text, I do my best to articulate Strawson’s more interesting, and more powerful, argument. The argument depends on an underlying picture of the nature of moral demands and moral relationships—a picture that has gone largely unnoticed, that is naturalistic without being reductionistic, and that is, I think, worthy of serious consideration. (shrink)

Most of us are partial to our friends and loved ones: we treat them with special care, and we feel justified in doing so. In recent years, the idea that good friends are also epistemically partial to one another has been popular. Being a good friend, so-called epistemic partialists suggest, involves being positively biased towards one's friends – that is, involves thinking more highly of them than is warranted by the evidence. In this paper, I outline the concept of epistemic (...) partiality and its relation to non-epistemic partiality and explore some considerations that speak in favour of and against such partialism in friendships. I finish by suggesting some directions in which this debate could go next. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the precautionary principle in the discussion about the ethical status of the human embryo. In this debate, some argue that the mere probability that a human person is involved justifies the duty to refrain from harming to the human embryo; from another point of view, the respect for life and human dignity decreases if the human embryo is not respected; finally, the philosophers Hans Jonas and Jürgen Habermas have proposed the existence of responsibility towards the human life (...) beginning because it is “inviolable” and “unavailable”. (shrink)

En una perspectiva �postsecular�, siguiendo a Habermas, puede afirmarse que no sólo la ratio sino también las culturas basadas en fides, pueden contribuir con �traducciones� que aporten significativamente a la comprensión del ser sí mismo humano y su télos, reflexión exigida por la filosofía moral hoy. El artículo propone algunos elementos del pensamiento de San Agustín que podrían abrirse a un diálogo fecundo con la ética contemporánea, tales como: el ser sí mismo capaz de ratio y veritas; la interioridad como (...) pilar último de la comunidad y de la sociedad; temporalidad y anhelo de felicidad; la experiencia del mal y la supremacía del bien; la tensión entre caritas y cupiditas; libertad y gracia; ciudadanía terrena y celeste. (shrink)

Representation is a pivotal concept in cognitive science, yet there is a serious obstacle to a naturalistic account of representations’ semantic content and intentionality. A representation having a determinate semantic content distinguishes correct from incorrect representation. But such correctness is a normative matter. Explaining how such norms can be part of a naturalistic cognitive science is what I call the normativity problem. Teleosemantics attempts to naturalize such norms by showing that evolution by natural selection establishes neural mechanisms’ functions, and such (...) functions provide the normativity requisite for a determinate semantic content. I argue that such attempts fail, because when specifying functions, and thus semantic contents, that are determinate enough to enable misrepresentation, they must tacitly appeal to human normative practices, especially the practice of giving intentional states as reasons for actions. I present a different tactic: using evolution by natural selection to avoid rather than solve the normativity problem. Representations’ semantic contents and their intentional targets are irreducibly normative. Semantics and intentionality are constituted within human normative practices. However, evolution by natural selection can be used to naturalistically explain the transition from a world without human beings and human normative practices — and thus without any distinction between thoughts that may be called “correct” or “incorrect” — to a world in which such human practices and distinctions are commonplace. (shrink)

Murdoch makes some ambitious claims about love’s epistemic significance which can initially seem puzzling in the light of its heterogeneous and messy everyday manifestations. I provide an interpretation of Murdochian love such that Murdoch’s claims about its epistemic significance can be understood. I argue that Murdoch conceives of love as a virtue, and as belonging at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of the virtues, and that this makes sense of the epistemic role Murdochian love fulfills. Moreover, I suggest that there (...) is good reason to think that Murdochian love is not as far from everyday conceptions of love as it can initially appear. (shrink)

Here I defend my solution to the wrong-kind-of-reason problem against Mark Schroeder’s criticisms. In doing so, I highlight an important difference between other accounts of reasons and my own. While others understand reasons as considerations that count in favor of attitudes, I understand reasons as considerations that bear (or are taken to bear) on questions. Thus, to relate reasons to attitudes, on my account, we must consider the relation between attitudes and questions. By considering that relation, we not only solve (...) the wrong-kind-of-reason problem, but we also bring into view rational agency—the use of reasons in thought. (shrink)