In the course of his painstaking study of ancient verse, Ferdinand de Saussure came up with an intriguing theory about the phonetics of the poetry he scrutinised. He postulated that the “jeux phoniques” he detected in the texts he analysed was proof that their authors were attempting to “parasite” the surface level meaning of their verse with a “hypotexte.” This hypotexte consisted of “anagrams” of “mots thèmes” whose phonetic properties were “isosyllabically diffracted” throughout the rest of the host text. Today (...) it is generally accepted that Saussure was wrong about this. Few however maintain that what he discerned in the phonetic depths of the verse he auscultated was no more than the figment of a fertile imagination. But if this be so, what exactly had he detected? This paper maintains that what Saussure stumbled upon was the trace of a contribution made to ancient verse by melodically and metrically organised sounds. This was inevitable. Virtually all the texts he probed were “carmina sacra” that were composed to be sung and accompanied by music. This musical accompaniment had a decisive impact on the phonetics of the “lexemic” words in the Poetry that has survived. This is so because sung verse cannot “euphoniously” accommodate a musical accompaniment unless its phonetics constituents are selected, concatenated and intoned in such a way as to follow the melodic contours and rhythm patterns that modulate their articulation. In addition, the point of making verse consist both of melodically organised arrangements of sound and of organisations of sound in which one can recognise ordinary words was not simply ornamental. The real point was to bi-nature what one was hearing. In other words, the goal was to “over-signify” the usual meanings of the “logocentric” words in the verse with a separate but complementary meaning and narrative encoded in melodised tones and metered rhythms. Why qualify the accompanying music as “acousmatic voices”? Because the music in question was added to song to give a voice to whichever tutelary divinity the song was performed to honour. That’s what makes “acousmatic voices” an especially apt epithet for characterising the melodically and rhythmically structured bodies of sound Saussure so presciently discerned in the phonetic depths of the poésie phonisante he probed. The point of their being in poetry was to give a voice to the agencies to whom the object or occasion of verse is beholden for its Being-in-the-world. (shrink)

Cooper et al. (this issue) develop an interactive activation model of spatial and imitative compatibilities that simulates the key results from Catmur and Heyes (2011) and thus conclude that both compatibilities are mediated by the same processes since their single model can predict all the results. Although the model is impressive, the conclusions are premature because they are based on an incomplete review of the relevant literature and because the model includes some questionable assumptions. Moreover, a competing model (Scheutz & (...) Bertenthal, 2012) is introduced that suggests the two compatibilities are not mediated by the same processes. We propose that more research is necessary before concluding that spatial and imitative compatibilities are mediated by the same processes. (shrink)

This article is a collective writing experiment undertaken by philosophers of education affiliated with the PESGB (Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain). When asked to reflect on questions concerning the Philosophy of Education in a New Key in May 2020, it was unsurprising that the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on society and on education were foremost in our minds. We wanted to consider important philosophical and educational questions raised by the pandemic, while acknowledging that, first and foremost, it (...) is a human tragedy. With nearly a million deaths reported worldwide to date, and with everyone effected in one way or another by Covid-19, there is a degree of discomfort, and a responsibility to be sensitive, in reflecting and writing about it academically. Members of this ‘Covid Collective’ come from various countries, with perspectives from Great Britain and Ireland well represented, and we see academic practice as a globally connected enterprise, especially since the digital revolution in academic publishing. The concerns raised in this article relate to but move beyond Covid-19, reflecting the impact of neoliberalism [and other political developments] on geopolitics with educational concerns as central to our focus. (shrink)

This article examines the issues that are at stake in the current resurgence of interest in the subject of habit. We focus on the role that habit has played in conceptions of the relations between body and society, and the respects in which such conceptions have been implicated in processes of governance. We argue that habit has typically constituted a point of leverage for regulatory practices that seek to effect some realignment of the relations between different components of personhood – (...) will, character, memory and instinct, for example – in order to bring about a specific end. In reviewing its functioning in this regard across a range of modern disciplines – philosophy, psychology, sociology – we explore the tensions between its use and interpretation in different lineages: in particular, the Cartesian–Kantian/ravaisson–bergson–deleuze lineages. The article then identifies how these questions are addressed across the contributions collected in this special issue. (shrink)

Early humans formed language units consisting of global and discrete dimensions of semiosis in dynamic opposition, or ‘growth points.’ At some point, gestures gained the power to orchestrate actions, manual and vocal, with significances other than those of the actions themselves, giving rise to cognition framed in dual terms. However, our proposal emphasizes natural selection of joint gesture-speech, not ‘gesture-first’ in language origin.

Sustained attention, a key cognitive skill that improves during childhood and adolescence, tends to be worse in some emotional and behavioural disorders. Sustained attention is typically studied in non-affective task contexts; here, we used a novel task to index performance in affective versus neutral contexts across adolescence (N = 465; ages 11–18). We asked whether: (i) performance would be worse in negative versus neutral task contexts; (ii) performance would improve with age; (iii) affective interference would be greater in younger adolescents; (...) (iv) adolescents at risk for depression and higher in anxiety would show overall worse performance; and (v) would show differential performance in negative contexts. Results indicated that participants performed more poorly in negative contexts and showed age-related performance improvements. Those at risk of depression performed more poorly than those at lower risk. However, there was no difference between groups as a result of affective context. For anxiety there was no difference in performance as a function of severity. However, those with higher anxiety showed less variance in their reaction times to negative stimuli than those with lower anxiety. One interpretation is that moderate levels of emotional arousal associated with anxiety make individuals less susceptible to the distracting effects of negative stimuli. (shrink)

This paper considers the ethics of routine antenatal HIV testing and the role of informed consent within such a policy in order to decide how we should proceed in this area—a decision that ultimately rests on the relative importance we give to public health goals on the one hand and respect for individual autonomy on the other.A recent illuminating qualitative study by Zulueta and Boulton1 explores the practicalities of informed consent in routine antenatal HIV testing. Its results support what I (...) have argued1 is inevitable with routine testing policies of this kind: that routine antenatal testing regimes are incompatible with requirements for informed consent. It has become clear that intervention could reduce the risk of transmitting HIV from mother to child from 15–20%2 to around 8%,3 or possibly as low as 2%.4,5 The evidence of this possibility produced a general trend towards introducing routine antenatal HIV screening in developed countries worldwide.6,7,8,9,10 The aim was to dramatically reduce the rate of HIV transmission from mother to child by encouraging universal antenatal HIV testing. The UK has been no exception, and in 1999 the government instructed health authorities to implement a policy of offering and recommending an HIV test to all pregnant women.11This UK antenatal screening policy and others like it, although well-meaning, are problematic in their formulation. In order to reflect contemporary ethical and legal practice, such policies attempt to marry the public health aims of maximising uptake of testing with a commitment to respect the choices of patients by requiring informed consent before they participate in screening. Thus, in the case of UK policy, health professionals are instructed to recommend the HIV test to all pregnant women in order to achieve the target of a 90% …. (shrink)

Philosophers have often sought criteria for a general distinction between appearance and reality. In chapter VII of Sense and Sensibilia, J. L. Austin claims to show that this enterprise is radically misconceived; and, characteristically, he bases his argument on the niceties of the use of ‘real’ in English. I shall try to show (1) that Austin’s account of how ‘real’ is used is muddled and inaccurate; and (2) that the uses of ‘real’ which Austin explores are irrelevant to the traditional (...) enquiry into the distinction between appearance and reality. Of these, (2) matters more, but most of my paper will treat of (1). The uses of ‘real’ which interested Austin may have some philosophical importance, so we might as well get them right. Also, although there are general grounds for denying that those uses are relevant to traditional epistemology, a tighter and more Austinian argument for the same conclusion can be based upon a correct account of the uses of ‘real’ in question. I should concede that I may have stated my thesis a little too strongly: for all I know, some philosophers may have pursued the traditional enquiry in such a miserably inadequate way that Austin’s points about the use of ‘real’ are, when suitably emended, effective against them. The fact that Austin did not publish Sense and Sensibilia suggests that he was not satisfied with its contents. Nevertheless, his views about the use of ‘real’ have been published and may be believed: personal considerations cannot be allowed to disarm criticism. I shall describe four ways of using ‘real’ in expressions of the form ‘a real F’ where ‘F’ stands for a general noun. Note the indefinite article: Austin writes as though nothing turns on the choice between ‘a real . . .’ and ‘the real . . .’, but this is not so. I shall argue that these four ways of using ‘real’ are distinct, though a single use of ‘real’ may partake of more than one of them. I believe but cannot prove that my four headings cover practically all idiomatic uses of the form ‘a real F’ other than the metaphorical, slipshod or pretentious.. (shrink)

Concepts We thank all three commentators for extremely constructive, insightful, and gracious commentaries. We cannot address all their valuable points. In this response, we elucidate and relate the concepts of addiction, disease, disability, autonomy, and well-being. We examine some of the implications of these relationships in the context of the helpful responses made by our commentators. We begin with the definitions of the relevant concepts which we employ: ¥? ? ? Addiction (Liberal Concept): An addiction is a strong appetite. ¥? (...) ? ? Appetites: An appetite is a disposition that generates desires that are urgent, oriented toward some rewarding behavior, periodically recurring, often in predictable circumstances, sated temporarily by their fulfillment, and generally provide pleasure. ¥? ? ? Disease (Naturalistic Concept): A disease is some biological or psychological state that results in subfunctioning of the organism in a given set of environmental and social circumstances, C. The reference class is a natural class of organisms of uniform functional design; specifically, an age group of a sex of a species. A normal function is a part or process within members of the reference class and is a statistically typical contribution by it to their individual survival and reproduction (Boorse 1977, 1997). ¥? ? ? Disability (Welfarist Concept): A disability is a relatively stable biological or psychological state that tends to reduce the amount of well-being that this person will enjoy in a given set of environmental and social circumstances (Savulescu and Kahane 2009; Kahane and Savulescu, 2009). ¥? ? ? Autonomy (Rationalist Concept): A person rationally desires or values some state of affairs if and only if he or she desires that state of affairs while (1) being in possession of all relevant. (shrink)

Medical decision making on behalf of unrepresented patients is one of the most challenging ethical issues faced in clinical practice. The legal environment surrounding these patients is equally complex. This article describes the efforts of a small coalition of interested healthcare professionals to address the issue in Colorado. A brief history of the effort is presented, along with discussion of the legal, ethical, practical, and political dimensions that arose in Colorado’s effort to address decision making for unrepresented patients through an (...) extension of the existing Colorado Medical Treatment Decision Act (CRS 15-18). A discussion of lessons learned in the process is included. (shrink)

The public sphere should be regulated so the distribution of political speech does not correlate with the distribution of income or wealth. A public sphere where people can fund any political speech from their private holdings is epistemically defective. The argument has four steps. First, if political speech is unregulated, the rich predictably contribute a disproportionate share. Second, wealth tends to correlate with substantive political perspectives. Third, greater quantities of speech by the rich can “drown out” the speech of the (...) poor, because of citizens’ limited attention span for politics. Finally, the normative problem with all this is that it reduces the diversity of arguments and evidence citizens become familiar with, reducing the quality of their political knowledge. The clearest implication of the argument is in favour of strict contribution limits and/or public funding for formal political campaigns, but it also has implications for more informal aspects of the public sphere. (shrink)

This paper draws on Kukla’s “Institutional Definition of Health” to provide a definition of “psychiatric condition” that delineates the proper bounds of psychiatry. I argue that this definition must include requirements that psychiatrization of a condition benefit the well-being of 1) the society as a collective, and 2) the individual whose condition is in question. I then suggest that psychiatry understand individual well-being in terms of the subjective values of individuals. Finally, I propose that psychiatry’s understanding of collective well-being should (...) be the result of a “socially objective” process, and give certain desiderata for this understanding. (shrink)

A report on Cornel West's Edinburgh Gifford Lectures 2024: "A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane".

How can we motivate ourselves to do what we think we ought? How can we deliberate about personal values and priorities? Bennett Helm argues that standard philosophical answers to these questions presuppose a sharp distinction between cognition and conation that undermines an adequate understanding of values and their connection to motivation and deliberation. Rejecting this distinction, Helm argues that emotions are fundamental to any account of value and motivation, and he develops a detailed alternative theory both of emotions, desires (...) and evaluative judgements and of their rational interconnections. The result is an innovative theory of practical rationality and of how we can control not only what we do but also what we value and who we are as persons. (shrink)

Challenges, possibilities, and opportunitie for re-founding the tradition of philosophical personalism today.

This paper argues that hate differs from mere disliking in terms of its “depth,” which is understood via a notion of “othering,” whereby one rejects at least some aspect of the identity of the target of hate, identifying oneself as not being what they are. Fleshing this out reveals important differences between personal hate, which targets a particular individual, and impersonal hate, which targets groups of people. Moreover, impersonal hate requires focusing on the place hate has within particular sorts of (...) communities, enabling a further important distinction between “insider” and “outsider” hate in terms of whether the hater includes members of the targeted group within a particular community or rejects them as “beneath” membership in that community. (shrink)

A category of enhancement technologies target neural systems as a means of improving physical performance. The author calls these as neurophysical enhancements. This chapter demonstrates why neurophysical enhancements deserve an ethical assessment which is independent of those relating to physical and cognitive enhancements. It focuses almost exclusively on the use of neurophysical enhancements in the sporting arena, where they are for the most part prohibited. World Anti‐Doping Agency (WADA) does permit some drugs which are effective enhancements. Caffeine is permitted on (...) the rationale that it is ineffective at unsafe doses (and hence safe at an effective dose). It makes little sense to ban every performance enhancer from sporting competition, no matter what it is used for, and what the risks are, since sport is essentially a project of performance enhancement. If every form of enhancement is to be considered unethical, competitive sport must be abandoned. (shrink)

If history—our past, the sum of our thoughts, passions, and deeds—is so pervasive, influential, and meaningful, why then do we lose sight of it? Why do we not gain good values from it? And if it is part of our existential core, why then do we so often fail to ravel it into our deliberations? I propose that very often and to a great degree it is shame that separates us from history.

Our cultural situation is to seek a moral form of self-constitution, rather than an ontological or epistemological foundation. Such a moral ground lies in the paradox of willing surrender of the will to do wrong or dysfunctional acts in order to enter temporally-extended processes of moral change. But the paradox of willing surrender of the will requires analysis. The propositional form of it cannot be sustained and must instead give way to willingness as an ongoing choice. The self-reflexivity of the (...) will with which we accomplish this turns out to be a core activity of human activity that seeks openness to moral growth through humility. The paper suggests that self-constitution in this manner this is what freedom is for us and is therefore the source of our hope. (shrink)

There is now a general consensus amongst philosophers in the values in science literature that values necessarily play a role in core areas of scientific inquiry. We argue that attention should now be turned from debating the value-free ideal to delineating legitimate from illegitimate influences of values in science, a project we dub “The New Demarcation Problem.” First, we review past attempts to demarcate the uses of values and propose a categorization of the strategies by where they seek to draw (...) legitimacy from. Next, we propose a set of desiderata for what we take to be a satisfactory solution and present a case study where conflicting sets of values clearly impinge on science, but where the legitimacy of their influence is ambiguous. We use these desiderata and the case study to illustrate what we take to be the strengths and weaknesses of current strategies. To be clear, our goal is not to answer the question we pose, but to articulate a framework within which a solution can be judged. (shrink)

Surveying nearly seven decades of habitual and obsessive reading, I consider how my character and psychology used reading to shape philosophical questions that move me into forms in which I could pursue them by reading. This became both the method and the substance of my philosophical work. It preserved some core emotional issues but also gave me the way to integrate them into scholarship and into my life.

Examining the author’s own experiences of narcotics addiction reveals certain aspects of the addicted mentality that have strong ethical valence. In general, this shows that addiction is not a state fundamentally characterized by lack. The rudiments of this position are found in some contemporary philosophy of addiction; also, it is contrasted with a common widely held mistaken view. Addiction should instead be understood in continuity with and as illuminating the nature of human personhood and subjectivity. Under a phenomenology specific to (...) the author’s experience, addiction appears as a mode of experience that has an unmanageable overflow of narratives created as discourses concerning people, events, thoughts, and feelings. (shrink)

A brief introduction to and commentary on the life of the Chinese philosopher Laozi is followed by an interpretative text of his teachings.

In this paper, I argue that our practice of giving and demanding apologies is rationalized by a belief that apologies make a difference to our normative situation. The characteristic normative effects of an apology are, I claim, that it removes an obligation on others to distance themselves from the wrongdoer, and that it makes the apologizer personally accountable to the addressee for their future compliance with the obligation they violated. However, if we ask what rationalizes that belief, two influential views (...) on the literature on apology – that I call the Reassurance View and the Performing Deference View – prove to be inadequate. In particular, these views cannot explain how apology can be both an expression of remorse for one’s wrongdoing but also a performative through which, by carrying out certain canonical actions, one can – all at once – change one’s normative situation. In order to explain these features of apology, I suggest that we see apology as akin to a normative power, but a normative power that is exercised expressively, or by an expressive action. In particular, I suggest that we see the power of apology as exercised by the performance of the expressive action of dissociation. (shrink)

Theatrical characters’ dual existence on stage and in text presents a unique, challenging case for the analytical philosopher. -/- Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play re-examines the ontological status of theatre and its fictional objects through the "possible worlds" thesis, arguing that theatre is not a mirror of our world, but a re-creation of it. Taking a fresh look at theatre’s key elements, including the hotly contested relationships between character and actor; onstage and offstage "worlds"; and the play-text (...) and performance, Michael Y. Bennett presents a radical new way of understanding the world of the play. (shrink)

Recently there has been a resurgence of philosophical interest in love, resulting in a wide variety of accounts. Central to most accounts of love is the notion of caring about your beloved for his sake. Yet such a notion needs to be carefully articulated in the context of providing an account of love, for it is clear that the kind of caring involved in love must be carefully distinguished from impersonal modes of concern for particular others for their sakes, such (...) as moral concern or concern grounded in compassion. That is, we might say, the kind of caring that is central to love must be somehow distinctly intimate. The trouble is to cash out these firm intuitions in a satisfactory way. (shrink)

Care ethics takes as central the discerning of needs in those being cared for and attempts to meet those needs. Perceptive caring agents are more likely to be able to identify needs in those for whom they are caring. The identification of needs is no small matter, not least in teaching encounters. This paper modestly proposes that at least some of the needs a caring agent should attempt to meet are a function of the identity of the patient of caring (...) action. Taking Nel Noddings’ account of care ethics as representative, I present it in outline. This leads to the needs-identification problematic. Following this I turn to Soran Reader’s account of needs. I interpret this to offer what I designate as identity as ‘what-ness’. Such an understanding of identity-based needs is a starting point for the caring agent but a more nuanced account, of identity as ‘who-ness’, is argued to be preferable. Identity as ‘who-ness’, as expressed in Paul Ricoeur’s work, advances the discussion, culminating in his concept of the ‘capable human being’. Having brought this aspect of Ricoeur’s thought into conversation with care ethics, I offer an account of identity-based needs conducive to the broader aims of the care ethical project. Finally, I consider what this bolstered account of care ethics might say about a brief and illustrative teaching encounter. (shrink)

The phenomenology of emotions has traditionally been understood in terms of bodily sensations they involve. This is a mistake. We should instead understand their phenomenology in terms of their distinctively evaluative intentionality. Emotions are essentially affective modes of response to the ways our circumstances come to matter to us, and so they are ways of being pleased or pained by those circumstances. Making sense of the intentionality and phenomenology of emotions in this way requires rejecting traditional understandings of intentionality and (...) so coming to see emotions as a distinctive and irreducible class of mental states lying at the intersection of intentionality, phenomenology, and motivation. (shrink)

Abstract:This article brings together considerations from philosophical work on standpoint epistemology, feminist philosophy of science, and epistemic injustice to examine a particular problem facing contemporary psychiatry: the conflict between the conceptual resources of psychiatric medicine and alternative conceptualizations like those of the neurodiversity movement and psychiatric abolitionism. I argue that resistance to fully considering such alternative conceptualizations in processes such as the revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders emerges in part from a particular form of epistemic (...) injustice (hermeneutical ignorance) leveled against a particular social group (which I call the "psychopathologized"). Further, insofar as the objectivity which psychiatry should aspire to is a kind of "social objectivity" which requires incorporation of various normative perspectives, this particular form of epistemic injustice threatens to undermine its scientific objectivity. Although many questions regarding implementation remain, this implies that psychiatry must grapple substantively with radical reconceptualizations of its domain if it is to achieve legitimate scientific objectivity. (shrink)

Numerous philosophers of science have argued that the incentive structure of science is a major contributor to the replication crisis. In this article I review FiveThirtyEight’s election forecasting model and show that it confronts similar problems in political polling and successfully mitigates them, not by changing the incentives, but by weighting a pollster’s effect on the model by their past reliability. I argue that a similar weighting procedure holds a promising approach to addressing the replication crisis in science.

This chapter analyses making/allowing in terms of positive/negative: you allow something to happen if an explanation of its happening requires only a negative fact about your behaviour. A negative fact about your behaviour is a highly general or uninformative one; it corresponds to almost the whole of the logical space of your possible ways of moving. An objection to this analysis, based on giving a very special status to immobility, is described and countered. The possibility space might have a different (...) metric, i.e. be structured in terms of something other than possible ways of moving. One such alternative metric is discussed. (shrink)

Industry is a major source of funding for scientific research. There is also a growing concern for how it corrupts researchers faced with conflicts of interest. As such, the debate has focused on whether researchers have maintained their integrity. In this article we draw on both the history of medicine and formal modeling to argue that given methodological diversity and a merit-based system, industry funding can bias a community without corrupting any particular individual. We close by considering a policy solution (...) that may seem to promote unbiased inquiry but that actually exacerbates the problem without additional restrictions. (shrink)

In this paper I consider whether traditional behaviors of animals, like traditions of humans, are transmitted by imitation learning. Review of the literature on problem solving by captive primates, and detailed consideration of two widely cited instances of purported learning by imitation and of culture in free-living primates (sweet-potato washing by Japanese macaques and termite fishing by chimpanzees), suggests that nonhuman primates do not learn to solve problems by imitation. It may, therefore, be misleading to treat animal traditions and human (...) culture as homologous (rather than analogous) and to refer to animal traditions as cultural. (shrink)