In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Montaignian MomentDan EngsterIn the Machiavellian Moment, J. G. A. Pocock argued that the development of modern republican theory was closely bound up with a paradigmatic shift in the early modern discourse of temporality and politics. 1 Whereas medieval thinkers tended to emphasize the supreme importance of eternal and universal principles in politics, the Italian civic humanists turned their attention to the stream of contingent temporal events ruled by (...) “fortune” and claimed human beings could create a stable political order within time through their own “virtue.” 2 The exemplar of this new paradigm was Machiavelli. In contrast to earlier humanist writers who still appealed to timeless values and static ideals in laying out their political theories, Machiavelli reframed his political discourse entirely in terms of contingency and fortune. “The Machiavellian moment,” Pocock wrote, “is a name for the moment in conceptualized time in which the republic was seen as confronting its own temporal finitude, as attempting to remain morally and politically stable in a stream of irrational events conceived as essentially destructive of all systems of secular stability.” 3 The importance of the Machiavellian moment, according to Pocock, was that it “left an important paradigmatic legacy” to modern political thought. Mach-iavelli’s new understanding of temporality and politics has “continued to pose problems in historical self-awareness, which form part of the journey of Western thought from the medieval Christian to the modern historical mode,” and his political strategies for taming fortune laid the foundation for the development of modern republican theory. 4 [End Page 625]Victoria Kahn has recently suggested several correctives to Pocock’s thesis. 5 Most importantly, she has criticized him for emphasizing the republican dimensions of Machiavelli’s thought while discounting the amoral or “Machiavellian” aspects of it. “For if Machiavellism is a rhetoric for conceptualizing and responding to the realm of contingency,” she has written, “it includes not only republicanism but also tyranny; it involves the use of force and fraud not only to advance one’s self interest but also to serve the commonwealth.” 6 According to Kahn, the “paradigm” which Machiavelli defined was not strictly republican but rather a broadly “activist” ideology amenable to a number of different causes. 7 But in this broader sense, she has continued to endorse Pocock’s assertion that Machiavelli’s approach to the problem of fortune and contingency was widely influential, or “paradigmatic,” in framing early modern political debates.In this article I suggest that Machiavelli’s arguments represented only one important shift in the discourse of temporality and politics in early modern Europe. During the late sixteenth century a second shift occurred; the exemplar of this new paradigm was Michel de Montaigne. 8 In his Essays Montaigne argued that Machiavelli and the civic humanists had grossly underestimated the capriciousness and uncertainty of fortune. He then challenged the effectiveness of traditional humanist strategies for establishing order within time and proposed a new set of principles for taming fortune based upon the concept of “nature” and the values of moderation, restraint, and self-discipline. I argue that no less than Machiavelli, Montaigne left an important paradigmatic legacy to later writers. He was one of the first early modern writers to suggest that human beings ought not to focus so much on trying actively to manipulate fortune. Instead, he felt that the aim should be more on attempting to construct self-sufficient and self-regulating communities that would avoid her blows altogether. In this respect he may be seen as a central transitional figure between the activist humanism of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and the more rationalistic state theories of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or more succinctly, between Machiavelli and Hobbes. The “Montaignian moment” outlined an alternative discourse of temporality and politics that provided a theoretical framework for the development and justification of the new language of the state. [End Page 626]Montaigne is not usually regarded as an important political thinker, let alone as a “paradigmatic” one. There have been two recent studies, however, that have attempted to situate his ideas in the history of early modern political thought. David Schaefer has argued that Montaigne was a proponent of republican ideas... (shrink)

Care theorists have made significant gains over the past twenty-five years in establishing caring as a viable moral and political concept. Nonetheless, the concept of caring remains underdeveloped as a basis for a moral and political philosophy, and there is no fully developed account of our moral obligation to care. This article advances thinking about caring by developing a definition of caring and a theory of obligation to care sufficient to ground a general moral and political philosophy.

: Care theorists have made significant gains over the past twenty-five years in establishing caring as a viable moral and political concept. Nonetheless, the concept of caring remains underdeveloped as a basis for a moral and political philosophy, and there is no fully developed account of our moral obligation to care. This article advances thinking about caring by developing a definition of caring and a theory of obligation to care sufficient to ground a general moral and political philosophy.

... Let me start my investigation by taking a brief look at the way in which self-awareness is expressed linguistically, as in the sentences "I am tired" or ...

In each of these areas, he reviews the contributions of earlier care theorists and then extends their arguments to provide a more complete description of the ...

Although liberal political philosophers have long recognised the tension between equal opportunity and the family, most have assumed there is little society can do to mitigate it. Brighouse and Swift argue, by contrast, that an analysis of the value of the family reveals limits on the rights of parents to benefit their children and hence points to a way to reconcile the family with equal opportunity. Their solution for resolving the tension between equal opportunity and the family, however, leads to (...) some untenable conclusions. A better solution for promoting equal opportunity in the family is to level up the opportunities that less advantaged parents have to promote the development and wellbeing of their children so that they are on par with the opportunities of the most advantaged parents. Five strategies are outlined for achieving this goal. Once society has provided all parents with real opportunities to fulfil their fiduciary duties, Brighouse and Swift's argument for limited parental partiality can be applied without contradiction. The result is an alternate solution for mitigating the conflict between equal opportunity and the family in liberal political philosophy. (shrink)

If one comes to Phénoménologie de la perception after having read Sein und Zeit (or Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs) one will be in for a surprise. Both works contain a number of both implicit and explicit references to Husserl, but the presentation they give is so utterly different, that one might occasionally wonder whether they are referring to the same author. Thus nobody can overlook that Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl differs significantly from Heidegger’s. It is far more charitable. In (...) fact, when evaluating the merits of respectively Husserl and Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty often goes very much against the standard view. This is not only the case in his notorious remark on the very first page of Phénoménologie de la Perception where he declares that the whole of Sein und Zeit is nothing but an explication of Husserl’s notion of Lifeworld, but also - to give just one further example - in one of his Sorbonne-lectures, where Merleau-Ponty writes that Husserl took the issue of historicity far more seriously than Heidegger. (shrink)

Asha Bhandary’s Freedom to Care represents an important challenge to the idea that care ethics and liberalism necessarily stand in tension, arguing instead that most of the commitments of care ethics can be integrated within a recognizably mainstream liberal contract theory. Although I am sympathetic to Bhandary’s project, I identify three ways in which it falls short: Bhandary’s thin moral premises fail to support decent care for all; her survival baseline principle of care does not support some important forms of (...) care; and her proceduralist approach offers little alternative other than coercion for assuring sufficient care for all. I argue a thicker set of moral assumptions based on the importance of decent care for all are necessary for reconciling liberalism and care ethics on more equal terms. (shrink)

In this entry, I tackle the phenomenon known as "faultless disagreement", considered by many authors to pose a challenge to the main views on the semantics of subjective expressions. I first present the phenomenon and the challenge, then review the main answers given by contextualist, absolutist and relativist approaches to the expressions in question. I end with signaling two issues that might shape future discussions about the role played by faultless disagreement in semantics.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology presents twenty-eight essays by some of the leading figures in the field, and gives an authoritative overview of the type of work and range of topics found and discussed in contemporary phenomenology. It is the definitive guide to what is currently going on in phenomenology, and offers a rich source of insight and stimulation for philosophers, students of philosophy, and for people working in other disciplines of the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, who are (...) interested in the state of phenomenology today. The essays explore a diverse range of topics, including intentionality, embodiment, perception, naturalism, temporality, self-consciousness, language, knowledge, ethics, politics, art and religion, and will make it clear that phenomenology, far from being a tradition of the past, is alive and in a position to make valuable contributions to contemporary thought. (shrink)

Many times, what we say proves to be wrong. It might turn out that what we took to be a comforting remark was, in fact, making things worse. Or that a joke was inappropriate. Or that yelling out loud was rude. More importantly for this paper, there are plenty of cases in which what we said turns out to be false: we spoke without paying attention, we were misinformed or tricked, or we made a reasoning mistake. -/- A particular instance (...) of this latter phenomenon is when someone changes their perspective and doesn't find their previous assertions true anymore. For example, imagine that you used to like licorice as a child, and that you went around saying things like "Licorice is tasty." But, growing up, you find licorice too strong and quite boring; your tastes have changed. While the taste of licorice itself has not changed, you are not going around anymore uttering "Licorice is tasty." In fact, in certain cases, you might even think that what you said in your childhood was wrong - at least in light of your present preferences. -/- Sometimes we "take back" the assertions we made when we realize they are no longer true. Such speech acts of taking back can be performed in various ways: more formally, as effected in a court of law or when an official speaks to the press, or more informally in our day-by-day interactions. These acts of taking back are known as retraction. Retraction is usually achieved by employing certain linguistic markers ('I was wrong', 'I was mistaken', 'I retract', "Scratch that' etc.) that signal that the retractor takes their previous speech act to be faulty in a certain way. -/- This phenomenon has formed the basis for a popular argument used by relativists about a variety of natural language expressions (predicates of taste, epistemic modals, moral and aesthetic claims etc.) in support of their view. Recently, several considerations (mostly from contextualists about the same expressions), both from the armchair and based on empirical studies, have been offered to undercut the support retraction was thought to provide for relativism. In this paper, I consider and re-evaluate that support in light of both types of considerations, showing that neither of them decisively undermines it. However, to survive the contextualist counterattack, the relativist needs to pay a price: that is, she will be forced to make some concessions or rethink certain claims. I show what I think those concessions should be and what needs to be rethought (and how). The upshot is that, while the support retraction offers relativism is not as strong as initially believed, appeal to retraction remains a legitimate move in the debate. In section 1, I introduce the views in the debate and clarify the phenomenon of retraction and its dialectical role. Armchair data are investigated in section 2, proper experimental studies in section 3, while section 4 summarizes and concludes. (shrink)

Care Ethics and Political Theory is a collection of fifteen original essays that explore the implications and applications of care to social and political policies, practices, and theories.

Parenting has an ambiguous place within the liberal tradition. On the one hand, liberal theorists have traditionally portrayed it as a private activity. On the other hand, they have also acknowledged the need for some public regulation of parenting in order to protect children’s interests. Some theorists have suggested that this ambiguity within liberalism can be best resolved by implementing parental licensing plans that would limit childrearing opportunities strictly to individuals who could prove their psychological, moral, and financial competency to (...) raise children well. In this article, I critique parental licensing schemes from a liberal perspective and argue that public parenting support, including paid parenting leaves, public childcare subsidies, and the like, is more consistent with liberal values and, in fact, a necessary component of any coherent liberal theory of justice. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology contains thirty-seven new essays by leading scholars in the field. The essays all highlight historical influences, connections, and developments and provide an in-depth coverage of the development of phenomenology; one that allows for a better comprehension and assessment of the continuity as well as diversity of the phenomenological tradition. The handbook is divided into three distinct parts. The first part contains chapters that address the way phenomenology has been influenced by earlier periods (...) or figures in the history of philosophy. The second part contains chapters targeting prominent phenomenologists: How was their work affected by earlier figures, how did their own views change over time, and what kind of influence did they exert on subsequent thinkers? The contributions in the third part trace various core topics such as subjectivity, intersubjectivity, embodiment, spatiality, and imagination in the work of different phenomenologists, in order to explore how the notions were transformed, enriched, and expanded up through the century. The handbook will be a source of insight for philosophers, students of philosophy, and for people working in other disciplines of the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, who are interested in the phenomenological tradition. It is an authoritative guide to how phenomenology started, how it developed, and where it is heading. (shrink)

Political theorists generally defend the moral importance of health care by appealing to its purported importance in promoting good health and saving lives. Recent research on the social determinants of health demonstrates, however, that health care actually does relatively little to promote good health or save lives in comparison with other social and environmental factors. This article assesses the implications of the social determinants of health literature for existing theories of health care justice, and outlines a new approach that can (...) justify publicly subsidized comprehensive health care despite its limited contribution to good health. Even if health care plays a relatively limited role in promoting good health, it remains morally important because of the care it provides to individuals. As such, it can be justified in terms of care ethics. When health care is justified primarily in terms of care rather than health, however, the goals of a just health-care system shift. The measure of a just health-care system is no longer strictly its ability to generate good health outcomes but also its ability to provide individuals with accessible, good quality daily care. This different focus has important consequences for the way we think about the institutions of a just health-care system as well as for the delivery and allocation of medical goods and services. (shrink)

Neither Critical Theory nor western Marxism ever understood crises as being solely concerned with the economy. Both saw them rather as necessarily involving consciousness and subjectivity as well. How does Critical Theory conceptualize economy and subjectivity as inseparable? This is the crucial question. Critical Theory claims, indeed, that it shows the inner connection between the economy and subjectivity. In its first generation, at any rate, Critical Theory meant to show that the economy is a constitutive part of subjectivity, while also (...) being its blind spot; or even that the economy is its blind spot because it is essentially constructive of subjectivity. The article will specify the connection between the economy and subjectivity and then will indicate the blind spot. While Critical Theory does not fully pinpoint the blind spot in this connection, by tracing the discussion that followed its first generation we may better find out what this blind spot might be. (shrink)

Sohn-Rethel’s great idea was to ‘socialise’ Kant’s transcendental subject by combining it with Marx’s commodity-form. In so doing, he took on three challenges simultaneously: a) the timeless validity of modern natural science; b) the social genesis of empirically pure forms of cognition; and c) socialisation occurring through a purely social synthesis. However, Sohn-Rethel construed Marx’s value-form analysis as an empirical exchange of commodities and held that such exchange performs a real abstraction – in this way, he laboured under the very (...) semblance that money engenders at the surface of society by virtue of its function qua means of exchange. This semblance can be rendered transparent by, on the one hand, explaining value in terms of capitalist valorisation rather than as a product of abstraction, and, on the other, developing money as the measure and form of this valorisation. (shrink)

This book explores contemporary welfare state reform from a moral and philosophical perspective.

In this paper, I explore a range of existent and possible ameliorative semantic theories of gender terms: invariantism, according to which gender terms are not context-sensitive, contextualism, according to which the meaning of gender terms is established in the context of use, and relativism, according to which the meaning of gender terms is established in the context of assessment. I show that none of these views is adequate with respect to the plight of trans people to use their term of (...) choice to self-identify and be referred to accordingly. I then consider an invariantist view based on self-identification and explore some of its challenges. (shrink)

When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is an inference process guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to (...) understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? MEANING AND RELEVANCE sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies. (shrink)

Ecologically-motivated authoritarianism flourished initially during the 1970s but largely disappeared after the decline of socialism in the late-1980s. Today, 'eco- authoritarianism ' is beginning to reassert itself, this time modelled not after the Soviet Union but modern-day China. The new eco-authoritarians denounce central planning but still suggest that governments should be granted powers that free them from subordination to citizens' rights or democratic procedures. I argue that current eco-authoritarian views do not present us with an attractive alternative to market liberal (...) democracy even if we take a highly pessimistic view of our shared prospects under the latter sort of regime. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the semantics of knowledge attributions(K-claims, for short) and proposes a position holding that K-claims are contextsensitive that differs from extant views on the market. First I lay down the data a semantic theory for K-claims needs to explain. Next I present and assess three views purporting to give the semantics for K-claims: contextualism, subject-sensitive invariantism and relativism. All three views are found wanting with respect to their accounting for the data. I then propose a hybrid (...) view according to which the relevant epistemic standards for evaluating K-claims are neither those at the context of the subject (subject-sensitive invariantism), nor those at the context of the assessor (relativism), but it is itself an open matter. However, given that we need a principled way of deciding which epistemic standards are the relevant ones, I provide a principle according to which the relevant standards are those that are the highest between those at the context of the subject and those at the context of the assessor/attributor. In the end I consider some objections to the view and offer some answers. (shrink)

While by no means intending to discount the importance of historical circumstances in motivating Bodin to change his definition of sovereignty, I suggest an alternative way for understanding this change. I study Bodin's writings in the intellectual context of his times, and argue that he proposed his absolutist theory of sovereignty as a way to preserve a minimal point of universal and immutable order for politics in a social world that he perceived as highly disorderly, corrupt and changing. I begin (...) by locating Bodin's thinking within the intellectual context of his times. Like many other sceptics of his generation, including Montaigne, Pasquier and Le Roy, Bodin no longer believed that human laws and society very closely reflected the immutable principles of the divine and natural orders, but instead argued that human affairs were generally detached from these orders and were characterized by a high degree of particularity, variability and mutability. However, in contrast to these more sceptical writers, he was unwilling to accept the possibility that human political order could subsist without some divine and natural foundation. In both the Methodus and Republique he therefore set out to identify a new universal foundation for human laws and society anchored in the divine and natural orders. (shrink)

The contemporary debate on collective intentionality in analytic philosophy has lasted several decades, but questions concerning the nature of ‘we’ and the relation between the individual and the community are obviously far older. We can find a particularly rich discussion in early phenomenology. Indeed, while starting out with an interest in the individual mind, phenomenologists began their exploration of dyadic forms of interpersonal relations shortly before the start of World War I and were already deeply engaged in extensive analyses of (...) collective forms of intentionality a few years later. A distinctive feature of the phenomenological contribution was its exploration of the relation between the first- and second-person singular and the first-person plural perspectives. How are I, you, and we intertwined? The aim of this paper is to present some core insights from this early debate. (shrink)

Justice, Care, and the Welfare State explores contemporary welfare state reform from a moral and philosophical perspective. It offers detailed arguments about the nature of justice in the areas of family policy, education, health care, old age pensions and long-term care, disability, and employment and poverty support. Challenging the ideal nature of much contemporary political philosophy, Engster applies political philosophy to public policy issues in order to generate concrete policy recommendations for better supporting social justice.

In his book The Conscious Mind David Chalmers introduced a by now familiar distinction between the hard problem and the easy problems of consciousness. The easy problems are those concerned with the question of how the mind can process information, react to environmental stimuli, and exhibit such capacities as discrimination, categorization, and introspection (Chalmers, 1996, 4, 1995, 200). All of these abilities are impressive, but they are, according to Chalmers, not metaphysically baffling, since they can all be tackled by means (...) of the standard repertoire of cognitive science and explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. This task might still be difficult, but it is within reach. In contrast, the hard problem—also known as the problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995, 201)—is the problem of explaining why mental states have phenomenal or experiential qualities. Why is it like something to ‘taste coffee’, to ‘touch an ice cube’, to ‘look at a sunset’ etc.? Why does it feel the way it does? Why does it at all feel like anything? Chalmers’s distinction confronts us with a version of the so-called ‘explanatory gap’. On the one hand, we have certain cognitive functions, which can apparently be explained reductively, and on the other hand, we have a number of experiential qualities, which seem to resist this reductive explanation. We can establish that a certain function is accompanied by a certain experience, but we have no idea why that happens, and regardless of how closely we scrutinize the neural mechanisms we don’t seem to be getting any closer at an answer. In his book, Chalmers also distinguished two concepts of mind: a phenomenal concept and a psychological concept. The first captures the conscious aspect of mind: Mind is understood in terms of conscious experience. The second concept understands mind in functional terms as the causal or explanatory basis for behavior.. (shrink)

Most contemporary justice theories focus on the basic structure of society but pay relatively little attention to the implementation of laws and policies at the street-level. As agents of the basic structure, social caseworkers and street-level bureaucrats are, however, potentially in a unique position in the fight to deliver justice at the coalface of social inequality. Introducing a paradigm of ‘Justice as Action’, we explore how street-level bureaucrats can work with both citizen-clients and, indeed, political philosophers, to promote justice. Although (...) the Justice as Action paradigm does not involve entirely abandoning ideal justice theories, we show how it provides a potential method for paying heed to the objections of political realists about the need to direct attention to the concerns of people ‘now and around here’ if we are to produce both meaningful political theory and meaningful political action. Our conclusion is that it is essential for front-line workers and street-level bureaucrats and political theorists to have more conversations with one another than they currently do in order to advance their shared cause. (shrink)

In his bookThe Conscious MindDavid Chalmers introduced a now-familiar distinction between the hard problem and the easy problems of consciousness. The easy problems are those concerned with the question of how the mind can process information, react to environmental stimuli, and exhibit such capacities as discrimination, categorization, and introspection. All of these abilities are impressive, but they are, according to Chalmers, not metaphysically baffling, since they can all be tackled by means of the standard repertoire of cognitive science and explained (...) in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. This task might still be difficult, but it is within reach. In contrast, the hard problem — also known astheproblem of consciousness — is the problem of explaining why mental states have phenomenal or experiential qualities. Why is it like something to ‘taste coffee,’ to ‘touch an ice cube,’ to ‘look at a sunset,’ etc.? Why does it feel the way it does? Why does it feel like anything at all? (shrink)

Recently, some scholars have argued that testimonial injustice may not only be due to prejudice toward the speaker, but also prejudice toward the content of what the speaker says. I argue that such accounts do not merely expand our picture of epistemic injustice, but give us reason to radically revise our approach to reducing testimonial injustice. The dominant conception of this project focuses on reducing speaker prejudice. But even if one were to successfully do so, the frequency of content prejudice (...) means that one would still commit testimonial injustice in many of the same circumstances. I argue that we must reorient the project of reducing testimonial injustice toward critiquing the ideologies that produce it. I conclude with a sketch of what such a research program might look like. (shrink)

Humans have two kinds of beliefs, intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are a most fundamental category of cognition, defined in the architecture of the mind. They are formulated in an intuitive mental lexicon. Humans are also capable of entertaining an indefinite variety of higher-order or "reflective" propositional attitudes, many of which are of a credal sort. Reasons to hold "reflective beliefs" are provided by other beliefs that describe the source of the reflective belief as reliable, or that provide (...) explicit arguments in favour of the reflective belief. The mental lexicon of reflective beliefs includes not only intuitive, but also reflective concepts. (shrink)

行動経済学によって、さまざまに系統的な不合理さが見えてきた。手をかけることが高評価をもたらすIKEA効果、やる気をそいでいる高額ボーナス、自分で思いついた(と思わせられた)意見は好ましい、雑用は一気に 片づけるほうが楽...。行動経済学研究の第一人者が、わたしたちがなぜ、どのように不合理な行動をしてしまうのかをユニークな実験で紹介。わかりやすい数々の実例で経済の真の姿を解明し、よりよい決断へとつなげ る話題作。.

Humans have two kinds of beliefs, intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are a fundamental category of cognition, defined in the architecture of the mind. They are formulated in an intuitive mental lexicon. Humans are also capable of entertaining an indefinite variety of higher‐order or‘reflective’propositional attitudes, many of which are of a credat sort. Reasons to hold reflective beliefs are provided by other beliefs that describe the source of the reflective belief as reliable, or that provide an explicit argument (...) in favour of the reflective belief. The mental lexicon of reflective beliefs includes not only intuitive, but also reflective concepts. (shrink)

The vision of integrating artificial intelligence in education is part of an ongoing push for harnessing digital solutions to improve teaching and learning. Drawing from Jasanoff and Hasse, this paper deliberates on how sociotechnical imaginaries are interrelated to the implications of new technologies, such as AI, in education. Complicating Hasses’s call for the development of Socratic ignorance to consider our predispositions about new technologies and open new prospects of thought, this paper revisits postphenomenology and Feenberg’s critical constructivist theories. While embracing (...) the notion of Socratic ignorance, this paper stresses the importance of developing a nuanced understanding of technology that realizes its lack of neutrality and supports the creation of a deeper understanding of how knowledge is produced, deployed, and interpreted in the digital age. Thus, this paper argues that an amalgam of Hasse’s call for advancing Socratic ignorance combined with postphenomenology and critical constructivism can support students in developing a critical understanding of technology and opening new landscapes of imaginaries. (shrink)

The Human Genome Project will produce information permitting increasing opportunities to prevent genetically transmitted harms, most of which will be compatible with a life worth living, through avoiding conception or terminating a pregnancy. Failure to prevent these harms when it is possible for parents to do so without substantial burdens or costs to themselves or others are what J call “wrongful handicaps”. Derek Parfit has developed a systematic difficulty for any such cases being wrongs — when the harm could be (...) prevented only by preventing the existence of the individual who would have a worthwhile life even with the handicap, then bringing him into existence with the handicap does not make him worse off and so does not wrong him. I argue that a non “person‐affecting” principle requiring the avoidance of suffering and limited opportunity correctly accounts for cases of wrongful handicaps without requiring that the individuals with the handicap have been made worse off and therefore wronged. It is an advantage, not a difficulty, of this account that it does not imply that the person with the handicap has been wronged or is a victim with a special moral complaint. (shrink)

Dan Zahavi engages with classical phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and a range of empirical disciplines to explore the nature of selfhood. He argues that the most fundamental level of selfhood is not socially constructed or dependent upon others, but accepts that certain dimensions of the self and types of self-experience are other-mediated.

The Human Genome Project will produce information permitting increasing opportunities to prevent genetically transmitted harms, most of which will be compatible with a life worth living, through avoiding conception or terminating a pregnancy. Failure to prevent these harms when it is possible for parents to do so without substantial burdens or costs to themselves or others are what J call “wrongful handicaps”. Derek Parfit has developed a systematic difficulty for any such cases being wrongs — when the harm could be (...) prevented only by preventing the existence of the individual who would have a worthwhile life even with the handicap, then bringing him into existence with the handicap does not make him worse off and so does not wrong him. I argue that a non “person‐affecting” principle requiring the avoidance of suffering and limited opportunity correctly accounts for cases of wrongful handicaps without requiring that the individuals with the handicap have been made worse off and therefore wronged. It is an advantage, not a difficulty, of this account that it does not imply that the person with the handicap has been wronged or is a victim with a special moral complaint. (shrink)

The relationship of self, and self-awareness, and experience: exploring classical phenomenological analyses and their relevance to contemporary discussions in ...

This revised edition includes a new Preface outlining developments in Relevance Theory since 1986, discussing the more serious criticisms of the theory, and ...

It is commonly believed that Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), well known as the founder of phenomenology and as the teacher of Heidegger, was unable to free himself from the framework of a classical metaphysics of subjectivity. Supposedly, he never abandoned the view that the world and the Other are constituted by a pure transcendental subject, and his thinking in consequence remains Cartesian, idealistic, and solipsistic. The continuing publication of Husserl’s manuscripts has made it necessary to revise such an interpretation. Drawing upon (...) both Husserl’s published works and posthumous material, Husserl’s Phenomenology incorporates the results of the most recent Husserl research. It is divided into three parts, roughly following the chronological development of Husserl’s thought, from his early analyses of logic and intentionality, through his mature transcendental-philosophical analyses of reduction and constitution, to his late analyses of intersubjectivity and lifeworld. It can consequently serve as a concise and updated introduction to his thinking. (shrink)

Much philosophical work has examined both imperatival and non-imperatival forms of address that aim to motivate others to action. But one such kind of address has received relatively little attention: begging. This is partly surprising as begging, both as an individual act and as a widespread social practice, raises acute, yet difficult to articulate, moral and political concerns. In this paper, I identify a central form of the phenomenon which constitutively involves communicating one’s relative powerlessness as a means of motivating (...) one’s target to act. I argue that this form of begging is present in a number of cases that animate many of our pre-theoretic normative worries about begging. I argue that when begging of this kind is bad for the beggar herself, this is so because either (i) the invoked powerlessness is bad for the beggar and thereby gives the action a negative evaluative meaning, or (ii) the invoked powerlessness is good/neutral, but the act of begging precludes or replaces valuable ways of interacting that the parties have reasons to care about in the context. In a slogan, the badness of begging revolves around power and helplessness. (shrink)