It is not wholly clear the extern to which Nel Nodding intends her ethic of caring to be an ethic that stands on its own in competition with others described by ethical theories. I argue that, given this ambiguity, Nodding' ethic of caring is a dangerous ethic because it can abet exploitation. I consider Noddings'responses to this criticism and conclude that the relational ontology of the ethic cannot rescue it from the charges of abetting exploitation.

Kathryn Morgan has introduced us to a typology of ‘the ways in which women’s moral voice and her sense of moral integrity are twisted and destroyed by patriarchal ideology and lived experience.’ She claims that this experience can induce in women ‘a sense of confusion and genuine moral madness.’I am in agreement with much of what Morgan says. However, I suspect that some others might find her case less convincing than I for the reason that she supports her claims by (...) an appeal to classical philosophical literature and what we might loosely call ‘sociological observations.’ One can imagine the easy retort—‘Yes, well, it’s true that Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau and Kant did say those silly things about women, but their remarks were mere asides and no one takes them seriously in this matter any more anyway. (shrink)

Kathryn Morgan has introduced us to a typology of ‘the ways in which women’s moral voice and her sense of moral integrity are twisted and destroyed by patriarchal ideology and lived experience.’ She claims that this experience can induce in women ‘a sense of confusion and genuine moral madness.’I am in agreement with much of what Morgan says. However, I suspect that some others might find her case less convincing than I for the reason that she supports her claims by (...) an appeal to classical philosophical literature and what we might loosely call ‘sociological observations.’ One can imagine the easy retort—‘Yes, well, it’s true that Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau and Kant did say those silly things about women, but their remarks were mere asides and no one takes them seriously in this matter any more anyway. (shrink)

Recent writers in feminist ethics have been concerned to find ways to reclaim and augment women's moral agency. This essay considers Sarah Hoagland's intriguing suggestion that we renounce moral praise and blame and pursue what she calls an "ethic of intelligibility." I argue that the eschewal of moral blame would not help but rather hinder our efforts to increase our sense of moral agency. It would, I claim, further intensify our demoralization.

Kathryn Morgan has introduced us to a typology of ‘the ways in which women’s moral voice and her sense of moral integrity are twisted and destroyed by patriarchal ideology and lived experience.’ She claims that this experience can induce in women ‘a sense of confusion and genuine moral madness.’I am in agreement with much of what Morgan says. However, I suspect that some others might find her case less convincing than I for the reason that she supports her claims by (...) an appeal to classical philosophical literature and what we might loosely call ‘sociological observations.’ One can imagine the easy retort—‘Yes, well, it’s true that Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau and Kant did say those silly things about women, but their remarks were mere asides and no one takes them seriously in this matter any more anyway. (shrink)

Feeling Power is a bold and provocative book whose breadth of inquiry is stunning. Author Megan Boler sets out to rescue emotions from their devalued and obscure political status by showing that they are both a site of social control and also a site for political resistance. She situates her inquiry within the context of education, convinced that classrooms, especially within higher education, constitute significant locations of social and political struggle. -/- Boler takes the reader on a wide-ranging interdisciplinary exploration (...) where she analyzes various discourses to show how emotions get visibly and invisibly addressed in education and how emotions reflect particular historical, cultural, and social arrangements. Her broad conception of emotion resonates with philosophical accounts that view emotions as (partially) cognitive as well as with accounts that give emotions a role in moral judgments and ethical reasoning. -/- In Part I, Boler builds upon the work of feminist theorists, such as Elizabeth Spelman (1989, 1991), Alison Jaggar (1989), Sandra Bartky (1990), and Sue Campbell (1997), and uses key concepts drawn from poststructural theorists to develop a theoretical framework for revealing and explicating the myriad ways in which the "politics of emotion," shaped by different scholarly disciplines, functions in public education to enforce social control of the nation's citizens. Through astute, gender-sensitive historical critiques of the mental hygiene and character education movements, and a close analysis of Daniel Goleman's (1995) contemporary notion of emotional intelligence, Boler shows how we are taught to internalize and enact emotional rules, and roles, that serve to maintain society's particular stratifications of gender, race, and class. The chapters on emotional intelligence and the emotional literacy curricula founded on this concept are, I think, among the best in the book. Together they constitute a persuasive example of the power of Boler's method of discourse analysis. (shrink)

It is not wholly clear the extent to which Nel Noddings intends her ethic of caring to be an ethic that stands on its own in competition with others described by ethical theories. I argue that, given this ambiguity, Noddings' ethic of caring is a dangerous ethic because it can abet exploitation. I consider Noddings' responses to this criticism and conclude that the relational ontology of the ethic cannot rescue it from the charges of abetting exploitation.

“Whatever matters to human beings,” wrote Sissela Bok, “trust is the atmosphere in which it survives.” Trudy Govier’s Dilemmas of Trust proves it. In this book, Govier focuses our attention on personal and interpersonal trust, exploring the broad and powerful effects trust and distrust have on our relationships, our work, our sense of self, the knowledge available to us, and the way in which we see the world. There has been, until recently, surprisingly little systematic attention paid to this elixir (...) of human intercourse within the contexts where it is so much taken for granted. And elixir it is, for without trust, as Govier convincingly argues, our golden world in which we proceed— secure, relaxed, enjoying easy communication with others, able to take the risks we need to love, grow, and enlarge our experience—crumbles to one in which we are fearful, suspicious, defensive, and withdrawn. (shrink)

Making room for character -- Pluralism and the community of moral judgment -- A cosmopolitan kingdom of ends --Responsibility and moral competence --Can virtue be taught?: the problem of new moral facts -- Training to autonomy: Kant and the question of moral education -- Bootstrapping -- Rethinking Kant's hedonism -- The scope of moral requirement -- The will and its objects -- Obligatory ends -- Moral improvisation -- Contingency in obligation.

Barbara Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brain’s material realities. In Echo Objects she argues that humanists should seize upon the exciting neuroscientific discoveries that are illuminating the underpinnings of cultural objects. In turn, she contends, brain scientists could enrich their investigations of mental activity by incorporating phenomenological considerations—particularly the intricate ways that images focus intentional behavior and allow us to feel thought. This, then, is a book for (...) both sides of the aisle, a stunningly broad exploration of how complex images—or patterns that compress space and time—make visible the invisible ordering of human consciousness. Stafford demonstrates, for example, how the compound formats of emblems, symbols, collage, and electronic media reveal the brain’s grappling to construct mental objects that are redoubled by prior associations. On the other hand, she compellingly shows that findings in evolutionary biology and the neurosciences are providing profound opportunities for understanding aesthetic conundrums as old and deep-seated as the human urge to imitate, the mapping of inner space, and the role of narrative and nonnarrative representation. As precise in her discussions of firing neurons as she is about the coordinating dynamics of image making, Stafford locates these major transdisciplinary issues at the intersection of art, science, philosophy, and technology. Ultimately, she makes an impassioned plea for a common purpose—for the acknowledgement that, at the most basic level, these separate projects belong to a single investigation. (shrink)

Moving effortlessly between symbolist poetry and Barbie dolls, artificial intelligence and Kleist, Kant, and Winnicott, Barbara Johnson not only clarifies ...

This paper responds to the contributions by Alexander Bird, Nathan Wildman, David Yates, Jennifer McKitrick, Giacomo Giannini & Matthew Tugby, and Jennifer Wang. I react to their comments on my 2015 book Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality, and in doing so expands on some of the arguments and ideas of the book.

Dispositionalism about modality is the view that metaphysical modality is a matter of the dispositions possessed by actual objects. In a recent paper, David Yates has raised an important worry about the formal adequacy of dispositionalism. This paper responds to Yates’s worry by developing a reply that Yates discusses briefly but dismisses as ad hoc: an appeal to a ’plenitude of powers’ including such powers as the necessarily always manifested power for 2+2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} (...) \begin{document}$$2+2$$\end{document} to be 4. I argue that the reply is not ad hoc at all, by defending the metaphysics of dispositions that should underly it. I then argue, first, that a proper understanding of dispositions’ degrees provides us with an argument for such necessarily always manifested dispositions; second, that all the natural attempts to block that argument can be resisted without being ad hoc; and third, that pragmatic considerations explain our intuitive resistance to the ascription of necessarily always manifested dispositions. Dispositionalism can be formally adequate after all. (shrink)

The distinction between concept and intuition is of the utmost importance for understanding Kant’s critical philosophy. For, as Kant himself claimed, all the distinctive claims of this philosophy rest on, and develop out of, a detailed account of the way all our cognition of things requires both intuitions and concepts.

This paper explores the prospects for dispositional accounts of abilities. According to so-called new dispositionalists, an agent has the ability to Φ iff they have a disposition to Φ when trying to Φ. We show that the new dispositionalism is beset by some problems that also beset its predecessor, the conditional analysis of abilities, and bring up some further problems. We then turn to a different approach, which links abilities not to motivational states but to the notion of success, and (...) consider ways of implementing that approach. Our results suggest that there are principled disanalogies between abilities and disposition which prevent any dispositional account of abilities from succeeding. (shrink)

Against the background of recent developments in neuroscience, the paper shows how, for Hegel, the theoretical, practical and evaluative functions of the mind are grounded in something like a natural normativity, based on the interaction of the body's inner world with the outer world. These forms of organic homeostasis are the basis for further kinds and levels of norms, and deviations from these norms, which result in mental pathologies, provide insights into the complexity of spirit.

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--Tèubingen, 2012 under the title: Weisheit der Befreiung im Dialog: engagierter Buddhismus und Befreiungstheologie im Vergleich ihrer wirtschaftsethischen Perspektiven und praktisch-theologischen Konsequenzen.

This paper investigates Slovak migrants’ use of new media to build social capital. It draws on data from a pilot study with 36 Slovaks living in the UK, and on content analysis of the main Facebook page for Czechs and Slovaks in the UK. The data suggest that Facebook is used for sharing emotions rather than to build a community and share practical information. While Facebook and Skype are used to maintain preexisting strong ties in the country of origin, face-to-face (...) contact and mobile phones are used to maintain ties within the UK. However, social media do not seem to facilitate the formation of weak ties prior to migration, with face-to-face contact being dominant upon arrival. Transnational migration experience forms a separate dimension within the participants’ identity, independent from social capital. The data are discussed in relation to findings from previous studies about Slovak migrants in the Republic of Ireland. (shrink)

In this essay, we examine the grounds, nature and content, status, acquisition and role, and justification of gratitude in Kant's ethical system, making use of student notes from Kant's lectures on ethics. We are especially interested in questions about the significance of gratitude in Kant's ethics. We examine Kant's claim that gratitude is a sacred duty, because it cannot be discharged, and explain how this claim is consistent with his insistence that “ought” implies “can.” We argue that for Kant a (...) proper understanding of self-esteem is importantly related to, if not necessary for, possession of the virtue of gratitude. (shrink)

There are two prevailing interpretations of the status which Kant accorded his claims in the Critique of Pure Reason: 1) he is analyzing our concepts of cognition and experience; 2) he is making empirical claims about our cognitive faculties. I argue for a third alternative: on Kant's account, all cognition consists in a reflective consciousness of our cognitive faculties, and in critique we analyze the content of this consciousness. Since Strawson raises a famous charge of incoherence against such a position, (...) I begin by showing that this charge is misplaced. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper relates Kant’s account of pure apperception to the agential approach to self-knowledge. It argues that his famous claim ‘The I think must be able to accompany all of my represent...

An extended analysis and account of the psychological/social/cognitive dynamics of intellectual controversy. The immediate focus is the recurrent failure of intellectual engagement, in encounters having to do with with truth, knowledge, language, science, and/or objectivity, between, on the one hand, rationalist-realist-objectivist philosophers and/or those they have instructed and, on the other hand, constructivist-pragmatist ("postmodern") theorists and/or those persuaded by their critiques and/or alternative views. Individual chapters examine critiques and defenses of objectivist-rationalist views in law, politics, literary studies, ethics, communication theory, (...) and philosophy of science. Theorists whose views are discussed critically at some length include legal scholar Robin West and philosophers Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, and Philip Kitcher. (shrink)

Rodolfo Sacco has devoted much of his research to the relations between law and language. His analysis were focused on the problem of legal translation for comparative law research, on mute law, and on the importance of understanding the dynamics of the different languages in Europe today.

In the history of formal semantics, the successful joining of linguistic and philosophical work brought with it some difficult foundational questions concerning the nature of meaning and the nature of knowledge of language in the domain of semantics: questions in part about “what’s in the head” of a competent language-user. This paper, part of a project on the history of formal semantics, revisits the central issues of (Partee, 1979) in a historical context, as a clash between two traditions, Fregean and (...) Chomskyan, a clash that accompanied early work combining Montague’s semantics with Chomskyan syntax. Recent advances in philosophy of mind (from, e.g., Stalnaker and Burge) go a long way towards changing the framework of arguments about “psychological reality” and “competence”, challenging the suppositions on which the original dichotomy rested, thus largely defusing the tension. (shrink)

Contemporary issues involving knowledge and science examined from a constructivist-pragmatist perspective often labeled "relativism." Individual chapters include a review of the difference between constructivist-pragmatist epistemology and "social constructivism;" an examination of recent writings by Bruno Latour; a critique of computational methods in literary studies; a skeptical look at current efforts to "integrate" the humanities and the natural sciences; and reflections on the social dynamics of belief in relation to denials of climate change and to hopes expressed by environmentalists.