In this wide-ranging study, Levine explores both sides of the mind-body dilemma, presenting the first book-length treatment of his highly influential ideas on the How does one explain the physical nature of an experience? This puzzle, the "explanatory gap" between mind and body, is the focus of this work by an influential scholar in the field.

In this book Steven Levine explores the relation between objectivity and experience from a pragmatic point of view. Like many new pragmatists he aims to rehabilitate objectivity in the wake of Richard Rorty's rejection of the concept. But he challenges the idea, put forward by pragmatists like Robert Brandom, that objectivity is best rehabilitated in communicative-theoretic terms - namely, in terms that can be cashed out by capacities that agents gain through linguistic communication. Levine proposes instead that objectivity (...) is best understood in experiential-theoretic terms. He explains how, in order to meet the aims of the new pragmatists, we need to do more than see objectivity as a norm of rationality embedded in our social-linguistic practices; we also need to see it as emergent from our experiential interaction with the world. Innovative and carefully argued, this book redeems and re-actualizes for contemporary philosophy a key insight developed by the classical pragmatists. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. By Oliver Sacks.

It is widely agreed upon that morality guides people with conflicting interests towards agreements of mutual benefit. We therefore might expect numerous proposals for organizing human moral cognition around the logic of bargaining, negotiation, and agreement. Yet, while “contractualist” ideas play an important role in moral philosophy, they are starkly underrepresented in the field of moral psychology. From a contractualist perspective, ideal moral judgments are those that would be agreed to by rational bargaining agents—an idea with wide-spread support in philosophy, (...) psychology, economics, biology, and cultural evolution. As a practical matter, however, investing time and effort in negotiating every interpersonal interaction is unfeasible. Instead, we propose, people use abstractions and heuristics to efficiently identify mutually beneficial arrangements. We argue that many well-studied elements of our moral minds, such as reasoning about others’ utilities (“consequentialist” reasoning) or evaluating intrinsic ethical properties of certain actions (“deontological” reasoning), can be naturally understood as resource-rational approximations of a contractualist ideal. Moreover, this view explains the flexibility of our moral minds—how our moral rules and standards get created, updated and overridden and how we deal with novel cases we have never seen before. Thus, the apparently fragmentary nature of our moral psychology—commonly described in terms of systems in conflict—can be largely unified around the principle of finding mutually beneficial agreements under resource constraint. Our resulting “triple theory” of moral cognition naturally integrates contractualist, consequentialist and deontological concerns. (shrink)

In his 1903 Principles of Mathematics, Russell holds that “it is a characteristic of the terms of a proposition”—that is, its “logical subjects”—“that any one of them may be replaced by any other entity without our ceasing to have a proposition”. Hence, in PoM, Russell holds that from the proposition ‘Socrates is human’, we can obtain the propositions ‘Humanity is human’ and ‘The class of humans is human’, replacing Socrates by the property of humanity and the class of humans, respectively. (...) Hence also, in PoM, Russell accepts the doctrine of the unrestricted variable: if we replace a logical subject of a proposition by a variable to yield a propositional function, the range of that variable includes absolutely every entity. For absolutely any entity can be taken as a value of that variable to yield a proposition, true or false. The doctrine of the unrestricted variable is thus incompatible with any type-theoretic metaphysics, according to which only entities of a certain restricted type can replace a logical subject of a given proposition so as to yield another proposition. (shrink)

This bold and unabashedly utopian book advances the thesis that Marx's notion of communism is a defensible, normative ideal. However, unlike many others who have written in this area, Levine applies the tools and techniques of analytic philosophy to formulate and defend his radical, political programme. The argument proceeds by filtering the ideals and institutions of Marxism through Rousseau's notion of the 'general will'. Once Rousseau's ideas are properly understood it is possible to construct a community of equals who (...) share some vision of a common good that can be achieved and maintained through cooperation or coordination that is at once both voluntary and authoritative. The book engages with liberal theory in order to establish its differences from Rousseauean-Marxian political theory. This provocative book will be of particular interest to political philosophers and political scientists concerned with Marxism, socialist theory and democratic theory. (shrink)

Contemporary process metaphysics has achieved a number of important results, most significantly in accounting for emergence, a problem on which substance metaphysics has foundered since Plato. It also faces trenchant problems of its own, among them the related problems of boundaries and individuation. Historically, the quest for ontology may thus have been largely responsible for the persistence of substance metaphysics. But as Plato was well aware, an ontology of substantial things raises serious, perhaps insurmountable problems for any account of our (...) epistemic access to such things. Physical things are subject to change, and as such, they are poor objects of knowledge—if knowledge is to be more reliable than mere opinion. There is a reading of Plato’s Theaetetus on which knowledge may be understood as a relation between an epistemic subject and a logos, where logoi are intrinsically dialectical, and where dialectic is a kind of intersubjective activity. Insofar as this epistemology may be attributed to Plato, the project of this paper is Platonic in spirit. It is also, in a sense, Kantian, in that it divorces ontology from the search for things-in-themselves, redirecting our attention from things to objects: epistemic objects. Such objects can be understood, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed, as shared by multiple subjects by virtue of their participation in an intersubjective world, constituted by what Shaun Gallagher calls participatory sense-making. On an epistemology constructed in this way, the fact that both epistemic objects and their subject are mutable is no obstacle to knowledge. Far-from-equilibrium systems are forever mutable; at thermodynamic equilibrium, there would be neither subject, nor object. Epistemic objects, on this picture, are metastable loci of interactive potential. (shrink)

I offer a new interpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety in Being and Time as an account of the relationship between individual agents and the public normative practices of their communities. According to a prominent recent interpretation, Heidegger’s discussions of anxiety, death and the “call of conscience” together explain how we can respond to the norms of our practices as reasons and subject them to critical reflection. I argue that this is only part of the story. Anxiety is an occasion (...) for Dasein to take responsibility for its ongoing activity of interpreting the possibilities for living and acting made available by the normative practices of its community, which is presupposed and overlooked from the perspective of everyday Dasein. Public normativity underdetermines Dasein’s conception of what it would mean to take up any of the possibilities available in its world as a way of living its own life. (shrink)

This book seeks to show how Karl Marx’s vision of communism was a continuation of Aristotle’s classical humanist philosophy. Challenging the Engelsian distortion of Marx, it presents a negation of previous interpretations of Marx which present him in materialist terms. Engels proposed a picture of the highest stage of communist society as an economic egalitarianism, a vision which became an axiom of Leninist-Stalinist-Soviet Communism. By contrast, here it is shown that Marx embraced the Aristotelian concept of “distributive justice”, of proportionate (...) equality. Spanning the works of Marx, from his university education and doctoral dissertation on the differences between the Democritean and Epicurean philosophy of the atom, to the study of his Rheinische Zeitung period and the persistence of classical humanism in Marx’s defense of the freedom of the press, Levine skillfully reveals the gravitational pull between Marx and Aristotle. Showing how classical humanism is the dominant ethos in the communism of Marx, the book includes chapters on: Hegel as a transition point between Aristotle and Marx The links between Marx’s theory of labor and Aristotle’s idea of the constitutive subject located in The Politics How the local methodologies of Aristotle and Hegel provided Marx with the social methodologies by which to interpret the functioning of capitalism Marx's Resurrection of Aristotle is the culmination of Norman Levine's life-long work to establish the correct placement of Marx and Marx’s communism within the classical humanist tradition. (shrink)

Over the last couple of decades, oocyte donation has become common, important, and sometimes lucrative. Women who donate eggs are often offered fees, though ostensibly only to offset their expenses and limited to no more than $10,000, following recommendations adopted by the fertility industry. Is the industry adhering to its recommendations? A study of advertisements published in college newspapers raises questions.

I examine Robert Brandom's reading of the classical pragmatists, as given in his new book Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary. I argue that his reading is deficient in certain fundamental respects, and that this deficiency illuminates important blind spots in Brandom's overall theoretical project. Specifically, I focus on Brandom's rationalist pragmatism and its rejection of the classical pragmatic conception of experience. I argue that this rejection is based on an overly instrumental reading of the classical figures, as well (...) as on an incorrect interpretation of them as succumbing to the Myth of the Given. My overall goal is to demonstrate that Brandom is lead astray in his encounter with the classical pragmatists because of his unwillingness to integrate into his theoretical picture the essentially embodied nature of human cognitive and practical activity. (shrink)

Metaphors of positions, spectrums, perspectives, viewpoints, and polarization reflect the same model, which treats beliefs—and the people who hold them—as points in space. This model is deeply rooted in quantitative research methods and influential traditions of Continental philosophy, and it is evident in some qualitative research. It can suggest that deliberation is difficult and rare because many people are located far apart ideologically, and their respective positions can be explained as dependent variables of factors like personality, partisanship, and demographics. An (...) alternative model treats a given person’s beliefs as connected by reasons to form networks. People disclose the connections among their respective beliefs when they discuss issues. This model offers insights about specific cases, such as discussions conducted on two US college campuses, which are represented here as belief-networks. The model also supports a more optimistic view of the public’s capacity to deliberate. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that color is a relational feature of the distal objects of perception, a way of appearing. I begin by outlining three constraints any theory of color should satisfy: (i) physicalism about the non-mental world, (ii) consistency with what is known from color science, and (iii) transparency about color experience. Traditional positions on the ontological status of color, such as physicalist reduction of color to spectral reflectance, subjectivism, dispositionalism, and primitivism, fail, I claim, to meet all (...) three constraints. By treating color as a relational property, a way of appearing, the three constraints can be met. However, serious problems for this view emerge when considering the relation between illusory color experiences (particularly hallucinations) and veridical color experiences. I do not propose a solution to these problems. (shrink)

Philosophical writing on the welfare state has taken a defensive turn in recent years, largely in response to two related phenomena: the re-emergence of pro-market ideologies in the larger political culture and the imperiled condition of real world welfare states in a global economy in which national governments have diminishing capacities for shaping the social and economic lives of their citizens. But thanks in part to the tireless advocacy of Philippe Van Parijs, an even more radically redistributive form of public (...) provision than the welfare state has come onto the intellectual agenda—and the political agenda too, at least in Belgium and the Netherlands. Van Parijs proposes that all citizens be accorded an unconditional “basic income grant” as large as is compatible with the need to generate as much wealth as possible for redistribution. By now, this idea has many defenders. It also boasts a genealogy extending back to such writers as Tom Paine, François Huet, Edward Bellamy and G. D. H. Cole. But Van Parijs has become its best-known and most adept philosophical proponent, and this book represents his most sustained effort to date to investigate its normative foundations. (shrink)

According to Chalmers (2018), the meta-problem of consciousness is 'the problem of explaining why we think that there is a problem of consciousness'. In this paper I argue that the key to understanding both consciousness itself and addressing the meta-problem is to understand what acquaintance is and what its objects are. Unfortunately, I think there are still some serious mysteries lurking here, which I present briefly in this commentary. In particular, on the view of acquaintance I favour, it is unclear (...) how our acquaintance with the contents of experience can serve as data for our theory of conscious experience. I end with some speculations concerning how to address this mystery. (shrink)

We examined the effects of three different training conditions, all of which involve the motor system, on kindergarteners’ mental transformation skill. We focused on three main questions. First, we asked whether training that involves making a motor movement that is relevant to the mental transformation—either concretely through action or more abstractly through gestural movements that represent the action —resulted in greater gains than training using motor movements irrelevant to the mental transformation. We tested children prior to training, immediately after training, (...) and 1 week after training, and we found greater improvement in mental transformation skill in both the action and move-gesture training conditions than in the point-gesture condition, at both posttest and retest. Second, we asked whether the total gain made by retest differed depending on the abstractness of the movement-relevant training, and we found that it did not. Finally, we asked whether the time course of improvement differed for the two movement-relevant conditions, and we found that it did—gains in the action condition were realized immediately at posttest, with no further gains at retest; gains in the move-gesture condition were realized throughout, with comparable gains from pretest-to-posttest and from posttest-to-retest. Training that involves movement, whether concrete or abstract, can thus benefit children's mental transformation skill. However, the benefits unfold differently over time—the benefits of concrete training unfold immediately after training ; the benefits of more abstract training unfold in equal steps immediately after training and during the intervening week with no additional training. These findings have implications for the kinds of instruction that can best support spatial learning. (shrink)

Almost since their publication, the writings of Michel de Montaigne have provided rich fodder for the work of scholars in myriad disciplines. Philosophers have considered Montaigne's views on skepticism; historians have examined his views on the Indians; deconstructionists and literary scholars have examined Montaigne's view of the self; and, political scientists have touched on his arguments for toleration. However, because each of these projects has been done largely in isolation, most scholars have failed to see the relationships between the various (...) aspects of Montaigne's thought. Alan Levine, in Sensual Philosophy, unites Montaigne's thought for the first time, ably and convincingly demonstrating the significant role Montaigne played in establishing the liberal ethos in the West. In exploring Montaigne's grounding for liberalism, Levine considers Montaigne's conceptualization of skepticism and its relationship to toleration. He argues that Montaigne's theories of self ground his idea of toleration without leaving it open to the corrosive charges of relativism and nihilism. Levine also articulates the importance of Montaigne's thought for contemporary conceptions of personal freedom, individuality, subjectivity, and self-creation by bringing him into dialogue with modern and postmodern political theorists such as Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Richard Rorty. This lively book persuades those who might be tempted by postmodernism that they should turn to Montaigne instead. (shrink)

In this chapter, I examine the debate between Rorty and two neopragmatists, Hilary Putnam and Jürgen Habermas. Though Putnam and Habermas have quite different philosophical backgrounds, their critiques of Rorty converge. Both argue that pragmatic radicalization of the linguistic turn requires seeing that our practices are guided from within by unconditional claims, and both argue that this conclusion follows from taking seriously the agent’s point of view. Rorty argues, in contrast, that the pragmatic radicalization of the linguistic turn requires naturalizing (...) human reason and rejecting all claims to unconditionality. I analyze the dialectic at the heart of this debate and suggest that it may not get at what is deepest in the pragmatic tradition. (shrink)

People typically show excellent memory for information that is central to an emotional event but poorer memory for peripheral details. Not all studies demonstrate memory narrowing as a result of emotion, however. Critically important emotional information is sometimes forgotten; seemingly peripheral details are sometimes preserved. To make sense of both the general pattern of findings that emotion leads to memory narrowing, and findings that violate this pattern, this review addresses mechanisms through which emotion enhances and impairs memory. Divergent approaches to (...) characterising information as central versus peripheral are also addressed. By directly contrasting these approaches, and the evidence supporting them, this review helps to clarify when and how emotion enhances memory and provides directions for future research. Evidence shows that memory narrowing as a result of emotion, and a number of violations of the memory narrowing pattern, can be explained by the view that emotion enhances memory for information relevant to currently active goals. (shrink)

While some may argue that universities are in a state of crisis, others claim that we are living in a post-university era; a time after universities. If there was a battle for the survival of the institution, it is over and done with. The buildings still stand. Students enrol and may attend lectures, though let’s be clear—most do not. But virtually nothing real remains. What some mistakenly take to be a university is, in actuality, an ‘uncanny’ spectral presence; ‘the nagging (...) presence of an absence … a “spectralized amnesiac modernity with its delusional totalizing systems”’. It is the remains and remnants of the university.[1]Overstatement? Perhaps. We think many if not most administrators, at all levels, will likely dissent. So too will many if not most teachers and students. Trying to determine whether this is correct, or to what extent, by consulting polls and reading opinion pieces in various education journals and professional papers is likely to be of little help. In any case, it is the hypothesis, along with closely related ones, and concerns about what can be done in the circumstances, that have generated this special issue.This special issue highlights and illustrates that most of the contested issues regarding educational theory and practice central to how universities and schools should be, and how they should be run, are first and foremost questions of value rather than fact. They are questions regarding what we want, but more importantly what we should want, from our universities and schools; about what they should be and what students, teachers and administrators should be doing to facilitate this.[1] See Cox and Levine and Boaks, Cox and Levine. (shrink)

Kirk’s aim in this book is to bridge what he calls “the intelligibility gap,” expressed in the question, “How could complex patterns of neural firing amount to this?”. He defends a position that he describes as “broadly functionalist,” which consists of several theses. I will briefly review them.

It is one thing to lament the financial pressures put on universities, quite another to face up to the poverty of resources for thinking about what universities should do when they purport to offer a liberal education. In Powers of the Mind, former University of Chicago dean Donald N. Levine enriches those resources by proposing fresh ways to think about liberal learning with ideas more suited to our times. He does so by defining basic values of modernity and then (...) considering curricular principles pertinent to them. The principles he favors are powers of the mind—disciplines understood as fields of study defined not by subject matter but by their embodiment of distinct intellectual capacities. To illustrate, Levine draws on his own lifetime of teaching and educational leadership, while providing a marvelous summary of exemplary educational thinkers at the University of Chicago who continue to inspire. Out of this vital tradition, Powers of the Mind constructs a paradigm for liberal arts today, inclusive of all perspectives and applicable to all settings in the modern world. (shrink)

Extract: Clearly, academic life takes place at the intersection of many social practices. If MacIntyre is right, the role-specific virtues of academic life should be understood in terms of these practices.2 Academic virtues are those excellences required to obtain the internal goods of the social practices constituting academic life. And the social practices of academic life are sustained, competitive and cooperative attempts to achieve a set of academic goals and realize academic forms of excellence. They are also sustained attempts to (...) expand and improve conceptions of these goals and forms of excellence. They emerge out of traditions—for instance the tradition of scientific argument— and must be understood in terms of these traditions. MacIntyre argues that this preliminary account of virtues in relation to social practices needs to be deepened in two ways: connecting it to the unity of an individual’s life on the one hand and to a coherent historical tradition on the other. Virtues are not just any set of traits delivering the internal goods of social practices, but those that serve to make coherent a person’s life and her place in an on-going tradition. They are crucial to lending meaning to one’s life and its struggles. (shrink)

Phenomenal consciousness comprises both qualitative character and subjectivity. The former provides the proprietary contents of conscious experiences – determining what they are like – and the latter is that feature that renders those contents “for the subject”, so there is something it is like at all. I have developed a theory of consciousness as “acquaintance” which I dub the “Cartesian Theater” model, on which there is a fundamental psycho-physical law that takes the output of cognitive and perceptual systems as input (...) and yields overall conscious experience as output. This model entails epiphenomenalism regarding phenomenal properties, which, I argue, presents a specific problem regarding our epistemic position with respect to this very theory. I develop a line of thought that seeks to disarm this challenge, relying to a large extent on a certain way of understanding both subjectivity itself and also cognitive phenomenology. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Context: Irrelevant and Relevant Hume's Argument against Justified Belief in Miracles Explained Immortality References Further Reading.

What is the root cause of ethical failure? Why is preoccupation with ethics more a part of the problem than a part of the solution? What makes ethical conduct a natural expression of who we are? What enables us to be ourselves in our relations with others? Ethical failure has become a significant concern in public life, in organizations and in educational institutions. The Capacity for Ethical Conduct explores how qualities of character and personality either make ethical conduct possible for (...) the individual or foster ethical failure. David Levine discusses how ethical conduct is a special way of relating to others, one that secures respect for their integrity by assuring that what they do can express who they are. He argues that this special way of relating to others results not from knowledge of, or a stated commitment to, rules, norms and values, but from the way we experience ourselves, especially from our ability to make a positive emotional investment in being and having a self. Traditionally, emphasis on the importance of values and ethics in shaping conduct tends to be connected to the need to find fault in self and others, fostering an atmosphere where the self is put at risk in its relations to others. This means that an excessive emphasis on ethics, rather than assuring ethical conduct, tends instead to create interpersonal settings marked by emotional assault. Because of this, talk about ethics often expresses ambivalence about ethical conduct, which makes the familiar combination of preoccupation with ethics and ethical failure unsurprising. The Capacity for Ethical Conduct explores the ways in which the interpersonal world of work either fosters a feeling of safety or encourages various forms of emotional assault. Presenting case studes and applying psychoanalytic object relation theory and self psychology, this book explores the factors underlying ethical failure and the capacity for ethical conduct. It will be of interest to scholars and practioners in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, sociology, organizational dynamics, management and public administration. (shrink)

Nineteenth and twentieth century philosophies of science have consistently failed to identify any rational basis for the compelling character of scientific analogies. This failure is particularly worrisome in light of the fact that the development and diffusion of certain scientific analogies, e.g. Darwin’s analogy between domestic breeds and naturally occurring species, constitute paradigm cases of good science. It is argued that the interactivist model, through the notion of a partition epistemology, provides a way to understand the persuasive character of compelling (...) scientific analogies without consigning them to an irrational or arational context of discovery. (shrink)

Contrary to common perceptions of Simmel’s work as dividing into three stages of Darwinism, Kantianism, and Goethean/Bergsonian Life-Philosophy, consideration of the full scope of the Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe demonstrates Simmel’s concern with both Kant and Goethe as life-long, just as was his engagement with core principles respectively associated with them: Form and Life. What changed in his mind over time was how those two principles were construed and related. In this view, Simmel’s Soziologie can be read as a treatise on (...) the properties of social forms that emerge out of vital processes – following a dynamic akin to Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb, whereas the Lebensanschauung puts more emphasis on the ways in which forms channel, constrain, and inspire the streams of life. This opens the door for creative work pursuing lines of connection between the two disciplines – a sociology of authentic individuality and a kind of existentialized sociology – and, beyond that, to a unified theory of action and evolution. (shrink)