Riassunto: Tra i disturbi del linguaggio, il deficit di tipo pragmatico viene spesso osservato nelle persone a seguito di trauma cranio-encefalico. Nonostante sia negletta nella pratica clinica, questa componente gioca un ruolo centrale nella qualità di vita di persone con TCE. L’aspetto peculiare del deficit di tipo pragmatico è la sua natura intrinsecamente connessa sia ad altre capacità di tipo cognitivo che relazionali delle persone fin nella storia pre-morbosa. L’obiettivo di questo lavoro è proporre un punto di vista teorico che, (...) beneficiando del dialogo tra neuropsicologia e fenomenologia, possa costituire un paradigma utile per considerare in modo più sistematico il deficit di tipo pragmatico. Piuttosto che frammentarlo e ridurlo solo a una lista di singoli sintomi, esso viene analizzato come conseguenza di un’alterazione non storica dell’ ipseità, mettendolo in relazione con il concetto di “ embodiment ”. Si avanza, in conclusione, una possibile proposta di presa in carico di tale neuropsicopatologia. Parole chiave: Trauma cranio-encefalico; Pragmatica; Comunicazione; Embodiment; Fenomenologia Pragmatic disorder due to TBI: A phenomenological approach to rehabilitation –: People who suffer from traumatic brain injury are frequently affected by pragmatic disorder, among other communicative impairments. While largely neglected in terms of rehabilitation strategies, the skills impaired by PD play a fundamental role in the quality of life of people who suffer from TBI. PD uniquely impacts a person’s cognitive and interpersonal abilities, including those from their pre-morbid history. The aim of this work is to propose a theoretical framework, based on a dialogue between neuropsychology and phenomenology, that may provide a useful paradigm in approaches to rehabilitation in PD. Instead of fragmenting this disorder into a list of symptoms, we address it as a consequence of a non-historical alteration of “ ipseity” in connection with the concept of “ embodiment”. In conclusion, we suggest an intervention for this neuropsychopathology. Keywords: Traumatic Brain Injury; Pragmatics; Communication; Embodiment; Phenomenology. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 245-258, March 2022.

Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, Unbelievers shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. These tugged in different ways not only on celebrated thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, and Pascal, but on men and women at every level of society whose voices we hear through their diaries, letters, and court records. Ryrie traces the roots of atheism born of anger, a sentiment familiar to (...) anyone who has ever cursed a corrupt priest, and of doubt born of anxiety, as Christians discovered their faith was flimsier than they had believed. As the Reformation eroded time-honored certainties, Protestant radicals defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics. In the process they set in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious age. (shrink)

This book develops an alternative account of rights according to which rights forfeiture has a much smaller role to play because rights themselves are more contextually contingent. For example, those who threaten to cause harm without a right to do so have weaker claims not to be killed than innocent bystanders or those who have a right to threaten to cause harm. By framing rights as the output of a balance of competing claims, and by laying out a detailed account (...) of how to balance competing claims, Walen provides a more coherent account of when killing in war is permissible. (shrink)

This paper examines the relations between, on the one hand, accounts of the distinction between an agent's identifying with, as opposed to feeling alienated from, their attitudes; and on the other, metaphysical accounts of action. It claims that a commitment to an event-causal conception of agency, which would analyse agency in terms of the causal potency of psychological states and events, appears to render mandatory a particular style of account of identification and alienation – namely, the hierarchical model offered by (...) Harry Frankfurt and Michael Bratman. It is argued that such accounts fall foul of a dilemma: the Authority Problem. The failure of attempts to avoid the Authority Problem is then used to motivate an attractive alternative style of account of the distinction, offered by Richard Moran. However, it is pressed that Moran's account rests on claims about agency which seem incompatible with the event-causal conception of agency. By making the links between the metaphysics of agency and accounts of identification and alienation more explicit, the paper allows us to better comprehend both the apparent need for and characteristic failures of some traditional accounts of identification and alienation, as well as make clear the action-theoretical debt incurred by those who would offer an alternative. (shrink)

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

When one is intentionally doing something, one represents that thing as a goal to be accomplished. One represents it practically. How should we characterize this practical representation further? In this paper, I argue that when one is intentionally doing something, one's representation of it as a goal to be accomplished must also be knowledge that one is intentionally doing that thing. And I argue that this knowledge must itself be one's intentionally doing that thing. I aim to show, then, that (...) insofar as representing practically just is knowing practically, it is equally acting intentionally. (shrink)

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

The standard of proof in criminal trials in many liberal democracies is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the BARD standard. It is customary to describe it, when putting a number on it, as requiring that the fact finder be at least 90% certain, after considering the evidence, that the defendant is guilty. Strikingly, no good reason has yet been offered in defense of using that standard. A number of non-consequentialist justifications that aim to support an even higher standard have been (...) offered; all are morally unsound. Meanwhile, consequentialist arguments plausibly support a substantially lower standard — in some cases so low as to undermine the idea that punishment is what is at stake. In this paper, I offer a new retributive justification that supports excluding the instrumental benefits of punishment from the balance that sets the standard. The resulting balance supports a standard arguably in the ballpark of the customary understanding of BARD: a standard requiring that the fact finder have a high, though not maximally high, degree of confidence that the defendant is guilty. (shrink)

In an earlier article, I introduced the “restricting claims principle” to explain what is right about the means principle: the idea that it is harder to justify causing or allowing someone to suffer harm if using him as a means than if causing or allowing harm as a side effect. The RCP appeals to the idea that claims not to be harmed as a side effect push to restrict an agent from doing what she would otherwise be free to do (...) for herself or others, given an appropriate account of her baseline freedom. Claims not to be harmed as a means are not in that way ‘‘restricting.’’ The original RCP relied on a counterfactual account of the agent’s baseline freedom: What could the agent permissibly do if the patient were not present? I argue here that that counterfactual baseline fails. The revised RCP relies instead on a ‘‘toolkit baseline’’: Do the patient claims concern the property the agent needs to use? This toolkit baseline reflects the different ways that agents relate to others: as fellow agents with whom they divide up the resources of the world, and as patients who might be affected by their actions. The toolkit baseline, resting on this agent-patient divide, provides a superior account of an agent’s baseline freedom, and a better account of the moral ground for the means principle. (shrink)

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

According to the Doctrine of Illicit Intentions, it is impermissible both to form and then to act on an illicit intention. An intention is illicit, roughly, if it causes the agent who has it to be, in a certain way, disposed to perform actions that are impermissible. If the range of actions an agent might be directed to perform by an intention includes impermissible actions, then it may be impermissible to form or act on that intention even if, in the (...) end, the agent performs no action that is impermissible (other than forming and acting on an illicit intention itself). (shrink)

Alec Hyslop defends a (modified) version of the traditional analogical inference to other minds and rejects alternatives, but only after subjecting each of...

The late Alec Nove explores the relationship between Marxist ideas and the Soviet reality and presents a methodology for understanding Soviet type societies.

Who are we today? That deceptively simple question continued to be asked by the French historian and philosopher, Michel Foucault, who for the last three decades has had a profound influence on English-speaking scholars in the humanities and social sciences.; This text is designed for undergraduates and others who feel in need of some assistance when coming to grips with Foucault's voluminous and complex writings. Instead of dealing with them chronologically, however, this book concentrates on some of their central concepts, (...) primarily Foucault's rethinking of the categories of "discourse", "power", and " the subject".; Foucault's writings contribute collectively to what he himself calls "an ontology of the present". His historical research was always geared towards showing how things could have been and still could be otherwise. This is especially the case with respect to the production of human subjects. (shrink)

Discussions of risk have assumed that risk must be modeled the same in all cases. This is a mistake. Normally, if people know that those affected by an agent’s choice have conflicting interests, th...

We are likely to have immersive virtual reality and ubiquitous augmented reality in the coming decades. At least some people will use extended reality or “the metaverse” to work, play and shop. In order to achieve the best possible versions of this virtual future, however, we will need to learn from three decades of regulating the Internet. The new virtual world cannot consist of walled corporate fiefdoms ruled only by profitmaximization. The interests of workers, consumers and citizens in virtuality require (...) proactive legislation and oversight. -/- This white paper first addresses the central question the metaverse poses, whether virtual life is inherently more alienating and less authentic than face-to-face life experiences. This question is both a philosophical question about the nature of the good life and an empirical question about the accumulating evidence about the impacts of the digital on subjective well-being. -/- . (shrink)

This article offers an exposition of the J. Peterman Company's Owner's Manual, a mock-vintage clothing catalogue that promises customers ‘things that make their lives the way they wish they were’. Written in dramatic, long-form prose and illustrated in watercolour – both uncommon in today's mail-order fashion industry – the Owner's Manual is at once appalling for its misogyny and enticing for its nostalgia. This article argues that the Owner's Manual and its enduring success confound existing paradigms for interpreting both fashion (...) media and the body's gendered relationship to attire. Are the Manual's millions of subscribers beset by false consciousness, imagining themselves into an oppressive sex/gender field and endorsing the catalogue's misogyny with their desire? The Manual is not fully intelligible within either structuralist or phenomenological interpretive modes – fashion theory's two most prevalent schools of thought – but, rather, begets an interpretive paradigm that forces us to reconcile individuals’ desires for, and identification into, historically mediated gender performance with the fact of individuals’ dignity, agency and autonomy. I argue that the Owner's Manual achieves this reconciliation by foregrounding sartorial objects, rather than individuals, as the bearers of gender fantasy and by demonstrating how these objects, laden with historical associations, have detached from the highly gendered contexts of their origins while nevertheless retaining aspects of their original semiotic potencies. (shrink)

This text meets the requirements of the OCR AS specification for critical thinking. Alec Fisher shows students how they can develop a range of creative and critical thinking skills that are transferable to other subjects and contexts.

Alec Kassman; XIV*—On Punishing, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 221–246, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/7.

Antony Duff’s The Realm of Criminal Law offers an appealing moral reconstruction of the criminal law. I agree that the criminal law should be understood to predicate punishment upon sufficient proof that the defendant has committed a public wrong for which she is being held to account and censured. But the criminal law is not only about censoring people for public wrongs; it must serve other purposes as well, such as preventing people from committing serious crimes and more generally from (...) violating reasonable regulations. These purposes, and perhaps retributive justice, require the criminal law also to mete out harsh treatment, but only insofar as such treatments are proportional to the culpable wrong committed. The problem for the criminal law is that many mala prohibita crimes consist of a minor wrong but also call for a relatively severe punishment. To accommodate that mismatch, it is necessary to complement the criminal law, as Duff and I conceive of it, with what I call “penal law.” Penal law relies on forfeiture to explain why hard treatment is permissible. The forfeiture must be fair, and it comes with its own proportionality limits. But those limits are not as strict as the limits implicit in the criminal law. It allows for penalties that are harsher than the punishments that could justifiably be meted out for many mala prohibita offenses. One and the same act can count as a crime and a penal infraction, and one and the same criminal justice system can and should handle both crimes and the penal infractions. It is, I think, only in that way that we can accommodate both the need to prevent public wrongdoing and the distinct importance of holding people accountable for the commission of public wrongs. (shrink)

In his analysis of the concept of causality, Hume finds that all events accounted causes and effects are contiguous and successive. No object can act efficaciously upon another so long as the objects are at a distance from each other. It may sometimes appear that “distant objects are productive of one another,” but on examination it is discovered that they are linked together by a series of intermediate causes which are contiguous among themselves; and even where examination does not directly (...) disclose the intermediate causal chain, it is still presumed that it exists. Also the cause is temporally prior to the effect. If I throw a stone through a window, the smashing of the glass follows the act of throwing the stone. It is only after the realization of the cause that the effect appears. Thus a cause is an object that is precedent to and contiguous with another object that is called the effect. (shrink)

Isabel Paterson is the founding godmother of the libertarian movement, known best for her book The God of the Machine, which Ayn Rand credited for having done “for capitalism what the Bible did for Christianity.” Often overlooked is her twenty-five-year career as a literary columnist for the New York Herald Tribune. Culture and Liberty: Writings of Isabel Paterson, edited by Stephen Cox, presents a selection of those columns along with private letters and other essays. They are a treasure. Paterson’s critical (...) performances show us a systematic yet unpredictable mind at work—a model not only of the first but also of any future libertarian worthy of the name. (shrink)

The arbitral world is at a crucial point in its historical development, poised between two conflicting conceptions of its nature, purpose, and political legitimacy. Formally, the arbitrator is an agent of the contracting parties in dispute, a creature of a discrete contract gone wrong. Yet, increasingly, arbitrators are treated as agents of a larger global community, and arbitration houses concern themselves with the general and prospective impact of important awards. In this paper, I address these questions, first, from the standpoint (...) of delegation theory. In Part I, I introduce the basic “Principal-Agent" framework [P-A] used by social scientists to explain why actors create new institutions, and then briefly discuss how P-A has been applied to the study of courts. Part II uses delegation theory to frame discussion of arbitration as a mode of governance for transnational business and investment. In Part III, I argue that the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes is presently in the throes of judicialization, indicators of which include the enhanced use of precedent-based argumentation and justification, the acceptance of third-party briefs, and a flirtation with proportionality balancing. Part IV focuses on the first wave of awards rendered by ICSID tribunals pursuant to Argentina's response to the crushing economic crisis of 2000-02, wherein proportionality emerged, adapted from the jurisprudence of the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization. (shrink)

The fraught ideological relationship between liberalism and imperialism has been theorized primarily through the British, French, and American empires. This article moves beyond the experiences of these “great powers” by turning to Spain and its preeminent twentieth-century liberal thinker, José Ortega y Gasset. Unlike his British, French, and American counterparts, Ortega articulated liberalism not to promote or defend the forging of empire but rather to cope with the disorienting effects of its unequivocal loss in the wake of the Spanish–American War. (...) The experience of imperial loss, I argue, informed Ortega’s call for a “new liberalism” that could enable Spain’s national and cultural renewal. Reading Ortega’s thought in this context thus reveals the lasting impact that imperial dispossession can have upon certain strands of liberalism. It also suggests that, in order to fully capture the relationship between liberalism and empire, it is necessary to incorporate a wider range of historical sources and imperial trajectories. (shrink)

Conversation analysis is now what Kuhn once called a normal science. It has a discernible body of concepts, methods, and recognizable objects of analysis. More importantly, its considerable archive of accumulated findings has a very high degree of redundancy-in the positive sense that researchers have continually replicated the findings of their colleagues. It ought, then, in every respect, to be the envy of the social sciences generally and not easily dismissed as an abstruse and recondite branch of language studies or (...) "discourse analysis" concerned with merely trivial fragments of recorded talk as such. To help CA be respecified in this way, the present paper unearths a relatively unknown part of its history in the partial book manuscript of Harvey Sacks's "Aspects of the Sequential Organization of Conversation," circulated in mimeo to colleagues in 1970. There we find innumerable appeals to the now well-recognized fact that the practical actions of everyday talk have significant, culturewide, formal structures that are the proper objects of the discipline. Or, in Sacks's own terms, seemingly insignificant mundane events are generated by a powerful social "machinery." The purpose of this paper is, then, to extract a sample of these aspects of Sacks's "Aspects" in order to illustrate, sketch, or give a preliminary sense of just that point. (shrink)

What economic conditions are necessary for us to arrive at a post-work future, and what should a post-work future look like? This chapter argues that only through the democratization of core economic institutions can we properly experiment with post-work imaginaries. I argue, based on principles of participatory autonomy and relational equality, for the democratization of workplaces, finance and investment, and the knowledge commons. Given these necessary structural changes, the possibility of a post-work future becomes a democratic choice by placing democratic (...) decision-making power in the hands of those who are directly affected by workplace decisions, investment decisions, and the collective production of knowledge. Through this democratization process, the potential to reduce working hours, the possibility of building meaningful work, and the chance to decenter work as the mechanism for economic security and meaning-making, all become subject to democratic deliberation and decision-making. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that free will beliefs and moral responsibility beliefs are strongly linked, yet ultimately distinct. Unfortunately, the most common measure of free will beliefs, the free will subscale (FWS) of the Free Will and Determinism Plus, seems to confound free will beliefs and moral responsibility beliefs. Thus, the present research (1,700 participants across two studies) details the development of a 2-factor FWS – the FWS-II – that divides the FWS into a free will subscale and a moral responsibility (...) subscale. The FWS-II showed good fit compared to standard fit thresholds and superior fit compared to the original FWS. The moral responsibility subscale was moderately correlated with general punitive attitudes and specific punitive assignments, even when controlling for the free will subscale. Conversely, the free will subscale was moderately correlated with conservativism and religiosity, even when controlling for the moral responsibility subscale. These results provide evidence that the FWS is better suited – psychometrically, theoretically, and practically – as a 2-factor measure of free will beliefs and moral responsibility beliefs than as a 1-factor measure of free will beliefs. (shrink)

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that neurological abnormalities decrease punishment by decreasing perceptions of free will. Experiment 1 found that a brain tumor decreased punishment for criminal behavior by decreasing perceptions of the afflicted criminal’s free will. This effect was stronger for liberal and non-religious participants than for conservative and religious participants. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 and additionally found that a brain tumor decreased perceptions of the afflicted criminal’s conscious decisions and true self, thereby decreasing perceptions of his free (...) will, thereby decreasing his punishment. Collectively, these results suggest that neurological abnormalities decrease punishment by decreasing perceptions of free will, especially among liberals and non-religious people. These results also suggest that neurological abnormalities decrease perceptions of free will – and ultimately decrease punishment – by decreasing perceptions of conscious decisions and the true self. (shrink)

Jacob Weinrib's Dimensions of Dignity 1 [DD] joins a small but growing literature committed to the reconstruction, as applied theory, of foundational concepts such as justice, authority, and the ru...