(Pdf updated to final, slightly revised version of November 2010) -/- Almost everyone would prefer to lead a meaningful life. But what is meaning in life and what makes a life meaningful? I argue, first, for a new analysis of the concept of meaningfulness in terms of the appropriateness of feelings of fulfilment and admiration. Second, I argue that while the best current conceptions of meaningfulness, such as Susan Wolf’s view that in a meaningful life ‘subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness’, (...) do a fairly good job capturing meaningfulness at a time, we need an account that makes sense of the intimate connection between meaningfulness and having a direction in one’s life. According to the Teleological View I propose, what makes a single chapter of a life most meaningful is success in reaching central, objectively valuable goals as a result of exercising essential human capacities. Life as a whole is most meaningful when past efforts increase the success of future goal-setting, goal-seeking, and goal-reaching, so that the life forms a coherent whole without being dedicated to a single aim. Since coherence in this sense is a holistic property of a life, global prudential value is not a function of local prudential values. I suggest that just as pleasure is the final good of human beings as subjects of experience, meaningfulness is the final good of human beings as active agents. (shrink)

When knowledge is being doubted one way to express this doubt is by a counterfactual. Typically this counterfactual quotes some elements of the actual case or a case considered as actual and dodges the connection between proposition believed and what makes that proposition true. For example, when Descartes states his dreaming skepticism case, he gives us instances where he has previously been lying in his bed fast asleep while dreaming that he is awake. What triggers the loss of knowledge in (...) Descartes’ case is that if he were asleep, he would still believe that he is sitting by the fire, holding a paper in his hand etc. The fact that he cannot distinguish between his dream-state and awake-state entails that he doesn’t know in the awake-state, considered as actual, either. So, a description of counterfactual possibilities that can be used to doubt knowledge in a possibility considered as actual has to make the truth of p indistinguishable from the falsity of p. Any possibility that falls under this description will be called transparent. Here is a definition: For any possibility W and any proposition believed p, W is transparent iff, in W the truth of p is indistinguishable from the falsity of p. (shrink)

This chapter is concerned with the use of conceptual analysis, particularly intuitions, in solving various philosophical problems such as the concepts of knowledge, free will, moral judgment, and intentional action, among others. Experimentalists make use of the Survey Model in conducting their studies since survey feedbacks produce data about which philosophical perspectives can be analyzed. An alternative model is the Dialogue Model of inquiry, which has proven to be more efficient as the philosopher can directly present alternate interpretations and varying (...) examples for the subject to choose from, yielding even more fruitful results. (shrink)

What should we believe if epistemic and practical reasons for belief point in different directions? I argue that there’s no single answer, but rather a Dualism of Theoretical and Practical Reason is true: what we epistemically ought to believe and what we practically ought to believe may come apart, and both are independently authoritative. I argue in particular against recently popular views that subordinate the epistemic to the practical: it’s not the case that epistemic reasons bear on what we ‘just (...) plain ought’ to believe just to the extent we have practical reason to believe epistemically correctly. Why? Because epistemic reasons give rise to authoritative demands independently of the practical pay-off of believing accordingly. This is shown in particular by the fact that it can be fitting to epistemically ‘blame’ us just because we fail to believe as we epistemically ought, even if we don’t have sufficient practical reason to believe so. I also argue that we don’t need to come up with what we ‘just plain ought’ to believe, because contrary epistemic and practical responsibility responses can be simultaneously fitting in conflict cases, and because epistemic and practical ought judgments give rise to different enkrasia requirements, among other things. (shrink)

Malcolm-Smith, Solms, Turnbull and Tredoux [Malcolm-Smith, S., Solms, M.,Turnbull, O., & Tredoux, C. . Threat in dreams: An adaptation? Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 1281–1291.] have made an attempt to test the Threat-Simulation Theory , a theory offering an evolutionary psychological explanation for the function of dreaming [Revonsuo, A. . The reinterpretation of dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 877–901]. Malcolm-Smith et al. argue that empirical evidence from their own study as well as (...) from some other studies in the literature does not support the main predictions of the TST: that threatening events are frequent and overrepresented in dreams, that exposure to real threats activates the threat-simulation system, and that dream threats contain realistic rehearsals of threat avoidance responses. Other studies, including our own, have come up with results and conclusions that are in conflict with those of Malcolm-Smith et al. In this commentary, we provide an analysis of the sources of these disagreements, and their implications to the TST. Much of the disagreement seems to stem from differing interpretations of the theory and, consequently, of differing methods to test it. (shrink)

Everyone agrees that not all norms that govern belief and assertion are epistemic. But not enough attention has been paid to distinguishing epistemic norms from others. Norms in general differ from merely evaluative standards in virtue of the fact that it is fitting to hold subjects accountable for violating them, provided they lack an excuse. Different kinds of norm are most readily distinguished by their distinctive mode of accountability. My thesis is roughly that a norm is epistemic if and only (...) if its violation makes it fitting to reduce epistemic trust in the subject, even if there is no doubt about their sincerity, honesty, or other moral virtues. That is, violations of epistemic norms don’t merit resentment or other forms of blame, but rather deduction of credibility points in internal scorekeeping and related attitudinal and behavioral changes. As Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice shows, such distrust is undesirable from the point of view of an epistemic agent. Consequently, when one manifests epistemic distrust towards a subject in suitable circumstances, it amounts a way of holding her accountable. Since this form of accountability involves no opprobrium, there is good reason to think it is not linked to voluntary control in the same way as moral accountability. Finally, I make use of this account of what makes epistemic norms distinctive to point out some faulty diagnostics in debates about norms of assertion. My aim is not to defend any substantive view, however, but only to offer tools for identifying the right kind of evidence for epistemic norms. (shrink)

Sentimentalism comes in many varieties: explanatory sentimentalism, judgment sentimentalism, metaphysical sentimentalism, and epistemic sentimentalism. This encyclopedia entry gives an overview of the positions and main arguments pro and con.

In this article, the author discusses the methodology of the internalism debate and the role that neuroscience and related experimental methods can play in it. The author argues that findings in either actual or fictional experimental psychology or neuroscience have little relevance to the debate. He claims that the findings do not provide any independent support pro or con internalism. He also observes that the traditional view of the methodological autonomy of philosophical moral psychology remains well-grounded.

According to the quasi-perceptualist account of philosophical intuitions, they are intellectual appearances that are psychologically and epistemically analogous to perceptual appearances. Moral intuitions share the key characteristics of other intuitions, but can also have a distinctive phenomenology and motivational role. This paper develops the Humean claim that the shared and distinctive features of substantive moral intuitions are best explained by their being constituted by moral emotions. This is supported by an independently plausible non-Humean, quasi-perceptualist theory of emotion, according to which (...) the phenomenal feel of emotions is crucial for their intentional content. (shrink)

Very plausibly, there is something important missing in our lives if we are thoroughly ignorant or misled about reality – even if, as in a kind of Truman Show scenario, intervention or fantastic luck prevents unhappiness and practical failure. But why? I argue that perfectionism about well-being offers the most promising explanation. My version says, roughly, that we flourish when we exercise our self-defining capacities successfully according to their constitutive standards. One of these self-defining capacities, or capacities whose exercise reveals (...) who we are, is Reason, our capacity for normative self-governance. I argue that in its practical use, Reason formally aims at competently realizing self-chosen valuable ends that are in harmony with each other, or valuable achievements. In its theoretical use, it formally aims at competently grasping fundamental enough subject matters, or a kind of understanding. Because success by reason’s own standards requires many things to go right, there are many different ways in which we can fall short. Some of them amount to partial success. But some, like incompetent inquiry that fails to yield understanding of its target, or taking inefficient means to a worthless end, are robust failures that amount to epistemic or agential unflourishing, and thus to a form of ill-being. (shrink)

“Altered State of Consciousness” (ASC) has been defined as a changed overall pattern of conscious experience, or as the subjective feeling and explicit recognition that one's own subjective experience has changed. We argue that these traditional definitions fail to draw a clear line between altered and normal states of consciousness (NSC). We outline a new definition of ASC and argue that the proper way to understand the concept of ASC is to regard it as a representational notion: the alteration that (...) has happened is not an alteration of consciousness (or subjective experience) per se, but an alteration in the informational or representational relationships between consciousness and the world. An altered state of consciousness is defined as a state in which the neurocognitive background mechanisms of consciousness have an increased tendency to produce misrepresentations such as hallucinations, delusions, and memory distortions. Paradigm examples of such generally misrepresentational, temporary, and reversible states are dreaming, psychotic episodes, psychedelic drug experiences, some epileptic seizures, and hypnosis in highly hypnotizable subjects. The representational definition of ASC should be applied in the theoretical and empirical studies of ASCs to unify and clarify the conceptual basis of ASC research. (shrink)

According to strong immanent realism, proposed for instance by David M. Armstrong, universals are concrete, located in their instances. E.J. Lowe and Douglas Ehring have presented arguments to the effect that strong immanent realism is incoherent. Cody Gilmore has defended strong immanent realism against the charge of incoherence. Gilmore’s argument has thus far remained unanswered. We argue that Gilmore’s response to the charge of incoherence is an ad hoc move without support independent of strong immanent realism itself. We conclude that (...) strong immanent realism remains under the threat of incoherence posed by Lowe and Ehring. (shrink)

Grandparental presence is known to correlate with the number of grandchildren born, and this effect may vary according to grandparental sex and lineage. However, existing studies of grandparental effects on fertility mostly concern traditional subsistence societies, while evidence from contemporary developed societies is both scarce and mixed. Here, we explore how grandparents affect the transition to second and subsequent children in the contemporary United Kingdom. The longitudinal Millennium Cohort Study (n = 10,295 families) was used to study the association between (...) grandparental investment and parents’ probability of having a new child within 4.5 years. Results show that contact with paternal grandparents is associated with higher probability of parents having a second child. In contrast, contact with maternal grandparents is associated with lower probability of having a third or subsequent child. Kin may have opposite effects on fertility even in contemporary societies, which may explain the lack of consistent effects of grandparental investment on fertility in previous studies. (shrink)

In disputes about conceptual analysis, each side typically appeals to pre-theoretical 'intuitions' about particular cases. Recently, many naturalistically oriented philosophers have suggested that these appeals should be understood as empirical hypotheses about what people would say when presented with descriptions of situations, and have consequently conducted surveys on non-specialists. I argue that this philosophical research programme, a key branch of what is known as 'experimental philosophy', rests on mistaken assumptions about the relation between people's concepts and their linguistic behaviour. The (...) conceptual claims that philosophers make imply predictions about the folk's responses only under certain demanding, counterfactual conditions. Because of the nature of these conditions, the claims cannot be tested with methods of positivist social science. We are, however, entitled to appeal to intuitions about folk concepts in virtue of possessing implicit normative knowledge acquired through reflective participation in everyday linguistic practices. (shrink)

This paper examines systematically which features of a life story (or history) make it good for the subject herself - not aesthetically or morally good, but prudentially good. The tentative narrative calculus presented claims that the prudential narrative value of an event is a function of the extent to which it contributes to her concurrent and non-concurrent goals, the value of those goals, and the degree to which success in reaching the goals is deserved in virtue of exercising agency. The (...) narrative value of a life is a simple sum of the values of individual events that comprise it. I claim that this view best explains and support common intuitions about the significance of the shape of a life. (shrink)

What is the relationship between meaning in life and happiness? In psychological research, subjective meaning and happiness are often contrasted with each other. I argue that while the objective meaningfulness of a life is distinct from happiness, subjective or felt meaning is a key constituent of happiness, which is best understood as a multidimensional affective condition. Measures of felt meaning should consequently be included in empirical studies of the causes and correlates of happiness.

A “conceptual spaces” approach is used to formalize Aristotle’s main intuitions about time and change, and other ideas about temporal points of view. That approach has been used in earlier studies about points of view. Properties of entities are represented by locations in multidimensional conceptual spaces; and concepts of entities are identified with subsets or regions of conceptual spaces. The dimensions of the spaces, called “determinables”, are qualities in a very general sense. A temporal element is introduced by adding a (...) time variable to state functions that map entities into conceptual spaces. That way, states may have some permanency or stability around time instances. Following Aristotle’s intuitions, changes and events will not be necessarily instant phenomena, instead they could be processual and interval dependent. Change is defined relatively to the interval during which the change is taking place. Time intervals themselves are taken to represent points of view. To have a point of view is to look at the world as it is in the selected interval. Many important concepts are relativized to intervals, for instance change, events, identity, ontology, potentiality, etc. The definition of points of view as intervals allows to compare points of view in relation to all these concepts. The conceptual space approach has an immediate semantic and structural character, but it is tempting to develop also logics to describe them. A formal language is introduced to show how this could be done. (shrink)

In this paper, my aim is to bring together contemporary psychological literature on emotion regulation and the classical sentimentalism of David Hume and Adam Smith to arrive at a plausible account of empathy's role in explaining patterns of moral judgment. Along the way, I criticize related arguments by Michael Slote, Jesse Prinz, and others.

Empathic feelings seem to causally influence our moral judgments at least sometimes. But is empathy necessary for our ability to make moral judgments? And is it a good thing if our judgments are based on empathy? This chapter examines the contemporary debate on these issues.

On a widely accepted view, what gives meaning to our lives is success in valuable ground projects. However, philosophers like Kieran Setiya have recently challenged the value of such orientation towards the future, and argued that meaningful living is instead a matter of engaging in atelic activities that are complete in themselves at each moment. This chapter argues that insofar as what is at issue is meaningfulness in its primary existential sense, strongly atelic activities do not suffice for meaning. Instead, (...) finding one’s life meaningful is warranted both by sustainable success in valuable prospective (future-oriented) projects, and by success in reflexive projects that aim to promote or realize a practice-dependent value that can be realized at each moment, but never for good. The latter kind of activities are only weakly atelic, since their aim remains distinct from the activity, and individual actions gain significance from serving a long-term commitment. Thus, whether our ground projects are prospective or reflexive, what we do at each moment contributes to leading a meaningful life only when it’s connected in the right way to what we do at other moments. (shrink)

This note explores how ideal subjectivism in metanormative theory can help solve two important problems for Fitting Attitude analyses of value. The wrong-kind-of-reason problem is that there may be sufficient reason for attitude Y even if the object is not Y-able. The many-kinds-of-fittingness problem is that the same attitude can be fitting in many ways. Ideal subjectivism addresses both by maintaining that an attitude is W-ly fitting if and only if endorsed by any W-ly ideal subject. A subject is W-ly (...) ideal when the most robust way of avoiding W-type practical problems is deferring to her endorsement. (shrink)

Name is a powerful sign, and name-giving is also calling one intolanguage. Name identifies, summons and subjects. Paul Celan wasfamiliar with all these uses of name and addresses them in his poeticsand poetry. This article will discuss how poetry like Celan’s, which is heavily influenced by so many philosophical readings, could form a critique of naming,on a poetical basis towards philosophical concepts that underline problematics of name-giving in poetic text in particular.

It seems to many that moral opinions must make a difference to what we’re motivated to do, at least in suitable conditions. For others, it seems that it is possible to have genuine moral opinions that make no motivational difference. Both sides – internalists and externalists about moral motivation – can tell persuasive stories of actual and hypothetical cases. My proposal for a kind of reconciliation is to distinguish between two kinds of psychological states with moral content. There are both (...) moral thoughts or opinions that intrinsically motivate, and moral thoughts or opinions that don’t. The thoughts that intrinsically motivate are moral intuitions – spontaneous and compelling non-doxastic appearances of right or wrong that both attract assent and incline us to act or react. I argue that there is good reason to think that these intuitions, but not moral judgments, are constituted by manifestations of moral sentiments. The moral thoughts that do not intrinsically motivate are moral beliefs, which are in themselves as inert as any ordinary beliefs. Thus, roughly, internalism is true about intuitions and externalism is true about beliefs or judgments. (shrink)

While suicide is typically associated with personal despair, people do sometimes kill themselves in the hope or expectation that their death will advance a political cause by way of its impact on the conscience of others, or in extreme cases simply as an expression of protest against a status quo felt to be unjust. Paradigm cases of such protest suicide may be public acts of self-immolation. This chapter distinguishes between instrumental and expressive protest suicide, examines the possible motivations behind them, (...) their possible moral justification, and their potential contribution to the meaning of the suicide’s life. It argues that when the value of the aim pursued by way of instrumental suicide is proportionate, killing oneself promotes it sufficiently, and other morally acceptable options are exhausted, instrumental protest suicide can be morally permissible and consistent with human dignity. It can even be an admirable act of self-sacrifice, provided that the agent’s motivations are suitable. Some of the standard moral objections to suicide don’t apply to such cases. But protest suicide remains morally risky, because one might be mistaken about the worth of one’s cause or the availability of alternatives, and because even these extreme acts typically have limited effect. (shrink)

Is it good for us if the different parts of our lives are connected to each other like the parts of a good story? Some philosophers have thought so, while others have firmly rejected it. In this paper, I focus on the state-of-the-art anti-narrativist arguments Amy Berg has recently presented in this journal. I argue that while she makes a good case that the best kind of lives for us do not revolve around a single project or theme, the best (...) kind of narrativist views actually encourage us to pursue a variety of different projects, as long as they are mutually supportive. I claim that when interpreted in the most plausible way, prudentially good-making narrative coherence arises precisely out of this kind of unity in diversity. Well-roundedness and narrative coherence are thus not inherently in tension, but are both good-making holistic features of our lives. (shrink)

Affective experiences motivate and rationalize behavior in virtue of feeling good or bad, or their valence. It has become popular to explain such phenomenal character with intentional content. Rejecting evaluativism and extending earlier imperativist accounts of pain, I argue that when experiences feel bad, they both represent things as being in a certain way and tell us to see to it that they will no longer be that way. Such commands have subjective authority by virtue of linking up with a (...) relevant background concern. The imperative content explains but doesn’t constitute world-directed motivation. It also rationalizes action indirectly, by giving rise to an affective seeming that represents the situation as calling for the authoritatively commanded behavior. One experience feels worse than another if its content tells us to bear a higher opportunity cost to comply with the command. Finally, experience-directed motivation is contingent on our being attitudinally (dis)pleased with the character of our experience. (shrink)

An overview and critical analysis of the study of consciousness, integrating findingsfrom philosophy, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience into a unified theoreticalframework.

Pride in our own actions tells a story: we faced a challenge, overcame it, and achieved something praiseworthy. In this paper, I draw on recent psychological literature to distinguish to between two varieties of pride, 'authentic' pride that focuses on particular efforts (like guilt) and 'hubristic' pride that focuses on the whole self (like shame). Achievement pride is fitting when either efforts or traits explain our success in meeting contextually relevant, authoritative, and challenging standards without excessive opportunity cost. When it (...) is fitting, our lives are at least somewhat meaningful. (shrink)

This edited book focuses on concepts and their applications using the theory of conceptual spaces, one of today’s most central tracks of cognitive science discourse. It features 15 papers based on topics presented at the Conceptual Spaces @ Work 2016 conference. The contributors interweave both theory and applications in their papers. Among the first mentioned are studies on metatheories, logical and systemic implications of the theory, as well as relations between concepts and language. Examples of the latter include explanatory models (...) of paradigm shifts and evolution in science as well as dilemmas and issues of health, ethics, and education. The theory of conceptual spaces overcomes many translational issues between academic theoretization and practical applications. The paradigm is mainly associated with structural explanations, such as categorization and meronomy. However, the community has also been relating it to relations, functions, and systems. The book presents work that provides a geometric model for the representation of human conceptual knowledge that bridges the symbolic and the sub-conceptual levels of representation. The model has already proven to have a broad range of applicability beyond cognitive science and even across a number of disciplines related to concepts and representation. (shrink)

The demands of rationality are linked both to our subjective normative perspective (given that rationality is a person-level concept) and to objective reasons or favoring relations (given that rationality is non-contingently authoritative for us). In this paper, I propose a new way of reconciling the tension between these two aspects: roughly, what rationality requires of us is having the attitudes that correspond to our take on reasons in the light of our evidence, but only if it is competent. I show (...) how this view can account for structural rationality on the assumption that intentions and beliefs as such involve competent perceptions of downstream reasons, and explore various implications of the account. (shrink)

Suppose that our life choices result in unpredictable experiences, as L.A. Paul has recently argued. What does this mean for the possibility of rational prudential choice? Not as much as Paul thinks. First, what’s valuable about experience is its broadly hedonic quality, and empirical studies suggest we tend to significantly overestimate the impact of our choices in this respect. Second, contrary to what Paul suggests, the value of finding out what an outcome is like for us does not suffice to (...) rationalize life choices, because much more important values are at stake. Third, because these other prudential goods, such as achievement, personal relationships, and meaningfulness, are typically more important than the quality of our experience (which is in any case unlikely to be bad when we achieve non- experiential goods), life choices should be made on what I call a story- regarding rather than experience-regarding basis. (shrink)

Consciousness seems to be an enigmatic phenomenon: it is difficult to imagine how our perceptions of the world and our inner thoughts, sensations and feelings could be related to the immensely complicated biological organ we call the brain. This volume presents the thoughts of some of the leading philosophers and cognitive scientists who have recently participated in the discussion of the status of consciousness in science. The focus of inquiry is the question: "Is it possible to incorporate consciousness into science?" (...) Philosophers have suggested different alternatives -- some think that consciousness should be altogether eliminated from science because it is not a real phenomenon, others that consciousness is a real, higher-level physical or neurobiological phenomenon, and still others that consciousness is fundamentally mysterious and beyond the reach of science. At the same time, however, several models or theories of the role of conscious processing in the brain have been developed in the more empirical cognitive sciences. It has been suggested that non-conscious processes must be sharply separated from conscious ones, and that the necessity of this distinction is manifested in the curious behavior of certain brain-damaged patients. This book demonstrates the dialogue between philosophical and empirical points of view. The writers present alternative solutions to the brain-consciousness problem and they discuss how the unification of biological and psychological sciences could thus become feasible. Covering a large ground, this book shows how the philosophical and empirical problems are closely interconnected. From this interdisciplinary exploration emerges the conviction that consciousness can and should be a natural part of our scientific world view. (shrink)

Why is unpleasant pain bad for us? Evidently because of how it feels. This bit of commonsense is a challenge for well-being perfectionism, since pain doesn’t look anything like failure to fulfill human nature. Here, I sketch a new version of perfectionism that avoids this problem. To explain what is basically good for us, it appeals to the capacities whose functioning defines who we are, or our subjective nature, instead of human nature. I argue that these capacities have a telic (...) structure, so that practical reason, for example, constitutively aims at competently realizing valuable ends that are in harmony. According to telic perfectionism, we do well when such formal aims are realized and badly when they’re frustrated. Crucially, our subjective nature is defined not only by how we reason but also by how we feel. And valenced experience, too, has built-in directionality, according to the most plausible views about the nature of pleasure and pain. The phenomenal character of unpleasant pain is inseparable from its setting for us the end of eliminating itself. As long as we are in pain, then, the formal aim of our self-defining capacity for valenced experience is frustrated. For telic perfectionism, unpleasant pain is thus robustly bad for us, and the explanation of its badness makes essential reference to how it feels. (shrink)

This paper is an overview of contemporary theories of meaning in life and its relation to well-being.

Binding can be described at three different levels: In neuroscience it refers to the integration of single-cell activities to form functional neural assemblies, especially in response to global stimulus properties; in cognitive science it refers to the integration of distributed modular input processing to form unified representations for memory and action, and in consciousness studies it refers to the unity of phenomenal consciousness . To describe and explain the unity of consciousness, detailed phenomenological descriptions of binding at the phenomenal level (...) and clarification of the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms are required. The disunity of consciousness during dreaming is a fruitful avenue to study phenomenal binding and its mechanisms. The notion of the 'bizarreness' of dreams is closely related to the concept of 'binding': bizarreness can be reconceptualized as referring to different types of unusual combinations of features in the binding of dream images coherently together. The present study concentrates on the representation of human characters and the bizarreness found in these representations. We developed a rating scale that distinguishes different types of bizarreness on the basis of the unusual combinations of elements that are manifested in dream images. The data consisted of 592 dream reports in the home-based dream diaries of 52 students. The results indicate that about half of the human characters appearing in our dreams contain bizarre elements, and that certain types of bizarreness are more frequent than others. Phenomenal features intrinsic to the representation of a person are less frequently bizarre than is the external relation between the person and the context . Thus, binding the local features of a representation coherently together appears to be less prone to errors than binding several different information streams together into a coherent phenomenal model of the world. (shrink)

For ambitious metaphysical neo-sentimentalists, all normative facts are grounded in fitting attitudes, where fittingness is understood in naturalistic terms. In this paper, I offer a neo-sentimentalist account of blameworthiness in terms of the reactive attitudes of a morally authoritative subject I label a Nagelian Imp. I also argue that moral impermissibility is indirectly linked to blameworthiness: roughly, an act is morally impermissible if and only if and because it is not *possible* in the circumstances to adopt a plan of performing (...) it without meriting blame, assuming the agent is rational, informed, and meets the conditions of accountability. (shrink)

It has become common to take reasons to form a basic normative category that is not amenable to non-circular analysis. This paper offers a novel characterization of reasons in terms of how we ought or it would be good for us to think in response to our awareness of facts, and thus rejects such Reason Primitivism. Briefly, for r to be a normative reason for A to φ is for it to be the case that A ought to conduct her (...) φ-relevant thinking in a φ-friendly manner, given her awareness of r. In mechanistic terms, this is to say that the psychological mechanisms responsible for A’s potentially φ-ing ought to be causally influenced in the direction of φ-ing by her awareness of r. For r to be an evaluative reason for A to φ is for it to be the case that it is desirable for A to conduct her φ-relevant thinking in a more or less φ-friendly manner, given her awareness of r. What someone ought to do or what it is desirable for someone to do is in turn to be understood in terms of fittingness of different positive or negative reactions. Linking the favoring relation between a fact and an action or belief explicitly with fittingness of attitudes towards the subject reveals the sense in which reasons are normative or evaluative. The paper also responds to six potential challenges to the view and argues it has certain advantages over competing reductionist proposals. (shrink)

Recently, psychologists have started to distinguish between three kinds of experience of meaning. Drawing on philosophical as well as empirical literature, I argue that the experience of one’s own life making sense involves a sense of narrative justification, so that not just any kind of intelligibility suffices; the experience of purpose includes enthusiastic future-directed motivation against the background of a global sort of hopefulness, or the resonance of what one does right now with one’s values; and finally, the experience of (...) significance consists primarily of feelings of pride and fulfilment, which construe our actions as making a positive difference to the world or as mattering to someone who matters to us. Mutually exclusive philosophical views of what makes our lives meaningful could all be simultaneously correct about the fittingness of these different kinds of experience. (shrink)

In considering the lodestars of American neoconservative thought-among them Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, James Q. Wilson, and Francis Fukuyama-Antti Lepistö makes a compelling case for the centrality of their conception of "the common man" in accounting for the enduring power and influence of their thought. Lepistö locates the roots of this conception in the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. Subsequently, the neoconservatives weaponized the ideas of Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and David Hume to denounce postwar liberal elites, educational authorities, and social (...) reformers-ultimately giving rise to a defining force in American politics: the "common sense" of "the common man.". (shrink)

Educational Theory, Volume 71, Issue 6, Page 717-741, December 2021. -/- Gert Biesta has criticized Anglo-American and German models of emancipatory education. According to Biesta, emancipation is understood in these models as liberation that results from a process in which a teacher transmits objective knowledge to his or her students and cultivates student capabilities. He claims that this so-called modern logic of emancipation does not lead to freedom because it installs inequality, dependency, and mistrust in the pedagogical relationship. In this (...) article, Antti Moilanen and Rauno Huttunen analyze whether German models of emancipatory education share the modern logic of emancipation and if they can escape Biesta's criticisms. For this purpose, they interpret Biesta's critique of the modern logic of emancipation and explicate central ideas related to the German models of critical education. They also compare the modern logic of emancipation to the German one, and they then assess German models of emancipatory pedagogy from the viewpoint of Biesta's criticisms. Moilanen and Huttunen conclude that the German models of emancipatory education present at least a partial alternative to the modern logic of emancipation. Despite this, the German models are based on the idea of education as cultivation. Because Biesta criticizes the theory of education as cultivation, it is possible to conclude that he would not accept the German models of emancipatory education. However, the German models of critical pedagogy provide answers to the following question: how can students achieve independence in the pedagogical relationship? When students take part in designing educational processes, they are summoned to assess the validity of the taught knowledge, and they practice independent decision-making at school; the pedagogical relationship, based on authority, can foster student self-determination. (shrink)