Agricultural reports and guides, nonhuman animal welfare studies, and animal rights reports attempt to document and convey the condition of nonhuman animals in agriculture. These disciplines tend to resist a prolonged and methodically versatile examination of individual animals. In his pioneer work, Lovenheim , The author produced such a biographical documentation of calves in the dairy and meat industries. He provided an exceptionally prolonged and detailed tracing of their lives as individuals, establishing an emotional attachment in both documenter and reader. (...) Yet, sentiments for the farmers, typical urban conceptions of communication with nonhuman animals, and difficulties in obtaining the relevant information limit Lovenheim's success and imply similar difficulties in other cases. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Generics are sentences such as Birds fly, which express generalizations. They are prevalent in speech, and as far as is known, no human language lacks generics. Yet, it is very far from clear what they mean. After all, not all birds fly—penguins don’t! -/- There are two general views about the meaning of generics in the literature, and each view encompasses many specific theories. According to the inductivist view, a generic states that a sufficient number of individuals satisfy a certain (...) property—in the example above, it says that sufficiently many birds fly. This view faces the complicated problem of spelling out exactly how many is “sufficiently many” in a way that correctly captures the intuitive truth conditions of generics. -/- An alternative, the rules and regulations view, despairs from this project and proposes instead that generics directly express rules in the world. Rules are taken to be abstract objects, which are not related to the properties of specific individuals. This view faces the difficult problem of explaining how people come to know of such rules when judging the truth of falsity of generics, and accounting for the strong intuition that a sentence such as Birds fly talks about birds, not abstract objects. -/- What seems to be beyond dispute is that generics, even if they do not express rules, are lawlike: they state non-accidental generalizations. Many scholars have taken this fact to indicate that generics are parametric on possible worlds: they refer to worlds other than the actual world. This, again, raises the problem of how people come to know about what happens in these other worlds. However, a rigorous application of standard tests for intensionality shows that generics are not, in fact, parametric on possible worlds, but only on time. This unusual property may explain much of the mystery surrounding generics. -/- Another mysterious property of generics is that although there is no language without them, there is no linguistic construction that is devoted to the expression of genericity. Rather, generics can be expressed in a variety of ways, each of which can also express nongenerics. Yet, each manifestation of generics differs subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) in its meaning from the others. -/- Even when these and other puzzles of genericity are solved, one mystery would remain: Why are generics, which are so easy to produce and understand in conversation, so difficult to analyze? (shrink)

In this paper I explore elements from Kant’s philosophy of right to develop a relational account of the wrong of poverty. Poverty is a relational wrong because it involves relations of problematic dependence, inequality, and humiliation. Such relations infringe the rights to freedom and equality of the poor. And the called-for response is one of public recognition and protection of the rights of the poor. This position means we must radically reconceptualize our individual duties to the poor: not _private beneficence_, (...) but _private remedies for public failures_. (shrink)

Arising out of the author's lifetime fascination with the links between the formal language of mathematical models and natural language, this short book comprises five essays investigating both the economics of language and the language of economics. Ariel Rubinstein touches the structure imposed on binary relations in daily language, the evolutionary development of the meaning of words, game-theoretical considerations of pragmatics, the language of economic agents and the rhetoric of game theory. These short essays are full of challenging ideas (...) for social scientists that should help to encourage a fundamental rethinking of many of the underlying assumptions in economic theory and game theory. As a postscript two economists, Tilman Borgers and Bart Lipman, and a logician, Johan van Benthem offer comments. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a way to translate the metainferences of a mixed metainferential system into formulae of an extended-language system, called its associated σ-system. To do this, the σ-system will contain new operators (one for each standard), called the σ operators, which represent the notions of "belonging to a (given) standard". We first prove, in a model-theoretic way, that these translations preserve (in)validity. That is, that a metainference is valid in the base system if and only if its (...) translation is a tautology of its corresponding σ-system. We then use these results to obtain other key advantages. Most interestingly, we provide a recipe for building unlabeled sequent calculi for σ-systems. We then exemplify this with a σ-system useful for logics of the ST family, and prove soundness and completeness for it, which indirectly gives us a calculus for the metainferences of all those mixed systems. Finally, we respond to some possible objections and show how our σ-framework can shed light on the “obeying” discussion within mixed metainferential contexts. (shrink)

Introduction Introducing Accessibility theory 0.1 On the role of context Utterances cannot be processed and interpreted on their own. ...

Dialogic or dialogical education is an umbrella term that encompasses a myriad of different and at times conflicting approaches. As there is no agreed-upon definition of ‘dialogue’ (not that there is or should be one unified definition), and even fewer clear and systematic guidelines for application, researchers and practitioners in the DE field are faced with countless questions and dilemmas. My aim in this paper is therefore to offer some ideas for a general outline of how to employ systematic thinking (...) on DE. This outline can serve as a basis for the development of a methodological tool that can enable researchers and practitioners to think about and apply dialogical practices with greater clarity, coherency and consistency. Following a normatively oriented (rather than instrumental) systematic line of reasoning, this paper will begin by discussing the basic values of three central dialogical approaches and then move on to discuss more practical parameters that surpass strictly pedagogical and didactic concerns. (shrink)

Our knowledge about the world is often expressed by generic sentences, yet their meanings are far from clear. This book provides answers to central problems concerning generics: what do they mean? Which factors affect their interpretation? How can one reason with generics? Cohen proposes that the meanings of generics are probability judgments, and shows how this view accounts for many of their puzzling properties, including lawlikeness. Generics are evaluated with respect to alternatives. Cohen argues that alternatives are induced by the (...) kind as well as by the predicated property, and thus provides a uniform account of the varied interpretations of generics. He studies the formal properties of alternatives and provides a compositional account of their derivation by focus and presupposition. Cohen uses his semantics of generics to provide a formal characterization of adequate default reasoning, and proves some desirable results of this formalism. (shrink)

This paper defends a rigorous reading of Hume’s critiques of arguments for the existence of God and of the belief in God against interpretations that endorse Humean theism, deism, and fideism. The latter include Donald Livingston’s theist reading, J. C. A. Gaskin’s “attenuated deism” reading, and Edward Kanterian’s “humble fideism” reading. I also examine whether Hume’s rejections of a positive theology commit him to agnosticism or atheism. My innovative challenge to such conclusions maintains that, while elements of both agnosticism and (...) atheism are found in Hume, these denote, respectively, a methodology and an incidental implication of his philosophy. But neither sufficiently captures his constructive vision for a society, individual psychology, and system of knowledge guided by naturalist principles and aims. For this, an alternate conception is needed that describes Hume’s philosophy of religion beyond mere atheism. (shrink)

Both traditional accounts of hope and some of their recent critics analyze hope exclusively in terms of attitudes that a hoper bears towards a hoped-for prospect, such as desire and probability assignment. I argue that all of these accounts misidentify cases of despair as cases of hope, and so misconstrue the nature of hope. I show that a more satisfactory view is arrived at by noticing that in addition to the aforementioned attitudes, hope involves a characteristic attitude towards an external (...) factor, on whose operation the hoper takes the prospect's realization to depend causally. (shrink)

What is the connection between moral rights and the good? While familiar normative theories give justificatory precedence to one notion over the other, this paper explores a neglected alternative: when properly specified, the notion of moral rights and of the good conceptually depend on each other.1.

On a souvent voulu expliquer les oeuvres par la vie de leur auteur. Ariel Suhamy fait l'inverse : il raconte ce qu'on sait de la vie de Spinoza à la lumière de sa doctrine. Son objet, c'est donc la vie humaine, la "vie véritable", celle qui ne se définit pas par la simple circulation du sang et la durée de l'existence, mais par l'intelligence de Dieu, du monde et de soi, et par les actes qui en découlent. Alors, comment (...) l'auteur de l'Éthique a-t-il vécu? Comment a-t-il mis en application sa pensée? Les mythes qui entourent cet homme, ce que l'Histoire peut reconstituer de sa vie, ne dérivent-ils pas aussi de cette pensée et de sa réception? Un livre novateur pour redécouvrir Spinoza."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This article proposes to analyse the way in which the body is addressed in the philosophical works of Judith Butler. The constructionism that characterizes her initial articles has been widely spread in the contemporary debates about sex and gender diversity, since in those articles she links the body to a discursive ontology that denounces the contingent and unnecessary welding between body -which is considered as the substantial and natural basis of gender and sexuality- and subjective identities. Such an epistemological turn, (...) however, entails the problem of the dissolution of the material body as a strong foundation for various political claims. From this point on, some argumentative lines will be drawn parting from different segments of the author’s thought. These lines tend to present a complex notion of the body, clung to the idea of vulnerability. El presente artículo se propone analizar el modo en que la obra filosófica de Judith Butler aborda el cuerpo. El construccionismo social que caracteriza sus textos iniciales ha cobrado gran difusión en los debates contemporáneos sobre la diversidad sexo-genérica, pues allí la autora vincula al cuerpo a una ontología discursiva que denuncia la soldadura contingente y no necesaria entre cuerpo -pretendida base sustancial y natural del género y la sexualidad- y las identidades subjetivas. Tal giro epistemológico, sin embargo, genera el problema de la disolución del cuerpo material como fundamento sólido para reclamos políticos diversos. A partir de aquí se extraen líneas argumentativas de diferentes segmentos del pensamiento de la autora tendientes a presentar una noción compleja de cuerpo anclada en la idea de vulnerabilidad. (shrink)

This article focuses on human dignity as a moral idea and, in particular, on a single but fundamental question: what conception of human dignity, if any, can generate an egalitarian duty to respect all persons? After surveying two mainstream and two alternative conceptions, the article suggests that explaining how human dignity generates an egalitarian duty of respect may be more difficult than has been appreciated.

Maïmonide (Cordoue 1138 - Fostat 1204) fait partie de ces rares penseurs du Moyen Age à avoir franchi les siècles en laissant une oeuvre encore très actuelle. Les écrits médicaux de ce philosophe, talmudiste et médecin, puisent dans les sagesses juives, grecques et arabes. Son sens de l'observation, son intérêt pour la clinique, son besoin permanent d'associer expérience pratique et savoir théorique, sa vision de la prévention font de ce grand médecin l'un des précurseurs de la médecine moderne. Il a (...) compilé toute la jurisprudence talmudique, étudié les grands textes de la médecine arabe et grecque, et a passé sa vie à essayer de concilier la pensée d'Aristote avec celle du judaïsme. Ariel Toledano nous propose une biographie intellectuelle et médicale de Maïmonide et nous immerge au sein de ses dix traités médicaux qui reflètent son éthique du soin : une philosophie qui vise à placer l'humain et sa santé dans une unité associant le corps et l'esprit. A l'heure du 880e anniversaire de la naissance de Maïmonide, cet ouvrage rappelle l'étendue de sa contribution scientifique, la modernité et la part universelle de son oeuvre. (shrink)

The observational-theoretical distinction has played a central role in the philosophy of science from logical empiricism onwards. Developments within the discipline have shown that such a distinction hides two non-identical distinctions: observational vs. non-observational and theoretical vs. non-theoretical. Likewise, metatheoretical structuralism proposed a more sophisticated treatment of theoricity in terms of the operational dependence or independence of concepts from the theories in which they appear. Despite this remarkable sophistication, it is still generally accepted that the distinction between theoretical and non-theoretical (...) concepts coincides with the explanatory vs. non-explanatory and testing vs. non-testing distinctions. Ginnobili and Carman argued for the independence between theoricity and explanation. In this paper we will focus on testing and argue for its independence from both theoricity and explanation. To do so, we propose an account of theory testing based on the framework of metatheoretical structuralism and apply it to natural selection theory and cladistics. (shrink)

Claiming rights against one another is a perfectly familiar phenomenon. We express the elementary thought you cannot do that to me in a variety of ways. And yet, in spite of the perfect familiarity of this phenomenon, the two standard philosophical theories of rights face notorious difficulties in accounting for it. My aim in this paper is to introduce a distinctive, second-personal account of rights. I will call this the independence theory of rights, the view that rights are specifications of (...) a basic right to independence against another. And I will argue that by taking as basic the second-personal thought you cannot do that to me the independence theory best illuminates the basic phenomenon of having rights against one another. (shrink)

Cognitive penetration of perception, broadly understood, is the influence that the cognitive system has on a perceptual system. The paper shows a form of cognitive penetration in the visual system which I call ‘architectural’. Architectural cognitive penetration is the process whereby the behaviour or the structure of the perceptual system is influenced by the cognitive system, which consequently may have an impact on the content of the perceptual experience. I scrutinize a study in perceptual learning that provides empirical evidence that (...) cognitive influences in the visual system produce neural reorganization in the primary visual cortex. The type of cognitive penetration can be synchronic and diachronic. (shrink)

Addressing one of the most difficult conceptual topics in the study of classical Hinduism, Ariel Glucklich presents a rigorous phenomenology of dharma, or order. The work moves away from the usual emphasis on symbols and theoretical formulations of dharma as a religious and moral norm. Instead, it focuses on images that emerge from the basic experiential interaction of the body in its spatial and temporal contexts, such as the sensation of water on the skin during the morning purification, or (...) the physical manipulation of the bride during the marriage ritual. Images of dharma are examined in myths, rituals, art, and even the physical landscape of the Hindu world. The varied and contingent experiences of dharma infuse it with a meaning that transcends a false analytical distinction from adharma, or chaos. Glucklich shows that when dharma is experienced by means of living images, it becomes inescapably temporal, and therefore inseparable from adharma. (shrink)

"Some sentences contain no overt quantifier, yet are interpreted quantificationally, e.g., Plumbers are available (entailing that some plumbers are available), or Plumbers are intelligent (whose entailment is less clear, but seems to be saying that a large number of plumbers are intelligent). Where does the quantifier come from? In this book, Ariel Cohen makes the novel proposal that the quantifier is not simply an empty category, but is generated by reinterpretations mechanisms, which are governed by well specified principles. He (...) demonstrates how the puzzling and sometimes mysterious properties of such sentences can be naturally derived from the reinterpretation mechanisms that generate them. The resulting picture has substantial implications that language contains hidden elements, underlying its surface structure"--. (shrink)

'Et si les livres de sciences humaines avaient leur esthétique propre? Et si les idées des savants étaient tout simplement belles?' Établissant un pont entre art et savoir, performance artistique et performance intellectuelle, Ariel Colonomos trace les contours d'une esthétique de la connaissance qui renouvelle les critères distinctifs du beau. Il balaie ainsi deux idées fausses : l'esthétique relèverait de préoccupations futiles et la beauté compromettrait la qualité du savoir. Chaque auteur et chaque discipline ont une voix, une plume, (...) et la beauté de la forme repose notamment sur la force d'une intrigue, la capacité d'un texte ou d'un discours à surprendre son public. Si la beauté est clarté, elle a aussi une part de mystère. Sur cette ligne de crête, les théories des sciences humaines font autant réfléchir que rêver. Dans la mesure où elle permet aux idées de se diffuser et d'être reconnues, l'esthétique du savoir prend une valeur communicationnelle et une portée universelle. Pour le démontrer, Ariel Colonomos entreprend un voyage ludique, mais toujours savant, à travers différents univers et disciplines - sciences, histoire, phénoménologie, anthropologie, sociologie, philosophie, éthique... -, de l'Antiquité à nos jours"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the issue of the alleged circularity in the determination of homologies within cladistic analysis. More specifically, I focus on the claims made by the proponents of the dynamic homology approach, regarding the distinction (sometimes made in the literature) between primary and secondary homology. This distinction is sometimes invoked to dissolve the circularity issue, by upholding that characters in a cladistic data matrix have to be only primarily homologous, and thus can be determined independently of phylogenetic (...) hypotheses, by using the classical Owenian criteria (for morphological characters) or via multiple sequence alignment (for sequence data). However, since in the dynamic approach, sequence data can be analyzed without being pre-aligned, proponents have claimed that the distinction between primary and secondary homology has no place within cladistics. I will argue that this is not the case, since cladistic practice within the dynamic framework does presuppose primary homology statements at a higher level. (shrink)

The article argues for the social production of curiosity. Due its motivating characteristic, curiosity is reconceptualized as an epistemic drive which organizes the social production of knowledge under given socio-historical and local-cultural circumstances. First, historical, philosophical, and sociological literature is reviewed to give a context for the argument. Then a theoretical apparatus is developed considering the emergence, development, and impact of epistemic drives which serves as a foundation for empirical analysis. The second part demonstrates applicability by discussing the problem of (...) economic incentives in scientific research. I argue that scientific projects with little to none immediate economic return have a significant disadvantage in acquiring funding which in turn impacts the mobilization of curiosity in their field. A tendency which systematically yields a disproportionate distribution of knowledge. In conclusion, the article suggests the usefulness of the epistemic drive notion in understanding curiosity as a sociological object. (shrink)

This paper focuses on negative exemplarity-related emotions (NEREs) and on their educational implications. In this paper, we will first argue for the nonexpendability of negative emotions broadly conceived (section 2) by defending their instrumental and intrinsic role in a good and flourishing life. In section 3, we will make the claim more specific by focusing on the narrower domain of NEREs and argue for their moral and educational significance by evaluating whether they fit the arguments provided in the previous section. (...) In section 4, we will propose three educational strategies to foster NEREs’ positive moral role. In conclusion, we will point out that an exemplarist approach to character education would greatly benefit from a more fine-grained account of the emotions involved in the educational process and from a broader perspective on which of these emotions should be taken as valuable for educational purposes. (shrink)

The two standard interpretations of Kant’s view of the relationship between external freedom and public law make one of the terms a means for the production of the other: either public law is justified as a means to external freedom, or external freedom is justified as a means for producing a system of public law. This article defends an alternative, constitutive interpretation: public law is justified because it is partly constitutive of external freedom. The constitutive view requires conceiving of external (...) freedom in a novel, second-personal way, that is, as an irreducibly relational norm. (shrink)

These are strange and unprecedented times in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most frontline healthcare professionals have never witnessed anything like this before. As a result, staff may experience numerous and continuous traumatic events, which in many instances, will negatively affect their psychological well-being. Particularly, nurses face extraordinary challenges in response to shifting protocols, triage, shortages of resources, and the astonishing numbers of patients who require care in expedited time constraints. As most healthcare workers are passionate nursing professionals, frustration (...) and often a sense of powerlessness occur when they find themselves unable to provide needed care to their patients. The overwhelming number of deaths, patients isolated and dying alone, and the ever-present fear of being infected and then infecting colleagues, family, friends due to the lack of protective gear or known protocols takes its toll on emotional and psychological well-being. For nurses, the experience of this significant (hopefully once-in-a-lifetime) event can inflict on-going moral injury. Nurses affected by this trauma require education, coping tools, and therapy to help avoid or alleviate the adverse effects on their well-being. Institutions must provide these resources to tend to the well-being of their healthcare staff, during and beyond the pandemic. This article aims to investigate moral distress—considering it as a moral injury—and offer tools and recommendations to support healthcare nurses as they respond to this crisis and its aftermath. (shrink)

One of the leading theories of social learning today is Wenger's theory of Communities of Practice'. CoP-theory reiterates basic tenets of social learning theory yet it us set apart from other theories of social learning and education not only by centering on identity-formation but by positing four key dualities as inherent structural features of the educational process. While concurring with Wenger's 'dilemmatic' understanding of education and his open-ended, practice-based conception of identity-formation, we argue that Wenger's theory overlooks central elements that (...) are needed in order to fully articulate the ends of the educational process, as he conceives them. We claim that further supplementation is needed to support the kind of educational processes that Wenger advocates. Referring to the work of Jack Mezirow and Charles Taylor, this supplementation concerns both critical reflection and 'ethical imagination'. Rather than threatening the coherency of the theory, we claim that these supplementations are internally derived from the ends of CoP-theory and are necessary for its very possibility. To remain in line with Wenger's dilemmatic structure of education, these supplementations are presented in the form of a duality: the tension between artistic and ethical imagination. (shrink)

Generics and frequency statements are puzzling phenomena: they are lawlike, yet contingent. They may be true even in the absence of any supporting instances, and extending the size of their domain does not change their truth conditions. Generics and frequency statements are parametric on time, but not on possible worlds; they cannot be applied to temporary generalizations, and yet are contingent. These constructions require a regular distribution of events along the time axis. Truth judgments of generics vary considerably across speakers, (...) whereas truth judgments of frequency statements are much more uniform. A generic may be false even if the vast majority of individuals in its domain satisfy the predicated property, whereas a frequency statement using, e.g., usually would be true. This paper argues that all these seemingly unrelated puzzles have a single underlying cause: generics and frequency statements express probability judgments, and these, in turn, are interpreted as statements of hypothetical relative frequency. (shrink)

Once upon a time, Aesop says, there was a donkey who wanted to be a pet dog. The pet dog was given many treats by the master and the household servants, and the donkey was envious of him. Hence, the donkey began emulating the pet dog. What happened next? The story ends up with the donkey beaten senseless, chased off to the stables, exhausted and barely alive. Who is to blame for the poor donkey’s unfortunate fate? Well, there could be (...) disagreement upon this, but we think emulation is to blame. And it’s on the kinds of envy-related emulation that we focus in this chapter. More analytically, we aim at vindicating the role of envy for moral exemplars within an exemplarist character educational framework. In the first section, we recall the central tenets of an exemplarist account of moral progress, and highlight how negative emotions, in general, have suffered a bad press within character education, with exemplarism being no exception. Then we provide a brief outline of standard strategies of defending envy by appealing to useful taxonomies of envy (e.g., Taylor 1988; Protasi 2016; Fussi 2018). After that, we put forward our 'Donkey Objection' by recalling Aesop’s fable on "foolish imitation", so as to show that when envy triggers mere emulation, it can bear devastating effects such as conformism and a lack of self-worth and personal integrity. In response to this objection, we bring into play a distinction between two rival forms of imitation—emulation and inspiration—and we coin the label of "inspired envy" for those forms of imitation by inspiration triggered by envy that lead to self-improvement avoiding morally detrimental consequences. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that generics tolerate exceptions. It turns out, however, that exceptions are tolerated only so long as they do not violate homogeneity: when the exceptions are not concentrated in a salient “chunk” of the domain of the generic. The criterion for salience of a chunk is cognitive: it is dependent on the way in which the domain is mentally represented. Findings of psychological experiments about the ways in which different domains are represented, and the actors affecting such (...) representations, account for judgments of generic sentences, facts which cannot be explained by linguistics alone. The reason for the homogeneity requirement itself is, in turn, also dependent on cognitive considerations. Generics express default rules, and psychological findings have shown that, the more homogeneous the domain, the easier it is for subjects to infer rules about it. Thus, cognitive results form a crucial part of a comprehensive account of the meaning of a linguistic expression. (shrink)

The propensity account of fitness intends to solve the classical tautologicity issue by identifying fitness with a disposition, the ability to survive and reproduce. As proponents recognized early on, this account requires operational independence from actual reproductive success to avoid circularity and vacuousness charges. They suggested that operational independence is achieved by measuring fitness values through optimality models. Our goal in this article is to develop this suggestion. We show that one plausible procedure by which these independent operationalizations could be (...) thought to take place, and which is in accordance with what is said in the optimality literature, is unsound. We provide two independent lines of reasoning to show this. We then provide a sketch of a more adequate account of the role of optimality models in evolutionary contexts and draw some consequences. (shrink)

Through hypothetical scenarios, this paper analyses whether machine learning (ML) could resolve one of the main shortcomings present in Christopher Boorse’s Biostatistical Theory of health (BST). In doing so, it foregrounds the boundaries and challenges of employing ML in formulating a naturalist (i.e., prima facie value-free) definition of health. The paper argues that a sweeping dataist approach cannot fully make the BST truly naturalistic, as prior theories and values persist. It also points out that supervised learning introduces circularity, rendering it (...) incompatible with a naturalistic perspective. Additionally, it underscores the need for pre-existing auxiliary theories to assess results from unsupervised learning. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the epistemological entanglements between data and data processing methods to manage expectations about what data patterns can predict. In conclusion, the paper argues against delegating the final authority for defining complex concepts like health to AI systems, as it necessitates ethical judgment and capacities for deliberation that AI currently lacks. It also warns against granting creators and deployers of AI systems the discretionary authority to determine these definitions outside the wider social discussion, advocating for ongoing public engagement on normative notions. Failure to do so risks limiting individuals and collectives’ ability to shape a just digital future and diminishes their fundamental epistemic agency. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article argues that received accounts of the concept of human dignity face more difficulties than has been appreciated, when explaining the connection between human dignity and the duty of respect that dignity is supposed to generate. It also argues that a novel, relational, account has the adequate structure to explain such connection.

Doernberg and Truog (2023) present a thoughtful analysis of the ethical tensions that arise from physicians increasingly occupying “multiple roles in healthcare”1 I take no issue with the classific...

This article proposes to narrow the gap between the space of reasons and the space of causes. By articulating the standard phenomenology of reasons and causes, we investigate the cases in which the clear-cut divide between reasons and causes starts to break down. Thus, substituting the simple picture of the relationship between the space of reasons and the space of causes with an inverted and complex one, in which reasons can have a causal-like phenomenology and causes can have a reason-like (...) phenomenology. This is attained by focusing on “swift reasoned actions” on the one hand, and on “causal noisy brain mechanisms” on the other hand. In the final part of the article, I show how an analogous move, that of narrowing the gap between one’s normative framework and the space of reasons, can be seen as an extension of narrowing the gap between the space of causes and the space of reasons. (shrink)

Interprets the Letters as a literary unity (designed almost as a novel by Plato) and provides insight into and information about Plato's self-understanding and his overall intentions as an author of his dialogues.

L'équilibre, notion introuvable et omniprésente chez Spinoza. L'enfant dont le corps est "comme en équilibre" illustre le mécanisme d'imitation des affects, au coeur de la psychologie spinoziste. Mais où trouverons-nous la définition de l'équilibre? Chez l'âne de Buridan, pris entre deux désirs strictement équivalents, et modèle du "libre-arbitre"? Mais celui-ci n'est qu'une illusion, même si souvent les hommes ne savent plus où se tourner et flottent entre deux affects contraires, espérance et crainte, amour et haine, etc. A cet équilibre figé, (...) s'oppose l'équilibre en mouvement, qui est un déséquilibre rattrapé. Le spinozisme procède par de fulgurantes équivalences : entre l'âme et le corps, entre Dieu et la nature, entre la puissance et le droit, la réalité et la perfection... Mais ces équivalences, quoi qu'en disent les détracteurs du spinozisme, ne sont pas de simples parallèles fixées dans un système inerte. La pensée qui les pose donne plus de poids tantôt à l'un, tantôt à l'autre des plateaux du balancier, de manière à produire en nous l'équilibre de l'âme, "l'équanimité" qui fait droit à la double postulation de la raison : connaître le monde dans sa nécessité, prendre la mesure de notre puissance d'agir. Cet ouvrage tente de penser, à partir de quelques figures exemplaires et sans souci de systématicité, cette économie pendulaire qui fait que "l'automate spirituel" que nous sommes peut pratiquer et vivre le spinozisme, et l'aimer. (shrink)

En el marco de los estudios actuales sobre la relación entre teoría y práctica de mímesis en Platón, el objetivo es indagar la caracterización [ethopoiía] platónica de Sócrates. Para tal fin, por un lado, se analiza la tematización de la caracterización en los Progymnásmata para mostrar su función y el lugar que ocupa Platón en esta tradición. Por otro lado, se estudian algunos pasajes clave de Apología de Sócrates y República I para echar luz sobre la composición narrativa, mímesis, y, (...) a través de ella, intentar dar cuenta del quehacer filosófico en la caracterización socrática. La hipótesis es que la opción por el diálogo está ligada no solo al modo de comprender, sino también al modo de transmitir el saber filosófico, y que, en tal marco, el personaje Sócrates encarna un tipo de saber hacer o disposicional. Este tipo de saber no sería reductible a proposiciones, de manera que la opción por el diálogo cumpliría una función no meramente estilística, sino fundamentalmente propedéutico-filosófica. (shrink)