In my paper, I present two competing perspectives on the foundational problem (as opposed to the descriptive problem) of quantifier domain restriction: the objective perspective on context (OPC) and the intentional perspective on context (IPC). According to OPC, the relevant domain for a quantified sentence is determined by objective facts of the context of utterance. In contrast, according to IPC, we must consider certain features of the speaker’s intention in order to determine the proposition expressed. My goal is to offer (...) a plausible and fair reconstruction of IPC. Drawing a parallel between quantifier domain restriction and standard cases of context dependence as indexicality, I argue that the speaker’s intentions can play a semantic role only if they satisfy an Availability Constraint: an intention must be made available or communicated to the addressee, and for that purpose the speaker can exploit any feature of the objective context (words, gestures, relevance or uniqueness of either the quantificational domain or of the referent in the context of utterance). An intention satisfying the Availability Constraint must be something that a hearer in normal circumstances is able to work out by relying on the physical surroundings of the utterance situation, on utterances exchanged during the previous conversation, and on background knowledge shared by speaker and addressee. (shrink)

This article considers the question ‘What makes hope rational?’ We take Adrienne Martin’s recent incorporation analysis of hope as representative of a tradition that views the rationality of hope as a matter of instrumental reasons. Against this tradition, we argue that an important subset of hope, ‘fundamental hope’, is not governed by instrumental rationality. Rather, people have reason to endorse or reject such hope in virtue of the contribution of the relevant attitudes to the integrity of their practical identity, which (...) makes the relevant hope not instrumentally but intrinsically valuable. This argument also allows for a new analysis of the reasons people have to abandon hope and for a better understanding of non-fundamental, ‘prosaic’ hopes. (shrink)

The language of hope is a ubiquitous part of political life, but its value is increasingly contested. While there is an emerging debate about hope in political philosophy, an assessment of the prevalent scepticism about its role in political practice is still outstanding. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of historical and recent treatments of hope in political philosophy and to indicate lines of further research. We argue that even though political philosophy can draw on recent (...) analyses of hope in analytic philosophy, there are distinct challenges for an account of hope in political contexts. Examples such as racial injustice or climate change show the need for a systematic normative account that is sensitive to the unavoidability of hope in politics as much as its characteristic dangers. (shrink)

Development economists have suggested that the hopes of the poor are a relevant factor in overcoming poverty. I argue that Kant’s approach to hope provides an important complement to the economists’ perspective. A Kantian account of hope emphasizes the need for the rationality of hope and thereby guards against problematic aspects of the economists’ discourse on hope. Section 1 introduces recent work on hope in development economics. Section 2 clarifies Kant’s question “What may I hope?” and presents the outlines of (...) his answer. Crucially, hope is rational if it is rational to trust in the structures of reality on which the realization of one’s hope depends. Section 3 argues that central tenets of Kant’s account of what makes hope rational can be applied to the context of poverty. It becomes apparent that the poor often have good reason to be hopeless since they may not trust fundamental structures that are necessary for realizing their hope. Thus, the insight that the poor need more hope must go hand in hand with a commitment to establishing trustworthy political structures, such that their hope can be rational. Section 4 highlights the relevance of the secular highest good for a better understanding of the justification and scope of our duties to the poor in a Kantian framework. (shrink)

Social death, central to the evil of genocide, distinguishes genocide from other mass murders. Loss of social vitality is loss of identity and thereby of meaning for one's existence. Seeing social death at the center of genocide takes our focus off body counts and loss of individual talents, directing us instead to mourn losses of relationships that create community and give meaning to the development of talents.

In recent times, phenomena of conversational asymmetry have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers—under various labels: illocutionary disablement and silencing, discursive injustice :440–457, 2014; Lance and Kukla in Ethics 123:456–478, 2013), illocutionary distortion. The common idea is that members of underprivileged groups sometimes have trouble performing particular speech acts that they are entitled to perform: in certain contexts, their performative potential is somehow undermined, and their capacity to do things with words is (...) distorted or even annulled. In this paper I will assess this idea, focusing on Rebecca Kukla’s and Rae Langton’s accounts; in particular, I will criticize the role the notion of uptake plays in their accounts, and claim that it may ultimately undermine the very idea of discursive injustice. While, according to Kukla and Langton, members of disadvantaged groups are victims of a kind of uptake failure, leading to illocutionary disablement and even silencing, in the account I present they are victims of a kind of communicative disablement. My overall aim is to develop a notion of discursive injustice that is more plausible and more effective for our broader purposes of criticising the structures of power and oppression. (shrink)

Indexicality is at the core of many major philosophical problems.1 In the last years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions.2 In this paper, I argue that a parallel may be drawn between the determination of the reference of the indexical expressions in recorded messages or written texts, and the determination of the illocutionary force of recorded or written utterances. To this aim, I will endorse the intention-based (...) approach proposed by Stefano Predelli - and in particular his distinction between context of utterance and context of interpretation. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

According to Mitchell Green, speech act theory traditionally idealizes away from crucial aspects of conversational contexts, including those in which the speaker’s social position affects the possibility of her performing certain speech acts. In recent times, asymmetries in communicative situations have become a lively object of study for linguists, philosophers of language and moral philosophers: several scholars view hate speech itself in terms of speech acts, namely acts of subordination. The aim of this paper is to address one of the (...) main objections to accounts of hate speech in terms of illocutionary speech acts, that is the Authority Problem. While the social role of the speaker is the focus of several approaches, the social role of the audience has too often been neglected. The author will show that not only must the speaker have a certain kind of standing or social position in order to perform speech acts of subordination, but also the audience must typically have a certain kind of standing or social position in order to either license or object to the speaker’s authority, and her acts of subordination. (shrink)

In this article, I bring Marx and Adorno into conversation with affect theory to establish three points: First, an affective reading of the concepts of alienation and exploitation via Marx’s metaphor of the “vampire capital” explains how capitalism depletes raced, gendered, and sexed working class of their bodily and mental powers. Second, discussing these thinkers’ ideas in the context of the larger mind and body opposition revives attention to the body in contemporary political theory and exposes how the mind and (...) body opposition covers the suffering caused by capitalism. Third, it shows that we must theorize the mind and body, feeling and thinking, as a mediated relation to grasping how particularly negative feelings can generate critical thinking, necessary to rebel against the vampire capital. (shrink)

This article proposes a Kantian account of our reasons to forgive that situates our moral fallibility as their ultimate ground. I explore similarities and differences between Kant’s account in the Doctrine of Virtue and the more recent account offered by Garrard and McNaughton, 39–60, 2003). After tracing the connection between moral fallibility and moral luck, I discuss Kant’s argument for a duty to be forgiving. Kant’s strategy yields a plausible account of the normative status of forgiveness: Although we generally have (...) a moral reason to forgive others, forgiveness is not required in every case of wrongdoing. Kant’s argument is based on the assumption that we are all in need of forgiveness, the nature of which I go on to explain. Forgiveness has the power to relieve us of a burden that results from moral failure, which grounds both its standing as a duty and its importance in the lives of fallible moral agents. (shrink)

It has been argued that Kants actions. However, it would be uncompromising to allow for only two possibilities: either full responsibility or none. Moreover, in the Metaphysics of Morals Kant himself claims that there can be degrees of responsibility, depending on the magnitude of the obstacles that have to be overcome when acting. I will show that this claim is consistent with Kant’s theory as a whole and thereby make transparent how degrees of responsibility are possible for Kant. The solution (...) is based on the distinction between two senses of responsibility: taking oneself to be an accountable person is an all-or-nothing affair, whereas praise- or blameworthiness for a particular action can still be a matter of degree. (shrink)

Resumen Platón proyecta en la República un programa cultural que supone la redefinición del papel de la poesía tradicional en razón de su asociación con los regímenes democrático y tiránico. Esto, según pretendo mostrar, puede vincularse de manera legítima con la polémica anticirenaica de Platón contra Aristipo. Para ello, por un lado, exploraré los rasgos del biotipo tiránico y su régimen concomitante en la República VIII-IX y, por otro, analizaré sus vínculos con los planteamientos anticirenaicos en el Gorgias. Este examen (...) permitirá ofrecer claves de análisis para dos pasajes muy discutidos de la República IX: el símil del ascensor y el número del tirano, que cobran una nueva luz a partir de la consideración de esta polémica intrasocrática.Plato put forward in Republic a cultural program which implies the redefinition of the role of traditional poetry due to its association with the democratic and tyrannical regimes. I intend to show that this point is connected with the anti-cyrenaic arguments that Plato raises against Aristippus. On the one hand, I will study the features of the tyrannical biotype and its correspondent regime in Republic VIII-IX, and, on the other, I will analyze its links with the anti-cyrenaic arguments in Gorgias. This exam will allow us to offer some clues to better understand two widely debated passages in Republic IX: the analogy of the lift and the tyrant’s number. Both acquire a new perspective when this intra-socratic polemic is taken into account. (shrink)

Semantic theory in linguistics cannot retain its traditional purity, free of pragmatic contextual considerations. Agreement with the preceding claim, generally shared by this volume's contributors, provides the setting for a presentation of various provocative approaches toward a precise definition of pragmatics along with a reconciliation of pragmatics with semantics. Here is a collection of leading-edge work that examines the semantics/pragmatics dispute in terms of phenomena such as indexicals, proper names, conventional and conversational implicatures, procedural meaning, and semantic underdetermination. Examples show (...) how these phenomena reach from the linguistic realm to the fields of psychology, philosophy, literature, and anthropology. (shrink)

This essay examines the concepts of ‘professionalism’ and ‘ethics’ as they are used in health professions education and, in particular, medical education. It proposes that, in order to make sense of the construct of ‘professional ethics,’ it would be helpful to conceive of professionalism and ethics as overlapping but not identical spheres. By allowing for areas of professionalism that are not directly pertinent to ethics, and areas of ethics that are not directly pertinent to the professional sphere, ‘professional ethics’ as (...) a focus of medical education can come into sharper relief. The essay argues that professional ethics should be understood not only in relation to major ethical issues such as end-of-life decisions, but also in relation to everyday actions and decisions. The essay ends by raising questions about how and by whom professional ethics is best taught. (shrink)

The paper explores the relationship of happiness and critique. It is a reflection on a decade of being trained in and practicing philosophical critique. It is a reflection on experiences I had during teaching on social justice, inclusion and diversity; and it is a reflection on the on-going debate on negative vs. affirmative forms of critique within feminist philosophy. It is also an exercise in imagining a transformation of our critical practices, where the embrace of more affirmative modes of critique (...) does not entail overlooking or turning a blind eye to the barriers that unjustly restrain some movements and allow for others' privileges to persist. I suggest that a diffractive approach to critique would allow for joyfully interchanging and alternating appropriate modes of debunking, of being the killjoy against sedimentations that weigh some of us down, with other modes of critique which allow us to augment and lift up examples of already on-going structural change. (shrink)

Although the exclusion of LGBTs from the rites and rights of marriage is arbitrary and unjust, the legal institution of marriage is itself so riddled with injustice that it would be better to create alternative forms of durable intimate partnership that do not invoke the power of the state. Card's essay develops a case for this position, taking up an injustice sufficiently serious to constitute an evil: the sheltering of domestic violence.

Implicating, as it is conceived in recent pragmatics, amounts to conveying a (propositional) content without saying it – a content providing no contribution to the truth-conditions of the proposition expressed by the sentence uttered. In this sense, implicating is a notion closely related to the work of Paul Grice (1913-1988) and of his precursors, followers and critics. Hence, the task of this article is to introduce and critically examine the explicit/implicit distinction, the Gricean notion of implicature (conventional and conversational) and (...) its recent developments and connections with the speaker's intentions, communicative responsibility and rationality. (shrink)

The paper emphasizes the inadequacy of formal semantics, the classical paradigm in semantics, in treating contextual dependence. Some phenomena of contextual dependence threaten one central assumption of the classical paradigm, namely the idea that linguistic expressions have a fixed meaning, and utterances have truth conditions well defined. It is possible to individuate three forms of contextual dependence: the one affecting pure indexicals, the one affecting demonstratives and "contextual expressions", and the one affecting all linguistic expressions. The third type of dependence (...) is top-down: context, and not only linguistic material, shows which variables must be instantiated, relying on context itself. The generalization of underdetermination to all linguistic expressions is in fact a kind of metadependence: the mode of dependence itself depends on context. (shrink)

Refutaciones Sofísticas ha sido usualmente interpretado como un intento de clasificación de sofismas. Este acercamiento, sin embargo, corre el riesgo de oscurecer la dimensión de sus propias intenciones confrontativas. El presente trabajo se propone enfatizar la importancia de las Refutaciones Sofísticas como parte de un programa antierístico que tiene por objetivo prioritario la filosofía megárica, en las antípodas de Aristóteles en el terreno epistemológico. Bajo esta luz, la resolución de argumentos erísticos excede el estudio lógico así como también la denuncia (...) sobre sus efectos prácticos y se erige como parte de una discusión entre líneas de inspiración socrática sobre los alcances y fines de la dialéctica y la filosofía en general. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to evaluate which context determines the illocutionary force of written or recorded utterances—those involved in written texts, films and images, conceived as recordings that can be seen or heard in different occasions. More precisely, my paper deals with the “metaphysical” or constitutive role of context—as opposed to its epistemic or evidential role: my goal is to determine which context is semantically relevant in order to fix the illocutionary force of a speech act, as distinct (...) from the information the addressee uses to ascertain the semantically relevant context. In particular I will try to assess two different perspectives on this problem, a Conventionalist Perspective and an Intentionalist Perspective. Drawing on the literature on indexicals in written texts and recorded messages, I will argue in favor of the Intentionalist Perspective: the relevant context is the one intended by the speaker. Bringing intentions into the picture, however, requires qualification; in particular, I will distinguish my Weak Intentionalist proposal from a Strong Intentionalist one. I will show that the Weak Intentionalist Perspective is flexible enough to deal with cases of delayed communication, but not so unrestricted as to yield counter-intuitive consequences. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to suggest that a necessary condition of autonomy has not been sufficiently recognized in the literature: the capacity to critically reflect on one’s practical attitudes (desires, preferences, values, etc.) in the light of new experiences . It will be argued that most prominent accounts of autonomy—ahistorical as well as history-sensitive—have either altogether failed to recognize this condition or at least failed to give an explicit account of it.

One crucial design characteristic of auditory texts embedded in instructional videos is the speaker gender, which has received some attention from empirical researcher in the recent years. Contrary to the theoretical assumption that similarity between the speaker’s and the learner’s gender might positively affect learning outcomes, the findings have often been mixed, showing null to contrary effects. Notwithstanding the effect on the outcomes, a closer look at how the speaker’s gender and speaker–learner similarities further determine cognitive variables, such as different (...) cognitive load types, is overdue. Moreover, on the part of the learner, the role of situational interest in the learning topic that might be gender related has been neglected so far. Therefore, this study explored the role of speaker and learner gender and their interaction regarding learning outcomes. We broaden our perspective by investigating the effects of gender-related differences concerning situational interest in the topic being taught and by determining different types of cognitive load. In a 2 (female/male speaker) × 2 (female/male learner) within- and between-subject design, 95 students learned about female and male human sexual maturity with an instructional video containing auditory explanations. Analysis results indicate that speaker gender and speaker–learner gender similarity had no impact on learning gains, situational interest, and cognitive load types. However, the results demonstrate that learner’s gender, especially for the topic of female sexual maturity, matters the most in line with the assessed variables. Compared with males, females had higher learning gains, reported higher interest in the topic, and invested more germane cognitive resources. Thus, instructional designers may want to consider learner gender-dependent interest and how it can be triggered when creating videos with auditory explanations. (shrink)

Contextualism is a view about meaning, semantic content and truth-conditions, bearing significant consequences for the characterisation of explicit and implicit content, the decoding/inferring distinction and the semantics/pragmatics interface. According to the traditional perspective in semantics (called "literalism" or "semantic minimalism"), it is possible to attribute truth-conditions to a sentence independently of any context of utterance, i.e. in virtue of its meaning alone. We must then distinguish between the proposition literally expressed by a sentence ("what is said" by the sentence, its (...) literal truth-conditions) and the implicit meaning of the sentence ("what is implicated" by a speaker uttering the sentence). Over the past forty years, however, an increasing number of linguists and philosophers have begun to underline the phenomenon of semantic underdetermination: the encoded meaning of the sentence employed by a speaker underdetermines the proposition explicitly expressed by an utterance of that sentence. According to the extreme version of this perspective – labelled "radical contextualism" - no sentence of a natural language expresses a complete proposition, or has fixed truth-conditions, even when unambiguous and devoid of indexicals. A sentence expresses a proposition only when completed and enriched with pragmatic constituents that do not correspond to any syntactic element of the sentence and yet are part of its semantic interpretation. More broadly, "contextualism" may be used to refer to a family of views which includes moderate contextualism (also called "indexicalism"), radical contextualism and non-indexical contextualism – and which contrasts with semantic minimalism. (shrink)

The testimonies of Stilpo of Megara show an anti-Platonic position within the megaric program against fundationists attempts. This paper studies a particular point of this deployment. We will review the origin of the views that locate thruth on the onomastic or on the predicative level. This initial survey will provide the basis for the study of the paradoxes of the nomination, an element Stilpo used as a tool to challenge the theory of Forms, and the analysis of the aporias of (...) predication, through which he rejects the combination of parts of the sentence in order to represent reality. The figure of Stilpo reveals the dialogical context in which ancient philosophies developed and, at the same time, displays ways of thinking the relationship between language and reality often forgotten. (shrink)

Este artículo explora las transformaciones experimentadas en los patrones y composición de la migración contemporánea ligadas a emergentes cambios económicos mundiales. Plantea que la alta participación de mujeres en la migración mundial está relacionada con la demanda en empleos precarios, principalmente en servicios, y que el destino migratorio está relacionado con el género del migrante, lo que contribuye a explicar la feminización de los flujos sur-sur. Se argumenta que las condiciones de vulnerabilidad económica de los migrantes laborales, y sus características (...) de género y origen nacional, determinan procesos de exclusión social en la sociedad de llegada, con consecuencias en su acceso a beneficios sociales, procesos de integración, y trayectorias de vida. (shrink)

The new book of Francesca Pentassuglio on Aeschines has come to fill an essential vacuum. The studies on Socratic philosophies have an interesting history that combines moments of great recognition with others of almost total disrepair. They were prominent in Antiquity and constituted a space where many lines were connected and enhanced the quantity and quality of the philosophical dialogue. Nothing at that time could make us suspect their subsequent fate and the development of an enormous di...

Resumen Este trabajo parte del fenómeno de constitución del diálogo socrático como formato discursivo para avanzar en la caracterización del modo en que varios representantes de este movimiento comprenden los límites del lenguaje, su poeticidad y su capacidad para representar lo real. La critica homérica en Antístenes y de los desarrollos sobre erótica en Esquines ofrecen un contexto interesante para sopesar los desarrollos platónicos y estudiar, en el contexto de conformación de la filosofía como género autónomo, la importancia y alcances (...) de las teorizaciones acerca de la poeticidad y la potencia epistémica del lenguaje.This paper studies the formation of the Socratic dialogues discourse in order to characterize the way in which several representatives of this movement understand the limits of language, its poetic character and its capability to represent reality. Homeric criticism in Antisthenes and Erotics studies in Aeschines offer an interesting context to measure Platonic works and to study the importance and scope of the theories about the poetic character and epistemic power of language in the context in which Philosophy was formed as an autonomous genre. (shrink)