In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anthony Close CENTERING THE DE-CENTERERS: FOUCAULT AND LAS MENINAS Over the last two decades, French avant-garde critical theory has shaken the pillars of the traditionalist temple with this thought: the interpreter of a literary text should not primarily be concerned with its author's intentional design, but rather with the surreptitious forces which shape it, warp it, and ultimately turn it into a problematic will-ofthe -wisp. The "decoding" of those (...) forces takes many forms (Freudian, anthropological, and so on), of which deconstruction is the most celebrated ; "de-centering"—the banishment of the intentional subject from the focus of interpretation — is common to all. In the first part of this article I wish to set out my philosophical objections to that exclusion, and in the second part, to examine an interesting failure to make it effective in practice: Foucault's analysis of Velazquez's painting Las Meninas, which constitutes the first chapter of Les mots et ks choses. One of my reasons for choosing Foucault's text as an example is that its premises are in some ways comparable to the philosophy of the archdeconstructor, Derrida. My skepticism about them and the analytic method based on them is not meant to suggest that I regard Foucault's historical studies as valueless. On the contrary, I recognize that he, together with some other decoders (particularly Barthes), has important things to say. My attack is a form of defense. I wish to uphold the value of traditional forms of interpretation by showing that though Foucault, like other decoders, casts radical doubts upon them in theory, he tends to negate those doubts by the implications of his practice. 21 22Philosophy and Literature M. H. Abrams has defined the traditionalist historian of culture as one who assumes that (a) authors of the past exploited the norms and possibilities of their language to say something determinate, (b) the properly equipped historian can approximate to their meaning, (c) his interpretation can aspire to a reasonable degree of objectivity. ' Let that serve as a working definition of my traditionalist standpoint. This has a philosophical rationale, basically Wittgensteinian and Austinian, which needs to be explained and set over against some of decoding's typical presuppositions. I choose Derrida's as an example. From my perspective, two objections can be leveled against his thought: its tendency to hypostatize the intentional subject as a metaphysical essence which must be reached through and beyond language, and to see language itself as an unrealistically slippery medium. Both objections were raised against him by Searle in their famous polemic with each other.2 Derrida's thought is inscribed within, even while it reacts against, a traditional conception of language as a name-like substitute for essence. According to this conception, influentially represented in this century by Husserl's phenomenology, bits of language somewhat resemble sterling currency bills which bear on their face the legend: "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of? pound(s)" That is, they are potentially capable ofbeing cashed for lumps of being, which can thus be possessed by mind. Derrida counters that the currency is fraudulent: it continually defers presence and possession, rendering problematic its relation to being and self, and their very existence. In order to foster the illusion that he is master of his words, hence of what they designate, Western Man has historically given status of originality to voice rather than to writing, to a form of expression which is seemingly intimate to consciousness rather than external. The paradoxical thesis ofDe lagrammatologie is that writing came first. One of the routes by which Derrida arrives at this conclusion is Saussure's conception of the discontinuous, articulated nature of language and the negative and differential character of linguistic signifiers, not stably linked to universal referents.3 On this basis he builds his idea of différance (a pun on difference and deferral ), the elusive negative margin which makes language possible, and at the same time, makes impossible consciousness's full presence to itself and to being.4 Hence Derrida's notion of language's anarchic and willful power to detach itself from die intentions or usage of its users and to float... (shrink)

What is indoctrination? This paper clarifies and defends a structural epistemic account of indoctrination according to which indoctrination is the inculcation of closed-minded belief caused by “epistemically insulating content.” This is content which contains a proviso that serious critical consideration of the relevant alternatives to one's belief is reprehensible whether morally or epistemically. As such, it does not demand that indoctrination be a type of unethical instruction, ideological instruction, unveridical instruction, or instruction which bypasses the agent's rational evaluation. In (...) this way, we can account for why indoctrination can occur for liberal democratic beliefs as much as it occurs for fascist, fundamentalist, or fanatical belief: for indoctrination is fundamentally a structural epistemic phenomenon. (shrink)

What is indoctrination? This paper clarifies and defends a structural epistemic account of indoctrination according to which indoctrination is the inculcation of closed-minded belief caused by “epistemically insulating content.” This is content which contains a proviso that serious critical consideration of the relevant alternatives to one's belief is reprehensible, whether morally or epistemically. As such, it does not demand that indoctrination be a type of unethical instruction, ideological instruction, unveridical instruction, or instruction which bypasses the agent's rational evaluation. In (...) this way, we can account for why indoctrination can occur for liberal democratic beliefs as much as it occurs for fascist, fundamentalist, or fanatical belief: for indoctrination is fundamentally a structural epistemic phenomenon. (shrink)

It’s often claimed that some people—fundamentalists or fanatics—are indeed sealed off from rational criticism. And every month new pop psychology books appear, describing the dumb ways ordinary people make decisions, as revealed by psychological experiments. The conclusion is that all or most people are fundamentally irrational. -/- Ray Scott Percival sets out to demolish the whole notion of the closed mind and of human irrationality. There is a difference between making mistakes and being irrational. Though humans are prone (...) to mistakes, they remain rational. In fact, making mistakes is a sign of rationality: a totally non-rational entity could not make a mistake. -/- Rationality does not mean absence of error; it means the possibility of correcting error in the light of criticism. In this sense, all human beliefs are rational: they are all vulnerable to being abandoned when shown to be faulty. -/- Percival agrees that people cling stubbornly to their beliefs, but he maintains, first, that not being too ready to abandon one’s beliefs is rational, and second, that people do not cling to their beliefs indefinitely or “come what may.” The illusion that they do can be dispelled by examining what really goes on in the formation and abandonment of beliefs, and here we need to observe the high rate of turnover in membership of ideological movements, as well as their numerous splits and schisms. -/- Percival examines and refutes the arguments of writers who have upheld the Irrationality or Closed Mind thesis, including Raymond Boudon, Serge Chakotin, Richard Dawkins, Jon Elster, Ernest Gellner, Adolf Hitler, Leszek Kolakowski, Walter Laqueur, Gustav Le Bon, Karl Popper, and Max Weber. -/- A key aspect of Percival’s approach is to identify “the persuader’s predicament,” the situational logic of the propagandist. Percival contends that a propagandist is faced with a trade-off between his message being closed to criticism and the message reaching and converting as many people as possible. It is possible to make a belief system more closed to criticism, but only by limiting the wide dissemination of the system. Percival illustrates the way belief systems adapt to criticism by an examination of two ideologies, Marxism and Freudianism, and by various examples drawn from the history of religion. (shrink)

The ongoing legal and bioethics debates on consent requirements for collecting, storing, and utilizing human biological material for purposes of basic and applied research—that is, genomic research biobanking—have already managed to pass through three ostensibly dissimilar stages.

A sample of 711 16 year old adolescents completed an Anglicised form of the Dommert revision of the Rokeach Dogmatism Scale, together with the Junior Eysenck Personality Inventory and Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices. They also provided information about church attendance, personal prayer and paternal occupation. The data demonstrate that higher dogmatism scores are associated with lower IQ scores, lower social class backgrounds, higher neuroticism scores, higher lie scale scores and being male. No correlation was found between dogmatism scores and personal (...) prayer, church attendance or extroversion scores. These findings are discussed against the wider background of the personal and social correlates of dogmatism. (shrink)

The paper argues that the view that the particular quantifier is ‘existentially loaded’ is a relatively new one historically and that it has become entrenched in modern philosophical logic for less than happy reasons.

Most mental health research largely ignores or minimises gender and age differences in depression. In ‘Don't mind the gap: Why do we not care about the gender gap in mental health?’, Patalay and Demkowicz identify a dearth of research on the causal factors of depression in young women. They attribute this to an over-reliance on biological accounts of gender differences in depression. Patalay and Demkowicz conclude that a person-centred approach that meaningfully engages with the reports of young women with (...) depression is more likely to expose the social drivers of depression that impact this group. This commentary focuses on Patalay and Demkowicz's call to examine the patient's lived experience. We argue that there is an urgent need to reflect upon the methodologies involved in examining lived experience and how they can be best utilised. Ultimately, we advocate for an approach known as ‘phenomenological psychopathology’, through a phenomenological investigation of depression in young women, we can go some way towards closing the gender gap. (shrink)

According to Gauchet we are living in a `society of individuals'. But a central term is missing from that formula, and not by any accident, for contemporary society has lost it from view: the term of the political. In sum, thus reads Gauchet's diagnosis, society today is haunted by a kind of individualism out of which no society can be conceived, as it obfuscates its political dimension. The aim of this article is to elaborate this diagnosis, and more specifically the (...) idea that there is no society, and therefore no individual either, without the political. In order to do so, I will explore the meaning of the formula `society of individuals'. Within the scope of this analysis, I shall primarily pay attention to the `primacy of the political' in Gauchet. To conclude, I will assess Gauchet's diagnosis, by fathoming in what sense contemporary individualism, besides being an `eclipse of the political', is also a threat to democracy. (shrink)

I will focus on the topic announced in the subtitle of Professor Descombes’ profound and provocative work: The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism. In the end, I will agree with practically everything in his incisive ‘critique’ except its conclusion: that cognitivism is incoherent. What he shows instead, I think, is that cognitivism, as an account of human thought and understanding, is deeply false. The difference matters because incoherence is harder to prove and, prima facie, less plausible. But, if (...) the same argument, slightly recast, shows falsehood with even more conviction, then the essential point is saved after all. So, following a quick characterization of cognitivism, I will attempt to distill what I take to be the main grounds and themes of Descombes’ critique, explain why I don’t think they expose an incoherence, and then show how they might be recast in a way that is devastating all the same. (shrink)

This paper argues that underlying Leo Strauss's interpretation of Early Modern political thought as premised on a break with nature as a moral standard is a contemporary moral and political phenomenology which inhibits the understanding of that period in its own terms.

This article compares the thinking of Andrzej Walicki and Isaiah Berlin on the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and on Soviet totalitarianism. It suggests that Berlin saw totalitarianism as an externally imposed political system, whereas Walicki understood totalitarianism to depend both on external pressure and inner coercion. The article draws on a variety of published and unpublished sources, including personal interviews with Walicki and Berlin’s archives at the New Bodleian Library in Oxford, England.

The legalization of Christianity occurred in 313 when Constantine’s Edict of Milan granted freedom of worship to Christians, along with tax exemption and patronage to bishops, expecting this would consolidate the Church and unify the Empire. Instead, he was confronted with bitter doctrinal disputes and incessant jurisdictional rivalry owing to scriptural obscurity provoking diverse interpretations. As Freeman states, “when one puts together the Gospels, the letters of Paul, the Book of Revelation and the Old Testament, there is no sense of (...) a coherent ‘axiomatic’ base on which to build theological truths”. Though claiming that Christian doctrines were divinely revealed once and for all, in fact since the fourth century they were decided by imperial councils or papal decrees. (shrink)

Essays discuss various aspects of Bloom's book concerning modern education in American.

Despite its significance in neuroscience and computation, McCulloch and Pitts's celebrated 1943 paper has received little historical and philosophical attention. In 1943 there already existed a lively community of biophysicists doing mathematical work on neural networks. What was novel in McCulloch and Pitts's paper was their use of logic and computation to understand neural, and thus mental, activity. McCulloch and Pitts's contributions included (i) a formalism whose refinement and generalization led to the notion of finite automata (an important formalism in (...) computability theory), (ii) a technique that inspired the notion of logic design (a fundamental part of modern computer design), (iii) the first use of computation to address the mind–body problem, and (iv) the first modern computational theory of mind and brain. (shrink)

The debate over the central issue confronted in Closing--the role of the university and the liberal arts in the United States--has become increasingly urgent and contentious. The goal of this collection of essays is to consider what we can learn about the dilemmas confronting American culture through a consideration of both The Closing of the American Mind and the debate it has aroused. The contributors differ among themselves as to the validity of both the diagnoses and the solutions Bloom (...) offers, yet they do not engage in "Bloom-bashing" or hero-worship. The goal of the book is to place the debate over Closing into the larger context than can be achieved in a book review format. To provide the historical perspective that has been missing in the controversy over Bloom, included in this volume is Christopher Lasch's "The Great Experiment: Where Did it Go Wrong?" Also included are essays by other leading critics: John K. Roth, Frank Caucci, William K. Buckley, Milton R. Stern, Susan Bourgeois, Margaret C. Jones, Daniel Zins, Kenneth Alan Hovey, Bonnie A. Hain, John Peacock, Patricia L. Lundberg, Peter Siedlecki, Mark W. Roche, William Thickstun, Lorraine Clark, and Gerald Graff. This volume of essays does much to illuminate the issue surrounding The Closing of the American Mind. (shrink)

Attempts to close the mind-body gap traditionally resort to a priori speculations. Motivated by dissatisfaction with such accounts, neurophenomenology constitutes one of the first attempts to close the mind-body gap non-metaphysically. Nonetheless, it faces significant challenges. Many of these challenges arise from its abandoning of transcendentality and its dim view of bioinformation. In this paper, I propose a superior non-metaphysical alternative: a combination of a reformed biosemiotics and transcendental phenomenology. My approach addresses the difficulties of neurophenomenology, while retaining (...) the merit of mutual constraints. Biosemiotics pays respect to bioinformation while imposing the sign-meaning duality on primitive forms of life, which is a relic of anthropomorphism. To avoid this unjustified commitment, I argue for a sign-free biosemantics which replaces Peirce’s semiotics with Husserl’s theory of meaning and exchanges naturalism for transcendentalism. Meaning, according to the resulting account, is the “intended as such”. The irreality of meaning results from what I term the ‘higher visibility’ of intentionality. I argue that the mind-body gap can be locally closed in a non-metaphysical manner as the result of reflection upon empirical biological investigations. Sign-free biosemantics uncovers the meanings for the organism that are implicit in biological research, while transcendental phenomenology analyses the experiences that biologists undergo when associating the physical with the biological level, while at the same time also analysing the very framework within which they work. Meanwhile, biosemiotics frees phenomenology from its methodological limitations, and the two domains establish mutual constraints in a more radical form than neurophenomenology. (shrink)

The United States Government does not mandate that US based firms follow US social and environmental law in foreign markets. However, because many developing countries do not have strong human rights, labor, and environmental laws, many multinationals have adopted voluntary corporate responsibility initiatives to self-regulate their overseas social and environmental practices. This article argues that voluntary actions, while important, are insufficient to address the magnitude of problems companies confront as they operate in developing countries where governance is often inadequate. The (...) United States can do more to ensure that its multinationals act responsibly everywhere they operate. First, policymakers should define the social and environmental responsibilities of global companies. They must consistently make their expectations for global business clear – and underscore that this objective can often be accomplished without mandates. Second, the US should closely examine the policies that undermine global Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and address the many conflicting signals sent by policymakers. Third, the President should make the US government a CSR model by examining how to use its purchasing power to promote human rights. Finally, the US government should require pension funds to report on the social and environmental consequences of their investments. In these ways, Americans can mind our business – and thus make sure that US based firms do not undermine social and environmental progress when they operate in the developing world. (shrink)

A major challenge to the Doctrine of Double Effect is the concern that an agent’s intention can be identified in such a fine-grained way as to eliminate an intention to harm from a putative example of an intended harm, and yet, the resulting case appears to be a case of impermissibility. This is the so-called “closeness problem.” Many people believe that one can address the closeness problem by adopting Warren Quinn’s version of the DDE, call it DDE*, which distinguishes between (...) harmful direct agency and harmful indirect agency. In this paper, I first argue that Quinn’s DDE* is just as vulnerable to the closeness problem as the DDE is. Second, some might think that what we should therefore do is give up on intentions altogether and move towards some kind of non-state-of-mind, victim-based deontology. I shall argue against this move and explain why intentions are indispensable to an adequate nonconsequentialist theory. Finally, I shall propose a new way of answering the closeness problem. (shrink)

Bloom's now famous manifesto for the salvation of American academia ("Back to the classics!") is worthy of serious consideration. His appraisal of current trends, such as the tendency to move away from theoretical traditions and towards practical or technical degrees, is often penetrating. (A good example is his discussion of the MBA degree: the degree itself is unobjectionable; but the value modern society places on it is a reflection of the "values" of modern society -values which have a destructive side (...) to them.). (shrink)

In this chapter, I revisit the issue of the explanatory gap that is supposed to open when considering identity statements between physical and mental phenomena. I show that the question asked in the original formulation of the explanatory gap was this: ʻwhy this phenomenal character, rather than any other, is attached to this physiological process?ʼ I argue that this question can be answered, because there is a natural fit between the phenomenal character of experiences and their functional roles. For example, (...) pains feel inherently unpleasant, and that explains why they cause avoidance behaviour, and the felt location and intensity of pain indicates the location and extent of damage to the body. I discuss some other possible gaps in our understanding the relationship between the mental and the physical, and conclude that the fit between functional role and phenomenal character goes a long way, though probably not the whole way, to closing the explanatory gap. (shrink)

This essay is an explication and analysis of the work of Sergei Kotliarevskii, a major Russian liberal theorist, focusing on his 1915 treatise Vlast’ i pravo. Problema pravovogo gosudarstva (Power and Law: The Problem of the Lawful State). Although the “lawful state” has long been a subject of interest and controversy (even at the definitional level) among historians and political scientists, curiously Kotliarevskii has not received the attention he deserves. His study of the concept of the lawful state, which for (...) him was integrally related to the ideal of the rule of law, is an important Russian contribution to the history and philosophy of law and the state. This essay explores the philosophical sources and contexts of his work; his understanding of the relationship among power, law, and thestate; his thesis that religious ideas and institutions were most important in the historical development of legal consciousness; his consideration of the modern constitutional state; and his conviction that personhood—the absolute value and dignity of the human person—was the ultimate justification for the rule of law. (shrink)

Minds, Ideas and Objects is a collection of conference papers on the topic of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of ideas or “sensory experience, thought, knowledge and their objects.” At least half the twenty-three papers are by well-known historians of philosophy who seldom disappoint, and there is some equally thought-provoking work among the rest. Some papers say little that is surprising, and some, including good ones, fail to convince, but few are weak. It is perhaps to be expected that coverage of (...) the period is uneven, but chance has played some odd tricks, giving us one paper each on Leibniz and Hume and none on Spinoza, whereas Berkeley excites the attention of six contributors, one more even than Kant. Most philosophers discussed are narrowly canonical, with just a page on Cudworth and only four even on Reid, but there are a couple of welcome articles on the vastly rewarding, until recently seldom studied Arnauld-Malebranche debate. Günter Zöller’s “The Austrian Way of Ideas,” summarizing the views on intentionality of Brentano and his pupils, Twardowski, Meinong, and Husserl, reminds us of the close continuities between early-modern and twentieth-century concerns. (shrink)

Kant made a number of highly original discoveries about the mind - about its ability to synthesise a single, coherent representation of self and world, about the unity it must have to do so, and about the mind's awareness of itself and the semantic apparatus it uses to achieve this awareness. The past fifty years have seen intense activity in research on human cognition. Even so, Kant's discoveries have not been superseded, and some of them have not even (...) been assimilated into current thinking. That is particularly true of his work on unity and on the semantic apparatus of self-awareness. The first four chapters of this book present a comprehensive overview of Kant's model for non-specialists, an overview largely unencumbered by detailed exegesis. The work then offers a close study of five major discussions of the mind in the Critique of Pure Reason and Anthropology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Artificial Minds and the Dilemma of Personal IdentityChristian Coseru (bio)Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind. By Susan Schneider. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.I. IntroductionAll diurnal organisms are stirred to action by light, but as entomologists have long known, for nocturnal insects the pull of its radiance can also spell doom. The image of a moth drawn to flame is suggestive of the sort of self-destructive (...) behavior that poets have long used to maximum rhetorical effect: "Thus had the candle singed the moth" proclaims Portia in the Merchant of Venice, pitying the fate that befell Arragon. The deceptive lure of artificial lights, however, is no longer mere fodder for the poetic imagination. Ecologists are warning us that species accustomed to navigating by moon or starlight, from beetles to seals and sea turtles, are getting confused, or worse.1 And medical science is beginning to establish a link between night-time light exposure and various sleep and metabolic disorders.2 Yet our Promethean ingenuity is a sight to behold: fueled by illumination tropes as metaphors for awareness and understanding, our mastery of light and of the electromagnetic wave spectrum has brought forth technologies, from CT scans and electromicrography to myoelectric sensors and solid-state lighting, that inspire utopian visions of genetically engineered and neurally enhanced post-humans alongside dystopian fantasies of runaway cyborgs. Among these technologies, AI stands out as the shiny new object commanding our attention.The future envisioned as a result of these technological advancements now includes the prospect of artificial minds, minds that, if they were to come anywhere close to resembling ours, let alone to surpassing human intelligence, would pose serious existential and ethical challenges for humanity. Or so the story goes, if Susan Schneider's compelling foray into AI research is any indication. Indeed, Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind (Schneider 2019) offers a philosophically savvy investigation of the debates that animate much of the contemporary fascination with the prospect of machine intelligence, which by some of the more optimistic [End Page 281] measures could be achieved within the lifetime of most millennials.3 As books aimed at a general audience pondering the promises and perils of superintelligent AI go, Artificial You succeeds precisely where most others falter: it brings conceptual clarity to often vague and nebulous claims by techno optimists about the impending emergence of consciousness from computational complexity, while at the same time offering a sober reminder that the technology underlying, say, artificial neural networks is far more advanced than most AI skeptics realize.I will not address Schneider's survey of the state of the art in AI research, which is succinct, informative, and for the most part illustrative of the transhumanist ethos she appears to embrace. Instead, I will focus on the problem of personal identity and the seemingly insurmountable challenges it raises for the prospect of radical human enhancement and synthetic consciousness. Specifically, I will argue that conceptions of personal identity rooted in psychological continuity akin to those proposed by Parfit and the Buddha may not provide the sort of grounding that many transhumanists chasing the dream of life extension think that they do if they rest upon ontologies that assume an incompatibility between identity and change. I will also suggest that process ontologies that take change to be primary, such as those that align with contemporary systems biology, offer a better way out of the personal identity dilemma. But the solution in this case, which regards biological organisms as processes rather than things, may constrain the possibility of biologically inspired superintelligent aliens (BISAs), which Schneider (following Bostrom 2014) posits as possibly the most common form of (extraterrestrial) superintelligence in the universe.II. Enhancement Beyond RecognitionPerhaps the central leitmotif of transhumanism is the idea of enhancement by means of current technologies such as genetic engineering and information technology as well as future ones such as nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. The range of enhancement options includes the extension of the human lifespan, the elimination of disease, and most importantly the augmentation of human intellectual, physical, and affective capacities (Bostrom 2003b). Further down the line, enhancement may move beyond merely augmenting existing... (shrink)