Epiphenomenalism is the thesis that though physical events may cause mental events, those mental events never cause physical events. In this paper, I will be concerned with the claim that our thoughts, intentions, and awareness play no causal role in producing actions. Though epiphenomenalism has been defended with a priori philosophical arguments, the majority of the support that it has gained in recent years has come from advances in neuroscience. At the center of these experiments is the Libet paradigm that (...) aims to show that our actions are initiated by unconscious brain processes prior to our awareness of the intention or decision to perform the corresponding actions. It has been widely suggested that these studies support the view that consciousness is epiphenomenal, and if Libet-style experiments support this conclusion, the results have direct implications for free will. I argue by way of a dilemma that any study that relies on reports of subjects’ awareness in its methodology cannot be used to support epiphenomenalism because the experimenters would have to rule out the possibility that consciousness plays a causal role in order to do so. (shrink)

This chapter considers the possibility and ethics of collective forgiveness. I begin by distinguishing between different forms of forgiveness to illustrate what it might look like for a collective to forgive that is distinct from the individual and group-based forgiveness of its members. I then consider how emotional models of forgiveness might capture the phenomenon of collective forgiveness. I argue that shortcomings with emotional models suggest that performative and social practice models of forgiveness more plausibly extend to collective forgiveness. I (...) close by exploring a range of moral questions and objections to practices of collective forgiveness. (shrink)

This article reflects on the work of feminist bioethicists over the past ten years, reviewing how effective feminists have been in using relational theory to reorient bioethics and where we hope it will go from here. Feminist bioethicists have made significant achievements using relational theory to shape the notion of autonomy, bringing to light the relevance of patients' social circumstances and where they are situated within systems of privilege and oppression. But there is much work to be done to reorient (...) bioethics so that it is capable of addressing some current public health challenges. We argue that relational theory holds promise for beginning this work. (shrink)

This book explores the nature, value, and role of hope in human life under conditions of oppression. Oppression is often a threat and damage to hope, yet many members of oppressed groups, including prominent activists pursuing a more just world, find hope valuable and even essential to their personal and political lives. This book offers a unique evaluative framework for hope that captures the intrinsic value of hope for many of us, the rationality and morality of hope, and ultimately how (...) we can hope well in the non-ideal world we share. It develops an account of the relationship between hope and anger about oppression and argues that anger tends to be accompanied by hopes for repair. When people’s hopes for repair are not realized, as is often the case for those who are oppressed, anger can evolve into bitterness: a form of unresolved anger involving a loss of hope that injustice will be sufficiently acknowledged and addressed. But even when all hope might seem lost or out of reach, faith can enable resilience in the face of oppression. Spiritual faith, faith in humanity, and moral faith are part of what motivates people to join in solidarity against injustice, through which hope can be recovered collectively. Joining with others who share one’s experiences or commitments for a better world, and uniting with them in collective action, can restore and strengthen hope for the future when hope might otherwise be lost. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what the attitude of hope consists in. We argue that shortcomings in recent theories of hope have methodological roots in that they proceed with little regard for the rich body of literature on the emotions. Taking insights from work in the philosophy of emotions, we argue that hope involves a kind of normative perception. We then develop a strategy for determining the content of this perception, arguing that hope is a perception of practical reasons. (...) Our proposal stands in contrast with familiar views on which hope is fundamentally about the good. We conclude by considering the increasingly popular idea that some hopes are non-intentional and thus, by implication, non-perceptual. We reply by arguing that our perceptual theory plausibly generalizes to these instances of hope. (shrink)

A few years ago, it was common for philosophers to begin inquiry into hope by noting that the subject has received little attention in the philosophical literature. But our ability to make this claim is quickly coming to an end; hope has been earning increasing recognition in the discipline, with philosophers exploring important questions related to the nature of hope, what makes hope rational, and how hope is connected to human wellbeing and agency. Despite this recent interest, however, there remains (...) very little discussion of the social and political dimensions of hope. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate the importance of a feminist perspective in bringing these dimensions into fuller view. I argue that feminist insights into the relational nature of the self, which call attention to where selves are socially situated in relation to others, enable a richer understanding of the nature and value of hope. (shrink)

This paper defends an account of moral shock as an emotional response to intensely bewildering events that are also of moral significance. This theory stands in contrast to the common view that shock is a form of intense surprise. On the standard model of surprise, surprise is an emotional response to events that violated one's expectations. But I show that we can be morally shocked by events that confirm our expectations. What makes an event shocking is not that it violated (...) one's expectations, but that the content of the event is intensely bewildering. What causes moral shock is, I argue, our lack of emotional preparedness for the event. And I show that, despite the relative lack of attention to shock in the philosophical literature, the emotion is significant to moral, social, and political life. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is not to offer yet another theory of hope, but to re-orient the discussion about the nature of hope to focus on hope’s place in our hearts: on how, exactly, hope makes us feel. Although philosophers writing on hope have certainly paid attention to hope’s affective dimensions, when affect is discussed, it is often assumed that hope is positively valenced. I argue that descriptions of the phenomenology of hope as positively valenced paint hope as brighter (...) and cheerier than many hopes tend to be, and that hope is not always pleasant to experience (even in part). In making this argument, I focus specifically on hopes we form in response to non-ideal conditions, hopes that are tainted by the negatively valenced emotion of fear. I then consider the complex relationship between hope, fear, and basal emotions: those emotions which are "experiential backdrops" on which particular emotions arise. I close by reflecting on implications for the relationship between hope and motivation, and raise the question of whether hope itself is an emotion. (shrink)

Philosophers have started to theorize the concept of ‘affective injustice’ to make sense of certain ways in which people’s affective lives are significantly marked by injustice. This new research has offered important insights into people’s lived experiences under oppression. But it is not immediately clear how the concept ‘affective injustice’ picks out something different from the closely related phenomenon of ‘psychological oppression.’ This paper considers the question of why we might need new theories of affective injustice in light of the (...) well-established cross-disciplinary literature on psychological oppression. I suggest that, whereas psychological oppression is found in the hearts and minds of people who are oppressed, affective injustice is most fruitfully understood as a structural phenomenon. It operates primarily outside of us: in affective norms, practices, and relationships that are embedded in social conditions of injustice. The account I offer is tentative and incomplete. But my hope is that it will help show how theorizing affective injustice has the potential to enrich existing theories of justice and theories of psychological oppression. (shrink)

Resentment, as it is currently understood in the philosophical literature, is individual. That is, it is anger about a moral injury done to oneself. But in some cases, resentment responds to systemic harms and injustices rather than direct moral injuries. The purpose of this paper is to move beyond individualistic conceptions of resentment to develop an account of collective resentment that better captures the character and effects of the emotion in these cases. I use the example of indigenous and settler (...) Canadians’ reciprocal resentments in response to the Indian Residential Schools and continuing political disagreements as an example of a context in which understanding collective resentment is important. (shrink)

Apologies are an important part of moral life and a method by which someone can satisfy their reparative obligations. At the same time, apologies can be used both as a shield to protect the person apologizing and as a weapon against the person to whom the apology is owed. In this paper we unpack both claims. We defend two principles one should employ to try to avoid such bad outcomes: (1) Apologies must be one-sided and nontransactional, and (2) the wrongdoer (...) must be willing to pay what they owe. We argue that these principles require the wrongdoer’s emotional vulnerability. Furthermore, we argue that the duty to be vulnerable in issuing apologies helps to make sense of why apologizing well is so difficult and why members of privileged groups might be especially prone to apologizing badly. (shrink)

Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs) have famously served as counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). The fine-grained version of the flicker defense has become one of the most popular responses to FSCs. Proponents of this defense argue that there is an alternative available to all agents in FSCs such that the cases do not show that PAP is false. Specifically, the agents could have done otherwise than decide on their own, and this available alternative is robust enough to ground moral (...) responsibility. In this paper, I argue that, when relying on definitions of ‘on one’s own’ within the literature on FSCs, a case can be constructed in which the agent could not have done otherwise than make a decision on his own. Insofar as this new case is successful, it will be able to avoid arguments about robustness while showing that moral responsibility does not require alternative possibilities of the type argued for by proponents of the fine-grained version of the flicker defense. (shrink)

In this article, I defend a conception of bitterness as a moral emotion and offer an evaluative framework for assessing when instances of bitterness are morally justified. I argue that bitterness is a form of unresolved anger involving a loss of hope that an injustice or other moral wrong will be sufficiently acknowledged and addressed. Orienting the discussion around instances of bitterness in response to social and political injustices, I argue that bitterness is sometimes morally justified even if it is (...) ultimately undesirable to bear. I then suggest that focusing only on the harms and risks of bitterness can distract from its positive role as a moral reminder about a past or persistent injustice, indicating that there is still moral and often political work left to do. Finally, I address the concern that bearing bitterness may lead to despair and inaction. I respond by arguing that moral agents can and do persist in their moral and political struggles with bitterness, and without hope that their efforts will be successful. (shrink)

David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is the definitive statement of the greatest philosopher in the English language. His arguments in support of reasoning from experience, and against the "sophistry and illusion"of religiously inspired philosophical fantasies, caused controversy in the eighteenth century and are strikingly relevant today, when faith and science continue to clash. The Enquiry considers the origin and processes of human thought, reaching the stark conclusion that we can have no ultimate understanding of the physical world, or (...) indeed our own minds. In either sphere we must depend on instinctive learning from experience, recognizing our animal nature and the limits of reason. Hume's calm and open-minded skepticism thus aims to provide a new basis for science, liberating us from the "superstition" of false metaphysics and religion. His Enquiry remains one of the best introductions to the study of philosophy, and his edition places it in its historical and philosophical context. (shrink)

A leading political theorist’s groundbreaking defense of ideal conceptions of justice in political philosophy Throughout the history of political philosophy and politics, there has been continual debate about the roles of idealism versus realism. For contemporary political philosophy, this debate manifests in notions of ideal theory versus nonideal theory. Nonideal thinkers shift their focus from theorizing about full social justice, asking instead which feasible institutional and political changes would make a society more just. Ideal thinkers, on the other hand, question (...) whether full justice is a standard that any society is likely ever to satisfy. And, if social justice is unrealistic, are attempts to understand it without value or importance, and merely utopian? Utopophobia argues against thinking that justice must be realistic, or that understanding justice is only valuable if it can be realized. David Estlund does not offer a particular theory of justice, nor does he assert that justice is indeed unrealizable—only that it could be, and this possibility upsets common ways of proceeding in political thought. Estlund engages critically with important strands in traditional and contemporary political philosophy that assume a sound theory of justice has the overriding, defining task of contributing practical guidance toward greater social justice. Along the way, he counters several tempting perspectives, including the view that inquiry in political philosophy could have significant value only as a guide to practical political action, and that understanding true justice would necessarily have practical value, at least as an ideal arrangement to be approximated. Demonstrating that unrealistic standards of justice can be both sound and valuable to understand, Utopophobia stands as a trenchant defense of ideal theory in political philosophy. (shrink)

This article defends an account of collective hope that arises through solidarity in the pursuit of justice. I begin by reviewing recent literature on the nature of hope. I then explore the relationship between hope and solidarity to demonstrate the ways in which solidarity can give rise to hope. I suggest that the hope born of solidarity is collective when it is shared by at least some others, when it is caused or strengthened by activity in a collective action setting, (...) and when the reciprocal hopeful expressions of individual group members result in an emotional atmosphere of hope that extends across the group. In the context of social movements, collective hope emerges alongside the collective intentions and actions of the solidarity group; namely, in the pursuit of a form of social justice that inspires the movement. I then suggest that the object of collective hope born of solidarity is the guiding ideal of justice and reflect on what it might mean to hope well for justice. (shrink)

The zetetic turn in epistemology raises three questions about epistemic and zetetic norms. First, there is the relationship question: what is the relationship between epistemic and zetetic norms? Are some epistemic norms zetetic norms, or are epistemic and zetetic norms distinct? Second, there is the tension question: are traditional epistemic norms in tension with plausible zetetic norms? Third, there is the reaction question: how should theorists react to a tension between epistemic and zetetic norms? Drawing on an analogy to practical (...) philosophy, I develop a focal point view to resolve these motivating questions. On the focal point view, traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms answer different types of normative questions. There is nevertheless a familiar type of evaluative tension between traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms, but this tension is an unavoidable feature of the normative landscape and not a sign that traditional epistemic norms need revision. But if traditional epistemic norms are not zetetic norms, then in what sense is zetetic epistemology a project for epistemologists? I conclude by articulating a sense in which some nontraditional epistemic norms are zetetic norms, and in which zetetic epistemology is an important part of the study of theoretical rationality. (shrink)

One of the enduring concerns of moral philosophy is deciding who or what is deserving of ethical consideration. Much recent attention has been devoted to the "animal question" -- consideration of the moral status of nonhuman animals. In this book, David Gunkel takes up the "machine question": whether and to what extent intelligent and autonomous machines of our own making can be considered to have legitimate moral responsibilities and any legitimate claim to moral consideration. The machine question poses a (...) fundamental challenge to moral thinking, questioning the traditional philosophical conceptualization of technology as a tool or instrument to be used by human agents. Gunkel begins by addressing the question of machine moral agency: whether a machine might be considered a legitimate moral agent that could be held responsible for decisions and actions. He then approaches the machine question from the other side, considering whether a machine might be a moral patient due legitimate moral consideration. Finally, Gunkel considers some recent innovations in moral philosophy and critical theory that complicate the machine question, deconstructing the binary agent--patient opposition itself. Technological advances may prompt us to wonder if the science fiction of computers and robots whose actions affect their human companions could become science fact. Gunkel's argument promises to influence future considerations of ethics, ourselves, and the other entities who inhabit this world. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can (...) just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Time-Reversal Invariance 2. Thermodynamics 3. Statistical Mechanics 4. The Reversibility Objections and the Past-Hypothesis 5. The Scope of Thermodynamics 6. The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention 7. Quantum Mechanics Appendix: Gedankenexperiments with Heat Engines Index Reviews of this book: The foundations of statistical mechanisms are often presented in physics textbooks in a rather obscure and confused way. By challenging common ways of thinking about this subject, Time and Chance can do quite a lot to improve this situation. --Jean Bricmont, Science Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own...It has a surgical precision...and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn. --Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear...The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to. --Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan. (shrink)

By means of an example, shows the possibility of beliefs that are separately rational whilst together inconsistent.

How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.

I attempt to get as clear as possible on the chain of reasoning by which irreversible macrodynamics is derivable from time-reversible microphysics, and in particular to clarify just what kinds of assumptions about the initial state of the universe, and about the nature of the microdynamics, are needed in these derivations. I conclude that while a “Past Hypothesis” about the early Universe does seem necessary to carry out such derivations, that Hypothesis is not correctly understood as a constraint on the (...) early Universe’s entropy. (shrink)

In describing his seven and a half years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, the late Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale has said: "In that atmosphere of death and hopelessness, stripped of the niceties, the amenities of civilization, my ideas on life and leadership crystallized." Despite torture, intimidation, and isolation, Stockdale fulfilled his duties as senior officer among the prisoners with intelligence and courage, defining rules of conduct and maintaining morale. He often described the intense pressures (...) of that situation as a "melting" experience, in which preconceived feelings, fears, and bias melt as one comes to realize that, under the gun, you must grow or fail—or, in some cases, grow or die. This collection of his essays and speeches from the 1980s and 1990s reinforces how that experience formed a lifelong basis for his philosophical thought on issues of character, leadership, integrity, personal and public virtue, and ethics. The selections in this volume all reflect, in one way or another, a central theme: how man can rise with dignity to prevail in the face of adversity. (shrink)

Background: Use of patients’ medical data for secondary purposes such as health research, audit, and service planning is well established in the UK. However, the governance environment, as well as public understanding about this work, have lagged behind. We aimed to systematically review the literature on UK and Irish public views of patient data used in research, critically analysing such views though an established biomedical ethics framework, to draw out potential strategies for future good practice guidance and inform ethical and (...) privacy debates. Methods: We searched three databases using terms such as patient, public, opinion, and electronic health records. Empirical studies were eligible for inclusion if they surveyed healthcare users, patients or the public in UK and Ireland and examined attitudes, opinions or beliefs about the use of patient data for medical research. Results were synthesised into broad themes using a framework analysis. Results: Out of 13,492 papers and reports screened, 20 papers or reports were eligible. While there was a widespread willingness to share patient data for research for the common good, this very rarely led to unqualified support. The public expressed two generalised concerns about the potential risks to their privacy. The first of these concerns related to a party’s competence in keeping data secure, while the second was associated with the motivation a party might have to use the data. Conclusions: The public evaluates trustworthiness of research organisations by assessing their competence in data-handling and motivation for accessing the data. Public attitudes around data-sharing exemplified several principles which are also widely accepted in biomedical ethics. This provides a framework for understanding public attitudes, which should be considered in the development in any guidance for regulators and data custodians. We propose four salient questions which decision makers should address when evaluating proposals for the secondary use of data. (shrink)

This paper is a critical discussion of Claudia Blöser’s (2022) “Global Poverty and Kantian Hope.” While Blöser shows that a lack of hope is often rational in the context of global poverty, I argue that some people’s hopes in the face of poverty might actually be rational, and that understanding the rationality of a person’s hope may require knowing more about the unique circumstances of their lives. I suggest that Blöser’s work on ‘fundamental hopes’ (with Titus Stahl) (2017) may be (...) key to understanding why some people hold on to hope for a better life and future. These reflections are meant to be more complementary to Blöser’s argument than critical, and they invite further inquiry into possibilities for hope that attend to people’s lived experiences under poverty. (shrink)

Understanding Animal Welfare, 2nd Edition is revised and expanded to incorporate new research and developments in animal welfare. Updated with greater accessibility in mind, the reader is guided through animal welfare in its cultural and historical context, methods of study, and applications in practice and policy. Drawing examples from farm, companion, laboratory and zoo animals, the text provides an up-to-date overview of research and its applications, while also tracing how concepts and methods have evolved over time. Originally intended for scientists (...) and professionals, Understanding Animal Welfare has also found a home in undergraduate classrooms. It is now the essential text for students, practitioners, veterinarians, and researchers in animal welfare and related fields. (shrink)

We start by presenting three different views that jointly imply that every person has many conscious beings in their immediate vicinity, and that the number greatly varies from person to person. We then present and assess an argument to the conclusion that how confident someone should be in these views should sensitively depend on how massive they happen to be. According to the argument, sometimes irreducibly de se observations can be powerful evidence for or against believing in metaphysical theories.

Unprecedented advances in medicine, genetic engineering, and demographic forecasting raise new questions that strain the categories and assumptions of traditional ethical theories. Heyd's approach resolves many paradoxes in intergenerational justice, while offering a major test case for the profound problems of the limits of ethics and the nature of value. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and (...) impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992. (shrink)

Worries about mental causation are prominent in contemporary discussions of the mind and human agency. Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how a mental substance (thought to be immaterial) could interact with a material substance, a body. Most philosophers nowadays repudiate immaterial minds, but the problem of mental causation has not gone away. Instead, focus has shifted to mental properties. How could mental properties be causally relevant to bodily behavior? How could something mental qua mental cause (...) what it does? After looking at the traditional Problem of Interaction, we survey various versions of the property-based problem and look at proposed solutions to them. (shrink)

Ratio, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 345-354, December 2021.

Film is an art form with a language and an aesthetic all its own. Since 1979, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art has been the best-selling and widely respected introduction to the analysis of cinema. Taking a skills-centered approach supported by a wide range of examples from various periods and countries, the authors strive to help students develop a core set of analytical skills that will deepen their understanding of any film, in any genre. Frame enlargements throughout the (...) text enable students to view images taken directly from completed films, while an optional, text-specific tutorial CD-ROM helps clarify and reinforce specific concepts addressed in the text with the use of film clips. Building on these strengths, the ninth edition adds coverage of new technologies, updated examples, and references to the authors' acclaimed weblog to provide unparalleled currency and connect students with the world of cinema today. (shrink)

Our aim in this entry is to articulate the state of the art in the moral psychology of personal identity. We begin by discussing the major philosophical theories of personal identity, including their shortcomings. We then turn to recent psychological work on personal identity and the self, investigations that often illuminate our person-related normative concerns. We conclude by discussing the implications of this psychological work for some contemporary philosophical theories and suggesting fruitful areas for future work on personal identity.

Perceptualists say that having a pain in a body part consists in perceiving the part as instantiating some property. I argue that perceptualism makes better sense of the connections between pain location and the experiences undergone by people in pain than three alternative accounts that dispense with perception. Turning to fellow perceptualists, I also reject ways in which David Armstrong and Michael Tye understand and motivate perceptualism, and I propose an alternative interpretation, one that vitiates a pair of objections—due (...) to John Hyman—concerning the meaning of ‘Amy has a pain in her foot’ and the idea of bodily sensitivity. Perceptualism, I conclude, remains our best account of the location of pains. (shrink)

Dark matter is a fundamental component of the standard cosmological model, but in spite of four decades of increasingly sensitive searches, no-one has yet detected a single dark-matter particle in the laboratory. An alternative cosmological paradigm exists: MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics). Observations explained in the standard model by postulating dark matter are explained in MOND by proposing a modification of Newton's laws of motion. Both MOND and the standard model have had successes and failures – but only MOND has repeatedly (...) predicted observational facts in advance of their discovery. In this volume, David Merritt outlines why such predictions are considered by many philosophers of science to be the 'gold standard' when it comes to judging a theory's validity. In a world where the standard model receives most attention, the author applies criteria from the philosophy of science to assess, in a systematic way, the viability of this alternative cosmological paradigm. (shrink)

Epistemic Evaluation aims to explore and apply a particular methodology in epistemology. The methodology is to consider the point or purpose of our epistemic evaluations, and to pursue epistemological theory in light of such matters. Call this purposeful epistemology. The idea is that considerations about the point and purpose of epistemic evaluation might fruitfully constrain epistemological theory and yield insights for epistemological reflection. Several contributions to this volume explicitly address this general methodology, or some version of it. Others focus on (...) advancing some application of the methodology rather than on theorizing about it. The papers go on to explore the idea that purposes allow one to understand the conceptual demands on knowing, examine how purposeful epistemology might shed light on the debate between internalist and externalist epistemologies, and further develop the idea of purposeful epistemology. (shrink)

Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is the most famous philosopher you've likely never heard of. In 1984, Parfit published what was, and is still, hailed by many philosophers as a work of genius - one of the most cited works of philosophy since World War II, Reasons and Persons. At its core, he argued that we should be concerned less with our own interests and more with the common good. His book brims with brilliant argumentative detail and stunningly inventive thought experiments that (...) challenged contemporary views about what it means to be a person, why one should forego concern for oneself as an identity that persists over time, what it means to act on the basis of reasons, and what we owe to future generations. Parfit also - unfashionably at the time - believed in a kind of grand unified theory of morality, what he called theory x, a non-religious ethical theory wherein all the major moral theories were converging from different sides on the same mountaintop. Parfit has had an enormous influence not only on philosophy, but also beyond, particularly amongst those in the fields of climate ethics, poverty relief, and charitable giving. In this book, the first-full scale biography of Parfit, Dave Edmonds tells the story of the thinker that many philosophers consider the most important moral philosopher of the last century. Edmonds' rendering of the man in full skilfully illuminates the person behind the acclaimed philosopher. Despite Parfit's extraordinary mind, outward appearances suggest his was also an extraordinarily uneventful life - one largely spent in cloistered institutions from Eton to Oxford and one seemingly monomaniacally devoted to ideas. Edmonds' aim is to show how this son and grandson of missionaries went from a genial and outgoing history student to a captivating, yet monkish philosopher singularly devoted to saving morality. In doing so, Edmonds makes Parfit's profound, but often impenetrable, ideas accessible to a broad audience and gives life and body to the thoughts of a seemingly pure thinker that captured the imagination of a generation of philosophers. (shrink)

Food is a challenging subject. There is little consensus about how and what we should produce and consume. It is not even clear what food is or whether people have similar experiences of it. On one hand, food is recognized as a basic need, if not a basic right. On the other hand, it is hard to generalize about it given the wide range of practices and cuisines, and the even wider range of tastes. This book is an introduction to (...) the philosophical dimensions of food. David M. Kaplan examines the nature and meaning of food, how we experience it, the social role it plays, its moral and political dimensions, and how we judge it to be delicious or awful. He shows how the different branches of philosophy contribute to a broader understanding of food: what food is (metaphysics), how we experience food (epistemology), what taste in food is (aesthetics), how we should make and eat food (ethics), how governments should regulate food (political philosophy), and why food matters to us (existentialism). Kaplan embarks on a series of philosophical investigations, considering topics such as culinary identity and authenticity, tasting and food criticism, appetite and disgust, meat eating and techno-foods, and consumerism and conformity. He emphasizes how different narratives help us navigate the complex world of food -- yet we all have responsibilities to ourselves, to others, and to animals. An original treatment of a timely subject, Food Philosophy is suitable for undergraduates while making a significant contribution to scholarly debates. (shrink)

Since the 1990s the so-called transparency of experience has played a crucial role in core debates in philosophy of mind. However, recent developments in the literature have made transparency itself quite opaque. The very idea of transparent experience has become quite fuzzy, due to the articulation of many different notions of transparency and transparency theses. Absent a unified logical space where these notions and theses can be mapped and confronted, we are left with an overall impression of conceptual chaos. This (...) is a problem, given the constant and ubiquitous references to transparency in the literature and its prominent position in the contemporary philosophy of mind. My goal in this paper is to restore clarity through proper analysis of the mutual relations between the different transparency theses. This allows me to uncover a unitary multidimensional logical space where existing (as well as possible) views can be properly singled out and located. (shrink)

We become ill in ways our parents and grandparents did not, with diseases unheard of and treatments undreamed of generations ago. This text tells the story of the modern experience of illness, linking ideas of illness, health, and postmodernism.

Much critical attention has been paid to the use of qualitative research in the medical sciences, with proponents advancing discussions of what it is and how it may be appraised, and critics arguing that it is of exploratory use only. Using philosophical analysis, I argue that such discussions are flawed insofar as they endorse the idea that qualitative and quantitative research are epistemically distinct categories involving different types of knowledge. Rather, I claim that such approaches are actually culturally distinct involving (...) different intellectual histories. Thus highlighting that qualitative research may not necessarily be exploratory, and that the qualitative-quantitative divide could be closed through the development of innovative social strategies. This makes possible not only shared standard setting practices, but also novel techniques which could optimise medical research to improve health care and save lives. (shrink)

EMBARGOED - expected end date 06.06.2025.

Examines the intersection between temporality, futurity, and the political in contemporary society by exploring how the imperative to govern an uncertain future affects the way political power is organized and exercised.

Examines the intersection between temporality, futurity, and the political in contemporary society by exploring how the imperative to govern an uncertain future affects the way political power is organized and exercised.