This paper provides a discussion of Jacques Rancière’s former teacher at École Normale Supérieure, then famous for fashioning Marxism with the philosophical gauge of structuralism, Louis Althusser. Perhaps a brief discussion on the relation between the two would render context to the origins of Rancière's philosophico-political praxis, specifically the humble beginnings of conceptualizing an egalitarian method out of his philosophical rupture with Althusserianism. Meanwhile, to reduce the philosophical enterprise of Althusser into its practical shortcomings and silence during the revolutionary events (...) of May 1968 in France would do an injustice to the magnitude of his contribution to contemporary French political theory and his major revisions in the theoretical direction of the Parti communiste français. Thus, the following discussions focus on sketching Althusser's theoretical foundations, which possibly clarifies the political decision he has made during May '68: a demand for organization over spontaneous revolutionary activity based on the authority of theoretical practice over the ideological activities—a decision that became the point of departure for Rancière's subversion of both mastery and the structural inequality Althusserianism entail. The whole piece is guided by the following two-fold question—a question, perhaps, akin to Badiou's inquiry: What were the philosophico-political interventions of Louis Althusser, and why did Rancière move away from his direction? (shrink)

Tradycyjne teorie psychologii moralności podkreślają rolę rozumowania i „wyższych procesów poznawczych”, podczas gdy ostatnie prace z tego zakresu uwypuklają udział emocji. W niniejszym artykule rozpatruję dane pochodzące z neuroobrazowania wspierające teorię sądzenia moralnego, zgodnie z którą zarówno procesy „poznawcze”, jak i emocjonalne pełnią istotne a czasami wzajemnie konkurencyjne role. Dane te wskazują, że rejony mózgu związane z kontrolą poznawczą (przednia część zakrętu obręczy i grzbietowo boczna kora przedczołowa) są zaangażowane w rozwiązywanie trudnych moralnych dylematów, w których wartości utylitarne wymagają naruszenia (...) „osobistej” sfery moralnej, co wiąże się ze wzrostem aktywności rejonów mózgu związanych z emocjami i poznaniem społecznym (przyśrodkowa kora przedczołowa, górna bruzda skroniowa, tylna część zakrętu obręczy, bieguny skroniowe, ciało migdałowate). Odkryliśmy także, że aktywność w~obszarach mózgu obejmujących przednią część grzbietowo bocznej kory przedczołowej prognozuje różnice w sądzeniu moralnym, w odmiennych warunkach — obszary te wykazują większą aktywność podczas wydawania sądów o~charakterze utylitarnym. Przypuszczam też, że coraz lepsze rozumienie fizjologicznych i neuronaukowych podstaw wydawania sądów moralnych może mieć wpływ na rozwiązywanie dylematów moralnych w~świecie realnym. (shrink)

Précis for a book symposium, with contributions from Meg Wallace, Louis deRosset, and Chris Tillman and Joshua Spencer.

Z propozycją rekalibracji etyki i zastąpienia jej neuroetyką wystąpiła Patricia S. Churchland. Churchland twierdzi, że im bardziej rozumiemy szczegóły funkcjonowania naszego systemu nerwowego, tym bardziej jesteśmy przekonani co do tego, że przyjmowane przez nas standardy moralnego działania są uwarunkowane neurobiologicznie. Od roku 2002 termin „neuroetyka” funkcjonuje jako nazwa nowej subdyscypliny etyki. Wymienia się w niej dwa zasadnicze działy: etykę neuronauki i neuronaukę etyki. Pierwszy dotyczy zasadniczo moralnych problemów związanych z zastosowaniem osiągnięć neuronauk, przedmiotem drugiego: neuronauki etyki, jest wpływ, jaki wiedza (...) z zakresu neuronauk ma na nasze rozumienie etyki. Artykuł jest krytyczną prezentacją nowej subdyscypliny etycznej i próbą pokazania, że jakkolwiek neurobiologiczne procesy mają wpływ na nasze działanie, to nie decydują o jego moralnym wymiarze. (shrink)

We ask whether it is reasonable to delay or refuse to take COVID-19 vaccines that have been shown in clinical trials to be safe and effective against infectious diseases. We consider two kinds of vaccine hesitancy. The first is geared to scientifically informed open questions about vaccines. We argue that in cases where the data is not representative of relevant groups, such as pregnant women and ethnic minorities, hesitancy can be reasonable on epistemic grounds. However, we argue that hesitancy is (...) not reasonable if a vaccine has passed well-conducted clinical trials. The second kind of hesitancy is to do with beliefs about the institutions offering a successfully trialled vaccine and the justifiability of cooperating with those institutions. For example, in the UK, distrust of the UK Government or the National Health Service is identified as a factor in the vaccine hesitancy of minority ethnic populations. We ask whether this sort of hesitation is reasonable given normative requirements of fair co-operation, both with those institutions and the wider population. We suggest that the answer is not straightforward. Sometimes the hesitation is unreasonable but understandable. -/- . (shrink)

Engaging feminist and queer of color theory as well as work emerging from social movements, this piece critically examines narratives of impasse between Black Studies and Native Studies in the US, particularly assertions of incommensurability between the goals of Black freedom and Native sovereignty. The article outlines some of the theoretical debates between Black and Indigenous Studies that have calcified into impasses, focusing particularly on Afropessimist and Settler Colonial Studies’ framings of either slavery/anti-Blackness or settler colonialism as the foundational violence (...) around which a racist/settler modernity is structured. This article argues that approaches that emphasize relationality and the co-determination of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism can help us to think beyond a Black/Native impasse and towards a mutual futurity for both Black and Indigenous people in living in the place we currently call the United States. (shrink)

The recent wave of same-sex marriage legalization marks the most significant human rights progress in decades. Nevertheless, the valuation effects on corporate America are unclear. While the arguments supporting marriage equality are largely in the domain of law and sociology, many prominent business leaders are actively engaged in campaigns advocating marriage equality. This suggests that the LGBT civil rights movement of our generation might have valuation implications for corporate America beyond human rights equality. This paper investigates the market perception of (...) state-level same-sex marriage legalization by examining the short-window market reactions to firms headquartered in a state. We find positive market reactions to firms headquartered in states that legally recognize marriage equality. Further, we find that the market views companies more favorably in: first-mover states before the Supreme Court ruling of United States v. Windsor, and states that have stronger anti-discrimination laws for the LGBT community. Our findings complement prior research that focuses on the economic consequences of firm-level LGBT human rights policies by examining the state/nation-level legal impact, adding a new dimension to ethical practices that can have economic consequences. (shrink)

This paper argues that research in the primary sources must precede the investigation of Byzantine philosophy. Two points are to be considered, on the one hand, the gathering of texts, and, on the other hand, the study of texts in relation to their sources. Thus the external evidence as well as the internal evidence of texts should be examined. In this double regard, the manuscripts containing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics are considered. Their authors are Michael of Ephesos, Eustratios of Nicaea, “Anonymus”, (...) Heliodoros of Prussa, Georgios Pachymeres, Michael Psellos, John Italos, Nikephoros Blemmydes, George Gemistos Plethon. (shrink)

What does it take to be prejudiced against a particular group? And is prejudice always epistemically problematic, or are there epistemically innocent forms of prejudice? In this paper, I argue that certain important forms of prejudice can be wholly constituted by the differential accessibility of certain pieces of information. These accessibility relations constitute a salience structure. A subject is prejudiced against a particular group when their salience structure is unduly organised around that category. This is significant because it reveals that (...) prejudice does not require the presence of any explicit cognitive or emotive attitude, nor need it manifest in behaviour: it can be solely constituted by the organisation of information, where that information may be accurate and well-founded. Nonetheless, by giving an account of ‘undue organisation’ in epistemic terms, I show that this account is compatible with an understanding of prejudice as a negatively valenced epistemic category. (shrink)

What, if anything, is epistemically wrong with beliefs involving accurate statistical generalizations about demographic groups? This paper argues that there is a perfectly general, underappreciated epistemic flaw which affects both ethically charged and uncharged statistical generalizations. Though common to both, this flaw can also explain why demographic statistical generalizations give rise to the concerns they do. To identify this flaw, we need to distinguish between the accuracy and the projectability of statistical beliefs. Statistical beliefs are accompanied by an implicit representation (...) of the statistic's modal profile. Their modal profile determines the circumstances in which they can legitimately be projected to unobserved instances. Errors in that implicit content can be compatible with the accuracy of the “bare” statistic, whilst systematically leading to downstream errors in reasoning, in a manner which reveals an epistemic flaw with an important aspect of the belief state itself. (shrink)

Amidst broad debates about the “New Green Revolution” in Africa, input-intensive agriculture is on the rise in some parts of Africa. This paper examines the underlying drivers of the recent and rapid adoption of herbicides and genetically modified seeds in the Burkina Faso cotton sector. Drawing on 8 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Houndé region, this article contends that economic and cultural dynamics—often considered separately in analyses of technology adoption—have co-produced a self-reinforcing technological treadmill. On the one hand, male (...) farmers seek to increase cotton production in response to an economic squeeze. At the same time, broader cultural shifts toward individualism have created labor shortages as a result of families splitting apart, parents putting their children in school, and some women and young men refusing to provide free labor. Male cotton farmers thus increase production by turning to labor-saving inputs like herbicides, but these inputs create more debt, further locking farmers into intensive production. This article thus expands on the classic concept of the technological treadmill, demonstrating how economic and cultural processes intersect within a process of agrarian change to drive labor-saving agricultural technology adoption in the Burkinabè cotton sector. This expanded treadmill concept illuminates the complex dynamics compelling farmers’ choices to opt into input-intensive agriculture, and also helps explain rising farmer differentiation, as poorer farmers struggle to stay afloat and wealthier farmers expand. (shrink)

It is an apparent truism about visual perception that we can see only what is visible to us. It is also frequently accepted that visual perception is dynamic: our visual experiences are extended through, and can evolve over time. I argue that taking the dynamism of visual experience seriously renders certain simplistic interpretations of the first claim, that a subject at a given time can see only what is visible to her at that time, false: we can be meaningfully said (...) to see invisible objects. This counterintuitive result in turn focuses our attention on the relationship between perception and memory. I show that it is difficult to draw a clear or simple distinction between the two. Memory and perception rely on, and blend with, one another. Together, these claims point us away from understanding visual perception as a simple reflection of the environment, and instead as closer to a process of dynamic modelling that draws together occurrent stimulation and stored information. (shrink)

Visual perception relies on stored information and environmental associations to arrive at a determinate representation of the world. This opens up the disturbing possibility that our visual experiences could themselves be subject to a kind of racial bias, simply in virtue of accurately encoding previously encountered environmental regularities. This possibility raises the following question: what, if anything, is wrong with beliefs grounded upon these prejudicial experiences? They are consistent with a range of epistemic norms, including evidentialist and reliabilist standards for (...) justification. I argue that we will struggle to locate a flaw with these sorts of perceptual beliefs so long as we focus our analysis at the level of the individual and her response to information. We should instead broaden our analysis to include the social structure within which the individual is located. Doing so lets us identify a problem with the way in which unjust social structures in particular “gerrymander” the regularities an individual is exposed to, and by extension the priors their visual system draws on. I argue that in this way, social structures can cap perceptual skill. (shrink)

We commonly evaluate search engines and the results they return, but what grounds those evaluations? One straightforward way of evaluating search engines appeals to their ability to satisfy the goals of the user. Are there, in addition, user-independent norms, that allow us to evaluate search engines in ways that may come apart from their ability to satisfy the individuals who use them? One way of grounding such norms appeals to moral or political considerations. I argue that in addition to those (...) norms, there are also distinct user-independent epistemic norms that apply to search engines. Evaluating search engines relative to them, however, requires us to appreciate the impact search engines have on our practices and norms of inquiry more broadly: by systematically altering the accessibility of information, search engines don’t just give us information but shape our collective imagination, and the categories it operates over. (shrink)

What kind of content must visual states have if they are to offer direct (noninferential) justification for our external world beliefs? How must they present that content if the degree of justification they provide is to reflect the nuance of our changing visual experiences? This paper offers an argument for the view that visual states comprise not only a content, but a confidence relation to that content. This confidence relation lets us explain how visual states can offer noninferential perceptual justification (...) of differing degrees for external world beliefs. These confidence relations let visual states justify beliefs in a way that is sensitive to subtle differences in the character of our visual experiences, while still allowing that visual states give us direct access to the external world in virtue of their content. (shrink)

By confronting variable use, the variationist method can reveal patterns of subjectification of grammatical morphemes. Applying this method to the analysis of salir(se) ‘go out’ variation in Mexican Spanish oral data, we conclude that subjectification is manifested structurally in the tendency for middle-marked salirse to co-occur with first-person singular or referents close to the speaker, positive polarity and the past tense. Further comparative dialectal and diachronic data indicate the origins of the se -marked form in physical spatial deviation. Usage of (...) the form then extends to situations that denote deviation from social norms. We thus propose that the locus of subjectification of this counter-expectation marker is an increasingly speaker-based construal of expectation. This semantic change appears to proceed via absorption of contextual meaning in the frequently occurring + de ‘from’ construction. (shrink)

This title examines captive animal welfare past to present including zoos and marine parks. Legislation regulating the process is discussed as are opposing viewpoints and alternatives such as virtual reality parks. A timeline, glossary, index, and historic and color photos supplement easy-to-read text. An infographic shows how the reader can learn more and get involved"--Publisher's website.

This title examines farm animal rights past to present from small farms to industrial production. Legislation regulating the process is discussed as are opposing viewpoints and solutions such as local and organic farming and alternative diets. A timeline, glossary, index, and historic and color photos supplement easy-to-read text. An infographic shows how the reader can learn more and get involved"--Publisher's website.

Gordon Belot argues that Bayesian theory is epistemologically immodest. In response, we show that the topological conditions that underpin his criticisms of asymptotic Bayesian conditioning are self-defeating. They require extreme a priori credences regarding, for example, the limiting behavior of observed relative frequencies. We offer a different explication of Bayesian modesty using a goal of consensus: rival scientific opinions should be responsive to new facts as a way to resolve their disputes. Also we address Adam Elga’s rebuttal to Belot’s analysis, (...) which focuses attention on the role that the assumption of countable additivity plays in Belot’s criticisms. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy uses experimental research methods from psychology and cognitive science in order to investigate both philosophical and metaphilosophical questions. It explores philosophical questions about the nature of the psychological world - the very structure or meaning of our concepts of things, and about the nature of the non-psychological world - the things themselves. It also explores metaphilosophical questions about the nature of philosophical inquiry and its proper methodology. This book provides a detailed and provocative introduction to this innovative field, (...) focusing on the relationship between experimental philosophy and the aims and methods of more traditional analytic philosophy. Special attention is paid to carefully examining experimental philosophy's quite different philosophical programs, their individual strengths and weaknesses, and the different kinds of contributions that they can make to our philosophical understanding. Clear and accessible throughout, it situates experimental philosophy within both a contemporary and historical context, explains its aims and methods, examines and critically evaluates its most significant claims and arguments, and engages with its critics. (shrink)

I identify three aspects to the puzzle of the speckled hen: A general puzzle, an epistemic puzzle, and a puzzle for the representationalist. These puzzles rely on an underlying “pictorialist” assumption, that we visually perceive general, determinable properties only in virtue of determinate properties or more specific, local features of our visual experience. This assumption is mistaken: Visual perception frequently starts from a position of uncertainty, and is routinely able to acquire information about general properties in the absence of more (...) specific information. Acknowledging that visual indeterminacy is structured this way resolves all three puzzles of the speckled hen. (shrink)

From Chaos to Creativity is a book that teaches readers how to build a productivity system that works with their art and with their lifestyle. Author Jessie Kwak helps readers tame the chaos that often surrounds a creative career and further enhance readers' creative output.

It has been standard philosophical practice in analytic philosophy to employ intuitions generated in response to thought-experiments as evidence in the evaluation of philosophical claims. In part as a response to this practice, an exciting new movement—experimental philosophy—has recently emerged. This movement is unified behind both a common methodology and a common aim: the application of methods of experimental psychology to the study of the nature of intuitions. In this paper, we will introduce two different views concerning the relationship that (...) holds between experimental philosophy and the future of standard philosophical practice (what we call, the proper foundation view and the restrictionist view), discuss some of the more interesting and important results obtained by proponents of both views, and examine the pressure these results put on analytic philosophers to reform standard philosophical practice. We will also defend experimental philosophy from some recent objections, suggest future directions for work in experimental philosophy, and suggest what future lines of epistemological response might be available to those wishing to defend analytic epistemology from the challenges posed by experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Wouldn’t it be nice if hateful people were invariably stupid to boot, if their prejudiced attitudes could be attributed to some kind of irrationality? Tempting though this prospect is, Endre Begby warns us against it. Philosophers have tended, he writes, to assume that prejudiced beliefs are always ‘a symptom of some kind of breakdown of epistemic rationality’ (p. 2). This view is Begby's target. There can, he claims, be epistemically unimpeachable instances of prejudicial belief. That claim comes bound up with (...) a broader account of what prejudice is, and of the epistemic framework we should adopt when evaluating agents. The result is a thought-provoking account of prejudice, and a case study of the tensions inherent in the non-ideal project. By intertwining discussion of prejudice with a discussion of the appropriate epistemological framework for its evaluation, the book encourages reflection on a series of important methodological questions, and ultimately a broader interrogation of the role of philosophy in the study of prejudice. (shrink)

In this chapter, we consider a posthumanist critique of international law in relation to the material world. Our perspective on posthumanism and international law is framed by a monument of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the so-called ‘founding father’ of the colony of South Australia. Centering the monument in our dialogue, we discuss two types of materialism: New materialism and historical materialism. We argue that an engagement with new and old materialism opens possibilities for a critical engagement with posthumanism. Central to this (...) critical engagement are themes of materiality, settler colonialism, agency, and exploitation – themes that are key for understanding the operation of international law. By identifying where the materialist theories differ, and also where they converge, we ultimately seek to identify the utility of a posthumanist critique for destabilising international law’s imperialist, capitalist, racialized and patriarchal structures. (shrink)

The Sleeping Beauty problem has spawned a debate between “thirders” and “halfers” who draw conflicting conclusions about Sleeping Beauty's credence that a coin lands heads. Our analysis is based on a probability model for what Sleeping Beauty knows at each time during the experiment. We show that conflicting conclusions result from different modeling assumptions that each group makes. Our analysis uses a standard “Bayesian” account of rational belief with conditioning. No special handling is used for self-locating beliefs or centered propositions. (...) We also explore what fair prices Sleeping Beauty computes for gambles that she might be offered during the experiment. (shrink)

Philosophy is often depicted as generically distinct from literature, myth, and history, as a discipline that eschews narration and relies exclusively on abstract reason. This book takes issue with that assumption, arguing instead that political philosophers have commonly presented their readers with a narrative, rather than a logic, of politics. The book maintains that philosophical texts frequently persuade through the creation of a 'role' that they invite their audience to inhabit. The author also investigates the place of narrative in politics (...) in two ways. It offers a hypothesis of a broad connection between political identity and narrative, and it analyzes three major figures in the history of political thought - Locke, Hegel, and Nietzsche - to demonstrate that their work is best understood through the hypothesis. The author argues that each of these philosophers rewrites the past in an attempt to direct the future. (shrink)