Despite popular consensus or relativist sentiments, rhetoric is not a purely subjective phenomenon but is firmly grounded in semiotic reality. The same definite semiosic nature of the universe that makes geology and archaeology work is also operant within rhetoric — as are syntactic configurations and the semantic situations that proceed from them. Inasmuch as semiosis extends throughout all the universe, from organic life in its most complex forms all the way to the most basic structures of physical matter, so rhetoric (...) finds its roots extending along these pathways. While language use falls partially within the multistability of the universe, with the result that there can be pliability in its use and perception, nevertheless the roots of rhetoric as semiotic ensure that syntax, the subsequent semantic content, and the rhetorical sense this semantic content presents within communication — all these are never fully nor finally reducible to human subjectivity. As the semiotic spiral in principle makes all that occurs within the universe discoverable and read-able, seen especially in forensic studies of physical structures, in just the same way we find that rhetoric and all instances of its usage are also discoverable and read-able. All that is needed is that the one reading has access to the semiosic traces, especially the relevant interpretants. Such is a very sobering ethical accountability grounded upon semiosis itself, extending to all anthroposemiotic life. (shrink)

The mutual interaction of philosophy and Roman political and cultural life has aroused more and more interest in recent years among students of classical literature, Roman history, and ancient philosophy. In this volume, which gathers together some of the papers originally delivered at a series of seminars in the University of Oxford, scholars from all three disciplines explore the role of Platonism and Aristotelianism in Roman intellectual, cultural, and political life from the second century BC to the third century AD.

This volume, which gathers together nine interdisciplinary papers delivered at a series of seminars on philosophy and Roman society in the University of Oxford, explores the role of Platonism and Aristotelianism in Roman intellectual, cultural, and political life from the second century BC to the third century AD.

This book makes a novel contribution to our understanding of Romance SE constructions by combining both diachronic and synchronic theoretical perspectives along with a range of empirical data from different languages and dialects. The collection, divided into four sections, proposes that SE constructions may be divided into one class that is the result of grammaticalization of a reflexive pronoun up the syntactic tree, from Voice and above, and another class that has resulted from the reanalysis of reflexive and anticausative morphemes (...) as an argument expletive or verbal morpheme generated in positions from Voice and below. The contributions, while varied in both empirical content and theoretical approach, all serve to highlight different aspects of the overarching idea that SE constructions have evolved from these two distinct grammaticalization paths. The book appeals to researchers and academics in the field and closes with a unified approach to various SE constructions that makes important use of its status as a verbal morpheme. In addition to aligning a novel string of empirical contributions under a new theoretical umbrella, a clear research direction emerges from this volume based on the morphosyntactic nature of SE itself: Is it a clitic, an agreement morpheme, or a verbal morpheme? (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 225 Seiten: 213-227.

How is reality really manufactured? The idea of social construction has become a commonplace part of much social research, yet precisely what is constructed, how it is constructed, and what constructionism means are often left unclear or taken for granted. In this major work, Jonathan Potter explores the central themes raised by these questions. Representing Reality explores the different traditions in constructivist thought--including sociology of scientific knowledge; conversation analysis and ethnomethodology; and semiotics, poststructuralism, and postmodernism--to provide a lucid introduction (...) to several key strands of work that have overturned the way we think about facts and descriptions. Potter illustrates his points throughout with varied and engaging examples taken from newspaper stories, relationship counseling sessions, accounts of paranormal events, social workers' assessments of violent parents, informal talk between program organizers, political arguments, and everyday conversations. Representing Reality offers the student and scholar in social psychology, rhetoric and discourse, and related fields a critical introduction to constructivism. (shrink)

= Knowing Rule: seeing, and only seeing, leads to knowing. This paper presents two kinds of evidence that children do not follow this rule. First, we critically review previous findings that children neglect the role of inference and argue that these studies do not in fact support the view that children follow a Seeing = Knowing Rule. We then present two studies in which children who correctly attributed ignorance and false belief to an observer in a false belief task also (...) attributed ignorance (Study 1) and false belief (Study 2) in true belief tasks. These findings demonstrate that children sometimes attribute ignorance and false belief to an observer who is granted visual access, an outcome that should not occur if children rigidly follow the Seeing = Knowing Rule. We end by discussing some problems associated with modifying the Seeing = Knowing Rule to account for children’s failure on the true belief task. (shrink)

Imagine that the person you see through the looking glass is a real person, with her own experiences, living in an environment that is the mirror-reverse of yours. You look at your right-hand glove as you put it on your right hand; she looks at her left-hand glove as she puts it on her left hand. You feel your heart beating on your left side; she feels her heart beating on her right side. You hear a bird chirping out the (...) window to your left; she hears a bird chirping out the window to her right. Is there any difference between your experience—your what-it-is-like phenomenal character—and hers? She is looking at her left-hand glove, the mirror-reverse of you as you look at your right-hand glove. Does she see what you see, a right-hand glove, or the reverse of what you see, a left-hand glove? Since her environment is the mirror-reverse of yours, and she seems to get by in it just fine, you'd probably assume, if you had to guess, that she sees it correctly. She is looking at her left-hand glove, after all. So it stands to reason that she is having an experience as of a left-hand glove, not a right-hand glove. And it stands to reason—it seems obvious—that an experience as of a left-hand glove differs in what it is like from an experience as of a right-hand glove. In this paper, I will argue that this last presupposition, obvious though it may seem, is false. I'll argue that (unless dualism is true) there is no intrinsic difference between what it is like to experience a left-hand glove and what it is like to experience a right-hand glove: if there are any relevant experiential differences, these are either merely comparative (differences in what it is like to compare gloves) or cognitive (differences in what it is like to bring an experience of a glove under a concept like LEFT or RIGHT). So your mirror-reverse twin, who won't differ from you in what she is comparing or thinking, will have the same (type of) experience as you. I'll call the position I am arguing against orientation–experience categoricalism, and the position I am arguing for orientation–experience relationism. Orientation–experience relationism is a surprising thesis, one whose falsity you might take for granted. I will argue for it by cases. Things go wrong for the orientation–experience categoricalist in one sort of way if we imagine that you and your mirror-twin's experiences differ: basically, this leads to absurdity if we imagine that you and she both live at a world with a non-orientable spatial topology (in the sense in which a Möbius strip or Klein bottle are non-orientable). Things go wrong for the orientation–experience categoricalist in a different sort of way if we assume that you and your twin would experience the same, but that someone else might have the experience that we were just imagining that your twin might have. Under these assumptions, we have to accept the existence of partial zombies, who lack the relevant phenomenology but behave as if they have it, at very close, empirically possible worlds. In an appendix, I argue that property dualism is the best alternative for those who cannot bring themselves to accept orientation-experience relationism. (shrink)

One concern bothering ancient and medieval philosophers is the logical worry discussed in Aristotle's De Interpretatione 9, that if future contingent propositions are true, then they are settled in a way that is incompatible with freedom. Another is if we grant God foreknowledge of future contingent events then God's foreknowledge will determine those events in a way precluding freedom. ;I begin by discussing the standard compatibilist solution to these problems as represented in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy and then examine (...) theories that allegedly deviate from the Boethian solution. Boethius's solution to these separate problems involves showing that both problems operate on an ambiguity in the scope of the modal operator 'necessarily' present in the articulation of the problem. Once the ambiguity is removed we see that both disambiguations fail to offer a sound argument against the compatibility of free action with either God's omniscience or future contingent proposition's being true. The only difference between the solutions is that before executing the scope distinction strategy in the theological problem, Boethius reminds us that God knows future contingents rather than foreknowing them, since God is timeless. ;The rest of my discussion examines positions that allegedly deviate from the Boethian solution: positions held by Peter de Rivo, William Ockham and Plotinus. I argue that Ockham doesn't in fact deviate from the Boethian solution to the theological problem as is commonly held. Instead of offering a compatibilist position where God's omniscience includes foreknowledge, Ockham denies that God foreknows the future advocating instead a more sophisticated Boethian position. The other two philosophers, Rivo and Plotinus, deviate from Boethius, but unfortunately neither position appears philosophically plausible. Rivo's incompatibilist solution to the logical problem is inconsistent with his retention of the Boethian solution to the theological problem and is probably implausible on its own. Plotinus's compatibilist account fails not because it claims that necessity and freedom are compatible, but because the account of moral responsibility Plotinus offers to justify the compatibility fails. (shrink)

Open-ended interviews remain the default data generation technique for qualitative psychology and sociology. This commentary raises questions with Griffin's understanding of naturalistic materials and the emic/ etic distinction. It reiterates problems in the use of open-ended interviews, and repeats the case for more considered support for their use.

Measures of algorithmic bias can be roughly classified into four categories, distinguished by the conditional probabilistic dependencies to which they are sensitive. First, measures of "procedural bias" diagnose bias when the score returned by an algorithm is probabilistically dependent on a sensitive class variable (e.g. race or sex). Second, measures of "outcome bias" capture probabilistic dependence between class variables and the outcome for each subject (e.g. parole granted or loan denied). Third, measures of "behavior-relative error bias" capture probabilistic dependence between (...) class variables and the algorithmic score, conditional on target behaviors (e.g. recidivism or loan default). Fourth, measures of "score-relative error bias" capture probabilistic dependence between class variables and behavior, conditional on score. Several recent discussions have demonstrated a tradeoff between these different measures of algorithmic bias, and at least one recent paper has suggested conditions under which tradeoffs may be minimized. -/- In this paper we use the machinery of causal graphical models to show that, under standard assumptions, the underlying causal relations among variables forces some tradeoffs. We delineate a number of normative considerations that are encoded in different measures of bias, with reference to the philosophical literature on the wrongfulness of disparate treatment and disparate impact. While both kinds of error bias are nominally motivated by concern to avoid disparate impact, we argue that consideration of causal structures shows that these measures are better understood as complicated and unreliable measures of procedural biases (i.e. disparate treatment). Moreover, while procedural bias is indicative of disparate treatment, we show that the measure of procedural bias one ought to adopt is dependent on the account of the wrongfulness of disparate treatment one endorses. Finally, given that neither score-relative nor behavior-relative measures of error bias capture the relevant normative considerations, we suggest that error bias proper is best measured by score-based measures of accuracy, such as the Brier score. (shrink)

This dissertation analyzes three legal doctrines that regulate unintentional aspects of criminal conduct. Chapter one defends the influence the law grants to an action’s unintended results in determining the extent of the agent’s criminal liability. First, I critique the argument that criminal law’s general mens rea requirement allows a result to affect the extent of a defendant’s criminal liability only if he possesses mens rea with respect to that result. The rules that define offenses and the rules that specify sentences (...) for individual criminal actions each guide conduct, but they do so differently. Effective offense definitions must be framed in terms of mental states, but effective sentencing rules need not be; therefore, mens rea must set the limits of liability, but the extent of liability need not depend on mens rea alone. Second, I argue that sentencing rules can most effectively guide offenders to reduce the risk that their offenses will unintentionally cause harm if those rules grade the seriousness of each offense based on its results, since the primary alternative, grading offenses based on their risk, requires methods of measuring and communicating risk that exceed the capacities of the criminal justice system. While chapter one addresses the extent of liability, chapters two and three address its scope: each presents an account of one of the two types of mens rea used to define unintentional crimes. Recklessness, the subject of chapter two, is often analyzed as requiring defendants to possess a belief (or similar mental state) directed towards the degree of risk an action creates. Defining offenses in terms of an agent’s beliefs about risk, however, guides individuals to evaluate actions in deliberation by estimating the degree of risk they create. And because individuals ordinarily cannot estimate risks accurately, such rules will not effectively guide them to reduce harm. Effective rules, I will argue, must identify prohibited actions in a different way—namely, through the features of those actions that make them unreasonably risky. The definition of recklessness does not itself identify those features directly; instead, by requiring individuals to comply with the standard of conduct of the law-abiding person, recklessness indirectly incorporates into law the social norms that regulate dangerous activities. To be reckless, then, defendants must recognize the features of their conduct in virtue of which it violates such a norm. Finally, chapter three analyzes negligence. Criminal negligence is paradoxical: even though culpability ordinarily requires advertence, negligent defendants are typically understood to be culpable for a risk they inadvertently create. Rather than rejecting culpability for negligence or expanding culpability beyond advertence, I dissolve the paradox by reconceptualizing negligence. Negligent defendants are culpable despite their failure to perceive one risk because they advert to a different risk—the risk that by failing to inquire before acting they will fail to uncover evidence of the risk that they do, in the end, actually fail to perceive. Negligence is epistemic recklessness, the culpable disregard of the risk of inadvertently performing a risky action. Though negligence, like recklessness, involves advertence to risk, it constitutes a distinct form of mens rea because it regulates a different aspect of conduct—the decision to inquire rather than the decision to act. And because omitting inquiry creates only a risk of a risk, negligence is systematically less risky than recklessness, and therefore less culpable. (shrink)

This article provides a new account of Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysical philosophy. After framing Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysical project (Section 1), I suggest that to understand the logic of his critique we should reconstruct a taxonomy which distinguishes between ‘rich metaphysics’ and ‘thin metaphysics’ (Section 2). I then consider Nietzsche’s methodological critique of ‘rich metaphysics’, arguing that his position, which alleges motivational bias against ‘rich metaphysics’, is not compelling, since even granting that previous ‘rich metaphysicians’ exemplified such bias there is no necessity (...) to a new ‘rich metaphysician’ doing so (Section 3). Nonetheless, there is much of interest in the second aspect of Nietzsche’s critique, understood in terms of indifference to ‘thin metaphysics’, which I consider in Section 4. I argue that the existing readings are unsatisfactory, and as an alternative we should think of this idea in sceptical terms by drawing on an argument from ‘thin metaphysical’ disagreement. (shrink)

This article argues that Cicero laid down his imperium in Brundisium in September 47 after Caesar had, in a meeting between the two men, granted Cicero permission to retain his imperium and title of imperator for as long as Cicero wished to do so. Instead of accepting Caesar’s offer, Cicero instead immediately repudiated it, laid down his imperium in the city of Brundisium, and went immediately to Tusculum to begin a second period of political retirement. Caesar’s offer and his return (...) to Italy in the autumn of 47 gave Cicero an excuse to consider expired the SCU of 7 January 49 and, by immediately renouncing his imperium, perform, under the cover of his now-fulfilled obligation to the Pompeians, a calculated personal statement of political independence. (shrink)

This paper examines the unique structures of identity formation within the craftsperson/maker mindset and their relation to Western views of work and labor. The contemporary Maker Movement has its origins not only in the internet revolution, but also in the revival of handicraft during the last several economic recessions. Economic uncertainty drives people toward the ideals and practices of craft as a way to regain a sense of agency and control. One learns how to become an active participant in our (...) material lives by making and maintaining the objects that surround us. This orientation toward craft has the potential to alter the practitioner's sense of self going forward. I will argue that the work-based nature of craft leads to a unique and positive sense of self that the assumed freedom of ‘art’ and intellectualized labor unwittingly discourages. Tacit mechanisms shape the craft mindset through emphasis on skill, mastery of materials, polymathic problem solving, and quality. Hannah Arendt’s notion of the vita activa and Martin Heidegger’s arguments on modern technology reveal the dynamics between physical and intellectual labor and how many have greatly misunderstood the ‘essence’ of the craftsperson’s work. Peter Dormer and Glenn Adamson’s analysis of the nature of craft demonstrate how these two lines of thought can be unified into one system of selfhood granting the greater sense of agency many seek without relying on an individualized sense of self. The Richard Sennett shows how this sense of self challenges the desire to liberate ourselves from labor via technology and poetic autonomy as seen in Franco Berardi’s Manifesto of Post-Futurism. Malcolm Gladwell's work on intuition examines the impact of this tacit craft mindset and the psychological mechanisms that drive it. This will allow Peter Korn’s first-hand account of his own craft practice to demonstrate this structure and its inherent points of resistance against today’s hyper-individualized and resultingly selfish ways of life. Throughout this paper, a clear emphasis on materiality as a profound source of embodied knowledge will be maintained to reveal craftspersonhood as a source of deep existential fulfillment and practical philosophy. Acknowledging and embracing our intrinsic materiality and all that it has to teach us is imperative in the face of a consumption-centric culture of excess and exploitation that looms over much of the West. (shrink)

One of the more visible recent developments in philosophical methodology is the experimental philosophy movement. On its surface, the experimentalist challenge looks like a dramatic threat to the apriority of philosophy; ‘experimentalist’ is nearly antonymic with ‘aprioristic’. This appearance, I suggest, is misleading; the experimentalist critique is entirely unrelated to questions about the apriority of philosophical investigation. There are many reasons to resist the skeptical conclusions of negative experimental philosophers; but even if they are granted—even if the experimentalists are right (...) to claim that we must do much more careful laboratory work in order legitimately to be confident in our philosophical judgments— the apriority of philosophy is unimpugned. The kinds of scientific investigation that experimental philosophers argue to be necessary involve merely enabling sensory experiences. Although they are not enabling in the sense of permitting concept acquisition, they are enabling in another epistemically significant way that is also consistent with the apriority of philosophy. (shrink)

Heroes may be brave, but not all of those who act bravely are necessarily heroes. Confucius is one of the most important figures in Chinese history, the philosopher-founder of an intellectual, ethical tradition that has shaped a quarter of the world's population. Often overlooked outside his native country, Jonathan Clements reveals Confucius to be an outspoken and uncompromising man, and places him within the context of China of 2,500 years ago. Confucius, a contemporary of Buddha, was the illegitimate son (...) of a retired soldier and a teenage concubine. He had a passionate belief in respect for others and it was this belief which underpinned his life and teachings. He advised the famous figures of his day, gaining their respect, and also the undying enmity of those whose paths he crossed. He was equally proud of both achievements, saying that if the evil people of the world liked him, he was doing something wrong. Confucius established many ideas that are taken for granted today. His theories became the foundation of one of the world's first civil services and established enduring social structures throughout Asia. In collating and refining the words of earlier, forgotten thinkers, he also preserved elements of China's prehistoric culture, and its ancient religion of ancestor-worship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.2 (2006) 450-470 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Romantic Love: A Literary Universal?Jonathan Gottschall Washington and Jefferson College (JG)Marcus Nordlund * Göteborg University (MN)ITo love someone romantically is—at least according to innumerable literary works, much received wisdom, and even a gradually coalescing academic consensus—to experience a strong desire for union with someone who is deemed entirely unique. It is to idealize this person, to think constantly (...) about him or her, and to discover that one's own life priorities have changed dramatically. It is to care deeply for that person's well-being and to feel pain or emptiness when he or she is absent.But is this intense emotional experience a universal experience, something that is characteristically and quintessentially human, or is it merely a sociocultural construct that belongs to a particular time and place? On this point there is less agreement, both within and between different academic disciplines. The audacious question we want to raise in the pages that follow is whether literature—or more specifically, a large-scale, multiple-coder content analysis of thousands of folk tales drawn from different parts of the planet—can contribute something to this difficult question about love, culture, and human nature.Let us first look briefly at the theoretical problem that we aim to address. A widespread view among literary scholars and social scientists over the last decades has been that romantic love is a social construction specific to Western culture. This is part of a relentless skepticism [End Page 450] toward assumptions that important categories of human psychology and emotion—romantic and parental love, gender, sexual orientation, and so on—are "natural" rather than constructed. This position is often, if not always, linked to an ideological concern to demystify (or at least problematize) what is perceived as an essentially destructive or oppressive emotion or belief. Taking her cue from Simone de Beauvoir, Marilyn Friedman gives no less than ten reasons why it may be problematic for women to fall in love with men. 1Of course, no argument of any kind can be strictly ideological in nature since it always involves empirical assumptions—either explicit or implicit—about the nature of things. For example, the psychoanalyst E. S. Persons opines that the "best evidence that romantic love is not hard-wired into the emotional repertoire of humanity but is a cultural construct is the fact that there are so many cultures in which it is virtually absent." 2 Another frequent argument for love's constructedness has been that "there is no definition that describes love throughout the ages or across cultures." 3In some literary-critical accounts, it is even argued that romantic love is a cultural invention that can be traced back with precision to the courtly troubadour culture of twelfth-century France. 4 According to yet another school, represented by the influential literary theorist Jonathan Culler, "the notion of romantic love (and its centrality to the lives of individuals) is arguably a massive literary creation." 5While the social constructivist position on romantic love typically involves a strong commitment to cultural specificity, a weaker version is held even by some cognitive theorists who grant more to biology and panhuman traits. From the perspective of their communicative theory of emotion, Philip Johnson-Laird and Keith Oatley argue that the "components [of romantic love] exist separately in different societies, but their integration into a recognizable complex is a cultural accomplishment [by the West]." 6At the other end of the romantic love continuum we find those who argue that this emotion belongs to a universal human nature: or, more specifically, that it can be attributed to specialised neural circuits whose ultimate purpose is to enhance reproductive success. Not surprisingly, this has been a favorite position among evolutionary psychologists, and it has recently received some support from neuroscientific studies.For example, the neuroscientists Andreas Bartels and Samir Zeki claim to have uncovered a "functionally specialised system" that lights up in fMRI (magnetic resonance) scans of brains whose owners claim to... (shrink)

We have come to regard nonhuman animals as beings of concern, and we even grant them some legal protections. But until we understand animals as moral agents in and of themselves, they will be nothing more than distant recipients of our largesse. Featuring original essays by philosophers, ethicists, religionists, and ethologists, including Marc Bekoff, Frans de Waal, and Elisabetta Palagi, this collection demonstrates the ability of animals to operate morally, process ideas of good and bad, and think seriously about (...) sociality and virtue. Envisioning nonhuman animals as distinct moral agents marks a paradigm shift in animal studies, as well as philosophy itself. Drawing not only on ethics and religion but also on law, sociology, and cognitive science, the essays in this collection test long-held certainties about moral boundaries and behaviors and prove that nonhuman animals possess complex reasoning capacities, sophisticated empathic sociality, and dynamic and enduring self-conceptions. Rather than claim animal morality is the same as human morality, this book builds an appreciation of the variety and character of animal sensitivities and perceptions across multiple disciplines, moving animal welfarism in promising new directions. (shrink)

The Science Granting Councils Initiative (SGCI) in Africa aims to strengthen the capacities of selected science granting councils (SGCs) in sub-Saharan Africa in order to support research and evidence-based policies that will contribute to Africa’s economic and social development. As part of SGCI, a study was conducted in 2021 to investigate strategies that have been adopted by fifteen SGCs participating in SGCI in promoting ethical practice in research and innovation. Data collection for the study was mainly based on a data (...) abstraction form that was completed for each country by an assigned focal person with a background in research ethics. The focal persons relied on various methods including document and website review and interviews with senior officers at the SGCs. The study specifically sought to describe the strategies and activities being implemented by the 15 SGCs in promoting ethics and integrity in research and innovation. The study revealed various strategies that were being implemented by the 15 SGCs aimed at promoting ethics in research and innovation including requiring proof of research ethics committee approval before releasing research funds and the inclusion of ethics questions in the application form for funding. It was observed that some activities and strategies were generic to most SGCs for example the development of general/standard guidelines for the conduct of research in each respective country. Overall, the different SGCs were involved in a broad spectrum of activities aimed at promoting research ethics and this paper presents an opportunity for cross fertilization of ideas. By providing a summary of the various strategies that SGCs are using in promoting ethical conduct of research, it is hoped that this paper will lead to improvements in the ways SGCs provide support and oversight over the research that they fund. (shrink)

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin put forward his theory of natural selection. Conventionally, Darwin's argument for this theory has been understood as based on an analogy with artificial selection. But there has been no consensus on how, exactly, this analogical argument is supposed to work – and some suspicion too that analogical arguments on the whole are embarrassingly weak. Drawing on new insights into the history of analogical argumentation from the ancient Greeks onward, as well as on (...) in-depth studies of Darwin's public and private writings, this book offers an original perspective on Darwin's argument, restoring to view the intellectual traditions which Darwin took for granted in arguing as he did. From this perspective come new appreciations not only of Darwin's argument but of the metaphors based on it, the range of wider traditions the argument touched upon, and its legacies for science after the Origin. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, moral philosophers have done their best to push the question of moral change off the intellectual agenda. If you look back to Principia Ethica, which appeared in 1903, you will find G.E. Moore taking it for granted that ethics is concerned with a single unanalysable object called “the good”, which is the only thing we can ever really mean when we talk about “goodness”. There could be no progress in morality as such, apart from throwing out (...) any historical flotsam and jetsam that might have made its way into the clear waters of ethical intuition. Genuine ethics did not have a history, in Moore’s opinion; only pseudo-ethics did. (shrink)

In this paper, we will critically examine the notion of rationality and the disabling instinct of self-preservation that play out in human relationships. That “man is a rational animal,” as Aristotle declared is usually taken for granted in social studies. But whether humans act rationally all the time, and in all circumstances remains questionable. Here, we shall investigate this concern from a decolonial perspective by engaging some contradictions thrown up in the context of coloniality within which a section of humanity (...) dehumanizes the rest. The question then is, how rational is the intellectual program of coloniality? Taking a cue from conversational thinking that places the notion of relationship at the center of decolonial analysis, we argue that coloniality fractures the inter and intra-racial relationships due mainly to the instinct of self-preservation that overwhelms human rationality. What has emerged today as the superior/inferior divide, racialism, classism, internal colonialism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, xenophobia, and genocide are some of the consequences of warped and uncritical thinking driven by an extreme form of the instinct of self-preservation. We argue that the promotion of critical (higher-order) thinking in addition to ordinary (lower-order) thinking could be crucial in a decolonial program. (shrink)

Epistemic questions have become an important area of debate within democratic theory. Epistemic democrats have revived epistemic justification of democracy, while social scientific research has speared a significant debate on voter knowledge. An area which has received less attention, however, is the epistemic case for markets. Market advocates have developed a number of epistemic critiques of democracy which suggest that most goods are better provided by markets than democratic institutions. Despite representing important challenges to democracy, these critiques have gone without (...) reply as democratic theorists have tended to exclude markets from consideration. This article responds to these critiques and argues that there are good epistemic grounds for granting a much greater role to democracy than its market critics have claimed. It argues that there is a broad range of goods, including important ethical goods, which are better provided by democracy than markets due to the particular epistemic burdens they create. (shrink)

People unacquainted with moral philosophy suppose that its business is to tell us the difference between right and wrong. Many moral philosophers, unfortunately, seem to agree with them, to the extent, at any rate, of taking it for granted that there is some one divison of actions into two classes, which division is of some especial or even unique significance. Actions, they have supposed, are either right or wrong. If they are right, then they must and ought to be done, (...) and to do them is our duty. If they are wrong, then they must not and ought not to be done, and it is our duty not to do them. If we do what is right, and do this because it is right, and not just because it suits us, then we have performed a morally good action, and we deserve praise or commendation. If we have done something which is wrong, then we have performed a morally bad action, and deserveblame, and possibly punishment. Finally, a man manifests his moral goodness by performing, from a sense of duty, those actions which belong to the first class, and omitting those which belong to the second class; since there are no other ways in which actions may be classified morally, he has ample oppo tunity for exercising his talents, and the morally good man, or the conscientious man, or the dutiful man, becomes the archetype of what a man ought to be. (shrink)

Mona Simion questions whether there is a distinction between taking back an assertion and taking back only the content of an assertion, as I have claimed. After arguing against the distinction in question, Simion grants that there is a difference between the cases that I use to illustrate the distinction, and thus turns to the task of explaining the difference in a way that keeps it from undermining the knowledge norm. The explanation she offers is in terms of a distinction (...) between doing something that is wrong and doing something that is blameworthy. I respond here by defending the distinction and questioning the explanation she gives of it. (shrink)

Since 9/11, Islamophobia has been gaining the attention of scholars, and, increasingly, it is perceived to be an integral part of the emerging zeitgeist of the 21st century. However, the term itself is much debated and little consensus exists as to what it means. Using data drawn from political debate on talk radio between Nick Griffin, Chairman of the British National Party, and Abdul, a Muslim from Manchester and membership categorisation analysis as a methodology, this paper aims to reveal (...) the category-work by which Islamophobia is achieved as a members’ accomplishment. Findings indicate that two versions of Islamophobia are talked into being. On the one hand, Griffin “does” Islamophobia through the operation of an adversarial standard relational pair Islam/west which operates within a membership categorisation device “worlds”, and so he achieves exclusion through cultural incompatibility. On the other hand, Abdul uses the membership categorisation device “race” within which the adversarial standard relational pair Muslim/asian-white British is operative, and so he ascribes overt racist attitudes to Islamophobes. (shrink)

In this essay, we explore the possibility and the extent of individual freedom within the Afro-communitarian set up. We contend that every community is made up of individuals whose association constitutes the community and as such, that the idea of individual freedom is not only possible but could be necessary. Granted that the idea of communitarianism presupposes the domination of communal values over individual endowments, we contend, nonetheless that when the idea of primordiality of private liberty is taken into account, (...) individual freedom could be defended. We engage extant literature in Afro-communitarianism to make a strong case using Michael Eze’s ‘realist perspectivism’ as a veritable index that defines the relationship between the individual and the community as contemporaneous which balances private liberty with public authority. Thus, we claim that since the freedom of the individual to function is necessary for the community to function, individual freedom is defensible insofar as it does not conflict with public authority. (shrink)

My question in this paper is whether digital technologies transform humanity and make politics impossible. Digital technologies, no doubt, are revolutionary. But I argue that what they have done in the Post-Cold War era are: (1) to further contract the spaces between politicians and the people; (2) transform actors from subjects to objects, such that we may in addition to social identities, talk about digital identities; (3) relocate the public sphere from squares to ilosphere where individuals are granted enormous expressive (...) powers but at the same time become vulnerable to large scale manipulations; (4) and escalate the tools of politics. My argument will be that digital technologies in a subtle way are transforming humanity in the digital space and that this might have costly moral consequences not only in politics generally but specifically in liberal democracy. However, I will contend that this transformation of humanity does not make politics impossible; it only escalates it with troubling consequences like those we saw in the 2016 American presidential election. (shrink)

Klein aims to refute scepticism on its own terms by showing that, even if we grant the sceptic as much as possible in the way of strong necessary conditions for knowledge and weak sufficient conditions for the defeat of knowledge claims, the case for scepticism is still defective. In this I think he is totally successful at least as regards the two forms of direct scepticism he deals with. On the third type of scepticism, iterative scepticism, I think his (...) results are more open to question--but only because I think he has conceded too much to the sceptic in the course of the argument. The main sceptical argument Klein is concerned with is the evil demon argument and its associated defences. Klein's argument in his two central chapters is detailed, rigorous and often labyrinthine. The long section on the concept of justification is hard to follow and might have benefitted from further formalization, especially since parts of it and the following section consist of derivations. One consequence of Klein's cautious manner of proceeding is that reviewers are compelled to take drastic short-cuts in terminology and exposition. One hopes this will not produce distortion, but the reader who fears it has is well advised to read the book, which more than repays careful study. (shrink)

Foundationalism came under attack in two areas in the first half of this century. First, some doubted whether the foundations were adequate to support the entire structure of knowledge, and second, the doctrine of the Agiven@ came under serious attack. = However, many epistemologists were not convinced that foundationalism was to be abandoned even if the criticisms were granted. According to these epistemologist, far from having shown that foundationalism itself was at fault, the critics of foundationalism had only been attacking (...) one particular version of foundationalism--that version that included infallibility, incorrigibility,, or some appeal to a Agiven@ at the base of the structure of justification. The claim of these defenders was that there are other possible types of foundationalism than this version of foundationalism, which has come to be called Classical Foundationalism. And thus opened up a new area of philosophical lexicography: the attempt to say what foundationalism itself is, so that Classical Foundationalism turned out to be one instance of foundationalism but not the only possible one. (shrink)

Following a brief account of the puzzle that ethics committees present for the Western Philosophical tradition, I will examine the possibility that social contract theory can contribute to a philosophical account of these committees. Passing through classical as well as contemporary theories, particularly Rawls' recent constructivist approach, I will argue that social contract theory places severe constraints on the authority that may legitimately be granted to ethics committees. This, I conclude, speaks more about the suitability of the theory to this (...) level of analysis than about the ethics committee phenomenon itself. Keywords: ethics committees, moral consensus, social contract theory CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

People unacquainted with moral philosophy suppose that its business is to tell us the difference between right and wrong. Many moral philosophers, unfortunately, seem to agree with them, to the extent, at any rate, of taking it for granted that there is some one divison of actions into two classes, which division is of some especial or even unique significance. Actions, they have supposed, are either right or wrong. If they are right, then they must and ought to be done, (...) and to do them is our duty. If they are wrong, then they must not and ought not to be done, and it is our duty not to do them. If we do what is right, and do this because it is right, and not just because it suits us, then we have performed a morally good action, and we deserve praise or commendation. If we have done something which is wrong, then we have performed a morally bad action, and deserveblame, and possibly punishment. Finally, a man manifests his moral goodness by performing, from a sense of duty, those actions which belong to the first class, and omitting those which belong to the second class; since there are no other ways in which actions may be classified morally, he has ample oppo tunity for exercising his talents, and the morally good man, or the conscientious man, or the dutiful man, becomes the archetype of what a man ought to be. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, moral philosophers have done their best to push the question of moral change off the intellectual agenda. If you look back to Principia Ethica, which appeared in 1903, you will find G.E. Moore taking it for granted that ethics is concerned with a single unanalysable object called “the good”, which is the only thing we can ever really mean when we talk about “goodness”. There could be no progress in morality as such, apart from throwing out (...) any historical flotsam and jetsam that might have made its way into the clear waters of ethical intuition. Genuine ethics did not have a history, in Moore’s opinion; only pseudo-ethics did. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PrefaceMost of the papers in this special issue of Diacritics were presented at a conference on the future of French studies organized at Cornell University with a special grant from the Office of the President, Hunter Rawlings III. The charge to the speakers was less to reflect on the situation of French studies in the American academy than to offer possibilities for the future, whether through programmatic argument (...) or illustration of the sort of work that might be undertaken under the banner of French studies. The editors have substituted for two papers from the conference that were already committed elsewhere two new papers from colleagues engaged in French studies at Cornell.The ongoing arguments about the future of French studies seem riven by a conflict of motives and aims. There are those who wish to confirm the dissolution of any fetishized notion of Frenchness, insisting on the multiplicity of francophonies and the fragmenting effects of globalization on anything that claims to be a specifically French identity. Conversely, there are those who promote French studies precisely as the defense of an irreducible specificity of things French, which is threatened by changes in the university and in the world and which the new field of French studies might have a chance of preserving. If these are not the options that our contributors embrace, it is not because they are insensible of their attractions—or of the beguiling possibility of combining them, by defining that essential Frenchness, to be pursued or preserved, as the dissolution of the idea of an essential Frenchness.One of the general aims of these papers is to promote and illustrate possibilities for novel kinds of reading and writing and for inventive modes of interdisciplinary study, which make French studies a lively field for students and teachers. But if there is a single substantial theme that runs through them all, it may be the mundane concern that Tom Conley calls “wondering what can be done to invigorate one of the richest of all literary canons.” How does that canon respond to the kinds of questions and issues that the unraveling and dissolution of boundaries—including those of France itself—have made possible? And should French studies, in the end, be conceived as the integration of the numerous interdisciplinary trajectories that depart from or traverse this canon or as a more distinctively specific practice for the study of everything French that is structured like a language?Copyright © 1999 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

“There's a new whistleblower in Washington,” according to CNN News. He is Food and Drug Administration scientist David Graham, who claims that the FDA failed to warn the public about certain drugs' dangerous side effects and pressured him to change his research's conclusion that the arthritis drug Vioxx caused heart attacks. Another Washington whistleblower, Dr. Jonathan Fishbein of the National Institutes of Health, alleged that he was fired because “he had raised concerns about sloppy practices that might endanger patient (...) safety” in a study of the AIDS drug nevirapine.Graham and Fishbein thus joined the ranks of whistleblowers who have gained some prominence in recent years for their reporting of corporate or institutional misconduct. The best-known whistleblowers—the FBI's Coleen Rowley, Enron's Sherron Watkins, and WorldCom's Cynthia Cooper, who together received Time magazine's Whistleblower Person of the Year Award in 20024 - focused public attention on the reform of corporate accounting and legal practices. (shrink)

The only way to settle conclusively what any part of a language means is to discover the circumstances, both linguistic and non-linguistic, in which the speakers of the language are prepared to use it. This is not a new doctrine, but Wittgenstein gave it new life by dramatising the following question: If someone used an expression in a radically non-standard way, could anything he said about his state of mind convince us that he nevertheless meant it in a standard way? (...) To answer ‘No’ to this, and to generalize that answer, is to say that the last-resort criteria for what something means lie in the way in which it is used - a fairly plain statement which I shall call ‘the behavioural theory (of meaning)’ and with which I shall here have no quarrel at all. What I wish to do in the following pages is to consider the relationship between the behavioural theory and some aspects of the concept of proof. It is beyond dispute that one can be led, by one’s acceptance of certain premisses, to accept a certain conclusion. There is, though, a problem about the nature of this ‘leading’. On the one hand, it is usual to think of it as sometimes having the nature of a forcing: ‘If you say that, you are committed to admitting this also; you cannot accept the one and reject the other.’ On the other hand, the behavioural theory of meaning makes it difficult to see how there can possibly be such a relationship between the premisses and the conclusion of any proof. There are many ways of bringing out the apparent clash between the behavioural theory and the notion of logical forcing or committal. Perhaps the clearest of them arises from asking how there can be room for a concept of committal in a purely behavioural study. In this spirit, we might grant that our knowledge of some of the ways in which the parts of a language are used may lead us to expect to find certain sorts of further use and not others; and we could compare such expectations with those of an anthropologist who finds that a certain society has a matriarchal system of authority and then proceeds to investigate its inheritance laws.. (shrink)

On 30 March 2020, the Hungarian parliament approved emergency measures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, granting prime minister Viktor Orbán the power to rule by decree. The very next day, the government repealed the legal recognition of transgenderism, ruling that assignations of biological sex are binary and permanent. The decision to place sexual difference under house arrest during a time of lockdown was not coincidental. As I argue in this short essay, Orbán’s move was itself a kind of assignation, (...) an act of discursive placing designed to eradicate transgenderism under the name of immunisation. -/- Drawing on Derrida’s motifs of the gift and the dance, I offer a topology of birthsex, the ontological category produced by Orbán’s law of immutable, dichotomous sexual dimorphism. I observe the movements of ipseity to show how Orbán’s placement of the birthsex legislation within his pandemic programme enabled him to define transgenderism as a dangerous and foreign illness that requires an immunising response. Finally, to consider the racial and colonial context of this assault on trans, intersex, and nonbinary lives, I turn to María Lugones and her work on the coloniality of gender, finding her choreography of resistance to be in step with Derrida’s. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 4, Page 515-529, May 2022. Much of the recent literature on freedom of speech has focused on the arguments for and against the regulation of certain kinds of speech. Discussions of hate speech and offensive speech, for example, abound in this literature, as do debates concerning the permissibility of pornography. Less attention has been paid, however, at least recently, to the normative foundations of freedom of speech where three classic justifications still prevail, based (...) on the values of truth, autonomy and democracy. In this paper we argue, first, that none of these justifications meet all four intuitive desiderata for an adequate theory of free speech. We go on to sketch an original relational view of free speech, one which grounds its value in the recognition that speakers grant each other when engaging in speech practices, and its limits in the republican ideal of non-dominated co-exercisable liberty. We briefly illustrate the relational approach’s implications for the debate on hate speech regulation and for the response to fake news. (shrink)