ABSTRACT Drawing upon a distinction between epistemically and metaphysically motivated notions of a concept, I consider the insurmountable problems of theories that appeal to our epistemic capacities to address the problem of the nature of concepts satisfactorily. Prominent theories of concepts hold that primitive concepts must have internal structure if they are to account for the explanatory functions that cognitive scientists have attributed to such constructs as prototypes, exemplars, and theories. Vindicating the role of non-experimental philosophy in the critical examination (...) of empirical theories, I argue that the explanatory effectiveness of those constructs is orthogonal to an argument concerning the structure of primitive concepts. Conceptual atomism provides an alternative approach to individuating primitive concepts the precise formulation of which has yet to be worked out. Despite its unpopularity, the atomist alternative is still in a better position to face the question of what concepts are than its competitors. RESUMEN Haciendo una distinción entre nociones de concepto epistémica y metafísicamente motivadas, considero las dificultades insuperables que enfrentan las teorías que apelan a nuestras capacidades epistémicas para abordar el problema de la naturaleza de los conceptos. Las teorías de conceptos más importantes sostienen que los conceptos primitivos deben poseer una estructura interna para cumplir aquellas funciones explicativas que científicas y científicos cognitivos les han atribuido a constructos tales como prototipos, ejemplares y teorías. Reivindicando el aporte de la filosofía no experimental en la evaluación de teorías empíricas, planteo que un argumento a favor de la estructura de los conceptos primitivos es independiente del poder explicativo de dichos constructos. El atomismo conceptual proporciona un enfoque alternativo para individualizar conceptos primitivos cuya formulación precisa aún no se ha elaborado. Pese a su impopularidad, la alternativa atomista está en una mejor posición que sus rivales para enfrentar la pregunta acerca de qué tipo de cosas son los conceptos. (shrink)

Until recently, it seemed like no theory about the relationship between rational credence and rational outright belief could reconcile three independently plausible assumptions: that our beliefs should be logically consistent, that our degrees of belief should be probabilistic, and that a rational agent believes something just in case she is sufficiently confident in it. Recently a new formal framework has been proposed that can accommodate these three assumptions, which is known as “the stability theory of belief” or “high probability cores.” (...) In this paper, I examine whether the stability theory of belief can meet two further constraints that have been proposed in the literature: that it is irrational to outright believe lottery propositions, and that it is irrational to hold outright beliefs based on purely statistical evidence. I argue that these two further constraints create a dilemma for a proponent of the stability theory: she must either deny that her theory is meant to give an account of the common epistemic notion of outright belief, or supplement the theory with further constraints on rational belief that render the stability theory explanatorily idle. This result sheds light on the general prospects for a purely formal theory of the relationship between rational credence and belief, i.e. a theory that does not take into account belief content. I argue that it is doubtful that any such theory could properly account for these two constraints, and hence play an important role in characterizing our common epistemic notion of outright belief. (shrink)

I argue that in order to account for normative uncertainty, an expressivist theory of normative language and thought must accomplish two things: Firstly, it needs to find room in its framework for a gradable conative attitude, degrees of which can be interpreted as representing normative uncertainty. Secondly, it needs to defend appropriate rationality constraints pertaining to those graded attitudes. The first task – finding an appropriate graded attitude that can represent uncertainty – is not particularly problematic. I tackle the second (...) task by exploring whether we can devise expressivist versions of the standard arguments used to support rationality constraints on degrees of uncertainty, Dutch book arguments and accuracy-dominance arguments. I show that we can do so, but that the resulting arguments don’t support the same rationality constraints as the original versions of the arguments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hispanic Utopian Studies and Activism as a PromptJulia Ramírez-Blanco (bio)In the last few years I have come to the Utopian Studies Societýs yearly conference as part of a smaller group, one that has its own parallel history in the left corner of the South of Europe and is networked mostly with Latin America. I am referring to the interdisciplinary research group Histopia, which has its base in Madrid́s Autónoma (...) University, is comprised of twenty-seven researchers from different institutions, and is coordinated by historian Juan Pro. As the name Histopia suggests, it was founded by historians. From the beginning there have been people from other fields, such as political science, architecture, cultural studies, and art history. The aim was always understanding utopianism beyond the study of texts, and centering research in everything that utopianism produces, such as social movements, political programs, and urban programs. In this sense, a premise was to understand utopias not as a footnote in history or a series of eccentric events, but as a guiding force that drives a [End Page 510] history. This placing of utopianism in history was clearly announced in the grouṕs website:Histopia seeks to go beyond the philological approach that predominates in Utopian Studies and to historicize the study of contemporary utopias and dystopias, showing how they respond to the contexts in which they arise, since they reflect the problems and frustrations of a society as well as the aspirations for change it contains, and the conditions of possibility that a particular cultural and emotional framework offers for developing them.1Together with this focus on history, which departs from the more text-centered traditions of an important part of utopian studies, the other main particularity of Histopia is its decentralizing of utopian studies towards the Spanish-speaking world. And to this end, the group also founded the Transatlantic Network for the Study of Utopias, which was created in 2015 to put in communication over 250 researchers, most of them from Latin America, but also from other places such as Australia or Japan.2The Spanish statés research funding programs have provided the bureaucratic framework and the material resources for the research group since 2015. Together with seminars, conferences, or workshops, the resulting publications have been linked with utopian literature, with dystopia, and with a focus on viewing history through the lens of utopia. One of the most recent endeavors has been a radically collective one, articulating a Dictionary of Utopian Places written by a multitude of authors.3 Histopia has also initiated several projects with schools, for the most part ongoing, and there have been many attempts to disseminate its work through radio and video projects. And since its founding, Histopia has tried reaching out beyond the Academy—an effort that is finally gaining success. In 2021 the international conference Intentional Communities: Concrete Utopias in History was extremely fruitful: we saw involved participation both in various interventions, and through activities such as streaming. Participants included people and organizations from social movements and from intentional communities.I want to argue here that the very formation of Histopia was a logical development from certain political triggers—and in particular, the so-called 15M Movement, a series of anti-austerity protests and direct-democracy initiatives that ignited antigovernment activism throughout Spain from 2011 on, culminating in the occupation of urban spaces (“encampments”) and in very large political assemblies. It is not just that the forces of activism were [End Page 511] reignited after 2011, and that its inheritors came together with the Histopia research group; the very existence of Histopia, I am arguing, can be read as a consequence of the 15M encampment and its aftermath.Prefigurative PracticesIn May 2011, following the example of the Arab world, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol was populated by a crowd armed with posters, slogans, and self-made banners. On the inhospitable ground of the square, anonymous persons erected an encampment so complex that it functioned as a miniature city, with spaces for preparing food, for nursery care, for rest, for legal consultation, for anti-racist and/or feminist activity. All work was voluntary, and materials were... (shrink)

Mental health issues are on the rise among early career researchers (ECRs), endangering the future of academia. Horizontal linkages among ECRs can play a role in building a reliable emotional support system. We offer four suggestions to overcome existing barriers and foster these linkages.

The aim of this paper is to examine whether it would be advantageous to introduce knowledge norms instead of the currently assumed rational credence norms into the debate about decision making under normative uncertainty. There is reason to think that this could help us better accommodate cases in which agents are rationally highly confident in false moral views. I show how Moss’ view of probabilistic knowledge can be fruitfully employed to develop a decision theory that delivers plausible verdicts in these (...) cases. I also argue that, for this new view to be better than existing alternatives, it must adopt a particular solution to the new evil demon problem, which asks whether agents and their BIV-counterparts are equally justified. In order to get an attractive decision theory for cases of moral uncertainty, we must reject the claim that agents and their BIV-counterparts are equally justified. Moreover, the resulting view must be supplemented with a moral epistemology that explains how it is possible to be rationally morally uncertain. This is especially challenging if we assume that moral truths are knowable a priori. (shrink)

Leibniz puts forward an intriguing argument against the moral permissibility of chattel slavery in a text from 1703. This argument has three independent layers or sub-arguments. The first is that slavery violates natural rights. The second is that moral laws such as the principles of equity and piety oppose slavery, or at least severely limit the permissible actions toward slaves. The third and final layer is that slavery can at most be justified if the slave is permanently incapable of conducting (...) herself well. Yet, it is very doubtful that any actual human beings satisfy that description. This paper analyzes and evaluates Leibniz’s argument, which scholars have so far largely neglected. Even though some elements of the argument are not original to Leibniz, it is of considerable importance for the scholarship of early modern philosophy: it sheds light on Leibniz’s views not only on the moral status of slavery itself, but also on moral rights and obligations more generally. (shrink)

This paper examines the surprisingly central role of sympathetic love within Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy. It shows that such love fulfils a range of metaphysical functions, and highlight an important shift in Cavendish’s account vis-a-vis earlier conceptions: sympathetic love is no longer given an emanative or mechanistic explanation, but is naturalized as an active emotion. It furthers investigate to what extent Cavendish’s account reveals a rift between the realm of nature and the realm of human sociability, and whether this rift really (...) prompts an inward turn, as some interpreters have suggested. (shrink)

In his new book "The Importance of Being Rational", Errol Lord aims to give a real definition of the property of rationality in terms of normative reasons. If he can do so, his work is an important step towards a defense of ‘reasons fundamentalism’ – the thesis that all complex normative properties can be analyzed in terms of normative reasons. I focus on his analysis of epistemic rationality, which says that your doxastic attitudes are rational just in case they are (...) correct responses to the objective normative reasons you possess. For some fact to be an objective normative reason to do something that you possess, you have to be in a position to know this fact and be able to competently use it as a reason to do that thing. Lord’s view is thus a knowledge-first view about possessing normative reasons. Throughout the book, Lord conceptualizes belief in the traditional tripartite way – if you take any attitude at all towards a proposition, then you either believe it, or disbelieve it, or you suspend judgment about it. Lord doesn’t discuss cases in which we’re uncertain. Yet, those cases are ubiquitous. I explore how his view can be extended to them. I first discuss whether his strategy for vindicating coherence requirements in terms of normative reasons can be applied to credences. I then ask how Lord can conceive of the doxastic attitudes that encode uncertainty . (shrink)

Leibniz portrays the most fundamental entities in his mature ontology in at least three different ways. In some places, he describes them as mind-like, immaterial substances that perceive and strive. Elsewhere, he presents them as hylomorphic compounds. In yet other passages, he characterizes them in terms of primitive and derivative forces. Interpreters often assume that the first description is the most accurate. In contrast, I will argue that the third characterization is more accurate than the other two. If that is (...) correct, Leibniz’s monadological metaphysics is even more radical than it initially seems: his ontology is best understood not as a substance-mode ontology but as a force ontology. At the metaphysical ground floor, we do not find substances that possess force; instead, we just find forces. Interpreting Leibniz as a force ontologist has far-reaching consequences. For instance, it requires us to reconsider the status of time in Leibniz’s system and to revise our understanding of appetitions and perceptions. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss three distinct but related puzzles involving lotteries: Kyburg’s lottery paradox, the statistical evidence problem, and the Harman-Vogel paradox. Kyburg’s lottery paradox is the following well-known problem: if we identify rational outright belief with a rational credence above a threshold, we seem to be forced to admit either that one can have inconsistent rational beliefs, or that one cannot rationally believe anything one is not certain of. The statistical evidence problem arises from the observation that people (...) seem to resist forming outright beliefs whenever the available evidence for the claim under consideration is purely statistical. We need explanations of whether it is in fact irrational to form such beliefs, and of whether a clear distinction can be drawn between statistical and non-statistical evidence. The Harman-Vogel paradox is usually presented as a paradox about knowledge: we tend to assume that we can know so-called ordinary propositions, such as the claim that I will be in Barcelona next spring. Yet, we hesitate to make knowledge claims regarding so-called lottery propositions, such as the claim that I won’t die in a car crash in the next few months, even if these lottery propositions are obviously entailed by the ordinary propositions we claim to know. Depending on one’s view about the relationship between rational belief and knowledge, the Harman-Vogel paradox has ramifications for a theory of rational outright belief. Formal theories of the relationship between rational credence and rational belief, such as Leitgeb’s stability theory, tend to focus mostly on handling Kyburg’s lottery paradox, but not the other two puzzles I mention. My aim in this article is to draw out relationships and differences between the puzzles, and to examine to what extent existing formal solutions to Kyburg’s lottery paradox help with answering the statistical evidence problem and the Harman-Vogel paradox. (shrink)

National legislation, as well as arguments of experts, in Germany and Israel represent opposite regulatory approaches and positions in bioethical debates concerning end-of-life care. This study analyzes how these positions are mirrored in the attitudes of laypeople and influenced by the religious views and personal experiences of those affected. We qualitatively analyzed eight focus groups in Germany and Israel in which laypeople were asked to discuss similar scenarios involving the withholding or withdrawing of treatment, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia. In both (...) countries, respect for patient autonomy and patients’ wishes to die with dignity found broad consent. Laypeople argued in favor of accepting such wishes when they were put down in an advance directive. Laypeople in non-religious groups in both countries argued on the basis of a respect for autonomy for the possibility of euthanasia in severe cases but, at the same time, cautioned against its possible misuse. National contrast was apparent in the moral reasoning of lay respondents concerning the distinction between withholding and withdrawing treatment. The modern religious laypeople in Israel, especially, argued strongly, on the basis of the halakhic tradition, against allowing the withdrawal of treatment in accord with a patient’s wish. We conclude by discussing the emergent notion of shared responsibility and views of professional responsibility, which we connect through relevant cultural themes such as religion and national culture. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to explain how and why all human cognition depends on the body for Leibniz. I will show that there are three types of dependence: (a) the body is needed in order to supply materials, or content, for thinking; (b) the body is needed in order to give us the opportunity for the discovery of innate ideas; and (c) the body is needed in order to provide sensory notions as vehicles of thought. The third type (...) is intimately connected to the faculty of the imagination, which supplies the sensory vehicles of thought. Hence, the paper will also examine Leibniz’s account of that faculty and its operations. Before doing any of this, however, I will address the elephant in the room: Leibniz’s claim that mind and body do not interact at all, metaphysically speaking. The correspondence between mind and body is merely a matter of what he calls ‘pre-established harmony’. At first glance, this Leibnizian doctrine may suggest a radical disembodiment of all human cognition. Yet, I will argue that this is not the case and that, quite to the contrary, pre-established harmony requires that cognition is embodied in one important sense. (shrink)

Movido no sólo por haber experimentado intensas ilusiones a lo largo de su vida, sino por su propia vocación teórica, y, una vez puesto a la tarea, por los sorprendentes hallazgos, en primer lugar, de que la palabra ilusión -«tan general, de tan larga historia, de tan claro linaje latino, común a tantas lenguas»- es algo privado del hispanohablante, y en segundo, de la casi absoluta ignorancia acerca de esta emoción, J. Marías aborda en este libro un insólito y fascinante (...) recorrido por este «secreto de la lengua española». A partir de aquí, y a través de sus distintos capítulos, Marías analiza con su indiscutible sabiduría las relaciones del término, y aquello que designa, con la imaginación, el tiempo, el deseo, la vocación, el amor y, por último, con la presencia y la ausencia del propio objeto de la ilusión. (shrink)

Bayesian epistemology provides a popular and powerful framework for modeling rational norms on credences, including how rational agents should respond to evidence. The framework is built on the assumption that ideally rational agents have credences, or degrees of belief, that are representable by numbers that obey the axioms of probability. From there, further constraints are proposed regarding which credence assignments are rationally permissible, and how rational agents’ credences should change upon learning new evidence. While the details are hotly disputed, all (...) flavors of Bayesianism purport to give us norms of ideal rationality. This raises the question of how exactly these norms apply to you and me, since perfect compliance with those ideal norms is out of reach for human thinkers. A common response is that Bayesian norms are ideals that human reasoners are supposed to approximate – the closer they come to being ideally rational, the better. To make this claim plausible, we need to make it more precise. In what sense is it better to be closer to ideally rational, and what is an appropriate measure of such closeness? This article sketches some possible answers to these questions. (shrink)

We undergo a traumatic experience, such as a life-threatening accident or a brutal attack. We survive a period of relentless stress, perhaps because we are in a war zone and witness or commit atrocities. Raised by parents who are alcoholic or mentally ill, we endure traumatic experiences on a daily basis. Or, we are ignored, neglected, or treated as playthings by narcissistic parents, who themselves were ignored and neglected, and on and on through generations. To survive these experiences, perhaps we (...) dissociate. This can take various forms. In the extreme form, we remove ourselves, psychically speaking, from the situation, perhaps by adopting the role... (shrink)

In this paper, I draw from Kantian and Husserlian reflections on the self-awareness of thinking for a contribution to the cognitive phenomenology debate. In particular, I draw from Kant’s conceptions of inner sense and apperception, and from Husserl’s notions of lived experience and self-awareness for an inquiry into the nature of our awareness of our own cognitive activity. With particular consideration of activities of attention, I develop what I take to be Kant’s and Husserl’s “agentive” and “proprietary” accounts. These, I (...) believe, augment contemporary discussions in interesting ways and further bolster the case for cognitive phenomenology. Moreover, the historical comparison highlights a number of assumptions made today that were not yet part of the framework at the time of Kant or at the time of Husserl. This helps reflect on the legitimacy of these assumptions. (shrink)

Leibniz sometimes tells us that there are only two fundamental types of mental states: perceptions and appetitions, that is, mental representations and desire-like states. While this may sound like an overly sparse ontology of mental states, the philosophy of mind that Leibniz builds from these elements is surprisingly nuanced and powerful. What makes this possible is that he distinguishes different sub-types of these mental states. Leibniz famously differentiates between unconscious and conscious perceptions, which gives him an advantage over philosophers like (...) Descartes, for whom all perceptions are conscious. He also distinguishes between reflective and unreflective perceptions, as well as between degrees of perceptual distinctness. Leibniz furthermore follows scholastic thinkers like Thomas Aquinas in distinguishing different types of appetitions. Uncovering what those are and what roles they play in Leibniz’s philosophy of mind are the central aims of this chapter. (shrink)

Moral rationalists and sentimentalists traditionally disagree on at least two counts, namely regarding the source of moral knowledge or moral judgements and regarding the source of moral motivation. I will argue that even though Leibniz's moral epistemology is very much in line with that of mainstream moral rationalists, his account of moral motivation is better characterized as sentimentalist. Just like Hume, Leibniz denies that there is a necessary connection between knowing that something is right and the motivation to act accordingly. (...) Instead, he believes that certain affections are necessary for moral motivation. On my interpretation, then, Leibniz is an externalist about judgements and motivation: he is committed to a gap between the judgement that something is morally right and the motivation to act accordingly. As a matter of fact, I will argue that there are two gaps. The first and less controversial one has to do with the fact that Leibniz reconciles his psychological egoism with ethical altruis.. (shrink)

This paper argues that the vitalist monisms of Anne Conway and Margaret Cavendish. Even though Conway is often cited as a proponent of a thoroughgoing ‘spiritualist’ ontology and Cavendish as the advocate of a similarly thoroughgoing materialism, their views turn out to be much closer than they may initially seem. Apart from highlighting the more radical nature of Conway’s position, such a reframing also has the added advantage of bringing the similarities between her own ‘spiritual’ monism and the vitalist ‘materialisms’ (...) of her time into sharper relief. As F. Wunderlich emphasizes, the notion of subtle matter pervaded the natural sciences of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The chapter provides a brief sketch of Cavendish’s ‘materialism’ and compares it to Conway’s view of created substance, drawing out a number of relevant similarities. It asks what may have motivated Conway and Cavendish to move beyond the materialism-immaterialism divide by ‘spiritualizing’ matter in this way. (shrink)

Leibniz’s correspondence with Antoine Arnauld is one of the clearest and most comprehensive expressions of Leibniz’s philosophy in the so-called middle period. This chapter will explore the philosophical content of this correspondence. It will concentrate on four of the most central topics: (a) complete concepts and contingency, (b) substance and body, (c) causation, and (d) the special status of rational souls in God’s plan.

Recently, political models which employ lottery-selection instead of ballot voting have been proposed. Proponents argue that such lottocratic models can improve the representation of the population and reduce undemocratic influences. In this paper, I argue that these proposals also satisfy the egalitarian requirement of democracy. I claim that having an equal chance to be selected by lot is equally egalitarian as having an equally weighed vote for two reasons: first, having a chance to be selected by lot satisfies the requirement (...) for political justice better than electoral democracy, and second, it provides citizens with equal political influence and not merely equal impact. (shrink)

He tried to look into her face, to find out what she thought, but she was smelling the lilac and the lilies of the valley and did not know herself what she was thinking—what she ought to say or do.OblomovMuch of modern and contemporary philosophy of mind in the ‘analytic’ tradition has presupposed, since Descartes, what might be called a realist view about the mind and the mental. According to this view there are independently existing, determinate items that are the (...) truth-conferrers of our ascriptions of mental predicates. The view is also a cognitivist one insofar as it holds that when we correctly ascribe such a predicate to an individual the correctness consists in the discovery of a determinate fact of the matter about the state the individual is in—a state which is somehow cognized by the ascriber. Disputes have arisen about the nature of the truth-conferrers and about the status and the nature of the individual's own authority about the state he is in. A dissenting position in philosophy of mind would have to be handled carefully. It would, most importantly, need to allow for the objectivity of ascriptions of mental predicates at least insofar as it made sense to reject some and accept others on appropriate grounds. Perhaps such a position in the philosophy of mind can be likened in at least one way to what David Wiggins has characterized as a doctrine of ‘cognitive underdetermination’ about moral or practical judgments. (shrink)

There is an ongoing expert debate with regard to financial incentives in order to increase organ supply. However, there is a lacuna of empirical studies on whether citizens would actually support financial incentives for organ donation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany ed. by Corey W. DyckJulia BorcherdingCorey W. Dyck, editor. Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Hardback, $85.00.In more ways than one, this volume constitutes an important contribution to ongoing efforts to reconfigure and enrich our existing philosophical canon and to question the narratives that have led to its current shape. To start, while there is (...) a growing amount of research dedicated to recovering the contributions of women to early modern philosophy, much of this work focuses on the seventeenth century, and geographically centers on England, France, and Italy. By turning the spotlight on eighteenth-century Germany, this volume broadens the scope of these efforts in an important way. Further, with the historiography of this period still shaped by a long-standing dismissive treatment of post-Leibnizian German philosophy and by the long shadow cast by the success of Kant's Critical philosophy, which eclipsed many of the thinkers opposed to it, challenges to its traditional narratives seem especially important. The editor's earlier collection (coedited with Falk Wunderlich) on Kant and his German contemporaries already succeeded in mounting such a challenge by showing that German philosophy throughout the eighteenth century in fact presents us with an extraordinarily rich tableau of intellectual life (Kant and His German Contemporaries. Vol. 1: Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Science and Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018]).The present volume stands as a further valuable contribution to relativizing the still dominant narrative of German philosophy as the story of a select few brilliant minds. It successfully dispenses not only with the idea that those minds were few, but also with the equally persistent one that they were exclusively male. Already in the nineteenth century, we find historians such as Karl Joël explicitly casting the new age of German philosophy inaugurated by Kant as its "masculine epoch"—an image undoubtedly furthered by its main protagonist, who cast philosophical acumen in decidedly male terms when he observed that "[a] woman who has a head full of Greek, like Madame Dacier, or one who engages in debate about the intricacies of mechanics, like the Marquise du Châtelet, might just as well have a beard; for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives" (Karl Joël, Die Frauen in der Philosophie [Hamburg, 1896], 48; Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen [Königsberg, 1764], translation in Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 146; both cited in Eileen O'Neill, "Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History," in Philosophy in a Feminist [End Page 154] Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, ed. Janet A. Kourany [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 17–62). Yet as the contributions to this volume forcefully illustrate, women in the period did—in spite of the numerous severe social, religious, and political obstacles they faced—in fact manage to gain access to its intellectual sphere, and actively shaped its philosophical landscape.While the papers collected here are of high quality throughout, they do vary in their approach. Many chapters, especially in the earlier parts of the volume, investigate female figures as philosophers in their own right, and carve out their self-standing contributions to prominent philosophical movements and debates. Focusing on Sophie of Hanover's correspondence with Leibniz, Christian Leduc's chapter begins by examining her metaphysical views and argues, against standing interpretations, that her main aim is to defend a version of the doctrine of physical influence as an account of mind-body interaction while rejecting metaphysical commitments regarding the nature of the soul in favor of a more agnostic, Lockean empiricist approach. In chapter 3, Stefanie Buchenau shows how women engaging with Wolffian Schulphilosophie began to view themselves as more than teachers and translators and started to claim the title of philosophers. Using the example of Johanna Charlotte Unzer, Buchenau convincingly argues that despite the "feminine," aesthetic garb of her thought, Unzer in fact offers a serious critique and revision of the Wolffian model of... (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Anne Conway’s ‘argument from love’ in her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. This argument, supported by a further argument, the ‘argument from pain’, undermines the dualist dichotomy between mind and matter by appealing to a vitalist similarity principle. My goal is two-fold: first, to contribute to a close systematic reconstruction and analysis of Conway’s arguments, which so far is largely lacking in the literature; second, to show that these arguments are richer and (...) more compelling than commentators have thought. (shrink)

In this commentary we describe the interplay between 1) contemporary popular and professional understandings of “risk” and “normality” in health and healthcare, and 2) the promotion by state and market forces of individual self-regulation of health. We draw upon the work of critical theorists who have described the relationship between risk, fear, and the notion of “normal” in health discourse to argue that these factors act, primarily via the popular media, to shape the discourse on, and overuse of, diagnostic tests (...) in Canada. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind was published over 50 years ago to wide acclaim, but his legacy has been tempered because of important misconceptions, including a) that contemporary philosophy has sufficiently absorbed what is valuable about his contribution; b) that he is responsible for propounding a version of philosophical behaviourism; and c) that Ryle travels down a substantially different philosophical track from that of Wittgenstein. This critical introduction sets out to overturn these misconceptions. It is extremely rare for a (...) UK-based philosopher to be invited to produce a critical introduction for a book published (in French) in France. The French publication has led to a) an invitation to produce an entry for Ryle for Stanford’s (on-line) Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, b) an AHRC research leave award to turn the introduction into a (English) book; an invitation to give lectures on the book at the Université de Picardie. The English version of the critical has received warm praise from a number of philosophers, including Cora Diamond. (shrink)

Leibniz’s claim that it is possible for us to gain metaphysical knowledge through reflection on the self has intrigued many commentators, but it has also often been criticized as flawed or unintelligible. A similar fate has beset Leibniz’s arguments against materialism. In this paper, I explore one of Leibniz’s lesser-known arguments against materialism from his reply to Bayle’s new note L, and argue that it provides us with an instance of a Leibnizian “argument from reflection”. This argument, I further show, (...) does not constitute a flawed appeal to mere introspection, but is in fact securely grounded in an important corollary of the Principle of Sufficient Reason: Leibniz’s Principle of Intelligibility. (shrink)

Leibniz is almost unique among early modern philosophers in giving final causation a central place in his metaphysical system. All changes in created substances, according to Leibniz, have final causes, that is, occur for the sake of some end. There is, however, no consensus among commentators about the details of Leibniz's views on final causation. The least perfect types of changes that created substances undergo are especially puzzling because those changes seem radically different from paradigmatic instances of final causation. Building (...) on my more general discussion of efficient and final causation in ‘Leibniz on Causation – Part 1,’ I will examine and assess some of the rival interpretations of Leibniz's account of final causation. (shrink)

John McCumbers’ book On Philosophy: Notes from a Crisis challenges the key dichotomy of Western philosophical tradition— the distinction between form, or οὐσία, and matter. This basic ontological distinction, first formulated by Aristotle, appears under different guises throughout the history of Western thought, making oppression integral to philosophy, and leading the discipline into the situation of a major crisis, in which, as McCumber eloquently argues, philosophy and philosophers find themselves today. In this essay I argue that by developing the notion (...) of the speaking of matter McCumber subverts the oppressive history of Western philosophy. I explore this rich concept, showing how it successfully undermines ousiodic ontology. By drawing on McCumber’s text, and also on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Gloria Anzaldúa I argue that a non-ousiodic ontology has to prioritize anomalous, or seemingly contradictory beings. I discuss one possible direction such ontology could take—it could focus on the internal stranger, or the metic, to use an ancient Greek term. (shrink)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 masterpiece Nostalghia allows us to rethink our ordinary notion of nostalgia and move beyond the idea of nostalgia as sentimental longing for the past, the fruitless yearning that allows us to avoid living in the present. The film suggests that nostalgia can help us notice that which is not a part of our current situation and to introduce new threads into the fabric of our world. Because of nostalgia, we become aware of perforations in the existing order (...) of things and, as a result, become capable of altering the status quo. The protagonist of Tarkovsky’s film, Gorchakov, a Russian poet visiting Italy, shows us that nostalgia is a violent voyage that never leads home but only helps us find and found a new–and always temporary–dwelling place. Nostalgia, then, is a journey to the home that never was, but to the home that might be. The final sequence of the film beautifully confirms this by placing Gorchakov next to his Russian home that turns out to be inside the ruins of the Cistercian abbey of San Galgano in Italy. This cinematic merging of two very different places and cultures creates a new world for Gorchakov and asks us to continue creating the places in which we happen to find ourselves today. (shrink)

This paper discusses Eastern Europe as a way of being traceable to a specific place or topos in between the West and its Others. By virtue of fitting neither one of the terms of the usual dichotomy it could provide novel insights into Western or European identity, as well as social and political problems, such as immigration. More precisely, Eastern Europe is an instance of the process of creating the self through the encounter with an other that is not radically (...) other. Such a notion of Eastern Europe is developed from three sources: the Ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus, the Chicana theorist and writer Gloria Anzaldúa, and Merab Mamardashvili, a philosopher from Soviet Georgia. (shrink)

Harmony has become a major challenge for modern governance in the twenty-first century because of the multi-religious, multi-racial and multi-ethnic character of our increasingly globalized societies. Governments all over the world are facing growing pressure to integrate the many diverse elements and subcultures which make up modern pluralistic societies. This book examines the idea of harmony, and its place in politics and governance, both in theory and practice, in Asia, the West and elsewhere. It explores and analyses the meanings, mechanisms, (...) dimensions and methodologies of harmony as a normative political ideal in both Western and Asian philosophical traditions. The book argues that in Western political thought - which sees politics as primarily concerned with resolving social conflicts and protecting individual rights - the concept of harmony has often been neglected. In contrast, since earliest times harmony or ‘he’ has been a profound theme in Confucian thought, and current leaders of many East Asian governments, and the Chinese government, have explicitly declared that the realisation of a harmonious society is their aim. The book also assesses how harmony is pursued, jeopardized or deformed in the real world of politics, based upon empirical analysis of a variety of different cultural, social and political contexts, including: China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Denmark, Latin America and the Scandinavian countries. It shows how harmony as an organizing concept can help to promote new thinking in governance, and overcome problems of modern-day governance like distrust, adversarial conflicts, hyper-individualism, coercive state intervention, and free-market alienation. It also discusses the potential problems posed by the pursuit of harmony, in particular in the grave threat of totalitarianism, and considers how these risks could best be mitigated. (shrink)