We use conversation analysis and a research design modeled on speed dating to examine college-aged speed daters’ assessments of their experience of this activity. In getting acquainted, participants solicit and provide accounts of the experience that treat it delicately and impersonally. Further, participants collaborate to claim a shared naivete toward speed dating, thereby presenting themselves as ordinary college students having a new experience. Non-standard assessment sequences throw such patterned practices into relief, and feature the disclosure of personal troubles occasioned by (...) the experience. Our findings have implications for the study of assessments, impression management, acquaintanceship, and relationship initiation. (shrink)

Jurisprudence -- Law -- Laws as rules of human action -- Positive law -- The sources of law -- The object of law -- Rights -- Analysis of a right -- The leading classifications of rights -- Rights at rest in motion --Private law : rights in rem -- Private law : rights in personam --Private law : remedial rights -- Private law : abnormal -- Private law : adjective -- Public law -- International law -- The application of law.

I distinguish two ways of explaining our capacity for ‘transparent’ knowledge of our own present beliefs, perceptions, and intentions: an inferential and a reflective approach. Alex Byrne (2011) has defended an inferential approach, but I argue that this approach faces a basic difficulty, and that a reflective approach avoids the difficulty. I conclude with a brief sketch and defence of a reflective approach to our transparent self-knowledge, and I show how this approach is connected with the thesis that we must (...) distinguish between a kind of self-knowledge that is of oneself as agent and another kind that is of oneself as patient. (shrink)

Charlemagne's monogram -- Introduction -- The problem of consciousness -- The earliest vision -- Truth, being, and mind -- The Kehre -- The essence of truth -- The later Heidegger -- Reading Heidegger after Heidegger -- Being not a soul but the unmediated discovery of being.

The first edition of The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy took the dialogue of science and philosophy from Aristotle through to Newton. This second edition adds eight chapters, taking the dialogue through the Enlightenment and up to Darwin. This anthology is an attempt to help bridge the gap between the history of science and the history of philosophy.

Imagine I hold up a Granny Smith apple for all to see. You would thereby gain justified beliefs that it was green, that it was apple, and that it is a Granny Smith apple. Under classical foundationalism, such simple visual beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning your experience. Under dogmatism, some or all of these beliefs are justified immediately by your experience and not by reasons you possess. This paper argues for what I call the looks (...) view of the justification of simple visual beliefs. According to the looks view, such beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning how the relevant things look. Unlike under classical foundationalism, under the looks view as I develop it, these reasons are public. They are public with respect to both their content and possession: with respect to content, they are not about ourselves and our experiences, and with respect to their possession, many people can have the very same looks-related reasons. (shrink)

The lever appears to be a very simple object, a tool used since ancient times for the most primitive of tasks: to lift and to balance. Why, then, were prominent intellectuals active around 1800 in areas as diverse as science, philosophy, and literature inspired to think and write about levers? In The Lever as Instrument of Reason, readers will discover the remarkable ways in which the lever is used to model the construction of knowledge and to mobilize new ideas among (...) diverse disciplines. These acts of construction are shown to model key aspects of the human, from the more abstract processes of moral decision-making to a quite literal equation of the powerful human ego with the supposed stability and power of the fulcrum point. (shrink)

Abstract I provide an account of the nature of seemings that explains why they are necessary for justification. The account grows out of a picture of cognition that explains what is required for epistemic agency. According to this account, epistemic agency requires (1) possessing the epistemic aims of forming true beliefs and avoiding errors, and (2) having some means of forming beliefs in order to satisfy those aims. I then argue that seeming are motives for belief characterized by their role (...) of providing us with doxastic instructions guided by our epistemic aims. Understanding the nature of seemings allows us to underwrite recent epistemological work by Michael Huemer, and shows why he was right to claim that seemings are the source of all justification. I then look at some objections both to my arguments regarding the connection between seemings and justification, and to Huemer’s related “Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism”. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-21 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9830-2 Authors Matthew Skene, Syracuse University, 8330 E. Quincy Ave., I-307, Denver, CO 80237, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

One’s account of the meaning of ethical sentences should fit – roughly, as part to whole – with one’s account of the meaning of sentences in general. When we ask, though, where one widely discussed account of the meaning of ethical sentences fits with more general accounts of meaning, the answer is frustratingly unclear. The account I have in mind is the sort of metaethical expressivism inspired by Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare, and defended and worked out in more detail recently (...) by Blackburn, Gibbard, and others. So, my first aim (§1) in this paper is to pose this question about expressivism’s commitments in the theory of meaning and to characterize the answer I think is most natural, given the place expressivist accounts attempt to occupy metaethics. This involves appeal to an ideationalist account of meaning. Unfortunately for the expressivist, however, this answer generates a problem; it’s my second aim (§2) to articulate this problem. Then, my third aim (§3) is to argue that this problem doesn’t extend to the sort of account of the meaning of ethical claims that I favor, which is like expressivism in rejecting a representationalist order of semantic explanation but unlike expressivism in basing an alternative order of semantic explanation on inferential role rather than expressive function. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Categorical Prescriptiveness Uniformity as a Moral Matter Uniformity Contrasted with Neutrality The Overridingness of Moral Principles.

Additive theories of rationality, as I use the term, are theories that hold that an account of our capacity to reflect on perceptually-given reasons for belief and desire-based reasons for action can begin with an account of what it is to perceive and desire, in terms that do not presuppose any connection to the capacity to reflect on reasons, and then can add an account of the capacity for rational reflection, conceived as an independent capacity to ‘monitor’ and ‘regulate’ our (...) believing-on-the-basis-of-perception and our acting-on-the-basis-of-desire. I show that a number of recent discussions of human rationality are committed to an additive approach, and I raise two difficulties for this approach, each analogous to a classic problem for Cartesian dualism. The interaction problem concerns how capacities conceived as intrinsically independent of the power of reason can interact with this power in what is intuitively the right way. The unity problem concerns how an additive theorist can explain a rational subject's entitlement to conceive of the animal whose perceptual and desiderative life he or she oversees as ‘I’ rather than ‘it’. I argue that these difficulties motivate a general skepticism about the additive approach, and I sketch an alternative, ‘transformative’ framework in which to think about the cognitive and practical capacities of a rational animal. (shrink)

The basics of good arguments -- Reasoning and logic -- Fallacies -- Belief, fact, and opinion -- Defining your terms -- Drawing analogies -- Cause and effect -- On good authority -- Making your case.

Situated at the intersection of film and media studies, literary theory, and continental philosophy, The Traces of Jacques Derrida's Cinema provides a trenchant account of the role of cinema in the oeuvre of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). The book is animated by Derrida's self-confessed passion for the movies, his reluctance to write about film despite the range of his corpus, and the generative encounters arising between his legacy and the field of (...) film and media studies as a result. Given the expanse of its references, interdisciplinarity, and consideration of Derrida's approach to the experience of both spectatorship and the act of being filmed, The Traces of Jacques Derrida's Cinema contributes to the ongoing close analyses of the philosopher's work while also providing a rigorous introduction to deconstruction. (shrink)

A venerable philosophical tradition holds that we rational creatures are distinguished by our capacity for a special sort of mental agency or self-determination: we can “make up” our minds about whether to accept a given proposition. But what sort of activity is this? Many contemporary philosophers accept a Process Theory of this activity, according to which a rational subject exercises her capacity for doxastic self-determination only on certain discrete occasions, when she goes through a process of consciously deliberating about whether (...) P and concludes by “making a judgment”, thereby bringing about a change in what she believes. I argue that this conception of our control over our beliefs implies an unacceptable picture of the agency we exercise in judging, and of the relation of such agency to the condition of belief itself. I suggest that the beliefs of a rational creature are themselves “acts of reason”, which reflect the capacity for doxastic self-determination in their very nature, not merely in certain facts about how they can originate. (shrink)

I argue that a variety of influential accounts of self-knowledge are flawed by the assumption that all immediate, authoritative knowledge of our own present mental states is of one basic kind. I claim, on the contrary, that a satisfactory account of self-knowledge must recognize at least two fundamentally different kinds of self-knowledge: an active kind through which we know our own judgments, and a passive kind through which we know our sensations. I show that the former kind of self-knowledge is (...) in an important sense fundamental, since it is intimately connected with the very capacity for rational reflection, and since it must be present in any creature that understands the first-person pronoun. Moreover, I suggest that these thoughts about self-knowledge have a Kantian provenance. (shrink)

This paper explores some surprising effects of psychological trauma on memory and develops the puzzle of observer memory for trauma. Memory for trauma tends to have a third-person perspective, or observer perspective. But it appears observer memory, by having a novel visual point of view, tends to misrepresent the past. And many find it plausible that if a memory type tends to misrepresent, it cannot yield knowledge of, or justification for believing, details of past events. But it is also plausible (...) that, with respect to details of past trauma, observer memory can yield knowledge or justification. I argue for a novel set of views that offers a way out of the puzzle: observer memory does tend to misrepresent, but it still has epistemic power regarding details of the past, although with special limits; but observer memory for trauma has other epistemic powers too, in that it allows for a kind of self-awareness. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMuch recent work on self-knowledge has been inspired by the idea that the ‘transparency’ of questions about our own mental states to questions about the non-mental world holds the key to un...

Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) was a leading figure in the Neo- Kantian philosophical movement that dominated European thought before 1918. He was also an inaugural figure in modern Jewish philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book explores Cohen's striking claim that ethics is rooted in law - a claim developed both in his philosophical ethics and his philosophy of Judaism, in particular in his writings on "love-of-neighbor," up to and including his well-known Religion of Reason. Dana Hollander proposes (...) that neither Cohen's systematic philosophy nor his "Jewish" philosophy should be seen as the dominant framework for his oeuvre as a whole, but that his understanding of key philosophical questions take shape in the passages between both corpuses, a trait that could be seen as paradigmatic for modern Jewish philosophy. Ethics Out of Law taps into one of the prime topics of current interest in the field of Jewish philosophy: the nature of Jewish political existence and the changing configurations of "law" that this entails. (shrink)

Adopting a view of utilitarian ethics in which motivation in the public interest takes on greater weight than is generally appreciated, this book explores the extent to which the philosophy of Immanuel Kant is consistent with this nuanced version of utilitarianism. Kant's requirement that full ethical merit needs an agent to act purely 'from duty' to forward 'the universal end of happiness' rather than from a personal inclination to achieve that end clearly distinguishes his position from the version of utilitarian (...) ethics adopted here. But this book also argues that Kant's approval of a secondary category of conduct - conduct 'in conformity with' duty - entailing other-regarding or 'sympathetic' motivation to advance general happiness, differs from the utilitarian position only in its meriting a qualified degree of ethical credit. After comparing Kant's position with those of eighteenth-century utilitarian writers from Locke to Bentham, the book evaluates reactions to Kant by J.S. Mill and Karl Marx and proposes Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) as a 'precursor' for maintaining a 'Kantian' doctrine of conduct 'from duty' and for other shared features. In terms of public policy, the work demonstrates Kant's justification of poor relief and reduced inequality, his proposal for a state education plan, and his opposition to paternalism. This book provides essential reading for academic specialists and students concerned with the interface of political economy and ethics, as well as the history of economic thought, political economy, history of ethics, history of political thought and intellectual history. Samuel Hollander is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, Canada, and an Officer in the Order of Canada. (shrink)

Deleuze & Guattari, Politics and Education mobilizes Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy as a revolutionary alternative to the lingering forms of transcendence, identity politics, and nihilism endemic to Western thought. Operationalizing Deleuze and Guattari's challenge to contemporary philosophy, this book presents their view as a revolutionary alternative to the lingering forms of transcendence, identity politics, and nihilism endemic to the current state of Western formal education. This book offers an experimental approach to theorizing, creating an entirely new way for educational theorists to approach (...) their work as the task of revolutionizing life itself. Examining new conceptual resources for grappling with and mapping a sustainable political alternative to the cliche's that saturate contemporary educational theory, this collection of essays works toward extracting a genuine image of education and learning that exists in sharp contrast to both the neo-liberal educational project and the critical pedagogical tradition. (shrink)

I argue that cognitively mature human beings have an important sort of control or discretion over their own beliefs, but that to make good sense of this control, we must reject the common idea that it consists in a capacity to act on our belief-state by forming new beliefs or modifying ones we already hold. I propose that we exercise agential control over our beliefs, not primarily in doing things to alter our belief-state, but in holding whatever beliefs we hold. (...) Our beliefs are thus not normally things on which we act; they are themselves our acts, in a sense I seek to explicate. (shrink)

We regularly appeal to claims of the form it seems that p in defense of a claim p. When we do so, we typically take it seems that p to be a reason for thinking that p but also a reason that “gets at” a relevant body of facts and its support for p. Other things being equal, we should want to vindicate our ordinary beliefs on this matter. We should want to vindicate the claim that facts about things seeming (...) certain ways can be reasons to think that things are that way while at the same time being somehow derivative reasons, that is, reasons only because they “get at” support from a certain body of facts. However, on the dominant view of how things seem—subjectivism—it is hard to see how to secure this result. Subjectivism takes how things seem to be a matter of how things do or would seem to some relevant subject. What we need is a defensible, nonsubjectivist account of how things seem. I propose and defend an account according to which, roughly, it seems that p iff the body of facts in the relevant perspective supports that p. (shrink)

In Measuring the Immeasurable Mind: Where Contemporary Neuroscience Meets the Aristotelian Tradition, Matthew Owen argues that despite its nonphysical character, it is possible to empirically detect and measure consciousness. -/- Toward the end of the previous century, the neuroscience of consciousness set its roots and sprouted within a materialist milieu that reduced the mind to matter. Several decades later, dualism is being dusted off and reconsidered. Although some may see this revival as a threat to consciousness science aimed at (...) measuring the conscious mind, Owen argues that measuring consciousness, along with the medical benefits of such measurements, is not ruled out by consciousness being nonphysical. Owen proposes the Mind-Body Powers model of neural correlates of consciousness, which is informed by Aristotelian causation and a substance dualist view of human nature inspired by Thomas Aquinas, who often followed Aristotle. In addition to explaining why there are neural correlates of consciousness, the model provides a philosophical foundation for empirically discerning and quantifying consciousness. En route to presenting and applying the Mind-Body Powers model to neurobiology, Owen rebuts longstanding objections to dualism related to the mind-body problem. With scholarly precision and readable clarity, Owen applies an oft forgotten yet richly developed historical vantage point to contemporary cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

The aim in this paper is to focus on one of the proposals about successful perception that has led its adherents to advance some kind of disjunctive account of experience. The proposal is that we should understand the conscious sensory experience involved in successful perception in relational terms. I first try to clarify what the commitments of the view are, and where disagreements with competing views may lie. I then suggest that there are considerations relating to the conscious character of (...) our perception of events that speak in its favour. (shrink)

Explores ontological humility in the history of philosophy, from Descartes to contemporary gender and race theory.

In this Very Short Introduction, John H. Holland, one of the leading figures in the field, introduces the key elements and conceptual framework of complexity. From complex physical systems such as fluid flow and the difficulties of predicting weather, to complex adaptive systems such as the diverse and interdependent ecosystems of rainforests, he uses simple examples to illustrate the approach and insights provided by complexity theory.

On Sense and Direct Reference: Readings in the Philosophy of Language focuses on the debate between neo-Fregeans and neo-Russellians in philosophy of language. With a foreword by Nathan Salmon, the volume collects more than 40 of the most important papers in philosophy of language in the last 40 years; including David Kaplan's "Demonstratives" and "Afterthoughts", and a paper written by Scott Soames especially for the volume. It is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses.

v. 1. The history of philosophy and science from ancient times to the present day -- v. 2. The origin of the mental capacities and dispositions of man and their normal, abnormal and supernormal manifestations.

In 2005, Charles Mills published “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” in Hypatia: a withering critique of much of contemporary political philosophy and ethics. For Mills such work in philosophy failed to attend to the realities of social life and politics, and in remaining silent on actual issues of domination and oppression served an ideological role in supporting the interests of white bourgeois men. Around the time that Charles Mills launched his broadside against ideal theory, trans theorists had been fighting their own (...) battle against the abstraction of theory from the realities of trans lives and oppression. Vivian Namaste (2000) and Jay Prosser (1998) argued that contemporary gender theory failed to justice to the actuality of trans life, retreating instead to understanding trans life through literary archetypes and idealized radical figures. In this chapter I’ll compare Mills’ critique of ideal theory with the transfeminist critique of 1990s gender theory, arguing that they share much in common. Centrally, both critiques share an underlying commitment to theory needing to be grounded in the actuality of oppression and power relations. This common thread, I suggest, must continue to guide transfeminist thought and action: contra Marquis Bey (2022) transfeminist thought and praxis must continue to be about trans lives, about the oppression of trans women, and about ways of actually achieving liberation from our current dire position. (shrink)

Does a flourishing life involve pursuing passionate attachments? Can we choose what these passionate attachments will be? This book offers an original theory of how we can actively cultivate our passionate attachments. The author argues that not only do we have reason to view passionate attachments as susceptible to growth, change, and improvement, but we should view these entities as amenable to self-cultivation. He uses Pierre Hadot's and Michel Foucault's accounts of Hellenistic self-cultivation as vital conceptual tools to formulate a (...) theory of cultivating our passionate attachments. First, their accounts offer the conceptual resources for a philosophical theory of how we can cultivate our passionate attachments. Second, the exercises of self-cultivation they focus on allow us to outline a practical method though which we can cultivate our passionate character. Doing this brings out a significantly new dimension to the role of the passionate attachments in the flourishing life and offers theoretical and practical accounts of how we can cultivate them based on the Hellenistic conception of self-directed character change. Cultivating Our Passionate Attachments will be of interest to advanced students and scholars working in virtue ethics, moral philosophy, and ancient philosophy. (shrink)

Among those enthused by Pascal’s pithy remark that “the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” are phenomenological value-theorists. What makes Pascal particularly attractive to these phenomenologists is the suggestion that the heart has reasons, and reasons of its own, which resonates with the quasi-cognitive function that they ascribe to feeling. Feelings apprehend values, which are genuine objects that display an essential order and a rank distinct from the objects of reason. In this paper, I introduce and evaluate (...) Pascal’s reception in phenomenological axiology. I begin by reviewing the philosophical position that for the phenomenological value-theorists corresponds to the Pascalian notion of the order of the heart (I). I then turn to Pascal and explore the notion of the order of the heart, especially in relation to the order of reason, in his thought (II). Finally, I evaluate the legitimacy of the attribution of the phenomenological position to Pascal, arguing that, while there is not a perfect correspondence, there is an affinity that warrants the phenomenologists’ allusions to Pascal (III). (shrink)

It's often thought that when we reason to new judgments in inference, we aim at believing the truth, and that this aim of ours can explain important psychological and normative features of belief. I reject this picture: the structure of aimed activity shows that inference is not guided by a truth‐aim. This finding clears the way for a positive understanding of how epistemic goods feature in our doxastic lives. We can indeed make sense of many of our inquisitive and deliberative (...) activities as undertaken in pursuit of such goods; but the evidence‐guided inferences in which those activities culminate will require a different theoretical approach. (shrink)

MacIntyre argues that management embodies emotivism, and thus is inherently amoral and manipulative. His claim that management is necessarily Weberian is, at best, outdated, and the notion that management aims to be neutral and value free is incorrect. However, new forms of management, and in particular the increased emphasis on leadership which emerged after MacIntyre’s critique was published, tend to support his central charge. Indeed, charismatic and transformational forms of leadership seem to embody emotivism to a greater degree than do (...) more Weberian, bureaucratic forms of management; hence, MacIntyre’s central contention about our emotivistic culture seems to be well founded. Having criticised the details but defended the essence of MacIntyre’s critique of management, this paper sketches a MacIntyrean approach to management and leadership by highlighting the affinities between MacIntyre’s political philosophy and Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership. (shrink)