In France, Fair Trade arrived on the scene in the late twentieth century, and since then has passed through several experimental phases before becoming an enduring "realistic" economic alternative. To understand the transformation, this article defines Fair Trade as a social construct issues and tensions of which change depending on the point of entry. By conducting a secondary analysis of several data sets from varied sources, including documentary material, interviews, and observations, the authors trace the history of Fair Trade in (...) France, define its introduction as a system, describe its institutionalization, and contribute to a greater understanding of how its ideals have changed and become more professional over time. The analyses reveal that the term "Fair Trade" has become ambiguous, spanning divergent and conflicting ideas and projects, including opening and closing conventional market systems and alter-globaliza-tion and anti-globalization. (shrink)

Pragmatic genealogies seek to explain ideas by regarding them, primarily, not as answers to philosophical questions, but as practical solutions to practical problems. Here I argue that pragmatic genealogies can inform the formation of philosophical canons. But the rationale for resorting to genealogy in this connection is not the familiar one that genealogy renders the concepts of the present intelligible by relating them to the concerns of the past—the claim is rather the reverse one, that genealogy renders the concepts of (...) the past intelligible by relating them to the concerns of the present: past thinkers can be made to speak to us by revealing how their ideas tie in with our concerns, in the sense of helping us to remedy practical problems we still face in some form. (shrink)

Far from being indiscriminately critical of the ideas he associated with the morality system, Bernard Williams offered vindicatory explanations of its crucial building blocks, such as the moral/non-moral distinction, the idea of obligation, the voluntary/involuntary distinction, and the practice of blame. The rationale for these concessive moves, I argue, is that understanding what these ideas do for us when they are not in the service of the system is just as important to leading us out of the system as the (...) critique of that system. I then show how regarding the aspiration to shelter life from luck as the system’s organizing ambition explains why the system elaborates and combines these building blocks in the way it does. Finally, I argue that the ultimate problem with the resulting construction is its frictionless purity. It robs valuable concepts of their grip on the world we live in, and, by insisting on purity from contingency, threatens to issue in nihilism about value and scepticism about agency. (shrink)

Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...) reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things,—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering. (shrink)

This chapter argues that several aspects of Bernard Williams’s style, methodology, and metaphilosophy can be read as evolving dialectically out of Wittgenstein’s own. After considering Wittgenstein as a stylistic influence on Williams, especially as regards ideals of clarity, precision, and depth, Williams’s methodological debt to Wittgenstein is examined, in particular his anthropological interest in thick concepts and their point. The chapter then turns to Williams’s explicit association, in the 1990s, with a certain form of Wittgensteinianism, which he called ‘Left Wittgensteinianism’. (...) It is shown how this is not a sudden conversion, but the direct product of Williams’s longstanding critical engagement with Wittgenstein’s methodology and metaphilosophy: Williams arrives at this position by envisaging a Wittgensteinianism that thinks in concrete sociohistorical terms, embraces genuine explanation, and relinquishes its insistence on the purity of philosophy. When properly understood, moreover, this critique turns out to be continuous with Williams’s advocacy of a conception of philosophy as a humanistic discipline. Finally, it is shown that Williams inherits from Wittgenstein a certain understanding of how philosophy can help us to live, in particular the therapeutic ambition to liberate us from distortions in our self-understanding by assembling reminders. (shrink)

There is growing interest for implementing tools to monitor cognitive performance in naturalistic work and everyday life settings. The emerging field of research, known as neuroergonomics, promotes the use of wearable and portable brain monitoring sensors such as functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate cortical activity in a variety of human tasks out of the laboratory. The objective of this study was to implement an on-line passive fNIRS-based brain computer interface to discriminate two levels of working memory load during (...) highly ecological aircraft piloting tasks. Twenty eight recruited pilots were equally split into two groups (flight simulator vs. real aircraft). In both cases, identical approaches and experimental stimuli were used (serial memorization task, consisting in repeating series of pre-recorded air traffic control instructions, easy vs. hard). The results show pilots in the real flight condition committed more errors and had higher anterior prefrontal cortex activation than pilots in the simulator, when completing cognitively demanding tasks. Nevertheless, evaluation of single trial working memory load classification showed high accuracy (>76%) across both experimental conditions. The contributions here are two-fold. First, we demonstrate the feasibility of passively monitoring cognitive load in a realistic and complex situation (live piloting of an aircraft). In addition, the differences in performance and brain activity between the two experimental conditions underscore the need for ecologically-valid investigations. (shrink)

Where does the impetus towards ethical theory come from? What drives humans to make values explicit, consistent, and discursively justifiable? This paper situates the demand for ethical theory in human life by identifying the practical needs that give rise to it. Such a practical derivation puts the demand in its place: while finding a home for it in the public decision-making of modern societies, it also imposes limitations on the demand by presenting it as scalable and context-sensitive. This differentiates strong (...) forms of the demand calling for theory from weaker forms calling for less, and contexts where it has a place from contexts where it is out of place. In light of this, subjecting personal deliberation to the demand turns out to involve a trade-off. (shrink)

Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? This book presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts (...) across the analytic-continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having. (shrink)

This paper situates Wittgenstein in what is known as the causalism/anti-causalism debate in the philosophy of mind and action and reconstructs his arguments to the effect that reasons are not a species of causes. On the one hand, the paper aims to reinvigorate the question of what these arguments are by offering a historical sketch of the debate showing that Wittgenstein's arguments were overshadowed by those of the people he influenced, and that he came to be seen as an anti-causalist (...) for reasons that are in large part extraneous to his thought. On the other hand, the paper aims to recover the arguments scattered in Wittgenstein's own writings by detailing and defending three lines of argument distinguishing reasons from causes. The paper concludes that Wittgenstein's arguments differ from those of his immediate successors; that he anticipates current anti-psychologistic trends; and that he is perhaps closer to Davidson than historical dialectics suggest. (shrink)

Plotin (205-270) est le premier des philosophes néoplatoniciens aussi bien d'un point de vue chronologique que par son importance. Auteur de 54 traités regroupés en six Ennéades ("neuvaines"), il consacra l'un d'eux, le traité 16 (Ennéade I, 9), très bref, à la question du suicide. Dans cet ouvrage Plotin se demande si et quand le suicide peut être un choix légitime. Le commentaire qui accompagne la traduction de ce traité s'efforce de l'éclairer même pour un lecteur qui ne connaîtrait rien (...) de la pensée de son auteur, et de déployer les différentes problématiques, issues de la pensée antique et en particulier platonicienne et stoïcienne, dans lesquelles s'inscrit l'analyse de Plotin."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Un ensemble de renouvellements paradigmatiques profonds ont marqué le champ académique depuis une vingtaine d'années. Comment les Sciences du sport ont-elles fait face à ces innovations épistémologiques? Les ont-elles prises en compte ou négligées? Suivant quelles modalités? Peut-on distinguer des appropriations qui seraient, suivant les cas, rhétoriques, métaphoriques, abusives, fécondes voire créatives? La mise en oeuvre des programmes innovants par les STAPS enrichit-elle en retour les espaces académiques qui les avaient originellement produits? Comment les traditions théoriques réagissent-elles à l'introduction des (...) points de vue novateurs? Suivant quelles voies se réalise la cohabitation entre traditions et innovations? Epistémologues et chercheurs, au moyen d'études de cas et de mises en perspectives transversales, croisent leurs regards pour éclairer ces problématiques complémentaires. Celles-ci permettent enfin d'interroger l'identité, épistémique et sociale, du champ STAPS. (shrink)

Winner of the Moonbeam Children's Animals/Pets Non-Fiction Gold Medal! A story about the fundamental connection between animals and people and how we can treat all of Earth's creatures with compassion and empathy. Furry polar bears, playful sea otters, slow sloths, prickly porcupines, and slimy snakes are just a few of the many animals we share our world with. And even though we might not look the same or have the same needs as our animal neighbors, we have more in common (...) with them than we might think. Our Animal Neighbors introduces children to the importance of treating all animals with the care and compassion they deserve. We all want to experience love, safety, and respect and this book is the first step to instilling those values at an early age. This planet is our home, and we should all be free to live a prosperous life regardless of whether we have hands, hooves, scales, or fur. “A serious message delivered with humor, simplicity, and charm makes this book an excellent purchase for families that value open-ended discussions. Also a good resource for classrooms and libraries that welcome diverse opinions and points of view.”—School Library Journal. (shrink)

In hoeverre kan een literair werk bijdragen tot de ethische ontwikkeling van zijn lezers, of juist niet? Behalve een genuanceerd antwoord op deze vraag, wil dit boek premissen bieden voor een methode om de ethische inslag van een literair werk aan het licht te brengen. Dat de romans van de Nederlandse schrijver Frans Kellendonk (1951-1990) een goede casus vormen om dieper op deze problematiek in te gaan, ligt voor de hand. Kellendonk staat immers bekend als een van de meest controversiële (...) Nederlandse auteurs van het einde van de twintigste eeuw. Vandaag wordt hij vooral beschouwd als een soort profeet van het hedendaagse scepticisme omtrent de multiculturele samenleving. Zijn laatste roman, 'Mystiek lichaam' (1986), zorgde bijvoorbeeld voor een geruchtmakende ideologische rel, terwijl er volgens sommige critici geen vuiltje aan de lucht was. Kellendonks romans stellen de eenduidige lectuur ervan steevast op de proef. - [provided by publisher]. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is thought to face an ‘implementation challenge’: the challenge of securing uptake of engineered concepts. But is the fact that implementation is challenging really a defect to be overcome? What kind of picture of political life would be implied by making engineering easy to implement? We contend that the ambition to obviate the implementation challenge goes against the very idea of liberal democratic politics. On the picture we draw, the implementation challenge can be overcome by institutionalizing control over (...) conceptual uptake, and there are contexts—such as professions that depend on coordinated conceptual innovation—in which there are good reasons to institutionalize control in this fashion. But the liberal fear of this power to control conceptual uptake ending up in the wrong hands, combined with the democratic demand for freedom of thought as a precondition of genuine consent, yields a liberal democratic rationale for keeping implementation challenging. (shrink)

Knowledge of the structure of ancestral genomes provides the basis of a new framework to better represent and interpret results from genomic and evolutionary studies. Because these ancestors lived tens of hundreds of million years ago, this knowledge will inevitably take the form of abstract representations, reconstructed on the basis both of experimental evidence collected on extant genomes and of our understanding of evolutionary processes. This is the field of Paleogenomics, a young discipline that is providing an increasingly precise picture (...) of our ancestral vertebrate genomes based on cytogenetic data, genome sequences and new algorithmic developments. Many recent studies have focused on the ancestral placental mammal and teleost fish genomes, although the outlines of even more distant pre‐vertebrate ancestors are being reported. BioEssays 30:122–134, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Recent reasoning accounts suggest that people can process elementary logical principles intuitively. These controversial “logical intuitions” are believed to result from a learning process in which developing reasoners automatize their application. To verify this automatization hypothesis, we contrasted the reasoning performance of younger (7th grade) and older (12th grade) reasoners with a two-response paradigm. Participants initially responded with the first intuitive response that came to mind and subsequently were allowed to deliberate on classic “bias” problems (base-rate problems and syllogisms). Results (...) showed that in addition to showing less deliberate correction of an initial erroneous response, younger reasoners were specifically less likely to generate the correct response from the outset. The findings lend credence to the role of a developmental automatization process and indicate that developmental improvements in reasoning accuracy are at least partially driven by an improvement in the accuracy of our intuitions. (shrink)

In this paper, I identify a central problem for conceptual engineering: the problem of showing concept-users why they should recognise the authority of the concepts advocated by engineers. I argue that this authority problem cannot generally be solved by appealing to the increased precision, consistency, or other theoretical virtues of engineered concepts. Outside contexts in which we anyway already aim to realise theoretical virtues, solving the authority problem requires engineering to take a functional turn and attend to the functions of (...) concepts. But this then presents us with the problem of how to specify a concept’s function. I argue that extant solutions to this function specification problem are unsatisfactory for engineering purposes, because the functions they identify fail to reliably bestow authority on concepts, and hence fail to solve the authority problem. What is required is an authoritative notion of conceptual function: an account of the functions of concepts which simultaneously shows why concepts fulfilling such functions should be recognised as having authority. I offer an account that meets this combination of demands by specifying the functions of concepts in terms of how they tie in with our present concerns. (shrink)

Bernard Williams thought that philosophy should address real human concerns felt beyond academic philosophy. But what wider concerns are addressed by Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, a book he introduces as being ‘principally about how things are in moral philosophy’? In this article, we argue that Williams responded to the concerns of his day indirectly, refraining from explicitly claiming wider cultural relevance, but hinting at it in the pair of epigraphs that opens the main text. This was Williams’s solution (...) to what he perceived as the stylistic problem of how to pursue philosophy as cultural critique. Taking the epigraphs as interpretative keys to the wider resonances of the book, we show how they reveal Williams’s philosophical concerns – with the primacy of character over method, the obligation to follow orders, and the possibility of combining truth, truthfulness, and a meaningful life in a disillusioned world – to be recognisably rooted in the cultural concerns of post-war Britain. In the light of its epigraphs, the book emerges as the critique of a philosophical tradition’s inadequacies to the special difficulties of its cultural moment. (shrink)

Bernard Williams articulated his later political philosophy notably in response to Ronald Dworkin, who, striving for coherence or integrity among our political concepts, sought to immunize the concepts of liberty and equality against conflict. Williams, doubtful that we either could or should eliminate the conflict, resisted the pursuit of conceptual integrity. Here, I reconstruct this Dworkin–Williams debate with an eye to drawing out ideas of ongoing philosophical and political importance. The debate not only exemplifies Williams's political realism and its connection (...) to his critique of the morality system. It also illustrates the virtues and hazards of contemporary efforts to ameliorate or engineer our concepts; it indicates what political philosophy might look to in appraising political concepts; it adverts to the different needs these concepts have to meet if they are to sustain a politics of pluralism, deal with polarization, and secure the consent of those who end up on the losing side of political decisions; and it presents us with two starkly contrasting conceptions of politics itself, of the place of political values within it, and of our prospects of reducing the uncomfortably conflictual character of those values through philosophy. (shrink)

Why would philosophers interested in the points or functions of our conceptual practices bother with genealogical explanations if they can focus directly on paradigmatic examples of the practices we now have?? To answer this question, I compare the method of pragmatic genealogy advocated by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker—a method whose singular combination of fictionalising and historicising has met with suspicion—with the simpler method of paradigm-based explanation. Fricker herself has recently moved towards paradigm-based explanation, arguing that it is (...) a more perspicuous way of reaping the same explanatory pay-off as pragmatic genealogy while dispensing with its fictionalising and historicising. My aim is to determine when and why the reverse movement from paradigm-based explanation to pragmatic genealogy remains warranted. I argue that the fictionalising and historicising of pragmatic genealogy is well motivated, and I outline three ways in which the method earns its keep: by successfully handling historically inflected practices which paradigm-based explanation cannot handle; by revealing and arguing for connections to generic needs we might otherwise miss; and by providing comprehensive views of practices that place and relate the respects in which they serve both generic and local needs. (shrink)

Cernée par la tentation autoritaire, la démocratie paraît fragilisée. Brandie comme un étendard, la promesse d'un? gouvernement du peuple, par le peuple, pour le peuple - n'a, semble-t-il, pas été véritablement tenue. La classe politique paraît souvent plus soucieuse de sa propre survie que du bien commun, la démocratie représentative ne serait-elle qu'un leurre? Partout dans le monde, de nouveaux mouvements citoyens cherchent à mettre en oeuvre une démocratie horizontale. En déconstruisant les mécanismes et les croyances qui régissent notre vision (...) du pouvoir, ce texte propose de refonder rigoureusement le concept de démocratie réelle."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In Truth and Truthfulness, Bernard Williams sought to defend the value of truth by giving a vindicatory genealogy revealing its instrumental value. But what separates Williams’s instrumental vindication from the indirect utilitarianism of which he was a critic? And how can genealogy vindicate anything, let alone something which, as Williams says of the concept of truth, does not have a history? In this paper, I propose to resolve these puzzles by reading Williams as a type of pragmatist and his genealogy (...) as a pragmatic genealogy. On this basis, I show just in what sense Williams’s genealogy can by itself yield reasons to cultivate a sense of the value of truth. Using various criticisms of Williams’s genealogical method as a foil, I then develop an understanding of pragmatic genealogy which reveals it to be uniquely suited to dealing with practices exhibiting what I call self-effacing functionality—practices that are functional only insofar as and because we do not engage in them for their functionality. I conclude with an assessment of the wider significance of Williams’s genealogy for his own oeuvre and for further genealogical inquiry. (shrink)

While Lee and Schwarz propose grounded procedures of separation as an explanation for physical cleansing in various domains (e.g., washing one's hands), we suggest that separation can also account for behavioral cleansing aimed at washing consciences and polishing reputations. We discuss this extension in terms of degrees of behavioral cleansing, motivations, and intentions behind cleansing, and social settings.

La 4e de couverture indique :"Farouche adversaire de l'absolutisme, défenseur de la tolérance religieuse, père fondateur du libéralisme, John Locke (1632-1704) est une figure canonique de l'histoire de la pensée politique européenne. Il a forgé son oeuvre au coeur même des batailles politiques qui agitaient l'Angleterre de la fin du XVII ème siècle et qui menèrent à la Glorieuse Révolution de 1688. Ce que l'on sait moins, c'est que Locke a également eu une très riche carrière coloniale au service de (...) l'expansion anglaise en Amérique. Sa philosophie constitue le moment inaugural d'une histoire au cours de laquelle allaient être inextricablement noués libéralisme et colonialisme, construction étatique et formation impériale. Elle révèle également les relations intimes qui ont uni épistémologie et politique depuis la découverte du Nouveau Monde. L'Amérique de John Locke entend mettre en évidence l'émergence d'une géopolitique de la connaissance avec laquelle nous sommes encore loin d'avoir fini.". (shrink)

This paper argues that Nietzsche is a critic of just the kind of genealogical debunking he is popularly associated with. We begin by showing that interpretations of Nietzsche which see him as engaging in genealogical debunking turn him into an advocate of nihilism, for on his own premises, any truthful genealogical inquiry into our values is going to uncover what most of his contemporaries deem objectionable origins and thus license global genealogical debunking. To escape nihilism and make room for naturalism (...) without indiscriminate subversion, we then argue, Nietzsche targets the way of thinking about values that permits genealogical debunking: far from trying to subvert values simply by uncovering their origins, Nietzsche is actively criticising genealogical debunking thus understood. Finally, we draw out the consequences of our reading for Nietzsche’s positive vision. (shrink)

Is the idea of the voluntary important? Those who think so tend to regard it as an idea that can be metaphysically deepened through a theory about voluntary action, while those who think it a superficial idea that cannot coherently be deepened tend to neglect it as unimportant. Parting company with both camps, I argue that the idea of the voluntary is at once important and superficial—it is an essentially superficial notion that performs important functions, but can only perform them (...) if we refrain from deepening it. After elaborating the contrast between superficial and deepened ideas of the voluntary, I identify the important functions that the superficial idea performs in relation to demands for fairness and freedom. I then suggest that theories trying to deepen the idea exemplify a problematic moralization of psychology—they warp psychological ideas to ensure that moral demands can be met. I offer a three-tier model of the problematic dynamics this creates, and show why the pressure to deepen the idea should be resisted. On this basis, I take stock of what an idea of the voluntary worth having should look like, and what residual tensions with moral ideas this leaves us with. (shrink)

Ce texte dessine les contours de l’interprétation de l’œuvre de Nietzsche par Georg Simmel. On en tirera des éléments pour l’intelligence du projet philosophique de Simmel, comme effort pour articuler objectivité et relativité de la valeur. Mais on trouvera aussi des raisons de défendre un certain usage de Nietzsche, replacé par Simmel dans une lignée humaniste, mais sans la moindre naïveté anthropocentrique. Nous nous arrêterons particulièrement sur deux thèses de Simmel : (1) Nietzsche propose une « théorie de la valeur (...) » objective et systématique ; (2) Nietzsche est un « moraliste » qui défend une variété particulière de « personnalisme ». (shrink)

If ethical reflection on which concepts to use has an avatar, it must be Nietzsche, who took more seriously than most the question of what concepts one should live by, and regarded many of our inherited concepts as deeply problematic. Moreover, his eschewal of traditional attempts to derive the one right set of concepts from timeless rational foundations renders his conceptual ethics strikingly modern, raising the prospect of a Nietzschean alternative to Wittgensteinian non-foundationalism. Yet Nietzsche appears to engage in two (...) seemingly contrary modes of concept evaluation: one looks to concepts’ effects, the other to what concepts express. I offer an account of the expressive character of concepts which unifies these two modes and accounts for Nietzsche’s seemingly bifurcating interests. His fundamental concern is with the effects concepts are likely to have going forward, and it is precisely this concern that motivates his preoccupation with what concepts express. He evaluates concepts by asking for whom they have a point, working back from a concept via the need it fills to the conditions that engender that need and thereby render the concept pointful. For a concept to be pointful is for it to serve the concerns of its users through its effects. But even when it is not pointful, a concept expresses the presuppositions of its pointfulness, which we can work back to by asking who would have need of such a concept. What emerges is a powerful approach to conceptual ethics that looks beyond the formal virtues and vices of concepts at the presuppositions we buy into by using them. (shrink)

The concept of value is often discredited for its ambivalence: value increases and decreases, and is valid for one person but not necessarily for the next. Philosophies of value are subjectivist or contaminated by economic rationality. I show, from Gilbert Simondon, that value can be conceived of as a variable quantity without falling into levelling or axiological relativism. This implies dismissing the neo-Kantian separation of ontology and axiology, rejecting the conception of culture as a set of values and the bipolarity (...) of value oppositions, and finally thinking of value from a physical-mathematical rather than an economic analogy. (shrink)

Against those who identify genealogy with reductive genealogical debunking or deny it any evaluative and action-guiding significance, I argue for the following three claims: that although genealogies, true to their Enlightenment origins, tend to trace the higher to the lower, they need not reduce the higher to the lower, but can elucidate the relation between them and put us in a position to think more realistically about both relata; that if we think of genealogy’s normative significance in terms of a (...) triadic model that includes the genealogy’s addressee, we can see that in tracing the higher to the lower, a genealogy can facilitate an evaluation of the higher element, and where the lower element is some important practical need rather than some sinister motive, the genealogy can even be vindicatory; and finally, that vindicatory genealogies can offer positive guidance on how to engineer better concepts. (shrink)

A brief history of the relations between humans and animals -- Out of sight, out of mind -- Everybody loses: the effects of industrial breeding and meat eating on poverty, the environment and health -- The real face of industrial animal breeding -- Sorry excuses -- The continuum of life -- The mass killing of animals--genocide versus zoocide -- A little side trip into the realm of moral judgment -- The dilemma of animal experimentation -- Illegal trade in wildlife -- (...) Animals as objects of entertainment -- Animal rights, human obligations -- An appeal to reason and to human kindness. (shrink)

The quasi-interchangeability of the words »culture« and »world« in German philosophy of culture at the beginning of the 20th century has frequently been stressed. Can we infer from that the idea that this philosophy of culture could be described as a type of cosmology? This article argues for such an interpretation, reflecting on Georg Simmel's work, particularly his little known concept of »ideal world«. Following this path, Simmel's relation to Kant and the Southwest School of Neo-Kantianism is analyzed.

Social and political concepts are indispensable yet historically and culturally variable in a way that poses a challenge: how can we reconcile confident commitment to them with awareness of their contingency? In this article, we argue that available responses to this problem—Foundationalism, Ironism, and Right Wittgensteinianism—are unsatisfactory. Instead, we draw on the work of Bernard Williams to tease out and develop a Left Wittgensteinian response. In present-day pluralistic and historically self-conscious societies, mere confidence in our concepts is not enough. For (...) modern individuals who are ineluctably aware of conceptual change, engaged concept-use requires reasonable confidence, and in the absence of rational foundations, the possibility of reasonable confidence is tied to the possibility of critically discriminating between conceptual practices worth endorsing and those worth rejecting. We show that Left Wittgensteinianism offers such a basis for critical discrimination through point-based explanations of conceptual practices which relate them to the needs of concept-users. We end by considering how Left Wittgensteinianism guides our understanding of how conceptual practices can be revised in the face of new needs. (shrink)

There is an under-appreciated tradition of genealogical explanation that is centrally concerned with social functions. I shall refer to it as the tradition of pragmatic genealogy. It runs from David Hume (T, 3.2.2) and the early Friedrich Nietzsche (TL) through E. J. Craig (1990, 1993) to Bernard Williams (2002) and Miranda Fricker (2007). These pragmatic genealogists start out with a description of an avowedly fictional “state of nature” and end up ascribing social functions to particular building blocks of our practices (...) – such as the fact that we use a certain concept, or live by a certain virtue – which we did not necessarily expect to have such a function at all. That the seemingly archaic device of a fictional state-of-nature story should be a helpful way to get at the functions of our actual practices must seem a mystifying proposal, however; I shall therefore endeavor to demystify it in what follows. My aim in this chapter is twofold. First, by delineating the framework of pragmatic genealogy and contrasting it with superficially similar methods, I argue that pragmatic genealogies are best interpreted as dynamic models whose point is to reveal the function – and non-coincidentally often the social function – of certain practices. Second, by buttressing this framework with something it notably lacks, namely an account of the type of functionality it operates with, I argue that both the type of functional commitment and the depth of factual obligation incurred by a pragmatic genealogy depend on what we use the method for: the dynamic models of pragmatic genealogy can be used merely as heuristic devices helping us spot functional patterns, or more ambitiously as arguments grounding our ascriptions of functionality to actual practices, or even more ambitiously as bases for functional explanations of the resilience or the persistence of practices. By bringing these distinctions into view, we gain the ability to distinguish strengths and weaknesses of the method’s application from strengths and weaknesses of the method itself. (shrink)

What reasons do we have to use certain concepts and conceptions rather than others? Approaching that question in a methodologically humanistic rather than Platonic spirit, one might seek “reasons for concept use” in how well concepts serve the contingent human concerns of those who live by them. But appealing to the instrumentality of concepts in meeting our concerns invites the worry that this yields the wrong kind of reasons, especially if the relevant concerns are nonmoral ones. Drawing on Susan Wolf’s (...) work on the moral/nonmoral distinction and the neglected role of reasons of love, I argue that this worry is misplaced, and in fact overlooks some of our most important reasons to prefer certain concepts over others. Yet a lingering worry remains, namely that the value of concepts does not just lie in what they are good for. Drawing on another strand in Wolf’s work, I explore the question whether concepts can be valuable good-for-nothings, and show how this ultimately also underscores the importance of reasons of love as reasons for concept use. (shrink)

This paper develops Bernard Williams’s suggestion that for philosophy to ignore its history is for it to assume that its history is vindicatory. The paper aims to offer a fruitful line of inquiry into the question whether philosophy has a vindicatory history by providing a map of possible answers to it. It first distinguishes three types of history: the history of discovery, the history of progress, and the history of change. It then suggests that much of philosophy lacks a vindicatory (...) history, for reasons that reflect philosophy’s character as a humanistic discipline. On this basis, the paper reconstructs Williams’s conception of what it means for philosophy to engage with its own history. The paper concludes that it is a mistake to think that a vindicatory history is what we would really like to have, and that in fact, the resulting picture gives philosophy several reasons to engage with its own history. (shrink)