Introspection is often cited as providing rational warrant for either a libertarian or a compatibilist view of human free will. C. A. Campbell argues for the former position, while Adolf Grünbaum argues for the latter. Others, such as Peter van Inwagen, attempt to show that introspection fails to provide adequate warrent for the belief that humans have free will. The paper seeks to demonstrate how all three views are mistaken, and to show just what introspective evidence rationally justifies. The epistemic (...) status of introspective truth claims is also discussed, as is the possibility of parallels between introspection related issues and the mind body problem. (shrink)

Introspection is often cited as providing rational warrant for either a libertarian or a compatibilist view of human free will. C. A. Campbell argues for the former position, while Adolf Grünbaum argues for the latter. Others, such as Peter van Inwagen, attempt to show that introspection fails to provide adequate warrent for the belief that humans have free will. The paper seeks to demonstrate how all three views are mistaken, and to show just what introspective evidence rationally justifies. The epistemic (...) status of introspective truth claims is also discussed, as is the possibility of parallels between introspection related issues and the mind body problem. (shrink)

In some cases people judge it morally acceptable to sacrifice one person’s life in order to save several other lives, while in other similar cases they make the opposite judgment. Researchers have identified two general factors that may explain this phenomenon at the stimulus level: (1) the agent’s intention (i.e. whether the harmful event is intended as a means or merely foreseen as a side-effect) and (2) whether the agent harms the victim in a manner that is relatively “direct” or (...) “personal”. Here we integrate these two classes of findings. Two experiments examine a novel personalness/directness factor that we call personal force, present when the force that directly impacts the victim is generated by the agent’s muscles (e.g., in pushing). Experiments 1a and b demonstrate the influence of personal force on moral judgment, distinguishing it from physical contact and spatial proximity. Experiments 2a and b demonstrate an interaction between personal force and intention, whereby the effect of personal force depends entirely on intention. These studies also introduce a method for controlling for people’s real-world expectations in decisions involving potentially unrealistic hypothetical dilemmas. (shrink)

Foucault’s remarks concerning psychoanalysis are ambivalent and even prima facie contra-dictory, at times lauding Freud and Lacan as anti-humanists, at others being severely criti-cal of their imbrication within psychiatric power. This has allowed a profusion of interpretations of his position, between so-called ‘Freudo-Foucauldians’ at one extreme and Foucauldians who condemn psychoanalysis as such at the other. In this article, I begin by surveying Foucault’s biographical and theoretical relationship to psychoanalysis and the sec-ondary scholarship on this relationship to date. I pay (...) particular attention to the discussion of the relationship in feminist scholarship and queer theory, and that by psychoanalytic thinkers, as well as attending to the particular focus in the secondary literature on Fou-cault’s late work and his relationship to the figure of Jacques Lacan. I conclude that Fou-cault’s attitude to psychoanalysis varies with context, and that some of his criticisms of psychoanalysis in part reflect an ignorance of the variety of psychoanalytic thought, partic-ularly in its Lacanian form. I thus argue that Foucault sometimes tended to overestimate the extent of the incompatibility of his approach with psychoanalytic ones and that there is ultimately no serious incompatibility there. Rather, psychoanalysis represents a substantively different mode of inquiry to Foucault’s work, which is neither straightforwardly ex-clusive nor inclusive of psychoanalytic insights. (shrink)

ExcerptIn 2021, in the pages of this journal, I contended that a coalition of interests in the United States had coalesced in opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump and duly taken power through the vehicle of Joe Biden.1 This coalition includes the Democratic Party, corporate elites, the media, academia, and—the subject of the present article—the national security (natsec) state. In that earlier piece, I focused on particular components of this coalition: legacy and social media. I went on in a (...) subsequent Telos piece to examine another of its elements: the academy.2 These fractions all appear, however, to be relatively minor players. While I argue that the legacy media have staged a counterrevolution to seize back control of the public sphere, this exhausts their parochial, pecuniary agenda; beyond this, they are simply part of a wider activist liberal cause. Contemporary liberal activism is in turn ideologically rooted in ideas propagated by sectors of the academy and hegemonic within it, but this has not, on my analysis, empowered the academy so much as the forces that make it increasingly redundant. (shrink)

This article deals with the relationship between the thought of Michel Foucault and that of Axel Honneth, arguing in favour of the former against the latter. I begin by considering Honneth’s early engagement in The Critique of Power with Foucault’s thought. I rebut Honneth’s criticisms of Foucault here as a misreading, one which prevents Honneth from coming to grips with Foucault’s position and hence the challenge that it poses to Honneth’s project. I then move on to offer a Foucauldian critique (...) of Honneth’s own position, arguing for a Foucauldian alternative to Critical Theory. (shrink)

IntroductionAs we near the semicentennial of the 1976 publication of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, for all its influence in the interim, this work remains today extraordinarily challenging in relation to our sexual mores. In this article, I will attempt to reapply its insights to analyze contemporary trends in sexuality and gender. Questions that I will consider include the continuing applicability of Foucault’s analyses, to what extent and how they may need to be revised in light of (...) historical developments, and what reading Foucault can tell us about our contemporary conjuncture. I will argue that volume 1 of The History of Sexuality remains highly relevant in this regard, although I will also indicate some ways in which things have moved on since Foucault’s time, and thus in which his thesis might be modified. Despite Foucault having apparently been extremely influential on academic thinking about sex, we seem nonetheless to have become or remained “other Victorians,” perversely mimicking the nineteenth-century sexology that Foucault pilloried. I will argue that we have continued to believe exactly the great myths about sex that Foucault sought to dispense with: namely, that sexuality has primarily been shaped by historic “repression,” that sexuality needs to be “liberated” from this repression, and that there is a “truth of sex” that is on the side of freedom. These beliefs have all mutated, however, to the extent that questions of sex (like many other social questions) are increasingly oriented around individual identities and the supposed sovereignty of the individual to determine their own truth. (shrink)

The dominant, individualistic understanding of autonomy that features in clinical practice and research is underpinned by the idea that people are, in their ideal form, independent, self-interested and rational gain-maximising decision-makers. In recent decades, this paradigm has been challenged from various disciplinary and intellectual directions. Proponents of ‘relational autonomy’ in particular have argued that people’s identities, needs, interests – and indeed autonomy – are always also shaped by their relations to others. Yet, despite the pronounced and nuanced critique directed at (...) an individualistic understanding of autonomy, this critique has had very little effect on ethical and legal instruments in clinical practice and research so far. In this article, we use four case studies to explore to what extent, if at all, relational autonomy can provide solutions to ethical and practical problems in clinical practice and research. We conclude that certain forms of relational autonomy can have a tangibl... (shrink)

Many drugs used in paediatric medicine are off-label. There is a rising call for the use of adaptive clinical trial designs in responding to the need for safe and effective drugs given their potential to offer efficiency and cost-effective benefits compared with traditional clinical trials. ADs have a strong appeal in paediatric clinical trials given the small number of available participants, limited understanding of age-related variability and the desire to limit exposure to futile or unsafe interventions. Although the ethical value (...) of adaptive trials has increasingly come under scrutiny, there is a paucity of literature on the ethical dilemmas that may be associated with paediatric adaptive designs. This paper highlights some of these ethical concerns around safety, scientific/social value and caregiver/guardian comprehension of the trial design. Against this background, the paper develops a non-static conceptual lens for understanding PADs. It shows that ADs are epistemically open and reduce some of the knowledge-associated uncertainties inherent in clinical trials as well as fast-track the time to draw conclusions about the value of evaluated drugs/treatments. On this note, the authors argue that PADs are ethically justifiable given they have multiple layers of safety, exposing enrolled children to lesser potential risks, create social/scientific value generally and for paediatric populations in particular, specifically foster the flourishing of paediatric populations and can significantly improve paediatric trial efficiency when properly designed and implemented. However, because PADs are relatively new and their regulatory, ethical and logistical characteristics are yet to be clarified in some jurisdictions, the cooperation of various public and private stakeholders is required to ensure that the interests of children, their caregivers and parents/guardians are best served while exposing paediatric research subjects to the most minimal of risks when they are enrolled in paediatric trials that use ADs. Data sharing not applicable as no datasets generated and/or analysed for this study. Not applicable. (shrink)

In this response, while agreeing with Balibar’s substantive positive position, I take issue with the way he situates it. Specifically, he casts it as a via negativa in relation to all previously existing thought. I suggest that it would be more accurate to say he is positioning the notion of the transindividual as a via media between two alleged extremes, individualism and organicism. I argue that the idea that there is an opposite and equal error to individualism is mistaken, and (...) that in actuality Balibar’s concept of the transindividual is not a radical departure from a long history of anti-individualism. (shrink)

In this article, I review recent findings in cognitive neuroscience in learning, particularly in the learning of mathematics and of reading. I argue that while cognitive neuroscience is in its infancy as a field, theories of learning will need to incorporate and account for this growing body of empirical data.

An essential introduction to ethics and values, this comprehensive anthology places the perennial human search for ethical values into historical perspective. The philosophers included are: Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Bentham, Cicero, Dewey, Hartman, Hume, James, Kant, Kierkegaard, Mill, Moore, Nietzsche, Plato, Sartre, Scheler, Schopenhauer, Spencer, Spinoza, St. Augustine, and Stevenson.

Co-published with the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, this book is a collection of 10 original translations of articles written by philosophers on the topics of art and aesthetics in the 20th century. It is a significant contribution to the subject of aesthetics in making available previously untranslated texts by European philosophers. Suitable for courses in the philosophy of art, aesthetics and art history.

Epistemology -- Power I -- Power II -- Subjectivity -- Resistance -- Critique -- Ethics.

This paper argues that although Epicureans will never marry for love, they may find it therapeutic to marry for sex: Epicureans may marry in order to limit anxiety about securing a sexual partner if they are prone to such anxiety and if they believe their prospective partner will satisfy them sexually. The paper shows that Epicureans believe that the process of obtaining sex can be a major source of anxiety, that it is acceptable for the sage to marry under certain (...) circumstances, and that the desire for sex alone is free of the groundless assumptions that fuel love. Epicureans would therefore approve of marrying to alleviate sexual anxiety. (shrink)

Etienne Balibar, one of the foremost living French philosophers, builds on his landmark work 'Spinoza and Politics' with this exploration of Spinoza's ontology. Balibar situates Spinoza in relation to the major figures of Marx and Freud as a precursor to the more recent French thinker Gilbert Simondon's concept of the transindividual. Presenting a crucial development in his thought, Balibar takes the concept of transindividuality beyond Spinoza to show it at work at both the individual and the collective level.

该书收入的论文分为三部分。第一部分的六篇论文探讨了文化和宗教对话的理论基础;第二部分九篇论文则是具体的宗教比较和对话;第三部分的四篇论文则把重点放在中国宗教的研究上。.

Contemporary critics of Augustine, including many feminists, have often charged him with debasing the body by considering it to be the seat of sin, worthy of enmity and neglect. I argue that in several texts Augustine displays a marked effort to liberate his readers from precisely that position. I attempt to show that in De doctrina christiana and City of God, Augustine defends the body by shifting the blame for sin from the flesh to the soul. I contend that this (...) move does not amount to claiming that the body is inherently good, but only that it is not inherently worthy of contempt -or, at least, no more than is the soul. I go on to show that in the Enchiridion Augustine moves beyond a mere defense of the body: he argues for its inherent goodness. This claim results from his metaphysics of created being, in which all substances are good to some extent simply because they are creations of God. Thus Augustine both defends the body, by showing that it is not entirely responsible for sin, and redeems it, by showing that it is inherently good. (shrink)

In the Philebus, Plato claims that there exists a natural state of organic harmony in which a living organism is neither restored nor depleted. In contrast to many scholars, I argue that this natural state of organic stability differs from a neutral state between pleasure and pain that Plato also discusses in the dialogue: the natural is without any changes to the organism, the neutral is merely without the perception of these changes. I contend that Plato considers the natural state (...) to be unobtainable by human beings, who can only achieve its closest approximation, namely, the neutral state. (shrink)

Diogenes Laertius reports that the Epicurean sage will pity slaves rather than punish them. This paper considers why a hedonistic egoist would feel pity for her subordinates, given that pity can cause psychological pain. I argue that Epicureans feel bad for those who lack the natural good of security, and that Epicureans’ concern for others is entirely consistent with their hedonistic egoism: they will endure the pain of pity in order to achieve the greater pleasure of social cohesion and to (...) avoid the greater pain of social conflict. According to Epicureans, our feelings for fellow humans prevent us from becoming savages, unable to enter into trustworthy compacts to promote our safety. (shrink)

This paper considers how Plato can account for the fact that pain features prominently in the intellectual pleasures of philosophers, given that in his view pleasures mixed with pain are ontologically deficient and inferior to ‘pure,’ painless pleasures. After ruling out the view that Plato does not believe intellectual pleasures are actually painful, I argue that he provides a coherent and overlooked account of pleasure in the Phaedrus, where purity does not factor into the philosopher’s judgment of pleasures at all; (...) what matters instead is the extent to which a given pleasure fosters the philosophical life. I show that to argue, as James Warren has recently done, that Plato thinks intellectual pleasures are not per se painful is less successful than the Phaedrus account at explaining philosophers’ lived experiences of pleasure, which often involve pain. (shrink)

For over three decades, clinical ethicists in the United States have recorded their consulting activities to supplement documentation in the medical record, often using locally developed instrument...

ABSTRACT This article considers Michel Foucault's theories of ethical speech and militant life in the context of Occupy Wall Street's encampments in Zuccotti Park. Focusing on the encampments and the production and circulation of resources to meet bodily needs, the article concludes that occupation was a self-inflicted form of precarity as well as an extension of an already existing vulnerability, a living that is at once a form of social death. I read the occupations as a mode of militant life, (...) which is to say, that which enacts precarity while at the same time transforming it into the object of radical speech. (shrink)