Motivated by a deep sense that injustice and inequality are wrong, liberals and reformers in the Western political tradition have focused their energies on policies and programs which seek inclusion: extending the suffrage to those without property; seeking to treat women the same as men, and blacks the same as whites; trying to ensure that as few as possible are excluded from economic opportunity due to lack of resources. Under current conditions, such demands for inclusion take two primary forms, especially (...) in the United States. One is a commitment to using the state to equalize the life chances of individuals. The other is a call for treating groups which have experienced discrimination with full respect. The former leads to the welfare state, while the latter is produced by, and in turn produces, what is commonly called identity politics, the politics of recognition, or the politics of presence. (shrink)

Indledning til “Om spørgsmålet: Hvad er oplysning?” af Moses Mendelssohn.

The value and function of theoretical knowledge is an important and disputed issue, which has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. I attempt to clarify the notion of theoretical knowledge and examine its general relationship to learning. Theoretical knowledge is not necessarily distinguished by any particular content; the adjective “theoretical” can just as well signify a particular methodological approach or a way of dealing with a topic, including the way it is conceptualized. I further argue that theoretical knowledge can be merely (...) implicit and non-propositional. Though I reject a radical constructivist view, according to which knowledge acquisition consists in socialization, it must be admitted that socialization and the acquisition of theoretical knowledge do turn out to go closely hand in hand, inasmuch as theoretical knowledge is often a precondition of successful socialization. Concepts, principles, models and symbolic systems support the acquisition of both theoretical and other kinds of knowledge, but also help the learner to find her way about in an environment that is already formed by theories and conceptual understandings. Theoretical knowledge is both a learning instrument and a tool for navigation. (shrink)

Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist who was uncritically preoccupied with "noble savages" and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade. Fugitive Rousseau demonstrates why these charges are wrong and argues that a fresh, "fugitive" perspective on political freedom is bound up with the themes of primitivism and slavery in Rousseau's political theory. Rather than trace Rousseau's arguments primarily to the social contract tradition of Hobbes and Locke, Fugitive Rousseau places Rousseau squarely in two imperial (...) contexts: European empire in his contemporary Atlantic world and Roman imperial philosophy. Anyone who aims to understand the implications of Rousseau's famous sentence "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" or wants to know how Rousseauian arguments can support a radical democratic politics of diversity, discontinuity, and exodus will find Fugitive Rousseau indispensable. (shrink)

This essay examines Arendt’s descriptions of “Hottentots” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, especially the comparisons and contrasts she frequently draws between Hottentots and other peoples. In particular, Arendt highlights dehumanization of presumptively “civilized” people in comparing them to African “savages.” Close reading of such analogies demands that we look beyond the racial explanations that other scholars have offered and focus instead on how Arendt’s conception of humanity is bound up with a specific sense of culture that is antiprimitivist—exclusive of peoples (...) without history, primitives. Analysis of her moral anthropology uncovers the Cape Colony discourses and postenlightenment German philosophical supports that inform her antiprimitivism. However, Arendt’s antiprimitivism may not remain confined to Origins. In later essays, Arendt analyzes the various aspects of culture in instructive ways.Yet she also synthesizes culture concepts into a schema that introduces problems for her. (shrink)

This book addresses nothingness as not only the untangible presence of an emotional, cultural, social, or even political void that is felt on an existential level, but has some solid foundations in reality. The death of a loved one, the social isolation of an individual, or the culture shock one may experience in another country are examples of situations in which an external sense of absence mirrors an internal psychological and philosophical sense of nothingness. Not much has been explicitly written (...) on nothingness in the history of psychology. On the other hand, nothingness seems to be implicitly embedded in many scholars' work. This duality of explicitly and implicitly expressed ideas about nothingness reveals how psychology finds inspiration in philosophy, and vice versa. The book aims to illustrate how the concept of the presence of absence--nothingness--fills a void in contemporary psychological theorizing. (shrink)

Knowledge about human wellbeing is a central part of ethical knowledge. But it is a neglected topic not only in ethics in general, but also in wellbeing theorizing, which has focused on enumerating the basic elements of wellbeing rather than on how to gauge, foster and maintain wellbeing in actual human lives. I consider the prospects for a procedural approach to wellbeing that sees it as depending on a process of continual adjustment between values, preferences, actions and emotions. The value-fulfilment (...) theory of Valerie Tiberius provides a model for such an approach, but needs to be corrected and supplemented in certain respects. I propose a version of the approach that is only partly, but still significantly procedural, and which does not privilege higher-order mental states. Considering the relevance of such an approach for ethics, I finally suggest that (certain forms of) moral agency may be best analyzed as an intersubjective process of adjustment and fulfilment of values and desires (etc.), and as a process of acquiring and exercising collective moral knowing how. (shrink)

Propositional attitudes are often classified as non-phenomenal mental states. I argue that there is no good reason for doing so. The unwillingness to view propositional attitudes as being essentially phenomenal stems from a biased notion of phenomenality, from not paying sufficient attention to the idioms in which propositional attitudes are usually reported, from overlooking the considerable degree to which different intentional modes can be said to be phenomenologically continuous, and from not considering the possibility that propositional attitudes may be transparent, (...) just like sensations and emotions are commonly held to be: there may be no appropriate way of describing their phenomenal character apart from describing the properties and objects they represent. (shrink)

In spite of the booming interest in social epistemology, explicit analyses of group knowledge remain rare. Most existing accounts are based on theories of joint intentionality. I argue that this approach, though not without merit or useful applications, is inadequate both when it comes to accounting for actual group knowledge attributions and for purposes of meliorative social epistemology. As an alternative, I outline a liberal, de-intellectualized account, which allows for the complex distribution of epistemic states typical of most real-world collectives, (...) and makes minimal requirements as to the psychological underpinnings of collective states of knowing and the formal features of groups. The account is inspired by theories of distributed and extended cognition. It is guided by the principle that we should use the same standard when dealing with social and individual epistemology. Careful attention to what is normally required—and, in particular, not required—for attributing knowledge to individuals lends support the more liberal view. (shrink)

The overwhelmingly dominant view of epistemic normativity has been an extreme form of deontology. I argue that although the pull towards deontology is quite understandable, given the traditional concerns of epistemology, there is no good reason for not also adopting a complementary consequentialist notion of epistemic normativity, which can be put to use in applied epistemology. I further argue that this consequentialist notion is not, despite appearances and popular sentiment to the contrary, any less genuinely epistemic than the deontological notion (...) and that it may even be considered more genuinely normative. (shrink)

Propositional attitudes are often classified as non-phenomenal mental states. I argue that there is no good reason for doing so. The unwillingness to view propositional attitudes as being essentially phenomenal stems from a biased notion of phenomenality, from not paying sufficient attention to the idioms in which propositional attitudes are usually reported, from overlooking the considerable degree to which different intentional modes can be said to be phenomenologically continuous, and from not considering the possibility that propositional attitudes may be transparent, (...) just like sensations and emotions are commonly held to be: there may be no appropriate way of describing their phenomenal character apart from describing the properties and objects they represent. (shrink)

The moral and epistemic significance of emotions has been increasingly emphasized in recent philosophy. The focus has been mostly on metaethical questions. We add a new perspective by considering the practical importance of gauging, reacting to, enhancing, or reducing the emotions of others and oneself. We focus particularly on the collective aspect of emotion development and regulation, how emotions are entangled with values, and how they may be used constructively for handling otherwise difficult situations. We use the case of elderly (...) care, drawing on a qualitative study from a Danish municipality, to illustrate the complex and multifarious ways in which emotions shape the normative landscape in which attempts to maintain or improve well-being take place. (shrink)

Phenomenology informs a number of contemporary attempts to give more weight to the lived experience of patients and overcome the limitations of a one-sidedly biomedical understanding of illness. Susan Bredlau has recently presented a reading of Plato’s dialogue Charmides, which portrays Socrates as a pioneer of the phenomenological approach to illness. I use a critical discussion of Bredlau’s interpretation of the Charmides to show that the phenomenology of illness also has its shortcomings and needs to be complemented by still other (...) approaches. While Bredlau does make a number of highly apt and relevant suggestions as to how a narrow biomedical approach to illness may be corrected, some of which are related to phenomenology, the attribution to Plato’s Socrates of a phenomenological approach is mistaken. Characteristically, Socrates shows little interest in the personal experience of a patient. He is more concerned with the patient’s lifestyle and conduct and so suggests an alternative or complementary perspective, stressing the importance of education and prevention to health care. (shrink)