Previous research on religion and helping has left some questions unanswered. In the present study, participants expressed willingness to help groups of people in need, and this after having been religiously versus non-religiously stimulated. The activation of religious context increased the willingness to help, but only the homeless. Orthodox religious people tended to consider the targets responsible for their problem, an association partially mediated by the belief in a just world for other. Symbolic thinking was associated with (...) willingness for helping, an association partially mediated by the belief in ultimate justice. Results suggest a limited and conditional prosociality as a consequence of religion. (shrink)

Debates over egalitarianism for the most part are not concerned with constraints on achieving an egalitarian society, beyond discussions of the deficiencies of egalitarian theory itself. This paper looks beyond objections to egalitarianism as such and investigates the relevant psychological processes motivating people to resist various aspects of egalitarianism. I argue for two theses, one normative and one descriptive. The normative thesis holds that egalitarians must take psychological constraints into account when constructing egalitarian ideals. I draw from non-ideal theories in (...) political philosophy, which aim to construct moral goals with current social and political constraints in mind, to argue that human psychology must be part of a non-ideal theory of egalitarianism. The descriptive thesis holds that the most fundamental psychological challenge to egalitarian ideals comes from what are called Just World Beliefs. A troubling result of Just World Beliefs, one that poses a prima facie obstacle to egalitarianism, is that people tend to dismiss or explain away any threats to their belief that the world is fundamentally just. The pervasiveness and severity of Just World Beliefs predicts that people will be resistant to egalitarian policies. My aim is to show how research on Just World Beliefs can help diagnose common problems for egalitarianism and assist in making realistic recommendations for bringing current societies closer to egalitarian ideals. (shrink)

This study investigates the relations between “Belief in a Just World” , religiosity and victim-blaming attitudes. In particular, the influence of BJW and religiosity on social attitudes is probed. Recent theoretical and psychometric developments in the BJW construct are considered. Thus, 176 Turkish subjects completed measures for BJW-Self /BJW-Other , “Belief in Immanent/Ultimate Justice,” attitudes towards the poor, and religiosity. Results show that Belief in Ultimate Justice and BJW-S are uniquely related to religiosity. As hypothesized, (...) BJW-O and Belief in Immanent Justice are strongly related to harsh attitudes towards the poor. However, contrary to our expectation, results do not indicate a positive link between religiosity and negative attitudes towards the poor. Study findings also provide strong cross-cultural support for the conceptual and psychometric revisions of the Just-World construct. (shrink)

The harshness and unpredictability of early life circumstances shape life history strategies for trade-offs between the resources devoted to somatic and reproductive efforts of individuals in the developmental process. This paper uses belief in a just world as a reflection of early environmental cues to predict an individual’s life history strategies. Research has found that belief in a just world influences life history strategies through a sense of control. However, the relationship between a sense (...) of control and a life history strategy is flawed because influencing life history strategies should be intrinsic to control strategies rather than a sense of control. A total of 408 Chinese undergraduate students completed the Personal Belief in a Just World Scale, Mini-K Scale, and Primary and Secondary Control Scale. Structural equation modeling suggested that belief in a just world can directly or indirectly influence life history strategies through primary and secondary control strategies, respectively; there was no statistical difference in the degree of influence between the two paths. These results deepen our understanding of the underlying mechanisms in the relationship between belief in a just world and life history strategies, which can be utilized to ensure a slow life history strategy among Chinese university students in the future. (shrink)

This essay subjects to philosophicalscrutiny a well-known theory in socialpsychology, the theory of a belief in a justworld (BJW-theory). What are theimplications of the theory for moralphilosophy, in general, and moraleducation/schooling, in particular? Shouldparents and teachers discourage or encouragechildren to believe in a just world, in thesense given to such a belief in this theory?The intricacies of BJW-theory areexplored, with special emphasis on the strangecase of ``victim derogation.'' The authorconcludes that the theory remains, for variousreasons, unilluminating, (...) both morally andeducationally, unless supplemented by normativeand factual interpretative conditions. Somesuch conditions are suggested and discussed. (shrink)

In the context of the COVID-19, we examined the relationship between college students’ ego depletion and their prosocial behavior. We explored the mediating role of social self-efficacy between ego depletion and prosocial behavior, we also examined the moderating role of personal belief in a just world in this relationship. 1,122 college students completed the ego depletion questionnaire, prosocial behavior questionnaire, social self-efficacy questionnaire, and personal belief in a just world questionnaire. The current findings suggested (...) that: Social self-efficacy mediated the relationship between college students’ ego depletion and their prosocial behaviors. The ego depletion of college students could be used to predict their prosocial behavior through social self-efficacy. Personal belief in a just world moderated the relationship between social self-efficacy and prosocial behavior. (shrink)

The aim of the study was to analyze the psychometric properties of the Social Justice Scale, composed by Representation, Recognition, and Redistribution dimensions. Likewise, the contribution of social dominance and the belief in a just world in each dimension were analyzed. A total of 471 young adults residing in Madrid participated in the online preliminary study, with an age range of 18–42 years with different genders. The main results indicated adequate psychometric properties for Social Justice Scale through (...) its three dimensions. In addition, we observed that both social dominance and belief in a just world might be psychosocial variables that modulate the levels of social justice. The main findings of the research and need for replication in future studies are discussed. (shrink)

This commentary focuses on how third parties impact the course of acts of revenge based on their world views, such as belief in a just world. Assuming this belief to be true, the following questions could be asked: (a) What are the consequences of a third party's worldview in terms of secondary victimization? (b) Are bystanders actually aware of these consequences? (c) If so, then why do they let it happens?

Abstract:Narratives are an interface that evolution has instilled in our brains for their optimal interaction with reality. Without them we would not be who we are: creatures that narrativize their experiences, integrate them into their autobiographical self, and imagine the future of this self. But narratives also distort reality by endowing it with meaning, purpose, and causality even when none exist. Literary stories with weak narrativity, such as those by Raymond Carver, remind us of another modality of the human mind (...) and selfhood available to us, one that registers the world without subjecting it to narrative selection and chronological ordering. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an algorithmic impossible-worlds model of belief and knowledge that provides a middle ground between models that entail that everyone is logically omniscient and those that are compatible with even the most egregious kinds of logical incompetence. In outline, the model entails that an agent believes (knows) φ just in case she can easily (and correctly) compute that φ is true and thus has the capacity to make her actions depend on whether φ. The (...) model thereby captures the standard view that belief and knowledge ground are constitutively connected to dispositions to act. As I explain, the model improves upon standard algorithmic models developed by Parikh, Halpern, Moses, Vardi, and Duc, among other ways, by integrating them into an impossible-worlds framework. The model also avoids some important disadvantages of recent candidate middle-ground models based on dynamic epistemic logic or step logic, and it can subsume their most important advantages. (shrink)

What would be the consequence of embracing skepticism about free will and/or desert-based moral responsibility? What if we came to disbelieve in moral responsibility? What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings? Would it cause nihilism and despair as some maintain? Or perhaps increase anti-social behavior as some recent studies have suggested (Vohs and Schooler 2008; Baumeister, Masicampo, and DeWall 2009)? Or would it rather (...) have a humanizing effect on our practices and policies, freeing us from the negative effects of what Bruce Waller calls the “moral responsibility system” (2014, p. 4)? These questions are of profound pragmatic importance and should be of interest independent of the metaphysical debate over free will. As public proclamations of skepticism continue to rise, and as the mass media continues to run headlines announcing free will and moral responsibility are illusions, we need to ask what effects this will have on the general public and what the responsibility is of professionals. (shrink)

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations ofbeliefs,which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations ofknowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive (...) science, we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibits a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind – one that is focused on understanding others' minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it. (shrink)

In this timely book, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter trains an autobiographical lens on a moment of remarkable transition in American journalism. Just a few years ago, the mainstream press was wrestling with whether labeling waterboarding as torture violated important norms of neutrality and objectivity. Now, major American newspapers regularly call the president of the United States a liar. Clearly, something has changed as the old rules of "balance" and "two sides to every story" have lost their grip. Is the (...) change for the better? Will it last? In Just a Journalist, Linda Greenhouse--who for decades covered the U.S. Supreme Court for The New York Times--tackles these questions from the perspective of her own experience. A decade ago, she faced criticism from her own newspaper and much of journalism's leadership for a speech to a college alumnae group in which she criticized the Bush administration for, among other things, seeking to create a legal black hole at Guantánamo Bay--two years after the Supreme Court itself had ruled that the detainees could not be hidden away from the reach of federal judges who might hear their appeals. One famous newspaper editor expressed his belief that it was unethical for a journalist to vote, because the act of choosing one candidate over another could compromise objectivity. Linda Greenhouse disagrees. Calling herself "an accidental activist," she raises urgent questions about the role journalists can and should play as citizens, even as participants, in the world around them. (shrink)

We care not only about how people treat us, but also what they believe of us. If I believe that you’re a bad tipper given your race, I’ve wronged you. But, what if you are a bad tipper? It is commonly argued that the way racist beliefs wrong is that the racist believer either misrepresents reality, organizes facts in a misleading way that distorts the truth, or engages in fallacious reasoning. In this paper, I present a case that challenges this (...) orthodoxy: the case of the supposedly rational racist. We live in a world that has been, and continues to be, structured by racist attitudes and institutions. As a result, the evidence might be stacked in favour of racist beliefs. But, if there are racist beliefs that reflect reality and are rationally justified, what could be wrong with them? Moreover, how do I wrong you by believing what I epistemically ought believe given the evidence? To address this challenge, we must recognize that there are not only epistemic norms governing belief, but moral ones as well. This view, however, is at odds with the assumption that moral obligation requires a kind of voluntary control that we lack with regard to our beliefs. This background assumption motivates many philosophers to try to explain away the appearance that beliefs can wrong by locating the wrong elsewhere, e.g., in an agent’s actions. Further, even accounts that accept the thesis that racist beliefs can wrong restrict the class of beliefs that wrong to beliefs that are either false or the result of hot irrationality, e.g., the racist belief is a result of ill-will. In this paper I argue that although the these accounts will capture many of the wrongs associated with racist beliefs, they will be only partial explanations because they cannot explain the wrong committed by the supposedly rational racist. The challenge posed by the supposedly rational racist concerns our epistemic practices in a non-ideal world. The world is an unjust place, and there may be many morally objectionable beliefs it justifies. To address this challenge, we must seriously consider the thesis people wrong others in virtue of what they believe about them, and not just in virtue of what they do. (shrink)

In 2008, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon acquired a painting called The Flight into Egypt which was attributed to the French artist Nicolas Poussin. Thought to have been painted in 1657, the painting had gone missing for more than three centuries. Several versions were rediscovered in the 1980s and one was passed from hand to hand, from a family who had no idea of its value to gallery owners and eventually to the museum. A painting that had been sold (...) as a decorative object in 1986 for around 12,000 euros was acquired two decades later by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon for 17 million euros. What does this remarkable story tell us about the nature of art and the way that it is valued? How is it that what seemed to be just an ordinary canvas could be transformed into a masterpiece, that a decorative object could become a national treasure? This is a story permeated by social magic the social alchemy that transforms lead into gold, the ordinary into the extraordinary, the profane into the sacred. Focusing on this extraordinary case, Bernard Lahire lays bare the beliefs and social processes that underpin the creation of a masterpiece. Like a detective piecing together the clues in an unsolved mystery he carefully reconstructs the steps that led from the same material object being treated as a copy of insignificant value to being endowed with the status of a highly-prized painting commanding a record-breaking price. He thereby shows that a painting is never just a painting, and is always more than a piece of stretched canvass to which brush strokes of paint have been applied: this object, and the value we attach to it, is also the product of a complex array of social processes – with its distinctive institutions and experts – that lies behind it. And through the history of this painting, Lahire uncovers some of the fundamental structures of our social world. For the social magic that can transform a painting from a simple copy into a masterpiece is similar to the social magic that is present throughout our societies, in economics and politics as much as art and religion, a magic that results from the spell cast by power on those who tacitly recognize its authority. By following the trail of a single work of art, Lahire interrogates the foundations on which our perceptions of value and our belief in institutions rest and exposes the forms of domination which lie hidden behind our admiration of works of art. (shrink)

We standardly attribute beliefs to both individuals and organised groups, such as governments, corporations and universities. Just as we might say that an individual believes something, for instance that oil prices are rising, so we might say that a government or corporation does. If groups are to genuinely have beliefs, then they need states with the characteristic features of beliefs. One feature standardly taken to characterise beliefs is their mind to world direction of fit: they should fit the (...) way the world is. By contrast, desires are standardly taken to have a world to mind direction of fit: they aim for the world to be a certain way and are satisfied when the world fits them. Recently, Lackey ( 2021 ) has appealed to direction of fit to argue against certain nonsummative accounts of group belief. Here, I argue that on deeper inspection, belief’s mind to world direction of fit is difficult to accommodate on summative accounts of group belief including Lackey’s own neo-summative account. Further, I argue that direction of fit considerations in fact motivate the main non-summative approaches to belief, namely functionalism and interpretationism. Along the way, we see how addressing the issue of the direction of fit of group beliefs raises important questions about how to understand group evidence and its relationship to the evidence of members. (shrink)

What is it to want something? Or, as philosophers might ask, what is a desire? This book defends “desire-as-belief”, the view that desires are just a special subset of our beliefs: normative beliefs. This view entitles us to accept orthodox models of human motivation and rationality that explain those things with reference to desire, but nonetheless to also make room for our normative beliefs to play a role in those domains. And this view tells us to diverge from (...) the orthodox view on which desires themselves can never be right or wrong. Rather, according to desire-as-belief, our desires can themselves be assessed for their accuracy, and they are wrong when they misrepresent normative features of the world. Hume says that it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of your finger, but he is wrong: it is foolish to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of your finger, and this is foolish because this preference misrepresents the relative worth of these things. (shrink)

This clear, readable introduction to philosophy presents a traditional theistic view of the existence of God.There are many fine introductions to philosophy, but few are written for students of faith by a teacher who is sensitive to the intellectual challenges they face studying in an environment that is often hostile to religious belief. Many introductory texts present short, easy-to-refute synopses of the traditional arguments for God's existence, the soul, free will, and objective moral value rooted in God's nature, usually (...) followed by strong objections stated as if they are the last word. This formula may make philosophy easier to digest, but it gives many students the impression that there are no longer any good reasons to accept the beliefs just mentioned.Philosophy, Reasoned Belief, and Faith is written for philosophy instructors who want their students to take a deeper look at the classic theistic arguments and who believe that many traditional views can be rigorously defended against the strongest objections. The book is divided into four sections, focusing on philosophy of religion, an introduction to epistemology, philosophy of the human person, and philosophical ethics. The text challenges naturalism, the predominant outlook in the academic world today, while postmodernist relativism and skepticism are also examined and rejected. Students of faith--and students without faith--will deepen their worldviews by thoughtfully examining the philosophical arguments that are presented in this book. Philosophy, Reasoned Belief, and Faith will appeal to Christian teachers, analytic theists, home educators, and general readers interested in the classic arguments supporting a theistic worldview. (shrink)

We examine carefully the rationale underlying the approaches to belief change taken in the literature, and highlight what we view as methodological problems. We argue that to study belief change carefully, we must be quite explicit about the ontology or scenario underlying the belief change process. This is something that has been missing in previous work, with its focus on postulates. Our analysis shows that we must pay particular attention to two issues that have often been taken (...) for granted: the first is how we model the agent's epistemic state. (Do we use a set of beliefs, or a richer structure, such as an ordering on worlds? And if we use a set of beliefs, in what language are these beliefs are expressed?) We show that even postulates that have been called beyond controversy are unreasonable when the agent's beliefs include beliefs about her own epistemic state as well as the external world. The second is the status of observations. (Are observations known to be true, or just believed? In the latter case, how firm is the belief?) Issues regarding the status of observations arise particularly when we consider iterated belief revision, and we must confront the possibility of revising by and then by ¬. (shrink)

A popular view has it that the mental representations underlying human pretense are not beliefs, but are “belief-like” in important ways. This view typically posits a distinctive cognitive attitude (a “DCA”) called “imagination” that is taken toward the propositions entertained during pretense, along with correspondingly distinct elements of cognitive architecture. This paper argues that the characteristics of pretense motivating such views of imagination can be explained without positing a DCA, or other cognitive architectural features beyond those regulating normal (...) class='Hi'>belief and desire. On the present “Single Attitude” account of imagination, propositional imagining just is a form of believing. The Single Attitude account is also distinguished from “metarepresentational” accounts of pretense, which hold that both pretending and recognizing pretense in others require one to have concepts of mental states. It is argued, to the contrary, that pretending and recognizing pretense require neither a DCA nor possession of mental state concepts. (shrink)

According to a plausible picture of information, to acquire information is to rule out possibilities. What is the nature of these possibilities? The most natural answer---that they are possible states of the world---seems to be refuted by the existence of informative truths that are necessary, and so don't rule out any real possibilities. This seems to show that informational contents cannot be identified with the real possibilities they eliminate. Real possibilities, it seems, are too coarse-grained to do the work (...) of informational contents. ;In the first part of the dissertation, I look at two defenses of the coarse-grained conception of content. First, Stalnaker has claimed that the informativeness of necessary truths can be explained within a two-dimensional semantic framework, in which necessary truths have contingent metalinguistic contents. In Chapter 1, I argue that this metalinguistic approach misconstrues the content of mathematical truths. Second, Stalnaker has claimed that we have independent reason to adopt a coarse-grained conception of content since naturalistic views of content such as indicator views allow only for coarse-grained contents. In Chapter 2, I argue that both indicator and teleological views allow for more fine-grained contents and that, given certain assumptions, they even require them. Together, these arguments show that the best attempt to explain the informativeness of necessary truths in terms of coarse-grained entities fails, and that naturalism gives us no reason for thinking that some other attempt will succeed. Instead of explaining informativeness in terms of the elimination of real possibilities, I claim, we should explain it in terms of the elimination of more fine-grained epistemic possibilities. ;In the second part of the dissertation, I describe the characteristic features of epistemic possibilities. Chapter 3 clarifies the relevant sense of epistemic possibility by distinguishing it from related senses that have gone under the same name. I argue that P is epistemically possible for a thinker at a time just in case an operative belief that P is compatible with his operative beliefs at this time, where beliefs are called compatible, not if their contents are compatible, but if the beliefs themselves are compatible in the sense that it is possible to have them at the same time. Since epistemic possibility in this sense is a matter of what it is possible to believe, I call it epistemic possibility in the believability sense. ;In Chapter 4, I turn to the question of what sort of thing epistemic possibilities are. I argue that epistemic possibilities can be defined in terms of, but not identified with, a certain kind of fine-grained content. (shrink)

The belief in a world governed by natural law has meant that our ideas of good thinking have increasingly turned toward formalizable schemes, suitable to support ideas of consistency, accuracy, and disembodied clarity. The idea that thinking might be a bodily thing hasn't been much appreciated among philosophers of this tradition. Yet, we shall pursue this line of thought in this paper. It is suggested that knowledge is not something we have but something created in the very moment (...) of use. The same goes for other essential concepts such as for instance causality. Causality is seen as a human bodily experience. Causality is an experience, and from this fact follows that the Newtonian world must be turned upside down. The laws of gravity are not something "out-there" but something "in-here". (shrink)

Robert Cummins presents a series of essays motivated by the following question: Is the mind a collection of beliefs and desires that respond to and condition our feeling and perceptual experiences, or is this just a natural way to talk about it? What sort of conceptual framework do we need to understand what is really going on in our brains?

The field of iterated belief change has focused mainly on revision, with the other main operator of AGM belief change theory, i.e. contraction, receiving relatively little attention. In this paper we extend the Harper Identity from single-step change to define iterated contraction in terms of iterated revision. Specifically, just as the Harper Identity provides a recipe for defining the belief set resulting from contracting A in terms of (i) the initial belief set and (ii) the (...) belief set resulting from revision by ¬A, we look at ways to define the plausibility ordering over worlds resulting from contracting A in terms of (iii) the initial plausibility ordering, and (iv) the plausibility ordering resulting from revision by ¬A. After noting that the most straightforward such extension leads to a trivialisation of the space of permissible orderings, we provide a family of operators for combining plausibility orderings that avoid such a result. These operators are characterised in our domain of interest by a pair of intuitively compelling properties, which turn out to enable the derivation of a number of iterated contraction postulates from postulates for iterated revision. We finish by observing that a salient member of this family allows for the derivation of counterparts for contraction of some well known iterated revision operators, as well as for defining new iterated contraction operators. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 369-396 [Access article in PDF] Worlds or Words Apart?The Consequences of Pragmatism for Literary Studies:An Interview with Richard Rorty Richard Rorty, with E. P. Ragg ER: I WANTED TO ASK YOU first about holism. Clearly holism doesn't just mean being interdisciplinary. Nor, as you argue in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is it merely a question of antifoundationalist polemic. Rather, you say (...) it marks "a distrust of the whole epistemological enterprise." 1 Could you explain what you mean by that?RR: If you weren't some kind of foundationalist you wouldn't bother to get into epistemology. Epistemology only looks attractive if you think that there is a topic called knowledge whose nature can be studied. The idea is that once you have learned its nature, you might get more of it than you had before. Only someone who thinks that knowledge has foundations located in sense perception, or pure reason, or divine revelation, or something, would take the idea of studying knowledge, its nature and limits, seriously. I think of holism as just the view that people change their beliefs in such a way as to achieve coherence with their other beliefs, to bring their beliefs and desires into some sort of equilibrium—and that that is about all there is to be said about the quest for knowledge. There are no rules for which beliefs you sacrifice in order to accommodate other beliefs, or which desires you change to accommodate changed beliefs. Because there aren't any rules, there aren't any methods you can study in order to improve the way you achieve equilibrium. The whole idea of studying how belief is changed is pretty hopeless. It's just too holistic a process to be an appropriate topic of study. [End Page 369]ER: Holism is obviously a natural corollary of pragmatism because pragmatists urge bringing as many different useful vocabularies to discussion as we can. This reminds me of your definition of "literariness." In Contingency, irony, and solidarity you describe literary skill as the ability to effect "surprising gestalt switches by making smooth rapid transitions from one terminology to another." 2 Would it be fair to say, then, that thinking holistically is, to some degree, literary?RR: No, I don't think so. It would be more appropriate to say thinking holistically, in the sense of not being limited to a given context or disciplinary framework, is a matter of thinking imaginatively. Politicians and theologians and engineers think imaginatively just as much as literary people do. To call it literary would be unduly to privilege literature.ER: Would you say that, as a writer, your own work has been treated holistically: first in the sense that your texts are seen as a growing body of thought—that is, that there is a difference between the writer of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and the author of Contingency, irony, and solidarity—and, second, in the sense that people have thought holistically about your ideas, have brought them to bear on literature, philosophy, social science, the very demarcations you want to transcend?RR: I think that the stuff I do is more interesting to people outside of philosophy than those inside it. This is an example of the same phenomenon that led Kuhn to be much more read by people outside the hard sciences than by people within them. My stuff, like Kuhn's, debunks certain views that various earlier philosophers, especially the positivists, had tried to impose on the culture. My readers are people who are looking for a way out from the view they absorbed, without much liking it, when they were young. People inside of philosophy, however, often regard all this debunking as endangering the problems to the solution of which they have devoted their lives. They do not want the problems dissolved, because that would dissolve their solutions as well. So they welcome it less than do outsiders.ER: One of the markers of your... (shrink)

Punishment is fundamentally unfair, never justly deserved, and cannot be eliminated. The deep Belief in a Just World, the subject of extensive psychological research, makes it difficult for us to accept the fact that we live in an unjust world. Belief in moral responsibility is designed to protect our comfortable belief in a just world, but that comfort comes at the price of blaming victims and blocking deeper inquiry. Facing the disturbing fact (...) of unavoidable injustice motivates us to take effective steps to minimize injustice: to seek out the deeper causes of criminal behavior and fix them, and to treat those we must unjustly punish (through coercive isolation) with respect, concern, and the least possible discomfort. (shrink)

0. Relativistic Content In standard semantics, propositional content, whether it be the content of utterances or mental states, has a truth-value relative only to a possible world. For example, the content of my utterance of ‘Jim is sitting now’ is true just in case Jim is sitting at the time of utterance in the actual world, and the content of my belief that Alice will give a talk tomorrow is true just in case Alice will (...) give a talk on the day following the occurrence of my belief state in the actual world. Let us call propositional content which has a truth-value relative only to a possible world ‘non-relativistic content’. Non-relativistic content can be treated as either structured or unstructured. On the unstructured-content view, non-relativistic content is a set of possible worlds and bears the truth-value true just in case the actual world is a member of that set. For example, the content of my utterance of ‘Jim is working now’ at time t is the set of worlds in which Jim is working at t, and this content is true just in case the actual world is among those worlds. On the structured-content view, non-relativistic content is a set or conglomeration of properties and/or objects, where properties are features which objects possess regardless of who considers or observes them and regardless of when they are being considered or observed. Such properties are said to be (or represent) functions from possible worlds to extensions. Relative to a possible world they determine a set of objects instantiating the property. For example, relative to the actual world the property of being human determines the set of actual humans. Not all content is non-relativistic. Let us say that propositional content is relativistic just in case it possesses a truth-value only relative to a centered world. A centered world is a possible world in which an individual and a time are marked, where the marked individual.. (shrink)

The question whether perceptual experiences justify perceptual beliefs is ambiguous. One problem is the well familiar skeptical one. How can perceptual experiences justify beliefs if those experiences may systematically deceive us? Our experiences might be just as they are and yet the world might be radically different. But there is also another problem about the justification of perceptual beliefs which arises independently of the above skeptical worry. This other problem has to do with our understanding of the very (...) notion of justification. It seems natural to think that justification can exist only in so far as what is justified is inferentially linked to the justifier. The question, then, is whether perceptual experiences can serve as an inferential basis for perceptual beliefs. The content of experiences does not seem to be the same sort of content that is possessed by beliefs. So the nature of the relation between experiences and beliefs is far from obvious. In this paper I survey various attempts of justifying the view that there is an inferential relation between experiences and beliefs so that the latter can be justified by the former and I argue that none of those attempts is satisfactory. I also suggest that the problem which those attempts address may be illusory. Even though it seems true that experiences and beliefs possess different kinds of contents, there may be no logical gap between those contents that needs to be bridged by some philosophical reflection. (shrink)

Narrative persuasion, i.e. the impact of narratives on beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, and the mechanisms underpinning endorsement of conspiracy theories have both drawn substantial attention from social scientists. Yet, to date these two fields have evolved separately, and to our knowledge no study has empirically examined the impact of conspiracy narratives on real-world conspiracy beliefs. In a first study, we exposed a group of participants (n = 37) to an X-Files episode before asking them to fill in a questionnaire (...) related to their narrative experience and conspiracy beliefs. A control group (n = 41) had to answer the conspiracy beliefs items before watching the episode. Based on past findings of both the aforementioned lines of research, we hypothesized that the experimental group would show greater endorsement of conspiracy beliefs, an effect expected to be mediated by identification to the episodes’ characters. We furthermore hypothesized that identification would be associated with cognitive elaboration of the narrative information. The first two hypotheses were disproved since no narrative persuasion effect was observed. In a second study, we sought to replicate these results in a larger sample (n = 166). No persuasive effect was found in the new data and a bayesian meta-analysis of the two studies strongly supports the absence of a positive effect of exposure to narrative material on endorsement of conspiracy theories. In both studies, a significant relation between conspiracy mentality and enjoyment was observed. In the second study, this relation was fully mediated by two dimensions of perceived realism, i.e., plausibility and narrative consistency. We discuss our results, based on theoretical models of narrative persuasion and compare our studies with previous narrative persuasion studies. Implications of these results for future research are also discussed. (shrink)

The current confrontation between Russia and Ukraine raises essential problems regarding ethics and laws of war. It also presents an opportunity to compose an ethics case study to analyze the idea of a just war. The present-day war of Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine can hardly be analyzed ethically. We lean back to the seminal ideas of just war theorists to argue that war must be waged in a manner that is consistent with moral and ethical principles, such as (...) proportionality, discrimination, and respect for the rights of non-combatants. This article emphasizes the relationship between war and politics, and the belief that military forces should be used rationally and calculatedly. Wars have influenced the development of the modern world history. The fall of the Soviet Union led to 30 years of peace; however, the ideas of its creators returned to contemporary Russian thinking. We attempt to draw conclusions based on the past to enable conflict to end peacefully and a balance to be restored. (shrink)

This article recounts how Neo-Scholastic international lawyers navigated the complex political landscape of the 1920s and 30s, combining universalism, nationalism and religious belief. Participating in the contemporary re-engagement of Catholics with modern politics, they re-imagined the international legal order in Catholic terms. They argued that a universal morality, overruling the extremes of state sovereignty, was the only solid basis for just and stable global legal relations. While the contribution of Catholics to the establishment of the post-war world (...) order and the rise of human rights is widely acknowledged, the interwar genealogy of these developments is not. Reading these thinkers’ universalist legal tenets in conjunction with their political trajectories provides a relevant frame to understand the moral charge characterizing international law in the early years of the Cold War. (shrink)

Critically engaging the work of Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida together with her own observations on contemporary politics, environmental degradation, and the pursuit of a just and sustainable world, Kelly Oliver lays the groundwork for a politics and ethics that embraces otherness without exploiting difference. Rooted firmly in human beings' relationship to the planet and to each other, Oliver shows peace is possible only if we maintain our ties to earth and world. Oliver (...) begins with Immanuel Kant and his vision of politics grounded on earth as a finite surface shared by humans. She then incorporates Hannah Arendt's belief in plural worlds constituted through human relationships; Martin Heidegger's warning that alienation from the Earth endangers not only politics but also the very essence of being human; and Jacques Derrida's meditations on the singular worlds individuals, human and otherwise, create and how they inform the reality we inhabit. Each of these theorists, Oliver argues, resists the easy idealism of world citizenship and globalism, yet they all think about the earth against the globe to advance a grounded ethics. They contribute to a philosophy that avoids globalization's totalizing and homogenizing impulses and instead help build a framework for living within and among the world's rich biodiversity. (shrink)

A philosophical look at the movie Inception and its brilliant metaphysical puzzles Is the top still spinning? Was it all a dream? In the world of Christopher Nolan's four-time Academy Award-winning movie, people can share one another's dreams and alter their beliefs and thoughts. Inception is a metaphysical heist film that raises more questions than it answers: Can we know what is real? Can you be held morally responsible for what you do in dreams? What is the nature of (...) dreams, and what do they tell us about the boundaries of "self" and "other"? From Plato to Aristotle and from Descartes to Hume, Inception and Philosophy draws from important philosophical minds to shed new light on the movie's captivating themes, including the one that everyone talks about: did the top fall down (and does it even matter)? Explores the movie's key questions and themes, including how we can tell if we're dreaming or awake, how to make sense of a paradox, and whether or not inception is possible Gives new insights into the nature of free will, time, dreams, and the unconscious mind Discusses different interpretations of the film, and whether or not philosophy can help shed light on which is the "right one" Deepens your understanding of the movie's multi-layered plot and dream-infiltrating characters, including Dom Cobb, Arthur, Mal, Ariadne, Eames, Saito, and Yusuf An essential companion for every dedicated Inception fan, this book will enrich your experience of the Inception universe and its complex dreamscape. (shrink)

It is a consequence of both Kennedy and McNally’s typology of the scale structures of gradable adjectives and Kennedy’s :1–45, 2007) economy principle that an object is clean just in case its degree of cleanness is maximal. So they jointly predict that the sentence ‘Both towels are clean, but the red one is cleaner than the blue one’ :259–288, 2004) is a contradiction. Surely, one can account for the sentence’s assertability by saying that the first instance of ‘clean’ is (...) used loosely: since ‘clean’ pragmatically conveys the property of being close to maximally clean rather than the property of being maximally clean, the sentence as a whole conveys a consistent proposition. I challenge this semantics–pragmatics package by considering the sentence ‘Mary believes that both towels are clean but that the red one is cleaner than the blue one’. We can certainly use this sentence to attribute a coherent belief to Mary: One of its readings says that she believes that the towels are clean by a contextually salient standard ; the other says that she believes that the towels are clean by her own standard. I argue that Kennedy’s semantics–pragmatics package can’t deliver those readings, and propose that we drop the economy principle and account for those readings semantically by assigning to the belief sentence two distinct truth conditions. I consider two ways to deliver those truth-conditions. The first one posits world-variables in the sentence’s logical form and analyzes those truth-conditions as resulting from two binding possibilities of those variables. The second one proposes that the threshold function introduced by the phonologically null morpheme pos is shiftable in belief contexts. (shrink)

An influential proposal is that knowledge involves safe belief. A belief is safe, in the relevant sense, just in case it is true in nearby metaphysically possible worlds. In this paper, I introduce a distinct but complementary notion of safety, understood in terms of epistemically possible worlds. The main aim, in doing so, is to add to the epistemologist’s tool-kit. To demonstrate the usefulness of the tool, I use it to advance and assess substantive proposals concerning knowledge (...) and justification. (shrink)

The present paper attempts to accomplish the following: (1) to clarify and critically discuss the phenomenology of “belief” as we find it in Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book (1913) (henceforward, Ideas I); (2) to clarify and critically discuss the manner in which the phenomenological method treats beliefs; (3) to clarify and critically discuss the manner of belief justification as described by the phenomenological method; and (4) to argue that, (...) class='Hi'>just as the phenomenological method can be used to validate scientific hypotheses, it can likewise be practised in our everyday worldly comportment to justify our everyday, commonsense beliefs. The paper proceeds from the idea that the phenomenological method is not the static descriptive method some make it out to be, but, rather, a living method at the service of life. The author begins with some preliminary remarks about Husserl’s concerns with unfounded or presupposed beliefs and their necessary “suspension” as dictated by the phenomenological reduction and epoche (“the method”). He then engages the text of Ideas I, especially sections 101 to 106, where Husserl presents a phenomenological conception of the character of belief. The paper concludes by treating the nature of belief justification, or “rational positing”, and puts forward the view that the phenomenological method in everyday practice can aid us in the realization of responsible epistemic conduct and, ultimately, lead toward responsible conduct towards ourselves and, hence, authentic being. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 7, Edition 2 September 2007. (shrink)

The “right intention” requirement, in the form of a requirement that the agent must have a justified true belief that the mind-independent conditions of the justification to use force are fulfilled, is not an additional criterion, but one that constrains the interpretation of the other criteria. Without it, the only possible interpretation of the mind-independent criteria is purely objectivist, that is, purely fact-relative. Pure objectivism condemns self-defense and just war theory to irrelevance since it cannot provide proper action (...) guidance: it is impractically demanding. This means that “revisionist” just war theories which base their doctrine of the moral inequality of combatants on the idea that objective justification defeats liability are irrelevant for the real world, where objective justification is virtually inaccessible. Moreover, only the right intention requirement in the form of a knowledge requirement, as opposed to requiring “good intentions” or “acceptable motivations,” can solve this problem. (shrink)

This dissertation interprets the lack of uniqueness in probability representations of agents' degrees of belief in the decision theory of Richard Jeffrey as a formal statement of an important epistemological problem: the underdetermination of our attributions of belief and desire to agents by the evidence of their observed behaviour. A solution is pursued through investigation of agents' attitudes to information of a conditional nature. ;As a first step, Jeffrey's theory is extended to agents' conditional attitudes of belief (...) and desire by introduction of a definition of conditional desirability. The second step is an analysis of agents' attitudes to conditionals. Following Adams it is argued that the probability of a conditional is the conditional probability of its consequent given the antecedent. Since numerous 'trivialization' results show that no proposition could be such that this were the case, it is proposed that conditionals express a variable proposition as a function of the context in which they are asserted. The consequent technical treatment of conditionals as proposition-valued functions of sets of possible worlds delivers Adams' thesis as a natural consequence without fear of trivialization. ;Conditionals are the underlying objects of the decision theory that is presented in the final chapter. A representation theorem is proven for preferences defined over sets of such conditionals satisfying certain closure conditions, where an agent is understood to prefer one conditional over another just in case she prefers that the former by true rather than the latter. The theorem establishes that a rational preference ranking of conditionals implies the existence of a unique probability function and a desirability function unique up to choice of scale, that agree with the preference ranking, and that these functions satisfy both the axioms of Jeffrey's decision calculus and Adams' thesis. The theorem is interpreted as saying that elicitation of an agent's choices amongst conditional options suffices to determine our attributions of belief and desire to them. (shrink)

In ordinary life we think that we know many things about the world. I know that I am sitting here. I know that it is not raining. I know that Reagan is President--and many more interesting things. We also think that we know things of a more general sort, e.g., that there are tables, chairs, physical objects, other people. Most of the time, we believe that we have good reasons for our beliefs. Descartes, Hume and Russell, however, as a (...) result of philosophical reflection, discover that we cannot know, nor do we have any good reason for our beliefs. ;Thomas Reid and G. E. Moore reject the sceptic's negative conclusions. They think scepticism is absurd, ridiculous and contrary to common sense. It is contrary to what we believe in ordinary life. These commonsense philosophers do not find the sceptical arguments compelling. They argue that scepticism is not as well supported as the ordinary view that we do know. ;A large part of my dissertation is a defense of scepticism against these commonsense philosophers' objections. I argue that Reid and Moore fail to appreciate the power and significance of scepticism. They fail to understand the relation between philosophical scepticism and ordinary life. A proper understanding of Humean scepticism thwarts any attempt to argue from ordinary life against scepticism. ;Still, I argue that Hume was concerned, indeed distressed, by the conflict between scepticism and ordinary life. But he does not think that conflict casts doubt on the truth of scepticism. I argue that Hume feels "philosophical melancholy" over his discoveries about human nature and the human condition. But his distress is totally at the philosophical level. That is because the recognition of the conflict between ordinary life and philosophical reflection is distressing at the philosophical level. I argue that Hume is right to feel the distress that he does, but I also maintain that he should be dissatisfied with his negative appraisal of our epistemic position, just as we are. ;Reid and Moore are right to be dissatisfied with scepticism, even though their attempts to legitimize that dissatisfaction fail. Their failure to appreciate the nature and importance of scepticism, however, is instructive because it forces us to explain why there is thought to be a problem about knowledge. They force us to express what is indeed difficult to express, namely, what it is that we want to understand when we undertake a philosophical investigation of knowledge. . . . UMI. (shrink)

In this paper, I take issue with the familiar view that the problem of the essential indexical is a merely technical problem, which can be solved through a straightforward revision of the familiar model of belief content. (The familiar model just says that the content of belief is a proposition.) I do not object to these technical fixes, but I think they leave some questions unanswered. Specifically, they deny us an attractive account of what it is for (...) different people to completely agree on their conception of what the world is like, according to which complete agreement consists in having beliefs with the same propositional content, but they do not give us anything to replace it with. Here, I consider whether we can say anything general about the relation between my beliefs and your beliefs (including, of course, our indexical beliefs), when you and I completely agree about what the world is like. (shrink)

The article examines the peculiarities of corporate culture formation and development in the modern stage of societal development, which is characterized by high levels of dynamism and conflict. It has been said that culture is something created by Man just as Man is the creation of culture, because culture influences behavior in a person from the beginning of their socialization through the assimilation of norms, values, models of behavior, etc. A person implements all of these in various types of (...) relationships which, in turn, develop structures, organizations, and all individuals, in particular. Corporate culture becomes the basis for the development of organizations at various levels through the application of management theory, especially when considering the current state of international, intercultural relations caused by globalization and migration processes. Corporate culture plays a particularly important role in ensuring the progressive development of science and education, and in preserving the intellectual potential of the state in conditions of social contradiction and military conflict. The development of corporate culture is based on such principles as tolerance, equality and partnership, which are embodied in the relations of any organization, corporation, etc. It has been shown that culture always involves some kind of change, and through such change, corporate culture can act as the criterion that will ensure a group’s integrity under the pressure of external challenges and act as the measure of the internal stability of any team that has determined its goals, tasks and the purpose of its development and the effective implementation of its values and beliefs. (shrink)

“Lash is capable of explaining the mind-bending concepts of Gnosticism and pagan mystery cults with bracing clarity and startling insight.... [His] arguments are often lively and entertaining.”—Los Angeles Times Fully revised and with a new preface by the author, this timely update is perfect for readers of The Immortality Key. Since its initial release to wide acclaim in 2006, Not in His Image has transformed the lives of readers around the world by presenting the living presence of the Wisdom (...) Goddess as never before revealed, illustrating that the truth of an impactful Gnostic message cannot be hidden or destroyed. With clarity, author John Lamb Lash explains how a little-known messianic sect propelled itself into a dominant world power, systematically wiping out the great Gnostic spiritual teachers, the Druid priests, and the shamanistic healers of Europe and North Africa. Early Christians burned libraries and destroyed temples in an attempt to silence the ancient truth-tellers and keep their own secrets. Not in His Image delves deeply into ancient Gnostic writings to reconstruct the story early Christians tried to scrub from the pages of history, exploring the richness of the ancient European Pagan spirituality—the Pagan Mysteries, the Great Goddess, Gnosis, the myths of Sophia and Gaia. In the 15th Anniversary Edition, Lash doubles down on his original argument against redemptive ideology and authoritarian deceit. He shows how the Gnostics clearly foresaw the current program of salvation by syringe, and places the Sophianic vision of life centrally in the battle to expose and oppose the evil agenda of transhumanism, making this well-timed update more relevant than ever. “Sometimes a book changes the world. Not in His Image is such a book. It is clear, stimulating, well-researched, and sure to outrage the experts.... Get it. Improve not just your own life, but civilization’s chances for survival.”—Roger Payne, author of Among Whales. (shrink)

The notion that business organizations are akin to Aristotelian political communities has been a central feature of research into virtue ethics in business. In this article, I begin by outlining this “community thesis” and go on to argue that psychological research into the “just world fallacy” presents it with a significant challenge. The just world fallacy undermines our ability to implement an Aristotelian conception of justice, to each as he or she is due, and imperils the (...) relational equality required for shared participation in communities. In the final section, I offer a description of what Aristotelian community might look like within organizations, and some suggestions about how it may be possible to resist the challenge posed by the just world fallacy. (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one (...) of the themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

Discursive liberal democracy might not be the best of all possible forms of government, yet in Europe it is largely accepted as such. The attractors of liberal democracy (majority rule, political equality, reasonable self-determination and an ideological framework built in a tentative manner) as well as an adequate dose of secularization (according to the doctrine of religious restraint) provide both secularist and educated religious people with the most convenient ideological framework. Unfortunately, many promoters of ideological secularization take too strong a (...) stance against the manifestation of religiosity in the public sphere. They claim that people may discuss, debate or adopt (coercive) laws and regularities only by means of secular public reasons and secular motivation. We argue that these secular restraints on the ideological framework are unfairly biased against religion, counterproductive and unreasonable. The exaggerated secular restrictions create a strict secular public sphere that appears to be a Pickwickian world suitable just for inoffensive, dull and lethargic people. Deliberately separated from the idea of truth, secular public reasons cannot sustain a complex adaptive system like discursive liberal democracy. Liberal democracy needs citizens with a strong sense of truth and with a sufficient will-power to follow both a personal ideal and a collective ideal. Religious beliefs provide people with just such a sense of truth and with the desire to have a certain kind of character. In the secularized public sphere of liberal democracy, people can manifest just educated religious beliefs that correspond to the real world and respect the principle of peaceable conduct. In the final part of the article we support the assertion that believers could and should educate their religious belief before expressing them in the public sphere. Educated religious beliefs have a wide enough propositional content, obey the moral imperative of William Clifford, are purged from all propositional components against which there is strong evidence and are consciously cultivated by the mechanism of suggestion. (shrink)