In an ideal democracy, people from all walks of life would come together to talk meaningfully and respectfully about politics. But we do not live in an ideal democracy. In contemporary democracies, which are marked by deep social divisions, different groups for the most part avoid talking to each other. And when they do talk to each other, their speech often seems to be little more than a vehicle for rage, hatred, and deception. -/- Democratic Speech in Divided Times argues (...) that we should nevertheless not give up on the ideal of democratic public speech. Drawing on the resources of political theory, epistemology, and philosophy of language, this book develops a sustained account of the norms that should govern public discourse in deeply divided circumstances. Should we try to find common ground when we talk to our political opponents, even though they seem unreasonable? Should we refrain from expressing anger, if we want to get things done? How can we use our speech to fight hate speech and disinformation? And is it even possible to speak to 'the other side,' in settings where different groups dislike one another, live apart from one another, and don't know much about one another? By tackling these questions, Lepoutre demonstrates that, when governed by the right set of norms, public speech can be a powerful force for good even amidst profound social divisions. (shrink)

Human activity is permeated by norms of all sorts: moral norms provide the 'code' for what we ought to do, norms of logic regulate how we ought to reason, scientific norms set the standards for what counts as knowledge, legal norms determine what is lawfully permitted and what isn't, aesthetic norms establish canons of beauty and shape artistic trends and practices, and socio-cultural norms provide criteria for what counts as tolerable, just, praiseworthy, or unacceptable in a community or milieu. Given (...) the diversity of norm-governed phenomena prevailing in our everyday experience, it is not surprising that the question of normativity has recently generated important debates in philosophy. However, the more specific question concerning the nature and function of 'norms in perceptual experience' has received comparatively little attention. This volume brings together scholars from philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, and phenomenology to explore this question. (shrink)

Men are living in the midst of a world pervaded by ideas.* Ideas, which provide men with help in their will to act and to think according to rules, which offer them guidance in their lives, are mustered into systems which are called ideologies.Ideologies are issued by the inclusive society, by special, functional groups inside the society and, beginning with a given stage in the development of human society, by ideological movements which profess to provide men not only with guidance (...) for special tasks or functions, but for life as a whole. So, individual men are faced with various sets of ideologies, more or less in agreement between themselves, more 'or less authoritative for them. They must choose between the suggestions, the rules, the orders given to them. As men are always in search of some degree of consistency in their ways of thinking and acting, they fit together the ideas they choose, unconsciously, into systems, into personal, private, individual ideologies. (shrink)

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid legal decision making has become prominent. This paper investigates the use of AI in a critical issue in employment law, the determination of a worker’s status—employee vs. independent contractor—in two common law countries (the U.S. and Canada). This legal question has been a contentious labor issue insofar as independent contractors are not eligible for the same benefits as employees. It has become an important societal issue due to the ubiquity of the gig (...) economy and the recent disruptions in employment arrangements. To address this problem, we collected, annotated, and structured the data for all Canadian and Californian court cases related to this legal question between 2002 and 2021, resulting in 538 Canadian cases and 217 U.S. cases. In contrast to legal literature focusing on complex and correlated characteristics of the employment relationship, our statistical analyses of the data show very strong correlations between the worker’s status and a small subset of quantifiable characteristics of the employment relationship. In fact, despite the variety of situations in the case law, we show that simple, off-the-shelf AI models classify the cases with an out-of-sample accuracy of more than 90%. Interestingly, the analysis of misclassified cases reveals consistent misclassification patterns by most algorithms. Legal analyses of these cases led us to identify how equity is ensured by judges in ambiguous situations. Finally, our findings have practical implications for access to legal advice and justice. We deployed our AI model via the open-access platform, https://MyOpenCourt.org/, to help users answer employment legal questions. This platform has already assisted many Canadian users, and we hope it will help democratize access to legal advice to large crowds. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 106-146, Spring 2024.

Il est une figure souvent croisée dans la littérature et les arts de la représentation : c'est l'Autre. Dès sa naissance, le cinéma a reçu un immense héritage à partir duquel il a généré à son tour des représentations spécifiques de l'Autre. Aussi bien imaginaires et réelles, étranges et banales, proches et lointaines, elles surgissent tantôt du dehors, tantôt du dedans de l'humaine réalité des êtres. Notamment décryptées par la psychanalyse et l'anthropologie, elles s'incarnent dans toutes sortes de films : (...) des fictions allant du réalisme au fantastique aussi bien que des documentaires. Cet ouvrage réunit des analyses rapprochées de certains films exemplaires, de toutes les époques et de tous les continents. (shrink)

Maxime Chastaing s'étonne de l'embarras manifesté par les philosophes pour s'assurer de l'existence des autres : ne va-t-il pas de soi que nous coexistons depuis toujours avec nos semblables et que nous ne doutons pas de leur présence tant que nous ne spéculons pas? Il s'agit dès lors de dénoncer avec énergie le faux problème philosophique de la connaissance d'autrui, tout en s'employant à rendre compte, grâce à la psychologie, des conditions de notre communauté d'existence. Cette perspective proprement psycho-philosophique est (...) déployée dès 1934, dans un travail inédit à ce jour, La compréhension d'autrui. Essai de psychologie descriptive. Proche à cette époque de Gabriel Marcel et d'Emmanuel Mounier, après avoir été l'élève de Jean-Paul Sartre au lycée du Havre, Chastaing est un des premiers en France à discuter les thèses de la phénoménologie allemande, d'Edmund Husserl à Max Scheler. Il anticipe ce faisant sur la phénoménologie d'autrui que Sartre développera, non sans résoudre par avance des difficultés que ce dernier mettra du temps à apercevoir. (shrink)

On trouvera dans cet ouvrage les principaux jalons du parcours philosophique étonnant de Maxime Chastaing (1913-1997) qui culmine dans une psycholinguistique, et même une psychophonétique, une étude des interactions sociales, enfin une théorisation du pacte romanesque liant l'écrivain à ses lecteurs.

« Falsifier la monnaie », réévaluer les valeurs : telle est la mission que l’oracle de Delphes aurait confiée à Diogène. Rapportée aux personnages du théâtre tragique, à Socrate ou encore à Antisthène, la subversion cynique permet de construire un concept de marginalité pour l’Antiquité grecque.

Les zombies sont partout, au cinéma, à la télévision, dans nos rues, chez notre libraire. Grotesques et terrifiants, ils pourraient n’être qu’une tendance kitsch, un divertissement à la mode. Derrière sa démarche traînante et ridicule se cache pourtant une figure symptomatique de notre époque. Peur de l’épidémie ou fantasme de la catastrophe, aliénation moderne ou fascination pour la violence : le zombie et le monde apocalyptique qu’il crée nous parlent d’abord, intimement, de nous-mêmes. Par l’obscène exhibition de la mort, l’ultime (...) tabou de la société occidentale, il brise les limites de la condition humaine : celles de la conscience, de la vie, de la civilisation. Mais surtout, il trahit un fantasme émergeant dans notre culture, celui d’en finir. (shrink)

Dire toute la vérité et rien que la vérité. Vivre dans la transparence et la franchise. Ces préceptes, les chantres du vrai ont voulu les appliquer de force à ce que tout nous désigne comme une forme retorse du mensonge : la littérature. Quelle est la légitimité de cette posture? N'est-on pas amené à la suspecter, à en reconnaître la fragilité et les impasses? Car, examinant l'inlassable guerre qui a opposé les tenants de la sincérité (Rousseau, Leiris, Sartre) à leurs (...) détracteurs (Molière, Laclos, Dostoïevski, Gary, Perec), on aperçoit se profiler une autre définition de ce qu'est la littérature. En toute mauvaise foi : ne serait-ce donc pas ainsi que les oeuvres se présentent à nous et se jouent de nous? C'est-à-dire en s'inscrivant dans une structure qui n'est ni le mensonge ni la vérité, mais leur mélange incertain. Qui affirme en niant et qui dément en proclamant. Sommes-nous pourtant prêts à accepter que tout discours échappe à ce qu'il est tout en continuant de l'être, à admettre que la littérature ne produise qu'une vérité, parfois contradictoire, et non la vérité? Percevoir la manière dont l'oeuvre pose la mauvaise foi, la suscite et la défie, c'est approcher ce qui constitue sa matière même, tant le moteur de ses intrigues que sa métaphysique implicite ou explicite. Mais c'est aussi repenser son rapport au lecteur, au réel et au savoir. Car il y a un paradoxe commun au menteur et au sincère que seule la mauvaise foi permet de décrire en s'arrachant à nos routines intellectuelles. (shrink)

Jeremy Waldron, among others, has forcefully argued that public hate speech assaults the dignity of its targets. Without denying this claim, I contend that it fails to establish that bans, rather than counterspeech, are the appropriate response. By articulating a more refined understanding of counterspeech, I suggest that counterspeech constitutes a better way of blocking hate speech’s dignitarian harm. In turn, I address two objections: according to the first, which draws on contemporary philosophy of language, counterspeech does not block enough (...) hate speech; according to the second, counterspeech blocks too much speech. Although these objections should qualify our optimism regarding counterspeech, I demonstrate that each can be turned, with even greater force, against hate speech bans. (shrink)

The notions of perceptual normativity and optimality have generated much discussion in the last decade or so in the literature on Merleau-Ponty. Husserl’s position on the topic has been far less extensively investigated. Surprisingly, however, Husserl wrote a great deal about the question of perceptual optimality. Not only are there a considerable number of important passages scattered throughout the manuscripts, the archive also contains a few important full texts on precisely this issue. Given the role of fulfillment for Husserl’s concept (...) of intentionality, this should not really come as a surprise, since the teleological nature of the fulfillment structure terminates in an experience of the optimum. Hence, however marginal this topic might seem at first glance, reflecting on it rapidly leads us to the heart of Husserl’s project and sheds further light on his conception of intentional experience. (shrink)

This is a survey paper giving a self-contained account of Shelah's theory of the pcf function pcf={cf:D is an ultrafilter on a}, where a is a set of regular cardinals such that a

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According to an influential objection, which Martha Nussbaum has powerfully restated, expressing anger in democratic public discourse is counterproductive from the standpoint of justice. To resist this challenge, this article articulates a crucial yet underappreciated sense in which angry discourse is epistemically productive. Drawing on recent developments in the philosophy of emotion, which emphasize the distinctive phenomenology of emotion, I argue that conveying anger to one’s listeners is epistemically valuable in two respects: first, it can direct listeners’ attention to elusive (...) morally relevant features of the situation; second, it enables them to register injustices that their existing evaluative categories are not yet suited to capturing. Thus, when employed skillfully, angry speech promotes a greater understanding of existing injustices. This epistemic role is indispensable in highly divided societies, where the injustices endured by some groups are often invisible to, or misunderstood by, other... (shrink)

This is the introduction to the symposium on Maxime Lepoutre, Democratic Speech in Divided Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). The symposium contains articles by Paul Billingham, Rachel Fraser, and Michael Hannon, and a response by the author.

An influential critique of anger holds that anger comes at an important epistemic cost. In particular, feeling angry typically makes risk less visible to us. This is anger’s ‘red mist.’ These epistemic costs, critics suggest, arguably outweigh the epistemic benefits commonly ascribed to anger. This essay argues that the epistemic critique of anger is importantly misleading. This is not because it underestimates anger’s epistemic benefits, but rather because it overlooks the fact that anger’s red mist performs a crucial moral function. (...) By concealing risk, the red mist helps protect the dignity and self-respect of those who live under severe and unchosen risk. This function is vitally important in non-ideal circumstances, where many are unjustly subjected to dignity-impairing risk. And it is irreplaceable, in that it cannot readily be performed by other political emotions, such as hope. Beyond providing a novel defence of anger, this argument has a broader upshot. Anger’s red mist reveals that ignorance is not always problematic in politics. Accordingly, it should not be treated—as has standardly been the case—as an unmitigated political evil. In the first instance, our efforts are better spent ascertaining when ignorance is a problem, and when, instead, it performs a felicitous function. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 40-78, Winter 2020.

While much research has focused on the effects of ethical and unethical leadership, little is known about how followers come to perceive their leaders as ethical or unethical. In this article, we investigate the co-creation of ethical and unethical leadership perceptions. Specifically, we draw from emerging research on moral congruence in organizational behaviour and empirically investigate the role of congruence in leaders’ and followers’ moral foundations in followers’ perceptions of ethical and unethical leadership. By analysing objective congruence scores from 67 (...) leader–follower dyads by means of polynomial regression with surface response analysis, we find partial support for our theoretically derived predictions. Significant effects were revealed for the fairness, loyalty, and authority moral foundations but not for the care and sanctity moral foundations. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of these findings. (shrink)

Ignorant speech, which spreads falsehoods about people and policies, is pervasive in public discourse. A popular response to this problem recommends countering ignorant speech with more speech, rather than legal regulations. However, Mary Kate McGowan has influentially argued that this ‘counterspeech’ response is flawed, as it overlooks the asymmetric pliability of conversational norms: the phenomenon whereby some conversational norms are easier to enact than subsequently to reverse. After demonstrating that this conversational ‘stickiness’ is an even broader concern for counterspeech than (...) McGowan suggests—it applies not just to oppressive or hateful speech, but also to ordinary policy-related misinformation—I argue that a more sophisticated account of counterspeech can nevertheless overcome it. First, the stickiness objection overlooks the distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ counterspeech. Instead of directly negating a distorted proposition, positive counterspeech affirms a correct proposition that is inconsistent with the falsehoods at hand. This, I contend, allows it to counter ignorant speech without triggering the properties that render it sticky. Second, the stickiness objection presupposes an unrefined conception of counterspeech’s temporality. Counterspeech should be understood as a diachronic process, which not only follows, but also pre-empts, ignorant utterances. Drawing on speech-act theories of silencing, I argue that pre-emptive counterspeech can condition the conversational context so as to prevent subsequent ignorant utterances from enacting sticky conversational norms. Thus, this theoretically-refined conception of counterspeech helps appreciate how verbal responses might overcome the stickiness of conversational norms; and, in doing so, it reveals that this stickiness need not provide reasons to prefer legal remedies to counterspeech. (shrink)

Traditional approaches describe ethical decision-making of leaders as driven by conscious deliberation and analysis. Accordingly, existing approaches of ethically-oriented leader development usually focus on the promotion of deliberative ethical decision-making, based on normative knowledge and moral reasoning. Yet, a continually growing body of research indicates that a considerable part of moral functions involved in ethical decision-making is automatic and intuitive. In this article, we discuss the implications of this moral intuition approach for the domain of ethically-oriented leader development. Specifically, we (...) introduce a conceptual model and develop a set of theoretical propositions, suggesting that the moral intuition perspective significantly contributes to effective ethically-oriented leader development. The discussion examines theoretical implications and practical applications of the presented propositions and outlines directions for future research. (shrink)

Public opinion research has shown that voters accept many falsehoods about politics. This observation is widely considered troubling for democracy—and especially participatory ideals of democracy. I argue that this influential narrative is nevertheless flawed, because it misunderstands the nature of political understanding. Drawing on philosophical examinations of scientific modelling, I demonstrate that accepting falsehoods within one’s model of political reality is compatible with—and indeed can positively enhance—one’s understanding of that reality. Thus, the observation that voters accept many political falsehoods does (...) not necessarily establish that they lack political understanding. I then address three worries: that voters cannot generally engage in such political modelling; that political modelling obscures facts that are crucial to political understanding; and that successful political modelling would require knowing that one’s model contains falsehoods. My responses reveal how, going forward, we should measure political ignorance; and they highlight the standing importance of participatory democracy. (shrink)

Jeremy Waldron, among others, has forcefully argued that public hate speech assaults the dignity of its targets. Without denying this claim, I contend that it fails to establish that bans, rather than counterspeech, are the appropriate response. By articulating a more refined understanding of counterspeech, I suggest that counterspeech constitutes a better way of blocking hate speech’s dignitarian harm. In turn, I address two objections: according to the first, which draws on contemporary philosophy of language, counterspeech does not block enough (...) hate speech; according to the second, counterspeech blocks too much speech. Although these objections should qualify our optimism regarding counterspeech, I demonstrate that each can be turned, with even greater force, against hate speech bans. (shrink)

Selected contributions to the symposium on "Mirror neurons and the evolution of brain and language" held on July 5-8, 2000 in Delmenhorst, Germany.

The main theme of Steve Crowell’s excellent Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger is ‘the connection between normativity and meaning’ (p. 1), a central issue in both Husserl’s and...

Faced with hate speech, oppressed groups can use their own speech to respond to their verbal oppressors. This “counterspeech,” however, sometimes itself takes on a hateful form. This paper explores the moral standing of such “hateful counterspeech.” Is there a fundamental moral asymmetry between hateful counterspeech, and the hateful utterances of dominant or oppressive groups? Or are claims that such an asymmetry exists indefensible? I argue for an intermediate position. There _is_ a key moral asymmetry between these two forms of (...) speech. But, this asymmetry notwithstanding, hateful counterspeech is capable of enacting serious harms—and so, contrary to what many legal theorists have argued, it is in principle an appropriate object of legal regulation. I begin by considering the central argument for thinking that hateful counterspeech is not seriously troubling. This argument holds that oppressed groups lack authority—and, by extension, “speaker power.” Yet this argument, I suggest, sits in tension with the fact that low-status members of dominant groups can, through their utterances, seriously harm members of oppressed groups. Philosophers of language have developed sophisticated arguments to explain this last phenomenon: they have argued that speaker power is relativised to particular jurisdictions; that it can be acquired dynamically in local settings; and that it is socially dispersed. I argue that, in light of these arguments, it appears that hateful counterspeech, too, can generate serious harms. Nevertheless, I show that this conclusion is compatible with recognising a crucial moral asymmetry between hateful counterspeech and the hate speech of oppressors. (shrink)

During the Zimbabwean crisis, millions crossed through the apartheid-era border fence, searching for ways to make ends meet. Maxim Bolt explores the lives of Zimbabwean migrant labourers, of settled black farm workers and their dependants, and of white farmers and managers, as they intersect on the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. Focusing on one farm, this book investigates the role of a hub of wage labour in a place of crisis. A close ethnographic study, it addresses the complex, shifting (...) labour and life conditions in northern South Africa's agricultural borderlands. Underlying these challenges are the Zimbabwean political and economic crisis of the 2000s and the intensified pressures on commercial agriculture in South Africa following market liberalization and post-apartheid land reform. But, amidst uncertainty, farmers and farm workers strive for stability. The farms on South Africa's margins are centers of gravity, islands of residential labour in a sea of informal arrangements. (shrink)

Most twentieth‐century European philosophers have attempted to think anew the Kantian question about the necessary conditions of experience. A rapid survey of last century's European philosophy would easily show that in spite of the various criticisms formulated against the very project of transcendental foundationalism, the vast majority of the philosophers in the so‐called Continental tradition have not abandoned the project of formulating transcendental arguments altogether. These transcendental inquiries into the conditions of possibility of all these phenomena are certainly more immediately (...) visible in the early works, especially those on Husserl, but a patient reading would show that they are still very much present in the later writings as well. The overcoming of classical transcendentalism at work in deconstruction is indeed the outcome of an ultra‐transcendental strategy. In Of Grammatology, Derrida exposes this ultra‐transcendental logic for the first time when he famously claims that a “pathway” through the transcendental is necessary. (shrink)

This article offers a critique of the central role afforded to the rights/sentience-based moral argument in the rhetorical strategy of the animal rights movement since the 1970s. Though important for articulating the movement’s philosophy and recruiting new activists, this argument has limited persuasive appeal, as suggested by the common failure of liberation movements to achieve their goals through moral advocacy. A two-prong approach addressing human health and environmental effects of animal agriculture is offered both as a supplemental strategy for reaching (...) audiences unaffected by the moral argument and as a critical means of strengthening that argument. (shrink)

How promising is Bitcoin as a currency? This paper discusses four claims on the advantages of Bitcoin: a more stable currency than state-backed ones; a secure and efficient payment system; a credible alternative to the central management of money; and a better protection of transaction privacy. We discuss these arguments by relating them to their philosophical roots in libertarian and neoliberal theories, and assess whether Bitcoin can effectively meet these expectations. We conclude that despite its advocates’ enthusiasm, there are good (...) reasons to doubt that Bitcoin can fulfill its promises and act as a functioning currency, rather than as a mere speculative asset. (shrink)

In his collection of essays Having the World in View (2009), John McDowell draws a distinction between empirical experience (conceived as the conceptual activity relevant to judgment) and empirical judgment (i.e., the full-fledged assertoric content itself ). McDowell’s latest proposal is that the form of empirical experience is transferable into judgment, but it is not itself a judgment. Taking back the view he advanced in Mind and World, McDowell now believes that perception does not have propositional content as such, but (...) the content of perception can, however, always be actualized in a judgment. There is, in other words, a strict parallelism between the deliverances of sensibility and potential future judgments of experience. The early Husserl disagrees with this and recognizesexplicitly the existence of coherent forms of perceptual engagement with the world that is independent of the mastery of language and the use of concepts.Perception constitutes—together with certain other embodied practices—our primary mode of access to the world, and this occurs before and independently ofour thinking activity. However, the realization of the centrality of time for intentionality will lead Husserl after 1905 to recognize a kind of lawfulness internal tothe sensuous materials themselves, prior to any egoical achievement. The most immediate consequence of this paradigm change is that the very idea of non-conceptual content now seems unwarranted. Indeed, if time is that which keeps the process of sense formation unified even at the lowest levels of constitution, then the world-disclosing activity of the ego cannot be discontinuous with the conceptual realm. Against this background, it will be argued that the dialectic between the conceptual and non-conceptual ultimately makes no sense on a phenomenological basis. Once temporality has entered the scene, the only meaningful opposition that stands is that between the conceptual and pre-conceptual spheres. (shrink)

The paper is organized around two ideas that come out in Steve Crowell’s Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger and that I discuss critically in turn. The first concerns the reach of Crowell’s claim according to which the connection between intentionality, meaning and normativity is necessary in all forms of intentional experience. I make my point by considering the case of imagining experiences, which are—I argue—meaningful, intentional, but not necessarily normative in any relevant sense. The second question is about (...) Crowell’s criticism of the role of bodily self-awareness in Husserl’s phenomenology of perception. While Crowell is right to maintain that the norm of proper functioning relevant to bodily skills can’t be understood as arising from a system of kinaesthetic sensations alone, I argue that bodily self-awareness still has a normative role to play in perception inasmuch as it allows me to cast my own experience in evaluative terms. (shrink)

The problems of diversity and pluralism have always been serious challenges to the stability of European societies. In the course of its history Europe elaborated various important ways of accommodation of differences, including toleration, respect and recognition. This article is devoted to discussion of the relations among them both in analytical and historical perspectives. I argue that toleration has always been based on a certain kind of respect and distinguish three main paradigms of the relations among these concepts. Then I (...) proceed to a discussion of the particular forms these paradigms took in European intellectual history and to an analysis of their applicability to the most important problems of contemporary society. I argue that pluralism and the complexity of contemporary society require pluralism in the modes of justifying toleration. (shrink)