It might at first seem that the senses (the five traditionally recognized conduits of outer sense) would have very little to contribute to an investigation of Kant's aesthetics. Is not Kant's aesthetic theory based on a relation of the higher cognitive faculties? Much however can be revealed by asking to what degree sight is essential to aesthetic judgment (of beauty and the sublime) as Kant describes it in the 'Critique of Judgment.' Here the sublime receives particular attention.

Much work on the sense of agency has focused either on abnormal cases, such as delusions of control, or on simple action tasks in the laboratory. Few studies address the nature of the sense of agency in complex natural settings, or the effect of skill on the sense of agency. Working from 2 case studies of mountain bike riding, we argue that the sense of agency in high-skill individuals incorporates awareness of multiple causal influences on action (...) outcomes. This allows fine-grained differentiation of the contributions of self and external factors to action outcomes. We further argue that the sense of agency incorporates prospective awareness of actions that are possible in a situation and awareness of the limits of control. These forms of sense of agency enable highly flexible, context-sensitive strategic control, and are likely to contribute to high interindividual variability in responses to complex tasks. (shrink)

The now growing literature on the content and sources of the phenomenology of first-person agency highlights the multi-faceted character of the phenomenology of agency and makes it clear that the experience of agency includes many other experiences as components. This paper examines the possible relations between these components of our experience of acting and the processes involved in action specification and action control. After a brief discussion of our awareness of our goals and means of action, it will focus on (...) the sense of agency for a given action, understood as the sense the agent has that he or she is the author of that action. I argue that the sense of agency can be analyzed as a compound of more basic experiences, including the experience of intentional causation, the sense of initiation and the sense of control. I further argue that the sense of control may itself be analysed into a number of more specific, partially dissociable experiences. (shrink)

Making Sense of Evolution explores contemporary evolutionary biology, focusing on the elements of theories—selection, adaptation, and species—that are complex and open to multiple possible interpretations, many of which are incompatible with one another and with other accepted practices in the discipline. Particular experimental methods, for example, may demand one understanding of “selection,” while the application of the same concept to another area of evolutionary biology could necessitate a very different definition.

In the philosophical literature concerning scientific experimentation, the notion of robustness has been solely discussed in relation to experimental results. In this paper, I propose a novel sense of experimental robustness that applies to experimental procedures. I call the foregoing sense of robustness procedure robustness and characterize it as the capacity of an experimental procedure to maintain its intended function invariant during the experimental process despite possible variations in its inputs. I argue that PR is a precondition for (...) what I call result robustness, which refers to the traditional sense of experimental robustness, namely the existence of convergent experimental results obtained through different and independent means of detection. Furthermore, I argue, PR and RR constitute useful experimental strategies in the context of high-energy physics experiments, but these strategies are not without limitations. (shrink)

Sense of Agency (SoA) is the subject of growing attention. It corresponds to the capacity to claim authorship over an action, associate specific consequences with a specific action, and it has been claimed to be a key point in the development of consciousness. It can be measured using the Sense of Agency Scale (SoAS), originally proposed by Tapal et al. (2017), who distinguished it into two-factor: Sense of Positive Agency (SoPA) and Sense of Negative Agency (SoNA). (...) This study reports on the first adaptation of the SoAS into another language, French. For this French version of the Sense of Agency Scale (F-SoAS), we analyzed responses from a sample of 517 native French-speakers. Our results indicate that the scale has good psychometric properties. Factor analysis confirm the same two-factor model as Tapal et al. (2017). However, some items were removed due to insufficient loadings with factors, leading to a short version of the scale (7-item). Furthermore, we observed gender differences that are consistent with findings in the literature. Specifically, women report higher SoNA scores and lower SoPA scores than men. We conclude by discussing possible uses and future directions for the scale. (shrink)

Governments and citizens of nearly every nation have been compelled to respond to COVID-19. Many measures have been adopted, including contact tracing and risk assessment algorithms, whereby citizen whereabouts are monitored to trace contact with other infectious individuals in order to generate a risk status via algorithmic evaluation. Based on 38 in-depth interviews, we investigate how people make sense of Health Code, the Chinese contact tracing and risk assessment algorithmic sociotechnical assemblage. We probe how people accept or resist Health (...) Code by examining their ongoing, dynamic, and relational interactions with it. Participants display a rich variety of attitudes toward privacy and surveillance, ranging from fatalism to the possibility of privacy to trade-offs for surveillance in exchange for public health, which is mediated by the perceived effectiveness of Health Code and changing views on the intentions of institutions who deploy it. We show how perceived competency varies not just on how well the technology works, but on the social and cultural enforcement of various non-technical aspects like quarantine, citizen data inputs, and cell reception. Furthermore, we illustrate how perceptions of Health Code are nested in people’s broader interpretations of disease control at the national and global level, and unexpectedly strengthen the Chinese authority’s legitimacy. None of the Chinese public, Health Code, or people’s perceptions toward Health Code are predetermined, fixed, or categorically consistent, but are co-constitutive and dynamic over time. We conclude with a theorization of a relational perception and methodological reflections to study algorithmic sociotechnical assemblages beyond COVID-19. (shrink)

In this paper phenomenological descriptions of the experiential structures of suicidality and of self-determined behaviour are given; an understanding of the possible scopes and forms of lived self-determination in suicidal mental life is offered. Two possible limits of lived self-determination are described: suicide is always experienced as minimally self-determined, because it is the last active and effective behaviour, even in blackest despair; suicide can never be experienced as fully self-determined, even if valued as the authentic thing to do, because no (...) retrospective re-evaluation from some future vantage is possible. The phenomenological descriptions of the possible scope of lived self-determination in suicidality, presented in this paper, should prove to be extremely helpful in three different fields of interest: (a) ethical debates regarding the pros and cons of autonomous or heteronomous suicide; (b) clinical day-to-day practice with respect to treating suicidal people; (c) people who suffered a suicidal crisis, attempted suicide or lost loved ones through suicides. (155 words). (shrink)

Haptic sensation of a material can be modulated by its visual appearance. A technique that utilizes this visual-haptic interaction is called as pseudo-haptic feedback. Conventional studies have investigated pseudo-haptic feedback in situations, wherein a user manipulated a virtual object using a computer mouse, a force-feedback device, etc. The present study investigated whether and how it was possible to offer pseudo-haptic feedback to a user who manipulated a virtual object using keystrokes. Participants moved a cursor toward a destination by pressing a (...) key. While the cursor was moving, the cursor was temporarily slowed down on a square area of the screen. The participants’ task was to report, on a five-point scale, how much resistance they felt to the cursor’s movement. In addition to the basic speed of the cursor, the ratio of the basic speed to the speed within the square area was varied. In Experiment 1, we found that these two factors interacted significantly with each other, but further analysis showed that the cursor speed within the square area was the most important determinant of perceived resistance. In Experiment 2, consistent with the results of the previous experiment, it was found that the cursor movement outside of the square area was not required to generate the sense of resistance. Counterintuitively, in Experiment 3, the sense of resistance was apparent even without user’s keystrokes. We discuss how the sense of resistance for a cursor moved by keystrokes can be triggered visually, but interpreted by the brain as a haptic impression. (shrink)

Involving as it does impossible worlds and the like, the Routley-Meyer worlds semantics for relevant logic has seemed unmotivated to some. I set a version of relevant semantics in a context to make sense of its different elements. Suppose a view which makes room for structured properties — or related entities which combine in arbitrary ways to form structured ones. Then it may seem natural to say entailment supervenes upon the structures, so that P entails Q just when part (...) of the condition for being p is being q. If P stands in this relation to Q, a result is that there is no possible world where P but not Q, so that P classically entails Q. But the conditions are not equivalent. For all possible worlds, but not all properties, are maximal and consistent. I suggest that relevant semantics is naturally seen as modeling entailment grounded in property structure and makes sense insofar as it reflects this fundamental and intuitive notion. (shrink)

. The phenomenology of certain mystical states is contrasted with the sense of “baseline” reality in an exploration of primary senses of reality. Nine theoretical and eight actual primary senses of reality are described. A neurophysiological model is presented to account for these states, and their possible adaptive significance is considered from an evolutionary perspective. Finally the state of absolute unitary being is contrasted with baseline reality, and their competing claims for primacy are evaluated in an epistemological context.

Contemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limits of violence, culture, and personhood. A (...) Sense of Brutality argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of “violence” as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that “violence” itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize “brutality” as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror—all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be. In narco-culture, the normalization of brutality into everyday life is a condition upon which the absolute erasure or derealization of people is made possible. (shrink)

In this paper I seek to clarify the role of narrative in personal unity. Examining the narrative self-constitution view developed by Marya Schechtman, I use a case of radical personal change to identify a tension in the account. The tension arises because a narrative can be regarded either to capture a continuing agent with a loosely coherent, consistent self-conception – or to unify over change and inconsistency. Two possible ways of responding, by distinguishing senses of identity or distinguishing identity and (...) autonomy, are examined, but I argue that neither precisely maps this tension. I then develop a distinction between two ways in which narrative can unify: through “bottom-up” processes related to the connection between agency and self-conception; and “top-down” processes related to self-interpretative activity. The account provides ways to resolve some criticisms of narrative theories of identity, in particular in better accounting for the role of repudiated characteristics in narrative identity. (shrink)

For the purpose of this discussion, I am taking it for granted that the sense of being stared at is real. The weight of available evidence seems to support its factual existence, as discussed in my earlier article in this issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Some people will dispute this conclusion, and there is as yet no universal consensus. But it is not necessary for everyone to agree that a phenomenon exists before discussing its possible implications. A (...) discussion of the implications of evolution began long before everyone agreed that evolution had occurred, and there are still people who deny its reality. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMetaphysics has long been regarded as providing meaning to the world. Subsequent progressive replacement attempts of this narrative by a scientific approach have generally led to a view of life as being void of meaning. However, this has not affected the quest for meaning or for an understanding of this meaning, despite an increasing societal neglect of the importance of its pursuit. This article aims to contribute to a philosophical understanding of the sense of life in the world, drawing (...) on Jean-Luc Nancy's understanding of sense as developed in his Sense of the World. To talk of “sense” rather than of “meaning” is an unconventional choice in the field, yet both differ from one another in that sense refers to an opening as the very possibility of meaningfulness generally. This means that, to understand meaning, we must understand sense. Key to Nancy's conception of sense is the transitivity of the verb being; being traverses itself from being as non-being “to” being as existence. Nancy is concer... (shrink)

This paper reviews the theoretical underpinnings of phenomenology-related writings which support claims that the self and the social (the ‘I’ and the ‘We’) can plausibly be integrated and nurtured together in education. We begin by analysing contemporary theorising which suggests that reviewing foundational phenomenologists, particularly Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, can lead to greater clarity in understanding and appreciating the intersubjective sense of the self and the social. This perspective is aided by reviewing the reciprocal connections which take place during human (...) action, situational structuring, and reality construction. Building on this review we consider some of the ontological possibilities for a self and social phenomenology to become more central to educational aims. In doing so, we raise rather than unpack in exhaustive detail associated methodological matters in light of their educational implications. If successfully enacted, we perceive considerable benefits for students in being able to directly attend to the properties of their experiences, especially in contexts where new habits are formed and where opportunities arise for self and shared experiences to be reviewed and reflected on by all involved. (shrink)

Top-down causation is often taken to be a metaphysically suspicious type of causation that is found in a few complex systems, such as in human mind-body relations. However, as Ellis and others have shown, top-down causation is ubiquitous in physics as well as in biology. Top-down causation occurs whenever specific dynamic behaviors are realized or selected among a broader set of possible lower-level states. Thus understood, the occurrence of dynamic and structural patterns in physical and biological systems presents a problem (...) for reductionist positions. We illustrate with examples of universality and functional equivalence classes how higher-level behaviors can be multiple realized by distinct lower-level systems or states. Multiple realizability in both contexts entails what Ellis calls “causal slack” between levels, or what others understand as relative explanatory autonomy. To clarify these notions further, we examine procedures for upscaling in multi-scale modeling. We argue that simple averaging strategies for upscaling only work for simplistic homogenous systems, because of the scale-dependency of characteristic behaviors in multi-scale systems. We suggest that this interpretation has implications for what Ellis calls mechanical top-down causation, as it presents a stronger challenge to reductionism than typically assumed. (shrink)

In this paper we examine whether the sense of agency represents an obstacle to the project of naturalizing the mental. On the basis of a thought experiment we suggest that the sense of agency is not an epiphenomenon. We also examine Frith's attempt to explain in functionalist terms the sense of agency through the comparator and metarepresentational mechanisms. Through a variety of arguments we try to show that explanation by recourse to these mechanisms is inadequate. We conclude (...) by suggesting that one possible reason for the failure of the functionalist approaches is that they begin from the assumption that thought is a form a of willed action. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on possible boosting factors for the sense of we-agency in joint actions. My aim is to shed light on a factor that, until now, has received little or no consideration at all, and that I call _vitality attunement_. I argue that vitality attunement stands between two other boosting factors for the sense of we-agency—i.e., rhythmic alignment and emotional attunement. Investigating two examples of joint action, i.e., dancing and joint musical performances, I show that (...) vitality attunement is not reducible to either of the other two boosting factors and that it deserves to be studied on its own as a distinctive boosting factor for the sense of we-agency. In order to argue for my thesis, I first introduce some of the most crucial aspects of the sense of we-agency in joint actions, then I analyze how rhythmic alignment and emotional attunement have been argued to foster such an experience, and finally I introduce vitality attunement, describing how it too can be a boosting factor for the sense of we and of we-agency. (shrink)

The formulation and implementation of policies addressing the need to adapt to climate change can be difficult due to the long-term, uncertain nature of localised climate change impacts and associated vulnerabilities. Difficulties are intensified because policy interventions can involve high costs, foregone opportunity and changes to people's way of life. Factors such as these can spur an uncritical, or reflexive, negativity regarding efforts to address the projected impacts of climate change. Such reflexive negativity is often trivialised in pejorative terms, such (...) as ‘Nimbyism’. However, stakeholder reluctance to accept the need for adaptation planning may be strongly influenced by self-perceptions that are resistant to change. People's sense of self and sense of place may contribute to an ‘imaginative intangibility’ with respect to climate adaptation, blocking thoughtful reflection and deliberation regarding alternative approaches and providing rationales for cheating the system once implemented. If acknowledged and addressed in a sensitive manner, it may be possible to manage these self-perceptions to elevate public discourse about climate change and help create situationally appropriate adaptation policy regimes. (shrink)

Utilitarian and deontological moral theories are often accused of failing to develop a convincing account of an agent's moral psychology, and so failing to provide an adequate theory of moral motivation that sustains their conception of morality as involving generally overriding moral duties. As a result of this apparent conflict between an agent's psychology and the demands of morality, many suggest making dramatic revisions to our conception of morality. I argue here that a more promising response is to examine where (...) it is that morality fits into human psychology, and then build a theory of moral motivation that sustains ordinary conceptions of morality from this foundation. To do this, I start by looking at Hume's account of moral motivation, which is grounded in a rich and full moral psychology. In an attempt to show that his theory provides a promising foundation for a contemporary theory of moral motivation, I explore his account of acting from duty and develop a new interpretation of his theory of moral motivation that fits most consistently with both his criticism of other accounts and his more general claims about the virtue of justice. I argue that Hume offers an account of justice as being always valuable in virtue of being a necessary condition to the enjoyment of one's good character. I go on to suggest that pride in one's character, what we might now call personal integrity, commits each agent to acting with a sense of duty, and enables her to attain a level of social interaction that is necessary for her psychological development, yet not possible without a commitment to justice. After defending this interpretation of Hume, I extend this basic notion of personal integrity and demonstrate how this idea, combined with the workings of empathy and the psychological need for positive social interaction, generates a viable theory of moral motivation that maintains the common conception of morality as involving generally overriding moral duties while avoiding threats of alienation. (shrink)

Our perceptual experiences stretch across time to present us with movement, persistence and change. How is this possible given that perceptual experiences take place in the present that has no duration? In this paper I argue that this problem is one and the same as the problem of accounting for how our experiences occurring at different times can be phenomenally unified over time so that events occurring at different times can be experienced together. Any adequate account of temporal experience must (...) also account for phenomenal unity. I look to Edmund Husserl's writings on time consciousness for such an account. (shrink)

The moral sense is at the heart of Hutcheson's system. Its prominent role in this philosopher's morals and posterior commentary eclipses the rest of the senses, but there is at least one sense that deserves more attention in scholarship: the sense of honour. The reason the sense of honour, and its subordination to the moral sense, is attention-worthy is that it combats Mandeville's idea of honour as artifice. First, I flesh out the tension between pride (...) and the moral sense and a possible tension between the sense of honour and the moral sense. Next, I show how Hutcheson expanded and elaborated on the sense of honour, particularly in his later works ( System and Compendiaria). His strategy consisted in dissolving the tension between the sense of honour and the moral sense. (shrink)

Contemporary experimental research has emphasised the role of centrally generated signals arising from premotor areas in voluntary muscular force perception. It is therefore generally accepted that judgements of force are based on a central sense, known as the sense of effort, rather than on a sense of intra-muscular tension. Interestingly, the concept of effort is also present in the classical philosophy: to the French philosopher Maine de Biran [Maine de Biran . Mémoire sur la décomposition de la (...) pensée , Vrin, Paris ], the sense of effort is the fundamental component of self-experience, the landmark of the exercise of the will. In the present review, after a presentation of the nature and neurophysiological bases of effort sensation, we will examine its possible involvement in the neurocognitive process of agency. We will further focus on delusions of alien control in schizophrenic patients. Experimental data suggest that these patients have an abnormal awareness of effort caused by cerebral anomalies in the frontal and parietal lobes. (shrink)

This article introduces and clarifies a neglected sense of the word ἤ (‘or’) employed by Aristotle and other authors. In this sense, called ‘indifferent’, ἤ signifies ‘one or the other, regardless of which’. It is shown how attention to this use makes it possible to explain the source of the ambiguity of certain sentences, most obviously, though not exclusively, sentences that make a necessity claim about an embedded disjunction, for example ‘It is necessary that A or B’. Why (...) this sense cannot be explained, as some scholars have suggested, by the distinction between exclusive and inclusive ἤ is also discussed. Finally, it is shown how awareness of this sense might rescue Aristotle from a gross inconsistency. (shrink)

In this work, we focus on a very specific case study: assuming that quantum theories deal with “particles” of some kind, what kind of entity can such particles be? One possible answer, the one we shall examine here, is that they are not the usual kind of object found in daily life: individuals. Rather, we follow a suggestion by Erwin Schrödinger, according to which quantum mechanics poses a revolutionary kind of entity: non-individuals. While physics, as a scientific field, is not (...) concerned with whether entities posited by a specific physical theory are individuals or not, answering this question is part of the quest for a better understanding of physical reality. Here lies, in large measure, the relevance of ontology. (shrink)

Günther’s book demonstrates that most objections to moral and legal principles are directed not against the validity of principles but against the manner of their application. If one distinguishes between the justification of a principle and its appropriate application, then the claim that the application of the principle in each individual case follows automatically from its universal justification proves to be a misunderstanding. Günther develops this distinction with the help of Habermas’s discourse theory of morality. He then employs it to (...) extend Kohlberg’s theory of moral development and to defend this against Gilligan’s critique. In the third and fourth parts of the book, Günther shows—in debate with Hare, Dworkin, and others—how argumentation on the appropriate application of norms and principles in morality and law is possible. (shrink)

I present a sense of the term “ideal theory” based on Joseph Raz’s response to the situation of a lifeguard faced with three drowning on one side and two on the other and unable to save all. From what is of value, such a theory builds up a conception of an ideal political state or an aspect of it which we have reason to realize, but ignoring whether it is possible for us to realize this.

What is the meaning of critique for critical phenomenology? Building on Gayle Salamon’s engagement with this question in the inaugural issue of Puncta: A Journal for Critical Phenomenology (2018), I will propose a six-fold account of critique as: 1) the art of asking questions, moved by crisis; 2) a transcendental inquiry into the conditions of possibility for meaningful experience; 3) a quasi-transcendental, historically-grounded study of particular lifeworlds; 4) a (situated and interested) analysis of power; 5) the problematization of basic (...) concepts and methods; and 6) a praxis of freedom that seeks not only to interpret the meaning of lived experience, but also to change the conditions under which horizons of possibility for meaning, action, and relationship are wrongfully limited or foreclosed. While the first two dimensions of critique are alive and well in classical phenomenology, the others help to articulate what is distinctive about critical phenomenology. (shrink)

Is there a crisis of sense in the world? Does it even make any sense to talk of either “sense” or a “world” that does or does not have any sense? According to Jean-Luc Nancy in The Sense of the World, it is no longer possible to speak of a “crisis of sense.” Such a way of formulating the problem of the sense of the world belongs to the past. “Today, we are beyond (...) this: all sense has been abandoned”. A crisis of sense implies a loss of sense in the world that can be regained or replaced, whereas an abandonment of sense rejects this entire setup. In this brilliant and exciting work, Nancy endeavors to elaborate this abandonment, which is not only an abandonment of sense, but also and at the same time an exposure to sense. In over thirty short but extremely insightful sections, Nancy articulates the double meaning of this abandonment through reflections on a number of thinkers and topics. He not only gathers up and focuses the strands of the respective problematics he is engaging, but he also inaugurates new, fruitful strands along which to pursue the questions and problems of sense facing us in our concrete existence. (shrink)

The experience of one’s body as one’s own is normally referred to as one’s “bodily sense of ownership” (BSO). Despite its centrality and importance in our lives, BSO is highly elusive and complex. Different psychopathologies demonstrate that a BSO is unnecessary and that it is possible to develop a limited BSO that extends beyond the borders of one’s biological body. Therefore, it is worth asking: what grounds one’s BSO? The purpose of this paper is to sketch a preliminary answer (...) to the ‘grounding question.’ Thus, I begin by briefly presenting some contemporary competing hypotheses concerning the ‘grounding question’ and explain why they seem unsatisfying. Second, I discuss the “dual-aspect” of bodily awareness, which is manifest in every normal tactile experience and consists in a subject-object structure of awareness. I then argue that the “dual-aspect” of bodily awareness has the potential of explaining BSO and can, therefore, be considered its grounds. Taking the “dual-aspect” of bodily awareness as the grounds of BSO manages to escape difficulties faced by contemporary hypotheses concerning BSO, fulfills certain necessary demands upon any account of BSO, and explains relevant empirical findings and psychopathologies. Consequently, I argue that it is a hypothesis worth pursuing. (shrink)

The primary aim of this interpretive essay is to reconstruct some of the most important features of Rawls’s theory of justice, and to offer a hypothesis about how its assumptions and arguments are tied together in a highly structured construction. An almost philological approach is adopted to highlight Rawlsian ideas. First, I consider in what sense Rawls is an individualist and in what sense he is not. Fromthis I conclude that he ought not be charged of psychological egoism (...) or atomism. Then I consider the role of rational choice, the contract and the relation of the latter to the criterion of reflective equilibrium. Here, pride of place is given to the reflexive method, while the role of contract and rational choice, though not denied, is downgraded. Finally, I enquire whether Rawls can be considered a universalist, and suggest that this category, owing to the theory’s practical aim and pragmatic method, is of little use. If successful, my reconstruction should offer a better insight into the theory and dispel some possible misunderstandings. But my presentation should not be read as either an assessment or a defense. (shrink)

The practice of democracy without insisting on its ethical values is bound to fail in any part of the world. This is what is currently going on in Nigeria. Are the principles of democracy congenial to these values? If they are, why do Nigerian politicians who are operating democratic style of governance not reflect these democratic values in their actions and words? This research study sets out to examine the possibility of making sense of the existing ethical connotation (...) inherent in the practice of democracy to its practitioners in Nigeria, Africa and the world at large. Does democracy as it is practiced in Nigeria induce or otherwise jettison ethical practices? The study adopts the socio-ethical method to critically examine the mutual interactive effects of the relationship between ethics and democracy. The study discovers that due to the high level of poverty in Nigeria and Africa, political leaders prefer to think, act, and work in order to satisfy their personal interest to the detriment of the interest of the public. The study concludes that at the moment, there is no mutual relationship between ethics and democracy in Nigeria. The achievement of this link is the beginning of development in Africa. (shrink)

i>: We should not overintellectualize the mind. Nonhuman animals can occupy islands of practical rationality: they can have specific, context-bound reasons for action even though they lack full conceptual abilities. Holism and the possibility of mistake are required for such reasons to be the agent’s reasons, but these requirements can be met in the absence of inferential promiscuity. Empirical work with animals is used to illustrate the possibility that reasons for action could be bound to symbolic or social (...) contexts, and connections are made to simulationist accounts of cognitive skills. (shrink)

At the time of writing, euthanasia for psychiatric conditions is legal in Belgium and the Netherlands, in cases that are judged to involve unbearable and untreatable suffering. There is a difference between ‘euthanasia’ and ‘assisted suicide’ or ‘assisted dying’. Although I will refer for the most part to ‘psychiatric euthanasia,’ my points apply equally to assisted dying. Even where these practices are legal, they are highly controversial. One case, in particular, received considerable media attention. In the Netherlands, on January 26, (...) 2018, a 29-year-old woman called Aurelia Brouwers ended her life... (shrink)

It is shown how the modal actualist might make sense of quantification over possible worlds and the tense-logical presentist might make sense of quantification over instants.

Ao dai is a typical long dress of Viet Nam used to be worn by both men and women of the Viet and other ethnic peoples. In her shaping and development history, Viet Nam became a place that converged various cultural flows such as the Vietnamese indigenous culture and that of the Chinese, Champa and Indian etc. To the end of the 19th century, especially the 20th, Viet Nam continued to be influenced by the French culture and the American ways (...) of living. The acceptance of cultures from various nationalities and communities from the North to South, East to West made it possible for the Vietnamese fashion designers to harmonize all into an Ao dai for the Vietnamese women. This article will synthesize and analyze three renovation movements of Ao dai in the 20th century. It also discusses about these processes and introduces typical innovators whose contribution has created the Ao dai as it is today, a traditional dress that represents history of the Vietnamese culture, aesthetic sense, art and vitality. (shrink)

In this paper, I am going to be concerned with the capacity of human beings to act jointly. In particular, I will focus on the phenomenal aspect of collective action. I shall suggest that the experience of being jointly engaged with another is complex: it comprises both a practical grasp of oneself and of the other person as single agents participating in the joint pursuit, and an experience of collective immersion in the activity, which includes a sense of joint (...) control. This suggestion gives rise to a number of puzzles: firstly, what is the relation between jointly engaged agents' awareness of self and other and their sense of a joint engagement? Secondly, how are we to substantiate the idea of a sense of joint control if it is also obviously true that I don't, however close our psychological and bodily attunements, have control over your doings? I shall argue that a satisfactory solution to these puzzles is possible only if we take seriously the notion of a perceptually constituted “intersubjective perspective” that is shared by the participants in joint activities and gives rise to an attitude of mutual trust. (shrink)

In the third and fourth parts of the book, Günther shows--in debate with Hare, Dworkin, and others--how argumentation on the appropriate application of norms and principles in morality and law is possible.

Olfactoric imagery is abundantly employed in the Bramhall-Hobbes controversy. I survey some examples and then turn to the possible significance of this. I argue that by forcing Hobbes into the figurative exchange Bramhall scores points in terms of moving the controversy into ground that is not covered by the limited view of rationality that Hobbes is committed to according to his rhetoric (at least as Bramhall perceives it). Bramhall clearly wants to move from cool argument to a more affluent rhetorical (...) appeal. I argue that choosing such a richer epistemology coheres with Bramhall. (shrink)

Libertarians about free will sometimes argue for their position on the grounds that our phenomenology of action is such that determinism would need to be false for it to be veridical. Many, however, have thought that it would be impossible for us to have an experience that is in contradiction with determinism, since this would require us to have perceptual experience of metaphysical facts. In this paper I show how the libertarian claim is possible. In particular, if experience depicts the (...) world such that there is more than one physically possible future, then determinism would need to be false for that experience to be veridical. I show that we have experiences, or perceptual episodes, of this kind on the basis of recent work in the study of perception. Theorists in this area have argued that we have vision-for-action, and that what we visually perceive are not just objects but also possibilities for action. If we experience that it is possible that we ϕ, then we also experience that it is possible that we not ϕ. Furthermore, we probably experience more than one possibility for action at any one moment. I argue that these are physical possibilities, and therefore that we experience the world such that there is more than one physically possible future. So the libertarian claim about the semantics of agential phenomenology is highly plausible, even if this does not entail libertarianism. (shrink)

This book brings together a group of Judith Butler's philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and Fanon. Drawing on her early work on Hegelian desire and her subsequent reflections on the psychic life of power and the possibility of self-narration, this book considers how passions such as desire, rage, love, and grief are bound up (...) with becoming a subject within specific historical fields of power. Butler shows in different philosophical contexts how the self that seeks to make itself finds itself already affected and formed against its will by social and discursive powers. And yet, agency and action are not necessarily nullified by this primary impingement. Primary sense impressions register this dual situation of being acted on and acting, countering the idea that acting requires one to overcome the situation of being affected by others and the linguistic and social world. This dual structure of sense sheds light on the desire to live, the practice and peril of grieving, embodied resistance, love, and modes of enthrallment and dispossession. Working with theories of embodiment, desire, and relationality in conversation with philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Spinoza, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Fanon, Butler reanimates and revises her basic propositions concerning the constitution and deconstitution of the subject within fields of power, taking up key issues of gender, sexuality, and race in several analyses. Taken together, these essays track the development of Butler's embodied account of ethical relations. (shrink)

Institutions represent a solid basis to organize and stabilize human life in diferent social contexts. They are external events in the world, but they also have a strong anchorage in the mind and in last years many scholars tried to explore their cognitive ground. Starting from the original attempt of Douglass C. North, who at the end of his career tried to establish a program called “Cognitive Institutionalism”, we discuss the merits and the limits of this approach. First, we show (...) that his statements are cognitively onerous as they imply the notions of mental models and beliefs. Instead, we argue that shared institutions do not require such a convergence and that coordination takes place in the form of social practices and habits. Second, we clarify some aspects of North’s cognitive theory avoiding the ontological reading, i.e. explaining in what sense institutions might depend on the human mind and how people are joined into a practice made possible via institutions. (shrink)

The concept of recognition has been in the center of intensive interest and debate for some time in social and political philosophy, as well as in Hegel-scholarship. The first part of the article clarifies conceptually what recognition in the relevant sense arguably is. The second part explores one possible route for arguing that the 'recognitive attitudes' of respect and love have a necessary role in the coming about of the psychological capacities distinctive of persons. More exactly, it explores the (...) possibility that they are necessary in the kind of intersubjective relationship in which normal human infants engage in the pre-linguistic communicative practice of pointing things to others, as described by Michael Tomasello. If an incapacity to participate in the already Gricean communicative practices of pointing makes it also impossible for the infant to learn symbolic communication, and if without the immediately intrinsically motivating other-regarding attitudes of recognition communicative pointing does not get off the ground, then the capacity for recognition may be a decisive difference between humans and their closest non-human relatives. That is, it may be why only human infants, but no other animals, are capable of embarking on a developmental journey that normally leads to full-fledged psychological personhood. If this is so, then the concept of recognition, today mostly discussed in social and political philosophy and Hegel-studies, could turn out to be a very useful tool in cognitive scientific work interested in specifically human forms of social intentionality, cognition, volition and so forth. (shrink)

As emphasized by Larry Laudan in developing the notion of non-refuting anomalies, traditional analyses of empirical adequacy have not paid enough attention to the fact that the latter does not only depend on a theory’s empirical consequences being true but also on them corresponding to the most salient phenomena in its domain of application. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the notion of non-refuting anomaly. To this end, I critically examine Laudan’s account and provide a criterion to determine (...) when a non-refuting anomaly can be ascribed to the applicative domain of a theory. Unless this latter issue is clarified, no proper sense can be made of non-refuting anomalies, and no argument could be opposed to those cases where an arbitrary restriction in a theory’s domain of application dramatically reduces the possibilities for its empirical scrutiny. In arguing for the importance of this notion, I show how several semanticist resources can help to reveal its crucial implications, not only for theory evaluation, but also for understanding the nature of a theory’s applicative domain. (shrink)

In this book, Neven Sesardic defends the view that it is both possible and useful to measure the separate contributions of heredity and environment to the explanation of human psychological differences. He critically examines the view - very widely accepted by scientists, social scientists and philosophers of science - that heritability estimates have no causal implications and are devoid of any interest. In a series of clearly written chapters he introduces the reader to the problems and subjects the arguments to (...) close philosophical scrutiny. His conclusion is that anti-heritability arguments are based on conceptual confusions and misunderstandings of behavioural genetics. His book is a fresh and compelling intervention in a very contentious debate. (shrink)

The thesis concerns the sense of self in Epictetus, with special reference to two key terms in his philosophy: prohairesis and prosopon. ;The first chapter explores the range of meaning behind the word prohairesis as Epictetus employs it. I begin by reviewing the background of the word, particularly in Aristotle. A discussion of the problem of free will and determinism in Stoic ethics follows, with reference to prohairesis in Epictetus. The implications of equating prohairesis with "the will" are then (...) explored, followed by a discussion of its significance as the complex of reason and desire, and as "intention." The first chapter concludes with a brief section on aidos in Epictetus, as an intimation of the notion of "conscience." ;Chapter Two extends the enquiry with particular attention to the word prosopon and Epictetus' view of roles as determinants of the self. The chapter opens with a review of the tradition of self-knowledge as a topos in Greek philosophy, and its importance for Epictetus. I then propose a taxonomy of the self as he understands it, organized under the categories of the "I" , the "me" and the "mine" . Two models of man, borrowed from Martin Hollis, are put forward as possible prototypes for Epictetus' perspective on "the person." Then the larger question of the Stoics' attitude toward society and social roles is addressed. The consequences of distinguishing between the first- and the third-person perspectives on "the person" are discussed. The chapter concludes with a section on the place of the body in Epictetus' thought, in connection with the dualism some scholars have ascribed to him. (shrink)