Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley provide a new account of plural logic. They argue that there is such a thing as genuinely plural denotation in logic, and expound a framework of ideas that includes the distinction between distributive and collective predicates, the theory of plural descriptions, multivalued functions, and lists.

According to the subjective view of lying, speakers can lie by asserting a true proposition, as long as they believe this proposition to be false. This view contrasts with the objective view, according to which lying requires the actual falsity of the proposition asserted. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to pairs of assertions that differ only in intuitively redundant content and to show that such pairs of assertions are a reason to favour the subjective view of (...) lying over the objective one. (shrink)

Edward Wilson Averill By the phrase 'anthropocentric account of color' I mean an account of color that makes an assumption of the following form: two ...

This article explores Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of gender as a category differentially applied across the global color line and María Lugones’ account of the coloniality of gender. While Wynter’s and Lugones’s work offer consequential insights for queer, trans, and intersex studies and activism, they have deliberately engaged these particular discourses and histories of struggle in limited ways. Wynter analyzes the contradictions of Western feminists’ organizing against female genital cutting in Africa, but she does not link her conclusions to their ramifications (...) for activism against genital cutting on children deemed intersex. Lugones uses the existence of intersex people as a turning point in her critique of Aníbal Quijano when developing her concept of the coloniality of gender, but she does not go further to connect global intersex activism and decolonial feminist struggles. This article explores the work of Wynter and Lugones for their compatibility with trans and intersex studies and activism, and the places where their work can be furthered through insights from trans and intersex studies. It concludes that to move beyond the coloniality of gender requires trans and intersex liberation and that trans and intersex liberation must be understood in a broader decolonial feminist framework. (shrink)

Classic texts that define the disjunctivist theory of perception.

Twenty-five years ago some young artists initiated V2, a contemporary interdisciplinary arts centre focusing on art and technology and its social, cultural relations. V2 focuses on the interference between media itself, and the social and cultural impact of (media) technology. In its projects V2 explores the relationship between the arts, science and technology by bringing together artists from different art disciplines, scientists and people from different practices thus initiating interdisciplinary working relations among them, this within concrete art projects. Research is (...) an important aspect of all activities within V2; it concerns presentation, hardware and software development, publications and artist in residencies and the education activities. V2 looks for the encounter between practice and theory within these projects. V2 operates within diverse (inter)national and local collaborations - some structural, some on a project basis. (shrink)

It's often said that it is impossible to respond to non-evidential considerations in belief-formation, at least not directly and consciously. Many philosophers think that this provides grounds for accepting a normative thesis: typically, some kind of evidentialism about reasons for belief, or what one ought to believe. Some also think it supports thinking that evidentialist norms are constitutive of belief. There are a variety of ways in which one might try to support such theses by appeal to the impossibility-claim. In (...) this paper, I put pressure on these various attempts by raising a simple yet overlooked problem for them. In brief, the problem is that it isn't true that one cannot (directly and consciously) respond, in belief-formation to considerations that don't actually constitute (good) evidence for the proposition under consideration; what is true, at most, is that one cannot (directly and consciously) respond, in belief-formation to considerations that one oneself takes to be evidentially irrelevant to that proposition. While this point is obvious once stated, its significance hasn't been appreciated, or so I'll argue. Once we take full account of it, the standard arguments from the impossibility-claim to evidentialism don't go through. (shrink)

This book explores how our minds represent things in the world, asking whether these representations necessarily have the structure of propositions about the world. The hope is that this will lead towards a more complete understanding of the puzzle of intentionality -- how it is that our minds make contact with the world.

In order for the so-called strengthened impairment argument to succeed, it must posit some reason R that causing fetal alcohol syndrome is immoral, one that also holds in cases of abortion. In formulating SIA, Blackshaw and Hendricks borrow from Don Marquis to claim that the reason R that causing FAS is immoral lies in the fact that it deprives an organism of a future like ours. I argue here that SIA fails to show that it is immoral to cause FAS (...) and abort fetuses that will not be born because it deprives them of an FLO. This is because fetuses that will not be born have no chance of having an FLO in the first place, so causing FAS for and aborting them cannot deprive them of one. I then consider three responses to my argument. I conclude that each fails. SIA does not accomplish its task of showing why it is immoral to impair fetuses that will not be born. Perhaps it can accomplish the task of showing why it is immoral to impair fetuses that will be born, but not without sacrificing at least some of its alleged significance. (shrink)

If a potential person would have a good life if he were to come into existence, can we coherently regard his coming into existence as better for him than his never coming into existence? And can we regard the situation in which he never comes into existence as worse for him? In this paper, we argue that both questions should be answered affirmatively. We also explain where prominent arguments to differing conclusions go wrong. Finally, we explore the relevance of our (...) answers to issues in population ethics. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that requirements of rationality are “wide-scope”. That is to say: they are requirements to satisfy some material conditional, such that one counts as satisfying the requirement iff one either makes the conditional’s antecedent false or makes its consequent true. These contrast with narrow-scope requirements, where the requirement takes scope only over the consequent of the conditional. Many of the philosophers who have preferred wide-scope requirements to narrow-scope requirements have also endorsed a corresponding semantic claim, namely that ordinary (...) talk about rationality, despite appearances to the contrary, expresses wide-scope claims. In doing so, they seek to avoid attributing massive error to ordinary speakers. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the wide-scope semantics inadequately captures the meaning of ordinary talk about rationality. It seems, then, that we are left with a dilemma: either give up the view that requirements of rationality are wide-scope, or accept an implausible semantics for ordinary talk about rationality, or attribute massive error to speakers. In this paper, I argue that this dilemma is only apparent, since we can appeal to a standard kind of contextualist semantics for modals to explain why narrow-scope talk comes out true in virtue of the wide-scope requirements. My view, then, combines wide-scoping about the explanatorily fundamental requirements of rationality with a contextualist variant of a narrow-scope semantics. I argue that this view gives us the best of both worlds, as well as solving related puzzles and challenges for the extant views in the literature. (shrink)

Saunders & van Brakel argue, inter alia, that there is for the claim that there are four unique hues (red, green, blue, and yellow), and that there are two corresponding opponent processes. We argue that this is quite mistaken.

Palmer's subjectivity barrier seems to be erected on a popular but highly suspect conception of visual experience, and his color room argument is invalid.

Can we trust our intuitive judgments of right and wrong? Are moral judgements objective? What reason do we have to do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong? In Conversations on Ethics, Alex Voorhoeve elicits answers to these questions from eleven outstanding philosophers and social scientists: -/- Ken Binmore; Philippa Foot; Harry Frankfurt; Allan Gibbard; Daniel Kahneman; Frances Kamm; Alasdair MacIntyre; T. M. Scanlon; Peter Singer; David Velleman; Bernard Williams. -/- The exchanges are direct, open, and sharp, (...) and give a clear account of these thinkers' core ideas about ethics. They also provide unique insights into their intellectual development - how they became interested in ethics, and how they conceived the ideas for which they became famous. Conversations on Ethics will engage anyone interested in moral philosophy. (shrink)

Against the two dominant ethical paradigms of continental philosophy–Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the other and Michel Foucault’s ethics of self-cultivation—The Self-Emptying Subject theorizes an ethics of self-emptying, or kenosis, one that reveals the immanence of an impersonal and dispossessed life without a why. Rather than align immanence with the enclosures of the subject, Dubilet engages the history of Christian mystical theology, modern philosophy, and contemporary theories of the subject to rethink immanence as what precedes and exceeds the very difference between (...) the (human) self and the (divine) other, between the subject and transcendence. By arguing that transcendence operates on life in secular as well as religious domains, the book challenges a dominant distribution of concepts within contemporary theoretical discourse, which associates transcendence exclusively with religion and theology and immanence exclusively with modern secularity and philosophy. -/- The Self-Emptying Subject argues that it is important to resist framing the relationship between medieval theology and modern philosophy as a transition from the affirmation of divine transcendence to the establishment of autonomous subjects. Through an engagement with Meister Eckhart, G. W. F. Hegel, and Georges Bataille, it uncovers a medieval theological discourse that rejects the primacy of pious subjects and the transcendence of God (Eckhart); retrieves a modern philosophical discourse that critiques the creation of self-standing subjects through a speculative rewriting of the concepts of Christian theology (Hegel); and explores a discursive site that demonstrates the subjecting effects of transcendence across theological and philosophical operations and archives (Bataille). Taken together, these interpretations suggest that if we suspend the antagonistic relationship between theological and philosophical discourses and decenter our periodizing assumptions and practices, we might encounter a yet unmapped theoretical fecundity of self-emptying that frees life from transcendent powers that incessantly subject it to their own ends. (shrink)

Blackshaw and Hendricks recently developed a strengthened version of the impairment argument (SIA) that imports Marquis’ account of the wrongness of abortion. I then argued that if SIA imports Marquis’ account, then it restates Marquis’ position and thus is not very significant. In turn, Blackshaw and Hendricks explained why they take SIA to be importantly different from Marquis’ account. I have two aims in this response. First, I reconstruct Blackshaw and Hendricks’ arguments for the claim that SIA is importantly different (...) from Marquis’ account. Second, I argue that SIA is not importantly different from Marquis’ account in the respect that Blackshaw and Hendricks take it to be. (shrink)

Subtlety is a concept as deeply intertwined with aesthetic judgements as virtually any other. But it is not clear what makes subtlety a good property of an artwork, or indeed if it is one. In this paper, I explore this under-discussed issue. First, I spend some time setting out hallmarks of subtlety and discussing different ways in which subtlety might be valuable. I then go on to defend a particular view about why subtlety is aesthetically valuable, by thinking through why (...) heavy-handedness is aesthetically bad. In essence, subtlety is valuable because it promotes active engagement with the artwork, and heavy-handedness is bad because it forces us into too passive a role. I connect this to the role of agency and autonomy in artistic experience. Finally, I discuss some related aesthetic concepts, and expand the view of subtlety to cover borderline art forms, nature, and people themselves. (shrink)

Scholars have paid little attention to the classifications among goods that Epicureans posit. This paper remedies that deficiency. I argue for three claims. First, if we take instrumental goods to be those that are a means or causally lead to the intrinsic good and we take constitutive goods to be those that are part of or amount to the intrinsic good, then the Epicureans probably took reverence for a wise man and wisdom to be instrumental goods but self-sufficiency and phronesis (...) to be constitutive goods. Second, Epicurean personal goods are those that produce eudaimonia but are firmly up to us to achieve rather than owing to chance. Third, Epicurean immortal goods are those that bring about divinely resilient tranquility for those who cultivate them. I then show how positing these classifications enables the Epicureans to claim that godlike happiness is achievable through our own efforts no matter the external circumstances. (shrink)

A Correction to this paper has been published: 10.1007/13164.1878-5166.

Esta obra apresenta uma reflexão sobre a identidade dos professores de língua portuguesa construída nos Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais e nas Orientações Curriculares Nacionais para o ensino de Língua Portuguesa. Este estudo foi motivado, porque em tais documentos curriculares há uma imposição de uma nova postura teórico-prática que acaba forjando uma nova identidade a tais profissionais. O autor utilizou a abordagem discursivo-desconstrutiva apresentada por Coracini em reflexões que tratam da mesma temática. A obra gira em torno da questão kantiana “quem somos (...) nós?”, tendo como preocupação principal a identidade do professor de Língua Portuguesa construída sob força de lei, num processo que envolve uma certa violência simbólica, em termos da teoria de Bourdieu e Passeron. (shrink)

G&S describe the radical neuron doctrine in a number of slightly different ways, and we think this hides an important distinction. On the one hand, the radical neuron doctrine is supposed to have the consequence "that a successful theory of the mind will make no reference to anything like the concepts of linguistics or the psychological sciences as we currently understand them", and so Chomskyan linguistics "is doomed from the beginning" (sect. 2.2.2, paras. 2,3).[1] (Note that `a successful theory' must (...) be read as `any successful theory', else the inference will fail.) On the other hand, the radical neuron doctrine is said to be the claim "that emergent psychological properties can be explained by low-level neurobiological properties" (sect. 2.3, para. 3). It is clear from the context that this can be more faithfully rendered as: psychological phenomena can be explained in (solely) neurobiological terms. But this formulation of the doctrine does not have the consequence just mentioned. (shrink)

Two critical reviews of Discipline and Punish inspired an exchange between Foucault and some prominent historians in 1978. In the texts from this exchange, Foucault addresses their criticism that, by focusing on unrealized plans and programs, such as Bentham’s Panopticon, his book lacks a sense of historical reality. Foucault replies, first, that the true aim of his book is to explore the emergence of a new type of penal rationality, not to insist that the Panopticon itself has been realized. Second, (...) he holds that types of rationality can produce distinctive sorts of effects, regardless of whether the plans and programs to which they are attached are ever fully achieved. This paper seeks to clarify Foucault’s underlying account in these responses of rationality and its efficacy. It also takes up and develops Foucault’s suggestive distinction between two different types of effects: “effects in the real” and “reality effects.”. (shrink)

The paper discusses Seneca’s phrase ‘human rights’ (ius humanum) in On Benefits 3 and relates the passage to recent debates about human rights in Stoicism and ancient philosophy. I argue that the Latin phrase refers either to rights or to a law conferring rights. The difference between the passage and a common expectation for human rights lies in the kind of relation between right and duty. In Seneca’s passage the right does not in itself have a correlative duty on the (...) part of other people, and yet it does, if exercised through benefactions, create a duty in others. By contrast, the relation between right and duty is usually expected to be unconditional. (shrink)

RESUMO Neste ensaio, discutiremos o modo como a relação entre liberdade e temporalidade aparece em momentos determinados da reflexão de Hannah Arendt, Sartre e Merleau-Ponty, tomando como eixo de investigação a maneira pela qual cada um deles concebe a articulação entre permanência e mudança na descrição da dinâmica temporal. Com isso, pretende-se estabelecer um horizonte de convergência e, em seu interior, explicitar dois encaminhamentos distintos para uma questão similar, mostrando como é possível estabelecer um eixo fenomenológico comum e, ao mesmo (...) tempo, explicitar a diversidade que o constitui. ABSTRACT In this essay, we will discuss the way in which the relationship between freedom and temporality appears at certain moments of Hannah Arendt, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty reflections, taking the way in which each of them conceives the articulation between permanence and change in time dynamics as an axis of investigation. With this, it is intended to establish a horizon of convergence and, within it, to make explicit two different approaches to a similar issue, showing how it is possible to establish a common phenomenological axis and, at the same time, explain the diversity that constitutes it. (shrink)

I am immensely grateful to the commentators for their insightful challenges to Criminally Ignorant.1 I’ve learned a tremendous amount from grappling with their objections and am indebted to them fo...

The textbook presentation of quantum mechanics, in a nutshell, is this. The physical state of any isolated system evolves deterministically in accordance with Schrödinger's equation until a "measurement" of some physical magnitude M (e.g. position, energy, spin) is made. Restricting attention to the case where the values of M are discrete, the system's pre-measurement state-vector f is a linear combination, or "superposition", of vectors f1, f2,... that individually represent states that..

Este ensaio pretende analisar a situação atual de confinamento imposta pela pandemia de Covid-19 a partir dos conceitos heideggerianos de técnica, quotidiano e preocupação. Defendemos que o isolamento oferece as condições materiais para que mais pessoas deem atenção a si mesmas e cuidem de se mesmas, do que resulta um deixar-ser tanto a própria liberdade quanto a do outro. Com isso, as possibilidades que somos são encaradas como tais, em especial nosso ser-para-a-morte.

Este texto pretende propor um breve comentário sobre o início do ensaio O Olho e o Espírito de Merleau-Ponty. Fazendo um recorte no movimento mais amplo de reconfiguração ontológica sugerido no ensaio, busca-se aqui indicar como a análise do corpo feita pelo filósofo aponta já para um outro tipo de ser, conduzindo ao reconhecimento de uma imbricação interna entre o subjetivo e o objetivo. Procura-se mostrar que o corpo já revela a estrutura reversível que se reconhecerá em todo o percebido, (...) marca da ontologia de Merleau-Ponty assentada na relação entre o visível e o invisível. (shrink)

Werner Bonefeld is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of York, UK, and Adjunct Professor at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana, Slovenia). He has published on topics as varied as the development of the British state during the 1980s and 1990s, Europe’s monetary union, ordoliberalism, and Marx’s critique of political economy. A ground-breaking critical theorist, Bonefeld’s contribution to an ‘open’ Marxism developed a rigorous critique of capitalist social relations without omitting the significant themes of lived (...) experience and class antagonism. The following interview marks the publication of a recent monograph titled A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation. Bonefeld discusses his reading of Frankfurt School critical theory and its relation to heterodox and open Marxist social theory with Alex Alvarez Taylor, whose research focuses on early critical theory. (shrink)

The paper gives an account of Rāmakaṇṭha’s (950–1000) contribution to the Buddhist–Brāhmaṇical debate about the existence or non-existence of a self, by demonstrating how he carves out middle ground between the two protagonists in that debate. First three points of divergence between the Brāhmaṇical (specifically Naiyāyika) and the Buddhist conceptions of subjectivity are identified. These take the form of Buddhist denials of, or re-explanations of (1) the self as the unitary essence of the individual, (2) the self as the substance (...) to which mental properties belong, (3) the self as the agent of both physical actions and cognitions. The difference of Rāmakaṇṭha’s position from both Nyāya and Buddhism is then elaborated. He posits a self, but not one that is an eternally unchanging substance, nor one that is anything other than consciousness. Hence his difference from Nyāya. He falls with Buddhism in holding that consciousness does not require anything other than itself to inhere in, but departs from Buddhism in holding that consciousness is not momentary but enduring. The guiding metaphor here is light, but light considered as a dynamic, qualitatively unchanging repetition of the action of illumination. (shrink)

Originally published in 1961. The essays in this volume focus on the awareness of science and art, evolution and Freudian psychology. Besides the chapter on Darwin and Freud, the author discusses criticism, the fantasy element in drama and popular literature, the history of the novel, the motivation of science and the function of erotic art.