Our culture and its scientific endeavor direly need a holistic characterization of mind and body. Many phenomena attest to the profound effects of beliefs on bodily function (e.g., open-label placebo's effects on chronic pain) and interoceptive systems’ role in mental processes (e.g., the emerging role of gut microbiomes in the mood). We need a mechanistic, integrative framework to account for these phenomena and generate novel predictions. Major advances have been made in understanding how the nervous system senses and regulates the (...) body and in modeling how the brain implements the computations that subserve such activities. However, the vestiges of Cartesianism have entrained a style of thinking in which systems from the brainstem downward exist as the implementation layer of computational processes supporting sensation and behavior, rather than a complementary locus of information processing. As speakers and microphones, rather than other members of the chorus. We are thus forced to perceive well-documented, belief-driven phenomena like placebo, ritual, and psychosomatic disorders as mysterious obstacles or dubious allies rather than as a wellspring of potential. (shrink)

A profile of teacher competences is described and interrogated in the light of inherent, language-based problematics. It is argued that such texts tend to constrain the modes and parameters within which to think about one's practice, in addition to masking possible deficiences in education systems through a pathologisation of the individual practitioner. The importance of keeping alive alternative discourses is stressed. Such discourses, it is argued, should recognise the complex idiosyncratic, contingent aspects of teaching and learning, and should include students' (...) reflections on their own in- and out-school experiences through dialogic, autobiographical writing. (shrink)

While Conviction Narrative Theory correctly criticizes utility-based accounts of decision-making, it unfairly reduces probabilistic models to point estimates and treats affect and narrative as mechanistically opaque yet explanatorily sufficient modules. Hierarchically nested Bayesian accounts offer a mechanistically explicit and parsimonious alternative incorporating affect into a single biologically plausible precision-weighted mechanism that tunes decision-making toward narrative versus sensory dependence under varying uncertainty levels.

Language’s intentional nature has been highlighted as a crucial feature distinguishing it from other communication systems. Specifically, language is often thought to depend on highly structured intentional action and mutual mindreading by a communicator and recipient. Whilst similar abilities in animals can shed light on the evolution of intentionality, they remain challenging to detect unambiguously. We revisit animal intentional communication and suggest that progress in identifying analogous capacities has been complicated by (i) the assumption that intentional (that is, voluntary) production (...) of communicative acts requires mental-state attribution, and (ii) variation in approaches investigating communication across sensory modalities. To move forward, we argue that a framework fusing research across modalities and species is required. We structure intentional communication into a series of requirements, each of which can be operationalised, investigated empirically, and must be met for purposive, intentionally communicative acts to be demonstrated. Our unified approach helps elucidate the distribution of animal intentional communication and subsequently serves to clarify what is meant by attributions of intentional communication in animals and humans. (shrink)

Language's intentional nature has been highlighted as a crucial feature distinguishing it from other communication systems. Specifically, language is often thought to depend on highly structured intentional action and mutual mindreading by a communicator and recipient. Whilst similar abilities in animals can shed light on the evolution of intentionality, they remain challenging to detect unambiguously. We revisit animal intentional communication and suggest that progress in identifying analogous capacities has been complicated by (i) the assumption that intentional (that is, voluntary) production (...) of communicative acts requires mental-state attribution, and (ii) variation in approaches investigating communication across sensory modalities. To move forward, we argue that a framework fusing research across modalities and species is required. We structure intentional communication into a series of requirements, each of which can be operationalised, investigated empirically, and must be met for purposive, intentionally communicative acts to be demonstrated. Our unified approach helps elucidate the distribution of animal intentional communication and subsequently serves to clarify what is meant by attributions of intentional communication in animals and humans. (shrink)

In his latest book Mechanical Choices, Michael Moore provides an explication and defence of the idea that responsibility comes in degrees. His account takes as its point of departure the view that free action and free will consist in the holding of certain counterfactuals. In this paper, I argue that Moore’s view faces several familiar counterexamples, all of which serve to motivate Harry Frankfurt’s classic insight that whether and to what extent one is responsible for one’s action has (...) more to do with what actually caused that action than with what one could or couldn’t have done instead. I then go on to sketch an alternative approach to degrees of responsibility that takes seriously this insight. I’ll argue that Moore ought to be sympathetic to this approach, inasmuch as it combines two familiar Moorean ideas: the idea that causal contribution comes in degrees, and the idea that acting freely is compatible with, and indeed entails, the fact that one’s action was caused by prior states of affairs. (shrink)

This introduction provides a highly readable critical overview of the main arguments and themes in twentieth-century and contemporary metaethics. It traces the development of contemporary debates in metaethics from their beginnings in the work of G. E. Moore up to the most recent arguments between naturalism and non-naturalism, cognitivism and non-cognitivism. A highly readable critical overview of the main arguments and themes in twentieth century and contemporary metaethics. Asks: Are there moral facts? Is there such a thing as moral (...) truth? Is moral knowledge possible? Traces the development of contemporary debates in metaethics from their beginnings in the work of G. E. Moore up to the most recent debates between naturalism and non-naturalism, cognitivism and noncognitivism. Provides for the first time a critical survey of famous figures in twentieth century metaethics such as Moore, Ayer and Mackie together with in-depth discussions of contemporary philosophers such as Blackburn, Gibbard, Wright, Harman, Railton, Sturgeon, McDowell and Wiggins. (shrink)

THIS ESSAY MAPS SOCIAL HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC INTERPREtations of Whiteness to develop an understanding of the complexity and rootedness of Whiteness as a social construction. Mapping Whiteness helps clarify historical pitfalls in the interpretation of racial formation, including the problems of essentialism, dualism, and assimilationism. A social historical perspective retrieves the multiethnic and multiclass reality of the "motley crowd" —sailors, slaves, and commoners whose religious and radical praxis subverted the dominant political and economic forces of the revolutionary Atlantic. The (...) subversive praxis of the motley crowd suggests an alternative moral imagination, moored by Black Catholic political theology, that affirms the historical complexity of racial formation, critiques and subverts White privilege, and celebrates the need to extend multiple struggles for social, political, and economic liberation. (shrink)

analytic tradition, from its early 20th-century roots in the work of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell through Saul Kripke’s pioneering advances in..

Alex Byrne offers an ambitiously comprehensive account of self-knowledge which invokes the transparency of the mind to the world. He gives a well-known quotation from G.E. Moore which introduces th...

This study investigated the link between meditation, self-reported mindfulness and cognitive flexibility as well as other attentional functions. It compared a group of meditators experienced in mindfulness meditation with a meditation-naïve control group on measures of Stroop interference and the “d2-concentration and endurance test”. Overall the results suggest that attentional performance and cognitive flexibility are positively related to meditation practice and levels of mindfulness. Meditators performed significantly better than non-meditators on all measures of attention. Furthermore, self-reported mindfulness was higher in (...) meditators than non-meditators and correlations with all attention measures were of moderate to high strength. This pattern of results suggests that mindfulness is intimately linked to improvements of attentional functions and cognitive flexibility. The relevance of these findings for mental balance and well-being are discussed. (shrink)

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)

ABSTRACT Reading the work of Sylvia Wynter and María Lugones together, particularly as it pertains to sex, gender, and sexuality, reveals the limits of popular discourses and frameworks of queer and feminist philosophy that may unwittingly obscure its constructions of sex and gender along the global color line. This article looks at Wynter’s analysis of gender as a category differentially applied across the global color line and Lugones’s analysis of the coloniality of gender. The author concludes to move beyond the (...) coloniality of gender requires intersex liberation, but also that intersex liberation must be understood within a decolonial framework. (shrink)

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the torture scenes in Ian Fleming’s canon of Bond novels and short stories (1953–1966), despite the fact that they represent some of the most potent sites of the negotiations of masculinity, nationhood, violence and the body for which Fleming’s texts are critically renowned. This article is an intersectional feminist reading of Fleming’s canon, which stresses the interpenetrations of homophobia, anticommunism and misogyny that are present in Fleming’s representation of torture. Drawing on close readings (...) of Fleming’s novels and theoretical discussions of heteronormativity, homophobia and national identity, this article argues that Fleming’s representations of torture are sites of literary meaning in which the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity are policed and reinforced. This policing is achieved, this article argues, through the associations of the perpetration of torture with homosexuality and Communism, and the survival of torture with post-imperial British hegemonic masculinity. Fleming’s torture scenes frequently represent set pieces in which Bond must reject or endure the unsolicited intimacy of other men; he must resist their seductions and persuasions and remain ideologically undefiled. Bond’s survival of torture is a metonymy for Britain’s survival of post-Second World War social and political upheaval. Further, the horror of torture, for Fleming, is the horror of a hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity in disarray: Bond’s survival represents the regrounding of normative heterosexual masculinity through the rejection of homosexuality and Communism. (shrink)

Alex Worsnip argues in favor of what he describes as a particularly robust version of fallibilism: subjects can sometimes know things that are, for them, possibly false (in the epistemic sense of 'possible'). My aim in this paper is to show that Worsnip’s argument is inconclusive for a surprising reason: the existence of possibly false knowledge turns on how we ought to model entailment or consequence relations among sentences in natural language. Since it is an open question how we (...) ought to think about consequence in natural language, it is an open question whether there is possibly false knowledge. I close with some reflections on the relation between possibly false knowledge and fallibilism. I argue that there is no straightforward way to use linguistic data about natural language epistemic modals to either verify or refute the fallibilist thesis. (shrink)

“Ordo,” as it has come to be used, suggests the basic structure of Christian worship that centers on table, font, and pulpit, and the shape of Christian living that flows from these centers. It is a commitment to that which grounds and guides our lives in the world.

I identify and discuss three principles that underlie these ideas: first, that we are finite; secondly, that we are self‐conscious about our finitude; and thirdly, that we aspire to be infinite. I argue that the third of these explains the value of certain things to us, and that it leads to our being shown that these things are of unconditioned value. Finally, by addressing the question what value our aspiration to be infinite itself has, I make some suggestions about the (...) relationship between our ineffable knowledge and God. (shrink)

The wrong version of my article ‘Aspects of the Infinite in Kant’ was printed in the last issue of Mind (pp. 205–23). I should like to correct an error that thereby appeared on page 207. In A430–2/B458–60 of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant does not deny that what is (mathematically) infinite should be what I called an actual measurable totality—if, by its measure, we mean ‘the multiplicity of given units which it contains’. His point is simply that what makes (...) it infinite cannot be the fact that its measure is the greatest possible; for there is no such thing. What he has in mind here can be illustrated as follows. Take the infinite multiplicity of hours that have elapsed up to a given moment; then the multiplicity of minutes that have elapsed, and indeed the multiplicity of hours that will have elapsed an hour later, are both greater. No multiplicity is so great that it cannot be increased in this way. (Of course, standard contemporary formal work on the infinite has superseded Kant here. A modern mathematician would want either to quarrel with this or at least to refine it.) He also refuses to allow that an infinite multiplicity is a number (cf. BIII and A526–7/B554–5). In the end, he thinks, there is no saying what it is for something to be (mathematically) infinite without falling back on ‘the true transcendental concept of infinitude,’ namely ‘that the successive synthesis of units required for the enumeration of a quantum can never be completed’. (shrink)

This chapter is concerned with the possibility of developing principles and procedural mechanisms to cope with groups that aspire to be collectively self‐governing.

This article considers the Pauline construction of a “spiritual body” in 1 Corinthians 15 and his flesh/spirit dualism more generally in light of Paul’s probable disability. I suggest that this rhetoric functioned as a strategy for Paul to claim social power in his social context by deemphasizing his physical presence, and thus reflects a negotiation with cultural patterns of disability abjection rather than a meaningful part of Christian teaching. Because of the active harm done by these dualistic constructions, however unintentional (...) such an interpretation may have been on Paul’s part, liberative Christian theologies must reject this framing and work to integrate not just “body” and spirit but also flesh and its more negative bodily associations such as weakness, pain, illness, and death. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Propositions Possibility Marginalia.

This volume shows Russell in transition from a neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian philosopher to an analytic philosopher of the first rank. During this period his research centred on writing The Principles of Mathematics where he drew together previously unpublished drafts. These shed light on Russell's paradox. This material will alter previous accounts of how he discovered his paradox and the related paradox of the largest cardinal. The volume also includes a previously unpublished draft of an early attempt to solve his paradox, (...) as well as the earliest known version of his generalised relation arithmetic. It contains three articles which have never previously been published in English. (shrink)

We make decisions all day, don't we? Do I pick up the dog's poop when I take him for his walk? Should I tell Mom where I really went after school? When I see something wrong happening, what should I do? Making a good choice, doing the right thing, or even knowing right from wrong can be hard! In What Would You Do? ​you can practice making hard decisions and have some fun while we explore some everyday dilemmas!​.