Antonia Lolordo presents an original interpretation of John Locke's metaphysics of moral agency, in which to be a moral agent is simply to be free, rational, and a person.

Through interviews and photographs the author shows real persons whose lives have been affected by tobacco-related diseases.

Where was he active, and where did his surroundings act upon him? In addition to these questions, Antonia Landois deals with the relevance of status of birth and 'acquired' scholarship.

Ce texte a déjà paru dans la revue E-rea [En ligne], 13.1 | 2015. Nous remercions Antonia Rigaud et la revue E-rea de nous avoir autorisé à en reproduire le début ici. Représentant une journée dans la vie d'une ville, Manhatta oscille entre un traitement narratif nous invitant à suivre le quotidien de la ville et un traitement beaucoup plus abstrait, cherchant à capter une atmosphère beaucoup plus qu'à produire un document exact. Tourné en 1921, le film est resté (...) dans l'histoire comme le premier film - Cinéma, animation et vidéo – GALERIE – Nouvel article. (shrink)

There has recently been a resurgence of interest in the early nineteenth century Scottish philosopher Mary Shepherd. This Element is intended to provide an overview of Shepherd's system, including her views on the following wide range of topics: causation, induction, knowledge of the external world, matter, life, animal cognition, the relationship between mind and body, the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, miracles, and the nature of divine creation. The author also provides an overview of relevant secondary literature (...) and argues for their own interpretation of Shepherd's metaphysics. (shrink)

Many great authors claim that reading literature can expand your phenomenal imagination and allow you to imagine experiences you have never had. How is this possible? Your phenomenal imagination is constrained by your phenomenal concepts, which are in turn constrained by the phenomenology of your own actual past experiences. Literature could expand your phenomenal imagination, then, by giving you new phenomenal concepts. This paper explains how this can happen. Literature can direct your attention to previously unnoticed phenomenal properties of your (...) own past experiences, as brought to mind by involuntary memory. This process gives you the opportunity to notice those phenomenal properties for the first time, and so also to form phenomenal concepts of those properties. Forming a new phenomenal concept strictly expands the range of your phenomenal imagination. It gives you the capacity to imagine more than you could have before, including certain specific kinds of experience that you yourself have never enjoyed firsthand. Literature’s capacity to expand your phenomenal imagination in this way is central to its social, moral, and epistemic value. (shrink)

The 18th-century American philosopher Jonathan Edwards argues that nothing endures through time. I analyze his argument, paying particular attention to a central principle it relies on, namely that “nothing can exert itself, or operate, when and where it is not existing”. I also consider what I supposed to follow from the conclusion that nothing endures. Edwards is sometimes read as the first four-dimensionalist. I argue that this is wrong. Edwards does not conclude that things persist by having different temporal parts; (...) he concludes that nothing persists. (shrink)

Just as bodily actions are things you do with your body, mental actions are things you do with your mind. Both are different from things that merely happen to you. Where does the idea of mental action come from? What are mental actions? And why do they matter in philosophy? These are the three main questions answered in this paper. Section 1 introduces mental action through a brief history of the topic in philosophy. Section 2 explains what it is to (...) be a mental action in terms of intentional action. Section 3 argues that the fact that we can perform mental actions has some striking consequences concerning mental content. Section 4 shows how mental action helps to explain some important facts about self-knowledge and the normativity of thought. The conclusion mentions two further fruitful avenues for philosophical research on mental action. (shrink)

ABSTRACT People suffer from a variety of cognitive shortcomings when forming and updating their political beliefs. Three pervasive shortcomings are confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, and motivated reasoning. The emotional state of anxiety can help us overcome these biases given the open-minded, information-rich, reflective deliberation with diverse people it may promote—although mass and social media may hinder this type of deliberation.

Paulo Friere is considered to be one of the most influential educational philosophers of the twentieth century. Within many progressive circles, he would be considered the most important radical educational philosopher of our times, given his contribution to a revolutionary understanding of education and his certainty and faith that education can function as one of the most significant empowering and democratizing forces in the lives of the disenfranchised. In this deeply personal introduction to the man,and his ideas and their contribution (...) to ideas of progressive schooling, Antonia Darder reflects on her personal memories of time spent with Freire and his influence on her own work. (shrink)

Locke claims that we have sensitive knowledge of the external world, in virtue of the fact that simple ideas are real, true, and adequate. However, despite his dismissive remarks about Cartesian external-world skepticism, Locke gives us little to go on as to how knowledge of the external world survives the fact of perceptual error, or even how perceptual error is possible. I argue that Locke has an in-principle problem explaining perceptual error.

Any contextualist approach to knowledge has to provide a plausible definition of the concept of context and spell out the mechanisms of context changes. Since it is the dynamics of context change that carry the main weight of the contextualist position, not every mechanism will be capable of filling that role. In particular, I argue that one class of mechanisms that is most popularly held to account for context changes, namely those that arise out of shifts of conversational parameters in (...) discourses involving knowledge claims, are not suited to the job because they cannot account for the genuinely epistemic nature of the context shift. A form of epistemic contextualism that defines the context through the structure of our epistemic projects is suggested. Context changes in this account are linked to changes in the background assumptions operative in our epistemic projects and the methods used to carry out our inquiries. (shrink)

You can come to know that you believe that p partly by reflecting on whether p and then judging that p. Call this procedure “the transparency method for belief.” How exactly does the transparency method generate known self-attributions of belief? To answer that question, we cannot interpret the transparency method as involving a transition between the contents p and I believe that p. It is hard to see how some such transition could be warranted. Instead, in this context, one mental (...) action is both a judgment that p and a self-attribution of a belief that p. The notion of embedded mental action is introduced here to explain how this can be so and to provide a full epistemic explanation of the transparency method. That explanation makes sense of first-person authority and immediacy in transparent self-knowledge. In generalized form, it gives sufficient conditions on an attitude’s being known transparently. (shrink)

In _Epistemic Explanations_, Sosa continues to defend a model of judgment he has long endorsed. On this complex model of judgment, judgment aims not only at correctness but also at aptness of a kind of alethic affirmation. He offers three arguments for the claim that we need this model of judgment instead of a simpler model, on which judgment aims only at correctness. The first argument cites the need to exclude knowledge-spoiling luck from apt judgment. The second argument uses the (...) complex model to distinguish judgment from mere guessing. The third argument involves the assessment of suspension of judgment as a performance. This paper shows why none of these arguments succeeds, and so recommends adopting the simpler model of judgment. (shrink)

Edgar Morin is one of the most important contemporary European philosophers. His name has recently also become well known on the American continent, especially in South America, where his works have given rise to several interesting cultural initiatives. The analysis of his pedagogical proposal can be a stimulating adventure for educators and teachers alike. Morin's proposal to link methodologically what is disjoined suggests re-establishing the connection between thought and action, in order to re-establish on rational and critical bases the ethical (...) principles of solidarity and responsibility and enable us to face the challenges of our times. (shrink)

Early in Movements of the Mind, Wayne Wu puts forth a foundational picture of action. On this picture, intentional action is necessarily a solution to a selection problem, a problem of choice among multiple causally possible alternatives. Forming an intention solves one selection problem; acting on that intention requires solving yet further selection problems about how to execute that intention. There are two serious issues with this picture of action. First: some intentional actions are causally necessitated. They can't be solutions (...) to selection problems. Wu's argument for this claim, which contrasts reflex with action, does not succeed in showing that action must solve a selection problem — nor that reflex does not solve such a problem. Second: the requirement to solve further selection problems while acting on an intention leads to a vicious regress that threatens the possibility of action in general. If these two issues are addressed, Wu's groundbreaking scientific approach to mental action might offer us a powerful new theory of ongoing causal control over intentional action. (shrink)

In several early 19th century works, Mary Shepherd articulates a theory of causation that is intended to respond to Humean skepticism. I argue that Shepherd's theory should be read in light of the science of the day and her conception of her place in the British philosophical tradition. Reading Shepherd’s theory in light of her conception of the history of philosophy, including her claim to be the genuine heir of Locke, illuminates the broader significance of her attempt to reinstate reason (...) as the source of scientific knowledge. Reading Shepherd's theory in light of the science of the day helps make plausible her claim that there are robust natural kinds in nature, defined by their causal powers: this is precisely what then-recent advances in chemistry hold. (shrink)

Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, best known for his work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, challenged education plans that contributed to the marginalization of minorities and the poor. Freire believed that education should be used for liberation by helping learners reflect on their experiences historically, giving immediate reality to issues of racism, sexism, and the exploitation of workers. Known as one of the most influential theoretical innovators of the twentieth century, his views have left a significant mark on progressive thinkers about education (...) and liberation. Reinventing Paulo Freire is an homage to him by protégé Antonia Darder. Here, she explores the legacy of Freire, interviews eight former students who studied him-- now teachers themselves, and reflects on the teaching practice as demonstrated by Freire himself. The interviews take the form of first person narratives; the epilogue consists simply of a letter and a poem. (shrink)

Aesthetic value empiricism claims that the aesthetic value of an object is grounded in the value of a certain kind of experience of it. The most popular version of value empiricism, and a dominant view in contemporary philosophical aesthetics more generally, is aesthetic hedonism. Hedonism restricts the grounds of aesthetic value to the pleasure enjoyed in the right kind of experience. But hedonism does not enjoy any clear advantage over a more permissive alternative version of value empiricism. This alternative is (...) aesthetic liberalism. On this view, an object’s aesthetic value is fully grounded in any value—not just the hedonic value—of a correct and complete experience of its sensory features. To demonstrate the advantages of liberalism over hedonism, I apply both views to analyze the aesthetic value of the Spring Temple Buddha and Anselm Kiefer’s Seraphim. I detail four advantages of liberalism over hedonism, and I conclude by defending liberalism from two kinds of objection. (shrink)

: Malebranche famously objects to Descartes' argument that the nature of the mind is better known than the nature of body as follows: if we had an idea of the mind's nature we would know the possible range of modes of the mind, including the sensory modes, but we do not know those modes and thus can't have an idea of the mind's nature. I argue that Malebranche's objections are readily answerable from within the Cartesian system. This argument involves examining (...) the status of sensations in Descartes, innate ideas, and Malebranche's occasionalism. (shrink)

This is about Gassendi's 5th Objections to the Meditations and Descartes' Reply. The main issue is what clear and distinct perception consists in and whether we need a criterion in order to know if we perceive something clearly and distinctly.

Este artigo tem como objetivo abordar uma intervenção realizada nas turmas do primeiro ano do ensino médio de uma escola localizada na cidade de Ipu-Ceará no ano de 2018, na disciplina de filosofia, com o tema ''Mito da caverna de Platão''. Assim, foram feitas leituras em sala de aula de alguns trechos do livro A República de Platão que aborda o tema, juntamente com o livro didático Filosofando: Introdução à filosofia das autoras Maria Lúcia de Arruda Aranha e Maria Helena (...) Pires Martins com o intuito de referenciar as cavernas contemporâneas. Deste modo, foi utilizado o método de ensino cuja intenção era a de apresentar livros e recursos audiovisuais para fins educacionais. Com a compreensão do mito da caverna de Platão, portanto, conseguimos vinculá-lo a um assunto da realidade dos alunos: a indústria da beleza que padroniza uma determinada forma de comportamento nos indivíduos, causando-lhes sérios problemas físicos e psicológicos. Para sustentar essa ideia, trabalhou-se com dois videoclipes das cantoras Beyoncé (Pretty Hurts) e Colbie Caillat (Try) na tentativa de despertar a reflexão da necessidade de autovalorização e aceitação física, em um distanciamento das cavernas patriarcais. Enfim, esse artigo manifesta uma enorme contribuição para os jovens do ensino médio, especialmente, na sua autoaceitação e formação identitária na medida em que compreendem os padrões como formas de aprisionamentos. Assim, conclui-se que estas discussões são relevantes por despertarem temas caros e reais aos jovens, tanto que promovem adoecimentos psicológicos. O propósito é o de expandir a discussão de tal forma que eles mesmos possam dialogar sobre o assunto. (shrink)