Sarah McGrath (2008; 2011) argues that, when it comes to our controversial moral views, we have no reason to think we are less likely to be in error than those who disagree with us. I refer to this position as the Moral Peer View (MPV). Under pressure from Nathan King (2011a; 2011b), McGrath admits that the Moral Peer View need not always have been true, though she maintains it is true now. Although King seems to think there should be current (...) counterexamples to the Moral Peer View, he holds back from actually proposing any. I argue that those of us who favor marriage equality and gender equality are currently in a position to reject the Moral Peer View with regard to these issues, and I propose conditions under which people can reasonably take their moral beliefs to be epistemically advantaged. King and McGrath agree that opponents of slavery like William Wilberforce could reasonably believe they enjoyed an epistemic advantage over proponents of slavery, and I suggest that proponents of marriage equality and gender equality might make similar claims. I propose that we can make additional claims to epistemic advantages if we believe that (1) almost everyone that considers the matter admits they are advantages, (2) those who disagree with use would admit they are advantages, and (3) we can give a plausible explanation as to why those that we think are epistemically disadvantaged have not noticed that they are disadvantaged. Finally, I argue that it reasonable to think our controversial beliefs are justified if we can find reasons to think our opponents are mistaken, and do not see similar reasons to think ourselves mistaken. This is a better policy than supposing we are just as prone to make mistakes as our opponents, as the latter is both less defensible in theory, and more likely to stifle intellectual progress. (shrink)

The Equal Weight View holds that, when we discover we disagree with an epistemic peer, we should give our peer’s judgment as much weight as our own. But how should we respond when we cannot tell whether those who disagree with us are our epistemic peers? I argue for a position I will call the Earn-a-Spine View. According to this view, parties to a disagreement can remain confdent, at least in some situations, by fnding justifable reasons to think their opponents (...) are less credible than themselves, even if those reasons are justifable only because they lack information about their opponents. (shrink)

The papers collected in this book share a common motivation: All respond to certain kinds of injustice that unfairly and unreasonably prevent the insights and intellectual abilities of vulnerable and stigmatized groups from being given their due recognition. Most people are opposed to injustice in principle, and do not want to have mistaken views about others. But research in the social sciences reveals a disturbing truth: Even people who intend to be fair-minded and unprejudiced are influenced by unconscious biases and (...) stereotypes, as well as social structures and institutions that lead to unjust judgments. We may sincerely want to be epistemically just, but we frequently fail, and simply thinking harder about it will not fix the problem. -/- This volume collects 17 new essays that draw from cutting-edge social science research, to suggest how we can better manage our own unjust reactions, as well as resist patterns of epistemic injustice that we may face. The volume concludes with an afterward by Miranda Fricker, reflecting on these new lines of research and potential future directions to explore. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s book Epistemic Injustice calls attention to an important sort of moral and intellectual wrongdoing, that of failing to give others their intellectual due. When we fail to recognize others’ knowledge, or undervalue their beliefs and judgments, we fail in two important respects. First, we miss out on the opportunity to improve and refine our own sets of beliefs and judgments. Second—and more relevant to the term “injustice”—we can deny people the intellectual respect they deserve. Along with describing the (...) wrong of epistemic injustice, Fricker proposes that epistemic justice is a virtue we “can, and should, aim for in practice”. But I argue that there are two major problems. First, it is not clear that it is reasonable to imagine there is any such stable disposition—that is, any such virtue—as the sort of justice she imagines. Second, even if there could be such a virtue, her theory of epistemic justice does not provide good guidance for avoiding epistemic injustice. While it could.. (shrink)

Martin's book develops and defends a theory of hope. My review gives details and critiques her argument.

When people disagree about what is moral, we face an epistemological challenge—when the answer to a moral question is not obvious, how do we determine who is right? What if, under the circumstances, we do not have the means to show one party or the other is right? In recent years, a number of epistemologists have turned their attention to the general epistemic problem of how to respond reasonably to disagreement, and we can look to their work for guidance. While (...) there remains significant disagreement about how to respond to disagreement, I will focus on what I take to be the best position in the debate, known as the “Conciliatory” position (or “Conciliation” for short), which holds that parties to a disagreement should become less confident of their initial opinions to some degree, according to the credibility of the parties involved. Conciliation, if interpreted straightforwardly, has some counter-intuitive implications for unpopular opinions, including unpopular moral judgments. If a moral non-conformist becomes somewhat less confident of her view in response to each disagreement with a presumed epistemic peer, she will eventually have such a low degree of confidence in her initial view that she will effectively have switched positions. This result is troubling because almost everyone accepts moral views that were non-conforming views at some point in time, and these views probably would not have become widespread if non-conformists had changed their positions. I propose a modified version of Conciliation which would enable moral non-conformists to engage in cautious “experiments in living.” This modified view, I argue, is reasonable for those who are concerned, not only with correcting their own mistaken moral views, but with promoting moral progress in general. (shrink)

_The Arcades Project_, the monumental unfinished work of cultural criticism by Walter Benjamin, is the German philosopher’s effort to comprehend urban modernity through the 19th-century Parisian shopping arcade. _The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin_ combines artworks with archival materials and poetic interventions to form an original, multifaceted response to this collagelike cultural text. Jens Hoffmann astutely pairs works by thirty-six well-known and emerging artists, including Lee Friedlander, Andreas Gursky, Pierre Huyghe, and Cindy Sherman, with the thirty-six “Convolutes,” (...) or themes, in Benjamin’s text. Bound into the main volume is a graphic novelette, from the imagination of Vito Manolo Roma, of Benjamin’s dream the night before he committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis. Scholarly essays by Hoffmann and Caroline A. Jones, texts selected by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, reproductions of Benjamin’s handwritten notes, and a list of the main Paris arcades discussed by him round out this extraordinary publication. (shrink)

The Equal Weight View holds that, when we discover we disagree with an epistemic peer, we should give our peer’s judgment as much weight as our own. But how should we respond when we cannot tell whether those who disagree with us are our epistemic peers? I argue for a position I will call the Earn-a-Spine View. According to this view, parties to a disagreement can remain confident, at least in some situations, by finding justifiable reasons to think their opponents (...) are less credible than themselves, even if those reasons are justifiable only because they lack information about their opponents. (shrink)

While the objects of olfaction are intuitively individuated by reference to the ordinary objects from which they arise, this intuition does not accurately capture the complex nature of smells. Smells are neither ordinary three-dimensional objects, nor Platonic vapors, nor odors. Rather, smells are the molecular structures of chemical compounds within odor plumes. Molecular Structure Theory is offered as an account of smells, which can explain the nature of the external object of olfactory perception, what we experience as olfactory objects, and (...) what determines the olfactory quality of smells by which we can demarcate the spatiotemporal boundaries of smells. (shrink)

One of the reasons often cited for the renewed interest in Aristotelian virtue theory is its alleged sensitivity to the particular case. In addition to rules and procedures is attention to the variety of individual cases, and a reminder of the shortfalls of misplaced rigour. Often quoted are the passages from the Nicomachean Ethics in which Aristotle warns that we must seek only so much precision as is appropriate for the subject matter. Repeated, too, is the well-known phrase of the (...) Ethics, that “judgment rests in perception”. The spirit of these remarks, in essence, that “practical wisdom is not scientific understanding”, is contrasted with modern views which stress the sufficiency of algorithms for fully determining right action and deliberation based on deduction from rules. (shrink)

Wiggins and Wilbanks (2019) raise a number of interesting concerns vis-à-vis citizen science and research. However, one area of innovation in citizen science that has seen significant advancements...

This article introduces and discusses a series of problems which any adequate account of legitimate practical authority must be able to solve. I then argue that Joseph Raz's influential Service Conception of Authority is unable to solve them. I develop a new account of legitimate authority by integrating many of the important insights of the Service Conception into my own framework for understanding the nature of moral rights and duties. I argue that this account has the resources to solve these (...) problems. (shrink)

Qualitative-consciousness arises at the sensory level of olfactory processing and pervades our experience of smells to the extent that qualitative character is maintained whenever we are aware of undergoing an olfactory experience. Building upon the distinction between Access and Phenomenal Consciousness the paper offers a nuanced distinction between Awareness and Qualitative-consciousness that is applicable to olfaction in a manner that is conceptual precise and empirically viable. Mounting empirical research is offered substantiating the applicability of the distinction to olfaction and showing (...) that olfactory qualitative-consciousness can occur without awareness, but any olfactory state that we are aware of being in is always qualitative. Evidence that olfactory sensory states have a qualitatively character in the absence of awareness derives from research on mate selection, the selection of social preference for social interaction and acquaintances, as well as the role of olfactory deficits in causing affective disorders. Furthermore, the conservation of secondary processing measures of olfactory valence during olfactory imagery experiments provides verification that olfactory awareness is always qualitatively conscious—all olfactory consciousness smells phenomenal. (shrink)

Mental Imagery, whereby we experience aspect of a perceptual scene or perceptual object in the absence of direct sensory stimulation is ubiquitous. Often the existence of mental imagery is demonstrated by asking one’s reader to volitionally generate a visual object, such as closing ones eyes and imagining an apple. However, mental imagery also arises in auditory, tactile, interoceptive, and olfactory cases. A number of influential philosophical theories have attempted to explain mental imagery in terms of belief-based forms of representation using (...) the Dependence Thesis, dependence upon means of access, such as enactivism, or in terms of the similarity of content with perceptual processing. The focus of this paper concerns the later approach and in particular assessing if Nanay’s promissory note that his theory is applicable to modalities other than vision, such as smell, seems likely to be of theoretical tender. The thesis argued for in this paper is that olfactory imagery exists and is best accounted for by considering it as a type of perceptual processing with a unique representational format relative to the olfactory perceptual modality. The paper concludes by summarizing the applicability of Nanay’s theory of mental imagery for olfaction and suggests some further issues that arise when transitioning to multi-modal mental imagery. (shrink)

The work, which came into its own with the emergence of modern copyright law at the turn of the twentieth century, occupies a pivotal position in copyright law. Focusing on the question of how copyright decides whether part of a work should be treated as a separate and distinct object, this Article looks at some of the techniques that copyright law uses to decide both what is a work and when a new work comes into being. The Article shows that (...) in spite of the central role that the work plays in copyright doctrine the law is not well equipped to explain when a new work has come into being. (shrink)

The olfactory system processes smells in a structural manner that is unlike the composition of thoughts or language, suggesting that some of the content of our olfactory experiences are represented in a format that does not involve concepts. Consequently, formative non-conceptual content is offered as an alternative theory of non-conceptual content according to which the difference between conceptual and non-conceptual states is simply a matter of the format of their structural parts and relations within a system of representations. Aside from (...) the theoretical merits of rethinking the quagmire of a debate regarding non-conceptual content as a format issue, studying olfaction shows that formative non-conceptual content is empirically plausible. (shrink)

“Sophisticated” theories of welfare face two potentially devastating criticisms. They are based upon two claims: that theories of welfare should be tested for what they imply about newborn infants and that even if a theory of welfare is intended to apply only to adults, we might still have sufficient reason to reject it because it implies an implausible divergence between adult and neonatal welfare. It has been argued we ought reject sophisticated theories of welfare because they have significantly counterintuitive implications (...) about neonatal welfare and because they imply an implausible divergence between the welfare of adults and that of newborns. I argue against both claims. (shrink)

In the following pages, and hopefully as a contribution to the philosophy of person, I shall try to: explore the notions of object and subject, and show briefly how these have been presupposed by, and have been articulated through, certain theories of person; suggest an argument for the overlap of object and subject as the ground for a discussion of feeling and experiencing; offer a neologism, coject, and its derivatives, cojective and cojectivity, as a new and fertile ground for the (...) reconstruction of the present social sciences as human sciences. These steps are taken in the main attempt to lay a further basis for the exploration, investigation, description, and analysis of person through the methods of the human sciences. (shrink)

Special problems relating to theories of language are always embedded within the sedimentary layers through which genuine philosophical problems arise, or behind any question or problem considered philosophically. Indeed, much of the most significant philosophizing in our century has been devoted to both the uncovering and the clarification of language games and theories of language which have generated both genuine and spurious ontological and metaphysical problems, and to the clarification of the language through which certain kinds of problems have arisen, (...) or in terms of which they have been presented. (shrink)

While few soldiers may have read the works of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, it is undoubtedly true that the ancient philosophy known as Stoicism guides the actions of many in the military. Soldiers and seamen learn early in their training “to suck it up,” to endure, to put aside their feelings and to get on with the mission. This book explores what the Stoic philosophy actually is, the role it plays in the character of the military (both ancient and modern), (...) and its powerful value as a philosophy of life. Marshalling anecdotes from military history—ranging from ancient Greek wars to World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq—the book illuminates the military mind and uses it as a window on the virtues of the Stoic philosophy, which are far richer and more interesting than our popularized notions. The book explores the deep, lasting value that Stoicism can yield, in issues of military leadership and character; in the Stoic conception of anger and its control (does a warrior need anger to go to battle?); and in Stoic thinking about fear and resilience, grief and mourning, and the value of camaraderie and brotherhood. The book concludes by recommending a moderate Stoicism, where the task for the individual, both civilian and military, youth and adult, is to temper control with forgiveness, and warrior drive and achievement with humility and humor. (shrink)

Smart city discourses often invoke the Panopticon, a disciplinary architecture designed by Jeremy Bentham and popularly theorized by Michel Foucault, as a model for understanding the social impact of AI technologies. This framing focuses attention almost exclusively on the negative ramifications of Urban AI, correlating ubiquitous surveillance, centralization, and data consolidation with AI development, and positioning technologies themselves as the driving factor shaping privacy, sociality, equity, access, and autonomy in the city. This paper describes an alternative diagram for Urban AI—the (...) Polyopticon: a distributed, polyvalent, multi-modal network of synthetic intelligences. It posits that fourth industrial revolution technologies change the political, social, and psychodynamic relationships of sentience and witness in the city, shifting the effects of watching and watched beyond the exclusive domain of top-down surveillance and discipline. The Polyopticon poses a more expansive and ambivalent spectrum of possibilities for Urban AI scenarios, one that undermines the totalizing, singular, and cerebral notion of intelligence that so often characterizes Urban AI and smart city critiques. (shrink)

According to the standard analysis of degree questions, the logical form of a degree question contains a variable that ranges over individual degrees and is bound by the degree question operator how. In contrast with this, we claim that the variable bound by the degree question operator how does not range over individual degrees but over intervals of degrees, by analogy with Schwarzschild and Wilkinson's proposal regarding the semantics of comparative clauses. Not only does the interval-based semantics predict the existence (...) of certain readings that are not predicted under the standard view, it is also able, together with other natural assumptions, to account for the sensitivity of degree questions to negative islands, as well as for the fact, uncovered by Fox and Hackl, that negative islands can be obviated by some properly placed modals. Like Fox and Hackl, we characterize negative island effects as arising from the fact that the relevant question, due to its meaning alone, can never have a maximally informative answer. Contrary to Fox and Hackl, however, we do not need to assume that scales are universally dense, nor that the notion of maximal informativity responsible for negative islands is blind to contextual parameters. (shrink)

Since its resurgence in the 1990s, character education has been subject to a bevy of common criticisms, including that it is didactic and crudely behaviorist; premised on a faulty trait psychology; victim‐blaming; culturally imperialist, racist, religious, or ideologically conservative; and many other horrible things besides. Matt Ferkany and Benjamin Creed examine an intellectualist Aristotelian form of character education that has gained popularity recently and find that it is largely not susceptible to such criticisms. In this form, character education is (...) education for practically intelligent virtue, or the intrinsically motivated and psychically harmonious exercise of robust and stable traits involving practical intelligence conducive to individual and collective human flourishing. (shrink)

In this article, we describe four theoretical and methodological problems that have impeded implicit attitude research and the popular understanding of its findings. The problems all revolve around assumptions made about the relationships among measures, constructs, cognitive processes, and features of processing. These assumptions have confused our understandings of exactly what we are measuring, the processes that produce implicit evaluations, the meaning of differences in implicit evaluations across people and contexts, the meaning of changes in implicit evaluations in response to (...) intervention, and how implicit evaluations predict behavior. We describe formal modeling as one means to address these problems, and provide illustrative examples. Clarifying these issues has important implications for our understanding of who has particular implicit evaluations and why, when those evaluations are likely to be particularly problematic, how we might best try to change them, and what interventions are best suited to minimize the effects of implicit evaluations on behavior. (shrink)

Edited collection on Wittgensteinian ethics. With contributions by Oskari Kuusela, Edward Harcourt, Anne-Marie Christensen, Sabina Lovibond, Alexander Miller, Benjamin De Mesel, Cora Diamond, Lars Hertzberg, Jeremy Johnson, Craig Taylor, Alice Crary, Lynette Reid.

When we think about Kantian virtue, what often comes to mind is the notion of respect. Respect is due to all persons merely in virtue of their status as rational agents. Indeed, on the Kantian view, specific virtues, such as duties of beneficence, gratitude, or self-perfection, are so many ways of respecting persons as free rational agents. To preserve and promote rational agency, to protect individuals from threats against rational agency, i.e., to respect persons, is at the core of virtue. (...) No doubt, part of the appeal of the Kantian notion of respect is that it offers an intuitive way of talking about the wrongness of manipulation and coercion, and in general, the wrongness of unfairly taking advantage of another. For to respect persons is to take seriously their status as persons, and to forswear, at some level, actions and attitudes that would compromise their dignity. Talking about respect has become shorthand for signaling deontological concerns. More formally, within recent Kantian exegesis, respect is viewed as yielding a more accessible and less contrived account of the Categorical Imperative than the more traditional criterion of universalizability and the contradictions tests applied to it. Within the Kantianinspired political theory of John Rawls, respect is also a core notion, representing a pervasive good, the bases of which, just states have an obligation to distribute to their members. Yet, for all its appeal, respect is an odd feature of Kantian ethics. For it is an emotion in a theory that prides itself in grounding morality in principles of reason alone. In this essay, I draw attention to the importance of respect in Kant's account in order to show just how he makes room for the emotions. Indeed, I shall argue that on Kant's account of full moral agency, we are emotional as well as rational creatures. Although Kant often portrays respect as an abstract emotional attitude mysteriously connected to our rationality, I argue that on a suitable revision, respect can be transformed into a more concrete attitude, cultivated and expressed alongside other emotions requisite for full virtue. (shrink)

This paper makes explicit the way in which many theorists of the epistemology of uncertainty, or formal epistemologists, are committed to a version of noncognitivism—one about thoughts that something is likely. It does so by drawing an analogy with metaethical noncognitivism. I explore the degree to which the motivations for both views are similar and how both views have to grapple with the Frege‐Geach Problem about complex thoughts. The major upshot of recognizing this noncognitivism is that it presents challenges and (...) opportunities not only in the philosophy of mind and language but also in epistemology itself. I present some examples where attention to the implicit noncognitivism in formal epistemology has affected or should affect epistemological theory. And I suggest that it is likely that further examples of this sort will arise. (shrink)

I explore the implications of the foundation metaphor for understanding the role of moral theories in ethics and bioethics and argue.

Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) discuss the ethical concerns associated with employing what they term conversational artificial intelligence as therapist substitutes. Given their apprehensions, they...

Recently, extremist ‘populist’ parties have succeeded in obtaining large enough democratic electoral mandates both to legally make substantive changes to the law and constitution and to legally eliminate avenues to challenge their control over the government. Extremists place committed liberal democrats in an awkward position as they work to legally revolutionize their constitutions and turn them into ‘illiberal democracies’. This article analyses political responses to this problem. It argues that the twin phenomena of legal revolution and illiberal democracy reveal a (...) latent tension between the constitutional commitments to democracy and liberalism, that is, the equal chance to have one’s political goals enacted into law and individual basic rights. Political extremists make the latent tension real when they use the procedures of democratic legal change to abrogate constitutional commitments to liberalism, among other things. Although the two commitments normally coexist side by side, exceptional times raise an existential dilemma for liberal democracies: is it constitutional to democratically amend liberalism out of the constitution? After analysing the moral legitimacy of both the democratic and liberal arguments, this article concludes that liberal constitutionalism is constitutive of genuine democracy. In other words, it is unconstitutional to abrogate basic liberal commitments and it is legitimate to adopt constitutional mechanisms to guarantee liberalism – even if it means constraining democracy to do so. This article then situates ‘constrained democracy’ within the liberal current as a way to conceive of and respond to this pressing problem. It concludes by discussing four constitutional mechanisms – inspired by the German Grundgesetz – to guarantee liberalism: unambiguous lexically prior commitment to liberalism, limits on negative majorities, the eternity clause and party bans. It concludes that constrained democracy is an important constitutional guarantee of liberal democracy and that the four mechanisms, among others, are essential to enact constrained democracy. (shrink)

This chapter assesses theories of the nature of personal love in Anglophone philosophy from the last two decades, sketching a case for pluralism. After rejecting arationalist views as failing to accommodate cases in which love is irrational, and contemporary quality views as giving love the wrong kind of reason, it argues that other theories only account for different subsets of what a complete theory of love should explain. It therefore concludes that while love always consists in valuing someone as a (...) particular individual, there are multiple ways of doing this, corresponding to multiple kinds of love. (shrink)

This article seeks to understand the origins of the Soviet concept of ‘sluggish schizophrenia’, a diagnostic category that was used to imprison political dissidents in the post-WWII era. It focuses on the 1920s and 1930s, a period when Soviet psychiatrists attempted to find ways to diagnose schizophrenia at its earliest stages. The new Soviet state supported these efforts, funding new institutions where clinicians encountered types of patients they had not previously studied. Conceptual disagreements arose about what symptoms could be used (...) to diagnose schizophrenia, and how it could be differentiated from other ‘borderline’ mental disorders such as neurosis and psychopathy. Several research groups used their findings to propose new clinical concepts, including ‘mild schizophrenia’ and sluggish schizophrenia. By the early 1930s Soviet psychiatrists no longer shared a basic consensus about schizophrenia. At the same time, the priorities of the Soviet government under Joseph Stalin ceased to support preventative psychiatry. The result was a 1936 ‘discussion’ at which the concept of mild schizophrenia was criticized and sluggish schizophrenia was held up as a model for how the discipline should develop in the future. (shrink)

Benjamin Barber is one of America's preeminent political theorists. He has been a significant voice in the continuing debate about the nature and role of democracy in the contemporary world. A Passion for Democracy collects twenty of his most important writings on American democracy. Together they refine his distinctive position in democratic theory. Barber's conception of "strong democracy" contrasts with traditional concepts of "liberal democracy," especially in its emphasis on citizen participation in central issues of public debate. These essays (...) critique the "thin representation" of liberal democracy and buttress the arguments presented in Barber's twelve books, most recently in his well-received Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Re-shaping the World. In these pieces, Barber argues for participatory democracy without dependence on abstract metaphysical foundations, and he stresses the relationship among democracy and civil society, civic education, and culture. A Passion for Democracy is divided into four sections. In the first, "American Theory: Democracy, Liberalism, and Rights," Barber addresses issues of ongoing relevance to today's debates about the roots of participatory democracy, including individualism vs. community, the importance of consent, and the irrelevance of Marxism. Essays in the second section, "American Practice: Leadership, Citizenship, and Censorship" provide a "strong democracy" critique of American democratic practice. "Education for Democracy: Civic Education, Service, and Citizenship" applies Barber's theories to three related topics and includes his much-discussed essay "America Skips School." The final section, "Democracy and Technology: Endless Frontier or End of Democracy?" provides glimpses into a future that technology alone cannot secure for democracy. In his preface, Barber writes: "In these essays... I have been hard on my country. Like most ardent democrats, I want more for it than it has achieved, despite the fact that it has achieved more than most people have dared to want." This wide-ranging collection displays not only his passion for democracy, but also his unique perspective on issues of abiding importance for the democratic process. (shrink)

Teacher action and change is a complex and nuanced phenomenon that has been theorized across diverse literature in terms of identity, agency, and power. Drawing on this literature, this article offers specific articulations of teacher identity as interpretive framework, power as legitimate action, and agency as moral coherence. We posit a model of teacher agency understood in the interplay of individual beliefs, values, and ideals with institutional roles, authority, and institutional action, producing (or not producing) authentic action. This model draws (...) a distinction between agency and power, and highlights dynamics of equilibrium and discord that may emerge between who teachers are and what they do. The agentive triad model serves as a theoretical tool for guiding or supporting teacher growth and agentive action, and for understanding the dynamics between institutionally legitimized roles and teacher identities. (shrink)

“I can smell you”—spoken as a factive statement, it is jarring and if uttered to a stranger it seems transgressive. Telling someone you see them generates a sense of affirming their identity, but your smell is private. Perhaps smell isn’t the lead sense, but what I hope to make clear throughout this chapter is that our sense of smell allows us to perceive aspects of our own and other’s identity. The chapter aims to show that our unconscious perception of the (...) smell of ourselves and others partially constitutes the foundations for our sense of self. We are immersed within an invisible sea of odourous chemical currents, some derived from our environment with its everyday flux of objects while other odourous plumes derive from the humanity encompassing us. People have a rich bouquet of smells generated from the volatile chemical compounds emanating from them, including their bodily odours (BO), their adorned perfumes, and associated environmental smells from their abode hitchhiking on their person. As individuals we have a smell that is composed from these ranges of odours that allows us to recognize ourselves as an olfactory entity distinct from someone else’s BO bouquet. However, if forced to introspectively report our own smell we would be befuddled. We aren’t often aware of smelling ourselves (unless we are worried about stinking), and we have trouble recollecting the last time we volitionally engaged in exploratorily sniffing someone else. Thus, establishing a weak constitution relation between smelling and our sense of self is challenging. What will need to be revealed is something that escapes our daily awareness and introspective access, that is, that we are continually perceiving our own and other people’s smells. Moreover, these qualitative states occur outside of conscious awareness and yet generate an underlying aspect of our sense of self. Aside from jostling our intuitions about the foundations of our sense of self the evidence surveyed might also require reconceptualizing the conscious versus unconscious distinction in accommodating the nature of our olfactory self and other smelling. (shrink)

Scholars have long recognized the importance of liberty in Milton's early prose, but they tend to center their analysis on republicanism. Although he would go on to express republicanism, Milton's early tracts tie liberty to English political and legal traditions rather than classical ones. Milton, in his early tracts, utilizes the language of the ancient constitution and the common law as he centers liberty on the property and bodies of English citizens, thus framing liberty in distinctly English terms. Additionally, Milton's (...) early prose accepts the power of the monarch, revealing Milton's initial commitment to the existing political structure. (shrink)