pSara Ahmed’s emWillful Subjects/em develops an account of willfulness as a site of simultaneous oppression and resistance: a diagnosis attributed to particular (not-quite-)subjects and to modes of behavior that are thereby diminished, pathologized, and controlled, and a “diagnosis” that may be positively affirmed as a way of living and doing otherwise. This essay puts Ahmed’s work on willfulness in conversation with María Lugones’ decolonial feminism, particularly her theory of active subjectivity. With Lugones, we offer, one can better understand the resistant (...) potential of willfulness, not simply as the willful subject possessing an oppositional “will of her own” (which risks reinscribing a unitary notion of the self), but rather, as exercising a different kind of subjectivity altogether—one that relies on multiplicity and arises through relationships across non-dominant difference. Extending the connections that Ahmed herself draws between willfulness and “madness,” we further explore the willful elements in experiences relating to mental illness and cognitive disability, categories of experience that we understand to be important (and undertheorized) aspects of what Aníbal Quijano has termed “the coloniality of power.”/p. (shrink)

Reflecting on the distinction between thinking about a non-occurrent pain and feeling a current pain takes us into the domain of contemporary philosophy of mind. In the former case we talk of the mental state’s intentional properties, in the latter of phenomenal properties. Daniel Dennett’s contributions to this discussion are clearly limned in his Content and Consciousness and it is no accident that its reappearance as a paperback is so quickly followed by his new collection, The Intentional Stance. The latter (...) work continues to develop themes begun in the former, especially his embedding philosophy of mind within an evolutionary framework. For those interested in contemporary philosophy of mind and Dennett’s exciting and controversial views, Content and Consciousness provides an excellent introduction and even some much needed “cash” for his latter views. In very broad strokes here is what he is up to. (shrink)

Recent developments in genomic science hold out the tantalizing prospect of soon being able to treat and prevent a wide variety of medical conditions through gene therapy. In time, it may be possible to use similar techniques not simply to combat disease but also to enhance, or improve on, normal human functioning.

"... both an excellent introduction and a thoroughgoing analysis of Kristeva’s writing." —Signs "The book is a brilliant combination of a recuperative and a critical reading of Kristeva’s work." —Changes: An International Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy "... a thorough, detailed, and critical analysis of the writings of Julia Kristeva." —Elizabeth Grosz "... the most involved and engaging study of Julia Kristeva’s work to date..." —The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory This first full-scale feminist interpretation of Kristeva’s work (...) situates her within the context of French feminism. Oliver guides her readers through Kristeva’s intellectual formation in linguistics, Freud, Lacan, and poetics. This comprehensive introduction to Kristeva makes accessible her important contributions to philosophy, linguistics, and psychoanalytic feminism. (shrink)

Tom Beauchamp and James Childress have always maintained that their four principles approach (otherwise known as principlism) is a globally applicable framework for biomedical ethics. This claim is grounded in their belief that the principles of respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence and justice form part of a 'common morality', or collection of very general norms to which everyone who is committed to morality subscribes. The difficulty, however, has always been how to demonstrate, at least in the absence of a full-blooded (...) analysis of the concept of morality, whether the four principles are foundational, and so globally applicable, in this way. In the recently published sixth edition of Principles of Biomedical Ethics, an imaginative and non-question-begging empirical method of determining the common morality's norms is suggested. In this paper, I outline this method, before arguing that it is difficult to see how it might be thought to achieve its purpose. (shrink)

The phenomena of call-outs and call-ins are fiercely debated. Are they mere instances of virtue signaling? Or can they actually perform social justice work? This paper gains purchase on these questions by focusing on how language users negotiate norms in speech. The authors contend that norm-enacting speech not only makes a norm salient in a context but also creates conversational conditions that motivate adherence to that norm. Recognizing this allows us to define call-outs and call-ins: the act of calling-out brings (...) with it the presupposition that its target's behavior is norm-violating, whereas the act of calling-in simply presupposes its target's willingness to revise their belief. With these definitions at hand, we evaluate whether call-outs and call-ins are suitable tools for combating social injustice. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine has always required integration of patient values with ‘best’ clinical evidence. It is widely recognized that scientific practices and discoveries, including those of EBM, are value-laden. But to date, the science of EBM has focused primarily on methods for reducing bias in the evidence, while the role of values in the different aspects of the EBM process has been almost completely ignored.

The view we defend is that in virtue of its nature, disgust is not fit to do any moral or social work whatsoever, and that there are no defensible uses for disgust in legal or political institutions. We first describe our favoured empirical theory of the nature of disgust. Turning from descriptive to normative issues, we address the best arguments in favour of granting disgust the power to justify certain judgements, and to serve as a social tool, respectively. Daniel Kahan (...) advances a pair of theses that suggest disgust is indispensable (Moral Indispensability Thesis), and so has an important part to play in the functioning of a just, well-ordered society (Conservation Thesis). We develop responses and show how they rebut the arguments given in support of each thesis. We conclude that any society free of social disgust would be more just, reasonable and compassionate. (shrink)

This book outlines and circumvents two serious problems that appear to attach to Kant’s moral philosophy, or more precisely to the model of rational agency that underlies that moral philosophy: the problem of experiential incongruence and the problem of misdirected moral attention. The book’s central contention is that both these problems can be sidestepped. In order to demonstrate this, it argues for an entirely novel reading of Kant’s views on action and moral motivation. In addressing the two main problems in (...) Kant’s moral philosophy, the book explains how the first problem arises because the central elements of Kant’s theory of action seem not to square with our lived experience of agency, and moral agency in particular. For example, the idea that moral deliberation invariably takes the form of testing personal policies against the Categorical Imperative seems at odds with the phenomenology of such reasoning, as does the claim that all our actions proceed from explicitly adopted general policies, or maxims. It then goes on to discuss the second problem showing how it is a result of Kant’s apparent claim that when an agent acts from duty, her reason for doing so is that her maxim is lawlike. This seems to put the moral agent’s attention in the wrong place: on the nature of her own maxims, rather than on the world of other people and morally salient situations. The book shows how its proposed novel reading of Kant’s views ultimately paints an unfamiliar but appealing picture of the Kantian good-willed agent as much more embedded in and engaged with the world than has traditionally been supposed. (shrink)

The book juxtaposes key texts from Foucault and Habermas; it then adds a set ofreactions and commentaries by theorists who have taken up the two alternative approaches to powerand critique.

If there is to be any progress in the debate about what sort of positive moral status Kant can give the emotions, we need a taxonomy of the terms Kant uses for these concepts. It used to be thought that Kant had little room for emotions in his ethics. In the past three decades, Marcia Baron, Paul Guyer, Barbara Herman, Nancy Sherman, Allen Wood and others have argued otherwise. Contrary to what a cursory reading of the Groundwork may indicate, Kant (...) thinks the emotions play an important role in the moral life. I want to extend the work of Baron, Guyer, Herman, Sherman and Wood in three ways. First, I will set out in a diagram Kant's taxonomy of feelings and emotions. Agreement on such a taxonomy should make it easier to evaluate debates about Kant and the emotions. Second, I will focus on a certain subclass of emotions – reason-caused affects – that have previously received little attention, even from these Kant scholars. Third, these scholars base much of their defence of Kant on his later works – especially the Metaphysics of Morals and the Anthropology – but Kant's fairly rich taxonomy of the emotions, including reason-caused affects, is clearly in place at least as early as the Critique of Judgment . I believe that the Critique of Judgment is an importantly ignored resource for understanding the moral role of the emotions for Kant. The third Critique makes positive, philosophically interesting claims about the emotions and morality. Kant emphasizes certain roles for emotions in this work that he develops to the same extent nowhere else. Nevertheless, the Critique of Judgment goes all but unmentioned by many who write on these issues. In what follows, I will defend as many of my claims as possible using the third Critique. (shrink)

In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant famously makes the following startling claim, which we can call the transcendental ideality thesis concerning the nature of space, or, for ease of reference in what follows, simply “TI”: Der Raum stellt gar keine Eigenschaft irgend einiger Dinge an sich, oder sie in ihrem Verhältniß auf einander vor, d.i. keine Bestimmung derselben, die an Gegenständen selbst haftete, und welche bliebe, wenn man auch von allen subjectiven Bedingungen der Anschauung abstrahirte.

Response to Gover (2015) on Trogdon and Livingston (2015) on artwork completion.

The Mental Capacity Act 2005 came into force in England and Wales in 2007. Its primary purpose is to provide “a statutory framework to empower and protect people who may lack capacity to make some decisions for themselves.” Examples of such people are those with dementia, learning disabilities, mental health problems, and so on. The Act also gives those who currently have capacity a legal framework within which they can make arrangements for a time when they may come to lack (...) it. Toward this end, it allows for them to make advance decisions or to appoint proxy decision makers with lasting powers of attorney. (shrink)

Rebecca Bennett, in a recent paper dismissing Julian Savulescu's principle of procreative beneficence, advances both a negative and a positive thesis. The negative thesis holds that the principle's theoretical foundation – the notion of impersonal harm or non-person-affecting wrong – is indefensible. Therefore, there can be no obligations of the sort that the principle asserts. The positive thesis, on the other hand, attempts to plug an explanatory gap that arises once the principle has been rejected. That is, it holds that (...) the intuitions of those who adhere to the principle are not genuine moral intuitions, but instead simply give voice to mere (non-moral) preferences. This paper, while agreeing that Savulescu's principle does not express a genuine moral obligation, takes issue with both of Bennett's theses. It is suggested that the argument for the negative thesis is either weak or question-begging, while there is insufficient reason to suppose the positive thesis true. (shrink)

In Beyond Physicalism, an interdisciplinary group of physical scientists, behavioral and social scientists, and humanists from the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research argue that physicalism must be replaced by an expanded scientific naturalism that accommodates something spiritual at the heart of nature.

Ethical medical care of pregnant women in Australia should include the real provision of information regarding the risks and benefits of vaginal birth. Routinely obtaining consent for the different ways in which childbirth is commonly intervened on and the assistance involved (such as midwife-led care or a planned caesarean section) and providing sufficient information for women to evaluate the harms and benefits of the care on offer, would not only enable the empowerment of women but would align with the current (...) standard of care as established by Rogers v Whittaker. (shrink)

Mark Schroeder’s Slaves of the Passions defends a version of the Humean Theory of Reasons he calls “Hypotheticalism,” according to which all reasons an agent has for action are explained by desires that are in turn explained by reference to her psychology. This paper disputes Schroeder’s claim that his theory has the potential to allay long-standing worries about moral objectivity and normativity within a Humean framework because it fails to attain the requisite level of agent-neutrality for moral reasons. The particular (...) problems, and their concomitant solutions, push us in the direction of a more modest ambition for the objectivity of this neo-Humean morality. Moreover, even if all the pieces of Schroeder’s theory are tweaked just enough to make a roughly universal morality practicable, the kind of universality gained might still omit some putatively desirable features of any moral system. (shrink)

Agamben maintains that Heidegger continues the work of the anthropological machine by defining Dasein as uniquely open to the closedness of the animal. Yet, Agamben’s own thinking does not so much open up the concept of animal as it attempts to save humanity from the anthropological machine that always produces the animal as the constitutive outside within the human itself. Agamben’s return to religious metaphors at best displaces the binary man-animal with the binary religion-science, and at worst returns us to (...) a discourse at least as violent as the one from which he is trying to escape. Merleau-Ponty’s reanimation of science provides an alternative. (shrink)

A diagnosis of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder ascribes cause to developmental disability; however, there are logical issues in causation with ethical implications. This article focuses on the use of fallacious logic in FASD, focusing on the Canadian Guidelines for diagnosis, and knowledge translation issues from science to practice. The clinician’s logical fallacy is an ethical issue of veracity in the clinician–patient relationship; this then leads to issues of nonmaleficence, because the diagnosis in turn blames the mother for her child’s difficulties. (...) Suggestions for revised diagnostic practices that avoid allusions to causation and responsibility are discussed. (shrink)

Chapter 1 is devoted to taking care of some preliminary issues. I begin by distinguishing those states of awareness in virtue of which we’re acquainted with the phenomenal characters of our experiences from those states of awareness some claim are at the very nature of experience. Then I reconcile the idea that experience is transparent with the claim that we can be acquainted with phenomenal character. -/- In Chapter 2 I set up a dilemma that is the primary focus of (...) the dissertation. In the first part of this chapter I argue that phenomenal acquaintance has three key features, what I call its ‘directness’, ‘thickness’, and ‘infallibility’. In the second part I argue, however, that it’s really quite puzzling how thoughts about phenomenal character (or any thoughts, for that matter) could have them. In the next two chapters I consider how we might resolve the dilemma described above. -/- I begin in Chapter 3 by considering an account of phenomenal acquaintance inspired by Bertrand Russell’s discussion of acquaintance. The general idea here is to excise mental representation from phenomenal acquaintance, and I ultimately reject the proposal. -/- Chapter 4 is the core chapter of the dissertation. In it I propose an account of phenomenal acquaintance that doesn’t excise mental representation. My account is comprised of three theses. First, token experiences are complex and have instances of phenomenal properties as components. Second, instances of phenomenal properties are mental representations, and they represent themselves. Third, the attention relevant to phenomenal acquaintance is underwritten by self-representation. I argue that my account explains how phenomenal acquaintance is direct, thick, and infallible, thereby resolving our dilemma. -/- I argue in Chapter 5 that my account of phenomenal acquaintance explains why there is an explanatory gap between the phenomenal and non-phenomenal truths. Accordingly, I conclude that the explanatory gap doesn’t pose a problem for physicalism. Here I implement what has come to be called the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ for responding to the challenge posed by the explanatory gap. (shrink)

Adam Smith’s work on moral sentiments is part of his much wider project of a science of man. And his most developed account of sympathy and sociability, provided in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, actually provides the central foundation for his wider, theoretical, or conjectural histories of law, language, government, and political economy. Indeed, his collected writings construct a space for thinking not only about the conjectural history of law, government, and society more precisely in terms of the mechanism of (...) sympathy and propriety. They also focus on the relationship between passions, actions, and political judgements. Smith’s theory of human and commercial sociability and sympathy nevertheless has various limits, and these can be understood in moral and political, commercial and historical, as well as providential and jurisprudential terms. My discussion here is an attempt to show how these limits interweave and interconnect across the body of Smith’s work. (shrink)

We argue that uncomputability and classical scepticism are both re ections of inductive underdetermination, so that Church's thesis and Hume's problem ought to receive equal emphasis in a balanced approach to the philosophy of induction. As an illustration of such an approach, we investigate how uncomputable the predictions of a hypothesis can be if the hypothesis is to be reliably investigated by a computable scienti c method.

Because of its characterization of National Socialism as a form of 'totalitarian monopoly capitalism', many critics of Franz Neumann's pioneering book of 1942, Behemoth, have rejected what they see as a crude Marxist analysis of the subject. This not only does little justice to the richness of Neumann's book, it also distorts its central focus. By contrast, this paper suggests that a proper appreciation of the impact of Max Weber in general, and Carl Schmitt in particular, on the development of (...) Neumann's thought permits a more detailed assessment of both the merits and the shortcomings of his most famous analysis. (shrink)

This article critically engages Julia Kristeva’s latest work on maternal passion as an antidote to what she calls “feminine fatigue.” Oliver elaborates, criticizes, and expands Kristeva’s view that maternity can be a model for thinking about passion and its relation to creativity and even to ethics. She relates Kristeva’s thinking about feminine fatigue to contemporary feminism in the United States. .

This paper argues against Julian Savulescu's principle of procreative beneficence. It maintains that prospective parents have no obligation at all to choose the child, out of a range of possible children, who is likely to lead the best life. This is because a standpoint that the author labels "the internal perspective" is a perfectly appropriate one for parents to adopt when thinking about their own future children. It is only policy makers who are obliged to take up an opposing standpoint--"the (...) external perspective"--and to be motivated by the sorts of "better for" judgements that that perspective delivers. (shrink)

What is Japanese philosophy? This paper will address this question, not by giving a survey of the works of Japanese philosophers or a definition of the subject matter of Japanese philosophy, but by attempting to present how it emerged as a distinct philosophical tradition—by sketching the controversies that gave rise to its formation; the social, intellectual, and historical factors that paved the way to its development; and the revolution of thought which finally gave it the title “Japanese philosophy.” I will (...) argue that Japanese philosophy was born not because Japanese thinkers desperately wanted a philosophy that they could call their own, but because, first and foremost, they were thinking of ways to articulate the ever changing and paradoxical nature of reality. Formed by their religion and informed by the Chinese and Japanese classics, they used the language learned from the West and tried to answer the most fundamental questions of existence. A unique way of philosophizing thus emerged and became a true locus of dialogue between Eastern and Western thought.An Inquiry into the Historical Development of Philosophy in Japan. (shrink)

This study examines the changing role of art and artist during the turn-of-the-century period, offering a consideration of the multiple dichotomies of art and life, aesthetics and economics, production and consumption, and centre and periphery.

Spatial asymmetries are an intriguing feature of directed attention. Recent observations indicate an influence of temperament upon the direction of these asymmetries. It is unknown whether this influence generalises to visual orienting behaviour. The aim of the current study was therefore to explore the relationship between temperament and measures of spatial orienting as a function of target hemifield. An exogenous cueing task was administered to 92 healthy participants. Temperament was assessed using Carver and White's (1994) Behavioural Inhibition System and Behavioural (...) Activation System (BIS/BAS) scales. Individuals with high sensitivity to punishment and low sensitivity to reward showed a leftward asymmetry of directed attention when there was no informative spatial cue provided. This asymmetry was not present when targets were preceded by spatial cues that were either valid or invalid. The findings support the notion that individual variations in temperament influence spatial asymmetries in visual orienting, but only when lateral targets are preceded by a non-directional (neutral) cue. The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric asymmetries and dopamine activity. (shrink)

Forgiveness is traditionally thought of as the forswearing of resentment. Resentment has been argued to be a moral emotion, tightly interrelated with moral protest against a wrongdoing. This has lead to forgiveness being thought of as the forgetting or condoning of wrongdoing. I will argue for a concept of forgiveness that is ‘uncompromising’ for it does not involve giving up one’s judgements about the wrongdoing. I will argue that resentment should be understood as a type of reactive attitude, and that (...) this means that it is not necessarily connected with moral protest. I will show that forgiveness is better understood as the overcoming of reactive attitudes (which includes resentment, but also indignation, anger, and other similar emotions). This will allow for forgiveness to be compatible with maintaining condemnation of wrongdoing. (shrink)

In this essay I investigate the unity of Emerson's sentences. I begin by describing the phenomenology of reading Emerson and use that phenomenology to orient the investigation. I propose to understand the unity of Emerson's sentences by using a variation of Frege's strategy for understanding the unity of sentences generally. I then address how the unity of the Emerson sentence serves to create the unity of the Emerson paragraph and even of the Emerson essay. Along the way I compare Emerson's (...) essays to Lancelot Andrewes’ sermons. I finish by using the results of the investigation and comparisons to provide a partial reading of “Experience” in which I shed light on the nature of Emerson's encounter with the problematic of skepticism. (shrink)

Memmi’s work is every sense a “life project”: a coherent project pursued throughout his long life as an intellectual, but also as the member of a minority group as he has consistently reminded his readers. It is therefore a personal project that is intimately intertwined with the life experiences of an individual, yet has implications for understanding broader communities and societies. The implication – and sometimes the stated intention – is that this is a life project from which the individual (...) concerned and others who read the work can learn something, at both private and public levels, concerning the functioning of human interactions. What then, does such an inventory of a lifetime of writing mean? (shrink)

A one-time editor must admit to nothing short of consternation when he views the child, full grown at twenty-five.