The articles published in this issue of Ethical Perspectives all relate to the social and political consequences of phenomena such as uncertainty and anxiety. The biennial Multatuli Lecture, held in Leuven on May 12th, 2001, addressed this very theme. In her paper, “Anxiety and Uncertainty in Modern Society”, Mary Douglas, one of the keynote speakers at the conference, puts forward the view that certainty is only possible when uncertainty is held in check by some kind of institution. Citing examples from (...) her vast experience of various cultural systems, she argues that the loss of certainty in contemporary society, lamented by many, should hardly come as a surprise. Modern demography, technology and forms of labour have contributed to the decline of many traditional institutions, and increased the flexibility and open-endedness of our experience. Douglas realizes that a return to traditional forms of community, and hence greater certainty, is a chimera. She argues that we should rather examine our desire for greater certainty, and prepare ourselves to live with uncertainty, without regrets.In “Habit and History”, Robert Bellah recalls the distinction between elaborated and restricted speech codes — described by Mary Douglas in her book Natural Symbols — and employs it to interpret the contemporary tension between individual autonomy and social solidarity. For Bellah, the history of modernity is an account of the ever increasing dominance of personal freedom, elaborated speech codes and a critical spirit at the expense of ritual practices, loyalty to social institutions and the sense of community. He suggests that we will only succeed in building livable futures once we have given up the illusion of autonomy as something absolute. Instead of viewing elaborated code and restricted code as mutually exclusive, Bellah wishes to explore the possible complementarities between the two, while acknowledging that only the restricted code gives meaning to our lives.Any wish to eradicate the causes of anxiety takes it for granted that a society released from the throes of anxiety would be a desirable one. In his article, “Whistling in the Dark”, Rudi Visker questions this assumption, drawing on a tradition of thought that seeks to emphasize anxiety's revelatory function: anxiety, as Mary Douglas also pointed out, can teach us a valuable lesson about our situation, about the limitations human lives are subject to. Rather than a condition that is produced by identifiable causes, anxiety should be considered as something that is there from the start, and society's task would then be to give this ineradicable anxiety an acceptable outlet or structure.Many critics of modernity posit a close relationship between the decline of traditional meaning systems and the increasing discontent among certain groups within society. Recently, more empirical research is being carried out in order to ascertain whether such a relationship indeed exists. In their paper, “The Malaise of Limitlessness”, Mark Elchardus and Jessy Siongers present the results of an investigation into the influence of de-traditionalization on various indicators of social discontent and social well-being, among young people of secondary-school age in Belgium. Although the concept of a tradition, thus also `de-traditionalization', is notoriously difficult to pin down, Elchardus and Siongers find evidence to support the view that the modernization process, with its increased individual choice and greater self-reflection, has led to the loss of meaningful reference points, and that this, in turn, is associated with uncertainty and malaise. Interestingly, there is also evidence of a correlation between social malaise and various attitudes such as intolerance, authoritarianism and anti-democratic feelings.While the previous contributions hint at what might be called an ethical form of sublimation, where anxiety is contained and directed towards acceptable objectives, Duston Moore's article, “Revolutionary Eros”, raises the prospect of an explicitly political form of sublimation. In this wide-ranging commentary on Marcuse's masterwork, Eros and Civilization, Moore works out the far-reaching political and economic consequences of what at first sight would seem to be a matter for private individuals: desire and its repression by nature and culture . For Marcuse, the performance principle is only one among an entire field of alternate possibilities for directing surplus-repression. The full critical force of Marcuse's argument lies in the suggestion that there may be other ways, that surplus-repression might be transformed, thus leading to new kinds of social relations and new, as yet unimagined forms of labour. (shrink)

We develop a broader, more fine-grained taxonomy of forms of ‘transformative experience’ inspired by the work of L.A. Paul. Our vulnerability to such experiences arises, we argue, due to the vulnerability, dependence, and affliction intrinsic to the human condition. We use this trio to distinguish a variety of positively, negatively, and ambivalently valenced forms of epistemically and/or personally transformative experiences. Moreover, we argue that many transformative experiences can arise gradually and cumulatively, unfolding over the course of longer periods of time.

ABSTRACT This paper offers an account of institutional testimonial justice and describes one way that it breaks down, which we call institutional opacity. An institution is opaque when it becomes resistant to epistemic evaluation and understanding by its agents and users. When one cannot understand the inner workings of an institution, it becomes difficult to know how to comport oneself testimonially. We offer an account of an institutional ethos to explain what it means for an institution to be testimonially just; (...) we then describe how an ethos of institutional testimonial justice can break down when the institution becomes opaque. An opaque institution is especially problematic for individuals and groups already rendered epistemically vulnerable during their interactions with that institution, which we call epistemically vulnerabilised individuals. We articulate the features of an encounter between an epistemically vulnerabilised individual and an opaque institution. We end by tracing ameliorative strategies that could help repair a deteriorated institutional ethos of testimonial justice. (shrink)

We examine the problem of generating definite noun phrases that are appropriate referring expressions; that is, noun phrases that (a) successfully identify the intended referent to the hearer whilst (b) not conveying to him or her any false conversational implicatures (Grice, 1975). We review several possible computational interpretations of the conversational implicature maxims, with different computational costs, and argue that the simplest may be the best, because it seems to be closest to what human speakers do. We describe our recommended (...) algorithm in detail, along with a specification of the resources a host system must provide in order to make use of the algorithm, and an implementation used in the natural language generation component of the IDAS system. (shrink)

This volume explores the central problems and exposes intriguing new directions in the philosophy of mathematics, making it an essential teaching resource, ...

This chapter offers a virtue epistemological framework for making sense of the common complaint that scientism is arrogant, dogmatic, or otherwise epistemically vicious. After characterising scientism in terms of stances, I argue that their components can include epistemically vicious dispositions, with the consequence that an agent who adopts such stances can be led to manifest epistemic vices. The main focus of the chapter is the vice of closed-mindedness, but I go on to consider the idea that arrogance and dogmatism are (...) ‘cooperative vices’, ones liable to be activated by closed-mindedness. I conclude that determining whether or not any given stance is vicious will require sensitivity to the ontology of that stance and the psychology of the agents who adopt them. This would be contribute to our understanding both of scientism and of epistemic virtuous and vicious characters or psychologies. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to use Sir William Crookes‘ researches into psychical phenomena as a sustained case study of the role of epistemic virtues within scientific enquiry. Despite growing interest in virtues in science, there are few integrated historical and philosophical studies, and even fewer studies focusing on controversial or ‗fringe‘ sciences where, one might suppose, certain epistemic virtues (like open-mindedness and tolerance) may be subjected to sterner tests. Using the virtue of epistemic courage as my focus, it (...) emerges that Crookes‘ psychical researches were indeed epistemically courageous, but that this judgment must be grounded in sensitivity to the motivational complexity and context-sensitivity of the exercise of epistemic virtues. The paper then considers Crookes‘ remarks on the relationship between epistemic virtuousness and the intellectual integrity and public duties of scientists, thereby placing epistemic virtues in the context of wider debates about the authority of science in late modern societies. I conclude that Crookes‘ researches into psychical phenomena offer instructive lessons for historians of science and virtue epistemologists concerning the complexity and contextuality of epistemic virtues, and the profitable forms that future studies of virtues in science could take. (shrink)

According to some recent critics, philosophy has not progressed over the course of its history because it has not exhibited any substantial increase in the stock of human wisdom. I reject this pessimistic conclusion by arguing that such criticisms employ a conception of progress drawn from the sciences which is inapplicable to a humanistic discipline such as philosophy. Philosophy should not be understood as the accumulation of epistemic goods in a manner analogous to the natural sciences. I argue that the (...) progressiveness of philosophy consists, if anything, in its capacity to provoke and sustain critical reflections upon the ideas and practices which shape and guide human life. (shrink)

A common presupposition in contemporary moral and political philosophy is that individuals should be provided with some basic threshold of goods, capabilities, or well-being. But if there is such a basic minimum, how should this be understood? Dale Dorsey offers an underexplored answer: that the basic minimum should be characterized not as the achievement of a set of capabilities, or as access to some specified bundle of resources, but as the maintenance of a minimal threshold of human welfare. In (...) addition, Dorsey argues that though political institutions should be committed to the promotion of this minimal threshold, we should reject approaches that seek to cast the basic minimum as a human right. His book will be important for all who are interested in theories of political morality. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an analysis of those aspects of Karl Polanyi's social and political thought that relate to environmentalism and ‘green’ politics today. I discuss whether or not he prefigured the degrowth movement, before focusing on his understanding of the New Deal (1933–1939). At the time of writing, the prospect appears likely of a return, at a global scale, of economic slump, mass unemployment and ecological crisis, the background conditions to which Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was responding (...) on the national scale. The paper concludes by drawing lessons from this comparison for possible Green New Deals. (shrink)

This paper explores the phenomenon of vulnerabilisation in relation to the experiences of persons with chronic illnesses. We distinguish a range of kinds of vulnerability, including epistemic vulnerabilities related to epistemic injustices, and describe various interpersonal and institutional processes which can create, exacerbate, and intensify those vulnerabilities. The dynamics of vulnerablisation are related to individual vices and institutional failings, the the pervasive pathophobia of many societies, and various contingent life-events. We conclude that susceptibility to varieties of vulnerabilisation is ultimately reflective (...) of the fragility that is definitive of the human condition. (shrink)

The traditional conception of knowledge as justified true belief is refuted in two famous counterexamples by Edmund L. Gettier. Roderick M. Chisholm has attempted to rescue a version of the traditional conception by distinguishing between defective and nondefective kinds of justification, and redefining knowledge more specifically as nondefectively justified true belief. Chisholm's revised definition avoids Gettier's counterexamples, but goes too far in the opposite direction, imposing conditions that are too narrow and not jointly necessary for knowledge. Chisholm's definition excludes some (...) claims that intuitively constitute genuine knowledge1 by entailing that if a true belief is invalidated as knowledge when defectively justified by a total body of evidence that also makes evident at least one false proposition, then no knowledge whatsoever can be supported by the same evidence. An alternative analysis of knowledge is proposed, according to which the potential loophole between the state of affairs that justifies belief in a proposition, and the state of affairs that makes the proposition true, permitted by the traditional concept of knowledge and discovered by Gettier's counterexamples, is closed by redefining knowledge as semantically‐epistemically evidentially relevant justified true belief. (shrink)

Contemporary metaphilosophical debates on the future of philosophy invariably include references to the natural sciences. This is wholly understandable given the cognitive and cultural authority of the sciences and their contributions to philosophical thought and practice. However such appeals to the sciences should be moderated by reflections on contingency of sciences. Using the work of contemporary historians and philosophers of science, I argue that an awareness of the radical contingency of science supports the claim that philosophy’s future should not be (...) construed as either dependent or necessarily related to that of the sciences. Therefore contemporary debates – about the possibility of philosophy’s status as a science, say – should be tempered by an appreciation of the fact that science may cease to be a significant feature of future metaphilosophical debates. I conclude by considering the implications of this claim for assessments of the progressiveness of philosophy. (shrink)

In this chapter, I offer an account of Midgley‘s critique of scientism that converges on the claim that, among its many faults, scientism is objectionable because it does science an injustice.

Humans have the ability to learn surprisingly complicated statistical information in a variety of modalities and situations, often based on relatively little input. These statistical learning (SL) skills appear to underlie many kinds of learning, but despite their ubiquity, we still do not fully understand precisely what SL is and what individual differences on SL tasks reflect. Here, we present experimental work suggesting that at least some individual differences arise from stimulus-specific variation in perceptual fluency: the ability to rapidly or (...) efficiently code and remember the stimuli that SL occurs over. Experiment 1 demonstrates that participants show improved SL when the stimuli are simple and familiar; Experiment 2 shows that this improvement is not evident for simple but unfamiliar stimuli; and Experiment 3 shows that for the same stimuli (Chinese characters), SL is higher for people who are familiar with them (Chinese speakers) than those who are not (English speakers matched on age and education level). Overall, our findings indicate that performance on a standard SL task varies substantially within the same (visual) modality as a function of whether the stimuli involved are familiar or not, independent of stimulus complexity. Moreover, test–retest correlations of performance in an SL task using stimuli of the same level of familiarity (but distinct items) are stronger than correlations across the same task with stimuli of different levels of familiarity. Finally, we demonstrate that SL performance is predicted by an independent measure of stimulus-specific perceptual fluency that contains no SL component at all. Our results suggest that a key component of SL performance may be related to stimulus-specific processing and familiarity. (shrink)

Meinong's doctrine of the modal moment and the watering-down of extranuclear properties to surrogate nuclear counterparts was offered in response to Russell's problem of the existent round square. To avoid an infinite regress of successively watered-down factualities, Meinong stipulates that the modal moment itself cannot be watered-down. This limits free assumption, since it means that the idea of the existent-cum-modal-moment round square cannot be entertained in thought. It is possible to eliminate the modal moment and watering-down from Meinongian semantics in (...) favor of a strict enforcement of the distinction between nuclear and extranuclear properties. This provides a simpler, more economical Meinongian object theory, and regains unrestricted free assumption. (shrink)

In his overview of recent work on intellectual humility, Nathan Ballantyne (2021) highlights some of the potential ‘dark sides’ of intellectual humility (IH) and calls for a critical study of the ‘value-theory’ of IH. In this article, we sketch out three ways that IH may threaten political conviction. We end our response by arguing that some forms of IH include different kinds of quietism about political convictions, which do not necessarily equate with a lack of conviction.

The Stoics maintained that virtue was the only good; everything else, therefore, was not-good. On the other hand, regarded by itself, this huge class was not equally valueless. Vice, of course, was bad; but everything else was thought to be ‘indifferent’: wealth, health, for example; indifferent, that is, with regard to the summum bonum. Of these Intermediates, men, from human nature, had a leaning to some; these were , had value, were called , that is, preferred, and virtue itself lay (...) in choice exercised among them. (shrink)

Based on an original synthesis of the work of Marx and Bergson, the key theorists of capitalism and creativity, the book presents an astonishing analysis of ...

I offer a new interpretation of Feyerabend’s ‘conquest of abundance’ narrative. I consider and reject both the ontological reading as implausible and the ‘historical’ reading as uncompelling. My own proposal is that the ‘conquest of abundance’ be understood in terms of an impoverishment of the richness of human experience. For Feyerabend, such abundance is ‘conquered’ when individuals internalize distorting epistemic prejudices including those integral to the theoretical conceptions associated with the sciences. I describe several ways, identified by Feyerabend, in which (...) individuals can be led to occlude the richness of their experience in ways that are existentially impoverishing. (shrink)

A compact complex space X is viewed as a 1-st order structure by taking predicates for analytic subsets of X, X \times X, … as basic relations. Let f: X→ Y be a proper surjective holomorphic map between complex spaces and set Xy:=f-1(y). We show that the set Ak,d:={y∈ Y: the number of d-dimensional components of Xy is (...) holomorphic map. The analogous result in the context of algebraic geometry gives rise to the definability of Morley degree. (shrink)

Review of Mark Wynn's book, Renewing the Senses: A Study of the Philosophy and Theology of the Spiritual Life.

Stephen Hawking recently caused controversy by suggesting that philosophy had become obsolete in the face of the advance of modern science. Hawking's The Grand Design is only the latest in a long series of premature notifications of the obsolescence of philosophy. A wide range of writers, including but not limited to scientists and philosophers, have suggested that philosophy, in part or in whole, has been superseded by the sciences in a way that, all things considered, justifies its abandonment. Some forty (...) years ago, E.O. Wilson suggested that the province of ethics should be turned over to biology, forty years before that the logical positivists had drawn up plans for the formation of a ‘scientific philosophy’, and before that, in the nineteenth century, Comte had identified philosophy as the mere precursor to a modern, ‘positive’ stage of human culture. The list of examples could be extended, a fact which prompts the point that, if philosophy is dying, then it is putting up quite a fight. (shrink)

Essays omhandlende den etiske dimension i det militære liv.

AN EMPIRICIST, ONE MIGHT THINK, OUGHT TO BE AGNOSTIC about the existence of the external world. That, anyway, is the received wisdom of respected empiricists such as David Hume. In A Treatise of Human Nature, book I, part II, section VI, Of the idea of existence, and of external existence, Hume argues that.

This essay takes a critical look at Jonathan Berg’s theory of direct belief. Berg’s analysis of the concept of direct belief is considered insightful, but doubts are raised concerning his generalization of the purely extensional truth conditional semantics of direct belief ascription sentences to the truth conditional semantics of all belief ascription sentences. Difficulties are posed that Berg does not discuss, but that are implied by the proposal that the truth conditional semantics of belief ascription sentences generally are those of (...) direct belief ascription sentences, and that once mentioned must enter into an evaluation of the proposition that by implication all beliefs are direct. Another line of objection concerns Berg’s second main thesis that the pragmatics as distinct from the semantics of belief ascription sentences can explain away apparent substitution failure validity breakdowns in belief ascription sentences as inappropriate utterances according to rules of roughly Gricean conversational implicature, rather than correspondence or non-correspondence with the facts about such things as what it is that people actually believe. These two parts of Berg’s argument, that the truth conditional semantics of all belief ascription sentences are those exclusively of direct belief ascription sentences, and that apparent substitution failure is effectively salva propria rather than salva veritate, are explored within the general framework of Berg’s thought experiment, eventually arriving at diametrically opposed conclusions, reflecting on what we believe comic book character Lois Lane believes and does not believe about Superman, and what she believes and does not believe about Clark Kent. (shrink)

A lively philosophical debate has lately arisen over the nature of elementhood in chemistry. Two different senses in which the technical term ELEMENT is currently in use by chemists have been identified, leaving chemistry open to the logical fallacy of equivocation. This paper introduces a third, more elemental candidate: the high-enthalpy short-lived unbonded atom. An enthalpy index based on free-atoms-as-elements is established, whereby one can monitor the degree to which an atom’s spin-based attractive force is implemented exo-enthalpically when the atom (...) binds chemically to others. Enthalpy indexing shows that the strength of an atom’s attractive force is proportional to its spin angular momentum. Vibrational spectroscopy shows that the force varies inversely as the fourth power of the inter-atom distance. Both features differentiate the chemical force from the stronger electromagnetic force and from the weaker Van der Waals force. (shrink)

What is the point of isdem ? Editors of Juvenal pass over the word without comment and most translators are content with an unexplained ‘the same’. But if it means ‘the same as the ships that made the bridge’, it is odd that it should be put with the first clause. On the other hand, if Juvenal means the same ships as those that passed through the Athos canal, the reference must be to the fleet that sailed to Greece and (...) not to the boats that formed the bridge. The awkwardness of the passage is shown up by the obscurity of the Budé translation: ‘la mer tellement couverte de ces mêmes navires que, solidifiée, elle aurait supporté les roues des chars.’. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the deployment and interdependence of different expressions of gendered and classed violence in shaping the choices, trajectories and subjectivities of young women on vocational beauty therapy courses. It takes as its premise the understanding that, far from simply being an aberrant expression of interpersonal or intergroup aggression, violence is embedded in social life in multiple and complex ways, reverberating through women's lives to reproduce disadvantage and subordination. The paper draws on theoretical and empirical investigations of the (...) interrelationships between structural, direct and symbolic expressions of violence and asks what this literature can offer in challenging normative, often individualised, conceptions of violence. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) beauty therapy courses and the young women undertaking them, I explore the accounts of students and their tutors on becoming and being ‘beauty girls’. I consider what these accounts might tell us about how forms of symbolic and interpersonal violence intersect with, reproduce and legitimise the violence involved in unequal and unjust socio-economic structures. I argue that the ways in which different forms of violence mutually reinforce each other at a micro-level produce an embodied ‘sense of limits’ that ultimately reproduces the structural violence of gendered and classed inequalities. The examples given illustrate both a ‘chronology of violence’ in young women's lives, and the way in which those lives can be understood, at least in part, as embedded in and shaped by networks of violence. Finally, I briefly consider examples of dissent and resistance, the conditions under which they might be possible and the ways in which, through the interplay of different forms of violence, they might also be curtailed. (shrink)

This essay examines the relationship between wording authorship, depression and addiction. Styron's own experience was of tumbling into acute depression, following the withdrawal of his habitual low-level alcohol habit. The paper examines the way in which such depressions may be described as emptinesses of being congruent with a philosophical (Sartrean) perspective: it compares them with the wild excesses and hyperactivities associated with alcoholism in Leaving Las Vegas and The Great Gatsby. The paper makes several theoretical association between alcoholic behavior and (...) the act of writing itself. (shrink)