In recent years, the construct of character has received substantial attention among developmental scientists, but no consensus exists about the content and structure of character, especially among children and early adolescents. In a study of positive development among racially diverse Cub Scouts in the greater Philadelphia area, we assessed the construct and concurrent validity of a new measure of character, the Assessment of Character in Children and Early Adolescents, among 906 Scouts and 775 non-Scout boys and girls. We identified an (...) eight-correlated-factor model as providing the best fit with our data. We further established measurement invariance and explored latent mean differences for ACCEA scores across two Scout groups, non-Scout boys and non-Scout girls. Girls were generally superior than boys on all character attributes. We further examined concurrent validity of ACCEA by correlating the character attributes with youth sense of school competence, intentional self-regulation and parental perception of youth school performance. We discuss implications for future character research and point to the value of the ACCEA measure being used by practitioners in character development programs. (shrink)

This volume seeks to advance and popularise the use of corpus-driven quantitative methods in the study of semantics. The first part presents state-of-the-art research in polysemy and synonymy from a Cognitive Linguistic perspective. The second part presents and explains in a didactic manner each of the statistical techniques used in the first part of the volume. A handbook both for linguists working with statistics in corpus research and for linguists in the fields of polysemy and synonymy.

Many contemporary philosophers argue that assertion is governed by an epistemic norm. In particular, many defend the knowledge account of assertion, which says that one should assert only what one knows. Here, I defend a non‐normative alternative to the knowledge account that I call the repK account of assertion. According to the repK account, assertion represents knowledge, but it is not governed by a constitutive epistemic rule. I show that the repK account offers a more straightforward interpretation of the conversational (...) patterns and intuitions that motivate the knowledge account. It does so in terms of ordinary normative principles that philosophers already accept, none of which are constitutive to assertion. I then contend that the repK account is preferable to the knowledge account because it is simpler, its implications are less contentious, and it avoids a problem for normative accounts of assertion recently raised by Peter Pagin. I also argue that the repK account offers a satisfying explanation of selfless assertion, a counterexample to the knowledge account posed by Jennifer Lackey. (shrink)

This article offers a new argument that there must be something rather than nothing, grounded in the PSR. Inspired by the rationalist tradition running from Parmenides to Spinoza and Leibniz, I argue that there must be something rather than nothing because the contrary would constitute a violation of the PSR. In particular, I argue that, if there was nothing, there could be no sufficient reason for it, since nothing at all would exist to serve as a sufficient reason. Therefore, given (...) the PSR, something must exist after all. After presenting and explaining this new argument, I consider a series of objections and replies, and develop some of its broader philosophical implications. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a doctrine I call ?infallibilism?, which I stipulate to mean that If S knows that p, then the epistemic probability of p for S is 1. Some fallibilists will claim that this doctrine should be rejected because it leads to scepticism. Though it's not obvious that infallibilism does lead to scepticism, I argue that we should be willing to accept it even if it does. Infallibilism should be preferred because it has greater explanatory power (...) than fallibilism. In particular, I argue that an infallibilist can easily explain why assertions of ?p, but possibly not-p? (where the ?possibly? is read as referring to epistemic possibility) is infelicitous in terms of the knowledge rule of assertion. But a fallibilist cannot. Furthermore, an infallibilist can explain the infelicity of utterances of ?p, but I don't know that p? and ?p might be true, but I'm not willing to say that for all I know, p is true?, and why when a speaker thinks p is epistemically possible for her, she will agree (if asked) that for all she knows, p is true. The simplest explanation of these facts entails infallibilism. Fallibilists have tried and failed to explain the infelicity of ?p, but I don't know that p?, but have not even attempted to explain the last two facts. I close by considering two facts that seem to pose a problem for infallibilism, and argue that they don't. (shrink)

The most widely endorsed philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness assume that it contributes a single functional capacity to an organism’s information processing toolkit. However, conscious processes are a heterogeneous class of psychological phenomena supported by a variety of neurobiological mechanisms. This suggests a plurality of functional contributions of consciousness (FCCs), in the sense that conscious experience facilitates different functional capacities in different psychological domains. In this paper, I first develop a general methodological framework for isolating the psychological functions that (...) are associated with conscious experience. I then use this to show that the leading accounts—Global Workspace Theories, Higher Order Thought Theory and Information Integration Theory—all fail to acknowledge this functional pluralism, which limits their applicability as theories of consciousness. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists now argue that emotions play a vital role in reasoning. This paper explores one particular way of elucidating how emotions help reason which may be dubbed ?the search hypothesis of emotion?. After outlining the search hypothesis of emotion and dispensing with a red herring that has marred previous statements of the hypothesis, I discuss two alternative readings of the search hypothesis. It is argued that the search hypothesis must be construed as an account of what emotions (...) typically do, rather than as a definition of emotion. Even as an account of what emotions typically do, the search hypothesis can only be evaluated in the context of a specific theory of what emotions are. 1 Introduction 2 The search hypothesis of emotion 3 A red herring: the frame problem 4 The search problem 5 Two readings of the search hypothesis 6 Two final remarks 7 Conclusion. (shrink)

The diversified methodology and expertise of interdisciplinary research teams provide the opportunity to overcome the limited perspectives of individual disciplines. This is particularly true at the interface of Robotics, Neuroscience, and Psychology as the three fields have quite different perspectives and approaches to offer. Nonetheless, aligning backgrounds and interdisciplinary expectations can present challenges due to varied research cultures and practices. Overcoming these challenges stands at the beginning of each productive collaboration and thus is a mandatory step in cognitive neurorobotics. In (...) this article, we share eight lessons that we learned from our ongoing interdisciplinary project on human-robot and robot-robot interaction in social settings. These lessons provide practical advice for scientists initiating interdisciplinary research endeavors. Our advice can help to avoid early problems and deal with differences between research fields, prepare for and anticipate challenges, align project expectations, and speed up research progress, thus promoting effective interdisciplinary research across Robotics, Neuroscience, and Psychology. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan's thinking revolutionised the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and had a major impact in fields as diverse as film studies, literary criticism, feminist theory and philosophy. Yet his writings are notorious for their complexity and idiosyncratic style. Emphasising the clinical basis of Lacan's work, _An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis_ is an ideal companion to his ideas for readers in every discipline where his influence is felt. The _Dictionary _features: * over 200 entries, explaining Lacan's own terminology and (...) his use of common psychoanalytic expressions * details of the historical and institutional context of Lacan's work * reference to the origins of major concepts in the work of Freud, Saussure, Hegel and other key thinkers * a chronology of Lacan's life and works. (shrink)

The standard view in epistemology is that propositional knowledge entails belief. Positive arguments are seldom given for this entailment thesis, however; instead, its truth is typically assumed. Against the entailment thesis, Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (Noûs, forthcoming) report that a non-trivial percentage of people think that there can be propositional knowledge without belief. In this paper, we add further fuel to the fire, presenting the results of four new studies. Based on our results, we argue that the entailment thesis does not (...) deserve the default status that it is typically granted. We conclude by considering the alternative account of knowledge that Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel propose to explain their results, arguing that it does not explain ours. In its place we offer a different explanation of both sets of findings—the conviction account, according to which belief, but not knowledge, requires mental assent. (shrink)

Traditionally, a justification for believing something is a priori is if, and only if, it is independent of experience. Throughout Western philosophy since Plato, some of the most divisive questions have been whether a priori justification exists, how it is possible, and how far it reaches. This book is structured around these three main questions. The first question has recently been modulated as to concern the significance of a priori justification: given the unclarities and presuppositions attached to standard explications of (...) the notion of a priori justification, is it still a useful notion for epistemology? In a tight dialectic, the chapters in this part either attack or defend the theoretical importance of that notion. The second part concerns the sources of a priori justification: since a priori justification is not grounded in experience--our arguably best understood source of justification--in what can it be grounded? The chapters in this part explore the possibility that a priori justification is grounded either in intuition or in understanding. The third part concerns the extent of a priori justification: beyond core cases like mathematical proof, what methods can yield a priori justification? The chapters in this part investigate to what degree and why methods like introspection, testimony, and others have an import on a priori justification. Overall, the book showcases and furthers some of the latest contemporary trends in thinking about these questions. (shrink)

How can experience provide knowledge, or even justified belief, about the objective world outside our minds? This volume presents original essays by prominent contemporary epistemologists, who show how philosophical progress on foundational issues can improve our understanding of, and suggest a solution to, this famous sceptical question.

Restrictive visitation policies produce inequities in healthcare that have meaningful consequences for patients’ health and well-being. There is a surplus of existing literature exploring the consequences of reduced visitation in the setting of pediatric patients lacking decision-making capacity, but relatively little scholarship addressing visitation restriction for less vulnerable adults possessing capacity. Here, we present the case of a patient who suffered serious complications of childbirth, during the delivery of her healthy newborn, leading to prolonged hospitalization. During her treatment course, she (...) was subsequently denied visitation with her newborn, who had been discharged from the hospital, and this had detrimental effects on her recovery. Hospital policies restricting visitation during the COVID-19 pandemic were intended to reduce the risk of disease exposure for both patients and staff, despite conflicting evidence demonstrating this benefit. In contrast, they often have negative effects on patient stress, mood, and physical recovery. The sequelae of this US-based case study argue the need for more holistic hospital visitation policies, placing a specific lens on adult patients receiving a visitation from their newborn children. (shrink)

Recent EEG studies on the early postmortem interval that suggest the persistence of electrophysiological coherence and connectivity in the brain of animals and humans reinforce the need for further investigation of the relationship between the brain’s activity and the dying process. Neuroscience is now in a position to empirically evaluate the extended process of dying and, more specifically, to investigate the possibility of brain activity following the cessation of cardiac and respiratory function. Under the direction of the Center for Healthy (...) Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, research was conducted in India on a postmortem meditative state cultivated by some Tibetan Buddhist practitioners in which decomposition is putatively delayed. For all healthy baseline and postmortem subjects presented here, we collected resting state electroencephalographic data, mismatch negativity, and auditory brainstem response. In this study, we present HB data to demonstrate the feasibility of a sparse electrode EEG configuration to capture well-defined ERP waveforms from living subjects under very challenging field conditions. While living subjects displayed well-defined MMN and ABR responses, no recognizable EEG waveforms were discernable in any of the tukdam cases. (shrink)

_ _From the frozen landscapes of the Antarctic to the haunted houses of childhood, the memory of places we experience is fundamental to a sense of self. Drawing on influences as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and J. G. Ballard, _The Memory of Place___ __charts the memorial landscape that is written into the body and its experience of the world._ Dylan Trigg’s _The Memory of Place_ _ __offers a lively and original intervention into contemporary debates within “place studies,” an interdisciplinary (...) field at the intersection of philosophy, geography, architecture, urban design, and environmental studies. Through a series of provocative investigations, Trigg analyzes monuments in the representation of public memory; “transitional” contexts, such as airports and highway rest stops; and the “ruins” of both memory and place in sites such as Auschwitz. While developing these original analyses, Trigg engages in thoughtful and innovative ways with the philosophical and literary tradition, from Gaston Bachelard to Pierre Nora, H. P. Lovecraft to Martin Heidegger. Breathing a strange new life into phenomenology, _The Memory of Place___ __argues that the eerie disquiet of the uncanny is at the core of the remembering body, and thus of ourselves. The result is a compelling and novel rethinking of memory and place that should spark new conversations across the field of place studies. Edward S. Casey, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and widely recognized as the leading scholar on phenomenology of place, calls _The Memory of Place _“genuinely unique and a signal addition to phenomenological literature. It fills a significant gap, and it does so with eloquence and force.” He predicts that Trigg’s book will be “immediately recognized as a major original work in phenomenology.”. (shrink)

This article reflects on the way COVID-19 has altered our understanding and experience of everyday life, with a particular focus on the relationship between anxiety and the body. There are a number of ways to think about how anxiety has impacted bodily experience during the pandemic, and I focus on two specific aspects. First, I focus on the transformation of the body from a site of pre-reflective unity to its thematization as a discernible thing. In the process, I argue that (...) this disclosure of the body as a thing renders the body an object of anxiety while also being an expression of anxiety. Second, I consider the role anxiety plays in altering our relationship to other people. Instead of a fluid interplay between oneself and another, I argue that the pandemic has shifted our relationship to other people through concealing the expressivity of the body. I conclude by considering how these aspects can challenge conventional ideas of phenomenology while also underscoring the necessity of a critical approach. (shrink)

This paper locates a source of contingency for Leibniz in the fact that God can do otherwise, absolutely speaking. This interpretative line has been previously thought to be a dead-end because it appears inconsistent with Leibniz’s own conception of God, as the ens perfectissimum, or the most perfect being (Adams, 1994). This paper points out that the best argument on offer which seeks to demonstrate this inconsistency fails. The paper then argues that the supposition that God does otherwise implies for (...) Leibniz (at least) that God would not be praiseworthy, which is an absurd implication—or a violation of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR)—but that this is not, strictly speaking, an inconsistency—or a violation of the principle of contradiction (POC). While praiseworthiness is a perfection—and is compossible with God’s other perfections—and so God must instantiate it, this paper argues that, given the nature of praiseworthiness for Leibniz, it in fact makes sense to say that praiseworthiness is merely a contingent perfection of God. (shrink)

David Hume and Simone de Beauvoir agree that human beings have a great deal of control over their moral and political lives, which is well captured in Hume's assertion that "mankind is an inventive species". But Hume argues that the most important thing needed to settle our social lives and determine justice is the agreement on rules of property, while Beauvoir thinks that the rules of property will never be enough to establish the best life, but rather that we should (...) be focusing on freedom. In this article we reconstruct Hume's argument for property, then develop a Beauvoirian critique of Hume that brings out the weakness of any theory of property that does not prevent inequalities of property from interfering with freedom. And then we give the last word to a Humean response to Beauvoir that would insist that there can be no freedom but only violence without rules of property, which she ignores. Both thinkers appeal to humanity as an overriding goal, and perhaps that is the way to reconcile the two: we need both property and freedom to achieve our humanity. (shrink)

What is the human body? Both the most familiar and unfamiliar of things, the body is the centre of experience but also the site of a prehistory anterior to any experience. Alien and uncanny, this other side of the body has all too often been overlooked by phenomenology. In confronting this oversight, Dylan Trigg’s The Thing redefines phenomenology as a species of realism, which he terms unhuman phenomenology. Far from being the vehicle of a human voice, this unhuman phenomenology (...) gives expression to the alien materiality at the limit of experience. -/- By fusing the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Levinas with the horrors of John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and H.P. Lovecraft, Trigg explores the ways in which an unhuman phenomenology positions the body out of time. At once a challenge to traditional notions of phenomenology, The Thing is also a timely rejoinder to contemporary philosophies of realism. The result is nothing less than a rebirth of phenomenology as redefined through the lens of horror. (shrink)

Virtue ethics prescribes cultivating global and behaviorally efficacious character traits, but John Doris and others argue that situationist social psychology shows this to be infeasible. Here, I show how certain versions of virtue ethics that ‘go mental’ can withstand this challenge as well as Doris’ further objections. The defense turns on an account of which psychological materials constitute character traits and which the situationist research shows to be problematically variable. Many situationist results may be driven by impulsive akrasia produced by (...) low-level , emotionally induced ignorance about one’s situation, and some may be driven by a further subtype: modal akrasia. Many subjects in the infamous Milgram experiments, e.g., seem to have recognized what the virtuous thing to do was and that they should do it, and only failed to do it because their emotions prevented them from seeing that they could. If the primary constituents of character traits are higher-level mental dispositions involved in deliberation, though, then the results don’t show that these psychological materials are problematically variable. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson's epistemology leads to a fairly radical version of scepticism. According to him, all knowledge is evidence. It follows that if S knows p, the evidential probability for S that p is 1. I explain Williamson's infallibilist account of perceptual knowledge, contrasting it with Peter Klein's, and argue that Klein's account leads to a certain problem which Williamson's can avoid. Williamson can allow that perceptual knowledge is possible and that all knowledge is evidence, while at the same time avoiding (...) Klein's problem. But while Williamson can allow that we know some things through experience, there are very many things he must say we cannot know. Given just how very many these are, he should be considered a sceptic. (shrink)

This book clarifies the distinctions between three key concepts - Anti-Racist Practice (ARP), Anti-Discriminatory Practice(ADP) and Anti-Oppressive Practice (AOP). Critically and constructively analysing these three approaches to practice it reappraises their potential in the light of emerging equality issues in the health service. With contributions from leading teachers and practitioners in the field, Equalising Opportunities provides students and practitioners in health and social care with a clear overview of an area where there is much confusion and imperfect understanding.

The debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists depends in large part on what ordinary people mean by ‘free will’, a matter on which previous experimental philosophy studies have yielded conflicting results. In Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (2005, 2006), most participants judged that agents in deterministic scenarios could have free will and be morally responsible. Nichols and Knobe (2007), though, suggest that these apparent compatibilist responses are performance errors produced by using concrete scenarios, and that their abstract scenarios reveal the folk (...) theory of free will for what it actually is—incompatibilist. Here, we argue that the results of two new studies suggest just the opposite. Most participants only give apparent incompatibilist judgments when they mistakenly interpret determinism to imply that agents’ mental states are bypassed in the causal chains that lead to their behavior. Determinism does not entail bypassing, so these responses do not reflect genuine incompatibilist intuitions. When participants understand what determinism does mean, the vast majority take it to be compatible with free will. Further results indicate that most people’s concepts of choice and the ability to do otherwise do not commit them to incompatibilism, either, putting pressure on incompatibilist arguments that rely on transfer principles, such as the Consequence Argument. We discuss the implications of these findings for philosophical debates about free will, and suggest that incompatibilism appears to be either false, or else a thesis about something other than what most people mean by ‘free will’. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a “psychoanalysis of Nature”. My thesis is that in order to understand the creation of a Merleau-Pontean psychoanalysis, we need to ultimately understand the place of Schelling in Merleau-Ponty’s late thought. Through his dialogue with Schelling, Merleau-Ponty will be able to formulate not only a psychoanalysis of Nature, but also fulfil the ultimate task of phenomenology itself; namely, of identifying “what resists phenomenology—natural being, the ‘barbarous’ source Schelling spoke of” (...) and situating it precisely at the heart of phenomenology. The plan for studying this natural psychoanalysis is threefold. First, I provide an overview of the role psychoanalysis plays in the 1951 lecture, “Man and Adversity,” focusing especially on this lecture as a turning point in his thinking. Second, I chart how Merleau-Ponty’s psychoanalysis is informed by the various ways in which the unconscious is formulated in his thought, leading eventually to a dialogue with Schelling. Accordingly, in the final part of the paper, I trace the role of Schelling’s thought in the creation of a Merleau-Pontean psychoanalysis. As I argue, what distinguishes this psychoanalysis is the centrality of Schelling’s idea of the “barbaric principle,” which manifests itself as the notion of an unconscious indexing an “excess of Being” resistant to classical phenomenology. (shrink)

Was love invented by European poets in the middle ages, as C. S. Lewis claimed, or is it part of human nature? Will winning the lottery really make you happy? Is it possible to build robots that have feelings? These are just some of the intriguing questions explored in this new guide to the latest thinking about the emotions. Drawing on a wide range of scientific research, from anthropology and psychology to neuroscience and artificial intelligence, Emotion: The Science of Sentiment (...) takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the human heart. Illustrating his points with entertaining examples from fiction, film, and popular culture, Dylan Evans ranges from the evolution of the emotions to the nature of love and happiness to the language of feelings, offering readers the most recent thinking on real life topics that touch us all. But Emotion is also a book filled with surprises. Readers will discover, for instance, that the basic emotions are felt the world over--whether we live in the shadow of Times Square or in the depths of the rain forest, we all feel the emotions of disgust, joy, surprise, anger, fear, and distress. We find out that, according to research, winning the lottery does not cause a lasting increase in happiness--a short-lived euphoria is followed in almost every case with a return to our usual emotional state, if not worse. And we meet Kismet, an MIT robot that can express a wide range of emotions, from fear to happiness. Fun to read and based on the latest scientific thinking, here is a stimulating look at our emotions. (shrink)

G protein‐coupled receptors (GPCRs) are the largest family of transmembrane receptors and primarily signal through two main effector proteins: G proteins and β‐arrestins. Many agonists of GPCRs promote “biased” responses, in which different cellular signaling pathways are activated with varying efficacies. The mechanisms underlying biased signaling have not been fully elucidated, with many potential “hidden variables” that regulate this behavior. One contributor is “location bias,” which refers to the generation of unique signaling cascades from a given GPCR depending upon the (...) cellular location at which the receptor is signaling. Here, we review evidence that GPCRs are expressed at and traffic to various subcellular locations and discuss how location bias can impact the pharmacologic properties and characterization of GPCR agonists. We also evaluate how differences in subcellular environments can modulate GPCR signaling, highlight the physiological significance of subcellular GPCR signaling, and discuss the therapeutic potential of exploiting GPCR location bias. (shrink)

Recent debates over the role of recognition by the community for one’s development and flourishing generally discuss community in a univocal sense: the way that recognition functions in particular communities is not fundamentally different from the way it functions in the larger community. They also tend to logically prioritize a fundamental human identity over particular religious, ethnic, or societal identities, which are understood to be secondary to, and derivative of, this basic identity. In his depiction of how communal recognition contributes (...) to individual selfhood, Søren Kierkegaard challenges these accounts by (1) differentiating between how communal recognition occurs in society in general and in one particular community, the Christian church and (2) questioning the idea that the self created in the former is more fundamental than that created in the latter. For Kierkegaard, one’s identities as both a Christian and a fully-developed self depend essentially on recognition by the Other: initially and fundamentally on recognition by God alone, and secondarily and derivatively on recognition by the human Other. (shrink)

It seems natural to suppose that the burgeoning field of critical phenomenology would come to bear at least some affinities or resemblances (whether implicitly or explicitly) to critical theory, insofar as both are deeply concerned with directing a rigorous critical eye towards the most pressing political, economic, cultural, and social issues of our time. Yet critical theory has also had its share of critics of phenomenology itself, not least of which was the foremost member of the first-generation Frankfurt School critical (...) theorists, Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno’s critique of phenomenology was, for historical reasons, confined to Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and might be concisely put as follows: for Adorno, classical phenomenology is insufficiently critical towards contemporary realities of oppression and domination (an insufficiency variously attributed to an alleged pernicious idealism, solipsism, methodological individualism, descriptivism, or ahistoricism in classical phenomenology). On this count, critical phenomenologists today may very well agree—at least to the point of affirming that phenomenology’s critical potential remained largely “untapped” in its classical formulations. However, in a twist of historical fate, Adorno failed to engage with a contemporaneous phenomenologist with whom he perhaps had more in common than anyone else: Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas himself was also notably critical of Husserl and Heidegger (while of course also being enormously indebted to them), for reasons not altogether dissimilar to Adorno’s. For Levinas, phenomenology had hitherto neglected the fundamental ethical or moral dimensions of experience—in particular our ethical responsibility towards the Other in the face of the manifold evils and injustices of the world. What might Adorno have thought of Levinas’s work, and Levinas of Adorno’s? What might they have learned from one another? And how might this exchange have affected the trajectories of critical theory, phenomenology, or critical phenomenology? (shrink)

Anxiety is sometimes thought of as either a state of mind, lacking a thick spatial depth, or otherwise conceived as something that individuals undergo alone. Such presuppositions are evident both conceptually and clinically. In this paper, I present a contrasting account of anxiety as being a situated affect. I develop this claim by pursuing a phenomenological analysis of agoraphobia. Far from a disembodied, displaced, and solitary state of mind, agoraphobic is revealed as being thickly mediated by bodily, spatial, and intersubjective (...) dimensions. (shrink)

Phenomenologically grounded research on pregnancy is a thriving area of activity in feminist studies and related disciplines. But what has been largely omitted in this area of research is the experience of childbirth itself. This paper proposes a phenomenological analysis of childbirth inspired by the work of Merleau-Ponty. The paper proceeds from the conviction that the concept of anonymity can play a critical role in explicating the affective structure of childbirth. This is evident in at least two respects. First, the (...) concept of anonymity gives structural specificity to the different levels of bodily existence at work in childbirth. Second, the concept of anonymity can play a powerful explanatory role in accounting for the sense of strangeness accompanying childbirth. To flesh these ideas out, I focus on two attributes of birth, sourced from first-person narratives of childbirth. The first aspect concerns the sense of leaving one’s body behind during childbirth while the second aspect concerns the sense of strangeness accompanying the first encounter with the baby upon successful delivery. I take both of these aspects of childbirth seriously, treating them as being instructive not only of the uniqueness of childbirth but also revealing something important about bodily life more generally. Accordingly, the paper unfolds in three stages. First, I will critically explore the concept of anonymity in Merleau-Ponty; second, I will apply this concept to childbirth; finally, I will provide an outline of how childbirth sheds light on the broader nature of bodily life. (shrink)

This article provides a new reconstruction and evaluation of Kant’s argument in §IX of the second Critique’s Dialectic. Kant argues that our cognitive faculties are wisely adapted to our practical vocation since their failure to supply theoretical knowledge of God and the immortal soul is a condition of possibility for the highest good. This new reconstruction improves upon past efforts by greater fidelity to the form and content of Kant’s argument. I show that evaluating Kant’s argument requires settling various other (...) issues in the interpretation of his moral philosophy, e.g. his account of moral psychology, motivation, education, and development. (shrink)

I argue that believing that p implies having a credence of 1 in p. This is true because the belief that p involves representing p as being the case, representing p as being the case involves not allowing for the possibility of not-p, while having a credence that’s greater than 0 in not-p involves regarding not-p as a possibility.

RésuméLes philosophes et les scientifiques présument en général que la conscience est caractérisée par « un point de vue à la première personne ». Selon une interprétation de cette revendication, les expériences sont définies, au moins en partie, par des représentations qui encodent un « point de vue » centré sur le sujet. Par contre, les revendications sur les caractéristiques déterminantes de la conscience doivent être attentives à la possibilité d'une dissociation : si une structure neurobiologique ou une fonction psychologique (...) n'est pas nécessaire ni suffisante pour la conscience, elle ne peut pas être un attribut distinctif dans un sens robuste. Je fais appel à la recherche sur l’émotion inconsciente, l'action guidée par la perception, la constance perceptuelle et les troubles psychiques pour soutenir que les représentations à la première personne dissocient de l'expérience consciente. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Divine Person" as Analogous NameDylan SchraderThe position of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Thomistic school that human beings cannot name God and creatures univocally is well-known.1 This includes the term "person," which is predicated of the Trinity, of angels, and of human beings truly but analogically. In contrast, it might seem that, when speaking of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in respect of one another, "divine person" must (...) be univocal.2 [End Page 217]The seventeenth-century Discalced Carmelites of Salamanca (the Salmanticenses) thought otherwise. They argued that the ratio3 of "divine person" is common to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit not univocally, but analogically, and that this follows from established Thomistic principles.4 Their position makes for an interesting case study in religious language, as the Salmanticenses apply a highly developed material logic to the central mystery of Christian faith.Words, Concepts, and ThingsIn On Interpretation (Peri hermeneias), Aristotle explains that words immediately signify concepts and, by means of concepts, things.5 This so-called "semantic triangle" makes it easy to misunderstand univocity and analogy if we do not first determine how a particular thinker conceives of the relationship among words, concepts, and things. To discern how the Salmanticenses understood this relationship, it is most helpful to look to their counterparts, the Discalced Carmelites at neighboring Alcalá de Henares outside Madrid, commonly called the Complutenses.6 The Complutenses' Artium cursus [End Page 218] serves as philosophical handmaid to the Salmanticenses' Cursus theologicus, and is therefore essential for correctly interpreting the latter's claims about grammar, logic, and metaphysics.7To begin with the verbal element, this is how the Complutenses, following a fairly typical account, explain the difference between a vocal sound, a name, and a term: A vocal sound (vox) is speech considered simply as an audible phenomenon, the pure sound wave. A name (nomen) is a vocal sound that signifies something. A term (terminus) is a name insofar as it serves as one end of a proposition.8 Terms may be purely mental (as when a proposition is conceived of in the mind alone), or they may be spoken or written.Names and terms are useful precisely because they signify. The Complutenses define "signifying" (significare) as "representing to the knowing power something other than [the signifier] itself."9 A name or term points beyond itself so that something else can become known to the mind through that name or term.When it comes to spoken (or written) terms, a term is "common" (communis) if it signifies more than one thing. Common terms may be "non-transcendent" (non transcendens) or "transcendent" (transcendens). Common terms are non-transcendent if they are predicated of certain things (such as "man" or "animal"). They are transcendent if they are predicated of all things. Six terms are usually acknowledged to be transcendent: "being" (ens); "thing" (res); "true" (verum); "good" (bonum); "something" (aliquid); and "one" (unum).10 [End Page 219]Here it is necessary to distinguish first and second "intention" (intentio).11 The Carmelites take "first intention" properly to be the act whereby the intellect knows things in accord with what is in them as realities.12 This act of the intellect is the "formal first intention," while the thing known is the "objective first intention." A name signifying a thing in this way is a "name of first intention."But the intellect can also attend to those things not in accord with what is in them from their own perspective as realities, but instead with reference to their character as acted upon by the intellect itself. This act is called "second intention."13 An example of first intention is the intellect's knowing that "man is an animal," whereas an example of second intention is its knowing that "'animal' is a genus."The Complutenses stress that first and second intention are, properly speaking, acts of the intellect—distinct ways of attending to what it knows—even though logicians often use "first intention" and "second intention" as shorthand to refer to the objects of these acts.14 In fact, because objective second intentions (the objects of the intellect's second-intentional acts) are beings of reason... (shrink)

Scientists disagree about which capacities a functional analysis of consciousness should target. To address this disagreement, I propose that a good functional analysis should target the etiological functions of consciousness. The trouble is that most hypotheses about the etiological origins of consciousness presuppose particular functional analyses. In recent years, however, a small number of scientists have begun to offer evolutionary hypotheses that are relatively theory neutral. I argue that their hypotheses can serve an independent standard for evaluating among theories of (...) consciousness. (shrink)

If one flips an unbiased coin a million times, there are 2 1,000,000 series of possible heads/tails sequences, any one of which might be the sequence that obtains, and each of which is equally likely to obtain. So it seems (1) 'If I had tossed a fair coin one million times, it might have landed heads every time' is true. But as several authors have pointed out, (2) 'If I had tossed a fair coin a million times, it wouldn't have (...) come up heads every time' will be counted as true in everyday contexts. And according to David Lewis' influential semantics for counterfactuals, (1) and (2) are contradictories. We have a puzzle. We must either (A) deny that (2) is true, (B) deny that (1) is true, or (C) deny that (1) and (2) are contradictories, thus rejecting Lewis' semantics. In this paper I discuss and criticize the proposals of David Lewis and more recently J. Robert G. Williams which solve the puzzle by taking option (B). I argue that we should opt for either (A) or (C). (shrink)

According to the traditional view of weakness of will, a weak-willed agent acts in a way inconsistent with what she judges to be best.1 Richard Holton has argued against this view, claiming that ‘the central cases of weakness of will are best characterized not as cases in which people act against their better judgment, but as cases in which they fail to act on their intentions’ (1999: 241). But Holton doesn’t think all failures to act on one’s prior intentions, or (...) all revisings of intentions, are cases of weakness of will (WW). Rather, he thinks an intention-revision is a case of WW only when it occurs ‘in circumstances in which [one] should not have revised [the intention]’. Holton points out that according to the traditional view of WW, to call an agent ‘weak-willed’ is to make descriptive claim about the agent (about whether an action in fact is inconsistent with what (s)he judges to be best). But according to Holton’s account, the question of whether the agent was weak-willed ‘will depend on which intentions [the agent] should have stuck with as a rational intender. That is a normative question’ (my emphasis) (241-3, 247-8. (shrink)

Surrogate selection can be extremely consequential for patients. Most surrogates are selected by default, so we should care about whether legal provisions for default surrogate selections are ethically justified. Most U.S. states use an inflexible, prioritized list of relationships, that is, a hierarchical list where eligible classes of higher-ranked individuals must be selected before lower-ranked individuals. I argue that while some inflexible, prioritized lists may roughly reflect the order that many patients would select, there is a significant minority that inflexible (...) lists systematically disempower. This is morally unacceptable given the availability of less morally problematic alternatives. One alternative is a flexible, prioritized list, which provides conditions for lower-ranked individuals to be selected ahead of higher-ranked ones. I argue that since all the U.S. states that currently have an inflexible, prioritized list systematically disempower a significant proportion of their residents, they have good reason to adopt a flexible, prioritized list instead. Furthermore, the Universal Law Commission currently recommends that states adopt an inflexible, prioritized list, so they have good reason to change their recommendation. (shrink)

The study of bi- and multilingualism in the ancient Mediterranean has come into its own in recent decades. The evidence is far greater for the Hellenistic and Roman periods than the Classical, so naturally scholarly attention has focussed less on the earlier era. This has led to some enduring notions about bilingualism in the fifth centuryb.c.e.which are yet to be fully scrutinized, including the idea that a Greek's speaking another tongue was inherently transgressive. What did it mean for a Greek (...) to speak a second language? This article re-evaluates the evidence for individual bilingualism in Herodotus and Thucydides in their fifth-century context, focussed on our two best-documented examples of bilingual Greek individuals (Histiaeus of Miletus and Themistocles of Athens). Close reading of Herodotus and Thucydides suggests that not only does the notion of an inherently transgressive bilingualism hold little water for this period, but bilingualism may even be a sign ofμῆτις. (shrink)