A translation of a dialogue between Evelyne Grossman and Jacob Rogozinski on Artaud, Deleuze, and the status of the ego.

On aborde ici la question du statut du corps et des figurations du corps politique dans la Révolution française. Il s’agirait de savoir si les révolutions démocratiques des temps modernes amorcent un processus de désincorporation du social oů, ŕ partir du régicide se défait l’hypostase du Corpus Mysticum – ou si l’on assiste ŕ une mouvement inverse de réincorporation, ŕ un simple transfert de souveraineté du corps déchu du monarque au Corps régénéré du peuple ou de la Nation. On examinera (...) ainsi, ŕ travers l’analyse des figurations du corps, la question du régicide ŕ la Terreur et les fondaments du discours et de la politique des Jacobins. (shrink)

Totalism is the view that one distribution of well-being is better than another just in case the one contains a greater sum of well-being than the other. Many philosophers, following Parfit, reject totalism on the grounds that it entails the repugnant conclusion: that, for any number of excellent lives, there is some number of lives that are barely worth living whose existence would be better. This paper develops a theory of welfare aggregation—the lexical-threshold view—that allows totalism to avoid the repugnant (...) conclusion, as well as its analogues involving suffering populations and the lengths of individual lives. The theory is grounded in some independently plausible views about the structure of well-being, identifies a new source of incommensurability in population ethics, and avoids some of the implausibly extreme consequences of other lexical views, without violating the intuitive separability of lives. (shrink)

Lara Buchak argues for a version of rank-weighted utilitarianism that assigns greater weight to the interests of the worse off. She argues that our distributive principles should be derived from the preferences of rational individuals behind a veil of ignorance, who ought to be risk averse. I argue that Buchak’s appeal to the veil of ignorance leads to a particular way of extending rank-weighted utilitarianism to the evaluation of uncertain prospects. This method recommends choices that violate the unanimous preferences of (...) rational individuals and choices that guarantee worse distributions. These results, I suggest, undermine Buchak’s argument for rank-weighted utilitarianism. (shrink)

Alva Noë’s version of the enactive conception in _Action in Perception_ is an important contribution to the study of visual perception. First, I argue, however, that it is unclear (at best) whether, as the enactivists claim, work on change blindness supports the denial of the existence of detailed visual representations. Second, I elaborate on what Noë calls the ‘puzzle of perceptual presence’. Thirdly, I question the enactivist account of perceptual constancy. Finally, I draw attention to the tensions between enactivism and (...) two trends in cognitive neuroscience: the two-visual systems model of human vision and the theory of internal forward models of action. (shrink)

According to asymmetric comparativism, it is worse for a person to exist with a miserable life than not to exist, but it is not better for a person to exist with a happy life than not to exist. My aim in this paper is to explain how asymmetric comparativism could possibly be true. My account of asymmetric comparativism begins with a different asymmetry, regarding the (dis)value of early death. I offer an account of this early death asymmetry, appealing to the (...) idea of conditional goods, and generalize it to explain how asymmetric comparativism could possibly be true. I also address the objection that asymmetric comparativism has unacceptably antinatalist implications. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Sometimes it seems that an existing bearer of value should be preserved even though it could be destroyed and replaced with something of equal or greater value. How can this conservative intuition be explained and justified? This paper distinguishes three answers, which I call existential, attitudinal, and object-affecting conservatism. I raise some problems for existential and attitudinal conservatism, and suggest how they can be solved by object-affecting conservatism.

Robustness is a common platitude: hypotheses are better supported with evidence generated by multiple techniques that rely on different background assumptions. Robustness has been put to numerous epistemic tasks, including the demarcation of artifacts from real entities, countering the “experimenter’s regress,” and resolving evidential discordance. Despite the frequency of appeals to robustness, the notion itself has received scant critique. Arguments based on robustness can give incorrect conclusions. More worrying is that although robustness may be valuable in ideal evidential circumstances (i.e., (...) when evidence is concordant), often when a variety of evidence is available from multiple techniques, the evidence is discordant. †To contact the author, please write to: Jacob Stegenga, Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Aristotle is said to have held that any kind of actual infinity is impossible. I argue that he was a finitist (or "potentialist") about _magnitude_, but not about _plurality_. He did not deny that there are, or can be, infinitely many things in actuality. If this is right, then it has implications for Aristotle's views about the metaphysics of parts and points.

Populists are often cast as deniers of rationality, creators of a climate of “post-truth,” and valuing tribe over truth and the rigors of science. Their critics claim the authority of rationality and empirical facts. Yet the critics no less than populists enable an environment of spurious claims and defective argumentation. This is especially true in the realm of science. An important case study is the account of scientific trust offered by a leading public intellectual and historian of science, Naomi Oreskes, (...) and the misapplication of that theory during the coronavirus pandemic. (shrink)

Personal authenticity is out of fashion amongst analytic philosophers. Yet, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus were clearly preoccupied by its theoretical and practical viability. In this study, Jacob Golomb illuminates the writings of these philosophers in an attempt to explain their particular ethical stance on the subject. This book will prove invaluable reading for students and teachers of philosophy, literature and education and indeed for anyone who has ever empathized with Camus's Meursault, Sartre's Matthieu or Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

I motivate and defend a previously underdeveloped functionalist account of the metaphysics of color, a view that I call ‘quality-space functionalism’ about color. Although other theorists have proposed varieties of color functionalism, this view differs from such accounts insofar as it identifies and individuates colors by their relative locations within a particular kind of so-called ‘quality space’ that reflects creatures’ capacities to discriminate visually among stimuli. My arguments for this view of color are abductive: I propose that quality-space functionalism best (...) captures our commonsense conception of color, fits with many experimental findings, coheres with the phenomenology of color experience, and avoids many issues for standard theories of color such as color physicalism and color relationalism. (shrink)

Wigner's quantum-mechanical classification of particle-types in terms of irreducible representations of the Poincaré group has a classical analogue, which we extend in this paper. We study the compactness properties of the resulting phase spaces at fixed energy, and show that in order for a classical massless particle to be physically sensible, its phase space must feature a classical-particle counterpart of electromagnetic gauge invariance. By examining the connection between massless and massive particles in the massless limit, we also derive a classical-particle (...) version of the Higgs mechanism. (shrink)

I defend a radical interpretation of biological populations—what I call population pluralism—which holds that there are many ways that a particular grouping of individuals can be related such that the grouping satisfies the conditions necessary for those individuals to evolve together. More constraining accounts of biological populations face empirical counter-examples and conceptual difficulties. One of the most intuitive and frequently employed conditions, causal connectivity—itself beset with numerous difficulties—is best construed by considering the relevant causal relations as ‘thick’ causal concepts. I (...) argue that the fine-grained causal relations that could constitute membership in a biological population are huge in number and many are manifested by degree, and thus we can construe population membership as being defined by massively multidimensional constructs, the differences between which are largely arbitrary. I end by showing that positions in two recent debates in theoretical biology depend on a view of biological populations at odds with the pluralism defended here. 1 Introduction2 Biological Population, Broad and Narrow3 Difficulties with Narrow Biological Population Conditions3.1 Against the genealogical condition3.2 Against the conspecificity condition3.3 Against the proximity condition3.4 Against the typology condition4 Causal Connectivity5 Massively Multidimensional Population Constructs6 Population Uniqueness and Natural Selection6.1 Statisticalism and its discontents6.2 Price at what price?7 Conclusion. (shrink)

One of the great Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century, Taubes published only this one book during his life, and here the English translation finally becomes available.

Professors Hildt (2023), Shepherd (2023), and Zilio and Lavazza (2023) jointly considered the ethical and philosophical implications of acknowledging non-human (e.g., machine) consciousness. Althou...

Consciousness is central to our lived experience. It is unsurprising, then, that the topic has captivated many students, neuroscientists, philosophers, and other theorists working in cognitive science. But consciousness may seem especially difficult to explain. This is in part because the term “consciousness” has been used in many different ways. The goal of this chapter is to explore several kinds of consciousness: what theorists have called “creature,” “phenomenal,” “access,” “state,” “transitive,” “introspective,” and “self” consciousness. The basic distinctions among these kinds (...) of consciousness are described in Section 1. Section 2 raises potential challenges for explaining these varieties of consciousness and describes a few current theories of them. Section 3 closes the chapter by exploring directions for future work in the cognitive science of consciousness. Along the way, some of the possible interrelationships among these kinds of consciousness are discussed. (shrink)

Out of a reassertion of old ways, this book presents a new blueprint for future professional conduct.

On Zeno Beach there are infinitely many grains of sand, each half the size of the last. Supposing Aristotle denied the possibility of Zeno Beach, did he have a good argument for the denial? Three arguments, each of ancient origin, are examined: the beach would be infinitely large; the beach would be impossible to walk across; the beach would contain a part equal to the whole, whereas parts must be lesser. It is attempted to show that none of these arguments (...) was Aristotle’s. Indeed, perhaps Aristotle’s finitism applied to magnitude only, not plurality. (shrink)

I try to reconcile Dretske's representational theory of conscious mental states with Rosenthal's higher-order thought (HOT) theory of conscious mental states by arguing that Rosenthal's HOT can make room for the notion of a state of consciousness whereby an invidual may be conscious of an object or property without thereby being conscious of being in such a state.

In traditional epistemology, psychological self-knowledge is taken to be the paradigm of privleged a priori knowledge. According to an influential incompatibilist line of thought, traditional epistemic features attributed to psychological self-knowledge are supposed to be inconsistent with content externalism. In this paper, I examine one prominent compatibilist response by an advocate of content externalism, i.e., Fred Dretske's answer tot he incompatibilist argument, based on the model of displaced perceptual knowledge. I discuss the costs and benefits of his answer.

Né en 1921, Edgar Morin est un penseur connu, mais heureusement pas toujours reconnu dans les milieux scientifiques. Sa ronflante Méthode, qui établit que les effets d’une action échappent souvent à son auteur en provoquant des conséquences méconnues, comble surtout des médias trop heureux d’avoir sous la main un théoricien tout-terrain aux analyses grandiloquentes. D’ailleurs, la femme, l’entreprise, le football, la France, l’Europe, les pays de l’est, les pays arabes, le monde... sont, pour Edgar Morin, complexes. En quelques années, Edgar (...) Morin a ainsi réussi à amener la gauche à jeter Marx et ses analyses tranchées aux poubelles de l’Histoire. Car avec Edgar Morin, c’est beaucoup plus complexe et parfois même un tantinet ésotérique. Il est donc insensé de faire preuve de volontarisme politique. (shrink)

I examine the impact of human metarepresentational abilities on human memory.

Der Staat, wie wir ihn zu kennen glauben, ist geschichtlich und gegenwartig die Ausnahme und nicht die Regel. Doch auch in Raumen begrenzter Staatlichkeit wird regiert, haufig unter Beteiligung privater Akteure und internationaler Organisationen. Der Band untersucht, ob und wie unter diesen Bedingungen legitimes Regieren moglich ist und wem die Verantwortung zukommt, Menschenrechte und demokratische Teilhabe zu gewahrleisten. Der erste Teil des Bandes fragt begrifflich nach den normativen Implikationen von Staatlichkeit. Hieran anschlieaend untersucht der zweite Teil menschenrechts- und gerechtigkeitstheoretische Fragen, (...) die sich aus begrenzter Staatlichkeit und dem Wirken nicht-staatlicher Governance-Akteure ergeben. Die Beitrage des dritten Teils erkunden, welche Implikation begrenzte Staatlichkeit fur das Ideal kollektiver Selbstbestimmung hat. Der vierte Teil des Bandes fragt schliealich, wie das Volkerrecht auf Governance in Raumen begrenzter Staatlichkeit reagieren sollte. (shrink)

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has taken a significant toll on mental health; people around the world are experiencing high levels of stress and deteriorated wellbeing. The past research shows that positive emotions can help people cultivate a resilient mindset; however, the reality created by the global crisis itself limits the opportunities for experiencing positive emotions. Thus, it is unclear to what extent their effect is strong enough to counter the psychological impact of the current pandemic. Here, the author reports the (...) findings of a survey conducted across two large representative samples in the United Kingdom and the United States during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A linear regression model revealed that the presence of positive emotions is strongly linked with resilience, in particular for individuals experiencing more negative emotions. These results show that positive emotions are particularly important to mental health in the context of high stress, reflected by increased levels of negative emotional experiences. These results are also consistent with the existential positive psychology perspective, which posits that even negative emotions can contribute to wellbeing once they are transformed. The author discusses the potential of positive emotions to transform suffering and thereby ameliorate the negative impact of the present collective crisis. (shrink)

One of the most promising theories of consciousness currently available is higher-order thought (“HOT”) theory, according to which consciousness consists in having suitable HOTs regarding one’s mental life. But critiques of HOT theory abound. We explore here three recent objections to the theory, which we argue at bottom founder for the same reason. While many theorists today assume that consciousness is a feature of the actually existing mental states in virtue of which one has experiences, this assumption is in tension (...) with the underlying motivations for HOT theory and arguably false. We urge that these objections, though sophisticated, trade on this questionable conception of consciousness, thereby begging the question against HOT theory. We then explain how HOT theory might instead understand consciousness. (shrink)

I investigate the role of the subject in judgment in Kant, Frege, and Husserl, situating it in the broader and less-often-considered context of their accounts of presentation as well as judgment. Contemporary philosophical usage of “representation” tends to elide the question of what Kant called the constitution of content, because of a reluctance, traced to Frege’s anti-psychologism, to attend to subjectivity. But for Kant and Husserl, anti-psychologism allows for synthesis as the subjective act necessary for both “mere presentation” and judgment. (...) In Begriffshrift, Frege alludes to a significant logical role for the subjective act of judgment, and in later work, traces of this logical role remain in the intensional notions of grasping a thought and judging as acknowledging its truth. But Frege’s anti-psychologism blocks interpreting these subjective notions in term of synthesis. Although similar in certain ways to Frege and equally anti-psychologistic, Husserl’s theory of judgment in the Logical Investigations maintains a role for subjective syntheses for presentations and judgments, and goes beyond Kant in allowing for a kind of objectivity at the level of non-judgment presentations. These two great anti-psychologists at the dawn of the parallel heydays of linguistic and phenomenological analysis are thus differentiated by the fates they assign to the act of synthesis. (shrink)

Everywhere in the world, and in every period of human history, it has been common for energy decisions to be made in an ethically haphazard manner. With growing population pressure and increasing demand for energy, this approach is no longer viable. We believe that decision makers must include ethical considerations in energy decisions more routinely and systematically. To this end, we propose an applied ethics framework that accommodates principles from three classical ethical theories—virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, and two Native American (...) ethics (Lakota and Navajo)—all considered from the perspectives of the impacted communities. We illustrate this framework by evaluating five recent energy decisions: the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Navajo Nation’s possible transition from coal to solar, hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania, uranium mining in Virginia, and the construction of the Xiaolangdi Dam in China. An applied ethics framework is preferable to existing ethical analyses because it can serve to sharpen arguments for (un)ethical decisions and action. Rather than treat ethical reasoning as a matter of opinion, we argue that applying ethical principles in a universal and standardized way adds rigor to energy sector decisions by presenting a position available for objective scrutiny. Because our framework identifies which aspects of a targeted action (if any) must adjust to improve ethical merit, it can serve as a practical tool for improving decision-making as we enter a new era of energy transitions. (shrink)

Recent studies suggest that meta-learning may provide an original solution to an enduring puzzle about whether neural networks can explain compositionality – in particular, by raising the prospect that compositionality can be understood as an emergent property of an inner-loop learning algorithm. We elaborate on this hypothesis and consider its empirical predictions regarding the neural mechanisms and development of human compositionality.