In this paper we present the results of a simulation study of credence developments in groups of communicating Bayesian agents, as they update their beliefs about a given proposition p. Based on the empirical literature, one would assume that these groups of rational agents would converge on a view over time, or at least that they would not polarize. This paper presents and discusses surprising evidence that this is not true. Our simulation study shows that these groups of Bayesian agents (...) show group polarization behavior under a broad range of circumstances. This is, we think, an unexpected result, that raises deeper questions about whether the kind of polarization in question is irrational. If one accepts Bayesian agency as the hallmark of epistemic rationality, then one should infer that the polarization we find is also rational. On the other hand, if we are inclined to think that there is something epistemically irrational about group polarization, then something must be off in the model employed in our simulation study. We discuss several possible interfering factors, including how epistemic trust is defined in the model. Ultimately, we propose that the notion of Bayesian agency is missing something in general, namely the ability to respond to higher-order evidence. (shrink)

Spinoza’s philosophy develops in striking ways over the course of his philosophical career. In his first work on metaphysics, the Short Treatise, Spinoza insists that humility is one of the highest virtues and that human beings have no power of their own. But in his final work on metaphysics, the Ethics, Spinoza bluntly declares that humility is not a virtue and argues that our essence simply consists in power. This essay demonstrates the interconnectedness and significance of these apparently distinct shifts. (...) I argue that Spinoza’s re-evaluation of humility is a consequence of his re-thinking of human power and that attention to these shifts puts the debate over acosmism in a new and surprising light. (shrink)

The long ignored philosophical content of Emerson's writings has recently emerged as a central topic in Emerson studies. In _Emerson's Pragmatic Vision_, David Jacobson enters the discussion, placing Emerson in a line of philosophers from Kant and Hegel to Heidegger and Derrida, and adding to our understanding of his philosophical appropriations and anticipations. In the process Jacobson shows how Emerson grappled not only with basic issues of philosophy but eventually with the value of philosophical discourse itself. Conceiving Emerson's (...) writings as reflective of a continuous inquiry into the fundamental question that motivates philosophy and guides reason—the question of Being—Jacobson traces his movement through philosophical humanism and anti-humanism to his identification of a philosophy founded on a reconceptualization of individual practice. _Emerson's Pragmatic Vision_ depicts not two Emersons but three. Between the early humanist confidence in self-reliance and the late embrace of fate, Jacobson identifies a transitional period, enunciated in the stark lecture, "The Method of Nature", and typified by the pessimism and humanist nostalgia of "Experience." The doctrine of fate, Emerson's mature pragmatic philosophy, is presented as a response to this period in which is found Emerson's retrieval of a philosophical posture rooted in obedience to the eloquence of the practice of life. (shrink)

This article constitutes a review of the concept of resistance in critical human rights education (CHRE) and its relevance for democratic education (DE). Our conceptual analysis draws on resistance studies, the emerging study of CHRE, and its implications for DE, which we suggest are interconnected. Although resistance is tied to the history of human rights, there is a lack of conceptual analysis, which we aim to remedy in this article. We argue that resistance is a core element of CHRE for (...) promoting democracy and teaching ethically complex topics on injustices. Our approach transcends the problematic forms of HRE which can limit the discourse, produce blind spots, and empty the critical and ethical content of education. We illustrate some of the complexities of resistance through failures to resist human rights violations in democracies, but also the potential of resistance in CHRE to challenge global injustices and promote democracy. (shrink)

This volume examines the implications of developments in the science of ethics for philosophical theorizing about moral psychology and human agency. These ten new essays in empirically informed philosophy illuminate such topics as responsibility, the self, and the role in morality of mental states such as desire, emotion, and moral judgement.

Dienes & Perner argue that the explicit representation of an individual to which a property is attributed requires explicit representation of the attributed property. The reasons for this conclusion are similar to the reasons why another of their conclusions may be considered suspect: A property may be explicit without an explicit representation of an individual or the predication of the property to an individual. We question the latter conclusion and draw connections to neurophysiological and cognitive evidence.

Workplace learning and competence development in work are frequently used concepts. A wide spread notion is that societal, institutional, and organizational changes require the development of knowledge, methods and strategies for learning at workplaces, in both public and private enterprises. In research on learning and competence development at work, the organizational learning and development as well as individual accomplishments are investigated from various perspectives and in different contexts. The theoretical base for research projects can, accordingly, be focused at a number (...) of organizational and system levels. This paper describes a research project called "Workplace development and learning in elder care" in which learning and knowledge were key issues and where Activity Theory was used as the theoretical base. The project was joint project between two research and development field units. These were UFFE, a municipal social services’ field research unit, and Äldrecentrum Västerbotten, a county council field research unit which aims to serve the interests of the elderly. The project was launched in the fall of 2000 and ended in the summer of 2003. I was employed part-time as a research leader at the municipal research unit and became the research leader for this particular project. A number of students, as well as employees from the county council geriatric care services and the municipal elder care participated in the project. The general aims of the project were to: a) investigate the prerequisites for development and learning; b) test and evaluate interventions at a workgroup level; and c) identify the need for new knowledge. The results were expected to be useful for the field research units as well as for the municipal and county eldercare services in their research and development work. I start with a presentation of the theoretical concepts and apply them in order to form a tentative hypothesis on the status of learning and knowledge in elder care. The next section contains a short description of the different parts of the project and the main results are presented. Finally, the results are discussed and related to the conditions and impact of workplace interventions. (shrink)

an anarchist critique of Bolshevism, drawing on Walter Benjamin. The translation and commentary published as "Theories of Justice, Profane and Prophetic: Gershom Scholem on the Bolshevik Revolution" in Gershom Scholem: In memoriam, Vol. 2, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought, 21, 2007.

a short text on the concept of justice by Walter Benjamin. The text was preserved by Gershom Scholem on 8 October 1916, the same method by which most of Benjamin's early writings have reached us. However, this piece somehow remained undetected by the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften. It first appeared in German and English in Metaphysics of the Profane, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 166-169, with permission of the German publishers Suhrkamp Verlag. It is presented here with (...) a typographical error corrected. (shrink)

Philosophers often call emotions appropriate or inappropriate. What is meant by such talk? In one sense, explicated in this paper, to call an emotion appropriate is to say that the emotion is fitting: it accurately presents its object as having certain evaluative features. For instance, envy might be thought appropriate when one’s rival has something good which one lacks. But someone might grant that a circumstance has these features, yet deny that envy is appropriate, on the grounds that it is (...) wrong to be envious. These two senses of ‘appropriate’ have much less in common than philosophers have supposed. Indeed, the distinction between propriety and correctness is crucial to understanding the distinctive role of the emotions in ethics. We argue here that an emotion can be fitting despite being wrong to feel, and that various philosophical arguments are guilty of a systematic error which we term the moralistic fallacy. (shrink)

An escalating consumption of animal products characterizes contemporary Western society, resulting in severe environmental consequences and heightened exploitation of animals. Among these issues, livestock production stands out as particularly detrimental due to its significant climate impact and land usage. Paradoxically, the Swedish organic food sector positions cattle as central to achieving sustainable food production. This article delves into the strategies employed by organic organizations to legitimize the consumption of cattle’s meat and dairy. The aim is to examine how Swedish organic (...) organizations produce knowledge of sustainability, and how these sustainability constructions are intertwined with anthroparchy, a system of power relations between humans and cattle. Furthermore, the study investigates how cattle’s agencies and bodies are portrayed. Interviews, documents and media material from organic organizations in Sweden are analyzed to explore how carnism, norms of eating cattle’s meat and dairy, is maintained. The analytical framework applied is rooted in critical animal studies and draws inspiration from Foucauldian discourse analysis, examining the interplay between power and knowledge. The findings reveal that certain environmental aspects are emphasized to reinforce the norm of keeping cattle for food production, while other dimensions are overlooked. Organic organizations represent cows as active subjects transforming their environment to legitimize their status as consumable commodities. The findings also show how carnistic norms limit the organic sector’s ability to achieve environmental objectives. This study underscores how anthroparchy, the dominant power structures between humans and cattle, is reproduced in the Swedish organic context through sustainability discourses that emphasize the subjectivities of cattle. (shrink)

The Montagovian hypothesis of direct model-theoretic interpretation of syntactic surface structures is supported by an account of the semantics of binding that makes no use of variables, syntactic indices, or assignment functions & shows that the interpretation of a large portion of so-called variable-binding phenomena can dispense with the level of logical form without incurring equivalent complexity elsewhere in the system. Variable-free semantics hypothesizes local interpretation of each surface constituent; binding is formalized as a type-shifting operation on expressions that denote (...) functions, & sentences containing a free pronoun are analyzed as a function from individuals to propositions having a meaning of type (e,t). Standard weak crossover effects & binding patterns in sentences with multiple pronouns are shown to submit to straightforward type-theoretic treatments that do not rely on indexation. The variable-free semantics smoothly implements full surface compositionality & requires less machinery than standard accounts to handle functional questions, their answers, sloppy inferences, & across-the-board binding. 73 References. J. Hitchcock. (shrink)

According to Vera Moser, the first professorship of healing pedagogy, Heilpädagogik at the University of Zürich in 1931, established pedagogy of the disabled as an academic discipline. Through the definition of the smallest common denominator for all disabilities, which Heinrich Hanselmann called “weakness of the soul,” a connecting element of “imbecility, deaf-mutism, blindness, neglect and idiocy” was established. Under Nazi rule, school pedagogy advanced to völkisch, nationalist special pedagogy, shifting from the category of “innate imbecility” to a broader concept of (...) disability. As an outcome of these programs and policies, 300,000 people with disabilities were killed as a part of the “T4 Aktion.” Within just a few decades after World War II, special pedagogy expanded its sphere of influence through professionalization and institutionalization in West and East Germany and across Europe. This paper explores how special pedagogy aligned itself with the Nazi regime’s discourse and policy on eugenics and race hygiene, leading to the murder and mass sterilization of “disabled” children and adults. It probes questions regarding the extent to which the professionalization of special pedagogy has drawn from the Nazi-era terminology of the deficient and foreign to legitimate the contemporary migrant bias in German and Austrian special pedagogical care. (shrink)

Drawing on a wide range of resources, including the history of philosophy, her role as director of a cognitive neuroscience group, and her Wittgensteinian training at Oxford, Jacobson provides fresh views on representation, concepts, perception, action, emotion and belief.

According to Cicero, “all emotions spring from the roots of error: they should not be pruned or clipped here and there, but yanked out” (Cicero 2002: 60). The Stoic enthusiasm for the extirpation of emotion is radical in two respects, both of which can be expressed with the claim that emotional responses are never appropriate. First, the Stoics held that emotions are incompatible with virtue , since the virtuous man will retain his equanimity whatever his fate. Grief is always vicious, (...) both bad and bad for you, even when directed at events commonly considered tragic, such as the loss of one’s child. (shrink)

Attempts to account for the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences have so far largely focused on their sensory aspects. The first aim of this article is to support the claim that phenomenal character has another, significant, aspect—the phenomenal realm is suffused with valence. What it’s like to undergo perceptual experiences—from pains to supposedly “neutral” visual experiences—standardly feels good or bad to some degree. The second aim is to argue, by appealing to theoretical and empirical considerations pertaining to the phenomenon of (...) valence-variance, that perceptual valence cannot be accounted for by extending the prevalent representationalist account of phenomenal character. Thus, a revision in the understanding of phenomenal character is called for. Finally, the phenomenon of valence-variance serves to make some headway toward defending a new Attitudinal-Representational Theory of perceptual valence, according to which perceptual valence is constituted by first-order conative attitudes directed toward the representational objects of experiences. (shrink)

Horace recommended that poets "mingle the useful and the sweet"; but the champions of an ethical function for art have yet to explain how moral and aesthetic values can truly be mingled. Their proposed ethical functions too often seem irrelevant to what we most care about in art. Moreover, we need an explanation of what art has to show us that is of ethical significance, and that we don't already know. ;The answer is to be found in the "thick concepts" (...) , which purport to provide reasons to feel and to act. Thick concepts are response-dependent, in that our application of them is guided by certain quasi-emotional responses, which they purport to warrant. These responses, I argue, are given content by their role in an ethical perspective, a value-laden "way of seeing" the world. Morality's aspirations to objectivity require that we gain imaginative acquaintance with the thick concepts of alien perspectives, without which real normative confrontation would be impossible. Fiction thus serves an ethical function by expanding our capacities of moral perception. ;Narrative art is uniquely well-suited to this task, because to give a reading of a story is to make sense of its characters and events in value-laden, emotional terms. Our engagement with fiction thus involves understanding the ethical perspectives that inform the text. This model of art's ethical function is immune to formalist challenges. Moreover, it answers the formidable hermeneutic and epistemological problems on which traditional theories founder. (shrink)

Mill advocated an unqualified defense of the liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense, which he understood to include not just the freedom to hold but also to express any opinion or sentiment. Yet considerable dispute persists about the nature of Mill’s argument for freedom of expression and whether his premises can support so strong a conclusion. Two prominent interpretations of Mill that threaten to undermine his uncompromising defense of free speech are considered and refuted. A better interpretation can (...) be founded on Mill’s claim that the liberties of conscience are inseparable in practice. This claim can be defended with modern psychological insight about the nature of cognitive bias, and epistemological insight about why justification of creedal beliefs requires the universal toleration of opinion, insights which are largely anticipated by Mill. This argument is especially vital because it highlights the divide between classical liberalism and progressivism that has become a flashpoint in the current political debate over free speech. (shrink)

According to Slote's ``agent-based'' virtue ethics, the rightness orwrongness of an act is determined by the motive it expresses. Thistheory has a problem with cases where an agent can do her duty onlyby expressing some vicious motive and thereby acting wrongly. In sucha situation, an agent can only act wrongly; hence, the theory seemsincompatible with the maxim that `ought' implies `can'. I argue thatSlote's attempt to circumvent this problem by appealing to compatibilism is inadequate. In a wide range of psychologically (...) realistic cases, an agent's effective choice will be between failingto do her duty and doing it from inferior motives. Then anythingshe can do will be wrong, according to the agent-based theory,contrary to the maxim Slote wishes to preserve. (shrink)

"This book takes a new angle on a much-studied phenomenon, focusing on the role of domination and identity construction, understanding and self-knowledge, moral transformation and the social community, systems of training and hierarchy used ...

Nietzsche wrote The Gay Science, which he later described as 'perhaps my most personal book', when he was at the height of his intellectual powers, and the reader will find in it an extensive and sophisticated treatment of the philosophical themes and views which were most central to Nietzsche's own thought and which have been most influential on later thinkers. These include the death of God, the problem of nihilism, the role of truth, falsity and the will-to-truth in human life, (...) the doctrine of the eternal recurrence, and the question of the proper attitude to adopt toward human suffering and toward human achievement. This volume presents the work in a new translation by Josefine Nauckhoff, with an introduction by Bernard Williams that elucidates the work's main themes and discusses their continuing philosophical importance. (shrink)

What is the relationship between the philosophical concept of the “autonomy of art” and the cultural policy-notion of “artistic freedom”? This article seeks to answer this question by taking the Swedish governmental report This Is How Free Art Is (Så fri är konsten 2021) and its reception in the Swedish main stream media as an emblematic example and by reading it symptomatically. Firstly, it traces the critical history of “artistic freedom” and the interrelated term “arm’s length distance”, primarily in the (...) context of Great Britain. Secondly, it critically reconstructs the concept of the “autonomy of art” in the history of Western philosophy by making a critique of a fetishized notion of art’s autonomy in the name of l’art pour l’art. The main argument is that the idea about art’s autonomy, on which the Swedish report leans, resembles such philosophical and art historical idea of art’s autonomy. The claim is also that such an understanding of art does not tie up, either philosophically or historically, with the arm’s length principle, since they ultimately rely on different conceptions of art’s freedom. (shrink)