Shepherd appears to endorse something like the following biconditonal regarding qualities and objects. □(An object, O, exists ↔ Some bundle of qualities, Q1, Q2, … Qn exists). There is a growing consensus in the secondary literature that she also takes the right side of this biconditional to ground the left side. I.e. Shepherd is a bundle theorist who takes an object to be nothing but a mass of qualities, or causal powers. I argue here that despite appearances, this interpretation reverses (...) Shepherd's actual view. I.e. I argue that for Shepherd qualities, or causal powers, are grounded in the intrinsic constitutions of objects. In the case of "external objects", these intrinsic constitutions are unknowable to us; in the case of "internal objects", we have direct knowledge of them. (shrink)

For Shepherd, how many things exist? On the one hand, it looks like the answer is going to be many. It is a central tent of Shepherd's philosophical system that causation is a relation whereby two or more objects combine to create a third. Since there are many instances of this causal relation, there must be many objects in the world. On the other hand, there are several moments throughout her writing where Shepherd indicates that the distinction between causes and (...) effects is in some sense unreal, and that while the world appears to us to consist of many distinct objects interacting causally, really there is just one thing and its merely nominally distinct parts. I argue that Shepherd is an ontological pluralist, and the texts that appear to express a commitment to ontological monism are best understood as expressing ontological holism instead. (shrink)

Shepherd argues that we can know that there exists a universe external to the mind because that universe is the only possible cause of our sensations. As a part of that argument, Shepherd eliminates the possibility that sensations might be caused by other sensations on the grounds that sensations are merely momentary existences and so not capable of standing in causal relations with each other. And yet she claims that sensations do stand in causal relations to other objects, both as (...) the effects of the combination of the external world, our organs of sense, and our minds, and as the partial causes of other sensations. These claims together generate a puzzle. If sensations are too fleeting to stand in causal relations with each other, how are they nonetheless capable of standing in causal relations to other objects? I suggest that because sensations exist only for a moment, to stand in synchronous causal relations with other sensations would require that the two sensations exist at precisely the same moment. But since cause and effect are identical during the moment in which they are combined, any two sensations that exist for only the moment of their combination are identical. Nothing can be its own cause, so sensations cannot be the sole cause of other sensations. Sensations can be the partial cause or effect of other objects, though, so long as those objects endure for more than a single moment. For example, external objects, organs of sense, and the mind, all exist both before and after the moments in which they combine to form a sensation. So, while their combination is identical to that sensation in that moment, all of these other objects exist outside of that moment, and that combination as well. (shrink)

While we are familiar with socialist and fascist aesthetics, liberalism is not usually thought to permit a political role for literature. Nussbaum has attempted to fill this lacuna. She sketches a “liberal aesthetics” by linking three aspects of literature to her normative proposal. The representation of suffering is connected to the capability approach; the presentation of ethical dilemmas to political liberalism; and the reaction of pity to legal and political judgment. Literature is thus hoped to contribute to the stability of (...) liberal democracies. For over 25 years, individual works by Nussbaum on the value of literature have been critiqued on aesthetic grounds: for not dealing with form, for denying the polyphony of texts, for having a limited conception of readerly identification, and for using an elitist and generically limited selection of material. As of yet, no criticisms have, however, considered the full oeuvre of Nussbaum’s defense of literature, and none have examined this aspect of her work in light of her political philosophy. By placing the aesthetic and political aspects of Nussbaum’s work in conversation, this article investigates the proposed relationship between literature and liberalism. It argues that each component of Nussbaum’s liberal aesthetics contains a political danger: foreclosing discussion of intergenerational responsibility; obscuring questions about which doctrines are permissible in the public sphere; and encouraging stereotypes of marginalized people. Literature, understood like this, may risk exacerbating present tensions within liberalism, rather than bolstering its stability. (shrink)

Mary Shepherd assigns reason a central role in her philosophical system, and so to understand that system we must understand her conception of reason. Does she, like Hume, take reason to be a mere matter of factual process that operates over independently contentful representations? Does she, like Descartes, take it to be a process that is intended to track the rational relations among such representations? Or does she, like Kant, take reason to be a structural feature of representations without which (...) they would not have content at all? I argue that Shepherd's understanding of reason is broadly Kantian. Reason is a causal process whereby non-representational sensible qualities are combined in order to form representations of objects as loci of causal powers. These representations represent their objects as the external, continuously and independently existing, causes of the sensible qualities from which they have been constructed, and also as having causal powers to combine with other objects to have other effects. These representations are not only the result of a process of reasoning, but are also constituted by the rational relations into which reason puts them. Reason is both the causal process that forms such representations, and the structure of those representations themselves. (shrink)

Lady Mary Shepherd holds that the relation of cause and effect consists of the combination of two objects to create a third object. She also holds that this account implies that causes are synchronous with their effects. There is a single instant in which the objects that are causes combine to create the object which is their effect. Hume argues that cause and effect cannot be synchronous because if they were then the entire chain of successive causes and effects would (...) all collapse into a single moment, and succession would not be possible. I argue that Shepherd has a ready, although implicit response, to Hume’s argument. Since causation is combination on Shepherd’s view, she is free to hold that there are times in between those instants in which combinations occur, during which times other, non-combinatory changes occur, which changes account for succession. (shrink)

There is an apparent tension in Shepherd’s accounts of space and time. Firstly, Shepherd explicitly claims that we know that the space and time of the unperceived world exist because they cause our phenomenal experience of them. Secondly, Shepherd emphasizes that empty space and time do not have the power to effect any change in the world. My proposal is that for Shepherd time has exactly one causal power: to provide for the continued existence of self-same or changing objects. Because (...) Shepherd takes causation to be a relation whereby two objects combine to form a third, their effect, whenever we perceive a continually existing object, since time is a proper part of such objects, our perception of time is caused by time itself. Likewise, space’s causal power is to provide for the possibility of the motion or rest of objects, and so when we perceive objects with space as a proper part, we come into causal contact with space. (shrink)

That Wilfrid Sellars claims that the framework of persons is not a descriptive framework, but a normative one is about as well known as any claim that he makes. This claim is at the core of the famous demand for a synoptic image that closes, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” makes its appearance at key moments in the grand argument of, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” and is the capstone of Sellars’ engagement with Kant in, Science and (...) Metaphysics. Whereas mere things can be subject to ought-to-be rules—e.g. a clock ought to chime on the hour—to be a person, as Sellars understands it, is to be subject to ought-to-do rules—e.g. one ought to wind one’s clocks to chime on the hour. Prima facie, though, there is more to being a person than just being subject to ought-to-do rules. For example, on at least some common ways of using ‘person’ to be a person is to have a unified consciousness, i.e. to be a single subject of a manifold of experience persisting through time. Arguably, that is what Kant takes a person to be. What I hope to show here is that it is what Sellars takes a person to be too. I.e. the exciting twist here is that as Sellars sees it being a single subject of experience persisting through time is being subject to a particular kind of ought-to-do rules, namely, those concepts-qua-inferential-rules that are the means by which we represent the world of causally-related objects existing in space and persisting through time. I take Sellars’ reasons for holding this set of theses to be essentially Kantian, and so my procedure for explicating them will be to trace a single philosophical thread through both Kant’s and Sellars’ thinking surrounding these issues. I begin with the historical problematic to which Kant’s Transcendental Deduction is intended as an answer. By what right does one apply the pure a priori concepts of the understanding? As the necessary means for representing the analytic unity of apperception, i.e. for representing oneself as the single subject of experience persisting through time. That leads to a consideration of the question of what the temporally-discursive experiences are of which one is supposed to be the single subject, and what the nature of the relation is of these experiences to such a subject. Here Sellars provides the answer. The question is ill formed. There is no relation of experiences to a subject because experiences are not themselves things. Rather, ‘an experience’ is a nominalization of the verb ‘experiencing’, which is itself a description of the act of a person. That thesis, then, brings us squarely to the question of what the framework of persons is, and why Sellars is so confident that it is an ineliminable feature of any future iteration of the synoptic image of the world. The answer to the latter question is that descriptive images themselves (scientific or manifest) are constituted by the rules that govern them, and it is only persons that can be subject to such rules. So, in the end, we return to Kant’s claim in the Transcendental Deduction that our representation of a world of causally-related objects existing in space and persisting through time is the means by which one represents oneself as the single subject of experience persisting through time. The descriptions that the scientific image provides are only possible, and necessary, because of what Kant would call their “ultimate principle”: the framework of persons. (shrink)

The paper argues that it is the rise of Artificial Intelligence as a concrete possibility (the idea of a thinking machine) that favoured the growth of interest in Cognitive Science within the academic community. This puts the history and the definition of AI in a different light, as it can be seen and understood as "a continuation of Philosophy by other means" (Landi, 2020) and not merely as a technology or a sum of technologies.

Evaluating other people's moral character is a crucial social cognitive task. However, the cognitive processes by which people seek out, prioritize, and integrate multiple pieces of character‐relevant information have not been studied empirically. The first aim of this research was to examine which character traits are considered most important when forming an impression of a person's overall moral character. The second aim was to understand how differing levels of trait expression affect overall character judgments. Four preregistered studies and one supplemental (...) study (total N = 720), using five different measures of importance and sampling undergraduates, online workers, and community members, found that our participants placed the most importance on the traits honest, helpful, compassionate, loyal, and responsible. Also, when integrating the information that they have learned, our participants seemed to engage in a simple averaging process in which all available, relevant information is combined in a linear fashion to form an overall evaluation of moral character. This research provides new insights into the cognitive processes by which evaluations of moral character are formed. (shrink)

Growing ties to private industry have prompted many to question the impartiality of academic bioethicists who receive financial support from for-profit corporations in exchange for ethics-related services and research. To the extent that corporate sponsors may view bioethics as little more than a way to strengthen public relations or avoid potential controversy, close ties to industry may pose serious threats to professional independence. New sources of support from private industry may also divert bioethicists from pursuing topics of greater social importance, (...) such as the needs of medically underserved communities. To inform ongoing debates about the financing of bioethics and its transparency to those concerned about potential sources of bias, we examined funding disclosures appearing in original research reports in major bioethics journals. Reviewing research published over a 15-year period, we found little evidence that for-profit corporations are influencing bioethics research directly. Instead, we found evidence that a great number of organizations, both public and private, support bioethics research. These findings suggest that worries about the cooption of bioethics research by a few interested stakeholders are greatly overstated and undersupported by available data. (shrink)

“A Nation of Madame Bovarys” rebuts the notion that literature is improves its readers morally, whether (1) by imparting instruction, (2) by eliciting empathy for non-parochial groups, or (3) by forcibly fine-tuning our capacity to navigate difficult ethical waters. Taking Geoffrey Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale as its test case, it argues that the positions taken by Nussbaum, Booth, Rorty, et al.—also including the “imaginative resistance” position—are vastly overblown; that empathy is unreliable as a guide to moral behavior; that readers tend (...) only to “learn” what they already believed going in; and that it is dangerous to expect otherwise, there being a risk, if the contemporary consensus were to hold, of the populace degenerating into a nation of Madame Bovarys. Accordingly, a view of literary engagement as primarily an opportunity for clarification may be not only more accurate but also, in the end, more salutary. (shrink)

People can be taught to manipulate symbols according to formal mathematical and logical rules. Cognitive scientists have traditionally viewed this capacity—the capacity for symbolic reasoning—as grounded in the ability to internally represent numbers, logical relationships, and mathematical rules in an abstract, amodal fashion. We present an alternative view, portraying symbolic reasoning as a special kind of embodied reasoning in which arithmetic and logical formulae, externally represented as notations, serve as targets for powerful perceptual and sensorimotor systems. Although symbolic reasoning often (...) conforms to abstract mathematical principles, it is typically implemented by perceptual and sensorimotor engagement with concrete environmental structures. (shrink)

Abraham Anderson’s Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumbers is a book with an ambitious, although well-circumscribed, goal—to settle once and for all what precisely it is in Hume that awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers—and an audacious conclusion—that both Hume and Kant are concerned primarily, if not exclusively, with rational theology. Unfortunately, at least to my mind, the methods that Anderson chooses to pursue this end and establish this conclusion prevent him from achieving either. Most strikingly, despite much (...) of the book being dedicated to defending his interpretation of Hume, Anderson does very little to engage with Hume scholarship, especially that which opposes his interpretation, and... (shrink)

Philosophy of Mind is usualy seen as the theoretical field in which theories about the functioning of the mind are elaborated, to be afterwards empirically tested through Artificial Intelligence. But this empirical approach does not fit the human mind which is not simply a machine. It is therefore possible to see Philosophy of Mind as a necessary creation to empty AI of its philosophical charge.

What is the epistemological status of Big Data? Is there really place for them in a scientific search for new empirical laws?

The discussion and debates around Ethical AI cannot simply ignore the fact that ethics is not a self-standing discipline by is part of Philosophy and can only be approached as such.

Some philosophical considerations over Yann LeCun’s position paper “A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence”.

Background: Despite the expansion of ethics consultation services, questions remain about the aims of clinical ethics consultation, its methods and the expertise of those who provide such services.Objective: To describe physicians’ expectations regarding the training and skills necessary for ethics consultants to contribute effectively to the care of patients in intensive care unit .Design: Mailed survey.Participants: Physicians responsible for the care of at least 10 patients in ICU over a 6-month period at a 921-bed private teaching hospital with an established (...) ethics consultation service. 69 of 92 eligible physicians responded.Measurements: Importance of specialised knowledge and skills for ethics consultants contributing to the care of patients in ICU; need for advanced disciplinary training; expectations regarding formal-training programmes for ethics consultants.Results: Expertise in ethics was described most often as important for ethics consultants taking part in the care of patients in ICU, compared with expertise in law , religious traditions , medicine and conflict-mediation techniques . When asked about the formal training consultants should possess, however, physicians involved in the care of patients in ICU most often identified advanced medical training as important.Conclusions: Although many physicians caring for patients in ICU believe ethics consultants must possess non-medical expertise in ethics and law if they are to contribute effectively to patient care, these physicians place a very high value on medical training as well, suggesting a “medicine plus one” view of the training of an ideal ethics consultant. As ethics consultation services expand, clear expectations regarding the training of ethics consultants should be established. (shrink)

according to hume’s theory of general representation, we represent generalities by associating certain ideas with certain words. On one prominent understanding of this theory, calling things by one name or another does not represent any real qualities of those things or any real relations between them. This interpretation runs into difficulty when we turn our attention to Hume’s own use of such general terms throughout the Treatise. It would seem that Hume’s own distinctions—such as the impression-idea distinction and simple-complex distinction—require (...) that the items so.. (shrink)

Plutarch's Moralia mentions that Theophrastus twice delivered his native city from tyrants (1097B, 1126F), a detail that has been difficult to make coherent with our existing understanding of Theophrastus’ life. Theophrastus seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time for this to have been possible, or to have been too undemocratic and scholastic a philosopher to have wanted to participate in these struggles in the first place. By more closely examining the nature of Plutarch's comment and the (...) evidence for Theophrastus’ political orientation and character, this article argues that there are, however, grounds on which to take Plutarch's report seriously. It presents a case for Theophrastus’ participation in two liberation struggles in 334 and 332, without complicating the trajectory of his accompanying Aristotle to both Macedonia and Athens during this period. (shrink)

Chibber’s The Class Matrix and Confronting Capitalism aim to rescue class from the cultural turn. Rather than thinking that mass media mollified the working class, he suggests we re-investigate capitalism itself. We can then see how hard capitalism makes it to take risks for the collective. Chibber’s solution is to shift people from ‘individualistic to solidaristic’ ways of thinking through lived practices, rather than the arts. This review argues, however, that by excluding the culture industry from encouraging solidaristic ways of (...) thinking, Chibber removes a crucial tool in the socialist armory: the way in which artistic representations can help us see ourselves and the world differently. (shrink)

Kant’s argument in the First Analogy for the permanence of substance has been cast as consisting of a simple quantifierscope mistake. Kant is portrayed as illicitly moving from a premise such as (1) at all times, there must exist some substance, to a conclusion such as (2) some particular substance must exist at all times. Examples meant to show that Kant makes this mistake feature substances coming into and out of existence, but doing so at overlapping times. I argue that (...) Kant offers an argument against this kind of example in the following passage. Kant’s claim is that, were substances to be created and destroyed as in the example, the appearances would then be related to two different times, in which existence flowed side by side, which is absurd. For there is only one time, in which all different times must not be placed simultaneously but only one after another (A188–9/B231–32). (shrink)

In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume attempts to explain all human cognition in terms of impressions, ideas, and their qualities, behaviors, and relations. This explanation includes a complicated attempted reduction of beliefs, or judgments, to single ideas. This paper attempts to demonstrate one of the inadequacies of this approach, and any of its kind (any attempted reduction of judgments to their constituent parts, single or multiple) via an argument concerning the logical forms of judgment found implicitly in Kant's Critique (...) of Pure Reason, and more explicitly in the works of Wilfrid Sellars. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Good Work:An Engaged Buddhist Response to the Dilemmas of ConsumerismDavid Landis BarnhillConsumerism is such an ingrained part of our culture, it is paradoxically difficult to avoid and easy to ignore. Sometimes it seems like the water we modern fish swim in.But the Buddhist call to awareness of our state of mind and the nature of reality leads us to reflect on it, to encounter it as directly as possible. (...) When we do, it is all too clear that consumerism goes directly against virtually everything Buddhism stands for. In thinking about a Buddhist response to it, what first comes to mind is the rich monastic tradition, with its trenchant analysis of the pervasiveness of desires, the ideal of life lifted free of craving, and the inviting simplicity of the communal life. But as an engaged Buddhist, I almost immediately feel that, compelling as it is, this monastic tradition is insufficient, particularly at a time when consumerism has become so devastating on a global scale. While the monastic tradition offers a model of a nonconsumer lifestyle, it does little to affect the industrialized world's accelerating exhaustion of natural resources. I sometimes put this point in mythical Buddhist imagery by saying that we live in a culture of hungry ghosts.1 But that would be optimistic. While hungry ghosts have a bloated stomach of insatiable cravings, their throats are as thin as pins. Modern culture has a gargantuan mouth and throat, and yet we still act as if our bellies are empty.So what can we as Buddhists do about such a destructive culture? Engaged Buddhism is a way of confronting social, political, and psychological poisons that threaten our world, and it offers an effective counter to consumer culture in at least three main ways. There is the extension of the Buddhist analysis of reality beyond the psychological and the metaphysical to the social, structural dimension of life of economic systems and political institutions. In the social context, the Buddhist truth of the mutual co-arising of phenomena takes on a more immense scope than the mere conditioning of consciousness, and a more concrete—and thus soiled—quality than Huayan Buddhism's mesmerizing metaphysics of Indra's net. The interpenetration of life (pratītya-samutpāda) includes billboards and boardrooms, peasants uprooted from their land as coffee is planted in their place. I live not just in interrelationship with the postglacial hills of Wisconsin but also with the mountains of toxins spewed [End Page 55] into the air to give us cheap, but very costly, energy. As Stephen Batchelor has said, "the contemporary social engagement of Dharma practice is rooted in awareness of how self-centered confusion and craving can no longer be adequately understood only as psychological drives that manifest themselves in subjective states of anguish. We find these drives embodied in the very economic, military, and political structures that influence the lives of the majority of the people on Earth."2 Engaged Buddhism gives us an incisive way to comprehend and critique our situation, and we stand on more solid ground as we view the vast and painful interconnections.Second, engaged Buddhism also can give us a vision of a social and political alternative, one that is based not on the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion but on generosity, compassion, and wisdom. But in doing so Buddhism must go beyond the limits of its own tradition and draw on the insights of contemporary social and environmental philosophies, from anarchism to bioregionalism. A creative merging of Buddhism and such ecosocial thought can help us work toward a modern life of communalism rather than consumerism, of contentment rather than self-perpetuating desire.3Third, engaged Buddhism gives us a basis for directly responding to a world of craving and suffering. Activism against the rising tide of consumerism—and against the social, political, and military structures and the deafening ideologies that support it—can emerge from a meditational steadiness. Contemplative activism avoids rage, burnout, and psychic numbness and allows us to meet greed and hatred with peace in a spirituality of resistance. Such a religiously based activism, however, needs to join hands4 with social philosophy and... (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present an interpretation of Shepherd’s account of our most fundamental cognitive powers, most especially the faculty that Shepherd calls perception, which she claims is a unity of contributions from the understanding and the senses. I find that Shepherd is what we would nowadays call a meaning holist: she holds that the meaning of any natural-kind term is constituted by its place in a system of definitions, which system specifies the causal roles of the (...) objects its terms name. Such an account of meaning raises questions about the contact that such a system of definitions, or conceptual scheme, makes with the world. The natural place to seek answers to these questions is in Shepherd’s account of perception, which I argue Shepherd takes to be our most fundamental cognitive faculty. Our cognitive lives begin with perceptions, representations of objects as the cause of those very perceptions of them. With this interpretation in hand, I draw a contrast between it and Boyle’s and Lolordo’s recent work on Shepherd’s theory of meaning. I argue that for Shepherd truths about the causal powers of objects are analytic, and that the relevant empirical questions answered by science concern whether our conceptual scheme accurately represents the world. Finally, I provide additional support for this interpretation by showing that it comports with Shepherd’s criticism of her philosophical opponents, Berkeley, Hume, and Reid. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 560-561, July 2012.

We are living in an age that is narratively obsessed: both in the academy and in popular culture, temporally articulated phenomena currently exert a vice-like grip over the collective imagination. Under such conditions, how may non-narrative sources of aesthetic power be made available once again to human observers? Charlie Kaufman’s response, in Adaptation, takes the form not of statements but of actions, of “philosophical therapy” for our insatiable narrative hunger. It leaves us, in the end, with two phenomena that have (...) (in the full sense of the word) no history at all: the beauty of flowers and the intricacy of a human soul. (shrink)

Shepherd’s argument against Hume’s thesis that an object can begin its existence uncaused has received short shrift in the secondary literature. I argue that the key to understanding that argument’s success is understanding its dialectical context. Shepherd sees the dialectical situation as follows. Hume presents an argument against Locke and Clarke the conclusion of which is that an object can come into existence uncaused. An essential premise of that argument is Hume’s theory of mental representation. Hume’s theory of mental representation, (...) however, is itself implausible and unsupported. Therefore, one need not accept this premise or this conclusion. Thus, Shepherd proceeds to her discussion of the relation of cause and effect free to help herself to the thesis that every beginning of existence must have a cause. Additionally, she elsewhere pays down the debt she incurs in that argument by presenting her own alternative theory of mental representation, which is both plausible in its own right, and can account for the error that she takes Hume to make. (shrink)

Meet the Metaorganism is a web‐based learning app that combines three fundamental biological concepts (coevolution, community dynamics, and immune system) with latest scientific findings using the metaorganism as a central case study. In a transdisciplinary team of scientists, information designers, programmers, science communicators, and educators, we conceptualized and developed the app according to the latest didactic and scientific findings and aimed at setting new standards in visual design, digital knowledge transfer, and online education. A content management system allows continuous integration (...) of new findings, which enables us to expand the app with the dynamics of the research field. Students can thus gain a close insight and connection to current research, and at the same time learn that knowledge is not static but grows dynamically. Especially in the realm of the easily accessible metaorganism research, visualization plays an essential role to keep complex processes understandable and memorable. Meet the Metaorganism is freely available online and can be accessed here: www.metaorganism.app. (shrink)

This paper brings together, for the first time, Machiavelli’s interest in political and social conflicts and some ethnographical sources concerning the contemporary discovery of cannibals in the Caribbean as well as in Brazil (Tupinamba). The hypothesis is that knowledge of these sources represents a filter that allowed Machiavelli to reinterpret social clashes notably in Florentine urban context.

Scholars working on Kant’s Anticipations of Perception generally attribute to him an argument that invalidly infers that objects have degrees of intensive magnitude from the premise that sensations do. I argue that this rests on an incorrect disambiguation of Kant’s use of Empfindung as referring to the mental states that are our sensings, rather than the objects that are thereby sensed. Kant’s real argument runs as follows. The difference between a representation of an empty region of space and/or time and (...) a representation of that same region as occupied by an object entails that, in addition to their extensive magnitude, objects must be represented as having a matter variable in intensive magnitude. Since it is the presence of sensation in a cognition that marks the difference between representing only the extensive magnitude of the object and the object as a whole, it is sensation that represents its intensive magnitude. (shrink)