Bernard Williams is a sceptic about the objectivity of moral value, embracing instead a qualified moral relativism—the ‘relativism of distance’. His attitude to blame too is in part sceptical. I will argue that the relativism of distance is unconvincing, even incoherent; but also that it is detachable from the rest of Williams's moral philosophy. I will then go on to propose an entirely localized thesis I call the relativism of blame, which says that when an agent's moral shortcomings by our (...) lights are a matter of their living according to the moral thinking of their day, judgements of blame are out of order. Finally, I will propose a form of moral judgement we may sometimes quite properly direct towards historically distant agents when blame is inappropriate—moral-epistemic disappointment. Together these two proposals may help release us from the grip of the idea that moral appraisal always involves the potential applicability of blame, and so from a key source of the relativist idea that moral appraisal is inappropriate over distance. (shrink)

Fricker shows that virtue epistemology provides a general epistemological idiom in which these issues can be forcefully discussed.

We gain information from collective, often institutional bodies all the time—from the publications of committees, news teams, or research groups, from web sites such as Wikipedia, and so on—but do these bodies ever function as genuine group testifiers as opposed to mere group sources of information? In putting the question this way I invoke a distinction made, if briefly, by Edward Craig, which I believe to be of deep significance in thinking about the distinctiveness of the speech act of testimony. (...) The distinction is that between somebody’s functioning as a ‘good informant’ and their functioning merely as a ‘source of information’. The difference between these has, as he remarks, a crucial ethical aspect: What I have in mind is the special flavour of situations in which human beings treat each other as subjects with a common purpose, rather than as objects from which services, in this case true belief, can be extracted. In this paper I shall try to bring out the distinctive nature of the role of good informant in a way that helps to clarify what is at stake in asking whether there can be group testimony in the sense of genuinely collective testimony—that is to say, where the group testifier is a collective and not merely a sum of individuals testifying in one or another form of aggregated chorus. (shrink)

Analyse van historische, juridische en filosofische aspecten van de terdoodveroordeling van de Griekse wijsgeer.

Taking on topics from pornography and prostitution to female genital mutilation, from womens magazines and marriage to sexual violence, contributors in this collection argue that the kind of liberal feminism currently rising to prominence does little to challenge the status quo.

Grounded in ideas about sense-making and whole-person care with a long intellectual heritage, the movement for Philosophical Health—with its specific conceptions of philosophical care and counselling—is a relatively recent addition to the ongoing debate about understanding better the perspectives of patients to improve health practice. This article locates the development of this movement within the context of broader discussions of person-centred care (PCC), arguing that the approach advocated by defenders of philosophical health can provide a straightforward method for implementing PCC (...) in actual cases. This claim is explained and defended with reference to the SMILE_PH method created by Luis de Miranda (Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health), an approach recently trialled convincingly with people living with traumatic spinal cord injury. (shrink)

This paper explores the relation between rational authority and social power, proceeding by way of a philosophical genealogy derived from Edward Craig's Knowledge and the State of Nature. The position advocated avoids the errors both of the 'traditionalist' (who regards the socio-political as irrelevant to epistemology) and of the 'reductivist' (who regards reason as just another form of social power). The argument is that a norm of credibility governs epistemic practice in the state of nature, which, when socially manifested, is (...) likely to imitate the structures of social power. A phenomenon of epistemic injustice is explained, and the politicizing implication for epistemology educed. (shrink)

When we hope to explain and perhaps vindicate a practice that is internally diverse, philosophy faces a methodological challenge. Such subject matters are likely to have explanatorily basic features that are not necessary conditions. This prompts a move away from analysis to some other kind of philosophical explanation. This paper proposes a paradigm based explanation of one such subject matter: blame. First, a paradigm form of blame is identified—‘Communicative Blame’—where this is understood as a candidate for an explanatorily basic form (...) of blame. Second, its point and purpose in our lives is investigated and found to reside in its power to increase the alignment of the blamer and the wrongdoer's moral understandings. Third, the hypothesis that Communicative Blame is an explanatorily basic form of blame is tested out by seeing how far other kinds of blame can reasonably be understood as derivative, especially in respect of blame's point and purpose. Finally, a new and quasi-political worry about blame is raised. (shrink)

The word solidarity is a borrowing from the French solidarité, which until the nineteenth century had the restricted legal meaning of a contractual obligation. I argue that in the pre-revolutionary decades, a newly born French lexeme was much closer to what solidarity would mean for modern societies, at least if we accept the agonistic context of most phenomena of solidarity: ‘esprit de corps’, taken from the military language and changed into a combat concept by the Philosophes. A ‘corps’ in French, (...) among other definitions, is an organised group with its own cohesion, its own interests, and its instinct of preservation. In this article, I argue that the study of the birth of ‘esprit de corps’, and the French Revolution attempt to universalise the concept, can shed some light on later debates on democratic forms of solidarity. If solidarity is a form of esprit de corps, and because of the military origin of the latter, solidarity should be considered as a ‘war machine’, an agonistic union rather than an all-encompassing and vague ideal of global fraternity. (shrink)

The concept of ‘the Canadian identity’ is a topic which has received much attention in recent decades, stimulating discussions on the topic of what makes a Canadian a Canadian? Today, being Canadian might suggest a love of hockey and poutine. However, a century ago, being “Canadian” was an emphasis on adapting or conforming to British norms. This paper will focus on one important theme in debates around ‘Canadianization’, specifically its reflection over time in the domestic structure of the early Ukrainian (...) settlers. Canadian identity studies can especially benefit from this trace of identity formation, by its application to a broader, multi-ethnical context. (shrink)

RESUMEN Se analiza si la versión de la justicia como equidad, presentada en El liberalismo político, es genuinamente una concepción política. Se examina el problema de la razonabilidad de las doctrinas comprehensivas, y se indaga luego si el argumento en dos etapas afecta la integridad estructural del liberalismo político. Se concluye que J. Rawls fracasa en su intento de justificar un liberalismo independiente de una doctrina comprehensiva de carácter liberal. ABSTRACT The article analyzes whether the conception of justice as fairness, (...) set forth by Rawls in Political Liberalism, is a genuine political conception. It first examines the issue of reasonableness of comprehensive doctrines and then goes on to inquire whether the two-step argument affects the structural integrity of political liberalism. The paper concludes that J. Rawls fails in his attempt to justify liberalism independently of a comprehensive liberal doctrine. (shrink)

Reinvigorates our understanding of Victorian and modernist works and society Offers a wide-ranging application of theories of distributed cognition to Victorian culture and Modernism Explores the distinctive nature and expression of notions of distributed cognition in Victorian culture and Modernism and considers their relation to current notions Reinvigorates our understanding of Western European works – including Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf – and society by bringing to bear recent insights on the distributed nature of cognition Includes essays by (...) international specialists in Victorian culture and Modernist literature, history, technology, science, philosophy and art including Andrew Michael Roberts, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei and Melba Cuddy-Keane Includes essays on literature, history, technology, science, philosophy and art This book brings together 11 essays by international specialists in Victorian culture and modernism and provides a general and period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities. Together, they revitalise our reading of Victorian and modernist works in the fields of history of technology, science and medicine, material culture, philosophy, art and literary studies by bringing to bear recent insights in cognitive science and philosophy of mind on the ways in which cognition is distributed across brain, body and world. (shrink)

I shall first briefly revisit the broad idea of ‘epistemic injustice’, explaining how it can take either distributive or discriminatory form, in order to put the concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ in place. In previous work I have explored how the wrong of both kinds of epistemic injustice has both an ethical and an epistemic significance—someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. But my present aim is to show that this wrong can also have a political (...) significance in relation to non-domination, and so to freedom. While it is only the republican conception of political freedom that presents nondomination as constitutive of freedom, I shall argue that non-domination is best understood as a thoroughly generic liberal ideal of freedom to which even negative libertarians are implicitly committed, for non-domination is negative liberty as of right—secured non-interference. Crucially on this conception, non-domination requires that the citizen can contest interferences. Pettit specifies three conditions of contestation, each of which protects against a salient risk of the would-be contester not getting a ‘proper hearing’. But I shall argue that missing from this list is anything to protect against a fourth salient threat: the threat that either kind of epistemic injustice might disable contestation by way of an unjust deflation of either credibility or intelligibility. Thus we see that both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can render a would-be contester dominated. Epistemic justice is thereby revealed as a constitutive condition of non-domination, and thus of a central liberal political ideal of freedom. (shrink)

Dreaming can be explained as the product of an interaction among memory processes, elaborative processes, and phenomenal awareness. A feedback circuit is activated by this interaction according to the associative links and the requirements of the dream scene. Recently, it has been hypothesized that a partial similarity exists between dreaming and mind wandering and that these two processes may involve the same neural default network. This commentary discusses the differences and similarities between phenomenal consciousness during dreaming and phenomenal consciousness during (...) mind wandering from the perspective of the “continuity” of engagement of cognitive systems. The greatest difference consists in the lack of reality testing during dreaming. Dream imagery is hallucinatory by nature. Consequently, the simulated world in dreams makes dream imagery more akin to perception. In contrast, the imagery of mind wandering is more similar to imagination. The level of meta-awareness is preserved more frequ... (shrink)

Through several historical case studies from the last 300 years, Luis de Miranda shows how the phrase 'esprit de corps' acts as a combat concept with a clear societal impact. He also reveals how interconnected, yet distinct, French, English and American modern intellectual and political thought is.

There are two kinds of forgiveness that appear as radically different from one another: one presents forgiveness as essentially earned through remorseful apology; the other presents it as fundamentally non-earned—a gift. The first, which I label Moral Justice Forgiveness, adopts a stance of moral demand and conditionality; the second, which I label Gifted Forgiveness, adopts a stance of non-demand and un-conditionality. Each is real; yet how can two such different responses to wrongdoing be of one and the same kind? This (...) paper explains how, by showing that the basic role each plays in moral-social life is the same; and that one is conceptually and therefore historically prior to the other. The result is pluralism, with each kind of forgiveness represented as distinctive in both its psychology and its normativity; and yet an ordered pluralism—with Moral Justice Forgiveness revealed as the root kind, and Gifted Forgiveness a culturally contingent iteration. (shrink)

The dual aim of this article is to reveal and explain a certain phenomenon of epistemic injustice as manifested in testimonial practice, and to arrive at a characterisation of the anti–prejudicial intellectual virtue that is such as to counteract it. This sort of injustice occurs when prejudice on the part of the hearer leads to the speaker receiving less credibility than he or she deserves. It is suggested that where this phenomenon is systematic it constitutes an important form of oppression. (...) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]. (shrink)

Reveals the diverse ways that cognition was seen as spread over brain, body and world in the 9–17th centuries - The second book in an ambitious 4-volume set looking at distributed cognition in the history of thought - Includes essays on literature, philosophy, law, art, music, medicine, science and material culture - For students and scholars in medieval and Renaissance studies, cognitive humanities and philosophy of mind - Draws out what was distinctive about medieval and Renaissance insights into (and superstitions (...) about) the cognitive roles of the body and environment - Examines how humanities topics are affected by new insights from the cognitive sciences This collection explores how medieval and Renaissance practices and ideas reveal the expression (and suppression) of cognition as distributed across brain, body and world. As many of the texts and practices have influenced later Western European societies and cultures, this book reveals vital stages in the historical development of our attempts to comprehend and optimise the distributed nature of cognition. (shrink)

11 essays by international specialists open up the research field of distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods - The third book in an ambitious four-volume set looking at distributed cognition in the history of thought - Brings together essays on literature, history, philosophy, art, archaeology, medicine, science and material culture - Includes a general and a period-specific introduction to distributed cognition and the cognitive humanities - For students and scholars in Enlightenment and Romantic studies, (...) cognitive humanities and philosophy of mind - Draws out what was distinctive about Enlightenment and Romantic insights into the cognitive roles of the body and environment - Examines how humanities topics are affected by new insights from the cognitive sciences This collection explores how Enlightenment and Romantic practices and ideas reveal the diverse ways that cognition was seen as spread over brain, body and world in the long 18th century. (shrink)

Entre 1990 y 2011 se constituyó una subjetividad que toleró un incremento significativo de malestar sin mayores expresiones políticas del mismo. Una sociedad despolitizada privatizó los problemas públicos y los asumió a nivel individual. En ese marco, el disenso de los ciudadanos con el orden político al cual debían responder, no sólo no tuvo nunca representación institucional, sino que más bien fue la institucionalidad su principal obstáculo. Las instituciones funcionaron como dique de contención del malestar y protegieron así a la (...) clase política. La latencia del malestar tuvo su final, o al menos una suspensión significativa, durante 2011, a partir de un proceso de movilización social de gran envergadura que ancló la energía del malestar en los problemas de la educación chilena. La ilegitimidad anterior de la protesta pública invirtió su signo y el acto de protesta pasó a ser parte fundamental del modo en que las demandas ciudadanas lograron, legítimamente, escalar hacia las autoridades, mientras éstas reducían su ya menguada aprobación. El presente artículo expone el carácter transformador de la mera posibilidad de procesar politizadamente el malestar, constituyéndose este hecho en condición suficiente para incrementar el grado de deliberación social sobre los problemas públicos, reconfigurando la textura del espacio público e incluso modificando radicalmente las condiciones hegemónicas imperantes. (shrink)

In spite of the presence of women in previously male-dominated ecclesial spaces, patriarchal normativity continues to be re-inscribed through the reproduction of knowledge, which sustains skewed gender power relations amongst the clergy. This was a case in point when a newly ordained woman priest in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa was recently addressed as, and given the official title, ‘mother’ during the vestment ritual at a church service where she was to celebrate the Eucharist for the first time. This (...) while the male priests present had retained the title ‘father’ without any critical reflection on the male-headship theology it perpetuates. If one considers that the ordination of women has opened the possibility for them to celebrate the Eucharist, which gives authority to preside at (or head) the ‘Table’, then one has to be mindful of the subtle ways in which language is used to regulate the production and reproduction of gender bias in a patriarchal system. Being the guest preacher at the celebratory service of this former Ethics and Theology student, I could do no other but interrupt the sermon I had prepared. In this article, I argue that interruption is a helpful theoretical concept – both as a transformative rhetorical strategy in the interpretation of biblical texts and also as an act of resisting discourses and practices that uphold and re-inscribe patriarchal norms. I will approach the hermeneutical concept of interruption from what I call a feminist theo-ethical perspective. (shrink)

In both social science and medicine, research on reproduction generally focuses on women. In this article, we examine how men’s reproductive contributions are understood. We develop an analytic framework that brings together Cynthia Daniels’ conceptualization of reproductive masculinity with a staged view of reproduction, where the stages include the period before conception, conception, gestation, and birth. Drawing on data from two medical sites that are oriented to the period before pregnancy, we examine how gendered knowledge about reproduction produces different reproductive (...) equations in different stages of the reproductive process. We conclude with a new research agenda that emerges from rethinking the role of men and masculinity in reproduction. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to three commentaries on Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. In response to Alcoff, I primarily defend my conception of how an individual hearer might develop virtues of epistemic justice. I do this partly by drawing on empirical social psychological evidence supporting the possibility of reflective self-regulation for prejudice in our judgements. I also emphasize the fact that individual virtue is only part of the solution – structural mechanisms also have an essential role (...) in combating epistemic injustice. My response to Goldberg principally concerns my perceptual account of the epistemology of testimony, which I defend as being both well-motivated and best categorized as a species of non-inferentialism. I also explain its relation to the reductionism/non-reductionism contrast, and defend my resistance to casting it as any kind of default view. In response to Hookway, I contrast discriminatory with distributive forms of epistemic injustice, and defend the basic taxonomy I present in the book, which casts testimonial and hermeneutical injustice as the two fundamental discriminatory forms of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

[T]he dominated live in a world structured by others for their purposes — purposes that at the very least are not our own and that are in various degrees inimical to our development and even existence.We are perhaps used to the idea that there are various species of oppression: political, economic, or sexual, for instance. But where there is the phenomenon that Nancy Hartsock picks out in saying that the world is “structured” by the powerful to the detriment of the (...) powerless, there is another species of oppression at work, one that has not been registered in mainstream epistemology: epistemic oppression. The word ‘structured’ may be read materially, so as to imply that social institutions and practices favour the powerful, or ontologically, so as to imply that the powerful somehow constitute the world. But for present purposes I am interested only in an epistemological reading, which implies that the powerful have some sort of unfair advantage in “structuring” our understandings of the social world. I will try to present an account of what this initially vague idea involves. I hope thereby to explain an exact sense in which the powerful can have a kind of epistemic advantage that means the powerless are epistemically oppressed. (shrink)

Being compassionate and empathic while making rational decisions is expected from healthcare workers across different contexts. But the daily challenges that these workers face, aggravated by the recent COVID-19 crisis, can give rise to compassion and decision fatigue, which affects not only their ability to meet these expectations but has a significant negative impact on their wellbeing. Hence, it is vital to identify factors associated to their exhaustion. Here, we sought to describe levels of compassion and decision fatigue during the (...) pandemic, and to identify factors related to these forms of exhaustion. We collected data using self-reported questionnaires to measure compassion fatigue, decision fatigue, and grit in five intervals from April to November, 2020 (N = 856). Our results showed a negative correlation between grit and compassion and decision fatigue. We also found that under the circumstances studied grit tends to be higher in technicians, nurses, other professionals (psychologists, social workers), and workers at the Emergency Room (ER), and lower in general practitioners. Compassion fatigue tend to be higher for technicians, whereas decision fatigue was lower for specialists, general practitioners, and technicians, and higher for those working at private hospitals. (shrink)

Este texto es la traducción del capítulo cuarto de The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, editado por Ian James Kidd, José Medina y Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. En él, Miranda Fricker aclara y delimita los conceptos de injusticia hermenéutica y testimonial, proporcionando ejemplos, narrando su genealogía, respondiendo a algunas de las críticas que recibieron estos conceptos, así como estableciendo relaciones de semejanza y contraste con otras concepciones de la justicia y otras ramas de la filosofía.

Background We investigated the personal philosophies of eight persons with a tetraplegic condition (four male, four female), all living in Sweden with a chronic spinal cord injury (SCI) and all reporting a good life. Our purpose was to discover if there is a philosophical mindset that may play a role in living a good life with a traumatic SCI. Methods Two rounds of in-depth qualitative interviews were performed by the same interviewer, a philosophical practitioner by training (de Miranda). The (...) second round systematically covered the following elements: bodily sense, sense of self, sense of belonging, sense of the possible, sense of purpose and philosophical sense. This six-step method developed by de Miranda is called SMILE_PH, an acronym for Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health. Results All the interviewees, as a consequence of their trauma, reported having gone through a reinvention of themselves which implied questioning the meaning and purpose of their life in particular and life in general. A philosophical rather than realistic sense of the possible was abstracted toward teleological growth. All interviewees developed a sense of purpose based on self-interested altruism and solidarity with disabled peers. Conclusions To reinvent a good life with SCI, in addition to physical training and willpower, one needs to consider philosophical questions about the self and life, what Kant called the cosmic interests of reason: What may I hope? What must I do? What can I know? Our results indicate that we should, in the future, explore what the philosophical health approach may bring to rehabilitation processes in the months or years that follow the trauma. (shrink)

Resumen: En el presente análisis proponemos una lectura del poemario Poemas da recordação e outros movimentos(2008) de Conceição Evaristo desde una perspectiva de la retórica subalterna, entendiendo lo anterior como la emergencia literaria de otras formas subjetivas. En este sentido afirmamos que en el poemario en análisis la subjetividad de la hablante se construye mediante la voz y el cuerpo femenino, afirmando la diferencia como sustento subjetivo. Abstract: In this analysis it is proposed a reading of the poetry collection of (...) Conceição Evaristo, Poemas da recordação e outros movimentos(2008) from subaltern rhetoric perspective. Understanding the aforementioned as the literary emergence of other subjective forms. In this regard, it is stated that in the poetry collection analyzed, the speaker’s subjectivity is constructed through the voice and female body, affirming difference as subjective sustenance. (shrink)

This introductory text encourages students to engage with key problems and arguments in ethics through a series of classic and contemporary readings. The text will inspire students to think about the distinctive nature of moral philosophy, and to draw comparisons between different traditions of thought, between ancient and modern philosophies, and between theoretical and literary writing about the place of value in human life. Each of the book's six chapters focuses on a particular theme: the nature of goodness, subjectivity and (...) objectivity in ethical thinking, justice and virtue, moral motivation, the place of moral obligation, and the idea that literature can be a form of moral philosophy. Each chapter features two or three key readings, drawn from texts as diverse as Plato's Republic, J. S. Mill's Utilitarianism, Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Rawls' A Theory of Justice. The readings are all accompanied by interactive commentary from the editors. (shrink)