The problem of “dirty hands” has become an important term, indeed one of the most important terms of reference, in contemporary academic scholarship on the issue of torture. The aim of this essay is to offer a better understanding of this problem. Firstly, it is argued that the problem of “dirty hands” can play neither within rule-utilitarianism nor within absolutism. Still, however, the problem of “dirty hands” represents an acute, seemingly irresolvable, conflict within morality, with the moral agent understood, following (...) Nagel, as necessarily holding mixed, absolutist-consequentialist moral intuitions, pulling in opposite directions. Secondly, a distinction is drawn between real situations of “dirty hands,” and other conflictual scenarios, which are commonly, but unjustifiably placed under the metaphorical title of “dirty hands.” Finally, it is suggested - utilizing Nagel’s own ideas, as developed in his later work, and Sen’s notion of evaluator relativity—that the moral “blind alley” manifested in the problem of “dirty hands” may not be totally blind after all, at least from the situated agent’s own internal point of view (as opposed to that of an external observer trying to put herself in the agent’s position by way of moral simulation). Thus, contrary to Walzer’s approach, it is possible for a person (politician) acting in a situation of “dirty hands,” not to believe herself to be guilty, but still be a moral person. (shrink)

Since Socrates, and through Descartes to the present day, the problems of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy's understanding of itself. Today the idea of ''first-person authority''--the claim of a distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental life--has been challenged from a number of directions, to the point where many doubt the person bears any distinctive relation to his or her own mental life, let alone a privileged one. In Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran argues (...) for a reconception of the first-person and its claims. Indeed, he writes, a more thorough repudiation of the idea of privileged inner observation leads to a deeper appreciation of the systematic differences between self-knowledge and the knowledge of others, differences that are both irreducible and constitutive of the very concept and life of the person.Masterfully blending philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Moran develops a view of self-knowledge that concentrates on the self as agent rather than spectator. He argues that while each person does speak for his own thought and feeling with a distinctive authority, that very authority is tied just as much to the disprivileging of the first-person, to its specific possibilities of alienation. Drawing on certain themes from Wittgenstein, Sartre, and others, the book explores the extent to which what we say about ourselves is a matter of discovery or of creation, the difficulties and limitations in being ''objective'' toward ourselves, and the conflicting demands of realism about oneself and responsibility for oneself. What emerges is a strikingly original and psychologically nuanced exploration of the contrasting ideals of relations to oneself and relations to others. (shrink)

The notion of ‘bipolar’ or ‘second‐personal’ normativity is often illustrated by such situations as that of one person addressing a complaint to another, or asserting some right, or claiming some authority. This paper argues that the presence of speech acts of various kinds in the development of the idea of the ‘second‐personal’ is not accidental. Through development of a notion of ‘illocutionary authority’ I seek to show a role for the ‘second‐personal’ in ordinary testimony, despite Darwall's argument that the notion (...) of the ‘second‐personal’ marks a divide between practical and theoretical reason. (shrink)

One way in which the characteristic gestures of philosophy and criticism differ from each other lies in their involvements with disillusionment, with the undoing of our naivete, especially regarding what we take ourselves to know about the meaning of what we say. Philosophy will often find less than we thought was there, perhaps nothing at all, in what we say about the “external” world, or in our judgments of value, or in our ordinary psychological talk. The work of criticism, on (...) the other hand, frequently disillusions by finding disturbingly more in what is said than we precritically thought was there. In our relation to the meaningfulness of what we say, there is a disillusionment of plentitude as well as of emptiness. And no doubt what is “less” for one discipline may be “more” of what someone else is looking for.In recent years, metaphor has attracted more than its share of both philosophical and critical attention, including philosophical denials of the obvious, as well as critical challenges to the obviousness of the ways we talk about metaphor. In this paper I discuss a problem of each sort and suggest a complex of relations between them. The particular denial of the obvious that I’m interested in is the claim recently made by Donald Davidson that “a metaphor doesn’t say anything beyond its literal meaning ,” nor is it even correct to speak of metaphor as a form of communication.1 There’s disillusionment with a vengeance; and even if not strictly believable, it is still not without its therapeutic value, as we shall see. 1. Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks , p. 30; hereafter abbreviated “WMM.” Davidson’s view has found supporters among both philosophers and literary theorists. It is, for example, important to the early argument of Richard Rorty’s recent book. See his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity , p. 18. Richard Moran is an assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton University. He is currently working on a book on subjectivity and contemporary concepts of personhood. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Preface; Introduction: Husserl's life and writings; 1. Husserl's Crisis: an unfinished masterpiece; 2. Galileo's revolution and the origins of modern science; 3. The Crisis in psychology; 4. Rethinking tradition: Husserl on history; 5. Husserl's problematical concept of the life-world; 6. Phenomenology as transcendental philosophy; 7. The ongoing influence of Husserl's Crisis.

Cet ouvrage est issu d’un colloque organisé à l’Université de Pennsylvanie en 2010 par les éditrices du volume, toutes deux historiennes. Les articles de cette anthologie sont d’une lecture très accessible, malgré leurs références érudites, et présentent un panorama de travaux menés essentiellement aux États-Unis, à la croisée du genre et de la religion. Ces recherches démontrent que les innovations théoriques des études de genre (gender studies) contribuent à renouveler les études juives et...

Saint Thomas Aquinas explains that in the science of mobiles, when descending to the living, each one of the species of the animals and plants are attended specifying what is proper to each of them, and here is where De Sensu et Sensato is found. Aquinas enumerates the diverse types of living beings according to the parts of soul and enlists the books that have a relation with them, deducing that De Sensu et Sensato corresponds to the exterior act that (...) occurs when feeling. (shrink)

Saint Thomas Aquinas distinguishes three operations of the intelect and explains that the one which treats about composition and divition, or the affirmative and negative sentence, belongs to the book Peri Hermeneias. Thus, Aquinas proceeds to comment why the verb, the name and the statement are interpretations or voices with meaning and why this book focuses on the enuntiative sentence for the truth and the false are found in it.

In this article I wish to re-examine the vexed issue of the possibility of idealism in ancient and medieval philosophy with particular reference to the case of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (c. 800idealisms immaterialism as his standard for idealism, and it is this decision, coupled with his failure to acknowledge the legacy of German idealism, which prevents him from seeing the classical and medieval roots of idealism more broadly understood.

This chapter begins with sketching briefly the emergence of intuition in rationalist philosophy. It focuses on the following problems: First, how are we to understand the defining characteristics of intuition in general, namely immediacy and singularity, and, furthermore, the characteristics of human intuition in particular, namely givenness, passivity and receptivity? Second, what, precisely, is given immediately in intuition? Third, in Immanuel Kant’s distinction between form and content, how can the pure forms of intuition (space and time) be themselves intuitions? The (...) chapter discusses precisely Kant’s intention to overcome Locke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz by introducing a new notion: intuitions as a separate ‘source of knowledge’. Another important feature of Kant’s departure from the Scholastic and rationalist tradition is his rejection of intellectual intuition, of the immediate apprehension of singular objects by intellect without the mediation of sensibility. (shrink)

What effect does creativity have on individuals, groups and societies, and on the fundamental values on which they base their actions and institutions? What constitutes good and evil, right and wrong, and how does creativity disrupt these beliefs? The Ethics of Creativity brings together an impressive collaboration of thinkers from several countries and disciplines to illuminate the thorny issues that arise when novel ideas and products brought forth by creativity collide with the rules and norms of what we believe to (...) be 'right' or 'good'. This book tackles questions of why most people claim to love creativity yet, in practice, may quash creative intentions, how creative innovations can create new ethical problems, when creativity and ethics tend to coincide and when they tend to conflict, and how both creativity and ethics might be harnessed to support a brighter future for all. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAfter co-occurrence of a neutral conditioned stimulus with an affective unconditioned stimulus, the evaluation of the CS acquires the US valence. This effect disappears when infor...

Mitochondrial bioenergetics plays a key role in multiple basic cellular processes, such as energy production, nucleotide biosynthesis, and iron metabolism. It is an essential system for animals' life and death (apoptosis) and it is required for embryo development. This, in conjunction with its being subjected to adaptive processes in multiple species and its gene products being involved in the formation of reproductive barriers in animals, raises the possibility that mitochondrial bioenergetics could be a candidate genetic mechanism of speciation. Here, we (...) discuss genetic and biochemical evidence for the possible involvement of this unique system, encoded by two genomes (the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes), that differ by an order of magnitude in their mutation rates in processes leading to speciation events. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to epistemology by studying the psychoanalytic notion of transference. Contrary to previous philosophical research on Freud, I claim that traditional models of interpretation or translation are insufficient to explain psychoanalytic understanding. After exploring the conceptual roots of this mistake, which I define as generic, I focus on the notion of transference and claim that it should be viewed as a unique form of understanding that enables the emergence of unconscious meaning or truth. I elaborate this (...) claim with a detailed study of the development of this notion in Freud’s texts. Transference is thus delineated as a form of understanding which is closely related to the matrix of love and defined in relation to the following parameters: intersubjectivity; visuality; and performativity. (shrink)

Since 1976 Hilary Putnam has drawn parallels between his "internal", "pragmatic", "natural" or "common-sense" realism and Kant's transcendental idealism. Putnam reads Kant as rejecting the then current metaphysical picture with its in-built assumptions of a unique, mind-independent world, and truth understood as correspondence between the mind and that ready-made world. Putnam reads Kant as overcoming the false dichotomies inherent in that picture and even finds some glimmerings of conceptual relativity in Kant's proposed solution. Furthermore, Putnam reads Kant as overcoming the (...) pernicious scientific realist distinction between primary and secondary qualities, between things that really exist and their projections, a distinction that haunts modern philosophy. Putnam's revitalisation of Kant is not just of historical interest, but challenges contemporary versions of scientific realism. Furthermore, Putnam has highlighted themes which have not received the attention they deserve in Kantian exegesis, namely, the problematic role of primary and secondary qualities in Kant's empirical realism, and the extent of Kant's commitment to conceptual pluralism.However, I argue that Putnam's qualified allegiance to Kant exposes him to some of the same metaphysical problems that affected Kant, namely, the familiar problem of postulating an absolute reality (Ding an sich), while at the same time disavowing the meaningfulness of so doing. In conclusion I suggest that Putnam might consider Hegel's attempts to solve this problem in Kant as a way of furthering his own natural realism. (shrink)

En este artículo se exploran algunas condiciones de posibilidad sobre un pensamiento bibliotecológico en América Latina. Para tales fines, se analizó la propuesta de una “Bibliotecología desde Abya Yala”, sobre todo por lo desafiante de sus pretensiones y porque exhibe algunos síntomas generalizados en esta clase de ideaciones (como inconsistencias conceptuales y metodológicas derivadas de prejuicios identitarios regionalistas). Se identificaron dos problemas básicos: “la identidad desde la exclusión” y el supuesto estado epistémico de “saber desde la inclusión”. La “identidad desde (...) la exclusión” se refiere al problema de intentar definir la identidad latinoamericana desde lo “no anglosajón”, y por el criterio de descarte de ideas ajenas como parte de las acciones para lograr, en modo artificial, el carácter “latinoamericano” auténtico (sin que exista de por medio una justificación epistémica). Por otro lado, el problema del supuesto “saber desde la inclusión” (que parte, más bien, desde la exclusión y la marginación hermenéutica) retoma los mismos prejuicios identitarios, y se posa, indirectamente, en el arcaico pensamiento funcionalista bibliotecológico. A pesar de esto, su rasgo más polémico resulta ser que se basa en estados epistémicos deterministas que no son sostenibles ni ética ni epistemológicamente (ni siquiera en la esfera práctica más inmediata). (shrink)

This book offers timely contributions to the process of conceptualizing a Latin American specificity and its forms of integration in larger contexts, both on the level of thought and the level of political and social praxis. To produce a critical reading of philosophy while also developing a philosophy of criticism is essential in cultures that continue to struggle for the decolonization of both thought and life. This book allows Anglophone readers access to the world of ideas of some of the (...) most relevant Latin American thinkers of our age. Through a comprehensive discussion of the works and contexts of thinkers such as of José Carlos Mariátegui, Enrique Dussel, Bolívar Echeverría, and Roger Bartra to Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Peter Sloterdijk, Mabel Moraña demonstrates that Latin American thought has not only been inseparable from Western philosophy but also from the determinants of its history and social struggles. By doing so, Mabel Moraña provides an extensive perspective on the connections between historical moments, social structures, and discursive practices. With its interdisciplinary focus, this book will be an important resource for scholars and students in Latin American studies, comparative literature, world literature, and philosophy. (shrink)

central to virtually all contemporary thinking on self-consciousness and first-person authority. And a good measure of its importance has been not only as an evolving philosophical account of these phenomena, but also as a model of an account that places the capacity for specifically first-person awareness of one's mental states at the center of what it is to be a subject of mental states in the first place. For not every philosophical account of introspection will take its specifically first-person features (...) to be essential to it (e.g., if it is allowed that this "faculty" could in principle be directed at the mind of another person), or seek to account for the capacity for self-knowl-. (shrink)

In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalistic science. Traditionally, however, Husserlian phenomenology has been resolutely anti-naturalist. Husserl identified naturalism as the dominant tendency of twentieth-century science and philosophy and he regarded it as an essentially self-refuting doctrine. Naturalism is a point of view or attitude (a reification of the natural attitude into the naturalistic attitude) that does not know that it is an attitude. For phenomenology, naturalism is objectivism. But phenomenology maintains that objectivity is (...) constituted through the intentional activity of cooperating subjects. Understanding the role of cooperating subjects in producing the experience of the one, shared, objective world keeps phenomenology committed to a resolutely anti-naturalist (or ) philosophy. (shrink)

Saint Thomas Aquinas establishes why is it that logic is the directive art of the act of reason and why is it convenient to divide it in correspondence with the operations of the intelect. Thus, the Posterior Analytics are related with the act of reason which goes from one thing which is known to other thing that is unknown. By analogy with the process of necessity of nature, in which she can not fail, Aquinas explains that truth can not fail (...) in the demonstrative syllogism, which has the certainty of science, and that this act of reason is founded in the Posterior Analytics. The rest of saint Thomas Aquinas' exposition focuses on determining to which books of logic does each act or process of reason corresponds. (shrink)

Beauty is a contested concept insofar as it seeks to mark a categorical distinction among the sources of pleasure, typically in terms of oppositions such as objective/subjective, universal/particular, necessity/contingency. Kant represents a culmination of this tradition in defining the judgment of beauty in terms of the requirement for universal agreement, modeling the judgment of beauty as closely as possible to ordinary factual judgments. A different tradition of thinking about beauty, however, while still seeking to mark a categorical distinction by reference (...) to the idea of necessity, finds the relevant sense of necessity not in conditions of agreement but necessities of erotic love and the sense of requirement felt toward its objects. This paper explores the consequences of taking this other tradition seriously, using Proust as a representative exemplar, as a way both of making sense of some of the features Kant ascribes to the concept of the beautiful, while avoiding the paradoxes stemming from his focus on the conditions for universal agreement. (shrink)

remarks some lessons about self-knowledge (and some other self-relations) as well as use them to throw some light on what might seem to be a fairly distant area of philosophy, namely, Sartre's view of the person as of a divided nature, divided between what he calls the self-as-facticity and the self-as-transcendence. I hope it will become clear that there is not just perversity on my part in bringing together Wittgenstein and the last great Cartesian. One specific connection that will occupy (...) me here is their shared hostility to the idea of theoretical certainty as our model for the authority of ordinary self-knowledge, and their relating of such a theoretical model to specific forms of self-alienation. This, in turn, is related to another concern they share, a concern with the difficulties, philosophical and otherwise, in conceiving of oneself as but one person in the world among others. (shrink)

Introduction to Phenomenology is an outstanding and comprehensive guide to an important but often little-understood movement in European philosophy. Dermot Moran lucidly examines the contributions of phenomenology's nine seminal thinkers: Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. Written in a clear and engaging style, this volume charts the course of the movement from its origins in Husserl to its transformation by Derrida. It describes the thought of Heidegger and Sartre, phenomenology's most famous thinkers, and introduces and (...) assesses the distinctive use of phenomenology by some of its lesser-known exponents, such as Levinas, Arendt and Gadamer. Throughout, the enormous influence of phenomenology on the course of twentieth-century philosophy is thoroughly explored. Clearly explaining technical terms and avoiding jargon, Introduction to Phenomenology is an indispensable introduction to the history and substance of this vital current in intellectual thought. (shrink)

Traditional models of skill learning posit that skilled action unfolds in an automatic manner and that control will prove deleterious to movement and performance proficiency. These perspectives assume that automated processes are characterised by low levels of control and vice versa. By contrast, a number of authors have recently put forward hybrid theories of skilled action which have sought to capture the close integration between fine-grained automatic motor routines and intentional states. Drawing heavily on the work of Bebko et al. (...) and Christensen et al., we argue that controlled and automated processes must operate in parallel if skilled performers are to address the wide range of challenges that they are faced with in training and competition. More specifically, we show how skilled performers use controlled processes to update and improve motor execution in training contexts and to stabilise performance under pressurised conditions. (shrink)

This fictional case study examines a person’s right to privacy, including the protection of their name, voice, and image, in the event that they decide to work at the same establishment where they and/or their relatives receive mental health-related therapeutic care.

In 2008, the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics dedicated an entire volume to ethical issues in sleep medicine. Texts published in the “Educating for Professionalism” and “Law, Policy, and Society” sections of this volume serve as theorical starting points to establish a correlation between lack of medical training in sleep disorders and ethical dilemmas encountered by expert witnesses during trials related to problematic automatic behaviours that occurred during REM sleep.

By the notion of imitation, Saint Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between the cognoscitive approach towards nature and the productive approach towards art. From these relation arises the possibility of reason ordering the multitude of men who conform a community. Thus, Saint Thomas Aquinas explains how is it that the city is the most important whole that reason can know and produce directing it towards an end. Aquinas continues annotating that politics belong to the genre of practical and moral sciences, not mechanical (...) or productive, and that in these genre it is the most worthy and perfect science of them all. (shrink)

Debates around the compatibility or mutual exclusivity between Islam and evolution have received increasing academic attention in recent years. While research into Islam and evolution has often focused on the views of Muslim publics, a body of literature has emerged that has focused on the views of Muslim clerics and public figures. However, little research has been conducted about how prominent Muslim voices have used online platforms, such as YouTube, to promote their own views on Islam and evolution. This article (...) explores the online video presentations of one such figure, namely, the American Muslim theologian Dr Yasir Qadhi. The article will demonstrate that Qadhi holds a relatively nuanced position on the compatibility between Islam and evolution, based on his understanding of the scientific consensus and Islamic scripture. Furthermore, it will also explore how Qadhi appeals directly to Muslims to reject many of the most common creationist arguments against evolution. (shrink)

Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review recent discussions (...) of intentionality, including some recent explorations of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm), and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness. (shrink)

This paper sets out a novel response to the ‘screening off problem’ for naïve realism. The aim is to resist the claim (which many naïve realists accept) that the kind of experience involved in hallucinating also occurs during perception, by arguing that there are causal constraints that must be met if an hallucinatory experience is to occur that are never met in perceptual cases. Notably, given this response, it turns out that, contra current orthodoxy, naïve realists need not adopt any (...) particular view about the psychological nature of hallucinatory experience to handle the screening off problem. Consequently, room opens up for naïve realists to endorse whatever theory of hallucinatory experience seems to best capture the distinctive nature of such episodes. (shrink)

In his later works, Merleau-Ponty proposes the notion of ‘the flesh’ (la chair) as a new ‘element’, as he put it, in his ontological monism designed to overcome the legacy of Cartesian dualism with its bifurcation of all things into matter or spirit. Most Merleau-Ponty commentators recognise that Merleau-Ponty's notion of ‘flesh’ is inspired by Edmund Husserl's conceptions of ‘lived body’ (Leib) and ‘vivacity’ or ‘liveliness’ (Leiblichkeit). But it is not always recognised that, for Merleau-Ponty, the constitution of the world (...) of perception, the problem of embodiment or incarnation, is at the very same time one with the problem of the experience of others in what Husserl called Einfühlung or Fremderfahung and indeed one with the problem of the constitution of the commonly shared world ‘for all’. As Merleau-Ponty put it in his late essay ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ in Signs, ‘the problem of Einfühlung, like that of my incarnation, opens on the meditation of sensible being, or, if you prefer, it betakes itself there’. In other words, the problem of the apprehension of the other is part of the overall apprehension of the transcendent world. In this paper I want to meditate on the relations between embodiment, experience of others, and experience of the world in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. I will take particular note, as in the title of this presentation, of the claim made by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible that ‘there is no brute world, only an elaborated world’ (il n'y a pas de monde brut, il n'y a qu'un monde élaboré). (shrink)