Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings and following (...) Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience. (shrink)

Hayden White probes the notion of authority in art and literature and examines the problems of meaning - its production, distribution, and consumption - in different historical epochs. In the end, he suggests, the only meaning that history can have is the kind that a narrative imagination gives to it. The secret of the process by which consciousness invests history with meaning resides in the content of the form, in the way our narrative capacities transforms the present into a (...) fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have desceneded. (shrink)

Approaches to the naturalization of phenomenology usually understand naturalization as a matter of rendering continuous the methods, epistemologies, and ontologies of phenomenological and natural scientific inquiry. Presupposed in this statement of the problematic, however, is that there is an original discontinuity, a rupture between phenomenology and the natural sciences that must be remedied. I propose that this way of thinking about the issue is rooted in a simplistic understanding of the phenomenological reduction that entails certain assumptions about the subject matter (...) of phenomenology and its relationship to the natural sciences. By contrast, Merleau‐Ponty's first work, The Structure of Behavior, presents a radically different approach to the phenomenological reduction, one that traverses the natural sciences and integrates them into phenomenology from the outset. I outline the argument for this position in The Structure of Behavior and then discuss consequences for current methodological issues surrounding the naturalization of phenomenology, focusing on the relationship between empirical sciences of mind, phenomenological psychology, and transcendental phenomenology. This novel exegesis of Merleau‐Ponty's view on the reduction offers new insight into his oft‐quoted remark that the phenomenological reduction is impossible to complete. (shrink)

I have two objectives in this article. The first is methodological: I elaborate a minimal phenomenological method and attempt to show its importance in studies of infant behavior. The second objective is substantive: Applying the minimal phenomenological approach, combined with Meltzoff’s “like-me” developmental framework, I propose the hypothesis that infants learn the pointing gesture at least in part through imitation. I explain how developments in sensorimotor ability (posture, arm and hand control and coordination, and locomotion) in the first year of (...) life prepare the infant for acquiring the pointing gesture. The former may directly enable the latter by allowing the infant to experience its own body as being “like those” of others, thus allowing it to imitatively appropriate a broader range of adult behavior. My proposal emphasizes the embodiment of mind in the development of cognition, contrary to latent dualistic tendencies in some developmental literature. (shrink)

Which is better: a guarantee of a modest amount of moral value, or a tiny probability of arbitrarily large value? To prefer the latter seems fanatical. But, as I argue, avoiding such fanaticism brings severe problems. To do so, we must decline intuitively attractive trade-offs; rank structurally identical pairs of lotteries inconsistently, or else admit absurd sensitivity to tiny probability differences; have rankings depend on remote, unaffected events ; and often neglect to rank lotteries as we already know we would (...) if we learned more. Compared to these implications, fanaticism is highly plausible. (shrink)

Recent advances in the capability of digital information technologies—particularly due to advances in artificial intelligence —have invigorated the debate on the ethical issues surrounding their use. However, this debate has often been dominated by ‘Western’ ethical perspectives, values and interests, to the exclusion of broader ethical and socio-cultural perspectives. This imbalance carries the risk that digital technologies produce ethical harms and lack social acceptance, when the ethical norms and values designed into these technologies collide with those of the communities in (...) which they are delivered and deployed. This special issue takes a step towards broadening the approach of digital ethics, by bringing together a range of cultural, social and structural perspectives on the ethical issues relating to digital information technology. Importantly, it refreshes and reignites the field of Intercultural Digital Ethics for the age of AI and ubiquitous computing. (shrink)

The development of string theory shows an unusual situation within the development of knowledge theory. Science achieves progress in understanding nature without direct empirical confirmation. Definitely, “an altered conception of scientific progress emerges” (R. Dawid). In our opinion, the only possibility to understand the new situation is to adopt some kind of naturalized epistemology. Naturalization viewed as declining of the a-prioriticity of philosophical knowledge, first, and reintroducing of psychology, second (P. Kitcher), gives many naturalized approaches in the realism debate field. (...) Is it possible to extend realism heritage into the ironic science like string theory? Yes, but of course we should be bothered by the semantics issue in such a case. As Michael Devitt noted, the main question is not even the question about the connection between realism and truth, but the question about the role of semantics in general. We think that Devitt’s interpretation of the semantics role allows to extend realism even into the ironic science. (shrink)

Not uncommon for Russian translations of British philosophical classics is the problem of not conveying the notions of imagination and fancy properly. The purpose of this paper is to serve as a reminder of the fact that concepts of fancy and imagination began to grow apart as early as the first part of 18 th century, and it is necessary to treat them accordingly for the translation to be correct. Very soon, the notion of imagination and the distinction between imagination (...) and fancy began to be involved in the contemplation of political reality. Today it is the notion of political imagination that attracts researchers the most, providing a tool for explaining continuity and discontinuities in political process as well as left utopianism and conservative nostalgia. The awareness of the distinction between imagination and fancy could foster research activity in such fields as the history of ideas and intellectual history as well as studies in ideology and power. The distinction is examined on the basis of texts usually considered to be written by authors of conservative strand. It is an interesting fact, indeed, that it was conservatives who made the main contribution to the development of this distinction in English-language philosophy. Among them are Coleridge, who resolutely draw the line between fancy and imagination, and Burke with his appeal to the moral imagination. The kindred typology of imagination was proposed in 20 th century by such thinkers as Irving Babbitt, T.S. Eliot and Russell Kirk. The importance of Kirk lies partly in that fact that he began the discussion of the conservative attitude to imagination and tried to frame it as a coherent narrative. (shrink)

A modest piece of experimental writing, Ghost of Revolution is intended as a methodological tool to question the form and function (tactics) of self-critique at the interface between art and science. Half fictional, half real, the “story” revolves around a speculative, biological connection between a mother and her son in an age of genetic manipulation. The speculation adopts a mode of writing that deviates from conventional story-telling in the sense that the characters are no longer leading roles in a piece (...) of animated theatre; instead, the act of writing focuses on the conscious movements of the textual fabric as a constitutive environment that contracts and expands, pushes and pulls discrete forces dia-logically. (shrink)

Erfreut begrüßen wir die textkritische Ausgabe der von Maximos Planudes verfaßten Übersetzung der Metamorphosen Ovids: so wird ein altes Desideratum der byzantinischen wie auch der lateinischen Philologie erfüllt. Die mühevolle Arbeit haben M. PAPATHOMOPOULOS und I. TSAVARI übernommen, und das Buch hat die Akademie von Athen herausgegeben, die im Rahmen anderer Schriftenreihen (Corpus philosophorum medii aevi, Philosophi Byzantini und Бιβλιοθήϰη А. Мανούςη) noch mehrere byzantinische Übersetzungen (von Boethius' De differentiis topicis und De consolatione Philosophiae sowie von Augustinus' De trinitate) erscheinen (...) ließ. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Je discute dans le présent article le concept de vertu naturelle chez Aristote et Thomas d’Aquin. J’analyse l’idée de Thomas d’Aquin de vertus qui sont naturelles à tous les être humains en m’aidant de la théorie contemporaine de la loi naturelle; et je défends son idée de vertus qui sont naturelles à certains êtres humains en discutant quelques problèmes en éthique contemporaine de la vertu et en comparant ses conceptions à celles de David Hume. Finalement, je recours au concept (...) de vertu naturelle pour examiner la question de l’unité des vertus et le problème du «courageux meurtrier nazi». Je comprends cette exploration du thème de la vertu naturelle comme une contribution à la réflexion sur la vertu en général et, plus particulièrement, au débat entre une éthique de la vertu et une éthique des principes. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to analyze the effectiveness of the practical implementation of ideas, depending on the rationality of the actors. The article examines approaches to understanding rationality in the history of philosophy. The author's integral understanding of rationality in modern conditions is proposed. The advanced ideas for building effective social systems are noted.

In this article, the author describes the far Eastern Federal district as one of the subjects, considers the socio-economic development of the Far East, especially the timber industry. Since this industry is a priority of socio-economic development. The author also describes the problems of development of the timber industry in the Far East, focusing on the production potential, the object of attention also includes customs duties, the cost of forest products. The author considers solutions to problems through the development of (...) foreign economic cooperation with the countries of the Northeast Asia, namely through foreign investment in the timber industry, construction of common enterprises on mutually beneficial terms, etc. (shrink)

For aggregative theories of moral value, it is a challenge to rank worlds that each contain infinitely many valuable events. And, although there are several existing proposals for doing so, few provide a cardinal measure of each world's value. This raises the even greater challenge of ranking lotteries over such worlds—without a cardinal value for each world, we cannot apply expected value theory. How then can we compare such lotteries? To date, we have just one method for doing so (proposed (...) separately by Arntzenius, Bostrom, and Meacham), which is to compare the prospects for value at each individual location, and to then represent and compare lotteries by their expected values at each of those locations. But, as I show here, this approach violates several key principles of decision theory and generates some implausible verdicts. I propose an alternative—one which delivers plausible rankings of lotteries, which is implied by a plausible collection of axioms, and which can be applied alongside almost any ranking of infinite worlds. (shrink)

To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent—absent or, as in some domains of Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal (...) fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural."1 Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As Barthes says, "narrative...is translatable without fundamental damage" in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is not. · 1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," Music, Image, Text, trans. Stephen Heath , p. 79.· 2. The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on derive via the Latin gnārus and narro from the Sanskrit root gnâ . The same root yields γνωριμος : see Emile Boisacq, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque , under the entry for this word. My thanks to Ted Morris of Cornell, one of our greatest etymologists. Hayden White, professor in the program of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Greco-Roman Tradition, and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. " The Narrativization of Real Events" appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Critical Responses to the present essay include Louis O. Mink's "Everyman His or Her Own Annalist", and Marilyn Robinson Waldman's "The Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711: A Reply to Hayden White," both in the Summer 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

The paper aims to unfold the «internal» content of Gettier’s argument as a skeptical argument against knowledge in terms of answering the question: «why he could be right when he says what he says». Our initial hypothesis is that E. Gettier does not say anything about the «accidentality of the fact that Smith has 10 coins in his pocket», but he uses the words «entailment» and «deduction», which substantiates the «truth of the conclusion», and on the basis of which he (...) attributes «knowledge» to Smith. The article comes out at a certain time, E. Gettier uses the rhetoric of necessary and sufficient conditions, with regard to justification an analogue of the closure principle is given, there are exactly two examples – all this lead to the assumption that E. Gettier’s «justification» in the form he speaks about it in the staging part of the article – is a logical relationship between beliefs that are interconnected by the relationship of entailment and are fixed in the same way in the person’s belief system. Much of the evidence on pages two and three is an illustration of why this «logical interpretation» of reasoning doesn’t work. Contrary to most popular points of view, E. Gettier managed to show only that the implementation of formal relations between beliefs does not allow one to get to «knowledge» in the form in which he defines it. In particular, such a reading makes it possible to block various attempts to propose a «fourth condition». It must meet the task set – to restore confidence that the fulfillment of the formal relations between beliefs can help to get to «knowledge». However, within the framework of the linguistic turn paradigm, in which E. Gettier works, this is impossible, because in general, it simply lacks adequate means of discussing the persuasiveness of the inference. In this sense, «knowledge» is, by definition, a fuzzy concept that brings us back to «classical notions» in which the persuasiveness of an argument implies not only validity, but also soundness, relevance, and usefulness. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking over (...) spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)

Suppose you found that the universe around you was infinite—that it extended infinitely far in space or in time and, as a result, contained infinitely many persons. How should this change your moral decision-making? Radically, it seems, according to some philosophers. According to various recent arguments, any moral theory that is ’minimally aggregative’ will deliver absurd judgements in practice if the universe is (even remotely likely to be) infinite. This seems like sound justification for abandoning any such theory. -/- My (...) goal in this thesis is simple: to demonstrate that we need not abandon minimally aggregative theories, even if we happen to live in an infinite universe. I develop and motivate an extension of such theories, which delivers plausible judgements in a range of realistic cases. I show that this extended theory can overcome key objections—both old and new—and that it succeeds where other proposals do not. With this proposal in hand, we can indeed retain minimally aggregative theories and continue to make moral decisions based on what will promote the good. (shrink)

In a recent article, ‘Why lockdown of the elderly is not ageist and why levelling down equality is wrong’, Savulescu and Cameron argue that a selective lockdown of older people is not ageist because it would treat people unequally based on morally relevant differences. This response argues that a selective lockdown of older people living in long-term care homes would be unjust because it would allow the expansive liberties of the general public to undermine the basic liberties of older people, (...) and because it would discriminate on the basis of extrinsic disadvantages. (shrink)

Broadly defined, government corruption is the abuse of public power for private gain. It can assume various forms, including bribery, embezzlement, cronyism, and electoral fraud. At root, however, government corruption is a problem of trust. Corrupt politicians abuse the powers entrusted to them by the electorate (the principal-agent problem). Politicians often resort to corruption out of a lack of trust that other politicians will abstain from it (the collective action problem). Corruption breeds greater mistrust in elected officials amongst the public. (...) The problem of trust is compounded where a lack of transparency and asymmetric information impede effective control over the exercise of public powers. (shrink)

Aggregative moral theories face a series of devastating problems when we apply them in a physically realistic setting. According to current physics, our universe is likely _infinitely large_, and will contain infinitely many morally valuable events. But standard aggregative theories are ill-equipped to compare outcomes containing infinite total value. So, applied in a realistic setting, they cannot compare any outcomes a real-world agent must ever choose between. This problem has been discussed extensively, and non-standard aggregative theories proposed to overcome it. (...) This paper addresses a further problem of similar severity. Physics tells us that, in our universe, how remotely in time an event occurs is _relative_. But our most promising aggregative theories, designed to compare outcomes containing infinitely many valuable events, are sensitive to how remote in time those events are. As I show, the evaluations of those theories are then relative too. But this is absurd; evaluations of outcomes must be absolute! So we must reject such theories. Is this objection fatal for all aggregative theories, at least in a relativistic universe like ours? I demonstrate here that, by further modifying these theories to fit with the physics, we can overcome it. (shrink)

Philosophy & Public Affairs, Volume 50, Issue 2, Page 202-238, Spring 2022.

The political teaching of the Republic is rooted in its peculiar use in book 4 of what would later be canonized as the four cardinal virtues. Socrates’ account of four deficient political regimes in Republic 8-9 is framed as an examination of four kinds of vice, and so may be read as a study of the political consequences of a serial loss of these same virtues. Socrates’ colorful description of the inferior regimes and their corresponding human types confirms that Plato (...) has represented generational changes occasioning transitions in regime-types as just such a gradual breakdown of virtue as a whole. The particular virtues provide the main fourfold scheme underlying the seemingly historical logic of political decline, while realistic touches and psychological explanation supplement rather than determine the overall scheme. Close literary attention is necessary to bring out this character of Socrates’ analysis of political degeneration. (shrink)

This article revisits John Wilson’s “first steps” in moral education—a conceptual analysis of morality—and what he calls an education in morality. Education in morality focuses on morality as a form of life with a specific domain in which it aims to initiate students, and on education as a growth-oriented, progressive activity. Arendt’s conception of natality in education is then used to show how it provides a catalyst for growth, discovery, and tradition-trumping newness, and acts as a stepping-stone to public action (...) as morality and recognition of the plurality of human life. It becomes clear that the inherent sociability of morality forces the consideration of it as a public and social act. Education in morality must preserve the potential for the capacity to contribute to the development of morality and concurrently develop that capacity through the production of plurality that follows and the negotiations necessary for its preservation. Morality, then, must not be taught as a static set of immutable principles, but rather as an inclusive, adaptive process by and through which groups govern their associations. (shrink)

Aquinas does not argue that natural inclinations per se suffice for moral absolutes, but rather that they suffice to make their objects known as self-evidently good for persons. Acting for the contrary of a natural inclination thereby harms persons and is contrary to the Bonum Precept (Good is to be done and pursued; evil is to be avoided). Acting for a self-evident good, however, becomes morally obligatory only when indispensable.

Издание адресуется специалистам в области искусствознания и всем тем, кто интересуется фундаментальными вопросами художественной жизни.

The purpose of the study is to analyze social ideas using the methods of philosophical phenomenology. The article clarifies the features of the application of phenomenology to the analysis of social phenomena. The main emphasis is placed on the study of social ideas that offer the implementation of projects of regional significance. The projects of "United Europe" were considered. The trajectories of the implementation of the original plan are presented. When summing up the results of the study, the importance of (...) focusing on empirical contexts in which social ideas find their practical implementation was noted. (shrink)

Can it be rational to be risk-averse? It seems plausible that the answer is yes—that normative decision theory should accommodate risk aversion. But there is a seemingly compelling class of arguments against our most promising methods of doing so. These long-run arguments point out that, in practice, each decision an agent makes is just one in a very long sequence of such decisions. Given this form of dynamic choice situation, and the (Strong) Law of Large Numbers, they conclude that those (...) theories which accommodate risk aversion end up delivering the same verdicts as risk-neutral theories in nearly all practical cases. If so, why not just accept a simpler, risk-neutral theory? The resulting practical verdicts seem to be much the same. In this paper, I show that these arguments do not in fact condemn those risk-aversion-accommodating theories. Risk aversion can indeed survive the long run. (shrink)

This article addresses the question of how ‘Country of Origin Information’ reports—that is, research developed and used to support decision-making in the asylum process—can be published in an ethical manner. The article focuses on the risk that published COI reports could be misused and thereby harm the subjects of the reports and/or those involved in their development. It supports a situational approach to assessing data ethics when publishing COI reports, whereby COI service providers must weigh up the benefits and harms (...) of publication based, inter alia, on the foreseeability and probability of harm due to potential misuse of the research, the public good nature of the research, and the need to balance the rights and duties of the various actors in the asylum process, including asylum seekers themselves. Although this article focuses on the specific question of ‘how to publish COI reports in an ethical manner’, it also intends to promote further research on data ethics in the asylum process, particularly in relation to refugees, where more foundational issues should be considered. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a novel account of the phenomenality of language by focusing on characteristics of perceived speech. I explore the extent to which the spoken word can be said to have a horizonal structure similar to that of spatiotemporal objects: our perception of each is informed by habitual associations and expectations formed through past experiences of the object or word and other associated objects and experiences. Specifically, the horizonal structure of speech in use can fruitfully be compared (...) to that of a tool in use. The comparison suggests an account of our linguistic faculty as continuous with more foundational faculties of perception and action. I provide empirical corroboration of this account by drawing on recent neuroimaging studies of the multimodal, sensorimotor bases of speech comprehension. I then discuss how such an understanding of our linguistic ability helps advocates of embodied, non-representationalist accounts of cognition respond to a common objection. Critics grant that embodied approaches may be adequate to account for lower-level, online modes of cognition, such as perception and action, which directly engage their object. But they question whether such approaches can “scale up” to higher modes of cognition, such as imagination, memory, thought, and language, which can entertain absent, non-existent, or abstract objects. By providing a plausible account of the continuity of lower cognition and language-involving cognition, my approach responds to this objection, at least where language is concerned. (shrink)

Since the publication of _A Theory of Justice _, John Rawls has been viewed as one of the most important political theorists of the twentieth century. In _John Rawls: Towards a Just World Order_, Patrick Hayden discusses Rawls's views regarding the nature of social justice among states. He examines Rawls's most important writings in order to assess how adequately his theory of justice is able to accommodate claims to universal human rights and shows how Rawls's work can contribute to (...) the construction of a cosmopolitan approach to issues of international justice. Beginning with Rawls's attempt to develop an account of international justice and human rights that is consistent with his earlier theory of justice as fairness, Hayden then offers a critical examination of Rawls's political philosophy and international thought which argues for a cosmopolitan variation on Rawls's 'law of peoples'. _John Rawls: Towards a Just World Order_ is a concise and detailed analysis of one of the foremost political philosophers of our time that demonstrates the importance of Rawls's work for contemporary debates regarding international relations, world politics and human rights. (shrink)

Expected utility theory often falls silent, even in cases where the correct rankings of options seems obvious. For instance, it fails to compare the Pasadena game to the Altadena game, despite the latter turning out better in every state. Decision theorists have attempted to fill these silences by proposing various extensions to expected utility theory. As I show in this paper, such extensions often fall silent too, even in cases where the correct ranking is intuitively obvious. But we can extend (...) the theory further than has been done before---I offer a new extension, Invariant Value Theory, which deals neatly with those problem cases and also satisfies various desirable conditions. But other prima facie desirable conditions, including Independence, the theory violates. Is this a problem for the proposal? It may not be---in a new impossibility result, I show that no theory can satisfy Independence in full generality without violating several other conditions that together seem just as plausible. (shrink)