Our political thinking is driven, far more than philosophers recognize, by a concern for social equality and, more specifically, a concern to avoid relations of inferiority. Niko Kolodny argues that, in order to make sense of the most familiar ideas in our political thought and discourse - the justification of the state, democracy, and rule of law, as well as objections to paternalism and corruption - we cannot merely appeal to freedom (as libertarians like Nozick do) or to distributive fairness (...) (as liberals like Rawls do). We must, instead, appeal directly to claims against inferiority, that no one stands above or below. (shrink)

We normally take it for granted that other people will live on after we ourselves have died. Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a "collective afterlife" in which humanity survives long after we are gone. Samuel Scheffler maintains that this assumption plays a surprising - indeed astonishing - role in our lives.

As prose dramatic texts Plato's dialogues would have been read by their original audience as an alternative type of theatrical composition. The 'paradox' of the dialogue form is explained by his appropriation of the discourse of theatre, the dominant public mode of communication of his time. The oral performance of his works is suggested both by the pragmatics of the publication of literary texts in the classical period and by his original role as a Sokratic dialogue-writer and the creator of (...) a fourth dramatic genre. Support comes from a number of pieces of evidence, from a statue of Sokrates in the Academy to a mosaic of Sokrates in Mytilene, which point to a centuries-old tradition of treating the dialogues in the context of performance literature and testify to the significance of the image of 'Plato the prose dramatist' for his original and subsequent audiences. (shrink)

Munoz-Dardé (2009) argues that a social contract theory must meet Rousseau's ‘liberty condition’: that, after the social contract, each ‘nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before’. She claims that Rousseau's social contract does not meet this condition, for reasons that suggest that no other social contract theory could. She concludes that political philosophy should turn away from social contract theory's preoccupation with authority and obedience, and focus instead on what she calls the ‘legitimacy’ of social arrangements. I (...) raise questions about each of these claims. (shrink)

Logothetis, N.K.: Single units and conscious vision. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B-Biological Sciences 353, 1801-1818 (1998) Abstract.

Normativity involves two kinds of relation. On the one hand, there is the relation of being a reason for. This is a relation between a fact and an attitude. On the other hand, there are relations specified by requirements of rationality. These are relations among a person's attitudes, viewed in abstraction from the reasons for them. I ask how the normativity of rationality—the sense in which we ‘ought’ to comply with requirements of rationality—is related to the normativity of reasons—the sense (...) in which we ‘ought’ to have the attitudes what we have conclusive reason to have. The normativity of rationality is not straightforwardly that of reasons, I argue; there are no reasons to comply with rational requirements in general. First, this would lead to ‘bootstrapping’, because, contrary to the claims of John Broome, not all rational requirements have ‘wide scope’. Second, it is unclear what such reasons to be rational might be. Finally, we typically do not, and in many cases could not, treat rational requirements as reasons. Instead, I suggest, rationality is only apparently normative, and the normativity that it appears to have is that of reasons. According to this ‘Transparency Account’, rational requirements govern our responses to our beliefs about reasons. The normative ‘pressure’ that we feel, when rational requirements apply to us, derives from these beliefs: from the reasons that, as it seems to us, we have. (shrink)

Niko Kolodny It is often said that there is a special class of norms, ‘rational requirements’, that demand that our attitudes be related one another in certain ways, whatever else may be the case.1 In recent work, a special class of these rational requirements has attracted particular attention: what I will call ‘requirements of formal coherence as such’, which require just that our attitudes be formally coherent.2 For example, we are rationally required, if we believe something, to believe what it (...) entails. And we are rationally required, if we intend an end, to intend what we take to be necessary means to it. The intuitive idea is that formally incoherent attitudes give rise to a certain normative tension, or exert a kind of rational pressure on each another, and this tension, or pressure, is relieved just when one of the attitudes is revised. As John Broome observes, these requirements are, by their nature, ‘wide scope’, which is to say that there is no particular attitude that one must have or lack in order to satisfy them. This is because they require just formal coherence, and there is no particular attitude that one must have or lack in order to be formally coherent. (shrink)

As the Global South is increasingly interpenetrated by neo-liberal and authoritarian regimes the idea of the South as a site of emancipatory resistance and exotic cultural difference has ended. This article offers an alternative route into the cultures of the South. It focuses on the shifting forms of the South in contemporary visual art and outlines the possibilities of non-coercive forms of cultural exchange and the cartographies of a cosmopolitanism from below. This perspective on the South is most evident in (...) the stories of embodied solidarity that stand in contrast to top down visions of socio-economic development and cultural homogenization. (shrink)

Ist der Indeterminismus mit der Relativitatstheorie und ihrer Konzeption der Gegenwart vereinbar? Diese Frage lasst sich beantworten, indem man die fur das alte Problem der futura contingentia entwickelten Ansatze auf Aussagen uber das Raumartige ubertragt. Die dazu hier Schritt fur Schritt aufgebaute relativistische indeterministische Raumzeitlogik ist eine erste philosophische Anwendung der multidimensionalen Modallogiken. Neben den ublichen Zeitoperatoren kommen dabei die Operatoren "uberall" und "irgendwo" sowie "fur jedes Bezugssystem" und "fur manches Bezugssystem" zum Einsatz. Der aus der kombinierten Zeit- und Modallogik (...) bekannte Operator fur die historische Notwendigkeit wird in drei verschiedene Operatoren ausdifferenziert. Sie unterscheiden sich bezuglich des Gebiets, in dem mogliche Raumzeiten inhaltlich koinzidieren mussen, um als Alternativen zueinander gelten zu konnen. Die Interaktion zwischen den verschiedenen Operatoren wird umfassend untersucht. Die Ergebnisse erlauben es erstmals, die Standpunkt-gebundene Notwendigkeit konsequent auf Raumzeitpunkte zu relativieren. Dies lasst auf einen metaphysisch bedeutsamen Unterschied zwischen deiktischer und narrativer Determiniertheit aufmerksam werden. Dieses Buch erganzt das viel diskutierte Paradigma der verzweigten Raumzeit um eine neue These: Der Raum ist eine Erzahlform der Entscheidungen der Natur. (shrink)

At first glance, love seems to be a psychological state for which there are normative reasons: a state that, if all goes well, is an appropriate or fitting response to something independent of itself. Love for one’s parent, child, or friend is fitting, one wants to say, if anything is. On reflection, however, it is elusive what reasons for love might be. It is natural to assume that they would be nonrelational features of the person one loves, something about her (...) in her own right. According to the “quality theory,” for example, reasons for love are the beloved’s personal attributes, such as her wit and beauty. In J. David Velleman’s provocative and ingeniously argued proposal, the reason for love is the beloved’s bare Kantian personhood, her capacity for rational choice and valuation.1 But no such nonrelational feature works. To appreciate just one difficulty, observe that whatever nonrelational feature one selects as the reason for love will be one that another person could, or actually does, possess. The claim that nonrelational features are reasons for love implies, absurdly, that insofar as one’s love for Jane is responsive to its reasons, it will accept any relevantly similar person as a replacement. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage propose une lecture méthodique de la place centrale et des sens multiples de l'aliénation et de l'extériorisation dans la Phénoménlogoie de l'esprit de Hegel. Quelle est la place de ces notions dans l'oeuvre majeure du philosophe allemand? L'auteur tente ainsi de mettre l'accent tantôt sur l'aspect et l'enracinement profondément social-historique de ces deux notions.

Every attempt to examine our consciousness’s passive life and its dynamic in its various forms inevitably intersects with our primal awareness of the future. Even though Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness enjoys a certain fame, his conception of our primordial relation to the future has not been adequately accounted for. The book at hand aims to offer a close study of Husserl’s view of protentional consciousness and to trace its unique contribution to our overall awareness of time. It offers an extensive (...) analysis of various aspects of protention by investigating its connection to different fields and levels of experience. To achieve such a task, the book stresses the need to enrich the familiar formal account of protention with a material one. Thus, alongside issues pertaining exclusively to the form of protention, such as its relation to fulfillment as well as its double-intentional structure, various other dimensions are discussed, such as the phenomena of disappointment and correction as well as the role hyle plays in both of them. In the same vein, special attention is given to the relation between protentional consciousness and affectivity, thus shedding light on the dynamic unity of our living-present. What this study purports to show is that Husserl’s phenomenology is equipped to offer a solid account of the thinnest and subtlest ways in which we are aware of the future in our experiential life. (shrink)

Asif A. Ghazanfar,1,3,* Hjalmar K. Turesson,1,3 statistical pattern recognition [16, 17] and psychophys- Joost X. Maier,1 Ralph van Dinther,2 ics [13, 18–23] have suggested that formants are signif- Roy D. Patterson,2 and Nikos K. Logothetis1 icant contributors to these indexical cues. It is likely, 1Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics then, that detecting formants could have provided 72076 Tuebingen ancestral primates with indexical cues necessary for Germany navigating the complex social interactions that are the 2Centre for the Neural Basis (...) of Hearing essence of primate societies. One important indexical Department of Physiology cue is body size. Formant cues related to body size University of Cambridge could be used by monkeys to determine the sex (in sex- CB2 3EG Cambridge ually dimorphic species), degree of potential threat (e.g., United Kingdom whether a competitor is larger or smaller), and/or age of an individual, as such cues do for human listeners [13, 18, 20, 21]. Summary Formants are the result of acoustic filtering by the supralaryngeal vocal tract—the nasal and oral cavities Vocal-tract resonances (or formants) are acoustic sigabove the vocal folds. During vocal production, pulses natures in the voice and are related to the shape and of air generated by the rapid movement of the vocal length of the vocal tract. Formants play an important folds produce an acoustic signal. The frequency of these role in human communication, helping us not only to pulses—the glottal-pulse rate—determines the fundadistinguish several different speech sounds [1], but mental frequency of the signal, which in turn is perceived also to extract important information related to the as pitch. As the signal passes through the supralaryngphysical characteristics of the speaker, so-called ineal vocal tract, it excites resonances, resulting in the dexical cues. How did formants come to play such an enhancement of particular frequency bands; these are important role in human vocal communication? One the formants.. (shrink)

Often our reason for doing something is an "instrumental reason": that doing that is a means to doing something else that we have reason to do. What principles govern this "instrumental transmission" of reasons from ends to means? Negatively, I argue against principles often invoked in the literature, which focus on necessary or sufficient means. Positively, I propose a principle, "General Transmission," which answers to two intuitive desiderata: that reason transmits to means that are "probabilizing" and "nonsuperfluous" with respect to (...) the relevant end. I then apply General Transmission to the debate over "detachment": whether "wide-scope" reason for a material conditional or disjunction implies "narrow-scope" reason for the consequent or disjuncts. (shrink)

We consider a paradox involving indicative conditionals (‘ifs’) and deontic modals (‘oughts’). After considering and rejecting several standard options for resolv- ing the paradox—including rejecting various premises, positing an ambiguity or hidden contextual sensitivity, and positing a non-obvious logical form—we offer a semantics for deontic modals and indicative conditionals that resolves the paradox by making modus ponens invalid. We argue that this is a result to be welcomed on independent grounds, and we show that rejecting the general validity of modus (...) ponens is compatible with vindicating most ordinary uses of modus ponens in reasoning. (shrink)

rational requirements are narrow scope. The source of our disagreement, I suspect, is that Broome believes that the relevant rational requirements govern states, whereas I believe that they govern processes. If they govern states, then the debate over scope is sterile. The difference between narrow- and wide-scope state requirements is only as important as the difference between not violating a requirement and satisfying one. Broome's observations about conflicting narrow-scope state requirements only corroborate this. Why, then, have we thought that there (...) was an important difference? Perhaps, I conjecture, because there is an important difference between narrow- and wide-scope process requirements, and we have implicitly taken process requirements as our topic. I clarify and try to defend my argument that some process requirements are narrow scope, so that if there were reasons to conform to rational requirements, there would be implausible bootstrapping. I then reformulate Broome's observations about conflicting narrow-scope state requirements as an argument against narrow-scope process requirements, and suggest a reply. (shrink)

Der Status des sogenannten syllogismos ex hypotheseôs Hypothese") in Aristoteles' Organon mag als kleines rätselhaftes Detail der Logikgeschichte gelten. Interessant ist dieses Detail, weil man leicht in Versuchung gerät, in ihm eine Schnittstelle zwischen antiker Begriffs- und Aussagenlogik zu erblicken. Im folgenden soll dafür plädiert werden, dass man dieser Versuchung lieber nicht nachgeben sollte. Schließlich soll die Vermutung geäußert werden, dass es näherliegend ist, innerhalb der aristotelischen Argumentationslehre eine ganz andere Identifikation vorzunehmen als die übliche.

Recently, much attention has been paid to ‘rational requirements’ and, especially, to what I call ‘rational requirements of formal coherence as such’. These requirements are satisfied just when our attitudes are formally coherent: for example, when our beliefs do not contradict each other. Nevertheless, these requirements are puzzling. In particular, it is unclear why we should satisfy them. In light of this, I explore the conjecture that there are no requirements of formal coherence. I do so by trying to construct (...) a theory of error for the idea that there are such requirements. (shrink)

The hyletic component of kinaesthetic sensation has generally been treated with suspicion. It is usually set aside in favour of Husserl’s later analysis of kinaesthetic experience which emphasizes its practical dimension. I try to show that a nuanced understanding of the hyletic component allows us to consider its deeper temporal function. From a rather neglected passage in his Ding und Raum I show that Husserl was aware of the temporal peculiarity of kinaesthetic sensation: it is characterized by a unique kind (...) of “sameness”. I then try to explain how the hyletic dimension of kinaesthetic sensation is responsible for this peculiarity. By escaping the contingencies of protentional fulfilment kinaesthetic hyle merely unifies in an actual “belonging-together” our sensing of position and the motivation of the correlative appearances. It is on this basis that it fundamentally shapes at a passive-hyletic level the complex temporal dynamic of the practical dimension of kinaesthetic experience. (shrink)

Quel rapport entretenait Marx avec la culture, l'histoire et la philosophie de la Grèce antique? Pourquoi le jeune Marx s'était-il intéressé à la pensée d'Epicure? Que représentait pour lui la philosophie enseignée par le fondateur de l'École du Jardin? A part l'aspect purement philosophique du rapport de l'auteur du Capital à la Grèce antique, on se donnera également pour tâche de mettre en perspective la contribution que les notions marxiennes de classe, de lutte des classes et d'exploitation peuvent apporter à (...) une compréhension féconde de l'histoire des formations sociales grecques, en partant de l'oeuvre majeure de l'historien britannique G. E. M. de Ste Croix. (shrink)

Promising is clearly a social practice or convention. By uttering the formula, “I hereby promise to do X,” we can raise in others the expectation that we will in fact do X. But this succeeds only because there is a social practice that consists (inter alia) in a disposition on the part of promisers to do what they promise, and an expectation on the part of promisees that promisers will so behave. It is equally clear that, barring special circumstances of (...) some kind, it is morally wrong for promisers to fail to do what they have promised to do. What is perhaps less clear is how the moral wrongness that is involved when promises are broken is related to the social practice that makes promising possible in the first place. (shrink)

My subject is what I will call the “Myth of Formal Coherence.” In its normative telling, the Myth is that there are “requirements of formal coherence as such,” which demand just that our beliefs and intentions be formally coherent.1 Some examples are.

First English translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1909 doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche.

Scope: New entry. The analogue of the article on Noncognitivism. Contrast to subjectivist views of..

We have, or at least we take ourselves to have, reason for patterns of action and emotion toward our parents, siblings, friends, spouses, children, and others with whom we have significant ties.1 This partiality involves seeing to it that both these relatives and our relationships to them fare well, as well as respecting both in our decisions. It also involves feeling certain positive emotions (e.g., joy, relief, gratitude) when they fare well or are properly regarded, and feeling certain negative emotions (...) (e.g., grief, anxiety, resentment) when they fare poorly or are not properly regarded. Famously, these reasons for partiality are agent-relative. I have reason to be partial to my relatives, whereas you do not, and you have reason to be partial to your relatives, whereas I do not. Less often noted, these reasons support requirements that are owed to our relatives. When we breach these requirements, we wrong our relatives, if not.. (shrink)

Despite considerable evidence that neural activity in monkeys reflects various aspects of face perception, relatively little is known about monkeys’ face processing abilities. Two characteristics of face processing observed in humans are a subordinate-level entry point, here, the default recognition of faces at the subordinate, rather than basic, level of categorization, and holistic effects, i.e. perception of facial displays as an integrated whole. The present study used an adaptation paradigm to test whether untrained rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) display these hallmarks (...) of face processing. In experiments 1 and 2, macaques showed greater rebound from adaptation to conspecific faces than to other animals at the individual or subordinate level. In experiment 3, exchanging only the bottom half of a monkey face produced greater rebound in aligned than in misaligned composites, indicating that for normal, aligned faces, the new bottom half may have influenced the perception of the whole face. Scan path analysis supported this assertion: during rebound, fixation to the unchanged eye region was renewed, but only for aligned stimuli. These experiments show that macaques naturally display the distinguishing characteristics of face processing seen in humans and provide the first clear demonstration that holistic information guides scan paths for conspecific faces. (shrink)

manganese (Mn2+) enhanced MRI (MEMRI) to study neuronal connectivity in vivo opens the possibility to these studies. However, several drawbacks exist that challenge its applicability. High Mn2+ concentrations produce cytotoxic effects that can perturb the circuits under study. In the other hand, the MR signal is..