Do we remember what pain feels like? Investigations into this question have sometimes led to ambiguous or apparently contradictory results. Building on research on pain memory by Rohini Terry and colleagues, I argue that this lack of agreement may be due in part to the difficulty researchers face when trying to convey to their study's participants the type of memory they are being tasked with recalling. To address this difficulty, I introduce the concept of 'qualitative memory', which, arguably, (...) is the sort of memory we have of what red looks like yet lack with respect to pain. I also briefly address a number of consequences the acknowledgment of qualitative memory would potentially have for philosophy, arguing that if we fail to have qualitative memories of certain sensations, such as pain, the standard philosophical accounts of experience, rational choice, and the sources of moral action may all need revision. (shrink)

Do we remember what pain feels like? Investigations into this question have sometimes led to ambiguous or apparently contradictory results. Building on research on pain memory by Rohini Terry and colleagues, I argue that this lack of agreement may be due in part to the difficulty researchers face when trying to convey to their study’s participants the type of memory they are being tasked with recalling. To address this difficulty, I introduce the concept of ‘qualitative memory’, which, arguably, (...) is the sort of memory we have of what red looks like yet lack with respect to pain. I also briefly address a number of consequences the acknowledgment of qualitative memory would potentially have for philosophy, arguing that if we fail to have qualitative memories of certain sensations, such as pain, the standard philosophical accounts of experience, rational choice, and the sources of moral action may all need revision. (shrink)

This paper is predicated on the understanding that clinical encounters between clinicians and patients should be seen primarily as inter-relations among persons and, as such, are necessarily moral encounters. It aims to relocate the discussion to be had in challenging medical decision-making situations, including, for example, as the end of life comes into view, onto a more robust moral philosophical footing than is currently commonplace. In our contemporary era, those making moral decisions must be cognizant of the existence of perspectives (...) other than their own, and be attuned to the demands of inter-subjectivity. Applicable to clinical practice, we propose and justify a Habermasian approach as one useful means of achieving what can be described as dialogic consensus. The Habermasian approach builds around, first, his discourse theory of morality as universalizable to all and, second, communicative action as a cooperative search for truth. It is a concrete way to ground the discourse which must be held in complex medical decision-making situations, in its actual reality. Considerations about the theoretical underpinnings of the application of dialogic consensus to clinical practice, and potential difficulties, are explored. (shrink)

Are leaders morally special? Is there something ethically distinctive about the relationship between leaders and followers? Should leaders do whatever it takes to achieve group goals? Leadership Ethics uses moral theory, as well as empirical research in psychology, to evaluate the reasons everyday leaders give to justify breaking the rules. Written for people without a background in philosophy, it introduces readers to the moral theories that are relevant to leadership ethics: relativism, amoralism, egoism, virtue ethics, social contract theory, situation ethics, (...) communitarianism, and cosmopolitan theories such as utilitarianism and transformational leadership. Unlike many introductory texts, the book does more than simply acquaint readers with different approaches to leadership ethics. It defends the Kantian view that everyday leaders are not justified in breaking the moral rules. (shrink)

I examine here a wide array of interlocking Socratic doctrines, especially as they show up in the ideas of Socratic Ignorance and the Examined Life —along with such other Socratic claims as the following. First, that No one errs willingly. Second, that, in acting intentionally, everyone is always seeking their own greatest available good, given their present circumstances, where that greatest good is taken over the rest of their lives. Third, that those who don’t see that harming others will not, (...) over the rest of their lives, serve their own greatest good, deserve not punishment but instruction. I conduct this examination with my eye on two blatant contemporary inequalities across race and class. The first is that involved in differentially funding different schools and thereby shortchanging the ability of those of our children who need it most to work out better means to their own greatest good over the rest of their lives; the second is that across race, class, and educational background in our extensive incarceration practices. In the longest part of this essay, I argue that a principal philosophical presupposition of punishment practices can be shown to be well wide of the mark by the Socratic theory I explore here. This is the presupposition that there is some kind of philosophical justification—for example, in modern “under the description” theories—for the decidedly questionable view that we can almost always determine quite sufficiently what a person’s intentions are for purposes of justifiably and usefully punishing supposed malefactors. (shrink)

A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology, by BrandomRobert. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. pp. xiv + 836.

The authors argue in favor of the “nonconciliation” (or “steadfast”) position concerning the problem of peer disagreement. Throughout the paper they place heavy emphasis on matters of phenomenology—on how things seem epistemically with respect to the net import of one’s available evidence vis-à-vis the disputed claim p, and on how such phenomenology is affected by the awareness that an interlocutor whom one initially regards as an epistemic peer disagrees with oneself about p. Central to the argument is a nested goal/sub-goal (...) hierarchy that the authors claim is inherent to the structure of epistemically responsible belief-formation: pursuing true beliefs by pursuing beliefs that are objectively likely given one’s total available evidence; pursuing this sub-goal by pursuing beliefs that are likely true (given that evidence) relative to one’s own deep epistemic sensibility; and pursuing this sub-sub-goal by forming beliefs in accordance with one’s own all-in, ultima facie, epistemic seemings. (shrink)

In his PhD proposal, now published as Seeing Sociological, Garfinkel [2006] formulated action in terms of a mutually constitutive structure—the Noesis-Noema Structures. This structure can be traced to Aaron Gurwitsch’s gestalt psychology and Law of Good Gestalt which theorises how participants prioritise functional Gestalts over other possible meanings of what is perceivable in their surroundings. While Gurwitsch illustrated his theory using images, in this paper we revisit Gurwitsch’s theory in light of the advances in recording real-time interaction to consider Gestalt (...) in spatio-temporality of real-time interaction. We consider the Law of Good Gestalt in terms of the dimensions of time and space, and postulate two analytical principles—the Principle of Good Momentary Gestalt and the Principle of Good Temporal Gestalt—for analysing a multi-angle video segment of a monologue taken from a training event. The analysis examines how the monologue was embedded in a multi-layer projection structure, so that during the time of the monologue, the trainer and trainees can be seen as achieving a transition between one activity to another while sustaining the frame of the training event. Through this, the analysis highlights the multi-layered structure of participants’ field of perception that constitutes their experience of the social activity, and explores a “method” to reconstruct such a structured field of perception through re-coupling meanings to the assemblages of multimodal resources recoverable on video. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

It is widely held that children’s linguistic input underdetermines the correct grammar, and that language learning must therefore be guided by innate linguistic constraints. Here, we show that a Bayesian model can learn a standard poverty‐of‐stimulus example, anaphoric one, from realistic input by relying on indirect evidence, without a linguistic constraint assumed to be necessary. Our demonstration does, however, assume other linguistic knowledge; thus, we reduce the problem of learning anaphoric one to that of learning this other knowledge. We discuss (...) whether this other knowledge may itself be acquired without linguistic constraints. (shrink)

Addressing many social challenges requires both structural and behavioral change. The binary of an i- and s-frame obscures how behavioral science can help foster bottom-up collective action. Adopting a community-frame perspective moves toward a more integrative view of how social change emerges, and how it might be promoted by policymakers and publics in service of addressing challenges like climate change.

Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, written in Latin around 525 A.D., was to become one of the most influential literary texts of the Middle Ages. The Old English prose translation and adaptation which was produced around 900 and claims to be by King Alfred was one of the earliest signs of its importance and use, and the subsequent rewriting of parts as verse show an interest in rivalling the literary shape of the Latin original. The many changes and additions have much (...) to tell us about Anglo-Saxon interests and scholarship in the Alfredian period. This new edition is the first to present the second prose-and-verse version of the Old English text, and allows it to be read alongside the original prose version, for which this is the first edition for over a century, and the introduction and commentary reveal much about the history of the text and its composition. The edition contains critical texts of both versions; a translation; a full introduction examining the manuscripts, the composition of the prose text and of the subsequent verse, the language, the authorship and date of the two versions, the relationship to other texts of the period and later uses of it, and the nature and purpose of the work; a detailed commentary exploring the relationship to the Latin text and to the early medieval commentary tradition; textual notes; and a glossary. (shrink)

Hegel remains widely known but largely unread in Anglo-American philosophy. Although the earlier hostility to his thought in these circles has begun to fade, Hegel still remains for many philosophers a more or less peripheral figure, somebody to be taught once other subjects in the philosophy department have been covered. This is partly because of his obscure style and mostly because of the standard picture of Hegel that remains in the psychic geography of many academic philosophers. Hegel is conceived as (...) the last great thinker who tried to fashion a unified systematic picture of God, man and the world through something called dialectic. On this standard view, Hegel is seen as arguing for a kind of grand Spirit who is gradually coming to self-consciousness by struggling through the contradictions He has created, using people as instruments for His coming to self-consciousness, until finally He succeeds somewhere in Berlin. Spirit-God comes to full self-consciousness and as parts of this grand Spirit-God, we too come to a full awareness of what we really are. This kind of grand metaphysical cosmology and theodicy does not fit the more skeptical temperaments of many twentieth-century academic thinkers. (shrink)

Among the many developments in philosophy in the last several years has been the relatively recent wave of books and articles, especially in ethics, linking Kantianism with Aristotelianism. Hegelians are not surprised at this turn. For Hegel, there was a kind of logic to the key concepts in Aristotle and Kant that inevitably pushed us from one to the other, and something like that thought is behind his notorious summary statement in thePhenomenologythat ‘everything hangs on apprehending and expressing the true (...) not merely assubstancebut also equally assubject.’ Or as we might alternately put it with a narrower scope, everything about our interpretation of Hegel hangs on what in the world we take Hegel to mean by that assertion. Answering that requires us to take a stand on what constitutes Hegel’s idealism and what constitutes his version of naturalism. (shrink)

Charvet’s arguments revolve around very recent discussions in Anglo-American analytical ethics and political philosophy. He considers and rejects, for example, arguments in favor of both Thomas Nagel’s version of ethical realism and the view that value is constituted by fulfillment of our strongest desires. Both suffer from the inadequate “shared assumption as to the fundamental independence of desire and value, and hence desire and reason”. Instead, we should see both as “interdependent”; value “comes into the world through the medium of (...) the interacting desire and the belief systems of the organism as these articulate and project onto the environment the organism’s needs”. He likewise rejects Nagel’s and Parfit’s views on prudential rationality and personal identity, arguing that no “attempt to establish [personal identity] purely in impersonal terms” can succeed, that “the self is a basic primitive concept that is presupposed in all experience”. (shrink)