Objective To develop an ethically, legally, and clinically appropriate ventilator allocation policy for AdventHealth Tampa and AdventHealth Carrollwood in Tampa, Florida, which could be enacted swiftly during the Covid-19 pandemic. Methods During Spring 2020, a subcommittee of the Medical Ethics Committee established consensus on the fundamental principles of the policy, then built on existing ethical, legal, and clinical guidance. Results The plan was finalized in May 2020. The plan triages patients based on exclusion criteria (imminent mortality), prognosis and expected benefit (...) of ventilation (using the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment), and change in prognosis over time. Decisions are made by committee in order to minimize moral distress among individual patient care providers. Conclusions Due to international concerns about healthcare resource shortages during the Covid-19 pandemic, hospitals need allocation policies informed by the crisis standard of care, the hospital’s ethical duty to plan for an emergency, and federal civil rights laws Policy Implications: This type of policy can serve as a model for other institutions to develop crisis standards of care resource allocation policies, which are a necessary component of disaster planning. (shrink)

Many elite athletes find the loss of their athletic abilities due to age or injury to be a profoundly challenging experience. While talent development is a well-studied phenomenon, far less attention has been paid to the issue of talent loss. We address this gap by exploring the experience and challenges faced by elite athletes who are losing, or who have lost, their talent. Drawing on three different understandings of the nature of talent, we argue that the experience of talent loss (...) is constituted by three distinct yet interrelated forms of disorientation. We conclude by examining how athletes and those supporting them may respond to these challenges. (shrink)

Recent discussions of mental causation have focused on three principles: (1) Mental properties are (sometimes) causally relevant to physical effects; (2) mental properties are not physical properties; (3) every physical event has in its causal history only physical events and physical properties. Since these principles seem to be inconsistent, solutions have focused on rejecting one or more of them. But I argue that, in spite of appearances, (1)–(3) are not inconsistent. The reason is that 'properties' is used in different senses (...) in the principles. In (1) and (3), 'properties' should be read as 'tropes' (properties here are particulars), while in (2) 'properties' should read as 'types' (properties here are universals or classes). Although mental types are distinct from physical types, every mental trope is a physical trope. This allows mental properties to be causally relevant to physical effects without violating the closed character of the physical world. (shrink)

This is an account of Sceptical investigation as it is presented by Sextus Empiricus. I focus attention on the motivation behind the Sceptic’s investigation, the goal of that investigation, and on the development Sextus describes from proto-Sceptical to Sceptical investigator. I suggest that recent accounts of the Sceptic’s investigative practice do not make sufficient sense of the fact that the Sceptic finds a relief from disturbance by way of suspending judgement, nor of the apparent continuity between proto-Sceptical and Sceptical investigation. (...) I offer an alternative account which turns on the suggestion that the Sceptic accepts that justification is the norm of belief. (shrink)

Hegel opens the first book of his Science of Logic with the statement of a problem: “The beginning of philosophy must be either something mediated or something immediate, and it is easy to show that it can be neither the one nor the other, so either way of beginning finds its rebuttal.” Despite its significant placement, exactly what Hegel means in his expression of this problem and exactly what his solution to it is, remain unclear. -/- In this book, (...) class='Hi'>Robb Dunphy provides a detailed engagement with Hegel’s “problem of beginning”, locating it within Hegel’s account of significant approaches to the topic of beginning in the history of Western philosophy, as well as making an extended case for the influence of Pyrrhonian Scepticism on the beginning of Hegel’s Logic. Dunphy’s discussion of the various putative solutions that Hegel might be thought to put forward contributes to debates concerning Hegel’s views on the methodology of logic, the relation between his Logic and his Phenomenology of Spirit, and differences between his Encyclopaedia presentation of logic and that of his greater Science of Logic. -/- Hegel and the Problem of Beginning also functions as a critical commentary on Hegel’s essay, “With what must the beginning of the science be made?” which should be of interest to both researchers and students working on the opening of Hegel’s Logic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thales of Miletus: The Beginnings of Western Science and PhilosophyKevin RobbPatricia F. O’Grady. Thales of Miletus: The Beginnings of Western Science and Philosophy. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002. Pp xxii + 310. Paper, $84.95.This book has a consistent thesis: Thales of Miletus was the first Western scientist and philosopher not just for what he began, but for what he himself said (or, as O'Grady believes, wrote). On this view, (...) Thales made significant contributions to metaphysics ("He asked the question: 'What is real?' no less than Plato and Aristotle did," 249), cosmology (on the earth and earthquakes, 87 ff.), astronomy (notably the eclipse, 126 ff.), mathematics (Proclus attributes Euclidean theorems to Thales, 191 ff.), psychology (on psyche) and theology (on "full of the gods," 108 ff.). O'Grady's thesis is that we know enough about Thales' thoughts in these areas (each a treacherous minefield of scholarly dispute, as O'Grady admits) that, after a clarified understanding of "Scientificity and Rationality" (her awkward title for Chapter 11), we can confidently conclude that philosophy and science were well begun by Thales. "I believe I have drawn a clear and detailed picture of a brilliant, veracious, and courageously speculative Greek. I see him as a questioner of almost everything, an investigator of nature...Thales is not the mere shadowy figure of Guthrie's perception. He is a man of substance, a man of distinction and of lasting importance" (251).O'Grady had early noted that W. K. C. Guthrie considered Thales a shadowy figure historically, made all the more so, Guthrie believed, because the legend kept expanding. For example, a sixth-century Thales as the seeker after the material archê, and so the first important physikos, is unknown before fourth-century Aristotle's Metaphysics Alpha, and by the time Euclidean theorems are attributed to Thales the tendency to foist imposing discoveries on famous persons was prevalent.This raises the major issue concerning O'Grady's exhaustively researched book. To what extent can the doxographic sources (the "A" sections of Diels's 1903Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker), be used to interpret the Presocratics, especially if the original wording from a thinker perished (any "B" section quotations). It is clear that in the fourth century nothing in writing from Thales survived for the Lyceum to read and catalogue although its scholars clearly sought it; the repeated legetai ("it is said") of Aristotle in Metaphysics Alpha and elsewhere is decisive. It is his standard way of indicating that no written work on the matter survives to be consulted, but stories or oral accounts do.O'Grady's thesis requires that the "A" section material be exploited fully, especially to present Thales as a philosopher (29-70). Many historians will be unwilling to take the entire journey with her. Some (Harold Cherniss) would balk at the first step. The demand for confirming ipsissima verba (or "B" quotations) to reconstruct the thought of any Presocratic with real confidence (as once proposed by G. S. Kirk) threatens to exclude Thales from histories of philosophy, an unsatisfactory result. Even so, Harold Cherniss proposed that drastic solution in 1935 in his magisterial Aristotle's Criticism of Presocratric Philosophy. Presocratic philosophy, he argued, should begin with Anaximander (375).The heart of Cherniss's numbingly exhaustive argument (400 + pages) was that Aristotle's purpose in surveying his predecessors's views was never historical, but dialectical. His intent was to argue for a fourfold causality (on the grounds only four archai had been turned up by all his predecessors, starting with Thales' material cause), and to fit those predecessors's views into a theory of natural causality as he had finally formulated it in his sophisticated, [End Page 107] largely technical vocabulary. Aristotle's "historical" notices on which all later accounts must depend were, thus, never history; the problem and the solution, along with their language, were Aristotle's alone. If Theophrastus paraphrased what he found in Aristotle (McDiarmid), and if the post-Aristotelian doxographic notices were largely dependent on Theophrastus (so already Diels in 1879, in Doxographi Graeci), then any attempt to extract a philosophical Thales from the later doxographic sources (or Aristotle) is methodologically doomed from... (shrink)

A commonly raised criticism against celebrity culture is that it celebrates people who become famous without any connection to their skills, talents or achievements. A culture in which people become famous simply for being famous is criticized for being shallow and inauthentic. In this paper we offer a defence of celebrity by arguing against this criticism. We begin by outlining what we call the Talent Argument: celebrity is a negative cultural phenomenon because it creates and sustains fame without any connection (...) to the accomplishments that arise from an expression of talent or skill. By appealing to the metaphysics of talent and skill, we argue against the Talent Argument and propose that being a celebrity requires the skills that are necessary to acquire and maintain one’s status as a celebrity. A celebrity is more likely to be talented and successful in their expression of these skills, and even celebrities who are ‘famous for being famous’ will often display talents and skills that give rise to their fame. This means that those who critique celebrity culture should not do so by appealing to the Talent Argument. We show how our account of celebrity, talent and skill works to reject both the strong version of the Talent Argument, as well as a weaker and more plausible version of the argument we call the Valuable Talents argument. We conclude by noting that our analysis has demonstrated the need to explore more closely the kinds of skills that are necessary to cultivate celebrity status. This allows for a more nuanced understanding of what a celebrity is, and the values that are attached to celebrity culture. (shrink)

In this chapter I consider three different positions on the a priori/a posteriori distinction that have been attributed to Hegel, specifically in the context of the epistemology of the metaphysical claims he defends in his Realphilosophie. I outline and briefly provide evidence for a reading of Hegel that understands him to retain the distinction in question, but to hold that the metaphysical claims he defends in the context of his philosophy of nature and his philosophy of spirit typically involve elements (...) of both a priori and a posteriori knowledge. I then defend this interpretation against two competitors. The first of these also takes Hegel to retain the distinction, but holds that the conclusions of his Realphilosophie, like those of his logic, are principally to be understood as known a priori. The second takes Hegel to abandon the a priori/a posteriori distinction altogether. I argue that these alternatives are less compelling. (shrink)

In this article I develop an interpretation of the opening passages of Hegel's essay ‘With what must the beginning of science be made?’ I suggest firstly that Hegel is engaging there with a distinctive problem, the overcoming of which he understands to be necessary in order to guarantee the scientific character of the derivation of the fundamental categories of thought which he undertakes in the Science of Logic. I refer to this as ‘the problem of beginning’. I proceed to clarify (...) the nature of the problem, which I understand to be motivated by a concern to avoid arbitrariness, and then to detail the nature of Hegel's proposed solution, which turns on understanding how the concept of ‘pure being’, understood in a specific sense to be both mediated and immediate, avoids the concerns about arbitrariness which accompany attempts to begin merely with something mediated, or merely with something immediate. On this basis, I offer a number of criticisms of alternative approaches to the beginning of Hegel's Logic. (shrink)

In this chapter, Robb Dunphy is concerned with the nature of G.E. Schulze's scepticism as he presents it in his 1792 work Aenesidemus, and with its relation to the metaphysical projects of Kant, Reinhold, and later German Idealists. After introducing Schulze's text, Dunphy turns to a recent interpretation offered by Jessica Berry, who claims that the extent to which Schulze endorsed a genuinely Pyrrhonian Scepticism has gone unacknowledged, both by his idealist contemporaries and by the majority of the secondary (...) literature on the period. Berry suggests that this unacknowledged Pyrrhonism in Aenesidemus provides the resources for a more radical criticism of the German Idealists' scientific, systematic metaphysical ambitions, to which they remain fundamentally vulnerable. Despite agreeing that an exploration of Schulze's debt to Pyrrhonism represents a valuable addition to our understanding of his scepticism, in the latter parts of the chapter Dunphy suggests that the Berry's attribution of a Pyrrhonian Scepticism to Schulze should to some extent be rejected, and that such a scepticism is perhaps not quite as problematic for the projects of Kant and the German Idealists as she suggests. (shrink)

Is simulation some new kind of science? We argue that instead simulation fits smoothly into existing scientific practice, but does so in several importantly different ways. Simulations in general, and computer simulations in particular, ought to be understood as techniques which, like many scientific techniques, can be employed in the service of various and diverse epistemic goals. We focus our attentions on the way in which simulations can function as (i) explanatory and (ii) predictive tools. We argue that a wide (...) variety of simulations, both computational and physical, are best conceived in terms of a set of common features: initial or input conditions, a mechanism or set of rules, and a set of results or output conditions. Studying simulations in these terms yields a new understanding of their character as well as a body of normative recommendations for the care and feeding of scientific simulations. (shrink)

In this article, evidence is briefly presented for three facts that together point to something puzzling. (1) That major continental philosophers of the nineteenth century tended to engage in some detail, as part of a broader preoccupation with ancient Greek thought, with Pyrrhonian scepticism. (2) That major continental philosophers of the twentieth century tended to engage in some depth with their nineteenth-century forebears and maintained their tendency to engage significantly with ancient Greek thought. (3) That twentieth-century continental philosophers demonstrate little (...) to no interest in Pyrrhonian scepticism. This raises the question: why does engagement with Pyrrhonism disappear from continental philosophy? The article discusses two hypotheses that might explain this disappearance. (shrink)

Talents often play a significant role in our personal and social lives. For example, our talents may shape the choices we make and the goods that we value, making them central to the creation of a meaningful life. Differences in the level of talents also affect how social institutions are structured, and how social goods and resources are distributed. Despite their normative importance, it is surprising that talents have not yet received substantial philosophical analysis in their own right. As a (...) result, the current literature is rife with conceptual ambiguity: a talent is referred to as all of a skill, potential, ability, capacity, endowment, and a natural gift. In response to this confusion, in this paper I develop an account of what a talent is, based on the debate concerning the metaphysics of ability and dispositions. I argue for a position that I call ‘talent dispositionalism’: S has a talent for skill A in circumstances C iff S has the general disposition to excellently develop and maintain A when, in circumstances C, she tries to excellently develop and maintain A. On this account, a talent is not the skill itself, but a general iterated ability for the excellent development and up-keep of a particular skill, constituted by an agent’s dispositional properties. I defend the account against four objections usually levelled against traditional dispositionalist theories of ability, and highlight some ways the account may influence debates in other areas of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

This book examines the progress of literacy in ancient Greece from its origins with the introduction of the alphabet in the eighth century to the fourth century, when the major cultural institutions of Athens became totally dependent on alphabetic literacy. Professor Robb introduces much new evidence and re-evaluates older evidence to demonstrate that early Greek literacy can only be understood in terms of the rich oral culture that immediately preceded it, one that was dominated by the oral performance of (...) epical verse, or "Homer". The eventual dependence of Athenian democratic institutions, notably law and higher education, on the technology of writing contributed to the "miracle" of Greece. (shrink)

The responsibility gap, commonly described as a core challenge for the effective governance of, and trust in, AI and autonomous systems (AI/AS), is traditionally associated with a failure of the epistemic and/or the control condition of moral responsibility: the ability to know what we are doing and exercise competent control over this doing. Yet these two conditions are a red herring when it comes to understanding the responsibility challenges presented by AI/AS, since evidence from the cognitive sciences shows that individual (...) humans face very similar responsibility challenges with regard to these two conditions. While the problems of epistemic opacity and attenuated behaviour control are not unique to AI/AS technologies (though they can be exacerbated by them), we show that we can learn important lessons for AI/AS development and governance from how philosophers have recently revised the traditional concept of moral responsibility in response to these challenges to responsible human agency from the cognitive sciences. The resulting instrumentalist views of responsibility, which emphasize the forward-looking and flexible role of agency cultivation, hold considerable promise for integrating AI/AS into a healthy moral ecology. We note that there nevertheless is a gap in AI/AS responsibility that has yet to be extensively studied and addressed, one grounded in a relational asymmetry of vulnerability between human agents and sociotechnical systems like AI/AS. In the conclusion of this paper we note that attention to this vulnerability gap must inform and enable future attempts to construct trustworthy AI/AS systems and preserve the conditions for responsible human agency. (shrink)

Through a careful reading of Foucault’s 1979 lectures on neoliberalism alongside Volumes 1 and 2 of The History of Sexuality, I argue that scholarship on both neoliberalism and queer theory should heed Foucault’s framing of both neoliberalism and sexuality as central to biopolitics. I thus offer two correctives to these fields of scholarship: for scholarship on neoliberalism, I locate a way to address the ethical bankruptcy of neoliberalism in a manner that Marxist analyses fail to provide; for scholarship in queer (...) theory, I warn that the longstanding embrace of non-conformity as a mode of resistance to normalization is suspiciously neoliberal. I conclude with the possibility of rehabilitating the concept of jouissance as a non-fungible limit to the enterprising rationality of neoliberalism that, if historicized and especially racialized, might offer a meaningful response to the increasing ethical collapse wrought by the neoliberalization of our lives. (shrink)

In our everyday social interactions, we try to make sense of what people are thinking, why they act as they do, and what they are likely to do next. This process is called mindreading. Mindreading, Shannon Spaulding argues in this book, is central to our ability to understand and interact with others. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have converged on the idea that mindreading involves theorizing about and simulating others’ mental states. She argues that this view of mindreading is limiting (...) and outdated. Most contemporary views of mindreading vastly underrepresent the diversity and complexity of mindreading. She articulates a new theory of mindreading that takes into account cutting edge philosophical and empirical research on in-group/out-group dynamics, social biases, and how our goals and the situational context influence how we interpret others’ behavior. -/- Spaulding's resulting theory of mindreading provides a more accurate, comprehensive, and perhaps pessimistic view of our abilities to understand others, with important epistemological and ethical implications. Deciding who is trustworthy, knowledgeable, and competent are epistemically and ethically fraught judgments: her new theory of mindreading sheds light on how these judgments are made and the conditions under which they are unreliable. -/- This book will be of great interest to students of philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, applied epistemology, cognitive science and moral psychology, as well as those interested in conceptual issues in psychology. (shrink)

Alfred A. Robb. THEOREM 54 If P1 and P2 be a pair of parallel inertia planes while an inertia plane Q1 has parallel general lines a and b in common with P1 and P2 respectively and if Q2 be an inertia plane parallel to Q1 through some ...

Reviled and fetishized, the work of Georges Bataille has been most often reduced to his outrageous, erotic, and libertine fiction and essays. But increasingly, readers are finding his insights into politics, economics, sexuality, and performance revealing and timely. Focusing on Bataille’s most extensive work, The Accursed Share, Shannon Winnubst and the contributors to this volume present contemporary interpretations that read Bataille in a new light. These essays situate Bataille in French and European intellectual traditions, bring forward key concepts for (...) understanding the challenges posed by his important work, and draw out his philosophy. Established voices and younger scholars cover a range of topics and themes, including ethics, politics, economy, psychology, and performance so readers can think with and through Bataille. While focusing attention on Bataille and his provocative work, this book offers a sympathetic, yet critical, reappraisal and rehabilitation. Contributors are Alison Leigh Brown, Andrew Cutrofello, Zeynep Direk, Jesse Goldhammer, Dorothy Holland, Pierre Lamarche, Richard A. Lee, Jr., Alphonso Lingis, Ladelle McWhorter, Lucio A. Privitello, Allan Stoekl, Amy Wendling, and Shannon Winnubst. (shrink)

This paper argues firstly that the argument of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is necessary for the justification of the beginning of his logical project, and secondly that Hegel's attempt to secure the beginning of his Science of Logic by relying upon the argument of the Phenomenology fails. I argue firstly that the position taken up at the beginning of Hegel's Logic is constructed in such a fashion that it relies upon the argument of the Phenomenology to justify it. I then (...) offer some support for the view of the relationship between the two texts defended by Maker in order to see how the two might be thought to be compatible. Finally, in the longest part of the paper, I offer a number of reasons for thinking that attempts to render the two compatible in this fashion fail. I therefore conclude that, as it stands, the beginning of Hegel's Logic is not secured against objection in the way that Hegel wants it to be. (shrink)

Worries about mental causation are prominent in contemporary discussions of the mind and human agency. Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how a mental substance (thought to be immaterial) could interact with a material substance, a body. Most philosophers nowadays repudiate immaterial minds, but the problem of mental causation has not gone away. Instead, focus has shifted to mental properties. How could mental properties be causally relevant to bodily behavior? How could something mental qua mental cause (...) what it does? After looking at the traditional Problem of Interaction, we survey various versions of the property-based problem and look at proposed solutions to them. (shrink)

Almost thirty years ago, in an attempt to undermine what he termed “the principle of alternate possibilities”.

In this paper, I propose that Derrida’s writing on the impossibility of justice has the potential for fruitful dialogue with Ruth Chang’s contemporary account of practical rationality. For Derrida, making a just decision must always come with a moment of undecidability, a “leap” into the unknown with an experience of doubt and anxiety that continues to “haunt” the decision-maker. By contrast, in her work on rationality, Chang proposes that hard decisions are difficult to make because the alternatives are “on a (...) par,” such that there are no rational differences between the alternatives that would contribute to choosing one over the other. Hard decisions are made by expressing one’s own rational agency, generating will-based reasons to commit to or “drift” into one of the alternatives. Derrida writes of anxiety, doubt, and impossibility, yet Chang writes of commitment, agency, and rationality. Despite these differences, there are important comparisons and connections between the two accounts that are worth exploring. I suggest that the moment of the decision which Derrida describes as heterogeneous to knowledge can be understood as a moment of parity in which there is a lack of given reasons, as explained by Chang. Chang’s account of rational agency provides an interpretation of how decision-making is possible despite the undecidability as described by Derrida. This notion of commitment and agency as explained by Chang is not incompatible with Derrida’s insistence that the responsible decision is haunted by anxiety and doubt. Instead, I suggest that Derrida’s writing highlights uncertainty as central to understanding the nature of hard choices and how to navigate the demands of justice. (shrink)

Leading scholars explore how different forms of ignorance are produced and sustained, and the role they play in knowledge practices.

According to Shannon Sullivan, thinking about the body as being in transaction with its social, political, cultural, and physical surroundings is not a new idea.

E.J. Lowe has recently proposed a model of mental causation on which mental events are emergent, thus exerting a novel, downward causal influence on physical events. Yet on Lowe's model, mental causation is at the same time empirically undetectable, and in this sense is "invisible". Lowe's model is ingenious, but I don't think emergentists should welcome it, for it seems to me that a primary virtue of emergentism is its bold empirical prediction about the long-term results of human physiology. Here (...) I'll try to restore emergentism's empirical status, but my broader aim is to use Lowe's model to explore some central topics in the mental causation debate, including the "causal closure" of the physical world and the nature of causal powers. (shrink)

"[A] lucid discussion of race that does not sell out the black experience." —Tommy Lott, author of The Invention of Race Revealing Whiteness explores how white privilege operates as an unseen, invisible, and unquestioned norm in society today. In this personal and selfsearching book, Shannon Sullivan interrogates her own whiteness and how being white has affected her. By looking closely at the subtleties of white domination, she issues a call for other white people to own up to their unspoken (...) privilege and confront environments that condone or perpetuate it. Sullivan’s theorizing about race and privilege draws on American pragmatism, psychology, race theory, and feminist thought. As it articulates a way to live beyond the barriers that white privilege has created, this book offers readers a clear and honest confrontation with a trenchant and vexing concern. (shrink)

The paper examines Hegel's treatment of Saint Anselm on the topics of God, Evil, and Truth. It considers why he defends Anselm against Kant's criticisms but also what objections he has to Anselm's conception of God in the Proslogion.

In this article, I argue that we need a better understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of the current debates in international law surrounding hate speech and inchoate crimes. I construct a theoretical basis for speech acts as incitement to genocide, distinguishing these speech acts from speech as genocide and speech denying genocide by integrating international law with concepts drawn from speech act theory and moral philosophy. I use the case drawn on by many commentators in this area of international criminal (...) law, the trial of media executives for the roles they played in the Rwandan genocide through public speech acts by media entities insulting an ethnic group or advocating violence against an ethnic group. Each of these men were institutional leaders and were charged with using their positions within Rwandan society to distribute what I call genocidal hate speech, genocidal incitement speech, and genocidal participation speech. I argue for a distinction between these three types of speech, and a difference in individual criminal liability for the dissemination of each type of speech. I also argue that there should be a difference in individual criminal liability for speech acts within the context of an ongoing or recent genocide, and speech acts that can be separated from a site of mass violence. (shrink)

The test of civilization is the power of drawing the most benefit out of cities." Ralph Waldo Emerson What is the role of the urban experience in the construction of American democratic ideals? By looking at the disparate visions of a just society advanced by Jefferson and Hamilton, this paper will attempt to provide an account of the historical role of the urban experience in the construction of the American vision of democracy. Then, through the works of John Dewey and (...) Lewis Mumford (and Robert Westbrook's account of their continuing disagreements), the essay will address some of the issues stemming from the role of urban experience in the processes of moral development. Then, through the work of Whitman, it will be argued that the urban experience is a necessary condition for the adequate development of democratic ideals. The essay will conclude with a brief analysis of some of the important elements of the urban experience, and their respective contributions to the construction of democratic values. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Kierkegaard endorses Hegel's theory of mediation, the view that relative opposites are mediated. However, I show that Kierkegaard denies Hegel's thesis that there are all and only relative opposites. I develop two of his arguments against this thesis. The first is existential. This argument comes from the dramatic interplay between A, the often disagreeable aesthete of Either/Or I, and Judge William, the dutiful ethicist of Either/Or II. Judge William convincingly argues that the possibility of (...) future aiming human projects is rendered obsolete if aesthetic and ethical forms of existence are mediated opposites. The second is philosophical. This second argument is offered by Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. I show that Climacus issues a reductio argument that I call "the argument from insufficient difference.". (shrink)

An adequate solution to the problem of mental causation should deliver, not just the efficacy of mental properties, but the efficacy of mental properties as such, of mentality in its own right. But this appears to block an identity solution from the outset. Any property that’s both mental and physical, the argument goes, has a dual nature, and this just reintroduces the problem of mental causation, now framed in terms of these two natures. But a powers ontology promises to save (...) the identity theory, at least from this problem. Such an ontology identifies a mental property’s mental and physical “natures” with just the property itself. A mental property is, at once, both wholly mental and wholly physical, so that to causally engage the physical nature of a mental property is to engage its mental nature as well. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers and psychologists defending the embodied cognition research program have offered arguments against mindreading as a general model of our social understanding. The embodied cognition arguments are of two kinds: those that challenge the developmental picture of mindreading and those that challenge the alleged ubiquity of mindreading. Together, these two kinds of arguments, if successful, would present a serious challenge to the standard account of human social understanding. In this paper, I examine the strongest of these embodied cognition arguments (...) and argue that mindreading approaches can withstand the best of these arguments from embodied cognition. (shrink)

In any event, I realize fully that the parole, the speech, the "word" of a writer such as myself, has something strange and even contradictory about it, even within its own creator. At the moment when I write, let us say, La Jalousie or Glissements progressifs du plaisir, what I propose is improbable and consequently unacceptable; that is, my parole as a writer or as a cinéaste in my novels or in my films is abrupt, inexplicable, nonrecuperable for any correctly (...) organized discourse. Nevertheless, you have noticed that I speak with the same clarity as any professor, and this constitutes an extremely interesting contradiction because it goes to the very heart of the debate; order and disorder never cease to interact, to contaminate each other, to practice a sort of mutual recuperation. If, having written a novel of disorder, I don't find someone—for example, Bruce Morrissette, about La Jalousie—to prove that it has order, I'll do it myself. The principle of order is so crucial that I wish to prove that the disorder which I've created I can myself transform into order. But, as soon as I have shown that it has its order, from that moment on I've destroyed the interest of my work. I have brought about within an organized discourse, organized according to the normal logic of Cartesianism, the recuperation of something which was in fact a machine of war against order. I often run into people who say to me after a film, "Ah, it's a pity that you didn't come to explain all of that before the film. We didn't understand a thing, and it is such a fine thing that you have explained it." And I reply, "Yes, but don't trust that too much," because what I've said is not at all the film. It is even almost the opposite; it is the way in which I show myself that there is in what I created a part which is in spite of everything, explainable by established order, and a part increasingly large, because order progresses. Alain Robbe-Grillet, novelist, film maker, and essayist, is the author of Les Gommes , Le Voyeur , La Jalousie , Dans le labyrinthe , La Maison de rendez-vous , Projet pour une révolution à New York , and Topologie d'une cité fantôme . His films include: L'Année dernière à Marienbad , L'Immortelle , Trans-Europ-Express , L'Homme qui ment , L'Eden et après , Glissements progressifs du plaisir , and Le Jeu avec le feu . He has presented his views on contemporary fiction in Pour un Nouveau Roman. Bruce Morrissette, author of books on Alain Robbe-Grillet and Sunny Distinguished Service Professor in the department of Romance languages and literature at the University of Chicago, has translated "Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction." He is the author of "Post-Modern Generative Fiction: Novel and Film". (shrink)