The majority of authors in the complicity literature claim that causal accounts of complicity are inadequate because they fail to handle cases of causal overdetermination (Kutz, 2000, 2007, 2020; Lawson, 2013; Driver, 2015a, b; Bazargan-Forward, 2013, 2017, 2022; Mellema, 2016; Aragon and Jaggar, 2018; Williams 2019; Bennett, 2021; Donohue, 2021; Knowles, 2021). However, it has recently been argued that causal accounts can handle such cases (Lepora and Goodin, 2013; Petterson, 2013; Jensen, 2020). In this paper I scrutinize these defenses. I (...) argue while they make some progress towards overcoming the standard overdetermination challenge, they are not fully satisfactory. More importantly, I present a novel challenge raised by cases of overdetermination—the explanatory challenge. I argue that, not only do these recent defenses not overcome this challenge, it is unlikely that any causal account can overcome it. Finally, I suggest that since causal accounts of complicity are inadequate, pluralism about complicity must be correct, because we cannot fully dispense with causation from our understanding of complicity. (shrink)

What is the impact of genetics and genomics on issues of identity and what do we mean when we speak of identity? This paper explores how certain concepts of identity used in philosophy can be brought together in a multi-layered concept of identity. It discusses the concepts of numerical, qualitative, personal and genetic identity-over-time as well as rival concepts of genomic identity-over-time. These are all understood as layers in the multi-layered concept of identity. Furthermore, the paper makes it clear (...) that our understanding of genomic identity and the importance attached to genomic sameness-over-time matters for the ethical questions raised by certain new gene technologies. (shrink)

“Who am I?” is the ultimate ontological question, and we often refer to it as the issue of consciousness. When people speak of consciousness they often slip into considerations of behavioral and neurological correlates of consciousness (for example, whether or not an entity can be self‐reflective). But these are third‐person (objective) issues and do not represent what David Chalmers calls the “hard question” of consciousness. The question of whether or not an entity is conscious is apparent only to itself. (...) The difference between neurological correlates of consciousness (such as intelligent behavior) and the ontological reality of consciousness is the difference between objective and subjective reality. That is why we cannot propose an objective consciousness detector without philosophical assumptions built into it. (shrink)

When your word processor or email program is running on your computer, this creates a "virtual machine” that manipulates windows, files, text, etc. What is this virtual machine, and what are the virtual objects it manipulates? Many standard arguments in the philosophy of mind have exact analogues for virtual machines and virtual objects, but we do not want to draw the wild metaphysical conclusions that have sometimes tempted philosophers in the philosophy of mind. A computer file is not made (...) of epiphenomenal ectoplasm. I argue instead that virtual objects are "supervenient objects". The stereotypical example of supervenient objects is the statue and the lump of clay. To this end I propose a theory of supervenient objects. Then I turn to persons and mental states. I argue that my mental states are virtual states of a cognitive virtual machine implemented on my body, and a person is a supervenient object supervening on his cognitive virtual machine. (shrink)

Despite social epistemologists’ condemnation of epistemic bubbles (Nguyen, 2018; Miller & Record, 2013; Pariser 2011; Simpson, 2012; Sunstein 2017), we defend that they may be epistemically beneficial for marginalized communities, especially when they help insiders to make sense of their lived experiences, that is, acquiring hermeneutical resources. Building on the previous work of Anderson (2021), Sunstein (2017) and Frost-Arnold (2021), who have already highlighted the epistemic benefits of certain bubbles, we focus on the case of Cystic Fibrosis (CF), a (...) chronic illness with severe symptoms, whose patients face difficulties to understand their own experience (for example, what being ‘young’ means with a reduced life expectancy). We then explain how they engage in what we assess as, following Medina & Whitt (2021), “epistemic activism” in a Facebook group meant for patients to share and interact with their favourite CF-related memes. The case illustrates how conditions of isolation and technological affordances contribute to a hermeneutical gain in the marginalized community (augmenting the community’s agency, amplificating their voices, and allowing them to develop and exercise their epistemic capacities). Lastly, we present the ethical guidelines (inspired in Frost-Arnold 2023) we have followed to engage in this sort of online research. (shrink)

Displays of eye movements may convey information about cognitive processes but require interpretation. We investigated whether participants were able to interpret displays of their own or others' eye movements. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants observed an image under three different viewing instructions. Then they were shown static or dynamic gaze displays and had to judge whether it was their own or someone else's eye movements and what instruction was reflected. Participants were capable of recognizing the instruction reflected in their (...) own and someone else's gaze display. Instruction recognition was better for dynamic displays, and only this condition yielded above chance performance in recognizing the display as one's own or another person's. Experiment 3 revealed that order information in the gaze displays facilitated instruction recognition when transitions between fixated regions distinguish one viewing instruction from another. Implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Conscientious refusal is distinguished by its peculiar attitude towards the obligations that the objector refuses: the objector accepts the authority of the institution in general, but claims a right of conscience to refuse some particular directive. An adequate ethics of conscientious objection will, then, require an account of the institutional obligations that the objector claims a right to refuse. Yet such an account must avoid two extremes: ‘anarchism,’ where obligations apply only insofar as they match individual conscience; and ‘totalitarianism,’ where (...) even immoral obligations bind us. The challenge is to explain institutional obligations in such a way that an agent can be obligated to act against conscience, yet can object if the institution's orders go too far. Standard accounts of institutional obligations rely on individual autonomy, expressed through consent. This paper rejects the Consent model; a better understanding of institutional obligations emerges from reflecting on the intersecting goods produced by institutions and the intersecting autonomy of numerous distinct agents rather than only one. The paper defends ‘Professionalism’ as a grounding of professional obligations. The professional context can justify acting against conscience but more often that context partly shapes the professional conscience. Yet Professionalism avoids totalitarianism by distinguishing between (mere) injustice and abuse. When institutions are – or we conscientiously believe them to be – merely unjust, their directives still obligate us; when they are abusive, however, they do not. Finally, the paper applies these results to the problem of conscientious refusal in general and specifically to controversial reproduction cases. (shrink)

What is it to be seen (naked) by one's cat? In “L'animal que donc je suis” (2006), the first of several lectures that he presented at a conference on the “autobiographical animal,” Jacques Derrida tells of his discomfort when, emerging from his shower one day, he found himself being looked at by his cat. Th experience leads him, by way of reflections on the question of the animal, to what is arguably the question of his philosophy: Who am I? (...) It is not so much that Derrida wants to answer this question as to be free of it. His task here is to determine the sense of it— where it leads, for example, when it comes to the nature of the diff erence between himself and his cat. Unlike animal rights activists (and unlike philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Cora Diamond, who have recently addressed this issue), Derrida does not want to erase this difference but wants to multiply it in order (among other things) to affirm the absolute alterity or singularity of his cat, which cannot be subsumed by any category (such as the animal). His cat is an Other in a way that no human being (supposing there to be such a thing, which Derrida is not prepared to grant) could ever be. And here is where “the question who?” leads as well, namely, to a path of escape from absorption into any identity-machine. As Derrida puts it in A Taste for the Secret: Who am I when I am not one of you? In a hospitable world one would be free not to answer. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this essay, I shall discuss Gadamer’s interpretation of Celan’s dialogical poetry in his essay “Wer bin Ich und wer bist Du?” (“Who am I and Who are You?”). One may argue that this is Gadamer’s articulation of the problem of the self-other relationship. To understand the question of self and other, it is first of all necessary to return to the poetic word from which the question arises. Speaking is, for Gadamer, the most profoundly self-forgetful action, because (...) class='Hi'>when one speaks, one is so deeply “within the word” that one is not turned toward the word but, rather, to what one wants to say with the word. For hermeneutics, interpreting means putting oneself on the task of the poetic text. The proximity between poetizing and interpreting emerges, also in its specificity concerning the proximity between poetizing and thinking. Such a proximity, in turn, divides itself into two extremes: the word that sublates itself, and the word that stands for itself. It is hence the uncertain fullness of language, where, unsurprisingly, both poetizing and interpreting come into themselves, which constitutes the link between the one and the other. Therefore, the interpreted word, intertwined with the poetic word does not replace what it indicates, but merely points beyond itself, to what is other than itself. Both pursue a meaning that points toward an open realm. (shrink)

Ethical guidelines protecting medical research participants have been criticized for stripping the sociocultural contexts of research. This critique is urgent considering ongoing calls to account for participant diversity in recruitment and inclusion procedures. Our intersectional analysis of illness narratives explores how sociostructural factors might play a role in participants’ exposure to research-related harm in clinical trials. Although widening participation does respond to generalizability concerns, we argue that gendered, classed, and ableist processes of self-silencing could simultaneously enhance risk of harm for (...) participants with multiple oppressed identities. To prevent this, researchers might actively involve participants when designing trials. (shrink)

Phenomenological analysis of the bodiliness of human existence establishes a sense in which human consciousness is prereflectively spatial and located at a particular place, and at the same time a sense in which consciousness detaches itself from its location by reflecting on it and itself. This paper probes a parallel aspect of that self which the reader becomes upon reading and entering the world of three selected fictive narratives: this “reading self,” as it will be called, replicates the structure of (...) real-world consciousness, for the reading self is both located at a specifiable place within each of the three fictive worlds and at the same time floats free of that location without leaving the narrative's world. Although the paper does not claim that the reading consciousness always or necessarily replicates real-world consciousness, it suggests that such replication, when it happens, is significantly related to the reading self's encounter with the fictive characters as both selves and others. To say that the latter are self-transcending selves is to say that the reading self may identify itself with them and move into the story's world; such identification does in fact take place. To say that at the same time the characters remain other selves is to say that the reading self, floating free within the story's world, also experiences a distance between itself and them. Yet this otherness does not turn the fictive characters into objects; that is, their otherness does not imply that they are merely objects to be explained in terms of social or biological forces nor that they are the products of an author's manipulations. Much of the paper is occupied with working out the interaction between the reading self's locatedness and non-locatedness, on the one hand, and the fictive characters' selftranscendence and otherness on the other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Am I the Bad Guy?Tavishi ChopraWhat do you do when the 6-year-old patient you have vowed to protect suddenly deems you the bad guy?The afternoon started out like any typical afternoon during my inpatient pediatric rotation. We had finished rounding, grabbed lunch, and began to see our new admits. My residents told me to go see a 6-year-old, Ela, in the ED. All I knew was that she (...) had a burn injury. As I walked to her ED room, my heart sank.Burns from cigarette stumps covered her torso and back. She was holding her shirt off her chest to prevent the excruciating pain caused by her t-shirt rubbing against her skin. As soon as Ela made eye contact with me, she immediately started crying and exclaiming, "Mommy didn't mean to!" confirming exactly what I thought. These burns were inflicted from someone she loved.Ela was eventually admitted into the hospital, and the Department of Child Services was contacted. Little did I know that I would be so conflicted by this decision.DCS launched an investigation on Ela's mom, but during the investigation, Ela's mom was permitted at her bedside. It was very clear that Ela felt protected and loved by her mom. Often it was only her mom who could get her to stop crying during the painful dressing changes. I felt torn allowing Ela's mom to have such a strong presence in Ela's hospital stay. To me, nothing in the world can justify hurting a child so cruelly, and inflicting that pain so many times. However, my job was to help Ela heal. That meant that because Ela turned to her mom for support, I also needed to include Ela's mom in our medical decisions. I buried away any negative feelings I had, and I proceeded to interact with Ela's mom in a professional manner.It was this that allowed me to get to understand Ela's mom a little bit more. She was a single mom [End Page E8] working multiple jobs to help keep her family afloat. She often lived her day on three to four hours of sleep, so she was very tired. The sleep deprivation made her frustrated more easily, and she didn't have a healthy outlet to release her emotions. Unfortunately, Ela was on the receiving end of that frustration.Hearing her story made me even more angry, confused, and upset that a child suffered. I strongly believed that as adults, we should have better control of our emotions, and sleep deprivation and frustration weren't an excuse. I couldn't find it in me to respect Ela's mom, who I shamefully began to avoid.I still wanted to bond with Ela and show her unconditional love. When Ela's mom was at work, I would use that opportunity to go and spend time with her. We would play "princesses," blow bubbles together, and turn dressing changes into a game. We formed a special bond, and I always made it a goal to go and spend some time with her every day.DCS, meanwhile, was actively conducting an investigation. They interviewed Ela's mom, Ela's siblings, and Ela. The findings of their investigation revealed that Ela's mom often would lose her temper, and the kids feared their mom. Hearing this further proved to me that I did not need to interact with Ela's mom. Embarrassingly, it was just as much a priority for me to avoid Ela's mom as it was to spend time with Ela.DCS eventually concluded that Ela's mom would lose custody of Ela for the time being. Because of the connection that Ela and I had, I took it upon myself to deliver the news to her. Our bond was shattered right then and there. She immediately began to cry, told me she hated me, and asked me to leave the room. Anytime I would go into her room after that, she would start screaming and refused to talk to me. In a span of five minutes, Ela's mom made a decision that destroyed their family... (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that AI-powered voice assistants, just as all technologies, actively mediate our interpretative structures, including values. I show this by explaining the productive role of technologies in the way people make sense of themselves and those around them. More specifically, I rely on the hermeneutics of Gadamer and the material hermeneutics of Ihde to develop a hermeneutic lemniscate as a principle of technologically mediated sense-making. The lemniscate principle links people, technologies and the sociocultural world in the (...) joint production of meaning and explicates the feedback channels between the three counterparts. When people make sense of technologies, they necessarily engage their moral histories to comprehend new technologies and fit them in daily practices. As such, the lemniscate principle offers a chance to explore the moral dynamics taking place during technological appropriation. Using digital voice assistants as an example, I show how these AI-guided devices mediate our moral inclinations, decisions and even our values, while in parallel suggesting how to use and design them in an informed and critical way. (shrink)

What Am I? is so-called because of its focus on Descartes’ primal question in the mind-body realm and his primal answer, viz. “a man”. The question and answer are primal in both senses of the adjective: they come first, early in meditation II, when the topic is broached for the first time; and, in my view of Descartes, they are also the most fundamental question and answer. There are other questions—many many other questions—Descartes raises about the mind-body problem. Some (...) came to substitute for the primal question, e.g., What is Mind? What is Body? How are mind and body connected? What is the union of mind and body like? I have elected the primal question and answer partly because I understand them better and partly because I see this as Descartes’ ur-concern. Ultimately, he was after an account of what each of us is. (shrink)

Within the current Dutch policy context the role of informal care is revalued. Formal care activities are reduced and family and friends are expected to fill this gap. Yet, there is little research on the moral ambivalences that informal care for loved ones who have severe and ongoing mental health problems entails, especially against the backdrop of neoliberal policies. Giving priority to one’s own life project or caring for a loved one with severe problems is not reconciled easily. Using a (...) case study we illustrate the moral ambivalences that persons may experience when they try to shape their involvement and commitment when a relative is in need. The case comes from a research project which explores whether it is possible to reduce coercive measures in psychiatry by organizing a Family Group Conference. The purpose of the article is to explore what theoretical concepts such as ‘communities of fate’, ‘communities of choice’ and ‘personal communities’ add in understanding how persons shape their involvement and commitment when a family member experiences recurrent psychiatric crises. (shrink)

Children ask existential questions, that is, questions about death, the meaning of existence, free will, God, the origin of everything, and kindred questions. P4/wC has the aspiration to give to children the occasion to discover and explore their questions in a safe environment, the community of inquiry. Thus, existential questioning should be possible in a community of inquiry. However, it is unclear whether the pedagogy of the community of inquiry can accommodate existential questioning. The chief trouble is that existential questioning (...) might be a cause of suffering: children might be unable to contain the emotional intensity that is experienced when we inquire about topics like death and the meaning of existence. In a community of inquiry, the emphasis over the community and the autonomy that children experience in choosing the questions for their inquiry might create occasions of suffering: some children might not be prepared to discuss existential issues or might be troubled by the candidate answers they explore and eventually end up to endorse. In this paper I highlight some of the main challenges that we need to face if we want to make room for existential questioning in the community of inquiry. (shrink)

In this paper, I deal with a striking phenomenon that often occurs when we explore the virtual environment of, for example, a video game. Suppose a friend sees me playing a video game and asks ‘Where are you?’ There are two possible answers to this question. I can either refer to my actual location (‘I am in my room’), but I can also refer to my location in the virtual world (‘I am in a space-ship’). Although my friend is (...) probably after this second reply, the first one is not false. At first sight, this gives rise to a tension. On the one hand both claims – ‘I am in my room’ and ‘I am in a space-ship’ – seem true. But on the other hand they also seem mutually exclusive as bilocation, i.e. being in two places at the same time, is impossible. I am either in London or in Paris, in the bathroom or in the kitchen, in a space-ship or in my room. How can I claim to be in two places at once? In the following, I discuss two ways to dissolve this tension:. (shrink)

The Internet has become a field of dragon teeth for a person’s identity. It has made it possible for your identity to be mistaken by a credit agency, spied on by the government, foolishly exposed by yourself, pilloried by an enemy, pounded by a bully, or stolen by a criminal. These harms to one’s integrity could be inflicted in the past, but information technology has multiplied and aggravated such injuries. They have not gone unnoticed and are widely bemoaned and discussed. (...) The government and private watchdogs are working to protect the identity of citizens though at least in the United States both the government and individuals all too often side with prosperity when it conflicts with privacy. Still, these information-technological threats to identity have been recognized and can be reasonably met through legislation, regulation, and discretion. There is another kind of danger to our identity that is more difficult to define and to meet, for it has no familiar predecessors, has no criminal aspects, and exhibits no sharp moral or cultural contours. Still that threat to our identity haunts us constantly and surfaces occasionally in conversations and the media. It makes us feel displaced, distracted, and fragmented at the very times when to all appearances we seem to be connected, busy, and energetic. At the same time, the culture of technology, and of information technology particularly, has opened up fields of diversity and contingency that invite us to comprehend our identities in newly responsible, intricate, and open-minded ways. (shrink)

As medical students we were not discouraged from introducing ourselves by saying, “Hello, I'm Dr. So-and-so,” as opposed to identifying ourselves as students. If we happened to be doing rounds with an intern or resident, the physician would introduce himself or herself as “Dr. X and over here is Dr. Y”—indicating a student. When I introduced myself as a medical student, I got the feeling that people thought it was silly or unnecessary.

This paper further elucidates our understanding of social identities. Some theorists have argued that we identify with our social statuses when we self-consciously adopt them as our own. This paper argues against this view and instead suggests that we identify with our social statuses when we care about them. Moreover, it theorizes care as a kind of emotional attunement to our social statuses that sometimes operates below the surface of self-reflective awareness.

We support the idea of applying cultural evolution theory to the study of storytelling, and fiction in particular. However, we suggest that a more plausible link between real and imaginary worlds is the feeling of “presence” we can experience in both of them: we feel present when we are able to correctly and intuitively enact our embodied predictions.

This is a popularisation of ideas current when it was written, on personal identity and the concept of a person, making a link with problems about 'knowing who' on the border of epistemology and the philosophy of language.

In scholarship on the history of philosophy, it is widely assumed that Charles Fourier was a utopian socialist who could not have exerted a significant influence on the development of Karl Marx's thought. Indeed, both Marx and Engels seem to have advanced this view. In contrast, I argue that in 1844 when Marx was developing his anthropology and social critique, he relied upon Fourier's thought to supply a key assumption. After establishing this connection, I explain why Marx's tacit reliance (...) on Fourier creates a problematic undercurrent in his thought. (shrink)

This essay examines the questions raised about debate in _Zhuāngzǐ_ 莊子 2, the practical advice this chapter offers us for dealing with debates when they arise, and some of the questions that will predictably occur about how and why to apply that advice. On the present interpretation, _Zhuāngzǐ_ 2 argues that joining any side in a verbal conflict promotes continued conflict, and that only appreciating and working along with each speaker’s distinct point of view affords us access to what (...) is “really” or “conclusively” (_guǒ_ 果) the case. In contentious situations, the text advises that we pay close attention to speakers and their ways of life—rather than to what they are supposedly speaking about—and that we abandon any immediate goal beyond preserving our own health. Along the way, it foregrounds pleasure and comfort rather than rightness as what we are most attuned to when we listen and respond to one another’s words. (shrink)

This study analyzed 328 single- and group-authored stories composed by nine 4-year-olds in a mixed-age preschool class participating in a peer-oriented storytelling and story-acting practice. Group-authored stories were overwhelmingly told by same-gender groups. The frequencies, developmental trajectories, and functions of group-authored stories were different for girls and boys. Girls told mostly group-authored stories in the fall and single-authored stories in the spring. Group-authoring provided ‘brain-storming sessions’ for narrative experimentation; these stories were longer, with more dramatic problems and more sophisticated character (...) portrayals. By the spring, girls’ single-authored stories also included these features, suggesting internalized narrative gains. Boys consistently preferred single-authored stories, though in the spring the frequency and quality of their group-authored stories increased. These were longer, with more sophisticated character portrayals, than single-authored stories. Group-authored stories made a distinctive contribution to narrative development, partly by helping boys and girls overcome limitations of their preferred narrative genres. (shrink)

The other night I had a very strange, and strangely coherent, dream. Socrates and Meno appeared to be arguing with each other in my presence. They talked English, I suppose, since I clearly thought I followed them; but I seem to remember that Greek words occurred from time to time. When I woke it seemed to me that the dream had some bearing on disputed matters of Platonic interpretation, so I shall try to reconstruct it here. Meno speaks first:Tell (...) me, Socrates, do you think that the just and the admirable are the same thing?I should hardly think so; for we call many things admirable—for example a young lad's cheek—which we would hardly call just; and perhaps vice versa. But I am only guessing, of course, because I cannot know whether A is the same as B unless I know what A is and what B is. (shrink)

I have two primary aims in the following paper, aims that are inextricably intertwined. First, I want to raise some historiographical and epistemological issues about how to write the history of psychoanalysis. Although they arise quite generally in the history of science, these issues have a special status and urgency when the domain is the history of psychoanalysis. Second, in light of the epistemological and methodological orientation that I am going to advocate, I want to begin a reading of (...) Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, one whose specificity is a function of my attachment to this orientation, to a particular way of doing the history of psychoanalysis. Despite the enormous number of pages that have been written on Freud’s Three Essays, it is very easy to underestimate the density of this book, a density at once historical, rhetorical, and conceptual. This underestimation stems in part from historiographical presumptions that quite quickly misdirect us away from the fundamental issues.In raising question about the historiography of the history of science, I obviously cannot begin at the beginning. So let me begin much further along, with the writings of Michel Foucault. I think of the works of Foucault, in conjunction with that of Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, as exemplifying a very distinctive perspective about how to write the history of science. In the English-speaking world, perhaps only the work of Ian Hacking both shares this perspective and ranks with its French counterparts in terms of originality and quality. No brief summary can avoid eliding the differences between Bachelard, Canguilhem, Hacking, and Foucault; indeed, the summary I am going to produce does not even fully capture Foucault’s perspective, which he called “archaeology.”1 But this sketch will have to do for the purposes I have in mind here, whose ultimate aim is to reorient our approach to the history of psychoanalysis. 1. The sketch that follows reproduces, with some omissions and additions, the beginning of my “Archeology, Genealogy, Ethics,” in Michel Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Hoy , pp. 221-34. Arnold I. Davidson is assistant professor in the department of philosophy, the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science, and the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is currently writing a book on the history and epistemology of nineteenth-century psychiatric theories of sexuality. (shrink)

I am John's[3] brain. In the flesh, I am just a rather undistinguished looking grey/white mass of cells. My surface is heavily convoluted and I am possessed of a fairly differentiated internal structure. John and I are on rather close and intimate terms; indeed, sometimes it is hard to tell us apart. But at times, John takes this intimacy a little too far. When that happens, he gets very confused about my role and functioning. He imagines that I organize (...) and process information in ways which echo his own perspective on the world. In short, he thinks that his thoughts are, in a rather direct sense, my thoughts. There is some truth to this of course. But things are really rather more complicated than John suspects, as I shall try to show. (shrink)

In this paper we present findings from an experiment involving both scientists working at the nanoscale and philosophers interested in this emerging field of research. Early career scientists working at the nanoscale were asked to read, discuss and debate two examples of philosophy of science that had been written with a specific focus on nanoscale science and technology. The papers that our participating scientists were asked to read were one by Jan Schmidt and one by George Khushf. These papers are (...) interesting for comparative discussion because although both draw on similar cases to make their arguments, Schmidt argues that nanotechnology represents a new form of reductionism, while Khushf argues that the field represents a shift towards more systems-based approaches of understanding and acting. The initial aim of this experimental exercise was both to create a space for discussion and reflection, and to investigate the scientific literacy of emerging works in the philosophy of nanoscience. Interestingly, interdisciplinary interaction during the exercise saw unexpected topics of interest and discussion emerge. In discussing the two articles, the scientists participating in our exercise highlighted a range of questions that not only related to the scientific content of the philosophers' arguments, but also to the way in which they conducted and presented their research. This exercise demonstrates the added value and richness that can come from interdisciplinary interactions across the social and natural sciences and from iterative discussions across theory and practice, especially when focused on emerging fields of research such as that of nanoscience and technology. (shrink)

When I say that I am a lot of things, I mean it literally and metaphysically speaking. The Self, or so I shall argue, is a plurality (notwithstanding the fact that ordinary language takes "the Self" to be a singular term – but, after all, language is only language). It is not a substance or a substratum, and it is not a collection or a bundle. The view I wish to advocate for is a kind of reductionism, in line (...) with some – but not all – broadly Humean ideas. In short, I will defend the view there are the experiences and mental states we have, and that's it: no additional substances, and no bundles. This does not mean, however, that there is no Self – the Self simply is the experiences. I will try to articulate and defend this view by showing that it can accommodate what I take to be the three main desiderata for any theory of the Self to satisfy: first, that the Self is the subject of experience (a subject of mental states, in general); second, that there is a unity to the Self in the sense that our (conscious, phenomenal) experience is at least partly continuous or 'stream-like'; and third, that we do not die when we go to sleep or when we otherwise don't have any (conscious, phenomenal) experiences. (shrink)

This is an introductory talk on why I am not a consequentialist. I am not going to go into the details of consequentialist theory, or to compare and contrast different versions of consequentialism. Nor am I going to present all the reasons I am not a consequentialist, let alone all the reasons why you should not be one. All I want to do is focus on some key problems that in my view, and the view of many others, make consequentialism (...) a totally unacceptable moral theory – a theory about what is right, what is good, or obligatory, or forbidden, or permissible, or praiseworthy. So let me begin by giving a basic definition of consequentialism, one all supporters of the view can agree on. Consequentialism is the theory that the fundamental aim of morality is to maximize value. Now I was tempted to say ‘sole aim’, but some consequentialists will disagree with that. They might hold, for instance, that one of the aims of morality is to abide by certain rules, or to cultivate certain virtues. But for them, what gives obedience to a rule or the cultivation of a virtue its point is that, ultimately, such behaviour maximizes value. So although maximizing value might not be the sole aim of morality – the sole answer to the question ‘What should I do to be good?’ and similar questions – still it is the fundamental aim of morality, and all other kinds of decision, action, and so on, derive their justification by reference to it. For my purposes, then, the difference between ‘sole’ and ‘fundamental’ is merely terminological. Now the first thing that might occur to someone is a pair of simple questions. Why should anyone believe that the fundamental aim of morality is to maximize value? What intuitive force does the idea even have in the first place? These are good questions. I was a consequentialist once, and I don’t think I ever posed them to myself. I just took it as understood that since so many philosophers were consequentialists, and since so many of my fellow students were as well, then even if it were ultimately shown not to be true, the maximization thought (as I will call it) was at least the obvious place to start when one did ethics.. (shrink)

What are the objects of thought? To consider a familiar case, may we assert that the proposition “I am thinking of a unicorn” entails that there is some object which is being thought of? Theories of subsistent objects provide an affirmative answer and seem to be based on the consideration that we are thinking of something when we think of a unicorn. Otherwise, to paraphrase G. E. Moore's well known statement of the argument, we would be thinking of the (...) same thing whether we thought of a unicorn or a griffen, namely, nothing. But, as G. E. Moore has shown, subsistence theories fail to distinguish between the logical and grammatical forms of such statements as “I am thinking of a unicorn” and “I am hunting a lion”. The latter is of the form · φx · Ψx; the former is not since it does not assert that the property of being a unicorn and the property of thought of by me both belong to something. But the problem that suggests itself is the nature of the contention that something is being thought of when, for example, we think of a unicorn. To begin with, is there no acceptable alternative to the various forms of the theory of subsistent objects according to which it would be correct to say that the proposition “I am thinking of a unicorn” entails the proposition “·x is being thought of”? And if saying that we are thinking of something, when we think of a unicorn, does not mean that there exists something that is being thought of, what is the force of the contention that we are thinking of something? (shrink)

The ‘When Am I?’ problem, introduced by Bourne 2002, 2006, and Braddon-Mitchell 2004, creates a problem for thinking that the past is just like the present, and responses by Forrest 2004 and Forbes 2016, in which activities and processes are distinctive of the present, suggest that the past is settled. This chapter argues that the ‘When am I?’ problem arises because it takes tense metaphysically seriously but not aspect. The solution of invoking processes and activities takes aspect as (...) seriously as tense. A two-dimensional (2D) framework explains the relationship between completed processes (associated with perfective aspect) and ongoing processes (associated with progressive aspect), also explaining cases where facts about the past seem to have changed retrospectively, and cases, building on Forbes and Wildman (2022), where meanings of words have changed over time. It allows that what’s true has changed while accepting that the past is intrinsically settled. (shrink)

The intention of this paper's title is not to position the notion of androgyny solely on the side of women writers, even though they are the most quoted. I have considered the phenomenon among both sexes, and the authors who 'forgot' their sex early on, in order to create. This 'forgetting' even seems to be the condition for genius. Indeed the androgyne, who is more an idea than a character, becomes for many writers the complete expression of that compulsory mixture (...) of strength and grace without which art and its claims remain incomplete. In fact authors have showcased themselves and have certainly thrown the dice for their own lives by creating an androgynous character, since that character has very often been a pretext for finding themselves through words and poetry. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a preliminary sketch of a culture-enabling Philosophy for/with Children practice. It is an approach to engaging philosophically with children that aims to encourage the exercise of critical reflection at the level of their respective cultures. This kind of P4wC practice hopes to address the challenges in facilitating philosophical dialogues with culturally/ethnically-diverse groups, especially when prejudice and negative stereotypes towards cultural/ethnic minorities are prevalent. Its focus is on helping children become cognizant of their cultural situatedness (...) and its impact on their thinking and attitude towards dialogue. Underlying this practice is the assumption that Philosophy is fundamentally a worldview and a method that is embedded in the culture where it is created, validated, and used. Such a manner of doing philosophy recognizes that children are active bearers of culture and are entitled to educational opportunities, like P4wC, that can empower them to think for themselves and with others while staying grounded on their cultural backgrounds. Thus, the Community of Inquiry functions as a caring space where intercultural understanding and critical affirmation of cultures are fostered and sustained. In connection, I suggest that a culture-enabling P4wC teacher should have three desired traits: a) openness to various cultural resources and frames, b) a sense of critical positionality, and c) partiality to the culturally marginalized. (shrink)

Two studies examined how different linguistic forms affect the way in which people access memories of former close relationships that are irrevocably over. Remembering former relationships can activate either positive or negative attitudes. Whether people feel sorrow that bygones are in fact bygones depends on attitudinal valence, but also on the linguistic form in which people express their attitudes. More abstract linguistic forms prevent people from retrieving specific and detailed memories, and thus prompt them to generating more counterfactual thoughts and (...) to experience stronger regret. In contrast, more concrete linguistic forms lead people to remember their personal past more vividly and accurately, and this subjective impression can forestall counterfactual thinking. Study 2 further shows that people are more prone to generate counterfactual thoughts when they focus on the final stage of their relationships rather than the beginning even when the valence of recalled attitudes and objective time are controlled. (shrink)

The term “posthuman” has been used in very different senses by different authors.2 I am sympathetic to the view that the word often causes more confusion than clarity, and that we might be better off replacing it with some alternative vocabulary.

Is freedom a Western concept? As a multifaceted human experience it seems fairly transcultural. Freedom is hardly a focus of philosophical discourses in China as it is in the West, and I suppose this partly accounts for the difficulty in tracking freedom and closely related notions of agency, choice, and autonomy in Chinese philosophy.Over four decades ago Herbert Fingarette raised the controversial idea about the absence of freedom in Confucian ethics. Although not intending to denigrate, Fingarette raised a polemic that (...) has lingered to the present.1 A. C. Graham noted the sour upshot of the issue when writing that "the claim that the concept of moral choice is foreign to Confucius has offended... (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that many, if not most, adult children have moral duties to visit their parents when they can do so at reasonable cost. However, whether such duties persist when the parents lose the ability to recognise their children, usually due to dementia, is more controversial. Over 40% of respondents in a public survey from the British Alzheimer’s Society said that it was “pointless” to keep up contact at this stage. Insofar as one cannot be morally (...) required to do pointless things, this would suggest that children are relieved of any duties to visit their parents. In what appears to be the only scholarly treatment of this issue, Claudia Mills has defended this view, arguing that our duties to visit our parents require a type of relationship that is lost when parents no longer remember who their children are. This article challenges Mills’ argument. Not only can children be duty-bound to visit parents who have lost the ability to recognise them, I argue that many children do in fact have such duties. As I show, these duties are grounded in any special interests that their parents have in their company; the fact that visiting their parents might allow them to comply with generic duties of sociability; and/or the fact that such visits allow them to express any gratitude that they owe their parents. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:I Am Food: The Mass in Planetary PerspectiveMaria Reis HabitoI Am Food: The Mass in Planetary Perspective. By Roger Corless. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004. 104 pp.In this timely reprint of I Am Food: The Mass in Planetary Perspective (originally published by Crossroad in 1981), the late Roger Corless demonstrates the potential for spiritual and intellectual creativity contained within a stance of dual religious belonging. Corless passed (...) away in January 2007, but this book remains as a way for us to know him and to appreciate, as he did, the possibilities for spiritual revitalization and transformation that may be generated at the intersection and interpenetration of Christian and Buddhist traditions.Corless was raised as a Protestant but as a teenager became deeply engaged with the study of world religions and claimed Buddhism in particular as his own. Eventually he would become a scholar of Chinese Buddhism and a practitioner within the Gelugpa lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. At the same time, however, that the young Corless was being drawn to Buddhism, his connection to his Christian faith was also deepening; his profound experiences of the loving power of God could not be denied even if Christianity's theism could not be easily reconciled with Buddhism's doctrine of emptiness. Instead of leaving one religion for the other, he deepened his engagement with both. He did not seek to synthesize or reconcile Christianity and Buddhism but rather held these traditions together in a dynamic, creative tension and lived each one fully in its turn. When asked about his religious affiliation, Corless would respond playfully that he was "a Buddhist on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, a Christian on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturday, and a Gaia worshipper on Sundays." In I Am Food, however, Corless shows us that on some Sundays, specifically at the celebration of the Mass, he was both Christian and Buddhist at the same time. The great contribution of this book is in its offering of a fresh and transformative approach to the Mass through the application of the symbolic structures of Tibetan Buddhist mandala visualization as a template for active participation in the communion ritual. [End Page 161]Corless's focus in this book is the ritual of the Mass as celebrated within the Roman Catholic tradition. His conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism occurred much to his "own surprise," prompted by his discovery in Catholicism of "a curious growing center which had great power and potential." This center "brought together many insights which I had picked up from other religions, and moved them to a new synthesis. This synthesis was concentrated in the oddly named 'Mass' " (p. 13). I Am Food offers a scholarly and personal meditation on the meaning, symbolism, and power contained in this central ritual of Catholicism. This project is signaled in the grammatically awkward but intriguing title of the book's first chapter, "Why Is the Mass?" Corless knows that many routine churchgoers never think or dare to ask this question, and the few who do ask it rarely find satisfactory answers. His book seeks to encourage such questioning among those who are in search of a personal religious experience "away from the dullness of minimalist routine" (p. 34). His very lively, humorous, and slightly irreverent style is intended to take the boredom out of the Mass, providing a very personal and original guide to it, different from the series of "excellent, but ultimately claustrophobic, devotional books on 'the spiritual meaning of the Mass'" (p. 13).Among Christian writings that were influential for his understanding of the Mass, Corless names The Mass in Slow Motion (1948) by Ronald Knox, which attempts to describe the inner meaning of the Mass, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Hymn of the Universe (1965), which describes a vision of the world as sacrament and celebrates Mass as a cosmic event. While Teilhard de Chardin inspires Corless's "planetary perspective" on the Mass, Nicholas Casabilas's A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy (1978) sharpens the focus on "the mystical significance of each and every act of the priest and people" (p. 13).Corless argues that what makes the Mass seem stifling is the notion of... (shrink)

Although the literature has focused on individual differences in authenticity, recent findings suggest that authenticity is sensitive to context; that is, it is also a state. We extended this perspective by examining whether incidental affect influences authenticity. In three experiments, participants felt more authentic when in a relatively positive than negative mood. The causal role of affect in authenticity was consistent across a diverse set of mood inductions, including explicit (Experiments 1 and 3) and implicit (Experiment 2) methods. The (...) link between incidental affect and state authenticity was not moderated by ability to down-regulate negative affect (Experiments 1 and 3) nor was it explained by negative mood increasing private self-consciousness or decreasing access to the self system (Experiment 3). The results indicate that mood is used as information to assess one's sense of authenticity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:I Am Speechless:Thank You, Colleague FriendsRita M. GrossBecause I had not seen half of these tributes before the session at which they were presented, I did not have a written paper, or even prepared notes, with which to respond to these colleagues. I was so touched by the care with which each person had prepared their remarks—a fully written paper in each case—and the wonderful things they said, that (...) when finally it was my turn to get up and take the podium, all I could say was, "I am speechless." That was my first response, but I am also very used to public speaking, so I did come up with some comments, which I reproduce here with some degree of faithfulness.I have known most of these friends for most of my professional life. I have traveled in India with two of them (Nancy and Kathleen), coedited or coauthored books with three of them (Nancy, Rosemary, and Terry), and cotaught with one of them (Paul). With everyone except Rosemary, we have visited each other's homes as well. One of the blessings of the academic life is sharing deep interests and concerns with one's colleagues, and I certainly have experienced that blessing. In person, I decided to respond to each person in the order in which they entered my life and I will also follow that format in these written comments.Nancy Auer FalkThe first person in this group whom I encountered was Nancy Falk, though, as she said, she doesn't remember me from those very early days. I entered the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1965, and because there were so few of us in those days, I clearly noticed a woman who was finishing her work in the same field I was entering—the history of religions. There were twelve women among some four hundred students at the Divinity School and six of us had entered that year! I remember that the professors were very worried about what to do with "all these women who now want to study religion." One of my professors said that he was changing some of the material he lectured on because of the presence of women in his class.In such an environment, I should have known better than to do a dissertation [End Page 89] studying women in religion and using feminist methodologies, which had not yet been developed, but which I did develop in my dissertation! It has taken me a long time to learn that telling the truth can exact a heavy price. I've often commented that all I've ever tried to do in my scholarship and in my thinking is to tell the truth. It's been hard to understand how that could be so controversial or so resented by so many people. But my dissertation was very controversial even though Mircea Eliade, who was still revered in those days, encouraged me to write the dissertation I did. But what I was doing was so controversial, largely I think, because I claimed that the sacrosanct University of Chicago methodology in the history of religions was inadequate, given that it simply had no tools with which to study the religious lives of at least half of humanity. Even years later I heard via some gossip train that students of the professor who most opposed my work were telling people that I was not supposed to have gotten a degree, but somehow, it had slipped though anyway. Now, some thirty-five years later, I am amazed at the level of insight I had as a graduate student in my mid to late twenties.During these graduate school battles, Nancy was already teaching at Western Michigan University, so I did not have her as an ally. But, as soon as I finished my degree, as she narrates in her comments, we began to work together on Unspoken Worlds, which, having been put together before computers, was extremely labor intensive. I really enjoyed the process of working together on that book. I enjoyed not having to hold back on anything. I enjoyed the give and take, the way we could put... (shrink)