This commentary on Elinor Mason’s _Ways to be Blameworthy_ considers Mason’s proposed reflexivity constraint on ordinary blame- and praiseworthy action. I argue that the reflexivity constraint leaves too many intuitively apt targets of praise and blame out of the reach of those attitudes, and the availability of their detached counterparts does not make up for this. I also suggest that Mason’s case for the constraint is open to question. This gives us reasons to prefer a moral concern account of ordinary (...) or communicative praise- and blameworthiness, an account that does not include a reflexivity constraint. Finally, I argue that the moral concern view has more resources to explain some of the nuances and complexities of our practice of moral judgment than Mason allows—nuances Mason turned to pluralism to capture. (shrink)

Julia Markovits develops a desire-based, internalist account of what normative reasons are--an account which is compatible with the idea that moral reasons can apply to all of us, regardless of our desires. She builds on Kant's formula of humanity to defend universal moral reasons, and addresses the age-old question of why we should be moral.

This essay examines the thought that our right actions have moral worth only if we perform them for the right reasons. It argues against the view, often ascribed to Kant, that morally worthy actions must be performed because they are right and argues that Kantians and others ought instead to accept the view that morally worthy actions are those performed for the reasons why they are right. In other words, morally worthy actions are those for which the reasons why they (...) were performed (the reasons motivating them) and the reasons why they morally ought to have been performed (the reasons morally justifying them) coincide. The essay calls this the Coincident Reasons Thesis and argues that it provides plausible necessary and sufficient conditions for morally worthy action, defending the claim against proposed counterexamples. It ends by showing that the plausibility of the thesis, which it argues is largely independent of any particular ethical standpoint, gives us some reason to doubt a class of ethical theories that includes utilitarianism. (shrink)

This essay explores the question of how to be good. My starting point is a thesis about moral worth that I’ve defended in the past: roughly, that an action is morally worthy if and only it is performed for the reasons why it is right. While I think that account gets at one important sense of moral goodness, I argue here that it fails to capture several ways of being worthy of admiration on moral grounds. Moral goodness is more multi-faceted. (...) My title is intended to capture that multi-facetedness: the essay examines saintliness, heroism, and sagacity. The variety of our common-sense moral ideals underscores the inadequacy of any one account of moral admirableness, and I hope to illuminate the distinct roles these ideals play in our everyday understanding of goodness. Along the way, I give an account of what makes actions heroic, of whether such actions are supererogatory, and of what, if anything, is wrong with moral deference. At the close of the essay, I begin to explore the flipside of these ideals: villainy. (shrink)

Theories of reasons and other normativia can seem to lead ineluctably to a tragic dilemma. They can be personal but parochial if they locate reasons in features of the point of view of actual people. Or they can be objective but alien if they take reasons to be mind-independent fixtures of the universe. Kantian constructivism tries to offer the best of both worlds: an account of normative authority anchored in the evaluative perspectives of actual agents but refined by a procedure (...) that guarantees certain principles, like the moral law, will have universal and unconditional authority. This chapter considers motivations for such a view and chronicles the intrepid efforts of its adherents to make good on this guarantee - to show that the structure of practical reason commits reasoners to morality. -/- . (shrink)

ABSTRACT The target of John Broome’s critique is a certain kind of reductive project: that of reducing the property of rationality to that of normativity, or the property of being rational to that of being as we ought or have conclusive reason to be. Broome argues that this reductive project fails, because the identity claim on which it rests is false. Rationality, he argues, supervenes on the mind: two people who are mental duplicates are necessarily also rational duplicates. But normativity, (...) or reasons-responsiveness, or being as we ought to be does not supervene on our minds: two people who are mental duplicates may not be normative duplicates. I am interested in the appeal of and prospects for the opposite reduction: of reasons, or normativity, understood as the property of being how one ought to be, to rationality. But because this reduction also entails the identity claim that Broome rejects, its success also depends on addressing Broome’s worries. This commentary has two aims: first, to motivate the project of reducing normativity or obligation or reasons to rationality, by bringing out what is attractive about it; and second, to argue that the project is not simply a non-starter, by taking up Broome’s challenge to the identity claim: like rationality, I argue, normativity, too—or at least the species of normativity that the reductive project targets—does supervene on the mind. (shrink)

Julia Markovits’ Moral Reason is a defense of internalism about moral reasons and a desire-based account of reasons for action. Even though she defends this position, she does not consider herself committed to relativism and to a desire-based understanding of what reasons there are. Indeed, it is crucial to make a distinction between two kinds of inquiry about reasons for action. On one side, we find “analytic inquiry” where the purpose is to define what reasons are. On the (...) other, we find “substantive inquiry” where the purpose is to define what reasons there are (pp. 1–11). According to Markovits, a desire-based defense on the analytic side does not imply a desire-based defense on the substantive side.Internalism and externalism are the most prominent views about reasons for action. Markovits understands internalism as the theory according to which what reasons we have do depend fundamentally on what ends we already have. On the other hand, externalism is understood as the theory acco .. (shrink)

Some subjectivist views of practical reasons entail that some people, in some cases, lack sufficient reasons to act as morality requires of them. This is often thought to form the basis of an objection to these subjectivist views: ‘the amoralism objection’. This objection has been developed at length by Julia Markovits in her recent book Moral Reason. But Markovits—alongside many other proponents of this objection—does not explicitly consider that her objection is premised on a claim that her (...) opponents deny on first-order grounds, often as part of a socially and politically motivated revisionism about the assessment of agents and their actions. As such, the amoralism objection as she presents it misses its dialectical mark. This has interesting consequences for subjectivism—and the methodology behind it—more generally. (shrink)

This paper investigates the norm of presupposition, as one pervasive type of indirect speech act. It argues against the view that sees presuppositions as an indirect counterpart of the direct speech act of assertion and proposes instead that they are much more similar to the direct speech act of assumption. More concretely, it suggests that the norm that governs presuppositions is not an epistemic or doxastic attitude such as knowledge, justified belief, or mere belief; it's a practical attitude, most plausibly (...) the attitude of rational acceptance. This view has important ramifications well beyond debates in philosophy of language and linguistics. It affects not only our view of which speech act sequences are fine and which are off; it bears on whether presuppositions can function as testimony, whether they can be lies, and whether they are ontologically committal, thus addressing central topics in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics. (shrink)

In the wake of the considerable cultural changes and social shifts that the United States and all advanced industrial democracies have experienced since the late 1960s and early 1970s, social discourse around the disempowered has changed in demonstrable ways. In From Property to Family: American Dog Rescue and the Discourse of Compassion, Andrei Markovits and Katherine Crosby describe a “discourse of compassion” that actually alters the way we treat persons and ideas once scorned by the social mainstream. This “culture (...) turn” has also affected our treatment of animals inaugurating an accompanying “animal turn”. In the case of dogs, this shift has increasingly transformed the discursive category of the animal from human companion to human family member. One of the new institutions created by this attitudinal and behavioral change towards dogs has been the breed specific canine rescue organization, examples of which have arisen all over the United States beginning in the early 1980s and massively proliferating in the 1990s and subsequent years. While the growing scholarship on the changed dimension of the human-animal relationship attests to its social, political, moral and intellectual salience to our contemporary world, the work presented in Markovits and Crosby’s book constitutes the first academic research on the particularly important institution of breed specific dog rescue. (shrink)

"En 1754, dans le Traité des sensations, Condillac s'efforce de démontrer que "toutes nos connaissances et toutes nos facultés viennent des sens, ou plutôt des sensations" Pour cela, Condillac développe une fiction, celle d'une statue dont il éveillerait progressivement les sens. Il demande au lecteur de se penser à la place de la statue, de s'imaginer n'avoir qu'un sens lorsque celle-ci n'en a qu'un seul d'éveillé, d'examiner successivement les cinq sens, isolément puis en les associant l'un à l'autre. L'attention, l'imagination, (...) la mémoire, l'entendement ne seraient pas les facultés d'un ego mais seraient distribués sur chaque sens. Au lieu de déterminer des facultés comme les pouvoirs d'un moi substantiel dans une métaphysique créationniste, Condillac construit le paradigme d'un moi pluriel, effet des opérations qu'il effectue. Le présent livre réévalue ainsi ce qu'une tradition philosophique, des idéologues aux positivistes, a décrit comme le sensualisme. Pour interroger cette interprétation, la fiction condillacienne de la statue peut être confrontée aux hypothèses qui lui sont contemporaines La Mettrie et son homme-machine. Diderot et l'idée d'anatomie métaphysique, Boureau-Deslandes et son Pygmalion, l'histoire naturelle de Charles Bonnet et l'homo duplex de Buffon, à des titres différents, retravaillent l'anthropologie. Cette pensée du sensible qui déplace l'homme dans la nature et dans l'histoire inquiète théologiens et moralistes et convoque les lecteurs d'aujourd'hui dans leur critique du subjectivisme."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Looks at the psychological nature of depression and discusses its portrayal in literature and art.

Discussions about the morality of slavery are a central part of the history of early modern philosophy. This book explores the philosophical ideas, theories, and arguments that occur in eighteenth-century debates about slavery, with a particular focus on the role that race plays in these debates. This exploration reveals how closely Blackness and slavery had come to be associated and how common it was to believe that Black people are natural slaves, or naturally destined for slavery. The book examines not (...) just well-known authors like David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but also less widely studied philosophers like Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Lemuel Haynes, and Olympe de Gouges. By presenting philosophically important aspects of debates about slavery in eighteenth-century North America and Europe, the book aims to be a valuable resource for scholars, instructors, and students who are curious about a topic that historians of philosophy have so far neglected. (shrink)

This entry provides an overview of the current state of the debate between epistemic permissivists and impermissivists. Three important choice points for the permissivist are identified, and implications are discussed for plausibility of the resulting versions of permissivism.

This paper argues that the vitalist monisms of Anne Conway and Margaret Cavendish. Even though Conway is often cited as a proponent of a thoroughgoing ‘spiritualist’ ontology and Cavendish as the advocate of a similarly thoroughgoing materialism, their views turn out to be much closer than they may initially seem. Apart from highlighting the more radical nature of Conway’s position, such a reframing also has the added advantage of bringing the similarities between her own ‘spiritual’ monism and the vitalist ‘materialisms’ (...) of her time into sharper relief. As F. Wunderlich emphasizes, the notion of subtle matter pervaded the natural sciences of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The chapter provides a brief sketch of Cavendish’s ‘materialism’ and compares it to Conway’s view of created substance, drawing out a number of relevant similarities. It asks what may have motivated Conway and Cavendish to move beyond the materialism-immaterialism divide by ‘spiritualizing’ matter in this way. (shrink)

The format of this volume in the Library of Living Philosophers series provides for a detailed interaction between those who interpret and critique Julia Kristeva's work and Kristeva herself, giving broad coverage, from diverse viewpoints, of all the major topics establishing her reputation. This work begins with her autobiography, which provides an excellent introduction to her work, situating it in relation to major political, intellectual, and cultural movements of the time. The major part of the book is comprised of (...) thirty-six essays by Kristeva's foremost interpreters and critics, together with her replies to the essays. These encounters cover an exceptionally wide range of theoretical and literary writing. The strong international and multidisciplinary focus includes authors from over ten countries, and spans the fields of philosophy, semiotics, literature, psychoanalysis, feminist thought, political theory, art, and religion. A comprehensive bibliography of works by Kristeva is included. (shrink)

Ausgehend von Lucian Freuds Bild »Painter Working, Reflection« (1993) entwirft Julia Regina Meer eine korporale Philosophie der Bilder. Das Bild avanciert dabei zum Ausgangspunkt des Denkens, was eine methodische Abgrenzung zu den Bildwissenschaften wie auch zur Bildtheorie ermöglicht. In Anlehnung an die Philosophie von Jean-Luc Nancy schlägt sie ein affirmatives Konzept von Körperlichkeit vor, das auf dem Grenzbegriff der Expeausition - der körperlichen Ausgesetztheit entlang der Haut - beruht. Wie der Selbstakt von Freud zeigt, potenzieren Bilder dieses Ausgesetztsein, da (...) sie nicht nur einen Bildinhalt ausstellen, sondern immer auch den Bildkörper mitaussetzen. (shrink)

This article develops the argument that non-cosmopolitan considerations of justice justify relief of sovereign debt for highly indebted poor states. In particular, the article claims that considerations of national determination warrant some debt-forgiveness in the backdrop of unfair terms of global interaction. In a context of inequality, poor countries cannot generally afford to disregard the costs of ignoring the interests of the wealthiest states. Patterns of unbalanced interaction undermine national self-determination by limiting the poor countries' effective capacity to choose between (...) different policies to achieve development and other worthy goals. In concrete, this article suggests that unequal terms of interaction constrain national self-determination by making of sovereign debt an 'escape mechanism' in the absence of rival alternatives to palliate the effects of underdevelopment and related afflictions, despite the causes of sovereign debt being partly domestic, possibly. Thus, this paper views national self-determination as dependent on the availability of acceptable (non-unbearably burdensome) policy options on the part of states. (shrink)

On Moral Certainty, Justification and Practice presents a view of morality that is inspired by the later Wittgenstein. Hermann explores the ethical implications of Wittgenstein's remarks on doubt, justification, rule-following, certainty and training, offering an alternative to interpretations of Wittgenstein's work that view it as being intrinsically ethical. The book scrutinises cases in which doubt and justification do not make sense, and contrasts certain justificatory demands made by philosophers with the role of moral justification in concrete situations. It offers an (...) account of moral certainty, which is linked to a view of moral competence. Contrary to the views propounded by philosophers who emphasise the importance of moral principles, it is argued that moral agency is first and foremost a matter of having certain capacities. The book takes an anti-intellectualist stance and remains close to concrete practices. The practice-based view of morality it endorses has implications for moral education, intercultural moral dialogue and the prospects for moral agreement, change and progress. (shrink)

Some studies have reported that, under some circumstances, participants sometimes reject the truth of conditional premises and give incorrect uncertain conclusions to MP and MT, despite the standard instructions to assume the truth of the premises. Instructions that emphasise the logical nature of the task, on the other hand, increase the number of valid conclusions to these two inferences. In this paper, we examine two possible explanations for the influence of instructions on the production of valid conclusions: (1) instructions trigger (...) a logical mode of thinking that is appropriate for the task to be solved, and (2) instructions affect the way that retrieved information is used when constructing a mental representation of the premises. In order to compare these two hypothesis, we used conditional causal relations having either many or few disabling conditions (i.e. cases of P and not-Q) and presented them in four different instructional conditions. When presented with the standard instructions to suppose the premises to be true, MP and MT inferences show a relatively low percentage of valid conclusions. However, when the logical nature of the task and the necessity to assume the truth of the premises are emphasised, the number of valid conclusions greatly increases. Also, if disabling conditions are made explicit or generated before the presentation of these logical instructions, the performance on MP and MT is lower than when only the logical instructions are presented. Finally, the instructions had no effect on AC and DA. From these results, we concluded that the instructions had an effect on the use of retrieved information rather than on inducing different modes of thinking. (shrink)

Bayesian epistemology provides a popular and powerful framework for modeling rational norms on credences, including how rational agents should respond to evidence. The framework is built on the assumption that ideally rational agents have credences, or degrees of belief, that are representable by numbers that obey the axioms of probability. From there, further constraints are proposed regarding which credence assignments are rationally permissible, and how rational agents’ credences should change upon learning new evidence. While the details are hotly disputed, all (...) flavors of Bayesianism purport to give us norms of ideal rationality. This raises the question of how exactly these norms apply to you and me, since perfect compliance with those ideal norms is out of reach for human thinkers. A common response is that Bayesian norms are ideals that human reasoners are supposed to approximate – the closer they come to being ideally rational, the better. To make this claim plausible, we need to make it more precise. In what sense is it better to be closer to ideally rational, and what is an appropriate measure of such closeness? This article sketches some possible answers to these questions. (shrink)

We undergo a traumatic experience, such as a life-threatening accident or a brutal attack. We survive a period of relentless stress, perhaps because we are in a war zone and witness or commit atrocities. Raised by parents who are alcoholic or mentally ill, we endure traumatic experiences on a daily basis. Or, we are ignored, neglected, or treated as playthings by narcissistic parents, who themselves were ignored and neglected, and on and on through generations. To survive these experiences, perhaps we (...) dissociate. This can take various forms. In the extreme form, we remove ourselves, psychically speaking, from the situation, perhaps by adopting the role... (shrink)

Sentences containing predicates of personal taste exhibit two striking features: whether they are true seems to lie in the eye of the beholder and whether they are true can be—and often is—subject to disagreement. In the last decade, there has been a lively debate about how to account for these two features. In this paper, I shall argue for two claims: first, I shall show that even the most promising approaches so far offered by proponents of so-called indexical contextualism fail (...) to account for the disagreement feature. They might be able to account for some disagreement data, but they have trouble accounting for two kinds of disagreement data that caused the estrangement from indexical contextualism and the migration to relativism in the first place: the denial and the retraction data. Second, I shall show that we still do not have to abandon indexical contextualism, because what I shall call the superiority approach—a new pragmatically extended version of indexical contextualism—can very well account for the data. (shrink)

Many people follow Grice in thinking that all conversational implicatures are cancellable. And often enough, they use this insight as a test for conversational implicatures. If you want to find out whether something is a conversational implicature, the test has it, you should ask yourself whether the thing in question is cancellable; if you find that it is not cancellable, you can infer that it is not a conversational implicature. If you find that it is cancellable, you can infer that (...) it might well be a conversational implicature and that you should now do further testing. Various philosophers and linguists have questioned the test however. Some have held that Grice's cancellability claim is subject to counterexamples and that the test is not reliable. Others have argued that even though Grice's claim can be defended against the examples in question, the test is not as informative as people have hoped. This article provides an overview of the recent discussion on the cancellability test and suggests a way forward. (shrink)

The pejorative connotation often associated with the ordinary language meaning of “conspiracy theory” does not only stem from a conspiracy theory’s being about a conspiracy, but also from a conspiracy theory’s being regarded as a particular kind of theory. I propose to understand conspiracy theory-induced polarization in terms of disagreement about the correct epistemic evaluation of ‘theory’ in ‘conspiracy theory’. By framing the positions typical in conspiracy theory-induced polarization in this way, I aim to show that pejorative conceptions of ‘conspiracy (...) theory’ are problematic for research open to the possibility of finding depolarization strategies. That is, because they preclude constructive engagement with the epistemic norms governing (the rationales foundational of) belief in conspiracy theories. (shrink)

This paper discusses the inefficacy problem that arises in contexts of “collective harm.‘ These are contexts in which by acting in a certain sort of way, people collectively cause harm, or fail to prevent it, but no individual act of the relevant sort seems to itself make a difference. The inefficacy problem is that if acting in the relevant way won’t make a difference, it’s unclear why it would be wrong. Each individual can argue, “things will be just as bad (...) whether or not I act in this way, so there’s no point in doing otherwise.‘ The goal of this paper is to give an overview of some of the main responses available to the problem and to highlight central issues that arise for each type of response. In the final section, I explain what I take to be the most promising strategy and discuss the form that this strategy should take. (shrink)

As stressed by Perruchet & Vinter, the SOC model echoes Johnson-Laird's mental model theory. Indeed, the latter rejects rule-based processing and assumes that reasoning is achieved through the manipulation of conscious representations. However, the mental model theory as well as its modified versions resorts to the abstraction of complex schemas and some form of implicit logic that seems incompatible with the SOC approach.

Lange Zeit hat die Idee eines musikalischen Fortschritts gleichermassen fasziniert und polarisiert. Als zentraler Bestandteil der Diskurse um die Neue Musik verlangt sie nach einer differenzierten historischen Betrachtung. Anhand von reichhaltigem Textmaterial analysiert Julia Freund die zentralen Konzepte und Argumentationslinien und entwirft ein vielfältiges Panorama der Debatten der 1950er Jahre. Ausgangspunkt ist ein close reading der Schriften und Vorlesungen Theodor W. Adornos, dessen Fortschrittsbegriff im Rahmen seines philosophischen Projekts der Aufklärungskritik greifbar wird. In einem zweiten und dritten Schritt nimmt (...) die Autorin die Denkfiguren und Narrative der seriellen Komponisten (darunter K. Stockhausen und P. Boulez) sowie die Gegenentwürfe ihrer Kritiker (wie P. Hindemith oder Fr. Blume) in den Blick"--Back cover. (shrink)

Was sind die philosophischen Grundannahmen postmoderner Texte und inwieweit übernehmen sie das Denken Friedrich Nietzsches? Findet sich der postmoderne Stil umgekehrt schon bei Nietzsche selbst? Julia Maria Pollichs romanistisch ausgerichtete Studie verbindet eine originelle literaturwissenschaftliche Deutung von Nietzsches Schriften, welche dessen Übermenschen-Konzept in neuem Licht erscheinen lässt, mit dem Nachdenken über die philosophisch-poetologischen Unterschiede zwischen modernem und postmodernem Schreiben. Anhand von vier Autoren und Werken aus dem Zeitraum zwischen Fin de Siècle und dem französischen Poststrukturalismus wird so eine Brücke (...) zwischen dem bei Nietzsche - entgegen seinem vorgeblichen Atheismus und "Antichristentum" - vorhandenen Mystik-Thema und der Mystik-Thematik der Postmoderne geschlagen."-- Back cover. (shrink)

People disagree frequently, about both objective and subjective matters. But while at least one party must be wrong in a disagreement about objective matters, it seems that both parties can be right when it comes to subjective ones: it seems that there can be faultless disagreements. But how is this possible? How can people disagree with one another if they are both right? And why should they? In recent years, a number of philosophers and linguists have argued that we must (...) become relativists about truth to understand faultless disagreements. This book shows that we can dispense with relativism. It combines a more standard semantics with a novel pragmatic theory to develop a superior approach. The book discusses both classic and recent literature in philosophy and linguistics. It provides a general introduction to the debate about the semantics and pragmatics of perspectival expressions, as well as an original contribution to the contemporary discussion. (shrink)