This paper provides a detailed account of the normal importance of self-knowledge. I critique two previous accounts, one developed by Bilgrami and the other inspired by Putnam. It is argued that the former conflates self-beliefs with the intentional states that these higher-order beliefs are about, whereas the latter shows only that true beliefs of certain kinds—as opposed to true self-beliefs simpliciter—improve our chances of survival. Self-knowledge is valuable for four reasons. First, it improves our chances of survival because it enables (...) us to assess our intentional states and adjust our behavior. Second, it plays a critical role in effecting cooperation because the efficient pursuit of common goals requires that one communicate to others information about one’s beliefs and desires. Third, it provides protection against psychopathologies such as anxiety and narcissism because it enables the agent to assume responsibility for his thoughts and actions. Fourth, it enhances the agent’s self-confidence and happiness because the less he doubts that his successes are the result of his acting on his attitudes and abilities, the more self-confident and happier he is. I conclude with a discussion of the disadvantages of self-knowledge and the advantages of self-ignorance and self-error. (shrink)

Is a devoted Nazi or a zombie bureaucrat a greater moral and political problem? Because the dangers of immoral fanaticism are so clear, the dangers of mindless bureaucracy are easy to overlook. Yet zombie bureaucrats have contributed substantially to the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century, doing so seemingly oblivious to the monstrous qualities of their actions. Hannah Arendt’s work on thoughtlessness raises a dilemma: if Eichmann, the architect of the Nazi Final Solution, truly was a thoughtless ‘cog’, lacking in (...) intentionality, can one really hold him morally accountable for the evil qualities of his acts? This article relates Arendt’s ‘thought’ and Strawson’s and Bilgrami’s discussion of ‘reactive attitudes’ and Sartre’s concept of ‘bad faith’. To find a basis for moral accountable in seemingly thoughtless cases like Eichmann’s. Although Arendt’s Eichmann is an extreme example, finding a basis to hold him accountable is valuable because ‘little Eichmanns’ will persist as long as impersonal forces structure and depress reactive attitudes. (shrink)

The philosopher Akeel Bilgrami’s notion of identity is original and challenging to liberal political theory, but still largely unaddressed by it. In a nutshell, Bilgrami characterizes identity as holding certain values and commitments with a crucial addendum: as we want to continue living by those values and commitments in the future, we erect some social and legal barriers to prevent them from change. Liberals of a Millian and/or Rawlsian cast of mind, in turn, arrange political institutions to enable such change, (...) as they assume that we are the kind of creatures that change their minds. In this sense, the identitarian and the liberal mindset are, as the philosopher claims, “mirror opposites”. This article engages with Bilgrami’s view in two senses: on the one hand, it highlights some potentially problematic areas that may call for further clarification and reinterpretation of the liberal canon, as well as offering other set of tensions that arise with non-liberal philosophical traditions. On the other hand, it contends that Bilgrami’s ultimate claim is not merely that the identitarian mindset is more rational than the liberal mentality, as he does, but that it makes political demands that should be assessed against the liberal ideal of justification. While it may be the case that identitarianism is rationally superior to certain versions of comprehensive liberalism, the paper concludes that it loses out to political liberalism, to the extent that Bilgrami’s identitarianism is willing to display the state’s coercive muscle in oppressive ways, in a way that political liberalism does not. (shrink)

ResumenEl propósito de este artículo es defender que el externismo social de Burge puede enfrentarse con éxito al trilema de Bilgrami, un argumento que pretende mostrar la incompatibilidad entre el externismo ortodoxo, dentro del cual figura el externismo de Burge, y el acceso privilegiado a los propios contenidos mentales. Además, pretendemos poner de manifiesto la existencia de ciertas tensiones en la versión del externismo defendida por Bilgrami.Palabras claveAtribuciones conceptuales, contenido psicológico, internismo, externismoAbstractThe aim of this paper is to defend that (...) Burge’s social externalism can successfully face Bilgrami’s trilemma, an argument that intends to show the incompatibility between orthodox externalism, in which Burge’s externalism is featured, and the privileged access to our own mental contents. In addition, we mean to demonstrate the existence of certain tensions in Bilgrami’s view of externalism.Keywords Conceptual atributions, psychological content, internalism, externalism. (shrink)

The thirty-three essays in <I>Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology</I> grapple with one of the most intriguing, enduring, and far-reaching philosophical problems of our age. Relativism comes in many varieties. It is often defined as the belief that truth, goodness, or beauty is relative to some context or reference frame, and that no absolute standards can adjudicate between competing reference frames. Michael Krausz's anthology captures the significance and range of relativistic doctrines, rehearsing their virtues and vices and reflecting on a spectrum of (...) attitudes. Invoking diverse philosophical orientations, these doctrines concern conceptions of relativism in relation to facts and conceptual schemes, realism and objectivity, universalism and foundationalism, solidarity and rationality, pluralism and moral relativism, and feminism and poststructuralism. Featuring nine original essays, the volume also includes many classic articles, making it a standard resource for students, scholars, and researchers. <B>Table of Contents:</B> Foreword by Alan Ryan Preface Introduction Michael Krausz <B>Part I. Orienting Relativism</B> 1. Mapping Relativisms Michael Krausz 2. A Brief History of Relativism Maria Baghramian <B>Part II. Relativism, Truth, and Knowledge</B> 3. Subjective, Objective, and Conceptual Relativisms Maurice Mandelbaum 4. “Just the Facts, Ma’am!” Nelson Goodman 5. Relativism in Philosophy of Science Nancy Cartwright 6. The Truth About Relativism Joseph Margolis 7. Making Sense of Relative Truth John MacFarlane 8. On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme Donald Davidson 9. Truth and Convention: On Davidson’s Refutation of Conceptual Relativism Hilary Putnam 10. Conceptual Schemes Simon Blackburn 11. Relativizing the Facts Paul A. Boghossian 12. Targets of Anti-Relativist Arguments Harvey Siegel 13. Realism and Relativism Akeel Bilgrami <B>Part III. Moral Relativism, Objectivity, and Reasons</B> 14. Moral Relativism Defended Gilbert Harman 15. The Truth in Relativism Bernard Williams 16. Pluralism and Ambivalence David B. Wong 17. The Relativity of Fact and the Objectivity of Value Catherine Z. Elgin 18. Senses of Moral Relativity David Wiggins 19. Ethical Relativism and the Problem of Incoherence David Lyons 20. Understanding Alien Morals Gopal Sreenivasan 21. Value: Realism and Objectivity Thomas Nagel 22. Intuitionism, Realism, Relativism, and Rhubarb Crispin Wright 23. Moral Relativism and Moral Realism Russ Schafer-Landau <B>Part IV. Relativism, Culture, and Understanding</B> 24. Anti Anti-Relativism Clifford Geertz 25. Solidarity or Objectivity? Richard Rorty 26. Relativism, Power, and Philosophy Alasdair MacIntyre 27. Internal Criticism and Indian Rationalist Traditions Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen 28. Phenomenological Rationality and the Overcoming of Relativism Jitendra N. Mohanty 29. Understanding and Ethnocentricity Charles Taylor 30. Relativism and Cross-Cultural Understanding Kwame Anthony Appiah 31. Relativism, Persons, and Practices Amélie Oksenberg Rorty 32. One What? Relativism and Poststructuralism David Couzens Hoy 33. Must a Feminist Be a Relativist After All? Lorraine Code List of Contributors Index. (shrink)

“What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex A Secular Age, where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a defining feature of the modern world, not the mere absence of religion, and casts light on the experience of transcendence that scientistic explanations of the world tend to neglect. -/- In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a prominent and varied group of scholars chart the (...) conversations in which A Secular Age intervenes and address wider questions of secularism and secularity. The distinguished contributors include Robert Bellah, José Casanova, Nilüfer Göle, William E. Connolly, Wendy Brown, Simon During, Colin Jager, Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan, Akeel Bilgrami, John Milbank, and Saba Mahmood. -/- Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age is edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun. (shrink)

The Problem of Perception offers two arguments against direct realism--one concerning illusion, and one concerning hallucination--that no current theory of ...

In this paper I examine Grace A. de Laguna’s theory of universals in its historical context and in relation to contemporary debates in analytic metaphysics. I explain the central features of her theory, arguing that her theory should be classified as a form of immanent realism and as a powers ontology. I then show in what ways her theory affords a theory of modality in terms of potentialities and discuss some of its consequences along the way.

A. H. Louie's More Than Life Itself is an exploratory journey in relational biology, a study of life in terms of the organization of entailment relations in living systems. This book represents a synergy of the mathematical theories of categories, lattices, and modelling, and the result is a synthetic biology that provides a characterization of life. Biology extends physics. Life is not a specialization of mechanism, but an expansive generalization of it. Organisms and machines share some common features, but organisms (...) are not machines. Life is defined by a relational closure that places it beyond the reach of physicochemical and mechanistic dogma, outside the reductionistic universe, and into the realm of impredicativity. Function dictates structure. Complexity brings forth living beings. (shrink)

This companion is a cutting-edge primer to critical forms of the posthumanities and the feminist posthumanities, aimed at students and researchers who want to catch up with the recent theoretical developments in various fields in the humanities, such as new media studies, gender studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, human animal studies, postcolonial critique, philosophy and environmental humanities. It contains a collection of nineteen new and original short chapters introducing influential concepts, ideas and approaches that have shaped and developed (...) new materialism, inhuman theory, critical posthumanism, feminist materialism, and posthuman philosophy. A resource for students and teachers, this comprehensive volume brings together established international scholars and emerging theorists, for timely and astute definitions of a moving target – posthuman humanities and feminist posthumanities. (shrink)

Inspired by Castañeda (1966, 1968), Perry (1979) and Lewis (1979) showed that a specific variety of singular thoughts, thoughts about oneself “as oneself” – de se thoughts, as Lewis called them – raise special issues, and they advanced rival accounts. Their suggestive examples raise the problem of de se thought – to wit, how to characterize it so as to give an accurate account of the data, tracing its relations to singular thoughts in general. After rehearsing the main tenets of (...) two contrasting accounts – a Lewisian one and a Perrian one – in the first section of this paper, in the second I will present a proposal of my own, which is a specific elaboration of the Perrian account. In the first section I will indicate some weaknesses of Perry’s presentation of his view; the proposal I will articulate in the second overcomes them. I will conclude with a brief discussion of reasons for preferring one or another account, in particular regarding the issue of the communication of de se thoughts. (shrink)

I. Ókor -- II. A középkor és a reneszánsz -- III. Az újkor.

The book questions two key dichotomies: that of the apparent and real, and that of the internal and external. This leads to revised notions of the structure of experience and the object of knowledge. Our world is experienced as possibilities of action, and to know is to know what to do. A further consequence is that the mind is best considered as a property of organisms' interactions with their environment. The unit of analysis is the loop of action and perception, (...) and the central concept is the notion of habit of action, which provides the embodied basis of cognition as the anticipation of action. This holds for non-linguistic tacit meanings as well as for linguistic meanings. Habit of action is a teleological notion and thus opens a possibility for defining intentionality and normativity in terms of the soft naturalism adopted in the book. The mind is embodied, and this embodiment determines our physical perspective on the world. Our sensory organs and other instruments give us instrumental access to the world, and this access is epistemic in character. The distinction between the physical and conceptual viewpoint allows us to define truth as the correspondence with operational fit. This embodied epistemic truth is however not a sign of antirealism, as the instrumentally accessed theoretical objects are precisely those objects that experimental science deals with.. (shrink)

[Socialism, essentialism and externalism] The paper defends two assumptions in Burge's externalist argument against materialism. One assumption is that the content of a belief is determined by the rules that govern its expression in a shared language. Hence, I call this principle "linguistic socialism." According to the other assumption, a belief survives as long as it keepds its content. Content is regarded hee as essential to a belief, so I call this principle "semantic essentialism." The critics of socialism such as (...) Davidson and Bilgrami reject it in favor of "individualism," claiming that the mental cotnent is idependent of conventionally fixed meaning. The opponents of essentialism such as Gibbons prefer "accidentalism," arguing that content is inessential to a belief. I argue that individualism and accidentalism contradict empirical facts and modal intuitions about belief ascriptions, respectively. (shrink)

La admirable riqueza cultural y artística del Renacimiento esconde una desoladora miseria y aquella "edad de la abundancia" contrasta con una inmensa pobreza. Lejos de ser una broma o una pesadilla, la celebrada Utopía de Tomás Moro fue antes que nada un desafío insoslayable, pues proponía que ninguna sociedad merece tal nombre si tolera la miseria de un solo pobre. Rico y pobre explora la cuestión en ese libro de 1516 y en otros del escritor londinense para concluir con un (...) esbozo de su vida a la luz de la pobreza como virtud indispensable y libertadora. He aquí un hombre afortunado que no fue indiferente ante el infortunio de tantos y que vio en la humanitas la virtud por excelencia que lleva a una constante atención y cuidado del prójimo. Inspirado por un cambio de actitud en su época, así como por su fe cristiana y la mejor tradición estoica, mostró una robusta preocupación sobre el tema subrayando el valor social que debe tener toda riqueza, tanto a nivel estatal como individual, destacando la grave obligación cívica de los ricos y la necesidad que tienen todos, ricos y pobres, de empeñarse en la práctica de cierto desprendimiento y generosidad si no quieren mermar su propia humanidad y fallecer en su avaricia. La percepción de la miseria había cambiado de tal manera que su remedio ya no podía estar en una u otra limosna en plazas e iglesias, sino en la acción bien pensada y perentoria de todo gobierno que se tenga por justo. Sir Tomás Moro, privilegiado desde la cuna y seguro en su trabajo profesional, vio la pobreza de tantos como un desastre social, pero uno que, al mismo tiempo, debería llevar a todo ser humano a ver en el desprendimiento y generosidad una excelencia o virtud que alumbra la "otra" libertad, y tan íntima y valiosa que en su caso brilló aun en la prisión y ante el horror de una muerte injusta y atroz." -- Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Tom 1. Rannekhristianskiĭ gnosticheskiĭ tekst v rossiĭskoĭ kulʹture (21 i︠a︡nvari︠a︡ 2011 g.) -- Tom 2. Sudʹby religiozno-filosofskikh iskaniĭ Nikolai︠a︡ Novikova i ego kruga (15-17 okti︠a︡bri︠a︡ 2012 g.).

Estamos a un año del cincuentenario de la aparición formal de la bioética en el escenario científico global. El afortunado neologismo usado por Potter en 1970 para vincular las ciencias experimentales con las ciencias humanísticas, creando un enfoque interdisciplinar indispensable -esencia de la bioética-, el cual pretende recuperar el liderazgo de la filosofía -particularmente de la ética- a fin de orientar apropiadamente los desarrollos de las ciencias prácticas en boga, como la biología, la ecología, la química, la cibernética, las nuevas (...) biotecnologías, la biomedicina, siempre con respeto de la dignidad del ser humano y su entorno. Es necesario estar alerta a ciertas tendencias actuales guiadas principalmente por intereses económicos y posverdad, corrientes transhumanistas que parecieran dar un nuevo giro copernicano en la reflexión científico-filosófica, en donde la esencia del ser humano pareciera esfumarse y quedar al libre arbitrio de las ciencias cibernéticas. ¿Qué hacer entonces? El reto que se vislumbra en el horizonte es volver a descubrir una racionalidad que la sustente, o como Potter decía en 1970: "El conocimiento de cómo utilizar el conocimiento" ¿Qué tan cerca está esta nueva ciencia de alcanzar las metas que su fundador Van Rensselaer Potter propuso para unir las ciencias experimentales con las ciencias humanísticas? ¿La biología con la filosofía, y a su vez destacar la urdimbre jurídica que de manera natural brota ante problemáticas y retos tan relevantes en el ámbito clínico, como son los que aborda y atiende la bioética como ciencia? En este contexto la bioética surge como una disciplina con un especial interés por discernir en esta multitud de nuevas posibilidades lo que es ético de lo que no lo es, lo que humaniza de lo que degrada, lo correcto de lo incorrecto, lo que concuerda con el respeto a la dignidad de las personas o no. De ahí el interés en aportar un conjunto de escritos científicos acerca de sus fundamentos y principales aplicaciones, tanto para personal de salud, alumnos de pregrado y posgrado, docentes, como a quienes pertenecen a comités hospitalarios: abogados, filósofos, representantes religiosos, así como profesionales de otros ámbitos, incluidas la investigación y la práctica clínica, que les permita tomar las decisiones correctas, dentro del marco del derecho sanitario vigente de nuestro país y conforme a los tratados internacionales de los que México es parte. El libro tiene como objetivo presentar a los estudiantes, docentes, investigadores y profesionales de distintas carreras, interesados en este ámbito, los fundamentos antropológicos y humanísticos de la novedosa y polémica ciencia de la bioética, sus campos de aplicación, los dilemas que suelen presentarse, así como algunas propuestas de solución de casos clínicos concretos por un grupo interdisciplinar de académicos de prestigiadas instituciones educativas de nuestro país. (shrink)