Online research in philosophy

I argue that the empirical literature on priming effects does not warrant nor suggest the conclusion, drawn by prominent psychologists such as J. A. Bargh, that we have no free will or less free will than we might think. I focus on a particular experiment by Bargh - the ‘elderly’ stereotype case in which subjects that have been primed with words that remind them of the stereotype of the elderly walk on average slower out of the experiment’s room than control (...) subjects – and I show that we cannot say that subjects cannot help walking slower or that they are not free in doing so. I then illustrate how these cases can be reconciled and normalized within a Davidsonian theory of action to show that, in walking slower, subjects are acting intentionally. My argument applies across various experiments, including those of goal priming. In the final section I argue that the only cases in which priming effects are efficacious are socalled Buridan cases. (shrink)

The relationship between self-realization, thus of what I really wholeheartedly endorse and I owe to myself, and morality or what we owe to others is normally thought of as antagonism, or as a pleasant coincidence: Only if I am indebted to such relations as my fundamental projects that I care wholeheartedly about, does morality have a direct connection to self-realization. The aim of this article is to argue against this picture. I will be argued that the structure of self-realization and (...) the caring activity involved commits the person to values that are beyond the object of his wholehearted caring, in a way that might just pave the way to morality. -/- . (shrink)

This paper offers an appraisal of Phillip Pettit’s approach to the problem how a finite set of examples can serve to represent a determinate rule, given that indefinitely many rules can be extrapolated from any such set. Negatively, I argue that Pettit’s so-called ethocentric theory of rule-following fails to deliver the solution to this problem that he sets out to provide. More constructively, I consider what further provisions are needed in order to advance Pettit’s distinctive general approach to the problem. (...) I conclude that what is needed is a ‘no-priority’ account of rule-exemplification: that is, an account that (a) affirms the constitutive role of agents’ responses in the exemplification of rules but (b) denies the explanatory priority given to such responses in Pettit’s theory. (shrink)