Online research in philosophy

Preface: Blurring the boundary between human and nonhuman beings -- Only one Holocaust? -- Evidence of things not seen -- The henmaid's tale -- Holocaust victimization imagery -- Procrustean solutions -- Scapegoats and surrogates : falsifying the fate of victims -- The 9/11 controversy -- An atrocity can be both unique and general.

This essay continues Kafka’s tale of a human being who metamorphoses into a beetle. The tale is developed in the light of some recent theory about personal identity and rational choice, particularly Robert Nozick’s Closest-Continuer theory and Mark Johnston’s Relativism about the self. These are potentially complementary conceptions of relativity about the self, Nozick’s focusing on the individual’s ‘metric’ as a criterion of personal continuity, Johnston’s on social standards. When the individually authentic determination about ‘closeness’ coincides with the community’s standards for continuity, the two accounts are complementary. The tale concludes with reference to applying the concept of personal identity for branching selves in the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Application of the concept of personal identity in an MWI context implies that there is a bad end in store for us all, as David Lewis argued in his last essay.

Abstract Freud's theory of slips of the tongue has been extensively criticized by Adolf Grunbaum and Edward Erwin. They argue that in an effort to make the theory plausible Freud relied on examples of speech errors that do not conform to his theoretical characterization of slips of the tongue. These examples have contributed to the impression that Freud's theory relies on a broader evidential base than it in fact does. Furthermore they argue that Freud has not established the existence of a causal connection between repressed ideation and slips of the tongue. I argue that both of these criticisms are ill?founded because they are demonstrably based on misinterpretations of Freud's view and misreadings of the relevant texts. Grunbaum and Erwin have consistently mistaken the epistemic structure of Freud's view. I am less interested in defending Freud's view than in clarifying the relationships between assertion and evidence in Freud's theory of parapraxes. To this end I conclude with an argument to show that within Freud's theory there is no criterion for telling that any particular thought has previously been repressed, and that in the absence of such a criterion a fundamental assumption of the theory is unsupported.

We propose that the fine discrete movements of the tongue as used in speech are what account for the extreme lateralization in humans, and that handedness is a mere byproduct of tongue use. With regard to syntax, we support the Armstrong et al. (1995) proposition that syntax derives directly from gestural motor movements as opposed to facial expressions.

In this contribution the author tries to show the relation between Lévinas and Husserl regarding the question of language and tongue. He begins by explaining what is the conception of language in the Logical Investigations and of tongue in Ideas II. The former allows Husserl to develop a univocal language, whereas the second reinscribes the tongue in the body with his intersubjective dimension. Husserl will have an influence on Lévinas, but the latter will reject his conception of language, for being too formal, and hold Husserl’s concept of the tongue to be a presupposition. Thus, the tongue becomes the way the alterity of the other expresses itself, the way a meaning appears independently from the subject.

There once was an ugly duckling. Except he wasn’t a duckling at all, and once he realized his error he lived happily ever after. And there you have an early primer from the animal literature on the issue of misrepresentation -- perhaps one of the few on this topic to have a happy ending. Philosophers interested in misrepresentation have turned their attention to a different fairy tale animal: the frog. No one gets kissed in this story and the controversial issue of self-recognition is avoided. There are simply some scientifically established facts about ways to get a frog to stick out its tongue. (Who would want to kiss a frog under those conditions, anyway?) Some frogs, it seems, are fairly indiscriminate about sticking out their tongues. Not just flies, but a whole slew of other things will go down the hatch if propelled at just the right velocity and range through a frog’s visual field, provoking a tongue-flicking response. Fortunately for us all, frogs seem to be a bit more discriminating about whom they will kiss. At first sight, the frog’s tongue-flicking response seems like an ideal starting point for those who wish to promote evolutionary or "teleological" theories of intentional content. The signals passed from the frog’s retina to the frog’s brain were undoubtedly honed by the deaths of untold millions of insects snagged by countless generations of amphibians. Those amphibian ancestors whose eyes generated signals that were more 1 reliable guides to the location of food in the environment did better at propagating their genes, all other things being equal, than their cohorts whose eye to brain signals were less reliable. The teleosemanticist identifies the content of frogs’ intracranial signals in terms of the environmental conditions that historically corresponded to successful tongue-flicking, namely the presence of frog food -- typically flies -- in tongue-flicking range. And their descendants live happily ever after. But this would not be a fairy tale unless there were something to pose a credible threat to this happy ending..