In a recent paper, Shaun Nichols (2002) presents a theory that offers an explanation of the cognitive processes underlying moral judgment. His Affect-Backed Norms theory claims that (i) a set of normative rules coupled with (ii) an affective mechanism elicits a certain response pattern (which we will refer to as the “moral norm response pattern”) when subjects respond to transgressions of those norms. That response pattern differs from the way subjects respond to violations of norms that lack the affective backing (...) (here referred to as the “conventional norm response pattern”). In response, Daniel Kelly and colleagues (2007) present data that, the authors claim, undermine Nichols’ Affect-Backed Norms theory by showing that there are novel cases in which (i) and (ii) are in place, yet subjects respond in the way typical of the conventional response pattern. In Section I of this paper we summarize the challenge to the Affect-Backed Norms theory from the novel cases introduced by Kelly et al. We then show how the challenge is potentially flawed because no verification was provided that subjects were experiencing affect when reading the cases, nor was level of affect controlled for. In Section II, we describe the study we conducted to determine what level of affect was induced when subjects read the novel cases. In Section III, we present our findings, namely that subjects respond to the novel cases with different levels of affect, which tracks their judgments of the severity of the transgressions in the cases. In Section IV, we discuss the results and show that the Affect-Backed Norms theory can explain subjects’ responses to the novel cases given this new 2 information about affective response. In Section V, we conclude with a thought about how these findings inform the traditional moral/conventional distinction. (shrink)
In much of the developing world daughters receive lower education and other investments than do their brothers, and may even be so devalued as to suffer differential mortality. Daughter disadvantage may be due in part to social norms that prescribe that daughters move away from their natal family upon marriage, a practice known as virilocality. We evaluate the effects of virilocality on female disadvantage using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey. We find little support for the hypothesis. There is (...) no evidence that the overall pattern of rough equality in the treatment of boys and girls in Indonesia masks differences according to post-marital residential practice. Virilocal groups do not have "missing daughters." Nor is there other evidence of son preference, such as in relatively low height-for-age or education for girls and women in virilocal areas. Explanations of daughter disadvantage as due to virilocality should be subject to further scrutiny and contextualization. (shrink)
This book explores the common thread holding together seemingly diverse tendencies in attacks on liberalism. The author argues that ambivalence about the self and about desire as an expression of the self fosters the intense animosity we observe directed toward the liberal ideal. Ambivalence arises because the self is viewed as the locus of a destructive form of desire, one that must be controlled and repressed. The author argues that speaking of ambivalence toward the self is another way of speaking (...) of ambivalence toward freedom, an ambivalence expressed in the impulse toward coercion that plays such a powerful role in the attack on liberalism. (shrink)
to use David Chalmers's jargon) claim that though zombies are conceivable, they are not metaphysically possible. This article calls this position regarding the relation between metaphysical and epistemic modality "modal autonomism," as opposed to the "modal rationalism" endorsed by David Chalmers and Frank Jackson, who insist on a deep link between the two forms of modality. This article argues that the defense of modal rationalism presented in Chalmers and Jackson (2001) begs the question against the type-B materialist/modal autonomist. (...) The argument proceeds as follows. Modal rationalists claim that for all nonphenomenal macro properties, the appropriate supervenience conditional is both necessary and a priori. Hence, type-B materialists must engage in special pleading when they claim that the relevant supervenience conditional for phenomenal properties, expressing the supervenience of the phenomenal on the physical, is necessary but not a priori. However, what Chalmers and Jackson demonstrate, if anything, is that the conditional that includes all the microphysical plus the phenomenal in the antecedent, and nonphenomenal macro facts (such as facts about water and other natural kinds, among other things) in the consequent, is a priori. The question arises why, since facts about water and the like do not metaphysically supervene on the phenomenal facts, is it appropriate to include the phenomenal facts in the antecedent of the relevant supervenience conditional. This article argues for the following claims: First, that it's crucial to the general semantic framework Chalmers and Jackson defend that they do include the phenomenal facts in the supervenience conditional; without them, the conditional would not be a priori. Second, that the only way to argue from the a priori character of these conditionals to the applicability of modal rationalism to the nonphenomenal cases is to rely either on modal rationalism itself or on the denial of type-B materialism. Obviously, in the context of this argument, either way would beg the question. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us Digg Reddit Technorati What's this? (shrink)
Thomas & Karmiloff-Smith (T&K-S) show that the assumption of residual normality (RN) does not hold in connectionist simulations, and argue that RN has been inappropriately applied to childhood disorders. We agree. However, we suggest that the RN hypothesis may never have been fully viable, either empirically or computationally.
This collection of thirteen essays, when viewed together, offers a unique perspective on the history of American philosophy. It illuminates for the first time in book form, how thirteen major American philosophical thinkers viewed a problem of special interest in the American philosophical tradition: the relationship between experience and reflection. Written by well-known authorities on the figure about which he or she writes, the essays are arranged chronologically to highlight the changes and developments in thought from Puritanism to Pragmatism to (...) Process Philosophy. While Doctrine and Experience will be of particular interest to specialists in American Philosophy, there is also much to offer anyone interested in the intellectual and cultural history of the United States. In order of appearance, the essays are: "Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening" by John E. Smith "Heart and Head: The Mind of Thomas Jefferson" by Andrew J. Reck"Emerson and the American Future" by Robert C. Pollock"Chauncey Wright and the Pragmatists" by Edward Madden"Charles S. Peirce: Action Through Thought – The Ethics of Experience" by Vincent G. Potter"Life Is in the Transitions’: Radical Empiricism and Contemporary Concerns" by John J. McDermott"John Dewey and the Metaphysics of American Democracy" by Ralph W. Sleeper"Individualization and Unification in Sartre and Dewey" by Thelma Z. Levine"Josiah Royce: Anticipator of European Existentialism and Phenomenology" by Jacqueline Ann K. Kegley"The Transcendence of Materialism and Idealism in American Thought" by John Lachs"C. I. Lewis and the Pragmatic Tradition in American Philosophy" by Sandra Rosenthal"The Social Philosophy of George Herbert Mead" by David Miller"Existence as Transaction: A Whiteheadian Study of Causality" by Elizabeth Kraus. (shrink)
In this paper I discuss the claim (advanced in various ways by Joseph Levine, Frank Jackson and David Chalmers) that the successful reduction of qualitative to physical states requires some sort of intelligible connection between our qualitative and physical concepts, which in turn requires a conceptual analysis of our qualitative concepts in causal-functional terms. While I defend this claim against some of its recent critics, I ultimately dispute it, and propose a different way to get the requisite intelligible (...) connection between qualitative and physical concepts. (shrink)
Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument and different conceivability arguments, advanced by Saul Kripke, David Chalmers and Joseph Levine, conclude that consciousness involves non-physical properties or properties that cannot be reductively accounted for in physical terms. Some physicalists have replied to these objections by means of different versions of the phenomenal concept strategy. David Chalmers has responded with the master argument, a reasoning that, if successful, would undermine any reasonable version of the phenomenal concept strategy. In this paper, I (...) argue that the master argument does not advance the debate between the supporters of the anti-physicalist arguments and those of the phenomenal concept strategy. (shrink)
The debate between the reductive and emergent materialist is still very much a live one. (Antony and Levine 1997; Auyang 2000; Bechtel and Richardson 1992; Block 1997; Boyd 1999; Crane 2001; David 1997; Fodor 1989; Fodor 1997; Kim 1993b; Kim 1994; Kim 1996; Kim 1999; Le Pore and Loewer 1987; Millikan 1999; Pereboom 2002; Rueger 2000; Van Gulick 2001; Yablo 1992). We argue that the best way to settle this debate is to take a step back and consider (...) the metaphysics that is motivated by a careful consideration of some scientific examples. We argue that an account of emergence which bases emergence of a complex whole in the physical organisation of the parts can account for the emergent explicable novelty can be found throughout science. This. (shrink)
among them Joseph Levine, David Chalmers, Frank Jackson and Jaegwon Kim?have claimed that there are conceptual grounds sufficient for ruling out the possibility of a reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness. Their claim assumes a functional model of reduction (regarded by Kim as an alternative to the traditional Nagelian model) which requires an a priori entailment from the facts in the reduction base to the phenomena to be explained. The aim of this paper is to show that this is (...) an unreasonable requirement?a requirement that no reductive explanation in science should be expected to satisfy. I argue that the functional model is not substantively different from the Nagelian model properly understood, and that the question whether consciousness is reductively explainable?in a sense involving property identifications or in some weaker sense compatible with Nagelian reduction?is a fundamentally empirical question, not one that can be settled on conceptual grounds alone. Introduction Kim's critique of the Nagelian model of reduction The functional model of reduction Is consciousness reducible? Psychophysical reduction: concluding remarks. (shrink)
Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction William A. Galston and Peter H. Hoffenberg; 2. Global poverty and uneven development Sakiko Fukuda-Parr; 3. The karma of poverty: a Buddhist perspective David R. Loy; 4. Poverty and morality in Christianity Kent A. Van Til; 5. Classical liberalism, poverty, and morality Tom G. Palmer; 6. Confucian perspectives on poverty and morality Peter Nosco; 7. Poverty and morality: a feminist perspective Nancy J. Hirschmann; 8. Hinduism and poverty Arvind Sharma; 9. The problem of (...) poverty in Islamic ethics Sohail H. Hashmi; 10. Jewish perspectives on poverty Noam Zohar; 11. Liberal egalitarianism and poverty Darrel Moellendorf; 12. Marxism and poverty Andrew Levine; 13. Poverty and natural law Stephen J. Pope; 14. Afterword Michael Walzer. (shrink)
Imperialism is thought to be wrong by virtually everyone today. The consensus may be correct. However, there may be a few good things to be said for empire. More importantly for political philosophy, empires are not harder to justify or legitimate than states, or so I argue. The bad press that empires receive seems due to a methodological suspect comparison of nasty empires to nice states. When nice empires are considered they do not fare much worse than (nice) states. I (...) suggest that empires can have the same weak kind of legitimacy that states have and that both lack fuller or stronger legitimacy. a Footnotesa An earlier version of this essay was presented at James Madison University and discussed at a workshop of the Committee for Politics, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. I am grateful to members of both audiences for critical questions and comments, in particular to John Brown, Farid Dhanji, Douglas Grob, Peter Levine, Jerry Segal, and Karol Soltan (others are thanked in the notes). Gratitude is also owed to Jose Idler-Acosta, David Lefkowitz, and Ellen Paul for helpful written comments. (shrink)
Dual review of George Levine’s Darwin Loves You and David Sloan Wilson’s Evolution for Everyone.) American Scientist. (Vol. 95, November-December, pp. 528-531, 2007).
David Michael Levin's ongoing exploration of the moral character and enlightenment-potential of vision takes a new direction in The Philosopher's Gaze . Levin examines texts by Descartes, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, using our culturally dominant mode of perception and the philosophical discourse it has generated as the site for his critical reflections on the moral culture in which we are living. In Levin's view, all these philosophers attempted to understand, one way or another, the distinctive (...) pathologies of the modern age. But every one also attempted to envision--if only through the faintest of traces, traces of mutual recognition, traces of another way of looking and seeing--the prospects for a radically different lifeworld. The world, after all, inevitably reflects back to us the character, the reach and range, of our vision. In these provocative essays, the author draws on the language of hermeneutical phenomenology and at the same time refines phenomenology itself as a method of working with our experience and thinking critically about the culture in which we live. (shrink)
On the first page of The Problem of Consciousness (1991), Colin McGinn asks "How is it possible for conscious states to depend on brain states? How can technicolour phenomenology arise from soggy grey matter?" Many philosophers feel that questions like these pose an unanswerable challenge to physicalism. They argue that there is no way of bridging the "explanatory gap" between the material brain and the lived world of conscious experience (Levine, 1983), and that physicalism about the mind can therefore (...) provide no answer to the "hard problem" of why brains give rise to consciousness (Chalmers, 1996). (shrink)
With contributions from medicine, psychology and philosophy, Pathways into the Jungian World looks at the central issues of commonality and difference in phenomenology and analytical psychology. The essays investigate how existential phenomenology and analytical psychology have been involved in the same fundamental cultural and therapeutic project. They both legitimize the subtlety, complexity, and depth of experience in an age when the meaning of experience has been abandoned to the dictates of pharmaceutical technology, economics and medical psychiatry. The contributors reveal how (...) Jung's relationship to the phenomenological tradition is being developed and rigorously show that the psychological resonance of the world is immediately available for phenomenological description. Contributors: Lionel Corbett, Veronica Goodchild, John Haule, David Michael Levin, Stanton Marlan, Bertha Mook, Robert Romanyshyn, Ronald Schenk, Charles E. Scott, Eva Marie Simms, Michael P. Sipiora, Mary Watkins, Mark Welman. (shrink)
In this study, I examine the significance of the trace and its legibility in the phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, showing that this trope plays a more significant role in Merleau-Ponty's thinking than has been recognized heretofore and that it constitutes a crucial point of contact between Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. But this point of contact is also, in both their philosophies, a site where their thinking is compelled to confront its limits and the enigmas involved in the description of the (...) topography of a hermeneutical flesh. It is argued that the significance of the trace consists in its alterity, its registering and inscribing in the very matter of the flesh an imperative spiritual assignment: the morally binding hold of the other person on my capacity to be responsive to the other's needs and bear responsibility for the other's welfare. The retrieval or recuperation of the trace, which, I argue, is inscribed as a certain predisposition in what, borrowing from Merleau-Ponty, we might call the prepersonal topology of the flesh, would thus constitute a task of the utmost importance for the formation of the moral self. However, given the paradoxical temporality of the trace and the hermeneutical nature of its legibility, the retrieval of the trace is not actually possible. Nevertheless, the attempt to retrieve it - one's commitment to retrieving it - is an absolutely imperative existential task, determining the character of the moral self. In both Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, however, the problematic nature of this recuperative project is manifested in the ambiguous, equivocal modality of their rhetoric, supposedly engaged in the phenomenological description of the primordial 'inscription', but oscillating, in fact, undecidably between descriptive and prescriptive, constative and performative, literal and metaphorical modes of discourse. It is argued that this, far from being a fault, is necessitated by the hermeneutic nature of the trace, which requires that the description be invocative and evocative, provoking a deep transformation in experience that would make the description true. It accordingly becomes clear that and why the moral phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, depending as they must on a metaphorical interaction between language and experience, cannot function within the framework of the traditional correspondence theory of truth. (shrink)
Several high-profile mathematical problems have been solved in recent decades by computer-assisted proofs. Some philosophers have argued that such proofs are a posteriori on the grounds that some such proofs are unsurveyable; that our warrant for accepting these proofs involves empirical claims about the reliability of computers; that there might be errors in the computer or program executing the proof; and that appeal to computer introduces into a proof an experimental element. I argue that none of these arguments withstands scrutiny, (...) and so there is no reason to believe that computer-assisted proofs are not a priori. Thanks are due to Michael Levin, David Corfield, and an anonymous referee for Philosophia Mathematica for their helpful comments. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Hofstra University Department of Mathematics colloquium series, and at the 2005 New Jersey Regional Philosophical Association; I am grateful to both audiences for their comments. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)
This essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological description of gestural motility in his Phenomenology of Perception contributes to, and in a material way carries forward, not only (1) the account of alienation that Marx proposes in his writings on the condition of manual labour, but also (2) the reflections, at once critical and utopian, that Marx set out in his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts , evoking in terms of praxis the realization and fulfillment of our sensuous nature as embodied beings. (...) It is also argued, here, that Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the philosophical accounts of gesture formulated by intellectualism and naturalism shows that, in spite of their differences, they are both ideologically constituted systems of thought that uncritically reflect, and consequently reproduce, the alienations and reifications to which Marx calls attention in his critique of capitalism. Thus, as long as the invisible hand of capital rules, the hands of the worker that exploitation has damaged - and indeed the fully realized hands of which Marx in his early years dreamed - will remain invisible. Key Words: alienated labour • Marx • Merleau-Ponty • motor pathologies • phenomenology • reification. (shrink)
In ?Some Myths about ?Mental Illness'? (Inquiry, Vol. 18 [1975], No. 3), Michael Moore attempts to clarify and refute what he takes to be the radical (existential) position concerning the nature and diagnosis of mental illness. Moore's dissatisfaction with certain formulations and conceptualizations of the radical position is endorsed; as also the need to introduce greater rigor and precision into the discussion of mental illness. But Moore's clarifications are really misunderstandings and, in consequence, his refutations do not succeed. Moore's five?fold (...) interpretative classification of the radical thesis is retained. (shrink)
In addition to the standard ellipsis process known as VP-ellipsis, another ellipsis process, known as pseudo-gapping, was first brought to the fore-front in the 1970’s by Sag (1976) and N. Levin (1986). This process elides subparts of a VP, as in (1): (1) Although I don’t like steak, I do___pizza. Developing ideas of K.S. Jayaseelan (Jayaseelan (1990)), Howard Lasnik has developed an analysis in which pseudo-gapping, which, in some instances, looks as though it is simply deleting a verb, is in (...) fact deletion of a verb phrase, so that pseudo-gapping is really a probe into the structure of the verb phrase. I will examine pseudo-gapping in detail, and will show that it truly is a gold mine of insight into a number of fundamental issues in syntax. More concretely, I will demonstrate that a careful, detailed analysis of this process will bear on the derivational level at which Principle A of the binding theory applies, as well as the amount of explicit encoding within syntactic representations of informational structure, particularly focus. The paper will also re-assess Lasnik’s conclusion that pseudo-gapping provides evidence for Larson’s (1988) V-raising to a higher empty V position, a case of head movement, and will show that the movement involved is actually a case of remnant movement, or XP-movement. (shrink)
Expands our understanding of the human potential of spiritual self-realization by interpreting it as the developing of a bodily-felt awareness informing our ...
The Postmodern Situation In his work on Nietzsche, the 'first' of the ' postmodern' thinkers, Heidegger writes: 'That period we call modern . . . is defined ...
This paper has three aims: first, to redeem some of Freud's most fundamental insights, so courageous and revolutionary that they were not even entirely appealing and intelligible to Freud himself; not understanding their teacher, Freud's disciples systematically distorted or suppressed his boldest speculations. By concentrating on an early Buddhist text of great profundity it is hoped to push our understanding of Freud beyond Freud himself. The exotic nature of this text makes it an especially powerful instrument for cutting through the (...) conservatism and resistance of venerable Freudian doctrine; secondly, to make more accessible a text which will encourage Western thinkers to do some serious thinking in the Buddhist way; and thirdly to examine the relationship between id and ego; it is shown why and how the egological construction (ego/superego) blocks the spontaneity of libidinal fulfillment. The role of representation in time-consciousness is also explored. (shrink)
"Before the Voice of Reason is a phenomenological critique of reason grounded in our experience of the voices that already address us and summon us prior to the ...
In this paper I examine important texts by Jacques Derrida in which, either implicitly or explicitly, the Shoah, the catastrophe of the Holocaust is signified, interrupting, disrupting, even disfiguring the texture of the text. The question is how appropriately to remember and mourn the dead within philosophical discourse, how to remember what happened and how to understand it as a question not only of ethical and political responsibility but also as an evil deeply and pervasively reflected in the ontology and (...) epistemology of the philosophical tradition—an evil circulating within the very substance of philosophical thought, and in such a way that Derrida will make this philosophical complicity in the violence and evil of the Holocaust register its painfully oppressive guilt in textual configurations haunted by the presence of the victims, remembered in traces of their absence. Thus we see how Derrida lets the question of an appropriate form of historical memory, a fitting way to remember the Shoah, invade his texts—how he lets the texts of his thought be exposed to its radical evil and exposed to the pain of an impossible mourning. We also see how the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence implies a contestation of historicism, a writing of history that betrays the past in the very process of making it present. (shrink)
This paper purports a limited study of the concept of reason. It analyzes the claim of religious belief to be reasonable. The context for this analysis is an examination of some evidential (criteriological) connections between reasonable belief and ?(good) reasons? for such belief. Consideration of the typical sort of evidential connection shows, not surprisingly, that religious belief cannot claim to be reasonable. But it is argued that there is (at least) one other sort of connection, and that it is philosophically (...) plausible to regard this connection as definitive of a quite distinctive sense of ?reasonable?, with its own kind and style of criteria, according to which religious belief can be thought reasonable. (shrink)
Three questions govern this ``phenomenological'' inquiry: (1) how are sanity and madness spatialized? (2) how do myths shape lived space? (3) how can we moderns use primitive myth-systems to restructure lived space? i contrast newtonian and einsteinian spaces with the original space of our living. i show that this 'normal' space, and the spaces of science, are structured by the egological subject and therefore reflect ego-pathology. can we use myths to schematize a more satisfying space?
