In this article, I focus on two moments of Nathaniel Kleitman's career, specifically that of his Mammoth Cave experiment in the 1930s and his consultation with the United States military in the 1940s–1950s. My interests in bringing these two moments of Kleitman's career together are to examine the role of nature and the social in his understanding of human sleep and the legacies these have engendered for sleep science and medicine in the present; more specifically, I am interested in Kleitman's (...) disallowance of napping in his scientific protocols, which may seem incidental until one apprehends the lack of napping as therapeutic treatment in modern sleep medicine. By forwarding a conception of historiography building on Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling” and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's philosophy of immanence, I show how the work of William Dement in the 1970s to found a medicine of sleep and the eclipse of biphasic sleeping patterns as a biological and social possibility is indebted to Kleitman's scientific work. The modification of sleep is also the modification of society itself; and, as Kleitman argued, the harnessing of nature can lead to the finer entrenchments of human nature and society. (shrink)

Recent approaches in the medical and social sciences have begun to lay stress on “plasticity” as a key feature of human physiological experiences. Plasticity helps to account for significant differences within and between populations, particularly in relation to variations in basic physiological processes, such as brain development, and, in the context of this article, daily sleep needs. This article proposes a novel basis for the redevelopment of institutions in accordance with growing awareness of human variation in physiological needs, and articulates (...) a theory of multibiologism. This approach seeks to expand the range of “normal” physiological experiences to respond to human plasticity, but also to move beyond critiques of medical practice that see medicine as simply responding to capitalist demands through the medicalization of “natural” processes. Instead, by focusing on how the institutions of U.S. everyday life—work, family, and school—structure the lives of individuals and produce certain forms of sleep as pathological, this article proposes that minor alterations in institutions could result in less pathologization for individuals and communities. Multibiologism provides a foundation for shared priorities in the social sciences, in bioethics, and in medical practice, and may lay the groundwork for emergent collaborations in institutional reform. (shrink)

In the mid-19 th century, increases in global migration and mobility produced a discernable rise in the number of ambiguous absences. This shift, combined with a novel expectation, linked to improved communications technology, that such absences might be resolved engendered the emergence of missing persons as a social category. A demand on the part of families of the missing that the state aid in their location would produce a Bourdieusian classification struggle over how to define and categorize this new mass (...) of absences. At issue would be whether an ambiguously absent individual was merely absent, as a routine component of social life, or whether the individual merited legitimation by the state as a new form of deviant: a "missing" person. Scholars have described the emerging administrative state’s enhanced powers of surveillance and classification and its persistent inclination to render their populations, in James Scott’s phrase, “legible.” Brought to the attention of the state, missing persons represented a body of people who had conspicuously fallen out of official sight. Yet, instead of attempting to fix this omission by gathering additional information on the lost — to, in effect, see the missing — as theories of the state would lead us to expect, the state chose to look away. In the United States, the state, in the form of municipal police departments, resisted classifying absences as cases of missingness and pushed back against families’ requests for aid. Leveraging the inherently ambiguous characteristics of the missing, the state promoted a definition of missing persons that conveniently freed it from the burden of managing an unmanageable population. In this article, drawing from archival data, I challenge prevailing theories of the modern state that emphasize its avidly classificatory nature by offering a case in which legibility was strategically withheld and a population was, in service of state interests, intentionally obscured. Only after the state lost its symbolic monopoly and the category was raced and gendered, becoming, in public discourse, associated with a socially valuable demographic – namely, young, white women – would the state, facing a threat to its legitimacy, deem the missing as worthy of being seen. (shrink)

This article focuses on the recent production of sleep as a matter of concern in American society. In it, I draw primarily on fieldwork with sleep researchers and clinicians to understand the means by which ideas about sleep are produced and disseminated, and discuss the rise of sleep medicine since the late 1970s and the ways sleep disabilities have been constructed and mobilized in contemporary allopathic research and practice. The article provides a description of modern sleep medicine practices, and analyses (...) clinical encounters between researchers, clinicians and patients, particularly the ways patient cases are produced and interpreted. I follow these ethnographic observations with textual analysis of the National Sleep Foundation's campaigns to promote sleep awareness, and offer the theoretical concepts of medical abstraction and insistence as a means to understand the production of sleep as a matter of concern, and how it might be made to adhere in particular patients' lives and the practices of clinicians. (shrink)

When managing their emotions, individuals often recruit the help of others; however, most emotion regulation research has focused on self-regulation. Theories of emotion and aging suggest younger and older adults differ in the emotion regulation strategies they use when regulating their own emotions. If how individuals regulate their own emotions and the emotions of others are related, these theorised age differences may also emerge for interpersonal emotion regulation. In two studies, younger and older adults’ intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion regulation strategy (...) choices were examined via self-report and behavioural assessments of regulating the emotions of another participant (Study 1; N = 80) and of a virtual human (Study 2; N = 100). Across both studies, younger adults reported greater intrapersonal suppression but not greater reappraisal. Younger and older adults were generally similar (supported by Bayesian analyses) for both self-reported and behavioural interpersonal emotion regulation strategies. Behavioural interpersonal emotion regulation was not related to self-reported intra- and interpersonal preferences. These results suggest interpersonal emotion regulation in ageing may show distinct patterns from theorised age differences in intrapersonal emotion regulation. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a host of ethical challenges, but key among these has been the possibility that health care systems might need to ration scarce critical care resources. Rationing p...

In recent years an increasing number of moral theorists have come to embrace the term "moral pluralism" to describe a particular kind of moral theory. Unfortunately, there has been little consensus regarding what exactly constitutes a pluralistic theory, and what specific commitments such theories involve. My dissertation takes on the task of articulating the underlying schema of pluralist moral theory, and of analyzing the plausibility and implications of pluralism's fundamental commitments. I argue that the most thoroughgoing pluralist theories are shaped (...) by two defining theses; the plurality of the good , and the plurality of the right , and that these are conceptually linked by two additional meta-ethical commitments. My analysis of the plausibility of these commitments is at times friendly to moral pluralism and at times critical of it. For instance, I develop an account of "value incommensurability," an idea upon which pluralism depends, that resists some of more the important attacks within the literature. Yet I also criticize the commitment to the plurality of the right, as held by Susan Wolf and several other pluralists. I argue that this view is less plausible than "limited pluralism"---a view that is pluralistic about the good but monistic about the right. In the final chapter I explore the relationship between moral pluralism and political liberalism, focusing on the role that overriding values play within each type of theory. (shrink)

This thesis offers an original theory of how we can cultivate our passionate attachments based on the Francophone interpretation of the Hellenistic conception of self-cultivation. Recently Harry Frankfurt, Bernard Williams, and Susan Wolf have argued that practical philosophers must direct more attention to how our passionate attachments radically affect our resolution to the question of ‘how one should live’. By neglecting this topic, these thinkers argue, we overlook some of the strongest and most distinctively human motivations that guide our practical (...) lives, ones that have a powerful effect on our capacity to flourish. Not only should philosophers explain how our moral obligations and prudential concerns guide our conduct, they should also explain how and why we are guided by deep-seated passionate attachments, considerations that Frankfurt, Williams, and Wolf argue provide the conditions for leading a life with a sense of meaning and purpose. Despite viewing passionate attachments as being vitally important, Frankfurt, Williams, and Wolf offer separate accounts of either why we cannot actively cultivate them, or why we cannot form a philosophical theory of doing so. If there is a way in which we can cultivate our passionate attachments, then these thinkers argue that we must look outside philosophy: to the contingency of personal preference, to self-help instruction manuals, to guidance from religious traditions, or in extremis to clinical psychology. My study aims to show that this attitude is overly pessimistic. Not only do we have reason to view passionate attachments as susceptible to growth, change, and improvement, but we should view these entities as amenable to self-cultivation. Only by understanding this process can we construct a theory of cultivating our passionate attachments. Focusing on Pierre Hadot’s and Michel Foucault’s respective accounts of Hellenistic self-cultivation, provides vital conceptual tools to formulate a theory of cultivating our passionate attachments. First, their accounts of Hellenistic self-cultivation offer the conceptual resources for a philosophical theory of how we can cultivate our passionate attachments. Second, the exercises of self-cultivation they focus on allow us to outline a practical method though which we can cultivate our passionate character. This takes the exercises of self-cultivation beyond their historical use, as well as beyond their role in the respective projects of these Francophone thinkers. Doing this brings out a significantly new dimension to the role of the passionate attachments in the flourishing life: not only are they valuable in the way Frankfurt, Williams, and Wolf suggest, but we can offer theoretical and practical accounts how we can cultivate them based on the Hellenistic conception of self-directed character change. (shrink)

When a slim, winsomely-written introductory volume manages accessibly to survey many of the most important signposts across Heidegger's path, does so in a way that both excavates new sources and puts them to constructive use, is historically-informed but futurally-minded and generous but critical -- that's an achievement. What's more, Judith Wolfe accomplishes these things while illuminating the rich but underemphasized hermeneutic significance for Heidegger's work of his lifelong struggle to reconcile himself to the Christian moorings of his life and (...) thought. (shrink)

Matthew Lavine’s The First Atomic Age is intended as a corrective to what has by now become a familiar story of postwar US nuclear culture. The popular enthusiasm for and fear of all things nuclear, as described in such works as Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light , was not in fact a new development but rather a repeat of a phenomenon that first manifested half a century earlier. Working with newspapers, magazines, trade journals, advertisements, product labels, pulp (...) fiction, poetry, and scientific biography, Lavine unequivocally demonstrates the ubiquity of references to both X-rays and radiation in popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. This, he argues, constitutes the “First Atomic Age”.Lavine divides the book into three long chapters according to how much the public might reasonably know about radiation and radioactivity. In the first period, the era of discovery, the lack of con .. (shrink)

Patients belonging to ethnic, racial, and religious minorities have been all but excluded from the legal academy’s ongoing conversation about informed consent. Perhaps this is just as well, since the conversation appears to have concluded that the doctrine has failed to serve as a meaningful regulation of clinical relationships. Informed consent does not operate in practice the way it was intended in theory. More than a decade ago, Peter Schuck noted the “informed consent gap” that distinguishes the “proper” law of (...) informed consent “on the books” from the actual consent law in action, and called for a more contextualized approach to informed consent. Susan Wolf later called for a systemic approach to informed consent in order to accommodate multiple decision points in the managed care setting. Some reformers have sought enhancements to expand the doctrine. (shrink)

Matthew Lipman’s Thinking in Education develops an approach to philosophical inquiry with children (PwC) that claims to develop critical, creative and caring thinking. With Lipman, these kinds of thinking are primarily tied to analytic-logical commitments, and as such, his approach concerns only one way to conceptualize thinking. To address this issue and create space for another understanding, I introduce the concept of affect based on the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. From a theoretical perspective, affect helps to (...) deepen the relationship between thinking, the body and experience in PwC; in addition, from a practical standpoint, it expands and enriches facilitation practices and curriculum design. To explore affect, I first show why PwC would benefit from such a theoretical expansion while also looking at connections already present within the literature on PwC. After a brief overview of affect theory and some of its initial applications to education, I propose a reading of Deleuzian affect augmented by thinkers like Claire Colebrook and Brian Massumi. Finally, I explore philosophical inquiry through affect and suggest how facilitation practices and curriculum design can respond in lieu of this conceptualization. This response examines several areas: inquiry, concepts, the community and ethical-political engagement. (shrink)

My strategy is to examine a recent trend in philosophical discussions of responsibility, a trend that tries, but I think ultimately fails, to give an acceptable analysis of the conditions of responsibility. It fails due to what at first appear to be deep and irresolvable metaphysical problems. It is here that I suggest that the condition of sanity comes to the rescue. What at first appears to be an impossible requirement for responsibility---the requirement that the responsible agent have created her- (...) or himself---turns out to be the vastly more mundane and non controversial requirement that the responsible agent must, in a fairly standard sense, be sane. (shrink)

This paper concerns a controversy between two compelling and popular claims in the theory of ability. One is the claim that ability requires control. The other is the claim that success entails ability, that is, that φ-ing entails that you are able to φ. Since actually φ-ing obviously does not entail that φ is in your control, these two claims cannot both be true. I introduce a new form of evidence to help adjudicate this controversy: judgments about the possibility and (...) probability of ability ascriptions. I argue that these judgments provide evidence in favor of the thesis that success entails ability, and against the thesis that ability requires control. Moreover, I argue that these judgments support an analysis of ability in terms of conditionals. (shrink)

Manipulation cases have figured prominently in philosophical debates about whether moral responsibility is in some sense deeply historical. Meanwhile, some philosophers have thought that folk thinking about manipulated agents may shed some light on the various argumentative burdens facing participants in that debate. This paper argues that folk thinking is, to some extent, deeply historical. Across three experiments, it is shown that a substantial number of participants did not attribute moral responsibility to agents with manipulation in their histories. The results (...) of these experiments challenge previous research indicating that folk thinking is not historicist. To the extent that folk thinking is relevant to philosophical debates about the nature of moral responsibility, the results helpfully illuminate the dialectical burdens facing competing conceptions of responsible agency. The present research also adds to the psychological literature by elucidating how lay conceptions of about free will and personal identity predict folk historicism. (shrink)

Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics.

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new (...) way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)

Manipulation cases have figured prominently in philosophical debates about whether moral responsibility is in some sense deeply historical. Meanwhile, some philosophers have thought that folk thinking about manipulated agents may shed some light on the various argumentative burdens facing participants in that debate. This paper argues that folk thinking is, to some extent, historical. Across three experiments, a substantial number of participants did not attribute moral responsibility to agents with manipulation in their histories. The results of these experiments challenge previous (...) research indicating that folk thinking is not historicist. Furthermore, perceptions of reduced free will, but not of a change in personal identity of the agent, account for the attenuation of moral responsibility when the agent was manipulated. To the extent that folk thinking is relevant to philosophical debates about the nature of moral responsibility, the results helpfully illuminate the dialectical burdens facing competing conceptions of responsible agency. (shrink)

MacIntyre argues that management embodies emotivism, and thus is inherently amoral and manipulative. His claim that management is necessarily Weberian is, at best, outdated, and the notion that management aims to be neutral and value free is incorrect. However, new forms of management, and in particular the increased emphasis on leadership which emerged after MacIntyre’s critique was published, tend to support his central charge. Indeed, charismatic and transformational forms of leadership seem to embody emotivism to a greater degree than do (...) more Weberian, bureaucratic forms of management; hence, MacIntyre’s central contention about our emotivistic culture seems to be well founded. Having criticised the details but defended the essence of MacIntyre’s critique of management, this paper sketches a MacIntyrean approach to management and leadership by highlighting the affinities between MacIntyre’s political philosophy and Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership. (shrink)

This book examines a main theme in religious epistemology, namely, the possibility of knowledge of God. Most often philosophers consider the rationality or justification of propositional belief about God, particularly beliefs about the existence and nature of God; and they will assess the conditions under which, if there is a God, such propositional beliefs would be knowledge, particularly in light of counter-evidence or the availability of religious disagreement. This book surveys such familiar areas, then turns toward newer and less-developed terrain: (...) interpersonal epistemology, namely what it is to know another person. It then explores the prospects for understanding what it might take to know God relationally, the contours of which are significant for many theistic traditions. (shrink)

At the very beginning of L’Homme-Machine, La Mettrie claims that Leibnizians with their monads have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul”; a few years later Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of ‘genetic’ information, conceived of living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence,” in his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés. This text first (...) appeared in Latin in 1751 under the title Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturae systemate, with the pseudonym Dr Baumann; it was translated by Maupertuis in 1754 as Essai sur la formation des corps organisés and was later included in his 1756 Œuvres under the title Système de la nature. Now, it is clear that Maupertuis was a kind of Leibnizian; and that his molecule possessed higher-level, ‘mental’ properties. In that sense he falls under the first category described by La Mettrie. But he was also involved in a debate on this issue with Diderot, who put forth a sustained critique of Maupertuis’ theory of the molecule in the additions to his 1753 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living minima, Diderot argues that these properties are ‘organizational’, i.e., they can only be properties of the whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism. (shrink)

Beneath the stylized violence and thrilling car crashes, the Mad Max films consider universal questions about the nature of human life, order and anarchy, justice and moral responsibility, society and technology, and ultimately, human redemption. In Mad Max and Philosophy, a diverse team of political scientists, historians, and philosophers investigates the underlying themes of the blockbuster movie franchise, following Max as he attempts to rebuild himself and the world. -/- This book guides you through the barren wastelands of a post-apocalyptic (...) future as you explore ethics and politics in The Wasteland, the importance of costumes and music, humankind's relationship with nature, commerce, gender, religion, madness, and more. (shrink)

The first edition of The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy took the dialogue of science and philosophy from Aristotle through to Newton. This second edition adds eight chapters, taking the dialogue through the Enlightenment and up to Darwin. This anthology is an attempt to help bridge the gap between the history of science and the history of philosophy.

This paper initiates analytic inquiry into the metaphysics of masculinity. I argue that individual masculinities (such as ‘clone masculinity’ and ‘incel masculinity’) are distinct homeostatic property cluster kinds related to gender structures via processes of adherence, failed-adherence, selective adherence, and/or reinterpretation with respect to male-coded social norms.

The notion that business organizations are akin to Aristotelian political communities has been a central feature of research into virtue ethics in business. In this article, I begin by outlining this “community thesis” and go on to argue that psychological research into the “just world fallacy” presents it with a significant challenge. The just world fallacy undermines our ability to implement an Aristotelian conception of justice, to each as he or she is due, and imperils the relational equality required for (...) shared participation in communities. In the final section, I offer a description of what Aristotelian community might look like within organizations, and some suggestions about how it may be possible to resist the challenge posed by the just world fallacy. (shrink)

Dialogues generated over a year of weekly meetings with 8 children at a school in Edinburgh. The author and the children attempted to craft stories reflecting philosophical problems.

A probability distribution is regular if it does not assign probability zero to any possible event. While some hold that probabilities should always be regular, three counter-arguments have been posed based on examples where, if regularity holds, then perfectly similar events must have different probabilities. Howson and Benci et al. have raised technical objections to these symmetry arguments, but we see here that their objections fail. Howson says that Williamson’s “isomorphic” events are not in fact isomorphic, but Howson is speaking (...) of set-theoretic representations of events in a probability model. While those sets are not isomorphic, Williamson’s physical events are, in the relevant sense. Benci et al. claim that all three arguments rest on a conflation of different models, but they do not. They are founded on the premise that similar events should have the same probability in the same model, or in one case, on the assumption that a single rotation-invariant distribution is possible. Having failed to refute the symmetry arguments on such technical grounds, one could deny their implicit premises, which is a heavy cost, or adopt varying degrees of instrumentalism or pluralism about regularity, but that would not serve the project of accurately modelling chances. (shrink)

In this chapter, we follow Edward Craig?s advice: ask what the concept of knowledge does for us and use our findings as clues about its application conditions. What a concept does for us is a matter of what we can do with it, and what we do with concepts is deploy them in thought and language. So, we will examine the purposes we have in attributing knowledge. This chapter examines two such purposes, agent evaluation and informant-suggestion, and brings the results (...) to bear on an important debate about the application conditions of the concept of knowledge?the debate between contextualists and their rivals. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

Recent research on the evolution of religion has focused on whether religion is an unselected by-product of evolutionary processes or if it is instead an adaptation by natural selection. Adaptive hypotheses for religion include direct fitness benefits from improved health and indirect fitness benefits mediated by costly signals and/or cultural group selection. Herein, I propose that religious denominations achieve indirect fitness gains for members through the use of ecologically arbitrary beliefs, rituals, and moral rules that function as recognition markers of (...) cultural inheritance analogous to kin and species recognition of genetic inheritance in biology. This recognition signal hypotheses could act in concert with either costly signaling or cultural group selection to produce evolutionarily altruistic behaviors within denominations. Using a cultural phylogenetic analysis, I show that a large set of religious behaviors among extant Christian denominations supports the prediction of the recognition signal hypothesis that characters change more frequently near historical schisms. By incorporating demographic data into the model, I show that more-distinctive denominations, as measured through dissimilar characteristics, appear to be protected from intrusion by nonmembers in mixed-denomination households, and that they may be experiencing greater biological growth of their populations even in the present day. (shrink)

Gareth Matthews suggests that we can better understand the nature of philosophical inquiry if we recognize the central role played by perplexity. The seminal representation of philosophical perplexity is in Plato's dialogues; Matthews examines the intriguing shifts in Plato's attitude to perplexity and suggests that these may represent a course of philosophical development that philosophers follow even today.

Shared agency is a distinctive kind of sociality that involves interdependent planning, practical reasoning, and action between participants. Philosophical reflection suggests that agents engage in this form of sociality when a special structure of interrelated psychological attitudes exists between them, a set of attitudes that constitutes a collective intention. I defend a new way to understand collective intention as a combination of individual conditional intentions. Revising an initial statement of the conditional intention account in response to several challenges leads to (...) a specification of the properties these intentions need to have in order to be genuine commitments. I then show how a structure of conditional intentions with these properties settles a collection of agents on engaging in social interactions that display all the features typically associated with shared agency. (shrink)

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold), a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails (...) that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value. (shrink)

Imagine I hold up a Granny Smith apple for all to see. You would thereby gain justified beliefs that it was green, that it was apple, and that it is a Granny Smith apple. Under classical foundationalism, such simple visual beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning your experience. Under dogmatism, some or all of these beliefs are justified immediately by your experience and not by reasons you possess. This paper argues for what I call the looks (...) view of the justification of simple visual beliefs. According to the looks view, such beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning how the relevant things look. Unlike under classical foundationalism, under the looks view as I develop it, these reasons are public. They are public with respect to both their content and possession: with respect to content, they are not about ourselves and our experiences, and with respect to their possession, many people can have the very same looks-related reasons. (shrink)