Interprets the Letters as a literary unity (designed almost as a novel by Plato) and provides insight into and information about Plato's self-understanding and his overall intentions as an author of his dialogues.

This paper provides a novel reconstruction of Kant’s argument for transcendental idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic. This reconstruction relies on two main contentions: first, that Kant accepts the then-ubiquitous view that all cognition is either from grounds or consequences, a view he props up by drawing a distinction between logical and real grounds; second, that Kant, like most of his contemporaries, holds that our representations are the most immediate grounds of our cognition. By stressing these elements, the most threatening objection (...) to Kant’s argument can be avoided, namely, the claim that Kant ignores the possibility that our representations of space and time are subjective in origin, but objective as regards their applicability. My reconstruction shows that this so-called neglected alternative objection is based on a conceptual confusion about the nature of a priori cognition. (shrink)

Cognitive penetration of perception, broadly understood, is the influence that the cognitive system has on a perceptual system. The paper shows a form of cognitive penetration in the visual system which I call ‘architectural’. Architectural cognitive penetration is the process whereby the behaviour or the structure of the perceptual system is influenced by the cognitive system, which consequently may have an impact on the content of the perceptual experience. I scrutinize a study in perceptual learning that provides empirical evidence that (...) cognitive influences in the visual system produce neural reorganization in the primary visual cortex. The type of cognitive penetration can be synchronic and diachronic. (shrink)

What ends should designers pursue? To what extent should they care about the societal and environmental impact of their work? And why should they care at all? Given the key influence design has on the way people live their lives, designing is fraught with ethical issues. Yet, unlike education or nursing, it lacks widespread professional principles for addressing these issues. -/- Rooted in a communitarian view of design practice, this lively and accessible book examines design through the lens of professions, (...) offering a critical vision that enables practitioners, academics and students of design in all disciplines to reflect on the practice’s overarching purposes. Considering how these are connected to others' flourishing and moulded by community interactions, "The Goods of Design" argues for a practice-based approach to cultivate professional ethics; it provides a normative direction that can meaningfully guide professional design activity, both individually and collectively. The volume also looks into the implications work has for the designer's self-growth as a person, offering ways to discover and navigate the complex tensions between personal and professional life. (shrink)

Both traditional accounts of hope and some of their recent critics analyze hope exclusively in terms of attitudes that a hoper bears towards a hoped-for prospect, such as desire and probability assignment. I argue that all of these accounts misidentify cases of despair as cases of hope, and so misconstrue the nature of hope. I show that a more satisfactory view is arrived at by noticing that in addition to the aforementioned attitudes, hope involves a characteristic attitude towards an external (...) factor, on whose operation the hoper takes the prospect's realization to depend causally. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One of the core issues where interpreters of Kant disagree concerns his alleged Noumenalism—the claim that the objects of our experience, which are in space and time, are underpinned by entities that are not spatio-temporal and that non-spatio-temporally cause our representations of empirical objects. Although there is much textual evidence in favour of Noumenalism, non-Noumenalists have also gathered a significant number of philosophical and exegetical challenges to such a reading of Kant. I present a novel way of understanding the (...) Noumenalist view, which characterises the distinction between appearances and things in themselves as the distinction between referents and truthmakers. I show that, on this interpretation of Kant, the most pressing problems for the Noumenalist reading are primarily based on equivocations between features of reference and features of truthmaking. (shrink)

Existential grounding is the thesis that all existential generalizations are grounded in their particular instances. This paper argues that existential grounding is false. This is because it is inconsistent with two plausible claims about existence: the claim that singular existence facts are generalizations and the claim that no object can be involved in a fact that grounds that same object's existence. Not only are these claims intuitively plausible, but there are also strong arguments in favour of each of them.

Our knowledge about the world is often expressed by generic sentences, yet their meanings are far from clear. This book provides answers to central problems concerning generics: what do they mean? Which factors affect their interpretation? How can one reason with generics? Cohen proposes that the meanings of generics are probability judgments, and shows how this view accounts for many of their puzzling properties, including lawlikeness. Generics are evaluated with respect to alternatives. Cohen argues that alternatives are induced by the (...) kind as well as by the predicated property, and thus provides a uniform account of the varied interpretations of generics. He studies the formal properties of alternatives and provides a compositional account of their derivation by focus and presupposition. Cohen uses his semantics of generics to provide a formal characterization of adequate default reasoning, and proves some desirable results of this formalism. (shrink)

Resumen En este trabajo se identifican estrategias de descortesía modalizadas deónticamente en ambientes laborales argentinos en contacto interlingüístico español-inglés e intercultural argentino-estadounidense en la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires durante 2012–2014. Se lo hace poniendo el foco de atención en la descortesía producida a través de correos electrónicos empresariales con propósitos laborales escritos en inglés en un medio fuertemente regulado que privilegia, fundamentalmente, funciones transaccionales y procedimentales para asegurar la maximización de sus fines lucrativos. En un corpus natural de 148 (...) correos electrónicos (agrupados en 22 secuencias, con aproximadamente 17.000 palabras), se identificaron cuatro estrategias de descortesía modalizadas deónticamente: ataque por atribución de la responsabilidad, contraataque por impugnación de la responsabilidad, contraataque por acatamiento forzado de la responsabilidad y ataque o contraataque por naturalización de la responsabilidad. A través de estas estrategias, se des-idealiza, desvaloriza y disminuye la imagen social con el propósito ulterior de reconstituir el orden moral que afianza el statu quo de los ambientes laborales estudiados. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Generics are sentences such as Birds fly, which express generalizations. They are prevalent in speech, and as far as is known, no human language lacks generics. Yet, it is very far from clear what they mean. After all, not all birds fly—penguins don’t! -/- There are two general views about the meaning of generics in the literature, and each view encompasses many specific theories. According to the inductivist view, a generic states that a sufficient number of individuals satisfy a certain (...) property—in the example above, it says that sufficiently many birds fly. This view faces the complicated problem of spelling out exactly how many is “sufficiently many” in a way that correctly captures the intuitive truth conditions of generics. -/- An alternative, the rules and regulations view, despairs from this project and proposes instead that generics directly express rules in the world. Rules are taken to be abstract objects, which are not related to the properties of specific individuals. This view faces the difficult problem of explaining how people come to know of such rules when judging the truth of falsity of generics, and accounting for the strong intuition that a sentence such as Birds fly talks about birds, not abstract objects. -/- What seems to be beyond dispute is that generics, even if they do not express rules, are lawlike: they state non-accidental generalizations. Many scholars have taken this fact to indicate that generics are parametric on possible worlds: they refer to worlds other than the actual world. This, again, raises the problem of how people come to know about what happens in these other worlds. However, a rigorous application of standard tests for intensionality shows that generics are not, in fact, parametric on possible worlds, but only on time. This unusual property may explain much of the mystery surrounding generics. -/- Another mysterious property of generics is that although there is no language without them, there is no linguistic construction that is devoted to the expression of genericity. Rather, generics can be expressed in a variety of ways, each of which can also express nongenerics. Yet, each manifestation of generics differs subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) in its meaning from the others. -/- Even when these and other puzzles of genericity are solved, one mystery would remain: Why are generics, which are so easy to produce and understand in conversation, so difficult to analyze? (shrink)

Character education is an increasingly discussed topic drawing upon virtue ethics as a moral theory. Scholars have predominantly understood educating character as a process that entails the formation of certain distinct character traits or functions through practice and habituation. However, these approaches present some problems. This paper explores the educational implications of various accounts focusing on the relationship between phronesis and other virtues. In particular, our focus will be on those that Miller (2023) has classified as Standard Model and Eliminativist (...) Model of practical wisdom. Starting from these accounts, we will outline three specific problems that the latter models appear to generate at a theoretical level in character education. Finally, we will address the task of demonstrating why the monist account of moral virtue recently proposed by the Aretai group—which conceives being virtuous in possessing phronesis understood as ethical expertise—might offer a refined response to these challenges. In addition, we will illustrate three educational pathways that can emerge from the same model. (shrink)

In this article, I take on a classic objection to Kant’s arguments in the Antinomy of Pure Reason: that the arguments are question-begging, as they draw illicit inferences from claims about representation to claims about reality. While extant attempts to vindicate Kant try to show that he does not make such inferences, I attempt to vindicate Kant’s arguments in a different way: I show that, given Kant’s philosophical backdrop, the inferences in question are not illicit. This is because the transcendental (...) realists that Kant was arguing against have certain philosophical commitments about the nature of ground which, if true, warrant the inferences that Kant draws. This historical corrective not only allows us to better understand Kant’s own thinking in the Antinomies but it also has important upshots for our understanding of Kant’s transcendental idealism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article argues that received accounts of the concept of human dignity face more difficulties than has been appreciated, when explaining the connection between human dignity and the duty of respect that dignity is supposed to generate. It also argues that a novel, relational, account has the adequate structure to explain such connection.

This Article explores the rule of law aspects of the intersection between intellectual property and antitrust law. Contemporary discussions and debates on intellectual property, antitrust, and the intersection between them are typically framed in economically oriented terms. This Article, however, shows that there is more law in law than just economics. It demonstrates how the rule of law has influenced the development of several IP doctrines, and the interface between IP and antitrust, in important, albeit not always acknowledged, ways. In (...) particular, it argues that some limitations on IP rights, such as exhaustion and limitations on tying arrangements, are grounded in rule of law principles restricting the arbitrary exercise of legal power, rather than solely in considerations of economic efficiency. The historical development of IP law has reflected several tensions, both economic and political, that lie at the heart of the constitutional order of the modern state: the tension between the benefits of free competition and the recognition that some restraints on competition may be beneficial and justified; the concern that power, even when conferred in the public interest, can often be abused and arbitrarily. (shrink)

Generics and frequency statements are puzzling phenomena: they are lawlike, yet contingent. They may be true even in the absence of any supporting instances, and extending the size of their domain does not change their truth conditions. Generics and frequency statements are parametric on time, but not on possible worlds; they cannot be applied to temporary generalizations, and yet are contingent. These constructions require a regular distribution of events along the time axis. Truth judgments of generics vary considerably across speakers, (...) whereas truth judgments of frequency statements are much more uniform. A generic may be false even if the vast majority of individuals in its domain satisfy the predicated property, whereas a frequency statement using, e.g., usually would be true. This paper argues that all these seemingly unrelated puzzles have a single underlying cause: generics and frequency statements express probability judgments, and these, in turn, are interpreted as statements of hypothetical relative frequency. (shrink)

Through hypothetical scenarios, this paper analyses whether machine learning (ML) could resolve one of the main shortcomings present in Christopher Boorse’s Biostatistical Theory of health (BST). In doing so, it foregrounds the boundaries and challenges of employing ML in formulating a naturalist (i.e., prima facie value-free) definition of health. The paper argues that a sweeping dataist approach cannot fully make the BST truly naturalistic, as prior theories and values persist. It also points out that supervised learning introduces circularity, rendering it (...) incompatible with a naturalistic perspective. Additionally, it underscores the need for pre-existing auxiliary theories to assess results from unsupervised learning. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the epistemological entanglements between data and data processing methods to manage expectations about what data patterns can predict. In conclusion, the paper argues against delegating the final authority for defining complex concepts like health to AI systems, as it necessitates ethical judgment and capacities for deliberation that AI currently lacks. It also warns against granting creators and deployers of AI systems the discretionary authority to determine these definitions outside the wider social discussion, advocating for ongoing public engagement on normative notions. Failure to do so risks limiting individuals and collectives’ ability to shape a just digital future and diminishes their fundamental epistemic agency. (shrink)

Doernberg and Truog (2023) present a thoughtful analysis of the ethical tensions that arise from physicians increasingly occupying “multiple roles in healthcare”1 I take no issue with the classific...

This article focuses on human dignity as a moral idea and, in particular, on a single but fundamental question: what conception of human dignity, if any, can generate an egalitarian duty to respect all persons? After surveying two mainstream and two alternative conceptions, the article suggests that explaining how human dignity generates an egalitarian duty of respect may be more difficult than has been appreciated.

In this chapter, my aim is to present an account of Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism that centers his view of propositions as mental acts. As I intend to show, Kant’s strategy in the Critique of Pure Reason is only intelligible under the assumption that the fundamental bearers of truth are mental entities.

In spite of the burgeoning philosophical literature on human dignity, Stephen Darwall's second-personal account of the dignity of persons has not received the attention it deserves. This article investigates Darwall's account and argues that it faces a dilemma, for it succumbs either to a problem of antecedence or to the wrong kind of reasons problem. But this need not mean one should reject a second-personal account. Instead, I argue that an alternative second-personal conception, one I will call relational, promises to (...) solve the dilemma by avoiding both the problem of antecedence and the wrong kind of reasons problem. More generally, distinguishing these two second-personal conceptions of the dignity of persons is important to enrich the available philosophical accounts of human dignity. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that generics tolerate exceptions. It turns out, however, that exceptions are tolerated only so long as they do not violate homogeneity: when the exceptions are not concentrated in a salient “chunk” of the domain of the generic. The criterion for salience of a chunk is cognitive: it is dependent on the way in which the domain is mentally represented. Findings of psychological experiments about the ways in which different domains are represented, and the actors affecting such (...) representations, account for judgments of generic sentences, facts which cannot be explained by linguistics alone. The reason for the homogeneity requirement itself is, in turn, also dependent on cognitive considerations. Generics express default rules, and psychological findings have shown that, the more homogeneous the domain, the easier it is for subjects to infer rules about it. Thus, cognitive results form a crucial part of a comprehensive account of the meaning of a linguistic expression. (shrink)

This paper defends a rigorous reading of Hume’s critiques of arguments for the existence of God and of the belief in God against interpretations that endorse Humean theism, deism, and fideism. The latter include Donald Livingston’s theist reading, J. C. A. Gaskin’s “attenuated deism” reading, and Edward Kanterian’s “humble fideism” reading. I also examine whether Hume’s rejections of a positive theology commit him to agnosticism or atheism. My innovative challenge to such conclusions maintains that, while elements of both agnosticism and (...) atheism are found in Hume, these denote, respectively, a methodology and an incidental implication of his philosophy. But neither sufficiently captures his constructive vision for a society, individual psychology, and system of knowledge guided by naturalist principles and aims. For this, an alternate conception is needed that describes Hume’s philosophy of religion beyond mere atheism. (shrink)

In this paper I explore elements from Kant’s philosophy of right to develop a relational account of the wrong of poverty. Poverty is a relational wrong because it involves relations of problematic dependence, inequality, and humiliation. Such relations infringe the rights to freedom and equality of the poor. And the called-for response is one of public recognition and protection of the rights of the poor. This position means we must radically reconceptualize our individual duties to the poor: not _private beneficence_, (...) but _private remedies for public failures_. (shrink)

Claiming rights against one another is a perfectly familiar phenomenon. We express the elementary thought you cannot do that to me in a variety of ways. And yet, in spite of the perfect familiarity of this phenomenon, the two standard philosophical theories of rights face notorious difficulties in accounting for it. My aim in this paper is to introduce a distinctive, second-personal account of rights. I will call this the independence theory of rights, the view that rights are specifications of (...) a basic right to independence against another. And I will argue that by taking as basic the second-personal thought you cannot do that to me the independence theory best illuminates the basic phenomenon of having rights against one another. (shrink)

Introduction Introducing Accessibility theory 0.1 On the role of context Utterances cannot be processed and interpreted on their own. ...

This article proposes to analyse the way in which the body is addressed in the philosophical works of Judith Butler. The constructionism that characterizes her initial articles has been widely spread in the contemporary debates about sex and gender diversity, since in those articles she links the body to a discursive ontology that denounces the contingent and unnecessary welding between body -which is considered as the substantial and natural basis of gender and sexuality- and subjective identities. Such an epistemological turn, (...) however, entails the problem of the dissolution of the material body as a strong foundation for various political claims. From this point on, some argumentative lines will be drawn parting from different segments of the author’s thought. These lines tend to present a complex notion of the body, clung to the idea of vulnerability. El presente artículo se propone analizar el modo en que la obra filosófica de Judith Butler aborda el cuerpo. El construccionismo social que caracteriza sus textos iniciales ha cobrado gran difusión en los debates contemporáneos sobre la diversidad sexo-genérica, pues allí la autora vincula al cuerpo a una ontología discursiva que denuncia la soldadura contingente y no necesaria entre cuerpo -pretendida base sustancial y natural del género y la sexualidad- y las identidades subjetivas. Tal giro epistemológico, sin embargo, genera el problema de la disolución del cuerpo material como fundamento sólido para reclamos políticos diversos. A partir de aquí se extraen líneas argumentativas de diferentes segmentos del pensamiento de la autora tendientes a presentar una noción compleja de cuerpo anclada en la idea de vulnerabilidad. (shrink)

Agricultural reports and guides, nonhuman animal welfare studies, and animal rights reports attempt to document and convey the condition of nonhuman animals in agriculture. These disciplines tend to resist a prolonged and methodically versatile examination of individual animals. In his pioneer work, Lovenheim , The author produced such a biographical documentation of calves in the dairy and meat industries. He provided an exceptionally prolonged and detailed tracing of their lives as individuals, establishing an emotional attachment in both documenter and reader. (...) Yet, sentiments for the farmers, typical urban conceptions of communication with nonhuman animals, and difficulties in obtaining the relevant information limit Lovenheim's success and imply similar difficulties in other cases. (shrink)

This paper investigates the conceptual and empirical possibility of non-executed, non-conscious proximal intentions, i.e., non-conscious proximal intentions to act that do not turn into a final act, but perhaps are vetoed or overcome by an alternative action. It constructs a conceptual framework in which such cases are justifiably considered ‘proximal intentions’. This is achieved by combining Alfred Mele’s notion of non-conscious proximal intentions together with the notion of trying or striving taken from Brian O’Shaughnessy’s model of action. With this framework (...) in hand we analyze empirical electroencephalography (EEG) findings regarding ‘change of intention’ scenarios. Prior to EEG development (and other brain imaging techniques), one would never consider non-executed, non-conscious proximal intentions a case of intention at all. However, with technological and interpretable development of EEG, a whole group of so called ‘intentions’ appears, and the main aim of the paper is to justify this expanded usage. (shrink)

Si estimamos pertinente indagar por el fundamento de la filosofía, centrarnos en el estudio de la _prima philosophia_ se convierte en una tarea tan urgente como necesaria. Por creerlo así, en el presente trabajo nos detendremos en dos alternativas. Por un lado, nos referiremos a la posición de Ernst Tugendhat y, por otro lado, a la de Karl-Otto Apel. Mientras que este sugiere que el lugar de la _prima philosophia_ debe ser ocupado por la _filosofía del lenguaje_; aquel sostiene que (...) la pregunta fundamental de la _antropología filosófica_ –“¿qué es el hombre?”– es aún _más básica_. Según su punto de vista, abordar el lenguaje humano implica un paso _posterior_: para comprenderlo como un elemento fundamental debemos preguntarnos _primero_ por las características que tienen los seres humanos en cuanto tales. En las dos primeras partes, daremos cuenta de ambos puntos de vista para, finalmente, concluir que las diferencias presentadas, que_ prima facie_ los separan, pueden salvarse. (shrink)

These are strange and unprecedented times in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most frontline healthcare professionals have never witnessed anything like this before. As a result, staff may experience numerous and continuous traumatic events, which in many instances, will negatively affect their psychological well-being. Particularly, nurses face extraordinary challenges in response to shifting protocols, triage, shortages of resources, and the astonishing numbers of patients who require care in expedited time constraints. As most healthcare workers are passionate nursing professionals, frustration (...) and often a sense of powerlessness occur when they find themselves unable to provide needed care to their patients. The overwhelming number of deaths, patients isolated and dying alone, and the ever-present fear of being infected and then infecting colleagues, family, friends due to the lack of protective gear or known protocols takes its toll on emotional and psychological well-being. For nurses, the experience of this significant (hopefully once-in-a-lifetime) event can inflict on-going moral injury. Nurses affected by this trauma require education, coping tools, and therapy to help avoid or alleviate the adverse effects on their well-being. Institutions must provide these resources to tend to the well-being of their healthcare staff, during and beyond the pandemic. This article aims to investigate moral distress—considering it as a moral injury—and offer tools and recommendations to support healthcare nurses as they respond to this crisis and its aftermath. (shrink)

How should we think about apparent conflicts of moral rights? I defend a non-balancing and holistic specification model: non-balancing because moral rights have absolute deontic stringency regardless of any balance of independent values; holistic because the content of moral rights is limited only by that of other moral rights. Holistic Specification, as I call the model, offers a principled, non-consequentialist explanation of exceptions to moral rights. Moreover, Holistic Specification explains why moral rights matter to practical thought while rendering remedial duties (...) less mysterious. (shrink)

In addition to the familiar cardinal and proportional readings of many and few, there is yet another interpretation, the relative proportional reading. This reading, unlike the ordinary absolute proportional reading, is not conservative. Under the relative reading, 'Many ψs are φs' is true just in case the proportion of φs among ψs is greater than the proportion of φs among members of contextually given alternatives to ψ. I provide a definition of proportional readings that reduces the differences between absolute and (...) relative interpretations to the value of a single parameter.I argue that relative readings are not restricted to many and few, but are also exhibited by the adverbs often and seldom, and by generics. Interpretations of determiners that have been treated as "focus-affected readings," interpretations of adverbs of quantification that have been treated as "pure frequency readings," and interpretations of generics which have been claimed to be cases of "reverse interpretation" or "direct kind predication" are, in fact, instances of relative readings.A: Army reserve service is especially hard on people who own a small business.Q: Do many small-business owners serve in your regiment?A: I don't know what it's like in other regiments –Q: I am not asking you about other regiments.A: I know, but relatively speaking . . .(Interview on Israel Army Radio, June 8th, 2001). (shrink)

Presentation of the section on Artificial Intelligence, Data and Objectivity: The Return of Data Naturalism? in the Monograph on Artificial Intelligence of Daimon - International Journal of Philosophy. Nº 90 (September - December 2023). Presentación de la sección sobre Inteligencia artificial, datos y objetividad. ¿El regreso del naturalismo dataista? en el Monográfico sobre Inteligencia Artificial de Daimon - Revista Internacional de Filosofía. Nº 90 (septiembre - Diciembre 2023).

The two standard interpretations of Kant’s view of the relationship between external freedom and public law make one of the terms a means for the production of the other: either public law is justified as a means to external freedom, or external freedom is justified as a means for producing a system of public law. This article defends an alternative, constitutive interpretation: public law is justified because it is partly constitutive of external freedom. The constitutive view requires conceiving of external (...) freedom in a novel, second-personal way, that is, as an irreducibly relational norm. (shrink)