What is objectionable about “blacking up” or other comparable acts of imagining involving unethical attitudes? Can such imaginings be wrong, even if there are no harmful consequences and imaginers are not meant to apply these attitudes beyond the fiction? In this article, we argue that blackface—and imagining in general—can be ethically flawed in virtue of being oppressive, in virtue of either its content or what imaginers do with it, where both depend on how the imagined attitudes interact with the imagining’s (...) context. We explain and demonstrate this using speech act theory alongside a detailed case study of blackface. (shrink)

Ethicism is the most comprehensively defended answer to the question regarding whether ethical properties determine aesthetic properties in artworks. According to ethicism, aesthetically relevant ethical flaws in artworks count as aesthetic flaws and aesthetically relevant ethical merits count as aesthetic merits. In this paper, I argue that ethicism’s most significant argument, the Merited Response Argument suffers from an ambiguity that makes it either unsound or uninteresting. Specifically, the notion of an artwork’s ‘prescribing’ a response, central to MRA, is ambiguous between (...) merely attempting to elicit a response from appreciators as appropriate to a work, and endorsing a response as appropriate to relevant parts of the actual world. While the first sense of ‘prescribe’ does the aesthetic work, the second does the ethical. (shrink)

The outcomes of sports and competitive games excite intense emotions in many people, even when those same people acknowledge that those outcomes are of trifling importance. I call this incongruity between the judged importance of the outcome and the intense reactions it provokes the Puzzle of Sport. The puzzle can be usefully compared to another puzzle in aesthetics: the Paradox of Fiction, which asks how it is we become emotionally caught up with events and characters we know to be unreal. (...) In this article, I examine the prospects of understanding our engagement with competitive games on the model of our engagement with works of fiction, thus enabling analogous explanations for both puzzles. I show that there are significant problems with such an approach and offer an alternative, mobilizing ideas from David Velleman and Thomas Nagel, that appeals to the volatility of our motivational attitudes. (shrink)

If a work of literary fiction prescribes us to imagine that the Devil made a bet with God and transformed into a poodle, then that claim is true in the fiction and we imagine accordingly. Generally, we cooperate imaginatively with literary fictions, however bizarre, and the things authors write into their stories become true in the fiction. But for some claims, such as moral falsehoods, this seems not to be straightforwardly the case, which raises the question: Why not? The puzzles (...) such cases raise are sometimes grouped under the heading “imaginative resistance”. In this paper, I argue against what I take to be the best attempts to dismiss the puzzles and solve them. I also tease out subtleties not sufficiently addressed in the existing literature and end by defending a unified solution of my own. According to this solution, the puzzling phenomena occur when literary works offer inadequate and exhaustive grounds for claims. The solution’s novelty lies in its giving a normative rather than psychological or alethic explanation for the puzzling phenomena, the relevant norms being those of proper artistic appreciation. (shrink)

According to what I call the Merit Principle, roughly, works of art that attempt to elicit unmerited responses fail on their own terms and are thereby aesthetically flawed. A horror film, for instance, that attempts to elicit fear towards something that is not scary is to that extent aesthetically flawed. The Merit Principle is not only intuitive, it is also endorsed in some form by Aristotle, David Hume, and numerous contemporary figures. In this paper, I show how the principle leads (...) to a novel paradox when applied to an undertheorized class of artworks I call ‘seductive works’. These artworks necessarily invite an unmerited response in order to invite a (merited) repudiation of that response. Thus, according to the Merit Principle, they are necessarily aesthetically flawed, which is counter-intuitive. I consider a number of unsuccessful solutions to the paradox that aim to preserve the Merit Principle, before rejecting that principle as it stands. I discuss what is challenging about seductive artworks, before briefly defending a new principle that appeals to a general way that a work’s aesthetic value is conditioned by the constraints under which it operates. This principle not only resolves the paradox, but explains the competing intuitions that give rise to it. (shrink)

In "Rethinking Sadomasochism," Patrick Hopkins challenges the "radical" feminist claim that sadomasochism is incompatible with feminism. He does so by appeal to the notion of "simulation." I argue that Hopkins's conclusions are generally right, but they cannot be inferred from his "simulation" argument. I replace Hopkins's "simulation" with Kendall Walton's more sophisticated theory of "make-believe." I use this theory to better argue that privately conducted sadomasochism is compatible with feminism.

The Ethical Question asks whether ethical values in artworks determine their aesthetic value and, if so, how. I argue that the question is ambiguous between a direct and an indirect reading. I show how the indirect reading is philosophically uninteresting because it has an obvious answer: a view called ‘immoralism’. I also show how most of the significant figures in the relevant literature address the indirect form of the question anyway—needlessly, if I am right. Finally, I consider whether some version (...) of the indirect question is more philosophically interesting, connecting it to the so-called ‘qua problem’. I attempt to give clarity to the discussion by applying work on the virtues and vices of explanations. (shrink)

This chapter examines autonomism. Autonomism is roughly the view that an artwork’s ethical properties do not bear on its aesthetic or artistic value. The author sketches some of the view’s history before describing various versions of it defended over the last quarter-century. These are divided into ‘radical’, ‘robust’, and ‘moderate’ forms of autonomism. The author considers the strengths and weaknesses of each. The author also devotes some space to the ‘interactionist’ views against which contemporary autonomism is typically opposed. In doing (...) so, he considers the so-called ‘qua problem’ at some length, as well its bearing on these various autonomist positions. (shrink)

A critical notice of Erich Hatala Matthes' 'Drawing the Line'.

Kendall Walton argues that photographs are transparent; we literally see the things depicted in them, not just the depictions. This intriguing claim has endured numerous criticisms from those I call the ‘egocentrists’, according to whom seeing—literal seeing—requires the conveyance of egocentric information; to count as seeing something, a visual experience of that thing must impart some information, however spare, about its position relative to the viewer. Since photographs fail to convey such information, the egocentrists claim, Walton’s transparency thesis fails. This (...) paper considers several ways this egocentric condition on seeing has been developed and shows that none of them is persuasive. Seeing, I argue, does not require the conveyance of egocentric information. As such, and barring other problems, Walton’s transparency thesis stands. The paper closes with a speculative discussion of the kinds of empirical and action-guiding considerations that motivate egocentrism. (shrink)

What is aesthetic appreciation? What values is it concerned with? This dissertation consists of three distinct papers tackling problems related to these questions. Chapter One According to what I call the Merit Principle, roughly, works of art that attempt to elicit unmerited responses fail on their own terms and are thereby aesthetically flawed. In the first chapter, I show how the principle leads to paradox when applied to an undertheorized class of artworks I call “seductive artworks”, which invite an unmerited (...) first-order response in order to invite a repudiation of that response. I consider a number of unsuccessful solutions to the paradox, before rejecting the Merit Principle as it stands. I conclude by briefly discussing what is challenging about seductive artworks and by proposing a revision to the Merit Principle. Chapter Two Generally, we cooperate imaginatively with literary fictions, however bizarre, and the things authors write into their stories become true in the fiction. But for some claims, such as moral falsehoods, this seems not to be straightforwardly the case, which raises the question: Why not? The puzzles such cases raise are sometimes grouped under the heading “imaginative resistance”. In this paper, I argue against what I take to be the best attempts to dismiss the puzzles and solve them. I also tease out subtleties not sufficiently addressed in the existing literature and end by defending a unified solution of my own. The solution’s novelty lies in its giving a normative rather than psychological or alethic explanation for the puzzling phenomena. Chapter Three The third chapter looks at the tenability of understanding our engagement with sport along the lines of our engagement with works of fiction. Specifically, it addresses an incongruity in our attitudes towards the outcomes of competitive games and asks why these outcomes frequently prompt intense reactions, while often also seeming utterly trivial. I show why the temptation to understand our engagement with sport as akin to our engagement with works of fiction—as involving games of make-believe—faces serious theoretical obstacles. I end by exploring two alternative possibilities to the proposal. (shrink)

© British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Other Shoes is a companion to Kendall Walton’s other essay collection, Marvellous Images, published seven years earlier. But careful study reveals considerable coherence; Walton reprises the same motifs throughout, though with different combinations and inflections, the book’s reverse chronology revealing how some of these ideas developed. Moreover, every paper exhibits the same accessible, sometimes (...) homespun, ‘care beans’, ‘gosh’ ) style typical of Walton: unburdened by needless technicality, yet deft. This style’s downside is perhaps that insufficiently careful readers may misread him. A quarter-century of Charles and faithful sidekick The Slime not so much evading critical fire as watching it spray harmlessly across the pages of philosophy journals is testament to this.Some of the papers, especially the... (shrink)

Conversations on Art and Aesthetics MaesHans oup. 2017. pp. 336. £30.

Review of 'Art and Belief' edited by Ema Sullivan-Bissett, Helen Bradley, and Paul Noordhof.

The ethical guidelines for prenatal diagnosis proposed by the World Health Organisation , as well as by national regulations, only refer to paternity and gender of the fetus as unacceptable, disease-unrelated criteria for prenatal selection, as no other such parameters are at hand so far. This perspective is too narrow because research on complex genetic systems such as cognition and ageing is about to provide clinically applicable tests for genetic constituents of potentially desirable properties such as intelligence or longevity which (...) could be misused as parameters for prenatal diagnosis. Moreover, there is an increasing number of prenatally testable genetic traits, such as heritable deafness, which are generally regarded as pathological but desired by some prospective parents and taken into account as parameters for pro-disability selection. To protect prenatal diagnosis from ethically unacceptable genetic consumerism, guidelines must be clarified as soon as possible and updated towards a worldwide restriction of prenatal genetic testing to immediately disease-determining traits. (shrink)

Recently, psychologists have explored moral concepts including obligation, blame, and ability. While little empirical work has studied the relationships among these concepts, philosophers have widely assumed such a relationship in the principle that “ought” implies “can,” which states that if someone ought to do something, then they must be able to do it. The cognitive underpinnings of these concepts are tested in the three experiments reported here. In Experiment 1, most participants judge that an agent ought to keep a promise (...) that he is unable to keep, but only when he is to blame for the inability. Experiment 2 shows that such “ought” judgments correlate with judgments of blame, rather than with judgments of the agent’s ability. Experiment 3 replicates these findings for moral “ought” judgments and finds that they do not hold for nonmoral “ought” judgments, such as what someone ought to do to fulfill their desires. These results together show that folk moral judgments do not conform to a widely assumed philosophical principle that “ought” implies “can.” Instead, judgments of blame play a modulatory role in some judgments of obligation. (shrink)

The right to health is enshrined in the constitution of the World Health Organization and numerous other international agreements. Yet today, an estimated 5.7 million people die each year from treatable infectious diseases, most of which are susceptible to existing antimicrobials if they were accessible. These deaths occur predominantly among populations living in poverty in low- and middle-income countries, and they greatly exceed the estimated 700,000 annual deaths worldwide currently attributed to antimicrobial resistance. Ensuring universal appropriate access to antimicrobials is (...) not only a critical part of realizing the right to health, it is necessary for mobilizing effective collective action against the development and spread of AMR. (shrink)

Early modern medicine was much more dependent on the senses than its contemporary counterpart. Although a comprehensive medical theory existed that assigned great value to taste and odor of medicaments, historical descriptions of taste and odor appears imprecise and inconsistent to modern eyes. How did historical actors move from subjective experience of taste and odor to culturally stable agreements that facilitated communication about the sensory properties of medicaments? This paper addresses this question, not by investigating texts, but by going straight (...) to the sensory impression, which certain substances convey. The aim is not to overwrite or rectify historical descriptions but to investigate whether modern methodologies for sensory assessment can be enlisted to understand the past. We draw on history of science for framing and research questions, pharmaceutical science for knowledge of pharmaceuticals and preparations, and food and meal science for assaying procedures and protocols. We show that sensory evaluation can yield precise descriptions that would not have been alien to early modern medicine makers. However, there are problems with translating descriptions of taste between different historical contexts. By comparing contemporary descriptions of sensations with eighteenth‐century ones, the article discusses how sensory descriptions are highly dependent on context, and subject to historical change. (shrink)

Both individually and as a collection, these essays will promote understanding and provoke further debate amongst students and established scholars alike.

Emergence is a universal phenomenon that can be defined mathematically in a very general way. This is useful for the study of scientifically legitimate explanations of complex systems, here defined as hyperstructures. A requirement is that the observation mechanisms are considered within the general framework. Two notions of emergence are defined, and specific examples of these are discussed.

This contribution traces the parallel development of two distinct approaches to peasant agroecological education: the peasant-to-peasant horizontal method that disseminated across Mesoamerica and the Caribbean beginning in the 1970s, and the political-agroecological training schools of combined consciousness-building and skill-formation that have been at the heart of the educational processes of member organizations of La Via Campesina since the 1990s. Applying a theoretical framework that incorporates territorial struggle, agroecology and popular education, we examine spatial and organizational aspects of each of these (...) models for peasant education and movement-building. Recognizing that the models, their respective contexts, and the dialectical relationships therein have been in constant evolution, we share findings on the movement-place as a territorial system with socio-historical subjectivity, that is, peasant movements as territorially-embedded, collective historical actors. This leads to some conclusions in moving past educational theory that has centered upon individual subjects, and approaching a conception of territory as a subject of learning processes. (shrink)

Das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Einzelinteressen und kollektivem Handeln ist ein klassisches Phänomen der Politik. Die Beiträge des Bandes behandeln dieses Thema aus verschiedenen theoretischen und methodischen Perspektiven.

While philosophers generally accept some version of the principle ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, recent work in experimental philosophy and cognitive science provides evidence against a presupposition or a conceptual entailment from ‘ought’ to ‘can’. Here, we review some of this evidence, its effect on particular formulations of the principle, and future directions for cognitive scientists and philosophers.

The focus of this paper are Dummett's meaning-theoretical arguments against classical logic based on consideration about the meaning of negation. Using Dummettian principles, I shall outline three such arguments, of increasing strength, and show that they are unsuccessful by giving responses to each argument on behalf of the classical logician. What is crucial is that in responding to these arguments a classicist need not challenge any of the basic assumptions of Dummett's outlook on the theory of meaning. In particular, I (...) shall grant Dummett his general bias towards verificationism, encapsulated in the slogan 'meaning is use'. The second general assumption I see no need to question is Dummett's particular breed of molecularism. Some of Dummett's assumptions will have to be given up, if classical logic is to be vindicated in his meaning-theoretical framework. A major result of this paper will be that the meaning of negation cannot be defined by rules of inference in the Dummettian framework. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEvaluative aesthetic discourse communicates that the speaker has had first-hand experience of what is talked about. If you call a book bewitching, it will be assumed that you have read the book. If you say that a building is beautiful, it will be assumed that you have had some visual experience with it. According to an influential view, this is because knowledge is a norm for assertion, and aesthetic knowledge requires first-hand experience. This paper criticizes this view and argues for (...) an alternative view, according to which aesthetic discourse expresses affective states of mind, analogously to how assertions express beliefs. It is because these affective states require first-hand experience that aesthetic discourse communicates that such acquaintance is at hand. The paper furthermore argues that the lack of an experience requirement for aesthetic belief ascriptions constitutes a problem for the kind of expressivist who claims that evaluative belief states are covert non-cognitive states. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider a few actual cases of mnemonic strategies among older subjects (older than 65). The cases are taken from an ethnographic study, examining how elderly adults cope with cognitive decline. We believe that these cases illustrate that the process of remembering in many cases involve a complex distributed web of processes involving both internal or intracranial and external sources. Our cases illustrate that the nature of distributed remembering is shaped by and subordinated to the dynamic characteristics (...) of the on-going activity and to our minds suggest that research on memory and distributed cognition should focus on the process of remembering through detailed descriptions and analysis of naturally occurring situations. (shrink)

Is the way in which political philosophy is conducted today too ahistorical? Does such ahistoricism render political philosophy too abstract? Is political philosophy thus incapable of dealing with the realities of political life? This volume brings together some of the world's leading political philosophers to address these crucial questions. The contributors focus especially on political philosophy's pretensions to universality and on its strained relationship with the world of real politics. Some chapters argue that political philosophers should not be cowed by (...) the accusations levied against them from outside of their own field. Others insist that these accusations require a dramatic reshaping of normative political thought. The volume will spark controversy across political philosophy and beyond. (shrink)

It is widely held within contemporary metaethics that there is a lack of linguistic support for evaluative expressivism. On the contrary, it seems that the predictions that expressivists make about evaluative discourse are not borne out. An instance of this is the so-called problem of missing Moorean infelicity. Expressivists maintain that evaluative statements express non-cognitive states of mind in a similar manner to how ordinary descriptive language expresses beliefs. Conjoining an ordinary assertion that p with the denial of being in (...) the corresponding belief state famously gives rise to Moorean infelicity:?? It’s raining but I don’t believe that it’s raining. If expressivists are right, then conjoining evaluative statements with the denial of being in the relevant non-cognitive state of mind should give rise to similar infelicity. However, as several theorists have pointed out, this does not seem to be the case. Statements like the following are not infelicitous: Murder is wrong but I don’t disapprove of it. In this paper, I argue that evaluative statements express the kind of states that are attributed by ‘find’-constructions in English and that these states are non-cognitive in nature. This addresses the problem of missing Moorean infelicity and, more generally, goes to show that there are linguistic facts which support expressivism about evaluative discourse. (shrink)

Rumfitt has given two arguments that in unilateralist verificationist theories of meaning, truth collapses into correct assertibility. In the present paper I give similar arguments that show that in unilateral falsificationist theories of meaning, falsehood collapses into correct deniability. According to bilateralism, meanings are determined by assertion and denial conditions, so the question arises whether it succumbs to similar arguments. I show that this is not the case. The final section considers the question whether a principle central to Rumfitt's first (...) argument, ‘It is assertible that if and only if it is assertible that it is assertible that ’, is one that bilateralists can reject, and concludes that they cannot. It follows that the logic of assertibility and deniability, according to a result by Williamson, is the little known modal logic K4 studied by Sobociński. The paper ends with a plaidoyer for bilateralists to adopt this logic. (shrink)

Dahlbäck, Forsblad and Hydén argue that conversational remembering in the real‐world must be acknowledged as an interactional practice grounded in and bound to the communicative actions produced by the interlocutors. They illustrate the complexity of those processes by referring to their own fieldwork examining older adults’ prospective memory within their homes (Dahlbäck, Kristiansson, & Stjernberg, 2013) and propose alternative methodologies (e.g., scenarios design) to increase collaborations between ethnographic and experimental memory researchers.

Within contemporary metaethics, it is widely held that there is a “presumption of realism” in moral thought and discourse. Anti-realist views, like error theory and expressivism, may have certain theoretical considerations speaking in their favor, but our pretheoretical stance with respect to morality clearly favors objectivist metaethical views. This article argues against this widely held view. It does so by drawing from recent discussions about so-called “subjective attitude verbs” in linguistics and philosophy of language. Unlike pretheoretically objective predicates (e.g., “is (...) made of wood”, “is 185 cm tall”), moral predicates embed felicitously under subjective attitude verbs like the English “find”. Moreover, it is argued that the widespread notion that moral discourse bears all the marks of fact-stating discourse is rooted in a blinkered focus on examples from English. Cross-linguistic considerations suggest that subjective attitude verbs are actually the default terms by which we ascribe moral views to people. Impressions to the contrary in English have to do with some unfortunate quirks of the term “think”. (shrink)

We treat the classical dynamics of the hydrogen atom in perpendicular electric and magnetic fields as a celestial mechanics problem. By expressing the Hamiltonian in appropriate action–angle variables, we separate the different time scales of the motion. The method of averaging then allows us to reduce the system to two degrees of freedom, and to classify the most important periodic orbits.

In bilateral logic formulas are signed by + and –, indicating the speech acts assertion and denial. I argue that making an assumption is also speech act. Speech acts cannot be embedded within other speech acts. Hence we cannot make sense of the notion of making an assumption in bilateral logic. Attempts to solve this problem are considered and rejected.

Australia’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely perceived to have been a successful one, based on the relatively few number of lives lost to the virus compared to the rest of the world. There remain, nonetheless, serious ethical challenges at the heart of the Australian response to COVID-19. The broadly positive outcomes of Australia’s pandemic response mask more troubling developments within its political culture, and the costs it has imposed on its society. This article examines two concerns in (...) particular: the normalisation of fear and emergency through the language and policy responses adopted by governments, and the significant diminution of individual freedoms and human rights. (shrink)

Empathy facilitates everyday social interactions and has often been linked in the literature to prosocial behavior. Robust evidence has been found for a positive relationship between experiencing empathy and behaving prosocially. However, empathy, and the empathy–prosocial behavior relationship in particular, has been studied mostly in combination with negative emotions. Less research has been conducted on empathy for positive emotions, and the link between positive empathy and displayed prosocial behavior has not been intensively investigated so far. The purpose of the present (...) article is thus twofold: first, we review and summarize research evidence on empathy for positive emotions, and second, we propose that people’s motivation to maintain an experienced positive affect is a viable mechanism linking positive empathy and prosocial behavior. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

A Suitable Amount of Crime looks at the great variations between countries over what are considered 'unwanted acts', how many are constructed as criminal and how many are punished.

People frequently entertain counterfactual thoughts, or mental simulations about alternative ways the world could have been. But the perceived plausibility of those counterfactual thoughts varies widely. The current article interfaces research in the philosophy and semantics of counterfactual statements with the psychology of mental simulations, and it explores the role of perceived similarity in judgments of counterfactual plausibility. We report results from seven studies (N = 6405) jointly supporting three interconnected claims. First, the perceived plausibility of a counterfactual event is (...) predicted by the perceived similarity between the possible world in which the imagined situation is thought to occur and the actual world. Second, when people attend to differences between imagined possible worlds and the actual world, they think of the imagined possible worlds as less similar to the actual world and tend to judge counterfactuals in such worlds as less plausible. Lastly, when people attend to what is identical between imagined possible worlds and the actual world, they think of the imagined possible worlds as more similar to the actual world and tend to judge counterfactuals in such worlds as more plausible. We discuss these results in light of philosophical, semantic, and psychological theories of counterfactual thinking. (shrink)