This essay explains some basic concepts about BDSM, and it responds to two important objections to it. The first is the psychological objection—that BDSM practitioners suffer from mental disorders—and the second is the ethical objection—that BDSM practitioners have morally compromised desires because of the kinds of activities they desire to participate in, especially ones that involve roles that dip into tortured oppressive histories (e.g., "rape" scenes, "master-and-slave" scenes). The paper argues that both objections fail, and, more specifically focusing on the (...) ethical objection, argues that BDSM desires are psychologically, conceptually, and phenomenologically different from their seeming counterpart real-life desires that are truly ethically defective. Finally, the paper argues that BDSM practitioners, in having to always understand, explore, and justify their desires (especially to a majority that is hostile to them), have an interesting chance to lead rich, flourishing lives. (shrink)

Miller analyzes the relationship between consent and autonomy by offering three pictures. For autonomy, Miller distinguishes between procedural, substantive, and weak substantive autonomy. The corresponding views of consent are what Miller has termed as consensual minimalism, consensual idealism, and consensual realism. The requirements of sexual consent under consensual minimalism are a voluntary informed agreement. However, feminist critiques reveal the inadequacies of this simple position. Consensual idealism, which corresponds with substantive autonomy, offers a robust picture where consent and (...) autonomy must be based on non-oppression. However, this view is considered too ideal and it ignores context. Weak substantive autonomy takes into account the context in the sexual domain. Correspondingly, consensual realism takes into account the context and still fulfills the requirements of consent. (shrink)

This chapter presents a positive philosophy of male sexuality: one that is not rooted in so-called toxic masculinity and which is compatible with gender equality. I argue that, for such a sexuality to be possible, respect is the moral baseline. However, the status quo for male sexuality is shaped by white supremacy and heteronormativity. To resist these values, men must do more than merely cross some minimal moral threshold for permissible sex. Rather, they ought to develop a caring character so (...) that they would want to seek out their own and their partner’s (robust) sexual fulfillment. Men ought actively to develop ways to increase pleasure for themselves and their partners. (shrink)

Modern political philosophers have been notoriously reluctant to recognize desert in their theories of distributive justice.2 A large measure of the philosophical resistance to desert can be attributed to the fact that much of what people possess ultimately derives from brute luck. If a person’s assets come from brute luck, then she cannot be said truly to deserve those assets. John Rawls suggests that this idea is “one of the fixed points of our considered judgments;”3 Eric Rakowski calls it “uncontroversial;”4 (...) Serena Olsaretti claims that a theory must accept it to be “defensible;”5 Peter Vallentyne, to be “plausible.”6 But there is dissent. Two prominent liberal political philosophers, David Miller and David Schmidtz, have recently denied that brute luck nullifies claims of desert and, in turn, articulated.. (shrink)

This entry first provides some background about how to define moral relativism. It then reviews two different strands of the contemporary discussion of moral relativism. The first concerns the question of whether most people endorse, either implicitly or explicitly, some form of moral relativism. The second concerns the question of whether moral relativism is actually true. Here the focus will be on the influential work of Shaun Nichols, who has proposed an account of the psychology of moral judgments which (...) he takes to provide support for moral relativism. Some problems will briefly be raised with Nichols’s main argument. (shrink)

This chapter considers recent work in ethics that takes seriously empirical work in moral psychology, and from that starting point ends up drawing certain conclusions in metaethics that go against traditional moral realist positions. In particular, it considers the work of four leading naturalistic moral psychologists: Joshua Greene, Shaun Nichols, Jesse Prinz, and John Doris.

In this chapter I consider the work of four leading naturalistic moral psychologists – Joshua Greene, Shaun Nichols, Jesse Prinz, and John Doris. Each of them draws a different meta-ethical conclusion, and they would likely disagree amongst themselves on a number of points. But here my goal is to consider, as much as space allows, whether the moral realist should feel threatened by the empirical work which they cite and the arguments which they base upon it.

Sentimental Rules is an ambitious and highly interdisciplinary work, which proposes and defends a new theory about the nature and evolution of moral judgment. In it, philosopher Shaun Nichols develops the theory that emotions play a critical role in both the psychological and the cultural underpinnings of basic moral judgment. Nichols argues that our norms prohibiting the harming of others are fundamentally associated with our emotional responses to those harms, and that such 'sentimental rules' enjoy an advantage in cultural (...) evolution, which partly explains the success of certain moral norms. This has sweeping and exciting implications for philosophical ethics. Nichols builds on an explosion of recent intriguing experimental work in psychology on our capacity for moral judgment and shows how this empirical work has broad import for enduring philosophical problems. The result is an account that illuminates fundamental questions about the character of moral emotions and the role of sentiment and reason in how we make our moral judgments. This work should appeal widely across philosophy and the other disciplines that comprise cognitive science. (shrink)

Williams (1970) argues that our intuitions about personal identity vary depending on how a given thought experiment is framed. Some frames lead us to think that persistence of self requires persistence of one's psychological characteristics; other frames lead us to think that the self persists even after the loss of one's distinctive psychological characteristics. The current paper takes an empirical approach to these issues. We find that framing does affect whether or not people judge that persistence of psychological characteristics is (...) required for persistence of self. Open-ended, abstract questions about what is required for survival tend to elicit responses that appeal to the importance of psychological characteristics. This emphasis on psychological characteristics is largely preserved even when participants are exposed to a concrete case that yields conflicting intuitions over whether memory must be preserved in order for a person to persist. Insofar as our philosophical theory of personal identity should be based on our intuitions, the results provide some support for the view that psychological characteristics really are critical for persistence of self. (shrink)

This chapter addresses two questions. First, can phenomenology be naturalized? Second, if so, how? It employs the term ‘phenomenology’, and understands the question in this second sense. At the same time, responses to the question about naturalising consciousness and the question about naturalising phenomenology, in this second sense, are interlaced. Edmund Husserl has been careful about how he defined phenomenology, distinguishing it from a naturalistic enterprise. The Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée proposal shows that a sufficiently complex mathematics can (...) help the translation of data from phenomenological and naturalistic realms. Neuroscientists often attract to personal-level practices and phenomenological experiences in establishing their experiments, and in many cases the only way to define the explanadum is in terms of phenomenology. The ‘truth’ of naturalism is not the naturalism which Husserl cautioned against, but a redefined non-reductionist naturalism that correlates with a redefined phenomenology. (shrink)

This chapter outlines the main ideas of my book National responsibility and global justice. It begins with two widely held but conflicting intuitions about what global justice might mean on the one hand, and what it means to be a member of a national community on the other. The first intuition tells us that global inequalities of the magnitude that currently exist are radically unjust, while the second intuition tells us that inequalities are both unavoidable and fair once national responsibility (...) is allowed to operate. This conflict might be resolved either by adopting a cosmopolitan theory of justice (which leaves no room for national responsibility) or by adopting a ?political? theory of justice (which denies that questions of distributive justice can arise beyond the walls of the sovereign state). Since neither resolution is satisfactory, the chapter defends the idea of national responsibility and proposes a new theory of global justice, whose main elements are the protection of basic human rights worldwide, and fair terms of interaction between independent political communities. (shrink)

This paper, in opposition to the standard theories of social cognition found in psychology and cognitive science, defends the idea that direct perception plays an important role in social cognition. The two dominant theories, theory theory and simulation theory , both posit something more than a perceptual element as necessary for our ability to understand others, i.e., to “mindread” or “mentalize.” In contrast, certain phenomenological approaches depend heavily on the concept of perception and the idea that we have a direct (...) perceptual grasp of the other person’s intentions, feelings, etc. This paper explains precisely what the notion of direct perception means, offers evidence from developmental studies, and proposes a non-simulationist interpretation of the neuroscience of mirror systems. (shrink)

I examine several aspects of the experience of time in depression and in the experience of different emotions. Both phenomenological and experimental studies show that depressed subjects have a slowed experience of time flow and tend to overestimate time spans. In comparison to patients in control conditions, depressed patients tend to be preoccupied with past events, and less focused on present and future events. Recent empirical findings in studies of emotion perception show different degrees of over- or underestimation of time (...) in perception of faces showing different emotions compared with neutral faces. Clinical phenomenology predicts that the effects on time estimation would not be additive if these tests were conducted with depressed subjects. (shrink)

A Polish group G is tame if for any continuous action of G, the corresponding orbit equivalence relation is Borel. When [Formula: see text] for countable abelian [Formula: see text], Solecki [Equivalence relations induced by actions of Polish groups, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 347 (1995) 4765–4777] gave a characterization for when G is tame. In [L. Ding and S. Gao, Non-archimedean abelian Polish groups and their actions, Adv. Math. 307 (2017) 312–343], Ding and Gao showed that for such G, the (...) orbit equivalence relation must in fact be potentially [Formula: see text], while conjecturing that the optimal bound could be [Formula: see text]. We show that the optimal bound is [Formula: see text] by constructing an action of such a group G which is not potentially [Formula: see text], and show how to modify the analysis of [L. Ding and S. Gao, Non-archimedean abelian Polish groups and their actions, Adv. Math. 307 (2017) 312–343] to get this slightly better upper bound. It follows, using the results of Hjorth et al. [Borel equivalence relations induced by actions of the symmetric group, Ann. Pure Appl. Logic 92 (1998) 63–112], that this is the optimal bound for the potential complexity of actions of tame abelian product groups. Our lower-bound analysis involves forcing over models of set theory where choice fails for sequences of finite sets. (shrink)

This article addresses questions about the sense of agency and its distinction from the sense of ownership in the context of understanding schizophrenic thought insertion. In contrast to “standard” approaches that identify problems with the sense of agency as central to thought insertion, two recent proposals argue that it is more correct to think that the problem concerns the subject’s sense of ownership. This view involves a “more demanding” concept of the sense of ownership that, I will argue, ultimately depends (...) on the sense of agency. In this regard, the sense of agency still appears to be the originating problem. (shrink)

According to recent accounts of the imagination, mental mechanisms that can take input from both imagining and from believing will process imagination‐based inputs (pretense representations) and isomorphic beliefs in much the same way. That is, such a mechanism should produce similar outputs whether its input is the belief that p or the pretense representation that p. Unfortunately, there seem to be clear counterexamples to this hypothesis, for in many cases, imagining that p and believing that p have quite different psychological (...) consequences. This paper sets out some central problem cases and argues that the cases might be accommodated by adverting to the role of desires concerning real and imaginary situations. (shrink)

The everyday capacity to understand the mind, or 'mindreading', plays an enormous role in our ordinary lives. Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich provide a detailed and integrated account of the intricate web of mental components underlying this fascinating and multifarious skill. The imagination, they argue, is essential to understanding others, and there are special cognitive mechanisms for understanding oneself. The account that emerges has broad implications for longstanding philosophical debates over the status of folk psychology. Mindreading is another trailblazing (...) volume in the prestigious interdisciplinary Oxford Cognitive Science series. (shrink)

In a detailed examination of Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, I argue that Quine fails to make the case that there are no analytical truths in ordinary language. Drawing on admissions he makes with regard to definitions and languages' relationship to pragmatic considerations, and an examination of his arguments concerning the interdefinability of the terms `synonymous', and `analytic', I argue that analytic truths exist as deducible consequences of the various uses to which language or sub-languages are put.

In this paper, we investigate the role of intention and joint attention in joint actions. Depending on the shared intentions the agents have, we distinguish between joint path-goal actions and joint final-goal actions. We propose an instrumental account of basic joint action analogous to a concept of basic action and argue that intentional joint attention is a basic joint action. Furthermore, we discuss the functional role of intentional joint attention for successful cooperation in complex joint actions. Anika Fiebich is PhD (...) student in Philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Shaun Gallagher is Lilian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, USA. (shrink)

The Ethics of Need: Agency, Dignity, and Obligation argues for the philosophical importance of the notion of need and for an ethical framework through which we can determine which needs have moral significance. In the volume, Sarah Clark Miller synthesizes insights from Kantian and feminist care ethics to establish that our mutual and inevitable interdependence gives rise to a duty to care for the needs of others. Further, she argues that we are obligated not merely to meet others’ needs (...) but to do so in a manner that expresses "dignifying care," a concept that captures how human interactions can grant or deny equal moral standing and inclusion in a moral community. She illuminates these theoretical developments by examining two cases where urgent needs require a caring and dignifying response: the needs of the elderly and the needs of global strangers. Those working in the areas of feminist theory, women’s studies, aging studies, bioethics, and global studies should find this volume of interest. (shrink)

Conversation is, first of all, an event, something that happens. But the concept of conversation has also been appropriated by various thinkers as a model or metaphor of hermeneutical experience, of communication, political discourse, the acquisition of knowledge, and so forth. As an event it has been analyzed within the hermeneutical tradition, from Schleiermacher to Gadamer, and in this analysis it has been tied to Romantic conceptions such as the universality of language, "linguistic heritage" (Angeborenheit der Sprache ), and what (...) von Humboldt called "the common denominator of human nature," the universal and spiritual humanity that we all share.1 So conceived conversation has been made a model of hermeneutical experience. Gadamer, as is well known, characterizes reading as a conversation or dialogue with a text. This is more than metaphor, he tells us. Interpretation means bringing the text "into the living present of conversation" (TM 368), restoring it to an original condition. (shrink)

Educational pressures such as challenging workload, demanding deadlines and competitiveness among undergraduate dental students erode academic integrity in clinical training. The implementation of honour codes have been associated with the reduction in academic dishonesty.An action research was undertaken to investigate and foster academic integrity through creative pedagogical strategies and the implementation of an honour code within the undergraduate dental programme.Students reported the honour code as relevant and it encouraged the five investigated fundamental values of academic integrity. The students also favoured (...) the annual implementation of the honour code. The creative pedagogical strategy facilitated a change in perception on academic integrity in the clinical scenarios sessions. Most students showed changes in perception of academic integrity. The majority of students’ narratives/responses were positive and the emerging subthemes also espoused the five out of the six ICAI fundamental values of academic integrity. Students indicated the need for inclusion of academic integrity education within the curriculum. They felt that staff also should be guided by an academic integrity policy.Implementation of an honour code coupled with creative pedagogical strategies helped to foster understanding and appreciation for academic integrity. Conversely the honour code implementation was more effective due to the use of supportive creative pedagogical strategies on academic integrity. It is still undetermined whether these change in perception impacted on clinical practice during training and post-graduation. (shrink)

In Political Theology the "Modern Way": The Case of Jacques Almain (d. 1515), Shaun Retallick provides the first monograph on this late medieval philosopher-theologian and conciliarist, and his thought. He demonstrates that Almain's political theology, of which ecclesiology is a sub-discipline, is strongly impacted by the Via moderna. At the heart of his political theology is the individual and his or her will. Yet, the individual is rarely viewed in isolation from others; there is a strong emphasis on community (...) and on the religious and secular bodies through which it is realized. But these bodies, including the Church, are understood in collectivist rather than corporatist terms, which tends to a quite radical form of conciliarism. (shrink)

Because the visual system cannot process all of the objects, colors, and features present in a visual scene, visual attention allows some visual stimuli to be selected and processed over others. Most research on visual attention has focused on spatial or location-based attention, in which the locations occupied by stimuli are selected for further processing. Recent research, however, has demonstrated the importance of objects in organizing (or segregating) visual scenes and guiding attentional selection. Because of the long history of spatial (...) attention research, theories of spatial attention are more mature than theories of other visual processes, such as object segregation and object attention. In the present paper, I outline a biased competition account of object segregation and attention, following similar accounts that have been developed for spatial attention (Desimone and Duncan, 1995). In my biased competition account, I seek to understand how some objects can be segregated and selected over other objects in a complex visual scene. Under this account, there are two sources of visual information that allow an object to be processed over other objects: bottom-up information carried by the physical stimulus and top-down information based on an observer's goals. I use the biased competition account to combine many diverse findings from the object segregation and attention literatures into a common framework. (shrink)

The medicalization of mental health remains a point of contention for bioethicists, especially as it concerns the epistemic capabilities of those diagnosed with an illness or disorder. Gosselin (2019) argues that biomedicalization commits epistemic injustices against these persons and consequently entraps them in a “cycle of vulnerability”; in response, she proposes principles of justice to defend them from such affronts. This paper builds off of her work and responds particularly to the demand for a “sociocentric view of the self as (...) essentially relational.” I present a theory of interdependent agency and affiliation that I contend conceptually bolsters her normative principles. I explain how an expanded use of relational epistemologies, united with a non-ideal theory of mental health, can enrich our hermeneutical resources with respect to those with mental illnesses/disorders. My account introduces normative considerations premised on interdependency, most notably from care theory. Concepts such as vulnerability, relational autonomy, attentiveness, and responsiveness ground a relationally-situated approach that (1) improves the epistemic positionalities of patients, (2) informs more suitable dynamics of care/treatment, and (3) unites groups of mutually interested actors against harm and injustice. I thus use a framework of care to promote affiliations of similarly disadvantaged persons under shared causes and initiatives. I refer to these assemblages as “caring affinity networks.”. (shrink)

The present volume provides an introduction to the major themes of work in experimental philosophy, bringing together some of the most influential articles in ...

The case of Xiang as described by Jane Carroll is indeed disconcerting well beyond the immediately apparent factors contained within the article. While Xiang’s direct medical expenses are excessive and his inability to pay for those expenses and further support his noncustodial family seem to be the main issues up for debate, Xiang, however, is likely going to need much more psychosocial support if he is to regain his previous independent functionality or retain any aspect of a quality of life (...) whilst continuing his indefinitely isolated treatment. In this response, I briefly outline the probable effects of Xiang’s current situation on his social identity and mental health as well as a potential way that we can minimize these adverse effects. (shrink)

_The Phenomenological Mind_ is the first book to properly introduce fundamental questions about the mind from the perspective of phenomenology. Key questions and topics covered include: • what is phenomenology? • naturalizing phenomenology and the cognitive sciences • phenomenology and consciousness • consciousness and self-consciousness • time and consciousness • intentionality • the embodied mind • action • knowledge of other minds • situated and extended minds • phenomenology and personal identity. This second edition includes a new preface, and revised (...) and improved chapters. Also included are helpful features such as chapter summaries, guides to further reading, and a glossary, making _The Phenomenological Mind_ an ideal introduction to key concepts in phenomenology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

An empirical study of people's intuitions about freedom of the will. We show that people tend to have compatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more concrete, emotional way but that they tend to have incompatiblist intuitions when they think about the problem in a more abstract, cognitive way.

Taking their starting point from the nineteenth-century reformer Robert Owen’s concern to promote the education of the poor, Hopkins (2016) together with the other authors in the volume, investigat...

Senior lecturers/lecturers in mental health nursing (11 in round one, nine in round two, and eight in the final round) participated in a three-round Delphi study into the teaching of health care ethics (HCE) to students of nursing. The participants were drawn from six (round one) and four (round three) UK universities. Information was gathered on the organization, methods used and content of HCE modules. Questionnaire responses were transcribed and the content analysed for patterns of interest and areas of convergence (...) or divergence. Findings include: the majority (72.8%) of the sample believed that insufficient time was allocated to the teaching of HCE; case studies were considered a popular, although problematic, teaching method; the ‘four principles’ approach was less than dominant in the teaching of HCE; and virtue ethics was taught by only 36.4% of the participants. The Delphi technique proved adequate and worth while for the purposes of this study. Further empirical research could aim to replicate or contradict these findings, using a larger sample and recruiting more university departments. Reflection is required on several issues, including the depth and breadth to which ethics theory and, more controversially, meta-ethics, are taught to nursing students. (shrink)

How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioural expressions (...) in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states. Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgement, and so forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this way? (shrink)

Opens up new dimensions in the philosophical thought of Merleau-Ponty and addresses contemporary issues concerning interpretation theory and postmodernity.