In the South Korean film, The Parasite, the underling family, in an act of desperation, uses deceptive means to infiltrate the rich family. The term parasite refers nominally to the underling family, and their efforts to befriend and inhabit the class territory and social hierarchy of the rich family. How can this be of use for education? To answer this, we ask: what can we learn from Parasite to inform contemporary philosophy of education? Primarily, this experimental piece written from different (...) philosophical viewpoints, suggests that the images, narrative, and social context of the film cannot be read stereotypically. Using a blend of Deleuze and Stiegler ‘cinema-theory’, we present a heuristic perspective on the Parasite from three viewpoints: (1) South Korean society, and how a pedagogy of the parasite helps to understand the dynamics of contemporary philosophy of education in a global context. South Korea is uniquely placed at the cusp and threshold of deterritorializing Western capitalism, given its position next to the only in-tact communist state system; (2) The film shows how theorizing an exceptional notion of time contributes to the overall pedagogy of the parasite. Here, being a parasite is about waiting to attach oneself to a host, yet this waiting is an anxious, perceptive, adherent time, a reciprocal time, and one internally interconnected to that of the host; (3) The ethics of the parasite. The parasite chooses a host from a certain viewpoint before attaching itself and trying to be absorbed into the host. The pedagogy of the parasite suggests a unique ethical treatment of these assimilative processes and allows us to consider cinema as a parasitic means to shake the passive audience out of its stupor when bearing witness to the violence in the film and its own collusion in the trauma and reality of contemporary capitalism. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin was a philosopher but perhaps more importantly he was an experienced critic of such passion, erudation and virtuosity.

Response-dependence theories have historically been very popular in aesthetics, and aesthetic response-dependence has motivated response-dependence in ethics. This chapter closely examines the prospects for such theories. It breaks this category down into dispositional and fittingness strands of response-dependence, corresponding to descriptive and normative ideal observer theories. It argues that the latter have advantages over the former but are not themselves without issue. Special attention is paid to the relationship between hedonism and response-dependence. The chapter also introduces two aesthetic properties that (...) lead to wrong kinds of reasons problems for aesthetic response-dependence: insightfulness and the capacity to change one’s perspective. These properties do not have obvious parallels in the ethical domain, and so present an obstacle for response-dependence even in aesthetics. The chapter ends by examining replies on behalf of the response-dependence theorist, ultimately suggesting that a restricted form of response-dependence is the most promising way forward for fans of such theories. (shrink)

This chapter is centered around an apparent tension that research on implicit bias raises between virtue and social knowledge. Research suggests that simply knowing what the prevalent stereotypes are leads individuals to act in prejudiced ways—biasing decisions about whom to trust and whom to ignore, whom to promote and whom to imprison—even if they reflectively reject those stereotypes. Because efforts to combat discrimination obviously depend on knowledge of stereotypes, a question arises about what to do next. This chapter argues that (...) the obstacle to virtue is not knowledge of stereotypes as such, but the “accessibility” of such knowledge to the agent who has it. “Accessibility” refers to how easily knowledge comes to mind. Social agents can acquire the requisite knowledge of stereotypes while resisting their pernicious influence, so long as that knowledge remains, in relevant contexts, relatively inaccessible. (shrink)

Perceptual experiences justify beliefs—that much seems obvious. As Brewer puts it, “sense experiential states provide reasons for empirical beliefs” (this volume, xx). In Mind and World McDowell argues that we can get from this apparent platitude to the controversial claim that perceptual experiences have conceptual content: [W]e can coherently credit experiences with rational relations to judgement and belief, but only if we take it that spontaneity is already implicated in receptivity; that is, only if we take it that experiences have (...) conceptual content. (1994, 162) Brewer agrees. Their view is sometimes called conceptualism; nonconceptualism is the rival position, that experiences have nonconceptual content. One initial obstacle is understanding what the issue is. What is conceptual content, and how is it different from nonconceptual content? Section 1 of this paper explains two versions of each of the rival positions: state (non)conceptualism and content (non)conceptualism; the latter pair is the locus of the relevant dispute. Two prominent arguments for content nonconceptualism—the richness argument and the continuity argument—both fail (section 2). McDowell’s and Brewer’s epistemological defenses of content conceptualism are also faulty (section 3). Section 4 gives a more simple-minded case for conceptualism; finally, some reasons are given for rejecting the claim—on one natural interpretation—that experiences justify beliefs. (shrink)

Can we trust our intuitive judgments of right and wrong? Are moral judgements objective? What reason do we have to do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong? In Conversations on Ethics, Alex Voorhoeve elicits answers to these questions from eleven outstanding philosophers and social scientists: -/- Ken Binmore; Philippa Foot; Harry Frankfurt; Allan Gibbard; Daniel Kahneman; Frances Kamm; Alasdair MacIntyre; T. M. Scanlon; Peter Singer; David Velleman; Bernard Williams. -/- The exchanges are direct, open, and sharp, (...) and give a clear account of these thinkers' core ideas about ethics. They also provide unique insights into their intellectual development - how they became interested in ethics, and how they conceived the ideas for which they became famous. Conversations on Ethics will engage anyone interested in moral philosophy. (shrink)

There are at least two different aspects of our rational evaluation of agents’ doxastic attitudes. First, we evaluate these attitudes according to whether they are supported by one’s evidence (substantive rationality). Second, we evaluate these attitudes according to how well they cohere with one another (structural rationality). In previous work, I’ve argued that substantive and structural rationality really are distinct, sui generis, kinds of rationality – call this view ‘dualism’, as opposed to ‘monism’, about rationality – by arguing that the (...) requirements of substantive and structural rationality can come into conflict. In this paper, I push the dialectic on this issue forward in two main ways. First, I argue that the most promising ways of resisting the diagnosis of my cases as conflicts still end up undermining monism in different ways. Second, supposing for the sake of argument that we should understand the cases as conflicts, I address the question of what we should do when such conflicts arise. I argue that, at least in a prominent kind of conflict case, the coherence requirements take precedence over the evidential requirements. (shrink)

Context-sensitive expressions appear ill suited to the purpose of sharing content across contexts. Yet we regularly use them to that end (in regulations, textbooks, memos, guidelines, laws, minutes, etc.). This paper describes the utility of the concept of a metacontext for understanding cross-contextual content-sharing with context-sensitive expressions. A metacontext is the context of a group of contexts: an infrastructure that can channel non-linguistic incentives on content ascription so as to homogenize the content ascribed to context-sensitive expressions in each context in (...) the group. Documents composed of context-sensitive expressions can share content across contexts when supported by an appropriate metacontext. The bible has its church, the textbook its education system, the form its bureaucracy, and the manifesto its social movement. Some metacontexts support cross-contextual content-sharing. Some don’t. A promising research programme (one with practical importance) would take metacontexts as its unit of analysis. (shrink)

Comment on Brogaard's Seeing and Saying (OUP 2018).

How do children acquire beliefs from testimony? In this chapter, we discuss children's trust in testimony, their sensitivity to and use of defeaters, and their appeals to positive reasons for trusting what other people tell them. Empirical evidence shows that, from an early age, children have a tendency to trust testimony. However, this tendency to trust is accompanied by sensitivity to cues that suggest unreliability, including inaccuracy of the message and characteristics of the speaker. Not only are children sensitive to (...) evidence of unreliability, but they are also sensitive to the positive reasons a speaker may have for the reliability of their testimony. This evidence is discussed in relation to reductivist and non-reductivist viewpoints. (shrink)

A survey of color science and color vision.

There is a correlation between positions taken on some scientific questions and political leaning. One way to explain this correlation is the cultural cognition hypothesis (CCH): people's political leanings are causing them to process evidence to maintain fixed answers to the questions, rather than to seek the truth. Another way is the different background belief hypothesis (DBBH): people of different political leanings have different background beliefs which rationalize different positions on these scientific questions. In this article, I argue for two (...) things. I argue that two attempts by proponents of the CCH to discredit the DBBH fail. And I argue that this matters, because while the CCH makes epistemic paternalistic interventions seem called for (as some philosophers have argued compellingly), the DBBH does not. The DBBH makes it much easier to stay closer to an ideal of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Within the history of African American struggle against racist oppression that often verges on dystopia, a hidden tradition has depicted a transfigured world. Daring to speculate on a future beyond white supremacy, black utopian artists and thinkers offer powerful visions of ways of being that are built on radical concepts of justice and freedom. They imagine a new black citizen who would inhabit a world that soars above all existing notions of the possible. In Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin offers (...) a groundbreaking examination of African American visions of social transformation and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures associated with racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to challenge American political thought and culture. Black Utopia spans black nationalist visions of an ideal Africa, the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sun Ra’s cosmic mythology of alien abduction. Zamalin casts Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler as political theorists and reflects on the antiutopian challenges of George S. Schuyler and Richard Wright. Their thought proves that utopianism, rather than being politically immature or dangerous, can invigorate political imagination. Both an inspiring intellectual history and a critique of present power relations, this book suggests that, with democracy under siege across the globe, the black utopian tradition may be our best hope for combating injustice. (shrink)

© The Authors [2017]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Sher believes that our basic epistemic situation — that we aim to gain knowledge of a highly complex world using our severely limited, yet highly resourceful, cognitive capacities — demands that all epistemic projects be undertaken within two broad constraints: epistemic freedom and epistemic friction. The former permits us to employ our cognitive resourcefulness fully while undertaking epistemic projects, while the latter requires that (...) such projects always be substantially grounded in both the mind and reality. Epistemic Friction is an exploration of the latter constraint — the former being left for later work — that demonstrates the complementary nature of three projects that Sher has been working on, largely independently of one another, over the past three decades: a dynamic, neo-Quinean model of knowledge, a substantivist theory of truth, and... (shrink)

Skepticism about the internal world is actually more troubling than skepticism about the external world.

What can we do—and what should we do—to fight against bias? This final chapter introduces empirically-tested interventions for combating implicit (and explicit) bias and promoting a fairer world, from small daily-life debiasing tricks to larger structural interventions. Along the way, this chapter raises a range of moral, political, and strategic questions about these interventions. This chapter further stresses the importance of admitting that we don’t have all the answers. We should be humble about how much we still don’t know and (...) dedicate efforts to gathering as much knowledge as possible. Even so, we know enough now to start making a difference, and this chapter ultimately aims to chip away at the gap between our abstract commitments to treat people fairly and our lived habits and experiences, which continue to be shaped by implicit and explicit prejudices and stereotypes about race, gender, and other social categories. (shrink)

A 20th anniversary edition of the art classic that celebrates the intersection of creative expression and spirituality—from one of the greatest living artists of our time Twenty years after the original publication of The Mission of Art, Alex Grey’s inspirational message affirming art’s power for personal catharsis and spiritual awakening is stronger than ever. In this special anniversary edition, Grey—visionary painter, spiritual leader, and best-selling author—combines his extensive knowledge of art history with his own experiences in creating art at (...) the boundaries of consciousness. Grey examines the roles of conscience and intention in the creative process, including practical techniques and exercises useful in exploring the spiritual dimensions of art. Challenging and thought-provoking, The Mission of Art will be appreciated by everyone who has ever contemplated the deeper purpose of creative expression. (shrink)

A survey of arguments for and against the view that colors are physical properties.

The Dangerous Book for Boys Abstract: Seventeenth and eighteenth century discussions of the senses are often thought to contain a profound truth: some perceptible properties are secondary qualities, dispositions to produce certain sorts of experiences in perceivers. In particular, colors are secondary qualities: for example, an object is green iff it is disposed to look green to standard perceivers in standard conditions. After rebutting Boghossian and Velleman’s argument that a certain kind of secondary quality theory is viciously circular, we discuss (...) three main lines of argument for the secondary quality theory. The first is inspired by an intuitively compelling picture of perception articulated by Reid; the second is that the secondary quality theory is a conceptual truth; the third line of argument is presented in Johnston’s influential paper ‘How to speak of the colors’. We conclude that all these arguments fail, and that the secondary quality theory is unmotivated. Keywords: color, secondary quality, disposition, vision, perception.. (shrink)

A mass problem is a set of Turing oracles. If P and Q are mass problems, we say that P is weakly reducible to Q if for all Y ∈ Q there exists X ∈ P such that X is Turing reducible to Y. A weak degree is an equivalence class of mass problems under mutual weak reducibility. Let [Formula: see text] be the lattice of weak degrees of mass problems associated with nonempty [Formula: see text] subsets of the Cantor (...) space. The lattice [Formula: see text] has been studied in previous publications. The purpose of this paper is to show that [Formula: see text] partakes of hyperarithmeticity. We exhibit a family of specific, natural degrees in [Formula: see text] which are indexed by the ordinal numbers less than [Formula: see text] and which correspond to the hyperarithmetical hierarchy. Namely, for each [Formula: see text], let hα be the weak degree of 0, the αth Turing jump of 0. If p is the weak degree of any mass problem P, let p* be the weak degree of the mass problem P* = {Y | ∃X ⊆ BLR )} where BLR is the set of functions which are boundedly limit recursive in X. Let 1 be the top degree in [Formula: see text]. We prove that all of the weak degrees [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], are distinct and belong to [Formula: see text]. In addition, we prove that certain index sets associated with [Formula: see text] are [Formula: see text] complete. (shrink)

I discuss a puzzle that shows there is a need to develop a new metaphysical interpretation of mathematical theories, because all well-known interpretations conflict with important aspects of mathematical activities. The new interpretation, I argue, must authenticate the ontological commitments of mathematical theories without curtailing mathematicians' freedom and authority to creatively introduce mathematical ontology during mathematical problem-solving. Further, I argue that these two constraints are best met by a metaphysical interpretation of mathematics that takes mathematical entities to be constitutively constructed (...) by human activity in a manner similar to the constitutive construction of the US Supreme Court by certain legal and political activities. Finally, I outline some of the philosophical merits of metaphysical interpretations of mathematical theories of this type. (shrink)

This paper argues that climate injustice will be compounded in the future as a result of the deferred nature of many climate impacts. My claim is that the temporal disconnect between emissions and climate harm threatens future people’s ability to access what I call “resistance goods,” which rely on forms of address, often realised in oppositional political action. I identify three resistance goods—self-assertion, solidarity and testimony—and show that each is threatened by the temporality of climate change. A compound of climate (...) injustice is that it will be experienced as demeaning, isolating and silencing by many future people. (shrink)

This chapter talks about the war between the Formics, a seemingly malevolent species of aliens, and humans in the Ender's Game. The great tragedy of the violence that erupted from the Human/Formic war was the result of two deep misunderstandings. The Formics not only failed to grasp the capabilities of humanity, but humanity also deeply misunderstood the creatures that they would come to nickname “buggers.” These misunderstandings may have resulted from what is sometimes called “cultural incommensurability.” The chapter relates that (...) what is most important about Ender is not merely his ability to understand his “enemy,” but his ability to love them. He is able to harness the sympathies of the humans and change their minds about the buggers. Along with the Formic hive‐ queen, Ender now occupies the space in between the two conceptual schemes—a space he can never retreat from—and has begun translating their meanings. (shrink)

There is an imbalance of gender roles in everyone's favorite space saga, with the vast majority of characters played by males while the female parts are minimized at nearly every turn. But the underlying problem of womanhood in Star Wars might be even more insidious than Darth Sidious himself. This chapter explains why it is difficult to embrace a strong female identity anywhere, let alone in the midst of intergalactic war. It analyzes whether the women in Star Wars have what (...) it takes to bring feminism to the Force. While Princess Leia and Queen Amidala are instantly recognizable figures in popular culture, the question arises whether they represent women positively. While Leia and Padmé are typically recognized as the feminist icons of Star Wars, they are not all the films have to offer. The women of Star Wars offer just as much as any of the individual male characters. (shrink)

Speciesism, broadly understood as the view that species membership is a morally relevant property, has been a central topic of debate within animal ethics for around 50 years. However, in all this time, animal ethicists have paid relatively scant attention to the nature of species membership itself. This seems potentially regrettable, since species membership's precise nature is presumably highly pertinent to the question of its exact moral relevance. Here, I advocate for a ‘species-focused’ approach to assessing speciesism, arguing that, in (...) debating the merits of speciesism, animal ethicists should (i) centre the nature of species membership, and (ii) consult philosophers of biology. Adherence to this second prescription appears necessary since a lot of what philosophers of biology believe regarding the nature of species membership appears contrary to what many animal ethicists have seemingly assumed. (shrink)

Siegel and Byrne debate whether perceptual experiences present rich properties or exclusively thin properties.

'What would happen if everyone acted that way?' This question is often used in everyday moral assessments, but it has a paradoxical quality: it draws not only on Kantian ideas of a universal moral law but also on consequentialist claims that what is right depends on the outcome. In this book, Alex Tuckness examines how the question came to be seen as paradoxical, tracing its history from the theistic approaches of the seventeenth century to the secular accounts of the (...) present. Tuckness shows that the earlier interpretations were hybrid theories that included both consequentialist and non-consequentialist elements, and argues that contemporary uses of this approach will likewise need to combine consequentialist and non-consequentialist commitments. (shrink)

A. G. Long presents a new account of the importance of conversation in Plato's philosophy.

Originally published in 1961. The essays in this volume focus on the awareness of science and art, evolution and Freudian psychology. Besides the chapter on Darwin and Freud, the author discusses criticism, the fantasy element in drama and popular literature, the history of the novel, the motivation of science and the function of erotic art.

This paper identifies the major failings of mainstream economics and the rational choice theory it relies upon. These failures were identified by the four figures mentioned in the title: economics treats agents as rational fools; by the time the long … More ›.

We welcome Blumenthal-Barby’s et al. (2022) plaidoyer for the integration of philosophy in bioethics because of a perceived mutual benefit. Drawing on experience from a collaborative project, funde...