In recent years, a number of authors have tried to respond to Frank Jackson’s so-called “Knowledge Argument” against physicalism by appealing to phenomenal concepts, that is, concepts under which fall the phenomenal aspect of our experiences, or, to put it in different terms, concepts under which fall the sensations attached to our experiences. However, there is no agreement in the literature regarding the nature of phenomenal concepts. For some, these concepts are recognitional in nature. Others take them as being demonstrative (...) in nature. In this paper, I will argue that physicalists should not take phenomenal concepts as being either recognitional or demonstrative in nature, for if they do they will not be able to respond to Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabela normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} Podemos ver na ausência de luz, e ouvir na ausência de som? Em seu livro Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows (2008), Roy Sorensen defende que sim, que podemos ver a escuridão na ausência de luz, e ouvir o silêncio na ausência de som. Neste artigo, defendo que (...) na escuridão nada vemos, no silêncio nada ouvimos, e que experienciar a ausência de luz e som é uma questão afetiva, e não perceptual. (shrink)

This article deals with some phenomena of the Hungarian legal language from a historical point of view, with special regard to the terminology of private law going back to Roman law tradition. The author aims, on the one hand, to present the historical background of the current terminology of Hungarian private law by means of some representative examples. On the other hand, it is attempted at demonstrating that “false friends” and some further misunderstandings in the current terminology of Hungarian private (...) law can be led back to the historical determination of the concepts/terms in question. A certain Hungarian legal language existed already in the 16th c., however it reached the common European level by the middle of the 19th c. This development took place mainly under the influence of the Austrian and German law and legal science. Due to the translation of foreign legal terms to Hungarian since the 19th c. there emerged some “global” difficulties of legal terminology also in the Hungarian legal language. As the most important example, the reception of bona fides can be mentioned. It was an amendment of the Hungarian Civil Code in 2006 which tried to eliminate the misunderstandings as regards the principle of good faith conceived formerly by many Hungarian jurists exclusively in subjective sense. The history of reception of the German notions of Gültigkeit and Wirksamkeit in Hungary is extremely intriguing, too. Hungarian jurists did not follow the pattern of the German BGB but developed this pair created by Windscheid by drawing a clear distinction between the validity and effectiveness of legal transactions, similar to the Italian terminology. Sometimes the reception of German notions happened in a less successful way. Despite the important foreign, especially German impacts, the Hungarian legal language is an autonomous one having several remarkable features which deserve attention also in comparison with terminology of the Western legal cultures. (shrink)

People seem to differ in their visual search performance involving emotionally expressive faces when these expressions are seen on faces of others close to their age compared to faces of non-peers, known as the own-age bias. This study sought to compare search advantages in angry and happy faces detected on faces of adults and children on a pool of children and adults. The goals of this study were to examine the developmental trajectory of expression recognition and examine the development of (...) an OAB. Participants were asked to find a target face displaying an emotional expression among eight neutral faces. Results showed that children and adults found happy faces significantly faster than angry and fearful faces regardless of it being present on the faces of peers or non-peers. Adults responded faster to the faces of peers regardless of the expression. Furthermore, while children detected angry faces significantly faster compared to fearful ones, we found no such difference in adults. In contrast, adults detected all expressions significantly faster when they appeared on the faces of other adults compared to the faces of children. In sum, we found evidence for development in detecting facial expressions and also an age-dependent increase in OAB. We suggest that the happy face could have an advantage in visual processing due to its importance in social situations and its overall higher frequency compared to other emotional expressions. Although we only found some evidence on the OAB, using peer or non-peer faces should be a theoretical consideration of future research because the same emotion displayed on non-peers’ compared to peers’ faces may have different implications and meanings to the perceiver. (shrink)

This paper argues that group attitudes can be assessed in terms of standards of rationality and that group-level rationality need not be due to individual-level rationality. But it also argues that groups cannot be collective epistemic agents and are not collectively responsible for collective irrationality. I show that we do not need the concept of collective epistemic agency to explain how group-level irrationality can arise. Group-level irrationality arises because even rational individuals can fail to reason about how their attitudes will (...) combine with those of others. In some cases they are morally responsible for this failure, in others they are not. Moreover, the argument for collective epistemic agency is incoherent because reasons-for-groups are ipso facto reasons-for-individual. Instead of talking about reasons-for-groups, we should therefore distinguish between self-regarding reasons and group-regarding reasons. Both kinds of reasons are reasons-for-individuals. These conceptual considerations in favour of moderate individualism are strengthened by an analysis of our moral practice of responding to collective shortfalls of rationality and by the unpalatable moral implications of collectivism about epistemic agency. There is no need to change the subject. Groups can be rational or irrational, but they do not reason. (shrink)

John McDowell and Bill Brewer famously defend the view that one can only have empirical beliefs if one’s perceptual experiences serve as reasons for such beliefs, where reasons are understood in terms of subject’s reasons. In this paper I show, first, that it is a consequence of the adoption of such a requirement for one to have empirical beliefs that children as old as 3 years of age have to considered as not having genuine empirical beliefs at all. But we (...) have strong reasons to think that 3-year-old children have empirical beliefs, or so I argue. If this is the case, McDowell and Brewer’s requirement for one to have empirical beliefs faces a strong challenge. After showing this, I propose an alternative requirement for one to have empirical beliefs, and argue that it should be favoured over McDowell and Brewer’s requirement. (shrink)

Experiences of absence are common in everyday life, but have received little philosophical attention until recently, when two positions regarding the nature of such experiences surfaced in the literature. According to the Perceptual View, experiences of absence are perceptual in nature. This is denied by the Surprise-Based View, according to which experiences of absence belong together with cases of surprise. In this paper, I show that there is a kind of experience of absence—which I call frustrating absences—that has been overlooked (...) by the Perceptual View and by the Surprise Based-View and that cannot be adequately explained by them. I offer an alternative account to deal with frustrating absences, one according to which experiencing frustrating absences is a matter of subjects having desires for something to be present frustrated by the world. Finally, I argue that there may well be different kinds of experiences of absence. (shrink)

Mutually beneficial exchanges in markets can be exploitative because one party takes advantage of an underlying injustice. For instance, employers of sweatshop workers are often accused of exploiting the desperate conditions of their employees, although the latter accept the terms of their employment voluntarily. A weakness of this account of exploitation is its tendency for over-inclusiveness. Certainly, given the prevalence of global and domestic socioeconomic inequalities, not all exchanges that take place against background injustices should be considered exploitative. This paper (...) offers a framework to identify exploitation in mutually beneficial exchange, focusing on the case of sweatshop labor. It argues that an employer can be viewed as taking unfair advantage of an underlying injustice if and only if the employer’s surplus from the exchange in the unjust state of affairs exceeds the surplus it could maximally obtain in a just state of affairs. The paper illustrates the applicability of this framework using three different conceptions of justice and argues that it is superior to microlevel accounts of exploitation that regard background justice as irrelevant. The paper concludes by describing some normative implications that follow from judging an exchange exploitative. (shrink)

One of the current debates in philosophy of mind is whether the content of perceptual experiences is conceptual or nonconceptual. The proponents of nonconceptual content, or nonconceptualists, typically support their position by appealing to the so-called Fineness of Grain Argument, which, in rough terms, has as its conclusion that we do not possess concepts for everything we perceive. In his Mind and World, John McDowell tried to give a response to the argument, and show that we do possess concepts for (...) everything we perceive. His response is based on the idea that we have a capacity to recognize all that we perceive. However, a good number of people took this proposal as being empirically false. My aim in this paper is to show that McDowell’s proposal is not only not empirically false, but likely to be empirically true. We do have the capacity to recognize all that we perceive, but such recognition capacity is dependent on information stored in short-term memory, and not in longterm memory, as McDowell’s critics have mistakenly supposed. (shrink)

Burge famously argued that one can have thoughts involving a concept C even if one’s understanding of C is incomplete. Even though this view has been extremely influential, it has also been taken by critics as less than clear. The aim of this paper is to show that the cases imagined by Burge as being ones in which incomplete understanding of concepts is involved can be made clearer given an account of direct concept ascriptions—such as “Peter has the concept of (...) arthritis”—according to which these ascriptions are to be analysed in terms of ascriptions of the knowledge of what something is. The upshot is that the cases imagined by Burge can be explained is terms of the idea of subjects knowing in part what something is. (shrink)

According to philosophers such as McDowell and Brewer, the contents of perceptual experience are conceptual. This view came to be known as Conceptualism. However, a number of critics have argued that they are wrong in thinking this, for they claim that there is an argument, the so-called Fineness of Grain Argument, which is valid and sound, and has as its consequence the falsity of Conceptualism. Although McDowell and Brewer seem to acknowledge that the Fineness of Grain Argument, if valid and (...) sound, has as its consequence the falsity of Conceptualism, they have ways of answering to the argument. In this paper, I will grant the proponents of Conceptualism that one of their ways of answering to the Fineness of Grain Argument is successful, and that the argument can be blocked. But I will argue that, even if this is the case, we have good reasons to think that Conceptualism is false. For there is another argument, that I will call the Constitution Argument, that has as its conclusion the falsity of Conceptualism. I show that the Constitution Argument is valid and sound, in which case we have good reasons to think that Conceptualism is false. (shrink)

Filosofía antigua -- Filosofía medieval : heavy metal y religión -- Filosofía moderna y contemporánea.

It is held by many philosophers that it is a consequence of epistemic contextualism that speakers are typically semantically blind, that is, typically unaware of the propositions semantically expressed by knowledge attributions. In his ?Contextualism, Invariantism and Semantic Blindness? (this journal, 2009), Martin Montminy argues that semantic blindness is widespread in language, and not restricted to knowledge attributions, so it should not be considered problematic. I will argue that Montminy might be right about this, but that contextualists still face a (...) serious and related problem: that it is a consequence of epistemic contextualism that subjects are typically unaware of contents conveyed by knowledge attributions, independently of whether these are semantic or non-semantic contents. Even if semantic blindness is widespread in language, it does not seem that content unawareness of this sort is. (shrink)

Neanderthal extinction is a matter of intense debate. It has been suggested that demography (as opposed to environment or competition) could alone provide a sufficient explanation for the phenomenon. We argue that demography cannot be a ‘stand-alone’ or ‘alternative’ explanation of token extinctions as demographic features are entangled with competitive and environmental factors, and further because demography should not be conflated with neutrality.

This paper develops an account of how economic and political institutions can limit the applicability of principles of justice even in non-relational cosmopolitan conceptions. It shows that fundamental principles of justice underdetermine fair distributive shares as well as justice -based requirements. It argues that institutions partially constitute the content of justice by determining distributive shares and by resolving indeterminacies about justice -based requirements resulting from strategic interaction and disagreement. In the absence of existing institutions principles of justice might not be (...) applicable for assessing distributions or guiding individual action and institutional design. Hence, accepting a specific cosmopolitan conception of justice is insufficient to settle global distributive questions. (shrink)

This essay discusses a less known period of Karl Mannheim's life, namely the period he spent in Hungary. I attempt to point out that the career of the young Mannheim, starting from a philosophical interest and continuing with a sociological one, is continuous. His first published works and letters prove that in the period preceding his emigration to Germany in 1919 he was concerned with questions that received their mature form in his sociology of knowledge. They include primarily the question (...) of culture, that of perspective-boundedness of cognition, interpretation and the problem of intellectuals. Despite changing disciplines from philosophy to sociology, the continuity of his oeuvre can be shown. (shrink)

There are several reasons to explore the role theater played in the life of Søren Kierkegaard and in the inspiration for his works. There are probably more reasons to analyze the role Kierkegaard played for theater, both as a source of inspiration and as a thinker reflecting on different facets of drama, performance, and acting. In the present study I focus on the diversity and complexity of Kierkegaard’s views on theater to elaborate on the possible connections and types of influence (...) he exercised on stage artists and theorists, shaping our contemporary theater theories. Approaches include literature, philosophy, theology, staging, acting, audience, and the history of theater, both in Kierkegaard’s times and later. (shrink)

The article analyzes ethnic data collection pertaining to criminal justice in Hungary. With such a sensitive and delicate issue at hand, Hungary has decided on an evasive approach, resisting ethnic data collection by law enforcement authorities. The author argues that this approach has become one of the obstacles in fighting discrimination and ethnic profiling. Moreover, Hungary’s restrictive approach to ethno-national data classification also causes severe constitutional problems in other, noncriminal legal circumstances, where ethnic data is used in the context of (...) additional rights and affirmative protection provided for ethno-national minorities. The first part of the article describes general problems relating to ethnic data collection and analyses of the Hungarian minority protection framework, in particular, the minority self-government structure (a unique constitutional institution). The second part focuses on the criminal justice system; the author’s aim is to show that prohibiting the official recognition and collection of data on ethnicity by criminal justice authorities has potentially ethnically discriminatory consequences. (shrink)

The thirty year long friendship between Imre Lakatos and the classic scholar and historian of mathematics Árpád Szabó had a considerable influence on the ideas, scholarly career and personal life of both scholars. After recalling some relevant facts from their lives, this paper will investigate Szabó's works about the history of pre-Euclidean mathematics and its philosophy. We can find many similarities with Lakatos' philosophy of mathematics and science, both in the self-interpretation of early axiomatic Greek mathematics as Szabó reconstructs it, (...) and in the general overview Szabó provides us about the turn from the intuitive methods of Greek mathematicians to the strict axiomatic method of Euclid's Elements. As a conclusion, I will argue that the correct explanation of these similarities is that in their main works they developed ideas they had in common from the period of intimate intellectual contact in Hungarian academic life in the mid-twentieth century. In closing, I will recall some relevant features of this background that deserve further research. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive and detailed exploration of the relationship between the thought of G.W.F. Hegel and that of John McDowell, the latter of whom is widely considered to be one of the most influential living analytic philosophers. It serves as a point of entry in McDowell’s and Hegel’s philosophy, and a substantial contribution to ongoing debates on perceptual experience and perceptual justification, naturalism, human freedom and action. The chapters gathered in this volume, as well as McDowell’s responses, make (...) it clear that McDowell’s work paves the way for an original reading of Hegel’s texts. His conceptual framework allows for new interpretive possibilities in Hegel’s philosophy which, until now, have remained largely unexplored. Moreover, these interpretations shed light on various aspects of continuity and discontinuity between the philosophies of these two authors, thus defining more clearly their positions on specific issues. In addition, they allow us to see Hegel’s thought as containing a number of conceptual tools that might be useful for advancing McDowell’s own philosophy and contemporary philosophy in general. (shrink)

The prevailing justification for constitutional institutions is that such institutions reflect and enable rational solutions to social problems. However, constitutions are constructed through emotionally driven processes that reflect both the public sentiments of the day and, at least to some extent, basic moral emotions. Historical examples from France and the United States demonstrate the role of such emotional processes in shaping the design of liberal constitutionalism. Further, constitutional law both sets and regulates emotional display rules; favors or disfavors certain emotional (...) commitments; and, particularly through the formulation of fundamental human rights, reflects and shapes emotional moral judgments. The emotional contributors to constitutional design and interpretation may be called “constitutional sentiments.”. (shrink)

If the task of constitutional theory is to set out a language in which the discourse of constitutional law may be grounded, a question of the utmost importance is how this terminology is created, defined and interpreted. In this groundbreaking new work, András Jakab maps out and analyses the grammar and vocabulary on which the core European traditions of constitutional theory are based. He suggests understanding key constitutional concepts as responses to historical and present day challenges experienced by European societies. (...) Drawing together a great and diverse range of literature, much of which has never before been touched upon by scholarship in the English language, Jakab reconceptualises and argues for a new understanding of European constitutional law discourse. In so doing he shines new light on what constitutes its distinctively European nature. This remarkable book is essential reading for all scholars and students of constitutional theory in Europe and beyond. (shrink)

The constitutional freedom of the individual is a specific legal permission to perform certain act-types by virtue of the constitution. Legal and constitutional permissions are either negative permissions, consisting of the lack of obligation or prohibition to perform a conduct, or positive permissions rendering the performance of certain acts possible. Further, a distinction is proposed between legal systems containing their constitution and those not containing their constitution. In the former, constitutional freedom is the freedom to perform any conduct, i.e. any (...) conduct neither obligatory nor prohibited by the law. In legal systems containing their constitution constitutional freedom includes all the act-types obligatorily permitted in the constitution as denominated freedom-rights. The final section contends that the “general right to freedom” is but a special case of the constitutional principle of equality. (shrink)

“I also talked to Buber yesterday; as a person he is lively and simple and remarkable, and seems to have nothing to do with the lukewarm things he has written” – wrote Franz Kafka to his fiancée Felice Bauer in the early 1913. What is the meaning of this harsh, yet respectful portraiture of Buber? Was it a casual ironic remark – or was it rather the way Kafka really thought of Martin Buber? And to what extent was Kafka important (...) for Buber? How can we understand the collaboration between the writer and philosopher? Close reading, contextualization and Begegnungsereignis. (shrink)

Women as individuals experience subtle discrimination regarding career development opportunities as evidenced by research on the Glass Ceiling. This paper looks at the ramifications of technology, specifically the Internet, and how it affects women’s career opportunities.