Entre Islam et Occident, le conflit existe. Il est profond. Et il n'a pas débuté le 11 septembre 2001 car - sans remonter aux Croisades - il oppose deux civilisations dont les valeurs, depuis des siècles, ne sont guère compatibles. Les orientalistes qui le nient se bercent d'illusions. Les partisans de Huntington, qui croient à la mission salvatrice de l'Occident, font tout autant fausse route. Situation d'autant plus grave que, depuis la guerre des Six jours, le conflit en question a (...) pris une forme aiguë, caractérisée d'abord par l'essor du mouvement islamiste, puis par celle d'un terrorisme international dont Al-Qaïda n'est qu'un relais parmi d'autres. Face à ces dangers (dont l'Europe aujourd'hui s'obstine à ignorer l'ampleur), la seule stratégie réaliste me semble consister, pour l'Occident, à opposer un front uni à l'islamisme, tout en laissant celui-ci faire la dure expérience de la réalité dans les pays qui souhaitent le porter au pouvoir car s'il peut être vaincu, ce ne sera pas par la force des armes ni par celle de la rhétorique, mais seulement par l'usure du temps. Ne nous y trompons pas : cette stratégie sera malaisée à mettre en œuvre, car elle devra, d'abord, affronter la passion antiaméricaine, antisioniste et tiers-mondiste qui, chez nous, inspire une grande partie de l'opinion actuelle. Autrement dit, cette maladie que Nietzsche, il y a un siècle déjà, baptisait nihilisme - et dans laquelle il percevait, non sans raison, un écho assourdi de l'antisémitisme chrétien. Comme si la vieille Europe, fatiguée d'avoir trop vécu, était désormais proche d'abdiquer les valeurs des lumières sur lesquelles sa propre culture s'était non sans peine édifiée. (shrink)

Seuls les Français qui voyagent régulièrement aux États-Unis savent le prestige qui est, là-bas, celui de Jacques Derrida. Les autres ne peuvent pas vraiment se rendre compte, soit parce qu’ils ignorent l’ampleur de la caisse de résonance que lui a offerte l’Université américaine, soit parce qu’ils partagent l’opinion selon laquelle...

Longtemps, la philosophie de l’histoire fut, dans la tradition européenne, un genre prestigieux. Né, comme la philosophie elle-même, avec Platon, relancé par Machiavel, stimulé par les débats passionnés qui nourrirent à la fin du XVIIe siècle ce qu’on appelle depuis la « querelle des Anciens et des Modernes », ce genre s’était épanoui chez Montesquieu et chez Voltaire. Puis...

Les philosophes, disait Robert Musil, sont des êtres violents qui, faute d'avoir une armée à leur disposition, se soumettent le monde en l'enfermant dans un système. Il peut aussi leur arriver de vouloir atteindre leurs objectifs en devenant les conseillers d'un prince. Ils s'exposent, en ce cas, à de pénibles frustrations, car le prince (" bon " roi ou " méchant " tyran) n'a que faire des conseils d'un naïf philosophe. Si je reviens ici sur les temps forts de cette (...) histoire (Platon et Denys, Descartes et Christine, Voltaire et Frédéric, Heidegger et Hitler, etc.), ce n'est pas pour inviter les philosophes à s'éloigner de la politique. C'est, au contraire, pour tenter d'instituer, entre le pouvoir et la pensée, un véritable dialogue. Encore faut-il, pour que celui-ci soit possible, que soit reconnue la nature paranoïaque de la démarche philosophique. C. D. (shrink)

Il s’agit dans cet article d’analyser le travail de désingularisation relative de l’événement que Ricœur opère par couplage avec le récit dans Temps et récit au début des années 1980, puis la reprise de la question de la singularité et de l’unicité de l’événement dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli dans le cadre théorique recomposé de la représentation historienne mise à l’épreuve de “l’événement aux limites” qu’est la Shoah. Dans Temps et récit Ricœur entend dépasser, par l’entrecroisement entre histoire et fiction (...) appliqué à des événements fondateurs d’identité collective comme la Shoah, l’aporie épistémologique de la dichotomie entre une histoire qui dissout l’événement dans l’explication et une attitude purement émotionnelle face aux événements à intensité éthique considérable. Cette narrativisation de l’événement se heurte cependant à la puissance traumatique de l’extra-textuel radical de l’événement-Shoah qui constitue ainsi un défi pour la représentation historienne du passé. C’est cette question que Ricœur reprend dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, mais cette fois-ci cet examen a été largement reconfiguré par la dialectique de la mémoire et de l’histoire contribuant à la représentation du passé. Tout en distinguant l’incomparabilité absolue au plan moral de la Shoah et l’incomparabilité relative sur le plan historiographique, Ricœur maintient que l’enchevêtrement entre jugement historiographique et jugement moral est inévitable, ouvrant ainsi sur la grande question de la responsabilité sociale, politique et éthique de l’historien. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Globalization arguably generated a governance gap that is being filled by transnational rule-making involving private actors among others. The democratic legitimacy of such new forms of governance beyond nation states is sometimes questioned. Apart from nation-centered democracies, such governance cannot build, for example, on representation and voting procedures to convey legitimacy to the generated rules. Instead, alternative elements of democracy such as deliberation and inclusion require discussion to assess new instruments of governance. The recently published standard ISO 26000 is an (...) interesting example of transnational governance. ISO 26000 was developed in a lengthy multiorganizational process for the purpose of giving guidance on the social responsibility of organizations. By assessing the specific case of ISO 26000, this study sheds light on the question of how legitimacy beyond nation-state democracy is ensured or constricted. Centering on the idea of deliberate democracy and democratic legitimacy, the study offers in-depth insights on the normative legitimacy of the development process of ISO 26000. Positioned on the interface of business studies and public policy, this article contributes to the academic literature on transnational governance and on the role of multistakeholder processes in shaping the role of business in society. (shrink)

We like to think of ourselves, our friends, and our families as decent people. We may not be saints, but we are still honest, relatively kind, and mostly trustworthy. Miller argues here that we are badly mistaken in thinking this. Hundreds of recent studies in psychology tell a different story: that we all have serious character flaws that prevent us from being as good as we think we are - and that we do not even recognize that these flaws exist. (...) But neither are most of us cruel or dishonest. Instead, Miller argues, we are a mixed bag. On the one hand, most of us in a group of bystanders will do nothing as someone cries out for help in an emergency. Yet it is also true that there will be many times when we will selflessly come to the aid of a complete stranger - and resist the urge to lie, cheat, or steal even if we could get away with it. Much depends on cues in our social environment. Miller uses this recent psychological literature to explain what the notion of "character" really means today, and how we can use this new understanding to develop a character better in sync with the kind of people we want to be. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a new semantic framework designed to capture a distinctly cognitive or epistemic notion of meaning akin to Fregean senses. Traditional Carnapian intensions are too coarse-grained for this purpose: they fail to draw semantic distinctions between sentences that, from a Fregean perspective, differ in meaning. This has led some philosophers to introduce more fine-grained hyperintensions that allow us to draw semantic distinctions among co-intensional sentences. But the hyperintensional strategy has a flip-side: it risks drawing semantic distinctions (...) between sentences that, from a Fregean perspective, do not differ in meaning. This is what we call the ‘new problem’ of hyperintensionality to distinguish it from the ‘old problem’ that faced the intensional theory. We show that our semantic framework offers a joint solution to both these problems by virtue of satisfying a version of Frege’s so-called ‘equipollence principle’ for sense individuation. Frege’s principle, we argue, not only captures the semantic intuitions that give rise to the old and the new problem of hyperintensionality, but also points the way to an independently motivated solution to both problems. (shrink)

This paper defends the persistence of the subjective or selfintimating dimension of experience in non-ordinary and pathological states of consciousness such as non-dual awareness, full absorption, drug-induced ego dissolution, and the minimal conscious state. In considering whether non-ordinary and pathological conscious states display any subjective features, we confront a dilemma. Either they do, in which case there needs to be some way of accounting for these features in phenomenal terms, or they do not, in which case there is nothing it (...) is like to be in them. But the dilemma only arises if we assume that opacity rather than phenomenality is a pervasive feature of these non-ordinary states. However, non-ordinary conscious states are deemed phenomenally opaque only by overly restrictive standards of conceivability that: (i) fail to account for the variety of nonordinary and pathological experience in non-arbitrary ways; (ii) sidestep the problem of the attribution and location of mental content (given intelligibility requirements for experience) or relegate them to illusory constructs; (iii) assume an unproblematic appeal to testimonial evidence. I discuss some cases from contemplative traditions and psychopathology and offer some plausible alternative explanations. (shrink)

The present volume collects essays on the philosophical foundations of quantum theories of gravity, such as loop quantum gravity and string theory. Central for philosophical concerns is quantum gravity's suggestion that space and time, or spacetime, may not exist fundamentally, but instead be a derivative entity emerging from non-spatiotemporal degrees of freedom. In the spirit of naturalised metaphysics, contributions to this volume consider the philosophical implications of this suggestion. In turn, philosophical methods and insights are brought to bear on the (...) foundations of quantum gravity itself. For instance, the idea of functionalism, borrowed from the philosophy of mind and discussed by several essays, exemplifies this mutual interaction the collection seeks to foster. (shrink)

The classic programme of conceptual engineering (Cappelen, Herman. 2018. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Eklund, Matti. 2021. “Conceptual Engineering.” In The Routledge Handbook of Social and Political Philosophy of Language, edited by Justin Khoo, and Rachel Sterken, 15–30. London: Routledge) envisages a two-stage ameliorating process. First, we assess ‘F’ and determine what the term should express. Second, we bring it about that ‘F’ expresses what it should express. The second stage gives rise to a (...) practical challenge: the implementation challenge. Engineering advocates need to explain by what means they can implement specific conceptual changes in the natural language shared by a community – a feat Herman Cappelen (2018. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; “Conceptual Engineering: The Master Argument.” In Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics, edited by Alexis Burgess, Herman Cappelen, and David Plunkett, 132–151. Oxford: Oxford University Press) argues to be beyond our understanding and control both on an externalist and on an internalist meta-semantics. I devise a new answer to the implementation challenge. Enlisting the influential theory of social norms by Cristina Bicchieri, I argue that engineering social norms in Bicchieri’s technical sense amounts to an effective, specific, and feasible means to implement specific conceptual change, at least on internalist premises. I also argue that Bicchieri’s social norms are an essential addition to the more familiar conventions and moral norms when it comes to conceptual engineering. (shrink)

No one in philosophy has paid much attention to the virtue of honesty in recent years. Here is a trait for which it is easy to find consensus that it is a virtue, and furthermore, a very important virtue. It also has obvious relevance to what we see going on in contemporary politics, for instance, or in sports, the entertainment world, and education. Yet as far as I can tell, only one article in a philosophy journal has appeared in several (...) decades which discusses this virtue at any length. -/- In this chapter I have two central aims: (i) to sketch some of the conceptual parameters of the virtue of honesty in general, as well as its subordinate virtues, and then (ii) to draw on leading work in psychology to determine, at least in a preliminary way, whether we should think that most people instantiate this virtue or not. (shrink)

Cases involving amoralists who no longer care about the institution of morality, together with cases of depression, listlessness, and exhaustion, have posed trouble in recent years for standard formulations of motivational internalism. In response, though, internalists have been willing to adopt narrower versions of the thesis which restrict it just to the motivational lives of those agents who are said to be in some way normal, practically rational, or virtuous. My goal in this paper is to offer a new set (...) of counterexamples to motivational internalism, examples which are effective both against traditional formulations of the thesis as well as against many of these more recent restricted proposals. (shrink)

Predictive processing, an increasingly popular paradigm in cognitive sciences, has focused primarily on giving accounts of perception, motor control and a host of psychological phenomena, including consciousness. But higher cognitive processes, like conceptual thought, language, and logic, have received only limited attention to date and PP still stands disconnected from a huge body of research in those areas. In this thesis, I aim to address this gap and I attempt to go some way towards developing and defending a cognitive-computational approach (...) to higher cognition within the predictive processing paradigm. To test its explanatory potential, I apply it to a range of linguistic and conceptual phenomena. I proceed in three steps. First, I lay out an account of concepts and suggest how concepts are represented, how they can be context-sensitively processed, and how the apparent diversity of formats arise. Secondly, I propose how paradigmatic higher cognitive competencies, like language and logical reasoning, could fit into the PP picture. Thirdly, I apply the PP account of concepts and language to a range of linguistic-conceptual phenomena as test cases, namely: metaphor, the semantic paradox (specifically the Liar Paradox) and copredication. Finally, I discuss some challenges and objections to the PP framework as applied to higher cognition and in general. (shrink)

In this article, I revisit Leibniz's early views on physical causation, more specifically, his relation to physical occasionalism focusing on the period from 1668 to 1676. An in-depth analysis of the Confession of Nature against the Atheists taken together with the Catholic Demonstrations, Leibniz's correspondence with Jakob Thomasius from 1668/69, and the Pacidius Philalethi (1676) serve as evidence that his position leads to physical occasionalism. This receives further confirmation by taking into account Leibniz's familiarity with Weigel's occasionalism in contrast to (...) Leibniz's later encounter of French occasionalism à la Cordemoy, La Forge, or Malebranche. Leibniz's exposure to Weigel's occasionalism, in turn, helps us better understand Leibniz's later critical reaction to occasionalism and how occasionalism helped him develop his own distinct views on causation as expressed in his mature philosophy. (shrink)

Expertise is often ascribed to persons who are considered exceptionally competent in a particular subject matter. In contrast to this traditional approach, the present paper introduces a contextual understanding of expertise ascriptions. More precisely, this paper introduces two different kinds of contextuality by advancing and advocating the thesis that expertise ascriptions are true if and only if their content within their context of use is true against standards in the context of assessment. This means that expertise ascriptions have indexical content (...) and are also assessment-sensitive. On this basis, a definition of expertise will be developed which outlines a series of conditions for what it takes to be an expert. (shrink)

We introduce a game for Gödel logic where the players’ interaction stepwise reduces claims about the relative order of truth degrees of complex formulas to atomic truth comparison claims. Using the concept of disjunctive game states this semantic game is lifted to a provability game, where winning strategies correspond to proofs in a sequents-of-relations calculus.

We treat the problem of reasoning with ambiguous propositions. Even though ambiguity is obviously problematic for reasoning, it is no less obvious that ambiguous propositions entail other propositions, and are entailed by other propositions. This article gives a formal analysis of the underlying mechanisms, both from an algebraic and a logical point of view. The main result can be summarized as follows: sound reasoning with ambiguity requires a distinction between equivalence on the one and congruence on the other side: the (...) fact that \ entails \ does not imply \ can be substituted for \ in all contexts preserving truth. Without this distinction, we will always run into paradoxical results. We present the sequent calculus \, which we conjecture implements sound and complete propositional reasoning with ambiguity, and provide it with a language-theoretic semantics, where letters represent unambiguous meanings and concatenation represents ambiguity. (shrink)

The focus of this special issue is on moral psychology and the goals of moral education. My focus will be considerably narrower in addressing the following question: In light of the situationist movement in psychology and philosophy, what should be the goal(s) of character education? The main conclusion will be that the central goal of character education should be modified in a certain way to make it more empirically informed. But not to worry, as this modification should be amenable to (...) most contemporary supporters of character education. (shrink)

This article presents an edited excerpt from a hitherto unknown fragmentary treatise by Rush Rhees. In the treatise, Rhees gives his account of the problem of continuity that he had started elaborating before he became acquainted with Wittgenstein. The excerpt, which contains Rhees' original distinction between outer and inner surfaces of bodies, builds on Brentano's theory of the continuum and his doctrine of plerosis. This treatment of continuity sheds light on Rhees' early philosophical development and confirms that even though he (...) and Wittgenstein discussed the problem of continuity, Rhees' own approach remained distinct from that of Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to be impacting all industry sectors, while becoming a motor for innovation. The diffusion of AI from the civilian sector to the defense sector, and AI’s dual-use potential has drawn attention from security and ethics scholars. With the publication of the ethical guideline Trustworthy AI by the European Union (EU), normative questions on the application of AI have been further evaluated. In order to draw conclusions on Trustworthy AI as a point of reference for responsible research (...) and development (R&D), we approach the diffusion of AI across both civilian and military spheres in the EU. We capture the extent of technological diffusion and derive European and German patent citation networks. Both networks indicate a low degree of diffusion of AI between civilian and defense sectors. A qualitative investigation of project descriptions of a research institute’s work in both civilian and military fields shows that military AI applications stress accuracy or robustness, while civilian AI reflects a focus on human-centric values. Our work represents a first approach by linking processes of technology diffusion with normative evaluations of R&D. (shrink)

Philosophers have inherited a familiar taxonomy of character types from Aristotle. We are all acquainted with the labels of the virtuous, vicious, continent, and incontinent person. The goal of this paper is to argue that we should jettison this framework. The main reason is that psychological research in the past fifty years has suggested a much more complex picture of moral character than what can be usefully captured by these four categories. In its place, I will suggest a better taxonomy (...) that makes use of the idea of what I call mixed character. (shrink)

Most approaches to quantum gravity suggest that relativistic spacetime is not fundamental, but instead emerges from some non-spatiotemporal structure. This paper investigates the implications of this suggestion for the possibility of time travel in the sense of the existence of closed timelike curves in some relativistic spacetimes. In short, will quantum gravity reverse or strengthen general relativity’s verdict that time travel is possible?

Standard Kripke-Putnam semantics is widely taken to entail that theoretical identifications like ‘Brontosauruses are Apatosauruses’ or ‘Gold is 79Au’ are necessary, if true. I offer a new diagnosis as to why this modal consequence ensues. Central to my diagnosis is the concept of a paradigm term. I argue that modal and epistemic peculiarities that are commonly considered as distinctive of natural kind expressions are in fact traits that are shared by paradigm terms in general. Philosophical semantics should broaden its focus (...) from natural kind expressions to paradigm terms. (shrink)

Cette étude formule l'hypothèse critique d'une opération de remythologisation par une réactualisation théologico-politique de la tragédie chez Heidegger. Cette opération ne saurait simplement coïncider avec une revalorisation " irrationnelle " du mythe, car elle procède d'abord d'une mise en question, non moins problématique, de la dualité supposée entre muthos et logos pour culminer dans ce qu'une note des années 1950 appellera la " mytho-logie de l'événement ". La réélaboration de la notion de mythe s'accomplit à partir du poème de Hölderlin (...) qui doit préfigurer les dieux de l'" autre commencement " post-judéo-chrétien, selon le projet spéculatif d'une " religion " censée relier le peuple à ses dieux nouveaux via l'être comme événement. L'hypothèse d'une remythologisation théologico-politique doit ainsi permettre d'éclairer non seulement le rôle matriciel de Hölderlin pour la pensée de l'être, mais aussi le surinvestissement illusoire du national-socialisme censé donner lieu au " peuple de Hölderlin ". Pour interroger cette réactualisation théologico-politique du mythe, l'étude se concentre sur les cours que Heidegger consacra à Hölderlin, tout en sollicitant l'intégralité du corpus des années 1933-1945, c'est-à-dire les cours fribourgeois, les traités inédits rédigés dans le sillage des Contributions (Beiträge) et les Cahiers noirs (Schwarze Hefte). (shrink)

In this essay I to do three things. First, I discuss a statement from the Tractatus which says that our free will consists in our ignorance of future actions: “The freedom of the will consists in the impossibility of knowing actions that still lie in the future. We could know them only if causality were an inner necessity like that of logical inference.” (5.1362) I think this statement might well be inspired by a claim Moore made in connection with free (...) will in his 1912 book Ethics: “We can hardly ever know for certain beforehand, which choice we actually shall make”. But I think Moore’s claim in favor of free will is not convincing. Second, I discuss a question raised in Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein asks what remains if we “subtract” the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm, and he adds in brackets: “Are the kinaesthetic sensations my willing?” (621) This added reflection is a reaction to ideas put forward by William James. Wittgenstein opposes these ideas. He argues that we should not think of the will as a cause at all, kinaesthetic or not, but rather as something embedded in, and constituted by, certain contexts of learning, expectation, practice, and lack of surprise. This is a strong claim. He also returns to the question about the predictability of the future: “When people talk about the possibility of foreknowledge of the future they always forget the fact of the prediction of one’s own voluntary movements” (629). The question is whether Wittgenstein has solved, or dissolved, the problem of free will. Some think that this is the case. I doubt it is. This is the third point I wish to discuss. (shrink)

This Element provides an overview of some of the central issues in contemporary moral psychology. It explores what moral psychology is, whether we are always motivated by self-interest, what good character looks like and whether anyone has it, whether moral judgments always motivate us to act, whether what motivates action is always a desire of some kind, and what the role is of reasoning and deliberation in moral judgment and action. This Element is aimed at a general audience including undergraduate (...) students without an extensive background in philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I will introduce a practical explication for the notion of expertise. At first, I motivate this attempt by taking a look on recent debates which display great disagreement about whether and how to define expertise in the first place. After that I will introduce the methodology of practical explications in the spirit of Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the state of nature along with some conditions of adequacy taken from ordinary and scientific language. This eventually culminates in the (...) respective explication of expertise according to which this term essentially refers to a certain kind of service-relation. This is why expertise should be considered as a predominantly social kind. This article will end up with a discussion of advantages and prima facie plausible objections against my account of expertise. (shrink)

The turn of the century saw a significant increase in the amount of attention being paid by philosophers to empirical issues about moral character. Dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle in the West, and Confucius in the East, philosophers have traditionally drawn on empirical data to some extent in their theorizing about character. One of the main differences in recent years has been the source of this empirical data, namely the work of social and personality psychologists on morally (...) relevant thought and action. -/- This entry briefly examines four recent empirical approaches to moral character. It will draw on the psychology literature where appropriate, but the main focus will be on the significance of that work for philosophers interested in better understanding moral character. The four areas are situationism, the CAPS model, the Big Five model, and the VIA. The remainder of this entry devotes a section to each of them. (shrink)

BackgroundAt the start of 2021, oncologists lacked the necessary scientific knowledge to adapt their clinical practices optimally when faced with cancer patients refusing or reluctant to be vaccinated against COVID-19, despite the marked vulnerability of these patients to severe, and even fatal forms of this new viral infectious disease. Oncologists at Foch Hospital were confronted with this phenomenon, which was observed worldwide, in both the general population and the population of cancer patients.MethodsBetween April and November 2021, the Ethics and Oncology (...) Departments of Foch Hospital decided to investigate this subject, through an empirical and interdisciplinary study in bioethics. Our scientific objective was to try to identify and resolve the principal bio-ethical issues, with a view to improving clinical practices in oncology during future major pandemics of this kind, from a highly specific bio-ethical standpoint. We used a mainly qualitative methodological approach based on questionnaires and interviews.ResultsIn April 2021, 29 cancer patients refused or were reluctant to be vaccinated. Seventeen of these patients said that making vaccination mandatory would have helped them to accept vaccination. In October 2021, only 10 cancer patients continued to maintain their refusal. One of the main reasons for the decrease in refusals was probably the introduction of the “pass sanitaire” in July 2021, which rendered vaccination indispensable for many activities. However, even this was not sufficient to convince these 10 cancer patients.ConclusionWe identified a key bio-ethical issue, which we then tried to resolve: vaccination policy. We characterized a major tension between “the recommendation of anti-COVID-19 vaccination” and “free will”, and the duty to “protect each other”. Mandatory vaccination, at least in France, could resolve this tension, with positive effects on quality of life, or survival, in cancer patients initially refusing or reluctant to be vaccinated, but only if collective and individual scales are clearly distinguished. (shrink)

Autistic individuals are commonly said – and also consider themselves – to be excessively literalist, in the sense that they tend to prefer literal interpretations of words and utterances. This literalist bias seems to be fairly specific to autism and still lacks a convincing explanation. In this paper we explore a novel hypothesis that has the potential to account for the literalist bias in autism. We argue that literalism results from an atypical functioning of the predictive system: specifically, an atypical (...) balance between predictions and error signals in language processing may make individuals more uncertain about their own predictions. Such uncertainty is then often resolved by resorting to the safest interpretation, that is, the literal one. We start by reviewing existing explanations of other autistic traits that appeal to predictive processing. We then apply these insights to language, by showing that predictions play a key role in everyday comprehension and that a low level of confidence in one’s own predictions is likely to escalate comprehension difficulties. Finally, we take a deeper look at non-literal uses of language by discussing the case of metaphors, to illustrate how a predictive processing account offers a promising explanation of the literalist bias in autism. (shrink)

In the framework of his transcendental philosophy, Kant strictly separates morality from aesthetics. The pleasure in the good and the pleasure in the beautiful are two different kinds of pleasure (Arten des Wohlgefallens). As a consequence, a moral act as such cannot be beautiful. It is only in a second step that Kant indicates possible connections, in his comments on aesthetic ideas, symbolism, the sensus communis, and education in general. In Confucius on the other hand we do not find such (...) a radical separation between beauty and morality. Ritual is a source of both. Moral acts can be beautiful. One might wonder whether Confucius missed a point, or whether Kant overdid the separation. Or is it that their conceptions are so fundamentally different that they cannot easily be translated and identified across different philosophical traditions? (shrink)

Este trabajo despliega la pertenencia “específica” o “más propia” de ciertas maneras del ser (p.e. existencia, ser-a-la-mano) a ciertos entes, tema que Heidegger menciona, pero no profundiza. La exposición se articula en cuatro pasos. Primero, se aclara la confusa con-ceptualidad de las maneras del ser. Segundo, se indaga el vínculo entre las maneras del ser y los entes, considerando a ambos como fenómenos y mostrando en ello la imposibilidad de captar este vínculo y la consecuente pertenencia específica según un “subjetivismo” (...) u “objetivismo”. Tercero, se acredita la propuesta principal de esta investigación, a saber, el rasgo fenoménico, ni subjetivo ni objetivo, de la pertenencia específica de las maneras del ser a los entes y la posibilidad de su modificabilidad. Cuarto, se aborda el existir preteoré-tico del Dasein en cuanto el suelo analítico en que se explicita hermenéutico-fenomenológicamente la pertenencia específica y su modificabilidad. (shrink)

This essay is about Wittgenstein, first about his views on ethics, second about his conception of language games. Third, it combines the two and shows how problems arise from this. Wittgenstein rejects theories of ethics and emphasises the variety of language games. Such language games are marked by what I call “inner relativity”. Wittgenstein himself was not a relativist, but it seems to me his views easily lead to what I call “outer relativism”. In matters of ethics this is particularly (...) problematic. (shrink)

Integrity, honesty, and truth seeking are important virtues that most people care about and want to see promoted in society. Yet surprisingly, there has been relatively little work among scholars today aimed at helping us better understand this cluster of virtues related to truth. This volume incorporates the insights and perspectives of experts working in a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, law, communication and rhetorical studies, theology, psychology, history, and education. For each virtue, there is a conceptual chapter, an application (...) chapter, and a developmental chapter. The resulting volume significantly deepens our knowledge about and appreciation for these central virtues. (shrink)

In this essay I point out parallels between Kant’s theory of aesthetics and Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule following. Although Wittgenstein did not write an aesthetics and Kant did not discuss Wittgensteinian rule-following problems, and although both Kant and Wittgenstein begin at very different starting points and use different methods, they end up dealing with similar issues, namely issues about rules, particularity, exemplarity, objectivity, practice, and as-if statements.

In the preface to On Certainty Anscombe and von Wright say that in 1949 Malcolm suggested to Wittgenstein to think again about Moore’s “Defense of Common Sense” (1925) and “Proof of an External World” (1939). Malcolm himself had written on the issue in “Defending Common Sense” (1949). In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein quotes Nestroy saying that there is usually very little progress in philosophy. But I think some progress has been made from Moore and Malcolm to Wittgenstein (...) regarding skepticism. There is more awareness of practice and perspective and this opens the discussion in novel ways. But it also gives rise to new problems, in particular of morality and relativity. (shrink)