David Chalmers claims that the logical possibility of ‘zombie worlds’ — worlds physically indiscernible from the actual world, but that lack consciousness — reveal that consciousness is a distinct fact, or property, in addition to the physical facts or properties.The ‘existence’ or possibility of Zombie worlds violates the physicalist demand that consciousness logically supervene upon the physical. On the assumption that the logical supervenience of consciousness upon the physical is, indeed, a necessary entailment of physicalism, the existence of zombie worlds (...) implies the falsity of physicalism. How do we determine the logical possibility of zombie worlds? By conceptual analysis of the concepts involved, keeping empirical facts in mind. (shrink)

In this paper I shall outline the approach to consciousness adopted by ethnomethodology and its `associate'conversation analysis. I shall attempt to do this by taking a minimalist stance, namely a basic formulation of the elements of these approaches, trying to strip away the ornate superstructures which have been erected upon that basis. I shall proceed in two ways. First, I shall seek to define ethnomethodology and conversation analysis by contrasting them to varying degrees with a variety of other approaches: symbolic (...) interactionism and, derivatively, the work of Goffman, the -social psychology of Rom Harre and his associates and with Norbert Wiley. Secondly, I shall give some examples of the use of the notion of `self'held by ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts that take a definitive turn towards a non-ironic, non-mentalist, non-essentialist and non-cognitivist approach to knowledge, consciousness and self. (shrink)

It is widely held that every person is a person essentially, where being a person is having special mental properties such as intelligence and self-consciousness. It follows that nothing can acquire or lose these properties. The paper argues that this rules out all familiar psychological-continuity views of personal identity over time. It also faces grave difficulties in accounting for the mental powers of human beings who are not intelligent and self-conscious, such as foetuses and those with dementia.

A great deal of effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to developing consciousness artificially (A small selection of the many authors writing in this area includes: Cotterill (J Conscious Stud 2:290–311, 1995 , 1998 ), Haikonen ( 2003 ), Aleksander and Dunmall (J Conscious Stud 10:7–18, 2003 ), Sloman ( 2004 , 2005 ), Aleksander ( 2005 ), Holland and Knight ( 2006 ), and Chella and Manzotti ( 2007 )), and yet a similar amount of (...) effort has gone in to demonstrating the infeasibility of the whole enterprise (Most notably: Dreyfus ( 1972/1979 , 1992 , 1998 ), Searle ( 1980 ), Harnad (J Conscious Stud 10:67–75, 2003 ), and Sternberg ( 2007 ), but there are a great many others). My concern in this paper is to steer some navigable channel between the two positions, laying out the necessary pre-conditions for consciousness in an artificial system, and concentrating on what needs to hold for the system to perform as a human being or other phenomenally conscious agent in an intersubjectively-demanding social and moral environment. By adopting a thick notion of embodiment—one that is bound up with the concepts of the lived body and autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980 ; Varela et al. 2003 ; and Ziemke 2003 , 2007a , J Conscious Stud 14(7):167–179, 2007b )—I will argue that machine phenomenology is only possible within an embodied distributed system that possesses a richly affective musculature and a nervous system such that it can, through action and repetition, develop its tactile-kinaesthetic memory, individual kinaesthetic melodies pertaining to habitual practices, and an anticipatory enactive kinaesthetic imagination. Without these capacities the system would remain unconscious, unaware of itself embodied within a world. Finally, and following on from Damasio’s ( 1991 , 1994 , 1999 , 2003 ) claims for the necessity of pre-reflective conscious, emotional, bodily responses for the development of an organism’s core and extended consciousness, I will argue that without these capacities any agent would be incapable of developing the sorts of somatic markers or saliency tags that enable affective reactions, and which are indispensable for effective decision-making and subsequent survival. My position, as presented here, remains agnostic about whether or not the creation of artificial consciousness is an attainable goal. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What is Consciousness and What Does it ‘Feel Like’? Literary Experience and the Creating of Consciousness Consciousness, Literary Experience and Education Note References.

For any given society, its particular technology of communication has far-reaching consequences, not merely as regards social organization, but on the epistemic level as well. Plato's name-theory of meaning represents the transition from the age of primary orality to that of literacy; Wittgenstein's use-theory of meaning stands for the transition from the age of literacy to that of a second orality (audiovisual communication, electronic information processing). On the basis of a use-theory of meaning the problem of machine consciousness, to which (...) the later Wittgenstein again and again returned, is capable of a non-essentialist solution: appropriate changes in our form of life might well entail a radically different psychological language-game. (shrink)

THERE are two conflicting motives in Husserlian phenomenology, one of which leads, in my view, to a more genuinely transcendental philosophy. According to one of its original programs, phenomenology was to be a descriptive science of essences and essential structures of various regions of phenomena and also of the empty region of object in general. The concern with meanings, as contradistinguished from essences, is equally original; it pervades the Prolegomena and the first three of the logical investigations and, of course, (...) the first volume of the Ideas. But the specifically phenomenological enterprise of clarification of meanings—and this is the second of the two motives-slowly moves to the forefront, for a while overshadowed by the essentialism of the beginning, but later on freed from it and reasserting its primacy as the philosophical activity par excellence. The concern with essences affiliates phenomenology to the classical rationalistic tradition, while the concern with meanings brings it closer to the empiricistic tradition. If in the former enterprise phenomenology appears to be an essentialism of Aristotelian sort, in the latter, Hume remains its acknowledged precursor. One of my contentions, which I will try to substantiate in the following pages, is that the peculiarly Husserlian sort of transcendental phenomenology develops out of the second concern rather than from the first. This rather broad claim needs to be qualified in various ways, which I will be doing as we proceed. For the present, I may perhaps add this much: there is a conception of transcendental subjectivity which can be reached only through an eidetic phenomenology of essences: on such a theory, transcendental subjectivity is the essence of empirical consciousness, transcendental ego is the essence of the empirical ego. But this is not exactly Husserl’s conception of ‘transcendental'. The transcendental according to Husserl is not the essence of the empirical, but the domain in which the meanings constituting the empirical have their origin. However, I should add that these two points of view are intertwined, in Husserl’s thought, in such a strange manner that my efforts to separate them may seem futile. They influence each other: there are, as a matter of fact, two conceptions of essence in Husserl, one of which is, in my view, closer than the other one to the specifically Husserlian conception of transcendental subjectivity. So also in the theory of meaning, the early essentialism did cast its shadow, but as soon as it is freed from essentialism it lays the foundation of a more truly phenomenological transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

A rejection of the notion of substance, an emphasis on intraworldly experience and an incorporation of ideas from modern biology are just three of the distinctive features of Alfred North Whitehead’s process metaphysics or philosophy of organism. The last two features give his scheme a heavily naturalistic tinge, despite his positing of eternal objects or universal forms of definiteness, which - together with subjective aims or final causes - are instantiated in a divinity prior to worldly realization.1 Such a naturalism (...) might seem to preclude largely a comparison with the work of Jacques Derrida, with other differences between the two being left aside. Derrida began his career as a student of phenomenology and structuralism, and by far the greater number of his philosophical writings has been devoted to thinkers who are explicitly post-Kantian. Yet this does not mean that he is a transcendental philosopher who abandons experience and the empirical world in favour of language and consciousness. In this paper I argue that Derrida’s work - which has been shown to be heavily informed by systems theory and evolutionary biology - is not in fact shut off from the extra-conscious and extra-linguistic dimensions of actuality. I also suggest that his deconstructive approach is strikingly similar to Whitehead’s in rejecting essentialism, namely, the idea of fixed and determined essences that underlie accidental properties and changes. From a Derridean perspective, one might even see Whitehead’s alternative as insufficiently radical, since it seems to posit not just eternal objects and God, but a cosmology in which the most fundamental beings or “actual entities” undergo no essential changes or mutations in their respective histories. It is arguable, however, that the latter conclusion would only be consequent on a restrictive interpretation of the pathways of process possible in Whitehead’s metaphysics.. (shrink)

It is argued that consciousness studies suffer from a Problem of Essentialism. In response, it is proposed that definitions of consciousness be treated as stipulative definitions. Some example definitions and their relevance for scientific inquiry are discussed.

Danto inicia su filosofía de la historia del arte con un núcleo problemático que inaugura el modernismo: una obra de arte llega a ser indiscernible de una mera cosa, en la medida en que es el resultado lógico de la narrativa de un cierto periodo. Hablar sobre el fin del arte es hablar de las razones que sustentan esa narración y de la posibilidad de su culminación. Se propone una crítica, a partir de la relación entre esencialismo, historicismo y pluralismo, (...) para examinar su controversial tesis sobre la clausura histórica del arte por agotamiento de su impulso cognitivo. Danto begins his philosophy of the history of art with the problematic issue that characterizes modernism: a work of art becomes indiscernible from a mere thing insofar as it is the logical result of the narrative of a certain period. To speak of the end of art is to speak of the reasons that support such narrative and the possibility of its culmination. The article proposes a critique on the basis of the relation among essentialism, historicism, and pluralism, in order to examine Danto's controversial thesis regarding the historical end of art due to the exhaustion of its cognitive impulse. (shrink)

“It may be thought that I am prejudiced. Perhaps I am. I would be ashamed of myself if I were not.” 1 When Mark Twain undertook correspondence for San Francisco’s Alta California on a $1250 trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 he had an established reputation as a humorist and was on the cusp of making the transition from journalist to author. Innocents Abroad, “an unvarnished tale” 2 published in 1869 and sewn together with questionable regard for (...) coherence or thematic consistency, sold thirty-one thousand copies in one year. Only Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done better, as Twain himself noted. What made his work such a success? “This book is the record of a pleasure trip” , Twain declared, yet there had already been innumerable pleasure trips and by more established authors than he. The multiplicity and seemingly contradictory narrative stances in Innocents makes any essentialist reading hard to establish and what one stance purports is as likely and easy to prove as any other. In the main though, two bodies of criticism have prevailed hitherto, one seeing the text as flawed by internal discontinuities, the other perceiving that disjointed narration need not preclude a unified authorial consciousness. It is my contention that Twain most likely wrote with at least five entirely separate purposes in mind, none of which coexisted simultaneously: i. The profit, reputation and contractual fulfilment to be had in writing c. 1500 words to newspapers daily. ii. The demonstrable acquisition of high society vocabulary and cultural regard commended by Mrs. Fairbanks and Olivia Langdom. iii. An arrant attack upon Presbyterianism. iv. A break with the codified genre of travel writing. v. The promotion of Twain as healer of a wounded nation. Point v) has gone largely neglected by critics. Yet Twain’s role as a unifier in post Civil-War society, as projector of national identity abroad for the benefit of domestic patriotism, and as healer of war-torn America is a cornerstone to our understanding Innocents. As shall be seen, shades of mental/national injury coexist in the text, alongside a humorous denigration of foreigners. The resultant implied superiority of America and Americans, notwithstanding Twain’s passing jabs at them and in spite of their bloody internecine conflict, is what I term “imperial therapy.”. (shrink)

The paper proposes to integrate literary studies in consciousness research to develop a strong ethical and existential dimension in the field. More specifically, it considers the value of fictional narrative for developing concepts of selfhood and personal identity that cohere with the reductionist explanations of human consciousness and self in modern empirical consciousness research. My central claim is that looking to the literary representations of human consciousness and existence that reject or are free from conventional essentialist ideas of self, agency, (...) and anthropocentrism can help 'normalize' the reductionist scientific descriptions of humans and reduce their psychologically and socio-culturally disruptive impact. The paper uses Virginia Woolf's The Waves as an example, showing how the novel's non-anthropocentric and non-essentialist conceptions of self and consciousness overlap with materialist theories in neuroscience and -philosophy but present these in a distinctive narrative framework and poetic terms that bring out the inherent emancipatory potential of the materialist explanation of human existence and offer the reader the possibility of relating to these experientially and emotionally. (shrink)

Anti-materialist thought experiments as, e.g., zombie arguments, have posed some of the most vexing problems for materialist accounts of phenomenal consciousness. I doubt, however, that arguments of this kind can refute the core thesis of materialism. Although I do not question that there is something very special about an adequate explanation of phenomenal consciousness, and although I accept the epistemic irreducibility of phenomenal consciousness, I deny that modal arguments reach far enough to establish essentialism about consciousness. I will draw (...) upon a relativistic conception of modal space and suggest to strictly separate between varieties of metaphysical possibility - depending on which world is considered as actual, and depending on accessibility relations. It is shown that the modal argument cannot endanger the reductive explanation of the mind-brain relation if one distinguishes carefully between possibility according to primary intensions and possibility according to secondary intensions . Modal arguments are strong enough to make an epistemological point but not an ontological one. (shrink)

Moody is right that the doctrine of conscious inessentialism is false. Unfortunately, his zombie-based argument against , once made sufficiently clear to evaluate, is revealed as nothing but legerdemain. The fact is -- though Moody has convinced himself otherwise -- certain zombies are impenetrable: that they are zombies, and not conscious beings like us, is something beyond the capacity of humans to divine.

In a context in which there is manifest multiplicity in women’s daily lives, feminists have struggled to identify what it uniquely means to be a woman, without falling prey to charges of essentialism. Conscious, however, of the role which collective gender identity plays in providing coherence and motivation to feminist activity, a number of theorists have sought to find a way to retain group cohesion in the face of internal diversity. In this article, the merits and demerits of (...) pre-existing attempts in this regard will be discussed. Having done so, an alternative approach, which builds on Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family resemblances’, will be put forward and defended. (shrink)

This essay considers how the JRE has engaged Catholic ethics in the last 50 years and how the concerns of Catholic ethics during this period of exceptional change are reflected and developed in the JRE. It discusses the transformation of Catholic ethics by focusing on the transitions: (i) from classical to historical consciousness; (ii) from an essentialist concept of human nature to a dynamic concept of the moral subject; (iii) from abstract to contextual moral reason; and (iv) from a discourse (...) that ignored the politics of power to one that reckons with it, analyzing the distinct ways in which the JRE engaged with these transformations. It concludes by looking to the future and suggests that a deeper engagement with the breadth of Catholic ethics internationally may help advance the Journal's mission and that a fuller interaction with the comparative and humanistic dimensions of the JRE's mission will enhance Catholic ethics. (shrink)

Science and its philosophical companion, Naturalism, represent reality in wholly nonpersonal terms. How, if at all, can a nonpersonal scheme accommodate the first-person perspective that we all enjoy? In this volume, Lynne Rudder Baker explores that question by considering both reductive and eliminative approaches to the first-person perspective. After finding both approaches wanting, she mounts an original constructive argument to show that a non-Cartesian first-person perspective belongs in the basic inventory of what exists. That is, the world that contains us (...) persons is irreducibly personal.After arguing for the irreducibilty and ineliminability of the first-person perspective, Baker develops a theory of this perspective. The first-person perspective has two stages, rudimentary and robust. Human infants and nonhuman animals with consciousness and intentionality have rudimentary first-person perspectives. In learning a language, a person acquires a robust first-person perspective: the capacity to conceive of oneself as oneself, in the first person. By developing an account of personal identity, Baker argues that her theory is coherent, and she shows various ways in which first-person perspectives contribute to reality. (shrink)

This chapter explores perspectivism in the American Pragmatist tradition. On the one hand, the thematization of perspectivism in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science can benefit from resources in the American Pragmatist philosophical tradition. On the other hand, the Pragmatists have interesting and innovative, pluralistic views that can be illuminated through the lens of perspectivism. I pursue this inquiry primarily through examining relevant sources from the Pragmatist tradition. I will illustrate productive engagements between pragmatism and perspectivism in three areas: in (...) the pragmatists’ fallibilistic theories of inquiry and truth, in their pluralistic metaphysics, and in their views on cultural pluralism. While there are some potential sticking points between pragmatism and perspectivism, particularly around the visual metaphor of perspective, these philosophical approaches nonetheless have much to learn from each other. Perspectivism is in danger of falling between the horns of pernicious relativism and a platitudinous view of the limits of human perception and cognition. The pragmatists accounts of truth and reality open the possibility of a more thoroughgoing perspectivism. I will follow this thread through Charles S. Peirce’s, William James’, and John Dewey’s theories of inquiry and truth, Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics, James’ radical pluralism, Dewey’s cultural naturalism, Richard Rorty’s anti-essentialism, Jane Addams’ standpoint epistemology, W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of race consciousness, Horace Kallen’s and Alain LeRoy Locke’s cultural pluralism, and Mary Parker Follett’s account of pluralistic integration. (shrink)

Recent discussions of “German Idealism ” have laid new emphasis on its central concern with the self-determining or “unconditioned” status of self-consciousness, its critique of “reflective” or “foundationalist” epistemologies and metaphysics, and its account of “Reason” or conceptuality as immanent in all human experience and social life. This article contends that this revaluation throws new light upon Karl Marx’s 1841 doctoral dissertation on ancient Greek atomism. It argues that Marx’s interest in comparing the atomistic theories of Democritus and Epicurus lies (...) in their being historical species of reflective or “essentialist” thinking that attempts to identify an underlying “principle” behind or “beyond” sensible “appearance.” Epicurus is accorded praise by Marx on account of his clear awareness of the necessary contradiction at the heart of any such structure, and his oblique demonstration of its internal link with the individualism and alienation of the post-Hellenic world. Intimately related themes are then shown to animate the rhetorical declarations against religion, in the name of “Reason” and “Self-consciousness”, that frame the dissertation. The precise manner in which Marx formulates this opposition, it is argued, indicate a closer and more conscious affinity with the original project of post-Kantian Idealism than has hitherto been appreciated. While Marx is sure to have intended more than a simple recycling of this tradition, it is suggested that a greater sensitivity to its role in shaping his outlook will prove suggestive—if not conclusive—for thinking about where he means to take it. (shrink)

Enlightenment values are built around the presumption of an independent rational self, citizen, consumer and pursuer of self-interest. Even the authoritarian and communitarian variants of the Enlightenment presumed the existence of autonomous individuals, simply arguing for greater weight to be given to their collective interests. Since Hume, however, radical Enlightenment empiricists have called into question the existence of a discrete, persistent self. Today neuroscientific reductionism has contributed to the rejection of an essentialist model of personal identity. Contemporary transhumanism has yet (...) to grapple with the radical consequences of the erosion of liberal individualism on their projects of individually chosen enhancement and longevity. Most transhumanists still reflect an essentialist idea of personal identity, even as they embrace projects of radical cognitive enhancement that would change every constituent element of consciousness. Transhumanists need to grapple with how their projects and ethics would change if personal identity is an arbitrary, malleable fiction. (shrink)

Some recent surveys of the modern philosophical debate over the existence of non-conceptual perceptual content have concluded that the distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual representations is largely terminological. To remedy this terminological impasse, Robert Hanna and Monima Chadha claim that non-conceptualists must defend an essentialist view of non-conceptual content, according to which perceptual states have representational content whose structure and psychological function are necessarily distinct from that of conceptual states. Hanna and Chadha additionally suggest that non-conceptualists should go “back to (...) Kant” to find the most defensible version of an essentialist content non-conceptualism. I propose instead that non-conceptualists go back even further to the seventh-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti, so that they may not only find historical precedent for an essentialist content view, but also some better arguments in its favor. This essay reconstructs Dharmakīrti's essentialist non-conceptualism about the contents of conscious sensory representations and the refined theory of conceptualization that it presupposes. In particular, I examine his arguments from the proprietary phenomenology of sensory experience, the cognitive encapsulation of sensory processing, as well as the iconic format of sensory representations, and assess the strength of these arguments relative to their modern counterparts. (shrink)

Introduction. The book is a study in Adam Smith's system of ideas; its aim is to reconstruct the peculiar framework that Adam Smith’s work provided for the shaping of a semi-autonomous new discipline, political economy; the approach adopted lies somewhere in-between the history of ideas and the history of economic analysis. My two claims are: i) The Wealth of Nations has a twofold structure, including a `natural history' of opulence and an `imaginary machine' of wealth. The imaginary machine is a (...) kind of Newtonian theory, whose connecting links are principles; provided either by `partial' characteristics of human nature or by analoga of physical mechanisms transferred to the social world; ii) a domain of the economic, understood as a self-standing social sub-system, was discovered first by Adam Smith. His `discovery' of the new continent of the economic was an `unintended result' of a deviation in his voyage to the never-found archipelago of natural jurisprudence. -/- 1. Imaginary machines and invisible chains: natural philosophy and method. The first chapter reconstructs Smith's views on the method in natural philosophy, presented primarily in the History of Astronomy (HA). The peculiar kind of semi-sceptical Newtonianism which permeates the essay is highlighted. Its reconstruction of the history of one natural science is shown to be based on the assumptions of Hume’s epistemology, and to lead to a self-aware deadlock. Smith's dilemma is between an essentialist realism and sceptical instrumentalism; the Cartesian presuppositions he shares with Hume and with the 18th century as a whole make it impossible for him to overcome his dilemma. The following chapters will show how, on the one hand, Smith's skeptical methodology encourages him in the enterprise to `carve off' a new self-contained discipline and how, on the other hand, his epistemological dilemma is reflected in the inner tensions of his moral and political theory as well as in a number of basic oscillations concerning the status of the new discipline. -/- 2. Chessboards and clocks: moral philosophy and method. -/- The second chapter reconstructs Smith's views on the method in the parallel field of moral philosophy, including the theory of moral sentiments and natural jurisprudence. I argue that The Theory of Moral Sentiments, when considered together with with the Lectures on Jurisprudence, where Smith's peculiar version of a `weaker' form of natural law is presented, wins special interest, not only for the history of ethics but even more for the history of political theory and the social sciences. The two most striking features of Smith's work in this area are highlighted. First, his effort at reformulating the `practical science' is a methodologically self-aware attempt at applying the Newtonian method to moral subjects. Secondly, this attempt ends in a stalemate as two distinguished kinds of normative order are introduced: one ultimate order of Reason, ultimately justifiable but inaccessible, and one weaker order of our `natural sentiments', to which we have empirical access, but which is so variable as to lack any ultimate value as a basis for grounding our normative claims. These two parallel conundrums may arguably account for the author's inability to publish during his lifetime both The History of Astronomy and the projected history and theory of law and government. -/- 3. Wheels, dams, and gravitation: the structure of scientific argument in The Wealth of Nations. -/- The third chapter provides the core of the book, dealing with the structure of the argument in WN. I argue that the main presupposition that makes the shift possible from a `natural history' to a `system' approach is the Newtonian contrast of `mathematical' with `physical' explanation; that is, Smith drops any discussion of the "original qualities" of human nature that could account for economic behaviour, while introducing, as `principles' for the system, a set of `hypothetical' statements of `observed' regularities in human behaviour and of `observed' super-individual self-regulating mechanisms. In bringing this presupposition to light, the coexistence of a teleological with a mechanistic approach is clarified; fresh light is shed on the notion of the invisible hand by a comparison of its occurrence in Smith with the occurrence of the same expression (until now overlooked) in the correspondence between Newton and Cotes. Finally, the peculiar semi-prescriptive and semi-descriptive character of political economy are highlighted, and the consistency of Smith's `impure' semi-prescriptive social science, when understood in his own terms, is defended against familiar charges with inconsistency and against even more familiar strained modernizations. -/- 4. Apples, deer, and frivolous trinkets: the construction of the economic. -/- The fourth chapter draws consequences from the third, examining how Smith's achievement in political economy, marking its transition to scientific status, carried a re-description of the phenomena, creating the comparatively independent and unified field of the economic. Smith's achievement is interpreted not as the `discovery' of an autonomous character already possessed by the economy out there, so much as a Gestalt-switch by which our perception of social phenomena is modified making us `see' the partial order of the economy as an isolated system. To sum up, the autonomy of the economic in social reality and the autonomy of the economic in social consciousness are shown to be two sides of one process. -/- 5. Concluding considerations: Political economy and the Enlightenment halved. -/- A few suggestions on the status of economic theory two centuries after The Wealth of Nations in its relationship to ‘practical philosophy’ are illustrated. (shrink)

Dion is a full-bodied man. Theon is that part of him which consists of all of him except his left foot. What becomes of Dion and Theon when Dion’s left foot is amputated? In Burke 1994, employing the doctrine of sortal essentialism, I defended a surprising position last defended by Chrysippus: that Dion survives while the seemingly unscathed Theon perishes. This paper defends that position against objections by Stone, Carter, Olson, and others. Most notably, it offers a novel, conservative (...) solution to the many-thinkers problem, a solution that enables us to accept the existence of brain-containing person-parts while denying that those person-parts are thinking, conscious beings. (shrink)

This article analyses strategies of perception of Europe that fit into a triple structure. The traditional division into philosophical, cultural, and political Europe is intersected with more fundamental European perceptions determined by different ways of thinking. In this article, these ways are referred to as the closed, the open and the hollow ones. Thus, three different conceptions of Europe arise: the closed Europe characterized by essentialism, ethnocentrism, and monologic consciousness; the open Europe based on the standpoint that protection of (...) one’s own identity and maturity depend on a dialogic relationship with representatives of other identities; and the hollow Europe that makes absolute the imperative of moral self-criticism, as well as identity’s deconstruction and its relativism. The discussion of all three strategies of perception of Europe is followed by the analysis of how they were received in Lithuania. The conclusion highlights the necessity to further research the relationship between all three conceptions of European identity. (shrink)

Moral phenomenology has enjoyed a resurgence lately, and within the field, a trend has emerged: uniform rejection of the idea that the experience of making ‘direct’ moral judgments has any phenomenal essence, that is, any phenomenal property or properties that are always present and that distinguish these experiences from experiences of making non-direct- moral judgments. This article examines existing arguments for this anti-essentialism and finds them wanting. While acknowledging that phenomenological reflection is an unstable pursuit, it is maintained here (...) that phenomenological essentialism about a certain domain of direct moral judgment, namely direct judgment of obligation and prohibition, is more credible than has been recognized. The positive proposal is to rehabilitate something close to Maurice Mandelbaum’s essentialism, specifically to maintain that direct moral judgment ’s phenomenal essence is arguably its felt categorical demand. The key to making this argument is to assume a ‘rich view’ of moral consciousness, the view that phenomenal features of moral judgment might be present even when they are not attended to. This assumption is controversial, but it is warranted by two considerations. First, though controversial, the rich view is intuitively plausible. Second, it reveals that the existing arguments against the kind of essentialism defended here appear to tacitly presuppose an equally controversial – and arguably less intuitive – rejection of the rich view. (shrink)

In this paper, I intend to make a case for Buddhist phenomenology. By Buddhist phenomenology, I mean a phenomenological interpretation of Yogācāra’s doctrine of consciousness. Yet, this interpretation will be vulnerable if I do not justify the way in which the anti-essentialistic Buddhist philosophy can countenance the Husserlian essence. I dub this problem of compatibility between Buddhist and phenomenology the ‘problem of essence’. Nevertheless, I argue that this problem will not jeopardize Buddhist phenomenology because: 1) Yogācārins, especially late Yogācārins represented (...) by Xuanzang do not articulate emptiness as a negation but as an affirmation of the existent; 2) Husserl’s phenomenological essence is not a substance that Yogācārins reject but the ideal sense that Yogācārins also stress. After resolving the problem of essence, I formulate Buddhist phenomenology as follows: on the epistemological level, it describes intentional acts of consciousness; on the meta-epistemological level, it entails transcendental idealism. (shrink)