In Moran, D. (ed.): Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Routledge, 2008.

We have some of our properties purely in virtue of the way we are. (Our mass is an example.) We have other properties in virtue of the way we interact with the world. (Our weight is an example.) The former are the intrinsic properties, the latter are the extrinsic properties. This seems to be an intuitive enough distinction to grasp, and hence the intuitive distinction has made its way into many discussions in philosophy, including discussions in ethics, philosophy of mind, (...) metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of physics. Unfortunately, when we look more closely at the intuitive distinction, we find reason to suspect that it conflates a few related distinctions, and that each of these distinctions is somewhat resistant to analysis. (shrink)

Davidson’s argument against the possibility of defining truth draws upon the work of Tarski. However, Tarski’s assumption that the semantic conception of truth holds only for formal languages which are not semantically closed is not as plausible as it seems to be since it can be shown that this would result in the impossibility of formulating a theory of truth, because the epistemological presuppositions of formal semantics undermine any theory of representation of reality in which our cognitions can be true (...) or false representations. Yet Davidson concludes that "there cannot be a definition of ‘For all languages L, and all sentences s in L, s is true in L if and only if... s... L’." I am challenging Davidson by introducing into his above scheme my own definition of truth — "For all languages L, and all sentences s in L, s is true in L if and only if we prove s in L" — and then showing how to prove this definition philosophically. (shrink)

The term "hedonism," from the Greek word ἡδονή (hēdonē) for pleasure, refers to several related theories about what is good for us, how we should behave, and what motivates us to behave in the way that we do. All hedonistic theories identify pleasure and pain as the only important elements of whatever phenomena they are designed to describe. If hedonistic theories identified pleasure and pain as merely two important elements, instead of the only important elements of what they are describing, (...) then they would not be nearly as unpopular as they all are. However, the claim that pleasure and pain are the only things of ultimate importance is what makes hedonism distinctive and philosophically interesting. (shrink)

Obscurity of expression is considered a flaw. Not so, however, in the speech or writing of intellectual gurus. All too often, what readers do is judge profound what they have failed to grasp. Here I try to explain this guru effect by looking at the psychology of trust and interpretation, at the role of authority and argumentation, and at the effects of these dispositions and processes when they operate at a population level where, I argue, a runaway phenomenon of overappreciation (...) may take place. (shrink)

Nghiên cứu này được thực hiện để tìm hiểu liệu các nguồn thông tin ảnh hưởng đến quyết định đầu tư của nhà đầu tư có ảnh hưởng đến sự sợ hãi của họ khi khủng hoảng xảy ra hay không? Nghiên cứu đã sử dụng phương pháp phân tích Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) trên bộ dữ liệu từ 1,526 nhà đầu tư Trung Quốc và Việt Nam. Kết quả nghiên cứu chỉ ra rằng, các nhà đầu tư tiếp cận (...) các loại thông tin khác nhau khi đưa ra quyết định đầu tư sẽ ảnh hưởng đến tần suất phản ứng sợ hãi khác nhau. Cụ thể, các nhà đầu tư tham khảo thông tin từ chuyên gia hoặc tự phân tích khi đưa ra quyết định đầu tư ít bị đóng băng (biểu hiện của tâm lý sợ hãi) hơn trong thời kỳ thị trường sụt giảm. Ngược lại, những người đưa ra quyết định đầu tư dựa trên thông tin từ người quen hay bạn bè và trực giác sẽ bị đóng băng thường xuyên hơn. -/- [English Abstract] This study was conducted to explore whether the sources of information priority during decision-making contribute to their fear reactions during crises. The research utilized the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics on data collected from 1,526 investors in China and Vietnam. The study results indicated that investors prioritizing different types of information when making investment decisions would have different frequency of fear reactions. Specifically, investors who prioritized information from experts or conducted self-analysis when making investment decisions experienced less freezing (an expression of psychological fear) during market downturns. Conversely, those who based their investment decisions on information from acquaintances, friends, and intuition tended to experience freezing more frequently. (shrink)

In Jacobsen, M.H. (ed.): Sociologies of the Unnoticed. Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008.

This chapter contains sections titled: “Meeting” on the Internet From Virtual to Real World Meeting Dating, Objectification, and Self‐Definition Dating and Authenticity.

Although we are enthusiastic about a Darwinian approach to culture, we argue that the overview presented in the target article does not sufficiently emphasize the crucial explanatory role that psychology plays in the study of culture. We use a number of examples to illustrate the variety of ways by which appeal to psychological factors can help explain cultural phenomena. (Published Online November 9 2006).

During the Covid-19 pandemic we increasingly turned to technology to stay in touch with our family, friends, and colleagues. Even as lockdowns and restrictions ease many are encouraging us to embrace the replacement of face-to-face encounters with technologically mediated ones. Yet, as philosophers of technology have highlighted, technology can transform the situations we find ourselves in. Drawing insights from the phenomenology of sociality, we consider how digitally-enabled forms of communication and sociality impact our experience of one another. In particular, we (...) draw attention to the way in which our embodied experience of one another is altered when we meet in digital spaces, taking as our focus the themes of perceptual access, intercorporeality, shared space, transitional spaces, and self-presentation. In light of the way in which technological mediation alters various dimensions of our social encounters, we argue that digital encounters constitute their own forms of sociality requiring their own phenomenological analysis. We conclude our paper by raising some broader concerns about the very framework of thinking about digitally and non-digitally mediated social encounters simply in terms of replacement. (shrink)

The Renaissance of Prudential Psychology Philosophical reflection on the good life in coming decades will likely owe a tremendous debt to the burgeoning science of subjective well-being and the pioneers, like Ed Diener, who brought it to fruition. While the psychological dimensions of human welfare now occupy a prominent position in the social sciences, they have gotten surprisingly little attention in the recent philosophical literature. The situation appears to be changing, however, as philosophers inspired by the empirical research begin to (...) examine more seriously the psychology of human flourishing. This is not to say that the philosophers of any era have kept entirely silent about such matters. While the term ‘subjective well-being’ has yet to take a significant place in the philosophical lexicon, philosophers have always evinced some interest in the subjective or psychological dimensions of human welfare, and sometimes quite a lot. Philosophical work on the good life has traditionally been the province of ethical theory, which may be understood broadly to include all aspects of value theory. Ethics in this broad sense is one of three main branches of philosophical inquiry, alongside metaphysics and epistemology. Philosophers sometimes use ‘ethics’ more narrowly, as a synonym for ‘morality’ or ‘moral theory’. But ethical theorists frequently claim to be in the business of trying to answer Socrates’ question: how ought one to live? And this question ranges well beyond matters of right and wrong, dealing also with matters of well-being, flourishing, welfare, eudaimonia, or pruden- tial value. There is some dispute about the precise equivalence of these expressions, which carry differing connotations. But all seem to concern the same cluster of issues: what benefits a person, is in her interest, or makes a person’s life go best for her. Thus contemporary theories of “wellbeing” or “welfare” appear to be direct competitors to ancient theories of “eudaimonia.” It can be useful, then, to employ these expressions interchangeably, whether or not they are strictly synonymous.. (shrink)

Groups do better at reasoning tasks than individuals, and, in some cases, do even better than any of their individual members. Here is an illustration. In the standard version of Wason selection task (Wason, 1966), the most commonly studied problem in the psychology of reasoning, only about 10% of participants give the correct solution, even though it can be arrived at by elementary deductive reasoning.1 Such poor performance begs for an explanation, and a great many have been offered. What makes (...) the selection task relevant here is that the difference between individual and group performance is striking. Moshman & Geil for instance (1998, see also Maciejovsky & Budescu, 2007) had participants try and resolve the task either individually or in groups of five or six participants. While, unsurprisingly, only 9% of the participants working on their own found the correct solution, an astonishing 70% of the groups did. Moreover, when groups were formed with participants who had first tried to solve the task individually, 80% of the groups succeeded, including 30% of the groups in which none of the members had succeeded on his or her own. How are such differences between individual and group performance to be explained? (shrink)

Members of a human group are bound with one another by multiple flows of information. (Here we use “information” in a broad sense that includes not only the content of people’s knowledge, but also that of their beliefs, assumptions, fictions, rules, norms, skills, maps, images, and so on.) This information is materially realized in the mental representations of the people, and in their public productions, that is, their cognitively guided behaviors and the enduring material traces of these behaviors. Mentally represented (...) information is transmitted from individuals to individuals through public productions. Public representations such as speech, gestures, writing, or pictures are a special type of public productions, the function of which is to communicate a content. Public representations play a major role in information transmission. Much information, however, is communicated implicitly, that is, without being publicly represented. Information can also be transmitted without being properly speaking communicated, not even implicitly, as when one individual acquires a skill by observing and imitating the behavior of others. Most information transmitted among humans is about local and transient circumstances, and is not transmitted beyond these. Some information of more general relevance, however, is repeatedly transmitted, and propagates throughout the group. Talk of “culture” (whatever the preferred definition or theory of culture) is about this widely distributed information and about its material realizations inside people’s mind and in their common environment (see Sperber 1996). One can study cultural phenomena in two main ways. One can interpret them, that is, try and make their contents intelligible to people of another culture, or more intelligible to members of the culture in which these phenomena occurs, as do anthropologists and historians. One may also try and explain causally how these cultural phenomena emerge, stabilize and evolve.. (shrink)

This article references the following linked citations. If you are trying to access articles from an off-campus location, you may be required to first logon via your library web site to access JSTOR. Please visit your library's website or contact a librarian to learn about options for remote access to JSTOR.

Many recovering dualists find that the old Cartesian demons are hard to exorcise. Dual substance abuse manifests itself not only as metaphysical dualism, but as a pervasive epistemological framework that creates an unhealthy codependent relationship between scientific realism and phenomenology. Daniel Dennett has led philosophers to recognize many of the symptoms of creeping crypto Cartesianism. In this paper, I try to take Dennett to the limit: Descartes lives on, I argue, in the very heart of cognitive science, in the concept (...) of representation. I outline a five-step program for overcoming this lingering, fundamental, allegiance to Cartesianism, and discuss Dennett's own progress along this path. (shrink)

Ciudad sobre ciudad compendia y resume a la perfección el proyecto filosófico de Eugenio Trías: la filosofía del límite. En anteriores libros Trías ha desarrollado separadamente lo que en este libro pretende articular de modo global. Lógica del limite desarrollaba una estética, La edad del espíritu, una filosofía de la religión y de la historia en función de lo que el autor denomina "la cita con lo sagrado, La razón fronteriza, se adentraba en el ámbito de la teoría del conocimiento, (...) Etica y condición humana, expone la naturaleza del ser del límite (el hombre) en su vertiente práctica y en su desarrollo cívico político. Ahora se trata de articular estos cuatro barrios que componen la ciudadela limítrofe, para construir la ciudad ideal, recuperando el proyecto platónico en su vertiente más innovadora... Sobre esos cuatro barrios se proyectan y desarrollan los conceptos fundamentales de la obra del autor: el ser del limite, la razón fronteriza y el suplemento simbólico. Trías desarrolla la ordenación de la ciudad y el despliegue de los barrios que la componen. Con ello consigue dar perfecta coherencia al proyecto de desarrollar la filosofía del límite y de ver las relaciones e interrelaciones que se dan entre esos diferentes barrios o ámbitos del pensamiento. Para desarrollar este proyecto Trías señala que la filosofía antes de ser un producto de la inteligencia, constituye una emoción. Por tanto este desarrollo vendrá marcado por tres emociones filosóficas fundamentales: el asombro, el vértigo y el amor-pasión. Tres elementos esenciales para comprender la noción del hombre como ser del límite, como anhelo de lo estético y de lo religioso en su afán de superar mediante lo simbólico las limitaciones impuestas a la razón por su carácter fronterizo. (shrink)

The current study is conducted to examine the following research questions: - Examine how knowledge acquisition and knowledge dissemination are associated with academic staff’s job satisfaction and teaching motivation - Examine whether job satisfaction mediates the relationship between knowledge acquisition, knowledge dissemination and teaching motivation.

“[…] only by uniting the power of the entire village could they chase Snake away.” —In “The Virtue of Sacrifice”; The Kingfisher Story Collection [1].

Experimental evidence on reasoning and decision making has been used to argue both that human rationality is adequate and that it is defective. The idea that reasoning involves not one but two mental systems (see Evans and Over, 1996; Sloman, 1996; Stanovich, 2004 for reasoning, and Kahneman and Frederick, 2005 for decision making) makes better sense of this evidence. ‘System 1’ reasoning is fast, automatic, and mostly unconscious; it relies on ‘fast and frugal’ heuristics (to use Gigerenzer’s expression (Gigerenzer et (...) al., 1999)) offering seemingly effortless conclusions that are generally appropriate in most settings, but may be faulty, for instance in experimental situations devised to test the limits of human reasoning abilities. ‘System 2’ reasoning is slow, consciously controlled and effortful, but makes it possible to follow normative rules and to overcome the shortcomings of system 1 (Evans and Over, 1996). The occurrence of both sound and unsound inferences in reasoning experiments and more generally in everyday human thinking can be explained by the roles played by these two kinds of processes. Depending on the problem, the context, and the person (the ability for system 2 reasoning is usually seen as varying widely between individuals, see Stanovich and West (2000)) either system 1 or system 2 reasoning is more likely to be activated, with different consequences for people’s ability to reach the normatively correct solution (Evans, 2006). The two systems can even compete: system 1 suggests an intuitively appealing response while system 2 tries to inhibit this response and to impose its own norm-guided one. Much evidence has accumulated in favour of such a dual view of reasoning (Evans, 2003, in press; for arguments against, see Osman, 2004). There is, however, some vagueness in the way the two systems are characterized. Instead of a principled distinction, we are presented with a bundle of contrasting features—slow/fast, automatic/controlled, explicit/implicit, associationist/rule based, modular/central— which, depending on the specific dual process theory, are attributed more or less exclusively to one of the two systems.. (shrink)

Such a bewildering and contradictory welter of behaviors and traits are connoted by “honor” and its best equivalents in other languages that analyses of the concept have daunted philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and literary scholars for millennia. Is it an external good given — and revoked just as easily — by others? Or does “honor” name an inner good that’s absolutely in our control: our integrity, our very commitment to right conduct? Is honor a central moral virtue — (...) as when we might say that “all was lost, save our honor”? Or is it a good quality that’s not-quite “moral,” or indeed even an antiquated virtue hostile to true morality? Is the honorable man a heroic figure who protects the weak, or one who can be expected to bully the weak, as in the case of “honor killings”? Is honor aristocratic and inegalitarian, and thus a virtue that enables and ennobles what’s essentially oppression? Or is honor a signal virtue of fair-dealing, fair-fighting, and fair competition, as evidenced in sportsmanship? (shrink)

On the phenomenological view, a minimal form of self-consciousness is a constant structural feature of conscious experience. Experience happens for the experiencing subject in an immediate way and as part of this immediacy, it is implicitly marked as my experience. For the phenomenologists, this immediate and first-personal givenness of experiential phenomena must be accounted for in terms of a pre-reflective self-consciousness. In the most basic sense of the term, selfconsciousness is not something that comes about the moment one attentively inspects (...) or reflectively introspects one's experiences, or in the instant of self-recognition of one's image in the mirror, or in the proper use of the first-person pronoun, or in the construction of a self-narrative. Rather, these different kinds of self-consciousness are to be distinguished from the pre-reflective self-consciousness which is present whenever I am living through or undergoing an experience, i.e., whenever I am consciously perceiving the world, whenever I am thinking an occurrent thought, whenever I am feeling sad or happy, thirsty or in pain, and so forth. (shrink)

Our understanding of language, its origins and subsequent evolution, is shaped not only by data and theories from the language sciences, but also fundamentally by the biological sciences. Recent developments in genetics and evolutionary theory offer both very strong constraints on what scenarios of language evolution are possible and probable, but also offer exciting opportunities for understanding otherwise puzzling phenomena. Due to the intrinsic breathtaking rate of advancement in these fields, and the complexity, subtlety, and sometimes apparent non-intuitiveness of the (...) phenomena discovered, some of these recent developments have either being completely missed by language scientists or misperceived and misrepresented. In this short paper, we offer an update on some of these findings and theoretical developments through a selection of illustrative examples and discussions that cast new light on current debates in the language sciences. The main message of our paper is that life is much more complex and nuanced than anybody could have predicted even a few decades ago, and that we need to be flexible in our theorizing instead of embracing a priori dogmas and trying to patch paradigms that are no longer satisfactory. (shrink)

In his book Ethics J. L. Mackie says that moral facts would have to be queer facts. I argue that an act’s hurting somebody is necessarily a reason, though not necessarily a conclusive reason, not to do that act; and that such hurting is a natural fact, not a queer fact. I try to defend this externalist position about this particular reason against internalists such as Mackie, and in particular against the position of Stephen Darwall in Impartial Reason.

In his book Ethics J. L. Mackie says that moral facts would have to be queer facts. I argue that an act’s hurting somebody is necessarily a reason, though not necessarily a conclusive reason, not to do that act; and that such hurting is a natural fact, not a queer fact. I try to defend this externalist position about this particular reason against internalists such as Mackie, and in particular against the position of Stephen Darwall in Impartial Reason.

In my paper I try to reconstruct the core of Martin Luther’s and Erasmus of Rotterdam’s view on the question of free will on the basis of my analysis of Erasmus’ treatise De libero arbitrio diatribé sive collatio and Luther’s answer De servo arbitrio. I also examine the compatibility of their views, or rather the main reasons for their incompatibility. I analyse the problematic and adversarial moments of both of the great thinkers views, which I fi nd in the case (...) of Martin Luther for example in the idea of all-doing God and in the view on the creation of the fi rst human, Adam; and in the case of Erasmus of Rotterdam for example in the question of merits and in the assertion that a spreading of the truth might be scandalous. Before presenting my conclusions I also deal with the diff erences in applied terminology and methodology of these two reform thinkers, which leads me to the question of the criterion of the truth. On the basis of these observationsI search for the key reasons for the disagreement between the two protagonists of this dispute and I evaluate the whole debate. (shrink)

Reply to Ian Johnston Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-2 DOI 10.1007/s11712-012-9274-1 Authors Dan Robins, School of Arts and Humanities, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, 101 Vera King Farris Drive, Galloway, NJ 08205, USA Journal Dao Online ISSN 1569-7274 Print ISSN 1540-3009.

In my work on Kant’s Transcendental epistemology, I criticize his three Critiques and show that none of them can solve the problems that Kant endeavored to solve; and he even, in a way, admitted it. In the first Critique, Kant attempts to solve the difficulties of the Cartesian Idealism and Humean Empirism, in combining them mechanically in his own Transcendental formalism and Sensual matter without being able to bridge the gap between them. In the second Critique, Kant endeavored to make (...) his Practical Reason of the a priori pure fact of formal morality into free moral conduct to materialize his ideal commonwealth of ends, but he could not bridge this gap. In his third Critique, Kant attempted to make the aesthetic reflective judgment of beauty objective, including of artworks, but failed to do so. The Peircean pragmaticist method can save the theory of knowledge both from the dogmatism of the metaphysical realists and from the inconsistency of the phenomenalists and holists. Peirce developed his epistemological realism in response to the difficulties of Kant’s transcendental epistemology, especially that of his three Critiques. It seems that in his late research Kant tries to follow Spinoza in the distinction between the causality in nature and the human inner causality as one’s Moral freedom and yet for Kant they operate in different domains to keep human freedom absolute, while the Spinozist conception of human freedom is in Nature and relative to human knowledge of reality and one’s relative power in Nature. Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View is a continuation of his Transcendental critical philosophy, but also his intended empirical epistemology by which to develop a practical deviation from his Copernican Revolution in the direction of the Peircean contra-revolution in Pragmaticist epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore risks and responsibilities associated with speaking for others. I argue that, contrary to the recent philosophical literature on the subject, speaking for others is not always epistemically or politically illegitimate. Moreover, epistemological justification is not the only important consideration when trying to determine if we should speak for others. Ethical justification also matters and can override epistemological worries. Indeed, sometimes we should speak for others though we cannot know their experience. I identify and evaluate five (...) kinds of speaking for others. I end by exploring some of the implications of my analysisfor social justice for women and girls internationally. (shrink)

This is a forthcoming section for the book "Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy", edited by Graham Oppy, Gregory Dawes, Evan Fales, Joseph Koterski, Mashhad Al-Allaf, Robert Fastiggi, and David Shatz. I was asked to write a brief essay on whether naturalism or theism can successfully explain the distribution of suffering in our world. Wheras another section covers the possibility that suffering is evidence against theism, my essay is concerned only with the ability for either naturalism or theism to (...) explain suffering. I argue that, for naturalists, suffering is not to be explained by either philosophers of religion or theologians. Instead, naturalists believe that suffering should be explained by the cognitive and social sciences, perhaps in conjunction with political philosophy and philosophy of mind. Moreover, naturalists may take suffering to be an important reason for action. In a world without a transcendent, supernatural being to watch over us, we can only depend upon each other to ameliorate existing conditions, to the extent that they can be ameliorated. On the other hand, theistic explanations of the distibution of suffering slip very easily into problematic theologies when they try to offer explicit explanations for suffering. For example, the world's most vulnerable people are often those who suffer the most, whereas oppressors are often able to prosper. That is, theistic explanations of our world's suffering easily slip into, e.g., the just world fallacy, racist ideology (i.e., that God favors some race(s) of people over others), or patriarchal ideology. Instead of offering an explicit explanation, theists should instead be skeptical theists -- i.e., they should argue that an explanation for our world's suffering is beyond our ken. While skeptical theism avoids the aforementioned problematic implications, if skeptical theism is true, then our world's suffering cannot be fully explained. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that in some sense legal philosophy, at least as the term is now understood among analytic jurisprudents in the Anglophone world, is to a large extent a creation of H. L. A. Hart’s work. It is with him that the search for the concept or the nature of law was one established as an independent object of inquiry, that consciously tried to avoid moral or political questions. In framing the province of jurisprudence in this way (...) Hart not only departed from the work of Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham, whose political commitments are clear, but also from the seemingly much closer enterprise of John Austin. After demonstrating this difference between Austin’s enterprise and Hart’s, I criticize the direction legal philosophy has taken following Hart’s lead.Resumen:En este ensayo se plantea la idea de que en cierto modo la filosofía del derecho —al menos en la forma en que es entendida entre los filósofos analíticos del mundo angloparlante— es en gran medida una invención de H. L. A. Hart. Con la obra de Hart, en efecto, la búsqueda del concepto o naturaleza del derecho, se ha consolidado como un objeto de investigación independiente, que conscientemente pretende deslindarse de las cuestiones políticas o morales. Al definir el campo de estudio de la filosofía del derecho en este sentido, Hart no sólo se aparta del trabajo de Thomas Hobbes y de Jeremy Bentham, cuyos compromisos políticos son evidentes, sino también del proyecto aparentemente más cercano de John Austin. Después de señalar la diferencia entre los proyectos de Austin y de Hart, el autor pone en cuestión la dirección que ha tomado la filosofía del derecho al ser encabezada por Hart. (shrink)

Many legal theorists have argued that analogical reasoning is merely rule-following in which the general rule is not stated. Lloyd Weinreb's tries to defend the practice of analogical reasoning on its own terms. He does so by giving examples of the way people use analogical reasoning, both in legal and non-legal contexts, as a means for deciding how to act in particular circumstances. By itself such evidence does not support Weinreb's case, because to justify analogy he must show that analogical (...) reasoning can somehow lead us to correct answers. Moreover, his evidence does nothing to challenge the claim that analogical reasoning is simply following suppressed rules.I try to give Weinreb a helping hand. I use the data he mentions that people actually reason by analogy as a starting point for a novel justificatory account of analogical reasoning based on the notion of reliable results: a process of reasoning is reliable, and therefore reliance on it justified, if it tends to generate correct results. This requires explaining what counts as correct results in law, which is a question of political philosophy. I show that the most fundamental condition for the acceptability of analogical reasoning is that the standard of legal correctness is not determined by principles derived by Reason (as is the approach in the civil law tradition) but rather by a standard of acceptance (more prevalent in the common law tradition). Nonetheless, I argue that there two other conditions - shared social values and skepticism about the possibility of discovering the right normative foundations to legal questions - that together have to obtain in order to justify reliance on analogical reasoning. Since that in a modern society it is unlikely that these two conditions are not likely to obtain, I conclude that even this sympathetic reconstruction of Weinreb's argument ultimately fails. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore risks and responsibilities associated with speaking for others. I argue that, contrary to the recent philosophical literature on the subject, speaking for others is not always epistemically or politically illegitimate. Moreover, epistemological justification is not the only important consideration when trying to determine if we should speak for others. Ethical justification also matters and can override epistemological worries. Indeed, sometimes we should speak for others though we cannot know their experience. I identify and evaluate five (...) kinds of speaking for others. I end by exploring some of the implications of my analysisfor social justice for women and girls internationally. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore risks and responsibilities associated with speaking for others. I argue that, contrary to the recent philosophical literature on the subject, speaking for others is not always epistemically or politically illegitimate. Moreover, epistemological justification is not the only important consideration when trying to determine if we should speak for others. Ethical justification also matters and can override epistemological worries. Indeed, sometimes we should speak for others though we cannot know their experience. I identify and evaluate five (...) kinds of speaking for others. I end by exploring some of the implications of my analysisfor social justice for women and girls internationally. (shrink)

Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s10743-009-9057-7 Authors Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen Center for Subjectivity Research Njalsgade 140-142 2300 Copenhagen Denmark Journal Husserl Studies Online ISSN 1572-8501 Print ISSN 0167-9848 Journal Volume Volume 25 Journal Issue Volume 25, Number 2.

Competent adults should be permitted to determine the course of their own lives. We may try to influence them. We may ask them, perhaps even implore them, to change their minds. But in the end, they are in charge of their lives. They get to choose their careers, whether and whom to marry, whether to exercise, and whether to have surgery.This emphasis on respect for patients’ autonomy may seem to imply that allowing patients to make their own decisions should always (...) take precedence over other considerations. Given this presumption, there has been almost no discussion in the medical literature or elsewhere about how important this value is and whether it should sometimes be balanced against and give way to other values. This absence of guidance is especially problematic in cases where respect for patient autonomy conflicts with promoting patients’ clinical interests. (shrink)

Manfred Frank and Niels Weidtmann (Eds.): Husserl und die Philosophie des Geistes Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s10743-011-9101-2 Authors Dan Zahavi, Center for Subjectivity Research, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Journal Husserl Studies Online ISSN 1572-8501 Print ISSN 0167-9848.

A philosophical zombie is a being indistinguishable from an ordinary human in every observable respect, but lacking subjective consciousness. Zombiehood implies *linguistic indiscriminability*, the zombie tendency to talk and even do philosophy of mind in language indiscriminable from ordinary discourse. Zombies thus speak *Zombish*, indistinguishable from English but radically distinct in reference for mental terms. The fate of zombies ultimately depends on whether Zombish can be consistently interpreted. If it can be interpreted consistently, then zombies remain possible, but no test (...) could ever reveal whether anyone is speaking Zombish. Any materialist theory of consciousness is therefore already a theory in Zombish, and is equally confirmable in its human language edition and its zombie-language edition . On the other hand, if Zombish cannot be consistently interpreted, then the zombies described in Zombish are logically impossible. Either way, the search for a materialistic theory of consciousness should be untroubled by the zombies among us. (shrink)