I defend indirect perceptual realism against two recent and related charges to it offered by A. D. Smith and P. Snowdon, both stemming from demonstrative reference involving indirect perception. The needed aspects of the theory of demonstratives are not terribly new, but their connection to these objections has not been discussed. The groundwork for my solution emerges from considering normal cases of indirect perception (e.g., seeing something depicted on a television) and examining the role this indirectness plays in demonstrative assertions. (...) I argue that indirectness routinely if not typically plays a justificatory role in such judgements, and not a semantic one, and that the same can be said of such judgements when considered within the indirect realist framework. The denial of this, on my analysis, is essential to the criticisms of Snowdon and Smith. The discussion is extended to include scenarios involving the sorts of misconceptions Smith employs. (shrink)

ExcerptWith the increasing attention devoted to Ernst Jünger, this superb translation of his 1934 essay “On Pain” is sure to enrich discussions on its subjects of pain, sensitivity, the body, and visual media. It comes with an informative introduction by translator David C. Durst as well as a substantial and wide-ranging preface by Russell A. Berman, which situates Jünger's text in the contexts of the Weimar Republic and contemporary culture. In Jünger's essay, pain is the measure of all things. Like (...) our shadow, it is always at our side. But Jünger knows that we wish to be rid of this…. (shrink)

In the face of limited resources during the COVID-19 pandemic response, public health experts and ethicists have sought to apply guiding principles in determining how those resources, including vaccines, should be allocated.

The Iliad and Beowulf provide rich sources of historical information. The novels of Henry Fielding and Henry James may be instructive in the art of moral living. Some go further and argue that Emile Zola and Harriet Beecher Stowe played a part in ameliorating the lives of those existing in harsh circumstances. However, as Derek Attridge argues in this outstanding and acclaimed book, none of these capacities is distinctive of literature. What is the singularity of literature? Do (...) the terms "literature" and "the literary" refer to actual entities found in cultures at certain times, or are they merely expressions characteristic of such cultures? Attridge argues that this resistance to definition and reduction is not a dead end, but a crucial starting point from which to explore anew the power and practices of Western art. Derek Attridge provides a rich new vocabulary for literature, rethinking such terms as "invention," "singularity," "otherness," "alterity," "performance" and "form." He returns literature to the realm of ethics, and argues for the ethical importance of literature, demonstrating how a new understanding of the literary might be put to work in a "responsible," creative mode of reading. The Singularity of Literature is not only a major contribution to the theory of literature, but also a celebration of the extraordinary pleasure of the literary, for reader, writer, student or critic. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by the author. (shrink)

Early discussions of ?climate justice? have been dominated by economists rather than political philosophers. More recently, analytical liberal political philosophers have joined the debate. However, the philosophical discussion of climate justice remains in its early stages. This paper considers one promising approach based on human rights, which has been advocated recently by several theorists, including Simon Caney, Henry Shue and Tim Hayward. A basic argument supporting the claim that anthropogenic climate change violates human rights is presented. Four objections to (...) this argument are examined: the ?future persons? objection; the ?risk? objection; the ?collective causation? objection; and the ?demandingness? objection. This critical examination leads to a more detailed specification and defence of the claim that anthropogenic climate change violates human rights. (shrink)

Thomas Hoccleve wrote his Regement of Princes in 1411 and addressed it to the patronage of Henry, Prince of Wales, who was to succeed to the throne as Henry V two years later, on the death of his father, Henry IV. The Regement is a book of the governance of princes, drawn from the De regimine principum of Aegidius Romanus and from other similar works including the Secreta secretorum, which purports to be a compendium of Aristotle's advice (...) on kingship to Alexander the Great. Like these works, Hoccleve's Regement lays out a series of unexceptionable moral principles that should guide a prince's behavior: the prince is exhorted, for instance, to be prudent, just, liberal, and receptive to counsel. These recommendations are supported with citations from biblical and classical authorities and a wealth of narratives exemplary of kingly and unkingly conduct. Princes were to look in such books as in a mirror, and there see displayed the image of what they should truly be. They were “Mirrors for Princes.” Princes welcomed them and on occasion commissioned them, not because they specially desired to have instruction in the business of government from clerks, nor because they would much appreciate being told things they did not wish to hear, but because it was important that they should represent themselves as receptive to sage counsel. They are not simply political public relations exercises but, equally, they are not “books of instruction.”. (shrink)

In his work on personal identity, Derek Parfit makes two revolutionary claims: firstly, that personal identity is not what matters in survival; and secondly, that what does matter is relation R. In this article I demonstrate his position here to be inconsistent, with the former claim being defensible only in case the latter is false. Parfit intends his famous fission argument to establish the unimportance of identity – a conclusion disputed by, among others, Mark Johnston. My approach is to (...) critically assess their debate, focusing on Johnston's reductio of Parfit's position. I contend that although Parfit's own response fails, there are other ways to save the fission argument. The unimportance of identity then comes at a cost, however, because the reductio can only be avoided by accepting either that nothing matters in survival, or else that facts about particles and forces do. Either way, relation R cannot be what matters. (shrink)

Who am I, and what am I? These questions are asked through the ages, and answered in various ways in disciplines ranging from philosphy through literature and politics to biology. It is a matter of personal and practical as well as intellectual interest, and perhaps for this reason academic debate on this subject attracts attention and stimulates controversy outside the ranks of the specialists. In Identity six internationally famous contributors, Bernard Williams, Derek Parfit, Henry Harris, Michael Ruse, Terence (...) Cave, and Anthony D. Smith, discuss identity from the viewpoints of their various disciplines. The book offers a comparison and cross-fertilization of insights and theories from outside and within philosophy, shedding light on this concept crucial to the humanities and the social and physical sciences. (shrink)

It is intuitive to suppose that the question of whether I persist through a given period will always have a metaphysically substantive ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Derek Parfit challenges this intuition. Given the truth of Reductionism, he argues, identity can be indeterminate. The main argument Parfit marshals in support of this claim employs his Sorites-style Combined Spectrum thought experiment. Despite its influence, there are conspicuous gaps in his argument. Notably, he claims that identity is indeterminate when questions about persistence (...) are ‘empty’. But indeterminacy in Sorites puzzles is traditionally held to result from vagueness – a topic Parfit avoids. Without an account of the relationships between vagueness, indeterminacy, and question-emptiness, his argument remains incomplete. I begin by outlining Parfit’s argument as it stands. I then propose that we can provide the missing details by supplementing Parfit’s treatment of the Combined Spectrum with Sider’s notion of nonsubstantivity. This gives us a clearer understanding of Parfit’s indeterminacy claim, and affords the room to accommodate vagueness in his argument. Once we spell out what this means, however, it becomes clear that a more radical conclusion is justified by Parfit’s reasoning: it is always an empty question whether a person persists. (shrink)

The career of Oxford philosopher Roger Crisp has produced a wonderfully rich yield of elegant, lucid philosophizing that combines in a rare mix historical erudition and brilliant, creative, and highly interdisciplinary ethical argument. Crisp is steeped in Aristotle and Mill, W. D. Ross and Derek Parfit, but his deepest source of inspiration is by his own admission the Victorian era Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick, author of the famous Methods of Ethics. Although Sidgwick has been regarded as a kind (...) of master of those who know by everyone from Brand Blanshard and C. D. Broad to John Rawls and Peter Singer, his star has been on an especially dramatic ascent in recent decades, in very... (shrink)

In his new book the eminent Kant scholar Henry Allison provides an innovative and comprehensive interpretation of Kant's concept of freedom. The author analyzes the concept and discusses the role it plays in Kant's moral philosophy and psychology. He also considers in full detail the critical literature on the subject from Kant's own time to the present day. In the first part Professor Allison argues that at the centre of the Critique of Pure Reason there is the foundation for (...) a coherent general theory of rational agency. The second part employs this account of rational agency as a key to understanding Kant's concept of moral agency and associated moral psychology. The third part focuses on Kant's attempt to ground both moral law and freedom in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason. This is a major contribution to the interpretation of Kant which will be of special interest to scholars and graduate students of Kant's moral theory. (shrink)

Henry E. Allison presents an analytical and historical commentary on Kant`s transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason. He argues that, rather than providing a new solution to an old problem, it addresses a new problem, and he traces the line of thought that led Kant to the recognition of the significance of this problem in his 'pre-critical' period. In addition to the developmental nature of the account of Kant`s views presented (...) here, two distinctive features of Allison's reading of the deduction are a defense of Kant`s oft criticized claim that the conformity of appearances to the categories must be unconditionally rather than merely conditionally necessary and an insistence that the argument cannot be separated from Kant`s transcendental idealism. (shrink)

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the normativity (...) of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. (shrink)

Henry Allison is one of the foremost interpreters of the philosophy of Kant. This new volume collects all his recent essays on Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. All the essays postdate Allison's two major books on Kant, and together they constitute an attempt to respond to critics and to clarify, develop and apply some of the central theses of those books. Two are published here for the first time. Special features of the collection are: a detailed defence of the (...) author's interpretation of transcendental idealism; a consideration of the Transcendental Deduction and some other recent interpretations thereof; further elaborations of the tensions between various aspects of Kant's conception of freedom and of the complex role of this conception within Kant's moral philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning to BreatheFive Fragments Against RacismB. Venkat Mani (bio)For Dr. JLW, for all Black academics and students1. Air HungerI know you, Derek Chauvin. You may think that we first met on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis. I was called George Perry Floyd. For you, I was just another Black man, a potential criminal. For me, you were not a police officer, but the knee that stands for racism. (...) You kneeled on my windpipe for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. Those were neither my first nor my last memories.You may choose not to recognize me, as you always have. But I do. I recognize every bone, muscle, tendon, pointy curve of the cap, every contour of your strong, heavy, determined, calculating, conniving knee that presses on my windpipe with a false sense of racist superiority. 9 minutes and 29 seconds. As often as you can.We have a history. You have never missed the opportunity of kneeling on my windpipe. You hauled me into your slave ships from various African ports along the Atlantic, then you kneeled on my windpipe all over your cotton and tobacco plantations in the Americas. We met again on schooners from Indian shores journeying across the Indian and Pacific oceans. With slavery banned in the British empire, you turned me into an indentured laborer. You made me put my thumb imprint on a document you created, in a script I could not read, of a language I could not speak. Then you threw me thousands of miles away in Mauritius, Fiji, and numerous Caribbean islands, pressing on my windpipe on sugarcane plantations. My wife, children, sisters, mothers, aunts, brothers, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, we all have lived through those fatal 9 minutes and 29 seconds: on water and land. Repeatedly. Consistently. Incessantly.You want specific dates? April 8, 1857, Barrackpore, Northern India. My name was Mangal Pandey, you called me a Sepoy. You hanged me for standing up against my subjugation by your British East India Company. Against your rule over my land and my people. With your many titles [End Page 41] and names: Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, Lieutenant-General Sir Colin Campbell, Brigadier-General Charles Windham, you rampaged through the streets of Delhi, Meerut, Lucknow, killing anyone in your way so I could be a jewel in Victoria's crown. January 29, 1863, Bear River, Idaho. I was one among the Shoshone of Bia Ogoi, you were Colonel Patrick Connor. You came to us on a frigid morning and killed us by the hundreds. November 15, 1884, the Congo Conference, Berlin. You were called Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and were acting at the behest of sharecropping interests of King Leopold the Second. Your name for me was a "savage." You set up a society to civilize me while you plundered my bounty. You started drawing lines through land, rivers, mountains, deserts. For you, it was the Scramble for Africa. For me, bloody murder. You knelt on my windpipe, smoking a pipe with tobacco my people had grown. April 13, 1919, Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar. You were called Brigadier General Reginald Edward Harry Dyer. For you, I was just a troublemaking native disrupting the civilized business of the Empire. You surrounded our peaceful gathering in Amritsar and opened fire. Your Nobel Laureate Rudyard Kipling claimed that "you did your duty as you saw fit." By killing us in thousands until the bullets ran out. Rikki Tikki Tavi. May 31, 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Inspired by Jim Crow, your knees came running to us in mobs to massacre us. October 19, 1926, Imperial Conference, London. Your name was Field Marshall the Right Honorable Jan Christian Smuts. For you, I was one among the many "colored" subjects from the Cape Colony. You spoke vehemently against mixing my people with your people. Eloquently, I was told, in favor of apartheid.You know very well, Chauvin, that our acquaintance neither begins in 1857 nor ends in 1926. I could take you on a grand tour of the world and give you all the dates when you appeared in different forms. Your self-induced conviction of racial supremacy over me remained the same... (shrink)

This paper identifies the phenomenon of conceptual competence injustice, a form of epistemic injustice that occurs when a marginalized epistemic agent makes a conceptual claim and is illegitimately regarded as having failed to grasp one or more of the concepts expressed in her testimony. The notion of a conceptual claim is given a deflationary account that is coextensive with the class of a priori knowable claims. This study reveals a form of oppression that severely hinders marginalized epistemic agents who seek (...) to create or communicate conceptual knowledge. Conceptual competence injustice is compared and contrasted with three other forms of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, and contributory injustice. The final section investigates a number of damaging effects that conceptual competence injustice has on marginalized persons pursuing a career in academic philosophy. (shrink)

Lacanian psychoanalysis is often considered antithetical to Frantz Fanon's decolonizing political project. This paper argues, by contrast, that by exploring hitherto under-explored aspects of the F...

In this paper I challenge the currently fashionable view that we should assess the basic premises of an argument for acceptability rather than for truth, and argue in favour of recognizing premise-truth as a criterion of argument goodness in one important sense and premise-acceptability as a criterion of argument goodness in another important sense.

This study considers the contribution of Francesco Patrizi da Cherso to the development of the concepts of void space and an infinite universe. Patrizi plays a greater role in the development of these concepts than any other single figure in the sixteenth century, and yet his work has been almost totally overlooked. I have outlined his views on space in terms of two major aspects of his philosophical attitude: on the one hand, he was a devoted Platonist and sought always (...) to establish Platonism, albeit his own version of it, as the only currect philosophy; and on the other hand, he was more determinedly anti-Aristotelian than any other philosopher at that time. Patrizi's concept of space has its beginnings in Platonic notions, but is extended and refined in the light of a vigorous critique of Aristotle's position. Finally, I consider the influence of Patrizi's ideas in the seventeenth century, when various thinkers are seeking to overthrow the Aristotelian concept of place and the equivalence of dimensionality with corporeality. Pierre Gassendi , for example, needed a coherent concept of void space in which his atoms could move, while Henry More sought to demonstrate the reality of incorporeal entities by reference to an incorporeal space. Both men could find the arguments they needed in Patrizi's comprehensive treatment of the subject. (shrink)

Frances Kamm has for some time now been a foremost champion of non-consequentialist ethics. One of her most powerful non-consequentialist themes has been the idea of inviolability. Morality's prohibitions, she argues, confer on persons the status of inviolability. This thought helps articulate a rationale for moral prohibitions that will resist the protean threat posed by the consequentialist argument that anyone should surely be willing to violate a constraint if doing so will minimize the overall number of such violations. As Kamm (...) put it in a 1992 article, ‘If morality permitted minimizing violations of persons by violating other persons, then each of those saved as well as those persons used to save others would be less inviolable. It is the permission, not any actual violation of persons, that makes this so.’ Now, as thus baldly asserted, this claim borders on the conclusory. It is almost as if the claim were that morality conferred on persons the following status: that of being protected from consequentialism. One wants to hear in what inviolability consists, in more detail, so that we can understand it independently of the negation of consequentialism. And there is also an opposite problem: if inviolability is a good, then why can't consequentialism take it into account? Hence, one also wants to hear why this would not be the case. (shrink)

Liao and Carbonell’s (2023) article, “Materialized Oppression in Medical Tools and Technologies” directs our attention, not to new cutting edge medical technologies, but to the pulse oximeter and t...

Constructivism claims to be a postepistemology that replaces ‘traditional’ concepts of knowledge. Supporters of constructivism have argued that progress requires that pre‐service teachers be weaned off traditional approaches and that they should adopt constructivist views of knowledge. Constructivism appears to be gaining ground rapidly and should no longer be viewed as an exercise in radical thinking primarily aimed at generating innovative teaching. It has become an integral part of the pedagogic mainstream. Close examination of the theoretical foundations of constructivism, however, (...) reveals that the basic assumptions of constructivism are flawed. Far from being a postepistemology, constructivism simply regresses to a pre‐Renaissance mindset with theology replaced with a psychologism. Constructivists should be aware that the implications of constructivism for future generations may be both profound and non‐benign. (shrink)

I am going to assume, in what follows, that when we engage with a fiction we are participating in a game of make-believe; that is, that we are engaging in an imaginative effort. In this paper I shall attempt to identify the kind of game we are playing. I begin with two words of caution. First, identifying the kind of game will be a matter of finding a game whose structure best reflects the facts about our engagement with fiction. The (...) fit, however, will not be exact. In a game of mud pies, the fact that the cardboard box holds a maximum of six globs of mud may make it true in the game that the oven holds a maximum of six pies, but the fact that the box has "Fyffes bananas" written on the side of it will probably not make it true in the game that the oven has the same. Second the variety of works of fiction makes it unwise to assume that one kind of game will cover all cases. These two provisos might be thought to vitiate my project before it begins. In the face of an objection to my first proviso, namely, that the kind of make-believe I maintain we play with fiction does not mirror the facts of our relations with fiction, I can reply that the structure is not isomorphic in that particular respect. In reply to the claim that in some particular instance we do not play the game of make-believe that I suggest we do, I can simply agree and count it as one of the many exceptions to the rule. (shrink)

In this essay, I muse upon aporia’s value as a pedagogical technique in the philosophy classroom using as a guide examples of aporia that are found in Plato’s Socratic dialogues. The word aporia, translated as “without passage” or “without a way,” is used metaphorically to describe the unsettling state of confusion many find themselves in after engaging in philosophical discourse. Following a brief introduction in which I situate aporia as a pedagogy amicable to experiential learning, I examine various ways in (...) which aporia appears in certain Platonic dialogues, which enables us to draw out some paradigmatic features of aporia. I then discuss how I apply aporia as a pedagogical technique in the contemporary philosophy classroom, taking up three specific concerns in detail: aporetic discomfort, right use, and potential misuse. (shrink)

The question of whether or not art is essentially a representation of reality has long been a bone of contention among philosophers of art – especially in the major branch of that discipline called the analytic philosophy of art, or analytic aesthetics. This paper argues that art - visual art, literature or music - is never essentially representation. The argument is based on the thinking of André Malraux in "The Voices of Silence".

The paper explores the much-neglected but crucial topic of the capacity of art to transcend time.

A difference of opinion exists among some philosophers who have recently inquired whether Marx thinks that capitalism is distributively unjust. What has to be determined is whether in Marx's view the wage worker suffers an injustice in not receiving most or all of the surplus value he creates. Allen Wood argues that this is not Marx's view, and George Brenkert agrees, for quite similar reasons; but Ziyad Husami and Gary Young, on the other hand, argue in reply to Wood, and (...) on overlapping grounds, for the opposite interpretation; Wood, in turn, has defended himself against Husami. (shrink)

The conventional view is that Enlightenment thinkers all believed that the fruits of Reason would always be beneficial. Is this accurate? Laclos's celebrated novel "Les Liaisons dangereueses", published in 1782, provides a perspective on the world of Reason that certainly does not square with that view. Working at the level of individual psychology, Reason in Laclos's novel divides the world into the strong and the weak – more specifically, the astute and the naïve. It defines human worth in terms of (...) a capacity to deceive and control others, a capacity that can only be fully expressed by the complete defeat and humiliation of one’s adversary. (shrink)

It’s common knowledge that those objects we regard as great works of art have a capacity to survive across time. But that observation is only a half-truth: it tells us nothing about the nature of this power of survival – about how art endures. -/- This question was once at the heart of Western thinking about art. The Renaissance solved it by claiming that great art is “timeless”, “eternal” – impervious to time, a belief that exerted a powerful influence on (...) Enlightenment philosophers and, later, on modern aesthetics. -/- The notion that art is timeless was contradicted by nineteenth century thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, and Taine who stressed the historical embeddedness of art. The conflict of these two ideas, together with other major factors discussed in this paper, has left us today without a viable account of the nature of art’s capacity to transcend time. -/- This paper proposes an alternative solution: the proposition that art survives by a process of metamorphosis. But the principal emphasis of the paper is on the question itself: how does art transcend time? (a question that has nothing to do with the so-called “test of time”). If modern aesthetics is to remain relevant to our modern world of art, in which the art of the past – stretching back to Lascaux and beyond – is as important as Picasso and contemporary art, it urgently needs to address this neglected question. (shrink)

The first two sections of this paper jointly comprise an edited version of the commentary I presented in the panel discussion of Harald R. Wohlrapp, The concept of argument: A philosophical foundation at the OSSA 11 conference, May 2016. My principal focus was on a claim Wohlrapp makes about the extent to which his concept of justification is "reconcilable" with the views of current philosophers about justifications. Following the conference, Wohlrapp sent me a response to my commentary. In section 3, (...) I report and reply to three of the comments he made in his response. (shrink)

One might naturally suppose that philosophers of art would take a strong interest in the idea of creation in the context of art. In fact, this has often not been the case. In analytic aesthetics, the issue tends to dwell on the sidelines and in continental aesthetics a shadow has sometimes been cast over the topic by the notion of the “death of the author” and by the claim, as Roland Barthes put it, that the author is only ever able (...) to “imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original”. This paper explains the understanding of artistic creation developed by the French art theorist André Malraux in his well-known book The Voices of Silence. Malraux argues that the true artist is involved in a creative act in the full sense of the term – creation ex nihilo – despite the debt he or she often owes to other artists. The paper also comments briefly on possible reasons why traditional post-Enlightenment aesthetics has said so little about the topic in question. (shrink)