In the clinical setting, not enough attention is paid to the role that emotion plays. It is at worst ignored or avoided, isolating those who are suffering, at best treated as something to help another to endure. This is the result, in part, of an impoverished idea that views emotion as mere feelings. However, emotions are not just feelings, they are cognitive. If we look beneath the surface, emotions can provide information about values and beliefs, some of which may be (...) false or unreasonable. When they are motivating decisions that seriously affect the lives of others, there is a moral obligation to ferret them out and correct or deal with them. Attention needs to be paid to the emotions of healthcare providers as well as to the emotions of patients and their loved ones, and more done to train healthcare providers to deal effectively and productively with emotion – their own and others’. A son tearfully requests everything be done for his dying father. He fears limiting treatment means his father will be ignored. A physician orders another course of chemotherapy because she cannot bear for this patient to die. The patient, fearing he will painfully suffocate to death, agrees. Paying attention to emotions and bringing to light the beliefs and values behind them can only enhance the care and consideration of all involved. (shrink)

The number of admissions to hospitals of patients without a proxy decision maker is rising. Very often these patients need fairly immediate medical intervention for which informed consent—or informed refusal—is required. Many have recommended that there be a process in place to make these decisions, and that it include a variety of perspectives. People are particularly wary of relying solely on medical staff to make these decisions. The University Hospitals Case Medical Center recruits community members from its Ethics Committee to (...) serve on a subcommittee, the Patients Without Proxies (PWP) Committee, which works with medical staff during the decision-making process for these patients. Generally, the community members go to the bedside to observe patients. This article looks at how those unused to observing hospitalized patients who are sick and/or dying are affected, comparing them to mock jurors in a research study who are exposed to graphic photographs related to a fabricated crime scene. Judgments made by the mock jurors are affected by viewing such images. The personal experience of witnessing unfamiliar and shocking scenes affects their subsequent judgments. While it may be difficult to tease out whether observing patients causes PWP members to be benefited or harmed, they are affected by what they see. If a variety of perspectives is desirable to reduce possible bias or error, this article argues that at least one community member should refrain from seeing the patient in order to add a different and valuable voice to the decision-making process. Members of the subcommittee base their judgments on the various kinds of information available. Sometimes the things they see, hear, or feel may affect them particularly deeply, and affect their judgments as well. In this article I explore the idea that something like this may be happening in a particular kind of clinical ethics case consultation. (shrink)

The church and other community organisations have a legitimate role to play in influencing public policy. However, intervention by the church and other religious bodies in recent litigation in Australia and the United Kingdom raises questions about the appropriateness of such bodies being permitted to intervene directly in the court process as amici curiae. We argue that there are dangers in such bodies insinuating their doctrine under the guise of legal argument in civil proceedings, but find it difficult to enunciate (...) a principled distinction between doctrine and legal argument. We advise that judges should exercise caution in dealing with amicus submissions. (shrink)

Dr Boyle is right in drawing attention to the apparent inconsistency between laws that allow a fetus in utero to be aborted at the mother’s will but give the law’s full protection to a newborn infant, perhaps of the same gestation as the aborted fetus. It makes no difference how disabled the infant is, or how poor the prognosis. The reason for the inconsistency is that the two stages of the infant’s development—before birth and after birth—are governed by different legal (...) principles.While a fetus is in utero, the applicable laws are the criminal law of abortion and the civil law of battery, which here focuses on the mother’s direction alone. As Dr Boyle says, the law on abortion in the UK—and also in Australia—enables an abortion to be lawfully performed if continuing the pregnancy would present a real risk to the mother’s life, or her physical and mental health; and, additionally, in some jurisdictions like the UK, for serious fetal abnormality: see Abortion Act 1967 ,1 which includes risks to “existing children” as well as to the mother.2 Recent changes to the criminal law in the Australian Capital Territory and Western Australia have gone further and abortion is now lawful in those jurisdictions, simply on the informed request of the mother.3In jurisdictions that do not have a specific provision allowing abortion on the grounds of fetal abnormality, doctors have inferred that having a child with a serious abnormality would constitute a threat to the mother’s life or health, again focussing on the mother. The concept of harm to the mother’s health has been interpreted by the courts to include harm during pregnancy and delivery and also after the birth.4 This might take account of difficulties in raising …. (shrink)

Three of the four commentators endorse our concerns about intervention by the Roman Catholic church as anamicus curiaein civil litigation, with few reservations. One commentary rejects our arguments in toto. We deal first with the three commentaries that support our arguments; secondly, with the reservations and qualifications in those commentaries, and thirdly, with the commentary that totally rejects our arguments.

For the last fifty years, the United States healthcare system has done an extremely poor job of delivering healthcare in a just and fair manner. The United States holds the dubious distinction of being the only industrialized nation in the world lacking provisions to ensure universal coverage. We attempt to provide some of the reasons this dysfunctional system has persisted and show that healthcare should not be a commodity. We begin with a brief historical overview of healthcare delivery in the (...) United States since WWII. This is followed by a critical analysis of the for-profit model including reasons to support the view that healthcare should not be a free market commodity. We also demonstrate how special interest groups have been able to win support for their practices based on propaganda rather than fact. A brief analysis of the Affordable Care Act is offered along with critical comments regarding its ineffectiveness. We conclude with a brief overview of international approaches that have resulted in universal coverage and suggest the United States ought to adopt an approach similar to those outlined so that it no longer stands as the only industrialized nation to ignore the glaring problems that exist. (shrink)

We examine ethical considerations in access to facial transplantation (FT), with implications for promoting health equity. As a form of vascularised composite allotransplantation, FT is still considered innovative with a relatively low volume of procedures performed to date by a small number of active FT programmes worldwide. However, as numbers continue to increase and institutions look to establish new FT programmes, we anticipate that attention will shift from feasibility towards ensuring the benefits of FT are equitably available to those in (...) need. This manuscript assesses barriers to care and their ethical implications across a number of considerations, with the intent of mapping various factors relating to health equity and fair access to FT. Evidence is drawn from an evolving clinical experience as well as published scholarship addressing several dimensions of access to FT. We also explore novel concerns that have yet to be mentioned in the literature. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

The existence of free will has been both an enduring presumption of Western culture and a subject for debate across disciplines for millennia. However, little empirical evidence exists to support the almost unquestioned assumption that, in general, Westerners endorse the existence of free will. The few studies that measure belief in free will have methodological problems that likely resulted in underestimating the true extent of belief. Recently, Rakos et al. (Behavior and Social Issues 17:20–39, 2008 ) found a stronger endorsement (...) of free will when demand characteristics were eliminated. The current study builds on this work by sampling incarcerated adolescents and adults, whose freedom to act is externally constrained. Belief in free will as well as attitudes toward punishment, self-esteem, and locus of control were measured. The results indicate that free will is strongly endorsed in Western society even when freedom to act is severely restricted. However, incarcerated adolescents endorsed free will to a slightly lesser extent than their nonincarcerated counterparts from Rakos et al. (Behavior and Social Issues 17:20–39, 2008 ), while incarcerated and nonincarcerated adults offered equally strong endorsements. The comparable endorsement by adults is consistent with the hypothesis that the belief in agency is an evolutionary adaptation. The small decrease found for incarcerated adolescents may reflect the interaction between developmental factors and the expression of an evolutionary adaptation. Additionally, incarcerated adolescents and adults associated beliefs in free will with viewing punishment as a means of deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution. Incarcerated adults, but not incarcerated adolescents, associated beliefs in free will with greater self-esteem and with an external locus of control. Finally, though both incarcerated adults and adolescents endorsed free will strongly, the former manifested the belief by emphasizing free agentic choice whereas the latter focused on the personal responsibility that is interwoven with free choice. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of evolutionary, cultural, and developmental factors. (shrink)

Skene and Parker are demonstrably mistaken in suggesting that the amicus role of Catholic bishops in three cases has been concerned with “developing” the law. In contrast with Skene and Parker’s freestanding conception of legal principle, the Catholic understanding of law’s rational moral foundations has permitted Catholic bishops to defend longstanding legal principle as well as defending the integrity of the church’s health care and welfare services. It is shown that in the three cases under discussion Catholic bishops (...) were providing needed argument otherwise unavailable to the courts in defence of existing statute. In face of the attempts by pressure groups to bypass the legislature and use the courts to subvert fundamental legal principles, the church is perhaps uniquely capable of continuing to provide to the courts rational defences of those principles. (shrink)

In their response, The role of the church in developing the law: response to commentators, Professors Skene and Parker make a number of criticisms of my commentary, some contestable, some plainly mistaken.1Their first criticism is that I am “incorrect” and “misleading” in describing the New South Wales Crimes Act as “[a] statute which provided that abortion was a criminal offence”. They give as their reason that: “The criminal offence created by section 83 of the Crimes Act 1900 is not (...) abortion. It is unlawful abortion. Because the word ‘unlawfully’ appears in the act, it is clear that the law states that it is sometime lawful to undertake an abortion.” They then explain the interpretation of the cognate provision in the Victorian legislation provided by Justice Menhennit in R v Davidson [1969] VR 667.The reason they offer for their criticism fairly summarises the moves made by Macnaghten J in his direction in R v Bourne and by Menhennit J in R v Davidson. But it is far from “clear” that the use of the word “unlawfully” supports those moves. It was and remains a matter of real controversy whether the use of the expression “unlawfully” has the meaning which Menhennit J attached to it.Section 83 of the Crimes Act provided:"Whosoever—unlawfully administers to, or causes to be taken by, any woman, whether with child or not, any drug or noxious thing; or unlawfully uses any instrument or other means, with intent in any such case to procure a miscarriage, shall be liable to penal servitude for ten years."Consider that provision alongside other provisions in the Crimes Act 1900 which also make use of the term …. (shrink)

This commentary contributes to philosophical reflection on the growing challenge of digital distraction and the value of attention in the digital age. It clarifies the nature of the problem in conceptual and historical terms; analyzes “freedom of attention” as an organizing ideal for moral and political theorizing; considers some constraints of political morality on coercive state action to bolster users’ attentional resources; comments on corporate moral responsibility; and touches on some reform ideas. In particular, the commentary develops a response to (...) an anti-paternalistic line of argument rooted in Mill’s Harm Principle that would oppose state regulation on the grounds that securing attentional capacities is a matter of personal responsibility alone. The commentary engages throughout with James Williams’s recent work on the attention economy by identifying areas of agreement and difference. (shrink)

This chapter explores the place of remorse in Sophie de Grouchy’s moral theory, as presented in her 1798 work, Letters on Sympathy, which was originally published with her translation of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. I argue that, for Grouchy, a cultivated sense of remorse weakens our self-conceit by drawing our attention to the ways in which we harm others, even for seemingly justifiable reasons. In so doing, we are led to recognize the equal standing of others, which gives (...) rise to the “sentiment of natural equality.” This “sentiment of natural equality” places a check on our norms and institutions and allows for the potential of moral progress. While Grouchy frames the Letters as a commentary on Smith’s writings, her discussion of remorse, equality, and moral progress shows her to be a bold and original thinker, and one worth taking seriously. (shrink)

One issue within conspiracy theory theory is whether, or to what extent, our central concept – – should map on to the common, lay sense of the term. Some conspiracy theory theorists insist that we use the term as everyday people use it. So, for example, if the term has a pejorative connotation in everyday parlance, then academic work on the concept should reflect that. Other conspiracy theory theorists take a more revisionist approach, arguing instead that while their use of (...) the theoretical concept should bear some relation to its use in natural language, it need not follow it subserviently. I argue that elements of this debate mirror related debates that were prominent in the philosophy of mind in the 1980s over folk psychology and eliminative materialism (debates that continue today, such as within the philosophy of perception and theories over how to individuate the senses). Then, there was a debate over whether the concepts of commonsense psychology, such as or, should be treated as theoretical posits, and hence open to significant revision or elimination, or whether they were instead the targets of explanation. I will argue that an eliminativist approach to has significant merit. (shrink)

During public health crises including the COVID-19 pandemic, resource scarcity and contagion risks may require health systems to shift—to some degree—from a usual clinical ethic, focused on the well-being of individual patients, to a public health ethic, focused on population health. Many triage policies exist that fall under the legal protections afforded by “crisis standards of care,” but they have key differences. We critically appraise one of the most fundamental differences among policies, namely the use of criteria to categorically exclude (...) certain patients from eligibility for otherwise standard medical services. We examine these categorical exclusion criteria from ethical, legal, disability, and implementation perspectives. Focusing our analysis on the most common type of exclusion criteria, which are disease-specific, we conclude that optimal policies for critical care resource allocation and the use of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) should not use categorical exclusions. We argue that the avoidance of categorical exclusions is often practically feasible, consistent with public health norms, and mitigates discrimination against persons with disabilities. (shrink)

What makes for a good education? What does one need to count as well-educated? Knowledge, to be sure. But knowledge is easily forgotten, and today's knowledge may be obsolete tomorrow. Skills, particularly in critical thinking, are crucial as well. But absent the right motivation, graduates may fail to put their skills to good use. In this book, Nathan King argues that intellectual virtues-traits like curiosity, intellectual humility, honesty, intellectual courage, and open-mindedness-are central to any education worthy of the name. Further, (...) such virtues are crucial to our functioning well in everyday life, in areas as diverse as personal relationships, responsible citizenship, civil discourse, and personal success. Our struggles in these areas often result from a failure to think virtuously. Drawing upon recent work in philosophy and psychology, King paints a portrait of virtuous intellectual character-and of the vices such a character opposes. Filled with examples and applications, this book introduces readers to the intellectual virtues: what they are, why they matter, and how we can grow in them. (shrink)

James Shaw has written an excellent book on Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations. It manages to provide fresh perspectives on a topic on which it seemed.

Business and Society Review, Volume 127, Issue S1, Page 343-367, Spring 2022.

Researchers have studied the athletes' dual careers with the aim of helping them to combine the sport and the academic–vocational sphere. Most of this research has addressed the study–sport combination, but there is a lack of studies on the work–sport combination. The main objective of this research was to explore the subjective perceptions of Spanish elite athletes when attempting to combine their careers as professional athletes with a second profession or trade. Further, this study aims to identify the access to (...) facilitating resources and the perception of obstacles and barriers to the development of a dual career. A qualitative approach was chosen to address these research questions. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was carried out on a sample of 18 elite athletes, and the data were collected using semi-structured interviews based on a set of superordinate and subordinate categories. The results showed that the athletes interviewed possessed valuable resources such as the transference of sports values to the work sphere. However, important barriers were highlighted such as the perception of sport institutions as absent entities in the work–sport combination. Thus, the study of this type of dual career seems to be one of the challenges facing the interested scientific community for the coming years. (shrink)

Austin takes on the problem of other minds, of how to respond to the question ‘how do you know?’, if this question is raised with regard to the thoughts, feelings, sensations, minds of other creatures. This problem has traditionally been understood as the problem of justifying our belief in the existence of other minds. Austin argues that believing in other persons, in authority and testimony, is an essential part of the act of communicating, and as such is an irreducible part (...) of our experience. While we can state certain advantages of communicative performances, there is no justification for our doing them as such. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging study, Quinn argues that human moral autonomy is compatible with unqualified obedience to divine commands. He formulates several versions of the crucial assumptions of divine command ethics, defending them against a battery of objections often expressed in the philosophical literature.

On the meta-level, ‘A Plea for Excuses’, sometimes regarded as the manifesto of ordinary language philosophy, illustrates Austin’s method of approaching philosophical issues, by patiently analysing the subtleties of ordinary language, by example. On the object level, the key distinction with regard to human actions that appear to be worthy of blame, Austin holds to be between a justification, which denies that the performed action was wrong, and an excuse, which instead denies that the agent was responsible for performing it. (...) Austin gives careful attention to particular cases of exculpatory speech, including precise word order and varying emphasis, etymological studies, and the special function of adverbial qualifying phrases, and shows how legal precedents and abnormal psychology may also be helpful in understanding why some efforts to excuse fail. In the final analysis, excuses are properly seen as setting limits to the ascription of moral responsibility, by stating explicitly how they differ from the more usual cases. (shrink)

A theology aims to explain the nature of God. A metatheology investigates more fundamental issues concerning how to structure such an intellectual endeavor. This book examines where it is best to start the project of theology in the hope of offering a defensible metatheory from which a complete and elegant theology can be developed.

The Zhuangzi offers quite a few stories that centre on performance: a bellstand maker who selects wood to create wonderful bellstands; a ferryman who steers through rough waters; a cicada catcher who uses a stick, as if it were his hand, to catch cicadas; and a wheelmaker who, in using his chisel, feels it in his hand and responds with his heart. What is the role of the stick, for the cicada catcher, and the chisel, for the wheelmaker? What do (...) these masters know? I situate these questions within the intellectual context of the Zhuangzi, highlighting the text’s opposition to prevailing conceptions of a flourishing life. I draw on recent debates in extended mind and cognition to suggest that they offer interesting ways of understanding the knowledgeable practices of these masters. The frameworks and vocabulary of extended mind allow me to bring out how and why the Zhuangzi’s examples of mastery are apt and insightful reasons for rejecting the then current views on good government. The dialogue benefits both Chinese and Western traditions: the examples in the Zhuangzi help to diversify contemporary Western philosophy’s understanding of knowledge. (shrink)

Prey-catching behavior (PCB) in frogs and toads has been the focus of intense neuroethological research from the mid-twentieth century to the present and epitomizes some major themes in science and philosophy during this period. It reflects the movement from simple reflexology to more complex views of instinctive behavior, but it also displays a neural reductionism that denies subjectivity and individual agency The present article engages contemporary PCB research but provides a philosophically more promising picture of it based on Whitehead's nonreductionist (...) "philosophy of organism," which proposes that the flow of events from stimulus to response in organisms of all kinds is mediated by "the intervening touch of mentality " This approach resolves some basic mind-body and mind-nature issues that have long bedeviled modern philosophy and presents an image of a postmodern frog for a constructively postmodern science. (shrink)

In part I of this paper, I argue that #MeToo testimony increases epistemic value for the survivor qua hearer when experiences like hers are represented by others; for society at large when false but dominant narratives about sexual violence and sexual harassment against women are challenged and replaced with true stories; and for the survivor qua teller when her true story is believed. In part II, I argue that the epistemic significance of #MeToo testimony compels us to consider the tremendous (...) and often unappreciated costs to the individual tellers, and the increased credibility they are owed in virtue thereof. (shrink)

Austin attacks the view that language is referential, based on the simplistic division of utterances into the ‘descriptive’ and ‘evaluative’, using his notion of performative utterances. Such utterances, in the appropriate circumstances, are neither descriptive nor evaluative, but count as actions, i.e., create the situation rather than describing or reporting on it. In saying ‘I promise to go’ one is making a promise, not stating that one is making it. A performative promise is not, and does not involve, the statement (...) that one is promising. It is an act of a distinctive sort, the very sort named by the performative verb. And, according to Austin, making explicit what one is doing is not describing what one is doing or stating that one is doing it. (shrink)

Criticises G. E. Moore’s highly influential proposal that ascriptions of agent ability implying freedom of choice or action, what the agent could do, are analyzable as conditional statements regarding what the agent would do under certain circumstances. Austin objects against Moore that some uses of ‘if’ are non-conditional and goes on to examine the uses of these non-conditional cases. Moore’s proposal also lies at the heart of some compatibilist theories of free will and determinism. Austin argues determinism to be a (...) pseudo-problem, so long as it remains a notion that is not itself clear cut. (shrink)

In the paper ‘COVID-19 vaccine boosters for young adults: a risk–benefit assessment and ethical analysis of mandate policies at universities,’ Bardoshet alargued that college mandates of the COVID-19 booster vaccine are unethical. The authors came to this conclusion by performing three different sets of comparisons of benefits versus risks using referenced data and argued that the harm outweighs the risk in all three cases. In this response article, we argue that the authors frame their arguments by comparing values that are (...) not scientifically or reasonably comparable and that the authors used values that represent grossly different risk profiles and grouped them into a set of figures to create an illusion of fair comparisons. We argue that absent the falsely skewed portrayals of a higher level of risk over benefit in their misrepresented figures, the five ethical arguments they presented completely fall apart. (shrink)

Cultural narratives shape how we think about the world, including how we decide when the end of life begins. Hospice care has become an integral part of the end‐of‐life care in the United States, but as it has grown, its policies and practices have also imposed cultural narratives, like those associated with the “six‐month rule” that the majority of the end of life takes place in the final six months of life. This idea is embedded in policies for a range (...) of care practices and reimbursement processes, even though six months is not always a meaningful marker. In the case of people living with advanced dementia, six months is both too early in the trajectory to facilitate conversations and too late in the trajectory to ensure decision‐making capacity. This essay encourages scholars and policy‐makers to consider how cultural narratives may limit what they think is possible in care for people living with dementia. (shrink)

Gender scholars argued that gendered organizations theory needs updating as organizational logic has shifted amid neoliberal workplace transformations. This qualitative case study of a high-tech firm reveals how features of the traditional work logic remain resilient. I analyze the gendered implications of a high-tech startup restructuring and going public, finding the flexible organization to bureaucratize, implementing specialized jobs and a hierarchy with standardized career ladders. Going public creates conflicting gendered logics that place women at a structural disadvantage, relegating them to (...) low-status, narrow jobs while simultaneously demanding masculine ideal worker norms of visibility and self-promotion. Despite networking, women experience job insecurity and a glass ceiling, while men are assumed ideal workers and advance. By tracing one high-tech firm’s restructuring from a startup to public company, I demonstrate how the collision of new and traditional workplace logics perpetuates gender inequalities. (shrink)

The central unifying element in the philosophy of Peter Browne is his theory of analogy. Although Browne's theory was originally developed to deal with some problems about religious language, Browne regards analogy as a general purpose cognitive mechanism whereby we substitute an idea we have to stand for an object of which we, strictly speaking, have no idea. According to Browne, all of our ideas are ideas of sense, and ideas of sense are ideas of material things. Hence we can (...) conceive of spiritual things – including even our own spirit – only by analogy. One interesting application Browne makes of his theory is an account of how concepts such as knowledge can be correctly applied to beings that have no intrinsic properties in common, such as non-human animals, humans, angels, and God. I argue that this is best understood as what, in the contemporary literature, is known as a ‘multiple realizability’ problem and that Browne's solution to this problem has important similarities to functionalist theories in recent philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Skilful expertise is grounded in practical, performative knowledge-how, not in detached, spectatorial knowledge-that, and knowledge-how is embodied by habitual dispositions, not representation of facts and rules. Consequently, as action control is a key requirement for the intelligent selection, initiation, and regulation of skilful performance, habitual action control, i.e. the kind of action control based on habitual dispositions, is the true hallmark of skill and the only veridical criterion to evaluate expertise. Not only does this imply that knowledge-that does not make (...) your actions more skilful, but it also implies that it makes them less skilful. This thesis, that I call Radical Habitualism, finds a precursor in Hubert Dreyfus. His approach is considered extreme by most philosophers of skill & expertise: an agent –says Dreyfus– does not perform like an expert when they lack the embodied dispositions necessary to control their action habitually or when they stop relying on such dispositions to control their actions. Thus, one cannot perform skilfully if their actions are guided by representations (isomorphic schemas, explicit rules, and contentful instructions), as the know-that that they convey disrupts or diminishes the agent’s habitual engagement with the task at hand. In defence of Radical Habitualism, I will argue that only the contentless know-how embedded in habitual dispositions fulfils (i) the genetic, (ii) the normative, and (iii) the epistemic requirements of skilful performance. I will examine the phenomenological premises supporting Dreyfus’ approach, clarify their significance for a satisfactory normative and explanatory account of skilful expertise, and rebut the most common objections raised by both intellectualists and conciliatory habitualists, concerning hybrid actions guided by a mix of habitual and representational forms of control. In revisiting Dreyfus anti-representationalist approach, I will particularly focus on its epistemological implications, de-emphasizing other considerations related to conscious awareness. (shrink)