Notion essentielle au croisement de la psychologie, de l'ethique et de l'esthetique de la tradition occidentale, la phantasia des Grecs, devenue imaginatio dans le monde latin avant d'etre traduite dans les differentes langues europeennes, a connu un echo considerable tout au long de l'histoire de la pensee philosophique. Les etudes rassemblees dans le present volume sont issues d'un seminaire et d'une journee d'etudes qui se sont tenus en 2001 a l'Universite catholique de Louvain et aux Facultes Notre-Dame de la Paix (...) de Namur. Elles visent a eclairer l'evolution du sens et du role de la notion au travers d'etapes historiques particulieres, surtout anciennes, s'echelonnant du VIe siecle avant Jesus-Christ au XVIIe siecle de notre ere. (shrink)

Conceptualizing the image of a dancing Supreme Goddess in the Hindu tradition presents a philosophical challenge because it demands a coherent rational reconciliation between her nature as continuously changing into multiple forms and the realm of pure, absolute, never-changing, formless being. Different strategies have been proposed in the history of philosophy in India. This paper analyzes the image of the dancing Goddess as it appears in the Devī Māhātmya and in the Tantric iconography of the Goddess Kālī. An argument is (...) developed to show that Śākta philosophy resolves this tension through a radical non-dualist understanding of the role that a mental image (vikalpa) plays in accessing supreme reality. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to revisit Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus 2.5.45-8 discussing whether Clement holds a moderate position οf laughter or, like most early Christians, tends to an “antigelastic” position. Some scholars, such as Stephen Halliwell and Laura Rizzerio, have concluded that Clement holds an intermediate position between an optimistic approach to laughter and its condemnation. However, in this essay we argue that while Clement’s position is not a straightforward antigelastic one, his apparent acceptance of laughter (...) is so narrow that his moderate view ends up being compromised. Ultimately, he is strongly inclined to condemn laughter and to prescribe an ascetic life devoid of laughter. (shrink)

The potential to collect brain data more directly, with higher resolution, and in greater amounts has heightened worries about mental and brain privacy. In order to manage the risks to individuals posed by these privacy challenges, some have suggested codifying new privacy rights, including a right to “mental privacy.” In this paper, we consider these arguments and conclude that while neurotechnologies do raise significant privacy concerns, such concerns are—at least for now—no different from those raised by other well-understood data collection (...) technologies, such as gene sequencing tools and online surveillance. To better understand the privacy stakes of brain data, we suggest the use of a conceptual framework from information ethics, Helen Nissenbaum’s “contextual integrity” theory. To illustrate the importance of context, we examine neurotechnologies and the information flows they produce in three familiar contexts—healthcare and medical research, criminal justice, and consumer marketing. We argue that by emphasizing what is distinct about brain privacy issues, rather than what they share with other data privacy concerns, risks weakening broader efforts to enact more robust privacy law and policy. (shrink)

Over the last five decades, philosophers of language have looked into the mechanisms for doing things with words. The same attention has not been devoted to how to undo those things, once they have been done. This paper identifies and examines three strategies to make one’s speech acts undone—namely, Annulment, Retraction, and Amendment. In annulling an act, a speaker brings to light its fatal flaws. Annulment amounts to recognizing an act as null, whereas retraction and amendment amount to making it (...) null. Speakers employ retraction to cancel the deontic updates engendered by a given act. They instead use amendment to adjust its degree of strength. I will argue that annulling, retracting, and amending are second-order speech acts, whose felicity conditions vary with the type of illocution they operate on. Undoing is therefore conceived of as a form of doing. Furthermore, I claim that, in calling off our acts, we undo the conventional or illocutionary effects of our words while leaving intact their past causal or perlocutionary outcomes. (shrink)

Bringing together Luce Irigaray's early psychoanalytically orientated writings with her more recent and more explicitly political writings, Irigaray and Politics weaves together the ontological, political and ethical dimensions of Irigaray's philosophy of sexuate difference in imaginative ways.

One realist response to the pessimistic meta-induction distinguishes idle theoretical wheels from aspects of successful theories we can expect to persist and espouses realism about the latter. Implementing the response requires a strategy for identifying the distinguished aspects. The strategy I will call renormalization group realism has the virtue of directly engaging the gears of our best current physics—perturbative quantum field theories. I argue that the strategy, rather than disarming the skeptical possibilities evinced by the pessimistic meta-induction, forces them to (...) retreat a level. I also suggest that those skeptical possibilities continue to carry force. (shrink)

Scientists typically use a variety of representations, including different kinds of figures, to present and defend hypotheses. In order to understand the justification of scientific hypotheses, it is essential to understand how visual representations contribute to scientific arguments. Since the logical understanding of arguments involves the truth or falsity of the representations involved, visual representations must have the capacity to bear truth in order to be genuine components of arguments. By drawing on Goodman's analysis of symbol systems, and on Tarski's (...) work on truth, I show that the figures used in science meet this criterion. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role that the distinction between principle and constructive theories have in the question of the explanatory power of Special Relativity. We show how the distinction breaks down at the explanatory level. We assess Harvey Brown’s (2005) claim that, as a principle theory, Special Relativity lacks of explanatory power and criticize it, as, we argue, based upon an unrealistic picture of the kind of explanations provided by principle (and constructive) theories. Finally, we (...) claim that the structural account of explanation (Hughes 1989b) captures the explanatory success of Special Relativity. (shrink)

Taking Arthur Fine’s The Shaky Game as my inspiration, and the recent 25th anniversary of the publication of that work as the occasion to exercise that inspiration, I sketch an alternative to the “Naturalism” prevalent among philosophers of physics. Naturalism is a methodology eventuating in a metaphysics. The methodology is to seek the deep framework assumptions that make the best sense of science; the metaphysics is furnished by those assumptions and supported by their own support of science. The alternative presented (...) here, which I call “Locavoracity,” shares Naturalism’s commitment to making sense of science, but alters Naturalism’s methodology. The Locavore’s sense-making projects are piecemeal, rather than sweeping. The Locavore’s hypothesis is that the collection of local sense-making projects fails to issue a single overarching unifying framework deserving of the title “the metaphysics that makes the best sense of science.” I muster some examples supporting the Locavore hypothesis from the interpretation of quantum field theories. (shrink)

Is religious faith consistent with being an intellectually virtuous thinker? In seeking to answer this question, one quickly finds others, each of which has been the focus of recent renewed attention by epistemologists: What is it to be an intellectually virtuous thinker? Must all reasonable belief be grounded in public evidence? Under what circumstances is a person rationally justified in believing something on trust, on the testimony of another, or because of the conclusions drawn by an intellectual authority? Can it (...) be reasonable to hold a belief on a topic over which there is significant, entrenched disagreement among informed inquirers, or should such disagreement lead all parties to modify or suspend their own judgments? Is there anything about faith that exempts it from measurement against such epistemic norms? And if we would so evaluate it, how exactly should we understand the intellectual commitments faith requires? The volume's introduction provides a roadmap of the central issues and controversies as currently discussed by philosophers. In fourteen new essays written to engage nonspecialists as well as philosophers working in religion and epistemology, a diverse and distinguished group of thinkers then consider the place of intellectual virtue in religious faith, exploring one or more of the specific issues noted above. (shrink)

My first aim in this paper is to show that the transparency claim cannot serve the purpose to which it is assigned; that is, the idea that perceptual experience is transparent is no help whatsoever in motivating an externalist account of phenomenal character. My second aim is to show that the internalist qualia theorist's response to the transparency idea has been unnecessarily concessive to the externalist. Surprisingly, internalists seem to allow that much of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience depends (...) essentially (and not just causally) upon externally located properties. They argue that we can also be aware of internal, non-intentional qualia. I present an alternative response the internalist can make to the transparency claim: phenomenal character is wholly internal, and seeming to be aware of externally located properties just is being aware of internally constituted experiential features. (shrink)

The ambiguity regarding whether a given intervention is perceived as enhancement or as therapy might contribute to the angst that the public expresses with respect to endorsement of enhancement. We set out to develop empirical data that explored this. We used Amazon Mechanical Turk to recruit participants from Canada and the United States. Each individual was randomly assigned to read one vignette describing the use of a pill to enhance one of 12 cognitive, affective or social domains. The vignettes described (...) a situation in which an individual was using a pill to enhance the relevant domain under one of two possible enhancement conditions, one perceived as enhancing above the norm, what most people recognize as a clear case of enhancement, whereas the other perceived as enhancing towards the norm, with the individual using the enhancement having a modest, but subclinical deficit. Participants were asked how comfortable they were with the individual using the enhancement and about the impact the enhancement might have had in the individuals’ success in life. We found that irrespective of the domain to be enhanced, participants felt significantly more comfortable with ETN than with EAN, and they regarded the enhancement intervention as contributing to greater success in life with ETN rather than EAN. These data demonstrate that the therapy enhancement distinction is morally salient to the public, and that this distinction contributes to the angst that people feel when considering the propriety of CAS enhancement. (shrink)

This paper sketches a right-maker account of normative practical reasons along functionalist lines. The approach is contrasted with other similar accounts, in particular John Broome's analysis of reasons as explanations of oughts.

Much contemporary political philosophy claims to be Kant-inspired, but its aims and method differ from Kant's own. In his recent book, Force and Freedom, Arthur Ripstein advocates a more orthodox Kantian outlook, presenting it as superior to dominant (Kant-inspired) views. The most striking feature of this outlook is its attempt to ground the whole of political morality in one right: the right to freedom, understood as the right to be independent of others’ choices. Is Ripstein's Kantian project successful? In this (...) research note I argue that it is not. First, I suggest that Ripstein's notion of freedom is viciously circular. It is meant to ground all rights, but in fact it presupposes an account of those rights. Second, I show that—independently of its inability to ground a whole political morality—such a moralized understanding of freedom is normatively unappealing. (shrink)

Moorean constructions are famously odd: it is infelicitous to deny that you believe what you claim to be true. But what about claiming that p, only to immediately put into question your evidence in support of p? In this paper, we identify and analyse a class of quasi-Moorean constructions, which we label counterevidentials. Although odd, counterevidentials can be accommodated as felicitous attempts to mitigate one’s claim right after making it. We explore how counterevidentials differ from lexicalised mitigation operators, parentheticals, and (...) anaphoric mitigation devices, and consider some cognate non-assertoric constructions. We conclude by exploring the implications of our analysis for theorising about linguistic responsibility, assertion, and lying. (shrink)

One of Mark Textor’s main aims in Brentano’s Mind is to refute Brentano’s claim that intentionality – the capacity our mental acts have for being of, about, or directed on something – is the mark of the mental. I defend the view that Brentano analysed intentionality in terms of intentional inexistence (and so wasn’t an intentionality primitivist as Textor suggests). And I argue that we can regard intentionality as being the mark of the mental, but only if we give a (...) non-relational analysis of the idea of intentional inexistence. Textor objects to an analysis of intentionality in terms of intentional inexistence for failing to account for the relationship between the object our mental act is directed on, and the ‘immanent’ or ‘inexistent’ object which all mental acts contain. I claim that this problem doesn’t arise if the object our mental act is directed on just is the immanent/ inexistent object. I argue that Brentano (at least sometimes) seems to identify the two. I then offer my own view of intentionality according to which our mental acts are directed on immanent/ inexistent objects, and that ‘directedness’ should be understood non-relationally. (shrink)

The debate over the propriety of cognitive enhancement evokes both enthusiasm and worry. To gain further insight into the reasons that people may have for endorsing or eschewing pharmacological enhancement, we used empirical tools to explore public attitudes towards PE of twelve cognitive, affective, and social domains. Participants from Canada and the United States were recruited using Mechanical Turk and were randomly assigned to read one vignette that described an individual who uses a pill to enhance a single domain. After (...) reading the vignette, participants were asked how comfortable they were with the individual using the enhancement. People were significantly more comfortable when they read about enhancement of certain CAS domains than others. We found a modest negative correlation between comfort level and the degree to which the PE was perceived as changing core features of the person. We also found a modest correlation between comfort level and the degree to which the PE was perceived as improving success in life. Finally, using a sequential mixed method technique, we found that participants who felt uncomfortable about PE use overwhelmingly focused on a lack of need and, to a lesser degree, expressed concerns about safety; those who felt comfortable about PE use most frequently mentioned the safety of the pill and its ability to provide a positive outcome. The data provide novel insights into public enthusiasms and concerns over the use of PE. (shrink)

Publications in contemporary science journals often include figures like graphs, diagrams, photographs, and MRIs, which are presented as support for the hypothesis the author is defending. As a first step to explaining how figures contribute to confirmation, I present an account of visual representation and use examples to show how the visual format is involved in the support those figures provide the authors’ conclusions. I then show that attempts to explain what figures contribute to scientific arguments without analyzing them as (...) visual representations will not succeed. (shrink)

Starting from the standard quantum formalism for a single spin 1/2 system (e.g., an electron), this essay develops a model rich enough not only to afford an explication of symmetry breaking but also to frame questions about how to circumscribe physical possibility on behalf of theories that countenance symmetry breaking.

This paper sets out to unpack the pragmatic structure of refusal—its illocutionary nature, success conditions, and normative effects. I argue that our ordinary concept of refusal captures a whole family of illocutions, comprising acts such as rejecting, declining, and the like, which share the property of being ‘negative second-turn illocutions’. Only _proper refusals_ (i.e. negative replies to permission requests), I submit, require speaker authority. I construe the ‘refusal family’ as a subclass of the directives-commissives intersection. After defending my view against (...) a number of potential objections, I highlight how a theoretically grounded analysis of refusal is not only of intrinsic value, but may also have significant moral and legal implications. (shrink)

This article documents our collaborative ongoing struggle to disrupt the reproduction of the coloniality of knowledge in the teaching of Gender Studies. We document how our decolonial feminist activism is actualised in our pedagogy, which is guided by feminist interpretations of ‘wonder’ (Irigaray, 1999; Ahmed, 2004; hooks, 2010) read alongside decolonial theory, including that of Ramón Grosfoguel, Walter D. Mignolo and María Lugones. Using notions of wonder as pedagogy, we attempt to create spaces in our classrooms where critical self-reflection and (...) critical intellectual and embodied engagement can emerge. Our attempts to create these spaces include multiple aspects or threads that, when woven together, might enable other ways of knowing-being-doing that works towards disrupting feminist complicity with coloniality in the Australian context. (shrink)

Context: I extend the enactive account of loving in romantic relationships that I developed with Hanne De Jaegher to the love of nature. Problem: I challenge a universal conceptualization of love of nature that does not account for the differences that are inherent to nature. As an alternative, I offer a situated account of loving a place as participatory sense-making. However, a question arises: How is it possible to communicate with the other-than-human? Method: I use panpsychist and enactive conceptual tools (...) to better define this situated approach to the love of nature and to reply to the research question. In particular, I focus on Mathews’s “becoming native” and the generative tensions that unfold in a dialectic of encounter when a common language is not shared. Results: The fundamental difference experienced in encountering the other-than-human is generative for building up the human-Earth connection if we let each other be listened to. I describe the ethical dimension that permeates this type of “enactive listening” at the core of a situated account of love of nature. Implications: Love of nature is of paramount importance in our current climate crisis characterized by environmental anxiety, despair, and anger. A situated love of nature emphasizes the importance of community-based local interventions to preserve the Earth. Love, thus understood as a fundamental moral and political power, is a catalyst for environmental activism. Constructivist content: My article links to participatory sense-making as defined by De Jaegher and Di Paolo, and De Jaegher’s loving epistemology. It offers a broader understanding of participatory sense-making that includes the other-than-human. It also introduces the new concept of “enactive listening.”. (shrink)

Meta-governance is Earth system governance for dealing with the global commons. This article develops a whole network approach to meta-governance to explore the potential for collective action for sustainable development by a loosely coupled network of networks. Networked corporate social responsibility governance has emerged around corporate sustainability and responsibility in the first years of the 21st century. Growing agreements and interactions among CSR initiatives suggest the development, structure, and governance of networked CSR governance as a network that can analytically be (...) viewed as a whole and as a platform for learning about systemic change. Using the evolution of CSR initiatives from about 1990 to 2014, the authors differentiate four developmental stages: independent and fragmented multistakeholder networks as CSR governance, collaborative CSR governance, networked CSR governance, and integrated networked CSR governance. The authors then present a framework to analyze networked CSR governance as a whole network experimenting with meta-governance. (shrink)

The need to evaluate the performance of clinical ethics services is widely acknowledged although work in this area is more developed in the United States. In the USA many studies that assess clinical ethics services have utilized empirical methods and assessment criteria. The value of these approaches is thought to rest on their ability to measure the value of services in a demonstrable fashion. However, empirical measures tend to lack ethical content, making their contribution to developments in ethical governance unclear. (...) The steady increase of clinical ethics committees in the UK must be accompanied by efforts to evaluate their performance. As part of this evaluative work it is important to examine how the practice of clinical ethics committees can be informed by empirical measures. (shrink)

A normal state on a von Neumann algebra defines a countably additive probability measure over its projection lattice. The von Neumann algebras familiar from ordinary QM are algebras of all the bounded operators on a Hilbert space H, aka Type I factor von Neumann algebras. Their normal states are density operator states, and can be pure or mixed. In QFT and the thermodynamic limit of QSM, von Neumann algebras of more exotic types abound. Type III von Neumann algebras, for instance, (...) have no pure normal states; the pure states they do have fail to be countably additive. I will catalog a number of temptations to accord physical significance to non-normal states, and then give some reasons to resist these temptations: pure though they may be, non-normal states on non-Type I factor von Neumann algebras can't do the interpretive work we've come to expect from pure states on Type I factors; our best accounts of state preparation don't work for the preparation of non-normal states; there is a sense in which non-normal states fail to instantiate the laws of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Emotions ( pathè) such as anger, fear, shame, and envy, but also pity, wonder, love and friendship have long been underestimated in Plato’s philosophy. The aim of Emotions in Plato is to provide a consistent account of the role of emotions in Plato’s psychology, epistemology, ethics and political theory. The volume focuses on three main issues: taxonomy of emotions, their epistemic status, and their relevance for the ethical and political theory and practice. This volume, which is the first edited volume (...) entirely dedicated to emotions in Plato’s philosophy, shows how Plato, in many aspects, was positively interested in these affective states in order to support the rule of reason. (shrink)

Externalist representationalism is touted as a superior rival to naïve realism, and yet a careful analysis of the externalist representationalist's analysis of our ordinary perceptual experiences shows the view to be far closer to naïve realism than we might have expected. One of the central advertised benefits of representationalist views in general is that they are compatible with the idea that ordinary, illusory and hallucinatory perceptual experiences are of the same fundamental kind. Naïve realists are forced to deny the ‘common (...) fundamental kind claim’ and adopt disjunctivism. However, I argue that externalist representationalism is also a version of disjunctivism. Consequently, one of the main rivals to naïve realism turns out not to be a rival at all. (shrink)

Arguably the most influential models of human decision-making today are based on the assumption that two separable systems – intuition and deliberation – underlie the judgments that people make. Our recent work is among the first to present neural evidence contrary to the predictions of these dual-systems accounts. We measured brain activations using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants were specifically instructed to either intuitively or deliberately judge the authenticity of emotional facial expressions. Results from three different analyses revealed (...) both common brain networks of activation across decision mode and differential activations as a function of strategy adherence. We take our results to contradict popular dual-systems accounts that propose a clear-cut dichotomy of the processing systems, and to support rather a unified model. According to this, intuitive and deliberate judgment processes rely on the same rules, though only the former are thought to be characterized by non-conscious processing. (shrink)

This book provides rigorous analyses of Deleuze's writings on theatre practitioners such as Artaud, Beckett and Carmelo Bene, as well as offering innovative ...

Background: The concept of dignity can be divided into two main attributes: absolute dignity that calls for recognition of an inner worth of persons and social dignity that can be changeable and can be lost as a result of different social factors and moral behaviours. In this light, the nursing profession has a professional dignity that is to be continually constructed and re-constructed and involves both main attributes of dignity. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine how nurses (...) described nursing’s professional dignity in internal medicine and surgery departments in hospital settings. Research design: The research design was qualitative. Ethical considerations: This study was approved by the ethics committees of the healthcare organizations involved. All the participants were provided with information about the purpose and the nature of the study. Participants: A total of 124 nurses participated in this study. Method: The data were collected using 20 focus group sessions in different parts of Italy. The data were analysed by means of a conventional inductive content analysis starting from the information retrieved in order to extract meaning units and sorting the arising phenomena into conceptually meaningful categories and themes. Results: Nursing’s professional dignity was deeply embedded in the innermost part of individuals. Regarding the social part of dignity, a great importance was put on the values that compose nursing’s professional identity, the socio-historical background and the evolution of nursing in the area considered. The social part of dignity was also linked to collaboration with physicians and with healthcare assistants who were thought to have a central role in easing work strain. Equally important, though, was the relationship with peers and senior nurses. Conclusion: The organizational environments under scrutiny with their low staffing levels, overload of work and hierarchical interactions did not promote respect for the dignity of nurses. To understand these professional values, it is pivotal to comprehend the role of different health professions in their cultural milieu and the evolution of the nursing profession in diverse countries. (shrink)

In Thinking How to Live, Allan Gibbard claims that expressivists can vindicate realism about moral discourse. This paper argues that Gibbard’s expressivism does not provide such a vindication.

There has been an ongoing debate about the best approach in environmental ethics. Bryan Norton believes that “weak anthropocentrism” will yield the best results for public policy, and that it is the most defensible position. In contrast, I have argued that an ecocentric, holistic position is required to deal with the urgent environmental problems that face us, and that position is complemented by the ecosystem approach and complex systems theory. I have called this approach “the ethics of integrity,” and in (...) this paper I show why this perspective suggests better solutions to difficult cases, for which “weak anthropocentrism” fails to provide an answer. (shrink)

The health care needs of rural populations often differ from those of their urban counterparts. And the ethical dilemmas that caregivers face are distinctively shaped in rural settings, not only by resource constraints, but by the nature of life in small, close-knit communities as well.