This volume offers the first English language collection of academic essays on the post-Holocaust thought of Jean Améry, a Jewish-Austrian-Belgian essayist, journalist and literary author. Comprehensive in scope and multi-disciplinary in orientation, contributors explore central aspects of Améry's philosophical and ethical position, including dignity, responsibility, resentment, and forgiveness.

Interpersonal coordination is a key factor in team performance. In interactive team sports, the limited predictability of a constantly changing context makes coordination challenging. Approaches that highlight the support provided by environmental information and theories of shared mental models provide potential explanations of how interpersonal coordination can nonetheless be established. In this article, we first outline the main assumptions of these approaches and consider criticisms that have been raised with regard to each. The aim of this article is to define (...) a theoretical perspective that integrates the coordination mechanisms of the two approaches. In doing so, we borrow from a theoretical outline of group action. According to this outline, group action based on a priori shared mental models is an example of how interpersonal coordination is established from the top down. Interpersonal coordination in reaction to the perception of affordances represents the bottom-up component of group action. Both components are inextricably involved in the coordination of interactive sports teams. We further elaborate on the theoretical outline to integrate a third, constructivist approach. Integrating this third approach helps to explain interpersonal coordination in game situations for which no shared mental models are established and game situations that remain ambiguous in terms of perceived affordances. The article describes how hierarchical, sequential and complex dimensions of action organization are important aspects of this constructivist perspective and how mental models may be involved. A basketball example is used to illustrate how top-down, bottom-up and constructivist processes may be simultaneously involved in enabling interpersonal coordination. Finally, we present the implications for research and practice. (shrink)

Radical views on cognition are generally defined by a cluster of features including non-representationalism and vehicle-externalism. In this paper, I concentrate on the way radical views on cognition define themselves as revolutionary theories in cognitive science. These theories often use the Kuhnian concepts of “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” for describing their ambitions and the current situation in cognitive science. I examine whether the use of Kuhn’s theory of science is appropriate here. There might be good reasons to think that cognitive (...) science is in a situation of foundational crisis, but that does not entail that the classical paradigm is currently displaced to the benefit of a new paradigm. Larry Laudan’s theory of research traditions is more enlightening than Kuhn’s theory for describing the scope and ambitions of radical views on cognition, and their relations with an anti-intellectualist tradition in philosophy. (shrink)

This essay argues that the proffered grounds for Cohen's rejection of market relations – that they are sustained by the base motives of greed and fear – are unsound and also unnecessary to explain the maximising behaviour induced by those relations.

:This paper argues that, inasmuch as exploitation is a form of injustice, exploitative acts need not be performed intentionally.

Based on an endorsement of the hypothesis of extended cognition, this paper proposes a criticism of the representationalist assumptions that still pertain to these contemporary models of cognition. I first rehearse some basic problems akin to any representationalist model of cognition, before proposing some more specific arguments directed against the necessity, the plausibility, and the coherence of the marriage between extended cognition and contemporary representationalism. Extended and distributed models of cognition have the resources to get rid of representationalism, and they (...) should better do it. Their adherence to representationalism might be an by-product of the extended character of the scientific study of cognition. (shrink)

Two major philosophical movements have sought to fundamentally rethink the relationship between humans and their environment(s): environmental ethics and enactivism. Surprisingly, they virtually never refer to or seek inspiration from each other. The goal of this analysis is to bridge the gap. Our main purpose, then, is to address, from the enactivist angle, the conceptual backbone of environmental ethics, namely the concept of intrinsic value. We argue that intrinsic value does indeed exist, yet its "intrinsicality" does not boil down to (...) being independent of the interests and needs of humans. Rather, it is brought forth by what we callshared enactionof an axiological domain. The latter is built upon such core posits of enactivism as autonomy, enaction, participatory sense-making as well as the most recent concept of loving as knowing proposed by Hanne De Jaegher. (shrink)

Criticisms and rejections of representationalism are increasingly popular in 4E cognitive science, and especially in radical enactivism. But by overfocusing our attention on the debate between radical enactivism and classical representationalism, we might miss the woods for the trees, in at least two respects: first, by neglecting the relevance of other theoretical alternatives about representationalism in cognitive science; and second by not seeing how much REC and classical representationalism are in agreement concerning basic and problematic issues dealing with mental content (...) and intentionality. In order to expand and exemplify these ideas, this paper presents two heterodox positions on intentionality and on the relations between content and representation. Special attention is paid to the way REC is rejecting these positions: I argue that this rejection reveals common assumptions with classical representationalism, but also undermines the coherence of REC’s conception of intentionality. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent discussions in the field of moral cognition suggest that the relationship between emotion and judgment-formation can be described in three separate ways: firstly, it narrows our atte...

Judgments about the extent to which an individual is free are easily among the more intractable of the various raw materials which present themselves for philosophical processing. On the one hand, few of us have any qualms about making statements to the effect that Blue is more free than Red. Explicitly or otherwise, such claims are the commonplaces of most history textbooks and of much that passes before us in the news media. And yet, good evidence for the presence of (...) a philosophical puzzle here is to be found in the familiar hesitation we experience when we first reflect on the grounds for such claims. Is it really the case that the average Russian is less free than an Englishman in a dole queue? Are we quite certain that a dirt farmer in the Appalachians enjoys greater personal liberty than the inmate of a well-appointed modern prison? Were citizens of classical Athens more free, or less free, than their counterparts in today's welfare states? (shrink)

This paper aims at answering the question “When is informational content explicitly represented in a cognitive system?”. I first distinguish the explicitness this question is about from other kinds of explicitness that are currently investigated in philosophy of mind, and situate the components of the question within the various conceptual frameworks that are used to study mental representations. I then present and criticize, on conceptual and empirical grounds, two basic ways of answering the question, the first one coming from the (...) classical computational theory of mind, the latter one issued from a procedural conception of informational contents. I then argue for a new answer to the initial question, an answer that retains some valuable insights of the criticized theories, but which underlines the importance and the interpretational source of the distinctiveness proper to explicitly represented contents. (shrink)

The article focuses on the work of Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham, in particular, a notion of the studio that provides both an anchor and departure for the work of all three. This genealogy turns primarily on Wallace’s photo-conceptual work from the 1970s, which establishes the space of the studio as an allegory of painting or the modernist tradition, and as the topological equivalent of the museum and street. Using Wallace’s model of post-studio practice as an analytic, the (...) article unpacks the tensions of Wall’s notion of cinematography, highlighting his mounting hesitations with photography understood on the model of the studio system, as an inside/outside relationship and as the mimesis of painting. Finally, the article puts the notions of studio as genealogy and dispositif to work in order to understand the logic of Graham’s emphasis on the durational art of film. (shrink)

Author of Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Universal jurisdiction has entered upon a dramatic and turbulent period of its long and generally stable history. Once associated primarily with prosecution for piracy or slave trading, it now figures in state-court prosecution of persons accused of international crimes that have been incorporated into state law, particularly genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. This new direction has generated serious interstate conflicts, particularly when the acts for which defendants are charged are viewed by some states or regions as criminal and (...) by others as heroic and when the actual or proposed defendants are citizens of a major power. The critical current task is to engage in broad public discussion of these issues in order to build some consensus among many states about the legitimate uses and potential abuses of universal jurisdiction. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Going Beyond Theory: Constructivism and Empirical Phenomenology” by Urban Kordeš. Upshot: The priority Kordeš gives to empirical phenomenology in the empirical assessment and grounding of constructivism stems from a restrictive conception of experience that has been questioned by other proponents of what he calls the “phenomenological attitude.”.

Where might one start? Of “education,” the Latinate etymology is evocative: to draw out, draw away from, draw forth. The echoes are linear. Ex tenebras lux, from the shadows of ignorance to the luminosity of knowing, a path towards experience out of innocence. That path has its symbolic origin in the library of third and second century B.C. Alexandria, where Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus of Samothrace first coined the word canon, as the mark of a standard of excellence. In (...) that library we would have found the Aristotelian texts summoning the human race to immortality, through an education that alone can lead us from the conditions of bestiality to those of divinity. Political order rests on an education in harmony with the constitutional structure of the city state; ultimately however eudaimonia, the highest joy known to man, lies in the educated exercise of the soul’s faculties in conformity with the most perfect virtue through philosophical contemplation. Here is the telos of the pedagogic journey. (shrink)