This book includes ten essays that trace the notion of unconcealment as it develops from Heidegger's early writings to his later work, shaping his philosophy of truth, language and history. 'Unconcealment' is the idea that what entities are depends on the conditions that allow them to manifest themselves. This concept, central to Heidegger's work, also applies to worlds in a dual sense: first, a condition of entities manifesting themselves is the existence of a world; and second, worlds themselves are disclosed. (...) The unconcealment or disclosure of a world is the most important historical event, and Heidegger believes there have been a number of quite distinct worlds that have emerged and disappeared in history. Heidegger's thought as a whole can profitably be seen as working out the implications of the original understanding of unconcealment. (shrink)

What is conscientious objection? -- Should conscientious objectors be accommodated? -- Assessing objectors' beliefs and reasons -- Accommodation and conscientious provision.

Unfortunately, many people today see the regulation of lies, disinformation, hate speech, and fake news as an infringement of free speech, at least when such speech is ‘political,’ despite the damage that such speech can do. But this very protective attitude toward speech rests on a mistaken understanding of the role of free speech in a liberal society. The right to free speech is based on the liberal value of freedom, and as such can be no broader than freedom itself. (...) And freedom has always been subject to reasonable limits in a liberal society. Indeed, while the principles of toleration and neutrality are often cited as supporting a broad interpretation of the right to free speech, they also tell us that certain limits apply to that right. We need not tolerate speech that encourages intolerance, and while government should be neutral between reasonable conceptions of the good, it need not be neutral between reasonable and unreasonable conceptions. These ideas form the framework of liberal society, and as I shall show, also provide a guide for understanding what kind of speech is protected in a liberal society and what it is not. (shrink)

In this paper I explore how and why personal identity might be essentially narrative in nature. My topic is the question of personal identity in the strict sense of identity—the question of which person you are, and how that person is extended in space, time, and quality. In this my question appears to contrast with the question of personal identity in the sense sought by teenagers and sufferers of mid-life crises who are trying to ‘find themselves’. But in fact it (...) will be key to my argument that these questions are not distinct and independent. Whereas Parfit was concerned, in his work on personal identity, with how he was extended over time, the teenager who is finding themselves is concerned with how they are extended in quality. Indeed, the core of my argument is that because narrative is the key to understanding how we are extended in quality, and quality is just one more dimension along which we are extended, along with space and time, narrative must also be the clue as to how we are extended in space and time. You, I will argue, are the protagonist in the best story of your life. (shrink)

Predictive coding – sometimes also known as ‘predictive processing’, ‘free energy minimisation’, or ‘prediction error minimisation’ – claims to offer a complete, unified theory of cognition that stretches all the way from cellular biology to phenomenology. However, the exact content of the view, and how it might achieve its ambitions, is not clear. This series of articles examines predictive coding and attempts to identify its key commitments and justification. The present article begins by focusing on possible confounds with predictive coding: (...) claims that are often identified with predictive coding, but which are not predictive coding. These include the idea that the brain employs an efficient scheme for encoding its incoming sensory signals; that perceptual experience is shaped by prior beliefs; that cognition involves minimisation of prediction error; that the brain is a probabilistic inference engine; and that the brain learns and employs a generative model of the world. These ideas have garnered widespread support in modern cognitive neuroscience, but it is important not to conflate them with predictive coding. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Truth and Unconcealment Unconcealment in General The Planks of the Platform Propositioned truth Unconcealment of the essence (being) of beings The revealing‐concealing of the clearing.

Psychiatrische en godsdiensthistorische beschouwingen over mystiek.

It is an honor to receive such careful and attentive criticism. In this response, I attempt to put the criticisms of the reasons latesters into the context of my argumentative aims in the book and to point toward how they might be answered.

In several works, Jason Brennan and Peter Martin Jaworski defend the following thesis: If it is permissible to have, use, or exchange something for free, then it is permissible to have, use, or exchange that thing for money. In this paper, I argue that No Limits is false. Moreover, the reasons why it is false reflect many of the complaints made against markets. The paper will proceed as follows: In §1, I summarize Brennan and Jaworski’s position to clarify exactly what (...) a challenge to No Limits requires. In §2, I raise just such a challenge, one which also captures the concern behind some “semiotic objections.” In §3, I offer a modification to No Limits that avoids my objection but, as a result, re-opens the question of whether markets in some of the goods Brennan and Jaworski discuss are permissible. I conclude in §4 by considering a possible response and some thoughts on the dialectic as it stands. (shrink)

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

In recent years, there has been tension between farmers and the Dutch government regarding sustainability policy (in the efforts to reduce the harm caused by manure surplus) and how implementing this policy affects farmers (in the form of justice concerns). We interviewed Dutch farmers to uncover how they view manure policy. We identified four types of injustices: procedural, contributive, distributive, and intergenerational. We propose that a multi-tiered approach is required to overcome these kinds of ‘wicked problems’, avoid paralysis from lack (...) of action, and overcome the flaws by overestimating the effectiveness of top-down policy. (shrink)

Let’s say that an act requires Person-Affecting Justification if and only if some alternative would have been better for someone. So, Lucifer breaking Xavier’s back requires Person-Affecting Justification because the alternative would have been better for Xavier. But the story continues: While Lucifer evades justice, Xavier moves on and founds a school for gifted children. Xavier’s deepest values become identified with the school and its community. When authorities catch Lucifer, he claims no Person-Affecting Justification is needed: because the attack set (...) Xavier on his life’s path, it’s no longer true that the alternative would have been better by the standard of what Xavier now values most. An unappealingly paternalistic way to hold Lucifer to account is to discount Xavier’s preferences as merely adaptive. Instead, I propose understanding the persons of Person-Affecting Justification to be not persons but person stages. This allows us to hold Lucifer to account without having to discount Xavier’s actual preferences, and has interesting implications for compensatory justice, including making sense of reparations for historical wrongs. (shrink)

Keepsakes are nostalgic objects par excellence. We value keepsakes because they prompt nostalgic memories of the past. But perhaps more importantly, we also value them because they afford a feeling of contact with that which they remind us of. Drawing on work in philosophy and psychology, this chapter aims to give an account of the nature and value of keepsakes as nostalgic objects. Keepsakes, it argues, are objects that bear a material continuity with some person, event, or place from one’s (...) past to which one has a personal attachment. To understand the distinctive experiential value of keepsakes as nostalgic objects, however, the chapter argues that we need to invoke the imagination. Keepsakes manifest the presence of the past by prompting one to imaginatively project what a keepsake is historically connected with onto the object as one experiences it in the present. (shrink)

Listening After Nature questions the reality of auditory natures. It argues that the line between wilderness and industrial culture is dull, and the natural world is presently a critical construct that entangles humans, animals, sites and technologies. Bringing new insights to the field of environmental sound arts in areas such as field recording, acoustic ecology and soundscape studies, Wright examines contemporary and archival audio works and calls for a 'post-natural' approach to sound. The book propels sounds arts discourse into critical (...) relationship with the environmental humanities and contemporary approaches dealing with the consequences of Anthropogenic change. Critical and imaginative, this is a book that forges urgent debate between sound, ethics, aesthetics and ecology. (shrink)

This is an overview of the main themes and theses of _Reasons First_ for a book symposium, and intended to be read alongside the other contributions to that symposium.

Population-level biomedical research has become crucial to the health system’s ability to improve the health of the population. This form of research raises a number of well-documented ethical concerns, perhaps the most significant of which is the inability of the researcher to obtain fully informed specific consent from participants. Two proposed technical solutions to this problem of consent in large-scale biomedical research that have become increasingly popular are meta-consent and dynamic consent. We critically examine the ethical and practical credentials of (...) these proposals and find them lacking. We suggest that the consent problem is not solved by adopting a technology driven approach grounded in a notion of ‘specific’ consent but by taking seriously the role of research governance in combination with broader conceptions of consent. In our view, these approaches misconstrue the rightful location of authority in the way in which population-level biomedical research activities are structured and organized. We conclude by showing how and why the authority for determining the nature and shape of choice making about participation ought not to lie with individual participants, but rather with the researchers and the research governance process, and that this necessarily leads to the endorsement of a fully articulated broad consent approach. (shrink)

This paper aims to respond on behalf of consequentialist theories of meaning in life to criticisms raised by Thaddeus Metz and, in doing so, demonstrates how the debate over theories of meaning in life might make progress. By using conceptual resources developed for consequentialist theories of morality, I argue that Metz’s general arguments against consequentialist theories of meaning in life fail. That is, some consequentialist theories can accommodate Metz’s criticisms. However, using conceptual resources developed in debate concerning consequentialist theories of (...) practical reason, I then demonstrate how we might progress in the debate between consequentialist and nonconsequentialist theories, and in theorizing on meaning in life more generally. (shrink)

Collocations are recurrent combinations of words where one lexical item occurs near another lexical item with a frequency far greater than chance. Collocations can be used to study meaning. I argue that the collocational phrase ‘really know’, in conjunction with some reasonable interpretive conclusions, provides us with evidence that the verb ‘know’ has an infallibilist sense. I make my case, first, by arguing that ‘really’ when part of the phrase ‘really know’ is best understood as synonymous with ‘truly’. I then (...) argue that there are two plausible interpretations of the function that ‘really’ plays in the phrase ‘really know’. On the first interpretation, ‘really’ helps distinguish claims about genuine infallibilist knowing from loose talk about ‘knowing’. On the second interpretation, ‘really’ is often used to disambiguate an infallibilist sense of ‘know’ from a fallibilist sense of ‘know’. On either interpretation, there is an infallibilist sense of ‘know’. (shrink)

The investigator seeks guidance related to a planned recruitment strategy of requiring participants to live within close proximity to the study site for the 32-week Phase II study examining the saf...

Thomas W. Dunfee, in addition to his many other contributions to business ethics literature, has generated a stream of research that attempts to tackle the issue of corruption. Dunfee's research on corruption includes three primary contributions: the introduction of "Integrative Social Contract Theory" which provides a normative theoretical framework by which to judge the morality of global business activity including corruption; the "C2 Principles", which outline specific content and implementation measures that corporations can voluntarily adopt to combat corruption; and a (...) normative evaluation of "guanxi," a concept which can lead to questionable corruption practices in China. The article will highlight Dunfee's contribution to the literature and suggest future research directions based on his academic work. (shrink)

Susanna Rinard aims to show that it is possible to rationally persuade an external world skeptic to reject external world skepticism. She offers an argument meant to convince a skeptic who accepts her views on “several orthogonal issues in epistemology” to give up their external world skepticism. While I agree with Rinard that it is possible to reason with a skeptic, I argue that Rinard overlooks a variety of good epistemic grounds a skeptic could appeal to in rejecting her argument (...) and its conclusion. More specifically, I argue that the external world skeptic can resist Rinard’s conclusion by (1) distinguishing between skepticism about knowledge and skepticism about justification, (2) by prioritizing obtaining accurate beliefs (maximizing true beliefs and minimizing false beliefs) over being rational, or (3) by treating suspension of judgment as the default rational doxastic attitude. (shrink)

The ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ is the view that ‘knows’ and its cognates have more than one sense, and that which sense of ‘knows’ is used in a knowledge ascription or denial determines, in part, the meaning (and as a result the truth conditions) of that knowledge ascription or denial. In this paper, I argue that the ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ ought to be taken seriously by those drawn to epistemic contextualism. In doing so I first argue that the ambiguity (...) theory of ‘knows’ is a distinct view from epistemic contextualism. Second, I provide independent philosophical and linguistic considerations to motivate the ambiguity theory. Third, I argue that the ambiguity theory has the same central, generally agreed upon virtues ascribed to epistemic contextualism (namely, the ability to solve certain persistent epistemological problems relating to skeptical arguments and the ability to preserve the truth of most of our everyday, ordinary usages of ‘knows’ and its cognates). Finally, I provide an ambiguity-theory-friendly account of why contextualism may be initially appealing, and why this shouldn’t dissuade us from taking the ambiguity theory seriously nonetheless. (shrink)

_Nature and Normativity _argues that the problem of the place of norms in nature has been essentially misunderstood when it has been articulated in terms of the relation of human language and thought, on the one hand, and the world described by physics on the other. Rather, if we concentrate on the facts that speaking and thinking are activities of organic agents, then the problem of the place of the normative in nature becomes refocused on three related questions. First, is (...) there a sense in which biological processes and the behavior of organisms can be legitimately subject to normative evaluation? Second, is there some sense in which, in addition to having ordinary causal explanations, organic phenomena can also legitimately be seen to happen _because_ they _should_ happen in that way, in some naturalistically comprehensible sense of ‘should’, or that organic phenomena happen _in order to_ achieve some result, because that result should occur? And third, is it possible to naturalistically understand how human thought and language can be legitimately seen as the normatively evaluable behavior of a particular species of organism, behavior that occurs in order to satisfy some class of norms? This book develops, articulates, and defends positive answers to each of these questions. (shrink)

Concerning a conversation about grounding between Philo, a quizzical maverick, and Cleanthes, a studious devotee of the very latest trends in metaphysics. Whereas Cleanthes enthuses about grounding, Philo counsels methodological caution and greater immersion in actual scientific practice.

Perception can provide us with a privileged source of evidence about the external world – evidence that makes it rational to believe things about the world. In Reasons First, Mark Schroeder offers a new view on how perception does so. The central motivation behind Schroeder’s account is to offer an answer to what evidence perception equips us with according to which it is what he calls world-implicating but non-factive, and thereby to glean some of the key advantages of both (...) externalism and internalism, respectively. He answers this motivation by developing a more specific view that he calls the Apparent Factive Attitude view, which pairs an answer to what evidence is provided by a perceptual experience with an answer to why having that perceptual experience provides you with that evidence. In this paper we advance two interconnected problems for Schroeder’s Apparent Factive Attitude view. A traditional intuitive judgment that often motivates internalists is the idea that internal duplicates must necessarily be equally rational in whatever beliefs they have. Schroeder’s arguments rely on a weaker claim - that people who are both internal and historical external duplicates but differ only in the veridicality of a single perceptual experience must be equally rational in whatever beliefs they have. In this way he preserves what he argues to be a more compelling internalist intuition. But our arguments will show that Schroeder’s view is committed to denying an even more compelling internalist intuition yet - that internal duplicates must have the same phenomenology. (shrink)

The ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ is the view that ‘knows’ and its cognates have more than one propositional sense – i.e. more than one sense that can properly be used in ‘knows that’ etc. constructions. Given that most of us are ‘intuitive invariantists’ – i.e. most of us initially have the intuition that ‘knows’ is univocal – defenders of the ambiguity theory need to offer an explanation for the semantic blindness present if ‘knows’ is in fact ambiguous. This paper is (...) an attempt to offer such an explanation. Section 1 contains a general argument for the ubiquity of semantic blindness for ambiguous words; the upshot being that semantic blindness for the ambiguity of ‘knows’ is thus unsurprising. Section 2 offers more specific arguments for why ‘knows’ is the type of ambiguous word that we’re very unlikely to quickly recognize is ambiguous. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Richard J. Bernstein (1932–2022)Tara Mastrelli and Mark SandersRemembrance for Richard J. BernsteinMy name is Tara Mastrelli. I am a graduate student at the New School for Social Research.1 Dick Bernstein was my teacher and my friend. I was also the TA for his final seminar on American Pragmatism this past spring, an experience that I want to share with you today.In the months leading up to this (...) seminar, Dick said something shifted for him in the way he understood pragmatism—a sort of awakening on his part. He redesigned his syllabus into two parts—the first, working through the classical pragmatists, namely, Peirce, James, and Dewey, as he had done for sixty-eight years. And then the second half would—in Dewey's words—turn toward "the problems of men" (though Dick would always say human beings), engaging with themes and texts from Black and feminist thinkers. To be clear, for Dick, this was not an expansion of the canon or an exercise in who should or should not count as a pragmatist. Rather his aim was something different altogether—to see if we could begin to understand pragmatism not as a canon at all, but rather as a living, evolving movement.Now the point is not that this was the perfect syllabus—it wasn't. The point is what redesigning his syllabus can tell us about the type of person and teacher that Dick was. At almost 90 years old, teaching a subject he had taught for almost seventy years, he did not sit back and say that he knew everything. He wanted to learn more—from his colleagues, his students, the world around him—to experience more, to challenge his assumptions, to understand more. [End Page 103]Beyond the syllabus, another factor that made this seminar unique was Dick's health. His illness started at the beginning of the semester. He taught our first class from an emergency room in New York City during the Omicron wave of COVID-19. He was wearing a mask and breathing tubes. Machines were beeping all around him. Nurses came in from time to time to check on him. Nonetheless … his enthusiasm was not remotely diminished. Laying out his aims and ambitions for the course, he referred to it as "an exciting adventure"—for him and for us.The syllabus was not perfect, and Dick's health ebbed and flowed throughout, and yet—as the course itself progressed—it evolved into the very thing he was hoping for, which was pragmatism as a living, evolving movement. He read and added new work from a colleague examining Black feminist pragmatism and its relationship to the Movement for Black Lives, adding a full session dedicated to it. On certain days, when his breath was weak, he asked me to lead our discussions, which took on more of an almost jazz-like character—my classmates and I riffing off each other as we tried to wrestle with concepts such as DuBois's color line against the backdrop of gentrification in our own neighborhoods. When I decided to run a progressive stack for our discussions on feminism, Dick replied, "Good for you!" and enthusiastically used the hand-raising function, patiently waiting his turn.At the end of the semester, he seemed to be feeling better—his voice was strong and his eyes were bright during our final session. He conveyed his sense that, despite his recurring lament that we did not have more time (he had always envisioned the course as two semesters, or sometimes two full years), the seminar had achieved what he had wanted to achieve: "Philosophy has come alive." A return to philosophy, "not just as a discipline to master, but something to be caught up in; the excitement of dealing with life—a return to a genuine Socratic conception of philosophy."I am sure many of you may know that Dick wrote his dissertation on Dewey. What you may not know is that he originally wanted to write it on Plato. (Phaedrus was his favorite.) But once he sat down, he realized he did not want to write something about Plato that, as he said... (shrink)

James Mark Baldwin left a legacy that has yet to be fully examined, one with profound implications for science and the humanities. In some sense it paralleled that of his friend Charles Sanders Peirce, whose semiotics became understood only a century later. Baldwin was trying to make sense of complex biological and social processes that only now have come into the limelight as biological sciences have re-emerged in psychology. Baldwin's focus on development, based on the observation of his own (...) children and extrapolated to his general theoretical scheme, is fully in line with where contemporary biological sciences are heading. This is exemplified by the bounded flexibility of the work of the genetic system. The general principle of persistent exploration of the environment with the result of creating novelty, which was the core of Baldwin's theoretical system, has since the 1960s become the guiding idea in genetics. Contemporary developmental science is rooted in Baldwin's thinking. In his new introduction, Jaan Valsiner shows that Baldwin's Genetic Theory of Reality demonstrates how human beings are in their nature social beings, establishes an alternative conceptualization of evolutionary theory, and formulates a system of developmental logic, all of which serve as the foundation for developmental psychology as a whole. This is a work of social science rediscovery long overdue. (shrink)

In August 2021, Froese et al. published survey data collected from 2,543 respondents on their subjective experiences living under imposed social distancing measures during COVID-19 (1). The questionnaire was issued to respondents in the UK, Japan, and Mexico. By combining the authors’ expertise in phenomenological philosophy, phenomenological psychopathology, and enactive cognitive science, the questions were carefully phrased to prompt reports that would be useful to phenomenological investigation and theorizing (2–4). These questions reflected the various author’s research interests (e.g., technology, grief, (...) time). Between April 7th and July 31st, 2021, a second questionnaire with the same question set was issued to respondents of the original who had agreed to do a follow-up. This was intended to capture subjective reports of life under social distancing measures a year after the initial survey. By this time–depending on their country of residence and health status–respondents had potentially lived with repeated and prolonged lockdowns and a variety of other restrictions on their social lives. When taken together, Survey I and Survey II provide a cross-cultural and longitudinal dataset that allows for analysis of longer-term impacts of imposed social distancing measures on people’s experiences. For researchers working in diverse disciplines, this dataset offers a rich resource that reflects people’s reactions to the imposition of different social restrictions in different countries and over different time periods. (shrink)

This book explores the steady decline in the status of the individual in recent years and addresses common misunderstandings about the concept of individuality. Drawing from psychology, neuroscience, technology, economics, philosophy, politics, and law, White explains how and why the individual has been devalued in the eyes of scholars, government leaders, and the public. He notes that developments in science have led to doubts about our cognitive competence, while assumptions made in the humanities have led to questions about our moral (...) competence. In this book, White goes on to argue that both of these views are mistaken and that they stem from overly simplistic ideas about how individuals make choices, however imperfectly, in their interests, which are multifaceted and complex. In response, he proposes a new way to look at individuals that preserves their essential autonomy while emphasizing their responsibility to others, inspired by the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the legal and political philosophy reflected in the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution. This book explains how individuality combines both rights and responsibilities, reconciles the popular yet false dichotomy between individual and society, and provides the basis for a humane and respectful civil society and government. This book is part of White's trilogy on the individual and society, which includes The Manipulation of Choice and The Illusion of Well-Being. (shrink)

In order to gain greater insight into the nature of corporate social responsibility (CSR) during a time of crisis, the study examines the commitment of firms to continue to engage in CSR activity despite financial pressures to divert their slack resources elsewhere. The setting of the study is CSR activity during the perhaps unprecedented global crisis associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a qualitative research method approach, both a variety of media sources and the relevant academic literature are reviewed (...) in order to identify examples of CSR activity related specifically to COVID-19. The examples are then categorized and situated according to Professor Archie Carroll’s well-known CSR Pyramid framework describing the economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic domains of CSR. As such, this study is the first to extend the rich literature stream utilizing Carroll’s CSR Pyramid within the unique context of a global pandemic. (shrink)