Over the past decade or so the term ‘communitarianism’ has been applied to a wide range of positions with great variation between them. This is not in itself an objection to its continued use, for a concept may be coherent and illuminating even though it shelters considerable diversity. What is troubling about the body of literature now labelled as communitarian is that it frequently appeals to images of community without giving the notion the analytical attention it deserves and that we (...) have come to expect in relation to other central political concepts such as ‘liberty’ and ‘justice.’ What I propose to do in this paper is to focus on a particular understanding of community which I think has been neglected in recent discussions, largely because it has not been sufficiently distinguished from others, and then to raise a question in the light of it which has been at the forefront of the debate: viz., can liberalism in its currently dominant form truly respect the value and importance of community? Several writers have responded to the critiques of liberalism develoged in the work of those such as Michael Sandel and Alasdair Macintyre by arguing that the basic framework of liberal thought is fully compatible with a due appreciation of community. Joel Feinberg, for example, attempts to show that ‘one can preserve one’s allegiance to personal autonomy in the way that liberalism requires while fully acknowledging the central and indispensable importance of community in human lives.’ I shall register some doubts about whether liberalism can show proper respect for community when ‘community’ is understood in the way I describe. (shrink)

In the film The Corporation* (Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, 2004, http://www.thecorporation.com/) there are several scenes taken from an interview with Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, Inc., the largest commercial carpet manufacturing firm in the world. Anderson had founded the company twenty one years earlier with a bank loan of $5000, and had built it up to its present size. In this interview the camera focuses in a close up on Anderson’s face so that he is speaking (...) directly to the viewer. This is filmed in such a way as to capture the candor with which he describes a vivid experience which led him to a sudden appreciation for the enormous value of the natural world and.. (shrink)

Katzav and Vaesen have argued that control by analytic philosophers of key journals, philosophy departments and at least one funding body plays a substantial role in explaining the emergence of analytic philosophy into dominance in the Anglophone world and the corresponding decline of speculative philosophy. They also argued that this use of control suggests a characterisation of analytic philosophy as, at the institutional level, a sectarian form of critical philosophy. I test these hypotheses against data about philosophy job hires at (...) key philosophy departments in the USA during the period 1930-1979, and against data about PhD completions during the period 1956-1965. I argue, further, that Katzav and Vaesen’s hypotheses can fully explain the data and are more fully able to do so than are some other key accounts of the emergence of analytic philosophy in the USA. (shrink)

Philosophical suspicions about the place of shame in the psychology of the mature moral agent are in tension with the commonplace assumption that to call a person shameless purports to mark a fault, arguably a moral fault. I shift philosophical suspicions away from shame and toward its absence in the shameless by focusing attention on phenomena of shamelessness. In redirecting our attention, I clarify the nature of the failing to which ascriptions of shamelessness might refer and defend the thought that, (...) as an evasion of moral self-censure, shamelessness can be morally pernicious. Far from foregoing shame, I conclude, we should be mindful of its moral importance and unapologetic in its defense. (shrink)

1 Some philosophers defend the thesis that women are adult human females. Call this the adult human female thesis (AHF). There are two versions of this thesis—one modal and one definitional. Accord...

As technology improves, artificial systems are increasingly able to behave in human-like ways: holding a conversation; providing information, advice, and support; or taking on the role of therapist, teacher, or counsellor. This enhanced behavioural complexity, we argue, encourages deeper forms of affective engagement on the part of the human user, with the artificial agent helping to stabilise, subdue, prolong, or intensify a person's emotional condition. Here, we defend a fictionalist account of human/AI interaction, according to which these encounters involve an (...) elaborate practise of imaginative pretence: a make-believe in which the artificial agent is attributed a life of its own. We attend, specifically, to the temporal characteristics of these fictions, and to what we imagine artificial agents are doing when we are not looking at them. (shrink)

In the contemporary debate on free will, most philosophers assume that the defense of libertarianism implies the defense of the notion of alternative possibilities. This article discusses this presupposition by showing that it is possible to build a libertarianism without alternative possibilities, apparently more robust than libertarianism with alternative possibilities. Inspired by Bergson, this nonclassical libertarianism challenges the idea that all causation implies the actualization of a predetermined possibility (an idea shared by determinism and classical libertarianism). Moreover, it challenges the (...) idea that free will is a mere choice between prefixed possibilities: for this libertarianism, free will is the result of a creative process of the mind—an entirely causal process whose outcome is not, however, predetermined. This nonclassical libertarianism describes the process of forming a will in a more realistic way than classical libertarianism does. Furthermore, it is not threatened by the problem of chance. (shrink)

An introduction to the philosophy of mathematics grounded in mathematics and motivated by mathematical inquiry and practice. In this book, Joel David Hamkins offers an introduction to the philosophy of mathematics that is grounded in mathematics and motivated by mathematical inquiry and practice. He treats philosophical issues as they arise organically in mathematics, discussing such topics as platonism, realism, logicism, structuralism, formalism, infinity, and intuitionism in mathematical contexts. He organizes the book by mathematical themes--numbers, rigor, geometry, proof, computability, incompleteness, (...) and set theory--that give rise again and again to philosophical considerations. (shrink)

What’s the difference between those psychological posits that are ‘me” and those that are not? Distinguishing between these psychological kinds is important in many domains, but an account of what the distinction consists in is challenging. I argue for Psychological Constructionism: those psychological posits that correspond to the kinds within folk psychology are personal, and those that don’t, aren’t. I suggest that only constructionism can answer a fundamental challenge in characterizing the personal level – the plurality problem. The things that (...) plausibly qualify as personal are motley. Other attempts at accounting for the personal level either cannot accommodate this plurality, or cannot explain what unifies the personal. Given arguments others have given for a pluralistic conception of folk psychology, constructionism explains and predicts this plurality in a systematic and unified way, thereby solving the plurality problem. (shrink)

Grace A. de Laguna was an American philosopher of exceptional originality. Many of the arguments and positions she developed during the early decades of the twentieth century later came to be central to analytic philosophy. These arguments and positions included, even before 1930, a critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction, a private language argument, a critique of type physicalism, a functionalist theory of mind, a critique of scientific reductionism, a methodology of research programs in science and more. Nevertheless, de Laguna identified (...) herself as a defender of the speculative vision of philosophy, a vision which, in her words, “analytic philosophy condemns.” I outline her speculative vision of philosophy as well as what is, in effect, an argument she offers against analytic philosophy. This is an argument against the view that key parts of established opinion, e.g., our best theoretical physics or most certain common sense, should be assumed to be true in order to answer philosophical questions. I go on to bring out the implications of her argument for the approaches to philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Willard V. Quine and David Lewis, and I also compare the argument to recent, related arguments against analytic philosophy. I will suggest that de Laguna offers a viable critique of analytic philosophy and an alternative approach to philosophy that meets this critique. (shrink)

In 1993, Jim Mason, journalist, advocate, and pioneering figure in the contemporary animal advocacy movement, published An Unnatural Order-a sweeping overview of the origins of our hatred and destruction of the natural world and its creatures, from the dawn of agriculture to the present day. Now fully revised and updated to reflect developments in paleoanthropology and ethology, as well as greater awareness of, and urgency regarding, the climate crisis, An Unnatural Order offers an expansive overview of what has changed (both (...) for good and for ill) and what has unfortunately remained the same. His message is clear: until we grapple with the question of the animal, and our relationship with animality and the natural world, we will not be able to confront the consequences of our perpetuation of environmental destruction, biodiversity collapse, and our alienation from the Earth and one another. As brilliantly polemical and richly descriptive as it was when it was published almost three decades ago, this new version of An Unnatural Order is sure to excite a passionate debate about our role in either saving the ecosystems upon which all species (including our own) rely, or bringing it all to an end. (shrink)

This was the last and most important and comprehensive work of Charlotte Mason, (founder of the Parents’ National Educational Union).

This book explains that the natural and only quite wholesome way of teaching is to let the child's desire for knowledge operate in the schoolboy and guide the teacher. This means that without foregoing discipline, nor cutting ourselves off from tradition, we must continue experiments already being started in our elementary schools. These are based on the chastening fact that children learn best before we adults begin to teach them at all: and hence that however uncongenial the task may be, (...) we must conform our teaching methods to those of Nature. The attempt has often been made before. But in this book there is a rare combination of intuitive insight and practical sagacity. The author refused to believe that the collapse of the desire for knowledge between seven and seventeen years of age is inevitable. (shrink)

A collection of spiritual essays written by Black thought leaders and teachers that discuss what it means to be Black in the world today.

Drawing upon the life and work of S. Kay Toombs, I explore the impact and import of phenomenological accounts of disability for the existentialist tradition. Through the case of multiple sclerosis, a noncongenital, late-onset, and degenerative disability, I show how the general structures that emerge from its lived experience largely support a mere-difference view of disability and highlight the need for an equitably habitable world. I further argue that phenomenological accounts of disability demonstrate accessibility to be the defining feature of (...) what it means to be embodied as we are. I conclude with a discussion of the more general philosophical relationship between disability, embodiment, and existentialism. (shrink)

Ethical extensionism is a common argument pattern in environmental and animal ethics, which takes a morally valuable trait already recognized in us and argues that we should recognize that value in other entities such as nonhuman animals. I exposit ethical extensionism’s core argument, argue for its validity and soundness, and trace its history to 18th century progressivist calls to expand the moral community and legal franchise. However, ethical extensionism has its critics. The bulk of the paper responds to recent criticisms, (...) including (1) environmental ethicists’ objection against its austere conception of moral value (2), feminist ethicists’ claim that extensionism fails to account for the moral significance of difference, (3) disability theorists’ concern that ethical extensionist arguments are offensive, and (4) animal rights theorists’ lament that extensionism is a practical failure. While something is to be gained from each criticism, I argue that they ultimately fail and that extensionism remains compelling. (shrink)

I develop Tetsurō Watsuji’s relational model of the self as “betweenness”. I argue that Watsuji’s view receives support from two case studies: solitary confinement and dementia. Both clarify the constitutive interdependence between the self and the social and material contexts of “betweenness” that define its lifeworld. They do so by providing powerful examples of what happens when the support and regulative grounding of this lifeworld is restricted or taken away. I argue further that Watsuji’s view helps see the other side (...) of this deprivation, how reconstructing aspects of betweenness is, at the same time, a reconstruction of the self. I conclude by briefly indicating further consequences of this view. (shrink)

When we look around us, some things look “alive,” others do not. What is it to “look alive”—to perceive animacy? Empirical work supports the view that animacy is genuinely perceptual. We should construe perception of animacy as perception of agents and behavior. This proposal explains how static and dynamic animacy cues relate, and explains how animacy perception relates to social cognition more broadly. Animacy perception draws attention to objects that are apt to be well‐understood folk psychologically, enabling us to marshal (...) our folk psychological resources efficiently. (shrink)

Biocentrism, a prominent view in environmental ethics, is the notion that all and only individual biological organisms have moral status, which is to say that their good ought to be considered for its own sake by moral agents. I argue that biocentrism suffers two serious problems: the Origin Problem and the Normativity Problem. Biocentrism seeks to avoid the absurdity that artifacts have moral status on the basis that organisms have naturalistic origins whereas artifacts do not. The Origin Problem contends that, (...) contra biocentrism, an entity’s origin is not relevant to whether that entity has moral status. The Normativity Problem is that biocentrists are preoccupied with accounting for the goods or interests of nonsentient organisms yet fail to establish why interests so construed confer moral status; biocentrism fails to bridge the good-ought gap. It is shown how these problems emerge in three prominent book-length works representative of the biocentrists’ positions over three decades: Paul Taylor’s Respect for Nature, Gary Varner’s In Nature’s Interests?, and Nicholas Agar’s Life’s Intrinsic Value. At minimum, these criticisms suggest that biocentrism is crucially incomplete as a moral framework at present and, optimistically, where more work remains to be done. If biocentrism really is dead, then moral status should be restricted to a more plausible locus such as sentience or rationality, the value of organisms needs a different expression, and environmental ethics needs an axiological foundation different than bare life. (shrink)

Since the publication of Wahrheit und Methode in 1960 (Tfibingen), Gadamer's hermeneutics has called forth a varied and fruitful response from the Continent, without receiving anything near the same attention from the English-speaking world. Though E. D. Hirsch thought Gadamer sufficiently important in 1965 to merit an early rebuttal and rehabilitation (Validity in Interpretation [New Haven, Conn., 1967], pp. 245-64), Wahrheit und Methode remained unread in England and America, partly because a translation was not available until 1975 (Truth and Method, (...) ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming [New York]). Even after that date, Gadamer's influence on Anglo-American debate has been largely secondhand, filtering in through such figures as Paul Ricoeur and Jiurgen Habermas. But a renewed interest in the question of what we are to make of tradition, no doubt spurred in large measure by deconstruction's effort to unmake it, has lent Gadamer a new pertinence. One sign that his stock is on the rise is the publication of Joel Weinsheimer's Gadamer's Hermeneutics, a much needed and admirably written introduction to Truth and Method that should push its value even higher. -- JSTOR (June 12, 2012.). (shrink)

A passionate defence of humanity and a work of radical optimism from the international bestselling author of Postcapitalism How do we preserve what makes us human in an age of uncertainty? Are we now just consumers shaped by market forces? A sequence of DNA? A collection of base instincts? Or will we soon be supplanted by algorithms and A.I. anyway? In Clear Bright Future, Paul Mason calls for a radical, impassioned defence of the human being, our universal rights and freedoms (...) and our power to change the world around us. Ranging from economics to Big Data, from neuroscience to the culture wars, he draws from his on-the-ground reporting from mass protests in Istanbul to riots in Washington, as well as his own childhood in an English mining community, to show how the notion of humanity has become eroded as never before. In this book Paul Mason argues that we are still capable - through language, innovation and co-operation - of shaping our future. He offers a vision of humans as more than puppets, customers or cogs in a machine. This work of radical optimism asks: Do you want to be controlled? Or do you want something better? (shrink)

In A Question of Time, Joel Pearl offers a new reading of the foundations of psychoanalytic thought, indicating the presence of an essential lacuna that has been integral to psychoanalysis since its inception. Pearl returns to the moment in which psychoanalysis was born, demonstrating how Freud had overlooked one of the most principal issues pertinent to his method: the question of time. The book shows that it is no coincidence that Freud had never methodically and thoroughly discussed time and (...) that the metaphysical assumption of linear time lies at the very heart of Freudian psychoanalysis. Pearl’s critical reading of Freud develops through an original dialogue that he creates with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and, specifically, with the German philosopher’s notion of temporality. Pearl traces the encounter between Freud and Heidegger by observing the common inspiration shaping their thinking: philosopher Franz Brentano, who taught both Freud and Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s mentor. The book travels down an alternate path, one overlooked by Freudian thought – a path leading from Brentano, through Husserl and onto Heidegger’s notion of time, which is founded on the ecstatic’ interrelation of past, present and future. (shrink)

How do we know about other minds on the basis of perception? The two most common answers to this question are that we literally perceive others’ mental states, or that we infer their mental states on the basis of perceiving something else. In this paper, I argue for a different answer. On my view, we don’t perceive mental states, and yet perceptual experiences often immediately justify mental state attributions. In a slogan: other minds are neither seen nor inferred. I argue (...) that this view offers the best explanation of our deeply equivocal intuitions about perception-based mental state attributions, and also holds substantial interest for the epistemology of perception more generally. (shrink)

This paper pursues two main aims. First, it distinguishes two kinds of improvisation: expert and inexpert. Expert improvisation is a (usually artistic) practice that the agent consciously sets as their goal and is evaluated according to (usually artistic) standards of improvisation. Inexpert improvisation, by contrast, supports and structures the agent’s action as it moves them towards their (usually everyday life) goals and is evaluated on its success leading the agent to the achievement of those goals. The second aim is to (...) describe inexpert improvisation as a robustly distributed affair, one that involves the ongoing integration of embodied practices with social and material resources within our surrounding environments. On the wide approach to improvisation fostered in this paper, inexpert improvisation is claimed to be our default way of inhabiting our world. (shrink)

Contrastive epistemologists say knowledge displays the ternary relation “S knows p rather than q”. I argue that “S knows p rather than q” is often equivalent to “S knows p rather than not-p” and hence equivalent to “S knows p”. The result is that contrastive knowledge is often binary knowledge disguised.

This paper introduces the philosophy of Grace Andrus de Laguna in order to renew interest in it. I show that, in the 1910s and 1920s, she develops ideas and arguments that are also found playing key roles in the development of analytic philosophy decades later. Further, I describe her sympathetic, but acute, criticism of pragmatism and Heideggerian ontology, and situate her work in the tradition of American, speculative philosophy. Before 1920, we will see, de Laguna appeals to multiple realizability to (...) undermine reductionism in science, to support perspectival, scientific realism and, with help from a private language argument, to favour the view that mental states are classified by behavioural, teleological roles over what came to be called ‘type physicalism’. Her view of speech, mostly developed in the 1920s, tells us that its primary role is coordinating group behaviour rather than expressing thoughts. Belief is understood in terms of its causal role, including its causal relations to other kinds of mental states, when coordinating group behaviour. Thought is similarly understood. In developing her theory of mind, de Laguna rejects the pragmatist claims that belief can be reduced to dispositions to behaviour and that thought’s function is to address specific, rather than general, problems. She also favours meaning holism and rejects the analytic–synthetic distinction. In later work, de Laguna argues that individuals’ activity of self-maintenance brings universals, conceived of as irreducible potentialities, into being and makes them increasingly determinate. Further, she identifies the existence of all individuals with forms of self-maintenance and takes the existence of people to include maintenance of the cultural world. Such a unified treatment of existence, she holds, permits making its evolution intelligible. Heidegger’s view of being is rejected for not permitting this. All de Laguna’s work, we will see, fits a vision of philosophy as the systematic, imaginative and naturalistic examination of being as well as a source of criticism of science. (shrink)

This book is concerned with the role of intuitions in the justification of philosophical theory. The author begins by demonstrating how contemporary philosophers, whether engaged in case-driven analysis or seeking reflective equilibrium, rely on intuitions as evidence for their theories. The author then provides an account of the nature of philosophical intuitions and distinguishes them from other psychological states. Finally, the author defends the use of intuitions as evidence by demonstrating that arguments for skepticism about their evidential value are either (...) self-defeating or guilty of arbitrary and unjustified partiality towards non-intuitive modes of knowledge. (shrink)

[This piece is written for those working in social gerontology and aging studies, with the aim of bringing insights from disability studies and philosophy of disability to bear on enduring debates in those fields.] The guiding question of humanistic age-studies—What does it mean to grow old?—cannot be answered without reflecting on disability. This is not simply because growing old invariably means becoming impaired in various ways, but also because the discriminations and stigmas involved in ageism are often rooted in ableism. (...) We here draw on research in the philosophy of disability as well as the interdisciplinary field of disability studies to explore the relationship between ageism and ableism. (shrink)

This entry addresses the nature and epistemological role of intuition by considering the following questions: (1) What are intuitions?, (2) What roles do they serve in philosophical (and other “armchair”) inquiry?, (3) Ought they serve such roles?, (4) What are the implications of the empirical investigation of intuitions for their proper roles?, and (5) What is the content of intuitions prompted by the consideration of hypothetical cases?

Blasius of Parma deals with intensification and remission of accidental forms, and the related concept of « latitude » in at least three texts : the Questiones de latitudinibus formarum, the Questio disputata de intensione et remissione formarum and Question 10 on Book V of the Physics. The paper is focussed on the two last. Blasius discusses theses about the ontological status of qualities and their relation to their subject of inherence through the issue of their intensification or weakening, at (...) the borderline of physics and metaphysics. In the same time, he takes sides for the calculating procedures that were on debate since the beginning of the 14th century. In binding the quality and its subject closely together, Blasius does not go as far as the Oxford Calculators in the mathematisation of intensive magnitudes. Nonetheless, he does attempt to integrate the new tools into his physics and his ontology. (shrink)