Examining the literature of slavery and race before the Civil War, Maurice Lee demonstrates for the first time exactly how the slavery crisis became a crisis of philosophy that exposed the breakdown of national consensus and the limits of rational authority. Poe, Stowe, Douglass, Melville, and Emerson were among the antebellum authors who tried - and failed - to find rational solutions to the slavery conflict. Unable to mediate the slavery controversy as the nation moved toward war, their writings (...) form an uneasy transition between the confident rationalism of the American Enlightenment and the more skeptical thought of the pragmatists. Lee draws on antebellum moral philosophy, political theory, and metaphysics, bringing a fresh perspective to the literature of slavery - one that synthesizes cultural studies and intellectual history to argue that romantic, sentimental, and black Atlantic writers all struggled with modernity when facing the slavery crisis. (shrink)

Our team at the Centre for Clinical Ethics has long been engaged in internal discussion about the purpose and value of ethics debriefs and their purported role in reducing moral distress (Morley an...

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to (...) engage in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people (...) spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we (...) take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

Homi Bhabha attends to the figure of the postcolonial metropolitan subject-a racialized subject who is not representative of the first world, yet a symbol of the metropolitan sphere. Bhabha describes theirdaily lives as inextricably split or doubled. His analysis cannot account for the agonistic moments when one is caught in not knowing, in focusing attention, and in developing understanding. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with the openness in the horizon of the gestaltian framework better accounts for such splits as moments on (...) the horizon for becoming and grasping something new. (shrink)

Homi Bhabha brings attention to the figure of the postcolonial metropolitan subject—a third world subject who resides in the first world. Bhabha describes the experiences of the “colonial” subject as ambivalently split. As much as his work is insightful, Bhabha's descriptions of the daily life of postcolonial metropolitan subjects as split and doubled is problematic. His analysis lends only to the possibility of these splittings/doublings as schizophrenically wholly arising. His analysis cannot account for the agonistic moments when the colonial subject (...) is caught in not knowing, and in developing understanding about present circumstances. A framework with an account of context and horizons, such as in phenomenology, can better depict the experiences of the postcolonial metropolitan subject. Maurice Merleau-Ponty follows a gestaltian contact with the world, which advances that the “most basic unit of experience is that of figure-on-a-background.” One perceives the figure/theme because of and within the background/horizon. In this horizonal framework, human experiences are ambiguously open. The openness in the horizon of the gestaltian framework better accounts for the conditions Bhabha refers to as splitting. The ambivalence can be understood not simply as conundrums that defy understanding but as ambiguous moments for expanding, developing, and growing. (shrink)

Utilizing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, I argue that the gestaltian framework’s co-determinacy of the theme and the horizon in seeing and experiencing the world serves as an encompassing epistemological framework with which to understand racism. Conclusions reached: as bias is unavoidably part of being in the world, defining racism as bias is superfluous; racism is sedimented into our very perceptions and experiences of the world and not solely a prejudice of thought; neutral perception of skin color is impossible. Phenomenology accounts (...) for the dynamic changes in expressions of racism and the interconnections of both race and sex for women of color. (shrink)

Focusing on the first four images of the Other mobilized in René Descartes’ Meditations—namely, the blind, the mad, the dreamy, and the bad—Reading Descartes Otherwise casts light on what have heretofore been the phenomenological shadows of “Cartesian rationality.” In doing so, it discovers dynamic signs of spectral alterity lodged both at the core and on the edges of modern Cartesian subjectivity. Calling for a Copernican reorientation of the very notion “Cartesianism,” the book's series of close, creatively critical readings of Descartes’ (...) signature images brings the dramatic forces, moments, and scenes of the cogito into our own contemporary moment. While unravelling the knotted skeins of ambiguity that have been spun within philosophical modernity out of such clichés as “Descartes, the abstract modern subject” and “Descartes, the father of modern philosophy,” the analysis highlights a figure who is at once everywhere and nowhere, a living Cartesian ghost. This effort at revitalizing and reframing the legacy of Cartesian modernity, in a way mindful of its proto-phenomenological traces, also involves reflecting on some of the trends in contemporary Cartesian scholarship while putting Descartes in dialogue with a host of twentieth century and contemporary Continental philosophers ranging from Edmund Husserl, Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc Marion, and Alain Badiou among others. (shrink)

Marcel Mauss’s discussion of the gift relies on a paradox: although gift-giving is the foundational act of building a society, in order for a gift to be circulated, society must be always-already presupposed so that the gift can reach and be recognized by its destination. This article focuses on how this paradox has been addressed in anthropological and philosophical studies of the gift, by reviewing work by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Godelier and Jacques Derrida. By illuminating each position through the (...) lens of the Lacanian triad of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, I first show how Lévi-Strauss and Godelier, respectively, focus on the symbolic and imaginary economies of the gift and how their perspectives are still bound by Mauss’s paradox in assuming the totality of society as the ultimate basis of gift exchange. I then read Derrida’s critique of Mauss as an attempt to explore the space for the aneconomic that grounds but simultaneously threatens the symbolic and imaginary economies of society. In doing so, I argue that the gift always includes the effaceable negativity and uncertainty that serve as the condition of (im)possibility for the social. (shrink)

“A Phenomenology of Seeing and Affect in a Polarized Climate,” focuses on the polarized political climate that reflects racial and class differences in the wake of the Trump election. She explores how to see differently about those with whom one disagrees—that is in this specific scenario for Lee, the Trump supporters, including Asian American members of her own family. Understanding Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of the interstice between the visible and the invisible, if human beings are to see otherwise, we (...) need to disrupt the ready association between the visible and the invisible. Here, she explores the function of affect for the possibility of this break. The phenomenological understanding of emotion does not necessarily empower emotion with any sort of superlative force, especially over reason. But a subject’s emotion chiasmatically reflects the world and vice versa. The caustic and strong emotions felt by people about this presidency reflects the entrenched political climate in our society and chiasmatically the entrenched political climate embroils people in strong emotions that make it difficult to see those with whom we disagree as people we can trust and consider reasonable. To break out of this standoff, to see differently about Trump supporters, one needs to feel differently about them as well. (shrink)

Patricia Williams in her book, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, describes being denied entrance in the middle of the afternoon by a “saleschild.” Utilizing the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this article explores their interaction phenomenologically. This small interaction of seemingly simple misunderstanding represents a limit condition in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis. His phenomenological framework does not explain the chasm between the “saleschild” and Williams, that in a sense they do not participate in the same world. This interaction between the “saleschild” (...) and Williams represents a moment when the two contest exactly what is reason in our society. To the extent that society discerns one’s actions as reasonable and the other’s actions as unreasonable, our society participates in determining that which constitutes reason. Williams’s work speaks precisely to this chasm as evident in her text’s subtitle, Memoirs of a Mad Woman. This decision relegates one subject to “judiciousness” and relegates the other to “madness.”. (shrink)

This anthology of classic essays focuses on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and the philosophical movement to which his writings gave impetus: phenomenology. Sixty contributions from a wide variety of scholars provide an introduction to phenomenology and existentialist phenomenology. Among the contributors are Frege, Chisholm, Merleau-Ponty, Schmitt, Tillman, Gendlin, Sellars, Linsky, Dreyfus, Ryle, Solomon, Schlick, Ricoeur, Marcel, Heidegger, Sartre, Brentano, Olafson, Camus, and de Beauvoir.

En La communauté inavouable (1983), se ocupa Blanchot expresamente de pensar la comunidad de quienes no tienen comunidad, cuestión que había asomado ya en Le livre á venir (1959) y en L'entretien infini (1969). La presente conferencia se refiere a estos antecedentes. En la primera parte; sobre el relato de Duras El square (1956) y el ensayo de Blanchot que lo medita, El dolor del diálogo, indica la relación "ética" entre la conversación y la desgracia. La segunda parte, entre otros, (...) caracteriza el tiempo en que se da la rareza de la conversación, así como las experiencias que permiten al pensamiento no anteponerse a la desgracia pero tampoco abandonarse a la ausencia de pensamiento. La tercera parte lee los escritos Lo indestructible, La relación del tercer género, etcétera, para caracterizar los diferentes "niveles" de la desgracia en dirección a la posibilidad o a la imposibilidad de conversar. La cuarta y última parte vuelve sobre la primera con el propósito de precisar la comunidad de los que no tienen nada en común salvo su separación -diferente en cada uno- del mundo: la comunidad de la desgracia. (shrink)

The standard versions of predicativism are committed to the following two theses: proper names are count nouns in all their occurrences, and names do not refer to objects but express name-bearing properties. The main motivation for predicativism is to provide a uniform explanation of referential names and predicative names. According to predicativism, predicative names are fundamental and referential names are explained by appealing to a null determiner functioning like “the” or “that.” This paper has two goals. The first is to (...) reject the predicativists’ explanation of the two types of names. I present three syntactic counterexamples to the predicativists’ account of referential names: incorporation, modification, and measure phrase uses. The second goal is to present a novel strategy to explain the two types of names. I propose that referential names are fundamental but that there are null morphemes available for transforming a name into a count noun (and possibly into other syntactic categories). (shrink)

Citizenship rights have become vital to our sense of personal identity and social membership in modern society. Roche argues that today we have to shift from the conventional postwar politics of social rights to a new politics of social obligations and personal responsibility.

This book explains the importance of embodiment in understanding the function of race. With chapters by expert contributors and coverage of the most recent thinking in philosophy of race, the book is ideal for upper-level students in Phenomenology, Philosophy of Race and Critical Race Theory.

It would be very difficult to discuss the question concerning the hypothesis of omniscience in microeconomics without relating this hypothesis to the more fundamental hypothesis of rationality (usually referred to as rationality principle or postulate) which is at the base of the very idea of an economic theory and even social sciences. Indeed omniscience is a quality which was typically attributed to homo oeconomicus whose essential characteristic is to be perfectly "rational". This association between omniscience and rationality goes back to (...) the marginalist revolution which progressively brought economists to model economic agents as rational calculators who make each decision by systematically maximizing their utility through the standard application of more or less sophisticated mathematical methods. But since the very idea of such a maximization has no meaning if all relevant parameters and variables are not carefully taken into account, it became relatively common to associate omniscience (the required knowledge of such parameters and variables) and rationality (the disposition to make decisions which tend to maximize the degree of success in reaching a goal). (shrink)

It is frequently repeated that the rationality principle is the fundamental principle of economics and it is so much so that the same principle is equivalently designated as the «economic principle»1. However, it is often the doom of fundamental principles that they are so intimately associated with the science itself that those who practice this science rarely take notice of their presence and of their role. Consequently, it is not surprising not to find any entry for "rationality" or for "rationality (...) principle" in virtually any treaties on economy. If rational behaviour is the object of economics like living organism is the object of biology, specific references could hardly be expected in either of these sciences to what is nothing but the affirmation of the very existence of their subject matter. (shrink)

Digital phenotyping is the term given to the capturing and use of user log data from health and wellbeing technologies used in apps and cloud-based services. This paper explores ethical issues in making use of digital phenotype data in the arena of digital health interventions. Products and services based on digital wellbeing technologies typically include mobile device apps as well as browser-based apps to a lesser extent, and can include telephony-based services, text-based chatbots, and voice-activated chatbots. Many of these digital (...) products and services are simultaneously available across many channels in order to maximize availability for users. Digital wellbeing technologies offer useful methods for real-time data capture of the interactions of users with the products and services. It is possible to design what data are recorded, how and where it may be stored, and, crucially, how it can be analyzed to reveal individual or collective usage patterns. The paper also examines digital phenotyping workflows, before enumerating the ethical concerns pertaining to different types of digital phenotype data, highlighting ethical considerations for collection, storage, and use of the data. A case study of a digital health app is used to illustrate the ethical issues. The case study explores the issues from a perspective of data prospecting and subsequent machine learning. The ethical use of machine learning and artificial intelligence on digital phenotype data and the broader issues in democratizing machine learning and artificial intelligence for digital phenotype data are then explored in detail. (shrink)

This paper aims to show how to conceive the relationship between educational methods and cognitive modes. Focusing on the difference between Stiegler and Hayles, I will show that it is necessary to invent an educational philosophy for hyper attention. While Stiegler agrees with Hayles’s position regarding attention, he criticizes Hayles for defining attention as duration. According to Stiegler, attention has less to do with duration than with ‘retention’ and ‘protention.’ Based on this phenomenological insight, Stiegler appeals for a need to (...) protect children from this mutation of the cognitive mode. However, Hayles suggests that hyper attention has certain advantages. It is not only a ‘mutation’ of attention but also a new cognitive mode in modern society. Thus, we should invent new educational methods and educational philosophies appropriate to hyper attention in order to bridge the gap between deep attention and hyper attention. (shrink)

The Sensible World and the World of Expression presents the lecture notes for a course taught by Maurice Marleau-Ponty, a central figure of phenomenological philosophy, at a key point in his career.

Breastmilk is bought, sold, and donated in a global marketplace, which risks exploiting the women who produce it. In Detroit, black mothers are targeted as paid milk donors; milk from Cambodian and Indian mothers is sold to parents in the United States and Australia; and the International Breast Milk Project sends donated milk from the United States to Africa. Drawing on transnational care work and affect theory, I argue that merely refraining from paying women does not eliminate potentially harmful effects. (...) Addressing the ethical implications of these exchanges requires reconsidering the relationship between gift and commodity and between love and work. (shrink)

This paper offers some comments about the subject matter of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior (1957). It first presents an argument against the common misconception that Verbal Behavior is about language. It then discusses the nature of verbal behavior as a subdivision of op?rant .behavior. Following that, the paper identifies three aspects of the concept of verbal behavior that need some clarification. Finally, the paper concludes by pointing out that the significance of Verbal Behavior lies most centrally in its effort to (...) offer a better way of talking about one part of psychology's subject matter. (shrink)

The last century saw two great revolutions in genetics the development of classic Mendelian theory and the discovery and investigation of DNA. Each fundamental scientific discovery in turn generated its own distinctive technology. These two case studies, examined in this text, enable the author to conduct a philosophical exploration of the relationship between fundamental scientific discoveries on the one hand, and the technologies that spring from them on the other. As such it is also an exercise in the philosophy of (...) technology. (shrink)