Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling original philosophy of human motivation and morality. He maintains that we cannot get clear about ethics until we get clear about human nature. So these are the sorts of questions he addresses: Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers in an exploration of guilt, shame, disgust, and other moral emotions; he (...) draws also on game theory and cognitive science in his account of the structures of human motivation. Many philosophers have wanted a naturalistic ethics a theory that integrates our understanding of human morality with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. What is special about Blackburn's naturalistic ethics is that it does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to the non-ethical. At the same time he banishes the spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. Ruling Passions sets ethics in the context of human nature: it offers a solution to the puzzle of how ethics can maintain its authority even though it is rooted in the very emotions and motivations that it exists to control. (shrink)

This volume collects some influential essays in which Simon Blackburn, one of our leading philosophers, explores one of the most profound and fertile of philosophical problems: the way in which our judgments relate to the world. This debate has centered on realism, or the view that what we say is validated by the way things stand in the world, and a variety of oppositions to it. Prominent among the latter are expressive and projective theories, but also a relaxed pluralism (...) that discourages the view that there are substantial issues at stake. The figure of the "quasi-realist" dramatizes the difficulty of conducting these debates. Typically philosophers thinking of themselves as realists will believe that they alone can give a proper or literal account of some of our attachments--to truth, to facts, to the independent world, to knowledge and certainty. The quasi-realist challenge, developed by Blackburn in this volume, is that we can have those attachments without any metaphysic that deserves to be called realism, so that the metaphysical picture that goes with our practices is quite idle. The cases treated here include the theories of value and knowledge, modality, probability, causation, intentionality and rule-following, and explanation. A substantial new introduction has been added, drawing together some of the central themes. The essays articulate a fresh alternative to a primitive realist/anti-realist opposition, and their cumulative effect is to yield a new appreciation of the delicacy of the debate in these central areas. (shrink)

Deconstruction and pragmatism constitute two of the major intellectual influences on the contemporary theoretical scene; influences personified in the work of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. Both Rortian pragmatism, which draws the consequences of post-war developments in Anglo-American philosophy, and Derridian deconstruction, which extends and troubles the phonomenological and Heideggerian influence on the Continental tradition, have hitherto generally been viewed as mutually exclusive philosophical language games. The purpose of this volume is to bring deconstruction and pragmatism into critical confrontation with (...) one another through staging a debate between Derrida and Rorty, itself based on discussions that took place at the College International de Philosophie in Paris in 1993. The ground for this debate is layed out in introductory papers by Simon Critchley and Ernesto Laclau, and the remainder of the volume records Derrida's and Rorty's responses to each other's work. Chantal Mouffe gives an overview of the stakes of this debate in a helpful preface. (shrink)

Simon J. Evnine explores the view that some objects have matter from which they are distinct but that this distinctness is not due to the existence of anything like a form. He draws on Aristotle's insight that such objects must be understood in terms of an account that links what they are essentially with how they come to exist and what their functions are. Artifacts are the most prominent kind of objects where these three features coincide, and Evnine develops (...) a detailed account of the existence and identity conditions of artifacts, and the origins of their functions, in terms of how they come into existence. He then extends this account to organisms, where evolution accomplishes what is effected by intentional making in the case of artifacts, and to actions, which are seen as artifactual events. (shrink)

This paper develops and defends a new account of B-theoretic endurantism and a new account of the metaphysics of the quantum state, and highlights the parallels between the considerations that motivate them. These new accounts are both fragmentalist, in the sense that they follow Fine (2005) in invoking a symmetric coordination relation between facts, such that facts that are pairwise incompatible (like Hugh's being happy and Hugh's being sad) can both obtain provided that they are not related by this relation. (...) However, while Fine allows that fragments can be logically incoherent— P can obtain in one fragment while not-P obtains in another—the fragmentalist accounts defended here are motivated even if we insist on logical coherence between fragments. (shrink)

Our engagement with time is a ubiquitous feature of our lives. We are aware of time on many scales, from the briefest flicker of change to the way our lives unfold over many years. But to what extent does this encounter reveal the true nature of temporal reality? To the extent that temporal reality is as it seems, how do we come to be aware of it? And to the extent that temporal reality is not as it seems, why does (...) it seem that way? These are the central questions addressed by Simon Prosser in Experiencing Time. He defends the B-theory of time, according to which the apparently dynamic quality of change, the special status of the present, and even the passage of time are all illusions. Prosser goes on to explore solutions to certain puzzles raised by experiences of temporal features such as changes, rates, and durations, and in doing so sheds light on broader issues in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Although it is argued that social justice is a core concern for the discipline, nursing has not generally played a leadership role in the responses to many of the greatest social problems of our time. These include the accelerated rate of climate change, pandemic threats, systemic racism, growing health and social inequities, and the regulation of new technologies to ensure an equitable future ‘for all.’ In nursing codes of ethics, administration, education, policies, and practice, social justice is often claimed to (...) be a core value, yet it is rarely contextualized by philosophical or theoretical underpinnings. It appears that nurses’ commitment to social justice may stem more from a penchant for ‘doing good’ than an attempt to explore, understand, and enact what is meant by social justice from an ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspective. We contend that the dominance of a human science perspective in nursing contributes to a narrow definition of health and relegates many issues central to social justice to the margins of nurses’ care. In this article, we explore how the focus on ‘the human’ in the human science perspective may not only be limiting the capacity of nurses to develop strategies to adequately address social injustice, but in some instances, direct nurses to contribute to their very reproduction. We suggest that a critical interrogation of this human‐centric hegemony can identify avenues of rupture and introduce posthumanism as an additional philosophical perspective for consideration to help bridge the human‐social divide. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that changes are occurring to the earth’s climate and, further, that these changes threaten important human interests. This raises the question of who should bear the burdens of addressing global climate change. This paper aims to provide an answer to this question. To do so it focuses on the principle that those who cause the problem are morally responsible for solving it (the ‘polluterpays’ principle). It argues thatwhilethishasconsiderable appeal it cannot provide a complete account of who (...) should bear the burdens of global climate change. It proposes three ways in which this principle needs to be supplemented, and compares the resulting moral theory with the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’. (shrink)

Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality critically reads the intersubjective theories on educational relations and uses a posthuman approach to ascribe agency relationally to humans and nonhumans alike. The book introduces the concept of ‘educational relationality’ and contains examples of nonhuman elements of technology and animals, putting educational relationality and other concepts into context as part of the philosophical investigation. Drawing on educational and posthuman theorists, it answers questions raised in ongoing debates regarding the roles of students and teachers (...) in education, such as the foundations of educational relations and how these can be challenged. The book explores educational relations within the field of philosophy of education. After critically examining intersubjective approaches to theories of educational relations, anthropocentrism and subject-centrism are localized as two problematic aspects. Post-anthropocentrism and intra-relationality are proposed as a theoretical framework, before the book introduces and develops a posthuman theory of educational relations. The analysis is executed through a diffractive reading of intersubjective theories, resulting in five co-concepts: impermanence, uniqueness-as-relationality, proximity, edu-activity, and intelligibility. The analysis provided through educational examples demonstrates the potential of using the proposed theory in everyday practices. Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, early childhood education, research methodology and curriculum studies. (shrink)

According to the Everett interpretation, branching structure and ratios of norms of branch amplitudes are the objective correlates of chance events and chances; that is, 'chance' and 'chancing', like 'red' and 'colour', pick out objective features of reality, albeit not what they seemed. Once properly identified, questions about how and in what sense chances can be observed can be treated as straightforward dynamical questions. On that basis, given the unitary dynamics of quantum theory, it follows that relative and never absolute (...) chances can be observed; that only on repetition of a large numbers of similar trials can relative probabilities be measured; and so on. The epistemology of objective chances can in this way be worked out from the dynamics. its curious features are thus explained. But one aspect of chance set-ups seems to resist this subsuming of chancing to branching: how is it that chance involves uncertainty? And if that is not possible, on Everettian lines, then the whole project is doomed. I argue that in fact there is no difficulty in making sense of uncertainty in the face of branching. Contrary to initial impressions, the unitary formalism is consistent with a well-defined notion of self-locating uncertainty. It is also consistent without: the mathematics under-determines the metaphysics in these respects. (shrink)

Saying ┌ that ψ is F ┐ when one should have said ┌ that φ is F ┐ involves making one of two different kinds of error. Either the wrong nominal term (┌ ψ ┐ instead of ┌ φ ┐) is ascribed to the right object or the right nominal term is ascribed to the wrong object. Judgments susceptible to one kind of error are immune to the other. Indexical terms such as ‘here’ and ‘now’ exhibit a corresponding pattern of (...) immunity and susceptibility to error, which suggests that they are complex demonstratives. This should also apply to ‘I’. (shrink)

Linguistic interaction between two people is the fundamental form of communication, yet almost all research in language use focuses on isolated speakers and listeners. In this innovative work, Garrod and Pickering extend the scope of psycholinguistics beyond individuals by introducing communication as a social activity. Drawing on psychological, linguistic, philosophical and sociological research, they expand their theory that alignment across individuals is the basis of communication, through the model of a 'shared workspace account'. In this workspace, interlocutors are actors who (...) jointly manipulate and control the interaction and develop similar representations of both language and social context, in order to achieve communicative success. The book also explores dialogue within groups, technologies, as well as the role of culture more generally. Providing a new understanding of cognitive representation, this trailblazing work will be highly influential in the fields of linguistics, psychology and cognitive linguistics. (shrink)

Simon Jarvis shows how a re-examination of Adorno's work from the perspective of classical German philosophy allows us to achieve a fuller understanding of all ...

Broad in its geographic scope and yet grounded in original archival research, this book situates the inception of modern aesthetic theory – the philosophical analysis of art and beauty - in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose. Simon Grote presents seminal aesthetic theories of the German and Scottish Enlightenments as outgrowths of a quintessentially Enlightenment project: the search for a natural 'foundation of morality' and a means of helping naturally self-interested human beings transcend their own (...) self-interest. This conclusion represents an important alternative to the standard history of aesthetics as a series of preludes to the achievements of Immanuel Kant, as well as a reinterpretation of several canonical figures in the German and Scottish Enlightenments. It also offers a foundation for a transnational history of the Enlightenment without the French philosophes at its centre, while solidly endorsing historians' growing reluctance to call the Enlightenment a secularising movement. (shrink)

The descriptions 'good' and 'bad' are examples of thin concepts, as opposed to 'kind' or 'cruel' which are thick concepts. Simon Kirchin provides one of the first full-length studies of the crucial distinction between 'thin' and 'thick' concepts, which is fundamental to many debates in ethics, aesthetics and epistemology.

Nick Hopwood, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord, “Seriality and scientific objects in the nineteenth century”, History of Science, xlviii. Series represent much that was new and significant in the sciences between the French Revolution and the First World War. From periodical publication to the cinema, tabulation to industrialized screening, series feature in major innovations in scientific communication and the organization of laboratories, clinics, libraries, museums and field - XIXe siècle – Nouvel article.

This Element considers the relationship between the traditional view of God as all-powerful, all-knowing and wholly good on the one hand, and the idea of human free will on the other. It focuses on the potential threats to human free will arising from two divine attributes: God's exhaustive foreknowledge and God's providential control of creation.

Does humour make us human, or do the cats and dogs laugh along with us? On Humour is a fascinating, beautifully written and funny book on what humour can tell us about being human. Simon Critchley skilfully probes some of the most perennial but least understood aspects of humour, such as our tendency to laugh at animals and our bodies, why we mock death with comedy and why we think it's funny when people act like machines. He also looks (...) at the darker side of humour, as rife in sexism and racism and argues that it is important for reminding us of people we would rather not be. (shrink)

It is often claimed by environmental philosophers and green political theorists that liberalism, the dominant tradition of western political philosophy, is too focused on the interests of human individuals to give due weight to the environment for its own sake. In "How to be a Green Liberal", Simon Hailwood challenges this view and argues that liberalism can embrace a genuinely 'green', non-instrumental view of nature. The book's central claim is that nature's 'otherness', its being constituted of independent entities and (...) processes that do not reflect our purposes, is a basis for value and can be incorporated within liberal political philosophy as a fundamental commitment alongside human freedom and equality. Hailwood argues that the conceptual resources already exist within mainstream liberalism for a thoroughly non-instrumental perspective. Adopting a rigorous philosophical approach Hailwood tackles a wide range of themes across environmental ethics, including holistic theories, deep ecology, eco-feminism and eco-anarchism, as well as issues in value theory and political philosophy more generally. In making the case for liberalism's green credentials "How to be a Green Liberal" is a formidable challenge to recent green political theory and will be required reading not only for students of political philosophy but for all those interested in the natural world and man's relationship to it. (shrink)

The paper has the following structure. In Section I, I introduce some important methodological preliminaries by asking: How should one reason about global environmental justice in general and global climate change in particular? Section II introduces the key normative argument; it argues that global climate change damages some fundamental human interests and results in a state of affairs in which the rights of many are unprotected: as such it is unjust. Section III addresses the complexities that arise from the fact (...) that some of the ill effects of global climate change will fall on the members of future generations. Section IV shows that some prevailing approaches are unable to deal satisfactorily with the challenges posed by global climate change. If the argument of this paper is correct, it follows that those who contribute to global climate change through high emissions are guilty of human rights violations and they should be condemned as such. (shrink)

: In the commentaries, a number of intriguing projections of Future State Maximization on a multitude of different systems are suggested, which raised the need to clarify certain ….

Beginning with a critical examination of the humanist assumptions of critical ethnography, this article interrogates and surfaces problems with the ontological and epistemological orientations of this research methodology. In drawing on exemplar empirical data from an arts‐based project, the article demonstrates the limitations in the humanist‐based qualitative research approach and advances a postdualist, postrepresentationalist direction for critical ethnography called entangled ethnography. Using data from a larger study that examined the perspectives of racialized mad artists, what is demonstrated in this inquiry (...) is that the entanglement of bodies, objects, and meaning‐making practices is central to working with the ontologically excluded, such as those who find themselves in various states of disembodiment and/or corporeal and psychic distribution. We propose the redevelopment of critical ethnography, extended by entanglement theory (a critical posthuman theory), and suggest that for it to be an inclusive methodology, critical ethnography must be conceptualized as in the process of becoming and always in regeneration, open to critique, extension, and redevelopment. (shrink)

In this enlightening new Very Short Introduction, Simon Critchley shows us that Continental philosophy encompasses a distinct set of philosophical traditions and practices, with a compelling range of problems all too often ignored by the analytic tradition. He discusses the ideas and approaches of philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Habermas, Foucault, and Derrida. He also introduces key concepts such as existentialism, nihilism, and phenomology, by explaining their place in the Continental tradition. The perfect guide for (...) anyone interested in the great philosophers, this volume explains in lucid, straightforward language the split between Continental and Anglo-American philosophy and the importance of acknowledging Continental philosophy. (shrink)

Levinas's idea of ethics as a relation of responsibility to the other person has become a highly influential and recognizable position across a wide range of academic and non-academic fields. Simon Critchley's aim in this book is to provide a less familiar, more troubling, and truer account of Levinas's work. He proposes a new dramatic method for reading Levinas, where the fundamental problem of his work is seen as the attempt to escape from the tragedy of Heidegger's philosophy and (...) the way in which that philosophy shaped political events in the last century. (shrink)

The 1929 encounter between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland is considered one of the most important intellectual debates of the twentieth century and a founding moment of continental philosophy. At the same time, many commentators have questioned the philosophical profundity and coherence of the actual debate. In this book, the first comprehensive philosophical analysis of the Davos debate, Simon Truwant challenges these critiques. He argues that Cassirer and Heidegger's disagreement about the meaning of Kant's philosophy is (...) motivated by their different views about the human condition, which in turn are motivated by their opposing conceptions of what the task of philosophy ultimately should be. Truwant shows that Cassirer and Heidegger share a grand philosophical concern: to comprehend and aid the human being's capacity to orient itself in and towards the world. (shrink)