In the multi-faceted trajectory of post-Kantian thought, Schelling—both the person and his philosophy—has always been a controversial figure. Popular historical accounts focus on his precocious interventions as part of the ‘Jena set’, initially building on Fichte's philosophy of the ‘I’, but quickly coming to challenge his predecessor's philosophical dominance. In the crucial period of the late 1790s, Schelling's most notable intervention was to develop a philosophy of nature alongside the Kantian and Fichtean theories of transcendental subjectivity, which caught the attention (...) of Goethe and led to his appointment, at the age of twenty-three, as professor of philosophy at the University of Jena. But Schelling's life and philosophical work continued well beyond this well-documented period, culminating in a late system in which he developed key ideas surrounding freedom, existence, modality and the history of human consciousness that all revolved around a distinction between what he called negative and positive philosophy. This distinction, and his insistence on the need for the development of the latter mode of philosophy, came to challenge some of the core assumptions of the largely rationalist German idealist project and it remains, to this day, perhaps the most powerful alternative to the Hegelian system that rose to dominance already within Schelling's own lifetime, but also well beyond it. (shrink)

In this paper I describe and defend an account of virtuous motivation that differs from what we might call ordinary moral motivation. It is possible to be morally motivated without being virtuously motivated. In the first half of the essay, I explore different senses of moral motivation and the philosophical puzzles and problems it poses. In the second half, I give an account of virtuous motivation that, unlike ordinary moral motivation, requires the motivational structure characteristic of a fully virtuous person. (...) I draw on Aristotle's account of virtuous action to argue that a fully virtuous agent's judgment reflects a robust form of moral knowledge about what features of an action render it virtuous and hence, choiceworthy. Virtuously motivated actions are chosen in light of those features and are accompanied by the affective state appropriate to the overall moral landscape in which the judgment is made. (shrink)

-/- Carefully considering the difference in the philosophical potential of page poetry and performance poetry, Karen Simecek argues that it is only by considering them side by side that the unique cognitive value of each can be realised. -/- Focusing on spoken word poetry reveals the importance of voice and embodied words to the differing epistemic rewards of engaging with contemporary works of poetry in both private reading and live performance. This concept of embodied voice progresses a new line (...) of thinking in the cognitivism debate and unlocks the philosophical value of engaging with poetry. Simecek's discussion of performed poetry also advances discussions of affect and experience in contemporary analytic aesthetics which raise new insights and connections within the field. -/- The moral significance of the differing effects of poetry finds comprehensive articulation through a rich philosophical analysis of the thoughts and affects which arise in particular contexts. Simecek concludes that when page poetry is treated as paradigmatic, this enables reflection in the singular, whereas taking poetry in live performance as paradigmatic enables reflection on what is shared and shareable with others. (shrink)

This paper defends an interpretation of Fanon's theory of recognition as revolving around his claim that we have a basic right to demand human behaviour from the other. Developing key Hegelian ideas in a novel direction, I argue that Fanon's theory of recognition employs a concretely universal concept of humanity as a normative orientation for establishing what he calls a ‘world of reciprocal recognitions’, which he equates with the creation of a ‘human reality’. In the first section, I take up (...) the three passages from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit cited by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks to outline three key features of Fanon's theory of recognition. In section two, I argue that there are three senses of ‘universal humanity’ operative in Fanon's work: a false universal, an abstract universal, and a concrete universal. Whereas the first two are critical, pejorative uses, the third provides the normative orientation for his account of recognition and social struggle. In the third section, I show how Fanon combines features of Hegel's concrete universal with features of Sartre's existential humanism in order to avoid an essentialist or ahistorical approach to human nature. Specifically, I argue that the ideas of self-transcendence and a universal human condition shed light on what Fanon refers to as the right of reciprocal recognition to demand human behaviour from the other, and our one human duty to not renounce our freedom. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that the gradual emergence of the modern nation-state is associated with intensified interest in the government of childhood. Grounded in the Foucauldian literature on governmentality and drawing on a broad range of disciplines, this book examines the government of childhood in the West from the early modern period to the present. The book deals with three key time periods, examining shifts in the conceptualization and regulation of childhood and child-rearing between the late sixteenth and late eighteenth (...) century; between the late eighteenth century and the mid/late twentieth century and the period from the late twentieth century to the present day. Building on the work of Chris Jenks, The Government of Childhood deploys the images of the Dionysian and Apollonian images of childhood as symbolic targets of power/knowledge and presents a third model - the Athenian child - as a symbolic target of modes of exercising power over the young that is grounded in children's capacity for agency. (shrink)

Although for a long time, Dutch academic philosophy was characterized by a pluralism of – imported – philosophical frameworks and paradigms, in more recent decades, a type of ‘normal philosophy’, in the Kuhnian sense, has become dominant which aims to solve ethical and political problems and dilemmas through rational-normative argumentation. Contrary to what is often claimed, the new 'normal philosophy' amounts not to thinking ‘beyond the analytic-continental divide’ in a fruitful synthesis, but to the subsumption of continental philosophical themes and (...) concepts under the analytic tradition. The potentially critical tenor of continental philosophy threatens to be ‘solved’ by this subsumption. ‘Normal philosophy’, with its emphasis on rational-normative argumentation, risks leading to a state philosophy that fits in with existing policy questions, ignoring systemic and structural power inequalities. I argue that the journal Krisis, in keeping with its original principles, should hang on to critical philosophical reflection, which today is needed more than ever, specifically – pace current right-wing and left-wing populist attacks on identity politics – on systemic, multiple forms of deprivation and oppression. (shrink)

Sir Ernst Gombrich and the Barber from Tuscany In the spirit of Sir Ernst Gombrich, this essay uses an anecdote—a chat between Gombrich and a barber from Tuscany—to illustrate a deeper point, namely, how cultural memory, tradition, and a canon give rise to an implied language of culture and cultural value. Gombrich staunchly defended tradition against relativism. By relativism, he meant something like "radical subjectivism." To his mind, subjectivism (in the cultural and social sense of the term) is not only (...) impossible, since meaning is conferred through culture and society, but it is also dangerous (in the cultural and ethical sense of the term), since it denies the existence of shared values. Against consensus on the one hand and radical subjectivism on the other, Gombrich advocated a middle way: criticism and self-criticism to ensure latitude; the search for "truth" to ensure a limited plurality of interpretations. (shrink)

Paradigmatic as Beauvoir’s thinking is for contemporary Western feminism, in the light of global developments, it is important to note that her feminist ideals surpass the dominant forms of Western liberalism in substantial ways. Her positive concept of ‘ethical’ freedom does not correspond to Western liberalism’s negative concept of freedom as the absence of constraints. Nor does her gender egalitarian concept of society resemble Western liberalism’s model of society with its dichotomous organization of labor and care. It is argued that (...) Western feminism, as it was conceived by Beauvoir, can be elaborated substantially, as well as strategically, into an inclusive feminism for a globalizing, yet culturally plural world. (shrink)

A theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, Karen Barad elaborates her theory of agential realism, a schema that is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics.

We frequently speak of certain things or phenomena being built out of or based in others. Making Things Up concerns these relations, which connect more fundamental things to less fundamental things: Karen Bennett calls these 'building relations'. She aims to illuminate what it means to say that one thing is more fundamental than another.

Many women today prepare for a big meeting by reading a stack of folders and applying lipstick. They order their male colleagues around, then wait for those same men to help them on with their coats. They have higher-status jobs than some of the men they date, yet they never call men socially or ask them out. What's going on? Why such seemingly contradictory behaviors? Have women completely failed feminism--or has feminism failed them? In The Lipstick Proviso , Karen (...) Lehrman--hailed by the New York Times as the "sharpest" of the new feminist thinkers--shows that women today are failing neither feminism nor themselves. Rather, they've entered a new stage of feminism, one in which the personal is not political, differences between the sexes need to be respected, and courtship, chivalry, and the nuclear family don't have to be jettisoned just because they existed before the sixties. Thirty years after the women's movement liberated women from narrowly defined roles, Lehrman argues, we are finally beginning to see which traditionally feminine behaviors are more deeply rooted in biology and which are more heavily influenced by culture. Lehrman asserts that the result--whatever it is--will not undermine feminism as long as women still retain equal rights, opportunities, and responsibilities. Dispensing with the outdated notion of sisterhood, Lehrman offers women a "lipstick proviso": women don't have to sacrifice their complex individuality in order to be equal. As the first book to move beyond a critique of orthodox feminism, The Lipstick Proviso sets a radically new course for the future of the women's movement. While there's still much political work to be done, Lehrman argues that women should now focus on the personal sides of their lives. Women can't rightly be called autonomous if they stay with abusive or even emotionally challenged lovers; say "yes" to sex when they really mean "no"; overeat or undereat to hide their sexuality. With wit and grace, Karen Lehrman offers in The Lipstick Proviso a way to complete the feminist revolution, and clearly establishes herself as the definitive voice of the next generation of feminism. (shrink)

HEGELIAN MOTIVES IN THOMAS MANN’S JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS The article discusses relations between Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his brothers and Hegelian conception of history and time. These two names are rather rarely linked together; in spite of Susan von Rohr Scaff’s works, the issue remains unexplored. I point out the similarities between Mann’s and Hegel’s understanding of eternity, the end of history and Absolute. Comparising their writings, I also refer to their cultural and historical background, suggesting that their common (...) experience of modernity affects the tendency to synthesis that joins them. (shrink)

We hypothesised that belief in conspiracy theories would be predicted by the general tendency to attribute agency and intentionality where it is unlikely to exist. We further hypothesised that this tendency would explain the relationship between education level and belief in conspiracy theories, where lower levels of education have been found to be associated with higher conspiracy belief. In Study 1 participants were more likely to agree with a range of conspiracy theories if they also tended to attribute intentionality and (...) agency to inanimate objects. As predicted, this relationship accounted for the link between education level and belief in conspiracy theories. We replicated this finding in Study 2, whilst taking into account beliefs in paranormal phenomena. These results suggest that education may undermine the reasoning processes and assumptions that are reflected in conspiracy belief. (shrink)

Recently much has been made of the grounding relation, and of the idea that it is intimately tied to fundamentality. If A grounds B, then A is more fundamental than B (though not vice versa ), and A is ungrounded if and only if it is fundamental full stop—absolutely fundamental. But here is a puzzle: is grounding itself absolutely fundamental?

Performance is increasingly important to the poet, which is evidenced by the growing numbers of videos and audio recordings online including YouTube, the National Poetry library, and Poetry Archive. As a result, there are greater opportunities to engage with poets reading their own work and consequently, there is a need to move away from thinking of poetry as primary something that takes shape on the page. Furthermore, by refocusing attention to poetry as an oral artform, in particular to poetry performance, (...) different ways of understanding the value of poetry come to the fore. The live poetry performance, I argue, offers an attempt to reclaim the personal individual expression of language in contemporary society and demands attention by the audience because of the role of voice and body in the performance. Through awareness of ‘uniqueness of voice,’ the performed poem becomes a site of collective meaning making with individual identity intact as a shared endeavour between performer and audience, and necessarily resists appropriation (in the sense that the words experienced cannot be divorced from the performer or the performance space to serve as a proxy for meaning elsewhere). This chapter therefore makes an argument for the need to engage with spoken word and performance poetry in the live performance space. (shrink)

The radical empiricism of William James was first formally presented in his seminal papers of 1904, 'Does Consciousness Exist?' and 'A World of Pure Experience'. In James's view, pure experience was to serve as the source for psychology's primary data and radical empiricism was to launch an effective critique of experimentalism in psychology, a critique from which the problem of experimentalism within science could be addressed more broadly. This collection of papers presents James's formal statements on radical empiricism and a (...) representative sample of contemporary responses from psychologists and philosophers. With only a few exceptions, these responses indicate just how badly James was misread - psychologists ignoring the heart of James's message and philosophers transforming James's metaphysics into something quite unintelligible to the emerging generation of experimental psychologists. (shrink)

Recent defenses of shaming as an effective tool for identifying bad practice and provoking social change appear compatible with feminism. I complicate this picture by examining two instances of online feminist shaming that resulted in shame backlashes. Shaming requires the assertion of social and epistemic authority on behalf of a larger community, and is dependent upon an audience that will be receptive to the shaming testimony. In cases where marginally situated knowers attempt to “shame up,” it presents challenges for feminist (...) uses. (shrink)

A variety of relations widely invoked by philosophers—composition, constitution, realization, micro-basing, emergence, and many others—are species of what I call ‘building relations’. I argue that they are conceptually intertwined, articulate what it takes for a relation to count as a building relation, and argue that—contra appearances—it is an open possibility that these relations are all determinates of a common determinable, or even that there is really only one building relation.

I offer a novel solution to the problem of counterfactual skepticism: the worry that all contingent counterfactuals without explicit probabilities in the consequent are false. I argue that a specific kind of contextualist semantics and pragmatics for would- and might-counterfactuals can block both central routes to counterfactual skepticism. One, it can explain the clash between would- and might-counterfactuals as in: If you had dropped that vase, it would have broken. and If you had dropped that vase, it might have safely (...) quantum tunneled to China. Two, it can explain why counterfactuals like can be true despite the fact that quantum tunneling worlds are among the most similar worlds. I further argue that this brand of contextualism accounts for the data better than other existing solutions to the problem. (shrink)

Studie over het filosofische werk van de Franse schrijfster (1908-1986).

Statistical methods used by healthcare entities enable the collection of various information about the structure and characteristics of treated patients. They are an important source of knowledge, and form a database that plays an important role in entity management theory. In the presented study, we analysed the hospital stays of patients treated in all hospital wards of the 3rd City Hospital in Łodź during 2012. The following, in particular, were taken into account: admittance procedure, discharge procedure, age and sex of (...) hospitalised persons. Patients in over 55% of cases were admitted using the sud- den admittance procedure. At the same time, over 3/4 of the stays ended with a referral for further treatment in ambulatory conditions, and death occurred in approx. 5% of hospitalisations. By comparing the discharge procedures, the percentage of deaths in the Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Wards can be seen clearly. Internal wards are next in turn. The biggest differences in the length of hospitalisation between the studied institution and the NFZ data concern the E77, A49, A48, A87, A33, D18, E16, E61 and G37 groups. (shrink)

The Key Issues series aims to make available the contemporary responses that met important books and debates on their first appearance. These take the form of journal articles, book extracts, public letters, sermons and pamphlets which provides an insight into the historical relevance and the social and political context in which a publication or particular topic emerged. Each volume brings together some of the key responses to the works.

The paper is an extended discussion of what I call the ‘dismissive attitude’ towards metaphysical questions. It has three parts. In the first part, I distinguish three quite different versions of dismissivism. I also argue that there is little reason to think that any of these positions is correct about the discipline of metaphysics as a whole; it is entirely possible that some metaphysical disputes should be dismissed and others should not be. Doing metametaphysics properly requires doing metaphysics first. I (...) then put two particular disputes on the table to be examined in the rest of the paper: the dispute over whether composite objects exist, and the dispute about whether distinct objects can be colocated. In the second part of the paper, I argue against the claim that these disputes are purely verbal disputes. In the third part of the paper, I present a new version of dismissivism, and argue that it is probably the correct view about the two disputes in question. They are not verbal disputes, and the discussion about them to date has not remotely been a waste of time. At this stage, however, our evidence has run out. I argue that neither side of either dispute is simpler than the other, and that the same objections in fact arise against both sides. (For example, the compositional nihilist does not in fact escape the problem of the many, and the one-thinger does not in fact escape the grounding problem.). (shrink)

This book discusses the notion that quantum gravity may represent the "breakdown" of spacetime at extremely high energy scales. If spacetime does not exist at the fundamental level, then it has to be considered "emergent", in other words an effective structure, valid at low energy scales. The author develops a conception of emergence appropriate to effective theories in physics, and shows how it applies (or could apply) in various approaches to quantum gravity, including condensed matter approaches, discrete approaches, and loop (...) quantum gravity. (shrink)

A lot of people believe that distinct objects can occupy precisely the same place for the entire time during which they exist. Such people have to provide an answer to the 'grounding problem' – they have to explain how such things, alike in so many ways, nonetheless manage to fall under different sortals, or have different modal properties. I argue in detail that they cannot say that there is anything in virtue of which spatio-temporally coincident things have those properties. However, (...) I also argue that this may not be as bad as it looks, and that there is a way to make sense of the claim that such properties are primitive. (shrink)

Both definite descriptions and pronouns are often anaphoric; that is, part of their interpretation in context depends on prior linguistic material in the discourse. For example: A student walked in. The student sat down. A student walked in. She sat down. One popular view of anaphoric pronouns, the d-type view, is that pronouns like ‘she’ go proxy for definite descriptions like ‘the student who walked in’, which are in turn treated in a classical Russellian or Fregean fashion. I argue for (...) a novel version of the d-type view in which anaphoric definites are restricted existential quantifiers that presuppose discourse uniqueness, which is uniqueness of discourse referent in the context, rather than uniqueness of object in the world. In other words, the anaphoric definites ‘the student’ and ‘she’ in and presuppose that there is a single object under discussion that is a student who walked in. I further argue that, by contrast, non-anaphoric definites are restricted existential quantifiers that presuppose worldly uniqueness, that is, that there is a unique object in the world that satisfies the descriptive information. The semantics for anaphoric and non-anaphoric definites accounts for the differences in truth conditions in discourses involving the two different types of definites, improving on existing accounts. It is further supported by crosslinguistic data. The semantics is formally implemented in a static system employing quantifier domain restriction in the style of Stanley and Szabo :219–261, 2000) and extended to account for bridging definites and donkey sentences. (shrink)

Over 700,000 copies of the original hardcover and paperback editions of this stunningly popular book have been sold. Karen Armstrong's superbly readable exploration of how the three dominant monotheistic religions of the world—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have shaped and altered the conception of God is a tour de force. One of Britain's foremost commentators on religious affairs, Armstrong traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present. From classical (...) philosophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the modern age of skepticism, Armstrong performs the near miracle of distilling the intellectual history of monotheism into one compelling volume. (shrink)

The classic Lewis-Stalnaker semantics for counterfactuals captures that Sobel sequences are consistent sequences, for example: a.If Sophie had gone to the parade, she would have seen Pedro dance. b.But if Sophie had gone to the parade and been stuck behind someone tall, she would not have seen Pedro dance. But reverse a sequence like this one and it no longer sounds so good, which is surprising on the classic semantics. This observation motivated Kai von Fintel and Thony Gillies to propose (...) dynamic semantic accounts of counterfactual conditionals. Subsequently, Sarah Moss defended the classic semantics against the charge that it need be abandoned in the face of these order effects, arguing that the infelicity of the reverse sequences is pragmatic. I argue that both accounts are ultimately untenable, but each account has strengths. Seeing what works and what doesn't in each account points the way to the right positive view. With this in mind, I defend a contextualist account of counterfactuals that takes conversational relevance to play a central role. (shrink)

I think that there is an awful lot wrong with the exclusion problem. So, it seems, does just about everybody else. But of course everyone disagrees about exactly _what_ is wrong with it, and I think there is more to be said about that. So I propose to say a few more words about why the exclusion problem is not really a problem after all—at least, not for the nonreductive physicalist. The genuine _dualist_ is still in trouble. Indeed, one of (...) my main points will be that the nonreductive physicalist is in a rather different position vis à vis the exclusion problem than the dualist is. Properly understanding nonreductive physicalism—and clearly recognizing that it is, after all, a form of _physicalism_—goes a long way toward solving the exclusion problem. (shrink)

In the ninth century BCE, the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity to the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Later generations further developed these initial insights, but we have never grown beyond them. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, were all secondary flowerings of the original Israelite vision. Now, in (...) The Great Transformation , Karen Armstrong reveals how the sages of this pivotal “Axial Age” can speak clearly and helpfully to the violence and desperation that we experience in our own times. Armstrong traces the development of the Axial Age chronologically, examining the contributions of such figures as the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the mystics of the Upanishads, Mencius, and Euripides. All of the Axial Age faiths began in principled and visceral recoil from the unprecedented violence of their time. Despite some differences of emphasis, there was a remarkable consensus in their call for an abandonment of selfishness and a spirituality of compassion. With regard to dealing with fear, despair, hatred, rage, and violence, the Axial sages gave their people and give us, Armstrong says, two important pieces of advice: first there must be personal responsibility and self-criticism, and it must be followed by practical, effective action. In her introduction and concluding chapter, Armstrong urges us to consider how these spiritualities challenge the way we are religious today. In our various institutions, we sometimes seem to be attempting to create exactly the kind of religion that Axial sages and prophets had hoped to eliminate. We often equate faith with doctrinal conformity, but the traditions of the Axial Age were not about dogma. All insisted on the primacy of compassion even in the midst of suffering. In each Axial Age case, a disciplined revulsion from violence and hatred proved to be the major catalyst of spiritual change. (shrink)

In this article, we describe a longitudinal inquiry into what it means to be a person in our contemporary world. Our method constitutes a dynamic, non-objectifying fusion of empirical and philosophical anthropology. Field-based anthropology examines actualities: how people lead their lives and talk about them. Philosophical anthropology addresses possibilities: who and what people could become in light of actualities while not being determined by them. We describe and illustrate our fieldwork in the classrooms of 16 teachers who work in New (...) York City public schools. We have sought in our observations to identify and think about signs or expressions of persons-in-the-making. We also touch on a series of dinner-discussions we have held with the teachers. These meetings have centered on the question of becoming a person in today’s political and cultural environment, and how education figures into the equation. Finally, we also describe the weekly meetings we have held as a research team, in which we engage the play of concepts and percepts. We close with remarks on the conceptual and existential ties that can link philosophy and fieldwork in schools. (shrink)

I suspect the answer to the question in the title of this paper is no. But the scope of my paper will be considerably more limited: I will be concerned with whether certain types of considerations that are commonly cited in favor of dynamic semantics do in fact push us towards a dynamic semantics. Ultimately, I will argue that the evidence points to a dynamics of discourse that is best treated pragmatically, rather than as part of the semantics.

This book explains how gossip contributes to knowledge. Karen Adkins marshals scholarship and case studies spanning centuries and disciplines to show that although gossip is a constant activity in human history, it has rarely been studied as a source of knowledge. People gossip for many reasons, but most often out of desire to make sense of the world while lacking access to better options for obtaining knowledge. This volume explores how, when our access to knowledge is blocked, gossip becomes (...) a viable path to knowledge attainment, one that involves the asking of questions, the exchange of ideas, and the challenging of preconceived notions. (shrink)