Philosophy is witnessing an ‘Agential Turn’, characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency – agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self-knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, (...) or make appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject’s rational point of view on the world. (shrink)

Epicurus holds, in Key Doctrine 31, that what is just according to nature is a súmbolon or sign of the interest there is in neither harming one another nor being harmed. Certain readings of this maxim equivocate this legal sign with other signs found in nature, thereby failing to give sufficient weight to the role of reciprocity in its production. Other readings simply import a legal sense from outside of Epicurean doctrine, thereby failing to explain what makes Epicurean súmbola legal. (...) A final set of readings attempt to find a legal rule as a kind of innate concept or Kantian ‘scheme’. This article identifies new sources for understanding súmbolon, drawn principally but not exclusively from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics. This article offers an original argument that Epicurus adopts Aristotle’s’ image of the tally stick (symbolon) as a meeting of often divergent interests which constitutes something new and particularly valuable to the Epicurean: friendship. A theoretical argument is also advanced to support this reading which claims that one person’s reflection on a ‘divine image’ of the end (telos) is insufficient to constitute a súmbolon; rather real (as opposed to abstract or ideal) individual interests are filtered via the mechanism of the tally, that is via the meeting of two given individuals who together generate a sign (symbolon) of reciprocal interest in neither harming nor being harmed. (shrink)

This essay considers how we talk in moral terms about crime and punishment using a framework that comes from psychoanalysis. The idea of the human as a metaphysical animal, an animal that thinks and loves, is given a naturalistic explanation in Freudian metapsychology as it was developed by Melanie Klein and Hans Loewald. While the former helps us understand the desire to punish as the enjoyable return of pain for pain, the latter indicates how mature human beings seek to pursue (...) a sense of wholeness. This understanding of moral psychology is applied to thinking about criminal justice where three ethical stances are identified, the vindictive, the vindicative and the validatory. The vindictive and the vindicative represent a compromise formation in law which excludes a broader validatory process aimed at truthful human reconciliation. (shrink)

Models of decision-making typically assume the existence of some common currency of value, such as utility, happiness, or inclusive fitness. This common currency is taken to allow comparison of options and to underpin everyday choice. Here we suggest instead that there is no universal value scale, that incommensurable values pervade everyday choice, and hence that most existing models of decision-making in both economics and psychology are fundamentally limited. We propose that choice objects can be compared only with reference to specific (...) but nonuniversal “covering values.” These covering values may reflect decision-makers’ goals, motivations, or current states. A complete model of choice must accommodate the range of possible covering values. We show that abandoning the common-currency assumption in models of judgment and decision-making necessitates rank-based and “simple heuristics” models that contrast radically with conventional utility-based approaches. We note that if there is no universal value scale, then Arrow’s impossibility theorem places severe bounds on the rationality of individual decision-making and hence that there is a deep link between the incommensurability of value, inconsistencies in human decision-making, and rank-based coding of value. More generally, incommensurability raises the question of whether it will ever be possible to develop single-quantity-maximizing models of decision-making. (shrink)

In this essay, we present Michael Polanyi’s theory of knowledge and outline its implications for theory development in organizational research. While Polanyi is best known in the field for his concept of tacit knowledge, we discuss here several other cognate concepts Polanyi has also introduced—notably conviviality, indwelling, tradition and lore, coherence, and post-critical reason—and show how they help us better understand organizational theorizing. Specifically, we argue the following. First, when engaged in theory creation, organizational scholars integrate largely unspecifiable particulars, in (...) search of deepening coherence, by dwelling in a fiduciary framework of previous theory, others’ narrativized experiences, and their own personal experiences. Secondly, driven by intellectual passions and commitments, organizational scholars bring about conceptual novelty by seeking to redirect intellectual attention to hitherto tacitly accepted subsidiary particulars, which they seek to reintegrate in novel ways. And, thirdly, since all knowledge, no matter how abstract, necessarily involves skillful action, organizational scholars dwell in scientific practice and, therefore, interiorize—that is, they become subsidiarily aware of—the practice’s collective purpose, which they freely and responsibly enact through the exercise of public liberty. (shrink)

From 1874–1888 Nietzsche commits himself to the “scheme” of Schopenhauer as Educator, and in this early text he endorses honesty (Ehrlichkeit), a deeply interpersonal virtue by means of which he counteracts the harmful effects of dissimulation (Verstellung). Despite its lifelong importance to Nietzsche, Ehrlichkeit has been widely neglected by scholars. Nietzsche’s practice of Ehrlichkeit is partially inspired by Diogenes’s outspokenness (parrhēsia), and he becomes simpler (einfacher) and more honest (ehrlicher) over time by writing spontaneously and confessionally, in defiance of scholarly (...) conventions. In his middle-period writings Nietzsche criticises Ehrlichkeit by means of Ehrlichkeit, and I formulate a “preservative” notion of self-overcoming to describe this self-critical mechanism. His commitment to Ehrlichkeit increases over time, and his autobiography, Ecce Homo, is the book of Ehrlichkeit par excellence. Nietzsche’s priority is to practise, not merely analyse, Ehrlichkeit, and with this in mind I provide a Nietzschean critique of Nietzsche scholarship. Nietzsche also introduces, in 1880, a stricter type of honesty (Redlichkeit) whose purpose is to recognise obscure truths, particularly those overlooked by the occasionally naïve Ehrlichkeit. I explain the development of Redlichkeit in Nietzsche’s writings and its links to cruelty (Grausamkeit), the avoidance of relevance fallacies, and the passion for knowledge (die Leidenschaft der Erkenntniss). Throughout Book IV of The Gay Science Nietzsche associates Redlichkeit with naturalistic metaphors, such as new suns, as a way of justifying his irrepressible passion for knowledge and further combatting the harmful effects of dissimulation. (shrink)

This paper develops the account of our experience and knowledge of time put forward by Russell in his Theory of Knowledge manuscript. While Russell ultimately abandons the project after it receives severe criticism from Wittgenstein (though several chapters derived from it appear as articles in The Monist), in producing this manuscript time, and particularly the notion of the present time, play a central role in Russell’s account of experience. In the present discussion, I propose to focus largely on Russell’s writing (...) in 1912–3, comparing this with some of the remarks made about memory by Moore in 1910–11. My motivation is twofold. First as a matter of scholarship, to reveal an original interpretation of Russell’s notion of immediate memory and of his view of our experience and knowledge of time over this period. Second as a matter of philosophical curiosity. There has been an increase in interest in temporal experience in contemporary discussions of the philosophy of mind, from memory and the imagination to the temporal aspects of perceptual experience. Russell’s writing in 1912–3 provides us with a philosophically interesting account of temporal experience which has points of contact with contemporary debates. (shrink)

People's time is a limited resource and, in economic evaluations that adopt a societal perspective, it is important that it is valued and accounted for. Yet, in economic evaluations of interventions for children and young people (CYP), attempts to take into account the opportunity cost of their time are rare. To understand why this is the case, we need to first understand what views health economists hold in relation to CYP time, and what challenges they face in incorporating this in (...) their evaluations. We planned and carried out an international survey of health economists. We used a combination of approaches to identify potential survey respondents (the survey's sampling frame), we developed a questionnaire that sought to capture respondents' views and practice through close- and open-ended questions, we piloted the questionnaire through a series of cognitive interviews, and we e-mailed unique links to the final version of the questionnaire to 1956 individuals in the sampling frame. We analysed data using quantitative (descriptive and inferential statistics) and qualitative (thematic analysis) methods. We received 274 complete responses. Most respondents (87%) believe CYP time should be considered for inclusion in economic evaluations conducted from a societal perspective. However, they identify a number of obstacles to doing so, most prominently uncertainties around appropriate practice (e.g., when CYP's time should or should not be included in calculations), methodological gaps (e.g., what value to attach to CYP's time), and practical difficulties in measuring displaced time in CYP. Reporting on their own practice, most respondents found it challenging to consider CYP time in their studies, and stressed the need for clear guidance on when, and further research on how, to appropriately account for CYP's time in economic evaluations. We offer our views on how to move the topic forwards and make suggestions further research. (shrink)

Imposing pure risks—risks that do not materialise into harm—is sometimes wrong. The Harm Account explains this wrongness by claiming that pure risks are harms. By contrast, The Autonomy Account claims that pure risks impede autonomy. We develop two objections to these influential accounts. The Separation Objection proceeds from the observation that, if it is wrong to v then it is sometimes wrong to risk v‐ing. The intuitive plausibility of this claim does not depend on any account of the facts that (...) ground moral wrongness. This suggests a close relationship between the factors that make an act wrong and the factors that make risking that act wrong, which both accounts fail to recognise. The Determinism Objection holds that both accounts fail to explain the wrongness of pure risks in a deterministic world. We then develop an alternative—The Buck‐Passing Account—that withstands both objections. (shrink)

Care—concern for and attending to the needs of the particular other we take responsibility—requires enacting time in a way that clashes with the industrial ‘clock time’ dominating our lives. Ethicists of care have highlighted the tensions between the temporalities involved in caring as a situated, relational and processual practice and the organization of care work according to standardized clock time. Yet, the practice of care work within bureaucratic work organizations seems to reconcile temporal demands of care and clock time. In (...) this article, we build on Barbara Adam’s concept of ‘timescape’ (Adam, Timewatch: The social analysis of time, Polity, 1995; Adam, Time, Polity, 2004) to inquire how care workers juggle apparently conflicting temporalities. Through a participant observation study of a child protection agency in France, we discover that care workers ‘trick’ time by carving out care timescapes that resist the clock—time as continuous, non-standardized, and in the present moment—while utilizing the structure of clock time in the form of ‘scheduling work’ to negotiate for and safeguard the process time they needed to ensure the provision of appropriate, ethical care. Confirming the centrality of time to ethical practices in organizations, our study further evidences and elucidates the intricate relations between clock time and process time in the ethical practice of care. (shrink)

The aim of this thesis is to argue for a version of what I call “emotional experientialism”. Emotional experientialism is the claim that emotional experience has an essential role to play in understanding evaluative concepts. I distinguish between a specific and a general version of emotional experientialism. Specific emotional experientialism claims that specific emotional experiences, such as shame, play an essential role in our understanding of specific evaluative concepts, such as SHAMEFUL. I argue that specific emotional experientialism is unwarranted and (...) that we should instead endorse general emotional experientialism. General emotional experientialism claims that having some form of emotional experience has an essential role to play in understanding evaluative concepts in general. Specifically, I argue that having some form of emotional experience is essential to understanding what it is like to value something and, in turn, understanding what it is like to value something plays an essential role in rendering intelligible why a given emotional experience is appropriate in the given circumstances. I argue for this claim by committing to the neo-sentimentalist biconditional and interpreting it as a claim about evaluative concepts: a given evaluative concept applies if and only if a given emotional response is appropriate. In addition, I argue that we can have some understanding of evaluative concepts without emotional experience, but I claim that for this appropriateness to be intelligible, we need to understand what it is like to value things in the relevant way. We can do this, I claim, either through actual emotional experience, or by means of dramatic imagination of what emotional experience might be like. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the controversial issue of sense perception in the Zhuangzi 莊子. Although scholars have not explicitly addressed this aspect of the Chinese text, a common assumption is that the Zhuangzi proposes a mysticism that undermines sense perception in favour of a transcendent self. After an overview of this interpretation, and after analysing some key passages of the text that deal with heart fasting (xinzhai 心齋), sitting and forgetting (zuowang 坐忘) and skill mastery, I demonstrate that some (...) interpreters of the Zhuangzi read the text as if it has a metaphysical bent, recommending that sense perception be transcended as a prerequisite to perfection. In contrast, my thesis is that the text does not propose a withdrawal from the senses and from the world, but rather warns about the danger of abiding to doctrinal knowledge, which has the consequence of a person losing their responsive awareness. Indeed, in the Zhuangzi, sense perception is not an impediment on the way to a supersensible reality, but an integral part of one's own being in the world. Through my analysis, I object to the idea that the Zhuangzi proposes a mystical union with something not immediately available, which moreover needs to be achieved by transcending the lived world that is encountered through sense perception. My view is that such a move not only postulates union with a transcendent entity, it also forces a dualism between a person's capacities. This is problematic because the Zhuangzi does not point to another world–in a two worlds theory–where one must ideally attain the condition of a transcendent self. On the contrary, in rejecting a univocal ethos, the text suggests one should keep responding to changing circumstances without turning one's perceptual awareness into entrenched habits. Thus, the Zhuangzi shows how sense perception should be seen, not as a “problem” but as an ethical possibility through which the univocity of doctrinal knowledge can be undermined. (shrink)

In Latin America the Environmental Humanities are not widely established as an academic concept either in teaching on in research, but the historically grounded and interdisciplinary vantage point of environmental research and analysis in the region has tremendous potential to contribute to the questions with which Environmental Humanities scholars are concerned. The distinctive characteristic shared in the modes of analysis developed by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Arturo Escobar is that their frameworks originate in the collective experiences of eco-social localities. These (...) webs of relations are at once at the crossroads of larger phenomena, such as the creation of colonial economies in the Andes dating back to the sixteenth century, and the social and environmental movements led by indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in twenty-first-century Colombia. The embedded knowledges that have come out of these experiences have in turn been incorporated into anti-colonial and decolonial proposals. (shrink)

Syntactic priming effects are argued to reflect the mechanisms that underlie language acquisition. This chapter explores the predictions of key models for such learning via syntactic priming and discusses the extent to which behavioural evidence is consistent with these predictions. Specifically, the chapter examines whether the timecourse of priming effects in research with children reflects lasting effects of syntactic experiences, and what between-group and between-individual variation in priming effects, predicted by the error-based nature of the learning mechanism, might be expected. (...) The chapter also considers whether learning via priming might be located in comprehension and – or production processes. The chapter finishes by making recommendations for how future research may build on existing findings to further test these models, including discussing methodological implications. (shrink)

I must first express my heartfelt thanks to Susanne Herrmann-Sinai and Christoph Schuringa for convening this debate. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to the four commentators for generously taking the time to read and think about my book, and for their thought-provoking and challenging comments. I have responded to as many of the latter as I could, and I look forward to hearing or reading, on other occasions, further comments on my responses.1.

Care—concern for and attending to the needs of the particular other we take responsibility—requires enacting time in a way that clashes with the industrial ‘clock time’ dominating our lives. Ethicists of care have highlighted the tensions between the temporalities involved in caring as a situated, relational and processual practice and the organization of care work according to standardized clock time. Yet, the practice of care work within bureaucratic work organizations seems to reconcile temporal demands of care and clock time. In (...) this article, we build on Barbara Adam’s concept of ‘timescape’ (Adam, Timewatch: The social analysis of time, Polity, 1995; Adam, Time, Polity, 2004) to inquire how care workers juggle apparently conflicting temporalities. Through a participant observation study of a child protection agency in France, we discover that care workers ‘trick’ time by carving out care timescapes that resist the clock—time as continuous, non-standardized, and in the present moment—while utilizing the structure of clock time in the form of ‘scheduling work’ to negotiate for and safeguard the process time they needed to ensure the provision of appropriate, ethical care. Confirming the centrality of time to ethical practices in organizations, our study further evidences and elucidates the intricate relations between clock time and process time in the ethical practice of care. (shrink)

Epicurus holds, in Key Doctrine 31, that what is just according to nature is a súmbolon or sign of the interest there is in neither harming one another nor being harmed. Certain readings of this maxim equivocate this legal sign with other signs found in nature, thereby failing to give sufficient weight to the role of reciprocity in its production. Other readings simply import a legal sense from outside of Epicurean doctrine, thereby failing to explain what makes Epicurean súmbola legal. (...) A final set of readings attempt to find a legal rule as a kind of innate concept or Kantian ‘scheme’. This article identifies new sources for understanding súmbolon, drawn principally but not exclusively from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics. This article offers an original argument that Epicurus adopts Aristotle’s’ image of the tally stick (symbolon) as a meeting of often divergent interests which constitutes something new and particularly valuable to the Epicurean: friendship. A theoretical argument is also advanced to support this reading which claims that one person’s reflection on a ‘divine image’ of the end (telos) is insufficient to constitute a súmbolon; rather real (as opposed to abstract or ideal) individual interests are filtered via the mechanism of the tally, that is via the meeting of two given individuals who together generate a sign (symbolon) of reciprocal interest in neither harming nor being harmed. (shrink)

We analyze whether journal editors exhibit home bias in their acceptance decisions towards researchers affiliated with institutions in the editor's home country. Our results show that the fraction of articles accepted by authors affiliated with European civil-law countries increase by 33 % when an editor from the same country serves in the journal. We analyze various possible reasons for this phenomenon and conclude that a likely explanation for the bias is that, in civil-law countries, there is greater emphasis on individuals' (...) solidarity with institutions. We also document that this bias extends to the European Union as a whole. Importantly, articles that are potentially subject to editorial home bias have 10 % lower impact than similar articles. Overall, the findings are consistent with the idea that cultural values potentially foster editorial-biased behavior and hinder scientific progress. (shrink)

Although Herder is critical of the Enlightenment, I show that his philosophy of history commits him to the claim that the age and culture shaped by the Enlightenment in some way makes a distinctive contribution to the development of humanity. Yet this contribution cannot make this age and culture superior to earlier ones, for this would violate Herder’s commitment to the principle that each age and culture ought to be accorded an equal status because of the equal value of its (...) contribution to the full development of humanity. I argue that an abstract way of thinking and a hostility to prejudice are integral elements of Herder’s attempt to situate the Enlightenment in his philosophy of history, despite how he otherwise criticizes the Enlightenment for its abstract thinking and its hostility to prejudice. (shrink)

A major theme of the European Enlightenment was the rationalization of value, the use of reason to determine the value of things, from diamonds to civilizations. This view of the Enlightenment is well-established in the human sciences. It is ripe for extension to the natural sciences, given the rich recent literature on affect, evaluation, and subjectivity in early modern science. Meanwhile, in art history, the new history of connoisseurship provides a model for the historical study of the evaluation of material (...) things. Historians of natural history have already noted the connections between science, Enlightenment, and connoisseurship. The time has come to extend their insights to other areas of Enlightenment science. This means recognizing the breadth of connoisseurship – the social, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity of the practice – as understood in Europe in the eighteenth century and the latter part of the seventeenth century. An outline of the three papers in this special section gives an indication of how this historiographical project might be carried out. (shrink)

When, why, and in what ways, do a person's errors have a bearing on whether they validly consent to another person's conduct?

This paper develops the account of our experience and knowledge of time put forward by Russell in his Theory of Knowledge manuscript. While Russell ultimately abandons the project after it receives severe criticism from Wittgenstein (though several chapters derived from it appear as articles in The Monist), in producing this manuscript time, and particularly the notion of the present time, play a central role in Russell’s account of experience. In the present discussion, I propose to focus largely on Russell’s writing (...) in 1912–3, comparing this with some of the remarks made about memory by Moore in 1910–11. My motivation is twofold. First as a matter of scholarship, to reveal an original interpretation of Russell’s notion of immediate memory and of his view of our experience and knowledge of time over this period. Second as a matter of philosophical curiosity. There has been an increase in interest in temporal experience in contemporary discussions of the philosophy of mind, from memory and the imagination to the temporal aspects of perceptual experience. Russell’s writing in 1912–3 provides us with a philosophically interesting account of temporal experience which has points of contact with contemporary debates. (shrink)

A considerable body of research has documented the emergence of what appears to be instrumental helping behavior in early childhood. The current study tested the hypothesis that one basic psychological mechanism motivating this behavior is a preference for completing unfinished actions. To test this, a paradigm was implemented in which 2-year-olds (n = 34, 16 female/18 male, mostly White middle-class children) could continue an adult’s action when the adult no longer wanted to complete the action. The results showed that children (...) continued the adult’s actions more often when the goal had been abandoned than when it had been reached (OR = 2.37). This supports the hypothesis that apparent helping behavior in 2-year-olds is motivated by a preference for completing unfinished actions. (shrink)

Although Hegel is increasingly recognized as an important figure in the history of political economy, his economic views are never strictly economic. In contrast to other modern thinkers, his primary concern is not the economic efficacy of different practices or institutions but the extent to which they enable and promote the development of human freedom. In this article, I argue that Hegel's pioneering critique of modern liberal economy plays out simultaneously at a more empirical level, corresponding to the properly economic (...) dimension of his analysis, and at a deeper, logical level, which grounds and guides his position. Moreover, I argue that the tendency to favour the first of these levels, found in most of the literature on Hegel's economic thought, reduces the Philosophy of Right's main argument to a more or less vigorous plea for economic interventionism. Against this kind of reading, I show that a renewed focus on the text's logical structure reveals a different and more radical philosophical proposition, which has yet to be fully acknowledged. In particular, I argue that Hegel's dialectical logic leads him beyond the liberalism‐interventionism debate, towards a qualitatively different conception of social and economic relations. (shrink)

Hobbes thinks that people who submit to government can not only hope for, but actually experience, something they recognize as a good life. The good life involves the exercise of harmless liberty—activity that the sovereign should not prohibit. The exchange of harmless liberty in the commonwealth for ruthless self-protection in the state of nature is what might be called Hobbes's peace dividend: the liberty of ordinary citizens to buy, sell, choose, and practice a trade as a source of income, and (...) the liberty to keep some of the proceeds if the state does not need resources for public protection. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the controversial issue of sense perception in the Zhuangzi 莊子. Although scholars have not explicitly addressed this aspect of the Chinese text, a common assumption is that the Zhuangzi proposes a mysticism that undermines sense perception in favour of a transcendent self. After an overview of this interpretation, and after analysing some key passages of the text that deal with heart fasting (xinzhai 心齋), sitting and forgetting (zuowang 坐忘) and skill mastery, I demonstrate that some (...) interpreters of the Zhuangzi read the text as if it has a metaphysical bent, recommending that sense perception be transcended as a prerequisite to perfection. In contrast, my thesis is that the text does not propose a withdrawal from the senses and from the world, but rather warns about the danger of abiding to doctrinal knowledge, which has the consequence of a person losing their responsive awareness. Indeed, in the Zhuangzi, sense perception is not an impediment on the way to a supersensible reality, but an integral part of one's own being in the world. Through my analysis, I object to the idea that the Zhuangzi proposes a mystical union with something not immediately available, which moreover needs to be achieved by transcending the lived world that is encountered through sense perception. My view is that such a move not only postulates union with a transcendent entity, it also forces a dualism between a person's capacities. This is problematic because the Zhuangzi does not point to another world–in a two worlds theory–where one must ideally attain the condition of a transcendent self. On the contrary, in rejecting a univocal ethos, the text suggests one should keep responding to changing circumstances without turning one's perceptual awareness into entrenched habits. Thus, the Zhuangzi shows how sense perception should be seen, not as a “problem” but as an ethical possibility through which the univocity of doctrinal knowledge can be undermined. (shrink)

Social interaction is both ubiquitous and central to understanding human behavior. Such interactions depend, we argue, on shared intentionality: the parties must form a common understanding of an ambiguous interaction (e.g., one person giving a present to another requires that both parties appreciate that a voluntary transfer of ownership is intended). Yet how can shared intentionality arise? Many well-known accounts of social cognition, including those involving “mind-reading,” typically fall into circularity and/or regress. For example, A’s beliefs and behavior may depend (...) on her prediction of B’s beliefs and behavior, but B’s beliefs and behavior depend in turn on her prediction of A’s beliefs and behavior. One possibility is to embrace circularity and take shared intentionality as imposing consistency conditions on beliefs and behavior, but typically there are many possible solutions and no clear criteria for choosing between them. We argue that addressing these challenges requires some form of we-reasoning, but that this raises the puzzle of how the collective agent (the “we”) arises from the individual agents. This puzzle can be solved by proposing that the will of the collective agent arises from a simulated process of bargaining: agents must infer what they would agree, were they able to communicate. This model explains how, and which, shared intentions are formed. We also propose that such “virtual bargaining” may be fundamental to understanding social interactions. (shrink)

The essential premise of #MeToo is that, while large numbers of women are subject to sexual harassment and assault, this reality is not known to or understood by unnamed others. This article interrogates the subject of non-knowing #MeToo points to but does not name, asking: who exactly does not know, and why? These questions provide the starting point to elaborate the concept of male ignorance. While this lexicon has been fleetingly deployed in canonical feminist works – where it denotes something (...) so obvious that is does not require explanation, functioning instead as a kind of feminist common sense – I develop it here so it might be put to greater use as a dedicated analytic. The work of Charles Mills, particularly his writings on white ignorance, provides a critical precedent in this regard. Following Mills in foregrounding the ideological operations of not knowing, I conceive male ignorance as a structure of concerted if unconscious epistemic occlusion which both stems from and serves to protect male privilege. As such, it plays a crucial role in securing the overall relation of domination and oppression within which gendered lives are lived. While male ignorance is itself multiple and has a variety of stakeholders, I argue that the non-knowing that surrounds sexual harassment and assault – which #MeToo draws attention to and seeks to undo – constitutes a paradigmatic manifestation, one in which cisgender heterosexual men have a particular stake. (shrink)

The relation between mental states and brain states is important in computational neuroscience, and in psychiatry in which interventions with medication are made on brain states to alter mental states. The relation between the brain and the mind has puzzled philosophers for centuries. Here a neuroscience approach is proposed in which events at the sub-neuronal, neuronal, and neuronal network levels take place simultaneously to perform a computation that can be described at a high level as a mental state, with content (...) about the world. It is argued that as the processes at the different levels of explanation take place at the same time, they are linked by a non-causal supervenient relationship: causality can best be described in brains as operating within but not between levels. This allows the supervenient (e.g., mental) properties to be emergent, though once understood at the mechanistic levels they may seem less emergent, and expected. This mind-brain theory allows mental events to be different in kind from the mechanistic events that underlie them; but does not lead one to argue that mental events cause brain events, or vice versa: they are different levels of explanation of the operation of the computational system. This approach may provide a way of thinking about brains and minds that is different from dualism and from reductive physicalism, and which is rooted in the computational processes that are fundamental to understanding brain and mental events, and that mean that the mental and mechanistic levels are linked by the computational process being performed. Explanations at the different levels of operation may be useful in different ways. For example, if we wish to understand how arithmetic is performed in the brain, description at the mental level of the algorithm being computed will be useful. But if the brain operates to result in mental disorders, then understanding the mechanism at the neural processing level may be more useful, in for example, the treatment of psychiatric disorders. (shrink)

This paper explores pedagogic strategies for resisting the racism of contemporary populism and age-old coloniality through challenging secularism in the academy, especially in social theory. Secularism sustains racism and imperialism in the contemporary academy and is inscribed, in part, through the norms of social theory. Post-secular social theory has been positioned by some as the decolonial answer, but often replicates the most problematic aspects of secularism. Whereas post-secularism affirms the previously denigrated side of the secular vs religious dualism, I am (...) more interested in unworking those classificatory schemas, setting the critical thought of religious teachers in relation with ‘secular’ social and political theorists such that boundaries erode. The ambition in this is to resist the hierarchical orderings of knowledge that pit Islamic, indigenous, and feminised subjectivity as backwards, dangerous or intrinsically inferior to secular, Christian, rational knowledge. It is also to disenchant the secular Gods (progress, money, growth, health) and hold open space for critical play in relation to the transcendental - to create a permissive, legitimising, space for students’ spiritual dimension, conocimiento, or the cultivation of soul. The paper draws theoretical inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Sylvia Wynter. It also draws on a practical experiment in disenchanting secularism through teaching an undergraduate module in social theory called Capitalism and Religion. (shrink)

I begin by acknowledging the profusion of Peter Sloterdijk’s published work, the suggestion by Bruno Latour that it may be on the side of design, and Sloterdijk’s pugnacious aversion to professorial critique. I focus on what I consider to be the crucial and vexed relationship between the general immunology of the Spheres trilogy [1998–2004] and the general ascetology of You Must Change Your Life [2009]. I present an analytical reconstruction of Sloterdijk’s account of originary spheric being-with in the trilogy, focused (...) on its culmination in the foam-world; I suggest this account is too ambiguous on key matters of basic ontological structure and I question whether the foam metaphor is adequate as a description of intersubjectivity today. Against the backdrop of this discussion I consider whether the general ascetology of Sloterdijk’s second anthropotechnics involves practising in, or practising on, the shells of symbolic immunity and conclude the latter. Setting this alongside the trilogy’s insistence that cells in the foam are “co-fragile,” I argue that anthropotechnical practising in the foam-world is suffused with a violence which Sloterdijk is reluctant to theorize. Registering one significant undeclared context of his discussion of self-enhancement, in postmodern management theory, I suggest that successful anthropotechnical practising in the foam-world requires the capacity to ignore other people and their interests. I note that Sloterdijk’s one-eyed embrace of competitive self-enhancement in You Must Change Your Life has since been qualified in brief remarks in What Happened in the 20th Century? [2016] but not substantively reconsidered. In conclusion, I pay tribute to the anthropotechnical lesson of Sloterdijk’s theoretical project, notwithstanding its design flaws and continuity errors. (shrink)

What are the connections between the successful performance of illocutionary acts and audience understanding or uptake of their performance? According to one class of proposals, audience understanding suffices for successful performance. I explain how those proposals emerge from earlier work and seek to clarify some of their interrelations.

Epicurus holds, in Key Doctrine 31, that what is just according to nature is a súmbolon or sign of the interest there is in neither harming one another nor being harmed. Certain readings of this maxim equivocate this legal sign with other signs found in nature, thereby failing to give sufficient weight to the role of reciprocity in its production. Other readings simply import a legal sense from outside of Epicurean doctrine, thereby failing to explain what makes Epicurean súmbola legal. (...) A final set of readings attempt to find a legal rule as a kind of innate concept or Kantian ‘scheme’. This article identifies new sources for understanding súmbolon, drawn principally but not exclusively from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics. This article offers an original argument that Epicurus adopts Aristotle’s’ image of the tally stick (symbolon) as a meeting of often divergent interests which constitutes something new and particularly valuable to the Epicurean: friendship. A theoretical argument is also advanced to support this reading which claims that one person’s reflection on a ‘divine image’ of the end (telos) is insufficient to constitute a súmbolon; rather real (as opposed to abstract or ideal) individual interests are filtered via the mechanism of the tally, that is via the meeting of two given individuals who together generate a sign (symbolon) of reciprocal interest in neither harming nor being harmed. (shrink)

A number of recent attempts to explain the apparent contrast between ‘human time’ and ‘physical time’ have appealed to Hartle’s (2005) sketch of an ‘Information Gathering and Utilizing System’ (IGUS) as a model for explaining human temporal experience. I argue that they fall foul of William James’ (1890) dictum that “[a] succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession”. Explaining how human beings come to represent time in the first place is a more substantive explanatory (...) task than it is often taken to be. (shrink)

If we adhere to Michel Foucault’s argument that modern societies are governed by disciplinary power, we must take a critical stance on the Cartesian cogito, which Foucault understands not as a philosophical liberation but as a form of cognitive governance of the body and its senses. Thus the cogito, as a central rationalistic principle, fits within the development of modern discipline. Les Corps dociles are bodily figures modelled by disciplinary mechanisms, which Foucault depicts in the chapter of the same name (...) in his Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (1975).1 Features such as docility and utility characterize this body, and their development can be traced back to René Descartes. (shrink)

Philosophy is witnessing an “Agential Turn,” characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency––agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self‐knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, or make (...) appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject's rational point of view on the world. (shrink)

This paper addresses the multiple readings that Foucault offers of Descartes’ Meditations during the whole span of his intellectual career. It thus rejects the (almost) exclusive focus of the literature on the few pages of the History of Madness dedicated to the Meditations and on the so-called Foucault/Derrida debate. First, it reconstructs Foucault’s interpretation of Descartes’ philosophy in a series of unpublished manuscripts written between 1966 and 1968, when Foucault was teaching at the University of Tunis. It then addresses the (...) important shifts that took place in Foucault’s thought at the beginning of the 1970s, which led him to elaborate a new approach to the Meditations in terms of ‘discursive events’. Finally, it argues that those shifts opened up to Foucault the possibility of developing an original reading of Descartes’ philosophy, surprisingly close to his own interest in ancient askēsis and the techniques of the self. (shrink)

Hot Skull (Sicak Kafa, 2022) directed by Mert Baykal and Umur Turagay may be labelled as the first critical dystopian TV series in Turkiye. The screen adaptation of Afsin Kum's novel Sicak Kafa (2016) attracted public attention and directed more global attention towards Turkish TV/narrative forms. Although speculative fiction in Türkiye has thrived through narratives and alternative world scenarios in literature—especially in the last fifty years—it has not progressed at the same level on the screen. However, Hot Skull has strong (...) potential to change the current approach and be a pioneering example of critical dystopia on the screen, inspiring other dystopian TV and film projects in the future. Baykal’s series illustrates a dystopian world in which all people, except for the protagonis Murat Siyavus, a former linguist, are susceptible to contracting the ARDS virus, a fictional illness caught through verbal communication, which results in jabbering—that is, talking gibberish. As the narrative unfolds, the yearning of the Anti-Epidemic Institution for absolute power is exposed. It is juxtaposed with the objectives of the Plus 1 movement that challenge the suppressive practices of this governing institution. This presentation will discuss Mert Baykal’s critical dystopia Hot Skull in terms of the portrayal of pandemic control, power practice, and hope through an analysis of the intricate relationship between the Anti-Epidemic Institution and the protagonist who ultimately becomes a strong herald of hope. (shrink)

We analyze whether journal editors exhibit home bias in their acceptance decisions towards researchers affiliated with institutions in the editor's home country. Our results show that the fraction of articles accepted by authors affiliated with European civil-law countries increase by 33 % when an editor from the same country serves in the journal. We analyze various possible reasons for this phenomenon and conclude that a likely explanation for the bias is that, in civil-law countries, there is greater emphasis on individuals' (...) solidarity with institutions. We also document that this bias extends to the European Union as a whole. Importantly, articles that are potentially subject to editorial home bias have 10 % lower impact than similar articles. Overall, the findings are consistent with the idea that cultural values potentially foster editorial-biased behavior and hinder scientific progress. (shrink)

In this paper I extend the case for a necessitation account of particular laws in Kant's philosophy of science by examining the relation between reason's hypothetical use in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic and the legitimate hypotheses identified in the Doctrine of Method. Building on normative accounts of reason's ideas, I argue that reason's hypothetical use does not describe the connections between objects and their grounds, which lie beyond the reach of the understanding, but merely prescribes the relations between (...) appearances and their conditions, for which the understanding must seek. A legitimate hypothesis, I suggest, is a proposition we hold to be true that fills in one or several of those relations. The problematic character of hypotheses requires that we evaluate our reasons for holding them to be true. While natural modality is grounded in the nature of things, which cannot be fully known, our reasons for assent can and must be grounded on features of objects that are epistemically available to us. (shrink)

A typically Nietzschean reflection on our cognitive capacities assumes the form of an investigation into the genesis of these capacities. Nietzsche is in fact remarkably consistent in his use of this approach. It is first on display in the unpublished essay On Truth and Lies, and it recurs with some frequency throughout the middle- and late-period. In this thesis, I am interested in understanding what Nietzsche aims to accomplish by reflecting on our cognitive capacities in this manner. On a standard (...) interpretation, Nietzsche resorts to this approach in the hope of accomplishing traditional epistemic aims. On this view, Nietzsche is looking to determine whether knowledge is possible at all; and if it is possible, under what conditions, and within which limits. Although the standard view currently appears as doxa in the scholarship, I believe that there is little to no textual evidence in support of it. In this thesis, I therefore propose an alternative. In my view, Nietzsche’s enquiries into the origins of our cognitive capacities stand in the service of his interest in the value of knowledge, and not in the service of knowledge’s possibility. To make this point I defend two claims. First, I argue that the mature Nietzsche is actually quite hostile to the idea that we can theoretically substantiate either the possibility of knowledge, or a sceptical stance regarding this possibility. If this is true, then certainly the mature Nietzsche could not possibly have intended for his genetic enquiries to contribute to that aim. Second, I offer a novel interpretation of Nietzsche’s third essay in The Genealogy to substantiate my claim that, in fact, the aim of these enquiries is to help us reflect on the value of knowledge. This interpretation, coupled with considerable circumstantial evidence, shows my interpretation to be more plausible than the standard view. (shrink)

Although Herder is critical of the Enlightenment, I show that his philosophy of history commits him to the claim that the age and culture shaped by the Enlightenment in some way makes a distinctive contribution to the development of humanity. Yet this contribution cannot make this age and culture superior to earlier ones, for this would violate Herder’s commitment to the principle that each age and culture ought to be accorded an equal status because of the equal value of its (...) contribution to the full development of humanity. I argue that an abstract way of thinking and a hostility to prejudice are integral elements of Herder’s attempt to situate the Enlightenment in his philosophy of history, despite how he otherwise criticizes the Enlightenment for its abstract thinking and its hostility to prejudice. (shrink)

How many factors, i.e. departures from normality, are necessary to explain a delusion? Maher’s classic one-factor theory argues that the only factor is the patient’s anomalous experience, and a delusion arises as a normal explanation of this experience. The more recent two-factor theory, on the other hand, contends that a second factor is also needed, with reasoning abnormality being a potential candidate, and a delusion arises as an abnormal explanation of the anomalous experience. In the past few years, although there (...) has been an increasing number of scholars offering a variety of arguments in defence of Maher’s one-factor theory, these arguments have not been adequately addressed by two-factor theorists. This paper aims to address this gap by critically examining the arguments on three crucial issues: the intelligibility of delusions, the dissociation between anomalous experiences and delusions, and the empirical evidence of a second factor. I will argue that the Maherian notion of anomalous experience is not sufficient for explaining delusions and the two-factor theory is on the right track in its search for the missing factor in the aetiology of delusions. (shrink)

A major theme of the European Enlightenment was the rationalization of value, the use of reason to determine the value of things, from diamonds to civilizations. This view of the Enlightenment is well-established in the human sciences. It is ripe for extension to the natural sciences, given the rich recent literature on affect, evaluation, and subjectivity in early modern science. Meanwhile, in art history, the new history of connoisseurship provides a model for the historical study of the evaluation of material (...) things. Historians of natural history have already noted the connections between science, Enlightenment, and connoisseurship. The time has come to extend their insights to other areas of Enlightenment science. This means recognizing the breadth of connoisseurship – the social, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity of the practice – as understood in Europe in the eighteenth century and the latter part of the seventeenth century. An outline of the three papers in this special section gives an indication of how this historiographical project might be carried out. (shrink)

What would a good answer to this question – call it (WK) – look like? What I’m going to call the standard analytic approach (SA) says that: (A) The way to answer WK is to analyse the concept of knowledge. (B) To analyse the concept of knowledge is to come up with noncircular necessary and sufficient conditions for someone to know that something is the case. Is the standard analytic approach to WK the right approach? If not, what would be (...) a better way of doing things? These are the questions I’m going to tackle here. I want to look at some criticisms of SA and consider the prospects for a different, non-standard analytic approach (NA) to WK. (shrink)

Characterizing the cultural evolution of imaginary worlds as a hedonic but non-adaptive exaptation from evolved exploratory tendencies, Dubourg and Baumard defend too narrow a conception of the adaptive evolution of imaginary worlds. Imagination and its imaginary worlds are ancient and adaptive, allowing deliberation over actions, consequences, and futures worth aspiring to, often engendering the world we see around us.

A major theme of the European Enlightenment was the rationalization of value, the use of reason to determine the value of things, from diamonds to civilizations. This view of the Enlightenment is well-established in the human sciences. It is ripe for extension to the natural sciences, given the rich recent literature on affect, evaluation, and subjectivity in early modern science. Meanwhile, in art history, the new history of connoisseurship provides a model for the historical study of the evaluation of material (...) things. Historians of natural history have already noted the connections between science, Enlightenment, and connoisseurship. The time has come to extend their insights to other areas of Enlightenment science. This means recognizing the breadth of connoisseurship – the social, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity of the practice – as understood in Europe in the eighteenth century and the latter part of the seventeenth century. An outline of the three papers in this special section gives an indication of how this historiographical project might be carried out. (shrink)

Although Hegel is increasingly recognized as an important figure in the history of political economy, his economic views are never strictly economic. In contrast to other modern thinkers, his primary concern is not the economic efficacy of different practices or institutions but the extent to which they enable and promote the development of human freedom. In this article, I argue that Hegel's pioneering critique of modern liberal economy plays out simultaneously at a more empirical level, corresponding to the properly economic (...) dimension of his analysis, and at a deeper, logical level, which grounds and guides his position. Moreover, I argue that the tendency to favour the first of these levels, found in most of the literature on Hegel's economic thought, reduces the Philosophy of Right's main argument to a more or less vigorous plea for economic interventionism. Against this kind of reading, I show that a renewed focus on the text's logical structure reveals a different and more radical philosophical proposition, which has yet to be fully acknowledged. In particular, I argue that Hegel's dialectical logic leads him beyond the liberalism‐interventionism debate, towards a qualitatively different conception of social and economic relations. (shrink)

In a world heavily stricken by disaster and tragedy, we may of late find ourselves asking whether we live in a utopia or dystopia. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the ensuing global inflation, rampant consumerism, the war between Ukraine and Russia, post-truth politics, global migration, refugee, and humanitarian crises in the aftermath of various troubles in various countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, and Rwanda, rigid explicit or implicit social stratification, the looming ecological collapse, Anthropocentrism, and the recent deadly earthquakes in Türkiye (...) and Syria, the world of today often appears closer to a dystopia than a utopia. (shrink)

This thesis addresses the empiricist project as it came to be formulated in the 18th century and specifically the attempts to determine the limits of human knowledge through its reduction to sensation. Taking Locke's departure from Cartesianism as my starting point, I pursue the efforts of Condillac to complete this reduction in two early works: the Essai sur l'origine des connoissances humaines (1746) and the Traité des sensations (1754). By according a central role to language in the Essai, Condillac attempts (...) a radical solution to the problem of how sensation alone can be a sufficient basis for the development of advanced faculties. I argue that Condillac's conception of signs as the principle which develops human understanding is best conceived as a means of circumventing what is arguably the central difficulty for Lockean empiricism, namely the problem of idealism. In the Traité Condillac attempts to complete his account of the development of the understanding by uncovering the conditions under which a pre-linguistic awareness is generated. However his efforts to discover the conditions of human knowledge within the sensible, inevitably involve Condillac in a negotiation with the 'rationalist' system-building from which he tries to distance himself. The recent discovery of an overtly Leibnizian tract, Les Monades (1746), provides, I argue, the key to a full understanding of Condillac's philosophy. In the thesis I describe the line of tension traced by Condillac as he accepts and rejects by turns some form of monadological system as the basis to his sensationalism. Through an analysis of the relationship with Leibniz I argue that the empiricist project inevitably becomes caught within the Condillacian dilemma: a dilemma arising from the dual obligation to place constraints on, and to uncover the conditions of possibility for, human inquiry. (shrink)

Characterizing the cultural evolution of imaginary worlds as a hedonic but non-adaptive exaptation from evolved exploratory tendencies, Dubourg and Baumard defend too narrow a conception of the adaptive evolution of imaginary worlds. Imagination and its imaginary worlds are ancient and adaptive, allowing deliberation over actions, consequences, and futures worth aspiring to, often engendering the world we see around us.

Appearance discrimination may restrict the opportunities of minority groups, including national, religious, and racial minorities. Employers sometimes impose appearance codes on their workforce that disproportionately affect these groups, potentially limiting their access to jobs. It is tempting to think that the solution here is simple. In practice, it might be said, the appearance features that are excluded by these codes often mask the real basis of the discrimination. Seen in their true light, these codes generally involve direct discrimination on the (...) basis of race, religion or nationality. Even when they do not, if they have a worse effect on a disadvantaged group, then they are cases of indirect discrimination. But things are not that simple, for an appearance feature can be a genuine reaction qualification, i.e., it can be a genuine qualification in virtue of the responses of those who come into contact with an employee, such as customers or clients. This chapter addresses the issue of when it is morally permissible for an employer to adopt an appearance code that disadvantages a minority group by pandering to the preferences of their customers or clients in cases where these preferences express their aesthetic tastes or are rooted in reasonable conceptions of the good to which they adhere. Consideration is given to whether the importance of integration might provide a reason to regard appearance codes as morally impermissible when it is harder or more costly for a minority group, such as a national, religious, or racial minority, to conform to them. (shrink)

The outbreak of Covid-19 is billed as a ‘once in a century event’. It has appeared as the prophesised rupture in our social, economic and political fabric of the world, with the recognition that what follows may not resemble what humanity has become used to. It is posed as a discontinuity in the normality of everyday life; a panic-inducing pandemic that threatens our collective existence across political borders and socio-economic and geographical locations. But the genetic novelty of the virus is (...) one thing; there is nothing novel in how we have individually, collectively, politically or culturally responded to this challenge. Covid-19 is a strong question, borrowing from Boaventura De Sousa Santos, which not only demands an answer but also probes the very possibility of our epistemic frames to come up with a novel answer at all. And to date, we have been unable to step out of the frames that act as ideological and political blinkers. To reiterate, there is nothing novel in our response to the virus as we have repeated, and as we were bound to repeat, the same tropes and trends that were there in our limited arsenal. Covid-19 then is more of an acceleration than a rupture – it is forcing us to race towards the destination which we have been inching towards in the last few decades. (shrink)

Design/methodology/approach We present the philosophical foundations of scientific realism and constructivism, and examine the extent to which PLS aligns with them. Purpose To determine whether PLS is fit for purpose for scholars holding scientific realist views. Findings PLS does not align with scientific realism but aligns well with constructivism. Research limitations/implications Research is needed to assess PLS’s fit with instrumentalism and pragmatism. Practical Implications PLS has no utility as a realist scientific tool, but may be of interest to constructivists. Originality (...) The study is the first to assess PLS’s alignments and mismatches with constructivist and scientific realist perspectives. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to correct errors in, and comment on the claims made in the comment papers of Rigdon (2022) and Henseler and Schuberth (2022), and to tidy up any substantive oversights made in Cadogan and Lee (2022). Design/methodology/approach The study discusses and clarifies the gap between Rigdon’s notion of scientific realism and the metaphysical, semantic and epistemological commitments that are broadly agreed to be key principles of scientific realism. The study also examines the ontological status of the variables (...) that Henseler and Schuberth claim are emergent using emergence logic grounded in the notion that variables are only truly emergent if they demonstrate a failure of generative atomism. Findings In scientific realism, hypothetical causal contact between the unobserved and the observed is a key foundational stance, and as such, Rigdon’s concept proxy framework (CPF) is inherently anti-realist in nature. Furthermore, Henseler and Schuberth’s suggestion that composite-creating statistical packages [such as partial least squares (PLS)] can model emergent variables should be treated with skepticism by realists. Research limitations/implications Claims made by Rigdon regarding the realism of CPF are unfounded, and claims by Henseler and Schuberth regarding the universal suitability of partial least squares (PLS) as a tool for use by researchers of all ontological stripes (see their Table 5) do not appear to be well-grounded. Practical implications Those aspiring to do science according to the precepts of scientific realism need to be careful in assessing claims in the literature. For instance, despite Rigdon’s assertion that CPF is a realist framework, we show that it is not. Consequently, some of Rigdon’s core criticisms of the common factor logic make no sense for the realist. Likewise, if the variables resulting from composite creating statistical packages (like PLS) are not really emergent (contrary to Henseler and Schuberth) and so are not real, their utility as tools for scientific realist inquiry are called into question. (shrink)

This article explores the legacy of Aristotle's advice for the preservation of tyrannies found in Politics Book 5, Chapter 11 on the formation of medieval and Renaissance fiscal literature. The tyrant's economic techniques for preserving his regime established commonplaces of fiscal governance in the medieval commentary and mirrors-for-princes tradition. Authors' engagement with the legacy of this passage led to controversial treatments of a ruler's disposition toward the moral virtue of liberality. Machiavelli's intervention over the danger of liberality to the fiscal (...) governance of the state needs to be placed in this longer context. (shrink)

A considerable body of research has documented the emergence of what appears to be instrumental helping behavior in early childhood. The current study tested the hypothesis that one basic psychological mechanism motivating this behavior is a preference for completing unfinished actions. To test this, a paradigm was implemented in which 2-year-olds (n = 34, 16 female/18 male, mostly White middle-class children) could continue an adult’s action when the adult no longer wanted to complete the action. The results showed that children (...) continued the adult’s actions more often when the goal had been abandoned than when it had been reached (OR = 2.37). This supports the hypothesis that apparent helping behavior in 2-year-olds is motivated by a preference for completing unfinished actions. (shrink)

Although Hegel is increasingly recognized as an important figure in the history of political economy, his economic views are never strictly economic. In contrast to other modern thinkers, his primary concern is not the economic efficacy of different practices or institutions but the extent to which they enable and promote the development of human freedom. In this article, I argue that Hegel's pioneering critique of modern liberal economy plays out simultaneously at a more empirical level, corresponding to the properly economic (...) dimension of his analysis, and at a deeper, logical level, which grounds and guides his position. Moreover, I argue that the tendency to favour the first of these levels, found in most of the literature on Hegel's economic thought, reduces the Philosophy of Right's main argument to a more or less vigorous plea for economic interventionism. Against this kind of reading, I show that a renewed focus on the text's logical structure reveals a different and more radical philosophical proposition, which has yet to be fully acknowledged. In particular, I argue that Hegel's dialectical logic leads him beyond the liberalism-interventionism debate, towards a qualitatively different conception of social and economic relations. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the controversial issue of sense perception in the Zhuangzi 莊子. Although scholars have not explicitly addressed this aspect of the Chinese text, a common assumption is that the Zhuangzi proposes a mysticism that undermines sense perception in favour of a transcendent self. After an overview of this interpretation, and after analysing some key passages of the text that deal with heart fasting (xinzhai 心齋), sitting and forgetting (zuowang 坐忘) and skill mastery, I demonstrate that some (...) interpreters of the Zhuangzi read the text as if it has a metaphysical bent, recommending that sense perception be transcended as a prerequisite to perfection. In contrast, my thesis is that the text does not propose a withdrawal from the senses and from the world, but rather warns about the danger of abiding to doctrinal knowledge, which has the consequence of a person losing their responsive awareness. Indeed, in the Zhuangzi, sense perception is not an impediment on the way to a supersensible reality, but an integral part of one's own being in the world. Through my analysis, I object to the idea that the Zhuangzi proposes a mystical union with something not immediately available, which moreover needs to be achieved by transcending the lived world that is encountered through sense perception. My view is that such a move not only postulates union with a transcendent entity, it also forces a dualism between a person's capacities. This is problematic because the Zhuangzi does not point to another world–in a two worlds theory–where one must ideally attain the condition of a transcendent self. On the contrary, in rejecting a univocal ethos, the text suggests one should keep responding to changing circumstances without turning one's perceptual awareness into entrenched habits. Thus, the Zhuangzi shows how sense perception should be seen, not as a “problem” but as an ethical possibility through which the univocity of doctrinal knowledge can be undermined. (shrink)

This paper argues that vice-charging, the practice of charging other persons with epistemic vice, can itself be epistemically vicious. It identifies some potential vices of vice-charging and identifies knowledge of other people as a type of knowledge that is obstructed by epistemically vicious attributions of epistemic vice. The hazards of vice-charging are illustrated by reference to the accusation that parents who hesitate to give their children the MMR triple vaccine are guilty of gullibility and dogmatism. Ethnographic and sociological research is (...) used to make the case that this charge is, in a significant range of cases, epistemically unjust and hinders attempts to make sense of vaccine hesitancy. This epistemic injustice consists in the representation of vaccine hesitant parents as less than full epistemic agents. A case is made for a more tolerant and inclusive approach, not only to vaccine hesitancy but also to other forms of unorthodoxy or non-compliance. The primary objective in these cases should be to achieve Verstehen of seemingly alien outlooks and practices so that policy makers and practitioners in public services can more effectively educate a sceptical public about the risks of vaccine hesitancy. (shrink)

Psychoactive drugs have been central to many human group rituals throughout modern human evolution. Despite such experiences often being inherently social, bonding and associated prosocial behaviors have rarely been empirically tested as an outcome. Here we investigate a novel measure of the mechanisms that generate altered states of consciousness during group rituals, the 4Ds: dance, drums, sleep deprivation, and drugs. We conducted a retrospective online survey examining experiences at a highly ritualized cultural phenomenon where drug use is relatively uninhibited- raves (...) and illegal free parties. Engaging in the 4Ds at raves or free parties was associated with personal transformation for those who experienced the event as awe-inspiring, especially for people with open personalities (n = 481). Without awe, or a ritual context, indulging in the 4Ds was associated with a lack of personal growth, or anomie. A complex SEM revealed that personal transformation following awe-inspiring raves was associated with bonding to other ravers and prosocial behavior toward this group at a cost to self in a simple economic game. Bonding to humanity was not associated with these events. The findings suggest that employing the 4Ds in a ritualized environment - particularly dancing and drug use – can help build meaningful social bonds with associated positive behavioral outcomes. (shrink)

Social interaction is both ubiquitous and central to understanding human behavior. Such interactions depend, we argue, on shared intentionality: the parties must form a common understanding of an ambiguous interaction (e.g., one person giving a present to another requires that both parties appreciate that a voluntary transfer of ownership is intended). Yet how can shared intentionality arise? Many well-known accounts of social cognition, including those involving “mind-reading,” typically fall into circularity and/or regress. For example, A’s beliefs and behavior may depend (...) on her prediction of B’s beliefs and behavior, but B’s beliefs and behavior depend in turn on her prediction of A’s beliefs and behavior. One possibility is to embrace circularity and take shared intentionality as imposing consistency conditions on beliefs and behavior, but typically there are many possible solutions and no clear criteria for choosing between them. We argue that addressing these challenges requires some form of we-reasoning, but that this raises the puzzle of how the collective agent (the “we”) arises from the individual agents. This puzzle can be solved by proposing that the will of the collective agent arises from a simulated process of bargaining: agents must infer what they would agree, were they able to communicate. This model explains how, and which, shared intentions are formed. We also propose that such “virtual bargaining” may be fundamental to understanding social interactions. (shrink)

This paper considers whether Kant’s aesthetics withstands the challenge of Conceptual Art. I begin by looking at two competing views of Conceptual Art by recent philosophers, before settling on an ‘inclusive’ view of the form: Conceptual Art includes both ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ non-perceptual art (NPA). I then set out two kinds of conceptual complexity that I argue are implicated by all aesthetic judgements of art (as art) on Kant’s view: the concept of art itself, and the idea the work is (...) meant to express (dependent beauty and aesthetic ideas, respectively). I go on to demonstrate the applicability of Kant’s aesthetics to Conceptual Art by considering two works by Lawrence Weiner, which I take to be a work of work of weak and strong NPA respectively. (shrink)

In many countries, individuals who have represented the majority group historically are decreasing in relative size and/or perceiving that they have diminished status and power compared to those identifying as immigrants or members of ethnic minority groups. These developments raise several salient and timely issues including: (a) how majority-group members’ cultural orientations change as a consequence of increasing intercultural contact due to shifting demographics;(b) what individual, group, cultural and socio-structural processes shape these changes; and (c) the implications of majority-group members’ (...) acculturation. Although research across several decades has examined the acculturation of individuals identifying as minority-group members, much less is known about how majority-group members acculturate in increasingly diverse societies. We present an overview of the state of the art in the emerging field of majority-group acculturation, identify what is known and needs to be known, and introduce a conceptual model guiding future research. (shrink)

In May 2019, 75 distressed migrants fleeing Libya were rescued by the merchant vessel Maridive 601 in the central Mediterranean Sea. With Italy, Malta, and Tunisia denying permission to disembark, the merchant vessel turned from a floating refuge into an offshore carceral space, leaving the migrants stranded near the Tunisian coast for 19 days. This article traces the migratory trajectories of the Maridive 75, as I will collectively refer to them, in order to show how EUrope’s desire to deter, capture, (...) and contain migrant mobilities has transformed the Mediterranean Sea into a carceral seascape. While offshore carcerality is not specific to EUrope’s southern maritime border and also not a novel phenomenon, increasingly restrictive migration policies have dramatically reshaped the Mediterranean borderzone over recent years, multiplying infrastructures, technologies, and spaces of confinement. Interrogating the Mediterranean Sea as a carceral space generates insights into an ever-growing panoply of carceral but mobile forms of governance seeking to discipline and police unauthorised and precarious human movements, both at sea and on land. At the same time, as this article demonstrates, unruly migrant mobilities and struggles at sea continue to expose the often-conflictual processes at work in the production of the Mediterranean carceral seascape. (shrink)

The essential premise of #MeToo is that, while large numbers of women are subject to sexual harassment and assault, this reality is not known to or understood by unnamed others. This article interrogates the subject of non-knowing #MeToo points to but does not name, asking: who exactly does not know, and why? These questions provide the starting point to elaborate the concept of male ignorance. While this lexicon has been fleetingly deployed in canonical feminist works – where it denotes something (...) so obvious that is does not require explanation, functioning instead as a kind of feminist common sense – I develop it here so it might be put to greater use as a dedicated analytic. The work of Charles Mills, particularly his writings on white ignorance, provides a critical precedent in this regard. Following Mills in foregrounding the ideological operations of not knowing, I conceive male ignorance as a structure of concerted if unconscious epistemic occlusion which both stems from and serves to protect male privilege. As such, it plays a crucial role in securing the overall relation of domination and oppression within which gendered lives are lived. While male ignorance is itself multiple and has a variety of stakeholders, I argue that the non-knowing that surrounds sexual harassment and assault – which #MeToo draws attention to and seeks to undo – constitutes a paradigmatic manifestation, one in which cisgender heterosexual men have a particular stake. (shrink)

This article analyses the published letters of two important artists, Camille Claudel (1864–1943) and Antonin Artaud (1869–1948), who were incarcerated in French psychiatric asylums in the early twentieth century. It argues that although asylum letters deviate from standard modes of epistolography, and pose interpretive difficulties, they remain sophisticated and hyper-meaningful communications. Contending that the language of ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘paranoia’ is not one of disconnection or primitive drives, but one of hyper-reflexivity, the article analyses how these writers responded to the constraints (...) of the communicative situation in which they were placed. It suggests that singular aspects of the texts, related to their materiality and psychotic patterns of thinking, reveal the limitations of traditional theories of epistolarity. (shrink)

Transitional justice, like other peacebuilding endeavours, strives to create change in the world and to produce knowledge that is useful (Goetschel and Pfluger 2014: 55). But the politics of how this knowledge is produced, shared and rendered legitimate depends upon the relationships between different epistemic communities, the way in which transitional justice has developed as a field, and the myriad contexts in which it is embedded at local, national and international levels. In particular, forms of ‘expert’ knowledge tend to be (...) legal, foreign and based on models to be replicated elsewhere. Work on epistemic communities of peacebuilding can be usefully brought to bear on transitional justice, speaking to current debates in the literature on positionality, justice from below, marginalisation and knowledge imperialism. This paper offers two contributions to the field of transitional justice: (1) an analysis of the way the field has developed as an epistemic community(ies) and the relevance of this for a politics of knowledge, and (2) an argument for the politics of knowledge to be more widely discussed and understood as a factor in shaping transitional justice policy and practice, and as a call to a more ethical relationship with the supposed beneficiaries of transitional justice interventions. (shrink)

People frequently see design in nature that reflects intuitive teleological thinking– that is, the order in nature that supports life suggests it was designed for that purpose. This research proposes that inferences are stronger when nature supports human life in particular. Five studies (total N = 1788) examine evidence for an anthro-teleological bias. People agreed more with design statements framed to aid humans (e.g., “trees produce oxygen so that humans can breathe”) than the same statements framed to aid other targets (...) (“trees produce oxygen so that leopards can breathe”). The bias was greatest when advantages for humans were well-known and salient (e.g., the ozone layer) and decreased when advantages for other targets were made explicit. The bias was not eliminated by highlighting the benefits for other species, however, and emerged spontaneously for novel phenomena (Jupiter’s gravity protects Earth from asteroids). We conclude that anthropocentric biases enhance existing teleological biases to see stronger design in phenomena where it enables human survival. (shrink)

Ramsey famously condemned discounting “future enjoyments” as “ethically indefensible”. Suppes enunciated an equity criterion which, when social choice is utilitarian, implies giving equal weight to all individuals’ utilities. By contrast, Arrow (Contemporary economic issues. International Economic Association Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1999a; Discounting and Intergenerational Effects, Resources for the Future Press, Washington DC, 1999b) accepted, perhaps reluctantly, what he called Koopmans’ (Econometrica 28(2):287–309, 1960) “strong argument” implying that no equitable preference ordering exists for a sufficiently unrestricted domain of infinite utility (...) streams. Here we derive an equitable utilitarian objective for a finite population based on a version of the Vickrey–Harsanyi original position, where there is an equal probability of becoming each person. For a potentially infinite population facing an exogenous stochastic process of extinction, an equitable extinction biased original position requires equal conditional probabilities, given that the individual’s generation survives the extinction process. Such a position is well-defined if and only if survival probabilities decline fast enough for the expected total number of individuals who can ever live to be finite. Then, provided that each individual’s utility is bounded both above and below, maximizing expected “extinction discounted” total utility—as advocated, inter alia, by the Stern Review on climate change—provides a coherent and dynamically consistent equitable objective, even when the population size of each generation can be chosen. (shrink)

Organization change failure has typically been viewed as occurring when expected outcomes of change have not been met. This view downplays key, but frequently hidden organizational dimensions such as deep structures and temporality. In this paper, drawing inspiration from the story of Alice in Wonderland (Carroll, 2011), we distinguish between surface level intervention approaches to change, deeper process approaches and, deeper yet structuration approaches and suggest the different ways they approach change failure as well as the implications of these. On (...) the basis of our exploration we propose a three-fold way forward: adopting a process-based, empirically grounded and reflective approach to understanding change and its often-failed outcomes; adopting methodologies that can capture deep structures and temporal dimensions; and incorporating expanded conceptions of time as a multi-level, nested construct. We illustrate our ideas of deep structures and temporality by drawing from a particularly important illustration of long term successful change that includes multiple short term failures, that of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the United States (NASA). (shrink)

Working within the reader perspective approach to biblical hermeneutics, a recent series of empirical studies has tested the theory that the readers’ psychological type preferences between sensing and intuition (perceiving functions) and between feeling and thinking (judging functions) shape distinctive readings of biblical texts. This study advances the debate by distinguishing between the two orientations within which the functions are expressed (introverted and extraverted). The added clarity offered by this refinement is illustrated by the distinctive voices of introverted intuition and (...) introverted sensing engaging with the Matthean Beatitudes, eight verses rich in materials to engage the perceiving functions. (shrink)

This paper identifies and elucidates a hitherto unnamed epistemic vice: epistemic insouciance. Epistemic insouciance consists in a casual lack of concern about whether one’s beliefs have any basis in reality or are adequately supported by the best available evidence. The primary intellectual product of epistemic insouciance is bullshit in Harry Frankfurt’s sense. This paper clarifies the notion of epistemic insouciance and argues that epistemic insouciance is both an epistemic posture and an epistemic vice. Epistemic postures are attitudes towards epistemic objects (...) such as knowledge, evidence or inquiry. Epistemic vices are defined as character traits, attitudes or thinking styles that systematically obstruct the gaining, keeping or sharing of knowledge. Epistemic insouciance is not just a posture but an affective posture. Such postures are distinguished from epistemic stances, which are policies that one can adopt or reject. Epistemic malevolence, as Jason Baehr describes it, is an example of an epistemically vicious epistemic stance that issues in active attempts to undermine the knowledge possessed by a specified group of individuals. An example of epistemic malevolence in action is the so-called ‘tobacco strategy’. I argue that epistemic malevolence undermines knowledge by instilling doubts about respectable sources of evidence. (shrink)