Imagination has been assigned an important explanatory role in a multitude of philosophical contexts. This paper examines four such contexts: mindreading, pretense, our engagement with fiction, and modal epistemology. Close attention to each of these contexts suggests that the mental activity of imagining is considerably more heterogeneous than previously realized. In short, no single mental activity can do all the explanatory work that has been assigned to imagining.

Intuitions about the transparency of experience have recently begun to play a key role in the debate about qualia. Specifically, such intuitions have been used by representationalists to support their view that the phenomenal character of our experience can be wholly explained in terms of its intentional content.[i] But what exactly does it mean to say that experience is transparent? In my view, recent discussions of transparency leave matters considerably murkier than one would like. As I will suggest, there is (...) reason to believe that experience is not transparent in the way that representationalism requires. Although there is a sense in which experience can be said to be transparent, transparency in this sense does not give us any particular motivation for representationalism—or at least, not the pure or strong representationalism that it is usually invoked to support. (shrink)

Imagination is celebrated as our vehicle for escape from the mundane here and now. It transports us to distant lands of magic and make-believe, and provides us with diversions during boring meetings or long bus rides. Yet the focus on imagination as a means of escape from the real world minimizes the fact that imagination seems also to furnish us with knowledge about it. Imagination seems an essential component in our endeavor to learn about the world in which we live--whether (...) we're planning for the future, aiming to understand other people, or figuring out whether two puzzle pieces fit together. But how can the same mental power that allows us to escape the world as it currently is also inform us about the world as it currently is? Ten original essays grapple with this neglected question; in doing so, they present a diverse array of positions ranging from cautious optimism to deep-seated pessimism. Blending perspectives from philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, Knowledge Through Imagination sheds new light on the epistemic role of imagination. (shrink)

The puzzle of imaginative desire arises from the difficulty of accounting for the surprising behaviour of desire in imaginative activities such as our engagement with fiction and our games of pretend. Several philosophers have recently attempted to solve this puzzle by introducing a class of novel mental states—what they call desire-like imaginings or i-desires. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the i-desire solution to the puzzle of imaginative desire. The introduction of i-desires is both ontologically profligate and (...) unnecessary, and, most importantly, fails to make sense of what we are doing in the imaginative contexts in question. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Iris Marion Young's conception of power, arguing that it is incomplete in at least two ways. First, Young tends to equate the term power with the narrower notions of ‘oppression’ and ‘domination.’ Thus, Young lacks a satisfactory analysis of individual and collective empowerment. Second, as Young herself admits, it is not obvious that her analysis of power can be useful in the context of thinking about transnational justice. I conclude by considering one way in which (...) Young's analysis of power needs to be extended or perhaps modified in order to do justice to questions of transnational justice. (shrink)

I doubt that even one of her readers will agree with all of Gutmann's conclusions--but they will all have to take account of the wealth of empirical evidence and stringent reasoning in this book.

What is consciousness and why is it so philosophically and scientifically puzzling? For many years philosophers approached this question assuming a standard physicalist framework on which consciousness can be explained by contemporary physics, biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. This book is a debate between two philosophers who are united in their rejection of this kind of "standard" physicalism - but who differ sharply in what lesson to draw from this. Amy Kind defends dualism 2.0, a thoroughly modern version of dualism (...) (the theory that there are two fundamentally different kinds of things in the world: those that are physical and those that are mental) decoupled from any religious or non-scientific connotations. Daniel Stoljar defends non-standard physicalism, a kind of physicalism different from both the standard version and dualism 2.0. The book presents a cutting-edge assessment of the philosophy of consciousness and provides a glimpse at what the future study of this area might bring. (shrink)

According to representationalism, the phenomenal character of a mental state reduces to its intentional content. Although representationalism seems plausible with respect to ordinary perceptual states, it seems considerably less plausible for states like moods. Here the problem for representationalism arises largely because moods seem to lack intentional content altogether. In this paper, I explore several possible options for identifying the intentional content of moods and suggest that none of them is wholly satisfactory. Importantly, however, I go on to argue that (...) the plausibility of representationalism should not be seen to rest on the question of whether moods have intentional content but rather on the question of whether the intentional content of moods, were there any, would be sufficient to determine their phenomenal character. As I argue, even if we concede to the representationalist that moods have intentional content, their phenomenal character outstrips their intentional content; thus, the representationalist reduction cannot succeed. Ultimately, then, I conclude that moods do indeed pose a serious objection to the representationalist theory. (shrink)

In this Element, we’ll explore the nature of both imagination and creative thinking in an effort to understand the relation between them and also to understand their role in the vast array of activities in which they are typically implicated, from art, music, and literature to technology, medicine, and science. Focusing on the contemporary philosophical literature, we will take up several interrelated questions: What is imagination, and how does it fit into the cognitive architecture of the mind? What is creativity? (...) Is imagination required for creativity? Is creativity required for imagination? Is a person simply born either imaginative or not (and likewise, either creative or not), or are imagination and creativity skills that can be cultivated? And finally, are imagination and creativity uniquely human capacities, or can they be had by nonbiological entities such as AI systems? (shrink)

A longstanding problem with the study of empathy is the lack of a clear and agreed upon definition. A trend in the recent literature is to respond to this problem by advancing a broad and all-encompassing view of empathy that applies to myriad processes ranging from mimicry and imitation to high-level perspective taking. I argue that this response takes us in the wrong direction and that what we need in order to better understand empathy is a narrower conceptualization, not a (...) broader one. I propose that empathy be conceptualized as a complex, imaginative process through which an observer simulates another person's situated psychological states while maintaining clear self–other differentiation. I defend my view through an examination of three processes: emotional contagion, a process of self-oriented perspective taking that I call “pseudo-empathy,” and empathy proper. Drawing on recent findings in social neuroscience, I highlight the differences among these processes and discuss conceptual, empirical, and normative reasons for keeping them theoretically and conceptually distinct. (shrink)

From the perspective of many philosophers of mind in these early years of the 21st Century, the debate between dualism and physicalism has seemed to have stalled, if not to have come to a complete standstill. There seems to be no way to settle the basic clash of intuitions that underlies it. Recently however, a growing number of proponents of Russellian monism have suggested that their view promises to show us a new way forward. Insofar as Russellian monism might allow (...) us to break out of the current gridlock, it's no wonder that it's become "hot stuff." To my mind, however, the excitement about Russellian monism is misplaced. Though some version of Russellian monism might well be true, I do not believe that it enables us to break free of the dualism/physicalism divide. As I will argue, once we properly understand what's required to flesh out an adequate monistic story, we will see that we are in an important way right back where we started. (shrink)

This essay provides a critical overview of the debate about corporate moral responsibility. Parties to the debate address whether corporations are the kinds of entities that can be blamed when they cause unjustified harm. Proponents of CMR argue that corporations satisfy the conditions for moral agency and so they are fit for blame. Their opponents respond that corporations lack one or more of the capacities necessary for moral agency. I review the arguments on both sides and conclude ultimately that what (...) divides the two is not so much competing conceptions of the corporation as it is disagreement about what moral agency requires. Homing in on the real site of contention will, it is hoped, allow future participants in the debate to focus their efforts more productively. (shrink)

Introduction -- Karl Marx's concept of alienation -- Objectification, alienation, and estrangement -- Other origins of alienation and objectification -- Marx's account of alienation : from early to late -- The alienated object of production : commodity fetishism -- The alienated means of production : machine fetishism -- Machines and the transformation of work -- Marx's energeticist turn -- The first law of thermodynamics -- From arbeit to arbeitskraft -- The second law of thermodynamics -- Machines in the communist future (...) -- Technology and the boundaries of nature -- Material wealth and value : the Grundrisse's fragment on machines -- The strife between technology and capital : the fall in the rate of profit -- Enjoyment not value : challenging the logic of exhaustion -- Man himself as fixed capital -- Class kinship and the redistribution of the means of production -- Machines in the capitalist reality -- Between thermodynamics and humanism : approaching capital -- Machinery as an historical category of production -- Machines, trains, and other capitalist monsters -- Rough, foul-mouthed boys : women's monstrous laboring bodies -- Wage labor and race -- Wage labor and sexuality -- Machinery and revolution -- Alienation beyond Marx -- Science and technology in Marx's excerpt notebooks -- Karl Marx and Charles Babbage -- Machines and temporality : the treadmill effect and free time -- Technophobia and technophilia -- Technophobia and twentieth-century theory. (shrink)

This paper argues that feminists have yet to develop a satisfactory account of power. Existing feminist accounts of power tend to have a one-sided emphasis either on power as domination or on power as empowerment. This conceptual one-sided-ness must be overcome if feminists are to develop an account complex enough to illuminate women's diverse experiences with power. Such an account is sketched here.

The Analects appears to offer two bodies of testimony regarding the felt, experiential qualities of leading a life of virtue. In its ostensible record of Confucius’ more abstract and reflective claims, the text appears to suggest that virtue has considerable power to afford joy and insulate from sorrow. In the text’s inclusion of Confucius’ less studied and apparently more spontaneous remarks, however, he appears sometimes to complain of the life he leads, to feel its sorrows, and to possess some despair. (...) Where we attend to both of these elements of the text, a tension emerges. In this essay, I consider how Confucius’ complaints appear to complicate any clean conclusion that Confucius wins a good life, particularly where we attend to important pre-theoretical sensibilities regarding what a “good life” ought to include and how it ought to feel for the one who leads it. (shrink)

My purpose in this essay is to suggest, via case study, that if Anglo-American philosophy is to become more inclusive of non-western traditions, the discipline requires far greater efforts at self-scrutiny. I begin with the premise that Confucian ethical treatments of manners afford unique and distinctive arguments from which moral philosophy might profit, then seek to show why receptivity to these arguments will be low. I examine how ordinary good manners have largely fallen out of philosophical moral discourse in the (...) west, looking specifically at three areas: conditions in the 18th and 19th centuries that depressed philosophical attention to manners; discourse conventions in contemporary philosophy that privilege modes of analysis not well fitted to close scrutiny of manners; and a philosophical culture that implicitly encourages indifference or even antipathy toward polite conduct. I argue that these three areas function in effect to render contemporary discourse inhospitable to greater inclusivity where Confucianism is concerned and thus, more broadly, that greater self-scrutiny regarding unexamined, parochial western commitments and practices is necessary for genuine inclusivity. (shrink)

In this book, Richlin argues that the attitude of sexual aggressiveness exhibited by the garden statues of the god Priapus served as a model for Roman satire from Lucilius to Juvenal.

This study focuses on the determinants of political strategies used by U.S. multinationals (MNCs) in Europe. Empirical support is found for Hillman and Hitt’s taxonomy of political decisions—that is, approach, participation level, and strategy. The role of institutional- versus firm-level variable determinants of these choices is explored as are the relative effects of firm versus industry variables within differing political contexts. Results based on a survey sample of 169 U.S. MNC subsidiaries within 14 European countries support the finding that both (...) institutional- and firm-level variables are important determinants of political strategy approach, participation level, and strategy. (shrink)

By reading the analyses of mysticism found in Beauvoir and Irigaray with and against some medieval women's mystical texts, the paper articulates a possible space for the divine within feminist thought.

This book makes a significant contribution to the tradition of liberal political theory: it explores the foundations and limits of the idea of equality within that theory and offers a sustained argument for a persuasive new view of liberalism. Liberal thinking has always displayed a tension between the claims of liberty and those of equality. Professor Gutmann examines the contributions of liberal theorists from Locke to Rawls on the subject of two kinds of equality - equality of opportunity to participate (...) and the equal distribution of economic goods. Valuing both, she shows that, far from being alternatives, the two ideals are compatible to a much greater degree than has previously been thought. Liberal Equality restores egalitarianism to political theory in a way that will forcefully challenge its critics to deeper reflection. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that persons suffering from Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) can give informed consent to surgical measures designed to treat this disorder. This is true even if the surgery seems radical or irrational to most people. The decision to have surgery made by a BIID patient is not necessarily coerced, incompetent or uninformed. If surgery for BIID is offered, there should certainly be a screening process in place to insure informed consent. It is beyond the scope (...) of this work, however, to define all the conditions that should be placed on the availability of surgery. However, I argue, given the similarities between BIID and gender dysphoria and the success of such gatekeeping measures for the surgical treatment of gender dysphoria, it is reasonable that similar conditions be in place for BIID. Once other treatment options are tried and gatekeeping measures satisfied, A BIID patient can give informed consent to radical surgery. (shrink)

This paper re-examines the relationship between power, reason and history in Horkheimer and Adorno’s "Dialectic of Enlightenment." Contesting Habermas’ highly influential reading of the text, I argue that "Dialectic of Enlightenment," far from being a dead-end for critical theory, opens up important lines of thought in the philosophy of history that contemporary critical theorists would do well to recover. My focus is on the relationship that Horkheimer and Adorno trace between enlightenment rationality and the domination of inner and outer nature.

This paper argues that Hannah Arendt's political theory offers key insights into the power that binds together the feminist movement - the power of solidarity. Second-wave feminist notions of solidarity were grounded in notions of shared identity; in recent years, as such conceptions of shared identity have come under attack for being exclusionary and repressive, feminists have been urged to give up the idea of solidarity altogether. However, the choice between (repressive) identity and (fragmented) non-identity is a false opposition, and (...) the Arendtian account of solidarity developed here allows us to move beyond this opposition. Thus, Arendt provides us with a model of solidarity that can stand a post-identity politics feminist theory in good stead. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Subjection and Autonomy: Foucault contra Habermas What Is Fallacious About the Genetic Fallacy? Conclusion References.

This paper presents a short classroom exercise to stimulate student discussion about the rights of shareholders versus the rights of stakeholders. Students are challenged to identify and evaluate their preconceived notions of what constitutes excessive profits. The exercise illustrates why the realization of a large return on investment cannot be used as prima facie evidence that a firm exploited employees, customers, or other stakeholders. This concept is illustrated using datafrom the pharmaceutical industry.

A profound problem posed by education for any pluralistic society with democratic aspirations is how to reconcile individual freedom and civic virtue. Children cannot be educated to maximize both individual freedom and civic virtue. Yet reasonable people value and intermittently demand both. We value freedom of speech and press, for example, but want people to refrain from false and socially harmful expression. The various tensions between individual freedom and civic virtue pose a challenge that is simultaneously philosophical and political. How (...) can we resolve the tensions philosophically in light of reasonable political disagreements over the relative value of individual freedom and civic virtue? Instead of giving priority to one value or the other, this essay defends a democratic ideal ofconscious social reproduction, which consists of three principles:nonrepression, nondiscrimination, and democratic deliberation. (shrink)

I explore connections between social divisions and diversity within the self, while striving to differentiate internal diversity and multiplicity. When the person is understood as composite or multiple, she is seen as divided into several distinct agent-like aspects. This view is found in ancient, modern, and postmodern philosophy, psychology, poetry, and lay people's accounts of their experience. I argue for a conception of the self as diverse but not composite or multiple.

Our exemplar of a Native American relational ethic is depicted through the Seven Grandfather Teachings, an ancient sacred story of Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples. These teachings state that human beings are responsible to act with wisdom, respect, love, honesty, humility, bravery, and truth toward each other and all creation. We illustrate the possible uses of this ethic through exercises wherein students reflect on the values and learn lessons related to ethics, leadership, teamwork, and relationships, or create stories using Native American (...) story form. (shrink)

This article explores the contemporary scientific practice of human genome science in light of Michel Foucault’s articulation of the problem of population. Rather than transcending the politics of social categories and identities, human genome research mobilizes many different kinds of populations. How then might we aim to avoid overgeneralized readings of the refiguring of human difference in the life sciences and grapple with the multiple and contradictory logics of population classification? In exploring the study of human variation through the case (...) of the ‘Quebec founder population’ at a private genome research laboratory in Canada, the article argues that the power to define and shape meanings of human variation and to organize vitality is not held by any one institution or form of scientific practice. While molecular genomics may be transforming conceptions of human difference, the laboratory is only one of many places where human genomic variation accrues value, meaning and relevance. Molecular configurations of human difference gain meaning through a traffic in populations that extends beyond the laboratory. In the case explored here this traffic in populations is constituted within a nexus of empire, national census practices and contemporary articulations of multicultural policies. (shrink)

The goal of this review is to consider how culture impacts the socialization of emotion development in infancy, and infants’ and young children’s subsequent outcomes. First, we argue that parents’ socialization decisions are embedded within cultural structures, beliefs, and practices. Second, we identify five broad cultural frames (collectivism/individualism; power distance; children’s place in family and culture; ways children learn; and value of emotional experience and expression) that help to organize current and future research. For each frame, we discuss the impact (...) on parents’ socialization practices and infants’ subsequent outcomes relating to emotion-related experience, expression, and understanding. We also generate testable hypotheses to further our understanding of the relationships between the five frames and emotion development in infancy. (shrink)

This companion volume focuses on the application and practical ramifications of Indian ethics. Here Indian dharma ethics is moved from its preeminent religious origins and classical metaethical proclivity to, what Kant would call, practical reason–or in Aristotle’s poignant terms, ēhikos and phronēis–and in more modern parlance normative ethics. Our study examines a wide range of social and normative challenges facing people in such diverse areas as women’s rights, infant ethics, politics, law, justice, bioethics and ecology. As a contemporary volume, it (...) builds linkages between existing theories and emerging moral issues, problems and questions in today’s India in the global arena. The volume brings together contributions from some 40 philosophers and contemporary thinkers on practical ethics, exploring both the scope and boundaries or limits of ethics as applied to everyday and real-life concerns and socio-economic challenges facing India in the context of a troubled globalizing world. As such, this collection draws on multiple forms of writing and research, including narrative ethics, interviews, critical case studies and textual analyses. The book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and students of Indian philosophy, Indian ethics, women and infant issues, social justice, environmental ethics, bioethics, animal ethics and cross-cultural responses to dominant Western moral thought. It will also be useful to researchers working on the intersection of Gandhi, sustainability, ecology, theology, feminism, comparative philosophy and dharma studies. (shrink)