The transparency of visual experience is a widely held and important thesis in the philosophy of perception. Critical discussion of transparency has focused on visual experiences, such as the experience of visual blur that are taken to be counter examples to transparency. Here, I consider a novel objection to transparency that does not depend on intuitions about examples. The objection is that if transparency is true then we cannot explain our ability to think about our visual experiences as such. In (...) response to this objection, I develop an account of how we are able to think about our own visual experiences as such that is compatible with transparency. (shrink)

Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination analyzes theological, religious, and philosophical themes in classical Christian fantasy, contemporary “post-Christian” fantasy, and fantasy at play in table top games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: the Gathering.

Given John L. Austin’s Oxonian pedigree, we should expect his discussion of how “to say something is to do something” (1962, 12) to be taken up analytically. However, Austin also offers resources that have been exploited outside of traditional analytic philosophy—think of certain analytic feminist work, for example, or literary critical uses of performativity. For the most part, such work extends and inflects Austin’s notion of illocution and its related concepts of force and performativity for disciplinary-specific ends. (...) This tendency in reading Austin to focus on illocution and its related concepts is understandable. After all, Austin devotes most of his Harvard lectures, assembled in How to Do Things .. (shrink)

There are broad commonalities between the projects of Donald MacKinnon (1913–1994) and Stanley Cavell (1926–) sufficient to make the claim that they struck an analogous pose in their respective contexts. This is not to discount their manifest differences. In the milieu of 1960s and 1970s Cambridge, MacKinnon argued in support of a qualified language of metaphysics in the service of a renewed catholic humanism and Christian socialism. At Harvard, Cavell articulated commitments that made him more at home in the world (...) of North American secular political liberalism. Where Nietzsche, Hume, Freud, Heidegger, Emerson and Thoreau were Cavell’s inspirations, Butler, Kant, G. E. Moore, Collingwood and the New Testament were MacKinnon’s. For all the stark differences, commonalities abound and the reason for this can be traced to a shared appreciation of Austin’s contribution to the ‘lingusitic turn’ together with Wittgenstein’s later work. They both developed projects obsessed with the problem of scepticism together with a commitment to a creative re-animation of moral discourse in light of it, with MacKinnon defending a qualified ‘moral realism’, and Cavell, ‘moral perfectionism’. Seen together, a distinctive post-Kantian and post-Wittgensteinian therapeutic moral philosophy is in evidence. (shrink)

'Becoming Who We Are' clarifies the political and existential aspects of Stanley Cavell's understanding of ordinary language and of skepticism, and shows the close connection between his reception of Kant, Heidegger, and Austin and his exploration of what Emersonian Perfectionism offers to democracy and modern life.

Publishers love titles that begin How or Why. Better still, How and Why, combining edification with utility. The target group is that overlap between the self-help audience and the idly curious—which is to say, most of us. And since emotions are very much about self-help and self-harm, they offer rich pickings in a burgeoning market. Flanagan's How to Do things with Emotions is a philosopher's take on moral emotions, the allusion to J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with (...) Words chiming with the self-help milieu. Reviewing cases, Flanagan points out that most scientific work in this field derives from experiments on psychology students, about as unrepresentative a slice of humanity as you could find. For Flanagan, they are too WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) to tell us much about the non-weird majority. To learn to “do emotions better,” he argues, we have to look farther afield. Although the emotional lives of cultural others are surely different from those taking Psychology 101, at some functional level they might be similar. Work out the conceptual logic and practical rationale of culturally elaborated emotions—Minangkabau “shame,” Ifaluk “righteous anger,” American “road rage”—and there is scope for comparison. Indeed, anthropology has shown as much, and it is from anthropology that Flanagan takes his cues. To mention two famous cases, what can we learn about anger management from Utku igloo-dwellers and Ilongot headhunters? Mutually dependent for survival in their snowy isolation, the Utku cannot risk getting angry. (They mercilessly tease their children into learning the futility of anger.) In the jungles of Luzon, Ilongot youths cast away their anger in externally directed violence: headhunting as cathartic sport. We can think of parallels closer to home.Flanagan's vigorously argued book, a tour de force of its kind, is both an anatomizing of anger and shame—two moral emotions we tend to “do badly”—and a proposal to “change how we do these emotions.” Indignation is fine, but anger that is vengeful or “pain-passing,” rather than righteous, is irrational and socially harmful. Shame can be incapacitating and cruel (the undeserved burn of a Twitter pile-on). What we need is reflective anger directed at injustice and a “mature sense of shame” that reminds us of the social contract and stops us misbehaving.In its How-and-Why format, the book combines theory and practice, metaethics with moralism. Here is how a prof should do self-help. But if the diagnosis is well made, the remedy is hard to imagine. As Flanagan recognizes, moral sentiments and practices are embedded in intricate forms of life and not readily detachable. Anger Utku-style is not a transferable skill, nor are educative routines forged in social ecologies remote from our own. Lacking serviceable models, Flanagan falls back on the anthropological justification that knowledge of cultural diversity expands our sense of human possibility, of other roads taken. In a globalizing world, difference is its own reward. For me, an anthropologist, that maxim is enough. Yet difference bedevils comparison, jinxing the units, warping criteria. Most languages lack a word for emotion or an equivalent umbrella concept; nor do emotion words translate well across languages. Emotion may be an incoherent notion, or at best a heuristic.Flanagan's use of the WEIRD tag makes things a bit too easy. Does it cover farmhands and factory workers? Are we so democratic, anyway? More damagingly, a typological approach blurs the circumstances of family, community, and biography that define an emotional episode and shape its phenomenology, the way it is felt and experienced—what a violent outburst or fearful exit means in the context of a life. Take Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, who flees a scene of failure and derails his life. It requires a long narrative to unravel the implications of his jumping ship and the paralyzing shame he experiences before the judgment of society. Or consider the scene in Anna Karenina in which the dignified and self-important Karenin, apprised of Anna's adulterous liaison, agonizes over the threat to his existence. To call his response jealousy would not scratch the surface. Characteristically for Tolstoy, the emotions go unnamed. Instead, we witness Karenin's fervid deliberations (emotions involve thoughts), vacillations (emotions have action tendencies), anguished calculations of impending scandal (emotions are appraisals), and bodily changes (emotions are cognized feelings). We shudder at the brutal metaphors through which he grasps his predicament and its cure: like rooting out a bad tooth, he decides. That welter of particularities escapes the theorist who needs clear-cut, comparable units, formulaic instances of jealousy or anger. But what are you left with if you omit the details? What would remain of Karenin's existential crisis?The novelist's privileged access to subjectivity is, of course, unavailable to the scientist, but the larger context of plot and character—a history of relations that gives emotional episodes their shape and power—has its analog in the ethnographic domain. Emotions are public as well as private events, their meanings and effects depending on a fit with social reality, a clash of perspectives. In thought and feeling, we are never really alone. All of which suggests that narrative, fictional or nonfictional, can capture the ongoing moment in a way that eludes other methods. If what we are after is living emotion, it is the movie, not the snapshot, that surely matters. No point in comparing “emotions” no one ever really experienced outside of an experiment.But there's the rub. In generalization—the goal of emotion theory—an emotion's social meaning, personal significance, pragmatic function, and narrative context get stripped out. All that makes it what it is! Even in doggedly empirical anthropology, detailed emotional episodes are rare (Jean Briggs's Utku ethnography Never in Anger, published in 1970, is still unsurpassed). Instead we get recollections and summary examples, lacking the constitutive detail, real-time evolutions, and consequences of the real thing. Yet these must serve for comparison, fodder for countless theoretical speculations. Are we at risk of analyzing faux emotions and building theories on cardboard constructions?An empty Arctic stage, a handful of characters, life simplified to survival: Briggs is a hard act to follow. Bare life does not make for basic emotions. On the white set, emotions prove hard to parse. That gruff hesitation, that flashing glint—are they tokens of anger? Empathy will not suffice. As Briggs shows, narrative context is all. And in our more cluttered emotional worlds, the value of backstory, interwoven biographies, and emotional plots is all the greater. Flanagan is right; we must do emotions better. (shrink)

Guy Austin _Claude Chabrol_ Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999 ISBN 0 7190 5271 8 (hb); 0 7190 5272 6 (pb) 197 pp.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophistics, Rhetorics, and Performance; or, How to Really Do Things with WordsBarbara CassinTranslated by Andrew Goffey"How to do things with words?" How can you really do things with nothing but words? It seems to me that sophistics is in a way the paradigm of discourse that does things with words. Doubtless it is not a "performative" in Austin's sense of the word, although Austin's sense varies (...) considerably in extension and intension. But it is for real a discourse that operates, that transforms or creates the world, and has what I call a "world effect."Making the connection with performativity is all the more tempting, as epideixis, the word that serves in Plato to designate sophist discourse, cannot be rendered better than by "performance," on condition that "performance" is also understood in the sense of contemporary aesthetics as a "happening," an "event," an improvisation that requires engagement (Gorgias is the inventor of discourse ex tempore, according to Philostratus)—something like an "exploit."1"Performative" is Austin's own invention, acclimated to French by Austin himself at a colloquium held at Royaumont (Austin 1962); thereafter it was immediately adopted and popularized by Émile Benveniste (1966). "Performance" is a much older term, which, after ceaseless borrowings to and fro between English and French, has seen its meaning shifted and extended accordingly. Klein's Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of English Language (Klein 1971) maintains that in English "performer" [End Page 349] was coined from Old French parfournir (from medieval Latin perfurnire) and/or parformer; in addition French borrowed the term at least three times, if the Dictionnaire culturel de la langue francaise (Rey 2005) is to be believed: in 1869, by analogy with the vocabulary of horse races to mean the "manner of developing a subject, of executing a work in public"; in 1953, to denote "individual result in the accomplishment of a task"; and in 1963, in the wake of Chomsky, to mean the opposite of "competence." In sum, the word is a fluid, bilingual term that bridges sport (performance in the sense of a record), technique (performance in the sense of the output of a machine), psychology (performance of a test), linguistics (performance/competence), and modern art (performance in the sense of happening).Let us start with the relationship between performance and performative. It is a way to interrogate the status of rhetorics, for which Austin, without naming it, reserves a somewhat unstable place between the "locutionary" on the one hand and the "illocutionary" or performative on the other, calling it the "perlocutionary" ("per" precisely as in "performative").2But it is not of Austin that I will speak. Austin is simply the contemporary frame of reference that informs us today: he "invented" the performative as such for us, by trying to isolate it. And he never hides the difficulty, the permeability, of his taxonomy. Just one citation is enough to show the difficulty. In the seventh lecture of the twelve that make up How to Do Things with Words (quite late then) he writes: "It is time [...] to make a fresh start on the problem. We want to reconsider more generally the senses in which to say something may be to do something, or in saying something we do something (and also perhaps to consider the different case in which by saying something we do something). Perhaps some clarification and definition may help us out of our tangle. For after all, 'doing something' is a very vague expression. When we issue any utterance whatsoever, are we not 'doing something'?" (1975, 91–92).In the framework of the generalized theory of speech acts, the difference between the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary has for a long time been in a "tangle". It is not so easy to differentiate between the three. All three are, precisely, "acts" of language, and without doubt the categories are at once abstract, slippery, and overlapping. The "locutionary" or "constative," a "normal" statement, is an utterance that "says something"; it is an "act of saying something" (1975, 100): "The cat is on the mat" has a meaning (both a "sense" and a "reference") and is susceptible of being either true or false. For... (shrink)

Widely regarded as one of the most important and influential sports books of all time, C. L. R. James's _Beyond a Boundary_ is—among other things—a pioneering study of popular culture, an analysis of resistance to empire and racism, and a personal reflection on the history of colonialism and its effects in the Caribbean. More than fifty years after the publication of James's classic text, the contributors to _Marxism, Colonialism, and Cricket_ investigate _Beyond a Boundary_'s production and reception and its implication (...) for debates about sports, gender, aesthetics, race, popular culture, politics, imperialism, and English and Caribbean identity. Including a previously unseen first draft of _Beyond a Boundary_'s conclusion alongside contributions from James's key collaborator Selma James and from Michael Brearley, former captain of the English Test cricket team, _Marxism, Colonialism, and Cricket_ provides a thorough and nuanced examination of James's groundbreaking work and its lasting impact. Contributors. Anima Adjepong, David Austin, Hilary McD. Beckles, Michael Brearley, Selwyn R. Cudjoe, David Featherstone, Christopher Gair, Paget Henry, Christian Høgsbjerg, C. L. R. James, Selma James, Roy McCree, Minkah Makalani, Clem Seecharan, Andrew Smith, Neil Washbourne, Claire Westall. (shrink)

This article presents a critical reevaluation of the thesis—closely associated with H. L. A. Hart, and central to the views of most recent legal philosophers—that the idea of state coercion is not logically essential to the definition of law. The author argues that even laws governing contracts must ultimately be understood as “commands of the sovereign, backed by force.” This follows in part from recognition that the “sovereign,” defined rigorously, at the highest level of abstraction, is that person or entity (...) identified by reference to game theory and the philosophical idea of “convention” as the source of signals with which the subject population has become effectively locked, as a group, into conformity. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

We describe the results of an experiment testing for the presence of strong altruism among Christians in New Zealand. The study examined anonymous participant generosity to cohort. We found that in modified dictator games, anonymous Christians in New Zealand gave significantly more to Canadian Christians than anonymous New Zealand citizens gave to their fellow citizens. The gifting opportunities occurred after anonymous benefactors observed recipients willingly undertake costly acts of group commitment. We found that mean gifting after witnessing a fellow group (...) member metaphorically "fall on a hand grenade" to punish a member of an out-group was almost four times greater in the Christian group than it was in the New Zealand control. Our data support the hypothesis that religious altruism exists and is especially strong among Christians in New Zealand. The data also weakly support a multi-level selection hypothesis for the evolution of religious altruism. (shrink)

Although death statutes permitting physicians to declare brain death are relatively uniform throughout the United States, academic debate persists over the equivalency of human death and brain death. Alan Shewmon showed that the formerly accepted integration rationale was conceptually incomplete by showing that brain-dead patients demonstrated a degree of integration. We provide a more complete rationale for the equivalency of human death and brain death by defending a deeper understanding of the organism as a whole and by using a novel (...) strategy with shared objectives to justify death determination criteria. Our OaaW account describes different types of OaaW, defining human death as the loss of status as a human OaaW. We defend human death as similar to nonhuman death in terms of wakefulness, but also distinct in terms of the sui generis properties, particularly conscious awareness. We thereby defend the equivalency of brain death and human death using a resulting neurocentric rationale. (shrink)

The standard inferentialist approaches to modal logic tend to suffer from not being able to uniquely characterize the modal operators, require that introduction and elimination rules be interdefined, or rely on the introduction of possible-world like indexes into the object language itself. In this paper I introduce a hypersequent calculus that is flexible enough to capture many of the standard modal logics and does not suffer from the above problems. It is therefore an ideal candidate to underwrite an inferentialist theory (...) of meaning for modal operators. Here I treat specifically the modal logics K, D, T, S4, B, and S5. I show that the calculi are adequate for each set of models, and show that they meet a large set of criteria that are generally thought necessary for a calculus to underwrite a theory of meaning. (shrink)

This book, the first to explore religious education and post-modernity in depth, sets out to provide a much needed examination of the problems and possibilities post-modernity raises for religious education.

In this book about metaphysics the author defends a realistic view of universals, characterizing the notion of universal by considering language and logic, the idea of possibility, hierarchies of universals, and causation. He argues that neither language nor logic is a reliable guide to the nature of reality and that basic universals are the fundamental type of universal and are central to causation. All assertions and predications about the natural world are ultimately founded on these basic universals. A distinction is (...) drawn between unified particulars and arbitrary particulars ; unified particulars are the terms of causal relations and thus the real constituents of the world. The world is not made up of events but of unified particulars and basic universals. (shrink)

In this paper I return to Hegel's dispute with Kant over the conceptual ordering of external and internal purposiveness to distinguish between two conceptions of teleology at play in the contemporary function debate. I begin by outlining the three main views in the debate (the etiological, causal role and organizational views). I argue that only the organizational view can maintain the capacity of function ascriptions both to explain the presence of a trait and to identify its contribution to a current (...) system, for it is the only view that considers teleology as a natural cause. To establish how teleology can be considered as a natural cause, advocates of the organizational view return to Kant's analysis of internal purposiveness. However, while Kant identifies the requirements that an object must meet to satisfy the demands of teleological judgment, I suggest that he denies that we can know whether they are truly met. I argue that Hegel's philosophy of nature is better equipped to determine how internal purposiveness can be considered as a natural cause, for it grounds organization in a form of purposiveness that is more fundamental than a designer's intention. (shrink)

This commentary critically examines a recent qualitative study, published in this issue of Neuroethics, on the attitudes of family caregivers toward evidence of covert consciousness in brain-injured patients.

In the early months of 2020, the deadly Covid-19 disease spread rapidly around the world. In response, national and regional governments implemented a range of emergency lockdown measures, curtailing citizens’ movements and greatly limiting economic activity. More recently, as restrictions begin to be loosened or lifted entirely, the use of so-called contact tracing apps has figured prominently in many jurisdictions’ plans to reopen society. Critics have questioned the utility of such technologies on a number of fronts, both practical and ethical. (...) However, little has been said about the ways in which the normative design choices of app developers, and the products that result therefrom, might contribute to ethical reflection and wider political debate. Drawing from scholarship in critical design and human–computer interaction, this paper examines the development of a QR code-based tracking app called Zwaai (‘Wave’ in Dutch), where its designers explicitly positioned the app as an alternative to the predominant Bluetooth and GPS-based approaches. Through analyzing these designers’ choices, this paper argues that QR code infrastructures can work to surface a set ofethical–political seams, two of which are discussed here—responsibilizationandnetworked (im)permanence—that more ‘seamless’ protocols like Bluetooth actively aim to bypass, and which may go otherwise unnoticed by existing ethical frameworks. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 8, July 2020, Page 811-815.

In this superbly argued and deeply engaging book, Andrew Linzey not only shows that animals can and do suffer but also that many of the justifications for inflicting animal suffering in fact provide grounds for protecting them.

In World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism, I argued that there is an important sense in which philosophilosophical naturalism’s current status as methodological orthodoxy is without rational foundation, and I argued that naturalists must give up two views that many of them are inclined to hold dear-realism about material objects and materialism. In the present article, I respond to objections raised by W. R. Carter, Austin Dacey, Paul Draper, and Andrew Melnyk in a symposium on World (...) Without Design sponsored in part by this journal. The objections I address fall into two main categories: objections against my characterization of naturalism, and objections against the main argument of the book, the argument for the conclusion that naturalists cannot justifiably accept realism about material objects. (shrink)

Recent work on emergence in physics has focused on the presence of singular limit relations between basal and upper-level theories as a criterion for emergence. However, over-emphasis on the role of singular limit relations has somewhat obscured what it means to say that a property or behaviour is emergent. This paper argues that singular limits are not central to emergence and develops an alternative account of emergence in terms of the failure of basal explainability. As a consequence, emergence and reduction, (...) long held to be two sides of the same coin in the emergentist tradition, are largely decoupled. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction; 2. Peace; 3. Rule of law; 4. Human rights; 5. Democracy; 6. Liberty; 7. The institutional ethos of the EU; 8. Towards the EU as a just institution; 9. Concluding proposals.

This volume brings together original research that throws new light on how standards of behavior for medical practitioners are articulated in different religious, social, and political contexts.

Andrew Shanks brings together a grand narrative of theology and continental philosophy to argue that the 'solidarity of the shaken' is the kingdom of God in secular dress. Using Jan Patocka's concept of the 'solidarity of the shaken', he explores mystical theology, gnosticism and ethical phenomenology through a set of key 19th- and 20th-century thinkers that exemplified the 'pathos of shakenness'.

Of all the crew to serve on a starship Enterprise, none has had such a convoluted line of existence as the venerable Mr. Spock. This chapter explores what the various incarnations of Mr. Spock can tell us about the nature of reality, existence, and personal identity. Lewis argues for the metaphysical theory of modal realism: all possible worlds are as real as the actual world. In science fiction parlance, this philosophical concept of world is more often called a universe. Thus, (...) Earth and Vulcan are both part of the same world depicted in Star Trek. The central question Lewis addresses is whether our world is the only real world, or whether other possible worlds could also be considered real. Lewis argues for the metaphysical theory of modal realism, all possible worlds are as real as the actual world. (shrink)

A new introduction to Kant, guiding the student through the key concepts of his work by examining the overall development of his ideas.

Some cases of prosopagnosia involve a highly circumscribed loss of A-consciousness. When seen in this way they offer further support for the arguments made in Block's target article.