In Valuing Health, Dan Hausman argues that well-being is not measurable, at least not in the way that science and policy would require. His argument depends on a demanding conception of well-being and on a pessimistic verdict upon the existing measures of subjective well-being. Neither of these reasons, I argue, warrant as much skepticism as Hausman professes.

According to linguistic relativism, we acquire knowledge about the world through language and thus the use of different languages results in different visions of the world. This view is sometimes supported by a statement saying that some of those visions are mutually inconsistent and they cannot be accepted simultaneously: the use of one of them is inconsistent with the use of the other. The paper discusses this statement referring to an example of languages of two logical calculi, and shows it (...) to be an overstatement. Theses of different languages are not inconsistent, for they are based on different concepts. Concepts, needed for negating theses expressed in either language, cannot be found in the other one. The paper therefore poses a question whether it is possible to compile conceptual apparatuses of languages which are believed to be incommensurable. It concludes that in fact there are no logical obstacles. Such languages can be used together without the risk of cognitive conflict. However, it can be difficult due to pragmatic reasons. Although this would not undermine the beliefs of people using the broadened language, it could undermine some of their values and attitudes. This way broadening of the cognitive perspective by compiling conceptual apparatuses of different languages is likely to weaken those attitudes towards reality, from which the languages in question originated. (shrink)

In this article several metalogical properties which are interesting and important from the philosophical point of view are discussed. Examples of non-classical logical systems which posses these properties are presented.

The much-lamented anthropocentrism of human rights is misleading. Human rights anthropocentrism is radically attenuated and reflects persistent patterns of intra- and interspecies injustice and binary subject–object relations inapt for twenty-first-century crises and posthuman complexities. This article explores the possibility of reimagining the “human” of human rights in the light of anti- and post-Cartesian analyses drawing—in particular—upon Merleau-Ponty and on new materialism. This article also seeks to reimagine human rights themselves as responsibilized, injustice-sensitive claim concepts emerging in the “midst of” lively (...) materialities and the uneven global dynamics of twenty-first-century predicaments. (shrink)

Self-illness ambiguity is a difficulty to distinguish the ‘self’ or ‘who one is’ from one's mental disorder or diagnosis. Although self-illness ambiguity in a psychiatric context is often deemed to be a negative phenomenon, it may occasionally have a positive role too. This paper investigates whether and in what sense self-illness ambiguity could have a positive role in the process of recovery and self-development in some psychiatric contexts by focusing on a specific case of mental disorder – anorexia nervosa.

In this essay, I reconstruct tolerance as a moral virtue, by critically analysing its definition, circumstances, justification and limits. I argues that, despite its paradoxical appearance, tolerance qualifies as a virtue, by means of a restriction of its proper object to differences that are chosen. Since this excludes the most important and divisive differences of contemporary pluralism from the scope of the virtue of tolerance, the moral model of toleration cannot constitute the micro-foundation of the corresponding political practice. However, if (...) the political ideal of toleration must be founded on independent political reasons of justice, the moral model can bridge the gap between private morality and public reason, providing citizens with moral motives to supplement the political obligation to neutrality. (shrink)

Profit-oriented service sectors such as tourism, hospitality, and entertainment are increasingly looking at how professional service robots can be integrated into the workplace to perform socio-cognitive tasks that were previously reserved for humans. This is a work in which social and labor sciences recognize the principle role of emotions. However, the models and narratives of emotions that drive research, design, and deployment of service robots in human–robot interaction differ considerably from how emotions are framed in the sociology of labor and (...) feminist studies of service work. In this paper, we explore these tensions through the concepts of affective and emotional labor, and outline key insights these concepts offer for the design and evaluation of professional service robots. Taken together, an emphasis on interactionist approaches to emotions and on the demands of affective labor, leads us to argue that service employees are under-represented in existing studies in human–robot interaction. To address this, we outline how participatory design and value-sensitive design approaches can be applied as complimentary methodological frameworks that include service employees as vital stakeholders. (shrink)

Language understanding comes with a particular kind of phenomenology. It is often observed that when listening to utterances in a familiar language, competent language users can have experiences of understanding the meanings of these utterances. The nature of such experiences is a much debated topic. In this paper, I develop a new proposal according to which experiences of understanding are a particular kind of epistemic feelings of fluency that result from evaluative monitoring processes. The perceptual experience that accompanies linguistic comprehension (...) results from the deployment of early stage auditory processes of speech perception that lead to the recognition of words. (shrink)

The guest editor introduces No. 3 Vol. 1 (2012), "Philosophical Anthropology and Social Analysis." .

Despite its commonality rape in war has long been an invisible war crime. Gender-based violence has escaped sanction because it has been shielded into the private sphere. Although rape in war is a form of public violence committed by soldiers representing a state it continues to be conceived as a private crime, committed by individual men. If women's human rights are to be respected in war and in peace the imaginary border between the public and the private has to be (...) abandoned. In this article rape in war is studied as a case of injustice for women in violent conflict. Arguments against feminist versions of ethics of care are formulated as these theories fail to challenge the public/ private distinction due to deep and constitutive gender norms. As an alternative, a narrative, feminist ethic of justice is presented based on women's narratives of experienced injustice in war. The theoretical model is developed through the integration of values derived from the ethics of care and thereby dismisses the distinction between public and private and between reason and emotion. The conclusion is that both substance and form of human rights must be based in concrete, situated gendered people's experiences of getting their human rights violated. (shrink)

Among the multiple, subliminal passions that inspire our life in innumerable ways, literature shows us one that seems to play a particularly penetrating role in human concerns. This passion, which Tymieniecka calls an `esoteric passion', finds its projection and crystallization in space: it is the esoteric passion for space. This subliminal passion, investigated through literature, allows the philosopher to reach beneath the fallacious separations of nature, humanness and the cultural world, restoring the wholeness of experience that has become lost in (...) the artificial one-sidedness of contemporary approaches, confined to language as they are. The elemental passion for place is investigated here in the literary fruits of creative imagination. Unravelled from the very depths of the primogenital, onto-poietic unfolding of life, the passion for place is revealed as projecting into the flux of life: it is a `station' of life-significance. This collection presents papers from two conferences of the International Society of Phenomenology and Literature held in Cambridge, MA in 1993/4. (shrink)

Philosophy has been always received or bypassed for its resonance or aloofness with the spirit of the time. Should not philosophy/phenomenology of life be expected to do more to ascertain its validity? Should it not pass the pragmatic test, that is to respond directly to the life-concerns of its time? What is the role of the philosopher and philosophy today? Due to the ever-advancing scientific, technological, social and cultural changes that are shaping human life and the life-world-in-transformation, we are desperately (...) seeking a measure to estimate life's unfolding, a compass to stir the course between Scylla and Charibda to maintain human-hood and creative insight for laying the cornerstones for the unforeseeable unfolding of life dynamisms. It is this challenge which philosophy/phenomenology of life meets with underlying ontopoietic unraveling of the hidden logoic concatenations of beingness-in-becoming. The present collection of essays offers contributions to answer this challenge by focusing upon measure, sharing-in-life, intersubjectivity and communication, societal equilibrium, education, and more. It will be of great interest to those working in the fields of Phenomenology, Philosophy, History of Philosophy, and Contemporary Philosophy. (shrink)

Fazekas and Overgaard () present a novel, multidimensional model that explains different ways in which conscious representations can be degraded. Moreover, the authors discuss possible mechanisms that underlie different kinds of degradation, primarily those related to attentional processing. In this letter, we argue that the proposed mechanisms are not sufficient. We propose that attentional mechanisms work differently at various processing stages; and factors that are independent of attentional ones, such as expectation, previous experience, and context, should be accounted for if (...) we are aiming to construct a comprehensive model of conscious visual perception. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate Aristotle’s power ontology, and of it argue for a new interpretation of his hylemorphism and theory of the four causes.

Some might ask "Why Locke's theory of knowledge now?" Though appreciated for his social philosophy, Locke has been criticized for his work in the field of epistemology ever since the publication of the Essay. It is even as if Locke serves only as an example of how not to think. When people criticize Locke, they usually cite the hostile commen taries of Berkeley, Kant, Husserl, or Sellars. But, one might ask, are they not all so eager to show the excellence (...) of their own epistemo logical views that they distort and underestimate Locke's thought? Russell aptly noted in his History of Western Philosophy that: No one has yet succeeded in inventing a philosophy at once credible and self-consis tent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the opposite. A philosophy which is not self-consis tent cannot be wholly true, but a philosophy which is self-consistent can very well be wholly false. The most fruitful philosophies have contained glaring inconsistencies, but for that very reason have been partially true. There is no reason to suppose that a self consistent system contains more truth than one which, like Locke's, is obviously more or less wrong. (B. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945], p. 613. ) Here Russell is uncommonly charitable with Locke. (shrink)

Krifka (1998) argues that stressed postposed additive particles associate with a clausemate constrastive topic, which need not be overt as long as it satisfies the appropriate contextual role. English too is stressed. Of the two Hungarian particles, szintén is stressed, is is not.

Recent health legislation in Norway significantly increases access to specialist care within a legally binding time frame. The paper describes the contents of the new legislation and introduces some of the challenges with proliferations of rights to health care. The paper describes some of the challenges associated with the proliferation of legal rights to health care. It explains the benefits of assessing the new law in the light of a rights framework. It then analyses the problematic aspects of establishing additional (...) priority rules as solutions to rights conflicts. It then defends adequacy criteria for acceptable priority rules when such rules are unavoidable. It finally defends our proposed method and explores concrete applications. (shrink)

Tematem artykułu jest etyczny problem klonowania ludzi. Zaprezentowane zostają w nim najważniejsze argumenty przeciwko klonowaniu obecne w powieści Kazuo Ishiguro Nie opuszczaj mnie. Wśród argumentów moralnych przeciwko klonowaniu ludzi przeanalizowane zostają: argument z instrumentalizacji oraz wewnętrznego życia klonów; z ograniczenia wolności jednostki oraz z jej unieszczęśliwienia; z prawa do posiadania wyjątkowej tożsamości i otwartej przyszłości; ze szkód psychicznych i rozchwiania tożsamości; z naturalnego prawa jednostki do relacji rodzinnych. Na koniec autor przeformułuje argument z mądrości odrazy na argument z mądrości współczucia.

In this article a certain "aesthetical" argument in favor of the situation ontology is presented. The connections between the claims concerning ontology, semantics and grammar are examined. The main thesis of the article is, that assuming the non-compositionality principle commits us to the acceptance of the primacy of situation.

This study of the Sicilian Questions of the philosopher and mystic Ibn Sabٴ īn of Murcia interprets the structure and sources of the text as a reflection of intellectual life in the late Almohad Arab West.

Investigation of spiritual-moral factors of psychological defence of personality is being put in practice through Christian cognition about a man and with the help of modern psychological achievement in science. The most important spiritual factors are sin and passion. Sin is observed as one of the reasons of moral men'sdiseases, which brings to moral, psychological and body's destructions and unconscious psychological defence. Defensive mechanisms is the way to support men's sin passion, blunt conscience, keep positive illusion and unbroken “I” of (...) his personality. All the necessary ways to overcome destructive psychologicaldefence and to get mental healthy are being observed. Confession, prayer, keep eating, taking part in Church Mystery, charity-wisdom are the main ways in Christian Tradition. (shrink)

This dissertation evaluates the contemporary viability of Aristotelian ethics. It argues that neo-Aristotelians are right in thinking that some version of Aristotle's ethics is viable today. However, standard interpretations are wrong in several respects: Aristotle's ethics does not and cannot ground ethics in eudaimonia as Nussbaum suggests it does. Nor does it treat virtue as a means to eudaimonia as Kant thought. Furthermore, Aristotle denies that ethics can be grounded at all. Instead, he suggests that arguments persuade only those who (...) have been properly habituated. ;The dissertation defends the relevance of Aristotle's ethics by arguing against some of the central challenges raised against it. First, Aristotle's argument in the Ethics need not presuppose an outdated metaphysical biology. Rather, he starts by analyzing the teleological structure of human action. Second, although Aristotle does not remove the tension between the contemplative and the ethical life, he argues convincingly that they can and must coexist in every complete human life. Third, even though Aristotle allows for more paternalism than do most contemporary thinkers, he still makes autonomy a necessary part of eudaimonia. Fourth, once we understand that Aristotle is not grounding ethics in eudaimonia, we see that many of Kant's criticisms of eudaimonistic ethics do not apply to him. Nevertheless, important disagreements remain, and the dissertation suggests that one important difference concerns the nature of inclinations and thus is psychological rather than ethical. Finally, the dissertation examines Nussbaum's attempt to create an Aristotelian ethics. It objects to her interpretation of Aristotle, and it also questions her project of grounding ethics in eudaimonia. ;The dissertation concludes that according to Aristotle, ethics cannot be grounded in anything other than the idea of what is intrinsically valuable, an idea which we acquire through habituation. It also suggests that Aristotle's ethics can withstand the objections that have been discussed. Indeed, it argues that Aristotle's ethics, which derives the virtues from an analysis of rational action and which gives inclinations a crucial role in moral action, is both viable and attractive. (shrink)