By examining the idea found in the works of several contemporary philosophers that the multiplicity of worlds is no longer merely possible – as it was for Leibniz – but actually determines our experience of reality, the article proposes an understanding of worlds as transcendental structures that frame the ontological multiplicity. The article argues that such a proliferation of actual worlds implies that the concept of world should be seen today as a category that belongs to the order of fiction, (...) making the world-building devices of literature relevant for understanding the contemporary experience of reality. The first part examines the conceptions of multiple worlds of Leibniz, Deleuze, and Badiou through the structural differences and similarities between possible and fictional worlds. While Deleuze actualises possible worlds, Badiou actualises fictional worlds. The second part explores worlds as political fictions, revisiting Kant’s conception of cosmopolitanism via Rancière’s definition of politics as a conflict of worlds. Rancière’s formulation of political dissensus in fictional and narrative terms sheds a new light on Kant’s description of cosmopolitanism as a perspective that presents history as a novelistic narrative. (shrink)

The essay discusses a significant shift in conceptualizing the notion of representation found in Alain Badiou’s ontology and Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics. From Heidegger to Deleuze, the artwork was able to express an ontological truth about the world on the condition that it does not represent it. Badiou’s ‘subtractive’ approach to ontology and Rancière’s redefinition of the modern aesthetic break with representation, however, suggest that there is nothing to express beyond the veil of representation. Instead, representation can only be counteracted by (...) the occurrence of surplus representations that subvert the principles of the dominant regime of representation. The essay provides an understanding of this shift by reversing the Leibnizian conceptual metaphor Adorno used to describe the modern artwork. Unlike ‘windowless monads’, whose seclusion from the world enables them to convey an ontological truth, artworks as ‘monadless windows’ reframe the parameters of what is perceived as reality. (shrink)

The article explores Adorno’s understanding of fetishism and melancholy as immanent to the artwork’s autonomous structure. In order to understand the relation between them, the Freudian understanding of fetishism and melancholy has to be considered along with the more explicit reference to the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism. Analysing the implications of Adorno’s claim that commodity fetishism is at the origin of artistic autonomy, the article shows how it should be understood not only as a materialist demystification but also as (...) a reaffirmation of art’s apparent self-sufficiency and its capacity to resist the commodification of society. Nevertheless—the article claims—thas this is only possible if art’s fetishism is dialectically opposed to its melancholy, through which art establishes a relation to the heterogeneous element of the lost object produced by its autonomous form. (shrink)

This paper attempts to clarify the aesthetical, ontological, and political grounds upon which certain modern philosophers (above all Heidegger and Deleuze) denounce the metaphor as an alternative device for producing meaning through language. It comes to the conclusion that the critique of metaphor is based on the critique of analogy as defined by the laws of representation, which should be replaced by a more direct expression of immanence or being. On the basis of other philosophical assumptions from various traditions and (...) the insights of literary theory, it proposes an alternative model of the metaphor that is no longer founded on analogy and demonstrates its philosophical implications. (shrink)

The affective turn in photography theory takes as its point of departure Roland Barthes’s move from semiology to affective phenomenology in Camera Lucida. This article, however, considers the way affective phenomenology is itself grounded in the semiological structure of photography. It looks at how, before Camera Lucida was even written, Thierry de Duve had already discussed the affective implications of Barthes’s understanding of photography’s indexical nature. The article then proceeds to rethink the structural affectivity of photography beyond Barthes’s and de (...) Duve’s emphasis on a direct relation between indexicality and loss. Reconsidering photography through Jacques Rancière’s conception of the aesthetic regime of art, the article rather puts emphasis on the indeterminacy of photography, which results from the way the camera captures and isolates a spatio-temporal fragment. Shifting the focus from indexicality to indeterminacy sheds a different light on the loss implied by the structure of photography, parallel to how Freud understood the difference between mourning and melancholy. (shrink)

A peculiar trait unites Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag’s famous accounts of photography: both emphasize the anti-Proustian character of the medium. Two versions of the same assertion are presented in Camera Lucida and On Photography, namely that the nature of photography prevents it from being able to provide the experience needed to regain what was lost in time. Curiously enough, in Raoul Ruiz’s film adaptation, Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, photographs are used by the director to set the world of the (...) novel into motion. Does the opening scene, which shows the writer browsing through photographs of the people he used to know, merely present Proust’s documented habit of collecting photographs of the... (shrink)

The article examines the transformations of the philosophical concept of world as it appears in the cosmopolitan tradition of political thought and its relation to the problem of the border. It focuses particularly on how world is understood as either lost or multiplied in the contexts of modernity, globalisation, and migration. The article discusses postcolonial conceptions of cosmopolitics and the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt to show how the universal ideal of the world is replaced by singular constructions of worlds (...) in terms of the experience of migrants and refugees or the phenomenological horizon of political action. I conclude by suggesting that Jacques Rancière’s understanding of politics as a conflict of worlds can take us beyond the traps of both cosmopolitan universalism and the phenomenological singularity of being-in-the-world. (shrink)

Am Ende des 18. Jh., als eines der berühmtesten politischen Dokumente, Die Erklärung der Menschen- und Bürgerrechte, verabschiedet wurde, war die Antwort auf die Frage nach dem „Was” der Menschenrechte nicht schwer zu finden, obwohl damit Neuland einer grundsätzlich anderen politischen Moral betreten wurde. Auf diese oder andere Weise wurden die Menschenrechte aus der Vernunft abgeleitet, d. h. aus einem Vermögen, welches ein „Evangelium der reinen Vernunft” schreiben sollte. Eineinhalb Jahrhunderte später, im Jahr 1948, war eine solche Antwort nicht nur (...) hindernisreich, sondern es ist in den einigen mageren Jahren des Wirkens der Allgemeinen Erklärung der Menschenrechte klar geworden, dass das Suchen nach dem „Was” der Menschenrechte jeden Tag mehrere und tiefere Unstimmigkeiten zum Vorschein bringt. Deswegen wird eine strategische Verschiebung vorgeschlagen: Erklären wir die Frage nach dem „Was” als überholt und widmen wir uns dem „Wie” der Menschenrechte. Anstatt der positiven Aufgabe, welches Denken auf das „Was” der Menschenrechte antworten kann, schlagen wir eine negative Aufgabe vor: Welches Denken kann dem „Wie” der Menschenrechte schaden? In diesem Beitrag soll gezeigt werden, dass sich durch die Postmoderne das onto-theo-logische Denken eingeschlichen hat, das als eine Linse wirkt, die den Blick auf die Menschenrechte verzerrt und dadurch eine der größten zeitgenössischen Gefahren für die Menschenrechte mit sich bringt. (shrink)

Krajem 18. stoljeća, kad je donesen jedan od najpoznatijih političkih dokumenata, Deklaracija o pravima čovjeka i građanina, nije bilo teško pronaći odgovor na pitanje o onome »što« ljudskih prava, premda se time stupilo na tlo jednog u temelju drugačijega morala. Na ovaj ili onaj način ljudska prava su se izvodila iz uma, što znači iz jedne moći koja bi trebala napisati »Evanđelje čistoga uma«. Stoljeće i pol kasnije, 1948. godine, jedno takvo pitanje ne samo da je bilo manjkavo, nego je (...) u samo nekoliko godina djelovanja Opće deklaracije o ljudskim pravima postalo jasno da traganje za onim »što« ljudskih prava svaki dan iznosi na vidjelo sve brojnije i dublje nesuglasice. Stoga je predložen jedan strateški pomak: proglasimo pitanje o onom »što« prevladanim i posvetimo se onome »kako« ljudskih prava. Umjesto pozitivne zadaće predlažemo negativnu zadaću: Koje mišljenje može naštetiti onome »kako« ljudskih prava? U ovom se prilogu treba pokazati kako se kroz postmodernu uvuklo onto-teološko mišljenje koje djeluje kao leća koja iskrivljuje pogled na ljudska prava i time predstavlja jednu od najvećih suvremenih prijetnji za ljudska prava. (shrink)

À la fin du XVIIIe siècle, à l’époque où fut voté l’un des documents politiques les plus célèbresla Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, il n’était pas difficile de répondre à la question du « quoi » des droits de l’homme, même si cela revenait à entrer dans une sphère morale fondamentalement différente. D’une manière ou d’une autre, les droits de l’homme avaient leur origine dans la raison, c’est-à-dire dans un pouvoir qui devrait écrire l’ « Evangile de (...) la raison pure ». Un siècle et demi plus tard, en 1948, une telle question non seulement ne suffisait plus, mais il était devenu clair, déjà à peine quelques années après l’entrée en vigueur de la Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme, que ce « quoi » des droits de l’homme mettait chaque jour en lumière des divergences de plus en plus profondes. C’est pourquoi nous proposons une avancée stratégique : décidons que la question du « quoi » est dépassée et consacrons-nous à la question du « comment » des droits de l’homme. À la place du problème positif – Quelle pensée peut répondre à la question du « quoi » des droits de l’homme ? -, nous proposons un problème négatif : Quelle pensée peut nuire au « comment » des droits de l’homme ? Cette contribution doit démontrer qu’une pensée onto-théologique s’est introduite dans le post-modernisme, agissant comme une lentille qui déforme le regard porté sur les droits de l’homme et qui représente pour ceux-ci l’une des plus importantes menaces contemporaines. (shrink)

The strict-tolerant approach to paradox promises to erect theories of naïve truth and tolerant vagueness on the firm bedrock of classical logic. We assess the extent to which this claim is founded. Building on some results by Girard we show that the usual proof-theoretic formulation of propositional ST in terms of the classical sequent calculus without primitive Cut is incomplete with respect to ST-valid metainferences, and exhibit a complete calculus for the same class of metainferences. We also argue that the (...) latter calculus, far from coinciding with classical logic, is a close kin of Priest’s LP. (shrink)

The contributors to this volume examine recent controversies about the importance of common sense psychology for our understanding of the human mind. Common sense provides a familiar and friendly psychological scheme by which to talk about the mind. Its categories tend to portray the mind as quite different from the rest of nature, and thus irreducible to physical matters and its laws. In this volume a variety of positions on common sense psychology from critical to supportive, from exegetical to speculative, (...) are represented. Among the questions posed are: Is common sense psychology an empirical theory, a body of analytic knowledge, a practice or a strategy? If it is a legitimate enterprise can it be naturalized or not? If it is not legitimate can it be eliminated? Is its fate tied to our understanding of consciousness? Should we approach its concepts and generalizations from the standpoint of conceptual analysis or from the philosophy of science? (shrink)

In this original and provocative book, Bogdan proposes that the ability to interpret others' mental states should be viewed as an evolutionary adaptation.

Some of the topics presented in this volume of original essays on contemporary approaches to belief include the problem of misrepresentation and false belief, conscious versus unconscious belief, explicit versus tacit belief, and the durable versus ephemeral question of the nature of belief. The contributors, Fred Dretske, Keith Lehrer, William Lycan, Stephen Schiffer, Stephen P. Stich, and the editor, Radu Bogdan, focus on the mental realization of belief, its cognitive and behavioral aspects, and the semantic aspects of its content. (...) This interdisciplinary study takes advantage of many new theories in what has become an important area of research. (shrink)

Intra-theoretical logical pluralism is a form of meaning-invariant pluralism about logic, articulated recently by Hjortland :355–373, 2013). This version of pluralism relies on it being possible to define several distinct notions of provability relative to the same logical calculus. The present paper picks up and explores this theme: How can a single logical calculus express several different consequence relations? The main hypothesis articulated here is that the divide between the internal and external consequence relations in Gentzen systems generates a form (...) of intra-theoretical logical pluralism. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a proof-theoretic defence of meaning-invariant logical pluralism. I argue that there is a relation of co-determination between the operational and structural aspects of a logic. As a result, some features of the consequence relation are induced by the connectives. I propose that a connective is defined by those rules which are conservative and unique, while at the same time expressing only connective-induced structural information. This is the key to stabilizing the meaning of the connectives across (...) multiple determinations of the consequence relation. (shrink)

Arguments, the story goes, have one or more premises and only one conclusion. A contentious generalisation allows arguments with several disjunctively connected conclusions. Contentious as this generalisation may be, I will argue nevertheless that it is justified. My main claim is that multiple conclusions are epiphenomena of the logical connectives: some connectives determine, in a certain sense, multiple-conclusion derivations. Therefore, such derivations are completely natural and can safely be used in proof-theoretic semantics.

Logical nihilism is the view that the relation of logical consequence is empty: there are counterexamples to any putative logical law. In this paper, I argue that the nihilist threat is illusory. The nihilistic arguments do not work. Moreover, the entire project is based on a misguided interpretation of the generality of logic.

The theme of this essay is rather simple, though its demonstration is not. It is that humans think reflexively or metamentally because -- and often in the forms in which -- they interpret each other. In this essay ‘metamental’ means ‘about mental’ and ‘reflexive mind’ means ‘a mind thinking about its own thoughts.’ To think reflexively or metamentally is to think about thoughts deliberately and explicitly, as in thinking that my current thoughts about metamentation are right. Thinking about thoughts requires (...) understanding thoughts as thoughts, as mental structures that represent; it also requires an ability to relate thoughts to other thoughts and to recognize such inter-thought relations. Since metamentation is essential to and uniquely distinctive of human minds, the idea that it originates in interpreting other minds can be encapsulated in the slogan that minds are minded because minds mind minds. This word play translates as: minds evolve into reflexive minds because they mind other minds -- where ‘minding other minds’ means interacting and bonding with other minds, being concerned or curious about them, representing their relations to the world, manipulating and using these relations for some purpose, and the like. All of this amounts (in my terminology) to interpreting other minds in social contexts of cooperation, communication, education, politics, and so on. It follows that intermental relations among individuals, handled by a distinct competence for interpretation, are essential to the evolution of abilities to represent intramental relations among thoughts, typical of a reflexive mind. I take ‘interpretation’ to be a convenient, short, and grammatically flexible label for what is known in philosophy as commonsense or folk psychology and in psychology as theory of mind, mindreading, or naive psychology. Interpretation is a cognitive rapport between an interpreter (she, in this book) and a subject (he), whereby she represents his mind-world relations, from the simplest, such as seeing.... (shrink)

Eliminativism assumes that commonsense psychology describes and explains the mind in terms of the internal design and operation of the mind. If this assumption is invalidated, so is eliminativism. The same conditional is true of intentional realism. Elsewhere (Bogdan 1991) I have argued against this 'folk- theory-theory' assumption by showing that commonsense psychology is not an empirical prototheory of the mind but a biosocially motivated practice of coding, utilizing, and sharing information from and about conspecifics. Here, without presupposing a (...) specific analysis of commonsense psychology, I want to challenge a key implication of the 'folk-theory-theory' assumption to the effect that commonsense psychology is committed to a definite architecture of the mind. (shrink)

A logical constant is weakly disharmonious if its elimination rules are weaker than its introduction rules. Substructural weak disharmony is the weak disharmony generated by structural restrictions on the eliminations. I argue that substructural weak disharmony is not a defect of the constants which exhibit it. To the extent that it is problematic, it calls into question the structural properties of the derivability relation. This prompts us to rethink the issue of controlling the structural properties of a logic by means (...) of harmony. I argue that such a control is possible and desirable. Moreover, it is best achieved by global tests of harmony. (shrink)

This is how guidance of behavior to goal grounds and explains cognition and the main forms in which it manages information.

An argument that in response to sociocultural pressures, human minds develop self-consciousness by activating a complex machinery of self-regulation.

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue S1, Page S72-S78, March‐April 2022.

An exploration of why and how the human competence for predication came to be.

The existence of the obligation to follow rules in sport is widely accepted, but there are only a few studies that provide accounts that justify it. Building upon Wolff's challenge to traditional political theories, this study proposes a theory that limits the level of normativity to which participants in sport contests are bound in an effort to maximize their autonomy. Instead of constructing a unitary theory of obligations to follow sport rules, a pluralistic account is offered, one that allows for (...) multiple sources of normativity, thus augmenting the freedom of communities to play games according to their values. (shrink)

In the past two decades, Confucian meritocrats have justified the unequal distribution of political power by appeal to the ideal of Confucian virtue politics. In this article, I demonstrate that at the heart of Confucian virtue politics lies a political leader’s affective accountability and show that non-democratic Confucian meritocracy fails to embody this moral ideal. Then, I argue that the ideal of Confucian virtue politics can be better realized in democratic system. To this end, I first describe how ordinary citizens’ (...) moral demand for a political leader’s affective accountability in a consolidated democratic society can make theoretical space for a Confucian political leader. Next, I articulate the role of a Confucian political leader in contemporary democratic society from a normative standpoint and show that at the core of Confucian democratic meritocracy lies ‘mutual moral transformation’, formed by dialectical interactions between a virtuous Confucian political leader and empowered citizens. (shrink)

Reflective equilibrium, as a methodology for the "formation of logics," fails on the *fringe*, where intricate details can make or break a logical theory. On the fringe, the process of theorification cannot be methodologically governed by anything like reflective equilibrium. When logical theorising gets tricky, there is nothing on the pre-theoretical side on which our theoretical claims can reflect of---at least not in any meaningful way. Indeed, the fringe is exclusively the domain of theoretical negotiations and the methodological power of (...) reflective equilibrium is merely nominal. (shrink)

Research targeting emotion’s impact on relational episodic memory has largely focused on spatial aspects, but less is known about emotion’s impact on memory for an event’s temporal associations. The present research investigated this topic. Participants viewed a series of interspersed negative and neutral images with instructions to create stories linking successive images. Later, participants performed a surprise memory test, which measured temporal associations between pairs of consecutive pictures where one picture was negative and one was neutral. Analyses focused on how (...) the order of negative and neutral images during encoding influenced retrieval accuracy. Converging results from a discovery study (N = 72) and pre-registered replication study (N = 150) revealed a “forward-favouring” effect of emotion in temporal memory encoding: Participants encoded associations between negative stimuli and subsequent neutral stimuli more strongly than associations between negative stimuli and preceding neutral stimuli. This finding may reflect a novel trade-off regarding emotion’s effects on memory and is relevant for understanding affective disorders, as key clinical symptoms can be conceptualised as maladaptive memory retrieval of temporal details. (shrink)

A prominent hypothesis holds that by speaking to infants in infant‐directed speech (IDS) as opposed to adult‐directed speech (ADS), parents help them learn phonetic categories. Specifically, two characteristics of IDS have been claimed to facilitate learning: hyperarticulation, which makes the categories more separable, and variability, which makes the generalization more robust. Here, we test the separability and robustness of vowel category learning on acoustic representations of speech uttered by Japanese adults in ADS, IDS (addressed to 18‐ to 24‐month olds), or (...) read speech (RS). Separability is determined by means of a distance measure computed between the five short vowel categories of Japanese, while robustness is assessed by testing the ability of six different machine learning algorithms trained to classify vowels to generalize on stimuli spoken by a novel speaker in ADS. Using two different speech representations, we find that hyperarticulated speech, in the case of RS, can yield better separability, and that increased between‐speaker variability in ADS can yield, for some algorithms, more robust categories. However, these conclusions do not apply to IDS, which turned out to yield neither more separable nor more robust categories compared to ADS inputs. We discuss the usefulness of machine learning algorithms run on real data to test hypotheses about the functional role of IDS. (shrink)

Conventionalism in sport philosophy has been rejected as unable to provide a theory of normativity and as collapsing in ethical relativism, but this criticism is rather imprecise about its target, which invites doubt about the legitimacy of the concept of conventionalism described by its critics. Instead, a more charitable and legitimate account of conventionalism is proposed, one that draws inspiration from conventionalism in axiomatic geometry and is able to avoid the counterarguments directed against conventionalism. This new model allows for a (...) number of non-conventional elements of sport, namely the definition of sport and certain central moral norms, while at the same time arguing that normativity in sport is not exhausted by them, which leaves athletic communities with authority over a broad range of norms. (shrink)

Information is the fuel of cognition. At its most basic level, information is a matter of structures interacting under laws. The notion of information thus reflects the (relational) fact that a structure is created by the impact of another structure. The impacted structure is an encoding, in some concrete form, of the interaction with the impacting structure. Information is, essentially, the structural trace in some system of an interaction with another system; it is also, as a consequence, the structural fuel (...) which drives the impacted system's subsequent processes and behavior. Information takes various forms because the world has many levels of compositional and functional complexity, under different constraints. The key constraints that matter in the understanding of information are natural patterns of organization, or types, and systematic correlations among types, or laws. These level- sensitive constraints, in the form of types and laws, shape the very form in which information is tokened in some structure, that is, the very form in which it is encoded. As a result, the information-producing interactions bring about different sorts of structures, with various sorts of causal effects and functions, whence so many ways in which information is coded and utilized. (shrink)