In this essay, I depart from the historical exclusion of trans women’s ethical insights from care ethics by focusing on trans literature as a source of knowledge expressed by trans women about care. I open up with the systematic denial of trans women as ethical knowers by analyzing Marilyn Frye's characterization of trans women as mindless servile robots under patriarchy. I then turn to trans literature to counter this portrayal. Specifically, I discuss short stories by Casey Plett and (...) Ryka Aoki as sources of knowledge about assumptive and futurebound practices of care. I begin by arguing that the work of Maria Lugones considers the spatial dimensions of love, and that this suggests that care involves giving space to another on their own terms. I then turn to Plett’s story “Other Women” to unpack assumptive care as a short-circuited form of caring in which a relationship to the other on their own terms is closed off by transphobic assumptions. I contrast this with Plett’s story “Winning,” which describes a futurebound care in which another’s space is kept open, permitting action that allows them to flourish on their own terms. After this, I discuss Aoki’s “To the New World” as an engagement with both racist assumptive care and futurebound care aimed at self-care. I conclude that these stories provide a rich space for considering trans ethical knowledge about care. (shrink)

An interview with Ed Casey where we discuss the intersections of his philosophical work with current political issues, including the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Perin argues that theSceptic is engaged in the search for truth and that since this is so, the Sceptic aims to satisfy certain basic rational requirements.

This chapter examines an epistemological disjunctivist treatment of self-knowledge of belief. More specifically, it considers whether such a Disjunctivism is confronted by a familiar objection facing Disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge. The objection is this: given that good and bad cases are subjectively indistinguishable, one cannot take oneself to be in the good case, when one is, by reflection alone, as Disjunctivists claim. Some philosophers have argued that the objection does not apply to the case of self-knowledge; I argue they are (...) wrong. There are “ringers” for belief, and their existence may undermine our claims to self-knowledge, even in good cases. I suggest that whether the objection applies to the case of self-knowledge depends on how we conceive of conscious judgment. I end by considering an alternative conception that rules out the possibility of bad cases for self-knowledge. (shrink)

Kriegel has recently developed an adverbial account of intentionality, in part to solve the problem of how we can think of non-existents. The view has real virtues: it endorses a non-relational conception of intentionality and is ontologically conservative. Alas, the view ultimately cannot replace the act-object model of intentionality that it seeks to, because it depends on the act-object model for its intelligibility at key points. It thus fails as a revisionistic theory. I argue that the virtues of adverbialism can (...) be had from within the act-object framework, provided we understand intentional objects correctly. I use Crane as a guide here, and build on his work on intentional objects. In the end, we can provide a suitable solution to the problem of thinking of non-existents within the act-object framework without adopting implausible ontological or metaphysical views. So, adverbialism is neither a possible stand-alone revisionary option nor a needed modif... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Autonomy is foundational to ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, and it has been closely associated with argumentation. What is curious about autonomy is that it has traditionally been explained in terms of reasoning and argument: autonomy involves reasoning because, standardly, someone who’s autonomous is one who thinks things through, who has reasons for their actions. Autonomy regards argument because to respect the autonomy of someone who thinks things through, one must offer them reasons, that is, argue with them. (...) One common thought is that provided one’s arguments meet certain criteria (e.g., they’re not sophistries or clever manipulations), then argument respects autonomy. But is this really so? No. Properly understood, argument is a kind of paternalism, for to argue with someone means to enter into and manage their stream of reasons, the very things that account for their autonomy. (shrink)

This is an interview with Edward S. Casey, conducted by Donald A. Landes.

In Christ the Heart of Creation, Rowan Williams argues that Christology as expounded by the classical tradition in Western theology holds a bounty for thinking in Christian ontology about the God-world relation. In particular, he uses the work of Søren Kierkegaard throughout to show that the relation between finite and infinite, immanent and transcendent, is not competitive, and thus there need be no metaphysical problem when holding that the incarnate God-man is both fully human and divine. This essay argues, however, (...) that Kierkegaard’s own pseudonymous work cited by Williams holds the incarnation to be far more paradoxical and intellectually offensive than Williams allows. However, such priority of offense does not put an end to Christ’s central ontological position but rather shifts it to new directions in our thinking about theological ontology. Rather than Williams’ own conception of a cosmos in which the divine and non-divine are compatible and harmonious, Kierkegaard presents a doctrine of existence in which God and the human are in constant, dynamic engagement and in which temporal being bears ultimate primacy for Christian existence. (shrink)

This is the first volume dedicated solely to the topic of epistemological disjunctivism. The original essays in this volume, written by leading and up-and-coming scholars on the topic, are divided into three thematic sections. The first set of chapters addresses the historical background of epistemological disjunctivism. It features essays on ancient epistemology, Immanuel Kant, J.L. Austin, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second section tackles a number contemporary issues related to epistemological disjunctivism, including its relationship with perceptual disjunctivism, radical skepticism, (...) and reasons for belief. Finally, the third group of essays extends the framework of epistemological disjunctivism to other forms of knowledge, such as testimonial knowledge, knowledge of other minds, and self-knowledge. Epistemological Disjunctivism is a timely collection that engages with an increasingly important topic in philosophy. It will appeal to researches and graduate students working in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Brought to you by: Crop X editors: Jonathan Alexander Perez, Harmony Smith, Corinne Tendorf, David Turturo, and Derek Rahn Williams. Faculty Advisor: David Turturo; Crop X team included: Chaimae Alehyane, Zachary S. Casey, Suzanna Brinez, Jacob Brown, Elizabeth George, Francisco Javier Muniz Ituarte, Brodey Myers. -/- Credits: Huckabee College of Architecture; Graphic Designers: Studio BLDG (Blossom Liu + Danny Gray); English Editor: Luke Studebaker; Spanish Translator: Jessie Forbes; Printer: Die Keure. Cover Photo: Derek Williams. -/- Generously supported by the (...) Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Huckabee College of Architecture, Texas Tech University. (shrink)

Pessimists about moral testimony hold that there is something suboptimal about forming moral beliefs by deferring to another. This paper motivates an analogous claim about self-knowledge of the reason-responsive attitudes. When it comes to your own mind, it seems important to know things “from the inside”, in the first-personal way, rather than putting your trust in another. After motivating Pessimism, the paper offers an explanation of its truth. First-person knowledge is distinctive because it involves knowing a state of mind and (...) finding it intelligible from one’s point of view. It concludes by considering the value of this form of self-understanding. (shrink)

I BEGIN WITH A PUZZLE of sorts. Time is one; space is two—at least two. Time comes always already unified, one time. Thus we say “What time is it now?” and not “Which time is it now?” We do not ask, “What space is it?” Yet we might ask: “Which space are we in?”. Any supposed symmetry of time and space is skewed from the start. If time is self-consolidating—constantly gathering itself together in coherent units such as years or hours (...) or semesters or seasons— space is self-proliferating. Take, for example, the dimensionality of space. One dimension in space is represented by a point or a line, whose radically reduced format mocks the extensiveness of cosmic space. Two dimensions, as in a plane figure, also falls far short of our sense that space spreads out indefinitely far beyond the perceiving subject. Only with three dimensions do we begin to approach an adequation between the structure and the sense of space. For then the subject is surrounded by something sufficiently roomy in which to live and move. Indeed, as Aristotle, Kant, and Merleau-Ponty all remark, the three-dimensionality of space directly reflects our bodily state, that is, the fact that as upright beings three perpendicular planes implicitly meet and intersect in us. Even here, proliferation abounds: our bilateral symmetry means that each dimension is doubled: one vertical plane bifurcates into “up” and “down,” the other vertical plane into “front” and “back,” and the horizontal plane into “right” and “left.” Thus subject-centered space is triple, only to be redoubled. Further, if we think of spatiality not as body-based but as locatory—as determined by landmarks and other locales in the environment—the proliferation is more striking still. There are the four cardinal directions, which themselves split easily into the thirty two points of a compass. Nor need we be so arithmetically well-rounded. Even apart from fancy mathematical models of n –dimensional space, and recent technological instantiations of virtual space, there is no end to the number or ways in which we can be oriented in space—in accordance with what Deleuze and Guattari call “the variability, the polyvocity of directions” by which we can move in any given spatial scene. Beyond direction, however, is place. Heidegger remarks that “space has been split up into places.” The fact is that we continually find ourselves immersed in a multiplex spatial network whose nodal points are supplied by particular places. If space is infinitely large, place is indefinitely many. (shrink)

Originally published in 1966, this pivotal work of Mikel Dufrenne revises Kant’s notion of _a priori,_ a concept previously given insufficient attention by philosophers, to realize a rich understanding that finally does justice to one of Kant’s most troubling cruxes. Following the Husserlian analytics of phenomenology, Dufrenne postulates a dualistic conception of the _a priori_ as a structure that expresses itself outside the human subject, but also as a virtual knowledge that points to a philosophy of immediate apprehension or feeling. (...) A friend of Paul Ricoeur, with whom he was detained as a prisoner of war during World War II, Dufrenne’s work until now has been sorely overlooked by American philosophers. (shrink)

Writers in pragmatist aesthetics tend, as naturalists, to avoid the originally Kantian-Idealist term “autonomy” when discussing art and aesthetic experience. Even so, a more general autonomy concept, emphasizing that art and the aesthetic comprise a normatively special aspect of experience, is already implicit in much of the pragmatist aesthetics literature, including in John Dewey’s seminal Art as Experience. As the cultural disciplines move beyond earlier modernist- and postmodernist-era debates about art’s total autonomy from or total “heteronomous” absorption within the processes (...) of life, I argue that a more naturalistically down-to-earth version of the above general autonomy idea remains indispensable in a century of social, environmental, and existential crises whose solutions demand creative agency of a kind that artistically charged experiences can inspire. Drawing upon key pragmatist themes, I further develop the general autonomy idea by arguing that aesthetic experiences within and without the fine arts are horizontally transcendent; that art and the aesthetic answer a persistent human need for experiences that are intrinsically rewarding while also serving the instrumental function of being redemptive; that to this end, our global culture needs collectively accessible autonomous spaces within language and experience that can help people explore and interrogate the meanings of what we individually and collectively do; and that the value of our theoretical beliefs about the arts lies not in their power to represent a world supposedly independent of human thought and action but in what they lead us to do in the world. In conclusion, I illustrate this pragmatic interpretation of the general autonomy idea with a reading of Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory. (shrink)

. I give a systematic presentation of a fairly large family of multiple-conclusion modal logics that are paraconsistent and/or paracomplete. After providing motivation for studying such systems, I present semantics and tableau-style proof theories for them. The proof theories are shown to be sound and complete with respect to the semantics. I then show how the “standard” systems of classical, single-conclusion modal logics fit into the framework constructed.

This work is an attempt to provide the scaffolding of a viable environmental ethics using the later writings of Martin Heidegger.

Edward S. Casey provides a thorough description of the varieties of human memory, including recognizing and reminding, reminiscing and commemorating, body memory and place memory. The preface to the new edition extends the scope of the original text to include issues of collective memory, forgetting, and traumatic memory, and aligns this book with Casey's newest work on place and space. This ambitious study demonstrates that nothing in our lives is unaffected by remembering.

Richard Moran and Matthew Boyle have objected to a variety of accounts of self-knowledge of belief on the grounds that they depict us, in possessing that knowledge, as alienated from our beliefs. The idea of alienation is meant to capture something important about the first-person perspective and to help us rule out competing accounts of self-knowledge. Moran and Boyle’s claim is that standing in a first-personal relation to one’s belief involves both knowing what one believes and occupying the perspective of (...) that belief on the world. This is the Alienation Constraint. The goal of the chapter is to provide a novel argument for it. Drawing on Shoemaker’s idea that it is impossible for a rational and conceptually competent subject to be “self-blind”, it argues that our capacity for self-knowledge must be constitutive of possession of the concept of belief, the Concept Constraint. The chapter argues that the Alienation Constraint follows from the Concept Constraint on an independently plausible understanding of the concept of belief. (shrink)

When the question is posed as to when Chinese thought influenced Western philosophy, people often turn to the philosophy of the German rationalist Christian Wolff, whose 1721 speech on the virtues of Confucianism led to his academic indictment and eventual ousting from the University of Halle in 1723. In his speech, Wolff lauds the Chinese for attaining virtues by natural revelation rather than appealing to Christian revelation, which made their accomplishments all the more impressive in his eyes (Fuchs 2006). According (...) to Kanamori (1997), the audience of Wolff’s speech “criticized it as the product of atheistic thoughts because they thought that the speaker valued Chinese morality as highly as Christian morals, which were formulated by divine revelation” (p. 299). The worry, in other words, was that Wolff was corrupted by Chinese thought since the atheism of Confucianism may have influenced Wolff’s own views. Almost invariably, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz’s name is involved in conversations that question the Chinese influence on Western philosophy, but it is typically tempered by the standard scholarly interpretation of the Leibniz-China connection, which is that Leibniz respected Chinese thought but was not influenced by it. I will argue against this standard scholarly interpretation by showing how Leibniz could have been influenced by Chinese thought. In particular, I propose that Leibniz’s conception of monads, which is something that we only see after his engagement with Chinese thought, may have been influenced by the Huayan Buddhist concept of li, which creeps into the Neo-Confucianism with which Leibniz had exposure. Should my argument be persuasive, this means that Chinese thought influenced the Western world sooner than has been previously believed. (shrink)

In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, _The Fate of Place_ is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor of (...) space from the seventh century A.D. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century. Casey begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. He presents an impressive history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book's final section, Casey explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray. (shrink)

Suppose I make an utterance, intending it to be a command. You don’t take it to be one. Must one of us be wrong? In other words, must each utterance have, at most, one illocutionary force? Current debates over the constitutive norm of assertion and over illocutionary silencing, tend to assume that the answer is yes—that each utterance must be either an assertion, or a command, or a question, but not more than one of these. While I think that this (...) assumption is intuitive, I will argue in this paper that it is not sustainable. I’ll argue that this assumption makes it hard to explain what determines illocutionary force in a consistent and non-ad hoc way. I will demonstrate this is not fatal for the notion of illocutionary force writ large by offering some alternatives. (shrink)

This essay addresses the question how we know our conscious thinking. Conscious thinking typically takes the form of a series of discrete episodes that constitute a complex cognitive activity. We must distinguish the discrete episodes of thinking in which a particular content is represented in phenomenal consciousness and is present “before the mind’s eye” from the extended activities of which these episodes form a part. The extended activities are themselves contentful and we have first-person access to them. But because their (...) content is not represented in phenomenal consciousness, this access cannot be broadly observational. Instead, I argue, it is agential. Furthermore, that extended activities are intentional explains the possibility of a nonobservational form of introspective access to the discrete episodes in consciousness. (shrink)

Linda Zagzebski makes a compelling and many-faceted case for the primacy of virtue in both epistemology and ethics, and for the thesis that "epistemic evaluation just is a form of moral evaluation". Along the way, she explores a variety of theoretical problems in both ethics and epistemology, advancing promising new analyses and solutions. For a work of contemporary epistemology, Virtues of the Mind is uncommonly readable, relevant, and historically informed—and Zagzebski manages all this without sacrificing depth or rigor. Specialists and (...) nonspecialists alike will find it a rewarding study. (shrink)

Combined oral contraceptives have been demonstrated to have significant benefits for the treatment and prevention of disease. These medications also are associated with untoward health effects, and they may be directly contraceptive. Prescribers and users must compare and weigh the intended beneficial health effects against foreseeable but unintended possible adverse effects in their decisions to prescribe and use. Additionally, those who intend to abide by Catholic teachings must consider prohibitions against contraception. Ethical judgments concerning both health benefits and contraception are (...) approached in this essay through an overview of the therapeutic, prophylactic, untoward, and contraceptive effects of COC and discussion of magisterial and traditional Catholic teachings from natural law. Discerning through the principle of double effect, proportionate reason, and evidence gathered from the sciences, medical and moral conclusions are drawn that we believe to be fully compliant with good medicine and Catholic teaching. (shrink)

Disagreement is, for better or worse, pervasive in our society. Not only do we form beliefs that differ from those around us, but increasingly we have platforms and opportunities to voice those disagreements and make them public. In light of the public nature of many of our most important disagreements, a key question emerges: How does public disagreement affect what we know? This volume collects original essays from a number of prominent scholars--including Catherine Elgin, Sanford Goldberg, Jennifer Lackey, Michael Patrick (...) Lynch, and Duncan Pritchard, among others--to address this question in its diverse forms. The book is organized by thematic sections, in which individual chapters address the epistemic, ethical, and political dimensions of dissent. The individual contributions address important issues such as the value of disagreement, the nature of conversational disagreement, when dissent is epistemically rational, when one is obligated to voice disagreement or to object, the relation of silence and resistance to dissent, and when political dissent is justified. Voicing Dissent offers a new approach to the study of disagreement that will appeal to social epistemologists and ethicists interested in this growing area of epistemology. (shrink)

Motivational Internalism is the thesis that, necessarily, moral beliefs are accompanied by motivational states. It is plausible to suppose that while another’s testimony might transmit information and justification, it can’t transmit motivational states such as moral emotions. Thus, Internalism provides a compelling explanation of “Pessimism”, the view that there is something illicit about forming moral beliefs by testimony. This paper presents a nonconstitutive reading of the Internalist thesis and then argues that it supports Pessimism in the form of a defeasible (...) presumption against moral deference. It also argues against views which explain Pessimism by appeal to requirements on moral belief formation. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky (1928 – ) Noam Chomsky is an American linguist who has had a profound impact on philosophy. Chomsky’s linguistic work has been motivated by the observation that nearly all adult human beings have the ability to effortlessly produce and understand a potentially infinite number of sentences. For instance, it is very likely that … Continue reading Noam Chomsky →.

Dewey's "Art as Experience" defends the view that art and life are a y. But his version of this view exhibits an ambiguity, arising from his ency to move back and forth in the text between two usages of "art". These usages allow for two different interpretations of the theme of the unity and life: an "aesthetic" interpretation emphasizing the uniqueness of the arts as instrumentally valuable sources of aesthetic and ummatoryexperience, and an "aestheticist" interpretation emphasizing the ence of such (...) experience not only in the fine arts but throughout the trum of intelligent practice. Are these interpretations necessarily in ion, or can we read them as part of a single consistent argument about the re of art in Dewey's text? I arguethat we can, but to do so we need to dialectically, and with a glance toward a figure whose influence on Dewey nderappreciated in the recent literature: Hegel. (shrink)

During the debates about the legalization of Voluntary Assisted Dying in Victoria, Australia, the presence of anti-VAD health professionals in the medical community and reported high rates of conscientious objection to VAD suggested access may be limited. Most empirical research on CO has been conducted in the sexual and reproductive health context. However, given the fundamental differences in the nature of such procedures and the legislation governing it, these findings may not be directly transferable to VAD. Accordingly, we sought to (...) understand how CO operates in the context of VAD. Prior to the implementation of the VAD legislation in June 2019, we conducted semi-structured interviews with seventeen health professionals with a self-declared CO to VAD, to explore what motivated their CO. Participants identified multiple motivations, which can be broadly categorized as: concerns for oneself; concerns for patients; concerns about the current Victorian legislation; and concerns for the medical profession. Participants’ moral commitments included personal, professional, and political commitments. In some cases, one’s CO was specific to Victoria’s current legislation rather than VAD more broadly. Our findings suggest CO motivations extend beyond those traditionally cited and suggest a need to better understand and manage CO in the healthcare context. (shrink)

In the developing world, the dramatic male bias in tobacco use is usually ascribed to pronounced gender disparities in social, political, or economic power. This bias might also reflect under-reporting by woman and/or over-reporting by men. To test the role of gender inequality on gender differences in tobacco use we investigated tobacco use among the Aka, a Congo Basin foraging population noted for its exceptionally high degree of gender equality. We also tested a sexual selection hypothesis—that Aka men’s tobacco use (...) is related to risk taking. Tobacco use, income, tobacco purchases, tobacco sharing, reasons for using tobacco, risk taking, and other variables were measured using structured surveys and peer reports. Tobacco use was verified by testing for salivary cotinine, a nicotine metabolite. Contrary to expectations, we found a very large male bias in tobacco use. Low levels of use among females appeared to be explained by aversions to tobacco, concerns over its negative effects on fetal health, and a desire to attract husbands, who prefer nonsmoking wives. High male use appeared to be related to a desire to enhance hunting abilities and attract and/or retain wives, who prefer husbands that smoke. We conclude that low levels of smoking by Aka women are better explained by the hypothesis that women evolved to avoid plant toxins to protect their fetuses and nursing infants. High male use might be better explained by sexual selection. We also highlight the important role that recreational drugs appear to play in hunter-gatherer sharing relationships. (shrink)

This essay traces the historical development of the relationship between eschatology and statecraft in the thought of Paul Ramsey. At the outset of his career, as exemplified in Basic Christian Ethics, Ramsey outlined a position in which the Christian doctrine of eschatology could be construed as a source of positive theological warrants for engagement in politics. By the end of his career Ramsey's political realism had trumped this earlier theological position on eschatology such that eschatology was seen as a permanent (...) limiting factor that restrained what he saw as Enlightenment stained utopian Christian political schemes. (shrink)

ExcerptIGiven that law is a profession that consists almost entirely in the manipulation of language, and given that, for most lawyers, the profession consists even more in the manipulation of the written than of the spoken word, it is perhaps surprising that, at least in the German-speaking world, lawyers have a decidedly mixed, tending toward bad, reputation as prose stylists. In a 2010 book intended to provide remedial writing instruction to German lawyers, for example, lawyer and journalist Eva Engelken explains (...) the book's necessity by pointing to the disastrous condition of what she disparagingly calls “lawyer German” (Anwaltsdeutsch), noting…. (shrink)