Drawing upon the work of Merleau-Ponty, Borrett et al. (2000) have attempted to model the primordial, "empty heads turned towards the world." Putting the issue of embodiment aside for another day, they propose two separate models, one of movement and the other of perception. While I am sympathetic to the point of their project, I argue in this commentary that their models are insufficiently vague. The following analytic abstractions to which they commit themselves seem seriously at odds with the nature (...) of their task: action versus perception; vision versus the other senses; spatial properties versus, for example, colour and meaning; and 'a controller' versus the body and its environment. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The publication of George Yancy's latest book, Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher (2020), provides a welcome opportunity to reflect not just on the book itself but on ‘Black’ public philosophy and how it should be conceptualised. In the first part of the essay, I look at public philosophy as a recent self‐conscious exercise in the profession and then – citing Critical Theory's coinage from decades ago of the idea of a ‘counterpublic’ – raise the (...) question of whether the concept of a ‘Black counterpublic philosophy’ might not be a better designation. The second part defends this claim by enumerating some of the key obstacles facing Black philosophers in the field: a minuscule population, a stigmatising identity shaped by the legacy of racial slavery in modernity, the denial of a recognised philosophical tradition, and a racial research focus at odds with the discipline's self‐conception as removed from the corporeal. Finally, the third part situates Yancy's work and achievement against this background, while warning (as illustrated by the virulent backlash he has encountered) of the dangers of such an enterprise. (shrink)

This commentary on Rossi’s The Ethical Commonwealth in History will address three points of interpretation related to Kant’s conception of the ethical community/commonwealth (ethischen gemeinen Wesen). First, I will raise a number of concerns related to Rossi’s use of Kant’s concept of the highest good. Second, I will examine the relevance of the overall project of Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason to his discussion of the ethical community, a matter that Rossi does not take up. Third, I (...) will challenge the optimism that Rossi assigns to Perpetual Peace in light of its closing “antinomy between politics and morals.”. (shrink)

The Belief in Intuition offers a fascinating and highly original exploration of the self in relation to freedom and authority. Juxtaposing Bergson and Scheler with figures ranging from Kant and Nie...

This paper concerns Yablo’s theory of asserted content as it is developed in his new book Aboutness. Yablo’s central idea is that in order to specify the asserted content of a sentence, we have to subtract those parts of its full semantic content that concern irrelevant subject matters. The paper argues that it is doubtful whether Yablo’s account successfully deals with its most basic envisaged application: to account for a difference of apparent truth value in cases of ordinary presupposition failure. (...) In addition, some doubts are raised concerning the success of the extension of Yablo’s account to fictional talk, the informativeness of identity statements, and ontological commitments of number talk. (shrink)

A critical assessment of the second chapter of Samuel Fleischacker’s Being Me Being You, where Fleischacker makes use of Smith’s account of empathy to develop a distinctive Smithian conception of ‘humanity’.

I introduce the symposium on Anjan Chakravartty’s Scientific Ontology by summarizing the book’s main claims. In my commentary, I first challenge Chakravartty’s claim that naturalized metaphysics cannot be indexed to science simpliciter. Second, I argue that there are objective truths regarding what conduces to particular epistemic aims, and that Chakravartty is therefore too permissive regarding epistemic stances and their resultant ontologies. Third, I argue that it is unclear what stops epistemic stances from having unlimited influence. Finally, I argue that Chakravartty’s (...) epistemic stance voluntarism is inadequately motivated and lacks empirical support for its psychological content. (shrink)

Formulating my comments I have had difficulties of three kinds. First, I am not at all sure that I have understood Davidson correctly at every point. Secondly, not being aware of how far I may take for granted that Davidson and I share what may be called the same background ...

In Bad Beliefs, Levy presents a picture of belief-forming processes according to which, on most matters of significance, we defer to reliable sources by relying extensively on cultural and social cues. Levy conceptualizes the kind of evidence provided by socio-cultural environments as higher-order evidence. But his notion of higher-order evidence seems to differ from those available in the epistemological literature on higher-order evidence, and this calls for a reflection on how exactly social and cultural cues are/count as/provide higher-order evidence. In (...) this paper, I draw on the three-tiered model of epistemic exchange that I have been developing recently, which highlights the centrality of relations of attention and trust in belief-forming processes, to explicate how social and cultural cues provide higher-order evidence. I also argue that Levy’s account fails to sufficiently address the issue of strategic actors who have incentives to pollute epistemic environments for their benefit, and more generally the power struggles, incentives, and competing interests that characterize human sociality. Levy’s attempted reduction of the political to the epistemic ultimately fails, but his account of social and cultural cues as higher-order evidence offers an insightful perspective on epistemic social structures. (shrink)

This article is a reply to Venkatapuram's critique in his article Health, Vital Goals, Capabilities, this volume. I take issue mainly with three critical points put forward by Venkatapuram with regard to my theory of health. (1) I deny that the contents of my vital goals are relative to each community or context, as Venkatapuram claims. There is no conceptual connection at all between standard circumstances and vital goals, as I understand these concepts. (2) Venkatapuram notes that I stop short (...) of filling the framework of vital goals with any content and thereby make my concept of health less concrete. I reply that some vital goals are indeed universal, viz. the ones which are necessary conditions for survival. Many other vital goals are individual and cannot therefore be included in a universal list. (3) Venkatapuram claims that my definition of vital goals is too broad, since it entails that some persons without any disease can be regarded as ill. However, in my understanding health is a relational concept from a state of complete health to a state of maximal illness. In this framework, a minor reduction of a state of complete health does not entail illness. This article also contains a comparison between my theory of health and Martha Nussbaum's theory of capabilities for dignity. (shrink)

NRP is a family of views differing by how they understand “reduction” and “physicalism.” Following Kim I understand the non-reduction as holding that some events and properties are distinct from any physical events and properties. A necessary condition for physicalism is that mental properties, events, and laws supervene on physical ones. Kim allows various understandings of “supervenience” but I think that physicalism requires at least the claim that any minimal physical duplicate of the actual world is a duplicate simpliciter. Some (...) complications aside this means that true mental propositions, e.g. Jaegwon is thinking about sailing, are metaphysically entailed by true physical propositions. Kim says that supervenience is too weak to capture the root idea of physicalism that mental property instantiations depend on physical property instantiations so he adds that the mental depends on the physical. One way in which this dependance might be spelled out is that mental properties are higher order functional properties whose instantiations are realized by instantiations of physical properties. An event is an instantiation of a property by an individual and a time. A mental event is the instantiation of a mental property. Not every predicate expresses a genuine property. Kim further suggests that properties are individuated, at least partly, by nomological and causal relations. For physicalism to have content something must be said about the difficult issue of characterizing the physical. Kim’s view seems to be that the micro-physical properties of ideal physics are physical. He also counts as physical properties that are conjunctions and aggregates of micro-physical properties and higher level properties defined over lower-level physical properties.. Since these latter two classes of properties supervene on the micro-properties and laws there is no need to include them in the supervenience base. (shrink)

2. The equal status mentioned in Thesis 2 need not mean, "equally concrete" or "inclusive," but only, "equally real," where "real" means having a character of its own with reference to which opinions can be true or false. But becoming or process is alone fully concrete or inclusive, since if A is without becoming, and B becomes, then the togetherness of AB also becomes. A new constituent means a new totality. In this sense, becoming is the ultimate principle.

The metaphysical question of what determines the contents of fictive utterances is closely related to the epistemological question of how audiences identify the.

I take issue with Bernard Gert’s interpretation of Hobbes on two main points. First, I argue that Hobbes’s moral theory reduces to a sophisticated form of consequentialism. Second, I argue that Hobbes’s moral theory is more demanding than Gert’s interpretation, and some of Hobbes’s own remarks, make it appear. I focus on Gert’s reading of Hobbes’s second law of nature, and argue that the law presents us with a Hobson’s choice—that is, the appearance of a choice of how much liberty (...) to relinquish when really there is none. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:98 COMMENTS ON TWEYMAN AND DAVIS Tweyman contends that in Parts X and XI of the Dialogues Philo sets aside his Pyrrhonian or skeptical approach to theology, which consists in falsifying or casting doubt on the hypotheses of Cleanthes, and instead argues for a thesis of his own, viz. what we might call the "indifference thesis" that the original source of all things is morally indifferent. Davis counters (...) with an alternative interpretation of these two Parts of the Dialogues, arguing that Philo's approach to Cleanthes' arguments is consistent throughout the Dialogues and that Philo's aim is always the same, viz., to show that if cleanthes remains true to his principles and accepts their logical consequences, it is Cleanthes who is the Pyrrhonian and Philo who is the moderate skeptic. My position is that neither Tweyman nor Davis have given a proper analysis of Parts X and XI. I would agree with Davis that Tweyman' s position does seem to have an initial implausibility to it for at least two reasons. First of all, in Part II Philo commits himself to the "mystical incomprehensibility thesis" that the attributes of God are perfect but incomprehensible; and the mystical incomprehensibility thesis is incompatible with the indifference thesis. It cannot be the case both that God has perfect but incomprehensible attributes and that we also know he is morally indifferent. Moreover, the mystical incomprehensi2 bility thesis is reiterated in Part VI and more importantly, in Part X: "None but we mystics, as you were pleased to call us, can account for this strange mixture of phenomena, by deriving it from attributes, infinitely perfect, but incomprehensible" 99 (D 199). Since Philo appears to stick to the mystical incomprehensibility thesis, Tweyman has a problem explaining how Philo can hold one position on the attributes of God in Part X (the mystical incomprehensibility thesis) and then supposedly reverse himself in Part XI to argue for another (the indifference thesis). Second, Tweyman' s position seems to contradict the strategic position outlined by Philo in Part II: "You seem not to apprehend, replied Philo, that I argue with Cleanthes in his own way; and by showing him the dangerous consequences of his tenets, hope at last to reduce him to our opinion." (D 145) The strategy is to show Cleanthes that any position but that of the mystics has dangerous, i.e., skeptical or theologically unwelcome consequences, and so should be abandoned. Philo's strategy is not to defend his own position, but rather to reveal the weaknesses in Cleanthes' position. Thus far I would agree that Davis' interpretation is more consistent with both Philo's strategic position and with his mystical incomprehensibility thesis. Yet Davis does not directly take up the important point about Parts X and XI which Tweyman raises: that Philo changes his way of arguing in Parts X and XI from that which he had been employing previously in the first eight sections, i.e., that he changes from a Pyrrhonian to a non-Pyrrhonian way of arguing. This is how Tweyman puts it: In the first eight sections, Philo argues against Cleanthes' hypothesis by advancing his own hypotheses. His effort to advance hypotheses must be assessed in light of the fact that (by his own admission) all such hypotheses are based on insufficient 100 data, and, therefore, none is, strictly speaking, acceptable. Their use is not to establish truths about the nature of God, but to establish the conclusion which we find at the end of Part VIII that 'a total suspense of judgment is here our only reasonable resource.' The design of the world is compatible with, and could have arisen from, an indefinite number of designing principles. On the other hand, we have seen that in dealing with Cleanthes' hypotheses in Parts X and XI we are able to proceed more scientifically, and, in this manner, eliminate all but one of the hypotheses which can be introduced to explain the design of the world. (Tweyman 84-85) Now Tweyman does seem to have a point here. It is true that Philo takes his arguments in Parts X and XI to have a conclusiveness which he did not attribute to his... (shrink)

Siyaves Azeri (2020) quite well shows that arithmetical thinking emerges on the basis of specific social practices and material engagement (clay tokens for economic exchange practices beget number concepts, e.g.). But his discussion here is relegated mostly to Neolithic and Bronze Age practices. While surely such practices produced revolutions in the cognitive abilities of many humans, much of the cognitive architecture that allows normative conceptual thought was already in place long before this time. This response, then, is an attempt to (...) sketch the deep prehistory of human cognition in order to show the inter-social bases of normative thought in general. To do this, I will look first to the work of Vygotsky and Leontiev, two often neglected psychologists whose combined efforts culminate in a developmental account of human cognitive origins. Then, I will review some key insights from the contemporary comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello—whose project is admittedly a Vygotskian one—in order to further shed light on the social-practical basis of abstract thought, of which mathematical cognition is surely a part. (shrink)

I am grateful to Catharine Abell and Gregory Currie for their incisive and productive commentaries on Apt Imaginings. In what follows, I will try to respond to.

I. Pryor on McKinsey: " A. Pryor’s Version of McKinsey-style Reasoning 1. Given authoritative self-knowledge, I can usually tell the contents of my own thoughts just by introspection. So I can know the following claim on the basis of reflection alone: " McK-1: I am thinking a thought with the content _water puts out fires_.

These comments, which include informal offhand asides made during delivery, derive from an ‘Author Meets Critics’ session on Robert Brandom’s book, From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars’ (2015), held at Kent State University and published subsequently in Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy (2017).

In this commentary I discuss the shared theme found in articles by Hoult, Calof, Cheit, Freyd, and Salter (this issue) of the prices of resisting attempts to engender silence when the topic is sexual abuse of children. The parallels between silencing tactics of sexual abusers of children and those used by the false memory movement against its critics are analyzed. Questions are raised about the ethical implications of such silencing strategies.

Swindal seeks to incorporate temporality into the formal-pragmatic analysis of discourse by developing what he calls ‘event-determining’ reflection. After outlining his motivations for introducing this new form of reflection, I offer a critique, first, of his appeal to meta-discourse about when to engage in discourse and, second, of the function of truth in his account. Finally, I suggest that Swindal’s theory of reflective acceptability fruitfully complements Robert Brandom’s normative pragmatics.

According to Tiedke, in order for an act to be free it must satisfy two requirements: (PR) The agent must have been the source of the action. (PAP) It must have been possible for the agent to have done otherwise. Different accounts of freedom cash these conditions out in different ways. The Standard Compatibilist offers the following versions of these principles: (PRSC) The agent's choice was a link in the chain of events that caused her to perform the action (PAPSC) (...) If the agent had chosen differently, she would have acted differently. What is important to note is that there is no requirement that the agent in fact have the ability to choose other than she does. Peacocke's version of compatibilist freedom differs from the standard account in exactly this regard. According to (Tiedke's reconstruction of) Peacocke, an act is free just in case the following conditions are satisfied: (PRPC) The agent must be able to conceptualize/reflect upon the factors influencing her decision to.. (shrink)

I present two challenges to the theory of moral sentimentalism that Michael Slote defends in his book. The first challenge aims to show that there are cases in which we empathize with an agent and yet judge her actions to be morally wrong. If such cases are plausible, then we have good reason to doubt Slote's claim that moral judgments are an affective attitude of warmth or chill and, thus, are purely sentiments. The second challenge is more of a suggestion. (...) At the end of my paper, I suggest that perhaps one important role that empathy plays in our moral phenomenology is to mitigate the scope of our moral judgments. If this is right, it tells not only against Slote's account but against moral sentimentalist approaches more broadly. (shrink)