In this wholly original study, Josep Corbi asks how one should relate to a certain kind of human suffering, namely, the harm that people cause one another. Relying upon real life examples of human suffering--including torture, genocide, and warfare--as opposed to thought experiments, Corbi proposes a novel approach to self-knowledge that runs counter to standard Kantian approaches to morality.

Presentación de las tres conferencias impartidas por Barry Stroud en la Càtedra Filosofia i Ciutadania J.L. Blasco, 2014.

(1988). Understanding, truth, and explanation. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 19-34. doi: 10.1080/02698598808573322.

Robert Dunn and Richard Moran have emphasized the importance of deliberation to account for the privileged authority of self-ascriptions. They oppose a theoretical attitude toward oneself to a deliberative attitude that they regard as more intimate, as purely first-personal. In this paper, I intend to challenge Dunn’s and Moran’s understanding of how the deliberative attitude is to be conceived of and, in particular, I will call into question their claim that this attitude is wholly non-observational. More positively, I will elaborate (...) on the sort of self-observation that must play a central role in an agent’s deliberation if she is to recognize a certain belief, decision, or intention as genuinely her own and, therefore, as expressing a purely first-person point of view. In the elaboration of my argument, I will rely on a number of situations as they are described in Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that moral projectivism cannot be coherently fix the content of our moral responses. To this purpose, I develop a number of arguments against moral dispositionalism and, in this context, I challenge both David Lewis' dispositionalist account of colour and Chistine Korsgaard's procedural realism.

Epistemology as Political Epostemology: Knowledge, Wound and Narrative Resumen: El tipo de conocimiento que a menudo se toma como modelo en Conocimiento expropiado es el que nos proporciona la ciencia, vinculado a la idea de información y a los desarrollos tecnológicos; solo emerge otro modelo cuando se analiza la injusticia hermenéutica y otras formas de daño epistémico. Broncano aúna ambos modelos bajo el rótulo ‘conocimiento’ y esta opción terminológica tiene sentido en la medida en que considera que la agencialidad entrañada (...) social y políticamente está en el centro de todo tipo de conocimiento. Defenderé, con todo, una tesis más radical, a saber: que, si nos tomamos en serio el papel de la agencialidad en la articulación del conocimiento, debemos acercarnos a la noción de conocimiento que se utiliza en la ciencia y en los desarrollos tecnológicos desde la perspectiva del esfuerzo de las y los supervivientes por articular sus experiencias de daño, y no a la inversa. Abstract: Quite often, Conocimiento expropiado takes the natural sciences as the model of knowledge, namely, the notion of knowledge that we associate with information and technological progress; an alternative model only emerges in this book when hermeneutic injustice and certain forms of epistemic harm are analysed. Broncano alludes to both epistemic experiences as knowledge, and this terminological choice makes sense insofar as he has placed socially and politically embedded agency at the centre of knowledge. My thesis is however that, if we are to take seriously the role of agency in the articulation of knowledge, we must examine the notion of knowledge as used in science and technological developments from the perspective of the survivors’ attempt to make sense of their moral wound rather than the other way round. Palabras clave: Conocimiento, relato, daño, objetividad, transformación. Keywords: Knowledge, narrative, moral wound, objectivity, transformative. (shrink)

As I see bus no. 29 approaching, I raise my arm. The bus stops, I take a few steps and get on it. This happens because the driver, having seen my arm raised, interpreted the gesture as a conventional expression of my wish to get on the bus. If it had been bus no. 17, I would not have raised my arm because I know that that bus follows quite a different route. This is not, of course, the end of (...) the story. I might also mention the reasons why I really wanted route 29, and so on. Fortunately, there is no need to go into the details. The important point is that in the explanation of this trivial set of actions I can quite naturally appeal to a number of mental states: perceptions, beliefs, interpretations, desires, etc. The previous story assumes, for instance, that. (shrink)

Abstract: There is much that I admire in Richard Moran's account of how first-person authority may be consistent with self-knowledge as an achievement. In this paper, I examine his attempt to characterize the goal of psychoanalytic treatment, which is surely that the patient should go beyond the mere theoretical acceptance of the analyst's interpretation, and requires instead a more intimate, first-personal, awareness by the patient of their psychological condition.I object, however, that the way in which Moran distinguishes between the deliberative (...) and the theoretical attitudes is ultimately inconsistent with a satisfactory account of psychoanalytic practice; mainly because, despite Moran's claims to the contrary, such a distinction is still inspired by a Cartesian picture of the self. I argue that, in the light of his distinction, Moran may emphasize that an agent's psychological dispositions should be permeable to her decisions and projects, but is forced to reject the idea that permeability could go the other way too. I explore Bernard Williams' notion of acknowledgment and Simone Weil's distinction between two notions of necessity, in order to articulate a notion of receptive passivity which may help us to characterize this second direction of permeability. I finally outline why receptive passivity (and, thereby, the double direction of permeability) is crucial in order to identify the goal of psychoanalytic treatment and, derivatively, to understand how a certain kind of awareness may have a significant therapeutic effect. (shrink)

I vindicate the thrust of the particularist position in moral deliberation. this purpose, I focus on some elements that seem to play a crucial role in first-person moral deliberation and argue that they cannot be incorporated into a more sophisticated system of moral principles. More specifically, I emphasize some peculiarities of moral perception in the light of which I defend the irreducible deliberative relevance of a certain phenomenon, namely: the phenomenon of an agent morally coming across a particular situation. Following (...) on from Bbernard Williams, I talk of an agent’s character as a factor that contributes to fixing what situations an agent comes morally across. A crucial point, in the debate, will be how an agent confronts the normatively loaded features of his own character when he is engaged in first-person deliberation. (shrink)

In Authority and Estrangement Richard Moran takes some rather illuminating steps towards getting rid of the Cartesian picture of self-knowledge. I argue, however, that Moran’s crucial distinction between deliberative and theoretical attitude is seriously contaminated by that traditional picture. More specifically, I will point out why some crucial aspects of the phenomena that Moran describes in terms of the interplay between the theoretical and the deliberative attitude, should rather be interpreted as a process that takes place within the deliberative attitude (...) itself. The theoretical attitude will, as a result, constitute a rather marginal attitude towards one’s own psychological dispositions and experiences, the adoption of which only makes sense in rather peculiar, often pathological, situations. (shrink)

In *Austerlitz* by W.G. Sebald, we go through a detailed report of Austerlitz of Austerlitz's life as delivered by him to a narrator about whom we know very little. The story dwells on a wealth of events and situations that Austerlitz experienced at the time as strange or episodic. There is however a constant impulse that, in hindsight, Austerlitz regards as unifying all those events and situations. I will approach the story in *Austerlitz* as the recounting of the process by (...) which Austerlitz becomes aware of the direction of this impulse and engages in a quest for truth the details of which will reveal (and determine) the ethical nature of the impulse that unifies his life. More specifically, I will account for Austerlitz's constant impulse in terms of the inescapability of a certain dynamics of projection that connects a particular situation to which his life is anchored to a more universal concern. (shrink)

I1. Anil Gupta distinguishes between thin and thick experiences. There are thick experiences like, say, the American Experience of a European traveller. And thin experiences like looking at a yello...

This volume includes a lucid discussion of recent developments by philosophers such as Block, Davidson, Fodor, Kim, Lewis, Mellor, Putnam, Schiffer, Shoemaker, ...

This article engages the role of temporality in the work of Thomas Hobbes. Rather than focusing on the political individual proposed by his later works, it politicizes the conception of subjectivity advanced in his earlier works. In these, he advances a materialist account of subjectivity that is conceptualized in entirely temporal terms. It is, he argues, the temporal categories of memory and imagination that make humans uniquely capable of selfhood and freedom. This early conception lacks the tendency towards domination described (...) in Leviathan, in which the state of nature is presented as a war of all against all. However, this article argues that what the state of nature reveals is that the temporality of subjectivity is not objective, but rather socially produced. As such, the state of nature depicts behavior resulting from material anxiety, which prevents thinking, and therefore acting, beyond the present. Political institutions therefore emerge in his thought as a mechanism for quelling anxiety such that the future becomes actionable. By projecting a vision of a secure, open future, these institutions create a present in which meaningful, self-directed actions become possible. That is, he is the first to posit the very modern notion that political institutions fundamentally shape our sense of possibility. (shrink)

In the debate about heterologous embryo transfer (HET), or embryo adoption, within marriage, discussion to date has proceeded predominantly from the perspective of the acting woman, with less attention paid to the effects on her spouse. In directing the focus of this paper to the man’s experience, the author is confirmed in his opinion that HET is contrary to the man’s dignity as husband and father. It is an infidelity to the exclusive union of his marriage, an affront to the (...) husband’s right to be the means by whom his wife becomes a mother, and a sacrilege to the sacrament by which his fatherhood is called to be an expression of God’s creative love. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.2 (Summer 2013): 287–297. (shrink)

La claridad y la argumentación sirven de refugio frente a la charlatanería en el filosofar, pero quienes enfatizan tales principios metodológicos tienden a identificar la claridad con la literalidad y la argumentación con la formalización. En este trabajo, considero los límites de una elucidación filosófica de nuestras prácticas morales que descanse en tal identificación; para ello, examino la relevancia de la posición original de John Rawls para la determinación de los principios de la justicia y, en general, de los experimentos (...) mentales para el estudio de la moralidad. La relevancia de la posición original depende, a mi entender, de un supuesto de concordancia según el cual, a menos que incurramos en algún error deliberativo, no puede haber discrepancia alguna entre nuestros juicios relativos a la justicia acerca de una situación hipotética y nuestros juicios cuando nos enfrentamos realmente a la misma. A lo largo del texto, trato de mostrar que tal supuesto es insostenible a partir del examen de una experiencia moral particular: a saber, la experiencia del soldado; y, para ello, revindico las virtudes deliberativas de la conciencia expresiva de ciertos hechos frente a una mera conciencia declarativa de los mismos; finalmente, extraigo algunas consecuencias de esta distinción para la definición de un estilo filosófico. Astress on clarity and argumentation may serve as a refuge against quackery, but often those who focus on such methodological principles tend to identify clarity with literalness and argumentation with formalization. My reflection upon the limits of a philosophical style inspired in such an identification is mainly concerned with the use of thought experiments in the elucidation of our moral practices and, more specifically, with the relevance of John Rawls' original position for the determination of the basic principles of justice. To this purpose, I emphasize that the relevance of the original position rests on a matching assumption according to which, if agents deliberate appropriately, there should not be any gap between our judgments concerning justice about a hypothetical situation and our judgments whenever we are actually confronted with it. I will, nevertheless, explore a particular moral experience, namely, that of the soldier, only to conclude that such an assumption is untenable. More specifically, I will defend the deliberative virtues of an expressive awareness of certain facts as opposed to a mere declarative awareness of them. In the last section, I will derive some implications of this distinction as to the articulation of a philosophical style. (shrink)

Why should philosophy, or even thinking, get in the way of seeing? In attempting to address this question, this paper identifies post-Romanticism as a phenomenologically inflected response to the failure of both pre-Romantic Reflexionsphilosophie and Hegelian speculative overcoming, one that seeks to express our relation to the world in a way that does not rely on a reflection model of consciousness and gives no support to the notion of a cognitively inaccessible absolute. It will be suggested that the poetry of (...) Fernando Pessoa offers lessons in such a post-Romanticism, showing how a phenomenological attentiveness to the world-disclosive power of poetry and to the everyday mereness of things constitutes a more coherent way of relating to the world. With reference to Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy, it will be argued that Pessoa’s poetry shows us that it is by reining in the reflection model of consciousness that we achieve a greater sense of the world and our position in it. (shrink)

Corby, Paschal M Following acts to legalise forms of assisted dying in other countries, the Australian state of Victoria is poised to do the same. In June last year, the Legal and Social Issues Committee of the Parliament of Victoria tabled the report resulting from its inquiry into end of life choices, which recommends the passing of laws that would make it legal for a terminally ill patient at the end of his or her life to ask a doctor to (...) help him or her die. This proposal is currently before a ministerial advisory panel consisting of clinical, legal, health administration and palliative care experts, with the task of drafting a bill to be presented in parliament sometime later this year, to be decided by a conscience vote of its members. (shrink)

To begin, I introduce an analysis of interlevel relations that allows us to offer an initial characterization of the debate about the way classical and connectionist models relate. Subsequently, I examine a compatibility thesis and a conditional claim on this issue.With respect to the compatibility thesis, I argue that, even if classical and connectionist models are not necessarily incompatible, the emergence of the latter seems to undermine the best arguments for the Language of Thought Hypothesis, which is essential to the (...) former. (shrink)

In response to a growing movement opposed to conscientious objection in medicine, the medical profession should resist the privatization of conscience in general and accept the challenge, presented by conscientious objection, of rethinking its practices and being true to its calling. These claims are informed by the traditional understanding of conscience and the thought of Jürgen Habermas on the relevance of religious truths in public debate and the legitimacy of public dissent.

This article focuses on two problems associated with tragedy. One ancient: what is it that draws us to the dramatic presentation of events of terrible suffering and loss? And one modern: namely, that while tragedies are still performed and appreciated, little new tragedy is being written. It will be argued in relation to the second problem that the vitality of tragedy as a dramatic form requires a less rigid approach to what might be considered tragic. And in relation to the (...) first problem it will be argued that this more expansive conception of tragedy will allow an understanding of the ‘pay-off’ of tragedy in a way that draws both on the tradition that focuses on tragedy as cathartic therapeutic, and on the tradition that sees it as a thought laboratory that allows ethical dilemmas to be posed and explored from different perspectives. This argument constitutes a two-fold dialectical synthesis and the effect of this is to facilitate an understanding of tragedy as establishing a ‘critical distance’ that sets the scene for the possibility of thinking. (shrink)

: In The View From Here, Jay Wallace emphasises that an agent's capacity to regret a past decision is conditioned by the attachments that she may have developed as a result. Those attachments shape the point of view from which she retrospectively deliberates. Wallace stresses, however, that not every normative aspect of her decision is affected by this change in perspective, because her decision will remain as unjustified as it was in the past. I will argue, however, that this approach (...) to justification is inconsistent with the normative import that Wallace ascribes to the actual dynamics of our attachments in his defence of the rationale of regret. If I am right, Wallace's approach is caught in the following dilemma: Either he renounces a nonperspectival approach to justification or he revises his view about the normative import of the actual dynamics of our attachments. (shrink)

In Values and the Reflective Point of View (2006), Robert Dunn defends a certain expressivist view about evaluative beliefs from which some implications about self-knowledge are explicitly derived. He thus distinguishes between an observational and a deliberative attitude towards oneself, so that the latter involves a purely first-person point of view that gives rise to an especially authoritative, but wholly non-observational, kind of self-knowledge. Even though I sympathize with many aspects of Dunn's approach to evaluative beliefs and also with his (...) stress on the practical significance of self-knowledge, I argue that his proposal seriously misinterprets the role of observation and evidence within the first-person point of view and, derivatively, in the formation of evaluative beliefs. (shrink)

In its relationship with that which might be considered to exist beyond the perceived limits of philosophical discourse—for the sake of brevity let us call it the Absolute—Early German Romanticism tends to be presented either as mystically positivistic and therefore wholly unphilosophical, or as philosophically informed and committed to a sort of critical antifoundationalism that offers, at best, a negative non-relation to the Absolute. Naturally enough, these two opposing positions give rise to opposing reconstructions of Romantic aesthetics. Whilst broadly in (...) agreement with the latter interpretation, this article argues, in relation to Friedrich Schlegel, that in the rush to establish the philosophical credentials of Frühromantik, some of its complexity has been jettisoned and along with it a more accurate understanding of the guiding spirit of Romantic aesthetics. Drawing on Fichte and Walter Benjamin, it will be argued that Schlegel's notion of the Wechselerweis is intended to bridge the ideal and the real in a positive experience of negation and that his much-vaunted aesthetics amounts to an attempt to develop a philosophico-literary form that would be able to express or, rather, perform precisely this. (shrink)

In the context of any attempt to rethink the modalities, possibilities, conditions and limitations of critical thought, the otherwise sober and restrained notion of ‘critical distance’, with all it...

In the ongoing debate, there are a set of mind-body theories sharing a certain physicalist assumption: whenever a genuine cause produces an effect, the causal efficacy of each of the nonphysical properties that participate in that process is determined by the instantiation of a well-defined set of physical properties. These theories would then insist that a nonphysical property could only be causally efficacious insofar as it is physically implemented. However, in what follows we will argue against the idea that fine-grained (...) mental contents could be physically implemented in the way that functional properties are. Therefore, we will examine the metaphysical conditions under which the implementing mechanism of a particular instance of a functional property may be individuated, and see how genuine beliefs and desires—insofar as they track the world—cannot meet such conditions. (shrink)

A subject is a being who has a life to lead. In this paper, I explore the array of resources that are available to us (i.e., Westerners at the turn of the millennium) to articulate and assess our lives. Specifically, I shall reflect on the impact that such matters may have on our naturalist conviction that the world ultimately consists of a causal network where notions such as sense and value have no direct bearing. Sometend to assume that an implication (...) of our naturalist world-view is that the notions of sense and value are inevitably relative to the subject’s desires and inclinations. This is, however, a line of reasoning that I would like to resist. For I am convinced that this approach unnecessarily restricts the number of resources to which we can legitimately appeal in order to lead our lives. This restriction will turn out to be quite serious because, as we shall see, it dramatically distorts our perception of the relevance that social ties may have in the life of a subject, as well as the conditions under which a human life may escape the absurd. (shrink)

For decades, the dominant research paradigm has included trials conducted in clinical settings with little involvement from communities. However, concerns about the relevance and applicability of the processes or outcomes of such research have led to calls for greater community engagement in the research process. As such, there has been a shift in emphasis from simply recruiting research participants from community settings to engaging community members more broadly in all aspects of the research process. The move toward community engaged research (...) is in part driven by the recognition that inclusion of diverse perspectives in multidisciplinary teams is essential to addressing complex problems. Investigators have come to recognize the inherent value of engaging community members as collaborators in multidisciplinary teams that are conducting research on issues of concern to communities. The insider perspective from community members is now recognized as essential in designing effective and well-received recruitment strategies, culturally appropriate measures, and identifying meaningful and broad-reaching venues for dissemination. (shrink)

Contrary to what he expected, Primo Levi didn’t experience his life after being released from Auschwitz as cheerful and light-hearted. He – like many other survivors – was haunted by an obscure and solid anguish. It took some effort for him to discern the object or source of this anguish. He finally identified it as springing from a sense of shame or guilt in front of the drowned, that is, of those who were exterminated in the Lager. He could not (...) determine, however, whether his shame or guilt was at all rational. In this paper l examine Levi’s shame in light of what I regard as the dominant conception of practical deliberation, according to which principles and emotional detachment are central to our ability to deliberate appropriately. This conception underlies the role that John Rawls ascribes to the original position in the determination of the fundamental principles of justice. Deliberation in the original position is supposed to abstract away from any particular moral situations that one may actually have faced, since these are purely circumstantial elements to be discarded as both irrelevant and misleading for a proper deliberation on the principles of justice. In this paper, I intend both to make a case against the conception of practical deliberation on which Rawls’ original position relies and to vindicate the rationality of Levi’s shame, once some well-entrenched assumptions are brought to light and challenged. (shrink)

Marta Suria writes *Ella soy yo* as part of her response to the irruption of the memories of the sexual aggressions she had suffered since childhood. She is convinced that the way she narrates her experience will transform and liberate her. How is it at all possible that a certain kind of narrative may transform and li- berate us? In this paper, we will first describe the conception of the relationship between language and experience that lies behind this perplexity and, (...) secondly, we will sketch an alternative conception that will hopefully allow us to account for the transformative power of certain kinds of narratives. This alternative conception will hinge on the idea of expression and on the concept of aspect perception. For this purpose, we will firstly argue that language can be used not only to describe or evaluate our experience, but also to express it; we will, then, defend the view that linguistic or gestural expressions of our experiences not only announce or manifest them, but contribute to shaping and modulating them; finally, we will highlight the transformative, humanizing power of certain expressive uses of language. (shrink)

The received view about rationalizing explanations divides our psychological status into two kinds: beliefs and desires. In *The Retrieval of Ethics*, Talbot Brewer makes a case against this view. In this paper, I examine our experience as readers of *The Castle* by Franz Kafka to support Brewer's critical program, that is, his challenge to the received view. I will argue, however, that a proper analysis of this experience poses a serious problem to Brewer's alternative approach, that is, to his attempt (...) to retrieve our agency thanks to a proper understanding of the role of the good in rationalizing explanations. (shrink)

Robert Dunn, David Finkelstein and Richard Moran have recently contributed to broadening the debate on self-knowledge within the analytic tradition. They raise questions concerning the sort of awareness that may have a healing effect in psychoanalytic therapy, and enhance the relevance to self-knowledge of a deliberative, and practically committed, attitude toward oneself. They reject, however, that self-observation could play a significant role in a strictly first-person attitude toward oneself, since they conceive of it as essentially detached and, in this respect, (...) similar to the kind of attitude that a third party might adopt. I will appeal to Simone Weil's distinction between two sorts obedience and to the contrast between two characters in *The Karamazov Brothers* to elucidate a kind of self-awareness that involves a kind of observation that is constitutively committed. This line of reasoning will also serve to elucidate a fundamental sort of self-knowledge that derives from the subject's capacity to acknowledge her own position within the ethical world and is closely associated to the goal of psychoanalytic therapy. (shrink)