Since Socrates, and through Descartes to the present day, the problems of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy's understanding of itself. Today the idea of ''first-person authority''--the claim of a distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental life--has been challenged from a number of directions, to the point where many doubt the person bears any distinctive relation to his or her own mental life, let alone a privileged one. In Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran argues (...) for a reconception of the first-person and its claims. Indeed, he writes, a more thorough repudiation of the idea of privileged inner observation leads to a deeper appreciation of the systematic differences between self-knowledge and the knowledge of others, differences that are both irreducible and constitutive of the very concept and life of the person.Masterfully blending philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Moran develops a view of self-knowledge that concentrates on the self as agent rather than spectator. He argues that while each person does speak for his own thought and feeling with a distinctive authority, that very authority is tied just as much to the disprivileging of the first-person, to its specific possibilities of alienation. Drawing on certain themes from Wittgenstein, Sartre, and others, the book explores the extent to which what we say about ourselves is a matter of discovery or of creation, the difficulties and limitations in being ''objective'' toward ourselves, and the conflicting demands of realism about oneself and responsibility for oneself. What emerges is a strikingly original and psychologically nuanced exploration of the contrasting ideals of relations to oneself and relations to others. (shrink)

Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review recent discussions (...) of intentionality, including some recent explorations of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm), and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness. (shrink)

This article offers an alternative reading of the Abbé Sieyès and the modern ‘nation-state’ problématique. I argue that the subject/object that is constituted in the early days of modernity is the incomplete society: an impossible-possibility ideal of congruency of population, authority and space. I suggest reading this ideal of congruency as a fantasy in that it offers a certain ‘fullness to come’, the promise of jouissance that can never be attained and is thus constantly re-envisioned and reinvoked. Drawing on discourse-analytical (...) and psychoanalytical tools I explain the logic of fantasy before analysing Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate?, as I show how he critiques and fragments the old model of the state and how his reading of the nation is fantasmatic, a continuous project towards impossible congruency. (shrink)

Little extended attention has been given to Kant's notion of self-conceit, though it appears throughout his theoretical and practical philosophy. Authors who discuss self-conceit often describe it as a kind of imperiousness or arrogance in which the conceited agent seeks to impose selfish principles upon others, or sees others as worthless. I argue that these features of self-conceit are symptoms of a deeper and more thoroughgoing failure. Self-conceit is best described as the tendency to insist upon one to oneself or (...) to others s will or inclinations upon others, and more centrally the tendency to reconstruct evidence and rationalize so that one may be convinced of one’s own virtue. While the conceited agent may ultimately impose her judgement upon others, she does so in order to preserve her delusion of virtue. (shrink)

In this article I will address the question of determining the moral limits of reproductive decisions. In so doing I will examine the contributions made by John Harris, who has over the years consistently addressed the ethical implications of advancing reproductive technologies. In addressing these matters, Harris has centred his arguments on the principle of harm and with this in mind has set out a specific theoretical framework from which decisions about disability and causing harm, as in the case of (...) reproductive decisions, can be rationally addressed. This discussion will attempt to question the conceptual scheme that he proposes. The aim here is not to present an alternative theoretical contribution to the morality of reproductive choice. Rather, in the attempt to follow some of the directives in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, the aim is to demonstrate some of the pitfalls of what Wittgenstein has described as the “craving for generality” in contemporary philosophy. I propose that this craving can distort, in this instance, our ordinary usage of concepts such as harm, suffering and disability and their role in the moral vocabulary of reproductive decision making. (shrink)

Standard responses to the knowledge argument grant that Mary could know all of the physical facts even while trapped inside her black‐and‐white room. What they deny is that upon leaving her black‐and‐white room and experiencing red for the first time, Mary learns a genuinely new fact. This paper develops an alternate response in a grounding physicalist framework, on which Mary does not know all of the physical facts while trapped inside the room. The main thesis is that Mary does not (...) know certain phenomenal facts while trapped inside the room, whereby these facts classify as physical due to being wholly and fully metaphysically grounded in the underlying fundamental facts which are themselves entirely physical. (shrink)

Speaking of Teaching: Lessons from History focuses on teaching as a fundamental act of all human beings, viewing the question of teaching through the lens of five famous thinkers and two contemporary problems. Moran argues that teaching is not given the attention that it deserves and proposes to situate school teaching in the context of many forms of teaching. Tracing the history of the idea of teaching from Socrates to Wittgenstein in the first several chapters, this book also examines (...) the intricacies of teaching morality and religion, showcasing society's ambivalence about teaching. (shrink)

Relationalists about episodic memory must endorse a disjunctivist theory of memory-experience according to which cases of genuine memory and cases of total confabulation involve distinct kinds of mental event with different natures. This paper is concerned with a pair of arguments against this view, which are analogues of the ‘causal argument’ and the ‘screening off argument’ that have been pressed in recent literature against relationalist (and hence disjunctivist) theories of perception. The central claim to be advanced is that to deal (...) with these two arguments, memory disjunctivists both can and should draw on resources that are standardly appealed to by rival common factor theories of episodic memory, and, in particular, to the idea that genuine memories and merely apparent ones are to be distinguished, at least in part, in terms of the distinctive ways in which they are caused. On the proposed view, there are substantive causal constraints associated both with cases of genuine memory and with cases of mere confabulation. The resulting theory thus tells us something important about the nature both of genuine memories and of mere confabulations, namely, that such experiences must be caused in certain distinctive ways and cannot occur except as the result of a distinctive sort of causal process. In addition, the theory enables the disjunctivist to offer a unified response to an important pair of arguments against her view. (shrink)

Introduction to Phenomenology is an outstanding and comprehensive guide to an important but often little-understood movement in European philosophy. Dermot Moran lucidly examines the contributions of phenomenology's nine seminal thinkers: Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. Written in a clear and engaging style, this volume charts the course of the movement from its origins in Husserl to its transformation by Derrida. It describes the thought of Heidegger and Sartre, phenomenology's most famous thinkers, and introduces and (...) assesses the distinctive use of phenomenology by some of its lesser-known exponents, such as Levinas, Arendt and Gadamer. Throughout, the enormous influence of phenomenology on the course of twentieth-century philosophy is thoroughly explored. Clearly explaining technical terms and avoiding jargon, Introduction to Phenomenology is an indispensable introduction to the history and substance of this vital current in intellectual thought. (shrink)

Denis, Lara. Moral Self-Regard: Duties to Oneself in Kant's Moral Theory. New York: Garland Publishing. 2001. Engstrom, Stephen. “The Concept ofthe Highest Good in Kant's Moral The- ory.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52, ...

The notion of ‘bipolar’ or ‘second‐personal’ normativity is often illustrated by such situations as that of one person addressing a complaint to another, or asserting some right, or claiming some authority. This paper argues that the presence of speech acts of various kinds in the development of the idea of the ‘second‐personal’ is not accidental. Through development of a notion of ‘illocutionary authority’ I seek to show a role for the ‘second‐personal’ in ordinary testimony, despite Darwall's argument that the notion (...) of the ‘second‐personal’ marks a divide between practical and theoretical reason. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel challenge for the panpsychist solution to the problem of consciousness. It advances three main claims. First, that the problem of consciousness is really an instance of a more general problem: that of grounding the qualitative. Second, that we should want a general solution to this problem. Third, that panpsychism cannot provide it. I also suggest two further things: (1) that alternative kinds of Russellian monism may avoid the problem in ways panpsychists cannot, and (2) that (...) a kind of neo-Aristotelian or ground-theoretical physicalism fares just as well here if not better. (shrink)

Moran, Stuart With the solemnity of the Ascension the Year A lectionary returns momentarily to the Gospel according to Matthew and, in fact, to the very end of that Gospel. We might note in the first place that Matthew makes no attempt to describe the mysterious reality that the tradition has come to call the Ascension.

In this paper I discuss Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological account of the constitution of the social world, in relation to some phenomenological contributions to the constitution of sociality found in Husserl’s students and followers, including Heidegger, Gurwitsch, Walther, Otaka, and Schutz. Heidegger is often seen as being the first to highlight explicitly human existence as Mitsein and In-der-Welt-Sein, but it is now clear from the Husserliana publications that, in his private research manuscripts especially during his Freiburg years, Husserl employs many of (...) the terms associated with Heidegger, e.g. Mitwelt, Weltlichkeit, Alltäglichkeit, Zeitlichkeit, and Geschichtlichkeit, and had detailed discussions of various forms of social constitution. It is clear that Husserl and Heidegger were exploring these themes in dialogue with one another, and that Husserl, in fact, has a rich phenomenology of sociality that is worth exploring in its own right. In this paper, I will outline some of the key aspects of Husserl’s contribution. (shrink)

The paper argues for the centrality of believing the speaker (as distinct from believing the statement) in the epistemology of testimony, and develops a line of thought from Angus Ross which claims that in telling someone something, the kind of reason for belief that a speaker presents is of an essentially different kind from ordinary evidence. Investigating the nature of the audience's dependence on the speaker's free assurance leads to a discussion of Grice's formulation of non-natural meaning in an epistemological (...) light, concentrating on just how the recognition of the speaker's self-reflexive intention is supposed to count for his audience as a reason to believe P. This is understood as the speaker's explicitly assuming responsibility for the truth of his statement, and thereby constituting his utterance as a reason to believe. (shrink)

In this article I wish to re-examine the vexed issue of the possibility of idealism in ancient and medieval philosophy with particular reference to the case of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (c. 800idealisms immaterialism as his standard for idealism, and it is this decision, coupled with his failure to acknowledge the legacy of German idealism, which prevents him from seeing the classical and medieval roots of idealism more broadly understood.

The author studies the theory of "first principles" at Leonardo Polo's philosophy (at the book El conocimiento habitual de los primeros principios) and Aristotle thought. He critics Polo's theory of first principles in using aristotelian concepts from Metafísica, III, IV and IX.

Authority and Estrangement addresses a set of questions about self-knowledge and seeks to answer them in the context of the broader differences between the first-person and third-person perspectives on oneself. Attention to these broader differences takes the discussion from epistemology to moral psychology, and seeks to relate some of the issues of contemporary philosophy of mind to the concerns with self-consciousness in post-Kantian thought.

It is undeniable that the assumption of sincerity is important to assertion, and that assertion is central to the transmission of beliefs through human testimony. Discussions of testimony, however, often assume that the epistemic importance of sincerity to testimony is that of a (fallible) guarantee of access to the actual beliefs of the speaker. Other things being equal, we would do as well or better if we had some kind of unmediated access to the beliefs of the other person, without (...) the risks involved in the overt act of speaking, and the assumption of sincerity in speech is the closest we can come to this access. Contrary to this picture, I argue that sincerity has a quite different epistemic role to play in testimony than that of an indicator of the speaker's beliefs. The epistemology of testimony requires reference to the speaker as agent, and not just the speaker's beliefs, as well as a sense of 'expression of belief' that links it to the specifically addressive relation to another person. (shrink)

Saint Thomas Aquinas explains that in the science of mobiles, when descending to the living, each one of the species of the animals and plants are attended specifying what is proper to each of them, and here is where De Sensu et Sensato is found. Aquinas enumerates the diverse types of living beings according to the parts of soul and enlists the books that have a relation with them, deducing that De Sensu et Sensato corresponds to the exterior act that (...) occurs when feeling. (shrink)

Saint Thomas Aquinas distinguishes three operations of the intelect and explains that the one which treats about composition and divition, or the affirmative and negative sentence, belongs to the book Peri Hermeneias. Thus, Aquinas proceeds to comment why the verb, the name and the statement are interpretations or voices with meaning and why this book focuses on the enuntiative sentence for the truth and the false are found in it.

Volume 23, Issue 3, September 2020, Page 302-313.

Shen et al.'s (2024) novel 3 × 3 ethical framework aims to facilitate “study-by-study decisions about returning individual research results (IRRs) from digital phenotyping in psychiatry.” The frame...

This unique volume is an introduction for computer scientists, including a formal study of theoretical algorithms for Big Data applications, which allows them to work on such algorithms in the future. It also serves as a useful reference guide for the general computer science population, providing a comprehensive overview of the fascinating world of such algorithms. To achieve these goals, the algorithmic results presented have been carefully chosen so that they demonstrate the important techniques and tools used in Big Data (...) algorithms, and yet do not require tedious calculations or a very deep mathematical background. (shrink)

Saint Thomas Aquinas establishes why is it that logic is the directive art of the act of reason and why is it convenient to divide it in correspondence with the operations of the intelect. Thus, the Posterior Analytics are related with the act of reason which goes from one thing which is known to other thing that is unknown. By analogy with the process of necessity of nature, in which she can not fail, Aquinas explains that truth can not fail (...) in the demonstrative syllogism, which has the certainty of science, and that this act of reason is founded in the Posterior Analytics. The rest of saint Thomas Aquinas' exposition focuses on determining to which books of logic does each act or process of reason corresponds. (shrink)

Saint Thomas Aquinas commences his study distinguishing the types of order that exist and with these he determines that moral philosophy studies, on one hand, the order of voluntary acts and, on the other hand, the human acts as ordered together and as orderd towards an end. The social character of the human being and the type of help he gives and receives in the order of the whole and the part is attended, and this leads to Aquinas dividing moral (...) philosophy in three parts: the monastic, which orders the acts towards an end; the economic, which orders the acts of the domestic multitude; and the politic, which orders the acts of the civil multitude. (shrink)

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is known for his principled criticism of colonialism, advocacy of the importance of indigenous languages, and concern with the role of culture and literature in forming the foundation of a truly national sensibility.Globalecticsadds interpretations of Fanon, Hegel, and the Marxian legacy. It provides an opportunity to assess Ngũgĩ’s analysis of colonialism and national liberation.

Early in the course of undertaking empirical research on the sexual diversity of the judiciary I had to address a particular challenge. Sexuality, I was repeatedly told, is not and ought not to be a difference that is taken into account. At best it ought to be disregarded or taken out of consideration. This generated a number of challenges for my research. How do you research and make sense of sexuality as a difference that key informants assert is absent or (...) seek to make invisible and irrelevant? How do you research the operation and effects of that which is not to be spoken about? How do you research the sexual norm when its existence and operation is denied? This article explores one response. It is a project that may for some be surprising and unexpected. It is a study of judicial portraits. Drawing on the insights of queer theory and art historical scholarship on portraits I undertake a textual analysis of these images, focusing upon the aesthetic and artistic traditions used to make them. A small case study of portraits of the Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of New South Wales is used to explore how, if at all, sexuality figured in these portraits. (shrink)