Two key themes structure the work of French philosopher of science Gilbert Simondon: the processes of individuation and the nature of technical objects. Moreover, these two themes are also at the heart of contemporary debates within Ethics and Bioethics. Indeed, the question of the individual is a key concern in both Virtue Ethics and Feminist Ethics of Care, while the hyper-technical reality of the present stage of medical technology is a key reason for both the urgency for and the (...) success of the field of Bioethics. And yet, despite its potential for thinking about these issues, Simondon’s philosophy remains largely unknown. Rather than exploring Simondon’s complex ontology for itself, the aim of this paper is to establish what contribution his work can make in Ethics and Bioethics on two essential questions: the relational structure of the self and the nature of the human-technology relation. I argue that Simondon’s re-conceptualization of the individual harmonizes with perspectives in Feminist Bioethics (particularly the Ethics of Care) and points toward what I call an “open” Virtue Ethics that takes relations to be essential. In order to establish this connection, I explore at length the relational approach to Feminist Bioethics offered by Susan Sherwin’s work. I argue that a Simondonian account of technology and of the individual furthers the relational understanding of the self, offers a characterization of Virtue Ethics that is in harmony with the Ethics of Care, and clarifies a notion of responsibility that is implicated in the complex reality of the modern technological milieu. (shrink)

. A partial analogy exists between the lifespan neuropsychological development of individuals and the biological evolution of species: In both of these major categories of growth, progressive emergence of wholes transcends inherently limited part‐processes. The remarkably small purview of each moment of consciousness experienced by an individual may be a crucial aspect of maintaining organization in that individual's cognitive development, protecting it from combinatorial chaos. In this essay I summarize experimental psychology research showing that working memory capacity comprises the so‐called (...) magical number 7±2 items, not only for words and digits but for spatial items and other sorts of cognitive materials, and not only in humans but also in other species. This is so to such an extent that 7±2 may be a “constant of nature.” The small quantity range 7±2 independent items, which builds upon a more elementary, instantaneous working memory capacity of three or four items, is surprisingly independent of the time duration of a cognitive task. Moreover, it is largely independent of ontogeny. Explanations of these powerful facts about working memory are offered here within both a functionalistic framework and a framework of hypothetical neural processes. At the neural level, working memory dynamics may comprise certain brain wave harmonics or topological relationships in the sheetlike cortex. Within the functionalistic framework, I suggest an additional analogy, pertaining to cultural evolution, with Tom Gilbert's work on risk analysis and “the global problematic” that follows from unforeseen consequences of the expansiveness of human ambition. Several connections are drawn with ideas presented by participants in the Chicago Religion and Science Group about how theologies and sciences try to understand the possibility of adaptive exercises of human freedom in the face of the extreme finiteness of each human individual. (shrink)

Does one have special obligations to support the political institutions of one’s own country precisely because it is one’s own? In short, does one have political obligations? This book argues for an affirmative answer, construing one’s country as a political society of which one is a member, and a political society as a special type of social group. The obligations in question are not moral requirements derived from general moral principles. They come, rather, from one’s participation in a special kind (...) of commitment: a joint commitment. This theory is referred to as the plural subject theory of political obligation since, by the author’s definition, those who are party to any joint commitment constitute a plural subject of some action in a broad sense of the term. Several alternative theories are compared and contrasted with plural subject theory, with a particular focus on the most famous — actual contract theory — according to which membership in a political society is a matter of participation in an agreement. The book offers plural subject accounts of both social rules and everyday agreements, and includes discussion of political authority and punishment. (shrink)

In The Adapted Mind (1992), Cosmides and Tooby argue for the thesis that biological evolution endowed the human mind with a system of content‐specific computational mechanisms designed to solve long‐standing adaptive problems humans encountered as hunter‐gatherers, and not just a generalized "capacity for culture" or all‐purpose "learning capacity". I analyze three types of arguments they offer: historical arguments for the rise of content‐Specific psychology; programmatic arguments for the aims, theory, concepts, and methods of their evolutionary approach; and experimental arguments for (...) the content‐dependence of reasoning. Their arguments stand or fall on the claim that functionally specialized adaptations must be richly structured in a content‐specific way. (shrink)

We discuss some research that has examined approach motivational urges and how this research clarifies the definition of approach motivation. Our research and that of others have raised doubts about the commonly accepted definition of approach motivation, which views it as a positive affective state triggered by positive stimuli. We review evidence that suggests: (a) that approach motivation is occasionally evoked by negative stimuli; (b) that approach motivation may be experienced as a negative state; and (c) that stimuli are unnecessary (...) to evoke approach motivation. (shrink)

The aims of this paper are twofold: (1) to critique Graham Harman’s avowedly nonrelational object-oriented ontology from the shared relational vantage of ethics, social philosophy, and feminist new materialism; and (2) to articulate the metaphysical basis for a materialist ontology that serves at once as a posthumanist metaethic, or, as I call it, proto-ethic. The nascent movements of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology suggest some fruitful strategies for challenging the anthropocentrism of the post-Kantian philosophical landscape. They do so, however, by (...) simultaneously foreclosing the possibility of thinking with these strategies to address moral and political problems, insofar as they characterize the real as fundamentally nonrelational. I argue that Harman’s adopted noumenalism is ultimately self-undermining, and offer as an alternative a materialist account of reality as intrinsically phenomenal, where phenomenality is unpacked as the excessive, ongoing source of proto-ethical norms to which every human ethical system implicitly appeals. (shrink)

Allen Carlson has argued that a proper aesthetics of nature must judge nature for ‘what it is’, and that such judgements must be informed by a scientific understanding of nature, in particular, one shaped by the science of ecology. Carlson uses these claims to support his theory of positive aesthetics. This paper argues that there are problems in this view. First, it misunderstands ecology, thereby adopting a view of the natural world that holds it to be much more integrated than (...) it is. Second, it ignores an even more fundamental science of nature, evolution. Thus, it misunderstands both ecology and nature. An alternative to this view would be an aesthetics based on an evolutionary understanding of nature, which holds that, although there are many functional wholes in nature, there is also significant conflict, disintegration, and incongruent scales. A proper aesthetics of nature must take these conflicts into account. The paper ends with a sketch of an aesthetic theory based on the science of evolution. (shrink)

I have been supposing that for the theory of reasoning, explicit belief is an all-or-nothing matter, I have assumed that, as far as principles of reasoning are concerned, one either believes something explicitly or one does not; in other words an appropriate "representation" is either in one's "memory" or not. The principles of reasoning are principles for modifying such all-or-nothing representations. This is not to deny that in some ways belief is a matter of degree. For one thing implicit belief (...) is certainly a matter of degree, since it is a matter of how easily and automatically one can infer something from what one believes explicitly. Furthermore, explicit belief is a matter of degree in the sense that one believes some things more strongly than others. Sometimes one is only somewhat inclined to believe something, sometimes one is not sure what to believe, sometimes one is inclined to disbelieve something, sometimes one is quite confident something is not so, and so forth. (shrink)

An emerging trend in cognitive science is to explore central epistemological questions using psychological methods. Early work in this growing area of research has revealed that epistemologists’ theories of knowledge diverge in various ways from the ways in which ordinary people think of knowledge. Reflecting the practices of epistemology as a whole, the vast majority of these studies have focused on the concept of propositional knowledge, or knowledge-that. Many philosophers, however, have argued that knowing how to do something is importantly (...) different from knowing that something is the case. Hence, in this paper we turn our attention to people’s concept of knowledge-how. We present data from two experiments that employed a sentence recognition task as an implicit measure of conceptual activation. The data from this implicit measure suggest that, contrary to prominent intellectualist theories of know-how, according to which know-how is a species of propositional knowledge, people’s concept of know-how more closely aligns with anti-intellectualism, the view that knowing how to perform some task consists in having the appropriate skills or abilities. (shrink)

Public access cable channels, remnants of competitive cable franchise battles, are often in the center of heated controversy over allowance of utterances that are at sharp odds with community values. This article reiterates that broad public discussion is both a legal and a philosophical mandate in this country, concluding that more harm than good emerges from preventing groups from airing their opinions. The opportunity is always available for countering messages that have been aired.

The present research was designed to test whether the subjective experience of more effort related to more reward valuation as measured by a neural response. This prediction was derived from the theory of cognitive dissonance and its effort justification paradigm. Young adult participants (n = 82) engaged in multiple trails of a low or high effort task that resulted in a loss or reward on each trial. Neural responses to the reward (loss) cue were measured using EEG, so that the (...) event-related potential known as the Reward Positivity (RewP) could be assessed. Results revealed no significant differences between low and high effort conditions on the RewP. However, within the high effort condition, a more subjective experience of effort was associated with a larger RewP. This research extends past research on the effort justification paradigm of cognitive dissonance theory by suggesting that effort justification is associated with an implicit measure of reward valuation. It therefore challenges recent perspectives on dissonance processes that posit that these evaluative changes should only occur on explicit but not implicit measures. (shrink)

The common view is that no novel IS an argument, though it might be reconstructed as one. This is curious, for we almost always feel the need to reconstruct arguments even when they are uncontroversially given as arguments, as in a philosophical text. We make the points as explicit, orderly, and (often) brief as possible, which is what we do in reconstructing a novel’s argument. The reverse is also true. Given a text that is uncontroversially an explicit, orderly, and brief (...) argument, in order to enhance plausibility, our first instinct is to flesh it out with illustrations and relationships to everyday life. If this process is fictive (e.g., with “thought experiments”) and orderly, it is story-telling. This paper investigates whether there is a principled way of determining a novel’s argument, which should contribute as much to understanding arguments as to understanding novels. (shrink)

Many philosophers of science follow Hempel in embracing both substantive and methodological anti-psychologism regarding the study of explanation. The former thesis denies that explanations are constituted by psychological events, and the latter denies that psychological research can contribute much to the philosophical investigation of the nature of explanation. Substantive anti-psychologism is commonly defended by citing cases, such as hyper-complex descriptions or vast computer simulations, which are reputedly generally agreed to constitute explanations but which defy human comprehension and, as a result, (...) fail to engender any relevant psychological events. It is commonly held that the truth of the substantive thesis would lend support to the methodological thesis. However, the standard argument for the substantive thesis presumes that philosophers’ own judgments about the aforementioned cases issues from mastery of the lay or scientific norms regarding the use of ‘explanation.’ Here we challenge this presumption with a series of experiments indicating that both lay and scientific populations require of explanations that they actually render their targets intelligible. This research not only undermines a standard line of argument for substantive anti-psychologism, it demonstrates the utility of psychological research methods for answering meta-questions about the norms regarding the use of ‘explanation.’. (shrink)

The field of cognition and emotion has grown considerably over the past 30 years, with an increased emphasis on the relationships between emotional and motivational components and how they contribute to basic perceptual, cognitive, and neural processes. For instance, research has revealed that emotion often influences these processes via emotion’s relationship with motivational dimensions, as when positive emotions low versus high in approach motivational intensity have different influences on attentional and other cognitive processes. Research has also revealed that motivational direction (...) (approach vs. withdrawal) and affective valence (positive vs. negative) are not as closely related as once was theorised; that is, positive affect is not inevitably associated with approach motivation and negative affect is not inevitably associated with withdrawal motivation. These and other lines of research with anger have suggested that the field needs to move beyond a focus on affective valence and it needs to consider an integration of dimensional and discrete models of emotion. The article also includes some suggestions for improving methods of measuring and inducing emotions and some recommendations for future researchers. (shrink)

The meaning of a symbol is determined by its use, but the canonical way of specifying meaning is in a statement of the form "S means...". To be able to provide such a specification is equivalent to being able to translate the symbol S into one's own terms. A change in usage of terms involves a change of meaning iff the correct translation between earlier usage and later usage takes a term into a different expression. Such translation is holistic, a (...) matter of finding the best mapping. Sameness of meaning is a similarity relation, as is sameness of concept. The meaning of a larger expression is derived from the meaning of its parts iff the translation of the whole is derived from the translation of its parts. (shrink)

In their book EVALUATING CRITICAL THINKING Stephen Norris and Robert Ennis say: “Although it is tempting to think that certain [unstated] assumptions are logically necessary for an argument or position, they are not. So do not ask for them.” Numerous writers of introductory logic texts as well as various highly visible standardized tests (e.g., the LSAT and GRE) presume that the Norris/Ennis view is wrong; the presumption is that many arguments have (unstated) necessary assumptions and that readers and test takers (...) can reasonably be expected to identify such assumptions. This paper proposes and defends criteria for determining necessary assumptions of arguments. Both theoretical and empirical considerations are brought to bear. (shrink)

This paper is a critique of pornography from within the framework of Heideggerian phenomenology. I contend that pornography is a pernicious form of technological discourse in which women are reduced to spectral and anonymous figures fulfilling a universal role, namely that of sexual subordination. Further, the danger of pornography is covered over in the public sphere as a result of the pervasive appeal to its status as mere fantasy. I argue that relegating the problem to the domain of fantasy is (...) superficial and specious at best, inasmuch as fantasy itself is ultimately grounded in everyday reality. When not concealed as innocuous “fantasy,” pornography has been defended under the rubric of “free speech.” One of my aims is to repudiate this approach by revealing it as grounded in a highly suspect and self-contradictory phallocentric view of language. Rae Langton’s (2009) recently published collection of essays on pornography attacks the problem largely in terms of “objectification” and the Austinian notion of “illocutionary disablement” from a position of authority. In this paper, I too confront the issues of language, objectification, and authority, but as articulated by means of Heidegger’s critique of technology. (shrink)

“Ethical criticism” is an approach to literary studies that holds that reading certain carefully selected novels can make us ethically better people, e.g., by stimulating our sympathetic imagination (Nussbaum). I try to show that this nonargumentative approach cheapens the persuasive force of novels and that its inherent bias and censorship undercuts what is perhaps the principal value and defense of the novel—that reading novels can be critical to one’s learning how to think.

Genomic research is an expanding and subversive field, leaking into various others, from environmental protection to food production to healthcare delivery, and in doing so, it is reshaping our relationship with them. The international community has issued various declaratory instruments aimed at the human genome and genomic research. These soft law instruments stress the special nature of genomics and our genetic heritage, and attempt to set limits on our activities with respect to same, as informed by the human rights paradigm. (...) This paper examines the primary thrust and, more importantly, the joint value position of the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights and the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, concluding that, though important legal instruments from the human rights paradigm, these instruments, or rather the values contained therein, must find a more influential hard law voice and a broader policy environment. (shrink)

For an object to be multilocated is for it to wholly occupy disjoint spatial regions simultaneously. If multilocation is possible, it is possible that a multilocated particle is wholly located at 1080 distinct locations, such that it constitutes a particle-for-particle duplicate of the actual universe. Such a universe would presumably be perceptually identical to the actual universe. If we take multilocation as possible, we are thus presented with two accounts between which our perceptual evidence cannot adjudicate: one wherein the universe (...) is constituted by many particles and another wherein it is constituted by one radically multilocated particle. Parsimony concerns dictate that the latter is the more rational to accept. Since this is absurd, we should reject that multilocation is possible. Mooney responds to the problem by arguing that distinct location is evidence of non-identity, even if acceptance of the possibility of multilocation entails that this evidence is not decisive. If this is right, then the evidence favors a theory featuring many particles. In this paper, I contend that our commitment to taking distinct location as evidence of nonidentity is motivated by a more fundamental intuition that does not apply in the relevant context. (shrink)

Western aesthetics has privileged contemplation as a necessary condition for authentic aesthetic experience. In contrast, I argue that the adequacy of aesthetic comportment must be measured by the self-presentation of the object in question, shaped by the place from which such presentations issue. Thus, the specific character of many forms of art, particularly in urban contexts, solicits a kind of “distracted” engagement rather than contemplative attention. Distraction is a positive mode of aesthetic engagement. I begin with a critical account of (...) the formalist theories of Kant and Bell as examples of this privileging of contemplative hermeneutics. I then consider Walter Benjamin’s theory of mimesis as a basis for a more fruitful account of aesthetic form, of which certain “distractive” artworks serve as examples. Distraction is an appropriate response to certain presentations, in the face of which absorption would be a kind of aesthetic failure. (shrink)

The recent outbreak of Ebola in West Africa has killed thousands of people, including healthcare workers. African responses have been varied and largely ineffective. The WHO and the international community’s belated responses have yet to quell the epidemic. The crisis is characteristic of a failure to properly comply with the International Health Regulations 2005. More generally, it stems from a failure of international health justice as articulated by a range of legal institutions and instruments, and it should prompt us to (...) question the state and direction of approaches to the governance of global public health. This paper queries what might be done to lift global public health as a policy arena to the place of prominence that it deserves. It argues that there are at least two critical reasons for the past, present and easily anticipated future failings of the global public health regime. After exploring those, it then articulates a new way forward, identifying three courses of action that might be adopted in realising better health outcomes and global health justice, namely value, institutional and legal reform. (shrink)

Beginning with Ronald Hepburn’s path-breaking essay, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” which helped establish the modern discipline of environmental aesthetics, philosophers have provided sketches of what, after Hegel, might be called “philosophical histories of the aesthetics of nature.” These histories are remarkably similar and can easily be blended together to create a “received history” of the discipline. This history has subtly influenced work in the field. Unfortunately, it is not completely accurate and, as a result, has had (...) a misleading effect. A more accurate and expanded alternative history calls into question the received history’s view both on the origins of the field in arts-based aesthetic theories and on the nature and value of the aesthetic categories, “the picturesque” and “the sublime.” These categories were not borrowed from philosophy of art and inappropriately applied to nature, but instead were developed to appraise landscapes, which unlike natural objects could only rarely be judged beautiful since they are almost never symmetrical or ordered. (shrink)