In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Faulkner's Novels Past and PresentAndrew J. McKenna (bio)This article contains instances of the N-word. The Editor, Michigan State University Press, and Michigan State University do not condone the use of this word and only after careful consideration have we reprinted it. In this case, the word appears in the context of works by Faulkner.When I first came East I kept thinking You've got to remember to think of (...) some of them as coloured people not niggers, … I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, and leave them alone. That was when I realized that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.—Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury ([1929] 2019, 45)A black man is a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia.—W. E. B. Du Bois ([1940] 1992, 153)When William Faulkner memorably stated, "the past is not dead, it's not even past," he was not reaching out for a place in the world-historical pantheon of aphoristic wisdom; he wasn't thinking about culture and history in general. A person of his own time and place, he was thinking about his experience in his own homeland, the deep South of his native [End Page 39] Mississippi, with its cherished myth of a Lost Cause that ennobled the effort to tear our country apart over slavery, and that subsequently enabled Jim Crow legislation, spawned the KKK, and sanctioned a century of lynching and burning. There has been an uptick of attention to Faulkner owing to Carl Rollyson's recent two-volume biography (2020) and, especially for my purposes, Michael Gorra's The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (2020), which focuses on the centrality of that cataclysm in his creative imagination and his historical vision.On more than one occasion Faulkner himself was emphatic in his own ambivalence toward "his native land," as in this self-description: "He was born of it and his bones will sleep in it; loving it even while hating some of it … the intolerance and injustice; the lynching of negroes not for the crimes they committed but because their skins were black" (in Blotner 2005, 354). Gorra (2020) argues that this very ambivalence is a generative resource for the author's greatest achievements, quoting Yeats's notorious dictum, "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry" (346). This can remind us of the notorious "crucible of doubt" out of which Dostoevsky allegedly forged his fiction. The Russian novelist is named (Blotner 2005, 718) as among seven of Faulkner's "masters" in the literary education of this omnivorous autodidact, with the others being Melville, Conrad, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, and Cervantes. With Dostoevsky especially he shares an admixture of horror and benign good humor. On occasion Faulkner was classed as an author of Southern Gothic, a label also applied to Flannery O'Connor, who, with Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, counts among his greatest literary progeny. A more capacious designation might rank him with masters of the grotesque, as Mikhail Bakhtin has explored this anomalous category in his writings on Rabelais and Dostoevsky.Light in August (Faulkner, 1932) begins and ends on a humorous note, as we follow the quest of the guileless Lena Grove for the father of her unborn child. She has concluded from her "endless care of other children" in her brother's household, "'I reckon that's why I got one so quick myself'" (3); the novel closes with her newborn infant in her arms in her now aimless trek, marveling, "My, my. A body does get around: here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it's already Tennessee" (480).Lena's peregrinations bookend the story of Joe Christmas, so named because he was born on that day and who, we find later in the narrative, was snatched away by his religiously fanatical grandfather to be placed in an orphanage, then snatched away again to be placed... (shrink)

i am humbled by the opportunity to address you today as the President of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. From my first experience at the annual meeting in Boston in 1995 to this meeting more than two decades later, SAAP has been my philosophical home. Here I have come to know many of the philosophers who have most influenced me: John Lachs, Peter Hare, John Ryder, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Jim Campbell, Marilyn Fischer, Erin McKenna, and John (...) McDermott, whose work, in particular, helped me find my philosophical voice by inspiring both the research that led to my first book and my approach to teaching American philosophy. It was McDermott, the second president of this society, who delivered... (shrink)

This paper argues that there are no people. If identity isn't what matters in survival, psychological connectedness isn't what matters either. Further, fissioning cases do not support the claim that connectedness is what matters. I consider Peter Unger's view that what matters is a continuous physical realization of a core psychology. I conclude that if identity isn't what matters in survival, nothing matters. This conclusion is deployed to argue that there are no people. Objections to Eliminativism are considered, especially that (...) morality cannot survive the loss of persons. (shrink)

I am honored to have this special issue devoted to themes in my philosophical work. This testimony is especially meaningful to me since I have benefitted so much from numerous meetings of the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World. I extend thanks to Joe Jones who proposed the idea to the editorial board, and to Jim Sauer who, as editor, saw it through to its publication. Grateful thanks go to Michael McKenna who, as guest editor, brought the collection (...) together. As well, over the years, McKenna has been for me the best kind of critical yet supportive interlocutor. At an earlier stage Andreea Ritivoi's initiative and encouragement was invaluable. Of course, I extend special thanks to the ten contributors from the United States, England, Germany, and India. To them I offer my replies in the spirit of an on-going discussion about the philosophy of interpretation. (shrink)

China’s business sector has been described as facing serious ethical challenges, including corruption and bribery, distributive injustice, environmental pollution, and misspending of public funds. Unethical decision-making in business represents a potentially destabilizing force for government, business, and society. Recent calls for research that is detailed, nuanced, contemporary, and context-specific on the effects of Asian national business systems on ethical business practices, according to Pereira et al. (2017), are particularly relevant for countries including China that possess the entanglement of a “multiplexity”-multiple (...) business systems co-existing within the same economy reliant on ethics and institutional trust for effective functioning, as discussed by Witt and Redding (2013). To this end, we conduct exploratory research investigating the relationship among Confucian values, Hofstede’s national culture, and ethical decision-making within a business context in China. Using data collected from 550 Chinese MBA students and business executives, results indicate that although both Confucian values and Hofstede’s national culture dimensions are associated with the use of egoism and justice in ethical decision-making scenarios, differential patterns emerged in these relationships. Confucian values were more predictive of outcomes. Of particular interest were the relationships between Confucian values and ethical criteria of yi and justice as well as li and zhi with egoism. Results suggest if the goal is enhancing institutional trust through an increased use of more principled justice-oriented ethics in business in China, an emphasis should be placed on yi (righteousness), coupled with a deemphasis on hierarchy and tradition in the form of li (ritual propriety) and zhi (wisdom). Including love of learning (haoxue), trust (xin), a long-term orientation, and individualistic messages oriented towards family and self-sufficiency may also strengthen overall ethical decision-making for SMEs, MNCs, and SOEs in navigating a multiplexity environment. (shrink)

We trace the genealogy of wisdom to show that its status in epistemological and management discourse has gradually declined since the Scientific Revolution. As the status of wisdom has declined, so the status of rational science has grown. We argue that the effects on the practice of management of the decline of wisdom may impede management practice by clouding judgment, degrading decision making and compromising ethical standards. We show that wisdom combines transcendent intellection and rational process with ethics to provide (...) a balanced and integrated way of knowing, deciding and acting for managers in a complex and uncertain business environment. Finally, we discuss the role and value of wisdom across a range of business functions including knowledge management, strategic management, leadership and international business. (shrink)

On 26 March 20091, I introduced in the U.S. Senate a piece of legislation designed to establish a National Criminal Justice Commission. The Presidential level blue-ribbon commission would be charge...

According to Charles Travis, Frege’s principle “always to sharply separate the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective” involves a move called “the fundamental abstraction.” I try to explain what this abstraction is and why it is interesting. I then raise a problem for it, and describe what I think is a better way to understand Frege’s principle.

I argue that being wide awake is an epistemic virtue which enables me to recognize immediately that I'm wide awake. Also I argue that dreams are imaginings and that the wide awake mind can immediately discern the difference between imaginings and vivid sense experience. Descartes need only pinch himself.

This paper explores the intersection of art history and AI technology. Special attention is paid to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a machine learning technology widely used in AI art. This technology is particularly interesting to art history and the philosophy of art because it raises enduring questions about the creative process of artmaking, especially what constitutes a new and original work of art. While this is a relatively new area, it is possible to discern emerging directions where art and AI (...) intersect. One pressing issue concerns the use (or misuse) of algorithmically enabled technologies and datasets to perpetuate longstanding art-historical biases. The critical position adopted in this paper shares this concern. I examine a notable example of GAN technology that claims to create original art styles. While such experiments in computational creativity are technically interesting, their artistic aims can be questionable. I argue a mechanical model of artistic development based solely on the autonomy of style is problematic for at least two reasons: 1) it uncritically reinstates a formalist view of art history; 2) it recreates a narrow style-centric ‘historical modernism.’ However, despite voicing these reservations, I also discuss the potential of this technology to engage with topics of critical relevance to art history and the philosophy of art. (shrink)

The chapter discusses the founding and development up to the present day of the journal “Husserl Studies” and the history and purpose of the journal The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy.

While historians of art have found death masks and life casts conceptually problematic, it is also noteworthy that these objects have received scant attention from philosophers of art. In this paper, I begin to redress this omission by offering examples of how the philosophy of art can help us understand these images. Two problems stand out: the problem of representation, for example, what type of representation a death mask is; and the problem of style and historicity, for example, whether images (...) imprinted from nature can indicate styles, and whether these images can evolve and transform along art-historical lines. After considering these problems, I conclude that these images are constrained in what they can and cannot represent. While there is a long tradition of imprinting from nature, this practice shows little discernible change over time. An unchanging tradition cannot claim to exhibit a history, at least in a narrative sense familiar to art history. The following investigation opens a dialog between Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art and practitioners of theoretical art history, including Ernst Gombrich and Georges Didi-Huberman, both of whom offer differing views on how these images can be treated. (shrink)

This study examines the contestability of “relevance” as an abstract construction with no fixed meaning when applied, and questions its usage in the research quality debate. It finds that different research agendas and approaches have their own idiosyncratic logic and that any logic has its own criteria for assessing quality which cannot be applied to assess the quality of others. This is illustrated by delineating practitioner-led research from academic-led research and by comparing and contrasting research perspectives as examples. The research (...) quality debate becomes meaningless when it is limited to a singular research agenda or approach as in practice these are invariably combined. Having said this, however, every agenda and approach can be argued to be legitimate as potentially each can find what otherwise cannot be noticed. As a result, this study challenges the conventional unitarist wisdom that conceptualises knowledge as commodity, and suggests instead that heterogeneity, linked to tolerance and relative independence of means and mind, free from the control or influence of others to enable critical distance from context and status quo and facilitate judgement, is the key to those seeking a meaningful research quality debate that acknowledges tolerance of the diversity of knowledge, difference, contestation and struggle. Although such heterogeneity may at first appear to add confusion rather than clarity, without first looking at this heterogeneity it is not possible to develop a dialogue, in the context of the present neo-liberal post-political drift that emphasises consensus, the annulment of dissensus and diverts attention from relationships of power, through which a positive contribution can be made to the research quality debate. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Between the publication of Montaigne's Essais and Hobbes's Leviathan rhetors became increasingly anxious about arguing in utramque partem. Paradiastolic discourse, fundamental to Montaigne's early essays, is anxiously though expertly deployed in Leviathan. Paradiastole fuses the ability to see and speak about an issue from antithetical perspectives with the ambivalence such power arouses in. Beyond their skepticism, Montaigne and Hobbes share a concern for how phenomena can be interpreted and represented through language. Despite Hobbes's desire for a method that would (...) ensure constant and determinate linguistic acts that would render rhetoric supererogatory, Leviathan demonstrates his unremarkable affinities with mainline Renaissance humanists alongside his uneasy affinities with the Sophists. Both the humanist and the Sophist used the trope to probe and to persuade, though both were anxious about the reversibility of such rhetorical redescriptions. Paradiastolic discourses, we argue, integrate the cognitive procedures of philosophy with the judicative procedures of rhetoric. The trope operates through exploiting the reciprocity between similar qualities, as exemplified by the influential paradiastolic pairing of ferox and fortis. (shrink)

Sacrificial moral dilemmas are widely used to investigate when, how, and why people make judgments that are consistent with utilitarianism. But to what extent can responses to sacrificial dilemmas shed light on utilitarian decision making? We consider two key questions: First, how meaningful is the relationship between responses to sacrificial dilemmas and what is distinctive of a utilitarian approach to morality? Second, to what extent do findings about sacrificial dilemmas generalise to other moral contexts where there is tension between utilitarianism (...) and common-sense intuitions? We argue that sacrificial dilemmas only capture one point of conflict between utilitarianism and common-sense morality, and new paradigms are needed to investigate other key aspects of utilitarianism, such as its radical impartiality. (shrink)

Logical guarantees of validity must be understood as subject to the proviso that no equivocation is committed. But we do not have a formal theory of equivocation. This paper attempts to formulate rules for responding to equivocal arguments in the context of dialogue. What occurs when one distinguishes meanings of an equivocal expression turns out to be rather different from definition.

The demanding frontier life of My Ántonia or Little House on the Prairie may be long gone, but the idyllic small town still exists as a cherished icon of American community life. Yet sprawl and urban density, rather than small towns and farms, are the predominant features of our modern society, agribusiness and other commercial forces have rapidly taken over family farms and ranches, and even the open spaces we think of as natural retreats only retain the barest façade of (...) their former frontier austerity. The fading communities, social upheaval, and enduring heritage of the Northern Plains are the subject of Jim Dow’s Marking the Land, a stirring photographic tribute to the complex and unyielding landscape of North Dakota. Jim Dow began making pilgrimages to this remote territory in 1981 and, with a commission from the North Dakota Museum of Art, he took photographs of the passing human presence on the land. The simple, stolid pieces of architecture carved out against the Dakota skies—whether the local schoolhouse, car wash, prison, homes, hunting lodge, or churches—evoke in their spare lines and weather-battered frames the stoic and toughened spirit of the people within their walls. Folk art is also an integral part of the landscape in Dow’s visual study, and he examines the subtle evolution of local craftsmanship from homemade sculptures, murals, and carvings to carefully crafted pieces aimed at tourists. Anchoring all of these explorations is the raw and striking landscape of the North Dakota plains. Marking the Land is a moving reflection by a leading American photographer on the state of the Northern Plains today, forcing us all to rethink our conceptions of America’s forgotten frontier. (shrink)

Robin McKenna argues that we need to make space for an approach to epistemology that avoids the idealizations typical of the field. He applies this approach to topics in applied and social epistemology, such as what to do about science denial, whether we should try to be intellectually autonomous, and what our obligations are to other inquirers.

How should we understand basic desert as a justification for blaming? Many philosophers account for free will by reference to the sort of moral responsibility that involves a blameworthy person deserving blame in a basic sense of desert; free will just is the control condition for this sort of moral responsibility. But what precisely does basic desert come to, and what is it about blame that makes it the thing that a blameworthy person deserves? As it turns out, there are (...) challenges in attempting to understand basic desert for blame. One concerns whether the only good in harming a person by blaming her is instrumental. If so, there may be reason to reject desert-based conceptions of blame. In this paper, I will develop an account of basically deserved blame. In doing so, I will also defend the controversial thesis that the harm involved in blaming can be good in a way that is not merely instrumental. (shrink)

In this book Michael McKenna advances a new theory of moral responsibility, one that builds upon the work of P.F. Strawson.

John Martin Fischer's The Metaphysics of Free Will is devoted to two major projects. First, Fischer defends the thesis that determinism is incompatible with a person's control over alternatives to the actual future. Second, Fischer defends the striking thesis that such control is not necessary for moral responsibility. This review essay examines Fischer's arguments for each thesis. Fischer's defense of the incompatibilist thesis is the most innovative to date, and I argue that his formulation restructures the free will debate. To (...) defend his second thesis Fischer relies upon examples designed to show that an agent is responsible for an unavoidable action. I criticize Fischer's account of these examples, but I also maintain that my criticisms do not compromise his theory of responsibility. I raise several other difficulties for Fischer's theory of responsibility, and I close by offering some suggestions about how he might further defend it. (shrink)

Data analytics, particularly the current rhetoric around “Big Data”, tend to be presented as new and innovative, emerging ahistorically to revolutionize modern life. In this article, we situate one branch of Big Data analytics, spatial Big Data, through a historical predecessor, geodemographic analysis, to help develop a critical approach to current data analytics. Spatial Big Data promises an epistemic break in marketing, a leap from targeting geodemographic areas to targeting individuals. Yet it inherits characteristics and problems from geodemographics, including a (...) justification through the market, and a process of commodification through the black-boxing of technology. As researchers develop sustained critiques of data analytics and its effects on everyday life, we must so with a grounding in the cultural and historical contexts from which data technologies emerged. This article and others develop a historically situated, critical approach to spatial Big Data. This history illustrates connections to the critical issues of surveillance, redlining, and the production of consumer subjects and geographies. The shared histories and structural logics of spatial Big Data and geodemographics create the space for a continued critique of data analyses’ role in society. (shrink)

Donald Davidson finds folk-psychological explanations anomalous due to the open-ended and constitutive conception of rationality which they employ, and yet monist because they invoke an ontology of only physical events. An eliminative materialist who thinks that the beliefs and desires of folk-psychology are mere pre-scientific fictions cannot accept these claims, but he could accept anomalous monism construed as an analysis, merely, of the ideological and ontological presumptions of folk-psychology. Of course, eliminative materialism is itself only a guess, a marker for (...) material explanations we do not have, but it is made plausible by, inter alia, whatever difficulties we have in interpreting intentional folk-explanations realistically. And surely anomalous monism does require further explanation if it is to be accepted realistically and not dismissed as an analysis of a folk-idiom which is to be construed instrumentally at best. Some further explanation is needed of how beliefs, desires, etc. can form rational patterns which have ‘no echo in physical theory’ and yet those beliefs, desires etc. be physical events. To this end I propose to graft on to anomalous monism a modest version of functionalism. (shrink)

A familiar claim in the free will debate is that the freedom in dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists is limited to the type required for an agent to deserve blame for moral wrongdoing, and to deserve it in a sense that is basic. In this paper, I seek a rationale for this claim, offer an explanation of basic desert, and then argue that the free will debate can persist even when divorced from basic desert.

Le présent article, à cheval entre autobiographie et recherche, donne à lire trois récits entremêlés : dans l’un d’eux, l’autrice est temporairement prise au piège d’une situation de violence conjugale ; dans un autre, elle accepte enfin sa sexualité queer ; enfin, le dernier consiste en une réflexion sur les propos, au xviii e siècle, de Jeremy Bentham sur les « irrégularités sexuelles », pour reprendre sa formule. En particulier, l’autrice se penche sur les dynamiques de pouvoir, notamment sur la (...) subversion de la soumission apparente, devenue pouvoir, dans le cadre d’actes consentis, et interroge ce qui nous pousse à faire du _kink_ de domination/soumission un comportement interdit ou tabou. (shrink)

Patrick Todd has recently fashioned a novel argument for incompatibilism, the Moral-Standing Zygote Argument. Todd considers much-discussed cases in which a manipulator causes an agent in a deterministic scenario to act morally wrongly from compatibilist-friendly conditions for freedom and moral responsibility. The manipulator, Todd contends, does not have the standing to blame the manipulated agent, and the best explanation for this is that incompatibilism is true. This is why the manipulated agent is not blameworthy. In this paper, I counter Todd (...) on behalf of the compatibilist, arguing that the best explanation for the manipulator's lack of moral standing to blame is due to the manipulator's intending to cause the manipulated agent to do wrong. (shrink)

What role, if any, should the government perform in a society? Two very different answers to this question have been provided by John Rawls and Robert Nozick. For Rawls, the government plays an important role in ensuring that the principles of justice are realized in the workings of society. For Nozick, the role of government is limited to that of providing protection. The debate over these two views has led to the questioning of the entire liberal doctrine, a questioning that (...) has taken place not only within intellectual circles, but also within the society at large. (shrink)

Alfred Mele’s Autonomous Agents offers a penetrating treatment of autonomy. Understood as an actual condition of self-rule, autonomy is nested within the range of freedom concepts often associated with discussions of moral responsibility. In part 1 of his two-part Autonomous Agents, Mele attempts to capture autonomy by exploring the upper reaches of self-control, where self-control is understood as the opposite of akrasia, that is, weakness of will. It is Mele’s contention that even an optimally self-controlled agent could fall short of (...) autonomy. What, he asks, can be added to an ideally self-controlled agent to provide conditions sufficient for autonomous agency? In part 2, Mele offers not one answer but two. He offers first an account that would satisfy a compatibilist, and then one that would meet the further demands of an incompatibilist. Mele himself remains agnostic as regards the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists. He does, however, shape novel accounts of each by exploiting the resources that, he argues, are needed to move past self-control to autonomy. He closes by arguing that we have better reason to believe that there are autonomous agents than we do to believe that there are none. (shrink)

John McDermott will be missed personally by many of us. Even more, though, the profession of philosophy has lost a strong voice for pluralism. McDermott worked tirelessly on behalf of voices that were not being heard. He did this by getting out-of-print works back into the hands of scholars, but he also did this by supporting many people in our Society as they searched for jobs and sought tenure and promotion in a system that does not always recognize the work (...) done in the American philosophical tradition. He reviewed articles and manuscripts and wrote countless blurbs for the backs of books. He did this even when he disagreed with the particulars of other people's work. I know that when I had a... (shrink)

In a world with limited resources, allocation of resources to certain individuals and conditions inevitably means fewer resources allocated to other individuals and conditions. Should a patient's personal responsibility be relevant to decisions regarding allocation? In this project we combine the normative and the descriptive, conducting an empirical bioethical examination of how both Norwegian and British doctors think about principles of responsibility in allocating scarce healthcare resources. A large proportion of doctors in both countries supported including responsibility for illness in (...) prioritization decisions. This finding was more prominent in zero‐sum scenarios where allocation to one patient means that another patient is denied treatment. There was most support for incorporating prospective responsibility (through patient contracts), and low support for integrating responsibility into co‐payments (i.e. through requiring responsible patients to pay part of the costs of treatment). Finally, some behaviours were considered more appropriate grounds for deprioritization (smoking, alcohol, drug use)—potentially because of the certainty of impact and direct link to ill health. In zero‐sum situations, prognosis also influenced prioritization (but did not outweigh responsibility). Ethical implications are discussed. We argue that the role that responsibility constructs appear to play in doctors' decisions indicates a needs for more nuanced—and clear—policy. Such policy should account for the distinctions we draw between responsibility‐sensitive and prognostic justifications for deprioritization. (shrink)