This 2003 book offers an interpretation of Heidegger's major work, Being and Time. Unlike those who view Heidegger as an idealist, Taylor Carman argues that Heidegger is best understood as a realist. Amongst the distinctive features of the book are an interpretation explicitly oriented within a Kantian framework and an analysis of Dasein in relation to recent theories of intentionality, notably those of Dennett and Searle. Rigorous, jargon-free and deftly argued this book will be necessary reading for all serious (...) students of Heidegger. (shrink)

Developing and implementing artificial intelligence (AI) systems in an ethical manner faces several challenges specific to the kind of technology at hand, including ensuring that decision-making systems making use of machine learning are just, fair, and intelligible, and are aligned with our human values. Given that values vary across cultures, an additional ethical challenge is to ensure that these AI systems are not developed according to some unquestioned but questionable assumption of universal norms but are in fact compatible with the (...) societies in which they operate. This is particularly pertinent for AI research and implementation across Africa, a ground where AI systems are and will be used but also a place with a history of imposition of outside values. In this paper, we thus critically examine one proposal for ensuring that decision-making systems are just, fair, and intelligible—that we adopt a principle of explicability to generate specific recommendations—to assess whether the principle should be adopted in an African research context. We argue that a principle of explicability not only can contribute to responsible and thoughtful development of AI that is sensitive to African interests and values, but can also advance tackling some of the computational challenges in machine learning research. In this way, the motivation for ensuring that a machine learning-based system is just, fair, and intelligible is not only to meet ethical requirements, but also to make effective progress in the field itself. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is one of the most important philosophers of the Twentieth century. His theories of perception and the role of the body have had an enormous impact on the humanities and social sciences, yet the full scope of his contribution not only to phenomenology but philosophy generally is only now becoming clear. In this lucid and comprehensive introduction, Taylor Carman explains and assesses the full range of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Beginning with an overview of Merleau-Ponty’s life and work, subsequent (...) chapters cover fundamental aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, including his philosophy of perception and intentionality; the role of the body in relation to perception; philosophy of history and culture; and his writings on art and aesthetics, particularly the work of Cezanne. A final chapter considers Merleau-Ponty’s importance today, examining his philosophy in light of recent developments in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Merleau-Ponty is essential reading for students of phenomenology, existentialism and Twentieth century philosophy. It is also ideal for anyone in the humanities and social sciences seeking an introduction to his work. (shrink)

The gravitational influence of Jupiter on Saturn produces, among other things, non-negligible changes in the eccentricity of Saturn that affect the magnitude of error of Ptolemaic astronomy. The value that Ptolemy obtained for the eccentricity of Saturn is a good approximation of the real eccentricity—including the perturbation of Jupiter—that Saturn had during the time of Ptolemy's planetary observations or a bit earlier. Therefore, it seems more probable that the observations used for obtaining the eccentricity of Saturn were done near Ptolemy’s (...) time, and rather unlikely earlier than the first century AD. Even if this is not quite a demonstration that Ptolemy used observations of his own, my argument increases its probability and practically discards the idea that Ptolemy borrowed values or observations from astronomers further back than the first century AD, such as Hipparchus or the Babylonians. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of hatred have tended to examine whether and when hatred can be morally or rationally justified. If hatred is rational, for instance, it might be because it is a fitting response to the given circumstances (Ben-Ze’ev 2000; Bell 2011). At the same time, hatred typically motivates action, and action of quite characteristic types. As Fischer et al. (2018) note, the so-called ‘emotivational’ goal of hatred appears to be not merely to hurt the target of hatred, but to destroy (...) them or let them suffer. Such types of action immediately raise questions about their moral status, but we should also ask questions about their rational status. In particular, when acting on the basis of a hatred that may itself be rational – at least in the sense of being fitting – are we also acting rationally? Working with a conception of rational agency according to which we act rationally when we guide our actions by reasons seen as reasons (see Jones 2003; Carman 2018), and granting that hatred can be fitting and thereby be a response to genuine reasons, I explore the ways in which acting on the basis of hatred could or could not be rational. (shrink)

Calls to decolonise the university and revise what we research and teach is a challenge that ought to be taken up by those working in African philosophy and philosophy in Africa, more generally. Often, the thought is that such decolonisation will involve a complete subversion, destruction or deconstruction of colonial attitudes, processes and concepts. A more moderate proposal for decolonisation of philosophy can be found, however, which is Kwasi Wiredu’s project of conceptual decolonisation. In this paper, I defend the project (...) from two categories of objection, what I call the decolonisation and methodology objections. I argue that the objections are misdirected and unfair because they fail to recognise the theoretical backing of Wiredu’s wider work. The critical reflection central to Wiredu’s project of conceptual decolonisation can be a genuinely helpful and viable route to take when tackling the challenges of decolonising philosophy. (shrink)

Throughout the Works and Days (WD), Hesiod reaffirms and promotes his audience’s belief in the reality of the supernatural — that is, the gods of Olympus, whose power the poet clearly takes seriously, given the somber warnings that populate the final calendrical portion of the piece. Drawing on S.I. Johnston’s recent The Story of Myth, as well as the work of folklorists K. Hänninen and G. Bennett, I outline the techniques Hesiod employs to render believable the influence of the divine (...) in both the distant past and the contemporary period. Hesiod constructs a story world familiar to his audience in order to bolster the credibility of the supernatural events, both mythical and contemporary, that he reports. When speaking of the gods’ influence in his own time, Hesiod remains firm on the fact of the gods’ continued intervention only in concrete, mundane phenomena experienced by each of his audience members. Otherwise, the poet tends toward vague language, leaving his audience to come to their own conclusion about the influence of the divine. To encourage a positive conclusion, Hesiod creates an analogy between abstract concepts, such as Strife, and the anthropomorphic gods of myth. Using these strategies, Hesiod imbues WD with belief in divine influence in the world, past and present. (shrink)

In _A Relational Moral Theory: African ethics in and beyond the continent_ ( 2022 ), Thaddeus Metz proposes an African moral theory according to which we ought to respect and honour the capacity of individuals to be party to harmonious relationship. He aims to present a moral theory that should ‘be weighed up against at least contemporary Western moral theories’ (p. 2). As Metz intends his theory to be a serious contender with other moral theories, I assess how his moral (...) theory can be applied and contribute to contemporary moral discussions _‘beyond the continent’_, as the subtitle of the book puts it. In particular, as Metz’s relational moral theory is grounded on the value of harmony, an important question is how well his theory handles _disharmony_ especially if his theory is to have application in our non-ideal world in which disharmony is rife. And here, I hold up Metz’s account to one area of disharmony, disruptive emotions and affective injustice. By first establishing how disruptive emotions and affective injustice pose a challenge to similar relational moral theories grounded in harmony, I argue that Metz’s theory has distinct advantages in the way in which it can indeed engage with such phenomena. I close the paper by considering the objection that Metz’s account is limited in making sense of a common form of disruptive emotion in response to structural injustices where affective injustice can arise, but ultimately conclude that such a limitation is superficial. (shrink)

Forms of African relational ethics that prioritise the value of harmony struggle to accommodate arguably valuable disharmony, such as disruptive emotions like anger. A wider literature on political emotions has defended the value of such emotions and even proposed that a particular form of injustice, affective injustice, can arise if we fail to create space for them. While it has recently been proposed that Thaddeus Metz's African-inspired relational moral theory can accommodate disruptive emotions and address affective injustice, in this philosophical (...) article I argue that any success that Metz's account has in this regard is superficial. This critique has important implications: either we need to engage further with disruptive emotions and affective injustice within an African relational ethics, or it may be the case that we instead need to return to how we conceptualise affective injustice to ensure that it does the justice-promoting work that we want it to do. (shrink)

Retrieving Realism, by DreyfusHubert and TaylorCharles. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. 184.

If emotions have a rational role in action, then one challenge for accounting for how we can act rationally when acting emotionally is to show how we can guide our actions by our emotional considerations, seen as reasons. In this paper, I put forward a novel proposal for how this can be so. Drawing on the interconnection between emotions, cares and caring, I argue that, as the emotional agent is a caring agent, she can be aware of the emotional consideration (...) as a pro tanto reason favouring an action choice and, even, as the reason for which she should act. (shrink)

Anger has potential epistemic value in the way that it can facilitate a process of our coming to have knowledge and understanding regarding the issue about which we are angry. The nature of anger, however, may nevertheless be such that it ultimately undermines this very process. Common non-philosophical complaints about anger, for instance, often target the angry person as being somehow irrational, where an unformulated assumption is that her anger undermines her capacity to rationally engage with the issue about which (...) she is angry. Call this assumption the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger. Such a charge is pernicious when levelled at the anger of those in positions of marginalisation or oppression, where it can threaten to silence voices on the very issue of the injustices that they face. In this paper I thus provide a much-needed interrogation of this charge. Firstly, and drawing on empirical literature on the effects of anger on decision-making, I flesh out the charge and why it poses a threat to how the epistemic value of anger has been defended. Secondly, I argue that the charge of emotional irrationality regarding anger can nevertheless be unwarranted, at least within a common context of political anger. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was described by Paul Ricoeur as 'the greatest of the French phenomenologists'. The essays in this volume examine the full scope of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, from his central and abiding concern with the nature of perception and the bodily constitution of intentionality to his reflections on science, nature, art, history, and politics. The authors explore the historical origins and context of his thought as well as its continuing relevance to contemporary work in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, biology, (...) art criticism and political and social theory. What emerges is a fresh image of Merleau-Ponty as a deep and original thinker whose philosophical importance has been underestimated, in part owing to the influence of intellectual movements such as existentialism and structuralism, into which his work could not be easily assimilated. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Merleau-Ponty currently available. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Husserl Heidegger.

Herman Philipse’s Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being is an attempt to interpret, analyze, and ultimately discredit the whole of Heidegger’s thought. But Philipse’s reading of the texts is uncharitable, and the ideas he presents and criticizes often bear little resemblance to Heidegger’s views. Philipse relies on a crude distinction between “theoretical” and “applicative” interpretations in arguing that Heidegger’s conception of interpretation as a kind of projection is, like the liar’s paradox, formally self-defeating. But even granting the distinction, the charge of reflective (...) incoherence is fallacious and question-begging. Finally, Philipse advances the astonishing “interpretive hypothesis” that the seemingly morbid existential themes in Being and Time were part of a deliberate “Pascalian strategy” to win converts to Heidegger’s own idiosyncratic “postmonotheist worship of Being.” In short, notwithstanding its nearly comprehensive coverage of Heidegger’s works, the book does not represent a sufficiently serious effort to understand the complexities and obscurities of Heidegger’s thinking. (shrink)

In 1975, Imre Lakatos and Elie Zahar claimed that the determination of planetary distances represents excess empirical content of Copernicus's theory over that of Ptolemy. This claim provoked an interesting discussion during the first half of the 1980s. The discussion started when Alan Chalmers affirmed that it is not correct to attribute this advantage to the Copernican system over the Ptolemaic. Other scholars criticized Chalmers's assertion, reaffirming the position of Lakatos and Zahar: one went even further, asserting that Copernicus has (...) not one but two methods for calculating distances, even though this claim was subsequently also criticized. But all participants assumed that Ptolemy has no method for calculating planetary distances. In this article, I argue that this is not correct. I argue, in fact, that Ptolemy has two independent methods for calculating the distances of some of the planets and, therefore, as far as the calculation of planetary distances is concerned, Ptolemy's system surpasses that of Copernicus. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology, always insisted that philosophy is not just a scholarly discipline, but can and must aspire to the status of a ‘strict’ or ‘rigorous science’ (strenge Wissenschaft). Heidegger, by contrast, began his winter lectures in 1929 by dismissing what he called the ‘delusion’ that philosophy was or could be either a discipline or a science as the most disastrous debasement of its innermost essence. To understand what Husserl had in mind, it is important to (...) begin by remembering that the word Wissenschaft has a wider extension than the word ‘science’. German distinguishes the Naturwissenschaften from the Geisteswissenschaften, or human sciences, which Husserl and Heidegger both believed could be perfectly ‘rigorous’ in their own way. Speakers of English, by contrast, tend to draw a threefold distinction among the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. (shrink)

La tradition manuscrite de la lyrique occitane nous a transmis quatre recueils, tous réalisés en Vénétie à la fin du xiiie siècle, qui sont décorés de miniatures évoquant chaque troubadour en tête des poèmes qui lui sont attribués. Parmi eux se sont glissées quelques femmes trobairitz. Huit d’entre elles sont ainsi représentées en train de chanter, mais dénuées de tout caractère individuel. À défaut de pouvoir révéler qui ont été ces poétesses-musiciennes dont l’identité souvent incertaine laisse planer un doute quant (...) à leur existence réelle, ces images témoignent d’abord de la célébrité dont elles bénéficiaient plusieurs décennies après leur disparition dans les milieux lettrés italiens. Images stéréotypées, rehaussées par l’éclat des fonds d’or et le chatoiement des couleurs, elles relèvent avant tout d’une fiction destinée à mettre en évidence la « noblesse », tant morale que sociale, des personnages. De telles représentations ne pouvaient mieux répondre à l’idéal même de la fin’amor, l’amour courtois : en elles se cristallise une vision idéale de la dame inaccessible et parfaite, la domna, chantée par les troubadours. (shrink)

Assuming that moral enhancement is morally permissible, I contend that a more careful theoretical treatment of emotion and the affective landscape is needed to advance both our understanding and the prospects of interventions aimed at moral enhancement. Using Douglas’ proposal for the direct modulation of counter‐moral emotions as a foil for discussion, I argue that the direct modulation of emotion fails to address underlying aspects of an agent’s psychology that will give rise to a range of counter‐moral motives beyond the (...) emotion that is targeted. This is because the direct modulation of emotion does not accommodate the fact that an emotional episode or emotional disposition is part of a network of other dispositions and responses, against a backdrop of our having cares and goals, as well as other cognitive content that can mediate how we apprehend a situation. By focusing on emotion rather than on moral capacity as other critiques have done, I thus argue that direct modulation is likely to be ineffective, and, more positively, by drawing out patterns of connections across the affective landscape, we can better tease out what it is that we should really be targeting if we are to achieve robust and meaningful moral change. (shrink)

Diagrams in medieval manuscripts of Greek mathematical and astronomical works can seem peculiar for a modern reader, given their persistent and widespread tendency to represent more geometric regularity than the argument requires and their usual visual inaccuracy in depicting the mathematical objects discussed in the text. Although most scholars believe that these tendencies go back to the original Greek authors, in a recent paper I argued that these odd features should not be attributed to Greek authors, but to transmission. My (...) main argument there is based on experiments made with university students who played the role of copyists. In this paper, I show that the vestiges of the changes caused by transmission are present in the very diagrams of the extant manuscripts. I analyze four diagrams taken from Aristarchus's On Sizes. (shrink)

This article analyzes the angular spacing of the degree marks on the zodiac scale of the Antikythera mechanism and demonstrates that over the entire preserved 88° of the zodiac, the marks are systematically placed too close together to be consistent with a uniform distribution over 360°. Thus, in some other part of the zodiac scale (not preserved), the degree marks have been spaced farther apart. By contrast, the day marks on the Egyptian calendar scale are spaced uniformly, apart from minor (...) errors. A solar equation of center is apparent which rises by nearly 2.7° over the preserved portion of the zodiac. The placement of the degree marks indicates that, in the preserved portion of the zodiac, the Sun was considered to run at a uniform pace of about 30° per synodic month, which is consistent with the Sun’s speed in the fast zone of the Babylonian solar theory of System A. (shrink)

The terminological boxes into which we press the history of philosophy often obscure deep and important differences among major figures supposedly belonging to a single school of thought. One such disparity within the phenomenological movement, often overlooked but by no means invisible, separates Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception from the Husserlian program that initially inspired it. For Merleau-Pontys phenomenology amounts to a radical, if discreet, departure not only from Husserls theory of intentionality generally, but more specifically from his account of the (...) intentional constitution of the body and its role in perceptual experience. (shrink)

If emotions provide reasons for action through their intentional content, as is often argued, where does this leave the role of the affective element of an emotion? Can it be more than a motivator and have significant bearing of its own on our emotional actions, as actions done for reasons? One way it can is through reinforcing other reasons that we might have, as Greenspan argues. Central to Greenspan’s account is the claim that the affective discomfort of an emotion, as (...) a fact about the agent’s state of being, provides an additional normative reason to act to alleviate the state. This, I argue, is not correct, nor is it the best way to understand emotions as reason-reinforcers. In this paper, I thus do two things: I provide an examination of how and why the affect of emotion could provide reasons to act to alleviate it and I propose that the real way emotions reinforce reasons is through the way they orient our attention onto things that matter, registering them as salient. (shrink)

Frustration is widely recognised to be central to many cases of moral anger in a political context, yet little philosophical attention has been paid to it. In this paper, I offer a much-needed philosophical analysis of frustration, working primarily with the example of the recent South African student protests. By developing a deeper philosophical understanding of frustration and its connections to moral anger, I argue that the movement between the two has a couple of important aspects. First, the movement involves (...) a transformation from simply responding to some opposition to viewing that opposition as wrongfully imposed by an agent; second, in the cases that are my focus, the movement is a response to a persistent opposition that is compounded by an erosion of trust, confidence and hope within a moral community, which ultimately changes the very nature of the opposition into a form of wrongdoing. These aspects allow us to assess the appropriateness of the movement, thereby developing a rich analysis of moral anger arising out of frustration in a political context. (shrink)

Dennett’s eliminativist theory of consciousness rests on an implausible reduction of sensory seeming to cognitive judgment. The “heterophenomenological” testimony to which he appeals in urging that reduction poses no threat to phenomenology, but merely demonstrates the conceptual indeterminacy of small-scale sensory appearances. Phenomenological description is difficult, but the difficulty does not warrant Dennett’s neo-Cartesian claim that there is no such thing as seeming at all as distinct from judging.

Intelligent Design (ID) argues for the existence of a designer, postulating it as a theoretical entity of a scientific theory aiming to explain specific characteristics in nature that seems to show design. It is commonly accepted within the Scientific Realism debate, however, that asserting that a scientific theory is successful is not enough for accepting the extramental existence of the entities it postulates. Instead, scientific theories must fulfill additional epistemic requirements, one of which is that they must show successful novel (...) predictions. Evolutionists typically attack ID by offering cases of bad design, such as the inverted retina of vertebrates. ID defenders defend their position affirming that the inversion of the retina must be a detail of design for an as of yet unknown function. The recent discovery of such a function is celebrated by ID defenders as a triumph over evolutionists. The inverted retina case is a good candidate for a novel prediction in favor of ID. In this paper, I analyze whether this is the case. (shrink)

This bibliography is the culmination of four years' work by a team of noted scholars; its annotated entries are organised by religious tradition and cover each tradition's central concepts, offering a judicious selection of primary and secondary works as well as recommendations of cross-cultural topics to be explored. Specialists in the history and literature of religions and comparative religion will find this bibliography a valuable research tool.

This issue of Philosophical Psychology hosts two book symposia. One is on Elizabeth Barnes’s book, Health Problems: Philosophical Puzzles about the Nature of Health (Oxford University Press, 2023),...

In Being and Time Heidegger advances a critique of Husserl's theory of intentionality by arguing that human understanding consists more fundamentally in an orientation toward practical activity than in mere cognition, for example deliberate perception or judgment. Heidegger criticizes Husserl for importing normative concepts drawn from logic into what purports to be a pure, presuppositionless description of consciousness. Above all, Heidegger is critical of the idealized conception of meaning that informs Husserlian phenomenology. The critique put forward in Being and Time (...) consequently rests on Heidegger's own view of the nature of meaning, its role in everyday practice, and its constitution in discourse. For Husserl, just as the notion of the "noema" or intentional content amounts to a generalization of the concept of meaning, so too what he calls the "positing" character of intentionality, that is, its inherent validity claim or presumption of actuality, is a generalization of the semantic concept of illocutionary force, more specifically assertoric force. Heidegger's conception of meaning, by contrast, eschews traditional semantic concepts borrowed from logic, and instead draws on Heidegger's claim that things in the world originally figure into our practical activities not as "occurrent" or object-like but as "available" for use. Practice thus lies at the heart of everyday significance, and it is the expressive-communicative dimension of practice, what Heidegger calls "discourse" , that underlies linguistic articulation. Assertion amounts to a derivative mode of discourse, parasitic on pre-predictive forms of expression and communication. The traditional concept of meaning as a discrete occurrent entity rests on an overgeneralization of the logical concept of the truth-valuable content of a proposition or assertion. Heidegger's account of meaning and practice in Being and Time, then, is an attempt to trace the origin of assertions in linguistic practice and to show the impossibility of recapturing the phenomenon of intentionality by appeal to the impoverished concept of meaning drawn from the assertoric paradigm central to the semantic tradition. Finally, I argue that conformism, or what Heidegger calls "inauthenticity" , is an unavoidable artifact of discourse, since the ongoing interpretation and reinterpretation essential to discourse necessarily rests on an indifferent normative background underwritten by the anonymous authority of "the one". (shrink)

This article explores the role of phenomenology in philosophical inquiry. It begins by discussing Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological reductions, the sharp distinction he draws between consciousness and reality, and his intuitive claims about intentionality. It then considers Martin Heidegger’s conceptions of phenomenon and phenomenology in relation to hermeneutics before returning to Husserl’s argument that we have a direct intuition, not just of entities, but of the phenomenal appearance of their being. It also examines Heidegger’s claim that “ontology is possible only as (...) phenomenology” and concludes by assessing phenomenology’s legacy and relevance to philosophy. (shrink)