1. Kant on the “Conditions of the Possibility” of Experience -- Claude Piché // 2. Plato and Kantian Transcendental Constructivism -- Tom Rockmore // 3. Kant and Fichte on the Notion of (Transcendental) Freedom -- Violetta L. Waibel // 4. Fichte, Transcendental Ontology, and the Ethics of Belief -- Steven Hoeltzel // 5. Transcendental Philosophy as “Therapy of the Mind”: Fichte’s “Facts of Consciousness” Lectures -- Benjamin D. Crowe // 6. From Transcendental Philosophy to Hegel’s Developmental Method -- William F. (...) Bristow // 7. How Transcendental Is Cohen’s Critical Idealism? -- Halla Kim // 8. Heidegger’s Failure to Overcome Transcendental Philosophy -- Eric S. Nelson // 9. Others as the Ground of Our Existence: Levinas, Løgstrup, and Transcendental Arguments in Ethics -- Robert Stern // 10. Raising Validity Claims for Reasons: Transcendental Reflection in Apel’s Argumentative Discourse -- Matthias Kettner // 11. Transcendental Arguments Based on Question-Answer Contradictions -- Yukio Irie // 12. Consequences of the Transcendental-Pragmatic Consensus Theory of Truth -- Michihito Yoshime // 13. On Jürgen Habermas’s Cognitive Theory of Morality -- Yasuyuki Funaba . (shrink)

Recently, mental strength education requires to change in a way that establishes a military value system suitable for a liberal democracy while facing the need to strengthen mental strength in response to unpredictable security situations. The key to fulfilling these twofold objectives lies in the fact that there is a positive correlation between the enhancement of a soldier’s democratic awareness and intangible force. Therefore, it is of great importance to emphasize the concept of ‘citizen in uniform’ as one of the (...) central military values. However, this concept has one problem before its use in military mental strength in which the orders of the military status and the orders of the civic seem heterogeneous and even conflicting. This study aims to dissolve the internal tension of this concept through a new philosophical interpretation of citizens in uniform, freedom, people and state, thereby providing the foundation for establishing for establishing new military values and enhancement of mental force. To this end, it examines the explanation of the current curriculum regarding these concepts first and diagnoses its several problems (II). The current curriculum presents a brief explanation of the compatibility of civil rights and military obligations but does not resolve the conflict between the two. A new understanding of them is possible by introducing Hegelian insights in Philosophy of Rights (III). From Hegel's point of view, freedom is not the mere absence of coercion but a capacity for self-determination. Freedom is difficult to realize wholly at the level of an isolated individual, and it calls for an ethical community to give it a specific form. A state that is the best entity in humanity is the supreme unit that defines individual freedom and identity. Then it naturally derives that national defense is one of the supreme missions directly related to the freedom and identity of its people. A re-description of the contents of the curriculum based on these insights can conceptually resolve the aforementioned problem and even strengthen its arguments (IV). The state and the people are in a more essential correlation than previously depicted, and liberal democratic values such as freedom, human rights and welfare are proved as constitutive of a state itself. The superiority of liberal democracy, which the current textbook attempts to prove, also becomes transparent. Finally, military duties do not conceptually conflict with civil freedom but are considered as a form of it. (shrink)

What is attention? How does it go wrong? Do attention deficits arise from genes or from the environment? Can we cure it with drugs or training? Are there disorders of attention other than deficit disorders? The past decade has seen a burgeoning of research on the subject of attention. This research has been facilitated by advances on several fronts: New methods are now available for viewing brain activity in real time, there is expanding information on the complexities of the biochemistry (...) of neural activity, individual genes can be isolated and their functions identified, analysis of the component processes included under the broad umbrella of "attention" has become increasingly sophisticated, and ingenious methods have been devised for measuring typical and atypical development of these processes, from infancy into childhood, and then into adulthood. In this book, Kim Cornish and John Wilding are concerned with attention and its development, both typical and atypical, particularly in disorders with a known genetic etiology or assumed genetic linkage. Tremendous advances across seemingly diverse disciplines - molecular genetics, pediatric neurology, child psychiatry, developmental cognitive neuroscience, and education - have culminated in a wealth of new methods for elucidating disorders at multiple levels, possibly paving the way for new treatment options. Cornish and Wilding use three specific-yet-interlinking levels of analysis: genetic blueprint, the developing brain, and the behavioral-cognitive outcomes, as the basis for charting the attention profiles of six well-documented neurodevelopmental disorders: ADHD, autism, fragile X syndrome, Down syndrome, Williams syndrome, and 22q11 deletion syndrome. Their overarching aim in this book is to provide the most authoritative and extensive account to date of disorder-specific attention profiles and their development from infancy through adolescence. (shrink)

Jason Stanley raises an important objection to hermeneutic fictionalism. The objection is called “The Autism Objection.” In this paper, I examine Stanley’s objection and defend hermeneutic fictionalism against it. After I show that the Autism Objection assumes the metarepresentational theory of pretense, I argue, mainly based on recent psychological studies, that pretense does not require the metarepresentational capacity. By doing this, I show that there are no good reasons to accept one of the premises the Autism Objection, that people with (...) autism lack the capacity to pretend. Finally, I mention two limitations of this paper. (shrink)

Terraformer les planètes lointaines pour les rendre aptes à porter des vies humaines nourrit sans doute des imaginations littéraires, mais ce que nous appelons « vie » reste pour le moment étroitement attaché à notre planète Terre.

This paper responds to Birch and Buskell's thoughtful critique. In it, I defend my use of behavioural ecology. I argue, contra Birch and Buskell, that I can give a principled defence of the emergence of conventions for respecting property, modelling as a network of pairwise iterated PDs between incipient farmers. Second, I defend my scepticism about the power of cultural group selection to optimise community normative packages. Finally, I located my views, as requested, against those of The dawn of everything. (...) I argue that the more complex “original position” envisaged in Dawn depends on special conditions rarely found on Pleistocene Africa. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate the philosophical thought and moral practice of a Korean neo-Confucian female scholar named Kang Chŏngildang 姜靜一堂, who not only believed in moral equality between men and women and the possibility of female sagehood but actually empowered herself to become a moral paragon. Furthermore, Chŏngildang’s strong faith in moral equality between men and women enabled her to engage in social criticism of the existing educational system and social norms which discriminated against women, not by overcoming neo-Confucianism, (...) commonly understood as essentially androcentric and patriarchal, but by wholeheartedly embracing and further re-appropriating it in the service of women’s moral self-empowerment and moral perfectibility. After explicating why Chŏngildang nonetheless subscribed to gendered roles and female virtue with reference to her neo-Confucian worldview, I suggest that she can be called a harbinger of Confucian feminism. (shrink)

Some causal situations appear similar but causally different. Preemptive prevention offers such an example. However, it is difficult to capture the causal difference. In fact, it resists analysis. I discuss Collins’ s account of causal difference, and argue that it is not adequate. I also argue that the causal difference is not analyzable in terms of either dependence or production. I then examine some non-reductive account of causal difference, and claim that the sense of causal difference has yet to be (...) specified. Preemptive prevention shows that the concept of causation, whether it is reducible to something else or not, still requires some further scrutiny. (shrink)

In the last few years, nativist, modular views of moral cognition have been influential. This paper shares the view that normative cognition develops robustly, and is probably an adaptation. But it develops an alternative view of the developmental basis of moral cognition, based on the idea that adults scaffold moral development by organising the learning environment of the next generation. In addition, I argue that the modular nativist picture has no plausible account of the role of explicit moral judgement, and (...) that no persuasive version of the ‘poverty of the stimulus' applies to moral cognition. (shrink)

Language is at the core of the cognitive revolution that has transformed that discipline over the last forty years or so, and it is also the central paradigm for the most prominent attempt to synthesise psychology and evolutionary theory. A single and distinctively modular view of language has emerged out of both these perspectives, one that encourages a certain idealisation. Linguistic competence is uniform, independent of other cognitive capacities, and with a developmental trajectory that is largely independent of environmental input (...) (Pinker 1994; Pinker 1997). Thus language is seen as a paradigm of John Tooby and Leda Cosmides’ concept of “evoked culture”: linguistic experience serves only to select a specific item from a menu of innately available options (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). In explaining this concept, they appeal to the metaphor of a jukebox. The human genome pre-stores a set of options, and the different experiences provided by different cultures select different elements out of this option set. I think an appropriate evolutionary perspective on language substantially undercuts this idealisation and the evoked culture model of language. Variability between speakers; the sensitivity of linguistic development to environmental input; and the limits of encapsulation are not noise. They are central to the language and its evolution. (shrink)

Currently, there is a resurgence of interests in phenomenology in education. This article sheds light on the importance of hermeneutical phenomenology in teaching and learning based on the lived experience of a Sioux Indian adolescent boy, elicited from an ethnographic case study conducted at an alternative high school in the US. Employing narrative inquiry, this article seeks phenomenological ways of understanding students' lived experiences and explores the meaning of the pedagogical practice of hermeneutical phenomenology in education. I delve into how (...) hermeneutical understanding of the phenomena of students' lived experience can catapult both students and teachers into the personal growth and development in a reciprocal way. It is my hope that such an understanding will facilitate an educational aim that focuses on the ontology of being and becoming while students' existence is brought to the center of teaching and learning. (shrink)

This essay aims to delineate Mengzi’s view of emotion by analyzing his first ethical sprout, often referred to by the Chinese term cèyǐn zhī xīn 惻隱之心.Previous scholars usually translate this term as “compassion,” “sympathy,” or “commiseration,” in the sense of the painful feeling one feels at the misfortune of others. My goal in this article is to clarify the nature of this painful feeling, and specifically I argue that (1) cèyǐn zhī xīn is primarily construing another being’s misfortune with sympathetic (...) concern, and that (2) the painfulness of cèyǐn zhī xīn comes from this concern-based construal of the object of one’s compassion. My interpretation of cèyǐn zhī xīn as a concern-based construal is an attempt to construct an important alternative to the inclinational view of Mengzian emotions, and it could be also considered as making a crucial step toward a new interpretation of the Mengzian theory of emotional cultivation. (shrink)

The current discussion on the relationship of epistemic justice to democracy focuses on its relationship to deliberative democracy. This article concerns the relationship of epistemic justice—specifically, testimonial justice which I call “epistemic fairness”—to aggregative democracy or democracy by voting. The aim of this article is to establish that in a good theory of democracy, epistemic fairness is one of the founding principles of the democratic institution of voting, that is, the principles by which the democratic institution of voting is organized. (...) Under an arguably plausible interpretation, the democratic institution of voting turns out to be committed to realizing epistemic fairness. If a theory of democracy implies that epistemic fairness is a founding principle of the democratic institution of voting, a number of implications follow with respect to the issues related to the practice of voting in actual democracies, such as the problem of gerrymandering or the fairness of the aggregation rule. (shrink)

These comments, which take the form of criticism and response, were the basis of a zoom conversation at the Eastern APA, January 2021. Josh is putting them up on philpapers (with permission from all involved) in case they are helpful to people interested in the themes of this book.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Christ as the Truth, the Light, the Life, but a Way?Bokin KimA conservative Korean Presbyterian pastor asks me what I know about Christ. He asks again what a Buddhist can know about Christ. He claims that Christ cannot be understood from the other aspects of view, but only from the Christian view. Then do I know at all about Christ?My Buddhist understanding of Christ does not start with how (...) Christ has been understood in the Christian context. My understanding is based on the reading of the Christian scripture. My reading of the scripture is guided by Sot’aesan’s understanding of Christianity. 1According to my reading, the Bible presents two meanings of Christ: Christ in the transhistorical sense and Christ in the historical sense. The meaning of Christ as the Truth, the Light, and the Life represents a Christ in the transhistorical sense. The meaning of Christ as a way represents a Christ in the historical sense. Because Jesus did not make any distinction or clarification between these two meanings, it is obvious that even the Christian tradition has confusion on the meaning of Christ. As a result, most Christians hold to an exclusive view of Christ that claims his uniqueness.My attribution of two meanings of Christ is derived from a similar distinction in Buddhism. Buddha in the transhistorical sense represents the universal nature of Buddha, which is identical with Truth. Truth can be replaced by other terms, such as Light or Life. Buddha in the historical sense means the historical nature of Buddha. In this sense, Buddha is unique and should not be depicted as absolute nor as universal. Likewise, Christ can be construed in these two ways.Christ as the Truth, Light, and LifeWhen I read the description of Christ as the Truth, Light, and Life in the Gospel according to John, I feel a strong urge to replace Christ with the term Buddha—not Gautama Buddha but Dharmakaya Buddha. Here Christ refers to the source of the historical Christ just as Dharmakaya Buddha is the source of historical Buddha. In this sense, Christ cannot be compared with any beings in the world and thus is being described absolutely. Christ only is the Truth, Light, and Life. Similarly, there is a Zen koan saying, “Buddha alone exists.”Here the terms Christ and Buddha do not point to historical figures such as Jesus of Nazareth and Siddhartha Gautama. According to a story related to the compilation of Buddha’s teaching, Ananda, who heard Buddha talk the most, was excluded from the committee of compilation. The reason was that Ananda saw the corporal aspect of the Buddha only, but he could not meet the spiritual aspect of the Buddha. [End Page 76] The term awakening in the Buddhist tradition refers to understanding the absolute or universal nature within each transient being.It seems wrong if one claims that only Christ, not Buddha, is the Truth, Light, or Life. By the same token it is wrong to say that Buddha alone, not Christ, exists in eternity. It is wrong to identify historical figures such as Jesus or Gautama with the Truth, Light, or Life. It is more erroneous to exclusively describe only one historical figure as the Truth, Light, or Life. According to my understanding, the terms Christ and Buddha are not the starting point for arguing the uniqueness of the historical Jesus or Gautama but for awakening our absolute or universal nature. That is, Christ as Truth, Light, and Life is our true nature or true self. In this nature there is no distinction between Christ and Buddha, between Christ and me, or between Buddha and me.Regardless of how our foundation is named—Christ (or God), Buddha (Dharmakaya Buddha), Tao, or Wu-chi—our foundation is the basis from which religions are originated.Christ as a WayChrist is a way to our foundation—in other words, the Truth, Light, and Life. Christ’s way is faith/grace. Jesus taught that the faith in God and grace from God would bring forth salvation to the believers. Similarly, Buddha is a way to the Truth, Light, and Life. Buddha’s way is practice/enlightenment... (shrink)