This piece written for Valentine’s Day 2014 links the love songs of Smokey Robinson with writing on romantic love from classical theorists to feminist writers like Mary Evans and bell hooks. Through a discussion of Smokey Robinson’s biography it argues that the political and affective key of his songs is similar to the arguments provided by feminist theory. It makes a case for holding to a ‘love ethic’ that is a doing, not confined to one person alone but rather circulated (...) and routed within wider communities. (shrink)

I will defend two claims. First, Schaffer's priority monism is in tension with many research programs in quantum gravity. Second, priority monism can be modified into a view more amenable to this physics. The first claim is grounded in the fact that promising approaches to quantum gravity such as loop quantum gravity or string theory deny the fundamental reality of spacetime. Since fundamental spacetime plays an important role in Schaffer's priority monism by being identified with the fundamental structure, namely the (...) cosmos, the disappearance of spacetime in these views might undermine classical priority monism. My second claim is that priority monism can avoid this issue with two moves: first, in dropping one of its core assumptions, namely that the fundamental structure is spatio-temporal, second, by identifying the connection between the non-spatio-temporal structure and the derivative spatio-temporal structure with mereological composition. (shrink)

The erosion of the three interlocking dimensions of nature, society and self is the consequence of what Felix Guattari referred to as integrated world capitalism (IWC). In South Africa the erosion of nature, society and self is also the consequence of centuries of colonialism and decades of apartheid. In this paper I wish to explore how the African philosophy of ubuntu (humanness), which appears to be anthropocentric, might be invoked to contribute to the healing of the three ecologies—how healing of (...) the social might transversally effect healing of nature and the self. My theoretical exploration has relevance to education in South Africa, given that a mandate of national curriculum policy is that indigenous knowledge systems form part of the discursive terrains of all school learning areas/subjects. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I offer an account of propositional learning: namely, learning that p. I argue for what I call the “Three Transitions Thesis” or “TTT” according to which four states and three transitions between them characterize such learning. I later supplement the TTT to account for learning why p. In making my case, I discuss mathematical propositions such as Fermat's Last Theorem and the ABC Conjecture, and then generalize to other mathematical propositions and to non-mathematical propositions. I also discuss (...) some interesting applications of the TTT, and reply to some noteworthy objections. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Close Enemies: The Relationship of Psychiatry and Psychology in the Assessment of Mental DisordersPhilippe Le Moigne, PhDAs Peter Zachar rightly points out in his comment, the assessment of mental disorders underwent new developments with the release of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-V in 2013 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Whereas in 1980, the manual had been thought of in a rigorously categorical way, on the basis of (...) distinct and closed syndromic entities, this new version advocated the development of a radically dimensionalist approach, with the diagnosis aiming this time to restore the whole symptomatological picture of the patient on a spectrum of ratings are supposed to cover the entirety of psychiatric semiology (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).For its part, my article aimed to show how standardized assessment, guided by the return of psychiatry’s authority and the assertion of its legitimacy in the diagnostic field, gave the ascendancy in the 1980s to the classificatory tradition and thus to the categorical model, to the detriment of personality approach and test psychology which offered a competing solution here. This perspective, historically dated, may have led the reader to think that there is an antagonism that cannot be overcome here. Rather, it should be seen as a form of structuring opposition, or even a “complementarity inscribed in rivalry,” between psychiatry and psychology, which is naturally susceptible to change over time.Indeed, the reversal operated by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-V is not total because it cannot be total. The defense of the dimensionalist approach, dear to the psychological testing tradition, was intended here to allow the identification of co-morbidities, present in most patients but poorly apprehended by the categorical approach, and to open up diagnosis to prevention by screening for minor manifestations of psychopathology when they suggest the [End Page 259] development of a manifest episode of the disease in the more or less long term. The risk here is that we end up with overdiagnosis and thus an over-representation of false positives (Wakefield, 2015). In other words, this type of approach does not escape the obligation to determine threshold scores, likely to indicate the lower limit of the disorder, and thus to resort to a categorical approach. There is a first affinity between the two perspectives which obeys, beyond the divergences in principle, a technical requirement.But the two approaches have even more in common when we look at their epistemological background: they share the idea that the representation and the intervention on mental disorder, to use Ian Hacking’s expression (1983), must be based on the model proposed by the physical and natural sciences. And as Greta Kaluzeviciute aptly points out in her comment, this orientation leads to the idea of measuring mental disorder in particular to conduct elaborate quantification operations to determine, for example, whether two entities are statistically distinct or whether a drug has a significant effect on the evolution of a pathology.This is in fact an old question that can be formulated as follows, to use the expression of the psychometrician Joel Michell (1999): are psychological dimensions metric? In other words, if we want to apply the language of numbers to mental disorders, they must share its properties, two of which seem essential: it must be possible to establish that each mental disorder, in the same way as qualities attributable to length for example, has a zero and can be divided by means of gradients (or degrees of intensity) whose interval is constant (Le Moigne, 2018; Michell, 1999). For lack of space, let us only address the second condition. This one has already been denied by many, starting with Bergson at the end of the nineteenth century (1889). He does not believe in the quantification of psychological expressions, starting with sensations. What is the common point, he wrote, between the feeling of a mild pain, as one feels a stiffness, and the sensation of a needle being hammered into your flesh? For him, one and the other of these intensities are incomparable, so that they do not belong to a similar register of sensations that one could stage from a 0 toward a... (shrink)

It was a dark and stormy night, in the otherwise unnoteworthy year 711 E.C. , and the great-aunt sat crouched at her typewriter, holding his hands out to it from time to time as if for warmth and swinging on a swing. He was a handsome boy of about eighteen, one of those men who suddenly excite your desire when you meet them in the street, and who leave you with a vague feeling of uneasiness and excited senses. On the (...) plate beside the typewriter lay a slice of tomato. It was a flawless slice. It was a perfect slice of a perfect tomato. It is perfectly boring. I hold out my hands to the typewriter again, while swinging and showing my delicate limbs, and observe that the rows of keys are marked with all the letters of the English alphabet, and all the letters of the French alphabet minus accent marks, and all the letters of the Polish alphabet except the dark L. By striking these keys with the ends of my fingers or, conceivably, a small blunt object, the aging woman can create a flaw in the tomato. She did so at once. It was then a seriously, indeed a disgustingly flawed tomato, but it continued to be perfectly boring until eaten. She expired instantly in awful agony, of snakebite, flinging the window wide to get air. It is a dark and stormy night and the rain falling in in the typewriter keys writes a story in German about a great-aunt who went to a symposium on narrative and got eaten in the forest by a metabear. She writes the story while reading it with close attention, not sure what to expect, but collaborating hard, as if that was anything new; and this is the story I wrote . . . Ursula K. Le Guin, distinguished novelist, poet, and essayist, is the author of The Left Hand of Darkness, Malafrena, and The Dispossessed, for which she won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award. Her novel The Lathe of Heaven was made into a film by the Public Broadcasting System. (shrink)

Ce texte répond aux critiques formulées par J.G. Hülsmann à propos de mon article “Ludwig von Mises, Théoricien de la Banque Libre”. J.G. Hülsmann me reproche une méthode scientifique douteuse sans voir que ses reproches ne s’adressent qu’à luimême. Pour lui répondre, il me suffit de le paraphraser. Le commentaire de Hülsmann a néanmoins un léger mérite, celui de mettre en exergue deux courts passages de l’oeuvre de Mises que j’omets involontairement dans mon article. Aussi il me revient de combler (...) cette lacune, d’interpréter ces deux passages, d’affiner et finalement d’appuyer le propos et la conclusion de mon article.This article is a reply to J.G. Hülsmann’s critics concerning my article “Ludwig von Mises, Théoricien de la Banque Libre”. J.G. Hülsmann blames me for an uncertain scientific method when these reproaches are aimed at himself. To respond, we just have to paraphrase. Nevertheless, for the credit of Hülsmann’s commentary, we have to say that it makes appear two short citations of Mises’ work that we unintentionally ignore in our article. So, to fill the gap, I have to interpret these citations, improve and finally rest the purpose and the conclusion of my article. (shrink)

In this article, I defend the thesis that selfishness and altruism can be intrapersonal . In doing so, I argue that the notions of intrapersonal altruism and selfishness usefully pick out behavioural patterns and have predictive value. I also argue that my thesis helps enrich our understanding of the prudential, and can subsume some interesting work in economic and psychological theory.

This article addresses the issue of the disciplinary status of Educational Studies, which both in the theoretical discourse and in the practice of this area is far from unambiguous. The issue is relevant not only for theoretical reasons but also for practical and social ones. This is because the status of Educational Studies, by having a decisive impact on the very understanding and nature of studies in education, at least in part may impact changes in educational practice. Two main models (...) of Educational Studies can be differentiated, with additional variation within these models. Among the terms most commonly used in discussion of the disciplinary status of Educational Studies, frequent mention is made of the autonomy that exists in various versions and of interdisciplinarity. This article proposes a new way of understanding this status, which I call the autonomy of Educational Studies as a second-level discipline, which includes aspects of both of the previously mentioned models, yet also adds certain modifications. In the course of my argumentation, I will conduct a comparative analysis of both traditions, and subsequently justify the proposed thesis, and finally briefly indicate potential problems which may be generated by this model. (shrink)

Wittgenstein refers to psychophysical parallelism in this apparently prejudiced way in paragraph 611 of Zettel , in the course of a rather remarkable passage. It begins at 605 with the claim that ‘One of the most dangerous ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads or in our heads’. Subsequent sections develop this remark in a way that demonstrates Wittgenstein's rejection of the view that thinking is any sort of process in the head, whether a (...) physiological process or a matter of the operations of ‘a nebulous mental entity’. Indeed he appears to consider that these ontologically opposed alternatives have a common source, in that they both derive from the mistaken view that there must be a mediating process between psychological phenomena such as my present remembering and my experience of the remembered event . If we find no suitable mediating physiological process, we are easily led to assume that there must be a process of a rather different sort, and hence we are led to believe in a ‘nebulous mental entity’. But this whole line of thought in fact depends on a ‘primitive interpretation of our concepts’, an interpretation which we uncritically made at the stage at which we assumed that there must be a process of some sort mediating between the phenomena. We are reminded of Wittgenstein's earlier remarks in Philosophical Investigations , I, 308. (shrink)

It so happens that classical physical theories can be interpreted as a representation of local interactions between systems with determinate properties. Orthodox quantum mechanics, which is one of our most experimentally well-confirmed theories, is notoriously resistant to being interpreted in terms of the above framework. Bell-type theorems and Bell-type experiments have made such an interpretation impossible. In the early sixties, John Bell demonstrated that any theory that represents its domain in terms of the above framework satisfies a set of inequalities, (...) the so-called Bell inequalities. Experiments on quantum phenomena violate Bell-type inequalities. By a simple modus tollens, the upshot is that no theory that includes all the elements of the above framework can recover all statistical predictions of quantum mechanics. Philosophers have been trying to interpret this result, that is, to understand what the world might be like if it is true that physical interactions between systems are non-local, or that physical systems do not possess determinate properties. This line of thought found its climax in program of Òexperimental metaphysicsÓ that developed after the violation of Bell-type inequalities was observed. Experimental metaphysics consists in deriving metaphysical conclusions from the Bell-type experimental results. The mainstream interpretation within experimental metaphysics is that Bell-type experiments force us to accept the existence of a form of non-locality at the ontological level, but a form that we can consider benign because it is of a non-causal type. In my dissertation, I assess to what extent philosophical investigation can help us decide what the world is like on the basis of our best physical theories, from the point of view of the quantum domain and with an emphasis on Bell-type phenomena. My conclusions point to a more modest view on the possible achievements of philosophy of physics than the experimental metaphysics program would have us believe. In the first part of my dissertation, I investigate what role philosophy of physics can legitimately hope to play in the development and evaluation of various accounts of quantum phenomena. I claim that it is not the role of philosophy of physics to impose criteria of acceptability on physical theories, in addition to coherence and empirical adequacy. By contrast, I take in my dissertation that the legitimate role of philosophy of physics is to clearly determine what is imposed by the phenomena and our best theories from what is a matter of preference on the basis of the structural analysis of the phenomena and theories. In the second part of my dissertation, I turn to the more specific case of the interpretation of Bell-type theorems and Bell-type phenomena. I undertake a systematic examination of the mainstream interpretation. I show that the mainstream interpretation includes three claims, one about locality, another one about causation and a last one about holism. I utilize theories of locality and causation in order to assess these three claims. On the one hand, the upshot of my analysis is that the claim about locality can be supported by a rigorous theory of locality. On the other hand, no theory of probabilistic causation can support the claims of the mainstream interpretation about causation when it is construed as a strong program of experimental metaphysics yielding conclusions about the ontology of the world. That said, weakened versions of the mainstream interpretation, those that do without conclusions about the ontology of the world, can be made compatible with some theories of probabilistic causation. In particular, the mainstream interpretation can be rigorously supported if its claims are restricted to the empirical level. (shrink)

I am very grateful to Natalja, Jacob and Sebastian for their kind attention to my paper, and for their many insights on this topic, which have materially helped me get clearer about some of the issues. All the points of disagreement are constructive and it has been both a pleasure and an education to engage with them. I’m also happy to note some points of agreement, too! Here I attempt to reply to some of the objections.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Carmen MirandaJessica LesCarmen Miranda, she called herself today. She suffered from decades of schizoaffective disorder and now more recently, end–stage renal disease from uncontrolled diabetes. I first met Carmen two weeks prior when she had been brought to the hospital on a 72 hour psychiatric hold for self–harm. She failed to go to dialysis for a week, an act that would kill her if allowed to continue. Now she (...) was here again, for the same reason.Everyone of competent mind has the right to refuse medical treatment. Unfortunately, Carmen’s mind was not currently grounded in reality. So against her will, our family medicine team admitted her to the hospital and arranged for dialysis early the next morning. None of us liked doing this. Fortunately, when the time came for the dialysis tech to insert the dialysis catheter into her shunt, Carmen agreed peacefully. After her dialysis, we had no right to keep her in the hospital because her life was no longer in danger, at least until the next week. We discharged her to home. However the question remained, what about next time?To navigate this ethical gray zone, we called an ethics committee meeting. An ethicist, nurses, hospital social workers, the inpatient family medicine resident team, and most importantly, two people who knew her very well—her caseworker and long–term psychiatrist—discussed her case for an [End Page 103] hour. Our medicine team learned that in her last period of clarity two months prior, Carmen made contradictory statements regarding her wishes. Carmen told her caseworker she was tired of dialysis and being sick and stated it was time to let herself go. During the same lucid week she told her psychiatrist that she was grateful she had been forced to complete dialysis against her wishes after a run of non–adherence while suffering psychosis a couple of months prior. Now months later she was in a downward spiral, exacerbated by the deterioration of her mentally ill husband. If she missed a dialysis treatment here and there, it was okay, but when she went on a run missing several treatments, it was slow suicide.The ethics meeting concluded that Carmen needed to complete an advanced directive and select a power of attorney other than her gravely incompetent husband as soon as she was deemed competent. If she did not become lucid again, her psychiatric team should apply for conservatorship, a legally appointed person who serves as guardian for a gravely disabled mentally ill person. However, conservatorship would take months. In the interim, the ethics committee ruled that our medicine team would continue to provide lifesaving treatment for her, against her wishes if necessary.The ethics meeting adjourned but our medicine team remained in a gray area. To what length should we go to treat her? If she continued to refuse dialysis would we hold her in the hospital until she became sufficiently docile by inevitable uremia that we could peacefully dialyze her? Possibly. Would we go so far as to put her under anesthesia to complete her dialysis? Personally, I hoped not.Just three days after the ethics committee meeting, her caseworker found Carmen yelling nonsensical phrases through the front door of her home while her husband held the door shut with his beer belly and good shoulder. After gaining entry later in the day, Carmen’s caseworker found their mutual medication collection strewn in the bathtub and no food in the house. He placed Carmen on a psychiatric hold and transported her to the hospital. The emergency department paged me when Carmen arrived. I braced myself for the possibilities that lay ahead. When I reached Carmen, she was sitting in a room reserved for psychiatric patients and under watch by a friendly police officer accustomed to these situations.“Hi, Carmen,” I said, one step into her room. She sat on the edge of the gurney, wrapped in three blankets.“Cold,” she said.The police officer spoke from behind my shoulder, “She has been requesting cup after cup of ice water, she won’t take anything else.”“Let’s get you more comfortable.” I returned with a warm blanket and draped it over her... (shrink)

On the aesthetic tastes of the youth in Ho Chi Minh City.

Although the tension which Christianity, in continuance with the Sache Jesu, first displayed with its surrounding culture, gradually conformed to the predominate culture of the ancient Mediterranean world, probably to avoid further conflict, it seems that the author of 1 Peter, despite my preference for a later dating ( circa the turn of the 1st century AD), was set on maintaining this tension. 1 Peter employs a ‘revolutionary subordination’. When the author of 1 Peter urges wives to be submissive or (...) slaves to obey their masters, he is not perpetuating normative conservatism. Rather, wives and slaves as followers of Christ were to subvert injustice the same way Jesus did. Wives therefore do not submit to their non-believing husbands because they buy in to society’s evaluation of them as inferior to their male counterparts. Rather, wives can submit to their non-believing husbands because they are triumphant in Christ and therefore emancipated moral agents, who may win over their non-believing husbands by their moral and godly conduct. (shrink)

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, (...) and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

Hostile epistemology is the study of how environmental features exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities. I am particularly interested in those vulnerabilities arise from the basic character of our epistemic lives. We are finite beings with limited cognitive resources, perpetually forced to reasoning a rush. I focus on two sources of unavoidable vulnerability. First, we need to use cognitive shortcuts and heuristics to manage our limited time and attention. But hostile forces can always game the gap between the heuristic and the ideal. (...) Second, we need to trust others, and trust makes us vulnerable. In particular, we need to trust experts whose expertise lies beyond our individual ability to vet. So we must rely on various imperfect signals and proxies, like institutional affiliation, to manage our trust. We are forced to use these imperfect and exploitable forms of reasoning, in order to cope with a cognitively overwhelming world. I present the hostile epistemology framework as a counterbalance to vice epistemology, which tends to locate responsibility for bad beliefs in the character of the believer. I draw two conclusions from my analysis. First: suppose we accept that that only communities and institutions can know about the world. This deeply social approach doesn’t solve the problem of expert identification. The individual still faces a problem: given their incomplete understanding, how should the individual pick which group to trust? Second: we might have hoped to get some kind of static picture of the right principles of reasoning — but hostile epistemology presents a different picture. We have to use risky heuristics and shortcuts, which hostile forces can game and exploit. We can respond by shifting to a different set of heuristics, but this simply shifts the location of our vulnerabilities. These new heuristics are also exploitable. There is no end to this, only a constant struggle to adapt. Limited beings in a hostile epistemic environment are locked in an unending epistemic arms race. (shrink)

Dans le cadre de ce travail, nous présentons une expérimentation menée auprès d’un public allophone inscrit à une formation universitaire. Ce travail a pour objectif de relever, d’une part, les spécificités dans les productions orales de ce public, et d’autre part, de démontrer l’intérêt d’un apprentissage sur corpus afin de construire un exposé structuré. Cette étude permet de s’ouvrir à d’autres perspectives didactiques en partant d’un corpus d’apprenants.

Cet article se présente comme un questionnement sur l'attitude à prendre, de la part d'un pays francophone tel que le Vietnam, « lourd » de son passé colonial, et attentif à « rattraper » le train en marche de l'humanité entière, après tant de péripéties et de retard connus durant et à cause de ses temps de guerre. Attitude à adopter envers soi-même, envers l'Autre et l'autre culture. Pour ce, il s'appuie sur les quelques notions de l'interculturel, analyse la façon (...) dont le Vietnam a su gérer ses rapports à soi et à l'Autre, d'hier à aujourd'hui, et propose une attitude à adopter pour chaque pays, dans l'espace francophone et face à la mondialisation. Ce questionnement se veut d'être une voix parmi d'autres et non la seule voix représentative du VietnamThis article’s aim is to ask questions about the attitude that should be adopted by Vietnam, a French-speaking country bearing its "heavy" colonial past. After so many events and delays caused by the war, the country is now interested in catching up with the train represented by the rest of mankind which is moving forward. The question is thus to define the attitude Vietnam could adopt towards itself, towards the Other and the other culture. Thus, this article has made use of certain notions of interculturality, analyzed the way in which Vietnam has managed relations with itself and with the Other, and proposes an attitude for each country to adopt in the French-speaking Community and in reaction to globalization. The author wishes to be a voice among others and not the only voice representing Vietnam. (shrink)

Les troubles du langage font partie des troubles cognitifs présents dans la maladie d’Alzheimer. Ils sont le plus souvent étudiés dans des tâches cliniques ciblées, éloignées des situations de communication naturelle. Leur but est de mettre en évidence les déficits linguistiques comme par exemple les troubles lexico-sémantiques présents dès le début de l’évolution et spécifiques de la maladie. Nous avons choisi de compléter les épreuves classiques d’évaluation du langage par l’étude d’une situation d’échange conversationnel en essayant de dégager de nouveaux (...) critères cliniques fonctionnels. Notre étude porte sur l’analyse automatique de corpus conversationnels recueillis auprès de 10 personnes âgées (moyenne d’âge = 90 ans) dont 5 présentant une maladie d’Alzheimer à un stade débutant à modéré (MMS moyen = 15/30). Nos analyses montrent des différences quantitatives et qualitatives entre les deux populations étudiées et proposent de s’intéresser davantage à l’interaction verbale pour mieux décrire le retentissement des troubles du langage sur la communication verbale des sujets avec maladie d’Alzheimer. (shrink)

Games have a complex, and seemingly paradoxical structure: they are both competitive and cooperative, and the competitive element is required for the cooperative element to work out. They are mechanisms for transforming competition into cooperation. Several contemporary philosophers of sport have located the primary mechanism of conversion in the mental attitudes of the players. I argue that these views cannot capture the phenomenological complexity of game-play, nor the difficulty and moral complexity of achieving cooperation through game-play. In this paper, I (...) present a different account of the relationship between competition and cooperation. My view is a distributed view of the conversion: success depends on a large number of features. First, the players must achieve the right motivational state: playing for the sake of the struggle, rather than to win. Second, successful transformation depends on a large number of extra-mental features, including good game design, and social and institutional features. (shrink)

This is a reply to Elisabeth Camp's and Elijah Millgram's probing discussions of "Games and the Art of Agency", in a symposium in Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. Millgram argues that games cannot function as a guide to life, because they are too different from life. Games are limited in a special way: in life, we deliberate about what goals we want to take on, but in games, the goals are fixed and given to us. Camp argues that there (...) is nothing particularly special about games, because the fluidity of agency is all over ordinary life too - games are just like ordinary life. I respond to Millgram: we do deliberate about our ends, in games, when we aesthetically reflect on which games to play. And I respond to Camp: games are distinctive in the way they regulate how our reasons flow across the game/life border. To respond to these criticisms, I add some substantial new features to my account of the motivational structure of game-play. (shrink)

Should the existence of moral disagreement reduce one’s confidence in one’s moral judgments? Many have claimed that it should not. They claim that we should be morally self-sufficient: that one’s moral judgment and moral confidence ought to be determined entirely one’s own reasoning. Others’ moral beliefs ought not impact one’s own in any way. I claim that moral self-sufficiency is wrong. Moral self-sufficiency ignores the degree to which moral judgment is a fallible cognitive process like all the rest. In this (...) paper, I take up two possible routes to moral self-sufficiency.First, I consider Robert Paul Wolff’s argument that an autonomous being is required to act from his own reasoning. Does Wolff’s argument yield moral self-sufficiency? Wolff’s argument does forbid unthinking obedience. But it does not forbid guidance: the use of moral testimony to glean evidence about nonmoral states of affairs. An agent can use the existence of agreement or disagreement as evidence concerning the reliability of their own cognitive abilities, which is entirely nonmoral information. Corroboration and discorroboration yields nonmoral evidence, and no reasonable theory of autonomy can forbid the use of nonmoral evidence. In fact, by using others to check on my own cognitive functionality, an agent is reasoning better and is thereby more autonomous.Second, I consider Philip Nickel’s requirement that moral judgment proceed from personal understanding. I argue that the requirement of understanding does forbid unthinking obedience, but not discorroboration. When an agent reasons morally, and then reduces confidence in their judgments through discorroboration, they are in full contact with the moral reasons, and with the epistemic reasons. Discorroboration yields more understanding, not less. (shrink)

We are often confronted with attempts to debunk our aesthetic tastes, like: “You only like jazz because you’re a pretentious hipster,” or, “Your love of the Western canon is just colonialism speaking.” Such debunking arguments often try to give a socio-historical accounting, intended to de-legitimize our tastes by showing that they arise from processes uninterested in real aesthetic value. One common version is the Art Populist debunk: that claims of aesthetic expertise in esoteric arts are really just elitist gatekeeping. Then (...) we have its mirror twin, the Art Expert debunk: that the populist love of simple arts serves the interests of profiteering entertainment corporations dispensing simplified slop. Suppose we accept one of these debunking argument. How are we supposed to got on? Are we supposed to not like the things we like, or force ourselves to choke down food we don’t enjoy? And suppose we accept both of these debunking arguments — what then? Are we supposed to simply give up our grip on beauty altogether? This is hard to imagine. Aesthetic debunking arguments have a harder time getting a grip on us, because aesthetic life involves a distinctively tight relationship between our felt aesthetic phenomena and our aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic life gives us phenomenal resistance to debunking arguments, when our felt loves lag behind our endorsed beliefs. I suggest a way through that offers a livable accommodation. We may be able to treat such debunking arguments, not as targeting the positive content of our taste, but as targeting the boundaries and limitations on our taste. That is, a Populist may not be able to debunk my deep felt love of opera, but they may be able to debunk my dismissal of dance-pop. In this case, we can take onboard both the Art Expert’s and the Art Populist’s debunking arguments, as targeting different varieties of narrowness and dismissal. These debunkings, then, move us, not towards aesthetic nihilism, but aesthetic expansionism. (shrink)

This is my reply to commentators in the symposium on my book, GAMES: AGENCY AS ART. The symposium features commentary by Thomas Hurka, Quill Kukla, and Alva Noe, and originally appeared in Analysis 81 (2).

During the 20th century, the format of domestic life became an explicit object of functional reworking and rewriting. Thanks to the industrialisation processes that affected it, the home entered the era of its technical reproducibility, becoming a container aimed at optimising the functions it is called upon to perform. The meanings that were associated with it in the bourgeois tradition of the previous century, first and foremost that of being the place of intimacy and family affection, underwent a significant transformation. (...) The signs of this transformation are particularly evident in the experimental and futuristic projects on human domesticity by Richard Buckminster Fuller. Thanks to them, domesticity enters a new horizon of expression, even beyond the architectural imagination, anticipating elements and characteristics that define its contemporary condition. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe goal of the study was to explore the relationship between parent–children relationships related to using the internet among kids and potentially associated factors.Materials and MethodsA sample of 1.216 Vietnamese students between the ages of 12 and 18 agreed to participate in the cross-sectional online survey. Data collected included socioeconomic characteristics and internet use status of participants, their perceived changes in relationship and communication between parents and children since using the internet, and parental control toward the child’s internet use. An (...) Ordered Logistic Regression was carried out to determine factors associated with parent–children relationship since using the internet.ResultsThe characteristics of the relationship between children and their parents since using the Internet were divided into three levels: deterioration, stability, and improvement. The topics that children most often communicate with their parents include learning, housework, and future directions. Two-way interactive activities, such as supporting parents to use the Internet, have a positive impact on the parent–child relationship. Stubborn parental control, such as establishing rules about contact or allowing Internet access and setting up global positioning system to track negatively affecting parent–child relationships.ConclusionFindings indicated that changes in the quality of the parent–child relationship were self-assessed by participants regard to kids’ internet use, especially in the COVID-19 epidemic context. Educational campaigns and programs to raise awareness of parents as to the dangers and negative influences that their children may encounter online, psychology of children’s behaviors and effects of different responding strategies are recommended. (shrink)

Moral reasoning is as fallible as reasoning in any other cognitive domain, but we often behave as if it were not. I argue for a form of epistemically-based moral humility, in which we downgrade our moral beliefs in the face of moral disagreement. My argument combines work in metaethics and moral intuitionism with recent developments in epistemology. I argue against any demands for deep self-sufficiency in moral reasoning. Instead, I argue that we need to take into account significant socially sourced (...) information, especially as a check for failures on our own moral intuitions and reasoning. -/- First, I argue for an epistemically plausible version of moral intuitionism, based on recent work in epistemic entitlement and epistemic warrant. Second, I argue that getting clear on the epistemic basis shows the defeasibility of moral judgment. Third, I argue the existence of moral disagreement is a reason to reduce our certainty in moral judgment. Fourth, I argue that this effect is not a violation of norms of autonomy for moral judgment. (shrink)

The paper attempts to construct a global model of a social contract using well-known metaphors of two great philosophers: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke. By modelling a global social contract, I mean the formulation of a social contract using two sets of data: one is global citizens' preferences about values and norms while the other is sovereign states' participation in multilateral treaties. Both Rousseau and Locke formulate their versions of social contract theories in the national context of eighteenth-century Europe. This (...) paper tries my hands on extending their theories to the global context. This paper attempts to link empirically the relationship between global citizens' preferences as gauged by the World Values Survey and sovereign states' participation in 120 multilateral treaties deposited to the United Nations. To see the link between citizens and treaties (quasi-legislative outcomes, sort of), dimensional similarities of the cosmos of citizens' preference and the cosmos of sovereign states' willingness to join multilateral treaties are examined. Once done, all the sovereign states are located in each of the two cosmoses, citizens and states, and the correlation coefficients between them are measured. Based on these empirical results, the nature of the global quasi-legislative process is clarified. Conclusions and implications are drawn. (shrink)

Background: This study examined the cyberbullying experience and coping manners of adolescents in urban Vietnam and explored the mediating effect of different support to the associations between cyberbullying and mental health issues.Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed on 484 students at four secondary schools. Cyberbullying experience, coping strategies, psychological problems, and family, peer, and teacher support were obtained. Structural equation modeling was utilized to determine the mediating effects of different support on associations between cyberbullying and psychological problems.Results: There were 11.6 (...) and 28.3% of students who reported that they experienced and observed at least one cyberbullying act in the last 3 months, respectively. Among the victims, only 48.2% tried to stop the perpetrators. Meanwhile, the majority of observers belonged to the “Intervene” group who tried to report cyberbullying acts or help victims. Family support was found to partially mediate associations between cyberbullying experience and observation with levels of psychological problems among adolescents.Conclusion: The 3-month rate of cyberbullying experience and observation among urban adolescents aged 11–14 was low. However, current coping strategies against cyberbullying were not sufficient. Family support is an important factor that should be considered for designing interventions to mitigating the impacts of cyberbullying on the mental health of adolescents. (shrink)

Après avoir appartenu au monde sinisé pendant deux mille ans, le Vietnam, conquis par la France en 1858, est entré dans une nouvelle ère. Les intellectuels vietnamiens, surtout ceux issus des écoles franco-indigènes et parlant bien le français, commencent à faire connaître les idées et les penseurs occidentaux à leurs concitoyens. C’est grâce à eux que Tolstoï devient alors célèbre à travers le pays. Dans cet article, nous tentons de donner un aperçu général de la réception de Tolstoï au Vietnam (...) dans la première moitié du XXe siècle. Nous analysons en particulier la biographie de Tolstoï publiée en 1939 et considérée comme l’une des biographies modernes les plus réussies. Conçue et rédigée par Nguyen Phi Hoanh qui souhaitait donner aux lecteurs une compréhension complète de la vie, de l’œuvre, mais aussi des idées de Tolstoï, cette biographie interroge également la pertinence de la philosophie du romancier russe, en particulier sa doctrine de la non-violence dans un contexte colonial. (shrink)

Au sein de la littérature vietnamienne où l’amitié est quasi-absente, se distingue l’œuvre de Phan Hồn Nhiên dont les personnages sont en quête de cette forme d’affection. Notre article s’interroge sur la spécificité de l’exercice amical chez l’écrivaine née en 1972. Comment articule-t-elle ce lien fondé sur la durée, au caractère éphémère des échanges, caractéristique de notre époque? Comment tient-elle compte des effets de la mondialisation? Comment le thème de l’amitié lui permet-il de renouveler la question de la condition de (...) l’individu contemporain et de sa pratique des relations interpersonnelles? (shrink)

The early Wittgentein talked a lot about what is the mystical and hinted that these are the most important things for him. But it is anything but an easy task to make sense of his talks on this subject. And some commentators even claim that it is impossible to do this. It shall be shown that we could understand the early Wittgenstein better if we had some knowledge of the thought of Chuang Tzu, a leading classical Chinese Taoist philosopher. For (...) both of them were to solve the problems of life. And they offered the very same solution to them: to accept unconditionally everything which happens to one and in this way to become one with the world as a whole. Finally, both of them insisted that the subject who becomes one with the world and the realm in which he is immersed are mystical, cannot be said meaningfully. (shrink)

This study investigates the relationship between corporate governance and corporate sustainability performance in the emerging Asian markets where the central role of sustainable development was perceived after the 2008 global financial crisis. We base our study on the triple bottom line approach that incorporates three dimensions of sustainability: economic, environmental, and social performance. A governance index comprising ten firm-specific provisions is proposed to summarise internal corporate governance. Consistent with agency theory, we confirm that firms with better corporate governance have better (...) corporate sustainability performance. We also determine which main factors drive the governance-sustainability relation. The findings have practical implications for firms, shareholders, and policy makers by emphasising the role of corporate governance in assessing and enhancing corporate sustainability performance. (shrink)

Grammar logics were introduced by Fariñas del Cerro and Penttonen in 1988 and have been widely studied. In this paper we consider regular grammar logics with converse ( REG c logics) and present sound and complete tableau calculi for the general satisfiability problem of REG c logics and the problem of checking consistency of an ABox w.r.t. a TBox in a REG c logic. Using our calculi we develop ExpTime (optimal) tableau decision procedures for the mentioned problems, to which various (...) optimization techniques can be applied. We also prove a new result that the data complexity of the instance checking problem in REG c logics is coNP-complete. (shrink)

This study examined how psychotherapists address hypothetical nonsexual multiple relationships dilemmas with Asian American clients and identified predictors of conservative decisions and the use of culture-based rationales. This survey of 787 Asian American and non-Asian American psychotherapists revealed that clinicians rely on mostly their personal policies and seldom focus on the clients' cultural backgrounds. Psychotherapists who consider their clients' Asian culture have more cultural knowledge and awareness, have been mental health providers longer, and are Asian American and female. Clinicians who (...) avoid multiple relationships tend to cite formal policies as justification and are less likely to consider clients' cultural worldviews, the therapeutic relationship, or their own values. The results are discussed in terms of specific revisions needed in the American Psychological Association Ethics Code, the benefits of more frequent consultation with colleagues and supervisors about ethical dilemmas, and recommendations for psychotherapists. (shrink)

In this paper I show how Michèle Le Dœuff’s conception of philosophy as work is central to her articulation of a fresh conception of women’s role in philosophy and philosophy’s relation to other work. In Hipparchia’s Choice (1991, 168) she writes that ‘There is at least a third way of conceiving of philosophy and the history of philosophy: we can regard both as work, and thus as a dynamic, which can lead to and from each other.’ My objective is to (...) clarify this concept of philosophy as work and to show its significance and implications for understanding women’s relation to philosophy and the complexity of Le Dœuff’s thought concerning the nature of freedom and oppression. (shrink)

Abstact : This article provides a critical examination of David Estlund’s epistemic proceduralism. Epistemic proceduralism suggests a promising way to justify democracy without renouncing the pursuit of truth. By making the legitimacy and authority of democratic institutions dependent on their general tendency to produce good decisions, rather than on the correctness of their results or on their mere procedural fairness, it shows that they can to be connected to substantial standards, such as justice, without ignoring the persistence of moral disagreements. (...) By subjecting political procedures to a dual requirement, both epistemic and egalitarian, it suggests that a mixed conception of the value of democracy can be articulated. But by refusing to take sides on the nature of truth, on the choice of the relevant substantial standard, or on the moral theory defining the constraints that equal respect imposes on the choice of political procedures, epistemic proceduralism fails in my view to offer a convincing defence of democracy. In order to explain what makes democracy valuable, a philosophical conception must take a position on the nature of truth, justice and equality. -/- Résumé : Cet article propose une relecture critique du procéduralisme épistémique élaboré par David Estlund. Cette théorie suggère une voie prometteuse pour justifier démocratie sans renoncer à la poursuite de de la vérité. En proposant de faire dépendre la légitimité et l’autorité des procédures démocratiques de leur tendance générale à produire de bonnes décisions, plutôt que de la justesse constante de leurs résultats ou à l’inverse de leur seule équité procédurale, il montre qu’elles peuvent être reliées à une visée substantielle, telle la justice, sans ignorer pour autant la persistance des désaccords à son endroit. En soumettant ces procédures à une double exigence, à la fois épistémique et égalitaire, il montre qu’une conception mixte de la valeur de la démocratie est concevable. Mais en refusant de prendre parti sur la nature de la vérité, sur le choix du critère objectif devant guider l’évaluation des décisions politiques ou sur la théorie morale permettant d’expliciter les contraintes que l’égal égard dû aux personnes impose au choix des procédures, le procéduralisme épistémique s’interdit de construire une justification convaincante de la démocratie. Une justification philosophique de la démocratie doit, pour rendre compte de ce qui fait sa valeur, prendre position sur la nature de la vérité, de la justice et de l’égalité. (shrink)

Michèle Le Doeuff's "Primal Scene": Prohibition and Confidence in the Education of a Woman My essay begins with Michèle Le Doeuff's singular account of the "primal scene" in her own education as a woman, illustrating a universally significant point about the way in which education can differ for men and women: gender difference both shapes and is shaped by the imaginary of a culture as manifest in how texts matter for Le Doeuff. Her primal scene is the first moment she (...) remembers when, while aspiring to think for herself, a prohibition is placed in her reading of literature. Her philosophyteacher—at a boys' school—told the young Michèle that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was "too difficult" for her to read. In recalling this scene, the older Michèle—now, a woman philosopher—directs her readers to this text by Kant, in order to demonstrate how knowledge has been constrained by the narrative and imagery in the text of a philosopher; similarly, in the texts of others. She finds the central imagery of Kant's text for setting the limits to human knowledge in his account of "the island of understanding," or "land of truth," surrounded by "a stormy sea" of uncertainty; the latter image also retains a seductive appeal, threatening to destroy the confidence of any knower who ventures out beyond the well-marked out island. Moreover, women have often been associated with the dangers at sea beyond the safety of the island, where falsehood and worse reign. I propose that "text matters" here not only for gender issues, but for the postcolonial theory which Le Doeuff's reading of island imagery enhances in western literature and culture. The suggestion is that women in the history of ideas have been more susceptible than men to prohibitions : women's negative education is against going beyond certain boundaries which have been fixed by a generally colonialist culture on the grounds of gender-hierarchies. I stress the significance of confidence in the production of knowledge. A lack or an inhibition of confidence in one's own ability to think critically risks the damaging exclusions of, for example, colonialism and sexism. My aim is to unearth the political biases evident in textual imagery, while also pointing to new epistemic locations, with island-and-sea imagery that transgresses patriarchal prohibition, liberating subjects for confident reading and writing of texts today. (shrink)

In Otherwise than Being, Levinas writes that the alterity of the Other escapes “le flair animal,” or the animal’s sense of smell. This paper puts pressure on the strong human-animal distinction that Levinas makes by considering the possibility that, while non-human animals may not respond to the alterity of the Other in the way that Levinas describes as responsibility, animal sensibility plays a key role in a relation to Others that Levinas does not discuss at length: friendship. This approach to (...) friendship addresses a gap in Levinas’ work between the absolute Other for whom I am responsible and the “brother” who is my political equal. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to present an understanding of knowledge and learning in organisations from pragmatist perspectives. Relying on the work of early pragmatists as well as contemporary pragmatists, we introduce a conceptualisation of knowledge as the outcome of inquiry. Knowledge, in this article, is presented as provisional, multi-perspective, both particular and general. Our point of departure here is that the chief value of knowledge is its usefulness in solving problems. Pragmatist views of knowledge are further explicated in (...) our discussion of four pragmatist themes, which we have identified as particularly viable on the basis of Jane Addams’ pragmatist view and the practice of democracy in organised life: 1) Knowledge as transactional in organisations, 2) Reciprocity and learning in organisations, 3) Experience-based knowledge and meaning-making in organisations, and 4) Sustainability as an ongoing, democratic process in organisations. In the pragmatist school of thought we draw upon, a predominant issue is always also the very purpose of knowledge, or what we refer to as ‘usefulness’. Under discussion, we argue that a pragmatist understanding of knowledge and learning in organisations allows us to move beyond the polarisation of cognitive-possession — social-process and instead work from an alternative framework, with a focus on processes of learning and knowledge in organisations that aim at integrative, democratic problem solving. (shrink)

Universities and funders in many countries have been using Journal Impact Factor (JIF) as an indicator for research and grant assessment despite its controversial nature as a statistical representation of scientific quality. This study investigates how the changes of JIF over the years can affect its role in research evaluation and science management by using JIF data from annual Journal Citation Reports (JCR) to illustrate the changes. The descriptive statistics find out an increase in the median JIF for the top (...) 50 journals in the JCR, from 29.300 in 2017 to 33.162 in 2019. Moreover, on average, elite journal families have up to 27 journals in the top 50. In the group of journals with a JIF of lower than 1, the proportion has shrunk by 14.53% in the 2015–2019 period. The findings suggest a potential ‘JIF bubble period’ that science policymaker, university, public fund managers, and other stakeholders should pay more attention to JIF as a criterion for quality assessment to ensure more efficient science management. (shrink)

This article reconsiders some of the arguments that I made in my two phenomenology-inspired books on what I have called the “filmic identification” in the cinema: Les structures de l’expérience filmique and Essai sur l’image et la communication. While the former has received some attention in film studies via Vivian Sobchack’s mediating work in her influential essay “Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience”, the latter is little known in film studies and phenomenological circles. The two guest editors have therefore (...) asked me to introduce and update my former position and place it in the intellectual climate of French-speaking film studies from the 1950s to the 1980s—that is, from the filmology movement to the dominance of semiology and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Si les non-conséquentialistes veulent adhérer à l'exigence d'universalisabilité, alors ils devront adopter une prise de position étonnamment relativiste. Non seulement vont-ils affirmer, dans une veine familière, que les prémisses invoquées dans l'argumentation morale n'ont de force que relative à l'agent, c'est-à-dire qu'elles peuvent impliquer l'usage d'un indexical — comme dans la considération que cette option-ci ou celle-là favoriserait mes engagements, me délesterait de mes devoirs ou bénéficierait à mes enfants — et qu'elles ne peuvent fournir de raisons qu'à l'agent indexicalement (...) pertinent, moi-même en l'occurrence. Ils devront aussi interpréter la considération invoquée dans les conclusions morales typiques, selon laquelle telle ou telle option est juste ou devrait être choisie ou peu importe, comme n'ayant elle-même qu'une force relative à l'agent.If non-consequentialists are to embrace the requirement of universalisability, then they will have to strike a surprisingly relativistic stance. Not only will they say, in familiar vein, that the premises adduced in moral argument may only be agent-relative in force: that is, may involve the use of an indexical — as in the consideration that this or that option would advance my commitments, discharge my duty, or benefit my children — and may provide reasons only for the indexically relevant agent: in this case, me. They will also have to construe the consideration adduced in typical moral conclusions, to the effect that this or that option is right or ought to be chosen or whatever, as itself only agent-relative in force. (shrink)

_ This scholarly article examines the intricate relationship between social policy and its effects on vulnerable populations. Through a comprehensive analysis of various social policies, the article elucidates the challenges, opportunities, and unintended consequences that arise in the realm of policy-making. The focal point remains the exploration of how policies, when effectively crafted and implemented, can either ameliorate or exacerbate vulnerabilities within specific population groups._.

There is a prominent phenomenon in the religious life of Vietnam, which is the emergence of “new religions”. These phenomena have not only made the religious space of the nation more complex and multi-dimensional but also challenged stability and sustainable development within the religious communities in this key economic region. Having studied the new religious phenomenon in recent years, we have noted its progress and widespread characteristics within the ethnic communities. While it may appear that "new religion" is a simple (...) and gentle concept and practice, it is in fact, intrinsically related to and has significant implications on the social life of the community members. However, there is a growing concern, considerable suspicion and anxiety with regards to its impacts on individuals, families, social and cultural traditions, beliefs and religions; many have opined that it is radically changing the peaceful cohabitation of diverse religious traditions, revealing a potential for conflicts across groups. Based on the religious reality of the Southern region of Vietnam, the Center for Religion Studies has implemented a project regarding new religions in Ho Chi Minh City and the problems faced by the religious policy in Vietnam. This article is an overview of the results of this project. (shrink)

A framework that brings together cultural perspectives and behavior genetics has long been needed. To be successful, however, we need sophistication in the conceptualization of culture. Here, we highlight three imperatives to this end: the need for a clear definition of cultural traits, inclusion of the role of societal power, and recognizing the distinction between traits and characteristic adaptations.

In this paper we study automated reasoning in the modal logic CPDLreg which is a combination of CPDL (Propositional Dynamic Logic with Converse) and REGc (Regular Grammar Logic with Converse). The logic CPDL is widely used in many areas, including program verification, theory of action and change, and knowledge representation. On the other hand, the logic REGc is applicable in reasoning about epistemic states and ontologies (via Description Logics). The modal logic CPDLreg can serve as a technical foundation for reasoning (...) about agency. Even very rich multi-agent logics can be embedded into CPDLreg via a suitable translation. Therefore, CPDLreg can serve as a test bed to implement and possibly verify new ideas without providing specific automated reasoning techniques for the logic in question. This process can to a large extent be automated. The idea of embedding various logics into CPDLreg is illustrated on a rather advanced logic TEAMLOGK designed to specify teamwork in multi-agent systems. Apart from defining informational and motivational attitudes of groups of agents, TEAMLOGK allows for grading agents' beliefs, goals and intentions. The current paper is a companion to our paper (Dunin-Kęplicz et al., 2010a). The main contribution are proofs of soundness and completeness of the tableau calculus for CPDLreg provided in (Dunin-Kęplicz et al., 2010a). (shrink)

On first reading Les Mots, it was as much of a surprise to note that references to religion and belief were both so frequent and so central to Sartre's unconventional autobiography as it was to learn that the famous Christian missionary Albert Schweitzer was his cousin. Further readings and analyses have reinforced my view that the language of belief plays a critical part in the text. These questions of belief and the references to religion that appear frequently in Les Mots (...) have received less attention. It could be said that these references are merely illustrative of Sartre's attempt to explain himself to himself and to us, and function as any metaphor would. But such a suggestion would fail to account for the many references to religion and belief and to explain why they are so tightly interlinked. We will argue that closer attention to these subjects provides significant insight into the work. Sartre, it would appear, uses a religious template, rather than an existentialist or a Marxist one, to understand his life's project, his past and his present. We will therefore investigate the nature of this use of the language of belief as a religious template and evaluate its significance. (shrink)