When a wrongdoing occurs, victims, barring special circumstance, can aptly forgive their wrongdoers, receive apologies, and be paid reparations. It is also uncontroversial, in the usual circumstances, that wronged parties can aptly blame their wrongdoer. But controversy arises when we consider blame from third-parties after the victim has forgiven. At times it seems that wronged parties can make blame inapt through forgiveness. If third parties blame anyway, it often appears the victim is justified in protesting. “But I forgave him!” In (...) other cases, however, forgiveness seems irrelevant: B can forgive A, but it can still seem that third parties can aptly blame A for the wrong against B. This perplexity adds a dimension to ongoing discussion regarding criteria for apt blame and the related issues of standing and fittingness. This paper explores the status of third party blame after forgiveness. I argue that while post forgiveness blame is often inapt, in many other cases forgiveness is irrelevant. This difference is explained by appeal to the various relationships third parties might have to wronged parties, and how these differences affect the ways we blame and thereby blame’s aptness. (shrink)

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, concern that there could be a shortage of ventilators raised the possibility of rationing care. Denying patients life-saving care captures our moral imagination, prompting the demand for a defensible framework of ethical principles for determining who will live and who will die. Behind the moral dilemma posed by the shortage of a particular medical good lies a broad moral geography encompassing important and often unarticulated societal values, as well as assumptions about (...) the nature and purpose of health care and the consequences of long-standing choices about health care as a social good. This article explores what COVID-19 has exposed concerning values and choices around health care in the United States. Employing the lens of Catholic Social Thought, it argues for an approach to rationing that is grounded in respect for human dignity, committed to distributing social goods in light of the common good, and self-conscious about the construction of vulnerability to illness and death. (shrink)

Celebrando os quarenta anos de A Hermenêutica do Sujeito — o curso ministrado por Michel Foucault no Collège de France, em 1982 —, este texto propõe-se a estabelecer conexões, gerais e específicas, entre aquele curso e a Educação. É feita uma discussão acerca da perspectiva analítica não metafísica adotada por Foucault, em contraste com o atual discurso pedagógico interpretativo dominante. São discutidos os sentidos que se pode dar a alguns insights daquele curso, em suas relações com a Educação contemporânea. Propondo-se (...) uma diferenciação entre pedagogia e Pedagogia, destaca-se a função subjetivante das práticas pedagógicas na educação escolarizada. Argumenta-se em favor da ontologia histórica, em oposição à ontologia transcendental e recorre-se ao conceito de frame, de modo a ressaltar sua importância e limitações em estudos como este. Discute-se a inversão moderna que colocou ênfase no preceito do “conhece-te a ti mesmo” (gnôthi seautón), deixando em segundo plano o preceito do “cuida de ti mesmo” (epiméleia heautoû), do que resultou a substituição do ideal antigo do sujeito das ações corretas pelo ideal moderno do sujeito dos saberes verdadeiros. Sugere-se que a Educação possa contribuir para suspender a anunciada morte do sujeito ou, pelo menos, mitigar os seus efeitos. Palavras-chave: Foucault; Subjetivação; Pedagogia; Ontologia histórica. Weaves: between Hermeneutics of the Subject and Education Abstract: Celebrating the forty years of The Hermeneutics of the Subject —the course by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France, in 1982—, this text proposes to establish connections, both general and specific, between that course and Education. A discussion is made about the non-metaphysical analytical perspective adopted by Foucault, in contrast to current dominant interpretive pedagogical discourses. The meanings that can be given to some insights from that course are discussed, in their relations with education. Proposing a differentiation between pedagogy and Pedagogy, the subjectivizing function of pedagogical practices in schools is highlighted. We argue in favor of historical ontology, as opposed to transcendental ontology, and we resort to the concept of frame, in order to emphasize its importance and limitations in foucauldian studies. We discuss the modern inversion that placed emphasis on the precept “know thyself” (gnôthi seautón), leaving in the background the precept “take care of yourself” (epiméleia heautoû), which resulted in the replacement of the ideal of the subject of correct actions by the modern ideal of the subject of true knowledge. We suggest that Education can contribute to suspend the announced death of the subject or, at least, mitigate its effects. Keywords: Foucault; Subjectivizing; Pedagogy; Historical ontology. Tesituras: entre la Hermenéutica del Sujeto y la Educación Resumen: Celebrando los cuarenta años de La Hermenéutica del Sujeto —curso por Michel Foucault en el Collège de France, en 1982—, este texto se propone establecer conexiones generales y específicas, entre ese curso y la Educación. Se discute la perspectiva no-metafísica adoptada por Foucault, en contraste con el actual discurso pedagógico interpretativo dominante. Se problematizan los sentidos que se pueden dar a algunos insigths de aquel curso, en sus relaciones con la educación contemporánea. Se propone una diferenciación entre pedagogía y Pedagogía y se destaca la función de subjetivación de las prácticas pedagógicas en las escuelas. Se argumenta a favor de la ontología histórica, en oposición a la ontología transcendental, y se recurre al concepto de frame, para enfatizar su importancia y limitaciones en estudios foucaultianos. Se discute la idea moderna que puso énfasis en el precepto de “conócete a ti mismo” (gnôthi seautón), dejando en segundo plano el “cuida de ti mismo” (epiméleia heautoû), lo que derivó en la sustitución del ideal antiguo del sujeto de las acciones correctas, por el ideal moderno del sujeto del conocimiento verdadero. Se sugiere que la Educación puede contribuir a suspender la anunciada muerte del sujeto o, al menos, mitigar sus efectos. Palabras clave: Foucault; Subjetivación; Pedagogia; Ontologia histórica. Data de registro: 08/07/2022 Data de aceite: 13/12/2022. (shrink)

Literature in the epistemology of disagreement has focused on peer disagreement: disagreement between those with shared evidence and equal cognitive abilities. Additional literature focuses on the perspective of amateurs who disagree with experts. However, the appropriate epistemic reaction from superiors who disagree with inferiors remains underexplored. Prima facie, this may seem an uninteresting set of affairs. If A is B’s superior, and A has good reason to believe she is B’s superior, A appears free to dismiss B’s disagreement. However, a (...) closer look will show otherwise. I first distinguish competent from incompetent inferiors and then argue that disagreement from the former often gives superiors reason to adjust credence and reevaluate belief. In other words, epistemic inferiority alone is insufficient grounds for dismissing opinion. More nuanced difficulties arise with incompetent inferiors. When superiors disagree with incompetents, this might provide evidence to bolster belief credence; however, agreement from incompetents can defeat justification. In either instance, inferior opinion carries epistemic weight. Yet, this fails to cover all ground; at times, superiors learn nothing from inferior disagreement. I finish by exploring these uninformative disagreements, how to distinguish them from the informative cases, and the proper epistemic reactions thereof. (shrink)

The introduction describes the monographic section of Scienza & Politica dedicated to the innovations which postcolonial and feminist studies in Latin America are introducing in the history of political thought as a whole. The fundamental concepts of the following essays are presented here to introduce their historic and critic analysis. It is also highlighted the specific character of continental laboratory which the historic and political reflection is assuming in South American continent and the connections which are occurring with other countries (...) in the global South. (shrink)

Possiamo ipotizzare che le reti sociali sollecitino nuove forme di collaborazione tra gli individui? Di che natura č la collaborazione che si realizza nelle reti? Il web 2.0 cambia radicalmente il modo in cui gli individui accedono alle risorse informative, per la facilitÀ dell'accesso alle stesse, la velocitÀ, la pluralitÀ delle fonti, ma soprattutto per il loro crescente intreccio con gli scambi interpersonali. Il filtro soggettivo carica ogni informazione di un forte contenuto emotivo, ne stabilisce una particolare veritÀ, quella, appunto, (...) attribuita al messaggio dal soggetto che lo utilizza. La testimonianza in prima persona diventa la chiave attorno a cui si organizzano le informazioni. Partendo dall'analisi delle pagine create su Facebook nella fase successiva ad un evento traumatico come il terremoto, argomentiamo come la collaborazione nelle reti si realizzi a partire dalla condivisione emotiva dell'esperienza e dal peculiare intreccio tra informazione e comunicazione. (shrink)

Political parties seem inclined to dogmatism. Understanding party politics via a plural-subject account of collective belief explains this phenomenon. It explains inter-party outrage at slight deviations from the party line and dogged refusals to compromise. It also aligns with an alternative theory of political representation. I argue that party dogmatism is unlikely to change and can be a democratic good. I conclude that not parties but patriots counteract the democratic ills of dogmatic party politics.

Cochran has argued that Catholic health care occupies a “unique place on the border of public and private life”. Catholic health care is accountable to both its religious and sacramental traditions and its public responsibilities. It is inevitable that “border skirmishes” will arise. Yet there is no single formula for suggesting what public-private collaboration should comprise or how conflicts between values ought to be resolved. It may be, as Cochran suggests, that increasingly bitter conflicts over widely valued services such as (...) sterilization, combined with market pressures to conform to for-profit trends in health care, will make divestiture of faith-based hospitals in favor of other types of church-community partnerships the best course for the future. (shrink)

Published in the American Journal of Bioethics.

Jeffrey Bishop’s The Anticipatory Corpse exposes a functional metaphysics at the root of contemporary medical practice that gives rise to inhumane medicine, especially at the end of life. His critique of medicine argues for alternative spaces and practices in which the communal significance of the body, its telos, can be restored and the meaning of a “good death” enriched. This essay develops an alternative epistemology of the body, drawing from Christian theological accounts of the communal or Eucharistic body and linking (...) liturgical practices to the cultivation of solidarity. It argues for an epistemology of the body that makes visible the invisible bodies at medicine’s margins and illumines the disparate worlds of health care globally. (shrink)

“If I were a better human being, that person’s voice wouldn’t sound so shrill to me.” Many of us may have had such thoughts. They give voice to the worrying intuition that if we were less affected by sexism and racism, or better at keeping our tempers, our fellow humans would look and sound differently to us. Making sense of this unease requires us to re-think the relation between experiences and standing commitments; to reconsider what we mean by self-control; and (...) to attend to empirical questions about perception, attention, emotion regulation, and tacit cognition. (shrink)

Draft of forthcoming article in the Journal of Medical Ethics where I discuss ethical tension between LGBT testimony and testimonial trust of medical professionals.

Agnes Arber (1879-1960) was a British botanist who was a leading plant morphologist during the first half of the 20th century. She also wrote on the history and philosophy of botany. I argue in this article that her philosophical work on form and on how the work of the mind and the eye relate to each other in morphological research are relevant to the science of today. Arber's unusual blend of interests - in botany, history, philosophy, and art - put (...) her in a unique position to examine issues of form. Even her unorthodox ideas on evolution can now be seen as fitting in well with discussions of natural selection as the predominant engine of evolutionary change. Arber's views also throw light on present work dealing with developmental plant genetics and with the study of protein form. I will further argue that her marginal position relative to institutional science, while it may have left her vulnerable to criticism, also made possible her deep philosophical reflections on morphology. (shrink)

Herbaria are collections of preserved plant specimens, primarily composed of paper sheets with pressed plants or plant parts attached to them. The most valuable kind of sheet is the holotype specimen. This is the specific plant that was used in describing the species by the person who first identified it. Botanists must reference the holotype when reclassifying or renaming a species. In the past, this meant either borrowing the sheet or visiting the herbarium in which it was housed. With digitization (...) of these sheets, there is much greater and easier access to this information. However, digital images are not substitutes for the sheets themselves. This article will discuss why this is the case, why scanning herbarium sheets is still worthwhile effort, and why the sheets themselves are still necessary to plant research. (shrink)

I argue here that Goethe's "delicate empiricism" is not an alternative approach to science, but an approach that scientists use consistently, though they usually do not label it as such. I further contend that Goethe's views are relevant to today's science, specifically to work on the structure of macromolecules such as proteins. Using the work of Agnes Arber, a botanist and philosopher of science, I will show how her writings help to relate Goethe's work to present-day issues of cognition and (...) perception. (shrink)

En estas páginas se trata de explicar, a partir de la reflexión de Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), en qué sentido el espacio mercantil puede comprenderse en términos epistemológicos y ontológicos. Más específicamente, constituye un dominio calculable de los objetos propio de la modernidad capitalista. Se persigue enlazar esa problemática con la cuestión filosófica del tiempo y con la teoría crítica de la industria cultural.

In some ways, someone suffering from the delusion that his or her spouse has been kidnapped and replaced with an imposter appears to believe that he or she eats dinner with an imposter every night. But the imperviousness of delusions to counter-evidence makes it hard to classify them as beliefs, and easier to classify them as imaginings. Bayne and Pacherie want to use Schwitzgebel’s dispositional account of belief to restore confidence in the doxastic character of delusion. While dispositionalism appears to (...) allow us to classify delusions as beliefs, this allowance isn’t a robust vindication of doxasticism. The significance of the allowance can be increased by emphasizing the role of folk-psychological norms in individuating propositional attitudes. But letting those norms play a large role in the individuation of belief makes it hard to count as believers the deluded subjects who violate most such norms. Dispositionalism about belief can’t defend doxasticism about delusion. (shrink)

According to Donald Davidson, any philosophy of mind that appeals to propositional content is doomed to become an account of the mind as a private theater. But Davidson's own work on thought‐attribution can be used to make propositional content safe. This paper uses Davidson's negative reaction to Gareth Evans's works on perceptually based demonstrative thought to tease out a way of talking about propositional content that doesn't slide into subjectivism. It also explains why Davidson saw Evans as a mentalist enemy (...) rather than an externalist ally, and suggests that Evans's work could play an important role in furthering Davidson's distinctive externalism. (shrink)

Bortolotti argues that the irrationality of many delusions is no different in kind from the irrationality that marks many non-pathological states typically treated as beliefs. She takes this to secure the doxastic status of those delusions. Bortolotti’s approach has many benefits. For example, it accounts for the fact that we can often make some sense of what deluded subjects are up to, and helps explain why some deluded subjects are helped by cognitive behavioral therapy. But there is an alternative approach (...) that secures the same benefits as Bortolotti’s account while bringing additional benefits. The alternative approach treats both many delusions and many of the non-pathological states to which Bortolotti compares them as in-between states. Subjects in in-between states don’t fully believe the beliefs which it is sometimes convenient to ascribe to them. This alternative approach to belief and belief-ascription fits well with an independently attractive account of the varied purposes of our ordinary attitude ascriptions. It also makes it easier to make fine-grained distinctions between intentional attitudes of different kinds. (shrink)

Our behavior doesn't always match the beliefs attributed to us, and sometimes the mismatch raises questions about what our beliefs actually are. I compare two approaches to such cases, and argue in favor of the one which allows some belief-attributions to lack a determinate truth-value. That approach avoids an inappropriate assumption about cognitive activity: namely, that whenever we fail in performing one cognitive activity, there is a distinct cognitive activity at which we succeed. The indeterminacy-allowing approach also meshes well with (...) an attractive view of folk-psychology: that ascriptions can help shape the attitudes they report. (shrink)

We can increase our understanding of expression by considering an analogy to demonstrative reference. The connections between a demonstrative phrase and its referent, in a case of fully successful communication with that phrase, are analogous to the connections between an expressible state and the behavior that expresses it. The connections in each case serve to maintain a certain status for the connected elements: as actions of persons; or as objects, events, or states significant to persons. The analogy to demonstrative reference (...) helps show that a positive account of expression can make conceptual connections between expressed states and expressive behaviors without courting reductive behaviorism. A general account of expression as marked by these connections is compared to accounts of expression offered by Dorit Bar-On and Mitchell Green. Bar-On’s account turns out to be compatible with the account proposed here, once some of its consequences are fully appreciated. Green’s account rules out, as not expressive, some behaviors like crouching (in fear) that intuitively seem expressive. When Green’s account is altered to allow such behaviors back in, the resulting account also fits the one proposed. (shrink)

The imperviousness of delusions to counter-evidence makes it tempting to classify them as imaginings. Bayne and Pacherie argue that adopting a dispositional account of belief can secure the doxastic status of delusions. But dispositionalism can only secure genuinely doxastic status for mental states by giving folk-psychological norms a significant role in the individuation of attitudes. When such norms individuate belief, deluded subjects will not count as believing their delusions. In general, dispositionalism won't confer genuinely doxastic status more often than do (...) competing accounts of belief. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 6, June 2019, Page W10-W15.