This article deals with several mediaeval Muslim thinkers who gave sympathetic attention to the religions of India, such as al-Bīrūnī, al-Gardīzī, Amīr Khusraw and Dārā Shukōh. The main part of the paper analyses the thought of the 18th century Indian Muslim thinker Mirzā Maẓhar Jān-i Jānān. Several scholars have maintained that Jān-i Jānān regarded the Hindūs as monotheists and the Vedas as divinely inspired. The conclusion reached here is that this assessment is exaggerated. While Jān-i Jānān concedes that the Hindūs (...) of the pre-Islamic era had their own prophets and believed in a religion that pleased God, the Hindūs who have lived since the coming of Islām without joining its fold are infidels. (shrink)

Capacity evaluation has become a widely used assessment device in clinical practice to determine whether patients have the cognitive ability to render their own medical decisions. Such evaluations, which might be better thought of as “capacity challenges,” are generally thought of as benign tools used to facilitate care. This paper proposes that such challenges should be reconceptualized as significant medical interventions with their own set of risks, side effects, and potentially deleterious consequences. As a result, a cost–benefit analysis should be (...) implemented prior to imposing such capacity challenges, and efforts should be made to minimize such challenges in situations where they are unlikely to alter the course of treatment. (shrink)

According to metaphysical coherentism, grounding relations form an interconnected system in which things ground each other and nothing is ungrounded. This potentially viable view’s logical territory remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I describe that territory by articulating four varieties of metaphysical coherentism. I do not argue for any variety in particular. Rather, I aim to show that not all issues which might be raised against coherentism will be equally problematic for all the versions of that view, which features far (...) more nuance and diversity than is typically ascribed to it. (shrink)

Metaphysical naturalism can be taken, roughly, to be the view that there is no God, and nothing beyond nature. Alvin Plantinga has argued that naturalism, in this sense, is self‐defeating. More specifically, he argues that an evolutionary account of human origins gives the naturalist compelling reasons for doubting the reliability of human cognitive faculties, and thus compelling reasons for doubting the truth of any of his beliefs, including naturalism itself. This argument, which has come to be known as the ‘evolutionary (...) argument against naturalism’, has generated a great deal of controversy, and a substantial literature concerning it has grown up as a result. In this paper, I will introduce readers to this literature. I begin by explaining the argument itself, and making clear its intuitive force. I then survey the main objections to it, such as the Perspiration Objection, the ‘Can’t the Naturalist Just Add a Little Something?’ Objection, and the Tu Quoque Objection: in the course of this survey, I pay particular attention to the most interesting of these, a version of the Tu Quoque Objection according to which the problem of evil results in a form of epistemic self‐defeat for the theist that is exactly analogous to the self‐defeat with which the naturalist is allegedly faced in the evolutionary argument. I go on to suggest that, despite the wide range of objections in the literature, the challenge of the evolutionary argument against naturalism is still very much with us, and I conclude by describing some promising directions for future research. (shrink)

Marx’s vision of unalienated production is often thought to be subject to decisive objections. This article argues that these objections rely on a misinterpretation of Marx’s position. It provides a new interpretation of Marx’s vision of unalienated production. Unlike another well-known account, it suggests that unalienated production involves realizing oneself through providing others with the goods and services they need for their self-realization. It argues that this view is appealing and that it offers a more successful response to objections than (...) previous interpretations. In doing so, it hopes to put Marx’s concern with alienation and nonalienation back on the table. (shrink)

The pursuit of knowledge has remained perennial since mankind's earliest days. A born thinker, philosopher, scientist, and discoverer, man has addressed many questions at the very center of life. In attempting to answer such questions, thinkers and philosophers have set forth many convincing (and conflicting) hypotheses, but all agree that achieving knowledge is the route to answering them. In Introduction to World Philosophies: A Chronological Progression, Mirza I. Ashraf describes perplexing philosophies in a simple style. He presents the central ideas (...) of prominent philosophers of the East and West from Zoroaster and Thales to Foucault and Derrida. He attempts to show that without these mentors of societies and civilizations, mankind would never have become what it is today and would not realize its potential for tomorrow. At a time in world history when the global exchange of information is often instantaneous, Ashraf's detailed presentations lead us toward a unified understanding of thought and culture. At this juncture, when the subject of world religions, traditions, and ideologies is at the heart of so much bitterness, these thinkers encourage us to think globally and generate a common approach to humankind's philosophical quest. (shrink)

Background: Guidelines for breaking bad news are largely directed at and validated in oncology patients, based on expert opinion, and neglect those with other diagnoses. We sought to determine whether existing guidelines for breaking bad news, particularly SPIKES, are consistent with patient preferences across patient populations. Methods: Patients from an online community responded to 5 open-ended and 11 Likert-scale questions identifying their preferences in having bad news delivered. Patient participants received a diagnosis of cancer, lupus, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, (...) HIV/AIDS, or Parkinson’s disease. Additionally, we surveyed all 14 English-curriculum Canadian medical schools regarding resources used to teach breaking bad news. Results: Ten of 12 responding schools used the SPIKES model. Preferences of 1337 patients were consistent with the recommendations of SPIKES. There was one exception: Most patients disagree that empathetic physical touch is important and some described apprehension. Responses were consistent across disease states. Content analysis of 220 open-ended patient responses revealed 16 patient-important themes. Themes were largely addressed by the SPIKES guidelines, but five were not: ensuring timely follow-up is planned; offering informational sheets about the diagnosis; offering contact information of support organizations, with some patients preferring patient support groups while others preferring counselors; and conveying a sense of determination to aid the patient through the diagnosis. The four most patient-important components of SPIKES were physicians conveying empathy, taking their time, explaining the diagnosis and its implications, and asking the patient if they understand. Conclusion: SPIKES is the most commonly taught framework for breaking bad news in Canadian medical schools. This is the first work to demonstrate that the existing guidelines in breaking bad news such as SPIKES largely reflect the perspectives of many patient groups, as assessed by quantitative and qualitative measures. We highlight the most important components of SPIKES to patients and identify five additional suggestions to aid clinicians in breaking bad news. (shrink)

The sensorimotor theory of perceptual consciousness offers a form of enactivism in that it stresses patterns of interaction instead of any alleged internal representations of the environment. But how does it relate to forms of enactivism stressing the continuity between life and mind? We shall distinguish sensorimotor enactivism, which stresses perceptual capacities themselves, from autopoietic enactivism, which claims an essential connection between experience and autopoietic processes or associated background capacities. We show how autopoiesis, autonomous agency, and affective dimensions of experience (...) may fit into sensorimotor enactivism, and we identify differences between this interpretation and autopoietic enactivism. By taking artificial consciousness as a case in point, we further sharpen the distinction between sensorimotor enactivism and autopoietic enactivism. We argue that sensorimotor enactivism forms a strong default position for an enactive account of perceptual consciousness. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga has famously argued that metaphysical naturalism is self-defeating, and cannot be rationally accepted. I distinguish between two different ways of understanding this argument, which I call the "probabilistic inference conception", and the "process characteristic conception". I argue that the former is what critics of the argument usually presuppose, whereas most critical responses fail when one assumes the latter conception. To illustrate this, I examine three standard objections to Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism: the Perspiration Objection, the Tu Quoque (...) Objection, and the "Why Can't the Naturalist Just Add a Little Something?" Objection. I show that Plantinga's own responses to these objections fail, and propose counterexamples to his first two principles of defeat. I then go on to construct more adequate responses to these objections, using the distinctions I develop in the first part of the paper. (shrink)

As the theory of the atom, quantum mechanics is perhaps the most successful theory in the history of science. It enables physicists, chemists, and technicians to calculate and predict the outcome of a vast number of experiments and to create new and advanced technology based on the insight into the behavior of atomic objects. But it is also a theory that challenges our imagination. It seems to violate some fundamental principles of classical physics, principles that eventually have become a part (...) of western common sense since the rise of the modern worldview in the Renaissance. So the aim of any metaphysical interpretation of quantum mechanics is to account for these violations. (shrink)

The paper presents an ethical analysis and constructive critique of the current practice of AI ethics. It identifies conceptual substantive and procedural challenges and it outlines strategies to address them. The strategies include countering the hype and understanding AI as ubiquitous infrastructure including neglected issues of ethics and justice such as structural background injustices into the scope of AI ethics and making the procedures and fora of AI ethics more inclusive and better informed with regard to philosophical ethics. These measures (...) integrate the perspective of AI justice into AI ethics, strengthening its capacity to provide comprehensive normative orientation and guidance for the development and use of AI that actually improves human lives and living together. (shrink)

This paper presents explication on how paleontologists reconstruct the past using fossils when _good_ modern analogues are not available. I call these _pastist_ methods to differentiate them from presentist methods in which such analogues are available. I do so by presenting two fossil cases: the problematica and graphoglyptids. I describe a forgotten heuristic, “analogue chaining,” that involves jumping from fossil anomaly to fossil anomaly using one to make sense of the other in successive fashion, using the relations _between fossils_ to (...) guide reconstruction. I relate this to the philosophy of historical sciences in four ways. First, that methods like analogue chaining have a “linearity” meaning that there are limited ways in which to learn about specimens using analogues. Second, that they are intrinsically difficult to notice, i.e. invisible. Third, that linearity and invisibility put pressure on some accounts of optimism about historical sciences. Fourth, our cases provide novel forms of optimism based on epistemic enhancement: the phenomena that some questions regarding an event are _better_ answered millions of years after its occurrence. (shrink)

Why are conditional degrees of belief in an observation E, given a statistical hypothesis H, aligned with the objective probabilities expressed by H? After showing that standard replies are not satisfactory, I develop a suppositional analysis of conditional degree of belief, transferring Ramsey’s classical proposal to statistical inference. The analysis saves the alignment, explains the role of chance-credence coordination, and rebuts the charge of arbitrary assessment of evidence in Bayesian inference. Finally, I explore the implications of this analysis for Bayesian (...) reasoning with idealized models in science. (shrink)

I analyze the epistemic strategies used by paleontologists (between 1830–1930) to reconstruct features of ancient organisms from fossilized bodies and footprints by presenting two heuristics: (1) a “claim of harmony” which posits the harmonious interaction of natural objects in order for complex systems to be simplified and (2) the “kintsugi heuristic” which is used inter-theoretically to explore new claims of harmony. I apply these to three successive historical cases: Georges Cuvier’s laws of correlation, the panpsychist paleontology of Edward Drinker Cope, (...) and the single-character approach of Henry Fairfield Osborn. (shrink)

This paper develops axiomatic foundations for a probabilistic-interventionist theory of causal strength. Transferring methods from Bayesian confirmation theory, I proceed in three steps: I develop a framework for defining and comparing measures of causal strength; I argue that no single measure can satisfy all natural constraints; I prove two representation theorems for popular measures of causal strength: Pearl's causal effect measure and Eells' difference measure. In other words, I demonstrate these two measures can be derived from a set of plausible (...) adequacy conditions. The paper concludes by sketching future research avenues. (shrink)

This paper aims to establish the connection between the theoretical and practical aims of the Office of the Hydrographer of the British Admiralty and Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) work on coral reefs from 1835 to 1842. I also emphasize the consistent zoological as well as geological reasoning contained in these texts. The Office’s influences have been previously overlooked, despite the Admiralty’s interest in using coral reefs as natural instruments. I elaborate on this by introducing the work of Alexander Dalrymple (1737–1808), the (...) first hydrographer of the Admiralty and a figure who has flown under the radar of the history of coral reef theories. I show that Dalrymple introduced a unified account of coral reefs in which multiple features of the coral reefs, such as their shape, slope of the sides, ridges, channels, and elevation relative to the water, were all explained by the action of the winds and waves—and proposed that one could use these features to predict seafaring conditions around the islands. Then, I show that Darwin’s “Coral Islands” (1835) and his _Coral Reefs_ monograph (1842) spoke to these hydrographical issues and did so, at times, by way of zoological reasoning. It was, for instance, the coral behavior and the related notion of a zoological or botanical _station_ that ultimately proved the biggest blow to the Admiralty’s aim to use the coral reefs as instruments because it eroded many uniform predictions regarding the past or future of a coral reef. Connecting these themes leads us to a surprising conclusion: that Darwin’s theory of coral reefs, long a model instance of Darwin making uniform predictable inferences, was, in actuality, also his first formal encounter with something at times the entire opposite. (shrink)

According to an influential view by Elizabeth Harman, moral ignorance, as opposed to factual ignorance, never excuses one from blame. In defense of this view, Harman appeals to the following considerations: that moral ignorance always implies a lack of good will, and that moral truth is always accessible. In this paper, I clearly distinguish these considerations, and present challenges to both. If my arguments are successful, sometimes moral ignorance excuses.

Islam means "peace" and "submission to God." With its ethical system of instruction for a balanced life based on faith and reason, how did this "religion of peace" come to be feared? After the 9/11 tragedy, Islam was judged by many in the West to be a hub of terrorism and a threat to world peace. People everywhere voiced concern over its concepts of war and Jihad. Ashraf traces these and related concepts from their inception in Qur'anic injunctions and the (...) Prophet's precepts to their current interpretation, evaluating them in their spiritual, moral, juridical, and cultural contexts. Misunderstandings about Islam lie at the core of much bitterness and violence. With no central authority to definitively interpret its teachings, misconceptions regarding Islam's ideology of war and peace abound. To label Islam as militant is to misinterpret jihad as simply a call to war and to ignore its laws governing warfare, which emphasize restraint as far as possible. Islamic Philosophy of War and Peace explains the spirit of Islam, its mandate for peace, and what the pluralistic notion of jihad stands for in the hope that clearing up ambiguities will foster peaceful relations between Muslims and the rest of the world. (shrink)

Hence, argumentation will have an increasing importance in education, both because it is a critical competence that has to be learned, and because argumentation ...

What is ethics? : subjectivism, relativism, good, moral standards -- Family, marriage and dowry -- Structures of inequality : caste, hunger, poverty -- Media and ethics : agency, privacy censorship -- Secularism and tolerance.

This paper explores and ultimately affirms the surprising claim that artificial intelligence (AI) can become part of the person, in a robust sense, and examines three ethical and legal implications. The argument is based on a rich, legally inspired conception of persons as free and independent rightholders and objects of heightened protection, but it is construed so broadly that it should also apply to mainstream philosophical conceptions of personhood. The claim is exemplified by a specific technology, devices that connect human (...) brains with computers and operate by AI-algorithms. Under philosophically reasonable and empirically realistic conditions, these devices and the AI running them become parts of the person, in the same way as arms, hearts, or mental capacities are. This transformation shall be called empersonification. It has normative and especially legal consequences because people have broader and stronger duties regarding other persons (and parts of them) than regarding things. Three consequences with practical implications are: (i) AI-devices cease to exist as independent legal entities and come to enjoy the special legal protection of persons; (ii) therefore, third parties such as manufacturers or authors of software lose (intellectual) property rights in device and software; (iii) persons become responsible for the outputs of the empersonified AI-devices to the same degree that they are for desires or intentions arising from the depths of their unconscious. More generally, empersonification marks a new step in the long history of human–machine interaction that deserves critical ethical reflection and calls for a stronger value-aligned development of these technologies. (shrink)

Should Marxists support universal basic income (UBI), i.e., a regular cash income paid to all without a means test or work requirement? This paper considers one important argument that they should, namely that UBI would be instrumentally effective in helping to bring about communism. It argues that previous answers to this question have paid insufficient attention to a logically prior question: what is Marx’s account of communism? In reply, it distinguishes two different accounts: a left-libertarian version that associates communism with (...) the freedom to live and work how one wants, and a perfectionist version that associates communism with the overcoming of alienated labour and self-realisation in work. It argues that UBI would make steps towards the left-libertarian account but not the perfectionist account. Ultimately, then, the question “should Marxists support basic income?” is shown to partly depend on which account of communism Marxists want to bring about. (shrink)

Michelle Moody-Adams suggests that “the main obstacle to moral progress in social practices is the tendency to widespread affected ignorance of what can and should already be known.” This explanation is promising, though to understand it we need to know what willful (affected, motivated, strategic) ignorance actually is. This paper presents a novel analysis of this concept, which builds upon Moody-Adams (1994) and is contrasted with a recent account by Lynch (2016).

T i 2 = S i +1 2 implies ∑ p i +1 ⊆ Δ p i +1 ⧸poly. S 2 and IΔ 0 ƒ are not finitely axiomatizable. The main tool is a Herbrand-type witnessing theorem for ∃∀∃ П b i -formulas provable in T i 2 where the witnessing functions are □ p i +1.

Infinite regress arguments play an important role in many distinct philosophical debates. Yet, exactly how they are to be used to demonstrate anything is a matter of serious controversy. In this paper I take up this metaphilosophical debate, and demonstrate how infinite regress arguments can be used for two different purposes: either they can refute a universally quantified proposition (as the Paradox Theory says), or they can demonstrate that a solution never solves a given problem (as the Failure Theory says). (...) In the meantime, I show that Black’s view on infinite regress arguments (1996, this journal) is incomplete, and how his criticism of Passmore can be countered. (shrink)

What do we owe to the lower animals, if anything? The issues raised by this question are among the most fascinating and fundamental in ethical theory. They provide a real watershed for the moral philosopher and, on perhaps the most widely professed view, a trenchant test of consistency in ethical practice. Among the virtues of these two challenging books is that they make painfully clear that there has been a paucity of clear and plausible argument in support of the nearly (...) universal tendency of humans to eat animal flesh, and to visit varying degrees of pain, discomfort, and unfreedom on the animals in question in the process.When we are asked why it is all right to do this, given our strong belief that it is not all right for us to eat other humans, we tend to give answers that won't readily wash. We may say, for example, that animals are stupid; but we don't think it all right to eat stupid people, including people less apparently competent than many of the higher animals. Or we may say things that are patently untrue, such as that the other animals don't really feel pain anyway. (shrink)

Students of Thomas Aquinas have so far lacked a comprehensive study of his doctrine of the transcendentals. This volume fills this lacuna, showing the fundamental character of the notions of being, one, true and good for his thought. The book inquires into the beginnings of the doctrine in the thirteenth century and explains the relation of the transcendental way of thought to Aquinas's conception of metaphysics. It analyzes 'Being', 'One', 'True', 'Good' and 'Beautiful' individually and discusses their importance for the (...) philosophical knowledge of God. Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas is intended as a contribution to the question 'What is philosophy in the Middle Ages?' It argues that the doctrine of the transcendentals is essential for understanding medieval philosophy. (shrink)

An implication relation between pictures is defined, it is then shown how conjunctions, disjunctions, negations, and hypotheticals of pictures can be formed on the basis of this. It is argued that these logical operations on pictures correspond to natural cognitive operations employed when thinking about pictures.

BackgroundSharing de-identified individual-level health research data is widely promoted and has many potential benefits. However there are also some potential harms, such as misuse of data and breach of participant confidentiality. One way to promote the benefits of sharing while ameliorating its potential harms is through the adoption of a managed access approach where data requests are channeled through a Data Access Committee (DAC), rather than making data openly available without restrictions. A DAC, whether a formal or informal group of (...) individuals, has the responsibility of reviewing and assessing data access requests. Many individual groups, consortiums, institutional and independent DACs have been established but there is currently no widely accepted framework for their organization and function.Main textWe propose that DACs, should have the role of both promotion of data sharing and protection of data subjects, their communities, data producers, their institutions and the scientific enterprise. We suggest that data access should be granted by DACs as long as the data reuse has potential social value and provided there is low risk of foreseeable harms. To promote data sharing and to motivate data producers, DACs should encourage secondary uses that are consistent with the interests of data producers and their own institutions. Given the suggested roles of DACs, there should be transparent, simple and clear application procedures for data access. The approach to review of applications should be proportionate to the potential risks involved. DACs should be established within institutional and legal frameworks with clear lines of accountability, terms of reference and membership. We suggest that DACs should not be modelled after research ethics committees (RECs) because their functions and goals of review are different from those of RECs. DAC reviews should be guided by the principles of public health ethics instead of research ethics.ConclusionsIn this paper we have suggested a framework under which DACs should operate, how they should be organised, and how to constitute them. (shrink)

This volume is a result of the international symposium “The Tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw School in European Culture,” which took place in Warsaw, Poland, September 2015. It collects almost all the papers presented at the symposium as well as some additional ones. The contributors include scholars from Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Poland. The papers are devoted to the history and reception of the Lvov-Warsaw School, a Polish branch of analytic philosophy. They present the School’s achievements as well as its (...) connections to other analytic groups. The contributors also show how the tradition of the School is developed contemporarily. The title will appeal to historians of analytic philosophy as well as historians of philosophy in Central Europe. (shrink)

In his 1953 lectures at the College de France, Merleau-Ponty dedicated much effort to further developing his idea of embodied subject and interpreted fresh sources that he did not use in Phenomenology of Perception. Notably, he studied more in depth the neurological notion of "body schema". According to Merleau-Ponty, the body schema is a practical diagram of our relationships to the world, an action-based norm with reference to which things make sense. Merleau-Ponty more precisely tried to describe the fundamentally dynamic (...) unity of the body, i.e. the fact there are various possibilities how the practical "diagram" of body schema could be de-differentiated (in pathology) or further refined (via cognitive and cultural superstructures, symbolic systems). This chapter summarises Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of the notion, while contrasting it to the more traditional understanding of the body in phenomenology and recent philosophical texts dealing with body schema. (shrink)

Hypothetico-deductive (H-D) confirmation builds on the idea that confirming evidence consists of successful predictions that deductively follow from the hypothesis under test. This article reviews scope, history and recent development of the venerable H-D account: First, we motivate the approach and clarify its relationship to Bayesian confirmation theory. Second, we explain and discuss the tacking paradoxes which exploit the fact that H-D confirmation gives no account of evidential relevance. Third, we review several recent proposals that aim at a sounder and (...) more comprehensive formulation of H-D confirmation. Finally, we conclude that the reputation of hypothetico-deductive confirmation as outdated and hopeless is undeserved: not only can the technical problems be addressed satisfactorily, the hypothetico-deductive method is also highly relevant for scientific practice. (shrink)

Inspired by Hannah Arendt, this contribution offers an exercise of thought as an attempt to distil anew the original spirit of what education means. It tries to articulate the event or happening that the word names, the experiences in which this happening manifests itself and the (material) forms that constitute it or make it find/take (its) place. Starting from the meaning of scholè as ‘free time’ or ‘undestined and unfinished time’ it further explores scholè as the time of attention which (...) is the time of the regard for the world, of being present to it (or being in its presence), attending it, a time of delivery to the experience of the world, of exposure and effacing social subjectivities and orientations, a time filled with encounters. Education, then, relates to forms of profanation, suspension and attention and can be articulated as the art (the doing) and technology that makes scholè happen. (shrink)

This essay proposes to view networks as sociocultural structures. Following authors from Leopold von Wiese and Norbert Elias to Gary Alan Fine and Harrison White, networks are configurations of social relationships interwoven with meaning. Social relationships as the basic building blocks of networks are conceived of as dynamic structures of reciprocal (but not necessarily symmetric) expectations between alter and ego. Through their transactions, alter and ego construct an idiosyncratic "relationship culture" comprising symbols, narratives, and relational identities. The coupling of social (...) relationships to networks, too, is heavily laden with meaning. The symbolic construction of persons is one instance of this coupling. Another instance is the application of social categories (like race or gender), which both map and structure social networks. The conclusion offers an agenda for research on this "meaning structure of social networks.". (shrink)

Representing the thinking of philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, coaches, and sports writers, these essays bring together a wide range of approaches to ...

Interpretation in science has gained little attention in the past because philosophers of science believed that interpretation belongs to the context of discovery or must be associated with meaning. But scientists often speak about interpretation when they report their findings. Elsewhere I have argue in favour of a pragmatic-rhetorical theory of explanation, and it is in light of this theory that I suggest we can understand interpretation in the natural sciences.

The contemporary situation within the realm of ethical theories is quite complicated. Were it not enough that many classical ethical theories are evolving into the new modern forms, new types of ethical theories are arising, as well. The main aim of the paper is to introduce this issue of ethical theories which are known under the term hybrid ethical theories. A secondary aim of the paper is to describe and characterize the contemporary ethical theory of ethics of social consequences, and (...) look for the answer whether it can be an example of this type of theory. To achieve the scope, the paper begins with a short introduction into the issue of contemporary consequentialism, followed by a presentation of the concept of hybrid ethical theories and its examples. Later the variability of consequentialism and ethics of social consequences are presented. The normative basis of this theory is subsequently analysed and explored in the context of hybrid ethical theories. Finally, the study clarify that the ethics of social consequences might be considered as a hybrid ethical theory. (shrink)

rationality has increasingly been a target of attack in contemporary educational research and practice and in its place practical reason and situated thinking have become a focus of interest. The argument here is that something is lost in this. In illustrating how we might think about the issue, this paper makes a response to the charge that as a result of his commitment to the ‘Enlightenment project’ Vygotsky holds abstract rationality as the pinnacle of thought. Against this it is argued (...) that Vygotsky had a far more sophisticated appreciation of reason and of its remit. The paper proceeds first by examining the picture of Vygotsky that is presented in the work of James Wertsch, and especially his claim that Vygotsky was an ambivalent rationalist, goes on to provide an account of Vygotsky that corrects this picture, and develops this in the light of the work of Robert Brandom, who shares Vygotsky’s inheritance of Hegel. The conclusion towards which this piece points is that the philosophical underpinnings of Vygotsky’s work provide a radically different idea of rationality and epistemology from that characterised as abstract rationality and that this has significance for education studies. (shrink)

How should we construe the unity, in affective experience, of felt bodily changes on the one hand and intentionality on the other, without forcing affective phenomena into a one-sided theoretical framework such as cognitivism? To answer this question, I will consider the specific kind of self-awareness implicit in affectivity. In particular, I will explore the idea that a bodily sense of ability is crucial for affective self-awareness. Describing the affective ways of “grasping oneself” manifest in a person’s felt sense of (...) ability will help us understand the intimate connection between bodily feelings and intentionality in affective processes. In order to illustrate these experiential structures in a concrete case, I will discuss experiential changes often reported by sufferers of depression. (shrink)

This article reconsiders Husserl’s concept of Leib in light of Merleau‐Ponty’s interpretation of the human body as an ontologically significant phenomenon. I first analyze Husserl’s account of the body as a “two‐fold unity” and demonstrate the problematic nature of its four implications, namely, the ambiguous ontological status of the body as subject‐object, the view of “my body” as “my object,” the preconstitutive character of the unity of the body, and the restriction of the constitution of the body to touch alone. (...) Building on this analysis, I explain how Merleau‐Ponty resolves the difficulties raised by Husserl’s account by reversing it. According to Merleau‐Ponty, “flesh” is not a two‐fold reality comprising subjective and objective aspects, but an ontological dimension from which these aspects can be abstracted through specific cognitive operations. Consequently, all subjective and objective aspects, even beyond the boundaries of one’s body, must be understood as founded in the indivisible unity of flesh. I argue that a thorough phenomenological description of the human body requires abandoning Husserl’s concept of Leib because it contributes to perpetuating subject‐object dualism. In contrast, Merleau‐Ponty’s notion of flesh reveals the circularity between subject and object and its general ontological significance. (shrink)