O texto traça as linhas gerais do pensamento de L. Fleck por meio da análise de seus principais trabalhos no campo da epistemologia. Foram consultadas publicações anteriores e posteriores à monografia de 1935, até o último trabalho datado de 1960 e escrito pouco antes de sua morte. Desta forma, procurou-se compreender o desenvolvimento de suas idéias e estabelecer conexões entre o seu pensamento e a atividade prática no campo das ciências aplicadas, com especial atenção para o ensino nas ciências da (...) saúde.The text traces the general lines of thought of L. Fleck through an analysis of his major works in the field of epistemology. Publications before and after the monograph of 1935 were consulted, up to the last work dated 1960 and written shortly before his death. Through this procedure, this study has sought to understand the development of his ideas and establish connections between Fleck’s concepts and practical activity in field of applied science, focusing especially on the teaching of the health sciences. (shrink)

A ciência é feita das escolhas de seus protagonistas e como tal, repleta de subjetividade. Uma teoria científica é uma suposição explicativa e negar a influência da imaginação como agente ativo na construção do conhecimento seria no mínimo ingenuidade. Embora a ciência possua regras bem definidas, seu método se limita a obtenção e tratamento de dados. O surgimento da ideia ou da hipótese inicial é fruto do salto intuitivo da livre imaginação humana. A Experimentação Mental é o processo de empregar (...) situações imaginárias para ajudar-nos a entender ou prever de que maneira as coisas podem se comportar na realidade. Assim como os Experimentos Concretos os Experimentos Mentais são uma ferramenta essencial na construção do conhecimento científico. Tais situações imaginárias são parte importante da argumentação dos cientistas na busca do convencimento de seus pares, servindo também como ferramenta didática. Neste trabalho, através da revisão de algumas das principais referências sobre este conceito, buscaremos analisar questões epistemológicas envolvidas. Afinal o que são Experimentos Mentais? Será que eles podem nos fornecer uma fonte de conhecimentos do mundo natural? De onde vem esse conhecimento? O objetivo principal desta análise é buscar padrões de interpretação através de categorias de definições apresentadas por pontos de vista significativos. Diferentes autores discutem os limites e potencialidades dos Experimentos Mentais, baseado em suas considerações propomos aqui cinco categorias distintas para sua compreensão: Processo de Re-contextualização, Intuições Platônicas, Argumentos Pitorescos, Experimentos e Manipulação de Modelos Mentais. Palavras-chave: Experimentos mentais. Gedanken experiment. Epistemologia. (shrink)

Seres humanos têm necessidade perene de encontrar respostas significativas para a sua vida: as respostas implicam a espiritualidade/religiosidade/religião e as experiências culturais. Nesse contexto objetiva-se discutir na perspectiva ético-fenomenológica a atuação pública das pessoas que detêm conhecimento teológico em vista de colaborar para a vida na sociedade plural do século XXI. A literatura escolhida para pensar crítico-reflexivamente a questão tem base fenomenológica, teológico-moral, e a perspectiva pública da Teologia. Observa-se que medo e culpabilidade estão ligados às “falsas imagens” de Deus; (...) não são de poucos os prejuízos e as dificuldades causadas por esta equivocada experiência. Resulta que convém reconsiderar, em muitos casos, a vida moral a partir de um _ethos_ profético, tornando mais crível e acolhedora a presença do Divino no mundo. Ou seja, requer sair da Academia e/ou dos Templos para estar junto à sociedade que convive em interculturalidade e inter-religiosidade. (shrink)

Ovídio, poeta latino do século I a.C, compôs as Heroides, obra em que heróis e heroínas das lendas escrevem a seus amados(as) ausentes. Todas as cartas apresentam profundo teor trágico, tanto na temática quanto nos aspectos trágicos marcantes. Analisamos a tragicidade na carta de Dejanira a Hércules, na qual a mulher do herói narra seu desespero ao receber a notícia da morte de Hércules, após vestir a túnica que ela havia enviado. Como base para a análise, serão usados os conceitos (...) aristotélicos de hamartia e hybris, bem como os sentimentos de terror e compaixão e também a concepção filosófica de trágico estabelecida pelos idealistas alemães do século XVIII. (shrink)

Os poetas elegíacos romanos estabelecem, em seus versos, uma forte relação entre o amor e a guerra. Os vocábulos usados para descrever os deuses do amor, Vênus e Cupido, ou o próprio ato amoroso, associam-se a vocábulos bélicos. Trava-se uma batalha entre os amantes ou entre o deus do Amor e aquele que foi ferido por sua flecha. Essa associação explica-se por questões míticas, as relações amorosas entre a deusa do amor e o deus da guerra, nas mitologias grega e (...) latina, e também por questões históricas, já que o nascimento da elegia, em Roma, acontece em um momento conturbado de guerras externas e internas. Exemplificaremos a relação entre amor e guerra com versos dos principais poetas que escreveram elegias amorosas, em Roma, Catulo, Tibulo, Propércio e Ovídio. (shrink)

Catulo (século I a.C.), o primeiro grande autor lírico romano, traz a elegia grega com temática variada, inclusive amorosa. Assim a poesia elegíaca latina desenvolve-se e ganha contorno de um gênero autônomo em Roma, com temática própria, a elegia erótica romana. O tema do amor passa a ser fundamental, nos autores do século de Augusto (século I a.C.), Tibulo, Propércio e Ovídio, que escrevem livros inteiros para uma amada. Contudo, unida à temática do amor encontramos também o tema morte, constante (...) em Propércio e encontrado também em Ovídio na esfera mítica. Através de fragmentos de poemas dos autores elegíacos, veremos como os temas amor e morte encontram-se unidos na elegia latina. (shrink)

A elegia é uma forma poética muito antiga. Os gregos compuseram elegias desde a lírica arcaica (século VII – V a.C.). Contudo, foram as elegias compostas no período da lírica alexandrina (século III – II a.C.) que influenciaram os elegíacos romanos. Tanto na Grécia quanto em Roma a elegia é considerada como gênero lírico, mas percebemos que nas composições romanas é notória a presença do trágico, especialmente, nas obras de Ovídio, por isso discutimos a problemática do gênero elegíaco, que se (...) apresenta na Antiguidade como um gênero híbrido. (shrink)

A personagem Medeia, desde os autores gregos, como Eurípides, é apresentada como o exemplo mais clássico do prejuízo causado pela paixão desmedida. Ela justifica todos os seus atos buscando como medida seu amor por Jasão. É o amor que a faz salvar a vida do amado e tirar várias outras vidas, inclusive de seus próprios filhos. Ovídio, poeta latino do século I a.C., retoma a personagem em sua obra Heroides, para também apresentar o mal que a paixão desenfreada pode causar (...) em um ser humano. A cultura romana que ensinava os riscos do amor e da paixão, como tão bem nos legou Lucrécio, em seu De rerum natura, buscava não cometer o erro de amar em demasia. Contudo, Ovídio mostra nessa obra, as dores e os sofrimentos causados por um amor que se torna para a personagem, ao mesmo tempo, sua salvação e sua destruição. (shrink)

Ovídio, o último autor elegíaco do período augustano, começou sua produção literária seguindo a tradição elegíaca latina, inaugurada por Catulo e intensificada por Tibulo e Propércio, que transformaram a elegia latina em verdadeiro estilo literário independente com temática unificada na paixão amorosa do eu-lírico por uma amada específica, trazendo assim a paixão como uma experiência pessoal, não mítica, como fizeram os alexandrinos. Ovídio inicia sua produção poetizando sua paixão por Corina, no livro Amores, mas sua elegia migra da paixão pessoal (...) para a paixão de personagens míticas e históricas, em Heroides, e depois para a teorização da conquista amorosa em Ars Amandi. Em toda essa produção a temática ainda é o amor. Esse sentimento, no entanto, é abordado de uma maneira inovadora. Também em seus últimos livros Tristia e Epistula ex Ponto, ele inova trazendo ainda uma experiência pessoal, mas não mais amorosa. Seu tema passa a ser a dor de ter sido obrigado a deixar Roma, seus amigos e sua família. (shrink)

In order to highlight the intimate relationship between imagining, drawing and making worlds, this essay questions the educational meaning of children to initiate in the action of drawing in face of the growing cultural tendency of the body being less and less required to produce senses. The incarnated action of drawing, as an aesthetic action of touching and being touched by the world when transposing the visible limits and entering into the intimacy of worldly invisibility, constitutes an experience that is (...) as recurrent and trivialized in school daily life as it is existentially complex due to its poetic power to enter the invisible and inaugurate worldviews. The historical disqualification of the image and imagination in Western thought, supported by the separation between subjectivity of the body and objectivity of the world, does not allow educational thought to consider the phenomenon of poetic imagination as an existential experience of language insertion in the world from the gesture of drawing. Gesture that finds its specificity in the instant the hand traces and inscribes lines on the surface of the supports as infinitely creative writing. The aesthetic gesture of drawing, temporalized by the rhythm of the body in the emergence of the fabulation that accompanies the repetition of the marks, implies a poetic experience of language that involves the fusion of two senses: that of the gesture in materiality and that of the mark configured in it, marked and cicatrized in the surface of the support by the body’s action that performed it. The approximation between education, arts and childhood allows us to highlight the philosophical and pedagogical tensions that involve the question of poetic imagination and to take another look at the action of drawing in the context of children's education. What emerges, from the dialogue between Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, is the relevance of the educational intention of caring for the vital function of language as an aesthetic and poetic experience that is constituted in the processuality of the body to make something appear that produces and contains presence, that which promotes and expands the existential density of the real. (shrink)

Dopo aver studiato l’argomento della divisione delle scienze speculative in Aristotele e Boezio, riprendiamo la marcia della nostra ricerca presentando il pensiero di Avicenna al riguardo. Bisogna ammettere l’importanza del suo contributo per lo sviluppo della filosofia, e in modo particolare la metafisica, nell’occidente medievale, senza il quale non si può cogliere la continuità e i cambiamenti progressivi nelle diverse edizioni di questa scienza regina del sapere razionale umano. Avicenna insisterà a ragione nell’importanza del subiectum scientiae per stabilire la (...) divisione delle scienze speculative, e metterà in rilievo il soggetto proprio della metafisica, cioè l’ente in quanto ente. In un altro contesto, vedremo come Avicenna parlerà dei diversi gradi di astrazione nelle varie facoltà conoscitive, ma senza mettere questa dottrina in rapporto con la questione della divisione delle scienze, come invece faranno successivamente altri autori, confondendo forse questi due livelli di riflessione. (shrink)

Upregulation of implicit positive affect (PA) can act as a mechanism to deal with negative affect. Two studies tracked temporal changes in positive and negative affect (NA) assessed by self-report and the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT; Quirin, Kazén, & Kuhl, 2009). Study 1 observed the predicted increases in implicit PA after exposure to a threat-related film clip, which correlated positively with the speed of recognising a happy face among an angry crowd. Study 2 replicated increases in implicit (...) PA after exposition to the same film clip, and showed that such increases were enhanced by priming self-referential stimuli. The findings are discussed against the background of personality systems interaction (PSI) theory (Kuhl, 2000, 2001), which emphasises the role of the implicit self in affect regulation. (shrink)

Contemporary education is awakening from a crisis that has held the development of its potential and its relevance at bay for well over a century. Revolutions in science and spirituality are emerging a new relational intelligence that demands commensurate educational paradigms for its blossoming into daily engagements with life and the world around us. At the same time as people are leading increasingly interconnected lives, aware of and often participating in the narratives of people and ecosystems in other parts of (...) the planet, information and communications technologies are increasingly integrating with and serving to mediate the human experience. This article explores the power of this confluence at the current nexus of civilizational demands in the context of increased planetary stresses and destabilizations. The case is made for a thrivable education praxis that draws on these emergent aspects of our developmental potential and emphasizes the importance of functional conviviality as an operational principle of learning for life. (shrink)

É reconhecida, contemporaneamente, a capacidade da literatura na formação de sujeitos críticos e participantes socialmente. Sendo assim, tão logo a escola passou a ser popularizada, a literatura teve, também, ampla divulgação nesse espaço. No entanto, apesar dessa relação ter sido iniciada por volta de cinquenta anos, cada vez mais, constata-se a dificuldade da escola na formação de leitores literários. Em vista disso , é objetivo deste artigo problematizar questões pertinentes ao trabalho com a literatura em dois espaços fundamentais para melhorar (...) a qualidade da educação básica no Brasil : a sala de aula e a biblioteca. (shrink)

O ensaio aproxima estudos em torno da dimensão poética da linguagem para abordar a relação entre docência na educação infantil e experiência de estar à escuta como modo estésico de coexistir no mundo. A aproximação entre filosofia, artes e educação infantil, desde o encontro entre e música e educação, sublinha que a escuta é o som do sentido e não o sentido do som a ser interpretado. A interlocução com o pensamento de Jean-Luc Nancy, ao permitir afirmar que o sentido (...) sensível suscita o sentido sensato ou inteligível e o faz num movimento constante que não se completa ou finaliza produzindo uma significação ou uma informação, emerge como resistência filosófica ao privilégio do registro teórico fundado na primazia ocidental do modelo óptico. Estar à escuta implica a ressonância como o som do sentido, como profundidade primeira ou última do corpo. A música como jogo entre som e ruído, como produção poética de ordenação de sentidos sonoros provocados pela ressonância – como gesto de escutar a escuta, contribui para interrogar a educação de bebês e crianças pequenas a partir de um corpo que pode brincar com a sonoridade do mundo para viver a poética do barulhar como potência musical de jogar com sons e ruídos. O apetite sonoro das crianças as convocam a barulhar pela estesia de escutar o mundo na pluralidade da coexistência. O gesto de estar à escuta na docência com bebês e crianças pequenas aponta para ações educativas que consideram a experiência constituinte de ressonâncias e reverberações de sentidos imbricamos no som, um sentir se sentir (aisthesis), como partição e partilha das vozes, dos signos, dos gestos, das formas, do sentido sentido e do sentido sensato que nos situam sendo-uns-com-os-outros na coexistência mundana. (shrink)

Bd. 1. Adolph Goldschmidt, Ernst Meumann, Wilhelm Waetzoldt und Arnold Schering -- Bd. 2. Paul Frankl, Emilt Utitz, Gustav Johann von Allesch und Wilhelm Worringer.

A questão que se coloca nesse texto é refletir sobre as contribuições que Marx formula para pensar a respeito da educação, a escola e a luta trabalhadora. Nosso intuito é, pois, a partir do “beber da fonte” da filosofia de práxis, pensar em que medida, o projeto de emancipação social, tal como propôs Marx, se realiza numa escola em crise, aonde muita coisa, aliás, muda na aparência para manter a essência íntegra. Nossas reflexões se voltam para compreender também, como por (...) meio do trabalho, as experiências de autoformação política da classe trabalhadora passam por uma radicalização vertiginosa do direito ao acesso, comprometedora, no entanto, do saber produzido socialmente. (shrink)

Gideon Rosen (2014) has drawn our attention to cases of duress of a particularly interesting sort: the person's ‘mind is not flooded with pain or fear’, she knows exactly what she is doing, and she makes a clear-headed choice to act in, as Rosen says, ‘awful ways’. The explanation of why we excuse such actions cannot be that the action was not voluntary. In addition, although some duress cases could also be viewed as necessity cases and thus as justified, Rosen (...) wisely sets aside that complicating factor by zeroing in on those cases where the action clearly is not justified. So why do we excuse in these cases, where the action is not justified and the agent acted voluntarily?Rosen thinks the key lies in the ‘ill will’ condition, ‘the idea that an act is blameworthy only if it manifests insufficient concern or regard for those affected’. He says this is relatively uncontroversial; much of my paper is taken up with calling the ‘ill will’ condition into question. I also take issue with Rosen on just how justifications and excuses differ. I argue in favour of understanding justifications (in a context where we are asking how justifications and excuses differ) as not requiring truth, but only reasonable belief. (shrink)

Clarke A. Chambers interviews Marcia Eaton, professor in the Department of Philosophy.

Did you know that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS? Or that Mike Pence called Michelle Obama “the most vulgar First Lady we’ve ever had”? No, you didn’t know these things. You couldn’t know them, because these claims are false.1 But many American voters believed them.One of the most distinctive features of the 2016 campaign was the rise of “fake news,” factually false claims circulated on social media, usually via channels of partisan camaraderie. Media analysts and social scientists are still (...) debating what role fake news played in Trump’s victory.2 But whether or not it drove the outcome, fake news certainly affected the choices of some individual voters.Why were people willing to believe easily... (shrink)

The emphasis on duly in Kant's ethics is widely held to constitute a defect. Marcia W. Baron develops and assesses the criticism, which she sees as comprising two objections: that duty plays too large a role, leaving no room for the supererogatory, and that Kant places too much value on acting from duty. Clearly written and cogently argued, Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology takes on the most philosophically intriguing objections to Kant's ethics and subjects them to a rigorous yet sympathetic (...) assessment. (shrink)

Deepfake technology uses machine learning to fabricate video and audio recordings that represent people doing and saying things they've never done. In coming years, malicious actors will likely use this technology in attempts to manipulate public discourse. This paper prepares for that danger by explicating the unappreciated way in which recordings have so far provided an epistemic backstop to our testimonial practices. Our reasonable trust in the testimony of others depends, to a surprising extent, on the regulative effects of the (...) ever-present possibility of recordings of the events they testify about. As deepfakes erode the epistemic value of recordings, we may then face an even more consequential challenge to the reliability of our testimonial practices themselves. (shrink)

Slips of the tongue, unwitting favoritism and stereotyped assumptions are just some examples of microaggression. Nearly all of us commit microaggressions at some point, even if we don’t intend to. Yet over time a pattern of microaggression can cause considerable harm by reminding members of marginalized groups of their precarious position. The Ethics of Microaggression is a much needed and clearly written exploration of this pervasive yet complex problem. What is microaggression and how do we know when it is occurring? (...) Can we be held responsible for microaggressions and if so, how? How has social media affected the problem? What role can philosophy play in understanding microaggression? Regina Rini explores these highly topical and controversial questions in an engaging and fair-minded way, arguing that an event is a microaggression precisely because it causes a marginalized person to experience an ambiguous encounter with oppression. She illustrates her argument with compelling examples from media, politics and psychology and explains the significance of essential concepts, such as media representation, reparative renaming, and safe spaces. The Ethics of Microaggression explains what microaggression is and offers strategies for combating it. Assuming no prior knowledge of the topic or philosophy, it demystifies a controversial and extremely important topic in clear language. It is ideal for anyone coming to the topic for the first time and for students in philosophy, gender studies, race theory, disability theory and social and political philosophy. (shrink)

Deepfakes are algorithmically modified video and audio recordings that project one person’s appearance on to that of another, creating an apparent recording of an event that never took place. Many scholars and journalists have begun attending to the political risks of deepfake deception. Here we investigate other ways in which deepfakes have the potential to cause deeper harms than have been appreciated. First, we consider a form of objectification that occurs in deepfaked ‘frankenporn’ that digitally fuses the parts of different (...) women to create pliable characters incapable of giving consent to their depiction. Next, we develop the idea of ‘illocutionary wronging’, in which an individual is forced to engage in speech acts they would prefer to avoid in order to deny or correct the misleading evidence of a publicized deepfake. Finally, we consider the risk that deepfakes may facilitate campaigns of ‘panoptic gaslighting’, where many systematically altered recordings of a single person's life undermine their memory, eroding their sense of self and ability to engage with others. Taken together, these harms illustrate the roles that social epistemology and technological vulnerabilities play in human ethical life. (shrink)

Contemporary and emerging chatbots can be fine-tuned to imitate the style, tenor, and knowledge of a corpus, including the corpus of a particular individual. This makes it possible to build chatbots that imitate people who are no longer alive — deathbots. Such deathbots can be used in many ways, but one prominent way is to facilitate the process of grieving. In this paper, we present a framework that helps make sense of this process. In particular, we argue that deathbots can (...) serve as affective scaffolds, modulating and shaping the emotions of the bereaved. We contextualize this affective scaffolding by comparing it to earlier technologies that have also been used to scaffold the process of grieving, arguing that deathbots offer some interesting novelties that may transform the continuing bonds of intimacy that the bereaved can have with the dead. We conclude with some ethical reflections on the promises and perils of this new technology. (shrink)

Since at least 2016, many have worried that social media enables authoritarians to meddle in democratic politics. The concern is that trolls and bots amplify deceptive content. In this chapter I argue that these tactics have a more insidious anti-democratic purpose. Lies implanted in democratic discourse by authoritarians are often intended to be caught. Their primary goal is not to successfully deceive, but rather to undermine the democratic value of testimony. In well-functioning democracies, our mutual reliance on testimony also generates (...) a distinctively democratic value: decentralized testimonial networks evade control by the state or powerful actors. The deliberate exposure of deception in democratic testimonial networks undermines this value by implicating citizens in their own epistemic corruption, weakening the resilience of democratic society against authoritarian pressure. In this chapter I illustrate that danger through a close reading of recent Russian social media interference operations, showing both their epistemic underpinnings and their ongoing political threat. (shrink)

Many of our cognitive capacities are the result of enculturation. Enculturation is the temporally extended transformative acquisition of cognitive practices in the cognitive niche. Cognitive practices are embodied and normatively constrained ways to interact with epistemic resources in the cognitive niche in order to complete a cognitive task. The emerging predictive processing perspective offers new functional principles and conceptual tools to account for the cerebral and extra-cerebral bodily components that give rise to cognitive practices. According to this emerging perspective, many (...) cases of perception, action, and cognition are realized by the on-going minimization of prediction error. Predictive processing provides us with a mechanistic perspective that helps investigate the functional details of the acquisition of cognitive practices. The argument of this paper is that research on enculturation and recent work on predictive processing are complementary. The main reason is that predictive processing operates at a sub-personal level and on a physiological time scale of explanation only. A complete account of enculturated cognition needs to take additional levels and temporal scales of explanation into account. This complementarity assumption leads to a new framework—enculturated predictive processing—that operates on multiple levels and temporal scales for the explanation of the enculturated predictive acquisition of cognitive practices. Enculturated predictive processing is committed to explanatory pluralism. That is, it subscribes to the idea that we need multiple perspectives and explanatory strategies to account for the complexity of enculturation. The upshot is that predictive processing needs to be complemented by additional considerations and conceptual tools to realize its full explanatory potential. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical reflection on the experience of time from within exile. Its focus on temporality is unique, as most literature on exile focuses on the experience of space, as exile involves dislocation, and moods of nostalgia and utopia. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback proposes that in exile, time is experienced neither as longing back to the lost past nor as wanting a future to come but rather as a present without anchors or supports. She articulates this present as (...) a "gerundive" mode, in which the one who is in exile discovers herself simply being, exposed to the uncanny experience of having lost the past and not having a future. To investigate this, the book establishes a conversation among three authors whose work has exemplified this sense of gerundive time: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot, and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. The book does not aim to discuss how these authors understand the relation between time and exile but enters in conversation with them in relation to this question. Attempting to think and express this difficult sense of time from within exile, the book engages with the relation between thought and language, and between philosophy and literature. Departing from concrete existential questions, it opens new philosophical and theoretical modes through which to understand what it means to be present in times of exile. (shrink)

Recent empirical work appears to suggest that the moral intuitions of professional philosophers are just as vulnerable to distorting psychological factors as are those of ordinary people. This paper assesses these recent tests of the ‘expertise defense’ of philosophical intuition. I argue that the use of familiar cases and principles constitutes a methodological problem. Since these items are familiar to philosophers, but not ordinary people, the two subject groups do not confront identical cognitive tasks. Reflection on this point shows that (...) these findings do not threaten philosophical expertise—though we can draw lessons for more effective empirical tests. (shrink)

A microaggression is a small insulting act made disproportionately harmful by its part in an oppressive pattern of similar insults. How should you respond when made the victim of a microaggression? In this paper I survey several morally salient factors, including effects upon victims, perpetrators, and third parties. I argue, contrary to popular views, that ‘growing a thicker skin’ is not good advice nor is expressing reasonable anger always the best way to contribute to confronting oppression. Instead, appropriately responding to (...) microaggression involves difficult application of practical wisdom that does not easily fall under a simple prescription. (shrink)

Generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Midjourney can produce prose or images. But can they produce art? I argue that this question, though natural and intriguing, is the wrong one to ask. A better question is this: can generative AI yield distinct or novel forms of aesthetic value? And I argue that the answer is yes. Generative AI can be used to put us in contact with the artificial sublime – a type of aesthetic value that Kant famously argues is (...) impossible. Kant claims that sublimity (a fusion of trepidation and wonderment) can only arise from encounters with nature, or perhaps close artistic depiction of natural scenes. I show how generative AI can yield encounters both with incalculable profundity (Kant’s mathematical sublime) as well as overwhelming moral chaos (Kant’s dynamical sublime). There are lessons not only for art criticism, but also for the philosophical theory of value. (shrink)

This short piece draws on political philosophy to show how social media interference operations can be used by hostile states to weaken the apparent legitimacy of democratic governments. Democratic societies are particularly vulnerable to this form of attack because democratic governments depend for their legitimacy on citizens' trust in one another. But when citizen see one another as complicit in the distribution of deceptive content, they lose confidence in the epistemic preconditions for democracy. The piece concludes with policy recommendations for (...) how democratic governments should protect themselves. (shrink)

During the past decade ethical theory has been in a lively state of development, and three basic approaches to ethics - Kantian ethics, consequentialism, and virtue ethics - have assumed positions of particular prominence.

The evidential value of moral intuitions has been challenged by psychological work showing that the intuitions of ordinary people are affected by distorting factors. One reply to this challenge, the expertise defence, claims that training in philosophical thinking confers enhanced reliability on the intuitions of professional philosophers. This defence is often expressed through analogy: since we do not allow doubts about folk judgments in domains like mathematics or physics to undermine the plausibility of judgments by experts in these domains, we (...) also should not do so in philosophy. In this paper I clarify the logic of the analogy strategy, and defend it against recent challenges by Jesper Ryberg. The discussion exposes an interesting divide: while Ryberg’s challenges may weaken analogies between morality and domains like mathematics, they do not affect analogies to other domains, such as physics. I conclude that the expertise defence can be supported by analogical means, though care is required in selecting an appropriate analog. I discuss implications of this conclusion for the expertise defence debate and for study of the moral domain itself. (shrink)

To "look good" and to "be good" have traditionally been considered two very different notions. Indeed, philosophers have seen aesthetic and ethical values as fundamentally separate. Now, at the crossroads of a new wave of aesthetic theory, Marcia Muelder Eaton introduces this groundbreaking work, in which a bold new concept of merit where being good and looking good are integrated into one.

This paper presents a regress challenge to the selective psychological debunking of moral judgments. A selective psychological debunking argument conjoins an empirical claim about the psychological origins of certain moral judgments to a theoretical claim that these psychological origins cannot track moral truth, leading to the conclusion that the moral judgments are unreliable. I argue that psychological debunking arguments are vulnerable to a regress challenge, because the theoretical claim that ‘such-and-such psychological process is not moral-truth-tracking’ relies upon moral judgments. We (...) must then ask about the psychological origins of these judgments, and then make a further evaluative judgment about these psychological origins… and so on. This chain of empirical and evaluative claims may continue indefinitely and, I will argue, proponents of the debunking argument are in a dialectical position where they may not simply call a halt to the process. Hence, their argument cannot terminate, and its debunking conclusion cannot be upheld. (shrink)

Friends as well as foes of Kant have long been uneasy over his emphasis on duty, but lately the view that there is something morally repugnant about acting from duty seems to be gaining in popularity. More and more philosophers indicate their readiness to jettison duty and the moral 'ought' and to conceive of the perfectly moral person as someone who has all the right desires and acts accordingly without any notion that (s)he ought to act in this way. Elsewhere' (...) I have argued that such a picture of the perfectly moral person is flawed. In this paper I examine the claim that acting from duty is morally repugnant. There is some truth to this charge, but, I argue, the repugnance attaches not to acting from duty as such, but only to certain ways of acting from duty. In isolating the objectionable elements of acting from duty, I hope not only to vindicate the skeletal concept but also to offer illumination on the question of just how we should understand morally good conduct. (shrink)

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT were trained on human conversation, but in the future they will also train us. As chatbots speak from our smartphones and customer service helplines, they will become a part of everyday life and a growing share of all the conversations we ever have. It’s hard to doubt this will have some effect on us. Here I explore a specific concern about the impact of artificial conversation on our capacity to deliberate and hold ourselves accountable (...) to reason – that is, to be autonomous, in Kant’s sense of the term. I develop ideas from psychologist Jean Piaget to show how chatbots are autonomy traps: their deference to our commands tempts us into venting authoritarian whims, ultimately weakening our own self-control. I argue that the Kantian tradition, including Piaget and sociologist Emile Durkheim, offers powerful conceptual resources for resisting this slide. But it will require us to do something that may seem bizarre: we will need to treat mindless chatbots as if they are autonomous persons too. (shrink)

...believe that his theory asks too much, demanding total devotion to morality and treating everything worth doing (and perhaps more) as a duty. But, despite their differences, the two sets of...