The beginning of the new realm in philosophical research, which is the oral history of phiosophy, is followed by the consequential set of serious ethical issues. The purpose of this article is to identify moral orientations a historian of philosophy can rely on in oral communication with respondents. The starting point of the analysis is the ethical standards of interviews developed by the Oral History Society. An example to test these standards based on the principle of maximum tolerance is the (...) case of Martin Heidegger. Considering the ambiguity of some outstanding philosophical figures, the main task of the article is to find the line between propagation of the dangerous views of the philosopher and objective philosophical analysis. As a guide to the ethics of interviewing philosophers, I propose the approach suggested by Alain Badieu and Barbara Cassin regarding Heidegger. They claim that a great philosopher can simultaneously be a Nazi and an anti-Semite. I outlined the general feature of interaction with ambiguous personalities in a philosophical interview: (1) the interviewer should not make extreme judgments in advance; (2) We have no right to remove some ambiguous philosophers from discourse, and communication with them is a personal matter of the interviewer. But philosophical community should produce the criteria for exact distinction between the sphere of ethically unacceptable and realm of uncertain. (shrink)

In the background of accelerated interdisciplinary development of phenomenology, there appears more clearly a deficiency of the epistemological groundingand methodological explanation of present research. This is particularly evident in the field of social phenomenology, in which the research positions extend fromthat of the “orthodox” transcendental phenomenologists to an endless search for a new foundation for pragmatic social phenomenology in philosophical anthropology, to a vague thesis about “fruitful discussion” between E. Husserl and A. Schutz. The main task of this article consists (...) in the establishment of the fundamental significance of the epistemological succession between Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and Schutz’s natural phenomenology. This confirms itself through the analysis of such concepts as sense and constitution, which play the prominent methodological role in the main works – Ideas-I and correspondingly The Phenomenology of the Social World. Such comparative analysis allows not only to highlight the most important similarities in the projects of both thinkers such as a “sense-giving function” of consciousness, but also to distinguish small deviations of the mundane phenomenology from the transcendental project, i.e., the rejection of transcendental reductions and the “pragmatic conditioning” of the subjective action’s sense through now- and so-states of the ego. It is proposed to interpret the famous Schutzian “turning away from Husserl” first of all as a skeptical turn; however, that does not mean that the essential transcendental prerequisites such as a correlation of “attitude – experience – world” should be abandoned. In the end, it is demonstrated that the main metaphysical statements of Husserl can still retain their value within the framework of the contemporary conventional research models such as the “scientific research program” by I. Lakatos, whereas further theoretical statements, i.e., of social phenomenology, can be bound with this “hard core” as “auxiliary hypotheses” in cooperation with empirical sciences. (shrink)

Interview of Olga Simoroz, Sofia Dmitrenko, Evgenia Zaichenko with Viktor Malakhov on the development of ethics as a philosophical discipline in Ukraine of the 60's - 70's.

Interview with Yaroslava Stratii, dedicated to the history of studies of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy’s manuscript inheritance (17-18th century) in Kiyv and Lviv from 1968. The interview was prepared by the activists of the Student Society of Oral History of Philosophy, organized at the Department of the History of Philosophy (Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv).

Biomedical diagnostic science is a great deal less successful than we've been willing to acknowledge in bioethics, and this fact has far-reaching ethical implications. In this article I consider the surprising prevalence of medically unexplained symptoms, and the term's ambiguous meaning. Then I frame central questions that remain answered in this context with respect to informed consent, autonomy, and truth-telling. Finally, I show that while considerable attention in this area is given to making sure not to provide biological care to (...) patients without a need, comparatively little is given to the competing, ethically central task of making sure never to obstruct access to biological care for those with diagnostically confusing biological conditions. I suggest this problem arises from confusion about the philosophical value of vagueness when it comes to the line between biological and psychosocial needs. (shrink)

This article argues that political injustices can arise from the distribution and character of our sexual desires and that we can be held responsible for correcting these injustices. It draws on a conception of structural injustice to diagnose unjust patterns of sexual attraction, which are taken to arise when socio-structural processes shaping the formation of sexual desire compound systemic domination and capacity-deprivation for the occupants of a social position. Individualistic and structural solutions to the problem of unjust patterns of sexual (...) attraction are assessed in the context of racialised sexual aversion, racial fetishism, and the desexualisation of people with disabilities. While both forms of intervention can help in principle, some of the advantages of structural approaches are laid out. A schema for assigning political responsibilities for addressing this injustice is proposed, with some limits identified to the kinds of state and social responses that are justified. Finally, the status of the merely aesthetically unappealing is considered, with a relational egalitarian approach concluding that they are subject to structurally unjust patterns of sexual desire only when exposed to oppression or second-class citizenship as a result. (shrink)

Sounds are audible, and sound sources are audible. What is the audible relation between audible sounds and audible sources? Common talk and philosophy suggest three candidates. The first is that sounds audibly are properties instantiated by their sources. I argue that sounds are audible individuals and thus are not audibly instantiated by audible sources. The second is that sounds audibly are effects of their sources. I argue that auditory experience presents no compelling evidence that sounds audibly are causally related to (...) audible sources. The third is that sounds audibly are related mereologically to their sources. I present and offer a defence of this third candidate. (shrink)

Aberrant consumer behaviour costs firms millions of pounds a year, and the Internet has provided young techno-literate consumers with a new medium to exploit businesses. This paper addresses Internet related ethics and describes the ways in which young consumers misdemean on the Internet and their attitudes towards these. Using a sample of 219 generation Y consumers, the study identified 24 aberrant behaviours which grouped into five factors; illegal, questionable activities, hacking related, human Internet trade and downloading. Those perceived as least (...) wrong were; "Downloading movie and music files from the Internet for free". The consequences of these behaviours have implications for educators, consumer policy and marketers. (shrink)

This introduction outlines the importance that Hans-Georg Backhaus’s transcript of Adorno’s 1962 seminar on ‘Marx and the Basic Concepts of Sociological Theory’ has for shedding light on the relationship between Adorno’s critical theory and the critique of political economy. PartIsignals the importance of the seminar by assaying the Anglophone scholarship on Adorno. PartIIcontextualises the seminar in the development of his thought. PartsIIIandIVfocus on what the transcript tells us about Adorno’s interpretation of Marx and the importance this interpretation held for Adorno’s (...) critical social theory. PartVpoints to the influence this interpretation of the critique of political economy had on the formation of the New German Reading of Marx. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church. By Stanley Hauerwas.

My concern is this paper is to consider the nature of obsessive thoughts with the aim of getting a clearer idea about the extent to which they are rightly identified as passive or as active. The nature of obsessive thoughts is of independent interest, but my concern with the question is also rooted in a general concern to map the extent of mental activity, and to defend the importance and centrality of a view of self-knowledge that appeals to agency. I (...) hold that much of our mental lives is active, and that the distinctive knowledge we have of our own minds is in many cases best explained by appealing to agency. Along with many others, I take knowledge of our actions and activities to be distinctive. We know our actions and activities in a way that we do not know anything else, and in a way that is distinctively and essentially self-conscious. (shrink)

This is a long critical discussion of Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism, focusing primarily on Wilderson's claim that Blackness is equivalent to Slaveness. The article draws out some strengths of the book, but argues that the book's central arguments often rest on shaky methodological, metaphysical, epistemic, and political grounds. Along the way, we consider some complications endemic to the project of evaluating a text so clearly geared towards Black audiences from the perspective of a non-Black reader.

In ‘The Epistemic Goals of the Humanities’, Stephen Grimm (2024) argues for epistemic continuities between the humanities, on one hand, and the social and natural sciences, on the other. This paper focuses on discontinuities. Drawing inspiration from Svetlana Alexievich’s literary non-fiction, I argue that if a reader is to gain a specific kind of understanding of the actions of the agents who appear in such work, they must engage in a rational evaluation of those agents’ reasons and actions. This epistemic (...) process may yield, not just understanding of another’s action, but a grip on the evaluative distance between the reader and the agents she reads about, together with a greater appreciation of normative matters. These epistemic gains are, I suggest, central to the value of the humanities, and play a key role in its corrective power. (shrink)

The development of a professional code of ethics should provide an explanation of the professional values and principals that guide a body of persons engaged in an important role in society. Most professions find ethical standards of conduct are necessary to codify acceptable behavior to develop public trust, reliability, and consistency in their performance. The proposed AMS Code of Ethics for Marketing Educators is the first step in developing communication, debate, and hopefully, agreement about the social responsibility of the marekting (...) discipline. It is important to note that the AMS code was not developed to punish wrongdoers but to provide a positive guide to help marketing educators understand how their actions may be viewed by society. It is an attempt to establish standards that are collectively viewed as important to the marketing education profession. (shrink)

The notion that if democracy is to flourish in East Asia it must be realized in ways that are compatible with East Asian’s Confucian norms or values is a staple conviction of Confucian scholarship. I suggest two reasons why it is unlikely and even undesirable for such a Confucianized democracy to emerge. First, 19th- and 20th-century modernization swept away or weakened the institutions which had transmitted Confucian practices in the past, undermining claims that there is an enduring Confucian communitarian or (...) cultural heritage today that democratic institutions have to adapt themselves to—or that a Confucian cultural spirit can be revived. Second, 20th-century East Asian statist regimes rationalized Confucianism for national ideologies meant to bind their citizens’ loyalties to developmentalist goals. Memories of this now delegitimized, statist Confucianism have contributed to the further marginalization of Confucian norms, and to their dissociation from democratic values, in today’s pluralistic democracies in East Asia. This essay argues that a Confucian conviction politics developed within the frame of East Asia’s actually existing liberal democracies provides a better course for advocates of Confucianism in democratic politics. (shrink)

Recent theorizing about the nature of the cognitive impairment in autism suggests that autistic individuals display abnormally weak central coherence, the capacity to integrate information in order to make sense of one’s environment. Our article shows the relevance of computational models of coherence to the understanding of weak central coherence. Using a theory of coherence as constraint satisfaction, we show how weak coherence can be simulated ina a connectionist network that has unusually high inhibition compared to excitation. This connectionist model (...) simulates autistic behaviour on both the false belief task and the homograph task. (shrink)

Moral principles or the rules of conduct are based in the society. If the purpose of ethics in research is to take into consideration the needs and the rights of the experimental subject, his social milieu must then largely determine the ethical considerations of a projected study. The inability to comprehend such rights may often be due to ignorance, disease and his societal values. Blood letting, biopsy and post-mortem examinations may so conflict with local beliefs that so called 'consent' to (...) these is much more than a surrender of the rights of the individual. It is difficult to conform with the highest principles of ethics in research in any uniform society. It is more so when the many variables are further complicated by cultural demands and social taboos. The best custodians of ethical standards must relate intimately with the norms of the local population. (shrink)

Telic egalitarianism is famously threatened by the levelling down objection. In its canonical form, the objection purports to show that it is not, in itself, an improvement if inequality is reduced. In a variant that is less often discussed, the objection is that telic egalitarians are committed to believing that sometimes one ought to reduce inequality, even when doing so makes no one better off. The standard egalitarian response to this ‘all things considered’ variant of the levelling down objection is (...) to embed egalitarianism in a pluralist consequentialist moral theory. In section 1, I briefly recapitulate this familiar strategy. In section 2, I argue that this standard pluralist consequentialist response is inadequate. The inadequacy of the standard response, I argue, stems from the fact that the following are jointly inconsistent: (1) a commitment to levelling down's impermissibility; (2) standard pluralist egalitarian consequentialism; (3) inequality being of non-trivial importance; and (4) the most plausible measures of inequality's badness. In section 3, I show that egalitarians can better respond to the all-things-considered levelling down objection by embedding egalitarianism in a nonconsequentialist moral theory. (shrink)

Kinship and friendship are key human relationships. Increasingly, data suggest that people are not less altruistic toward friends than close kin. Some accounts suggest that psychologically we do not distinguish between them; countering this is evidence that kinship provides a unique explanatory factor. Using the Implicit Association Test, we examined how people implicitly think about close friends versus close kin in three contexts. In Experiment 1, we examined generic attitudinal dispositions toward friends and family. In Experiment 2, attitude similarity as (...) a marker of family and friends was examined, and in Experiments 3 and 4, strength of in-group membership for family and friends was examined. Findings show that differences exist in implicit cognitive associations toward family and friends. There is some evidence that people hold more positive general dispositions toward friends, associate attitude similarity more with friends, consider family as more representative of the in-group than friends, but see friends as more in-group than distant kin. (shrink)

Prior research shows mixed findings regarding individuals’ belief-revision strategies. The current research is aimed to test (a) whether individuals’ reasoning across abstract vs real-world content shows similarity, and (b) whether individuals’ syllogistic reasoning predicts their belief-revision strategies. Experiment 1, testing 76 participants (50 females), provides evidence for the similarity in reasoning across abstract and real-world content (p.05). Individuals seem to revise the conditional statement in the AC and DA inferences, especially when the content poses a threat. In contrast, individuals prefer (...) to revise the categorical premise in the MT inferences, especially when the content poses a threat. These findings suggest that in the face of inconsistency individuals’ decision about which of their prior beliefs they should revise is influenced by the structure and content of the belief-contravening problem rather than their reasoning ability. (shrink)

At the end of the last section we anticipated the concluding page of the argument, where Plato makes the soul imperishable, as well as not-dead, and where he describes finally the soul's withdrawal at the approach of death. For the conclusion that the soul never admits death, and is in that sense was probably in Plato's eyes the heart of the argument. The final page, we shall argue, will have seemed to Plato in some ways less important, and even something (...) of an embarrassment. (shrink)

Hegel’s World Revolutions is a fascinating work which brings a new and illuminating narrative to the development of Hegel’s political thinking. Through examinations of Kant’s moral and political ph...

Robert Denis Collison Black was internationally recognized as the authority on Jevons, and in particular on the centrally important elements of Benthamite Utilitarianism in Jevons' thought. Jevons' Theory Political Economy was, Black argued, a Benthamite exercise, not a systematic treatise on value and distribution. This in turn explained why Jevons' theory of production was essentially classical, and why he had no theory of aggregate distribution. Black's work on Jevons also threw light on the professionalization of economics. Black was the well-merited (...) recipient of many honours. In 1974 he was elected both a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He became an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin in 1982; President of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland over the years 1983 to 1986; acted as President of Section F of the British Association in 1984–5; was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society in 1987; and in 1988, Queen's University bestowed upon him an Hon. D.Sc. Econ. (shrink)

New Blackfriars, Volume 103, Issue 1105, Page 322-325, May 2022.

Open peer commentary on the article “Never Mind the Gap: Neurophenomenology, Radical Enactivism, and the Hard Problem of Consciousness” by Michael D. Kirchhoff & Daniel D. Hutto. Upshot: We agree with Kirchhoff and Hutto that phenomeno-physical identities have to be motivated to approach the hard problem of consciousness. We propose that REC will do a better job in motivating these identities if intentionality and phenomenality are considered inseparable. We suggest that the notion of dispositional flexibility motivates these phenomeno-intentional identities and (...) opens up a practical avenue for neurophenomenology. (shrink)