In this lively look at current debates in American philosophy, leading philosophers talk candidly about the changing character of their discipline. In the spirit of Emerson's _The American Scholar_, this book explores the identity of the American philosopher. Through informal conversations, the participants discuss the rise of post-analytic philosophy in America and its relations to European thought and to the American pragmatist tradition. They comment on their own intellectual development as well as each others' work, charting the course of American (...) philosophy over the past few decades. Giovanna Borradori, in her substantial introduction, explains the history of the analytic movement in America and the home-grown reaction against it. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American philosophy was a socially engaged interdisciplinary enterprise. In transcendentalism and pragmatism, then the dominant currents in American thought, philosophy was connected to history, psychology, and public issues. But in the 1930s, the imported European movement of logical positivism redefined philosophical discourse in terms of mathematical logic and theory of language. Under the influence of this analytic view, American philosophy became a professionalized discipline, divorced from public debate and intellectual history and antagonistic to the other, more humanistic tradition of continental thought. _The American Philosopher_ explores the opposition between analytic and continental thought and shows how recent American work has begun to bridge the gap between the two traditions. Through a reexamination of pragmatism, and through an attempt to understand philosophy in a more hermeneutical way, the participants narrow the distance between America's distinctly scientific philosophy and Europe's more literary approach. Moving beyond classical analytic philosophy, the participants confront each other on a number of topics. The logico-linguistic orientations of Quine and Davidson come up against the more discursive, interdisciplinary agendas of Rorty, Putnam, and Cavell. Nozick's theory of pluralist anarchism goes face-to-face with the aesthetic neo-foundationalism of Danto. And Kuhn's hypothesis of paradigm shifts is measured against MacIntyre's ethics of "virtues." Borradori's conversations offer an unconventional portrait of the way philosophers think about their work; scholars and students will not be its only beneficiaries, so will everyone who wonders about the current state of American philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and KuhnDavid GormanThe American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn, by Giovanna Borradori; translated by Rosanna Crocitto; xii & 177pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, $32.00 cloth, $12.95 paper.The idea for this book, first published in Italian in 1991, was good—to assemble a collection of (...) interviews with the key figures in American philosophy. And the list of philosophers whom Giovanna Borradori chose as representing the best in contemporary American thought was very good—as becomes especially clear when in her introduction she mentions the ones who, for whatever reason, got away: Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, Nelson Goodman, Saul Kripke, John Rawls, and John Searle (p. 5). Add these names to those of the philosophers whom she was able to interview for this volume, and you have an impressively complete roster of the thinkers who have made the postwar era in the United States arguably one of the great periods of philosophy.Unfortunately, the execution of the book does not fulfill the promise of its conception. And perhaps nothing could have; the fact remains, however, that Borradori proves herself singularly ill-equipped, in terms both of background knowledge and of intellectual orientation, to bring out very much of importance in these important philosophers’ ideas, either in the interviews that she conducts with them or in the prefatory material that she supplies to bind the collection together.The essence of Borradori’s problem is that she approaches these professional academic philosophers with the incongruous assumption that they are [End Page 388] people with interesting general ideas about history, society, art, religion, or whatever—she assumes in short that these professors are intellectuals. But that is scarcely a term that describes your typical American philosopher. Nor do I mean this condescendingly: on the contrary, just what is significant and valuable about contemporary philosophers in the analytic mold (as almost all of Borradori’s interviewees are) is the narrowness of their focus on problems and methods of logic and the natural sciences, the two Archimedean levers by which analytic philosophy has come far closer than anyone could have predicted to moving the conceptual universe decisively.Of course, not everyone views matters this way, and Richard Rorty in particular has made a spectacular career out of disputing this image—largely a self-congratulatory one, as he takes it—of the analytic tradition. Whether his dissent is justified or not, his role in the collection constitutes another of its problems, because he is not just one of the group of thinkers whom Borradori is interviewing: beyond this, it is Rorty’s ideas which supply Borradori with an intellectual program (in default of one of her own), which necessarily distorts her presentation of the other philosophers’ thoughts, and her line of questioning in these interviews. So, for example, all the interviewees are subjected to questions about American Pragmatism generally and John Dewey in particular, not because these things are of any inherent significance to most of them (as several of them point out, politely), but because Rorty thinks that they should be, and because Borradori follows his line unquestioningly. Thus most of the conversations recorded here are at cross-purposes to start with.Borradori provides brief introductions for each interview, betraying little familiarity with the work of the philosophers, particularly when the work involved is at all technical, or more than about ten years old. Except to summarize these summaries her general introduction for the volume does no more than to indulge in the kind of military and cartographic metaphors made tiresomely familiar by such recent European thinkers as Foucault. Little seems to have been lost in the retranslation of this volume from the Italian, except that the historian of science George Sarton has somehow become “Georges Sardon” (p. 31).David GormanNorthern Illinois UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Most expressions in natural language are vague. But what is the best semantic treatment of terms like 'heap', 'red' and 'child'? And what is the logic of arguments involving this kind of vague expression? These questions are receiving increasing philosophical attention, and in this book, first published in 2000, Rosanna Keefe explores the questions of what we should want from an account of vagueness and how we should assess rival theories. Her discussion ranges widely and comprehensively over the main (...) theories of vagueness and their supporting arguments, and she offers a powerful and original defence of a form of supervaluationism, a theory that requires almost no deviation from standard logic yet can accommodate the lack of sharp boundaries to vague predicates and deal with the paradoxes of vagueness in a methodologically satisfying way. Her study will be of particular interest to readers in philosophy of language and of mind, philosophical logic, epistemology and metaphysics. (shrink)

Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms -- such as 'tall', 'red', 'bald', and 'tadpole' -- have borderline cases ; and they lack well-defined extensions. The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate.This anthology collects for the first time the most important papers in the field. After a substantial introduction that surveys (...) the field, the essays form four groups, starting with some historically notable pieces. The 1970s saw an explosion of interest in vagueness, and the second group of essays reprints classic papers from this period. The following group of papers represent the best recent work on the logic and semantics of vagueness. The essays in the final group are contributions to the continuing debate about vague objects and vague identity. (shrink)

This paper asks whether a good philosophical account of something can ever be circular. It explores the kind of circumstances in which an account of F might involve F itself while still serving the functions of and meeting the requirements on a philosophical account. The paper discusses two criteria for acceptable circularity, based on ideas from Humberstone 1997. And it illustrates the surprisingly wide variety of kinds of accounts in which circularity need not be bad.

People with higher levels of emotional intelligence (EI: adaptive emotional traits, skills and abilities) typically achieve more positive life outcomes, such as psychological wellbeing, educational attainment, and job-related success. Although the underpinning mechanisms linking EI with those outcomes are largely unknown, it has been suggested that EI may work as a ‘stress buffer’. Theoretically, when faced with a stressful situation, emotionally intelligent individuals should show a more adaptive response than those with low EI, such as reduced reactivity (less mood deterioration, (...) less physiological arousal), and faster recovery once the threat has passed. A growing number of studies have begun to investigate that hypothesis in respect to EI measured as both an ability (AEI) and trait (TEI), but results are unclear. To test the ‘stress-buffering’ function of EI, we systematically reviewed experimental studies that explored the relationship between both types of EI and acute stress reactivity or recovery. By searching 4 databases, we identified 45 eligible studies. Results showed that EI was only adaptive in certain contexts, and that findings differed according to stressor type, and how EI was measured. In terms of stress reactivity, TEI related to less mood deterioration during sports-based stressors (e.g. competitions), physical discomfort (e.g. dental procedure), and cognitive stressors (e.g. memory tasks), but did not appear as helpful in other contexts (e.g. speeches). Furthermore, effects of TEI on physiological stress responses, such as heart rate, were inconsistent. Effects of AEI on subjective and objective stress reactivity were often non-significant, with high levels detrimental in some cases. However, data suggest that both higher AEI and TEI relate to faster recovery from acute stress. In conclusion, results provide mixed support for the stress-buffering effect of EI. Limitations and quality of studies are also discussed. Findings could have implications for EI training programmes. (shrink)

Logical Pluralists maintain that there is more than one genuine/true logical consequence relation. This paper seeks to understand what the position could amount to and some of the challenges faced by its formulation and defence. I consider in detail Beall and Restall’s Logical Pluralism—which seeks to accommodate radically different logics by stressing the way that they each fit a general form, the Generalised Tarski Thesis (GTT)—arguing against the claim that different instances of GTT are admissible precisifications of logical consequence. I (...) then consider what it is to endorse a logic within a pluralist framework and criticise the options Beall and Restall entertain. A case study involving many-valued logics is examined. I next turn to issues of the applications of different logics and questions of which logic a pluralist should use in particular contexts. A dilemma regarding the applicability of admissible logics is tackled and it is argued that application is a red herring in relation to both understanding and defending a plausible form of logical pluralism. In the final section, I consider other ways to be and not to be a logical pluralist by examining analogous positions in debates over religious pluralism: this, I maintain, illustrates further limitations and challenges for a very general logical pluralism. Certain less wide-ranging pluralist positions are more plausible in both cases, I suggest, but assessment of those positions needs to be undertaken on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

Taking a series of colour patches, starting with one that clearly looks red, and making each so similar in colour to the previous one that it looks the same as it, we appear to be able to show that a yellow patch looks red. I ask whether phenomenal sorites paradoxes, such as this, are subject to a unique kind of solution that is unavailable in relation to other sorites paradoxes. I argue that they do not need such a solution, nor (...) do they succumb to one. In particular, I reject the claim made by Fara and Raffman that looks the same is a transitive relation, which would allow us to solve phenomenal sorites paradoxes by denying the possibility of the required kind of sorites series. (shrink)

Beneficent clinical usage of placebos has been a problem for the application of Kant’s deontology in medical ethics, which, in its strictest form, rejects deception universally. Some defenders of deontology have countered this by arguing placebos can be used by a physician without necessarily being deceptive. In this paper we argue that such a manipulation of Kant’s absolutism is not credible, and therefore, that we should look beyond deontology in our consideration of placebo usage in clinical practice. We conclude that (...) Kant’s deontology cannot be made compatible with placebo use in clinical practice due to the primacy it affords to the principle of autonomy. (shrink)

I argue that biographical information is akin to other non-aesthetic, social, historical, or political information. As such, artist’s biographies are always relevant and important when interpreting art. While the meaning and value of a piece of art is not determined by any single piece of contextual information, neither is its meaning and value ever entirely separated from context. In some cases, however, a piece of art that is technically magnificent may be experienced as repugnant when the artist has committed egregious (...) acts. (shrink)

Evan's influential argument against vague objects (_Analysis<D>, 1978) has a parallel directed against contingent identity. I argue that Noonan failed in his attempt to accept Evans's argument but save contingent identity by establishing a disanalogy between the two arguments (in The Philosophical Quarterly 1991). Instead, I suggest an alternative way to block the argument against contingent identity and argue that its analogue provides a satisfactory response to Evans's original argument.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Alcaics In Exile: W. H. Auden’s “In Memory Of Sigmund Freud”Rosanna WarrenOn September 23, 1939, Sigmund Freud died in exile in London, a refugee from Nazi Austria. Within a month, Auden, who had been living in the United States since January of that year, wrote a friend in England that he was working on an elegy for Freud. 1 The poem appeared in The Kenyon Review early in (...) 1940. A stately public ode, the poem mourns not only the death of a publicly significant individual, but the collapse of a world. Hitler had overrun Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland; assaults on Jews had intensified; England and France had just declared war on Germany. There would be, indeed, many who would have to be mourned:When there are so many we shall have to mourn, when grief has been made so public, and exposed to the critique of whole epoch the frailty of our conscience and anguish,of whom shall we speak?...Someone encountering this poem for the first time, on the page or in the ear, might be pardoned for puzzling over its form. It sounds prosy. It seems to have some recognizable English cadences, pentameters (“[inline-graphic 01]”), tetrameters (“ ”), and even trimeters (“ ”). But the pattern seems unruly, with some [End Page 111] lines stretching out beyond five traditional beats, and ignoring any iambic order: “turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he.” Groping for a more satisfactory principle of organization, a reader with some knowledge of versification may be moved to count syllables. Such a reader will discover that the poem is indeed organized syllabically in lines of 11, 11, 9, and 10 syllables. “Aha,” says the reader, alert to Auden’s intimacy with Classical civilization: “A Horatian ode. Not inappropriate for a formal elegy.” Reflecting further, and leafing through the pages of Horace, that reader will find, or remember, that two thirds of Horace’s odes are in these quatrains, the alcaic stanza. Auden, it appears, has composed his elegy in some version of the meter of Alcaeus, the 7th century b.c.e. Greek poet whose stanza became second nature to Horace. And we cannot enter the world of Auden’s poem without asking, why alcaics? And how do they work here?“In Memory of Sigmund Freud” is sometimes said to be Auden’s first syllabic poem. 2 Others demur, proposing both earlier and later examples. 3 Whatever the spats about dating Auden’s early syllabic practice, scholars conventionally agree that his turn toward syllabic composition reflects his evolving interest in a discursive poetry; in the poet as a private intelligence with a public voice; and in the work, respectively, of Horace and Marianne Moore. Having identified the poem as syllabic, many critics move on to heftier topics like psychoanalysis versus Marxism, Auden more than most poets having laid himself open to an overridingly thematic criticism of Big Ideas. But if, having acknowledged the influence of Horace and Moore in Auden’s refusal of English iambic lyricism here, we stay with the question of meter, we are led back to the older progenitor, Alcaeus, a great poet of exile, whose stanza Auden adopts and adapts. I shall ask how it affects our reading to observe that the stanza itself has a genealogy, and brings its expressive burden to bear on Auden’s poem.“In Memory of Sigmund Freud” relies on a counterpoint of two metrical systems, the largely iambic accentual/syllabic system, traditional in English since Wyatt, and a flattened version of Greek quantitative meter, which was a musical notation of syllable length. For Auden, whose great prosodic facility was almost a handicap, the problem was, “not how to write in iambics but how not to write in them from automatic habit.” 4 Throughout his poetic life, he reached for cadences to interrupt the “natural” iambics, sometimes recalling the Old English alliterative beat, and often turning to ballads and popular tunes for rhythmical variation. By the late thirties, he was not only disillusioned [End Page 112] with the Spanish Civil War and his role as quasi-Socialist bard, but was seeking new compositional principles as well. Free verse was not an alternative: his ear required an evident... (shrink)

Few studies in the business ethics literature explore marginalized populations, such as the racially minoritized entrepreneur. This absence is an ethical issue for the business academy as it limits the advancement of racial epistemologies. This study explores how this exclusionary space emerges within the academy by identifying white solipsistic behavior, an ‘othering’ of minoritized populations. Using a multi-method approach, we find the business literature homogenizes the racially minoritized business owner regardless of race/ethnic origin and categorizes them as lacking in comparison (...) to White entrepreneurs. A critical discourse analysis of university entrepreneurship website language and images reveals that the racially minoritized are presented as the outgroup. The language used to describe entrepreneurs was found to be predominantly agentic, building a hegemonic categorization of White men dominating entrepreneurship. Troublingly, but consistent with the literature review, when racialized minorities were present in images, we found them to be marginalized. Employing an experimental design to mock-up four websites featuring student entrepreneurs differing by race and gender, we ask ‘what if we make these under-represented entrepreneurs visible?’ Results show that women, and specifically racially minoritized women, have a greater impact on the entrepreneurial interests of university students compared to men. Overall, the results provide empirical evidence for white solipsism in the business academy. We call for self-reflexivity to transparentize the ‘invisible’ racially minoritized entrepreneur and fill the ‘white space’ by changing the framing and context of business research to be more inclusive. (shrink)

In this paper, I ask whether we should see different logical systems as appropriate for different domains (or perhaps in different contexts) and whether this would amount to a form of logical pluralism. One, though not the only, route to this type of position, is via pluralism about truth. Given that truth is central to validity, the commitment the typical truth pluralist has to different notions of truth for different domains may suggest differences regarding validity in those different domains. Indeed, (...) as we’ll see, the differences between the proposed multiple notions of truth are often of a type that is clearly significant in relation to logical features, such as whether or not a constructive notion of truth is at issue. I criticise domain-based logical pluralism. Having done so I introduce a context-based framework that operates with a context-relative notion of validity. I show that this context-based framework can be employed by the domain-specific logical pluralist, but that framework also allows for logical pluralism that does not involve several domains. Different contexts may demand rules of classical logic, where others only justify intuitionistic rules, even when the same domain (e.g. mathematics) is at issue. (shrink)

Can supervaluationism successfully handle indirect speech reports? This chapter considers, and rejects, Schiffer’s claim that they cannot. One alleged problem with indirect speech reports is that the truth of “Carla said that Bob is tall” implausibly requires that Carla said all of a huge number of precise things (i.e. that Bob was over n feet tall, for values of n corresponding to precisifications of “tall”). The paper shows why the supervaluationist is not committed to this. Vague singular terms are no (...) particular problem for supervaluationism within indirect speech reports, it is argued, but there remain some issues surrounding certain vague demonstratives. The supervaluationist has good responses available, however, and any remaining questions face all theories of vagueness and are more appropriately addressed within a theory of demonstratives rather than a theory of vagueness. (shrink)

In 1966, a team made up of Brazilian and foreign scientists spent a week carefully recording the body temperature and other clinical signs and symptoms of 110 Tiriyó Indigenous people in their communities along the Brazil-Suriname border. Led by the Yale University virologist and immunologist Francis Black, the researchers faced an "epidemic" with a special profile, distinct from those most common in Indigenous populations, which usually resulted in widespread illness, the collapse of subsistence activities, hunger, and as a rule, elevated (...) mortality.Rather, what was happening with the Tiriyó was a planned event, controlled and carefully... (shrink)

This piece gives an overview of the supervaluationist theory of vagueness. According to that theory, a sentence is true if and only if it is true on all ways of making it precise. This yields borderline case predications that are neither true nor false, but yet classical logic is preserved almost entirely. The article presents the view and some of its merits and briefly compares it with other theories of vagueness. It raises issues about higher-order vagueness and the definitely operator (...) and about the supervaluationist's accounts of truth and validity. (shrink)

In 1962 a team of scientists conducted their first joint fieldwork in a Xavante village in Central Brazil. Recycling long-standing notions that living Indigenous people represented human prehistory, the scientists saw Indigenous people as useful subjects of study not only due to their closeness to nature, but also due to their sociocultural and political realities. The geneticists’ vision crystalized around one subject – the famous chief Apöwẽ. Through Apöwẽ, the geneticists fixated on what they perceived as the political prowess, impressive (...) physique, and masculine reproductive aptitude of Xavante men. These constructions of charismatic masculinity came at the expense of recognizing how profoundly colonial expansion into Mato Grosso had destabilized Xavante communities, stripping them of their land and introducing epidemic disease. The geneticists’ theorizing prefigured debates to come in sociobiology, and set up an enduring research programme that Apöwẽ continues to animate even four decades after his death. (shrink)

Degree theories of vagueness build on the observation that vague predicates such as 'tall' and 'red' come in degrees. They employ an infinite-valued logic, where the truth values correspond to degrees of truth and are typically represented by the real numbers in the interval [0,1]. In this paper, the success with which the numerical assignments of such theories can capture the phenomenon of vagueness is assessed by drawing an analogy with the measurement of various physical quantities using real numbers. I (...) argue that degree theories of vagueness are undermined by the failure of the necessary connectedness principle. Moreover, the semantics for the connectives entail that there must be a uniquely correct numerical assignment for the sentences, and this is implausible. Different senses of 'coming in degrees' are then distinguished; I argue that a confusion between them could be the source of the degree theorist's error, and the distinction illuminates the problem cases described earlier in the paper. (shrink)

This paper, starting from the awareness of the anthropological finitude, aims to investigate the symbolic meaning of the catastrophe in today's society. With reference to E. De Martino’s and G. Anders’s anthropo - philosophical theses, the paper analyzes the representation of present catastrophes as Apocalypses without eskaton , in which the "blindness" of man and his inability to react is manifested. Both technological catastrophes directly caused by man and environmental disasters indirectly produced by anthropic neglect causes a widespread sense of (...) powerlessness, leaving man devoid of theoretical and practical means to guide his action. This implies, however, the necessity to widen human "feel" and the ability to understand the "meaning" of our actions in the world. This paper aims to examine all these issues through an ecocritic analysis of the novel The Road by C. McCarthy, in order to show that there is still a deeply human way to experience the fragility and to represent the catastrophe. (shrink)

A l'occasion du Jubilé de l'an 2000, des enseignants universitaires se sont rencontrés pour s'interroger sur le rôle de l'université dans la promotion d'un nouvel humanisme. L'A. aborde cette question à partir du visage. Partie de la personne manifestant le plus l'identité acquise par l'individu, le visage révèle la personne. Mais comment le lire ? Utilisant le modèle de pensée de Lonergan, dans lequel la foi religieuse et la progression de l'humain sont inséparables, l'A. présente les traits du visage qui (...) peuvent interpeller l'expérience de l'enseignant universitaire pour s'occuper ensuite du devenir du visage de chaque sujet et du processus humain auquel il participe. Il examine ensuite les traits négatifs qui peuvent faire obstacle au devenir même du sujet. (shrink)

This book is a survey of how law, language and translation overlap with concepts, crimes and conflicts. It is a transdisciplinary survey exploring the dynamics of colonialism and the globalization of crime. Concepts and conflicts are used here to mean 'conflicting interpretations' engendering real conflicts. Beginning with theoretical issues and hermeneutics in chapter 2, the study moves on to definitions and applications in chapter 3, introducing cattle stealing as a comparative theme and global case study in chapter 4. Cattle stealing (...) is also known in English as 'rustling, duffing, raiding, stock theft, lifting and predatorial larceny.' Crime and punishment are differently perceived depending on cultures and legal systems: 'Captain Starlight' was a legendary 'duffer'; in India 'lifting' a sacred cow is a sacrilegious act. Following the globalization of crime, chapter 5 deals with human rights, ethnic cleansing and genocide. International treaties in translation set the scene for two world wars. Introducing 'unequal treaties' (e.g. Hong Kong), chapter 6 highlights disasters caused by treaties in translation. Cases feature American Indians (the 'trail of broken treaties'), Maoris (Treaty of Waitangi) and East Africa (Treaty of Wuchale). (shrink)

bildwechsel is one of the most prolific and longstanding video collectives established in Europe within the framework of the women’s movement. Founded in 1979 by students of the Hamburg College of Fine Arts, in 1986 the group became an umbrella organization with activities and agents spread all over Europe and the world sharing a common infrastructure. The purpose of bildwechsel is to strengthen women’s presence in the audiovisual media and to advance feminist and queer art. The group has been pursuing (...) its mandate initially through local workshops and exhibitions, then through archival practices and programming activities promoted on the organization’s website. This article examines bildwechsel as an example of women’s ability to maintain a niche presence within the European and the world art scene since the late 1970s via grassroots globalized practices, from within a theoretical framework drawing on transnational feminism and new media theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Social, the Outer and the ReflexiveSome More Dimensions of Subjectivity, Schizophrenia, and Its RecoveryThe author reports no conflicts of interest.First of all, I want to express my gratitude to the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry, Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, and the Karl Jaspers Award Committee for their recognition of my paper "Institution or individuality? Some reflections on the lessons to be learned from personal accounts (...) of recovery from schizophrenia" (Wannberg, 2024). I am also very thankful for Dr. Paul B. Lieberman's (2024) and Pr. Elizabeth Pienkos' (2024) stimulating comments on the paper.In the original paper, I used the case of the first person accounts of recovery from schizophrenia as a paradigm to elucidate the components of subjectivity more generally, as well as their logical relations. My main point was that considering the "recovery claim" as potentially endowed with a meaning sufficiently close to the official definition of the "personal" sense of recovery at stake—that is, in brief, having "become oneself" despite recurring or residual symptoms—invites us to question current phenomenological, narrative and constructionist approaches of the self in psychopathology. By contrast to these, I stressed the need of a conception of the self more sensible to its social and interpersonal dimensions, which I attempted to sketch out notably by resorting to Wittgenstein's (1953/1997) idea of "grammar." I am very happy that both Lieberman and Pienkos see the appeal to the social as a welcome move with regard to prevailing approaches to schizophrenia and its recovery. But what does it really mean for the subjective or the individual to be socially and interpersonally constituted, and how are we to account for that? [End Page 75]At a first glance, appealing to the social seems to be in line with current trends in psychopathology, including, as Pienkos points out, in the phenomenological tradition. She elsewhere announces a "shift in emphasis" currently taking place within phenomenological psychopathology, characterized by an increasing interest in the situated and dated aspects of subjectivity (Pienkos et al., 2023). This is a valuable turn. However, I am quite dubious that the well-known distinction between an "experiential" and a "narrative" self to which Pienkos appeals is apt to do all the conceptual work required to attain a satisfactory conception of the self and its social dimensions. In my original paper, I took the "recovery account" to challenge both these notions. As concerns the experiential dimension, I held that this type of account questions the phenomenologist's assumption that subjectivity is ultimately grounded in lived (self-)experience. Provided that typical symptoms of schizophrenia (e.g., thought insertion) are expressions of a disorder situated at this most "fundamental" level of the self and provided that they are stemming, at least according to one of the most widespread phenomenological models, from a trait-like disposition present before the onset of psychosis (e.g., Henriksen et al., 2019), it is quite natural to think that these symptoms persist in some form in the context of recovery (e.g., as intrusive thoughts or as "thoughts spoken out loud"). This is indeed the case for several of the authors "in recovery" in the Schizophrenia Bulletin's archives (e.g., Greenblat, 2000), which provided the main source of my analysis. But if this is so, we cannot see their recovery claim as an expression of a "whole" self, so to speak. So we must either say that "personal" recovery from schizophrenia is an illusion or a contradiction, or else we must revise the foundational status of the experiential dimension (other possible options are left aside for the purposes of this brief comment). I argue for the revisionist option. For the equation between the subjective and the experiential does not only lead to an unwelcomed skepticism about the recovery account. There are also more straightforward philosophical reasons for refusing it. Wittgenstein (1980) made a first important step by inviting us to better take into account the variability of the psychological concepts. He notably made a crucial categorical distinction between "lived experiences" (like sensations and mental images) and "attitudes" (like beliefs and intentions) such that all concepts which, when used in the first person... (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a social conception of subjectivity, via a philosophical reading of first-person accounts of recovery from schizophrenia, published in the _Schizophrenia Bulletin_. Following the hypothesis that these accounts exemplify a more general tension between, on the one hand, normative and social dimensions of the self, and on the other, experiential and psychological dimensions, the first section of the paper formulates the problem from a philosophical perspective inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein's grammatical approach. The second section explores (...) and rejects different possible readings (sociologistic, phenomenological, or narrativist readings), as conceiving the subject in too passive a relationship with him or herself, and as leading to overly skeptical conclusions about the claims in the first-person accounts insisting on the notion of recovery as a restoration of a sense of self and as empowerment. The third section suggests that a more positive answer can be given via the idea of a certain _grammar of recovery_ governing these narratives, and sketches out how this relates to the more general philosophical question on subjectivity. (shrink)

This dissertation looks at how Sanskrit philosophers grappled with the question of how we acquire knowledge on the basis of what others tell us. In particular, it examines Sanskrit interreligious debates on the epistemic status of testimony, and specifically, religious testimony. I analyze these debates primarily through the work of Jayanta Bhaṭṭa, a 9th century Kashmiri Nyāya philosopher, as well as the works of his Buddhist and Mīmāṃsaka interlocutors. Through a close reading and intertextual analysis of these works, I engage (...) historically and philosophically with the key issues in these debates. In particular, I look at Jayanta’s examination of the following set of related questions: 1) whether, and the conditions under which, testimony is a source of knowledge, 2) why, on the basis of practical factors, religious testimony merits different epistemic treatment than mundane types of testimony, and 3) how to approach the challenge of religious disagreement, particularly, disagreement stemming from mutually conflicting scriptural traditions. In examining these debates, I argue that differences in opinion over the epistemic status of testimony boil down to a disagreement over the proper relationship between the individual epistemic agent and the broader social and practical world. In particular, this disagreement centers on who bears the brunt of epistemic responsibility in testimonial exchanges, the speaker or the recipient, and whether practical factors, like stakes-considerations and interests, affect the strength of a subject’s epistemic position. I also approach these debates through the conceptual resources of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of religion in order to help clarify complex Sanskrit philosophical arguments and ultimately underscore the relevance of Sanskrit texts to contemporary discussions. In particular, I argue for the usefulness of certain theoretical frameworks and principles for understanding Jayanta’s work, primarily, the thesis of pragmatic encroachment, which claims that pragmatic factors can affect the level of epistemic support a subject needs for certain beliefs. Additionally, I argue that Jayanta’s unique approach to the problem of religious disagreement, especially his consideration of the socio-practical factors that affect the epistemic status of belief, might help break some of the deadlock in contemporary theorizing on intractable religious disagreement. (shrink)