I begin by proposing and explicating a plausible articulation of the view that morality is overriding. I then argue that it would be desirable for this thesis to be sustained. However, the prospects for its vindication will depend crucially on which moral theory we adopt. I examine some schematic moral theories in order to bring out which are friendly and which unfriendly to moral overridingness. In light of the reasons to hope that the overridingness thesis can be sustained, theories apparently (...) incompatible with it – I argue that consequentialism is one – have a count against them. (shrink)

What role can intellectual virtues play in an account of knowledge when we interpret those virtues internalistically, i.e., as depending only on internal states of the cognizer? Though it has been argued that internalist virtues are ill suited to play any role in an account of knowledge, I will show that, on the contrary, internalist virtues can play an important role in recent accounts of knowledge developed to utilize externalist virtues. The virtue account of knowledge developed by Linda Zagzebski is (...) intended to be supplemented by her version of the intellectual virtues which require an external success component. John Greco and Wayne Riggs both develop credit accounts of knowledge on which the abilities we use when we get credit for a true belief must be reliable. I examine the similarities between these three accounts of knowledge and demonstrate that internalist virtues fit into these accounts just as well as externalist virtues. Thus, although internalist virtues do not require a reliable connection to truth, they can still play an important role in defining the truth-requiring concept of knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACTGaze-cuing refers to the spontaneous orienting of attention towards a gazed-at location, characterised by shorter response times to gazed-at than non-gazed at targets. Previous research suggests that processing of these gaze cues interacts with the processing of facial expression cues to enhance gaze-cuing. However, whether only negative emotions can enhance gaze-cuing is still debated, and whether this emotional modulation varies as a function of individual differences still remains largely unclear. Combining data from seven experiments, we investigated the emotional modulation of (...) gaze-cuing in the general population as a function of participant sex, and self-reported subclinical trait anxiety, depression, and autistic traits. We found that emotional enhancement of gaze-cuing can occur for both positive and negative expressions, the higher the score on the Attention to Detail subscale of the Autism Spectrum Quotient, the smaller the emotiona... (shrink)

What is the best model of epistemic agency for virtue epistemology? Insofar as the intellectual and moral virtues are similar, it is desirable to develop models of agency that are similar across the two realms. Unlike Aristotle, the Stoics present a model of the virtues on which the moral and intellectual virtues are unified. The Stoics’ materialism and determinism also help to explain how we can be responsible for our beliefs even when we cannot believe otherwise. In this paper I (...) show how a neo-Stoic model of epistemic agency can address common objections to treating epistemic and moral agency similarly and allow a robust explanatory role for character in determining our actions and beliefs. The picture of epistemic responsibility that flows from this model also explains why we often deserve credit for our knowledge, while demonstrating that the truth of our beliefs is not something for which we are epistemically responsible. (shrink)

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2016 by the New York Times, a spirited account of a major intellectual movement of the twentieth century and the revolutionary thinkers who came to shape it, by the best-selling author of How to Live Sarah Bakewell. Paris, 1933: three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves (...) to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called Phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!" It was this simple phrase that would ignite a movement, inspiring Sartre to integrate Phenomenology into his own French, humanistic sensibility, thereby creating an entirely new philosophical approach inspired by themes of radical freedom, authentic being, and political activism. This movement would sweep through the jazz clubs and cafés of the Left Bank before making its way across the world as Existentialism. Featuring not only philosophers, but also playwrights, anthropologists, convicts, and revolutionaries, At the Existentialist Café follows the existentialists' story, from the first rebellious spark through the Second World War, to its role in postwar liberation movements such as anti-colonialism, feminism, and gay rights. Interweaving biography and philosophy, it is the epic account of passionate encounters--fights, love affairs, mentorships, rebellions, and long partnerships--and a vital investigation into what the existentialists have to offer us today, at a moment when we are once again confronting the major questions of freedom, global responsibility, and human authenticity in a fractious and technology-driven world. (shrink)

The issue which I wish to address in this paper is the widespread tendency in Anglophone philosophy to insist on a separation between the history of philosophy and the history of ideas or intellectual history. This separation reflects an anxiety on the part of philosophers lest the special character of philosophy will be dissolved into something else in the hands of historians. And it is borne of a fundamental tension between those who think of philosophy's past as a source of (...) ideas and arguments of interest to the present, and those who hold that the philosophy of the past should be studied on its own terms, in relation to its immediate context, without reference to the present. The challenge, then, is to re-historicise the history of philosophy, and to keep the philosophers onside. (shrink)

This article responds to two ethical conundrums associated with the practice of disability passing. One of these problems is the question of whether or not passing as abled is morally wrong in that it constitutes deception. The other, related difficulty arises from the tendency of the able-bodied in contemporary society to reinforce the activity of passing despite its frequent condemnation as a form of pretense or fraud. We draw upon recent scholarship on transgender and disability passing to criticize and explore (...) some alternatives to the problematic theory of personal identity that is presupposed by the claim that passing as abled always amounts to deceit. We additionally demonstrate the moral indefensibility of society’s reinforcement of disability passing by showing that it may derive, at least in part, from ablest assumptions concerning distributive justice as it relates to disabled individuals. (shrink)

This article critically examines the ways in which the trope of prosthesis has been used in recent theory to understand human-technology relationships. Analyzing the trope from a number of angles, including disability, factory labor practices, mass production, and marketing, the author scrutinizes ways in which technologies are simultaneously wounding and enabling in ways for which the prosthesis trope cannot account.

Risk communicators often need to communicate probabilistic predictions. On occasion, an event with 10% likelihood will occur, or one with 90% likelihood will not – a probabilistically unexpected ou...

E. A. Burtt, dans Metaphysical foundations of modern physic remarque que, «dans toutes les études génétiques qui sont entreprises aujourd’hui avec une telle confiance, la nature précise et les assomptions de la pensée scientifique moderne elle-même n’ont jamais fait l’objet d’une recherche critique réellement désintéressée ». Si cela est vrai dans la science moderne, c’est surtout vrai dans la philosophie moderne. Demander quels sont les postulats d’un système quelconque est devenu une question habituelle, depuis que les mathématiques modernes ont mis (...) en question la vérité des postulats d’Euclide et que la logique moderne en a fait ensuite autant de ceux d’Aristote. On recherche ici quels sont les postulats fondamentaux des systèmes cartésiens. (shrink)

This essay addresses the relation between ghosts and the fires of writing. It allows itself to dream of purely burning, of consuming and leaving behind all objects, topics and occasions in an absolutely concrete, singular, sensational experience of reading. It is written to and for ghosts – the only ones who can survive in the blazing building that writing can become. The ghosts live in burning house scenes, in poems about dream rooms and erotic hauntings, and in the intellectual tension (...) of literary and non-literary texts. They have something to do with the fires of sexuality, and the intensities of sublimation. It is all about love and death. (shrink)

Many adolescents use their electronic devices to send each other sexually explicit texts, photos, and videos of themselves—commonly known as sexting. This can be fun and is not usually problematic. However, if the intended recipient decides to share these sexts with a broader audience, the consequences for the depicted can be detrimental. The purpose of this study was to investigate the prevalence of sext-sharing among Dutch adolescents and explore the characteristics of those who do, to gain a better understanding of (...) factors involved in dissemination. We used data from “Sex under the age of 25,” a representative national survey on sexual health among a sample of 20,834 Dutch 12–24-year-olds. The prevalence of sext-sharing was estimated using Complex Samples. Logistic regressions were used to assess associations between demographics, school-based sexting education, sexual- and online behavior, and mental health and sext-sharing. About 4% of the adolescents reported having shared someone else's sext in the last six months. Being male, aged 12–14 years, frequent social media usage, watching online porn, sexual experience, and being subjected to sext-sharing themselves associated most strongly with sext-sharing. Our findings show that the likelihood of sext-sharing is lower in older adolescents and that it associates with the extent of adolescents' sexual curiosity and online activity. The overlap between sharing sexts of others and having one's own sext shared suggests that dissemination of personal sexual content might be normalized or used as an act of retribution. Further research could be helpful to explain the mechanisms underlying this overlap. The results of this study illustrate the importance of exposing adolescents to evidence based preventive educational interventions on sexting from 12 years onwards and not just within the context of traditional school-based sex education, but also as a part of the media-literacy curriculum. (shrink)

The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art. By S. Rebecca Martin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 282, illus. $59.95.

Early modern natural philosophers such as Francis Bacon are frequently seen as providing a legitimating ideology for British imperial expansion. Although this has been challenged by one recent study, much of Bacon's work on English colonisation remains unexplored. This article argues that far from being an ideological apologist for English colonisation, Bacon had two sets of colonial anxieties. The first derived from a tradition of civic humanism which concerned the moral corruption, dispossession of indigenous people and the greed involved in (...) the British colonization of Ireland and America. Bacon's second anxiety was not moral but epistemological, and stemmed from his natural philosophy. For Bacon, colonies were not simply new commonwealths, they were places which potentially produced the natural knowledge vital for the recreation of man's original, epistemic empire over the world. Consequently, Bacon was not only interested in the morality of colonising, but also whether the knowledge produced in colonies was reliable. An exploration of Bacon's views on colonisation also offers us a point of entry into the scholarly debate about the relationship between Bacon's natural philosophy and his political thought. (shrink)

Princess Elisabeth and Anne Conway were contemporaries whose lives present many striking parallels. From their early interest in Descartes’ philosophy to their encounter with Van Helmont and the Quakers in their maturity, both were brought into contact with the same sets of ideas and forms of spirituality at similar points in their lives. Despite their common interest in philosophy, and their many mutual acquaintances, it is difficult to ascertain what either knew about the other, and whether either knew anything about (...) the other’s philosophy. This paper reviews the evidence for connections between them and their knowledge of one another. After outlining the parallels in their personal circumstances and the sources for their knowledge of each other, I discuss key intermediaries: Henry More, the Hartlib Circle, Francis Mercury van Helmont and the Quaker leaders Robert Barclay and George Keith. Although they were certainly aware of one another, the answer to the question of whether there was any philosophical inter-change between them remains especially elusive. (shrink)

More than a record of dramatic incidents and daring personalities, this book adds significantly to our understanding of how the United States fought World War II. It demonstrates that the extent, and limitations, of secret intelligence ...

The Promise of Friendship investigates what makes friendship possible and good for human beings. In dialogue with authors ranging from Aristotle and Montaigne to Proust, Levinas, and Derrida, Sarah Horton argues that friendship is suited to our finitude—that is, to the limits within which human beings live—and proposes a novel understanding of friendship as translation: friends translate the world for each other so that each one experiences the world not as the other does but in light of the friend's (...) always-unknowable experience. The very distance between friends that makes it impossible for them to know each other wholly also makes it possible for them to be transformed by friendship. Friendship, then, is possible and good for those who love precisely that they can never wholly know the friend. Friendship is a profound, mutual self-giving that highlights the irreplaceability of each person, fundamentally shapes the self, and is one of the greatest joys of human existence. (shrink)

À première vue, la précaution n’a plus de rôle majeur à jouer face aux risques liés aux changements climatiques dont l’origine anthropique est désormais avérée. Elle aurait ainsi laissé la place en partie à la prévention, ce qui n’a rien de surprenant puisque ces deux approches s’inscrivent dans un continuum. Les risques générés par les changements climatiques ont cependant la particularité d’être des risques globaux à la fois en raison de la multiplicité des acteurs qui en sont à l’origine et (...) de la portée des préjudices qui découlent de leur réalisation. Or il reste au moins deux éléments d’incertitude scientifique qui concernent, d’une part, les liens entre les effets globaux des changements climatiques et les effets au niveau local et, d’autre part, les interactions possibles entre risques multiples. Face à ces éléments d’incertitude variables, la précaution est le curseur permettant de déterminer à un instant précis l’acceptabilité sociale des risques. L’approche de précaution constitue l’origine et le principe directeur d’un processus de recherche et de décision caractérisé par la pluralité : des situations de précaution ouvrent la voie à des degrés de précaution et à différents niveaux de mesures de précaution. Cette dynamique se manifeste du point de vue juridique au niveau du processus d’identification des risques, de la détermination des obligations des Etats et enfin de l’engagement de leur responsabilité. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss expertise by considering the activity of reading. Cognitive scientists have traditionally conceptualised reading as a single, well-defined task, namely the decoding of letter sequences into meaningful sequences of speech sounds. This definition captures a core feature of the reading activity at the computational level, but it is an overly narrow model of how reading behaviour occurs in the real world. We propose a more expansive model of expertise. In our view, expertise in general is best (...) conceptualised as a distributed process that takes place within a cultural-cognitive ecosystem. Our model allows for a more inclusive view of expertise in reading. We argue that reading is better understood as a manifold task domain that admits multiple reasonable criteria for evaluating performance. We draw on ethnographic data to show how our model allows for a wider appreciation of what expertise in reading amounts to in educational contexts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Centre-pieceSarah Wood (bio)πoν σoν θαvατɛ τo κɛντρoν πoν σoν αδη τo νıκoςO death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?- St. Paul, 1st Letter to the Corinthians… on dit en anglais, self-centred. En vérité je rêve depuis toujours d’écrire un texte self-centred, je n’y suis jamais arrive, je tombe toujours sur les autres, cela finira par se savoir.- Jacques Derrida, ‘Mes chances’The word exists, therefore the (...) feeling exists.- Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.What makes a centre is something sharp: a goad, the point of a needle or the sting of an insect. A spur, peg, rivet or pin. One becomes aware of the possibility of a point, a douleur vive, a lively pain. For the word ‘centre’ is derived from the Greek for ‘sting.’Kentron can mean pain itself. The sting refers to an external cause of pain and to the pain as it is experienced, so it is not one but two; not two but one. And a kentron, even if it is pain and pains you or me, is not itself a perception. It arrives but it’s not given: we have to read and write towards it. For perception, as Derrida clarified in the discussion after giving ‘Structure, Sign and Play’: ‘is precisely a concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given originating from the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language as a system of reference’(Macksey and Donato 272). Sometimes, in torment, and perhaps still looking for origin and presence, I go to the dictionary.But words have no centre. The dictionary tells me this. Figuratively a kentron is an incentive, a metaphorical goad. However there is no mention of kentron in the etymology of ‘incentive,’ which comes, according to the OED, from canere, to sing. An incentive is what makes you sing. A beautiful mistake, one suspects. But let’s make no mistake, our word kentron is the enchanted and enchanting and chance vibration of a tuning-fork in the nerves that is silence and song. It hits me-and-the-dictionary like lightning because it is part of poetry. What I am saying is: a centre has a particular relation to the part of us that is capable of feeling a desire to die. Hélène Cixous is very precise about this wish: ‘The desire to die is the desire to know; it is not the desire to disappear, and it is not suicide, it is the desire to enjoy’ (Cixous, Three Steps 34). It makes us two, she says. It follows from this, I think, that we have to be two to want to be part of the events that ensue when a poem strikes, to want to know silence from the inside. This kentron, this centre, doubles us up like a stitch.How is it possible to know and enjoy what is not? To expand on this question I can point you to two later texts by Derrida: ‘“Che cos’è la poesia?”,’ and Archive Fever. The former gives an account of poetry as ‘a stranger to all production, especially creation,’ and the latter discusses the Freudian death drive, which is ‘an aggression and a destruction’ of a particularly thorough kind (Derrida, ‘Che’ 233 / 232; Archive Fever 11). A poem enjoins its reader: ‘destroy me [détruis-moi], or rather render my support invisible to the outside, in the world … in any case do what must be done so that the provenance of the mark remains from now on unlocatable or unrecognizable.’ It will be as if the thing Freud calls the death drive had come along, working in silence ‘to destroy [détruire] the archive: on the condition of effacing, but also with a view to effacing its own “proper traces.”‘ (Derrida, Archive Fever 10 / Mal d’archive 24.) Destruction without ruin, without trace, unreadable, completely missing but not without love: what Derrida calls poematic experience entails the forbidden knowing and enjoyment of what never happens as a kind of phenomenal allure that never was, but is all the more taken to heart, loved... (shrink)

In team-based tasks, successful communication and mutual understanding are essential to facilitate team coordination and performance. It is well-established that an important component of human conversation is the maintenance of common ground. Maintaining common ground has a number of associated processes in which conversational participants engage. Many of these processes are lacking in current synthetic teammates, and it is unknown to what extent this lack of capabilities affects their ability to contribute during team-based tasks. We focused our research on how (...) teams package information within a conversation, by which we mean specifically whether information is explicitly mentioned or implied, and how multiple pieces of information are ordered both within single communications and across multiple communications. We re-analyzed data collected from a simulated remotely-piloted aerial system task in which team members had to specify speed, altitude, and radius restrictions. The data came from three experiments: the “speech” experiment, the “text” experiment, and the “evaluation” experiment. We asked first whether teams settled on a specific routine for communicating the speed, altitude, and radius restrictions, and whether this process was different if the teams communicated in speech compared to text. We then asked how receiving special communication instructions in the evaluation experiment impacted the way the human teammates package information. We found that teams communicating in either speech or text tended to use a particular order for mentioning the speed, altitude, and radius. Different teams also chose different orders from one another. The teams in the evaluation experiment, however, showed unnaturally little variability in their information ordering and were also more likely to explicitly mention all restrictions even when they did not apply. Teams in the speech and text experiments were more likely to leave unnecessary restrictions unmentioned, and were also more likely to convey the restrictions across multiple communications. The option to converge on different packaging routines may have contributed to improved performance in the text experiment compared some of the conditions in the evaluation experiment. (shrink)

In this reflection, I respond to Anthony Reddie's reflections and assertions about the sacramentality of black flesh in a world shaped by white supremacy. I locate myself as Korean American and refer to my experience of ministering to university students during the rise of Black Lives Matter in the US. Instead of offering cognate claims for the sacramentality of Asian flesh, I ask what theological repentance should look like in light of the historical profaning of the black body. Using the (...) work of two black American artists, jazz musician Robert Glasper and painter Titus Kaphar, I offer beginning reflections on how our liturgies and practices need to change as part of theological repentance—including lament. (shrink)