Perception is our key to the world. It plays at least three different roles in our lives. It justifies beliefs and provides us with knowledge of our environment. It brings about conscious mental states. It converts informational input, such as light and sound waves, into representations of invariant features in our environment. Corresponding to these three roles, there are at least three fundamental questions that have motivated the study of perception. How does perception justify beliefs and yield knowledge of our (...) environment? How does perception bring about conscious mental states? How does a perceptual system accomplish the feat of converting varying informational input into mental representations of invariant features in our environment? -/- This book presents a unified account of the phenomenological and epistemological role of perception that is informed by empirical research. So it develops an account of perception that provides an answer to the first two questions, while being sensitive to scientific accounts that address the third question. The key idea is that perception is constituted by employing perceptual capacities - for example the capacity to discriminate instances of red from instances of blue. Perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence are each analyzed in terms of this basic property of perception. Employing perceptual capacities constitutes phenomenal character as well as perceptual content. The primacy of employing perceptual capacities in perception over their derivative employment in hallucination and illusion grounds the epistemic force of perceptual experience. In this way, the book provides a unified account of perceptual content, consciousness, and evidence. (shrink)

A serious commitment to environmentalism entails ending America’s population growth and hence a more restrictive immigration policy. The need to limit immigration necessarily follows when we combine a clear statement of our main environmental goals—living sustainably and sharing the landscape generously with nonhuman beings—with uncontroversial accounts of our current demographic trajectory and of the negative environmental effects of U.S. population growth, nationally and globally. Standard arguments for the immigration status quo or for an even more permissive immigration policy are without (...) merit. Americans must choose between allowing continued high levels of immigration and creating a sustainable society. (shrink)

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, human population growth is one of the two primary causes of increased greenhouse gas emissions and accelerating global climate change. Slowing or ending population growth could be a cost effective, environmentally advantageous means to mitigate climate change, providing important benefits to both human and natural communities. Yet population policy has attracted relatively little attention from ethicists, policy analysts, or policy makers dealing with this issue. In part, this is because addressing population matters (...) means wading into a host of contentious ethical issues, including family planning, abortion, and immigration. This article reviews the scientific literature regarding voluntary population control's potential contribution to climate change mitigation. It considers possible reasons for the failure of climate ethicists, analysts, and policy makers to adequately assess that contribution or implement policies that take advantage of it, with particular reference to the resistance to accepting limits to growth. It explores some of the ethical issues at stake, considering arguments for and against noncoercive population control and asking whether coercive population policies are ever morally justified. It also argues that three consensus positions in the climate ethics literature regarding acceptable levels of risk, unacceptable harms, and a putative right to economic development, necessarily imply support for voluntary population control. (shrink)

The rapidly growing research on hybrid organizations in recent years suggests that these organizations may have particular abilities to facilitate institutional change. This article contributes to our understanding of change and, in particular, sustainable transformation in society by highlighting the importance of organizational forms. Looking more closely at the role of hybrid organizations in processes of path generation, we analyze the conditions under which hybrid organizations may enable path generation. A retrospective exploratory case study of the Swedish hybrid organization The (...) Natural Step confirms how hybrids can take part in- and may facilitate the early phases of path generation: assimilation and coalescence. The conclusion drawn is that hybrids have multivocal abilities that enable them to earn trust and authority to open up “neutral” spaces for orientation and connection between actors in separated sub-paths, and that this in turn may ease tensions and trigger dialogue and exchange, also between former opponents. Yet, as also seen in the case, this enabling position of the hybrid may be both fragile and temporary. (shrink)

This book breaks new ground in our understanding of how we perceive and represent the space around us - one of the central topics in cognitive psychology. It presents a new view of development and spatial cognition by reversing the usual focus on vision and examining the evidence on representation in the total absence of vision without specific brain damage. Findings from the author's work with congenitally totally blind and with sighted children, together with studies from a wide variety of (...) other areas, are set in the context of intersensory and spatial development. Touch and movement are considered as converging sources of reference information with and without vision. The findings have important implications for future work in many fields, particularly developmental pscychology; cognition, cognitive neuroscience and visual handicap, and make this new work essential reading for students and researchers in these fields. (shrink)

Those who model doxastic states with a set of probability functions, rather than a single function, face a pressing challenge: can they provide a plausible decision theory compatible with their view? Adam Elga and others claim that they cannot, and that the set of functions model should be rejected for this reason. This paper aims to answer this challenge. The key insight is that the set of functions model can be seen as an instance of the supervaluationist approach to vagueness (...) more generally. We can then generate our decision theory by applying the general supervaluationist semantics to decision-theoretic claims. The result: if an action is permissible according to all functions in the set, it’s determinately permissible; if impermissible according to all, determinately impermissible; and – crucially – if permissible according to some, but not all, it’s indeterminate whether it’s permissible. This proposal handles with ease some difficult cases ) on which alternative decision theories falter. One reason this view has been overlooked in the literature thus far is that all parties to the debate presuppose that an acceptable decision theory must classify each action as either permissible or impermissible. But I will argue that this thought is misguided. Seeing the set of functions model as an instance of supervaluationism provides a compelling motivation for the claim that there can be indeterminacy in the rationality of some actions. (shrink)

I argue that there are phenomenological constraints on what it is to see an object, and that these are overlooked by some theories that offer allegedly sufficient causal and counterfactual conditions on object-seeing.

Nietzsche and the Long Flight of the “Good European”. The question of “the good European,” as Nietzsche conceives it, refers to a complex process of cultural transformation that starts from the critical relationship toward the European Christian heritage. The three volumes discussed in this review single out three different aspects of this cultural process: a “new Enlightenment,” which refers to the gradual liberation from the European tradition “in search of good Europeans” (Crescenzi / Gentili / Venturelli 2017), the early twentieth-century (...) debate around “European identity” (Crescenzi / Gentili / Venturelli 2018), in which the good European takes on a precise role, and contemporary Europe and the current relevance of the good European (Brusotti / McNeal / Schubert / Siemens 2020). This review discusses and reflects critically on these three volumes, examining how they contribute to contemporary debates about Nietzsche and the question of a European culture. (shrink)

: Recently a number of influential academic environmentalists have spoken out against wilderness, most prominently William Cronon and J. Baird Callicott. This is odd, given that these writers seem to support two cornerstone positions of environmentalism as it has developed over the past twenty years: first, the view articulated within environmental ethics that wild, nonhuman nature, or at least some parts of it, has intrinsic or inherent value; second, the understanding developed within conservation biology that we have entered a period (...) of massive anthropogenic biodiversity loss and that landscape-level habitat preservation is essential for combating this. I argue here that Cronon and Callicott are wrong. In fact, an ethics of respect for nonhuman nature and an informed, scientific understanding of what is necessary to preserve it do strongly support increased wilderness preservation. (shrink)

There are two basic types of ethical judgments: deontological judgements that focus on focus on duty and obligation and eudaimonist judgements that focus on human excellence and the nature of the good life. I contend that we must carefully distinguish these two types of judgement and not try to understand one as a special case of the other. Ethical theories may be usefully divided into two main kinds, deontological or eudaimonist, on the basis of whether they take one of the (...) other of these types of judgement as primary. A second important contention, which this paper supports but does not attempt to justify fully, is that neither type of theory trumps the other, nor should we subsume them under some more encompassing ethical synthesis. (shrink)

L’enjeu de ce recueil est de contribuer à repenser la notion de limite, en l’envisageant sous les différentes figures, philosophiques, écologiques, politiques, que lui confère notre présent. Comme le montrent, sous des modalités diverses, les contributions de ce collectif, la limite peut et doit être conçue en dehors des valeurs négatives – borne, restriction ou frontière –, qui en affaiblissent la portée. Elle peut alors être pensée sur le fond de cet illimité où s’ouvre la question même du dehors. Si (...) la finitude demeure la condition de l’existence, de l’art et de la pensée, assumer notre condition finie ne consiste donc pas à se murer dans le connu, mais bien à en transgresser les bornes, et ce faisant, à s’illimiter. Au plus loin de la fermeture des frontières que prônent certaines politiques, ou de la certitude dogmatique dans laquelle certains cherchent à réassurer leur pensée, la limite ne vit que de son rapport fécond à l’illimité. Interrogeant l’existence, la politique, l’art – autant dire, la pensée même –, les textes de ce recueil mettent au jour un certain don de l’illimité. (shrink)

Finland is currently undergoing a fundamental structural transformation in the forestry sector, with factories closing in the Global North and production being shifted to the Global South (see also Carrere & Lohmann 1996; Cossalter & Pye-Smith 2003). This is accompanied by Finnish mass movements protesting unemployment and demanding corporate social responsibility (CSR) from theforest industry. The difficult domestic situation, however, seems to overshadow the circumstances of the new production regions in the South. What do we actually know about the impacts (...) of the Finnish forestry sector in those societies? The branches of global forest companies may be located in regions that are experiencing various societal conflicts – like in the case of indigenous communities in northeastern Brazil, where the question of land ownership remains unsolved. The aim of our paper is to bring out the perspective of these traditional communities and the legitimacy problems of the Finnish forest industry in Brazil. We also scrutinize the corporate tactics by which companies seek to gain societal acceptability in the region. These range from social programs and campaigns to violent confrontations, even to attempts to deconstruct the identities of indigenous communities. Our general argument is that while companies have outlined their CSR policies in theory, the situation in actual practice is quite different. Companies often fail to take into account the prevailing socioeconomic conditions in the region and some of the more marginal stakeholders like indigenous peoples, who obviously have no economic importance to the company. (shrink)

A short overview of the philosophical significance of perceptual contents.

It seems obvious that Nietzsche has influenced the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). The extent to which Adorno and Horkheimer base their argument on Nietzsche, however, remains controversial. By analyzing an early draft of the first excursion of the Dialectic of Enlightenment from 1943, this article demonstrates that Nietzsche was more important for the development of its main concepts than has been assumed, in particular his analysis of myth and enlightenment. In the earlier version of the Ulysses-chapter Nietzsche, together with Rudolf (...) Borchardt, is a pivotal point of reference. Indeed, it is the Nietzschean reflection on Homer and on the pre-Homerian epic—and Borchardt’s interpretation of these themes—that Adorno views as the first original form of the dialectics of enlightenment. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that certain perceptual relations are represented in visual experience.

In discussions of perception and its relation to knowledge, it is common to distinguish what one comes to believe on the basis of perception from the distinctively perceptual basis of one's belief. The distinction can be drawn in terms of propositional contents: there are the contents that a perceiver comes to believe on the basis of her perception, on the one hand; and there are the contents properly attributed to perception itself, on the other. Consider the content.

Noting the pervasiveness of the adoption of "responsibility" as a core ideal of neoliberal governance, the contributors to Competing Responsibilities challenge contemporary understandings and critiques of that concept in political, social, and ethical life. They reveal that neoliberalism's reification of the responsible subject masks the myriad forms of individual and collective responsibility that people engage with in their everyday lives, from accountability, self-sufficiency, and prudence to care, obligation, and culpability. The essays—which combine social theory with ethnographic research from Europe, North (...) America, Africa, and New Zealand—address a wide range of topics, including critiques of corporate social responsibility practices; the relationships between public and private responsibilities in the context of state violence; the tension between calls on individuals and imperatives to groups to prevent the transmission of HIV; audit culture; and how health is cast as a citizenship issue. Competing Responsibilities allows for the examination of modes of responsibility that extend, challenge, or coexist with the neoliberal focus on the individual cultivation of the self. Contributors Barry D. Adam, Elizabeth Anne Davis, Filippa Lentzos, Jessica Robbins-Ruszkowski, Nikolas Rose, Rosalind Shaw, Cris Shore, Jessica M. Smith, Susanna Trnka, Catherine Trundle, Jarrett Zigon. (shrink)

Reply to John Campbell's contribution to a symposium on *The Contents of Visual Experience*.

In this paper I argue that it's possible that the contents of some visual experiences are influenced by the subject's prior beliefs, hopes, suspicions, desires, fears or other mental states, and that this possibility places constraints on the theory of perceptual justification that 'dogmatism' or 'phenomenal conservativism' cannot respect.

The first on the topic of environmental virtue ethics, this book seeks to provide the definitive anthology that will both establish the importance of environmental virtue in environmental discourse and advance the current research on environmental virtue in interesting and original ways. The selections in this collection, consisting of ten original and four reprinted essays by leading scholars in the field, discuss the role that virtue and character have traditionally played in environmental discourse, and reflect upon the role that it (...) should play in the future. (shrink)

In part one I present a positive argument for the claim that philosophical argument can rationally overturn common sense. It is widely agreed that science can overturn common sense. But every scientific argument, I argue, relies on philosophical assumptions. If the scientific argument succeeds, then its philosophical assumptions must be more worthy of belief than the common sense proposition under attack. But this means there could be a philosophical argument against common sense, each of whose premises is just as worthy (...) of belief as the scientist’s philosophical assumptions. If so, then the purely philosophical argument will also succeed. In part two I consider three motivations, each of which comprises a distinct philosophical methodology, for the opposing view: the Moorean idea that common sense enjoys greater plausibility than philosophy; case judgments should trump general principles; reflective equilibrium and conservatism. I argue that all three motivations fail. (shrink)

I argue for an environmental virtue ethics which specifies human excellence and flourishing in relation to nature. I consider Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson as environmental virtue ethicists, and show that these writers share certain ethical positions that any environmental virtue ethics worthy of the name must embrace. These positions include putting economic life in its proper,subordinate place within human life as a whole; cultivating scientific knowledge, while appreciating its limits; extending moral considerability to the nonhuman world; (...) and supporting wilderness protection. I argue that Thoreau, Leopold, and Carson themselves exemplify the potential for cultivating excellence in engagement with wild nature: their lives are among our most powerful arguments for its preservation. (shrink)

What do we see? We are visually conscious of colors and shapes, but are we also visually conscious of complex properties such as being John Malkovich? In this book, Susanna Siegel develops a framework for understanding the contents of visual experience, and argues that these contents involve all sorts of complex properties. Siegel starts by analyzing the notion of the contents of experience, and by arguing that theorists of all stripes should accept that experiences have contents. She then introduces (...) a method for discovering the contents of experience: the method of phenomenal contrast. This method relies only minimally on introspection, and allows rigorous support for claims about experience. She then applies the method to make the case that we are conscious of many kinds of properties, of all sorts of causal properties, and of many other complex properties. She goes on to use the method to help analyze difficult questions about our consciousness of objects and their role in the contents of experience, and to reconceptualize the distinction between perception and sensation. Siegel's results are important for many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of science. They are also important for the psychology and cognitive neuroscience of vision. (shrink)

Recently, the thesis that experience is fundamentally a matter of representing the world as being a certain way has been questioned by austere relationalists. I defend this thesis by developing a view of perceptual content that avoids their objections. I will argue that on a relational understanding of perceptual content, the fundamental insights of austere relationalism do not compete with perceptual experience being representational. As it will show that most objections to the thesis that experience has content apply only to (...) accounts of perceptual content on which perceptual relations to the world play no explanatory role. With austere relationalists, I will argue that perceptual experience is fundamentally relational. But against austere relationalists, I will argue that it is fundamentally both relational and representational. (shrink)

The first full philological edition in English of the Roman philosopher Seneca's De Clementia. It includes the Latin text with apparatus criticus, a new English translation, a substantial introduction, and a commentary on matters of textual and literary criticism and issues of socio-political, historical, cultural, and philosophical significance.

Increasing public knowledge of science is a widely recognized goal, but what that knowledge might consist of is rarely unpacked. Existing measures of science literacy tend to focus on textbook knowledge of science. Yet constructing a meaningful list of facts, even facts in application, is not only difficult but less than satisfying as an indicator of what people actually know—or need to know—as citizens. Revisiting this concept from a more sociological perspective yields a rather different concept that is here termed (...) “critical science literacy.” The implications of this reconsideration for thinking about citizen perspectives, for the work of science journalists and other professional interpreters, and for the design and evaluation of new approaches to science communication are explored. (shrink)

In recent years, digital tools, such as WhatsApp, have been increasingly deployed to support group interaction and collaboration in higher education contexts. To understand contemporary, digitally-mediated collaborative dynamics – including the role played by tutors and the situated nature of group development – robust and innovative methodologies are needed. In this paper, we illustrate how integrating qualitative methods with quantitative tools used in qualitative ways makes it possible to trace how tutors adapt their style to support group development, which in (...) turn triggers student development in a circular and responsive process. To make visible this contemporary phenomenon, we combine thematic content analysis – a qualitative tool – with a quantitative method: Social Network Analysis. Drawing on data generated by two WhatsApp learning groups in research exploring the collaborative construction of boundary objects in a master’s level “E-learning Psychology” course, we suggest that our methodological approach has the potential to support interrogation of complex and dynamic digitally-mediated group interactions. Our results show the situational nature of an effective tutorship style through its complex adaptation to learners’ maturity, digital tools, and learning goals. (shrink)

Volume 22, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 106-108.

This is a literary and philosophical study that links the idea of secularism to the form of the novel. It offers a groundbreaking critical foundation both for understanding the move toward a secular culture and for examining the role of the individual in modern ethical, political, and spiritual contexts.

Blurb: Thoreau wrote that we have professors of philosophy but no philosophers. Can't we have both? Why doesn't philosophy hold a more central place in our lives? Why should it? Eloquently opposing the analytic thrust of philosophy in academia, noted pluralist philosopher Bruce Wilshire answers these questions and more in an effort to make philosophy more meaningful to our everyday lives. Writing in an accessible style he resurrects classic yet neglected forms of inquiring and communicating. In a series of personal (...) essays, Wilshire describes what is wrong with the current state of philosophy in American higher education, namely the cozy but ultimately suffocating confinements of professionalism. He reclaims the role of the philosopher as one who, like Socrates, would goad us out of self-contentedness into a more authentic way of being and knowing. Table of Contents Preface 1. Nihilistic Consequences of Analytic Philosophy 2. ” The Ph.D. Octopus”: William James's Prophetic Grasp of the Failures of Academic Professionalism 3. The Pluralist Rebellion in the American Philosophical Association 4. Phenomenology in the United States 5. Nature or Nurture?: The Significance of Indigenous Thought 6. Conceptual Problems in Grasping Genocide 7. Henry Bugbee: Philospher of Intimacy 8. William James on the ” Spiritual” 9. Looking for Bek Acknowledgments Index. (shrink)

Based on the personal experience of the author, who is involved in theatre projects with women convicts, the article moves across issues of detention, migration, and precarity. Foucault's concept of governmentality is instrumental in describing the arbitrary exercise of power on incarcerated people and their precarious living conditions. Life in jail is especially uncertain for clandestine migrants. In the article, recollections from the rehearsals of the show / racconti del corpo (Tales of the body) alternate with images and quotes from (...) the play, poems by women convicts, and reflections on detention as the ultimate condition of precarity for migrant women. (shrink)

This book analyses the role of diagrammatic reasoning in Plato’s philosophy: the readers will realize that Plato, describing the stages of human cognitive development using a diagram, poses a logic problem to stimulate the general reasoning abilities of his readers. Following the examination of mental models in this book, the readers will reflect on what inferences can be useful to approach this kind of logic problem. Plato calls for a collaboration between writer and readers. In this book the readers will (...) examine the connection between diagrams and discovery, realizing the important epistemic role of visualization. They will recognize the crucial role that diagrams play in problem solving. The logic problem elaborated by Plato is addressed considering the epistemic function of mental models. These models introduce to an advanced stage of cognitive development, in which reasoning uses in its investigations a higher-level of mathematical complexity, represented by structuralism. (shrink)

The cause of global environmental decline is clear: an immense and rapidly growing human economy. In response, environmentalists should advocate policies leading to fewer people, lower per capita consumption, and less harmful technologies. All three of these must be addressed, not just one instead of the others. That is our best remaining hope to create sustainable societies and preserve what global biodiversity remains. Sharing Earth justly with other species and protecting it for future human generations are achievable goals, but only (...) if we recognize limits to growth, show restraint in both consumption and procreation, replace maximizing thinking with sufficiency thinking, and cultivate gratitude for what we receive from nature. Efficiency cannot take the place of ethics. Cleverness cannot take the place of wisdom. Humanity must learn to recognize and appreciate ‘enough.’. (shrink)