In an ideal democracy, people from all walks of life would come together to talk meaningfully and respectfully about politics. But we do not live in an ideal democracy. In contemporary democracies, which are marked by deep social divisions, different groups for the most part avoid talking to each other. And when they do talk to each other, their speech often seems to be little more than a vehicle for rage, hatred, and deception. -/- Democratic Speech in Divided Times argues (...) that we should nevertheless not give up on the ideal of democratic public speech. Drawing on the resources of political theory, epistemology, and philosophy of language, this book develops a sustained account of the norms that should govern public discourse in deeply divided circumstances. Should we try to find common ground when we talk to our political opponents, even though they seem unreasonable? Should we refrain from expressing anger, if we want to get things done? How can we use our speech to fight hate speech and disinformation? And is it even possible to speak to 'the other side,' in settings where different groups dislike one another, live apart from one another, and don't know much about one another? By tackling these questions, Lepoutre demonstrates that, when governed by the right set of norms, public speech can be a powerful force for good even amidst profound social divisions. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 48, Issue 1, Page 40-78, Winter 2020.

During the Zimbabwean crisis, millions crossed through the apartheid-era border fence, searching for ways to make ends meet. Maxim Bolt explores the lives of Zimbabwean migrant labourers, of settled black farm workers and their dependants, and of white farmers and managers, as they intersect on the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. Focusing on one farm, this book investigates the role of a hub of wage labour in a place of crisis. A close ethnographic study, it addresses the complex, shifting (...) labour and life conditions in northern South Africa's agricultural borderlands. Underlying these challenges are the Zimbabwean political and economic crisis of the 2000s and the intensified pressures on commercial agriculture in South Africa following market liberalization and post-apartheid land reform. But, amidst uncertainty, farmers and farm workers strive for stability. The farms on South Africa's margins are centers of gravity, islands of residential labour in a sea of informal arrangements. (shrink)

In the proposed article by Maxim Isaenko "Ukrainian Christian tradition of state creation... "on the question of application A comparative methodological approach is presented in the analysis conceptual dispositions available in Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian types of state-building and organization of power institutions. Studying socio-legal models that are characteristic of three Slavic peoples, vectors of kinship and distance are outlined understanding of the phenomena of the state, power, law.

According to an influential objection, which Martha Nussbaum has powerfully restated, expressing anger in democratic public discourse is counterproductive from the standpoint of justice. To resist this challenge, this article articulates a crucial yet underappreciated sense in which angry discourse is epistemically productive. Drawing on recent developments in the philosophy of emotion, which emphasize the distinctive phenomenology of emotion, I argue that conveying anger to one’s listeners is epistemically valuable in two respects: first, it can direct listeners’ attention to elusive (...) morally relevant features of the situation; second, it enables them to register injustices that their existing evaluative categories are not yet suited to capturing. Thus, when employed skillfully, angry speech promotes a greater understanding of existing injustices. This epistemic role is indispensable in highly divided societies, where the injustices endured by some groups are often invisible to, or misunderstood by, other... (shrink)

Maxime Chastaing s'étonne de l'embarras manifesté par les philosophes pour s'assurer de l'existence des autres : ne va-t-il pas de soi que nous coexistons depuis toujours avec nos semblables et que nous ne doutons pas de leur présence tant que nous ne spéculons pas? Il s'agit dès lors de dénoncer avec énergie le faux problème philosophique de la connaissance d'autrui, tout en s'employant à rendre compte, grâce à la psychologie, des conditions de notre communauté d'existence. Cette perspective proprement psycho-philosophique est (...) déployée dès 1934, dans un travail inédit à ce jour, La compréhension d'autrui. Essai de psychologie descriptive. Proche à cette époque de Gabriel Marcel et d'Emmanuel Mounier, après avoir été l'élève de Jean-Paul Sartre au lycée du Havre, Chastaing est un des premiers en France à discuter les thèses de la phénoménologie allemande, d'Edmund Husserl à Max Scheler. Il anticipe ce faisant sur la phénoménologie d'autrui que Sartre développera, non sans résoudre par avance des difficultés que ce dernier mettra du temps à apercevoir. (shrink)

Faced with hate speech, oppressed groups can use their own speech to respond to their verbal oppressors. This “counterspeech,” however, sometimes itself takes on a hateful form. This paper explores the moral standing of such “hateful counterspeech.” Is there a fundamental moral asymmetry between hateful counterspeech, and the hateful utterances of dominant or oppressive groups? Or are claims that such an asymmetry exists indefensible? I argue for an intermediate position. There _is_ a key moral asymmetry between these two forms of (...) speech. But, this asymmetry notwithstanding, hateful counterspeech is capable of enacting serious harms—and so, contrary to what many legal theorists have argued, it is in principle an appropriate object of legal regulation. I begin by considering the central argument for thinking that hateful counterspeech is not seriously troubling. This argument holds that oppressed groups lack authority—and, by extension, “speaker power.” Yet this argument, I suggest, sits in tension with the fact that low-status members of dominant groups can, through their utterances, seriously harm members of oppressed groups. Philosophers of language have developed sophisticated arguments to explain this last phenomenon: they have argued that speaker power is relativised to particular jurisdictions; that it can be acquired dynamically in local settings; and that it is socially dispersed. I argue that, in light of these arguments, it appears that hateful counterspeech, too, can generate serious harms. Nevertheless, I show that this conclusion is compatible with recognising a crucial moral asymmetry between hateful counterspeech and the hate speech of oppressors. (shrink)

Traditional approaches describe ethical decision-making of leaders as driven by conscious deliberation and analysis. Accordingly, existing approaches of ethically-oriented leader development usually focus on the promotion of deliberative ethical decision-making, based on normative knowledge and moral reasoning. Yet, a continually growing body of research indicates that a considerable part of moral functions involved in ethical decision-making is automatic and intuitive. In this article, we discuss the implications of this moral intuition approach for the domain of ethically-oriented leader development. Specifically, we (...) introduce a conceptual model and develop a set of theoretical propositions, suggesting that the moral intuition perspective significantly contributes to effective ethically-oriented leader development. The discussion examines theoretical implications and practical applications of the presented propositions and outlines directions for future research. (shrink)

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid legal decision making has become prominent. This paper investigates the use of AI in a critical issue in employment law, the determination of a worker’s status—employee vs. independent contractor—in two common law countries (the U.S. and Canada). This legal question has been a contentious labor issue insofar as independent contractors are not eligible for the same benefits as employees. It has become an important societal issue due to the ubiquity of the gig (...) economy and the recent disruptions in employment arrangements. To address this problem, we collected, annotated, and structured the data for all Canadian and Californian court cases related to this legal question between 2002 and 2021, resulting in 538 Canadian cases and 217 U.S. cases. In contrast to legal literature focusing on complex and correlated characteristics of the employment relationship, our statistical analyses of the data show very strong correlations between the worker’s status and a small subset of quantifiable characteristics of the employment relationship. In fact, despite the variety of situations in the case law, we show that simple, off-the-shelf AI models classify the cases with an out-of-sample accuracy of more than 90%. Interestingly, the analysis of misclassified cases reveals consistent misclassification patterns by most algorithms. Legal analyses of these cases led us to identify how equity is ensured by judges in ambiguous situations. Finally, our findings have practical implications for access to legal advice and justice. We deployed our AI model via the open-access platform, https://MyOpenCourt.org/, to help users answer employment legal questions. This platform has already assisted many Canadian users, and we hope it will help democratize access to legal advice to large crowds. (shrink)

Jeremy Waldron, among others, has forcefully argued that public hate speech assaults the dignity of its targets. Without denying this claim, I contend that it fails to establish that bans, rather than counterspeech, are the appropriate response. By articulating a more refined understanding of counterspeech, I suggest that counterspeech constitutes a better way of blocking hate speech’s dignitarian harm. In turn, I address two objections: according to the first, which draws on contemporary philosophy of language, counterspeech does not block enough (...) hate speech; according to the second, counterspeech blocks too much speech. Although these objections should qualify our optimism regarding counterspeech, I demonstrate that each can be turned, with even greater force, against hate speech bans. (shrink)

In the philosophical literature, it is customary to think of perception as being assessable with respect to epistemic norms. E.g., the whole discussion around disjunctivism, which is now often considered to be the dominant, if not the default position in philosophy of perception, is, by and large, framed and motivated by epistemological concerns about truth and falsity. This book argues that perception is normative in another, more fundamental sense. Perception is governed by norms that Doyon calls perceptual, that is, immanent (...) to its own structure. This does not mean that perceptual norms are cut-off from external facts; it rather means that they are constitutive moments of our experience of these facts. Perceptual norms are, in that sense, constitutive or enabling norms in that they establish what perception is. To articulate this view, he draws in the repertoire of the phenomenological tradition, in the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular. Like Kant, both phenomenologists were concerned with the question of the unity of experience and sought to identify the conditions of possibility for having a perception, which they conceive not as a mere sensible experience of the outer world, but as a continuous and meaningful experience of reality. Unlike Kant, however, neither phenomenologist immediately identified these conditions with cognition or epistemic criteria. For both phenomenologists, perception has its own standards, its own conditions of possibility. Perception obtains when it unfolds concordantly or coherently; and when the perceptual progression corresponds to or is in harmony with one's goal or interest, perception can also be said to be optimal. From the phenomenological point of view, concordance (Einstimmigkeit) and optimality (Optimalität) are the two basic perceptual norms governing over perceptual experience, and much of the book is devoted to clarifying their meaning and to address the philosophical consequences that follow from this insight. (shrink)

Eines der Hauptanliegen der Phänomenologie Husserls besteht darin, eine Analyse der Wesensstruktur des Bewusstseins vorzunehmen. Husserls Konzeption des Bewusstseins als Bereich von Erlebnissen ist insofern ›phänomenologisch‹, als er auf eine kausale Erklärung der die mentalen Zustände begleitenden neurologischen Prozesse verzichtet, bzw. sie bewusst ausblendet. Aufgabe der Phänomenologie ist es vielmehr, die unveränderlichen und wesenshaften Eigenschaften, Strukturen und Erkenntnisleistungen des Bewusstseins in der erstpersonalen (›ich‹) Perspektive zu beschreiben.

Men are living in the midst of a world pervaded by ideas.* Ideas, which provide men with help in their will to act and to think according to rules, which offer them guidance in their lives, are mustered into systems which are called ideologies.Ideologies are issued by the inclusive society, by special, functional groups inside the society and, beginning with a given stage in the development of human society, by ideological movements which profess to provide men not only with guidance (...) for special tasks or functions, but for life as a whole. So, individual men are faced with various sets of ideologies, more or less in agreement between themselves, more 'or less authoritative for them. They must choose between the suggestions, the rules, the orders given to them. As men are always in search of some degree of consistency in their ways of thinking and acting, they fit together the ideas they choose, unconsciously, into systems, into personal, private, individual ideologies. (shrink)

We prove the following theorem: For a partially ordered set Q such that every countable subset of Q has a strict upper bound, there is a forcing notion satisfying the countable chain condition such that, in the forcing extension, there is a basis of the null ideal of the real line which is order-isomorphic to Q with respect to set-inclusion. This is a variation of Hechler’s classical result in the theory of forcing. The corresponding theorem for the meager ideal was (...) established by Bartoszyński and Kada. (shrink)

Reading Of An Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy poses difficult questions of interpretation. We have indeed to account for multiple and often entangled themes as we have to deal with Derrida’s apparent inconsistency between his criticism of the apocalyptic tone in philosophy and his own use of that particular tone in his discourse. This article sheds light on this apparent ambiguity by drawing a parallel between the question of tone in hegelian philosophy and the “apocalyptic” thread of the “end (...) of philosophy” emphasized upon in Of An Apocalyptic Tone… Such a comparison provides us with a fresh understanding of that central thread of the book and helps in return unraveling the derridean debate with Kant and his heirs which relates to the possibility and the limits of demystification. (shrink)

A Critical Review of Alva Noë's Varieties of Presence.

This article offers a critique of the central role afforded to the rights/sentience-based moral argument in the rhetorical strategy of the animal rights movement since the 1970s. Though important for articulating the movement’s philosophy and recruiting new activists, this argument has limited persuasive appeal, as suggested by the common failure of liberation movements to achieve their goals through moral advocacy. A two-prong approach addressing human health and environmental effects of animal agriculture is offered both as a supplemental strategy for reaching (...) audiences unaffected by the moral argument and as a critical means of strengthening that argument. (shrink)

On trouvera dans cet ouvrage les principaux jalons du parcours philosophique étonnant de Maxime Chastaing (1913-1997) qui culmine dans une psycholinguistique, et même une psychophonétique, une étude des interactions sociales, enfin une théorisation du pacte romanesque liant l'écrivain à ses lecteurs.

Der vorliegende Sammelband analysiert die diversen Formen einer ideologisch motivierten Instrumentalisierung von Meister Eckharts Mystik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus und bietet darüber hinaus auch ganz neues, bislang noch unveröffentlichtes Quellenmaterial zu den institutionellen Hintergründen der Eckhart-Rezeption im Dritten Reich. This volume analyses the various forms of ideological instrumentalization Meister Eckhart’s mysticism has been subject to during the era of National Socialism. Furthermore, the volume includes hitherto unpublished source material concerning the institutional background of Eckhart’s reception in the Third Reich.

Ignorant speech, which spreads falsehoods about people and policies, is pervasive in public discourse. A popular response to this problem recommends countering ignorant speech with more speech, rather than legal regulations. However, Mary Kate McGowan has influentially argued that this ‘counterspeech’ response is flawed, as it overlooks the asymmetric pliability of conversational norms: the phenomenon whereby some conversational norms are easier to enact than subsequently to reverse. After demonstrating that this conversational ‘stickiness’ is an even broader concern for counterspeech than (...) McGowan suggests—it applies not just to oppressive or hateful speech, but also to ordinary policy-related misinformation—I argue that a more sophisticated account of counterspeech can nevertheless overcome it. First, the stickiness objection overlooks the distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ counterspeech. Instead of directly negating a distorted proposition, positive counterspeech affirms a correct proposition that is inconsistent with the falsehoods at hand. This, I contend, allows it to counter ignorant speech without triggering the properties that render it sticky. Second, the stickiness objection presupposes an unrefined conception of counterspeech’s temporality. Counterspeech should be understood as a diachronic process, which not only follows, but also pre-empts, ignorant utterances. Drawing on speech-act theories of silencing, I argue that pre-emptive counterspeech can condition the conversational context so as to prevent subsequent ignorant utterances from enacting sticky conversational norms. Thus, this theoretically-refined conception of counterspeech helps appreciate how verbal responses might overcome the stickiness of conversational norms; and, in doing so, it reveals that this stickiness need not provide reasons to prefer legal remedies to counterspeech. (shrink)

In his collection of essays Having the World in View (2009), John McDowell draws a distinction between empirical experience (conceived as the conceptual activity relevant to judgment) and empirical judgment (i.e., the full-fledged assertoric content itself ). McDowell’s latest proposal is that the form of empirical experience is transferable into judgment, but it is not itself a judgment. Taking back the view he advanced in Mind and World, McDowell now believes that perception does not have propositional content as such, but (...) the content of perception can, however, always be actualized in a judgment. There is, in other words, a strict parallelism between the deliverances of sensibility and potential future judgments of experience. The early Husserl disagrees with this and recognizesexplicitly the existence of coherent forms of perceptual engagement with the world that is independent of the mastery of language and the use of concepts.Perception constitutes—together with certain other embodied practices—our primary mode of access to the world, and this occurs before and independently ofour thinking activity. However, the realization of the centrality of time for intentionality will lead Husserl after 1905 to recognize a kind of lawfulness internal tothe sensuous materials themselves, prior to any egoical achievement. The most immediate consequence of this paradigm change is that the very idea of non-conceptual content now seems unwarranted. Indeed, if time is that which keeps the process of sense formation unified even at the lowest levels of constitution, then the world-disclosing activity of the ego cannot be discontinuous with the conceptual realm. Against this background, it will be argued that the dialectic between the conceptual and non-conceptual ultimately makes no sense on a phenomenological basis. Once temporality has entered the scene, the only meaningful opposition that stands is that between the conceptual and pre-conceptual spheres. (shrink)

Опубликованный в прошлом году издательством V-A-C Press русский перевод книги Катрин Малабу 2004 года продолжает знакомство читателей с современной материалистической философией во всем многообразии ее форм и разновидностей. То, что выгодно отличает Малабу от других коллег по континентальному «цеху», - это ясное и четкое продолжение программы деконструкции метафизики своего учителя и научного руководителя Жака Деррида. Под руководством последнего Малабу защитила диссертацию по философии Гегеля, в которой она впервые обнаружила и раскрыла концепт, ставший ее «визитной карточкой», - пластичность.

The article presents a theoretical analysis of the extramural polemic between Slavoj Žižek and Evald Ilyenkov, undertaken in the context of the search for the foundational underpinnings of the two philosophers’ perspectives on the limit-logical definitions of being. It shows how this apparently “abstract” search grows out of the socio-historical circumstances of the thinkers’ lives, which are inscribed in the dramatic conditions of existence of the political events of the twentieth century. The active life-political position of the follower of Marx’s (...) ideas, figuratively expressed in the text by Lenin’s term “tactics of social democracy” (Lenin 1962), is justified by one or another cognitive position: the unified attitude “not to explain but to transform the world” breaks down into various “tactics” precisely in the attempt to solve the problem of radical negativity (as Žižek formulates it). This is expressed in the division of Marxism into “Western” and “Eastern”. This article analyzes the legitimacy of such a division and shows the conditions for a disintegration of the divide. The relation of Ilyenkov and Žižek to Hegel’s works turns out to be the key to understanding this division, and consequently to the essential difference in socio-political attitudes and “tactics”, of which they are creative representatives. The analysis leads to the formulation of the “germ cell” of disagreement between Ilyenkov and Žižek—the problem of the universal—which unfolds in the difference between the thinkers’ positions on certain theoretical points. The limitation of Ilyenkov’s position, established under the fire of Žižek’s criticism, is removed, according to the author, by the development of a new category of “fractality”, which acts as a counterpart to the main dialectical category of “totality” and provides a concrete (in the Hegelian sense) solution to the problem of radical negativity in the spirit of the classical philosophical tradition. (shrink)

Spinoza n’a pas élaboré de grande pensée sur le commerce, mais il l’a activement pratiqué. Le présent article mesure l’impact de cette pratique sur sa philosophie politique, en prenant en compte la manière dont l’histoire des idées s’articule à l’histoire de l’auteur, et en suivant comment l’élaboration d’une métaphysique du commerce le conduit à évacuer le négoce de son anthropologie.

Franciscus Van den Enden is commonly considered as the man who taught Latin to B. de Spinoza. It is unknown if he actually taught him something else, but we do know he used a pedagogy of his own and made the young philosopher aware of the importance of pedagogical issues. The present article helps to document their relationship from a historical and theoretical perspective, by clarifying Van den Enden’s ideas on a most debated subject: the use of honorary titles to (...) distinguish pupils in the classroom. In particular, it shows how the rejection by Van den Enden of titles commonly used in Jesuits schools finds echoes in Spinoza’s philosophy. At the same time, the article argues that through their common participation in theatrical plays, Van den Enden and Spinoza shared a pedagogical experience that helped to overcome the problems linked to the introduction of a hierarchy, not theoretically, but in practice. (shrink)

This is the introduction to the symposium on Maxime Lepoutre, Democratic Speech in Divided Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). The symposium contains articles by Paul Billingham, Rachel Fraser, and Michael Hannon, and a response by the author.

Critical review of Jocelyn Benoist, L'adresse du réel (2017). The text is part of a special issue of the journal PHILOSOPHIQUES, with contributions from Charles TRAVIS, Markus GABRIEL, Mathieu MARION, Aude BANDINI, and Jocelyn BENOIST. The text is in French. -/- Étude critique sur L'adresse du réel (2017) de Jocelyn Benoist. Le texte est extrait d'une disputatio publiée dans la revue PHILOSOPHIQUES. Avec des textes de Charles TRAVIS, Markus GABRIEL, Mathieu MARION, Aude BANDINI et Jocelyn BENOIST.

This paper discusses the performativity of Heidegger’s language. It tries to ascertain how Heidegger attains the appearance of phenomena by writing about them. This paper focuses accordingly on two questions: First, how is it possible to break out of language by means of words in order to make way for the unutterable, and second, how can what appears also disappear at the same time. The essay”The Origin of the Work of Art” (”DerUrsprung des Kunstwerkes”) is rife with examples inwhich Heidegger (...) describes a phenomenon and analyses it as a possibility of making the experience of its particular”way of being” (“Seinsweise”). This paper examines in detail Heidegger’s attempt to provide a setting in which phenomena can appear in such a way that the assertion can be made that they show themselves”by themselves”. (shrink)

According to the influential “expressive” argument for hate speech laws, legal restrictions on hate speech are justified, in significant part, because they powerfully express opposition to hate speech. Yet the expressive argument faces a challenge: why couldn't we communicate opposition to hate speech via counterspeech, rather than bans? I argue that the expressive argument cannot address this challenge satisfactorily. Specifically, I examine three considerations that purport to explain bans’ expressive distinctiveness: considerations of strength; considerations of directness; and considerations of complicity. (...) These considerations either fail to establish that bans are expressively superior to counterspeech, or presuppose that bans successfully deter hate speech. This result severely undercuts the expressive argument's appeal. First, contrary to what its proponents suggest, this argument fails to circumvent the protracted empirical controversies surrounding bans’ effectiveness as deterrents. Second, the expressive argument appears redundant, because bans are expressively distinctive only insofar as hate speech is already suppressed. (shrink)

The essay contrasts two recurring phenomena of European culture: renaissance and avant-garde. The author discusses the paradigmatic Renaissance of 15th and 16th centuries and the paradigmatic Avant-Garde of early 20th century from the point of view of a practicing artist, interested in philosophical, social, religious, and political involvements of artists and their creation. The author shows the artistic and social history of 20th century as a struggle between the Avant-Garde and the Renaissance ideals, which, as he points out, found a (...) fertile ground in in the 20 years that followed immediately the Second World War. (shrink)

It will be argued that the virtual agent (VA) can be characterized using phenomenological descriptive tools and other conceptual means within related paradigms of the analysis of subjectivity. From such a point of view, the main features of VA are: •VA is constituted by its communicative valencies; •VA is intentionally active in perception, and it is the case also at the intersubjective level; •VA establishes and supports the truth of its statements, which come out as a creative boundary, an "unquestionable (...) point of contact" between virtual "I" and virtual reality; •communicative intersubjectivity in cyberspace is better describedthrough recursive ontologies. Peirce's conception of the Subject as a species of semiosis can be helpful to clarify these points. Unlike the traditional concept of subject where communication stands at a level resting on an underlying level of being, for Peirce communication is inherent in mind itself. Along these lines, I argue for the open multivalence of the signified as overdetermined by communicative acts. (shrink)