Philosophers have not been sceptical only about metaphysics or religious beliefs. There are a great number of other beliefs generally held which they have had at least as much difficulty in justifying, and in the present article I ask questions as to the right philosophical attitude to these beliefs in cases where to our everyday thought they seem so obvious as to be a matter of the most ordinary common sense. A vast number of propositions go beyond what is (...) merely empirical and cannot be seen to be logically necessary but are still believed by everybody in their daily life. Into this class fall propositions about physical things, other human minds and even propositions about one's own past experiences based on memory, for we are not now ‘observing’ our past. The phenomenalist does not escape the difficulty about physical things, for he reduces physical object propositions, in so far as true, not merely to propositions about his own actual experience but to propositions about the experiences of other human beings in general under certain conditions, and he cannot either observe or logically prove what the experiences of other people are or what even his own would be under conditions which have not yet been fulfilled. What is the philosopher to say about such propositions? Even Moore, who insisted so strongly that we knew them, admitted that we did not know how we knew them. The claim which a religious man makes to a justified belief that is neither a matter of purely empirical perception nor formally provable is indeed by no means peculiar to the religious. It is made de facto by everybody in his senses, whether or not he realizes that he is doing so. There is indeed a difference: while everyone believes in the existence of other human beings and in the possibility of making some probable predictions about the future from the past, not everybody holds religious beliefs, and although this does not necessarily invalidate the claim it obviously weakens it. (shrink)

"And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime."--William Wordsworth A Sense Sublime is a record of a life lived during the last years of the twentieth century on the northern edge of the tallgrass prairies of Illinois, where seas of flowing grasses give way to the glaciated hills of Wisconsin. With camera in hand, Richard Quinney walked the streets and byways and traveled the country roads. (...) Quinney watched through his viewfinder the rising and passing of all things, giving attention to the wonder of daily existence. He captures the transcendental landscape; land and sky powerfully meld into one. The black and white of shadow on snow explores the light and darkness we know and experience in human existence. Gothic images of weathered homes and barns of long-gone settlers and shaded cemeteries still haunt the landscape, while romantic vistas of clouds majestically drifting over magnificent prairies instill an agrarian sublimity akin to Wordsworth or Thoreau. The photographs, from the end of a century, document the passing of the seasons and the years. Quinney's photographs are historical artifacts, framed of portions of the world within his spiritual eye, the camera's viewfinder. The photos, accompanied with notes from Quinney's journals, as well as the words of others, are extensions of the long tradition of transcendental writers, romantic poets, and landscape painters. They are Quinney's own attempt to solve the mystery of human existence and a way to experience the sublime in everyday life. These were the years lived as a camera. (shrink)

Can there be a theory-free experience? And what would be the object of such an experience. Drawing on ideas set out by Husserl in the “Crisis” and in the second book of his “Ideas”, the paper presents answers to these questions in such a way as to provide a systematic survey of the content and ontology of common sense. In the second part of the paper Husserl’s ideas on the relationship between the common-sense world (what he called the (...) ‘life-world’) and the world of physical theory are subjected to a critical evaluation. The relation of Husserl’s ideas to current work in folk psychology and naive physics and to the direct realism of J. J. Gibson are also treated. (shrink)

Large changes in a scene often become difficult to notice if made during an eye movement, image flicker, movie cut, or other such disturbance. It is argued here that this _change blindness_ can serve as a useful tool to explore various aspects of vision. This argument centers around the proposal that focused attention is needed for the explicit perception of change. Given this, the study of change perception can provide a useful way to determine the nature of visual attention, and (...) to cast new light on the way that it is?and is not?involved in visual perception. To illustrate the power of this approach, this paper surveys its use in exploring three different aspects of vision. The first concerns the general nature of _seeing_. To explain why change blindness can be easily induced in experiments but apparently not in everyday life, it is proposed that perception involves a _virtual representation_, where object representations do not accumulate, but are formed as needed. An architecture containing both attentional and nonattentional streams is proposed as a way to implement this scheme. The second aspect concerns the ability of observers to detect change even when they have no visual experience of it. This _sensing_ is found to take on at least two forms: detection without visual experience (but still with conscious awareness), and detection without any awareness at all. It is proposed that these are both due to the operation of a nonattentional visual stream. The final aspect considered is the nature of visual attention itself?the mechanisms involved when _scrutinizing_ items. Experiments using controlled stimuli show the existence of various limits on visual search for change. It is shown that these limits provide a powerful means to map out the attentional mechanisms involved. (shrink)

John Smith (1618-1652), the 17th century Cambridge Platonist, employed the traditional language of the spiritual senses of the soul to develop an early modern theological aesthetic central to his religious epistemology and thus to his philosophy of religion and systematic theology. As a Christian Platonist, Smith advocated intellectual intuition of Divine Goodness as the key to theological knowledge and spiritual practice. Additionally, Smith’s theory of prophecy rests on the reception of sensible images in the imagination. Chapter one lays out how (...) Smith’s place in this tradition has been under-appreciated by scholars working on the Cambridge Platonists and the spiritual senses. Chapter two presents an interpretive summary of the spiritual senses tradition and proposes a functional typology that registers three uses of non-corporeal perception throughout the history of Christian theology: (1) accounts of the origin and methods of theological knowledge, (2) descriptions of spirituality, and (3) attempts to systematically present or defend Christian theology. Chapter three places Smith in his historical and intellectual context in early seventeenth century England noting especially how his education prepared him to contribute to the mystical tradition of the spiritual senses of the soul. Chapter four argues that Smith’s theories of theological knowledge, method, and prophecy rest on his development of the spiritual senses tradition, combining intellectual intuition and imaginative perception. Chapter five addresses the role of spiritual aesthetics in Smith’s prescriptive account of Christian piety. Here the spiritual senses are both means and reward in the spiritual life in the process of deification (theosis). Chapter six demonstrates how Smith’s theology forms a coherent system with intellectual intuition informing natural theology and revelation being supplemented by spiritual perception via the imagination. The central uniting feature therefore is the spiritual perception of theological truth. Chapter seven closes with a summary of Smith’s various uses of the spiritual senses and proposes future research on his influence upon later figures including Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and prospective constructive work inspired by Smith’s combination of reason and experience in religion. (shrink)

In this paper, we identify and discuss some of the ethical problems associated with digital sensors used to detect water contamination and air pollution in the United States. Such safety devices are often deployed unsystematically and with questionable efficacy, thereby structuring the life chances of people in unequal ways. Whereas most technological infrastructures are hidden from view . or at least from active awareness . until they cease to function, those infrastructures meant to monitor and/or regulate largely "invisible" public (...) health dangers resist public awareness even when they fail. Because such detection systems tend to indivi-dualize responsibility for reducing risk, the systems may normalize and perhaps exacerbate root problems of contamination and unequal exposure. One ethical challenge is to render such systems and their failures legible. (shrink)

In her insightful and stimulating article, The Mind of a Moral Agent, Professor Susanna Blumenthal traces the influence of Scottish Common Sense philosophy on early American law. Among other things, Blumenthal argues that the basic model of moral agency upon which early American jurists relied, which drew heavily from Common Sense philosophers like Thomas Reid, generated certain paradoxical conclusions about legal responsibility that later generations were forced to confront. "Having cast their lot with the Common Sense philosophers (...) in the "formative era" of American law," she explains, "early republican jurists thus bequeathed to future generations of lawyers a problem of responsibility of no small proportions." In this invited comment for Law and History Review, I first argue that the problems of responsibility on which Blumenthal focuses our attention are not specific to Scottish Common Sense, but rather descend straight from the core of the Western legal and moral tradition. The same problems would arise if Common Sense philosophy had never existed. Second, even if it is true that Common Sense exerted a powerful influence on American academic life in the antebellum period, it still must be shown that this influence extended to specific features of American law, which remained at the time almost entirely the product of English common law. Blumenthal has not met this burden, however, because she does not identify any specific doctrines or judicial opinions that might support the conclusion that early American jurists "were steeped in Common Sense philosophy" or sought to construct "an indigenous legal tradition, built on the universalistic premises of Common Sense." Rather, her defense of this interesting claim is highly selective, resting mainly on the writings of Wilson and Hoffman. Third, although Blumenthal claims that there is something puzzling or paradoxical from a Common Sense perspective about the diversity of moral opinion, the existence of irrational or evil actors, or the fact that individuals often disregard the dictates of their moral sense, she does not adequately explain what exactly that paradox is, nor why Common Sense adherents should be troubled by it. Locke had made objections like these familiar as a result of his attack on innate practical principles in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Yet already by the eighteenth century, critics like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Reid, and their followers had rejected Locke's arguments as based on mere confusion and fallacy. Finally, a key point that Blumenthal neglects, as does John Witt in his elegant chapter on Wilson, is that Common Sense philosophers also supplied positive scientific arguments for innate moral knowledge, based on observation and induction rather than introspection, whose intellectual worth has proved remarkably durable. We risk misunderstanding Scottish Common Sense and its place in the history of ideas if we overlook contributions like these, or remain content to think of it merely as an unduly optimistic philosophy, which relied mainly on introspection to affirm the innate goodness of humankind, but which gave way to a more accurate theory of human nature as the nineteenth century unfolded. Certainly there is some truth to this description, but it is only part of the story, and a potentially misleading one. (shrink)

It is commonly supposed that morality faces a justificatory crisis. Rationalism seeks to resolve this crisis by means of a direct response to the moral sceptic--to the person who doubts that there is a rational way of deciding what moral position to adopt or whether to be moral at all. I argue that the very aspirations of rationalism--to seek a refutation of the sceptic that concedes her initial standpoint and to base morality on a formal concept of rationality--are misguided. As (...) an alternative, I introduce an approach which has neither of these aspirations--the substantive approach--and argue that it offers a more satisfactory justificatory ideal than rationalism. When measured by this ideal morality does not face a justificatory crisis. ;I argue that both subjectivist and inter-subjectivist rationalists fail to refute the sceptic. I consider the possibility that there is something specific to subjectivism which gives rise to the appearance that morality faces a justificatory crisis and argue that the justificatory standards set up by inter-subjective rationalism--if not met--equally give rise to the same appearance. Thus, it might be thought that rationalism's failure to refute the sceptic reveals that morality does indeed face a justificatory crisis. Instead, I contend that the rationalistic standards themselves should be rejected. To demotivate rationalism, I argue that the substantive approach makes better sense of our lives. The task of making sense of our lives includes not only the task of making our lives intelligible but also one of rendering them meaningful. With regard to subjectivist rationalism, I argue that agents employ substantive reasons in the attempt to make sense of themselves, that this employment of substantive reasons is part and parcel of a meaningful life, and that rationalism's formal concept of rationality cannot capture this use of these reasons. In the case of inter-subjectivist rationalism, I claim that in criticizing others for, say, cruel acts it is the cruelty of those acts that we should focus on and that in its attempt to refute the moral sceptic rationalism distorts our view on such matters. (shrink)

In one of the closing paragraphs of Treatise Book 1, Hume provocatively concludes: ‘Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous’ . Unlike the first clause, the meaning of the second clause is far from obvious. I claim that errors in philosophy are ‘only ridiculous’ for Hume in the sense that – unlike errors in religion – they fail to disturb us psychologically or in practical life. The interesting question, however, is why they (...) fail to disturb us. I suggest that it is their critical role in resolving the psychological instability brought on by philosophical reflection that makes errors in philosophy quite helpful to us and necessary for re-stabilising ourselves. In recognising a positive role for philosophical errors, my account challenges the standard interpretation of Hume's claim according to which ‘ridiculous’ philosophical errors play the merely negative role of being innocuous or safely dismissed. (shrink)

Marc Richir’s phenomenological work proposes a new type of phenomenology, a non-standard one. To him, a non-standard phenomenology is, first of all, a phenomenology that is crossing the barrier of intentionality (Richir, 2015). In this context, perception has a special role. Firstly, it involves phantasia, and not the imaginary. Secondly, it is a perception of non-intentional objects. Because of these two reasons, the other becomes the Other, namely a non-intentional object that cannot be pinpointed in a definite time / space (...) frame. In this paper, I will try to demonstrate that, starting from this lack of conceptualization that the Other represents, a sense is constructed. It is a sense in the making (sens se faisant), as Richir puts it (Richir 1988, 2015); a sense whose never-ending development gives meaning to someone’s life. In order for this to take place, the effective presence of the Other is crucial. Otherwise, sense stands still and meaning is aborted. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the nature of “meaning” and “meaningfulness” in the context of instrumental music education. By doing so, I propose to expand the ways in which instrumental music educators conceive their mission and the ways in which we may instill meaning in people’s lives. Traditionally, pursuits of philosophical deliberation have claimed that meaningfulness comes from either personal happiness (e.g., Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) or an impersonal sense of duty (e.g., St. Augustine, (...) St. Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant). However, philosopher Susan Wolf (2010) criticizes these positions in favor of a broader perspective, one that arises from understanding that there is a third sort of value, namely “meaningfulness.” Rightly understanding meaningfulness may help us engage more fully with a greater sense and understanding of the full potentials of eudaimonia: a life of significance and value for oneself and one’s community. Therefore, this paper links meaningfulness to a 4-E (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) account of “sense-making” in/for instrumental music education. In doing so, I discuss the aims of public-school music education; aims that engage teachers and students in meaningfulness—a meaningfulness that is ethical, embodied, enacted, and extended—in, with, and through musics and, more directly, “instrumental” music making. (shrink)

Metamorphosis is a sudden change, a ‘becoming-other’ in life or in philosophical perspective. A revelatory event initiates in a double manner the move from Heidegger's futile search for a transcendental IT that delivers perceptible beings to the confident positing of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, suffused with the IF of incorporeal sense. In the process Deleuze dramatically enacts his personal connection between sense (Sinn) and being (Sein).

My aim … is to show that the celestial machine is likened not to a kind of divine living being but rather to a clockwork. I consider the human body to be a machine … Although it may exaggerate to say that Descartes fathered the mechanization of biology, it is true that his Treatise of Man provided the first systematic development of the idea that a complete understanding of all the phenomena of life, including all abilities and behaviour of (...) animals, can be achieved by viewing living things as machines. To make this out, Decartes had to learn to think about living things in a new way. My first aim here is to identify the fundamental conceptual innovations at work in Descartes’ attempt to extend the new mechanics to include biology. My second aim is to locate the point at which Descartes’ mechanical imagination runs out. This requires study of Descartes’ scientific work on sense. (shrink)

This study is a kind of applied phenomenology, or more precisely, of applied phenomenological hermeneutics. I argue that phenomenologists hardly analyze concrete phenomena but prefer to engage in theoretical debates, and therefore I call for more applied studies. The case of a patient who suffered a cerebralhemorrhage is used in order to reconstruct how she slowly regained everyday sense-connexions. The case is very interesting as the patient was rather disoriented when waking up from an artificial coma of several weeks, (...) and it took her many years to fully recover. The goal of this paper is to describe some aspects of this process from a subjective perspective as well as from a participant observer’s viewpoint. The data used for this chapter mainly stem from in-depth qualitative interviews. The structures of the life-world of Alfred Schutz are used to analyze the processes of sense constitution. This proves helpful but the data also suggest a revision of Schutz’s analyses in some respects. (shrink)

Over the past few centuries the free will debate has largely turned on the question of whether or not the truth of the thesis of determinism is compatible with the relevant form of freedom that is required for moral responsibility. This way of approaching the free will problem was fundamentally challenged by P.F. Strawson in his hugely influential paper “Freedom and Resentment,” which was published in 1962. In this paper Strawson pursues a line of argument that can be found in (...) the work of several major figures in the “moral sense school,” such as David Hume and Adam Smith. The strategy Strawson employs is one that begins with a complex and subtle description of the attitudes and practices that are constitutive of moral responsibility as we observe it in human life. According to Strawson, both sides in this debate fail to identify the real foundations of moral responsibility, which rests with the fabric of our human emotional psychology. When we start from inside these natural, human commitments, Strawson maintains, we are better placed to generate a viable and pertinent theory of human freedom as it relates to the requirements of moral responsibility. (shrink)

In this paper I make a number of points about “political correctness”. Although individually these arguments seem straightforward - and will hopefully be uncontroversial - put together in context they reveal the idea of a “politically correct”, left-wing dominated, media or intelligentsia in Western political culture to be a conservative bogeyman. The rhetoric of “political correctness” is in fact overwhelmingly a right-wing conservative one which itself is used mainly to silence dissenting political viewpoints. However, the same investigation also suggests that (...) a “politics of speech” is an inevitable fact of social life and that some sorts of censorship are likewise inevitable. The question of censorship is therefore revealed as not “Whether we should tolerate all sorts of speech?” but “Which sorts of speech should we tolerate?”. (shrink)

J. L. A. Garcia holds that my defense of voluntary euthanasia in an earlier paper amounts to an "assault on traditional common sense" about what medical ethics permits physicians to do, particularly insofar as I hold that a physician's duty to abstain from intentionally killing is only a defeasible duty, not an unconditional one. But I argue here that it is Garcia's views that are more at odds with common sense, and that voluntary euthanasia is in fact a (...) humane alternative that respects patient autonomy and is consistent with the most fundamental moral duties of physicians. Among these is a duty to relieve suffering, which can sometimes outweigh the fundamental duty to conserve life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sense and Sensibility: IARPT’s Four Existential OrientationsWilliam David Hart (bio)I. Introduction: IARPT’s Liberal HorizonThe concerns of the Institute of American Religious and Philosophical Thought are worlds apart from the preoccupations that animate the characters in Jane Austen’s novels. This is not to say that IARPT is disinterested in romance, love, and heartbreak. It is to say, rather, that Sense and Sensibility, the title of Austen’s 1811 novel, (...) is a good cover term for the matters that I wish to address. I say this despite the fact that many characters in the novel, especially Fanny Dashwood, are insufferable members of a British ruling class that, along with its wealth-hording, patriarchy-sustaining institution of primogeniture, needed to be expropriated by the working class. I say this despite the fact that the sensibility of the British aristocracy, as is true of all aristocracies, is off-putting. With this proviso, it is precisely the sense and sensibility of the Institute (the love, romance and, perhaps, tragedy) that I wish to survey through a focus on what I take to be its animating existential concerns. I call these orientations existential rather than merely intellectual because they go beyond ideas, professional commitments, and implicate the entire range of life dispositions. These orientations are habit-forming.Constitutive of these orientations are anxieties regarding the meaning and significance of those things for which we live and die. The sheer fact of consciousness, of conscious matter, of matter conscious of its consciousness and the wonder and awe this inspires as we consider the very existence of things is part of our existential ensemble too. For some of us wonder and awe before the groundless gratuity of existence, let’s call this ontological curiosity, compete with death anxiety and its intimations for preeminence in how we imagine the meaning and significance of our life. This is not a binary matter. For some people, perhaps for most, the joy of existence larded as it is with terrible things exceeds, as the case make be, the quiet desperation, sorrow, or terror, and the emptiness at the center of all things. My exploration focuses on the anxieties rather than the curiosity. I take it for granted that the deep source of anxiety is mortality and its various intimations. Our quest for lives of meaning and significance is threatened by the “horrid d’s”1 of death, disease, dread, despair, [End Page 5] and disappointment. Various thinkers have theorized how we cope with this anxiety. Some argue that denial is a dominant way of dealing with death, which they take to be foundational to the other meaning and significance-threatening phenomena.2 Where the answers to these threats provided by traditional religions are found lacking or otherwise no longer credible, denial expresses itself in the form of various immortality projects: typically, the puritanical, maniacal, and methodical pursuit of health and wealth, in consumerism of all kinds, from the hottest new diet, to a Peloton exercise bike, to a Tesla. And then there is the pursuit of fame and celebrity, which many people can no longer distinguish, the hope, captured so well in the theme song for the television series, Fame. “Fame / I’m going to live forever / Baby, remember my name.”3 We want to be remembered. Whether by future generations or, inside the digital clouds of Instagram or TikTok, or, as some would have it, within the consequent nature of God. Of course, for some populations, death is not so easily denied. Death has an in their face immediacy, insistence, and oppugnancy that rips through flesh and leaves its subject not merely anxious but dead. I speak, for example, of the mind-numbing repetitiveness with which police kill Black people. Or the myriad ways, including environmental racism, in which Blacks are subject to premature death. Some thinkers even theorize that death is the existential horizon for Black people in an ontologically distinctive way.4 Thus the March 2020 police-raid killing of Breonna Taylor in her home may be a statistical anomaly but is experienced as a monstrous revelation of the nature of things, of Black social life as social death. This is not a... (shrink)

Loyalty is a much-discussed topic among business ethicists, but this discussion seems to have issued in very few clear conclusions. This article builds on the existing literature on the subject and attempts to ground a definite conclusion on a limited topic: whether, and under what conditions, it makes sense for an employee to offer loyalty to his employer. The main ways in which loyalty to one’s employer can contribute to human flourishing are that it makes the employee more trustworthy (...) and therefore more valuable as an employee; makes it easier to form authentic relationships in other areas of the employee’s life; expands the employee’s field of interests and gives her or him a richer identity; provides greater motivation for the employee’s work; makes it possible to have a greater unity in the employee’s life; improves the performance of the organization for which the employee works; contributes to the protection of valuable social institutions; and, in so far as many employees share an attitude of loyalty towards the organization which employs them, it becomes possible for this organization to become a true community. Last, but not the least, loyal relationships have an inherent value. The article also reviews the main arguments that have been offered against employee loyalty and concludes that none of them offers a reason why it would be inappropriate in all cases for an employee to be loyal to her or his employer. The force of these arguments depends on the specific attributes of the organization for which the employee works. The main conclusion of the article is that while being a loyal employee involves risk, it has the potential to contribute significantly to the employee’s fulfilment. The main challenge for employees is to identify employers who are worthy of being loyal to. (shrink)

Making Sense examines the philosophical issues and disputes that lie behind the news headlines of the day. We read about what is happening in the world, but how do we know what the truth is, or whether there is one 'truth' at all? A president has his private sexual affairs discussed and analyzed by everyone, but is the private life of anyone the proper moral concern of others? A war against terrorism is declared, but what justifies the use (...) of armed forces with its inevitable loss of life? Making Sense draws out these philosophical disputes and shows how we can use the techniques of philosophy and the insights of its greatest practitioners to understand the issues behind the headlines better. It explains the proper role of philosophy in this respect, showing both the limits and the reach of philosophical analysis of current affairs. It also argues that applying philosophy to news stories can and should inform our wider understanding; what we know, believe and value. A philosophically informed reading of the news creates a two-way process where philosophy sheds light on the news and the news, thus illuminated, sheds light on our philosophy. The book covers themes such as war, truth, morality, the environment, religious faith, the ending of life and the meaning of value. It examines such news stories as the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the war against terrorism, the siege at Waco, the genetically modified foods debate and advances in human therapeutic cloning. The discussions interweave philosophy and current affairs to create a compelling narrative that challenges how we make sense both of the world around us and of our own beliefs. (shrink)

Recent experimental research has revealed forms of human behavior involving interaction among unrelated individuals that have proven difficult to explain in terms of kin or reciprocal altruism. One such trait, strong reciprocity, is a predisposition to cooperate with others and to punish those who violate the norms of cooperation, at personal cost, even when it is implausible to expect that these costs will be repaid. We present evidence supporting strong reciprocity as a schema for predicting and understanding altruism in humans. (...) We show that under conditions plausibly characteristic of the early stages of human evolution, a small number of strong reciprocators could invade a population of self-regarding types, and strong reciprocity is an evolutionarily stable strategy. Although most of the evidence we report is based on behavioral experiments, the same behaviors are regularly described in everyday life, for example in wage setting by firms, tax compliance, and cooperation in the protection of local environmental public goods. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to the problem of the relations between the common sense and the various forms of the Irrational: contradictory and absurd situations, paranormal experience, depersonalization and excessive passion. First of all, the author precises the concept of common sense, distinguishing it from the so-called everyday conscience. The difference is in the personal and responsible character ofthe common sense thought and behaviour. The common sense is described as a extraordinary flexible instrument of the practical (...) life and a particular phenomenon of the rationality. The paper demonstrates that the common sense is stable. It can be examinated and seduced by the very different irrational situations which might destroy it. But the common sense can save itself even in the paranormal experience and quit from the social daily absurd because it isn't merely logic, — it has capacity to the interpretation, humour and playing. However, the common sense cannot survive any demolition of the personality or diminution of its roles. The author examines psychological phemomena including the hypertrophy of emotion and will. It will be shown that too strong passions and loss of self controlling makes the common sense step back. The formal rule of bureaucracy is also the moment which pushs the common sense aside. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to the problem of the relations between the common sense and the various forms of the Irrational: contradictory and absurd situations, paranormal experience, depersonalization and excessive passion. First of all, the author precises the concept of common sense, distinguishing it from the so-called everyday conscience. The difference is in the personal and responsible character ofthe common sense thought and behaviour. The common sense is described as a extraordinary flexible instrument of the practical (...) life and a particular phenomenon of the rationality. The paper demonstrates that the common sense is stable. It can be examinated and seduced by the very different irrational situations which might destroy it. But the common sense can save itself even in the paranormal experience and quit from the social daily absurd because it isn't merely logic, — it has capacity to the interpretation, humour and playing. However, the common sense cannot survive any demolition of the personality or diminution of its roles. The author examines psychological phemomena including the hypertrophy of emotion and will. It will be shown that too strong passions and loss of self controlling makes the common sense step back. The formal rule of bureaucracy is also the moment which pushs the common sense aside. (shrink)

The senses can be powerful triggers for memories of our past, eliciting a range of both positive and negative emotions. In this book we explore what is so special about sense memories, how they work in the brain, how they can enrich our daily life, and even how they can help those suffering from problems involving memory.

The paper endeavors to provide a perspective on aesthetics that proceeds from the original Greek meaning of “aesthetics” as “what is perceived by the senses.” It then introduces a potential dialogue between Confucian and Gadamerian hermeneutic philosophical insights on the importance of “making more sense,” i.e., developing a particular human ethico-aesthetic “sense” for the continuous generation of harmonious communities by partly fusing the two schools of thought. Since the focus of the paper is on early Confucian philosophy, the (...) paper also discusses the relational ontology of classical Chinese philosophy, Confucian considerations of learning, cultivation, emotions and humanization, but also touches upon broader East Asian philosophical notions of “everyday aesthetics,” i.e. how aesthetics is integrated into everyday life, for instance in ritual, dance, calligraphy and other fields that are too often set aside as belonging to a separate category of “art”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Biological, brain, and behavioral sciences offer strong and growing support for the virtue ethics account of moral judgment and ethical behavior in business organizations. The acquisition of moral agency in business involves the recognition, refinement, and habituation through the processes of reflexion and reflection of a moral sense encapsulated in innate modules for compassion, hierarchy, reciprocity, purity, and affiliation adaptive for communal life both in ancestral and modern environments. The genetic and neural bases of morality exist independently of (...) institutional frameworks and social structures. The latter not only shape moral behaviors within circumscribed limits, they also imply a plurality and compartmentalization of roles which may enable or impede the habituation of virtue. Becoming a virtuous agent entails the practical refinement of predispositionsin situas a member of a community of practitioners rather than entailing a normative ethical educational project seeking an intellectual resolution of abstract moral questions. (shrink)

A subject is a being who has a life to lead. In this paper, I explore the array of resources that are available to us (i.e., Westerners at the turn of the millennium) to articulate and assess our lives. Specifically, I shall reflect on the impact that such matters may have on our naturalist conviction that the world ultimately consists of a causal network where notions such as sense and value have no direct bearing. Sometend to assume that (...) an implication of our naturalist world-view is that the notions of sense and value are inevitably relative to the subject’s desires and inclinations. This is, however, a line of reasoning that I would like to resist. For I am convinced that this approach unnecessarily restricts the number of resources to which we can legitimately appeal in order to lead our lives. This restriction will turn out to be quite serious because, as we shall see, it dramatically distorts our perception of the relevance that social ties may have in the life of a subject, as well as the conditions under which a human life may escape the absurd. (shrink)

In The Inviting Garden, Allen Lacy speaks for the great number of dedicated and committed gardeners who share his passion for green and growing things and who take pleasure in all the rich satisfactions that the personal garden offers its makers. He also invites the beginner to take the plunge--to set forth on the lifelong journey that is the gardener's way of life. Gardening, Lacy explains with great eloquence and good humor, is much more than a hobby. It delights (...) all the senses, each in its turn. It offers virtually less intellectual stimulation. It has a profound spiritual dimension, as a basis for the lifelong friendships that bind people together in the common and shared pursuit of making the earth flourish with beauty. Its joys are unlimited, for they engage its practitioners as whole persons, not partial beings. With the kind of tantalizing prose that makes you want to reach for a trowel, Allen Lacy gives us a deeply thoughtful book on the whole enterprise of gardening. (shrink)

It is only in the last few decades that analytic philosophers in particular have begun to pay any serious attention to the topic of life’s meaning. Such philosophers, however, do not usually attempt to answer or analyse the traditional question ‘What is the meaning of life?’, but rather the subtly different question ‘What makes a life meaningful?’ and it is generally assumed that the latter can be discussed independently of the former. Nevertheless, this paper will argue that (...) the two questions are indeed connected, and that identifying and expanding upon the most plausible analysis of the former will provide the resources necessary to determine the most plausible answer to the latter. Specifically, this paper will argue that the traditional question is simply a request for the information which constitutes a coherent answer to one or more of a certain set of questions regarding human existence that were salient to the asker. In simpler language, the meaning of life itself is the information a person needs to make sense of it. This analysis can then also be applied to individual lives, such that asking for the meaning of X’s life is an analogous request for the information necessary to make sense of that life in particular. Running with this concept of the ‘meaning’ of something as its ‘sense’, the paper then outlines an accompanying theory of ‘meaningfulness’ as ‘sensefulness’: a measure of the richness of certain aspects of the life, multiplied by their intelligibility. (shrink)

Why think that emotions are kinds of evaluations? This chapter puts forward an original account of emotions as evaluations apt to circumvent some of the chief difficulties with which alternative approaches find themselves confronted. We shall proceed by first introducing the idea that emotions are evaluations (sec. I). Next, two well-known approaches attempting to account for this idea in terms of attitudes that are in and of themselves unemotional but are alleged to become emotional when directed towards evaluative contents are (...) explored. According to the first approach, emotions are nothing but evaluative judgments. Sec. II reminds the reader of the problems associated with this idea: one of its consequences is to deprive creatures with limited cognitive capacities of any sort of partaking of emotional life. According to the second approach, which is often praised for its capacity to avoid the pitfalls facing an appeal to evaluative judgments, emotions are perception-like experiences of evaluative properties and are as such within the reach of creatures bereft of conceptual capacities. This perceptual theory is taken up in sect. III, in which we explain why it remains unsatisfactory insofar as it shares with the evaluative judgement theory the idea that what makes emotions evaluations is the specific contents that they have. On this basis, we proceed by outlining in sect. IV an alternative—the attitudinal theory of emotions. Its main point of departure from current theorizing about the emotions consists in elucidating the fact that emotions are evaluations not in terms of what they represent, but rather in terms of the sort of attitude subjects take towards what they represent. We explore here what sorts of attitudes emotions are and defend the idea that they are felt bodily attitudes. (shrink)

Presents the life of the political writer whose pamphlet "Common Sense" influenced colonial opinion during the Revolutionary War.

The project of this paper is to synthesize enactivist cognitive science and practice theory in order to develop a new account of pretend play. Pretend play is usually conceived of as a representationalist phenomenon where a pretender projects a fictional mental representation onto reality. It thus seems that pretense can only be explained in representationalist terms. In this paper, we oppose this usual approach. We instead propose not only new explanatory tools for pretend play, but also a fundamental reconceptualization of (...) the phenomena of pretend play, that is, of the very explanandum of theories of pretense. To do so, we suggest combining the turn to action and embodiment in the cognitive sciences with the practice turn in the humanities. From our point of view, pretend play has to be seen in its role in human life as a whole, which is to help children to learn to master the complex sociocultural contingencies of the manifold social practices that make up social reality. Pretend play should therefore be conceived as alternative sense-making that is always related, in varying ways, to ordinary social practices. Pretenders do not need to project mental representations onto reality, but make sense of their surroundings in different ways than encultured adults in ordinary practices. In the paper, we spell out this view and show how it enables an enactivist reconceptualization of imagination, intentions and knowledge, which are usually thought of as being available only to representationalist accounts of pretense. (shrink)

_A Critical Sense_ brings together in a single volume the leading figures of contemporary radical theory. Moving freely between philosophy, politics and cultural studies, it offers a fascinating overview of the lines of thought of today's intellectual left. Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and critical theory, literary studies, deconstruction, pragmatism, postcolonial and queer theory are discussed in a series of interviews from the journal _Radical Philosophy_. Those interviewed are: Judith Butler Cornelius Castoriadis Drucilla Cornell Axel Honneth Istvan Meszaros Edward Said Renata Salecl (...) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Cornel West Slavoj Zizek For those unfamiliar with the often daunting work of some of today's most important thinkers, _ACritical Sense_ will offer an ideal introduction; for those already acquainted with the writings of the theorists interviewed here, the collection will throw new - and often surprising - light on familiar ground. (shrink)

Philosophy is one of the least inclusive disciplines in the humanities and this situation is changing only very slowly. In this article I consider how one of the women of the Wartime Quartet, Iris Murdoch, can help to challenge this situation. Taking my cue from feminist and philosophical practices, I focus on Murdoch's experience of being a woman and a philosopher and on the role experience plays in her philosophical writing. I argue that her thinking is best characterised with the (...) notion of common sense orsensus communis. This term recognises her understanding of philosophy as based in experience and as a shared effort ‘to make sense of our life’, as Mary Midgley puts it. (shrink)

Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings (...) and following Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience. (shrink)

This paper stands at the confluence of two streams in contemporary political thought. One stream is composed of those critics of liberal political philosophy who are often described collectively as ‘communitarians’. What unites these critics is a belief that contemporary liberalism rests on an impoverished and inadequate view of the human subject. Liberal political thought – as manifested, for instance, in the writings of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Ronald Dworkin – claims centrally to do justice to individuality: to specify (...) the conditions under which distinct individuals, each with his own view about how life should be lived, can pursue these visions to the best of their ability. But, the critics claim, liberalism is blind to the social origins of individuality itself. A person comes by his identity through participating in social practices and through his affiliation to collectivities like family and nation. An adequate political philosophy must attend to the conditions under which people can develop the capacity for autonomy that liberals value. This, however, means abandoning familiar preoccupations of liberal thought – especially the centrality it gives to individual rights – and looking instead at how social relationships of the desired kind can be created and preserved. It means, in short, looking at communities – their nature and preconditions. (shrink)

Introspective reports are used as sources of information about other minds, in both everyday life and science. Many scientists and philosophers consider this practice unjustified, while others have made the untestable assumption that introspection is a truthful method of private observation. I argue that neither skepticism nor faith concerning introspective reports are warranted. As an alternative, I consider our everyday, commonsensical reliance on each other’s introspective reports. When we hear people talk about their minds, we neither refuse to learn (...) from nor blindly accept what they say. Sometimes we accept what we are told, other times we reject it, and still other times we take the report, revise it in light of what we believe, then accept the modified version. Whatever we do, we have (implicit) reasons for it. In developing a sound methodology for the scientific use of introspective reports, we can take our commonsense treatment of introspective reports and make it more explicit and rigorous. We can discover what to infer from introspective reports in a way similar to how we do it every day, but with extra knowledge, methodological care, and precision. Sorting out the use of introspective reports as sources of data is going to be a painstaking, piecemeal task, but it promises to enhance our science of the mind and brain. (shrink)

Is it ever possible for people to act freely and intentionally against their better judgement? Is it ever possible to act in opposition to one's strongest desire? If either of these questions are answered in the negative, the common-sense distinctions between recklessness, weakness of will and compulsion collapse. This would threaten our ordinary notion of self-control and undermine our practice of holding each other responsible for moral failure. So a clear and plausible account of how weakness of will and (...) self-control are possible is of great practical significance. Taking the problem of weakness of will as her starting point, Jeanette Kennett builds an admirably comprehensive and integrated account of moral agency which gives a central place to the capacity for self-control. Her account of the exercise and limits of self-control vindicates the common-sense distinction between weakness of will and compulsion and so underwrites our ordinary allocations of moral responsibility. She addresses with clarity and insight a range of important topics in moral psychology, such as the nature of valuing and desiring, conceptions of virtue, moral conflict, and the varieties of recklessness (here characterised as culpable bad judgement) — and does so in terms which make their relations to each other and to the challenges of real life obvious. Agency and Responsibility concludes by testing the accounts developed of self-control, moral failure, and moral responsibility against the hard cases provided by acts of extreme evil. (shrink)

The influential stage of Internet of Things has reformed all fields of life in general but specifically with the emergence of artificial intelligence has drawn the attention of researchers into a new paradigm of life standard. This revolution has been accepted around the globe for making life easier with the use of intelligent devices such as smart sensors, actuators, and many other devices. AI-enabled devices are more intelligent and capable of doing a specific task which saves a (...) lot of resources and time. Different approaches are available in the existing literature to tackle diverse issues of real life based on AI and IoT systems. The role of decision-making has its own importance in the AI-enabled and IoT systems. In-depth knowledge of the existing literature is dire need of the research community to summarize the literature in effective way by which practitioners and researchers can benefit from the prevailing proofs and suggest new solutions for solving a particular problem of AI-enabled sensing and decision-making for the IoT system. To facilitate research community, the proposed study presents a systematic literature review of the existing literature, organizes the evidences in a systematic way, and then analyzes it for future research. The study reported the literature of the last 5 years based on the research questions, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and quality assessment of the selected study. Finally, derivations are drawn from the included paper for future research. (shrink)

In this paper I propose to examine the cognitive status of mystical experience. There are, I think, three distinct but overlapping sorts of religious experience. In the first place, there are two kinds of mystical experience. The extrovertive or nature mystic identifies himself with a world which is both transfigured and one. The introvertive mystic withdraws from the world and, after stripping the mind of concepts and images, experiences union with something which can be described as an undifferentiated unity. Introvertive (...) mysticism is a more important phenomenon than extrovertive mysticism. Numinous experiences are complex experiences involving dread, awe, wonder, and fascination. One finds oneself confronted with something which is radically unlike ordinary objects. Before its overwhelming majesty and power, one is nothing but dust and ashes. In contrasting oneself with its uncanny beauty and goodness, one experiences one's own uncleanness and ugliness. The experiences bound up with the devotional life of the ordinary believer are also religious in character. Nevertheless these more ordinary experiences should, I think, be distinguished both from numinous experiences and from mystical experiences, for they do not appear to involve the sense of immediate presence which characterises the latter. (shrink)

The influential stage of Internet of Things has reformed all fields of life in general but specifically with the emergence of artificial intelligence has drawn the attention of researchers into a new paradigm of life standard. This revolution has been accepted around the globe for making life easier with the use of intelligent devices such as smart sensors, actuators, and many other devices. AI-enabled devices are more intelligent and capable of doing a specific task which saves a (...) lot of resources and time. Different approaches are available in the existing literature to tackle diverse issues of real life based on AI and IoT systems. The role of decision-making has its own importance in the AI-enabled and IoT systems. In-depth knowledge of the existing literature is dire need of the research community to summarize the literature in effective way by which practitioners and researchers can benefit from the prevailing proofs and suggest new solutions for solving a particular problem of AI-enabled sensing and decision-making for the IoT system. To facilitate research community, the proposed study presents a systematic literature review of the existing literature, organizes the evidences in a systematic way, and then analyzes it for future research. The study reported the literature of the last 5 years based on the research questions, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and quality assessment of the selected study. Finally, derivations are drawn from the included paper for future research. (shrink)

We must begin by asking; What exactly is common sense? No doubt the word was originally used as a translation of Aristotle's; κοί⋯νη αἴσθησις but that is not its modern meaning. When Reid or more recent philosophers speak of common sense, they clearly have something else in view. At the present day, it is perhaps most often used to mean a quality of a mind, as when we say that jurymen or Members of Parliament should be men of (...) common sense, meaning that they should show intelligence in the ordinary affairs of life; or again, we say that a little common sense would enable us to solve this or that political problem. But we are not concerned with that meaning either, though it would be interesting to discuss it. Common sense, as we are concerned with it here, means rather a body of very general principles commonly accepted by ordinary non-philosophical men in the ordinary affairs of life. These principles are really philosophical—that is to say, they belong to the proper subject-matter of philosophy—but, of course, the plain man who accepts or applies them at every moment of his life is far from being aware of this. Some of them are metaphysical, or epistemological, others are ethical; and whether or not there can be a common-sense theology, as a recent writer has asserted, it seems quite possible that there may be one or two among them which properly belong to the theologian's province. All these principles, taken together, make up what is usually called the common-sense view of the world. But in this discussion we shall confine ourselves to the metaphysical or epistemological ones, which are more frequently appealed to than the others, and which, besides, seem to be more interesting. But our conclusions, if valid, will apply to the others also. (shrink)

What Stanislas Debaene dubs "the number sense" is a natural ability humans share with other animals, enabling us to "count" to four virtually instantaneously. This so-called "accumulator" provides "a direct intuition of what numbers mean" (p. 5). Beyond four, our ability to perceive numbers becomes approximate, though concepts enable us to move beyond approximation. Because humans typically learn number concepts in early childhood, we easily forget that our brains retain the number sense throughout life. This book examines (...) the biological basis for this intuitive ability, with nine chapters organized into three readily graspable groups of three. Aside from its frustrating lack of a clear referencing system (making it difficult or impossible to trace Debaene's sources), the book is a pleasure to read. (shrink)

This book looks at a family of views involving the pro-life view of abortion and Christianity. These issues are important because major religious branches (for example, Catholicism and some large branches of Evangelicalism) and leading politicians assert, or are committed to, the following: (a) it is permissible to prevent some people from going to hell, (b) abortion prevents some people from going to hell, and (c) abortion is wrong. They also assert, or are committed to, the following: (d) it (...) is permissible to use defensive violence to prevent people from killing innocents, (e) doctors who perform abortions kill innocents, and (f) it is wrong to use defensive violence against doctors who perform abortions. In this book, I argue that these and other principles are inconsistent. (shrink)

In Schopenhauer’s view, the whole organic and inorganic world is ultimately governed by an insatiable, blind will. Life as a whole is purposeless: there is no ultimate goal or meaning, for the metaphysical will is only interested in manifesting itself in (or as) a myriad of phenomena, which we call the “world” or “life.” Human life, too, is nothing but an insignificant product or “objectivation” of the blind, unconscious will, and because our life is determined by (...) willing (that is, by needs, affects, urges, and desires), and since willing is characterized by lack, our life is essentially full of misery and suffering. We are constantly searching for objects that can satisfy our needs and desires; once we have .. (shrink)

Is there anything new that can be learnt about Carnap and his philosophy from recent findings about Carnap’s participation in the production of the Circle’s inofficial manifesto of 1929, Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis? “More than one might think”, is my answer. To be sure, what there is to be learnt is not something radically new, but that is still enough to make a difference in an ongoing dispute over whether Carnap’s philosophy was of a purely academic nature. What there (...) is to be learnt is enough to contradict the quite common picture of Carnap as quietist.1 Instead, Carnap emerges as an activist and his philosophy as part of his activism. Accordingly, the thesis to be defended here is that throughout his life, though perhaps most strongly so during his Vienna Circle period, Carnap intended his philosophy to make a difference to everyday life: it was to be political in the broadest sense. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION HUTCHESONS LIFE AND WORKS The history of philosophy includes the names of many persons, famous in their time, whose contributions to human ...