Philosophers tend to treat meaningfulness as a type of value worth seeking and promoting, on a par with well-being and moral value. In this paper I argue that finding something in one's life meaningful does not require attributing to it any substantive positive value, but rather it can be rooted in an attachment to one's narrative identity or to one's place in a broader story about the world. This proposal explains how we can find meaning in past experiences of adversity, hardship, or loss without finding any silver linings in such experiences or having reason to seek them again the future.
Emotions are central to our engagements with fictional narratives and partly ground our evaluations of literary works. Nevertheless, the idea of reacting emotionally to a work of fiction raises problems that philosophers are still struggling to deal with. In this paper, we will focus on a subset of these problems, which concerns the psychological function of emotions in the context of reading fiction. The standard approach to this question assumes an internalist and individualist perspective, focusing on individual internal states. However, we argue that our emotional responses to fiction are deeply social, embedded in social practices and serving important social functions that are often neglected in the literature, which constrain and partly determine the emotionality of the reading experience. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to supplement the internalist perspective by exploring the social dimension of emotions in fiction. Our main argument is that the emotions we feel when reading literary works look both inward and outward. They help our embodied imaginative recreations of narrative worlds, but they also engage authors of fictional works and other readers who partake in this practice with us, which calls for a more social and externalist approach to understanding emotions in fiction.
Philosophical debates on assertion norms advance different rules for when assertions count as proper or warranted. In this paper, I show that in order to resolve these debates, engagement with speech act theory can be fruitful. In particular, a speech act may be infelicitous or 'unhappy' for different and mutually independent reasons. Specifically, an assertion may be defective either for reasons concerning the epistemic position of the speaker, or for reasons concerning the state of the world. The speaker may be held responsible for the former but not for the latter. The same distinction also applies to other speech acts. If all participants in the debate were to acknowledge that an assertion may be improper for different reasons, the discussion would lose its rationale.
In Wittgenstein's early remarks on value and the mystical, we find a particular philosophical problem that I shall call 'Wittgenstein's Koan'. The problem emerges because Wittgenstein holds three prima facie incompatible claims: the totality of what exists is the totality of facts, that is, the world; absolute value cannot be part of the world; yet there are experiences, such as the experience of wonder at the existence of the world, that somehow seem to have absolute value. In this paper I shall argue that this problem should be treated like a Zen's koan, that is, a paradox that can't be solved through canonical discursive moves but requires a non-discursive experiential breakthrough, what is called 'kensho' in Zen Buddhism. To support this contention, I shall argue that canonical discursive solutions are exegetically or theoretically implausible or both and I shall describe the key experiential breakthrough which Wittgenstein lived and made him feel that there is indeed a koan to be explored and solved. In this way, the paper intends to contribute to the ever-growing interest in the dialogue between Wittgenstein's philosophy and Zen Buddhism.
For some time, philosophical analyses of life's meaning have almost universally treated it as constituted by value of a certain sort. However, this has recently been challenged by philosophers who instead see life's meaning as constituted by something like sense or intelligibility. Pushing back against the challenge posed by this 'Intelligibility View', it has been argued that it fails to capture everything we mean when we talk of meaningful lives (Metz 2019), and that the established 'Value View' is ultimately the correct approach (Landau 2021). Focusing on the specific theory presented in Thomas (2019), this paper attempts to defend the Intelligibility View from some of the objections and counter-examples given against it, while also providing counter-examples to the Value View in return. In addition, it evaluates and rejects the option of retaining both views, with each being correct in different contexts, and the option of subsuming one view into the other. It concludes that the Intelligibility View is the neatest, most intuitive, and most theoretically plausible approach to life's meaning currently in the literature.
Some philosophers of religion are attracted to Wittgenstein's claim of approaching religion in a descriptive and non-revisionary manner because they desire greater plurality and diversity of religions in their study. However, Wittgenstein's account of religious beliefs as never based on evidence (i.e., non-evidentialism) and rituals as never performed as a means to an end (i.e., non-instrumentalism) results in a prescriptive conception of religion that impedes the plurality and diversity of religions apt for study. Moreover, since he thinks scientific beliefs are evidential and scientific practices are instrumental, he effectively dichotomizes religion from science. After demonstrating this, we counter that: (i) many religious beliefs are based on evidence; (ii) many religious practices are means to an end; (iii) not every society that has a religion separates it from science; (iv) Wittgenstein's approach gaslights many religious believers.
By situating Wittgenstein's handwritten manuscripts in the Socratic tradition of philosophy, I argue that contrary to Wittgenstein's misjudgement about the role and impact of the Socratic conception of philosophy, his own way of doing philosophy has much in common with that of philosophers in the Socratic tradition in terms of orientation and rhetorical style. Focusing on Movements of Thought, the latest edition of Wittgenstein's Koder Diaries, I argue that the convergence of philosophical and personal remarks in Wittgenstein's handwritten manuscripts is the result of writing in the form of hypomnemata or private notes or exhortations to the self with the intention of capturing the movements of thought and working on oneself.
Deprivation explains why death is bad, if it is bad, but it cannot explain existential panic, horror, and related emotions that facing the nothingness of death can induce. I consider various attempts to explain those emotions and argue that they arise from the fact that one's death seems impossible. For Jean-Paul Sartre, horror and related emotions can occur only in a world that is magical in his special sense of the term. A world where impossible things happen is magical in that sense. I conclude that existential terror is a fitting response to the nothingness of death.
Recently, there has been much debate about the role and nature of political theories. Jeremy Waldron has argued that we misconstrue a theory's purpose if we summarize it in terms of 'What Plato Would Allow', because a normative theory is a conceptual exploration and should not be reduced to a policy wish list. To make sense of such phrases beyond Waldron's critique, this paper provides some conceptual tools to clarify the practical purpose of normative political theories. First, it draws on Bernard Williams' distinction between the enactive and structural models in political theory. Second, it seeks to reconstruct normative political theories as sets of speech acts having an illocutionary point that expresses the relation between theory and practice. Third, the paper outlines five types of illocutionary points (Intervention, Justification, Reconciliation, Critique, and Imagination of alternatives). The idea of an illocutionary point can make sense of the practical import of a theory in a multifaceted manner and without subscribing to a specific conception of practicality.
Joseph Agbakoba’s Development and Modernity in Africa is at once courageous, deeply self-reflexive, epochal, and thoroughly awakening. It achieves a foundational representation and reconstruction of human agency in traditional Africa to guide contemporary Africa. This huge achievement is anchored on two main features that run throughout the text. One is that it refocuses Africans’ attention on themselves as the primary agents of every bit of their historical experiences—past, present, and the future. The other is that it highlights a connection among Africans’ existential concerns, epistemic concerns and creativity, and lingering epistemic orientation. These drive knowledge generation and research agenda on the continent. The book therefore qualifies as a mirror for self-understanding by Africans—about themselves, their actions, and what they have made or can make of themselves and context. The book contains an elaborate Introduction and seven tightly argued chapters. Chapters 1 to 3 focus on conceptual clarifications and philosophical analyses of concepts. Chapters 4 to 6 are a historical presentation of and hermeneutic engagement with facts and fictions. Chapter 7 is a reconstructive project. There, Agbakoba highlights how to improve trans-cultural, complementary, and just understanding of Africa’s possible self-improvement today and in the future. In this book, which for now qualifies as his magnum opus, Agbakoba responds to several burning issues in African studies generally and philosophy in Africa, in particular. For each issue, Agbakoba highlights paths to improved human agency and development in Africa. By doing this, he weakens the lure of old and new scholarly trends that sustain irresponsibility and blame-gaming on the continent. The most recent of such trends is the search for what is described as decolonization. Four of the issues he responded to stand out. They are closely related, but I will try to keep them separate. First is the lingering question of Africans’ contributions to and degree of culpability for their past and present predicaments, and development crises. Agbakoba explains that transatlantic slavery would not have Philosophical Papers
The ongoing debate about whether Frege has ever abandoned the metalinguistic solution to Frege's Puzzle not only is important by itself, but has serious ramifications. In this article, I show that Frege did abandon the metalinguistic solution and his objection to it is as follows. Though the co-reference relation between two signs is mediated by the connection of each of the two signs with the same designated thing, the connection is nevertheless arbitrary because it could be established even if one of the two signs is distinguished from the other only as object not as sign. As a result, if by "a = b" we assert a co-reference relation, we would express no proper knowledge.
Abstract In its attempt to deflate of the pretensions of ‘Western knowledge’, the epistemic decolonisation movement carries on the work of Socrates, who sought to persuade those who thought that they were wise but were not, that they were not. Yet in its determination to recover and elevate indigenous systems of thought, decolonisation seems opposed to this very work, which is always corrosive of inherited belief. Decolonisation both expresses and contradicts the spirit of Socratic philosophy.
Many consider Hobbes the father of political individualism, claiming that his new conception of happiness involved abandoning its metaphysical dimension, which had been central in ancient times and in the Middle Ages. Highlighting previous commentators’ inattention to the link between scientific knowledge and happiness in Hobbes’s thought, I demonstrate the inaccuracy of considering him the founder of a new ideal of happiness grounded in individual experience. Hobbes adopts the ancient principle that man’s happiness is necessarily conditional upon his submission to a normative system derived from the truth regarding his nature. His originality lies in an innovative understanding of human nature and scientific truth. This article suggests that progress in a person’s life, which is possible only in the realm of pleasures of the mind, is an objective element of Hobbes’s notion of happiness, which derives from his definition of humans as rational and curious beings. Leaving the state of nature freed man from the misery that results from constant war and the horror of violent death that accompanied it, but not from the misery whose source is ignorance regarding the purpose of life.
Abstract Most accounts of cognitive scaffolding focus on ways that external structure can support or augment an agent’s cognitive capacities. We call cases where the interests of the user are served benign scaffolding and argue for the possibility and reality of hostile scaffolding. This is scaffolding which depends on the same capacities of an agent to make cognitive use of external structure as in benign cases, but which undermines or exploits the user while serving the interests of another agent. We develop criteria for scaffolding being hostile and show by reference to examples including the design features of electronic gambling machines and casino management systems that hostile scaffolding exists and can be highly effective. In cases where the scaffolding is deep and permits the offloading of significant cognitive work, hostile scaffolding exploitatively manipulates cognitive processing itself. Given the extent of human reliance on scaffolding this is an important and neglected vulnerability.
Much of what is taught in the discipline of philosophy in most universities in African countries is European philosophy. This is the reality that Thaddeus Metz met when he moved to South Africa in 1999. The moral philosophy that was taught to students at the University of Witwatersrand did not stem from the local intellectual tradition. Metz took it upon himself to read and engage with scholars about indigenous Africa with a view to seeing what contributions sub-Saharan cultures could make to contemporary debates on the study of moral philosophy. His concern was that sub-Saharan ethical philosophy had been unjustly neglected around the world. In the text, he outlines the sub-Saharan communal ethic and goes on to make the claim that African tradition grounds a moral theory that is actually more attractive than the dominant modern Western moral theories. A Relational Moral Theory consists of parts of Metz’s previously published journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries that he has reviewed and revised, and put together as a monograph. Most texts which normally consist of revised and updated pieces previously published usually come out as a patchwork of edited pieces lacking a seamless unity. In his text, Metz carefully puts together the revised previously published pieces into a coherent thesis with a smooth flow. The book consists of an introductory chapter and twelve other chapters. It is divided into three broad parts, reflecting the three branches of the arm of knowledge that deals with moral principles—ethics. Part I is located within the branch of meta-ethics and is subtitled ‘African Ethics Without a Metaphysical Gound’. Part II finds grounding in the domain of normative ethics and is subtitled ‘Communality as the Ground of African Morality’. Part III is situated within the branch of applied ethics and is subtitled ‘Communality as the Ground of Morality Simpliciter’. Part I of the book is largely methodological and consists of two chapters, Chapters 2 and 3. In these, the author outlines the method he uses; this method is important in that it runs through the rest of the book. Chapter 2 justifies the author’s favored moral theory. In the chapter, the author outlines and then dismisses the moral claims of some renowned Philosophical Papers
There is an alternative to the type of moral standing that hypothetically supervenes on other, base or subvenient, properties. Attributed moral standing results when people who have a naturally selected belief that they are worthy of moral consideration negotiate with others with the aim of being acknowledged as having moral standing and are successful. They could successfully negotiate with people who possessed supervenient moral standing. In a hypothetical evolutionary competition with the latter, they would replace them entirely. The result would be a moral community that excludes animals but that includes human infants. Membership in the moral community ends up being what it would be if moral standing supervened on the property of being human. The supervenience doctrine is also criticized on other grounds.
Freedom-determinism compatibilism says a deed is correctly censurable if and only if it flows from a bad character, irrespective of what caused that character. In the relevant sense, the doer could have done otherwise whenever with a better character s/he would have. But commonsense considers that unavoidable early brutalizing experiences can at least mitigate blame. The reconciliation is that when a partly formed bad character causes early choices productive of a more fully formed character which leads then to subsequent misdeeds, blame for them is augmented on account of that, but it is not thus augmented if the early brutalization was instead unavoidable. Properly viewed, the case is one, not of reduced blame, but just of unaugmented blame.
