Bernard Williams contends that philosophy is part of a broader humanistic enterprise of 'making sense of' ourselves and our activities, including the activity of science. Whereas the scientific enterprise purports to offer an absolute conception of the world as it is (independently of any local perspective on it), the humanistic enterprise cannot disengage itself from the contingent history of our ideas upon which it operates. While I agree with Williams that philosophy should be more attentive to history, his account of philosophy, from which he derives this conclusion, is fatally flawed, being unable to meet three perennial challenges to any principled defense of philosophy as a discipline: i.e., the questions of authority, incubativity and peculiarity. Those challenges can be met only if we understand philosophy not as a humanistic discipline that is part of the broader humanistic enterprise, but as a distinctively normative discipline that tasks itself with finding answers to explicitly or implicitly normative questions, in contrast to various scientific and humanistic disciplines of descriptive inquiry. In this paper, I argue for the equivalence of philosophicality with normativity, explicate the theoretical and practical implications of the normative account of philosophy, and defend it against potential objections.
Abstract One of Bernard Williams’ abiding aims was to reassure us in the face of what I call ‘genealogical anxiety’: the anxiety that once our cherished beliefs, concepts, values and practices have their origins revealed, we will be rationally compelled to abandon them. Williams’ treatment of genealogical anxiety rests on a deep distinction between science and ethics: while ‘our’ scientific outlook can be ‘vindicated’ by its history, ‘our’ ethical-political outlook cannot. In so arguing, Williams fails to reckon with the full force of genealogical anxiety and the problem of contingency that provokes it; he is guilty, ironically, of a kind of scientism about the natural sciences, seeing them as a form of inquiry free from historically contingent perspective. To make my case, I turn to On Certainty , in which Wittgenstein presents the Euromodern scientific outlook as no less susceptible of genealogical anxiety than any other. What’s more, Wittgenstein takes seriously a reply to genealogical anxiety – an externalist reply – that Williams dismisses as a ‘thin tune’ not ‘worth whistling’. If Wittgenstein is right that scientific and ethical outlooks are equally susceptible of genealogical critique, then it may well turn out that this ‘thin tune’ is the only one we have available to whistle.
Abstract A number of high-profile people seem to have moved from the left to the right quite suddenly, and without appearing to move through intermediate positions. Often, they do not just go right; they go right and bananas: accepting bizarre conspiracy theories and other such beliefs. This paper argues that this phenomenon can be explained by a combination of psychological pressures and genuine reasons, with the person pivoting from left to right on the fulcrum provided by a belief to which they are strongly committed and on which their side initially splits. This account explains how people go bananas while remaining rational and remaining concerned with evidence. The evidence to which they respond is provided by testimony. The pivot belief provides them with reasons to place much heavier weight on the testimony of the right, their former opponents, than on their own former side.
The term 'Artificial Intelligence' (AI) was introduced in 1956 by American mathematician and computer scientist John McCarthy, who used it in a funding proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth College (McCarthy et al., 1955). AI is myriad technologies that mutate and evolve, yet both the academic field devoted to its study and the industry that aims to realize it in its multiplicity are often said to have the nebulous aim, intimated already in McCarthy's proposal, of making machines capable of displaying human-level, intelligent activity in all or most domains.1 The history of AI is narrated as a sequence of alternating 'springtimes' and 'winters' in which an approach is supposedly made to this vague goal, then falters (e.g., Bostrom 2014, pp. 6-8; Kurzweil, 2005, 263-266). In 2022, the year chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) seized the world's attention, and OpenAI's ChatGPT became for many identical to all AI, a massive springtime broke out, with a small cohort of companies securing unprecedented funding while their leaderships told stories about how general machine intelligence at the human level or, to use the current jargon, artificial general intelligence (AGI), was just around the corner.
This essay provides meta-ethical foundations for an approach to political realism. The foundations appeal to the kind of non-objectivity of morality involved in taking a critical and reflective perspective on our own moral and political outlooks. The essay argues that the distinctive methodology of an approach to political realism can be derived from these non-objectivist foundations. This methodology requires political philosophy to be more critical and reflective than it usually is, for it to be more deeply engaged with history, sociology, and other human sciences, and for it to look less like applied moral philosophy.
Anscombe defined intentional action in terms of what she called 'the special question "Why?"' In the first part of this article, we present four objections to defining intentional action in this way. Then, in the second part, we show that Anscombe's special question can instead be used to define a much broader category of conduct, namely that for which an agent is responsible. We thereby repurpose one of the most influential ideas in twentieth-century philosophy of action within a novel theory of responsibility.
Lookism, wrongful appearance discrimination, is prevalent and impactful, and yet largely neglected. This paper explores why this form of discrimination is ignored, when other forms of discrimination which have similar impacts in, for example, employment and education, are taken seriously in policy, practice, and everyday life. It offers five possible reasons for why lookism is neglected; that it is unfamiliar, that people believe lookism should not be prevalent, that people believe lookism is natural, that lookism is not legislated against and that shame attaches to experiences of lookism. The paper seeks to offer an account of the reasons that underpin the otherwise confusing neglect of lookism. The paper argues that far from being an acceptable form of discrimination, lookism is a serious form of discrimination that all, irrespective of political and ideological commitments, have reasons to address.
Historians of philosophy widely concur that Galileo Galilei (re)introduced the metaphysical dichotomy of primary and secondary properties into philosophical discourse. However, his conceptual distinction appeared muddled, resulting in frequent misinterpretations or disregard over time. This paper aims to demonstrate that the apparent vagueness of the dichotomy stems from a common misunderstanding shaped by the subsequent distinction between two kinds of properties, primary and secondary. Accordingly, the central argument advanced here is that Galileo did not intend to differentiate between two kinds of properties inherent in external things. Instead, he sought to distinguish between the perception of spatial properties and the concurrent internal bodily sensations evoked by the mechanical impacts of external objects. Focusing on his isolation of an aspect of sensory experience, namely sensible qualities, it is suggested that Galileo recognised the phenomenal aspect of experience and thereby contributed to the early modern development of the concept of perceptual consciousness.
Many scholars think that anger is an unruly emotion - or worse. However, anger can contribute to political life and affirmative social change. I call politics consistent with this interpretation of anger a fairly angry politics. A fairly angry person raises a valid but incomplete point about the injustice of their circumstance, in an unpersuasive, incomplete, or flawed way. The fairly angry person should not be dismissed as resentful insofar as there are often structural reasons for their inability to be heard. To explore this interpretation of anger, the paper briefly examines Aristotle's definition of anger in the Rhetoric and then contrasts the paradigmatic anger of the relatively privileged figure of Homer's Achilles with the non-ideal anger of Sophocles' Philoctetes. The paper then offers a further analysis of fairly angry politics by considering Bryan Doerries's Theater of War project's revival of Sophocles' Philoctetes. Hearing angry speeches may help to remind hearers who occupy a dominant role to sacrifice some of their own comfort, invulnerability, and epistemic privilege; indeed, as perpetrators of (or persons complicit in) injustice, they have a responsibility to hear and respond to unruly anger.
This essay argues that Descartes' cogito, although a significant contribution to so-called 'Western' epistemological and ontological traditions, reveals new insights when tested against an Ubuntu-relational framework. The framework that allows for Descartes' method of doubt and the conclusions about being that follow is, for us, inadequate, as it fails to address some crucial presumptions that trail a relational perspective. It is in this inadequacy that the cogito loses its promise and bows to what we take to be a more comprehensive foundational truth from the African perspective; that relationality precedes thought and concretises existence. What follows, then, is our attempt to show that this thesis is plausible by re-examining the Cogito in light of the Ubuntu relational framework. To do this, we will provide a brief exposition of Descartes' journey towards the Cogito, especially as presented in the Meditations and the Discourse on Method. Having done that, we will proceed to outline a metaphysical account of the Ubuntu relational framework, and, finally, place Ubuntu in conversation with Descartes' cogito. It is in this conversation that new insights on (at least) one foundational truth would be revealed - 'Konke kuyikho ngokunye'; that is, that 'all things are, through other things'.
I present a critical review of one of the most influential trends in scholarship analysing the conceptual relationship between Freud and Kant in moral psychology. I discuss three Kantian sophisticated naturalistic approaches (KSNAs), which explore the possibility of accommodating Kantian moral imperatives within the Freudian psycho-developmentalist account, based primarily on the idea of the superego. Specifically, I examine three of their arguments about moral development that revolve around: (1) the relevance of guilt for moral orientation. The KNSAs propose that guilt is a moral feeling, the manifestation of a superego or moral conscience. I argue instead that guilt is not a moral feeling per se, although it can sometimes serve as a moral orientation. (2) The nature of our sources of moral motivation. For the KSNAs, it is irrelevant to think about the sources of our moral motivation because it is impossible to know them. I argue, however, for the relevance of the intelligibility of our moral commands, which should somehow match or resemble their moral source. (3) The concept of ideality. For the KNSAs, the superego's commands are moral because they are ideal. I will argue that the ideality of the superego's commands is, on the contrary, self-deceptive.
In this paper we argue for a surprising similarity between the kinds of roles notation plays in music and in mathematics. We argue that in both cases the notation is doing more than merely documenting something that we have an independent grip on - either a musical performance/composition or a mathematical structure. In both instances, the notation can lead to new innovations, it can help in abstracting away from distracting details and it can facilitate explanations. In light of these functions, we argue that both musical and mathematical notations serve as models of the intended targets: musical and mathematical structures. Seen in this light, developing, and reflecting upon, notation is central to both musical and mathematical practice and is deserving of greater philosophical attention.
Eudaimonist virtue ethicists from Aristotle to contemporary Neo-Aristotelians have held (1) that human flourishing (eudaimonia) is the ultimate ethically justifying end of action and (2) that human flourishing consists in the exercise of virtues of character. This paper has two goals. First, I argue for separating these two commitments and distinguishing eudaimonism in general from its common virtue-ethical interpretation. To do so, I clarify the justificatory structure of eudaimonism. Second, I object to the conjunction of these two views, eudaimonism and the character virtue conception of flourishing. On the eudaimonist assumption that flourishing is the sole ultimate justificatory end of ethical action, whatever flourishing consists in must be a plausible ultimate end that does not require further justification. But character-virtuous activity is not a plausible ultimate end. The moral and prudential activities that exercise character virtues like justice, courage, and moderation characteristically aim to produce or distribute instrumental benefits which must serve, and be justified by, other ends in turn.
We are often responsible for the care of others – we find ourselves accepting these responsibilities, and in turn, holding others accountable for fulfilling theirs. Yet while it is clear that we sometimes owe such duties, it is less clear why we owe them. What explains our duties to care? It is this question that I take up. This is a question about normative grounding: it asks why, or in virtue of what, these duties exist. Though not expressly framed in terms of grounding, care ethicists have paid considerable attention to this question – offering either voluntarist or non-voluntarist accounts of grounds. I argue that voluntarist accounts are misguided and turn to non-voluntarist alternatives, which are, in turn, divided between views that trace grounds to (a) certain relational facts or (b) a natural duty. Arguing that neither (a) nor (b) is individually correct, this paper offers a new account: 'hybrid non-voluntarism.' On this view, our duties to care are grounded in a relational moral principle: they exist in virtue of natural duties but are 'triggered' only by specific relational ties. Through this account, I aim to resolve existing tensions within care ethics and elucidate the grounds of our duties to care.
