Abstract Gregory Currie’s claim that art manifests artists’ skilful activity is given sympathetic examination. The scope of the claim is considered, as well as the sense in which it invokes a personal connection to the artist. Currie’s information-focused account of the value of manifestation profiles is extended to encompass engagement with art that may not share information bearing accepted value. The significance of sheer connection to the object worked on by the artist is explored, with reference to Benjaminian aura and pressing Currie’s comparison of humanly and mechanically made copies.
Abstract Is there anything the individual ought to do in light of the climate catastrophe and insufficient political leadership in addressing it? I argue that we can find in Kant a collectivist conception of individual obligation that provides an answer: each of us, as an individual, has climate obligations, but the nature of these obligations is made determinate only with reference to the collective of which the individual is a part. I suggest that Kant’s collectivism sheds light on the relations between the individual and the collective and the ethical and political in the climate crisis.
Abstract Pictures manifest the skills of their makers. Offering only a partial characterization of that idea, I show how it bears on the differences between originals and copies and between paintings and photographs, how it connects the visible appearances of pictures with their histories, what it suggests about the origin of our aesthetic sense, and about the role of agency in art criticism.
Contemporary philosophical orthodoxy treats names as universally accessible, arbitrary tags that track referents across space, time and possibility. I argue that paradigmatic nicknames, like ‘Shrimpy’, ‘Crooked Hillary’ and ‘Bubblegum’, do track referents, but are marked by contrast with proper names by enforcing restrictions on who they can be used by and with, and when they can be used; and by framing their referents under affectively valenced social identities. While proper names can also carry social information, it is part of nicknames’ characteristic function to manage face, in ways that an adequate overall theory of meaning needs to explain.
This paper presents a new phenomenology of love, with a fresh analysis of its intentional and temporal structures and a clarification of its affective, axiological and conative bases. The paper begins by questioning the habitual manner of classifying emotions into oppositional pairs of positive and negative ones. The second part focuses on the intentional and temporal structures of love. It demonstrates that love is a personal emotion in the specific sense that it draws from the very core of the intentional subject and is conatively anchored in this core. On the basis of this analysis, the paper argues that the obligation to care for the loved one is transitive: love demands that the lover cares not just for her beloved but also for the loves of her beloved. Utilizing these results, the third part proceeds to study the role of love in ethics. In this interest it develops a novel interpretation of the ‘commandment of love’.
Philosophers of language have tended to treat names merely as tools for talking about individuals, either directly or as part of a denoting phrase. We argue that names are every bit as much tools for tracking, maintaining, and performatively updating our positions in social space, as well as projecting a linguistic persona. This pushes us towards a revised picture of the meanings of names, one which incorporates what we shall call a ‘social sense’.
The debate over whether the social sciences should emulate the natural sciences or humanities has waned in recent decades, partly because it seems futile. I argue that this futility stems largely from insufficient appreciation of the empirical questions that any defensible position in this debate must confront. By bringing these empirical considerations into sharper relief, the debate can be fruitfully reframed.
Among the requirements essential to the proper pursuit of our intellectual endeavours, there is the requirement to seek additional evidential reasons beyond those that one currently possesses when one asks oneself a question. The aim of this paper is to explore the nature of this ‘questioning requirement’ in greater detail. After considering and dismissing accounts that take the questioning requirement to be either a practical or an epistemic requirement, I put forward my own view, which holds that the questioning requirement arises from the very nature of the illocutionary act of self-questioning. Just as the illocutionary act of promising generates obligations, asking oneself a question generates a requirement to seek evidential reasons to answer the question one has posed.
This paper explores Latin medieval accounts of intentionality developed after Thomas Aquinas, focusing in particular on the theories of mental presence and mental directedness defended by Hervaeus Natalis and Peter Auriol. As the paper aims to show, these two authors distinguish between the intentional and the real presence of objects to the mind, and consequently between intentional directedness and real directedness towards objects. The paper argues that their theory, which combines detailed phenomenological insights with careful considerations about the way our mind relates to objects and reality, constitutes a valuable alternative to Aquinas’s views on presence and directedness as reconstructed by Therese Cory.
This paper argues that Beauvoir’s The Second Sex offers a genealogy of the morality of sexual hierarchy in which love plays a central role. In dialogue with Sara Heinämaa’s reading of Beauvoir as a projection theorist, I argue that the economic and moral dimensions of Beauvoir’s revaluation of love are illuminated by reading her in a particular tradition of ‘French Marx’. According to Beauvoir, both religious and secular mystifications of love, like Marx’s ‘opium of the masses’, veil the real relations between human beings. However, rather than merely unmasking individualistic mystifications of love, The Second Sex situates what I call ‘the opium of the lasses’ in an axiological critique of Marx’s projection theory of religion and post-Nietzschean discussions of ‘love’ and its capitalist co-optations. As such, Beauvoir’s revaluation of love concerns not only the weight of patriarchal myths of what makes women ‘lovable’, but an inquiry into the possibility of co-responsible solidarity—of what it means to become love-able, able to love.
National humiliation is the humiliation felt by individuals who identify with the state (or nation) in response to an international event. Humiliation of this variety is often used, by both politicians and scholars in international relations, to explain a range of international conflicts (Chinese antagonism towards the West, the US response to 9/11, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and so on). In this paper, I explore the epistemic harms that result from national humiliation. First, I argue what is most relevant within the epistemic domain is not humiliation, the emotion, but humiliation narratives, which are used as discursive mechanisms to justify conflict. Second, I argue that such narratives affect in-groups mobilized by populist rhetoric as well as out-groups marginalized by them. I conclude by suggesting some possible ways to mitigate these harms and foster epistemic resilience across societal divides.
The standard gloss of ‘intentionality’ as ‘aboutness’ may be insufficiently fine-grained to capture the complexity of medieval theories of intentionality. Using Thomas Aquinas as a case study, I show that he provides distinct accounts of two aspects of the phenomenon, which could be called ‘intentional presence’ and ‘intentional directing’. These distinct accounts are joined together through his theory of imitation into what I call a ‘theory of intentionality as active imitating’, but without giving relations of likeness any work to do in the account. In each part of the account, Aquinas draws on a general metaphysical schema that applies to both mental and non-mental being, contra interpretations that view intentionality as a sui generis feature of mental states.
This paper develops an account of information as possible knowledge. What it is for a signal T to carry the information that p is for T to have a disposition to generate knowledge that p in some agent S: upon reception of the signal T by S, S is in a position to know that p based on it. We argue the account is strongly superior to probabilistic competitors on both extensional adequacy and prior plausibility.
What sort of inquiry is social science? This question used to preoccupy philosophers, but fell off their agenda due to a stalemate between so-called naturalists, who took the ideal to benatural science, and exceptionalists, who allied social sciences with the humanities. I show that both positions commit the error of contrastivism, namely, defining social science in contrast to these two traditions, which inevitably ends up caricaturing them. Using recent advances in philosophy, I formulate constructivism about social sciences, a view that denies an essence to this inquiry and grounds it in the needs of communities to understand and improve themselves.
Abstract Liberation philosophy seeks to contribute to the liberation of the oppressed and to the creation of a more just society. A meliorative philosophy is one that improves human lives. A liberation philosophy can be regarded as meliorative only if it has a compelling theory of change. A theory of change for philosophical interventions should explain how they can contribute to social, political or economic change. The main components of such a theory are identified and shown to be present in the work of the best liberation philosophers, such as Martin Luther King Jr. A meliorative philosophy improves human lives by, among other things, providing the kind of guidance that leads to better decision-making and improved conduct. Philosophy should conceive of the guidance it offers as co-created and reflect on the conditions for effective co-creation. The distinctive virtues of meliorative philosophy, including liberation philosophy, are personal qualities that enable co-creation. These include humility, practicality, an openness to diverse perspectives, and an instinct for lived complexity. There are philosophical purists who reject the demand that philosophy should answer to practical needs. We should be sceptical about some of the claims made by philosophical purists.
Abstract Bertrand Russell abandoned the notion of acquaintance in July 1918. What changes does this force in his account of the mind? This paper focuses on one puzzle of interpretation about this. In 1913, Russell offered an account of ‘egocentric particulars’, his term for indexicals and demonstratives. He argued that the fundamental objection to neutral monism was that it could not provide an adequate theory of these terms. In 1918, Russell now embraces a form of neutral monism, but he does not return to the problem of indexicals until 1940 in his William James lectures. Is the account given in 1940 significantly different from the one given in 1913? What was the argument against neutral monism in 1913? Does Russell offer a new solution in 1940 or reject his earlier view as mistaken? The answers offered here are used to draw more general morals about the current debate concerning relational theories of sense perception.
Abstract In this paper I ask what logical consequence is, and give an answer that is somewhat different from the usual ones. It isn’t clear why anyone would need a new approach to logical consequence, so I begin by explaining the work that I need the answer to do and why the standard conceptions aren’t adequate. Then I articulate a replacement view which is.
Abstract In ‘Logical Consequence (Slight Return)’, Gillian Russell asks ‘What is logical consequence?’, a question which has vexed logicians since at least the twelfth century, when people first began to wonder what it meant for one sentence (or proposition) to follow from another sentence (or proposition, or set of sentences, or set of propositions), or whether it was possible to put down rules determining when the relation of ‘follows from’ (or ‘is antecedent to’) holds. Her aim is threefold: (1) to explain what an answer to the question ‘What is logical consequence?’ would need to be able to do in order to be a satisfying answer; (2) to identify previous answers to the question; and (3) to demonstrate why these previous answers are inadequate to do what the answer needs to be able to do, and to offer a new answer. In the present paper, I respond to these aims in two ways. The first is to say something about where Russell’s central question even comes from, because this is not a topic that is often discussed by twentieth- and twenty-first-century logicians, and even historians of logic tend to not have had much to say about when—and why—this question even comes about in the first place. The second is to evaluate the accounts proposed and discussed by Russell, including her new proposal. In the end, I will argue that she has reached the right account of the nature of logical consequence, but not necessarily for the right reasons.
In her article in this volume Linda Martín Alcoff makes the case for a form of political epistemology that denaturalizes, in the sense of historically and socially situating, procedures of knowledge production and distribution. She pursues this project via a discussion of three twentieth-century thinkers (Horkheimer, Habermas and Foucault) who, she argues, pursued this form of political epistemology, albeit in different ways, and to different ends. In this article I pursue a similar project, but within a different tradition, one that grows out of naturalized epistemology.
AbstractLaborde contrasts Default Republicanism with Labordian Republicanism. The latter view ‘answers’ the Probabilistic and the Anti-Psychology Objections to Default Republicanism. The former objection holds that the mere possibility of unconstrained intervention does not matter for unfreedom, whereas the latter contends that it is by virtue of the experience-independent fact of servitude that one is unfree. I argue that people sympathetic to these objections should have reservations about Labordian Republicanism. In any case, republicans should reject the Anti-Psychology Objection. More generally, Pluralist Republicanism might be preferable to Labordian Republicanism.
