Paulo Freire insists that the oppressed are the more likely agents of liberation because the oppressors self-handicap their abilities to dismantle the systems of oppression they create and sustain. I develop this basic picture relying on the thought of Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla and the character-type he calls 'apretado.' Apretados are people who understand themselves in relation to their material possessions, relatively high social positions, and who construe their social positions as self-validating proof of their deserving more or being more valuable than others. Apretados create oppressive social structures that enable them to live in accordance with their self-conceptions, but these structures enslave apretados to the validating gaze of others and condemn apretados to a state of Sartrean bad faith and alienation from the selves they construct in time with their actions. Unafflicted by these self-imposed harms, the oppressed are the more likely agents of liberation, as Freire insists.
This paper addresses the issue of violent images that have been subjected to a specific photographic reinformation. This process is typically used in the case of mass-distributed violent images to protect the dignity of persons depicted in a state of extreme vulnerability. Taking juridical and sociological explanations as a starting point, I explore the reasons behind the visual strategies increasingly adopted by the media for photographic materials documenting violent events in recent history. Then, I highlight the philosophical stakes underlying the media's choice to blur imagistic violence, focusing on three issues: the effect of the attenuation of visual aggressiveness on the viewer; the tension arising between the desire to see everything and the hiatus produced by blurring in the visual field; and the viewer's forms of appropriating the content of the violent blurred images.
A recent discussion in virtue ethics revives the question of how virtue relates to skill. Is skill merely a useful analog to explaining the nature of virtue, or is virtue actually a skill? The motivation objection is one of a number of arguments that virtue is not a skill. The idea is that virtues are motivationally constrained by requiring their possessors to have certain concerns, goals, and motivations, but skills are not. In this paper, we argue that the motivation objection fails because, contra the objection, skills include at least four motivational constraints: aspiration for excellence, commitment to the game, beauty and truth, and the goods of persons. These four constraints ground our evaluation of skills and the skillful. Together, they form a motivational spectrum of skill. We conclude by arguing that the motivational spectrum of skill defeats the motivation objection and provides some evidence for virtue being a skill.
I argue that, given the choice, we have a right not to undergo transformative experiences. We are entitled to affirm our previous autonomous agency by deciding in this way, and this right is grounded in the significance of our self-authorship. I further show that many of the suggested demands of morality involve transformative change, and so meeting these demands would involve not just paying a high cost, but forfeiting this right. Though this may be morally required, we may wrong ourselves in complying.
I offer a new way of thinking about immortality: like atmospheric convection, it might be sensitive to initial conditions (the butterfly effect). Bernard Williams famously argued that eternal life would become boring or alienating. But suppose our world is a non-linear dynamical system: the laws of nature and the past determine the future but there is no lower limit on a future-altering difference in the initial state. So, eternal life might have unending possibilities for fascination while remaining sta-ble enough to help us preserve our identity and character. This is not to say that eternity would be enjoyable. It might be awful. Nor does it entail that we should accept it. A mortal life might be better or equal. But non-linearity shows new ways to enjoy and understand eternity.
There are many debates surrounding the proper usage of the word "disability." In this paper, we argue that it is a mistake to attempt to diagnose such debates in a vacuum, but rather that we should assess the truth of specific attributions based on context. This is a familiar move from the literature on epistemic contextualism about knowledge. We thus briefly describe how the maneuver is used in that literature. We then formulate two versions of Disability Contextualism (DC)-a weak version that merely asserts that the context is relevant for assessing the truth of affirmations and denials regarding particular models of disability, and a stronger version that says a bit more about what elements of the context might be relevant. We then argue for why contextualism is the appropriate option for "disability" by looking at some of the major competitors of its epistemic counterpart.
Reflective reasoning has been central to philosophy and cognitive science more generally. However, scholars lack a unified empirical explication of “reflection.” This paper synthesizes a cross-disciplinary account from philosophers, scientists, and centuries of English speakers: “reflection” often refers to—among other things—conscious and deliberate reconsideration of an initial intuition. This two-factor account of reflection empirically distinguishes reflection from often conflated phenomena such as rumination; it also tidily classifies self-conscious reflection as a subset of reflection. This account also accommodates mounting evidence that reflection is neither necessary nor sufficient for rationality. The two-factor account has implications for philosophy (e.g., that both practical and theoretical reasoning can benefit from reflection) and science (e.g., that reflection can be a solution to rather than just a symptom of negative rumination). So the two-factor account should be preferred to accounts that do less to unify, make sense of, and guide philosophy and science.
I defend the novel thesis that structural rationality just is applied rational understanding. Applied rational understanding involves our grasping, appreciating, or being sensitive to the basic structure or "logic" of our attitudes, where such sensitivity leads us to properly maintain or revise our attitudes so as to achieve coherence among them. This approach addresses two main issues. First, it explains why there exists a puzzling dualism in our rational psychology: namely, that clear-eyed structural irrationality is unintelligible to us and resists first-personal accounts of behavior in ways that substantive irrationality doesn't. Second, this approach shows (i) that, given plausible reliabilist intuitions, there's no necessary connection between the first-person and structural rationality; and (ii) that there is a necessary connection between the first-person and what Tyler Burge calls "fully realized rational agency." In this paper, I provide a new way of defending this important Burgean claim.
In paradigmatic cases of intentional actions, when an agent & ccedil;b-s intentionally, they believe that they're & ccedil;b-ing. Not only is it justified for them to maintain the belief while & ccedil;b-ing intentionally, but it was also justified for them to acquire the belief-before they believe that they're & ccedil;b-ing. Call the latter ex ante agential justification. What explains this ex ante agential justification? This paper examines the idea that an agent's epistemic warrant for forming first-person beliefs about what they're doing is evidence-based. It's argued that this idea faces a timing problem: any evidence accessible to an agent before they form first-person beliefs about what they're doing is, at best, evidence about what they will do, not what they are doing. A solution is offered that comes with a price in one's metaphysics of time.
Reflective reasoning has been central to phiThis paper synthesizes a cross-disciplinary account from philosophers, scientists, and centuries of English speakers: "reflection" often refers to-among other things- conscious and deliberate reconsideration of an initial intuition. This two-factor account of reflection empirically distinguishes reflection from often conflated phenomena such as rumination; it also tidily classifies self-conscious reflection as a subset of reflection. This account also accommodates mounting evidence that reflection is neither necessary nor sufficient for rationality. The two-factor account has implications for philosophy (e.g., that both practical and theoretical reasoning can benefit from reflection) and science (e.g., that reflection can be a solution to rather than just a symptom of negative rumination). So the two-factor account should be preferred to accounts that do less to unify, make sense of, and guide philosophy and science.
This paper defends the conditional thesis: if non-human animals engage in instrumental practical reasoning involving individual innovation, then such animals are likely self-conscious. Against neo-Kantian views that tie rationality to conceptual self-consciousness, and against empiricist critiques that decouple animal rationality from self-consciousness, I argue for an intermediate position. Drawing on cases of animal tool use (hook-bending in birds), I show that representing non-actual states of affairs and combining such representations with goals-a hallmark of individual innovation-requires a form of active cognition best explained by positing nonconceptual self-representation. I distinguish this from teleofunctionalist explanations, which attribute representational combination to selection mechanisms (evolutionary, social, etc.) rather than individual cognition. Where teleofunctional accounts fall short, self-representation plays an explanatory role akin to the essential indexical in human action. The upshot is a novel case for the essential connection between self-consciousness and rationality that accommodates animal cognition while preserving key neo-Kantian insights.
Despite many disagreements, contemporary theorists of rationality largely agree that substantive rationality is to be understood in terms of correctly responding to reasons. While recent literature focuses on questions about the relationship between substantive and structural rationality, or which kinds of normative reasons are involved in substantive rationality, comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of what it is to correctly respond to reasons. Recent dispositionalist accounts of correctly responding to reasons mark an exception to this trend. In this paper, I argue that dispositionalist accounts make a crucial mistake in eschewing an essential role for the agent's first-personal normative outlook. As a result, they cannot make sense of the fact that rational evaluation is a form of credit or criticism. I conclude that a successful account of correctly responding to reasons must capture the agent's first-personal normative outlook as an indispensable component of rational evaluability.
It is often hard to articulate a thought. Why should this be, if not that to have a thought is one thing, and to know it something else? I argue that in fact the gap between thought and its articulation is not epistemic. While it's true that we come to know our thoughts better through articulation, it's not because the thought is already perfectly determinate despite my ignorance of it. Rather, we make the thought determinate through articulation. This connection between the determinacy of the thinker's knowledge of their thought and the determinacy of the thought itself is a mark of thought's fundamentally first-person character.
Thought about the world is interwoven with thought about ourselves and about others. If, interrelations notwithstanding, self, world, and other are three topics, then the judgments p, I think p, and A thinks p differ in determinate content. A Realist, who affirms the antecedent, faces a set of puzzles as to how to understand the transition from p to I think p, or from A thinks p and p to A correctly thinks p. An Eleatic maintains, by contrast, that we can only make sense of these transitions if we treat p, I think p, and A thinks p as displaying the same thought in three different ways. The Eleatic, however, faces a corresponding puzzle about how to make sense of the transition from A thinks p and A is F to someone F thinks p. Resolving the difficulty, I conclude, requires articulating a conception of human singularity.
To stress the gravity of James C. Scott's scholarly contributions, this article synthesizes his claims in various works with Sylvia Wynter's delineation of "Man" in the Western intellectual canon to reveal a new frame of analysis for decolonial scholars: the Scott-Wynter Law. According to the Scott-Wynter Law, every state must possess an "other"-a negation-with which it can differentiate from itself and its ideals; otherwise, if the state cannot validate both its existence and power, then it will effectively disintegrate into nothingness. This paper argues that the modern state created an ungovernable class of people-most commonly under the ideal of race-not just as a means of economic and political advantage, but as a means of literally validating itself epistemologically and ontologically.
From the thought of mid-twentieth century Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla (1919-1963), I develop an account of what I call an 'ethics of ethnic identity,' which include: (a) a set of norms of agency grounded in ethnic identity, or ethnic norms of agency-reasons for action and obligations that spring from a given ethnic identity, and (b) a type of normativity governing these ethnic norms of agency. I argue that one of the theoretical advantages of this account is that it fares well with respect to human flourishing, morals obligations, and freedom and autonomy. I also develop an account of ethics of ethnic identity from Christine Korsgaard's account of the sources of normativity and use it as a sophisticated foil against which my elaborations of Portilla's views can be fruitfully contrasted.
Historically, we see figures of major political movements advocating that people suffering from oppressive political powers cultivate a love of enemy. It should strike us as astonishing: it is one thing to maintain an attitude of concern and empathy toward those who oppose you when you are in a position of power, or even on equal footing, but quite another to maintain such attitudes toward those who hold power over you and actively threaten your life and livelihood. Why is it that the injunction to love our enemies is preached and practiced by those harmed by enmity? I suggest that the skills W. E. B. Du Bois calls "clairvoyance" are at once skills needed to maintain one's own dignity under oppression and skills by which we can love enemies while retaining a sense of agency and self.
This paper explores Karol Wojtyla's/John Paul II's concept of alienation in relation to its antithesis, participation, within his personalist philosophy. It pursues four objectives. First, it argues that alienation is a fundamental concept in Wojtyla's thought, as the dialectic between alienation and participation extends his analysis of human fulfillment through action into the social context where actions occur, namely, among other persons. Second, it emphasizes Wojtyla's distinction between negative verifications of participation and alienation, a methodological nuance neglected or misunderstood in secondary literature. This distinction underscores the subtlety of Wojtyla's concept of alienation and the precision required in its interpretation. Third, it expands on Wojtyla's limited discussion of examples of alienation, arguing for the plausibility of his claim that a unified reality of alienation is present both in concentration camps and technologically advanced capitalism. Finally, it identifies five areas for further research to develop Wojtyla's foundational insights on alienation.
In this essay I provide an account of the human the state of being estranged from the place of our spiritual fulfillment. I discuss three perennial forms of spiritual (including God, on a theistic view), and alienation from the world. Following this, I consider how each form of alienation can be overcome. In each case, I begin by discussing how theism stands accused of causing alienation, and against these accusations, I argue that a theistic perspective in fact offers important resources for enabling us to overcome alienation from self, others, and the world. effort on our part, I am particularly concerned to show how it also requires a posture of receptivity to grace, that is, given unmerited good.
I argue that Kierkegaard and Pope Francis are philosophically similar figures inasmuch as they both follow and depart from Hegel in the same way. They borrow Hegel's dialectic of polar oppositions, but they depart from his idealism and his conception of sublation as that which overcomes alienation. In place of sublation, Kierkegaard and Francis emphasize the stubborn longevity of tension in the dialectic. They also insist that faith, far from being a form of alienation, is that which overcomes alienation without sublating or removing the anxiety of polar tension.
