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Friedrich Schleiermacher is among the philosophers who influenced Karoline von Günderrode's thought. Although this influence is relevant, it has received little attention. Both authors agree on distinguishing "spirit" and "body" or "the inner and the outer" in similar terms. However, there was a significant difference between them. In Schleiermacher's works that Günderrode considered (On Religion and Soliloquies), he conceives of the relationship as one in which the world or outer depends on the spirit or inner. For Günderrode, this relationship is polar, as "spirit" and "world" form part of an original totality. This difference from the philosopher influences the issue that both raised of access to the "primordial ground." For Schleiermacher, the world depends on spirit; the issue of access to that foundation is circumscribed to access to the spiritual dimension. In contrast, for Günderrode, "spirit" and "body" are poles of a previous original totality. Hence, access to the primordial ground does not coincide with the spirit's access to itself. Instead, access to unity is both spiritual and corporeal. Günderrode's differences from Schleiermacher are based on an argument we attempt to elucidate and evaluate in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many philosophers think that we should use a lottery to decide who gets a good to which two persons have an equal claim but which only one person can get. Some philosophers think that we should save identified persons from harm even at the expense of saving a somewhat greater number of statistical persons from the same harm. I defend a principled way of justifying both judgements, namely, by appealing to the decreasing marginal moral value of survival chances. I identify four desiderata that, I contend, any such justification should satisfy, and explain how my account meets these desiderata, unlike some previous accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers have spent a great deal of time debating whether intransitive preferences can be rational. I present a risky decision that poses a challenge for the defender of intransitivity. The defender of intransitivity faces a trilemma and must either: (i) reject the rationality of intransitive preferences, (ii) deny State‐wise Dominance, or (iii) accept the bizarre verdict that you can be required to pay to relabel the tickets of a fair lottery. If we take the first horn, then we have a synchronic refutation of intransitivity, an improvement on widely criticized diachronic arguments. I sketch possible responses that may rescue intransitivity and argue that each response is possible but generates an explanatory debt. I conclude by showing how the challenge here clarifies the foundations of decision theory without transitivity, conditional on some explanatory debt being payable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to serve as an introductory discussion of the European Continental tradition of pedagogics, specifically from a North American perspective. It begins with an overview of the Continental tradition and its main figures. Here, we find a philosophical and, thus, language‐sensitive attitude toward the human, the child; and a specific pedagogical terminology, i.e., descriptions and interpretations about the reality of education, such as educational practices, goals, norms, and organizational forms of educational institutions. John Dewey's educational theories exemplify the North American perspective on Continental pedagogics and its study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. Dewey's writings diverge notably from this tradition, as he integrated into his work American pragmatism and an interest in the scientific method, an interest that plays a role in today's policy trends in the United States and elsewhere. Then again, Dewey took a critical stand toward instrumentalizing pedagogics for political aims. On this point, the German‐born political philosopher Hannah Arendt agreed with him. As Arendt can be seen as an example of a Continental perspective on philosophy that includes a strong warning to separate politics and education, she relates to Dewey's argument against instrumentalization. Thus, this article also features some of her work. The overall intention is to contribute to a renewal of a language for pedagogics by delineating a historical‐philosophical perspective on this specific field of professional practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Gareth B. Matthews' book, "The Child's Philosopher," which explores the Philosophy for Children movement. The book covers various themes, including philosophical communication with children, the relationship between Philosophy for Children and the history of philosophy, and the movement's engagement with cultural diversity. The article focuses on two main themes: developmental psychology and gender issues in Philosophy for Children. Matthews critiques stage theory and emphasizes valuing children's intellect and moral agency. The article raises concerns about potential oppression of children in philosophical discussions and the gendered experiences of adults and children. It also explores the dangers of gender bias in education, particularly in Philosophy for Children classes, and suggests countering it through story-based teaching and philosophical whimsy. The text concludes by emphasizing the importance of addressing gender bias in education and promoting inclusivity and equity. [Extracted from the article]

Can large language models produce expert‐quality philosophical texts? To investigate this, we fine‐tuned GPT‐3 with the works of philosopher Daniel Dennett. To evaluate the model, we asked the real Dennett 10 philosophical questions and then posed the same questions to the language model, collecting four responses for each question without cherry‐picking. Experts on Dennett's work succeeded at distinguishing the Dennett‐generated and machine‐generated answers above chance but substantially short of our expectations. Philosophy blog readers performed similarly to the experts, while ordinary research participants were near chance distinguishing GPT‐3's responses from those of an "actual human philosopher". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the contemporary debate on free will, most philosophers assume that the defense of libertarianism implies the defense of the notion of alternative possibilities. This article discusses this presupposition by showing that it is possible to build a libertarianism without alternative possibilities, apparently more robust than libertarianism with alternative possibilities. Inspired by Bergson, this nonclassical libertarianism challenges the idea that all causation implies the actualization of a predetermined possibility (an idea shared by determinism and classical libertarianism). Moreover, it challenges the idea that free will is a mere choice between prefixed possibilities: for this libertarianism, free will is the result of a creative process of the mind—an entirely causal process whose outcome is not, however, predetermined. This nonclassical libertarianism describes the process of forming a will in a more realistic way than classical libertarianism does. Furthermore, it is not threatened by the problem of chance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That there is a "crisis of peer review" at the moment is not in dispute, but sufficient attention has not yet been paid to the normative potential that lies in current calls for reform. In contrast to approaches to "fixing" the problems in peer review, which tend to maintain the status quo in terms of professionalising opportunities, this paper addresses the needs of philosophers and how peer‐review reform can be an opportunity to improve the academic discipline of philosophy, whereby progress is understood as making the discipline more fair to the global academic community and more conducive to the flourishing of academic philosophers. The paper evaluates recent categories of relevant norms and correlating reforms. In conclusion, it recommends that philosophy pursue the norms of transparency and democracy explicitly when proposing peer‐review reform and suggest that proposals for forum‐based models of peer review are most likely to support those norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierre Hadot is best known as a historian of ancient philosophy and for advocating the relevance of ancient thinking for contemporary lives. What is less well known is that he was one of the first French philosophers to take a serious interest in the work of Wittgenstein, publishing between 1959 and 1962 two essays on the Tractatus and two on the Philosophical Investigations, since republished as Wittgenstein et les limites de langage (Paris: J. Vrin, 2010). Only two of these essays are available (and not widely) in English translation. Part of my goal is to argue that they deserve the attention of anglophone readers. My focus here is on Hadot's remarks about the Philosophical Investigations. Hadot argues that this work produces a self‐defeating paradox because it claims that we can speak intelligibly only within a language‐game, but Wittgenstein, like the philosophers he criticises, tries to transcend language‐games in the presentation of his views. Despite this criticism, Hadot is inspired by Wittgenstein's discussion of the multiplicity of language‐games to argue that the texts of ancient philosophy are not part of the same language‐game as those of modern philosophy and must be approached as 'spiritual exercises', rather than as bodies of doctrine or theory. Wittgenstein is thus a key inspiration for Hadot's historiographical method. I argue that Hadot is too impressed by a faulty analogy between the Tractatus and the Investigations and that he gives a problematically reductive interpretation of Wittgenstein's talk of language‐games and implausibly attributes to Wittgenstein a reverence for 'the ordinary' that supposedly takes the place of his earlier wonder at the existence of the world. Many commentators since Hadot have made similar errors, so his case remains instructive. I conclude by suggesting, nonetheless, that something like Hadot's proposals about historiographical method may be justified by a better reading of the Investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though Plato, famously, had Socrates ban the poets from his republic while Wittgenstein seems to aspire to a style of philosophical writing that approaches the literary, there is a troubling similarity between them in their elision of the self as a self. Saying what he means in the mode of the philosopher or meaning what he says in the mode of the poet, how can the self both be and say itself? The misprision of Abraham's binding of Isaac in the thinking of Kierkegaard, who with Plato was one of Wittgenstein's favourite philosophers, is a telling opening into the question of the self in its responsibilities and its discontents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socrates is a man of faith whose love and pursuit of the truth is grounded in religious conviction. Faith, whatever else it may be, involves guiding one's life in terms of a transcendent dimension, recognizing a reality lying behind any particular experience. In Plato's Phaedo, a literary and philosophical masterpiece, we enter the narrative of Socrates' trial and execution on the day of his death, examining arguments for the immortality of the psyche. The dialogue combines logical argument and mythological speculation, and presents Socrates simultaneously as an abstract theorist and an unforgettably singular person. Distinct persons, such as Socrates, have an interest in continuing to exist as the individuals that they are. When we cease to exist, we lose the opportunity to engage in any activity that is worth doing, such as—emphatically, for some of us—doing philosophy. What Socrates is presented as having discovered in the Phaedo—with the ostensibly absent Plato lurking behind every line in this literary gem of a text—is a way of transforming oneself with an eye on immortality. That Socrates dies utterly without fear is the supreme vindication of the philosophical life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In humanities departments across the country Allan Bloom is condemned and reviled—but for what misconduct? The present investigation into our distorted view of Bloom begins by reframing his transgressions. Bloom has offended eminent philosophy professors by boosting students' desire for a philosophic education. He has emboldened promising young people by teaching them to bear up under the deforming forces of convention and corruption and edge their way towards the question, 'How should I live my life?' A philosophic education as Bloom sees it 'means precisely helping students to pose this question to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not a continuous concern'. The philosopher's interests are not shared by most people. Hostility to philosophy is the natural condition of man. This surprising fact, plainly stated, invites so much anger that Bloom—standing in for the philosopher—is forced to defend himself. The story of Bloom, like Socrates', gives an account of philosophy's emergence, distinctive features and always imaginable suppression. Plato's artful writing captured Socrates' way of life for posterity. This essay explores the nature and function of Bloom's bestselling book The Closing of the American Mind (1987), as well as the purpose of Saul Bellow's final novel, Ravelstein (2000), a fictive account of Bloom's life and death. Together these books amount to the true Apology of Allan Bloom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Senescence and epigenetic alterations are two important hallmarks of cellular aging. During aging, cells subjected to stress undergo many cycles of damage and repair before finally entering either apoptosis or senescence, a permanent state of cell cycle arrest. The first biomarkers of senescence to be identified were increased ß‐galactosidase activity and induction of p16INK4a. Another feature of senescent cells is the senescence‐associated secretory phenotype (SASP), a complex secretome containing more than 80 pro‐inflammatory factors including metalloproteinases, growth factors, chemokines and cytokines. The secretome is regulated through a dynamic process involving a self‐amplifying autocrine feedback loop and activation of the immune system. Senescent cells play positive and negative roles depending on the composition of their SASP and may participate in various processes including wound healing and tumour suppression, as well as cell regeneration, embryogenesis, tumorigenesis, inflammation and finally aging. The SASP is also a biomarker of age, biological aging and age‐related diseases. Recent advances in anti‐age research have shown that senescence can be now prevented or delayed by clearing the senescent cells or mitigating the effects of SASP factors, which can be achieved by a healthy lifestyle (exercise and diet), and senolytics and senomorphics, respectively. An alternative is tissue rejuvenation, which can be achieved by stimulating aged stem cells and reprogramming deprogrammed aged cells. These non‐clinical findings will open up new avenues of clinical research into the development of treatments capable of preventing or treating age‐related pathologies in humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lovers often disagree. We may reject the specific goals our loved ones pursue or the broad values they hold. Some philosophers suggest that such evaluative conflict makes romantic love in its ideal form deficient. I argue that this is mistaken. On the contrary, our ideal of love holds that we can love people for "who they are" (as we say), even as we profoundly disagree with them. My argument draws on intuitive cases from screwball comedy about love amid conflict, love across political party lines, as well as "forbidden" love across religions and cultures. At a deeper level, I sketch an ideal of love I call intimate independence and argue that this ideal is (a) fully compatible with any evaluative conflict, (b) embedded in our ordinary attitudes toward mature love between equals, and (c) an ideal worth achieving. As long as intimate independence is a compelling ideal, deep conflict will not seem like an obstacle to true love. The ideal reminds us that love can bring together people with radically different points of view, and that to insist on shared ends or values is thus to miss a part of the meaning and power of love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers are now wary of conflating the "fittingness" or accuracy of an emotion with any form of moral assessment of that emotion. Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson, who originally cautioned against this "conflation", also warned philosophers not to infer that an emotion is inaccurate from the fact that feeling it would be morally inappropriate, or that it is accurate from the fact that feeling it would be morally appropriate. Such inferences, they argue, risk committing "the moralistic fallacy", a mistake they claim is widespread throughout the work of contemporary and historical moral philosophers. I argue that many basic and familiar forms of moral assessment of the emotions are not subject to these arguments. I illustrate this by reconsidering the idea that to assess an emotion as "fitting" is to assess it as what a virtuous person would feel. After showing how assessments akin to this "virtue‐theoretical" notion of fit may be prevalent even outside of the Aristotelian tradition, I suggest some more charitable and philosophically productive interpretations of the philosophical views of the emotions that D'Arms and Jacobson criticize, and argue that we cannot coherently theorize about the fittingness conditions of the emotions in a morally neutral way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiments have led some philosophers to conclude that the reference determination of natural kind terms is neither simply descriptive nor simply causal‐historical. Various theories have been aired to account for this, including ambiguity, hybrid, and different‐idiolects theories. Devitt and Porter (2021) hypothesized that some terms are covered by one theory, some another, with a place for all the proposed theories. The present paper tests hypotheses that the term 'Rio de Janeiro Myrtle' is simply causal‐historical but the term 'rice' is hybrid. For, whereas the former term is of scientific but little practical interest, the latter is not: rice is a significant part of the human diet. So, we predicted there would be two factors to the reference determination of 'rice': a superficial‐descriptive one and a deep‐causal one. Our experiments confirmed these hypotheses using the methods of elicited production and truth value judgments. We take our results to support the hybrid Theory of 'rice' rather than the ambiguity or different‐idiolects theory. We were not testing 'myrtle' but, surprisingly, our results implied that 'myrtle' was partly descriptive and so like 'rice' but not 'Rio de Janeiro Myrtle'. A follow‐up experiment confirmed these puzzling results. More investigation is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of philosophers argue that indeterminacy is metaphysical (or worldly) in the sense that indeterminacy has its source in the world itself (rather than how the world is represented or known). The standard arguments for metaphysical indeterminacy are centered around the sorites paradox. In this essay, I present a novel argument for metaphysical indeterminacy. I argue that metaphysical indeterminacy follows from the existence of constitutive social construction; there is indeterminacy in the social world because there is indeterminacy in how the social world is constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers often identify forgiveness with either overcoming or forswearing blaming attitudes such as, paradigmatically, resentment for the right reasons; yet there is little debate as to which of the two (if either) is correct. In this article, I present three arguments that aim to strengthen the forswearing view. First, on the overcoming view, many paradigm cases of forgiveness would turn out to be mere 'letting go' instead. Second, only the forswearing view plausibly allows for forgiveness in cases where the victim lost resentment before she had a reason to forgive. Third, only the forswearing view can show why victims of an offense are usually able to know whether they are in a position to forgive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People are not as fast or as strong as many other creatures that evolved around us. What gives us an evolutionary advantage is working together to achieve common aims. Coordinating joint action begins at a tender age with such cooperative activities as alternating babbling and clapping games. Adult joint activities are far more complex and use multiple means of coordination. Joint action has attracted qualitative analyses by sociolinguists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers as well as empirical analyses and theories by cognitive scientists. Here, we analyze how joint action is spontaneously coordinated from start to finish in a novel complex real‐life joint activity, assembling a piece of furniture, a task that captures the essentials of joint action, collaborators, things in the world, and communicative devices. Pairs of strangers assembled a TV cart from a stack of parts and a photo of the completed cart. Coordination prior to each assembly action was coded as explicit, using speech or gesture, or implicit, actions that both advanced the task and communicated the next step. Initial planning relied on explicit communication about structure, but not action nor division of labor, which were improvised. That served to establish a joint representation of the goal that informed actions and monitored progress. As assembly progressed, coordination was increasingly implicit, through actions alone. Joint action is a dynamic interplay of explicit and implicit signaling with respect to things in the world to coordinate ongoing progress, guided by a shared representation of the goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question whether food preference decisions are controlled by innate instincts, or a conscious decision‐making process is still open. The answer to this question is important not only for neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers but also for food scientists and developers. Looking from different perspectives involved in food preference decisions could not only settle a long ongoing debate but also pave the way to understand why people prefer to eat what they eat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1645 Troilo Lancetta saw to the publication of a compilation of texts, Raccolta medica, et astrologica, under the anagrammatic and implausible pseudonym Lootri Nacattel. Most of these texts were translations into the Italian vernacular. They include writings by Girolamo Cardano; Hippocrates; Aristotle, and his commentators; Girolamo Fracastoro; Lancetta's teacher, the philosopher Cesare Cremonini; and a handful of ancient Greek and Latin historians, in addition to excerpts from Lancetta's medical writings. The presentation of the selected texts advances a set of polemics against the practice of bloodletting as a cure for fevers and against astrology, especially its use in medicine. The collection employs a range of authorities both classical and recent to bring anti‐Galenic and anti‐astrological teachings, already present in the University of Padua, to a broader readership. This transfer reinforced Lancetta's identity as an erudite expert in philosophy and in medicine, an identity that he cultivated in other publishing endeavors, which included Latin editions of Cremonini's psychological and dialectical writings. Lancetta's Raccolta reflects a sophisticated employment of medical humanism, which used Aristotelian and Hippocratic texts to undermine interpretations of Galen and promoted Cremonini's teachings about Meteorology as part of arguments about the subalternation of medicine to philosophy, the vanity of astrology, and the denial of the predictive power of prodigious meteorological phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Wittgenstein still eludes classification as either an analytic or a poetic philosopher, this article considers his work under the perspective of essayism as a hybrid intellectual attitude that combines elements from both modes of thinking. Drawing on Adorno's and Musil's accounts, I present four characteristics of essayism that can be applied to Wittgenstein's writing: (a) essayism does not claim access to primal knowledge or an absolute starting point of thought, but typically reacts to given ideas; (b) it is systematic insofar as it is concerned with words, things, and events in systemic contexts rather than in isolation; (c) it is anti‐systematic insofar as it neither accepts the given conceptual system nor strives for an ultimate system in which all things are in their place and all problems ultimately solved; (d) it is aware of, and emphasizes, the mediatedness of its objects and warns of any equation of the conceptual ordering with the order of reality. As a consequence, essayism goes beyond a particular text form, but concerns an attitude towards the world that manifests itself in various forms. It thus turns out to be not merely a form of writing but ultimately a form of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christopher Hill's Perceptual experience is a must‐read for philosophers of mind and cognitive science. Here I consider Hill's representationalist account of spatial perception. I distinguish two theses defended in the book. The first is that perceptual experience does not represent the enduring, intrinsic properties of objects, such as intrinsic shape or size. The second is that perceptual experience does represent certain viewpoint‐dependent properties of objects—namely, Thouless properties. I argue that Hill's arguments do not establish the first thesis, and then I raise questions about the Thouless‐property view and its role in Hill's defense of representationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present piece focuses on the influence of Plotinus' understanding of time and eternity as articulated in Plotinus' third and fifth Enneads upon Mīr Dāmād's (d. 1631–2) conception of eternity, perpetuity, and time found in his Book of Blazing Brands (Kitab al‐Qabasāt). Although Mīr Dāmād's conception of eternity, perpetuity, and time resembles that of Plotinus' cosmology and ontology, he departs from Plotinus' hypostases in establishing strict parameters for each domain. Unlike Plotinus, Mīr Dāmād argues that the realm of eternity is reserved for God alone, while the realm of Perpetuity contains the Platonic Forms. For Mīr Dāmād, the realm of time is an effect of the realm of Perpetuity and a tool for human beings to understand how to measure events in the temporal world. Unlike many other Shī'ite philosophers, Mīr Dāmād's articulation of these three cosmological realms incorporates thought found in the works of both prominent Sunni and Shī'ite scholars such as Ibn Sīnā, Abū Ḥāmid al‐Ghāzālī, Suhrawardī, and Naṣīr al‐Dīn Ṭūsī. Although his most successful student, Mullā Ṣadrā Shirazī, had ultimately disagreed with his teacher's cosmological doctrine, he remained influenced by the multitude of sources that his teacher had used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It might be that intuitions are central to philosophy, and it might be that this is true because when philosophers give case‐based arguments for philosophical claims (in published philosophy), the case verdict is typically (a) an intuited proposition and (b) either left undefended or defended on the grounds that it is an intuited proposition. This paper remains neutral on these global issues, however, and instead focuses on whether there is a nontrivial (or many‐membered) class of case‐based arguments in philosophy in which the case verdict is defended by appeal to background beliefs and not on the grounds that it is an intuited proposition. The paper argues that the answer is affirmative by examining seven such arguments that are referred to as "paradigm cases" of case‐based arguments in which the verdict is justified via an appeal to intuition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers ponder on how to do philosophy and how to do it well. This pondering has divided metaphilosophers' concern about philosophical methodology into two groups, which we could label "pro‐history" and "pro‐intuition." The claim (and belief) of philosophers who are in the "pro‐history" group can be found in this sentence by Robert Pasnau (2011): "The discipline of philosophy benefits from a serious, sustained engagement with its history." Those in the "pro‐intuition" group believe that for philosophy not to slide into the realm of irrelevance it must rely on intuitions to make sense of our present ontologies, rather than study history of philosophy. This paper argues that both proponents of the pro‐history and those of the pro‐intuition approach are wrongheaded. It argues for what it calls protohistory. Protohistory here refers to the method of doing philosophy in which the intuitions of philosophers are informed by the history of philosophy (though not directly influenced by it but indirectly informed by it). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pleasants has developed the idea of basic moral certainties. Analogous to Wittgenstein's basic empirical certainties, they are best described as universal moral certainties which are natural and nonpropositional, and show unreflectively in the way we act. A clear‐cut example is the wrongness of killing innocent human beings. Philosophers have levelled three damaging criticisms against Pleasants' proposal by (i) offering counterexamples to his proposed example of moral certainty, (ii) highlighting some disanalogies between moral certainties and Wittgenstein's basic empirical certainties and, lastly, (iii) showing the lack of arguments and evidence offered by Pleasants to substantiate the claim that moral certainties are natural. To address these criticisms, Laves has revised Pleasants' proposal by providing numerous amendments. In this paper, I develop some concerns about Laves' proposed amendments and indicate that, at present, they are unable to fully overcome the criticisms levelled against the idea of basic moral certainty. Whether Laves' proposal can escape these troubles demands further attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti‐dualistic social ontologies, those highlighting the intrinsic interdependency of agency and structure as two sides of the same coin, are sometimes criticized for failing to provide a satisfactory account of autonomous – capable and free – agency, or even denying the reality of such agency. This paper contests these claims, arguing that anti‐dualistic ontologies only conflict with autonomous agency when the latter is understood in a highly voluntaristic sense, whose ideational roots go to what philosophers of free will call "incompatibilist" intuitions of freedom. Those intuitions suggest that actions (intentions, decisions) ultimately determined by extrinsic causes lack the kind of freedom presupposed by moral responsibility, so when agentive autonomy is presumed to involve such freedom, it does indeed cohere poorly with the anti‐dualistic picture of intrinsically structured agency. Herein, however, an alternative, "compatibilist" notion of autonomy is advanced, such that does not conflict with extrinsic determination and is therefore congruent with anti‐dualistic social ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immanuel Kant was possibly both the most influential racist and the most influential moral philosopher of modern, Western thought. So far, authors have either interpreted Kant as an "inconsistent egalitarian" or as a "consistent inegalitarian." On the former view, Kant failed to draw the necessary conclusions about persons from his own moral philosophy; on the latter view, Kant did not consider non‐White people as persons at all. However, both standard interpretations face significant textual difficulties; instead, I argue that Kant's moral egalitarianism is so thin as to remain almost entirely useless as an antidote to racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noting that the doctrine of the general resurrection attracted renewed attention after the Reformation, and after the atomist revival led to the displacement of traditional hylomorphism by alternative matter theories, this article surveys the ways in which the resurrection was discussed by leading natural philosophers in seventeenth‐century England. These include discussion of how bodily resurrection might be possible, what resurrected bodies will be like; as well as the nature of living conditions after the resurrection. It is indicated that the resurrection seems to have played a much less prominent place in the writings of natural philosophers than the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and other issues of natural theology. Reasons for this lack of prominence are tentatively offered, chiefly focusing on its unsuitability for combatting the perceived atheism of the time. It is hoped that this preliminary survey might inspire others to extend the survey, especially to cover Continental philosophers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Niklas Luhmann, causality is both an impossibility and a necessity in education. On the one hand, the task of the teacher is an impossible one, because teaching as communication is a closed system that cannot determine the learning of pupils' psychical system in any causal sense. On the other hand, one cannot practice as a teacher without a belief in causality, i.e., in a causal connection between teaching and learning. In his article "The Child as the Medium of Education," Luhmann focuses on the enablement of education, despite its impossibility. His answer is that one thing that makes education possible is the emergence of the symbolically generalized medium "the child." In this article, Lars Qvortrup focuses on Luhmann's understanding of causality. According to Luhmann, causality is not a simple, ontological fact, but the result of the attribution of certain causes to certain effects. The conclusion is that causality as an attribution category — and not causality as an ontological fact — is another thing that makes education possible. Qvortrup also concludes, however, that Luhmann is not alone in criticizing the traditional, mechanical concept of causality. Other contemporary philosophers and sociologists have pointed out that in order to analyze causality in complex social systems, one has to select some causal factors and ignore others. While others do this based on seemingly pure scientific and statistical criteria, Luhmann focuses on attribution as a social construction of causality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many philosophers tacitly accept the View: consciousness is necessary for being a welfare subject. That is, in order to be an eligible bearer of welfare goods and bads, an entity must be capable of phenomenal consciousness. However, this paper argues that, in the absence of a compelling rationale, we are not licensed to accept the View, because doing so amounts to fallacious reasoning in theorizing about welfare: insisting on the View when consciousness is not in fact important for welfare value in a systematic and significant way is objectionably "consciousist." As a result, the View does not advance our understanding of the value of consciousness. The paper further diagnoses why we may be attracted to the View, and what we should accept instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recurring theme dominates recent philosophical debates about the nature of conscious perception: naïve realism's opponents claim that the view is directly contradicted by empirical science. I argue that, despite their current popularity, empirical arguments against naïve realism are fundamentally flawed. The non‐empirical premises needed to get from empirical scientific findings to substantive philosophical conclusions are ones the naïve realist is known to reject. Even granting the contentious premises, the empirical findings do not undermine the theory, given its overall philosophical commitments. Thus, contemporary empirical research fails to supply any new argumentative force against naïve realism. I conclude that, as philosophers of mind, we would be better served spending a bit less time trying to wield empirical science as a cudgel against our opponents, and a bit more time working through the implications of each other's views – something we can accomplish perfectly well from the comfort of our armchairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers have often debated the truth of microstructural essentialism about chemical substances: whether or not the structure of a chemical substance at the molecular scale is what makes it the substance it is. Oddly they have tended to pursue this debate without identifying what a structure is, and with some confusion and about what a chemical substance is. In this paper I draw on chemistry to rectify those omissions, providing a pluralist account of structure, clarifying what (according to chemistry) a chemical substance is and defending microstructural essentialism, as I understand that position. I then give an account of the existence of composite substances and objects in chemistry, an issue that goes back to Aristotle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I propose a theory of living organisms that captures the insights of both traditional Aristotelian hylomorphism and John Dupré's "biological processualism". Like traditional Aristotelian hylomorphism, the proposed theory understands material objects to be comprised of both matter and form. Unlike contemporary structural varieties of hylomorphism, however, it does not understand the form of a material object to be a relation, configuration, or structure exhibited by its parts but an activity or process in which its matter is continuously engaged. Following Mark Steen, I call the proposed theory "Hyloenergeism". As a version of hylomorphism, hyloenergeism better captures the inherent dynamism of living organisms than contemporary structural approaches. And it does so not by abandoning the substantialist paradigm, as Dupré's biological processualism does, but by reconceptualizing the nature of material substances as possessing a processual core. Hyloenergeism, then, paves a middle way for those looking for a substance view of living organisms sensitive to the concerns raised by contemporary processualist philosophers of biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of social philosophy and its relationship to the individual and the social totality. The author explores the ideas of Max Horkheimer, who argued that social philosophy should focus on the fate of humans as members of a community, rather than as isolated individuals. Horkheimer emphasized the importance of understanding the overarching structures of being that exist in the social totality. The article also draws connections between Horkheimer's ideas and the work of philosophers such as Hegel and Rawls, highlighting the role of moral grounding and the possibility of a convergence of differing comprehensive views in a liberal constitutional democracy. [Extracted from the article]

There has been growing excitement in recent years about "dual‐character" concepts. Philosophers have argued that such concepts can help us make progress on a range of philosophical issues, from aesthetics to law to metaphysics. Dual‐character concepts are thought to have a distinctive internal structure, which relates a set of descriptive features to an abstract value, and which allows people to use either the descriptive features or the abstract value for determining the extension of the concept. Here, we skeptically investigate the central argument in favor of their existence. Across three new empirical studies, we systematically demonstrate that the linguistic patterns that dual‐character concepts were originally posited to explain are likely better explained by much more general features of language use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neural decoding studies seem to show that the "private" experiences of others are more accessible than philosophers have traditionally believed. While these studies have many limitations, they do demonstrate that by capturing patterns in brain activity, we can discover a great deal about what a subject is experiencing. We present a thought experiment about a super‐decoder — the Atlantis machine — and argue that given plausible assumptions, an Atlantis machine could one day be built. On the basis of this argument, we then argue for the rejection of robust notions of consciousness, which have generated numerous puzzles, including puzzles about the possibility of philosophical zombies. In light of the Atlantis machine, it can be seen that robust notions of consciousness do not earn their explanatory or descriptive keep. More modest concepts of consciousness are sufficient to account for all phenomena — in both senses of the term. This kind of antirobustness about consciousness is a deflationary approach to conscious experience that differs in important ways from illusionist approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers a largely overlooked phenomenological account of nonconceptual experience that turns on experience having a sense that is unique to intuition, and which can be invoked to explain how we come to view what we experience in objective terms without referring to ready‐made concepts. The two early phenomenologists Edith Stein and Gertrud Kuznitzky are discussed as having elaborated two distinct, yet related, versions of this intuitive sense. My discussion identifies two common assumptions of both philosophers: firstly, the idea that the objective character of intuition hinges on the structure of apprehension, which is found by investigating the regularities of the appearance of objects; secondly, the objective character of intuition presupposes a metaphysical notion of things having a sense in themselves. Importantly, both philosophers do not take this "sense in itself" to be a direct part of the contents of experience, showing objectivity to arise out of intuition instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The normativity of meaning—introduced by Kripke in 1982, and the subject of active debate since the early 1990s—has been exclusively understood in terms of duty‐imposing norms. But there are norms of another type, well‐known within the philosophy of law: authority‐conferring norms. Philosophers thinking and writing about the normativity of meaning—normativists, anti‐normativists, and even Kripke himself—seem to have failed to consider the possibility that semantic norms are authority‐conferring. I argue that semantic norms should be understood as having an authority‐conferring structure, and show how this allows normativism about meaning to escape the two most popular arguments against it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here is a widespread but controversial idea: those animals who represent correctly are likely to be selected over those who misrepresent. While various versions of this claim have been traditionally endorsed by the vast majority of philosophers of mind, recently, it has been argued that this is just plainly wrong. My aim in this paper is to argue for an intermediate position: that the correctness of some but not all representations is indeed selectively advantageous. It is selectively advantageous to have correct representations that are directly involved in bringing about and guiding the organism's action. I start with the standard objection to the claim that it is selectively advantageous to represent correctly, the 'better safe than sorry' argument gand then generalize it with the help of Peter Godfrey Smith's distinction between Cartesian and Jamesian reliability and the trade‐off between them. This generalized argument rules out a positive answer to our question at least as far as the vast majority of our representational apparatus is concerned. But this argument fails to apply in the case of the correctness of a special kind of representation, one that is directly involved in bringing about, and in guiding, actions. We can still maintain that it is selectively advantageous to have a reliable mechanism for producing representations of this kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some philosophers think that if someone acts wrongly while falsely believing that her act is permissible, this moral mistake cannot excuse her wrongdoing. And some think that this is because it is morally blameworthy to fail to appreciate the moral significance of non‐moral facts of which one is aware, such that mistakenly believing that one's act is permissible when it is in fact wrong is itself morally blameworthy. Here I challenge the view that it is blameworthy to fail to appreciate the moral significance of non‐moral facts of which one is aware. This view seems okay if we focus on examples of people mistakenly believing that their wrongful acts are permissible. But it is not remotely plausible when we consider other varieties of moral mistake – such as believing that one's action is required when it is in fact supererogatory, believing that one's action is wrong when it is in fact permissible, and believing false things about the moral properties of others' actions and of merely possible actions. The upshot is that those who maintain that moral mistakes cannot excuse are sent back to the drawing board; we need a new explanation of why this would be the case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophy is beginning to pay problems of linguistic justice the attention they deserve in today's heavily interconnected and migrant world. Contemporary philosophy itself, however, has a particular problem of linguistic justice that deserves metaphilosophical attention. At least in the philosophical tradition that is mainstream in much of the world today, viz., analytic philosophy, methodological and sociological mechanisms make it the case that the voices of non‐(native) Anglophone philosophers are substantially less heard. Among the mechanisms responsible for this situation, argues this paper, is the emphasis given by influential philosophical institutions to linguistic style and appearances as signs of clarity, precision, and rigour in the treatment of philosophical problems. Such an emphasis is not justifiable, in part because it deprives philosophy of a wider variety of perspectives. The paper concludes by presenting and motivating a recent initiative that aims to foster greater linguistic and cultural diversity within the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What should education aim to accomplish? What are its goals and how should it attempt to achieve them? Much excellent work, by philosophers and by policymakers, takes for granted the institutions and practices devised in the past. Yet, from time to time, it is important to stand back and to think more generally, to pose larger questions. My book, The Main Enterprise of the World, is written in that spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Confucian philosopher Mengzi believes that 'extending' one's kindness facilitates one's moral development and that it is intimately tied to performing morally good actions. Most interpreters have taken Mengzian kindness to be an emotional state, with the extension of kindness to centrally involve feeling kindness towards more people or in a greater number of situations. I argue that kindness cannot do all the theoretical work that Mengzi wants it to do if it is interpreted as an emotion. I submit that Mengzi's notion of extending kindness is best understood as the exercise of a capacity for intelligently performing kind actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts, based on the concepts and methods of the philosopher Jacques Rancière, to conceptualize the process of gentrification as a scene of sharing and disagreement, a scene in which the paradox of a limited access to housing and a shared occupation of public space occurs simultaneously. Three concepts of Jacques Rancière help us to encompass the scene of the disagreement of gentrification, as the partition of sensible, the equality of intelligence, and the dissensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, various philosophers have argued that we can obtain knowledge via the imagination. In particular, it has been suggested that we can come to know concrete, empirical matters of everyday significance by appropriately imagining relevant scenarios. Arguments for this thesis come in two main varieties: black box reliability arguments and constraints‐based arguments. We suggest that both strategies are unsuccessful. Against black‐box arguments, we point to evidence from empirical psychology, question a central case‐study, and raise concerns about a (claimed) evolutionary rationale for the imagination's reliability. Against the constraints‐based account, we argue that to the extent that it works, this does not give rise to knowledge that is distinctively from the imagination. We conclude by suggesting that the imagination's role in raising possibilities, traditionally seen as part of the context of discovery, can in fact play a role in justification, including as a bulwark against certain sorts of skepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores Locke's theory of quantity and its connection to his broader philosophical framework, emphasizing its historical roots in Aristotle's approach to quantity. Topics include Locke's treatment of quantity principles, the quantity-quality distinction, and their relevance to discussions on infinity and demonstrative knowledge.

Perceptual experience usually comes with "phenomenal force", a strong sense that it reflects reality as it is. Some philosophers have argued that it is in virtue of possessing phenomenal force that perceptual experiences are able to non‐inferentially justify beliefs. In this article, I introduce an alternative, inferentialist take on the epistemic role of phenomenal force. Drawing on Bayesian modeling in cognitive science, I argue that the sense of reality that accompanies conscious vision can be viewed as epistemically appraisable in light of its rational etiology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is a human more conscious than an octopus? In the science of consciousness, it's oftentimes assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. This paper (1) argues that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, (2) examines the semantics of 'more conscious than' expressions, (3) develops an analysis of what it is for a degreed property to count as degrees of consciousness, and (4) applies the analysis to various theories of consciousness. I argue that whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness comes in degrees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]