Global Economy,Justice and Sustainability

Although this paper attends to some extent to the question whether the global economy promotes or impedes either justice or sustainability, its main focus is on the relationship between justice and sustainability. Whilst sustainability itself as a normative goal is about sustaining inter alia justice, justice itself requires intergenerationally the sustaining of the conditions of a good life for all. At the heart of this is a conception of justice as realising the basic rights of all–in contrast to a more demanding distributive principle or a less demanding principle of not violating the liberty rights or other basic rights of others. Although Pogge’s analysis that the global economy causes harm by failing to realise basic rights is seen as a useful challenge to common libertarian assumptions, the acceptance of other positive correlative duties, following Shue, is advocated. Insofar as the global economy fails to realise basic justice, the question is ‘how far can it realistically be changed?’ and this is a function partly of the moral attitudes of individuals at large.     

Zen and the Art of Living Mindfully: The Health-Enhancing Potential of Zen Aesthetics

Amidst the burgeoning enthusiasm for mindfulness in the West, there is a concern that the largely secular ‘de-contextualized’ way in which it is being harnessed is denuding it of its potential to improve health and well-being. As such, efforts are underway to ‘re-contextualize’ mindfulness, explicitly drawing on the wider framework of Buddhist ideas and practices in which it was initially developed. This paper aims to contribute to this, doing so by focusing on Zen Buddhism, and in particular on Zen aesthetic principles. The article concentrates on the seven principles identified by Hisamatsu (1971) in his classic text Zen and the Fine Arts: kanso (simplicity); fukinsei (asymmetry); koko (austere sublimity); shizen (naturalness); daisuzoku (freedom from routine); sei-jaku (tranquillity); and yūgen (profound grace). The presence of these principles in works of art is seen as reflecting and communicating insights that are central to Buddhism, such as non-attachment. Moreover, these principles do not only apply to the creation and appreciation of art, but have clear applications for treating health-related issues, and improving quality of life more generally. This paper makes the case that embodying these principles in their lives can help people enhance their psychosomatic well-being, and come to a truer understanding of the essence of mindful living.     

The Quantificational Domain of <Emphasis Type="BoldItalic">dou</Emphasis>: An Experimental Study

Which NP does all associate with in e.g. “The pandas, the children all saw”—the pandas, the children, or both? The intuition of adult Mandarin Chinese native speakers regarding the interpretation of the adverbial quantifier dou ‘all’ remains unclear and controversial, and various incommensurate theories of domain selection have been proposed. These studies may have failed to yield clear results because they used testing materials in which the interpretation of dou is confounded with other principles of NP interpretation (e.g. zhexie xiaohai ‘these children’ is truth-functionally synonymous with ‘all these children’). To address these concerns, we present the first set of experimental studies on adult knowledge and use of syntactic constraints on the quantifier domain of dou. The results support the hypothesis that dou can take one and only one c-commanding NP as its domain, but falsify interesting theoretical accounts that assume a strict locality constraint on dou quantification.     

Expansion of Parents’ Undetermined Experience in Socioeducational Programs: Extending the Dialogical Self Theory

The Dialogic Self Theory (DST—Hermans et al. Integrative Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, 51(4), 1-31, 2017) is extended here in its dynamic aspects through focusing on the notions of indeterminacy, emptiness and movement. Linking with Husserl, I propose moving the dialogical self (DS) from a clear position in the “repertory of the Self” to an undetermined horizon. This makes it possible to introduce “holes” (emptiness) into the schematic representation of the “repertory of the Self”. Yet Husserl’s concept of horizon seems to focus too much on making the indeterminable determinate. To overcome this limit, I incorporate Bergson’s concept of empty form into the DST. This enables conceptualising the extension and emergence of horizon. Extending Bergson’s concept of organisation, it is possible to see how the expansion of the horizon in a movement of globalisation does not necessarily entail the disorganisation of the DS but rather to its further organisation. Extending the system of DS by Hermans et al. Integrative Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, 51(4), 1-31, (2017), I open by suggesting that movements are both horizontal (between people) and vertical (between the person, the institutions and the norms) connectors. My conceptual propositions are illustrated by parents’ and educators’ discourses in two Canadian socio-educational programs.     

That in the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Martyā</Emphasis> Which is <Emphasis Type="Italic">Amṛta</Emphasis>: a Dialog with Ramchandra Gandhi

This philosophical meditation, which deals with death as question, presence, and even teacher, begins with Ramchandra Gandhi’s (RCG’s) penetrating essay ‘On Meriting Death.’ What does it mean ‘to merit’ death? To provide an answer, I travel through RCG’s corpus, in dialog with contemporary theorists such as Sri Aurobindo, Daya Krishna, and Mukund Lath. RCG implies that the question about ‘meriting’ death, and life, is not and cannot be ‘personal’ or ‘isolated’. For X to die, is for his close and distant samāj a matter of losing him and living without him. Hence meriting death, as also life, is a joint venture which involves deep understanding regarding non-isolation as the heart of the human situation. RCG’s creative thinking, or svarāj in ideas, reaches its peak when he dares to offer an answer of his own to the piercing question kim ā?caryam, ‘what is amazing?’ raised in the Yak?a-pra?na episode of the Mahābhārata. For RCG, the heart of the matter is not the ‘ungraspability’ of one’s unavoidable death, or the perennial search for ‘permanence’ in vain, but our failure to perceive ‘that in the martyā which is am?ta,’ i.e., a sense of solidarity in the face of death, connecting ‘I and Thou,’ which he derives from the icchā m?tyu of his grandfather, the famous Mahatma.     

The Logical Structure of Just War Theory

A survey of just war theory literature reveals the existence of quite different lists of principles. This apparent arbitrariness raises a number of questions: What is the relation between ad bellum and in bello principles? Why are there so many of the former and so few of the latter? What order is there among the various principles? To answer these questions, I first draw on some recent work by Jeff McMahan to show that ad bellum and in bello principles are not, as often portrayed, independent—the justice of conduct in war largely presupposes the justice of the recourse to war. Undermining this independence claim is one important step toward revealing the unified logical structure of just war theory. I then argue that we can see the dependence of the jus in bello upon the jus ad bellum, not just in the content of certain principles, but also in the structure of the two sets of principles: I construct a one-to-one mapping between ad bellum and in bello principles. In doing so, I argue also that the shared structure successfully finds place for the questions central to the evaluation of the morality of war: what is a sufficient provocation to use force, what objectives may be sought by force, why or for what ends, who has authority to decide to use force, and when or in what circumstances? Despite variations in expression, the theory allows for a coherent and comprehensive evaluation of morality in warfare.     

Scientific Realism Within Perspectivism and Perspectivism Within Scientific Realism

Perspectivism is often understood as a conception according to which subjective conditions inevitably affect our knowledge and, therefore, we are never confronted with reality and facts but only with interpretations. Hence, subjectivism and anti-realism are usually associated with perspectivism. The thesis of this paper is that, especially in the case of the sciences, perspectivism can be better understood as an appreciation of the cognitive attitude that consists in considering reality only from a certain ‘point of view’, in a way that can avoid subjectivism. Whereas the way of conceiving a notion is strictly subjective, the way of using it is open to intersubjective agreement, based on the practice of operations whose nature is neither mental nor linguistic. Therefore, intersubjectivity (that is a ‘weak’ sense of objectivity) is possible within perspectivism. Perspectivism can also help understand the notion of ‘scientific objects’ in a referential sense: they are those ‘things’ that become ‘objects’ of a certain science by being investigated from the ‘point of view’ of that science. They are ‘clipped out’ of things (and constitute the ‘domain of objects’ or the ‘regional ontology’ of that particular science) by means of standardized operations which turn out to be the same as those granting intersubjectivity. Therefore this ‘strong’ sense of objectivity, which is clearly realist, coincides with the ‘weak’ one. The notion of truth appears fully legitimate in the case of the sciences, being clearly defined for the regional ontology of each one of them and, since this truth can be extended in an analogical sense to the theories elaborated in each science, it follows that are real also the unobservable entities postulated by those theories.     

The Modal Logic of Gödel Sentences

The modal logic of Gödel sentences, termed as GS, is introduced to analyze the logical properties of ‘true but unprovable’ sentences in formal arithmetic. The logic GS is, in a sense, dual to Grzegorczyk’s Logic, where modality can be interpreted as ‘true and provable’. As we show, GS and Grzegorczyk’s Logic are, in fact, mutually embeddable. We prove Kripke completeness and arithmetical completeness for GS. GS is also an extended system of the logic of ‘Essence and Accident’ proposed by Marcos (Bull Sect Log 34(1):43–56, 2005). We also clarify the relationships between GS and the provability logic GL and between GS and Intuitionistic Propositional Logic.     

No I,No Problems: The Quintessence of Buddhist Psychology of Awakening

If psychology is viewed as the science of human mind, the Buddha could unarguably be termed as the finest depth psychologist humanity has seen. Not only did he penetrate deep into the hidden recesses of human mind and uncovered the machinations of the latent tendencies, he also found the way out of their stranglehold on mankind. As a compassionate teacher, he focused his entire teaching primarily on the later practical aspect. He often mentioned that he taught only two things: there is unhappiness (dukkha) and there is a way out of this unhappiness. The root cause of this unhappiness, he identified as the primeval ignorance avijja, which creates the notion of ‘I’ as an individual entity, the doer, the feeler and the thinker. This in turn gives rise to the concepts of ‘I and mine’, ‘thee and thine’ from which originate craving (raga) and aversion (dosa). The Buddha’s penetrative insight into the nature of human reality revealed that what we call ‘I’ or a ‘being’ is only a concatenation of the five impermanent aggregates, viz. the body, consciousness, intellect, feelings and volitional mental formations, which work interdependently, changing from moment to moment in accordance with the law of cause and effect. By a systematic cultivation of the mindfulness of these aggregates anyone can progressively uproot the ego and purify the mind by extinguishing this fire of defilements continuously burning within it. As the mind gets progressively purified, it awakens from the illusion of ‘personality’ and naturally abides in loving kindness (maîtri), compassion (karuna), altruistic joy (mudita) and equanimity (upekkha) to increasing degree. ‘No I, No problems’, as one contemporary Master puts it.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Wh</Emphasis>-Questions,Universal Statements and Free Choice Inferences in Child Mandarin

This study investigated 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children’s comprehension of wh-questions, universal statements and free choice inferences. Previous research has found that Mandarin-speaking children assign a universal interpretation to sentences with a wh-word (e.g., shei ‘who’) followed by the adverbial quantifier dou ‘all’ (Zhou in Appl Psycholinguist 36:411–435, 2013). Children also compute free choice inferences in sentences that contain a modal verb in addition to a wh-word and dou (Zhou, in: Nakayama, Su, Huang (eds.) Studies in Chinese and Japanese language acquisition: in honour of Stephen Crain. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, pp 223–235, 2017). The present study used a Question-Statement Task to assess children’s interpretation of sentences containing shei + dou, both with and without the modal verb beiyunxu ‘was allowed to’, as well as the contrast between sentences with shei + dou, which are statements for adults, versus ones with dou + shei, which are wh-questions for adults. The 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking child participants exhibited adult-like linguistic knowledge of the semantics and pragmatics of wh-words, the adverbial quantifier dou, and the deontic modal verb beiyunxu.     

Moral principles as moral dispositions

What are moral principles? In particular, what are moral principles of the sort that (if they exist) ground moral obligations or—at the very least—particular moral truths? I argue that we can fruitfully conceive of such principles as real, irreducibly dispositional properties of individual persons (agents and patients) that are responsible for and thereby explain the moral properties of (e.g.) agents and actions. Such moral dispositions (or moral powers) are apt to be the metaphysical grounds of moral obligations and of particular truths about what is morally permissible, impermissible, etc. Moreover, they can do other things that moral principles are supposed to do: explain the phenomena “falling within their scope,” support counterfactuals, and ground moral necessities, “necessary connections” between obligating reasons and obligations. And they are apt to be the truthmakers for moral laws, or “lawlike” moral generalizations.     

Hillel and Confucius: The prescriptive formulation of the golden rule in the Jewish and Chinese Confucian ethical traditions

A prospective convert asked Hillel to teach him the entire Torahwhile standing on one foot. Hillel replied, “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That isthe whole of Torah and the remainder is but commentary. Go and study it.” (Hillel:Shab. 31; emphasis added)Zigong: “Is there asingle word that can serve as a guide to conduct throughout one’s life?” Confucius said: “Perhaps the word ‘shu’, ‘reciprocity’: ‘Do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you’.” (Analects: 15.24; see alsoAnalects. 12 andZhongyong. 13.3; emphasis added)¹     

Higher-order theories of consciousness and what-it-is-like-ness

Ambitious higher-order theories of consciousness aim to account for conscious states when these are understood in terms of what-it-is-like-ness. This paper considers two arguments concerning this aim, and concludes that ambitious theories fail. The misrepresentation argument against HO theories aims to show that the possibility of radical misrepresentation—there being a HO state about a state the subject is not in—leads to a contradiction. In contrast, the awareness argument aims to bolster HO theories by showing that subjects are aware of all their conscious states. Both arguments hinge on how we understand two related notions which are ubiquitous in discussions of consciousness: those of what-it-is-like-ness and there being something it is like for a subject to be in a mental state. This paper examines how HO theorists must understand the two crucial notions if they are to reject the misrepresentation argument but assert the awareness argument. It shows that HO theorists can and do adopt an understanding—the HO reading—which seems to give them what they want. But adopting the HO reading changes the two arguments. On this reading, the awareness argument tells us nothing about those states there is something it is like to be in, and so offers no support to ambitious HO theories. And to respond to the misrepresentation understood according to the HO reading is to simply ignore the argument presented, and so to give no response at all. As things stand, we should deny that HO theories can account for what-it-is-like-ness.     

Contextual-Hierarchical Reconstructions of the Strengthened Liar Problem

In this paper we shall introduce two types of contextual-hierarchical (from now on abbreviated by ‘ch’) approaches to the strengthened liar problem. These approaches, which we call the ‘standard’ and the ‘alternative’ ch-reconstructions of the strengthened liar problem, differ in their philosophical view regarding the nature of truth and the relation between the truth predicates T r ⁿ and T r ⁿ⁺¹ of different hierarchy-levels. The basic idea of the standard ch-reconstruction is that the T r ⁿ⁺¹-schema should hold for all sentences of \(\mathcal {L}^{n}\). In contrast, the alternative ch-reconstruction, for which we shall argue in section four, is motivated by the idea that T r ⁿ and T r ⁿ⁺¹ are coherent in the sense that the same sentences of \(\mathcal {L}^{n}\) should be true according to T r ⁿ and T r ⁿ⁺¹. We show that instances of the standard ch-reconstruction can be obtained by iterating Kripke’s strong Kleene jump operator. Furthermore, we will demonstrate how instances of the alternative ch-reconstruction can be obtained by a slight modification of the iterated axiom system KF and of the iterated strong Kleene jump operator.     

Depicting and seeing-in. The <Emphasis Type="Italic">‘Sujet’</Emphasis> in Husserl’s phenomenology of images

In this paper I investigate an underappreciated element of Husserl’s phenomenology of images: the consciousness of the depicted subject (Sujet or Bildsujet), which Husserl calls the Sujetintention, e.g. the awareness of the sitter of a portrait. Husserl claims that when a consciousness regards a figurative image, it is absorbed in the awareness of the depicted subject and yet this subject some how withholds its presence in the midst of its appearance in the image-object (Bildobjekt). Image-consciousness is an intuitive (anschaulich) consciousness that intends a being that is both ‘in’ and ‘beyond’ the image: the depicted subject haunts the image. Borrowing Richard Wollheim’s language, the aim of this study is to determine what it means for a consciousness to see a depicted-subject in an image-depiction, which happens on the basis of seeing an image-object in a material image-thing, like paint, canvas, ink, paper etc. Restricting myself to figurative images, I will argue against the view that the relation to the depicted subject is symbolic or signitive. I argue that the consciousness of the Sujet is quasi-perceptual, which allows for a better account of the depicted subject’s sense of absence. I develop this view on the basis of Husserl’s claims that the depicted subject is the bearer of norms inherent to intuitive appearances, which concern how the profiles and movements of an object ought to unfold, though they fail to do so for image-consciousness. This failure is not a mere privation for the image as a perceptual appearance but is inherent to its status as a mediated and artificial presence.     

Descartes’ debt to Teresa of Ávila,or why we should work on women in the history of philosophy

Despite what you have heard over the years, the famous evil deceiver argument in Meditation One is not original to Descartes (1596–1650). Early modern meditators often struggle with deceptive demons. The author of the Meditations (1641) is merely giving a new spin to a common rhetorical device. Equally surprising is the fact that Descartes’ epistemological rendering of the demon trope is probably inspired by a Spanish nun, Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), whose works have been ignored by historians of philosophy, although they were a global phenomenon during Descartes’ formative years. In this paper, I first answer the obvious question as to why previous early modernists have missed something so important as the fact that Descartes’ most famous publication relies on a well-established genre and that his deceiver argument bears a striking similarity to ideas in Teresa’s final work, El Castillo Interior (Interior Castle, 1588)? I discuss the meditative tradition at the end of which Descartes’ Meditations stands, present evidence to support the claim that Descartes was familiar with Teresa’s proposals, contrast their meditative goals, and make a point-by-point comparison between the meditative steps in Teresa’s Interior Castle and those in Descartes’ Meditations which constitute (what I call) their common deceiver strategy. My conclusion makes a case for a broader and more inclusive history of philosophy.     

Moral phenomenology: Foundational issues

In this paper, I address the what, the how, and the why of moral phenomenology. I consider first the question What is moral phenomenology?, secondly the question How to pursue moral phenomenology?, and thirdly the question Why pursue moral phenomenology? My treatment of these questions is preliminary and tentative, and is meant not so much to settle them as to point in their answers’ direction.     

Justification as faultlessness

According to deontological approaches to justification, we can analyze justification in deontic terms. In this paper, I try to advance the discussion of deontological approaches by applying recent insights in the semantics of deontic modals. Specifically, I use the distinction between weak necessity modals (should, ought to) and strong necessity modals (must, have to) to make progress on a question that has received surprisingly little discussion in the literature, namely: ‘What’s the best version of a deontological approach?’ The two most obvious hypotheses are the Permissive View, according to which justified expresses permission, and the Obligatory View, according to which justified expresses some species of obligation. I raise difficulties for both of these hypotheses. In light of these difficulties, I propose a new position, according to which justified expresses a property I call faultlessness, defined as the dual of weak necessity modals. According to this view, an agent is justified in \(\phi\)-ing iff it’s not the case that she should [/ought] not \(\phi\). I argue that this ‘Faultlessness View’ gives us precisely what’s needed to avoid the problems facing the Permissive and Obligatory Views.