Recommending beauty: semantics and pragmatics of aesthetic predicates

The paper offers a semantic and pragmatic analysis of statements of the form ‘x is beautiful’ as involving a double speech act: first, a report that x is beautiful relative to the speaker’s aesthetic standard, along the lines of naive contextualism; second, the speaker’s recommendation that her audience comes to share her appraisal of x as beautiful. We suggest that attributions of beauty tend to convey such a recommendation due to the role that aesthetic practices play in fostering and enhancing interpersonal coordination. Aesthetic practices are driven by a disposition towards the attunement of attitudes and aesthetic recommendations contribute to forwarding such attunement. Our view is motivated by an attempt to satisfy the following set of desiderata: to account for (i) the experiential nature of aesthetic judgments, (ii) disagreements in aesthetic debates, and (iii) the normative aspirations of aesthetic discourse, as well as to avoid appealing to (iv) error theory and (v) realist ontological commitments.     

Do We Share a Project of Being in the World Well?

ABSTRACT

I question whether the flourishing that McMullin presents as negotiating the demands of three distinct normative domains is itself normative. If it is, I argue it must be incremental in some way to McMullin’s three normative domains, because there is no single, plausible, structural inter-relation between the domains. This leads to regress. If flourishing is not normative, then it undermines the unity of reason that is a cornerstone of McMullin’s account. These difficulties lead to further consideration of flourishing conceived, as McMullin does, as a project of living well in the world. What is the content of this project and what role can it play? If it is merely formal, i.e. without content, then it can be shared, but is empty, therefore without a role. If it has content, and so plays a role in balancing or unifying one’s responses to the normative domains, then that content comes, McMullin claims, from answers to the question, “Who am I?” However, I claim that this question and the answers it is likely to elicit cannot supply the content required. Even if it could, it could not do so to produce a project that is plausibly normative, leaving it thus disconnected from the normative domains. I conclude that the normative character of McMullin’s notion of flourishing cannot be made good. My tentative suggestions are to jettison flourishing as a central part of conceiving a life well-lived; or to swap Aristotle for Plato to supplant flourishing with the idea of a good life.     

Disagreement, Ambivalence, and Engagement: The Political Consequences of Heterogeneous Networks

Individuals with similar political orientations may find themselves in dissimilar social and political surroundings, with important consequences for the flow of political information among citizens. Analyses of data from the post-election survey of the 1900 National Election Study show that some individuals reside within extensive networks of political discussion and communication, whereas others are politically isolated. With respect to presidential candidate preference in 1900, some citizens in networks were surrounded by discussants who agreed with their preference, others by discussants who held ambiguous and undetermined preferences, and still others by discussants who held politically divergent preferences. These preference distributions have various implications for the formation of political opinion and for levels of political engagement and turnout.     

Prolegomena to any Future History of Analytic Philosophy

Abstract: The careful historical and metaphilosophical attention recently bestowed upon analytic philosophy has revealed that traditional ways of defining it are inadequate. In the face of this inadequacy, contemporary authors have proposed new definitions that detach analytic philosophy from its turn of the twentieth century origins. I argue that this contemporary trend in defining analytic philosophy is misguided, and that it diminishes the likelihood of our coming to an accurate historical and metaphilosophical understanding of it. This is especially unsatisfactory since such understanding is essential to finding an adequate remedy for the widely perceived ills of contemporary analytic philosophy. I suggest that a more fruitful approach to developing such understanding might begin with treating the unity of analytic philosophy as illusory.     

Perceived Disagreement and Heterogeneity in Social Networks: Distinct Effects on Political Participation

ABSTRACT

Although the coexistence of conflicting opinions in society is the very core of democracy, people’s tendency to avoid conflict could keep them away from political discussion and participation. On the other hand, being exposed to diverse political views could motivate citizens to participate. We conducted secondary analyses on two 2013 ITANES (Italian National Election Studies) probability samples in order to test the hypotheses that perceived network disagreement (between an individual and her/his discussion partners) and heterogeneity (among discussants holding different political opinions) exert independent and opposite effects on political participation through motivation and knowledge. Results converged in showing that disagreement dampened, while heterogeneity encouraged, political participation (voting, propensity to abstain in future, offline and online activism, and timing of vote decision) by decreasing or increasing, respectively, political interest and, in turn, knowledge.     

论马克思实践哲学的政治意蕴

In order to deepen the studies on the philosophy of practice, it is essential to explore the political significance of Marx's philosophy of practice. Marx's philosophy of practice is rooted in the problem of modernity and the separation between “individual subjectivity” and “societal community” in the modern context is the basic background of Marx's practical philosophy. It is the basic interest of Marx's philosophy of practice to find a way to end this separation via critique of civil society. Therefore, Marx's philosophy of practice has a clear significance, which manifests in the following aspects: one is “liberation politics,” and the other, “the regulatory mode of the socio-political institution.” Translated by Zhang Lin from Zhexue Yanjiu 哲学研究 (Philosophical Research), 2007, (1): 3–10     

Identity and Difference: A Hundred Years of Analytic Philosophy

At its origins, analytic philosophy is an interest in language, science, logic, analysis, and a systematic rather than a historical approach to philosophical problems. Early analytic philosophers were famous for making clear conceptual distinctions and for couching them in comprehensible and lucid sentences. It is argued that this situation is changing, that analytic philosophy is turning into its mirror image and is thereby becoming more like the kind of philosophy that it used to oppose.     

What’s wrong with contemporary philosophy?

Philosophy in the West divides into three parts: Analytic Philosophy (AP), Continental Philosophy (CP), and History of Philosophy (HP). But all three parts are in a bad way. AP is sceptical about the claim that philosophy can be a science, and hence is uninterested in the real world. CP is never pursued in a properly theoretical way, and its practice is tailor-made for particular political and ethical conclusions. HP is mostly developed on a regionalist basis: what is studied is determined by the nation or culture to which a philosopher belongs, rather than by the objective value of that philosopher’s work. Progress in philosophy can only be attained by avoiding these pitfalls.     

Detection of words versus good old counting: A note on Mizrahi and Dickinson, “The analytic-continental divide in philosophical practice”

In a recent Metaphilosophy article, Moti Mizrahi and Michael Dickinson argue against characterizing the divide between analytical and continental philosophy as a divide in the use of arguments. This hypothesis is rejected on the basis of a text-mining approach. The present paper argues that the results they extracted do not answer the questions they set out to answer as well as would have been possible. This is due to Mizrahi and Dickinson's choice to disregard duplicate occurrences of argument word pairs, their main indicator for the occurrence of arguments in articles. This paper reconstructs their method by now also counting duplicates. A small corpus (n = 436) of recent (2015–2021) analytical and continental articles is used to rerun the experiment; the results oppose Mizrahi and Dickinson's and suggest that arguments (as operationalized by Mizrahi and Dickinson) occur more in analytical articles. The paper argues that part of the discrepancy derives from the specific methodological choices they made.