Internationalism or Search for Roots: A Tension in Modern Indian Thought

The problems of internationalism often look different and require different solutions depending on one's particular cultural standpoint. Contemporary Indian philosophers find that their philosophical efforts have long been too much oriented to the West, and that what Indian philosophy now needs is less international influence and more rootedness in their own rich tradition. This is needed for a more balanced international dialogue. The goal of internationalism in philosophy is not to bring into being a world-philosophy, but a global conversation on philosophical problems that is not inhibited by differing approaches.     

Hedonistic morality and the art of life: Jean-Marie Guyau revisited

The aim of this paper is to defend the position that aesthetics and ethics in sport are not two separate domains or aspects. In sport, the aesthetic and the ethical both arise from sport’s (aesthetic) attractiveness or from the pleasure sport offers to its activists and consumers. To think about sport philosophically, we should find a link and a principle beyond this division as a source of both the aesthetic and the ethical in sport. The philosophy and philosophical sociology of Jean-Marie Guyau is presented as a response to this problem. Two points of fundamental importance are considered critically here: his criticism of any reductionism, and life or the idea of life as key principle of a philosophical system which puts ethics and aesthetics together.     

Should/Can Philosophy be Ethnic? Varieties of Internationalism in Philosophy

This paper describes the situation of philosophy in Japan with respect to the question of internationalism. For more than a hundred years, Japan took Western culture as its model and European philosophy as the authentic philosophy. This tendency was paradoxically strengthened by the post-war humanism. It gave us Japanese philosophers a clear discipline to work in but cut us off from our own native culture, history, and philosophical traditions. In wishing to recover this loss, I argue that it is necessary to distinguish between two forms of internationalism: humanistic and merely fashionable. The latter in fact derives from domestic reasons.     

The Philosophical Personality Argument

Perhaps personality traits substantially influence one??s philosophically relevant intuitions. This suggestion is not only possible, it is consistent with a growing body of empirical research: Personality traits have been shown to be systematically related to diverse intuitions concerning some fundamental philosophical debates. We argue that this fact, in conjunction with the plausible principle that almost all adequate philosophical views should take into account all available and relevant evidence, calls into question some prominent approaches to traditional philosophical projects. To this end, we present the Philosophical Personality Argument (PPA). We explain how it supports the growing body of evidence challenging some of the uses of intuitions in philosophy, and we defend it from some criticisms of empirically based worries about intuitions in philosophy. We conclude that the current evidence indicates that the PPA is sound, and thus many traditional philosophical projects that use intuitions must become substantially more empirically oriented.     

The Awful English Language

Abstract

The ever-increasing dominance of English within analytic philosophy is an aspect of linguistic globalisation. To assess it, I first address fundamental issues in the philosophy of language. Steering a middle course between linguistic universalism and linguistic relativism, I deny that some languages might be philosophically superior to others, notably by capturing the essential categories of reality. On this background I next consider both the pros and cons of the Anglicisation of (analytic) philosophy. I shall defend the value of English as a lingua franca, while denying both the feasibility and the desirability of English as the sole universal language of philosophy. Finally I turn to the linguistic inequality in contemporary analytic philosophy. While it does not per se amount to an injustice, there is a need to level the playing field. But the remedy does not lie in linguistic academic sectarianism. Instead, what might be called for are piecemeal measures to reduce explicit and implicit biases against analytic philosophers on the geographic fringes, biases that are only partly connected to the predominance of English.     

Persistent bias in expert judgments about free will and moral responsibility: a test of the expertise defense

Many philosophers appeal to intuitions to support some philosophical views. However, there is reason to be concerned about this practice as scientific evidence has documented systematic bias in philosophically relevant intuitions as a function of seemingly irrelevant features (e.g., personality). One popular defense used to insulate philosophers from these concerns holds that philosophical expertise eliminates the influence of these extraneous factors. Here, we test this assumption. We present data suggesting that verifiable philosophical expertise in the free will debate—as measured by a reliable and validated test of expert knowledge—does not eliminate the influence of one important extraneous feature (i.e., the heritable personality trait extraversion) on judgments concerning freedom and moral responsibility. These results suggest that, in at least some important cases, the expertise defense fails. Implications for the practice of philosophy, experimental philosophy, and applied ethics are discussed.     

Some Reflections around the Concept of Value: On Valéry's Claim that Philosophy is Poetry

In response to Paul Valéry's claim that “philosophy is poetry,” Simone Weil set out to examine the nature of philosophical thinking. She argues that it is above all concerned with value. In the course of her argument, she lays out the grammatical differences between thinking about value, and other epistemological endeavours. These differences mean that inconsistencies are not to be avoided in philosophy, and that philosophy is not a matter of system building. In the end, she also believes that thinking philosophically requires one to possess the value of detachment, and hence a readiness to be transformed.     

BEALER ON THE AUTONOMY OF PHILOSOPHICAL AND SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

Abstract: In a series of influential articles, George Bealer argues for the autonomy of philosophical knowledge on the basis that philosophically known truths must be necessary truths. The main point of his argument is that the truths investigated by the sciences are contingent truths to be discovered a posteriori by observation, while the truths of philosophy are necessary truths to be discovered a priori by intuition. The project of assimilating philosophy to the sciences is supposed to be rendered illegitimate by the more or less sharp distinction in these characteristic methods and its modal basis. In this article Bealer's particular way of drawing the distinction between philosophy and science is challenged in a novel manner, and thereby philosophical naturalism is further defended.     

Experimental Explication

Two recently popular metaphilosophical movements, formal philosophy and experimental philosophy, promote what seem to be conflicting methodologies. Nonetheless, I argue that the two can be mutually supportive. I propose an experimentally‐informed variation on explication, a powerful formal philosophical tool introduced by Carnap. The resulting method, which I call “experimental explication,” provides the formalist with a means of responding to explication's gravest criticism. Moreover, this method introduces a philosophically salient, positive role for survey‐style experiments while steering clear of several objections that critics of “positive experimental philosophy” raise. Thus, it provides the experimentalist with a more defensible example of how empirical work can have positive philosophical import. For these reasons, experimental explication should appeal to experimental philosophers (at least those working within the positive program) and formal philosophers alike.     

Law, Strategy and Democracy: A Response to Duff

abstract   In this response to Antony Duff's paper, I raise doubts about the method of moving from internal to external critique, suggesting that external critique, focusing on more basic principles in moral and political philosophy, has primacy, and that internal critique, if it is done well, will very quickly turn external. I then suggest a different distinction: that between pure and strategic philosophical work, suggesting that more strategic work might be done in legal philosophy to improve the impact of philosophical work on those more concerned with policy. Finally, I suggest that more philosophically focused work on law and democracy has become increasingly important in the light of developments in criminal justice, something missing from Duff's account .     

医学生临床实习应掌握的几种哲学思维方式

为适应全球卫生事业的迅猛发展,面对医学教育落后于医学发展的现状,转化医学教育迫在眉睫。在第三代“以系统为基础”的教育改革中,培养医学生的哲学思维无疑是其重要环节之一。思维方式必须在医学生步入临床时就要开始正确培养,一旦开始阶段就养成不正确的思维方式、不但会导致医疗过程中的失误,而且再想改变将会有很大难度。本文通过对医学哲学重要性的探讨,剖析医学生哲学思维的不足,阐述了医学生,临床实习过程中应掌握的几种哲学思维方式。旨在提高医学生的哲学理念,促进以岗位胜任能力为导向的医学教育转型发展。     

Can Philosophy be International?

There is a difference between internationalism in politics and philosophy. This paper takes the position that internationalism is possible in politics but not in philosophy, although it is an objective worth pursuing in both domains.     

Two Key Differences between Science and Philosophy

C. S. Peirce made the following claim: If science reveals truth, then consensus among scientists can be expected in the limit. This article does not dispute this claim; it simply assumes it. On the basis of this assumption, the following question is asked: Is it possible to extend Peirce's claim to philosophy in a natural way? It is argued that two important differences between science and philosophy strongly militate against such an extension. Does this mean that there is no truth to be found in philosophy? Are there, perhaps, different kinds of truth (scientific, philosophical, religious, and so on)? But such questions, though related to the present investigation, are nevertheless well beyond the scope of this article.     

Toward a systematic philosophy of medicine

Can Pellegrino and Thomasma's book, A Philosophical Basis of Medical Practice (1981), rightfully claim to be a step forward towards a systematic philosophy of medicine? We try to answer this question by focusing our comment upon three related aspects of the book, namely (1) the problem of philosophical method(s), (2) the alleged Aristotelian-Thomistic orientation, (3) the view of philosophical anthropology of the authors. It is first argued that it is doubtful whether there is as much philosophical method in the authors' book as their reflections on philosophical method suggest. Second, we argue that if Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy is important to the authors, it is not so much because of its methods and content, as because it supplies them with a very convenient framework for didactically ordering and transmitting their views about what they consider to be — philosophically speaking — basic about medicine. Third we argue that the authors' conception of philosophical anthropology bears (in point of method and ontology) more resemblance to the humanistic naturalism of John Dewey, than to any of the European philosophical traditions (Aristotelism, (Neo)Thomism, Merleau-Pontyian phenomenology) listed in support of their philosophical enterprise.     

A metaphilosophical dialogue

Three philosophical attitudes in dialogue are suggested in answering the question posed by the Journal. An inviting, First Inner Voice undeerstands philosophy as a shareable theoretical task that can be explained and understood even across distant philosophical paradigms. A Second Inner Voice, sometimes termed in the dialogue as sceptic, distrusts any metaphilosophical definition of what philosophy is and what it should do, but would, nevertheless, aspire to retain a certain universalistic understanding of its own work, though it cannot be strongly and conceptualy rendered. A Third Inner Voice, regarded in the text as somewhat Hegelian, insists in the unavoidability of strong philosophical definitions both in historical and in conceptual terms. No proposal or conclusion is forwarded regarding what should be done in contemporary philosophy, though an analysis of harm experiences is taken as an example of philosophical work     

Objective Similarity and Mental Representation

The claim that similarity plays a role in representation has been philosophically discredited. Psychologists, however, routinely analyse the success of mental representations for guiding behaviour in terms of a similarity between representation and the world. I provide a foundation for this practice by developing a philosophically responsible account of the relationship between similarity and representation in natural systems. I analyse similarity in terms of the existence of a suitable homomorphism between two structures. The key insight is that by restricting attention to only those homomorphisms induced by causal processes, we can solve two philosophical problems with a single assumption. First, causal structure provides an adequate source for the bias required to ensure the similarity relation is non-trivial; second, it provides an adequate source for the directionality required to move from similarity to representation. I defend this account against objections by Goodman and van Fraassen and demonstrate that it is indeed the account of similarity's role in representation assumed by psychological practice.     

Embracing the “Nation”

The idea of the “nation” has played only a small role in modern political philosophy because of its apparent irrationalism and amoralism. David Miller, however, sets out to show that these charges can be overcome: nationality is a rational element of one’s cultural identity, and nations are genuinely ethical communities. In this paper I argue that his project fails. The defence against the charge of irrationalism fails because Miller works within a framework of ethical particularism which leads to a position of metaethical relativism. A consequence of this relativism is that a community’s moral principles and boundaries of exclusion cannot be rationally justified to those constructed as “outsiders”. The defence against the charge of amoralism fails because Miller does not so much provide an argument to show that nations are ethical communities as assume they are; we are therefore left without resources to discriminate between ethical and unethical nations. I apply these problems to Miller’s treatment of the question of immigration, arguing that it shows that his version of “liberal” nationalism has a tendency to collapse towards a conservative position on such issues. This should not give us any great confidence that the nation, as Miller presents it, should be embraced by modern political philosophy. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Why Talk about Chinese Metaphysics?

Chinese philosophy in the twentieth century has often been related to some sort of cultural or other particularism or some sort of philosophical universalism. By and large, these still seem to be the terms along which academic debates are carried out. The tension is particularly manifest in notions such as “Chinese philosophy,” “Daoist cosmology,” “Neo-Confucian idealism,” or “Chinese metaphysics.” For some, “Chinese metaphysics” may be a blatant contradictio in adiecto, while others may find it a most ordinary topic to be discussed at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this article, I set out to examine two major discourses in which talk about “metaphysics” is frequent and popular and to which talk of “Chinese metaphysics” may wish to contribute: the history of philosophy and analytic philosophy. My contention is that it is usually far from obvious what reasons are behind putting “Chinese metaphysics” on the academic agenda and to what precise purpose this is done. What my discussion seeks to highlight is the as yet often largely unarticulated dimension of the politics of comparative philosophy—of which talk about “Chinese metaphysics” may but need not be an example.     

Feminist Challenges to Conceptions of God: Exploring Divine Ideals

This paper presents a feminist intervention into debates concerning the relation between human subjects and a divine ideal. I turn to what Irigarayan feminists challenge as a masculine conception of ‘the God’s eye view’ of reality. This ideal functions not only in philosophy of religion, but in ethics, politics, epistemology and philosophy of science: it is given various names from ‘the competent judge’ to the ‘the ideal observer’ (IO) whose view is either from nowhere or everywhere. The question is whether, as Taliaferro contends, my own philosophical argument inevitably appeals to the impartiality and omni-attributes of the IO. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God.     

Philosophical Sensitivity

Although much has been written about the nature of philosophy and how the discipline can be defined, little attention has been paid to the ways we develop the facility to reflect philosophically or why cultivating this ability is valuable. This article develops a conception of “philosophical sensitivity,” a perceptual capacity that facilitates our awareness of the philosophical dimension of experience. Based in part on Aristotle's notion of a moral perceptual capacity, philosophical sensitivity starts with most people's natural inclinations as children to reflect about life's fundamental mysteries; when this capacity is cultivated with training over time, our attentiveness to the philosophical features of ordinary life becomes almost second nature. In much the same way an aesthetically sensitive person notices certain qualities of experience not readily perceptible by others, philosophical sensitivity involves the development of a particular way of seeing the world.