The Embodiment Thesis

In this essay I articulate and defend a thesis about the nature of morality called “the embodiment thesis”. The embodiment thesis states that moral values underdetermine the obligations and entitlements of individual persons, and that actual social institutions must embody morality by specifying these moral relations. I begin by presenting two thought experiments that elucidate and motivate the embodiment thesis. I then proceed by distinguishing the embodiment thesis from a Rawlsian doctrine about the nature of justice, from the doctrine of moral relativism, and from solutions to the coordination problem of rational choice theory.     

The Finite-Dimensional Freeman Thesis

I suggest a modification—and mathematization—of Freeman’s thesis on the relations among “perception”, “the finite brain”, and “the world”, based on my recent proposal that the theory of finite topological spaces is both an adequate and a natural mathematical foundation for human psychology.

The Decision-Theoretic Lockean Thesis

Abstract

Certain philosophers maintain that there is a ‘constitutive threshold for belief’: to believe that p just is to have a degree of confidence that p above a certain threshold. On the basis of this view, these philosophers defend what is known as ‘the Lockean Thesis’, according to which it is rational to believe that p just in case it is rational to have a degree of confidence that p above the constitutive threshold for belief. While not directly speaking to the controversy over the Lockean Thesis, this paper defends the general idea behind it—namely, the thesis that there is some threshold such that it is rational to believe that p if and only if it is rational to have a degree of confidence greater than that threshold. This paper identifies the threshold in question—not with the alleged constitutive threshold for belief—but with what I call ‘the practical threshold for rational belief’. Roughly, the thesis defended here is that it is rational to believe that p if and only if it is rational to have a degree of confidence that p that rationalizes engaging in certain types of practical reasoning.     

The Happy-Productive Worker Thesis Revisited

Despite extensive research on the subject spanning over 70 years, uncertainty still remains as to whether happier workers are in fact more productive. This study combined longitudinal prospective and experience sampling methods to examine the relationship between happiness and self-reported productivity among Directors employed in the public and private sectors. Analyses at a trait level suggested happy people were more productive. Similarly, at the state level of analysis, people were more productive when they were happier. Among the happiness indicators examined (job satisfaction, quality of work life, life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect) positive affect was most strongly, but not exclusively, tied to productivity at both the state and trait levels. Discussion focuses on reconciling a long history of mixed findings regarding the happy-productive worker thesis.

The Charismatic Movement and the Secularization Thesis

A brief account of the secularization approach is presented with some rebuttal of common criticisms and it is argued that the charismatic renewal movement in Britain, far from refuting secularization, is the kind of religious expression one would expect in an increasingly secular society.     

The Colonization Thesis: Habermas on Reification

Abstract

According to Habermas’ colonization thesis, reification is a social pathology that arises when the communicative infrastructure of the lifeworld is ‘colonized’ by money and power. In this paper I argue that, thirty years after the publication of the Theory of Communicative Action, this thesis remains compelling. However, while Habermas offers a functionalist explanation of reification, his normative criticism of it remains largely implicit: he never explains what is wrong with reification from the perspective of the people whose social relations are reified. As a result, Habermas cannot explain why only some forms of colonization lead to reification effects. In particular, he suggests that reification effects result from the juridification of communicatively structured domains of action but not from the commodification of labour power. I criticize this argument and suggest that if the normative dimension of the colonization thesis is made explicit, a more nuanced explanation of reification becomes possible.     

The Epistemic Sense of the Pedigree Thesis

Jules Coleman has shown that positivism's pedigree thesis has a semantic sense and an epistemic sense. The semantic sense states the conditions a proposition must satisfy in order to be law. The epistemic sense constitutes a standard that can be used to identify the community's law. In this article, I argue the epistemic sense is considerably more modest than has often been supposed. At most, it provides a means for conclusively identifying those legislative utterances that give rise to statutory law. Accordingly, it is false that the pedigree thesis provides a test for deciding even questions of settled law.     

Leaning Into Termination

Ending treatment is inevitably filled with multiple and disparate losses for the analytic dyad. The author sets forth a call for reconsidering termination from a Relational perspective. She argues that many, if not all, terminations, are primed for enactment. The mutual processes of attaching and detaching, of growing close and then saying goodbye elicit powerful feelings and equally powerful dissociative processes. Specifically, she suggests that termination can be understood as co-created enactments of complex unconscious processes between patient and analyst. There is some necessary integrative work that may possible only when ending treatment. Key to this integrative work is the acceptance of both the achievements and the limitations of analytic work for both participants. She argues that we need to suspend our analytic ambition and begin to formulate what a co-created and mutually enacted good-enough ending would look like.     

Heidegger's Generative Thesis

Abstract: For William Blattner, Heidegger's phenomenology fails to demonstrate how a nonsuccessive temporal manifold can ‘generate’ the appropriate sequence of world‐time Nows. Without this he cannot explain the ‘derivative’ status of ordinary time. In this article I show that it is only Blattner's reconstruction that makes failure inevitable. Specifically, Blattner is wrong in the way he sets out the explanatory burden, arguing that the structure of world‐time must meet the traditional requirements of ordinary time logic if the derivation is to succeed. He takes this to mean: mundane ‘tasks’, the contents of world‐time nows, must form a transitive series, importing back into world‐time the very structure that Heidegger says is derived by its levelling‐off. I argue, instead, that world‐time nows, seen at the level of lived content, can be quite ‘irrational’ but this is perfectly consistent with the generative thesis. Adapting Blattner's useful suggestion that temporality is sequence building or ‘iterative’ I show that iteration does not manifest itself at the level of tasks but at the ‘existential’ level of my involvement in a task. Depriving that involvement of its expressive content is what accounts for the levelling‐off of the world‐time now and thus the derivation of the ordinary concept of time.     

Termination as Necessary Madness

The author offers an intensive clinical study, in which the paradox of termination is illuminated. For this patient, termination repeats the schizoid problem for which he arrived in treatment. The fear of closeness is confirmed by the knowledge that closeness will inevitably lead to loneliness and loss. This treatment dilemma opens up an inquiry into the original formulation of the analytic situation. The author proposes that the structure of psychoanalysis—intimacy entwined with the severing of intimacy—may conceal a need-fear dilemma which lies at the heart of our practice. I propose that this dilemma has always been gendered. Resistance to termination has been “feminized,” and a willingness to terminate has been “masculinized.”     

Analytic philosophy and continental philosophy The Campbell Thesis revised

Humanism is most commonly used as a prefabricated answer, covering the injunction to place man at the centre of our preoccupations, not to succumb to the risk of subordinating him to anything else, when dealing with nature, history, economics or politics, with means and with ends. In this sense humanism is supposed to be the remedy for all evils. But this sort of answer is only possible against a background where the question of humanism is forgotten. To return to the question of humanism is to open a line of questioning about the presuppositions of a thinking which makes man the centre of nature and of history. But if we bring these presuppositions to light, will humanism still be able to remain an acceptable answer? Shouldn't we, on the contrary, call it radically into question? – as the instrument, or the mask, of a project for domination – a project of which man has forever sought to be the vector. Levinas showed the invalidity of the conception of humanism which is dominant in the philosophical tradition, not in order to give way to the shortcomings of anti-humanism, but to re-found humanism in a different way.