Eighteenth-century French materialism clockwise and anticlockwise

ABSTRACT

Because of their reliance on mechanistic metaphors and analogies referring to machines, the eighteenth-century materialists La Mettrie and Diderot have sometimes been described as ‘mechanistic materialists’. However, if one pays close attention to the ways in which mechanical analogies and metaphors were used in eighteenth-century French materialism, one sees that the recourse to these metaphors and comparisons in no way implies mechanism in the sense of physicalist reductionism. Instead, early instances of these comparisons appear in arguments pointing out that technological artefacts have functional properties which are not reducible to their physical properties. When La Mettrie compares man to a machine in his L'homme machine, he insists at the same time on the fact that, just like a machine, man is a cultural artefact. According to La Mettrie, man's very existence depends on language and culture, and it is precisely this dependence on culture which distinguishes him from other animals. However, La Mettrie's sceptical stance renders his position towards physicalistic reductionism ambiguous. Diderot, who by contrast was interested in the distinction between the living and non-living, distances himself from the ambiguous use of mechanistic metaphors and insists on the irreducibility of physiological and biological phenomena to the physical.     

Performatiwiteit en selfonthulling as sleutelbegrippe in Hannah Arendt se etiek van deugdelikheid

Abstract

In this paper I argue that, in a liberal society that confmes itself solely to providing free basic education, children from the higher strata are systematically subjected to developmental opportunities that can reliably be expected to give them an advantage in the process of meritocratic competition. I will show how enforcing the universal education policy can include children from the least fortunate families in the process of meritocratic competition.

I make a case for a commitment to the extensive redistributive tax measures needed to ensure truly universal education as the condition of equal opportunity. I argue that this proposal is, in fact, consistent with real egalitarians’ aim to achieve equality, and consistent with their principle of fair equality of opportunity. Providing an equal opportunity in an educational programme could possibly be an attempt to attain equality.     

Grounding and Necessity

Abstract

The elucidations and regimentations of grounding offered in the literature standardly take it to be a necessary connection. In particular, authors often assert, or at least assume, that if some facts ground another fact, then the obtaining of the former necessitates the latter; and moreover, that grounding is an internal relation, in the sense of being necessitated by the existence of the relata. In this article, I challenge the necessitarian orthodoxy about grounding by offering two prima facie counterexamples. First, some physical facts may ground a certain phenomenal fact without necessitating it; and they may co-exist with the latter without grounding it. Second, some instantiations of categorical properties may ground the instantiation of a dispositional one without necessitating it; and they may co-exist without grounding it. After arguing that these may be genuine counterexamples, I ask whether there are modal constraints on grounding that are not threatened by them. I propose two: that grounding supervenes on what facts there are, and that every grounded fact supervenes on what grounds there are. Finally, I attempt to provide a rigorous formulation of the latter supervenience claim and discuss some technical questions that arise if we allow descending grounding chains of transfinite length.     

Identity theft1

Abstract

Psychoanalysis has almost disappeared from the curricula of most American universities, which I illustrate by the case of the department of psychology at my own university, Harvard. Courses on psychoanalysis are very rare there and it is mostly seen as a part of history of psychology and not as a set of ideas that can be useful nowadays. Personality models developed by Freud or Melanie Klein, as well as many more contemporary psychoanalysts, are, however, still very relevant for the humanities. This is particularly the case for Shakespeare studies and I am trying to show that despite the fact that psychoanalysis can enrich this field, less and less students show interest in it or are willing to admit that they themselves may have unconscious reactions. I focus on the usefullness of the concept of projective identification and propose the thesis that is another name for the activities of theater, and indeed for theater itself.     

Materialism in the mainstream of early German philosophy

ABSTRACT

Discussions of the reception of materialist thought in Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century tend to focus, naturally enough, upon the homegrown freethinkers who advanced the cause of Lucretius, Hobbes, and Spinoza in clandestine publications and frequently courted the ire of the state for doing so. If the philosophers belonging to the mainstream of German intellectual life in that period are accorded a place in the story, it is only insofar as they actively set themselves against the materialist threat and, in the course of working to undermine it, actually only succeeded in inadvertently drawing more popular attention to it. By contrast, in this paper I will show that it was not just insofar as the thinkers of the early eighteenth century played the role of the diligent critic and unwittingly propagated the views of their opponents that materialism can be said to have penetrated into the very mainstream of the German Enlightenment. Rather, as I will argue, there was a striking degree of uptake of distinctively materialist claims even among its most vociferous mainstream critics, and that this is the case for thinkers in both the Wolffian and the Thomasian traditions.     

Hidden feelings 1945-95

Abstract

It was a fact learnt early in life: wherever I travelled in Europe as a teenager, it paid me to explain that I was Dutch, not German. And when I left home at 18, in search of the elusive key to good faith and freedom, and came to Britain, crossing the Channel to reach the sole part of Europe untouched by enemy invasion, I felt I was welcomed like a lost daughter; many people told me of the part they played in the liberation of Holland in 1945. And now, fifty years after the historic events of the Second World War have passed, I still like to invoke the ‘magic’ if I can. While staying in a bed and breakfast in Coventry recently, I pointed out to the landlady that a morning call, as written down by the German guest, was requested at 7.15, instead of, as she had read, at 9.15. ‘Oh’, she said, annoyed, realizing the mistake: ‘Do they cross their number seven? We never do’. I was instantly eager to clear my name: ‘The Dutch never do so either’     

Contract governance of religious diversity in a German city-state and its ambivalences

ABSTRACT

This contribution discusses whether specific German policy instruments developed to govern relations between the state and religious communities are a decisive step towards legal equality or of limited impact when extended to non-Christian religious minorities. I research the effects of the 2012 ‘contracts’ concluded between the city’s government and the Muslim and Alevi communities in the German city (state) of Hamburg by drawing on academic research, analysing official documents and interviewing city officials and local politicians. I find that the contracts are a decisive step towards legal equality but bring with them shortcomings that show the limited impact of contract governance measured against the complex reality of (non-)religious life in contemporary societies.     

The Content of Emotional Thoughts

Abstract

In this paper I examine Peter Goldie's theory of emotional thoughts and feelings, offered in his recent book The Emotions and subsequent articles. Goldie argues that emotional thoughts cannot be assimilated to belief or judgment, together with some added-on phenomenological component, and on this point I agree with him. However, he also argues that emotionally-laden thoughts, thoughts had, as he puts it, ‘with feeling,’ in part differ from unemotional thoughts in their content. The thought ‘the gorilla is dangerous’ when thought with an emotional feeling of fear differs in its content from the thought ‘the gorilla is dangerous’ when thought without actually feeling fear. I argue that Goldie offers no good reason to think that the difference between emotional and unemotional thoughts is found in their contents. In fact, the analogies Goldie presents to help make his case actually suggest that the contribution feelings make to the distinctive role played by emotional thoughts consists solely in their influencing the way we think emotional thoughts. However, this position is consistent with Goldie's broader point: that theories which treat emotional feelings as phenomenological afterthoughts should be rejected.     

Describing citation structures in sport burnout literature: A citation network analysis

ObjectivesTo evaluate sport burnout research using citation network analysis.DesignA citation network analysis.MethodsWe began by searching the term “sport and burnout” in SportDiscus, Physical Education Index, and PsycINFO. From the returned search, we then selected and analyzed all peer-reviewed English articles that were published before 2012. This allowed us to create a network of inter-citations.ResultsOur search yielded 102 articles, of which there were 11 reviews (11%), 13 qualitative articles (13%), 76 quantitative articles (75%), and two mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) articles (2%). The 11 most cited articles were published between 1984 and 2006, appearing in 5 journals (7 of them in the same journal). Merely 2 of the most cited articles investigated coach burnout. Top-cited articles typically conducted original research using male and female individual sport athletes and were published by North American authors, with two recent exceptions. The most cited article, and also most influential burnout model, was Smith's (1986) cognitive-affective stress model.ConclusionsThe findings show that following an initial focus on coach burnout, more recent studies examine athletes. In this paper we have identified some strengths amongst the most cited papers, including a wide range of publication dates and a focus on both male and female athletes; however, there were also limitations such as a scarcity of articles investigating team sport athletes.     

What is so Magical About a Theory of Intrinsic Intensionality?

Abstract

Curiously missing in the vast literature on Hilary Putnam's so-called model-theoretic argument against semantic realism is any response from would-be proponents of what Putnam would call magical theories of reference. Such silence is surprising in light of the fact that such theories have occupied a significant position in the history of philosophy and the fact that there are still several prominent thinkers who would, no doubt, favor such a theory. This paper develops and examines various responses to Putnam's argument on behalf of the proponent of a magical theory of reference. While Putnam's explicit replies to such responses to his argument seem to involve little more than name calling, I develop arguments that show that there are significant problems facing any would-be proponent of such a view. While magical theories of reference are far from the strawmen Putnam seems to take them to be, there are, I argue, genuine reasons for a semantic realist to prefer a non-magical theory of reference.     

Properties of Being in Heidegger’s Being and Time

Abstract

While it is well known that the early Heidegger distinguishes between different ‘kinds of being’ and identifies various ‘structures’ that compose them, there has been little discussion about what these kinds and structures of being are. This paper defends the ‘Property Thesis’, the position that kinds of being (and their structures) are properties of the entities that have them. I give two arguments for this thesis. The first is grounded in the fact that Heidegger refers to kinds and structures of being as ‘characteristics’ and ‘determinations’, which are just two different words for ‘properties’, in the broadest senses of these terms. The second argument is based on the fact that kinds and structures of being play three roles that properties are supposed to play: they account for similarities between things, they are what predicates express, and they are what abstract nouns refer to.     

“We want the world and we want it now”: Materialism,time perspectives and problem spending tendency of Chinese

Chinese consumers' spending has been expanding rapidly in the past decade, and along with it household and credit card debt. The present research collected evidence to triangulate the contention that materialism is positively related with Chinese's problem spending tendency (PST), and that present‐time‐perspective (PTP) and future‐time perspectives (FTP) interact systematically with materialism to affect PST. A survey of the general population in Macao, China (Study 1; N = 239) confirmed that materialism was positively correlated with PST. An interaction between materialism and PTP intensified the relationship, whereas an interaction with FTP weakened the relationship. Another survey with a sample of university students (Study 2; N = 223) again found positive relationships among PST, materialism, and PTP, as measured by temporal discount rate. But further exploration showed that PST was only related with temporal discounting among high materialists, but not among low materialists. Study 3 experimentally examined the causal effects of materialism and FTP on PST. When being primed of an orientation towards materialism (n = 33), the participants' planned consumption doubled that of the control group (n = 31). A FTP prime interacted with materialism prime and put a “damper” on participants' planned spending (n = 29), compared to their counterparts who were not primed of such a time perspective.     

Internalism, (Super)fragile Reasons,and the Conditional Fallacy

Abstract

David Sobel (2001) objects to Bernard Williams's internalism, the view that an agent has a reason to perform an action only if she has some motive that will be served by performing that action. Sobel is an unusual challenger in that he endorses neo-Humean subjectivism, ‘the view that it is the agent's subjective motivational set that makes it the case that an agent does or does not have a reason to φ’ (219). Sobel's objection in fact arises from this very commitment. Internalism, he says, is incompatible with the best subjectivist accounts of reasons for action—accounts that suggest that there are what he calls fragile reasons and perhaps also superfragile ones, both of which allegedly provide for counterexamples to internalism. I argue that such reasons do not in fact threaten internalism. I then briefly explore whether internalism is vulnerable to a related charge—that it commits the conditional fallacy.     

Culture and Knowledge

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the relationship between culture and knowledge. More particularly, I argue against the standpoint that there is an inevitable link between culture and knowledge. Central to the argument are insights about change, adaptation and communication. In addition, I consider whether knowledge can be thought of as being akin to a private possession, and the multicultural implications of different theories of knowledge. The paper is concluded with some thoughts on the differences between us.     

Rationality,group choice and expected utility

In this paper I propose a view uniformly extending expected utility calculations to both individual and group choice contexts. By way of three related cases I discuss the problems inherent in applying expected utility to group choice cases. I show that the problem with such group cases does not essentially depend upon the fact that more than one agent is involved. A modified strategy is then devised allowing the application of the expected utility formula to these otherwise problematic cases. One case, however, leads to contradiction. But recognizing the falsity of the proposition.(1) If an agent x knows options A and B are both available, and x knows that were he to do A he would be better off (in every respect) than were he to do B, then doing A is more rational for x than doing B,allows the resolution of the contradiction and also allows my modified strategy to resolve otherwise paradoxical cases of group choice such as the Prisoners' Dilemma.This paper is dedicated to my parents, Arleen Eichengreen and Alvin Richter, for their encouragement, understanding, and financial support. Very special thanks also go to Daniel Hunter, Richard Sharvy, and Paul Horwich. In addition I owe a great deal to discussions and correspondence with Michael Ferejohn, John Ferejohn, Kit Fine, Allan Gibbard, Dale Jamieson, Gregory Kavka, David Lewis, J. Karel Lambert, Alice Perrin, Howard Pospesel, Brian Skyrms, J. Howard Sobel, and Michael Tooley.     

From humility to envy: Questioning the usefulness of sad passions as a means towards virtue in Spinoza's Ethics

In the Ethics, Spinoza defines certain traditional virtues such as humility and repentance as species of sadness and denies that they are virtues. He nonetheless holds that they can turn out to be useful as a means towards virtue—in fact, the greatest virtue of blessedness—in the life of someone who is not guided by reason. In this paper, I examine Spinoza's relatively overlooked claim regarding the usefulness of sad passions as a means towards blessedness. In taking up Spinoza's treatment of humility as my case study, I show that there is a tension between this claim and his other explicit commitments in the Ethics. More specifically, after considering his views regarding the consequences of humility—including, most notably, its susceptibility to envy—and conditions of achieving blessedness, I show that humility cannot effectively be said to bring about cooperation and push “weak‐minded” people in the right direction so that, in the end, they may be free and enjoy blessedness. I conclude by suggesting that if we must rely on passions as a means towards virtue in the Spinozistic universe, we must rely not on debilitating sad passions such as humility, but on joy‐based social passions such as love.     

On Persons and Immortality Symposium on Pedro Tabensky,Happiness: Personhood,Community, Purpose

Abstract

This paper considers Tabensky’s method of critical introspection, and in particular the conception of personhood that informs it. By interrogating the lives of pure hedonism, divinity and immortality from our already existing conception of personhood, Tabensky argues that such lives are incompatible with what it is to be a person, and desiring to live them is therefore irrational. Concentrating on the example of immortality, I argue that, while there are undoubtedly disadvantages associated with the immortal life, these are contingent rather than essential to the notion of being a person. In fact, we have very little idea of the boundaries of that concept. The paper concludes by looking at the consequences of Tabensky’s approach for issues surrounding moral vision and improvement, and new technologies of the person.     

Doing what one meant to do

When I engage in some routine activity, it will usually be the case that I mean or intend the present move to be followed by others. What does ‘meaning’ the later moves consist in? How do I know, when I come to perform them, that they were what I meant? Problems familiar from Wittgenstein's and Kripke's discussions of linguistic meaning arise here. Normally, I will not think of the later moves. But, even if I do, there are reasons to deny that thinking of them can constitute what it is to mean to perform them. I argue that the problem can be solved, in the case of routine action, by the notion that our behavioural routines are guided by what I callmodest agent memory. It will help explain both how wecan have future moves ‘in mind’ and how we can be in a position to avow the fact.     

How to Think About Virtue and Right

Abstract

Robert Johnson argues that virtue ethical accounts of right action fail because they cannot take account of the fact that there are things we ought to do precisely because we do not possess virtuous character traits. Self-improving actions are his paradigm case and it would indeed be a problem if virtue ethics could not make sense of the propriety of self-improvement. To solve this serious problem, I propose that virtue ethics ought to define right action in terms of the virtuous agent's reasons for action instead of defining right action in terms of the actions that the virtuous agent performs. I argue that this revised definition of right action makes sense of the Tightness of self-improving actions and that it can be given a genuinely virtue ethical interpretation.