This chapter from Michel Serres’s comprehensive study on Leibniz—"The System of Leibniz and its Mathematical Models [Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques]"—examines Leibniz’s epistemological framework. This framework, which Leibniz developed for a large part in his “Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas [Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis],” is juxtaposed against Descartes’s "Meditations on First Philosophy [Meditationes de Prima Philosophia]" and the method of systematic doubt developed therein. While Descartes rejects any knowledge with the slightest possibility (...) of falsehood, Leibniz accepts knowledge with even a minimal degree of truth. Leibniz’s approach involves a progressive genesis of truth through a series of filters, each further refining knowledge. This process is intrinsically linked to infinitism and combinatorics, allowing for a gradual differentiation of the distinct from the indistinct. The filters are applied sequentially, with each filter proceeding through its own oppositions, resulting in a spectrum of knowledge ranging from obscure to clear, confused to distinct, inadequate to adequate, and symbolic to intuitive. This framework facilitates pluralism within rationalism that proceeds through evolving or regional truths. The filters overlap, and only the final stage of knowledge is devoid of mixture. Leibniz’s epistemology is non-Cartesian, as it relativizes truth and falsehood at each stage of the filtering process. It also accounts for the limitations of sensory perception, attributing them to the imperfection of the human mind in its current state. (Translated by Martijn Boven). (shrink)

Michel Serres's relation to ecocriticism is complex. On the one hand, he is a pioneer in the area, anticipating the current fashion for ecological thought by over a decade. On the other hand, 'ecology' and 'eco-criticism' are singularly infelicitous terms to describe Serres's thinking if they are taken to indicate that attention should be paid to particular 'environmental' concerns. For Serres, such local, circumscribed ideas as 'ecology' or 'eco-philosophy' are one of the causes of our ecological (...) crisis, and no progress can be made while such narrow concerns govern our thinking. This chapter intervenes in the ongoing discussion about the relation of Serres to ecology by drawing on some of Serres's more recent texts on pollution and dwelling, and this fresh material leads us to modulate existing treatments of Serres and ecology. I insist on the inextricability of two senses of ecology in Serres's approach: a broader meaning that refers to the interconnectedness and inextricability of all entities (natural and cultural, material and ideal), and a narrower sense that evokes classically 'environmental' concerns. Serres's recent work leads us to challenge some of the vectors and assumptions of the debate by radicalising the continuity between 'natural' and 'cultural' phenomena, questioning some of the commonplaces that structure almost all ecological thinking, and arguing that the entire paradigm of ecology as 'conservation' and 'protection' is bankrupt and self-undermining. After outlining the shape of Serres's 'general ecology' and its opposition to ecology as conservation, this chapter asks what sorts of practices and values a Serresian general ecology can engender when it considers birdsong, advertising, industrial pollution and money to be manifestations of the same drive for appropriation through pollution. A response is given in terms of three key Serresian motifs: the world as fetish, parasitic symbiosis, and global cosmocracy. (shrink)

The work of Michel Serres is often presented as a radical break with the work of Gaston Bachelard. The aim of this paper is to partly correct this image, by focusing on Serres’s early Hermes series (1969-1980). In these books Serres portrays himself as a follower of Bachelard, exemplarily shown in his neologism of the ‘new new scientific spirit’ (le nouveau nouvel esprit scientifique), updating Bachelard in the light of more recent scientific developments. This allows a (...) reinterpretation of the relation between both authors, one where there is room to acknowledge how the roots of Serres’s philosophy lie not in a radical break with Bachelard, but can be partly understood as a Bachelardian criticism of Bachelard himself. This Bachelardian criticism consists in what could be called his ‘surrationalism’: the sciences do not follow the categories imposed by philosophers, but are always more flexible and open than these categories allow. Specific critiques of Serres, such as those concerning the novelty of Bachelard’s thought, the role of epistemology and finally the political dimension of science will be evaluated through a reappraisal of this Bachelardian move that underlies Serres’s criticism. (shrink)

Within continental philosophy of biology the work of Michel Serres has not received a lot of attention. Nonetheless, this chapter wants to argue that Serres was part of a group of thinkers – together with Jacques Monod and Henri Atlan – that started to think about biology in terms of second-order cybernetics and information theory. Therefore, this chapter aims to do four things. First of all, it maps the relation between Serres and Canguilhem, one that was (...) mediated by authors such as Louis Althusser or Jacques Monod. Secondly, it fleshes out Serres’s own ‘biophilosophy’. I label this alternative tradition as a ‘biophilosophy without a subject’. Finally, this chapter explores the consequences of this alternative biophilosophy through a brief examination of two authors whose work lies in the line of this tradition: René Girard and Bruno Latour. Though at first sight different, they both draw inspiration from this biophilosophy to develop a framework that, paradoxically, ‘jumps over’ the subject. Hence, the reason why biology is neither a prominent theme in Girard’s nor in Latour’s work. This is not because of a lack of biophilosophy, but because of an implicit one: a biophilosophy without a subject. (shrink)

Michel Serres’s proposal to extend the social contract to a natural contract has been met with criticism and misunderstanding. In this article, I would like to respond to common criticisms by reconsidering two central related concepts. It is claimed that we cannot represent nature’s interests and therefore cannot come to an agreement, and thus a contract, with nature. However, I will suggest a way out by reinterpreting representation and agreement. I will start with the problem of representation: nature (...) cannot be represented. Specifically, I will present two counterarguments. The first argument is that political representation is always difficult, even in the case of human beings. Representing nature only seems more difficult because we have forgotten the difficulties associated with representing humans. The second argument aims to rethink representation. Representing nature only seems so hard because we tend to follow a cognitive understanding of representation, as if representation is about representing the ideas of the represented party. Instead, following Michael Saward, I propose an alternative understanding of representation as a game of representative claims and counterclaims: political representation is about claiming to speak on behalf of a referent and then allowing that referent to respond to that claim. Then I turn to the problem of agreement. A natural contract seems difficult because it is hard to imagine what it would mean for nature to agree to a particular proposal. To counter this, I turn to the notion of symbiosis, found in the work of Serres. A natural contract, I will argue, need not be a contract of consensus or synthesis. The alternative is a contract of symbiosis, which does not require all parties to have a common understanding of the situation. Instead, it allows for an agreement in which all parties have their own interests and definition of the situation. In this sense, a natural contract can make sense if it is understood as a contract in which symbiosis is achieved through political representation based on a game of claims and counterclaims. (shrink)

Focusing upon the five books of his early Hermes series, this article argues that Michel Serres furnishes an accomplished, unconventional philosophical account of communication and mediation-a structuralist epistemology designed to comprehend the sciences in their complexity and plurality-that, even decades after its first publication, has significant value for media theory. Two key themes within this pentalogy are highlighted: firstly, its emphasis upon motifs of communication, transport, and circulation, attempting to grasp the scientific field in topological terms, as a (...) kind of networked encyclopaedia; and secondly, its attempt to account for the intricate relationship between the formal and the empirical in all theorization. (shrink)

Much French philosophy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been marked by the positive valorization of alterity, an ethical position that has recently received a vigorous assault from Alain Badiou’s privilege of sameness. This article argues that Badiou shares a great deal in common with the philosophies of alterity from which he seeks to distance himself, and that Michel Serres’s little-known account of alterity offers a much more radical alternative to the ethics of difference. Drawing (...) on both translated and as yet untranslated works, I argue that the Serresian ontology of inclination, along with his conceptual personae of the hermaphrodite and the parasite, informs ethical and political positions that offer a distinctive ethics and politics that present fresh insights about the relation between the singular and the universal, the contingency of market exchange, and the nature of violence. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the conception of evil and the prescriptions for its mitigation that Michel Serres has articulated in his recent works. My explication of Serres’s argument centers on the claim, advanced in many different texts, that practices of exclusion, motivated by what he calls “the terrifying concupiscence of belonging,” are the primary sources of evil in the world. After explicating Serres’s argument, I examine three important objections, concluding that Serres overestimates somewhat the (...) role of exclusion in perpetuating evil and that his prescriptions for mitigating evil are excessively optimistic. (shrink)

Presentation given at the PACT 2023 Conference (14th Annual Meeting of the Pacific Association for the Continental Tradition) centered around the theme of "Home and Homeless.".

In The Troubadour of Knowledge, Michel Serres demonstrates, by means of an extended discussion of learning, that our capacity to adopt a position presupposes a kind of disorienting exposure to a dimension of pure possibility that both subtends and destabilizes that position. In this paper I trace out the implications of this insight for our understanding of obligation, especially as it is articulated in the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Specifically, I argue that obligation is given along with (...) a dimension of moral possibility, and not, as Kant thought, as an unmediated fact of reason. (shrink)

Among the contemporary philosophers using the concept of the Anthropocene, Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers are prominent examples. The way they use this concept, however, diverts from the most common understanding of the Anthropocene. In fact, their use of this notion is a continuation of their earlier work around the concept of a ‘parliament of things.’ Although mainly seen as a sociology or philosophy of science, their work can be read as philosophy of technology as well. Similar to Latour’s claim (...) that science is Janus-headed, technology has two faces. Faced with the Anthropocene, we need to shift from technologies of control to technologies of negotiations, i.e., a parliament of things. What, however, does a ‘parliament of things’ mean? This paper wants to clarify what is conceptually at stake by framing Latour’s work within the philosophy of Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers. Their philosophy implies a ‘postlinguistic turn,’ where one can ‘let things speak in their own name,’ without claiming knowledge of the thing in itself. The distinction between object and subject is abolished to go back to the world of ‘quasi-objects’ (Serres). Based on the philosophy of science of Latour and Stengers the possibility for a politics of quasi-objects or a ‘cosmopolitics’ (Stengers) is opened. It is in this framework that their use of the notion of the Anthropocene must be understood and a different view of technology can be conceptualized. (shrink)

According to Immanuel Kant, moral experience is made possible by respect, an absolutely unique feeling in which the sensible and the intelligible are given immediately together. This paper argues that Kant's moral philosophy underemphasizes the role of this sensibility at the heart of moral experience and that a more rigorous conception of respect, grounded in Michel Serres's concepts of the parasite, the excluded/included third, and noise would yield a moral philosophy more consistent with Kant's own basic insights.

This book proposes a substantially new solution to a classic philosophical problem: how is it possible that morality genuinely obligates us, binding our wills without regard to our perceived well-being? Building on Immanuel Kant’s idea of the fact of reason, the book argues that the bindingness of obligation can be traced back to the fact, articulated in different ways by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Serres, and Jean-Luc Nancy, that we find ourselves responsive, prior to all reflection, to a pre-personal, (...) originary dimension of sense. (shrink)

I present first the challenge for epistemology when it faces the dilemma between rationalism and empiricism, followed by a presentation of the ideas introduced by Ruyer in order to ask if they can be articulated to the "third way" in epistemology. I explore the consequences of Ruyer's inversion of our understanding of space which can be looked upon as psychic. I consider Ruyer's refusal to locate in pure immanence the scheme of eupraxic resolution of successful aggregates–as living forms–in our experience. (...) I then highlight the major principles of Gaston Bachelard's and Michel Serres's respective epistemologies, and in a lesser measure those of Bergon and Deleuze as well, in order to underscore Ruyer's refusal to limit philosophy to what science allows one to say, but also in order to finally situate the verticalism of his position. (shrink)

The increasing standardization, specialisation and monetarization of academic publishing is designed to foster quality in research and expression. But these tendencies also pose serious challenges to the expression of cultural difference, particularly with regard to philosophy and religious studies. Scholars from various cultural backgrounds outside of mainstream universities often find themselves marginalised when the quality of their work is judged through the metrics of mainstream academic publishing. Smaller journals which give a forum to local research are gradually disappearing or becoming (...) irrelevant. The corporate control of publishing limits the access and distribution of information making it difficult for smaller regional universities to access and conduct research. But these challenges to the expression of cultural difference also reflect the deeper tendencies of the information age. To approach this problem, we need to consider the conflict between culture and spirit on the one hand, with the flows of information and capital on the other. I will introduce this problem through an idea of hermeneutics presented by George McLean. I will then discuss the approaches to this problem by such writers as Michel Serres, Jean Francois Lyotard, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida. I will show that these latter writers devise strategies to reach something outside of the cybernetic flows of information in the media age, but that their solutions are incomplete because they rely on intellectual concepts of redemption and ignore the concrete practices of spiritual redemption. The issue that cross-cultural journals must consider is how to emphasize something beyond the merely intellectual; how to amplify practice within its expression. I will address this issue in the spirit of a poem by Emily Dickinson entitled “Publication – is the Auction” which supplies the title of this essay. (shrink)

O filósofo francês Henri Bergson (1859-1941) escreveu em seu artigo “Introdução à Metafísica” [1] que o cálculo infinitesimal, o mais poderoso método de investigação de que dispõe o espírito humano, foi o resultado da inversão da maneira habitual do trabalho de pensamento de partir de um conceito rígido para um conceito dinâmico de apreensão de uma realidade fluida e viva. Esse método cientifico e matemático é desse último modo, partindo de conceitos dotados de fluidez para apreender uma realidade igualmente fluida. (...) Por isso Bergson aproxima esse cálculo do seu conceito de metafísica que é a capacidade de apreensão do fenômeno do interior do seu processo e não de fora do mesmo, como é mais comum nas ciências. Bergson cita Isaac Newton (1642-1727) e seu método das fluxões, mas deve-se enfatizar a importância do filósofo e cientista alemão Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) na descoberta desse método de cálculo fundamental no desenvolvimento das ciências e do pensamento científico. Este artigo é uma revisão de Leibniz, G.W., “Naissance du Calcul Différentiel- 26 articles des Acta eruditorum”, Introduction, traduction et notes para Marc Parmentier, préface de Michel Serres, Paris: J. Vrin, 1995. (shrink)

There is growing concern that decision-making informed by machine learning (ML) algorithms may unfairly discriminate based on personal demographic attributes, such as race and gender. Scholars have responded by introducing numerous mathematical definitions of fairness to test the algorithm, many of which are in conflict with one another. However, these reductionist representations of fairness often bear little resemblance to real-life fairness considerations, which in practice are highly contextual. Moreover, fairness metrics tend to be implemented in narrow and targeted toolkits that (...) are difficult to integrate into an algorithm’s broader ethical assessment. In this paper, we derive lessons from ethical philosophy and welfare economics as they relate to the contextual factors relevant for fairness. In particular we highlight the debate around acceptability of particular inequalities and the inextricable links between fairness, welfare and autonomy. We propose Key Ethics Indicators (KEIs) as a way towards providing a more holistic understanding of whether or not an algorithm is aligned to the decision-maker’s ethical values. (shrink)

Opponents to consciousness in fish argue that fish do not feel pain because they do not have a neocortex, which is a necessary condition for feeling pain. A common counter-argument appeals to the multiple realizability of pain: while a neocortex might be necessary for feeling pain in humans, pain might be realized differently in fish. This paper argues, first, that it is impossible to find a criterion allowing us to demarcate between plausible and implausible cases of multiple realization of pain (...) without running into a circular argument. Second, opponents to consciousness in fish cannot be provided with reasons to believe in the multiple realizability of pain. I conclude that the debate on the existence of pain in fish is impossible to settle by relying on the multiple realization argument. (shrink)

In this paper I take up the question of the nature of the doxastic attitudes we entertain while inquiring into some matter. Relying on a distinction between two stages of open inquiry, I urge to acknowledge the existence of a distinctive attitude of cognitive inclination towards a proposition qua answer to the question one is inquiring into. I call this attitude “hypothesis”. Hypothesis, I argue, is a sui generis doxastic attitude which differs, both functionally and normatively, from suspended judgement, full (...) belief, credences, and acceptance. In closing, I point to the epistemological significance of hypothesis. More specifically, I contend that holding an attitude of hypothesis enables us to respond rationally to peer disagreement, and I suggest that such an attitude offers a suitable articulation of the view, originally put forward by Philip Kitcher, that cognitive diversity in inquiry has epistemic benefits. (shrink)

Whether the prefrontal cortex is part of the neural substrates of consciousness is currently debated. Against prefrontal theories of consciousness, many have argued that neural activity in the prefrontal cortex does not correlate with consciousness but with subjective reports. We defend prefrontal theories of consciousness against this argument. We surmise that the requirement for reports is not a satisfying explanation of the difference in neural activity between conscious and unconscious trials, and that prefrontal theories of consciousness come out of this (...) debate unscathed. (shrink)

This article introduces an account of moral education grounded in Zagzebski’s recent Exemplarist Moral Theory and discusses two problems that have to be solved for the account to become a realistic alternative to other educational models on the market, namely the limited-applicability problem and the problem of indoctrination. The first problem raises worries about the viability of the account in ordinary circumstances. The second charges the proposed educational model with indoctrinating students. The main goal of this article is to show (...) how an exemplar-based account of moral education can handle both problems without compromising its structure and upshot. (shrink)

This paper tackles the problem of defining what a cognitive expert is. Starting from a shared intuition that the definition of an expert depends upon the conceptual function of expertise, I shed light on two main approaches to the notion of an expert: according to novice-oriented accounts of expertise, experts need to provide laypeople with information they lack in some domain; whereas, according to research-oriented accounts, experts need to contribute to the epistemic progress of their discipline. In this paper, I (...) defend the thesis that cognitive experts should be identified by their ability to perform the latter function rather than the former, as novice-oriented accounts, unlike research-oriented ones, fail to comply with the rules of a functionalist approach to expertise. (shrink)

This provocation critiques the notion of long-term thinking and the claims of its proponents that it will help address failures in dominant conceptions of time, particularly in regard to environmental crises. Drawing on analyses of the Clock of the Long Now and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, the article suggests that we be more wary of the concept’s use in what we might call chronowashing. Like the more familiar greenwashing, where environmental issues are hidden by claims to (...) be addressing the problem, the article explores how these examples of long-term thinking distract from extractivism, racism, and environmental injustice, making it harder to address the complexities involved. In particular, the article discusses examples where long-term thinking provides a veneer of environmental concern that actually disconnects from the work of building more equitable forms of relation. As a contrast, the article’s author asks: What is lost when we diagnose a problem as arising due to short-term thinking and propose long-term thinking as the solution? Against chronowashed environmental time, the author argues for more complex approaches that explicitly take into account the temporalities of inequality, political organization, ethical responsibilities and much else. The article engages with approaches to time that foreground the work needed to create time and move ethically within it, including Charles W. Mills’s white time and Kyle Powys Whyte’s kinship time. The author suggests that a stronger emphasis on the temporality of community, solidarity, and coalition—versus what James Hatley and Deborah Bird Rose have described as temporal narcissism—can better foreground the kinds of work that needs to be done, particularly by those with privilege. (shrink)

Review of Felice C. Frankel's "The visual elements—design: a handbook for communicating science and engineering.".

In this paper I aim to illuminate the significance of thought insertion for debates about the first-person concept. My starting point is the often-voiced contention that thought insertion might challenge the thesis that introspection-based self-ascriptions of psychological properties are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person concept. In the first part of the paper I explain what a thought insertion-based counterexample to this immunity thesis should be like. I then argue that various thought insertion-involving scenarios do not give (...) rise to successful counterexamples to the immunity of the target class of self-ascriptions. In the second part of the paper I turn to defend a Metasemantic Explanation of why the immunity thesis holds. The Metasemantic Explanation rests on a reference-fixing story about the mental ‘I’ whose key contention is that introspective impressions play an essential role in fixing its reference. It is part of my argument in favour of the proposed reference-fixing story, as well as of the Metasemantic Explanation, that they respect the paradigmatic features of self-ascriptions of inserted thoughts. (shrink)

The presence of easily accessible yet unpossessed evidence seems to matter epistemically. In this chapter I offer an inquiry-theoretic explanation of this datum. I argue that agents in the target cases fail to be competent inquirers and gather the relevant easily accessible evidence. This offers a deflationary explanation of the initial datum. I then show how to inflate this explanation to vindicate the thought that unpossessed evidence has defeating power over the justificatory status of one’s beliefs. The inflationary explanation rests (...) on two main planks. First, the subject who believes that p in the target cases ought to have gathered the target piece of evidence that bears on p. Secondly, such a duty is incompatible with justifiedly believing p. Along the way, the chapter offers a framework for thinking about zetetic competence, comments on the existence of epistemic duties of inquiry, and discusses the relationship between such duties and traditional epistemic norms of belief. (shrink)

The surface grammar of reports such as ‘I have a pain in my leg’ suggests that pains are objects which are spatially located in parts of the body. We show that the parallel construction is not available in Mandarin. Further, four philosophically important grammatical features of such reports cannot be reproduced. This suggests that arguments and puzzles surrounding such reports may be tracking artefacts of English, rather than philosophically significant features of the world.

While possessing moral understanding is agreed to be a core epistemic and moral value, it remains a matter of dispute whether it can be acquired via testimony and whether it involves an ability to engage in moral reasoning. This paper addresses both issues with the aim of contributing to the current debates on moral understanding in moral epistemology and virtue ethics. It is argued that moral epistemologists should stop appealing to the argument from the transmissibility of moral understanding to make (...) a case for their favorite view of moral understanding. It is also argued that proponents of exemplarist moral theories cannot remain neutral on whether the ability to engage in moral reasoning is a necessary component of moral understanding. (shrink)

Permissivism is the view that, sometimes, there is more than one doxastic attitude that is perfectly rationalised by the evidence. Impermissivism is the denial of Permissivism. Several philosophers, with the aim to defend either Impermissivism or Permissivism, have recently discussed the value of (im)permissive rationality. This paper focuses on one kind of value-conferring considerations, stemming from the so-called “truth-connection” enjoyed by rational doxastic attitudes. The paper vindicates the truth-connected value of permissive rationality by pursuing a novel strategy which rests on (...) two main planks: first, there is a distinction between a fine-grained and a coarse-grained type-individuation of belief-forming methods. Secondly, different kinds of decision-theoretic reasoning, i.e. expected-accuracy reasoning and accuracy-domination reasoning, must be paired with a fine-grained and a coarse-grained type-individuation of methods, respectively. I argue that while the first pair is wholly irrelevant to the question of the truth-connection, the second affords the means to a permissivist explanation of the truth-connected value of rationality. (shrink)

Ad hoc concepts feature prominently in lexical pragmatics. A speaker can use a word or phrase to communicate an ad hoc concept that is different from the lexically encoded concept and the hearer can construct the intended ad hoc concept pragmatically during utterance comprehension. I argue that some philosophical concepts have origins as ad hoc concepts, and such concepts pose a challenge for experimental philosophy regarding these concepts. To illustrate this, I consider philosophers’ ‘what-it’s-like’-concepts and experimental philosophy of consciousness.

This article presents a fairness principle for evaluating decision-making based on predictions: a decision rule is unfair when the individuals directly impacted by the decisions who are equal with respect to the features that justify inequalities in outcomes do not have the same statistical prospects of being benefited or harmed by them, irrespective of their socially salient morally arbitrary traits. The principle can be used to evaluate prediction-based decision-making from the point of view of a wide range of antecedently specified (...) substantive views about justice in outcome distributions. (shrink)

As for most measurement procedures in the course of their development, measures of consciousness face the problem of coordination, i.e., the problem of knowing whether a measurement procedure actually measures what it is intended to measure. I focus on the case of the Perceptual Awareness Scale to illustrate how ignoring this problem leads to ambiguous interpretations of subjective reports in consciousness science. In turn, I show that empirical results based on this measurement procedure might be systematically misinterpreted.

Zeugmatic oddness is a linguistic intuition of oddness with respect to an instance of zeugma, i.e. a sentence containing an instance of a homonymous or polysemous word being used in different meanings or senses simultaneously. Zeugmatic oddness is important for philosophical debates as philosophers often use it to argue that a particular philosophically interesting expression is ambiguous and that the phenomenon referred to by the expression is disunified. This paper takes a closer look at zeugmatic oddness. Focusing on relevant psycholinguistic (...) literature on homonymy and polysemy processing and representation, I argue that there are two different ways in which zeugmatic oddness can arise. Philosophical upshots concerning zeugmatic oddness are then drawn. (shrink)

While it seems hard to deny the epistemic significance of a disagreement with our acknowledged epistemic peers, there are certain disagreements, such as philosophical disagreements, which appear to be permissibly sustainable. These two claims, each independently plausible, are jointly puzzling. This paper argues for a solution to this puzzle. The main tenets of the solution are two. First, the peers ought to engage in a deliberative activity of discovering more about their epistemic position vis-à-vis the issue at stake. Secondly, the (...) peers are permitted to do so while entertaining a sui generis doxastic attitude of hypothesis. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION THE PROBLEM OF THE BEING OF THE EGO AND THE FUNDAMENTAL PRESUPPOSITIONS OF ONTOLOGY "Mit dem cogito sum beansprucht Descartes, der Philosophic ...

The article investigates the significance of the so-called phenomenon of apparent faultless disagreement for debates about the semantics of taste discourse. Two kinds of description of the phenomenon are proposed. The first ensures that faultless disagreement raises a distinctive philosophical challenge; yet, it is argued that Contextualist, Realist and Relativist semantic theories do not account for this description. The second, by contrast, makes the phenomenon irrelevant for the problem of what the right semantics of taste discourse should be. Lastly, the (...) following dilemma is assessed: either faultless disagreement provides strong evidence against semantic theories; or its significance should be considerably downplayed. (shrink)

The paper proposes an account of the rational response to higher‐order evidence whose key claim is that whenever we acquire such evidence we ought to engage in the inquiring activity of double‐checking. Combined with a principle that establishes a connection between rational inquiry and rational belief retention, the account offers a novel explanation of the alleged impermissibility of retaining one's belief in the face of higher‐order evidence. It is argued that this explanation is superior to the main competitor view which (...) appeals to the notion of defeat. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that perceptual‐motor simulations are often constitutively involved in language comprehension. Call this “the simulation view of language comprehension”. This article applies the simulation view to illuminate the much‐discussed phenomenon of copredication, where a noun permits multiple predications which seem to select different senses of the noun simultaneously. On the proposed account, the (in)felicitousness of a copredicational sentence is closely associated with the perceptual simulations that the language user deploys in comprehending the sentence.

Tradition has it that first-person thought is somehow special. It is also commonplace to maintain that the first-person concept obeys a rule of reference to the effect that any token first-person thought is about the thinker of that thought. Following Annalisa Coliva and, more recently, Santiago Echeverri, I take the specialness claim to be the claim that thinking a first-person thought comes with a certain guarantee of its pattern of reference. Echeverri maintains that such a guarantee is explained by a (...) fairly flatfooted interpretation of the thinker-reflexive rule. I argue, however, that the explanatory aspirations of the thinker-reflexive rule are fulfilled only if we accept an epistemically loaded gloss on the notion of a thinker of a thought featuring the rule. That gloss is unpacked in terms of the subject’s ability to be acquainted with the phenomenal character of their thoughts. (shrink)

This paper explores what happens when artists fail to execute their goals. I argue that taxonomies of failure in general, and of failed-art in particular, should focus on the attempts which generate the failed-entity, and that to do this they must be sensitive to an attempt’s orientation. This account of failed-attempts delivers three important new insights into artistic practice: there can be no accidental art, only deliberate and incidental art; art’s intention-dependence entails the possibility of performative failure, but not of (...) failed-art; and art’s intention-dependence is perfectly compatible with the role that luck plays in artistic creation. (shrink)

The premise that every work belongs to an art-kind has recently inspired a kind-centred approach to theories of art. Kind-centred analyses posit that we should abandon the project of giving a general theory of art and focus instead on giving theories of the arts. The main difficulty, however, is to explain what makes a given kind an art-kind in the first place. Kind-centred theorists have passed this buck on to appreciative practices, but this move proves unsatisfactory. I argue that the (...) root of this dissatisfaction stems not from the act of kicking the can down the road, but from not kicking it far enough. The missing ingredient, I argue, is a notion of convention which does the work of marking the difference between art and non-art for a given physical medium. (shrink)

Francis Sparshott introduced the term ‘remote art’ in his 1982 presidential address to the American Society for Aesthetics. The concept has not drawn much notice since—although individual remote arts, such as palaeolithic art and the artistic practices of subaltern cultures, have enjoyed their fair share of attention from aestheticians. This paper explores what unites some artistic practices under the banner of remote art, arguing that remoteness is primarily a matter of some audience’s epistemic distance from a work’s context of creation. (...) I introduce palaeoart—the depiction of extinct prehistoric fauna and flora, especially from the Mesozoic—as a paradigmatic case of remote art, showing that its remoteness is secured both by the deceptively rich cognitive load required for its creation and appreciation, and by its existence at the margins of the institutional artworld, which ensures that this cognitive loading is largely obscured. Too often, remote art is not just inscrutable, it is invisible to us. (shrink)