In recent years, a number of moral philosophers have held both that there are particular moral truths, and also that there are no general moral principles which explain these particular moral truths--either because there simply are no moral principles, or because moral principles are themselves explained by or derived from particular moral truths rather than vice versa. Often this combination of doctrines is held by philosophers interested in reviving an Aristotelean approach..

In this paper, I shed light on Kant’s notion of Erkenntnis or cognition by focusing on texts pertaining to Kant’s thoughts on logic. Although a passage from Kant’s Logik is widely referred to for understanding Kant’s conception of Erkenntnis, this work was not penned by Kant himself but rather compiled by Benjamin Jäsche. So, it is imperative to determine its fidelity to Kant’s thought. I compare the passage with other sources, including Reflexionen and students’ lecture notes. I argue that several (...) of the text’s peculiarities stem from Jäsche rather than Kant, but that nevertheless Jäsche largely got Kant's view right, with two major exceptions. First, Jäsche’s text fails to reproduce Kant’s key thesis that kennen and verstehen are jointly sufficient for Erkenntnis. Second, Jäsche’s text gives the false impression that Kant holds that animals have consciousness. (shrink)

Decision theory and folk psychology both purport to represent the same phenomena: our belief-like and desire- and preference-like states. They also purport to do the same work with these representations: explain and predict our actions. But they do so with different sets of concepts. There's much at stake in whether one of these two sets of concepts can be accounted for with the other. Without such an account, we'd have two competing representations and systems of prediction and explanation, a dubious (...) dualism. Folk psychology structures our daily lives and has proven fruitful in the study of mind and ethics, while decision theory is pervasive in various disciplines, including the quantitative social sciences, especially economics, and philosophy. My interest is in accounting for folk psychology with decision theory -- in particular, for believe and wanting, which decision theory omits. Many have attempted this task for belief. (The Lockean Thesis says that there is such an account.) I take up the parallel task for wanting, which has received far less attention. I propose necessary and sufficient conditions, stated in terms of decision theory, for when you're truly said to want; I give an analogue of the Lockean Thesis for wanting. My account is an alternative to orthodox accounts that link wanting to preference (e.g. Stalnaker (1984), Lewis (1986)), which I argue are false. I argue further that want ascriptions are context-sensitive. My account explains this context-sensitivity, makes sense of conflicting desires, and accommodates phenomena that motivate traditional theses on which 'want' has multiple senses (e.g. all-things-considered vs. pro tanto). (shrink)

According to the Desiderative Lockean Thesis, there are necessary and sufficient conditions, stated in the terms of decision theory, for when one is truly said to want. What one is truly said to want, it turns out, varies remarkably by context—and to an underappreciated degree. To explain this context-sensitivity—and closure properties of wanting—I advance a Desiderative Lockean view that is distinctive in having two context-sensitive parameters.

You want to see the concert, but don’t want to take a long drive (even though the concert is far away). Such *strongly conflicting desire ascriptions* are, I show, wrongly predicted incompatible by standard semantics. I then object to possible solutions, and give my own, based on *some-things-considered desire*. Considering the fun of the concert, but ignoring the drive, you want to see the concert; considering the boredom of the drive, but ignoring the concert, you don’t want to take the (...) drive. (shrink)

In recent years, campaigns across the globe have called for the removal of objects symbolic of white supremacy. This paper examines the ethics of altering or removing such objects. Do these strategies sanitize history, destroy heritage and suppress freedom of speech? Or are they important steps towards justice? Does removing monuments and renaming schools reflect a lack of parity and unfairly erase local identities? Or can it sometimes be morally required, as an expression of respect for the memories of people (...) who endured past injustices; a recognition of this history's ongoing legacies; and a repudiation of unjust social hierarchies? (shrink)

Algorithms wield increasing control over our lives—over which jobs we get, whether we're granted loans, what information we're exposed to online, and so on. Algorithms can, and often do, wield their power in a biased way, and much work has been devoted to algorithmic bias. In contrast, algorithmic neutrality has gone largely neglected. I investigate three questions about algorithmic neutrality: What is it? Is it possible? And when we have it in mind, what can we learn about algorithmic bias?

Are properties perfectly natural (or not) relative to worlds, or are they perfectly natural (or not) tout court? That is, could there be a property P that is instanti-ated at worlds w1 and w2, and is perfectly natural at w1 but not at w2? Here, we offer an original argument for the non-world-relativity of perfect naturalness. Along the way, we reply to a prima facie compelling argument for the contin-gency of perfect naturalness, based upon the connection between natural prop-erties and (...) laws of nature. (shrink)

I argue that Kant’s primary epistemological concern in the Critique of Pure Reason’s transcendental deduction is empirical cognition. I show how empirical cognition is best understood as “rational sensory discrimination”: the capacity to discriminate sensory objects through the use of concepts and with a sensitivity to the normativity of reasons. My dissertation focuses on Kant’s starting assumption of the transcendental deduction, which I argue to be the thesis that we have empirical cognition. I then show how Kant’s own subjective deduction (...) fleshes out his conception of empirical cognition and is intertwined with key steps in the transcendental deduction’s arguments that the categories have objective validity and that we have synthetic a priori cognition. (shrink)

Meet Tega. Blue, fluffy, and AI-enabled, Tega is a relational robot: a robot designed to form relationships with humans. Created to aid in early childhood education, Tega talks with children, plays educational games with them, solves puzzles, and helps in creative activities like making up stories and drawing. Children are drawn to Tega, describing him as a friend, and attributing thoughts and feelings to him ("he's kind," "if you just left him here and nobody came to play with him, he (...) might be sad"). Scholars and members of the public alike have raised the alarm about relational robots, worrying that the relationships that people, and especially children, form with such robots are objectionably inauthentic. We, members of an interdisciplinary team that developed and studies Tega, make this inauthenticity worry precise and offer practical recommendations for addressing it. We distinguish two kinds of (in)authenticity -- inauthenticity as unreality, and inauthenticity as deception -- arguing that neither is just what others have thought it is. With our distinction in hand, we argue that the authenticity concern can be met only through co-design methods -- methods that give stakeholders of all kinds (e.g. parents, educators, and children themselves) a genuine say in how relational robots are built. (shrink)

Until recently, experimental philosophy has been associated with the questionnaire-based study of intuitions; however, experimental philosophers now adapt a wide range of empirical methods for new philosophical purposes. New methods include paradigms for behavioural experiments from across the social sciences as well as computational methods from the digital humanities that can process large bodies of text and evidence. This book offers an accessible overview of these exciting innovations. The volume brings together established and emerging research leaders from several areas of (...) experimental philosophy to explore how new empirical methods can contribute to philosophical debates. Each chapter presents one or several methods new to experimental philosophy, demonstrating their application in a key area of philosophy and discussing their strengths and limitations. Methods covered include eye tracking, virtual reality technology, neuroimaging, statistical learning, and experimental economics as well as corpus linguistics, visualisation techniques and data and text mining. The volume explores their use in moral philosophy and moral psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and the history of ideas. Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy is essential reading for undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

A compositional semantics for anankastic conditionals (‘If you want p, you must φ’) has been elusive. Condoravdi and Lauer (2016) decisively object to all semantics that precede their own. CL's view rests on a response to *the problem of conflicting goals*; CL use an interpretation of 'want' on which an agent's desires don't conflict with her beliefs. But a proper response requires lack of conflict with the facts. CL's view fails. Anankastic conditionals are still a mystery.

Animal welfare has a long history of disregard. While in recent decades the study of animal welfare has become a scientific discipline of its own, the difficulty of measuring animal welfare can still be vastly underestimated. There are three primary theories, or perspectives, on animal welfare - biological functioning, natural living and affective state. These come with their own diverse methods of measurement, each providing a limited perspective on an aspect of welfare. This paper describes a perspectival pluralist account of (...) animal welfare, in which all three theoretical perspectives and their multiple measures are necessary to understand this complex phenomenon and provide a full picture of animal welfare. This in turn will offer us a better understanding of perspectivism and pluralism itself. (shrink)

What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to be sick? These two questions are much closer to one another than has hitherto been acknowledged. Indeed, both raise a number of related, albeit very complex, philosophical problems. In recent years, the phenomenology of health and disease has become a major topic in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine, owing much to the work of Havi Carel (2007, 2011, 2018). Surprisingly little attention, however, has been given to (...) the phenomenology of animal health and suffering. This omission shall be remedied here, laying the groundwork for the phenomenological evaluation of animal health and suffering. (shrink)

There has been much criticism of the idea that Friston's free-energy principle can unite the life and mind sciences. Here, we argue that perhaps the greatest problem for the totalizing ambitions of its proponents is a failure to recognize the importance of evolutionary dynamics and to provide a convincing adaptive story relating free-energy minimization to organismal fitness.

This article engages with debates concerning the moral worth of human beings with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMDs). Some argue that those with such disabilities are morally less valuable than so-called normal human beings, whereas others argue that all human beings have equal moral value and so each group of humans ought to be treated with equal concern. We will argue in favor of a reconciliatory view that takes points from opposing camps in the debates about the moral worth (...) of humans with PIMDs. The view in question, roughly, is this: most humans with PIMDs are persons in the morally significant sense and so deserve equal moral consideration to so-called normal human beings. Some humans with PIMD may not, however, be persons, but nevertheless deserve equal moral consideration to persons because they stand in a special relation to persons. (shrink)

This essay presents a heterodox reading of the issue of solipsism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, out of which the whole of the TLP can be re-read. Inspired by, though not dependent on, the themes of virtuality and singularity found in Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism’, Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘logical space’ is here complexly related to the paradoxes of the ‘metaphysical subject’ and ‘solipsism,’ within which the strictures of sense are defined, and through which the logico-pictorial scaffolding of the TLP precipitates its own (...) systematic dissolution. It shows how nonsense envelopes not only not idle chatter, and metaphysical confusion, but sense itself. (shrink)

As a result of the world-wide COVID-19 epidemic, an internal tension in the goals of medicine has come to the forefront of public debate. Medical professionals are continuously faced with a tug of...

Drawing on findings from the study of prejudice and prejudice reduction, we identify a number of mechanisms through which religious communities may influence the intergroup attitudes of their members. We hypothesize that religious participation could in principle either reduce or promote prejudice with respect to any given target group. A religious community’s influence on intergroup attitudes will depend upon the specific beliefs, attitudes, and practices found within the community, as well as on interactions between the religious community and the larger (...) social environment in which it is embedded. Basing our proposals on findings from the literature on prejudice formation and prejudice reduction allows us to outline useful directions for future studies of religion and prejudice. (shrink)

This paper seeks to recover the function of universal history, which was to place particulars into relation with universals. By the 20th century universal history was largely discredited because of an idealism that served to lend epistemic coherence to the overwhelming complexity arising from universal history's comprehensive scope. Idealism also attempted to account for history's being "open"--for the human ability to transcend circumstance. The paper attempts to recover these virtues without the idealism by defining universal history not by its scope (...) but rather as a scientific method that provides an understanding of any kind of historical process, be it physical, biological or human. While this method is not new, it is in need of a development that offers a more robust historiography and warrant as a liberating historical consciousness. The first section constructs an ontology of process by defining matter as ontic probabilities rather than as closed entities. This is lent warrant in the next section through an appeal to contemporary physical science. The resulting conceptual frame and method is applied to the physical domain of existents, to the biological domain of social being and finally to the human domain of species being. It is then used to account for the emergence of human history's initial stage--the Archaic Socio-Economic Formation and for history' stadial trajectory--its alternation of evolution and revolution. (shrink)

Human neural organoid research is advancing rapidly. As Greely notes in the target article, this progress presents an “onrushing ethical dilemma.” We can’t rule out the possibility that suff...

A core challenge for contemporary bioethics is how to address the tension between respecting an individual’s autonomy and promoting their wellbeing when these ideals seem to come into conflict (Not...

Emotional states of consciousness, or what are typically called emotional feelings, are traditionally viewed as being innately programed in subcortical areas of the brain, and are often treated as different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the perception of external stimuli. We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content, arise from one system in the brain. On this view, what differs in emotional and non-emotional states is the kind of inputs that are processed by a (...) general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences. Although subcortical circuits are not directly responsible for conscious feelings, they provide non-conscious inputs that coalesce with other kinds of neural signals in the cognitive assembly of conscious emotional experiences. In building the case for this proposal, we defend a modified version of what is known as the higher-order theory of consciousness. (shrink)

The conditions animals experience during the early developmental stages of their lives can have critical ongoing effects on their future health, welfare, and proper development. In this paper we draw on evolutionary theory to improve our understanding of the processes of developmental programming, particularly Predictive Adaptive Responses (PAR) that serve to match offspring phenotype with predicted future environmental conditions. When these predictions fail, a mismatch occurs between offspring phenotype and the environment, which can have long-lasting health and welfare effects. Examples (...) include metabolic diseases resulting from maternal nutrition and behavioral changes from maternal stress. An understanding of these processes and their evolutionary origins will help in identifying and providing appropriate developmental conditions to optimize offspring welfare. This serves as an example of the benefits of using evolutionary thinking within veterinary science and we suggest that in the same way that evolutionary medicine has helped our understanding of human health, the implementation of evolutionary veterinary science (EvoVetSci) could be a useful way forward for research in animal health and welfare. (shrink)

Contemporary analytic theological discussions of atonement do not attend extensively to questions of how narrative might relate to the atoning work of Christ. Liberation theologians, on the other hand, utilize narrative in their scholarly method regularly and often employ it when discussing atonement or reconciliation. This essay argues that analytic theologians should consider the notion of narrative (and narrative identity) as a mechanism of atonement in the broad sense of the term introduced when William Tyndale coined ‘atonement’ to translate 2 (...) Corinthians 5. I then offer some psychological grounds for thinking that reframing one’s self-narrative in terms of a transcendent narrative is often conducive to human flourishing, and I consider the work of James H. Cone as an instance of such transcendent narrative reframing at work. (shrink)

In recent years, the ethical impact of AI has been increasingly scrutinized, with public scandals emerging over biased outcomes, lack of transparency, and the misuse of data. This has led to a growing mistrust of AI and increased calls for mandated ethical audits of algorithms. Current proposals for ethical assessment of algorithms are either too high level to be put into practice without further guidance, or they focus on very specific and technical notions of fairness or transparency that do not (...) consider multiple stakeholders or the broader social context. In this article, we present an auditing framework to guide the ethical assessment of an algorithm. The audit instrument itself is comprised of three elements: a list of possible interests of stakeholders affected by the algorithm, an assessment of metrics that describe key ethically salient features of the algorithm, and a relevancy matrix that connects the assessed metrics to stakeholder interests. The proposed audit instrument yields an ethical evaluation of an algorithm that could be used by regulators and others interested in doing due diligence, while paying careful attention to the complex societal context within which the algorithm is deployed. (shrink)

What are the truth conditions of want ascriptions? According to an influential approach, they are intimately connected to the agent’s beliefs: ⌜S wants p⌝ is true iff, within S’s belief set, S prefers the p worlds to the not-p worlds. This approach faces a well-known problem, however: it makes the wrong predictions for what we call (counter)factual want ascriptions, wherein the agent either believes p or believes not-p—for example, ‘I want it to rain tomorrow and that is exactly what is (...) going to happen’ or ‘I want this weekend to last forever, but of course it will end in a few hours’. We solve this problem. The truth conditions for want ascriptions are, we propose, connected to the agent’s conditional beliefs. We substantiate this connection by pursuing a striking parallel between (counter)factual and non-(counter)factual want ascriptions on the one hand and counterfactual and indicative conditionals on the other. (shrink)

Fears of black-box algorithms are multiplying. Black-box algorithms are said to prevent accountability, make it harder to detect bias and so on. Some fears concern the epistemology of black-box algorithms in medicine and the ethical implications of that epistemology. In ‘Who is afraid of black box algorithms? On the epistemological and ethical basis of trust in medical AI,' Durán and Jongsma seek to allay such fears. While some of their arguments are compelling, we still see reasons for fear.

Alongside the rapid global advances in neuroscientific research, neuroethics has been one of the fastest growing sub-fields within bioethics. With this rapid expansion, bioethicists struggle to kee...

The compelling, widely-accepted Satisfaction-is-Truth Principle says that if S wants p, then S has a desire that's satisfied in exactly the worlds where p is true. We reject the Principle; an agent may want p without having a desire that's satisfied when p obtains in any old way. Other theorists who reject the Principle rely on contested intuitions about when agents get what they want. We instead appeal to—and shed new light on—the dispositional role of desire.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, writing together from 1972 to 1992, developed a robust body of theoretical work exemplar of the French poststructuralist tradition. Through their magnum opus, a two-part series entitled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia,” they interrogated the nature of desire, the organizational schemas of society, and the metaphysical structure of the world. Yet, despite claiming to have produced a thoroughly egalitarian project, their work is subject to a variety of exclusionary developments and cultural limitations. This paper attempts to traverse (...) these deficiencies through speculative ecological and theological engagements with the work of Deleuze and Guattari. These engagements begin with the development of “schizoanalytical theology,” an application of their theory of schizoanalysis which disrupts transcendental views of divinity to ground spirituality in the creativity of desire and variability of ecological processes. This is followed by an exploration of the theories of Édouard Glissant, a Francophone theorist from Martinique whose work, heavily influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, is centered around the development of an ontology consistent with the cultural experiences of the colonized. Glissant’s interpretation of, and departure from, Deleuze and Guattari is explored for insights into how their theory may corrected and refigured to be responsive to the nuances of both minority perspectives and the ecological crisis. The paper is closed with a dialogue between Guattari’s theory of “ecosophy” and Glissant’s socio-cultural views on ecology, showing the application, and flexibility, of schizoanalytical theology to a variety of modern crises which find their culmination in ecological degradation. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman (1906-2007) approached the arts and other kinds of knowledge as forms of symbolism. His principal aim in philosophy was to advance understanding and remove confusions by verbal analysis and logical constructions. Goodman's philosophical theories encompass nominalism, constructivism and a version of radical relativism. In his Languages of Art, Goodman sets forth distinctions among the various art according to differences in the forms of symbols employed. He contributed as well to arts education and to philosophy of the museum. His (...) performance work, "Hockey Seen: A Nightmare in Three Periods and Sudden Death embodies his aesthetic theories. (shrink)

David Rosenthal explains conscious mentality in terms of two independent, though complementary, theories—the higher-order thought (“HOT”) theory of consciousness and quality-space theory (“QST”) about mental qualities. It is natural to understand this combination of views as constituting a kind of representationalism about experience—that is, a version of the view that an experience’s conscious character is identical with certain of its representational properties. At times, however, Rosenthal seems to resist this characterization of his view. We explore here whether and to what (...) extent it makes sense to construe Rosenthal’s views as representationalist. Our goal is not merely terminological—discerning how best to use the expression ‘representationalism’. Rather, we argue that understanding Rosenthal’s account as a kind of representationalism permits us not only to make sense of broader debates within the philosophy of mind, but also to extend and clarify aspects of the view itself. (shrink)

Our goal is to illustrate that Darwinian and autopoietic views of the organism are not as squarely opposed to each other as is often assumed. Indeed, we will argue that there is much common ground between them and that they can usefully supplement each other.

Our goal is to illustrate that Darwinian and autopoietic views of the organism are not as squarely opposed to each other as is often assumed. Indeed, we will argue that there is much common ground between them and that they can usefully supplement each other.

Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) aim to compensate for the loss of a sensory modality, typically vision, by converting information from the lost modality into stimuli in a remaining modality. “The vOICe” is a visual-to-auditory SSD which encodes images taken by a camera worn by the user into “soundscapes” such that experienced users can extract information about their surroundings. Here we investigated how much detail was resolvable during the early induction stages by testing the acuity of blindfolded sighted, naïve vOICe users. (...) Initial performance was well above chance. Participants who took the test twice as a form of minimal training showed a marked improvement on the second test. Acuity was slightly but not significantly impaired when participants wore a camera and judged letter orientations “live”. A positive correlation was found between participants' musical training and their acuity. The relationship between auditory expertise via musical training and the lack of a relationship with visual imagery, suggests that early use of a SSD draws primarily on the mechanisms of the sensory modality being used rather than the one being substituted. If vision is lost, audition represents the sensory channel of highest bandwidth of those remaining. The level of acuity found here, and the fact it was achieved with very little experience in sensory substitution by naïve users is promising. (shrink)

This paper explores the cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor and its relevance for contemporary ethics. It takes as it’s starting point two papers on Maximus’ cosmology and environmental ethics (Bordeianu, 2009; Munteanu, 2010) and from there argues that we can not consider environmental ethics in isolation from other ethical issues. This, as both Ware and Keselopoulos have also pointed out, is because the environmental crisis is actually a crisis in the human heart and in human attitudes toward everything about (...) us. The paper goes through some key areas in Maximus’ cosmology according to his own formula of creation – movement – rest and considers at each stage the implications of this theology for the way the human should be living and treating other beings. The main sources for this exploration are Ambiguum 7, Ambiguum 41, and The Mystagogia with especial focus on the doctrine of the logoi and the divisions of nature. The paper concludes that Bordeianu and Munteanu are right to consider Maximus’ theology to be of ecological relevance, but that this relevance comes from the radical ethical statement being made about human activity. Maximus’ theology points the human toward becoming in the likeness of Christ who unites heaven and earth through love. The love of Christ when considered in an ethical context stands as a formidable challenge to current attitudes and institutions that advocate the exploitation and destruction of human or non-human creation. (shrink)

In this paper, we distinguish between different sorts of assessments of algorithmic systems, describe our process of assessing such systems for ethical risk, and share some key challenges and lessons for future algorithm assessments and audits. Given the distinctive nature and function of a third-party audit, and the uncertain and shifting regulatory landscape, we suggest that second-party assessments are currently the primary mechanisms for analyzing the social impacts of systems that incorporate artificial intelligence. We then discuss two kinds of as-sessments: (...) an ethical risk assessment and a narrower, technical algo-rithmic bias assessment. We explain how the two assessments depend on each other, highlight the importance of situating the algorithm within its particular socio-technical context, and discuss a number of lessons and challenges for algorithm assessments and, potentially, for algorithm audits. The discussion builds on our team’s experience of advising and conducting ethical risk assessments for clients across dif-ferent industries in the last four years. Our main goal is to reflect on the key factors that are potentially ethically relevant in the use of algo-rithms, and draw lessons for the nascent algorithm assessment and audit industry, in the hope of helping all parties minimize the risk of harm from their use. (shrink)

I argue here that the existence of hermeneutical injustice as a pervasive feature of our collective linguistic and conceptual resources undermines the originalist task at two levels: one procedural, one substantive. First, large portions of society were (and continue to be) systematically excluded from the process of meaning creation when the Constitution and its Amendments were adopted, so originalism relies on enforcement of a meaning that was generated through an undemocratic process. Second, the original meaning of some words in those (...) texts may be substantively objectionable as a result because they fail to capture the relevant experiences of affected people at the time even if they accurately capture the conceptual understanding of reasonable people at the time, and this substantive failing may infect the text’s democratic legitimacy. To the extent that it can be overcome, overcoming this epistemic problem will require originalists to take seriously the insights of critical theory, understood in this Note as a normative inquiry into the historical context of the language and meaning of statutory text. Because originalists are already committed to a nominally descriptive inquiry into this context, and because this nominally descriptive inquiry masks the inherently normative aspects of the hermeneutical landscape, the switch to an explicitly normative inquiry may prove quite painless. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is the general thesis that the death of the human organism is what constitutes the death of a person. All admit that when the death of a human organism occurs, in some form or another, this normally does result in the death of a person. But, some maintain, organismic death is not the same thing as personal death. Why? Because, they maintain, despite the fact that persons are associated with a human organism (‘their organism’), they (...) are not identical with their organism, and so they can, at least in principle and perhaps in actuality, die before or after their organism dies. The thesis described above I shall call ‘the two-deaths thesis’ in virtue of the fact that its proponents believe that there are two kinds of death, viz. organismic death and personal death. The opposing thesis, according to which the death of a human organism does constitute the death of a person, I call the ‘one death thesis’. After giving some background remarks in section 2 of this paper, in section 3 I argue that, if we take linguistic usage seriously, neither the two-deaths thesis nor the one-death thesis is true. I argue, rather, that so far as linguistic usage goes it is indeterminate which of them is true. In section 4 I go further and argue that if one accepts a widely held metaphysical view, viz. that the world itself partially determines reference and the extensions of our concepts, then it is plausible that the one-death thesis is true despite the facts about linguistic usage. (shrink)

In this commentary we advance Jagiello et al.'s proposal by zooming in on the possible evolutionary origins of the “bifocal stance” that may have enabled a major transition in human cultural evolution, arguing that the evolution of the bifocal stance was driven by an explosion in cultural complexity arising from cooperative foraging, which led to a feedback loop between the ritual and instrumental stances.

This dissertation aims to analyze, clarify, and reconstruct the concept of class consciousness by developing a dialectical account of political agency at work in the concept. I defend a dialectical account of agency, that includes both the way in which individuals come together to form groups, but also the capacity of a collective to transform social conditions. I argue that this account of political agency is necessary in order to understand the possibility of social transformation or change. I trace the (...) development of the relationship between consciousness and agency in the early tradition of Western Marxism, focusing primarily on the account of class consciousness given by Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness. Against his account of the world historical agency of a unified proletariat, however, I defend Theodor Adorno’s insistence on nonidentity, and the importance of unreconciled groups in capitalist society. In order to understand these groups, such as the vanguard, party, or proletariat, we must understand the way in which individuals form groups, as well as their inherent collectivity. -/- My account of the political agency at work in the concept of class consciousness is broadly speaking pluralist. I argue that a multiplicity of methodologies is needed in order to arrive at a complete picture of the concept. I defend an account of class consciousness that is neither reductive nor deflationary with respect to other dimensions of social domination. This class forward approach seeks to build intersectional political coalitions in order to undertake revolutionary action. Successful revolutionary social transformation is never guaranteed in advance; however, the concept of class consciousness, reconstructed through the lens of political agency, offers conceptual resources to address the problems of today, for the sake of a better tomorrow. (shrink)