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Joanna Baillie on Sympathetic Curiosity and Elizabeth Hamilton's Critique Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2024-03-18 DEBORAH BOYLE
Scholars working on recovering forgotten historical women philosophers have noted the importance of looking beyond traditional philosophical genres. This strategy is particularly important for finding Scottish women philosophers. By considering non-canonical genres, we can see the philosophical interest of the works of Scottish poet and playwright Joanna Baillie (1762–1851), who presents an account
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Does Studying Philosophy Make People Better Thinkers? Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2024-03-07 MICHAEL PRINZING, MICHAEL VAZQUEZ
Philosophers often claim that doing philosophy makes people better thinkers. But what evidence is there for this empirical claim? This paper reviews extant evidence and presents some novel findings. We discuss standardized testing scores, review research on Philosophy for Children and critical thinking skills among college students, and present new empirical findings. On average, philosophers are better
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Exploring Arbitrariness Objections to Time Biases Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2024-03-07 ANDREW J. LATHAM, KRISTIE MILLER, JORDAN OH, SAM SHPALL, WEN YU
Abstract There are two kinds of time bias: near bias and future bias. While philosophers typically hold that near bias is rationally impermissible, many hold that future bias is rationally permissible. Call this normative hybridism. According to arbitrariness objections, certain patterns of preference are rationally impermissible because they are arbitrary. While arbitrariness objections have been
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Call-Outs and Call-Ins Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2024-03-01 KELLY HERBISON, PAUL-MIKHAIL CATAPANG PODOSKY
The phenomena of call-outs and call-ins are fiercely debated. Are they mere instances of virtue signaling? Or can they actually perform social justice work? This paper gains purchase on these questions by focusing on how language users negotiate norms in speech. The authors contend that norm-enacting speech not only makes a norm salient in a context but also creates conversational conditions that motivate
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Courageous Love: K. C. Bhattacharyya on the Puzzle of Painful Beauty Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2024-02-29 EMILY LAWSON, DOMINIC MCIVER LOPES
In the 1930s, the Bengali philosopher K. C. Bhattacharyya proposed a new theory of rasa, or aesthetic emotion, according to which aesthetic emotions are feelings that have other feelings as their intentional objects. This paper articulates how Bhattacharyya's theory offers a novel solution to the puzzle of how it is both possible and rational to enjoy the kind of negative emotions that are inspired
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Two kinds of requirements of justice Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2024-02-06 NICHOLAS SOUTHWOOD, ROBERT E. GOODIN
Claims about what justice “requires” and the “requirements” of justice are pervasive in political philosophy. However, there is a highly significant ambiguity in such claims that appears to have gone unnoticed. Such claims may pick out either one of two categorically distinct and noncoextensive kinds of requirement that we call 1) requirements-as-necessary-conditions for justice and 2) requirements-as-demands
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Moral Shock and Trans ‘Worlds’ of Sense Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2024-01-03 E. M. HERNANDEZ
This paper has two aims: to explore the affective dimensions of moral shock and the way it relates to normative marginalization of those furthest from dominant society and also, more specifically, to articulate the trans experience of constantly being under moral attack because the dominant ‘world’ normatively defines trans individuals out of existence. Toward these ends, I build on Katie Stockdale's
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Aesthetic Blame Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-12-12 ROBBIE KUBALA
One influential tradition holds that blame is a moral attitude: blame is appropriate only when the target of blame has violated a moral norm without excuse or justification. Against this, some have recently argued that agents can be blameworthy for their violation of epistemic norms even when no moral norms are thereby violated. This paper defends the appropriateness of aesthetic blame: agents can
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Ubuntu in Elephant Communities Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-12-12 BIRTE WRAGE, DENNIS PAPADOPOULOS, JUDITH BENZ-SCHWARZBURG
African (Bantu) philosophy conceptualizes morality through ubuntu, which emphasizes the role of community in producing moral agents. This community is characterized by practices that respond to and value interdependence, such as care, cooperation, and respect for elders and ancestral knowledge. While there have been attributions of morality to nonhuman animals in the interdisciplinary animal morality
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Aesthetic Experience as Interaction Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-11-27 BENCE NANAY
The aim of this article is to argue that what is distinctive about aesthetic experiences has to do with what we do -- not with our perception or evaluation, but with our action and, more precisely, with our interaction with whatever we are aesthetically engaging with. This view goes against the mainstream inasmuch as aesthetic engagement is widely held to be special precisely because it is detached
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Institutional Genidentity Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-11-20 JOSHUA RUST
An abbreviated history of marriage helps motivate the question of whether ancient Roman marriage and contemporary love marriage could qualify as stages of the same (token) institution despite carrying significantly different functions, deontological powers, and constitutive rules. Having raised the question of institutional identity over time, I proceed to answer the question by appealing to Kurt Lewin's
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Liveliness as a Theory of Meaning in Life: Problems and Prospects Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-11-20 KIRK LOUGHEED
I aim to more fully develop a theory of meaning in life based on the concept of life force that is important to a substantial number of Africans in the sub-Sahara region. While life force implies a large invisible ontology, Thaddeus Metz has recently developed an entirely naturalistic version of it known as liveliness. However, he also offers two objections that hinge on the idea that life force cannot
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Humanism: A Reconsideration Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-10-23 ALEKSY TARASENKO-STRUC
Humanism is the view that people treat others inhumanely when we fail to see them as human beings, so that our treatment of them will tend to be more humane when we (fully) see their humanity. Recently, humanist views have been criticized on the grounds that the perpetrators of inhumanity regard their victims as human and treat them inhumanely partly for this reason. I argue that the two most common
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Idealist Panpsychism and Spacetime Structure Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-10-09 DAMIAN ALEKSIEV
This paper presents a novel argument against one theoretically attractive form of panpsychism. I argue that ‘idealist panpsychism’ is false because it cannot account for spacetime's structure. Idealist panpsychists posit that fundamental reality is purely experiential. Moreover, they posit that consciousness at the fundamental level metaphysically grounds and explains both the facts of physics and
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An Epistemic Version of Pascal's Wager Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-10-06 ELIZABETH JACKSON
Epistemic consequentialism is the view that epistemic goodness is more fundamental than epistemic rightness. In this article, I examine the relationship between epistemic consequentialism and theistic belief. I argue that in an epistemic consequentialist framework, there is an epistemic reason to believe in God. Imagine having an unlimited amount of time to ask an omniscient being anything you wanted
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Inductive Reasoning Involving Social Kinds Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-09-28 BARRETT EMERICK, TYLER HILDEBRAND
Most social policies cannot be defended without making inductive inferences. For example, consider certain arguments for racial profiling and affirmative action, respectively. They begin with statistics about crime or socioeconomic indicators. Next, there is an inductive step in which the statistic is projected from the past to the future. Finally, there is a normative step in which a policy is proposed
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Considerateness Differentiated: Three Types of Virtuousness Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-09-25 KRISTJÁN KRISTJÁNSSON
Despite the prevalence of the virtue of considerateness in everyday moral discourse and the proliferation of philosophical studies of virtue language, considerateness hardly ever appears on philosophical agendas. When discussed in academia, its meaning seems fuzzy and unclear. This article makes amends for this gap by subjecting considerateness to conceptual scrutiny. The author argues that considerateness
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A Functional Analysis of Human Deception Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-09-21 VLADIMIR KRSTIĆ
A satisfactory analysis of human deception must rule out cases where it is a mistake or an accident that person B was misled by person A's behavior. Therefore, most scholars think that deceivers must intend to deceive. This article argues that there is a better solution: rather than appealing to the deceiver's intentions, we should appeal to the function of their behavior. After all, animals and plants
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What Do Beginning Students Think about Philosophy before Their First College Course? Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-09-04 BAILIE PETERSON, DAVID AGBOOLA, KELLY LUNDBERG
In this article, we present the results of an original study identifying the perceptions of beginning philosophy students at the start of their first introductory course. We surveyed over 1,100 students representing over 40 universities and colleges in the United States regarding their initial perceptions of gender bias, inclusivity, value, understanding, similarities, and enjoyment of philosophy.
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Doing Moral Philosophy Without ‘Normativity’ Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-08-30 JORAH DANNENBERG
This essay challenges widespread talk about morality's ‘normativity’. My principal target is not any specific claim or thesis in the burgeoning literature on ‘normativity’, however. Rather, I aim to discourage the use of the word among moral philosophers altogether and to reject a claim to intradisciplinary authority that is both reflected in and reinforced by the role the word has come to play in
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Standpoint Epistemology and Epistemic Peerhood: A Defense of Epistemic Privilege Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-08-30 BRIANA TOOLE
Standpoint epistemology is committed to the view that some epistemic advantage can be drawn from the position of powerlessness. Call this the epistemic privilege thesis. This thesis stands in need of explication and support. In providing that explication and support, I first distinguish between two readings of the thesis: the thesis that marginalized social locations confer some epistemic advantages
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Explanation and the Right to Explanation Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-08-29 ELANOR TAYLOR
In response to widespread use of automated decision-making technology, some have considered a right to explanation. In this article, I draw on insights from philosophical work on explanation to present a series of challenges to this idea, showing that the normative motivations for access to such explanations ask for something difficult, if not impossible, to extract from automated systems. I consider
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How to Disrupt a Social Script Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-08-22 SAMIA HESNI
Social scripts, like A gives a compliment, B says ‘thank you’, pervade and shape natural language discourse and social interactions. Scripts usually promote cooperation between conversational participants, but not always. For example, if A pays B a ‘compliment’ like ‘nice legs’, A puts B in a double bind of either abiding by the compliment script by saying ‘thank you’ and being humiliated, or breaking
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Emotions and the Action Analogy: Prospects for an Agential Theory of Emotions Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-08-03 HICHEM NAAR
According to the action analogy, emotions and actions have certain structural and normative similarities that no theory of emotions should ignore. The action analogy has recently been used in an objection against the so-called perceptual theory of emotions, often defended by means of an analogy between emotion and perception. Beyond the dialectical significance of the action analogy, one might wonder
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C. I. Lewis's Theory of Ideas: Royce's Problem and Lewis's Solution Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-07-31 RICHARD KENNETH ATKINS
Implicit in C. I. Lewis's conceptual pragmatism is an account of how our ideas undergo a process of social development. Lewis's account of that process resolves a problem with Josiah Royce's theory of ideas. Royce holds that there are both sensuous and symbolic ideas. It is, however, possible for someone to have only a sensuous idea of how middle C sounds and for another person to have only the symbolic
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The Sooner the Better: An Argument for Bias Toward the Earlier Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-07-07 BRADFORD SAAD
In this article I argue that we should be prudentially and morally biased toward earlier events: other things equal, we should prefer for good events to occur earlier and disprefer for bad events to occur earlier. The argument contends that we should accord at least some credence—if only a small one—to a theoretical package featuring the growing block theory of time and that this package generates
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Inquiring Attitudes and Erotetic Logic: Norms of Restriction and Expansion Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-06-19 DENNIS WHITCOMB, JARED MILLSON
A fascinating recent turn in epistemology focuses on inquiring attitudes like wondering and being curious. Many have argued that these attitudes are governed by norms similar to those that govern our doxastic attitudes. Yet, to date, this work has only considered norms that might prohibit having certain inquiring attitudes (“norms of restriction”), while ignoring those that might require having them
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Contingency, Sociality, and Moral Progress Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-05-17 OLOF LEFFLER
A debate has recently appeared regarding whether non-naturalism is better than other metaethical views at explaining moral progress. I shall take the occasion of this debate to present a novel debunking dilemma for moral non-naturalists, extending Sharon Street's Darwinian one. I will argue that moral progress indicates that our moral attitudes tend to reflect contingent sociocultural and psychological
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Contrastive Intentions Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-04-19 ANDREW PEET
This paper introduces and argues for contrastivism about intentions. According to contrastivism, intention is not a binary relation between an agent and an action. Rather, it is a ternary relation between an agent, an action, and an alternative. Contrastivism is introduced via a discussion of cases of known but (apparently) unintended side effects. Such cases are puzzling. They put pressure on us to
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Indexing Philosophy in a Fair and Inclusive Key Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-04-14 SIMON FOKT, QUENTIN PHARR, CLOTILDE TORREGROSSA
Existing indexing systems used to arrange philosophical works have been shown to misrepresent the discipline in ways that reflect and perpetuate exclusionary attitudes within it. In recent years, there has been a great deal of effort to challenge those attitudes and to revise them. But as the discipline moves toward greater equality and inclusivity, the way it has indexed its work has unfortunately
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Probabilism: An Open Future Solution to the Actualism/Possibilism Debate Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-04-14 YISHAI COHEN, TRAVIS TIMMERMAN
The actualism/possibilism debate in ethics is traditionally formulated in terms of whether true counterfactuals of freedom about the future (true subjunctive conditionals concerning what someone would freely do in the future if they were in certain circumstances) even partly determine an agent's present moral obligations. But the very assumption that there are true counterfactuals of freedom about
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Biased Evaluative Descriptions Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-04-13 SARA BERNSTEIN
In this essay I identify a type of linguistic phenomenon new to feminist philosophy of language: biased evaluative descriptions. Biased evaluative descriptions are descriptions whose well-intended positive surface meanings are inflected with implicitly biased content. Biased evaluative descriptions are characterized by three main features: (1) they have roots in implicit bias or benevolent sexism,
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Dealbreakers and the Work of Immoral Artists Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-04-12 IAN STONER
A dealbreaker, in the sense developed in this essay, is a relationship between a person's psychology and an aspect of an artwork to which they are exposed. When a person has a dealbreaking aversion to an aspect of a work, they are blocked from embracing the work's aesthetically positive features. I characterize dealbreakers, distinguish this response from other negative responses to an artwork, and
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Master Narratives, Self-Simulation, and the Healing of the Self Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-04-12 RYAN BOLLIER
Infiltrated consciousness occurs when a subject's sense of self comes to be strongly and negatively shaped by victimizing master narratives. Consider the stay-at-home dad who has internalized a harmful narrative of traditional masculinity and so feels ashamed because he is not the family's bread winner. One way master narratives infiltrate consciousness is through conditioning self-simulation by assigning
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Moral Principles as Generics Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-04-12 RAVI THAKRAL
I argue that moral principles involve the same sort of generalization as ordinary yet elusive generic generalizations in natural language such as ‘Tigers are striped’ or ‘Peppers are spicy’. A notable advantage of the generic view is that it simultaneously allows for pessimism and optimism about the role and status of moral principles in our lives. It provides a new perspective on the nature of moral
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Political Legitimacy as Grounded in the Wills of Citizens: A Reply to Peter Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-04-12 E. R. PRENDERGAST
Fabienne Peter (2020) recently proposed a taxonomy of accounts of the meta-normative grounds of political legitimacy. In this article, I argue that there is an important distinction left out of that taxonomy that complicates the picture. This is the distinction between attitude-independent and attitude-dependent conceptions of normative truth. Through an examination of these conceptions of normative
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Universalism and the Problem of Aesthetic Diversity Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-04-12 ALEX KING
This essay examines a recent line of thought in aesthetics that challenges realist-leaning aesthetic theories. According to this line of thought, aesthetic diversity and disagreement are good, and our aesthetic judgments, responses, and attachments are deeply personal and even identity-constituting. These facts are further used to support anti-realist theories of aesthetic normativity. I aim to achieve
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Moral Grandstanding and the Norms of Moral Discourse Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-04-11 A. K. FLOWERREE, MARK SATTA
Moral grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self-promotion. Recent philosophical work assumes that people can often accurately identify instances of grandstanding. In contrast, we argue that people are generally unable to reliably recognize instances of grandstanding and that we are typically unjustified in judging that others are grandstanding as a result. From there we argue that, under most
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Two Dimensions of Responsibility: Quality and Competence of Will Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-04-03 TAYLOR MADIGAN
Pure quality of will theories claim that ‘the ultimate object’ of our responsibility responses (i.e., praise and blame) is the quality of our will. Any such theory is false—or so I argue. There is a second dimension of (moral) responsibility, independent of quality of will, that our responsibility responses track and take as their object—namely, how adroitly we are able to translate our will into action;
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No Harm, Still Foul: On the Effect-Independent Wrongness of Slurring Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-03-22 RALPH DIFRANCO, ANDREW MORGAN
Intuitively, a speaker who uses slurs to refer to people is doing something morally objectionable even if no one is measurably affected by their speech. Perhaps they are only talking to themselves, or they are speaking with bigots who are already as vicious as they can be. This paper distinguishes between slurring as an expressive act and slurring as the act of causing a psychological effect. It then
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Skepticism, the Virtue of Preemptive Distrust Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-03-20 JOHNNY BRENNAN
How does trust operate under conditions of oppression? Little attention has been paid to how distrust may be both necessary and costly to its bearer. Distrust is clearly warranted under certain conditions, but do those conditions contribute to a reduction in one's overall well-being? More importantly, is there something about distrust itself (rather than the conditions that warrant it) that contributes
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Desert and Dissociation Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-03-08 CHRISTOPHER BENNETT
I argue against the idea of basic desert. I claim that the supposed normative force of desert considerations is better understood in terms of dissociation. The starting point is to note that an important strategy in spelling out the apparent normative force of desert considerations appeals to the idea of complicity. I argue that the idea of basic desert cannot give a good explanation of this connection
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Anne Conway's Ontology of Creation: A Pluralist Interpretation Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-03-02 JOHN GREY
Does Anne Conway (1631–79) hold that the created world consists of a single underlying substance? Some have argued that she does; others have argued that she is a priority monist and so holds that there are many created substances, but the whole created world is ontologically prior to each particular creature. Against both of these proposals, this article makes the case for a substance pluralist interpretation
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Defensiveness and Identity Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-03-01 AUDREY YAP, JONATHAN ICHIKAWA
Criticism can sometimes provoke defensive reactions, particularly when it implicates identities people hold dear. For instance, feminists told they are upholding rape culture might become angry or upset because the criticism conflicts with an identity that is important to them. These kinds of defensive reactions are a primary focus of this paper. What is it to be defensive in this way, and why do some
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Despair and Hopelessness Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-02-27 JACK M. C. KWONG
It has recently been argued that hope is polysemous in that it sometimes refers to hoping and other times to being hopeful. That it has these two distinct senses is reflected in the observation that a person can hope for an outcome without being hopeful that it will occur. Below, I offer a new argument for this distinction. My strategy is to show that accepting this distinction yields a rich account
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Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me: A Phenomenology of Racialized Conflict Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-02-27 NICLAS RAUTENBERG
This article investigates the structure of racialized conflict experience. Embarking from a conflict event in Ta-Nehisi Coates's autobiography Between the World and Me and contrasting the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz with insights from Black phenomenology, I argue that Coates's experience discloses conflictual, but intertwined, modes of being-in-the-world. Further, it presents an
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Social Doubt Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-01-17 TOM ROBERTS, LUCY OSLER
We introduce two concepts—social certainty and social doubt—that help to articulate a variety of experiences of the social world, such as shyness, self-consciousness, culture shock, and anxiety. Following Carel's (2013) analysis of bodily doubt, which explores how a person's tacit confidence in the workings of their body can be disrupted and undermined in illness, we consider how an individual's faith
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Environmental Activism and the Fairness of Costs Argument for Uncivil Disobedience Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2023-01-16 TEN-HERNG LAI, CHONG-MING LIM
Social movements often impose nontrivial costs on others against their wills. Civil disobedience is no exception. How can social movements in general, and civil disobedience in particular, be justifiable despite this apparent wrong-making feature? We examine an intuitively plausible account—it is fair that everyone should bear the burdens of tackling injustice. We extend this fairness-based argument
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Self-Narrative, Affective Identification, and Personal Well-Being Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2022-12-14 KATHERINE CHIEH-LING CHENG
The narrative view of personhood suggests that we as persons are constituted by self-narratives. Self-narratives support not only the sense of personal persistence but also agency. However, it is rarely discussed how self-narratives promote or hinder personal well-being. This paper aims to explore what a healthy self-narrative looks like. By reframing a famous debate between Strawson and Schechtman
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From Ideal Worlds to Ideality Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2022-11-21 CRAIG WARMKE
In common treatments of deontic logic, the obligatory is what is true in all deontically ideal possible worlds. In this article, I offer a new semantics for Standard Deontic Logic with Leibnizian intensions rather than possible worlds. Even though the new semantics furnishes models that resemble Venn diagrams, the semantics captures the strong soundness and completeness of Standard Deontic Logic. Since
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Procreative Justice Reconceived Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2022-11-18 EMMALON DAVIS
This paper reconsiders Tommie Shelby's (2016) analysis of procreation in poor black communities. I identify three conceptual frames within which Shelby situates his analysis—feminization, choice-as-control, and moralization. I argue that these frames should be rejected on conceptual, empirical, and moral grounds. As I show, this framing engenders a flawed understanding of poor black women's procreative
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Being a Celebrity: Alienation, Integrity, and the Uncanny Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2022-11-03 ALFRED ARCHER, CATHERINE M. ROBB
A central feature of being a celebrity is experiencing a divide between one's public image and private life. By appealing to the phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, we analyze this experience as paradoxically involving both a disconnection and alienation from one's public persona and a sense of close connection with it. This ‘uncanny’ experience presents a psychological conflict for celebrities:
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Perry, the ‘Ego-Centric Predicament’, and the Rise of Analytic Philosophy in the United States Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2022-11-03 MATTHIAS NEUBER
This paper examines Ralph Barton Perry's analysis of the ‘ego-centric predicament’. It will be shown that Perry convincingly argued against prevailing contemporary versions of idealism and that it makes perfectly good sense to consider him a precursor of subsequent trends in American analytic philosophy. Perry's appraisal and promotion of the contemporary logic of relations in the framework of early
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Prospect Utilitarianism and the Original Position Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2022-11-03 HUN CHUNG
Suppose we assume that the parties in the original position took Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory as constituting their general knowledge of human psychology that survives through the veil of ignorance. How would this change the choice situation of the original position? In this paper, I present what I call ‘prospect utilitarianism’. Prospect utilitarianism combines the utilitarian social welfare
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Assessor Relative Conativism Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2022-09-08 KRISTIE MILLER
According to conventionalist or conativist views about personal-identity, utterances of personal-identity sentences express propositions that are, in part, made true by the conative attitudes of relevant persons-stages. In this paper I introduce assessor relative conativism: the view that a personal-identity proposition can be true when evaluated at one person-stage's context and false when evaluated
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The Universe Waking Up: A Useful Idea for Atheists Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2022-09-08 BRUCE MILEM
Some writers have described human beings as participating in the universe waking up or serving as the means by which the universe comes to know itself. In this paper I argue that this idea can be given a straightforward explanation with minimal metaphysical commitments. As long as one grants that the universe has a kind of unity and that human beings are conscious, it is possible to see human beings
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Grounding Functionalism and Explanatory Unificationism Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2022-09-05 ALEXIOS STAMATIADIS-BRÉHIER
In this essay, I propose a functionalist theory of grounding (functionalist-grounding). Specifically, I argue that grounding is a second-order phenomenon that is realized by relations that play the noncausal explanatoriness role. I also show that functionalist-grounding can deal with a powerful challenge. Appeals to explanatory unificationism have been made to argue that the success of noncausal explanations
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Kantian Eudaimonism Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2022-09-05 E. SONNY ELIZONDO
My aim in this essay is to reorient our understanding of the Kantian ethical project, especially in relation to its assumed rivals. I do this by considering Kant's relation to eudaimonism, especially in its Aristotelian form. I argue for two points. First, once we understand what Kant and Aristotle mean by happiness, we can see that not only is it the case that, by Kant's lights, Aristotle is not a
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The Magic of Ad Hoc Solutions Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2022-08-18 JEROEN SMID
When a theory is confronted with a problem such as a paradox, an empirical anomaly, or a vicious regress, one may change part of the theory to solve that problem. Sometimes the proposed solution is considered ad hoc. This paper gives a new definition of ‘ad hoc solution’ as used in both philosophy and science. I argue that a solution is ad hoc if it fails to live up to the explanatory requirements
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Narrative Determination Journal of the American Philosophical Association Pub Date : 2022-08-18 PAUL STUDTMANN, CHRISTOPHER SHIELDS
The traditional problem of free will has reached an impasse; we are unlikely to see progress without rethinking the terms in which the problem had been cast. Our approach offers an alternative to the standard terms of the debate, by developing an authorially parameterized approach articulated within a two-dimensional semantics for temporal predicates.