Search

Your anonymous reviewer of Cecile Fabre's Spying Through a Glass Darkly (May 13) tells us that Kant objects to espionage because it contravenes 'the principle of treating our fellow humans [...]

Kieran Setiya MIDLIFE A philosophical guide 200pp. Princeton University Press. 18.95 [pounds sterling]. 978 0 691 17393 1 In 1791, a young Austrian noblewoman wrote to Immanuel Kant to ask [...]

Some comments on Quassim Cassam's Self and World written for a conference at the Institute of Philosophy in 2017. I consider the objection that Cassam raises to Strawson's argument from unity to objectivity in The Bounds of Sense and raise some general questions about Cassam's problem of misconception and its application to transcendental arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual experiences seem to exhibit phenomenological particularity: when you look at some object, it —that particular object—looks some way to you. But experiences exhibit generality too: when you look at a distinct but qualitatively identical object, things seem the same to you as they did in seeing the first object. Naïve realist accounts of visual experience have often been thought to have a problem with each of these observations. It has been claimed that naïve realist views cannot account for the generality of visual experiences, and that the naïve realist explanation of particularity has unacceptable implications for self-knowledge: the knowledge we have of the character of our own experiences. We argue in this paper that neither claim is correct: naïve realism can explain the generality of experiences, and the naïve realist explanation of particularity raises no problems for our self-knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper, Gray, Knickman, and Wegner (2011) present three experiments which they take to show that people perceive patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) to have less mentality than the dead. Following on from Gomes and Parrott (forthcoming), we provide evidence to show that participants' responses in the initial experiments are an artifact of the questions posed. Results from two experiments show that, once the questions have been clarified, people do not ascribe more mental capacity to the dead than to PVS patients. There is no reason to think that people perceive PVS patients as more dead than dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper, Gray, Knickman, and Wegner (2011) present three experiments which they take to show that people judge patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) to have less mental capacity than the dead. They explain this result by claiming that people have implicit dualist or afterlife beliefs. This essay critically evaluates their experimental findings and their proposed explanation. We argue first that the experiments do not support the conclusion that people intuitively think PVS patients have less mentality than the dead. And second, we provide an alternative explanation of our ascriptions of mentality to the dead and PVS patients, one which turns on Epicurean considerations about the nature of death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can the experience of great art play a role in our coming to understand the ethical framework of another person? In this article I draw out three themes from Iris Murdoch’s ‘The Sovereignty of Good’ in order to show the role that communal attention to works of art can play in our ethical lives. I situate this role in the context of Murdoch’s wider philosophical views. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scepticism is sometimes expressed about whether there is any interesting problem of other minds. In this paper I set out a version of the conceptual problem of other minds which turns on the way in which mental occurrences are presented to the subject and situate it in relation to debates about our knowledge of other people's mental lives. The result is a distinctive problem in the philosophy of mind concerning our relation to other people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]