Alien ExperiencePub Date : 2020-01-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190845629.003.0001
M. Tumulty
{"title":"Alien Experience","authors":"M. Tumulty","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190845629.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190845629.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 If I were a better human being, that person’s voice wouldn’t sound so shrill to me. Many of us may have had such thoughts. They give voice to the worrying intuition that if we were less affected by sexism and racism, or better at keeping our tempers, our fellow humans would look and sound differently to us. Alien Experience argues that we should take this sense of unease seriously. It is as philosophically significant as our unease over desires or fears that we disown. Making sense of this unease requires us to re-think the relation between experiences and standing commitments; to re-consider what we mean by self-control; and to attend to empirical questions about perception, attention, and tacit cognition. Alien Experience contests the assumption that while we may be answerable (morally, ethically, legally) for our attitudes and emotions, we are not answerable, at least not in any interesting way, for our perceptions and sensations. That assumption is threaded through debates in the philosophy of mind, moral psychology, and ethics, but it leads to a flattened view of the ways experiences are related to agency. Recognizing that we in fact can be alienated from our experiences leads us to a more nuanced view of agency, and helps us appreciate distinctive opportunities for self-improvement.","PeriodicalId":307163,"journal":{"name":"Alien Experience","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133270129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alien ExperiencePub Date : 2020-01-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190845629.003.0006
M. Tumulty
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"M. Tumulty","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190845629.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190845629.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"There are some forms of cruelty, injustice, or simple unkindness that we can’t help but notice. That they are cruel, unjust, or unkind is clear to everyone: to their sometimes gleeful perpetrators, to those wounded by them, and to everyone else in the vicinity. But there are forms of cruelty and injustice that are not like this. Some forms of racialized harassment, and some forms of sexual violence, are easy to conceal—in the sense that anyone not directly targeted by them can find a way not to notice them. Sometimes, that not-noticing is active and culpable. Sometimes it isn’t. Either way, the shock and dismay of a White person coming to grips with the power and depth of racism in her community, or the shock and dismay of a man coming to grips with the extent of sexual violence in his community, can be off-putting. The news isn’t shocking to the people who’d been struggling all along. Someone who has long been aware of the contours of the problem may look on in bemused frustration as the newly shocked manage to secure attention—from peers, the press, perhaps policymakers—that had somehow been in short supply before....","PeriodicalId":307163,"journal":{"name":"Alien Experience","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120951070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alien ExperiencePub Date : 2020-01-23DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190845629.003.0002
M. Tumulty
{"title":"Self-Control","authors":"M. Tumulty","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190845629.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190845629.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Some philosophers distinguish between judgmental control (or rational control) and merely managerial self-control—particularly with respect to our control of our mental states. States like desire are normatively supposed to disappear whenever we sincerely endorse judgments in tension with them. (I am not supposed to continue wanting to smoke after I sincerely judge smoking to be bad for me.) When such states prove recalcitrant—when they resist judgmental control—we can apply to ourselves methods that also work when we use them on others. However, some forms of merely managerial control are also essentially first-personal in character. Investigating their first-personal character explains why some experiences can feel alien to us in the way some of our desires can—even though we don’t usually expect that our experiences will bend to our judgments.","PeriodicalId":307163,"journal":{"name":"Alien Experience","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124258350","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}