EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY最新文献

{"title":"Bradley's Regress and a Problem in Action Theory","authors":"Helen Steward","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13016","url":null,"abstract":"<p>There is a problem which often arises during the course of various discussions in action theory and related fields about how exactly we are to characterise the relation which obtains between an agent and her (token) actions. An agent is a particular individual; it is often assumed that any token action of hers must be another.<sup>1</sup> But what is the relation between these two particulars, when the agent is the agent of the action in question? Obviously, one asymmetric relation between them is this: the agent, S, <i>is the agent of</i> the action, A. But is there a <i>further</i> relation between agent and action <i>in virtue of which</i> it is correct to say that A is S's action? The idea that agency must be reducible to something assumed to be more basic, such as causation, has sometimes tempted philosophers to think so – and there are also fairly common locutions which can make it seem as though S's being the agent of an action, A might hold in virtue of another, perhaps more basic relationship – ‘execution’ or ‘performance’, or simply ‘doing’, for example. But as I shall try to show below, it is not at all easy to make any of these ideas work.</p><p>In order to have a handy label for the problem which attaches to this search for a relation to undergird propositions of the form ‘S is the agent of A', I am going to call it the ‘agent-action problem’. The problem has rarely been acknowledged as a <i>general</i> difficulty – although it gives rise to various sub-problems, which have been often enough remarked upon.<sup>2</sup> Moreover, even when the sub-problems are observed, they are sometimes noted merely as passing curiosities which perhaps constitute nothing more than minor linguistic inconveniences to the philosopher of action. In a way, then, neither the sub-problems nor the fundamental problem which in my view underlies the sub-problems has really received any serious, sustained scrutiny of a properly wide-ranging sort. In this paper, I want to suggest, however, that it deserves such scrutiny – and that a failure properly to get to grips with the general form of the problem is indicative of philosophy of action's failure to get a decent ontological understanding of its own subject matter. This failure, I believe, is connected to some of the puzzles in which philosophers find themselves embroiled, with respect to such issues as whether agents are causes of their actions<sup>3</sup>; whether the agent ‘disappears' in a problematic way from certain pictures of what action involves<sup>4</sup>; and which physical events, precisely, compose or constitute our actions.<sup>5</sup> I want to argue that once we understand the true source of the agent-action problem, it can be seen that the problem is related in certain interesting ways to the philosophical difficulty which has come to be known as ‘Bradley's Regress'. The range of options for responding to it can, I think, therefore be usefully illuminated by reflecting on those that have be","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"32 3","pages":"629-643"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142404779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"No Self-Reference, No Ownership?","authors":"Bernhard Ritter","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13008","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A ‘no-ownership’ or ‘no-self theory’ holds that there is no proper subject of experience; the ownership of experience can only be accounted for by invoking a sub-personal entity. In the recent self-versus-no-self debate, it is widely assumed that the no-referent view of ‘I’, which is closely associated with Wittgenstein and G. E. M. Anscombe, implies a no-ownership theory of experience. I spell out this assumption with regard to both non-reflective and reflective consciousness and show that it is false. If the so-called ‘self’ is an individual, the person, nothing more is required for the ownership of sensations than the non-reflective experiencing, undergoing, or suffering of them, whereas the sense of ‘ownership’ of reflective consciousness varies according to the type of ‘I’-thought in question. Ownership of ‘I’-thoughts about one’s own actions, for one thing, is a matter of being able to fit future actions to them or answer questions as to why one is doing what one does.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 2","pages":"475-492"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144117898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Narrative Understanding","authors":"Alexander Prescott-Couch","doi":"10.1111/ejop.12994","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12994","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Much work in history, anthropology, sociology, and political science has a narrative form — the events described are emplotted into <i>stories.</i> A number of recent critics of narrative have argued that the story form is a poor vehicle for social scientific explanation, as it often misleads us about the causal structure of the social world. Defenders of narrative typically claim that such criticisms miss the point of narrative. Even if narrative is not the best means for providing us with causal information, it can provide us with information about something else of importance such as the events' “meanings” or others' experiences. I reject such defenses of narrative, but I then offer a novel defense in their place. On the view I defend, narratives increase our understanding of the social world not by giving us some kind of special information about the social world but rather by cuing certain kinds of responses to it. I tie this conception of the epistemic function of narrative to the political role that narrative can play in correcting failures of interpersonal recognition and promoting structural change.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 2","pages":"405-423"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.12994","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144117930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Exteriority of Thinking: Hegel and Heidegger","authors":"Thomas Khurana","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13000","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ejop.13000","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In <i>The Culmination</i>, Robert Pippin offers a stunning reassessment of the achievements of absolute idealism. Having developed some of the most persuasive defenses of Hegel's absolute idealism to date, Pippin now argues that Heidegger's trenchant critique of Hegel has revealed a dogmatism at the very heart of absolute idealism: an unwarranted identification of what is with what is discursively knowable. This dogmatic identification leads to a distorted understanding of the meaning of Being, a reifying account of beings, and a neglect of our own finitude. In this article, I defend Hegel against these charges. The upshot of this discussion is twofold. Rather than evading the question of the exteriority of being, I argue, Hegel in fact aims to reveal that this exteriority is internal to thinking itself. And rather than identifying the meaning of being with discursive knowability, Hegel shows that the meaning of being resides in a form of freedom that goes beyond the self-transparency of knowing.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"32 3","pages":"949-958"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142215332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Replies to Nicholas Walker, Taylor Carman, and Peter Gordon","authors":"Iain Macdonald","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13003","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ejop.13003","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In what follows, I present my replies to Nicholas Walker, Taylor Carman, and Peter Gordon's reflections on my <i>What Would Be Different? Figures of Possibility in Adorno.</i> I begin by summarizing what is at stake in the book. My reply to Nicholas Walker and Taylor Carman focusses on Adorno's criticisms of Heidegger, who claims that the history of metaphysics has blocked our access to an “other beginning” for thinking. This prepares the ground for a comparison of Adorno's and Heidegger's notions of what I call “blocked possibility.” My reply to Peter Gordon clarifies the relation of “blocked possibility” to actuality and, more specifically, to the actuality of happiness in Adorno's writings.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"32 3","pages":"983-992"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13003","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142215333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Attention and Attendabilia: The Perception of Attentional Affordances","authors":"Tom McClelland","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13010","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ejop.13010","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Agents are continually faced with two related selection problems: i) the problem of selecting what to do from a space of possible behaviours; ii) the problem of selecting what to attend to from a space of possible <i>attendabilia</i>. We have psychological mechanisms that enable us to solve both types of problem. But do these mechanisms follow different principles or work along the same lines? I argue for the latter. I start from the theory that bodily action is supported by a sensitivity to <i>affordances</i>. Strong evidence suggests that affordances feature in our perception of the world and that affordance perception can trigger the neural preparation of the afforded act. An agent can thus see a teapot <i>as grippable</i> and their doing so can automatically ready a gripping response. Something affords attending for an agent just in case it is a possible target of their focal attention. I argue that we are sensitive to these attentional affordances in much the same way. First I argue that we perceive things <i>as attendable</i>. Second I argue that our doing so can trigger the preparation of shifts in focal attention. My case for this is based on a variety of phenomenological, neurological and behavioural parallels between our sensitivity to bodily affordances and our sensitivity to attentional affordances. This yields a unified account with specific implications for our understanding of attention and affordance perception and general implications for our understanding of how the mind solves selection problems.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 2","pages":"493-513"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142215334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Misinterpreting Negativism: on Peter E. Gordon's A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity","authors":"Fabian Freyenhagen","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13005","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ejop.13005","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Adorno scholarship has come a long way in the last twenty years. His philosophy was long overshadowed by the accusation of being too negative. This accusation was made not just from outside of the Frankfurt School research tradition, but crucially also within it, especially from Jürgen Habermas, often portrayed as the leading figure of its “2nd generation”. In Habermas's case the accusation took different forms—sometimes it is about Adorno's theory lacking the standing for social critique; sometimes it is about its lacking normative foundations; and sometimes it is about performative contradiction (between the content of saying that the social world is thoroughly distorted by ideology and the act of saying that). The upshot is meant to be the same in each case: we need a positive normative resource which then provides the standard with which to criticise our social world. That led then to various debates about what that positive standard should be—communicative action, recognition/social freedom, or the right to justification (to name three prominent answers by Habermas, Honneth, and Forst respectively). Especially in the last two decades, there has been more push-back against the accusation (and the purported positive standards). Some—including (full disclosure!) I—have insisted that Adorno's taking a negativistic stance is defensible and, indeed, preferable to the supposedly positive alternatives.</p><p>It is into this context that Gordon seeks to intervene, with his newest book. He rejects the negativistic revival of Adorno, despite accepting that the textual evidence for a negativist interpretation appear to be strong (p. 5). Like Habermas, he thinks we need a positive standard for social critique, but, unlike Habermas, Gordon thinks that such a positive standard can be found in Adorno's work. He is not alone in thinking this – Gordon Finlayson and Martin Seel are among the earlier examples of interpretations which ascribe a positive core to Adorno's philosophy. What is more specific to Gordon, is that he suggests that the ‘source’ of normativity of Adorno's critical theory of society is a ‘maximalist demand for happiness’ in the broad sense of human flourishing (pp. xvi-xviii and <i>passim</i>, especially Chapter 2). It is this demand that animates Adorno's materialist ‘ethics of vulnerability’ (pp. 15, 196–197). The demand for happiness is immanent in the social world, notably in certain experiences and elements that have anticipatory character (pp. 46, 56–57, 70, 210), pointing to complete flourishing and alluding to the good even in the distorted instances of happiness that the wrong social world affords us (pp. 54–57, 70–71). In this way, precarious happiness (or precarious experience of happiness) gives us a glimpse of complete, comprehensive happiness; and is the source for immanent social critique.</p><p>Gordon clearly thinks that an orientation towards human flourishing has much to recommend it, albeit he does not offer an indepen","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"32 4","pages":"1353-1360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142215336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Doxastic Agent's Awareness","authors":"Sophie Keeling","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13006","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ejop.13006","url":null,"abstract":"<p>When performing actions, we can be aware of what we are doing in virtue of being the one doing it. Or, at the very least, we can be aware that we are doing <i>something</i>. While to an extent contested, this is nevertheless a familiar claim – that we can enjoy a so-called ‘agent's awareness’ and/or ‘sense of agency’ in acting on the world. For example, suppose that Sally is opening a jar. The thought is that she can be aware of opening the jar even if her eyes are closed, and arguably even if her fingers happen to be numb. Or in any case, her experience is different from how it would be if she passively watched things happen to her. She wouldn't be surprised to find the jar unscrewed once she opens her eyes – the jar is open because <i>she</i> opened it. And the thought isn't just that we can form beliefs about what we are doing. It is a claim about certain forms of conscious experience which can then ground our self-ascriptions.</p><p>Standardly, philosophers have limited the scope of agent's awareness to intentional actions, or at the very least actions – as we might initially expect. In contrast, I argue here that agent's awareness also extends to beliefs. This is to broaden the framework to introduce <i>doxastic agent's awareness</i>: an agentive awareness of making up one's mind and keeping it made up with regards to one's beliefs. Such awareness is possible because our awareness of performing a given action can be more or less rich, and I will suggest that in performing certain mental actions we see ourselves as forming and sustaining our beliefs. For example, suppose that Julia deliberates about Smith. She weighs the pros and cons and makes up her mind, thus concluding that Smith is a bad politician. I want to say that in doing all this, Julia is aware of making up her mind and forming a belief. This is still to ground the relevant awareness in our performance of actions, but to argue that in this way our experience can also encompass an awareness of mental <i>states</i>.</p><p>In order to grip onto its significance, I initially motivate doxastic agent's awareness as a way of accounting for our self-knowledge of belief, and in particular, our use of the so-called ‘transparency method’. I also offer independent arguments, and the thesis bears additional importance for the agent's awareness and sense of agency research programme.</p><p>The paper proceeds as follows. In §1, I introduce the question of what warrants our self-ascriptions of belief. By way of a reply in §2, I start presenting the thesis on the table – that we have an agentive awareness of them. This prior awareness, I propose, grounds our self-ascriptions. In §3, I offer additional arguments that we can possess doxastic agent's awareness.</p><p>I also want to clarify that my ultimate aim in this paper is to advocate relevant phenomenological and epistemic parities from the practical domain to that of belief. To a large extent, for example, I will assume that we at least some","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 1","pages":"112-122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13006","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142215335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introspection: First-person access in science and agency: By Maja Spener Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780198867449","authors":"Christopher Mole","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13004","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ejop.13004","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"32 4","pages":"1384-1388"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142215337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What a jerk!","authors":"Thorsten Sander","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13007","url":null,"abstract":"<p>I argue that “general pejoratives” such as “jerk” or “bastard” differ crucially from items such as “that damn N”. While items such as the latter typically serve to give vent to one's attitudes, general pejoratives essentially involve judgments about a person's behaviour or character. This is particularly evident in cases where pejoratives occur not as epithets, but as predicate nominals. If we want to account for the overall contribution of words such as “jerk”, there are three kinds of content that ought to be distinguished: truth-conditional contents, evaluative presuppositions, and expressive contents that are either at-issue (in the case of expressive predicates) or non-at-issue (in the case of epithets).</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"33 2","pages":"458-474"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144118156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}