Psychologisation de la justice sociale ? Une relecture de la conception honnethienne de la justice
ABSTRACT. Dans les interprétations contemporaines, des efforts ont été déployés pour sauver la théorie de la justice d’Axel Honneth contre la charge de psychologisation de l’injustice. Nous montrons que cette psychologisation se lie à d’autres composantes de sa théorie : la société civile, l’expérimentation historique, et son alternative : le socialisme.
L’autodétermination des minorités nationales : entre Allen Buchanan et Will Kymlicka
ABSTRACT. L’objectif de la présentation sera de proposer une théorie mitoyenne entre celle de Buchanan et Kymlicka permettant d’avoir une solution aux conflits intraétatiques entre les nationalismes concurrents dans les États libéraux et démocratiques.
Approaching the world with a Zhuangzian, two-sided consciousness
ABSTRACT. The Zhuangzi gestures toward a way to be detached about states of the world without compromising our existing ethical dedications and pursuits. This paper articulates this way and shows how such detached engagement might be a better approach to certain problems that the Stoics and Thomas Nagel once grappled with.
Grounding moral debiasing within a scientific context: What is the criterion of moral error?
ABSTRACT. Cognitive debiasing’s yielding rational improvement inspires developing moral debiasing to yield moral improvement. Moral debiasing presupposes moral errors. The moral psychology literature’s incompatible criteria of moral erroneousness impede moral debiasing. The right criterion, scientifically and practically, is two-tier subjective moral irrationality. Applications include non-paternalistic moral education befitting higher-education philosophy courses.
How to Straddle the Objective and Participant Stances
ABSTRACT. P.F. Strawson describes the possibility of “straddling” of the objective and participant stances. Drawing on work in the philosophy of emotion by Amélie Rorty and a multidimensional account of the reactive attitudes, we provide a framework to explain how such possibility should be understood.
Costs of Coping in a Non-Ideal World: Affective Injustice
ABSTRACT. After overviewing a taxonomy of coping strategies and highlighting their connection with different ways of exercising one’s agency in the face of oppressive structures, our contribution outlines the distinctive types of affective injustice arising from instances of coping against or because of oppression.
A Feminist Naturalized Approach to Oppression-Related Emotions
ABSTRACT. In this paper, I introduce the category of “oppression-related emotions”, explaining what they are and why I think this notion is a useful conceptual tool. Then I argue that the methodological and philosophical approach needed to study oppression-related emotions is naturalized (and therefore interdisciplinary), and feminist.
ABSTRACT. This paper aims to develop a distinctive feminist account of harm that defines harm in terms of obstructions to basic well-being, where well-being is understood in a feminist relational sense. In doing so, it provides a novel foundation for feminist theorizing involving the concept of harm.
ABSTRACT. I propose an account of womanhood as relating to femininity through which one’s existentially apt subjectivity is curbed. I argue that my account can explain both the universality and diversity of women’s experience of gender oppression and can withstand the crucial critiques within two major debates on gender metaphysics.
A Conceptual Analysis of Technological Assistance and Substitution
ABSTRACT. This paper offers a conceptual analysis of assistive vs. substitutive technologies. In particular, I discuss what differentiates assistance from substitution more generally, on what basis we may judge technology to be assistive or substitutive, and how to deal with hard cases where the line between assistance and substitution becomes blurred.
ABSTRACT. In discourse surrounding AI image generators, professional artists have accused technologists of stealing their works to train the AI models involved. This paper substantiates this claim using arguments from Locke’s theory of property and the identification, in critical data studies, of a colonialist pattern of extraction in AI development.
ABSTRACT. In this paper, I develop the beginning of an AI Ethics that mirrors the structure of Just War theory. I carve out theoretical space for ethical AI to be justified, but also bolster grounds for skepticism about ethical AI.
Necessity and Distinguishing states in Newcomb's Problem
ABSTRACT. Newcomb's problem is the site of a protracted controversy in philosophy about the rationality of decisions. I want to make the case that one major cause of the controversy in this and related cases are disagreements about what necessities distinguish states of the world to be chosen between.
ABSTRACT. I propose a novel solution to the problem of quantum ontology: as Newton’s theory provides a clear ontology for the classical world, Bohm’s 1952 theory—an extension of Newton’s theory to the quantum domain—provides a clear ontology for the quantum world: particles affected by classical and quantum forces.
The Practice of Relativistic Cosmological Modeling as an Entifying Technology of Theory
ABSTRACT. How the theoretical practice of cosmological modeling transformed the universe-as-a-totality into a phenomenon for scientific inquiry, effectively extracting cosmology from philosophy, first into mathematics, then, ultimately, into physics. How this practice was taken up and applied by American theorists affords a unique history of an emergent community and its evolution.
WITHDRAWN - The Condorcet Jury Theorem in an Ambiguous World
ABSTRACT. The Condorcet Jury Theorem assumes voter competence do deduce merits of the majority rule for epistemic purposes. This paper reevaluates if we can presuppose voter competence in light of ambiguity. Surprisingly, voter competence can fail this case, even if we assume rationality, honesty, and minimal fidelity of beliefs.
ABSTRACT. In this paper, I propose a novel theory of properties in which a property has two different metaphysical aspects: the predicational aspect and the objectual aspect. Then, I show that this double-aspect theory of properties nicely resolves the concept horse paradox.
ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the nature of linguistic agency. Dispositionalism arguably cannot accommodate the possibility of such agency. But the opponents of dispositionalism who take meaning to be a matter of being related to a broader practice are also guilty of distorting the agential dimension of language use.
ABSTRACT. In this paper, I suggest that recent arguments against anti-conventionalism, put forward separately by Elisabeth Camp (2016) and Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone (2017), are guilty of conflating anti-conventionalism with contextualism. Once this conflation is made clear, it becomes apparent that their concerns with anti-conventionalism are unfounded.
Remembering as a Mental Action and the (Dis)continuism Debate
ABSTRACT. Four articles argue that remembering’s a mental action. All thereby take a side in the (dis)continuism debate in philosophy of memory. At issue is whether remembering is the same kind of attitude/process as imagining. In defense of the articles, I argue that remembering is an imaginative project involving agentive-imagistic-content construction.
ABSTRACT. According to the relational view, joint attention is a three-place experiential relation between two co-attenders and an object. This paper argues that the relational view falls short in explaining how this experiential relation interacts with beliefs and doubts of co-attenders and supports joint attention’s normative role in grounding rational coordination.
Animal Rationality and Animal Consciousness: The Importance of Clear Explananda
ABSTRACT. Conceptually, rationality and consciousness face similar issues: our existing theories tend to rely on assumptions of unlicensed anthropocentrism, but it is unclear how scientific study should proceed without those theories. I argue that recent work on theory-light approaches to consciousness can inform our investigation of rationality by helping identify explananda.
ABSTRACT. Figdor (2018) proposes literal interpretation of psychological semantics based on quantitative modelling as a solution to semantic anthropocentrism that is perpetuated by qualitative analogy. I argue that literal interpretation according to modelling begs the question—it tells us nothing more than the fact that the model has been described.
The Metaphysics of Words Beyond Bundles and Lineages: Exactly how does the analogy with biological species help?
ABSTRACT. I identify some instructive blind spots in arguments in the metaphysics of words introduced by analogy with philosophy of biology in Gasparri’s “A pluralistic theory of word” and argue that analogies between biology and linguistics have so far been rather misleading.
Direct Manipulation as a Threat to Intentional Agency (Not Just Free Agency)
ABSTRACT. I offer a soft-line response to Pereboom’s four-case argument. Causal processes involving direct manipulation are not exercises of intentional agency because they involve heteromesial causal deviance. There is a relevant difference between causal processes involving direct manipulation and apersonal deterministic causal processes. Ergo, the four-case argument does not threaten source-compatibilism.
Haji, Kane, and Lemos on Libertarian Free Will and Luck
ABSTRACT. This paper deals with libertarian free will and the problem of luck. It defends the most recent versions of the views of Robert Kane and John Lemos against recent important criticisms raised by Ishtiyaque Haji.
ABSTRACT. Peter Hanks defends a version of Blackburn's dilemma according to which there is no successful reductive explanation of necessity. Central to Hanks's defense are the denial of multiple potential grounds and the assumption that the source of necessity must itself be a grounding fact. This paper argues against both.
ABSTRACT. Some have recently argued have argued that it is impermissible to inquire into a question whose answer one already knows. I draw on the literature on metacognitive feelings to show that there are many cases in which it is permissible to inquire into a question whose answer one already knows.
ABSTRACT. This paper defends the following norm of inquiry: inquiry into a question, Q, is rationally permissible only if epistemic improvement upon Q is possible. This norm can explain the rationality of inquiry across a range of cases, from mundane every-day inquiries, to specialized inquiries in fields like science and philosophy.
ABSTRACT. It is often assumed that track records are the golden standards for evaluating expertise. I argue, however, that choosing who to trust based on track records can be epistemically harmful under certain conditions, in particular, when we update our own beliefs according to the testimony of those experts.
ABSTRACT. I argue for an academic freedom framing for controversial campus events on the grounds that it supports universities in fulfilling their duty of care to students and employees. I illustrate my view through three case studies from a single Canadian university with some attention to media framing.
What’s Wrong with Calling COVID-19 "The Chinese Virus": Microinvalidations, Negligence, and a Duty of Care
ABSTRACT. Trump claimed “the Chinese virus” was merely an attempt to be “accurate”—while simultaneously rekindling stereotypes linking Asian immigration with contagion and inspiring hate crimes. I’ll argue Trump’s words meet the legal definition of negligence, and moreover, the moral duties of other perpetrators are illuminated by comparisons to negligence law.