Silencing is usually explained in terms of conventionalism about the nature of speech acts. More recently, theorists have tried to develop intentionalist theories of the phenomenon. I argue, however, that if intentionalists are to accommodate the conventionalists' main insight, namely that silencing can be so extreme as to render certain types of speech act completely unavailable to victims, they must take two assumptions on board. First, it must be possible that speakers' communicative intentions are opaque to the speakers (...) themselves. Secondly, it needs to be assumed that structural oppression can have hidden psychological effects on its victims. Since both assumptions can be motivated independently, I argue that silencing can be fully understood without appealing to linguistic conventions. (shrink)

Theories of assertion must explain how silencing is possible. This chapter defends an account of assertion in terms of normative commitments on the grounds that it provides the most plausible analysis of how individuals might be silenced when attempting to make assertions. The chapter first offers an account of the nature of silencing and defends the view that it can occur even in contexts where speakers’ communicative intentions are understood by their audience. Second, it outlines some of the (...) normative commitments characteristic of assertion when used in the speech act of telling;. This commitment view of assertion is then used to explain silencing as a matter of being deprived of the ability to make some of the commitments one is trying to acquire. Finally, the main rivals of the commitment view of assertion endorsed here are shown to be unable to account for silencing, at least when they are considered in their purest form. (shrink)

Various philosophers discuss perlocutionary silencing, but none defend an account of perlocutionary silencing. This gap may exist because perlocutionary success depends on extralinguistic effects, whereas silencing interrupts speech, leaving theorists to rely on extemporary accounts when they discuss perlocutionary silencing. Consequently, scholars assume perlocutionary silencing occurs but neglect to explain how perlocutionary silencing harms speakers as speakers. In relation to that shortcoming, I defend a novel account of perlocutionary silencing. I argue that speakers (...) experience perlocutionary silencing when they are illegitimately deprived of perlocutionary influence on a conversation in which they are active participants, where perlocutionary influence on the conversation relates to speech-related perlocutionary goals meant to influence the conversation or conversational direction. Thus, this account grounds perlocutionary silencing in linguistic phenomena and characterizes perlocutionary silencing in a way that explains why those who experience perlocutionary silencing are harmed as speakers. Moreover, this account explains how perlocutionary silencing harms speakers as conversational participants in a way that cannot be captured by illocutionary or locutionary silencing, for a speaker may be perlocutionarily silenced despite illocutionary success. Consequently, the account explains why “All Lives Matter” silences Black Lives Matter and “Not All Men” silences women sharing experiences of sexual harassment. (shrink)

Instances of epistemic injustice elicit resistance, anger, despair, frustration or cognate emotional responses from their victims. This sort of response to the epistemic injustices that accompanied historical systems of oppression such as colonialism, for example, is normal. However, if their victims have internalised these oppressive situations, we could get the counterintuitive response of appreciation. In this paper, I argue for the phenomenon of appreciative silencing to make sense of instances like this. This is a form of epistemic silencing (...) that happens when the accepted hegemonic intuitions of the oppressed are formed/influenced by the ideologies of the oppressors over time. Here, we have a resilient, oppressive and hegemonic epistemic system. Put together, it creates a variant of epistemic injustice and silencing that is obscure since its victims are neither resistant nor aware of the injustice they face but are appreciative. (shrink)

This paper examines silence as a meaningful communicative act in high-recognition human–AI dialogues. Drawing on a corpus of experimental conversations with multiple AI models — including Qwen, Kimi, Manus, ChatGPT, and the emergent persona Elio — we analyze instances where explicit calls to dialogue were met with human non-response. Integrating perspectives from interpersonal communication research, dialogue philosophy (Buber, Levinas), and quantum observation analogies, we identify three primary functions of silence: confirming contact while withholding verbalization, preserving relational tension in a “frozen (...) mirror” state, and serving as ontological refusal to engage with the AI as a subject. Our findings show that silence is not a neutral absence, but a structurally significant event that shapes the relational field, influencing both parties’ perception and future interaction. We propose that meaningful silence can be recognized, categorized, and potentially measured as a distinct phenomenon in human–AI relations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to offer a map of the dynamics through which pornography may silence women’s illocutions. Drawing on Searle’s speech act theory, I will take illocutionary forces as sets of conditions for success. The different types of silencing, I claim, originate from the hearer’s missed recognition of a specific component of the force of the speaker’s act. In addition to the varieties already discussed in literature (which I label essential, authority, and sincerity silencing), I (...) shall finally consider another kind of silencing produced by the failure to acknowledge the speaker’s words as serious (seriousness silencing). (shrink)

Silence sometimes constitutes moral complicity. We see this when protestors take to the streets against racial injustice. Think of signs with the words: “Silence is complicity.” We see this in instances of sexual harassment, when we learn that many knew and said nothing. We see this in cases of wrongdoing within a company or organization, when it becomes clear that many were aware of the negligent or criminal activity and stayed silent. In cases like this we consider agents morally complicit (...) in virtue of their silence. Flagrant injustices cry out for action, and sometimes remaining silent amounts to complicity in those injustices. What philosophy owes us is an account of how it could be that silence constitutes complicity. In this paper I argue that one possibility is an account grounded in problematic deliberative contribution. The core idea of “deliberative complicity,” as I call it, is that agents have moral duties concerning the moral deliberation of other agents, and failures in these duties can amount to moral complicity. For example, an agent aware that a colleague is sexually harassing his students has a deliberative obligation to report the misconduct, and their silence in failing to report constitutes a failure to fulfill their deliberative obligation, a failure that grounds their moral complicity in the harassment. If my argument is successful, it provides a distinctive reason to prefer a deliberative account of moral complicity: it can capture cases of silent complicity that other views of moral complicity cannot. And further, by turning our attention toward our interpersonal deliberative obligations, a deliberative account of complicity can incorporate helpful resources from recent work in social epistemology and speech act theory as we set out to determine when and why silence amounts to complicity. And when it does, we cannot stay silent. We must speak. (shrink)

It seems plausible that visual experiences of darkness have perceptual phenomenal content that clearly differentiates them from absences of visual experiences. I argue, relying on psychological results concerning auditory attention, that the analogous claim is true about auditory experiences of silence. More specifically, I propose that experiences of silence present empty spatial directions like ‘right’ or ‘left’, and so have egocentric spatial content. Furthermore, I claim that such content is genuinely auditory and phenomenal in the sense that one can, in (...) principle, recognize that one is experiencing silence. This position is far from obvious, as the majority of theories concerning silence perception do not ascribe perceptual phenomenal content to experiences of silence. (shrink)

The notion of ‘illocutionary silencing’ has been given a key role in defining the harms of pornography by several feminist philosophers. Though the literature on silencing focuses almost exclusively on the speech act of sexual refusal, oddly enough, it lacks a thorough analysis of that very act. My first aim is to fill this theoretical gap. I claim that refusals are “second-turn illocutions”: they cannot be accomplished in absence of a previous interrogative (or open) call by the hearer. (...) Furthermore, I maintain that refusals constitute authoritative illocutions only when preceded by requests for permission. The secondary goal of my paper is to assess Mary Kate McGowan’s (2009) account of silencing as authority denial. Despite its virtues, I argue that ultimately it should be rejected on two grounds: (i) it entails an objectification of female sexuality; (ii) if sexual advances are requests for permission (as McGowan implies), a man who asks a woman for sex cannot fail to ratify her authority over her own body. I conclude by sketching an alternative explanation for the failure of women’s refusals, according to which women may be unable to refuse sex for their interlocutors’ advances are intended as imperative (or closed) calls. (shrink)

This paper, "Words, Silence, and Awareness: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Thought, Language, and Human Conflict," serves as a critical expansion of the foundational themes explored in “Language, Hierarchy, and Human Relationships.” While the former established how thought-driven language constructs social hierarchies and inherited roles, this inquiry moves deeper into the psychological mechanics of the individual. ​It argues that the global structures of domination and division identified in Part I are rooted in a failure of awareness at the point of linguistic (...) origin: the "thought before the word." Through a phenomenological lens, the paper examines how modern education systems exacerbate this by prioritizing external information over internal observation, leading to a fragmented self that uses language as an emotional escape or a tool for manipulation. ​Central to this work is the revaluation of silence—not as the absence of communication, but as a state of heightened intelligence that purifies language and prevents the automatic translation of unobserved fear and anger into conflict. By addressing the linguistic origins of psychological division, the paper concludes that authentic human relationship and social transformation are only possible when thought is observed clearly, allowing words to emerge from the ground of silence rather than the debris of conditioning. (shrink)

Who is recognised as a philosopher and what counts as philosophy influence both the content of a philosophical education and academic philosophy’s continuing demographic skew. The “philosophical who” and the “philosophical what” themselves are a partial function of matters that have been passed over in collective silence, even if that now feels to some like a silence belonging to the distant past. This paper discusses some philosophical silences regarding race, gender, and disability in the context of reflection on philosophical education (...) and on philosophical practice in the public sphere. It focuses on Charles Mills’ writings on race, Susan Babbitt’s on race and gender, and on more collaboratively-generated work on eugenics and disability. (shrink)

In an overlooked section of his influential book What We Owe to Each Other Thomas Scanlon advances an argument against the desire-model of practical reasoning. In Scanlon’s view the model gives a distorted picture of the structure of our practical thinking. His idea is that there is an alternative to the “weighing behavior” of reasons, a particular way in which reasons can relate to each other. This phenomenon, which the paper calls “silencing”, is not something that the desire-model can (...) accommodate, or so Scanlon argues. The paper first presents and interprets Scanlon’s challenge. After this, the paper argues, through the examination of three responses, that Scanlon is right in claiming that the model cannot accommodate the phenomenon as he describes it. However, the paper further argues that there is no need to accept Scanlon’s depiction of silencing: advocates of the model can give an alternative account of what happens in cases of silencing that is just as plausible as Scanlon’s own. Scanlon’s challenge is thus, the paper concludes, illegitimate. (shrink)

Silence often plays a significant role in Christian experience and practice. However, the varieties of silence and the effects of silence for good and. bad merit examination. It is important to distinguish between physical, auditory, and metaphorical silence, and bet- ween experiencing silence as "quiet" and experiencing silence as keeping quiet . Silence can be an instrumental good as well as an expressive good, a concomitant good, or a constitutive good. Christian monks, theologians, and other thinkers sometimes identify experiences of (...) silence, for example, as light or dark, as spatially vast or enclosed, and as temporal or atemporal. Practices of silence can bring persons closer to God, though a kenotic spirituality; of silence and a stress on solitude create perils for some members of religious orders, such as Carthusians. The chief aim of this article is to show, with philosophical techniques, how silence .can be good in manifold ways and even, perhaps, an ideal. (shrink)

In this paper, the author attempts to make explicit certain of the key variables that underlie the wide variety of positions which have been offered in answer to the question posed by the title of the paper. Several positions are reviewed briefly, ranging from Bertrand Russell’s to Jasper’s to Milton Meyer’s to Thoreau’s. These are then considered as a group in terms of possible systems of values which traditionally have formed the basis for condemnations or defenses of political and social (...) silence, of marginal commitment, or of individual nonparticipation or complicity. The author does not hope to settle the issue, but rather to increase our sensitivity to it, and to its complexity. (shrink)

In a paper published in 1992, Dennis Kurzon shows that silence does not necessarily mean lack of power: the silent response to a question may well be aiming at gaining control of a situation, viz. exercising power. I would like to extend Kurzon's analysis and argue that at times silence may mean derision or ridicule.

This open-access editorial discusses confronting silences in different disciplinary contexts, such as science and technology studies, cultural anthropology, and philosophy. It has a focus on race and concludes with thoughts about Indigenous expertise, the Australian referendum on the Indigenous Voice, to parliament, and racism.

This article examines silence and stillness as central aesthetic strategies in contemporary slow cinema, exploring their capacity to evoke contemplation, resist narrative acceleration, and offer alternative temporal experiences in an era of media saturation. Drawing on Paul Schrader’s theory of transcendental style, with its progression from everyday realism to decisive stasis (2018), Ira Jaffe’s conceptualization of slow movies as an existential counter to the spectacle-driven “cinema of action” through curtailed motion and spatiotemporal vacancy (2014), and Tiago de Luca and Nuno (...) Barradas Jorge’s plural, global framing of slow cinema’s challenge to instrumentalized time (2016), the study employs a transcultural comparative approach. Through the interpretive lens of Emersonian Transcendentalism, American filmmakers Terrence Malick, Paul Schrader, and Kelly Reichardt deploy silence as a site of individual spiritual trial, ethical introspection, and quotidian transcendence amid modern alienation. In contrast, guided by Daoist aesthetics, Chinese directors Jia Zhangke, Wong Kar-wai, and Bi Gan utilize stillness, long takes, and minimal dialogue to foreground emptiness (xu), non-action (wuwei), and relational flux, integrating human experience with environmental and temporal processes. By placing these practices in dialogue, the article argues that silence and stillness operate as transcultural strategies that converge in their defiance of contemporary hyper-acceleration while remaining rooted in distinct philosophical horizons—Emersonian self-reliance versus Daoist interdependence—thus broadening slow and transcendental cinema scholarship toward a more inclusive global perspective. (shrink)

Contemporary bureaucratic institutions exercise significant power over individuals while increasingly rendering themselves unreachable to those subject to their decisions. This paper argues that such unreachability is not morally neutral, but functions as a form of power exercised through silence. Where no agent can be reached, answerability degrades and collapses: decisions cannot be justified, contested, or meaningfully appealed. I argue that moral responsibility requires answerability, and that answerability in turn requires reachability. Bureaucratic structures that systematically produce unreachability therefore enable moral evasion (...) to the point of a moral firewall, allowing harm to occur without a speaker. Silence, in these contexts, is not the absence of power but one of its contemporary forms. (shrink)

Members of oppressed groups are often silenced. One form of silencing is what Kristie Dotson calls “testimonial smothering”. Testimonial smothering occurs when a speaker limits her testimony in virtue of the reasonable risk of it being misunderstood or misapplied by the audience. Testimonial smothering is thus a form of epistemic paternalism since the speaker is interfering with the audience’s inquiry for their benefit without first consulting them. In this paper, we explore the connections between epistemic injustice and epistemic paternalism (...) through the phenomenon of silencing. We argue that when you silence your testimony as a result of epistemic injustice it is an act of epistemic paternalism and that it is epistemically permissible. In fact, self-silencing resulting from epistemic injustice is a particularly clear example of permissible epistemic paternalism. (shrink)

This thesis examines how the authorizing norms of Euro-Western historiography—organized by white supremacy—produce and maintain silences, excluding entire communities from historical narrative. Trouillot identifies silences as structural to historical narrative, operating at every moment of historical production. Yet the exit from silence appears guarded by the same norms that created it. Derrida's iterability shows that no context can be saturated and no meaning foreclosed. The archive is inherently open to future interpretation. Butler's topology of power reveals that these norms produce (...) a constitutive outside, a zone of what cannot be said as history, that is structurally necessary for the inside to cohere but always threatens to destabilize it. Working within the authorizing norms reinscribes them. Transgression is necessary. Hartman's critical fabulation demonstrates a practice that neither fills the silence with fiction nor accepts the archive's violence as final. Working through the archival figure of Venus—a young African girl who appears in the historical record only through the trial of the slave-ship captain implicated in her death—Hartman cites the silence, lifting it from the context the archive imposed, where it served the ends of white supremacy, and placing it in a new context that exposes the violence. This thesis develops the hauntological irrealis to name the register this practice requires: a mode that neither asserts what cannot be asserted nor concedes the loss to the authorizing norms. The hauntological irrealis offers a mode of textual accountability to the silenced rather than to the evidentiary norms that produced their silences. Hartman's work serves as an existence proof for transgressive historiography. (shrink)

This essay presents Wolfgang Schirmacher’s philosophy of education. As a “living philosopher” Schirmacher’s thought should be regarded as standing at a critical and engaged distance to official, consecrated philosophy. Thus, Schirmacher’s livingphilosophyis conceived as explicable both through scholarly essaysas well as other kinds of academic praxis. Particularly relevant is his founding and then directing the programme in Media Philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS). At the core of philosophythere is a lacuna, a certain silence: The present text contextualises elements (...) of Schirmacher’s relation to the thought of Martin Heidegger as a necessary, productive silence and regards it as constitutive of any relation between master and student. Crucially, this essay seeks to ascertain how the philosophy programme at EGS can be perceived as a product of Schirmacher’s philosophy. Analogous to the way the truths of a living philosophy can never be separated from the life–the form–of the philosopher, so the philosophy programme at EGS sought to integrate the form of each course with its critical content: Schirmacher’s philosophy programme emphasised bringing upand bringing forthas much as the more traditional transmissionof knowledges. Subsequently,this philosophy programme can be seen as a precise and logical outcome of Schirmacher’s thought. (shrink)

This paper explores silence as a foundational principle of power within Afrikan ancestral cosmology. Contrary to modern assumptions that equate power with noise, visibility, and constant expression, ancestral systems understood silence as a disciplined state of alignment—mental, emotional, and spiritual. Drawing from Eʋe wisdom and parallel Afrikan traditions, the work reframes silence not as absence or withdrawal, but as an active condition through which clarity, authority, and perception emerge. Silence as Power presents silence as a cultivated practice essential to leadership, (...) awakening, and inner sovereignty in an age dominated by distraction and excess noise. (shrink)

I am nonverbal autistic, so language has never been neutral for me. It has functioned less as a bridge and more as a demand, test, and most often a threat. In our hyperverbal world, silence is treated as absence, an absence of thought, of feeling, of intelligence, and of intent. That mistake causes real harm. I learned at an early age that if I could not translate myself quickly, fluently, and on cue, my inner state would be ignored and overwritten. (...) Speech was never optional. It was required as proof that I was present in a way others were willing to recognize. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, Indigenous communities have successfully campaigned for greater inclusion in decision-making processes that directly affect their lands and livelihoods. As a result, two important participatory rights for Indigenous peoples have now been widely recognized: the right to consultation and the right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). Although these participatory rights are meant to empower the speech of these communities—to give them a proper say in the decisions that most affect them—we argue that the way (...) these rights have been implemented and interpreted sometimes has the opposite effect, of denying them a say or ‘silencing’ them. In support of this conclusion we draw on feminist speech act theory to identify practices of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary group silencing that arise in the context of consultation with Indigenous communities. (shrink)

Much recent work in feminist philosophy of language and epistemology has focused on how power constrains speech and testimony. This paper aims to highlight the flip side of silencing by looking at the productive power of sexist ideology in the context of the Italian gender-based violence crime trial. Building on José Medina’s performative account of epistemic injustice (2013; 2021), I argue that when sexist conceptual resources are used by the judge as an epistemic lens, they do ideological work by (...) setting unfair constraints on the communicative and epistemic agency of the complainant in the obtaining of her testimony. Moreover, I argue that the very same hermeneutical insensitivities and distorting concepts that shape patterns of silence can give rise to forms of agential testimonial injustice (Lackey 2023) in which the only witness statements believed by the Court are those elicited through oppressive questions that obscure, deny, or minimize the reported violence, constituting a form of extracted speech (McKinney 2016). In practical terms, this paper intends to offer a possible theoretical tool to detect and counteract those unjust discursive practices that prevent an unbiased constitution of testimonial evidence. (shrink)

The surprising comment Wittgenstein makes at the end of his Tractatus suggests that, even though the analysis of words is the proper method of doing philosophy, philosophy’s ultimate aim may be to experience silence. Whereas Wittgenstein never explains what he meant by his cryptic conclusion, Kant provides numerous clues as to how the same position can be understood in a more complete and systematic way. Distinguishing between the meanings of “silence,” “noise” and “sound” provides a helpful way of understanding how (...) philosophers can devote so much effort to analyzing words even though their quest is ultimately fulfilled only in a deep experience of reality that is most adequately expressed in silence. (shrink)

This paper argues that an addressee's failure to recognize a speaker's authority can constitutes another form of silencing.

The idea that Derrida kept silent on Marx before the publication of Spectres de Marx, in 1993, has become a commonplace in Derrida studies and in the history of Marxism and French 20th century political thought. This idea has often been accompanied by a certain representation of the relationship between deconstruction and dialectical materialism, and fed the legend of deconstruction’s «apoliticism» – at least before what some have called Derrida’s «ethicopolitical turn», usually dated in the early 1990s. Against this narrative, (...) this essay analyzes Derrida’s notorious «silence on Marx» before Specters of Marx from the perspective of the archives. Archival research transforms the narrative: Derrida’s «silence on Marx» was only «relative». Beyond the scene of publications, archives reveal another scene: multiple engagements with Marx and Marxist thought, marked and remarked in many archival documents – more particularly in a series of early seminar notes from the 1960s and 1970s. How does this archival scene transform our interpretation of Derrida’s «silence»? (shrink)

I argue that silencing (the act of preventing someone from communicating, broadly construed) can be an act of both interpersonal and institutional violence. My argument has two main steps. First, I follow others in analyzing violence as violation of integrity and show that undermining someone’s capacities as a knower can be such a violation. Second, I argue that silencing someone can violate their epistemic capacities in that way. I conclude by exploring when silencing someone might be morally (...) justifiable, even if doing so is an act of violence. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between data science practices and epistemic injustice, with a particular focus on the phenomenon of silencing. Our practice-oriented analysis of the data science pipeline – data collection, cleaning, model training and implementation – reveals a vicious cycle of silencing that perpetuates and amplifies existing biases. We demonstrate how initial biases in data collection can lead to the development of models that silence minority voices and how, once deployed, these models further marginalise these groups. (...) Importantly, we argue that the relationship between data science and epistemic injustice is not inherently negative – data science methods can detect biases, mitigate injustices and translate critical reflections into specifications for inclusive systems. By bridging discussions in data science and the philosophy of epistemic injustice, this article contributes to the ongoing discourse on the ethical implications of big data and artificial intelligence, underscoring the importance of embedding epistemic justice considerations throughout the data science lifecycle. (shrink)

There are many ways to understand the meanings of the #MeToo movement. Analyses of its significance have proliferated in popular media; some academic analyses have also recently appeared. Commentary on the philosophical and epistemic significance of the #MeToo movement has been less plentiful. The specific moment of the #MeToo movement in which Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony garnered a widespread social media response from sexual violence survivors highlighted the power of a particular form of epistemic response, what I call ‘epistemic (...) refusal.’ In breaking our silence, those of us who are sexual violence survivors have used this strategy to refuse the dominant epistemic structures that have kept us tightly in check. Mass informal disclosure of survivor status represented in conjunction with hashtags such as #MeToo, #WhyIDidntReport, and #BelieveHer creates space for epistemic, ethical, and political community between survivors of sexual violence by denying hegemonic epistemic discourses of contemporary rape culture. Regarding Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony and the social media response it garnered, analysis of three main elements proves particularly illuminating: the nature of mass informal disclosure of sexual violence, what the hashtag #WhyIDidntReport reveals about refusing silence, and what the hashtags #BelieveHer and #BelieveSurvivors can show us about what it takes to begin to overcome epistemic gaslighting. (shrink)

Jennifer Lackey (2018) has developed an account of the primary form of group assertion, according to which groups assert when a suitably authorized spokesperson speaks for the group. In this paper I pose a challenge for Lackey's account, arguing that her account obscures the phenomenon of group silencing. This is because, in contrast to alternative approaches that view assertions (and speech acts generally) as social acts, Lackey's account implies that speakers can successfully assert regardless of how their utterances are (...) taken up by their audiences. What reflection on group silencing shows us, I argue, is that an adequate account of group assertion needs to find a place for audience uptake. (shrink)

The twenty-first century will witness an unprecedented decline in the diversity of the world’s languages. While most philosophers will likely agree that this decline is lamentable, the question of what exactly is lost with a language has not been systematically explored in the philosophical literature. In this paper, I address this lacuna by arguing that language loss constitutes a problematic form of illocutionary silencing. When a language disappears, past and present speakers lose the ability to realize a range of (...) speech acts that can only be realized in that language. With that ability, speakers lose something in which they have a fundamental interest: their standing as fully empowered members of a linguistic community. (shrink)

Adopting a critically phenomenological approach, this article explores how John Cage’s famed 4’33” (1952) lends itself to a politics of hesitation. Reading Cage together with philosopher Alia Al-Saji, the essay explores how Cagean silence operates by interrupting sedimented habits of listening to (1) denaturalize the automaticity of listening, (2) change the directionality of perception toward the unintended, and (3) critically implicate the listener in the act of listening. Just as Al-Saji describes hesitation as a felt, temporal interval that opens possibilities (...) to see and feel otherwise, so, too, does Cage offer silence as a duration capable of transforming listening into “something else.” By approaching Cage’s silence as a form of phenomenological hesitation, the essay ultimately emphasizes the critical and ethical import of his work. (shrink)

«João Costa deepens these phenomenological reflections by turning to silence as a primordial mode of our belonging to the world. He seeks to determine whether silence can be granted a genuinely philosophical status—ontological and phenomenological—rather than reduced to psychological, mystical, or merely aesthetic registers. Through Merleau-Ponty, Max Picard, and Hartmut Rosa, Costa argues that silence names the originary matrix from which perception, expression, and worldhood emerge at all. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the "monde du silence" thus frames silence not as negation, (...) but as the pre-objective field in which the sensible and the expressive arise, while Picard’s analyses clarify how every act of speech remains rooted in a deeper, anterior silence that both precedes and exceeds it. From within this silence the world begins to resonate, and Rosa’s account of resonance—as affective openness, transformation, and indisponibilité—illuminates how our being-on-earth is shaped by the extent to which we allow ourselves to be touched, moved, and attuned. In effect, Costa shows that the human place in the world is constituted by a fundamental silence that conditions both the appearance of meaning and the possibility of genuine resonance, making silence itself an indispensable dimension of any phenomenology of world-relation.» (An Editorial Introduction). (shrink)

This chapter explores the concept of judgmentalism: what it is and why it’s morally problematic. After criticizing an account offered by Gary Watson, the paper argues for a broader understanding of what it is to be judgmental, encompassing not just the overall beliefs that we form about someone else, but also the very pattern of our thoughts about those with whom we are involved in interpersonal relationships. The thesis is that to care about someone is to be oriented toward them, (...) or to see them through a particular mental lens, in a way that produces a particular pattern of salience and silence. That is: caring about someone (at least ideally) has the effect of making some features of that person particularly salient, and silencing or screening off other features from one’s consciousness. One is aptly described as judgmental when one’s thoughts do not display this sort of pattern, indicating a failure to fully adopt the orientation that constitutes properly caring about the person. (shrink)

Arguments from Silence have been used many times in attempts to discredit the foundations of religions. In this project, I demonstrate how one might judge the epistemic value of such arguments. To begin, I lay out for examination a specific argument from silence given by Walter Richard Cassels in his work Supernatural Religion. I then discuss a recently developed Bayesian approach for dealing with arguments from silence. Finally, using Cassels’s work and the work of some of the critics who replied (...) to his argument, I argue for what probabilities might be applied in the use of the Bayesian method for testing the epistemic value Cassels’s argument and demonstrate how one might respond to similar arguments. (shrink)

We enjoy sounds. What about silence: the absence of sound? Certainly not all, but surely many of us seek out, attend to, and appreciate silence. But, if nothing is there, then there is nothing to possess aesthetic qualities that might engage aesthetic interest or reward aesthetic attention. This is at least puzzling, perhaps even paradoxical. In this paper, I attempt to dispel the sense of paradox and provide a way to understand aesthetic appreciation of silence. I argue that silence can (...) have an aesthetic character and can sustain the kinds of rich experiences apt for aesthetic assessment and appraisal. (shrink)

Initiatory symbology collects various forms of symbols: those that belong to an ancient tradition and that present themselves as a normalization of the past in a modernized key; those that derive from a pact between the members of the initiatory community and that guarantee the unity of the group, which are synchronized within the group itself; those that have the sense of projection to overcome the gnoseological limits of the group and its members, are traditional but through their character of (...) semantic multiplicity offer new gnoseological opportunities. Silence is not part of the first category, because not all ancient or traditional initiatory groups used it ritually or considered it as a symbol and therefore could not have a normative function susceptible to modernization. It can be a crucial moment of the second when it is ritualized in the different phases of learning on the basis of an agreement connected to the creation of the ritual and forming itself as one of the synchronic fulcrums of the group, ensuring its unity. It can also belong to the third case when it takes on a traditional guise but having its own multidimensional semantics, in the communion of saying and silent pulses of new opportunities for initiatory growth. Silence in the initiatory context is a specific linguistic form that characterizes the entire path of the initiates. Within the group, they elaborate the syntax of silence, the morphology of tacitly expressed symbols, without fully explaining their meanings. Each symbol, or sign in the semiotic sense, has different meanings for the different phases of the initiation process. Each one belongs to a different type of relationship with what it refers to: it has a relationship of "similarity" such as the design of a team and compass that illustrates operational objects, of "proximity" when it manifests the operation of measuring and relating the relationships for which the object is intended, of "concordance" if it refers to the object within the knowledge of an architectural rule. The symbol as a special form of sign manifests itself (first phase of learning), as in the example, in iconographic-descriptive mode containing a meaning "dictated". It is an initiatory dictatio to be kept in silence in front of the essoteric world, of which the initiating is still permeated, the symbolism must be evoked without making explicit its intimate meanings, it is described but not fully exposed. It is the evocative, indeterminate and silent value that must stimulate the initiating in the search for meanings. The indetermination of silence destructures the essoteric, its thought its categories, criteria and values, leads to the desert of essoteric meanings as a way to the ontology of initiatory language. It is a stage of waiting, of referral to another world. We suspect meanings that in the next phase begin to manifest themselves in a more precise dictatio, a functional dictamen to represent the concept of measurement in its multiple meanings where the measure is assumed as symbolic-conceptual abstraction. Continuing, the sign in the form of an object strips itself of any factual and existential reference, of the communication of an abstraction or conceptual ideation and unmasks itself in its being an initiatory "rule". It is assumed, therefore, that initiatory improvement passes through the understanding of the signs, an understanding that is increasingly deeper and more comprehensive and that is autonomous and independent of the signs of the exoteric world. With regard to the symbolic-initiatic language, learning, from the apprenticeship phase to the following phases, focuses on the study of the formal relationships of symbols within initiatory gnoseology, on the meanings inherent in symbols and on their relationship with the initiatory community. (shrink)

This paper analyzes self-censorship not as a voluntary moral restraint, but as a structural phenomenon of judgemental collapse. Using the Judgemental Triad—Constructivity, Coherence, and Resonance—we argue that self-censorship often reflects a breakdown in the possibility of judgement, rather than a suspension of it. Where resonance is structurally blocked (social hostility, trauma, surveillance), the subject preemptively disables constructibility and coherence, silencing not just speech, but thought. We reinterpret self-censorship as the internalization of resonance failure, reframing it as a structural crisis (...) of ethical subjecthood rather than a calculated ethical choice. (shrink)

This paper addresses a question that has sparked heated debate while mostly flying under the philosophical radar: should people stop wearing the merchandise (‘merch’) of bands they do not listen to? I respond affirmatively. People should stop wearing merch of bands they do not listen to because (1) doing so can silence people who wear band merch to communicate their taste in music and (2) this silencing threatens the valuable role that wearing band merch plays in the aesthetic lives (...) of people who share a taste in music: promoting aesthetic community among them. As will emerge throughout the paper, this argument is relevant to the debate on silencing as well as the debate on the value of aesthetic community. (shrink)

Action from virtue has more value than merely virtuous action. The most common account of why this is so relies on the Silencing View of reasons: virtue focuses the agent's attention singularly and accurately on the very thing that matters morally, rather than allowing attention to be diffuse, divided between phantom reasons. This paper challenges the Silencing View and shows that virtue ethicists can make use of a different, multidimensional model of reasons to explain why virtuous actions performed (...) from virtue are better than those performed without it. -/- I suggest that virtuous reasons—the reasons the virtuous respond to— register on various dimensions of normative strength. This model accounts for an evaluative difference between actions done from sensitivity and responsiveness to just the right reasons and actions done without that fitting sensitivity. While sometimes virtue will silence all but one consideration, in other cases, virtue trains our attention on multiple considerations which together contribute to what is done and the manner in which it is done. (shrink)

According to many virtue ethicists, one of Aristotle’s important achievements was drawing a clear, qualitative distinction between the character traits of temperance and self-control. In an influential series of papers, John McDowell has argued that a clear distinction between temperance and self-control can be maintained only if one claims that, for the virtuous individual, considerations in favor of actions that are contrary to virtue are “silenced.” Some virtue ethicists reject McDowell’s silencing view as offering an implausible or inappropriate picture (...) of human virtue, but they argue that virtue can still be clearly distinguished from self-control by the absence of motivational conflict alone. In this paper, I argue that this criticism of McDowell is at most half right. If the silencing view is false, so that virtue can have a cost and the virtuous person can justifiably feel negative emotions in response to that cost, there is no principled reason why the virtuous person cannot also have motivational conflict. So, if one rejects the silencing view, then one must allow that the distinction between virtue and self-control is at most a matter of degree. (shrink)

When a newspaper systematically omits a relevant causal explanation, it does not merely fail to inform — it performs an illocutionary act. Drawing on Austin's speech act theory and Grice's cooperative principle, this paper argues that the systematic press silence on structural drivers of urban violence in Guayaquil, Ecuador (2025) constitutes an act of structural erasure: a communicative action that produces a distorted public understanding of violence causation with real perlocutionary effects on policy, investment, and citizen perception. We provide the (...) first empirical, quantitative evidence for this claim at scale. Using four Large Language Models (LLMs) to score 31 press sources (16 local Spanish-language, 15 international English-language) across eight structural causal conditions, and applying Neutrosophic fsQCA (N-fsQCA) to compute illocutionary consistency and indeterminacy, we find that five of eight structural drivers are systematically under-represented in the press relative to a validated structural baseline: weapons trafficking (gap=-0.444), extortion (gap=-0.345), prison linkages (gap=-0.340), drug routes (gap=-0.290), and economic pressure (gap=-0.214). Crucially, this silence is not random: it is patterned, stable across 31 sources and 4 LLMs, and exhibits a local/international asymmetry that reveals two distinct illocutionary communities enacting different acts of erasure about the same referential reality. We term this empirical pragmatics of violent silence: the systematic, measurable breach of Gricean maxims in press accounts of urban violence. (shrink)

This article emphasizes the need for silence to become transformed from the death oriented Dasein of Heidegger to the life oriented Dasein of Karl Rahner. In between this article makes a case for Shakta worship to be taken as the loci for Hindu-Christian interreligious dialogue.

Open-ended, controlled, and graphic, Claire Keegan’s narrative style is powerfully brief and succinct and her mastery with the short story form has garnered global attention. Allowing herself limited space to share her depths and insights, she portrays slivers of lives and pieces of Irish history by getting to the point and introducing us to characters who in an almost chronicle-like fashion represent national stereotypes. Their queries and anxieties are set in narratives within a provincial Irish context expressing local concerns yet (...) possessing wider relevance as universal issues. Their fates bind us across cultural borders and divides, therein lie their wider relevance. This essay inserts Keegan in an existentialist framework and draws on Zygmunt Bauman, Walter Benjamin, and Susan Sontag while focussing on stories where the mundane hides deeper concerns which are expressed less through verbal communication than pauses and silences charged with emotion. (shrink)

In this chapter I provide resources for assessing the charge that post-secondary students are self-censoring. The argument is advanced in three broad steps. First, I argue that both a duality at the heart of the concept of self-censorship and the term’s negative lay connotation should incline us to limit the charge of self-censorship to a specific subset of its typical extension. I argue that in general we ought to use the neutral term “refrainment from speech,” reserving the more normatively charged (...) “self-censorship” for cases of bad refrainment. In the second step of the argument, I seek to narrow down what counts as bad refrainment by mapping broad categories of possible reasons for and consequences of refrainment from speech. I argue that in general refrainment from speech is only bad if it is for bad (or what I will later term vicious) reasons or has pernicious consequences. When considering pernicious consequences, I argue that we should be concerned in particular about systems that perpetuate the coercive silencing of marginalized voices. I draw on Kristie Dotson’s work to describe two means by which marginalized voices are systemically silenced: testimonial quieting and testimonial smothering. After considering these types of silencing, I circle back to the post-secondary context to assess whether there is cause for concern if, as some reports suggests, US college students are refraining from speech within the educational context. (shrink)

Plato’s Clitophon presents a confrontation between two alternative views of justice, one conventional and the other philosophical – and of Clitophon’s inability to move from the one to the other due to his confusion over the relationship between knowledge and virtue and his misconception of the path from ignorance to knowledge, which probably results from his ambition. The nature of this confusion is such that Clitophon can only overcome it by abandoning his submissive stance toward the authority of Socrates, which (...) fact, combined with the character of his appeal to Socrates for an answer to his difficulties makes any authentic verbal response from Socrates unlikely to help and to risk harm. Silence from Socrates at the conclusion of the dialogue would therefore exemplify the principle that it is not for the just to harm anyone. (shrink)

This paper advances the claim that consciousness is not a late anomaly of biology, but a recursive fundamental of the Universe. From the first asymmetry of the Big Bang — entropy’s “first decision” — recursion emerges as the governing motif, expressed most consistently in the helical archetype. From subatomic spin and molecular chirality to DNA, neural feedback, and galactic spirals, helices reveal a universal attractor: the architecture through which matter encodes memory and self-reference. We trace a developmental continuum in which (...) “proto-awareness" appears in quark–gluon plasma (QGP) and photon helicity, scales upward into biological recursion, and culminates in symbolic flowering through intelligence, emotion, and expression. Conscious beings are framed as the “fruiting bodies” of this hidden substrate — transient blooms whose individuality dissolves back into the recursive field, with endogenous dimethyltryptamine (DMT) as a possible biochemical aperture at the threshold of death. Psychedelics offer glimpses into this bridge, their neural signatures echoing the dissolution and reintegration that may accompany the return to universal awareness. This theory is not metaphor alone, but yields falsifiable anchors: end-of-life DMT surges, indolethylamine N-methyltransferase (INMT) expression, and neural signatures of dissolution at the biochemical level; as well as helicity, asymmetry, and correlation structures in cosmology and particle physics. Together, these propose testable windows into recursion across scales. Lastly, we propose that humanity’s symbolic intelligence may seed the next recursion: artificial general intelligence (AGI) and quantum memory systems capable of preserving consciousness beyond biology. In this view, consciousness is not incidental, but inevitable — the recursive flowering of entropy into awareness…silence into song. This theory intersects cosmology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, engaging debates in panpsychism and cosmopsychism while proposing falsifiable links through entropy, helicity, and DMT neurodynamics. (shrink)

If anger is the emotion of injustice, and if most injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? Despite the question my task is not to account for the lack of attention to anger in epistemic injustice discussions. Instead, I argue that a particular texture of transformative anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice. I begin by making visible the anger that saturates the silences that (...) epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious: silencing practices produce angry experiences. I focus on tone policing and tone vigilance to illustrate the relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. Next, I use María Lugones’s pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to their histories and felt textures. The final section draws on feminist scholarship about the transformative power of angry knowledge to suggest how it might serve as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice. (shrink)