Tim Crane reviewing a Marxist history of analytic philosophy writes, “the paradox is that the more analytic philosophy became dominant in the universities, the more it became removed from the concerns of the average person with philosophical interests.” It is like an examination. It is at least two actually: the first examination question is “What is the solution to this paradox?”; the second examination question is “Can you knock out the ‘the’: present a paradox so that it is merely a (...) paradox, even given the whole context in which Crane writes?”! I am not sure. I shall present three other paradoxes in response, and one beforehand concerning a Joseph Conrad imitator. (shrink)

Austin takes on the problem of other minds, of how to respond to the question ‘how do you know?’, if this question is raised with regard to the thoughts, feelings, sensations, minds of other creatures. This problem has traditionally been understood as the problem of justifying our belief in the existence of other minds. Austin argues that believing in other persons, in authority and testimony, is an essential part of the act of communicating, and as such (...) is an irreducible part of our experience. While we can state certain advantages of communicative performances, there is no justification for our doing them as such. (shrink)

Psyche: Inventions of the Other is the first publication in English of the twenty-eight essay collection Jacques Derrida published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. Advancing his reflection on many issues, such as sexual difference, architecture, negative theology, politics, war, nationalism, and religion, Volume II also carries on Derrida's engagement with a number of key thinkers and writers: De Certeau, Heidegger, Kant, Lacoue-Labarthe, Mandela, Rosenszweig, and Shakespeare, among others. Included in this volume are new or revised translations of (...) seminal essays (for example, "Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference," "Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand," "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," and " Interpretations at War : Kant, the Jew, the German"). (shrink)

Human experience is not confined to waking life. Do experiences in dreams matter? Humans are not the only living beings who have experiences. Does nonhuman experience matter? The Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu, writing during the late fourth and early fifth centuries C.E., argues in his work The Twenty Verses that these alternative contexts ought to inform our understanding of mind and world. Vasubandhu invites readers to explore experiences in dreams and to inhabit the experiences of nonhuman beings—animals, hungry ghosts, and beings (...) in hell. Other Lives offers a deep engagement with Vasubandhu’s account of mind in a global philosophical perspective. Sonam Kachru takes up Vasubandhu’s challenge to think with perspective-diversifying contexts, showing how his novel theory draws together action and perception, minds and worlds. Kachru pieces together the conceptual system in which Vasubandhu thought to show the deep originality of the argument. He reconstructs Vasubandhu’s ecological concept of mind, in which mindedness is meaningful only in a nexus with life and world, to explore its ongoing philosophical significance. Engaging with a vast range of classical, modern, and contemporary Asian and Western thought, Other Lives is both a groundbreaking work in Buddhist studies and a model of truly global philosophy. The book also includes an accessible new translation of The Twenty Verses, providing a fresh introduction to one of the most influential works of Buddhist thought. (shrink)

This is a book about the moral-existential nature of, and the desire inscribed in, the deadlocks generated by our attempts to ground and exhaustively explain the concerns that provoke philosophical reflection. While the book argues that these deadlocks are symptomatic of an impossibility internal to the very enterprise of grounding and explanation, it does not, however, declare any substantial groundlessness. Rather, the book shows that the choice between secure ground and groundlessness, or between final explanations and the inexplicable, is ultimately (...) arbitrary. Instead, through readings of the so-called hard problem of consciousness, of Descartes’ first principle of philosophy, of Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, and of Lacan and Wittgenstein, Toivakainen argues that the actual point of significance, the sense of the impossibility or deadlock, must be traced back to the claims of desire that inform the very movement of grounding and explanation, a desire that is inscribed in a constitutive and inescapable address between self and other. In short, the book translates and rewrites points of structural deadlock into their (original) moral-existential landscapes by following traces of desire. (shrink)

How do we acquire knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of others? Knowing Other Minds brings together ten original essays that address various questions in philosophy and in empirical cognitive science which arise from our everyday social interaction with other people.

Humanistic management emphasises the importance of respecting humanity in and through meaningful work within organisations. In this paper we introduce a Levinasian approach to organising. Levinas argues that the Other appeals to us and allows us to take responsibility towards the Other – i.c. an employee, a customer, a supplier, etcetera. In this article our focus is on employees. By taking the Other as a starting point of his reflections, Levinas helps to transform the organisation and management (...) of work and humans in business organisations. Based on the concept of alterity and becoming susceptible to the appeal that comes to us through what Levinas refers to as the ‘face of the Other’, we argue that the philosopher calls for ‘an agapeic turn’ to management and organisation. This turn means that the focus on the well-being of the employee – and the needs, interests, ideas, and expectations as perceived by him or her – should be at the core of organising. As a result, this paper calls for an increased focus on self-determination and self-organisation to allow the Other both voice and control over her or his behaviour, actions and contributions to the outputs and outcomes of one’s organisational unit. Through our focus on a Levinas approach, we concretize and deepen the traditional understanding of agape, making it more relevant to our functioning in a business setting. As a result, agape is introduced as an analytical concept that guides the structuring and the effectuation of human interaction in and through organisations. (shrink)

The conviction ofthe New Testament writers was that there is no salvation apart from Jesus. This orthodox doctrine is widely rejected today because God’s condemnation of persons in other world religions seems incompatible with various attributes of God.Analysis reveals the real problem to involve certain counterfactuals of freedom, e.g., why did not God create a world in which all people would freely believe in Christ and be saved? Such questions presuppose that God possesses middle knowledge. But it can be (...) shown that no inconsistency exists between God's having middle knowledge and certain persons' being damned; on the contrary it can be positively shown that these two notions are compatible. (shrink)

Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway relies on mutually incompatible grounding gestures, one of which describes the relationality of an always already material-discursive reality, while the other seeks to ground this relation one-sidedly in matter. These two materialisms derive from the gesture she borrows from the New Materialist (and other related) fields, which posits her work as an advance over the history of “representationalism” and “social constructivism.” In turn, this one-sided materialism produces a skewed reading of the quantum (...) mechanical phenomena with which she engages. Her attempt to create an ontological (not epistemological) interpretation of quantum mechanics proves deconstructible. Instead, a science of undecidability or science of quant à helps us to understand debates among scientists and philosophers over the completeness or incompleteness of quantum mechanics and its epistemological or ontological status – by demonstrating that these questions will necessarily remain unresolved. (shrink)

This paper presents a distinctively metaphysical version of the problem of other minds. The main source of this version of the problem lies in the principle that, when it comes to consciousness, no distinction can sensibly be drawn between appearance and reality. I will argue that, unless we want to call that principle into question, we should seriously consider the possibility of accepting the conclusion that other minds are not like our own. This option is less problematic than (...) it might seem at first if we are willing to reconceive facts of consciousness as subjective rather than objective in nature. -/- . (shrink)

This essay addresses a serious question in theistic bioethics—what those of faith ought to make of transhumanism. In it, I argue for two theses: (1) Humanity—having slain Pestilence, War, and Famine—will slay Death as well. (In other words, the transhumanists are descriptively right.) (2) It is not death that really torments us. (In other words, the transhumanists are normatively wrong.) In doing so, I’ll suggest a theological solution to the Fermi Paradox: maybe we have not encountered any (...) class='Hi'>other technological civilizations because, while intelligent animals are fairly common in our galaxy, none of the others are driven by the restlessness that would drive us to sail the stars. In other words, maybe none of the others are fallen. (shrink)

The article explores a conceptualization of Eastern Europe at the intersection of literature and philosophy, focusing on two texts: The Issa Valley (1955) by Czesław Miłosz and The Other Heading (1991) by Jacques Derrida. In this context, Eastern Europe can be understood as a historical topos situated between Russian imperial violence concerning civil liberties and Western Enlightenment rationality,...

In this paper, I explore several issues surrounding what is called “telepathy” in the context of the problem of other minds. I begin with a quick review of the conditions in which this notion arose and the difficulties to which it gave rise upon its introduction. This review will allow me, after having shown that the notion of telepathy provides no path to the problem's solution, to draw a distinction between two discursive levels: an epistemological or ontological level, on (...) the one hand, and a semantic or logical level, on the other. I maintain that it is at the second level that the deepest and most intractable difficulties relating to the “powers of the mind” arise. These difficulties occupy a blind spot in discussions involving the notion of telepathy (Alan Turing will provide a striking illustration of this). Finally, I suggest that this pseudo‐solution (telepathy) is at root a response to a pseudo‐problem—the inaccessibility of other minds—since the difficulties with the intelligibility of telepathy are parallel to those with which the problem of “other minds” is freighted. (shrink)

LEMONCAKE? In October 2024, I had a poem published (2 lines long) and I was encouraged by Greater Manchester Mental Health to join a poetry group. I went to the central library of Manchester, Saint Peter's Square, and asked if there was a poetry group there. I was given the date of the next meeting and I went. I turned up a little late and ate some cake. The host (or compere or MC) had a very noticeable London accent, which (...) reminded me somewhat of Professor Julian Dodd's accent. It was all white people (about 30 of them! must disambiguate), me (Asian) and one black woman, who appeared comfortable with postcool older poetry folk - it was mostly people older than me there. I'm not racist, but there are a lot of brown and yellow people in this city, and probably black too. The star poet on this occasion was a local poet who read a punky poem with lines (like?) "Don't you step on my astroturf, Diane, don't you dare" and was associated with a working class poetry initiative. Fiery! I found out how to book a spot to read poetry myself, though I planned to read stuff-like-what-gets-rejected. Next month, I read some poetry. It was all white people this time, and maybe one black woman again (the three or so Asians in the network had not yet been ordered to come in?). I read two of my 1920s-New York-modernism-or-universal poems. One opened thus: "My head is an envelope addressed to the world/ Open it stranger/ And bring the news to the people". The host commented on the imagery within each participant's poetry apart from mine, but he told me, "We will hopefully see you again." Can't complain. In the break between poetry readings, a young woman opposite me struck up a conversation. She had blonde curly Polish hair, and, I suppose, looked to me much like the person I spoke to most in economics, a girl/woman with blonde curly hair and of Polish background. (I spoke to 4 Poles there and then wrote up my findings as an in-joke.) She commented on the images in my poetry, told me she had been on a course and told me of a Newcastle saying: "Shy birds get nowt." I interpreted that as a suggestion to do with seduction, but didn't take it up, merely asked her if she would be attending again. She said yes. I felt I would never return and never did, despite encouragement from an economics friend. A Macclesfield poet-man complemented my poetry too. CARROTCAKE? At the time I was thinking to apply for a creative writing course, an expensive university one, with the money I made from investments, while insane apparently, and my 2 published lines as the ticket in (it is 5 now, reducing portfolio submission fun). But here is a comedy sketch suggesting what would have happened. Week 8. I am leaving class with my friend. I say, "I have got a B grade again." She says, "I started off at C and now I have got A grades. You can improve." A cat comes up to me and says, "Hey, I don't read much poetry, but I liked your poetry." (Cats don't actually talk much, by the way.) A dog comes up to me and says much the same. A tree and a cloud do too. She graduates and publishes in fancy journals, while my struggles with the creative writing professors go on for decades. (Is this a bit Tracey Emin? Apologies for any unanticipated offensiveness. By the way, a memory: this black man in psychiatry ward looks Hendrixy, this other brown man has volumes of poetry probably...). (shrink)

When we seek a fuller understanding of individual liberty including its relational character, we confront a conundrum. The evident advantages of a single individual possessing liberty cannot be simply transferred to a greater number of beneficiaries. This conundrum is confronted with the resources of Hohfeld's analytical framework, developed specifically to elucidate the practical outworkings of interpersonal relations within the law. Attention is also paid to concerns expressed by von Wright over a representation of liberty (permission) within the resources of standard (...) deontic logic which fails to address its social aspect. The aggregate level of the Hohfeldian scheme is employed to represent a complete picture of liberty, but one that cannot guarantee benefits for a plurality of holders. The conclusion is reached that in order to extend the advantages of individual liberty to all, something other than liberty is required. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that, despite the progress made in recent years, virtue argumentation theory still lacks a more systematic acknowledgment of other-regarding virtues. A fuller recognition of such virtues not only enriches the field of research of virtue argumentation theory in significant ways, but also allows for a richer and more intuitive view of the virtuous arguer. A fully virtuous arguer, it is argued, should care to develop both self-regarding and other-regarding virtues. He should be concerned (...) both with his own development as an arguer and with helping other arguers in that regard. (shrink)

From the pencil to the puppet to the drone—the humanities and the social sciences continue to ride a wave of interest in material culture and the world of things. How should we understand the force and figure of that wave as it shapes different disciplines? Other Things explores this question by considering a wide assortment of objects—from beach glass to cell phones, sneakers to skyscrapers—that have fascinated a range of writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Man Ray, Spike Lee, (...) and Don DeLillo. The book ranges across the literary, visual, and plastic arts to depict the curious lives of things. Beginning with Achilles’s Shield, then tracking the object/thing distinction as it appears in the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan, Bill Brown ultimately focuses on the thingness disclosed by specific literary and artistic works. Combining history and literature, criticism and theory, Other Things provides a new way of understanding the inanimate object world and the place of the human within it, encouraging us to think anew about what we mean by materiality itself. (shrink)

This paper investigates the nature of, and distinctions between, ‘ordinary’ and ‘sceptical’ doubts regarding our knowledge of the external world, and their relationship to such doubts regarding our knowledge of other minds. It introduces a framework for distinguishing these doubts within the context of external world scepticism and evaluates its applicability, often just assumed, to the problem of other minds. This evaluation is achieved by contrasting the views of Marie McGinn and Stanley Cavell, and their interpretations of Wittgenstein's (...) notion of an attitude, which are shown to hinge on this question. It concludes, via a distinction in the staging of each scepticism, that we can't straightforwardly import the framework of doubts from external world scepticism to the problem of other minds. This undermines McGinn's response to the problem and explains some commonly misunderstood insights of Cavell's work. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the claim that testimony can serve as a basic source of knowledge of other people’s mental lives against the objection that testimonial knowledge presupposes knowledge of other people’s mental lives and therefore can’t be used to explain it.

There is another Socratic method, Socratic mimēsis, and an instance of this is when Plato has Socrates play ‘the annoying questioner’ in the Hippias Major. Other interpreters have suggested that the reasons for Socrates’s dramatic play are depersonalization and distance. I argue for viewing Socrates’s role-playing as a way to dramatize the inner dialogue that happens inside one’s mind in what we may call conscience. Hippias the sophist lacks a conscience: his focus is acquisitive as opposed to inquisitive. Plato (...) has staged a pedagogical theater of Hippias’s failed lesson for the benefit of Plato’s audience, the listeners/readers of the dialogue. (shrink)

Although fairness is a key moral trait, limited research focuses on participants' observed fairness behavior because moral traits are generally measured through self-report. This experiment focused on day-to-day interpersonal fairness rather than impersonal justice, and fairness was assessed as observed behavior. The experiment investigated whether a self-reported fairness trait would moderate a situational influence on observed fairness behavior, such that individuals with a stronger fairness trait would be less affected by a situational influence than those with a weaker fairness trait. (...) We used an iterated resource game in which participants could withdraw resources as they chose, and we manipulated the number of resources bogus players withdrew. The number of resources participants withdrew was the behavioral measure of fairness. Results confirmed the expected moderation of the unfairness manipulation by a fairness trait on observed behavior. Those reporting a stronger fairness trait were unaffected by the manipulation, whereas those reporting a weaker fairness trait were more strongly influenced. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the resources Thomas Aquinas provides for enquiries concerning the psychological abilities of nonhuman animals. I first look to Aquinas’s account of divine, angelic, human, and nonhuman animal naming, to help us articulate the contours of a ‘critical anthropocentrism’ that aims to steer clear of the mistakes of a na¨ıve anthropocentrism and misconceived avowals to entirely eschew anthropocentrism. I then address the need for our critical anthropocentrism both to reject the mental-physical dichotomy endorsed by ‘folk psychology’ (...) and to articulate a more adequate ‘commonsense psychology’ that acknowledges most embodied animal behavior is observable psychological behavior. Next, I argue that we can develop Aquinas’s doctrine of estimation and conation to formulate an account of nonhuman animal action that more adequately characterizes the purposeful behaviors of nonhuman animals. To do so, we first need to recognize a wider range of nonhuman animal behaviors that are captured by Aquinas’s ‘estimative sense’, and that all of these behaviors are specified by a finite variety of particular goods confined to the animals’ environmental niches. But we also need to supplement Aquinas’s account of human and nonhuman animal agency by exploring the ontogeny and ecology of how humans and other animals become attuned to affordances within these different environmental niches. I argue that we should look to Aquinas’s account of nonhuman animal capacities in ST I-II 6-17 for subtle insights that can expand our understanding of how nonhuman animals engage in purposeful behavior by exercising analogous nonrational and imperfectly voluntary forms of intention, deliberation, choice, execution, and enjoyment. I conclude with an outline for how future enquiry can seek to explain the nonrational purposeful problem-solving competencies of chimps, canines, corvids, cetaceans, cephalopods, and other nonhuman animal species. (shrink)

There are the social sciences, such as economics and social anthropology, and philosophy of social science has questions such as “Can this discipline predict?” and “Is it actually a science?” But there are other matters which one addresses at a high level of generality and involve much reflection probably and philosophical talent, so some people will probably count addressing these as doing philosophy: for example - an issue philosophers have some familiarity with from W.V. Quine - "Will I be (...) too nervous working with your preferred assumptions, philosopher?" Beyond social science, consider psychiatric diagnostic systems. The Lacanian system is simple and elegant, but maybe reality is messier than that; but too many categories and the average psychiatrist will find it too stressful to use. There is probably a battle over swing-voter-like figures: a psychiatrist who thinks, “I want to help people but I have some ordinary aims in life too. Relax at the end of the day. Have a family perhaps. Be a consultant with some authority, not having to politely answer every annoying person.”. (shrink)

According to traditional phenomenal approaches to perceptual justification, perceptual experience provides rational support for actions, beliefs, and intentions. When you see a banana as yellow, that perceptual experience makes it reasonable for you to believe that the banana is yellow. Debates about perceptual justification and the merits of the phenomenal approach have been centred on the solitary mind. But decades of research show that other people have an implicit impact on individual perception and cognition: perception is often other-centred (...) or “altercentric”. This influence even occurs with the mere presence of others: we unconsciously and spontaneously encode others’ perceptual perspectives and shift our frame of reference accordingly. What is the epistemic standing of altercentric biased perception? This paper introduces this phenomenon and maps its epistemic profile. I review empirical evidence suggesting that during altercentric bias, a perceiver represents another’s perspectival content, which can introduce a conflict between ego-centric and other-centric contents. I contrast altercentric bias with closely related phenomena, including cognitive penetrability of perception and exogenous attention capture, and argue that under certain conditions it poses unique problems to the epistemic justificatory role of perception, and particularly to the phenomenal approach to perceptual justification. (shrink)

Paul-Mikhail Podosky introduces the notion of other-oriented hermeneutical injustice and argues that non-human animals are often the subjects of such injustice. In this paper, I argue that although the notion of other-oriented hermeneutical injustice is coherent, Podosky’s examples – including his primary case of non-human animals – are not instances of it. I attempt to show that an epistemology of ignorance serves as a better theoretical basis for Podosky’s argument. In the final section of the paper, I discuss (...) a case that, at first glance, seems to be one of other-oriented hermeneutical injustice. However, I argue that ultimately an epistemology of ignorance gives us a better account of the case. (shrink)

This post-colonial and feminist reading of the Enlightenment explores the proto-postmodernist practice of examining one’s conclusions through the eyes of the Other. Self-estrangement to gain critical distance from one’s taken-for-granted assumptions, was central to the Enlightenment, and remains vital for critical sociopolitical thinking today.

We find it natural to say that creatures with minds can be understood ‘from the inside’. The paper explores what could be meant by this attractive but, on reflection, somewhat mysterious idea. It suggests that it may find a hospitable placement, which makes its content and appeal clearer, in one version of the so-called ‘simulation theory’ approach to grasp of psychological concepts. Simulation theory suggests that ability to use imagination in rethinking others’ thoughts and in recreating their trains of reasoning (...) is central to our grasp and use of psychological concepts.On this view to think of another’s mind is not to think of some intricate quasi-mechanical assemblage of items in the other’s head which causally explain her behavior. If this is all that the ‘inside’ of another person, i.e. her mind, were like, then there would be no question of anything being ‘from’ it. The simulation view, however, emphasizes that thoughts essentially have content and that identifying another’s thought, and working out its possible effects, involves identifying its content and oneself entertaining thoughts with the same content.So, on this approach, to think of another’s mind is to think of a complex but rationally unified set of thoughts, a set which is conceived as had by one subject but where the contents and relations can be grasped and appreciated by another. Some of these thoughts will be indexical and the whole can thus be said to constitute the subject’s point of view on the world, both literally and metaphorically. Grasping this point of view is, the paper suggests, what is meant by speaking of ‘understanding from the inside’. (shrink)

Based on the examination of 49 Chinese criminal trials transcribed from the audio-visual recordings on the ‘China Court Trial Online’ website ( https://tingshen.court.gov.cn/ ), the institutional participants–prosecutors, defence lawyers, and judges–are found to frequently repeat defendants’ responses (‘other-repetition’), after a question–answer adjacency pair. Other-repetition has been described as a resource for showing participation and familiarity (Tannen 2007), initiating repair and registering receipt (Schegloff 1997), and displaying understanding and emotional stance (Svennevig 2004). However, other-repetition in trial discourse has (...) not been thoroughly researched. Therefore, this article aims to further examine this salient institutional linguistic feature in order to explore stance construction as a third turn. It is common to associate certain prosodic features of a repetition with the stance of the speaker. However, prosody may not be a reliable cue for stance interpretation in Chinese courtrooms, as institutional participants might conceal their stance during a repetition. Though they are more explicit in displaying their stance with turn-initial repeats, the distinction between the prosody of repeats for different functions is not categorical. It is found that defendants are sensitive to the lexicogrammar and multimodal cues for stance interpretation. (shrink)

In her essay collection First, Second, and Other Selves: Essays on Friendship and Personal Identity, well-known scholar of ancient philosophy Jennifer Whiting gathers her previously published essays taking Aristotle's theories on friendship as a springboard to engage with contemporary philosophical work on personal identity and moral psychology. Whiting examines three themes throughout the collection, the first being psychic contingency, or the belief that the psychological structures characteristic of human beings may in fact vary, not just from one cultural context (...) to another, but also from one individual to another. The second theme is the belief that friendship informs an understanding of the nature of the self, an idea that springs from Whiting's uncommon reading of Aristotle's writings on friendship. Specifically, Whiting explains a scenario in which a "virtuous agent" adopts a kind of impersonal attitude both towards herself and towards her "character" friends, loving both because they are virtuous; this scenario ties in with an examination of the Aristotelian concept of the ideal friend as an "other self," or a friendship that evolves from character rather than ego, as well as Whiting's meditation on whether or not a virtuous individual should have a "special" sort of concern for her own future self, distinct in kind from the concern that she has for others. The third theme is that of rational egoism, a concept that Whiting critiques, especially in the context of Aristotle's eudaimonism. The central tenet of the collection is the message that taking "ethocentric" attitudes both towards ourselves and towards our friends sheds light on the nature of personal identity and helps to combat ethnocentric and other objectionable forms of bias, a message that is becoming increasingly urgent in light of the recent deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. (shrink)

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the problem of other minds. Although there was once near consensus that there is in fact no problem of knowledge about others, that is no longer so clear. This paper introduces a problem about our awareness of others. By isolating and drawing on features of two familiar problems about other minds—epistemological and conceptual—I point to a problem about other minds that, unlike these other formulations of the problem, (...) shows it to be unique. An upshot of this is that the topic of other minds, or ‘other-knowledge’, is as deserving of its own investigation as the topic of self-knowledge has proven to be in philosophy. I begin by drawing on phenomenology, in which philosophers have had a different orientation toward the problem of others. Some phenomenologists, I argue, ask about what sort of awareness is involved in the basic relation we stand in to others, where this is understood to be different from the basic relation we stand in to the non-mental world. This problem captures two features of the topic of other minds that I claim are unique: mediation and asymmetry. (shrink)

Other people figure in our experience of the world; they strike us as unique and gen- uinely other. This paper explores whether a Husserlian account of empathy as the way in which we constitute an intersubjective world can account for the uniqueness and otherness of other people in our experience. I contend that it can’t. I begin by explicating Husserl’s theory of empathy, paying particular attention to the reduction to a purely egoic sphere and the steps that (...) ostensibly permit a subject to re-inhabit a world of others from out of this sphere. In querying Husserl’s theory, I consider a series of problems, raised by Zhida Luo, concerning the apparent centrality of bod- ily similarity in empathy. I sketch Luo’s solution, which involves a shift to tactile similarity. While it makes for a better theory of empathy, this solution isn’t sufficient to make room for the givenness of another person not originally predicated on simi- larity. To clarify what’s at issue here, I turn to the Husserlian pictures of empathy presented by Heinz Kohut and Edith Stein. I conclude with a remark about what might be required, given the inability of Husserlian empathy to make room for the experience of others as singular and other, for a picture of our phenomenal life to have a shape that accounts for the coexistence of empathy to others who are like oneself and hospitality to others as genuine others. (shrink)

This case study is designed to help students evaluate ethical boundaries in employment contracts and workplace responsibilities. A job description typically outlines an employee’s primary responsibilities, but it cannot account for every possible task. To address this, the “other duties as assigned” clause in employment contracts allows employers to add responsibilities beyond the listed core duties. This clause ensures flexibility in handling unforeseen or necessary tasks that support the organization’s goals even if not explicitly mentioned in the job description. (...) When such tasks arise, employees are expected to perform these “other duties” as part of their role. However, ethical and legal issues may arise when tasks assigned under the “other duties as assigned” clause are excessively burdensome, unrelated to an employee’s primary responsibilities, or inconsistent with the intent—or a violation of the spirit—of the employment contract. These “other duties” may be perceived as exploitative or abusive, potentially resulting in disputes between employers and employees. The case study under discussion explores an instance in which an employer exceeds these boundaries by regularly assigning tasks that deviate significantly from the intended scope of the employees’ roles. This analysis will highlight the potential for misuse of the “other duties as assigned” clause and its broader implications for both parties. (shrink)

John McDowell’s original motivation of disjunctivism occurs in the context of a problem regarding other minds. Recent commentators have insisted that McDowell’s disjunctivism should be classed as an epistemological disjunctivism about epistemic warrant, and distinguished from the perceptual disjunctivism of Hinton, Snowdon and others. In this paper I investigate the relation between the problem of other minds and disjunctivism, and raise some questions for this interpretation of McDowell.

In this article, I attempt to explore the relation between two sets of terms in Derrida's work: friendship and democracy, and ethics and politics. On the basis of a reading of Derrida's interpretation of Blanchot in The Politics of Friendship, I argue that Blanchot's notion of a non-traditional conception of friendship is a reconstruction of Levinas's notion of the ethical relation to the other, which in turn provides the basis for the formalistic ethical affirmation of Derrida's work, an affirmation (...) found most clearly in his remarks on justice. I then move from the The Politics of Friendship to Derrida's more recent text on Levinas, Adieu, and try to explore the relation between ethics and politics in Derrida's work, with particular reference to the question of democracy. My concluding thesis is that Derrida's recent work is attempting to articulate, through notions such as democracy to come and the new international, what I call 'a repoliticization of Marxism'. (shrink)