Clark WolfDepartment of Philosophy & Religious Studies,Iowa State UniversityPaul Thompson’s Spirit of the Soil was groundbreaking when it appeared in 1995, and has aged remarkably well. The substan...

Nurses are encountering an increasing number of ethical dilemmas in clinical practice. Ethics courses for baccalaureate nursing students provide the opportunity for the development of critical thinking skills in order to deal with these effectively. The purpose of this descriptive qualitative study was to describe ethical reasoning in 70 baccalaureate nursing students enrolled in a nursing ethics course. Reflective clinical journals were analyzed as appropriate for qualitative inquiry. The overriding theme emerging from the data was `in the process of becoming', (...) which includes: practicing as a professional, lacking the confidence as a student nurse to take an ethical stand, advocating for patients, being just in the provision of care, identifying the spiritual dimensions of nursing practice, confronting the `real world' of health care, making a commitment to practice with integrity, and caring enough to care. The development of critical thinking and ethical reasoning within the framework of knowing and connecting is essential in nursing education. (shrink)

The force of sceptical inquiries into out knowledge of other people is a paradigm of the force that philosophical views can have. Sceptical views arise out of philosophical inquiries that are identical in all major respects with inquiries that we employ in ordinary cases. These inquiries employ perfectly mundane methods of making and assessing claims to know. This paper tries to show that these inquiries are conducted in cases that lack certain contextual ingredients found in ordinary cases. The paper concludes (...) that these ordinary methods of inquiry, when employed in these limited cases, put us in a position in which we actually cannot know. Thus our ability to know will be a function of the added contextual elements that are found in ordinary cases. A second conclusion is that we come literally to observe bodily behaviour in the course of the sceptical inquiry; while in ordinary cases we observe pain-behaviour. (shrink)

In ‘Other minds: ‘Ordinary’ and ‘Sceptical doubt’, Daniel Simons presents an interpretation of what lies at the root of my disagreement with Cavell's claim that there is no strictly sceptical problem about other minds but only a worry that we are forced to live. His interpretation hangs on his introducing a distinction between ‘ordinary’ and ‘sceptical’ doubt, which he elaborates by appeal to the work of Thompson Clarke. I argue that the aim of Clarke's paper, ‘The Legacy (...) of Skepticism’, is actually to problematize, and ultimately reject, the traditional conception of the philosophical and its understanding of the relation between philosophy and our everyday practice, which Simons presupposes. My interpretation of Clarke brings to light the way in which Simons misinterprets Cavell on certain key points and makes my disagreement with him appear much greater than it is. The misinterpretation is, I believe, natural for someone who wants to take Cavell's use of the ‘sceptical’ epithet seriously. It raises the question of how Cavell's idea of ‘living our scepticism’ is to be interpreted. I argue that Simons’ interpretation ends by committing Cavell to views he clearly rejects. (shrink)

Paul Thompson's book The Spirit of the Soil first appeared in 1995, and has been re-issued in a new edition in 2017. This comment on the new edition addresses Thompson's argument concerning the pro...

Thompson Clarke’s seminal paper “The Legacy of Skepticism” (1972) is notoriously difficult in both substance and presentation. Despite the paper’s importance to skepticism studies in the nearly half-century since its publication, no attempt has been made in the secondary literature to provide an account, based on a close reading of the text, of just what Clarke’s argument is. Furthermore, much of the existing literature betrays (or so it seems to me) fundamental misunderstandings of Clarke’s thought. In (...) this essay, I attempt to explain—concisely but comprehensively—Clarke’s overall argument in “The Legacy of Skepticism.”. (shrink)

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

This paper reports a literature review on the topic of ethical issues in in-depth interviews. The review returned three types of article: general discussion, issues in particular studies, and studies of interview-based research ethics. Whilst many of the issues discussed in these articles are generic to research ethics, such as confidentiality, they often had particular manifestations in this type of research. For example, privacy was a significant problem as interviews sometimes probe unexpected areas. For similar reasons, it is difficult to (...) give full information of the nature of a particular interview at the outset, hence informed consent is problematic. Where a pair is interviewed (such as carer and cared-for) there are major difficulties in maintaining confidentiality and protecting privacy. The potential for interviews to harm participants emotionally is noted in some papers, although this is often set against potential therapeutic benefit. As well as these generic issues, there are some ethical issues fairly specific to in-depth interviews. The problem of dual role is noted in many papers. It can take many forms: an interviewer might be nurse and researcher, scientist and counsellor, or reporter and evangelist. There are other specific issues such as taking sides in an interview, and protecting vulnerable groups. Little specific study of the ethics of in-depth interviews has taken place. However, that which has shows some important findings. For example, one study shows participants are not averse to discussing painful issues provided they feel the study is worthwhile. Some papers make recommendations for researchers. One such is that they should consider using a model of continuous (or process) consent rather than viewing consent as occurring once, at signature, prior to the interview. However, there is a need for further study of this area, both philosophical and empirical. (shrink)

2. The equal status mentioned in Thesis 2 need not mean, "equally concrete" or "inclusive," but only, "equally real," where "real" means having a character of its own with reference to which opinions can be true or false. But becoming or process is alone fully concrete or inclusive, since if A is without becoming, and B becomes, then the togetherness of AB also becomes. A new constituent means a new totality. In this sense, becoming is the ultimate principle.

We seem, or so it seems to some theorists, to experience a rich stream of highly detailed information concerning an extensive part of our current visual surroundings. But this appearance, it has been suggested, is in some way illusory. Our brains do not command richly detailed internal models of the current scene. Our seeings, it seems, are not all that they seem. This, then, is the Grand Illusion. We think we see much more than we actually do. In this paper (...) I shall (briefly) rehearse the empirical evidence for this rather startling claim, and then critically examine a variety of responses. One especially interesting response is a development of the so-called ‘skill theory’, according to which there is no illusion after all. Instead, so the theory goes, we establish the required visual contact with our world by an ongoing process of active exploration, in which the world acts as a kind of reliable, interrogable, external memory (Noe, Pessoa and Thompson (2000), Noe (2001). The most fully worked-out versions of this response ( Noe and O’Regan (2000), O’Regan and Noe 2001) tend, however, to tie the contents of conscious visual experience rather too tightly to quite low-level features of this ongoing sensorimotor engagement. This (I shall argue) undervalues the crucial links between perceptual experience, reason and intentional action, and opens the door to a problem that I will call ‘sensorimotor chauvinism’: the premature welding of experiential contents to very specific details of our embodiment and sensory apparatus. Drawing on the dual visual systems hypothesis of Milner and Goodale (1995), I sketch an alternative version of the skill theory, in which the relation between conscious visual experience and the low-level details of sensorimotor engagement is indirect and non-constitutive. The hope is thus to embrace the genuine insights of the skill theory response, while depicting conscious visual experience as most tightly geared to knowing and reasoning about our world.. (shrink)

Summary This article re-examines the political thought of the neglected Fabian essayist and radical journalist William Clarke. Historians have differed over the relative importance of socialism and liberalism in Clarke's political thought. The argument is made here that the key to Clarke's thought lies in his moralised conception of democracy, rooted in his monist ontology. The further deepening of democracy was threatened for Clarke by developments in monopolistic capitalism and the related emergence of a new imperialism. (...) Clarke's understanding of democracy, rather than more overtly economic considerations, lies at the heart of his political religion, and links his views on domestic and foreign affairs. As befits a philosophical monist, his political thought reveals the limitations of established dichotomies for grasping the character of progressivism in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. (shrink)

In this essay, we focus primarily on Moore’s “Proof of an External World” and Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism.” We are not exactly commenting on Clarke’s “The Legacy of Skepticism,” interpreting it, although what we do involves us in (some of) that. Instead of directly commenting on it, we do things with Legacy; we read Moore’s Proof and Kant’s Refutation with Clarke in mind. And by way of doing this, we bring onto the stage a post-Legacy Moore, and a (...) post-Legacy Kant. We do not claim to present Moore and Kant per se (to use Clarke’s term); we do not portray Moore and Kant as they are independently of “The Legacy of Skepticism.” We propose instead Moore and Kant as we read them after Legacy, i.e., in light of the pure/plain distinction. (shrink)

Ethical Dilemmas in Community-Based Research: Working with Vulnerable Youth in Rural Communities Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s10805-010-9123-y Authors Natalie Clark, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC Canada V2C 5N3 Sarah Hunt, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada Georgia Jules, Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC Canada V2C 5N3 Trevor Good, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada Journal Journal of Academic Ethics Online ISSN 1572-8544 Print ISSN 1570-1727 Journal Volume Volume 8 Journal Issue Volume 8, Number 4.

Research on the specific features of daydreaming compared with mind-wandering and night dreaming is a neglected topic in the philosophy of mind and the cognitive neuroscience of spontaneous thought. The extant research either conflates daydreaming with mind-wandering (whether understood as task-unrelated thought, unguided attention, or disunified thought), characterizes daydreaming as opposed to mind-wandering (Dorsch, 2015), or takes daydreaming to encompass any and all “imagined events” (Newby-Clark & Thavendran, 2018). These dueling definitions obstruct future research on spontaneous thought, and are insufficiently (...) precise to guide empirical studies. They also fail to illuminate the phenomenal core of daydreaming, namely, its dreamlike qualities. Although daydreaming is related to both mind-wandering and narrative imagination, it is not reducible to either. We argue that daydreams are experiences of spontaneous, immersive imagination in the waking state. The main task of our investigation is to distinguish daydreaming, conceptually and phenomenologically, from mind-wandering, on the one hand, and night dreaming, on the other. Although daydream experiences can vary widely, we distinguish prototypical experiences of daydreaming from adjacent imaginative activity, including fleeting imagery and “focused daydreaming,” or crafted visualization. We consider our phenomenological analysis as preparatory work for conceptually distinguishing different spontaneous and imaginative states so that they can be investigated accordingly with questionnaires and qualitative methods. We argue that precision about the phenomenal character of daydreaming can guide neurophenomenological investigations, help delimit studies on individual variance in daydreaming features, and identify differences among daydreaming, mind-wandering, and night dreaming conceptually and phenomenologically, and possibly eventually in terms of neural correlates. (shrink)

In an earlier paper ("Skeptical Parasitism and the Continuity Argument," 'Metaphilosophy' 2004: 714-732) I suggested that the well-known "plane-spotters" story-first proposed by Thompson Clarke and later developed by Barry Stroud-distorts the very skeptical view it aims to elucidate. However, considerations of space prohibited me from fleshing out my criticisms of the Clarke/Stroud story in that paper. In this paper I aim to fill in this lacuna by showing how the Clarke/Stroud story distorts the skeptic's view. I (...) conclude the paper by briefly sketching the alternative position I endorse and explaining how it avoids the distortions encouraged by the Clarke/Stroud story. (shrink)

Thompson Clarke’s central contention is that the project of traditional epistemology has been deemed invalid for the wrong reasons and its true legacy consequently missed. According to Clarke, the picture of traditional epistemology conveyed by its modern critics gets things about exactly upside down. While the sample situations examined by the traditional epistemologist and the standards in the light of which he assesses them, contrary to what his modern critics claim, are not the product of philosophizing, the (...) logical relation that they are supposed to bear to ‘common sense’ and ultimately ‘common sense’ itself are. However, the ‘common sense’ assessed by traditional epistemology, although it is really an artifact of philosophizing, is neither the product of philosophical reflection nor the result of philosophical prejudice. It is not in the least gratuitous. A critique of the traditional philosophical project can only be as compelling as that project itself under the interpretation that it gives of it. (shrink)

A reply to a paper by Thompson Clarke, in which he argues that the reason it is so difficult to identify uniquely the philosophical question of knowledge is that complexes of words, even with apparently the same meanings, can be seen to have different connotations in ordinary natural language from what they have in the philosophical pursuit into knowledge. Stroud doubts that Clarke's argument can be used to explain, or even resolve, the challenge of scepticism, and argues (...) that even if we accept the difference in point or implication Clarke appeals to, the theoretical challenge is as real as ever. (shrink)

The paper uses thompson clark's theory of the relation of perceptual parts and wholes to illuminate certain aspects of our knowledge of other minds. The thesis is that the traditional problem can be usefully broken down into two parts--One of which calls for a better understanding of the logic of perceptual concepts; the other, For a closer look at what happens when we try to take the epistemological skeptic seriously.

This essay looks at Thompson Clarke’s two published essays in the context of his doctoral dissertation. In the dissertation the topics of those essays fit into a general scheme. There is supposed to be a uniform form of “inquiry,” which, as Clarke sees it, is present in both the case for skepticism (a pessimistic view of the possibility of knowledge) and a supposed case for sense data. He uses the term ‘inquiry’ to stress that it is not (...) an argument, but rather a particular way of raising the question, which makes both skepticism and sense data seem, where they do, inescapable. The essay, “Seeing Surfaces and Physical Objects,” is meant to be a simple example of an inquiry of the relevant type. The inquiry in the case of skepticism is carried out, or at least sketched in some detail, in the other published essay, “The Legacy of Skepticism,” which argues compellingly that that case collapses. The inquiry in the case of sense data was never spelled out, or at least in neither the essays nor the dissertation. The argument of the present essay is that there simply is no such inquiry. The idea of sense data does not parallel the idea of skepticism in such ways, which helps illuminate the difference between perceptual and cognitive awareness. (shrink)

This chapter addresses Cavell’s understanding skepticism, demonstrating that Cavell neither affirms the correctness of the skeptic’s claims nor refutes them, but provides a _critique_ of epistemology. Skepticism is an expression of our deep discomfort with our finitude, our resistance to _accepting_ the world and _acknowledging_ those with whom we share it. And it is a particularly pure example of a more general attempt to speak without accepting responsibility for the conditions that make speech intelligible—an attempt to disown the criteria of (...) our language, to speak without speaking to someone, to speak without being someone who needs or wants to speak, and who wants and needs to be addressed. This chapter draws heavily upon Wittgenstein and Heidegger in its account of this aspect of Cavell’s work, as other commentators have as well and upon Thompson Clarke, as they have not. (shrink)

This chapter reflects on a long philosophical career. According to the author, what attracted him to philosophy was in part precisely the idea that it wasn’t like getting a job or following a professional career. He thought of philosophy as something you studied just for its own sake. The author also shares his life as a graduate student at Harvard University, where he was influenced by the likes of Burton Dreben and Rogers Albritton. He went to Berkeley in 1961, and (...) cites his erstwhile colleague Thompson Clarke as the one philosopher to whom he owes the most. The author concludes by asserting that what he and his fellow philosophers have been doing is similar to the kind of investigation undertaken by greats such as Plato, Aristotle, René Descartes, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

Do we directly perceive physical objects? What is the significance of the qualification ‘directly’ here? Austin famously denied that there was a unique interpretation by which we could make sense of the traditional debate in the philosophy of perception. I look here at Thompson Clarke’s discussion of G. E. Moore and surface perception to answer Austin’s scepticism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 10.2 (2005) 101-135 [Access article in PDF] Truth, Knowledge and the Wild World Jim Cheney One ought not to put too much stock in the word 'philosophy'.... [T]here are alternative ways of intelligently engaging the world. To construe one's thinking in terms of belief is characteristic of a particular kind of world view and it remains to be seen whether those who share an indigenous (...) world view conceive of experience in such an overtly intellectualized manner. Leroy N. Meyer and Tony Ramirez (1996, 104)1 Wilderness treats me like a human being. Tom Birch2As Holmes Rolston III has said, "A principal characteristic of human life is that it develops into biography. In that sense, humans do not want their values in nature, any more than they want other goods in life, to come seriatim, like beads on a string.... Humans want a storied residence in nature where the passage of time integrates past, present, and future in a meaningful career" (Rolston 1988, 351). This is what I had hoped for: a narrative of storied residence in Midwest prairie, lake, and river country, and in the mountains and deserts of Idaho, with the history of the development of an environmental ethic (or ethos) left largely implicit within that larger narrative, leaving readers to reflect as they may on the philosophical dimensions of the journey. To leave traditional philosophical [End Page 101] modes of expression completely behind proved impossible (for now), but it has been for me a worthwhile exercise to locate my reflections on "truth, knowledge, and the wild world" in something of a narrative form. It is the lakes and rivers, prairies, mountains, and deserts that have remained implicit. They have cast their spell, however, on any attempt to impose cultural order on the relationship between truth, knowledge, and the wild world. I Looking back on it, it seems that my entire philosophical career has been implicated—in one way or another, directly and indirectly—in these two questions: "How important is truth to knowledge and epistemology?" and "What is the role of natural environments in the production of knowledge?" Furthest back, at the very origin of my philosophical life, reflections on philosophical knowledge were inevitably posed and thought about in natural environments, particularly in my meditations as I drifted in the early morning mist on the St. Croix River and several Minnesota lakes, especially Cedar Lake. Even now, when I am trying to make my way to a new understanding of some philosophical issue, I walk along the shores of Lake Michigan and the Milwaukee River, or sit by rivers and lakes in Idaho, a place that became my second home after meeting my partner, Fran. Northern White Cedars stand in our yard, front and back; Western Red Cedar holds our house in its embrace.There is no question in my mind that natural environments are the deepest sources of whatever philosophical understandings I may have come to. In terms of formal studies, however, the question of the role of natural environments in the production of knowledge did not emerge for me until, well into my teaching career, I discovered the newly-emerging field of environmental ethics. It was at that point that the deepest wellspring of my philosophy and my life came together with my professional philosophical interests—in an uneasy balance. Until that time, as I think of it now, my philosophical track through the curious environment of the academy, however well it prepared me to think about central issues in environmental ethics, was mostly marked by a fascination with glittering baubles and gemstones and did not truly touch the soil, water, and atmosphere of my life.Questions of truth, knowledge, and epistemology took center stage from the beginning of my formal philosophical studies. As an undergraduate [End Page 102] at Berkeley, Thompson Clarke introduced me (in three courses) to the skeptical implications of Ordinary Language Philosophy that had escaped the attention of J. L. Austin and others. This baptism into the rigors of skeptical philosophy left me pretty much convinced, as my partner and... (shrink)

A substantial step in The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell's critique of the modern epistemological tradition is a unique and intricate endeavor, supported by different intuitions and strategies. In light of this, the central aim of this paper is to articulate the main theoretical and methodological basis that govern such reading of traditional epistemology’s procedures, and, indeed, the entire Cavellian philosophical project, aiming to provide an indispensable groundwork for those who intend to delve into the American’s work. Thus, the following (...) are presented: the foundations and methods of ordinary language philosophy, primarily inherited from Austin, and sophisticated by Cavell in Must We Mean What We Say?; the innovative theses concerning the modern skeptical problem proposed by Thompson Clarke in The Legacy of Skepticism; and the principles of Cavell's unorthodox interpretation of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, supported by the analysis of grammatical criteria. Placed side by side, these three ideas help clarify the inaugural hypothesis of The Claim of Reason, that the classical notion of knowledge as certainty must be mistaken. Finally, Cavell's alternative suggestion of knowledge as acknowledgement is briefly addressed and situated within the broader landscape of the theories of knowledge. With that, the intent is to show that the Cavellian criticism aims not only to diagnose an epistemological concern born in modernity, but to also argue that it cannot be eliminated with a refutation of skepticism, but only recognized through the acceptance of its truth. (shrink)

Em ‘O Cético em Seu Lugar e Tempo’ o professor Myles Burnyeat trata das aporiai céticas desenvolvidas por Sexto Empírico em torno das noções de lugar e tempo, combatendo as interpretações aristotélicas das respectivas noções. Em seguida o autor demonstra que as noções aristotélicas são elaborações que justificam o entendimento ‘ordinário’ que o senso comum tem de lugar e tempo. Isto leva Burnyeat à conclusão de que o ceticismo de Sexto combate as asserções científicas, mas também as do senso comum, (...) não havendo assim insulamento em Sexto. Após isto o conceito de insulamento, que se origina em Thompson Clarke ( The Legacy of Skepticism ), será melhor desenvolvido. Nesta parte Burnyeat tenta descobrir a origem Moderna do insulamento. (shrink)

Plausibly, any adequate theory of perception must (a) solve what Alva Noë calls 'the problem of perceptual presence,' and (b) do justice to the direct realist idea that what is given in perception are garden-variety spatiotemporal particulars. This paper shows that, while Noë's sensorimotor view arguably satisfies the first of these conditions, it does not satisfy the second. Moreover, Noë is wrong to think that a naïve realist approach to perception cannot handle the problem of perceptual presence. Section three of (...) this paper develops a version of naïve realism that meets both of the adequacy conditions above. This paper thus provides strong considerations in favor of naïve realism. (shrink)

I start with two basic lines of response to Cartesian skepticism about the ‘external world’: in the first, which is characteristic of Analytic philosophers to this day, the focus is on the meaning of ‘know’—what it ‘refers’ to, its ‘semantics’ and its ‘pragmatics’; in the second, which characterizes Continental responses to Descartes, the focus is on the philosophizing or meditating subject, and its relation to its body and world. I argue that the first approach is hopeless: if the Cartesian worry (...) that I could be dreaming right now so much as makes sense, the proposal that—under some theory of knowledge (or of ‘knowledge’)—my belief that I am sitting in front of the computer right now may still be (or truly count as) a piece of knowledge, would rightfully seem to the skeptic to be playing with words and missing the point. I then argue that the practice of Ordinary Language Philosophy, which has mostly been linked to the first line of response to Cartesian skepticism, may be seen as actually belonging with the second line of response; and I show how a form of what may be called “Existentialist Ordinary Language Philosophy” can be used to reveal the nonsensicality of the Cartesian skeptical worry. My argument takes its cue from Thompson Clarke’s insight—an insight that Clarke himself has not pursued far or accurately enough—that our concept of Dream is not a concept of the “standard type.”. (shrink)

In two of his three published articles Thompson Clarke argued for occasion-sensitivity as the key to disarming lines of thought which he called ‘enquiries’. In one he argued that there must be occasion-sensitivity if the notion of knowledge is not to collapse, so that there must be occasion-sensitivity. In the other he argued merely that if one did assume occasion-sensitivity he could avoid the conclusion that the most one ever sees of an opaque solid is part of its (...) surface. Clarke also suggested, but did not attempt to show, that it takes occasion-sensitivity to disarm arguments for sense-data. This chapter suggests that, sadly, such is not so. Or perhaps not so sadly: sense-datum arguments do not get so far as requiring occasion-sensitivity to disarm them. The lingering mystery is why sense data have ever seemed compulsory to so many. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up Thompson Clarke’s distinction between “philosophical” and “plain” ways of understanding a question that could be expressed with the words, “how do you know…?” Clarke argues that this distinction has two important implications. First, philosophical skepticism would stand in an “indirect” relation with its “plain” counterparts, so that what the philosopher is examining is not, as it might initially seem, a plain claim to know, but rather what Clarke calls “philosophical common (...) sense.” Second, if philosophical common sense is intelligible then it cannot be defended: philosophical skepticism would be unavoidable. For Clarke philosophical common sense is intelligible, only if our “conceptual human constitution” is of the “standard type,” and our “conceptual human constitution” is of the “standard type” only if the concepts of dreaming and waking do not have a “knowability requirement” built into them. I defend the claim that these concepts have a “knowability requirement” by tracing the “knowability requirement” to the nature of judgment itself: in particular to what I describe as the priority of the first-person point of view in the constitution of states of judgment. If this is right, the only intelligible questions of the form “how do you know…?” are of the plain variety, and any satisfying treatment of skepticism would have to forego a defense of “philosophical common sense.”. (shrink)

Perry Anderson, Edward Palmer Thompson, David Harvey, Moishe Postone, Derek Sayer, Simon Clarke, Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood et David McNally : neuf penseurs importants dont l'influence grandissante marque un renouveau de l'apport de l'oeuvre de Marx et de ses successeurs au champ des sciences sociales. Chaque chapitre décrit le parcours intellectuel de l'une de ces figures et analyse sa contribution à une pensée en mouvement, offrant ainsi pour la première fois au public francophone un tour d'horizon des (...) différentes formes du marxisme anglo-saxon contemporain. Hétérogène, ce courant de pensée résolument antidogmatique est traversé de tendances communes telles la critique du réductionnisme économique et une sensibilité accrue aux processus historiques des rapports de domination. Historiens, sociologues, politologues, géographes ou philosophes, les auteurs ici réunis ont chacun à leur manière contribué au vaste chantier théorique de la pensée marxiste et du matérialisme historique, qui continue de s'étendre, un siècle et demi après sa fondation. (shrink)

Perception is often treated as the passive reception of sensory data, a process that merely informs an already‑constituted self. This paper argues for a different view: perception is an active, constructive capacity that simultaneously builds a coherent self and supplies the causal information needed for intentional agency. Drawing on phenomenological (Husserl, Merleau‑Ponty), enactive (Varela, Thompson), and predictive processing (Clark, Friston) traditions, the paper defends a constructive‑enactive account of perception. It shows that perception is not only epistemic (providing mental maps (...) of the world) but also ontological – it participates in the ongoing self‑construction of the agent. Because perception makes causal pathways legible, it is the epistemic gateway to interdependence. Consequently, institutional visibility – the condition that makes causal consequences traceable – is a moral necessity. A society that blocks perception of causal relations (an obscuring‑form society) directly undermines the cognitive capacity that underlies flourishing. (shrink)

The return of STS to its historical roots / Baird Callicott -- Phil-tech meets eco-phil / Don Idhe -- Is technology use insidious? / Kyle Whyte, Ryan Gunderson, Brett Clark -- Resistance to risky technologies / Paul Thompson -- Remediation technologies and respect for others / Ben Hale -- Early geoengineering governance / Clare Heyward -- Design for sustainability / Ibo van de Poel -- Industrial ecology and environmental design / Braden Allenby -- Ecodesign in the era of symbolic (...) consumption / Zhang Wei -- Do we consume too much? / Mark Sagoff -- Sustainable technologies for sustainable lifestyles / Philip Brey -- Sustainable animal agriculture and environmental virtue ethics / Raymond Anthony -- Technology, responsibility, and meat / Wyatt Galusky. (shrink)