-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Sara Peppe and Björn FreterPublisher’s Note: Decolonising the Mind is a collection of essays about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity. The book, which advocates for linguistic decolonization, is one of Ngũgĩ’s best-known and most-cited non-fiction publications, helping to cement him as a pre-eminent voice theorizing the “language debate” in post-colonial studies. Ngũgĩ describes the book as “a summary of some of the issues in which I have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of my practice in fiction, theatre, criticism, and in teaching of literature…” Decolonising the Mind is split into four essays: “The Language of African Literature,” “The Language of African Theatre,” “The Language of African Fiction,” and “The Quest for Relevance.”
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Ten-Herng LaiAbstract: Art can be addressed, not just to individuals, but to groups. Art can even be part of how groups think to themselves – how they keep a grip on their values over time. I focus on monuments as a case study. Monuments, I claim, can function as a commitment to a group value, for the sake of long-term action guidance. Art can function here where charters and mission statements cannot, precisely because of art's powers to capture subtlety and emotion. In particular, art can serve as the vessel for group emotions, by making emotional content sufficiently public so as to be the object of a group commitment. Art enables groups to guide themselves with values too subtle to be codified.
Comment (from this Blueprint): This paper highlights the role monuments can play as groups attempt to speak to itself to solidify its own commitment. As a form of art, it can publicly reinforce the commitments, especially through carrying the emotions, attitudes that cannot be easily expressed in propositions, towards certain individuals or ideals. The commitments can be something great, evil, or mediocre. Also consider the fact that art engages with our emotions rather than our rational capacity.
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Nora HeinzelmannAbstract: Free action and microphysical determination are incompatible but this is so only in virtue of a genuine conflict between microphysical determination with any active behavior. I introduce active behavior as the veridicality condition of agentive experiences and of perceptual experiences and argue that these veridicality conditions are fulfilled in many everyday cases of human and non-human behavior and that they imply the incompatibility of active behavior with microphysical determination. The main purpose of the paper is to show that the view proposed about active behavior leads to a natural compromise between libertarianism and compatibilism, which avoids the flaws of both positions while preserving their central insights.
Comment:
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Nora HeinzelmannAbstract: I will present an argument for property dualism. The argument employs a distinction between having a concept of a property and grasping a property via a concept. If you grasp a property P via a concept C, then C is a concept of P. But the reverse does not hold: you may have a concept of a property without grasping that property via any concept. If you grasp a property, then your cognitive relation to that property is more intimate then if you just have some concept or other of that property. To grasp a property is to understand what having that property essentially consists in.
Comment:
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Nora HeinzelmannAbstract: The knowledge argument aims to establish that conscious experience involves non-physical properties. It rests on the idea that someone who has complete physical knowledge about another conscious being might yet lack knowledge about how it feels to have the experiences of that being. It is one of the most discussed arguments against physicalism.
Comment:
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Nora HeinzelmannIntroduction: Everyone familiar with the current mind-body debate has probably heard about Frank Jackson's neurophysiologist Mary. So I tell her story very briefly. Mary knows everything there is to know about the neurophysiological basis of human colour vision but she never saw colours herself (she always lived in a black-and-white environment). When Mary is finally released into the beauty of the coloured world, she acquires new knowledge about the world and - more specifically - about the character of the visual experiences of others. This appears clear at first sight. In the ongoing philosophical debate, however, there is no agreement about whether Mary really gains new knowledge and about whether this would, if it were so, represent a problem for physicalism. Those who defend the so-called argument from knowledge (or 'knowledge argument') think that it does.
Comment:
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Andrea BlomqvistAbstract: Nussbaum argues for a cognitivist theory of emotions, whereby an emotion is similar to a judgement. An emotion has an intentional object which is being evaluated as e.g. bad for one. On her view, our emotional reactions to different situations are connected to the idea of eudaimonia, and emotions could be seen as a guide to a flourishing life. As such, Nussbaum aims to explain how certain emotions feel like they're tearing us apart (e.g. grieving a dead family member), since they are literally bad for us. She thus departs from the Jamsian tradition whereby the psychological component of an emotion is emphasised (or emotions are sometimes reduced to physiological responses), and argues instead that the physiological response is not a necessary component of an emotion.
Comment: This paper offers a good introduction into the cognitivist theories of emotions and their basic claims. It would be good to pair with non-cognitivist theories such as William James's or Jesse Prinz's.
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Franci Mangraviti and Viviane FairbankAbstract: This chapter reviews the book A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity (1993), by Louise B. Antony and Charlotte Witt. The appeal to reason and objectivity amounts to a request that the observer refuses to be intimidated by habit, and look for cogent arguments based on evidence that has been carefully sifted for bias. In our own society the arguments of feminists make such appeals to reason and objectivity all the time, and in a manner that closely resembles Platonic arguments. And yet today reason and objectivity are on the defensive in some feminist circles. We are frequently told that reason and objectivity are norms created by "patriarchy," and that to appeal to them is to succumb to the blandishments of the oppressor. We are told that systems of reasoning are systems of domination, and that to adopt the traditional one is thus to be co-opted. A Mind of One's Own is a collection of essays by women who are prominent in philosophy today and who wish to confront recent feminist criticisms of philosophy. Most of the contributors are under fifty and widely respected; most grew up with strong political ties to feminism.
Comment: available in this Blueprint
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Andrea BlomqvistAbstract: I will argue that our capacity to directly read off truths from fiction, and the power of the novelist to testify to truths, is indeed limited. I will go on to argue that there are, however, further more indirect ways of coming to truths through fiction, but that even in those cases the author's power to manipulate should make the epistemically virtuous person proceed carefully. However, before I do that I want to raise three obvious kinds of response to our puzzle. These responses take issue with the claims by which the problem is set up, and I want to look at them briefly, really only to set them aside. My interest is primarily a resolution that hangs on to all three claims.
Comment: This would be a good further reading for students who are interested in how we can learn from fiction, especially if they wish to write a coursework essay on the topic.
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Cailin O'ConnorAbstract: Vague predicates, those that exhibit borderline cases, pose a persistent problem for philosophers and logicians. Although they are ubiquitous in natural language, when used in a logical context, vague predicates lead to contradiction. This paper will address a question that is intimately related to this problem. Given their inherent imprecision, why do vague predicates arise in the first place? I discuss a variation of the signaling game where the state space is treated as contiguous, i.e., endowed with a metric that captures a similarity relation over states. This added structure is manifested in payoffs that reward approximate coordination between sender and receiver as well as perfect coordination. I evolve these games using a variation of Herrnstein reinforcement learning that better reflects the generalizing learning strategies real-world actors use in situations where states of the world are similar. In these simulations, signaling can develop very quickly, and the signals are vague in much the way ordinary language predicates are vague - they each exclusively apply to certain items, but for some transition period both signals apply to varying degrees. Moreover, I show that under certain parameter values, in particular when state spaces are large and time is limited, learning generalization of this sort yields strategies with higher payoffs than standard Herrnstein reinforcement learning. These models may then help explain why the phenomenon of vagueness arises in natural language: the learning strategies that allow actors to quickly and effectively develop signaling conventions in contiguous state spaces make it unavoidable
Comment:
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Clotilde TorregrossaAbstract: Whatever else a critique of reason attempts, it must surely criticize reason. Further, if it is not to point toward nihilism, a critique of reason cannot have only a negative or destructive outcome, but must vindicate at least some standards or principles as authorities on which thinking and doing may rely, and by which they may (in part) be judged. Critics of 'the Enlightenment project' from Pascal to Horkheimer to contemporary communitarians and postmodernists, detect its Achilles' heel in arrant failure to vindicate the supposed standards of reason that are so confidently used to criticize, attack, and destroy other authorities, including church, state, and tradition. If the authority of reason is bogus, why should such reasoned criticism have any weight? Suspicions about reason can be put innumerable ways. However, one battery of criticisms is particularly threatening, because it targets the very possibility of devising anything that could count as a vindication of reason. This line of attack is sometimes formulated as a trilemma. Any supposed vindication of the principles of reason would have to establish the authority of certain fundamental constraints on thinking or acting. However, this could only be done in one of three ways. A supposed vindication could appeal to the presumed principles of reason that it aims to vindicate - but would then be circular, so fail as vindication. Alternatively, it might be based on other starting points - but then the supposed principles of reason would lack reasoned vindication, so could not themselves bequeath unblemished pedigrees.
Comment:
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Simon Fokt, Contributed by: Ian James KiddAbstract: The Analects appears to offer two bodies of testimony regarding the felt, experiential qualities of leading a life of virtue. In its ostensible record of Confucius' more abstract and reflective claims, the text appears to suggest that virtue has considerable power to afford joy and insulate from sorrow. In the text's inclusion of Confucius' less studied and apparently more spontaneous remarks, however, he appears sometimes to complain of the life he leads, to feel its sorrows, and to possess some despair. Where we attend to both of these elements of the text, a tension emerges. In this essay, I consider how Confucius' complaints appear to complicate any clean conclusion that Confucius wins a good life, particularly where we attend to important pre-theoretical sensibilities regarding what a 'good life' ought to include and how it ought to feel for the one who leads it.
Comment: A rich text that explains the role of complaints - and, more broadly, disappointment, regret, and sadness - in the moral life. Especially good for challenging the idea that the moral life will insulate a person from such negative affects. Also points out the tendency of some moral philosophers to downplay certain aspects of human beings when constructing their ideals.
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Nick NovelliPublisher's note: Mortality in Traditional Chinese Thought is the definitive exploration of a complex and fascinating but little-understood subject. Arguably, death as a concept has not been nearly as central a preoccupation in Chinese culture as it has been in the West. However, even in a society that seems to understand death as a part of life, responses to mortality are revealing and indicate much about what is valued and what is feared. This edited volume fills the lacuna on this subject, presenting an array of philosophical, artistic, historical, and religious perspectives on death during a variety of historical periods. Contributors look at material culture, including findings now available from the Mawangdui tomb excavations; consider death in Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist traditions; and discuss death and the history and philosophy of war.
Comment: This volume contains a number of excellent essays on mortality as it appears in Chinese philosophy. It would be useful in a history of Chinese philosophy course, or to provide an additional perspective in a course on philosophy of death, immortality and the afterlife. Of particular value for this purpose is Tao Jiang's chapter comparing Linji Yixuan's views on immortality to those of William James, discussing the degree to which remembrance counts as immortality.
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: M. Jimena Clavel Vázquez and Andrés Hernández VillarrealAbstract:
-Yolia is one of the principal indigenous terms present in Christian Nahua terminology in the first decades of European contact. It is employed for “soul” or “spirit” and often forms a doublet with ánima in Nahuatl texts of an ecclesiastical, devotional, or secular nature. the term -Yolia/teyolia has also lived a rich and fascinating life in scholarly literature. Its etymology (“the means for one’s living”) is strikingly similar to that of the Spanish word “ánima”, or “soul.” Taking into account the possibility that attestations of the seemingly pre-Hispanic -Yolia can be identified in some of the written sources, we have reviewed historical, linguistic, and anthropological evidence concerning this term in order to revisit the Nahua concept of the “soul.” we also scrutinize the very origin of -Yolia in academic discourse. this analysis, based on broader historical and linguistic evidence referring to both pre-Conquest beliefs and Christianization in sixteenth-century central Mexico, is the point of departure for proposing and substantiating an alternative hypothesis about the origin of -yolia. Our precise focus has been to trace and pinpoint a pervasive Christian influence, manifest both in indigenous Colonial texts and conceptual frameworks of modern scholars interpreting them. we conclude that -Yolia is a neologism created in the early Colonial period.
Comment (from this Blueprint): Offers a critical discussion of López Austin’s 'The Human Body in the Mexica Worldview'. They propose to consider tonalli as the animistic entity that was most likely to be present in pre-Hispanic thought.
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Carl FoxAbstract: In his paper on 'The Concept of Voluntariness', Ben Colburn helpfully takes up the task of developing my view about the sense of voluntariness that is relevant for judgments of substantive responsibility, or judgments about individuals' liability to pick up some costs of their choices. On my view, a necessary condition for holding people responsible for their choices is that those choices be voluntary in the sense that they are not made because there is no acceptable alternative, where the standard for the acceptability of options is an objective standard of well-being. [...] Colburn's first point is entirely well-taken. By way of endorsing it, I ask whether we are justified in taking some but not all kinds of beliefs to affect the voluntariness of choice, as his elaboration of my view suggests. However, I find Colburn's second point less convincing, and argue that we should allow for the moral character of options to affect the voluntariness of choice.
Comment: Short debate article responding to some criticisms of Olsaretti's account of voluntariness made by Ben Colburn and probably best read in conjunction with Colburn's article. Does a good job of responding to the criticisms and explaining her account. Good further reading for teaching about voluntariness and autonomy.
Comment (from this Blueprint): The papers in this volume were foundational for the post-colonial debate on African language.