Diversity Reading List

Publisher's Note: Imagine that Plato came to life in the twenty-first century and embarked on a multi-city speaking tour. How would he mediate a debate between a Freudian psychoanalyst and a 'tiger mum' on how to raise the perfect child? How would he handle the host of a right-wing news program who denies there can be morality without religion? What would Plato make of Google, and of the idea that knowledge can be crowdsourced rather than reasoned out by experts? Plato at the Googleplex is acclaimed thinker Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's dazzling investigation of these conundra. With a philosopher's depth and erudition and a novelist's imagination and wit, Goldstein probes the deepest issues confronting us by allowing us to eavesdrop on Plato as he takes on the modern world; it is a stunningly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden role in today's debates on religion, morality, politics and science.

Abstract:
In this article, Gonzalez-Arnal challenges Susan James' embodied conception of personal identity by analysing transexual narratives. According to Gonzalez-Arnal, James' account cannot fully capture the experience of transexual persons since they describe the continuity of their personal (but also gender) identity despite significant changes in their bodies. Gonzalez-Arnal examines how other two theories of personal identity, a reductionist and a dualist one, might provide a better picture of the transexual narratives. After concluding that none the reductionist nor the dualist account does much better than an embodied view of personal identity, Gonzalez-Arnal proposes an improvement to James' view that accommodates transexual experiences, namely, acknowledging the integration of the "inner" self and other's perception of one's body in shaping one's "outer self".

Abstract:

The paper discusses two problems with Graham Priest's version of dialetheism: the thesis that one cannot be rationally obliged to both accept and reject something, and the use of a Contraction-less conditional in dealing with Curry paradoxes. Some solutions are suggested.

Abstract: This paper argues that there are powerful similarities between cognitive development in children and scientific theory change. These similarities are best explained by postulating an underlying abstract set of rules and representations that underwrite both types of cognitive abilities. In fact, science may be successful largely because it exploits powerful and flexible cognitive devices that were designed by evolution to facilitate learning in young children. Both science and cognitive development involve abstract, coherent systems of entities and rules, theories. In both cases, theories provide predictions, explanations, and interpretations. In both, theories change in characteristic ways in response to counterevidence. These ideas are illustrated by an account of children's developing understanding of the mind.

Abstract:

One of the most basic questions an ontology can address is: How many things, or substances, are there? A monist will say, ‘just one’. But there are different stripes of monism, and where the borders between these different views lie rests on the question, ‘To what does this “oneness” apply?’ Some monists apply ‘oneness’ to existence. Others apply ‘oneness’ to types. Determining whether a philosopher is a monist and deciphering what this is supposed to mean is no easy task, especially when it comes to those writing in the early modern period because many philosophers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries include God in their ontologies. In The Principles, Anne Finch Conway offers an ontology that is often described as being both ‘vitalist’ and ‘monist’. I take this to mean that, for Conway, all that exists is in some way alive and that if asked ‘How many things, or substances, are there?’ Conway would say, ‘Just one’. But to what does this ‘oneness’ apply? And where does the point of disagreement between Conway and her interlocutors, Hobbes, Spinoza, More, and Descartes lie? In this paper, I argue that determining the answer to this first question turns out to be quite difficult. Nevertheless, we can still make sense of the second.

Introduction: The concept of artistic freedom, like that of academic freedom, is as potent as it is slippery. Its indeterminacy may in fact lend the concept some power, since it can be uncritically applied to many different kinds of situations involving artists and their creations. Philosopher Paul Crowther has observed that the prevailing conception of artistic freedom is essentially negative in character: it is based 'purely on the absence of ideological or conceptual restraint.' There is a widespread art-world intuition that the creative freedom of the artist should be given virtually absolute precedence in decisions about the creation, exhibition, and treatment of artworks. As a recent controversy involving Swiss artist Christoph Buchel and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) shows, the dominant conception of artistic freedom also entails freedom from financial and logistical constraints such as museum budgets and exhibition deadlines. In this particular case, the artist and his supporters argued that the museum violated his artistic freedom by attempting to display his unfinished and abandoned artwork against his wishes. As with the Tilted Arc controversy in the 1980s, this case raises provocative questions about the nature of artistic freedom as 'artistic' as it comes into conflict with the needs and interests of the institutions that pay for, exhibit, and, in Mass MoCA's case, construct the work.

Content: Govier distinguishes four kinds of slippery slope arguments - conceptual, precedential, causal and mixed - and argues that only the last kind are likely to ever be sound.

Abstract: The view that physical objects do not, in fact, possess colour properties is certainly the dominant position amongst scientists working on colour vision. It is also a reasonably popular view amongst philosophers. However, the recent philosophical debate about the metaphysical status of colour properties seems to have taken a more realist turn. In this article, I review the main philosophical views – eliminativism, physicalism, dispositionalism and primitivism – and describe the problems they face. I also examine how these views have been classified and suggest that there may be less disparity between some of these positions than previously thought

Abstract: My first aim in this paper is to show that the transparency claim cannot serve the purpose to which it is assigned; that is, the idea that perceptual experience is transparent is no help whatsoever in motivating an externalist account of phenomenal character. My second aim is to show that the internalist qualia theorist's response to the transparency idea has been unnecessarily concessive to the externalist. Surprisingly, internalists seem to allow that much of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience depends essentially (and not just causally) upon externally located properties. They argue that we can also be aware of internal, non-intentional qualia. I present an alternative response the internalist can make to the transparency claim: phenomenal character is wholly internal, and seeming to be aware of externally located properties just is being aware of internally constituted experiential features.

Summary: I propose that the meanings of vague expressions render the truth conditions of utterances of sentences containing them sensitive to our interests. For example, 'expensive' is analyzed as meaning 'costs a lot', which in turn is analyzed as meaning 'costs significantly greater than the norm'. Whether a difference is a significant difference depends on what our interests are. Appeal to the proposal is shown to provide an attractive resolution of the sorites paradox that is compatible with classical logic and semantics.