Diversity Reading List

Summary (Diversifying Syllabi): Leslie argues that generic language has an effect on social cognition. Specifically, generic language plays a role in the way small children develop concepts related to abilities, which facilitates the transmission and development of social prejudices.

Abstract: A recent study published in Nature Neuroscience purports to have answered a question posed to Locke in 1688 by his friend William Molyneux, namely, whether ‘a man born blind and made to see’ would be able to identify, immediately and by vision alone, objects previously known only by touch. The answer, according to the researchers – and as predicted by Molyneux, as well as Locke, Berkeley, and others – is ‘likely negative. The newly sighted subjects did not exhibit an immediate transfer of their tactile shape knowledge to the visual domain’. Since then, however, many commentators have argued that the answer is still not clear. Moreover, in the contemporary literature on Molyneux’s Question, and more generally on cross-modal perception and the individuation of the senses, it is sometimes hard to determine what question is being investigated. In this paper, I distinguish a number of different questions about the relation between visual and tactual perception that can arise when considering Molyneux’s problem.

Abstract:

This article proposes a new reading of the mirror analogy presented in the doctrine of Chinese Yogācāra Buddhism. Clerics, such as Xuanzang 玄奘 and his protégé Kuiji 窺基, articulated this analogy to describe our experience of other minds. In contrast with existing interpretations of this analogy as figurative ways of expressing ideas of projecting and reproducing, I argue that this mirroring experience should be understood as revealing, whereby we perceive other minds through the second-person perspective. This mirroring experience, in its allusion to the collectivity of consciousness, yields the metaphysical explication of mutual interdependence and the prescription of norms for compassionate actions.

Abstract: Issues of pretense and imagination are of central interest to philosophers, psychologists, and researchers in allied fields. In this entry, we provide a roadmap of some of the central themes around which discussion has been focused. We begin with an overview of pretense, imagination, and the relationship between them. We then shift our attention to the four specific topics where the disciplines' research programs have intersected or where additional interactions could prove mutually beneficial: the psychological underpinnings of performing pretense and of recognizing pretense, the cognitive capacities involved in imaginative engagement with fictions, and the real-world impact of make-believe. In the final section, we discuss more briefly a number of other mental activities that arguably involve imagining, including counterfactual reasoning, delusions, and dreaming.

Publisher’s Note:
lmost all theories of knowledge and justified belief employ moral concepts and forms of argument borrowed from moral theories, but none of them pay attention to the current renaissance in virtue ethics. This remarkable book is the first attempt to establish a theory of knowledge based on the model of virtue theory in ethics. The book develops the concept of an intellectual virtue, and then shows how the concept can be used to give an account of the major concepts in epistemology, including the concept of knowledge. This highly original work of philosophy for professionals will also provide students with an excellent introduction to epistemology, virtue theory, and the relationship between ethics and epistemology.

Abstract:
"An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy" unlocks the mystery of ancient Chinese philosophy and unravels the complexity of Chinese Buddhism by placing them in the contemporary context of discourse. Elucidates the central issues and debates in Chinese philosophy, its different schools of thought, and its major philosophers. Covers eight major philosophers in the ancient period, among them Confucius, Laozi, and Zhuangzi. Illuminates the links between different schools of philosophy. Opens the door to further study of the relationship between Chinese and Western philosophy.

Abstract:
This paper explores a late-Ming Chinese philosopher Wang Yangming’s (1472–1529) philosophical assertions showcasing the pivotal role that human mind plays in shaping our worldview. Wang Yangming’s view—especially his declaration that the Mind is the Principle—emphasizes that the human mind is the sole foundation of moral principles and that worldly affairs are identified with human ethical practices. This position has been contentious both in his times and among contemporary scholars. While some critics, notably Chen Lai, find Wang’s synthesis of the ethical and the metaphysical realm problematic, others like Wing-tsit Chan view Wang Yangming’s philosophy as verging on subjective idealism. Both Chen and Chan argue that Wang Yangming commits the fallacy of the conflation of fact and value. In this paper, I defend Wang Yangming’s ethics-oriented metaphysics against such criticisms. I will engage a comparative study between Wang Yangming’s perspective and pragmatist metaphysics—a modern philosophical stance which sees metaphysics as intertwining with human ethics and practices. Building upon this comparative study, this paper aims to highlight the intrinsic bond between metaphysics and ethics and to advocate for the centrality of ethics in shaping the very foundation of metaphysical thinking. The conclusion of this paper is that Wang Yangming’s metaphysics aligns with commonsense realism, rather than with subjective idealism. His metaphysics is not a confused worldview that conflates fact with value, nor is it subjective idealism. Instead, it is a metaphysics with the ethical grounding of human engagements and humanistic concerns.

Abstract: Much of the discussion of Naive Realism about veridical experience has focused on a consequence of adopting it—namely, disjunctivism about perceptual experience. However, the motivations for being a Naive Realist in the first place have received relatively little attention in the literature. In this paper, I will elaborate and defend the claim that Naive Realism provides the best account of the phenomenal character of veridical experience.

Abstract: Many philosophers are skeptical about disjunctivism—a theory of perceptual experience which holds roughly that a situation in which I see a banana that is as it appears to me to be (the good case) and one in which I have a hallucination as of a banana (a certain kind of bad case) are mentally completely different. Often this skepticism is rooted in the suspicion that such a view cannot adequately account for the bad case—in particular, (i) that such a view cannot explain why what it’s like to have a hallucination can be exactly like what it’s like to have a veridical experience, (ii) that it cannot explain why the hallucination I have in the bad case is subjectively indistinguishable from the kind of experience I have in the good case, and (iii) that it cannot offer a viable account of the nature of hallucination. In this paper, I argue that a proper formulation of disjunctivism can avoid these objections. Disjunctivism should be formulated as the weakest claim required to preserve its primary motivation, viz., Naïve Realism—the view that veridical experience fundamentally consists in the subject perceiving entities in her environment. And the weakest claim required to preserve Naïve Realism allows for many sorts of commonalities across the good and hallucinatory cases, commonalities that can be marshaled in responding to the objections. Most importantly, disjunctivism properly formulated is compatible with “positive” accounts of the nature of hallucination (as against M.G.F. Martin’s widely accepted argument to the contrary).

Abstract: Disjunctivist theories of perceptual experience claim that veridical and non-veridical experiences are radically unalike in some respect (other than the obvious difference in their causal histories). This chapter outlines four ways of elaborating this basic claim, each motivated by a different concern. The first is disjunctivism about the objects of experience, motivated by Direct Realism. The second is disjunctivism about the content of experience, motivated by the view that some experiences have object-dependent content. The third is disjunctivism about perceptual evidence (also known as epistemological disjunctivism), which is a strategy for responding to a particular sort of argument for scepticism about the external world. The fourth is disjunctivism about the metaphysical structure of experience (also known as metaphysical disjunctivism), which is motivated by Naïve Realism (a species of Direct Realism).