Lennon, Kathleen. Imagine and the Imaginary
2015, Imagination and the Imaginary. Routledge.
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Added by: Andrea BlomqvistSummary: The concept of the imaginary is pervasive within contemporary thought, yet can be a baffling and often controversial term. In Imagination and the Imaginary , Kathleen Lennon explores the links between imagination - regarded as the faculty of creating images or forms - and the imaginary, which links such imagery with affect or emotion and captures the significance which the world carries for us. Beginning with an examination of contrasting theories of imagination proposed by Hume and Kant, Lennon argues that the imaginary is not something in opposition to the real, but the very faculty through which the world is made real to us. She then turns to the vexed relationship between perception and imagination and, drawing on Kant, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, explores some fundamental questions, such as whether there is a distinction between the perceived and the imagined; the relationship between imagination and creativity; and the role of the body in perception and imagination. Invoking also Spinoza and Coleridge, Lennon argues that, far from being a realm of illusion, the imaginary world is our most direct mode of perception. She then explores the role the imaginary plays in the formation of the self and the social world. A unique feature of the volume is that it compares and contrasts a philosophical tradition of thinking about the imagination - running from Kant and Hume to Strawson and John McDowell - with the work of phenomenological, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist and feminist thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, Castoriadis, Irigaray, Gatens and Lloyd. This makes Imagination and the Imaginary essential reading for students and scholars working in phenomenology, philosophy of perception, social theory, cultural studies and aesthetics.Comment: This book introduces the reader to the history of imagination as an area of philosophy, as conceived by Hume and Kant, and as explored by Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. It concerns the relationship between imagination and perception, and the formation of the self and social world based on imagination. It is suitable in a module focusing on imagination, or more broadly on aesthetics.
Leonelli, Sabina. What distinguishes data from models?
2019, European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (2):22.
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Added by: Sara PeppeAbstract: I propose a framework that explicates and distinguishes the epistemic roles of data and models within empirical inquiry through consideration of their use in scientific practice. After arguing that Suppes' characterization of data models falls short in this respect, I discuss a case of data processing within exploratory research in plant phenotyping and use it to highlight the difference between practices aimed to make data usable as evidence and practices aimed to use data to represent a specific phenomenon. I then argue that whether a set of objects functions as data or models does not depend on intrinsic differences in their physical properties, level of abstraction or the degree of human intervention involved in generating them, but rather on their distinctive roles towards identifying and characterizing the targets of investigation. The paper thus proposes a characterization of data models that builds on Suppes' attention to data practices, without however needing to posit a fixed hierarchy of data and models or a highly exclusionary definition of data models as statistical constructs.Comment: This article deepens the role of model an data in the scientific investigation taking into account the scientific practice. Obviously, a general framework of the themes the author takes into account is needed.
Lepora, Chiara. Individual Complicity: The Tortured Patient
2013, In Chiara Lepora & Robert Goodin (eds.), On complicity and compromise. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Simon FoktAbstract: Medical complicity in torture is prohibited by international law and codes of professional ethics. But in the many countries in which torture is common, doctors frequently are expected to assist unethical acts that they are unable to prevent. Sometimes these doctors face a dilemma: they are asked to provide diagnoses or treatments that respond to genuine health needs but that also make further torture more likely or more effective. The duty to avoid complicity in torture then comes into conflict with the doctor's duty to care for patients. Sometimes the right thing for a doctor to do requires complicity in torture. Whether this is the case depends on: the expected consequences of the doctor's actions; the wishes of the patient; and the extent of the doctor's complicity with wrongdoing. Medical associations can support physicians who face this dilemma while maintaining a commitment to clear principles denouncing torture.
Leslie, Sarah-Jane. Carving up the Social World with Generics
2014, in: T. Lombrozo, J. Knobe, and S. Nichols (eds.) Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 1, Oxford University Press.
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Added by: Simon FoktSummary (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.Comment: This text can support classes on social cognition, the social nature of language, and essentialism (including social and psychological essentialism). It will also serve well as an introduction to generics in philosophy of language. In philosophy of gender and race classes it can offers a good illustration of how stereotypes are created.
Levenbook, Barbara Baum. Are There Any Positive Rights?
1990, Archiv für Rechts- Und Sozialphilosophie 42:156-66
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Barbara Baum LevenbookAbstract:
This essay is aimed at those moral philosophers who recognize a certain category of negative moral rights, but refuse to recognize a similar category of positive moral rights. That category consists of moral rights normally held by human beings. Such rights may be called "natural moral rights." My thesis is that if there is a natural negative right not to be killed, then -- contra Thomson, Nozick and others -- there must be at least one natural positive right, which might be called a "right not to be allowed to die."
Levenbook, Barbara Baum. That Makes It Worse
1980, The Monist 63 (2):228-245.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Barbara Baum LevenbookAbstract: Essays on excusing conditions and their correlates, mitigating conditions, usually begin with the assumption that there is general agreement on what the standard excuses are, and on where they are inapplicable. This assumption is justified; criminal law and the history of discussions of excuses have produced accord, though now and then doubts are expressed about particulars. Essays on excuses typically aim not so much to convince one that such-and-such are the general types of excuses but, rather, to show how they work and what their operation reveals about the nature of voluntary acts, full responsibility, etc.Comment: In a course on moral reasoning
Levenbook, Barbara Baum. Welfare and Harm After Death
2013, In James Stacey Taylor (ed.), The Metaphysics and Ethics of Death: New Essays. Oxford University Press. pp. 188-209.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Barbara Baum LevenbookAbstract: My aim in this essay is to defend the claim that posthumous harm is possible against an argument that assumes that an event harms a person only if it makes it the case that his or her welfare diminishes (compared to some benchmark) and further assumes that no one exists after death. This argument gets a purchase against posthumous harm only if one adds what I call Mortality-Bounded Welfare: the thesis that no events that occur after the end of one-s life can detrimentally affect one-s welfare. I accept the first two assumptions with some modification, but provide an argument to reject Mortality-Bounded Welfare. Although I use an argument form familiar in these kinds of discussions -- contrast cases in a thought-experiment, one involving an undeniably living person, and one not -- my defense of the thesis that the boundaries of welfare-affecting events may extend beyond the existence of the person in question is novel. My strategy is to make a case for a human condition having residual boundaries, by which I mean that it may obtain because of events that postdate a person, and then argue that it affects welfare. In the course of my argument, I provide a subsidiary argument that rights have residual boundaries. In particular, I argue that once rights vest (in existing people), they delineate not only a sphere of behavior that satisfies the rights but also a sphere of rights-violating behavior on the part of others. Unless this delineation is defeated by moral means, actual behavior on the part of others that falls within the respective spheres is right-satisfying or right-violating. The story does not change with regard to a right to performances potentially or necessarily postdating the right-holder. Unlike some attempts to argue that posthumous harm is possible, my defense of the possibility of posthumous harm is compatible with various metaphysical positions about when a posthumous harm occurs. I go on to demonstrate that my thought-experiment argument is free of an important objection (raised by Taylor, 2005) to two well-known attempts to defend posthumous harm on the basis of thought-experiments, Parfit-s (1984) and Feinberg-s (1984). For the sake of completeness, I sketch a different thought-experiment argument against Mortality-Bounded Welfare. I explain why this different thought-experiment does not make use of the idea of rights with residual boundaries. In closing, I trace a recent attempt, grounded in our agency, to argue for the possibility of posthumous harm. This attempt accepts, as mine does, the assumptions about welfare diminution and nonexistence after death and is likewise compatible with various metaphysical positions about when posthumous harm occurs. The argument in question is provided by Keller (2004) and is compatible with analyses of welfare offered by Scanlon and Raz. Although I grant its underlying assumption that agency sometimes has a posthumous extension, I argue that my defense of the possibility of posthumous harm is superior to this one by expanding on a recent criticism of its position on welfare offered by Bradley (2007).Comment: in a value theory course
Levin, Janet. Could love be like a heatwave?: Physicalism and the subjective character of experience
1986, Philosophical Studies 49 (March):245-61.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Simon FoktAbstract: We expect there to be a connection between experience and knowledge in many of our ordinary epistemic judgments; this expectation is by no means confined to our knowledge of mental states. Thus, the appeal to a special necessary connection between experience and knowledge of mental states ignores the generality of this phenomenon. More important, however, it takes this phenomenon too seriously: our unreflective expectations about the previous experiences of a person who has knowledge, as I have argued, have little to do with whether these experiences are necessary for knowledge of that sort. Thus, they provide no threat to physicalism, or any other objective theory of mental states. To be sure, it is not hard to see why reductionist theses in the philosophy of mind raise suspicion, as they have often ignored the complexity of our mental lives. In this case, however, the suspicion leads to unwarranted fears about Procrusteans under the bed: it is not the insufficiencies of objectivity, but the vestiges of Empiricism, that suggest that these theories may be inadequate for expressing all the truth about experience that there is.
Levin, Janet. Molyneux’s Question and the Amodality of Experience
2018, Inquiry 61: 590-610.
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Added by: Simon Fokt, Contributed by: Simon Prosser
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.
Comment: Background reading on Molyneux's question and spatial perception.
Lewis, David, Lewis, Stephanie. Holes
1970, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 48(2): 206–212
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Added by: Clotilde TorregrossaAbstract:
Synopsis generated from the paper: A dialogue between Argle, a nominalist materialist, and Bargle. Bargle argues that saying there are holes in a piece of cheese commits one to holes as immaterial entities, since a hole is an absence of matter. Argle first treats “there are holes in …” as an unanalyzed shape-predicate, synonymous with “is perforated,” so that it does not quantify over holes. Counting holes, and saying there are as many holes as crackers without saying how many, makes that paraphrase unmanageable. Argle then accepts that holes exist, but identifies them with material objects: their hole-linings. Said of a hole, “in” and “through” mean “part of,” and many different linings can be “the same hole” when they share a part that is itself a hole. Here “same” means co-perforated, not identical. Bargle presses the costs of this view: whether a hole can spin, how volume is assigned, how much of the cheese belongs to a hole, and whether the halves of a roller are themselves holes. Argle accepts several departures from common opinion as the price of a clear and economical theory. They present the exchange as a simple illustration of their usual disputes over what exists, and as a case that would have threatened Argle’s materialism if holes could not be reduced to matter.
Comment: This is an accessible resource which works well to introduce various issues in ontology and meta-ontology in an engaging way. Would work well in an undergraduate course on metaphysics or ontology, or as introductory reading for a graduate level course on metaphysics or ontology.
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