Conception Of Ourselves Research Articles

The Gut Microbiome and the Imperative of Normalcy

Healthism and ableism intertwine through an imperative of normalcy and the ensuing devaluing of those who fail to meet societally dominant norms and expectations around “normal” health. This paper tracks the effect of that imperative of normalcy through current research into gut microbiome therapies, using therapies targeting fatness and autism as examples. The complexity of the gut microbiome ought to encourage us to rethink our conception of ourselves and our embeddedness in the world; instead, the microbiome is transformed into one more tool for controlling unruly bodies and minds.

Immunity to error through misidentification and the functionalist, self-reflexive account of episodic memory

Fernández (2019) offers an account of the nature of episodic memory that marries two core ideas: (i) role-functionalism about episodic memory, and (ii) self-reflexive mnemonic content. One payoff of this view is that episodic memory judgments are immune to error through misidentification. Fernández takes this to reveal something important about the nature of one’s self-awareness in memory and our first-person conception of ourselves. However, once one sees why such judgments are immune in this way, according to the proposed account, the fact that they are immune becomes moot. While technically immune to error through misidentification, episodic memory judgments are not grounded in a way such that they have any interesting epistemological import for the subject (in contrast to other paradigms of such judgments), and any insights about our self-awareness and self-conception are directly derivable from the metaphysics of memory content alone.

VULNERABLE SELVES AND OPENNESS TO LOVE

In this personal tribute to Pamela Sue Anderson, based on many conversations, I try out the idea that she was seeking to locate an underlying metaphysical and ethical unity that makes our human vulnerability, love and reflective self-understanding both possible and intelligible. I trace this unity in Pamela’s philosophical imaginary to resonances or retrievals from three philosophers who featured in her “internal dialogues”: Spinoza, Kant and Levinas. I also allude to the great influence on Pamela and myself of our mutual friend Adrian Moore. My thought is that Pamela was pursuing something fundamental about our humanity as open, creative, fluid and risky becoming rather than being. I suggest that she found kinship with Spinoza’s thinking of vulnerability and love together and his vision of underlying unities to make sense of ourselves. In Kant’s First Critique, I suggest that she found a unified deduction of the possibility of objectivity and subjectivity and that she also traced in his moral philosophy the richer conception of ourselves offered by the “humanity” version of the categorical imperative and by the joint origin of the objectivity of the moral law and the subjectivity of our moral agency. These resources made room for human vulnerability, self-love and the love of others within the scope of the Kantian project. Of the three philosophers, Levinas was closest to Pamela’s perception of vulnerability and love and her conception of gendered human selves living lives of complex becoming rather than of being. His fusion of morality and metaphysics and the unity of his post-phenomenological deduction of subjectivity and saying bring into focus the influences I discern.

Freedom and the Fact of Reason

AbstractThe focus of my argument is whether, and in what sense, freedom is ‘revealed’ by the fact of reason in Kant’s secondCritique. I examine the passages in which Kant refers to the fact of reason and conclude that he uses the term to refer to our taking morality as authoritative, and to our apprehending the content of the moral law. I then point out how various commentators have claimed each to bethefact of reason. Next I address how each is claimed by Kant to reveal ‘freedom’ to us and argue that our taking morality as authoritative is best understood as referring to our conception of ourselves as autonomous beings, and that our apprehending the moral law’s content reveals only the idea of freedom as a coherent one. Neither would demonstrate that we actually are autonomous, nor would their conjunction, despite what some commentators have claimed. In closing I defend the deflationary position that the fact of reason entitles us to postulate our freedom, but only from the practical point of view, and that it demonstrates that freedom is a coherent idea.

De l’histoire des émotions à la généalogie de la subjectivité

Recent historical works dealing with the changing role of emotions in social and private life over centuries present a challenge to any philosophical or scientific theory aiming to grasp the essence of emotions. The paper identifies several methodological difficulties that all inquiries into past forms of emotional life are inevitably faced with. Then, it develops three philosophical lessons from the vast overview gathered by par A. Corbin, J.-J. Courtine and G. Vigarello in three recent volumes of their History of emotions. The first conceives of the radical historicity of emotions as an argument against reductionist accounts of emotions in contemporary affective neuroscience, according to which emotions are best explained as autonomous physiological responses to a changing environment. The second lesson makes explicit the methodological postulate of many historical investigations that assimilates the emotional experiences with their narrative traces in literature, autobiography and correspondence. It also provides several reasons justifying the indivisibility of emotions from their expression. The final lesson develops a novel genealogy of subjectivity stemming from the study of our past “emotional regimes”. Contemporary psychology and neurobiology – the author argues – shapes a new conception of ourselves, making visible and manageable our emotional life in a way that is undoubtedly more informal and democratic, but nevertheless subjected to new forms of control through different incentives to account for what we feel.

Self and others

ABSTRACTWhat is the relation between self-knowledge and knowledge of others? And how do we develop an understanding of others and ourselves? In this paper, I will argue that our sense of self is thoroughly social even though self-knowledge is not based on the same kind of evidence as knowledge of others. Moreover, I will suggest that we need to distinguish between different kinds of self- and other-understanding: some are based on procedural knowledge or knowing-how and involve an implicit representation of self or other, while others involve conceptual abilities. I will conclude with some considerations regarding the role of the second-person perspective in structuring the development of the concept of ourselves and others as persons.

Images as Mediated Realities: Vilém Flusser and Harun Farocki in Meta-dialogue

A critical gaze and an investigative guise are necessary in a time where the uneven boundaries between “the real” and the phantasmagoric are blurred into our conceptions of reality. We are surrounded by interfaces, screens, virtual spaces and infinite networks. Technologic advancements departing from the photographic medium have the potential to change our relations to our surroundings and our conceptions of ourselves through images. We are no longer merely receivers of images, we are active producers of them; In the 1980’s, philosopher Vilém Flusser and filmmaker Harun Farocki were already engaged in questions aimed at understanding our relationship to images and our responsibility towards the production images. Both urged their readers and spectators to engage in dialogue, to understand the phenomenon of photography and its direct correlations to mass communication structures. Keywords: codes, communication theory, reality, responsibility, technical image

Danger Talk in Psychoanalysis: Things I Learned From Muriel Dimen

ABSTRACTDanger talk is a symbolic elaboration of our sense of otherness as we perceive it in ourselves or others (to the extent that these can be distinguished). It can be wonderfully creative and sexy; but it can also serve the aim of mass stultification, as in the recent shutting down of American psychic life in order to accommodate 1 ridiculous man and the criminal sycophants who invented him. Unfortunately, the destructive form of danger talk is inherent in our concept of ourselves as “the human species.” It mobilizes signifiers that “sublimate” fight-flight-freeze responses into fancy discourses about our superiority to animals, vegetables, and minerals. Among the many things Muriel Dimen taught me, she helped me to understand how this variation on the absurdity of human self-love has contributed to the ethical failure of the psychoanalytic profession to take responsibility for the exploitation of patients.

On the Existential side of the Eternalism-Presentism Dispute

The current analytical debate on time is full of attempts to adjudicate from a purely theoretical standpoint among competing temporal ontologies. Little attention has instead been devoted to the existential attitudes -- emotional or ethical -- that may lurk behind, or ensue from, the endorsement of one of them. Some interesting opinions have however been voiced regarding the two most prominent views in the arena, namely eternalism and presentism; it has been said that the former is nourished by a fear of death, or more generally by a desire of preservation for whatever we find precious and valuable, and that the latter is fuelled by a propensity to reap whatever fruits the present brings, as enshrined in the carpe diem motto. This paper explores such a territory by focusing on the reality of past sentience, whether joyful or painful, and on the open future. The first part contrasts the reality of past sentience that comes with eternalism with the denial of this reality that follows from presentism, and argues that from an emotional, or perhaps even moral, standpoint the latter is preferable to the former. The second part clarifies why the eternalist must renounce the open future, whereas presentism is consistent with it, and considers how its rejection or acceptance, as the case may be, could be emotionally, or even morally, significant for our conception of ourselves as free agents. The conclusion offers a tentative proposal regarding which temporal ontology is superior from an existential perspective and some ruminations on the impact that all this may have on the theoretical side of the issue.

Dualism, panpsychism, and the bioethical status of brainless embryos

Summary We draw upon David Chalmers (1996) and Galen Strawson's (2006) defense of the pervasiveness of experience and wed it to Peter Unger's (2006) immaterialist solution to the Problem of the Thinking Many. The idea is that the soul's thoughts depend upon physical composites that though, pace panpsychism, are themselves are unable to think, still contribute to a thinking soul whenever they exist. And they will exist wherever a living organism is found. We think the result is more plausible than either dualism or panpsychism taken by themselves, both of which we still hope to show are more compelling than most will initially think. We will proceed by first stating an argument in favor of dualism. We agree with Unger that the most compelling argument for dualism follows from the considerable troubles that can be advanced against materialism on the basis of the metaphysical Problem of the Thinking Many. Our conception of ourselves, our self-knowledge, our freedom, and our bioethics would appear in great trouble if there were overlapping thinkers, each composed of a good part of the brain that belongs to the others. The absurdity of such an abundance of thinkers enough reason to doubt that materialism is true. In addition to the absurdity of countless thinkers, a consequence is that we will lack what Unger believes is the power to be a genuine chooser. Philosophers sympathetic to libertarian free will are likely to be bothered by the threat to genuine choosing that Unger diagnoses. And even those who are not bothered, perhaps because they are of a compatibilist stripe, will likely count it as a strike against materialism that it brings with it the absurdity of uncompensated suffering at levels they never earlier expected. We then defend dualism against its two major criticisms: the neurological dependence of thought and the problem of interactionism. Next, we explore the appeal of panpsychism's critique of consciousness as emergent. We borrow a transformed version of that idea that has the result that there are far more experiences than recognized by the typical materialist or dualist. We then conclude with why this is not morally problematic. Once the morally relevant sense of potential is recognized, an abundance of minimally-minded organisms is no more morally problematic than the fact that typical materialists allow that some insects may have minimal minds. Incidentally, the final part of our paper on potentiality should be of interest as well to both those dye-in-the-wool-panpsychics who are unmoved by our marriage of their view with dualism and those orthodox materialist readers who are uninterested in making use of any aspect of panpsychism or dualism. So unreconstructed panpsychics can still help themselves to our moral conclusions about the moral significance of the potential of some minimal minds to become sophisticated minds. Likewise, even those readers who do not take panpsychism or dualism or their combination seriously, may still find compelling our arguments about the morally relevant type of potential.

Jouvay Ayiti: Haiti's New Day, from Mas to Mas Action

IntroductionchARLes DAy, An engLishMAn, in A JouRnAL oF his soJouRn in the Caribbean in the late nineteenth century, noted the following about a mas1 he witnessed in the Trinidad Carnival in 1847:The primitives were negroes, as nearly naked as might be, bedaubed with a black varnish. One of this gang had a long chain and padlock attached to his leg, which chain the other pulled. What this typified I was unable to learn; but as the chained one was occasionally thrown down on the ground and treated with a mock bastinadoing [beating] it probably represented slavery.2Whatever accounts for Day's tentativeness in deciphering the meaning of the performance, notwithstanding the event that the mas sought to re-present, there are two things that are clear here. First, by situating itself on the street, the theatre of the mas (or what is given to the audience) makes visible, in this peculiar play, a grave tragedy: African enslavement in the West Indies, presented by performers who themselves might have been until recently enslaved. Second, Day's comment is not merely an early account of mas in Trinidad. It seems, also, to be a documentation of an early manifestation of what we know today as Jabmolassi, or the molasses-covered devil (Jab or Djab from the French word diable). Therein lies the drama, the internal narrative guiding the performance.This f/act alone, though, demands consideration of mas as a sort of protest performance, in light of molasses being a by-product of the sugar cane production process, for which task these masqueraders were previously enslaved.In the Caribbean and West Africa, there are other masquerades which perform similarly, using substances which allow for the (further) blackening of the skin. In revisiting Day's account we confront another critical truth about mas. To remember and to create performance - especially one from the place of one's origin, in a New World, whose re/order/ing of human existence is based on amnesia and the rendering of our early masquerader as labour, as commodity, and consumer - are essentially acts of defiance. Mas amplifies and makes what might not be known, conscious.T he 2010 earthquake and J o u v ay Ayi tiWhen the shocking news of the tragedy of Haiti's 2010 earthquake hit us in Trinidad, some of us resolved to be part of Haiti's regeneration. In our reasoning, though, more than cans and clothing were demanded in this effort. Under the auspices of the Lloyd Best Institute of the West Indies, an independent think tank in Trinidad and Tobago - its late founder a long-standing advocate of Haiti in the region - the initial caucus comprised artists, intellectuals, and academics, all of whom shared a long-term commitment to Haiti's role as a beacon of Caribbean civilisation. These meetings would continue over the course of that year as we explored the most effective ways within our means to alter the paradigm of consciousness about Haiti. We regarded ourselves as a Group on or a Convois (the name given to African secret societies in nineteenthcentury Trinidad).Our conception of ourselves as a Convois recalled a historical/biological connection between Trinidad and Haiti, one that is perhaps not well known. The Cedula de Poblacion of 1783 enfranchised Roman Catholic French planters from neighbouring Caribbean islands as landowners, so that their enslaved workforce might develop the Trinidad plantation economy. These same labourers would constitute the Convois (later known as Regiments), which were said to be set up for dancing and innocent amusements.3 These activities, however, masked a number of hidden transcripts, not the least among which was rebellion - clearly inspired by the Haitian Revolution, and evidenced in this song-plot, discovered on the Shand Estate in Diego Martin in 1805:Pain nous ka mangeC'est viande bekeDu vin ka boueC'est sang bekeThe bread we eatIs the white man's fleshThe wine we drinkIs the white man's bloodHe St DomingoSonge St DomingoHe St DomingoRemember St Domingo4Among the initial efforts of our Convois or Working Group were: providing support for the faith-based initiative Is There Not a Cause; organising public seminars on Haiti; exploring the possibilities of a Haitian band participating in Emancipation celebrations in Trinidad and Tobago in August 2010; and publishing material on Haiti in the Trinidad and Tobago Review. …

Introduction: Human-nature Interactions through a Multispecies Lens

This introduction brings together a group of papers focusing on conservation theory and practice, and argues strongly for a new place-based conservation through a multispecies lens. Honouring the work of Brian Morris, a scholar who has consistently forged a persuasive set of conceptual connections between science and society, and building on his insights into environmental history and human-nature interactions, we outline a vision of conservation that incorporates new narratives – at the intersection between the ecological and the social – to reimagine the world in the Anthropocene. This includes challenging the persistence of fortress, neoprotectionist and other top-down forms of conservation, through a recognition that conservation is deeply rooted in (human, nonhuman and more-than- human) senses of place. The introduction urges scholars to focus on landscapes as units of analysis: ‘multispecies assemblages’ that are easily overlooked at other spatial and historical scales. It calls for increased attention to the contact zones where the lives of humans and other species biologically, culturally and politically intersect, as a counterpoint to the dominant planetary perspective of earth systems and conservation science. It underlines the importance of deep relational analyses of human interactions with other life forms, through renewed attention to multispecies histories, locality, and forms of knowledge rooted in place. It is at this level, through historically nuanced accounts founded on a more place-based conception of ourselves as a species, that new narratives and answers to our current predicament will emerge.

Activating the Mind: Descartes' Dreams and the Awakening of the Human Animal Machine

In this essay I argue that one of the things that matters most to Descartes' account of mind is that we use our minds actively. This is because for him only an active mind is able to re‐organize its passionate experiences in such a way that a genuinely human, self‐governed life of virtue and true contentment becomes possible. To bring out this connection, I will read the Meditations against the backdrop of Descartes' correspondence with Elisabeth. This will reveal that in Descartes' writings there is a crucial connection between the conception of ourselves as dreamers and the idea that we fail to realize our true potential as self‐determined, active agents. Dreams, as Descartes conceives them, are passively received mental states that inhibit our freedom to use reason at will. To awaken here takes the form of activating our thoughts, which holds the key to freeing ourselves from the stimulus‐response patterns that Descartes takes to be at work in animal conduct. Applied to the Meditations, these insights suggest that this work engages in questions far beyond the epistemological agenda. By activating the mind, the Meditations teach us how to realize our true human potential as virtuous thinkers and passionate agents.

Is Dasein People? Heidegger According to Haugeland

In an unfinished book manuscript and papers dating from 1982 to 2007, published and unpublished during his lifetime—collected here under the title he intended for the book, Dasein Disclosed—John Haugeland advances a highly original interpretation of Being and Time, centering on his unorthodox conception of what Heidegger meant by the term Dasein. On the standard reading, although the word is not synonymous with “person” or “human being,” it nevertheless refers to what those terms refer to, namely individual people like you and me. Haugeland maintains, instead, that it designates a historically concrete practice or “way of life” in which individuals—which he calls “cases of” Dasein—participate. I argue that the standard reading is correct—not obviously so, but for reasons of exegetical detail that have become clear only in light of this posthumously published volume. First, Haugeland’s interpretation leads him to equate two conceptions of ourselves that are and must be kept distinct in Heidegger’s ontology: the self as “I myself” and the self as “anyone” (das Man). Second, Haugeland’s claim that “others” is Heidegger’s generic terms for persons obscures the methodological orientation of Being and Time, namely, that it takes Dasein itself as both the agent and the witness—the source of phenomenological evidence or testimony—for the inquiry. Dasein, that is, being both the philosophical inquirer and the entity that calls itself “I,” whose being is being-with “others,” can be none other than the individual human being.

Art, Magic, and Agency

In this essay, I intend to argue that the concept of magic can be extended to cover an agent’s use of works of art to influence her perceptions of herself and of reality. More specifically, I intend to argue that works of art can be used to create, confirm, or affirm normative identities, that is, conceptions of ourselves as standing in a special relationship to certain norms and values. My argument will include contributions to the discussion of magic as well as agency in art made by Robin Collingwood, Ernst Gombrich, and Alfred Gell. I will conclude by providing some examples of how perceptually magic uses of art can function to form normative identities. I will also say something about how to morally evaluate such uses of art.

The Problem with Neurolaw

This article describes and critiques the increasingly popular program of reductive neuroLaw. Law has irrevocably entered the age of neuroscience. Various institutes and conferences are devoted to questions about the relation between neuroscience and legal procedures and doctrines. Most of the new “neuroLaw” scholarship focuses on evidentiary and related issues, and is important and beneficial. But some versions of reductive NeuroLaw are, to put it bluntly, redolent of fascism. Although they claim to liberate us from false conceptions of ourselves and to open new spaces for more scientific applications of the law, they end up stripping away all notions of “selves” and of “law.” This article argues that a revitalized sense of transcendent causation is required to avoid the violent metaphysics of reductive neuroLaw and to maintain the integrity of both “law” and “science.”

The Scientific Study of Religion and the Pillars of Human Dignity

A familiar theme in discussions of science and religion is the impact of scientific progress on our conception of ourselves. Of particular concern in understanding this impact is the question of how our view of human dignity is affected by scientific progress-or even influential scientific theories, whether or not they are ultimately well confirmed. I include here theories in the cognitive science of religion (CSR), but my concern is wider. It has been said that Darwin unseated our sense of our uniqueness in the biological realm and that Freud undermined our sense of rational self-control. Even supposing these claims are true and that they weaken or eliminate two of the pillars of human dignity, they do not by themselves undermine the possibility of justified theistic beliefs or other justified beliefs that support the view that human persons have a kind of dignity. Granted, the bare truth of theism does not imply that we are free and autonomous in the sense widely taken to be most relevant to human dignity, but some versions of theism-such as those implying that God would not have created persons who are not free and inherently valuable-tend to support the view that we have a kind of dignity. If, as many philosophers and others believe, scientific findings undermine both arguments for theism and, even apart from that, some cherished views about the uniqueness and rationality of human beings, the idea that human beings have dignity is deprived of one source of support. This paper will explore whether developments in CSR might threaten our positive selfconception and, independently of that, the idea that there is a rational basis for theism. Might the results and likely developments of CSR undermine the idea of human dignity as implying-in normal adult human beings- minimally, on the psychological side, free rational agency and a good measure of autonomy and, on the normative side, moral rights and a capacity for moral agency, i.e., roughly, for action based on moral judgment or cognition?1Scientists tend to presuppose, and philosophers widely agree, that our mental life depends on our neural life. Researchers in CSR tend to assume that their results can be accommodated by whatever is learned about the neural underpinnings of cognition, but most of them apparently proceed as if certain cognitive and broadly social-scientific concepts are adequate for scientific explanation of human behavior.2 This raises the question whether CSR is committed to the reducibility of the cognitive properties and laws crucial for its explanations to physical properties and correspondingly physicalistic laws. If not, it apparently presupposes a kind of autonomy on the part of those properties and laws. This, in turn, implies that the cognitive concepts and properties cmcial for religious expression and commitment might also have autonomous explanatory power, a kind that does not depend on taking them to be identical with any physical counterparts.Neutrality about reduction does not entail rejection of reducibility in principle. But it is not clear that anything essential in CSR precludes maintaining the irreducibility of psychological properties to physical ones (I hereafter assume that mentalistic concepts are not reducible to physicalistic ones and that in any case our main questions in this paper require considering reducibility only for properties and laws). If CSR does not entail such reducibility, then a kind of dualism important-even if not essential-for most religions cannot be attacked by naturalistic proponents of CSR as inconsistent with their scientific endeavors. If, however, CSR presupposes that physical (including neurobiological) properties and laws are explanatorily basic, it faces the problem of how to connect its own findings, at least in outline, with an underlying physicalistic theory. Section I will indicate some areas in which results in CSR bear on the issues sketched above. Section II will consider the relation between these results and a materialistic conception of the human person. …

The Moral Cognition/Consciousness Connection

People experience joy and pain. We appreciate brilliant colors. We have awareness of our own mental states, and we attribute mental states to others—not only beliefs and desires, but also phenomenal experiences (such as joy and pain). We knowingly construct conceptions of ourselves and deploy these self-concepts to navigate the world around us. These are fundamental aspects of the human experience, encompassing phenomenal consciousness, on the one hand, and self-consciousness on the other. Let us refer to these collectively as consciousness. Just as we cannot but enjoy conscious experiences, we also naturally conceive of the world in ethical terms with an understanding of right and wrong. Moral violations are continually readily apprehensible; but when it is not obvious that some person should or should not have acted in some particular way, just how they should have acted is often a matter of intense debate. Most of us concede that it would have been wrong for George to shoot Trayvon without provocation, but not if George was violently assaulted after having just stepped out of his car to ask a few questions. But why was George trailing Trayvon for so long? Why was he so intent in knowing what this person was doing in his neighborhood? Doesn’t that display a morally suspect character? Such sensationalized news stories are the fodder of conversations over dinner or on the social network, but in ordinary contexts, often when alone, we cannot but assess the actions of others according to a moral framework. We conclude that it was wrong for that patron to have been so curt with the waiter. We assess that it was good for the young woman to have given up her seat for the octogenarian. These assessments apply not only to our fellows’ actions, but bleed over onto the actors themselves. That the driver cut off the cyclist on a rainy day reveals an inconsiderate villain who cannot easily occupy the mindset of his compatriots. The cyclist is the clear victim here. We feel her pain.

Solving Frege's Puzzle

Our actions are a product of mental states that represent how the world is, how we want it to be, and so forth. Such is central to our conception of ourselves as rational agents. I suppose it is possible that this conception is simply wrong. Perhaps there are, as eliminativists have argued, no such things as beliefs and desires. Or perhaps there are, but these states are merely relations to uninterpreted formulae in some internal computational system. I am going to set such questions aside here and assume that our ordinary conception of our ourselves is not wholly mistaken. The question I want to discuss concerns the role played in this conception by the notion of representation, that is, by representational content. The question is: How must we understand the contents of mental states such as beliefs and desires if those states are to play the causal and explanatory roles envisaged for them? 1

The Problem of Agency and the Problem of Accountability in Kant's Moral Philosophy

Abstract: This paper discusses the function and scope of incompatibilist or transcendental freedom in Kant's moral philosophy. The prevailing view among scholars, most notably Allison, is that the function of transcendental freedom is to enable us to articulate a first‐person conception of ourselves as rational agents involved in deliberation and choice. Thus, the scope of transcendental freedom is rational agency in general. In order to perform this function, freedom has to be merely conceivable. Pace Allison, I argue that our first‐person conception is neutral with respect to causal determinism, and that the function of transcendental freedom is to provide the metaphysical conditions of the possibility of genuine moral responsibility and perfect justice, and to get rid of moral luck. In order to perform this function, transcendental freedom has to be not just conceivable, but metaphysically real. My view suggests that we only have reason to attribute freedom to ourselves in situations in which we are aware that the moral law commands us categorically. We do not have a similar reason to believe we are free in purely prudential choices. Thus, the scope of transcendental freedom is not rational agency in general, but only moral agency.