Kinds Of Beings Research Articles

Focusing Perspectives and Establishing Boundaries and Power: Why the Suyá/Kïsêdjê Sing for the Whites in the Twenty-first Century

Looking at Lowland South America as a whole, it appears that instrumental and vocal music are essential components of the relationships between kinds of beings and realms. This is one reason why music in the region is important and so often at the heart, rather than the periphery, of social experience. New music is produced and learned at the interface between kinds of beings, and music is used to transition from one realm to another or one kind of being to another. But how does one move from the apparently sacred sphere intrinsic to these societies to the conflicted struggle of these Indigenous communities to survive the assaults on their lands, their health and their livelihood brought by agroindustry, large dam projects and oil drilling? What is the place of music at this interface, and what does that use tell us about music as a whole for the region?

Some Surprising Implications of Negative Retributivism

AbstractNegative retributivism is the view that though the primary justifying aim of legal punishment is the reduction of crime, the state's efforts to do so are subject to side‐constraints that forbid punishment of the innocent and disproportionate punishment of the guilty. I contend that insufficient attention has been paid to what the side‐constraints commit us to in constructing a theory of legal punishment, even one primarily oriented toward reducing crime. Specifically, I argue that the side‐constraints limit the kinds of actions that are appropriately criminalised, the kinds of beings who are appropriately liable to legal punishment, and the absolute and comparative severity of sanctions. I also argue that a third retributive constraint is needed, one which I term a ‘non‐degradation constraint’. According to this third constraint, in our efforts to reduce crime, we must avoid treating offenders as non‐moral beings and ensure that punishment does not atrophy or erode the complex capacity for moral responsibility. When this third constraint is combined with the persuasive instrumental case for promoting the moral responsiveness of offenders, the result is an approach to crime reduction that is quite different from ones which emphasise general deterrence and incapacitation. In the closing section, I broach the question whether negative retributivism has been appropriately characterised in the literature on legal punishment.

Selfhood beyond the Species Boundary

Selfhood beyond the Species Boundary David Herman (bio) A review of Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley: U of California P, 2013. Growing out of fieldwork conducted in the forests around Ávila, a Quichua-speaking Runa village in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon region, Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think participates in what might be called the “ontological turn” in recent anthropological research. This turn calls for the comparative study of the various ontologies projected by different cultures, past and present. At issue are more or less widely shared understandings of the kinds of beings that populate the world, the qualities and abilities those beings are taken to embody (including the capacity to have perspectives on events, among other attributes linked to selfhood), and how the beings included in various categories and subcategories relate to those categorized as human.1 Coming to terms with differences among such categorization systems has far-reaching implications not only for anthropology but also for other areas of inquiry concerned with how systems of this sort shape various institutions and practices; pertinent fields of research include the history of agriculture, animal ethics, and the sociology of companion animals in families. Cultural ontologies also bear saliently on the study of literary and other narratives that feature the perspectives and experiences of nonhuman animals, or that more or less explicitly situate human characters in wider, trans-species constellations of agents.2 In his introduction, Kohn suggests that “an ethnographic focus not just on humans or only on animals but also on how humans and animals relate breaks open the circular closure that otherwise confines us when we seek to understand the distinctively human by means of that which is distinctive to humans”—for example, via sociocultural anthropology with its emphasis on language, culture, society, and history (6).3 Although he connects his approach to other research on human-nonhuman relationships, including Bruno Latour’s use of actor-network analysis to explore the hybrid formations that link humans with various artifacts and instruments and also Jane Bennett’s Deleuze-inspired account of the agency of matter, Kohn objects to the way some of this work flattens out “important distinctions between humans and other kinds of beings, as well as those between selves and objects” (7). Accordingly, he gravitates toward “Donna Haraway’s conviction that there is something about our everyday engagements with other kinds of creatures that can open new kinds of possibilities for relating and understanding” (Kohn 7). In the discussion of runa puma, or “were-jaguars,” that opens the book, Kohn comments, How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things. If jaguars also represent us—in ways that can matter vitally to us—then anthropology cannot limit itself just to exploring how people from different societies might happen to represent them as doing so. Such encounters with other kinds of beings force us to recognize the fact that seeing, representing, and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs. (1) Kohn’s other key conceptual resources include monistic models that resist dichotomizing culture and nature, and that thereby offset dualistic anthropological paradigms “in which humans are portrayed as separate from the worlds they represent” (9), along with Charles Saunders Peirce’s semiotic system and Terrence W. Deacon’s more recent use of Peirce’s ideas to explore emergent phenomena in the domain of biology. In the book’s first chapter, “The Open Whole,” Kohn combines his emphases on monism and on semiotics to map out what he terms the “ecology of selves,” human as well as nonhuman, within which the human inhabitants of Ávila situate themselves. Kohn proposes the concept of “amplification” to distinguish forest settings from other places where the multifarious ecology of selves might be less evident, arguing that immersion in the especially “dense ecology [of the Amazonian forest] amplifies and makes visible a larger semiotic field beyond that which is exceptionally human” (49). He then goes on to explore how anthropology might be reoriented around the assumption that life itself is constitutively semiotic. In Kohn’s account, which builds on Peirce’s triadic model of the sign as...

Childhood in Action: A Study of Natality’s Relationship to Societal Change in Never Let Me Go

Introduction Children are our future. This phrase is used so often that it is generally considered to be a cliche, devoid of any insight. If taken seriously, however, it points to the stakes involved in raising and educating society's youngest members. In her theorizing on the political realm, Hannah Arendt posits that children hold the key to renewing the common human world because of their newness, an idea she explains through her concept of natality. Arendt's understanding of political renewal through the actions of new humans places tremendous importance on children. At the same time, the idea that children will inherit stewardship of the political realm can be threatening to adults, which is another of Arendt's insights. These new humans, strangers to the world, require high levels of care and attention because of their dependency and vulnerability, but as they grow up they will make claims on the common human world and will act to change it. Here is a reminder to adults of both their fallibility and their mortality. Given these dynamics, then, it is unsurprising that so many debates and controversies rage over the best ways to raise and educate children. Hanging in the balance is nothing less than the future of the political world itself. To explore these dynamics, I turn to Arendt's writings on the functioning of the political sphere. I ask how children's initial vulnerability and dependency on adults for survival affects their role in society. I highlight Arendt's view, as formulated in The Human Condition and Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, that natality, the fact that humans are born as radically new creatures, is what gives them the ability to do something new in the common world. However, Arendt also cautions that the child is not yet in a position to put this natality to use in the public sphere; she must be protected from the harsh judgments of that realm and in turn the public realm must be protected from the disruptive newness of the child. (1) I also draw on Deborah Britzman's interpretation of natality in her text The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions. Britzman highlights the relationality of natality: the infant is formed by her first experiences of life through her relationship with her first other (usually her mother) and this sets the stage for her future modes of relating with the world. In order to delve into the implications of natality for society, its unsettling power, and its incredible fragility, I turn to the sketch of human clone children in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. This novel is a particularly interesting literary object for the study of natality because it depicts a world that will likely seem familiar in some basic ways, with one key difference that is both subtle and striking: the existence of human clones. The uncanny world of the novel thus provides an opportunity for the reader to reflect on the significance of natality because it conjures up characters who live in a similar world to ours but who lack the straightforward relationship to natality that comes from being born to human parents and having experienced the intimate first relationship necessitated by the helplessness of the infant. Technology may change the ways humans arrive in our world in the future, but for now all humans have entered the world as infants from the wombs of human mothers. Thus the novel provides a scenario that can be used as a test case, one whose fictionality can nonetheless illuminate the significance of natality in the world outside the novel. After all, these characters are not some radically new type of creature, completely unrelated to human beings as we understand them. Rather, they are exact genetic copies of humans; they appear to be basically the same kind of beings as the people who live in the cities and towns outside of Hailsham and those who exist in the world the reader inhabits. At its most basic and most literal, natality can simply be considered to name the fact that humans are born--to another human and as a helpless infant. …

Another Scientific Threat to Free Will?

The claim that neuroscientists have proved that - or at least produced powerful evidence that - free is an illusion has received a lot of press. Here are just two examples:Free will is not defining feature of humanness, modern neuroscience implies, but is rather an illusion that endures only because biochemical complexity conceals mechanisms of decision making. (Science News, Dec. 6, 2008; Siegfried [2008])Researchers have found patterns of brain activity that predict people's decisions up to 10 seconds before they're aware they've made a choice. . . . The result was hard for some to stomach because it suggested that unconscious brain calls shots, making free an illusory afterthought. (ScienceNOW Daily News, April 14, 2008; Youngsteadt [2008])In Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will (Mele 2009), I argue that scientists - neuroscientists and others - have not proved that free is an illusion and have not produced powerful evidence for that claim. Manuel Vargas has suggested that in that book I ignore a serious scientific to free (2009). The alleged is identified in section 1 . It is me topic of this article.Scientists who argue for illusion thesis about free arrive at that conclusion by way of some pretty striking empirical propositions that they infer their data. For example, Benjamin Libet contends that brain produces unconscious decisions to act about a third of a second before person becomes aware of them (1985, 2004), and Daniel Wegner argues that are never among causes of corresponding actions (2002, 2004, 2008). In Effective Intentions I review me experiments that are claimed to support striking empirical propositions such as these and I explain why propositions are not justified by data. Because these empirical propositions play a central role in reasoning that leads such scientists as Libet and Wegner to their conclusions about free will, if my arguments that propositions are not justified by data hit their mark, they undermine scientific arguments at issue about free will. For example, it may be plausible that a person whose conscious intentions never play a role in producing corresponding behavior never acts freely; but if we lack good reason to believe that our conscious intentions never play a role of this kind, this particular line of argument for thesis that free is an illusion is out of running (at least until powerful evidence for claim about conscious intentions is produced).1. What Threatens Free Will?In a review ?? Effective Intentions, Manuel Vargas suggests that the core threat to free might arise not striking empirical propositions that I discuss there, but instead from bare fact that there are neurological antecedents to conscious decisions. . . . What is really at stake is whether our conscious intentions, even given some role in production of action, can be picked out of causal nexus and treated as special or 'free' (2009). He offers following diagnosis of what scientists I disagree with might be thinking:[They] are sometimes motivated by what philosophical literature labels as intuitions - idea that for us to act with a free we must be ultimate origins of strands of causal nexus. On one way of putting things, source theorists think that free acts cannot have causal antecedents that extend back in time prior to decisions of agent or agent's free formulation of relevant characterological inputs to that decision. . . . Acknowledging that our actions have causal roots in pre-conscious brain activity, as Mele does, just highlights fact of our causal embeddedness. It does nothing to block basic worry of how we could be kinds of beings that stop buck enough to count as free, or as deserving of moral praise and blame. …

Kant on Construction, Apriority, and the Moral Relevance of Universalization

This paper introduces a referential reading of Kant’s practical project, according to which maxims are made morally permissible by their correspondence to objects, though not the ontic objects of Kant’s theoretical project but deontic objects (what ought to be). It illustrates this model by showing how the content of the Formula of Universal Law might be determined by what our capacity of practical reason can stand in a referential relation to, rather than by facts about what kind of beings we are (viz., uncaused causes). This solves the neglected puzzle of why there are passages in Kant’s works suggesting robust analogies between mathematics and ethics, since to universalize a maxim is to test a priori whether a practical object with that particular content can be constructed. An apparent problem with this hypothesis is that the medium of practical sensibility (feeling) does not play a role analogous to the medium of theoretical sensibility (intuition). In response I distinguish two separate Kantian accounts of mathematical apriority. The thesis that maxim universalization is a species of construction, and thus a priori, turns out to be consistent with the account of apriority that informs Kant’s understanding of actual mathematical practice.

A Mayan ontology of poultry: Selfhood, affect, animals, and ethnography

AbstractThis article has three key themes: ontology (what kinds of beings there are in the world), affect (cognitive and corporeal attunements to such entities), and selfhood (relatively reflexive centers of attunement). To explore these themes, I focus on women's care for chickens among speakers of Q'eqchi' Maya living in the cloud forests of highland Guatemala. Broadly speaking, I argue that these three themes are empirically, methodologically, and theoretically inseparable. In addition, the chicken is a particularly rich site for such ethnographic research because it is simultaneously self, alter, and object for its owners. To undertake this analysis, I adopt a semiotic stance towards such themes, partly grounded in the writings of the American pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and George Herbert Mead, and partly grounded in recent and classic scholarship by linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists. (Linguistic anthropology, political economy, ontology, affect, selfhood, animals, chickens, Mesoamerica, Maya, Q'eqchi')*

Toward a Non-Stoical Cosmopolitanism

Toward a Non-Stoical Cosmopolitanism

Aristotle on Nonsubstantial Individuals

As a first stab, call a property recurrent if it can be possessed by more than one object, and nonrecurrent if it can be possessed by at most one object. The question whether Aristotle holds that there are nonrecurrent properties has spawned a lively and ongoing debate among commentators over the last forty-five years. One source of textual evidence in the Categories, drawn on in this debate, is Aristotle’s claim that certain properties are inseparable from what they are in. Here the point of contention is whether this commits Aristotle to holding that these properties are inseparable from individuals, since it is commonly held that a property is nonrecurrent, if it is inseparable from an individual. I argue that this evidence is neutral on the question whether there are nonrecurrent properties in Aristotle. One of my aims here is to disentangle the question of recurrence from local issues of individuality and universality in the Categories. But another aim is to turn from the textual considerations, which have dominated the debate, to broader methodological considerations. It is a shared assumption among all those who look to textual evidence from the Categories, so to decide whether Aristotle believes there are nonrecurrent properties, that in this work Aristotle is engaged in a project where the question of recurrence is relevant. I argue that Aristotle’s concerns in the Categories are disjoint from the question of recurrence, and so this shared assumption is false. I. The Philosophical Issue In the Categories, Aristotle classifies beings into individual and universal substances, and also individuals and universals in categories other than substance, such as quality and quantity. I call these kinds of beings ‘nonsubstances’. The basis of this classification is two kinds of predication: a thing may be said of a subject and a thing may be present in a subject. Individual substances such as Callias are neither said of, nor present in, a subject; universal substances such as human are said of, but not present in, a subject; nonsubstantial universals such as colour are both said of, and present in, a subject; and nonsubstantial individuals are present in, but not said of, a subject. 1 What sort of things are nonsubstantial individuals? Aristotle’s examples are a ‘certain case of grammatical knowledge’ (he tis grammatike) present in a soul and a ‘certain paleness’ (to ti leukon) pre

Reminiscências do De Libero Arbítrio de Santo Agostinho no De Veritate de Santo Anselmo

As part of the results of my post doctoral research program, this paper compares some doctrines on the Augustinian concepts of free will and truth, developed on De libero arbitrio, and those on the same notions, exposed by Anselm of Canterbury, on the Three Treatises on Holy Scripture - De verdate, De libertate arbitrii and De casu Diaboli. Looking for the theoretical foundations of Anselm’s definition of veritas as rectitudo, we’ve found some connections between the postulates of Anselm’s notion of veritas and those analysed by Augustine for the same notion. Three points of convergence between both authors are pointed out in this paper: 1. the foundation of the concept of things being truth in a Principle of Being, which is rational, eternal and per se subsistent. 2. the idea of being-as-duty (an ontological duty), which is grounded on the fact that things received being and truth from that Principle. 3. the idea that all beings may accomplish themselves carrying out their specific end. Doing that, their truth will be achieved as rectitudo. As rational beings can recognize their own end, they perform it using their free will. When this particular kind of beings chooses their own end according to what is their essential truth, truth becomes not only rectitudo but justice. Two important principles that both, Anselm and Augustine, defend, are underlined as two main conclusions of this paper: the crucial convergence between being and duty, and the principle that human judgment is basically axiological, because it is supported by the difference between reason and truth.

Aristotle on Ontological Dependence

AbstractAristotle holds that individual substances are ontologically independent from non-substances and universal substances but that non-substances and universal substances are ontologically dependent on substances. There is then an asymmetry between individual substances and other kinds of beings with respect to ontological dependence. Under what could plausibly be called the standard interpretation, the ontological independence ascribed to individual substances and denied of non-substances and universal substances is a capacity for independent existence. There is, however, a tension between this interpretation and the asymmetry between individual substances and the other kinds of entities with respect to ontological independence. I will propose an alternative interpretation: to weaken the relevant notion of ontological independence from a capacity for independent existence to the independent possession of a certain ontological status.

Rights, Values, Regulation, and Health Care

For the past two hundred years, a debate has flourished in political philosophy on the issue of what kinds of rights human beings possess. This is not the debate about whether we have any rights at all. Instead, the rights versus so-called rights debate is about whether human beings have rights other than so-called negative rights not to be killed, assaulted, robbed or silenced. Locke, the major seventeenth-century individualrights theorist, argued that we all possess the so-called natural negative rights not to be intruded upon. Because of the kind of beings we are, we require certain social conditions, including respect for our negative rights, when we form communities. Locke s critics argued that the negative rights he identified are only some of the rights that we possess. Such critics maintain that we also have so-called positive rights whereby others must not only refrain from intruding on us, but owe us positive services such as welfare, health care, and education. Positive-rights theorists do not argue that it is merely decent and morally proper for others to voluntarily help us when we are in need. Instead, they argue that just as others may be forced to desist from murdering or assaulting us they can also be forced to give us whatever they can to help—including their work, their earnings, and the fruits of their talents.

Immanent Philosophy: The Consequences and Concepts of Human Resource Management

In this paper I present a philosophically-inspired approach to the field of human resource management (HRM). Such an approach demands a certain kind of reader and a certain kind of HR professional: readers and professionals who are less occupied with the application and implementation of new HR technologies and more with the complex impact of HRM technologies and practices on individuality and sociality. I argue that concepts, technologies and practices of HRM are in practice elements in an immanent philosophy, which reproduces and transforms how individuals and organisations can come into being. Two seemingly contradictory, simultaneous tendencies are discussed. First, the practices and technologies of HRM can and have been seen as disciplining, conservative forces, creating egoistic individuals with little or no interest in sharing a common responsibility towards the organisation. Second, a new kind of sociality arises from the openings that practices and technologies are creating, as the social does not so much disappear as take on new forms. I will discuss these different kinds of beings through a case example involving a group performance appraisal system in a major financial institution. I conclude by reflecting on the matter-of-fact spirit in which HR technologies and practices are implemented and the vast power which the ‘Resource Management’ exercises in creating the ‘Human’.

Substance, Attribute, and Mode in Spinoza

AbstractSome of Spinoza's most well‐known doctrines concern what kinds of beings there are and how they are related to each other. For example, he claims that: (1) there is only one substance; (2) this substance has infinitely many attributes; (3) this substance is God or nature; (4) each of these attributes express the divine essence; and (5) all else is a mode of the one substance. These claims have so astonished many of his readers that some of them have surely concluded that they must not know what Spinoza means by “substance,”“attribute,” and “mode.” In this article I shall try to explain how Spinoza understands the basic ontological categories denoted by these expressions.

The Rationality of Happiness

In his recent book, Happiness: personhood, community, purpose, Pedro Tabensky answers the question of what happiness is. He develops an Aristotelian account of happiness that, he claims, is everyone’s maximally rational ideal. Much of the support for this claim rests on what Tabensky calls the method of critical introspection. This method involves introspecting on the kind of beings that we are and the kind of lives we can thus lead. If properly carried out, Tabensky claims, critical introspection will reveal to any individual that the active life of virtue is in fact the maximally rational ideal. I argue that two features of Tabensky’s account undermine this claim. The first is his account of the method of critical introspection itself. The second is his account of the nature and acquisition of virtue developed in his analogy between living and painting, and in his discussion of the eudaimon community. Tabensky’s account of critical introspection carried out at the general level of persons shows only that it works negatively to identify the kind of lives we could not lead as persons. It does not function positively to reveal that the maximally rational life for any person is the active exercise of virtue. Tabensky does suggest that the method carried out by particular individuals will reveal the kind of life they should be leading. However, it follows from Tabensky’s account of the nature and acquisition of virtue, I argue, that critical introspection can only reveal the active life of virtue to be the maximally rational ideal for those individuals who have had the right sort of upbringing in the right sort of community.

The Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes From Harry Frankfurt

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book Forum: PsychotherapyFull AccessThe Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes From Harry FrankfurtMARK D. REGO, M.D., MARK D. REGOSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., Milford, Conn.Published Online:1 Jun 2003https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.160.6.1196-aAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Although the focus of much of the discussion between clinician and patient has shifted in recent years from the dynamic unconscious to the role of symptoms, some themes remain fundamental to the psychiatric endeavor. One of the most enduring of these is that of the divided self. How a person achieves agency and a sense of self in the face of conflict, symptoms, and dilemmas is of immediate interest to the clinician and of defining interest to Harry Frankfurt.Contours of Agency is a compilation of essays from a 1999 conference devoted to Frankfurt’s work. In it many distinguished philosophers take up points from Frankfurt’s work and offer expansions, alternatives, and straight criticism.The work of Frankfurt, an analytic philosopher, offers insightful, stimulating, and even provocative perspectives on the divided self and related themes. Over the past 30 years, Frankfurt has given much thought to what it means to be a person (and, comparatively, what it means to fall short of this). His main essays on these reflections are contained in two slim and very accessible volumes: The Importance of What We Care About(1) and Necessity, Volition and Love(2).For Frankfurt the fundamental dimension of our humanity is our ability to reflect on our own mental life. We can have thoughts about thoughts, feelings about feelings, etc. It is in the process of finding rectitude between these layers of experience and reflection that we work out who we are and how we live our lives. Thus, for Frankfurt, concepts such as externality (things that occur within our mental histories but are not necessarily part of our identity), wholeheartedness, identity, and will are central to understanding what kind of beings we are. Frankfurt does not seek to define humans from the outside but, rather, from the inside by route of what we care about and the extent of our efforts.An important aspect of this work is that Frankfurt focuses not on psychopathology or ethics (although he uses examples from both fields) but on everyday experience. It is in this vein that love is, for Frankfurt, the central organizing feature of a person. This love is neither romantic nor moral; it is what we care about, and, being such, it is valuable in and of itself (i.e., without specific reference to the worth of the beloved).The essays in Contours of Agency are too numerous to review here. Their quality will vary with the interest of the reader. Of note are “The True, the Good and the Lovable: Frankfurt’s Avoidance of Objectivity” by Susan Wolf and “Love’s Authority” by Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and trained psychoanalyst. These essays take up the difficult issue of Frankfurt’s claims about love. Frankfurt’s responses to each essay are among the most lucid and edifying parts of the collection.As for the mental health reader, the book likely contains more finely grained arguments than desired. Although the readings do not bear directly on clinical or ethical issues (for the latter I recommend Jeanette Kennett’s recent volume [3]), the thoughtful and rigorous commentary on the bases for human agency provides a worthwhile stretching of some mental muscles that the clinician will undoubtedly call on in this era of evolving paradigms of mental illness.Edited by Sarah Buss and Lee Overton. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2002, 381 pp., $45.00.

Suárez on Beings of Reason

Beings of reason or non-existent objects have always been a source of mind-boggling paradoxes that have vexed philosophers and thinkers in the past and present. Consider Bertrand Russell's paradox: if A and B are not different, then the difference between A and B does not subsist. But how can a non-entity be the subject of a proposition? Or Meinong's paradox: There are objects of which it is true that there are no such objects. At the root of these troubling conundrums are two basic questions: What are beings of reason? What kind of existence do they have? Francisco Suarez was well aware that a solution to the metaphysical questions concerning the essential character of beings of reason and their ontological status would serve as the key to solving the puzzles and paradoxes just described. A solution to these metaphysical questions would also bring about an understanding of how we talk about beings of reason and other problems that they give rise to in the philosophy of language. In this paper, I present Suarez's view on the nature and ontological status of beings of reason and clarify some of the following questions: What kind of beings (entia) are beings of reason? What kind of being (esse) do beings of reason have? This latter concern is related to the following metaphysical issues: What are real beings? What is the nature and ontological status of possible beings? What is the distinction between real beings, actual beings, and possible beings?

Three Levels of Marketing: Random, Routine, and Reflective

In the past, scarce resources have led us sort ourselves as if we were many kinds of beings, mostly unreflective, instead of one. Now, our very survival depends on classifying all people as human and reflective. This maturing change is already happening because high-tech weapons are not a scarce resource and the alternative is death by terrorism. The marketplace of the 21st century will profit by showing respect for consumers as reflective human beings. This paper offers a guide to the reflective level of thought and action, showing and explaining the logical and pragmatic relations between random, routine, and reflective functioning.

Speaking Your Mind: Large Inarticulateness Constitutional and Circumstantial

When someone is asked to speak his mind, it is sometimes possible for him to furnish what his utterance appears to have omitted. In such cases we might say that he had a mind to speak. Sometimes, however, the opposite is true. Asked to speak his mind, our speaker finds that he has no mind to speak. When it is possible to speak one's mind and when not is largely determined by the kinds of beings we are and by the kinds of resources we are able to draw upon. In either case, not speaking one's mind is leaving something out whose articulation would or could matter for the purposes for which one was speaking in the first place. Inarticulation is no fleetingly contingent and peripheral phenomenon in human thinking and discourse. It is a substantial and dominant commonplace. In Part One I attempt to say something about what it is about the human agent that makes inarticulateness so rife. In Part Two, I consider various strategies for making the unarticulated explicit, and certain constraints on such processes. I shall suggest, among other things, that standard treatments of enthymematic reconstruction are fundamentally misconceived.

From the Nature of Persons to the Structure of Morality

Intuitionism—in some form or another—is the most widely recognized and thoroughly discussed method of justification for moral theories. It rests on the claim that a moral theory must not deviate too much from our pre-theoretical moral convictions (or at least those that we are prepared to hold on reflection). In some form or another, this methodology goes back at least as far as Aristotle, and has been discussed, refined, and defended by such contemporary philosophers as John Rawls and Norman Daniels.There is, however, another methodology for constructing and defending moral theories. It draws on premises about human nature or the nature of persons to support conclusions about the nature and structure of morality. This method—which I will call thenature to morality methodology—evaluates a moral claim or moral theory on the basis of its relation to some (alleged) facts about the kind of beings we are. For brevity, I will use the term ‘nature-claims’ to refer to claims about human nature or the nature of persons, and the term ‘nature-facts’ to refer to true nature-claims. The nature-claims that have been used to support or criticize various moral theories include claims about human motivation, personal identity, the human soul, and the conceptual features of personhood or rational agency.