Philosophy

This book collects Tyler Burge’s essays on self‐knowledge, interlocution, reasoning, and reflection. The essays use epistemology as a way of understanding underlying powers of mind. They focus on cognition that is warranted through understanding, mostly warranted non‐empirically (apriori). The relevant warrants set norms whose fulfillment reflects on powers of mind that are distinctive of persons and, on earth, distinctive of human beings.

Physicalism entails that truths expressed in non-physical terms are redescriptions of a world specifiable in narrowly physical terms. This book argues that physicalists must therefore hold that the physical truth about the world ‘logico-conceptually’ entails the mental truth, in the sense that it is impossible for broadly logical and conceptual reasons that the former should have been true if the latter had been false. The ‘redescriptive physicalism’ based on these ideas is a fresh approach to the nature of the mental-physical connection, and the book explains why physicalists should endorse it. It must be distinguished from ‘a priori physicalism’, which Jackson and Chalmers say physicalism requires. Although physicalism does need phenomenal truths to be logico-conceptually entailed by the narrowly physical truth, the idea that they are also inferrable a priori is mistaken. On the other hand ‘a posteriori physicalism’ is too weak, and the psycho-physical identity thesis is not even sufficient for physicalism. Yet the physical-to-mental connection does not depend on analytic truths: there are holistic but non-analytic conceptual links from physical to mental descriptions, explicable by means of functionalism – which, it is argued, physicalism entails. Redescriptive physicalism is also an excellent basis for dealing with questions of mental causation. Some regard the ‘Cartesian intuitions’ as objections to these views; it is argued that they are false. As to the ‘explanatory gap’, there is an epistemic gap, but it has a physicalistically acceptable explanation.

Contempt is often derided as a thoroughly nasty emotion inimical to the respect we owe all persons, but ethicists have said little about what contempt is or whether it deserves its ugly reputation. In Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt, Macalester Bell argues that we must reconsider contempt’s role in our moral lives. While contempt can be experienced in inapt and disvaluable ways, it may also be a perfectly appropriate response that provides the best way of answering a range of neglected faults. Using a wide range of examples, Bell provides an account of the nature of contempt and its virtues and vices. While some insist that contempt is always unfitting due to its globalism, Bell argues that this objection mischaracterizes the person assessments at the heart of contempt. Contempt is, in some cases, the best way to respond to arrogance, hypocrisy, and other vices of superiority. Contempt does have a dark side, and inapt forms of contempt structure a host of social ills. Racism is best characterized as an especially pernicious form of inapt contempt, and Bell’s account of contempt helps us better understand the moral badness of racism. Race-based contempt is best answered by mobilizing a robust counter-contempt for racists and others who contemn inaptly. The book concludes with a discussion of overcoming contempt through forgiveness. This account of forgiveness sheds light upon the broader issue of social reconciliation and what role reparations and memorials may play in giving persons reasons to overcome their contempt for institutions.

Mental causation has been a hotly disputed topic in recent years, with reductive and non-reductive physicalists vying with each other and with dualists over how to accommodate, or else to challenge, two widely accepted metaphysical principles—the principle of the causal closure of the physical domain and the principle of causal non-overdetermination—which together appear to support reductive physicalism, despite the latter’s lack of intuitive appeal. Current debate about these matters appears to have reached something of an impasse, prompting the question of why this should be so. One possibility well worth exploring is that, while this debate makes extensive use of ontological vocabulary—by talking, for instance, of substances, events, states, properties, powers, and relations—relatively little attempt has been made within the debate itself to achieve either clarity or agreement about what, precisely, such terms should be taken to mean. Hence, the debate has become somewhat detached from broader developments in metaphysics and ontology, which have lately been proceeding apace, providing us with an increasingly rich and refined set of ontological categories upon which to draw, as well as a much deeper understanding of how they are related to one another. In preparing this volume, the editors invited leading metaphysicians and philosophers of mind to reflect afresh upon the problem of mental causation in the light of some of these recent developments, with a view to making new headway with one of the most challenging and seemingly intractable issues in contemporary philosophy.

Recent work on the nature of intentionality has focused on the connection between intentionality and phenomenal consciousness. The notion of phenomenal intentionality, in particular, has surfaced in the literature in the late nineties and has commanded ever growing interest. The very definition of phenomenal intentionality is contested, but broadly speaking, this is supposed to be a kind of intentionality a mental state has in virtue of its phenomenal character. This book explores a number of issues raised by the notion of phenomenal intentionality, in particular whether there is any such thing, how common it is (with particular focus on whether it occurs in non-sensory, purely cognitive states), and what place it might hold in the overall theory of intentionality.

This book presents a series of multiply interrelated chapters which together make up an original study of selfhood (subjectivity or personal identity). It explores a variety of articulations (in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the arts) of the idea that selfhood is best conceived as a matter of non-self-identity — for example, as becoming or self-overcoming, or as being what one is not and not being what one is, or as being doubled or divided. Philosophically, a sustained reading of the work of Nietzsche and Sartre is central to this project, although Wittgenstein is also fundamental to its concerns; the book therefore draws extensively on texts usually associated with ‘Continental’ philosophical traditions, primarily in order to test the feasibility of a non-elitist form of moral perfectionism. Within the arts, several chapters examine various films whose themes intersect with those of the philosophers under study (including Hollywood melodramas, recent spy movies such as the Bourne trilogy and the latest incarnation of James Bond, and David Fincher's Benjamin Button); Wagner's Ring cycle is a recurrent concern; and the novels of Kingsley Amis, J. M. Coetzee, and David Foster Wallace are also prominent.

We all seem to know what mental states we are in. At any given moment, we know, for example, what we believe, and what we want. But how do we know that? The project of Transparent Minds is to explain our knowledge of our own propositional attitudes. Fernández puts forward a view that is motivated by the so-called transparency of belief: If we are asked whether we believe that a proposition P is the case, we do not search for a state that we can identify as the belief that P in our minds. Instead, we consider whether P is the case or not. Drawing on this idea, Fernández proposes that we attribute beliefs to ourselves based on our grounds for those beliefs, and we attribute desires to ourselves based on our grounds for those desires. The book argues that this view explains our privileged access to our own beliefs and desires. Three applications are drawn from the model of self-knowledge that emerges: A solution to Moore's paradox, an account of the thought-insertion delusion, and an explanation of self-deception. The puzzles raised by all three phenomena can be resolved, Fernández argues, if we construe them as failures of self-knowledge. The resulting picture of self-knowledge challenges the traditional notion that it is a matter of introspection. For the main tenet of the book is that we come to know what we believe and desire by ‘looking outward,’ and attending to the states of affairs which those beliefs and desires are about.