The Phenomenal Unity of Consciousness

2020 ◽  
pp. 207-229
Author(s):  
Farid Masrour
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Unity Of Consciousness ◽  
Natural Feature ◽  
Unity Thesis ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Phenomenal Unity

Philosophical interest in unity of consciousness goes back at least to Kant. A recent revival of interest among analytic philosophers of mind focuses on unity of consciousness, construed as phenomenal unity. This chapter will survey some of the issues and questions that have been central to this recent work before sketching an alternative to what may be seen as a dominant, though implicit, tendency in the recent literature on unity: to formulate the idea that phenomenal unity is a natural feature of consciousness in terms of what the chapter will term the Unity Thesis. According to this thesis, all synchronous experiences of a conscious subject at a moment are phenomenally unified with each other. The chapter then rebuts another trend in recent literature: the tendency to understand phenomenal unity as obtaining in virtue of a type of oneness or singularity. The chapter advances an alternative that sees phenomenal unity as obtaining in virtue of connectivity conditions over relations among phenomenal experiences.

scholarly journals Does False Consciousness Necessarily Preclude Moral Blameworthiness?: The Refusal of the Women Antisuffragists

Hypatia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Lee Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Epistemic Injustice ◽  
Victim Blaming ◽  
False Consciousness ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
Knowledge Practices ◽  
Structural Distortions ◽  
In Virtue Of

Abstract Social philosophers often invoke the concept of false consciousness in their analyses, referring to a set of evidence-resistant, ignorant attitudes held by otherwise sound epistemic agents, systematically occurring in virtue of, and motivating them to perpetuate, structural oppression. But there is a worry that appealing to the notion in questions of responsibility for the harm suffered by members of oppressed groups is victim-blaming. Individuals under false consciousness allegedly systematically fail the relevant rationality and epistemic conditions due to structural distortions of reasoning or knowledge practices, undermining their status as responsible moral agents. But attending to the constitutive mechanisms and heterogeneity of false consciousness enables us to see how having it does not in itself render someone an inappropriate target of blame. I focus here on the 1889 antisuffragist manifesto “An Appeal against Female Suffrage,” arguing that its signatories, despite false consciousness, satisfy both conditions for ordinary blameworthiness. I consider three prominent signatories, observing that the irrationality characterization is unsustainable beyond group-level diagnoses, and that their capacity to respond appropriately to reasons was not compromised. Following recent work on epistemic injustice, I also argue that culpable mechanisms constituted their false consciousness, rendering them blameworthy for the Appeal.

Metaphysical Grounding

Philosophy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Raven
Keyword(s):  
Recent Literature ◽  
Phenomenal Character ◽  
Institutional Facts ◽  
Metaphysical Grounding ◽  
In Virtue Of

Metaphysical ground is supposed to be a distinctive metaphysical kind of determination. It is or underwrites constitutive explanations. These explanations answer questions asking in virtue of what something is so. For example, suppose that an act is pious just in case it is loved by the gods. Following Socrates, one might still ask whether an act is pious because the gods love it or whether it is loved by the gods because it is pious. This may be interpreted as a question of ground. Then, one answer is that what the gods love grounds what is pious. And an alternative answer is that what is pious grounds what the gods love. Either way, Socrates’s question concerns what something’s being pious consists in, or what it holds in virtue of, or what grounds it. Once one has the notion of ground, one will likely find it involved in many of philosophy’s big questions. In ethics, the question might be whether an action’s maximizing goodness grounds its rightness. In epistemology, the question might be whether a process producing a belief grounds its justification. In language, the question might whether what a speaker means in uttering a sentence grounds its meaning. In law, the question might be whether social and institutional facts ground the legal facts. In metaphysics, the question might be whether physical facts ground all the rest. In mind, the question might be whether a representation’s content grounds its phenomenal character. The list could go on. The extraordinary range and ambition of these questions of ground explains continued interest in them. But only recently have some philosophers viewed these questions as concerning ground as such. This growing self-consciousness is moving more philosophers to view ground as a topic worthy of study. Much of the recent literature on ground has focused on exploring its structure (Structure) and its connections to other notions (Connections). These explorations spring from the hope that clarifying ground will help clarify the big questions it helps express. Some of the literature on ground explores these applications to the big questions (Applications). But there are also skeptics who challenge ground’s grand pretensions. Some of these skeptics doubt ground’s usefulness for clarifying the big questions. Other skeptics doubt that ground is even intelligible. This has led to a vigorous debate over whether ground deserves the attention it receives (Skepticism and Anti-Skepticism).

Recent Work on Latin American Women: A Review Essay

1975 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 497-516
Author(s):  
Susan A. Soeiro
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Dominant Male ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
American Women ◽  
Male Group ◽  
As If

The recent literature on women in Latin America as yet forms a minute part of a necessary revision aimed at achieving a balanced and multidimensional view of the Ibero-American reality, past and present. Men, as the traditional transmitters of culture in society, have conveyed what they knew, understood, and judged to be important. Since women's activities differed considerably from those of men, they were regarded as insignificant and unworthy of mention. Scholars have further perpetuated the patriarchal and sexist assumptions of their own societies or those they have studied. As a fesult, more than four and a half centuries of history and all of the important ongoing processes of modernization, urbanization, professionalization, and even propagation seem to have occurred without the participation or even the presence of women. It was simply assumed that what was said of men held equally true for women. Hence the conception of reality perpetrated by social scientists and historians was that perceived by a dominant male group, who represented a partial construct as if it were a more complex whole.

Leibniz and Materialism

1974 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 495-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Philosophical Analysis ◽  
The Mind

Seventeenth century discussions of materialism, whether favorable or hostile towards the position, are generally conducted on a level of much less precision and sophistication than recent work on the problem of the mind-body relation. Nevertheless, the earlier discussions can still be interesting to philosophers, as the plethora of references to Cartesian arguments in the recent literature makes clear. Certainly the early development of materialist patterns of thought, and efforts on both the materialist and immaterialist side to establish fundamental points in the philosophical analysis of mind, have considerable historical interest at the present time. This paper attempts to clarify the significance of some of leibniz's views in connection with the materialist thesis. I do not have in mind his rather notorious parallelism, though some of the points made below bear indirectly on the character of this position (or perhaps on the question whether he held it consistently). Instead, I will examine his approach to arguments against materialism.

scholarly journals II. Electrical conductivity in gases traversed by cathode rays

1901 ◽  
Vol 195 (262-273) ◽  
pp. 49-77 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Electrical Conductivity ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Negative Ions ◽  
In Virtue Of

Though it has been known that a gas becomes a conductor when traversed by cathode rays, yet the laws connecting this electrical conductivity have not hitherto been studied. The theory has been put forward by J. J. Thomson and Rutherford* that when a gas becomes a conductor under a radiation, it does so in virtue of the production of positive and negative ions throughout its mass. This view has been established by their experiments on Röntgenised gases, and confirmed by those of Zeleny on the same subject. The recent work of Rutherford on Uranium Radiation also affords another example of such a process in the gases traversed.

scholarly journals Moral Explanations, Thick and Thin

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan Cline
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Thick Concepts ◽  
Moral Explanations ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
Cornell Realism ◽  
In Virtue Of

Cornell realists maintain that irreducible moral properties have earned a place in our ontology in virtue of the indispensable role they play in a variety of explanations. These explanations can be divided into two groups: those that employ thin ethical concepts and those that employ thick ethical concepts. Recent work on thick concepts suggests that they are not inherently evaluative in their meaning. If correct, this creates problems for the moral explanations of Cornell realists, since the most persuasive moral explanations are those that employ thick concepts. If thick concepts are not inherently evaluative, then the most plausible explanations on offer cannot support Cornell realism. Moral explanations employing thin concepts, however, are too flimsy to support the view. Unless proponents can develop a compelling story about thick concepts or thin explanations, Cornell realism is in trouble.

The Multiplicity of I

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-32
Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Personality Disorder ◽  
Multiple Personality Disorder ◽  
Unity Of Consciousness ◽  
Multiple Personality ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Phenomenal Unity ◽  
Virtual Subjects

If in heteronymic simulation I am a subject other than the subject I am, there are evidently as many other I’s as there are possible acts of simulation. Pessoa, inhabiting countless lives, says that by creating in imagination a multiplicity of virtual subjects, each of which is him, he has ‘ubiquitized’ himself. So he affirms a thesis I will call ‘Subject Plurality’: I am many subjects other than the subject I am. We need, though, to distinguish two versions of this thesis, for it can be read as making either a diachronic claim or a synchronic one. Interpreters of Pessoa have been drawn to present the Pessoan self as a sort of parliament or confederation of souls. Despite Pessoa’s appeal, once, to the metaphor of a colony—and there only in connection with the phenomenal unity of consciousness rather than with reference to the multiplicity of heteronyms—the ‘confederation’ theory is not Pessoa’s. It is a Proustian, not a Pessoan, picture of multiplicity. An appreciation of this distinction is crucial to seeing why Pessoa’s multiplicity of I is not reducible to another mental illness, multiple personality disorder. The distinction between successive and simultaneous subject plurality has found a surprising application: understanding Afrofuturism’s experimentation with multiple sonic selves.

Case Interactions in Syntax

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Coon ◽  
Clint Parker
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
Case Morphology ◽  
Abstract Case ◽  
Verbal Agreement

The phenomenon of case has been studied widely at both the descriptive and theoretical levels. Typological work on morphological case systems has provided a picture of the variability of case cross-linguistically. In particular, languages may differ with respect to whether or not arguments are marked with overt morphological case, the inventory of cases with which they may be marked, and the alignment of case marking (e.g., nominative-accusative vs. ergative-absolutive). In the theoretical realm, not only has morphological case been argued to play a role in multiple syntactic phenomena, but current generative work also debates the role of abstract case (i.e., Case) in the grammar: abstract case features have been proposed to underlie morphological case, and to license nominals in the derivation. The phenomenon of case has been argued to play a role in at least three areas of the syntax reviewed here: (a) agreement, (b) A-movement, and (c) A’-movement. Morphological case has been shown to determine a nominal argument’s eligibility to participate in verbal agreement, and recent work has argued that languages vary as to whether movement to subject position is case-sensitive. As for case-sensitive A’-movement, recent literature on ergative extraction restrictions debates whether this phenomenon should be seen as another instance of “case discrimination” or whether the pattern arises from other properties of ergative languages. Finally, other works discussed here have examined agreement and A’-extraction patterns in languages with no visible case morphology. The presence of patterns and typological gaps—both in languages with overt morphological case and in those without it—lends support to the relevance of abstract case in the syntax.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document