Epistemic Disadvantage

Recent philosophical literature on epistemic harms has paid little attention to the difference between deliberate and non-deliberate harms. In this paper, I analyze the “Curare Case,” a case from the 1940’s in which patient testimony was disregarded by physicians. This case has been described as an instance of epistemic injustice. I problematize this description, arguing instead that the case shows an instance of “epistemic disadvantage.” I propose epistemic disadvantage indicates when harms result from warranted asymmetric relations that justifiably exclude individuals from hermeneutical participation. Epistemic disadvantage categorizes harms that result from justifiable exclusions, are non-deliberate, and result from poor epistemic environments. This analysis brings out a meaningful difference between accidental and deliberate harms in communicative exchanges.

Philosophy in the Narrative Mode

Histories of Arabic and Islamic philosophy tend to focus on texts which are systematic in nature and conventionally classified as philosophy or related scholarly disciplines. Philosophical principles, however, are also defining features of texts associated with other genres. Within the larger field of philosophy, this might be especially true of ethics and within the larger body of literature this might be especially the case for stories. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that the very purpose of storytelling is to reinforce and disseminate moral conventions. Likewise, the moral philosopher can be conceptualized as a homo narrans.The aim of this contribution is to apply the approach to narratives as a mode of debating ethical or moral principles to biographies of Alexander the Great. More than any other figure of the classical world, Alexander was religiously validated in the Islamic tradition due to his quasi-prophetic status as the ‘man with the two horns’ in the Qur’an. He appears prominently in the larger orbit of Arabic and Islamic philosophy as interlocutor and disciple of Aristotle and is adduced anecdotally in philosophical literature as an example to teach larger lessons of life. As a world conqueror, he provided an attractive model for those who sought to reconcile philosophical insight with worldly ambition.Focusing on biographies of Alexander, this article explores ethical principles which are inscribed in this body of literature and thus reads the texts as a narrativized form of philosophy. The analysis is comparative in two ways. Biographies of different periods and regions of the Islamicate world will be discussed, but comparisons with pre-Islamic biographies of Alexander (notably Roman biographies and the Alexander Romance) are included as well.

Citizenship and Paternalism*

Do states have a right to exclude prospective immigrants as they see fit? According to statists, the answer is a qualified yes. For these authors, self-determining political communities have a prima facie right to exclude, which can be overridden by the claims of vulnerable individuals. However, there is a concern in the philosophical literature that statists have not yet developed a theory that can protect children born in the territory from being excluded from the political community. For if the self-determining political community has the right to decide who should form the self in the first place, then that right should count against both newcomers by immigration and newcomers by birth. Or so the concern goes. This chapter defends statism against this line of criticism and defends a new account of the value of citizenship for children.

Tending Immanence, Transcending Sectarianism: Plane of Mixed Castes and Religions

The attempt in this article is to extrapolate the notion of hybridity latent in B. R. Ambedkar’s reflections on mixed castes, and outcastes, which subsequently leads to the causal link that he then derives gesticulating to social evils, namely, the origin of untouchability. Whether this embryonic notion of hybridity present in Ambedkar’s work is amenable to the extrapolation of Dalit identity thought along the lines of Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “immanent mixtures” is a thread that this study pursues. This certainly has broad implications for the prevalent notions of Dalit identity. This study ventures to read Ambedkar’s work, Riddles in Hinduism (1987) alongside Deleuze, probing into the intuitive link between notions of hybridity and the plane of immanence. Ideological distancing from predetermined categories of identity considered to be reductive in nature by the intellectuals of Indian philosophical thinking view such predetermined notions as facile conceptions that run short of representative qualities of complex and varied particularities of reasoned engagement with one’s resources. Amartya Sen heralded this ideological position in his work titled, The Argumentative Indian (2006), in favor of heterodoxy and reasoned choice determining priorities between different identities. Lacunae regarding identification of resources prominent in Sen’s work is pointed out by Jonardon Ganeri, who hails from the cluster of contemporary Sanskritists competent in philological and theoretical exegesis of “sastric” philosophical literature from the classical period of India. This study is a close reading of Jonardon Ganeri’s concept of ‘resources within’ which he develops in his work, Identity as Reasoned Choice (2012) to examine the potentiality of this concept to advance a theoretical framework that could counter a sectarian view of Indian tradition, as it is professed at the outset of his work. Sectarianism, which Ganeri opposes, identifies mysticism to be its chief trait which he shows to be selectively usurping only those resources grounded in Vedantic wisdom from India’s past.

Introduction

This introductory chapter explains the aim of the book: the analysis of real possibilities as anchored in a spatio-temporal world that is rudimentarily relativistic. It contrasts real possibilities to other possibilities discussed in the philosophical literature. It explains how branching is related to the possible worlds framework made popular, e.g., by David Lewis’s works. It offers philosophical comments on crucial notions and assumptions of BST, such as events, histories, and temporal directedness. It ends up with some hints about how the BST project is situated in modal metaphysics, touching themes such as the concept of actuality or the distinction between possibilities as “alternatives to” vs. “alternatives for”.

Department of Logic and Methodology of Science: Achievements and Prospects

The article provides an overview of activity of the department of logic and methodology of science of the H.S. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy, National Academy of Science of Ukraine. This activity includes scientific research, translation of philosophical literature, organization of seminars on urgent problems of modern philosophy. Research projects, on the one hand, are based on scientific traditions formed over the years in the Institute, and on the other hand, they focus on the transformations in scientific cognition and science, and build the projections for the future. It presents methodological backgrounds of the project «Semiotic analysis of cultural phenomena» (2018–2020), and outlines research tasks of the projects «Communicative transformations in modern science» (2020–2021) and «Logical, ontological and axiological dimensions of modern scientific knowledge» (2022–2024). Involvement of young scholars in research in logic, methodology and philosophy of science is the major challenge for the department.

The Quietist Posit: A Methodologically Agnostic Resolution to the Problem of Qualia

<p>This thesis paper addresses the aim and methodology of an argument by Daniel Dennett (1988; 1992), who proposes an eliminativism with regards to the referent of the term “qualia”. Dennett’s argument centres on the purported failure for any property to meet the criteria for this term widely found in traditional philosophical literature. Dennett argues that this failure may be demonstrated as a result of the term failing to refer to any property which contains naturalistic methodological verification conditions. I provide, in this paper, an outline of two key historical arguments by W.V. Quine and Ludwig Wittgenstein, respectively, whose influence on Dennett’s position will help clarify a certain vulnerability in the latter’s argument. I then provide a series of arguments to serve as important counterexamples to the methodology employed by Dennett which, I argue, reveal a dialectical stalemate between two sets of competing methodologies –methodological naturalism and phenomenology. I argue that this stalemate is indicative of a methodological underdetermination with regards to the question of whether qualia exist. I refer to this as the “methodological problem of qualia”. I then propose that a resolution may be found for this problem by adopting a methodological agnosticism. I argue that upon this agnosticism, it is possible to positively assert methodological verification conditions according to which it may be determined whether the term “qualia” refers to a property which contains naturalistic methodological verification conditions. I argue that these are the conditions which hold upon the explicitly conditional, or “methodological”, assumption of a naturalistic methodological verificationism, as opposed to a phenomenological methodology, or vice versa. I conclude that, under these conditions, the term “qualia” therefore may succeed in referring to a property which contains naturalistic methodological verification conditions. As such, I propose that Dennett is incorrect: neither the term nor its referent merit elimination, but rather the latter a quietist resolution, and the former its own meaningful place in language.</p>

The Quietist Posit: A Methodologically Agnostic Resolution to the Problem of Qualia

<p>This thesis paper addresses the aim and methodology of an argument by Daniel Dennett (1988; 1992), who proposes an eliminativism with regards to the referent of the term “qualia”. Dennett’s argument centres on the purported failure for any property to meet the criteria for this term widely found in traditional philosophical literature. Dennett argues that this failure may be demonstrated as a result of the term failing to refer to any property which contains naturalistic methodological verification conditions. I provide, in this paper, an outline of two key historical arguments by W.V. Quine and Ludwig Wittgenstein, respectively, whose influence on Dennett’s position will help clarify a certain vulnerability in the latter’s argument. I then provide a series of arguments to serve as important counterexamples to the methodology employed by Dennett which, I argue, reveal a dialectical stalemate between two sets of competing methodologies –methodological naturalism and phenomenology. I argue that this stalemate is indicative of a methodological underdetermination with regards to the question of whether qualia exist. I refer to this as the “methodological problem of qualia”. I then propose that a resolution may be found for this problem by adopting a methodological agnosticism. I argue that upon this agnosticism, it is possible to positively assert methodological verification conditions according to which it may be determined whether the term “qualia” refers to a property which contains naturalistic methodological verification conditions. I argue that these are the conditions which hold upon the explicitly conditional, or “methodological”, assumption of a naturalistic methodological verificationism, as opposed to a phenomenological methodology, or vice versa. I conclude that, under these conditions, the term “qualia” therefore may succeed in referring to a property which contains naturalistic methodological verification conditions. As such, I propose that Dennett is incorrect: neither the term nor its referent merit elimination, but rather the latter a quietist resolution, and the former its own meaningful place in language.</p>

Why bother the public? A critique of Leslie Cannold’s empirical research on ectogenesis

Can discussion with members of the public show philosophers where they have gone wrong? Leslie Cannold argues that it can in her 1995 paper ‘Women, Ectogenesis and Ethical Theory’, which investigates the ways in which women reason about abortion and ectogenesis (the gestation of foetuses in artificial wombs). In her study, Cannold interviewed female non-philosophers. She divided her participants into separate ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ groups and asked them to consider whether the availability of ectogenesis would change their views about the morality of dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. The women in Cannold’s study gave responses that did not map onto the dominant tropes in the philosophical literature. Yet Cannold did not attempt to reason with her participants, and her engagement with the philosophical literature is oddly limited, focussing only on the pro-choice perspective. In this paper, I explore the question of whether Cannold is correct that philosophers’ reasoning about abortion is lacking in some way. I suggest that there are alternative conclusions to be drawn from the data she gathered and that a critical approach is necessary when attempting to undertake philosophy informed by empirical data.

Translation Program and “Philosophy” Series

The review presents the main translations of the classics of philosophical literature in previous years. The publication was made in cooperation with the Mizhvukhamy Foundation and the Tempora Publishing House. The main stress of the review is made on the works of Emanuele Severino, Ibn Sina, Henry David Thoreau and Edmund Husserl.