Philosophy Research Collection

Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932), a prominent member of the Brentano School, is well known for his subjectivist value theory, whereby being valuable means being the object of a subject’s desire. Accordingly, the literature has interpreted his account of desire as the foundation of his axiology. However, such an interpretation overlooks the intrinsic richness of this account. This paper proposes, in contrast, to understand von Ehrenfels’s approach to desire as an autonomous psychological theory. I first emphasize that, for von Ehrenfels, desires are intentional, emotional experiences, before turning to his original reductionist definition of conative phenomena, according to which we desire an object when its representation as real ‘promotes our happiness’ compared to its representation as unreal. In doing so, I clarify the experiences of happiness and representation, critically review the formulations of this definition, and conclude that the ‘promotion of happiness’ best captures a procedure for knowing our desires.

This research investigates gender disparities in the architecture profession in Ireland, focusing on working conditions, career progression, and reasons for leaving the field. Although women graduate from schools of architecture in equal numbers to men, only approximately 30% of registered architects in Ireland are women. This study is exploratory in nature — it did not begin with a specific hypothesis to test — and therefore explores likely factors contributing to this imbalance, including workplace cultures, experiences and perceptions of gender inequality, sexism and discrimination.

For women architects, the confluence of gender and professional identity has remained unresolved since their admittance to the profession of architecture. The past decade has seen a resurgence in the use of the term ‘women in architecture’ coupled with renewed debate around its use as well as challenges from feminist historians and theorists to recognise other forms of architectural practices and identities. The research presented here examines the interplay between gender and the professional identity of those working within, and outside of, architectural professional practice in Ireland by combining questions on gender and professional identity from a large survey (n = 684) and 23 semi-structured interviews. Launched in March 2023, the Irish Architecture Career Tracker Survey received over 680 completed online questionnaires. The respondents, ranging in age from 20 to 72, were asked, ‘How important is being a woman/man to the way you think about your career?’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, the results for men and women are almost the inverse of one another. Male respondents tended towards ‘being a man is not at all important to the way I think about my career,’ at 45%, whilst female respondents tended towards the opposite, ‘being a woman is extremely important to the way I think about my career,’ at 41%. Another key question asked was whether or not ‘The term ‘woman in architecture’ is an important reflection of who I am professionally?’ Just 40% of female participants agreed with this statement. In the 23 semi-structured interviews which followed the survey, these two topics were explored, providing rich qualitative. Interviewees were both male and female and ranged in age from 32 to 62. When analysed using a reflexive thematic approach, we identified six themes which, when taken together, show a difficult and at times contradictory and paradoxical confluence of gender and professional identity, especially, but not only, for female architects. We suggest that these apparent contradictions and paradoxes are a way to cope with the quintessential sexist dilemma that identifying as a ‘woman in architecture’ continues to present.

Michael B. Gill’s A Philosophy of Beauty: Shaftesbury on Nature, Virtue, and Art focuses on Shaftesbury’s thinking about nature, religion, morality, and art. This beautifully and engagingly written book is insightful for scholars and general readers alike, and invites readers to explore the philosophical issues that arise from Shaftesbury’s philosophy. Gill not only shows how Shaftesbury’s ideas were revolutionary at the turn of the eighteenth century but also how they remain relevant today. Shaftesbury’s major work, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, was one of the most influential books published during the first half of the eighteenth century. According to Gill, “[i]t played a momentous role in turning European thought away from the negative and toward the positive—in nature, religion, morality, and art” (1). Although Characteristicks serves as a major source, Gill also engages with numerous other published and unpublished writings by Shaftesbury. A Philosophy of Beauty is divided into five chapters which focus respectively on nature and God, virtue, art, painting, and writing.

I argue that what speakers mean or express can be determined by their implicit or unconscious states, rather than explicit or conscious states. Further, on this basis, I show that the sincerity conditions for utterances can also be fixed by implicit states. This is a surprising result, which goes against common assumptions about speech acts and sincerity. Roughly, I argue that the result is implied by two plausible and independent theories of the metaphysics of speaker meaning and, further, that this is a robust basis on which to make an inference, with a fair degree of confidence, about the relationship between expression and implicit attitudes.

Visual perception is widely taken to present properties such as redness, roundness, and so on. This in turn might be thought to give rise to accuracy conditions for experience, and so content, regardless of which metaphysical view of perception one endorses. An influential version of this argument —Susanna Siegel’s ‘Argument from Appearing’ — aims to establish the existence of content as common ground between representational and relational views of perception. This goes against proponents of ‘austere’ relationalism who deny that content plays a substantive role in philosophical explanations of conscious perceptual experience. Though Siegel’s argument purports to be neutral with respect to the metaphysics of perception, it relies upon an equivocation between the presentation of property-types and property-instances. Consequently, the argument begs the question against the austere relational view, and so fails to establish the desired conclusion. So while relationalists can and should allow that experiences have accuracy conditions, it does not follow from this that they have contents of any philosophically interesting or significant kind.

Each of our sensory modalities — vision, touch, taste, etc. — works on a slightly different timescale, with differing temporal resolutions and processing lag. This raises the question of how, or indeed whether, these sensory streams are co-ordinated or ‘bound’ into a coherent multisensory experience of the perceptual ‘now’. In this paper I evaluate one account of how temporal binding is achieved: the temporal windows hypothesis, concluding that, in its simplest form, this hypothesis is inadequate to capture a variety of multisensory phenomena. Rather, the evidence suggests the existence of a more complex temporal structure in which multiple overlapping windows support distinct functional mechanisms. To aid in the precise formulation of such views, I propose a taxonomy of temporal window types and their characteristics that in turn suggests promising avenues for future empirical and philosophical research. I conclude by examining some philosophical implications of multi-window models for the metaphysics of perception and perceptual experience more generally.

Les travaux de Zénon se caractérisent par leur grande érudition et par la profondeur des analyses, par le courage dans l’exploration de thèmes précédemment ignorés ou rarement abordés, par la richesse des notes de bas de page (un médiéviste français les avait décrites comme étant « des notes océaniques ») et par la capacité, aujourd’hui encore plus rare que jadis, d’étudier les débats doctrinaux dans leur contexte historique et politique. Zénon s’intéressait avant tout à la pensée philosophique ou théologique d’un auteur, mais il voulait la restituer à son époque et l’étudier dans son contexte (doctrinal, politique, institutionnel), sans cependant expliquer l’une par l’autre. Un lecteur peu sensible à ce type d’approche holistique (la « méthode Kaluza ») d’un texte médiéval n’aurait pas la patience de saisir le véritable enjeu de cette méthode et serait tenté de la considérer comme étant moins intéressante (ou moins digne d’un philosophe) que d’autres. Et pourtant, ce genre d’analyse peu spectaculaire résiste à l’épreuve du temps et renouvelle considérablement nos connaissances.

In a previous article (O’Shea 2006) I provided a concise overview of the reception of Kant’s philosophy among analytic philosophers during the periods from the ‘early analytic’ reactions to Kant in Frege, Russell, Carnap and others, to the systematic Kant-inspired works in epistemology and metaphysics of C. I. Lewis and P. F. Strawson, in particular. In this chapter I use the recently reinvigorated work of Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) in the second half of the twentieth century as the basis for presenting some of the most familiar ‘analytic Kantian’ themes that continue to animate current debates. I also argue that the complex relationships between Sellars’ philosophy and Kant’s thought are often misunderstood. Overall the chapter examines Sellars’ analytic appropriations of Kant in three topic-areas of significant current philosophical debate: (1) conceptual analysis and the structure of human knowledge; (2) laws of nature, the causal modalities, and the pragmatic or relative a priori; and (3) the disputes concerning Kant and nonconceptual content.

Untranslatability has been seen as a problematic concept in Translation Studies, rooted in outdated views of translation as doomed to failure. In this paper, I argue against such a view of untranslatability to make two claims. The first is that at least a temporary untranslatability is the condition of translation, without it translation would be redundant. The second is that untranslatability offers us both an ethical and descriptive model for intersubjective relations such that it does not merely refer to a textual practice but also to ways in which we relate to each other as human beings. In the first part of the paper, I engage with two critics of untranslatability–Ricoeur and Venuti–to claim that in their rejection of the untranslatable, they lose something productive. Against a view of the untranslatable as something ‘sacred’, as described by Heidegger; I argue that we might think of the untranslatable as that which exceeds our understanding yet generates the desire to understand at all. Drawing on the work of Derrida, Levinas, and Cassin, I claim that the untranslatable offers us a way of thinking of translation and understanding in general as ethical when they are paused, suspended, or interrupted.

Faced with urgent calls for more trust in experts, especially in high impact and politically sensitive domains, such as climate science and COVID-19, the complex nature of public trust in experts and the need for a more critical approach to the topic are easy to overlook. Scepticism–at least in its Humean mitigated form that encourages independent, questioning attitudes–can prove valuable to democratic governance, but stands in opposition to the cognitive dependency entailed by epistemic trust. In this paper, we investigate the tension between the value of mitigated scepticism and the need for trust in experts. We offer four arguments in favour of mitigated scepticism: the argument from loss of intellectual autonomy; the argument from democratic deficit; the argument from the normative failures of science; and the argument from past and current injustices. One solution, which we reject, is the idea that reliance, rather than trust, is sufficient for accommodating experts in policy matters. The solution we endorse is to create a ‘climate of trust’, where questioning experts and expertise is welcomed, but the epistemic trust necessary for acting upon information which the public cannot obtain first-hand is enabled and encouraged through structural, institutional and justice-based measures.

This review examines the alleged crisis of trust in environmental science and its impact on public opinion, policy decisions in the context of democratic governance, and the interaction between science and society. In an interdisciplinary manner, the review focuses on the following themes: the trustworthiness of environmental science, empirical studies on levels of trust and trust formation; social media, environmental science, and disinformation; trust in environmental governance and democracy; and co-production of knowledge and the production of trust in knowledge. The review explores both the normative issue of trustworthiness and empirical studies on how to build trust. The review does not provide any simple answers to whether trust in science is generally in decline or whether we are returning to a lessenlightened era in public life with decreased appreciation of knowledge and truth. The findings are more nuanced, showing signs of both distrust and trust in environmental science.

I argue that while every betrayal is a breach of trust, not every breach of trust is a betrayal. I defend a conception of trust as primarily a feature of behaviour (i.e. trusting behaviour) and only secondarily a feature of a mental attitude. So it is possible to have the attitude of distrust towards someone while still trusting them in the way you behave. This makes sense of the possibility of Judas Iscariot breaching Jesus’ trust, and so betraying him, even though Jesus presumably knew that Judas would do just that. This conception of trust may be spelt out in terms of making oneself reliant on somebody in a collaboration with them. Such collaborations include relationships like friendships and love affairs, as well as political activities or defending one’s country against aggression. I argue that only when these collaborations involve a commitment to loyalty is a breach of trust a betrayal. And loyalty is a feature of those collaborations or relationships that exclude others – us/them collaborations.

Dédié à la mémoire de Joseph Baruch (Giuseppe) Sermoneta (p. ix), cet ouvrage, d’une qualité et d’une érudition remarquables, porte sur l’un des auteurs oubliés (ils sont très nombreux) de l’histoire de la pensée, en l’occurrence Moïse ben Sabbataï. Le lecteur a ainsi accès à un dossier complet, comprenant une introduction sur la philosophie en Italie au xive siècle suivie de plusieurs éditions partielles ou complètes de textes jamais publiés auparavant (de Moïse ben Sabbataï et son maître, Juda de Rome), ainsi que d’un glossaire des termes philosophiques employés par Moïse ben Sabbataï. J.-P. Rothschild a consacré une partie importante de sa carrière à la réception du Livre des causes dans les milieux juifs médiévaux, en commençant par son doctorat dirigé par Colette Sirat. Cet ouvrage vient compléter et parfaire les travaux qu’il a déjà accomplis.

George Pitcher marks a familiar distinction in the philosophy of emotions as follows: When it is said of someone that he has an emotion, this may be said of him either in (a) an occurrent, or in (b) a dispositional sense. A person who is frightened by a face at a window, or who gets angry at two boys because they are mistreating a dog, has an emotion in the former, occurrent, sense – he is actually in the grip of the emotion. But a person who hates his father, or is jealous of his landlord, has an emotion in the latter, dispositional, sense – he may not actually be feeling the emotion now. (Pitcher 1965, 331-2). I will take issue with this idea that there are two different senses in which someone has an emotion. While it is unquestionably the case that there is a proper distinction to be marked here, I take it that it is the distinction between an emotional state being active and the same state being dormant, not a distinction between two kinds of emotional state – occurrent and dispositional ones. I will argue that when you are in the grip of anger with the two boys for mistreating the dog you are in the very same dispositional state you will be in later when you have cooled down and are thinking about something else altogether though still angry with the two boys for mistreating the dog. When in the grip of anger you are in a dispositional state that is in the process of being manifested – it is an active dispositional state.

This third volume, like the preceding two, and indeed the entire conference, was not meant to constitute neither an introduction to nor an exhaustive synthesis on Proclean metaphysics and its diverse receptions. The main goal was to celebrate around an exceptional and enduring episode of the history of thought the dialogue between scholars from disciplines unjustly disaggregated in publications and conferences. Indeed, Marc and I sought to gather studies that because of their diversity and despite of their divergencies posititions could nurture the research on the entagled conceptual history of the Elements of Theology and the Book of Causes.

In this paper, I will argue that Locke is a substance dualist in the general sense, in that he holds that there are, independent of our classificatory schema, two distinct kinds of substances: wholly material ones and wholly immaterial ones. On Locke's view, the difference between the two lies in whether they are solid or not, thereby differentiating him from Descartes. My way of establishing Locke as a general substance dualist is to be as minimally committal as possible at the outset, especially with respect to the classic debates on Locke's positions in this domain, including those concerning substrata, real essences, and the like. Nonetheless, I show that minimal commitments about Locke's primary/secondary quality distinction are sufficient to derive some substantive conclusions about his positions on these issues, as well as that he is a general substance dualist.

I argue that Sellars’s metaconceptual theory of the categories exemplifies and extends a long line of nominalistic thinking about the nature of the categories from Ockham and Kant to the Tractatus and Carnap, and that this theory is far more central than has generally been realized to each of Sellars’s most famous and enduring philosophical conceptions: the myth of the given, the logical space of reasons, and resolving the ostensible clash between the manifest and scientific images of the human being in the world. Sellars’s distinctive contribution to this longstanding (if currently on the defensive) metaconceptual approach to the nature of ontological categories was to interpret and reconstruct it in terms of his own ‘meaning as use’ or norm-governed inferential role semantics. With these resources Sellars sought to preserve the genuine insights in the ‘realist’ or broadly platonic traditions while simultaneously defending the idea that in the end, as he puts it, “a naturalistic ontology must be a nominalistic ontology” (1980a NAO IV §129).

How we name each other sets in motion how we treat each other, each act of naming both opens up a certain mode of engagement and closes off others. When we tell each other our nationality or our political affiliation, our religion or our ethnicity, our gender or our class, and so on; we reveal an aspect of who we are. Sometimes we do this explicitly, at other times we do so implicitly or unintentionally. We each have many aspects and often these sides of who we are affirm our membership of a group – Republicans or Democrats; Catholics or Hindus; male or trans and so on. This group membership may be an integral part of how we understand ourselves and relate to others, or it may be experienced as merely incidental. As Iris Marrion Young has argued, group membership is part of the contemporary human condition that in itself is relatively neutral but is also not simple or exclusive. Rather, group membership is “multiple, cross-cutting, fluid, and shifting […]. In complex, highly differentiated societies like our own, all persons have multiple group identifications.” (Young, 48)

It is widely accepted that there is a visual field, but the analogous notion of an auditory field is rejected by many philosophers on the grounds that the metaphysics or phenomenology of audition lack the necessary spatial structure. In this paper, I argue that many of the common objections to the existence of an auditory field are misguided and that, contrary to a tradition of philosophical scepticism about the spatiality of auditory experience, it is as richly spatial as visual experience — and in some ways even more so. By carefully considering the spatiality and boundedness of audition, along with how sounds or their sources are experienced as occurring within the surrounding acoustic environment, we can gain a better understanding of (i) our auditory experience of space and (ii) the conditions for the existence of spatial sensory fields in general in a way that does not privilege vision over the other senses.