Abstracts
Keynotes
Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago): A Toxic Brew: Sexism and Misogyny
The Monarchy of Fear argues that fears of many kinds have unsettled today's democracies and fueled the rise of populism. One key area in which we see this happening is gender relations, where resistance to women's increasing outspokenness in politics, employment, and the home often takes an ugly form. I examine the roots of today's misogyny, arguing that it has its roots in fear, but through three different intermediate emotions, all rooted in fear: anger, envy, and disgust. The Times Higher Education Supplement review of The Monarchy of Fear can be found here.
Anna Marmodoro (Durham / Oxford): Building the World without Relations. The Master Builders: Anaxagoras, Plato, Aristotle.
Abstract: TBC
Student speakers
Nathaniel Baron-Schmitt (MIT): Winning
People sometimes seem to care immensely about rather odd things. Consider some friends playing a casual yet intense game of basketball, or some fans watching a game on TV and cheering for their team of preference. Why do they care so much about whether a ball goes through one hoop rather than another? Are they attuned to some great significance of the outcome of the game? Thomas Hurka (2006) and Gwen Bradford (2015) think so: the players have the opportunity to vanquish a tough opponent, which would constitute a valuable achievement. I disagree: I doubt this can make sense of the attitudes of the fans, who do not stand to gain much from the victory of their favorite team. Another possibility: do the fans and players vastly overestimate the importance of winning? This too seems unlikely. Though they display great enthusiasm during the game, they may not pay it much thought after it ends. This suggests that they realize that it is not of immense importance. Is there some other way of making sense of their investment in the outcome? Do they have some other reason to care? Perhaps they care so that they'll have more fun, or so they'll count as really playing the game? I argue that these aren't reasons to care: they are the "wrong kinds of reason".
My view is that players and fans often do not believe that the outcome of a game matters. Instead, they pretend that the outcome matters, and this causes them to have the phenomenology of caring about the outcome. I develop an idea from Walton (2015): that games crucially involve an element of fiction. The fiction says that it is important to follow the rules of a game, and ultimately to win. Of course, winning often really is important, and players and fans often recognize that it is. Money or pride or fame may be on the line. But when it comes to casual but enthusiastic players and fans, I think they generally only pretend that winning matters. And I think this is a central aspect of games. If you want to play a game, and you don't already see some reason why winning matters, what you do is pretend that it matters. Same for fans. If you want to be an active spectator, rather than a dispassionate, disengaged onlooker, what you do is: pick a team to root for, and pretend that it's important for that team to win.
Brett Karlan (Princeton): Bias and Belief
In this paper, I consider the nature of the implicit attitudes, or the mental states that underlie implicitly biased behaviors. Implicit bias manifests in cases where an agent behaves as if some stereotype were true of a member of a social group, even if that agent also sincerely disavows the content of the stereotype. Thus, if John tends to hire men for the company he runs, even while sincerely believing that women are just as cut out for the work as men, his is demonstrating an implicit bias. The nature of the mental states that give rise to these behaviors has come under intense philosophical scrutiny of late, with many authors arguing such states are not beliefs, but rather some other propositional attitude (an alief, or an in-between belief) or non-propositional mental state (e.g. a mere association between concepts). Arguments for these conclusions have the same broad outline: they seek to identify a property or set of properties that the implicit attitudes have that beliefs, by their nature, cannot have; it is thereby concluded that the implicit attitudes must be something other than beliefs.
I argue here that such arguments do not succeed. There is nothing about the nature of either the implicit attitudes, or belief more generally, such that the implicit attitudes could not be a kind of belief. I identify four defining features of the implicit attitudes, each of which is thought to be a property that a belief state could not have: implicit attitudes are resistant to being brought to consciousness, disavowed by the agent who holds them, encapsulated from other mental states, and fail to enter into characteristically belief-like reasoning relations. In each case, I argue that there is no intuitive pressure, when considering other cases where such properties are present, to say that the states in question are anything other than beliefs. Using cases drawn from literature on fragmentation and opacity in human belief systems, I argue that beliefs, too, can be resistant to being brought to consciousness (cases of suppressed belief), disavowed (unwitting historian cases), encapsulated (fragmented belief cases), and inferentially inert (recalcitrant belief cases). Thus, there is nothing about the nature of belief that precludes implicit attitudes from being beliefs.
This negative conclusion is the strongest claim of the paper. Given that many authors think that the implicit attitudes just could not be belief, establishing the negative conclusion is not trivial. I do, however, think there are also positive reasons to go in for a belief view of the implicit attitudes. If we help ourselves to an old distinction between implicit and explicit belief, a natural proposal presents itself: the implicit attitudes are implicit beliefs that are often in tension with the agent's explicit beliefs. On this view, implicit bias is a particularly striking example of a general feature of our non-ideal mental lives: the fragmentation and opacity of our belief sets. I briefly discuss such an account here.
Ethan Jerzak (UC Berkeley): Paradoxical Desires
I present a paradoxical combination of desires. I show why it's paradoxical, and consider ways of responding to it. The paradox saddles us with an unappealing disjunction: either we reject the possibility of the case by placing surprising restrictions on what we can desire, or we revise some bit of classical logic. I argue that denying the possibility of the case is unmotivated on any reasonable way of thinking about propositional attitudes. So the best response is a non-classical one, according to which certain desires are neither determinately satisfied nor determinately not satisfied. Thus, theorizing about paradoxical propositional attitudes helps constrain the space of possibilities for adequate solutions to semantic paradoxes more generally.
Qiong Wu (Boston): Modality, Fundamentality, and Quantificational Truth
In Chapter 12 of Writing the Book of the World (2011), Sider claims that the necessity-contingency distinction is not a fundamental feature of the world and develops a reductive account to show how modal truths can be reduced to non-modal truths, in the form of quantificational statements. In this paper, I argue that the success of Sider's reductive strategy relies on a specific semantics of quantifiers that involves modal features. If I am right, Sider's account faces two problems: first, the reduction is not complete. For modality is required for quantificational truths to function as the reductive base. Second, if modality is required to characterize quantificational truths as the reductive base and modality is non-fundamental, then the fundamentality of quantificational truths is put into question.
Jonas Raab (Manchester): The Unbearable Circularity of Easy Ontology
In this paper, I consider Amie Thomasson's deflationary metaontology (Easy Ontology) and argue that it is viciously circular. Easy Ontology rests on the idea of analytic entailments between application conditions of terms such as 'number'. In her characterization of application conditions, Thomasson herself insists on a 'non-circularity' condition, viz., the application conditions of a term 'T' are not allowed to simply be 'Ts exist'. This is a reasonable demand as the goal of Easy Ontology is to infer the existence of certain entities by checking whether the application conditions of the corresponding terms are fulfilled or whether already established entities analytically entail their existence. To this end, Thomasson distinguishes 'basic' from 'derivative' terms. Granting her the non-circularity of the latter, I argue that the application conditions of the former are nonetheless circular. My argument rests solely on premises that Thomasson herself explicitly endorses. For example, the motivation to associate application conditions with terms is to avoid indeterminate reference (i.e., to circumvent the qua problem), viz., every term must invoke among its application conditions a 'categorial' or 'sortal' term to sufficiently disambiguate its referent. As this applies to all terms, the basic ones must satisfy this condition, too. This, then, means that the application conditions of them must invoke one another and are, therefore, circularly determined. To establish this conclusion, I will consider the possible cases (basic terms figuring in the application conditions of basic terms; derivative terms figuring in the application conditions of basic terms) and conclude that none of the available options is satisfying.
In the second part of the paper, I evaluate how much damage such circularity does to Thomasson's approach. She argues herself that even if Easy Ontology does not apply to all existence questions, it can still be applied to many. I argue that this claim is incorrect; rather, Easy Ontology is only a plausible metaontological candidate if it successfully answers all existence questions---in particular, it has to give a plausible account of the 'basic' entities which are used to infer the existence of other entities. For, Easy Ontology introduces the idea of application conditions to circumvent the qua problem which are the source of such analytical entailments that are involved in such inferences. But, as the basic terms are only specifiable circularly, such entailments are non-existent. Further, if the distinction of 'basic' and 'derivative' terms is supposed to be exhaustive, the application conditions of the latter are not safe as they are a combination of the application conditions of the former. This, then, means that the circularity of the application conditions of the basic terms infects the application conditions of the derivative terms. Thus, in such an account, no entities are inferable after all.
Maura Ceci (Leiden, Netherlands): The Body: Power and Resistance
The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasure. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p.157
Having in mind this passage, this paper will explore three main topics of Foucault's philosophy and how they deal with each other: power, resistance, and body. Our claim is that a more thorough account of the body might help us to better understand the dynamics of power and resistance. This paper is structured as a critique of the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions formulated by Judith Butler. Our suggestion is to dismantle two dichotomies that we think were wrongly assumed from Foucault's thought: the dichotomy of the constructed body and the pre-discursive body (Butler, 1898) and consequently the dichotomy between power and resistance. Our claim is that resistance is not something apart and outside power that resists it, but the two are strictly interrelated and the very exercise of power could not be possible without involving a possible or actual resistance to it. Therefore, we shall argue that deducing an ontological pre-discursive body that would resist the exercise of power might be inconsistent within Foucault's dynamics of power, to the extent that resistance can exercise itself only within a power-relation, as well as power necessarily presupposes a resistance to it in order to properly manifest itself. Power should be understood as a multiplicity of forces relations which act upon each other. The body should be seen then as the locus on which power and resistance operate. Within Foucault's thought there is no space for any pre-existing body on which power exercise itself, on the contrary, bodies are the results of this constant struggle between power and resistance. The body is the place on which both possibilities and limitations of power are developed, understood as an actualization of forces.
Claire Field (St Andrews): Conflict Resolution: Demoting the Enkratic Principle
The enkratic principle has long enjoyed protected status as a requirement of rationality. I argue that this is a mistake, the principle should instead be thought of as a defeasible indication of positive epistemic appraisal. That this is a mistake can be seen by considering a puzzle arising from the possibility of misleading evidence about what rationality requires. I argue that the best way to resolve this conflict is to distinguish between two distinct kinds of evaluation that contribute to the conflict. This strategy for conflict resolution allows us to accommodate the intuitions that have contributed to the enkratic principle's popularity as a requirement of rationality, while providing a helpful diagnosis of why the conflict has seemed puzzling.
Here, I argue that the best way to solve a pernicious puzzle of epistemic rationality is to reject this orthodoxy. Rather than thinking of the enkratic principle as a requirement of rationality, we should view it as a defeasible indication that the agent has exhibited epistemic conduct that deserves positive epistemic appraisal. By distinguishing between two distinct kinds of epistemic evaluation – evaluations of how well attitudes meet the requirements of rationality, and evaluations of the agent's epistemic conduct.
This allows us to solve the puzzle while accommodating the intuitions that contributed to the enkratic principle's lofty status. If the enkratic principle is a requirement of rationality, then we are faced with a puzzle, so long as we also think that rationality prohibits and requires some particular attitudes, such as contradictory attitudes, and that rationality requires that we conform our beliefs to our evidence. These lead to conflict in situations where agents have misleading evidence about what rationality requires. Since the conflict arises only if the enkratic principle is also a requirement of rationality, I argue that we should resolve the conflict by thinking of the enkratic principle as a defeasible indication of positive epistemic appraisal, and not a requirement of rationality. I motivate this strategy through consideration of the enkratic principle's agential focus, and the observation that it appears to be neither necessary nor sufficient for positive epistemic evaluation of either kind.
This permits a solution to conflict arising from the possibility of having misleading evidence for a false view of what rationality requires, while also accommodating the intuitions that have motivated others to think of the enkratic principle as a requirement of rationality, as well as diagnosing the confusion between kinds of evaluation that have made the conflict puzzling. Demoting the enkratic principle from its position as a requirement of rationality means that rationality sometimes makes surprising demanding demands of us – we are sometimes required to be level incoherent. Fortunately, considering epistemic appraisal can help us work out what to say about agents who fail to meet these demands.
Joaquim Giannotti (Glasgow): Ontological Fundamentality
The notion of fundamentality is supposed to play an important role in philosophical inquiry and scientific theorising. Yet there is no consensus on how to formulate it in precise terms. According to a promising view, fundamentality is a form of ontological independence. This view has the merit of capturing a natural connection between fundamentality and ontological dependence. However, it has been recently argued that it is possible that there are fundamental and yet ontologically dependent entities; therefore, we should not characterise the fundamental in terms of ontological independence. My aim is to show that such a possibility does not threaten a conception of fundamentality as a form of ontological independence. I illustrate this claim by providing a definition of equifundamentality and showing that fundamental and yet ontologically dependent entities can be treated as equifundamental.
Wilson Lee (Edinburgh) and Kathryn Nave (Edinburgh): We Are Living in a Predictable World and I Am a Predictable Girl: Voluntary Servitude, Social Construction, and Predictive Processing
Values and attitudes resisting revision despite counter-evidence and systematically occurring in virtue of structures of domination are often called false consciousness. Unfortunately, the mainstream of anglophone philosophy has paid little attention to analysing this concept. This is partly due to a puzzle pertaining to the false consciousness of the dominated, which de la Boétie calls 'voluntary servitude': why do members of dominated social groups have values and attitudes that are against their own interests?
The trouble is that many members of dominated social groups do in fact actively maintain false consciousness by themselves—sometimes involving highly abstract and nuanced attitudes (e.g. female anti-suffragists and U. S. alt-right women leaders).
In this paper, we argue that the development and persistence of false consciousness is to be explained by the stable—though ultimately socio-historical—nature of the relevant objects of those attitudes. Members of dominated social groups mistake a certain socially objectified understanding of themselves as natural self-understanding, due to what Ian Hacking calls the looping effect (social classifications shaping behaviours that reinforce them) and the historical stabilisation of a pre-existing, initially non-ideological, structure of domination.
But the mechanisms of 'naturalisation' and 'looping' in attitude-formation and maintenance require demystification. For this, we turn to how predictive processing (PP) understands the brain to move from sensory evidence to knowledge of its environmental causes. That is, in attempting to predict patterns in the former, the brain forms a model that comes to match the structure of the latter. Attitudes about the world are instantiated by the parameters of this model and they are maintained (or revised) in virtue of their predictive success (or failure). Confronted with an observation (e.g. the lack of women in leadership positions), prior knowledge involving the greater probability of more parsimonious explanations may bias the system towards the simpler hypothesis (e.g. 'women are incompetent') over one that posits a complex nexus of socio-historical causes for the same.
Although overly simple, or outright false, attitudes may often be formed, the driving principle behind PP is that the incorrect predictions these attitudes generate would tend to lead to the latter's revision or abandonment. This does not occur with attitudes in voluntary servitude because, for PP, action is self-prediction: we model ourselves as an agent, and we act as we predict an agent like us would do. Thus, PP provides an explanatory mechanism for the looping effect. A prior that 'woman are incompetent' influences an individual's expectations and interpretations not only of other women's behaviour, but also of her own—biasing her to predict, and so behave accordingly. Observation of such behaviour by other women confirms the predictions made by the hypothesis of female incompetence, increasing its strength ergo its influence on their own behaviour. Thus, naturalisation occurs when the very existence of that prior attitude within a group creates a pernicious niche in which said attitude's predictive success makes its acceptance as a stable part of one's environment rational.
Zhiyu Luo (St Andrews): Sympathetic Feeling as the Medium of Duty: Rethinking Kant's Duty of Sympathy
In the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant divides duties of love into three categories: duties of beneficence, of gratitude, and of Teilnehmung, which is commonly referred to as sympathy. The traditional interpretation of the third duty of love tends to understand it as an obligation to utilize our natural receptivity to sympathetic feelings as a means to fulfilling the other duties of love, particularly the duty of beneficence, and an indirect duty to cultivate these feelings. An upshot of this reading is that the duty of sympathy is generally considered to be only instrumental in, and thus secondary to, the duty of beneficence. However, Melissa Fahmy (2009) forcefully argues that this account greatly underestimates the scope and value of Kant's duty of sympathy. She stresses that the duty of sympathy is a direct duty of "active sympathetic participation" with others, which is served by the indirect duty to cultivate our natural sympathetic feelings and consists in the expression of the cultivated sympathetic feelings through various forms of communication.
In this paper I will follow the lead of Fahmy in construing the duty of Teilnehmung as a duty of active sympathetic participation, but refine her account on the relationship between the aforementioned direct and indirect duties. I argue that cultivation is not necessarily temporally prior to communication as Fahmy thinks; rather, their relationship is to be characterized as mutually informing, since communication of sympathetic feelings not only resultantly betrays the cultivated sympathetic feelings, but also enriches and intensifies these feelings as one becomes clearer about their content in the process of fulfilling the duty in practice. It will emerge from this discussion that sympathetic feeling is to be construed as a medium through which the representation of duty is naturally expressed in practice. This conception of sympathetic feeling, I argue, is consistent with Kant's long-held insistence on the purity of motivation from duty, and also better explains than Sherman's (1997) purely epistemic account why Kant understands sympathetic feeling as an "impulse" (Antrieb) that moves us to do what the representation of duty alone would not accomplish.
Teresa Baron (Southampton): Billie (Gene) Is Not My Mother: Defining Biological Parenthood
The concept of biological parenthood is one which we take for granted on a daily basis. While would-be adoptive parents, for example, have to jump through dozens of legal hoops, law and social custom give automatic primacy to the biological parents of a child in the distribution of rights and responsibilities. Similarly, philosophers have given much time and thought to debates over moral and legal parenthood, and how parental rights and responsibilities are acquired, but have (for the most part) continued to take for granted the notion of biological parenthood, often arguing that biological parenthood gives rise to special rights over children, or obligations towards them. However, as new reproductive technologies and practices disaggregate the genetic and gestational elements of procreation, and we begin to hypothesize further divisions, the possible combinations and permutations of reproductive roles increase in number. We should therefore turn our attention to the question: what is a biological parent?
A notion of biological parenthood as being encompassed by genetic parenthood (gamete contribution) has been defended by several theorists, and has been taken up increasingly by advocates for reproductive technologies such as gestational surrogacy. In this paper, I argue that arguments for geneticism are unjustified, as the characteristics of genetic parenthood deemed significant by geneticists are present (albeit in different ways) in gestation. I suggest a definition of biological parenthood based on conditions of efficient causation and material overlap, allowing us to answer the question of how to ascribe biological parenthood in those situations in which the genetic and gestational maternal roles in reproduction are disaggregated.
Maria-Jose Pietrini-Sanchez (Sheffield): A Case of the Unenforceability of Surrogacy Contracts: Can Unilateral Contracts Integrate Autonomy-Respecting Surrogacy Agreements?
Most people think that 'contracts are contracts' and must be fulfilled; therefore, the contracting parties must keep their promises. Many people may think that whether the contract should be enforceable or not depends largely on whether it is morally valid. However, some types of agreements question these assumptions. In this document, I argue that some contracts require to be unenforceable to be legally and morally valid. To show this, I explore the case of surrogacy contracts. Surrogacy is a complex and controversial practice that poses the question of whether it should be in a moral category different from other commercial transactions. The fact that surrogacy involves pregnancies and babies gives rise to many pressing issues that question the suitability of contracts as the framework that should govern these transactions. However, I argue that contract law has room to accommodate morally valid surrogacy agreements and avoid the implication that a specific performance ought to be imposed.
I discuss Cécile Fabre's (2006) model of surrogacy contracts as unenforceable, specifically in its form of unilateral contracts. In the first part, I argue that Fabre's model brings light to how a compelling case in favour of autonomy-respecting surrogacy contracts could be built. In the second part, I argue that some modifications to typical unilateral contracts can be enough to accommodate (i) the surrogates' right to control of what happens to and with their reproductive capacities, and (ii) the surrogates' right to keep the children. The main focus of the paper is on commercial contractual surrogacy. Whether or not the surrogate is genetically connected with the child, is irrelevant to my argument.