The Phenomenology of Kantian Respect for Persons

Emotions can be understood generally from two different perspectives: (i) a third-person perspective that specifies their distinctive functional role within our overall cognitive economy and (ii) a first-person perspective that attempts to capture their distinctive phenomenal character, the subjective quality of experiencing them. One emotion that is of central importance in many ethical systems is respect (in the sense of respect for persons or so-called recognition-respect). However, discussions of respect in analytic moral philosophy have tended to focus almost entirely on its functional role, in particular the behaviors that respect disposes us to engage in (or refrain from). Here we wish to investigate the phenomenal character of respect, what it is like to feel respect for persons. Since Kant is the reference point for modern discussions of respect, we try to reconstruct Kant’s account of the phenomenology of respect, but also endeavor to refine his account in light of our own phenomenological observations

Grammatical properties of pronouns and their representation : an exposition

This volume brings together a cross-section of recent research on the grammar and representation of pronouns, centering around the typology of pronominal paradigms, the generation of syntactic and semantic representations for constructions containing pronouns, and the neurological underpinnings for linguistic distinctions that are relevant for the production and interpretation of these constructions. In this introductory chapter we first give an exposition of our topic (section 2). Taking the interpretation of pronouns as a starting point, we discuss the basic parameters of pronominal representations, and draw a general picture of how morphological, semantic, discourse-pragmatic and syntactic aspects come together. In section 3, we sketch the different domains of research that are concerned with these phenomena, and the particular questions they are interested in, and show how the papers in the present volume fit into the picture. Section 4 gives summaries of the individual papers, and a short synopsis of their main points of convergence

A fresh look on the role of the second kind of knowledge in Spinoza’s Ethics

In this paper, through a close reading of Spinoza's use of common notions I argue for the role of experiential and experimental knowledge in Spinoza's epistemology

Social and Political Dimensions of Identity

We study the interior regularity of solutions to the Dirichlet problem Lu = g in Omega, u = 0 in R-nOmega, for anisotropic operators of fractional type Lu(x) = integral(+infinity)(0) dp integral(Sn-1) da(w) 2u(x) - u(x + rho w) - u(x - rho w)/rho(1+2s). Here, a is any measure on Sn-1 (a prototype example for L is given by the sum of one-dimensional fractional Laplacians in fixed, given directions). When a is an element of C-infinity(Sn-1) and g is c(infinity)(Omega), solutions are known to be C-infinity inside Omega (but not up to the boundary). However, when a is a general measure, or even when a is L-infinity(s(n-1)), solutions are only known to be C-3s inside Omega. We prove here that, for general measures a, solutions are C1+3s-epsilon inside Omega for all epsilon > 0 whenever Omega is convex. When a is an element of L-infinity(Sn-1), we show that the same holds in all C-1,C-1 domains. In particular, solutions always possess a classical first derivative. The assumptions on the domain are sharp, since if the domain is not convex and the measure a is singular, we construct an explicit counterexample for which u is not C3s+epsilon for any epsilon > 0 - even if g and Omega are C-infinity

The impossibility of sympathy

Copyright © 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of scholarly citation, none of this work may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. For information address the University of Pennsylvania Press, 3905 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112.This article questions the status of sympathy in eighteenth century studies. It argues that sympathy can be seen as an economy of two persistent idealizations: the untouchable—that touches everything. Tracing the genealogy of fellow feeling as a militant Puritan concept of exclusion that is still marked by its theological and political past, the sympathy advocated by Hutcheson, Hume and Smith appears as an idealization confronted by its own impossibility. The eighteenth century is a century in search of an absent and insufficient sympathy, a sympathy that is already preoccupied with its own limitations and excesses: a meta-discourse on sympathy still eludes us

A. Lincoln, Philosopher: Lincoln’s Place in 19th-Century Intellectual History

The nineteenth century in Europe and America was an era of second thoughts. Those second thoughts were largely about the Enlightenment, which had been born in the mid-1600s as a scientific revolution and blossomed into the Age of Reason in the 1700s, when it seemed that no puzzle was beyond the grasp of scientific rationality. That blossom was snipped all too quickly by the French Revolution, which drowned rationality in human politics in a spray of Jacobin-terrorized blood, then by the revulsion of European art and music from the Enlightenment’s canons of balance and symmetry in favor of the Romantic glorification of the sublime and the irrational, and finally by the rage and contempt that the Enlightenment’s most rationalized offspring—its bourgeois capitalist entrepreneurs, inventors, and managers—inspired in the hearts of intellectuals and aristocrats alike. This does not mean that the Enlightenment was herded off the scene entirely by the Romantic reaction. The scientists had dug themselves firmly into a position from which they refused to be dislodged, and the bourgeoisie of France and England continued their relentless struggle to wrest control of their nations’ politics from its nobles and emperors. So, there remained men and women of the nineteenth century who lashed themselves firmly to the mast of the Enlightenment, disregarding the sirens of Romantic passion in art and literature, as well as politics. And it is among the latter that we must classify Abraham Lincoln. [excerpt