Feminism in philosophy of language: communicative speech acts

Book synopsis: The thirteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume are written by philosophers at the forefront of feminist scholarship, and are designed to provide an accessible and stimulating guide to a philosophical literature that has seen massive expansion in recent years. Ranging from history of philosophy through metaphysics to philosophy of science, they encompass all the core subject areas commonly taught in anglophone undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses, offering both an overview of and a contribution to the relevant debates. Together they testify to the intellectual value of feminism as a radicalizing energy internal to philosophical inquiry. This volume will be essential reading for any student or teacher of philosophy who is curious about the place of feminism in their subject

Meaning and uselessness: how to think about derogatory words

Williams explains why there might have been some point to a linguistic approach in ethics. I suggest that there might be some point to paying attention to an ethical dimension in philosophy of language. I shall consider words that I label ‘derogatory’, and questions they raise about linguistic meaning

A Disjunctive Conception of Acting for Reasons

A disjunctivist conception of acting for reasons is introduced by way of showing that a view of acting for reasons must give a place to knowledge. Two principal claims are made. 1. This conception has a role analogous to that of the disjunctive conception that John McDowell recommends in thinking about perception; and when the two disjunctivist conceptions are treated as counterparts, they can be shown to have work to do in combination. 2. This conception of acting for reasons safeguards the connection between considerations that move us to act in particular ways and considerations that favour our acting in particular ways.Articl

Anomalousness in action

Book synopsis: The latest volume of the critically acclaimed Library of Living Philosophers series is devoted to the work of analytic philosopher Donald Davidson. Following the standard LLP format, Davidson discusses his life and philosophical development in an intellectual autobiography. This is followed by 31 critical essays by distinguished scholars; Davidson replies to each of these essays. Although Donald Davidson is considered an analytic philosopher, his thought straddles many areas of philosophy. One of his greatest contributions is the development of a philosophical system based on his theory of mind and language, but he has also worked on theory of action, philosophy of language, decision theory, psychology, epistemology, ethics, the concept of truth, and the concept of objectivity. Davidson is a former Carus Lecturer who has held more than twenty distinguished lectureships and research fellowships at universities in this country and abroad, including Queens College, Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Peru. He is currently professor emeritus at UC-Berkeley

Free speech and hate speech: language and rights

Book synopsis: Quasi ogni aspetto dell’esperienza umana sembra essere legato all’idea di normatività. Ma cosa sono le norme? Che cosa le giustifica? A chi, in quale misura e perché si applicano? Che rapporto hanno con i fatti e i valori? Questo volume (corredato di un’amplissima bibliografia) affronta tali questioni dal punto di vista della filosofia del linguaggio, della teoria della conoscenza, della morale, della filosofia del diritto e dell’azione

Agency and actions

Among philosophical questions about human agency, one can distinguish in a rough and ready way between those that arise in philosophy of mind and those that arise in ethics. In philosophy of mind, one central aim has been to account for the place of agents in a world whose operations are supposedly ‘physical’. In ethics, one central aim has been to account for the connexion between ethical species of normativity and the distinctive deliberative and practical capacities of human beings. Ethics then is involved with questions of moral psychology whose answers admit a kind of richness in the life of human beings from which the philosophy of mind may ordinarily prescind. Philosophy of mind, insofar as it treats the phenomenon of agency as one facet of the phenomenon of mentality, has been more concerned with how there can be ‘mental causation’ than with any details of a story of human motivation or of the place of evaluative commitments within such a story. This little account of the different agenda of two philosophical approaches to human agency is intended only to speak to the state of play as we have it, and it is certainly somewhat artificial. I offer it here as a way to make sense of attitudes to what has come to be known as the standard story of action. The standard story is assumed to be the orthodoxy on which philosophers of mind, who deal with the broad metaphysical questions, have converged, but it is held to be deficient when it comes to specifically ethical questions. Michael Smith, for instance, asks: ‘How do we turn the standard story of action into the story of ‘orthonomous action?’, where orthonomous action is action ‘under the rule of the right as opposed to the wrong’. Smith is not alone in thinking that the standard story is correct as far as it goes but lacks resources needed to accommodate genuinely ethical beings. Michael Bratman is another philosopher who has this thought; and I shall pick on Bratman’s treatment of human agency in due course

Agency and alienation

Book synopsis: Today the majority of philosophers in the English-speaking world adhere to the "naturalist" credos that philosophy is continuous with science, and that the natural sciences provide a complete account of all that exists--whether human or nonhuman. The new faith says science, not man, is the measure of all things. However, there is a growing skepticism about the adequacy of this complacent orthodoxy. This volume presents a group of leading thinkers who criticize scientific naturalism not in the name of some form of supernaturalism, but in order to defend a more inclusive or liberal naturalism. The many prominent Anglo-American philosophers appearing in this book--Akeel Bilgrami, Stanley Cavell, Donald Davidson, John Dupré, Jennifer Hornsby, Erin Kelly, John McDowell, Huw Price, Hilary Putnam, Carol Rovane, Barry Stroud, and Stephen White--do not march in lockstep, yet their contributions demonstrate mutual affinities and various unifying themes. Instead of attempting to force human nature into a restricted scientific image of the world, these papers represent an attempt to place human nature at the center of renewed--but still scientifically respectful--conceptions of philosophy and nature

Physicalism, conceptual analysis, and acts of faith

Frank Jackson and the author each take the other to hold a position in philosophy of mind that it is extremely difficult to sustain. This chapter tries to say something about how that can be. It seeks to demonstrate the sanity of Jackson's opponents and the fragility of his own position than to hold out for the truth of any particular doctrine. It wants to bring to the surface an assumption in ontology, which is seen as a crucial part of the grounding of Jackson's particular version of physicalism. Once it is appreciated that this assumption is contestable, Jackson's opponents may be seen in a different light from the one in which they appear in his writings. More generally, a connection will appear between the vast literature on physicalism as a topic in philosophy of mind and the equally vast literature on material constitution as a topic in metaphysics

Dealing with facts

This is a contribution to a symposium on Stephen Neale's Facing Facts. I bring to the discussion a different theory of facts from any Neale considers, and argue that it avoids flaws in Russell’s theory (Russell's being the only theory Neale finds defensible)

Knowledge how in philosophy of action

I maintain that an account of knowledge how to do something – an account which might be supposed to uncover ‘the nature’ of such knowledge – can't be got by considering what linguists tell us is expressed in ascriptions of knowing how. Attention must be paid to the knowledge that is actually being exercised when someone is doing something. I criticize some claims about ascriptions of knowledge-how which derive from contemporary syntactic and semantic theory. I argue that these claims can no more provide an understanding of what it is to intend to do something than of what it is to know how to do something. Philosophy, not linguistics, must be the source of such understanding