*Indicates a student co-author.
Basu, Rima. “Syllabus Design and World-Making.” The Art of Teaching Philosophy, edited by Brynn Welch. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, pp. 41-48.
Abstract: There are many commonalities between the framework of roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons and the way in which we design classes and assignments. The professor (the dungeon master) selects a number of readings with some end goal in mind (the campaign). Along the way the students are expected to be active participants (roleplay) and the professor designs progressively harder assignments (quests) in order to test the students' abilities and to promote learning and growth (leveling up). This structural analogy prompted me to investigate how such a framework could be implemented more explicitly in a class, and in this chapter I describe how I did so.
Basu, Rima. “The Challenges of Thick Diversity, Polarization, Debiasing, and Tokenization for Cross-Group Teaching: Some Critical Notes." NOMOS LXVI: Civic Education in Polarized Times, edited by Eric Beerbohm and Elizabeth Beaumont. NYU Press, 2024, pp. 175-192.
Abstract: The powerful role that teachers can play in our development is the focus of Binyamin, Jayusi, and Tamir's chapter in this volume. They argue that teachers, in particular teachers that don't share the same background as their students, can help counter the increasing polarization that characterizes our current era. In these critical notes I raise three challenges to their proposal. First, by exploring the mechanisms of polarization I demonstrate that polarization is not a problem unique to thick diversity or thick multiculturalism. Second, the central premise of the authors' proposal rests on the ability of greater contact to reduce prejudice. The contact hypothesis, however, has numerous backlash effects and unintended consequences that can increase prejudice rather than reduce prejudice. These backlash effects and unintended consequences raise serious doubts for the success of placing minority teachers in majority classrooms to reduce prejudice. Third, I raise concerns about how the proposal tokenizes minority teachers, the use of instrumental rationales for diversity, and the politics of deference and being-in-the-room privilege that also go unaddressed in their proposal.
External Grant: Basu, Rima. NEH Summer Program Stipend for Moral Psychology, Cornell University.
Hurley, Paul. Against the Tyranny of Outcomes. Oxford University Press, 2024.
Abstract: Outcomes tyrannize over prevailing accounts of ethics, actions, reasons, attitudes, and social practices. The right action promotes the best outcome, the end of every action is an outcome to be promoted, reasons to act are reasons to promote outcomes, and preferences and desires rationalize actions that aim at the outcome of realizing their contents--making their contents true. The case for this tyranny turns on a related set of counterintuitive outcome-centered interpretations of deeply intuitive claims that it is always right to do what's best, that every action brings about an outcome, and that the good is prior to the right. The ethical case for consequentialism elides the distinction between these claims in each case, allowing the counter-intuitive interpretations to hijack the plausibility of the intuitively plausible counterparts. This ethical hijacking has succeeded in large part because a conflation between two different senses of bringing about, and an assumption that all non-deontic value rationales for action are outcome-centered, are thoroughly entrenched at the non-ethical level as well. The "neutral" framework of reasons, actions, and attitudes within which we frame the ethical debate begs the question in favor of a consequentialist resolution of the debate, providing a non-ethical argument for outcome-centered ethics. To expose this conflation and this unwarranted assumption, then, is to undermine the case for these default outcome-centered accounts of reasons, actions, and attitudes as well, and in doing so to expose a subtle but pernicious shift from looking directly at oneself, one's reasons, the values they reflect, one's actions, and the practices in which one is involved, to looking at these same things as if in a fun house mirror--the recognizable features are there, but subtly, profoundly distorted, often beyond recognition.
Hurley, Paul. “Paradox of Deontology.” International Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2024.
Abstract: Intuitively, it is wrong to kill even to prevent two other people from killing. Consequentialists have argued that reflection on such moral restrictions engenders an air of paradox: how can it be morally wrong to lie or kill if by doing so I prevent more lyings and killings? The air of paradox arises because the persisting intuitive appeal of such restrictions is called into question by the attempt to explain their deep intuitive appeal. The threat of paradox can be dissipated by demonstrating either that the intuitive appeal of such restrictions dissipates on reflection, or by showing that there is after all a plausible theoretical explanation for them. Both consequentialists and their opponents have recently offered theoretical explanations supporting such restrictions. Consequentialist strategies propose either shifting the focal point of evaluations away from actions to rules or motives, or refining the standpoints from which the outcomes to be promoted are ranked. Their critics argue that there are perfectly good, nonparadoxical explanations of such restrictions through appeal to value, but that such explanations are elided from view by the assumption, built into the case for paradox, that any such appeal to the value must be an appeal to the value of outcomes to be promoted. Reject the consequentialist's outcome-centered constraint on value, they argue, and plausible explanations are readily available for why it is much worse to violate such a restriction even though the outcome of doing so would in some sense be better.
Johnson, Gabbrielle M. “Varieties of Bias.” Philosophy Compass, vol. 19, issue 7, July 2024.
Abstract: The concept of bias is pervasive in both popular discourse and empirical theorizing within philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This widespread application threatens to render the concept too heterogeneous and unwieldy for systematic investigation. This article explores recent philosophical literature attempting to identify a single theoretical category—termed ‘bias’—that could be unified across different contexts. To achieve this aim, the article provides a comprehensive review of theories of bias that are significant in the fields of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, machine learning, and epistemology. It focuses on key examples such as perceptual bias, implicit bias, explicit bias, and algorithmic bias, scrutinizing their similarities and differences. Although these explorations may not conclusively establish the existence of a natural theoretical kind, pursuing the possibility offers valuable insights into how bias is conceptualized and deployed across diverse domains, thus deepening our understanding of its complexities across a wide range of cognitive and computational processes.
Johnson, Gabbrielle M. “The (Dis)unity of Psychological (Social) Bias.” Philosophical Psychology, vol. 37, no. 6, 2024, pp. 1349-1377.
Abstract: This paper explores the complex nature of social biases, arguing for a functional framework that recognizes their unity and diversity. The functional approach posits that all biases share a common functional role in overcoming underdetermination. This framework, I argue, provides a comprehensive understanding of how all psychological biases, including social biases, are unified. I then turn to the question of disunity, demonstrating how psychological social biases differ systematically in the mental states and processes that constitute them. These differences indicate that biases at various levels of the cognitive architecture require distinct treatment along at least two dimensions: epistemic evaluation and mitigation strategies. By examining social biases through this dual lens of unity and diversity, we can more effectively identify when and how to intervene on problematic biases. Ultimately, this approach provides a nuanced understanding of the nature of social bias, offering practical guidance for addressing existing biases and proactively managing emerging biases in both human and artificial minds.
Alter, Torin, Amy Kind, and Robert J. Howell. Philosophy of Mind: Fifty Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments. Routledge, 2024.
Abstract: Imaginative cases, or what might be called puzzles and other thought experiments, play a central role in philosophy of mind. The real world also furnishes philosophers with an ample supply of such puzzles. This volume collects 50 of the most important historical and contemporary cases in philosophy of mind and describes their significance. The authors divide them into five sections: consciousness and dualism; physicalist theories and the metaphysics of mind; content, intentionality, and representation; perception, imagination, and attention; and persons, personal identity, and the self. Each chapter provides background, describes a central case or cases, discusses the relevant literature, and suggests further readings. Philosophy of Mind: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments promises to be a useful teaching tool as well as a handy resource for anyone interested in the area.
Kind, Amy. “Accuracy in imagining.” Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, vol. 5, June 2024.
Abstract: Recent treatments of imagination have increasingly treated imagining as a skill. Insofar as imaginative accuracy is one of the factors that underwrites this skill, it is important to understand what it means to say that an imagining is accurate. This paper takes up that task. The discussion proceeds in four parts. First, I address two worries that may naturally arise about the coherence of the notion of imaginative accuracy. Second, with those worries addressed, I turn to an exploration of what is meant by imaginative accuracy. My discussion relies on two key points: first, that accuracy is best understood in terms of aim; and second, that imaginings aim at the representation of fictional states of affairs. I call this line of thought the fictionality approach. Third, I look more closely at six different types of imaginings in an effort to develop and clarify the fictionality approach. Finally, I turn to what I call the calibration objection. Given the nature of imagination, there seems to be no way to calibrate one’s judgments of imaginative accuracy. After showing how much of the force of the calibration objection can be defused, I offer some brief concluding remarks.
Kind, Amy. “The impoverishment problem.” Synthese, vol. 203, no. 120, 2024.
Abstract: Work in philosophy of mind often engages in descriptive phenomenology, i.e., in attempts to characterize the phenomenal character of our experience. Nagel’s famous discussion of what it’s like to be a bat demonstrates the difficulty of this enterprise (1974). But while Nagel located the difficulty in our absence of an objective vocabulary for describing experience, I argue that the problem runs deeper than that: we also lack an adequate subjective vocabulary for describing phenomenology. We struggle to describe our own phenomenal states in terms we ourselves find adequately expressive. This paper aims to flesh out why our phenomenological vocabulary is so impoverished – what I call the impoverishment problem. As I suggest, this problem has both practical and philosophical import. After fleshing out the problem in more detail, I draw some suggestive morals from the discussion in an effort to point the way forward towards a solution.
Kind, Amy. “Delusion and Imagination.” The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Delusion, edited by Ema Sullivan-Bissett. Routledge, 2024, pp. 324-335.
Abstract: In light of various challenges to the doxastic conception of delusion that treats delusional states as false beliefs, several philosophers have recently suggested that we should instead treat such states as imaginings. This chapter explores this alternative conception of delusion, what I refer to as the imagination model. In order to understand this model, it is necessary first to understand what imagination is and how it differs from other mental states like belief. Providing such an understanding is the task of Part II. In Part III, I turn to the imagination model itself. In addition to clarifying the core commitments of the theory, I also consider two prominent versions of it, one that has been developed primarily by Gregory Currie (2000) and one that has been developed primarily by Shaun Gallagher (2009). With these two versions of the imagination model before us, we are also well positioned to see the advantages this model has over the belief model. In the final section of the paper, Part IV, I explore some common criticisms directed at the imagination model. At the heart of these criticisms is the charge that proponents of the imagination model have misconstrued the nature of belief and the way that it differs from imagination. As I argue, none of these criticisms is wholly successful.
Kind, Amy. “Contrast or Continuum? The Case of Belief and Imagination.” Belief, Imagination, and Delusion, edited by Ema Sullivan-Bissett. Oxford University Press, 2024.
Abstract: Though philosophers have traditionally treated imagination and belief as distinct kinds of mental states, this orthodoxy has recently been challenged. According to what we might call the continuum hypothesis, imagination and belief should be seen as lying on a continuum, with at least some of the intermediary states along this continuum best thought of as imagination-belief hybrids. In this paper, I review the case for the continuum hypothesis. After setting out the philosophical consensus that is challenged by the continuum hypothesis, I turn to a consideration of the hypothesis itself and I attempt to clarify more precisely what exactly it amounts to. As we will see, there are really two different views on offer: what I will call the cluster view and the continuum view. Focusing in on the continuum view, l look more specifically at two arguments that have been offered in defense of it. As I will suggest, the case that has been offered is not nearly as strong as its defenders would have us believe. Finally, in the last section I attempt to draw out some morals from our discussion and briefly point the way forward.
Kind, Amy. “Imagination, society, and the self.” Imagination and Experience, edited by Íngrid Vendrell Ferran and Christiana Werner. Routledge, 2024, pp. 369-387.
Abstract: In this chapter, I explore the way that self-imaginings can be negatively influenced by the society in which we live and, in particular, how societal factors work to constrain our imaginings of ourselves and our futures. Because the range of possibilities that we are presented with are too often limited and constrained, societal interactions can serve to stultify our imaginations, that is, to hinder our ability to imagine different experiences for ourselves. Rather than opening up new options, the pressures and norms imposed by society can often serve to foreclose them – or, even worse, to keep them entirely invisible. By focusing on two different types of imaginings where social influences are especially in play, I am able to flesh out some of the ways that social norms and pressures constrain imagination. I then offer an explanation of socially constrained imaginings in terms of the notion of imaginative rigidity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of three complementary strategies that we can use to combat imaginative rigidity and a consideration of some specific, real-world examples where we can see the results of such strategies.
Kind, Amy. “Argumente für eine fertigkeitsbasierte Theorie der Imagination,” (“The Case for a Skills-Based Framework for Imagination”). Geist und Imagination, edited by Serena Gregorio, Gerson Reuter, Matthias Vogel, and Christiana Werner. 55-85. Suhrkamp, 2024, pp. 55-85.
Abstract: This paper aims to make a comprehensive case for adopting a skills-based framework when theorizing about imagination. My discussion proceeds in three parts. First, I lay out in more detail what it means to treat imagination as a skill. Second, I take up several common objections to the claim that imagination is a skill and aim to show why they are mistaken. Third, I discuss some philosophical payoffs to treating imagination as a skill. In particular, I show how we are able to make progress on two philosophical puzzles: the puzzle of imaginative resistance and the puzzle of transformative choice. Finally, in some short concluding remarks, I draw out a more general moral about how the adoption of a skills-based framework can have important import for philosophical methodology.
Kind, Amy. “Personal Identity: A Debate between Sydney Shoemaker and Hywel Lewis.” Open University Digital Archive, 2024.
Kind, Amy. “What Counts as Cheating? Deducibility, Imagination, and the Mary Case.” Philosophia, vol. 52, 2024, pp. 211-220.
Abstract: In The Matter of Consciousness, in the course of his extended discussion and defense of Frank Jackson’s famous knowledge argument, Torin Alter dismisses some objections on the grounds that they are cases of cheating. Though some opponents of the knowledge argument offer various scenarios in which Mary might come to know what seeing red is like while still in the room, Alter argues that the proposed scenarios are irrelevant. In his view, the Mary case is offered to defend the claim that phenomenal facts cannot be a priori deduced from physical facts. Thus, a proposed scenario constitutes an objection to the knowledge argument only if it presents a case in which Mary’s learning inside the room comes about via a priori deduction from physical facts. Call this the deducibility standard. In what follows, I’ll explore a series of relevant cases in an effort to clarify this standard. Doing so enables us to better understand how cheating should be assessed in this context and thereby also to get clearer on the argumentative dialectic surrounding the Mary case.
Kind, Amy. “How to think about consciousness from a philosophical viewpoint.” Psyche, 2024.
Abstract: What is it like to be you? Dive into the philosophical puzzle of consciousness and see yourself and the world in new ways.
Kreines, James. “True Purposes and an Outstanding Problem of Purposiveness in Hegel.” Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy, vol. 43, no. 2, 2024, pp. 161-187.
Abstract: This paper focuses on Hegel’s claim that purposiveness or teleology is, in his unusual terminology, “the truth of” mechanism. First, I defend several important insights about this from Maraguat’s book, True Purposes in Hegel’s Logic. Second, I argue that what follows from these insights is that there is an outstanding problem about Hegel’s account of teleology, not solved in this book, or other recent work on the topic; I conclude with reason to expect that a solution would have to involve a radically idealist account of teleology.
Kreines, James. “Schelling's Critique of Hegel: Options and Responses, in the Spirit of Highlighting Shared Insights.” Society for German Idealism and Romanticism, vol. 7, 2024, pp. 26-40.
Abstract: The late Schelling offers an important philosophical critique of Hegel. In this paper, I consider the critique, and options for Hegelian reply. But I do not consider this in the spirit of a zero-sum contest. The point is rather that it is worth exploring both sides of the conflict in ways that, together, support the philosophical importance of this period of philosophy. Here I take as a partner the explanation and defense of Schelling's critique in Dews' Schelling's Late Philosophy in Confrontation with Hegel. I offer the Schellingian some different options, for how to pursue and develop the philosophical problem for Hegel; and I suggest and defend Hegelian replies to each.
Locke, Dustin. “The Clear and Concise AF Assignment: A Quick and Effective Way to Teach Basic Writing Skills.” The Art of Teaching Philosophy: Reflective Values and Concrete Practices, edited by Brynn Welch. Bloomsbury, 2024.
Abstract: This paper describes an assignment that quickly and effectively teaches students how to write papers that are clear, concise, academic, and focused ('clear and concise af'). The assignment is inspired by the mastery learning approach to education, wherein (1) students are asked to learn certain basic skills before taking on advanced tasks and (2) students are given clear feedback as to whether and when they have sufficiently mastered the basic skills. The assignment prepares students to write philosophical essays that are rewarding for them to write and enjoyable for their instructors to grade.
Obdrzalek, Suzanne. “Platonic Dualism Reconsidered.” Phronesis, vol. 69, no. 1, 2024, pp. 31-62.
Abstract: I argue that in the Phaedo, Plato maintains that the soul is located in space and is capable of locomotion and of interacting with the body through contact. Numerous interpreters have dismissed these claims as merely metaphorical, since they assume that as an incorporeal substance, the soul cannot possess spatial attributes. But careful examination of how Plato conceives of the body throughout his corpus reveals that he does not distinguish it from the soul in terms of spatiality. Furthermore, assigning spatial attributes to the soul plays an important role in Plato’s account of the relation of body and soul.
Rajczi, Alex. The Art Experience: An Introduction to Philosophy and the Arts. Routledge, 2024.
Abstract: The Art Experience: An Introduction to Philosophy and the Arts is a 90,000-word book that guides readers through some of the most critical issues in the philosophy of art. The book has three parts: The first part asks about the difference between art and other things. This is a real-life issue that comes up when we see a very strange work – maybe a painting that is just a solid blue canvas – and wonder: is that really art? Having the right definition of art also helps us decide whether all art has some special purpose or important value. The second part asks how we should understand art and get the most out of it. Has some great art been overlooked? How should we open our minds to art? How should we interpret art once we have experienced it? The last part is about evaluating art. What makes one artwork better than another? Can those opinions be right or wrong, or are they just a matter of personal taste?
Many books about philosophy of art seem to be unnecessarily lacking in diversity – they don’t discuss the work of diverse authors, and they don’t ask whether traditional approaches to the philosophy of art are in some way biased. These are vital topics for the current era, and my book addresses them. For instance, the book discusses Ajume Wingo’s writings about Nso art, bell hooks’s theory of the “oppositional gaze,” and Linda Nochlin’s work on women and the artistic canon.
Shalowitz, David I. and Alex Rajczi. “Refining research on access to gynecologic cancer care: The DIMeS framework.” Gynecologic Oncology, vol. 188, September 2024, pp. 158-161.
Abstract: Substantial progress has been made in the standards of care for patients with gynecologic cancers: advances in medical and surgical care have unquestionably improved survival and decreased treatment-related morbidity. However, these advances are not available to all who need them. As a result, the concept of “access to care” has become a hot-button topic in health disparities research, and it has also become a focus for health systems and professional organizations committed to improving health equity. Importantly, there is no consensus definition of access to care, and several fundamental philosophical questions about access remain unanswered. Conceptual clarity about access is critical to interventional research designed to develop and test methods of correcting barriers to access. In this article, we propose a systematic framework for empirical research in access to gynecologic cancer care. In doing so, we engage fundamental philosophical questions about access to health care, and after doing so, we provide a working framework to guide cancer researchers in identifying and correcting inequities. The results are generalizable: the framework proposed can be used in other areas of health research as well.
Toole, Briana. “Standpoint Epistemology and Epistemic Peerhood: A Defense of Epistemic Privilege.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 10, no. 3, 2024, pp. 409-426.
Abstract: Standpoint epistemology is committed to the view that some epistemic advantage can be drawn from the position of powerlessness. Call this the epistemic privilege thesis. This thesis stands in need of explication and support. In providing that explication and support, I first distinguish between two readings of the thesis: the thesis that marginalized social locations confer some epistemic advantages (the epistemic advantage thesis) and the thesis that marginalized standpoints generate better, more accurate knowledge (the standpoint thesis). I then develop the former by appealing to the notion of epistemic peers available in the disagreement literature. I next turn to the latter thesis, arguing that consciousness-raising plays an analogous role in the achievement of a standpoint as training does in the achievement of expertise. The upshot of this analysis is that it clarifies that while marginalization is necessary (though not sufficient) for epistemic advantage, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for epistemic privilege.