Volume 28, Issue 1

This article argues against the relevance of the enhancement/treatment and biomedical/non-biomedical enhancement distinctions by analysing their validity in two ways: their clarity and whether they track our intuitions regarding what is permissible and impermissible. The treatment/enhancement distinction is found to be deficient in both respects. The biomedical/non-biomedical distinction, whilst clear, does not track our intuitions regarding what is permissible and impermissible. The article concludes that, in order to help the enhancement medicine debate, the distinctions should be abandoned due to the fact they hinder clear ethical analysis.

The following considerations deal with a suggestion on how to conceive of knowledge of one’s own intentional doings as a kind of knowledge that is somehow infallible. The proposal discussed in this paper holds that there is no way to get the content of one’s own practical knowledge claim wrong but that we might err in ascribing practical knowledge to ourselves. The upshot of my argumentation will be the following: if we assert that conjunction, that is, if we adhere to the subject-content-disanalogy, as I will name it, we are faced with a dilemma. Therefore, it seems, the subject-content-disanalogy needs to be rejected. But, as will show up, rejecting it comes at high costs, too: to reject the subjectcontent- disanalogy forces us to equally reject at least one basal action theoretical insight we aim at accounting for

This paper concerns the Wishful Thinking Problem for non-cognitivism, which has recently been raised by Cian Dorr. Contrary to Dorr’s claim that the Wishful Thinking Problem is a new crucial objection to non-cognitivism in addition to the well-known Frege- Geach Problem, I argue that recent research has shown that the Wishful Thinking Problem is not independent of the Frege-Geach Problem and therefore it is not lethal to non-cognitivism. However, the Wishful Thinking Problem is still a problem for noncognitivism, for it reveals that the Frege-Geach Problem may be even more troublesome than non-cognitivists originally thought

In this paper I agree with both Ian Hacking and Victoria McGeer that the ‘Theory of Mind’ theory (ToM) is fundamentally flawed. However, I find reasons to reject both of their critiques of ToM as incoherent and instead build upon certain parts of McGeer’s work to develop my own rejection of ToM. I end by suggesting routes this rejection might take the philosophy of psychology down

Pritchard calls his epistemological disjunctivism ‘the holy grail of epistemology’. What this metaphor means is that the acceptance of this thesis puts the internalism-externalism debate to an end, thanks to satisfaction of intuitions standing behind both competing views. Simultaneously, Pritchard strongly emphasizes that the endorsement of epistemological disjunctivism does not commit one to metaphysical disjunctivism. In this paper I analyze the formulations and motivations of epistemological disjunctivism presented by Pritchard and McDowell. Then I consider the most common argument for the claim that epistemological disjunctivism can be held without the support of metaphysical disjunctivism. I conclude that the plausibility of epistemological disjunctivism depends on the plausibility of metaphysical disjunctivism. If the latter is false, the former postulates a set of conditions for epistemic justification that are impossible to be fulfilled.

Expressions belonging to the lexical fields of medicine and psychology recur repeatedly throughout Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings since the 1930s. He uses therapeutic vocabulary mostly in the context of metaphilosophical reflections, i.e. reflections about the activity of philosophizing. But how are we to understand such expressions? Even though some interpreters admit their metaphorical nature, the methodological background of using figurative language has hitherto been neglected concerning this matter. Here, I argue that Wittgensteinian therapy is what G. Lakoff and M. Johnson have termed a “structural metaphor”. Thus we do not only obtain a better understanding of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy, but also of the role metaphor use plays within his methodology. I shall try to show that he uses therapeutic metaphors (akin to pictorial elements) as argumentative and epistemological devices and thereby investigates the philosophically problematic expression ‘philosophy’ grammatically

The “model argument” against action-theories of causation is a reply to a strategy for avoiding the “argument of unmanipulable causes”. The critics follow the action-theorists in a certain shift of topic - leaving the explication debate towards one of justified assertion of causal claims - and end up at a wrong position concerning the role of practical knowledge for justifying causal claims about events that are not under technical control. Following them the justification would take the form of “analogy arguments“, which can not guarantee the truth of the conclusion in a non-circular way. Contrary to their position I present a reconstruction of causal inference in which practical knowledge about manipulation does play the role of a necessary condition for justifiying causal claims about unmanipulable relations