Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

According to presentism, only what is present exists. According to eternalism, all past, present and future things exist. Hence, in presentism, although there was pain, past pain does not exist. In contrast, in eternalism, it is not only the case that there was pain; past pain exists. Given the intrinsic obnoxiousness of pain, presentism is therefore morally or existentially more desirable that eternalism. An argument along these lines has been proposed by Orilia and several objections to it have been put forward. A dialogue between a presentist who defends the…

Jack Spencer has recently argued that somebody might be able to do the impossible.  In response, Anthony Nguyen has argued against Spencer’s arguments. In this paper, I do not argue against Spencer’s arguments. Instead, I argue directly against Spencer’s thesis. In the first part of my paper, I develop an argument that suggests that it is implausible that somebody is able to do the impossible (because somebody who is able to do the impossible would be able to do something that would have incredible consequences). In the second part of…

Fictional characters may raise serious troubles about their identity even within one and the same story. Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, for instance, depicts a world pretty much like ours, in which there seems to be no indeterminate identity, yet leaves it open whether the Shade character is the same as the Kinbote character. On the contrary, in Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, there seems to be two characters, Kumiko and the Woman in the hotel room, that are indeterminately identical. Worse still, there are also cases of inconsistent identity: in…

In this text I intend to show to what extent a certain epistemological understanding of psychoanalysis (fundamentally Freudian) finds parallels with the so-called liberalization process of epistemological naturalism. My thesis is that the sui generis epistemological modalities created by Freud not only coincide with this process, but to a significant degree were precursors of the methodological and ontological innovations that LN (liberal naturalism) proposes to defend and theorize. I begin by reviewing the process of liberalization of epistemic naturalism, from a predominantly physicalist model to a liberal version that takes…

In this paper, I show how a pragmatist stance may address the problem of the resolvability of moral conflicts. Pragmatism challenges skeptical and relativist views by arguing that moral conflict resolution is possible via inquiry and exchange of reasons. From a normative standpoint, pragmatism also differs from utilitarian and deontological views, according to which a specific moral theory is correct in every context. From a pragmatist point of view, both utilitarian and deontological responses can be justified, depending on contextual conditions and reasons, on the people to whom reasons are…

Naïve Realism has become increasingly popular as a theory about veridical perceptions. At the heart of this view is the idea that conscious perceptions are relational events, in which mind-independent aspects of the environment are actual constituents of the experience. Despite its growing popularity, several aspects of the naïve realist proposal regarding the nature of veridical perception and its phenomenal character remain unclear. Naïve Realists sometimes disagree on some of their central claims or have yet to fully articulate their commitments on key aspects of the view. In this paper,…

Recent research shows that the inappropriate use of race and ethnicity in healthcare leads to poor patient outcomes. Contemporaneous work shows that accounting for inequalities caused by discrimination often requires the use of race and ethnicity as variables that are mediated in their effects by discrimination along those dimensions of identity and/or classification. This suggests that the appropriateness of using racial and ethnic group descriptors depends on context. This paper explores some contexts in which the use of racial and ethnic group descriptors may be appropriate, and the limitations thereof.…

This article investigates Katalyn Farkas’s notion of privileged access as a criterion to distinguish the mental from the physical. Farkas argues that a state is mental if and only if its subject has a special kind of awareness of it, that is, if it has a unique subjective dimension. I compare this notion with Rorty’s view that the mental can be characterized by incorrigibility, that is, being immune to third-person errors. I claim that the two notions are related but both have difficulties in accounting for the variety and intricacy…

Debates over the use of racial categories in medicine have, thus far, been largely focused on cases and considerations occurring in the United States. However, race is used in medical settings in many places outside the US. I argue that the US focus leads to important limitations in our ability to understand and intervene on issues of race in medicine in other areas of the world. I draw on work from metaphysics of race debates to indicate why transnational continuities and discontinuities in race present a problem for US focused…

The topic of the relationship between transhumanism and posthumanism is one that has received very little attention over the years. These two quickly growing schools of thought display a rather odd combination of similarities and differences that can make them appear both as completely independent and unrelated, or as heavily connected variations of the same idea. However, only a few attempts have been made at examining how they really correlate to each other. As such, in this article I will attempt to provide an analysis of both transhumanism and posthumanism,…