Calendar

John Dewey, in his resistance to foundational individualism, declares that individual autonomy so conceived is a fiction; for Dewey, it is association that is a fact. In his own language: “There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate in association.” In a way that resonates with Confucian role ethics, the revolutionary Dewey particularizes the fact of associated living and valorizes it by developing a vision of the habitude of unique, defused, relationally-constituted human beings. That is, he develops a distinctive, if not idiosyncratic language of habits and “individuality” to describe the various modalities of association that enable human beings to add value to their activities and to transform mere relations into a communicating community.

In Confucian role ethics, Dewey’s contention that association is a fact is restated in a different vocabulary by appealing to specific roles rather than unique habitudes for stipulating the specific forms that association takes within lives lived in family and community—that is, the various roles we live as sons and teachers, grandmothers and neighbors. For Confucianism, not only are these roles descriptive of our associations, they are also prescriptive in the sense that roles in family and community are themselves normative, guiding us in the direction of appropriate conduct. Whereas for both Confucianism and Dewey, mere association is a given, flourishing families and communities are what we are able to make of our facticity as the highest human achievement.

Fordham Natural Law Colloquium

5:30-6:00 check in, 6:00-7:50 program

Location: Fordham Law School, Bateman 2-01B

Contact Michael Baur and Ben Zipursky for more information.

Contact John Drummond for more information.

In this paper, I explore the role that metaphor plays in the development of new scientific models. My goal is to illustrate metaphor’s fecundity in this regard, the way in which it extends our understanding in surprisingly diverse ways. As Mary Hesse put this point, “it is precisely in its extension that the fruitfulness of the model may lie” (1980, 114).

The particular focus of my paper is on the history of what John Haugeland called mind design: the use of mechanical models to reverse-engineer how minds work (1997, 1). My history focuses on two such models: the clockwork model and the computer model. In each case, I show how a metaphorical understanding of the model led to conceptual innovation in two distinct ways. First, it provided an interpretive frame that guided new research by offering an abstract, hypothesized structure to be later filled in by empirical research (Camp 2020). Second, it provided a concrete exemplar to contrast with human minds (Daston 1994). For instance, while on the one hand Descartes invoked the clockwork model to explain how color vision works (Adams 2015), he also invoked it as a vivid illustration of how human reasoning does not work (Riskin 2016).

It is this second source of conceptual innovation that is the real core of the paper; it reveals what I call the dialectic of mind design. This dialectic is especially evident in our tendency to redefine what it is to be human in response to new technological developments. For instance, it is evident when we take something that was previously assumed to be paradigmatic of mental acuity, such as the ability to play chess, and redefine it as something merely mechanical (Ensmenger 2012). But it is equally well evident when we take something that was previously taken to be mechanical—such as color vision—and redefine it as paradigmatically mental (Chalmers 1997; cf. Adams and Browning 2020). The concept of mindedness is, in this sense, a constantly moving goalpost that is perennially being redefined in response to new technological developments.

The importance of incorporating value pluralism into a theory of justice is recognized in many conceptualizations of justice. This pluralism is often seen as a reason to attend to a range of perspectives, perspectives which can function as a source of information in determining which principles should guide justice. However, philosophy’s ability to properly attend to different perspectives has received extensive attention in the criticisms of various non-ideal theorists, who argue that ideal-theoretical philosophy runs the risk of excluding important aspects of actual social problems. Taking these criticisms on board, this paper builds on non-ideal theory by arguing for a Wittgensteinian family resemblance approach to justice. I will explain how this linguistic practice-embedded understanding of justice can be a helpful tool for non-ideal theory, as it can give us insight into why, in various similar but different cases, the notion of justice is seen as applicable. In light of this approach, I will suggest a reorientation of the pluralist demand towards an empirical starting point.

Th 1/25/24: Kate Manne

Th 2/1/24: Scott Shapiro

Th 2/8/24: Ekow Yankah

Th 2/15/24: Tommie Shelby

Th 2/22/24 Gideon Rosen

Th 2/29/24: Sabeel Rahman

Th 3/7/24: Amy Sepinwall

Th 3/14/24: Erik Encarnacion

Th 3/21/24: Seyla Benhabib

Th 4/4/24: Amalia Amaya

Th 4/11/24: Debbie Hellman

Th 4/18/24: Mala Chatterjee

Th 4/25/24: Liam Murphy

Contact Aditi Bagchi: https://www.fordham.edu/school-of-law/faculty/directory/full-time/aditi-bagchi/

Th 1/25/24: Kate Manne

Th 2/1/24: Scott Shapiro

Th 2/8/24: Ekow Yankah

Th 2/15/24: Tommie Shelby

Th 2/22/24 Gideon Rosen

Th 2/29/24: Sabeel Rahman

Th 3/7/24: Amy Sepinwall

Th 3/14/24: Erik Encarnacion

Th 3/21/24: Seyla Benhabib

Th 4/4/24: Amalia Amaya

Th 4/11/24: Debbie Hellman

Th 4/18/24: Mala Chatterjee

Th 4/25/24: Liam Murphy

Contact Aditi Bagchi: https://www.fordham.edu/school-of-law/faculty/directory/full-time/aditi-bagchi/

Th 1/25/24: Kate Manne

Th 2/1/24: Scott Shapiro

Th 2/8/24: Ekow Yankah

Th 2/15/24: Tommie Shelby

Th 2/22/24 Gideon Rosen

Th 2/29/24: Sabeel Rahman

Th 3/7/24: Amy Sepinwall

Th 3/14/24: Erik Encarnacion

Th 3/21/24: Seyla Benhabib

Th 4/4/24: Amalia Amaya

Th 4/11/24: Debbie Hellman

Th 4/18/24: Mala Chatterjee

Th 4/25/24: Liam Murphy

Contact Aditi Bagchi: https://www.fordham.edu/school-of-law/faculty/directory/full-time/aditi-bagchi/