Philosophy

Goran Bregovic, who played a huge role in familiarizing the world with Balkan music, is simultaneously the most lauded and the most criticized Balkan musician of today. His image as a cosmopolite and an authentic composer is undermined by accusations of cultural appropriation, contamination of tradition, and capitalist exploitation. In this paper, I want to place the debate around his music within a theoretical framework of the Balkan Studies, and defend Bregovic against those allegations. I argue that Bregovic’s self-orientalization and stereotypization is a symptom of his heritage of self-colonization, which he uses as a mechanism promoting international cultural exchange.

Gadamer in Truth and Method developed a conception of understanding that was meant to solve the problem of non-scientific knowledge: how do we obtain knowledge through our experience of art? In this paper, I focus on Gadamer’s concept of dialogue. He believes that we can obtain true knowledge from artworks in a similar way we can discover truth in the course of a dialogue, whose parties’ goal is to reach an agreement on its subject matter. I argue that Gadamer’s dialogue analogy is compelling, because it captures some truths about the nature of our understanding (primarily that understanding is historical and depends on the situation of the subject) and justifies our knowledge in multiple cases (i.e. explains why one believes that one’s understanding is true). However, it fails to explain how to distinguish understanding from misunderstanding, because Gadamer’s account of truth, which results from the analogy, is too permissive and almost excludes the possibility of misunderstanding. Furthermore, although Gadamer posits his account not as a normative, but as a purely descriptive theory, he nevertheless attempts to prescribe some normative qualities to it, claiming that the logic of the dialogue is the right way of approaching a text (in the broader sense). At the same time, Gadamer’s theory denies itself means to argue in its own support and when employed as a method of inquiry, it becomes self-contradictory.

In Being and Time Heidegger had not yet fully developed his views on language into a complete conception, but one can already notice here the traces of what is going to be developed in his later works. In this paper I collect Heidegger’s comments on language and discourse scattered throughout the book and argue that the distinction he makes between the two provides crucial foundations for the argument of the whole book. While it is more or less clear what Heidegger means by discourse, his account of language is quite puzzling and requires further examination, but I argue in this paper that it is precisely language that allows Heidegger to make his claims about the fundamental characteristics of human Being. My interpretation indicates some tension existing between the concepts of language and discourse, which may be not easy to resolve.

In this paper, I evaluate Peter Kivy's "enhanced formalism" that posits musical emotions as formal musical qualities. I argue that his theory, considering all its merits, fails to account correctly for our musical experience, because it leaves out imagination as its key component.

The purpose of this note is to tidy up some matters concerning ascriptions of intention and the employment of the doctrine of double effect (henceforth DDE). I first argue that Jonathan Bennett’s efforts to show that DDE is a foolish doctrine are unsatisfactory. I then consider a puzzle of Mark Johnston’s that seems to pose a problem for the defender of DDE. I turn to possible solutions to the puzzle, criticize one, and then offer the one I find most appealing. I then show how my proposal for employing DDE enables it to make some distinctions between courses of conduct without issuing foolish pronouncements about moral permissibility.

Philosophers from Hart to Lewis, Johnston and Bennett have expressed various degrees of reservation concerning the doctrine of double effect. A common concern is that, with regard to many activities that double effect is traditionally thought to prohibit, what might at first look to be a directly intended bad effect is really, on closer examination, a directly intended neutral effect that is closely connected to a foreseen bad effect. This essay examines the extent to which the commonsense concept of intention supports a reasonably consistent and coherent application of double effect. Two important conclusions are these: (1) a number of traditionally proscribed activities involve a kind of “targeting” of innocents that can be taken to exhibit a direct intention to harm them; (2) a direct intention to harm need not involve a desire to harm in any ordinary sense of the latter expression.

This essay consists of some clarifying remarks on the doctrine of double effect (DDE). After providing a contemporary formulation of the doctrine we put special emphasis on the distinction between those aspects of an action plan that are intended and those that are merely foreseen (the I/F distinction). Making use of this distinction is often made difficult in practice because salient aspects of the action plan exhibit a felt “closeness” to one another that is difficult if not impossible to articulate with the precision we might like. The essay goes on to examine an especially adroit criticism of DDE best articulated by J.J. Thomson. We conclude with a brand new double effect case (new to the philosophical literature anyway) taken from medicine and Roman Catholic pastoral ministry.

This paper has two aims. First, I explore the scope and limitations of the doctrine of double effect (DDE) by focusing specifically on the notion of "effect classification." Turning my attention to some hard cases, I argue that the DOE has to be supplemented by additional principles that specify how effects are to be discriminated from one another and how the various aspects of the relevant actions are to be classified as intended or simply foreseen. Secondly, I draw some general lessons from this specific investigation of the DDE bearing on the way in which moral principles of this sort can be seen to function helpfully in moral reflection.

This paper consists of some remarks on sexual desire made against the backdrop of the properties theory of romantic love. After presenting a sketch of the properties theory it is suggested that most lovers want to be sexually desired in virtue of aspects of themselves that they can appreciate. In making this suggestion we are embracing an element of mindfulness or erotic thinking that ordinarily accompanies romantic sexuality. We go on to resist possible charges of egocentricity in the account and to illuminate some ways that the properties theory makes sense of problems relating to fungibility.

This paper consists of some remarks on sexual desire made against the backdrop of the properties theory of romantic love. After presenting a sketch of the properties theory it is suggested that most lovers want to be sexually desired in virtue of aspects of themselves that they can appreciate. In making this suggestion we are embracing an element of mindfulness or erotic thinking that ordinarily accompanies romantic sexuality. We go on to resist possible charges of egocentricity in the account and to illuminate some ways that the properties theory makes sense of problems relating to fungibility.

Some remarks on Anscombe's Thesis aka the Simple View and Bratman's Video Games case, together with a wide-ranging treatment of the relations between intending, acting intentionally, belief, and likelihood of success. Much of this material appeared in my PhD diss Essays on Ethics and Action (Princeton 1997).