Philosophy

Because Levinas understands ethical response as a response to the radical alterity of the other, he contrasts it with justice, for which alterity becomes a question of equality. Drawing upon the practice of dependency work and the insights of feminist care ethics, I argue that the opposition between responding to another's singularity and leveling it via parity-based principles is belied in the experience of care. Through a hermeneutic phenomenology of caring for my post-stroke grandfather, I develop an account of dependency work as a material dialectic of embodied response involving moments of leveling, attention, and interruption. Contra much of response ethics’ and care ethics’ respective literatures, this dialectic suggests that they complement each other in ways that productively illuminate themes of each. I conclude by suggesting that when response and care ethics are thought together through the experience of dependency work, such labors produce finite responsibility with infinite hope.

Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) is a very rare condition describing those with an intense desire or need to move from a state of ability to relative impairment, typically through the amputation of one or more limbs. In this paper, I draw upon research in critical disability studies and philosophy of disability to critique arguments based upon the principle of nonmaleficence against such surgery. I demonstrate how the action-relative concept of harm in such arguments relies upon suspect notions of biological and statistical normality, and I contend that each fail to provide normative guidance. I then propose a critical theory of harm, one marked by substantive engagement with both empirical and reflective inquiry across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. I conclude by discussing implications of a critical theory of harm and how it might enrich ongoing debates in bioethics, philosophy of disability, and the health humanities more broadly.

An increasing number of scholars at the intersection of feminist philosophy and critical disability studies have turned to Merleau-Ponty to develop phenomenologies of disability or of what, following Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, I call "non-normate" embodiment. These studies buck the historical trend of philosophers employing disability as an example of deficiency or harm, a mere litmus test for normative theories, or an umbrella term for aphenotypical bodily variation. While a Merleau-Pontian-inspired phenomenology is a promising starting point for thinking about embodied experiences of all sorts, I here draw a cautionary tale about how ableist assumptions, implicit or explicit, can easily undermine accounts of non-normate experience. I first argue that the problematic treatment or omission of disability within the history of philosophy in general and the phenomenological tradition in particular is due to the inheritance of what I call “the ableist conflation” of disability with pain, suffering, and disadvantage. I then show that Merleau-Ponty’s famous reading of the blind man’s cane is problematic insofar as it omits the social dimensions of disabled experiences, misconstrues the radicality of blindness as a world-creating disability, and operates via an able-bodied simulation that confuses object annexation or extension with incorporation. In closing, I contend that if phenomenology is to overcome the errors of traditional philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty once hoped, it must heed the insights of “crip” or non-normate phenomenology, which takes the lived experience of disability as its point of departure.

There is a widely held view, due to the work of Jerome Stolnitz, that the concept of a distinctively aesthetic mode of perception, one defined by the characteristic of disinterestedness, originated with such writers as Shaftesbury, Addison, Hutcheson, Burke, and Archibald Alison. I argue through a detailed examination of the texts that this view is a complete misrepresentation. Those of the writers under discussion who employ the concept of disinterestedness (which not all of them do) do not give it the so-called “perceptual” meaning that Stolnitz does, and none of them use it to define a specifically “aesthetic” mode of perception, attention, pleasure, or anything else. The governing concept of their aesthetic thought was neither “disinterestedness” nor “the aesthetic” but (with the exception of Shaftesbury) “taste.” I conclude with an analysis of what the differences are, and why they matter.

According to Kant, the singular judgement ‘This rose is beautiful’ is, or may be, aesthetic, while the general judgement ‘Roses in general are beautiful’ is not. What, then, is the logical relation between the two judgements? I argue that there is none, and that one cannot allow there to be any if one agrees with Kant that the judgement ‘This rose is beautiful’ cannot be made on the basis of testimony. The appearance of a logical relation between the two judgements can, however, be explained in terms of what one does in making a judgement of taste. Finally, I describe an analogy between Kant’s treatment of judgements of taste and J. L. Austin’s treatment of explicit performative utterances, which I attribute to a deeper affinity between their respective projects.

Against interpretations of Kant that would assimilate the universality claim in judgments of taste either to moral demands or to theoretical assertions, I argue that it is for Kant a normative requirement shared with ordinary empirical judgments. This raises the question of why the universal agreement required by a judgment of taste should consist in the sharing of a feeling, rather than simply in the sharing of a thought. Kant’s answer is that in a judgment of taste, a feeling assumes the role of predicate. Such a solution presents a problem as serious as the one it purports to solve.

Kant’s argument in § 38 of the Critique of Judgment is subject to a dilemma: if the subjective condition of cognition is the sufficient condition of the pleasure of taste, then every object of experience must produce that pleasure; if not, then the universal communicability of cognition does not entail the universal communicability of the pleasure. Kant’s use of an additional premise in § 21 may get him out of this difficulty, but the premises themselves hang in the air and have no independent plausibility. What Kant offers as a proof of our right to make judgments of taste is more charitably construed as an indirect argument for the adequacy of a speculative explanation of a presumed right to make judgments of taste.

Peter Geach’s distinction between logically predicative and logically attributive adjectives, first advanced just over fifty years ago, has become part of the technical apparatus of philosophers. For all that, no satisfactory explanation of what an attributive adjective is has yet been provided. We argue that Geach’s discussion suggests two different ways of understanding the notion. According to one, an adjective is attributive just in case predications of it in combination with a noun fail to behave in inferences like a logical conjunction of two separate predications. According to the other, an adjective is attributive just in case it cannot be applied in a truth-value-yielding fashion unless combined with a noun. We argue that the latter way of understanding the notion yields both a more defensible version of Geach’s arguments that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are attributive and a more satisfactory explanation of attributivity.

In the exposition of the first moment of the judgment of taste, Kant argues that the satisfaction in the beautiful, or “favor,” is the only “free” satisfaction, because it alone is not determined by interests. Examination of what Kant means by “interest”—an element of his thought that has not been well understood—shows that, even if this argument is effective in application to the distinction between favor and the satisfaction in the good, it fails in application to the distinction between favor and the satisfaction in the agreeable. The thesis that favor is the only “free” satisfaction does not, however, depend essentially on the concept of interest; in fact, Kant's argument is strengthened by being reformulated without that concept.

Kant holds that when we judge a thing beautiful, we do so on no other basis than our pleasure in the contemplation of it, while at the same time, we presume to judge with validity for everyone. To explain how this is possible is the task of what he calls the critique of taste. Such a task has three main parts. The first is to describe and analyze the essential characteristics of judgments of this kind. The second is to identify the state of mind from which such judgments take rise, this being, according to Kant, a state of harmonious free play between the cognitive faculties. The third part is the “deduction,” or proof of our right to make judgments of taste. I argue that Kant is unsuccessful in the second and third parts of this task. The main interest of his critical effort, I find, lies in his descriptive and analytical account of judgments of taste, specifically in his attempt to comprehend both their subjective character and their claim to universal validity. The first of these he understands as consisting in the judgment’s being based in feeling; the universality claim he understands as a normative requirement. I argue that no interpretation can be faithful to these basic tenets of Kant’s analysis without also accepting his conclusion that the act of judging in some sense “precedes” the very feeling of pleasure on which it is said to be based. I attempt to make sense of this conclusion in terms of the peculiar kind of consciousness of pleasure involved in such a judgment.