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1. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Mark Silcox

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2. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Christopher M.P. Tomaszewski

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One of the greatest challenges facing materialist theories of the human mind is the problem of intentionality. As many non-materialists of various stripes have pointed out, it is very diffi cult to say, if the human mind is a purely material thing, how this material thing can be about or represent another thing wholly distinct from itself. However, for their part, these same non-materialists have relied heavily or exclusively on this intuition that one material thing cannot be about another. In this paper, that hole in the intentionality objection to materialist theories of mind is fi lled by way of providing the germ of a new (though quite old in some respects) theory of the metaphysics of intentionality. On this view, intentionality just is partial identity. Partial identity is a concept introduced by David Armstrong and used by Donald Baxter to give a metaphysics of instantiation. The aboutness exhibited by our mental activity is simply a partial identity relation between the mind and the object of thought. This thesis, I contend, is a faithful interpretation of Brentano’s “intentional inexistence,” which the objects of thought have in the mind and which he held to be characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. Some interesting and fortuitous consequences, including an elucidation of precisely why one material thing can never be about something distinct from itself, are then examined, and fi nally a defense against some objections is given.

3. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Christopher A. Bobier

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4. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Samuel Arnold

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5. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Matthew Wilson

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6. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Deborah K. Heikes

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The age of Enlightenment has, upon refl ection, turned out to be an age of exclusion. Part of the explanation for this is that Descartes’ inward turn leaves reason unable to rely on anything other than its own resources. Rather than give in to cultural relativism, philosophers of the time deny the epistemic and moral agency of those who are different from themselves. Even as philosophy rejects its Cartesian heritage, the same dilemma faces us: fi nd some uniformity and regularity within cognition or accept the legitimacy of all sorts of cognition. This dilemma, however, can be dissolved by appealing to a practice closely related to being rational but that is decidedly non-modern in approach, namely, reasonableness. The concept of reasonableness accounts for humans’ diverse capacity to reason while providing some normative expectations across various practices.

7. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Torsten Menge

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What is the normative import of telling a genealogy of our present reason-giving practices? In this paper, I will focus on Michel Foucault’s materialist genealogies in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, which attend to the social and material settings in which we act and give and ask for reasons. A number of influential critics have interpreted them as a critical evaluation of our reason-giving practices. But understood in this way, Foucault’s genealogical project faces significant philosophical problems. I will sketch a different account, arguing that telling a genealogy can have an uncanny effect: It can disrupt our familiarity with the everyday world by revealing to us the embodied norms that structure our everyday activities. Once we recognize that our situation is structured by normative demands, we cannot simply let ourselves be carried along by found norms. Genealogies call on us to take responsibility for these norms and to practically transform the space in which we act.

8. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Don Berkich

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The problem of original intentionality—wherein computational states have at most derived intentionality, but intelligence presupposes original intentionality—has been disputed at some length in the philosophical literature by Searle, Dennett, Dretske, Block, and many others. Largely absent from these discussions is the problem of original agency: Robots and the computational states upon which they depend have at most derived agency. That is, a robot’s agency is wholly inherited from its designer’s original agency. Yet intelligence presupposes original agency at least as much as it does original intentionality. In this talk I set out the problem of original agency, distinguish it from the problem of original intentionality, and argue that the problem of original agency places as much of a limit on computational models of cognition and is thus at least as vexing as the problem of original intentionality.

9. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
R. Bensen Cain

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10. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Andrew Morgan

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11. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Larry Alan Busk

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This paper analyzes two forms of “fl ight from freedom” (or bad faith) embodied by characters in Beauvoir’s fi ction, connecting these portrayals to the situation of women as described in The Second Sex as well as the discussion of social freedom in The Ethics of Ambiguity. The characters under consideration are Monique from the story “The Woman Destroyed” and Françoise from the novel She Came to Stay, who represent fl ight from freedom in related but distinct ways. My claim is that considering these two characters in conjunction allows us to see the two decisive moments of Beauvoir’s theory of authentic freedom in negative manifestations. Monique attempts to make herself into an object by abdicating her freedom, while Françoise takes herself for a sovereign subject and is unable to recognize the freedom of others.

12. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
R.M. Farley

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13. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Glenn Tiller

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14. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Julie Wulfemeyer

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I take it as given that we manage to linguistically refer to objects we can neither perceive nor uniquely describe. Kripke accounts for this fact by appeal to causal-historical chains of communication. But Evans famously presented what has seemed to many a devastating counterexample to Kripke’s view: the phenomenon of reference-shifting. Here, I’ll agree with critics that Kripke’s view is insuffi cient to handle cases of reference shift, but I’ll argue for an alternative version of the causal-historical account that is immune to Evans’ counterexample. The key move will be at the foundations; it will require a change in what it is we’re giving a causal-historical account of. Critically, I’ll argue that we should reject two claims associated with the causal-historical picture. First, we should reject the claim that names are used to think of their referents. Second, we should reject the claim that later speakers defer to earlier ones.

15. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Erik Krag

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16. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Paul Carron

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17. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Robert P. Reed

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18. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Matthew Shea

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19. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Sarah H. Woolwine

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20. Southwest Philosophy Review: Volume > 33 > Issue: 1
Erik W. Schmidt

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One common set of arguments against universal markets contends that the special status of certain goods (e.g., organs, reproductive services, or native artifacts) makes it inappropriate or wrong to compare their worth to the value of a commodity or to some amount of money. These arguments rest on the fear that market valuations would distort the way we value the goods in question rather than the fear that their sale could exploit or directly harm the people involved in the exchange. In this paper I use behavioral economics to explain why these arguments persuade so many people despite the fact that we already engage in a wide range of economic valuations with respect to those contested domains. I conclude by identifying the implications this has for the broader debate over contested markets.