Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

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…

The article examines the ethics of musical interpretation, focusing on the performer’s responsibility in faithfully recreating a work from the score. Drawing inspiration from conductor Daniel Barenboim’s reflections (2016), it analyzes the delicate balance between personal expression and fidelity to the work, highlighting how interpretation involves not only technical skill but also moral responsibility. This notion develops through the importance attributed to history, authenticity, and the present in interpretation. These concepts are explored in the relationship between the score and the performer, addressing the ethical challenges involved in balancing fidelity…

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…

This article summarizes John Locke’s considered views on freedom, explaining that freedom is a power of the mind to act in accordance with its volitions, that freedom is a power that can belong only to substances, that we have the freedom to will in many cases, including the power to hold our wills undetermined and thereby suspend the prosecution of our desires.  This is a seemingly reasonable account of how our minds work, and should work, when we make (important) decisions.  But Locke takes us to be morally responsible and…

The nominal ground that entwines human beings and animal behaviours is unwilling to admit moral valuing as a non-human act. Just to nail it down explicitly, two clauses ramify the moral conscience of human beings as follows: a) Can non-humans be moral beings?, b) Unconscious animal behaviours go beyond any moral judgments. My approach aims to rebuff these anthropomorphic clauses by justifying animals’ moral beings and animals’ moral behaviours from a meta-ethical stance. A meta-ethical outlook may enable an analysis of ethical and normative views through the limit of moral…

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…

This essay engages Catherine Malabou’s provocation that the life sciences can provide a materialist theory of thought (plasticity) that can reimagine agency, identity, and freedom. Paying particular attention to the science of epigenetics and its potential rethinking of origins and history in the name of a radical futurity, I argue that in fact it shows that plasticity is the very mode by which power is enacted and reproduced, specifically anti-black notions of race. I conclude with a brief discussion of Zakkiyah Jackson and her theory of plasticity, to show that…

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…