Over/Under-appreciated Philosophy?

Elizabeth Anderson's "How should egalitarians cope with market risks?"

Pierre Cloarec submitted the following post to me by email:

I wish to submit a paper that seems grievously underestimated: Elizabeth Anderson’s “How Should Egalitarians Cope with Market Risks”, Theoretical Inquiries in Law 9 (2007): 239-270. It is pretty curious since Anderson’s “What Is the Point...” has been widely discussed and since she can be otherwise viewed as a “top name”. “How Should Egalitarians...” was not even referenced on PhilPapers until yesterday (I took the liberty to add it), and Google Scholar indicates only 25 citations since the paper’s publication (as opposed to more than 1000 for the 1999 paper, and 89 for her 2010 The Imperative of Integration). Yet it is a welcome follow-up to “What Is the Point...”. She both refines the definition of luck egalitarianism, differentiating between desert-catering and responsibility-catering LE (and also partly anticipates some of the points later made by Tan’s 2008 “A Defense of LE” in J Phil), and, just as importantly, clarifies her positive account of responsibility, a point which was not crystal-clear in “What Is the Point...”. She makes clear with what she thinks responsibility is to be contrasted, security rather than luck, and provides a very interesting market-based (whether it’s compelling is another issue) rationale for this. So I believe a little more advertisement wouldn’t hurt the paper :-)

I'm a big fan of Anderson's "What is the Point of Equality?", but I have to confess, I haven't read, "How should egalitarians cope with market risks?" So, what does everyone think of the latter? Is it underappreciated?

Title/Mission Change

I began this blog last July with the hope of drawing attention to "underappreciated philosophy" -- to discussing ideas/philosophers that readers consider to have not gotten enough attention. Unfortunately, although we have had a few submissions -- and a few good discussions! -- the blog has mostly languished.

Because this seems unfortunate to me -- I think there is value in drawing "underappreciated philosophy" to the fore -- I began giving some thought on how I might jumpstart the blog a bit. It then occurred to me that expanding the blog's mission to include "over-appreciated philosophy" might do the trick. Allow me to explain.

Most of we philosophers, I think, have views both about ideas/arguments we think are "underappreciated", but also about ones we think are over-appreciated -- ideas and arguments that are widely discussed, and in some cases even dominate the literature, but which we think shouldn't. I, for instance, have voiced skepticism in the comments section here about arguments about "the meaning of proper names" based on (Kripkean) intuition-mongering about reference. Insofar as not all people share the intuitions, and we seem perfectly capable of engaging in many different (Wittgensteinian) "language games" with proper names -- sometimes using them as rigid-designators, other times as definite descriptions -- I believe the search for "the meaning" of proper names has been, on the whole, a big mistake. Proper names don't have one meaning or referent; they have many. Or so it seems to me. And, of course, I have doubts about other ideas/arguments too (counterfactual theories of causation, compatibilism about free will, material constitution, etc.).

Of course, my doubts about these things could be all wrong. But, what could be more fun (and potentially productive!), I thought, than a forum to debate whether particular philosophical ideas/arguments are "over-" or "under-" appreciated. Hence, I have decided, as an experiment, to change this blog's focus. The aim of the blog is now to solicit and discuss posts from readers arguing that particular ideas/arguments are over- or under-appreciated!

There is, I realize, some hazard in this. I have, as a rule -- in, for instance, developing and moderating the Philosophers' Cocoon -- committed myself to doing what I can to contribute to making our discipline a friendlier, more inclusive place. Although I was "raised" very early on in my career to treat philosophy as a "take-no-prisoners bloodsport", I have long since come to despise that approach to philosophy. I would like to see our discipline become a more friendly and inclusive place, not less, and am committed to doing what I can to play whatever small part I can toward these ends. At the same time, critical thought and discussion -- defending and criticizing ideas/arguments -- is a central part of philosophy, and indeed can, I think, if done properly, play a part in making philosophy more friendly and inclusive. Indeed, I think extending this blog's mission can do this in two related ways. First, by creating a forum for people to make the case that a given idea/argument is under-appreciated, unpopular or underecognized ideas may be brought to the fore. Second, by creating a forum for people to make the case that a given idea is over-appreciated, dominant (and potentially exclusionary) ideas/arguments may be questioned. So, for example, to return to the case of proper names, one of the main reasons I stopped working in philosophy language many years ago is that I didn't feel like skeptical worries about dominant (Kripkean) intuitions were taken seriously. I felt like the literature on proper names had been captured by a group of people with a certain set of intuitions -- intuitions that excluded people (like me) who did not find them at all persuasive.

This, then, is the rationale for the blog's change of name and mission. Discussion and debate of which ideas/arguments are "over-" and "under-"appreciated may be fun, stimulating, and productive. That, at any rate, is my hope. Of course, there is always the possibility for such a project to devolve into unfriendly "bashing" of philosophers, ideas, and arguments. I hope this possibility is not realized here, and if it begins to go that direction, I may choose to end the experiment.

Here, then, are the procedures and ground rules:

1. Submissions should be sent to Marcus Arvan at [email protected]
2. Submissions will be posted anonymously unless the author wishes their identity to be known.
3. Submissions must be submitted to me non-anonymously from an email address that I can verify to be registered to its submitter.
4. Sumbitters may submit (anonymously or otherwise) on behalf of their own philosophical ideas/arguments.
5. A submitter can only submit one post per calendar year on a given philosophical idea or argument (multiple submissions on different ideas/arguments by a single author are fine). This is to prevent individuals from repeatedly posting on the same idea/argument repeatedly.
6. For moral and legal reasons, allegations of plagiarism or research misconduct (or anything remotely similar) will not be permitted. This is not a place to report that people "stole your ideas."  Submissions may only make a case for (A) an idea piece of work being unjustifiably ignored or (B) insufficiently credited to a person by the profession at large.
7. Discussion in the comments section must be respectful. I will use my moderating powers to ensure a respectful tone of conversation.

Here goes!

John Kekes -- Underappreciated Philosophy?

A reader recently emailed me the following submission:

As a “new” reader of your blog...I’d like to suggest some material for your Underappreciated philosophy project (which seems itself underappreciated). As I am currently working on the opposition to equality, I’ve been at pain to find serious literature on this subject. Actually, it seems that the bulk of the debate is between various egalitarian theses; when it comes to the opposition to equality, most of what I find is either blatantly question-begging or addressed to a straw man (e.g. Rothbard’s “Egalitarianism: a revolt against nature”). Whatever the explanation of this turns out to be (perhaps conservative-minded brilliant people choose careers other than philosophy, perhaps they fail to get published, I don’t know), it has led to a lack of attention to (serious) conservative arguments. Thus I was quite happy to find some in Kekes’s work, most notably his Against Liberalism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997) and The Illusions of Egalitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003), as I believe that, as philosophers, we should generally be happy to disagree strongly with serious theses, rather than with straw-man-objections and gross misunderstandings.

In this respect, even though I do strongly disagree with Kekes, it cannot be said that he uses abusive rhetoric and pays insufficient attention to the actual theses he objects to. He does use such rhetoric at times, but, so to speak, he generally does not attack windmills. Thus it seems to me that anyone interested in political philosophy (even more if one is interested in egalitarianism, as I am) should dive into Kekes’s work and take his objections into account, and rely on these when examining actual conservative objections to his/her own theses.

I haven't read Kekes' work in detail, and so perhaps am not the best person to judge whether his philosophy -- and specifically, his arguments against liberalism -- are underappreciated. For what it is worth, I do think there are good questions to raise about liberalism's overwhelming focus on autonomy (something that Kekes evidently criticizes; though he is by no means the only one to do this; communitarians have been objecting to liberalism on some such grounds for years). The only thing I can say about Kekes is this: I have read this short piece by him in City Journal, and I think it is awful.

Although I'm no big fan of Ronald Dworkin -- I broadly agree with Kekes' assessment of Dworkin's Sovereign Virtue, especially Dworkin's infamous "envy test" -- Kekes' discussion of Rawls is, by my lights, profoundly unfair, and really quite irresponsible as a public presentation of philosophical ideas.

Look, Rawls has his problems. Many political liberals, myself included, have taken Rawls to task for focusing on "ideal theory" (something Kekes savages Rawls for in his City Journal piece). But to presend that Rawls' focus on ideal theory is somehow an irreparable problem -- a refutation of liberalism -- is just silly. Yes, liberals have a bad history of focusing on ideal theory, to the detriment of nonideal theory -- and this is a big oversight. But it is also an oversight that we are working on. Furthermore, if people like me are right -- see e.g. my "First Steps Toward a Nonideal Theory of Justice" -- Rawls' ideal theory may well be correct as a theory of a just society, as well as extendable to nonideal conditions in a way that makes sense of the value of things other than autonomy.

Furthermore, Kekes' criticisms of Rawls' original position are quite silly. Kekes objects that the parties to the original position aren't flesh and blood human beings, but rather "puppets." This is absolutely incorrect. The original position models flesh and blood human beings deliberating from a position of fairness about principles they would want to govern society, and would be satisfied with once the veil of ignorance is raised and they find themselves in society, with real communal attachments, religion, personal views, etc. 

Kekes also argues that Rawls' two principles of justice are incompatible, as Rawls' first principle requires equal basic liberties and the second principle "economic equality." One problem with this gloss, of course, is that Rawls' second principle doesn't require economic equality. It merely requires society's economic rules to be set up to the maximum advantage of the least well off. A second problem is that once this is understood, there is no conflict between the two principles. One can give people equal basic liberties and yet also make economic rules constrain the manner in which people can utilize their equal liberties. 

Furthermore, Kekes contends that Rawls cannot distinguish between a poor but responsible single mother and a petty criminal -- that is, that Rawls' theory would have us treat both people exactly the same. This is also irresponsible. Rawls' priniciples of justice require that a society's economic scheme be to the maximum advantage of the worst off -- but this is perfectly consistent with holding petty criminals responsible for their actions. All Rawls' principles require is that society be set up so that the worst off have the best economic situation possible. If some people in society (e.g. the petty criminal) don't make the best of that situation, so much the worse for them. Furthermore -- although Kekes doesn't seem to realize this -- isn't there a problem with a society that gives rise to petty criminals? Rawls' theory of justice is explicitly designed to promote the self-respect of all, such that people have incentive to work. Apparently, Kekes didn't bother to actually read A Theory of Justice all the way through. If he had, he would know this.

Finally, Kekes -- again, wrongly -- takes Rawls to be irreparably committed to modern welfare state redistributionism (i.e. taking from the rich to give to the poor). Except that Rawls explicitly argued that the welfare state is bad, and unjust, because it doesn't give the poor the best economic situation they can have. Rawls instead defended something he called "property-owning democracy", which is essentially a scheme that doesn't take from the rich so much as it imposes rules on economic transactions at the outset that work to the maximum advantage of the poor.

To be clear, Rawls' theory of justice is not without its problems. But people like Kekes do no one any favors -- not the least themselves -- by setting up liberals like Rawls as straw men. Rawls was not a dummy. He should not be treated like one.

David Benatar's "Better Never to Have Been" -- Underappreciated Philosophy?

I received the following anonymous submission today:

I found out about the book I'd want to suggest via a SEP entry, so there is at least some attention to it in the field. Still, I'm suggesting it for a post because I think it does not get the attention (neither the appreciation nor the criticism) it deserves. It's called "Better Never To Have Been" by Prof. David Benatar of Cape Town. Its central claim is that being born is a considerable harm to every person that is born. In a nutshell (and in my words) I would summarize his central argument as follows: Absence of suffering is always a good thing, even if there is no being that experiences the absence. But absence of pleasure is only a bad thing if there is a being capable of experiencing the absence. Considering that there is always some suffering in the life of every being capable of experiencing it, a world in which no such beings exist is always morally better than a world in which some exist.

I would like to see more discussion about this book, mainly because I myself am not sure if any of it holds water. Neither do I know what it implies if Benatar is right (or if he's wrong, for that matter).

As someone who has read Benatar's book, I'd like to second this submission. Although I recall being unconvinced by an argument or two, on the whole I found Benatar's book fascinating and persuasive. If Benetar is right -- and I am very much persuaded that he may be (see below) -- it is always morally wrong to have children. The book is notable not only for defending such a provocative conclusion, but for doing a damn good job of it.

A few remarks on the book's arguments. First, Benetar argues forcefully (in my opinion) that common arguments for its being better to live a human life than never to live at all -- for instance, that the good of a human life tends to outweigh the bad, that we tend to want to live rather than die, etc. -- all fail. If I recall correctly (I read the book a while ago), there is plenty of evidence that (1) there is significantly more bad (suffering) than good (happiness) in most human lives, and (2) the mere fact that people don't want to die is no evidence at all that it is good to live: the best explanations of why we want to live are (A) the sunk-cost fallacy (human beings tend not to want to quit things they have invested time and energy in), and (B) a natural, evolutionarily-implanted desire to live (which is no evidence of actual value in a human life, just a nearly-unavoidable, irrational, implanted desire to not die). Second, Benetar argues that even if some human lives have more good than bad, it is morally wrong to have children when the probabilities favor the opposite (most human lives have more bad than good).

Part of what I find so persuasive about Benatar's book is his claim that if we are honest with ourselves -- if we are openminded, rather than merely reactive -- the claims he is making about human lives are, well, pretty obvious. And I have to say that, when I am honest with myself, it seems to me that the claims he makes are, if not obviously true, then at least very plausible. For when I think honestly about my life, and the lives of people I know, I see what he sees. Look, I've been pretty darn lucky in life. I've had good parents, was raised well, was lucky enough to be born into the most wealthy and powerful nation on earth...and yet, it seems to me that my life has had significantly more pain and disappointment than happiness. Yes, I have had some incredible moments of happiness: getting married, getting my PhD, publishing my first article. But these were but a few moments of intense joy over the course of several decades. Life's disappointments have been far greater in number and more permanent in severity.  There are daily stresses, of course. Daily life often has more difficulties and worries than joy.  Then there are things like grief over the death of loved ones -- kinds of pain and suffering that almost never fade. Then there are the many, "What ifs?" -- things one could have done but didn't -- as well as ordinary mistakes in life (which cannot be changed, and profoundly affect one's life prospects; I myself have many regrets). And of course all of our lives will end in tragedy: with death, often painful death. And again, I am one of the (very) lucky ones.

Then there are the unlucky among us: people who suffer from mental or physical illnesses through no fault of their own, people who suffer profoundly bad luck (think: families of 9/11 victims or everyday victims of violent crime, people whose children die as a result of accidents), and so on. I have known some of these people, and have seen (and in some cases, shared) their suffering.

In short, when I am being honest with myself, Benatar's basic point seems right: although some small percentage of human beings may live truly charmed lives -- living their hopes and dreams -- human life, for most of us, is really quite dreadful on the whole, containing far more pain, disappointment and suffering than joy. We have all kinds of ways of rationalizing our lives to ourselves: ways of trying to convince ourselves that our lives are pretty good. But again, when I am honest with myself, all of the apologies for life realy do ring hollow to me. And insofar as they do, Benatar's argument persuades me: I am not sure at all that it is morally permissible to have children. What gives me, or anyone else, a moral right to take such chances with the life of another? What gives me, or anyone else, a right to bring into the world a human being whose life is likely to contain significantly more bad than good? 

Miriam Ronzoni's "The Global Order: A Case of Background Injustice? A Practice-Dependent Account" -- Underappreciated Philosophy?

Patrick Taylor Smith has submitted the following post:

If you work in global justice, you are probably familiar with (and sick of) what might be called 'the basic structure' debate that started with Charles Beitz's Political Theory and International Relations. Briefly, if you are a relational egalitarian, then you think that co-membership in some set of institutions or co-participation in common practices* is necessary to activate or trigger obligations of egalitarian distributive justice. Of course, there is considerable disagreement between relational egalitarians concerning which institutions or practices appropriately undergird claims of equal distributive consideration (which is not necessarily the same strict equality of distributive shares, since egalitarian distributive justice presumably can include something like a difference principle, but you get the idea). Furthermore, there is disagreement at the global level about how to properly characterize global governance and economic institutions. So, the 'basic structure' debate concerns whether the appropriate institutions exist at the global level (that is, do global institutions constitute a basic structure?) that justify a global-egalitarian distribution of the benefits of social cooperation. Generally speaking, those who think that the basic structure is essentially coercive say 'No, there is no global basic structure' while those who think that the appropriate institutions are those that structure cooperative and productive activity say, 'Yes, there is.' **

 I don't think it is too controversial to say that this debate, if not utterly stale, has reached the point where one might suspect that the moves have gotten a bit baroque. But Miriam Ronzoni's article, 'The Global Order: A Case of Background Injustice?' does a really excellent job of giving the debate some new life. See, most of the foregoing debate has been about, if I may, the ontological question: is there a global basic structure that triggers a global demand for egalitarian distributive justice? Yet, Ronzoni asks, 'Should there be a global basic structure even if there isn't one right now?' Rawls, for example, more or less assumes that we have a domestic basic structure and that a global one is unnecessary, end of discussion. Most people have objected to Rawls by saying there is a global basic structure (a claim I find pretty implausible), whereas Ronzoni's piece offers a whole new avenue for discussion: why do we have basic structures and when should we create them? So, she argues that we should build a global basic structure in order to handle certain problems that we simply cannot reasonably expect even relatively just states to handle bilaterally in the realm of international politics.

Anyway, as you can perhaps tell, I'm very much on board with thinking about global justice in these terms*** Yet, the few times I have mentioned the Ronzoni's view to senior people, I've gotten blank stares. As I'm very impressed by this article (which isn't to say I agree with everything in it), and I really think that we can breathe new life into the global egalitarian justice/global basic structure debate if we attended to it more carefully, I consider it quite under-appreciated.

* People should be the lookout for a paper of Kristina Meshelski's (http://csun.academia.edu/KristinaMeshelski/CurriculumVitae) where she argues that relational egalitarians should focus on structures instead of practices or institutions.

** See my forthcoming SEP Entry on 'International Distributive Justice' with Michael Blake for a deeper analysis of these positions.

***This is also one of the reasons that I think early modern political theory is especially relevant these days. Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and company were dealing with a world where the modern state was still in an inchoate form, so there were dealing with a developing institutions.

 

 

Soft Encouragement

[Cross-posted at The Philosophers' Cocoon]

I'd really like to encourage everyone to submit material to me ([email protected]) to post here. This blog has received a ton of visits since its launch the other day, and I think it promises to accomplish something important and good: namely, draw unfairly neglected work to greater attention. However...I have yet to receive any submissions. (Well, I received one submission, but it wasn't on philosophy!)

Surely there are works of philosophy that are underappreciated or inadequately credited to people. This is your chance to (anonymously!) get on your soap-box and make a case. So, if you know of a philosopher, a paper, an idea, or an argument that you think has gone underappreciated, please -- submit a post and let us all know about it!

 

Gregg Rosenberg on Consciousness and Causation -- Underrated Philosophy?

While waiting for reader submissions, I suppose I will start things off. My selection today for "underappreciated philosophy" is Gregg Rosenberg's 2005 Oxford University Press book, A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World.

I'm not sure that Rosenberg's book counts as underappreciated simpliciter. It seems to be appreciated by a certain type of philosopher (it has been cited 74 times according to Google Scholar, mostly by people sympathetic with panpsychism and Russellian/Neutral Monism). My sense is that it is underappreciated by philosophers at large, however, and by people interested in the metaphysics of consciousness and causation.

I guess I will begin with a little background on Rosenberg. He was, apparently, a student under (CORRECTION: with) David Chalmers back when Chalmers was at Indiana. According to the back flap of the book, Rosenberg left the discipline after grad school, patented some form of technology, started a venture-capital funded company, and sold it (for a lot of money presumably) in 2001. He then went back to his dissertation, wrote it up as a book, and got it published through OUP. Pretty remarkable.

Anyway, here's why I think the book is underappreciated.  Here's a first pass: it's a book that more or less singlehandedly caused me, a one-time staunch physicalist, to become a mind-body dualist. I know this is just a personal anecdote, but still, I think it is worth dwelling on for a moment. I started out my undergraduate career doing philosophy of mind at Tufts with Dan Dennett, one of the hardest-core physicalists out there. I was completely on board with him. Dualism had always seemed silly to me, and completely at odds with any scientifically respectable account of reality. And reading David Chalmers' book The Conscious Mind didn't sway me at all. The Zombie Argument -- the argument that Chalmers' entire book was based on -- immediately struck me then (just as it does now) as utterly question-begging. It seemed to me that will share Chalmers' intuition that zombies are conceivable, and so metaphysically possible, if one antecedently finds dualism attractive. Since I didn't find dualism attractive in the slightest, the Zombie Argument seemed silly to me.

Anyway, I more or less remained a physicalist...until I read Rosenberg's book. What was it about the book that did it for me? What was it that converted me into dualist? The first preface of Rosenberg's wonderful premise hits the nail on the head. Rosenberg writes on p. ix:

My intention in writing this book was to create something whose importance lies beyond the details of its arguments. I myself consider this primarily a book of ideas. Of all my hopes, my dearest is this: that A Place for Consciousness should provide inspiration to those like me who were raised with the physicalist orthodoxy, accepting it but not fully comfortably, whose disquiet always has been silenced at the end by the baffling question: How could it be otherwise? I believe this book points to a place in the space of philosophical ideas where something truly new and interesting exists. I am, above all, trying to lead readers to that place so that they can return without me to explore it on their own...

...

Both Russell and Whitehead argued that physical science reveals only a structural aspect to nature. If physics is all structure, it is natural to suppose that intrinsic properties related to the intrinsic properties we experience in consciousness are the intrinsic content of the physical. The suggestoin raises several questions: (1) Why should the intrinsic properties of a physical system be experiential? (2) Why do they exist above the level of the microphysical...? (3) Why should they form a unity of the kind we are acquainted within consciousness? and (4) Why should phenomenal content, as the intrinsic content of the physical, correspond so closely to the information structure within the brain? By constitutively linking experience and causation, I answer these questions from first principles. (my bolding/italics)  

The sections I have bolded here are key. Professional philosophers today seem to emphasize rigor above all else. This has long puzzled me (see here, here, here, and here), given that most of the Greats (the Platos, the Aristotles, the Kants, etc.) almost "to a T" went beyond what they could rigorously show, opening up important new ways of thinking in the process. Kant never successfully established categorical normativity -- but so what? He was the first person to even get us thinking about it explicitly. And that was a great advance. 

Rosenberg's book accomplished something similar for me. In contrast to other work defending some form of dualism (such as Chalmers' work), Rosenberg's book painted the first picture of reality to me that made dualism seem more plausible than physicalism. This was in large part because -- and here's the real thing that gripped me about his book -- Rosenberg shows (pretty convincingly in my view) that it is not just consciousness that science has trouble accounting for; science cannot account for causation either. And it can't account for it for the same simple reason: science deals with structure, whereas consciousness and causation -- properly understood -- both seem utterly simple and intrinsic. (note: it was really the second half of Rosenberg's book -- the part on causation, not the first part (on consciousness) -- that "got" me)

Indeed, Rosenberg got me to fundamentally "see the world in a different way" -- a way in which the idea of there being intrinsic qualities (such as primitive consciousness and causation) just have to be a part of any remotely plausible metaphysical picture of reality. For here, essentially, is what the book got me to see. First, every substance or property (note: I think there is no coherent distinction between substances and properties) we would ordinarily call physical -- mass, charge, the weak and strong nuclear forces, books, motorcyles, whatever -- are all fundamentally relational, or structural, in nature. An electon just is defined in terms of a particular function. So is mass. So is charge. Etc. But -- and this is the second thing that Rosenberg's book got me to see -- you can't have relations without relata. There have to be intrinsic properties "behind" the relations we observe (as physical things) for there to be those relations in the first place. This is, by the way, something that I think Kant knew too (with the phenomena/noumena distinction), and which Daniel Stoljar has focused on recently as well (though I think he is wrong in his analysis of its implications). 

So, anyway, it wasn't the detailed arguments of Rosenberg's book that got me. I suspect some (or even much) of his own theory of causation, and how consciousness emerges from large-scale causal nexus in the brain, is false. Be that as it may, Rosenberg got me to thinking, for the very first time -- on broadly Kantian grounds, but also simply focusing on the phenomena of consciousness, causation, and structure -- that any world at all (let alone ours) just has to be dualistic in nature: at least in the sense of there being (A) "physical"/structural properties that can be measured by science, and (B) intrinsic/non-structural properties which cannot. (Readers might also note that these are ideas I explore and put to use in the new metaphysical model of the world and quantum mechanics that I developed in my recent Phil Forum paper "A New Theory of Free Will". Among other things, I argue that *any* world whatsoever must be constructed on a hardware/software duality that maps onto precisely the structural/intrinsic distinction that motivates mind-body dualism).

That, in a nutshell, is why I am a dualist today. I think Rosenberg's point is fundamentally right, that it persuasively shows what's wrong with physicalism, and that it persuasively shows what is fundamentally wrong with all purported defenses of physicalism, including the phenomenal concept strategy (which I agree with Chalmers to be a blind alley: either phenomenal concepts can be made sense of in relational/physical terms, in which case they fail to account for the intrinsic/non-relational elements of experience, or else they are understood in a non-physical way, in which case the strategy is self-defeating). And that is why I think Rosenberg's book is underappreciated.

Mission Statement

This blog was inspired by these three posts over at "What is it Like to be a Woman in Philosophy?", and this post at "The Philosophers' Cocoon." These posts collectively suggest two things:

1. Sometimes good philosophy is unjustifiably ignored or underappreciated, and
2. Sometimes credit for a good philosophical idea or argument is unjustifiably attributed to one person(s) rather than another (either in whole or in part).

This blog is premised on the idea that both phenomena are regrettable and deserve a forum for redress. This blog aims to be such a forum.

Its mission is simple: Anyone who believes that a *published* philosophical work, idea, or argument has been unfairly ignored or insufficiently credited to a particular person is invited to submit an entry briefly explaining why in detail.  (note: this is not a blog for publishing new philosophical essays or ideas. Its aim is to draw attention to underappreciated *published* philosophy).

I will post submissions as I receive them, without any editing -- subject, however, to several rules (see below).  Site visitors are then encouraged to discuss the merits of the post in the comments section. 

A few rules:

• Submissions should be sent to Marcus Arvan at [email protected]
• Submissions will be posted anonymously unless the author wishes their identity to be known.
• Submissions must be submitted to me non-anonymously from an email address that I can verify to be registered to its submitter.
• A submitter can only submit one post per calendar year on a given work, idea, argument or author (multiple submissions by a single submitter on different works/idea/arguments/authors are fine). This is to prevent individuals from repeatedly posting on the same philosopher or idea.
• For moral and legal reasons, allegations of plagiarism or research misconduct (or anything remotely similar) will not be permitted. This is not a place to report that people "stole your ideas."  Submissions may only make a case for (A) an idea piece of work being unjustifiably ignored or (B) insufficiently credited to a person by the profession at large.
• Discussion in the comments section must be respectful. I will use my moderating powers to ensure a respectful tone of conversation.

Finally, submissions may be from the authors of the work in question. There are no rules against self-promotion here. If you feel that your own work, idea, or argument has been unjustifiably ignored or insufficiently credited to you, you may submit a post on it (though you should be aware that some readers may infer that the submitter in fact you).

If this blog becomes a no-holds-barred place for self-promotion, then as far as I am concerned, so be it. The way I see it, in a competitive professional environment such as ours, anyone should be able to make a case that their work deserves greater consideration or recognition. Whether anyone chooses to listen or accept the case being made, of course, is another issue. :)

So, then...on with the show!