New Essays on Human Understanding

New Essays explicates Leibniz’s doctrines in response to John Locke’s Essay. The Preface anticipates the most important disagreements. The body of the work is a dialogue between an admirer of Locke, who retells the Essay and his friend who is impressed with Leibniz’s system. They compare views under somewhat artificial rules, with the result that many of Locke’s doctrines discredited in favour of Leibniz’s. I argue that these results have modest but legitimate rational ground. New Essays is tailored to readers influenced by Locke, stressing the inseparable connection between sense perception and intellect. It maintains in detail that the nature of substances is best understood by considering them as concrete individuals that are metaphysically complete down to their spatial and temporal relations to everything in the universe. However, New Essays also contains a wealth of philosophical views regarding language, logic, mathematics, physics, morals, persons, society, history, and more.

Can Zinc Correction in SARS-CoV-2 Patients Improve Treatment Outcomes?

The ongoing severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic for which there is no established treatment available yet, has caused more than 68,000 deaths so far. Following the SARS-CoV outbreak in 2003, an Italian group described a hypothesis about the efficacy of two old drugs: Chloroquine (CQ) and Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), against SARS-CoV and its future emergents. Later, this hypothesis was shown to be relevant in-vitro. Due to the high genetic similarity of SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, the hypothesis introduced by Savarino et al. and the further supportive in-vitro evidence served a rational ground for three different Chinese groups to test the efficacy of CQ or HCQ against SARS-CoV-2 in-vitro. These studies showed promising in-vitro efficacy of CQ and HCQ against SARS-CoV-2. Unfortunately, in the absence of sufficient clinical data on the (in)efficacy of CQ and HCQ in SARS-CoV-2 patients, the compassionate and off-label use of these medications is becoming politicized. Herein, we underline some critical features of the CQ/HCQ mechanism of action concerning SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, we put forward a hypothesis based on three lines of evidence on a probable link between zinc-deficiency/zinc correction and response to CQ/HCQ- and possibly other SARS-CoV-2 treatments.

Rationalism: A Rational Ground for Morality

Rationalists (including Butler, Price, and Reid) defend an alternative to the sentimentalist position, in three main areas: (1) Against the view that practical reason is subordinate to non-rational desire, they argue that some of our actions result from desires that are responsive to reason, so that we are guided by the apparent merits of different course of action, not just by our non-rational preferences. (2) Against the view that moral judgments depend on our emotions, and moral facts are partly constituted by our emotional reactions, they argue that moral judgments cannot be understood unless we recognize that they are rational judgments about objective facts. (3) Against the view that our moral outlook is utilitarian, they argue that utility is only one relevant moral consideration, and that we have good reason to attend to justice, generosity, and other aspects of morality that are not subordinate to utility.

Sentimentalism: A Non-Rational Ground for Morality

Sentimentalists (including Hutcheson and Hume) take morality to rest on emotions and sentiments, not on practical reason. They argue that reason cannot be the primary guide of action, because it can only find means to ends that appeal to our emotions. Since moral judgments guide our actions, they must depend on emotions and cannot be rational judgments about objective facts. Right and wrong are partly constituted by our emotions of approval and disapproval. Our moral emotions approve of benevolence, and therefore our moral outlook is utilitarian. Even the sentiments that belong to the apparently non-utilitarian rules of justice can be explained by reference to a utilitarian outlook.

Individual personal values as mediators during behavioral perception and transference

Perception and transference are two behavioral processes affecting human existence and survival. This study focuses on the concept of interpersonal relationships of university students during transference and perceived behavioral processes. Information was gathered from 234 university students. Three factors, i.e., perceived behavior, personal values, and transference behavior were explored. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the proposed conceptual model and hypotheses were tested with structure equation modeling. The findings support the mediational role of personal values in perceived and transferred behavior and also the role of personal values in passing of activated schema from an interpersonal relationship to another. This study will provide a rational ground to behavior scientists that it’s the ‘Eigenwelt’ responsible for achieving full individual potential in case of ‘Mitwelt’.

Fear of the Open: Resistances of the Public Sphere

This chapter explores the theme of the ‘outside’, and the fears, desires, drives and indeed drift it seems to inspire, in order to raise the question of agoraphobia in a number of contexts. In particular, agoraphobia is not only about recoil or retreat from public spaces: surprisingly enough, an abiding fear of the ‘open’ may in fact generate the conditions of possibility for a democratically-oriented public sphere, however fragile and contradictory they may be. Agoraphobic fear of the space of the public square, whether crowded or comparatively empty, can produce inconsistent effects, provoking reactionary paranoia as well as inspiring political dissent. But if the appeal to the ‘rational ground’ of a public sphere is at least in part based upon agoraphobic, crowd-fearing impulses, its evocation of reason and duty is exceeded and resisted by a notion of Levinasian responsibility that has been described in terms of an ‘ethical agoraphobia’. If the ‘ethical agoraphobia’ of Levinasian responsibility entails a step into the ‘open’ that cannot simply be faced fearlessly, then this surely prompts critique of recent speculative materialism as in want of an object to be scared of.

Hur legitimeras socialpolitiska besparingar?

How are cutbacks in social policy legitimized? The construction of personal assistance as a ”cost problem”This article seeks to explain how current austerity measures targeting personal assistance for people with disabilities are legitimized. Following the work of Bacchi and Ingram and Schneider, I argue that the construction of personal assistance as a ”cost problem” is absolutely central, where assistance-users are depicted as ”over-users” and potential fraudsters, while personal assistance companies are described as solely motivated by maximizing profits. However, upon closer scrutiny, the actual cutbacks that the government has implemented do not match how the ”cost problem is constructed”; the policies aimed to reduce costs are not particularly e cient to reduce benefit frauds or hamper profits. This suggests that the ”cost problem” is not the rational ground for policy, but an ad hoc construction that serves the purpose of justifying general cutbacks striking at all personal assistance users.

The problem of rational moral enlistment

How can one bring children to recognize the requirements of morality without resorting only to non-rational means of persuasion (i.e. what rational ground can be offered to children for their moral enlistment)? Michael Hand has recently defended a foundationalist approach to answering this question and John White has responded by a) criticizing Hand’s solution to the Problem of Rational Moral Enlistment, and b) attempting to circumvent the problem by suggesting a Humean route which understands moral enlistment as grounded in sentiment. While I do not accept Hand’s preferred solution to the Problem of Rational Moral Enlistment, I am also unpersuaded by White’s attempt to circumvent it. Instead, making use of work by Ben Spiecker and Jan Steutel, I attempt a different solution to the Problem of Rational Moral Enlistment – one appealing to reflective equilibrium rather than to ethical foundationalism as Hand’s does. Whereas Hand hopes to ground rational moral enlistment in a single, self-evident foundational justification of some moral standards, I instead hope to facilitate rational moral enlistment through a rational procedure which starts with students’ existing moral commitments and attempts to revise or expand them through a certain kind of critical reflection.

Radical Skepticism and Underdetermination

This chapter reveals a more nuanced way to conceive of the radical skeptical paradox—one that makes no essential appeal to a closure-style principle for knowledge. It discusses the skeptical challenge presented by, on the one hand, underdeterminationRK/rational ground-based radical skepticism and, on the other hand, closureRK-based radical skepticism. Then, in light of these general reflections about these two forms of radical skeptical challenge, the chapter sets out what, both minimally and ideally, we would want from an intellectually satisfying response to the problem of radical skepticism, where this is a response to this problem that deals with both kinds of skeptical challenge.

Rousseau on the ground of obligation: Reconsidering the Social Autonomy interpretation

In Rousseau’s Social Contract, political laws are rationally binding because they satisfy the interests that motivate individuals to obey such laws. The later books of Emile justify morality by showing that it is continuous with the natural dispositions of a well-brought-up subject and is thus conducive to genuine happiness. In both the moral and political cases, Rousseau argues for an internal connection between the rational ground of an obligation and the broader aspects of human psychology that are satisfied and expressed by acting from that obligation. Yet, inspired by Kantian philosophy, the recent and influential Social Autonomy interpretation has disjoined rationality and psychology. Criticising this interpretation, I argue that for Rousseau, obligations are justified because they satisfy the demands made by our moral psychology, most notably amour-propre, i.e. the desire to have one’s worth recognised by others.