Lookism, wrongful appearance discrimination, is prevalent and impactful, and yet largely neglected. This paper explores why this form of discrimination is ignored, when other forms of discrimination which have similar impacts in, for example, employment and education, are taken seriously in policy, practice, and everyday life. It offers five possible reasons for why lookism is neglected; that it is unfamiliar, that people believe lookism should not be prevalent, that people believe lookism is natural, that lookism is not legislated against and that shame attaches to experiences of lookism. The paper seeks to offer an account of the reasons that underpin the otherwise confusing neglect of lookism. The paper argues that far from being an acceptable form of discrimination, lookism is a serious form of discrimination that all, irrespective of political and ideological commitments, have reasons to address.

The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) was introduced in 1956 by American mathematician and computer scientist John McCarthy, who used it in a funding proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth College (McCarthy et al., 1955). AI is myriad technologies that mutate and evolve, yet both the academic field devoted to its study and the industry that aims to realize it in its multiplicity are often said to have the nebulous aim, intimated already in McCarthy’s proposal, of making machines capable of displaying human-level, intelligent activity in all or most domains.1 The history of AI is narrated as a sequence of alternating ‘springtimes’ and ‘winters’ in which an approach is supposedly made to this vague goal, then falters (e.g., Bostrom 2014, pp. 6–8; Kurzweil, 2005, 263–266). In 2022, the year chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) seized the world’s attention, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT became for many identical to all AI, a massive springtime broke out, with a small cohort of companies securing unprecedented funding while their leaderships told stories about how general machine intelligence at the human level or, to use the current jargon, artificial general intelligence (AGI), was just around the corner.

According to Bernard Williams, philosophy is a ‘humanistic' discipline when it is dedicated to helping us make the best sense of our lives, and to do this philosophy must turn to history and to the development of our self-understanding over time. In this paper I follow Williams’ humanistic methodology by considering another kind of history and the way it informs our present self-understanding, both as persons and as philosophers. I am concerned with youth or adolescence as a kind of history with which we must try to come to terms. Looking to the Western philosophy’s origin story, of Socrates corrupting the youth, to D.W Winnicott’s writings on youth, and Williams’ own writing on shame, I ask: if we conceive of youth as a kind of history, what is involved in coming to terms with, and living well with the past of our youth, and how might reflection on youth be part of philosophy, humanistically conceived?

In ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’, Bernard Williams argued that philosophy has a distinctive relationship with history, and not just the history of philosophy. He had in mind, especially, moral and political thought. For Williams, changes in ethical outlook are typically driven by social and cultural forces distinct from the power of rational argument. When an ethical idea prevails over time, holders of the outlook it supplants often have ‘have [no] reason to recognize the transition as an improvement’ (Williams 2000: 486). By their lights, the arguments for change are question-begging. In this respect, Williams believed, the history of ethics is unlike the history of modern science, whose telling typically vindicates later scientists on terms compelling to their predecessors.

Historians of philosophy widely concur that Galileo Galilei (re)introduced the metaphysical dichotomy of primary and secondary properties into philosophical discourse. However, his conceptual distinction appeared muddled, resulting in frequent misinterpretations or disregard over time. This paper aims to demonstrate that the apparent vagueness of the dichotomy stems from a common misunderstanding shaped by the subsequent distinction between two kinds of properties, primary and secondary. Accordingly, the central argument advanced here is that Galileo did not intend to differentiate between two kinds of properties inherent in external things. Instead, he sought to distinguish between the perception of spatial properties and the concurrent internal bodily sensations evoked by the mechanical impacts of external objects. Focusing on his isolation of an aspect of sensory experience, namely sensible qualities, it is suggested that Galileo recognised the phenomenal aspect of experience and thereby contributed to the early modern development of the concept of perceptual consciousness.

I discuss three lines of thought that appear in Williams’s ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’: the idea of science as pursuing an ‘absolute conception’ of the world, the idea that ‘there is no conception of the world that is not conceptualised in some way or other’, and the idea of ‘making sense of ourselves’. I consider whether the possibility of ‘making sense of ourselves’ fits with the idea of science as providing an ‘absolute conception of the world’, and I conclude that it does not.

I present a critical review of one of the most influential trends in scholarship analysing the conceptual relationship between Freud and Kant in moral psychology. I discuss three Kantian sophisticated naturalistic approaches (KSNAs), which explore the possibility of accommodating Kantian moral imperatives within the Freudian psycho-developmentalist account, based primarily on the idea of the superego. Specifically, I examine three of their arguments about moral development that revolve around: (1) the relevance of guilt for moral orientation. The KNSAs propose that guilt is a moral feeling, the manifestation of a superego or moral conscience. I argue instead that guilt is not a moral feeling per se, although it can sometimes serve as a moral orientation. (2) The nature of our sources of moral motivation. For the KSNAs, it is irrelevant to think about the sources of our moral motivation because it is impossible to know them. I argue, however, for the relevance of the intelligibility of our moral commands, which should somehow match or resemble their moral source. (3) The concept of ideality. For the KNSAs, the superego’s commands are moral because they are ideal. I will argue that the ideality of the superego’s commands is, on the contrary, self-deceptive.

One of Bernard Williams’ abiding aims was to reassure us in the face of what I call ‘genealogical anxiety’: the anxiety that once our cherished beliefs, concepts, values and practices have their origins revealed, we will be rationally compelled to abandon them. Williams’ treatment of genealogical anxiety rests on a deep distinction between science and ethics: while ‘our’ scientific outlook can be ‘vindicated’ by its history, ‘our’ ethical-political outlook cannot. In so arguing, Williams fails to reckon with the full force of genealogical anxiety and the problem of contingency that provokes it; he is guilty, ironically, of a kind of scientism about the natural sciences, seeing them as a form of inquiry free from historically contingent perspective. To make my case, I turn to On Certainty, in which Wittgenstein presents the Euromodern scientific outlook as no less susceptible of genealogical anxiety than any other. What’s more, Wittgenstein takes seriously a reply to genealogical anxiety – an externalist reply – that Williams dismisses as a ‘thin tune’ not ‘worth whistling’. If Wittgenstein is right that scientific and ethical outlooks are equally susceptible of genealogical critique, then it may well turn out that this ‘thin tune’ is the only one we have available to whistle.

This paper discusses a deflationary theory of human action developed by John Hyman. His theory of human action comprises two central claims, one about the general nature of action, another about the mark of human agency. An action is the causing of a change by a substance. A human action, as opposed to sub-personal actions, is one that results from the integrated operations of our cognitive and motor systems. Taken together these two claims offer a minimalist theory of human action that does not appeal to intention, the will or the power to choose. The first claim is by now familiar in the literature, not so the second one. This paper offers a critical discussion of this second claim. I shall argue that it sits uncomfortably with certain kinds of mental action. As a fix, I argue that we should appeal to the functional role of the executive system to specify the relevant kind of integration characteristic of human action. I proceed to show how the revised proposal shares the appeal of Hyman’s view while avoiding its difficulties.

Anscombe defined intentional action in terms of what she called ‘the special question “Why?”’ In the first part of this article, we present four objections to defining intentional action in this way. Then, in the second part, we show that Anscombe’s special question can instead be used to define a much broader category of conduct, namely that for which an agent is responsible. We thereby repurpose one of the most influential ideas in twentieth-century philosophy of action within a novel theory of responsibility.

Why do academic philosophy in times like these? I present a reading of Bernard Williams’ conception of philosophy as a humanistic discipline alongside his reflections on humanistic inquiry more generally, guided by the concern that during times of deep social and political crisis, academic philosophy is not worth doing. Given those circumstances, one might - and should - wonder if it is anything other than a distraction, an evasion of political responsibility, or a decadent frivolity. I present this reading in light of Roger Scruton’s criticism in 1995 that though Williams was “the most prominent” British ethicist of the time, his work lacks substantive ethical content. Given Williams’ response to Scruton, my reading will emphasize two things: first, that Williams’ conception of philosophy as a humanistic discipline reveals why the substance of his ethical thought is typically presented in an indirect and oblique manner. Second, that by reading Williams with this in mind, one can reconstruct from his later work a way of answering the question I began with. Philosophy, understood in a certain way and given certain historically contingent social and institutional conditions, can express and reflect the values of the outlook he held and which we may be losing: it may manifest a distinctively liberal form of freedom inseparable from the value of truthfulness.

In this paper we argue for a surprising similarity between the kinds of roles notation plays in music and in mathematics. We argue that in both cases the notation is doing more than merely documenting something that we have an independent grip on – either a musical performance/composition or a mathematical structure. In both instances, the notation can lead to new innovations, it can help in abstracting away from distracting details and it can facilitate explanations. In light of these functions, we argue that both musical and mathematical notations serve as models of the intended targets: musical and mathematical structures. Seen in this light, developing, and reflecting upon, notation is central to both musical and mathematical practice and is deserving of greater philosophical attention.

In their work Bernard Williams and Richard Wollheim rarely encounter each other as philosophers, but they are, I argue, in a silent interlocution that can be articulated through Stanley Cavell’s reflections on philosophy and psychoanalysis (Cavell 1987). Cavell urged the renewal of philosophy as a humanistic discipline through a rapprochement of philosophy and psychoanalysis. In ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline’ Williams articulated his long-held view of philosophy as a discipline of reflective enquiry aimed at self-knowledge. This paper explores how Richard Wollheim’s philosophical deployment of psychoanalytic theses owed to Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein can supply a real, bodily, basis for the form of critical self-knowledge on which Williams insisted.

Sometimes our scientific advances demonstrate that our ordinary way of speaking about the world is wrong. Sometimes, however, they show exactly how our ordinary descriptions get things right.

In this paper, I give a framework for working out which of the two cases we are in. I suggest we think about how science can reveal indeterminacy in our ordinary language. When this occurs, we should respond by thinking about what we want our ordinary talk to do for us. As a case study, I’ll examine the exchange between Arthur Eddington and Susan Stebbing regarding the significance of the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom for our ordinary solidity judgements.

The major consequence of this proposal is that it requires us to reflect on ourselves and our lives as well as the world. To determine whether our ordinary talk is proven wrong by science we must think about what we want to do with our everyday speech. This requires taking a leaf out of Bernard Williams’ book. Namely, it requires doing philosophy as a humanistic discipline.

We are often responsible for the care of others – we find ourselves accepting these responsibilities, and in turn, holding others accountable for fulfilling theirs. Yet while it is clear that we sometimes owe such duties, it is less clear why we owe them. What explains our duties to care? It is this question that I take up. This is a question about normative grounding: it asks why, or in virtue of what, these duties exist. Though not expressly framed in terms of grounding, care ethicists have paid considerable attention to this question – offering either voluntarist or non-voluntarist accounts of grounds. I argue that voluntarist accounts are misguided and turn to non-voluntarist alternatives, which are, in turn, divided between views that trace grounds to (a) certain relational facts or (b) a natural duty. Arguing that neither (a) nor (b) is individually correct, this paper offers a new account: 'hybrid non-voluntarism'. On this view, our duties to care are grounded in a relational moral principle: they exist in virtue of natural duties but are ‘triggered' only by specific relational ties. Through this account, I aim to resolve existing tensions within care ethics and elucidate the grounds of our duties to care.

For Bernard Williams, ethical inquiry is fundamentally about sense-making: it starts from what we already care about, and is always local. As a result, Williams opposes scientistic models of philosophy, arguing that philosophy should be seen as ‘part of a wider humanistic enterprise of making sense of ourselves and our activities’. This paper critiques the assumptions about disciplinarity on which Williams’s argument is based, and uses some resources from Dewey’s pragmatism to propose some friendly amendments to Williams’s account of the nature of value inquiry. Rather than seeking to assign philosophy either to the humanities or the sciences, it is more fruitful to examine philosophy through the lens of a transdisciplinary epistemology, in which incompatible methodologies and ontologies and how to reconcile them, are central. What is required is less a shift from scientistic to humanistic conceptions of philosophy, than for philosophers working in value inquiry to better align their aspirations for theory with what it can actually deliver.

This essay provides meta-ethical foundations for an approach to political realism. The foundations appeal to the kind of non-objectivity of morality involved in taking a critical and reflective perspective on our own moral and political outlooks. The essay argues that the distinctive methodology of an approach to political realism can be derived from these non-objectivist foundations. This methodology requires political philosophy to be more critical and reflective than it usually is, for it to be more deeply engaged with history, sociology, and other human sciences, and for it to look less like applied moral philosophy.

This essay argues that Descartes’ cogito, although a significant contribution to so-called ‘Western’ epistemological and ontological traditions, reveals new insights when tested against an Ubuntu-relational framework. The framework that allows for Descartes’ method of doubt and the conclusions about being that follow is, for us, inadequate, as it fails to address some crucial presumptions that trail a relational perspective. It is in this inadequacy that the cogito loses its promise and bows to what we take to be a more comprehensive foundational truth from the African perspective; that relationality precedes thought and concretises existence. What follows, then, is our attempt to show that this thesis is plausible by re-examining the Cogito in light of the Ubuntu relational framework. To do this, we will provide a brief exposition of Descartes’ journey towards the Cogito, especially as presented in the Meditations and the Discourse on Method. Having done that, we will proceed to outline a metaphysical account of the Ubuntu relational framework, and, finally, place Ubuntu in conversation with Descartes’ cogito. It is in this conversation that new insights on (at least) one foundational truth would be revealed – ‘Konke kuyikho ngokunye’; that is, that ‘all things are, through other things’.