Damian Cox

Critical thinking is often nominated as a graduate attribute, a learning outcome, and is even offered as a discrete subject in schools and universities. Therefore, it is important to gain clarity about the fundamental goal or purpose of critical thinking education. What should instructors be aiming at when they seek to instil critical thinking in their students? In this paper, we argue that the aim of critical thinking is the achievement and maintenance of intellectual autonomy. In setting out our argument for this conclusion, we investigate the three most plausible candidates for the goal of critical thinking practice. The first such candidate is successful inquiry: inquiry that succeeds in obtaining epistemic goods such as knowledge, true belief, or empirically adequate explanation. The second candidate is epistemically virtuous inquiry, i.e. inquiry that exhibits the full range of epistemic virtues, including the skills and capacities needed to support them. The third candidate is intellectual autonomy. We develop an account of intellectual autonomy as a form of self-respect attached to one’s epistemic and intellectual life and argue that only intellectual autonomy in this sense does full justice to the practice of critical thinking.

The gamer’s dilemma, initially proposed by Luck (Ethics and Information Technology 11(1):31–36, 2009) posits a moral comparison between in-game acts of murder and in-game acts of paedophilia within single-player videogames. Despite each activity lacking the obvious harms of their real-world equivalents, common intuitions suggest an important difference between them. Some responses to the dilemma suggest that intuitive responses to the two cases are based on important differences between the acts themselves or their social meaning. Others challenge the fundamental assumptions of the dilemma. In this paper, we identify and explore key imaginative and emotional differences in how certain types of in-game violence are experienced by players, consider how these differences factor into the moral lives of players, and use these insights to resolve the dilemma. The view we develop is that the key moral emotion in offensive video gameplay is self-repugnance. This is not repugnance of the act one directs a game character to perform in the game, nor repugnance of the character one plays. It is repugnance of oneself in playing the game. If self-repugnance is a fitting emotional response to playing a videogame, then this is prima facie grounds for thinking it is wrong to play the videogame. Our approach to the gamer’s dilemma is to distinguish the fittingness conditions of self-repugnance from the fittingness conditions of other moral emotions as they pertain to playing videogames. We argue that because of the virtual character of the actions performed in video games, self-repugnance is a fitting response to particular kinds of offensive gameplay. On the other hand, in-game murder is not invariably a fitting ground for self-repugnance. We argue that this difference is grounded in imaginative responses to the harm of death and the harms of profound suffering. Our task is to explain and justify this difference in fittingness conditions and use this to resolve the gamer’s dilemma.

In attempting to debunk moral realism through an appeal to evolutionary facts, debunkers face a series of problems, which we label the problems of scope, corrosiveness, and post‐hoc justification. To overcome these problems, debunkers must assume certain metaphysical or epistemological positions, or otherwise pre‐establish them. In doing so, they must assume or pre‐establish the very conclusion they seek in advancing the argument. This means that such debunking arguments either beg the question against the moral realist or are undermined as standalone metaethical arguments.

Posthumanist film and television is both a vehicle for reflection on discrimination and prejudice and a means of gratifying in fantasy deeply imbedded human impulses towards prejudice. Discrimination lies at the heart of posthuman narratives whenever the posthuman coalesces around an identifiable group in conflict with humans. We first introduce the idea of prejudice as a form of psychological defense, contrasting it with other accounts of prejudice in the philosophical literature. We then apply this notion to number of posthumanist film and television narratives. An adequate account of prejudice tells us about posthumanism in film—the significance of posthumanist thinking, speculation and fantasy. It helps account for the proliferation of television series and films about people who—being at one time dead, still dead or partially dead, or only sometimes dead, or have powers and appetites we do not have—are borderline creatures: not fully us, but still near to us.

Competition and contest underpin academic life in many ways, not all of them constructive or valuable. In this paper I make a start on the task of distinguishing valuable academic competition from its opposite and suggest reforms of academic institutions that would diminish the prevalence of destructive competition and approach more nearly the egalitarian goal of treating all members of the academic community—especially, but not only, students—as equally valued and equally deserving of respect. To do this, I develop a distinction between two kinds of competition: tender competition and rank competition. I analyse the illusion of meritocracy in terms of them. My principal recommendation for university pedagogical practice is to eliminate grading of student work and replace grading systems with a system of demanding pass/fail assessments.

An introduction to philosophy through film, _Thinking Through Film: Doing Philosophy, Watching Movies_ combines the exploration of fundamental philosophical issues with the experience of viewing films, and provides an engaging reading experience for undergraduate students, philosophy enthusiasts and film buffs alike. An in-depth yet accessible introduction to the philosophical issues raised by films, film spectatorship and film-making Provides 12 self-contained, close discussions of individual films from across genres Films discussed include Total Recall, Minority Report, La Promesse, Funny Games, Ikuru, The Dark Knight, Memento, AI and more Explores concepts that span epistemology, metaphysics, fate, choice, robot love, time travel, personal identity, spectacle, ethics, luck, regret, consequentialism, deontology and the philosophy of film itself A uniquely flexible resource for courses in philosophy and film that encourages student reflection, as well as being an engaging read for the film enthusiast

In this chapter I use a film by the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Le Fils, to explore the difference between Stoic and Anti-Stoic approaches to overcoming victimhood. The Stoic approach to overcoming victimhood emphasizes the inner-strength and resourcefulness of victims. It sets up an ideal of Stoic independence in which a person responds to becoming a victim by marshalling inner resources to overcome destructive and painful emotions. An Anti-Stoic approach to overcoming victimhood rejects such an appeal to independence and acknowledges that victims do not generally possess the inner resources needed to eliminate destructive and painful emotions. According to Anti-Stoicism, overcoming victimhood is a risky affair; it requires both courage and luck. I use Le Fils to argue that the Anti-Stoic approach to overcoming victimhood is both more realistic and more valuable than the Stoic approach

BOOK REVIEW Extract: Integrity, it seems, is a matter of remaining true to oneself, or rather, it is a matter of remaining true to what one reasonably judges to be the best of oneself. In Integrity and the Virtues of Reason, Greg Scherkoske seeks to overturn this piece of conventional wisdom. It is a fine book and I learned a lot from it. Scherkoske elaborates and defends the idea that integrity is an epistemic virtue; that it is not fundamentally a matter of being true to oneself but of being a good and responsible epistemic agent. What is wrong with the conventional picture, Scherkoske thinks, is that it invites moral danger. The moral danger Scherkoske has in mind takes two forms. One is self-indulgence. When faced with demands from others, fidelity to one's own commitments just because they are one's own can easily lead to a promotion of one's own interests over the interests of others. The second danger is blind allegiance. "Even if a person's commitments cannot be construed as self-indulgent or egoistic, an individual's belief that something is a matter of integrity might be taken to foreclose the possibility of challenge and revision".

While some may argue that universities are in a state of crisis, others claim that we are living in a post-university era; a time after universities. If there was a battle for the survival of the institution it is over and done with. The buildings still stand. Students enrol and may attend lectures, though most do not. But virtually nothing real remains. What some mistakenly take to be a university is, in actuality, an “uncanny” spectral presence. The encompassing ethico-philosophical question is this: what is it about spectral space and the feeling of absence with regard to the university that is important to understand? The Spectral University is characterized by the absence of what used to give the university its constitutive form and structure; of what is essential to the university as an important place of learning and growth. What is gone is the ability to pursue the academic virtues.

This paper is a study in contrasts. In the first part, I describe one prominent set of approaches to representing the ethical: those of analytic philosophy and the experimental moral psychology inspired by it. I argue that what is missing in this approach is a perspicuous representation of the ethical. The term “perspicuous representation” is drawn from the work of Wittgenstein, where it means a way of representing phenomena that reveals the inner connections between their parts or aspects and makes apparent their meaning for us. Arriving at perspicuous representations is fundamental to Wittgenstein’s interpretative/philosophical methodology. In Philosophical Investigations he says, “The concept of a perspicuous...

This paper argues that theories of truth which seek to specify the ontological ground of true statements by appealing to an ontology of truth‐makers face a severe and possibly insurmountable obstacle in the form of logically complex statements. I argue that there is no apparent way to develop an account of logically complex truth within the confines of a modest and plausible ontology of truth‐makers and to this end criticize independent attempts by Armstrong and Pendlebury to develop such an account.

In this paper, I develop an objection to agent-based accounts of right action. Agent-based accounts of right action attempt to derive moral judgment of actions from judgment of the inner quality of virtuous agents and virtuous agency. A moral theory ought to be something that moral agents can permissibly use in moral deliberation. I argue for a principle that captures this intuition and show that, for a broad range of other-directed virtues and motives, agent-based accounts of right action fail to satisfy this principle.

This paper explores the grounds upon which moral judgment of a person's beliefs is properly made. The beliefs in question are non-moral beliefs and the objects of moral judgment are individual instances of believing. We argue that instances of believing may be morally wrong on any of three distinct grounds: (i) by constituting a moral hazard, (ii) by being the result of immoral inquiry, or (iii) by arising from vicious inner processes of belief formation. On this way of articulating the basis of moral judgment of belief it becomes clear that rational and epistemic norms do not exhaust the kinds of normative judgment properly made of a person's state of believing. We argue that there are instances of believing that are both rational and true and yet morally wrong