A blog about philosophical explorations supported by the Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy (BIAP)
This is a post by Andrei Bespalov (Pompeu Fabra University).
In liberal democracies, citizens must respect one another as free and equal partners in self-government. According to public reason liberals, the idea of civic respect entails that policies can be enforced by the state only if they are reasonably justified to all citizens. But what should count as a reasonable justification in a public whose members disagree with one another on the basic matters of morality, philosophy, and religion?
This is a post by Federico Arena (University of Girona).
When someone utter stereotypes like “Girls are not good at mathematics” or “Mapuches are usually drunk” we intuitively sense something wrong with what has been said. The reasons for the negative evaluation of stereotypes are linked to the varieties of harms that they may cause to the stereotyped people. Indeed, such statements often express inaccurate beliefs that are the result of the imposition to certain groups of discriminatory social relationships and inegalitarian hierarchies.
This is a post by Manuel García-Carpintero (University of Barcelona).
Consider simple subject-predicate claims about ourselves such as “I once was in Athens”, made on the basis of watching what I take to be a photograph of myself in Athens. The claim might be wrong for all kind of reasons; say, that the photo has been tampered with, and it is not Athens what it shows. Now, developing suggestions by Wittgenstein, S. Shoemaker advanced a notion that he labeled Immunity to Error through Misidentification, to contrast the relatively low epistemic standing of a self-ascription like this with most of the more standard cases in which we refer to and make judgments about ourselves.
This is a post by Teresa Marques (University of Barcelona).
Imagine the following scenario: My husband and I go to the supermarket. When we get home, we bring the shopping bags from the car to the kitchen and as we start to put things away in the fridge, I notice that the eggs are missing. I wonder if we left them in the car. And so, I ask my husband for the car keys, to which he replies:
– The keys might be on the table.
He says ‘might’ because he is not completely certain if they are on the table, in his backpack, or in the pocket of his jacket.
This is a post by Filippo Contesi (University of Milan), Enrico Terrone (University of Genoa), Marta Campdelacreu (University of Barcelona) and Genoveva Martí (ICREA, University of Barcelona).
If we had a penny for every time we hear the saying “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”… Since at least the 18th century, philosophers and common people alike have pondered the question of whether or not the proverb is true. Some have answered one way, others the other. However, philosophers have typically agreed that, in general, people often claim that the proverb is true and that our aesthetic preferences are indeed a matter of individual or subjective taste.
This is a post by Iñigo González-Ricoy (University of Barcelona) and Pablo Magaña (Pompeu Fabra University).
If you have ever wondered why you have a say over who gets elected to your city council, your children’s school board, or the parliament of your country but not to the board of the company you work for, then you are not alone. In recent years, lawmakers across the political spectrum, from Elizabeth Warren to Theresa May, international institutions, from the European Parliament to the International Labour Organization, and workers in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere have entertained similar thoughts.
This is a post by Josefa (Pepa) Toribio (ICREA, University of Barcelona).
Some actions strike us as right or wrong—as morally charged. For example, imagine you see someone helping an elderly person cross the street. You might immediately feel that this is a good action. Conversely, if you witness someone being rude to a cashier, you might instantly sense that this behaviour is wrong. When we recognize that an action is wrong, what does this recognition involve? How should we understand this sensitivity to basic moral properties?
This is a post by Patrick Connolly (University of Barcelona).
Tech innovation generally arrives on a predictable wave of hype and hyperbole, we’re used to this by now. It serves the economic interests of the companies proclaiming their latest developments to spread the idea that what they have created is a revolutionary development that will lead us towards utopia. Indeed, the overriding economic model of tech is based upon generating publicity in order to encourage investment and the creation of multi-billion-dollar stock market valuations for companies that lose billions of dollars every year.
Open Philosophy 