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Publication Metadata only Between Socrates and Kant. Thinking and sensus communis in Arendt's conception of the banality of evil(Edizioni Ets, 2017) Department of Philosophy; Roney, Patrick; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/AThe aim of this paper is to show how Hannah Arendt develops her concept of the banality of evil through a phenomenological appropriation of Kant's theory of judgment and of the principle of sensus communis in particular. Even though Arendt initially defined the banality of evil as a form of thoughtlessness grounded upon her understanding of thinking as an inner dialogue with one's 'other' self, I argue that she develops the concept much more extensively in relation to Kant's doctrine of reflective judgment and the possibility of a sensus communis as a pre-conceptual model of unforced consensus for the public space. I further argue that her reading of Kant is carried out together with both an existential-ontological re-appraisal of appearances and its relation to the transcendental imagination. Through the emphasis on the sensus communis, the banality of evil can then be re-defined as a refusal of the same.Publication Metadata only Dretske on non-epistemic seeing(Wiley, 2017) Department of Philosophy; Demircioğlu, Erhan; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 193390In this article, I make a distinction between two versions of non-epistemicism about seeing, and bring explicitly into view and argue against a particular version defended by Dretske. More specifically, I distinguish non-epistemic seeing as non-conceptual seeing, where concept possession is assumed to be cognitively demanding, from non-epistemic seeing as seeing without noticing, where noticing is assumed to be relatively cognitively undemanding. After showing that Dretske argues for the possibility of non-epistemic seeing in both senses of the term, I target his thesis that a given subject (non-epistemically) sees all the objects that are visually differentiated in her visual field, where visual differentiation does not require that she notice those objects. I argue that the notion of a visual field deployed in the formulation of the thesis cannot be phenomenal and therefore that seeing without noticing amounts to mere visual confrontation (in a sense to be specified). I further argue that since the epistemicist does not (and need not) deny the existence of seeing without noticing in the sense of mere visual confrontation, there is a clear sense in which Dretske's non-epistemicism turns out to be trivial.Publication Metadata only Evil and the experience of freedom: Nancy on schelling and Heidegger(Humanities Press Inc, 2009) Department of Philosophy; Roney, Patrick; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/AThis essay examines Jean-Luc Nancy's re-posing of the question of freedom in The Experience of Freedom in relation to three issues-what lie calls the "thought of freedom," the reality of evil, and the closure of metaphysics. All three elements that lie discusses point directly to Heidegger's engagement with Friedrich Schelling's attempt to establish a system of freedom. My intervention into the discussion between these three thinkers will address several issues. The first part draws out the implications of Nancy's argument that the thought of freedom, not the question of being as Heidegger Would have it, is the ultimate matter for thinking that arises at the end of metaphysics. This in turn has important implications for Nancy's understanding of evil. The next part confronts and criticizes Nancy's contention that there is an "ontodicy" in Heidegger's thought that lends a certain justification to evil. The final part aims to show how Heidegger's engagement with Schelling and the reality of evil has to be understood within the context of the question concerning technology. This leads to a second confrontation with Nancy, who proposes a quite different interpretation of technology according to his own ontology, which he calls "being singular plural," which amounts in effect to a liberation of technology from the being-question.Publication Metadata only Hearkening to Thalia: toward the rebirth of comedy in continental philosophy(Humanities Press Inc, 2009) Department of Philosophy; Freydberg, Bernard; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/AThis paper discloses and furthers the rebirth of comedy in Continental philosophy in three stages. The first treats Greek comedy, bringing forth the comic contours in Plato and exploring the philosophical content of Aristophanic comedy. The second examines certain German encounters with comedy, from the staid Wieland translations of Aristophanes through the thoughtful discussions of Schiller, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The third investigates twentieth-century American comedy and its connection to American Continental philosophy, and includes a close analysis of the Marx Brothers' Horsefeathers. The latter serves as a bridge to some surprising developments regarding comedy, poetry, and philosophy.Publication Metadata only Locke on personal identity: the form of the self(Slovak Academy of Sciences - Inst of Philosophy, 2011) Department of Philosophy; Azeri, Siyaveş; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/AIn line with the empiricist project, Locke tries to describe how unconscious encounters with environment yield to the emergence of consciousness. For Locke the self is identical with consciousness and consciousness is accessible empirically. As far as the identity of human is concerned, identity of the self depends on the consciousness of the person. The person is identical to himself to the extent that he is aware of his own perceptions and thinking. The range of the person's memory sets the limits of consciousness. According to Locke, consciousness is an element that accompanies all acts of thinking including act of recollection. Such accompanying consciousness constitutes the form of the identity of the self, whereas memory-ideas may be considered the content of consciousness. Therefore, it is this formal constitutive element that provides constancy of the idea of the self. If so, then it can be claimed that Locke's approach to the question of the self results in admitting the truth of what he intends to reject and it is self-defeating; this is to say that, Locke's methodology pushes him to adopt a Platonic-Aristotelian formal theory of identity in general and of personal identity in particular.Publication Metadata only Politics of shame in Turkey: public shaming and mourning(Springer, 2020) Department of Philosophy; Direk, Zeynep; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 5771The politics of shame makes part of the politics of affects. It is becoming a prominent form of politics in the age of social media. Social media, insofar as it presents a plurality of perspectives, can be a milieu for public deliberation. Acknowledging that politics of shame can be of different types, this essay considers two different experiences of politics of shame in social media. It compares public shaming as an activist strategy of moral reform in contemporary feminist politics with politics of shame under authoritarianism by concentrating on two cases from Turkey. At first the structure of shame will be articulated by recourse to the phenomenological and psychological theories of shame. In public shaming for feminist moral reform, the publically shamed agent, who is a feminist, is accused by a group for performing an injurious speech act or a deed with mediate pernicious, harmful consequences. It is my contention that a theory of gender or sexual difference can be false, but is not morally equivalent to an attack on somebody's existence, racism, and acts of genocide denial. Practices of public shaming in feminism are not self-defense; they are repressive and unfair attacks that destroy public deliberation. It is also problematic to attack feminists, on the grounds of arguments that are based on analogies, which do not apply to non-Western geo-political contexts. All politics of shame is not wrong. For example, the practices of politics of shame that concern non-elaborate mourning have moral and political value insofar as they can play a role in challenging an authoritarian political rule. In this case, the public shame results from attesting to injustice done to the other(s) in the public sphere, a public sphere, which is already closed, and highly manipulated by the authoritarian state.Publication Metadata only Reasons, rationalization, and rationality(Springer) Department of Philosophy; Demircioğlu, Erhan; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 193390In this paper, I provide an answer to the question "what is it for a reason to be the reason for which a belief is held?" After arguing against the causal account of the reason-for-which connection, I present what I call the rationalization account, according to which a reason R a subject S has for a belief P is the reason for which S holds P just in case R is the premise in S's rationalization for P, where the argument from R to P becomes S's rationalization in virtue of her endorsing it. In order to bring explicitly into view the version of the rationalization account I aim to argue for, I draw two distinctions, one between occurrent and dispositional endorsement and the other between personal and public endorsement. I show that the version of the rationalization account thus clarified receives intuitive support from various cases and survives some formidable objections that might be tempting to level against it.Publication Metadata only Reliabilism, the generality problem, and the basing relation(Wiley, 2019) Department of Philosophy; Demircioğlu, Erhan; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 193390In A Well-Founded Solution to the Generality Problem, Comesana argues, inter alia, for three main claims. One is what I call the unavoidability claim: Any adequate epistemological theory needs to appeal, either implicitly or explicitly, to the notion of a belief's being based on certain evidence. Another is what I call the legitimacy claim: It is perfectly legitimate to appeal to the basing relation in solving a problem for an epistemological theory. According to Comesana, the legitimacy claim follows straightforwardly from the unavoidability claim. The third is what I call the basing solution claim: An appeal to the notion of basing relation is all we need to solve the generality problem for (process) reliabilism. In this article, I argue that the unavoidability claim and the basing solution claim are false and that the legitimacy claim might be true only in a qualified sense.