TY  - JOUR
A1  - van Buuren, Jasper
T1  - The Difference between Moral Sources and Hypergoods
JF  - International philosophical quarterly
N2  - In Sources of the Self Charles Taylor makes clear that both hypergoods and moral sources are essential to the moral life. Although hypergoods and moral sources are not the same thing, Taylor’s descriptions of these concepts are quite similar, and so their distinction requires interpretation. I propose that we interpret the difference on the basis of another distinction that is central to Taylor’s thinking: that between immanence and transcendence. Whereas a moral source transcends us, a hypergood is the value of our immanent way of relating to that moral source. This interpretation requires that we first differentiate between a narrow and a wide sense of “moral source.”
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.5840/ipq201641259
SN  - 0019-0365
SN  - 2153-8077
VL  - 56
SP  - 171
EP  - 186
PB  - Philosophy Documentation Center
CY  - Charlottesville
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - van Buuren, Jasper
T1  - critique of neuroscience
JF  - Continental philosophy review
N2  - Bennett and Hacker criticize a number of neuroscientists and philosophers for attributing capacities which belong to the human being as a whole, like perceiving or deciding, to a “part” of the human being, viz. the brain. They call this type of mistake the “mereological fallacy”. Interestingly, the authors say that these capacities cannot be ascribed to the mind either. They reject not only materialistic monism but also Cartesian dualism, arguing that many predicates describing human life do not refer to physical or mental properties, nor to the sum of such properties. I agree with this important principle and with the critique of the mereological fallacy which it underpins, but I have two objections to the authors’ view. Firstly, I think that the brain is not literally a part of the human being, as suggested. Secondly, Bennett and Hacker do not offer an account of body and mind which explains in a systematic way how the domain of phenomena which transcends the mental and the physical relates to the mental and the physical. I first argue that Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology provides the kind of account we need. Then, drawing on Plessner, I present an alternative view of the mereological relationships between brain and human being. My criticism does not undercut Bennett and Hacker’s diagnosis of the mereological fallacy but rather gives it a more solid philosophical–anthropological foundation.
KW  - Mereological fallacy
KW  - Neuroscience
KW  - Philosophical anthropology
KW  - Body as subject and object
KW  - Eccentric positionality
KW  - Personhood
KW  - Psychophysical neutrality
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-015-9318-4
SN  - 1387-2842
SN  - 1573-1103
VL  - 49
SP  - 223
EP  - 241
PB  - Springer
CY  - Dordrecht
ER  -