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This chapter focuses on Gettier’s argument against the JTB theory of knowledge. Its central claim is that this argument is more complex than ordinarily recognized because Gettier not only argues against the JTB theory but also for the judgments that he makes about his famous cases. These subsidiary arguments rely on the notion of “epistemic luck.” The chapter points out, furthermore, that, in the aftermath of the publication of Gettier’s landmark paper, many others offered their own arguments for Gettier judgments and hence that the idea that it is “just intuition” that supports these judgments is a myth. The chapter closes by drawing a distinction between the producer and the consumer of a philosophical thought experiment. and uses this distinction to further criticize the view that intuitions play an important evidential role in philosophy The connection between this distinction and the view that thought experimentation is primarily abductive is also described.

Consider a simple thought-experiment: What if it were possible, say by dipping into a skin dye bath or using special pigmentation-altering lights in a converted tanning bed, to change one’s skin colour temporarily and reversibly? You can be “Shirley Temple” white this week, “Louis Armstrong” black next week, “Genghis Khan” or “Madame Butterfly” Asian the week after that. Temporary skin colour change could be used to combat racism in hiring, education, admission to special societies; to facilitate social interaction in teaching or travel; or to pursue aesthetic and self-identity interests. But would race-colour change be deceptive or morally problematic? At issue is whether a person is somehow “really” a specific colour and if so, whether it would violate “race integrity” (if there is such a thing) to change it. Is skin colour a basic constituent of personal identity? The underlying theoretical race ontology issues involve racial skepticism, racial constructionism, and population naturalism, and whether deracialised interaction among individuals and peoples of the world might be possible.

This chapter focuses on commonsense and philosophical worries about collective consciousness and collective personhood. The arguments in this chapter proceed in a highly theoretical way, leading up to the claim that any theory that establishes a necessary connection between consciousness and mentality will require fundamental and untenable revisions to the foundations of cognitive science. These arguments are directed toward philosophers of mind; they address recent research in social psychology and experimental philosophy, as well as the familiar criticisms of functionalism advanced by Ned Block and John Searle.

There is psychological evidence that ‘typical’ characteristics can acquire normative status: what is atypical can come to be seen as deviant. I consider two main areas where this idea is relevant to the case of philosophy: first, the professional philosophy seminar or conference talk, where an adversarial, and sometimes downright hostile, atmosphere can come to be regarded as ‘the norm’, so that those who find such an atmosphere alienating are regarded as being too thin-skinned. Second, I discuss thought experiments, where, again, the ‘normal’ response can be taken to be the ‘right’ response, so that students whose own intuitions conflict are, again, regarded as being at fault in some way. In both cases there are at least prima facie reasons to think that women are more likely than men to be the ‘deviants’; but there are also non-gender-based reasons to resist the move from atypicality to deviance.

The introduction outlines historical and formal links between Bildung, biology, and the narrative strategies used by modernist novelists. The classical Bildungsroman, with its insistent linearity, originated from the same organicist aesthetics and ideology as one of the nineteenth-century’s most pervasive biological narratives: recapitulation, in which individual development (ontogeny) repeats species evolution (phylogeny) in miniature. By the early twentieth century, however, this linear biological paradigm was giving way to a more complex set of nonlinear developmental models, which served as inspiration or even templates for the formal experiments of several prominent novelists seeking to rehabilitate the ideals associated with the Bildungsroman. Linking the various new models is the concept of reversion, a developmental disruption of simple chronology that would seem, from the perspective of recapitulation theory, to be regressive or otherwise pathological. Each of the novels featured in the book incorporates some form of biologically derived reversion into its narrative structure, allowing it to retain Bildung’s spiritual and aesthetic ideals while challenging the reductionism and sinister political implications of recapitulation theory.

The brief conclusion charts some of the ways in which fiction continues to engage with contemporary biology after 1960—as Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and Ali Smith’s How to be both do with molecular genetics, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go with cloning, and Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed and Ian McEwan’s Nutshell with evolutionary genetics. Linking modernist to contemporary Bildungsromane, I propose that using biological models to dissociate development from chronology is not only a narratological practice but also an ethical and political one. Investigating how biology participated in the modernist search for an expanded understanding of development, Modernist Life Histories positions itself within a multidisciplinary attempt to negotiate the condition of “alternative” or “multiple modernities.”

This essay triangulates Dylan Thomas’s 1940 collection of stories, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, with Franz Kafka’s ‘Investigations of a Dog’ (1922) and a portion of Stefan Themerson’s writing, to compare the different ways in which they experiment conceptually with imaginary species-shifting. Thomas’s syntax, collocations of vocabulary, and very choice of title show that he is thinking in this work about a mode of apprehension of the world that is mobile, resourceful, omnivorous, semi-domesticated, smelly, noisy, and completely without prejudice in its assessment of the grounds for helping friends and harming enemies. This is a prose for paying attention, listening and nosing the air: a prose whose vigilance is effectively unending – it does not employ a sentence structure that ever feels complete, it simply pauses for rest. And there is a politics of a sort to this ‘canine’ syntax. The title of his collection of stories might seem jocular, but it hints at an insistence on a serious need to see, hear, taste and smell the world with heightened senses requiring an equivalent linguistic form of shape-shifting.

This chapter contains a variety of thought experiments. It imagines that, in order to stimulate the economy, the Government gives everyone some money, and that this becomes a permanent and popular Citizen's Income; it imagines a woman with a child, and a man with a young family, firstly anywhere in the world, and then in the UK, and their experiences of current benefits systems; and it imagines a country without a benefits system, and explores the reform options available: giving everyone the same amount, or means-testing the payment. The conclusion reached is that, in the context of a progressive income tax system, the sensible approach is a Citizen's Income. The chapter closes with a discussion of how the Citizen's Income debate out to be structured, and concludes that reform options should not be tested against tests defined by the current system, but the current system should be tested against reform options; and that it should be recognised that problems relating to any necessary transition arrangements might have more to do with the current system than with the new one.