Results for 'Michael Hickson'

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  1. Pierre Bayle and the Secularization of Conscience.Michael W. Hickson - 2018 - Journal of the History of Ideas 79 (2):199-220.
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  2. Theodicy and Toleration in Bayle’s Dictionary.Michael W. Hickson - 2013 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 51 (1):49-73.
    Theodicy and Toleration Seem at first glance to be an unlikely pair of topics to treat in a single paper. Toleration usually means putting up with beliefs or actions with which one disagrees, and it is practiced because the beliefs or actions in question are not disagreeable enough to justify interference. It is usually taken to be a topic for moral and political philosophy. Theodicy, on the other hand, is the attempt to solve the problem of evil; that is, to (...)
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  3. A Brief History of Problems of Evil.Michael W. Hickson - 2014 - In Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard-Snyder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to The Problem of Evil. Wiley. pp. 3-18.
    While evil has always fascinated philosophers, it is only in modern times that the existence of evil has been seen as a serious challenge to belief in the existence of a powerful and benevolent God. In order to demonstrate this, the following chapter traces the historical emergence of what philosophers today call “the problem of evil” through an analysis of the writings of Plato, Epicurus, Sextus Empiricus, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Descartes, Bayle, and Hume.
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  4. Disagreement and Academic Scepticism in Bayle.Michael Hickson - 2016 - In Sébastien Charles & Plínio Junqueira Smith (eds.), Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy. Cham: Springer Verlag.
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  5. Belief and Invincible Objections: Bayle, Le Clerc, Leibniz.Michael W. Hickson - 2015 - In Christian Leduc, Paul Rateau & Jean-Luc Solère (eds.), Leibniz et Bayle: confrontation et dialogue. Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag. pp. 69-86.
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  6. Conscientious Refusals without Conscience.Michael W. Hickson - 2010 - Philo 13 (2):167-184.
    In this paper I uncover and critically analyze a methodological assumption in the literature on conscientious refusals in health care. The assumption is what I call the “Priority of Conscience Principle,” which says the following: to determine the moral status of any act of conscientious refusal, it is first necessary to determine the nature and value of conscience. I argue that it is not always necessary to discuss conscience in the debate on conscientious refusals, and that discussing conscience is even (...)
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  7. Pierre Bayle: Dialogues of Maximus and Themistius.Pierre Bayle & Michael W. Hickson - 2016 - Leiden, Netherlands: Brill's Texts and Sources in Intellectual History 256/18.
    An English translation of Pierre Bayle's posthumous last book, Entretiens de Maxime et de Themiste (1707), in which Bayle defends his skeptical position on the problem of the evil. This book is often cited and attacked by G.W. Leibniz in his Theodicy (1710). Over one hundred pages of original philosophical and historical material introduce the translation, providing it with context and establishing the work's importance.
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  8. The Rise of Religious Skepticism in the Seventeenth Century.Michael W. Hickson & Thomas M. Lennon - 2014 - In Daniel Kaufman (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 563-582.
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  9. Simon Foucher and Anti-Cartesian Skepticism.Michael W. Hickson - 2019 - In Steven Nadler, Tad M. Schmaltz & Delphine Antoine-Mahut (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 678-690.
    A survey of the skepticism of Simon Foucher, with particular attention to his objections to Descartes' philosophy.
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  10. Varieties of Academic Skepticism in Early Modern Philosophy: Pierre-Daniel Huet and Simon Foucher.Michael W. Hickson - 2018 - In Diego E. Machuca & Baron Reed (eds.), Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 320-341.
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  11. Pierre Bayle.Michael W. Hickson - 2016 - In Lawrence Nolan (ed.), The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon. New York, USA: Cambridge University Press. pp. 55-56.
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  12. Bayle on Évidence as a Criterion of Truth.Michael W. Hickson - 2018 - In Antony McKenna (ed.), Libertinage et philosophie à l’époque classique (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle), n° 14, La pensée de Pierre Bayle. pp. 105-125.
    A survey of Bayle's skeptical arguments regarding Descartes' criterion of truth, which Bayle refers to as "evidence." Bayle's arguments for degrees of evidence, as well as for the necessity and sufficiency of possessing a high degree of evidence in order to form virtuous beliefs, are surveyed as well.
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  13. The Real Significance of Bayle’s Authorship of the Avis.Michael W. Hickson & Thomas M. Lennon - 2009 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 1 (17):191-205.
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  14. Reductio ad Malum.Michael W. Hickson - 2011 - Modern Schoolman 88 (3-4):201-221.
    Pierre Bayle is perhaps most well-known for arguing in his Dictionary (1697) that the problem of evil cannot be solved by reason alone. This skepticism about theodicy is usually credited to a religious crisis suffered by Bayle in 1685 following the unjust imprisonment and death of his brother, the death of his father, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. But in this paper I argue that Bayle was skeptical about theodicy a decade earlier than these events, from at (...)
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  15. The Moral Certainty of Immortality in Descartes.Michael W. Hickson - 2011 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 28 (3):227-247.
    In the Dedicatory Letter of the Meditations, René Descartes claims that he will offer a proof of the soul’s immortality, to be accomplished by reason alone. This proof is also promised by the title page of the first edition of the Meditations, which includes the words “in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated.” But in the Synopsis, and later in his replies to objections, Descartes gives a more nuanced account of the possibility of (...)
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  16. The Message of Bayle's Last Title: Providence and Toleration in the Entretiens de Maxime et de Thémiste.Michael W. Hickson - 2010 - Journal of the History of Ideas 71 (4):547-567.
    In this paper I uncover the identities of the interlocutors of Pierre Bayle's Entretiens de Maxime et de Themiste, and I show the significance of these identities for a proper understanding of the Entretiens and of Bayle's thought more generally. Maxime and Themiste represent the philosophers of late antiquity, Maximus of Tyre and Themistius. Bayle brought these philosophers into dialogue in order to suggest that the problem of evil, though insoluble by means of speculative reason, could be dissolved and thus (...)
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  17. Compassionate phenomenal conservatism.Michael Huemer - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (1):30–55.
    I defend the principle of Phenomenal Conservatism, on which appearances of all kinds generate at least some justification for belief. I argue that there is no reason for privileging introspection or intuition over perceptual experience as a source of justified belief; that those who deny Phenomenal Conservatism are in a self-defeating position, in that their view cannot be both true and justified; and that thedemand for a metajustification for Phenomenal Conservatism either is an easily met demand, or is an unfair (...)
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  18. Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements.Michael Koenigs, Liane Young, Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Fiery Cushman, Marc Hauser & Antonio Damasio - 2007 - Nature 446 (7138):908-911.
    The psychological and neurobiological processes underlying moral judgement have been the focus of many recent empirical studies1–11. Of central interest is whether emotions play a causal role in moral judgement, and, in parallel, how emotion-related areas of the brain contribute to moral judgement. Here we show that six patients with focal bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a brain region necessary for the normal generation of emotions and, in particular, social emotions12–14, produce an abnor- mally ‘utilitarian’ pattern of (...)
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  19. A liberal realist answer to debunking skeptics: the empirical case for realism.Michael Huemer - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (7):1983-2010.
    Debunking skeptics claim that our moral beliefs are formed by processes unsuited to identifying objective facts, such as emotions inculcated by our genes and culture; therefore, they say, even if there are objective moral facts, we probably don’t know them. I argue that the debunking skeptics cannot explain the pervasive trend toward liberalization of values over human history, and that the best explanation is the realist’s: humanity is becoming increasingly liberal because liberalism is the objectively correct moral stance.
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  20. The Markov blankets of life: autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle.Michael David Kirchhoff - 2018 - Journal of the Royal Society Interface 15 (138).
    This work addresses the autonomous organization of biological systems. It does so by considering the boundaries of biological systems, from individual cells to Home sapiens, in terms of the presence of Markov blankets under the active inference scheme—a corollary of the free energy principle. A Markov blanket defines the boundaries of a system in a statistical sense. Here we consider how a collective of Markov blankets can self-assemble into a global system that itself has a Markov blanket; thereby providing an (...)
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  21. When is parsimony a virtue.Michael Huemer - 2009 - Philosophical Quarterly 59 (235):216-236.
    Parsimony is a virtue of empirical theories. Is it also a virtue of philosophical theories? I review four contemporary accounts of the virtue of parsimony in empirical theorizing, and consider how each might apply to two prominent appeals to parsimony in the philosophical literature, those made on behalf of physicalism and on behalf of nominalism. None of the accounts of the virtue of parsimony extends naturally to either of these philosophical cases. This suggests that in typical philosophical contexts, ontological simplicity (...)
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  22. Revisionary intuitionism.Michael Huemer - 2008 - Social Philosophy and Policy 25 (1):368-392.
    I argue that, given evidence of the factors that tend to distort our intuitions, ethical intuitionists should disown a wide range of common moral intuitions, and that they should typically give preference to abstract, formal intuitions over more substantive ethical intuitions. In place of the common sense morality with which intuitionism has traditionally allied, the suggested approach may lead to a highly revisionary normative ethics.
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  23. In defence of repugnance.Michael Huemer - 2008 - Mind 117 (468):899-933.
    I defend the 'Repugnant' Conclusion that for any possible population of happy people, a population containing a sufficient number of people with lives barely worth living would be better. Four lines of argument converge on this conclusion, and the conclusion has a simple, natural theoretical explanation. The opposition to the Repugnant Conclusion rests on a bare appeal to intuition. This intuition is open to charges of being influenced by multiple distorting factors. Several theories of population ethics have been devised to (...)
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  24. Phenomenal Conservatism and the Internalist Intuition.Michael Huemer - 2006 - American Philosophical Quarterly 43 (2):147-158.
    Externalist theories of justification create the possibility of cases in which everything appears to one relevantly similar with respect to two propositions, yet one proposition is justified while the other is not. Internalists find this difficult to accept, because it seems irrational in such a case to affirm one proposition and not the other. The underlying internalist intuition supports a specific internalist theory, Phenomenal Conservatism, on which epistemic justification is conferred by appearances.
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  25. An Abductive Theory of Constitution.Michael Baumgartner & Lorenzo Casini - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (2):214-233.
    The first part of this paper finds Craver’s (2007) mutual manipulability theory (MM) of constitution inadequate, as it definitionally ties constitution to the feasibility of idealized experiments, which, however, are unrealizable in principle. As an alternative, the second part develops an abductive theory of constitution (NDC), which exploits the fact that phenomena and their constituents are unbreakably coupled via common causes. The best explanation for this common-cause coupling is the existence of an additional dependence relation, viz. constitution. Apart from adequately (...)
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  26. (Online) Manipulation: Sometimes Hidden, Always Careless.Michael Klenk - forthcoming - Review of Social Economy.
    Ever-increasing numbers of human interactions with intelligent software agents, online and offline, and their increasing ability to influence humans have prompted a surge in attention toward the concept of (online) manipulation. Several scholars have argued that manipulative influence is always hidden. But manipulation is sometimes overt, and when this is acknowledged the distinction between manipulation and other forms of social influence becomes problematic. Therefore, we need a better conceptualisation of manipulation that allows it to be overt and yet clearly distinct (...)
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  27. Where there is life there is mind: In support of a strong life-mind continuity thesis.Michael David Kirchhoff & Tom Froese - 2017 - Entropy 19.
    This paper considers questions about continuity and discontinuity between life and mind. It begins by examining such questions from the perspective of the free energy principle (FEP). The FEP is becoming increasingly influential in neuroscience and cognitive science. It says that organisms act to maintain themselves in their expected biological and cognitive states, and that they can do so only by minimizing their free energy given that the long-term average of free energy is entropy. The paper then argues that there (...)
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  28. Causation as simultaneous and continuous.Michael Huemer & Ben Kovitz - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (213):556–565.
    We propose that all actual causes are simultaneous with their direct effects, as illustrated by both everyday examples and the laws of physics. We contrast this view with the sequential conception of causation, according to which causes must occur prior to their effects. The key difference between the two views of causation lies in differing assumptions about the mathematical structure of time.
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  29. Serious theories and skeptical theories: Why you are probably not a brain in a vat.Michael Huemer - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (4):1031-1052.
    Skeptical hypotheses such as the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis provide extremely poor explanations for our sensory experiences. Because these scenarios accommodate virtually any possible set of evidence, the probability of any given set of evidence on the skeptical scenario is near zero; hence, on Bayesian grounds, the scenario is not well supported by the evidence. By contrast, serious theories make reasonably specific predictions about the evidence and are then well supported when these predictions are satisfied.
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  30. Existence Is Evidence of Immortality.Michael Huemer - 2021 - Noûs 55 (1):128-151.
    Time may be infinite in both directions. If it is, then, if persons could live at most once in all of time, the probability that you would be alive now would be zero. But if persons can live more than once, the probability that you would be alive now would be nonzero. Since you are alive now, with certainty, either the past is finite, or persons can live more than once.
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  31. The Influence of Situational Factors in Sacrificial Dilemmas on Utilitarian Moral Judgments.Michael Klenk - 2022 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (3):593-625.
    The standard way to test alternative descriptive theories of moral judgment is by asking subjects to evaluate (amongst others) sacrificial dilemmas, where acting classifies as a utilitarian moral judgment and not acting classifies as a deontological moral judgment. Previous research uncovered many situational factors that alter subject’s moral judgments without affecting which type of action utilitarianism or deontology would recommend. This literature review provides a systematic analysis of the experimental literature on the influence of situational factors on moral judgments in (...)
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  32. Autonomy and Online Manipulation.Michael Klenk & Jeff Hancock - 2019 - Internet Policy Review 1:1-11.
    More and more researchers argue that online technologies manipulate human users and, therefore, undermine their autonomy. We call this the MAL view on online technology because it argues from Manipulation to Autonomy-Loss. MAL enjoys public visibility and will shape the academic discussion to come. This view of online technology, however, fails conceptually. MAL presupposes that manipulation equals autonomy loss, and that autonomy is the absence of manipulation. That is mistaken. In short, an individual can be manipulated while being fully personally (...)
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  33. Feminist Epistemology and Social Epistemology: Another Uneasy Alliance.Michael D. Doan - 2024 - Apa Studies on Feminism and Philosophy 23 (2):11-19.
    In this paper I explore Phyllis Rooney’s 2003 chapter, “Feminist Epistemology and Naturalized Epistemology: An Uneasy Alliance,” taking guidance from her critique of naturalized epistemology in pursuing my own analysis of another uneasy alliance: that between feminist epistemology and social epistemology. Investigating some of the background assumptions at work in prominent conceptions of social epistemology, I consider recent analyses of "epistemic bubbles" to ask how closely such analyses are aligned with ongoing research in feminist epistemology. I argue that critical feminist (...)
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  34. Digital Well-Being and Manipulation Online.Michael Klenk - 2020 - In Christopher Burr & Luciano Floridi (eds.), Ethics of digital well-being: a multidisciplinary approach. Springer.
    Social media use is soaring globally. Existing research of its ethical implications predominantly focuses on the relationships amongst human users online, and their effects. The nature of the software-to-human relationship and its impact on digital well-being, however, has not been sufficiently addressed yet. This paper aims to close the gap. I argue that some intelligent software agents, such as newsfeed curator algorithms in social media, manipulate human users because they do not intend their means of influence to reveal the user’s (...)
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  35. Horizontal Surgicality and Mechanistic Constitution.Michael Baumgartner, Lorenzo Casini & Beate Krickel - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85:417-430.
    While ideal interventions are acknowledged by many as valuable tools for the analysis of causation, recent discussions have shown that, since there are no ideal interventions on upper-level phenomena that non-reductively supervene on their underlying mechanisms, interventions cannot—contrary to a popular opinion—ground an informative analysis of constitution. This has led some to abandon the project of analyzing constitution in interventionist terms. By contrast, this paper defines the notion of a horizontally surgical intervention, and argues that, when combined with some innocuous (...)
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  36. Metaphysical Explanation by Constraint.Michael Bertrand - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (6):1325-1340.
    It is often thought that metaphysical grounding underwrites a distinctive sort of metaphysical explanation. However, it would be a mistake to think that all metaphysical explanations are underwritten by metaphysical grounding. In service of this claim, I offer a novel kind of metaphysical explanation called metaphysical explanation by constraint, examples of which have been neglected in the literature. I argue that metaphysical explanations by constraint are not well understood as grounding explanations.
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  37. Resisting Structural Epistemic Injustice.Michael Doan - 2018 - Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4 (4).
    What form must a theory of epistemic injustice take in order to successfully illuminate the epistemic dimensions of struggles that are primarily political? How can such struggles be understood as involving collective struggles for epistemic recognition and self-determination that seek to improve practices of knowledge production and make lives more liveable? In this paper, I argue that currently dominant, Fricker-inspired approaches to theorizing epistemic wrongs and remedies make it difficult, if not impossible, to understand the epistemic dimensions of historic and (...)
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  38. Manipulation, injustice, and technology.Michael Klenk - 2022 - In Michael Klenk & Fleur Jongepier (eds.), The Philosophy of Online Manipulation. Routledge. pp. 108-131.
    This chapter defends the view that manipulated behaviour is explained by an injustice. Injustices that explain manipulated behaviour need not involve agential features such as intentionality. Therefore, technology can manipulate us, even if technological artefacts like robots, intelligent software agents, or other ‘mere tools’ lack agential features such as intentionality. The chapter thus sketches a comprehensive account of manipulated behaviour related to but distinct from existing accounts of manipulative behaviour. It then builds on that account to defend the possibility that (...)
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  39. Ethics of vaccine refusal.Michael Kowalik - 2021 - Journal of Medical Ethics 48 (4):240-243.
    Proponents of vaccine mandates typically claim that everyone who can be vaccinated has a moral or ethical obligation to do so for the sake of those who cannot be vaccinated, or in the interest of public health. I evaluate several previously undertheorised premises implicit to the ‘obligation to vaccinate’ type of arguments and show that the general conclusion is false: there is neither a moral obligation to vaccinate nor a sound ethical basis to mandate vaccination under any circumstances, even for (...)
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  40. Ontological-Transcendental Defence of Metanormative Realism.Michael Kowalik - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (2):573-586.
    If there is something (P) that every possible agent is committed to value, and certain actions or attitudes either enhance or diminish P, then normative claims about a range of intentional actions can be objectively and non-trivially evaluated. I argue that the degree of existence as an agent depends on the consistency of reflexive-relating with other individuals of the agent-kind: the ontological thesis. I then show that in intending to act on a reason, every agent is rationally committed to value (...)
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  41. Some hallucinations are experiences of the past.Michael Barkasi - 2020 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (3):454-488.
    When you hallucinate an object, you are not in the normal sort of concurrent causal sensory interaction with that object. It's standardly further inferred that the hallucinated object does not actually exist. But the lack of normal concurrent causal sensory interaction does not imply that there does not exist an object that is hallucinated. It might be a past‐perceived object. In this paper, I argue that this claim holds for at least some interesting cases of hallucination. Hallucinations generated by misleading (...)
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  42. Moral Philosophy and the ‘Ethical Turn’ in Anthropology.Michael Klenk - 2019 - Zeitschrift Für Ethik Und Moralphilosophie (2):1-23.
    Moral philosophy continues to be enriched by an ongoing empirical turn,mainly through contributions from neuroscience, biology, and psychology. Thusfar, cultural anthropology has largely been missing. A recent and rapidly growing‘ethical turn’ within cultural anthropologynow explicitly and systematically studiesmorality. This research report aims to introduce to an audience in moral philosophyseveral notable works within the ethical turn. It does so by critically discussing theethical turn’s contributions to four topics: the definition of morality, the nature ofmoral change and progress, the truth of (...)
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  43. Ethics of digital contact tracing and COVID-19: who is (not) free to go?Michael Klenk & Hein Duijf - 2020 - Ethics and Information Technology 23 (1):69-77.
    Digital tracing technologies are heralded as an effective way of containing SARS-CoV-2 faster than it is spreading, thereby allowing the possibility of easing draconic measures of population-wide quarantine. But existing technological proposals risk addressing the wrong problem. The proper objective is not solely to maximise the ratio of people freed from quarantine but to also ensure that the composition of the freed group is fair. We identify several factors that pose a risk for fair group composition along with an analysis (...)
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  44. There Is No Pure Empirical Reasoning.Michael Huemer - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (3):592-613.
    The justificatory force of empirical reasoning always depends upon the existence of some synthetic, a priori justification. The reasoner must begin with justified, substantive constraints on both the prior probability of the conclusion and certain conditional probabilities; otherwise, all possible degrees of belief in the conclusion are left open given the premises. Such constraints cannot in general be empirically justified, on pain of infinite regress. Nor does subjective Bayesianism offer a way out for the empiricist. Despite often-cited convergence theorems, subjective (...)
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  45. A Theistic Argument Against Platonism (and in Support of Truthmakers and Divine Simplicity).Michael Bergmann & Jeffrey E. Brower - 2006 - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 2:357-386.
    Predication is an indisputable part of our linguistic behavior. By contrast, the metaphysics of predication has been a matter of dispute ever since antiquity. According to Plato—or at least Platonism, the view that goes by Plato’s name in contemporary philosophy—the truths expressed by predications such as “Socrates is wise” are true because there is a subject of predication (e.g., Socrates), there is an abstract property or universal (e.g., wisdom), and the subject exemplifies the property.1 This view is supposed to be (...)
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  46. We Need Non-factive Metaphysical Explanation.Michael Bertrand - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (3):991-1011.
    Suppose that A explains B. Do A and B need to be true? Provided that we have metaphysical explanation in mind, orthodoxy answers “yes:” metaphysical explanation is factive. This article introduces and defends a non-factive notion of metaphysical explanation. I argue that we need a non-factive notion of explanation in order to make sense of explanationist arguments where we motivate a view by claiming that it offers better explanations than its competitors. After presenting and rejecting some initially plausible rivals, I (...)
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  47. Old wine in new bottles: Evolutionary debunking arguments and the Benacerraf–Field challenge.Michael Klenk - 2017 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 20 (4):781-795.
    Evolutionary debunking arguments purport to show that robust moral realism, the metaethical view that there are non-natural and mind-independent moral properties and facts that we can know about, is incompatible with evolutionary explanations of morality. One of the most prominent evolutionary debunking arguments is advanced by Sharon Street, who argues that if moral realism were true, then objective moral knowledge is unlikely because realist moral properties are evolutionary irrelevant and moral beliefs about those properties would not be selected for. However, (...)
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  48. Moral Judgement and Moral Progress: The Problem of Cognitive Control.Michael Klenk & Hanno Sauer - 2021 - Philosophical Psychology 34 (7):938-961.
    We propose a fundamental challenge to the feasibility of moral progress: most extant theories of progress, we will argue, assume an unrealistic level of cognitive control people must have over their moral judgments for moral progress to occur. Moral progress depends at least in part on the possibility of individual people improving their moral cognition to eliminate the pernicious influence of various epistemically defective biases and other distorting factors. Since the degree of control people can exert over their moral cognition (...)
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  49. The Literalist Fallacy & the Free Energy Principle: Model building, Scientific Realism and Instrumentalism.Michael David Kirchhoff, Julian Kiverstein & Ian Robertson - manuscript
    Disagreement about how best to think of the relation between theories and the realities they represent has a longstanding and venerable history. We take up this debate in relation to the free energy principle (FEP) - a contemporary framework in computational neuroscience, theoretical biology and the philosophy of cognitive science. The FEP is very ambitious, extending from the brain sciences to the biology of self-organisation. In this context, some find apparent discrepancies between the map (the FEP) and the territory (target (...)
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  50. Debunking, Epistemic Achievement, and Undermining Defeat.Michael Klenk - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (1):43-60.
    Several anti-debunkers have argued that evolutionary explanations of our moral beliefs fail to meet a necessary condition on undermining defeat called modal security. They conclude that evolution, therefore, does not debunk our moral beliefs. This article shows that modal security is false if knowledge is virtuous achievement. New information can undermine a given belief without providing reason to doubt that that belief is sensitive or safe. This leads to a novel conception of undermining defeat, and it shows that successful debunking (...)
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