In the “Contrary Miracles Argument,” Hume argues that the occurrence of miracle stories in rival religions should undermine our belief in the trustworthiness of these reports. In order for this argument to have any merit, it has to be understood in its historical, religious context. Miracle stories are used in support of religions, and it's part of religion as we find it to reject miracle stories from rival traditions. A defender of miracle stories could avoid the argument by breaking the (...) connection between miracles and religious doctrine, but then miracles won't justify revealed religion. (shrink)

In the appendix to the Treatise, Hume retracts his claim that perceptions with the same object only vary with respect to vivacity. In material in the appendix that he tells his reader to insert in Book 1, he explains his reasons: the vivacity connected to belief is different in kind from that from the vivacity connected to poetry. Poetry can be more vivid, in its way, than belief. Since Hume’s main arguments for the thesis that beliefs are vivid ideas in (...) the main body of the Treatise depend on the assumption that ideas with the same object only vary in vivacity, he owes us new arguments from his claim. He provides various arguments for a slightly revised thesis that belief is a sort of vivid idea at the beginning of the appendix. Three of these arguments, an argument from introspection, an argument from the involuntariness of belief, and an appeal to the explanatory power of his account are preserved in the first Enquiry. (shrink)

The common view that Hume is a regularity theorist about laws of nature isn’t textually well grounded. The texts show that he thinks of them as objective governing principles that could conceivably be violated while still counting as a law of nature. This is a standard view at the time, and Hume borrows it from others. He implies that the best evidence for rational religion is the exceptionless workings of the laws of nature, he argues that suicide isn’t incompatible with (...) the will of God by identifying his will with the laws of nature, and he has Philo argue for the existence of God from the simplicity of the laws governing the world. He sheds some of the theological baggage that laws of nature carry at the time, but not all of it. (shrink)

Two arguments in Hume’s essay on miracles are reductios ad Catholicism: if you believe in the miracles in the Bible, then you ought to believe in Catholic miracles as well. Hume’s intended readers hated Catholicism and would sooner reject miracles than follow the pope. Hume argues that Jansenist miracle stories meet the standards of trustworthiness as well as any miracles in history. He knows that his Protestant believers don’t believe the stories, and he hopes to persuade his readers to reject (...) any testimony that falls short of that standard. In the ‘Contrary Religions Argument,’ Hume argues that contrary religions should undermine our belief in the trustworthiness of miracle reports. The main contrary religion Hume has in mind is Catholicism, since most miracles stories are Catholic, and Hume’s readers would have rejected them out of hand. He then concludes that if most religiously motivated testimony for miracles is false such testimony is generally unreliable, including testimony for Biblical miracles. (shrink)

The overarching theme of Locke’s Image of the World, by Michael Jacovides, is that Locke’s belief in the best science of his day shapes his philosophy in important ways. Jacovides contends that “by understanding the scientific background to Locke’s thoughts, we can better understand his work” (1), including both his positions and his arguments for those positions. To a lesser extent, Jacovides’s book also treats Locke as a case study in thinking about how much scientific theory (...) should influence philosophy. While much of the science Locke relies on is incomplete or problematic, and so leads him into errors, Jacovides is sympathetic to Locke’s approach of using the best scientific theories to help develop and justify his philosophical positions. Throughout the book Jacovides shows how science – Locke’s study of medicine, and later Boyle’s corpuscularianism, and then later Newton’s physics – influence Locke’s thinking on a variety of topics. The result is an impressive account of the history of science at a critical point in its development through the lens of one of the great philosophers of that time. (shrink)

The first group of articles attempt to give some insight into how we behave that is reasonably free of theoretical delusions. In the next three groups I comment on three of the principal delusions preventing a sustainable world— technology, religion and politics (cooperative groups). People believe that society can be saved by them, so I provide some suggestions in the rest of the book as to why this is unlikely via short articles and reviews of recent books by well-known writers. (...) -/- America and the world are in the process of collapse from excessive population growth, most of it for the last century and now all of it due to 3rd world people. Consumption of resources and the addition of 4 billion more ca. 2100 will collapse industrial civilization and bring about starvation, disease, violence and war on a staggering scale. Billions will die and nuclear war is all but certain. In America this is being hugely accelerated by massive immigration and immigrant reproduction, combined with abuses made possible by democracy. Depraved human nature inexorably turns the dream of democracy and diversity into a nightmare of crime and poverty. The root cause of collapse is the inability of our innate psychology to adapt to the modern world, which leads people to treat unrelated persons as though they had common interests. This, plus ignorance of basic biology and psychology, leads to the social engineering delusions of the partially educated who control democratic societies. Few understand that if you help one person you harm someone else—there is no free lunch and every single item anyone consumes destroys the earth beyond repair. Consequently social policies everywhere are unsustainable and one by one all societies without stringent controls on selfishness will collapse into anarchy or dictatorship. Without dramatic and immediate changes, there is no hope for preventing the collapse of America, or any country that follows a democratic system. Hence my concluding essay “Suicide by Democracy”. -/- Those wishing to read my other writings may see Talking Monkeys 2nd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle 2nd ed (2019), Suicide by Democracy 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Stucture of Human Behavior (2019) and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019) . (shrink)

This collection of articles and reviews are about human behavior (as are all articles by anyone about anything), and so about the limitations of having a recent monkey ancestry (8 million years or much less depending on viewpoint) and manifest words and deeds within the framework of our innate psychology as presented in the table of intentionality. As famous evolutionist Richard Leakey says, it is critical to keep in mind not that we evolved from apes, but that in every important (...) way, we are apes. If everyone was given a real understanding of this (i.e., of human ecology and psychology to actually give them some control over themselves), maybe civilization would have a chance. As things are however the leaders of society have no more grasp of things than their constituents and so collapse into anarchy and dictatorship appears inevitable. -/- Since philosophy proper is essentially the same as the descriptive psychology of higher order thought (behavior), and philosophical problems are the result of our innate psychology, or as Wittgenstein put it, due to the lack of perspicuity of language, they run throughout human discourse and behavior, so there is endless need for philosophical analysis, not only in the ‘human sciences’ of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, history, literature, religion, etc., but in the ‘hard sciences’ of physics, mathematics, and biology. It is universal to mix the language game questions with the real scientific ones as to what the empirical facts are. Scientism is ever present and the master has laid it before us long ago, i.e., Wittgenstein (hereafter W) beginning with the Blue and Brown Books in the early 1930’s. -/- Although I separate the book into sections on philosophy and psychology, religion, biology, the ‘hard sciences’ and politics/sociology/economics, all the articles, like all behavior, are intimately connected if one knows how to look at them. As I note, The Phenomenological Illusion (oblivion to our automated System 1) is universal and extends not merely throughout philosophy but throughout life. I am sure that Chomsky, Obama, Zuckerberg and the Pope would be incredulous if told that they suffer from the same problems as Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, or that that they differ only in degree from drug and sex addicts in being motivated by stimulation of their frontal cortices by the delivery of dopamine (and over 100 other chemicals) via the ventral tegmentum and the nucleus accumbens, but it’s clearly true. While the phenomenologists only wasted a lot of people’s time, they are wasting the earth and their descendant’s future. -/- I hope that these essays will help to separate the philosophical issues of language use from the scientific factual issues, and in some small way hinder the collapse of civilization, or at least make it clear why it is doomed. -/- Those wishing to read my other writings may see Talking Monkeys 2nd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle 2nd ed (2019), Suicide by Democracy 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Stucture of Human Behavior (2019) and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019) . (shrink)

This collection of articles was written over the last 10 years and the most important and longest within the last year. Also I have edited them to bring them up to date (2016). All the articles are about human behavior (as are all articles by anyone about anything), and so about the limitations of having a recent monkey ancestry (8 million years or much less depending on viewpoint) and manifest words and deeds within the framework of our innate psychology as (...) presented in the table of intentionality. As famous evolutionist Richard Leakey says, it is critical to keep in mind not that we evolved from apes, but that in every important way, we are apes. If everyone was given a real understanding of this (i.e., human ecology and psychology) in school, maybe civilization would have a chance. In my view these articles and reviews have many novel and highly useful elements, in that they use my own version of the recently (ca. 1980’s) developed dual systems view of our brain and behavior to lay out a logical system of rationality (personality, psychology, mind, language, behavior, thought, reasoning, reality etc.) that is sorely lacking in the behavioral sciences (psychology, philosophy, literature, politics, anthropology, history, economics, sociology etc.). (shrink)

John Rawls shares the Enlightenment's commitment to finding moral and political principles which can be reflectively endorsed by all individuals autonomously. He usually presents reflective autonomy in Kantian, rationalist terms: autonomy is identified with the exercise of reason, and principles of justice must be constructed which are acceptable to all on the basis of reason alone. Yet David Hume, Adam Smith and many other Enlightenment thinkers rejected such rationalism, searching instead for principles which can be endorsed by all on the (...) basis of all the faculties of the human psyche, emotion and imagination included. The influence of these sentimentalists on Rawls is clearest in his descriptive moral psychology, but I argue that it is also present in Rawls's understanding of the sources of normativity. Although this debt is obscured by Rawls's explicit "Kantianism," his theory would be strengthened by a greater understanding of its debts to the sentimentalist Enlightenment. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Enlightenment sentimentalism’s greatest potential contribution to scholarship today is not a matter for moral philosophy alone, but rather an agenda for fruitful collaboration between fields across the humanities and social sciences. This interdisciplinary program for both understanding an improving human nature is contrasted with alternative approaches, and defended against objections that it cannot produce a moral code categorically binding on any rational being as such. The chapter concludes with some sociological and psychological hypotheses that might help (...) explain why the interdisciplinary and sentimentalist approach to ethics, for all its intellectual virtues, has not been adequately appreciated. (shrink)

One of the most basic questions facing democratic theory is who ought to be included in political participation. Most recent discussions of this question have focused on the wrongful exclusion of those who ought to be included. Less attention has been paid to the question of whether political participation can be objectionably over-inclusive. Robert Dahl insists that it can; a claim to inclusion, he writes, “cannot be justified if it is advanced by persons whose interests are not significantly affected by (...) the decisions of that unit.” This essay is a moral defense of what Dahl would consider political over-inclusion, of empowering those entirely unaffected by a given political decision to participate in the making of that decision. My argument is not that the unaffected have a right to participate or that they are somehow wronged by political exclusion in a manner analogous to how the affected may be wronged when excluded. What matters morally is not what a proper resolution to a specific political conflict will do for the unaffected—by definition, it can do nothing for them. What matters is what the inclusion of the unaffected can do to improve the quality of the decision being made, and hence to benefit those affected by this decision. My focus will be on one particular manner in which the inclusion of the unaffected can improve political decision-making: namely, by increasing impartiality. As I argue in the first section of this essay, whereas the affected can only possess what I call “artificial impartiality,” the unaffected possess what I call “natural impartiality.” . (shrink)

Leo Strauss presents at least two distinct accounts of the idea that the authors in the political-philosophical canon have often masked their true teachings. A weaker account of esotericism, dependent on the contingent fact of presecution, is attributed to the moderns, while a stronger account, stemming from a necessary conflict between philosophy and society, is attributed to the ancients. Although most interpreters agree that Strauss here sides with the ancients, this view fails to consider the possibility that Strauss's writings on (...) esotericism may themselves be composed esoterically. A reevaluation of Straussian hermeneutics in light of this possibility suggests that the elitism and secrecy often associated with "Straussianism" may stem, not from Strauss's true account of esotericism, but instead from an exoteric doctrine designed to seduce students into a life of philosophy. (shrink)

The best accuracy arguments for probabilism apply only to credence functions with finite domains, that is, credence functions that assign credence to at most finitely many propositions. This is a significant limitation. It reveals that the support for the accuracy-first program in epistemology is a lot weaker than it seems at first glance, and it means that accuracy arguments cannot yet accomplish everything that their competitors, the pragmatic (Dutch book) arguments, can. In this paper, I investigate the extent to which (...) this limitation can be overcome. Building on the best arguments in finite domains, I present two accuracy arguments for probabilism that are perfectly general—they apply to credence functions with arbitrary domains. I then discuss how the arguments’ premises can be challenged. We will see that it is particularly difficult to characterize admissible accuracy measures in infinite domains. (shrink)

Case studies about institutional pressures encouraging dishonesty in the US Navy.

Many philosophers assume that, when making moral decisions under uncertainty, we should choose the option that has the greatest expected moral value, regardless of how risky it is. But their arguments for maximizing expected moral value do not support it over rival, risk-averse approaches. In this paper, I present a novel argument for maximizing expected value: when we think about larger series of decisions that each decision is a part of, all but the most risk-averse agents would prefer that we (...) consistently choose the option with the highest expected value. To the extent that what we choose on a given occasion should be guided by the entire series of choices we prefer, then on each occasion, we should choose the option with the highest expected moral value. (shrink)

The article assesses different models of professional ethics and develops a model which sees professional imperatives as the institutionally-guided expression of foundational moral principles. This article uses the model to assess the moral pressures placed on interrogators in undercover operations in which a detective poses as a suspect in pre-arraignment holding. While highly effective, the level of empathetic rapport required risks incurring compassion fatigue and burn out on the part of detectives.

This chapter will develop standards for assessing individual moral responsibility for collective action. In some cases, these standards expand a person’s responsibility beyond what she or he would be responsible for if performing the same physical behavior outside of a group setting. I will argue that structural differences between two ideal types of groups— organizations and goal- oriented collectives— largely determine the baseline moral responsibility of group members for the group’s collective action. (Group members can be more or less responsible (...) for collective action beyond that baseline due to personal qualities like knowledge of the intended collective outcome.) The same individual physical behavior can make the member of a goal-oriented collective responsible for the entire collective action to an equal degree with her fellow group members, whereas the typical organization member is only responsible for his contributory action. (shrink)

I develop a contractualist theory of just intelligence collection based on the collective moral responsibility to deliver security to a community and use the theory to justify certain kinds of signals interception. I also consider the rights of various intelligence targets like intelligence officers, service personnel, government employees, militants, and family members of all of these groups in order to consider how targets' waivers or forfeitures might create the moral space for just surveillance. Even people who are not doing anything (...) prejudicial to other states' security can be modeled as ceding rights against diagnostic collection--light touch collection limited to ascertaining if someone is likely an intelligence threat--as part of their duty to support just foreign institutions. Foreign intelligence officers could not perform the same job potential targets can reasonably demand their intelligence agencies perform on their behalf without this ceding of rights. More invasive forms of collection can only be justified if officers can reasonably model their citizens consenting to being the target of the same sort of collection by adversary states. (shrink)

The suite of secretive national security programs initiated in the US since 9/11 has created debate not only about the merits of targeted killing, torture, secret detention, cyberwar, global signals intercepts, and data-mining, but about the very secrecy in which these programs were conceived, debated by government officials, and implemented. Law must be revealed to those who are expected to comply with its demands. Law is a mere pretext for coercion if the laws permitting the government to coerce people for (...) non-compliance are concealed. The purpose of this essay is to determine whether inhabitants of a liberal state—a type of state tracing the legitimacy of its coercive actions to the consent of the governed—also need to know the internal protocols and legal findings of the government agencies ostensibly serving them. To put this question another way, what, if anything, may government agencies in liberal states keep secret? (shrink)

This paper will address the moral implications of non-coercive interrogations in intelligence contexts. U.S. Army and CIA interrogation manuals define non-coercive interrogation as interrogation which avoids the use of physical pressure, relying instead on oral gambits. These methods, including some that involve deceit and emotional manipulation, would be mostly familiar to viewers of TV police dramas. As I see it, there are two questions that need be answered relevant to this subject. First, under what circumstances, if any, may a state (...) agent use deception or manipulation in the course of his or her duties? Second, if there are classes of persons who, by their activities, lose a legitimate expectation for honest-dealing, how are state agents to proceed when the identity of such persons is unclear? (shrink)

This chapter addresses the morality of two types of national security electronic surveillance (SIGINT) programs: the analysis of communication “metadata” and dragnet searches for keywords in electronic communication. The chapter develops a standard for assessing coercive government action based on respect for the autonomy of inhabitants of liberal states and argues that both types of SIGINT can potentially meet this standard. That said, the collection of metadata creates opportunities for abuse of power, and so judgments about the trustworthiness and competence (...) of the government engaging in the collection must be made in order to decide whether metadata collection is justified in a particular state. Further, the moral standard proposed has a reflexive element justifying adversary states’ intelligence collection against one another. Therefore, high-tech forms of SIGINT can only be justified at the cost of justifying cruder versions of signals intelligence collection practiced by a state’s less-advanced adversaries. (shrink)

This article discusses the rights enjoyed by irregular combatants in detention, that is, members of organized groups (who may be fighting an insurgency or engaging in terror attacks) who fail to qualify for POW status. The paradigmatic example of such a detainee would be an al-Qaeda agent.

A brief overview of the Christian just war tradition, with case studies.

An assessment of Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach with respect to religion. I contend that her contribution to John Rawls's project of political-liberalism would be less accommodating of religion, specifically illiberal religions, than it desires to be. This feature weakens the capabilities approach as a foundation for inclusive and stable political institutions in pluralistic societies.

A case study exploring the importance of compassion for enemies appealing to a series of targeting decisions, co-written with the senior Marine in Iraq in 2003-4.

“Critical thinking is one of the biggest hiatuses in our education system. Learning to distinguish sense from nonsense is of great importance in the information age that we live in. In a systematic way, this book helps you to gain insight into, and subsequently eliminate, the most important reasoning errors that we all tend to make. It also helps you to debunk weak and fallacious arguments and unreliable information. -/- In addition to understanding what critical and scientific thinking entails, you (...) will learn more about what makes science reliable. In times of skepticism regarding science, where (sometimes dangerous) pseudoscientific and conspiracy theories run rampant, this is particularly important. -/- Critical thinking is not a matter of intellectual preference or even self-interest (although one certainly benefits from thinking critically). It is first and foremost a matter of moral and social responsibility. Better thinking leads to a better world. With this book I hope to contribute to that important goal and you, dear student or reader, can do the same!” - Michael Vlerick -/- . (shrink)

In this article I argue that Hutcheson has a theory of obligation that is different in important ways from the views of his predecessors and that his theory may not be as problematic as critics have claimed. In section (I) I sketch a brief picture of the rich conceptual landscape surrounding the concept of obligation in the Early Modern period. I focus on the five figures Hutcheson explicitly references: Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, their French translator and commentator Jean Barbeyrac, as (...) well as G. W. Leibniz and Richard Cumberland. In section (II) I offer an account of Hutcheson’s theory of obligation and illustrate that not only does Hutcheson have a view on what previous figures called the source, end, and object of obligation, he also focuses on the epistemological question of the origin of our idea of obligation as opposed to the metaphysical question of the efficient cause of obligation. Furthermore, although Hutcheson shares with his predecessors the idea that obligation implies a certain kind of necessity, he conceives of this necessity in a unique way, namely in terms of the necessity of a perception. In section (III) I defend Hutcheson’s theory of obligation against three objections: 1. that it makes a sham of obligation by locating its source within the human being, 2. that it is reducible to divine command theory, and 3. that, in the end, Hutcheson has no real or meaningful theory of obligation. My hope is that, at the very least, appraising these objections helps further clarify the theory of obligation that Hutcheson presents in his works. (shrink)

Imagination is necessary for scientific practice, yet there are no in vivo sociological studies on the ways that imagination is taught, thought of, or evaluated by scientists. This article begins to remedy this by presenting the results of a qualitative study performed on two systems biology laboratories. I found that the more advanced a participant was in their scientific career, the more they valued imagination. Further, positive attitudes toward imagination were primarily due to the perceived role of imagination in problem-solving. (...) But not all problem-solving episodes involved clear appeals to imagination, only maximally specific problems did. This pattern is explained by the presence of an implicit norm governing imagination use in the two labs: only use imagination on maximally specific problems, and only when all other available methods have failed. This norm was confirmed by the participants, and I argue that it has epistemological reasons in its favour. I also found that its strength varies inversely with career stage, such that more advanced scientists do (and should) occasionally bring their imaginations to bear on more general problems. A story about scientific pedagogy explains the trend away from (and back to) imagination over the course of a scientific career. Finally, some positive recommendations are given for a more imagination-friendly scientific pedagogy. (shrink)

The fact of evolution raises important questions for the position of moral realism, because the origin of our moral dispositions in a contingent evolutionary process is on the face of it incompatible with the view that our moral beliefs track independent moral truths. Moreover, this meta-ethical worry seems to undermine the normative justification of our moral norms and beliefs. If we don’t have any grounds to believe that the source of our moral beliefs has any ontological authority, how can our (...) moral judgments be justified in an objective way? In this chapter, I argue that while traditional moral realism is untenable in the light of evolution, normative justification should not be handed the same fate. It is precisely in the fact that moral norms and beliefs are grounded in evolved, innate and therefore universally shared intuitions that those norms and beliefs can be objective-for-us. Such an internalist justification allows us to differentiate moral right from wrong, not because some feature of the external world forces us to acknowledge this, but because our moral nature forces us to project this moral judgment on the world. What’s more, guided by this innate moral compass we can both assess and realize moral progress. (shrink)

Reasoning from a naturalistic perspective, viewing the mind as an evolved biological organ with a particular structure and function, a number of influential philosophers and cognitive scientists claim that science is constrained by human nature. How exactly our genetic constitution constrains scientific representations of the world remains unclear. This is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, it often leads to the unwarranted conclusion that we are cognitively closed to certain aspects or properties of the world. Secondly, it stands in the way (...) of a nuanced account of the relationship between our cognitive and perceptual wiring and scientific theory. In response, I propose a typology or classification of the different kinds of biological constraints and their sources on science. Using Boden’s notion of a conceptual space, I distinguish between constraints relating to the ease with which we can reach representations within our conceptual space and constraints causing possible representations to fall outside of our conceptual space. This last kind of constraints does not entail that some aspects or properties of the world cannot be represented by us – as argued by advocates of ‘cognitive closure’ – merely that some ways of representing the world are inaccessible to us. It relates to what Clark and Rescher have framed as ‘the alien scientist hypothesis’. The purpose of this typology is to provide some much needed clarity and structure to the debate about biological constraints on science. (shrink)

This chapter illustrates that Lambert’s works focus not only on mathematical and scientific topics but include reflections on issues in practical philosophy as well. I illustrate, first, that Lamber conceives of moral science [Moral] as the theory of moral judgement and, second, that an important part of this science illustrates how we are to distinguish moral truth from moral illusion.

The book presents the first comprehensive survey of limits of the intentional control of action from an interdisciplinary perspective. It brings together leading scholars from philosophy, psychology, and the law to elucidate this theoretically and practically important topic from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary approaches. It provides reflections on conceptual foundations as well as a wealth of empirical data and will be a valuable resource for students and researchers alike. Among the authors: Clancy Blair, Todd S. Braver, Michael (...) W. Cole, Anika Fäsche, Maayan Davidov, Peter Gollwitzer, Kai Robin Grzyb, Tobias Heikamp, Gabriele Oettingen, Rachel McKinnon, Nachschon Meiran, Hans Christian Röhl, Michael Schmitz, John R. Searle, Gottfried Seebaß, Gisela Trommsdorff, Felix Thiede, J. Lukas Thürmer, Frank Wieber. (shrink)

This is an engaging and accessible introduction to the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle's great masterpiece of moral philosophy. Michael Pakaluk offers a thorough and lucid examination of the entire work, uncovering Aristotle's motivations and basic views while paying careful attention to his arguments. The chapter on friendship captures Aristotle's doctrine with clarity and insight, and Pakaluk gives original and compelling interpretations of the Function Argument, the Doctrine of the Mean, courage and other character virtues, Akrasia, and the two treatments of (...) pleasure. There is also a useful section on how to read an Aristotelian text. This book will be invaluable for all student readers encountering one of the most important and influential works of Western philosophy. (shrink)

This essay is a reflection on the idea of truth-making and its applications. I respond to a critique of my 1986 paper on truth-making and discuss some key principles at play in the Truth-maker Program as it has emerged over the past 25 years, paying special attention to negative and general truths. I maintain my opposition to negative and general facts, but give an improved account of how to do without them. In the end, I accept Truth-maker Maximalism and a (...) weakened form of Truth-maker Necessitarianism, reject the assumption that truth-makers must be entities, and urge that the idea of a truth-maker be broadened and loosened so that it applies to anti-realistic as well as realistic truths. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida’s ‘Faith and Knowledge’ presents an account of the complex relationship between religion and technoscience that disrupts their traditional boundaries by uncovering both an irreducible faith at the heart of science and an irreducible mechanicity at the heart of religion. In this paper, I focus on the latter, arguing that emphases in Derrida’s text on both the ‘sources’ of religion and its interaction with modern technologies underemphasize the ways in which a general ‘mechanicity’ is present throughout religion. There is (...) no faith, I contend, that is not in some way materially constituted according to a mechanicity operative not only at its origin but continuously and in ever-changing forms, and not only in its interactions with other fields and institutions but within its own structure and daily life. By closely examining ‘Faith and Knowledge’—along with examples from his essay ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’ and Michael Naas’s Miracle and Machine—I argue that more attention should be paid to the mechanisms, both human and non-human, that populate and perform religion in its factical life. Mechanical bodies and practices are enlisted by religious traditions in order that these traditions continue to exist by continually reconstituting themselves in, for example, the repetitive use of religious objects or the vocal recitation of creeds. Such mechanical acts of religion are not ultimately opposed to the faithful experience that is often taken to be the wellspring of religious life; on the contrary, they are the conditions for the possibility of this experience. (shrink)

Commentators disagree about the extent to which Kant’s ethics is compatible with consequentialism. A question that has not yet been asked is whether Kant had a view of his own regarding the fundamental difference between his ethical theory and a broadly consequentialist one. In this paper I argue that Kant does have such a view. I illustrate this by discussing his response to a well-known objection to his moral theory, namely that Kant offers an implicitly consequentialist theory of moral appraisal. (...) This objection was most famously raised by Mill and Schopenhauer, but also during Kant’s time by Pistorius and Tittel. I show that Kant’s response to this objection in the second Critique illustrates that he sees the fundamental difference between his moral theory and a broadly consequentialist one to be one that concerns methodology. (shrink)

I review Michael T. Ferejohn's "Formal Causes: Definition, Explanation, and Primacy in Socratic and Aristotelian Thought".

Guest Editor's Introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy exploring 'New Perspectives on Hutcheson's Moral Philosophy'. The purpose of the special issue is to explore aspects of Hutcheson’s moral philosophy that have not received a great deal of attention in the past and to thereby illustrate that his contributions to the history of ethics are far richer than the current secondary literature suggests.

Different people reason differently, which means that sometimes they reach different conclusions from the same evidence. We maintain that this is not only natural, but rational. In this essay we explore the epistemology of that state of affairs. First we will canvass arguments for and against the claim that rational methods of reasoning must always reach the same conclusions from the same evidence. Then we will consider whether the acknowledgment that people have divergent rational reasoning methods should undermine one’s confidence (...) in one’s own reasoning. Finally we will explore how agents who employ distinct yet equally rational methods of reasoning should respond to interactions with the products of each others’ reasoning. We find that the epistemology of multiple reasoning methods has been misunderstood by a number of authors writing on epistemic permissiveness and peer disagreement. (shrink)

Influential thinkers such as Young, Sugden, Binmore, and Skyrms have developed game-theoretic accounts of the emergence, persistence and evolution of social contracts. Social contracts are sets of commonly understood rules that govern cooperative social interaction within societies. These naturalistic accounts provide us with valuable and important insights into the foundations of human societies. However, current naturalistic theories focus mainly on how social contracts solve coordination problems in which the interests of the individual participants are aligned, not competition problems in which (...) individual interests compete with group interests. In response, I set out to build on those theories and provide a comprehensive naturalistic account of the emergence, persistence and evolution of social contracts. My central claim is that social contracts have culturally evolved to solve cooperation problems, which include both coordination and competition problems. I argue that solutions to coordination problems emerge from “within-group” dynamics, while solutions to competition problems result largely from “between-group” dynamics. (shrink)

Michael Crichton‟s latest novel Next (2006) is his third about genomics. Yet, whereas Jurassic Park (and its sequel The lost world) contained stories about sequencing, reconstructing and revivifying the genomes of (extinct) animals, Next analyses the impact of genomics in the biomedical sphere: its consequences for human life (health, labour, sexuality, family life). Gene patenting, and the philosophy of genetic determinism that inspired and legitimised this practice, is at the root of most of the soap-like absurdities Crichton stages in (...) his novel. (shrink)

The ontology of decision theory has been subject to considerable debate in the past, and discussion of just how we ought to view decision problems has revealed more than one interesting problem, as well as suggested some novel modifications of classical decision theory. In this paper it will be argued that Bayesian, or evidential, decision-theoretic characterizations of decision situations fail to adequately account for knowledge concerning the causal connections between acts, states, and outcomes in decision situations, and so they are (...) incomplete. Second, it will be argues that when we attempt to incorporate the knowledge of such causal connections into Bayesian decision theory, a substantial technical problem arises for which there is no currently available solution that does not suffer from some damning objection or other. From a broader perspective, this then throws into question the use of decision theory as a model of human or machine planning. (shrink)

In this paper a parallel is drawn between the problem of epistemic access to abstract objects in mathematics and the problem of epistemic access to idealized systems in the physical sciences. On this basis it is argued that some recent and more traditional approaches to solving these problems are problematic.

This chapter offers an account of Crusius’ conception of freedom. In the first part of the chapter I sketch Crusius’ understanding of ‘Thelematology’ or ‘science of the will’ and his conception of the will itself. In the second part of the paper I provide an account of Crusius’ conception of freedom of the will and I focus on two topics: his understanding of freedom as self-determination and his conception of free choice. Contrary to how some of the secondary literature portrays (...) his view, I argue that freedom of the will, for Crusius, is not best described as the freedom to choose otherwise or liberty of indifference. On the contrary, Crusius argues that free choice is rarely indifferent to its choices and is most often strongly inclined towards certain ends that free choice must overcome and choose against. (shrink)

The British philosopher Michael Dummett (1925–2011) not only had a massive influence on the development of analytical philosophy within the philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and metaphysics, but also contributed significantly to historical and metaphilosophical debates about the nature of this philosophical movement and its proper account. He proposed to define analytical philosophy as philosophy whose aim is the analysis of the structure of thought by way of the analysis of language. Hence, it is philosophy the gist of (...) which is the linguistic turn. A number of critics of this proposal (including Barry Smith, Peter Hylton, and Hans-Johann Glock) emphasised that Dummett’s proposal captures merely some features of this diversified and multifaceted philosophical tradition, and is far from being historically adequate. (shrink)