Effective Altruism is a rapidly growing and influential contemporary philosophical movement committed to updating utilitarianism in both theory and practice. The movement focuses on identifying urgent but neglected causes and inspiring supererogatory giving to meet the need. It also tries to build a broader coalition by adopting a more ecumenical approach to ethics which recognizes a wide range of values and moral constraints. These interesting developments distinguish Effective Altruism from the utilitarianism of the past in ways that invite cooperation and (...) warrant a fresh look from Thomists. Nonetheless Effective Altruism’s fundamentally consequentialist and aggregative model for ethics precludes more foundational agreement with Thomistic ethics in ways that limit the extent of practical cooperation. (shrink)

Classical authors were generally artistic realists. The predominant aesthetic theory was mimesis, which saw the truth of art as its successful representation of reality. High modernists rejected this aesthetic theory as lifeless, seeing the truth of art as its subjective expression. This impasse has serious consequences for both the Church and the public square. Moving forward requires both, first, an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of the high modernist critique of classical mimetic theory, and, second, a theory of truth (...) which makes adequate reference to both subject and object. This paper argues that Lonergan offers just such an account of truth, and so cashes out the high modernist rejection of classical mimesis in Lonergan’s terms, thereby creating the opportunity for a synthesis of the two views. (shrink)

If Large Language Models can make real scientific contributions, then they can genuinely use language, be systematically wrong, and be held responsible for their errors. AI models which can make scientific contributions thereby meet the criteria for scientific authorship.

In his article “Insight: Genesis and Ongoing Context,” Fred Crowe calls out Lonergan’s line “the diagram is more important than…is ordinarily believed” as the “philosophical understatement of the century.” Sixteen pages later he identifies elaborating an invariant cognitional theory to underlie generalized emergent probability and thus “the immanent order of the universe of proportionate being,” as “our challenge,” “but given the difficulty” he does not “see any prospect for an immediate answer.” Could this have something to do with the lack (...) of a comprehensive diagram of cognitional theory? Appendix A of The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism offers diagrams of the dynamics of knowing and doing perhaps copied from Lonergan’s own blackboard work, but they do not distinguish explanatory and descriptive insights, let alone statistical insights, and do not illustrate the pull upwards or the fusing of routinized insights. Before we can effectively relate cognitional theory to generalized emergent probability, we must have an adequately rigorous and precise cognitional theory. I firmly believe in the truth of Lonergan’s fundamental insights, but in order to rigorously undergird generalized emergent probability there are many pertinent questions about his cognitional theory which must be asked and answered. In this paper I (1) review some of Lonergan’s attempts to diagram cognitional theory and discuss what insights they do and do not express, (2) elaborate and defend principles for making our formulations of insight into insight rigorous and clear, and (3) attempt to build up a diagram which makes full use of those principles in a maximally expressive way. (shrink)

While recently hyped as a defense against AI plagiarism, oral exams have fallen out of favor in American philosophy departments. They are often perceived as part of an antiquated system where the day-to-day coursework is sharply distinguished from a 100% weighted final exam, with a more oppositional than collaborative student-professor relationship. Such examinations do not lend themselves to blind grading, and also reinforce the existing privilege of students who are confident, fast-spoken, and know what to study. This kind of oral (...) examination is clearly at odds with the contemporary transparent and collaborative process embodied in techniques like specifications grading, with its proven benefits for novice philosophy students in introductory-level courses. I want to defend a rather different role for oral exams. Novice philosophy students need rapid feedback in order to know whether they have correctly understood the expectations embodied in syllabi and rubrics. Six best practices are offered for achieving this goal while minimizing drawbacks. (shrink)

Aquinas’s characterization of sacra doctrina has received sustained engagement addressing its relation to contemporary conceptions of theology and Aristotelian conceptions of science. More recently, attention has been paid to Aquinas’s neo-Platonist influences, and the way they lead him to subvert purely Aristotelian categories. I therefore combine these themes by introducing the first study of whether sacra doctrina counts as a technê in Plato’s sense. After examining how Platonic technê relate to their ergon. epistasthai, gignôskein, and epistêmê and examining sacra doctrina’s (...) relationship to each of these Platonic categories, I suggest that sacra doctrina is an unqualified Platonic technê. (shrink)

The use of lexical signs like ‘knowledge’ has consequences. Not only do they have direct psychological resonances, but people ascribe beliefs and act based on their semantics. This paper proposes that such consequences are up for negotiation, and introduces a formal framework from financial theory to suggest constraints on those negotiations and implications of those constraints. The upshot is that changing language will be easier sometimes than others, and philosophers’ projects of linguistic change should be aware of those conditions.

Amie Thomasson challenges advocates of layered conceptions of reality to explain “how layers are distinguished” and “what holds them together” by “examining the world” (2014). One strategy for answering such questions is mereological, treating inter-layer relations as parthood relations, where layers exist whenever composition does, and the number of layers will be equivalent to the number of answers to Peter Van Inwagen’s Special Composition Question, while answers to his General Composition Question explain what holds the layers together (1987). Various answers (...) have been proffered for these questions, from the physicalist atomism of Richard Feynman (2015), Hilary Putnam (1958), and Kit Fine (1992) to the holism of Jonathan Schaffer (2010), the two-layer emergentism of Van Inwagen himself (1995), Tim Maudlin’s three-layered “flash ontology” (2011), and Rob Koons two-layered “thermal substances” (2019). In this PhD project, I seek to meet Thomasson’s challenge by identifying which of these proposals are compatible with plausible interpretations of quantum physics. Atomist answers may have difficulty with relativity, while holistic and emergentist models have trouble giving an account of experimental conditions. Maudlin and Koons’ views, meanwhile, may make testable predictions about the scope of entanglement. Examining the world can lead us to sharply winnow our theories about how layers are distinguished and what holds them together. (shrink)

Most accounts of cognitive scaffolding focus on ways that external structure can support or augment an agent’s cognitive capacities. We call cases where the interests of the user are served benign scaffolding and argue for the possibility and reality of hostile scaffolding. This is scaffolding which depends on the same capacities of an agent to make cognitive use of external structure as in benign cases, but that undermines or exploits the user while serving the interests of another agent. We develop (...) criteria for scaffolding being hostile and show by reference to examples including the design features of electronic gambling machines and casino management systems that hostile scaffolding exists and can be highly effective. In cases where the scaffolding is deep and permits the offloading of significant cognitive work, hostile scaffolding exploitatively manipulates cognitive processing itself. Given the extent of human reliance on scaffolding this is an important and neglected vulnerability. [This is an updated version of the paper, added in February 2023.]. (shrink)

It is often assumed that it seems to each of us as though time flows, or passes. On that assumption it follows either that time does in fact pass, and then, pretty plausibly, we have mechanisms that detect its passage, or that time does not pass, and we are subject to a pervasive phenomenal illusion. If the former is the case, we are faced with the explanatory task of spelling out which perceptual or cognitive mechanism (or combination thereof) allows us (...) to detect and track time’s passage (§2.1) If the latter, then we are faced with the task of explaining how, and why, we are subject to a pervasive phenomenal illusion (§2.2). There is, however, a third, somewhat less discussed, explanatory project. Rather than assuming that it seems to each of us as though time passes, and then attempting to explain why it seems that way, we jettison that assumption. According to these views it does not seem to us as though time passes; instead, we come to falsely believe that it seems to us as though time passes (§3). This view requires that we explain how we come to have systematically false beliefs about the way our experiences seem to us. This paper aims to motivate this third explanatory strategy and say something about what kind of cognitive mechanisms might be responsible for our having a false belief that it seems as though time passes, (§3.1) and why we might have evolved (some of) those mechanisms (§3.2). In particular, the paper does not aim to argue for this view: rather, it aims to present it as a viable contender alongside other more common views. (shrink)

When are morally good actions beautiful, when indeed they are? In this paper, it is argued that morally good actions are beautiful when they appear to express the deep or true self, and in turn tend to give rise to an emotion which is characterised by feelings of being moved, unity, inspiration, and meaningfulness, inter alia. In advancing the case for this claim, it is revealed that there are additional sources of well-formedness in play in the context of moral beauty (...) in addition to those that have tended to be focused on to date: one which is connected to imagining a deep location for the goodness concerned, and another which is connected to imagining that the goodness stems from capacities which are essential to the person. (shrink)

These are my materials (a short precis, and replies to John MacFarlane, Mitchell Green, Ryan Wasserman, and Anthony Bigg and Kristie Miller) for a symposium on my book, _The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False_ (OUP, 2021) in *Analytic Philosophy*. [The contribution from MacFarlane is available on his website, those from Wasserman and Green are on their Academia profiles, and the contribution from Bigg and Miller is on Miller's PhilPapers profile.].

What is the nature of the concept BEAUTY? Does it differ fundamentally from nearby concepts such as PRETTINESS? It is argued that BEAUTY, but not PRETTINESS, is a dual-character concept. Across a number of contexts, it is proposed that BEAUTY has a descriptive sense that is characterised by, inter alia, having intrinsically pleasing appearances; and a normative sense associated with deeply-held values. This account is supported across two, pre-registered, studies (N=500), and by drawing on analysis of corpus data. It is (...) suggested that this can help to explain why beauty, unlike prettiness, is thought to be deep in both the sense of being important, and in the sense of being less closely tied to sensory surfaces. (shrink)

Why are moral actions beautiful, when indeed they are? This paper assesses the view, found most notably in Schiller, that moral actions are beautiful just when they present the appearance of freedom by appearing to be the result of internal harmony (the Schillerian Internal Harmony Thesis). I argue that while this thesis can accommodate some of the beauty involved in contrasts of the ‘continent’ and the ‘fully’ virtuous, it cannot account for all of the beauty in such contrasts, and so (...) needs to be weakened considerably (to the Internal Harmony Thesis). To account for the remaining beauty that cannot be fully accommodated even by this revised thesis, as well as the beauty contained in contrasts that involve agents who experience internal conflict as a result of being sensitive to different sources of moral value to an appropriate extent, a number of further theses need to be posited: namely, that the beauty of some moral actions is to be accommodated in terms of internal disharmony (the Internal Disharmony Thesis), and in terms of a felt harmony between the appreciator of the action and the executor of the action (the Affective Harmony Thesis). As such, in contrast to Schiller, I suggest that we need to take a pluralist and context-sensitive approach to accommodating the beauty of moral actions. (shrink)

Why must incompatibility be symmetric? An odd question, but recent work in the semantics of non-classical logic, which appeals to the notion of incompatibility as a primitive and defines negation in terms of it, has brought this question to the fore. Francesco Berto proposes such a semantics for negation argues that, since incompatibility must be symmetric, double negation introduction must be a law of negation. However, he offers no argument for the claim that incompatibility really must be symmetric. Here, I (...) provide such an argument, showing that, insofar as we think of incompatibility in normative pragmatic terms, it can play its basic pragmatic function only if it is symmetric. The upshot is that we can vindicate Berto’s claim about the symmetry of incompatibility but only if we, pace Berto, think about incompatibility, in the first instance, as a pragmatic relation between acts rather than a semantic relation between contents. (shrink)

This paper reviews current debates in social epistemology about the relations ‎between ‎knowledge ‎and consensus. These relations are philosophically interesting on their ‎own, but ‎also have ‎practical consequences, as consensus takes an increasingly significant ‎role in ‎informing public ‎decision making. The paper addresses the following questions. ‎When is a ‎consensus attributable to an epistemic community? Under what conditions may ‎we ‎legitimately infer that a consensual view is knowledge-based or otherwise ‎epistemically ‎justified? Should consensus be the aim of scientific inquiry, and (...) if so, what ‎kind of ‎consensus? How should dissent be handled? It is argued that a legitimate inference ‎that a ‎theory is correct from the fact that there is a scientific consensus on it requires taking ‎into ‎consideration both cognitive properties of the theory as well as social properties of ‎the ‎consensus. The last section of the paper reviews computational models of ‎consensus ‎formation.‎. (shrink)

Abstract Theories are metaphysically equivalent just if there is no fact of the matter that could render one theory true and the other false. In this paper I argue that if we are judiciously to resolve disputes about whether theories are equivalent or not, we need to develop testable criteria that will give us epistemic access to the obtaining of the relation of metaphysical equivalence holding between those theories. I develop such ?diagnostic? criteria. I argue that correctly inter-translatable theories are (...) metaphysically equivalent, and what we need are ways of determining whether a putative translation is correct or not. To that end I develop a number of tools we can employ to discern whether a translation is a correct one. (shrink)

Let us call non-presentist dynamism any view according to which (a) a single moment of time is objectively present and (b) which time is objectively present changes and (c) objectively non-present times exist, and at least some of these are occupied by objects, events, or properties. Non-presentist dynamism has an advantage over presentist dynamism—the view that only present objects, properties, and events exist, and that which objects, properties and events there are, changes—in the truthmaking arena. Presentists have trouble finding plausible (...) truthmakers for past (and future) tensed propositions, since no past, (or future) objects, properties, or events exist, which could make true said propositions. Hence presentists have to resort to one of two strategies. According to the first, nothing makes past (or future) tensed propositions true, though some are true nonetheless. For some class of propositions, the truth of said propositions does not in any way depend on ontology. This strategy rejects even the fairly weak requirement that for any proposition P, and worlds w and v, if P is true in w but not in v, then either something exists in v but not in w or else some n-tuple of things stands in some fundamental relation in v but not in w . Call this account No Truthmaker: -/- No Truthmaker: There are no truthmakers for past-tensed truths. -/- Embracing No Truthmaker is typically taken to be a cost of presentism. According to the second strategy, some presently existing thing makes true past-tensed truths. Advocates of this strategy embrace anti-aboutness truthmaking, the view that while all truths are grounded in being, the truth of a proposition need not grounded in the thing(s) the proposition is about. Since past things do not exist, past-tensed propositions are made true by something other than what they are about. Such presentists endorse some version of Present Record Truthmaking. (shrink)

Amie Thomasson’s work provides numerous ways to rethink and improve our approach to metaphysics. This chapter is my attempt to begin to sketch why I still think the easy approach leaves room for substantive metaphysical work, and why I do not think that metaphysics need rely on any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge. After distinguishing two possible forms of deflationism, I argue that the easy ontologist needs to accept (implicitly or explicitly) that there are worldly constraints on what sorts of entities could (...) exist, and could co-exist. I argue this leaves room for a substantive role for metaphysics if (following the work of E.J. Lowe) we take metaphysics to be concerned with the possible ways that reality could be. I explain how this conception does not need to appeal to any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge, and need only make use of conceptual and/or empirical means to arrive at views on what could exist (and co-exist). Thus, the answer I propose to the question posed in the title, at least in my view, is no-one. Or, at least, no-one should be afraid of conceptual analysis. Not even metaphysicians. (shrink)

While the contemporary philosophical literature is replete with discussion of the control or freedom required for moral responsibility, only more recently has substantial attention been devoted to the knowledge or awareness required, otherwise called the epistemic condition. This area of inquiry is rapidly expanding, as are the various positions within it. This chapter introduces two major positions: the reasonable expectation view and the quality of will view. The chapter then explores two dimensions of the epistemic condition that serve as fault (...) lines along which these two views diverge. The first dimension concerns different kinds of ignorance. The second concerns what agents can be directly blameworthy for. The chapter closes by sketching a novel approach that incorporates advantages of opposing positions on this topic. (shrink)

Miller analyzes the relationship between consent and autonomy by offering three pictures. For autonomy, Miller distinguishes between procedural, substantive, and weak substantive autonomy. The corresponding views of consent are what Miller has termed as consensual minimalism, consensual idealism, and consensual realism. The requirements of sexual consent under consensual minimalism are a voluntary informed agreement. However, feminist critiques reveal the inadequacies of this simple position. Consensual idealism, which corresponds with substantive autonomy, offers a robust picture where consent and (...) autonomy must be based on non-oppression. However, this view is considered too ideal and it ignores context. Weak substantive autonomy takes into account the context in the sexual domain. Correspondingly, consensual realism takes into account the context and still fulfills the requirements of consent. (shrink)

Temporal dynamists typically hold that it seems to us as though time robustly passes, and that its seeming so is explained by the fact that time does robustly pass. Temporal non-dynamists hold that time does not robustly pass. Some non-dynamists nevertheless hold that it seems as though it does: we have an illusory phenomenal state whose content represents robust passage. Call these phenomenal passage illusionists. Other non-dynamists argue that the phenomenal state in question is veridical and represents something other than (...) robust passage. Call this the veridical passage-less view. This paper argues in favour of the latter view over the former, by arguing that we should reject passage illusionism. (shrink)

In this article, robust evidence is provided showing that an individual’s moral character can contribute to the aesthetic quality of their appearance, as well as being beautiful or ugly itself. It is argued that this evidence supports two main conclusions. First, moral beauty and ugliness reside on the inside, and beauty and ugliness are not perception-dependent as a result; and, second, aesthetic perception is affected by moral information, and thus moral beauty and ugliness are on the outside as well.

According to the most important objection to the existence of moral beauty, true judgements of moral beauty are not possible as moral judgements require being motivated to act in line with the moral judgement made, and judgements of beauty require not being motivated to act in any way. Here, I clarify the argument underlying the objection, and show that it does not show that moral beauty does not exist. I present two responses: namely, that the beauty of moral beauty does (...) not lie in the moral goodness per se (the “adjacent properties” response); and that only a dispositional motivation to act is required for the moral judgements that are typically made as part of judgements of moral beauty, whereas aesthetic judgements only rule out state motivations to act (the “equivocation of motivation required” response). In addressing the objection, I show how moral beauty is consistent with disinterestedness, and so should be accepted more widely; and also clarify where the beauty in moral beauty resides, and how the moral-aesthetic distinction should be drawn. (shrink)

Very roughly, the epistemic objection to the growing block theory (GBT) says that according to that theory there are many past times at which persons falsely believe they are present. Since there is nothing subjectively distinguishable about a situation in which one truly believes one is present, from a situation in which one falsely believes one is present, the GBT is a theory on which we cannot know that we are present. In their articulation and defence of the GBT, Correia (...) and Rosenkranz (C&R) argue that the epistemic objection fails miserably. In what follows I try to unpack their response to the objection, and locate it amongst others. Along the way I flag some confusions I have about how we are to think about the GBT as articulated by C&R. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 28 This paper develops four proposals for explicating the notion of an ersatz part. It then evaluates each proposal with respect to a number of jobs for which ersatz parts are posited. We argue that each of the four notions of ersatz parthood do better with respect to some jobs, and worse with respect to others. Thus, we think, it’s horses for courses: which notion of ersatz part one chooses will be sensitive to which metaphysical project (...) one is pursuing. (shrink)

Which traits are beautiful? And is their beauty perceptual? It is argued that moral virtues are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain emotion— ecstasy—and that compassion tends to be more beautiful than fair-mindedness because it tends to give rise to this emotion to a greater extent. It is then argued, on the basis that emotions are best thought of as a special, evaluative, kind of perception, that this argument suggests that moral virtues (...) are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain kind of evaluative perceptual experience. (shrink)

In The Conditions for Ethical Chemical Restraint, Crutchfield and Redinger (2024) propose ethical standards for the use of chemical restraints, which they consider normatively distinct from physica...

I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and (...) ugliness sits opposed to beauty across a neutral midpoint (the argument from proposed intensions). And third, ugliness and disgustingness function in the same way in both giving rise to representations of contamination (the argument from the law of contagion). In making these arguments, I show why prominent objections to the thesis do not succeed, cast light on some of the artistic functions of ugliness, and, in addition, demonstrate why a dispositional account of disgustingness is correct, and present a novel problem for warrant-based accounts of disgustingness (the ‘too many reasons’ problem). (shrink)

Given that conspiracies exist, can we be justified in dismissing conspiracy theories without concerning ourselves with specific details? I answer this question by focusing on contrarian conspiracy theories, theories about conspiracies that conflict with testimony from reliable sources of information. For example, theories that say the CIA masterminded the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 9/11 was an inside job, or the Freemasons are secretly running the world are contrarian conspiracy theories. When someone argues for a contrarian conspiracy theory, their options (...) are to appeal to eyewitness testimony, incriminating documents, photographs, audio recordings, video recordings, allegedly scientific evidence, anomalies, or considerations of cui bono (who benefits). Most laypeople don’t know how to adequately respond to arguments for contrarian conspiracy theories, but this doesn’t mean that it’s dogmatic to reject them. I argue that many laypeople are defeasibly justified in rejecting a variety of contrarian conspiracy theories based on testimony and this justification is rarely defeated by arguments for contrarian conspiracy theories even if we don’t know how to respond to these arguments. (shrink)

Are mandatory lockdown measures, which place restrictions on one’s freedom to move and assemble, justifiable? Offhand, such measures appear to compromise important rights to secure goals of public health. Proponents of such measures think the trade-off is worth it; opponents think it isn’t. However, one might think that casting the debate in these terms concedes too much to the opponents. Mandatory lockdown measures don’t infringe important rights because no one has a right to impose a risk of grievous harm on (...) others—and, in the context of a pandemic, participating in the prohibited activities (e.g., going out to the bar) does just that. -/- This chapter explores whether this defense of mandatory lockdown measures holds up. It, first, considers whether we have a right against risk imposition—and, if so, how such a right is best understood. It then considers the objection that, even if there is such a right, people who voluntarily choose to engage in the prohibited activities—at least if fully appraised of the risks involved—effectively waive it. The chapter argues that this objection fails. (shrink)

I argue that the main existing accounts of the relationship between the beauty of environmental entities and their moral standing are mistaken in important ways. Beauty does not, as has been suggested by optimists, confer intrinsic moral standing. Nor is it the case, as has been suggested by pessimists, that beauty at best provides an anthropocentric source of moral standing that is commensurate with other sources of pleasure. I present arguments and evidence that show that the appreciation of beauty tends (...) to cause a transformational state of mind that is more valuable than mere pleasure, but that leads us to falsely represent beautiful entities as being sentient and, in turn, as having intrinsic moral standing. To this extent, beauty is not, then, a source of intrinsic moral standing; it’s a source of a more important anthropocentric value than has hitherto been acknowledged. (shrink)

It has been a common assumption that words are substances that instantiate or have properties. In this paper, I question the assumption that our ontology of words requires posting substances by outlining a bundle theory of words, wherein words are bundles of various sorts of properties (such as semantic, phonetic, orthographic, and grammatical properties). I argue that this view can better account for certain phenomena than substance theories, is ontologically more parsimonious, and coheres with claims in linguistics.

The puzzle of petitionary prayer: if we ask for the best thing, God was already going to do it, and if we ask for something that's not the best, God's not going to grant our request. In this paper, we give a new solution to the puzzle.

Origen of Alexandria can be credited as the founder of a Christian speculative angelology, in which Christ the Logos is both the creator and the interpreter of the angels. He introduces the angels as the first created rational beings who, in contemplating the divine Word (Logos), freely choose to direct their will as holy angels in service to or wicked demons in antagonism against the love of God. The first created rational beings are divided into three orders: the angels, the (...) demons, and the neutral spirits of human souls. The angels remain closest in contemplation of the Logos, yet, due to their negligence, descend to unfold in the angelic hierarchy. The angels and demons thereafter guide the movements of all spirits, substances, and signs in the created world. The neutral spirits of human souls can choose to follow either the guidance of guardian angels or demons. And yet after the Incarnation, the angels are distinguished from the demons by their choice to follow Christ. Origen’s angelology has often been regarded as an early Christian alternative to Middle Platonic daemonologies. And after Karl Barth, his angelology has come to be dispensed from Christian theology. However, as Jean Daniélou has observed, Origen had previously departed from Platonic daemonology in affirming that angelic mediacy must pass away like the light of the stars before the brilliance of the Logos of Christ. He had, in this way, already assimilated the mediacy of the angels to the absolute mediation of Christ. And, in assimilating angelic to christic mediacy, Origen also attributes the reason with which the world is moved to the divine reason of the divine Word (Logos) of Christ in God. Origen’s angelology can thus be read both before and after Barth as a science of the angels. (shrink)

This paper argues for a particular view about in what metaphysical equivalence consists: namely, that any two metaphysical theories are metaphysically equivalent if and only if those theories are strongly hyperintensionally equivalent. It is consistent with this characterisation that said theories are weakly hyperintensionally distinct, thus affording us the resources to model the content of propositional attitudes directed towards metaphysically equivalent theories in such a way that non-ideal agents can bear different propositional attitudes towards metaphysically equivalent theories.

This paper focuses on a recently articulated, emergentist conception of ethical naturalism and its commitment to causal efficacy, or the idea that moral properties have causal powers, along with its supporting commitment to moral causation. After I reconstruct the theory, I explain how it offers some interesting theoretical benefits to moral realists in virtue of its commitment to causal efficacy. Then, after locating some examples of moral causation in support of this commitment, I present and respond to five objections to (...) such causation, which all threaten to undermine this support. Lastly, I consider a very serious problem that the theory faces in virtue of positing emergent moral properties as responsible for moral causation – namely, the problem of downward moral causation. I describe this problem in detail and argue that, as it stands, it does not spell doom for the theory. (shrink)

I pedagogically show that the momentum operator in quantum mechanics, in the position representation, commonly known to be a derivative with respect to a spatial x-coordinate, can be derived by identifying momentum as the generator of space translations.

This document is a set of notes I took on QFT as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, mainly inspired in lectures by Burt Ovrut, but also working through Peskin and Schroeder (1995), as well as David Tong’s lecture notes available online. They take a slow pedagogical approach to introducing classical field theory, Noether’s theorem, the principles of quantum mechanics, scattering theory, and culminating in the derivation of Feynman diagrams.

Metaphysicians frequently appeal to intuition. But when is that appeal useful? I consider that question by focusing on our existential intuitions. In particular, I want to go some way to answering the question of whether, and when, appeal to existential intuitions is useful, by consid-ering the issue in the light of an argument for unrestricted composition. This argument appeals to a difference in the extent to which restricted and unrestricted compositionalists appeal to existential intuitions, and concludes that at the very (...) least, restricted compositionalists are on shak-ier epistemic ground than unrestricted compositionalists. Having outlined this argument for unrestricted composition, I con-sider the nature of the unrestricted existential quantifier in the context of three different metaphysical scenarios about the way the world might be: scenarios that differ with respect to whether the metaphysics of a world completely or uniquely settles the division of that world into ob-jects. I argue that appeal to intuition is not only useful but necessary if we are to determine the intension of ‘exists’ and hence its extension at any given world. But this appeal is not simply an appeal to our brute ex-istential intuitions—our dispositions actually to quantify over a certain domain. Rather, it requires equilibration over a set of worlds in which we consider our ‘quantificational’ dispositions in each world, where, importantly, included in this set of worlds are worlds in which the meta-physics differently settles the division of those worlds into objects. Ul-timately, I argue, our dispositions yield various conditional claims about our concept <existence>. These are conditional claims of the most ab-stract kind: they tell us, for instance, that if there is some natural, unique division of our world into objects, then the unrestricted quantifier ranges over all and only the objects in that domain. But, I will argue, our untu-tored, world-bound dispositions are no guide at all to what actually ex-ists even on the supposition that metaphysics alone does not uniquely or completely settle a natural division of our world into objects. Hence they are no guide to the nature of composition. And to the extent that certain restricted compositionalist views depend on such intuitions, so much the worse for them. Or so I shall argue. (shrink)

I give a pedagogical derivation of the Cramer-Rao Bound, which gives a lower bound on the variance of estimators used in statistical point estimation, commonly used to give numerical estimates of the systematic uncertainties in a measurement.

Many philosophers are sympathetic to a perdurantist view of persistence. One challenge facing this view lies in its ability to ground prudential rationality. If, as many have thought, numerical identity over time is required to ground there being sui generis (i.e. non-instrumental) prudential reasons, then perdurantists can appeal only to instrumental reasons. The problem is that it is hard to see how, by appealing only to instrumental reasons, the perdurantist can vindicate the axiom of prudence: the axiom that any person-stage (...) has reason to promote the wellbeing of any other person-stage that is part of the same person as that stage. The claim that perdurantists cannot vindicate the axiom, and hence that the view should be rejected, is what we call the normative argument against perdurantism. In this paper we argue that purely instrumental rationality can ground the truth of this axiom, and hence that the normative argument against perdurantism fails. (shrink)

Kopec and Titelbaum collect five alleged counterexamples to Uniqueness, the thesis that it is impossible for agents who have the same total evidence to be ideally rational in having different doxastic attitudes toward the same proposition. I argue that four of the alleged counterexamples fail, and that Uniqueness should be slightly modified to accommodate the fifth example.

According to an argument that I will call the argument from loose lips, we can safely reject certain notorious conspiracy theories because they posit conspiracies that would be nearly impossible to keep secret. I distinguish between three versions of this argument: the epistemic argument, the alethic argument, and the statistical argument. I, then, discuss several limitations of the argument from loose lips. The first limitation is that only the statistical argument can be applied to new conspiracy theories. The second limitation (...) is that no version of the argument suffices to rule out the existence of small initial conspiracies that have no need to add further conspirators. The third limitation is that no version of the argument is dialectically efficacious in the context of arguing with the relevant conspiracy theorists because nothing is said to address the alleged evidence that they cite. (shrink)

While many aspects of cognition have been shown to be shared between humans and non-human animals, there remains controversy regarding whether the capacity to mentally time travel is a uniquely human one. In this paper, we argue that there are four ways of representing when some event happened: four kinds of temporal representation. Distinguishing these four kinds of temporal representation has five benefits. First, it puts us in a position to determine the particular benefits these distinct temporal representations afford an (...) organism. Second, it provides the conceptual resources to foster a discussion about which of these representations is necessary for an organism to count as having the capacity to mentally time travel. Third, it enables us to distinguish stricter from more liberal views of mental time travel that differ regarding which kind(s) of temporal representation is taken to be necessary for mental time travel. Fourth, it allows us to determine the benefits of taking a stricter or more liberal view of mental time travel. Finally, it ensures that disagreement about whether some species can mentally time travel is not merely the product of unrecognised disagreement about which temporal representation is necessary for mental time travel. We argue for a more liberal view, on the grounds that it allows us to view mental time travel as an evolutionarily continuous phenomenon, and to recognise that differences in the ways that organisms mentally time travel might reflect different temporal representations, or combinations thereof, that they employ. Our ultimate aim, however, is to create the conceptual framework for further discussion regarding what sorts of temporal representations are required for mental time travel. (shrink)

In this article, an account of the architecture of the cognitive contamination system is offered, according to which the contamination system can generate contamination represen- tations in circumstances that do not satisfy the norms of contamination, including in cases of mere visual contact with disgusting objects. It is argued that this architecture is important for explaining the content, logic, distribution, and persistence of maternal impression beliefs – according to which fetal defects are caused by the pregnant mother’s experiences and actions (...) – which in turn provide important evidence of the architecture of the cognitive contamination system. (shrink)

Coronavirus disease 2019 can lead to respiratory failure. Some patients require extracorporeal membrane oxygenation support. During the current pandemic, health care resources in some cities have been overwhelmed, and doctors have faced complex decisions about resource allocation. We present a case in which a pediatric hospital caring for both children and adults seeks to establish guidelines for the use of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation if there are not enough resources to treat every patient. Experts in critical care, end-of-life care, bioethics, and (...) health policy discuss if age should guide rationing decisions. (shrink)

Inspired by Helen Longino’s ‘critical contextual empiricism’, in this paper I argue that art arises from social epistemic procedures that encompass both aesthetic functions and institutional practices. Within these procedures, aesthetic functions are developed, validated, and enforced through institutional practices, rather than being solely tied to the artistic outcomes of those practices. I call this approach ‘critical contextual aestheticism’.