My purpose is to refute the intentionalist approach to perception. Drawing from mainstream literature, I identify a principle on which any version of intentional theory relies. My paper is a detailed attack on the truth of the principle. In the first section I will introduce terminology and will taxonomize various statements of the intentional view. In the second section I will briefly outline a sketch of the skeletal intentionalist theory that develops from the assumption of the principle alone. Then, in (...) the third section, I will advance my reasons against this theory. In the fourth section, I will set forth anintuitive and definitive counterexample to the adequacy of the principle of intentionalism to accounting for ordinary perception. Moving from this, in the fifth section, I will provide some reasons explaining why intentionalism is condemned at being unsuccessful. Finally, in the last section of the paper, I will give my conclusions. (shrink)

My paper provides reasons in support of the view that vague identity claims originate from a conflict between rigidity and precision in designation. To put this stricly, let x be the referent of the referential terms P and Q. Then, that the proposition “that any x being both a P and a Q” is vague involves that the semantic intuitions at work in P and Q reveal a conflict between P and Q being simultaneously rigid and precise designators. After having (...) shortly commented on an example of vague identity claim, I make the case for my proposal, by discussing how reference by baptism conflicts with descriptive attitudes towards understanding conceptual contents. (shrink)

My paper characterizes religious beliefs in terms of vagueness. I introduce my topic by providing a general overview of my main claims. In the subsequent section, I develop basic distinctions and terminology for handling the notion of religious tradition and capturing vagueness. In the following sections, I make the case for my claim that religious beliefs are vague by developing a general argument from the interconnection between the referential opacity of religious belief content and the long-term communitarian history of the (...) precisification of what such content means. I start from describing an empirical example in the third section, and then I move to settle the matter in a conceptually argumentative frame in the fourth one. My conclusions in the final section address a few of consequences relevant to debates about religious epistemology and religious diversity. (shrink)

Most literature on religious beliefs and disagreements among traditions focuses on a bit of mainstream assumptions: religions should be construed in substantive terms; religions are to be individuated by their core belief systems; adherents to a single tradition assent to the same belief system; religious beliefs have factual content; incompatible religious beliefs cannot be both true; and so on. In my work I question all these claims in order to defend a non kantian approach to deep pluralism. In the first (...) part I develop a narrative theory of doxastic practices. My fundamental intuition is that ambiguity, vagueness, and indeterminacy of meaning are non amendable features of any ordinary belief. Consequently, no proposition has a definite meaning, and there is no a priori reason to assume that if two believers assume the same belief, they both hold the same content. What I'm trying to do is to argue in support of a realist epistemology, without assuming a normative and rationalist stance. My evidential body is mainly drawn from psychology and psychoanalysis. In the second part I apply such a narrative theory to the study of the doxastic character of religions. I reject both functionalist and substantive approaches to religion, and I defend my own viewpoint which I label experentialism. After providing a characterization of religious beliefs, I refute how Alston, Ward and Hick account for the the doxastic features of religions. I then propose a definition of religious diversity which turns out to be alternative to the mainstream one. I work by empirical evidence from semiotics, sociology of religion and history of religions. In the third and conclusive part of my book, I give reasons against the mainstream approach to religious diversity, and I explain how my definition can be more appropriate to the sociological study of religious beliefs than the mainstream one. Finally, I provide an account of deep pluralism, I show that my approach to religious epistemology and religions is compatible with (and recommended by) deep pluralism, I differentiate kantian from non kantian pluralism, and I explain why non kantian deep pluralism resists the traditional objections to pluralism. Throughout the book I discuss relevant materials from Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (shrink)

Evolutionary research on the biological fitness of groups has recently given a prominent value to the role that prosocial behaviors play in favoring a successful adaptation to ecological niches. Such a focus marks a paradigm shift. Early views of evolution relied on the notion of natural selection as a largely competitive mechanism for the achievement of the highest amount of resources. Today, evolutionists from different schools think that collaborative attitudes are an irremovable ingredient of biological change over time. As a (...) consequence, a number of researchers have been attracted by evolutionary studies of human behaviors. Some think that a continuity among prosocial attitudes of human beings and other social mammals can be detected, and that this fact has relevance for accounting for human morality. Others deny one or the other of these claims, or both. The papers in the present special issue address how these topics impact ethics and religion. (shrink)

Anecdotal pluralism (AP) is the claim that, when two individuals disagree on the truth of a religious belief, the right move to make is to engage in a communal epistemic process of evidence sharing and evaluation, motivated by the willingness to learn from each other, understand the adversary's views and how these challenge their own, and re-evaluate their own epistemic position in regards to external criticisms. What I will do in my paper is to provide a presentation of AP and (...) give a few reasons in support. I will begin with showing how pluralism can be promoted by religious experiences inhering in any (historical) tradition. To this regard, my purpose is to analyse such experiences as conducive to the assumption of the two main principles defining any pluralist view. Subsequently, I will construe AP by seven claims, and I will focus my efforts on justifying its superiority both to exclusivism/inclusivism and other varieties of pluralism. My next and final move is to list a few reasons which support my view. (shrink)

My paper argues for the claim that religious experience may provide evidential reasons in support of religious beliefs. I name such a claim epistemic view of mystical experience (EM). In the first section, I sketch two approaches to EM. Swinburne, Alston and Plantinga (among others) develop a notable defense of EM. On the contrary, seminal works by Feuerbach and Bultmann offer the opposite account. I briefly show how to resist to the criticism of EM. In light of such line of (...) reasoning, I move to Alston's Theory of Doxastic Practices (TDP) in the second section. After giving a skeletal account of TDP, I construe an argument in Alstonian terms against the naturalist refutations of EM. In the third section, I highlight the main problem with TDP, that is, the claim that perceptions and religious experiences have an analogical relation. Examples from sacred texts of different traditions show that such a claim fails to grasp what a religious experience is. In the final section I give a preliminary account of the notion of presentational experience, and show that it is possible to defend EM more plausibly than TDP does by the use of this notion. (shrink)

An overview of the recent debate on the Trinity in the analytic philosophy of religion. I move from putting forward the Logical Problem of the Trinity (LPT) according to R.Cartwright and M.Rea. I then define two useful notions in order to evaluate the interpretive force of the mainstream approaches to answer LPT; i.e. , be X a concept, I define maximally robust reading of X and sufficiently robust reading of X. In the subsequent section, I offer an expository analysis of (...) Latin Trinitarianism, Social Trinitarianism and Material Constitution Trinitarianism in line with such concepts. I finally advance some reasons why neither of these properly work. My main argument is that every traditional phrasing of the doctrine of the Trinity asks Christians to hold maximally robust reading both of the onefoldness of God and the threefoldness of Divine Persons. Now, while Latin Trinitarianism, Social Trinitarianism and Material Constitution Trinitarianism provide maximally robust account of God's onefoldness, they can't give a maximally robust account for Persons' threefoldness. (shrink)

The paper is divided in two parts. The first presents my exegesis of the fourth chapter of the Gospel of John. My main claim is that the composer of the text manipulate the chronological order of miracles in his "signs source" in order to approach the story of the woman from Samaria together to the healing of the son of the roman officer in Kapharnaus. The two episodes deal with two different ways to convert to faith. Consequently, they provide a (...) complete phenomenology of the formation process of religious belief. The second part considers two fundamental interpretations of the johannine notion of faith, i.e. the fideistical and the existentialist. I reject both: the first is logically inconsistent within the Johannine framework (the Gospel of John assumes principles whose consequences contradict the fideistic interpretation of faith); the second is ontologically senseless. (shrink)

Intractable disagreements are commonly analyzed in terms of the semantic opposition of (at least) couples of disputed beliefs (purely epistemic view, from here on PEV). While such a view seems to be a very natural starting point, my intuitions are that such an approach is misleadingly unrealistic, and that an empirical modeling towards how individuals hold beliefs in intractable opposition constitutes a strong defeater for PEV. My work addresses disagreements within the religious domain. Accordingly, I will be concerned with developing (...) my empirical understanding of religious beliefs, and will show the consequences of such proposal on how to answer the problem of religious diversity. (shrink)

According to René Girard, all religious traditions - and so every tradition- originate from a communitarian violence towards a randomly chosen individual. I provide an introductory construal of Girard’s proposal in the first section of my paper. In the second section, I will address a conceptual view of the theory by making explicit its principles and their inferential relations. In the third section, I will explain how philosophers of language address slurs and hate-speech. Particularly, I will apply such materials to (...) Girard’s assumption that the three friends’ discourses to Job are instances of hate-speech. My purpose is to defend the use of a presuppositional account of derogatory epithets in the philosophy of religion, and to argue for the legitimacy of reading a number of religious statements which cement a social group into a “we” in opposition to an individual who is individuated as an instance of a “not-we” as slurs. In the fourth section, I will argue that, if Girard is right in thinking that speech-hate and the use of slurs are means for the identification of a scapegoat within a group, then Girard’s theory needs to be adjusted in order to accommodate some obvious difficulties. Finally, in the fifth section, I will sum up my conclusions and then provide a few suggestions for defending the theory. (shrink)

Discuto la tesi di Micheletti secondo la quale ogni spiegazione fattuale presuppone premesse di ordine superiore rispetto alla spiegazione (M.Micheletti, “Radical Divine Alterity and the God-World Relationship”). Nella prima sezione del testo introdurrò la tesi, muovendo dalla analisi di alcuni esempi di spiegazione, ed elencherò le ragioni che (apparentemente) richiedono la postulazione di higher-degree propositions per rendere conto di factual propositions. Nella seconda sezione regimenterò logicamente la tesi di Micheletti. Nella terza sezione discuterò la validità della logica della spiegazione così (...) introdotta, con un’attenzione particolare alla analisi semantica della nozione di spiegazione, allo statuto modale delle ragioni che costituiscono una spiegazione, e all’approccio grammaticale alle higher order propositions. Nella quarta e ultima sezione avanzerò brevissime considerazioni conclusive. (shrink)

My paper challenges the externalist mainstream assumptions towards the understanding of religious beliefs (i.e., reliabilism by W.Alston, the warrant belief approach by A.Plantinga, the neowittgensteinian analysis of doxastic systems). According to such assumptions, religious beliefs should be evaluated rational in terms of the same doxastic standard giving justification for ordinary factual beliefs. Moving from the empiricist intuition that the kind of content of belief matters to the form of belief and the justification practices for it, I argue for the claim (...) that religious beliefs do not concern facts or experiences but assiological interpretations of facts or experiences. After some brief introductory considerations, in the second section of my paper I provide criteria for distinguishing between factual and non factual beliefs, and I offer a general account for the doxastic spectrum. In the subsequent section I characterize the assumption of religious beliefs as qualitative, mostly implicit and in the de dicto modality. In order to prove my characterization I draw a phenomenology of religious belief from individual testimonies concerning religious conversion. I finally conclude answering some objections in the fourth section of the paper. (shrink)

I consider an argument by Plotinus to show how the notion of transcendence is used in explaining the nature of knowledge. The argument is set forth in sections 4-6 of the treatise V.8 (31). In my opinion this argument provides a good example of the philosophical frame of Platonism. I sum up this frame in the following theses: a) for a thing being is to be real and true; so that for a thing being real and being true is equivalent; (...) but b) for a thing being real and true means being intelligible; that is to say: a thing could be understood because that thing is a being; thus, c) for a thing being is the identity of its ontological and epistemological nature. (shrink)

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is one of the most influential early modern philosophers, and in reason of this a never-ending critical interest focuses on his works. Such a critical attention gave rise to a broad literature and it is in fact quite easy to find valuable introductory books to Berkeley's works. It would be thus superfluous to provide a further summary of the entire production of Berkeley. Rather, I focus on a specific issue, namely the main points of interest of immaterialism (...) for the contemporary debates in philosophy. The currently most discussed Berkeleian arguments are those from his earlier production (those developed around 1709-1713). Thus, I will be mainly concerned with the conceptual structure of A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Among Berkeley's early works, this is the one that was thought as a systematic illustration for philosophers of his ideas. (shrink)

Persistent disagreements may induce parties in the disagreement to experience a strong state of anxiety. Such anxiety has a psychological nature in ordinary cases of disagreement (i.e., cases which do not impact on the doxastic identity of the opposing epistemic agents). On the contrary, the more the content of a disagreement concerns basic issues related to the non-negotiable views for the parties involved, the more anxiety turns out to be of an epistemic kind, and, accordingly, suggests a set of normative (...) consequences. I will outline the main differences between ordinary and doxastic-identity-related disagreements in terms of the nature of the anxiety they give rise. In light of this distinction, I will characterize religious disagreements as disagreements of the latter type, and I will provide a few insights for approaching them. (shrink)

My paper moves from Kant's taxonomy for the arguments for the existence of God. After providing a brief survey of Kant's account, I claim that contemporary arguments from design fit Kant's characterization of the physico-theological argument. Then, in the second section, I deal with the logical frame of the argument from design. In the third section I introduce Berkeley's divine language argument (DLA), in order to demonstrate that DLA is an argument from design. Consequently, in the fourth section, I give (...) a refutation of Hooker's and Kline's reading of DLA. Finally, in the last section, I take Berkeley's DLA as a paradigmatic case of the argument from design, showing a fundamental difficulty the argument endorses. (shrink)

My paper provides a preliminary work towards a theory of freedom and agency which I name "Theory of Procedural Agency (TPA)". Since TPA relies on intuitions which can not be settled into the metaphysical framework of contemporary approaches to freedom and agency, I focus on some reasons which explain why these intuitions should be preferred to the competing ones. My strategy is to argue for my view defending an embryonal version of TPA, that is Berkeley's considerations on free will, agency (...) and determinism. In the first section I deal with Berkeley's treatment of free will. My idea is that his arguments offer clear and evident reasons in support of the first intuition grounding a TPA like approach to freedom. In the second section I move some criticisms to Berkeley's theory of will, claiming that, in order to overcome these, the assumption of the constitution view concerning self-knowledge would help. In the third section I set forth a logical formulation for TPA, showing how Berkeley's consideration on agency provide grounding reasons for that. Finally, in the last section, I plan the work to be done to achieve a consistent and complete version of TPA. (shrink)

An introduction to how heteronomous views address the topic of moral autonomy. In the first section I provide a short history of the rise of the autonomy stance in meta ethics. Then I sketch the relationship between Kant and mainstream contemporary Kantians. I finally outline a summary of the papers in the special issue of Dialegesthai.

The theorizing about the doctrine of the Trinity by contemporary analytic philosophers of religion has recently been imbued with an air of enthusiastic excitement and self-confidence. My intuition is that there’s room for saying something more in support to the embarrassment and puzzlement traditionally related to the predication of God’s onefoldness and threefoldness. My purpose is to deliver a general argument for (weak) trinitarian skepticism. My view is that the argument provides substantive reasons in support to the common sense intuition (...) that either God’s onefoldness and threefoldness aren’t actually compatible or God’s onefoldness and threefoldness aren’t robustly construed. (shrink)

My paper addresses what a religion is. I comment briefly on the "substantive versus functionalist" debate, and I provide reasons to reject both of them. While I offer short summary arguments against the functionalist approach, I develop two detailed arguments against the substantive one. The former moves from the evidence that religious beliefs change over time. The latter moves from internal disagreements about the meaning of the core beliefs of a faith. These two arguments show that it is impossible to (...) reduce the belief system of any historical faith to a set of propositions which all the adherents to a tradition assent to. Although my arguments are conceptual, I include also empirical materials in support of my view. I then conclude by presenting a pluralist account of religions from an internalist standpoint. (shrink)

The critical target of my paper is the normativist stance of Kantian meta ethics. After a very short introduction, I develop a characterization of contemporary mainstream Kantism as a conjunction of a normativist claim, a rationalist claim and a proceduralist claim. In the subsequent section I make the case against the normativist claim by drawing a counterexample, and defend the relevance of such counterexample as a reason that defeats the appeal of the Kantian approach to meta ethics. I finally conclude (...) by highlighting the main reasons why the challenge my counterexample rises are not answerable within a Kantian framework. (shrink)

David Berman's work on experimental philosophy is a defence of a traditional approach to empiricism against both contemporary rationalism and logico-analytic philosophy. While his approach focuses on empirical evidence in support of theoretical claims, Berman distinguishes his position from the kind of experimentalism recently risen from the analytic world. After having highlighted the merit of Berman's approach to philosophy, I comment on his main views, addressing particularly the relationship between language, intuitions and experience from the standpoint of the epistemological topic (...) of belief justification. (shrink)

My paper addresses the notion of moral responsibility in religious ethics. I begin with the outline of the doctrine of moral heteronomy. The scripture stories of the Tables of the Laws and the Holy Covenant provide the general pattern for heteronomic ethics. My claim is that heteronomic ethics transfers the responsibility for the action A an agent x is performing from x to the normative system commanding x to perform A. I then picture the architecture of the normative system of (...) the Decalogue (System D) and I work out criteria for the completeness and consistency of the system. In the next section I make the case for the actual incompleteness and inconsistency of D. As a consequence, an agent subject to the authority of D can not rule his moral conduct by the norms in D. Therefore, the acceptance of D transfers the moral responsibility for the actions by x from x to D, but D does not provide a complete and consistent system of norms to rule x's conduct. In the final section of the paper I briefly present the way religious ethics deals with this problem, by offering an alternative approach to the notion of moral responsibility. (shrink)

My main claim is that, in order to account for the nature of human mind, philosophy of mind should embody topics usually treated by disciplines as ethics or applied philosophy so as to enrich the pure notion of cognitive experience to the extent of treating the whole of human experience. I begin with considering the Cartesian approach to the "cogito". I argue for the claim that cartesian-like dualists (Descartes and Locke, Kant and Husserl) fail in treating the opposition of internalism (...) and externalism concerning experience. This failure commits them to a form of epistemological idealism unable to manage the "veil of perception" objection. I then settle a provisional account for the mind, mainly dependent on a Berkeleyan-Humean deflationist approach to it, showing the necessity to incorporate in it robust practical topics from an ontological point of view. (shrink)

My starting assumption concerns the default view in western aestethics. My claim is that the view can be characterized in the following manner: while the arts and religious experience are formally different kinds of human experience, the arts have the same content of religious experience (Essentialist claim, EC). I argue that both from a realist and antirealist standpoint EC does not make sense. Consequently, EC should be rejected as the right approach to the relation between the arts and religious experience.

In this paper, I examine the book "Relations: Ontology and Philosophy of Religion" which is a collection of invited and selected papers dealing with both ontology and the philosophy of religion. It aims at showing how the two disciplines can fruitfully interact and provide useful tools for philosophical investigation. The background is relational ontology and analytical philosophy.

Realists about possible worlds typically identify possible worlds with abstract objects, such as propositions or properties. However, they face a significant objection due to Lewis (1986), to the effect that there is no way to explain how possible worlds-as-abstract objects represent possibilities. In this paper, I describe a response to this objection on behalf of realists. The response is to identify possible worlds with propositions, but to deny that propositions are abstract objects, or indeed objects at all. Instead, I argue (...) that realists should follow Prior (1971) and others in treating higher-order quantification (e.g. quantification into predicate or sentence position) as a genuine form of quantification in its own right, and so in particular, not to be analysed in terms of first-order quantification over abstract objects. I argue that from this ‘higher-orderist’ perspective, there is a relatively straightforward answer to the question of how possible worlds-as-propositions succeed in representing possibilities. (shrink)

Realists about possible worlds typically identify possible worlds with abstract objects, such as propositions or properties. However, they face a significant objection due to Lewis (1986), to the effect that there is no way to explain how possible worlds-as-abstract objects represent possibilities. In this paper, I describe a response to this objection on behalf of realists. The response is to identify possible worlds with propositions, but to deny that propositions are abstract objects, or indeed objects at all. Instead, I argue (...) that realists should follow Prior (1971) and others in treating higher-order quantification (e.g. quantification into predicate or sentence position) as a genuine form of quantification in its own right, and so in particular, not to be analysed in terms of first-order quantification over abstract objects. I argue that from this ‘higher-orderist’ perspective, there is a relatively straightforward answer to the question of how possible worlds-as-propositions succeed in representing possibilities. (shrink)

This paper will attempt to assess the primary differences between what I take to be the two primary philosophical "traditions" in contemporary French philosophy, using Derrida (transcendence) and Deleuze (immanence) as exemplary representatives. The body of the paper will examine the use of these terms in three different areas of philosophy on which Derrida and Deleuze have both written: subjectivity, ontology, and epistemology. (1) In the field of subjectivity, the notion of the subject has been critiqued in two manners, either (...) by appealing either to the transcendence of the other (Levinas, Derrida) or to the immanent jlux of experience itself, in relation to which the Ego itself is trancendent (Deleuze, Foucault, Sartre, James). (2) In the field of ontology, a purely "immanent" ontology would be an ontology in which there is neither a "beyond" or an "otherwise" Being, nor "interruptions" in Being, both of which would require an appeal to a formal element of transcendence (Deleuze). Such a "transcendent" and aporetic structure, which can never appear or be present as such within Being, is what lies at the basis of the project of deconstruction, with its attendant aporias (Derrida). (3) This distinction, finally, finds parallels in Kant's epistemology, for whom the possible experience is conditioned by purely immanent criteria (Deleuze), whereas what goes beyond the limits of possible experience is transcendent (Derrida). Drawing on these three thread of analysis, the paper concludes with an assessment of what is at stake in the ethical differences between the two traditions. The question of "transcendence" is "What mast I do?", which is the question of morality (a duty or obligation that is beyond being, an "ought" beyond the "is"). The question of "immanence" is "What can I do?" (my power or capacity as an existing individual within being). For Levinas and Derrida, ethics precedes ontology because it is derived from an element of transcendence (the Other); for Deleuze, ethics is ontology because it is derived from the immanent relation of beings to Being at the level of their existence (Spinoza). (shrink)

It has become customary to conceptualize the living cell as an intricate piece of machinery, different to a man-made machine only in terms of its superior complexity. This familiar understanding grounds the conviction that a cell's organization can be explained reductionistically, as well as the idea that its molecular pathways can be construed as deterministic circuits. The machine conception of the cell owes a great deal of its success to the methods traditionally used in molecular biology. However, the recent introduction (...) of novel experimental techniques capable of tracking individual molecules within cells in real time is leading to the rapid accumulation of data that are inconsistent with an engineering view of the cell. This paper examines four major domains of current research in which the challenges to the machine conception of the cell are particularly pronounced: cellular architecture, protein complexes, intracellular transport, and cellular behaviour. It argues that a new theoretical understanding of the cell is emerging from the study of these phenomena which emphasizes the dynamic, self-organizing nature of its constitution, the fluidity and plasticity of its components, and the stochasticity and non-linearity of its underlying processes. (shrink)

This paper explores various subtleties in our ordinary thought and talk about normative reasons—subtleties which, if taken seriously, have various upshots, both substantive and methodological. I focus on two subtleties in particular. The first concerns the use of reason (in its normative sense) as both a count noun and as a mass noun, and the second concerns the context-sensitivity of normative reasons-claims. The more carefully we look at the language of reasons, I argue, the clearer its limitations and liabilities become. (...) The cumulative upshot is that although talk of reasons is intelligible and useful for the purposes of communication, we should be wary of placing much weight on it when engaging in substantive normative inquiry. By way of illustration, I consider some potential pitfalls of taking our talk of reasons too seriously, explaining how careful attention to the language of reasons undermines the main argument for moral particularism, Mark Schroeder’s recent defense of Humeanism about practical reasons, and the “reasons-first” program in metanormativity. (shrink)

Motion—and, in particular, local motion or change in location—plays a central role in Kenelm Digby’s natural philosophy and in his arguments for the immateriality of the soul. Despite this, Digby’s account of what motion consists in has yet to receive much scholarly attention. In this paper, I advance a novel interpretation of Digby on motion. According to it, Digby holds that for a body to move is for it to divide from and unify with other bodies. This is a view (...) of motion—as change in relations of parthood—that Alison Peterman attributes to Digby’s contemporary and acquaintance, Margaret Cavendish. Having shown that Digby’s presentation of the view predates Cavendish’s by more than a decade, I make a case that Digby’s work influenced Cavendish’s on this topic. In developing and defending my reading, I consider to what extent the Digbean account of motion and the arguments for it accord with the ideals of the mechanical philosophy emerging in the early modern period. (shrink)

According to (what I will call) an inner awareness theory of consciousness, you are in a (phenomenally) conscious state only if you are aware, in some sense, of your being in the state. This theory is widely held, but what arguments are there for holding it? In this paper, I gather together in a systematic way the main arguments for holding the theory and suggest that none of them is persuasive. I end the paper by asking what our attitude to (...) the theory should be if there is no existing argument for it. (shrink)

There has recently been a focus on the question of statue removalism. This concerns what to do with public history statues that honour or otherwise celebrate ethically bad historical figures. The specific wrongs of these statues have been understood in terms of derogatory speech, inapt honours, or supporting bad ideologies. In this paper I understand these bad public history statues as history, and identify a distinctive class of public history-specific wrongs. Specifically, public history plays an important identity-shaping role, and bad (...) public history can commit specifically ontic injustice. Understanding bad public history in terms of ontic injustice helps understand not just to address bad public history statues, but also understand the value of public history more broadly. (shrink)

Creationism about fictional entities requires a principle connecting what fictions say exist with which fictional entities really exist. The most natural way of spelling out such a principle yields inconsistent verdicts about how many fictional entities are generated by certain inconsistent fictions. Avoiding inconsistency without compromising the attractions of creationism will not be easy.

Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.

The U.S. election in November 2016 raised and amplified doubts about first-past-the-post (“plurality rule”) electoral systems. Arguments against plurality rule and for alternatives like preferential voting tend to be consequentialist: it is argued that systems like preferential voting produce different, better outcomes. After briefly noting why the consequentialist case against plurality rule is more complex and contentious than it first appears, I offer an expressive alternative: plurality rule produces actual or apparent dilemmas for voters in ways that are morally objectionable, (...) and avoidable under preferential voting systems. This expressive case against plurality rule is both simpler and more ecumenical than its consequentialist counterpart, and it provides strong reasons to prefer alternatives to plurality rule. Moreover, it suggests a distinct way of evaluating different alternatives like preferential voting. (shrink)

Difference and Repetition might be said to have brought about a Deleuzian Revolution in philosophy comparable to Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Kant had denounced the three great terminal points of traditional metaphysics – self, world and God – as transcendent illusions, and Deleuze pushes Kant’s revolution to its limit by positing a transcendental field that excludes the coherence of the self, world and God in favour of an immanent and differential plane of impersonal individuations and pre-individual singularities. In the process, he (...) introduces numerous conceptual innovations into philosophy: the becoming of concepts; a transformation of the form of the question; an insistence that philosophy must start in the middle; an attempt to think in terms of multiplicities; the development of a new logic and a new metaphysics based on a concept of difference; a new conception of space as intensive rather than extensive; a conception of time as a pure and empty form; and an understanding of philosophy as a system in heterogenesis – that is, a system that entails a perpetual genesis of the heterogeneous, an incessant production of the new. -/- Keywords: concepts, becoming, multiplicity, singularity, the middle [au milieu], difference, intensity, time, system, the new. (shrink)

The debate regarding the role of conscientious objection in healthcare has been protracted, with increasing demands for curbs on conscientious objection. There is a growing body of evidence that indicates that in some cases, high rates of conscientious objection can affect access to legal medical services such as abortion—a major concern of critics of conscientious objection. Moreover, few solutions have been put forward that aim to satisfy both this concern and that of defenders of conscientious objection—being expected to participate in (...) the provision of services that compromise their moral integrity. Here we attempt to bring some resolution to the debate by proposing a pragmatic, long-term solution offering what we believe to be an acceptable compromise—a quota system for medical trainees in specialties where a conscientious objection can be exercised, and is known to cause conflict. We envisage two main objectives of the quota system we propose. First, as a means to introduce conscientious objection into countries where this is not presently permitted. Second, to minimise or eliminate the effects of high rates of conscientious objection in countries such as Italy, where access to legal abortion provision can be negatively affected. (shrink)

Our aim here is to explore the prospects of a relativist response to moral debunking arguments. We begin by clarifying the relativist thesis under consideration, and we explain why relativists seem well-positioned to resist the arguments in a way that avoids the drawbacks of existing responses. We then show that appearances are deceiving. At bottom, the relativist response is no less question-begging than standard realist responses, and – when we turn our attention to the strongest formulation of the debunking argument (...) – the virtues of relativism turn out to be vices. (shrink)

Précis for a book symposium, with contributions from Meg Wallace, Louis deRosset, and Chris Tillman and Joshua Spencer.

Debunking arguments—also known as etiological arguments, genealogical arguments, access problems, isolation objec- tions, and reliability challenges—arise in philosophical debates about a diverse range of topics, including causation, chance, color, consciousness, epistemic reasons, free will, grounding, laws of nature, logic, mathematics, modality, morality, natural kinds, ordinary objects, religion, and time. What unifies the arguments is the transition from a premise about what does or doesn't explain why we have certain mental states to a negative assessment of their epistemic status. I examine (...) the common, underlying structure of the arguments and the different strategies for motivating and resisting the premises of debunking arguments. (shrink)

We give a brief overview of several recent strands of speech-act theory, and then survey some issues in social and political philosophy can be profitably understood in speech-act-theoretic terms. Our topics include the social contract, the law, the creation and reinforcement of social norms and practices, silencing, and freedom of speech.

Supererogatory acts—good deeds “beyond the call of duty”—are a part of moral common sense, but conceptually puzzling. I propose a unified solution to three of the most infamous puzzles: the classic Paradox of Supererogation (if it’s so good, why isn’t it just obligatory?), Horton’s All or Nothing Problem, and Kamm’s Intransitivity Paradox. I conclude that supererogation makes sense if, and only if, the grounds of rightness are multi-dimensional and comparative.

In this article we focus on three key precepts shared by Confucianism and the African ethic of Ubuntu: the central value of community, the desirability of ethical partiality, and the idea that we tend to become morally better as we grow older. For each of these broad similarities, there are key differences underlying them, and we discuss those as well as speculate about the reasons for them. Our aim is not to take sides, but we do suggest ways that Ubuntu (...) and Confucianism might have something to learn from each other and perhaps come closer. We hope that our preliminary reflections can inspire further debate and thinking on a theme – dialogues between long-standing and large-scale non-Western traditions – that is bound to increase in importance as non-Western societies play a greater role in the global system and as the search continues for a 'global ethic'. (shrink)

This article synthesizes the results of several interviews with argumentation scholars from across the American continents to address three questions regarding the connections in argumentation studies between North and South/Central America: “What motivated the study of argumentation in the Americas?” “What commonalities, if any, exist in argumentation studies across the Americas?” and “What should the future of argumentation studies in the Americas look like?” Using these interviews in combination with existing textual sources, the article also provides motivated suggestions for directions (...) for the future of the community in the field. (shrink)

Moral debunking arguments are meant to show that, by realist lights, moral beliefs are not explained by moral facts, which in turn is meant to show that they lack some significant counterfactual connection to the moral facts (e.g., safety, sensitivity, reliability). The dominant, “minimalist” response to the arguments—sometimes defended under the heading of “third-factors” or “pre-established harmonies”—involves affirming that moral beliefs enjoy the relevant counterfactual connection while granting that these beliefs are not explained by the moral facts. We show that (...) the minimalist gambit rests on a controversial thesis about epistemic priority: that explanatory concessions derive their epistemic import from what they reveal about counterfactual connections. We then challenge this epistemic priority thesis, which undermines the minimalist response to debunking arguments (in ethics and elsewhere). (shrink)

This monograph investigates the temporal interpretation of narrative discourse in two parts. The theme of the first part is narrative progression. It begins with a case study of the adverb ‘now’ and its interaction with the meaning of tense. The case study motivates an ontological distinction between events, states and times and proposes that ‘now’ seeks a prominent state that holds throughout the time described by the tense. Building on prior research, prominence is shown to be influenced by principles of (...) discourse coherence and two coherence principles, NARRATION and RESULT, are given a formally explicit characterization. The key innovation is a new method for testing the definitional adequacy of NARRATION and RESULT, namely by an abductive argument. This contribution opens a new way of thinking about how eventive and stative descriptions contribute to the perceived narrative progression in a discourse. -/- The theme of the second part of the monograph is the semantics and pragmatics of tense. A key innovation is that the present and past tenses are treated as scalar alternatives, a view that is motivated by adopting a particular hypothesis concerning stative predication. The proposed analysis accounts for tense in both matrix clauses and in complements of propositional attitudes, where the notorious double access reading arises. This reading is explored as part of a corpus study that provides a glimpse of how tense semantics interacts with Gricean principles and at-issueness. Several cross-linguistic predictions of the analysis are considered, including their consequences for the Sequence of Tense phenomenon and the Upper Limit Constraint. Finally, a hypothesis is provided about how tense meanings compose with temporal adverbs and verb phrases. Two influential analysis of viewpoint aspect are then compared in light of the hypothesis. (shrink)

The potential to collect brain data more directly, with higher resolution, and in greater amounts has heightened worries about mental and brain privacy. In order to manage the risks to individuals posed by these privacy challenges, some have suggested codifying new privacy rights, including a right to “mental privacy.” In this paper, we consider these arguments and conclude that while neurotechnologies do raise significant privacy concerns, such concerns are—at least for now—no different from those raised by other well-understood data collection (...) technologies, such as gene sequencing tools and online surveillance. To better understand the privacy stakes of brain data, we suggest the use of a conceptual framework from information ethics, Helen Nissenbaum’s “contextual integrity” theory. To illustrate the importance of context, we examine neurotechnologies and the information flows they produce in three familiar contexts—healthcare and medical research, criminal justice, and consumer marketing. We argue that by emphasizing what is distinct about brain privacy issues, rather than what they share with other data privacy concerns, risks weakening broader efforts to enact more robust privacy law and policy. (shrink)