In certain cases, people judge that agents bring about ends intentionally but also that they do not bring about the means that brought about those ends intentionally—even though bringing about the ends and means is just as likely. We call this difference in judgments the Kraemer effect. We offer a novel explanation for this effect: a perceived difference in the extent to which agents know how to bring about the means and the ends explains the Kraemer effect. In several experiments, (...) we replicate the Kraemer effect in a variety of non-moral and moral scenarios, and we find support for our new account. This work accords with a burgeoning area of action theory that identifies an important connection between know-how and intentionality. (shrink)

People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm- conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal-selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette-based paradigms. We use a novel set of video stimuli to investigate this effect for prospective causal judgments—i.e., judgments about the cause of some future outcome. Four experiments show that people more frequently select norm- violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some future outcome. We show that the abnormal-selection effects (...) are not primarily explained by the perception of agency (Experiment 4). We discuss these results in relation to recent efforts to model causal judgment. (shrink)

People generally accept that there is causation by omission—that the omission of some events cause some related events. But this acceptance elicits the selection problem, or the difficulty of explaining the selection of a particular omissive cause or class of causes from the causal conditions. Some theorists contend that dependence theories of causation cannot resolve this problem. In this paper, we argue that the appeal to norms adequately resolves the selection problem for dependence theories, and we provide novel experimental evidence (...) for it. (shrink)

People often reason about omissions. One line of research shows that people can distinguish between the semantics of omissive causes and omissive enabling conditions: for instance, not flunking out of college enabled you (but didn’t cause you) to graduate. Another line of work shows that people rely on the normative status of omissive events in inferring their causal role: if the outcome came about because the omission violated some norm, reasoners are more likely to select that omission as a cause. (...) We designed a novel paradigm that tests how norms interact with the semantics of omissive enabling conditions. The paradigm concerns the circuitry of a mechanical device that plays music. Two experiments used the paradigm to stipulate norms and present a distinct set of possibilities to participants. Participants chose which causal verb best described the operations of the machine. The studies revealed that participants’ responses are best predicted by their tendency to consider the semantics of omissive relations. In contrast, norms had little to no effect in participants’ responses. We conclude by marshaling the evidence and considering what role norms may play in people’s understanding of omissions. (shrink)

People maintain a positive identity in at least two ways: They evaluate themselves more favorably than other people, and they judge themselves to be better now than they were in the past. Both strategies rely on autobiographical memories. The authors investigate the role of autobiographical memories of lying and emotional harm in maintaining a positive identity. For memories of lying to or emotionally harming others, participants judge their own actions as less morally wrong and less negative than those in which (...) other people lied to or emotionally harmed them. Furthermore, people judge those actions that happened further in the past to be more morally wrong than those that happened more recently. Finally, for periods of the past when they believed that they were very different people than they are now, participants judge their actions to be more morally wrong and more negative than those actions from periods of their pasts when they believed that they were very similar to who they are now. The authors discuss these findings in relation to theories about the function of autobiographical memory and moral cognition in constructing and perceiving the self over time. (shrink)

People seem more divided than ever before over social and political issues, entrenched in their existing beliefs and unwilling to change them. Empirical research on mechanisms driving this resistance to belief change has focused on a limited set of well-known, charged, contentious issues and has not accounted for deliberation over reasons and arguments in belief formation prior to experimental sessions. With a large, heterogeneous sample (N = 3,001), we attempt to overcome these existing problems, and we investigate the causes and (...) consequences of resistance to belief change for five diverse and less contentious socio-political issues. After participants chose initially to support or oppose a given socio-political position, they were provided with reasons favoring their chosen position (affirming reasons), reasons favoring the other, unchosen position (conflicting reasons), or all reasons for both positions (reasons for both sides). Our results indicate that participants are more likely to stick with their initial decisions than to change them no matter which reasons are considered, and that this resistance to belief change is likely due to a motivated, biased evaluation of the reasons to support their initial beliefs (prior-belief bias). More specifically, they rated affirming reasons more favorably than conflicting reasons—even after accounting for reported prior knowledge about the issue, the novelty of the reasons presented, and the reported strategy used to make the initial decision. In many cases, participants who did not change their positions tended to become more confident in the superiority of their positions after considering many reasons for both sides. (shrink)

Epistemologists have long believed that epistemic luck undermines propositional knowledge. Action theorists have long believed that agentive luck undermines intentional action. But is there a relationship between agentive luck and epistemic luck? While agentive luck and epistemic luck have been widely thought to be independent phenomena, we argue that agentive luck has an epistemic dimension. We present several thought experiments where epistemic luck seems to undermine both knowledge-how and intentional action and we report experimental results that corroborate these judgments. These (...) findings have implications for the role of knowledge in a theory of intentional action and for debates about the nature of knowledge-how and the significance of knowledge representation in folk psychology. (shrink)

Having positive moral traits is central to one’s sense of self, and people generally are motivated to maintain a positive view of the self in the present. But it remains unclear how people foster a positive, morally good view of the self in the present. We suggest that recollecting and reflecting on moral and immoral actions from the personal past jointly help to construct a morally good view of the current self in complementary ways. More specifically, across four studies we (...) investigated the extent to which people believe they have changed over time after recollecting their own moral or immoral behaviors from the personal past. Our results indicate that recollecting past immoral actions is associated with stronger impressions of dissimilarity and change in the sense of self over time than recollecting past moral actions. These effects held for diverse domains of morality (i.e., honesty/dishonesty, helping/harming, fairness/unfairness, and loyalty/disloyalty), and they remained even after accounting for objective, calendar time. Further supporting a motivational explanation, these effects held when people recollected their own past actions but not when they recollected the actions of other people. (shrink)

In this article, I draw an important distinction between two kinds of inquiry. “Framed inquiries” take for granted and use a conceptual framework in order to ask and answer questions, while “framing inquiries” require the creation, revision, or expansion of the conceptual framework itself in order to address the problem at hand. This distinction has been largely ignored in epistemology, and collapsed by two radically opposed philosophical camps: representationalism and antirepresentationalism. While the former takes all inquiries to be in the (...) business of discovering mind-independent facts, the latter takes all inquiries to be primarily governed by pragmatic considerations. Against the objections raised by both camps, I defend a pragmatist and substantive distinction between framed and framing inquiry, inspired by Rudolf Carnap’s distinction between internal and external questions and reformulated in terms of John Dewey’s theory of inquiry. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering takes a distinctively normative and reconstructive approach to our conceptual repertoire. This approach is congenial to the ideas defended by philosophers belonging to the multifaceted tradition of American and Cambridge Pragmatism. This special issue is devoted to the investigation and development of these connections. Our introduction maps some of the historical and theoretical entanglements between the two fields and gives a short overview of the contributions to the special issue.

According to cognitive psychologists, moral decision-making is a dual-process phenomenon involving two types of cognitive processes: explicit reasoning and implicit intuition. Moral development involves training and integrating both types of cognitive processes through a mix of instruction, practice, and reflection. Serious games are an ideal platform for this kind of moral training, as they provide safe spaces for exploring difficult moral problems and practicing the skills necessary to resolve them. In this article, we present Morality Play, a model for the (...) design of serious games for ethical expertise development based on the Integrative Ethical Education framework from moral psychology and the Lens of the Toy model for serious game design. (shrink)

Do physicists believe that general relativity is true, and that electrons and phonons exist, and if so, in what sense? To what extent does the spectrum of positions among physicists correspond to philosophical positions like scientific realism, instrumentalism, or perspectivism? Does agreement with these positions correlate with demographic factors, and are realist physicists more likely to support research projects purely aimed at increasing knowledge? We conducted a questionnaire study to scrutinize the philosophical stances of physicists. We received responses from 384 (...) physicists and 151 philosophers. Our main findings are (1) On average, physicists tend toward scientific realism, and slightly more so than philosophers of science. (2) Physicists can be clustered into five groups. Three show variants of scientific realism, one is instrumentalist, and one seems undecided or incoherent. (3) Agreement with realism weakly correlates with approval of building a bigger particle collider. (4) Agreement with realism weakly correlates with the seniority of physicists. (5) We did not find correlations with other factors, such as whether physicists focus on theoretical or experimental research and whether they engage with applied or basic research. (shrink)

Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We demonstrate how plausibility (...) ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential ‘salience bias’. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox (‘argument from hallucination’). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods’ philosophical usefulness. (shrink)

Kant begins his Lectures on Pedagogy by stating, “[t]he human being is the only creature that must be educated” (Kant, 2007, 9:441), and he argues that it is through education that we can transform our initial “animal nature into human nature” (ibid. 2007, 9:441). Kant understands education as involving an ordered process of care, discipline, instruction and formation through enculturating, civilizing and moralizing (Formosa 2011). Further, Kant envisages that we should pursue as a species the “moral perfection” that is the (...) “final destiny of the human race” through education (Collins, 1997, 27:470; see Dean, 2014). However, to engage in this pursuit Kant believes that, through education and social change, we have to regulate our “animal nature” and counter the moral corruption of our species, which he calls the “radical innate evil in human nature (not any the less brought upon us by ourselves)” (Kant, 1998, 6:32). If humanity is to pursue its final destiny of moral perfection, then education will need to respond responsibly to the propensity to evil that is deeply rooted in us as finite and imperfect rational beings living in imperfect and at times even in morally corrupted social conditions. This paper outlines some of the relevant issues. (shrink)

It is still a live question in epistemology and philosophy of science as to what exactly evidence is. In my view, evidence consists in experiences called “seemings.” This view is a version of the phenomenal conception of evidence, the position that evidence consists in nonfactive mental states with propositional content. This conception is opposed by sense-data theorists, disjunctivists, and those who think evidence consists in physical objects or publicly observable states of affairs—call it the courtroom conception of evidence. Thomas Kelly (...) has recently argued that the phenomenal conception cannot play all the roles evidence plays and is thus inadequate. Having first explained the nature of seemings, in this essay I utilize Kelly’s own understanding of the four major roles of evidence and argue that the phenomenal conception can play each one. Experience is a good candidate for evidence. (shrink)

The basing demand on doxastic justification is a widely held and highly intuitive dogma of contemporary epistemology. In Silva [2015, AJP], I argued that the dialectical significance of this dogma is severely limited by our lack of independent grounds for endorsing it. Oliveira [2015, AJP] sought to defend the basing demand on doxastic justification. Here I explain why Oliveira’s attempted defense of the basing demand misses its mark. I also briefly suggest that there is an alternative way of defending the (...) basing demand. The alternative way is reconciliatory: it shows that most epistemologists may have been right to insist on such a demand, but perhaps still wrong to treat it as a dialectically powerful tool in the assessment of certain substantive epistemological theories. (shrink)

Although Alston believed epistemically circular arguments were able to justify their conclusions, he was also disquieted by them. We will argue that Alston was right to be disquieted. We explain Alston’s view of epistemic circularity, the considerations that led him to accept it, and the purposes he thought epistemically circular arguments could serve. We then build on some of Alston’s remarks and introduce further limits to the usefulness of such arguments and introduce a new problem that stems from those limits. (...) The upshot is that adopting Alston’s view that epistemically circular arguments can be used to justify their conclusions is more costly than even he thought. (shrink)

In discussing instrumentalism in philosophy of science, John Dewey is rarely studied, but rather mentioned in passing to credit him for coining the label. His instrumentalism is often interpreted as the view that science is an instrument designed to control the environment and satisfy our practical ends, or likened to the Duhemian view that scientific objects are useful fictions for organizing observable phenomena. Dewey was careful to qualify the first view and denied holding the second. Furthermore, the observable/unobservable distinction does (...) not play any significant role in Dewey’s instrumentalism. The question then arises: Was the inventor of instrumentalism himself an instrumentalist? I present the key aspects of Dewey’s instrumentalismand contrast his views with the instrumentalism of Mach, Duhem and Poincaré. Dewey’s epistemological instrumentalism is global and not local; nevertheless, it is fallibilist and optimistic, rather than skeptical and pessimistic. Dewey’s ontological instrumentalism concerns the nature of scientific objects, regardless of whether they are observable or unobservable, and is fully compatible with realism about atoms or electrons. Dewey’s practical instrumentalism holds that becausescience provides understanding of the workings of nature rather than an exhaustive picture of reality, it is thebest instrument we have for the enrichment of experience. (shrink)

It is now widely accepted that a scientifically credible conception of human nature must reject the folkbiological idea of a fixed, inner essence that makes us human. We argue here that to understand human nature is to understand the plastic process of human development and the diversity it produces. Drawing on the framework of developmental systems theory and the idea of developmental niche construction we argue that human nature is not embodied in only one input to development, such as the (...) genome, and that it should not be confined to universal or typical human characteristics. Both similarities and certain classes of differences are explained by a human developmental system that reaches well out into the 'environment'. We point to a significant overlap between our account and the ‘Life History Trait Cluster’ account of Grant Ramsey, and defend the developmental systems account against the accusation that trying to encompass developmental plasticity and human diversity leads to an unmanageably complex account of human nature. (shrink)

We describe an approach to measuring biological information where ‘information’ is understood in the sense found in Francis Crick’s foundational contributions to molecular biology. Genes contain information in this sense, but so do epigenetic factors, as many biologists have recognized. The term ‘epigenetic’ is ambiguous, and we introduce a distinction between epigenetic and exogenetic inheritance to clarify one aspect of this ambiguity. These three heredity systems play complementary roles in supplying information for development. -/- We then consider the evolutionary significance (...) of the three inheritance systems. Whilst the genetic inheritance system was the key innovation in the evolution of heredity, in modern organisms the three systems each play important and complementary roles in heredity and evolution. -/- Our focus in the earlier part of the paper is on ‘proximate biology’, where information is a substantial causal factor that causes organisms to develop and causes offspring to resemble their parents. But much philosophical work has focused on information in ‘ultimate biology’. Ultimate information is a way of talking about the evolutionary design of the mechanisms of development and inheritance. We conclude by clarifying the relationship between the two. Ultimate information is not a causal factor that acts in development or heredity, but it can help to explain the evolution of proximate information, which is. (shrink)

Sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests has been a persistent and widespread problem in the Church. Although more than 80 percent of victims have been boys, prior studies have rejected the idea that the abuse is related to homosexuality among priests. Available data show, however, that the proportion of homosexual men in the priesthood is correlated almost perfectly with the percentage of male victims and with the overall incidence of abuse. Data also show that while the incidence of abuse (...) is lower today than it was three decades ago, it has not declined as much as is commonly believed, and has recently begun to rise amid signs of episcopal complacency about procedures for the protection of children. (shrink)

Excerpt: In this essay I explore the nature of the necessity of historical development in Nietzsche’s genealogy of Judeo-Christian moral values. I argue that the progression of moral stages in Nietzsche’s study is ordered in such a way that the failure of each stage is logically and structurally necessary, that each failure structures the resultant system or paradigm, but that the historical manifestation of moral paradigms coinciding with predicted or projected theoretical structures is contingent upon a multitude of other historical (...) factors. Therefore, the systematic internal failures of moral stages allow for, but do not cause, successive events. (shrink)

In order to fight massive vandalism the English- language Wikipedia has developed a system of surveillance which is carried out by humans and bots, supported by various tools. Central to the selection of edits for inspection is the process of using filters or profiles. Can this profiling be justified? On the basis of a careful reading of Frederick Schauer’s books about rules in general (1991) and profiling in particular (2003) I arrive at several conclusions. The effectiveness, efficiency, and risk-aversion of (...) edit selection all greatly increase as a result. The argument for increasing predictability suggests making all details of profiling manifestly public. Also, a wider distribution of the more sophisticated anti-vandalism tools seems indicated. As to the specific dimensions used in profiling, several critical remarks are developed. When patrollers use ‘assisted edit- ing’ tools, severe ‘overuse’ of several features (anonymity, warned before) is a definite possibility, undermining profile efficacy. The easy remedy suggested is to render all of them invisible on the interfaces as displayed to patrollers. Finally, concerning not only assisted editing tools but tools against vandalism generally, it is argued that the anonymity feature is a sensitive category: anons have been in dispute for a long time (while being more prone to vandalism). Targeting them as a special category violates the social contract upon which Wikipedia is based. The feature is therefore a candidate for mandatory ‘underuse’: it should be banned from all anti-vandalism filters and profiling algorithms, and no longer be visible as a special edit trait. (shrink)

The outcomes of sports and competitive games excite intense emotions in many people, even when those same people acknowledge that those outcomes are of trifling importance. I call this incongruity between the judged importance of the outcome and the intense reactions it provokes the Puzzle of Sport. The puzzle can be usefully compared to another puzzle in aesthetics: the Paradox of Fiction, which asks how it is we become emotionally caught up with events and characters we know to be unreal. (...) In this article, I examine the prospects of understanding our engagement with competitive games on the model of our engagement with works of fiction, thus enabling analogous explanations for both puzzles. I show that there are significant problems with such an approach and offer an alternative, mobilizing ideas from David Velleman and Thomas Nagel, that appeals to the volatility of our motivational attitudes. (shrink)

Our computational metaphysics group describes its use of automated reasoning tools to study Leibniz’s theory of concepts. We start with a reconstruction of Leibniz’s theory within the theory of abstract objects (henceforth ‘object theory’). Leibniz’s theory of concepts, under this reconstruction, has a non-modal algebra of concepts, a concept-containment theory of truth, and a modal metaphysics of complete individual concepts. We show how the object-theoretic reconstruction of these components of Leibniz’s theory can be represented for investigation by means of automated (...) theorem provers and finite model builders. The fundamental theorem of Leibniz’s theory is derived using these tools. (shrink)

The latest news from our planet is threatening: climate change, pollution, forest loss, species extinctions. All these words are frightening and there is no sign of improvement. Simple logic leads to the conclusion that humanity has to react, for its own survival. But at the scale of a human being, it is less obvious. Organizing one’s daily life in order to preserve the environment implies self-questioning, changing habits, sacrificing some comfort. In one word, it is an effort. Then, what justifies (...) such an effort? The personal choice to act in order to preserve our environment is often made by simple altruism. This choice is based on our love for other human beings: our love for the others grounds our effort. Our moral values, our ethical reflections and our religious beliefs are the deep core of these choices. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15.12 NRSV). This Charter shows the moral and religious values that can help us react regarding the current environmental crisis and it should empower us to transcend the ideas of effort and sacrifice in order to consider the respect of the shared house, in a prophetic fulfillment of the being. (shrink)

The world has surpassed three million deaths from COVID-19, and faces potentially catastrophic tipping points in the global climate system. Despite the urgency, governments have struggled to address either problem. In this paper, we argue that COVID-19 and anthropogenic climate change (ACC) are critical examples of an emerging type of governance challenge: severe collective action problems that require significant individual behavior change under conditions of hyper- partisanship and scientific misinformation. Building on foundational political science work demonstrating the potential for norms (...) (or informal rules of behavior) to solve collective action problems, we analyze more recent work on norms from neighboring disciplines to offer novel recommendations for more difficult challenges like COVID-19 and ACC. Key insights include more attention to (1) norm-based messaging strategies that appeal to individuals across the ideological spectrum or that reframe collective action as consistent with resistant subgroups’ pre-existing values, (2) messages that emphasize both the prevalence and the social desirability of individual behaviors required to address these challenges, (3) careful use of public policies and incentives that make individual behavior change easier without threatening norm internalization, and (4) greater attention to epistemic norms governing trust in different information sources. We conclude by pointing out that COVID-19 and climate change are likely harbingers of other polarized collective action problems that governments will face in the future. By connecting work on norms and political governance with a broader, interdisciplinary literature on norm psychology, motivation, and behavior change, we aim to improve the ability of political scientists and policy makers to respond to these and future collective action challenges. (shrink)

In "Rethinking Sadomasochism," Patrick Hopkins challenges the "radical" feminist claim that sadomasochism is incompatible with feminism. He does so by appeal to the notion of "simulation." I argue that Hopkins's conclusions are generally right, but they cannot be inferred from his "simulation" argument. I replace Hopkins's "simulation" with Kendall Walton's more sophisticated theory of "make-believe." I use this theory to better argue that privately conducted sadomasochism is compatible with feminism.

An important question about moral progress is what causes it. One of the most popular proposed mechanisms is moral reasoning: moral progress often happens because lots of people reason their way to improved moral beliefs. Authors who defend moral reasoning as a cause of moral progress have relied on two broad lines of argument: the general and the specific line. The general line presents evidence that moral reasoning is in general a powerful mechanism of moral belief change, while the specific (...) line tries to establish that moral reasoning can explain specific historical examples of moral progress. In this paper, we examine these lines in detail, using Kumar and Campbell’s (2022, A Better Ape: The Evolution of the Moral Mind and How It Made Us Human. Oxford University Press) model of rational moral progress to sharpen our focus. For each line, we explain the empirical assumptions it makes; we then argue that the available evidence supports none of these assumptions. We conclude that at this point, we have no idea if moral reasoning causes moral progress. (shrink)

We propose in this article some new elements for the interpretation of Heraclitus' doctrine, concerning in particular the role of the opposition of contraries as generator of harmony, that results from Fragments 8DK and 51DK. This interpretation is based on the conceptual tool of matrices of concepts. After having described the basic elements that govern the latter, we set out to define in this conceptual framework the notions of opposition and contrary, as well as of harmony. This allows us to (...) give an interpretation and also a justification of Heraclitus' specific doctrine, according to which the opposition of opposites generates harmony. (shrink)

This paper does three interrelated things. First, it argues that the universalism that forms the target of criticism and attack by decolonial theorists from the Global South is a debased form of universalism, what might be termed “ethnocentric universalism.” Second, equipped with a conceptual grip on ethnocentric universalism, it shows that the picture on which ethnocentric universalism confers some innocuous epistemic privilege to members of dominant groups is not quite accurate—ethnocentric universalism is incompatible with the epistemic flourishing of members of (...) dominant groups. And third, based on that claim, and the additional consideration that ethnocentric universalism equally undermines the epistemic flourishing of members of historically marginalized groups, it proposes an emancipatory framework for engaging with it. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Elizabeth Anderson’s application of the epistemological idiom of mētis to the debate over the equal status of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge in the academic curriculum. Against the denial of this equal status by critics of indigenous knowledge or science, Anderson defends what one might term a conciliatory view, the view, roughly, that indigenous knowledge meets the criteria of scientific knowledge presupposed by the critics of the equal status of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge in the (...) academic curriculum, and it is continuous with agroecological form of mainstream scientific inquiry. I argue that the conciliatory view does not rest substantively on mētis as an epistemological idiom since the view is based on the direct conceptual relation between the notion of indigenous knowledge and the notion of scientific knowledge or inquiry. More importantly, the view amounts to appealing to the critics of the equal status of indigenous knowledge on the terms of those critics and leaves unchallenged those very core assumptions that ground their denial of the equal status of indigenous knowledge in the first place. Building on her fruitful analysis of mētis, I attempt a sketch of an alternative view that vindicates the equal status of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge in the academic curriculum, but which avoids those drawbacks. (shrink)

In the replies to my critics that follow I offer a more detailed account of the specific papers that they discuss or examine. The papers that they are especially concerned with are: “The Material World and Natural Religion in Hume’s Treatise” (Ryan) [Essay 3], “Hume’s Skepticism and the Problem of Atheism” (Fosl) [Essay 12], and “Hume’s Philosophy of Irreligion and the Myth of British Empiricism (Gautier) [Essay 16].

Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy is a collection of essays that are all concerned with major figures and topics in the early modern philosophy. Most of the essays are concerned, more specifically, with the philosophy of David Hume (1711-1776). The sixteen essays included in this collection are divided into five parts. These parts are arranged under the headings of: (1) Metaphysics and Epistemology; (2) Free Will and Moral Luck; (3) Ethics, Virtue and Optimism; (4) Skepticism, Religion and Atheism; and (...) (5) Irreligion and the Unity of Hume’s Thought. A particularly important theme running through many of these essays is the subject of Hume’s irreligious aims and intentions. The fifth and final part of the collection is devoted to an articulation and defence of this specific understanding of Hume’s philosophical thought. (shrink)

For Rawls, the demands of justice compete with moral and religious obligations that are part of citizens’ comprehensive doctrines. The ways we love are shaped by our comprehensive doctrines; however, love can also stand in opposition to our moral and religious beliefs. I will argue that love – spousal, familial and associational – constitutes its own register of values along with its own set of obligations. For this reason love confronts not only our moral and religious beliefs, it also confronts (...) the demands and requirements of justice. Rawls has worked out a negotiated peace between the obligations of justice and the demands of citizens’ comprehensive doctrines in the form of an overlapping consensus on a free-standing political conception of justice. I will argue that in Rawls’s philosophy, justice has not yet made peace with love. (shrink)

Dans ce qui suit, je m'attache à présenter les éléments d'une doctrine philosophique, qui peut être définie comme un contextualisme dialectique. Je m'efforce tout d'abord de définir les éléments constitutifs de cette doctrine, à travers les dualités et pôles duaux, le principe d'indifférence dialectique et le biais d'uni-polarisation. Je m'attache ensuite à souligner l'intérêt spécifique de cette doctrine au sein d'un domaine particulier de la méta-philosophie : la méthodologie utilisée pour la résolution des paradoxes philosophiques. Je décris enfin une application (...) de cette dernière aux paradoxes suivants : le paradoxe de Hempel, le paradoxe de l'examen-surprise et l'argument de l'Apocalypse. (shrink)

English translation of an article originally published in French in Liber Amicorum Pascal Engel, J. Dutant, G. Fassio & A. Meylan (eds.), University of Geneva, 2014, pp. 581-608. In what follows, I strive to present the elements of a philosophical doctrine, which can be defined as dialectical contextualism. I proceed first to define the elements of this doctrine: dualities and polar contraries, the principle of dialectical indifference and the one-sidedness bias. I emphasize then the special importance of this doctrine in (...) one specific field of meta-philosophy: the methodology for solving philosophical paradoxes. Finally, I describe several applications of this methodology on the following paradoxes: Hempel's paradox, the surprise examination paradox and the Doomsday Argument. (shrink)

In a previous paper (Compléments pour une théorie des distorsions cognitives, Journal de Thérapie Comportementale et Cognitive, 2007), we did present some elements aimed at contributing to a general theory of cognitive distortions. The latter elements, based on the reference class, the duality and the system of taxa, are applied here to generalised anxiety disorder. This allows to describe, on the one hand, the specific distortions related to generalised anxiety disorder, consistently with recent work emphasising the role played by uncertain (...) situations with regard to future events. On the second hand, these elements allow to define one type of structured reasoning, of inductive nature, which contributes to the formation and maintenance of anxious ideas. (shrink)

Plato's Republic divided subsequent study of justice in two, as a virtue of people and of institutions. Here, the start of a reunification is attempted. Justice is first understood personally as the mean between arrogance and servility, where just people properly respect themselves and others. Because justice requires that like cases be treated alike and self-respect is a special instance of respect generally, justice requires a single standard for self and others. In understanding justice in terms of respect, structural analogies (...) become apparent between "recognition" and "appraisal" respect, on one hand, and Rawls' two principles of justice on the other. The paper closes with a discussion of how mercy is related to justice and an explanation of why just people always look for reasons to mitigate blame and punishment but never to aggravate them. (shrink)

Should a principle of charity be applied to the interpretation of the colour concepts exercised in visual experience? We think not. We shall argue, for one thing, that the grounds for applying a principle of charity are lacking in the case of colour concepts. More importantly, we shall argue that attempts at giving the experience of colour a charitable interpretation either fail to respect obvious features of that experience or fail to interpret it charitably, after all. Charity to visual experience (...) is therefore no motive for resisting the natural, Galilean response to a scientific understanding of light and vision. The best interpretation of colour experience ends up convicting it of widespread and systematic error. (shrink)

This paper argues that, given a certain apparently inevitable thesis about content, we could not know our own minds. The thesis is that the content of a thought is determined by its relational properties.

If the sun were to suddenly go out we wouldn't know it for 8 minutes. But if Alice is sitting in the middle of the sun and measures one of a pair of entangled particles and we measure the other one, what direction she measures her particle in has instantaneous effects on the one we measure. This is resolved in the Presentist Fragmentalist interpretation of QM.

This is a contribution to a Book symposium on The Limits of Free Will: Selected Essays by Paul Russell. Russell provides replies to three critics of The Limits of Free Will. The first reply is to Robert Wallace and focuses on the question of whether there is a conflict between the core compatibilist and pessimist components of the "critical compatibilist" position that Russell has advanced. The second reply is to Angela Smith's discussion of the "narrow" interpretation of moral responsibility (...) responsibility (as defended by R. Jay Wallace) and how best to respond to it. The third and last reply is concerned with Christopher Bennett's criticism of Russell's views concerning "motivational scepticism" and the possibility of pure practical reasons. (shrink)

In this paper, I give a brief overview of ideas from Reformed Epistemology, and the relationship between faith, evidence, and belief. I discuss what makes belief in God rationally warranted, and how reformed epistemology strikes a middle ground between fideism and evidentialism. In effect, reformed epistemology avoids the fideist idea that belief in God must be taken on "blind faith," but also avoids some of the epistemic issues present in evidentialism, such as its self-referential incoherence. The reformed epistemologist says belief (...) in God is rational, but not for the reasons demanded by evidentialists. (shrink)

This paper considers the question of “atheism” as it arises in Hume’s _Dialogues_. It argues that the concept of “atheism” involves several signficiant ambiguities that are indicative of philosophical and interpretive disagreements of a more substantial nature. It defends the view that Philo’s general sceptical orientation accurately represents Hume’s own “irreligious” and “atheistic” commitments, both in the _Dialogues_ and in his other (“earlier”) writings. While Hume was plainly a “speculative atheist”, his “practical atheism” was targeted more narrowly against “superstition” - (...) as opposed to deism or religion of a more “philosophical” kind. (shrink)

What was René Girard’s attitude towards philosophy? What philosophers influenced him? What stance did he take in the philosophical debates of his time? What are the philosophical questions raised by René Girard’s anthropology? In this interview, Paul Dumouchel sheds light on these issues.