Results for 'Justin Steinberg'

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  1. Spinoza.Justin Steinberg & Valtteri Viljanen - 2020 - Cambridge: Polity. Edited by Valtteri Viljanen.
    Benedict de Spinoza is one of the most controversial and enigmatic thinkers in the history of philosophy. His greatest work, Ethics (1677), developed a comprehensive philosophical system and argued that God and Nature are identical. His scandalous Theological-Political Treatise (1670) provoked outrage during his lifetime due to its biblical criticism, anticlericalism, and defense of the freedom to philosophize. Together, these works earned Spinoza a reputation as a singularly radical thinker. -/- In this book, Steinberg and Viljanen offer a concise (...)
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  2. Affect, Desire, and Judgement in Spinoza's Account of Motivation.Justin Steinberg - 2016 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (1):67-87.
    Two priority problems frustrate our understanding of Spinoza on desire [cupiditas]. The first problem concerns the relationship between desire and the other two primary affects, joy [laetitia] and sadness [tristitia]. Desire seems to be the oddball of this troika, not only because, contrary to the very definition of an affect, desires do not themselves consist in changes in one's power of acting, but also because desire seems at once more and less basic than joy and sadness. The second problem concerns (...)
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  3. Two Puzzles Concerning Spinoza's Conception of Belief.Justin Steinberg - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (1):261-282.
    Spinoza's account of belief entails that if A has two ideas, p and q, with incompatible content, A believes that p if the idea of p is stronger than the idea of q. This seems to leave little space for dominant non-beliefs, or cases in which there is discord between one's beliefs and one's affective-behavioral responses. And yet Spinoza does allow for two classes of dominant non-beliefs: efficacious fictions [fictiones] and ideas that conduce to akrasia. I show how Spinoza can (...)
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  4. An Epistemic Case for Empathy.Justin Steinberg - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (1):47-71.
    Much recent work on empathy assumes that one cannot give non-question-begging reasons for empathizing with others. In this article I argue that there are epistemic reasons for cultivating empathy. After sketching a brief general account of empathy, I proceed to argue that empathic information is user-friendly, fostering the achievement of widely held cognitive goals. It can also contribute to social knowledge and the satisfaction of democratic ideals. The upshot of my analysis is that there are strong, but defeasible, epistemic reasons (...)
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  5. (1 other version)Spinoza on Being Sui Iuris and the Republican Conception of Liberty.Justin D. Steinberg - 2008 - History of European Ideas 34 (3):239-249.
    Spinoza's use of the phrase “sui iuris” in the Tractatus Politicus gives rise to the following paradox. On the one hand, one is said to be sui iuris to the extent that one is rational; and to the extent that one is rational, one will steadfastly obey the laws of the state. However, Spinoza also states that to the extent that one adheres to the laws of the state, one is not sui iuris, but rather stands under the power [sub (...)
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  6. Imitation, Representation, and Humanity in Spinoza’s Ethics.Justin Steinberg - 2013 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 51 (3):383-407.
    In IVP50S, Spinoza claims that “one who is moved to aid others neither by reason nor by pity is rightly called inhuman. For (by IIIP27) he seems to be unlike a man” (IVP50S). At first blush, the claim seems implausible, as it relies on the dubious assumption that beings will necessarily imitate the affects of conspecifics. In the first two sections of this paper, I explain why Spinoza accepts this thesis and show how this claim can be made compatible with (...)
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  7. Benedict Spinoza: Epistemic Democrat.Justin Steinberg - 2010 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 27 (2):145-164.
    In this paper, I maintain—contrary to those commentators who regard him as a principled republican—that at the core of Spinoza’s political theory is an instrumental, rather than an intrinsic, defense of democratic procedures. Specifically, Spinoza embraces democratic decision procedures primarily because they tend to result in better decisions, defined relative to a procedure-independent standard of correctness or goodness. In contemporary terms, Spinoza embraces an epistemic defense of democracy. I examine Spinoza’s defense of collective governance, showing not only how it differs (...)
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  8. (1 other version)Spinoza’s Curious Defense of Toleration.Justin Steinberg - 2010 - In Yitzhak Melamed Michael Rosenthal (ed.), Spinoza’s ‘Theological-Political Treatise’: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 210 – 230..
    In this essay I consider what grounds Spinoza’s defense of the freedom to philosophize, considering why Spinoza doesn’t think that we should attempt to snuff out irrationality and dissolution with the law’s iron fist. In the first section I show that Spinoza eschews skeptical, pluralistic, and rights-based arguments for toleration. I then delineate the prudential, anticlerical roots of Spinoza’s defense, before turning in the final section to consider just how far and when toleration contributes to the guiding norms of governance: (...)
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  9. Spinoza on Civil Liberation.Justin Steinberg - 2008 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (1):pp. 35-58.
    In the final chapter of the Tractactus Theologico-Politicus , Spinoza declares that “the purpose of the state is, in reality, freedom.” While this remark obviously purports to tell us something important about Spinoza’s conception of the civitas , it is not clear exactly what is revealed. Recently, a number of scholars have interpreted this passage in a way that supports the view that Spinoza was a liberal for whom civic norms are rather more modest than the freedom of the Ethics (...)
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  10. (1 other version)Spinoza on Human Purposiveness and Mental Causation.Justin Steinberg - 2011 - Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy 14.
    Despite Spinoza’s reputation as a thoroughgoing critic of teleology, in recent years a number of scholars have argued convincingly that Spinoza does not wish to eliminate teleological explanations altogether. Recent interpretative debates have focused on a more recalcitrant problem: whether Spinoza has the resources to allow for the causal efficacy of representational content. In this paper I present the problem of mental causation for Spinoza and consider two recent attempts to respond to the problem on Spinoza’s behalf. While these interpretations (...)
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  11. Following a Recta Ratio Vivendi: The Practical Utility of Spinoza’s Dictates of Reason.Justin Steinberg - 2014 - In Matthew J. Kisner & Andrew Youpa (eds.), Essays on Spinoza's Ethical Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 178 – 196.
    In recent years, a number of commentators have expressed dissatisfaction with Spinoza’s account of practical reason. In this paper, I defend his account against the most prominent objections, showing that the dictates of reason play an important role in guiding thought and action. However, against the standard interpretation, I propose that we view these rules not as exceptionless, instrumental prescriptions—hypothetical imperatives with necessary antecedents, as Curley memorable put it—but rather as adaptable guideposts that aid us in the complex, dynamic process (...)
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  12. Spinoza and Political Absolutism.Justin Steinberg - 2017 - In Yitzhak Y. Melamed & Hasana Sharp (eds.), Spinoza's Political Treatise: A Critical Guide. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 175 – 189.
    Spinoza’s treatment of absolute sovereignty raises a number of interpretative questions. He seems to embrace a form of absolutism that is incompatible with his defense of mixed government and constitutional limits on sovereign power. And he seems to use the concept of “absolute sovereignty” in inconsistent ways. I offer an interpretation of Spinoza’s conception of absolutism that aims to resolve these problems. I argue that Spinoza is able to show that, when tied to a proper understanding of authority, absolute sovereignty (...)
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  13. Spinoza’s Dynamic Theory of Mind in the 21st Century.Justin Steinberg - 2022 - Journal of Spinoza Studies 1 (1):111-120.
    In this paper I maintain that Spinoza systematizes independently credible accounts of belief-formation, affect, and desire into an intriguing general theory of how the mind works. His account also explains disparate downstream psychological phenomena, including: (1) emotional responses to fiction; (2) belief perseverance; (3) the reduction of cognitive dissonance; (4) epistemic conservativism that opens us up to confirmation bias, identity protection, and intolerance. Given the promise of Spinoza’s program, I conclude with a plea for further philosophical engagement.
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  14. 'Stop Being So Judgmental!’: A Spinozist Model of Personal Tolerance.Justin Steinberg - 2020 - In Mitja Sardoč (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Toleration. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 1077 - 1093.
    This chapter considers the challenges to, and the resources for, cultivating a personal capacity for tolerance, given a Spinozist account of belief-formation. After articulating two main components of personal tolerance, I examine the features of Spinoza’s theory of cognition that make the cultivation of tolerance so difficult. This is followed by an analysis of Spinoza’s account of overcoming intolerant tendencies. Ultimately, I argue that the capacity of individuals to be tolerant depends crucially on the establishment of conditions of trust, conditions (...)
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  15. Spinoza on Civil Agreement and Bodies Politic.Justin Steinberg - 2019 - In Aurelia Armstrong, Keith Green & Andrea Sangiacomo (eds.), Spinoza and Relational Autonomy: Being with Others. Edinburgh: Eup. pp. 132 – 148.
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  16. Humility: A History.Justin Steinberg (ed.) - forthcoming - Oxford University Press.
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  17. Response to Critics.Sandra Leonie Field - 2021 - European Hobbes Society Online Colloquium.
    The European Hobbes Society Online Colloquium featured my book, Potentia: Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics, with critical commentaries from Alissa MacMillan, Chris Holman, and Justin Steinberg. This is my response to their commentaries.
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  18. Accuracy and epistemic conservatism.Florian Steinberger - 2018 - Analysis 79 (4):658-669.
    Epistemic utility theory is generally coupled with veritism. Veritism is the view that truth is the sole fundamental epistemic value. Veritism, when paired with EUT, entails a methodological commitment: norms of epistemic rationality are justified only if they can be derived from considerations of accuracy alone. According to EUT, then, believing truly has epistemic value, while believing falsely has epistemic disvalue. This raises the question as to how the rational believer should balance the prospect of true belief against the risk (...)
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  19. Priority monism and part/whole dependence.Alex Steinberg - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (8):2025-2031.
    Priority monism is the view that the cosmos is the only independent concrete object. The paper argues that, pace its proponents, Priority monism is in conflict with the dependence of any whole on any of its parts: if the cosmos does not depend on its parts, neither does any smaller composite.
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  20. Meddlesome Blame and Negotiating Standing.Justin Snedegar - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Blaming others for things that are not our business can attract charges of meddling and dismissals of blame. It is well known that such charges are often contentious because the content and applicability of anti-meddling norms can be difficult to nail down. This paper argues that another important source of contention is that it is often not settled in advance whether some wrongdoing is or is not the business of a would-be blamer. Thinking about the grounds of anti-meddling norms—privacy, intimacy, (...)
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  21. Nietzsche as Panpsychist.Justin Remhof - 2024 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 1 (forthcoming):1-23.
    This paper argues that Nietzsche is a panpsychist. Panpsychism holds that mental features are ubiquitous and fundamental in reality. I first argue that Nietzsche’s rejection of Cartesian dualism leads him to substance monism. To better understand his monism, I examine Nietzsche’s rejection of Newtonian atomism. Nietzsche holds that bundles of forces, or will to power, are more fundamental than hard, extended atoms. So, will to power is fundamental. I then investigate Nietzsche’s remarks on organic and inorganic nature to show that (...)
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  22. Symposium on Justin Remhof’s Nietzsche’s Constructivism: a Metaphysics of Material Objects.Justin Remhof - 2020 - Philosophia 49 (2):571-583.
    Symposium on Nietzsche's Constructivism (Routledge, 2018), replies to Adler, Cabrera, Doyle, Migotti, Sinhababu, Pedersen.
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  23. A Diversified Approach to Fission Puzzles.Justin Mooney - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    I introduce a new approach to fission puzzles called the Diversified Approach that proceeds by distinguishing different kinds of fission and assimilating each kind to a different ordinary phenomenon, such as breaking apart, replication, or part loss. To illustrate this approach, I apply it to the case of amoebic fission. The upshot is a novel account of amoebic fission according to which the dividing amoeba ceases to exist because it breaks apart. After developing this solution and highlighting some of its (...)
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  24. Zhu Xi on Self-Focused vs. Other-Focused Empathy.Justin Tiwald - 2020 - In Kai-Chiu Ng & Yong Huang (eds.), Dao Companion to Zhu Xi’s Philosophy. Springer. pp. 963-980.
    This chapter is about issues in ethics and moral psychology that have been little explored by contemporary philosophers, ones that concern the advantages and disadvantages of two different kinds of empathy. Roughly, first type is what is sometimes called “other-focused” empathy, in which one reconstructs the thoughts and feelings that someone else has or would have. The second type, “self-focused” empathy, is the sort of emotional attitude someone adopts when she imagines how she would think or feel were she in (...)
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  25.  47
    The Justice of Decommodification.Justin P. Holt - 2022 - Critique 50 (1):205-220.
    Decommodification is an important support for the development of our excellences and the pursuit of our freedom of conscience. In order to show this, the paper will be structured as follows. First, it will be argued that a decommodified social threshold of goods and services is a necessary part of a free-standing politically liberal conception of justice. The authors to be reviewed in this section are R.H. Tawney and John Rawls. The second section will discuss a compendium of possible decommodified (...)
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  26. Frankfurt cases: the fine-grained response revisited.Justin A. Capes & Philip Swenson - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (4):967-981.
    Frankfurt cases are supposed to provide us with counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities. Among the most well known responses to these cases is what John Fischer has dubbed the flicker of freedom strategy. Here we revisit a version of this strategy, which we refer to as the fine-grained response. Although a number of philosophers, including some who are otherwise unsympathetic to Frankfurt’s argument, have dismissed the fine grained response, we believe there is a good deal to be said (...)
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  27.  52
    Marx's understanding of nature, social forms, and practical standards.Justin P. Holt - 2007 - Dissertation, The New School
    This dissertation explains Karl Marx’s understanding of nature, human action, and a materialist standard of practical action. Marx’s understands natural processes as not identical with human action. There are two types of human action for Marx: material action and social action. Material action can use natural processes. Social action does not directly use natural processes, but social action can promote how material action uses natural processes. The difference between natural processes, material action, and social action is important for Marx since (...)
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  28.  53
    中國哲學會學術專刊第六輯--「危機時代的哲學--『後』疫情時期的反思」.Justin Nnaemeka Onyeukaziri (ed.) - 2024
    此研究的目的是論述在悲劇發生時哲學具作為慰藉手段的作用。西方哲學的羅馬希臘化時期,跨越了不同的哲學流派,蓬勃發展了一種被稱為“慰藉”(consolatione)的特殊哲學著作的文體。因此,哲學家和哲學 思想家撰寫了幾部名為“De consolatione”(On Consolation)的哲學著作,一直持續到中世紀,如波埃修斯(Boethius)的通俗著作“De Consolatione Philosophia”(On the Consolation of Philosophy)。在羅馬希臘化時期哲學家現存的著作中,塞內卡的著作可以說是最多且篇幅相當長,是寫給他所認識遭受悲劇的人的。因此,本文試圖在塞內卡的著作中探索這種特殊的哲學體裁—論慰藉。本文要探究 他如何使用這種哲學體裁來幫助遭受悲劇的人,特別是遭受親人的死亡,而獲得心靈的平靜與安寧。其目的是利用塞內卡關於“De Consolatione”的著作來反思世界各地許多遭受Covid-19 疫情帶來悲劇的人。即是證明和探索哲學思考在悲劇時的作用。這表明,哲學或哲學家不是悲劇時的無助旁觀者,而是與人類境遇具有生存相關性的活動。更具體一點,此論文的目的就是回答下面這個問題:哲學可以對超過四百 萬因爲疫情而直接死亡的人(不包括那些間接死亡的人)其遭受苦死的家人和朋友說些什麼?今天哲學家如何為因 Covid-19 疫情而遭受悲劇的人們帶來慰藉?此論文認為,哲學家塞內卡(Seneca)可以教今天的哲學家如何運用哲學作為處理當今悲劇的手段。因此,本文架構如下: 1. 塞內卡哲學的簡要闡述。 2. 論述慰藉之哲學文體。 3. 塞內卡《慰藉》著作的哲學論述。 4. 塞內卡思想對 Covid-19 疫情的反思。 5. 結論。.
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  29. Dismissing Blame.Justin Snedegar - 2024 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26 (3).
    When someone blames you, you might accept the blame or you might reject it, challenging the blamer’s interpretation of the facts or providing a justification or excuse. Either way, there are opportunities for edifying moral discussion and moral repair. But another common, and less constructive, response is to simply dismiss the blame, refusing to engage with the blamer. Even if you agree that you are blameworthy, you may refuse to engage with the blame—and, specifically, with blame coming from this particular (...)
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  30. Physicalism Requires Functionalism: A New Formulation and Defense of the Via Negativa.Justin Tiehen - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (1):3-24.
    How should ‘the physical’ be defined for the purpose of formulating physicalism? In this paper I defend a version of the via negativa according to which a property is physical just in case it is neither fundamentally mental nor possibly realized by a fundamentally mental property. The guiding idea is that physicalism requires functionalism, and thus that being a type identity theorist requires being a realizer-functionalist. In §1 I motivate my approach partly by arguing against Jessica Wilson's no fundamental mentality (...)
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  31. Modal Disagreements.Justin Khoo - 2015 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (5):511-534.
    It is often assumed that when one party felicitously rejects an assertion made by an- other party, the first party thinks that the proposition asserted by the second is false. This assumption underlies various disagreement arguments used to challenge contex- tualism about some class of expressions. As such, many contextualists have resisted these arguments on the grounds that the disagreements in question may not be over the proposition literally asserted. The result appears to be a dialectical stalemate, with no independent (...)
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  32. Do transposable elements have functions of their very own?Justin Garson - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (3):1-18.
    Philosophers who study the problem of biological function often begin their deliberations by reflecting on the functions of parts of animals, or the behavior of animals. Applying theories of biological function to unconventional or borderline cases can help us to better evaluate and refine those theories. This is the case when we consider whether parts of transposable elements —bits of “selfish” DNA that move about within a host genome—have functions of their own, that is, whether the parts of TEs have (...)
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  33. Explaining causal closure.Justin Tiehen - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (9):2405-2425.
    The physical realm is causally closed, according to physicalists like me. But why is it causally closed, what metaphysically explains causal closure? I argue that reductive physicalists are committed to one explanation of causal closure to the exclusion of any independent explanation, and that as a result, they must give up on using a causal argument to attack mind–body dualism. Reductive physicalists should view dualism in much the way that we view the hypothesis that unicorns exist, or that the Kansas (...)
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  34. The functional sense of mechanism.Justin Garson - 2013 - Philos Sci 80 (3):317-333.
    This article presents a distinct sense of ‘mechanism’, which I call the functional sense of mechanism. According to this sense, mechanisms serve functions, and this fact places substantive restrictions on the kinds of system activities ‘for which’ there can be a mechanism. On this view, there are no mechanisms for pathology; pathologies result from disrupting mechanisms for functions. Second, on this sense, natural selection is probably not a mechanism for evolution because it does not serve a function. After distinguishing this (...)
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  35. Playing Fair and Following the Rules.Justin Tosi - 2017 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 14 (2):134-141.
    In his paper “Fairness, Political Obligation, and the Justificatory Gap” (published in the Journal of Moral Philosophy), Jiafeng Zhu argues that the principle of fair play cannot require submission to the rules of a cooperative scheme, and that when such submission is required, the requirement is grounded in consent. I propose a better argument for the claim that fair play requires submission to the rules than the one Zhu considers. I also argue that Zhu’s attribution of consent to people commonly (...)
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  36. Competing Reasons.Justin Snedegar - 2021 - In Jessica Brown & Mona Simion (eds.), Reasons, Justification, and Defeat. Oxford Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter investigates different ways that pro tanto reasons bearing on our options can compete with one another in order to determine the overall normative status of those options. It argues for two key claims: (i) any theory of this competition must include a distinct role for reasons against, in addition to reasons for, and (ii) any theory must allow for comparative verdicts about how strongly supported the options are by the reasons, rather than simply which options are permissible or (...)
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  37. Moral Grandstanding.Justin Tosi & Brandon Warmke - 2016 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 44 (3):197-217.
    Moral grandstanding is a pervasive feature of public discourse. Many of us can likely recognize that we have engaged in grandstanding at one time or another. While there is nothing new about the phenomenon of grandstanding, we think that it has not received the philosophical attention it deserves. In this essay, we provide an account of moral grandstanding as the use of public discourse for moral self-promotion. We then show that our account, with support from some standard theses of social (...)
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  38. Two types of psychological hedonism.Justin Garson - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 56:7-14.
    I develop a distinction between two types of psychological hedonism. Inferential hedonism (or “I-hedonism”) holds that each person only has ultimate desires regarding his or her own hedonic states (pleasure and pain). Reinforcement hedonism (or “R–hedonism”) holds that each person's ultimate desires, whatever their contents are, are differentially reinforced in that person’s cognitive system only by virtue of their association with hedonic states. I’ll argue that accepting R-hedonism and rejecting I-hedonism provides a conciliatory position on the traditional altruism debate, and (...)
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  39. Self-Colocation: A Colocation Puzzle for Endurantists.Justin Mooney - 2019 - Synthese (6):5297-5309.
    The recent literature on the nature of persistence features a handful of imaginative cases in which an object seems to colocate with itself. So far, discussion of these cases has focused primarily on how they defy the standard endurantist approaches to the problem of temporary intrinsics. But in this article, I set that issue aside and argue that cases of apparent self-colocation also pose another problem for the endurantist. While the perdurantist seems to have a fairly straightforward account of self-colocation, (...)
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  40. Epistemic Limitations and Precise Estimates in Analog Magnitude Representation.Justin Halberda - 2016 - In A. Baron & D. Barner (eds.), Core Knowledge and Conceptual Change. Oxford University Press. pp. 167-186.
    This chapter presents a re-understanding of the contents of our analog magnitude representations (e.g., approximate duration, distance, number). The approximate number system (ANS) is considered, which supports numerical representations that are widely described as fuzzy, noisy, and limited in their representational power. The contention is made that these characterizations are largely based on misunderstandings—that what has been called “noise” and “fuzziness” is actually an important epistemic signal of confidence in one’s estimate of the value. Rather than the ANS having noisy (...)
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  41. Contrastive Reasons and Promotion.Justin Snedegar - 2014 - Ethics 125 (1):39-63,.
    A promising but underexplored view about normative reasons is contrastivism, which holds that considerations are fundamentally reasons for things only relative to sets of alternatives. Contrastivism gains an advantage over non-contrastive theories by holding that reasons relative to different sets of alternatives can be independent of one another. But this feature also raises a serious problem: we need some way of constraining this independence. I develop a version of contrastivism that provides the needed constraints, and that is independently motivated by (...)
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  42. David Lewis in the lab: experimental results on the emergence of meaning.Justin Bruner, Cailin O’Connor, Hannah Rubin & Simon M. Huttegger - 2018 - Synthese 195 (2):603-621.
    In this paper we use an experimental approach to investigate how linguistic conventions can emerge in a society without explicit agreement. As a starting point we consider the signaling game introduced by Lewis. We find that in experimental settings, small groups can quickly develop conventions of signal meaning in these games. We also investigate versions of the game where the theoretical literature indicates that meaning will be less likely to arise—when there are more than two states for actors to transfer (...)
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  43. Moral Disagreement and Moral Semantics.Justin Khoo & Joshua Knobe - 2016 - Noûs:109-143.
    When speakers utter conflicting moral sentences, it seems clear that they disagree. It has often been suggested that the fact that the speakers disagree gives us evidence for a claim about the semantics of the sentences they are uttering. Specifically, it has been suggested that the existence of the disagreement gives us reason to infer that there must be an incompatibility between the contents of these sentences. This inference then plays a key role in a now-standard argument against certain theories (...)
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  44. Function, selection, and construction in the brain.Justin Garson - 2012 - Synthese 189 (3):451-481.
    A common misunderstanding of the selected effects theory of function is that natural selection operating over an evolutionary time scale is the only functionbestowing process in the natural world. This construal of the selected effects theory conflicts with the existence and ubiquity of neurobiological functions that are evolutionary novel, such as structures underlying reading ability. This conflict has suggested to some that, while the selected effects theory may be relevant to some areas of evolutionary biology, its relevance to neuroscience is (...)
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  45. Reason claims and contrastivism about reasons.Justin Snedegar - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (2):231-242.
    Contrastivism about reasons is the view that ‘reason’ expresses a relation with an argument place for a set of alternatives. This is in opposition to a more traditional theory on which reasons are reasons for things simpliciter. I argue that contrastivism provides a solution to a puzzle involving reason claims that explicitly employ ‘rather than’. Contrastivism solves the puzzle by allowing that some fact might be a reason for an action out of one set of alternatives without being a reason (...)
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  46. Scepticism about the argument from divine hiddenness.Justin P. Mcbrayer & Philip Swenson - 2012 - Religious Studies 48 (2):129 - 150.
    Some philosophers have argued that the paucity of evidence for theism — along with basic assumptions about God's nature — is ipso facto evidence for atheism. The resulting argument has come to be known as the argument from divine hiddenness. Theists have challenged both the major and minor premises of the argument by offering defences. However, all of the major, contemporary defences are failures. What unites these failures is instructive: each is implausible given other commitments shared by everyone in the (...)
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  47. Explaining Loss of Standing to Blame.Justin Snedegar - 2023 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 21 (3-4):404-432.
    Both in everyday life and in moral philosophy, many think that our own past wrongdoing can undermine our standing to indignantly blame others for similar wrongdoing. In recent literature on the ethics of blame, we find two different kinds of explanation for this. Relative moral status accounts hold that to have standing to blame, you must be better than the person you are blaming, in terms of compliance with the norm. Fault-based accounts hold that those who blame others for things (...)
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  48. Power, Bargaining, and Collaboration.Justin Bruner & Cailin O'Connor - 2017 - In Thomas Boyer-Kassem, Conor Mayo-Wilson & Michael Weisberg (eds.), Scientific Collaboration and Collective Knowledge. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    Collaboration is increasingly popular across academia. Collaborative work raises certain ethical questions, however. How will the fruits of collaboration be divided? How will the work for the collaborative project be split? In this paper, we consider the following question in particular. Are there ways in which these divisions systematically disadvantage certain groups? -/- We use evolutionary game theoretic models to address this question. First, we discuss results from O'Connor and Bruner (unpublished). In this paper, we show that underrepresented groups in (...)
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  49. Should CSR Give Atheists Epistemic Assurance? On Beer-Goggles, BFFs, and Skepticism Regarding Religious Beliefs.Justin L. Barrett & Ian M. Church - 2013 - The Monist 96 (3):311-324.
    Recent work in cognitive science of religion (CSR) is beginning to converge on a very interesting thesis—that, given the ordinary features of human minds operating in typical human environments, we are naturally disposed to believe in the existence of gods, among other religious ideas (e.g., seeAtran [2002], Barrett [2004; 2012], Bering [2011], Boyer [2001], Guthrie [1993], McCauley [2011], Pyysiäinen [2004; 2009]). In this paper, we explore whether such a discovery ultimately helps or hurts the atheist position—whether, for example, it lends (...)
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  50. Defending Nietzsche's Constructivism about Objects.Justin Remhof - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 25 (2):1132-1158.
    Nietzsche appears to adopt a radical Kantian view of objects called constructivism, which holds that the existence of all objects depends essentially on our practices. This essay provides a new reconstruction of Nietzsche's argument for constructivism and responds to five pressing objections to reading Nietzsche as a constructivist that have not been addressed by commentators defending constructivist interpretations of Nietzsche.
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