Switch to: References

Citations of:

Ifs and cans

In Austin J. L., Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 42. pp. 109-132 (1956)

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. Agents’ Abilities.Romy Jaster - 2020 - Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
    In the book, I provide an account of what it is for an agent to have an ability. According to the Success View, abilities are all about success across possible situations. In developing and applying the view, the book elucidates the relation between abilities on the one hand and possibility, counterfactuals, and dispositions on the other; it sheds light on the distinction between general and specific abilities; it offers an understanding of degrees of abilities; it explains which role intentions and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  • Masked Abilities and Compatibilism.M. Fara - 2008 - Mind 117 (468):843-865.
    An object's disposition to A in circumstances C is masked if circumstances C obtain without the object Aing. This paper explores an analogous sense in which abilities can be masked, and it uses the results of this exploration to motivate an analysis of agents' abilities in terms of dispositions. This analysis is then shown to provide the resources to defend a version of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities against Frankfurt-style counterexamples. Although this principle is often taken to be congenial to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   199 citations  
  • Dispositions without Conditionals.Barbara Vetter - 2014 - Mind 123 (489):129-156.
    Dispositions are modal properties. The standard conception of dispositions holds that each disposition is individuated by its stimulus condition(s) and its manifestation(s), and that their modality is best captured by some conditional construction that relates stimulus to manifestation as antecedent to consequent. I propose an alternative conception of dispositions: each disposition is individuated by its manifestation alone, and its modality is closest to that of possibility — a fragile vase, for instance, is one that can break easily. The view is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   79 citations  
  • Are abilities dispositions?Barbara Vetter - 2019 - Synthese 196 (196):201-220.
    Abilities are in many ways central to what being an agent means, and they are appealed to in philosophical accounts of a great many different phenomena. It is often assumed that abilities are some kind of dispositional property, but it is rarely made explicit exactly which dispositional properties are our abilities. Two recent debates provide two different answers to that question: the new dispositionalism in the debate about free will, and virtue reliabilism in epistemology. This paper argues that both answers (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  • Agentive Modals.Matthew Mandelkern, Ginger Schultheis & David Boylan - 2017 - Philosophical Review 126 (3):301-343.
    This essay proposes a new theory of agentive modals: ability modals and their duals, compulsion modals. After criticizing existing approaches—the existential quantificational analysis, the universal quantificational analysis, and the conditional analysis—it presents a new account that builds on both the existential and conditional analyses. On this account, the act conditional analysis, a sentence like ‘John can swim across the river’ says that there is some practically available action that is such that if John tries to do it, he swims across (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   45 citations  
  • Dispositions, Abilities to Act, and Free Will: The New Dispositionalism.Randolph Clarke - 2009 - Mind 118 (470):323-351.
    This paper examines recent attempts to revive a classic compatibilist position on free will, according to which having an ability to perform a certain action is having a certain disposition. Since having unmanifested dispositions is compatible with determinism, having unexercised abilities to act, it is held, is likewise compatible. Here it is argued that although there is a kind of capacity to act possession of which is a matter of having a disposition, the new dispositionalism leaves unresolved the main points (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   101 citations  
  • The Agentive Modalities.John Maier - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (3):113-134.
    A number of philosophical projects require a proper understanding of the modal aspects of agency, or of what I call ‘the agentive modalities.’ I propose a general account of the agentive modalities, one which takes as its primitive the decision-theoretic notion of an option. I relate this account to the standard semantics for ‘can’ and to the viability of some positions in the free will debates.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   78 citations  
  • Agency and Two‐Way Powers.Maria Alvarez - 2013 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 113 (1pt1):101-121.
    In this paper I propose a way of characterizing human agency in terms of the concept of a two‐way power. I outline this conception of agency, defend it against some objections, and briefly indicate how it relates to free agency and to moral praise‐ and blameworthiness.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   46 citations  
  • What is it for a Machine Learning Model to Have a Capability?Jacqueline Harding & Nathaniel Sharadin - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    What can contemporary machine learning (ML) models do? Given the proliferation of ML models in society, answering this question matters to a variety of stakeholders, both public and private. The evaluation of models' capabilities is rapidly emerging as a key subfield of modern ML, buoyed by regulatory attention and government grants. Despite this, the notion of an ML model possessing a capability has not been interrogated: what are we saying when we say that a model is able to do something? (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Practical Knowledge and Luminosity.Juan S. Piñeros Glasscock - 2019 - Mind 129 (516):1237-1267.
    Many philosophers hold that if an agent acts intentionally, she must know what she is doing. Although the scholarly consensus for many years was to reject the thesis in light of presumed counterexamples by Donald Davidson, several scholars have recently argued that attention to aspectual distinctions and the practical nature of this knowledge shows that these counterexamples fail. In this paper I defend a new objection against the thesis, one modelled after Timothy Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. Since this argument relies on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • Does Success Entail Ability?David Boylan - 2021 - Noûs 56 (3):570-601.
    This paper is about the principle that success entails ability, which I call Success. I argue the status of Success is highly puzzling: when we focus on past instances of actually successful action, Success is very compelling; but it is in tension with the idea that true ability claims require an action be in the agent's control. I make the above tension precise by considering the logic of ability. I argue Success is appealing because it is classically equivalent to two (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Dispositional Abilities.Ann Whittle - 2010 - Philosophers' Imprint 10.
    Dispositional compatibilists argue that a proper understanding of our abilities vindicates both compatibilism and the principle of Alternate Possibilities (the claim that the ability to do otherwise is required for freedom and moral responsibility). In this paper, I argue that this is mistaken. Both analyses of dispositions and abilities should distinguish between local and global dispositions or abilities. Once this distinction is in place, we see that neither thesis is established by an analysis of abilities.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   73 citations  
  • The phenomenology of free will.Eddy Nahmias, Stephen G. Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer & Jason Turner - 2004 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (7-8):162-179.
    Philosophers often suggest that their theories of free will are supported by our phenomenology. Just as their theories conflict, their descriptions of the phenomenology of free will often conflict as well. We suggest that this should motivate an effort to study the phenomenology of free will in a more systematic way that goes beyond merely the introspective reports of the philosophers themselves. After presenting three disputes about the phenomenology of free will, we survey the (limited) psychological research on the experiences (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   60 citations  
  • Updating as Communication.Sarah Moss - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (2):225-248.
    Traditional procedures for rational updating fail when it comes to self-locating opinions, such as your credences about where you are and what time it is. This paper develops an updating procedure for rational agents with self-locating beliefs. In short, I argue that rational updating can be factored into two steps. The first step uses information you recall from your previous self to form a hypothetical credence distribution, and the second step changes this hypothetical distribution to reflect information you have genuinely (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   60 citations  
  • The Defeasibility of Knowledge-How.J. Adam Carter & Jesús Navarro - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (3):662-685.
    Reductive intellectualists (e.g., Stanley & Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011a; 2011b; Brogaard 2008; 2009; 2011) hold that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that. If this thesis is correct, then we should expect the defeasibility conditions for knowledge-how and knowledge-that to be uniform—viz., that the mechanisms of epistemic defeat which undermine propositional knowledge will be equally capable of imperilling knowledge-how. The goal of this paper is twofold: first, against intellectualism, we will show that knowledge-how is in fact resilient to being undermined by (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • Unable to Do the Impossible.Anthony Nguyen - 2020 - Mind 129 (514):585-602.
    Jack Spencer has recently argued for the striking thesis that, possibly, an agent is able to do the impossible—that is, perform an action that is metaphysically impossible for that person to perform. Spencer bases his argument on (Simple G), a case in which it is impossible for an agent G to perform some action but, according to Spencer, G is still intuitively able to perform that action. I reply that we would have to give up at least four action-theoretical principles (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • "Actual" does not imply "feasible".Nicholas Southwood & David Wiens - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (11):3037-3060.
    The familiar complaint that some ambitious proposal is infeasible naturally invites the following response: Once upon a time, the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of women seemed infeasible, yet these things were actually achieved. Presumably, then, many of those things that seem infeasible in our own time may well be achieved too and, thus, turn out to have been perfectly feasible after all. The Appeal to History, as we call it, is a bad argument. It is not true that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  • Intentional action first.Yair Levy - 2013 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (4):705-718.
    The paper motivates a novel research programme in the philosophy of action parallel to the ‘Knowledge First’ programme in epistemology. It is argued that much of the grounds for abandoning the quest for a reductive analysis of knowledge in favour of the Knowledge First alternative is mirrored in the case of intentional action, inviting the hypothesis that intentional action is also, like knowledge, metaphysically basic. The paper goes on to demonstrate the sort of explanatory contribution that intentional action can make (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  • Abilities.John Maier - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    In the accounts we give of one another, claims about our abilities appear to be indispensable. Some abilities are so widespread that many who have them take them for granted, such as the ability to walk, or to write one's name, or to tell a hawk from a handsaw. Others are comparatively rare and notable, such as the ability to hit a Major League fastball, or to compose a symphony, or to tell an elm from a beech. In either case, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   60 citations  
  • The complex tapestry of free will: striving will, indeterminism and volitional streams.Robert Kane - 2019 - Synthese 196 (1):145-160.
    The aim of this paper is to respond to recent discussion of, and objections to, the libertarian view of free will I have developed in many works over the past four decades. The issues discussed all have a bearing on the central question of how one might make sense of a traditional free will requiring indeterminism in the light of modern science. This task involves, among other things, avoiding all traditional libertarian appeals to unusual forms of agency or causation that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  • What does causality have to do with necessity?Helen Steward - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-25.
    In her ‘Causality and Determination’, Anscombe argues for the strong thesis that despite centuries of philosophical assumption to the contrary, the supposition that causality and necessity have something essential to do with one another is baseless. In this paper, I assess Anscombe’s arguments and endorse her conclusion. I then attempt to argue that her arguments remain highly relevant today, despite the fact that most popular general views of causation today are firmly probabilistic in orientation and thus show no trace of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Dispositional accounts of abilities.Barbara Vetter & Romy Jaster - 2017 - Philosophy Compass 12 (8):e12432.
    This paper explores the prospects for dispositional accounts of abilities. According to so-called new dispositionalists, an agent has the ability to Φ iff they have a disposition to Φ when trying to Φ. We show that the new dispositionalism is beset by some problems that also beset its predecessor, the conditional analysis of abilities, and bring up some further problems. We then turn to a different approach, which links abilities not to motivational states but to the notion of success, and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  • Basic Action and Practical Knowledge.Will Small - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    It is a commonplace in philosophy of action that there is and must be teleologically basic action: something done on an occasion without doing it by means of doing anything else. It is widely believed that basic actions are exercises of skill. As the source of the need for basic action is the structure of practical reasoning, this yields a conception of skill and practical reasoning as complementary but mutually exclusive. On this view, practical reasoning and complex intentional action depend (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Responsibility for Testimonial Injustice.Adam Piovarchy - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (2):597–615.
    In this paper, I examine whether agents who commit testimonial injustice are morally responsible for their wrongdoing, given that they are ignorant of their wrongdoing. Fricker (2007) argues that agents whose social setting lacks the concepts or reasons necessary for them to correct for testimonial injustice are excused. I argue that agents whose social settings have these concepts or reasons available are also typically excused, because they lack the capacity to recognise those concepts or reasons. Attempts to trace this lack (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Ability, modality, and genericity.John Maier - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (2):411-428.
    Accounts of ability in the philosophical literature have tended to be modal ones: claims about an agent’s abilities are understood in terms of what she does in certain non-actual scenarios. In contrast, a prominent account of ability ascriptions in the recent semantics literature appeals to genericity: claims about an agent’s abilities are understood in terms of what she generally manages to do. The latter account resolves some long-standing problems for modal accounts, but encounters problems of its own. I propose a (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  • Conditional Intentions.Luca Ferrero - 2009 - Noûs 43 (4):700 - 741.
    In this paper, I will discuss the various ways in which intentions can be said to be conditional, with particular attention to the internal conditions on the intentions’ content. I will first consider what it takes to carry out a conditional intention. I will then discuss how the distinctive norms of intention apply to conditional intentions and whether conditional intentions are a weaker sort of commitments than the unconditional ones. This discussion will lead to the idea of what I call (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   37 citations  
  • Situationism, capacities and culpability.Adam Piovarchy - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (6):1997-2027.
    The situationist experiments demonstrate that most people's behaviour is influenced by environmental factors much more than we expect, and that ordinary people can be led to behave very immorally. A number of philosophers have investigated whether these experiments demonstrate that subjects' responsibility-relevant capacities are impeded. This paper considers how, in practice, we can assess when agents have a reduced capacity to avoid wrongdoing. It critiques some previously offered strategies including appeals to the reasonable person standard, appeals to counterfactuals and understandability (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  • Policy Externalism.Daniel Drucker - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (2):261-285.
    I develop and argue for a kind of externalism about certain kinds of non-doxastic attitudes that I call policy externalism. Policy externalism about a given type of attitude is the view that all the reasonable policies for having attitudes of that type will not involve the agent's beliefs that some relevant conditions obtain. My defense primarily involves attitudes like hatred, regret, and admiration, and has two parts: a direct deductive argument and an indirect linguistic argument, an inference to the best (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • Meaning-preserving contraposition of conditionals.Gilberto Gomes - 2019 - Journal of Pragmatics 1 (152):46-60.
    It is argued that contraposition is valid for a class of natural language conditionals, if some modifications are allowed to preserve the meaning of the original conditional. In many cases, implicit temporal indices must be considered, making a change in verb tense necessary. A suitable contrapositive for implicative counterfactual conditionals can also usually be found. In some cases, the addition of certain words is necessary to preserve meaning that is present in the original sentence and would be lost or changed (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Opposing powers.Randolph Clarke - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 149 (2):153 - 160.
    A disposition mask is something that prevents a disposition from manifesting despite the occurrence of that disposition’s characteristic stimulus, and without eliminating that disposition. Several authors have maintained that masks must be things extrinsic to the objects that have the masked dispositions. Here it is argued that this is not so; masks can be intrinsic to the objects whose dispositions they mask. If that is correct, then a recent attempt to distinguish dispositional properties from so-called categorical properties fails.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   39 citations  
  • Rational 'ought' implies 'can'.Ralph Wedgwood - 2013 - Philosophical Issues 23 (1):70-92.
    Every kind of ‘ought’ implies some kind of ‘can’ – but there are many kinds of ‘ought’ and even more kinds of ‘can’. In this essay, I shall focus on a particular kind of ‘ought’ – specifically, on what I shall call the “rational ‘ought’”. On every occasion of use, this kind of ‘ought’ is focused on the situation of a particular agent at a particular time; but this kind of ‘ought’ is concerned, not with how that agent acts at (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • Generalized Update Semantics.Simon Goldstein - 2019 - Mind 128 (511):795-835.
    This paper explores the relationship between dynamic and truth conditional semantics for epistemic modals. It provides a generalization of a standard dynamic update semantics for modals. This new semantics derives a Kripke semantics for modals and a standard dynamic semantics for modals as special cases. The semantics allows for new characterizations of a variety of principles in modal logic, including the inconsistency of ‘p and might not p’. Finally, the semantics provides a construction procedure for transforming any truth conditional semantics (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • On the role of indeterminism in libertarian free will.Robert Kane - 2016 - Philosophical Explorations 19 (1):2-16.
    In a recent paper in this journal, “How should libertarians conceive of the location and role of indeterminism?” Christopher Evan Franklin critically examines my libertarian view of free will and attempts to improve upon it. He says that while Kane's influential [view] offers many important advances in the development of a defensible libertarian theory of free will and moral responsibility … [he made] “two crucial mistakes in formulating libertarianism” – one about the location of indeterminism, the other about its role (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  • The Problem of Enhanced Control.Christopher Evan Franklin - 2011 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (4):687 - 706.
    A crucial question for libertarians about free will and moral responsibility concerns how their accounts secure more control than compatibilism. This problem is particularly exasperating for event-causal libertarianism, as it seems that the only difference between these accounts and compatibilism is that the former require indeterminism. But how can indeterminism, a mere negative condition, enhance control? This worry has led many to conclude that the only viable form of libertarianism is agent-causal libertarianism. In this paper I show that this conclusion (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  • Arguments for incompatibilism.Kadri Vihvelin - 2003/2017 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Determinism is a claim about the laws of nature: very roughly, it is the claim that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the natural laws. Incompatibilism is a philosophical thesis about the relevance of determinism to free will: that the truth of determinism rules out the existence of free will. The incompatibilist believes that if determinism turned out to be true, it would also be true that we don't have, and have never had, free will. The (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   42 citations  
  • Local miracle compatibilism.Helen Beebee - 2003 - Noûs 37 (2):258-277.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   33 citations  
  • A theory of the normative force of pleas.Christopher Evan Franklin - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 163 (2):479-502.
    A familiar feature of our moral responsibility practices are pleas: considerations, such as “That was an accident”, or “I didn’t know what else to do”, that attempt to get agents accused of wrongdoing off the hook. But why do these pleas have the normative force they do in fact have? Why does physical constraint excuse one from responsibility, while forgetfulness or laziness does not? I begin by laying out R. Jay Wallace’s (Responsibility and the moral sentiments, 1994 ) theory of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   30 citations  
  • Control, Attitudes, and Accountability.Douglas W. Portmore - 2013 - In David Shoemaker, Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press UK.
    It seems that we can be directly accountable for our reasons-responsive attitudes—e.g., our beliefs, desires, and intentions. Yet, we rarely, if ever, have volitional control over such attitudes, volitional control being the sort of control that we exert over our intentional actions. This presents a trilemma: (Horn 1) deny that we can be directly accountable for our reasons-responsive attitudes, (Horn 2) deny that φ’s being under our control is necessary for our being directly accountable for φ-ing, or (Horn 3) deny (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Punishing the Awkward, the Stupid, the Weak, and the Selfish: The Culpability of Negligence.Michael S. Moore & Heidi M. Hurd - 2011 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 5 (2):147-198.
    Negligence is a problematic basis for being morally blamed and punished for having caused some harm, because in such cases there is no choice to cause or allow—or risk causing or allowing—such harm to occur. The standard theories as to why inadvertent risk creation can be blameworthy despite the lack of culpable choice are that in such cases there is blame for: (1) an unexercised capacity to have adverted to the risk; (2) a defect in character explaining why one did (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  • A Compatibilist Theory of Alternative Possibilities.Joseph Keim Campbell - 1997 - Philosophical Studies 88 (3):319-330.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   43 citations  
  • How to Think about the Problem of Free Will.Peter Inwagen - 2008 - The Journal of Ethics 12 (3-4):327-341.
    In this essay I present what is, I contend, the free-will problem properly thought through, or at least presented in a form in which it is possible to think about it without being constantly led astray by bad terminology and confused ideas. Bad terminology and confused ideas are not uncommon in current discussions of the problem. The worst such pieces of terminology are “libertarian free will” and “compatibilist free will.” The essay consists partly of a defense of the thesis that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   36 citations  
  • Understanding Omnipotence.Kenneth L. Pearce & Alexander R. Pruss - 2012 - Religious Studies 48 (3):403-414.
    An omnipotent being would be a being whose power was unlimited. The power of human beings is limited in two distinct ways: we are limited with respect to our freedom of will, and we are limited in our ability to execute what we have willed. These two distinct sources of limitation suggest a simple definition of omnipotence: an omnipotent being is one that has both perfect freedom of will and perfect efficacy of will. In this paper we further explicate this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • What 'If'?William B. Starr - 2014 - Philosophers' Imprint 14.
    No existing conditional semantics captures the dual role of 'if' in embedded interrogatives — 'X wonders if p' — and conditionals. This paper presses the importance and extent of this challenge, linking it to cross-linguistic patterns and other phenomena involving conditionals. Among these other phenomena are conditionals with multiple 'if'-clauses in the antecedent — 'if p and if q, then r' — and relevance conditionals — 'if you are hungry, there is food in the cupboard'. Both phenomena are shown to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • Theism and Secular Modality.Noah Gordon - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Southern California
    I examine issues in the philosophy of religion at the intersection of what possibilities there are and what a God, as classically conceived in the theistic philosophical tradition, would be able to do. The discussion is centered around arguing for an incompatibility between theism and two principles about possibility and ability, and exploring what theists should say about these incompatibilities. -/- I argue that theism entails that certain kinds and amounts of evil are impossible. This puts theism in conflict with (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Thrasymachus’ Unerring Skill and the Arguments of Republic 1.Tamer Nawar - 2018 - Phronesis 63 (4):359-391.
    In defending the view that justice is the advantage of the stronger, Thrasymachus puzzlingly claims that rulers never err and that any practitioner of a skill or expertise (τέχνη) is infallible. In what follows, Socrates offers a number of arguments directed against Thrasymachus’ views concerning the nature of skill, ruling, and justice. Commentators typically take a dim view of both Thrasymachus’ claims about skill (which are dismissed as an ungrounded and purely ad hoc response to Socrates’ initial criticisms) and Socrates’ (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • The ordinary and the experimental: Cook Wilson and Austin on method in philosophy.Guy Longworth - 2018 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (5):939-960.
    To what extent was ordinary language philosophy a precursor to experimental philosophy? Since the conditions on pursuit of either project are at best unclear, and at worst protean, the general question is hard to address. I focus instead on particular cases, seeking to uncover some central aspects of J. L. Austin’s and John Cook Wilson’s ordinary language based approach to philosophical method. I make a start at addressing three questions. First, what distinguishes their approach from other more traditional approaches? Second, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • What time travelers may be able to do.Peter B. M. Vranas - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 150 (1):115 - 121.
    Kadri Vihvelin, in "What time travelers cannot do" (Philos Stud 81: 315-330, 1996), argued that "no time traveler can kill the baby who in fact is her younger self, because (V1) "if someone would fail to do something, no matter how hard or how many times she tried, then she cannot do it", and (V2) if a time traveler tried to kill her baby self, she would always fail. Theodore Sider (Philos Stud 110: 115-138, 2002) criticized Vihvelin's argument, and Ira (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • XV—Intelligent Capacities.Victoria McGeer - 2018 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 118 (3):347–376.
    In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle argued that a more sophisticated understanding of the dispositional nature of ‘intelligent capacities’ could bolster philosophical resistance to the tempting view that the human mind is possessed of metaphysically ‘occult’ powers and properties. This temptation is powerful in the context of accounting for the special qualities of responsible agency. Incompatibilists indulge the temptation; compatibilists resist it, using a variety of strategies. One recent strategy, reminiscent of Ryle’s, is to exploit a more sophisticated understanding (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • The way of the agent.Nuel Belnap & Michael Perloff - 1992 - Studia Logica 51 (3-4):463 - 484.
    The conditional,if an agent did something, then the agent could have done otherwise, is analyzed usingstit theory, which is a logic of seeing to it that based on agents making choices in the context of branching time. The truth of the conditional is found to be a subtle matter that depends on how it is interpreted (e.g., on what otherwise refers to, and on the difference between could and might) and also on whether or not there are busy choosers that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   29 citations  
  • Perceptual Capacities.Susanna Schellenberg - 2019 - In Dena Shottenkirk, Manuel Curado & Steven S. Gouveia, Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics. New York: Routledge. pp. 137 - 169.
    Despite their importance in the history of philosophy and in particular in the work of Aristotle and Kant, mental capacities have been neglected in recent philosophical work. By contrast, the notion of a capacity is deeply entrenched in psychology and the brain sciences. Driven by the idea that a cognitive system has the capacity it does in virtue of its internal components and their organization, it is standard to appeal to capacities in cognitive psychology. The main benefit of invoking capacities (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations