The increasing demand for transparency in AI has recently come under scrutiny. The question is often posted in terms of “epistemic double standards”, and whether the standards for transparency in AI ought to be higher than, or equivalent to, our standards for ordinary human reasoners. I agree that the push for increased transparency in AI deserves closer examination, and that comparing these standards to our standards of transparency for other opaque systems is an appropriate starting point. I suggest that a (...) more fruitful exploration of this question will involve a different comparison class. We routinely treat judgments made by highly trained experts in specialized fields as fair or well-grounded even though—by the nature of expert/layperson division of epistemic labor—an expert will not be able to provide an explanation of the reasoning behind these judgments that makes sense to most other people. Regardless, laypeople are thought to be acting reasonably—and ethically—in deferring to the judgments of experts that concern their areas of specialization. I suggest that we reframe our question regarding the appropriate standards of transparency in AI as one that asks when, why, and to what degree it would be ethical to accept opacity in AI. I argue that our epistemic relation to certain opaque AI technology may be relevantly similar to the layperson’s epistemic relation to the expert in certain respects, such that the successful expert/layperson division of epistemic labor can serve as a blueprint for the ethical use of opaque AI. (shrink)

Moral understanding is a species of knowledge. Understanding why an action is wrong, for example, amounts to knowing why the action is wrong. The claim that moral understanding is immune to luck while moral knowledge is not does not withstand scrutiny; nor does the idea that there is something deep about understanding for there are different degrees of understanding. It is also mistaken to suppose that grasping is a distinct psychological state that accompanies understanding. To understand why something is the (...) case is to grasp or see why something is the case and grasping and seeing are ways of knowing. (shrink)

In 2010, pitcher Armando Galarraga was denied a perfect game when umpire Jim Joyce called Jason Donald safe at first with two outs in the bottom of the 9th. In the numerous media discussions that followed, Joyce’s ‘blown’ call was commonly referred to as ‘mistaken’, ‘wrong’, or otherwise erroneous. However, this use of language makes some not uncontroversial ontological assumptions. It claims that the fact that a runner is safe or out has nothing to do with the ruling of the (...) umpire himself, but rather with some state of the universe that does not depend on the umpire for its existence. In this paper, I recast the problem as a version of Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma and argue that the view implied by the above assertions is actually misguided. Instead, I hope to show that an alternative view – what I call ‘restricted umpire voluntarism’ – is actually more in line with the spirit of the game of baseball and is not as counterintuitive as it may appear.. (shrink)

This is the editors' Introduction to a special issue of the journal, Multisensory Research. European philosophers of the modern period found multisensory perception to be impossible because they thought that perceptual ideas are defined by how they are experienced. Under this conception, the individual modalities are determinables of ideas—just as colour is a determinable that embraces red and blue, so also the visual is a determinable that embraces colour and (visually experienced) shape. Since no idea is experienced as, for example, (...) both visual and auditory, there can be no such thing as audiovisual perception. This conception of modality is not directly contested, but a variety of perceptual phenomena are listed that could raise interesting questions if treated as multimodal in origin. (shrink)

This article uses recent work in philosophy of science and social epistemology to argue for a shift in analytic philosophy of religion from a knowledge-centric epistemology to an epistemology centered on understanding. Not only can an understanding-centered approach open up new avenues for the exploration of largely neglected aspects of the religious life, it can also shed light on how religious participation might be epistemically valuable in ways that knowledge-centered approaches fail to capture. Further, it can create new opportunities for (...) interaction with neighboring disciplines and can help us revitalize and transform stagnant debates in philosophy of religion, while simultaneously allowing for the introduction and recovery of marginalized voices and traditions. (shrink)

This essay explores a theory of panoramas put forward by the experimental postwar German novelist and translator Arno Schmidt. Schmidt claims that panoramas were so pervasive in the visual culture of the nineteenth century that they unconsciously influenced writers of the period, so that when they wanted to describe vast landscapes they unthinkingly framed their descriptions by drawing on experience with specific panoramas. He primarily expounds the theory in his longest work of fiction, Zettel’s Traum (1970), translated as Bottom’s Dream (...) (2016), where he supports it with evidence from Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne. He also promoted the theory in later interviews, and regarded it not just as part of his fiction but as a significant discovery in its own right. This essay extracts Schmidt’s theory from its fictional context and illustrates how he thought it could be used hermeneutically to uncover submerged panoramas in the works of nineteenth century authors. We conclude by locating the theory as part of the contemporary reception history of panoramas. (shrink)

Although there has been much discussion regarding shame and guilt, not enough has been said about the complexities of the relationship between the two. In this paper, I examine one way in which I take shame and guilt to interact – namely in cases of so-called “survivor’s guilt” among victims of trauma. More specifically, I argue that survivor’s guilt may represent a kind of response to feelings of shame – one which is centrally tied to the central philosophical notions of (...) autonomy and integrity. (shrink)

Our attempts at simulating the mind’s skills is based on our own just-so-stories -/- Our attempts at simulating the human mind’s skills are based on our own just-so-stories. These are creative narratives that are produced by our imaginative mind. The brain does not and cannot tell us how it works; it can only produce a belief, a narrative, or a just-so-story.

Medieval and early modern devotional works rarely receive serious treatment from philosophers, even those working in the subfields of philosophy of religion or the history of ideas. In this article, I examine one medieval devotional work in particular—the Middle High German image- and verse-program, Christus und die minnende Seele (CMS)—and I argue that it can plausibly be viewed as a form of medieval public philosophy, one that both exhibited and encouraged philosophical innovation. I address a few objections to my proposal—namely, (...) that CMS is neither public enough nor that it counts as proper philosophy—and I attempt to defend CMS’s public philosophical credentials in light of these objections. I conclude with a brief discussion of how devotional texts like CMS can help us do innovative public philosophy today. (shrink)

Plato articulates a deep perplexity about inquiry in ?Meno's Paradox??the claim that one can inquire neither into what one knows, nor into what one does not know. Although some commentators have wrestled with the paradox itself, many suppose that the paradox of inquiry is special to Plato, arising from peculiarities of the Socratic elenchus or of Platonic epistemology. But there is nothing peculiarly Platonic in this puzzle. For it arises, too, in classical Indian philosophical discussions, where it is formulated with (...) great clarity, and analysed in a way that casts it in a new light. We present three treatments of the puzzle in Indian philosophy, as a way of refining and sharpening our understanding of the paradox, before turning to the most radical of the Indian philosophers to tackle it. The Indian philosophers who are optimistic that the paradox can be resolved appeal to the existence of prior beliefs, and to the resources embedded in language to explain how we can investigate, and so move from ignorance to knowledge. Highlighting this structural feature of inquiry, however, allows the pessimist philosopher to demonstrate that the paradox stands. The incoherence of inquiry is rooted in the very idea of aiming our desires at the unknown. Asking questions and giving answers rests on referential intentions targeting objects in a region of epistemic darkness, and so our ?inquiry sceptic? also finds structurally similar forms of incoherence in the pragmatics of interrogative discourse. (shrink)

In this essay, we analyze the Black Mirror episode "Arkangel" alongside Nietzsche’s critique of religion. After providing an overview of his critique, we argue that the episode demonstrates how a world enframed by technology itself ends up being just as decadent, or just as pathological, repressive, corrupt, anti-life, and unredemptive as Nietzsche accuses Christianity of being. Nietzsche thought, at one point, that science and technology might provide a non-metaphysical or non-theological solution to what he calls our “metaphysical need.” However, Arkangel (...) shows how technology does not overcome problems of idolatrous forms of religion and can be just another tool for manipulation that produces the same kinds of pathologies. Nietzsche insists that the only way to overcome religion as an oppressive system is to “philosophize with a hammer,” or to deconstruct its idolatrous strictures and the “all too human” forces behind it. Ultimately, this deconstruction requires declaring “the death of God.”. (shrink)

Issues surrounding pregnancy loss are rarely addressed in Christian philosophy. Yet a modest estimate based on the empirical and medical literature places the rate of pregnancy loss between fertilization and term at somewhere between 40–60%. If miscarriage really is as common as the research gives us to believe, then it would seem a pressing topic for a Christian philosophy of the future to address. This paper attempts to begin this work by showing how thinking more closely about pregnancy loss understood (...) as a grievable event can have a profound impact on the way we think about particular theoretical debates in Christian philosophy and provide opportunities for the discipline to put its skills to use in the development of helpful conceptual and hermeneutical resources for those grieving such losses. However, this will require seeking out and taking seriously the testimony of those who have undergone pregnancy loss, as well as getting clearer on how best to conceptualize pregnancy and its loss in the first place. (shrink)

The idea of “nonbelieving prayer” might sound odd, maybe even paradoxical. a closer examination of the functions of prayer and how religious participants actually engage in it tells a different story. After developing a working definition of prayer, this chapter examines a few types and functions of prayer and argues that they can be performed non-doxastically. In fact, such a stance might even be more epistemically and theologically virtuous than that which would accompany full belief in the kind of God (...) who could be the recipient of such manifestations of human prayer. (shrink)

Illusionism about phenomenal properties has the potential to leave us with all the benefit of taking consciousness seriously and far fewer problems than those accompanying phenomenal realism. The particular problem I explore here is an epistemological puzzle that leaves the phenomenal realist with a dilemma but causes no trouble for the illusionist: how can we account for false beliefs about our own phenomenal properties? If realism is true, facts about our phenomenal properties must hold independent of our beliefs about those (...) properties, so mistaken phenomenal beliefs must always remain an open possibility. But there is no way to identify the phenomenal facts that make these beliefs false other than by mere stipulation. If illusionism is true, then the state of affairs regarding what a subject's experience seems like is just the illusion itself; there are no further facts of the matter about which the subject might have mistaken beliefs, so the problem does not arise. (shrink)

Peirce is far too strange for the uses to which he is put in art history. This is a plea to art historians for a moratorium on Peirce citations.

Several of the most compelling anti-materialist arguments are motivated by the supposed existence of an unbridgeable epistemic gap between first-person subjective knowledge about one’s own conscious experience and third-personally acquired knowledge. The two with which this paper is concerned are Frank Jackson’s ‘knowledge argument’ and David Chalmers’s ‘modal argument’. The knowledge argument and the modal argument are often taken to function as ‘two sides of the same coin … in principle each succeeds on its own, but in practice they work (...) best in tandem’. This paper disagrees with the above claim, and argues that when considered together the knowledge argument and modal arguments illuminate each other’s weaknesses. These weaknesses become apparent when we acknowledge the epistemic richness of the cognitive aspect of perceptual experience, and question the epistemic role that any non-cognitive aspect might play. Closer examination of judgments about what it’s like to have a perceptual experience reveals fundamental problems with the knowledge argument, and when these problems are exposed, the two arguments can no longer ‘buttress each other where help is needed’. It becomes clear that neither is likely to succeed on its own, and when taken together both are destabilized. (shrink)

This article for the PHILOKLES Journal for Popular Philosophy surveys a few common theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of self-deception before putting forward a thus far relatively unexplored intentionalist option, namely what the author calls the "project model of self-deception". On this model, self-deception is understood as a dynamic, diachronic activity, aimed at the preservation of a certain self-image, to which an agent is implicitly committed. The author shows how this model can make subjects responsible for their self-deceptions without running (...) straightforwardly into the so-called "paradoxes" of self-deception. (shrink)

Causation is one of philosophy's most venerable and thoroughly-analyzed concepts. However, the study of how ordinary people make causal judgments is a much more recent addition to the philosophical arsenal. One of the most prominent views of causal explanation, especially in the realm of harmful or potentially harmful behavior, is that unusual or counternormative events are accorded privileged status in ordinary causal explanations. This is a fundamental assumption in psychological theories of counterfactual reasoning, and has been transported to philosophy by (...) Hitchcock and Knobe (2009). A different view--the basis of the culpable control model of blame (CCM)--is that primary causal status is accorded to behaviors that arouse negative evaluative reactions, including behaviors that stem from nefarious motives, negligence or recklessness, a faulty character, or behaviors that lead to harmful or potentially harmful consequences. This paper describes four empirical studies that show consistent support for the CCM. (shrink)

While much has been written on the moral and metaphysical status of fetuses in Christian bioethics, little thought has been given to how we might characterize the afterlives of the unborn, especially of those human biological individuals who die before even developing a body that could theoretically be resurrected. In this paper, I therefore undertake an examination of questions surrounding the afterlife, specifically as it relates to early pregnancy loss. I first lay out what I call the “problem of weird (...) heavens” that arises when we consider that significantly more unborn human beings have died than have been born in the history of humankind. I then go on to consider questions surrounding both the soteriological status of the embryo and the status of any resurrected “body” it might have. I conclude with the germs of an alternative approach mirrored on the idea of embryonic resorption and mystical union. (shrink)

Is the pool of fair predictive algorithms fair? It depends, naturally, on both the criteria of fairness and on how we pool. We catalog the relevant facts for some of the most prominent statistical criteria of algorithmic fairness and the dominant approaches to pooling forecasts: linear, geometric, and multiplicative. Only linear pooling, a format at the heart of ensemble methods, preserves any of the central criteria we consider. Drawing on work in the social sciences and social epistemology on the theoretical (...) foundations of the wisdom of crowds, we explain how our observations present an exception to the general trend of finding tradeoffs between the accuracy and fairness of forecasts. (shrink)

While some philosophical models reduce religious faith to either mere belief or affect, more recent accounts have begun to look at the volitional component of faith. In this spirit, John Bishop has defended the notion of faith as a ‘doxastic venture’. In this article, I consider Bishop's view in detail and attempt to show that his account proves on the one hand too permissive and on the other too restrictive. Thus, although the doxastic-venture model offers certain advantages over other prominent (...) views in the philosophy of religion, it still falls short of providing us with an ultimately satisfactory account of religious faith. (shrink)

This dissertation focuses on questions regarding the metaphysical and psychological possibility of self-deception and attempts to show that self-deception is a phenomenon best characterized as both motivated and intentional, such that self-deceivers can be held responsible for their deceptions in a stronger sense than that of being merely epistemically negligent. -/- In Chapter One, I introduce the paradoxes of self-deception, which arise when one attempts to draw a close analogy between self- and other-deception, and I discuss the various ways in (...) which one might characterize an unwarranted belief as irrational. I go on to show how the various ways one understands interpersonal deception may mirror the various accounts one might give of self-deception. I concluded the chapter with a brief discussion of the role of empirical studies in philosophical investigations of irrationality. -/- In Chapter Two, I look more closely at a particular kind of intentionalist account of self-deception, namely the claim that we must suppose the existence of a partitioned mind to make sense of the so-called "internal irrationality" of the self-deceiver. I discuss both stronger and weaker versions of this theory, in an attempt to show that it tends to raise more metaphysical worries than it solves. I argue further that if there is such a thing as divisions within the mind, an account of self-deception centered around such divisions will not get the intentionalist about self-deception what he or she wants. -/- In Chapter Three, I move on to discuss non-intentionalist accounts of self-deception. Such theories have gained in popularity in recent years, due to their appeals to explanatory parsimony. Against these theories, I argued that there are certain phenomenon we take to be central to self-deception that Mele, Barnes, et al. cannot account for. I therefore propose that a more robust account of self-deception is necessary to make sense of these phenomena. -/- Chapter Four attempts to provide such an account. I claim that if we focus more heavily on the diachronic process by which self-deceivers elicit and/or maintain their beliefs over time, what emerges looks much more like an intentional project aimed at the manipulation of one's evidence or evidential standards than a mere more-or-less unconscious process of motivated biasing. I suggest that such a view can escape the paradoxes of self-deception, while at the same time making sense of the features lacking on non-intentionalist accounts. -/- Finally, in Chapter Five I examine the morality of self-deception. I argue that self-deceivers are not only epistemically but also morally responsible for their self-deceptions, and that self-deception generally represents a moral failure on the part of the moral agent, regardless of the normative moral theory one adopts. (shrink)

The central point is that the consciousness is an advanced information channel. Consciousness is not the seat of the self or free will. The action is in the sub-consciousness brain systems. Consciousness is a "just so story teller" consciousness collects and correlates scenes into sequential presentations. The function of consciousness is to provide a new information channel between other brain systems. The pre-consciousness communication between brain systems evolved and is limited by the possible pathways, these pathways did not provide the (...) possibility of a historical correlation or integration with a high level pattern of cause and effect at a significantly abstract but focused level. Consciousness provides this pathway. Consciousness provides this pathway by providing a method for the brain to take its existing expressions both visual and auditory and re-create a time line of experiences and conversations that are then re-presented to the rest of the brain through the existing sensory channels at the level of the brain. This is not a feedback loop in the simple sense, but a feedback loop of a rarified and extremely intensely processed, correlated and organized remembering. This allows the brains different functional entities to get information that it could not get from the evolved pre-consciousness internal pathways. These presentation are used by the other brain systems in a manner similar to any sensory input. This perspective would place Consciousness in the position of a cyber reality generator that feeds back to the rest of the brain. (shrink)

Mental fictionalism is not the benign view that we may better understand the mind if we think of mental states as something like useful fictions, but the more radical view that mental states just are useful fictions. This paper argues that, if one were to treat mental states as a kind of fiction, the genre of fiction best suited to this purpose would be fantasy make-believe, in which magic is a central feature. After defending a promising fictionalist account of mental (...) discourse as a kind of prop-oriented make believe against recent criticism, the paper ultimately concludes that mental fictionalism faces further, potentially insurmountable, challenges. Most significantly, there is a problematic disanalogy between folk psychology and fiction: our mental state attributions aim to track truth, and this crucial aspect of our mental discourse cannot be captured if we interpret it as a kind of fictional discourse. For this and other reasons, the cost of adopting mental fictionalism likely outweighs its benefits. Whether or not these problems can be resolved, there is still much to be gained from taking mental fictionalism seriously: in doing so we may illuminate several important features of our own folk psychology that often go unnoticed. (shrink)

Perceptual filling-in for vision is the insertion of visual properties (e.g., color, contour, luminance, or motion) into one’s visual field, when those properties have no corresponding retinal input. This paper introduces and provides preliminary empirical support for filled/non-filled pairs, pairs of images that appear identical, yet differ by amount of filling-in. It is argued that such image pairs are important to the experimental testing of theories of consciousness. We review recent experimental research and conclude that filling-in involves brain activity with (...) relatively high integrated information (Phi) compared to veridical visual perceptions. We then present filled/non-filled pairs as an empirical challenge to the integrated information theory of consciousness, which predicts that phenomenologically identical experiences depend on brain processes with identical Phi. (shrink)

There are at least three basic phenomena that philosophers traditionally classify as paradigm cases of irrationality. In the first two cases, wishful thinking and self-deception, a person wants something to be true and therefore ignores certain relevant facts about the situation, making it appear to herself that it is, in fact, true. The third case, weakness of will, involves a person undertaking a certain action, despite taking herself to have an all-things-considered better reason not to do so. While I think (...) that Stephen Colbert's notion of "truthiness" might be able to fit the mold of each of these three kinds of irrationality, it applies most directly to cases of wishful thinking and self-deception — and it’s these two types of irrationality that I discuss extensively in this paper. As we will see, there are some troubling philosophical problems that arise regarding phenomena like self-deception. But we can use the concept of truthiness to show how these “paradoxes of irrationality” may be resolved without denying the fundamental irrationality of truthiness itself. -/- An earlier version of this paper ("Truthiness, Self-Deception, and Intuitive Knowledge") appeared in "The Daily Show and Philosophy" (2007). (shrink)

PURPOSE—A substantial fraction of the observations made by clinicians and entered into patient records are expressed by means of negation or by using terms which contain negative qualifiers (as in “absence of pulse” or “surgical procedure not performed”). This seems at first sight to present problems for ontologies, terminologies and data repositories that adhere to a realist view and thus reject any reference to putative non-existing entities. Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and Referent Tracking (RT) are examples of such paradigms. The (...) purpose of the research here described was to test a proposal to capture negative findings in electronic health record systems based on BFO and RT. METHODS—We analysed a series of negative findings encountered in 748 sentences taken from 41 patient charts. We classified the phenomena described in terms of the various top-level categories and relations defined in BFO, taking into account the role of negation in the corresponding descriptions. We also studied terms from SNOMED-CT containing one or other form of negation. We then explored ways to represent the described phenomena by means of the types of representational units available to realist ontologies such as BFO. RESULTS—We introduced a new family of ‘lacks’ relations into the OBO Relation Ontology. The relation lacks_part, for example, defined in terms of the positive relation part_of, holds between a particular p and a universal U when p has no instance of U as part. Since p and U both exist, assertions involving ‘lacks_part’ and its cognates meet the requirements of positivity. CONCLUSION—By expanding the OBO Relation Ontology, we were able to accommodate nearly all occurrences of negative findings in the sample studied. (shrink)

If I were asked to put forward an ethical principle which I considered to be especially certain, it would be that no one can be responsible, in the properly ethical sense, for the conduct of another. Responsibility belongs essentially to the individual. The implications of this principle are much more far-reaching than is evident at first, and reflection upon them may lead many to withdraw the assent which they might otherwise be very ready to accord to this view of responsibility. (...) But if the difficulties do appear to be insurmountable, and that, very certainly, does not seem to me to be the case, then the proper procedure will be, not to revert to the barbarous notion of collective or group responsibility, but to give up altogether the view that we are accountable in any distinctively moral sense. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine various philosophical approaches to religious experience and natural theology and look at some ways in which the former might be relevant for the latter. I argue that by thinking more about oft-overlooked or -underemphasized understandings of a) what might constitute religious experience and b) what functions natural theology might serve, we can begin to develop a more nuanced approach to natural theological appeals to religious experience — one that makes use of materially mediated religious experience (...) to develop a natural theology more sensitive to the varieties of experience of lived religion “on the ground”. (shrink)

It is commonly supposed that a certain kind of belief is necessary for religious experience. Yet it is not clear that this must be so. In this article, I defend the possibility that a subject could have a genuine emotional religious experience without thereby necessarily believing that the purported object of her experience corresponds to reality and/or is the cause of her experience. Imaginative engagement, I argue, may evoke emotional religious experiences that may be said to be both genuine and (...) appropriate, despite not necessarily including beliefs of the aforementioned kind.I go on to maintain that such religious engagement is compatible not only with non-belief but also with disbelief. (shrink)

According to standard scientific realism, science seeks truth and we can justifiably believe that our successful theories achieve, or at least approximate, that goal. In this paper, I discuss the implications of the following competitor thesis: Any theory we may favor has competitors such that we cannot justifiably deny that they are approximately true. After defending that thesis, I articulate three specific threats it poses for standard scientific realism; one is epistemic, the other two are axiological (that is, pertaining to (...) the claim that science seeks truth). I also flag an additional axiological “challenge,” that of how one might justify the pursuit of a primary aim, such as truth. Bracketing epistemic realism, I argue that the axiological threats can be addressed by embracing a refined realist axiological hypothesis, one that specifies a specific subclass of true claims sought in science. And after identifying three potential responses to the axiological “challenge,” I contend that, while standard axiological realism appears to lack the resources required to utilize any of the responses, the refined realist axiology I embrace is well suited to each. (shrink)

In this introductory chapter, we discuss some of the challenges raised by the project of pluralization in the discipline of philosophy. We look at a few theoretical approaches to pluralization that this volume takes up—namely, the figure-based approach, the global approach, and the genre-based approach—and we consider what the pluralization project might also mean for philosophical pedagogy. Finally, we give a brief summary of the contributions in this volume and provide possible cross-references for each chapter.

In this chapter, we examine a few potential problems when inquiring into the ethics of medieval Christian and Islamic mystical traditions: First, there are terminological and methodological worries about defining mysticism and doing comparative philosophy in general. Second, assuming that the Divine represents the highest Good in such traditions, and given the apophaticism on the part of many mystics in both religions, there is a question of whether or not such traditions can provide a coherent theory of value. Finally, the (...) antinomian tendencies and emphasis on passivity of some mystics might lead one to wonder whether their prescriptive exhortations can constitute a coherent theory of right action. We tackle each of these concerns in turn and discuss how they might be addressed, in an attempt to show how medieval mysticism, as a fundamentally practical enterprise, deserves more attention from practical and moral philosophy than it has thus far received. (shrink)

Baseball is an exceptionally superstitious sport. But what are we to say about the rationality of such superstitious behavior? On the one hand, we can trace much of the superstitious behavior we see in baseball to a type of irrational belief. But how deep does this supposed irrationality run? It appears that superstitions may occupy various places on the spectrum of irrationality — from motivated ignorance to self-deception to psychological compulsion —depending on the type of superstitious belief at work and (...) on the means of formation and/or maintenance of that belief. In this paper, I first examine the various types of superstitions we find in baseball culture, in an attempt to see what these different kinds of superstitions might have in common. I then lay out a working definition of superstition within a baseball context by examining the general psychology underlying such behavior, in an attempt to ascertain the possible causal and/or motivational reasons for the acquisition of superstitious beliefs and practices in sports like baseball. Finally, I argue that, in addition to superstitions acquired merely via the workings of a type of biasing mechanism, there also appear to be genuine cases of superstition acquisition and maintenance, in which the agent may be said to be actively engaged. I claim that in at least some cases of superstitious belief, it is possible that agents are employing an awareness of their own rational epistemic standards to allow themselves to believe and act irrationally, and that the result of such “pseudo-rational” behavior is perhaps a form of self-deceptive superstitious belief. (shrink)

In this chapter, I first explore the possible meanings of the expression 'non-metaphysical religion' and its relation to the realism and cognitivism debates (as well as these debates' relation to each other). I then sketch out and defend the germs of an alternative semantics for religious language that I call 'religious imaginativism'. This semantics attempts to move us away from the realism-antirealism debates in Philosophy of Religion and in this sense might count as 'non-metaphysical'. At the same time, it allows (...) that religious utterances may be truth-evaluable. This creates space for a "theism with God" (and for a "God of theism") without being running into the problems confronted by more metaphysical approaches. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the possibility of what I call “non-doxastic theistic prayer”, namely prayer that proceeds without full belief in God – or in the kind of God who could be the recipient of such prayer. After developing a working definition of prayer, I proceed to discuss a few prominent forms of prayer and explore the ways in which such prayer might legitimately be performed non-doxastically. I conclude by examining the possibility that some forms of what I call (...) “prayerful pretense” may be more epistemically and morally virtuous than their fully doxastic counterparts. (shrink)

Homeostatic property clusters (HPCs) are offered as a way of understanding natural kinds, especially biological species. I review the HPC approach and then discuss an objection by Ereshefsky and Matthen, to the effect that an HPC qua cluster seems ill-fitted as a description of a polymorphic species. The standard response by champions of the HPC approach is to say that all members of a polymorphic species have things in common, namely dispositions or conditional properties. I argue that this response fails. (...) Instances of an HPC kind need not all be similar in their exhibited properties. Instead, HPCs should instead be understood as unified by the underlying causal mechanism that maintains them. The causal mechanism can both produce and explain some systematic differences between a kind’s members. An HPC kind is best understood not as a single cluster of properties maintained in stasis by causal forces, but as a complex of related property clusters kept in relation by an underlying causal process. This approach requires recognizing that taxonomic systems serve both explanatory and inductive purposes. (shrink)

In this paper we distinguish two issues that are often run together in discussions about physicalism. The first issue concerns levels. How do entities picked out by non-physical terminology, such as biological or psychological terminology, relate to physical entities? Are the former identical to, or metaphysically supervenient on, the latter? The second issue concerns physical parts and wholes. How do macroscopic physical entities relate to their microscopic parts? Are the former generally determined by the latter? We argue that views on (...) these two issues are independent of one another and should not be conflated. (shrink)

This paper explains how to use a new software tool for argument diagramming available free on the Internet, showing especially how it can be used in the classroom to enhance critical thinking in philosophy. The user loads a text file containing an argument into a box on the computer interface, and then creates an argument diagram by dragging lines from one node to another. A key feature is the support for argumentation schemes, common patterns of defeasible reasoning historically know as (...) topics . Several examples are presented, as well as the results of an experiment in using the system with students in a university classroom. (shrink)

In a recent article, Joel Pust argued that direct inference based on reference properties of differing arity are incommensurable, and so direct inference cannot be used to resolve the Sleeping Beauty problem. After discussing the defects of Pust's argument, I offer reasons for thinking that direct inferences based on reference properties of differing arity are commensurable, and that we should prefer direct inferences based on logically stronger reference properties, regardless of arity.

In a pair of recent articles, Brian Leftow and Eleonore Stump offer independent, although similar, accounts of the metaphysics of the Incarnation. Both believe that their Aquinas-inspired theories can offer solutions to the kind of Leibniz’s Law problems that can seem to threaten the logical possibility of this traditional Christian doctrine. In this paper, I’ll have a look at their compositional account of the nature of God incarnate. In the end, I believe their position can be seen to have unacceptable (...) philosophical and theological implications, and that is it inadequate to solve the Leibniz’s law problems that motivate it in the first place. (shrink)

Robert Kimball, in “What’s Wrong with Argumentum Ad Baculum?” (Argumentation, 2006) argues that dialogue-based models of rational argumentation do not satisfactorily account for what is objectionable about more malicious uses of threats encountered in some ad baculum arguments. We review the dialogue-based approach to argumentum ad baculum, and show how it can offer more than Kimball thinks for analyzing such threat arguments and ad baculum fallacies.

We present an original emergent individuals view of human persons, on which persons are substantial biological unities that exemplify metaphysically emergent mental states. We argue that this view allows for a coherent model of identity-preserving resurrection from the dead consistent with orthodox Christian doctrine, one that improves upon alternatives accounts recently proposed by a number of authors. Our model is a variant of the “falling elevator” model advanced by Dean Zimmerman that, unlike Zimmerman’s, does not require a closest continuer account (...) of personal identity. We end by raising some remaining theological concerns. (shrink)

Authenticates approximately 500 lines of Aristotle's lost work the Protrepticus (Exhortation to Philosophy) contained in the circa third century AD work by Iamblichus of Chalcis entitled Protrepticus epi philosophian. Includes a complete English translation of the authenticated material.

It is often suggested that when opinions differ among individuals in a group, the opinions should be aggregated to form a compromise. This paper compares two approaches to aggregating opinions, linear pooling and what I call opinion agglomeration. In evaluating both strategies, I propose a pragmatic criterion, No Regrets, entailing that an aggregation strategy should prevent groups from buying and selling bets on events at prices regretted by their members. I show that only opinion agglomeration is able to satisfy the (...) demand. I then proceed to give normative and empirical arguments in support of the pragmatic criterion for opinion aggregation, and that ultimately favor opinion agglomeration. (shrink)

Often in academia, women and minorities are held to a higher standard in how they present themselves (caring, empathetic) and how they manage the emotions of colleagues and students. The emotional labour that is expected of them is well documented. In this paper, I develop a new concept to address the emotional labour of diversity workers: Responsive Diversity Work. I summarize Carla Fehr’s view of the epistemic diversity worker, develop a theory of emotional labour, and explain how the responsive diversity (...) worker, in virtue of the unfair emotional labour expected of her, is at great risk of mental health issues. (shrink)

Until recently Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) has been regarded as the “last medieval philosopher,” representing the end of the philosophically respectful scholastic tradition going back to the Early Middle Ages. In fact, however, Suárez stood at the beginning, rather than at the end, of a distinguished scholastic culture, which should best be labeled “Baroque scholasticism,” and which flourished throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In this paper I offer some ideas on why the study of this philosophical culture has been (...) so far neglected by the mainstream Anglo-American philosophical historiography and argue that more attention should be paid to it. (shrink)

Traditionally, the term ’God’ has been understood either as a proper name or as a description. However, according to a new view, the term God’ in a sentence like "Jesus Christ is God" functions as a kind term, much as the term ’tiger’ functions in the sentence "Tigger is a tiger." In this paper I examine the claim that divinity can be construed as a ’supernatural’ kind, developing the outlines of an account of the semantics of God’ along these lines, (...) and suggest that it might solve an important philosophical problem concerning the Incarnation. (shrink)