In his metaphysical summa of 1986, The Plurality of Worlds, David Lewis famously defends a doctrine he calls ‘modal realism’, the idea that to account for the fact that some things are possible and some things are necessary we must postulate an infinity possible worlds, concrete entities like our own universe, but cut off from us in space and time. Possible worlds are required to account for the facts of modality without assuming that modality is primitive – that there (...) are irreducibly modal facts. We argue that on one reading, Lewis’s theory licenses us to assume maverick possible worlds which spread through logical space gobbling up all the rest. Because they exclude alternatives, these worlds result in contradictions, since different spread worlds are incompatible with one another. Plainly Lewis’s theory must be amended to exclude these excluders. But, we maintain, this cannot be done without bringing in modal primitives. And once we admit modal primitives, bang goes the rationale for Lewis’s modal realism. (shrink)

David Lewis (1980) proposed the Principal Principle (PP) and a “reformulation” which later on he called ‘OP’ (Old Principle). Reacting to his belief that these principles run into trouble, Lewis (1994) concluded that they should be replaced with the New Principle (NP). This conclusion left Lewis uneasy, because he thought that an inverse form of NP is “quite messy”, whereas an inverse form of OP, namely the simple and intuitive PP, is “the key to our concept of (...) chance”. I argue that, even if OP should be discarded, PP need not be. Moreover, far from being messy, an inverse form of NP is a simple and intuitive Conditional Principle (CP). Finally, both PP and CP are special cases of a General Principle (GP); it follows that so are PP and NP, which are thus compatible rather than competing. (shrink)

The Principal Principle (PP) says that, for any proposition A, given any admissible evidence and the proposition that the chance of A is x%, one's conditional credence in A should be x%. Humean Supervenience (HS) claims that, among possible worlds like ours, no two differ without differing in the spacetime-point-by-spacetime-point arrangement of local properties. David Lewis (1986b, 1994a) has argued that PP contradicts HS, and the validity of his argument has been endorsed by Bigelow et al. (1993), Thau (1994), (...) Hall (1994), Strevens (1995), Ismael (1996), Hoefer (1997), and Black (1998). Against this consensus, I argue that PP might not contradict HS: Lewis's argument is invalid, and every attempt – within a broad class of attempts – to amend the argument fails. (shrink)

There is an inherent link between colonisation and carceral institutions, and in this paper I aim to illuminate and critically review the philosophical implications of prison structures in relation to coloniality. I draw on the work of Lewis Gordon, Frantz Fanon & Nelson Maldonado-Torres in arguing that physical incarceration not only colonises the body, but the mind too, as a form of structural violence. In order to establish an existential phenomenological framework for coloniality in incarceration, I also make reference (...) to Hannah Arendt. Her work on both totalitarianism and the banality of evil help to develop the framework, and I further utilise Lisa Guenther’s work on solitary confinement in taking a phenomenological approach to thinking about incarceration. After this critical discussion of the coloniality of incarceration, I apply the framework to the New Zealand context, where Māori are hugely overrepresented in prisons. In invoking Sharon Shalev’s recent report into solitary confinement in Aotearoa, I argue that the disproportionate numbers of Māori in New Zealand prisons are symptomatic of the inherently colonial nature of carceral institutions, and also maintain that understanding the fundamentally colonial nature of prisons is key to ensuring the Crown and government fulfil certain obligations to Māori under the Treaty of Waitangi. (shrink)

Studious Drift: Movements and Protocols for a Postdigital Education (Lewis and Hyland 2022) continues Tyson Lewis’s theoretical project of dismantling the learning metaphysics, this time in the digital sphere. The object of concern here is e-studying or digital studying. Lewis has shown elsewhere, in an article written with Cristopher Moffett (Lewis and Moffett 2021), that the university lecture can be circumvented and profaned by turning attention to the students’ gesture of notetaking.

According to the standard interpretation of Lewis’s theory of predicate meaning (the U&N theory), the naturalness of meaning candidates should be stated metaphysically - as a length of definition in terms of fundamental properties. Recently, Weatherson has criticized the U&N theory and argued that the criterion of naturalness should be stated epistemologically - as the amount of evidence needed to form a belief. Despite the criticism, his attitude towards the U&N theory is quite relaxed. According to Weatherson, the U&N (...) theory can be used as a good heuristic for delivering the correct verdicts when doing applied semantics, i.e., when we try to determine the best meaning candidate for a particular predicate. In this paper, I try to show that the “good heuristic strategy” is of no use because A) there is no guarantee that the epistemological and the metaphysical criteria of naturalness deliver the same verdicts and B) even if they deliver the same verdicts, the difference in their theoretical backgrounds may affect arguments which rely on the verdicts. The difference will be shown by drawing on the example of Theodore Sider and his use of the U&N theory. (shrink)

This paper explores some consequences of Lewis’s (Australas J Philos 74(4):549–567, 1996) understanding of how knowledge is compartmentalized. It argues, first, that he underestimates how badly it impacts his view. When knowledge is compartmentalized, it lacks at least one of two essential features of Lewis’s account: (a) Elusiveness—familiar skeptical possibilities, when relevant, are incompatible with everyday knowledge. (b) Knowledge is a modality—when a thinker knows that p, there is no relevant possibility where p is false. Lewis proposes (...) compartmentalized knowledge to keep treating knowledge as a modality while mitigating one of its unrealistic epistemological implications: In normal modal epistemic logic (and standard possible world semantics), a thinker always counts as knowing the strongest proposition that follows from the set of all the individual propositions that this thinker knows. Lewis’s compartmentalization proposal is that thinkers merely know the conjunctions of propositions that are known in each of, but not across, their compartments. The irony is that in avoiding overblown knowledge the view now allows for thinkers to attend to skeptical error possibilities and yet knowledge is present. The account avoids inflation of knowledge in one sense only to acquire another type of knowledge the view denies subjects can have. This problem motivates an inspection of knowledge accounts whose intra-compartment closure principles are weaker than those that are valid in normal modal-logic. The conclusion is that some formulations of closure can avoid the challenge Lewis’s view faces. Nevertheless, even these closure principles pose a barrier—perhaps an implausible barrier—for knowledge of ignorance. Even when the reasoning supporting the lack of knowledge is sound, a subject cannot always know she doesn’t know. Interestingly, this obstacle is one that knowledge of knowledge doesn’t seem to face. (shrink)

The revolutionary outbreak in a variety of civilizations centered around 600 B.C.E., a period in which the great world religions as well as philosophy emerged, from Hebrew scriptures and the teachings of Buddha to the works of Greek and Chinese philosophers, has been named the Axial Age by Karl Jaspers. Yet 75 years earlier, in 1873, unknown to Jaspers and still unknown to the world, John Stuart Stuart-Glennie elaborated a fully developed and more nuanced theory of what he termed The (...) Moral Revolution to characterize the period. This book also brings to light the previously undiscussed ideas of D. H. Lawrence on the phenomenon from 20 years before Jaspers, the seldom mentioned contributions of Lewis Mumford, and proposes a new context for understanding the phenomenon. Halton rewrites the history of this fascinating theory and opens new ways of conceiving the meaning of The Moral Revolution for today. (shrink)

This thesis is an argument for the view that there are problems for Modal Reductionism, the thesis that modality can satisfactorily be defined in non-modal terms. -/- I proceed via a case study of David Lewis’s theory of concrete possible worlds. This theory is commonly regarded as the best and most influential candidate reductive theory of modality. Based on a detailed examination of its ontology, analysis and justification, I conclude that it does badly with respect to the following four (...) minimal conditions on a satisfactory reductive theory of modality: that it be (a) genuinely reductive, (b) materially adequate, (c) conceptually adequate and (d) that its justification provides good reason to think it true. -/- These problems for Lewis’s theory are not, I suggest, due to his idiosyncratic conception of possible worlds as concrete entities. Rather, because Lewis’s theory can be seen to represent an important class of structurally similar reductive theories of modality, the problems for Lewis’s theory generalise to problems for these other theories. This suggests that Modal Reductionism is unpromising. In the light of this, the alternative approach to understanding modality, Modal Primitivism, appears more attractive. (shrink)

This eighth volume of Collected Papers includes 75 papers comprising 973 pages on (theoretic and applied) neutrosophics, written between 2010-2022 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 102 co-authors (alphabetically ordered) from 24 countries: Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Abduallah Gamal, Firoz Ahmad, Ahmad Yusuf Adhami, Ahmed B. Al-Nafee, Ali Hassan, Mumtaz Ali, Akbar Rezaei, Assia Bakali, Ayoub Bahnasse, Azeddine Elhassouny, Durga Banerjee, Romualdas Bausys, Mircea Boșcoianu, Traian Alexandru Buda, Bui Cong Cuong, Emilia Calefariu, Ahmet Çevik, Chang Su Kim, Victor (...) Christianto, Dae Wan Kim, Daud Ahmad, Arindam Dey, Partha Pratim Dey, Mamouni Dhar, H. A. Elagamy, Ahmed K. Essa, Sudipta Gayen, Bibhas C. Giri, Daniela Gîfu, Noel Batista Hernández, Hojjatollah Farahani, Huda E. Khalid, Irfan Deli, Saeid Jafari, Tèmítópé Gbóláhàn Jaíyéolá, Sripati Jha, Sudan Jha, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Darjan Karabašević, M. Karthika, Kawther F. Alhasan, Giruta Kazakeviciute-Januskeviciene, Qaisar Khan, Kishore Kumar P K, Prem Kumar Singh, Ranjan Kumar, Maikel Leyva-Vázquez, Mahmoud Ismail, Tahir Mahmood, Hafsa Masood Malik, Mohammad Abobala, Mai Mohamed, Gunasekaran Manogaran, Seema Mehra, Kalyan Mondal, Mohamed Talea, Mullai Murugappan, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Aslam Malik, Muhammad Khalid Mahmood, Nivetha Martin, Durga Nagarajan, Nguyen Van Dinh, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Lewis Nkenyereya, Jagan M. Obbineni, M. Parimala, S. K. Patro, Peide Liu, Pham Hong Phong, Surapati Pramanik, Gyanendra Prasad Joshi, Quek Shio Gai, R. Radha, A.A. Salama, S. Satham Hussain, Mehmet Șahin, Said Broumi, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Selvaraj Ganesan, Shahbaz Ali, Shouzhen Zeng, Manjeet Singh, A. Stanis Arul Mary, Dragiša Stanujkić, Yusuf Șubaș, Rui-Pu Tan, Mirela Teodorescu, Selçuk Topal, Zenonas Turskis, Vakkas Uluçay, Norberto Valcárcel Izquierdo, V. Venkateswara Rao, Volkan Duran, Ying Li, Young Bae Jun, Wadei F. Al-Omeri, Jian-qiang Wang, Lihshing Leigh Wang, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas. (shrink)

The study of reference often leads to addressing fundamental issues in semantics, metaphysics and epistemology; this suggests that reference is closely linked to the three realms. The overall purpose of this study is to elucidate the structure of some of these links, through a close examination of the “mechanism” of reference. As in many other enquiries, considering the possible (i.e., the modal,) in addition to the actual proves very helpful in clarifying and explicating insights. The reference of a term with (...) respect to possible worlds is commonly called “intension”; so this is a study of intensions. The main contribution of the study is an outline for a “calculator” of intensions. It is argued that the intension of a term is a function of three variables: (a) the way in which the term “picks out” its referent in different possible worlds (semantics); (b) criteria of identity (metaphysics); and (c) the actual state of affairs (actuality). While considering different possible values for these variables, it is demonstrated how the variables combine to generate the term’s intension. In other words, the result is a calculator that when provided with the required values, yields the reference of the term in different possible worlds. By taking into account the possible gap between what we take the values of these variables to be and what they may in fact be, we also gain important insights into the epistemic aspect of reference. In addition, since a rigid designator is a term with constant intension, the proposed thesis provides an elaborate account of rigidity. The first chapter is devoted to the development of the calculator of intensions. Each of the following three chapters elaborates on one aspect of intensions, namely, the semantic, metaphysical and epistemic aspects. In the course of these chapters, various familiar puzzles pertaining to the respective philosophical realms are addressed (many of these puzzles are discussed in Kripke’s Naming and Necessity – a work that considerably inspired this study). In the fifth and last chapter the analysis of intensions is applied to two case-studies from relatively recent philosophical literature: the Kripke-Lewis debate over the identity theory of mind, and the debate over the significance of Donnellan’s referential/attributive distinction. The novel accounts that these applications generate purport to illustrate the importance and originality of the proposed thesis. (shrink)

The Equation (TE) states that the probability of A → B is the probability of B given A. Lewis (1976) has shown that the acceptance of TE implies that the probability of A → B is the probability of B, which is implausible: the probability of a conditional cannot plausibly be the same as the probability of its consequent, e.g., the probability that the match will light given that is struck is not intuitively the same as the probability that (...) it will light. Here I want to counter Lewis’ claim. My aim is to argue that: (1) TE express the coherence requirements implicit in the probability distributions of a modus ponens inference (MP); (2) the triviality result is not implausible because it is a result from these requirements; (3) these coherence requirements measure MP employability, so TE significance is tied to it; (4) MP employability doesn’t provide either the acceptability or the truth conditions of conditionals, since MP employability depends on previous independent reasons to accept the conditional and some acceptable conditionals are not MP friendly. Consequently, TE doesn’t have the logical significance that is usually attributed to it. (shrink)

In a lot of domains in metaphysics the tacit assumption has been that whichever metaphysical principles turn out to be true, these will be necessarily true. Let us call necessitarianism about some domain the thesis that the right metaphysics of that domain is necessary. Necessitarianism has flourished. In the philosophy of maths we find it held that if mathematical objects exist, then they do of necessity. Mathematical Platonists affirm the necessary existence of mathematical objects (see for instance Hale and Wright (...) 1992 and 1994; Wright 1983 and 1988; Schiffer 1996; Resnik 1997; Shapiro 1997 and Zalta 1988) while mathematical nominalists, usually in the form of fictionalists, hold that necessarily such objects fail to exist (see for instance Balaguer 1996 and 1998; Rosen 2001 and Yablo 2005). In metaphysics more generally, until recently it was more or less assumed that whatever the right account of composition—the account of under what conditions some xs compose a y—that account will be necessarily true (for a discussion of theories of composition see Simons 1987 and van Inwagen 1987 and 1990; the modal status of the composition relation is explicitly addressed in Schaffer 2007; Parsons 2006 and Cameron 2007). Similarly, it has generally been assumed that whatever the right account is of the nature of properties, whether they be universals, tropes, or whether nominalism is true, that account will be necessarily true (though see Rosen 2006 for a recent suggestion to the contrary). In considering theories of persistence it has been widely held that whether objects endure or perdure through time is a matter of necessity (Sider 2001; though see Lewis 1999 p227 who defends contingent perdurantism). And with respect to theories of time it is frequently held that whichever of the A- or B-theory is true is necessarily true. A-theorists often argue that there is time in a world only if the A-theory is true at that world (see for instance McTaggart 1903; Markosian 2004; Bigelow 1996; Craig 2001) while B-theorists often argue that the A-theory is internally inconsistent (Smart 1987; Mellor 1998; Savitt 2000 and Le Poidevin 1991). Once again, we find a few recent contingentist dissenters. Bourne (2006) suggests that it is a contingent feature of time that it is tensed, and thus that the A-theory is contingently true. Worlds in which there exist only B-theoretic properties are worlds with time, it is just that time in those worlds time is radically different to the way it is actually. Other defenders of the B-theory, though not expressly contingentists, do offer arguments against versions of the A-theory that try to show that such A-theories theories are inconsistent with the actual laws of nature (see for instance Saunders 2002 and Callender 2000); these arguments, at least, leave room for the possibility that the A-theories in question are contingently false (at least on the assumption that the laws of nature are themselves contingent, an assumption that not everyone accepts). Despite some notable exceptions, necessitarianism has flourished in many, if not most, domains in metaphysics. One such exception is Lewis’ famous defence of Humean supervenience as a contingent claim about our world. Lewis does not argue that necessarily, the supervenience base for all matters of fact in a world is nothing but a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact. Rather, he thinks that we have reason to think that our world is one in which Humean supervenience holds (see Lewis 1986 p9-10 and 1994). Another exception to the necessitarian orthodoxy is to be found in the lively debate about the modal status of the laws of nature. Here, if anything, contingentism has been the dominating force, with it generally being held that there are possible worlds in which different laws of nature hold (this view is defended by, among others, Lewis 1986 and 2010; Schaffer 2005 and Sidelle 2002). Necessitarian dissenters hold that the laws of nature are necessary, frequently because they think it is necessary that fundamental properties have the causal or nomic profiles they do (see for instance Shoemaker 1980 and 1988; Swoyer 1982; Bird 1995; Ellis and Lierse 1994). Nevertheless, when it comes to thinking about the nature of the laws themselves, the necessitarian presumption is back on firm footing. Though there is disagreement about whether the laws are generalisations that feature in the most virtuous true axiomatisation of all the particular matters of fact (often known as the Humean view of laws and defended by Ramsey 1978; Lewis 1986 and Beebee 2000) or whether laws are relations of necessity that hold between universals (a view defended by Armstrong 1983; Dretske 1977; Tooley 1977 and Carroll 1990) no one has seriously suggested that it might be a contingent matter which of these is the right account of laws. The necessitarian orthodoxy is not surprising since metaphysics is largely an a priori process. While a priori reasoning may be used to determine whether a proposition is necessary or contingent, it is not well placed (in the absence of a posteriori evidence) to determine whether a contingent proposition is actually true or false. Since metaphysicians aim to tell us which principles are true in which worlds, on the face of it the discovery that metaphysical principles are contingent seems to make part of the task of metaphysics epistemically intractable. In what follows I consider two reasons one might end up embracing contingentism and whether this would lead one into epistemic difficulty. The following section considers a route to contingent metaphysical truths that proceeds via a combination of conceptual necessities and empirical discoveries. Section 3 considers whether there might be synthetic contingent metaphysical truths, and the final section raises the question of whether if there were such truths we would be well placed to come to know them. (shrink)

In this paper I present a precise version of Stalnaker's thesis and show that it is both consistent and predicts our intuitive judgments about the probabilities of conditionals. The thesis states that someone whose total evidence is E should have the same credence in the proposition expressed by 'if A then B' in a context where E is salient as they have conditional credence in the proposition B expresses given the proposition A expresses in that context. The thesis is formalised (...) rigorously and two models are provided that demonstrate that the new thesis is indeed tenable within a standard possible world semantics based on selection functions. Unlike the Stalnaker-Lewis semantics the selection functions cannot be understood in terms of similarity. A probabilistic account of selection is defended in its place. -/- I end the paper by suggesting that this approach overcomes some of the objections often leveled at accounts of indicatives based on the notion of similarity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The individual-community relationship has always been one of the most fundamental topics of social sciences. In sociology, this is known as the micro-macro relationship while in economics it refers to the processes, through which, individual actions lead to macroeconomic phenomena. Based on philosophical discourse and systems theory, many sociologists even use the term "emergence" in their understanding of micro-macro relationship, which refers to collective phenomena that are created by the cooperation of individuals, but cannot be reduced to individual actions. (...) "Emergence" theories attempt to explain the nature of society as a complex system by examining how individuals and their relationships lead to the creation of integrated and macro-social phenomena such as markets, educational systems, cultural beliefs, and shared social practices. As a prelude to activity, every researcher has to answer the question from the methodological point of view, how is it possible to study the behavior of social groups and how can we gain knowledge about the laws related to social groups? Anyone who deals with humanities and social sciences or any reality and phenomenon that affects human beings, inevitably deals with the reality that is emerging. In fact, emergence occurs when one level of reality emerges radically from another level. Examples of emergent levels of reality include how the mind emerges from the body; or the way society emerges from human beings. Therefore, when there is an emerging factor, different scientific disciplines should be used, because it is inevitable to talk about social affairs, psychology and neurobiology, as well as physical and even chemical. -/- INTRODUCTION Since its beginning in the 19th century, sociology has faced the fundamental question of what a social phenomena stands for? At a glance, sociologists deal with the study of social groups, collective behavior, institutions, social structures, social networks, and social dynamics, and ultimately all such phenomena are composed of individuals. Therefore, social phenomena seem to have no independent ontological status, and in this case, sociology is ultimately about reducible individuals. Different approaches about the micro-macro relationship, using the concept of "emergence", argue that although collective phenomena are created by individuals, they cannot be reduced to individual action. The term "emergence" is used to distinguish "emergent results" from " Procedural results". Results are called Procedural that can only be calculated by adding or subtracting the causes that act together. On the contrary, they are emergent outcomes that are qualitatively novel compared to the causes from which they originate. An example of such emergent results is mental characteristics that emerge from neural processes, but are not considered among the characteristics of neural processes of components - which are their origin. Philosophical debates about emergentism and reductionism focus on the mind-brain relationship, but as many philosophers have noted, they can be generalized to apply to any hierarchical set of features. The cognitive revolution reactivated a 19th century controversy between theorists of Identity and dualism. The theorists of Identity believe in reductionist materialism and elimination of metaphysics, according to which the mind is nothing more than the biological, while the dualists believe that the mind and the brain are distinct from each other. Emergence has been considered as a third way between the theories of Identity and dualism. -/- METHODOLOGY Interdisciplinarity Is fundamentally indicated by the dominance of open systems as well as social and emerging systems at different levels. Therefore, as long as we are facing a new emergentism, there will necessarily be different fields and an interdisciplinary method. The commonality of social sciences and cognitive sciences on the issue of emergence provides the possibility of interaction and exchange of concepts between these two for deeper research. Therefore, in this research, apart from the concepts of Subvenience and downward causation, we have used multiple realization and wildly disjunctive, which are used to explain the emerging concept in cognitive sciences, including neurobiology, psychology, and philosophy. For analytical and interdisciplinary approaches, after examining the concepts of subvenience, and wildly disjunctive, Individualistic and collectivist emergentism have been reviewed. And then their adequacy is criticized and evaluated in meeting strong emergence conditions. -/- FINDINGS Philosophers of the mind have been able to define the conditions of irreducibility and downward causation, which are essential for strong emergence, by using the principle of subvenience with the help of multiple realization and wildly disjunctive principles. Therefore, by definition, emergentist individualism suffers from the problem of how to explain downward causality and irreducibility, and emergentist collectivism faces the challenge of reification. The analysis of the challenges facing the two methodological approaches of individualism and collectivism leads us to three unresolved issues about the emerging phenomenon, which are realism, downward causality, and mechanism. Despite the differences in the stances of these two approaches regarding the aforementioned triple problems, individualists and collectivists both agree that some social characteristics are reducible; and some others are irreducible due to their complexity, the determination of which, depends on the case study of the mechanism of emergence of each social characteristic. -/- CONCLUSION An emergence that is consistent with reductionism is called a weak emergence. And strong emergence includes the principle of irreducibility and downward causality. According to strong emergence, the characteristics of social phenomena have downward causal power, which cannot be reduced to the causal forces. The principle of subvenience, together with multiple realization and wildly disjunctive, can provide the conditions of irreducibility and downward causality, which are essential conditions of strong emergence. Based on the philosophical analysis of two methodological approaches, individualist and collectivist, it can be concluded that emergentist individualism suffers from the problem of how to explain downward causality and irreducibility, and reification collectivism faces the challenge of reification. The analysis of the problems faced by these two approaches leads us to three unresolved issues, which are realism, downward causality, and mechanism. individualist emergentists acknowledge the existence of emergent social characteristics, but despite this, they believe that these characteristics are not real but merely analytical constructs that require explanation based on individuals and their mutual actions. But collectivists argue that emergentism yields a categorical ontology and supports social realism. They accept the dependence of social characteristics on individuals, but claim that social entities and structures are ontologically independent. Individualists and collectivists both agree that some social characteristics are reducible; and others are irreducible due to their complexity; and the only way to recognize this is to engage in empirical studies of the mechanisms and temporal processes of "emergence" that create social characteristics. -/- NOVELTY The newness of this compact article is as follows: a) Presenting an interdisciplinary approach using the analysis of philosophy of cognitive sciences, including the philosophy of mind, neurobiology and psychology to formulate the issue of social emergence; b) Criticizing individualist and collectivist methodological approaches to the issue of social emergence and explaining the sufficiency and shortcomings of both in providing weak and strong emerging conditions; c) Explaining and categorizing the challenges facing methodological approaches in explaining the phenomenon of social emergence, in three categories: realism, downward causality, and mechanism. BIBLIOGRAPHY Beckermann, A., Flohr, H., & Kim, J. (eds.) (1992). Emergence or reduction? Essays on the prospects of nonreductive physicalism. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bhaskar, R. (1979). The possibility of Naturalism. New York: Routledge. Bhaskar, R., Danermark, B. & Price, L. (2018). Interdisciplinarity and wellbeing: A critical realist general theory of interdisciplinarity. London and New York: Routledge. Blau, P.M. (1981). Introduction: diverse views of social structure and their common denominator. In Blau, P.M. & Merton, R.K. (eds.), Continuity in Structural Inquiry (pp. 1–23). Beverly Hills: Sage. Blau, P.M. (1987). Microprocess and macrostructure. In K.S. Cook (ed.), Social Exchange Theory (pp. 83–100). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Brooks, R.A., & Maes, P. (eds). (1994). Artificial life IV; proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Clark, A. (1997). 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Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34, 260–282. Sawyer, R. K. (2005). Social emergence: societies as complex systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sawyer, R.K. (2003). Nonreductive individualism: Part 2, Social causation. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 33, 203–224. Winch, P. (1993). The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy‭ (SAMT, Trans.). Tehran, Iran: SAMT. (shrink)

According to the deductive-nomological account of ground, a fact A grounds another fact B in case the laws of metaphysics determine the existence of B on the basis of the existence of A. Accounts of grounding of this particular variety have already been developed in the literature. My aim in this paper is to sketch a new version of this account. My preferred account offers two main improvements over existing accounts. First, the present account is able to deal with necessitarian (...) as well as non-necessitarian cases of grounding by acknowledging the existence of two types of metaphysical laws. I will argue that we should assume that metaphysical laws come in the necessitarian as well as in the non-necessitarian varietyclosely paralleling the distinction between strict and non-strict laws in the philosophy of science. The second main improvement of the present account is that this account is able to provide an explanation of why the laws of metaphysics have a direction built into them. I will argue that we should characterize metaphysical laws with the help of Theodore Sider’s (2011) notion of structure, which is a descendent of David Lewis’s (1983) notion of naturalness. According to the account of metaphysical laws developed in this paper, metaphysical laws express in their antecedents either perfectly structural truths or more structural truths than in their consequents. Since on Sider’s account structural features of reality are fundamental features of reality, the account is able to explain as to why the laws of metaphysics take us from the fundamental to the derivative. (shrink)

l. There is an antinomy in Hare's thought between Ought-Implies-Can and No-Indicatives-from-Imperatives. It cannot be resolved by drawing a distinction between implication and entailment. 2. Luther resolved this antinomy in the l6th century, but to understand his solution, we need to understand his problem. He thought the necessity of Divine foreknowledge removed contingency from human acts, thus making it impossible for sinners to do otherwise than sin. 3. Erasmus objected (on behalf of Free Will) that this violates Ought-Implies-Can which he (...) supported with Hare-style ordinary language arguments. 4. Luther a) pointed out the antinomy and b) resolved it by undermining the prescriptivist arguments for Ought-Implies-Can. 5. We can reinforce Luther's argument with an example due to David Lewis. 6. Whatever its merits as a moral principle, Ought-Implies-Can is not a logical truth and should not be included in deontic logics. Most deontic logics, and maybe the discipline itself, should therefore be abandoned. 7. Could it be that Ought-Conversationally-Implies-Can? Yes - in some contexts. But a) even if these contexts are central to the evolution of Ought, the implication is not built into the semantics of the word; b) nor is the parallel implication built into the semantics of orders; and c) in some cases Ought conversationally implies Can, only because Ought-Implies-Can is a background moral belief. d) Points a) and b) suggest a criticism of prescriptivism - that Oughts do not entail imperatives but that the relation is one of conversational implicature. 8. If Ought-Implies-Can is treated as a moral principle, Erasmus' argument for Free Will can be revived (given his Christian assumptions). But it does not 'prove' Pelagianism as Luther supposed. A semi-Pelagian alternative is available. (shrink)

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ETHICS. AFTER NIETZSCHE -/- Preface This book tells the story of twentieth-century ethics or, in more detail, it reconstructs the history of a discussion on the foundations of ethics which had a start with Nietzsche and Sidgwick, the leading proponents of late-nineteenth-century moral scepticism. During the first half of the century, the prevailing trends tended to exclude the possibility of normative ethics. On the Continent, the trend was to transform ethics into a philosophy of existence whose self-appointed task was (...) that of describing the human condition as consisting of choices, as unavoidable as arbitrary, without any attempt at providing criteria for making such choices. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the heir of ethics was a philosophy of morality, that is, an analysis of the language of morality that intended to clarify valuations without trying to justify them. 1958 was the year of the normative turn that led to the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy, a turn followed by decades of controversies between distinct kinds of normative ethics: utilitarian, Kantian, virtue ethics. While the controversy was raging, a quiet revolution took place, that of applied ethics which surprisingly dissolved the controversy's very subject matter by providing methods for making convergence possible on intermediate principles even when no agreement was available about first principles. The normative turn and the revolution of applied ethics have led us, at the turn of the century, to a goal that was quite far from the starting point. Instead of scepticism and relativism that was the fashion at the beginning of the century, at the beginning of the third millennium impartial and universal moral arguments seem to hold the spot being supported, if not by a final rational foundation, at least by reasonableness, the most precious legacy of the Enlightenment. -/- ● TABLE OF CONTENTS -/- ● I Anglo-Saxon philosophy: naturalism 1. Dewey beyond evolutionism and utilitarianism 2. Dewey and anti-essentialist moral epistemology 3. Dewey and naturalist moral ontology 4. Dewey and normative ethics of conduct and function 5. Perry and semantic naturalism -/- ● II Anglo-Saxon philosophy: ideal utilitarianism and neo-intuitionism 1. Moore's critique of utilitarian empiricism 2. Moore on the naturalistic fallacy 3. Moore on the nature of intrinsic value 4. Moore on ideal utilitarianism 5. Prichard on the priority of the right over the good 6. Ross's coherentist moral epistemology 7. Ross's moral ontology: realism, pluralism, and non-naturalism 8. Ross's normative ethics of prima facie duties -/- The chapter reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore's early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. It stresses the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. It argues that PE is more a patchwork of somewhat diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. -/- ●III Anglo-Saxon philosophy: non-cognitivism 1. The Scandinavian School, the Vienna circle and proto-emotivism 2. Wittgenstein and the ineffability of ethics 3. Russell's and Ayer's radical emotivism 4. Stevenson and moderate emotivism 5. Stevenson and the pragmatics of moral language 6. Stevenson and the methods for solving ethical disagreement 7. Hare and prescriptivism The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of 'good', its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with 'emotive' meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell's ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson's theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. A section reconstructs the discussion from the Forties about Hume's law, mentioning Karl Popper's argument and Richard Hare's early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- ●IV Anglo-Saxon philosophy: critics of non-cognitivism 1. Neo-naturalism and its objections to the naturalistic fallacy argument 2. Objections to Hume's law 3. Clarence Lewis and the pragmatic contradiction 4. Toulmin and the good reasons approach 5. Baier and moral reasons 5. Baier, social moralities and the absolute morality 6. Baier and the moral point of view 7. Baier and the contents of absolute ethics -/- ● V Continental philosophy: the philosophy of values 1. Max Weber and the polytheism of values 2. Phenomenology against psychologism and rationalism 3. Reinach and the theory of social acts 4. Scheler and the material ethics of values 5. Hartmann and the ontology of values 6. Plessner, Gehlen and the Philosophische Anthropologie -/- The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl's project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the apriori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy conducted in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach's theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that sketches the ideas 'discovered' later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section discusses Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of 'values' – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler, who claimed to be Husserl's legitimate heirs. -/- ● VI Continental philosophy: the critics of the philosophy of values 1. Freud, the Superego and Civilization 2. Heidegger on original ethos against ethics 3. Sartre and de Beauvoir on authenticity and ambiguity 4. Adorno and Horkheimer on emancipation and immoralism -/- ●VII Post-liberal theologians and religious thinkers 1. Barth on the autonomy of faith from ethics 2. Developments of Reformed moral theology after Barth 3. Bonhoeffer on the concrete divine command and ethics of penultimate realities 4. Developments of Reformed and Catholic moral theology after world war II 5. Baeck and the transformation of liberal Judaism 6. Rosenzweig against liberal Judaism 7. Buber and religion as the vital lymph of morality 8. Heschel and Judaism as a science of actions -/- The chapter examines the main protagonists of Christian theology and Jewish religious thinking in the twentieth century. It stresses how the main dilemmas of contemporary philosophical ethics lie at the root of the various path of inquiry taken by these thinkers. -/- ● VIII Normative ethics: neo-Utilitarianism 1. The discussion on act and rule utilitarianism 2. Hare on two-tiered preference utilitarianism 3. Harsanyi, Gauthier and rational choice ethics 4. Parfit, utilitarianism and the idea of a person 5. Brandt and indirect conscience utilitarianism -/- The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick's and Moore's fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine refuted. Two examples give the reader a glimpse at this uproarious process. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This transformation results in preference utilitarianism combined with a 'Kantian' version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare's two-level preference utilitarianism, where act utilitarianism plays the function of the eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of an action-guiding practical device. -/- ● IX Normative ethics: neo-Aristotelianism and virtue ethics 1. Hannah Arendt, action and judgement 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer and phronesis 3. Alasdair MacIntyre on practices, virtues, and traditions 5. Stuart Hampshire on deliberation 6. Bernard Williams and moral complexity 7. Feminist ethics -/- Sect 1 reconstructs the post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named 'Rehabilitation of practical philosophy' is described. Heidegger's most brilliant disciples were the promoters of this Rehabilitation. Hans-Georg Gadamer is a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle's lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger's lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the significant role of the notion of phronesis. Sect 3 discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. It argues that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. The chapter gives a short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot's and Peter Geach's critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre's grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- ● X Normative ethics: Kantian and rights-based ethics 1. Dialogical constructivism 2. Apel, Habermas and discourse ethics 3. Gewirth and rights-based ethics 4. Nagel on agent-relative reasons 5. Donagan and persons as ends in themselves Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This current started with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. The chapter offers an examination of his argument in some detail, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas's elaboration on Apel's theory. -/- ● XI The applied ethics renaissance 1. Elisabeth Anscombe on the atom bomb 2. From medical ethics to bioethics 3. Rawls and public ethics 3. Nozick, Dworkin and further developments of public ethics 5. Sen and the revival of economic ethics -/- The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin's new casuistry. The chapter argues that Rawls's distinction between a "political" and a "metaphysical" approach to the theory of justice, one central part of ethical theory, is a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and the new casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter. The idea is that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls' view never will be close – on the essential criteria for judgment. -/- ● XII Fin-de-siècle metaethics 1. Deontic logics 2. Anti-realism 3. External realism 4. Internal realism 5. Kantian constructivism -/- The chapter illustrates the fresh start of meta-ethical discussion in the Eighties and Nineties and the resulting new alignments: metaphysical naturalism, internal realism, anti-realism, and constructivism. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a new solution to Mary’s puzzle in Jackson’s famous knowledge argument. We are told that imprisoned Mary knows all facts or truths about color and color vision. On her release, she learns something new according to B-type of materialism and according to property dualism. I argue that this cognitive improvement can only be accounted for in terms of what Schellenberg has recently called “capacitism,” namely the claim that that experience is constitutively a matter of (...) discriminating and singling out particulars by employing perceptual capacities. Of course, I am not claiming that knowing the phenomenal character is simply the possession of abilities, let alone that the phenomenal character is a sort of know-how. That is why my claim is not affiliated with Lewis and Nemirow's ability hypothesis position. I take for granted here a sort of property-representationalism, according to which the phenomenal character of experience supervenes on the cluster of properties that the respective experiences represent. On her release, Mary acquires those perceptual abilities on the basis of which she learns to discriminate all shades of color. And after applying her old physical concept RED to the shade of red, she comes to know what it is like to experience red (propositional knowledge). (shrink)

The present thesis focuses on counterfactuals. Specifically, we will address new questions and open problems that arise for the standard semantic accounts of counterfactual conditionals. The first four chapters deal with the Lewisian semantic account of counterfactuals. On a technical level, we contribute by providing an equivalent algebraic semantics for Lewis' variably strict conditional logics, which is notably absent in the literature. We introduce a new kind of algebra and differentiate between local and global versions of each of (...) class='Hi'>Lewis' variably strict conditional logics. We study the algebraic properties of Lewis' logics and the structure theory of our newly introduced algebras. Additionally, we employ a new algebraic construction, based on the framework of Boolean algebras of conditionals, to provide an alternative semantics for Lewisian counterfactual conditionals. This semantic account allows us to establish new truth conditions for Lewisian counterfactuals, implying that Lewisian counterfactuals are definable conditionals, and each counterfactual can be characterized as a modality of a corresponding probabilistic conditional. We further extend these results by demonstrating that each Lewisian counterfactual can also be characterized as a modality of the corresponding Stalnaker conditional. The resulting formal semantic framework is much more expressive than the standard one and, in addition to providing new truth conditions for counterfactuals, it also allows us to define a new class of conditional logics falling into the broader framework of weak logics. On the philosophical side, we argue that our results shed new light on the understanding of Lewisian counterfactuals and prompt a conceptual shift in this field: Lewisian counterfactual dependence can be understood as a modality of probabilistic conditional dependence or Stalnakerian conditional dependence. In other words, whether a counterfactual connection occurs between A and B depends on whether it is "necessary" for a Stalnakerian/probabilistic dependence to occur between A and B. We also propose some ways to interpret the kind of necessity involved in this interpretation. The remaining two chapters deal with the probability of counterfactuals. We provide an answer to the question of how we can characterize the probability that a Lewisian counterfactual is true, which is an open problem in the literature. We show that the probability of a Lewisian counterfactual can be characterized in terms of belief functions from Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence, which are a super-additive generalization of standard probability. We define an updating procedure for belief functions based on the imaging procedure and show that the probability of a counterfactual A > B amounts to the belief function of B imaged on A. This characterization strongly relies on the logical results we proved in the previous chapters. Moreover, we also solve an open problem concerning the procedure to assign a probability to complex counterfactuals in the framework of causal modelling semantics. A limitation of causal modelling semantics is that it cannot account for the probability of counterfactuals with disjunctive antecedents. Drawing on the same previous works, we define a new procedure to assign a probability to counterfactuals with disjunctive antecedents in the framework of causal modelling semantics. We also argue that our procedure is satisfactory in that it yields meaningful results and adheres to some conceptually intuitive constraints one may want to impose when computing the probability of counterfactuals. (shrink)

Predication is a lingual relation. We have this relation when a term is said (λέγεται) of another term. This simple definition, however, is not Aristotle’s own definition. In fact, he does not define predication but attaches his almost in a new field used word κατηγορεῖσθαι to λέγεται. In a predication, something is said of another thing, or, more simply, we have ‘something of something’ (ἓν καθ᾿ ἑνὸς). (PsA. , A, 22, 83b17-18) Therefore, a relation in which two terms are posited (...) to each other in a way that one is said (predicated) of the other is a predication. The term of which the other term is said is called a subject (ὑποκειμένον) and the other, which is said about the subject, is called the predicate. Thus, in a predication the predicate is predicated of the subject; given that being predicated is almost as the same as being said. The relation between being said and being predicated is so close that ‘if something is said of a subject both its name and its definition are necessarily predicated of the subject.’ (Cat., 5, 2a19-26) This, however, is true only about the second genera and not the accidents. a) Nature of relation in predication What is Aristotle’s theory about the nature of the relation in a predication? How does he fundamentally understand this relation? Phil Corkum distinguishes between predication logic and traditional term logic and argues that the relation between subject and predicate in Aristotle is of the latter kind. While in predicate logic, subjects and predicates have distinct roles, they have the same role in traditional term logic. In predication logic, subjects refer, but predicates characterize. Thereupon, a sentence expresses a truth if the object to which the subject refers is correctly characterized by the predicate. In traditional term logic, both subjects and predicates refer and a sentences expresses a truth if both name one and the same thing. He concludes that Aristotle ‘problematically conflates prediction and identity claims’ because while he thinks both subjects and predicates refer, he would deny that a sentence is true just in case the subject and the predicate name one and the same thing. Based on this, Corkum believes that Aristotle’s core semantic is not identity but the weaker relation of constitution, which is a mereological interpretation: ‘All men are mortal’ is true just in case the mereological sum of humans is part of the mereological sum of mortals. b) Aristotle’s theory of predication: one or two theories? Frank Lewis finds an inconsistent gap between the theory of predication in the Categories and that in the later books of the Metaphysics VII, 6. So too Joan Kung, Terry Irwin, Daniel Graham. c) Distinction of ‘being said of’ and ‘being in’ Owen enumerates the texts in which Aristotle’s distinction between ‘being said of’ and ‘being in’ is asserted: OI. 11b38-12a17; To., 127b1-4; Cat. 1a20-b9; 2a11-14; 2a27-b6; 2b15-17; 3a7-32; 9b22-24 d) Predication in Aristotle and the standard ‘S is P’ Marie De Rijk Lambertus thinks that the ‘S is P’ pattern is misleading when it comes to express predication in Aristotle. In his view, ‘The Aristotelian procedure should be described in terms of appositively assigning an attribute (κατηγορούμενον) to a substrate (ὑποκείμενον), rather than ascribing a predicate to a subject by means of a copula…. The comment should be considered an attribute which is said to fall to a substrate, without understanding this procedure in terms of sentence predication.’ e) Aristotle’s predication: bipartite or tripartite? It is a difficulty to make Aristotle’s theories of name-verb predication and tripartite predication consistent. The reason is that tripartite is not consistant with his name-verb structure based on which he says that the predicate term is the ‘verb.’ (20a31; 20b1-2; 16a13-5) The problem is that in a tripartite form like ‘Socrates is white’ we cannot take ‘is white’ as the verb because, based on Aristotle himself, no part of a verb can be significant itself. (16b6-7) However, his assertions about the equivalences between the two structures (OI. 12, 21b9-10; PrA. 51b13-16; Met., 1017b22-30) must mean that they are not inconsistent in his own view. Thus, as Allen Bāck points, ‘Aristotle seems to think that he has a single, consistent theory.’ The sense of saying or speaking as the root sense of rhema makes the relation between predication (saying something of something) and verb more interesting. The use of rhema in the sense of a long expression approves this. In Plato’s work (399ac) where Socrates claims that the name anthropos derives from anthron ha opopen (‘he who examines what he has seen’) we have an onoma from, or in place of, a rhema. 1) Subject The subject (ὑποκειμένον) is that of which another term is said or predicated. Aristotle’s own definition is of a much more philosophical value: ‘By subject I mean that which is expressed by an affirmative term (λέγω δὲ ὑποκείμενον τὸ κάταφάσει δηλούμενον).’ (Met., K, 1067b18) Throughout Aristotle’s work, three kinds of subjects can be found: possible, prime and absolute subject. a) Possible subject Those things that can take the position of a subject in a predication we call possible subjects, no matter they can or cannot take the position of predicate in any predication. All terms except the ultimate predicates are possible subjects because they can take the position of subject. b) Prime subject Those that in any predication can only take the position of a subject and not the position of a predicate are prime subjects. (Cat., 5, 3a36-b2; Met., Z, 1028b36-1029a1) This is the truest sense of subject and belongs only to substances. (Met., Z, 1029a1-2) In fact, ‘that which is not predicated of a subject, but of which all else is predicated’ is a substance. (Met., Z, 1029a7-9) In Categories, besides primary substances (Cat., 2, 1b3-6), individual qualities are also said not to be able to be said of anything else. (Cat., 2, 1a23-29) Aristotle’s examples are a certain ‘knowledge-of-grammar’ (τὶς γράμματικὴ) and ‘an individual white’ (τὸ τὶ λευκὸν). Thus, although substances are indeed in the truest sense individuals and, thereby, in the truest sense primary subjects, other individuals can take the position of subject as well. c) Absolute subject While substances are prime subjects of all other things, there is still something of which substances can be predicated and this predication is not an accidental predication: matter. (Met., Z, 1029a21-24) This predication is, indeed, the predication of a ‘form or this’ on matter and material substance. (Met., Θ, 1049a34-36) The only thing that is absolutely a subject, therefore, and can be a predicate is prime matter (πρώτη ὓλη). (Met., Θ, 1049a24-27) d) Subject and substance The most important thing in being a substance is being a subject: ‘It is because the primary substances are subjects for all the other things and all the other things are predicated of them or are in them, that they are called substances most of all.’ (Cat., 5, 2b15-17) And what is nearer to this position is more a substance as a species is more a substance than a genus.’ (Cat., 5, 2b7-8) e) Primary versus accidental subject A subject is a primary subject in a predication when the predicate is predicated of it as itself. In such a case, the subject is the subject of the predicate qua itself and not qua something else. A subject, on the one hand, is an accidental subject when it is not the primary subject of the predicate that is predicated on it. It means that a subject is an accidental subject when the predicate is predicated of it not qua itself but qua something else. An accidental subject is, therefore, anything other than a substance. 2) Predicate as universal It is evident from our discussion of kinds of subjects that except matter, primary substances (if we ignore both accidental predication and cases of absolute subjects) and other individuals, everything else can take the position of a predicate. Since primary substances are individuals, it results that everything except matter and individuals are capable to take the position of predicate. The immediate consequence of this is that the predicate must be a universal. When individuals cannot take the position of predicate, this position cannot be taken by any particular. Therefore, only universals can be predicated of others. Moreover, albeit universals can be a simple subject (for another universal), they are not prime subjects. The closeness of universal and predicate is to the extent that Aristotle differentiates universal from subject. (Met., Θ, 1049a27-30) 3) Categories or classes of predicates Aristotle distinguishes ten highest classes into one of which each predicate must necessarily fall: substance (or what a thing is), quality, quantity, relation, place, time, position, state, activity and passivity. (Cat., 4, 1b25-27; To., I, 9, 103b20- ; PsA., A, 22, 83b13-23) The substance counted among predicates must refer to secondary and not primary substances not only because Aristotle insists that primary substances cannot be predicated but also from his own examples of the category of substance: man and animal. (To., I, 9, 103b25) However, if a predicate be asserted of itself or its genus be asserted of it, the predicate signifies substance or what is; but if ‘one kind of predicate is asserted of another kind,’ it signifies one of the other nines. (To., I, 9, 103b30) These categories are so comprehensive that no predicate can remain outside them so that even non-being has as many senses as categories. (Met., M, 1089a26-30) a) That whether Aristotle’s categories are merely linguistic or fundamentally ontological is a so much controversial dispute. Some like G. E. R. Lloyd believe that ‘categories are primarily intended as a classification of reality … rather than of the signifying terms themselves.’ b) Although Aristotle’s categories have been historically regarded as a classification of predications, there are some recent commentators like Jonathan Barnes that think it is classifying predicates and not predications. 4) Kinds of predicates In his introduction of Categories, as J. W. Thorp truly points out , Aristotle distinguishes between the category of substance and the other categories using μὲν ... δὲ construction. This construction illustrates that beside tenfold classification of categories, there is an even more crucial differentiation between two kinds of predicates: substance or what is on the one hand and the other nine ones on the other hand: the distinction between what is predicated of the subject as what it is and what is predicated of it as an accident. Therefore, we have three kinds of classification - a twofold, a fourfold and a tenfold-complicatedly classifying the same thing, viz. the predicate. Predicates can be divided also to four kinds: property, definition, genus and accident. (To., I, 4, 101b11-20) A property is that predicate that is convertible with its subject and does not signify its essence. A definition is that predicate that is convertible with its subject and signifies its essence. It is a genus if it is not predicated convertibly and is contained in the definition of its subject. And it is an accident if it is neither convertible nor contained in the definition of its subject. (To., I, 8, ^103b3) All of these four kinds are among categories. (To., I, 9, 103b20) It seems that there might be some kind of relation between the twofold and the fourfold distinction: whereas genus and definition are predicated as what it is, accidents are not so predicated. There seems to be some rules that determine to each of these four kinds each predicate belongs. At To., IV, 123b30ff. Aristotle asserts: ‘If B has a contrary and A does not, then B does not belong to A as its genus.’ There is a dispute around per se accidents (τὰ καθ’ αὑτὰ συμβεβηκότα) (Topics., 102a18) whether they must be regarded as either of the four kinds or as a fifth kind. Barnes (1970) argued that they ‘do not fit at all neatly into the fourfold classification.’ He argues that based on the definition of accidents at A, 5, 102b4-5, they must be accidents but based on another definition, A, 5, 102b6-7, they cannot be accidents. He also defends the view that they are not properties. Barnes concludes: ‘This shows that the two definitions are not equivalent, and hence that the ‘predicables’ are not well-defined.’ Demetris J. Hadgopoulos defends the view that the two definitions of accidents are equivalent and per se accidents are properties. 5) Five types of predications We have five kinds of predications based on our division of subjects and our discussion of predicates: simple, primary (itself divided to substantial and accident), accidental (itself divided to primary and secondary), aoincidental and absolute predication. a) Simple predication. This is a predication in which a universal is predicated of either a particular or a universal subject. This sense of predication includes all other senses except the first kind of accidental predication. b) Primary predication. This is a predication in which a universal is predicated of a primary subject, namely a substance. A primary predication is of two kinds: i) Substantial predication. A primary predication in which the predicate is part of, or is included in, the definition of the subject. The universal that is the predicate here is the definition or the genus or the species or the diferentia of the subject. It is this predication that Aristotle calls a unity: ‘A statement may be called a unity … because it exhibits a single predicate as inhering not accidentally in a single subject.’ (PsA., B, 10, 93b35-37) It is only substantial predicates that can be predicated of each other: ‘Predicates which are not substantial are not predicated of one another.’ (PsA., A, 22, 83b18-19) Aristotle defines a substantial predication also in another way. A predication in which a higher genus is predicated on a lower genus, species, a substance or an individual, (or a species is predicated on an individual) is a substantial predication. Therefore, a substantial predication is a predication in a series that has individuals on one of its ends and a general category on its other end. In fact, only substantial predicates can be predicated of one another. (PsA., A, 22, 83b17-19) This series cannot be an infinite series because otherwise not only substances would not be definable but also a genus would be equal to one of its own species. (PsA., A, 22, 83b7-10) -/- ii) Accident predication. A primary predication in which the predicate is not part of, or is not included in, the definition of its subject. The universal that is the predicate here is the property or the accident of the subject. c) Accidental predication. This is a predication in which the subject is not a primary subject and its predicate is a substance. This predication is of two kinds: i) Primary accidental predication. This is a predication in which an accident is predicated of substance. Such a predication can go ad infinitum, which is inferable from Aristotle’s assertion that the secondary accidental predication cannot go ad infinitum. ii) Secondary accidental predication. It is a predication in which an accident is predicated of another accident. Such a predication, Aristotle asserts, cannot go ad infinitum because even more than two accidents cannot be combined. Now what is the meaning of Aristotle’s assertion that we cannot continue this ad infinitum? Does it mean that we cannot continue the predication ‘The musician is white’ and say ‘The white is Athenian?’ But why not? Or maybe he means that by adding any predication, we are still in a condition of predicating two accidents of a substance on each other. -/- As primary subjects, substances can also take the position of predicate though not essentially but accidentally. In propositions like ‘the white is a log’ or ‘That big thing is a log’ we observe substance taking the position of predicate but this is only accidentally: ‘When I affirm ‘the white is a log,’ I mean that something which happens to be white is a log- not that white is the subject in which log inheres (οὐχ ὡς τὸ ὑποκείμενον τῷ ξύλῳ τὸ λευκόν ἐστι), for it was not qua white or qua a species of white that the white (thing) came to be a log (οὔτε λευκὸν ὄν οὔθ᾿ ὃπερ λευκόν τι ἐγἐνετο ξύλον), and the white (thing) is consequently not a log except incidentally.’ (PsA., 22, 83a3-9) Aristotle compares this accidental use of substance in the position of predicate with the substantial use of it in the place of a subject: ‘On the other hand, when I affirm ‘the log is white,’ I do not mean that something else, which happens to be a log, is white (οὐχ ὃτι ἓτερόν τί ἐστι λευκόν, ἐκείνῳ δὲ συμβέβηκε ξύλῳ εἶναι), (as I should if I said ‘the musician is white,’ which would mean ‘The man who happens also to be a musician is white’); on the contrary, log is here the subject- the subject which actually came to be white, and did so qua wood or qua a species of wood and qua nothing else.’ (PsA., 22, 83a8-14) Aristotle asks us not to call propositions like ‘The white is a log’ a predication at all or at least call them accidental predication instead of simple (ἁπλως) predication. (PsA., A, 22, 83a14-17) An accidental predication, in which we have a substance in the place of predicate, is different from an essential predication in that while the subject of an accidental predication is said to be the predicate not by itself but as something different with which it coincides, the subject of an essential predicate is said to be the predicate by itself and not because it is something else: ‘Since there are attributes which are predicated of a subject essentially and not accidentally- not, that is, in the sense in which we say ‘That white (thing) is a man,’ which is not the same mode of predication as when we say ‘The man is white’: the man is white not because he is something else but because he is man, but the white is man because ‘being white’ coincides with ‘humanity’ within one subject. Therefore, there are terms such as are essentially subjects of predicates. (PsA., A, 19, 81a24-29) This capability of ‘non-essentially and only accidentally’ being a subject does belong, in fact, to all sensible things. (PsA., A, 27a32-36) d) Coincidental predication. this is a predication in which none of the subject and predicate are a substance or an individual. In this predication, one of the accidents of a substance or individual is predicated of one of the other accidentals of the same substance or individual. For example, when it is said that ‘The white is musical,’ there is an individual, say Socrates, for which both of white and musical are accidents. e) Absolute predication. This is a predication in which a form or a substance is predicated of a matter or a material substance. Some commentators like Loux and Lewis regarded this predication as close to accident predication, both based on inherence. As R.M. Dancy points out, these predications make Aristotle’s theory of predication immanentist: not only accident predications are explained by the immanence of accidents in substances, some of the substantial predications, which were not explained in Categories, are also explained by the immanence of form in matter. It is interesting that in this kind of predication, it is the predicate and not the subject, which is in the strictest sense substance. As the central books of Metaphysics claim, the form is the substance. Thus, in this predication, substance gets away from the sense of ὑποκείμενον. Corkum mentiones 68a19 as the only instance where Aristotle explicitly claims that a term may be predicated of itself, a passage that is, in Corkum’s view, problematic. 6) Demonstrable predicates Those predicates are demonstrable that are so related to their subjects that there are other predicates prior to them predicable of their subjects (ἔτι δ᾿ ἄλλος, εἰ ὧν πρότερα ἄττα κατηγορεῖται). (PsA., A, 22, 83b32-34) 7) Series of predications Since it is possible for a predicate to be itself the subject of another predication, we can have a series of predications in which the predicate of a predication is the subject of the next predication. This series has the following features: a) It has a limit (in number) (PsA., A, 22, 83b14-16) on the side of subjects: there are subjects that cannot themselves be predicated (PsA., A, 27, 43a39-41), which are, as we noted, prime subjects: particulars, i.e. prime substances and other individuals. (PsA., A, 19-22) Aristotle calls them ultimate (ὓστατον). (PsA., 21, 82a36-b1) b) It has a limit (in number of kinds) (PsA., A, 22, 83b14-16) also on the side of predicates: there must be predicates that cannot be subjects. (PsA., A, 19-22; PsA., A, 27, 43a36-39) Aristotle calls them primary (πρῶτον). (PsA., A, 21, 82b1-4) These are the highest categories or the highest genera of categories. (PsA., A, 22, 83b14-16) c) The series has an escalating shape from mere subjects at its downside to mere predicates at its upside. It is Aristotle himself whos uses the words up and down in this sense. (e.g. PsA., A, 22, 83b2-3) d) The predications that lie between lowest and highest ones must be finite in number. (PsA., A, 19-22 especially: 20, 82a21-35) These have subjects and predicates, each capable of both of the roles of being subject and being predicated. A result of this fitness is that neither demonstration can go to infinity nor everything is demonstrable, the two points Aristotle always insist on. e) The upward side includes the more universal ones and the downward the more particular ones. (PsA., 20, 82a21-23) f) It follows from the above features that ‘neither the ascending nor the descending series of predications … are infinite.’ (PsA., A, 22, 83b24-25) g) Reciprocation and convertibility. Except in case of terms (i.e. subjects and predicates) that are at each of the ends of series of predications, namely ultimates and primaries, it is possible to reciprocate (ἀντιστρέφειν) terms and convert the predication. (PsA., A, 19, 82a15-20) h) Antipredication. Antipredication means that in a predication (S is P), the subject becomes the predicate of its predicate (P is S) in the same category its predicate was predicated on it. For example, if P is in the category of quality, antipredication means that S be predicated of P in the category of quality. In other words, P is a quality of S and S is a quality of P. Aristotle rejects this. (PsA., A, 22, 83a36-b3) i) Self-predication versus other-predication. Aristotle distinguishes between a predication in which a term is said of itself and a predication in which a term is said of another. (Phy., Δ, 2, 209a31-33) j) Predicablity (Cat., 5, 3a36-b2): 1) Primary substances and individuals are not predicable. 2) Secondary substances are of two kinds: genus and species i) Genus is predicable able both of the species and of the individuals. ii) Species is predicable of the individual. 3) Differentiae are predicable both of the species and of the individuals. 8) Predication as classification a) Richard Patterson believes that Aristotle’s so repeated construction using hoper (estin A hoper B) in Topics (120a23 sq., 122b19, 26sq., 123a, 124a18, 125a29, 126a21, 128a35. Also in Posterior Analytics (83a24-30) (Brunschwig’s list. ‘expresses the fact that A is a kind of B (esti A B tis), that A is a species of the genus B.’ 9) Universal predication Aristotle defines universal predication (κατὰ παντὸς κατηγορεῖσθαι) as such: ‘wherever no instance of the subject (τῶν τοῦ ὑποκειμέμνου) can be found of which the other term cannot be asserted.’ (PrA., A, 24b27-29) In this predication, the subject is included in another as in a whole (ἐν ὃλῳ εἶναι) and the predicate is predicated of all of the subject (κατὰ παντὸς κατηγορεῖσθαι). (PrA., A, 24b26-27) Attach another discussion we had about ἐν ὃλῳ here. 10) Quantity of predication A predication, truly stated, has a quantity, which is the number of objects under the name of the subject of which the predicate is predicated. The quantity of subject can be stated in four ways: a. Indefinite: when the predicate belongs or does not belong to the subject without any mark to show to haw many of the particulars under the name of the subject it does or does not belong. E.g. ‘Man is white’; ‘Man is not white.’ (PrA., A, 24a20; OI., I, 7, 17b8-12) b. Universal quantity: When the predicate belongs to all or none of the subject. E.g. ‘Every man is animal’; ‘No man is animal.’ (PrA., A, 24a18-19; OI., I, 7, 17b5-6) The contrary of a predication of a universal quality is a predication of a universal quality. E.g. the contrary of ‘Every man is white’ is ‘No man is white.’ (OI., I, 7, 17b20-23) c. Particular quantity: When the predicate belongs (or does not belong) to some of the subject. E.g. ‘Some men are white’; ‘Some men are not white.’ (PrA., A, 24a19-20) d. Single quantity: when the subject is a proper name of only one object. E.g. ‘Socrates is white’; ‘Socrates is not white.’ The contrary of this predication is of a single quantity: ‘Socrates is not white.’ (OI., I, 7, 17b38-18a4) 11) Convertibility of predication. Some predications are convertible, that is, it is possible to change the place of subject and predicate in a true proposition so that the converted proposition remains true. This is supposed to mean that given the truth of a predication, the truth of the converted predication is inferable. The convert form of a predication depends on its quantity. a. Indefinite quantity: This predication has no strictly true convert because its quantity is not stated. b. Universal quantity: It can be converted in two ways: i) A negative universal can be converted to a negative universal in which the terms are changed. E.g. ‘No pleasure is good’ can be converted to ‘No good is pleasure.’ (PrA., A, 2, 25a5-8 and a14-19) ii) An affirmative universal can be converted to an affirmative particular in which the terms are changed. E.g. ‘Every pleasure is good’ can be converted to ‘Some good is pleasure.’ (PrA., A, 2, 25a7-9) c. Particular quantity: If it is negative, it cannot be converted but if it is affirmative, it can be converted to an affirmative predication with particular quantity. E.g. ‘Some pleasure is good’ can be converted to ‘Some good is pleasure.’ (PrA., A, 2, 25a10-13 and a20-24) d. Single quantity: It cannot be converted. 12) Characteristics of relations between subject and predicate 1. A predicate is of a wider range than its subject. It is based on this fact that Aristotle: a) Prevents individuals to be predicate because there is nothing of which an individual be of a wider range. In other words, it is due to the fact that since an individual is only ‘one particular’ thing and, thus, cannot be of a wider extent than anything that Aristotle prevents them of being a predicate. Matthews, however, thinks we cannot use Socrates, a substance and an individual, in the place of predicate and say it of Socrates because ‘Socrates does not classify Socrates: it names him.’ b) Prevents differentia, species and things under species to be predicated of genus. (To., Z, 6, 144a27-) c) Prevents the species and the things under it to be predicated of the differentia. (To., Z, 6, 144b1-4) d) Also about the effect because it is wider than its subject. (PsA., B, 17, 99a) e) Each attribute is wider than every individual it is predicated on, though several attributes, collectively considered, might not be wider but exactly the substance of a thing. (PsA., B, 13, 96a32-b1) 2. The predicate of a predicate of a subject will be predicated of the subject too: ‘whenever one thing is predicated of another as of a subject, all things said of what is predicated will be said of the subject too.’ (Cat., 3, 1b10-15) In fact, it is due to its predication of the subject that it is predicated of its predicate. (Cat., 5, 2a36-b1) Moreover, what is not predicated of the predicate of a subject cannot be predicated of it as well. (PrA., A, 27, 43b22-27) Thus, what, for example, is not predicated of animal, cannot be predicated of man. 3. The predicate of a subject can be predicated of its predicates as well. (Cat., 5, 3a1-6) For example, you call the individual man grammatical and, thence, you call both a man and an animal grammatical. Nonetheless, the predicate of a subject belongs to it more properly than to its higher predicates. (PrA., A, 27, 43a27-32) 4. It is only the subject that can be distributed and not the predicate. (PrA., A, 27, 43b16-22; OI, I, 7, 17b12-16) Therefore, we can say e.g. ‘Every man is animal’ but we cannot say ‘Every man is every animal.’ 5. It is the reason of the relation between subjects and predicates, that is the reason of predication, which is the subject of inquiry. (Met., Z, 1041a20-24) In other words, since it is a meaningless inquiry to ask why a thing is itself (Met., Z, 1041a14-15), the only remaining meaningful inquiry is to ask why something is something else, i.e. to ask about the reason of predication. 6. A subject cannot categorize its predicate in the same category in which it is categorized by it. If e.g. A is a quality of B, B cannot be a quality of A. Therefore, there is no reciprocation in the same category. (PsA., A, 22, 83a36-39) 13) Characteristics of series of predications 1. A series of secondary accidental predication cannot go ad infinitum for not even more than two terms can be comnbined. For an accident is not an accident of an accident, unless it be because both are accidents of the same subject. (Met., Γ, 1007b1-4) 2. Infinite series cannot be traversed in thought. (PsA., A, 22, 83b6-7) 3. The predications of genera on each other must be ended and cannot go to infinity because otherwise not only substances would not be definable but also a genus would be equal to one of its own species. (PsA., A, 22, 83b7-10) Therefore, a series of predication of genera on each other must be limited on both sides. There must be an upward limit in general categories as well as a downward limit in individual because they cannot be predicated of others. Whatever lies between these limits can both be predicated of others and others be predicated of them. (PrA., A, 27, 43a36-43) 4. The order of predicates matters: it makes a difference whether the series be ABC or BAC. (PsA., B, 13, 96b25-32) . (shrink)

According to strong composition as identity, the logical principles of one–one and plural identity can and should be extended to the relation between a whole and its parts. Otherwise, composition would not be legitimately regarded as an identity relation. In particular, several defenders of strong CAI have attempted to extend Leibniz’s Law to composition. However, much less attention has been paid to another, not less important feature of standard identity: a standard identity statement is true iff its terms are coreferential. (...) We contend that, if coreferentiality is dropped, indiscernibility is no help in making composition a genuine identity relation. To this aim, we analyse as a case study Cotnoir’s theory of general identity, in which indiscernibility is obtained thanks to a revisionary semantics and true identity statements are allowed to connect non-coreferential terms. We extend Cotnoir’s strategy for indiscernibility to the relation of comaternity, and we show that, neither in the case of composition nor in that of comaternity, indiscernibility contibutes to show that they are genuine identity relations. Finally, we compare Cotnoir’s approach with other versions of strong CAI endorsed by Wallace, Bøhn, and Hovda, and canvass the extent to which they violate coreferentiality. The comparative analysis shows that, in order to preserve coreferentiality, strong CAI is forced to adopt a non-standard semantic treatment of the singular/plural distinction. (shrink)

The thesis revolves around the following questions. What is time? Is time tensed or tenseless? Do things endure or perdure, i.e. do things persist by being wholly present at many times, or do they persist by having temporal parts? Do causes bring their effects into existence, or are they only correlated with each other? Within a realist approach to metaphysics, the author claims that the tensed view of time, the endurance view of persistence, and the production view of causality naturally (...) combine into what is called the dynamic view of temporal reality, and that the tenseless view of time, the perdurance view of persistence, and the correlation view of causality naturally combine into what is called the static view of temporal reality. The author argues in favour of a dynamic view. During the discussion a number of metaphysical problems are addressed. First, it is argued that the charges that the dynamic view is contradictory, made by J.M.E. McTaggart and David Lewis, are viciously circular. Secondly, it is argued that the static view cannot account for change, and deprives metaphysics of essential means to provide natural explanations to empirical phenomena. Thirdly, the author presents a novel account of the nature of necessary causal production. He suggests that the traditional conception of causes as essentially being external to the effects should be abandoned, and that causal production instead should be explicated in terms of reciprocal interactions between coexistent substances. (shrink)

It is commonly believed that the role of context cannot be ignored in the analysis of conditionals, and counterfactuals in particular. On truth conditional accounts involving possible worlds semantics, conditionals have been analysed as expressions of relative necessity: “If A, then B” is true at some world w if B is true at all the A-worlds deemed relevant to the evaluation of the conditional at w. A drawback of this approach is that for the evaluation of conditionals with the same (...) antecedents at some world, the same worlds are deemed as relevant for all occasions of utterance. But surely this is inadequate, if shifts of contexts between occasions are to be accounted for. Both the linguistic and logical implications of this defect are discussed, and in order to overcome it a modification of David Lewis’ ordering semantics for counterfactuals is developed for a modified language. I follow Lewis by letting contexts determine comparative similarity assignments, and show that the addition of syntactic context parameters (context indices) to the language gives the freedom required to switch between sets of relevant antecedent worlds from occasion to occasion by choosing the corresponding similarity assignment accordingly. Thus an account that extends Lewis’ analysis of a language containing a single counterfactual connective > to a language containing infinitely many counterfactual connectives >_c, each indexed by a different context name c, overcomes the limitations of traditional analyses. Finally it is also shown that these traditional accounts can be recovered from the modified account if certain contextual restrictions are in place. -/- . (shrink)

Second part of the translation into Spanish of David Lewis' "New Work for a Theory of Universals", corresponding to the last sections of the original paper. || Segunda parte de la traducción al español del trabajo de David Lewis "New Work for a Theory of Universals", correspondiente a últimas secciones del artículo original. Artículo original publicado en: Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 61, No. 4, Dec. 1983, pp. 343-377.

The editor's introduction discusses Clarence I. Lewis's conceptual pragmatism when compared with post-empiricist epistemology and argues that several Cartesian assumptions play a major role in the work, not unlike those of Logical Positivism. The suggestion is made that the Cartesian legacy still hidden in Logical Positivism turns out to be a rather heavy ballast for Lewis’s project of restructuring epistemology in a pragmatist key. More in detail, the sore point is the nature of inter-subjectivity. For Lewis, no (...) less than for the Logical Positivists at the time of the Protocols Controversy and Husserl in the Cartesian Meditations, this is a problem without a solution. The reason is that all these philosophers are apparently unable to realize that the existence of a plurality of knowing subjects cannot be treated at once both as a speculative problem and a methodological one. Lewis, thanks to his pragmatist approach both comes closer to the right answer and offers an even more naïve unsatisfactory solution to the pseudo-problem under discussion. The fact that he has clear in mind that inter-subjectivity means not only a plurality of linguistic utterances but also a co-existence of different kinds of practical behaviour. Eventually, the very idea of mind, the key-idea in the book, suffers from the above mentioned tension. In fact, if inter-subjective communication and action is considered at a methodological level, the very idea of mind would not need an analysis, and no kind of ‘reflexive’ analysis. Methodology might be limited to a ‘naïve’ level where the existence of the world and a plurality of subjects be taken as a bedrock of uncritically accepted evidence. Philosophical reflection on ultimate evidence, instead, would take a different approach, maybe the one Wittgenstein was putting into practice in the same years when Mind and the world order was written, namely it would be bound to question the very meaning of the idea of ‘mind’ as an undue fiction – the same carried out by Descartes – when he assumed the Cogito to be at once a body of self-evident truths and a thing or substance, the familiar Platonic idea of psyche or soul. (shrink)

Group agents like businesses, political parties, universities, and charity organisations dominate our social and political landscapes. Their activities dictate our legal structures, the availability of education and healthcare, and our collective leap into climate crisis. Hence, it is crucial that we understand both the norms of these group agents and how these norms arise. will argue for applying the organisational account of normativity to group agents as the best means to achieve this understanding. Roughly, the organisational account says that the (...) norms of an agent are determined by that agent’s structure insofar as that structure dictates both what the agent is capable of and what is necessary for its persistence in its present environment. I argue that expanding the organisational account to group agents best positions us to understand both what a group’s norms are and how they arise. I suggest that the organisational account provides us with a powerful tool for addressing unjust collective behaviours in the social and political spheres. (shrink)

Philosophers have routinely taken a pessimistic view of the account of cognition offered by David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature, claiming that Hume's limited explanatory resources cannot capture the rich complexity of our thought, judgment, and reasoning. I provide a qualified defense of Hume's attempt to analyze a cognitive activity in terms of objectual conception, ie conceiving or imagining an object. I defend Hume from objections offered by his contemporary Thomas Reid (and echoed by various recent Hume scholars), (...) presenting an interpretation of the account that resolves these worries. (shrink)

The High Court continues to exercise its inherent jurisdiction to make declarations about interventions into the lives of situationally vulnerable adults with mental capacity. In light of protective responses of health care providers and the courts to decision-making situations involving capacitous vulnerable adults, this paper has two aims. The first is diagnostic. The second is normative. The first aim is to identify the harms to a capacitous vulnerable adult’s autonomy that arise on the basis of the characterisation of situational vulnerability (...) and autonomy as fundamentally opposed concepts or the failure to adequately acknowledge the conceptual relationship between them at common law. The second part of this aim is to draw upon developments in analytic feminist philosophy to illustrate how standard approaches to autonomy are ill-equipped to capture the autonomy issues of capacitous vulnerable adults when their decisions regarding care and treatment are at stake. The second (normative) aim is to develop an account of self-authorised, intersubjective autonomy on the basis of analytic feminist insights into the relational practices of recognition. This account not only attempts to capture the autonomy of capacitous vulnerable adults and account for the necessary harms to their autonomy that arise from standard common law responses to their situational vulnerability, it is also predicated on the distinctions between mental capacity, the satisfaction of conditions for informed consent and the exercise of autonomy, meaning that it is better placed to fulfil the primary aim of the inherent jurisdiction – to facilitate the autonomy of vulnerable adults with capacity. (shrink)

Two primary roles for propositions are to be i) the objects of the attitudes (especially belief) and ii) the primary bearers of truth and falsity. Interpreters of John Locke are in very broad agreement that propositions, as he presents them, serve this second role. However, whether Locke’s propositions can be said to serve the first role is a more difficult question, as Locke was frequently regarded as having overlooked the force/content distinction, meaning that many interpreters regard him as taking the (...) propositions not to be the objects of the attitudes, but instead, to be identical to the attitudes themselves. In this paper, I present the basics of Locke’s accounts of propositions, truth, and judgment. I then explain the interpretive divide between those scholars who interpret Locke as offering a more philosophically appealing proto-Fregean account of propositions (one which does recognize the force/content distinction), and those who defend the philosophically less satisfying account which identifies propositions with judgments on textual grounds. Finally, I defend the conflation account against one of it’s largest philosophical challenges, by showing how that view can address the Frege-Geach problem. (shrink)

Being able to ask others to do things, and thereby giving them reasons to do those things, is a prominent feature of our interpersonal lives. In this paper, I discuss the distinctive normative status of requests – what makes them different from commands and demands. I argue for a theory of this normative phenomenon which explains the sense in which the reasons presented in requests are a matter of discretion. This discretionary quality, I argue, is something that other theories cannot (...) accommodate, though it is a significant aspect of the relations that people stand in to one another, and the kinds of practical reasons that flow from those relations. (shrink)

Resumen Ésta es la primera traducción al español de las guías “Atención después de la investigación: un marco para los comités de ética de investigación del National Health Service (NHS) (borrador versión 8.0)”. El documento afirma que existe una fuerte obligación moral de garantizar que los participantes enfermos de un estudio clínico hagan una transición después del estudio hacia una atención de la salud apropiada. Con “atención de la salud apropiada” se hace referencia al acceso para los participantes a la (...) atención de la salud, proporcionada principalmente por el National Health Service (en adelante NHS), el sistema de salud del Reino Unido, y/o a la intervención en estudio, también llamada producto o tratamiento en investigación. Las guías “Atención después de la investigación” están dirigidas principalmente a los miembros de los 79 comités de ética de investigación del NHS y a quienes presentan sus estudios de investigación ante estos comités. Se trata de un documento borrador muy avanzado, trabajado en numerosas reuniones, durante más de 3 años, que ha sido discutido por participantes de estudios y miembros de la comunidad, miembros y presidentes de comités de ética de investigación del Reino Unido, especialistas internacionales en ética de la investigación, representantes de la industria y otras partes interesadas. La redacción de las guías es producto de la colaboración de Neema Sofaer y Penney Lewis, ambas investigadoras del King’s College London, en el Centre of Medical Law and Ethics del Dickson Poon School of Law, y Hugh Davies, Asesor en Ética de la Investigación de la Health Research Authority (HRA) del NHS. El traductor del presente documento, Ignacio Mastroleo, participó del workshop en la Fundación Brocher (Ginebra, Suiza, diciembre de 2011) donde se revisó el borrador versión 7.0 y contribuyó en la revisión del borrador de la versión 8.0 durante el 2012. -/- Abstract This is the first Spanish translation of the guidelines “Care after research: a framework for NHS RECs (8th draft)”. The document states that there is a strong moral obligation to ensure that participants in a clinical study who are ill transition after the study to appropriate healthcare. The terms "appropriate healthcare" refer to participants’ access to health care, mainly provided by the National Health Service (NHS), the health system in the UK, and/or to the intervention study also named investigational treatment or product. The guides "Care after research" are mainly directed to members of the 79 NHS committees of research ethics (RECs) and to those who submit their research to these committees. This is a very advanced draft document, worked in several meetings, for more than three years, that has been discussed with study participants and community members, members and chairs of RECs in the UK, international specialists in research ethics, industry representatives and other stakeholders. The drafting of the guidelines is the result of the collaboration of Neema Sofaer and Penney Lewis, both researchers at King's College London, at the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics of Dickson Poon School of Law, and Hugh Davies, Research Ethics Advisor of the Health Research Authority (HRA) of the NHS. The translator of this document, Ignacio Mastroleo, attended the workshop at the Brocher Foundation (Geneva, Switzerland, December 2011) where draft version 7.0 was revised and contributed in the revision of draft version 8.0 during 2012. (shrink)

David Hume fancied himself the Newton of the mind, aiming to reinvent the study of human mental life in the same way that Newton had revolutionized physics. And it was his view that the novel account of belief he proposed in his Treatise of Human Nature was one of that work’s central philosophical contributions. From the earliest responses to the Treatise forward, however, there was deep pessimism about the prospects for his account. It is easy to understand the source of (...) this pessimism: The constraints he employed in theorizing stem from his Newtonian ambitions. Constraints such as his copy principle and his decision to rely only on variations in “force and vivacity” for differentiating types of mental states severely limit his available explanatory resources. However, it is one thing to regard an account as untenable, and quite another to understand where it fails. In this paper, I focus on one long-standing objection to Hume’s account — the objection that Hume cannot offer an account of negative belief or denial — as presented by Hume’s contemporary Thomas Reid, as well as more recently by Barry Stroud, and defend Hume from this objection. I argue that Hume both should and does endorse an account of negative belief based in relations of contrariety between contents, rather than between mental activities, and survey the different options available to Hume for spelling out an account of contrary contents. (shrink)

Care after research is for participants after they have finished the study. Often it is NHS-provided healthcare for the medical condition that the study addresses. Sometimes it includes the study intervention, whether funded and supplied by the study sponsor, NHS or other party. The NHS has the primary responsibility for care after research. However, researchers are responsible at least for explaining and justifying what will happen to participants once they have finished. RECs are responsible for considering the arrangements. There are (...) ethical and practical issues, in particular when participants may wish to continue on the study intervention after the study. There are also various guidelines and legislation. This document presents a framework of questions to help NHS RECs and their applicants. Information on this document’s development is here. (shrink)

This entry summarizes an emerging subdiscipline of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy (“x-phi”) which has variously been referred to as experimental philosophical bioethics, experimental bioethics, or simply “bioxphi”. Like empirical bioethics, bioxphi uses data-driven research methods to capture what various stakeholders think (feel, judge, etc.) about moral issues of relevance to bioethics. However, like its other parent discipline of x-phi, bioxphi tends to favor experiment-based designs drawn from the cognitive sciences – including psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics – to (...) tease out why and how stakeholders think as they do. (shrink)

Recently, the practice of deciding legal cases on purely statistical evidence has been widely criticised. Many feel uncomfortable with finding someone guilty on the basis of bare probabilities, even though the chance of error might be stupendously small. This is an important issue: with the rise of DNA profiling, courts are increasingly faced with purely statistical evidence. A prominent line of argument—endorsed by Blome-Tillmann 2017; Smith 2018; and Littlejohn 2018—rejects the use of such evidence by appealing to epistemic norms that (...) apply to individual inquirers. My aim in this paper is to rehabilitate purely statistical evidence by arguing that, given the broader aims of legal systems, there are scenarios in which relying on such evidence is appropriate. Along the way I explain why popular arguments appealing to individual epistemic norms to reject legal reliance on bare statistics are unconvincing, by showing that courts and individuals face different epistemic predicaments (in short, individuals can hedge when confronted with statistical evidence, whilst legal tribunals cannot). I also correct some misconceptions about legal practice that have found their way into the recent literature. (shrink)

Review of 'What is Political Philosophy?' by Charles Larmore, Princeton University Press 2020.

A Zoom discussion about racism and ableism in philosophy.

Recent years have seen fresh impetus brought to debates about the proper role of statistical evidence in the law. Recent work largely centres on a set of puzzles known as the ‘proof paradox’. While these puzzles may initially seem academic, they have important ramifications for the law: raising key conceptual questions about legal proof, and practical questions about DNA evidence. This article introduces the proof paradox, why we should care about it, and new work attempting to resolve it.

Recent work takes both philosophical and scientific progress to consist in acquiring factive epistemic states such as knowledge. However, much of this work leaves unclear what entity is the subject of these epistemic states. Furthermore, by focusing only on states like knowledge, we overlook progress in intermediate cases between ignorance and knowledge—for example, many now celebrated theories were initially so controversial that they were not known. -/- This paper develops an improved framework for thinking about intellectual progress. Firstly, I argue (...) that we should think of progress relative to the epistemic position of an intellectual community rather than individual inquirers. Secondly, I show how focusing on the extended process of inquiry (rather than the mere presence or absence of states like knowledge) provides a better evaluation of different types of progress. This includes progress through formulating worthwhile questions, acquiring new evidence, and increasing credence on the right answers to these questions. I close by considering the ramifications for philosophical progress, suggesting that my account supports rejecting the most negative views while allowing us to articulate different varieties of optimism and pessimism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A thriving project in contemporary epistemology concerns identifying and explicating the epistemic virtues. Although there is little sustained argument for this claim, a number of prominent sources suggest that curiosity is an epistemic virtue. In this paper, I provide an account of the virtue of curiosity. After arguing that virtuous curiosity must be appropriately discerning, timely and exacting, I then situate my account in relation to two broader questions for virtue responsibilists: What sort of motivations are required for epistemic (...) virtue? And do epistemic virtues need to be reliable? I will sketch an account on which curiosity is only virtuous when rooted in a non-instrumental appreciation of epistemic goods, before arguing that curiosity can exhibit intellectual virtue irrespective of whether one is reliable in satisfying it. (shrink)

Should we use the same standard of proof to adjudicate guilt for murder and petty theft? Why not tailor the standard of proof to the crime? These relatively neglected questions cut to the heart of central issues in the philosophy of law. This paper scrutinises whether we ought to use the same standard for all criminal cases, in contrast with a flexible approach that uses different standards for different crimes. I reject consequentialist arguments for a radically flexible standard of proof, (...) instead defending a modestly flexible approach on non-consequentialist grounds. The system I defend is one on which we should impose a higher standard of proof for crimes that attract more severe punishments. This proposal, although apparently revisionary, accords with a plausible theory concerning the epistemology of legal judgments and the role they play in society. (shrink)

I argue that traditional views on which beliefs are subject only to purely epistemic assessment can reject demographic profiling, even when based on seemingly robust evidence. This is because the moral failures involved in demographic profiling can be located in the decision not to suspend judgment, rather than supposing that beliefs themselves are a locus of moral evaluation. A key moral reason to suspend judgment when faced with adverse demographic evidence is to promote social equality—this explains why positive profiling is (...) dubious, along with more familiar cases of negative profiling, and why profiling is suspect even when no particular action is at stake. My suspension-based view, while compatible with revisionary normative positions, does not presuppose them. Philosophers of all stripes can reject demographic profiling both in thought and deed. (shrink)

The practice of assigning authorship for a scientific publication tends to raise two normative questions: 1) ‘who should be credited as an author?’; 2) ‘who should not be credited as an author but should still be acknowledged?’. With the publication of the revised version of The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (ECCRI), standard answers to these questions have been called into question. This article examines the ways in which the ECCRI approaches these two questions and compares these approaches (...) to standard definitions of ‘authorship’ and ‘acknowledgment’ in guidelines issued by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). In light of two scenarios and the problems posed by these kinds of ‘real-world’ examples, we recommend specific revisions to the content of the ECCRI in order not only to provide a more detailed account of the tasks deserving of acknowledgment, but to improve the Code’s current definition of authorship. (shrink)

What is it to be mentally healthy? In the ongoing movement to promote mental health, to reduce stigma, and to establish parity between mental and physical health, there is a clear enthusiasm about this concept and a recognition of its value in human life. However, it is often unclear what mental health means in all these efforts and whether there is a single concept underlying them. Sometimes, the initiatives for the sake of mental health are aimed just at reducing mental (...) illness, thus implicitly identifying mental health with the absence of diagnosable psychiatric disease. More ambitiously, there are high-profile proposals to adopt a positive definition, identifying mental health with psychic or even overall well-being. We argue against both: a definition of mental health as mere absence of mental illness is too thin, too undemanding, and too closely linked to psychiatric value judgments, while the definition in terms of well-being is too demanding and potentially oppressive. As a compromise, we sketch out a middle position. On this view, mental health is a primary good, that is, the psychological preconditions of pursuing any conception of the good life, including well-being, without being identical to well-being. (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)