Important advances in biomedical and behavioral research ethics have occurred over the past few decades, many of them centered on identifying and eliminating significant harms to human subjects of research. Comprehensive attention has not been paid to the totality of harms experienced by animal subjects, although scientific and moral progress require explicit appraisal of these harms. Science is a public good and the prioritizing within, conduct of, generation of, and application of research must soundly address questions about which research is (...) morally defensible and valuable enough to support through funding, publication, tenure, and promotion. Likewise, educational pathways of re-imagined science are critical. (shrink)

Naive observers viewed a sequence of colored Mondrian patterns, simulated on a color monitor. Each pattern was presented twice in succession, first under one daylight illuminant with a correlated color temperature of either 16,000 or 4,000 K and then under the other, to test for color constancy. The observers compared the central square of the pattern across illuminants, either rating it for sameness of material appearance or sameness of hue and saturation or judging an objective property—that is, whether its change (...) of color originated from a change in material or only from a change in illumination. Average color constancy indices were high for material appearance ratings and binary judgments of origin and low for hue–saturation ratings. Individuals’ performance varied, but judgments of material and of hue and saturation remained demarcated. Observers seem able to separate phenomenal percepts from their ontological projections of mental appearance onto physical phenomena; thus, even when a chromatic change alters perceived hue and saturation, observers can reliably infer the cause, the constancy of the underlying surface spectral reflectance. (shrink)

Nosotres, biólogues, ecologistas y otres profesionales dedicados a proteger la vida, les escribimos con una solicitud urgente. Les pedimos muy comedidamente que su organización o institución emita un comunicado oficial condenando la crisis en curso y abordando los impactos ambientales y humanitarios en Palestina.

Artykuł dotyczy dwóch bardzo mało znanych utworów słynnych twórców literatury niemieckiej. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, twórca Fausta, ma w swym dorobku moralizatorski wiersz pt. Dziennik. Jednak z obawy o posądzenie go o niemoralne treści, nigdy za życia poety utwór ten nie został opublikowany. Również Siedem wierszy Rainera Marii Rilkego jest bardzo rzadko drukowanych. Mimo, iż Rilke długo wzbraniał się przed lekturą utworów niemieckiego wieszcza, to jednak Dziennik stanowił wyjątek. Wiersz Goethego poświęcony jest kryzysowi seksualnemu i twórczemu bohatera, za którym kryje (...) się sam poeta. Wiersze Rilkego stanowią cykl poświęcony aktowi miłosnemu dwojga kochanków. Artykuł stara się przeanalizować wzajemne związki obu tych tak różnych dzieł i odpowiedzieć na pytanie, czy R. M. Rilke wzorował się na twórczości J. W. Goethego. (shrink)

We discuss some implications of the Holocaust for moral philosophy. Our thesis is that morality became distorted in the Third Reich at the level of its social articulation. We explore this thesis in application to several front-line perpetrators who maintained false moral self-conceptions. We conclude that more than a priori moral reasoning is required to correct such distortions.

[This is an edited version of a keynote talk at the conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) on November 28, 2022, with some minor additions and subtractions.] -/- There has recently been widespread discussion of whether large language models might be sentient or conscious. Should we take this idea seriously? I will break down the strongest reasons for and against. Given mainstream assumptions in the science of consciousness, there are significant obstacles to consciousness in current models: for example, their (...) lack of recurrent processing, a global workspace, and unified agency. At the same time, it is quite possible that these obstacles will be overcome in the next decade or so. I conclude that while it is somewhat unlikely that current large language models are conscious, we should take seriously the possibility that successors to large language models may be conscious in the not-too-distant future. (shrink)

There are two versions of the language-of-thought hypothesis (LOT): Representational LOT (roughly, structured representation), introduced by Ockham, and computational LOT (roughly, symbolic computation) introduced by Fodor. Like many others, I oppose the latter but not the former. Quilty-Dunn et al. defend representational LOT, but they do not defend the strong computational LOT thesis central to the classical-connectionist debate.

While first-person methods are essential for a science of consciousness, it is controversial what form these methods should take and whether any such methods are reliable. I propose that first-person experiments are a reliable method for investigating conscious experience. I outline the history of these methods and describe their characteristics. In particular, a first-person experiment is an intervention on a subject's experience in which independent variables are manipulated, extraneous variables are held fixed, and in which the subject makes a phenomenal (...) judgement about the target experience of the investigation. I examine historical and contemporary examples of first-person experiments: Mariotte’s demonstration of the visual blind spot, Kanizsa’s subjective contours, the Tse Illusion, and investigations of the non-uniform resolution of the visual field. I discuss the role that phenomenal contrast plays in these methods, and how they overcome typical introspective errors. I argue that their intersubjective repeatability is an important factor in their scientific status, however, it is not the only factor. That they control for extraneous factors and confounds is another factor which sets them apart from pseudoscience (e.g., the perception of auras), and hence another reason for classifying them as genuine experiments. Furthermore, by systematically mapping out the structure of visual experience, these methods make scientific progress. Praises of such first-person experimental approaches may not always be sung by philosophers and psychologists, but they continue to flourish as respectable scientific methods nevertheless. (shrink)

Empirical work has lately confirmed what many philosophers have taken to be true: people are ‘biased toward the future’. All else being equal, we usually prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. According to one hypothesis, the temporal metaphysics hypothesis, future-bias is explained either by our beliefs about temporal metaphysics—the temporal belief hypothesis—or alternatively by our temporal phenomenology—the temporal phenomenology hypothesis. We empirically investigate a particular version of the temporal belief hypothesis according to (...) which future-bias is explained by the belief that time robustly passes. Our results do not match the apparent predictions of this hypothesis, and so provide evidence against it. But we also find that people give more future-biased responses when asked to simulate a belief in robust passage. We take this to suggest that the phenomenology that attends simulation of that belief may be partially responsible for future-bias, and we examine the implications of these results for debates about the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

This paper discusses the Uniqueness Thesis, a core thesis in the epistemology of disagreement. After presenting uniqueness and clarifying relevant terms, a novel counterexample to the thesis will be introduced. This counterexample involves logical disagreement. Several objections to the counterexample are then considered, and it is argued that the best responses to the counterexample all undermine the initial motivation for uniqueness.

A key question in the philosophy of logic is how we have epistemic justification for claims about logical entailment (assuming we have such justification at all). Justification holism asserts that claims of logical entailment can only be justified in the context of an entire logical theory, e.g., classical, intuitionistic, paraconsistent, paracomplete etc. According to holism, claims of logical entailment cannot be atomistically justified as isolated statements, independently of theory choice. At present there is a developing interest in—and endorsement of—justification holism (...) due to the revival of an abductivist approach to the epistemology of logic. This paper presents an argument against holism by establishing a foundational entailment-sentence of deduction which is justified independently of theory choice and outside the context of a whole logical theory. (shrink)

Given his view that the modern world is ‘radically evil’, Adorno is an unlikely contributor to business ethics. Despite this, we argue that his work has a number of provocative implications for the field that warrant wider attention. Adorno regards our social world as damaged, unfree, and false and we draw on this critique to outline why the achievement of good work is so rare in contemporary society, focusing in particular on the ethical demands of roles and the ideological nature (...) of management’s self-understanding. Nevertheless, we show that Adorno’s comments on activities such as art and philosophy mean that it is possible to draw on his work in a way that contributes constructively to the conversation about good and meaningful work within business ethics. (shrink)

The ability to perceive the shapes of things as enduring through changes in how they stimulate our sense organs is vital to our sense of stability in the world. But what sort of capacity is shape constancy, and how is it reflected in perceptual experience? This paper defends a pluralist account of shape constancy: There are multiple kinds of shape constancy centered on geometrical properties at various levels of abstraction, and properties at these various levels feature in the content of (...) perceptual experience, governing patterns of apparent shape similarity. I propose that the varieties of shape constancy are subserved by the syntactic complexity of perceptual shape representations. By assigning discrete constituents to various abstract shape parameters, these representations attune us to the preservation of certain abstract shape properties through changes in more determinate shape properties. Finally, I draw broader lessons concerning the nature and function of perceptual constancy. (shrink)

According to the Free Will Explanation of a traditional view of hell, human freedom explains why some people are in hell. It also explains hell’s punishment and finality: persons in hell have freely developed moral vices that are their own punishment and that make repentance psychologically impossible. So, even though God continues to desire reconciliation with persons in hell, damned persons do not want reconciliation with God. But this moral vice explanation of hell’s finality is implausible. I argue that God (...) can and would make direct or indirect alterations in their character to give them new motivational reasons that re-enable their freedom to repent. Subsequently, I argue that it is probable that each damned person will be saved eventually, because there is a potential infinity of opportunities for free repentance. Thus, if the Free Will Explanation’s descriptions of hell and divine love are correct, it is highly probable that each person in hell escapes to heaven. (shrink)

The revival of republicanism was meant to challenge the hegemony of liberalism in contemporary political theory on the grounds that liberals show insufficient concern with institutional protection against political misrule. This article challenges this view by showing how neorepublicanism, particularly on Philip Pettit’s formulation, demands no greater institutional protection than does political liberalism. By identifying neutrality between conceptions of the good as the constraint on institutional requirements that forces neorepublicanism into the liberal framework, the article shows that neutrality is what (...) neorepublicans must jettison to offer a tenable critique of liberalism. Only then can neorepublicans ensure greater protection against misrule by demanding that citizens participate more actively in politics. They can then also criticize liberalism for failing to appreciate the importance of such protection. (shrink)

How can work be a genuine good in life? I argue that this requires overcoming a problem akin to that studied by Marx scholars as the problem of work, freedom and necessity: how can work be something we genuinely want to do, given that its content is not up to us, but is determined by necessity? I argue that the answer involves valuing contributing to the good of others, typically as valuing active pro-sociality – that is, valuing actively doing something (...) good for others. This makes work better in one way, and may even make work something we are genuinely glad to have in our lives. Contemporary philosophical thinking about good work tends to focus on how work can be good for the person doing it, by providing, for example, self-realization or social relationships, while underappreciating the special importance of valuing social contribution. People will typically only really want work if they want a part of their lives to be about the good of others. This also means that work may be a part of the best life, something we should take into account when discussing work-related policies and the desirability of a ‘post-work’ future. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts denying that temporal passage is an objective feature of reality face an explanatory challenge with respect to why it appears to us as though time passes. Recently, two solutions have surfaced. Cognitive illusionism claims that people experience the passage of time due to their belief that time passes. Cognitive error theory claims that we do not experience the passage of time, but hold the belief that we do, which we have acquired through making an inference from the prior (...) belief that time passes. These approaches suppose that belief and passage experience are explanatorily connected, and they depend on the claims that people who experience the passage of time or at least believe that they do also believe that time passes. To test these claims, we probed the beliefs of populations of individuals with depression and schizotypy, thus conditions that are strongly associated with alterations in temporal phenomenology. Depression was assessed with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and schizotypy with the short Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences (O-LIFE). While cognitive illusionism and inferentialist cognitive error theory would predict a strong association between BDI and O-LIFE scores and beliefs about time passage, our study found no such association. The experience of passage does not seem to be explanatorily connected to beliefs about the passage of time. (shrink)

Until recently, philosophers debating the rationality of time-biases have supposed that people exhibit a first-person hedonic bias toward the future, but that their non-hedonic and third-person preferences are time-neutral. Recent empirical work, however, suggests that our preferences are more nuanced. First, there is evidence that our third-person preferences exhibit time-neutrality only when the individual with respect to whom we have preferences—the preference target—is a random stranger about whom we know nothing; given access to some information about the preference target, third-person (...) preferences mirror first-person preferences. As a result, the simulation hypothesis has been proposed, according to which third-person preferences will mirror first-person preferences when we can simulate the mental states of the preference target. Second, there is evidence that we prefer negative hedonic events to be in our past (we are first-person negatively hedonically future-biased) only when we view future events as fixed and in no way under our control. By contrast, when we perceive it to be within our power to mitigate the badness of future events, we are first-person negatively hedonically past-biased. This is the mitigation hypothesis. We distinguish two versions of the mitigation hypothesis, the squirrelling version and the heuristic version. We ran a study which tested the simulation hypothesis, and which aimed to determine whether the squirrelling or the heuristic version of the mitigation hypothesis enjoys more empirical support. We found support for the heuristic version of the hypothesis, but no support for the squirrelling version. (shrink)

It is now well-known that Newton–Cartan theory is the correct geometrical setting for modelling the quantum Hall effect. In addition, in recent years edge modes for the Newton–Cartan quantum Hall effect have been derived. However, the existence of these edge modes has, as of yet, been derived using only orthodox methodologies involving the breaking of gauge-invariance; it would be preferable to derive the existence of such edge modes in a gauge-invariant manner. In this article, we employ recent work by Donnelly (...) and Freidel in order to accomplish exactly this task. Our results agree with known physics, but afford greater conceptual insight into the existence of these edge modes: in particular, they connect them to subtle aspects of Newton–Cartan geometry and pave the way for further applications of Newton–Cartan theory in condensed matter physics. (shrink)

In this paper I will introduce a new compatibilist account of free action: indirect conscious control compatibilism, or just indirect compatibilism for short. On this account, actions are free either when they are caused by compatibilist‐friendly conscious psychological processes, or else by sub‐personal level processes influenced in particular ways by compatibilist‐friendly conscious psychological processes. This view is motivated by a problem faced by a certain family of compatibilist views, which I call conscious control views. These views hold that we act (...) freely when we act in a way that is caused by certain conscious psychological processes. One problem for such views is that current neuroscience suggests that most of our actions are not caused by such processes. Instead, many of the actions we typically suppose are free are caused by sub‐personal level processes and hence would count as not free according to contemporary conscious control views. I argue, contra these views, that many actions caused by these sub‐personal level processes are indirectly free. Further, most of the actions we ordinarily judge to be free are free in this indirect manner. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the present study, we examined how the perceived attainability and relatability of moral exemplars predicted moral elevation and pleasantness among both adult and college student participants. Data collected from two experiments were analyzed with Bayesian multilevel modeling to explore which factors significantly predicted outcome variables at the story level. The analysis results demonstrated that the main effect of perceived relatability and the interaction effect between attainability and relatability shall be included in the best prediction model, and thus, were (...) deemed to predict the outcome variables significantly. The main effect of relatability as well as its interaction with attainability positively predicted elevation and pleasantness. We discussed educational implications of the findings in terms of how relatability may be the first point of emphasis for moral educators to focus on and attainability can then bolster the effectiveness. These relatable and attainable moral exemplars can be sources for moral elevation and pleasantness, which promote motivation to emulate moral behavior presented by the exemplars. (shrink)

There are two kinds of time-bias: near-bias and future-bias. While philosophers typically hold that near-bias is rationally impermissible, many hold that future-bias is rationally permissible. Call this normative hybridism. According to arbitrariness objections, certain patterns of preference are rationally impermissible because they are arbitrary. While arbitrariness objections have been levelled against both near-bias and future-bias, the kind of arbitrariness in question has been different. In this paper we investigate whether there are forms of arbitrariness that are common to both kinds (...) of preferences, and hence whether there are versions of the arbitrariness objection that are objections both to near-bias and future-bias. If there are, then this might go some way towards undermining normative hybridism and to defending a thorough-going time-neutralism. (shrink)

Public reason liberals expect individuals to have justificatory reasons for their views of certain political issues. This paper considers how groups can, and whether they should, give collective public reasons for their political decisions. A problem is that aggregating individuals’ consistent judgments on reasons and a decision can produce inconsistent collective judgments. The group will then fail to give a reason for its decision. The paper considers various solutions to this problem and defends a deliberative procedure by showing how it (...) incentivizes information sharing and leads to outcomes most acceptable to the group members. (shrink)

Parental overuse of portable technology poses a bonafide threat to the welfare and development of children. In the past decade, researchers have documented this phenomenon whereby parents pay far more attention to handheld electronic devices than to their children's safety and developmental needs. What most studies have failed to examine is the extent to which workers in privately owned and operated daycares also exhibit technology-induced distracted behavior. This article aims to identify the moral harm of caregivers' distracted behaviour in a (...) private daycare setting or, more simply, the welfare effects of distracted daycare. First, with the assistance of recent research, the phenomenon of distracted caregiving is defined. Then, the documented harms of distracted caregiving in a daycare setting are catalogued. Next, an ethical analysis of the phenomenon of distracted daycare working is undertaken from four normative ethical perspectives: (i) ethical egoism, (ii) utilitarianism, (iii) principlism and (iv) care ethics. Five recommendations for reforming distracted daycares, each based upon one or more of the four ethical perspectives, inform the article's conclusions. (shrink)

Philosophers have long noted, and empirical psychology has lately confirmed, that most people are “biased toward the future”: we prefer to have positive experiences in the future, and negative experiences in the past. At least two explanations have been offered for this bias: belief in temporal passage and the practical irrelevance of the past resulting from our inability to influence past events. We set out to test the latter explanation. In a large survey, we find that participants exhibit significantly less (...) future bias when asked to consider scenarios where they can affect their own past experiences. This supports the “practical irrelevance” explanation of future bias. It also suggests that future bias is not an inflexible preference hardwired by evolution, but results from a more general disposition to “accept the things we cannot change”. However, participants still exhibited substantial future bias in scenarios in which they could affect the past, leaving room for complementary explanations. Beyond the main finding, our results also indicate that future bias is stake-sensitive and that participants endorse the normative correctness of their future-biased preferences and choices. In combination, these results shed light on philosophical debates over the rationality of future bias, suggesting that it may be a rational response to empirical realities rather than a brute, arational disposition. (shrink)

In this essay, I want to explore the possibility that the success of narrative in stimulating empathy comes from the relation that narrative bears to emotion—where emotion is a kind of proto-narrative that possibly accounts for the structure and range of narratives themselves —and that our familiarity with emotions as micro-narratives results in the motivation of narrative. That is, the resolution of events occurs in terms of feeling rather than other forms of closure, since other forms of closure represent literal (...) endings as, quite simply, the cessation of events whereas emotion achieves its end by being felt or translated in empathetic terms and in ways that endure beyond the formality of the fictive event that ends the narrative. I will be using Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart (1999) and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997) to discuss narrative and emotions, or the role of emotion in motivating narrative events and the role of narrative in conveying and stirring emotion in the reader. (shrink)

Although some previous studies have investigated the relationship between moral foundations and moral judgment development, the methods used have not been able to fully explore the relationship. In the present study, we used Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) in order to address the limitations in traditional regression methods that have been used previously. Results showed consistency with previous findings that binding foundations are negatively correlated with post-conventional moral reasoning and positively correlated with maintaining norms and personal interest schemas. In addition to (...) previous studies, our results showed a positive correlation for individualizing foundations and post-conventional moral reasoning. Implications are discussed as well as a detailed explanation of the novel BMA method in order to allow others in the field of moral education to be able to use it in their own studies. (shrink)

While the contemporary philosophical literature is replete with discussion of the control or freedom required for moral responsibility, only more recently has substantial attention been devoted to the knowledge or awareness required, otherwise called the epistemic condition. This area of inquiry is rapidly expanding, as are the various positions within it. This chapter introduces two major positions: the reasonable expectation view and the quality of will view. The chapter then explores two dimensions of the epistemic condition that serve as fault (...) lines along which these two views diverge. The first dimension concerns different kinds of ignorance. The second concerns what agents can be directly blameworthy for. The chapter closes by sketching a novel approach that incorporates advantages of opposing positions on this topic. (shrink)

The social world contains institutions, groups, objects, and more. This essay explores a puzzle about the essences of social items. There is widespread consensus against social essences because of problematic presuppositions often made about them. But it is argued that essence can be freed from these presuppositions and their problems. Even so, a puzzle still arises. In a Platonic spirit, essences in general seem detached from the world. In an Aristotelian spirit, social essences in particular seem embedded in the world. (...) The puzzle is that these inclinations are individually plausible but jointly incompatible. The essay has four aims: to clarify and refine the puzzle; to explore the puzzle's implications for essence in general and for social essences in particular; to illustrate the fruitfulness of the general distinction between detached and embedded; and to develop this distinction to sketch a novel solution to the puzzle. (shrink)

Deflationists about truth hold that the function of the truth predicate is to enable us to make certain assertions we could not otherwise make. Pragmatists claim that the utility of negation lies in its role in registering incompatibility. The pragmatist insight about negation has been successfully incorporated into bilateral theories of content, which take the meaning of negation to be inferentially explained in terms of the speech act of rejection. We implement the deflationist insight in a bilateral theory by taking (...) the meaning of the truth predicate to be explained by its inferential relation to assertion. We combine this account of the meaning of the truth predicate with a new diagnosis of the Liar Paradox: its derivation requires the truth rules to preserve evidence, but these rules only preserve commitment. The result is a novel inferential deflationist theory of truth, which solves the Liar Paradox in a principled manner. We end by showing that our theory and simple extensions thereof have the resources to axiomatize the internal logic of several supervaluational hierarchies, including Cantini’s. This solves open problems of Halbach (2011) and Horsten (2011). (shrink)

This paper attempts to show how Adorno’s thought can illuminate our reflections on the future of work. It does so by situating Adorno’s conception of genuine activity in relation to his negativist critical epistemology and his subtle account of the distinction between true and false needs. What emerges is an understanding of work that can guide our aspirations for the future of work, and one we illustrate via discussions of creative work and care work. These are types of work which (...) cater to persistent human needs, albeit ones that are distorted under present social conditions. Adorno’s thought helps us to understand why this is the case. (shrink)

Can groups really be agents or is group agency just a fiction? Christian List and Philip Pettit argue influentially for group-agent realism by showing how certain groups form and act on attitudes in ways they take to be unexplainable at the level of the individual agents constituting them. Group agency is therefore considered not a fiction or a metaphor but a reality we must account for in explanations of certain social phenomena. In this paper, I challenge this defence of group-agent (...) realism by showing how it is undermined by individual-level analysis of how individuals interact within groups. While group agency can be a useful fiction, real agents are at the individual level, not the collective level. (shrink)

Can a group be morally responsible instead of, or in addition to, its members? An influential defense of corporate responsibility is based on results in social choice theory suggesting that a group can form and act on attitudes held by few, or even none, of its members. The members therefore cannot be (fully) responsible for the group’s behavior; the group itself, as a corporate agent, must be responsible. In this paper, I reject this view of corporate responsibility by showing how (...) it pays insufficient attention to individual agency. By accounting for group members’ strategic behavior, we shall see how they control collective attitude formation and are therefore responsible for their group’s behavior. (shrink)

The norm of assertion, to be in force, is a social norm. What is the content of our social norm of assertion? Various linguistic arguments purport to show that to assert is to represent oneself as knowing. But to represent oneself as knowing does not entail that assertion is governed by a knowledge norm. At best these linguistic arguments provide indirect support for a knowledge norm. Furthermore, there are alternative, non-normative explanations for the linguistic data (as in recent work from (...) Van Elswyk). Direct arguments would rely on normative judgments about the permissibility or impermissibility of assertions with and without the speaker knowing the content asserted. John Turri's work experimental results purport to show that our norm of assertion is factive, and probably knowledge. But as a number of recent experimentalists (Kneer, Reuter and Broessel, Marsili and Wiegmann) have shown, Turri's results rely on the problemmatic use of 'should' as in 'Maria should assert that she owns a 1990 watch.' Correcting for this, these experimentalists provide strong evidence that our norm of assertion is not factive. The standard reply to evidence like this from the assertion of unlucky falsehoods is the excuse maneuver. But Marsili and Wiegmann, following Turri's protocol for testing for excuse validation, show that participants who judge that assertions unlucky falsehoods are permissible are not guilty of excuse validation. Given our current understanding of the experimental evidence, knowledge is not our norm of assertion. (shrink)

The harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding is at the heart of Kant’s account of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, but interpreters have long struggled to determine what Kant means when he claims the faculties are in a state of free play. In this article, I develop an interpretation of the free play of the faculties in terms of the freedom of attention. By appealing to the different way that we attend to objects in (...) aesthetic experience, we can explain how the faculties are free, even when the subject already possesses a concept of the object and is bound to the determinate form of the object in perception. (shrink)

This chapter defends the account of metaphysical indeterminacy of Barnes and Williams against Eklund's objections.

Many classically valid meta-inferences fail in a standard supervaluationist framework. This allegedly prevents supervaluationism from offering an account of good deductive reasoning. We provide a proof system for supervaluationist logic which includes supervaluationistically acceptable versions of the classical meta-inferences. The proof system emerges naturally by thinking of truth as licensing assertion, falsity as licensing negative assertion and lack of truth-value as licensing rejection and weak assertion. Moreover, the proof system respects well-known criteria for the admissibility of inference rules. Thus, supervaluationists (...) can provide an account of good deductive reasoning. Our proof system moreover brings to light how one can revise the standard supervaluationist framework to make room for higher-order vagueness. We prove that the resulting logic is sound and complete with respect to the consequence relation that preserves truth in a model of the non-normal modal logic _NT_. Finally, we extend our approach to a first-order setting and show that supervaluationism can treat vagueness in the same way at every order. The failure of conditional proof and other meta-inferences is a crucial ingredient in this treatment and hence should be embraced, not lamented. (shrink)

What is it to base a belief on reasons? Existing attempts to give an account of the basing relation encounter a dilemma: either one appeals to some kind of neutral process that does not adequately reflect the way basing is a content‐sensitive first‐personal activity, or one appeals to linking or bridge principles that over‐intellectualize and threaten regress. We explain why this dilemma arises, and diagnose the commitments that are key obstacles to providing a satisfactory account. We explain why they should (...) be rejected anyway, and then offer a new, knowledge‐first virtue epistemological theory of the basing relation that shows how we can substantially theorize about mental processes without these commitments. The resulting view plausibly captures the way in which basing is an inherently mental and content‐sensitive process. (shrink)

Spinoza, le spinozisme et les fondements de la sécularisation est un ouvrage dédié à la mémoire d’Emmanuel Levinas, dont l’auteur a été l’élève durant plusieurs années. Il vise, à travers une analyse d’ordre philosophique, historique, épistémologique et théologique, à mettre au jour les conditions d’émergence interrelatées du spinozisme et de la sécularisation. Pour ce faire, il souligne, entre autres, l’importance des polémiques anti-maimonidiennes, des débats sur les attributs divins, la substance, l’infini, du marranisme et de la Kabbale sur la formation (...) du spinozisme, ainsi que son rapport à la pensée contemporaine. Il mène une recherche interdisciplinaire devant permettre d’éclairer l’origine des difficultés théoriques que ce système philosophique présente. (shrink)

This paper shows how the availability heuristic can be used to justify inference to the best explanation in such a way that van Fraassen's infamous "best of a bad lot" objection can be adroitly avoided. With this end in mind, a dynamic and contextual version of the erotetic model of explanation sufficient to ground this response is presented and defended.

[If you find this article interesting, let me mention another of my articles, “On Deducing Ethical Egoism from Psychological Egoism” (Theoria, 2023), which in many ways is a more thorough treatment of the topic. But it’s not an expanded version of this one. For instance, each article addresses arguments not addressed in the other.] Philosophers generally reject the view that psychological egoism (suitably supplemented with further premises) entails ethical egoism. Their rejections are generally unsatisfying. Some are too brief to win (...) confidence; others employ an uncharitable statement of psychological egoism. This is unfortunate, for the view that psychological egoism entails ethical egoism is philosophically significant (and not without proponents). Although it ultimately deserves rejection, it warrants better treatment than it typically receives. I thus examine it in some detail. Among other things, I carefully consider some original, sophisticated attempts to establish it, having first taken care to produce proper formulations of ethical and psychological egoism. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss whether different interpretations of the ‘aim’ of belief—both the teleological and normative interpretations—have the resources to explain certain descriptive and normative features of suspended belief (suspension). I argue that, despite the recent efforts of theorists to extend these theories to account for suspension, they ultimately fail. The implication is that we must either develop alternative theories of belief that can account for suspension, or we must abandon the assumption that these theories ought to be able (...) to account for suspension. To close, I briefly consider some of the reasons we have in favour of pursing each of these options, and I suggest that it is worth exploring the possibility that suspension is best understood as its own attitude, independently of theories of belief’s ‘aim’. (shrink)

One debate surrounding Derk Pereboom’s (2001, 2014) four-case argument against compatibilism focuses on whether, and why, we judge manipulated agents to be neither free nor morally responsible. In this paper, we propose a novel explanation. The four-case argument features cases where an agent is the only individual in her universe who has been manipulated. Let us call manipulation whose scope includes at least one but not all agents existential manipulation. Contrast this with universal manipulation, which affects all agents within a (...) universe. We propose that we find agents in Pereboom’s manipulation cases less free and morally responsible in part because they are the target of existential manipulation. We empirically tested this hypothesis and found that people’s free will and moral responsibility judgments were sensitive to the scope of manipulation: people judged existentially manipulated agents significantly less free and responsible than universally manipulated agents. (shrink)

The received view of Kant’s moral philosophy is that it precludes all moral luck. But I offer a plausible interpretation according to which Kant embraces moral luck in circumstance and constitution. I interpret the unconditioned nature of transcendental freedom as a person’s ability to do the right thing no matter how she is inclined by her circumstantial and constitutive luck. I argue that various passages about degrees of difficulty relating to circumstantial and constitutive luck provide a reason to accept a (...) pro-moral luck interpretation of Kant. (shrink)

We explain and explore class-theoretic potentialism—the view that one can always individuate more classes over a set-theoretic universe. We examine some motivations for class-theoretic potentialism, before proving some results concerning the relevant potentialist systems (in particular exhibiting failures of the $\mathsf {.2}$ and $\mathsf {.3}$ axioms). We then discuss the significance of these results for the different kinds of class-theoretic potentialists.