There are things of which it is true to say that there are no such things. How can we resolve this paradox? Panayot Butchvarov argues that there are objects of reference that are not also entities, where the former must merely be thinkable but the latter must be indefinitely re-identifiable. This paper argues that fictional and many other unreal objects are indeed indefinitely re-identifiable, so they must be counted as existing things on Butchvarov's theory. The paradox is best resolved by (...) distinguishing among domains of existence: Sherlock Holmes exists in the unrestricted domain of objects and in the fictional domain created by Conan Doyle, but not in the domain of the real world. Thus to exist and to be real are different things; all objects exist in some domain, but only real objects really exist. (shrink)

The book covers scientific and philosophical topics by bringing them closer to literature. Some topics are scientific explanation, the concept of cause, rational argumentation, pseudoscience, language, ethics, philosophy of mind, posthumanism, and democracy. Summary Prefazione di Severino Saccardi. Introduzione. Capitolo 1: Le scrivanie di Eddington. 1.1. Il vecchio Qfwfq (I. Calvino. Le cosmicomiche). 1.2. L’assassino invisibile (L.F. Celine, Il dottor Semmelweis). 1.3. Gli gnommeri di Ingravallo (C.E. Gadda, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana). 1.4. I sergenti di Napoleone (L. Tolstoj, (...) Guerra e pace). 1.5. Tex e il Coyote nero (G. Bonelli, Il Coyote nero). 1.6. “Elementare Watson!” (A.C. Doyle, Il segno dei quattro). Capitolo 2. Non saranno mai delusi. 2.1. L’albero di Natale. (V. Perrin, Cambiare l’acqua ai fiori). 2.2. Il dagherrotipo di Buendia. (G.G. Marquez, Cent’anni di solitudine). 2.3. Don Ferrante e la peste. (A. Manzoni, I promessi sposi). Capitolo 3. Capitolo puffo. 3.1. L’Accademia di Lagado. (J. Swift, I viaggi di Gulliver). 3.2. Bruto è uomo d’onore. (W. Shakespeare, Giulio Cesare). 3.3. Le oche mute. (G. Orwell, 1984). Capitolo 4. “Quarantadue!” 4.1. Lo zio N’Ba N’Ga. (I. Calvino, Le cosmicomiche). 4.2. La mosca cocchiera. (J. de La Fontaine, Favole). 4.3. Il fiore del dr. Dek. (E. Salgari, Le meraviglie del Duemila). Capitolo 5. L’ultimo uomo. 5.1. La pernice accusatrice. (Cyrano de Bergerac, Gli stati e gli imperi del Sole). 5.2. Pallino in via Mjasnickaja. (M.A. Bulgakov, Cuore di cane). Capitolo 6. Scenari perturbanti. 6.1. Dissipatio. (G. Morselli, Dissipatio H.G.). 6.2. Un mammifero meccanizzato. (S. Butler, Erewhon). 6.3. Mlle Olimpia. (E.T.A. Hoffmann, Racconti notturni). Capitolo 7. La gente perbene. 7.1. La balena bianca. (H. Melville, Moby Dick). 7.2. Betsabea Everdeene. (T. Hardy, Via dalla pazza folla). 7.3. Un’idea francese. (C. McCarthy, Cavalli selvaggi). 7.4. Le montagne del Montana. (D. Delillo, Rumore bianco). (shrink)

Barz (2018) contends that there is no specification of the phenomenon of first-person authority that avoids falsity or triviality. This paper offers one. When a subject self-ascribes a current conscious mental state in speech, there is a presumption that what she says is true. To defeat this presumption, one must be able to explain how she has been led astray.

According to Pessimism about moral testimony, it is objectionable to form moral beliefs by deferring to another. This paper motivates Pessimism about another source of moral knowledge: propositional memory. Drawing on a discussion of Gilbert Ryle’s on forgetting the difference between right and wrong, it argues that Internalism about moral motivation offers a satisfying explanation of Pessimism about memory. A central claim of the paper is that Pessimism about memory (and by extension, testimony) is an issue in moral psychology rather (...) than moral epistemology. That is because it is best explained by appeal to claims about the constitution of moral knowledge as a state of mind, rather than requirements on belief formation. The paper also provides reason to think that the focus on testimony, pervasive in the literature, is something of a red herring. (shrink)

Every account of moral responsibility has conditions that distinguish between the consequences, actions, or traits that warrant praise or blame and those that do not. One intuitive condition is that praiseworthiness and blameworthiness cannot be affected by luck, that is, by factors beyond the agent’s control. Several philosophers build their accounts of moral responsibility on this luck-free condition, and we may call their views Luck-Free Moral Responsibility (LFMR). I offer moral and metaphysical arguments against LFMR. First, I maintain that considerations (...) of fairness that often motivate LFMR do not require its adoption. Second, I contend that LFMR has counterintuitive implications for the nature and scope of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness and that LFMR is vulnerable to a reductio ad absurdum. Third, I state some common reasons for thinking that LFMR’s commitment to true counterfactuals of libertarian freedom is problematic, and I argue that if there are no such true counterfactuals and if LFMR is true, a person is praiseworthy and blameworthy at most for a tiny fraction of her actions. Fourth, I argue that proponents of LFMR cannot escape this skeptical cost by appealing to a different kind of counterfactual of freedom. Fifth, I develop an anti-skeptical motivation to affirm the idea that luck can affect moral responsibility. (shrink)

Should a principle of charity be applied to the interpretation of the colour concepts exercised in visual experience? We think not. We shall argue, for one thing, that the grounds for applying a principle of charity are lacking in the case of colour concepts. More importantly, we shall argue that attempts at giving the experience of colour a charitable interpretation either fail to respect obvious features of that experience or fail to interpret it charitably, after all. Charity to visual experience (...) is therefore no motive for resisting the natural, Galilean response to a scientific understanding of light and vision. The best interpretation of colour experience ends up convicting it of widespread and systematic error. (shrink)

Is human free will compatible with the natural laws of the universe? To “compatibilists” who see free actions as emanating from the wants and reasons of human agents, free will looks perfectly plausible. However, “incompatibilists” claim to see the more ultimate sources of human action. The wants and reasons of agents are said to be caused by physical processes which are themselves mere natural results of the previous state of the world and the natural laws which govern it. This paper (...) argues that the incompatibilists make a mistake in appealing to such non-agent sources of human action. They fail to realize that free will may exist at one scale, but not at the scales where they look. When free will is considered from the correctly scaled perspective, it does seem compatible with determinism and natural laws. (shrink)

Since the end of the Cold War, international ethicists have focused largely on issues outside the traditional scope of security studies. The nuclear ethics literature needs to be revived and reoriented to address the new and evolving 21st century nuclear threats and policy responses.

Public discussions of political and social issues are often characterized by deep and persistent polarization. In social psychology, it’s standard to treat belief polarization as the product of epistemic irrationality. In contrast, we argue that the persistent disagreement that grounds political and social polarization can be produced by epistemically rational agents, when those agents have limited cognitive resources. Using an agent-based model of group deliberation, we show that groups of deliberating agents using coherence-based strategies for managing their limited resources tend (...) to polarize into different subgroups. We argue that using that strategy is epistemically rational for limited agents. So even though group polarization looks like it must be the product of human irrationality, polarization can be the result of fully rational deliberation with natural human limitations. (shrink)

Is it possible that the most famous critic of quantum mechanics actually invented most of its fundamentally important concepts? -/- In his 1905 Brownian motion paper, Einstein quantized matter, proving the existence of atoms. His light quantum hypothesis showed that energy itself comes in particles (photons). He showed energy and matter are interchangeable, E = mc2. In 1905 Einstein was first to see nonlocality and instantaneous action-at-a-distance. In 1907 he saw quantum “jumps” between energy levels in matter, six years before (...) Bohr postulated them in his atomic model. Einstein saw wave-particle duality and the “collapse” of the wave in 1909. And in 1916 his transition probabilities for emission and absorption processes introduced ontological chance when matter and radiation interact, making quantum mechanics statistical. He discovered the indistinguishability and odd quantum statistics of elementary particles in 1925 and in 1935 speculated about the nonseparability of interacting identical particles. -/- It took physicists over twenty years to accept Einstein’s light-quantum. He explained the relation of particles to waves fifteen years before Heisenberg matrices and Schrödinger wave functions. He saw indeterminism ten years before the uncertainty principle. And he saw nonlocality as early as 1905, presenting it formally in 1927, but was ignored. In the 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper, he explored nonseparability, which was dubbed “entanglement” by Schrödinger. The EPR paper has gone from being irrelevant to Einstein’s most cited work and the basis for today’s “second revolution in quantum mechanics.” -/- In a radical revision of the history of quantum physics, Bob Doyle develops Einstein’s idea of objective reality to resolve several of today’s most puzzling quantum mysteries, including the two-slit experiment, quantum entanglement, and microscopic irreversibility. (shrink)

The orthodox view of proper names, Millianism, provides a very simple and elegant explanation of the semantic contribution of referential uses of names–names that occur as bare singulars and as the argument of a predicate. However, one problem for Millianism is that it cannot explain the semantic contribution of predicative uses of names. In recent years, an alternative view, so-called the-predicativism, has become increasingly popular. According to the-predicativists, names are uniformly count nouns. This straightforwardly explains why names can be used (...) predicatively, but is prima facie less congenial to an analysis of referential uses. To address this issue, the-predicativists argue that referential names are in fact complex determiner phrases consisting of a covert definite determiner and a count noun—and so, a referential name is a definite description. In this paper, I will argue that despite the appearance of increased theoretical complexity, the view that names are ambiguous between predicative and referential types is in fact superior to the unitary the-predicativist view. However, I will also argue that to see why this ambiguity view is better, we need to give up the standard Millian analysis. Consequently, I will first propose an alternative analysis of referential names that retains the virtues of Millianism, but provides an important explanatory connection to the predicative uses. Once this analysis of names is adopted, the explanation for why names are systematically ambiguous between referential and predicative types is both simple and elegant. Second, I will argue that the-predicativism has the appearance of being simpler than an ambiguity view, but is in fact unable to account for certain key properties of referential names without making ad hoc stipulations. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that three of the most prominent theories of conditional acceptance face very serious problems. David Lewis' concept of imaging, the Ramsey test and Jonathan Bennett's recent hybrid view all face viscious regresses, or they either employ unanalyzed components or depend upon an implausibly strong version of doxastic voluntarism.

In this paper, I examine the ethics of e - trust and e - trustworthiness in the context of health care, looking at direct computer-patient interfaces (DCPIs), information systems that provide medical information, diagnosis, advice, consenting and/or treatment directly to patients without clinicians as intermediaries. Designers, manufacturers and deployers of such systems have an ethical obligation to provide evidence of their trustworthiness to users. My argument for this claim is based on evidentialism about trust and trustworthiness: the idea that trust (...) should be based on sound evidence of trustworthiness. Evidence of trustworthiness is a broader notion than one might suppose, including not just information about the risks and performance of the system, but also interactional and context-based information. I suggest some sources of evidence in this broader sense that make it plausible that designers, manufacturers and deployers of DCPIs can provide evidence to users that is cognitively simple, easy to communicate, yet rationally connected with actual trustworthiness. (shrink)

The dispute between realists about color and anti-realists is actually a dispute about the nature of color properties. The disputants do not disagree over what material objects are like. Rather, they disagree over whether any of the uncontroversial facts about material objects--their powers to cause visual experiences, their dispositions to reflect incident light, their atomic makeup, and so on--amount to their having colors. The disagreement is thus about which properties colors are and, in particular, whether colors are any of the (...) properties in a particular set that is acknowledged on both sides to exhaust the properties of material objects. In a previous paper we discussed at length one attempt to identify colors with particular properties of material objects--namely, with their dispositions to cause visual experiences. Here we shall discuss a different and perhaps more influential version of realism, which says that the colors of material objects are microphysical properties of their surfaces. We shall call this theory physicalism about color (physicalism, for short). In order to evaluate this theory, however, we shall first have to clarify some methodological issues. Our hope is that we can bring some further clarity to the question of color realism, whether or not we succeed in our critique of the physicalists' answer. (shrink)

Causal closure arguments against interactionist dualism are currently popular amongst physicalists. Such an argument appeals to some principles of the causal closure of the physical, together with certain other premises, to conclude that at least some mental events are identical with physical events. However, it is crucial to the success of any such argument that the physical causal closure principle to which it appeals is neither too strong nor too weak by certain standards. In this paper, it is argued that (...) various forms of naturalistic dualism, of an emergentist character, are consistent with the strongest physical causal closure principles that can plausibly be advocated. (shrink)

The standard view says that epistemic normativity is normativity of belief. If you’re an evidentialist, for example, you’ll think that all epistemic reasons are reasons to believe what your evidence supports. Here we present a line of argument that pushes back against this standard view. If the argument is right, there are epistemic reasons for things other than belief. The argument starts with evidentialist commitments and proceeds by a series of cases, each containing a reason. As the cases progress, the (...) reasons change from counting in favor of things like having a belief to things like performing ordinary actions. We argue that each of those reasons is epistemic. If the argument succeeds, we should think there are epistemic reasons to consider hypotheses, conduct thought and physical experiments, extend one’s evidence, and perform mundane tasks like eating a sandwich, just as there are epistemic reasons to believe what one’s evidence supports. (shrink)

It is almost unanimously accepted that Kant denies resultant moral luck—that is, he denies that the lucky consequence of a person’s action can affect how much praise or blame she deserves. Philosophers often point to the famous good will passage at the beginning of the Groundwork to justify this claim. I argue, however, that this passage does not support Kant’s denial of resultant moral luck. Subsequently, I argue that Kant allows agents to be morally responsible for certain kinds of lucky (...) consequences. Even so, I argue that it is unclear whether Kant ultimately endorses resultant moral luck. The reason is that Kant does not write enough on moral responsibility for consequences to determine definitively whether he thinks that the lucky consequence for which an agent is morally responsible can add to her degree of praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. The clear upshot, however, is that Kant does not deny resultant moral luck. (shrink)

In epistemology and philosophy of science, there has been substantial debate about truth’s relation to understanding. “Non-factivists” hold that radical departures from the truth are not always barriers to understanding; “quasi-factivists” demur. The most discussed example concerns scientists’ use of idealizations in certain derivations of the ideal gas law from statistical mechanics. Yet, these discussions have suffered from confusions about the relevant science, as well as conceptual confusions. Addressing this example, we shall argue that the ideal gas law is best (...) interpreted as favoring non-factivism about understanding, but only after delving a bit deeper into the statistical mechanics that has informed these arguments and stating more precisely what non-factivism entails. Along the way, we indicate where earlier discussions have gone astray, and highlight how a naturalistic approach furnishes more nuanced normative theses about the interaction of rationality, understanding, and epistemic value. (shrink)

Can faith be valuable and, if so, under what conditions? We know of no theory-neutral way to address this question. So, we offer a theory of relational faith, and we supplement it with a complementary theory of relational faithfulness. We then turn to relationships of mutual faith and faithfulness with an eye toward exhibiting some of the ways in which, on our theory, faith and faithfulness can be valuable and disvaluable. We then extend the theory to other manifestations of faith (...) and faithfulness, propose a way to unify them under a theory of faith and faithfulness simpliciter, and explain how they can be neo-Aristotelian virtues and vices. We close with our solution to the value problem and avenues for further research. (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)

This paper argues for a Husserlian account of phenomenal intentionality. Experience is intentional insofar as it presents a mind-independent, objective world. Its doing so is a matter of the way it hangs together, its having a certain structure. But in order for the intentionality in question to be properly understood as phenomenal intentionality, this structure must inhere in experience as a phenomenal feature. Husserl’s concept of horizon designates this intentionality-bestowing experiential structure, while his concept of motivation designates the unique phenomenal (...) character of this structure as it is experientially lived through. The way experience hangs together is itself a phenomenal feature of experience. (shrink)

One of the central criteria for free will is “Could I have done otherwise?” But because of a temporal asymmetry in human choice, the question makes no sense. The question is backward-looking, while human choices are forward-looking. At the time when any choice is actually made, there is as of yet no action to do otherwise. Expectation is the only thing to contradict (do other than). So the ability to do something not expected by the ultimate expecter, Laplace’s demon, is (...) a better criterion for free will. If human action is fundamentally unpredictable, then we have free will. Scientists have studied a form of fundamental unpredictability, known as undecidability. The features that make a system capable of undecidable dynamics have been identified: program-data duality; potential to access an infinite computational medium; and the ability to implement negation. Humans have all three of these features, so we very likely are fundamentally unpredictable, so we have free will. (shrink)

Observers inspected normal, high quality color displays of everyday visual scenes while their eye movements were recorded. A large display change occurred each time an eye blink occurred. Display changes could either involve "Central Interest" or "Marginal Interest" locations, as determined from descriptions obtained from independent judges in a prior pilot experiment. Visual salience, as determined by luminance, color, and position of the Central and Marginal interest changes were equalized. -/- The results obtained were very similar to those obtained in (...) prior experiments showing failure to detect changes occurring simultaneously with saccades, flicker, or “mudsplashes” in the visual scene: Many changes were very hard to detect, and Marginal Interest changes were harder to detect than Central Interest changes. -/- Analysis of eye movements showed, as expected, that the probability of detecting a change depended on the eye’s distance from the change location. However a surprising finding was that both for Central and Marginal Interest changes, evenwhen observers were directly fixating the change locations (within 1 degree),more than 40% of the time they still failed to see the changes. It seems that looking at something does not guarantee you “ see” it. (shrink)

This book is an introduction to The Metaphysicist, the second Information Philosopher website, a work in progress on some classical questions in philosophy that 20th-century logical positivists and analytic language philosophers dis-solved as pseudo-problems. -/- The Metaphysicist analyzes the information content in twenty classic problems in metaphysics - Abstract Entities, Being and Becoming, Causality, Chance, Change, Coinciding Objects, Composition (Parts and Wholes), Constitution, Free Will or Determinism, God and Immortality, Identity, Individuation, Mind-Body Problem, Modality, Necessity or Contingency, Persistence, Possibility and (...) Actuality, Space and Time, Truth, Universals, Vagueness, and the 20th-century problem of WaveParticle Duality. -/- The Metaphysicist also includes pages on the classic paradoxes and puzzles used for millennia to wrestle with these metaphysical problems The Debtor’s Paradox, Dion and Theon, The Growing Argument, The Infinite Regress, The Problem of the Many, The Ship of Theseus, The Sorites Puzzle, The Statue and the Clay, and Tibbles, the Cat. -/- Information philosophy is a new philosophical methodology that goes “beyond logic and language” to the underlying information structures in the cosmos, in the world, in biological systems, and in the human mind - structures without which logic, language, and science would be impossible. (shrink)

This paper develops a philosophical account of moral disruption. According to Robert Baker (2013), moral disruption is a process in which technological innovations undermine established moral norms without clearly leading to a new set of norms. Here I analyze this process in terms of moral uncertainty, formulating a philosophical account with two variants. On the Harm Account, such uncertainty is always harmful because it blocks our knowledge of our own and others’ moral obligations. On the Qualified Harm Account, there is (...) no harm in cases where moral uncertainty is related to innovation that is “for the best” in historical perspective, or where uncertainty is the expression of a deliberative virtue. The two accounts are compared by applying them to Baker’s historical case of the introduction of mechanical ventilation and organ transplantation technologies, as well as the present-day case of mass data practices in the health domain. (shrink)

Our folk epistemology says that if someone knows that P and tells you that P, then, given the absence of defeaters, if you believe what they tell you, you will come to know that P as well. A speaker's knowledge that P is then, for the most part, enough for a hearer to come to know that P. But there are counterexamples to this principle: testimonial knowledge does not always transfer from the speaker to the hearer. Why should that be (...) so? Because testimonial knowledge arises through the flow of information--from conclusive grounds--from the speaker through the speaker's assertion to the hearer's state of comprehension as of the speaker's assertion. A speaker's belief can be based on conclusive grounds, but the speaker's assertion may fail to provide conclusive grounds to the hearer. Then the hearer won't acquire knowledge, even from a knowledgeable speaker. Knowledge from testimony then works more like knowledge through perception. But wait, you say, that can't be so because testimony involves free will but perception does not. The essay ends with a broadly Hume inspired reply to this objection. (shrink)

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

R.J. Barnes (chapter 3) takes up the ways in which Sicilian comedy engaged current intellectual fashions, especially philosophy. Sicily was the home of rich and influential poetic and philosophical traditions that Epicharmus held up for comic examination and ridicule.

Moral reasoning traditionally distinguishes two types of evil: moral and natural. The standard view is that ME is the product of human agency and so includes phenomena such as war, torture and psychological cruelty; that NE is the product of nonhuman agency, and so includes natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, disease and famine; and finally, that more complex cases are appropriately analysed as a combination of ME and NE. Recently, as a result of developments in autonomous agents in cyberspace, (...) a new class of interesting and important examples of hybrid evil has come to light. In this paper, it is called artificial evil and a case is made for considering it to complement ME and NE to produce a more adequate taxonomy. By isolating the features that have led to the appearance of AE, cyberspace is characterised as a self-contained environment that forms the essential component in any foundation of the emerging field of Computer Ethics. It is argued that this goes some way towards providing a methodological explanation of why cyberspace is central to so many of CE’s concerns; and it is shown how notions of good and evil can be formulated in cyberspace. Of considerable interest is how the propensity for an agent’s action to be morally good or evil can be determined even in the absence of biologically sentient participants and thus allows artificial agents not only to perpetrate evil but conversely to ‘receive’ or ‘suffer from’ it. The thesis defended is that the notion of entropy structure, which encapsulates human value judgement concerning cyberspace in a formal mathematical definition, is sufficient to achieve this purpose and, moreover, that the concept of AE can be determined formally, by mathematical methods. A consequence of this approach is that the debate on whether CE should be considered unique, and hence developed as a Macroethics, may be viewed, constructively, in an alternative manner. The case is made that whilst CE issues are not uncontroversially unique, they are sufficiently novel to render inadequate the approach of standard Macroethics such as Utilitarianism and Deontologism and hence to prompt the search for a robust ethical theory that can deal with them successfully. The name Information Ethics is proposed for that theory. It is argued that the uniqueness of IE is justified by its being non-biologically biased and patient-oriented: IE is an Environmental Macroethics based on the concept of data entity rather than life. It follows that the novelty of CE issues such as AE can be appreciated properly because IE provides a new perspective. In light of the discussion provided in this paper, it is concluded that Computer Ethics is worthy of independent study because it requires its own application-specific knowledge and is capable of supporting a methodological foundation, Information Ethics. (shrink)

A far-reaching and influential view in evolutionary biology claims that species are cohesive units held together by gene flow. Biologists have recognized empirical problems facing this view; after sharpening the expression of the view, we present novel conceptual problems for it. At the heart of these problems is a distinction between two importantly different concepts of cohesion, what we call integrative and response cohesion. Acknowledging the distinction problematizes both the explanandum of species cohesion and the explanans of gene flow that (...) are central to the view we discuss. We conclude by tracing four broader implications for the study and conceptualization of species. (shrink)

Biological atomism postulates that all life is composed of elementary and indivisible vital units. The activity of a living organism is thus conceived as the result of the activities and interactions of its elementary constituents, each of which individually already exhibits all the attributes proper to life. This paper surveys some of the key episodes in the history of biological atomism, and situates cell theory within this tradition. The atomistic foundations of cell theory are subsequently dissected and discussed, together with (...) the theory’s conceptual development and eventual consolidation. This paper then examines the major criticisms that have been waged against cell theory, and argues that these too can be interpreted through the prism of biological atomism as attempts to relocate the true biological atom away from the cell to a level of organization above or below it. Overall, biological atomism provides a useful perspective through which to examine the history and philosophy of cell theory, and it also opens up a new way of thinking about the epistemic decomposition of living organisms that significantly departs from the physicochemical reductionism of mechanistic biology. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin made the distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty. Since then, prominent contemporary philosophers including Charles Taylor and Martha Nussbaum have declared negative liberty insufficient or incoherent. This is a critique of those declarations, which have been unduly accepted to a large extent. The critique primarily focuses on Taylor, who made the most direct and complete argument against negative liberty. His argument is shown to be ineffective. And further, his conception of positive liberty is shown to be incoherent.

From the time of Confucius and Aristotle up until the present day, theorists have argued that the individual self exists only as an aspect of social structures. The claim is not merely that the self is causally affected by social structures; but that the self is just social structure. The most recent iteration of this claim comes in book-length from Brian Lowery, though the argument was made more completely by Charles Taylor and Kenneth Gergen in the preceding decades. The most (...) rigorous version of the argument draws on Wittgenstein, claiming that thought itself is impossible without socially constructed meanings. Wittgenstein argued that a “private language” would be incoherent because the person using the language could not have any criteria by which to judge the correctness of the symbols used. However, this reasoning fails as an argument against individualized thought because it applies equally well to the use of public languages. So this paper argues that eliminative social constructivism has never made any sense, least of all in its latest form. (shrink)

Precision Medicine is driven by the idea that the rapidly increasing range of relatively cheap and efficient self-tracking devices make it feasible to collect multiple kinds of phenotypic data. Advocates of N = 1 research emphasize the countless opportunities personal data provide for optimizing individual health. At the same time, using biomarker data for lifestyle interventions has shown to entail complex challenges. In this paper, we argue that researchers in the field of precision medicine need to address the performative dimension (...) of collecting data. We propose the fun-house mirror as a metaphor for the use of personal health data; each health data source yields a particular type of image that can be regarded as a ‘data mirror’ that is by definition specific and skewed. This requires competence on the part of individuals to adequately interpret the images thus provided. (shrink)

We take ourselves to have an inner life of thought, and we take ourselves to be capable of linguistically expressing our thoughts to others. But what is the nature of this “inner life” of thought? Is conscious thought necessarily carried out in language? This paper takes up these questions by examining Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression. For Merleau-Ponty, language expresses thought. Thus it would seem that thought must be independent of, and in some sense prior to, the speech that expresses it. (...) He also claims, however, that thinking just is linguistic expression, and thus that language constitutes thought. The primary aim of this paper is to make sense of this constitutive claim while maintaining that, for Merleau-Ponty, there is an inner life of thought that exists independently of linguistic expression, and that this inner life rightly deserves the label “thought”. The upshot of this account is twofold. First, it explains why the mainstream view of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression seems plausible, but is ultimately inadequate. Second, it functions as a corrective to contemporary debates about the nature and scope of phenomenal consciousness and the sense in which conscious experience has content. (shrink)

We developed and tested a behavioral version of the Defining Issues Test-1 revised (DIT-1r), which is a measure of the development of moral judgment. We conducted a behavioral experiment using the behavioral Defining Issues Test (bDIT) to examine the relationship between participants’ moral developmental status, moral competence, and reaction time when making moral judgments. We found that when the judgments were made based on the preferred moral schema, the reaction time for moral judgments was significantly moderated by the moral developmental (...) status. In addition, as a participant becomes more confident with moral judgment, the participant differentiates the preferred versus other schemas better particularly when the participant’s abilities for moral judgment are more developed. (shrink)

(In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Psychology of Forgiveness, edited by Glen Pettigrove and Robert Enright) This chapter discusses forgiveness conceived as primarily a volitional commitment, rather than an emotional transformation. As a commitment, forgiveness is distal, involving moral agency over time, and can take the form of a speech act or a chosen attitude. The purpose can be a commitment to repair or restore relationships with wrongdoers for their sake or the sake of the relationship, usually by forswearing (...) one’s hostile attitudes toward a particular wrongdoing; the commitment may also be to oneself for one’s own sake, to be a person with a virtue of forgivingness. It can be incident-specific, that is, a response to a particular occasion of harm, or a forward-looking disposition, an aim to cultivate the habit of being a forgiving person in advance. The enabling conditions of forgivingness as a virtue may be more basic master virtues including integrity and humility, motivations that also underpin commitments to be unforgiving, so this chapter concludes with some careful consideration of the ethics of unforgivingness to others, and the commitment to be unforgiving of oneself. (shrink)

Augustine′s conversion to Christianity in A.D. 386 is a pivotal moment not only in his own life, but in Christian and world history, for the theology of Augustine set the course of theological and cultural development in the western Christian church. But to what exactly was Augustine converted? Scholars have long debated whether he really converted to Christianity in 386, whether he was a Platonist, and, if he adhered to both Platonism and Christianity, which dominated his thought. The debate of (...) the last thirteen decades spans an immense body of literature in multiple languages. In this literature, four major views on Augustine′s conversion may be discerned. The first view is associated with Gaston Boissier and Adolph von Harnack, and was famously championed by Prosper Alfaric: that Augustine in 386 converted to neo-Platonism but not to Christianity. Second, there is the view recently promoted by Catherine Conybeare: that Augustine in 386 converted to Christianity and rejected neo-Platonism. Third, there is the view that he converted to Christianity and was also a neo-Platonist; the most famous adherents of this view are Robert J. O′Connell and Pierre Courcelle. Finally, there is the view recently promoted by Carol Harrison: that Augustine committed to Christianity in 386, yet did not utterly reject neo-Platonism; rather, he aimed to develop a Christian faith that was informed by neo-Platonic insight. In this article, I first explain and distinguish these four general views, and then I explain why I prefer the fourth view. -/- More Info: This is the pre-peer reviewed version of Boone, Mark, "The Role of Platonism in Augustine's 386 Conversion to Christianity," Religion Compass 9.5 (May 2015), 151-61. This article has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rec3.12149/abstract. (shrink)

In this paper we raise the question whether technological artifacts can properly speaking be trusted or said to be trustworthy. First, we set out some prevalent accounts of trust and trustworthiness and explain how they compare with the engineer’s notion of reliability. We distinguish between pure rational-choice accounts of trust, which do not differ in principle from mere judgments of reliability, and what we call “motivation-attributing” accounts of trust, which attribute specific motivations to trustworthy entities. Then we consider some examples (...) of technological entities that are, at first glance, best suited to serve as the objects of trust: intelligent systems that interact with users, and complex socio-technical systems. We conclude that the motivation-attributing concept of trustworthiness cannot be straightforwardly applied to these entities. Any applicable notion of trustworthy technology would have to depart significantly from the full-blown notion of trustworthiness associated with interpersonal trust. (shrink)

In this critical notice, I review and critique ‘Psychiatric Casualties’ (2021) by Mark C. Russell and Charles Figley. In so doing, I analyze a natural experiment from WWII, which has previously only been misinterpreted. The natural experiment leads me to conclude that predisposition results in some individuals being far more likely than others to develop war stress disorders such as PTSD. This point puts me in disagreement with Russell and Figley, though I endorse the general message of their book: that (...) the military has failed in its responsibility to properly care for psychiatric casualties, and that there are steps which could be taken to improve the situation. (shrink)

Augustine and William James both argue that religious faith can be both practical and rational even in the absence of knowledge. Augustine argues that religious faith is trust and that trust is a normal, proper, and even necessary way of believing. Beginning with faith, we then work towards knowledge by means of philosophical contemplation. James’ “The Will to Believe” makes pragmatic arguments for the rationality of faith. Although we do not know (yet) whether God exists, faith is a choice between (...) the risk of believing something false and the risk of not believing something true, and in the absence of convincing evidence we may decide for ourselves which risk we prefer. We may be able to experience God in the future and thereby gain knowledge, yet this may be contingent on our willingness to believe. There are key differences, however. Augustine is a Christian with a neo-Platonic bent, James an empiricist defending the religion of your choice. These differences may be less significant than they first appear. After explaining Augustine and then James I draw out the major points of comparison and contrast and suggest a few reasons their insights might be at least partially synthesized. -/- This is the accepted version of the following article: Mark J. Boone, “Augustine and William James on the Rationality of Faith,” The Heythrop Journal (online edition December 2018), which has been published in final form at [See First URL]. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with the Wiley Self-Archiving Policy [See Second URL]. (shrink)

Our question is this: What makes an act one of entrapment? We make a standard distinction between legal entrapment, which is carried out by parties acting in their capacities as (or as deputies of) law- enforcement agents, and civil entrapment, which is not. We aim to provide a definition of entrapment that covers both and which, for reasons we explain, does not settle questions of permissibility and culpability. We explain, compare, and contrast two existing definitions of legal entrapment to commit (...) a crime that possess this neutrality. We point out some problems with the extensional correctness of these definitions and propose a new definition that resolves these problems. We then extend our definition to provide a more general definition of entrapment, encompassing both civil and legal cases. Our definition is, we believe, closer to being extensionally correct and will, we hope, provide a clearer basis for future discussions about the ethics of entrapment than do the definitions upon which it improves. (shrink)

David Lewis objected to theories that posit necessary connections between distinct entities and to theories that involve a magical grasping of their primitives. In On the Plurality of Worlds, Lewis objected to nondescript ersatzism on these grounds. The literature contains several reconstructions of Lewis’ critique of nondescript ersatzism but none of these interpretations adequately address his main argument because they fail to see that Lewis’ critique is based on broader methodological considerations. I argue that a closer look at his methodology (...) reveals the broader objection he presented against nondescript ersatzism. This objection, I further argue, remains a challenge for the ersatzer who posits structure-less entities as possible worlds. (shrink)

The general idea of strong foundationalism is that knowledge has a foundation in well warranted beliefs which do not derive any warrant from other beliefs and that all our other beliefs depend on these foundational ones for their warrant. Although inerrancy posits Scripture as a solid foundation for theology, the idea that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy involves a strong foundationalist epistemology is deeply problematic. In fact, inerrancy does not require any particular view of the structure of knowledge, and notable (...) sources on inerrancy tout it in ways inconsistent with most forms of strong foundationalism. (shrink)

Perception is a central means by which we come to represent and be aware of particulars in the world. I argue that an adequate account of perception must distinguish between what one perceives and what one's perceptual experience is of or about. Through capacities for visual completion, one can be visually aware of particular parts of a scene that one nevertheless does not see. Seeing corresponds to a basic, but not exhaustive, way in which one can be visually aware of (...) an item. I discuss how the relation between seeing and visual awareness should be explicated within a representational account of the mind. Visual awareness of an item involves a primitive kind of reference: one is visually aware of an item when one's visual perceptual state succeeds in referring to that particular item and functions to represent it accurately. Seeing, by contrast, requires more than successful visual reference. Seeing depends additionally on meta-semantic facts about how visual reference happens to be fixed. The notions of seeing and of visual reference are both indispensable to an account of perception, but they are to be characterized at different levels of representational explanation. (shrink)

Naive realism in philosophy of perception is the view that (successful) perception involves a direct relation between perceiving subjects and the world. The naive realist says that your perception of a cat on the mat is a worldly relation which is partially constituted by the cat and the mat; a spatio-temporal chunk of the world is presenting itself to you. Recently, Elijah Chudnoff and John Bengson have independently developed an extension of this view to intellectual experiences, or intuitions, for traditionally (...) a priori domains. We argue that this view, which we call ‘Intuitional Naive Realism’ (INR), will not have the epistemic advantages that Chudnoff and Bengson claim that it does. In perception, but not intuition, there is a deeper explanation of what makes it the case that one experience is constituted by the world while another is not. Whether or not INR is true, then, it does no interesting epistemological work for traditionally a priori domains. (shrink)

At the heart of two recent theological traditions are hermeneutical principles which are not only consistent but are integrated in the hermeneutics of Augustine. According to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy as it has been recently articulated by Evangelicals, Scripture has an original meaning, and that meaning is not open to the possibility of error. According to some thinkers in postmodern theology, including Jean-Luc Marion, the meaning of Scripture transcends its original meaning. After examining postmodernism and inerrancy, I consider their (...) harmony in the writings of Augustine, who takes original meaning as a guide for understanding that biblical meaning which transcends it. An Augustinian hermeneutic consistent with inerrancy is thus an alternative to the more typical non-inerrantist postmodern theologies. (shrink)

Despite the end of the Cold War and the ascendancy of liberal democracy celebrated by Francis Fukuyama as “the end of history”, a growing number of scholars and political activists point to its inherent shortcomings. However, they have tended to dismiss it on the basis of one or two of its salient weaknesses. While this is a justifiable way to proceed, it denies the searching reader an opportunity to see the broad basis for the growing rejection of liberal democracy among (...) African political theorists. Consequently, in this article, I argue that from an African perspective, the almost hegemonic status of liberal democracy can be challenged on at least five grounds, namely, logical inconsistency, impracticability due to the largely communalistic outlook of many africans, inconsistency between affirmation and action, violation of the right to ethnic identity, and the moral imperative to assert the right to cultural emancipation. -/- I conclude by calling upon African and Africanist political theorists to utilise indigenous African political thought, coupled with emancipatory aspects of political thought from other parts of the world, to design practicable models of democracy for contemporary African states. I further conclude that in order to promote genuine inter-cultural dialogue on democratisation, people from Western cultures ought to acknowledge the equality of all cultures, and to recognise that systems of governance are part and parcel of those cultures. (shrink)

A naturalistic theory of intentionality is proposed that differs from previous evolutionary and tracking theories. Full-blown intentionality is constructed through a series of evolvable refinements. A first, minimal version of intentionality originates from a conjectured internal process that estimates an organism’s own fitness and that continually modifies the organism. This process produces the directedness of intentionality. The internal estimator can be parsed into intentional components that point to components of the process that produces fitness. It is argued that such intentional (...) components can point to mistaken or non-existing entities. Different Fregian senses of the same reference correspond to different components that have different roles in the estimator. Intentional components that point to intentional components in other organisms produce directedness towards semi-abstract entities. Finally, adding a general, population-wide means of communication enables intentional components that point to fully abstract entities. Intentionality thus naturalized has all of its expected properties: being directed; potentially making errors; possibly pointing to non-existent, abstract, or rigid entities; capable of pointing many-to-one and one-to-many; distinguishing sense and reference; having perspective and grain; and having determinate content. Several examples, such as ‘swampman’ and ‘brain-in-a-vat’, illustrate how the theory can be applied. (shrink)