A review of Carl Huffman's new edition of the fragments of Archytas of Tarentum. Praises the extensive commentary on four fragments, but argues that at least two dubious works not included in the edition ("On Law and Justice" and "On Wisdom") deserve further consideration and contain important information for the interpretation of Archytas. Provides a complete translation for the fragments of those works.

As inductive decision-making procedures, the inferences made by machine learning programs are subject to underdetermination by evidence and bear inductive risk. One strategy for overcoming these challenges is guided by a presumption in philosophy of science that inductive inferences can and should be value-free. Applied to machine learning programs, the strategy assumes that the influence of values is restricted to data and decision outcomes, thereby omitting internal value-laden design choice points. In this paper, I apply arguments from feminist philosophy of (...) science to machine learning programs to make the case that the resources required to respond to these inductive challenges render critical aspects of their design constitutively value-laden. I demonstrate these points specifically in the case of recidivism algorithms, arguing that contemporary debates concerning fairness in criminal justice risk-assessment programs are best understood as iterations of traditional arguments from inductive risk and demarcation, and thereby establish the value-laden nature of automated decision-making programs. Finally, in light of these points, I address opportunities for relocating the value-free ideal in machine learning and the limitations that accompany them. (shrink)

Why is it that some instances of disagreement appear to be so intractable? And what is the appropriate way to handle such disagreements, especially concerning matters about which there are important practical and political needs for us to come to a consensus? In this paper, I consider an explanation of the apparent intractability of deep disagreement offered by hinge epistemology. According to this explanation, at least some deep disagreements are rationally unresolvable because they concern ‘hinge’ commitments that are unresponsive to (...) rational considerations. This explanation, if correct, seems to have troubling implications for how we should respond to deep disagreement. If my position on a topic is not responsive to rational considerations, then what choice have I but to dogmatically hold to that position, and simply dismiss the views of those with whom I disagree? I address this problem by identifying an attitude of intellectual humility that is appropriate to have towards one's hinge commitments, and suggest that this attitude provides the basis for a non-rational, constructive way to resolve deep disagreement. (shrink)

Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors (...) We Live By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection. (shrink)

On 4 December 2006, during discussions on the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Bill, Andrew Dismore, Member of Parliament and then Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, said, ‘Organisations can kill people … but it is the actions and omissions of people in organisations that cumulatively cause death’. However, the corporate entity is a vehicle for the communal actions of those who guide the business activities. Attempting to seek out persons or people that are solely responsible for deaths (...) and violations of human rights caused by companies is fruitless. The entity is a vehicle for those actions, it possesses its own, often deep, pockets of finance and resources, and it has a public image. It is more useful to punish the corporate entity, in instances where the corporate behaviour has led to death and human rights abuses, as it is in seeking out individual defendants. Soft law options have not brought about a sufficient reduction in instances of deaths caused by corporate behaviour across jurisdictional borders. This article will argue that the time has now come to establish an international hard law on corporate killing, and for states to ensure that there is a viable path towards a redress for victims and their families along with adopting a duty to assist the victim or their family to pursue redress to ensure a fair balance of power against transnational companies. (shrink)

. In the philosophy of J. L. Schellenberg, “evolutionary religion” is a religious stance oriented towards the deep future. According to Schellenberg, the best form of evolutionary religion is non-doxastic faith in ultimism. I reject Schellenberg’s arguments for preferring ultimism and suggest that committing non-doxastically to traditional religion makes more sense from an evolutionary perspective. I argue that the alignment argument for traditional religion remains sound even when the deep future is considered. Furthermore, I assess Schellenberg’s claim that humanity is (...) religiously immature. (shrink)

An adequate understanding of the ubiquitous practice of mechanistic explanation requires an account of what Craver termed “constitutive relevance.” Entities or activities are constitutively relevant to a phenomenon when they are parts of the mechanism responsible for that phenomenon. Craver’s mutual manipulability account extended Woodward’s account of manipulationist counterfactuals to analyze how interlevel experiments establish constitutive relevance. Critics of MM argue that applying Woodward’s account to this philosophical problem conflates causation and constitution, thus rendering the account incoherent. These criticisms, we (...) argue, arise from failing to distinguish the semantic, epistemic, and metaphysical aspects of the problem of constitutive relevance. In distinguishing these aspects of the problem and responding to these critics accordingly, we amend MM into a refined epistemic criterion, the “matched interlevel experiments” account. Further, we explain how this epistemological thesis is grounded in the plausible metaphysical thesis that constitutive relevance is causal betweenness. (shrink)

In “What Makes a Scientific Explanation Distinctively Mathematical?” (2013b), Lange uses several compelling examples to argue that certain explanations for natural phenomena appeal primarily to mathematical, rather than natural, facts. In such explanations, the core explanatory facts are modally stronger than facts about causation, regularity, and other natural relations. We show that Lange's account of distinctively mathematical explanation is flawed in that it fails to account for the implicit directionality in each of his examples. This inadequacy is remediable in each (...) case by appeal to ontic facts that account for why the explanation is acceptable in one direction and unacceptable in the other direction. The mathematics involved in these examples cannot play this crucial normative role. While Lange's examples fail to demonstrate the existence of distinctively mathematical explanations, they help to emphasize that many superficially natural scientific explanations rely for their explanatory force on relations of stronger-than-natural necessity. These are not opposing kinds of scientific explanations; they are different aspects of scientific explanation. (shrink)

Longtermists have argued that humanity should significantly increase its efforts to prevent catastrophes like nuclear wars, pandemics, and AI disasters. But one prominent longtermist argument overshoots this conclusion: the argument also implies that humanity should reduce the risk of existential catastrophe even at extreme cost to the present generation. This overshoot means that democratic governments cannot use the longtermist argument to guide their catastrophe policy. In this paper, we show that the case for preventing catastrophe does not depend on longtermism. (...) Standard cost-benefit analysis implies that governments should spend much more on reducing catastrophic risk. We argue that a government catastrophe policy guided by cost-benefit analysis should be the goal of longtermists in the political sphere. This policy would be democratically acceptable, and it would reduce existential risk by almost as much as a strong longtermist policy. (shrink)

The standard version of sufficientarianism maintains that providing people with enough, or as close to enough as is possible, is lexically prior to other distributive goals. This article argues that this is excessive – more than distributive justice allows – in four distinct ways. These concern the magnitude of advantage, the number of beneficiaries, responsibility and desert, and above-threshold distribution. Sufficientarians can respond by accepting that providing enough unconditionally is more than distributive justice allows, instead balancing sufficiency against other considerations.

The genetic modification of pigs as a source of transplantable organs is one of several possible solutions to the chronic organ shortage. This paper describes existing ethical tensions in xenotransplantation (XTx) that argue against pursuing it. Recommendations for lifelong infectious disease surveillance and notification of close contacts of recipients are in tension with the rights of human research subjects. Parental/guardian consent for pediatric xenograft recipients is in tension with a child’s right to an open future. Individual consent to transplant is (...) in tension with public health threats that include zoonotic diseases. XTx amplifies concerns about justice in organ transplantation and could exacerbate existing inequities. The prevention of infectious disease in source animals is in tension with the best practices of animal care and animal welfare, requiring isolation, ethologically inappropriate housing, and invasive reproductive procedures that would severely impact the well-being of intelligent social creatures like pigs. (shrink)

The concept of bias is pervasive in both popular discourse and empirical theorizing within philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. This widespread application threatens to render the concept too heterogeneous and unwieldy for systematic investigation. This article explores recent philosophical literature attempting to identify a single theoretical category—termed ‘bias’—that could be unified across different contexts. To achieve this aim, the article provides a comprehensive review of theories of bias that are significant in the fields of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, (...) machine learning, and epistemology. It focuses on key examples such as perceptual bias, implicit bias, explicit bias, and algorithmic bias, scrutinizing their similarities and differences. Although these explorations may not conclusively establish the existence of a natural theoretical kind, pursuing the possibility offers valuable insights into how bias is conceptualized and deployed across diverse domains, thus deepening our understanding of its complexities across a wide range of cognitive and computational processes. (shrink)

I argue that Sellars’s naturalization of Kant should be understood in terms of how he used behavioristic psychology and cybernetics. I first explore how Sellars used Edward Tolman’s cognitive-behavioristic psychology to naturalize Kant in the early essay “Language, Rules, and Behavior”. I then turn to Norbert Wiener’s understanding of feedback loops and circular causality. On this basis I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing, which he introduces in “Being and Being Known,” can be understood in terms of what (...) I call cybernetic behaviorism. I interpret picturing in terms of cycles of cybernetic behavior and signifying in terms of coordination between cybernetic behavior systems, or what I call triangulated cybernetic behavior. This leads to a formal, naturalistic understanding of personhood as the capacity to engage in triangulated cybernetic behavior. I conclude by showing that Sellars’s thought has the resources, which he did not exploit, for introducing the concept of second-order cybernetics. This suggests that Sellars’s philosophy of mind could be developed in the direction of autopoiesis and enactivism. (shrink)

This paper continues the defense of a version of scientific realism, Tautological Scientific Realism, that rests on the claim that, excluding some areas of fundamental physics about which doubts are entirely justified, many areas of contemporary science cannot be coherently imagined to be false other than via postulation of radically skeptical scenarios, which are not relevant to the realism debate in philosophy of science. In this paper we discuss, specifically, the threats of meaning change and reference failure associated with the (...) Kuhnian tradition, which depend on a descriptivist approach to meaning, and we argue that descriptivism is not the right account of the meaning and reference of theoretical terms. We suggest that an account along the lines of the causal-historical theory of reference provides a more faithful picture of how terms for unobservable theoretical entities and properties come to refer; we argue that this picture works particularly well for TSR. In the last section we discuss how our account raises concerns specifically for perspectival forms of scientific realism. (shrink)

A new translation and edition of Aristotle's Protrepticus (with critical comments on the fragments) -/- Welcome -/- The Protrepticus was an early work of Aristotle, written while he was still a member of Plato's Academy, but it soon became one of the most famous works in the whole history of philosophy. Unfortunately it was not directly copied in the middle ages and so did not survive in its own manuscript tradition. But substantial fragments of it have been preserved in several (...) works by Iamblichus of Chalcis, a third century A.D. neo-Pythagorean philosopher and educator. On the basis of a close study of Iamblichus' extensive use and excerption of Aristotle's Protrepticus, it is possible to reconstruct the backbone of the lost work, and then to flesh it out with the other surviving reports about the work from antiquity (for example in Alexander of Aphrodisias and other ancient commentators on Aristotle). It is also possible to identify several papyrus fragments of the work, and many references and literary allusions in later authors, especially Cicero, whose own lost dialogue Hortensius was a defense of philosophy modeleld on Aristotle's. (shrink)

The method of reflective equilibrium focuses on the relationship between principles and judgments. Principles are relatively general rules for comprehending the area of enquiry. Judgments are our intuitions or commitments, ‘at all levels of generality’ (Rawls 1975: 8), regarding the subject matter. The basic idea of reflective equilibrium is to bring principles and judgments into accord. This can be achieved by revising the principles and/or the judgments. -/- I first look at normative political judgments (Section 2) before considering the role (...) of principles, arguments, devices of representation and background theory in wide reflective equilibrium (Section 3). I then consider two of the main challenges to the method (Section 4), and show how to use it to deliberate about substantive political principles (Section 5). I conclude with an extended example of the method in action (Section 6). (shrink)

According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific (...) explanation. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation (pp. 331–496). New York: Free Press; Kitcher (1989); Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 1–25). My concern is with the minimal suggestion that an adequate philosophical theory of scientific explanation can limit its attention to the format or structure with which theories are represented. The representational subsumption view is a plausible hypothesis about the psychology of understanding. It is also a plausible claim about how scientists present their knowledge to the world. However, one cannot address the central questions for a philosophical theory of scientific explanation without turning one’s attention from the structure of representations to the basic commitments about the worldly structures that plausibly count as explanatory. A philosophical theory of scientific explanation should achieve two goals. The first is explanatory demarcation. It should show how explanation relates with other scientific achievements, such as control, description, measurement, prediction, and taxonomy. The second is explanatory normativity. It should say when putative explanations succeed and fail. One cannot achieve these goals without undertaking commitments about the kinds of ontic structures that plausibly count as explanatory. Representations convey explanatory information about a phenomenon when and only when they describe the ontic explanations for those phenomena. (shrink)

Clinical Legal Education programmes now take place in most law schools in England and Wales. However, legal education continues to be predominantly focused on the analysis and application of rules, doctrines, and theories to hypothetical scenarios or essay questions. This form of pedagogy either minimises or ignores the role of the client in terms of supplying lawyers with knowledge pertinent to their case. In other words, it overlooks the fact that the lawyer’s acquisition of knowledge is not confined to technical (...) rationality. This article seeks to achieve three broad aims. First, to contribute to the debate concerning the epistemology of reflective practice. Second, to develop a theoretical reflective cycle, informed by Kant’s transcendental idealism, which seeks to maximise knowledge acquisition in legal education, namely knowledge supplied by the client. Third, to address implicit bias using the proposed reflective cycle. An optimal pedagogy for using this cycle is Clinical Legal Education, namely live client clinics. (shrink)

This chapter explores the unifying themes of “the Pittsburgh School” of Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell: a social pragmatist account of intentionality, the rejection of the Myth of the Given, and the partial rehabilitation of Hegel for analytic philosophy. In addition this chapter also discusses three points of disagreement within the Pittsburgh School: whether or not we should posit sense-impressions, whether perceptual intentionality is world-relational, and whether the natural sciences have epistemic authority over other ways of thinking about nature. The chapter (...) concludes with a metaphilosophical concern about the status of a return to Hegel within analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy follows an anti-Hegelian neo-Kantian institution of a divide between philosophy and the social and natural sciences. Hegel would reject such a divide, since he conceives of philosophy as investigating “shapes of a world” and not just “shapes of consciousness”. In these terms the Pittsburgh School marks a return to Hegel trimmed to suit the needs of analytic philosophy rather than questioning those needs. (shrink)

This paper explores the complex nature of social biases, arguing for a functional framework that recognizes their unity and diversity. The functional approach posits that all biases share a common functional role in overcoming underdetermination. This framework, I argue, provides a comprehensive understanding of how all psychological biases, including social biases, are unified. I then turn to the question of disunity, demonstrating how psychological social biases differ systematically in the mental states and processes that constitute them. These differences indicate that (...) biases at various levels of the cognitive architecture require distinct treatment along at least two dimensions: epistemic evaluation and mitigation strategies. By examining social biases through this dual lens of unity and diversity, we can more effectively identify when and how to intervene on problematic biases. Ultimately, this approach provides a nuanced understanding of the nature of social bias, offering practical guidance for addressing existing biases and proactively managing emerging biases in both human and artificial minds. (shrink)

The web is increasingly inhabited by the remains of its departed users, a phenomenon that has given rise to a burgeoning digital afterlife industry. This industry requires a framework for dealing with its ethical implications. We argue that the regulatory conventions guiding archaeological exhibitions could provide the basis for such a framework.

In this paper we argue that political envy is central to unraveling the racial dynamics in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. Building upon Sara Protasi’s taxonomy of envy and, in particular, from her analysis of some DTRT scenes, we conduct a more thorough interrogation of how political emotions, most notably envy, shape race relations in the film. We start by summarizing Protasi’s account of envy and then review two alternative accounts of political emotions. After elucidating what envy is and (...) how it becomes politically valenced, we analyze three key scenes that are the most emblematic of political envy: 1) a discussion between three Black characters on the street corner, 2) an exchange between the film’s main character, Mookie, and his racist co-worker, Pino; and 3) the film’s climactic riot sequence. Our analysis of these three scenes, in addition to complementing previous readings of Do The Right Thing, highlight envy’s potential to either impede or promote political action. (shrink)

Online technologies enable vast amounts of data to outlive their producers online, thereby giving rise to a new, digital form of afterlife presence. Although researchers have begun investigating the nature of such presence, academic literature has until now failed to acknowledge the role of commercial interests in shaping it. The goal of this paper is to analyse what those interests are and what ethical consequences they may have. This goal is pursued in three steps. First, we introduce the concept of (...) the Digital Afterlife Industry, and define it as an object of study. Second, we identify the politico-economic interests of the DAI. For this purpose, we develop an analytical approach based on an informational interpretation of Marxian economics. Third, we explain the practical manifestations of the interests using four real life cases. The findings expose the incentives of the DAI to alter what is referred to as the “informational bodies” of the dead, which in turn is to be seen as a violation of the principle of human dignity. To prevent such consequences, we argue that the ethical conventions that guide trade with remains of organic bodies may serve as a good model for future regulation of DAI. (shrink)

Two arguments in Eudemian Ethics 2 that are crucial to Aristotle’s definition of moral virtue as a mean state contain claims that Aristotle says are clear by induction. In these contexts, he explicitly appeals to examples coming from arts and sciences like gymnastic training and medicine for evidence. But Aristotle does not here, or elsewhere (at least in any extant work), including the parallel arguments in the Nicomachean Ethics, actually supply or discuss the evidence that makes these inductive arguments clear. (...) Fortunately, strong support for them can be found in the Hippocratic Corpus, especially in On Ancient Medicine and On Regimen. (shrink)

The possibilities of unconscious perception and unconscious bias prompt parallel debates about unconscious mental content. This chapter argues that claims within these debates alleging the existence of unconscious content are made fraught by ambiguity and confusion with respect to the two central concepts they involve: consciousness and content. Borrowing conceptual resources from the debate about unconscious perception, the chapter distills the two conceptual puzzles concerning each of these notions and establishes philosophical strategies for their resolution. It then argues that empirical (...) evidence for unconscious bias falls victim to these same puzzles, but that progress can be made by adopting similar philosophical strategies. Throughout, the chapter highlights paths forward in both debates, illustrates how they serve as fruitful domains in which to study the relationship between philosophy and empirical science, and uses their combined study to further understanding of a general theory of unconscious content. (shrink)

I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing should be taken seriously by philosophers of mind, language, and cognition. I begin with interpretations of key Sellarsian texts in order to show that picturing is best understood as a theory of non-linguistic cognitive representations through which animals navigate their environments. This is distinct from the kind of discursive cognition that Sellars called ‘signifying’ and which is best understood in terms of socio-linguistic inferences. I argue that picturing is required because reflection (...) on signifying cannot adequately explain our need for cognitive friction. I then show how the idea of picturing is further developed by Paul Churchland, Ruth Garrett Millikan, and Huw Price. I finally turn to predictive processing as a theory of cognitive representation, and in particular Andy Clark’s ‘radical predictive processing’, to further characterize picturing. However, doing so has the cost of pushing picturing and signifying further apart than Sellars intended. (shrink)

I argue that a circa first century B.C./A.D. anonymous epistolary comic novel depicting a fictional interaction between Hippocrates of Cos and Democritus of Abdera contains an insightful imitation of Democritus that can cast light on the historical Democritus’s thought, including his thought on the touchy subject of appropriate and inappropriate laughter. The only thing certain about Democritus’s view of laughter is that he denounced laughter at human misfortune as inappropriate. The later legend of him as laughing at everything and everyone (...) indiscriminately is a later distortion of his view which the author of the comic novel seems concerned to counteract. (shrink)

Williamson's influential anti-luminosity argument aims to show that our own mental states are not “luminous,” and that we are thus “cognitively homeless.” Among other things, this argument represents a significant challenge to the idea that we enjoy basic self-knowledge of our own occurrent mental states. In this paper, I summarize Williamson's anti-luminosity argument, and discuss the role that the notion of “epistemic basis” plays in it. I argue that the anti-luminosity argument relies upon a particular version of the basis-relative safety (...) condition on knowledge. This commitment is significant because basic self-knowledge seemingly lacks any kind of distinct epistemic basis, such as inference, observation, testimony, etc., despite representing a genuine kind of knowledge of contingent matters of fact. I consider a disjunctivist account, according to which true basic self-beliefs indeed lack an epistemic basis in any kind of epistemic method, yet are still epistemically grounded in the mental states they concern. I argue that this account of self-knowledge is compatible with standard understandings of the basis relative safety condition on knowledge, but rejects the particular version required by the anti-luminosity argument. (shrink)

Luck egalitarianism is a family of egalitarian theories of distributive justice that aim to counteract the distributive effects of luck. This article explains luck egalitarianism's main ideas, and the debates that have accompanied its rise to prominence. There are two main parts to the discussion. The first part sets out three key moves in the influential early statements of Dworkin, Arneson, and Cohen: the brute luck/option luck distinction, the specification of brute luck in everyday or theoretical terms and the specification (...) of advantage as resources, welfare, or some combination of these. The second part covers three later developments: the democratic egalitarian critique of luck egalitarianism, the luck egalitarian acceptance of pluralism, and luck egalitarian doubts about the significance of the brute luck/option luck distinction. (shrink)

Discrimination, understood as differential treatment of individuals on the basis of their respective group memberships, is widely considered to be morally wrong. This moral judgment is backed in many jurisdictions with the passage of equality of opportunity legislation, which aims to ensure that racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, sexual-orientation, disability and other groups are not subjected to discrimination. This chapter explores the conceptual underpinnings of discrimination and equality of opportunity using the tools of analytical moral and political philosophy.

In this opinion piece we propose the investigation of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). BDD is a psychiatric disorder characterised by appearance-based preoccupations and accompanying compulsions. While safe and effective treatments for BDD exist, non-response and relapse rates remain high. Therefore, there is a need to investigate promising new treatment options for this highly debilitating condition. Preliminary evidence suggests safety, feasibility, and potential efficacy of psychedelic treatments in disorders that share similar psychopathological mechanisms with BDD. (...) Drawing on this evidence, as well as on relevant qualitative reports and theoretical proposals, we argue that it would be worthwhile to conduct a phase 2a study aimed at assessing the safety and feasibility of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in BDD. We also offer some suggestions for how future research ought to proceed. (shrink)

We offer a sceptical examination of a thesis recently advanced in a monograph published by Princeton University Press, entitled Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia. In this dense and probing work, Christopher I. Beckwith, a professor of Central Eurasian studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, argues that Pyrrho of Elis adopted a form of early Buddhism during his years in Bactria and Gandhāra, and that early Pyrrhonism must be understood as a sect of early Buddhism. In making (...) his case Beckwith claims that virtually all scholars of Greek, Indian, and Chinese philosophy have been operating under flawed assumptions and with flawed methodologies, and so have failed to notice obvious and undeniable correspondences between the philosophical views of the Buddha and of Pyrrho. In this study we take Beckwith’s proposal and challenge seriously, and we examine his textual basis and techniques of translation, his methods of examining passages, his construal of problems and his reconstruction of arguments. We find that his presuppositions are contentious and doubtful, his own methods are extremely flawed, and that he draws unreasonable conclusions. Although the result of our study is almost entirely negative, we think it illustrates some important general points about the methodology of comparative philosophy. (shrink)

An interruption. Rethinking the first three chapters of this book, I have come to suspect that, not unlike Iris Murdoch and Emmanuel Levinas, the way I imagine ‘ethics’ floats on an idea that any ethical substantive position or ethical theory is always shaped through our existential condition and our embodied encounter with others. To Murdoch, existence is the disposition for our responses to the ways in which we perceive reality, and yet, although these responses are always part of who we (...) are, they are not always part of what we do, and so, we set ourselves ethical tasks when we desire to act ethically. As scholar Bridget Clarke argues, “to attend to something [for Murdoch] is to approach it with a just and loving eye, and therewith to perceive it in its unbounded particularity and complexity, and so, as it truly is.” Or as I argue, to attend to the other ‘justly and lovingly’, Murdoch would instruct, is not merely to accurately collect details about the other and then arrive at an approximation of its being, but also to apprehend the other as ‘distinctly singular’ and ‘distinctly foreign’ from oneself–which at once forgoes any assimilation of the other into oneself, incidentally. The recognition of the other as ‘one who embodies human otherness and dignity’ becomes the condition for and coherent way of imagining and accessing moral reality. Moreover, for Diane Davis, this “being-for-the-other names a pre-originary obligation to respond to the other [and] it is in this response that both the self and the other emerge as existents” whose ethical projects are each challenged by the markedly different and infinitely other being. This obligation, Levinas might also say, is an ‘authority’ that is experienced like the effect of the other upon me, so that I am subsequently motivated to enact ethical task-making. I am not, therefore, “pulling everything other into the same, the known, the comprehended,” nor am I looking to any normative theories as authoritative templates from which I act ethically. And so, unlike Husserl, I am not “joining the philosophical tradition in its fundamental disrespect for all things other,” but instead, by dispositioning myself between these theories in responsible Levinasian fashion, I will be tracking them in response to their confronting me, and not as normative theories that are applicable to real and lived experiences. (shrink)

Some philosophers writing on the possibility of faultless disagreement have argued that the only way to account for the intuition that there could be disagreements which are faultless in every sense is to accept a relativistic semantics. In this article we demonstrate that this view is mistaken by constructing an absolutist semantics for a particular domain – aesthetic discourse – which allows for the possibility of genuinely faultless disagreements. We argue that this position is an improvement over previous absolutist responses (...) to the relativist's challenge and that it presents an independently plausible account of the semantics of aesthetic discourse. (shrink)

Disagreements about abortion are often assumed to reduce to disagreements about fetal personhood (and mindedness). If one believes a fetus is a person (or has a mind), then they are “pro-life.” If one believes a fetus is not a person (or is not minded), they are “pro-choice.” The issue, however, is much more complicated. Not only is it not dichotomous—most everyone believes that abortion is permissible in some circumstances (e.g. to save the mother’s life) and not others (e.g. at nine (...) months of a planned pregnancy)—but scholars on both sides of the issue (e.g. Don Marquis and Judith Thomson) have convincingly argued that fetal personhood (and mindedness) are irrelevant to the debate. To determine the extent to which they are right, this article will define “personhood,” its relationship to mindedness, and explore what science has revealed about the mind before exploring the relevance of both to questions of abortion’s morality and legality. In general, this article does not endorse a particular answer to these questions, but the article should enhance the reader’s ability to develop their own answers in a much more informed way. (shrink)

Democritus of Abdera, best known as a cosmologist and the founder of atomism, wrote more on ethics than anyone before Plato. His work Peri euthumiês (On Contentment) was extremely influential on the later development of teleological and intellectualist ethics, eudaimonism, hedonism, therapeutic ethics, and positive psychology. The loss of his works, however, and the transmission of his fragments in collections of maxims (gnomai), has obscured the extent his contribution to the history of systematic ethics and influence on later philosophy, especially (...) in the Hellenistic age. In this essay I review the evidence basis for Democritus’ ethics, discuss the rhetorical and logical aspects of his maxims, attempt to synthesize the fragments into an overall interpretation, and offer a summary some of the more influential aspects of his ethics. (shrink)

Encyclopedia article on Democritus. Includes a brief overview of his philosophical views, major works, and critical reception.

I develop a positive interpretation of Democritus' theory of agency and responsibility, building on previous studies that have already gone far in demonstrating his innovativeness and importance to the history and philosophy of these concepts. The interpretation will be defended by a synthesis of several familiar ethical fragments and maxims presented in the framework of an ancient problem that, unlike the problem of free will and determinism, Democritus almost certainly did confront: the problem of the causes of human goodness and (...) success. I will argue that Democritus' account of the virtues and success is naturally interpreted as an intellectualist one. His focus on our intellectual powers as the source of our own agency and cause of our success led him to remarkable breakthroughs in moral psychology, including the development of a kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy for stress and anxiety, and the proposal of an autonomous source of moral sanction. (shrink)

In some influential histories of ancient philosophy, teleological explanation and mechanistic explanation are assumed to be directly opposed and mutually exclusive alternatives. I contend that this assumption is deeply flawed, and distorts our understanding both of teleological and mechanistic explanation, and of the history of mechanistic philosophy. To prove this point, I shall provide an overview of the first systematic treatise on mechanics, the short and neglected work Mechanical Problems, written either by Aristotle or by a very early member of (...) his school. I will argue that the work is thoroughly Aristotelian in methodology, and that taking it seriously can deepen our understanding of Aristotle’s discussion of animal and human self-motion in the Physics and On the Movement of Animals. (shrink)

Critics of luck egalitarianism have claimed that, far from providing a justification for the public insurance functions of a welfare state as its proponents claim, the view objectionably abandons those who are deemed responsible for their dire straits. This article considers seven arguments that can be made in response to this ‘abandonment objection’. Four of these arguments are found wanting, with a recurrent problem being their reliance on a dubious sufficientarian or quasi-sufficientarian commitment to provide a threshold of goods unconditionally. (...) Three arguments succeed, showing that luck egalitarians have good reasons for assisting ‘negligent victims’ on account of changes that may occur in an individual between the time of their choice and their subsequent disadvantage, bad option luck, and doubts about free will and responsibility. Luck egalitarianism is therefore shown to offer strong support for public insurance. (shrink)

To Aaron Pacitti and Michael Cauvel–whose journal article, “Rent-Seeking Behavior and Economic Justice: A Classroom Exercise” broadly argues that “understanding the [complexities] of rent-seeking behavior helps fill the gap between economics and politics”–the varieties of rent are wide and, therefore, can only be described in their category-specific positions. I will discuss three of these categories in more detail below, but for now, I propose that a useful working grasp of economic rent involves “the amount paid to the owner of a (...) factor of production over the cost that is to be necessarily incurred on utilizing such elements in the production process.” In math terms, ‘economic rent’ equals the agreed-upon-amount paid by the consumer (when that amount far exceeds the market value of the product) minus the cost spent by the producer to make the product (when that cost is far below the typical amount to produce the product). Originally, the concept of economic rent concerned land ownership and the production of natural goods. Two major economists, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, offered insights into the general makeup and logic of what they called, the rent of land and simply rent, respectively. (shrink)

Greco-Roman meteorology will be described in four overlapping developments. In the archaic period, astro-meteorological calendars were written down, and one appears in Hesiod’s Works and Days; such calendars or almanacs originated thousands of years earlier in Mesopotamia. In the second development, also in the archaic period, the pioneers of prose writing began writing speculative naturalistic explanations of meteorological phenomena: Anaximander, followed by Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and others. When Aristotle in the fourth century BCE mentions the ‘inquiry that all our predecessors have (...) been calling meteorology’ (338a26), he is referring to these writers. In the third development, the first two enterprises were combined: empirical data collection about meteorological phenomena began to be married to naturalistic theoretical explanation. This innovation was prompted by Democritus and synthesised in its most influential form by Aristotle. At this point more sophisticated techniques of both short-term weather forecasting and long-term speculation about global climate change were also developed. In the fourth development, the wider implications of the naturalistic explanation of meteorological phenomena were contested. The views of ‘meteorologists’ had been controversial since the archaic period because they were perceived, and sometimes intended, to displace the divine prerogatives and undermine traditional religion. These controversies intensified throughout the classical and Hellenistic periods. (shrink)

As many as you know, the title of this article was also the title of an international philosophy for children symposium held at the Menger Hotel in downtown San Antonio on April 12-14, 1989. The symposium was the culminating event of a year-long project in which third, fourth, and fifth grade teachers from four area schools implemented the philosophy for children program in their schools. In addition to a brief history of this project and a summary of the symposium and (...) related events, the paper concludes with reactions to this year long project from both teachers and students involved in the program. (shrink)

In a recent book and article, James Sterba has argued that there is no free will defense. It is the purpose of this article to show that, in the most technical sense, he is wrong. There is a version of the free will defense that can solve what Sterba (rightly) takes to be the most interesting and severe version of the logical problem of moral evil. However, I will also argue that, in effect (or, we might say, in practice), Sterba (...) is correct. The only working version of the free will defense requires embracing a view that entails consequences theists traditionally have not and cannot accept. Consequently, the one and only free will solution is not viable. Unless some other solution can be found (Sterba argues there is none), the logical problem of evil, as Sterba understands it, either commits one to atheism, or a version of theism that practically all theists would regard as a heresy. (shrink)

Archytas of Tarentum, a contemporary and associate of Plato, was a famous Pythagorean, mathematician, and statesman of Tarentum. Although his works are lost and most of the fragments attributed to him were composed in later eras, they nevertheless contain valuable information about his thought. In particular, the fragments of On Law and Justice are likely based on a work by the early Peripatetic biographer Aristoxenus of Tarentum. The fragments touch on key themes of early Greek ethics, including: written and unwritten (...) laws; freedom and self-sufficiency; moderation of the emotions and cultivation of virtues; equality and the competence of the majority to participate in government; criticism of “rule by an individual”; a theory of the ideal “mixed constitution”; distributive and corrective justice and punishment, and of the rule of law. The fragments also contain one of the only positive accounts of democracy in ancient Greek philosophy. (shrink)

Christian apologists, like Willian Lane Craig and Stephen T. Davis, argue that belief in Jesus’ resurrection is reasonable because it provides the best explanation of the available evidence. In this article, I refute that thesis. To do so, I lay out how the logic of inference to the best explanation (IBE) operates, including what good explanations must be and do by definition, and then apply IBE to the issue at hand. Multiple explanations—including (what I will call) The Resurrection Hypothesis, The (...) Lie Hypothesis, The Coma Hypothesis, The Imposter Hypothesis, and The Legend Hypothesis—will be considered. While I will not attempt to rank them all from worst to best, what I will reveal is how and why The Legend Hypothesis is unquestionably the best explanation, and The Resurrection Hypothesis is undeniably the worst. Consequently, not only is Craig and Davis’ conclusion mistaken, but belief in the literal resurrection of Jesus is irrational. In presenting this argument, I do not take myself to be breaking new ground; Robert Cavin and Carlos Colombetti have already presented a Bayesian refutation of Craig and Davis’ arguments. But I do take myself to be presenting an argument that the average person (and philosopher) can follow. It is my goal for the average person (and philosopher) to be able to clearly understand how and why the hypothesis “God supernaturally raised Jesus from the dead” fails utterly as an explanation of the evidence that Christian apologist cite for Jesus’ resurrection. (shrink)

The automation of online social life is an urgent issue for researchers and the public alike. However, one of the most significant uses of such technologies seems to have gone largely unnoticed by the research community: religion. Focusing on Islamic Prayer Apps, which automatically post prayers from its users’ accounts, we show that even one such service is already responsible for millions of tweets daily, constituting a significant portion of Arabic-language Twitter traffic. We argue that the fact that a phenomenon (...) of these proportions has gone unnoticed by researchers reveals an opportunity to broaden the scope of the current research agenda on online automation. (shrink)