In addition to thinking about the meanings of solidarity, it is important to address how solidarity of the appropriate sort can be cultivated. Possibilities include the transformative power of key individuals or events; and the role of institutions. In health care it is suggested that a combination of the two strategies is required. Professional conduct includes not only acting in 'face to face' delivery, but also engaging with those institutions which enable or disable certain ways of acting, so that they (...) are constantly subject to revision to ensure that they facilitate the provision of decent healthcare. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the claim that justification is closed under conjunction, and confront its most alarming consequence — that one can have justification for believing propositions that are unlikely to be true, given one's evidence.

Many of the items that humans consume are produced in ways that involve serious harms to persons. Familiar examples include the harms involved in the extraction and trade of conflict minerals (e.g. coltan, diamonds), the acquisition and import of non- fair trade produce (e.g. coffee, chocolate, bananas, rice), and the manufacture of goods in sweatshops (e.g. clothing, sporting equipment). In addition, consumption of certain goods (significantly fossil fuels and the products of the agricultural industry) involves harm to the environment, to (...) future persons, and to current persons in low-lying and developing countries, by way of their impacts on climate change. When it comes to such large-scale harms, it's easy for the individual to feel helpless. Even if she sincerely wishes things were otherwise, she may wonder what she could possibly do to make them so. In this paper I briefly explore several promising avenues for generating duties in individuals to consume ethically, and develop one in particular: that an individual ought to signal her commitments to others, as a first step in collectivizing to act against unjust global labour practices. (shrink)

In this essay, I evaluate four central metaethical readings of Spinoza’s moral philosophy in the literature: unqualified anti-realism, qualified anti-realism, qualified realism, and unqualified realism. More specifically, I discuss the metaethical readings of Charles Jarrett (unqualified anti-realism), Matthew Kisner (qualified anti-realism), Jon Miller (qualified realism), and Andrew Youpa (unqualified realism), each of which captures core aspects of this debate. My conclusions are that (1) Spinoza is neither an unqualified anti-realist nor an unqualified realist and (2) Spinoza’s ethical framework represents a (...) qualified synthesis of realist (naturalistic) and anti-realist (affective) features. (shrink)

Recently two distinct forms of rule-utilitarianism have been introduced that differ on how to measure the consequences of rules. Brad Hooker advocates fixed-rate rule-utilitarianism, while Michael Ridge advocates variable-rate rule-utilitarianism. I argue that both of these are inferior to a new proposal, optimum-rate rule-utilitarianism. According to optimum-rate rule-utilitarianism, an ideal code is the code whose optimum acceptance level is no lower than that of any alternative code. I then argue that all three forms of rule-utilitarianism fall prey to two fatal (...) problems that leave us without any viable form of rule-utilitarianism. (shrink)

When Adam Smith published his celebrated writings on economics and moral philosophy he famously referred to the operation of an invisible hand. Adam Smith's Political Philosophy makes visible the invisible hand by examining its significance in Smith's political philosophy and relating it to similar concepts used by other philosophers, revealing a distinctive approach to social theory that stresses the significance of the unintended consequences of human action. This book introduces greater conceptual clarity to the discussion of the (...) invisible hand and the related concept of unintended order in the work of Smith and in political theory more generally. By examining the application of spontaneous order ideas in the work of Smith, Hume, Hayek and Popper, Adam Smith's Political Philosophy traces similarities in approach and from these builds a conceptual, composite model of an invisible hand argument. While setting out a clear model of the idea of spontaneous order the book also builds the case for using the idea of spontaneous order as an explanatory social theory, with chapters on its application in the fields of science, moral philosophy, law and government. (shrink)

Does ?ought? imply ?can? for collectives' obligations? In this paper I want to establish two things. The first, what a collective obligation means for members of the collective. The second, how collective ability can be ascertained. I argue that there are four general kinds of obligation, which devolve from collectives to members in different ways, and I give an account of the distribution of obligation from collectives to members for each of these kinds. One implication of understanding collective obligation and (...) ability in the proposed way is that a group can be blameworthy for failing to realize its obligation even when no member of the group is blameworthy for failing to realize her obligation. (shrink)

This review focuses on the Ogdoas scholastica by Jacob Lorhard, published in 1606. The importance of this document turns on the fact that it contains what is almost certainly the first published occurrence of the term “ontology.” The body of the work consists in a series of diagrams called “diagraphs.” Relevant features of this compendium of diagraphs are: 1. that it does not in fact contain the word “ontology,” and 2. that Lorhard himself was not responsible for its content.

This paper was presented as the keynote address at the 2005 Philosophy Graduate Student Conference at the University of Memphis on “Limitations of Subjectivity.”.

Gilles Deleuze was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth-century, and Smith is widely recognized to be one of his most penetrating interpreters, as well as an important philosophical voice in his own right. Combining his most important pieces over the last fifteen years along with two new essays, this book is Smith 's definitive treatise on Deleuze. The essays are divided into four sections, which cover Deleuze's use of the history of philosophy, an overview of (...) his philosophical system, an analysis of several Deleuzian concepts, as well as an assessment of his position within contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

The “Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine" is one of the most important and innovative chapters in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's book, A Thousand Plateaus. It is a highly original text in political philosophy whose implications have yet to be fully mined—or even partially mined, for that matter. This short text analyzes the "noumenal" status that Deleuze assigns to the nomadic war machine, and analyzes the fundamental role that the nomadology plays in Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy.

The book’s core argument is that an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer. In supporting their claim, the authors, Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith, marshal (...) evidence from mathematics, physics, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and biology, setting up their book around three central questions: What are the essential marks of human intelligence? What is it that researchers try to do when they attempt to achieve "artificial intelligence" (AI)? And why, after more than 50 years, are our most common interactions with AI, for example with our bank’s computers, still so unsatisfactory? Landgrebe and Smith show how a widespread fear about AI’s potential to bring about radical changes in the nature of human beings and in the human social order is founded on an error. There is still, as they demonstrate in a final chapter, a great deal that AI can achieve which will benefit humanity. But these benefits will be achieved without the aid of systems that are more powerful than humans, which are as impossible as AI systems that are intrinsically "evil" or able to "will" a takeover of human society. (shrink)

In her ‘On the apparent paradox of ideal theory’, Laura Valentini combines three supposedly plausible premises to derive the paradoxical result that ideal theory is both unable to, and indispensable for, guiding action. Her strategy is to undermine one of the three premises by arguing that there are good and bad kinds of ideal theory, and only the bad kinds are vulnerable to the strongest version of their opponents’ attack. By undermining one of the three premises she releases ideal theorists (...) from the paradox, which is as follows. (1) Any sound theory of justice is action-guiding. (2) Any sound theory of justice is ideal. (3) Any ideal theory fails to be action-guiding. Here I shall respond to Valentini in two ways. First, I shall show that both (1) and (2) are false. The falsity of either is sufficient to release ideal theorists from the paradox. Second, I shall show that Valentini’s response to (3) can be extended, because her bad kinds of ideal theory do not necessarily fail to guide action. The cumulative effect of my arguments further strengthens Valentini’s support of ideal theory. I will deal with premises (1) and (2) in Sections I and II, and (3) in Section III. (shrink)

The politics of climate change is marked by the fact that countries are dragging their heels in doing what they ought to do; namely, creating a binding global treaty, and fulfilling the duties assigned to each of them under it. Many different agents are culpable in this failure. But we can imagine a stylised version of the climate change case, in which no agents are culpable: if the bad effects of climate change were triggered only by crossing a particular threshold, (...) and it was reasonably, but mistakenly, believed by each country that insufficiently many other countries were willing to cooperate in order for that threshold to remain uncrossed, no country would be required to make a unilateral contribution. Yet even without culpability, we can diagnose a moral ill: the world has gone other than it should have. If not for the mistaken beliefs, there would have been a global climate treaty, and all the avoidance of future suffering that would come with it. In this article I argue that this moral ill has implications for the non-culpable agents, in that it generates duties to disgorge actual holdings over and above the counterpart holdings in the relevant counterfactual: those holdings the agents would have had, were the world to have gone as it should. (shrink)

Searle’s tool for understanding culture, law and society is the opposition between brute reality and institutional reality, or in other words between: observer-independent features of the world, such as force, mass and gravitational attraction, and observer-relative features of the world, such as money, property, marriage and government. The question posed here is: under which of these two headings do moral concepts fall? This is an important question because there are moral facts – for example pertaining to guilt and responsibility – (...) which hover uncomfortably close to the boundary between the observer-relative and the observer-independent. By means of a thought experiment involving an imagined Chinese society in which guilt is determined by the random throwing of sticks, I seek to show that moral concepts threaten the foundations of Searle’s philosophy of social reality. (shrink)

J. N. (Jitendra Nath) Mohanty (1928–2023). -/- Professor J. N. Mohanty has characterized his life and philosophy as being both “inside” and “outside” East and West, i.e., inside and outside traditions of India and those of the West, living in both India and United States: geographically, culturally, and philosophically; while also traveling the world: Melbourne to Moscow. Most of his academic time was spent teaching at the University of Oklahoma, The New School Graduate Faculty, and finally Temple University. Yet his (...) preeminent work in Husserlian phenomenology developed alongside his eminent work in Indian philosophy: describing his interests as “a fusion of disparate horizons.” -/- J. N. Mohanty was born September 26, 1928, in Cuttack (Odisha, East India). After graduating from high school, he went on to study both Indian and Western philosophy in Calcutta, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees. There he read Whitehead and Kant’s First Critique; although he wanted to include mathematics in his curriculum, he was led instead to include Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. On the shelves of his teacher, Ras Vihar Das, he came upon a copy of the English translation (Ideas I, 1931) of Edmund Husserl’s classic Ideen I (1913), which presented Husserl’s ground-breaking conception of phenomenology. In 1952–1954 he left India for the first time, reaching Göttingen to study mathematics and philosophy, which earned him a doctorate in mathematics and “philosophy of mathematical sciences” (in his own words). In Göttingen, Mohanty found the powerful mathematical world that Husserl himself had earlier interacted with, where several Husserl students had formed the Göttingen school of phenomenology. During these years Mohanty studied primarily mathematics, alongside Kant and also Vedic Sanskrit. From his friend Günter Patzig, interpreter of Aristotle and Frege, Mohanty was drawn to Frege in relation to mathematical logic. He attended lectures of Heidegger, intrigued by his ontological thinking. Yet, despite the Husserlian legacy, Mohanty was completely self-taught in his studies of Husserl (as he has reported). With a doctorate in mathematics, and ideas from Kant and Frege in his philosophical background, Mohanty set about crafting his own conception of philosophy grounded in phenomenology, drawing on Husserl’s extensive work, critically sifting through Husserl’s texts and their emerging concepts of intentionality, meaning, subject, intersubjectivity, and world. In between he wrote his first book-length study: on phenomenological insights in Nicolai Hartmann and A. N. Whitehead (1958). -/- Over many decades Mohanty formulated and argued, in analytical detail, for a conception of phenomenology and its place in philosophy, later presented in a clear and concise book titled Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Account (1989). Over these very decades the same scholar explored classical and recent Indian philosophy, thinking through kindred ideas of consciousness, self, and knowledge drawn from the Indian philosophical contexts. While writing on Nyāya theory of truth, he also pondered whether the world and finite individual are illusory or real, and whether Marx, Arendt, Gandhi (whom he heard speak in Calcutta), or Vinoba Bhave (with whom he marched across India for the land-grant movement) could best navigate post-Independent India’s social and svarāj or self-rule reforms. The two Mohantys, thinking through a vision of self and world, turned out to be “non-different” or “non-dual” as they each practiced critical phenomenology from both inside and outside the respective philosophical and cultural traditions. Numerous students, fellows, and colleagues or collaborators have benefited immensely from this infusion and unified approach to diversity in philosophical thought. In the 2000s, moving into retirement, Mohanty wrote two long books devoted to his understanding of Husserl and phenomenology and the calling of philosophy itself. This two-volume study shows Mohanty himself thinking through Husserl, critically, in The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Introduction (2008), and Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years: 1916–1938. As Mohanty worked on Husserl, he carefully indicated where he agreed and where he rejected or changed ideas, all part of his practice in phenomenology of “description and interpretation.” It was the same pattern he used in addressing the thought of Husserl vis-à-vis Kant or Frege or even Quine. -/- As Mohanty developed his understanding of phenomenology over the years, he wrote books on theory of meaning and the concept of intentionality, developing a model of ideal meaning and its foundation in intentionality, drawing on Husserl’s results. He followed these with the book Husserl and Frege (1982), linking the thought of those foundational figures for the “continental” and “analytic” traditions, respectively, in twentieth-century Western philosophy. Over his long career Mohanty addressed both traditions in his clear and accessible writing style. While developing his views on phenomenology, Mohanty regularly looked to “Husserl and his others,” evaluating views in Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and then Derrida and others in the wake of Husserl. With his background in Kant, Mohanty also looked toward Heidegger and Hegel in relation to Husserl’s later work in the Crisis (1935–38). Similarly, he looked to contemporary analytic philosophers, adjudicating his own, oft-wise Husserlian views in relation to Frege, Nagel, and others. Amid his active scholarly career, Mohanty co-founded the journal Husserl Studies, and was editorial advisor to Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Philosophy East & West, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Sophia, among others. -/- Yet all this while Mohanty was also thinking and writing about Indian philosophy and its relation to phenomenology. In his own retrospective, Indian philosophy is “the permanent background” of his Husserlian thinking, while Kant is the recurrent Western background of his Husserlian phenomenology. Mohanty’s form of “transcendental phenomenology” evolved, in his own perspective, against the background of his studies of Navya-Nyāya on logic and Vedānta on consciousness, in Indian philosophy, and against the background of Kant’s First Critique on the transcendental, in Western philosophy. Accordingly, Mohanty’s study of logical form and of the intentionality of consciousness seeks a fusion of East and West in the conception of transcendental phenomenology. (Cf. Mohanty’s apt response to critics in The Empirical and the Transcendental (2000).) Even in the context of North American Husserl scholarship, Mohanty has exercised an earnest fusion of East and West. For the so-called East Coast and West Coast interpretations of Husserl’s crucial notion of noema both find a sympathetic spirit in J. N. Mohanty’s careful and nuanced interpretation of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. With Mohanty the two faces of the noema are the logical (Fregean) and the phenomenal (Kantian), and these views of intentional structure join in consciousness—in a way resonant with Indian thought. -/- - David Woodruff Smith (UC Irvine) and Purushottama Bilimoria (SFSU, San Francisco; University of Melbourne) -/- For photo of Prof Mohanty visit APA online memorial_minutes2023 Courtesy of APA Memorial Minutes (& Proceedings) 2023 . (shrink)

In this paper I respond to Marcello Di Bello’s criticisms of the ‘normic account’ of the criminal standard of proof. In so doing, I further elaborate on what the normic account predicts about certain significant legal categories of evidence, including DNA and fingerprint evidence and eyewitness identifications.

: In the epistemology of the late Wittgenstein, a central place is given to the notion of the hinge: an arational commitment that provides a foundation of some sort for the rest of our beliefs. Quasi-fideism is an approach to the epistemology of religion that argues that religious belief is on an epistemic par with other sorts of belief inasmuch as religious and non-religious beliefs all rely on hinges. I consider in this paper what it takes to find the appropriate (...) hinge for a quasi-fideist approach to the epistemology of religion. (shrink)

We begin at the beginning, with an outline of Aristotle’s views on ontology and with a discussion of the influence of these views on Linnaeus. We move from there to consider the data standardization initiatives launched in the 19th century, and then turn to investigate how the idea of computational ontologies developed in the AI and knowledge representation communities in the closing decades of the 20th century. We show how aspects of this idea, particularly those relating to the use of (...) the term 'concept' in ontology development, influenced SNOMED CT and other medical terminologies. Against this background we then show how the Foundational Model of Anatomy, the Gene Ontology, Basic Formal Ontology and other OBO Foundry ontologies came into existence and discuss their role in the development of contemporary biomedical informatics. (shrink)

This essay is a response to Luis M. Augusto’s intriguing paper on the rift between mainstream and formal ontology. I will show that there are in fact two questions at issue here: 1. concerning the links between mainstream and formal approaches within philosophy, and 2. concerning the application of philosophy (and especially philosophical ontology) in support of information-driven research for example in the life sciences.

This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have done so much (...) to demonstrate the continued fertility of the ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our own day. For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical culture, and in fact a number of them found their philosophical home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American" is in this light a "grave historical distortion". If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy "could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" (1988, p. 7). Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised -- in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in the field of cognitive science. (shrink)

Is it right to convict a person of a crime on the basis of purely statistical evidence? Many who have considered this question agree that it is not, posing a direct challenge to legal probabilism – the claim that the criminal standard of proof should be understood in terms of a high probability threshold. Some defenders of legal probabilism have, however, held their ground: Schoeman (1987) argues that there are no clear epistemic or moral problems with convictions based on purely (...) statistical evidence, and speculates that our aversion to such convictions may be nothing more than an irrational bias. More recently, Hedden and Colyvan (2019, section VI) describe our reluctance to convict on the basis of purely statistical evidence as an ‘intuition’, but suggest that there may be no ‘in principle’ problem with such convictions (see also Papineau, forthcoming, section 6). In this paper, I argue that there is, in some cases, an in principle problem with a conviction based upon statistical evidence alone – namely, it commits us to a precedent which, if consistently followed through, could lead to the deliberate conviction of an innocent person. I conclude with some reflections on the idea that the criminal justice system should strive to maximise the accuracy of its verdicts – and the related idea that we should each strive to maximise the accuracy of our beliefs. (shrink)

Long-standing neglect of the chemical senses in the philosophy of perception is due, mostly, to their being regarded as ‘lower’ senses. Smell, taste, and chemically irritated touch are thought to produce mere bodily sensations. However, empirically informed theories of perception can show how these senses lead to perception of objective properties, and why they cannot be treated as special cases of perception modelled on vision. The senses of taste, touch, and smell also combine to create unified perceptions of flavour. The (...) nature of these multimodal experiences and the character of our awareness of them puts pressure on the traditional idea that each episode of perception goes one or other of the five senses. Thus, the chemical senses, far from being peripheral to the concerns of the philosophy of perception, may hold important clues to the multisensory nature of perception in general. (shrink)

In 1890 Christian von Ehrenfels published his classic paper "Über 'Gestaltqualitäten'", the first systematic investigation of the philosophy and psychology of Gestalt. Ehrenfels thereby issued an important challenge to the psychological atomism that was still predominant in his day. His paper not only exerted a powerful influence on the philosophy of the Meinong school, it also marked the beginning of the Gestalt tradition in psychology, later associated with the work of Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka in Berlin. Includes papers by C. (...) Von Ehrenfels, Kurt Grelling and Paul Oppenheim and contributions by K. Mulligan, P.M. Simons and Barry Smith. (shrink)

Epistemic permissivism is the view that it is possible for two people to rationally hold incompatible attitudes toward some proposition on the basis of one body of evidence. In this paper, I defend a particular version of permissivism – unacknowledged permissivism (UP) – which says that permissivism is true, but that no one can ever rationally believe that she is in a permissive case. I show that counter to what virtually all authors who have discussed UP claim, UP is an (...) attractive view: it is compatible with the intuitive motivations for permissivism and avoids a significant challenge to permissivism: the arbitrariness objection. (shrink)

Imagine yourself standing on the edge of a canyon, marveling at the terrain below, wondering about all the sights currently obscured from your view, and lamenting that you just don’t have time to commit to the steep descent in and long trek across, which would give you a perspective from right up close. Being handed Juha Räikkä’s new book Social Justice in Practice is like being told there’s a flying fox you can take: the canyon is applied political theory, and (...) the flying fox allows the reader to see many different issues, at some speed, and always with the wider context in view. Tuck your loose items of clothing away in your bags, and hop on.The book is loosely organized into six sections, with twelve chapters overall. The first two sections (“Theory and Practice” and “Action and Uncertainty”) introduce readers to the issues around the methodology of contemporary political theory, from whether the arguments of political theory should be more sensitive to what is feasible, through the. (shrink)

A ‘lottery belief’ is a belief that a particular ticket has lost a large, fair lottery, based on nothing more than the odds against it winning. The lottery paradox brings out a tension between the idea that lottery beliefs are justified and the idea that that one can always justifiably believe the deductive consequences of things that one justifiably believes – what is sometimes called the principle of closure. Many philosophers have treated the lottery paradox as an argument against the (...) second idea – but I make a case here that it is the first idea that should be given up. As I shall show, there are a number of independent arguments for denying that lottery beliefs are justified. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what organisms are and therefore what kinds of biological entities qualify as organisms. For some time now, the concept of organismality has been eclipsed by the notion of individuality. Biological individuals are those systems that are units of selection. I develop a conception of organismality that does not rely on evolutionary considerations, but instead draws on development and ecology. On this account, organismality and individuality can come apart. Organisms, in my view, are as Godfrey- (...) class='Hi'>Smith puts it “essentially persisters.” I argue that persistence is underpinned by differentiation, integration, development, and the constitutive embeddedness of organisms in their worlds. I examine two marginal cases, the Portuguese Man O’ War and the honey bee colony, and show that both count as organisms in light of my analysis. Next, I examine the case of holobionts, hosts plus their microsymbionts, and argue that they can be counted as organisms even though they may not be biological individuals. Finally, I consider the question of whether other, less tightly integrated biological systems might also be treated as organisms. (shrink)

Increasingly, in data-intensive areas of the life sciences, experimental results are being described in algorithmically useful ways with the help of ontologies. Such ontologies are authored and maintained by scientists to support the retrieval, integration and analysis of their data. The proposition to be defended here is that ontologies of this type – the Gene Ontology (GO) being the most conspicuous example – are a part of science. Initial evidence for the truth of this proposition (which some will find self-evident) (...) is the increasing recognition of the importance of empirically-based methods of evaluation to the ontology development work being undertaken in support of scientific research. The ontologies created by scientists must, of course, be associated with implementations satisfying the requirements of software engineering. But these ontologies are not themselves engineering artifacts, and to conceive them as such brings grievous consequences. Rather, we shall argue, ontologies such as the GO are comparable to scientific theories, to scientific databases, or to scientific journal publications. Such a view implies a radically new conception of what is involved in the authoring, maintenance and application of ontologies in scientific contexts, and therewith also a radically new approach to the evaluation of ontologies and to the training of ontologists. (shrink)

Since it is only five years since the publication of our paper, "Geographical categories: An ontological investigation" (Smith and Mark 2001), it seems somewhat strange to be making retrospective comments on the piece. Nevertheless, the field is moving quickly, and much has happened since the article appeared. A large number of papers have already cited the work, which suggests that there is a seam here that people find worthy of being mined. In this short essay, we first review the (...) paper and attempt to assess its significance from the perspective of our current work. We then put the paper in the context of our individual and joint works, which led up to it, and summarize our research trajectories since the paper appeared, pointing out what some of this reveals about spatial ontology in general. We conclude with some remarks on the future of ontological research in geographical information science. (shrink)

REMARKS ON EVOLUTION AND TIME-SCALES, Graham Cairns-Smith; HODGSON'S BLACK BOX, Thomas Clark; DO HODGSON'S PROPOSITIONS UNIQUELY CHARACTERIZE FREE WILL?, Ravi Gomatam; WHAT SHOULD WE RETAIN FROM A PLAIN PERSON'S CONCEPT OF FREE WILL?, Gilberto Gomes; ISOLATING DISPARATE CHALLENGES TO HODGSON'S ACCOUNT OF FREE WILL, Liberty Jaswal; FREE AGENCY AND LAWS OF NATURE, Robert Kane; SCIENCE VERSUS REALIZATION OF VALUE, NOT DETERMINISM VERSUS CHOICE, Nicholas Maxwell; COMMENTS ON HODGSON, J.J.C. Smart; THE VIEW FROM WITHIN, Sean Spence; COMMENTARY ON HODGSON, Henry (...) Stapp. (shrink)

There is a basic distinction, in the realm of spatial boundaries, between bona fide boundaries on the one hand, and fiat boundaries on the other. The former are just the physical boundaries of old. The latter are exemplified especially by boundaries induced through human demarcation, for example in the geographic domain. The classical problems connected with the notions of adjacency, contact, separation and division can be resolved in an intuitive way by recognizing this two-sorted ontology of boundaries. Bona fide boundaries (...) yield a notion of contact that is effectively modeled by classical topology; the analogue of contact involving fiat boundaries calls, however, for a different account, based on the intuition that fiat boundaries do not support the open/closed distinction on which classical topology is based. In the presence of this two-sorted ontology it then transpires that mereotopology—topology erected on a mereological basis—is more than a trivial formal variant of classical point-set topology. (shrink)

The parceling of land into real estate is more than a simple geometrical affair. Real estate is a historical product of interaction between human beings, political, legal and economic institutions, and the physical environment. And while many authors, from Jeremy Bentham to Hernando de Soto, have drawn attention to the ontological (metaphysical) aspect of property in general, no comprehensive analysis of landed property has been attempted. The paper presents such an analysis and shows how landed property differs from other types (...) of property in a way which implies a special role for political and economic philosophy of property rights in land. This is the Chinese translation of "The Metaphysics of Real Estate", Topoi, 20: 2 (September 2001), 161–172. (shrink)

From a radical feminist perspective, gender is a cage. Or to be more precise, it’s two cages. If genders are cages, then surely we want to let people out. Being less constrained in our choices is something we all have reason to want: theorists in recent years have emphasized the importance of the capability to do and be many different things. At the very least, we should want an end to sex-based oppression. But what does this entail, when it comes (...) to gender? In this paper, I’ll compare four ‘transitional pathways’, with a view to considering how each relates to the ultimate end of ending sex-based oppression. Should we open the doors to the cages, so that people can move freely between them, but leave the cages themselves in place?. Should we add more cages?. Should we make the cages bigger, so that people have a lot more room to move around inside them? Or should we dismantle the cages, so there are no more genders at all?. Some of these options are ‘gender revisionist’, others are gender abolitionist. I’ll argue in favour of a gender abolitionist pathway. (shrink)

This paper, while neutral on questions about the minimality of truth, argues for the non-minimality of truth-aptness.

When does a human being begin to exist? We argue that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. We lay down a set of conditions for being a human being, and we determine when, in the course of normal fetal development, these conditions are first satisfied. Issues dealt with along the way include: modes of substance-formation, twinning, the nature of the intra-uterine environment, and the nature of the (...) relation between fetus and mother (connection, parthood, dependence). (shrink)

Scholars have argued that Plato's decision to include women in the ruling class was either intended as a joke, or else was forced on him by other political commitments. In tis paper, I argue that the arguments he offers for including women in positions of power can and should be taken as sincere.

Climate change appears to be a classic aggregation problem, in which billions of individuals perform actions none of which seem to be morally wrong taken in isolation, and yet which combine to drive the global concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) ever higher toward environmental (and humanitarian) catastrophe. When an individual can choose between actions that will emit differing amounts of GHGs―such as to choose a vegan rather than carnivorous meal, to ride a bike to work rather than drive a car, (...) or to take a reusable bag to the supermarket rather than send another plastic bag to landfill―does she have any reason to choose the lower-emitting actions? In this chapter I'll reject the claim that individuals don't make a difference when it comes to climate change. I first discuss making a difference with every action, as a way of getting clearer about how individuals' actions impact causally on the harms resulting from climate change, making a distinction so far overlooked in the climate ethics discussion between 'macro' thresholds like ice-cap melt, and 'micro' thresholds like severe weather events. I set aside making a difference with every action as implausible, and then move on to discuss both low probability of major difference, and high probability of minor difference. I argue that both of these are plausible characterizations of individuals' causal contributions to climate change. I conclude by noting some policy implications of having (probabilistic) individual difference-making back in play. (shrink)

We take as our starting point a thesis to the effect that, at least for true judgments of many varieties, there are parts of reality which make such judgments are true. We argue that two distinct components are involved in this truthmaker relation. On the one hand is the relation of necessitation, which holds between an object x and a judgment p when the existence of x entails the truth of p. On the other hand is the dual notion of (...) projection, which holds between a judgment p and an object x when the truth of p entails the existence of x. A truthmaker for a judgment p is then a necessitator for p which satisfies the further constraint that it is part of p’s projection. We offer a formal theory of the truthmaker relation thus defined, exploiting ontological tools of basic mereology and the theory of dependence. We then apply the theory to a range of problems connected with generic expressions, ellipsis, vagueness, and indexical and perceptual judgments. (shrink)

In the Nintendo game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, players move to an uninhabited island and quickly become instrumental to the naming, aesthetic development, and biodiversity of the island. In some ways, the game can foster a love for and curiosity about nature. In other ways, the game reinforces harmful colonialist values and attitudes that are ultimately an obstacle to conservation in the real world. Here I critique the game values relevant to conservation, both the values that benefit and the values (...) that hinder conservation. I discuss possibilities for a future version of the game that reinforces values better aligned with conservation. (shrink)

Certain states in the Global North have responded to refugees seeking safety on their territories through harmful practices of border violence, detention, encampment and containment that serve to prevent and deter refugee arrivals. These practices are ostensibly justified through an appeal to a right to control borders. This paper therefore assesses whether these harmful practices can indeed be morally justified by a state’s right to control borders. It analyses whether Christopher Heath Wellman’s account of a state’s right to freedom of (...) association, which represents the most restrictive account of a state’s right to control borders available in the literature, can extend to justify current harmful practices against refugees. If not, then no available justification will be able to do so, and thus contemporary harmful practices used against refugees cannot be justified by a state’s right to control borders. (shrink)

Since 2002 we have been testing and refining a methodology for ontology development that is now being used by multiple groups of researchers in different life science domains. Gary Merrill, in a recent paper in this journal, describes some of the reasons why this methodology has been found attractive by researchers in the biological and biomedical sciences. At the same time he assails the methodology on philosophical grounds, focusing specifically on our recommendation that ontologies developed for scientific purposes should be (...) constructed in such a way that their terms are seen as referring to what we call universals or types in reality. As we show, Merrill’s critique is of little relevance to the success of our realist project, since it not only reveals no actual errors in our work but also criticizes views on universals that we do not in fact hold. However, it nonetheless provides us with a valuable opportunity to clarify the realist methodology, and to show how some of its principles are being applied, especially within the framework of the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry initiative. (shrink)

The paper is an exercise in descriptive ontology, with specific applications to problems in the geographical sphere. It presents a general typology of spatial boundaries, based in particular on an opposition between bona fide or physical boundaries on the one hand, and fiat or human-demarcation-induced boundaries on the other. Cross-cutting this opposition are further oppositions in the realm of boundaries, for example between: crisp and indeterminate, complete and incomplete, enduring and transient, symmetrical and asymmetrical. The resulting typology generates a corresponding (...) categorization of the different sorts of objects which (complete) boundaries determine or demarcate. The theory is applied first of all in the areas of geography and of administrative and property law. Indications are then given as to how the typology may be applied also in other fields where physical and fiat boundaries are at work, including the field of cognitive linguistics and the related field of the ontology of truth. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.