Results for 'Chris Mcconville'

304 found
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  1. When Transmission Fails.Chris Tucker - 2010 - Philosophical Review 119 (4):497-529.
    The Neo-Moorean Deduction (I have a hand, so I am not a brain-in-a-vat) and the Zebra Deduction (the creature is a zebra, so isn’t a cleverly disguised mule) are notorious. Crispin Wright, Martin Davies, Fred Dretske, and Brian McLaughlin, among others, argue that these deductions are instances of transmission failure. That is, they argue that these deductions cannot transmit justification to their conclusions. I contend, however, that the notoriety of these deductions is undeserved. My strategy is to clarify, attack, defend, (...)
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  2. Psychedelics and Meditation: A Neurophilosophical Perspective.Chris Letheby - 2022 - In Rick Repetti (ed.), Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 209-223.
    Psychedelic ingestion and meditative practice are both ancient methods for altering consciousness that became widely known in Western society in the second half of the 20th century. Do the similarities begin and end there, or do these methods – as many have claimed over the years – share some deeper common elements? In this chapter I take a neurophilosophical approach to this question and argue that there are, indeed, deeper commonalities. Recent empirical studies show that psychedelics and meditation modulate overlapping (...)
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  3. Parity, moral options, and the weights of reasons.Chris Tucker - 2022 - Noûs 57 (2):454-480.
    The (moral) permissibility of an act is determined by the relative weights of reasons, or so I assume. But how many weights does a reason have? Weight Monism is the idea that reasons have a single weight value. There is just the weight of reasons. The simplest versions hold that the weight of each reason is either weightier than, less weighty than, or equal to every other reason. We’ll see that this simple view leads to paradox in at least two (...)
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  4. Ethics and genetics: Susceptibility testing in the workplace.Chris MacDonald & Bryn Williams-Jones - 2002 - Journal of Business Ethics 35 (3):235-241.
    Genetic testing in the workplace is a technology both full of promise and fraught with ethical peril. Though not yet common, it is likely to become increasingly so. We survey the key arguments in favour of such testing, along with the most significant ethical worries. We further propose a set of pragmatic criteria, which, if met, would make it permissible for employers to offer (but not to require) workplace genetic testing.
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  5. (1 other version)Phenomenal conservatism and evidentialism in religious epistemology.Chris Tucker - 2011 - In Raymond VanArragon & Kelly James Clark (eds.), Evidence and Religious Belief. Oxford, US: Oxford University Press. pp. 52--73.
    Phenomenal conservatism holds, roughly, that if it seems to S that P, then S has evidence for P. I argue for two main conclusions. The first is that phenomenal conservatism is better suited than is proper functionalism to explain how a particular type of religious belief formation can lead to non-inferentially justified religious beliefs. The second is that phenomenal conservatism makes evidence so easy to obtain that the truth of evidentialism would not be a significant obstacle to justified religious belief. (...)
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  6. Dignity-enhancing nursing care.Chris Gastmans - 2013 - Nursing Ethics 20 (2):142-149.
    Starting from two observations regarding nursing ethics research in the past two decades, namely, the dominant influence of both the empirical methods and the principles approach, we present the cornerstones of a foundational argument-based nursing ethics framework. First, we briefly outline the general philosophical–ethical background from which we develop our framework. This is based on three aspects: lived experience, interpretative dialogue, and normative standard. Against this background, we identify and explore three key concepts—vulnerability, care, and dignity—that must be observed in (...)
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  7. Too far beyond the call of duty: moral rationalism and weighing reasons.Chris Tucker - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (6):2029-2052.
    The standard account of supererogation holds that Liv is not morally required to jump on a grenade, thereby sacrificing her life, to save the lives of five soldiers. Many proponents defend the standard account by appealing to moral rationalism about requirement. These same proponents hold that Bernie is morally permitted to jump on a grenade, thereby sacrificing his life, to spare someone a mild burn. I argue that this position is unstable, at least as moral rationalism is ordinarily defended. The (...)
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  8. The Elusive Higgs Mechanism.Chris Smeenk - 2006 - Philosophy of Science 73 (5):487-499.
    The Higgs mechanism is an essential but elusive component of the Standard Model of particle physics. Without it Yang‐Mills gauge theories would have been little more than a warm‐up exercise in the attempt to quantize gravity rather than serving as the basis for the Standard Model. This article focuses on two problems related to the Higgs mechanism clearly posed in Earman’s recent papers (Earman 2003, 2004a, 2004b): what is the gauge‐invariant content of the Higgs mechanism, and what does it mean (...)
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  9. Weighing Reasons Against.Chris Tucker - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Metaethics.
    Ethicists increasingly reject the scale as a useful metaphor for weighing reasons. Yet they generally retain the metaphor of a reason’s weight. This combination is incoherent. The metaphor of weight entails a very specific scale-based model of weighing reasons, Dual Scale. Justin Snedegar worries that scale-based models of weighing reasons can’t properly weigh reasons against an option. I show that there are, in fact, two different reasons for/against distinctions, and I provide an account of the relationship between the various kinds (...)
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  10. Suspensive Wronging.Chris Ranalli - forthcoming - In Alexandra Zinke & Verena Wagner (eds.), Suspension in Epistemology and Beyond. Routledge.
    According to the thesis of doxastic wronging, we can wrong people in virtue of having certain beliefs about them. In this chapter, I motivate and defend a similar view, the thesis of suspensive wronging, that we can wrong people in virtue of bearing an indecision attitude towards certain questions that bear on certain people. I explore the extent to which the thesis of suspensive wronging fits with certain prominent conceptions of suspension of judgment, including the sui generis attitude, higher-order, and (...)
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  11. A Holist Balance Scale.Chris Tucker - 2023 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (3):533-553.
    Scale-based models of weighing reasons face challenges concerning the context sensitivity of weight, the aggregation of weight, and the methodology for determining what the weights of reasons are. I resolve these challenges.
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  12. Cessation states: Computer simulations, phenomenological assessments, and EMF theories.Chris Percy, Andrés Gómez-Emilsson & Bijan Fakhri - manuscript
    The stream of human consciousness appears to be interruptible, in that we can experience a sensation of ‘returning to ourselves after an absence of content’ (e.g. sleep, anaesthesia, full-absorption meditation). Prima facie, such evidence poses a challenge to simple applications of theories of consciousness based on electromagnetic or neural activity in the brain, because some of this activity persists during periods of interruption. This paper elaborates one of several possible responses to the challenge. We build on a previous theory in (...)
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  13. Justice and Attachment to Natural Resources.Chris Armstrong - 2013 - Journal of Political Philosophy 22 (1):48-65.
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  14. Philosophy of Psychedelics.Chris Letheby - 2021 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    Recent clinical trials show that psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin can be given safely in controlled conditions, and can cause lasting psychological benefits with one or two administrations. Supervised psychedelic sessions can reduce symptoms of anxiety, depression, and addiction, and improve well-being in healthy volunteers, for months or even years. But these benefits seem to be mediated by "mystical" experiences of cosmic consciousness, which prompts a philosophical concern: do psychedelics cause psychological benefits by inducing false or implausible beliefs about (...)
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  15.  71
    Inflation and the Origins of Structure.Chris Smeenk - 2018 - In David E. Rowe, Tilman Sauer & Scott A. Walter (eds.), Beyond Einstein: Perspectives on Geometry, Gravitation, and Cosmology in the Twentieth Century. New York, USA: Springer New York. pp. 205-241.
    Guth provided a persuasive rationale for inflationary cosmology based on its ability to solve fine-tuning problems of big bang cosmology. Yet one of the most important consequences of inflation was only widely recognized a few years later: inflation provides a mechanism for generating small departures from uniformity, needed to seed formation of subsequent structures, by “freezing out” vacuum fluctuations to form classical density perturbations. This paper recounts the historical development of this aspect of inflation and puts it in context of (...)
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  16. Self unbound: ego dissolution in psychedelic experience.Chris Letheby & Philip Gerrans - 2017 - Neuroscience of Consciousness 3:1-11.
    Users of psychedelic drugs often report that their sense of being a self or ‘I’ distinct from the rest of the world has diminished or altogether dissolved. Neuroscientific study of such ‘ego dissolution’ experiences offers a window onto the nature of self-awareness. We argue that ego dissolution is best explained by an account that explains self-awareness as resulting from the integrated functioning of hierarchical predictive models which posit the existence of a stable and unchanging entity to which representations are bound. (...)
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  17.  77
    Validating the Universe in a Box.Chris Smeenk & Sarah C. Gallagher - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (5):1221-1233.
    Computer simulations of the formation and evolution of large-scale structure in the universe are integral to the enterprise of modern cosmology. Establishing the reliability of these simulations has been extremely challenging, primarily because of epistemic opacity. In this setting, robustness analysis defined by requiring converging outputs from a diverse ensemble of simulations is insufficient to determine simulation validity. We propose an alternative path of structured code validation that applies eliminative reasoning to isolate and reduce possible sources of error, a potential (...)
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  18. Humean laws, explanatory circularity, and the aim of scientific explanation.Chris Dorst - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (10):2657-2679.
    One of the main challenges confronting Humean accounts of natural law is that Humean laws appear to be unable to play the explanatory role of laws in scientific practice. The worry is roughly that if the laws are just regularities in the particular matters of fact (as the Humean would have it), then they cannot also explain the particular matters of fact, on pain of circularity. Loewer (2012) has defended Humeanism, arguing that this worry only arises if we fail to (...)
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  19. Withhold by Default: A Difference Between Epistemic and Practical Rationality.Chris Tucker - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-24.
    It may seem that epistemic and practical rationality weigh reasons differently, because ties in practical rationality tend to generate permissions and ties in epistemic rationality tend to generate a requirement to withhold judgment. I argue that epistemic and practical rationality weigh reasons in the same way, but they have different "default biases". Practical rationality is biased toward every option being permissible whereas epistemic rationality is biased toward withholding judgment's being required.
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  20. Dogmatic Withholding: Confessions of a Serial Offender.Chris Tucker - forthcoming - In Alexandra Zinke & Verena Wagner (eds.), Suspension in Epistemology and Beyond. Routledge.
    This chapter provides an account of what dogmatism is, why the term matters, and how it applies to withholding judgment. Roughly, a person is dogmatic about P when a certain problematic personal investment—a superiority complex, broadly construed—biases their judgment concerning whether P. The term dogmatism and its cognates matter because of their social function. To accuse you of dogmatism is to signal how you are to be treated: your judgment or behavior needs to be “brought down to earth,” so that (...)
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  21. Words That Harm: Defending the Dignity Approach to Hate Speech Regulation.Chris Bousquet - 2022 - Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 35 (1):31-57.
    The dignity approach to racist hate speech regulation maintains that hate speech ought to be regulated because it impugns targets’ dignity and poses a threat to their equal treatment. This approach faces the significant causal challenges of showing that hate speech has the power to erode its targets’ dignity and that regulations can successfully protect that dignity. My aim is to show how a friend of the dignity approach can resolve these challenges. To do so, I borrow insights from the (...)
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  22. Commands and Collaboration in the Origin of Human Thinking: A Response to Azeri’s “On Reality of Thinking”.Chris Drain - 2021 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 10 (3):6-14.
    L.S. Vygotsky’s “regulative” account of the development of human thinking hinges on the centralization of “directive” speech acts (commands or imperatives). With directives, one directs the activity of another, and in turn begins to “self-direct” (or self-regulate). It’s my claim that Vygotsky’s reliance on directives de facto keeps his account stuck at Tomasello's level of individual intentionality. Directive speech acts feature prominently in Tomasello’s developmental story as well. But Tomasello has the benefit of accounting for a functional differentiation in directive (...)
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  23. Philosophy of Cosmology.Chris Smeenk - 2013 - In Robert Batterman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Physics. Oxford University Press USA. pp. 607-652.
    This chapter addresses philosophical questions raised in contemporary work on cosmology. It provides an overview of the Standard Model for cosmology and argues that its deficiency in addressing theories regarding the very early universe can be resolved by introducing a dynamical phase of evolution that eliminates the need for a special initial state. The chapter also discusses recent hypotheses about dark matter and energy, issues that it relates to philosophical debates about underdetermination.
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  24. There is no measurement problem for Humeans.Chris Dorst - 2021 - Noûs 57 (2):263-289.
    The measurement problem concerns an apparent conflict between the two fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, namely the Schrödinger equation and the measurement postulate. These principles describe inconsistent behavior for quantum systems in so-called "measurement contexts." Many theorists have thought that the measurement problem can only be resolved by proposing a mechanistic explanation of (genuine or apparent) wavefunction collapse that avoids explicit reference to "measurement." However, I argue here that the measurement problem dissolves if we accept Humeanism about laws of nature. (...)
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  25. Divine Satisficing and the Ethics of the Problem of Evil.Chris Tucker - 2020 - Faith and Philosophy 37 (1):32-56.
    This paper accomplishes three goals. First, it reveals that God’s ethics has a radical satisficing structure: God can choose a good enough suboptimal option even if there is a best option and no countervailing considerations. Second, it resolves the long-standing worry that there is no account of the good enough that is both principled and demanding enough to be good enough. Third, it vindicates the key ethical assumption in the problem of evil without relying on the contested assumption that God’s (...)
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  26. (2 other versions)Seemings and Justification: An Introduction.Chris Tucker - 2013 - In Seemings and Justification: New Essays on Dogmatism and Phenomenal Conservatism. New York: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 1-29.
    It is natural to think that many of our beliefs are rational because they are based on seemings, or on the way things seem. This is especially clear in the case of perception. Many of our mathematical, moral, and memory beliefs also appear to be based on seemings. In each of these cases, it is natural to think that our beliefs are not only based on a seeming, but also that they are rationally based on these seemings—at least assuming there (...)
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  27. Sovereign Wealth Funds and Global Justice.Chris Armstrong - 2013 - Ethics and International Affairs 27 (4):413-428.
    Dozens of countries have established Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) in the last decade or so, in the majority of cases employing those funds to manage the large revenues gained from selling resources such as oil and gas on a tide of rapidly rising commodity prices. These funds have raised a series of ethical questions, including just how the money contained in such funds should eventually be spent. This article engages with that question, and specifically seeks to connect debates on SWFs (...)
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  28. Experience as evidence.Chris Tucker - 2024 - In Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This chapter explores whether and when experience can be evidence. It argues that experiences can be evidence, and that this claim is compatible with just about any epistemological theory. It evaluates the most promising argument for the conclusion that certain experiences (e.g., seeming to see) are always evidence for believing what the experiences represent. While the argument is very promising, one premise needs further defense. The argument also depends on a certain connection between reasonable belief and the first person perspective.
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  29. New Populism, New Conspiracism, and the Old Rhetoric of Purity.Chris A. Kramer - 2023 - Encyclopedia of New Populism and Responses in the 21St Century.
    This entry investigates the connections between neo-populism and neo-conspiracism in the USA. One central thread is the rhetoric of purity that fosters rigid dichotomies of thought about identities, contributing to both populism and conspiracism, eliciting a neologism: conspirapopulism.
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  30. Time travel and time machines.Chris Smeenk & Christian Wuthrich - 2011 - In Craig Callender (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time. Oxford University Press. pp. 577-630.
    This paper is an enquiry into the logical, metaphysical, and physical possibility of time travel understood in the sense of the existence of closed worldlines that can be traced out by physical objects. We argue that none of the purported paradoxes rule out time travel either on grounds of logic or metaphysics. More relevantly, modern spacetime theories such as general relativity seem to permit models that feature closed worldlines. We discuss, in the context of Gödel's infamous argument for the ideality (...)
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  31. Fittingness: A User’s Guide.Chris Howard & Rach Cosker-Rowland - 2023 - In Chris Howard & Rach Cosker-Rowland (eds.), Fittingness. OUP.
    The chapter introduces and characterizes the notion of fittingness. It charts the history of the relation and its relevance to contemporary debates in normative and metanormative philosophy and proceeds to survey issues to do with fittingness covered in the volume’s chapters, including the nature and epistemology of fittingness, the relations between fittingness and reasons, the normativity of fittingness, fittingness and value theory, and the role of fittingness in theorizing about responsibility. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of issues to (...)
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  32. The dual scale model of weighing reasons.Chris Tucker - 2021 - Noûs 56 (2):366-392.
    The metaphor of weighing reasons brings to mind a single (double-pan balance) scale. The reasons for φ go in one pan and the reasons for ~φ go in the other. The relative weights, as indicated by the relative heights of the two pans of the scale, determine the deontic status of φ. This model is simple and intuitive, but it cannot capture what it is to weigh reasons correctly. A reason pushes the φ pan down toward permissibility (has justifying weight) (...)
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  33. Tomasello, Vygotsky, and the Phylogenesis of Mind: A Reply to Potapov’s “Objectification and the Labour of the Negative in the Origin of Human Thinking”.Chris Drain - 2021 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 10 (6):23-29.
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  34.  42
    The Playful Thought Experiments of Louis CK.Chris A. Kramer - 2016 - In Mark Ralkowski (ed.), Louis CK and Philosophy. Popular Culture & Philosophy. pp. 225-236.
    It is trivially true that comedians make jokes and thus are not serious; they are “just playing.” But watching Louis CK, especially his performances in Chewed Up, Shameless, and Hilarious, it is evident that he has more in mind than simply getting his audience to frivolously guffaw. I will make the case that this is so given the content of some of his humor which centers on areas of socio-political-ethical tensions that can be uncomfortable when addressed in a direct, “bona-fide” (...)
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  35. In defence of error theory.Chris Daly & David Liggins - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 149 (2):209-230.
    Many contemporary philosophers rate error theories poorly. We identify the arguments these philosophers invoke, and expose their deficiencies. We thereby show that the prospects for error theory have been systematically underestimated. By undermining general arguments against all error theories, we leave it open whether any more particular arguments against particular error theories are more successful. The merits of error theories need to be settled on a case-by-case basis: there is no good general argument against error theories.
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  36. Luck, Propositional Perception, and the Entailment Thesis.Chris Ranalli - 2014 - Synthese 191 (6):1223-1247.
    Looking out the window, I see that it's raining outside. Do I know that it’s raining outside? According to proponents of the Entailment Thesis, I do. If I see that p, I know that p. In general, the Entailment Thesis is the thesis that if S perceives that p, S knows that p. But recently, some philosophers (McDowell 2002, Turri 2010, Pritchard 2011, 2012) have argued that the Entailment Thesis is false. On their view, we can see p and not (...)
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  37. Are Ableist Insults Secretly Slurs?Chris Cousens - 2020 - Language Sciences 77.
    Philosophers often treat racist and sexist slurs as a special sort of puzzle. What is the difference between a slur and its correlates? In attempting to answer this question, a second distinction has been overlooked: that between slurs and insults. What makes a term count as a slur? This is not an unnecessary taxonomical question as long as ableist terms such as ‘moron’ are dismissed as mere insults. Attempts to resolve the insult/slur distinction by considering the communicative content of slurs (...)
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  38. Stocking the Genetic Supermarket: Reproductive Genetic Technologies and Collective Action Problems.Chris Gyngell & Thomas Douglas - 2014 - Bioethics 29 (4):241-250.
    Reproductive genetic technologies allow parents to decide whether their future children will have or lack certain genetic predispositions. A popular model that has been proposed for regulating access to RGTs is the ‘genetic supermarket’. In the genetic supermarket, parents are free to make decisions about which genes to select for their children with little state interference. One possible consequence of the genetic supermarket is that collective action problems will arise: if rational individuals use the genetic supermarket in isolation from one (...)
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  39. Unconscious Pleasures and Attitudinal Theories of Pleasure.Chris Heathwood - 2018 - Utilitas 30 (2):219-227.
    This paper responds to a new objection, due to Ben Bramble, against attitudinal theories of sensory pleasure and pain: the objection from unconscious pleasures and pains. According to the objection, attitudinal theories are unable to accommodate the fact that sometimes we experience pleasures and pains of which we are, at the time, unaware. In response, I distinguish two kinds of unawareness and argue that the subjects in the examples that support the objection are unaware of their sensations in only a (...)
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  40. Acquaintance and Fallible Non-Inferential Justification.Chris Tucker - 2016 - In Brett Coppenger & Michael Bergmann (eds.), Intellectual Assurance: Essays on Traditional Epistemic Internalism. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 43-60.
    Classical acquaintance theory is any version of classical foundationalism that appeals to acquaintance in order to account for non-inferential justification. Such theories are well suited to account for a kind of infallible non-inferential justification. Why am I justified in believing that I’m in pain? An initially attractive (partial) answer is that I’m acquainted with my pain. But since I can’t be acquainted with what isn’t there, acquaintance with my pain guarantees that I’m in pain. What’s less clear is whether, given (...)
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  41. Satisficing and Motivated Submaximization (in the Philosophy of Religion).Chris Tucker - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (1):127-143.
    In replying to certain objections to the existence of God, Robert Adams, Bruce Langtry, and Peter van Inwagen assume that God can appropriately choose a suboptimal world, a world less good than some other world God could have chosen. A number of philosophers, such as Michael Slote and Klaas Kraay, claim that these theistic replies are therefore committed to the claim that satisficing can be appropriate. Kraay argues that this commitment is a significant liability. I argue, however, that the relevant (...)
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  42. Subjective Theories of Well-Being.Chris Heathwood - 2014 - In Ben Eggleston & Dale E. Miller (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 199-219.
    Subjective theories of well-being claim that how well our lives go for us is a matter of our attitudes towards what we get in life rather than the nature of the things themselves. This article explains in more detail the distinction between subjective and objective theories of well-being; describes, for each approach, some reasons for thinking it is true; outlines the main kinds of subjective theory; and explains their advantages and disadvantages.
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  43. Taking a New Perspective on Suffering and Death.Chris Tweedt - 2019 - In Kevin Vallier & Joshua Rasmussen (eds.), A New Theist Response to the New Atheists. New York: Routledge. pp. 47-58.
    There is a massive amount of severe suffering and death in the world, and much of this suffering and death is out of our control. The amount and severity of suffering and death in the world can be used to make an argument for (or elicit a reaction against) the existence of God: if God—an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good being—exists, God would not allow such massive amounts of suffering and death. I'll propose a line of response that begins by exploring (...)
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  44. The Necessity of Accidents.Chris Dorst & Marc Lange - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    We argue that if there are laws of nature, then there must also be accidents. If the “laws” in a world suffice to determine the world’s entire history, then these “laws” cannot play various central roles characteristic of laws, and thus (we conclude) they are not laws at all. Many proposed accounts of lawhood (primitivist accounts, universals accounts, the Best System Account, the Package Deal Account, essentialist accounts) inappropriately permit worlds with laws but no accidents. We identify two otherwise dissimilar (...)
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  45. Which Direction Do We Punch: The Powers and Perils of Humour Against the New Conspiracism.Chris A. Kramer - 2022 - In Rashi Bhargava & Richa Chilana (eds.), Punching Up in Stand-Up Comedy. Routledge Chapman & Hall. pp. 235-254.
    This chapter will evaluate humor used with the specific intent to reveal glaring epistemic errors that lead to injustice; flaws in reasoning so transparent that straightforward logic, argument, and evidence seem ineffectual against them, and in some cases, just silly to think such tools would be needed. Laughter seems to be one of the only sane responses. In particular, I will assess how humor can combat conspiracy theories, propaganda, lies, and bullshit. The last one I view in Harry Frankfurt's sense (...)
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  46. Subversive Humor as Art and the Art of Subversive Humor.Chris A. Kramer - 2020 - The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 1 (1):153–179.
    This article investigates the relationships between forms of humor that conjure up possible worlds and real-world social critiques. The first part of the article will argue that subversive humor, which is from or on behalf of historically and continually marginalized communities, constitutes a kind of aesthetic experience that can elicit enjoyment even in adversarial audiences. The second part will be a connecting piece, arguing that subversive humor can be constructed as brief narrative thought experiments that employ the use of fictionalized (...)
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  47. Laws, melodies, and the paradox of predictability.Dorst Chris - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-21.
    If the laws of nature are deterministic, then it seems possible that a Laplacean intelligence that knows the initial conditions and the laws would be able to accurately predict everything that will ever happen. However, it would be easy to construct a counterpredictive device that falsifies any revealed prediction about its future behavior. What would then occur if a Laplacean intelligence encountered a counterpredictive device? This is the paradox of predictability. A number of philosophers have proposed solutions to it, though (...)
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  48. Productive Laws in Relativistic Spacetimes.Chris Dorst - forthcoming - Philosophers' Imprint.
    One of the most intuitive views about the metaphysics of laws of nature is Tim Maudlin's idea of a Fundamental Law of Temporal Evolution. So-called FLOTEs are primitive elements of the universe that produce later states from earlier states. While FLOTEs are at home in traditional Newtonian and non-relativistic quantum mechanical theories (not to mention our pre-theoretic conception of the world), I consider here whether they can be made to work with relativity. In particular, shifting to relativistic spacetimes poses two (...)
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  49. Splitting the (In)Difference: Why Fine-Tuning Supports Design.Chris Dorst & Kevin Dorst - 2022 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 11 (1):14-23.
    Given the laws of our universe, the initial conditions and cosmological constants had to be "fine-tuned" to result in life. Is this evidence for design? We argue that we should be uncertain whether an ideal agent would take it to be so—but that given such uncertainty, we should react to fine-tuning by boosting our confidence in design. The degree to which we should do so depends on our credences in controversial metaphysical issues.
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  50. A Mooring for Ethical Life.Chris Melenovsky - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania
    Since G.A. Cohen’s influential criticism, John Rawls’s focus on the basic structure of society has fallen out of favor in moral and political philosophy. The most prominent defenses of this focus has argued from particular conceptions of justice or from a moral division of labor. In this dissertation, I instead argue for the Rawlsian focus from the ways in which social institutions establish new obligations, rights and powers. I argue that full evaluation of individual conduct requires that we evaluate the (...)
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