The present volume collects essays on the philosophical foundations of quantum theories of gravity, such as loop quantum gravity and string theory. Central for philosophical concerns is quantum gravity's suggestion that space and time, or spacetime, may not exist fundamentally, but instead be a derivative entity emerging from non-spatiotemporal degrees of freedom. In the spirit of naturalised metaphysics, contributions to this volume consider the philosophical implications of this suggestion. In turn, philosophical methods and insights are brought to bear on the (...) foundations of quantum gravity itself. For instance, the idea of functionalism, borrowed from the philosophy of mind and discussed by several essays, exemplifies this mutual interaction the collection seeks to foster. (shrink)

The author of the monograph is a Candidate of Culturology, Associate Professor of Tyumen State University. The monograph tests approaches to the understanding of the essence of Hobbes’s and Locke’s ideas about miracles that are more flexible than a formational-evolutionist approach. The monograph presents the main characteristics of these ideas as Christian philosophical ones, shows their general Christian direction and the historiographic perspective of studying these ideas primarily in line with Christian philosophy. The monograph is intended for experts in (...) the history of philosophy, the history of ideas, theology, religious studies, historical anthropology, as well as for those interested in the problems of historical-philosophical knowledge. Автор монографии – кандидат культурологии, доцент Тюменского государственного университета. В монографии апробируются более гибкие подходы к пониманию сущности идей Гоббса и Локка о чудесах по сравнению с формационно-эволюционистским подходом. Представлены основные характеристики идей Гоббса и Локка о чудесах как христианских философских идей. Показана общехристианская направленность идей Гоббса и Локка о чудесах и историографическая перспективность изучения этих идей в первую очередь как христианских философских идей. Монография рассчитана на специалистов в области истории философии, истории идей, теологии, религиоведения, исторической антропологии, а также на всех, кто интересуется проблемами историко-философского знания. (shrink)

This introduction concerns the place that Indian philosophical literature should occupy in the history of philosophy, and the challenge of championing pre-modern modes of inquiry in an era when philosophy, at least in the anglophone world and its satellites, has in large measure become a highly specialized and technical discipline conceived on the model of the sciences. This challenge is particularly acute when philosophical figures and texts that are historically and culturally distant from us are engaged not only (...) exegetically but also with a view to recruiting their topics and arguments for contemporary philosophical debates. (shrink)

This book examines the epistemic function of perception and the relation between language and conceptual thought, and provides new ways of conceptualizing the Buddhist defense of the reflexivity thesis of consciousness: namely, that each cognitive event is to be understood as involving a pre-reflective implicit awareness of its own occurrence.

The Four ages contains a brief explicit discussion of the issue of Christian philosophy, referencing the Middle Ages and the 1930s French debates about Christian philosophy. Closer attention to the debates reveals a plurality of positions rather than unanimous agreement on Christian philosophy, indicating that the quite complex issues were not resolved. In this review article, I contest Deely’s interpretation of Maritian’s position, provide an exegesis of Maritain’s position, argue that Deely’s explicit position is identifiable as very (...) close to Neo-Scholastic opponents of Christian philosophy during the debates, and briefly discuss Gilson’s and Blondel’s criticisms of such positions articulated during the 1930s debates. I also indicate that despite his opposition to Christian philosophy, Deely shares several key insights with its proponents, and I end by suggesting but not developing a few ways Deely’s semiotic approach could bear additional fruit for postmodern Christian philosophy’s ongoing projects of self-understanding. (shrink)

This article presents a metaphysical approach to the interpretation of the role of things-in-themselves in Kant’s theoretical philosophy. This focuses upon identifying their transcendental function as the grounding of appearances. It is interpreted as defining the relation of appearing as the grounding of empirical causality. This leads to a type of dual-aspect account that is given further support through a detailed examination of two sections of Kant’s first Critique. This shows the need to embed this dual-aspect account within a (...) two-perspective framework. The resulting picture is contrasted with the main rival theories and objections are addressed. (shrink)

This is an edited transcript of a conversation to be included in the collection "Conversations on Rational Choice". The conversation was conducted in Munich on 7 and 9 February 2016.

What are some of the distinctive virtues of the confluence approach that sets it apart from other attempts to do philosophy across cultural boundaries? First, unlike comparing and contrasting, the confluence approach remains faithful to the dominant conception of philosophy as an intellectual enterprise centered on dialogue and argumentation, in which philosophers pursue unresolved problems by building on the achievements of their acknowledged forbears. Second, confluence philosophy implements a syncretic and creative approach to doing philosophy by (...) drawing on non-Western philosophical sources while using the tools and conceptual resources of analytic philosophy. Third and last, the confluence approach highlights possible tensions when the traditions of thought brought into dialogue are on a diverging path on certain matters. Contemporary philosophy, at least in the Anglophone world and its satellites, is an avowedly secular enterprise, deferring to the sciences for its account of what can be said to exist at the most fundamental level and for its understanding of the processes that realize cognition. Buddhism at its core is often understood as a soteriological project manly concerned with overcoming suffering, which sometimes is taken to entail an insight into the emptiness of all the constitutive elements of existence and/or experience. Confluence philosophy thus makes it possible to ask whether defending a theoretical framework which affirms this truth of emptiness means that one must engage in the very sort of activity, namely, rational self-assertion, that hinders enlightenment. (shrink)

The author undertakes an attempt to answer the following question: is Christian philosophy possible today? The question seems to be of great importance due to the fact that what Christians who try to do philosophy usually encounter is bitter criticism which comes to them from two sides at once: that of academy and that of the Church. In short, for academy their philosophy is too Christian, and for the Church it is too academic. Being indebted to the (...) insights of Étienne Gilson and Mieczyslaw A. Krapiec (the original Polish spelling: Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec, pronounced: myechisuaf albert krompyetz), the author comes to the conclusion thatChristian philosophy is possible today only if: 1) it isnot identified with the art of persuasion, as its final end lies in gaining understanding rather than being convincing, 2) itis the work of a Christian, and 3) it has thereal world as its object and metaphysics as its method. ForChristian philosophy—which in essence consists indoing philosophy by Christians in order to get morerational understanding of their religious faith—shouldbe identified with theperfection of the intellect achieved by practicingthe classical philosophy of being. (shrink)

Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and (...) behavior, individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) nonreductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring nonreductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory. (shrink)

This thematic bibliography provides a narrative account of the most important literature comprising, and about, the 1930s debates about Christian carried out by Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Maurice Blondel, Emile Brehier, Gabriel Marcel, and many others. It functions as a companion piece to my book Reason Fulfilled By Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates In France.

The point of departure for Perceiving Reality is the idea that per- ception is an embodied structural feature of consciousness whose function is determined by phenomenal experiences in a corresponding domain (of visible, tangibles, etc.). In Perceiving Reality, I try to develop a way of conceiving of our most basic mode of being in the world that resists attempts to cleave reality into an inner and outer, a mental and a physical domain. The central argument of the book is that (...) what we apprehend in perception are not, to paraphrase J.L. Austin, the external, mind-independent, medium-sized dry goods that populate the realist’s ontology. Rather, to paraphrase Husserl and a group of Buddhist philosophers in league with Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, the objects apprehended in perception are the intentional or aspectual object. (shrink)

The notion of “representation” is central to Kant’s transcendental philosophy. But naturalism and mind-body reductionism tend to reduce talk of (first-person) representation to stories of (third-person) causality and evolution. How does Kant fare in this context?

This chapter considers the literature associated with explorations of consciousness in Indian philosophy. It focuses on a range of methodological and conceptual issues, drawing on three main sources: the naturalist theories of mind of Nyaya and Vaisesika, the mainly phenomenological accounts of mental activity and consciousness of Abhidharma and Yogacara Buddhism, and the subjective transcendental theory of consciousness of Advaita Vedanta. The contributions of Indian philosophers to the study of consciousness are examined not simply as a contribution to intellectual (...) history, but rather with a view to evaluating their relevance to contemporary issues, specifically to the mind-body problem. The presence of dualist positions with strong naturalist undercurrents in Indian philosophy, especially in the Nyaya and Samkhya traditions, rules out the possibility of treating the mind-body problem as an idiosyncratic feature of Cartesian metaphysics. (shrink)

The aim of this exploratory paper is to review an under-appreciated parallel between group agency and artificial intelligence. As both phenomena involve non-human goal-directed agents that can make a difference to the social world, they raise some similar moral and regulatory challenges, which require us to rethink some of our anthropocentric moral assumptions. Are humans always responsible for those entities’ actions, or could the entities bear responsibility themselves? Could the entities engage in normative reasoning? Could they even have rights and (...) a moral status? I will tentatively defend the (increasingly widely held) view that, under certain conditions, artificial intelligent systems, like corporate entities, might qualify as responsible moral agents and as holders of limited rights and legal personhood. I will further suggest that regulators should permit the use of autonomous artificial systems in high-stakes settings only if they are engineered to function as moral (not just intentional) agents and/or there is some liability-transfer arrangement in place. I will finally raise the possibility that if artificial systems ever became phenomenally conscious, there might be a case for extending a stronger moral status to them, but argue that, as of now, this remains very hypothetical. (shrink)

It is often argued that higher-level special-science properties cannot be causally efficacious since the lower-level physical properties on which they supervene are doing all the causal work. This claim is usually derived from an exclusion principle stating that if a higher-level property F supervenes on a physical property F* that is causally sufficient for a property G, then F cannot cause G. We employ an account of causation as difference-making to show that the truth or falsity of this principle is (...) a contingent matter and derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which a version of it holds. We argue that one important instance of the principle, far from undermining non-reductive physicalism, actually supports the causal autonomy of certain higher-level properties. (shrink)

This book chapter represents one of the engagements between Catholic and Wesleyan philosophers at the 2008 Wesleyan Philosophy Society. The issue of what precisely "Wesleyan philosophy" would mean and comprise can be usefully illuminated by comparison with the positions and issues that were raised and discussed by Catholic scholars during the 1930s Christian philosophy debates in France, which included Etienne Gilson, Maurice Blondel, Jacques Maritain, and Gabriel Marcel. We also discuss how the thought on a contemporary Catholic (...) philosopher Adriaan Peperzack, specifically on affectivity, can be brought into comparison with that important theme in Wesleyan philosophy. (shrink)

The ``doctrinal paradox'' or ``discursive dilemma'' shows that propositionwise majority voting over the judgments held by multiple individuals on some interconnected propositions can lead to inconsistent collective judgments on these propositions. List and Pettit (2002) have proved that this paradox illustrates a more general impossibility theorem showing that there exists no aggregation procedure that generally produces consistent collective judgments and satisfies certain minimal conditions. Although the paradox and the theorem concern the aggregation of judgments rather than preferences, they invite comparison (...) with two established results on the aggregation of preferences: the Condorcet paradox and Arrow's impossibility theorem. We may ask whether the new impossibility theorem is a special case of Arrow's theorem, or whether there are interesting disanalogies between the two results. In this paper, we compare the two theorems, and show that they are not straightforward corollaries of each other. We further suggest that, while the framework of preference aggregation can be mapped into the framework of judgment aggregation, there exists no obvious reverse mapping. Finally, we address one particular minimal condition that is used in both theorems – an independence condition – and suggest that this condition points towards a unifying property underlying both impossibility results. (shrink)

Suppose that the members of a group each hold a rational set of judgments on some interconnected questions, and imagine that the group itself has to form a collective, rational set of judgments on those questions. How should it go about dealing with this task? We argue that the question raised is subject to a difficulty that has recently been noticed in discussion of the doctrinal paradox in jurisprudence. And we show that there is a general impossibility theorem that that (...) difficulty illustrates. Our paper describes this impossibility result and provides an exploration of its significance. The result naturally invites comparison with Kenneth Arrow's famous theorem (Arrow, 1963 and 1984; Sen, 1970) and we elaborate that comparison in a companion paper (List and Pettit, 2002). The paper is in four sections. The first section documents the need for various groups to aggregate its members' judgments; the second presents the discursive paradox; the third gives an informal statement of the more general impossibility result; the formal proof is presented in an appendix. The fourth section, finally, discusses some escape routes from that impossibility. (shrink)

This paper generalises the classical Condorcet jury theorem from majority voting over two options to plurality voting over multiple options. The paper further discusses the debate between epistemic and procedural democracy and situates its formal results in that debate. The paper finally compares a number of different social choice procedures for many-option choices in terms of their epistemic merits. An appendix explores the implications of some of the present mathematical results for the question of how probable majority cycles (as in (...) Condorcet's paradox) are in large electorates. (shrink)

Nudge is a popular public policy tool that harnesses well-known biases in human judgement to subtly guide people’s decisions, often to improve their choices or to achieve some socially desirable outcome. Thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) methods new possibilities emerge of how and when our decisions can be nudged. On the one hand, algorithmically personalized nudges have the potential to vastly improve human daily lives. On the other hand, blindly outsourcing the development and implementation of nudges to (...) “black box” AI systems means that the ultimate reasons for why such nudges work, that is, the underlying human cognitive processes that they harness, will often be unknown. In this paper, we unpack this concern by considering a series of examples and case studies that demonstrate how AI systems can learn to harness biases in human judgment to reach a specified goal. Drawing on an analogy in a philosophical debate concerning the methodology of economics, we call for the need of an interdisciplinary oversight of AI systems that are tasked and deployed to nudge human behaviours. (shrink)

In a paper published in 1998, Ricardo Salles argues that the Stoic theory of action cannot account for practical knowledge, i.e., knowledge about what action is appropriate to be carried out in certain circumstances. The aim of this paper is to propose a solution to this problem. For this aim, I argue that the Stoics developed a perceptual theory of moral knowledge. According to this theory, the moral properties instantiated in objects, people, and actions are known through perception. After explaining (...) this theory, I argue that it allows us to show that the Stoics deemed perception as a source of practical knowledge. (shrink)

The exclusion argument is widely thought to put considerable pressure on dualism if not to refute it outright. We argue to the contrary that, whether or not their position is ultimately true, dualists have a plausible response. The response focuses on the notion of ‘distinctness’ as it occurs in the argument: if 'distinctness' is understood one way, the exclusion principle on which the argument is founded can be denied by the dualist; if it is understood another way, the argument is (...) not persuasive. (shrink)

This paper explores Thomas Aquinas’ and Richard Swinburne’s doctrines of simplicity in the context of their philosophical theologies. Both say that God is simple. However, Swinburne takes simplicity as a property of the theistic hypothesis, while for Aquinas simplicity is a property of God himself. For Swinburne, simpler theories are ceteris paribus more likely to be true; for Aquinas, simplicity and truth are properties of God which, in a certain way, coincide – because God is metaphysically simple. Notwithstanding their different (...) approaches, some unreckoned parallels between their thoughts are brought to light. (shrink)

Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scientific theories are nothing but constructs re-describing people's behaviour. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, on a par with the unobservables in science, such as electrons and electromagnetic fields. While behaviourism has gone out of fashion in psychology, it remains influential in economics, especially in ‘revealed preference’ theory. We defend mentalism in economics, construed as a positive science, and show that it fits best scientific practice. (...) We distinguish mentalism from, and reject, the radical neuroeconomic view that behaviour should be explained in terms of brain processes, as distinct from mental states. (shrink)

In the growing literature on decision-making under moral uncertainty, a number of skeptics have argued that there is an insuperable barrier to rational "hedging" for the risk of moral error, namely the apparent incomparability of moral reasons given by rival theories like Kantianism and utilitarianism. Various general theories of intertheoretic value comparison have been proposed to meet this objection, but each suffers from apparently fatal flaws. In this paper, I propose a more modest approach that aims to identify classes of (...) moral theories that share common principles strong enough to establish bases for intertheoretic comparison. I show that, contra the claims of skeptics, there are often rationally perspicuous grounds for precise, quantitative value comparisons within such classes. In light of this fact, I argue, the existence of some apparent incomparabilities between widely divergent moral theories cannot serve as a general argument against hedging for one's moral uncertainties. (shrink)

In the preface to On Certainty Anscombe and von Wright say that in 1949 Malcolm suggested to Wittgenstein to think again about Moore’s “Defense of Common Sense” (1925) and “Proof of an External World” (1939). Malcolm himself had written on the issue in “Defending Common Sense” (1949). In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein quotes Nestroy saying that there is usually very little progress in philosophy. But I think some progress has been made from Moore and Malcolm to (...) Wittgenstein regarding skepticism. There is more awareness of practice and perspective and this opens the discussion in novel ways. But it also gives rise to new problems, in particular of morality and relativity. (shrink)

We offer a critical assessment of the “exclusion argument” against free will, which may be summarized by the slogan: “My brain made me do it, therefore I couldn't have been free”. While the exclusion argument has received much attention in debates about mental causation (“could my mental states ever cause my actions?”), it is seldom discussed in relation to free will. However, the argument informally underlies many neuroscientific discussions of free will, especially the claim that advances in neuroscience seriously challenge (...) our belief in free will. We introduce two distinct versions of the argument, discuss several unsuccessful responses to it, and then present our preferred response. This involves showing that a key premise – the “exclusion principle” – is false under what we take to be the most natural account of causation in the context of agency: the difference-making account. We finally revisit the debate about neuroscience and free will. (shrink)

Some moral theorists argue that innocent beneficiaries of wrongdoing may have special remedial duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing. These arguments generally aim to simply motivate the idea that being a beneficiary can provide an independent ground for charging agents with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Consequently, they have neglected contexts in which it is implausible to charge beneficiaries with remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing, thereby failing to explore the limits (...) of the benefiting relation in detail. Our aim in this article is to identify a criterion to distinguish contexts in which innocent beneficiaries plausibly bear remedial duties to the victims of wrongdoing from those in which they do not. We argue that innocent beneficiaries incur special duties to the victims of wrongdoing if and only if receiving and retaining the benefits sustains wrongful harm. We develop this criterion by identifying and explicating two general modes of sustaining wrongful harm. We also show that our criterion offers a general explanation for why some innocent beneficiaries incur a special duty to the victims of wrongdoing while others do not. By sustaining wrongful harm, beneficiaries-with-duties contribute to wrongful harm, and we ordinarily have relatively stringent moral requirements against contributing to wrongful harm. On our account, innocently benefiting from wrongdoing _per se_ does not generate duties to the victims of wrongdoing. Rather, beneficiaries acquire such duties because their receipt and retention of the benefits of wrongdoing contribute to the persistence of the wrongful harm suffered by the victim. We conclude by showing that our proposed criterion also illuminates why there can be reasonable disagreement about whether beneficiaries have a duty to victims in some social contexts. (shrink)

This paper pursues two lines of inquiry. First, drawing on evidence from clinical literature on borderline states of consciousness, I propose a new categorical framework for liminal states of consciousness associated with certain forms of meditative attainment; second, I argue for dissociating phenomenal character from phenomenal content in accounting for the etiology of nonconceptual states of awareness. My central argument is that while the idea of nonconceptual awareness remains problematic for Buddhist philosophy of mind, our linguistic and categorizing practices (...) cannot be adequately explained without considering the ways in which the first-person phenomenology grounds a more basic level of cognitive and affective sensing. (shrink)

It is controversial whether ”Christian Philosophy’ is a useful or even consistent notion. After providing some historical background to the problem, I will distinguish and explicate two possible understandings of ”Christian Philosophy’ which should be kept apart: a ”Thomistic’ and an ”Augustinian’ one, of which the latter has garnered more attention in the recent literature. A sketch of the most prominent current ”Augustinian’ position leads to some considerations for why a ”Thomistic’ understanding of ”Christian Philosophy’ has more (...) to recommend it, if the term is regarded as useful at all. (shrink)

This chapter pursues the question of naturalism in the context of non-Western philosophical contributions to ethics and philosophy of mind: First, what conception of naturalism, if any, is best suited to capture the scope of Buddhist Reductionism? Second, can such a conception still accommodate the distinctive features of phenomenal consciousness (e.g., subjectivity, intentionality, first-person givenness, etc.). The first section reviews dominant conceptions of naturalism, and their applicability to the Buddhist project. In the second section, the author provides an example (...) of problematic issues more stringent conceptions of naturalism under the guise of neurophysicalism confront, and evaluate Flanagan’s response to these issues. The third section considers briefly the reflexivity thesis (the thesis that consciousness consists in conscious mental states being implicitly self-aware), specifically as articulated by Dignaga, Dharmakirti and their followers, and uses this thesis to articulate a conception of minimal agency as mineness that, the author argues, further challenges Flanagan’s neurophysicalism stance and his compatibilist account of moral agency. The paper concludes, in the fourth section, by suggesting a way in which no-ownership conceptions of reflexive self-consciousness can help us both to get the structure of phenomenal consciousness right and to ground our conceptions of agency, intentionality, and moral responsibility. (shrink)

Legal theorists have proposed several theories to justify statutes of limitations in the criminal law, but none of these normative theories is generally accepted. This chapter investigates the related descriptive question as to whether ordinary people have the intuition that legal punishment becomes less appropriate as time passes from the date of the offense and, if they do, what factors play a role in these intuitions. Five studies demonstrate that there is an intuitive statute of limitations on both legal punishment (...) and moral criticism, and that these intuitions arise, in part, from judgments about changes in psychological connectedness over time. (shrink)

Can we design a perfect democratic decision procedure? Condorcet famously observed that majority rule, our paradigmatic democratic procedure, has some desirable properties, but sometimes produces inconsistent outcomes. Revisiting Condorcet’s insights in light of recent work on the aggregation of judgments, I show that there is a conflict between three initially plausible requirements of democracy: “robustness to pluralism”, “basic majoritarianism”, and “collective rationality”. For all but the simplest collective decision problems, no decision procedure meets these three requirements at once; at most (...) two can be met together. This “democratic trilemma” raises the question of which requirement to give up. Since different answers correspond to different views about what matters most in a democracy, the trilemma suggests a map of the “logical space” in which different conceptions of democracy are located. It also sharpens our thinking about other impossibility problems of social choice and how to avoid them, by capturing a core structure many of these problems have in common. More broadly, it raises the idea of “cartography of logical space” in relation to contested political concepts. (shrink)

If I am aware that p, say, that it is raining, is it the case that I must be aware that I am aware that p? Does introspective or object-awareness entail the apprehension of mental states as being of some kind or another: self-monitoring or intentional? That is, are cognitive events implicitly self-aware or is “self-awareness” just another term for metacognition? Not surprisingly, intuitions on the matter vary widely. This paper proposes a novel solution to this classical debate by reframing (...) the problem of self-knowledge in terms of the relation between phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge. Concepts of consciousness such as “introspective awareness” and “reflexive self-awareness” are grounded in phenomenal experiences rather than physical events and processes. As such they yield a different kind of self-knowledge than what can be gained by applying externalist conceptual schemas to understanding the mind. I argue that Dharmakīrti’s theory of content can be seen as endorsing the efficacy of phenomenal experience as a vehicle for self-knowledge. (shrink)

A framing effect occurs when an agent's choices are not invariant under changes in the way a decision problem is presented, e.g. changes in the way options are described (violation of description invariance) or preferences are elicited (violation of procedure invariance). Here we identify those rationality violations that underlie framing effects. We attribute to the agent a sequential decision process in which a “target” proposition and several “background” propositions are considered. We suggest that the agent exhibits a framing effect if (...) and only if two conditions are met. First, different presentations of the decision problem lead the agent to consider the propositions in a different order (the empirical condition). Second, different such “decision paths” lead to different decisions on the target proposition (the logical condition). The second condition holds when the agent's initial dispositions on the propositions are “implicitly inconsistent,” which may be caused by violations of “deductive closure.” Our account is consistent with some observations made by psychologists and provides a unified framework for explaining violations of description and procedure invariance. (shrink)

Mark Siderits’ confluence approach to philosophy, first sketched in his landmark monograph, Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy (2003), is emblematic of what has arguably become the most influential way of engaging historically and culturally distant Buddhist thinkers and texts systematically and constructively. For nearly half a century, and rather fittingly for someone enthralled by Madhyamaka, Siderits has successfully charted a middle ground between the text-based, exegetical approach to Buddhist philosophy still dominant in many parts of Europe and (...) East Asia and the methods of contemporary Anglophone analytic philosophy. Indebted to both, yet unconstrained by either, the confluence approach represents Siderits’ unique brand of historically-informed systematic reflection, delivered in the characteristically forceful and tightly argued prose that defines his inimitable style. (shrink)

The aim of this expository paper is to give an informal overview of a plausible naturalistic case for free will. I will describe what I take to be the main naturalistically motivated challenges for free will and respond to them by presenting an indispensability argument for free will. The argument supports the reality of free will as an emergent higher-level phenomenon. I will also explain why the resulting picture of free will does not conflict with the possibility that the fundamental (...) laws of nature are deterministic, and I will address some common objections. (shrink)

Traditionally, moral philosophers have distinguished between doing and allowing harm, and have normally proceeded as if this bipartite distinction can exhaustively characterize all cases of human conduct involving harm. By contrast, cognitive scientists and psychologists studying causal judgment have investigated the concept ‘enable’ as distinct from the concept ‘cause’ and other causal terms. Empirical work on ‘enable’ and its employment has generally not focused on cases where human agents enable harm. In this paper, we present new empirical evidence to support (...) the claim that some important cases in the moral philosophical literature are best viewed as instances of enabling harm rather than doing or allowing harm. We also present evidence that enabling harm is regarded as normatively distinct from doing and allowing harm when it comes to assigning compensatory responsibility. Moral philosophers should be exploring the tripartite distinction between doing harm, allowing harm, and enabling harm, rather than simply the traditional bipartite distinction. Cognitive scientists and psychologists studying moral judgment, who have so far largely adopted the bipartite distinction in this area of research, should likewise investigate the tripartite distinction. (shrink)

Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their critiques. We conclude (...) that, while they have made important points, the principle remains worthy of further development and exploration. Our purpose in engaging with these critiques is constructive — we aim to formulate beneficiary pays in ways that would give it a plausible role in allocating the cost of addressing human-induced climate change, while acknowledging that some understandings of the principle would make it unsuitable for this purpose. (shrink)

This paper surveys medieval Christian philosophy.

While a large social-choice-theoretic literature discusses the aggregation of individual judgments into collective ones, there is much less formal work on the transformation of judgments in group communication. I develop a model of judgment transformation and prove a baseline impossibility theorem: Any judgment transformation function satisfying some initially plausible conditions is the identity function, under which no opinion change occurs. I identify escape routes from this impossibility and argue that the kind of group communication envisaged by deliberative democats must be (...) "holistic": It must focus on webs of connected propositions, not on one proposition at a time, which echoes the Duhem-Quine "holism thesis" on scientific theory testing. My approach provides a map of the logical space in which different possible group communication processes are located. (shrink)

In this essay, we explore an issue of moral uncertainty: what we are permitted to do when we are unsure about which moral principles are correct. We develop a novel approach to this issue that incorporates important insights from previous work on moral uncertainty, while avoiding some of the difficulties that beset existing alternative approaches. Our approach is based on evaluating and choosing between option sets rather than particular conduct options. We show how our approach is particularly well-suited to address (...) this issue of moral uncertainty with respect to agents that have credence in moral theories that are not fully consequentialist. (shrink)

Can there be a global demos? The current debate about this topic is divided between two opposing camps: the “pessimist” or “impossibilist” camp, which holds that the emergence of a global demos is either conceptually or empirically impossible, and the “optimist” or “possibilist” camp, which holds that the emergence of a global demos is conceptually as well as empirically possible and an embryonic version of it already exists. However, the two camps agree neither on a common working definition of a (...) global demos, nor on the relevant empirical facts, so it is difficult to reconcile their conflicting outlooks. We seek to move the debate beyond this stalemate. We argue that existing conceptions of a demos are ill-suited for capturing what kind of a global demos is needed to facilitate good global governance, and we propose a new conception of a demos that is better suited for this purpose. We suggest that some of the most prominent conceptions of a demos have focused too much on who the members of a demos are and too little on what functional characteristics the demos must have in order to perform its role in facilitating governance within the relevant domain. Our new proposal shifts the emphasis from the first, “compositional” question to the second, “performative” one, and provides a more “agency-based” account of a global demos. The key criterion that a collection of individuals must meet in order to qualify as a demos is that it is not merely demarcated by an appropriate membership criterion, but that it can be organized, democratically, so as to function as a state-like agent. Compared to the existing, predominantly “compositional” approaches to thinking about the demos, this agency-based approach puts us into a much better position to assess the empirical prospects for the emergence of a global demos that can facilitate good global governance. (shrink)

Like many of their counterparts in the West, Buddhist philosophers realized a long time ago that our linguistic and conceptual practices are rooted in pre-predicative modes of apprehension that provide implicit access to whatever is immediately present to awareness. This paper examines Dignāga’s and Dharmakīrti’s contributions to what has come to be known as “Buddhist epistemology” (sometimes referred in the specialist literature by the Sanskrit neologism pramāṇavāda, lit. “doctrine of epistemic warrants”), focusing on the phenomenological and epistemic role of perception (...) and self-awareness. The central argument is that reliance on accurate observations and on an understanding of the contextual and dispositional factors that constrain, condition, and direct our perceptual and intentional states gives this tradition of epistemic inquiry a pragmatic focus unique in premodern Indian philosophy. (shrink)

At the core of republican thought, on Philip Pettit’s account, lies the conception of freedom as non-domination, as opposed to freedom as noninterference in the liberal sense. I revisit the distinction between liberal and republican freedom and argue that republican freedom incorporates a particular rule-of-law requirement, whereas liberal freedom does not. Liberals may also endorse such a requirement, but not as part of their conception of freedom itself. I offer a formal analysis of this rule-of-law requirement and compare liberal and (...) republican freedom on its basis. While I agree with Pettit that republican freedom has broader implications than liberal freedom, I conclude that we face a trade-off between two dimensions of freedom (scope and robustness) and that it is harder for republicans to solve that trade-off than it is for liberals. Key Words: freedom • republicanism • liberalism • noninterference • non-domination • rule of law • robustness • liberal paradox. (shrink)

When philosophers, social scientists, and politicians seek to determine the justice of institutional arrangements, their discussions have often taken the form of questioning whether and under what circumstances the redistribution of wealth or other valuable goods is justified. This essay examines the different ways in which redistribution can be understood, the diverse political contexts in which it has been employed, and whether or not it is a useful concept for exploring questions of distributive justice.

This paper deals with the Stoic concept of misprinted representation (φαντασία παρατυπωτική), which has received little attention compared to other concepts of Stoic epistemology and philosophy of mind. I aim at showing that a better understanding of this concept is important for grasping some elements of the Stoic account of mental representations that have been ignored or misunderstood in modern Stoic scholarship. First, by clarifying the status of the misprinted representation as a genuine representation, we can understand what it (...) means (and does not mean) to say, from the Stoic point of view, that the intentional object of a representation is the external object that caused it. Second, by understanding this issue, we obtain some resources to deal with the ambiguity of the preposition ἀπό in the definition of cognitive representation. Thus, the concept of misprinted representation proves to be important for appropriately understanding the Stoic concepts of representation and cognitive representation. (shrink)

Michael S. Moore defends the ideas of free will and responsibility, especially in relation to criminal law, against several challenges from neuroscience. I agree with Moore that morality and the law presuppose a commonsense understanding of humans as rational agents, who make choices and act for reasons, and that to defend moral and legal responsibility, we must show that this commonsense understanding remains viable. Unlike Moore, however, I do not think that classical compatibilism, which is based on a conditional understanding (...) of the ability to do otherwise, provides a sufficiently robust account of free will, even when it is amended as Moore suggests. I argue that free will and responsibility can be defended more robustly by observing that, at the level of agency, there can be alternative possibilities and mental causation in a stronger sense than recognized by classical compatibilism, even if physical determinism is true. Moore’s arguments could thus be strengthened by embracing this compatibilist libertarian position. At the same time, I note that, although the idea of responsibility is robustly defensible, there are independent reasons for rejecting a retributivist approach to punishment. (shrink)