Results for 'Could have done otherwise'

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  1. Frankfurt Cases and 'Could Have Done Otherwise'.Leslie Allan - manuscript
    In his seminal essay, Harry Frankfurt argued that our exercise of free will and allocation of moral responsibility do not depend on us being able to do other than we did. Leslie Allan defends this moral maxim from Frankfurt's attack. Applying his character-based counterfactual conditional analysis of free acts to Frankfurt's counterexamples, Allan unpacks the confusions that lie at the heart of Frankfurt's argument. The author also explores how his 4C compatibilist theory measures up against Frankfurt’s conclusions.
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  2. Actions, thought-experiments and the 'principle of alternate possibilities'.Maria Alvarez - 2009 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (1):61 – 81.
    In 1969 Harry Frankfurt published his hugely influential paper 'Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility' in which he claimed to present a counterexample to the so-called 'Principle of Alternate Possibilities' ('a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise'). The success of Frankfurt-style cases as counterexamples to the Principle has been much debated since. I present an objection to these cases that, in questioning their conceptual cogency, undercuts many (...)
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  3. (1 other version)Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.Harry G. Frankfurt - 1969 - Journal of Philosophy 66 (23):829-839.
    This essay challenges the widely accepted principle that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. The author considers situations in which there are sufficient conditions for a certain choice or action to be performed by someone, So that it is impossible for the person to choose or to do otherwise, But in which these conditions do not in any way bring it about that the (...)
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  4. Free will as involving determination and inconceivable without it.R. E. Hobart - 1934 - Mind 43 (169):1-27.
    The thesis of this article is that there has never been any ground for the controversy between the doctrine of free will and determinism, that it is based upon a misapprehension, that the two assertions are entirely consistent, that one of them strictly implies the other, that they have been opposed only because of our natural want of the analytical imagination. In so saying I do not tamper with the meaning of either phrase. That would be unpardonable. I mean (...)
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  5. The force and fairness of blame.Pamela Hieronymi - 2004 - Philosophical Perspectives 18 (1):115–148.
    In this paper I consider fairness of blaming a wrongdoer. In particular, I consider the claim that blaming a wrongdoer can be unfair because blame has a certain characteristic force, a force which is not fairly imposed upon the wrongdoer unless certain conditions are met--unless, e.g., the wrongdoer could have done otherwise, or unless she is someone capable of having done right, or unless she is able to control her behavior by the light of moral (...)
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  6. A Interpretação condicional da possibilidade de agir diferentemente.Gilberto Gomes - 2005 - Ethica (Rio de Janeiro) 12 (1-2):115-121.
    Freedom is often defined by the possibility of doing otherwise. The conditional interpretation of this possibility, advanced by Moore, maintains that to say that someone could have done otherwise is to say that someone would have done otherwise if she had decided to do so. This conception is adequate for the thesis that freedom is compatible with natural causality. The present article presents a defense of this interpretation against the argument with which (...)
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  7. On the very idea of a robust alternative.Carlos J. Moya - 2011 - Critica 43 (128):3-26.
    According to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities, an agent is morally responsible for an action of hers only if she could have done otherwise. The notion of a robust alternative plays a prominent role in recent attacks on PAP based on so-called Frankfurt cases. In this paper I defend the truth of PAP for blameworthy actions against Frankfurt cases recently proposed by Derk Pereboom and David Widerker. My defence rests on some intuitively plausible principles that yield (...)
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  8. A challenge for Frankfurt-style compatibilists.Philip Swenson - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (5):1279-1285.
    The principle of alternative possibilities tells us that an agent is morally responsible for an action only if he could have done otherwise. Frankfurt-style cases provide an extremely influential challenge to the PAP . And Frankfurt-style compatibilists are motivated to accept compatibilism about responsibility and determinism in part due to FSCs. But there is a significant tension between our judgments about responsibility in FSCs and our judgments about responsibility in certain omissions cases. This tension has thus (...)
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  9. What time travelers cannot not do (but are responsible for anyway).Joshua Spencer - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (1):149-162.
    The Principle of Alternative Possibilities is the intuitive idea that someone is morally responsible for an action only if she could have done otherwise. Harry Frankfurt has famously presented putative counterexamples to this intuitive principle. In this paper, I formulate a simple version of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities that invokes a course-grained notion of actions. After warming up with a Frankfurt-Style Counterexample to this principle, I introduce a new kind of counterexample based on the possibility (...)
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  10. Moral Sense and the Foundations of Responsibility.Paul Russell - 2011 - In Robert Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will: Second Edition. Oup Usa. pp. 199-220.
    Throughout much of the first half of the twentieth century, the free-will debate was largely concerned with the question of what kind of freedom was required for moral responsibility and whether the kind of freedom required was compatible with the thesis of determinism. This issue was itself addressed primarily with reference to the question of how freedom is related to alternative possibilities and what the relevant analysis of “could have done otherwise” comes to. The discussion of (...)
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  11. Incommensurable Goods, Alternative Possibilities, and the Self-Refutation of the Self-Refutation of Determinism.Michael Baur - 2005 - American Journal of Jurisprudence 50 (1):165-171.
    In his paper, "Free Choice, Incommensurable Goods and the Self-Refutation of Determinism,"' Joseph Boyle seeks to show how the argument for the self-refutation of determinism - first articulated over twenty-five years ago - is an argument whose force depends on (first) a proper understanding of just what free choice is, and (secondly) a proper understanding of how free choice is a principle of moral responsibility. According to Boyle, a person can make a genuinely free choice only if he is presented (...)
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  12. Free Will and Compatibilism.Leslie Allan - manuscript
    The author mounts a case against the libertarian and hard determinist's thesis that free will is impossible in a deterministic world. He charges incompatibilists with misconstruing ordinary 'free will' talk by overlaying common language with their own metaphysical presuppositions. Through a review of ordinary discourse and recent developments in jurisprudence and the sciences, he draws together the four key factors required for an act to be free. He then puts his 4C theory to work in giving a credible account of (...)
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    What Rothbard could have done but did not do: The merits of Austrian economics without extreme apriorism.Alexander Linsbichler - 2024 - Philosophical Problems in Science 76:43-84.
    Austrian economics emphasizes a priori components of social scientific theory. Most emphatically, Ludwig Mises and Murray Rothbard champion praxeology, a methodology often criticized as extremely aprioristic. Among the numerous justifications and interpretations of praxeology to be found in the primary and secondary literature, conventionalism avoids the charge of extreme apriorism by construing the fundamental axiom of praxeology as analytic instead of synthetic. This paper (1) explicates the tentative structure of the fundamental axiom, (2) clarifies some aspects of a conventionalist defense (...)
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  14. Artificial Free Will: The Responsibility Strategy and Artificial Agents.Sven Delarivière - 2016 - Apeiron Student Journal of Philosophy (Portugal) 7:175-203.
    Both a traditional notion of free will, present in human beings, and artificial intelligence are often argued to be inherently incompatible with determinism. Contrary to these criticisms, this paper defends that an account of free will compatible with determinism, the responsibility strategy (coined here) specifically, is a variety of free will worth wanting as well as a variety that is possible to (in principle) artificially construct. First, freedom will be defined and related to ethics. With that in mind, the two (...)
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  15. Saints, Heroes and Moral Necessity.Alfred Archer - 2015 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 77:105-124.
    Many people who perform paradigmatic examples of acts of supererogation claim that they could not have done otherwise. In this paper I will argue that these self-reports from moral exemplars present a challenge to the traditional view of supererogation as involving agential sacrifice. I will argue that the claims made by moral exemplars are plausibly understood as what Bernard Williams calls a ‘practical necessity’. I will then argue that this makes it implausible to view these acts (...)
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  16. Frankfurt-Style Cases User Manual: Why Frankfurt-Style Enabling Cases Do Not Necessitate Tech Support.Florian Cova - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (3):505-521.
    ‘Frankfurt-style cases’ (FSCs) are widely considered as having refuted the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) by presenting cases in which an agent is morally responsible even if he could not have done otherwise. However, Neil Levy (J Philos 105:223–239, 2008) has recently argued that FSCs fail because we are not entitled to suppose that the agent is morally responsible, given that the mere presence of a counterfactual intervener is enough to make an agent lose responsibility-grounding abilities. (...)
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  17. The Contingency of Creation and Divine Choice.Fatema Amijee - 2022 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 10:289-300.
    According to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (‘PSR’), every fact has an explanation for why it obtains. If the PSR is true, there must be a sufficient reason for why God chose to create our world. But a sufficient reason for God’s choice plausibly necessitates that choice. It thus seems that God could not have done otherwise, and that our world exists necessarily. We therefore appear forced to pick between the PSR, and the contingency of creation (...)
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  18. Why It Is Sometimes Fair to Blame Agents for Unavoidable Actions and Omissions.Ken Levy - 2005 - American Philosophical Quarterly 42 (2):93 - 104.
    It is generally thought that ought implies can. If this maxim is correct, then my inability to do otherwise entails that I cannot be blamed for failing to do otherwise. In this article, however, I use Harry Frankfurt’s famous argument against the "Principle of Alternative Possibilities" (PAP) to show that the maxim is actually false, that I can be blamed for failing to do otherwise even in situations where I could not have done (...). In these situations, I do not act otherwise not because I cannot act otherwise but because I choose not to act otherwise.None. (shrink)
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  19. Do intuitions about Frankfurt-style cases rest on an internalist prejudice?Florian Cova & Hichem Naar - 2016 - Philosophical Explorations 19 (3):290-305.
    “Frankfurt-style cases” are widely considered as having refuted the Principle of Alternate Possibilities by presenting cases in which an agent is morally responsible even if he could not have done otherwise. However, Neil Levy has recently argued that FSCs fail because our intuitions about cases involving counterfactual interveners are inconsistent, and this inconsistency is best explained by the fact that our intuitions about such cases are grounded in an internalist prejudice about the location of mental states (...)
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  20. Que tipo de determinação é compatível com que tipo de liberdade? – Uma resposta a Marcelo Fischborn.Gilberto Gomes - 2019 - Filosofia Unisinos 2 (20):113-127.
    While agreeing with Fischborn’s (2018) contention that, according to one traditional definition of compatibilism, my position should be classified as that of a libertarian incompatibilist, I argue here for a different view of compatibilism. This view involves, on the one hand, local probabilistic causation of decisions (rather than universal strict determinism) and, on the other, free will conceived as involving decisions generated by a decision-making process carried out by the brain, which consciously contemplates different alternatives and could in principle (...)
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  21. Free Will, Temporal Asymmetry, and Computational Undecidability.Stuart T. Doyle - 2022 - Journal of Mind and Behavior 43 (4):305-321.
    One of the central criteria for free will is “Could I have done otherwise?” But because of a temporal asymmetry in human choice, the question makes no sense. The question is backward-looking, while human choices are forward-looking. At the time when any choice is actually made, there is as of yet no action to do otherwise. Expectation is the only thing to contradict (do other than). So the ability to do something not expected by the (...)
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  22. Beliefs That Wrong.Rima Basu - 2018 - Dissertation, University of Southern California
    You shouldn’t have done it. But you did. Against your better judgment you scrolled to the end of an article concerning the state of race relations in America and you are now reading the comments. Amongst the slurs, the get-rich-quick schemes, and the threats of physical violence, there is one comment that catches your eye. Spencer argues that although it might be “unpopular” or “politically incorrect” to say this, the evidence supports believing that the black diner in his (...)
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  23. "If Only I Had" Versus "If Only I Had Not:" Mental Deletions, Mental Additions, and Perceptions of Meaning in Life Events.Keith Markman & Hyeman Choi - 2019 - Journal of Positive Psychology 14 (5):672-680.
    The present research investigated the relationship between meaning perceptions and the structure of counterfactual thoughts. In Study 1, participants reflected on how turning points in their lives could have turned out otherwise. Those who were instructed to engage in subtractive (e.g., If only I had not done X...”) counterfactual thinking (SCT) about those turning points subsequently reported higher meaning perceptions than did those who engaged in additive (e.g., ‘If only I had done X...’) counterfactual thinking (...)
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  24. Could God Have Made the Big Bang? (On Theistic Counterfactuals).Duncan Macintosh - 1994 - Dialogue 33 (1):3-20.
    Quentin Smith argues that if God exists, He had a duty to ensure life's existence; and He couldn't rationally have done so and made a big bang unless a counter-factual like "If God had made a big bang, there would have been life," was true pre-creation. But such counter-factuals are not true pre-creation. I argue that God could have made a big bang without irrationality; and that He could have ensured life without making (...)
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  25. Fire and Forget: A Moral Defense of the Use of Autonomous Weapons in War and Peace.Duncan MacIntosh - 2021 - In Jai Galliott, Duncan MacIntosh & Jens David Ohlin (eds.), Lethal Autonomous Weapons: Re-Examining the Law and Ethics of Robotic Warfare. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 9-23.
    Autonomous and automatic weapons would be fire and forget: you activate them, and they decide who, when and how to kill; or they kill at a later time a target you’ve selected earlier. Some argue that this sort of killing is always wrong. If killing is to be done, it should be done only under direct human control. (E.g., Mary Ellen O’Connell, Peter Asaro, Christof Heyns.) I argue that there are surprisingly many kinds of situation where this is (...)
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  26. Plato’s Metaphysical Development before Middle Period Dialogues.Mohammad Bagher Ghomi - manuscript
    Regarding the relation of Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, scholars have been divided to two opposing groups: unitarists and developmentalists. While developmentalists try to prove that there are some noticeable and even fundamental differences between Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, the unitarists assert that there is no essential difference in there. The main goal of this article is to suggest that some of Plato’s ontological as well as epistemological principles change, both radically and fundamentally, between the early (...)
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  27. πολλαχῶς ἔστι; Plato’s Neglected Ontology.Mohammad Bagher Ghomi - manuscript
    This paper aims to suggest a new approach to Plato’s theory of being in Republic V and Sophist based on the notion of difference and the being of a copy. To understand Plato’s ontology in these two dialogues we are going to suggest a theory we call Pollachos Esti; a name we took from Aristotle’s pollachos legetai both to remind the similarities of the two structures and to reach a consistent view of Plato’s ontology. Based on this theory, when Plato (...)
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  28. Armchair Knowledge and Modal Skepticism: A Rapprochement.Felipe Leon - 2009 - Dissertation, University of California, Riverside
    The thought experiment is a seemingly indispensable tool in the armchair philosopher’s toolbox. One wonders, for example, how philosophers could come to think that justified true belief isn’t knowledge, that reference isn’t determined by an expression’s associated description, or that moral responsibility doesn’t require the ability to do otherwise, without the use of thought experiments. But even if thought experiments play an integral role in philosophical methodology, their legitimacy is at least initially puzzling: one would think that significant (...)
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  29. Aristotle on Definition.Mohammad Bagher Ghomi - manuscript
    Definition has the following features in Aristotle’s philosophy: 1. Each thing has only one definition and ‘it is impossible that there should be more than one definition for the same thing.’ (To., Z, 5, 142b^25; cf. To., Z, 4, 141a26) 2. Definition is ‘a formula of the essence’ (Met., H, 1042a17-18) and, thus, signifies the essence of the thing. (To., I, 5, ^101b30-) About the relation between definition and essence Aristotle regards three possibilities (PsA., B, 94a11-14): a) A definition as (...)
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  30. Could God Love Cruelty? A Partial Defense of Unrestricted Theological Voluntarism.Laura Frances Callahan - 2021 - Faith and Philosophy 38 (1):26-44.
    One of the foremost objections to theological voluntarism is the contingency objection. If God’s will fixes moral facts, then what if God willed that agents engage in cruelty? I argue that even unrestricted theological voluntarists should accept some logical constraints on possible moral systems—hence, some limits on ways that God could have willed morality to be—and these logical constraints are sufficient to blunt the force of the contingency objec­tion. One constraint I defend is a very weak accessibility requirement, (...)
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  31. Ways Modality Could Be.Jason Zarri - manuscript
    In this paper I introduce the idea of a higher-order modal logic—not a modal logic for higher-order predicate logic, but rather a logic of higher-order modalities. “What is a higher-order modality?”, you might be wondering. Well, if a first-order modality is a way that some entity could have been—whether it is a mereological atom, or a mereological complex, or the universe as a whole—a higher-order modality is a way that a first-order modality could have been. First-order (...)
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  32. No Harm Done? An Experimental Approach to the Nonidentity Problem.Matthew Kopec & Justin Bruner - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (1):169-189.
    Discussions of the non-identity problem presuppose a widely shared intuition that actions or policies that change who comes into existence don't, thereby, become morally unproblematic. We hypothesize that this intuition isn’t generally shared by the public, which could have widespread implications concerning how to generate support for large-scale, identity-affecting policies relating to matters like climate change. To test this, we ran a version of the well-known dictator game designed to mimic the public's behavior over identity-affecting choices. We found (...)
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  33. Rationalism and Necessitarianism.Martin Lin - 2012 - Noûs 46 (3):418-448.
    Metaphysical rationalism, the doctrine which affirms the Principle of Sufficient Reason (the PSR), is out of favor today. The best argument against it is that it appears to lead to necessitarianism, the claim that all truths are necessarily true. Whatever the intuitive appeal of the PSR, the intuitive appeal of the claim that things could have been otherwise is greater. This problem did not go unnoticed by the great metaphysical rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz. Spinoza’s response was to (...)
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  34. Does Eternity Have A Future?Yitzhak Melamed - 2018 - The Philosophers' Magazine 81:40-44.
    Metaphysics as an independent discipline has a surprisingly short history. Until the early eighteenth century, many, perhaps even most, writers on “metaphysics” primarily had the eponymous work of Aristotle in mind. In the writings of the early eighteenth-century German rationalists—Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten—we find a conception of metaphysics that is no longer necessarily tied to Aristotle’s great work. But metaphysics as a discipline was not blessed with longevity, as a dozen years or so before Louis XVI it was condemned (...)
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  35. The Creation of Necessity.Beth Seacord - 2015 - Journal of Philosophical Investigations at University of Tabriz 9 (17):153-171.
    In Descartes theological writing, he promotes two jointly puzzling theses: T1) God freely creates the eternal truths (i.e. the Creation Doctrine) and T2) The eternal truths are necessarily true. According to T1 God freely chooses which propositions to make necessary, contingent and possible. However the Creation Doctrine makes the acceptance of T2 tenuous for the Creation Doctrine implies that God could have acted otherwise--instantiating an entirely different set of necessary truths. Jonathan Bennett seeks to reconcile T1 and (...)
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  36. Artificial Knowing Otherwise.Os Keyes & Kathleen Creel - 2022 - Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 8 (3).
    While feminist critiques of AI are increasingly common in the scholarly literature, they are by no means new. Alison Adam’s Artificial Knowing (1998) brought a feminist social and epistemological stance to the analysis of AI, critiquing the symbolic AI systems of her day and proposing constructive alternatives. In this paper, we seek to revisit and renew Adam’s arguments and methodology, exploring their resonances with current feminist concerns and their relevance to contemporary machine learning. Like Adam, we ask how new AI (...)
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  37. Contextualizing Free Will.Romy Jaster - 2020 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 74 (2):187-204.
    Hawthorne toys with the view that ascriptions of free will are context-sensitive. But the way he formulates the view makes freedom contextualism look like a non-starter. I step into the breach for freedom contextualism. My aim is twofold. On the one hand, I argue that freedom contextualism can be motivated on the basis of our ordinary practice of freedom attribution is not ad hoc. The view explains data which cannot be accounted for by an ambiguity hypothesis. On the other hand, (...)
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  38. Counterfactual Reasoning in Art Criticism.Angela Sun - 2022 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (3):276-285.
    When we evaluate artworks, we often point to what an artist could have done or what a work could have been in order to say something about the work as it actually is. Call this counterfactual reasoning in art criticism. On my account, counterfactual claims about artworks involve comparative aesthetic judgments between actual artworks and hypothetical variations of those works. The practice of imagining what an artwork could have been is critically useful because (...)
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  39. The problem of extras and the contingency of physicalism.Robert Francescotti - 2014 - Philosophical Explorations 17 (2):241-254.
    Perhaps all concrete phenomena obtain solely in virtue of physical phenomena. Even so, it seems that the world could have been otherwise. It seems that physicalism, if true, is contingently true. In fact, many believe that the actual truth of physicalism allows metaphysically possible worlds duplicating the actual world in all physical respects while containing immaterial extras, e.g. ghosts, spirits, or Cartesian souls, that no physicalist would believe actually exist. Here I focus on physicalism regarding mentality and (...)
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  40. Beyond sensorimotor segregation: On mirror neurons and social affordance space tracking.Maria Brincker - 2015 - Cognitive Systems Research 34:18-34.
    Mirror neuron research has come a long way since the early 1990s, and many theorists are now stressing the heterogeneity and complexity of the sensorimotor properties of fronto-parietal circuits. However, core aspects of the initial ‘ mirror mechanism ’ theory, i.e. the idea of a symmetric encapsulated mirroring function translating sensory action perceptions into motor formats, still appears to be shaping much of the debate. This article challenges the empirical plausibility of the sensorimotor segregation implicit in the original mirror metaphor. (...)
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  41. Evidence of Falsehood.Timothy R. O'Donnell - manuscript
    It has been largely assumed from the start that truth, the first premise of the Tripartite theory of Knowledge, is necessary for a mental state of knowing. And this has intuitively made sense. Examples that demonstrate the logic of this premise are wide-spread and easily found. Yet, if one tries to establish the necessity of this condition for oneself, one may discover, a logical flaw in this premise. In theory truth is necessary, however, in practice it is not truth that (...)
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  42. With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.Rani Lill Anjum & Stephen Mumford - 2013 - In Benedikt Kahmen & Markus S. Stepanians (eds.), Critical Essays on "Causation and Responsibility". De Gruyter. pp. 219-238.
    Omissions are sometimes linked to responsibility. A harm can counterfactually depend on an omission to prevent it. If someone had the ability to prevent a harm but didn’t, this could suffice to ground their responsibility for the harm. Michael S. Moore’s claim is illustrated by the tragic case of Peter Parker, shortly after he became Spider-Man. Sick of being pushed around as a weakling kid, Peter became drunk on the power he acquired from the freak bite of a radioactive (...)
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  43. Imagining Evil.Adam Morton - 2010 - Les Ateliers de L’Ethique 5 (1):26-33.
    It is in a way easier to imagine evil actions than we often suppose, but what it is thus relatively easy to do is not what we want to understand about evil. To argue for this conclusion I distin- guish between imagining why someone did something and imagining how they could have done it, and I try to grasp partial understanding, in part by distinguishing different imaginative pers- pectives we can have on an act. When we (...)
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  44. (1 other version)What Kind of Necessary Being Could God Be?Richard Swinburne - 2012 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4 (2):1--18.
    A logically impossible sentence is one which entails a contradiction, a logically necessary sentence is one whose negation entails a contradiction, and a logically possible sentence is one which does not entail a contradiction. Metaphysically impossible, necessary and possible sentences are ones which become logically impossible, necessary, or possible by substituting what I call informative rigid designators for uninformative ones. It does seem very strongly that a negative existential sentence cannot entail a contradiction, and so ”there is a God’ cannot (...)
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  45. An Examination of Spinoza’s Moral Philosophy.Idorenyin F. Esikot, Peter Bessong & Emmanuel E. Ette - 2019 - GNOSI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Human Theory and Praxis 2 (1).
    Spinoza's moral philosopher represents his most concerted attempt to come to terms with the great philosophical questions of the existence and identity of God, the nature and origin of the human mind concerning God, the origin and nature of emotions, the power of emotions as they restrict freedom of choice. His ethics is derived from his metaphysics and psychology. His belief that everything emanates from a perfect and infinite God made him conclude that evil does not exist. Further, he argues (...)
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  46. Critical Notice: Perspectival Realism. [REVIEW]Angela Potochnik - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1):355-363.
    There’s a recurrent divide among philosophical views about science—those focused on practice vs. those focused on metaphysics, assertions of pluralism vs. assertions of realism, accounts of how science’s history could have gone otherwise vs. accounts of how science achieves knowledge. Michela Massimi’s Perspectival Realism is ultimately a bridging project, aiming to cross this divide. The project is to recruit resources from perspectivism, a kind of pluralism about science, to show how science achieves knowledge and, thus, to inform (...)
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  47. What It's Like To Have a Cognitive Home.Matt Duncan - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (1):66-81.
    Many people believe that the mind is an epistemic refuge of sorts. The idea is that when it comes to certain core mental states, one’s being in such a state automatically puts one in a position to know that one is in that state. This idea has come under attack in recent years. One particularly influential attack comes from Timothy Williamson (2000), who argues that there is no central core of states or conditions—mental or otherwise—to which we are guaranteed (...)
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  48. (1 other version)Do Imaginings have a Goal?Marcus Hunt - 2023 - Axiomathes: Global Philosophy 33 (1):1-17.
    The paper investigates whether imaginative states about propositions can be assessed in terms of fittingness (also known as correctness, appropriateness, aptness). After characterizing propositional imaginings and explaining the idea of fittingness, I present some considerations in favour of the no conditions view: imagining seems to be the sort of action that cannot be done unfittingly, and imaginings have no external cognitive nor conative goals in light of which they could be unfitting. I then examine the local conditions (...)
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  49. Justice Without Retribution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Stakeholder Views and Practical Implications.Farah Focquaert, Gregg Caruso, Elizabeth Shaw & Derk Pereboom - 2018 - Neuroethics 13 (1):1-3.
    Within the United States, the most prominent justification for criminal punishment is retributivism. This retributivist justification for punishment maintains that punishment of a wrongdoer is justified for the reason that she deserves something bad to happen to her just because she has knowingly done wrong—this could include pain, deprivation, or death. For the retributivist, it is the basic desert attached to the criminal’s immoral action alone that provides the justification for punishment. This means that the retributivist position is (...)
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  50. Musical scaffolding and the pleasure of sad music: Comment on “An Integrative Review of the Enjoyment of Sadness Associated with Music".Joel Krueger - forthcoming - Physics of Life Reviews.
    Why is listening to sad music pleasurable? Eerola et al. convincingly argue that we should adopt an integrative framework — encompassing biological, psycho-social, and cultural levels of explanation — to answer this question. I agree. The authors have done a great service in providing the outline of such an integrative account. But in their otherwise rich discussion of the psycho-social level of engagements with sad music, they say little about the phenomenology of such experiences — including features (...)
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