Part of a book symposium on Graham Priest's Towards Non-Being.

Berry, Daniels, and Ladin make a strong argument for discontinuing the use of, “lack of social support,” as an organ transplantation listing criterion. This argument, however, actually leads to conclusions much stronger than those that the authors’ propose: The argument works equally well against using, (1) any “psychosocial” factors at all as a listing criterion, and, (2) any criteria other than factors that directly relate to empirically established medical need, and/or empirically established survival rate. Moreover, while the authors rightly point (...) to a lack of empirical evidence connecting social support to survivability, they neglect mentioning that the empirical literature on social support provides grounds to favor listing persons who seem to, sadly, lack a social support system. (shrink)

I argue that Graham Priest's story 'Sylvan's Box' has an attractive consistent reading. Priest's hope that this story can be used as an example of a non-trivial 'essentially inconsistent' story is thus threatened. I then make some observations about the role 'Sylvan's Box' might play in a theory of unreliable narrators.

This essay offers an account of Kierkegaard’s view of the limits of thought and of what makes this view distinctive. With primary reference to Philosophical Fragments, and its putative representation of Christianity as unthinkable, I situate Kierkegaard’s engagement with the problem of the limits of thought, especially with respect to the views of Kant and Hegel. I argue that Kierkegaard builds in this regard on Hegel’s critique of Kant but that, against Hegel, he develops a radical distinction between two types (...) of thinking and inquiry: the ‘aesthetic-intellectual’ and the ‘ethico-religious’. I clarify this distinction and show how it guides Kierkegaard’s conception of a form of philosophical practice that involves drawing limits to the proper sphere of disinterested contemplation. With reference to two rival interpretations of Kierkegaard’s approach to the limits of thought—which I call ‘bullet-biting’ and ‘relativizing’—I further show how my ‘disambiguating’ account can better explain how, and why, his work courts a form of self-referential incoherence, in which it appears that certain limits of thought are at once affirmed and violated. (shrink)

(April 2019) UNBELIEVABLE similarities between some articles from a book edited by Bliss and Priest (2018) and my ideas (2002-208) -/- (2018) Reality and its Structure - Essays in Fundamentality, Ricki Bliss and Graham Priest (eds.), Oxford Univ Press -/- The content of this paper is about the following articles from the above book: -/- Gabriel Oak Rabin (2018) Grounding Orthodoxy and the Layered Conception Daniel Nolan (2018) Cosmic Loops Naomi Thompson (2018) Metaphysical Interdependence, Epistemic Coherentism, and (...) Tuomas E. Tahko (2018) Holistic Explanation Fundamentality and Ontological Minimality Matteo Morganti (2018) The Structure of Physical Reality Beyond Foundationalism Nathan Wildman (2018) On Shaky Ground? Exploring the Contingent Fundamentality Thesis . (shrink)

Evolutionary debunking arguments abound, but it is widely assumed that they do not arise for our perceptual beliefs about midsized objects, insofar as the adaptive value of our object beliefs cannot be explained without reference to the objects themselves. I argue that this is a mistake. Just as with moral beliefs, the adaptive value of our object beliefs can be explained without assuming that the beliefs are accurate. I then explore the prospects for other sorts of vindications of our object (...) beliefs—which involve “bootstrapping” from our experiences as of midsized objects—and I defend bootstrapping maneuvers against a variety of objections. Finally, I argue for an explanatory constraint on legitimate bootstrapping and show how some attempts to respond to debunking arguments run afoul of the constraint. (shrink)

A normative reason for a person to? is a consideration which favours?ing. A motivating reason is a reason for which or on the basis of which a person?s. This paper explores a connection between normative and motivating reasons. More specifically, it explores the idea that there are second-order normative reasons to? for or on the basis of certain first-order normative reasons. In this paper, I challenge the view that there are second-order reasons so understood. I then show that prominent views (...) in contemporary epistemology are committed to the existence of second-order reasons, specifically, views about the epistemic norms governing practical reasoning and about the role of higher-order evidence. If there are no second-order reasons, those views are mistaken. (shrink)

COTENT -/- (April 2019) Why so many people (from so many countries/domains/on so many topics) have already plagiarized my ideas? (Gabriel Vacariu) -/- Some preliminary comments Introduction: The EDWs perspective in my article from 2005 and my book from 2008 -/- I. PHYSICS, COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY (‘REBORN DINOSAURS’) • (2016) Sean Carroll (California Institute of Technology, USA) • (2016) Frank Wilczek (Nobel Prize in Physics) • (2017-2019 - NEW March 2019) Carlo Rovelli in three books (2015, 2017) to my ideas (...) (2002-2008) + commentary February 2018! • (2016) Kastner + (2017) R. E. Kastner, Stuart Kauffman, Michael Epperson • (2017) Lee Smolin (2017) • (May 2018) ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra!’ - A fairy-tale with Eugen Ionesco and the Idiot about Nothingness -/- II. PHYSICS • (2011) Radu Ionicioiu (Physics, University of Bucharest, Romania) and Daniel R. Terno’s ideas (Physics, Macquarie University, Sydney • (2013) Côté B. Gilbert (Oontario, Canada) • (2015) Pikovski Igor, Zych Magdalena, Costa Fabio, and Brukner Časlav • (2015) Elisabetta Caffau (Center for Astronomy at the University of Heidelberg and the Paris Observatory) • (2015) Wolfram Schommers • (2015) Some astrophysicists • (2016) Dylan H. Mahler, Lee Rozema, Kent Fisher, Lydia Vermeyden, Kevin J. Resch, Howard M. Wiseman, and Aephraim Steinberg • (2016) Bill Poirier • (2016 or 2017) Adam Frank • (2017, 2017) Sebastian de Haro • (2017) Laura Condiotto • (2016) Hugo F. Alrøe and Egon Noe • (2017) Federico Zalamea • (2018) Unbelievable similarities between Peter J. Lewis’s ideas (2018) and my ideas (2002-2008) • (2018) Timothy Hollowood, ‘Classical from Quantum’ • (2018) Mario Hubert and Davide Romano, ‘The Wave-Function as a Multi-Field’ -/- III. COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF MIND • (2011-2014) Did Georg Northoff (Psychoanalysis, Institute of Mental Health) plagiarize my ideas (2002-2008)? • (2011) Kalina Diego Cosmelli, Legrand Dorothée and Thompson Evan’s ideas (USA) • (2015) David Ludwig (Philosophy, University of Amsterdam) • (2016) Neil D. Theise (Department of Pathology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, USA) and Kafatos C. Menas • David Bourget (2018) (or University of Western Ontario) + Chalmers • (2016) Dan Siegel (Mindsight Institute, USA) -/- IV. Philosophy (of science) • (2010) Alexey Alyushin (Moscow, Russia) • (2013 + 2017) Markus Gabriel (Bonn University) • (2013) Andrew Newman’s ideas (University of Nebraska, at Omaha, USA) • (2016) Tahko E. Tuomas (University of Helsinki, Finland) + Tahko E. Tuomas • (2017) Jani Hakkarainen (University of Tampere, Finland) + (2017) Markku Keinänen, Antti Keskinen & Jani Hakkarainen • (2017) Dean Rickles (HPS, Univ. of Sydney) • (2017) Did Dirk K. F. Meijer and Hans J. H. Geesink (University of Groningen, Netherlands) • (2018) Jason Winning’s ideas (2018) • (2018) David Mark Kovacs (Lecturer of philosophy at Tel Aviv University) -/- July 2018 • Oreste M. Fiocco • Baptiste Le Bihan (University of Geneva, forthcoming) • Antonella Mallozzi (The Graduate Center – CUNY, forthcoming in Synthese, penultimate draft) • Erik C. Banks (Wright State University, 2014) • Sami Pihlström (2009) • Katherin Koslicki’s ideas (2008) The Structure of Objects, Oxford University Press) and my ideas (2002-2005-2006) -/- November 2018 • Maurizio Ferraris (2014/2012) Manifesto of New Realism • Graham Harman (2017) : Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Penguin Books) -/- January 2019 • Philip Ball (2018) • Gerhard Grössing • Anne Sophie Meincke (November 2018) • Baptiste Le Bihana (University of Geneva) and James Read (Oxford Univ.) • Baptiste Le Bihan (University of Geneva) • Alexander Alexandrovich Antonov (2016) (Research Center of Information Technologies “TELAN Electronics”, Kiev, Ukraine): -/- February 2019 • James Barham (2019) • Giorgio Lando (2017) • (2018) Albrecht von M¨uller • Elias Zafiris • (2019) Flaminia Giacomini, Esteban Castro-Ruiz, & Časlav • (2019) Valia Allori, OUP (2019) • (2018) Paulo De Jesus Phenom Cogn Sci • (2016) TIMOTHY MORTON, For a Logic of Future Coexistence • (2017) Andrew Cooper, Two directions for teleology: naturalism and idealism, Synthese -/- March 2019 • (2019) Massimiliano Proietti,1 Alexander Pickston,1 Francesco Graffitti,1 Peter Barrow,1 Dmytro Kundys,1 Cyril Branciard,2 Martin Ringbauer,1, 3 and Alessandro Fedrizzi1: (2019) • (2015) Cˇaslav Brukner On the quantum measurement problem, at arXiv:1507.05255v1 [quant-ph] 19 Jul 2015 • (2015) Mateus Araújo, Cyril Branciard, Fabio Costa, Adrien Feix, Christina Giarmatzi, Časlav Brukner, Witnessing causal nonseparability, • (2008 + 2013) Giulio Chiribella,∗ Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano,† and Paolo Perinotti‡ QUIT Group, Dipartimento di Fisica “A. Volta” and INFM, via Bassi 6, 27100 Pavia, Italy§ (Dated: October 22, 2018): Transforming quantum operations: quantum supermaps arXiv:0804.0180v2 [quant-ph] (22 Oct 2008) + Giulio Chiribella,1, ∗ Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano,2, † Paolo Perinotti,2, ‡ and Benoit Valiron3, § (2013), Quantum computations without definite causal structure, at • (2013) Ognyan Oreshkov1;2, Fabio Costa1, Cˇ aslav Brukner1;3, Quantum correlations with no causal order, • (2018) Marcus Schmieke, Kränzlin, 17 July 2018 These articles are in this book: Reality and its Structure - Essays in Fundamentality, Ricki Bliss and Graham Priest (2018), -/- Gabriel Oak Rabin (2018) Grounding Orthodoxy and the Layered Conception Daniel Nolan (2018) Cosmic Loops Naomi Thompson (2018) Metaphysical Interdependence, Epistemic Coherentism, and Tuomas E. Tahko (2018) Holistic Explanation Fundamentality and Ontological Minimality Matteo Morganti (2018) The Structure of Physical Reality Beyond Foundationalism Nathan Wildman (2018) On Shaky Ground? Exploring the Contingent Fundamentality Thesis -/- April 2019 (2015) M. Ringbauer1;2, B. Du_us1;2, C. Branciard1;3, E. G. Cavalcanti4, A. G. White1;2 & A. Fedrizzi: “Measurements on the reality of the wavefunction” -/- June 2019 Timothy Morton (2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013) Open Humanities Press Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 1–34 “Ian Bogost thinks objects as units”: Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008) in Timothy Morton 2013, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013) OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS (I have not read Bogost yet, but in Morton’s book, I found UNBELIEVABLE similarity between Bogost’s main ideas and my EDWs ideas!!) -/- [Obviously, there are other “specialists” that published UNBELIEVABLE similar ideas to my ideas but I have not discovered them yet…] -/- . (shrink)

What is a normative reason for acting? In this paper, I introduce and defend a novel answer to this question. The starting-point is the view that reasons are right-makers. By exploring difficulties facing it, I arrive at an alternative, according to which reasons are evidence of respects in which it is right to perform an act, for example, that it keeps a promise. This is similar to the proposal that reasons for a person to act are evidence that she ought (...) to do so; however, as I explain, it differs from that proposal in two significant ways. As a result, I argue, the evidence-based account of reasons I advance shares the advantages of its predecessor while avoiding many of the difficulties facing it. (shrink)

COTENT -/- (April 2019) Why so many people (from so many countries/domains/on so many topics) have already plagiarized my ideas? (Gabriel Vacariu) -/- Some preliminary comments Introduction: The EDWs perspective in my article from 2005 and my book from 2008 -/- I. PHYSICS, COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY (‘REBORN DINOSAURS’) • (2016) Sean Carroll (California Institute of Technology, USA) • (2016) Frank Wilczek (Nobel Prize in Physics) • (2017-2019 - NEW March 2019) Carlo Rovelli in three books (2015, 2017) to my ideas (...) (2002-2008) + commentary February 2018! • (2016) Kastner + (2017) R. E. Kastner, Stuart Kauffman, Michael Epperson • (2017) Lee Smolin (2017) • (May 2018) ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra!’ - A fairy-tale with Eugen Ionesco and the Idiot about Nothingness -/- II. PHYSICS • (2011) Radu Ionicioiu (Physics, University of Bucharest, Romania) and Daniel R. Terno’s ideas (Physics, Macquarie University, Sydney • (2013) Côté B. Gilbert (Oontario, Canada) • (2015) Pikovski Igor, Zych Magdalena, Costa Fabio, and Brukner Časlav • (2015) Elisabetta Caffau (Center for Astronomy at the University of Heidelberg and the Paris Observatory) • (2015) Wolfram Schommers • (2015) Some astrophysicists • (2016) Dylan H. Mahler, Lee Rozema, Kent Fisher, Lydia Vermeyden, Kevin J. Resch, Howard M. Wiseman, and Aephraim Steinberg • (2016) Bill Poirier • (2016 or 2017) Adam Frank • (2017, 2017) Sebastian de Haro • (2017) Laura Condiotto • (2016) Hugo F. Alrøe and Egon Noe • (2017) Federico Zalamea • (2018) Unbelievable similarities between Peter J. Lewis’s ideas (2018) and my ideas (2002-2008) • (2018) Timothy Hollowood, ‘Classical from Quantum’ • (2018) Mario Hubert and Davide Romano, ‘The Wave-Function as a Multi-Field’ -/- III. COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF MIND • (2011-2014) Did Georg Northoff (Psychoanalysis, Institute of Mental Health) plagiarize my ideas (2002-2008)? • (2011) Kalina Diego Cosmelli, Legrand Dorothée and Thompson Evan’s ideas (USA) • (2015) David Ludwig (Philosophy, University of Amsterdam) • (2016) Neil D. Theise (Department of Pathology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, USA) and Kafatos C. Menas • David Bourget (2018) (or University of Western Ontario) + Chalmers • (2016) Dan Siegel (Mindsight Institute, USA) -/- IV. Philosophy (of science) • (2010) Alexey Alyushin (Moscow, Russia) • (2013 + 2017) Markus Gabriel (Bonn University) • (2013) Andrew Newman’s ideas (University of Nebraska, at Omaha, USA) • (2016) Tahko E. Tuomas (University of Helsinki, Finland) + Tahko E. Tuomas • (2017) Jani Hakkarainen (University of Tampere, Finland) + (2017) Markku Keinänen, Antti Keskinen & Jani Hakkarainen • (2017) Dean Rickles (HPS, Univ. of Sydney) • (2017) Did Dirk K. F. Meijer and Hans J. H. Geesink (University of Groningen, Netherlands) • (2018) Jason Winning’s ideas (2018) • (2018) David Mark Kovacs (Lecturer of philosophy at Tel Aviv University) -/- July 2018 • Oreste M. Fiocco • Baptiste Le Bihan (University of Geneva, forthcoming) • Antonella Mallozzi (The Graduate Center – CUNY, forthcoming in Synthese, penultimate draft) • Erik C. Banks (Wright State University, 2014) • Sami Pihlström (2009) • Katherin Koslicki’s ideas (2008) The Structure of Objects, Oxford University Press) and my ideas (2002-2005-2006) -/- November 2018 • Maurizio Ferraris (2014/2012) Manifesto of New Realism • Graham Harman (2017) : Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Penguin Books) -/- January 2019 • Philip Ball (2018) • Gerhard Grössing • Anne Sophie Meincke (November 2018) • Baptiste Le Bihana (University of Geneva) and James Read (Oxford Univ.) • Baptiste Le Bihan (University of Geneva) • Alexander Alexandrovich Antonov (2016) (Research Center of Information Technologies “TELAN Electronics”, Kiev, Ukraine): -/- February 2019 • James Barham (2019) • Giorgio Lando (2017) • (2018) Albrecht von M¨uller • Elias Zafiris • (2019) Flaminia Giacomini, Esteban Castro-Ruiz, & Časlav • (2019) Valia Allori, OUP (2019) • (2018) Paulo De Jesus Phenom Cogn Sci • (2016) TIMOTHY MORTON, For a Logic of Future Coexistence • (2017) Andrew Cooper, Two directions for teleology: naturalism and idealism, Synthese -/- March 2019 • (2019) Massimiliano Proietti,1 Alexander Pickston,1 Francesco Graffitti,1 Peter Barrow,1 Dmytro Kundys,1 Cyril Branciard,2 Martin Ringbauer,1, 3 and Alessandro Fedrizzi1: (2019) • (2015) Cˇaslav Brukner On the quantum measurement problem, at arXiv:1507.05255v1 [quant-ph] 19 Jul 2015 • (2015) Mateus Araújo, Cyril Branciard, Fabio Costa, Adrien Feix, Christina Giarmatzi, Časlav Brukner, Witnessing causal nonseparability, • (2008 + 2013) Giulio Chiribella,∗ Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano,† and Paolo Perinotti‡ QUIT Group, Dipartimento di Fisica “A. Volta” and INFM, via Bassi 6, 27100 Pavia, Italy§ (Dated: October 22, 2018): Transforming quantum operations: quantum supermaps arXiv:0804.0180v2 [quant-ph] (22 Oct 2008) + Giulio Chiribella,1, ∗ Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano,2, † Paolo Perinotti,2, ‡ and Benoit Valiron3, § (2013), Quantum computations without definite causal structure, at • (2013) Ognyan Oreshkov1;2, Fabio Costa1, Cˇ aslav Brukner1;3, Quantum correlations with no causal order, • (2018) Marcus Schmieke, Kränzlin, 17 July 2018 These articles are in this book: Reality and its Structure - Essays in Fundamentality, Ricki Bliss and Graham Priest (2018), -/- Gabriel Oak Rabin (2018) Grounding Orthodoxy and the Layered Conception Daniel Nolan (2018) Cosmic Loops Naomi Thompson (2018) Metaphysical Interdependence, Epistemic Coherentism, and Tuomas E. Tahko (2018) Holistic Explanation Fundamentality and Ontological Minimality Matteo Morganti (2018) The Structure of Physical Reality Beyond Foundationalism Nathan Wildman (2018) On Shaky Ground? Exploring the Contingent Fundamentality Thesis -/- April 2019 (2015) M. Ringbauer1;2, B. Du_us1;2, C. Branciard1;3, E. G. Cavalcanti4, A. G. White1;2 & A. Fedrizzi: “Measurements on the reality of the wavefunction” -/- June 2019 Timothy Morton (2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013) Open Humanities Press Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 1–34 “Ian Bogost thinks objects as units”: Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008) in Timothy Morton 2013, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013) OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS (I have not read Bogost yet, but in Morton’s book, I found UNBELIEVABLE similarity between Bogost’s main ideas and my EDWs ideas!!) -/- [Obviously, there are other “specialists” that published UNBELIEVABLE similar ideas to my ideas but I have not discovered them yet…] -/- . (shrink)

What makes it the case that an utterance constitutes an illocutionary act of a given kind? This is the central question of speech-act theory. Answers to it—i.e., theories of speech acts—have proliferated. Our main goal in this chapter is to clarify the logical space into which these different theories fit. -/- We begin, in Section 1, by dividing theories of speech acts into five families, each distinguished from the others by its account of the key ingredients in illocutionary acts. Are (...) speech acts fundamentally a matter of convention or intention? Or should we instead think of them in terms of the psychological states they express, in terms of the effects that it is their function to produce, or in terms of the norms that govern them? In Section 2, we take up the highly influential idea that speech acts can be understood in terms of their effects on a conversation’s context or “score”. Part of why this idea has been so useful is that it allows speech-act theorists from the five families to engage at a level of abstraction that elides their foundational disagreements. In Section 3, we investigate some of the motivations for the traditional distinction between propositional content and illocutionary force, and some of the ways in which this distinction has been undermined by recent work. In Section 4, we survey some of the ways in which speech-act theory has been applied to issues outside semantics and pragmatics, narrowly construed. (shrink)

There has been much debate over whether to accept the claim that meaning is normative. One obstacle to making progress in that debate is that it is not always clear what the claim amounts to. In this paper, I try to resolve a dispute between those who advance the claim concerning how it should be understood. More specifically, I critically examine two competing conceptions of the normativity of meaning, rejecting one and defending the other. Though the paper aims to settle (...) a dispute among proponents of the claim that meaning is normative, it should be of interest to those who challenge it. After all, before one takes aim, one’s target needs to be in clear view. (shrink)

This paper argues for several related theses. First, the epistemological position that knowledge requires safe belief can be motivated by views in the philosophy of science, according to which good explanations show that their explananda are robust. This motivation goes via the idea—recently defended on both conceptual and empirical grounds—that knowledge attributions play a crucial role in explaining successful action. Second, motivating the safety requirement in this way creates a choice point—depending on how we understand robustness, we'll end up with (...) different conceptions of safety in epistemology. Lastly, and most controversially, there's an attractive choice at this point that will not vindicate some of the most influential applications of the safety-theoretic framework in epistemology, e.g., Williamson's arguments against the KK principle, and luminosity. (shrink)

The last two decades have seen a surge of support for normative quietism: most notably, from Dworkin, Nagel, Parfit and Scanlon. Detractors like Enoch and McPherson object that quietism is incompatible with realism about normativity. The resulting debate has stagnated somewhat. In this paper I explore and defend a more promising way of developing that objection: I’ll argue that if normative quietism is true, we can create reasons out of thin air, so normative realists must reject normative quietism.

According to a familiar (alleged) requirement on practical reason, one must believe a proposition if one is to take it for granted in reasoning about what to do. This paper explores a related requirement, not on thinking but on acting—that one must accept a goal if one is to count as acting for its sake. This is the acceptance requirement. Although it is endorsed by writers as diverse as Christine Korsgaard, Donald Davidson, and Talbot Brewer, I argue that it is (...) vulnerable to counterexamples, in which agents act in light of ends that they do not accept but are still merely considering. For instance, a young professional may keep a job option open not because she definitely wants or intends to take it, but just because she is considering taking it. I try to show that such examples are not easily resisted; that they present challenges specifically for Brewer, Davidson, and especially Korsgaard; and that the examples also raise fresh, non-partisan questions in action theory. What is considering, exactly? How could it fall short of acceptance while still guiding behaviour? How can we act for an end before thinking it through? (shrink)

Our question is this: What makes an act one of entrapment? We make a standard distinction between legal entrapment, which is carried out by parties acting in their capacities as (or as deputies of) law- enforcement agents, and civil entrapment, which is not. We aim to provide a definition of entrapment that covers both and which, for reasons we explain, does not settle questions of permissibility and culpability. We explain, compare, and contrast two existing definitions of legal entrapment to commit (...) a crime that possess this neutrality. We point out some problems with the extensional correctness of these definitions and propose a new definition that resolves these problems. We then extend our definition to provide a more general definition of entrapment, encompassing both civil and legal cases. Our definition is, we believe, closer to being extensionally correct and will, we hope, provide a clearer basis for future discussions about the ethics of entrapment than do the definitions upon which it improves. (shrink)

We argue that a certain version of pragmatic encroachment, according to which one knows that p only if one’s epistemic position with respect to p is practically adequate, has a problematic consequence: one can lose knowledge that p by getting evidence for p, and conversely, one can gain knowledge that p by getting evidence against p. We first describe this version of pragmatic encroachment, and then we defend that it has the problematic consequence. Finally, we deal with a worry that (...) the consequence we find problematic is not, in fact, problematic. (shrink)

(Recipient of the 2020 Everett Mendelsohn Prize.) This article revisits the development of the protoplasm concept as it originally arose from critiques of the cell theory, and examines how the term “protoplasm” transformed from a botanical term of art in the 1840s to the so-called “living substance” and “the physical basis of life” two decades later. I show that there were two major shifts in biological materialism that needed to occur before protoplasm theory could be elevated to have equal status (...) with cell theory in the nineteenth century. First, I argue that biologists had to accept that life could inhere in matter alone, regardless of form. Second, I argue that in the 1840s, ideas of what formless, biological matter was capable of dramatically changed: going from a “coagulation paradigm” that had existed since Theophrastus, to a more robust conception of matter that was itself capable of movement and self-maintenance. In addition to revisiting Schleiden and Schwann’s original writings on cell theory, this article looks especially closely at Hugo von Mohl’s definition of the protoplasm concept in 1846, how it differed from his primordial utricle theory of cell structure two years earlier. This article draws on Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of “ontological metaphors” to show that the cell, primordial utricle, and protoplasm can be understood as material container, object, and substance, and that these overlapping distinctions help explain the chaotic and confusing early history of cell theory. (shrink)

Kripke’s Wittgenstein is standardly understood as a non-factualist about meaning ascription. Non-factualism about meaning ascription is the idea that sentences like “Joe means addition by ‘plus’” are not used to state facts about the world. Byrne and Kusch have argued that Kripke’s Wittgenstein is not a non-factualist about meaning ascription. They are aware that their interpretation is non-standard, but cite arguments from Boghossian and Wright to support their view. Boghossian argues that non-factualism about meaning ascription is incompatible with a deflationary (...) theory of truth. Wright argues that non-factualism about meaning ascription is incoherent. To support the standard interpretation, I’ll respond to each argument in turn. To the degree that my responses are successful, Byrne and Kusch have an unmotivated interpretation of Kripke’s Wittgenstein. Wilson provides a factualist interpretation that is not based on Boghossian and Wright’s arguments. Miller argues for a non-factualist interpretation against Wilson, but I’ll show that Miller’s interpretation faces a dilemma. Miller’s argument cannot be maintained if a coherent interpretation of the skeptical solution is to be provided. I’ll show how this dilemma can be avoided and provide an independent argument against Wilson so that a non-factualist interpretation of the skeptical solution can be maintained. (shrink)

English translation of Kant's Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (Königsberg in Prussia, 30 September 1784).

Previous research in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) suggests that a main aim of explainability approaches is to satisfy specific interests, goals, expectations, needs, and demands regarding artificial systems (we call these “stakeholders' desiderata”) in a variety of contexts. However, the literature on XAI is vast, spreads out across multiple largely disconnected disciplines, and it often remains unclear how explainability approaches are supposed to achieve the goal of satisfying stakeholders' desiderata. This paper discusses the main classes of stakeholders calling for explainability (...) of artificial systems and reviews their desiderata. We provide a model that explicitly spells out the main concepts and relations necessary to consider and investigate when evaluating, adjusting, choosing, and developing explainability approaches that aim to satisfy stakeholders' desiderata. This model can serve researchers from the variety of different disciplines involved in XAI as a common ground. It emphasizes where there is interdisciplinary potential in the evaluation and the development of explainability approaches. (shrink)

Molinists hold that there are contingently true counterfactuals about what agents would do if put in specific circumstances, that God knows these prior to creation, and that God uses this knowledge in choosing how to create. In this essay we critique Molinism, arguing that if these theses were true, agents would not be free. Consider Eve’s sinning upon being tempted by a serpent. We argue that if Molinism is true, then there is some set of facts that fully explains both (...) Eve’s action and everything else Eve does that influences that action; and that if this is the case, Eve does not act freely. The first premise of this argument follows from the explanatory relations the Molinist is committed to, and the second premise follows from libertarian intuitions about free will. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 3, pp 441 - 456 Several kinds of historical alternatives are distinguished. Different kinds of historical alternatives are valuable to the practice of history for different reasons. Important uses for historical alternatives include representing different sides of historical disputes; distributing chances of different outcomes over alternatives; and offering explanations of why various alternatives did _not_ in fact happen. Consideration of counterfactuals about what would have happened had things been different in particular ways plays particularly useful (...) roles in reasoning about historical analogues of current conditions; reasoning about causal claims; and in evaluating historical explanations. When evaluating the role of alternative histories in historical thinking, we should keep in mind the uses of historical alternatives that go well beyond the long-term and specific scenarios that are the focus of so-called “counterfactual history”. (shrink)

Although thought experiments were first discovered as a sui generis methodological tool by philosophers of science (most prominently by Ernst Mach), the tool can also be found – even more frequently – in contemporary philosophy. Thought experiments in philosophy and science have a lot in common. However, in this chapter we will concentrate on thought experiments in philosophy only. Their use has been the centre of attention of metaphilosophical discussion in the past decade, and this chapter will provide an overview (...) of the results this discussion has achieved and point out which issues are still open. (shrink)

Recent debate in the literature on political obligation about the principle of fairness rests on a mistake. Despite the widespread assumption to the contrary, a person can have a duty of fairness to share in the burdens of sustaining some cooperative scheme even though that scheme does not represent a net benefit to her. Recognizing this mistake allows for a resolution of the stalemate between those who argue that the mere receipt of some public good from a scheme can generate (...) a duty of fairness and those who argue that only some voluntary action of consent or acceptance of the good can generate such a duty. I defend a version of the principle of fairness that holds that it is the person’s reliance on a scheme for the provision of some product or service that generates duties of fairness to share in the burdens of sustaining the scheme. And, on this version, the principle of fairness is politically significant: regardless of whether the citizen has a duty to obey the law, she will still have important political duties of fairness generated by her reliance on the various public goods provided by those society-wide cooperative schemes sustained by the sacrifices of her fellow citizens. (shrink)

Our lives are guided by habits. Most of the activities we engage in throughout the day are initiated and carried out not by rational thought and deliberation, but through an ingrained set of dispositions or patterns of action—what Aristotle calls a hexis. We develop these dispositions over time, by acting and gauging how the world responds. I tilt the steering wheel too far and the car’s lurch teaches me how much force is needed to steady it. I come too close (...) to a hot stove and the burn I get inclines me not to get too close again. This feedback and the habits it produces are bodily. They are possible because the medium through which these actions take place is a physical, sensible one. The world around us is, in the language of postphenomenology, an opaque one. We notice its texture and contours as we move through it, and crucially, we bump up against it from time to time. The digital world, by contrast, is largely transparent. Digital media are designed to recede from view. As a result, we experience little friction as we carry out activities online; the consequences of our actions are often not apparent to us. This distinction between the opacity of the natural world and the transparency of the digital one raises important questions. In this chapter, I ask: how does the transparency of digital media affect our ability to develop healthy habits online? If the digital world is constructed precisely not to push back against us, how are we supposed to gauge whether our actions are good or bad, for us and for others? The answer to this question has important ramifications for a number of ethical, political, and policy debates around issues in online life. For in order to advance cherished norms like privacy, civility, and fairness online, we need more than good laws and good policies—we need good habits, which dispose us to act in ways conducive to our and others’ flourishing. (shrink)

Sobel sequences have had a huge impact on the discussion of counterfactuals. They can be composed of conditionals and mere descriptions. What is especially puzzling about them is that they are often felicitously uttered when their reversal is not. Up to now, there is no unified explanation. I examine two strategies. We might begin with conditionals and proceed to descriptions. Or we might begin with descriptions and proceed to conditionals. I argue for the latter variant and outline a universal theory (...) of Sobel sequences in terms of presuppositional anaphora. One relevant result is that the phenomenon neither counts against nor in favour of the simplified standard account of counterfactuals à la Stalnaker-Lewis. (shrink)

A wide variety of ontologies relevant to the biological and medical domains are available through the OBO Foundry portal, and their number is growing rapidly. Integration of these ontologies, while requiring considerable effort, is extremely desirable. However, heterogeneities in format and style pose serious obstacles to such integration. In particular, inconsistencies in naming conventions can impair the readability and navigability of ontology class hierarchies, and hinder their alignment and integration. While other sources of diversity are tremendously complex and challenging, agreeing (...) a set of common naming conventions is an achievable goal, particularly if those conventions are based on lessons drawn from pooled practical experience and surveys of community opinion. We summarize a review of existing naming conventions and highlight certain disadvantages with respect to general applicability in the biological domain. We also present the results of a survey carried out to establish which naming conventions are currently employed by OBO Foundry ontologies and to determine what their special requirements regarding the naming of entities might be. Lastly, we propose an initial set of typographic, syntactic and semantic conventions for labelling classes in OBO Foundry ontologies. Adherence to common naming conventions is more than just a matter of aesthetics. Such conventions provide guidance to ontology creators, help developers avoid flaws and inaccuracies when editing, and especially when interlinking, ontologies. Common naming conventions will also assist consumers of ontologies to more readily understand what meanings were intended by the authors of ontologies used in annotating bodies of data. (shrink)

There are at present two ways in which to evaluate religiously-based claims to accommodation in the legal context. The first, objective approach holds that these claims should be grounded in « facts of the matter » about the religions in question. The second, subjective approach, is grounded in an appreciation by the courts of the sincerity of the claimant. The first approach has the advantage of accounting for the difference between two constitutional principles : freedom of conscience on the one (...) hand, and freedom of religion on the other. It has the disadvantage of transforming courts into expert bodies on religious matters. The subjective approach has a harder time accounting for the distinction. It also risks giving rise to a proliferation of claims. A plausible synthesis between the two approaches requires that we uncover the normative grounds justifying the granting by liberal democracies of religious accommodation. An analogous argument to that put forward by Kymlicka in the case of minority nations identifies the interest that citizens have in being able to exercise their « cultural agency » : the creative reappropriation and reinterpretation of the rituals, practices and norms of religious traditions.Il existe à l’heure actuelle dans le contexte juridique deux principales approches à l’évaluation de la légitimité des demandes d’accommodement pour des motifs religieux. La première, objective, affirme que ces demandes doivent pouvoir s’appuyer dans des faits concernant la religion en question. La seconde, subjective, s’appuie sur l’appréciation de la sincérité de la demande faite par le requérant. La première approche a l’avantage de rendre compte de la distinction entre les deux principes constitutionnels que sont, d’une part, la liberté de conscience, et de l’autre, la liberté de religion. Elle a l’inconvénient de tendre à ériger les tribunaux en « experts » sur des questions religieuses. L’approche subjective rend plus difficilement compte de la distinction entre les deux principes, et de plus risque de donner lieu à une prolifération de demandes. Pour atteindre une synthèse plausible de ces deux approches, il nous faut identifier les fondements normatifs justifiant l’intérêt que les démocraties libérales ont à reconnaître une telle catégorie d’accommodements. En prenant appui dans le célèbre argument de Kymlicka justifiant les droits de nations minoritaires, nous pouvons identifier un intérêt que ces types d’État ont à protéger les conditions permettant aux citoyens de manifester leur « agentivité culturelle », leur capacité à s’identifier en se les réappropriant et en les réinterprétant les normes, pratiques et rites issues de traditions religieuses. (shrink)

Faith in God conflicts with reason—or so we’re told. We focus on two arguments for this conclusion. After evaluating three criticisms of them, we identify an assumption they share, namely that faith in God requires belief that God exists. Whether the assumption is true depends on what faith is. We sketch a theory of faith that allows for both faith in God without belief that God exists, and faith in God while in belief-cancelling doubt God’s existence. We then argue that (...) our theory, unlike the theory of Thomas Aquinas, makes sense of four central items of faith-data: (i) pístis in the Synoptics, (ii) ʾemunāh in the Hebrew scriptures, (iii) exemplars of faith in God, including Abraham, Jesus, and Mother Teresa, and (iv) the widespread experience of people of faith today. We close by assessing revisions of the two arguments we began with, revisions that align with our theory of faith, and find them dubious, at best. (shrink)

We reply to various arguments by Otavio Bueno and Edward Zalta (‘Object Theory and Modal Meinongianism’) against Modal Meinongianism, including that it presupposes, but cannot maintain, a unique denotation for names of fictional characters, and that it is not generalizable to higher-order objects. We individuate the crucial difference between Modal Meinongianism and Object Theory in the former’s resorting to an apparatus of worlds, possible and impossible, for the representational purposes for which the latter resorts to a distinction between two kinds (...) of predication, exemplification and encoding. We show that encoding has fewer forerunners in the history of philosophy than Bueno and Zalta want, and that there’s a reason why the notion has been found baffling by some. (shrink)

The vast literature on negative treatment of outgroups and favoritism toward ingroups provides many local insights but is largely fragmented, lacking an overarching framework that might provide a unified overview and guide conceptual integration. As a result, it remains unclear where different local perspectives conflict, how they may reinforce one another, and where they leave gaps in our knowledge of the phenomena. Our aim is to start constructing a framework to help remedy this situation. We first identify a few key (...) ideas for creating a theoretical roadmap for this complex territory, namely the principles of etiological functionalism and the dual inheritance theory of human evolution. We show how a “molecular” approach to emotions fits into this picture, and use it to illuminate emotions that shape intergroup relations. Finally, we weave the pieces together into the beginnings of a systematic taxonomy of the emotions involved in social interactions, both hostile and friendly. While it is but a start, we have developed the argument in a way that illustrates how the foundational principles of our proposed framework can be extended to accommodate further cases. (shrink)

What is consciousness and why is it so philosophically and scientifically puzzling? For many years philosophers approached this question assuming a standard physicalist framework on which consciousness can be explained by contemporary physics, biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. This book is a debate between two philosophers who are united in their rejection of this kind of "standard" physicalism - but who differ sharply in what lesson to draw from this. Amy Kind defends dualism 2.0, a thoroughly modern version of dualism (...) (the theory that there are two fundamentally different kinds of things in the world: those that are physical and those that are mental) decoupled from any religious or non-scientific connotations. Daniel Stoljar defends non-standard physicalism, a kind of physicalism different from both the standard version and dualism 2.0. The book presents a cutting-edge assessment of the philosophy of consciousness and provides a glimpse at what the future study of this area might bring. (shrink)

COTENT -/- (second April 2019) Why so many people (from so many countries/domains/on so many topics) have already plagiarized my ideas? (Gabriel Vacariu) -/- Some preliminary comments Introduction: The EDWs perspective in my article from 2005 and my book from 2008 -/- I. PHYSICS, COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY (‘REBORN DINOSAURS’ ) • (2016) Did Sean Carroll’s ideas (California Institute of Technology, USA) plagiarize my ideas (2002-2010) (within the EDWs framework)? • (2016) Frank Wilczek’s ideas (Nobel Prize in Physics) (Philosophy of Mind (...) and Quantum Mechanics) • (2017-2019 - NEW March 2019) Carlo Rovelli’s ideas (Italy) in three books (2015, 2017) to my ideas (2002-2008) + commentary February 2018! • (2016) Kastner + (2017) R. E. Kastner, Stuart Kauffman, Michael Epperson • (2017) A trick: Lee Smolin’s ideas (2017) and my ideas (2002-2008) • (May 2018) ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra!’ - A fairy-tale with Eugen Ionesco and the Idiot about Nothingness -/- II. PHYSICS • (2011) Radu Ionicioiu (Physics, University of Bucharest, Romania) and Daniel R. Terno (Physics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia) • (2013) Côté B. Gilbert (Oontario, Canada) • (2015) Pikovski Igor, Zych Magdalena, Costa Fabio, and Brukner Časlav’s ideas and my ideas (2006-2008) (Quantum Mechanics) • (2015) Elisabetta Caffau’s ideas (Center for Astronomy at the University of Heidelberg and the Paris Observatory) and my ideas (2011, 2014) • (2015) Did Wolfram Schommers (University of Texas at Arlington, USA & Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany) (Physics) • (2015) "Dark Matter May be 'Another Dimension' - Or Even a Major Galactic Transport System" January 22, 2015 • (2016) Dylan H. Mahler, Lee Rozema, Kent Fisher, Lydia Vermeyden, Kevin J. Resch, Howard M. Wiseman, and Aephraim Steinberg’s ideas (USA) • (2016) Bill Poirier’s ‘Many Interacting Worlds’ (Quantum Mechanics) • (2016 or Adam Frank’s ideas (University of Rochester in New York , USA) • (2017, 2017) Did Sebastian de Haro (HPS, Cambridge, UK) plagiarize my ideas (2002-2008) • (2017) Laura Condiotto’s ideas and my ideas (2002-2008) • (2016) Hugo F. Alrøe and Egon Noe’s (Department of Agroecology, Aarhus University, Denmark) ideas (USA) • (2017) Federico Zalamea’s ideas and my ideas • (2018) Peter J. Lewis’s ideas (2018) and my ideas (2002-2008) • (2018) Timothy Hollowood, ‘Classical from Quantum’, [arXiv:1803.04700v1 [quant-ph] 13 March 2018] • (2018) Mario Hubert and Davide Romano, ‘The Wave-Function as a Multi-Field’ -/- III. COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF MIND • (2011-2014) Did Georg Northoff (Psychoanalysis, Institute of Mental Health) plagiarize my ideas (2002-2008)? • (2011) Kalina Diego Cosmelli, Legrand Dorothée and Thompson Evan’s ideas (USA) and my ideas (Cognitive Neuroscience) • (2015) Did David Ludwig (Philosophy, University of Amsterdam) plagiarize many of my ideas? (Philosophy (of Mind) • (2016) Neil D. Theise (Department of Pathology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, USA) and Kafatos C. Menas (Department of Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, USA) • David Bourget (2018) (Director, Centre for Digital Philosophy, Western University (or University of Western Ontario) + Chalmers • (2016) Dan Siegel’s ideas (Mindsight Institute, USA) -/- IV. Philosophy (of science) • (2010) Alexey Alyushin (Moscow, Russia) • (2013 + 2017) Did Markus Gabriel (Bonn University) • (2013) Andrew Newman’s ideas (University of Nebraska, at Omaha, USA) • (2016) Did Tahko E. Tuomas (University of Helsinki, Finland) plagiarize my ideas? + Tahko E. Tuomas (‘The Epistemology of Essence’) • (2017) Jani Hakkarainen (University of Tampere, Finland) + (2017) Markku Keinänen, Antti Keskinen & Jani Hakkarainen • (2017) Dean Rickles’s ideas (HPS, Univ. of Sydney) • (2017) Did Dirk K. F. Meijer and Hans J. H. Geesink (University of Groningen, Netherlands • (2018) Jason Winning’s ideas (2018) • (2018) David Mark Kovacs (Lecturer of philosophy at Tel Aviv University) -/- Conclusion Bibliography -/- July 2018 • Oreste M. Fiocco • Baptiste Le Bihan (University of Geneva, forthcoming) • Antonella Mallozzi (The Graduate Center – CUNY, forthcoming in Synthese, penultimate draft) • Erik C. Banks (Wright State University, 2014) • Sami Pihlström (2009) • Katherin Koslicki’s ideas (2008) -/- November 2018 • Maurizio Ferraris (2014/2012) Manifesto of New Realism • Graham Harman (2017) : Object-Oriented Ontology: -/- January 2019 • Philip Ball (2018): “Why everything you thought you knew about quantum physics is different” • Gerhard Grössing “Vacuum landscaping: cause of nonlocal influences without signaling” • Anne Sophie Meincke (November 2018) The Disappearance of Change (IJPS) • Baptiste Le Bihana (University of Geneva) and James Read (Oxford Univ.) “Duality and Ontology” • Baptiste Le Bihan (University of Geneva): “Space Emergence in Contemporary Physics: • Alexander Alexandrovich Antonov (2016) -/- February 2019 • James Barham (2019): “The Reality of Purpose and the Reform of Naturalism” • Giorgio Lando (2017) Mereology - A Philosophical Introduction, Bloomsbury Academic • (2018) Albrecht von M¨uller • Elias Zafiris, Concept and Formalization of Constellatory Self-Unfolding • (2019) Flaminia Giacomini, Esteban Castro-Ruiz, & Časlav Brukner • (2019) Valia Allori, “Scientific Realism without the Wave-Function: An Example of Naturalized Quantum Metaphysics” • (2018) Paulo De Jesus “Thinking through enactive agency: • (2016) TIMOTHY MORTON, For a Logic of Future Coexistence, (Columbia University Press) • (2017) Andrew Cooper, Two directions for teleology: -/- March 2019 • (2019) Massimiliano Proietti,1 Alexander Pickston,1 Francesco Graffitti,1 Peter Barrow,1 Dmytro Kundys,1 Cyril Branciard,2 Martin Ringbauer,1, 3 and Alessandro Fedrizzi1: (2019) “Experimental rejection of observer-independence in the quantum world” • (2015) Cˇaslav Brukner On the quantum measurement problem, • (2015) Mateus Araújo, Cyril Branciard, Fabio Costa, Adrien Feix, Christina Giarmatzi, Časlav Brukner, Witnessing causal nonseparability, • (2008 + 2013) Giulio Chiribella,∗ Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano,† and Paolo Perinotti‡ QUIT Group, Dipartimento di Fisica “A. Volta” and INFM, via Bassi 6, 27100 Pavia, Italy§ (Dated: October 22, 2018): Transforming quantum operations: quantum supermaps (22 Oct 2008) + Giulio Chiribella,1, ∗ Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano,2, † Paolo Perinotti,2, ‡ and Benoit Valiron3, § (2013), Quantum computations without definite causal structure, • (2013) Ognyan Oreshkov1;2, Fabio Costa1, Cˇ aslav Brukner1;3, Quantum correlations • (2018) Marcus Schmieke, Kränzlin, 17 July 2018, “Orthogonal Complementarity -/- April 2019 These articles are in this book: Reality and its Structure - Essays in Fundamentality, Ricki Bliss and Graham Priest (2018), Oxford Univ Press -/- Gabriel Oak Rabin (2018) Grounding Orthodoxy and the Layered Conception Daniel Nolan (2018) Cosmic Loops Naomi Thompson (2018) Metaphysical Interdependence, Epistemic Coherentism, and Tuomas E. Tahko (2018) Holistic Explanation Fundamentality and Ontological Minimality Matteo Morganti (2018) The Structure of Physical Reality Beyond Foundationalism Nathan Wildman (2018) On Shaky Ground? Exploring the Contingent Fundamentality Thesis -/- (2015) M. Ringbauer, B. Duffus, C. Branciard1;3, E. G. Cavalcanti4, A. G. White1;2 & A. Fedrizzi: “Measurements on the reality of the wavefunction” . (shrink)

In this paper, I will compare Kant’s and Kierkegaard’s reflections on faith as they are articulated in the particular analyses of Abraham’s sacrifice. Kant’s prosecution of Abraham, which commences from the idea of “natural religion”, rests on two interrelated lines of attack, an epistemological one and ethical one, which deem Abraham’s action to be morally reprehensible. For Kant, the primacy of the practical reason leaves no special room for divine duties that are not ethical at the same time. On the (...) other hand, Kierkegaard’s defence of the sacrifice is orbiting around the possibility of a teleological suspension of the ethical. If such a suspension is possible, then faith is a paradox according to which the single individual is higher than the universal. As such, an absolute duty to god is possible, but such a duty is not rationally justifiable or publicly communicable. My paper ends with to some considerations about the protestant inheritance of both, Kant and Kierkegaard. (shrink)

Abstract. I outline the standard picture of fiction. According to this picture, fiction is centred on making believe some truth-apt content. I take a closer look at everyday usage of the expressions ‘according to the fiction’ and ‘in the fiction’ to countervail the streamlining tendencies that come with the standard picture. Having outlined highly variegated use patterns, I argue for a metaexpressivist picture: ‘according to the fiction’ does not primarily report fictional truth but a complex pattern of reactions the fiction (...) seems intended to elicit. In the corresponding expressivist picture of the act of fiction-making, the latter is not primarily modeled on stating and believing truth but on the variegated pattern of intended reactions. (shrink)

This is a pdf of a Mathematica calculation that supplements the paper "Presentist Fragmentalism and Quantum Mechanics" forthcoming in Foundations of Physics. In that paper the Born rule (or at least a progenitor) is derived from experimental conditions on the mutual observations of two fragments. In this pdf the experimental conditions are applied to Hilbert space dimensions 3, 4, and 5. It turns out each of these have a 1-dimensional solution space which, it is hoped, can be interpretated as the (...) phase. (shrink)

The strategy of this paper is twofold: First, we carry out a systematic investigation of the question of what specific kind of meaning quotation marks contribute to the overall meaning of an utterance. We consider the following kinds of meaning: literal meaning (§ 2.1), conventional implicature (§ 2.2), presupposition (§ 2.3), and conversational implicature (§ 2.4). We present arguments in favor of a pragmatic analysis of quotation marks, claiming that the notion of conversational implicature seems to be the most promising (...) alternative: All general features of this kind of meaning are met by quotational constructions. Nonetheless, an approach based on conversational implicatures faces some problems when taking direct and pure quotations into account, namely effects on truth-conditions and, allegedly, on grammaticality. Thus, our second aim is to propose acceptable solutions to these criticisms in § 3. Finally, in § 4, we consider how a radical pragmatic account of quotation could be integrated into a Neo-Gricean architecture of the semantics/pragmatics-interface. (shrink)

The paper deals with the theory of universals of Sebastian Izquierdo (1601–1681), a Spanish Jesuit author working in Rome, as he formulated and defended it in Disputation 17 of his major philosophical work The Lighthouse of Sciences (Pharus scientiarum), published in Lyon in 1659. Izquierdo’s discussion centers around three questions: What is universality? Is there some intellect-independent universality? What is the nature of the intellect-dependent universality? Izquierdo’s approach may be seen as a search for the third way between the (moderate) (...) realism of the Thomists and the Scotists and the (conceptualist) nominalism of some Jesuits such as Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza (1578–1641). (shrink)

It is widely agreed that hypocrisy can undermine one’s moral standing to blame. According to the Nonhypocrisy Condition on standing, R has the standing to blame some other agent S for a violation of some norm N only if R is not hypocritical with respect to blame for violations of N. Yet this condition is seldom argued for. Macalester Bell points out that the fact that hypocrisy is a moral fault does not yet explain why hypocritical blame is standingless blame. (...) She raises a challenge: one must explain what is distinct about hypocritical blame such that the hypocritical blamer lacks the standing to blame, even if the arrogant or petty blamer does not. Of those writing on hypocrisy, only we offer a direct response to Bell’s challenge. Recently, however, our account has come under criticism. We argue here that (1) our account can handle these criticisms and that (2) no other rival account adequately addresses Bell’s challenge of explaining what is uniquely objectionable about hypocritical blame. Because answering Bell’s challenge is a necessary component of any plausible account of the relationship between hypocrisy and standing, our account remains the best on offer. (shrink)

Does a political conception of human rights dictate a particular view of corporate human rights obligations? The U.N. “Protect, Respect, and Remedy” Framework and Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights hold that corporations have only a responsibility to respect human rights. Some critics have argued that corporations should be responsible for a wider range of human rights obligations, beyond merely an obligation to respect such rights. Furthermore, it has been argued that the Framework relied on a political conception of (...) human rights, and this is what led to limiting corporate obligations to mere respect for human rights. In this paper, I explore and critically assess this general claim about political conceptions of human rights. This involves distinguishing different types of political conceptions of human rights, as well as specifying what makes a theory of human rights a “political conception.” In light of this clarificatory discussion, I argue that the general thesis is false; the mere fact that a theory offers a political conception of human rights does not necessarily entail any certain range of corporate human rights obligations. Finally, I identify some of the other aspects of a theory of human rights that do affect the range of corporate obligations it will prescribe. (shrink)

The article examines Greek philosopher Aristotle's understanding of mathematical numbers as pluralities of discreet units and the relations of unity and multiplicity. Topics discussed include Aristotle's view that a mathematical number has determinate properties, a contrast between Aristotle and French philosopher René Descartes in terms of their understanding of number and Aristotle's description of ways to understand eidetic numbers.

Although the differences between Spinoza and Nietzsche are crucial, there are several aspects on which one can trace a relevant set of similarities between the two authors. The refutation of teleology, transcendence and free will, together with the consequent embracement of fatality, the pursuit of joy, and the particular emphasis on affectivity are just a few of the resemblances that can be drawn between Spinoza and Nietzsche. This paper is focused only on the last aspect mentioned above. Both Spinoza and (...) Nietzsche developed an account of immanent pursuit of joy, which can be derived from a particular understanding of affects. The two philosophers tried to create a peculiar bridge between knowledge and affectivity, which meant a significant departure from their previous philosophical tradition, and which gave them an idiosyncratic place in the entire picture of modern thought. (shrink)

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was one of the main exponents of evolutionary thinking in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. He gave that kind of thinking an unprecedented metaphysical turn. In consequence of his versatility he also encountered the notion of truth-making, which he connected with his ever-present concerns about time and duration. Eager to stress the dimension of radical change and of novelty in the nature of things, he rejected (in one form) what he called “the retrograde movement of (...) the true” while championing it – with undeniable delight in the air of paradox – in a derivative form. In the paper I explain what “the retrograde movement of the true” consists in – in its two forms. (shrink)

This paper seeks to provide an overview of some of the main areas of debate that have emerged in recent years at the interface between theories of justice and health care. First, the paper consi- ders various positions as to what the index of justice with respect to health ought to be. It warns on practical and principled grounds against conceptual inflation of the notion of "health" as it appears in theories of distributive justice. Second, it considers how various standards (...) according to which goods ought to be distributed in a just society apply to debates within health care. (shrink)

(Original French text followed by English version.) For Berkeley, mathematical and scientific issues and concepts are always conditioned by epistemological, metaphysical, and theological considerations. For Berkeley to think of any thing--whether it be a geometrical figure or a visible or tangible object--is to think of it in terms of how its limits make it intelligible. Especially in De Motu, he highlights the ways in which limit concepts (e.g., cause) mark the boundaries of science, metaphysics, theology, and morality.

This book is conceived as an introductory text into the theory of syntactic and semantic information, and information flow.

After a general remark about Armstrong’s conception of ontology, I raise objections against this view and defend an alternative account of the connection between particulars and their properties, involving a kind of ontological dependence which is different from Armstrong’s necessary connection between particulars and their properties.