An overview of hyperintensionality is provided. Hyperintensional languages have expressions with meanings that are more fine-grained than necessary equivalence. That is, the expressions may necessarily co-apply and yet be distinct in meaning. Adequately accounting for theories cast in hyperintensional languages is important in the philosophy of language; the philosophy of mind; metaphysics; and elsewhere. This entry presents a number of areas in which hyperintensionality is important; a range of approaches to theorising about hyperintensional matters; and a range of debates that (...) attention to hyperintensional constructions has generated. (shrink)

I investigate when we can (rationally) have attitudes, and when we cannot. I argue that a comprehensive theory must explain three phenomena. First, being related by descriptions or names to a proposition one has strong reason to believe is true does not guarantee that one can rationally believe that proposition. Second, such descriptions, etc. do enable individuals to rationally have various non-doxastic attitudes, such as hope and admiration. And third, even for non-doxastic attitudes like that, not just any description will (...) allow it. I argue that we should think of attitude formation like we do (practical) choices among options. I motivate this view linguistically, extending "relevant alternatives'' theories of the attitudes to both belief and to the other, non-doxastic attitudes. Given a natural principle governing choice, and some important differences between doxastic and non-doxastic "choices'', we can explain these puzzling phenomena. (shrink)

I make a proposal about what wondering is and how it differs from other mental phenomena like curiosity. I argue that, though it's tempting to analyze wondering as a desire to know the answer to the question one wonders about, that would be wrong, since wondering is an activity rather than a state, i.e., something we do. I also argue that wondering about a question needn't even essentially involve a desire to know the answer to that question, even as a (...) necessary part of what rationalizes the wondering. Instead, on my account, to wonder about a question is to consider various possible answers as possible answers, guided by mechanisms whose function is to make the subject epistemically better off with respect to those answers, and which considering ceases at least when a person is consciously certain of the answer to their question. This allows wondering to not be objectionably metacognitive, and allows us to make sense of cases in which the motivating desire isn't to know an answer but just to wonder itself. (shrink)

How do we acquire moral obligations to others? The most straightforward cases are those where we acquire obligations as the result of particular actions which we voluntarily perform. If I promise you that I will trim your hedge, I face a moral Obligation to uphold my promise, and in the absence of some morally significant countervailing reason, I should indeed cut your hedge. Moral obligations which arise as a result of wrongdoing, as a function of corrective justice, are typically thought (...) to be of a similar nature. (shrink)

Alasia Nuti’s recent book Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress puts forward a compelling vision of contemporary duties to redress past wrongdoing, grounded in the idea of “historical-structural-injustice”, constituted by the “structural reproduction of an unjust history over time and through changes”. Such an approach promises to transcend the familiar scholarly divide between “backward-looking” and “forward-looking” models, and allow for a reparative approach that focuses specifically on those past wrongs that impact the present, while retaining (...) a significant focus on the historical. While Nuti’s work is perhaps the most sophisticated treatment of structural injustice to date, this paper argues that an exclusive concentration on historical-structural-injustices neglects some aspects and some acts of wrongdoing that call out for present-day redress. What is needed, therefore, is a pluralist theory that can accept the pressing force in the present of historical-structural-injustices, whilst also making room for past-regarding duties that either do not fit, or are not best conceptualized in terms of, this approach, without being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of historic injustice. (shrink)

We defend a functionalist approach to emotion that begins by focusing on emotions as central states with causal connections to behavior and to other cognitive states. The approach brackets the conscious experience of emotion, lists plausible features that emotions exhibit, and argues that alternative schemes are unpromising candidates. We conclude with the benefits of our approach: one can study emotions in animals; one can look in the brain for the implementation of specific features; and one ends up with an architecture (...) of the mind in which emotions are fully accommodated through their relations to the rest of cognition. Our article focuses on arguing for this general approach; as such, it is an essay in the philosophy of emotion rather than in the psychology or neuroscience of emotion. (shrink)

I develop and argue for a kind of externalism about certain kinds of non-doxastic attitudes that I call policy externalism. Policy externalism about a given type of attitude is the view that all the reasonable policies for having attitudes of that type will not involve the agent's beliefs that some relevant conditions obtain. My defense primarily involves attitudes like hatred, regret, and admiration, and has two parts: a direct deductive argument and an indirect linguistic argument, an inference to the best (...) explanation of some strange ways we use certain conditionals. The main thought throughout is that attitudes we reason with, like belief, are very different from attitudes we don't reason with, in a way that constrains the former but not the latter. Finally, I investigate some consequences of policy externalism, including that it secures the possibility of genuine conditional apologies. (shrink)

Teleology has a complicated history in the biological sciences. Some have argued that Darwin’s theory has allowed biology to purge itself of teleological explanations. Others have been content to retain teleology and to treat it as metaphorical, or have sought to replace it with less problematic notions like teleonomy. And still others have tried to naturalize it in a way that distances it from the vitalism of the nineteenth century, focusing on the role that function plays in teleological explanation. No (...) consensus has seemed possible in this debate. This paper takes a different approach. It argues that teleology is a perfectly acceptable scientific notion, but that the debate took an unfortunate misstep some 2300 years ago, one that has confused things ever since. The misstep comes in the beginning of Aristotle’s Physics when a distinction is made between two types of teleological explanation. One type pertains to artifacts while the other pertains to entities in nature. For Aristotle, artifacts are guided by something external to themselves, human intentions, while natural entities are guided by an internal nature. We aim to show that there is, in fact, only one type of legitimate teleological explanation, what Aristotle would have considered a variant of an artifact model, where entities are guided by external fields. We begin with an analysis of the differences between the two types of explanation. We then examine some evidence in Aristotle’s biological works suggesting that on account of his natural-artifactual distinction, he encountered difficulties in trying to provide teleological accounts of spontaneous generation. And we show that it is possible to resolve these difficulties with a more robust version of an artifact model of teleology, in other words, with an externalist teleology. This is McShea’s model, in which goal-directed entities are guided by a nested series of upper-level fields. To explain teleological behavior, this account invokes only external physical forces rather than mysterious internal natures. We then consider how field theory differs from other efforts to naturalize teleology in biology. And finally, we show how the account enables us to grapple with certain difficult cases – genes and intentions – where, even in biology today, the temptation to posit internal natures remains strong. (shrink)

I consider difficult data involving the interaction of attitudes and conditionals, specifically non-doxastic attitude expressions like 'regret'. I first show that felicitous attitude conditionals in "ignorance contexts", where the relevant person doesn't know the antecedent is true, give rise to a number of difficult problems given widely held assumptions in semantics. I then argue that, even so, we should expect these conditionals to be true and reasonable to utter in ignorance contexts, given certain other kinds of attitude construction that tend (...) to involve free relatives like `whatever'. I then use that observation to explain many of the more puzzling aspects of these conditionals, and to show that we should treat felicitous doxastic attitude conditionals differently from felicitous non-doxastic ones. I leave explaining felicitous doxastic attitude conditionals for future work, but offer constraints on a satisfying explanation of them. (shrink)

Despite their popularity, relatively scant attention has been paid to the upshot of Bayesian and predictive processing models of cognition for views of overall cognitive architecture. Many of these models are hierarchical ; they posit generative models at multiple distinct "levels," whose job is to predict the consequences of sensory input at lower levels. I articulate one possible position that could be implied by these models, namely, that there is a continuous hierarchy of perception, cognition, and action control comprising levels (...) of generative models. I argue that this view is not entailed by a general Bayesian/predictive processing outlook. Bayesian approaches are compatible with distinct formats of mental representation. Focusing on Bayesian approaches to motor control, I argue that the junctures between different types of mental representation are places where the transitivity of hierarchical prediction may be broken, and I consider the upshot of this conclusion for broader discussions of cognitive architecture. (shrink)

The notion of representation in neuroscience has largely been predicated on localizing the components of computational processes that explain cognitive function. On this view, which I call “algorithmic homuncularism,” individual, spatially and temporally distinct parts of the brain serve as vehicles for distinct contents, and the causal relationships between them implement the transformations specified by an algorithm. This view has a widespread influence in philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, and has recently been ably articulated and defended by Shea. Still, I am (...) skeptical about algorithmic homuncularism, and I argue against it by focusing on recent methods for complex data analysis in systems neuroscience. I claim that analyses such as principle components analysis and linear discriminant analysis prevent individuating vehicles as algorithmic homuncularism recommends. Rather, each individual part contributes to a global state space, trajectories of which vary with important task parameters. I argue that, while homuncularism is false, this view still supports a kind of “vehicle realism,” and I apply this view to debates about the explanatory role of representation. (shrink)

Our approach to emotion emphasized three key ingredients. We do not yet have a mature science of emotion, or even a consensus view—in this respect we are more hesitant than Sander, Grandjean, and Scherer or Luiz Pessoa. Relatedly, a science of emotion needs to be highly interdisciplinary, including ecology, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. We recommend a functionalist view that brackets conscious experiences and that essentially treats emotions as latent variables inferred from a number of measures. But our version of functionalism (...) is not definitional or ontological. It is resolutely methodological, in good part because it is too early to attempt definitions. (shrink)

We argue that supererogation cannot be understood just in terms of reasons for action. In addition to reasons, a theory of supererogation must include prerogatives, which can make an action permissible without counting in favor of doing it.

Some Presentists—according to whom everything is present—identify instants of time with propositions of a certain kind. However, the view that times are propositions seems to be at odds with Presentism: if there are times then there are past times, and therefore things that are past; but how could there be things that are past if everything is present? In this paper, we describe the Presentist view that times are propositions ; we set out the argument that Presentism is incompatible with (...) the view that times are propositions ; and then we describe three possible responses to that argument on behalf of Presentists who identify times with propositions. We argue that each of these responses comes with significant costs. Finally, we describe a fourth possible response—according to which times are irreducibly higher-order entities—which appears to avoid the costs of the other three. We also describe and respond to two objections to the higher-order strategy. (shrink)

It has been suggested that intuitions supporting the nonvacuity of counterpossibles can be explained by distinguishing an epistemic and a metaphysical reading of counterfactuals. Such an explanation must answer why we tend to neglect the distinction of the two readings. By way of an answer, I offer a generalized pattern for explaining nonvacuity intuitions by a stand-and-fall relationship to certain indicative conditionals. Then, I present reasons for doubting the proposal: nonvacuists can use the epistemic reading to turn the table against (...) vacuists, telling apart significant from spurious intuitions. Moreover, our intuitions tend to survive even if we clear-headedly intend a metaphysical reading. -/- . (shrink)

While those who take a "structuralist" approach to racial justice issues are right to call attention to the importance of social practices, laws, etc., they sometimes go too far by suggesting that antiracist efforts ought to focus on changing unjust social systems rather than changing individuals’ minds. We argue that while the “either/or” thinking implied by this framing is intuitive and pervasive, it is misleading and self-undermining. We instead advocate for a “both/and” approach to antiracist moral education that explicitly teaches (...) how social structures influence ideas about race and how ideas about race shape, sustain, and transform social structures. Ideally, antiracist moral education will help people see how social change and moral progress depend on the symbiotic relations between individuals and structures. We articulate a conception of “structure-facing virtue” that exemplifies this hybrid approach to illuminate the pivotal role moral education plays in the fight for racial justice. (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)

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)

This paper examines the explanatory distinctness of wiring optimization models in neuroscience. Wiring optimization models aim to represent the organizational features of neural and brain systems as optimal (or near-optimal) solutions to wiring optimization problems. My claim is that that wiring optimization models provide design explanations. In particular, they support ideal interventions on the decision variables of the relevant design problem and assess the impact of such interventions on the viability of the target system.

This paper examines both creepiness and the distinctive reaction had to creepiness, being “creeped out.” The paper defends a response-dependent account of creepiness in terms of this distinctive reaction, contrasting our preferred account to others that might be offered. The paper concludes with a discussion of the value of detecting creepiness.

Recently, Piccinini and Craver have stated three theses concerning the relations between functional analysis and mechanistic explanation in cognitive sciences: No Distinctness: functional analysis and mechanistic explanation are explanations of the same kind; Integration: functional analysis is a kind of mechanistic explanation; and Subordination: functional analyses are unsatisfactory sketches of mechanisms. In this paper, I argue, first, that functional analysis and mechanistic explanations are sub-kinds of explanation by scientific (idealized) models. From that point of view, we must take into account (...) the tradeoff between the representational/explanatory goals of generality and precision that govern the practice of model-building. In some modeling scenarios, it is rational to maximize explanatory generality at the expense of mechanistic precision. This tradeoff allows me to put forward a problem for the mechanist position. If mechanistic modeling endorses generality as a valuable goal, then Subordination should be rejected. If mechanists reject generality as a goal, then Integration is false. I suggest that mechanists should accept that functional analysis can offer acceptable explanations of cognitive phenomena. (shrink)

Recent work on the evidential argument from evil offers us sundry considerations which are intended to weigh against this form of atheological arguments. By far the most provocative is that on a priori grounds alone, evil can be shown to be evidentially impotent. This astonishing thesis has been given a vigorous defense by Keith Yandell. In this paper, we shall measure the prospects for an a priori dismissal of evidential arguments from evil.

Springer. We find in contemporary culture starkly contrasting estimates of the value of faith. On the one hand, for many people, faith is a virtue or positive human value, something associated with understanding, hope, and love, something to be inculcated, maintained, and cherished. On the other hand, for many people, faith is a vice, something associated with dogmatism, arrogance, and close-mindedness, something to be avoided at all costs. The papers included in this special (double) issue on approaches to faith explore (...) questions about faith in a variety of settings through a diverse range of examples, both secular and religious. The attempt to deepen our understanding of faith in the context of ordinary human relationships (e.g., between parents and children, friends, generals and their armies, business partners, citizens and the state), a commitment to ideals, or the pursuit of significant goals is clearly of general philosophical interest, as is the examination of potential connections between faith and topics such as trust or reliance. (shrink)

It is a truism to say that we live in a world that has been deeply shaped by imperialism. The history of humanity is, in many ways, a story of the attempted and achieved subjugation of one people by another, and it is unsurprising that such interaction has had profound effects on the contemporary world, affecting cultural understandings of community identity; the composition of, and boundaries between, modern day states; and the distribution of resources between different communities. This chapter addresses (...) the claim that some contemporary states may possess obligations to pay reparations as a result of the lasting effects of a particular form of historic imperialism: colonialism. Claims about the harms and benefits caused by colonialism must make some kind of comparison between the world as it currently is, and a counterfactual state where the injustice which characterised so much of historic interaction between colonisers and the colonised did not occur. Rather than imagining a world where there was no such interaction, this chapter maintains that the appropriate counterfactual is one where relations between different communities were characterized by an absence of domination and exploitation. This means that current day states may possess reparative duties which are much more extensive than is often supposed. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the framework for the compositional relations of properties in the sciences, or "realization relations", offered by Ken Aizawa and Carl Gillett (A&G) in a series of papers, and in particular on the analysis of "multiple realizations" they build upon it. I argue that A&G's analysis of multiple realization requires an account of levels and I try to show, then, that the A&G framework is not successful under any of the extant accounts of levels. There is consequently (...) a real concern tha thte A&G framework for realization may not be viable. (shrink)

Basic Emotion Theory, or BET, has dominated the affective sciences for decades (Ekman, 1972, 1992, 1999; Ekman and Davidson, 1994; Griffiths, 2013; Scarantino and Griffiths, 2011). It has been highly influential, driving a number of empirical lines of research (e.g., in the context of facial expression detection, neuroimaging studies and evolutionary psychology). Nevertheless, BET has been criticized by philosophers, leading to calls for it to be jettisoned entirely (Colombetti, 2014; Hufendiek, 2016). This paper defuses those criticisms. In addition, it shows (...) that we have good reason to retain BET. Finally, it reviews and puts to rest worries that BET’s commitment to affect programs renders it outmoded. We propose that, with minor adjustments, BET can avoid such criticisms when conceived under a radically enactive account of emotions. Thus, rather than leaving BET behind, we show how its basic ideas can be revised, refashioned and preserved. Hence, we conclude, our new BET is still a good bet. (shrink)

Andy Egan has presented a dilemma for decision theory. As is well known, Newcomb cases appear to undermine the case for evidential decision theory. However, Egan has come up with a new scenario which poses difficulties for causal decision theory. I offer a simple solution to this dilemma in terms of a modified EDT. I propose an epistemological test: take some feature which is relevant to your evaluation of the scenarios under consideration, evidentially correlated with the actions under consideration albeit, (...) causally independent of them. Hold this feature fixed as a hypothesis. The test shows that, in Newcomb cases, EDT would mislead the agent. Where the test shows EDT to be misleading, I propose to use fictive conditional credences in the EDT-formula under the constraint that they are set to equal values. I then discuss Huw Price’s defence of EDT as an alternative to my diagnosis. I argue that my solution also applies if one accepts the main premisses of Price’s argument. I close with applying my solution to Nozick’s original Newcomb problem. (shrink)

The scale and character of past injustice can seem overwhelming. Grievous wrongdoing characterizes so much of human history, both within and between different political communities. This raises a familiar question of reparative justice: what is owed in the present as a result of the unjust actions of the past? This article asks what should be done in situations where contemporary debts stemming from past injustice are massive in scale, and seemingly call for nonideal resolution or settlement. Drawing on recent work (...) by Sara Amighetti and Alasia Nuti on deliberative reparative processes, the article differentiates between two different approaches to settling claims for reparation. The first pursues settlement in a legal or quasi legal sense, seeking to close a matter through discussion, compromise, and bargaining in such a way as to maximize one’s interest while drawing a line under the events in question. The second is grounded not in one’s own interest but in an acknowledgement of the inevitable inadequacy of one’s reparative response. Such an approach to settlement centres the agency of the individuals and groups harmed by past wrongdoing. The article examines the reparations issue with reference to a range of recent cases of alleged settlement, including claims for reparation for torture by the British army in Kenya in the 1950s, for sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army in East Asia in the Second World War, and for genocide by German colonial forces between 1904 and 1908. (shrink)

The traditional approach to explanation in cognitive neuroscience is realist about psychological constructs, and treats them as explanatory. On the “standard framework,” cognitive neuroscientists explain behavior as the result of the instantiation of psychological functions in brain activity. This strategy is questioned by results suggesting the distribution of function in the brain, the multifunctionality of individual parts of the brain, and the overlap in neural realization of purportedly distinct psychological constructs. One response to this in the field has been to (...) employ the tools of databasing and machine learning to attempt to find and quantify specific correlations between psychological kinds such as ‘memory’ or ‘attention’ (or sub-kinds thereof) and patterns of activity in the brain. I assess the status and prospects of these projects. I argue that current proponents of the project are vague about their aims, vis-à-vis the standard framework, sometimes suggesting substantiation of the framework, sometimes suggesting retaining the framework but revising the ontology of mental constructs, and sometimes suggesting abandonment of the framework. I argue that extant results from within the projects fail to substantiate the standard framework, and propose an alternative. On my view, psychological constructs should not be viewed as explanantia, but instead as heuristic concepts that help us uncover ways that behaviors can vary and the ways that the brain implements those distinctions. I then discuss the normative upshot of these views for databasing and brain mapping projects. (shrink)

I outline Hume’s views about conceivability evidence. Then I critically scrutinize two threats to conceivability-based modal epistemology. Both arise from Hume’s criticism of claims to knowing necessary causal relationships: Firstly, a sceptical stance towards causal necessity may carry over to necessity claims in general. Secondly, since – according to a sceptical realist reading – Hume grants the eventuality of causal powers grounded in essential features of objects, conceivability-based claims to comprehensive metaphysical possibilities seem endangered. I argue that although normal conceivability-based (...) claims are defeasible, they are prima facie vindicated. (shrink)

Against modal rationalism, Manolo Martínez argues that elementary bodily mechanisms allow cognizers to know possibility. He presents an exemplary behavioral mechanism adapted to maximizing expected outcome in a random game. The bodily mechanism purportedly tracks probabilities and related possibilities. However, it is doubtful that cognizers like us can know metaphysical modalities purely by virtue of bodily mechanisms without using rational capacities. Firstly, Martínez’s mechanism is limited. But knowledge of probabilities arguably has to cover a variety of probabilistic outcomes. One may (...) need an ability to calculate probabilities. Bodily mechanisms can realize such an ability, but this will presumably amount to instantiating rational capacities. Secondly, the purported connection between the items tracked by the bodily mechanism and genuine metaphysical possibilities is tenuous. There are points at which it may fail. Further, we would need to know by rational metaphysical considerations that the connection holds in order to bodily know possibilities. (shrink)

In recent decades, environmental rights have been increasingly developed at both the national and international level, along with increased adjudication of these rights in both national (constitutional) courts and international human rights courts. These parallel trends raise a question as to whether it is better to develop and adjudicate environmental rights at the national or international level. This article considers the case made by James May and Erin Daly in favor of developing environmental rights at the national constitutional level and (...) adjudicating these rights in domestic courts. I consider the limitations of this case by showing that international environmental human rights can play a role that systematically benefits environmental protection, with adjudication in international human rights courts a key part of that process. This involves drawing on an argument offered by Allen Buchanan to justify a system of international legal human rights, which appeals to a number of benefits that such a system can provide. The argument is developed and applied to adjudication of environmental human rights in international human rights courts. First, it is shown how these benefits are realized in the area of environmental human rights. Second, it is shown how adjudication can enhance these benefits, both by providing a mechanism for their realization and by facilitating a mutually supportive relationship among them. On the basis of these enhanced benefits and the value that they add, it is concluded that there is strong justification for developing and adjudicating environmental human rights at the international level. (shrink)

The aftermath of war is always messy and complicated. When should objects or resources that were unjustly taken in wartime be returned to the victims of misappropriation, or their heirs? This article advances two arguments that are intended to buttress claims for the restitution of property in general, and particularly claims advanced by the heirs of the original victims of misappropriation.

En este trabajo sostengo que la concepción mecanicista no captura la relevancia explicativa de la ley de polarización dinámica de Cajal. La relevancia explicativa de la ley se fundamenta en su rol como principio de diseño neuronal. Como tal, la ley nos brinda acceso epistémico a intervenciones ideales, conceptualmente posibles, sobre la localización de los diversos componentes de los centros nerviosos, y nos permiten evaluar el impacto de esas intervenciones sobre las condiciones de viabilidad del organismo.

Matthew Soteriou provides an analysis of authoritatively knowing one’s own mental acts which depends on a surprising assumption: One cannot truly judge that one is judging. After briefly criticizing his account of one’s awareness that one is judging, I critically scrutinize two of his arguments against the possibility of truly judging that one is judging. Firstly, assuming such a possibility leads to a regress. Secondly, the second-order judgement inevitably replaces the first-order judgement such as to make the former wrong.

One of the important questions discussed by philosophers of technology has to do with the moral significance of artefacts in human life. While many philosophers agree that artefacts do have moral significance attached to them, opinions vary as to how it is to be construed. In this paper we deal with the approach of the influential Dutch philosopher of technology Peter Paul Verbeek. He criticizes traditional ethical theories for assuming that whatever relevancy artefacts have for morality is entirely dependent on (...) human beings, since artefacts are mere passive instruments of human agency. In contrast, he develops a view of moral agency that includes artefacts and that ascribes moral agency to human-technology hybrids rather than to humans as such. The goal of this paper is to elucidate Verbeek’s account of moral agency and evaluate it. We also deal with his views on post phenomenology and mediation underlying this account. Although the general gist of our paper is expository, we point out to several problems for Verbeek’s account. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the discourse around evil from the perspective of philosophical anthropology. Through an analysis of the religious symbolism of evil and an associated quest for a complete study of being, I intend in this article to explore fresh ways of establishing the relation between our rhetorical practices of evil and moral responsibility. I draw on Ricoeur’s work on the primary symbols of evil, which can be seen as a means for clarifying and extending our understanding of (...) evil and moral responsibility. I employ the concept of “the double intentionality of symbol” to advance an expressive-performative model of speaking about the full shape of moral responsibility. At stake in my paper is the possibility of recognizing the need to valorise subordinate resources of knowledge that might prevent us from studying and responding to the elusive reality of evil in intellectual abstraction. (shrink)

Joona Räsänen has argued that pro‐life arguments against the permissibility of infanticide are not persuasive, and fail to show it to be immoral. We responded to Räsänen’s arguments, concluding that his critique of pro‐life arguments was misplaced. Räsänen has recently replied in ‘Why pro‐life arguments still are not convincing: A reply to my critics’, providing some additional arguments as to why he does not find pro‐life arguments against infanticide convincing. Here, we respond briefly to Räsänen’s critique of the substance view, (...) and also to his most important claim: that possession of a right to life by an infant does not rule out the permissibility of infanticide. We demonstrate that this claim is unfounded, and conclude that Räsänen has not refuted pro‐life arguments against infanticide. (shrink)

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the primary architect of the neuron doctrine and the law of dynamic polarization, is considered to be the founder of modern neuroscience. At the same time, many philosophers, historians, and neuroscientists agree that modern neuroscience embodies a mechanistic perspective on the explanation of the nervous system. In this paper, I review the extant mechanistic interpretation of Cajal’s contribution to modern neuroscience. Then, I argue that the extant mechanistic interpretation fails to capture the explanatory import of Cajal’s (...) law of dynamic polarization. My claim is that the definitive formulation of Cajal’s law of dynamic polarization, despite its mechanistic inaccuracies, embodies a non-mechanistic pattern of reasoning (i.e., design explanation) that is an integral component of modern neuroscience. (shrink)

A brief article on faith as a psychological attitude.

Vera Zasulich’s shooting of Trepov, a governor of St Petersburg who had ordered the flogging of a political prisoner, in January 1878, catapulted her to international fame as a revolutionary heroine, a reputation that she put to good use by becoming one of the five ‘founding parents’ of Russian Marxism that created the ‘Group for the Emancipation of Labour’ in 1883. But her act of self-sacrifice also triggered, to her dismay, the institutionalisation of individual terrorist tactics in the Russian Populist (...) movement with the creation of the ‘People’s Will’ (Narodnaya Volya) Party in 1879. The organisation went into decline after the killing of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and Populism itself was increasingly superseded by Marxism as the hegemonic force on the left with the rise of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). But individual terrorist tactics reappeared with the creation of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1902, prompting Zasulich to write an article for Die neue Zeit, the theoretical organ of German Social Democracy, in which she both condemned the Neo-Populist tendency as deleterious to the rising labour movement and supported the organisational plans for the RSDLP sponsored by the Iskra group, developed at length by Lenin in his book What Is to Be Done?, published in March 1902. This article provides the background to Vera Zasulich’s article ‘The Terrorist Tendency in Russia’ (December 1902), setting it against the history of the Russian revolutionary movement from 1878 to 1902. (shrink)

The 14-day rule restricts the culturing of human embryos in vitro for the purposes of scientific research for no longer than 14 days. Since researchers recently developed the capability to exceed the 14-day limit, pressure to modify the rule has started to build. Sophia McCully argues that the limit should be extended to 28 days, listing numerous potential benefits of doing so. We contend that McCully has not engaged with the main reasons why the Warnock Committee set such a limit, (...) and these still remain valid. As a result, her case for an extension of the 14-day rule is not persuasive. (shrink)

Kit Fine has proposed a new solution to what he calls ‘a familiar puzzle’ concerning modality and existence. The puzzle concerns the argument from the alleged truths ‘It is necessary that Socrates is a man’ and ‘It is possible that Socrates does not exist’ to the apparent falsehood ‘It is possible that Socrates is a man and does not exist’. We discuss in detail Fine’s setting up of the ‘puzzle’ and his rejection, with which we concur, of two mooted solutions (...) to it. (One of these uses standard, Kripkean, notions, and the other rests on work done by Arthur Prior.) We set out, and reject, the philosophy of modality underlying Fine’s new solution, and we defend an alternative response to the alleged puzzle. Our solution follows the work of David Wiggins in distinguishing between the sentential operator ‘It is necessary that’ and the predicate modifier ‘necessarily’. We briefly provide this distinction with a possible- world semantics on which it is neither a necessary truth, in some sense, that Socrates exists nor true, in some sense, that Socrates necessarily exists. (shrink)

With a length of over 60 years (first issue appeared in 1950), the magazine ,,Mitropolia Olteniei” had an important contribution to the study of history and philosophy of religions. In this review have been approached numerous issues of dogmatic theology, moral, religious and history and philosophy of religions. This study approached topics ranging from religions of Dacians and neighboring peoples to the important topics as inter-religious dialogue for modern society. If publications are spread over period of 60 years, one can (...) deduce easily that in a relatively short period, this article will return among these studies with names and their articles who will continue to bring their contribution to the history and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Grice, Lewis, and Skyrms proposed similar distinctions between kinds of meaning. The meaning of terms in human language, as Lewis and Skyrms had it, is ‘conventional’. Skyrms presented models showing how it is possible for conventional meaning to evolve in a population without reliance on pre-existing meaning. But one might think of conventionality as coming in degrees, based on whether the evolutionary process begins with ‘natural saliences’. We propose a theory of natural salience and several extensions of Skyrms’s models to (...) capture this notion. These models reveal that natural saliences can hinder, as well as help, the evolution of language. (shrink)

An important problem for decision-makers in society deals with the efficient and equitable allocation of scarce resources to individuals and groups. The significance of this problem is rapidly growing since there is a rising demand for scarce resources all over the world. Such resource dilemmas belong to a conceptually broader class of situations known as social dilemmas. In this type of dilemma, individual choices that appear ‘‘rational’’ often result in suboptimal group outcomes. In this article we study how people make (...) monetary allocation decisions between the community where they live and a neighbouring community, with the aim of finding out to what extent these decisions are subject to biased over-weighting. The manuscript reports four experiments that deal with the way individuals make such allocation decisions when the potential beneficiaries are such communities. The specific goal of these experiments is to gauge the amount of bias in the weights that people assign to the various beneficiaries. Taken together, the results from all the four experiments suggest that making the gain of the neighbouring community prominent to a higher extent de-biases the outcomes (the prominence effect) compared to when own community gain is made prominent. Place identity is discussed as a potentially important factor in this connection. Hence, it may be argued that there seems to be some kind of a pro-self component that is able to explain a large part of the variance observed for the prominence effect. Connections between such a factor and in-group favouritism are discussed. A strength of the study was that these major results appeared to be quite robust when considered as task effects, as the salience of the manipulated context factors in the studies (in terms of reliable main or interaction effects) did not distort them. (shrink)