This chapter examines how epistemic norms could be social norms, with a reliance on work on the philosophy and social science of social norms from Bicchieri (on the one hand) and Brennan, Eriksson, Goodin and Southwood (on the other hand). We explain how the social ontology of social norms can help explain the rationality of epistemic cooperation, and how one might begin to model epistemic games.

The last decades have seen major advances in the study of gestures both in humans and non-human primates. In this paper, we seriously examine the idea that there may be gestural form types that are shared across great ape species, including humans, which may underlie gestural universals, both in form and meaning. We focus on one case study, the hand fling gesture common to chimpanzees and humans, and provide a semantic analysis of this gesture.

A counterpossible conditional is a counterfactual with an impossible antecedent. Common sense delivers the view that some such conditionals are true, and some are false. In recent publications, Timothy Williamson has defended the view that all are true. In this paper we defend the common sense view against Williamson’s objections.

A discussion of Sosa's Knowing Full Well. The authors focus on the understood place and significance of animal and reflective knowledge.

We criticise Shepard's notions of “invariance” and “universality,” and the incorporation of Shepard's work on inference into the general framework of his paper. We then criticise Tenenbaum and Griffiths' account of Shepard (1987b), including the attributed likelihood function, and the assumption of “weak sampling.” Finally, we endorse Barlow's suggestion that minimum message length (MML) theory has useful things to say about the Bayesian inference problems discussed by Shepard and Tenenbaum and Griffiths. [Barlow; Shepard; Tenenbaum & Griffiths].

REMARKS ON EVOLUTION AND TIME-SCALES, Graham Cairns-Smith; HODGSON'S BLACK BOX, Thomas Clark; DO HODGSON'S PROPOSITIONS UNIQUELY CHARACTERIZE FREE WILL?, Ravi Gomatam; WHAT SHOULD WE RETAIN FROM A PLAIN PERSON'S CONCEPT OF FREE WILL?, Gilberto Gomes; ISOLATING DISPARATE CHALLENGES TO HODGSON'S ACCOUNT OF FREE WILL, Liberty Jaswal; FREE AGENCY AND LAWS OF NATURE, Robert Kane; SCIENCE VERSUS REALIZATION OF VALUE, NOT DETERMINISM VERSUS CHOICE, Nicholas Maxwell; COMMENTS ON HODGSON, J.J.C. Smart; THE VIEW FROM WITHIN, Sean Spence; COMMENTARY ON HODGSON, Henry (...) Stapp. (shrink)

In ‘The Kalam Cosmological Argument Neither Bloodied nor Bowed’ , David Oderberg provides four main criticisms of the line of argument which I developed in ‘Time, Successive Addition, and Kalam Cosmological Arguments’ . I argue here that none of these lines of criticism succeeds. Further I re-emphasise the point that those who maintain that the temporal series of past events is formed by ‘successive addition’ are indeed thereby committed to a highly contentious strict finitist metaphysics.

This paper is a response to a paper by Rich Davis in which he argues that David Lewis' modal realism is inconsistent with classical theism. I provide what I take to be a coherent modal realist formulation of classical theism.

This paper is a response to David Oderberg's discussion of the Tristram Shandy paradox. I defend the claim that the Tristram Shandy paradox does not support the claim that it is impossible that the past is infinite.

This paper discusses a range of modal ontological arguments. It is claimed that these modal ontological arguments fail because they depend upon controversial assumptions about the nature of modal space.

This paper is a reply to a prior work by C. J. F. Williams in which he criticised David Kaplan's account of the contingent analytic. In this paper, I take myself to be defending Kaplan's views against Williams' attack.

This paper is a response to David Oderberg's criticisms of a previous paper of mine. (Bibliographical details are provided in the article.).

This paper is an examination of the contingent a priori and the necessary a posteriori. In particular, it considers -- and assesses -- the criticisms that Nathan Salmon makes of the views of Saul Kripke.

Short, critical review of John Foster's book *The Divine Lawmaker*.

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] is the point of epistemic evaluation? Why do we appraise others as knowers, understanders and so forth? Epistemology has traditionally focused on analysing the conditions under which one has knowledge, leaving aside for the most part questions about the roles played by epistemic evaluation in our lives more broadly. This fact is borne out by the so-called Gettier (...) literature. For decades, epistemologists have attempted to ferret out the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge, but few have asked why knowledge would have the features suggested by conceptual analysis. Suppose, for example, that knowledge really is non-lucky justified true belief. Why would this be? What use do we have for a concept that is demarcated by those conditions? Is there something abhorrent about coming... (shrink)

Tarihte herhalde çok az soru Tanrı’nın varlığı sorusu kadar sık sorulmuş, çok yanıtlanmış ve verilen birbirinden farklı onca yanıta rağmen kesin bir sonuca ulaştırılamayıp tartışılmaya devam etmiştir. Yine de geçmişe dönüp baktığımızda bu soruya verilen farklı yanıtların farklı uygarlıkların inşa edilmesine, bazılarının yıkılmasına, acımasız çatışmalara ve her şeye rağmen kucaklaşmalara da vesile olduğunu görüyoruz. Tanrı var mı? Varsa onu nasıl bilebiliriz? Tanrı yoksa her şey mubah mı? İnsan aklı ilahi olanı kavrayabilir mi? Tanrı’nın varlığı ahlaklı olmanın şartı mı? Evren akıllı (...) bir tasarımcının imzasını taşıyor mu? Bu kitapta felsefeci William David Beck, bu sorulara tarihte verilen yanıtları ve bu konudaki tartışmaları ele alarak meselenin genel ve tarihsel bir tablosunu bize sunuyor. Platon, Aristoteles, Marcus Aurelius gibi Eski Yunan ve Roma düşünürlerinden Anselmus, Thomas Aquinas, Augustinus ve Yahudi-Hıristiyan geleneğine, Doğu’nun bilgelerine, İbni Rüşd, Fârâbî ve Gazzâlî gibi İslam düşünürlerinden Alvin Plantinga, Graham Oppy, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Max Tegmark gibi Batılı modern ilahiyatçılara, bilim insanlarına ve Yeni Ateizm hareketine kadar uzanan bir çizgide “Tanrı var mı?” sorusuna verilen çeşitli yanıtları ve bu yanıtlara sunulan akılcı gerekçeleri ortaya koyarak soruya felsefece bir yanıt vermenin nasıl bir iş olduğunu da gösteriyor. (shrink)

This article aims at clarifying some issues raised by a recent book of Daniel W. Graham about the Presocratic cosmology. It particularly intends to shed some light on the understanding of Anaxagoras’ universe by suggesting some reasons why, despite Graham’s opinion, it is still possible to think that the stars were flat according to him. Another goal is highlighting the importance of the comprehensive physical theory of Anaxagoras, based on a circular motion called perichoresis, which would explain diverse (...) phenomena in a consistent way by introducing simplicity in his cosmology. (shrink)

New philosophical essays on love by a diverse group of international scholars. Topics include contributions to the ongoing debate on whether love is arational or if there are reasons for love, and if so what kind; the kinds of love there may be ; whether love can explain the difference between nationalism and patriotism; whether love is an necessary component of truly seeing others and the world; whether love, like free will, is “fragile,” and may not survive in a deterministic (...) world; and whether or not love is actually a good thing or may instead be a force opposed to morality. Key philosophers discussed include Immanuel Kant, Iris Murdoch, Bernard Williams, Harry Frankfurt, J. David Velleman, Niko Kolodny, Thomas Hurka, Bennett Helm, Alfred Mele and Derk Pereboom. Essays also touch on the treatment of love in literature and popular culture, from Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair to Spike Jonze’s movie her. (shrink)

Impossible worlds are representations of impossible things and impossible happenings. They earn their keep in a semantic or metaphysical theory if they do the right theoretical work for us. As it happens, a worlds-based account provides the best philosophical story about semantic content, knowledge and belief states, cognitive significance and cognitive information, and informative deductive reasoning. A worlds-based story may also provide the best semantics for counterfactuals. But to function well, all these accounts need use of impossible and as well (...) as possible worlds. So what are impossible worlds? Graham Priest claims that any of the usual stories about possible worlds can be told about impossible worlds, too. But far from it. I'll argue that impossible worlds cannot be genuine worlds, of the kind proposed by Lewis, McDaniel or Yagisawa. Nor can they be ersatz worlds on the model proposed by Melia or Sider. Constructing impossible worlds, it turns out, requires novel metaphysical resources. (shrink)

This paper presents and motivates a new philosophical and logical approach to truth and semantic paradox. It begins from an inferentialist, and particularly bilateralist, theory of meaning---one which takes meaning to be constituted by assertibility and deniability conditions---and shows how the usual multiple-conclusion sequent calculus for classical logic can be given an inferentialist motivation, leaving classical model theory as of only derivative importance. The paper then uses this theory of meaning to present and motivate a logical system---ST---that conservatively extends classical (...) logic with a fully transparent truth predicate. This system is shown to allow for classical reasoning over the full (truth-involving) vocabulary, but to be non-transitive. Some special cases where transitivity does hold are outlined. ST is also shown to give rise to a familiar sort of model for non-classical logics: Kripke fixed points on the Strong Kleene valuation scheme. Finally, to give a theory of paradoxical sentences, a distinction is drawn between two varieties of assertion and two varieties of denial. On one variety, paradoxical sentences cannot be either asserted or denied; on the other, they must be both asserted and denied. The target theory is compared favourably to more familiar related systems, and some objections are considered. (shrink)

This paper shows how to conservatively extend classical logic with a transparent truth predicate, in the face of the paradoxes that arise as a consequence. All classical inferences are preserved, and indeed extended to the full (truth—involving) vocabulary. However, not all classical metainferences are preserved; in particular, the resulting logical system is nontransitive. Some limits on this nontransitivity are adumbrated, and two proof systems are presented and shown to be sound and complete. (One proof system allows for Cut—elimination, but the (...) other does not.). (shrink)

Brought to you by: Crop X editors: Jonathan Alexander Perez, Harmony Smith, Corinne Tendorf, David Turturo, and Derek Rahn Williams. Faculty Advisor: David Turturo; Crop X team included: Chaimae Alehyane, Zachary S. Casey, Suzanna Brinez, Jacob Brown, Elizabeth George, Francisco Javier Muniz Ituarte, Brodey Myers. -/- Credits: Huckabee College of Architecture; Graphic Designers: Studio BLDG (Blossom Liu + Danny Gray); English Editor: Luke Studebaker; Spanish Translator: Jessie Forbes; Printer: Die Keure. Cover Photo: Derek Williams. -/- Generously supported by (...) the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Huckabee College of Architecture, Texas Tech University. (shrink)

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to shed some light on a certain type of sentence, which I call a borderline contradiction. A borderline contradiction is a sentence of the form F a ∧ ¬F a, for some vague predicate F and some borderline case a of F , or a sentence equivalent to such a sentence. For example, if Jackie is a borderline case of ‘rich’, then ‘Jackie is rich and Jackie isn’t rich’ is a borderline contradiction. Many theories (...) of vague language have entailments about borderline contradictions; correctly describing the behavior of borderline contradictions is one of the many tasks facing anyone offering a theory of vague language. Here, I first briefly review claims made by various theorists about these borderline contradictions, attempting to draw out some predictions about the behavior of ordinary speakers. Second, I present an experiment intended to gather relevant data about the behavior of ordinary speakers. Finally, I discuss the experimental results in light of several different theories of vagueness, to see what explanations are available. My conclusions are necessarily tentative; I do not attempt to use the present experiment to demonstrate that any single theory is incontrovertibly true. Rather, I try to sketch the auxiliary hypotheses that would need to be conjoined to several extant theories of vague language to predict the present result, and offer some considerations regarding the plausibility of these various hypotheses. In the end, I conclude that two of the theories I consider are better-positioned to account for the observed data than are the others. But the field of logically-informed research on people’s actual responses to vague predicates is young; surely as more data come in we will learn a great deal more about which (if any) of these theories best accounts for the behavior of ordinary speakers. (shrink)

Contributors: -/- John Beatty (British Columbia); Kelly James Clark (Ibn Haldun, Istanbul); Angela Coventry (Portland State); Thomas Holden (UC Santa Barbara); Willem Lemmens (Antwerp); Robin Le Poidevin (Leeds); Jennifer Marusic (Edinburgh); Kevin Meeker (South Alabama); Amyas Merivale (Oxford); Peter Millican (Oxford); Dan O’Brien (Oxford Brookes); Graham Oppy (Monash); Paul Russell (Lund); Andre C. Willis (Brown).

Placeholder essentialism is the view that there is a causal essence that holds category members together, though we may not know what the essence is. Sometimes the placeholder can be filled in by scientific essences, such as when we acquire scientific knowledge that the atomic weight of gold is 79. We challenge the view that placeholders are elaborated by scientific essences. On our view, if placeholders are elaborated, they are elaborated Aristotelian essences, a telos. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments (...) used by traditional essentialists—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2), acquired traits (study 3) and inferences about offspring (study 4)—we find support for the view that essences are elaborated by a telos. And we find evidence (study 5) that teleological essences may generate category judgments. (shrink)

This is a forthcoming section for the book "Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy", edited by Graham Oppy, Gregory Dawes, Evan Fales, Joseph Koterski, Mashhad Al-Allaf, Robert Fastiggi, and David Shatz. I was asked to write a brief essay on divine hiddenness and divine inscrutability. I argue that theism is trapped between two opposite poles. On one end, we encounter an argument developed by John Schellenberg. God is understood as a being who, in virtue of God's perfect (...) love, would have relationship with any of Her creatures who are open to loving relationship with God. If so, we would not expect there to exist non-resistant non-believers. Yet there are non-resistant non-believers. So, this sort of God does not exist. On the other pole, God is completely incomprehensible. But if God is incomprehensible, then this leads to a series of theological problems. For example, if God is incomprehensible, then it is difficult to understand how any human could rationally endorse God's existence. I argue that both poles are problematic for the theist and that it is difficult to see how to construct a road through the middle that would not inherit the problems of either pole. (shrink)

This is a forthcoming section for the book "Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy", edited by Graham Oppy, Gregory Dawes, Evan Fales, Joseph Koterski, Mashhad Al-Allaf, Robert Fastiggi, and David Shatz. I was asked to write a brief essay on whether naturalism or theism can successfully explain the distribution of suffering in our world. Wheras another section covers the possibility that suffering is evidence against theism, my essay is concerned only with the ability for either naturalism or (...) theism to explain suffering. I argue that, for naturalists, suffering is not to be explained by either philosophers of religion or theologians. Instead, naturalists believe that suffering should be explained by the cognitive and social sciences, perhaps in conjunction with political philosophy and philosophy of mind. Moreover, naturalists may take suffering to be an important reason for action. In a world without a transcendent, supernatural being to watch over us, we can only depend upon each other to ameliorate existing conditions, to the extent that they can be ameliorated. On the other hand, theistic explanations of the distibution of suffering slip very easily into problematic theologies when they try to offer explicit explanations for suffering. For example, the world's most vulnerable people are often those who suffer the most, whereas oppressors are often able to prosper. That is, theistic explanations of our world's suffering easily slip into, e.g., the just world fallacy, racist ideology (i.e., that God favors some race(s) of people over others), or patriarchal ideology. Instead of offering an explicit explanation, theists should instead be skeptical theists -- i.e., they should argue that an explanation for our world's suffering is beyond our ken. While skeptical theism avoids the aforementioned problematic implications, if skeptical theism is true, then our world's suffering cannot be fully explained. (shrink)

What does it mean to know how to do something? This book develops a comprehensive account of know-how, a crucial epistemic goal for all who care about getting things right, not only with respect to the facts, but also with respect to practice. It proposes a novel interpretation of the seminal work of Gilbert Ryle, according to which know-how is a competence, a complex ability to do well in an activity in virtue of guidance by an understanding of what it (...) takes to do so. This idea is developed into a full-fledged account, Rylean responsibilism, which understands know-how in terms of the normative guidance and responsible control of one's acts. Within the complex current debate about know-how, this view occupies a middle ground position between the intellectualist claim that know-how just is propositional or objectual knowledge and the anti-intellectualist claim that know-how just is ability. In genuine know-how, practical ability and guiding intellect are both necessary, but essentially intertwined. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

In the recent philosophical literature on inquiry, epistemologists point out that their subject has often begun at the point at which you already have your evidence and then focussed on identifying the beliefs for which that evidence provides justification. But we are not mere passive recipients of evidence. While some comes to us unbidden, we often actively collect it. This has long been recognised, but typically epistemologists have taken the norms that govern inquiry to be practical, not epistemic. The recent (...) literature challenges this assumption and uncovers a rich range of questions about the epistemic normativity of inquiry. In this paper, I approach these questions from the formal side of epistemology. Developing out of the philosophy of science, as it did, this branch of epistemology has long discussed inquiry. And, building on the insights of Janina Hosiasson (1931), David Blackwell (1951), and I. J. Good (1967), it has produced a reasonably well-developed framework in which to understand norms of inquiry, both epistemic and practical. In the first half of the paper, I will present the pragmatic versions of this framework due to Hosiasson, Blackwell, and Good, and the epistemic version due to Graham Oddie (1997); in the second half of the paper, I put this framework to work, turning to some of the questions from the recent debate about inquiry and asking how the framework can help us answer them. Questions include: When should we initiate an inquiry, when should we continue it, when should we conclude it, and when should we reopen it? How do epistemic norms of inquiry relate to epistemic norms of belief or credence, and can they conflict, as Jane Friedman (2020) contends? How should we resolve the apparent puzzle raised by Friedman's example of counting the windows in the Chrysler Building? How should we direct our attention, as Georgi Gardiner (2022) asks? How should we choose and reason after receiving evidence we'd rather not have received? And how should we understand the epistemic error that occurs when someone is resistant to evidence in the way Mona Simion (2023) describes? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scrutinizing the Art of TheaterAaron Meskin (bio)IntroductionIn his 1992 address to the American Society for Aesthetics, Peter Kivy suggested that philosophers of art might do best by giving up on “grand theorizing” (that is, pursuing the definition of art).1 In its place he proposed that they pursue the “careful and imaginative philosophical scrutiny of the individual arts and their individual problems.”2 Of course John Passmore and others had said (...) similar things at earlier points,3 but philosophical aesthetics has, it seems to me, finally and robustly taken the turn toward the philosophies of the arts. Much of the best work in philosophical aesthetics over the last fifteen years or so has pursued the route Kivy suggested. James Hamilton’s The Art of Theater is part of this turn—it is careful and imaginative scrutiny of the art of theater done at the very highest level, and I am delighted to have this opportunity to comment on it.4In what follows I shall address a number of issues raised by Hamilton’s work: the definition of theatrical enactment; the place of pretending and imagining in theatrical performance; the nature of Hamilton’s “ingredients model” and its relation to more traditional accounts of the work/performance relation; the account of theatrical style on offer; and the question of what we have learned from experimental theater.But before I move on to address those aspects of the book’s content in detail, let me say something about the pedagogical significance of this work. Although there are a number of legitimate ways to teach introductory courses on aesthetics and the philosophy of art (for example, by following a historical progression or by structuring it around certain key issues), one increasingly attractive option is to teach a course that focuses on those aforementioned individual arts and their individual problems. So, for example, I used to regularly teach graduate seminars in aesthetics to students enrolled [End Page 51] in a fine arts doctoral program. These students studied music, art education, the visual arts, theater, and dance; the seminars were designed to provide them with a broad foundation in philosophical aesthetics. Since they typically had no background in philosophy, I made the effort to assign readings and topics relevant to their own artistic practices and interests. Providing them with contemporary cutting-edge philosophical material on music and the visual arts was not hard. Kivy’s work, as well as that by Jerrold Levinson, Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, and others, makes that fairly easy. And intriguingly—since philosophers are commonly said to have ignored the art of dance—there’s even a decent amount of recent philosophical work on that art form by such authors as Graham McFee, Frances Sparshott, and Noël Carroll and Sally Banes.5 But where to turn to for the theater students? I would often read some of Aristotle’s Poetics with them, but I have to admit that the serious students of the theater that I encountered in those seminars typically knew that text much better than I did. (Still, I hope I challenged their breezy assumptions about catharsis!) We would read Hume on tragedy together—fun, but not really so much about the theater—and sometimes a bit of Nietzsche. But there was never much to give them from contemporary philosophers on the subject—a few articles here and there, of course, but nothing that clearly laid out the big and distinctive issues that the art form of theater raises. Nothing, to put the point a bit differently, that would provide any evidence that there really was a lively and extant philosophy of theater out there, as there are lively and extant philosophies of film, music, literature, and photography. In short, for those attracted to the prospect of teaching aesthetics as the philosophies of arts, the dearth of good work on theater by contemporary philosophers has been a significant source of frustration and even a bit of an embarrassment.The book in question is not the only recent philosophical work on theater. There are fine articles on the topic by David Osipovich, David Saltz, and Paul Woodruff, among others. Hamilton himself has a string of... (shrink)

Suppose Alice asserts p, and the Caterpillar wants to disagree. If the Caterpillar accepts classical logic, he has an easy way to indicate this disagreement: he can simply assert ¬p. Sometimes, though, things are not so easy. For example, suppose the Cheshire Cat is a paracompletist who thinks that p ∨ ¬p fails (in familiar (if possibly misleading) language, the Cheshire Cat thinks p is a gap). Then he surely disagrees with Alice's assertion of p, but should himself be unwilling (...) to assert ¬p. So he cannot simply use the classical solution. Dually, suppose the Mad Hatter is a dialetheist who thinks that p ∧ ¬p holds (that is, he thinks p is a glut). Then he may assert ¬p, but it should not be taken to indicate that he disagrees with Alice; he doesn't. So he too can't use the classical solution. The Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter, then, have a common problem, and philosophers with opinions like theirs have adopted a common solution to this problem: appeal to denial. Denial, these philosophers suppose, is a speech act like assertion, but it is not to be understood as in any way reducing to assertion. Importantly, denial is something different from the assertion of a negation; this is what allows it to work even in cases where assertion of negation does not. Just as importantly, denial must express disagreement, since this is the job it's being enlisted to do. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

A long-standing puzzle for moral philosophers and psychologists alike is the concept of psychopathy, a personality disorder marked by tendencies to defy moral norms despite cognitive knowledge about right and wrong. Previously, discussions of the moral deficits of psychopathy have focused on willingness to harm and cheat others as well as reasoning about rule-based transgressions. Yet recent research in moral psychology has begun to more clearly define the domains of morality, en- compassing issues of harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and spiritual (...) purity. Clinical descriptions and theories of psychopathy suggest that deficits may exist primarily in the areas of harm and fairness, although quantitative evidence is scarce. Within a broad sample of participants, we found that scores on a measure of psychopathy predicted sharply lower scores on the harm and fairness subscales of a measure of moral concern, but showed no relationship with authority, and very small relationships with ingroup and purity. On a measure of willingness to violate moral standards for money, psychopathy scores predicted greater willingness to violate moral concerns of any type. Results are further explored via potential mediators and analyses of the two factors of psychopathy. (shrink)

Plato's Phaedo is a literary gem that develops many of his most famous ideas. David Ebrey's careful reinterpretation argues that the many debates about the dialogue cannot be resolved so long as we consider its passages in relative isolation from one another, separated from their intellectual background. His book shows how Plato responds to his literary, religious, scientific, and philosophical context, and argues that we can only understand the dialogue's central ideas and arguments in light of its overall structure. (...) This approach yields new interpretations of the dialogue's key ideas, including the nature and existence of 'Platonic' forms, the existence of the soul after death, the method of hypothesis, and the contemplative ethical ideal. Moreover, this comprehensive approach shows how the characters play an integral role in the Phaedo's development and how its literary structure complements Socrates' views while making its own distinctive contribution to the dialogue's drama and ideas. (shrink)

Explores five fault lines in the fledgling field of responsibility theory, serious methodological disputes traceable to P.F. Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment.".

Part of a Festschrift for Fred Miller, this essay reconsiders Miller's interpretation of Aristotle in terms of natural rights. After defending Miller against his numerous critics, I draw a somewhat different lesson from his interpretation than he himself does: Miller helps us to see that an Aristotelian theory of justice can do all the work that we would reasonably want a theory of rights to do while avoiding significant problems that the idiom and rhetoric of rights tend to generate.

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

Perceptualists say that having a pain in a body part consists in perceiving the part as instantiating some property. I argue that perceptualism makes better sense of the connections between pain location and the experiences undergone by people in pain than three alternative accounts that dispense with perception. Turning to fellow perceptualists, I also reject ways in which David Armstrong and Michael Tye understand and motivate perceptualism, and I propose an alternative interpretation, one that vitiates a pair of objections—due (...) to John Hyman—concerning the meaning of ‘Amy has a pain in her foot’ and the idea of bodily sensitivity. Perceptualism, I conclude, remains our best account of the location of pains. (shrink)

Humour is worthy of serious ethical consideration. However, it is often taken far too seriously. In this paper, it is argued that while humour is sometimes unethical, it is wrong much less often than many people think. Non-contextual criticisms, which claim that certain kinds of humour are always wrong, are rejected. Contextual criticisms, which take issue with particular instances of humour rather than types of humour, are more promising. However, it is common to overstate the number of contexts in which (...) humour is wrong. Various mistakes of this kind are highlighted and cautioned against. (shrink)

To the extent that dualism is even taken to be a serious option in contemporary discussions of personal identity and the philosophy of mind, it is almost exclusively either Cartesian dualism or property dualism that is considered. The more traditional dualism defended by Aristotelians and Thomists, what I call hylemorphic dualism, has only received scattered attention. In this essay I set out the main lines of the hylemorphic dualist position, with particular reference to personal identity. First I argue that overemphasis (...) of the problem of consciousness has had an unhealthy effect on recent debate, claiming instead that we should emphasize the concept of form. Then I bring in the concept of identity by means of the notion of substantial form. I continue by analyzing the relation between form and matter, defending the traditional theses of prime matter and of the unicity of substantial form. I then argue for the immateriality of the substantial form of the human person, viz. the soul, from an account of the human intellect. From this follows the soul's essential independence of matter. Finally, although the soul is the immaterial bearer of personal identity, that identity is still the identity of an essentially embodied being. I explain how these ideas are to be reconciled. Footnotesa I am grateful to Stephen Braude, John Cottingham, John Haldane, David Jehle, Joel Katzav, Eduardo Ortiz, and Fred Sommers for helpful comments and discussion of a draft of this essay. I would also like to thank Ellen Paul, whose suggestions have helped greatly to improve the essay's style and content. (shrink)

Realists about aesthetic judgment believe something like the following: for an aesthetic judgment of be correct, it must respond to the intrinsic aesthetic properties possessed by the object in question (e.g., Meskin et al., 2013; Kieran 2010). However, Cutting’s (2003) empirical research on aesthetic judgment puts pressure on that position. His work indicates that unconscious considerations extrinsic to an artwork can underpin said judgements. This paper takes Cutting’s conclusion a step further: If philosophers grant that it’s possible to appreciate artwork (...) on the basis of unconscious biases, then we never can be fully confident that our aesthetic judgment is undergirded by the intrinsic aesthetic properties of an artwork. Furthermore, if judgment on the basis of unconscious, external reasons cannot be ruled out, we cannot be confident that our aesthetic judgments are ‘correct’. I argue that Cutting’s research is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the extrinsic, unconscious factors that influence aesthetic judgment. Expectation bias formed via social influence and context greatly influence aesthetic judgments and are unavoidable: we inevitably form expectations based on all kinds of contextual cues independently of any actual exposure to the item in question. Such factors make it terribly difficult to be confident in our aesthetic judgments. Even if there are objective properties that mark out some items as aesthetically superior to others, we cannot be sure that our judgments are responding to those properties. (shrink)

We have a mentalistic view of objects. This is due to the interdependence of folk psychology and folk physics, where these are interconnected by what I call Teleological Commingling. When considering events that don’t involve agents, we naturally default to tracking intentions, goal-directed processes, despite the fact that agents aren’t involved. We have a deep-seated intentionality bias which is the result of the pervasive detection of agency cues, such as order or non-randomness. And this gives rise to the Agentive Worldview: (...) we view nature as a whole as being infused with agency and purpose. Teleological Commingling and the Agentive Worldview it gives rise to are at the core of our conception of objects. I maintain that the ordinary view of material objects is rooted in an implicit, false theory. It should be given no weight in metaphysical debates about the nature of material objects. And this problematizes the central methodological assumption that metaphysical theories of material objects should be beholden to common sense. (shrink)

A brief introduction to the life and work of William Paley, including a discussion of the structure of his famous design argument.

This chapter develops Moral Occasionalism, according to which moral facts are grounded in certain natural facts, which are called sub-moral grounds, and these sub-moral grounds influence us in such a way as to induce largely correct moral beliefs. Moral Occasionalism is designed to explain the correlation of moral beliefs with the moral facts—and to do so in a way that is consistent with non-interactionist views, according to which moral facts neither influence nor are influenced by moral beliefs. It is argued (...) that moral non-naturalists and others who are committed to non-interactionist views ought to be in the business of defending Moral Occasionalism. The chapter shows that Moral Occasionalism has major advantages over its chief non-interactionist rival, namely David Enoch’s “godless pre-established harmony” view. The chapter anticipates and responds to several objections. (shrink)

A high level of confidence in the identity of individuals is required to let them die as ordered by an advance directive. Thus, if we are animalists, then we should lack the confidence required to apply lethal advance directives to the cheerfully demented, or so I argue. In short, there is consensus among animalists that the best way to avoid serious objections to their account is to adopt an ontology that denies the existence of brains, hands, tables, chairs, iced-tea, and (...) lemonade. The adoption of such an ontology reduces the justificatory force of commonsense, which is key in arguing that we are animals and that we persist as long as we are biologically alive. With this loss of justification comes the loss of a high level of confidence that Quinn-pre-dementia’s lethal advanced directive applies to Quinn-post-dementia, via identity. If we do not have a high level of confidence that Quinn-pre-dementia’s advanced directive applies to Quinn-post- dementia, then it is not enough (on its own) to let Quinn-post-dementia die. (shrink)