David Tomasi presents new, groundbreaking research on the science and application of Mind-Body Medicine strategies to improve clinical outcomes in inpatient psychiatry settings. Much more than a list of therapeutic recommendations, this book is a thorough description of how Mind-Body Medicine can be successfully applied, from a therapeutic as well as from an organizational, cost-effective analysis viewpoint, to the full spectrum of psychiatric treatments. Furthermore, this study examines the role of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary treatment teams, with a special (...) focus on the profession and the role of psychotherapists and group therapists, thereby providing solid scientific evidence of the benefits of patient-provider therapeutic alliances. In this sense, this book serves as a guide for professionals and institutions both in the private and the public sphere, to learn effective treatment and management strategies. About the Author Psychotherapist, Researcher, and Philosopher Dr. David Låg Tomasi is the author of Medical Philosophy (ibidem, 2016) and the co-author of Positive Patient Response to a Structured Exercise Program Delivered in Inpatient Psychiatry (Global Advances in Health and Medicine, 2019), the most-read research item from the University of Vermont (Researchgate, 2019). A member of several national and international Academies of Sciences, Dr. Tomasi works in the Inpatient Psychiatry Unit at the UVM Medical Center, and teaches at the University of Vermont and the Community College of Vermont. ---- Ibidem / Columbia University Press. (shrink)

This book presents an analysis of the correlation between the mind and the body, a complex topic of study and discussion by scientists and philosophers. Drawing largely on neuroscience and philosophy, the author utilizes the scientific method and incorporates lessons learned from a vast array of sources. Based on the most recent cutting-edge scientific discoveries on the Mind-Body problem, Tomasi presents a full examination of multiple fields related to neuroscience. The volume offers a scientist-based and student-friendly journey into medicine, (...) psychology, artificial intelligence, embodied cognition, and social, ecological and anthropological models of perception, to discover our truest self. -/- Introduction The Exact Science of the Hard Matter Between Psyche and Mind Medicine on, of and off the Brain Brain, Culture, Society Perception and Cognition Conclusion: Philosophy as Basic Approach Toward Neuroscience . (shrink)

Questa conferenza, in diretta dagli Stati Uniti (11/11), rappresenta la versione italiana della ricerca, precedentemente pubblicata in inglese dall'Accademia Tiberina, nel 2022.

Tomasi, D. 2024. Psychotherapy: Essence, Experience, and Examination. Foreword to Adler, D. 2024. What we really need – Experiences of a psychoanalyst. New York, NY: Ibidem Verlag / Columbia University Press, Original: Adler, D. 2023. Was wir wirklich brauchen: Erfahrungen eines Psychoanalytikers. Stuttgart, D: Schattauer / Klett-Cotta Verlag -/- Psychotherapy: Essence, Experience, and Examination Foreword to Dieter Adler: What we Truly Need – Experiences of a Psychoanalyst. -/- In any serious, scientific, and ethically justified healthcare profession, the focus should (...) be always on the overall health, treatment, improvement, and amelioration of the patient. What clinical and professional background should therefore a mental health professional have? In his book, Adler does not want to simply offer a quick guide to self-help. In fact, he is clear about the fact that this is not the purpose of the book: “Maybe I’ll write one sometime: How you can reliably become independent of self-help books.” In fact, this book is a reflection on a 30-year-long professional career in which the author has learned to ask questions, to listen attentively, and to help shed light on some of the most complex and hidden aspects of what makes us human. To be sure, this does not mean that this book does not present a practical approach to well-being, quite the contrary. The author lists a series of areas the patient can focus on, in order to achieve a higher state of balance, healing, and happiness. Amongst these we find socialization, upbringing, and community, making friends, understanding and working on one’s emotions and the emotions of others, staying physically and mentally active, finding a sense of security and confidence, maintaining a sense of curiosity, finding a work-life balance and rediscovering peace and calmness, having goals, purposes, and meaning in life, and of course, understanding those negative, self-sabotaging mechanisms and processes which hinder such developments. (shrink)

Authors: Joseph M. Eble, John A. Di Camillo, Peter J. Colosi. --- NEWS RELEASE For Immediate Release February 27, 2024 Contact: Joseph M. Eble, MD Corresponding author 919-667-5206 -/- The statement, Catholics United on Brain Death and Organ Donation: A Call to Action (HTML), was published on February 27, 2024. It was prepared by Joseph Eble, a physician and President of the Tulsa Guild of the Catholic Medical Association; John Di Camillo, an ethicist of The National Catholic Bioethics Center; and (...) Peter Colosi, a philosophy professor at Salve Regina University. -/- Catholic United explains that the criteria for brain death establish only partial loss of brain function. This is now abundantly clear based on scientific studies, a recent effort to lower the legal standard for death, and updated brain death guidelines issued in October 2023. -/- Catholics United bridges a divide among faithful Catholics about whether the concept of brain death aligns with Church teaching. Some Catholics hold that brain death represents true death when there is complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity, often called whole brain death. Others hold that brain death does not represent true death. Since the existing criteria establish only partial loss of brain function, all the endorsers—whether they accept or reject whole brain death as true death—agree that “the current brain death criteria in widespread use do not provide moral (prudential) certainty of death.” -/- Catholics United calls on health care professionals and institutions to cease organ harvesting that relies on the inadequate criteria, noting that 70% of all donors are declared dead using brain death criteria. “Given the lack of moral certainty of death whenever the current brain death criteria are used,” the statement affirms, “a clear majority of vital organ donors can be presumed alive at the time of organ harvesting.” Since the Catholic Church forbids removing vital organs when this would kill the patient, “it is therefore wrong to remove organs from patients declared dead using these inadequate criteria.” . (shrink)

Preface: The following article is an adaptation of an open letter sent by the au- thor to the local U.S. Elementary School Administration on October 14, 2022, in response to the introduction of Transgender Literature in grades 2 and above (starting age 7) in the local US elementary school attended by the author’s children. More specifically, children have been introduced to three books: I Am Jazz, by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings; Jacob’s New Dress, by Ian Hoffman and Sarah Hoffman; (...) and Born Ready. The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope, by Jodie Patterson. As part of this, children have been asked to join discussion in class to talk about the contents of each book and other related literature. Of note, several meetings with the administration and the school board have followed, but no changes have been made to the administration and content of the literature presented to children, with the exception of parents’ voluntary exclusion, per direct request, of their children from class time in which the books above and related new literature will be discussed in the future. Furthermore, these topics have also been discussed as part of a recent Lecture the author presented at the Academy of Sciences of Rome with the title “Science or Ideology?” in November 2022. (shrink)

An examination of Sex and Gender under the most recent scientific discoveries in the areas of neuroscience, endocrinology, biology, psychology, medicine, and linguistics. Presented as part of the Conference "Gender: Ideology or Science?" at the "Accademia Tiberina," Rome, Italy, November 25, 2022.

Understanding the role of (human) Free Will is a necessary premise and substantial process for the appropriate application of any healing art, starting with psychotherapeutic approached focused on the amelioration and improvement of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral elements in the suffering person, and more generally in the path toward healing and truth every person embarks on. This article examines the three interconnected areas of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to explore what the existence and activation of Free Will represents in the (...) life of human beings, from its clinical-medical-therapeutic outcomes to its implications to identity, community, and society. (shrink)

When approaching the nature and etiology of psychophysical problems in a given population, it is important to understand the causal relations, the mechanisms, and the processes which underlie given problems, issues, and disorders. This examination attempts to investigate the connection between neural pathophysiology and proprioceptive ontology of olfactory and visual cortical circuitry on the basis of the current scientific evidence indicated by the results of studies in which subjects underwent a series of therapeutic modalities focused on the improvement of overall (...) wellbeing with the utilization of devices and technologies to stimulate multiple motor vs. somatosensory processes. More specifically, the studies at the centers of this analysis incorporated physical movement and virtual reality interactions, with the supplement of olfactory stimulation. In this examination, such research is also investigated from a theoretical standpoint, with the ultimate goal to better determine which interventions are justified under the premise of a mutual support between empirical values (through laboratory examination) and logical deduction (via philosophical investigation). (shrink)

This brief essay examines the basic parameters of the neuroscientific and philosophical understanding at the basis of emotional and cognitive processes in the broader context of Embodied cognition. More in detail, the discussion follows a series of areas of investigation, structured via responses to basic questions, namely: A) Impact of mind-body dualism in everyday life, B) Possible Preferred Perspective (PPP) under the lenses of Emotional Intelligence, C) Simulation-Theory vs. Theory-Theory D) Neuropsychological paired-deficits vs. Physiological Investigations E) Influence of social distancing (...) on the ability to recognize and understand emotions F) Conclusion. (shrink)

Human decision-making process are the result, as in many other psychological processes, of theinteraction of nature and nurture. A solid understanding of the neuroscientific underpinning ofsuch processes, in combination of a well-grounded anthropology of the human person, help shedlight on the role, the phenomenology and the outcomes of such decisions in developmentalconsiderations and everyday life behavior .

Olfactory Virtual Reality (OVR) for Wellbeing and Reduction of Stress, Anxiety and Pain - Journal of Medical Research and Health Sciences.

(...) However, whether we chose a weak or strong approximation, the set would not make any sense at all, if (once more) this choice would not be justified in either temporal or spatial sense or given the context of possible applicability of the set in different circumstances. This would obviously represent a dualism in itself as we would (for instance) posit and apply a full identity-equality-equivalence of x and y when applying Newtonian physics to certain observations we make (it would (...) be the case of neural correlates), and we would posit and apply a non - identity-equality-equivalence of x and y when applying Quantum mechanics to other observations. Following this dualism in and of theories, the same sate would need to be slightly modified: U2:(x~y)∪(x≈y); U3:(x~y)∩(x≈y); U4a:(x~y)⊆(x≈y) vs. U4b:(x~y)⊇(x≈y). (shrink)

Background: The complexity of diagnostic presentations of an inpatient psychiatry population requires an integrative approach to health and well-being. In this sense, the primary need of this research aims at developing clinical strategies and healthier coping skills for anger, anxiety, and depression; promoting self-esteem, healthier sleep, and anxiety reduction; as well as enhancing mood and emotional–behavioral regulation via exercise and nutrition education. Objectives: The primary objective is to promote exercise, fitness, and physical health in inpatient psychiatry patients. The secondary objective (...) includes therapeutic management of depressive symptoms and patient-centered approach to mania, angry outbursts, and generalized disruptive behavior. The tertiary objective is promoting research in the psychophysiological effectors of exercise and nutrition education in combination with psychotherapy. Method: Monitoring self-reported changes in mood and general well-being via administration of surveys and questionnaires pre- and postexercise sessions. Results: The research yielded positive outcomes in all areas investigated, suggesting the positive effects of exercise and mind–body strategies in the context of psychotherapy in inpatient psychiatry. Conclusion: Physical exercise may be a helpful way to reduce mental health disorders in the context of inpatient psychiatry by targeting anxiety, depression, anger, psychomotor agitation, and muscle tension and addressing stressors and triggers and to develop a more balanced and integrated sense of self. (shrink)

Background: As part of a consistent effort to examine and provide integrative medical approaches to the therapeutic offering for psychophysical health, this study investigates the utilization of Olfactory Virtual Reality (OVR) in an inpatient psychiatry unit, more specifically in the Shepardson 3 Inpatient Psychiatry Unit at the University of Vermont Medical Center, in Burlington, VT, USA. Objectives: The purpose of this protocol is to explore the therapeutic value of olfactory virtual reality (OVR) in the above described population, and to collect (...) statistically significant data to determine the feasibility of potential future OVR studies. Method: Direct subject observation and monitoring in the context of Olfactory Virtual Reality (OVR) sessions and Qualitative data collection via the administration of subject surveys, subdivided in: a) Pre-OVR experience, b) Immediate post-OVR experience, and c) 1-to-3-hour post-OVR experience questionnaires. Results: The research yielded positive outcomes in all areas investigated, despite challenges related to the utilization of the device itself, issues in individual olfactory threshold, and COVID-19 restrictions and limitations. Conclusion: The outcome of this study indicates that the utilization of olfactory virtual reality technologies is a safe and effective integrative approach to target several aspects of psychological and physical health such as anxiety, stress, and pain, in combination with the psychotherapeutic and pharmacological standards of care in inpatient psychiatry. (shrink)

A precise overview of pediatric emergencies would require taxological considerations around the differences between strictly neurological factors, as modulated both via neuroanatomical differentiation in the context of normal vs. abnormal biological development, and underlying neurofunctional mechanisms, and the connection with such processes with the neuromodulated activation of digestive processes. Furthermore, an important distinction between nephrological considerations and urological considerations is necessary, more specifically, by focusing on the treatment of diseases affecting the kidneys and their ability to function in the first (...) case, and on the treatment of diseases affecting the urinary tract in the latter. In this paper, we will present a general overview of the most important aspects of each category, starting with the brief description of neurological emergencies as indicating a general (system-based vs. localized) deterioration of mental capacity, with added possible partial or full loss of cognitive capacities and/or impaired perceptual modalities and consciousness, with or without response to stimuli. (shrink)

Mental health challenges can be described via the application of multiple lenses, from clinical-medical perspectives, to social and community-based, to further understandings in the context of public health. While these challenges can represent multiple issues to the scientific community at-large, especially because of the translational issues attached to the application of research and practice to the sphere of community services, it is useful to understand that the triad ethics, evidence, and experience can be instrumental in navigating the complexity of the (...) issue-at-hand. Furthermore, the work of researchers and practitioners is rooted in a solid understanding of the specific needs of psychiatric patients, particularly from the perspective of possible misunderstandings, ostracization, and stigmatization of psychiatric issues and related presentation, affect, and behaviours. Years of research have indicated how a proper interaction between resources at the level of scientific research and the community is a fundamental cornerstone for a practice rooted in both science and true care for individuals affected by mental health disorders. In this presentation we will discuss the case of the Centro Salute Mentale (Mental Health Centre, CSM) of Verona. (shrink)

John Tomasi's new book, Free Market Fairness, has been well-received as "one of the very best philosophical treatments of libertarian thought, ever" and as a "long and friendly conversation between Friedrich Hayek and John Rawls—a conversation which, astonishingly, reaches agreement". The book does present an authoritative state-of-the-debate across the spectrum from right-libertarianism on the one side to high liberalism on the other side. My point is not to question where Tomasi comes down with his own version of "market (...) democracy" as a remix of Hayek and Rawls. My point is to use his sympathetic restatements of views across the liberal spectrum to show the basic misframings and common misunderstandings that cut across the liberal-libertarian viewpoints surveyed in the book. As usual, the heart of the debate is not in the answers to carefully framed questions, but in the framing itself. (shrink)

Bioethics journals have lagged behind medical and science journals in exploring the threat of conflict of interest (COI) to the integrity of publications. Some recent discussions of COI that have occurred in the bioethics literature are reviewed. Discussions of what has been termed the ?Healy affair? unintentionally demonstrate that the direct and indirect influence of undisclosed COI may come from those who call for protection from the undue influence of industry. Paradoxically, the nature and tone of current discussions may serve (...) to dull sensitivities to what is indeed a serious set of issues facing bioethics. Some proposals are presented to address COI and other challenges to the integrity of bioethics and its journals. COI is too important a topic to be left to ideologues, and there is no substitute for readers' caution and skepticism as tools in dealing with the full range of biases that exist in published papers. (shrink)

How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.

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)

This is a collective study of the epistemic significance of disagreement: twelve contributors explore rival responses to the problems that it raises for philosophy. They develop our understanding of epistemic phenomena that are central to any thoughtful engagement with others' beliefs.

The old evidence problem affects any probabilistic confirmation measure based on comparing pr(H/E) and pr(H). The article argues for the following points: (1) measures based on likelihood ratios also suffer old evidence difficulties; (2) the less-discussed synchronic old evidence problem is, in an important sense, the most acute; (3) prominent attempts to solve or dissolve the synchronic problem fail; (4) a little-discussed variant of the standard measure avoids the problem, in an appealing way; and (5) this measure nevertheless reveals a (...) different problem for probabilistic confirmation measures, a problem that is unlikely to lend itself to formal solution. (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)

A wide range of prominent epistemological theories include a principle of conservatism. Such principles take the fact that an agent currently holds a certain belief to constitute at least some measure of epistemic justification for her to maintain that belief. I examine the main arguments that have been made in conservatism's behalf, and find them unsound. Most interestingly, conservatism does not fall out of confirmational holism (the view that the justification of each of our beliefs is in part determined by (...) our other beliefs). I argue that conservatism is a mild form of dogmatism, and should be abandoned. (shrink)

Abstract:Skepticism about grounding is the view that ground-theoretic concepts shouldn’t be used in meta­physical theorizing. Possible reasons for adopting this attitude are numerous: perhaps grounding is unintelligible; or perhaps it’s never instantiated; or perhaps it’s just too heterogeneous to be theor­­­­­etically useful. Unfortunately, as currently pursued the debate between grounding enthusiasts and skeptics is insufficiently structured. This paper’s purpose is to impose a measure of conceptual rigor on the debate by offering an opinionated taxonomy of views with a reasonable claim (...) to being “skeptical.” I argue that carving up logical space into pro- and anti-grounding views isn’t especially helpful; rather, we should recognize various degrees of ground-theoretic involvement depending on how inflationary our understanding of the theoretical term ‘ground’ is. (shrink)

Much recent discussion in the philosophy of mathematics has concerned the indispensability argument—an argument which aims to establish the existence of abstract mathematical objects through appealing to the role that mathematics plays in empirical science. The indispensability argument is standardly attributed to W. V. Quine and Hilary Putnam. In this paper, I show that this attribution is mistaken. Quine's argument for the existence of abstract mathematical objects differs from the argument which many philosophers of mathematics ascribe to him. Contrary to (...) appearances, Putnam did not argue for the existence of abstract mathematical objects at all. I close by suggesting that attention to Quine and Putnam's writings reveals some neglected arguments for platonism which may be superior to the indispensability argument. (shrink)

The most immediately appealing model for formal constraints on degrees of belief is provided by probability theory, which tells us, for instance, that the probability of P can never be greater than that of (P v Q). But while this model has much intuitive appeal, many have been concerned to provide arguments showing that ideally rational degrees of belief would conform to the calculus of probabilities. The arguments most frequently used to make this claim plausible are the so-called "Dutch Book" (...) arguments. (shrink)

This essay focuses on three recent books on morality and virtue, Michael Slote's 'Morals from Motives', Rosalind Hursthouse's 'On Virtue Ethics', and Philippa Foot's 'Natural Goodness'. Slote proposes an "agent-based" ethical theory according to which the ethical status of acts is derivative from assessments of virtue. Following Foot's lead, Hursthouse aims to vindicate an ethical naturalism that explains human goodness on the basis of views about human nature. Both Hursthouse and Slote take virtue to be morally basic in a way (...) that Foot, to her credit, does not. We argue that all three views face a range of serious difficulties. (shrink)

We are quickly passing through the historical moment when people work in front of a single computer, dominated by a small CRT and focused on tasks involving only local information. Networked computers are becoming ubiquitous and are playing increasingly significant roles in our lives and in the basic infrastructure of science, business, and social interaction. For human-computer interaction o advance in the new millennium we need to better understand the emerging dynamic of interaction in which the focus task is no (...) longer confined to the desktop but reaches into a complex networked world of information and computer-mediated interactions. We think the theory of distributed cognition has a special role to play in understanding interactions between people and technologies, for its focus has always been on whole environments: what we really do in them and how we coordinate our activity in them. Distributed cognition provides a radical reorientation of how to think about designing and supporting human-computer interaction. As a theory it is specifically tailored to understanding interactions among people and technologies. In this article we propose distributed cognition as a new foundation for human-computer interaction, sketch an integrated research framework, and use selections from our earlier work to suggest how this framework can provide new opportunities in the design of digital work materials. (shrink)

Much contemporary epistemology is informed by a kind of confirmational holism, and a consequent rejection of the assumption that all confirmation rests on experiential certainties. Another prominent theme is that belief comes in degrees, and that rationality requires apportioning one's degrees of belief reasonably. Bayesian confirmation models based on Jeffrey Conditionalization attempt to bring together these two appealing strands. I argue, however, that these models cannot account for a certain aspect of confirmation that would be accounted for in any adequate (...) holistic confirmation theory. I then survey the prospects for constructing a formal epistemology that better accommodates holistic insights. (shrink)

Supervenience is necessary co-variation between two sets of entities. In the good old days, supervenience was considered a useful philosophical tool with a wide range of applications in the philosophy of mind, metaethics, epistemology, and elsewhere. In recent years, however, supervenience has fallen out of favor, giving place to grounding, realization, and other, more metaphysically “meaty”, notions. The emerging consensus is that there are principled reasons for which explanatory theses cannot be captured in terms of supervenience, or as the slogan (...) goes: “Supervenience Is Nonexplanatory”. While SIN is widely endorsed, it is far from clear what it amounts to and why we should believe it. In this paper, I will distinguish various theses that could be meant by it, and will argue that none of them is both interesting and plausible: on some interpretations of ‘explanatory’, we have no reason to believe that supervenience is unexplanatory, while on other interpretations, supervenience is indeed unexplanatory, but widely accepted textbook cases of explanatory relations come out as unexplanatory, too. This result raises doubts as to whether there is any interesting sense in which SIN is true, and suggests that the contemporary consensus about supervenience is mistaken. (shrink)

Here, I put forth a construal of P. F. Strawson’s so-called reversal, his view that what it means to be morally responsible is determined by our practices of holding responsible. The “concern-based” construal that I defend holds that what it means to be morally responsible is determined by the basic social concerns of which our practices are an expression. This construal, I argue, avoids a dilemma that Patrick Todd has recently raised for the reversal.

Political philosophers frequently claim that political ideals can provide normative guidance for unjust and otherwise nonideal circumstances. This is mistaken. This paper demonstrates that political ideals contribute nothing to our understanding of the normative principles we should satisfy amidst unjust or otherwise nonideal circumstances.

We take it that we can exercise doxastic agency by reasoning and by making judgments. We take it, that is, that we can actively make up our minds by reasoning and judging. On what I call the ‘Standard View’ this is so because judgment can yield belief. It is typical to take it that judgments yield beliefs by causing them. But on the resultant understanding of the Standard View, I argue, it is unclear how judgment could play its role in (...) doxastic agency in the way we take it to. I therefore offer an alternative understanding of how judgment yields belief. Drawing on Ryle I argue that when one comes to believe by judging the event which is one's judging is token identical to the event which is one's coming to believe. This paves the way for version of the Standard View capable of explaining how we can actively make up our minds despite that we cannot believe or come to believe at will. (shrink)

I argue that, unlike your brain, you are not composed of other things: you are simple. My argument centers on what I take to be an uncontroversial datum: for any pair of conscious beings, it is impossible for the pair itself to be conscious. Consider, for instance, the pair comprising you and me. You might pinch your arm and feel a pain. I might simultaneously pinch my arm and feel a qualitatively identical pain. But the pair we form would not (...) feel a thing.1 Pairs of people themselves are incapable of experience. Call this The Datum. What explains The Datum? I think the following exhaust the reasonable options. (1) Pairs of people lack a sufficient number of immediate parts. (2) Pairs of people lack immediate parts capable of standing in the right sorts of relations to each other and their environment. (3) Pairs of people lack immediate parts of the right nature. (4) Pairs of people are not structures (they are unstructured collections of their two immediate parts). (5) Some combination of (1) – (4). Finally, (6) pairs of people are not simple. (shrink)

When an entity ontologically depends on another entity, the former ‘presupposes’ or ‘requires’ the latter in some metaphysical sense. This paper defends a novel view, Dependence Deflationism, according to which ontological dependence is what I call an aggregative cluster concept: a concept which can be understood, but not fully analysed, as a ‘weighted total’ of constructive and modal relations. The view has several benefits: it accounts for clear cases of ontological dependence as well as the source of disagreement in controversial (...) ones; it gives a nice story about the evidential relevance of modal, mereological and set-theoretic facts to ontological dependence; and it makes sense of debates over the relation's formal properties. One important upshot of the deflationary account is that questions of ontological dependence are generally less deep and less interesting than usually thought. (shrink)

eSports practice designates a unique set of activities tethered to competitive, virtual environments, or worlds. This correlation between eSports practitioner and virtual world, we argue, is inadequately accounted for solely in terms of something physical or intellectual. Instead, we favor a perspective on eSports practice to be analyzed as a perceptual and embodied phenomenon. In this article, we present the phenomenological approach and focus on the embodied sensations of eSports practitioners as they cope with and perceive within their virtual worlds. (...) By approaching eSports phenomenologically, we uncover ways in which its unique forms of virtual involvement overlap with as well as differentiate themselves from traditional structures of embodiment. (shrink)

There have recently been a number of strong claims that normative considerations, broadly construed, influence many philosophically important folk concepts and perhaps are even a constitutive component of various cognitive processes. Many such claims have been made about the influence of such factors on our folk notion of causation. In this paper, we argue that the strong claims found in the recent literature on causal cognition are overstated, as they are based on one narrow type of data about a particular (...) type of causal cognition; the extant data do not warrant any wide-ranging conclusions about the pervasiveness of normative considerations in causal cognition. Of course, almost all empirical investigations involve some manner of ampliative inference, and so we provide novel empirical results demonstrating that there are types of causal cognition that do not seem to be influenced by moral considerations. (shrink)

Both Representation Theorem Arguments and Dutch Book Arguments support taking probabilistic coherence as an epistemic norm. Both depend on connecting beliefs to preferences, which are not clearly within the epistemic domain. Moreover, these connections are standardly grounded in questionable definitional/metaphysical claims. The paper argues that these definitional/metaphysical claims are insupportable. It offers a way of reconceiving Representation Theorem arguments which avoids the untenable premises. It then develops a parallel approach to Dutch Book Arguments, and compares the results. In each case (...) preferencedefects serve as a diagnostic tool, indicating purely epistemic defects. (shrink)

It is obvious that we would not want to demand that an agent' s beliefs at different times exhibit the same sort of consistency that we demand from an agent' s simultaneous beliefs; there' s nothing irrational about believing P at one time and not-P at another. Nevertheless, many have thought that some sort of coherence or stability of beliefs over time is an important component of epistemic rationality.

Why do people create extra representations to help them make sense of situations, diagrams, illustrations, instructions and problems? The obvious explanation— external representations save internal memory and com- putation—is only part of the story. I discuss seven ways external representations enhance cognitive power: they change the cost structure of the inferential landscape; they provide a structure that can serve as a shareable object of thought; they create persistent referents; they facilitate re- representation; they are often a more natural representation of (...) structure than mental representations; they facilitate the computation of more explicit encoding of information; they enable the construction of arbitrarily complex structure; and they lower the cost of controlling thought—they help coordinate thought. Jointly, these functions allow people to think more powerfully with external representations than without. They allow us to think the previously unthinkable. (shrink)

Dispositional essentialists argue that physical properties have their causal roles essentially. This is typically taken to mean that physical properties are identical to dispositions. I argue that this is untenable, and that we must instead say that properties bestow dispositions. I explore what it is for a property to have such a role essentially. Dispositional essentialists argue for their view by citing certain epistemological and metaphysical implications, and I appeal to these implications to place desiderata on the concept of essence (...) involved. I argue that the traditional modal theory of essence meets these desiderata, but that the resulting theory wrongly implies that certain dispositions essential to mass are essential to charge, thereby offering a new argument against modal theories of essence. I argue that dispositional essentialism requires a primitive notion of essence, and develop a primitivist theory based on Kit Fine's views. I show that the primitivist theory has all the virtues of the modal alternative, and none of the vices. I develop a novel way of thinking about the relationship between properties, laws and dispositions, and argue that it has distinct advantages over standard dispositional essentialist formulations. (shrink)