Introduction: Traditionally, empathy has been studied from two main perspectives: the theory-theory approach and the simulation theory approach. These theories claim that social emotions are fundamentally constituted by mind states in the brain. In contrast, classical phenomenology and recent research based on enactive theories consider empathy as the basic process of contacting others’ emotional experiences through direct bodily perception and sensation. Objective: This study aims to enrich knowledge of the empathic experience of pain by using an experimental phenomenological method. Method: (...) Implementing an experimental paradigm used in affective neuroscience, we exposed 28 healthy adults to a video of sportspersons suffering physical accidents while practicing extreme sports. Immediately after watching the video, each participant underwent a phenomenological interview to gather data on embodied, multi-layered dimensions (bodily sensations, emotions, and motivations) and temporal aspects of empathic experience. We also performed quantitative analyses of the phenomenological categories. Results: Experiential access to the other person’s painful experience involves four main-themes. Bodily resonance: participants felt a multiplicity of bodily, affective, and kinesthetic sensations. Attentional focus: some participants centered their attention more on their own personal discomfort and sensations of rejection, while others on the pain and suffering experienced by the sportspersons. Kinesthetic motivation: some participants experienced the feeling in their bodies to avoid or escape from watching the video, while others experienced the need to help the sportspersons avoid suffering any injury while practicing extreme sports. Temporality of experience: participants witnessed temporal fluctuations in their experiences, bringing intensity changes in their bodily resonance, attentional focus, and kinesthetic motivation. Finally, two experiential structures were found: one structure is self-centered empathic experience, characterized by bodily resonance, attentional focus centered on the participant’s own experience of seeing the sportsperson suffering, and self-protective kinesthetic motivation; the other structure is other-centered empathic experience, characterized by bodily resonance, attentional focus centered on the sportsperson, and prosocial kinesthetic motivation to help them. Discussion: We show how phenomenological data may contribute to comprehending empathy for pain in social neuroscience. In addition, we address the phenomenological aspect of the enactive approach to the three dimensions of embodiment of human consciousness, especially the intersubjective dimension. Also, based on our results, we suggest an extension of the enactive theory for non-interactive social experience. (shrink)

In consciousness studies there is a growing tendency to consider experience as (i) fundamentally affective and (ii) deeply interlinked with interoceptive and homeostatic bodily processes. However, this view still needs further development to be part of any rigorous theory of consciousness. To advance in this direction, we ask: (1) is there any affective type that is always present in consciousness?, (2) is it related to interoception and homeostasis?, and (3) what are its properties? Here we analyse and compare Jim Russell's (...) core affect and Thomas Fuchs' concept of vitality, and propose a more encompassing notion that subsumes both: continuous organismic sentience. It provides affirmative answers to questions 1 and 2, and, regarding question 3, a preliminary list of thirteen properties divided into ontological, phenomenological, and functional categories. This is the first of a series of studies that will systematically address different notions of a fundamental, homeostatically-rooted affective type, to achieve a rigorous, unified concept for consciousness science. (shrink)

The Texas borderlands have come to be increasingly important in the historical literature and in public opinion for the way that the region shapes national thought on race, borders, and ethnicity. With this increasing importance, it is pressing to examine the history of these issues in the region so that they may be accurately and insightfully deployed. This article contributes to the existing scholarship with a close discursive analysis of race in the booster materials, 1904-1941. The booster materials forge a (...) notion of race relations that borrows from tropes common across the West but is also informed by Jim Crow and the unique demands of the region. The booster materials forward a notion of race that is largely unique in Western boosterism, positing only two major characters, Mexicans and white Northerners. The figure of ‘the Mexican’ is drawn more as a part of nature than human society in that it shares the fundamental characteristics of the land, animals, and rivers of the region. Nature in the region is depicted as an adventitious, disorderly, and wasteful body that calls out for northern discipline. The ‘Northerners’ are figured as the ones who, through applying discipline to the natural resources of the area (land, water, and Mexicans) can bring reason, fertility, and profitable connection to the national economy. The consequences of this racial division are further explored in the article as they play out in schooling, religion, justice, beauty, leisure, and sport. (shrink)

En estas notas críticas presento y analizo el libro de Javier Vilanova Arias, Filosofía de sentido común, poniendo especial énfasis en la legitimidad con la que se utiliza el término «sentido común». Para ello, expongo la tesis de Vilanova y planteo la problemática de defender o no un uso reiterado del mismo, entendiendo este como una acomodación recursiva que puede entrar en conflicto con la pluralidad semántica del lenguaje.

Reseña del libro Filosofía de la mente, de Mariano Rodríguez González (Ediciones Complutense, 2021), publicada en el número 66 de la Revista de la Sociedad de Lógica, Metodología y Filosofía de la Ciencia en España.

Astrobiocentrism is a vision that places us in a scenario of confirmation of life in the universe, either as a second genesis or as an expansion of humanity in space. It manages to raise consistent arguments in relation to questions such as what would happen to knowledge if life were confirmed in the universe, how would this change the way we understand our place in the cosmos? Astrobiocentrism raises a series of reflections in the context of confirmed discovery, and it (...) develops concepts that work directly with what would happen after irrefutable evidence has been obtained that we are not alone in space. Unlike biocentrism or ecocentrism, the astrobiocentric view is not limited to the Earth-centric perspective, and for it incorporates a multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary understanding. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to make a reflection on the astrobiocentric issues related to the challenges and problems of the discovery of life in the universe and the expansion of mankind into space. Here we explore some aspects of the transition from biogeocentrism to astrobiocentrism, astrobiosemiotics, homo mensura, moral community, planetary sustainability and astrotheology. (shrink)

It is not yet clear which response behavior requires self-regulatory effort in the moral dilemma task. Previous research has proposed that utilitarian responses require cognitive control, but subsequent studies have found inconsistencies with the empirical predictions of that hypothesis. In this paper we treat participants’ sensitivity to utilitarian gradients as a measure of performance. We confronted participants (N = 82) with a set of five dilemmas evoking a gradient of mean utilitarian responses in a 4-point scale and collected data on (...) heart rate variability and on utilitarian responses. We found positive correlations between tonic and phasic HRV and sensitivity to the utilitarian gradient in the high tonic group, but not in the low tonic group. Moreover, the low tonic group misplaced a scenario with a selfish incentive at the high end of the gradient. Results suggest that performance is represented by sensitivity correlated with HRV and accompanied with a reasonable placement of individual scenarios within the gradient. (shrink)

It has often been noticed that conciliatory views of disagreement are "self-undermining" in a certain way: advocates of such views cannot consistently maintain them when other philosophers disagree. This leads to apparent problems of instability and even inconsistency. Does self-undermining, then, show conciliationism untenable? If so, the untenablity would extend not only to almost all views of disagreement, but to a wide range of other views supporting what one might call epistemic modesty: roughly, the idea that getting evidence that one (...) has made an epistemic error in arriving at one’s opinion may require adjusting that opinion. This paper argues that the phenomenon of self-undermining does not disclose any defect in views mandating epistemic modesty. Instead, it highlights an uncomfortable but natural consequence of reflecting on one's own possible epistemic imperfections, a sort of reflection that tends to cause epistemic ideals to conflict. (shrink)

When do the folk think that material objects persist? Many metaphysicians have wanted a view which fits with folk intuitions, yet there is little agreement about what the folk intuit. I provide a range of empirical evidence which suggests that the folk operate with a teleological view of persistence: the folk tend to intuit that a material object survives alterations when its function is preserved. Given that the folk operate with a teleological view of persistence, I argue for a debunking (...) explanation of folk intuitions, concluding that metaphysicians should dismiss folk intuitions as tied into a benighted view of nature. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to develop an argument against metaphysical debates about the existence of human races. I argue that the ontology of race is underdetermined by both empirical and non-empirical evidence due to a plurality of equally permissible candidate meanings of "race." Furthermore, I argue that this underdetermination leads to a deflationist diagnosis according to #hich disputes about the existence of human races are non-substantive verbal disputes. $hile this diagnosis resembles general deflationist strategies in contemporary metaphysics" I (...) show that my argument does not presuppose controversial metametaphysical assumptions. (shrink)

Actualists of a certain stripe—dispositionalists—hold that metaphysical modality is grounded in the powers of actual things. Roughly: p is possible iff something has, or some things have, the power to bring it about that p. Extant critiques of dispositionalism focus on its material adequacy, and question whether there are enough powers to account for all the possibilities we intuitively want to countenance. For instance, it seems possible that none of the actual contingent particulars ever existed, but it is impossible to (...) explain this by appealing to the powers of some actual thing or things to bring it about. I argue instead that dispositionalism, in the simple form championed by its proponents, is formally inadequate. Dispositionalists interpret the modal operators as simple existential claims about powers, but if we interpret the operators that way, the resulting system of modal logic is too weak to capture metaphysical modality. I argue that we can modify the standard dispositionalist interpretations of the operators to secure formal adequacy, but at the cost of accepting that not all modality is grounded in powers. This, I shall suggest, is not a bad thing—the resulting theory still has powers at its core and has certain attractive features, in addition to formal adequacy, that the standard theory lacks. (shrink)

In the first half of this paper, I argue that essential properties are intrinsic and that this permits a modal analysis of essence that is immune the sort of objections raised by Fine. In the second half, I argue that intrinsic properties collectively have a certain structure and that this accounts for some observations about essences: that things are essentially determinate; that things often have properties within a certain range essentially; and that the essential properties of things are their core (...) properties. (shrink)

This paper consider Prior's connective Tonk from a particular bilateralist perspective. I show that there is a natural perspective from which we can see Tonk and its ilk as perfectly well-defined pieces of vocabulary; there is no need for restrictions to bar things like Tonk.

The aim of this article is to discuss the relation between indigenous and scientific kinds on the basis of contemporary ethnobiological research. I argue that ethnobiological accounts of taxonomic convergence-divergence patters challenge common philosophical models of the relation between folk concepts and natural kinds. Furthermore, I outline a positive model of taxonomic convergence-divergence patterns that is based on Slater's [2014] notion of “stable property clusters” and Franklin-Hall's [2014] discussion of natural kinds as “categorical bottlenecks.” Finally, I argue that this model (...) is not only helpful for understanding the relation between indigenous and scientific kinds but also makes substantial contributions to contemporary debates about natural kinds.to contemporary debates about natural kinds. (shrink)

Xenophobia is conceptually distinct from racism. Xenophobia is also distinct from nativism. Furthermore, theories of racism are largely ensconced in nationalized narratives of racism, often influenced by the black-white binary, which obscures xenophobia and shelters it from normative critiques. This paper addresses these claims, arguing for the first and last, and outlining the second. Just as philosophers have recently analyzed the concept of racism, clarifying it and pinpointing why it’s immoral and the extent of its moral harm, so we will (...) analyze xenophobia and offer a pluralist account of xenophobia, with important implications for racism. This analysis is guided by the discussion of racism in recent moral philosophy, social ontology, and research in the psychology of racism and implicit attitudes. (shrink)

This is a story about three of my favorite philosophers—Donnellan, Russell, and Frege—about how Donnellan’s concept of having in mind relates to ideas of the others, and especially about an aspect of Donnellan’s concept that has been insufficiently discussed: how this epistemic state can be transmitted from one person to another.

Orthodoxy has it that knowledge is a composite of belief and non-mental factors. However, Timothy Williamson suggests that orthodoxy implies that the concept of belief is acquired before the concept of knowledge, whereas developmental data suggest the reverse. More recently, Jennifer Nagel reviews the psychological evidence, building a psychological case that the concept of knowledge emerges prior to belief. I assess the psychological state of the art and find support for the opposite conclusion. Overall the empirical evidence supports the orthodox (...) view that the concept of belief is prior to the concept of knowledge. (shrink)

Compare your pain when immersing your hand in freezing water and your pleasure when you taste your favourite wine. The relationship seems obvious. Your pain experience is unpleasant, aversive, negative, and bad. Your experience of the wine is pleasant, attractive, positive, and good. Pain and pleasure are straightforwardly opposites. Or that, at any rate, can seem beyond doubt, and to leave little more to be said. But, in fact, it is not beyond doubt. And, true or false, it leaves a (...) good deal more to be said: about the nature of sensory affect; its relations to perception, motivation, and rationality; its value; and the mechanisms underlying it. Much is said about these matters in the contributions that follow. Here, in this introductory essay, we map the dialectical landscape and locate our contributors’ papers within it. (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.

For Kant, any authentic moral demands are wholly distinct from the demands of prudence. This has led critics to complain that Kantian moral demands are incompatible with our human nature as happiness-seekers. Kant’s defenders have pointed out, correctly, that Kant can and does assert that it is permissible, at least in principle, to pursue our own happiness. But this response does not eliminate the worry that a life organized around the pursuit of virtue might turn out to be one from (...) which we cannot expect any of this (permissible) happiness. To address this worry, Kant would need to establish that there is a kind of harmony between virtue and our own happiness that can give us confidence that aiming at morality does not require us to abandon our hope for happiness in this life. This paper aims to show that Kant—building on insights from Rousseau that Kant identifies with Cynicism—does offer an account of such a harmony between virtue and worldly happiness. (shrink)

A recurring claim in a number of behavioural, cognitive and neuro-scientific literatures is that there is, or must be, a unidimensional ‘common currency’ in which the values of different available options are represented. There is striking variety in the quantities or properties that have been proposed as determinants of the ordering in motivational strength. Among those seriously suggested are pain and pleasure, biological fitness, reward and reinforcement, and utility among economists, who have regimented the notion of utility in a variety (...) of ways, some of them incompatible. This topic deserves philosophical attention for at least the following reasons. Repeated invocation of the ‘common currency’ idiom isn’t merely terminological coincidence because most of the claims are competing explanations either of manifest pattern in choices, or of order in the processes producing choice. We can’t suppose that the different currency claims within each area are compatible, because there are significant obstacles to identifying pairs of members of either the ‘pattern’ or ‘process’ group. There are, finally, seriously opposed positions about the relationships between the pattern facts and the process facts. There are philosophical positions both favouring and opposing a common currency. But direct consideration of the abstract relationships between claims about common currencies across scientific settings, and the arguments for and against these claims, is relatively rare. There is, though, much of philosophical interest to be found here. (shrink)

Corcoran’s 27 entries in the 1999 second edition of Robert Audi’s Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge UP]. -/- ancestral, axiomatic method, borderline case, categoricity, Church (Alonzo), conditional, convention T, converse (outer and inner), corresponding conditional, degenerate case, domain, De Morgan, ellipsis, laws of thought, limiting case, logical form, logical subject, material adequacy, mathematical analysis, omega, proof by recursion, recursive function theory, scheme, scope, Tarski (Alfred), tautology, universe of discourse. -/- The entire work is available online free at more than (...) one website. Paste the whole URL. http://archive.org/stream/RobertiAudi_The.Cambridge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy/Robert.Audi_The.Cambrid ge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy -/- The 2015 third edition will be available soon. Before you think of buying it read some reviews on Amazon and read reviews of its competition: For example, my review of the 2008 Oxford Companion to Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Logic,29:3,291-292. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01445340701300429 -/- Some of the entries have already been found to be flawed. For example, Tarski’s expression ‘materially adequate’ was misinterpreted in at least one article and it was misused in another where ‘materially correct’ should have been used. The discussion provides an opportunity to bring more flaws to light. -/- Acknowledgements: Each of these entries was presented at meetings of The Buffalo Logic Dictionary Project sponsored by The Buffalo Logic Colloquium. The members of the colloquium read drafts before the meetings and were generous with corrections, objections, and suggestions. Usually one 90-minute meeting was devoted to one entry although in some cases, for example, “axiomatic method”, took more than one meeting. Moreover, about half of the entries are rewrites of similarly named entries in the 1995 first edition. Besides the help received from people in Buffalo, help from elsewhere was received by email. We gratefully acknowledge the following: José Miguel Sagüillo, John Zeis, Stewart Shapiro, Davis Plache, Joseph Ernst, Richard Hull, Concha Martinez, Laura Arcila, James Gasser, Barry Smith, Randall Dipert, Stanley Ziewacz, Gerald Rising, Leonard Jacuzzo, George Boger, William Demopolous, David Hitchcock, John Dawson, Daniel Halpern, William Lawvere, John Kearns, Ky Herreid, Nicolas Goodman, William Parry, Charles Lambros, Harvey Friedman, George Weaver, Hughes Leblanc, James Munz, Herbert Bohnert, Robert Tragesser, David Levin, Sriram Nambiar, and others. -/- . (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists alike have argued recently that relatively abstract beliefs or cognitive categories like those regarding race can influence the perceptual experience of relatively low-level visual features like color or lightness. Some of the proposed best empirical evidence for this claim comes from a series of experiments in which White faces were consistently judged as lighter than equiluminant Black faces, even for racially ambiguous faces that were labeled ‘White’ as opposed to ‘Black’ (Levin and Banaji 2006). The latter result (...) is considered especially indicative of cognitive penetration, based on the reasoning that the relevant distortions were a function of lexical labeling, and hence the effect must have been mediated by categorization at the cognitive level. I argue that this reasoning is flawed, and that the assumptions on which it relies are questionable on both empirical and theoretical grounds. I propose an alternative, low-level explanation of the phenomena, which I argue is empirically more plausible and abductively preferable to the cognitive-penetration account. The upshot is that cognitively impenetrable perceptual systems may be psychologically more plastic and hence philosophically more significant than is nowadays commonly assumed. (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.

Many epistemologists hold that an agent can come to justifiably believe that p is true by seeing that it appears that p is true, without having any antecedent reason to believe that visual impressions are generally reliable. Certain reliabilists think this, at least if the agent’s vision is generally reliable. And it is a central tenet of dogmatism (as described by Pryor (2000) and Pryor (2004)) that this is possible. Against these positions it has been argued (e.g. by Cohen (2005) (...) and White (2006)) that this violates some principles from probabilistic learning theory. To see the problem, let’s note what the dogmatist thinks we can learn by paying attention to how things appear. (The reliabilist says the same things, but we’ll focus on the dogmatist.) Suppose an agent receives an appearance that p, and comes to believe that p. Letting Ap be the proposition that it appears to the agent that p, and → be the material implication, we can say that the agent learns that p, and hence is in a position to infer Ap → p, once they receive the evidence Ap.1 This is surprising, because we can prove the following. (shrink)

There is a tension between the reasonable desire not to be judgmental of other people’s behaviour or character, and the moral necessity of making negative judgments in some cases. I sketch a way in which we might accommodate both, via an evaluation of the good of reputation and the ethics of judgment of other people’s character and behaviour. I argue that a good reputation is a highly valuable good for its bearer, akin to a property right, and not to be (...) damaged without serious reason deriving from the demands of justice and the common welfare. Rash judgment wrongfully damages reputation and is sometimes a seriously immoral act. Rashness is not merely about lack of evidence, but involves lack of charity and is to be avoided even in some cases where the evidence of bad character or action is epistemically sufficient for judgment. I argue that the desirability of a good name for its holder, whether the reputation is deserved or not, means that in all but a relatively narrow range of cases it is always wrong to think badly of someone, even if they are bad. (shrink)

The authors outline the way in which documents as social objects have evolved from their earliest forms to the electronic documents of the present day. They note that while certain features have remained consistent, processes regarding document authentication are seriously complicated by the easy reproducibility of digital entities. The authors argue that electronic documents also raise significant questions concerning the theory of ‘documentality’ advanced by Maurizio Ferraris, especially given the fact that interactive documents seem to blur the distinctions between the (...) static documents (or ‘inscriptions’) which form Ferraris’s starting point, and dynamic software processes. The authors argue further that the Ferraris view as applied to legal documents is flawed because of the fact that courts may treat contractual obligations as enduring even in spite of a complete absence of enduring inscriptions. Finally, the authors note that traces in brains, another important family of inscriptions (as Ferraris conceives them), differ significantly from genuinely documentary inscriptions by their lack of public inspectability. (shrink)

O’Regan and Noë’s sensorimotor approach rejects the old-fashioned view that perceptual experience in humans depends solely on the activation of internal representations. Reflecting a wealth of empirical work, for example active vision, the approach suggests that perceiving is, instead, a matter of bodily exploration of the outside environment. To this end, the approach says the perceiver must deploy knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies, the ways sense input changes with movement by the perceiver or object perceived. Clark has observed that the approach (...) faces a challenge accounting for the experience of temporal duration, since event-like properties cannot be characterised by reference to the sensory consequences of possible movements. This paper argues that the account can best be shored up by emphasising, more than Noë does, the dependence of perceptual experience, in general, on temporally extended, organismic interaction with the outside environment. The paper argues, moreover, that an ‘extensionalist’ account of temporal experience could help make sense of object experience, which is itself, plausibly, an experience of temporal duration. (shrink)

According to the most popular theories of intentionality, a family of theories we will refer to as “functional intentionality,” a machine can have genuine intentional states so long as it has functionally characterizable mental states that are causally hooked up to the world in the right way. This paper considers a detailed description of a robot that seems to meet the conditions of functional intentionality, but which falls victim to what I call “the composition problem.” One obvious way to escape (...) the problem (arguably, the only way) is if the robot can be shown to be a moral patient – to deserve a particular moral status. If so, it isn’t clear how functional intentionality could remain plausible (something like “phenomenal intentionality” would be required). Finally, while it would have seemed that a reasonable strategy for establishing the moral status of intelligent machines would be to demonstrate that the machine possessed genuine intentionality, the composition argument suggests that the order of precedence is reversed: The machine must first be shown to possess a particular moral status before it is a candidate for having genuine intentionality. (shrink)

How should we account for the extraordinary regularity in the world? Humeans and Non-Humeans sharply disagree. According to Non-Humeans, the world behaves in an extraordinarily regular way because of certain necessary connections in nature. However, Humeans have thought that Non-Humean views are metaphysically objectionable. In particular, there are two general metaphysical principles that Humeans have found attractive that are incompatible with all existing versions of Non-Humeanism. My goal in this paper is to develop a novel version of Non-Humeanism that is (...) consistent with (and even entails) both of these general metaphysical principles. By endorsing such a view, one can have the explanatory benefits of Non-Humeanism while at the same time avoiding two of the major metaphysical objections towards Non-Humeanism. (shrink)

In this thesis I offer an interpretation of Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism. I argue against interpreting Schopenhauer’s pessimism as if it were merely a matter of temperament, and I resist the urge to find a single standard argument for pessimism in Schopenhauer’s work. Instead, I treat Schopenhauer’s pessimism as inherently variegated, composed of several distinct but interrelated pessimistic positions, each of which is supported by its own argument. I begin by examining Schopenhauer’s famous argument that willing necessitates suffering, which I defend (...) against the misrepresentative interpretation advocated by Ivan Soll. I also offer a metaphysical reading of Schopenhauer’s claim that no amount happiness can compensate for the mere fact of suffering, based upon his negative conception of happiness. I proceed by analysing Schopenhauer’s criticisms of two prominent optimists, Leibniz and Rousseau. I attempt to salvage something of Schopenhauer’s counterargument against Leibniz that this is the worse of all possible worlds, and I also examine Schopenhauer’s claim that the optimistic metaphysics of a priori rationalistic philosophy cannot cope with the evidence of meaningless suffering. In the case of Rousseau, I interpret Schopenhauer’s brief objection to Rousseau’s assumption of original goodness, by means of an examination of Schopenhauer’s conception of the contrary doctrine, original sin. Next I consider the metaphysics of Schopenhauer’s account of eternal justice. After defending it against a number of objections, I argue that the nature of his version of eternal justice, which he admits constitutes a justification for suffering, does not conflict with the fact that he so strongly condemns Leibniz’s and Rousseau’s optimistic justifications for suffering. Finally I assess whether and to what extent Schopenhauer’s ethics of salvation are either pessimistic or optimistic. I conclude that the mere fact that salvation is possible is not necessarily a cause for optimism, but that Schopenhauer’s doctrine of salvation is made partly optimistic by the higher form of cognition that he describes as part of it. I also argue that Schopenhauer’s views on the essentially mystical nature of the state of salvation ultimately commit him to being neither positively optimistic nor positively pessimistic about salvation. I conclude overall with some brief remarks about the meaning of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, and how in spite of its diverse nature, it is able to lay down a singular challenge to all future philosophers concerned with the question of suffering. (shrink)

Musical works change. Bruckner revised his Eighth Symphony. Ella Fitzgerald and many other artists have made it acceptable to sing the jazz standard “All the Things You Are” without its original verse. If we accept that musical works genuinely change in these ways, a puzzle arises: why can’t I change Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony? More generally, why are some individuals in a privileged position when it comes to changing musical works and other artifacts, such as novels, films, and games? I give (...) a view of musical works that helps to answer these questions. Musical works, on this view, are created abstract objects with no parts. The paradigmatic changes that musical works undergo are socially determined normative changes in how they should be performed. Due to contingent social practices, Bruckner, but not I, can change how his symphony should be performed. Were social practices radically different, I would be able to change his symphony. This view extends to abstract artifacts beyond music, including novels, films, words, games, and corporations. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 4, Page 373-412, Fall 2023.

A critical examination of the Reflection principle in Bayesian epistemology, and of the diachronic Dutch-book-style arguments that have been invoked to support Reflection and Conditionalization.

This article surveys different forms of emergence, distinguishing them from each other by means of their relationship to deducibility conceived as Kimian functional reduction.

We start by presenting three different views that jointly imply that every person has many conscious beings in their immediate vicinity, and that the number greatly varies from person to person. We then present and assess an argument to the conclusion that how confident someone should be in these views should sensitively depend on how massive they happen to be. According to the argument, sometimes irreducibly de se observations can be powerful evidence for or against believing in metaphysical theories.

A spirited reading of Derrida’s view of ethics as transcendental and performative.

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)

The eponymous dialogue presents the sophist as a figure who defies definition, and those difficulties are attributed to the conception of the image. Ultimately, the sophist is defined as a species of image maker. The image, however, which is important throughout the Platonic corpus as a metaphor, an analogy, and a metaphysical concept as well, receives in the Sophist little clarification or definition apart from whatever may be inferred from the division of image making arts. In the Sophist, the sophist (...) escapes definition as in no other dialogue, rendering even the concluding division one that makes the distinction of the sophist from the philosopher problematic, if not impossible. The paper explores how the dialogue problematizes and rethinks the metaphysics of the image, as compared to its use in dialogues such as the Phaedo and the Republic, pointing to a refinement in understanding the relation of judgment to knowledge and appearance to reality. (shrink)

Recent objections to epistemic permissivism have a metaepistemic flavor. Impermissivists argue that their view best accounts for connections between rationality, planning and deference. Impermissivism is also taken to best explain the value of rational belief and normative assessment. These objections pose a series of metaepistemic explanatory challenges for permissivism. In this paper, I illustrate how permissivists might meet their explanatory burdens by developing two permissivist metaepistemic views which fare well against the explanatory challenges.

One of the central limitations of sensory substitution devices (SSDs) is their inability to reproduce the non-sensory feelings that are normally associated with visual experiences, especially hedonic and aesthetic responses. This limitation is sometimes reported to cause SSD users frustration. To make matters worse, it is unclear that improvements in acuity, bandwidth, or training will resolve the issue. Yet, if SSDs are to actually reproduce visual experience in its fullness, it seems that the reproduction of non-sensory feelings will be of (...) some importance. We offer a novel solution. Researchers can produce hedonic and aesthetic responses by eliciting these feelings artificially, pairing distal objects that should be pleasurable to pleasurable stimulus outputs from the SSD. We outline two strategies for accomplishing this: first, by means of a prefixed, hardwired, association of pleasant distal objects to pleasant stimulus outputs from the SSD; second, by means of a flexible, feedback-based association which creates associations based on a subject-directed matching of distal objects to patterns of stimuli from the SSD which the subject takes to have the corresponding hedonic properties. We evaluate some problems with both strategies, and we argue that the feedback-based strategy is more promising. Researchers can use this strategy to help the blind, allowing them to take pleasure in the objects they perceive using SSDs. (shrink)