There are many different oughts. There is a moral ought, a prudential ought, an epistemic ought, the legal ought, the ought of etiquette, and so on. These oughts can prescribe incompatible actions. What I morally ought to do may be different from what I self-interestedly ought to do. Philosophers have claimed that these conflicts are resolved by an authoritative ought, or by facts about what one ought to do simpliciter or all-things-considered. However, the only coherent notion of an ought simpliciter (...) has preposterous first-order normative commitments. It is more reasonable to reject the ought simpliciter in favor of the form of normative pluralism advocated in (Tiffany 2007). (shrink)

It has long been widely agreed that some concepts can be possessed only by those who have undergone a certain type of phenomenal experience. Orthodoxy among contemporary philosophers of mind has it that these phenomenal concepts provide the key to understanding many disputes between physicalists and their opponents, and in particular offer an explanation of Mary’s predicament in the situation exploited by Frank Jackson's knowledge argument. I reject the orthodox view; I deny that there are phenomenal concepts. My arguments exploit (...) the sort of considerations that are typically used to motivate externalism about mental content. Although physicalists often appeal to phenomenal concepts to defend their view against the knowledge argument, I argue that this is a mistake. The knowledge argument depends on phenomenal concepts; if there are no phenomenal concepts, then the knowledge argument fails. (shrink)

Is there one univocal or generic notion of ground? Monists answer yes, while pluralists answer no. Pluralists argue that monism cannot meet plausible constraints on an adequate theory of ground. My aim in this paper is to articulate a monist theory of ground that can satisfy the pluralist constraints in a way that leaves the pluralists with no reasons not to endorse the monist picture of ground. I do this by adopting a tripartite conception of ground and then showing that (...) it has the resources to vindicate monism while satisfying the pluralist constraints on a theory of ground. (shrink)

Mengzi states that our human nature consists of our ability to feel compassion, disdain, respect, and (dis-)approval: all human beings have them. But he also states that we lose these four emotional capacities if we don’t reflect on or attend to them. There is an apparent contradiction in saying that all humans have them, but some have lost them. This essay offers a close reading of Mengzi’s phrase “to lose it” that helps explain away this appearance of contradiction. In doing (...) so, Mengzi is interpreted to be offering an ethics of attention about how we should attend to ourselves and others selectively to have a functional social life. (shrink)

Mark Schroeder has argued that all reasonable forms of inconsistency of attitude consist of having the same attitude type towards a pair of inconsistent contents (A-type inconsistency). We suggest that he is mistaken in this, offering a number of intuitive examples of pairs of distinct attitudes types with consistent contents which are intuitively inconsistent (B-type inconsistency). We further argue that, despite the virtues of Schroeder's elegant A-type expressivist semantics, B-type inconsistency is in many ways the more natural choice in developing (...) an expressivist account of moral discourse. We close by showing how to adapt ordinary formality-based accounts of logicality to define a B-type account of logical inconsistency and distinguish it from both semantic and pragmatic inconsistency. In sum, we provide a roadmap of how to develop a successful B-type expressivism. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have offered quasi-perceptual theories of desire, according to which to desire something is roughly to “see” it as having value or providing reasons. These are offered as alternatives to the more traditional Humean Theory of Motivation, which denies that desires have a representational aspect. This paper examines the various considerations offered by advocates to motivate quasi-perceptualism. It argues that Humeanism is in fact able to explain the same data that the quasi-perceptualist can explain, and in one (...) case the Humean explanation is superior. Quasi-perceptual accounts of desire, the paper concludes, are for the most part unmotivated. (shrink)

Thomas Reid (1710–96) is increasingly being seen as a highly significant philosopher and a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. This new edition of Reid's classic philosophical text in the philosophy of mind at long last gives scholars a complete, critically edited text of the Inquiry. The critical text is based on the fourth life-time edition (1785). A selection of related documents showing the development of Reid's thought, textual notes, bibliographical details of previous editions and a full introduction by the (...) editor makes this an important contribution to the study of this increasingly respected philosopher. -/- Key Features - Complete, critically edited text of the Inquiry accompanied by a judicious selection of manuscript evidence relating to its composition - Comprehensive Introduction providing an historical and philosophical account of the formation of the Inquiry - Detailed textual notes which include bibliographical details and allusions, translations, references to secondary literature and selected passages from Reid's manuscripts. (shrink)

It has long been recognised that great art, whether visual art, literature or music, has a special capacity to “live on” – to endure – long after the moment of its creation. Thus, our world of art today includes, for example, ancient Mesopotamian sculpture, Shakespeare’s plays, and the music of medieval times. How does this capacity to endure operate? Or to ask that question another way: what does “endure” mean in the case of art? The Renaissance concluded that art endures (...) because it is timeless – impervious to change, “eternal”, “immortal” – and this solution, which was ratified without question by Enlightenment philosophers of art such as Hume and Kant, still lingers on in some quarters today. But developments since the nineteenth century have gravely weakened the credibility of the proposition that art is immortal, and the idea is now effectively dead. This leaves us with a major dilemma: if art is not impervious to change, how exactly does it endure? If the time-honoured solution of immortality is no longer viable, what alternative explanation can we find to replace it? -/- This paper explains why immortality is dead, describes our contemporary dilemma, and briefly canvasses a possible solution. (shrink)

Are there cases in which agents ought to give up on satisfying an obligation, so that they can avoid a temptation which will lead them to freely commit an even more significant wrong? Actualists say yes. Possibilists say no. Both positions have absurd consequences. This paper argues that common-sense morality is committed to an inconsistent triad of principles. This inconsistency becomes acute when we consider the cases that motivate the possibilism–actualism debate. Thus, the absurd consequences of both solutions are unsurprising: (...) any proposed solution will have consequences incompatible with common moral practice. Arguments for denying one of the principles are considered and rejected. The paper then suggests that the inconsistent moral commitments originate in an inconsistent picture of human agency. Revisionary pictures of human agency are considered. It is argued that a quasi-Platonic picture of agency, similar to that advocated by Gary Watson 1977, is the most promising. (shrink)

Donald Preziosi, an influential modern voice in art history, argues that his discipline has proved ‘particularly effective in naturalizing and validating the very idea of art as a “universal” human phenomenon’. If this claim is true, it would mean, in my view, that art history has done a serious disservice to our modern understanding of art. For as the French art theorist, André Malraux, points out, the idea of art is definitely not a universal human phenomenon, there being ample evidence (...) that the vast majority of cultures throughout history, have not regarded their painting, sculpture, poetry, and music as ‘art’. -/- Today, of course, we willingly regard many works from non-European and early cultures as art and welcome them into art museums, but this is a recent development, barely more than a century old. This paper examines certain major issues arising from this situation, including: when and why the idea of art arose; the radical change in the word’s meaning that occurred after Manet; how this change led to the inclusion of many non-European and ancient works in our modern world of art; and the inadequate responses to these developments by modern philosophers of art and art historians. (shrink)

Examines (1) the birth of art-as-beauty in Western art and the concomitant birth of the idea of art itself; (2) the death of art-of-beauty from Manet onwards. Also looks briefly at some major implications for aesthetics (the philosophy of art). Paper includes some relevant reproductions.

Early discussions of ?climate justice? have been dominated by economists rather than political philosophers. More recently, analytical liberal political philosophers have joined the debate. However, the philosophical discussion of climate justice remains in its early stages. This paper considers one promising approach based on human rights, which has been advocated recently by several theorists, including Simon Caney, Henry Shue and Tim Hayward. A basic argument supporting the claim that anthropogenic climate change violates human rights is presented. Four objections to this (...) argument are examined: the ?future persons? objection; the ?risk? objection; the ?collective causation? objection; and the ?demandingness? objection. This critical examination leads to a more detailed specification and defence of the claim that anthropogenic climate change violates human rights. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Contemporary relativists often see their view as contributing to a semantic/post-semantic account of linguistic data about disagreement and retraction. I offer an independently motivated metasemantic account of the same data, that also handles a number of cases and empirical results that are problematic for the relativist. The key idea is that the content of assertions and beliefs is determined in part by facts about other times, including times after the assertion is made or the belief is formed. On this (...) temporal externalist view, speaker behaviours such as retraction of previous assertions play a role in making it the case that a past utterance has a given meaning. (shrink)

Ambivalence is most naturally characterized as a case of conflicting desires. In most cases, an agent’s intrinsic desires conflict contingently: there is some possible world in which both desires would be satisfied. This paper argues, though, that there are cases in which intrinsic desires necessarily conflict—i.e., the desires are not jointly satisfiable in any possible world. Desiring a challenge for its own sake is a paradigm case of such a desire. Ambivalence of this sort in an agent’s desires creates special (...) problems for the project of reducing all facts about an agent’s desires to facts about his or her preferences over options. If this reductive project fails, there is reason to suspect that the Decision Theory cannot give us a complete theory of Humean rationality. (shrink)

The idea that experts (especially scientific experts) play a privileged role in determining the meanings of our words and the contents of our concepts has become commonplace since the work of Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge, and others in the 1970s. But if experts have the power to determine what our words mean, they can do so responsibly or irresponsibly, from good motivations or bad, justly or unjustly, with good or bad effects. This paper distinguishes three families of metasemantic views based (...) on their attitudes towards bad behaviour by meaning-fixing experts, and draws a series of distinctions relevant for the normative evaluation of meaning-determining actions. (shrink)

Many authors have proposed that grounding is closely related to metaphysical laws. However, we argue that no existing theory of metaphysical laws is sufficiently general. In this paper we develop a general theory of grounding laws, proposing that they are generative relations between pluralities of propositions and propositions. We develop the account in an essentialist language; this allows us to state precisely the sense in which grounding might be reduced to laws. We then put the theory to use in showing (...) how moral laws can play a role in grounding particular moral facts, in defending monism about ground, and in showing in what sense there is no gap between the grounds and the grounded. Finally, we make a novel proposal about what grounds facts about ground. (shrink)

This paper discusses varieties of normative phenomena, ranging from morality, to epistemic justification, to the rules of chess. It canvases a number of distinctions among these different normative phenomena. The most significant distinction is between formal and authoritative normativity. The prior is the normativity exhibited by any standard one can meet or fail to meet. The latter is the sort of normativity associated with phenomena like the "all-things-considered" ought. The paper ends with a brief discussion of reasons for skepticism about (...) authoritative normativity. (shrink)

For Malraux, modernity in art is not only about modern art; it is also about the birth of what he aptly terms “the first universal world of art.” This event was a consequence of the process of metamorphosis which is central to Malraux’s account of the relationship between art and time. The article explains this event, noting also that modern aesthetics has not provided an explanation. (This is the English version of the final which will be in French.).

In this paper, I argue that forgiveness is a morally appropriate response only when it is grounded in the wrongdoer’s demonstration of genuine remorse, their offer of a sincere apology, and, where appropriate, acts of recompense and behavioral change. I then respond to John Kleinig’s suggestion (in his paper “Forgiveness and Unconditionality”) that when an apology is not forthcoming, there are at least three additional grounds that, when motivated by virtues such as love and compassion, could nevertheless render “unconditional forgiveness” (...) a morally laudable option. I argue that such grounds could indeed constitute or result in laudable responses to wrongdoing, but only if they are not conceived of or described in terms of forgiveness. (shrink)

It has recently been alleged that expressivism cannot account for the obvious fact that normative sentences and their negations express inconsistent kinds of attitudes. I explain how the expressivist can respond to this objection. I offer an account of attitudinal inconsistency that takes it to be a combination of descriptive and normative relations. The account I offer to explain these relations relies on a combination of functionalism about normative judgments and expressivism about the norms governing them. It holds that the (...) inconsistency of normative judgments is primitive. One potential problem for this view is that the large number of normative primitives that the expressivist will allegedly need to accept will render the view grossly unparsimonious. In defending this thesis, I suggest that it is a mistake to hold the lack of normative parsimony of expressivism against its core psychological claims. (shrink)

In earlier work, I predicted that we would probably not be able to determine the colors of the dinosaurs. I lost this epistemic bet against science in dramatic fashion when scientists discovered that it is possible to draw inferences about dinosaur coloration based on the microstructure of fossil feathers (Vinther et al., 2008). This paper is an exercise in philosophical error analysis. I examine this episode with two questions in mind. First, does this case lend any support to epistemic optimism (...) about historical science? Second, under what conditions is it rational to make predictions about what questions scientists will or will not be able answer? In reply to the first question, I argue that the recent work on the colors of the dinosaurs matters less to the debate about the epistemology of historical science than it might seem. In reply to the second question, I argue that it is difficult to specify a policy that would rule out the failed bet without also being too conservative. (shrink)

It has come to be widely accepted that jus post bellum includes responsibilities to rebuild. Consequently, duties to establish a sustainable peace are increasingly defined in terms of duties to protect and promote international human rights, including duties to effectively investigate human rights violations, to ensure access to effective remedy, and to transform institutional and legal contexts that have facilitated or sustained human abuse. But what are investigations by transitional bodies seeking when they take on these tasks? Often, investigators present (...) themselves as seeking the truth and claim value for their findings based on having produced a better description or explanation than was antecedently available. But is truth worth pursuing for its own sake in transitions from conflict or must it contribute to some other goal to be valuable? In what follows I argue that the value of truth in transitions from conflict lies in the role of truth in ascribing knowledge. The connection between truth and knowledge makes it important to preserve distinctively epistemological grounds for accepting and rejecting claims and narratives. These distinctively epistemological grounds explain how, if it is conceived of as adequate responsiveness to experience, truth is a legitimate and important goal in transitions from violence that is worth pursuing for its own sake. In particular, I argue that there is value in insisting that adequate responsiveness to experience serve as an arbiter in the reception of claims and narratives because when responsiveness to experience plays an arbitral role it becomes possible for bodies such as truth commissions to serve as vehicles by which groups may attain or ascribe knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose that those who reject higher-order theories of consciousness should not rule out the possibility of having conscious experiences that they cannot introspect. I begin by offering four arguments that such non-introspectible conscious experiences are possible. Next, I offer two arguments for thinking that we actually have such experiences. According to the first argument, it is unlikely that evolution would have furnished us with a faculty of introspection that worked flawlessly. According to the second argument, there (...) are many plausible potential sources of non-introspectible experiences. Given that all of these sources are at least somewhat plausible, it is fairly probable that we have some kind or other. Finally, I consider whether we might be justified in believing that we can introspect all of our conscious experiences if in fact we can. I show that current approaches to justifying belief in epiphenomenal qualia do not carry over. The upshot of these arguments is that we should be less certain that we really know what it feels like to be us. There may be much more to our experiences than we are aware of. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that most or all perceptual experiences are infused with imaginative contributions. While the idea is not new, it has few supporters. I begin by developing a framework for the underlying debate. Central to that framework is the claim that a perceptual experience is infused with imagination if and only if there are self-generated contributions to that experience that have ampliative effect on its phenomenal and directed elements. Self-generated ingredients to experience are produced by the subject as (...) opposed to being received from the world. Some form of stored content is an obvious starting point. Ampliative effects are aspects of perceptual experience that outstrip the content the senses get from the world. This conceptual framework is applied to three case studies: object-sameness and object-kind recognition (section 2), memory colour (section 3), and perceptual constancy and amodal completion (section 4). If the three cases and my overall analysis are accepted (a substantive if), then we have a forceful inductive argument for perception being infused with imagination. (shrink)

Appealing to imagination for modal justification is very common. But not everyone thinks that all imaginings provide modal justification. Recently, Gregory and Kung :620–663, 2010) have independently argued that, whereas imaginings with sensory imageries can justify modal beliefs, those without sensory imageries don’t because of such imaginings’ extreme liberty. In this essay, I defend the general modal epistemological relevance of imagining. I argue, first, that when the objections that target the liberal nature of non-sensory imaginings are adequately developed, those objections (...) also threaten the sensory imaginings. So, if we think that non-sensory imaginings are too liberal for modal justification, we should say the same about sensory imaginings. I’ll finish my defense by showing that, when it comes to deciding between saying that all imaginings are prima facie justificatory and saying that no imaginings are justificatory, there is an independent reason for accepting the former. (shrink)

We offer an account of the metaphysics of persons rooted in Latter-day saint scripture that vindicates the essentiality of origins. We then give theological support for the claim that prospects for the success of God’s soul making project are bound up in God creating particular persons. We observe that these persons would not have existed were it not for the occurrence of a variety of evils (of even the worst kinds), and we conclude that Latter-day saint theology has the resources (...) to endorse a strong soul-making non-identity theodicy. We then introduce two complications for this account rooted in the problem of horrendous evils. First, horrendous evils threaten to undermine our confidence that God is good to each created person within the context of their life. And second, horrendous evils raise concerns about the value of persons whose existence depends on the occurrence of those evils. We may wonder whether those whose existence depends on the occurrence of horrendous evils are valuable enough to motivate God’s allowance of those evils. We show that by attending to important structural features of a post-mortem, pre-eschatological state called the spirit world, Latter-day Saints can ameliorate these concerns about horrendous evils . (shrink)

This chapter defends a view of semantics on which developing a semantic theory closely resembles developing a scale of measurement. The view helps explain how semantics has made so much progress despite deep disagreements about the target of semantic theorizing (e.g., between those who maintain that semantics is characterizing something psychological, and those who maintain that it is characterizing something social), how appeals to set-theoretic abstracta make sense despite Benacerraf-style worries and despite the fact that set-theoretic entities fit badly with (...) standard (e.g., causal) metasemantic views, and why the threat of radical context sensitivity does not undermine the semantic project. (shrink)

Normative discourse frequently involves explanation. For example, we tell children that hitting is wrong because it hurts people. In a recent paper, Selim Berker argues that to account for this kind of explanation, expressivists need an account of normative grounding. Against this, I argue that expressivists should eschew grounding and stick to a more pragmatic picture of explanation, one that focuses on how we use explanatory speech acts to communicate information. I propose that the standard form of a normative explanation (...) is a generalizing explanation, one which shows a particular moral injunction to follow from a more general injunction. I use Marc Lange’s account of unifying explanations in mathematics as a model for the canonical form of a normative explanation, but also to establish that logical entailment can be explanatory, so long as premises entailing the conclusion answer appropriately to our interests. An additional upshot of the resulting view is that it paves the way for a purely metaphysical solution to the problem of creeping minimalism. Quasireal properties are those that, unlike real properties, stand outside of the metaphysical hierarchy of grounding relations. (shrink)

In what follows we present group rights as portrayed in contemporary theoretical debates; compare this portrayal with some of the claims actually advanced by various indigenous groups throughout the world; and give reasons for preferring the practical to the theoretical treatments. Our findings suggest that liberal-individualist and corporatist accounts of group rights actually agree on the kind of importance that group interests have for persons and on what it is that groups who claim rights are concerned about. Both liberal-individualists and (...) corporatists locate the importance of group interests in the personal psychology of individual group members. As a result, both treat group interests (such as cultural integrity) as not only different in kind from individualized interests such as freedom of expression but as potentially in competition with them. In contrast, the real-world demands of indigenous groups place emphasis on concrete ways in which the preserving of communal life can be important to individuals’ well-being, in addition to the various spiritual and symbolic resources which such life may provide. These practical aspects of communal life make individuals’ group interests a lot like their individualized ones, and so suggest that group rights do not introduce new or distinctive theoretical questions. Instead, group rights are raise familiar questions about how individuals’ interests ought to be balanced against one another when they are in competition; what counts as an adequate institutional structure for the instantiation of a right; and who ought to be recognized as an authoritative judge of whether a right has been respected. (shrink)

Mental content normativists hold that the mind’s conceptual contents are essentially normative. Many hold the view because they think that facts of the form “subject S possesses concept c” imply that S is enjoined by rules concerning the application of c in theoretical judgments. Some opponents independently raise an intuitive objection: even if there are such rules, S’s possession of the concept is not the source of the enjoinment. Hence, these rules do not support mental content normativism. Call this the (...) “Source Objection.” This paper refutes the Source Objection, outlining a key strand of the relationship between judgments and their contents in the process. Theoretical judgment and mental conceptual content are equally the source of enjoinment; norms for judging with contents do not derive from one at the expense of the other. (shrink)

Hybridization by introgression (“hybridization”) is a complex topic in conservation. Many conservation decision-makers are concerned about hybridization by introgression because it may threaten species persistence or local phenotypes, among other potential long-term problems. While attitudes have changed towards hybridization as a conservation threat, there are still concerns about hybridization as a problem, particularly if the hybridization was anthropogenically mediated. I propose that these concerns are overblown and that it is misguided to focus on whether hybridization is unintentionally human-mediated. I argue (...) that practitioners should still consider the effects of hybridization on conservation, but the reasons should concern the long-term environmental consequences, such as ecological function and social and cultural that hybridization has, rather than whether humans “caused” the hybrid. I propose a series of steps to think differently about these cases. (shrink)

Joseph Raz and Sergio Tenenbaum argue that the Guise of the Good thesis explains both the possibility of practical reason and its unity with theoretical reason, something Humean psychological theories may be unable to do. This paper will argue, however, that Raz and Tenenbaum face a dilemma: either the version of the Guise of the Good they offer is too strong to allow for weakness of will, or it will lose its theoretical advantage in preserving the unity of reason.

Venomous snakebite is a neglected tropical disease and disease of poverty, affecting hundreds of thousands of people annually. The only effective medical intervention for snakebite is antivenom, produced primarily using captive venomous snakes as a source of venom. This paper analyzes snakes’ welfare at venom labs within this global health context. I recommend significant changes to improve the welfare of captive snakes, particularly in light of recent ethological research and attention on snakes. These recommendations are broadly consequentialist, aiming to improve (...) the lives of the snakes and ensure that people have increased access to affordable antivenom. (shrink)

Attitudinal embeddings, such as ‘I hope that murder is wrong’ or ‘she is glad that eating meat is not wrong’ are a less substantial problem for expressivists than is standardly thought. If expressivists are entitled to talk of normative beliefs, they can explain what it is to for an attitude to be semantically related to a normative content in terms of being functionally related to a belief with a normative content.

Historically, culture has been treated as an object in international documents. One consequence of this is that cultural rights in international law have been understood as rights of access and consumption. Recently, an alternative conception of culture, and of what cultural rights protect, has emerged from international documents treating indigenous peoples. Within these documents culture is treated as an activity rather than a good. This activity is ascribed to peoples as well as persons, and protecting the capacity of both peoples (...) and persons to engage in culture is taken to be as basic a component of human dignity as are freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and freedom from torture. It is not an accident that this treatment of culture has emerged from international documents treating indigenous peoples. However, the value of this treatment of culture extends beyond the human rights of indigenous peoples. Treating culture as an activity establishes an understanding of what cultural rights protect that clarifies the relationship between cultural rights and other mechanisms for protecting minorities and frames the role of cultural communities in the realization of human dignity as an important physical and political issue, not just a psychological one. For these reasons, the norms regarding cultural rights that are emerging from international documents treating indigenous peoples are a much-needed step forward for peoples' rights more generally. (shrink)

Modern aesthetics is divided into two branches – the Anglo-American and the Continental. A major cause of this division is their divergent views about the place of history in aesthetics, the first tending to minimize historical considerations, while the second readily embraces them. This article explores the place of history in André Malraux's theory of art and argues that his thinking quickly resolves this long-standing disagreement. (This text is a translation of the published French version.).

"From the Proceedings of the British Academy, London, volume LXV (1979)" - title page. Series: Henrietta Hertz Trust annual philosophical lecture -- 1978 Other Titles: Proceedings of the British Academy. Vol.65: 1979.

Who constitutes the public on whose behalf such an official speaks and in whose name the apology is offered? In this paper I argue that in most cases, the “public” that the official offering an apology represents and on whose behalf the apology is offered is not the general public but the public sector: those who direct, control and populate the apparatus of the state. I argue that in most cases there is not a plausible model according to which public (...) sector actors can be treated as vehicles for actions, decisions, projects and values of the general public: a public sector actor is not an avatar of the general public. This makes for a gap between public officials and the general public that must be explicitly bridged with respect to actions, decisions and attitudes named in a public apology in order for members of the general public to perceive themselves as part of either the wrongs for which apology is offered or the apology itself. Recognizing this gap does not imply that members of the general public are not or cannot be responsible for wrongs perpetrated by public sector actors. However, it does imply that the source of the responsibility will not usually be found in public officials having acted at the behest of or for the sake of the general public. (shrink)

It seems undeniable that some cultures encourage individuals to act in ways that harm others, and/or to believe that there is nothing wrong when another acts in a way that harms them. And when this is the case it also seems undeniable that it would be better if the scope for such cultures to guide individuals' decision-making were minimized or even eliminated. From these observations a number of people have inferred that groups which exhibit bad cultures ought not to be (...) permitted to hold or exercise group rights. Susan Okin's liberal feminist critique of multiculturalism is one of the most interesting and persuasive examples of this type of argument. In this paper I take a closer look at Okin's critique and ask whether it actually does give one reason to be skeptical about group rights. I conclude that it does not. For although the worries which animate Okin's critique are good ones to have, it is a mistake to think that they are about group rights. Moreover, insofar as Okin's concerns are well motivated they are not actually worries about morally problematic cultures but rather worries about groups' internal political and social structures. These worries should not be equated. Ultimately (I argue) it is not only misleading but counterproductive to focus on the viciousness of a group's culture as a potential reason for disqualifying it from holding or exercising rights. (shrink)

I argue that standard explanationist solutions to the problem of creeping minimalism are largely on the right track, but they fail to correctly specify the kind of explanation that is relevant to distinguishing realism from quasirealism. Quasirealism should not be distinguished from realism in terms of the explanations it gives of why a normative judgment—a normative sentence or attitude—has the semantic content that it has. Rather, it should be distinguished in terms of the explanations it offers of what the semantic (...) content of a normative judgment is. (shrink)

The controversy that accompanied the publication and reprinting of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammed as part of a 2005 editorial in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten has been widely interpreted as yet another illustration of an ineliminable tension between multiculturalism and liberalism. Such an interpretation would have us believe that what is at issue in defending the cartoons is our commitment to civil liberties as a mainstay of liberal democracy. But is this really what is at issue? A closer examination suggests (...) that what is actually being defended in this case is not civil liberty but civil privilege. In particular, what is at issue is the privilege to exclude and define Muslims. (shrink)

It is widely believed that Twin-Earth-style thought experiments show that the contents of a person's thoughts fail to supervene on her intrinsic properties. Several recent philosophers have made the further claim that Twin-Earth-style thought experiments produce metaphysically necessary conditions for the possession of certain concepts. I argue that the latter view is false, and produce counterexamples to several proposed conditions. My thesis is of particular interest because it undermines some attempts to show that externalism is incompatible with privileged access.

By creating certain marks on paper, or by making certain sounds-breathing past a moving tongue-or by articulation of hands and bodies, language users can give expression to their mental lives. With language we command, assert, query, emote, insult, and inspire. Language has meaning. This fact can be quite mystifying, yet a science of linguistic meaning-semantics-has emerged at the intersection of a variety of disciplines: philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and psychology. Semantics is the study of meaning. But what exactly is "meaning"? (...) What is the exact target of semantic theory? Much of the early work in natural language semantics was accompanied by extensive reflection on the aims of semantic theory, and the form a theory must take to meet those aims. But this meta-theoretical reflection has not kept pace with recent theoretical innovations. This volume re-addresses these questions concerning the foundations of natural language semantics in light of the current state-of-the-art in semantic theorising. (shrink)

The paper highlights analytic aesthetics’ unacknowledged assumption that art is timeless, a view it inherited from Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume and Kant, who in turn inherited it from the Renaissance. This view, I contend, is no longer tenable because it is at odds with our experience of the art of the past. Analytic aesthetics bypasses this dilemma because it confines its attention to topics such as the nature of aesthetic pleasure, whether the appreciation of art should be disinterested and (...) so on, which it partitions off from historical change and encases in a world where time stands still and where, by consequence, the temporal nature of art, including art’s capacity to transcend time, can be ignored. (shrink)

A *very* rough draft of a paper on Anselm's "ontological argument" in which I argue that the argument in the Proslogion rests on a robust notion of having "that then which nothing greater can be thought" in one's mind.

This paper argues that, with certain provisos, predicting one's future actions is incompatible with rationally deliberating about whether to perform those actions. It follows that fully rational omniscient agents are impossible, since an omniscient being could never rationally deliberate about what to do . Consequently, theories that explain practical reasons in terms of the choices of a perfectly rational omniscient agent must fail. The paper considers several ways of defending the possibility of an omniscient agent, and concludes that while some (...) of these may work, they are inconsistent with the aim of explaining practical normativity by appeal to such an agent. (shrink)

There has been recent work on acedia and its relationship to depression, but the results are a mixed bag. In this essay, I engage some recent scholarship comparing acedia with depression, endeavouring to clarify the concept of acedia using literature from theology, philosophy, psychiatry, and even a 16th-century treatise on witchcraft. Along the way, I will show the following key theses. First, the concept of acedia is not identical to the concept of depression. Acedia is not merely a primitive psychological (...) predecessor to depression, but it marks off significantly different ways of being, not least because of one’s spiritual relation to God. As Lucrèce Luciani-Zidane (2009: 13) has said, “acedia is entangled in the heart (or life) of Christian dogma.” Second, however, it is still possible that an instance of acedia can coincide with an instance of depression, if one’s condition, or state, is such that each term can be correctly and truthfully applied. By the conclusion of this piece, I begin to explore what practical implications this view has for practitioners and laypersons. (shrink)