Results for 'Duncan Barker'

337 found
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  1.  86
    On the Principle of Indifference: A Defence of the Classical Theory of Probability.Michael J. Duncan - manuscript
    The classical theory of probability has long been abandoned and is seen by most philosophers as a non-contender—a mere precursor to newer and better theories. In this paper I argue that this is a mistake. The main reasons for its rejection—all related to the notorious principle of indifference—are that it is circular, of limited applicability, inconsistent, and dependent upon unjustified empirical assumptions. I argue that none of these claims is true and that the classical theory remains to be refuted.
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  2. Review of Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire. [REVIEW]Duncan Ivison - 2017 - Journal of British Studies 56:892-4.
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  3. (1 other version)Monism and Material Constitution.Stephen Barker & Mark Jago - 2014 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95 (1):189-204.
    Are the sculpture and the mass of gold which permanently makes it up one object or two? In this article, we argue that the monist, who answers ‘one object’, cannot accommodate the asymmetry of material constitution. To say ‘the mass of gold materially constitutes the sculpture, whereas the sculpture does not materially constitute the mass of gold’, the monist must treat ‘materially constitutes’ as an Abelardian predicate, whose denotation is sensitive to the linguistic context in which it appears. We motivate (...)
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  4. Well-being, Disability, and Choosing Children.Matthew J. Barker & Robert A. Wilson - 2019 - Mind 128 (510):305-328.
    The view that it is better for life to be created free of disability is pervasive in both common sense and philosophy. We cast doubt on this view by focusing on an influential line of thinking that manifests it. That thinking begins with a widely-discussed principle, Procreative Beneficence, and draws conclusions about parental choice and disability. After reconstructing two versions of this argument, we critique the first by exploring the relationship between different understandings of well-being and disability, and the second (...)
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  5. Genealogical Defeat and Ontological Sparsity.Jonathan Barker - 2023 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 47:1-23.
    When and why does awareness of a belief's genealogy render it irrational to continue holding that belief? According to explanationism, awareness of a belief’s genealogy gives rise to an epistemic defeater when and because it reveals that the belief is not explanatorily connected to the relevant worldly facts. I argue that an influential recent version of explanationism, due to Korman and Locke, incorrectly implies that it is not rationally permissible to adopt a “sparse” ontology of worldly facts or states of (...)
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  6.  48
    (1 other version)Multiculturalism.Duncan Ivison - 2001 - In Neil J. Smelser & Paul B. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier. pp. 10169-75.
    First published in the International Encyclopaedia of Social and Behavioural Sciences (Pergamon Press, 2001); reprinted in the 2nd edition (2015). An overview of different justifications of multiculturalism in contemporary political theory, as well as various challenges to and critiques of those arguments.
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  7. Being Positive About Negative Facts.Mark Jago & Stephen Barker - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (1):117-138.
    Negative facts get a bad press. One reason for this is that it is not clear what negative facts are. We provide a theory of negative facts on which they are no stranger than positive atomic facts. We show that none of the usual arguments hold water against this account. Negative facts exist in the usual sense of existence and conform to an acceptable Eleatic principle. Furthermore, there are good reasons to want them around, including their roles in causation, chance-making (...)
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  8. Natural Theology and Miracles: In Defense of Spectator Evidence.Steven Merle Duncan - manuscript
    I mostly agree with most of what Paul Moser has said in his books in the Philosophy of Religion. The views he has defended are a needed corrective to the evidentialist paradigm in the philosophy of religion. At the same time, his development of his central ideas has resulted in views that are, somewhat idiosyncratic and extreme. In this essay I hope to present a different articulation of those ideas, also defensible from within a Christian perspective, that preserves their central (...)
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  9. Mental Illness and Moral Discernment: A Clinical Psychiatric Perspective.Duncan A. P. Angus & Marion L. S. Carson - 2020 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12 (4):191-211.
    As a contribution to a wider discussion on moral discernment in theological anthropology, this paper seeks to answer the question “What is the impact of mental illness on an individual’s ability to make moral decisions?” Written from a clinical psychiatric perspective, it considers recent contributions from psychology, neuropsychology and imaging technology. It notes that the popular conception that mental illness necessarily robs an individual of moral responsibility is largely unfounded. Most people who suffer from mental health problems do not lose (...)
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  10. The Interaction Problem.Steven Merle Duncan - manuscript
    This is an updated version of one section of my essay "Objections to Dualism" prepared for presentation at the 2019 Mountain-Pacific SCP Conference in Las Vegas, April 6-7, 2019.
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  11. Presupposition and entailment.John A. Barker - 1976 - Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 17 (2):272-278.
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  12. The Self at Liberty: Political Argument and the Arts of a Government.Duncan Ivison - 1997 - Ithaca, NY, USA: Cornell University Press.
    The central task of this book is to map a subtle but significant addition to the political discourse on liberty since the early modern period; a gradual shift of focus form the individual secure in spheres of non-interference, or acting in accordance with authentic desires and beliefs, to the actions of a self at liberty. Being free stands opposed, classically, to being in someone else’s power, being subject to the will of another – in particular, to being constrained by the (...)
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  13. More Problems for Parsimonious Logics of Location: A Reply to Kleinschmidt.Michael J. Duncan - manuscript
    In a recent paper Shieva Kleinschmidt has argued that if certain scenarios involving extended simple regions are possible (so-called ‘Place Cases’), then no logic of location with only one primitive locative notion (i.e., no ‘parsimonious logic of location’) will suffice to describe all of the locative possibilities. Since almost all existing logics of location are parsimonious (and apparently for good reason) the argument is a considerable obstacle to the development of a satisfactory logic of location. Kleinschmidt suggests that the best (...)
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  14. Morality and Relations before Hume.Stewart Duncan - manuscript
    In his Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals David Hume said that a group of earlier modern philosophers, beginning with Malebranche, held that morality was founded on relations. In this paper I follow up on that suggestion by investigating pre-Humean views in moral philosophy according to which morality is founded on relations. I do that by looking at the work of Nicolas Malebranche, John Locke, and Samuel Clarke. Each of them talked prominently about relations in their accounts of basic aspects (...)
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  15. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Weaponized: A Theory of Moral Injury.Duncan MacIntosh - 2023 - In Justin T. McDaniel (ed.), Preventing and Treating the Invisible Wounds of War: Combat Trauma, Moral Injury, and Psychological Health. Oxford University Press. pp. 175-206.
    This chapter conceptually analyzes the post-traumatic stress injuries called moral injury, moral fatigue or exhaustion, and broken spirit. It then identifies two puzzles. First, soldiers sometimes sustain moral injury even from doing right actions. Second, they experience moral exhaustion from making decisions even where the morally right choice is so obvious that it shouldn’t be stressful to make it; and even where rightness of decision is so murky that no decision could be morally faulted. The injuries result of mistaken moral (...)
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  16. Seeing Other Minds.Steven M. Duncan - 2010 - Seattle Critical Review (on Line) 1 (1):1-30.
    In this paper, I offer an account of our knowledge of other minds based on V. C. Aldrich's account of aesthetic perception, according to which there is a sense in which we literally see other minds.
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  17. Gods Revisited.Steven M. Duncan - manuscript
    Inspired by Paul Moser's recent work, this paper presents a new parable on the topic of belief and unbelief in the tradition of Wisdom, Flew and Mitchell. -/- This paper was read at the annual POH Symposium at Lake Wenatchee, WA in May, 2010. An edited version of this paper has appeared in the second issue of the Seattle Critical Review (online).
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  18. Wittgenstein's Ethics in the Koder Diaries.Duncan Richter - manuscript
    The subject of this paper is not Wittgensteinian ethics but Wittgenstein’s own ethical beliefs, specifically as these are revealed in the so-called Koder diaries. While the Koder Diaries, also known as Manuscript 183, do contain the kind of thing that one would expect to find in a diary (e.g. accounts of travel and personal relationships), they also contain more obviously philosophical remarks, sometimes as reflections on these personal remarks. Wittgenstein’s diaries illustrate well a point that Iris Murdoch has emphasized, that (...)
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  19. The Consequences of Neurophysiological Materialism.Steven M. Duncan - manuscript
    In this essay, I argue that neurophysiological materialism - the thesis that all of our mental contents are caused by non-mental, purely physical brain states - is epistemically self-refuting, and ought to be rejected even if it cannot be otherwise disproved.
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  20. Mind, Body, Space, and Time.Steven M. Duncan - manuscript
    In this essay I explore some of the basic elements of consciousness from a substance dualist point of view, incorporating some elements of Kant's Transcendental Analytic into an overall account of the constitution of consciousness.
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  21. Theism and Christianity.Steven M. Duncan - manuscript
    In this essay, I investigate the implications for the discussion of theism in philosophy of religion for the beliefs of ordinary Christians and conclude that, in light of its historical development, those implications are minimal.
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  22. Rights.Duncan Ivison - 2007 - Acumen Publishing/Routledge.
    The language of rights pervades modern social and political discourse and yet there is deep disagreement amongst citizens, politicians and philosophers about just what they mean. Who has them? Who should have them? Who can claim them? What are the grounds upon which they can be claimed? How are they related to other important moral and political values such as community, virtue, autonomy, democracy and social justice? In this book, Duncan Ivison offers a unique and accessible integration of, and (...)
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  23. Negative Emotions.Steven M. Duncan - manuscript
    I have a theory of the emotions that many people find unflattering. I contend that all emotions, as such, are negative and neither life-enhancing nor truth-connected. In this essay, I present this theory and my reasons for it.
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  24. Knowledge as Fact-Tracking True Belief.Fred Adams, John A. Barker & Murray Clarke - 2017 - Manuscrito 40 (4):1-30.
    ABSTRACT Drawing inspiration from Fred Dretske, L. S. Carrier, John A. Barker, and Robert Nozick, we develop a tracking analysis of knowing according to which a true belief constitutes knowledge if and only if it is based on reasons that are sensitive to the fact that makes it true, that is, reasons that wouldn’t obtain if the belief weren’t true. We show that our sensitivity analysis handles numerous Gettier-type cases and lottery problems, blocks pathways leading to skepticism, and validates (...)
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  25. Harming as making worse off.Duncan Purves - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (10):2629-2656.
    A powerful argument against the counterfactual comparative account of harm is that it cannot distinguish harming from failing to benefit. In reply to this problem, I suggest a new account of harm. The account is a counterfactual comparative one, but it counts as harms only those events that make a person occupy his level of well-being at the world at which the event occurs. This account distinguishes harming from failing to benefit in a way that accommodates our intuitions about the (...)
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  26. Ditching Dependence and Determination: Or, How to Wear the Crazy Trousers.Michael Duncan, Kristie Miller & James Norton - 2021 - Synthese 198 (1):395–418.
    This paper defends Flatland—the view that there exist neither determination nor dependence relations, and that everything is therefore fundamental—from the objection from explanatory inefficacy. According to that objection, Flatland is unattractive because it is unable to explain either the appearance as of there being determination relations, or the appearance as of there being dependence relations. We show how the Flatlander can meet the first challenge by offering four strategies—reducing, eliminating, untangling and omnizing—which, jointly, explain the appearance as of there being (...)
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  27. Postcolonial Liberalism.Duncan Ivison - 2002 - Cambridge University Press.
    Postcolonial Liberalism presents a compelling account of the challenges to liberal political theory by claims to cultural and political autonomy and land rights made by indigenous peoples today. It also confronts the sensitive issue of how liberalism has been used to justify and legitimate colonialism. Ivison argues that there is a pressing need to re-shape liberal thought to become more receptive to indigenous aspirations and modes of being. What is distinctive about the book is the middle way it charts between (...)
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  28. Kant on Modality.Colin Marshall & Aaron Barker - 2024 - In Andrew Stephenson & Anil Gomes (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Kant. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter analyzes several key themes in Kant’s views about modality. We begin with the pre-critical Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God, in which Kant distinguishes between formal and material elements of possibility, claims that all possibility requires an actual ground, and argues for the existence of a single necessary being. We then briefly consider how Kant’s views change in his mature period, especially concerning the role of form and thought in defining modality. (...)
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  29. Historical Injustice.Duncan Ivison - 2006 - In John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Honig & Anne Phillips (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory. Oxford University Press.
    This article examines the concept of historical injustice in the context of contemporary political theory. It examines the moral consequences of historical injustice for the descendants of both the perpetrators and the victims and outlines the six questions that any plausible defence of the idea of making reparations for past injustices must deal with. It suggests that taking historical injustice seriously is compatible with moral cosmopolitanism and it also helps with the understanding the nature of various kinds of inequalities that (...)
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  30. The Ashgate Research Companion to Multiculturalism.Duncan Ivison (ed.) - 2010 - London: Ashgate.
    The Ashgate Research Companion to Multiculturalism brings together a collection of new essays by leading and emerging scholars in the humanities and social sciences on some of the key issues facing multiculturalism today. It provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge treatment of this important and hotly contested field, offering scholars and students a clear account of the leading theories and critiques of multiculturalism that have developed over the past twenty-five years, as well as a sense of the challenges facing multiculturalism in (...)
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  31. Locke and his Critics on the Possibility of Material Minds.Stewart Duncan - 2024 - In John Symons & Charles Wolfe (eds.), The History and Philosophy of Materialism. Routledge.
    This chapter looks at the discussion of materialism in John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, and then at parts of the Anglophone reaction to those discussions. It considers the early criticisms of Locke by Edward Stillingfleet and the anonymous author of three sets of Remarks on Locke’s Essay. It then looks at some other ways in which readers reacted to Locke’s discussions: the views of Anthony Collins and John Toland, which one might be tempted to think of as Lockean materialism; (...)
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  32. Multiculturalism and resentment.Duncan Ivison - 2008 - In Duncan Ivison & Geoffrey Brahm Levey (eds.), Political Theory and Australian Multiculturalism. Oxford: Berghan. pp. 129-148.
    There are two kinds of resentment relevant to the politics of multiculturalism today. 1 The first, which is basically Nietzsche’s conception of ressentiment, occurs under conditions in which people are subject to systematic and structural deprivation of things they want (and need), combined with a sense of powerlessness about being able to do anything about it. It manifests itself in terms of a focused anger or hatred towards that group of people who seem to have everything they want, and yet (...)
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  33. Acquaintance.Matt Duncan - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (3):e12727.
    To be acquainted with something (in the philosophical sense of “acquainted” discussed here) is to be directly aware of it. The idea that we are acquainted with certain things we experience has been discussed throughout the history of Western Philosophy, but in the early 20th century it gained especially focused attention among analytic philosophers who drew their inspiration from Bertrand Russell's work on acquaintance. Since then, many philosophers—particularly those working on self‐knowledge or perception—have used the notion of acquaintance to explain (...)
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  34. Preference's Progress: Rational Self-Alteration and the Rationality of Morality.Duncan Macintosh - 1991 - Dialogue 30 (1-2):3-32.
    I argue that Gauthier's constrained-maximizer rationality is problematic. But standard Maximizing Rationality means one's preferences are only rational if it would not maximize on them to adopt new ones. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, it maximizes to adopt conditionally cooperative preferences. (These are detailed, with a view to avoiding problems of circularity of definition.) Morality then maximizes. I distinguish the roles played in rational choices and their bases by preferences, dispositions, moral and rational principles, the aim of rational action, and rational (...)
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  35. McClennen’s Early Cooperative Solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma.Duncan MacIntosh - 1991 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 29 (3):341-358.
    This paper reviews six attempts to give cooperative solutions to Prisoners Dilemmas: symmetry (agents are in identical situations, so should choose the same way, so should both choose cooperation because that’s better for each), mechanism (each agent should delegate the decision to a machine which will choose cooperation for them provided the other does likewise), inducement (the agents should make a side bet which pays off only upon both cooperating), resolution (each agent should resolve to cooperate, then act on the (...)
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  36. Locke, liberalism and empire.Duncan Ivison - 2003 - In Peter R. Anstey (ed.), The Philosophy of John Locke: New Perspectives. New York: Routledge. pp. 86--105.
    What does the 'colonialist' reading of Locke's political theory suggest about the relationship between liberalism and colonialism in general, as well as the pre-history of liberalism in particular?
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  37. Knowledge of things.Matt Duncan - 2020 - Synthese 197 (8):3559-3592.
    As I walk into a restaurant to meet up with a friend, I look around and see all sorts of things in my immediate environment—tables, chairs, people, colors, shapes, etc. As a result, I know of these things. But what is the nature of this knowledge? Nowadays, the standard practice among philosophers is to treat all knowledge, aside maybe from “know-how”, as propositional. But in this paper I will argue that this is a mistake. I’ll argue that some knowledge is (...)
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  38. Four Conceptions of Liberty as a Political Value.Duncan Ivison - 2023 - In Dimitrios Karmis & Jocyn Maclure (eds.), Civic Freedom in an Age of Diversity. pp. 393-411.
    What would it mean to have a suitably ‘realistic’ account of political liberty? On the one hand, I don’t think we can properly understand liberty without an underlying account of personhood or agency.2 In making sense of liberty, we need to ask: What kind of agency does it presuppose or promote? What kind of independence do we care most about? What does it mean to exercise control, or to be self-guiding, in the kind of world we live in today? At (...)
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  39. Should Algorithms that Predict Recidivism Have Access to Race?Duncan Purves & Jeremy Davis - 2023 - American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (2):205-220.
    Recent studies have shown that recidivism scoring algorithms like COMPAS have significant racial bias: Black defendants are roughly twice as likely as white defendants to be mistakenly classified as medium- or high-risk. This has led some to call for abolishing COMPAS. But many others have argued that algorithms should instead be given access to a defendant's race, which, perhaps counterintuitively, is likely to improve outcomes. This approach can involve either establishing race-sensitive risk thresholds, or distinct racial ‘tracks’. Is there a (...)
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  40. Review of Aziz Rana The Two Faces of American Freedom. [REVIEW]Duncan Ivison - 2011 - Perspectives 9:683-4.
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  41. Fire and Forget: A Moral Defense of the Use of Autonomous Weapons in War and Peace.Duncan MacIntosh - 2021 - In Jai Galliott, Duncan MacIntosh & Jens David Ohlin (eds.), Lethal Autonomous Weapons: Re-Examining the Law and Ethics of Robotic Warfare. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 9-23.
    Autonomous and automatic weapons would be fire and forget: you activate them, and they decide who, when and how to kill; or they kill at a later time a target you’ve selected earlier. Some argue that this sort of killing is always wrong. If killing is to be done, it should be done only under direct human control. (E.g., Mary Ellen O’Connell, Peter Asaro, Christof Heyns.) I argue that there are surprisingly many kinds of situation where this is false and (...)
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  42. Democratic Trust and Injustice.Duncan Ivison - 2023 - Journal of Social and Political Philosophy 2 (1):78-94.
    Trust is a crucial condition for the legitimacy and effectiveness of democratic institutions in conditions of deep diversity and enduring injustices. Liberal democratic societies require forms of engagement and deliberation that require trustful relations between citizens: trust is a necessary condition for securing and sustaining just institutions and practices. Establishing trust is hard when there is a lingering suspicion that the institutions citizens are subject to are illegitimate or undermine their ability to participate and deliberate on equal terms. The promise (...)
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  43. The Self Shows Up in Experience.Matt Duncan - 2019 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 10 (2):299-318.
    I can be aware of myself, and thereby come to know things about myself, in a variety of different ways. But is there some special way in which I—and only I—can learn about myself? Can I become aware of myself by introspecting? Do I somehow show up in my own conscious experiences? David Hume and most contemporary philosophers say no. They deny that the self shows up in experience. However, in this paper I appeal to research on schizophrenia—on thought insertion, (...)
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  44. Quasi-Fideism and Religious Conviction.Duncan Pritchard - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 10 (3):51-66.
    It is argued that standard accounts of the epistemology of religious commitmentfail to be properly sensitive to certain important features of the nature of religious conviction. Once one takes these features of religious conviction seriously, then it becomes clear that we are not to conceive of the epistemology of religious conviction along completely rational lines.But the moral to extract from this is not fideism, or even a more moderate proposal that casts the epistemic standing of basic religious beliefs along nonrational (...)
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  45. Biological Individuals.Robert A. Wilson & Matthew J. Barker - 2024 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The impressive variation amongst biological individuals generates many complexities in addressing the simple-sounding question what is a biological individual? A distinction between evolutionary and physiological individuals is useful in thinking about biological individuals, as is attention to the kinds of groups, such as superorganisms and species, that have sometimes been thought of as biological individuals. More fully understanding the conceptual space that biological individuals occupy also involves considering a range of other concepts, such as life, reproduction, and agency. There has (...)
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  46. New Arguments for Composition as Identity.Michael J. Duncan - 2015 - Dissertation, University of Sydney
    Almost all philosophers interested in parthood and composition think that a composite object is a further thing, numerically distinct from the objects that compose it. Call this the orthodox view. I argue that the orthodox view is false, and that a composite object is identical to the objects that compose it (collectively). This view is known as composition as identity. -/- I argue that, despite its unpopularity, there are many reasons to favour com- position as identity over the orthodox view. (...)
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  47. Animalism is Either False of Uninteresting (Perhaps Both).Matt Duncan - 2021 - American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2):187-200.
    “We are animals.” That’s what animalists say—that’s their slogan. But what animalists mean by their slogan varies. Many animalists are adamant that what they mean—and, indeed, what the true animalist thesis is—is that we are identical to animals (human animals, to be precise). But others say that’s not enough. They say that the animalist thesis has to be something more—perhaps that we are essentially or most fundamentally human animals. This paper argues that, depending on how we understand it, animalism is (...)
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  48. Against Purity.Jonathan Barker - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9.
    A fundamental fact is “pure” just in case it has no grounded entities—ex. Tokyo, President Biden, the River Nile, {Socrates}, etc.—among its constituents. Purity is the thesis that every fundamental fact is pure. I argue that Purity is false. My argument begins with a familiar conditional: if Purity is true, then there are no fundamental “grounding facts” or facts about what grounds what. This conditional is accepted by virtually all of Purity’s defenders. However, I argue that it is also the (...)
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  49. Preference-Revision and the Paradoxes of Instrumental Rationality.Duncan MacIntosh - 1992 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (4):503-529.
    To the normal reasons that we think can justify one in preferring something, x (namely, that x has objectively preferable properties, or has properties that one prefers things to have, or that x's obtaining would advance one's preferences), I argue that it can be a justifying reason to prefer x that one's very preferring of x would advance one's preferences. Here, one prefers x not because of the properties of x, but because of the properties of one's having the preference (...)
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  50. The Convergence of National Rational Self-Interest and Justice in Space Policy.Duncan Macintosh - 2023 - International Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (1):87-106.
    How may nations protect their interests in space if its fragility makes military operations there self-defeating? This essay claims nations are in Prisoners Dilemmas on the matter, and applies David Gauthier’s theories about how it is rational to behave morally—cooperatively—in such dilemmas. Currently space-faring nations should i) enter into co-operative space sharing arrangements with other rational nations, ii) exclude—militarily, but with only terrestrial force—nations irrational or existentially opposed to other nations being in space, and iii) incentivize all nations into co-operation (...)
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