An interview with Ed Casey where we discuss the intersections of his philosophical work with current political issues, including the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The paper identifies the phenomenal rise of increasingly invasive forms of elective cosmetic surgery targeted primarily at women and explores its significance in the context of contemporary biotechnology. A Foucauldian analysis of the significance of the normalization of technologized women's bodies is argued for. Three "Paradoxes of Choice" affecting women who "elect" cosmetic surgery are examined. Finally, two utopian feminist political responses are discussed: a Response of Refusal and a Response of Appropriation.

Many philosophers and psychologists have attempted to elucidate the nature of mental representation by appealing to notions like isomorphism or abstract structural resemblance. The ‘structural representations’ that these theorists champion are said to count as representations by virtue of functioning as internal models of distal systems. In his 2007 book, Representation Reconsidered, William Ramsey endorses the structural conception of mental representation, but uses it to develop a novel argument against representationalism, the widespread view that cognition essentially involves the manipulation of (...) mental representations. Ramsey argues that although theories within the ‘classical’ tradition of cognitive science once posited structural representations, these theories are being superseded by newer theories, within the tradition of connectionism and cognitive neuroscience, which rarely if ever appeal to structural representations. Instead, these theories seem to be explaining cognition by invoking so-called ‘receptor representations’, which, Ramsey claims, aren’t genuine representations at all—despite being called representations, these mechanisms function more as triggers or causal relays than as genuine stand-ins for distal systems. I argue that when the notions of structural and receptor representation are properly explicated, there turns out to be no distinction between them. There only appears to be a distinction between receptor and structural representations because the latter are tacitly conflated with the ‘mental models’ ostensibly involved in offline cognitive processes such as episodic memory and mental imagery. While structural representations might count as genuine representations, they aren’t distinctively mental representations, for they can be found in all sorts of non-intentional systems such as plants. Thus to explain the kinds of offline cognitive capacities that have motivated talk of mental models, we must develop richer conceptions of mental representation than those provided by the notions of structural and receptor representation. (shrink)

Some have claimed that there are laws of appearance, i.e. in principle constraints on which types of sensory experiences are possible. Within a representationalist framework, these laws amount to restrictions on what a given experience can represent. I offer an in-depth defence of one such law and explain why prevalent externalist varieties of representationalism have trouble accommodating it. In light of this, I propose a variety of representationalism on which the spatial content of experience is determined by intrinsic features of (...) conscious subjects. I conclude by considering an externalist-friendly reworking of my proposal, but suggest that the success of such a reworking is dubious. (shrink)

Jeanette Edwards observes a pattern of questions of the form “Why do anthropology fieldwork in location X?” - she only hears the question posed of some places - and she explains this pattern by saying that some places are taken to be obviously legitimate for anthropology fieldwork whereas others are not. I draw distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate, obviously legitimate and not obviously legitimate, and better and worse. The distinctions lead to a different explanation.

In this paper, I consider Augustine’s attempted solution of the problem of divine foreknowledge and free will. I focus on two distinct notions of God’s relationship to time as they relate to this problem. In Confessions XI, Augustine develops an understanding of time and foreknowledge that cIearly offers a possible solution to the foreknowledge/free will problem. I then turn to On Free Will 3.1-4, where Augustine conspicuously declines to use a solution similar to the one in the Confessions, rather developing (...) a response that demands a very different conception of foreknowledge. I subsequently argue that in On Free Will, Augustine’s argument requires that God’s foreknowledge, when considered in light of events involving human freedom, must be in a real sense dependent on the results of free choice. (shrink)

Suppose that, while you are dreamlessly asleep, the sizes of and distances between all objects in the world are uniformly multiplied. Would you be able to detect this global inflation? Intuitively, no. But would your experience of size remain accurate? Intuitively, yes. On these grounds, some have concluded that our experiences do not represent size and instead represent modes of presentation of size. We are, in this sense, ‘cut off’ from the sizes of things in the external world. Here, I (...) argue for a more modest conclusion: undetectable inflation reveals that our experiences represent only relative size. Call this view austere phenomenal relativism––or austere relativism, for short. I develop a framework to contrast austere relativism with its competitors, give an extended argument for the view, and then defuse a potential dilemma concerning the units in which our experiences represent size. (shrink)

This paper identifies three positions on the relationship between language and experience, the third of which I was not acquainted with before from my reading. It seems absurd.

A recent argument against content internalism bucks tradition: it abandons Twin-Earth-style thought experiments and instead claims that internalism is inconsistent with plausible principles relating belief contents and truth values. Call this the transparency argument. Here, it is shown that there is a structurally parallel argument against content internalism’s foil: content externalism. Preserving the transparency argument while fending off the parallel argument against externalism requires that content-determination and truth-value-determination are implausibly linked together and that eternalism about belief contents is true. Given (...) these requirements, there may be reason to prefer simple, thought-experiment-based arguments against internalism – the sort of arguments that the transparency argument is meant to supersede. (shrink)

I present a sense of the term “ideal theory” based on Joseph Raz’s response to the situation of a lifeguard faced with three drowning on one side and two on the other and unable to save all. From what is of value, such a theory builds up a conception of an ideal political state or an aspect of it which we have reason to realize, but ignoring whether it is possible for us to realize this.

This is a one page handout, presenting a puzzle from J.G. Frazer regarding why, to become the priest of Diana at Nemi, one had to first break a bough in the sacred grove.

This article argues against Bowman Clarke's attempt to eliminate futurity from the God of Process.

Jeanette Edwards tells us that she is often asked about why she did fieldwork in the English town of Bacup, whereas she has not heard anthropologists who did fieldwork in Papua New Guinea asked why there. She commits herself to a certain explanation for this: potential inquirers assume that non-Western societies are legitimate objects of study for social anthropology but this is not assumed for Western societies. I propose another explanation: it is not about the legitimacy of the object of (...) study, rather “your” levels of commitment. Would you do that for anthropology? (shrink)

In the study of education, as in many more travelled regions of Classical scholarship, democratic Athens is something of a special case. The cautions formulation is appropriate: in the case of education, surprisingly few studies have sought to establish quite how special Athens was, and those which have, have often raised more questions than they answered. The subject itself is partly to blame. The history of education invites comparison with the present day, while those planning the future of education rarely (...) fail to invoke the past. The place of Classical Athens in European culture has ensured a place for Athenian education in almost every debate from the relation between education and democracy to the value of educationversustraining, and as the original champion of causes as varied as mass education, co-education, and the national curriculum. Desirable as it is to be in demand, such treatment is not calculated to produce the most circumspect account of the subject. The study of education is further hampered by the fact that our knowledge of Athenian culture is so vibrant and diverse in some ways and so partial in others. Plato and Aristophanes present a vivid fictional picture of education in the late fifth century. If we add a few passages from Xenophon and Aristotle, a large number of vases depicting men, women, and children reading, playing the lyre, and doing athletics, and one or two archaeological finds of an educational appearance, it is tempting to take the result as a clear portrait of a society at school. (shrink)

Jeanette Edwards sounds as if she wishes to reject the question “Why did you do fieldwork there?” I propose a metaphysical route to this, which is to say, “The self before fieldwork is not my self,” but this conflicts with the traditional Lockean account of personal identity.

How well do we understand our own societies? In this paper, I raise quite obvious puzzles for Diego Gambetta and Gloria Origgi’s depiction of Italy as a kakonomy and Kathleen Stock’s depiction of ordinary people.

Deidealization as a topic in its own right has attracted remarkably little philosophical interest despite the extensive literature on idealization. One reason for this is the often implicit assumption that idealization and deidealization are, potentially at least, reversible processes. We question this assumption by analyzing the challenges of deidealization within a menu of four broad categories: deidealizing as recomposing, deidealizing as reformulating, deidealizing as concretizing, and deidealizing as situating. On closer inspection, models turn out much more inflexible than the reversal (...) thesis would have us believe, and deidealization emerges as a creative part of modeling. (shrink)

This paper contains my second attempt to pastiche the Lacanian philosopher and social theorist Renata Salecl. The pastiche responds to the theories of social inequality and education of Pierre Bourdieu.

The mind-body problem is intuitively familiar, as mental and physical entities mysteriously interact. However, difficulties arise when intertwining concepts of the self with mental and physical traits. To avoid confusion, I propose instead focusing on three categories, with the mental matching the mind and physical the body with respect to raw inputs and outputs. The third category, the self, will experience and measure the others. With this new classification, we can see difficulties clearly, specifically five questions covering interaction and correlation. (...) We break down the problem using both existing theories and a hypercube topology representing the solution. We show any satisfactory theory must explain both spatial interaction and content correlation, and that we cannot escape our topology, whatever our preferred fundamental substance and mind-body movement permutation. We conclude by looking outside the hypercube, noting how solutions such as existential monism, priority monism, and will-based cosmic-idealism avoid the dangers involved. (shrink)

This paper attempts to develop an ethico-aesthetic framework for enriching one's life and ethical outlook. Drawing primarily from Nietzsche, Foucault, and Heidegger, an argument is made that Heidegger's understanding of this issue was mistaken. The ontological crisis of modernity is not the overt influence of mathematics as a worldview over poetics and more traditionally aesthetic approaches. It is the rampant mis-and over-application of abstraction within one's view of the world while denying the material realities of life as we live it. (...) This runaway abstractive worldview leads to the misapplication of mathematics and other sciences which in turn facilitate the dehumanization of life and those within it. When we try to solve the real problems of our material human lives through overly abstractive means, then we arrive at inauthentic arguments that fuel popular disdain for philosophy as irrelevant and nothing more than the purview of the elite. The goal is a recalibration of the argument toward addressing the denial of materiality within Modernism. (shrink)

This document briefly summarizes several objections to Thomas Kuhn on science, including by Feyerabend, Davidson, and Fodor.

Imprecise probabilities are often modelled with representors, or sets of probability functions. In the recent literature, two ways of interpreting representors have emerged as especially prominent: vagueness interpretations, according to which each probability function in the set represents how the agent's beliefs would be if any vagueness were precisified away; and comparativist interpretations, according to which the set represents those comparative confidence relations that are common to all probability functions therein. I argue that these interpretations have some important limitations. I (...) also propose an alternative—the functional interpretation—according to which representors are best interpreted by reference to the roles they play in the theories that make use of them. (shrink)

According to comparativism, degrees of belief are reducible to a system of purely ordinal comparisons of relative confidence. (For example, being more confident that P than that Q, or being equally confident that P and that Q.) In this paper, I raise several general challenges for comparativism, relating to (i) its capacity to illuminate apparently meaningful claims regarding intervals and ratios of strengths of belief, (ii) its capacity to draw enough intuitively meaningful and theoretically relevant distinctions between doxastic states, and (...) (iii) its capacity to handle common instances of irrationality. (shrink)

Most see having their individuality stifled as equivalent to the terrible forced conformity found within speculative fiction like George Orwell's 1984. However, the oppression of others by those in power has often been justified through ideologies of individualism. If we look to animistic traditions, could we bridge the gap between these extremes? What effect would such a reevaluation of identity have on the modern understanding of selfhood? The term ' in-dividual' suggests an irreducible unit of identity carried underneath all of (...) our titles and experiences—the real self. By linking Marilyn Strathern's elaboration of dividualism and Nurit Bird-David's relational epistemology , a clear contrast forms between the animistic sense of self and that of the West. This system of selfhood more readily encourages a life lived in Henri Bergson's sense of duration and sets up a state of dialogical discourse , as seen in Mikhail Bakhtin's work. These concepts challenge the traditional praise for individuality and exposes how individualism can be used as a tool of marginalization as seen in Michel Foucault's critique of authorship. I argue that pursuing a sense of self rooted in these concepts instead of individualism mitigates this marginalization via a more socially aware cultural environment that the traditional Western sense of self fails to create. (shrink)

This paper objects to an explanation I extract from Jeanette Edwards, concerning a pattern she observes of questions asked and not asked. There are propositions accepted as axioms which apparently lead to that pattern. I present an axiomatization but it leads to different questions.

Comparativism is the view that comparative confidences (e.g., being more confident that P than that Q) are more fundamental than degrees of belief (e.g., believing that P with some strength x). In this paper, I outline the basis for a new, non-probabilistic version of comparativism inspired by a suggestion made by Frank Ramsey in `Probability and Partial Belief'. I show how, and to what extent, `Ramseyan comparativism' might be used to weaken the (unrealistically strong) probabilistic coherence conditions that comparativism traditionally (...) relies on. (shrink)

In his book, The Last Word, Thomas Nagel expresses the hope that there exists no God. Guy Kahane, in his paper ‘Should We Want God to Exist?’, attempts to defend Nagel from an argument that concludes such a hope may be impermissible. In this paper we present a new defense for the hope that God does not exist.

This paper challenges the notion that the only way to progress to a post-capitalist society is through the wholesale destruction of the capitalist economic system. Instead, I argue that Craft —an existential state and praxis informed by the creation and maintenance of objects of utility—is uniquely situated to effectively reclaim these systems due to its its focus on materiality over abstraction and its unique position as a socially aware form of praxis. This argument focuses not on competition, but on hyper-abstraction (...) as the key driver of capitalist exploitation and its most glaring ethical flaw. Karl Marx's work on commodity fetishism is key to understanding this misguided form of abstraction which displaces commodities so far from their functional form that they feed into what Martin Heidegger termed gestell , or enframing. Postmodern attempts to destabilize capitalist influence in the fine arts, like the de-objectification of the 1960s described by Ursula Meyer, often fell victim to the same fetishistic mindset and simply increased the hold of capitalism within the arts. The enframing worldview that Heidegger warns us about is fed by hyper-abstraction, and while he directly offers up art as the remedy to this situation via poiēsis , key moments in his writings on the related notion of geschick support this new notion of Craft , rather than the fine arts, as a more capable system for the rehabilitation of modern society. (shrink)

This paper uses a paradox inherent in any solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness to argue for God’s existence. The paper assumes we are “thought machines”, reading the state of a relevant physical medium and then outputting corresponding thoughts. However, the existence of such a thought machine is impossible, since it needs an infinite number of point-representing sensors to map the physical world to conscious thought. This paper shows that these sensors cannot exist, and thus thought cannot come solely (...) from our physical world. The only possible explanation is something outside, argued to be God. (shrink)

The title question arises because the philosophy seems the same as asking, “What if everyone did that?” In this paper, I give a partial response to the question. In an appendix, I consider the question of why should we tell you the answer?

In this paper I argue that a reimagining of the notion of silence as more than a sonic phenomenon is needed to address the dominant structural apparati of Western discourse. Silence as an existential medium is where the Foucauldian apparatuses that power the status-quo of the world operate. They forge connections between things like ideology and social organization where one falls into the wake of the other and is shaped in a way that is nearly invisible to the passing glance. (...) It is the indeterminacy within silence as explored by John Cage that that allows this to happen, but it also offers the potential to have an active role in the shaping of these apparatuses toward a more beneficial and culturally aware form of society. This new approach is crucial in helping one learn to embrace the indeterminacy of life and the hazy relational structures that drive our existence. (shrink)

Many arguments against naïve realism are arguments against its corollary: disjunctivism. But there is a simpler argument—due to Mehta —that targets naïve realism directly. In broad strokes, the argument is the following. There are certain experiences that are, allegedly, in no way phenomenally similar. Nevertheless, naïve realism predicts that they are phenomenally similar. Hence, naïve realism is false. Mehta and Ganson successfully defend this argument from an objection raised by French and Gomes :451–460, 2016). However, all parties to this dispute (...) have missed the real problem with Mehta’s argument. As I see it, the real problem is twofold. First, despite his claims to the contrary, the experiences Mehta cites are phenomenally similar. Moreover, finding experiences that are in no way phenomenally similar turns out to be a difficult task. Second, there are motivated versions of naïve realism that are immune to Mehta’s argument. The upshot is that even if Mehta’s argument is sound, the most that it can show is that one version of naïve realism is false. (shrink)

ABSTRACT According to comparativism, comparative confidence is more fundamental than absolute confidence. In two recent AJP papers, Stefánsson has argued that comparativism is capable of explaining interpersonal confidence comparisons. In this paper, I will argue that Stefansson’s proposed explanation is inadequate; that we have good reasons to think that comparativism cannot handle interpersonal comparisons; and that the best explanation of interpersonal comparisons requires thinking about confidence in a fundamentally different way than that which comparativists propose: specifically, we should think of (...) confidence as a dimensionless quantity. (shrink)

According to the preference-centric approach to understanding partial belief, the connection between partial beliefs and preferences is key to understanding what partial beliefs are and how they’re measured. As Ramsey put it, the ‘degree of a belief is a causal property of it, which we can express vaguely as the extent to which we are prepared to act on it’ The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays, Routledge, Oxon, pp 156–198, 1931). But this idea is not as popular as (...) it once was. Nowadays, the preference-centric approach is frequently dismissed out-of-hand as behaviouristic, unpalatably anti-realist, and/or prone to devastating counterexamples. Cases like Eriksson and Hájek’s :183–213, 2007) preferenceless Zen monk and Christensen’s :356–376, 2001) other roles argument have suggested to many that any account of partial belief that ties them too closely to preferences is irretrievably flawed. In this paper I provide a defence of preference-centric accounts of partial belief. (shrink)

Perceptual experience is often said to be transparent; that is, when we have a perceptual experience we seem to be aware of properties of the objects around us, and never seem to be aware of properties of the experience itself. This is a introspective fact. It is also often said that we can infer a metaphysical fact from this introspective fact, e.g. a fact about the nature of perceptual experience. A transparency theory fills in the details for these two facts, (...) and bridges the gap between them. We have three aims: to scrutinize Michael Tye’s transparency theory :137–151, 2002; Consciousness revisited: materialism without phenomenal concepts, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2009; Philos Stud 170:39–57, 2014a), introduce a new transparency theory, and advance a meta-theoretical hypothesis about the interest, and import, of transparency theories. (shrink)

In his Edifying Discourses, Soren Kierkegaard published a sermon entitled ‘The Unchangeableness of God’ in which he reiterated the dogma which dominated Catholic, Protestant and even Jewish expressions of classical supernaturalist theology from the first century A.D. until the advent of process theology in the twentieth century. The dogma that as a perfect being, God must be totally unchanging in every conceivable respect was expressed by Kierkegaard in such ways as: He changes all, Himself unchanged. When everything seems stable and (...) in the overturn of all things, He remains equally unchanged; no change touches Him, not even the shadow of a change; in unaltered clearness He, the father of lights, remained eternally unchanged. 1. (shrink)

This is a two page handout summarizing a number of objections made against Robert Graves's book of Greek myths.

This paper proposes that before the opening of Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King, the “hero” had to solve a lot of riddles.

Influenced by Martha Kuhlman, I am disposed to read Milan Kundera as personally disliking crowds. But I speculate that there is a practical reason for his writing against crowds, if we see him as part of a system of novelists.

A review of some major topics of debate in normative decision theory from circa 2007 to 2019. Topics discussed include the ongoing debate between causal and evidential decision theory, decision instability, risk-weighted expected utility theory, decision-making with incomplete preferences, and decision-making with imprecise credences.

This paper presents critical reactions to the use of the ostriches in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, focusing on the fact that he does not use their most striking quality. But, despite the demand, I struggle to find much to criticize, though I do flag a worry about Kundera’s consistency regarding what is common knowledge.

A textbook by Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen tells us that Gregory Bateson criticized the use of the term ‘function’ in social anthropology on the following grounds: it has no place outside of mathematics. But consulting the Bateson text referred to, he does not say that in his section on function and even endorses certain uses of the term “function” in anthropology. I look into these and his criticisms of functionalism, responding to the criticisms.

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson says that a sense of the fundamental unity of science was once achieved by successful specialist scientists expanding into borderline areas of research. I distinguish two ways in which this expansion can occur and note how one of these ways was, from Bateson’s perspective, troublesome for social anthropology.

Mary Beard considers the thesis that Frazer’s book The Golden Bough was popular because it provided practical aid for colonialists. But she introduces another relationship between the book and British colonialism: that it provided an image of the British colonial project as a whole. I present two objections to the proposal that there was this relationship, as well as – in the appendix – flagging a concern about the internal coherence of Beard’s paper with the introduced relationship.

An assurance theory of trust begins from the act of assurance – whether testimonial, advisorial or promissory – and explains trust as a cognate stance of resting assured. My version emphasizes the risks and rewards of trust. On trust’s rewards, I show how an assurance can give a reason to the addressee through a twofold exercise of ‘normative powers’: (i) the speaker thereby incurs an obligation to be sincere; (ii) if the speaker is trustworthy, she thereby gives her addressee the (...) reason. Each claim is controversial; my contribution lies in how I defend them together, linking the sincerity obligation to the provision of reasons. On trust’s risks, I defend a popular thesis about the nature of trust – that trust differs from mere reliance in how it risks betrayal – against the objection that the thesis ‘moralizes’ trust. Such betrayal need not be moral, I argue, because it may derive entirely from how the assurance purports to provide a reason. (shrink)

Joseph Raz criticizes John Rawls for a procedure supporting a non-adaptable constitution. This paper considers how a non-adaptable constitution can seem not so counterintuitive and also when.

Parts of the Victorian middle class were troubled by how Victorian society was both highly evolved and contained savage parts. I propose a solution to the paradox they faced.

This paper presents a puzzle that occurred to me while reading Milan Kundera defining graphomania: a mania for writing books for an unknown public. I also present a solution.

I observe common ground and differences between the first page of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Christina Rossetti’s Commonplace.