This essay from 1999, republished in Notre Dame Magazine online in July 2023, explores how the 1950s were a time of fundamental transformations in American society, a time when the United States went fully megatechnic. The hugely increased power of military, corporate-industrial and “big science” institutions developed during the 1950s signaled the transformation to megatechnic America, with atomic bombs and nuclear testing, automobiles and televisions as key symbols of that transformation. Figures such as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward (...) class='Hi'>Teller illustrated the battle between national security dictates controlling nuclear bomb testing and responsible science. -/- Since the Second World War the United States has been problematically guided by a power-oriented culture, which, in the names of national security and convenience, has tended to reshape America toward an increasingly hierarchical model of society based on the system requirements of a machine. This same era gave birth to a generalized economic prosperity in the United States, to the civil rights movement, to feminism, literary and artistic innovations, and to other openings of public equality and freedom. Yet the magnification of bureaucratic-corporate structures in that postwar, cold war prosperity has ultimately tended to restructure America against the basic requirements of democratic community. (shrink)

I modify and generalize Carnap’s notion of frameworks as a way of unpacking Goodman’s metaphor of “making worlds with symbols”. My frameworks provide, metaphorically, a way of making worlds out of symbols in as much as all our framework-bound access to the world is through frameworks that always stand to be improved in accuracy, precision, and usually both. Such improvement is characterized in pragmatist terms.

Sainsbury argued that exact extensions for predicates entails the unacceptable infinite tower of higher order vagueness so that exact extensions must be rejected. I offer a second argument: The exact extensions arise when semantic values are assumed to be (exact) properties. But no assignment of unique properties to predicates could arise from any real-world finite basis. How, then, is talk of properties as semantic values to be understood? We distinguish the precise compositional rules of semantics from the operation of messy, (...) imprecise rules at the word/world interface for applicability of minimal predicates. When such application is sufficiently clear it is idealized as property instantiation and semantic composition proceeds in familiar ways. These imprecise rules for application of minimal predicates provide the proper locus for study of vagueness. The conclusions thus far apply to show that higher order vagueness is not forced and that classical logic can generally be retained. I discuss implications for the sorites paradox. Abandoning properties entails abandoning simple correspondence truth understood as Pa is true just in case a has the property signified by P. As an alternative I outline a pragmatist approach to truth, the spirit of which is conveyed by the slogan, “To be true enough is to work well enough.”. (shrink)

Science is widely taken to aim, and often to succeed, in producing truths, a “mirror of nature”. Not so. Instead, science fashions models, understood broadly as representations that are never both completely precise and completely accurate. . This chapter discusses how the misconception arose and how it is now being corrected. The account begins with a tension between the founding metaphors of the Scientific Revolution, reading God’s book of nature and the clock metaphor. The former pre-frames laws and physics fundamentalism; (...) the latter the discovery of mechanisms, how things work. Laws aimed at truth, but the world is too complicated for us to get generalizations exactly right. Likewise, the complexity of mechanisms always requires simplifying idealization. Further, different problems require different idealizations and so a pluralism of accounts. The pluralism is unproblematic as different problems about the same subject matter can be consistently dealt with using very different schemes of simplification. (shrink)

Taking the semantic values of predicates to be precise properties leaves no room for predicate vagueness. I suggest instead understanding talk of properties as used in semantics as idealized placeholders for the imprecise results of navigating the word/world interface. Basic predications result by applying imprecise informal rules of word use, and it is in the imprecision of these rules that vagueness arises. The idealized property-placeholders then function to separate the messy process of navigating the word/world interface from the exact rules (...) of semantic composition. This scheme applies a methodology of problem separation that is well known in the physical sciences. (shrink)

Sainsbury argued that exact extensions for predicates entails the unacceptable infinite tower of higher order vagueness so that exact extensions must be rejected. I offer a second argument: The exact extensions arise when semantic values are assumed to be (exact) properties. But no assignment of unique properties to predicates could arise from any real-world finite basis. How, then, is talk of properties as semantic values to be understood? We distinguish the precise compositional rules of semantics from the operation of messy, (...) imprecise rules at the word/world interface for applicability of minimal predicates. When such application is sufficiently clear it is idealized as property instantiation and semantic composition proceeds in familiar ways. These imprecise rules for application of minimal predicates provide the proper locus for study of vagueness. The conclusions thus far apply to show that higher order vagueness is not forced and that classical logic can generally be retained. I discuss implications for the sorites paradox. Abandoning properties entails abandoning simple correspondence truth understood as Pa is true just in case a has the property signified by P. As an alternative I outline a pragmatist approach to truth, the spirit of which is conveyed by the slogan, “To be true enough is to work well enough.”. (shrink)

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

Nature is complex, exceedingly so. A repercussion of this “complex world constraint” is that it is, in practice, impossible to connect words to the world in a foolproof manner. In this paper I explore the ways in which the complex world constraint makes vagueness, or more generally imprecision, in language in practice unavoidable, illuminates what vagueness comes to, and guides us to a sensible way of thinking about truth. Along the way we see that the problem of ceteris paribus laws (...) is exactly the problem of vagueness and susceptible to similar treatment. (shrink)

Conventional scientific realism is just the doctrine that our theoretical terms refer. Conventional antirealism denies, for various reasons, theoretical reference and takes theory to give us only information about the word of the perceptual where reference, it would appear, is secure. But reference fails for the perceptual every bit as much for the perceptual as for the theoretical, and for the same reason: the world is too complicated for us to succeed in attaching specific referents to our terms. That would (...) appear to leave us with a kind of latter day, representational idealism: All we have are representations. I argue that our representations tell us about an independent world without securing reference by showing that the world is very like the way it is represented in a range of different, often complementary modeling schemes. Though never exact, these representations are of something extra-representational because they present the world modally as going beyond what is represented explicitly. (shrink)

In practice theoretical terms are open-ended in not being attached to anything completely specific. This raises a problem for scientific realism: If there is no one completely specific kind of thing that might be in the extension of “atom”, what is it to claim that atoms exist? A realist’s solution is to say that in theoretical contexts of mature atom-theories there are things that play the role of atoms as characterized in that theory-context. The paper closes with a laundry list (...) of problems that this more careful statement of scientific realism still faces. (shrink)

[The version of this paper published by Oxford online in 2019 was not copy-edited and has some sense-obscuring typos. I have posted a corrected (but not the final published) version on this site. The version published in print in 2020 has these corrections.] Which is more fundamental, assertion or testimony? Should we understand assertion as basic, treating testimony as what you get when you add an interpersonal addressee? Or should we understand testimony as basic, treating mere assertion -- assertion without (...) testimony -- as what you get when you subtract that interpersonal relation? In this chapter, I’ll argue for the subtractive approach and for the more general thesis that its treatment of the interpersonal element in assertion makes understanding that interpersonal element the key to understanding how assertion expresses belief. My theory of belief-expression in assertion treats it as internalizing the transmission of belief in testimony. How we understand that internalizing move depends on how we conceptualize the interpersonal element in testimony. Since what I’ll call the Command Model does not give us the conceptual resources to make this move, we should adopt an alternative that I’ll call the Custodial Model, on which a testifier aims not to convince her addressee but to reason with him – to give him reasons to believe what she tells him grounded in her trustworthiness in thus attempting to influence him. The subtractive approach to assertion thus rests on a key distinction between the aims of reasoning and persuasion. (shrink)

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)

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)

We develop an approach to the problem of de se belief usually expressed with the question, what does the shopper with the leaky sugar bag have to learn to know that s/he is the one making the mess. Where one might have thought that some special kind of “de se” belief explains the triggering of action, we maintain that this gets the order of explanation wrong. We sketch a very simple cognitive architecture that yields de se-like behavior on which the (...) action-triggering functionality of the belief-state is what counts it as de se rather than some prior property of being “de se” explaining the triggering of action. This functionality shows that action-triggering change in belief-state also undergirds a correlative change in the objective involved in the triggered action. This model is far too simple to have any claim to showing how the de se works for humans, but it shows, by illustration, that nothing mysteriously “subjective”” need be involved in this aspect of self-conception. While our exposition is very different from those of Perry and Recanati, all three of us are developing the same kind of view. (shrink)

Can a reason to believe testimony derive from the addressee’s trust itself or only from reliability in the speaker that the trust perhaps causes? I aim to cast suspicion on the former view, defended by Faulkner, in favor of the latter – despite agreeing with Faulkner’s emphasis on the second-personal normativity of testimonial assurance. Beyond my narrow disagreement with Faulkner lie two broader issues. I argue that Faulkner misappropriates Bernard Williams’s genealogy of testimony when he makes use of Williams’s genealogical (...) argument in his own preferred assurance view of testimony. Though Williams doesn’t clearly articulate it, there is a deep reason why Williams’s genealogy cannot underwrite an argument for trust-based testimonial reasons. Can a genealogical argument underwrite any version of the assurance view? I sketch an assurance view of testimonial reasons that rejects Faulkner’s thesis that such reasons could be grounded in trust. Then I examine what it would take for that assurance view to receive genealogical vindication. (shrink)

Is autonomy – governing yourself – compatible with letting yourself be governed by trust? This paper argues that autonomy is not only compatible with appropriate trust but actually requires it. Autonomy requires appropriate trust because it is undermined by inappropriate mistrust. An autonomous agent treats herself as answerable for her action-guiding commitments, where answerability requires openness to the rational influence of external, critical perspectives on those commitments. This openness to correction makes one vulnerable to manipulation and can be exploited in (...) ways that undermine autonomy instead of supporting it. We argue that autonomy is undermined by inappropriate trust, and that the inappropriateness lies in the agent’s failure to manifest appropriate responsiveness to evidence of untrustworthiness in the one trusted. The problem isn’t that autonomy requires dispensing with trust but that trust must itself be governed by appropriate responsiveness to evidence of untrustworthiness. Our view confronts two challenges. One challenge lies in explaining why you shouldn’t treat your vulnerability to manipulation as a general reason to let your trusting disposition lapse into an untrusting one. We argue that there is no such general reason to let your responsiveness to evidence of untrustworthiness be supplanted by a suspicious disposition to seek and require positive evidence of trustworthiness. A second, and deeper, challenge arises from the fact that in some especially sophisticated cases of manipulation there is no evidence of untrustworthiness to which you could respond. We argue that you cannot rationally cope with even this unresolvable risk of exploited trust by trusting only yourself. (shrink)

How must you think about time when you form an intention? Obviously, you must think about the time of action. Must you frame the action in any broader prospect or retrospect? In this essay I argue that you must: you thereby commit yourself to a specific prospect of a future retrospect – a retrospect, indeed, on that very prospect. In forming an intention you project a future from which you will not ask regretfully, referring back to your follow-through on that (...) intention, “What on earth was I thinking?” I argue that this broader attitude expresses the self-accountability necessary for practical commitment. (shrink)

Practical commitment is Janus-faced, looking outward toward the expectations it creates and inward toward their basis in the agent’s will. This paper criticizes Kantian attempts to link these facets and proposes an alternative. Contra David Velleman, the availability of a conspiratorial perspective (not yours, not your interlocutor’s) is what allows you to understand yourself as making a lying promise – as committing yourself ‘outwardly’ with the deceptive reasoning that Velleman argues cannot provide a basis for self-understanding. Moreover, the intrapersonal availability (...) of such a third perspective is what enables you to commit yourself ‘inwardly.’ Here I offer an alternative to Christine Korsgaard’s account of practical commitment, on which committing yourself requires identifying yourself with a principle. You needn’t identify yourself with a principle, I argue, because the unity at which you aim when you commit yourself is a unity not with your acting self but with a later perspective, where the relation is one of self-intelligibility, not self-justification, and therefore needn’t be mediated by principles. This ‘twice-future’ perspective – neither your present intending nor your (once-)future acting but a third perspective that looks back on that relation – plays the intrapersonal role played in interpersonal commitment by potential co-conspirators. Kantians are therefore right to link your ability to commit yourself with your ability credibly to express that commitment to others. But the linkage generates a strikingly unKantian result. The nature of agency cannot provide an apriori basis for honesty because what enables you to commit yourself is what also enables you to lie. (shrink)

This paper treats two questions about the relation between trust and the will. One question, about trust, is whether you can trust ‘at will.’ Can you trust despite acknowledging that you lack evidence of the trustee’s worthiness of your trust? Another question, about the will, is whether you can exercise your will at all without trust – at least, in yourself. I treat the second question as a guide to the first, arguing that the role of trust in the will (...) reveals how you can trust at will. The key lies in distinguishing two ways of being responsive to evidence. On the one hand, you cannot trust someone – whether another person or your own earlier self – whom you judge unworthy of your trust. On the other hand, trust does not require a positive assessment of trustworthiness. I thus take issue with Pamela Hieronymi’s analysis of trust as a “commitment-constituted attitude.” Your trust is indeed constrained by your responsiveness to evidence of untrustworthiness, but you need undertake no commitment akin to or involving a judgment that the trustee is trustworthy. We can see why trust is not a commitment-constituted attitude by seeing how trust itself plays a role in forming a commitment. (shrink)

How far, if at all, do our intrapersonal and our interpersonal epistemic obligations run in parallel? This paper treats the question as addressing the stability of doxastic commitment in the two dimensions. In the background lies an analogy between doxastic and practical commitment. We’ll pursue the question of doxastic stability by coining a doxastic analogue of Gregory Kavka’s much-discussed toxin case. In this new case, you foresee that you will rationally abandon a doxastic commitment by undergoing a shift in the (...) context in which you doxastically deliberate. The case reveals an important stability condition on doxastic commitment that plays no role in cases modeled on Ulysses and the Sirens, the scenario that has shaped previous attempts to draw an analogy between doxastic and practical commitment. The stability condition thereby revealed is not diachronic -- it does not involve a shift in belief -- but we can construct specifically diachronic cases that reveal an important intrapersonal epistemic obligation. This obligation arises when you expect the shift in belief by ‘projecting’ yourself into a future doxastic context -- thus vindicating a restricted, but only this restricted, application of Bas van Fraassen’s Reflection Principle. Despite some important differences, we can use these diachronic cases as a model for interpersonal cases that reveal an important role for doxastic context in the epistemology of disagreement. But the roles played by projection and context in disagreement ensure that there is no general obligation to be responsive to the opinion of an epistemic peer who disagrees with you. (shrink)

If by “demon” one understands an evil occult being, then its equivalent in the Islamic narrative is the intersection of the category jinn with that of the shayātīn: a demon is a shaytān from among the jinn. The literature in the Islamic tradition on these subjects is vast. In what follows, we will select some key elements from it to provide a brief summary: first on the nature of the jinn, their nature, and their relationship to God and human beings; (...) second, on the origin, nature, and role of Shaytān (Satan himself) and the shayātīn in the moral drama of Islam. Then, we will take a closer look at the relationship between jinn and humankind, according to Islam, and the phenomena of the demonic as it manifests itself in that relation. In the process, I will entertain, tentatively, some philosophical speculation as to the nature of that ultimately mysterious relation and phenomena, drawn from what we find in the religious sources. (shrink)

This paper engages two debates about trust, deriving from two distinct questions about the nature of trust. The first asks how to define trust. Does trusting B to φ involve anything more than relying on B to φ? The second asks about the normative structure of trust. Does trust most fundamentally embody a two-place or a three-place relation? I’ll defend a new position in the second debate that yields an equally new position in the first. The standard three-place model highlights (...) ‘A trusts B to φ.’ The two-place model prefers ‘A trusts B.’ On my new three-place model, both are less fundamental than ‘A φs through trust in B.’ We do, of course, trust people to do things. But the most fundamental form of trust lies in doing something through trust in a person. I call this the Assurance View of trust because I’ll argue that trusting involves accepting another’s invitation to trust – an assurance, in effect, that the other is relevantly trustworthy. Trust thereby differs from mere reliance by how it makes available a reason to rely on the trusted. In mere reliance, your reason to rely on B is exogenous to the reliance relation, emerging, for example, from B’s track record of relevant reliability. When you trust B, by contrast, you take yourself to have a reason to rely on B that is endogenous to your trust, a reason grounded not merely in B’s reliability, exogenously considered, but in B’s ongoing responsiveness to your relevant needs. The Assurance View’s key insight emerges, I’ll argue, from cases wherein trust is disappointed – the trusted does not do what you trusted her to do – yet not thereby betrayed. (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 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.

It’s a popular idea that memory resembles testimony insofar as each can ‘preserve’ epistemic warrant. But how does such ‘preservation’ do its epistemic work? I have elsewhere developed an assurance theory of testimonial warrant. Here, I develop an assurance theory of preservative memory. How could the ‘preservation’ of warrant through memory work through an assurance? What would even count as an intrapersonal assurance? I explain each form of preservation by contrasting the relation that preserves warrant with a pathological alternative. My (...) assurance theory of testimony theorizes the illocutionary norms governing the speech act of telling by explaining what goes wrong when there’s what Austin calls an ‘abuse.’ But what norms govern an intrapersonal memory relation? There are two sides in a memory relation: the earlier self judges that p, then memory keeps the later self in epistemic touch with that judgment by ‘preserving’ its warrant. But this is not an illocutionary relation. (When you ‘tell yourself that p,’ you are trying to ‘convince yourself’ that p and as such typically do not yet even judge that p.) I argue that the earlier self nonetheless offers an assurance by extending an invitation to trust. Your earlier self judges that p in part by projecting a future in which you will continue to trust yourself on the question whether p when you lose access to the evidence that informed the judgment. That projection of trust in yourself posits a worthiness of trust that ought to lead others to accept your testimony that p. Assurance in memory and assurance in testimony thus ought to work together. This aspect of the parallel emerges vividly when we see how it breaks down in the pathology of gaslighting – more than merely illocutionary abuse! – which targets specifically how testimony and memory work together in inviting trust relations. (shrink)

My paper discusses the philosophical interrelationship between perfection, truth, and knowledge. The connection that exists between these three concepts underscores the argument of my paper that they are all one and the same thing. -/- The concepts of perfection, truth and knowledge are analysed in that order. I analyse perfection and demonstrate the practicalities of my arguments. Truth is then scrutinized and defined to illustrate its intimate relationship with perfection leading to the conclusion that knowledge being ‘truth that is perfect’. (...) -/- In dealing with the theory of knowledge, I take into account the justification of knowledge and highlighted arguments that I found to be insufficient. I derive a premise to refute and replace both the traditional and contemporary views of knowledge. -/- In the paper presented, I consider views of some prominent philosophers including; Locke, Russell, Plato, Aristotle and Leibniz. (shrink)

[This draft is dated November 2007. I wrote it while I was a fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies at UW-Milwaukee, in 2005-06, and published it only on the Center's website as a working paper. Many of the core ideas in this paper wound up in "Receptivity and the Will," Nous 2009, "Assertion, Sincerity, and Knowledge," Nous 2013, and "Assurance and Warrant," Philosophers' Imprint 2014 -- though formulated rather differently. What follows is the original abstract.] This working paper (...) extends a project that I’ve been developing for several years on the role of trust, including self-trust, in rationality and personal autonomy. I’m interested equally in epistemic questions (what to believe) and in practical questions (how to act), though the present paper addresses only the former. In an earlier paper on the epistemic side of my project, “Telling as Inviting to Trust” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, May 2005), I offered an explanation of how you can get an entitlement to believe something simply by trusting someone when she tells you it’s so, the entitlement deriving not merely from the assurance but from the trustworthy character of the one who gives it. The present paper adapts my explanation of believing-on-another’s-word to belief as such, via the observation that you can’t form a belief without trusting someone’s judgment – if only your own. I view intrapersonal reasoning about what to believe as an internalization of the interpersonal cases I analyzed in that earlier paper. In each instance, belief-formation has a second-personal dynamic: an invitation to trust on one side, trusting acceptance of that invitation on the other. If I’m right, the dynamic at the heart of all belief manifests not autonomy but a trusting heteronomy, whereby you render yourself appropriately receptive to judgment – your own or another’s. (The idea that judging is inviting self-trust first occurred to me in 2002, but I didn’t get a chance to develop it properly till 2005-06, my fellowship year at the Center for 21st Century Studies. I appreciate the support.). (shrink)

This essay utilizes the work of the comedy group, Monty Python, as a means of introducing basic concepts in Existentialism, especially as it pertains to the writings of Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus.

This essay examines the music of Radiohead as a means of introducing various elementary concepts and theories in the philosophy of music.

This paper explores various metaphysical aspects of Leibniz’s concepts of space, motion, and matter, with the intention of demonstrating how the distinctive role of force in Leibnizian physics can be used to develop a theory of relational motion using privileged reference frames. Although numerous problems will remain for a consistent Leibnizian relationist account, the version developed within our investigation will advance the work of previous commentators by more accurately reflecting the specific details of Leibniz’s own natural philosophy, especially his handling (...) of the dynamical interactions of plenum bodies. (shrink)

The object of this paper is not arguments from contingency in general, but specifically Aquinas’s ‘Third Way’ as it appears in his Summa Theologica. I will raise three objections to this argument. First, the argument depends on the premise, that if everything were contingent, then there would have been a time during which nothing exists, but this is not self-evident and no argument is given for it here. Secondly, Aquinas tells us that a key premise in this argument, that an (...) infinite order of things necessary through one another is impossible, has been proven just previously (in the ‘second way’) with respect to an infinite order of efficient causes. But this argument fallaciously equivocates between two different senses of the term ‘first’, and the fallacy does not disappear when applied to the ‘third way’. Thus, Aquinas not only fails, in this argument, to prove the existence of a thing necessary in itself, but fails to prove that anything is necessary at all. Lastly, this argument suffers from a puzzling ambiguity as to the meaning of the term ‘necessity’, and either way of interpreting the term consistently in the argument raises difficulties. (shrink)

This essay explores the possibility of constructing a structural realist interpretation of spacetime theories that can resolve the ontological debate between substantivalists and relationists. Drawing on various structuralist approaches in the philosophy of mathematics, as well as on the theoretical complexities of general relativity, our investigation will reveal that a structuralist approach can be beneficial to the spacetime theorist as a means of deflating some of the ontological disputes regarding similarly structured spacetimes.

This paper examines Descartes' problematic relational theory of motion, especially when viewed within the context of his dynamics, the Cartesian natural laws. The work of various commentators on Cartesian motion is also surveyed, with particular emphasis placed upon the recent important texts of Garber and Des Chene. In contrast to the methodology of most previous interpretations, however, this essay employs a modern "spacetime" approach to the problem. By this means, the role of dynamics in Descartes' theory, which has often been (...) neglected in favor of kinematic factors, is shown to be central to finding a solution to the puzzle of Cartesian motion. (shrink)

Among the most popular strategies for justifying political obligations are those that appeal to the principle of fairness. These theories face the challenge, canonically articulated by Robert Nozick, of explaining how it is that persons are obligated to schemes when they receive goods that they do not ask for but cannot reject. John Simmons offers one defense of the principle of fairness, arguing that people could be bound by obligations of fairness if they voluntarily accept goods produced by a cooperative (...) scheme. Simmons, however, thinks that such a theory will do little work in justifying political obligations, since virtually no one voluntarily accepts state goods. This paper attempts to advance just such a theory by arguing that states are in fact genuine cooperative schemes and that Simmons is overly pessimistic in his appraisal of whether the majority of citizens accept the goods provided by their states. (shrink)

I propose some arguments suggested by Descartes' text for the conclusion that we are not identical to our bodies. I suggest that a natural extension of those arguments leads to Plantinga's Replacement Argument. I conclude that even if such an argument is plausible, its conclusion does not establish the further claim that we can exist without a body.

According to the iterative conception of set, each set is a collection of sets formed prior to it. The notion of priority here plays an essential role in explanations of why contradiction-inducing sets, such as the Russell set, do not exist. Consequently, these explanations are successful only to the extent that a satisfactory priority relation is made out. I argue that attempts to do this have fallen short: understanding priority in a straightforwardly constructivist sense threatens the coherence of the empty (...) set and raises serious epistemological concerns; but the leading realist interpretations---ontological and modal interpretations of priority---are deeply problematic as well. I conclude that the purported explanatory virtues of the iterative conception are, at present, unfounded. (shrink)

This essay explores the vexed issue of individual corporeal substance in Descartes' natural philosophy. Although Descartes' often referred to individual material objects as separate substances, the constraints on his definitions of matter and substance would seem to favor the opposite view; namely, that there exists only one corporeal substance, the plenum. In contrast to this standard interpretation, however, it will be demonstrated that Descartes' hypotheses make a fairly convincing case for the existence of individual material substances; and the key to (...) this new found individuation is a long neglected set of passages in the Principles of Philosophy. (shrink)

Plotinus’ famous treatise against the Gnostics (33), together with contemporary and thematically related treatises on Intelligible Beauty (31), on Number (34), and on Free Will and the Will of the One (39), can be seen as providing the essential components of a Plotinian defense of polytheism against conceptual moves that, while associated for him primarily with Gnostic sectarians overlapping with Platonic philosophical circles, will become typical of monotheism in its era of hegemony. When Plotinus’ Gnostics ‘contract’ divinity into a single (...) God, they not only devalue the cosmos for its multiplicity and diversity, but also multiply intelligible principles unreasonably. This is because they have foreclosed the distinction, which is to become increasingly explicit in the later antique Platonists, between the intelligible and that which is given existentially, the domain belonging to Plotinus’ indeterminate multiplicity of ‘intelligible Gods’, as opposed to the dialectically determinate number of intelligible principles. Plotinus is prescient in recognizing that incipient monotheism threatens to erase the distinction between philosophy and theology, and between both of these and psychology, the final outcome of which can only be solipsism or nihilism. The defense of polytheism is seen in this fashion to be essential to the preservation of the space for philosophical discourse. (shrink)

This paper investigates the question of, and the degree to which, Newton’s theory of space constitutes a third-way between the traditional substantivalist and relationist ontologies, i.e., that Newton judged that space is neither a type of substance/entity nor purely a relation among such substances. A non-substantivalist reading of Newton has been famously defended by Howard Stein, among others; but, as will be demonstrated, these claims are problematic on various grounds, especially as regards Newton’s alleged rejection of the traditional substance/accident dichotomy (...) concerning space. Nevertheless, our analysis of the metaphysical foundations of Newton’s spatial theory will strive to uncover its unique and innovative characteristics, most notably, the distinctive role that Newton’s “immaterialist” spatial ontology plays in his dynamics. (shrink)

This paper investigates Newton’s ontology of space in order to determine its commitment, if any, to both Cambridge neo-Platonism, which posits an incorporeal basis for space, and substantivalism, which regards space as a form of substance or entity. A non-substantivalist interpretation of Newton’s theory has been famously championed by Howard Stein and Robert DiSalle, among others, while both Stein and the early work of J. E. McGuire have downplayed the influence of Cambridge neo-Platonism on various aspects of Newton’s own spatial (...) hypotheses. Both of these assertions will be shown to be problematic on various grounds, with special emphasis placed on Stein’s influential case for a non-substantivalist reading. Our analysis will strive, nonetheless, to reveal the unique or forward-looking aspects of Newton’s approach, most notably, his critical assessment of substance ontologies, that help to distinguish his theory of space from his neo-Platonic contemporaries and predecessors. (shrink)

In the paper, certain rational postulates for protocols describing real communicating are introduced.These rational postulates, on the one hand, allow assigning a certain typology of real systems of interactions, which is consistent with the reality of epistemic argumentation in systems of communicating, and on the other one – defining rules of using argumentation in real situations. Moreover, the presented postulates for protocols characterize information networks and administering knowledge in real interactivity systems. Due to the epistemic character of the considerations, the (...) problem undertaken in the paper concerns working out fundamental assumptions that refer to building of epistemic logics. They allow establishing the correctness of the discourse defined by rational postulates of protocols of real communication. In the context of the presented problem there are the following two research questions distinguished: 1) How do we determine the rule of building of real dynamic epistemic logics? and 2) How should we define semantics for these logics? Within the framework of considerations relating to the research questions asked, certain epistemic operators, relativized to types of communicating, are introduced. Basic logical relations between using these operators are established for these operators. The relations are presented by a diagram called the square of epis temic operators. On the basis of these logical relations some axioms for real dynamic epistemic logics are presented. The semantics of real dynamic epistem ic logics is extended by the methods of lower and upper approximation of formula evaluating. This allows defining ‘approximation Kripke models’. The results of conceptualization of knowledge on real premises of epistemic argum entation presented in this paper can be applied to rhetoric in real systems of interaction. (shrink)

Very little attention has been paid towards examining John Rawls’s liberal principle of legitimacy as a self-standing theory. Nevertheless, it offers a highly original way of thinking about state legitimacy. In this paper, I will offer a sketch of what such an account might look like. At its heart is the idea that the legitimacy of the state resides not in the consent of the governed, nor in the state’s conformity with the appropriate principles of justice, but rather in citizens’ (...) endorsement of the state and its underlying constitutional principles on the basis of their own comprehensive conceptions of justice. Such an account offers a stable middle ground between popular alternatives, and has a way of not just solving, but dissolving, the problem of legitimacy. (shrink)

In this reading of the Euthyphro, Socrates and Euthyphro are seen less in a primordial conflict between reason and devotion, than as sincere Hellenic polytheists engaged in an inquiry based upon a common intuition that, in addition to the irreducible agency of the Gods, there is also some irreducible intelligible content to holiness. This reading is supported by the fact that Euthyphro does not claim the authority of revelation for his decision to prosecute his father, but rather submits it to (...) elenchus, and that Euthyphro does not embrace the ‘solution’ of theological voluntarism when Socrates explicitly offers it. Since the goal of this inquiry is neither to eliminate the noetic content of the holy, nor to eliminate the Gods’ agency, the purpose of the elenchus becomes the effort to articulate the results of this productive tension between the Gods and the intelligible on the several planes of Being implied by each conception of the holy which is successively taken up and dialectically overturned to yield the conception appropriate to the next higher plane, a style of interpretation characteristic of the ancient Neoplatonists. (shrink)

This essay examines Hobbes’ philosophy of space, with emphasis placed on the variety of interpretations that his concept of imaginary space has elicited from commentators. The process by which the idea of space is acquired from experience, as well as the role of nominalism, will be offered as important factors in tracking down the elusive content of Hobbes’ conception of imaginary space.