“What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems (...) and how these variations can help researchers taxonomize cognitive systems. (shrink)

Centrando la atención inicialmente en el cuerpo humano, algunos estudiosos (biólogos y filósofos) han descubierto en el mismo una serie de rasgos físicos atípicos, inexplicables a la luz de la sola biología. Estos caracteres físicos proporcionan los datos necesarios de los que se han valido las doctrinas antropológicas aquí estudiadas para concluir (en un sentido filosófico, como es propio de su método) que el cuerpo humano es el correlato físico del alma de una criatura racional. La ilimitada apertura de la (...) razón humana a la realidad tiene su reflejo en la inadaptación morfológica del cuerpo humano, que aparece como un cuerpo extrañamente abierto, es decir, carente de especialización (aunque, por ello mismo, más vulnerable físicamente), desvinculado del ambiente físico y libre de las ataduras que su hábitat impone a la morfología de cualquier animal. Asimismo, la apertura de la voluntad (fundamento profundo de la libertad), encuentra análoga correspondencia en la indeterminación física de la conducta humana. Ésta, desasistida o liberada –dependiendo de la perspectiva que se adopte– del instinto animal, se encuentra en la perentoria necesidad de conducir por sí misma, bajo la guía de la razón, todas las acciones de la vida humana. En sustancia, este libro presenta el paradójico e interesante resultado de unas investigaciones interdisciplinares de ciencia y filosofía, que, insistiendo en el estudio de los aspectos físicos del ser humano, han sacado a la luz valiosas observaciones sobre su espíritu, sin el cual la criatura humana, dotada de un cuerpo de una anómala indigencia biológica, no habría logrado sobrevivir. (shrink)

In this paper the propositional logic LTop is introduced, as an extension of classical propositional logic by adding a paraconsistent negation. This logic has a very natural interpretation in terms of topological models. The logic LTop is nothing more than an alternative presentation of modal logic S4, but in the language of a paraconsistent logic. Moreover, LTop is a logic of formal inconsistency in which the consistency and inconsistency operators have a nice topological interpretation. This constitutes a new proof of (...) S4 as being "the logic of topological spaces", but now under the perspective of paraconsistency. (shrink)

After an initial premise of historical contextualization, the article presents Suárez’s theory of matter, contained above all in the Disputatio metaphysica XIII, as a renewal and conceptual and terminological improvement of the Scotist theory of prime matter exposed in Lectura II, d. 12. Based on the Scotist idea of matter as aliquid (something) endowed with a positive entitas in so far as founded on the theological notion of creation, Suárez elaborates a new ontological statute of matter, of a non-Aristotelian nature, (...) on new theoretical bases: the hipostatization of the prime matter, the immediate inhesion of the quantity on matter, the loss of unity of the material substance (and the appeal of the mode of substantial union to remedy it) and the distinction between entitative extension and quantitative extension. (shrink)

The overwhelming majority of those who theorize about implicit biases posit that these biases are caused by some sort of association. However, what exactly this claim amounts to is rarely specified. In this paper, I distinguish between different understandings of association, and I argue that the crucial senses of association for elucidating implicit bias are the cognitive structure and mental process senses. A hypothesis is subsequently derived: if associations really underpin implicit biases, then implicit biases should be modulated by counterconditioning (...) or extinction but should not be modulated by rational argumentation or logical interventions. This hypothesis is false; implicit biases are not predicated on any associative structures or associative processes but instead arise because of unconscious propositionally structured beliefs. I conclude by discussing how the case study of implicit bias illuminates problems with popular dual-process models of cognitive architecture. (shrink)

The article studies some of the most important political ideas present in the origins of the modern State, especially the notion of political sovereignty, which, borne and developed in the maiestas of the imperial roman law and in the averroistic interpretation of the aristotelian idea of the perfect community, is accepted and developed by Francisco de Vitoria in the De potestate civili. Vitoria characterizes sovereignty with the features of supremacy in the domestic activity of the State and independence with regard (...) to other States. (shrink)

Inquiry, Volume 57, Issue 1, Page 55-96, February 2014.

The spirit of the Second Vatican Council can be expressed in three terms that summarize its tremendous effort: faithful, pastoral and modern. In this spirit, the Church sought to deal with doctrinal questions in a new way, preferring mercy to severity. In agreement with this spirit of the Council, Paul VI transformed the Congregation of the Holy Office into the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith and suppressed the Index of prohibited books. The inclusion of many modern philosophers shows that (...) the relation between modern philosophical thought and Catholic theology has been difficult, most likely due to the principle of immanence at the heart of modern thought. The article, then, analyzes and evaluates the metaphysical, gnoseological and ethical themes that stem from the assumption of the principle of immanence in some modern philosophers. However, the suppression of the Index shows that the essential continuity, faithfulness to the faith, is able to be accompanied by the accidental reform, as pastoral requirement and modernization. (shrink)

The article studies historically and systematically one of the most important aspects of Suárez’s metaphysics: the actualism, which consists in a reinterpretation of the Aristotelian doctrine of potency and act, which rejects the potency in its own sense and replaces it by the idea of an actuated potency (i.e., possessing an own being).

In some recent works, Crupi and Iacona have outlined an analysis of ‘if’ based on Chrysippus’ idea that a conditional holds whenever the negation of its consequent is incompatible with its antecedent. This paper presents a sound and complete system of conditional logic that accommodates their analysis. The soundness and completeness proofs that will be provided rely on a general method elaborated by Raidl, which applies to a wide range of systems of conditional logic.

After presenting evidence about categorization behavior, this paper argues for the following theses: 1) that there is a border between perception and cognition; 2) that the border is to be characterized by perception being modular (and cognition not being so); 3) that perception outputs conceptualized representations, so views that posit that the output of perception is solely non-conceptual are false; and 4) that perceptual content consists of basic-level categories and not richer contents.

A Bayesian mind is, at its core, a rational mind. Bayesianism is thus well-suited to predict and explain mental processes that best exemplify our ability to be rational. However, evidence from belief acquisition and change appears to show that we do not acquire and update information in a Bayesian way. Instead, the principles of belief acquisition and updating seem grounded in maintaining a psychological immune system rather than in approximating a Bayesian processor.

The guiding thread of the paper is the diagnosis that the advanced division of cognitive labor (that is, intellectual specialization) engenders a set of perennial, political and epistemic challenges (Millgram 2015) that, simultaneously, also generate opportunities for philosophy. In this paper, I re-characterize the nature of synthetic philosophy as a means to advance and institutionalize philosophy. For my definition of synthetic philosophy see section 2. In section 1, I treat Plato’s Republic as offering two models to represent philosophy's relationship to (...) the other sciences within the advanced division of labor. I highlight that for Plato intellectual specialization is central not just to economic, but also to political life. And, yet, that the very dispersion of scientific expertise, and its esoteric nature, also generates non-trivial challenges to the recognition and political utilization of knowledge. From Plato we can infer that in imperfect circumstances, philosophy’s self-constitution is, in part, a response to these challenges in political epistemology. However, how philosophy is institutionalized differs through time. In section 2, I re-introduce my conceptualization of synthetic philosophy and restate it. This makes visible that synthetic philosophy is already widely practiced in the profession as philosophy of the special sciences, PPE, formal modelling, public philosophy, etc. I use recent work by Dorst (2023) to illustrate synthetic philosophy and to identify some of the processes that give rise to the need for it. In sections 2-3, I contrast my account with the evolving ways that Philip Kitcher has conceptualized synthetic philosophy in order to make more precise the version promoted here. I do so not just because Kitcher and I use the same term, ‘synthetic philosophy,’ but because the temptations inherent in Kitcher’s approach should be resisted. -/- . (shrink)

This essay attempts to clarify the nature and structure of aliefs. First I distinguish between a robust notion of aliefs and a deflated one. A robust notion of aliefs would introduce aliefs into our psychological ontology as a hitherto undiscovered kind, whereas a deflated notion of aliefs would identify aliefs as a set of pre-existing psychological states. I then propose the following dilemma: one the one hand, if aliefs have propositional content, then it is unclear exactly how aliefs differ from (...) psychological states we already countenance, in which case there is no robust notion of aliefs; on the other, if aliefs just contain associative content, then they cannot do the explanatory work set out for them, in which case there is no reason to posit aliefs at all. Thus, it appears that we have little reason to posit the novel category of robust aliefs. (shrink)

Do university ethics classes influence students’ real-world moral choices? We aimed to conduct the first controlled study of the effects of ordinary philosophical ethics classes on real-world moral choices, using non-self-report, non-laboratory behavior as the dependent measure. We assigned 1332 students in four large philosophy classes to either an experimental group on the ethics of eating meat or a control group on the ethics of charitable giving. Students in each group read a philosophy article on their assigned topic and optionally (...) viewed a related video, then met with teaching assistants for 50-minute group discussion sections. They expressed their opinions about meat ethics and charitable giving in a follow-up questionnaire (1032 respondents after exclusions). We obtained 13,642 food purchase receipts from campus restaurants for 495 of the students, before and after the intervention. Purchase of meat products declined in the experimental group (52% of purchases of at least $4.99 contained meat before the intervention, compared to 45% after) but remained the same in the control group (52% both before and after). Ethical opinion also differed, with 43% of students in the experimental group agreeing that eating the meat of factory farmed animals is unethical compared to 29% in the control group. We also attempted to measure food choice using vouchers, but voucher redemption rates were low and no effect was statistically detectable. It remains unclear what aspect of instruction influenced behavior. (shrink)

Traditionally, a scientific model is thought to provide a good scientific explanation to the extent that it satisfies certain scientific goals that are thought to be constitutive of explanation. Problems arise when we realize that individual scientific models cannot simultaneously satisfy all the scientific goals typically associated with explanation. A given model’s ability to satisfy some goals must always come at the expense of satisfying others. This has resulted in philosophical disputes regarding which of these goals are in fact necessary (...) for explanation, and as such which types of models can and cannot provide explanations. Explanatory monists argue that one goal will be explanatory in all contexts, while explanatory pluralists argue that the goal will vary based on pragmatic considerations. In this paper, I argue that such debates are misguided, and that both monists and pluralists are incorrect. Instead of any goal being given explanatory priority over others in a given context, the different goals are all deeply dependent on one another for their explanatory power. Any model that sacrifices some explanatory goals to attain others will always necessarily undermine its own explanatory power in the process. And so when forced to choose between individual scientific models, there can be no explanatory victors. Given that no model can satisfy all the goals typically associated with explanation, no one model in isolation can provide a good scientific explanation. Instead we must appeal to collections of models. Collections of models provide an explanation when they satisfy the web of interconnected goals that justify the explanatory power of one another. (shrink)

I describe a phenomenon that has not yet been described in the epistemology literature. I label this phenomenon expression-style exclusion. Expression-style exclusion is an example of how s...

What is a concept? Philosophers have given many different answers to this question, reflecting a wide variety of approaches to the study of mind and language. Nonetheless, at the most general level, there are two dominant frameworks in contemporary philosophy. One proposes that concepts are mental representations, while the other proposes that they are abstract objects. This paper looks at the differences between these two approaches, the prospects for combining them, and the issues that are involved in the dispute. We (...) argue that powerful motivations have been offered in support of both frameworks. This suggests the possibility of combining the two. Unlike Frege, we hold that the resulting position is perfectly coherent and well worth considering. Nonetheless, we argue that it should be rejected along with the view that concepts are abstract objects. (shrink)

We propose four policies of ethical design of human-grade Artificial Intelligence. Two of our policies are precautionary. Given substantial uncertainty both about ethical theory and about the conditions under which AI would have conscious experiences, we should be cautious in our handling of cases where different moral theories or different theories of consciousness would produce very different ethical recommendations. Two of our policies concern respect and freedom. If we design AI that deserves moral consideration equivalent to that of human beings, (...) that AI should be designed with self-respect and with the freedom to explore values other than those we might impose. We are especially concerned about the temptation to create human-grade AI pre-installed with the desire to cheerfully sacrifice itself for its creators’ benefit. (shrink)

One relatively neglected challenge in ethical artificial intelligence (AI) design is ensuring that AI systems invite a degree of emotional and moral concern appropriate to their moral standing. Although experts generally agree that current AI chatbots are not sentient to any meaningful degree, these systems can already provoke substantial attachment and sometimes intense emotional responses in users. Furthermore, rapid advances in AI technology could soon create AIs of plausibly debatable sentience and moral standing, at least by some relevant definitions. Morally (...) confusing AI systems create unfortunate ethical dilemmas for the owners and users of those systems, since it is unclear how those systems ethically should be treated. I argue here that, to the extent possible, we should avoid creating AI systems whose sentience or moral standing is unclear and that AI systems should be designed so as to invite appropriate emotional responses in ordinary users. (shrink)

Except for a patina of twenty-first century modernity, in the form of logic and language, philosophy is exactly the same now as it ever was; it has made no progress whatsoever. We philosophers wrestle with the exact same problems the Pre-Socratics wrestled with. Even more outrageous than this claim, though, is the blatant denial of its obvious truth by many practicing philosophers. The No-Progress view is explored and argued for here. Its denial is diagnosed as a form of anosognosia, a (...) mental condition where the affected person denies there is any problem. The theories of two eminent philosophers supporting the No-Progress view are also examined. The final section offers an explanation for philosophy 's inability to solve any philosophical problem, ever. The paper closes with some reflections on philosophy 's future. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a novel account of concept acquisition for an atomistic theory of concepts. Conceptual atomism is rarely explored in cognitive science because of the feeling that atomistic treatments of concepts are inherently nativistic. My model illustrates, on the contrary, that atomism does not preclude the learning of a concept.

Moorean arguments are a popular and powerful way to engage highly revisionary philosophical views, such as nihilism about motion, time, truth, consciousness, causation, and various kinds of skepticism (e.g., external world, other minds, inductive, global). They take, as a premise, a highly plausible first-order claim (e.g., cars move, I ate breakfast before lunch, it’s true that some fish have gills) and conclude from it the falsity of the highly revisionary philosophical thesis. Moorean arguments can be used against nihilists in ethics (...) (error theorists), too. Recently, error theorists have recognized Moorean arguments as a powerful challenge and have tried to meet it. They’ve argued that moral Moorean premises seem highly credible to us, but aren’t, by offering various debunking explanations. These explanations all appeal to higher-order evidence—evidence of error in our reasoning. I argue that drawing attention to higher-order evidence is a welcome contribution from error theorists, but that the higher-order evidence actually counts further against error theoretic arguments—including their debunking explanations—and further in favor of Moorean arguments and the commonsense views they support. Along the way I answer a few prominent objections to Moorean arguments: that they are objectionably question-begging, rely on categorizing some facts as “Moorean Facts”, and that reports of one’s credence in a proposition bears no interesting relation to that proposition’s credibility. (shrink)

For a period of several years the philosopher of science Hasok Chang has promoted various inter-related views including pluralism, pragmatism, and an associated view of natural kinds. He has also argued for what he calls the persistence of everyday terms in the scientific view. Chang claims that terms like phlogiston were never truly abandoned but became transformed into different concepts that remain useful. On the other hand, Chang argues that some scientific terms such as acidity have suffered a form of (...) “rupture”, especially in the case of the modern Lewis definition of acids. Chang also complains that the degree of acidity of a Lewis acid cannot be measured using a pH meter and seems to regard this as a serious problem. The present paper examines some of these views, especially what Chang claims to be a rupture in the definition of acidity. It is suggested that there has been no such rupture but a genuine generalization, on moving from the Brønsted-Lowry theory to the Lewis theory of acidity. It will be shown how the quantification and measurement of Lewis acidity can easily be realized through the use of equilibrium theory and the use of stability constants. (shrink)

Whole Brain Emulation has been championed as the most promising, well-defined route to achieving both human-level artificial intelligence and superintelligence. It has even been touted as a viable route to achieving immortality through brain uploading. WBE is not a fringe theory: the doctrine of Computationalism in philosophy of mind lends credence to the in-principle feasibility of the idea, and the standing of the Human Connectome Project makes it appear to be feasible in practice. Computationalism is a popular, independently plausible theory, (...) and Connectomics a well-funded empirical research program, so optimism about WBE is understandable. However, this optimism may be misplaced. This article argues that WBE is, at best, no more compelling than any of the other far-flung routes to achieving superintelligence. Similarly skeptical conclusions are found regarding immortality. The essay concludes with some positive considerations in favor of the Biological Theory of consciousness, as well as morals about the limits of Computationalism in both artificial intelligence and the philosophy of mind more generally. (shrink)

I frame my argument by way of Hayek's tendency to treat Hume and Smith as central articulations of the rule of law. The rest of the paper explores their defense of clientelism. First, I introduce Hume’s ideas on the utility of patronage in his essay, “Of the Independency of Parliament.” I argue that in Hume clientelism just is a feature of parliamentary business. It seems ineliminable. I then contextualize Hume’s account by comparing it to Montesquieu’s account of this system of (...) patronage in Book XIX, chapter 27 of The Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu primarily treats it as a species of bad corruption. However, he also sees some benefits to it. I then turn to Smith and I show that he echoes Hume’s analysis of corruption in an easily ignored passage in Wealth of Nations. I then show that for Smith one argument in favor of a kind of federal parliamentary union between Great Brittain and her American colonies lies in its ability to facilitate and make more efficient the system of patronage by the Crown. While Smith’s account of these matters is quite Humean, one can discern in Smith a distinct cost-benefit argument for the acceptance of the necessity of a system of patronage in the service of the peaceful expansion and entrenchment of the rule of law in his proposal for parliamentary union. (shrink)

According to the analysis of concessive conditionals suggested by Crupi and Iacona, a concessive conditional $$p{{\,\mathrm{\hookrightarrow }\,}}q$$ p ↪ q is adequately formalized as a conjunction of conditionals. This paper presents a sound and complete axiomatic system for concessive conditionals so understood. The soundness and completeness proofs that will be provided rely on a method that has been employed by Raidl, Iacona, and Crupi to prove the soundness and completeness of an analogous system for evidential conditionals.

Daoism and Environmental Philosophy explores ethics and the philosophy of nature in the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related texts to elucidate their potential significance in our contemporary environmental crisis. This book traces early Daoist depictions of practices of embodied emptying and forgetting and communicative strategies of undoing the fixations of words, things, and the embodied self. These are aspects of an ethics of embracing plainness and simplicity, nourishing the asymmetrically differentiated yet shared elemental body of life of the myriad things, (...) and being responsively attuned in encountering and responding to things. These critical and transformative dimensions of early Daoism provide exemplary models and insights for cultivating a more expansive ecological ethos, environmental culture of nature, and progressive political ecology. This work will be of interest to students and scholars interested in philosophy, environmental ethics and philosophy, religious studies, and intellectual history. (shrink)

Replicating or exceeding human intelligence, not just in particular domains but in general, has always been a major goal of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We argue here that “human intelligence” is not only ill-defined, but often conflated with broader aspects of human psychology. Standard arguments for replicating it are morally unacceptable. We then suggest a reframing: that the proper goal of AI is not to replicate humans, but to complement them by creating diverse intelligences capable of collaborating with humans. This goal (...) renders issues of theory of mind, empathy, and caring, or community engagement, central to AI. It also challenges AI to better understand the circumstances in which human intelligence, including human moral intelligence, fails. (shrink)

Based on three recently published books on climate justice, this article reviews the field of climate ethics in light of developments of international climate politics. The central problem addressed is how idealised normative theories can be relevant to the political process of negotiating a just distribution of the costs and benefits of mitigating climate change. I distinguish three possible responses, that is, three kinds of non-ideal theories of climate justice: focused on (1) the injustice of some agents not doing their (...) part; (2) the policy process and aiming to be realistic; and (3) grievances related to the transition to a clean-energy economy. The methodological discussion underpinning each response is innovative and should be of interest more generally, even though it is still underdeveloped. The practical upshot, however, is unclear: even non-ideal climate justice may be too disconnected from the fast-moving and messy climate circus. (shrink)

Number words seemingly function both as adjectives attributing cardinality properties to collections, as in Frege’s ‘Jupiter has four moons’, and as names referring to numbers, as in Frege’s ‘The number of Jupiter’s moons is four’. This leads to what Thomas Hofweber calls Frege’s Other Puzzle: How can number words function as modifiers and as singular terms if neither adjectives nor names can serve multiple semantic functions? Whereas most philosophers deny that one of these uses is genuine, we instead argue that (...) number words, like many related expressions, are polymorphic, having multiple uses whose meanings are systematically related via type shifting. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

The Standard View of personal identity says that someone who exists now can exist at another time only if there is continuity of her mental contents or capacities. But no person is psychologically continuous with a fetus, for a fetus, at least early in its career, has no mental features at all. So the Standard View entails that no person was ever a fetus--contrary to the popular assumption that an unthinking fetus is a potential person. It is also mysterious what (...) does ordinarily happen to a human fetus, if it does not come to be a person. Although an extremely complex variant of the Standard View may allow one to persist without psychological continuity before one becomes a person but not afterwards, a far simpler solution is to accept a radically non-psychological account of our identity. (shrink)

Consider the following three claims. (i) There are no truths of the form ‘p and ~p’. (ii) No one holds a belief of the form ‘p and ~p’. (iii) No one holds any pairs of beliefs of the form {p, ~p}. Irad Kimhi has recently argued, in effect, that each of these claims holds and holds with metaphysical necessity. Furthermore, he maintains that they are ultimately not distinct claims at all, but the same claim formulated in different ways. I find (...) his argument suggestive, if not entirely transparent. I do think there is at least an important kernel of truth even in (iii), and that (i) ultimately explains what’s right about the other two. Consciousness of an impossibility makes belief in the obtaining of the corresponding state of affairs an impossibility. Interestingly, an appreciation of this fact brings into view a novel conception of inference, according to which it consists in the consciousness of necessity. This essay outlines and defends this position. A central element of the defense is that it reveals how reasoners satisfy what Paul Boghossian calls the Taking Condition and do so without engendering regress. (shrink)

On an intellectualist approach to belief, the intellectual endorsement of a proposition (such as “The working poor deserve as much respect as the handsomely paid”) is sufficient or nearly sufficient for believing it. On a pragmatic approach to belief, intellectual endorsement is not enough. Belief is behaviorally demanding. To really, fully believe, you must also “walk the walk.” This chapter argues that the pragmatic approach is preferable on pragmatic grounds: It rightly directs our attention to what matters most in thinking (...) about belief. (shrink)

This paper has two main aims. The first is to present a general approach for understanding “dispositional” and “categorical” properties; the second aim is to use this approach to criticize Russellian Monism. On the approach I suggest, what are usually thought of as “dispositional” and “categorical” properties are really just the extreme ends of a spectrum of options. The approach allows for a number of options between these extremes, and it is plausible, I suggest, that just about everything of scientific (...) interest falls in this middle ground. I argue that Russellian Monism depends for its plausibility on the unarticulated assumption that there are no properties in the middle ground. (shrink)

While Spelke provides powerful support for concept nativism, her focus on understanding concept nativism through six innate core knowledge systems is too confining. There is also no reason to suppose that thecurse of a compositional mindconstitutes a principled reason for positing less innate structure in explaining the origins of concepts. Any solution to such problems must take into account poverty of the stimulus considerations, which argue for postulating more innate structure, not less.

This paper takes a fresh look at the nativism–empiricism debate, presenting and defending a nativist perspective on the mind. Empiricism is often taken to be the default view both in philosophy and in cognitive science. This paper argues, on the contrary, that there should be no presumption in favor of empiricism (or nativism), but that the existing evidence suggests that nativism is the most promising framework for the scientific study of the mind. Our case on behalf of nativism has four (...) parts. (1) We characterize nativism’s core commitments relative to the contemporary debate between empiricists and nativists, (2) we present the positive case for nativism in terms of two central nativist arguments (the poverty of the stimulus argument and the argument from animals), (3) we respond to a number of influential objections to nativist theories, and (4) we explain the nativist approach to the conceptual system. (shrink)

How do you know what you want? Philosophers have lately developed sophisticated accounts of the practical and doxastic knowledge that are rooted in the point of view of the subject. Our ability to just say what we are doing or what we believe—that is, to say so authoritatively, but not on the basis of observation or evidence—is an aspect of our ability to reason about the good and the true. However, no analogous route to orectic self-knowledge is feasible. Knowledge of (...) desire is distinctive in being a matter of our affective response to imagined prospects. An examination of this idea yields the following thesis: I know what I want just in case the object pursued in anticipation of a certain pleasure actually yields the anticipated pleasure. (shrink)

For some reason, participants hold agents more responsible for their actions when a situation is described concretely than when the situation is described abstractly. We present examples of this phenomenon, and survey some attempts to explain it. We divide these attempts into two classes: affective theories and cognitive theories. After criticizing both types of theories we advance our novel hypothesis: that people believe that whenever a norm is violated, someone is responsible for it. This belief, along with the familiar workings (...) of cognitive dissonance theory, is enough to not only explain all of the abstract/concrete paradoxes, but also explains seemingly unrelated effects, like the anthropomorphization of malfunctioning inanimate objects. (shrink)

At some point in the future – perhaps within the next few decades – it will be possible for foetuses to develop completely outside the womb. Ectogenesis, as this technology is called, raises substantial issues for the abortion debate. One such issue is that it will become possible for a woman to have an abortion, in the sense of having the foetus removed from her body, but for the foetus to be kept alive. We argue that while there is a (...) right to an abortion, there are reasons to doubt that there is a right to the death of the foetus. Our strategy in this essay is to consider and reject three arguments in favour of this latter right. The first claims that women have a right not to be biological mothers, the second that women have a right to genetic privacy, and the third that a foetus is one's property. Furthermore, we argue that it follows from rejecting the third claim that genetic parents also lack a right to the destruction of cryopreserved embryos used for in vitro fertilization. The conclusion that a woman possesses no right to the death of the foetus builds upon the claims that other pro-choice advocates, such as Judith Jarvis Thomson, have made. (shrink)

Arguments from disagreement against moral realism begin by calling attention to widespread, fundamental moral disagreement among a certain group of people. Then, some skeptical or anti-realist-friendly conclusion is drawn. Chapter 2 proposes that arguments from disagreement share a structure that makes them vulnerable to a single, powerful objection: they self-undermine. For each formulation of the argument from disagreement, at least one of its premises casts doubt either on itself or on one of the other premises. On reflection, this shouldn’t be (...) surprising. These arguments are intended to support very strong metaphysical or epistemological conclusions about morality. They must therefore employ very strong metaphysical or epistemological premises. But, given the pervasiveness of disagreement in philosophy, especially about metaphysics and epistemology, very strong premises are virtually certain to be the subject of widespread, intractable disagreement—precisely the sort of disagreement that proponents of these arguments think undermine moral claims. Thus, these arguments undermine their own premises. If Chapter 2’s argument is sound, it provides realists with a single, unified strategy for responding to any existing or forthcoming arguments from disagreement. (shrink)

El interés por la obra filosófica del P. Francisco Suárez, de la Compañía de Jesús, está hoy más vivo que nunca. No se limita únicamente a los estudiosos españoles, sino que se extiende a otros países (como EE.UU., Francia, Alemania, Italia, etc.) donde los estudios sobre la filosofía de Suárez han adquirido una notoria relevancia. Motivo de este interés es la creciente conciencia de la modernidad de su filosofía, certificada por la recepción de no pocas de sus ideas en el (...) pensamiento Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Wolff, Kant, Hegel, e incluso de la actual fenomenología, como Zubiri y Heidegger han puesto de manifiesto. El libro consta de una presentación histórica y sistemática de la filosofía de Suárez, contenida en lo fundamental en las Disputaciones metafísicas, que fueron la primera obra que, como elaboración sistemática de metafísica, abandonaba ya la forma, habitual hasta entonces, del comentario a la Metafísica de Aristóteles. Proyectadas inicialmente como un opúsculo de filosofía preliminar a la cristología, las Disputaciones metafísicas terminarían siendo una obra monumental de la historia del pensamiento. (shrink)

How homogenous are the sources of human motivation? Textbook Humeans hold that every human action is motivated by desire, thus any heterogeneity derives from differing objects of desire. Textbook Kantians hold that although some human actions are motivated by desire, others are motivated by reason. One question in this vicinity concerns whether there are states such that to be in one is at once take the world to be a certain way and to be motivated to act: the state-question. My (...) question here is different: whether passion and reason constitute distinct sources of human motivation: the source question. In this essay, I defend an affirmative answer to the source-question while remaining neutral on the state-question. I distinguish between what I call orectic desires, which are associated with the appetites, and anorectic desires, which are associated with judgments of the good. I argue that the two sorts of desires constitute distinct sources of motivation initially on the basis of their differing epistemological profiles. Specifically, self-attributions of anorectic desires are governed by the transparency condition, self-attributions of orectic desires are not. It emerges from this discussion that the motivation for performing an action arises in very different ways from each sort of desire. This difference, in turn, is explained by their differing relations to the will. Roughly, an orectic desire influences the will, but an anorectic desire is the will. The motivation to perform some of our actions derives simply from the determination that they are to-be-done—from reason. (shrink)