In a series of papers, Don Fallis points out that although mathematicians are generally unwilling to accept merely probabilistic proofs, they do accept proofs that are incomplete, long and complicated, or partly carried out by computers. He argues that there are no epistemic grounds on which probabilistic proofs can be rejected while these other proofs are accepted. I defend the practice by presenting a property I call ‘transferability’, which probabilistic proofs lack and acceptable proofs have. I also consider what (...) this says about the similarities between mathematics and, on the one hand natural sciences, and on the other hand philosophy. (shrink)

This paper takes up the question of how videographic public announcements (VPAs)---i.e. videos that a wide swath of the public sees and knows that everyone else can see too--- have functioned to mobilize people politically, and how the presence of deepfakes in our information environment stands to change the dynamics of this mobilization. Existing work by Regina Rini, Don Fallis and others has focused on the ways that deepfakes might interrupt our acquisition of first-order knowledge through videos. But I (...) point out that even where every audience member takes a video to be veridical, where first-order knowledge acquisition is secure, an audience aware of deepfakes in their environment will not acquire higher order knowledge in the way that has erstwhile been characteristic for audiences of VPAs. Engaging with ideas from the literatures on public announcement logic, common knowledge, and convention, I enumerate a variety of ways in which we should expect this absence of higher order knowledge to throw up barriers to political mobilization. I go on to apply my analysis of VPAs to the mechanisms by which an uptick in publicly available videos of police brutality over the last decade, mediated by camera phones and social media, was responsible for the largest mass protests in US history in summer 2020. This makes vivid the stakes of the transformation in our mobilizing environment that I've claimed deepfakes effect: where we lose the common-knowledge-generating effects of VPAs, there are fresh obstacles to this sort of mass mobilization. (shrink)

In mathematics, any form of probabilistic proof obtained through the application of a probabilistic method is not considered as a legitimate way of gaining mathematical knowledge. In a series of papers, Don Fallis has defended the thesis that there are no epistemic reasons justifying mathematicians’ rejection of probabilistic proofs. This paper identifies such an epistemic reason. More specifically, it is argued here that if one adopts a conception of mathematical knowledge in which an epistemic subject can know a mathematical (...) proposition based solely on a probabilistic proof, one is then forced to admit that such an epistemic subject can know several lottery propositions based solely on probabilistic evidence. Insofar as knowledge of lottery propositions on the basis of probabilistic evidence alone is denied by the vast majority of epistemologists, it is concluded that this constitutes an epistemic reason for rejecting probabilistic proofs as a means of acquiring mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

The chapter examines fifty years of philosophers working on lying - from the 1970s to the current day – focusing on how lying is defined (descriptively and normatively), whether lying involves an intention to deceive (Deceptionists) or not (Non-Deceptionists), why lying is wrong, and whether lying is worse than other forms of deception, including misleading with the truth. Philosophers discussed include Roderick Chisholm and Thomas Feehan, Alan Donagan, Sissela Boy, Charles Fried, David Simpson, David Simpson, Bernard Williams, Paul Faulkner, Thomas (...) Carson, Roy Sorensen, Don Fallis, Jennifer Saul, Andreas Stoke, Jonathan Webber and Clea Rees. (shrink)

This introduction summarizes the contributions made by authors Ian Cornelius, Bernd Frohmann, Ronald E. Day, Jonathan Furner, John M. Budd, Don Fallis, Birger Hjørland, Torkild Thellefsen, Elin K. Jakob, Jack Mills, Elaine Svenonius, Stephen Paling, Hope A. Olson, Amanda Spink and Charles Cole, and Søren Brier, to an inaugural review of the Philosophy of Information from perspectives in Library and Information Science/Studies. Philosopher Luciano Floridi provides an Afterword with respect to the application of this new school of thought as (...) of 2004. -/- [A decennial issue was published in 2015, also in Library Trends, and a third issue on the topic is planned for 2024.] -/- . (shrink)

"... Dr. Ihde brings an enlightening and deeply humanistic perspective to major technological developments, both past and present." —Science Books & Films "Don Ihde is a pleasure to read.... The material is full of nice suggestions and details, empirical materials, fun variations which engage the reader in the work... the overall points almost sneak up on you, they are so gently and gradually offered." —John Compton "A sophisticated celebration of cultural diversity and of its enabling technologies.... perhaps the best single (...) volume relating the philosophical tradition to the broad issues raised by contemporary technologies." —Choice "... important and challenging... " —Review of Metaphysics "... a range of rich historical, cultural, philosophical, and psychological insights, woven together in an intriguing and clear exposition... The book is really a pleasure to read, for its style, immense learning and sanity." —Teaching Philosophy The role of tools and instruments in our relation to the earth and the ways in which technologies are culturally embedded provide the foci of this thought-provoking book. (shrink)

In his recent article, “God and Horrendous Suffering,” John W. Loftus argues that what he calls horrendous suffering is incompatible with traditional theism. The extent of horrendous suffering in the world, he says, “means that either God does not care enough to eliminate it, or God is not smart enough to eliminate it, or God is not powerful enough to eliminate it.” For Loftus, however, the problem is not simply evil, but horrendous suffering, a particularly acute form of evil which (...) renders theism completely untenable. Here I will argue in reply, first, that because horrendous suffering is itself a form of evil, it cannot be easily reconciled with naturalism, since naturalism actually precludes the existence of evil. Then I will argue that horrendous suffering is not only compatible with theism, but is best explained in the context of Christian theism in particular. Finally I will suggest that because God’s work of creation is not yet complete, we have good reason for maintaining hope even in the face of horrendous evils. (shrink)

There are three questions associated with Simpson’s paradox (SP): (i) Why is SP paradoxical? (ii) What conditions generate SP? and (iii) How to proceed when confronted with SP? An adequate analysis of the paradox starts by distinguishing these three questions. Then, by developing a formal account of SP, and substantiating it with a counterexample to causal accounts, we argue that there are no causal factors at play in answering questions (i) and (ii). Causality enters only in connection with action.

Maps the future of phenomenological thought, accounting for how technology expands our means of experiencing the world.

As formulated by atheist Jeffery Jay Lowder, the Evidential Argument from the History of Science, or AHS, is premised on the observation that over the course of modern history, naturalistic explanations have progressively overtaken supernaturalistic explanations. That history, says Lowder, constitutes evidence that metaphysical naturalism is true (hence that theism is false). But it’s possible that the historical pattern as described is not actually the result of any genuine explanatory virtues of naturalistic over supernaturalistic explanations. If there are good reasons (...) to suspect that naturalistic explanations fail to accurately or adequately explain the world around us, then we would not have sufficient grounds to follow Lowder’s argument to its conclusion. Here I will present three reasons to suspect that naturalistic explanations fail to accurately or adequately explain the world around us: (1) an alternative reading of the history of science according to pessimistic induction; (2) the arbitrary epistemic requirements of methodological naturalism; and (3) the ongoing resistance of certain phenomena (the origins of the universe and of life on earth) to any naturalistic explanations that are coherent and relatively simple. (shrink)

Phenomenological psychology has emphasized that experience as it is immediately "given" to the experiencing individual is an appropriate subject matter for psychological investigation. Consideration of the methodological implications of this stance suggests that certain text analytic and cluster analytic methods could be used to discern the identifying properties of different types of experience. We present results of a study in which textual analysis was used to identify recurrent properties of participants' verbal accounts of their experience, cluster analysis was used to (...) classify participants' accounts according to the similarity of their profiles of properties, and the resulting clusters were examined for their more or less characteristic prpoerties. Using these methods, three distinct types of experience of a Renaissance painting were identified and described. This demonstration of numerically aided phenomenological methods indicates the compatibility of rigorous and sensitive descriptions of experiential accounts. (shrink)

Hume describes “mental geography” as the endeavor to know “the different operations of the mind, to separate them from each other, to class them under their proper heads, and to correct all that seeming disorder, in which they lie involved, when made the object of reflection and enquiry.” While much has been written about his geography of thought in Treatise Book 1, relatively little has been written about his geography of feeling in Books 2 and 3, with the result that (...) there has been considerable puzzlement and disagreement about the meaning and grounds of many of his central theses about the passions, action, and morals. My endeavor in this chapter is to remove some common sources of perplexity about his classification of the operations of feeling “under their proper heads” in that work. I begin by explaining his three highest-level distinctions bearing on this terrain: that between impressions and ideas; that between original impressions and secondary impressions; and that between the passions and the other emotions. In order to understand this third distinction, I explain his three different senses of the term ‘emotion’ and the relations among them. I ill then examine five different kinds of secondary impressions that he recognizes. These are: (1) sensible agitations; (2) feelings of or from mental operations; (3) volitions; (4) the passions (including motives); and (5) sentiments of taste. The broad outlines of the resulting geography are mapped out in a chart at the end. (shrink)

We discuss Russell's 1913 essay arguing for the irrelevance of the idea of causation to science and its elimination from metaphysics as a precursor to contemporary philosophical naturalism. We show how Russell's application raises issues now receiving much attention in debates about the adequacy of such naturalism, in particular, problems related to the relationship between folk and scientific conceptual influences on metaphysics, and to the unification of a scientifically inspired worldview. In showing how to recover an approximation to Russell's conclusion (...) while explaining scientists' continuing appeal to causal ideas (without violating naturalism by philosophically correcting scientists) we illustrate a general naturalist strategy for handling problems around the unification of sciences that assume different levels of naïveté with respect to folk conceptual frameworks. We do this despite rejecting one of the premises of Russell's argument, a version of reductionism that was scientifically plausible in 1913 but is not so now. (shrink)

It was the summer of 1984, the American dollar was strong, and this was my first venture to Europe. I found her and didn't even know I was searching for her. Mysteriously she crossed my path one day in Rome. I should confess though- at this point in my life, I am an uneasy Protestant.

Judges is about loss: a loss of the individual which leads to a loss of the tribe, and, if circumstances remain unchecked, a loss of the nation.

With the appearance of Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane came the inauguration of theologians and philosophers questioning the preeminence of scholarly attention given to time to the virtual exclusion of space.

What do we do with Judges? This two-edged word? This ambidextrous book? These ambivalent heroes? The Judges were drawing their last fleeting breaths shipwrecked and scattered upon the shores of historical-critical-grammatical-linear-modernist-masculine interpretation. "The narrative is primitive," they said. "The editors have made a mess," they exclaimed. "The conclusion is really an appendix," another said. Then the bible-acrobats jumped in pretending there was no literary carnage while at the same time drawing our eyes away from the literary carnage. "No, no, there (...) is an order to this disorderly book!" "Gideon is a man of faith," they explained. "Gideon is a sham," others retorted. "Long live the king," they cried. "Oh no, the king will bring down the nation," others said. Enter the latest literary critics and the fresh feminist readers to save the day. And save they have. Barry noted the irony. Cheryl called attention to the elaborate, spiraling labyrinth. Phyllis remembered the forgotten. Mieke heralded the incoherence. Deborah the Bee slings Barak with irony. Cowardly Jephthah sacrifices his virgin daughter immediately after he is filled with the spirit. Blind Samson remains stuck in some adolescent, Pinnochio-like stage milling around the same old vices. The Levite, the man of word and sacrifice, lies to the people and dismembers his wife. To beat it all the myopic narrator joins in lock step with the other blind characters stumbling around in the narrative. What manner of text is this? These Judges, these stories, are even more troubling now that we take them seriously. Now what do we do with Judges? The recent scholarship is most promising, but I think we must press forward, or is that backward, or perhaps to another plan. Perhaps Judges hearkens forward to the postmodern. What would Judges look like if we viewed the story through a postmodern lens? Would we see the text in another dimension? Would we let the characters live and breathe as confusing, confounding, intricate characters? Judges speaks to me. These judges, they teach me. How can I ever forget my reading of Judges? For once I found a text reflecting the madness of faith in my maddening world. For once I saw a text like Pablo. I heard the echo of Umberto. I noted the faint murmurings of Jacques. I danced a most joyous jig with Julia. I saw, up ahead, or was that behind me, or over to the side, Martin's flickering candle. Mieke, meet Jael. Barak, meet Barry. Jacques, meet Gideon. Samson, meet Martin. Umberto, meet the narrator or two or three. Pablo, meet the Levite's wife---sorry, she has no name. (shrink)

Narcissus has no need of art because his own reflection preoccupies him.

Art, beauty, and the voice of God. And what of beauty?

The three major classical accounts of the morality of abortion are all subject to at least one major problem. Can we do better? This article aims to discuss three accounts that purport to be superior to the classical accounts. First, it discusses the future of value argument for the immorality of abortion. It defends the claim that the future of value argument is superior to all three of the classical accounts. It then goes on to discuss Warren's attempt to fix (...) up her personhood account and David Boonin's attempt to fix up Tooley's desire account. Warren claims that her updated version of a personhood account is superior to any potentiality account, such as the future of value account. The article evaluates her claim. Boonin argues that his improved desire view both deals adequately with the apparent counterexamples to Tooley's original account and also is superior to the future of value account. The article evaluates his views as well. (shrink)

Numismatics is a broad and complex area of study connecting with many different areas of human endeavor, including philosophical analysis. This paper critically discusses some of the practical and conceptual issues involved in applying the obverse- vs. reverse-side distinction to coins. We may not be able to come up with precise definitions which take care of all the counterexamples, but we still must be careful in how we define the terms within the discipline and how we use these terms.

Aimee did not want to survive; she neither wanted to live nor to die.

"Everything is a pretext for a good dinner.".

We want God to make sense, to be reasonable, to act according to how we think God should act. This kind of thinking, though, is not far from where we live today. If I give money to the church, then God will bless me financially. If I have my “quiet time” in scripture, then God will bless my day. If I raise my children right, then surely they will turn out right. In themselves these actions are good and right; however, (...) we have to ask ourselves, “Do our motives emerge from the desire to give a place to the mystery of faith, or, rather, to conquer mystery?”. (shrink)

We live in a world of many odd-shaped pieces, a cosmic jigsaw puzzle that often seems to have been further complicated by cruel fate.

What is the relationship between prophetic vision and vision in terms for a hoped-for future? How might vision for a church or person best be defined today?

In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, one of the principal Upaniṣads, we find a venerable and famous story where the god Prajāpati separately instructs three groups of people (gods, humans, and demons) simply by uttering the syllable “Da.” In this paper, our concern is not with ethics but theories of meaning and interpretation: How can all divergent interpretations of a single expression be correct, and, indeed, endorsed by the speaker? As an exercise in cross-cultural philosophical reflection, we consider some of the leading (...) modern theories of meaning—those of Grice, Quine, and Davidson—in order to see if the Upaniṣadic story receives a natural home in any of them. We conclude that the story is best understood through Grice’s theory of meaning rather than Quine’s or Davidson’s. (shrink)

Gregory La Cava’s 1936 screwball comedy film My Man Godfrey is structured by consubstantiality, which will be defined here as the reification of a second, oppositional element in response to the negation of a first. Because the second element is conditioned by the very thing it negated, a third element is required to reverse the (subjective) point of view as corollary to the first, objective reversal. The film takes place in the depths of the Great Depression; its story centers on (...) the discovery and restoration of ‘the forgotten man’, represented by Godfrey Parke, who has renounced his wealth and social position to live in a shanty-town under the pseudonym of Smith following a failed love-affair. After being ‘claimed’ during a scavenger hunt, he becomes the butler of the family of a New York industrialist, Alexander Bullock. One daughter, Irene, falls in love with him; the other, Cornelia, attempts to frame him by planting ‘stolen’ pearls. Godfrey eludes her trap and uses collateral from the pearls to invest in the futures market, where he rescues his host’s company’s shares to save the family from ruin. With surplus funds he reclaims the shanty-town site and builds a modernist night-club, employing his former ‘forgotten men’ companions. Consubstantiality is played out visually and dramatically. Its component parts are encoded into a visual paradigm to demonstrate the toroidal logic that connects consubstantiality to Jacques Lacan’s theories of discourse and sexuation. Here, topology qualifies Freud’s contention that ‘Psyche is extended; knows nothing of it’ by showing how the non-orientation of the 2-d manifold becomes the self-intersecting traps of 3-d immersion – traps that are already well-known as dramatic devices. (shrink)

Occasionally, in the introductory philosophy courses I teach, a student will give an interesting argument for non-belief in God. Though I have never seen this argument in print, it seems familiar. Basically, the argument goes like this. Religious belief is largely determined by geography – where you are born and raised largely determines your religious beliefs. But believing something just because of where you are born and raised is not a reliable indication of whether that belief turns out to be (...) true. So, in some sense, you are not justified in your religious beliefs. I will attempt a more rigorous reconstruction of this argument and offer an objection to it. (shrink)

Thomas Polger has argued in favor of the mind-brain type-identity theory, the view that mental states or processes are type-identical to states of the central nervous system. Acknowledging that the type-materialist must respond to Kripke's modal anti-materialist argument, Polger insists that Kripke's argument rests on dubious assumptions concerning the identity conditions of brain states. In brief, Polger claims that one knows that x and y are non-identical when one knows the identity conditions for both x and y. Replace x and (...) y with 'brain states' and 'sensations' and it follows that one can know that brain states and sensations are non-identical only if one knows the identity conditions for brain states. But, according to Polger, we do not know the identity conditions for brain states. Hence, we should not be so confident that brains states and sensations are non-identical after all. But Polger's account is terribly flawed. Ironically, if Polger's skepticism is warranted, then Polger himself has no good reasons to be a type-materialist. But more importantly, Polger's skepticism regarding the identity conditions of brain states is deeply defective. We do, I submit, understand the identity conditions of brain states. In the end, I submit, Kripke is safe from Polger. (shrink)

"Any man-any artist, as Nietzsche or Cezanne would say- climbs the stairway in the tower of his perfection at the cost of a struggle with a deunde-not with an angel, as some have maintained, or with his muse. This fundamental distinction must be kept in mind if the root of a work of art is to be grasped." -Frederico Garcia Lorca.

Our generation is turning to mentoring as an instrument of God to repair the ruin of our personal losses.

It is only the story... that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort. Without we are blind. -Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah.

We lose something central to our humanity when we divide our world into neat little packages of sacred and secular.

It is quite fair to say that to the degree language works is also to the degree language does not work.

In debates over life and death it is often said that one should err on the side of caution—that is, on the side of life. In light of the recent case of Terri Schiavo, it is explained how the “err-on-the-side-of-life” argument proceeds, and an objection to it is offered.

An encyclopedic exploration of the images, symbols, motifs, metaphors, figures of speech and literary patterns of the Bible.

"I tried to find out for myself, from the start, when I was a child, what was right and what was wrong-because no one around me could tell me. And now that everything is leaving me I realize I need someone to show me the way and to blame me and praise me, by right not ofp ower but ofa uthority, I need my father." -Albert Camus, The First Man.

Compassion is called out of us when we see situations where there is an obvious absence of something or someone life-giving.

"He who is satisfied has never truly craved. And he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor." -Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel.

This essay argues that a new technique of ordering and producing space emerged in the sixteenth century, whereby the Américas were taken as a heterotopic laboratory for the space of the grid. As the ordered grid of space lightened the physical fortification of heavy walls traditionally found in medieval Europe, it implanted new methods of ordering the behavior of the human body and soul. In this way, the grid gave rise to disciplinary techniques of controlling and producing human subjectivity. The (...) global problematic of space as it emerges after 1492 is a central thematic of decolonial philosophy and critiques of coloniality. Many accounts of decolonial philosophy emphasize the ontological nihilation of the periphery, the European production of the other as non-being in an empty space beyond the line. This article supplements this view by arguing that we need an account of the production and ordering of this space that goes beyond simple negation and emptiness. The coloniality of power, thus, has a disciplinary dimension that involves the ordering and production of subjects and spaces in the Américas, while Foucauldian disciplinary power is entangled with the coloniality of power. (shrink)

In his final works, Foucault explains his overall project as a “history of truth” centered on the relations between subjectivity and truth. While the early archaeology focuses primarily on the formation of new objects and discourses of knowledge, and later, genealogy on techniques of power, the problematic of truth is the overriding framework through which Foucault develops these analyses. Throughout all of his work, in fact, Foucault’s question is how discourse, institutions, politics, and subjects are established within regimes of truth.

Theoretical arguments and empirical investigations indicate that a high proportion of published findings do not replicate and are likely false. The current position paper provides a broad perspective on scientific error, which may lead to replication failures. This broad perspective focuses on reform history and on opportunities for future reform. We organize our perspective along four main themes: institutional reform, methodological reform, statistical reform and publishing reform. For each theme, we illustrate potential errors by narrating the story of a fictional (...) researcher during the research cycle. We discuss future opportunities for reform. The resulting agenda provides a resource to usher in an era that is marked by a research culture that is less error-prone and a scientific publication landscape with fewer spurious findings. (shrink)

This paper investigates the interaction of gender, disability and education in rural Iran, which is a relatively unexplored field of research. The responses of 10 female students with disabilities from Isfahan indicated that the obstacles they faced included marginalization, difficulties in getting from home to school, difficulties within the school building itself, and discrimination by teachers, classmates and school authorities. The data collected for the study contain a wide range of conservative gendered discourses, and show how traditional gender beliefs interact (...) with disability to aggravate the problems faced in education by young women with disabilities. It is hoped that the findings will raise awareness among policy-makers of the many formidable obstacles that make it difficult for young women with disabilities to achieve their full potential in education. (shrink)