In this article I propose to reframe debates about ideals of emotion in medicine, abandoning the current binary setup of this debate as one between ‘clinical detachment’ and empathy. Inspired by observations from my own field work and drawing on Sky Gross’ anthropological work on rituals of practice as well as Henri Lefebvre’s notion of rhythm, I propose that the normative drive of clinical practice can be better understood through the notion of attunement. In this framework individual types of emotions (...) are not, as such, appropriate or inappropriate, but are evaluated depending on their synchronicity with the specific rhythms of the practice. To set up this proposal, I show how typical arguments about emotions in medicine—what I call emotion-entity focused frameworks—are insufficient. I then draw on ethnographic observations from two orthopaedic departments and interviews with medical practitioners to show (1) how clinical practice is driven by rhythmicity, shaped in the case of orthopaedic surgery by a clinical aim of efficient, controlled intervention, and (2) how clinicians continuously refer to this drive and the flow of rhythms when evaluating inappropriate or problematic emotion. I argue that the use of a rhythm framework rather than ideals of detachment or empathy allows for a sensitivity to the complexity and situation-dependent elements of emotional ideals in clinical practice; and I end by proposing the term ‘attuned concern’—which stresses the importance of regulation and adjustment to circumstances rather than of maintaining a constant distance/involvement—as a more fitting alternative to ‘clinical detachment’. (shrink)

The paper offers the concept of reversing the medical humanities. In agreement with the call from Kristeva et al. to recognise the bidirectionality of the medical humanities, I propose moving beyond debates of attitude and aptitude in the application and engagement (either friendly or critical) of humanities to/in medicine, by considering a reversal of the directions of epistemic movement (a reversal of the flow of knowledge). I situate my proposal within existing articulations of the field found in the medical humanities (...) meta-literature, pointing to a gap in the current terrain. I then develop the proposal by unfolding three reasons why we might gain something from exploring a reversed knowledge flow. First, a reversed knowledge flow seems to be an inherent—but still to be articulated—possibility in medical humanities and thus provides an opportunity for more knowledge. Second, the current unidirectionality of the field is founded on an inconsistency in the depiction of the connection between medicine and humanities, which risks creating the very divide that medical humanities set out to bridge. Practising a reversal may help avoid this divide. And third, a reversal might help rebalance the internal epistemic power, so as to motivate less external scepticism and in turn displace more external epistemic power towards medical humanities. I end the paper with a remark on precursors for a reversal, and ideas for where to go from here. (shrink)

The term “value of life” can refer to life’s intrinsic dignity: something nonincremental and time-unaffected in contrast to the fluctuating, incremental “value” of our lives, as they are longer or shorter and more or less flourishing. Human beings are equal in their basic moral importance: the moral indignities we condemn in the treatment of e.g. those with dementia reflect the ongoing human dignity that is being violated. Indignities licensed by the person in advance remain indignities, as when people might volunteer (...) their living, unconscious bodies for surrogacy or training in amputation techniques. Respect for someone’s dignity is significantly impacted by a failure to value that person’s very existence, whatever genuine respect and good will is shown by wanting the person’s life to go well. Valuing and respecting life is not, however, vitalism: there can be good and compelling reasons for eschewing some means of prolonging life. (shrink)

This chapter considers the ways in which whiteness as a skin color and ideology becomes a dominant level that sets the background against which all things, people and relations appear. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, it takes up a series of films by Bruce Nauman and Marlon Riggs to consider ways in which this level is phenomenally challenged providing insights into the embodiment of racialization.

In recent years, calls have been made to address the relative dearth of qualitative sociological investigation into the sensory dimensions of embodiment, including within physical cultures. This article contributes to a small, innovative and developing literature utilizing sociological phenomenology to examine sensuous embodiment. Drawing upon data from three research projects, here we explore some of the ‘sensuousities’ of ‘intense embodiment’ experiences as a distance-running-woman and a boxing-woman, respectively. Our analysis addresses the relatively unexplored haptic senses, particularly the ‘touch’ of heat. (...) Heat has been argued to constitute a specific sensory mode, a trans-boundary sense. Our findings suggest that ‘lived’ heat, in our own physical-cultural experiences, has highly proprioceptive elements and is experienced as both a form of touch and as a distinct perceptual mode, dependent upon context. Our analysis coheres around two key themes that emerged as salient: (1) warming up, and (2) thermoregulation, which in lived experience were encountered as strongly interwoven. (shrink)

This paper considers the analogies and disanalogies between a certain sort of argument designed to oppose scepticism about free will and a certain sort of argument designed to oppose scepticism about the external world. In the case of free will, I offer the ancient Lazy Argument and an argument of my own, which I call the Agency Argument, as examples of the relevant genre; and in the case of the external world, I consider Moore’s alleged proof of an external world. (...) I draw attention to analogies and disanalogies between the arguments offered in each case in order to suggest that although the Agency Argument shares with its Moorean relative the unfortunate property of being dialectically ineffective against some of those it is mainly hoping to convince, it will not be dialectically ineffective against all of them. It is also argued that the Agency Argument is less vulnerable than Moore’s proof to worries about its justificatory structure. (shrink)

This manuscript consists of two parts, Part I. and Part II. Part I., written by the same author and titled "THE PERSECUTED CHURCH: THE CLANDESTINE CATHOLIC CHURCH (ECCLESIA SILENTII) IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA DURING COMMUNISM 1948 – 1991," was published in the January issue of the Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe (OPREE), ISSN: 2693-2148.2 It includes a brief historical overview and introduces the Clandestine Catholic Church (Ecclesia Silentii) in Czechoslovakia during Communism from 1948 to 1991. Part II. directly follows Part (...) I. and continues with the following sections: Results, Discussion, Conclusion, and References. Part II considers the collapse of the Czech Roman Catholic Church and the end destruction of the Clandestine Catholic Church by the Holy See, along with the process of secularization after the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia from 1991 to 2021. (shrink)

We apply the analysis that we have developed over the course of several publications on the significance of ignorance for decision-making, especially in surrogate (and, thus, in political) contexts, to political decision-making, such as it has been, during the COVID-19 pandemic (see Scheall 2019; Crutchfield and Scheall 2019; Scheall and Crutchfield 2020; Scheall 2020). Policy responses to the coronavirus constitute a case study of the problem of policymaker ignorance. We argue that political responses to the virus cannot be explained by (...) assuming that the interests of policymakers were at loggerheads with those of their constituents at the beginning of the crisis. In order to explain the responses of policymakers, it is necessary to recognize the effects of relevant ignorance on their incentives to pursue different policy objectives. We discuss the knowledge that policymakers required at the start of the pandemic in order to deliberately realize the goal of limiting overall human suffering and the spontaneous forces that could have facilitated the realization of this goal. The problem of policymaker ignorance implies that policymakers have not earnestly pursued the goal of limiting overall suffering due to the novel coronavirus, but have repeatedly resorted to the pursuit of relatively less epistemically burdensome goals. The problem of policymaker ignorance explains why policymakers have focused primarily on limiting one kind of suffering – physical suffering due to the virus – and have mostly ignored related kinds of suffering, i.e., the economic, sociological, psychological, and physical suffering caused by policies to limit physical suffering from the virus. The problem of policymaker ignorance also helps to explain why policymakers relied on the relatively blunt instrument of economic lockdown rather than more focused protection policies, and why they continue to resort to lockdowns, despite the emerging scientific evidence of their ineffectiveness at mitigating physical suffering due to the virus. (shrink)

According to ‘regularity theories’ of causation, the obtaining of causal relations depends on no more than the obtaining of certain kinds of regularity. Regularity theorists are thus anti-realists about necessary connections in nature. Regularity theories of one form or another have constituted the dominant view in analytic Philosophy for a long time, but have recently come in for some robust criticism, notably from Galen Strawson. Strawson’s criticisms are natural criticisms to make, but have not so far provoked much response from (...) regularity theorists. The paper considers and rebuts Strawson’s objections. For example, Strawson claims that if there were no necessary connections in nature, we ought continually to find the regularity of the Universe surprising. I argue that the fact that the Universe is regular is something we take ourselves (fallibly) to know, and hence, in the light of this knowledge, its continued orderliness is not at all surprising. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper Beebee argues that the problem of induction, which she describes as a genuine sceptical problem, is the same for Humeans than for Necessitarians. Neither scientific essentialists nor Armstrong can solve the problem of induction by appealing to IBE, for both arguments take an illicit inductive step.

The paper considers whether psychiatric kinds can be natural kinds and concludes that they can. This depends, however, on a particular conception of ‘natural kind’. We briefly describe and reject two standard accounts – what we call the ‘stipulative account’ (according to which apparently a priori criteria, such as the possession of intrinsic essences, are laid down for natural kindhood) and the ‘Kripkean account’ (according to which the natural kinds are just those kinds that obey Kripkean semantics). We then rehearse (...) a more permissive account: Richard Boyd’s ‘homeostatic property cluster’ (HPC) account. We argue that psychiatric kinds can in principle count as natural kinds on the HPC account. Moreover, specific psychiatric kinds (Tourette’s, schizophrenia, etc.) can be natural kinds even if the category psychiatric disorder is not itself a natural kind. (shrink)

Humean compatibilism is the combination of a Humean position on laws of nature and the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. This article's aim is to situate Humean compatibilism in the current debate among libertarians, traditional compatibilists, and semicompatibilists about free will. We argue that a Humean about laws can hold that there is a sense in which the laws of nature are 'up to us' and hence that the leading style of argument for incompatibilism?the consequence argument?has a (...) false premiss. We also display some striking similarities between Humean compatibilism and libertarianism, an incompatibilist view. For example, standard libertarians face a problem about luck, and we show that Humean compatibilists face a very similar problem. (shrink)

Emotion processing is known to be impaired in psychopathy, but less is known about the cognitive mechanisms that drive this. Our study examined experiencing and suppression of emotion processing in psychopathy. Participants, violent offenders with varying levels of psychopathy, viewed positive and negative images under conditions of passive viewing, experiencing and suppressing. Higher scoring psychopathics were more cardiovascularly responsive when processing negative information than positive, possibly reflecting an anomalously rewarding aspect of processing normally unpleasant material. When required to experience emotional (...) response, by ‘getting into the feeling’ of the emotion conveyed by a negative image, higher factor 1 psychopathic individuals showed reduced responsiveness, suggesting that they were less able to do this. These data, together with the absence of corresponding differences in subjective self-report might be used to inform clinical strategies for normalising emotion processing in psychopathic offenders to improve treatment outcome, and reduce risk amongst this client group. (shrink)

In a recent paper (Bird 2001), Alexander Bird argues that the law that common salt dissolves in water is metaphysically necessary - and he does so without presupposing dispositionalism about properties. If his argument were sound, it would thus show that at least one law of nature is meta- physically necessary, and it would do so without illicitly presupposing a position (dispositionalism) that is already committed to a necessitarian view of laws. I shall argue that Bird's argument is unsuccesful.

I reply to criticisms from Duetz and Dentith, Basham, and Hewitt. I argue that the central disputes on this topic concern how ordinary people understand conspiracy theories and how to evaluate concrete conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists.

For anyone approaching the Encheiridion of Epictetus for the first time, this book provides a comprehensive guide to understanding a complex philosophical text. Including a full translation and clear explanatory commentaries, Epictetus's 'Encheiridion' introduces readers to a hugely influential work of Stoic philosophy. Scott Aikin and William O. Stephens unravel the core themes of Stoic ethics found within this ancient handbook. Focusing on the core themes of self-control, seeing things as they are, living according to nature, owning one's roles (...) and fulfilling the responsibilities that those roles entail, the authors elucidate the extremely challenging ideas in Epictetus's brisk chapters. Divided into five distinct parts, this book provides readers with: -/- - A new translation of the Encheiridion by William O. Stephens. - A new introduction to ancient Stoicism, its system of concepts, and the ancient figures who shaped it. - A fresh treatment of the notorious and counter-intuitive 'Stoic paradoxes'. - An accessible overview of the origin and historical context of the Encheiridion. - Detailed commentaries on each chapter of the Encheiridion that clarify its recurring themes and highlight their interconnections. - Careful attention to the presentation of the arguments embedded in Epictetus's aphoristic style. - A thoughtful discussion of serious criticisms of Epictetus's Stoicism and replies to these objections. -/- Written with clarity and authority, Epictetus's 'Encheiridion' provides a foundation from which readers can understand this important text and engage with the fundamental questions of Stoic philosophy and ethics. This guide will aid teachers of Epictetus, students encountering Stoicism for the first time, and readers seeking a greater understanding of Stoic ethics. (shrink)

Singularists about causation often claim that we can have experiences as of causation. This paper argues that regularity theorists need not deny that claim; hence the possibility of causal experience is no objection to regularity theories of causation. The fact that, according to a regularity theorist, causal experience requires background theory does not provide grounds for denying that it is genuine experience. The regularity theorist need not even deny that non-inferential perceptual knowledge of causation is possible, despite the fact that (...) such knowledge would sometimes allow us to make inferences about what happens in far-off places and times. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Michael Huemer provides a new interpretation for ‘N’, the operator that occurs in Peter van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument, and argues that, given that interpretation, the Consequence Argument is sound. I have no quarrel with Huemer’s claim that the Consequence Argument is valid. I shall argue instead that his defense of its premises—a defense that allegedly involves refuting David Lewis’s response to van Inwagen—is unsuccessful.

Howard’s moral fortification theory of criminal punishment lends itself to justifying correction for children in schools that is supportive. There are good reasons to include other students in the learning opportunity occasioned by doing right in response to wrong, which need not exploit the wrongdoing student as a mere means. Care ethics can facilitate restorative and problem-solving approaches to correction. However, there are overriding reasons against doing so when this stigmatises the wrongdoing student, since this inhibits their learning. Responses that (...) avoidably stigmatise students impermissibly undermine both the developmental ethos of education, and students’ recognition and respect for each other as equals. (shrink)

Some bemoan the incivility of our times, while others complain that people have grown too quick to take offense. There is widespread disagreement about what counts as an insult and when it is appropriate to feel insulted. Here I propose a definition and a preliminary taxonomy of insults. Namely, I define insults as expressions of a lack of due regard. And I categorize insults by whether they are intended or unintended, acts or omissions, and whether they cause offense or not. (...) Unintended insults are of particular concern since greater understanding may help us to avoid them. And insults by omission warrant special consideration because they suggest an interesting extension of Grice’s theory of conversational implicature. (shrink)

This paper presents a dilemma which it has been alleged by Kim Frost must be faced by any defender of the notion of a two-way power and offers a solution to the dilemma which is distinct from Frost’s own. The dilemma is as follows: assuming that powers are to be individuated by what they are powers to do or undergo, then either there is a unified description of the manifestation-type which individuates the power, or there is not. If there is, (...) then two-way powers are revealed really to be one-way powers, after all. If there is not, then it is difficult to explain why the two-way power does not simply dissolve into a mere combination of two one-way powers. The paper offers an account of what a two-way power is that is distinct from the one Frost takes for granted, and argues that this different conception is the key to avoiding the dilemma. It is also argued that this alternative conception has several further advantages over its rival and also that it has no less of a claim than Frost’s notion to be prefigured in Aristotle’s original discussion. (shrink)

This paper argues that public statues of persons typically express a positive evaluative attitude towards the subject. It also argues that states have duties to repudiate their own historical wrongdoing, and to condemn other people’s serious wrongdoing. Both duties are incompatible with retaining public statues of people who perpetrated serious rights violations. Hence, a person’s being a serious rights violator is a sufficient condition for a state’s having a duty to remove a public statue of that person. I argue that (...) this applies no less in the case of the ‘morally ambiguous’ wrongdoer, who both accomplishes significant goods and perpetrates serious rights violations. The duty to remove a statue is a defeasible duty: like most duties, it can be defeated by lesser-evil considerations. If removing a statue would, for example, spark a violent riot that would risk unjust harm to lots of people, the duty to remove could be outweighed by the duty not to foreseeably cause unjust harm. This would provide a lesser-evil justification for keeping the statue. But it matters that the duty to remove is outweighed, rather than negated, by these consequences. Unlike when a duty is negated, one still owes something in cases of outweighing. And it especially matters that it is outweighed by the predicted consequences of wrongful behaviour by others. (shrink)

How should we conceive of policymakers for the purposes of political analysis? In particular, if we wish to explain and predict political decisions and their consequences, if we wish to ensure that political action is as effective as it can be, how should we think of policymakers? Should we think of them as they are commonly conceived in traditional political analysis, i.e., as uniquely knowledgeable and as either altruistic (i.e., as motivated to realize goals associated with their constituents’ interests) or (...) knavish (i.e., as motivated to realize goals associated with their own personal interests), or should we treat them as possibly ignorant with respect to their political tasks? -/- It is always an open question whether policymakers possess the knowledge required to realize some policy objective. It should never be assumed a priori that policymaker knowledge is adequate to the policy tasks with which policymakers are charged. Politicians need knowledge concerning the causes of social phenomena adequate to control events sufficiently well to ensure the success of their policies. No argument has ever been offered for the standard, if only implicit, assumption that policymakers, somehow automatically, possess this knowledge. In many contexts, there is no reason to believe that policymakers possess or can acquire this knowledge. Indeed, a bit of reflection reveals how unlikely it is that and how rare the circumstances must be in which policymakers meet this condition, which political philosophers, theorists, economists, and other political thinkers have traditionally assumed as a matter of course. -/- The main purpose of the book is to encourage a conversation among scholars and students of political inquiry (in philosophy and political theory, political science, economics and political economy) concerning the best way to conceive of policymakers for the purposes of such inquiry. -/- The book defends an alternative, more realistic, method of political analysis. The book argues against the false assumption that policymakers are epistemically privileged. The book presents and defends the alternative assumption that, with respect to the knowledge required to discharge their political tasks effectively, policymakers are at least as ignorant as constituents. -/- The book further argues that whether policymakers are altruistic or knavish is, in the first instance, a function of the nature and extent of their ignorance with regard to constituent-minded policy goals. Policymakers who possess the knowledge required to be effectively altruistic are more likely to be altruistic, other things the same, than policymakers who are ignorant of the knowledge that successful altruism requires. -/- This being said, my goal is more to leave readers thinking about and inclined to debate these profound issues than to prescribe a particular methodological conclusion (even less to advocate a particular political conclusion). The book is a heuristic for spurring further conversation. It makes of readers fellow interlocutors partnered with the characters (and the author!) of the dialogue. -/- The vehicle for this analysis is a conversation between four friends, philosophy graduate students, with different interests, different levels and kinds of experience, and different political preferences. The four friends consider how politicians should be conceived for the purposes of analyzing political decision-making and its consequences. -/- In his famous Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, David Hume concluded that the assumption of an all-knowing and all-powerful God was neither necessary nor sufficient to explain natural phenomena. Dialogues concerning Natural Politics does for social science what Hume did for natural science. Both books undermine the assumption that some epistemically privileged being – God in the case of natural phenomena and God-like politicians in the case of social phenomena – must be invoked to explain relevant phenomena. (shrink)

Epistemic peer disagreement raises interesting questions, both in epistemology and in philosophy of science. When is it reasonable to defer to the opinion of others, and when should we hold fast to our original beliefs? What can we learn from the fact that an epistemic peer disagrees with us? A question that has received relatively little attention in these debates is the value of epistemic peer disagreement—can it help us to further epistemic goals, and, if so, how? We investigate this (...) through a recent case in paleoanthropology: the debate on the taxonomic status of Homo floresiensis remains unresolved, with some authors arguing the fossils represent a novel hominin species, and others claiming that they are Homo sapiens with congenital growth disorders. Our examination of this case in the recent history of science provides insights into the value of peer disagreement, indicating that it is especially valuable if one does not straightaway defer to a peer’s conclusions, but nevertheless remains open to a peer’s evidence and arguments. (shrink)

In 1947 Donald Cary Williams claimed in The Ground of Induction to have solved the Humean problem of induction, by means of an adaptation of reasoning first advanced by Bernoulli in 1713. Later on David Stove defended and improved upon Williams’ argument in The Rational- ity of Induction (1986). We call this proposed solution of induction the ‘Williams-Stove sampling thesis’. There has been no lack of objections raised to the sampling thesis, and it has not been widely accepted. In our (...) opinion, though, none of these objections has the slightest force, and, moreover, the sampling thesis is undoubtedly true. What we will argue in this paper is that one particular objection that has been raised on numerous occasions is misguided. This concerns the randomness of the sample on which the inductive extrapolation is based. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the question what a continuant is, in the context of a very interesting suggestion recently made by Rowland Stout, as part of his attempt to develop a coherent ontology of processes. Stout claims that a continuant is best thought of as something that primarily has its properties at times, rather than atemporally—and that on this construal, processes should count as continuants. While accepting that Stout is onto something here, I reject his suggestion that we should (...) accept that processes are both occurrents and continuants; nothing, I argue, can truly occur or happen, which does not have temporal parts. I make an alternative suggestion as to how one might deal with the peculiar status of processes without jettisoning a very natural account of occurrence; and assess the consequences for the category of continuant. (shrink)

In her ‘Causality and Determination’, Anscombe argues for the strong thesis that despite centuries of philosophical assumption to the contrary, the supposition that causality and necessity have something essential to do with one another is baseless. In this paper, I assess Anscombe’s arguments and endorse her conclusion. I then attempt to argue that her arguments remain highly relevant today, despite the fact that most popular general views of causation today are firmly probabilistic in orientation and thus show no trace of (...) the assumptions Anscombe hoped to undermine. My suggestion is that Anscombe's interests in causality are distinct from those which mostly animate the modern debate about the general nature of causality and that in those specialized areas of philosophy in which those concerns still dominate, one can still see the effects of the fallacies and confusions to which she alerts us. I conclude by offering two possible complementary explanations of the tendency to suppose that causation is a variety of necessitation. (shrink)

Hume's two definitions of causation have caused an extraordinary amount of controversy. The starting point for the controversy is the fact, well known to most philosophy undergraduates, that the two definitions aren't even extensionally equivalent, let alone semantically equivalent. So how can they both be definitions? One response to this problem has been to argue that Hume intends only the first as a genuine definition—an interpretation that delivers a straightforward regularity interpretation of Hume on causation. By many commentators' lights, however, (...) this is a bug rather than a feature: such an account of the two definitions leaves necessary connection out of Hume's story about the meaning of "cause" .. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to argue for psychological egoism, i.e., the view that the ultimate motivation for all human action is the agent’s self-interest. Two principal opponents to psychological egoism are considered. These two views are shown to make human action inexplicable. Since the reason for putting forward these views is to explain human action, these views fail. If psychological egoism is the best explanation of human action, then humans will not differ as regards their motivations for their (...) actions. However, humans will differ as regards their knowledge of what is in fact in their self-interest. (shrink)

People often assume that everyone can be divided by sex/gender (that is, by physical and social characteristics having to do with maleness and femaleness) into two tidy categories: male and female. Careful thought, however, leads us to reject that simple ‘binary’ picture, since not all people fall precisely into one group or the other. But if we do not think of sex/gender in terms of those two categories, how else might we think of it? Here I consider four distinct models; (...) each model correctly captures some features of sex/gender, and so each is appropriate in some contexts. But the first three models are inadequate when tough questions arise, like whether trans women should be admitted as students at a women’s college or when it is appropriate for intersex athletes to compete in women’s athletic events. (‘Trans’ refers to the wide range of people who have an atypical gender identity for someone of their birth-assigned sex, and ‘intersex’ refers to people whose bodies naturally develop with markedly different physical sex characteristics than are paradigmatic of either men or women.) Such questions of inclusion and exclusion matter enormously to the people whose lives are affected by them, but ordinary notions of sex/gender offer few answers. The fourth model I describe is especially designed to make those hard decisions easier by providing a process to clarify what matters. (shrink)

This paper argues, by attention to the category of sub-intentional agency, that many conceptions of the nature of agency are 'over-mentalised', in that they insist that an action proper must be produced by something like an intention or a reason or a desire. Sub-intentional actions provide counterexamples to such conceptions. Instead, it is argued, we should turn to the concept of a two-way power in order to home in on the essential characteristics of actions.

Scepticism concerning the idea of causation being linked to contingent chance-raising is articulated in Beebee’s challenging chapter. She suggests that none of these approaches will avoid the consequence that spraying defoliant on a weed is a cause of the weed’s subsequent health. We will always be able to abstract away enough of the healthy plant processes so all that’s left is the causal chain involving defoliation and health. In those circumstances, there will be contingent chance-raising. Beebee’s conclusion is that we (...) should reject the idea of contingent chance-raising and just accept that all causation involves chance-raising. This involves the reclassification of some intuitive cases of causation as causal processes without causation but rather hindering (a distinctive kind of process). It seems clear from this discussion and from the brief earlier remarks about the status of prevention that the classification of types of causal processes and the characterization of their link to causation are matters of some importance. (shrink)

Sex determines much about one's life, but what determines one's sex? The answer is complicated and incomplete: on close examination, ordinary notions of female and male are vague. In 2012, the International Olympic Committee further specified what they mean by woman in response to questions about who, exactly, is eligible to compete in women's Olympic events. I argue, first, that their stipulation is evidence that the use of vague terms is better described by semantic approaches to vagueness than by epistemic (...) approaches. In addition, the IOC's 2012 stipulation was made with sensitivity to its practical consequences. Linguistic actions often have morally relevant consequences, and I contend that, other things equal, we should adopt theories about language that acknowledge the responsibility we bear for what we say. Taking vagueness to be an epistemic phenomenon precludes the sense of agency needed for moral responsibility; taking it to be semantic does not. Thus I advance two arguments for semantic approaches to vagueness, as against epistemic approaches: one descriptive and one normative. (shrink)

The paper argues that the reconciliation of the Causal Theory of Perception with Disjunctivism requires the rejection of causal particularism – the idea that the ontology of causation is always and everywhere an ontology of particulars (e.g., events). The so-called ‘Humean Principle’ that causes must be distinct from their effects is argued to be a genuine barrier to any purported reconciliation, provided causal particularism is retained; but extensive arguments are provided for the rejection of causal particularism. It is then explained (...) how the reconciliation of the causal theory with disjunctivism can proceed on the basis of an ontology of facts. (shrink)