Buddhist philosophy asserts that human suffering is caused by ignorance regarding the true nature of reality. According to this, perceptions and thoughts are largely fabrications of our own minds, based on conditioned tendencies which often involve problematic fears, aversions, compulsions, etc. In Buddhist psychology, these tendencies reside in a portion of mind known as Store consciousness. Here, I suggest a correspondence between this Buddhist Store consciousness and the neuroscientific idea of stored synaptic weights. These weights are strong synaptic connections built (...) in through experience. Buddhist philosophy claims that humans can find relief from suffering through a process in which the Store consciousness is transformed. Here, I argue that this Buddhist 'transformation at the base' corresponds to a loosening of the learned synaptic connections. I will argue that Buddhist meditation practices create conditions in the brain which are optimal for diminishing the strength of our conditioned perceptual and behavioural tendencies. (shrink)

Through an examination of his remarks on Genesis, chapters 2–3, I will demonstrate that Spinoza’s argument for sexual inequality is not only an aberration,but a symmetrical inversion of a view he propounds, albeit implicitly, in his Ethics. In particular, “the black page” of his Political Treatise ignores, along with the intellectual capacities of women, the immeasurable benefits of affectionate partnership between a man and a woman that he extols in his retelling of the Genesis narrative. If the doctrine of the (...) black page maintains that it is the dependency of wives upon their husbands that explains their weakness and justifies their exclusion from formal roles in politics, his unusual narrative of the Fall illustrates that it is precisely Adam's lack of appreciation of his need for his wife that accounts for his imbecility. (shrink)

Like any broad narrative about the history of ideas, this one involves a number of simplifications. My hope is that by taking a closer look Spinoza's notorious remarks on animals, we can understand better why it becomes especially urgent in this period as well as our own for philosophers to emphasize a distinction between human and nonhuman animals. In diagnosing the concerns that give rise to the desire to dismiss the independent purposes of animals, we may come to focus on (...) a new aspect of what needs to change about contemporary thinking on species divisions. In what follows, I will bring out Spinoza's contradictory and ambivalent remarks pertaining to the specific differences between humans and animals. It is my suspicion that this ambivalence continues to plague us today. Like Spinoza, we want to say that humans are like and unlike animals. As a simply descriptive claim, it may be true and innocuous. Yet, the way we affirm our proximity and distance from nonhuman animals requires careful attention. Spinoza viewed this proximity as a source of danger. We might do well to emphasize, with thinkers such as Donna Haraway (2003),how our proximity and difference are also sources of pleasure and power, both to be able to enjoy the affectionate bond that can often develop between humans and our animal companions but also to quell the anxiety that might encourage us to exploit and abuse them. (shrink)

Although Spinoza’s words about intuition, also called “the third kind of knowledge,” remain among the most difficult to grasp, I argue that he succeeds in providing an account of its distinctive character. Moreover, the special place that intuition holds in Spinoza’s philosophy is grounded not in its epistemological distinctiveness, but in its ethical promise. I will not go as far as one commentator to claim that the epistemological distinction is negligible (Malinowski-Charles 2003),but I do argue that its privileged place in (...) Spinoza’s system belongs primarily to its ethical importance, by which I mean that intuition’s value is prized by virtue of the agency it confers upon those who enjoy it. Spinoza often notes that what distinguishes the “wise man” is that he is more powerful, able to do more. That is,the wise and free person with whose description the Ethics culminates is set apart not, first and foremost, by virtue of possessing a scientific account of the true cosmological order. The Ethics is perhaps called an ethics, rather than a treatise on metaphysics or knowledge, because it concludes with a demonstration of how one comes to be able to do what is best and to live a more joyful life. Intuitive science is essential to the characterization of the power to think and live well. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between violence and the domination of speech in Spinoza’s political thought. Spinoza describes the cost of such violence to the State, to the collective epistemic resources, and to the members of the polity that domination aims to script and silence. Spinoza shows how obedience to a dominating power requires pretense and deception. The pressure to pretend is the linchpin of an account of how oppression severely degrades the conditions for meaningful communication, and thus the possibilities (...) for thinking and acting in common. Because it belongs to human nature to desire to share our thoughts with others, Spinoza believes that most people experience efforts to control our communication to be acutely intolerable. As a result, such unbearable violence threatens the political order that deploys it. I conclude with some speculative remarks about why, in the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza consistently deploys the superlative form of the adjective violentus in reference to the domination of thought and speech rather than to other modes of political violence. (shrink)

In what follows, I will substantiate the argument that there are at least two senses in which Spinoza’s principles support revolutionary change. I will begin with a quick survey of his concerns with the problem of insurrection. I will proceed to show that if political programs can be called revolutionary, insofar as freedom is their motivation and justification, and insofar as freedom implies an expansion of the scope of the general interest to the whole political body, Spinoza ought to be (...) called a revolutionary. Finally, I will contend that even if he does not praise mass insurrection, he finds its guarantee in the laws of human nature itself, which cannot tolerate tyranny. And, thus, it is in a revolutionary vein that Spinoza cites Seneca repeatedly: violenta imperianemo continuit diu (TTP 5 8, 16 9). (shrink)

Rorty finds that my own appropriation of Spinoza toward a re-conception of ideology critique falls short, however, by (a) failing to “take Spinoza’s mind-body identity seriously” and by (b) advocating a “battle of ideas” rather than an enlargement of perspective. She presents an illuminating analysis of how, according to Spinoza, dichotomies serve as blunt provisional tools that become counterproductive once understanding is reached. She suggests that I preserve certain distinctions to the detriment of my own liberation project, such as the (...) distinction between the truth of an idea and its persuasive force. As part of criticism (a), she admonishes me for neglecting the importance of material conditions, and with criticism (b) she suggests that the imagery of battle misconstrues the project of becoming rational and the power of truth. Below I will try to show that we do not disagree about either the importance of material conditions for a project of political transformation or the identity of mind and body in substance. We do disagree, however, about the character of ideology critique. I will offer an example, in an attempt to demonstrate why it is neither a distortion of Spinoza nor strategically counterproductive to understand the project of thinking as an effort of what I call “resistant reconstruction” within the attribute of thought. (shrink)

I begin this paper with a survey of the textual evidence for a new Cartesian subject, a post-Cartesian Cartesian individual, for whom the life of the body, its passions, and its relationships are central. In the second section, I consider his remarks on hatred, which complicate his view embodied life. Even if Descartes’s study of the passions in his treatise as well as his correspondence calls for a more nuanced understanding of the Cartesian person, we will find in his attention (...) to embodiment a conflicted and wary human being for whom relationships can be nourishing and sweet just as easily as they can be noxious and bitter. (shrink)

In examining Judith Butler's treatment of Spinoza insofar as it reflects the tenacity of a commitment to the need to "honor the death drive," a need often justified by the ethical and political resources it provides, this essay asks about the basis of this need for feminist theory. From whence does it come? What ethical and political work does a primary vigilance toward our destructive and death-bent urges do? Thus, I begin with a review of Butler's treatment of Spinoza, and (...) proceed to make some suggestions about what motivates her creative appropriation of his principle of conatus. Finally, without demanding that Butler represent Spinoza's philosophy accurately, I propose that Spinoza's philosophy allows a very strong acknowledgment of destruction, including self-destruction, without conceding the necessity of an ethics or politics of anxiety. Like Butler, and perhaps even more radically, Spinoza insists upon our opacity to ourselves, our irreducible and original multiplicity and constitutive relationality, as well as the inability finally to demarcate the boundaries of the self. Yet his ethics culminates in what he calls a "remedy for the affects," in an endeavor to displace and minimize sad passions, like anxiety. In concluding, the question for feminist theory remains: Which are the best fictions, models of selfhood, and modes of speculation for the displacement of anxiety, aggression, and the passions that trigger violence agianst ourselves and others in a misogynist, homophobic, and racist culture? If I am not able to answer these questions in the course of this brief essay, I hope to underline the importance of asking them. (shrink)

This essay examines Elizabeth Grosz's provocative claim that feminist and anti-racist theorists should reject a politics of recognition in favor of "a politics of imperceptibility." She criticizes any humanist politics centered upon a dialectic between self and other. I turn to Spinoza to develop and explore her alternative proposal. I claim that Spinoza offers resources for her promising politics of corporeality, proximity, power, and connection that includes all of nature, which feminists should explore.

Against the common understanding that the Ethics promotes a "radical anti-emotion program," I claim that Spinoza describes an immanent transformation of love from a form of madness to an expression of wisdom. Love as madness produces the affects that another tradition unites in the seven deadly sins, such as lust, gluttony, envy, greed, and pride. Spinoza, however, never condemns these affects as such. Within each affect one can find its "correct use" (E5p10schol), which enables us to love and to live (...) otherwise. As we come to understand our beloveds as determinate expressions both of nature's power and of our own ability to persevere in being, we find conditions for our liberation within these most burdensome of passions. More specifically, as we diminish our tendency to imagine what we love in terms of its finitude and susceptibility to loss, we are determined to love and to know both others and ourselves by the joyful passions. Ultimately, Spinoza's portrait of love suggests ways of life that generate the satisfaction of our possessive desire with the collective and inclusive love of, certainly, the eternal and immutable thing, but also the eternal and immutable in things, in each other, and above all, in ourselves. In other words, Spinoza's economics of love and possession point up the desire to appropriate our own power in and of community, and in of nature. (shrink)

In asserting that the desire to possess what we cannot exclusively and permanently have lies at the root of human misery, Spinoza's Ethics discloses a problem that requires a political response. Although the final part of the Ethics appears to be the least practical of Spinoza's writings, it nonetheless foregrounds the tangible problem of our desire for possession, our desire to have what gives us joy. Moreover, it proposes a remedial practice by means of which this problematic desire might generate (...) satisfaction and strength rather than frustration and suffering. The "remedy for the affects" demands a reorientation of one's possessive desire corollary to the fundamentally affective and affirmative understanding of justice propounded in Spinoza's political writings. The cure for the possessive lovesickness portrayed in the Ethics, I aim to show, entails institutions of justice insofar as they operate upon our proprietary desires. (shrink)

The nucleus accumbens orchestrates processes related to reward and pleasure, including the addictive consequences of repeated reward (e.g., drug addiction and compulsive gambling) and the accompanying feelings of craving and anhedonia. The neurotransmitters dopamine and endogenous opiates play interactive roles in these processes. They are released by natural rewards (i.e., food, water, sex, money, play, etc.) and are released or mimicked by drugs of abuse. Repeated drug use induces conditioned down-regulation of these neurotransmitters, thus causing painful suppression of everyday pleasure. (...) As with many spiritual traditions, Buddhism provides strong advice against the pursuit of worldly pleasures to attain the ‘‘good life.’’ In contrast, many forms of meditation give rise to an immense and abiding joy. Most of these practices involve ‘‘stilling the mind,’’ whereby all content-laden thought (e.g., fantasies, daydreams, plans) ceases, and the mind enters a state of openness, formlessness, clarity, and bliss. This can be explained by the Buddhist suggestion that almost all of our everyday thoughts are a form of addiction. It follows that if we turn off this internal ‘‘gossip of ego,’’ we will find relief from the biochemical dopamine/opiate down-regulation, which is, perhaps, the perpetual concomitant of our daily rumination. (shrink)

In ‘Are Citizenship Tests Necessarily Illiberal?’, Michael Blake argues that difficult citizenship tests are not necessarily illiberal, so long as they test for the right things. In this paper, I argue that Blake’s attempt to square citizenship tests with liberalism fails. Blake underestimates the burdens citizenship tests impose on immigrants, ignoring in particular the egalitarian claims immigrants have on equal social membership. Moreover, Blake’s positive justification of citizenship tests – that they help justify immigrants’ coercive voting power – both neglects (...) the fact that such tests are coercively imposed on immigrants and that the citizenship test Blake envisions does little to help ensure immigrants’ votes are legitimate. Citizenship tests thus aren’t, even in principle, a way of protecting citizens from unjustified coercive power. They are, even under favourable circumstances, an illiberal way of obstructing immigrants’ quest for social equality. (shrink)

In this commentary, I respond to the core question of Ruddick’s paper: How does the theoretical dethroning of humanity force us to reinvent ethics? In so doing, I expand on Spinoza’s profound contribution to the radical rethinking of the subject at the level of ontology. Although Ruddick invokes Spinoza, first and foremost, as a potential resource for ethics in light of climate disruption, I conclude that those resources offer only a glimmer of how to live differently. The work of re-imagination (...) at the level of metaphysics is flourishing, but we have yet to develop its implications for ethics and politics. (shrink)

Balibar presents Spinoza as a profound critic of " the anthropomorphic illusion. " Spinoza famously derides the tendency of humans to project their own imagined traits and tendencies onto the rest of nature. The anthropomorphic illusion yields a gross overestimation our own agency. I argue in this essay that the flip side of this illusion is our refusal to extend certain properties we reserve exclusively to ourselves. The result is that we disregard the power of social and political institutions because (...) they do not resemble us. The anthropomorphic illusion therefore causes us both to overestimate our power as singular individuals and to underestimate the power of social and political institutions. If we understand ourselves and institutions as " transindividuals " rather than on the illusory model of substantial individuality, it is unproblematic to attribute individuality to collective powers, like the commonwealth, and makes better sense of how we are determined by external forces. (shrink)

In this article I shall consider two seemingly contradictory claims: first, the claim that everybody who thinks that there are ordinary objects has to accept that they are vague, and second, the claim that everybody has to accept the existence of sharp boundaries to ordinary objects. The purpose of this article is of course not to defend a contradiction. Indeed, there is no contradiction because the two claims do not concern the same ‘everybody’. The first claim, that all ordinary objects (...) are vague, is a claim that stems both from common sense intuitions as well as from various types of ontologies of ordinary objects. This puts then pressure on theories of vagueness to account for the vague nature of ordinary objects – but, as we shall see, all theories of vagueness have to accept the existence of sharp thresholds. This is obvious in the case of epistemicism, and it is a well-known defect of supervaluationism, but as we will see friends of metaphysical vagueness do have to endorse the existence of sharp thresholds in their theory as well. Consequently, there are reasons for dissatisfaction with these accounts, since they do not seem to be able to do the job we asked them to do. (shrink)

It is well known that classical, aka ‘sharp’, Bayesian decision theory, which models belief states as single probability functions, faces a number of serious difficulties with respect to its handling of agnosticism. These difficulties have led to the increasing popularity of so-called ‘imprecise’ models of decision-making, which represent belief states as sets of probability functions. In a recent paper, however, Adam Elga has argued in favour of a putative normative principle of sequential choice that he claims to be borne out (...) by the sharp model but not by any promising incarnation of its imprecise counterpart. After first pointing out that Elga has fallen short of establishing that his principle is indeed uniquely borne out by the sharp model, I cast aspersions on its plausibility. I show that a slight weakening of the principle is satisfied by at least one, but interestingly not all, varieties of the imprecise model and point out that Elga has failed to motivate his stronger commitment. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: It is a familiar story that Kant’s defence of our synthetic a priori cognition in the Critique of Pure Reason suffered sharp criticism throughout the extended philosophical revolutions that established analytic philosophy, the pragmatist tradition, and the phenomenological tradition as dominant philosophical movements in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the most important positive adaptations of Kant’s outlook, however, was the combined analytic and pragmatist conceptions of the a priori that were developed by the American philosophers (...) C. I. Lewis (1883–1964) and Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989), most notably in Lewis’s 1929 classic, Mind and the World Order, followed by Sellars’ critical reworking of Lewis’s outlook in ‘Is There a Synthetic A Priori?’ (1953) and other mid-century articles. Both Lewis and Sellars defended central aspects of Kant’s analysis of our a priori knowledge of mind-independent physical objects and necessary causal connections. But both also radically transformed Kant’s view by defending the idea that there are alternative a priori conceptual frameworks that are subject to an ongoing process of reassessment and replacement on overall pragmatic and explanatory grounds. Furthermore, while Sellars’ answer to his question, ‘Is There a Synthetic A Priori?’ thus represented a partial endorsement of Lewis’s pragmatic relativization of the a priori, I argue that Sellars’ account of meaning diverged from Lewis in ways that constituted a significant improvement upon the previous ‘analytic’ defenses of the a priori, not only in Lewis but in general. This arguably has implications for wider disputes concerning the nature and possibility of a priori knowledge in non-formal domains. (shrink)

In his New Essays on Human Understanding, Leibniz presents a sharp attack on Locke's theory of personal identity, Matching Locke's thought-experiments with those of his own, Leibniz seeks to show that our identity cannot rest on matters of consciousness alone-being the same person is rather a matter of the continued existence of an immaterial substance. I draw attention to some contemporary thinkers who-while eschewing the immaterial substances-are sympathetic to the kind of argument Leibniz offered. This leads to a dilemma: on (...) the face of things. we cannot be sympathetic to both Leibniz and Locke. I investigate a theory which would resolve this dilemma-giving up something which each held dear, but not everything, The resultant theory leans unpopularly more towards the side of Leibniz than Locke but can point to the authority of no less than David Wiggins. In the end, though, I argue that there is another solution to the dilemma - a solution which claims that Leibniz and Locke are arguing at cross-purposes, and that their arguments are best seen as answers to different questions. This solution still requires the giving-up of widely-held beliefs but involves significantly less cost than the alternatives. (shrink)

I claim that we should reject a sharp distinction between fiction and non-fiction according to which documentary is a faithful representation of the facts, whilst fiction films merely invite us to imagine what is made up. Instead, we should think of fiction and non-fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a combination of non-essential features and which influence appreciation in a variety of ways. An objection to this approach is that it renders the distinction too conventional and fragile, (...) undermining our justification for criticising documentaries like Bowling for Columbine or The Hunting Ground for playing fast and loose with the facts. I argue that this objection is misguided, misidentifying the justification for criticising non-fiction films that mislead or deceive. I develop an alternative account that explains why we also criticise many fictions for inaccuracy. (shrink)

I begin with a description of the benefits and limits of DNA barcoding as presented by its advocates not its critics. Next, I argue that due to the mutually dependent relationship between defining and delimiting species, all systems of classification are grounded in theory, even if only implicitly. I then proceed to evaluate DNA barcoding in that context. In particular, I focus on the barcoders’ use of a sharp boundary by which to delimit species, arguing that this boundary brings along (...) additional theoretical commitments inconsistent with the way taxonomists conceive of species, viz., as entities that have vague boundaries and that cannot be defined by any single attribute other than ancestry. Given these inconsistencies, I conclude that even if groupings based on DNA barcodes match those of an existing taxonomy, the two systems of classification are not necessarily tracking the same entities, i.e., species. (shrink)

I argue that Adam Smith, far from being a utilitarian as claimed by Alain Caillé, was instead a semi-sceptical philosopher who defended a pluralistic normative ethics of prudence, justice, benevolence, and, far from being the founder of the science of a system self-produced by the interaction of individual self-interests, was a sharp critic of the practices of the commercial society of his time in the name of liberty, justice, and equality. In a word, was from being the putative father of (...) Capitalism, Adam Smith was the father o a liberal left and a forefather of the present-day critics of globalization. (shrink)

[...] I will only investigate [Austin's] claims as challenges to present-day model theoretic semantics. My main point will be to draw a sharp line between the semantic and pragmatic aspects of performatives and thereby discover a gap in Austin’s treatment. This will in my view naturally lead to the proposal in Section 2, that is, to treating performatives as denoting changes in intensional models. The rest of Section 2 will be concerned with the status of felicity conditions and a tentative (...) extension of Montague’s PTQ. (shrink)

I begin this essay with a notion of "authority" that makes a sharp distinction between authority and power, and grant that such authority is not only legitimate, but perhaps even necessary in human affairs. I then trace the devaluation of this idea through varying degrees of institutionalization, culminating in its political cooptation. I argue, finally, that what goes by the name of political authority is the very antithesis of the legitimate and necessary element that we began with.

I intend to dismantle a piece of historiographic mythology created by self-styled ‘Revisionists’ (Hill, Alvey, Oslington, etc.). According to the myth, Adam Smith endorsed several of the traditional proofs of God’s existence; he believed that the order existing in the world is a morally good order implemented by Divine Providence; he believed that evil in the world is part of an all-encompassing Divine Plan; and that the ‘invisible hand’ is the hand of the Christian God who leads the rich to (...) employ their wealth for the greater benefit of the greatest number. I argue instead that there is a remarkable analogy between Smith’s and Kant’s theory of religion. Smith’s philosophy is a third way between Rationalism and Phyrronism, arguing that doctrines confirmed by reason in every field, from natural science to theology, are nothing more than combinations of ideas agreeable to the imagination; if we try, on the basis of both Smithian texts and their context and co-text, to reconstruct his lectures on natural theology, all kind of evidence converge in indicating that he reduced proofs of God´s existence to ‘inventions of the imagination’ and argued that philosophical theism is not different in status from primitive belief in invisible beings, or that it is as unwarranted as any system is, and besides that it generates a moral conundrum; he argued also that teleological explanations are no more and no less imaginary than those based on efficient causes, that the teleological order we may imagine in the world is not too bad from a ‘consequentialist’ point of view, and yet it is far below any moral standard; I argued that this is by no means a proof of Smith’s ‘irreligion’ and also that no convincing proof of any turn from religion to irreligion on his part has been provided so far, and finally that the two viable options he left open were either dismal unbelief or Theism on a moral basis. I defend this third way by proving that what Smith’s lost lectures on natural religion said can be reconstruct with some plausibility and what they did not say with absolute certainty; I argue that he developed a sharp criticism of natural theology, that he argued that at the root of religion there are a number of principles of the mind that make religious belief a ‘natural belief’; I do so by reconstructing, first, the context of the missing lectures (sect. 2); then the contents of their first part, considering the proofs of God’s existence and his attributes (sects 3-4); the ‘principles of the mind’ lying at the root of polytheism (sect. 5), of philosophical monotheism (par. 6), and of pure and rational religion (par.7); I contend, then, that his vindication of toleration is consistent with ‘pure and rational religion’ (par. 8) and that attempts to prove a phantom conversion to ‘natural religion’ or ‘irreligion’ result from misreading (par.9). My conclusions are the following: i) Adam Smith claimed that any natural theology is impossible; ii) There is in fact some kind of order in the world, and it proves useful to a point in allowing for humankind’s survival, but it doesn’t meet any minimal moral criterion; iii) the world is not teleologically ordered; we may indeed imagine such order for mental economy, but the world abounds in misery and depravity; iv) consequences of human wickedness and insanity do, happily enough, deviate from intended outcomes; we may feign invisible mechanisms at work behind, but to mistake them for a hidden mechanism is as childish as the primitive’s belief in ‘invisible beings’. v) there are indeed themes from theological doctrines in Smithian economic theory, but they not the kind of rational theology ‘discovered’ by the ‘New View’; they are instead Augustinian and Jansenist themes. vi) Smith’s theological doctrines did – as suggested by Waterman – have a bearing on his economic theory not by ‘doctrinal dependence’ but – as suggested by Harrison – in the more modest role of source of blueprints for economic explanation. (shrink)

Tim Ingold draws a sharp line between animism and hylomorphism, that is, between his relational ontology and a rival genealogical ontology. He argues that genealogical hylomorphism collapses under a fallacy of circularity, while his relationism does not. Yet Ingold fails to distinguish between vicious or fallacious circles, on the one hand, and virtuous or hermeneutic circles, on the other. I demonstrate that hylomorphism and Ingold’s relational animism are both virtuously circular. Hence, there is no difference between them on this count. (...) A path thus opens for what I call hylomorphic animism. While Ingold’s relational animism leads into obscurity, hylomorphic animism is able to explain the differences in power between material things. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the implications of moral vagueness (viz., the vagueness of moral predicates) for non-naturalist metaethical theories like those recently championed by Shafer-Landau, Parfit, and others. I characterise non-naturalism in terms of its commitment to 7 theses: Cognitivism, Correspondence, Atomism, Objectivism, Supervenience, Non-reductivism, and Rationalism. I start by offering a number of reasons for thinking that moral predicates are vague in the same way in which ‘red’, ‘tall’, and ‘heap’ are said to be. I then argue that (...) the moral non-naturalist seeking to countenance moral vagueness faces a dilemma: are moral properties vague, or perfectly sharp? On either horn of the dilemma, serious problems arise for some of the central tenets of non-naturalism: vague properties seem to threaten Objectivism, Supervenience, and Non-reductivism; on the other hand, sharp properties raise problems for Supervenience and Rationalism. The difficulties on each horn of the dilemma are real, and while they may not be insuperable, they do, at the very least, drastically limit the things non-naturalists can consistently say about moral properties, facts, and reasons. (shrink)

In “Perceptual Confidence,” I argue that our perceptual experiences assign degrees of confidence. In “Precision, not Confidence, Describes the Uncertainty of Perceptual Experience,” Rachel Denison disagrees. In this reply I first clarify what i mean by ‘perceptual experiences’, ‘assign’ and ‘confidence’. I then argue, contra Denison, that perception involves automatic categorization, and that there is an intrinsic difference between a blurry perception of a sharp image and a sharp perception of a blurry image. -/- .

In this paper I examine the concept of cross-temporal personal identity (diachronicity). This particular form of identity has vexed theorists for centuries -- e.g.,how can a person maintain a belief in the sameness of self over time in the face of continual psychological and physical change? I first discuss various forms of the sameness relation and the criteria that justify their application. I then examine philosophical and psychological treatments of personal diachronicity(for example,Locke's psychological connectedness theory; the role of episodic memory) (...) and find each lacking on logical grounds, empirical grounds, or both. I conclude that to achieve a successful resolution of the issue of the self as a temporal continuant we need to draw a sharp distinction between the feeling of the sameness of one's self and the evidence marshaled in support of that feeling. (shrink)

In this paper I will offer a novel understanding of a priori knowledge. My claim is that the sharp distinction that is usually made between a priori and a posteriori knowledge is groundless. It will be argued that a plausible understanding of a priori and a posteriori knowledge has to acknowledge that they are in a constant bootstrapping relationship. It is also crucial that we distinguish between a priori propositions that hold in the actual world and merely possible, non-actual a (...) priori propositions, as we will see when considering cases like Euclidean geometry. Furthermore, contrary to what Kripke seems to suggest, a priori knowledge is intimately connected with metaphysical modality, indeed, grounded in it. The task of a priori reasoning, according to this account, is to delimit the space of metaphysically possible worlds in order for us to be able to determine what is actual. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a counterexample to the so called vagueness argument against restricted composition. This will be done in the lines of a recent suggestion by Trenton Merricks, namely by challenging the claim that there cannot be a sharp cut-off point in a composition sequence. It will be suggested that causal powers which emerge when composition occurs can serve as an indicator of such sharp cut-off points. The main example will be the case of a heap. It seems (...) that heaps might provide a very plausible counterexample to the vagueness argument if we accept the idea that four grains of sand is the least number required to compose a heap—the case has been supported by W. D. Hart. My purpose here is not to put forward a new theory of composition, I only wish to refute the vagueness argument and point out that we should be wary of arguments of its form. (shrink)

In this paper I piece present an account of Husserl’s approach to the phenomenological reconstruction of consciousness’ immemorial past, a problem, I suggest, that is quite pertinent for defenders of Lockean psychological continuity views of personal identity. To begin, I sketch the background of the problem facing the very project of a genetic phenomenology, within which the reconstructive analysis is situated. While the young Husserl took genetic matters to be irrelevant to the main task of phenomenology, he would later come (...) to see their importance and, indeed, centrality as the precursor and subsoil for the rationality of consciousness. I then argue that there is a close connection between reconstruction and genetic phenomenology, such that reconstruction is a necessary component of the program of genetic phenomenology, and I set out an argument of Husserl’s compelling one to enter into reconstructive territory. With that impetus, I schematically lay out the main contours one finds in Husserl’s practice of reconstructive techniques. We find him taking two distinct approaches, that of the individual viewed egologically (through the abstract lens of a single individual’s consciousness) and as embedded in interpersonal relations. Husserl occasionally calls these the approach “from within” and “from without,” respectively. Ultimately, the two approaches are not only complementary, but require one another. In closing, I argue that these considerations lead to a blurring of lines between the genetic and generative phenomenological registers, which challenges the prevalent view that there is a sharp demarcation of the two. (shrink)

Given the sharp distinction that follows from Hume’s Fork, the proper epistemic status of propositions of mixed mathematics seems to be a mystery. On the one hand, mathematical propositions concern the relation of ideas. They are intuitive and demonstratively certain. On the other hand, propositions of mixed mathematics, such as in Hume’s own example, the law of conservation of momentum, are also matter of fact propositions. They concern causal relations between species of objects, and, in this sense, they are not (...) intuitive or demonstratively certain, but probable or provable. In this article, I argue that the epistemic status of propositions of mixed mathematics is that of matters of fact. I wish to show that their epistemic status is not a mystery. The reason for this is that the propositions of mixed mathematics are dependent on the Uniformity Principle, unlike the propositions of pure mathematics. (shrink)

In this paper I will defend the idea of the success of post-truth as one of the main features of hypermodernity. In order to understand such a claim, I will start by defining “post-truth” and showing the key differences that separate it from simple manipulation or lies. I will explain how post-truth characterizes a whole new way of understanding the difference between truth and falsity: a new attitude of indifference to the sharp distinction that moderns and ancients had placed between (...) these two notions. I will contend that this new attitude had been announced by the work of at least three recent philosophers: Harry Frankfurt, Gianni Vattimo and Mario Perniola. They give different names to “post-truth”, though, and attribute it to different causes (from anti-intellectualism to the new media and to sheer carelessness). After that, I will explore how two key aspects of hypermodernity (according to Gilles Lipovetsky), i.e. hyperindividualism and hyperconsumption, cohere with this spread of post-truth. Finally, I will summarily refer to some political and geopolitical events that corroborate the relevance of post-truth in our hypermodern world. (shrink)

In a quantum universe with a strong arrow of time, we postulate a low-entropy boundary condition to account for the temporal asymmetry. In this paper, I show that the Past Hypothesis also contains enough information to simplify the quantum ontology and define a unique initial condition in such a world. First, I introduce Density Matrix Realism, the thesis that the quantum universe is described by a fundamental density matrix that represents something objective. This stands in sharp contrast to Wave Function (...) Realism, the thesis that the quantum universe is described by a wave function that represents something objective. Second, I suggest that the Past Hypothesis is sufficient to determine a unique and simple density matrix. This is achieved by what I call the Initial Projection Hypothesis: the initial density matrix of the universe is the normalized projection onto the special low-dimensional Hilbert space. Third, because the initial quantum state is unique and simple, we have a strong case for the \emph{Nomological Thesis}: the initial quantum state of the universe is on a par with laws of nature. This new package of ideas has several interesting implications, including on the harmony between statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, the dynamic unity of the universe and the subsystems, and the alleged conflict between Humean supervenience and quantum entanglement. (shrink)

One reason to think that names have a predicate-type semantic value is that they naturally occur in count-noun positions: ‘The Michaels in my building both lost their keys’; ‘I know one incredibly sharp Cecil and one that's incredibly dull’. Predicativism is the view that names uniformly occur as predicates. Predicativism flies in the face of the widely accepted view that names in argument position are referential, whether that be Millian Referentialism, direct-reference theories, or even Fregean Descriptivism. But names are predicates (...) in all of their occurrences; they are predicates that are true of their bearers. When a name appears as a bare singular in argument position, it really occupies the predicate position of what in this essay is called a denuded definite description: a definite description with an unpronounced definite article. Sloat provided good evidence for this. The definite article is sometimes pronounced with names in the singular: ‘The Ivan we all love doesn't feel well’. Sloat proposed a disjunctive generalization of when the definite article must be pronounced with a singular name. This essay shows that by slightly revising Sloat's generalization, we arrive at a simple, nondisjunctive, syntactic rule that governs the overt appearance of the definite article with singular names. But Ivan does not necessarily bear the name ‘Ivan’, so one might worry that the sentence “Ivan might not have had ‘Ivan’ as a name” would incorrectly be predicted false. This essay shows that Predicativism does not have this consequence by showing that incomplete definite descriptions in general and incomplete denuded descriptions, such as ‘Øthe Ivan’, in particular are rigid designators. (shrink)

In this paper, I concentrate on some of the more peculiar, perhaps even polemical, features of Aristotle’s discussions of Plato’s Republic in the second book of the Politics. These features include Aristotle’s several rather sharp or ironic remarks about Socrates and his project in the Republic, his use of rhetorical questions, or his tendency to bring out the most extreme consequences of Socrates’s theory (such as that it will destroy the polis and that it will lead to incestuous relationships). As (...) I argue, some of these polemical features result from the special character of Socrates’ theory that Aristotle criticizes whereas others are consciously aimed at countering the attractive force of Socrates’s image of the ideal city, which can and does appeal to readers over and above its theoretical, purely rational credentials. (shrink)

[Author's note: I am posting this dissertation since it may be of interest to some people working on vagueness and related topics. It does not represent my current views on the topic. I have never attempted to publish any of this work, though I hope some day to return to it.] -/- Philosophers have devoted a lot of attention to vagueness in recent years, but there is still no general consensus about how to resolve the Sorites paradox. Timothy Williamson‘s epistemic (...) view, which claims that our vague terms have unknown sharp boundaries, is the most popular and most controversial current account. No one has shown exactly what is wrong the epistemic view and no one has provided a satisfying alternative to it. These two projects – articulating what is wrong with the epistemic view, and providing a plausible alternative – are the primary goals of this dissertation. -/- Additionally, I survey ordinary intuitions that underlie Sorites paradoxes, and I note how these intuitions inform, and are informed by, a number of deeper philosophical debates in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and ethics. In part, this serves as an explanation of why the Sorites paradox has remained so difficult to resolve. -/- The most common objection to the epistemic view – that it provides an unsatisfactory account of the connection between meaning and use – has not been successful in undermining the view. My own objection is a metaphysical, and not a semantic, objection: the epistemic view fails to provide the best explanation of what objects and properties exist. Instead, an eliminativist account of macro-level objects and properties, according to which there are no mountains and there is no property of being lavender-colored, is a better metaphysical account than one that claims that there are mountains and color properties that have sharp boundaries. -/- Of course, this eliminativist view is intuitively unappealing, and to show how statements in ordinary language can in some way be taken to be true, I introduce the normative choice account. According to this view, although non-normative facts about linguistic behavior and about the external world do not determine a precise reference for our terms, our choices may do so. I claim that this provides all that is needed for there to be semantic normativity. First, we are still guided in our choices to some extent by psychological tendencies, and second, there are resources in semantic deliberation to respond to aberrant uses of language. (shrink)

Sartre draws a sharp distinction between consciousness, on the one hand, and inner sense or knowledge of (it)self, on the other: ‘La conscience n’est pas un mode de connaisance particullier, appelé sens intime ou connaisance de soi’ (B& N: 7). I explore in detail the meaning of the terms involved in that distinction with a view to highlight its significance.

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom dominating the social sciences and philosophy regarding temporal discounting, the practice of discounting the value of future utility when making decisions. Although there are sharp disagreements about temporal discounting, a kind of standard model has arisen, one that begins with a normative standard about how we should make intertemporal comparisons of utility. This standard demands that in so far as one is rational one discounts utilities at future times with an exponential discount function. Tracing (...) the justification for this standard through economics, philosophy and psychology, I’ll make what I believe is the best case one can for it, showing how a non-arbitrariness assumption and a dominance argument together imply that discounting ought to be exponential. Ultimately, however, I don’t find the case compelling. Non-exponential temporal discounting is often rational. If this is correct, Instead of trying to ‘fix’ non-exponential discounting because it is irrational and associated with negative life outcomes, we might instead focus attention on why the conditions obtain that make such discounting rational. (shrink)

Epistemologists often appeal to the idea that a normative theory must provide useful, usable, guidance to argue for one normative epistemology over another. I argue that this is a mistake. Guidance considerations have no role to play in theory choice in epistemology. I show how this has implications for debates about the possibility and scope of epistemic dilemmas, the legitimacy of idealisation in Bayesian epistemology, uniqueness versus permissivism, sharp versus mushy credences, and internalism versus externalism.

Intentionalism about visual experiences is the view according to which the phenomenal character of a visual experience supervenes on the content of this experience. One of the most influential objections to this view is about blur: seeing a fuzzy contour clearly and seeing a sharp contour blurrily have different phenomenal character but the same content. I argue that this objection does not work if we understand perceptual content simply, and not particularly controversially, as partly constituted by the sum total of (...) perceptually attributed properties, some determinable, some determinate. (shrink)

Leibniz’s views on modality are among the most discussed by his interpreters. Although most of the discussion has focused on Leibniz’s analyses of modality, this essay explores Leibniz’s grounding of modality. Leibniz holds that possibilities and possibilia are grounded in the intellect of God. Although other early moderns agreed that modal truths are in some way dependent on God, there were sharp disagreements surrounding two distinct questions: (1) On what in God do modal truths and modal truth-makers depend? (2) What (...) is the manner(s) of dependence by which modal truths and modal truth-makers depend on God? Very roughly, Leibniz’s own answers are: (1) God’s intellect and (2) a form of ontological dependence. The essay first distinguishes Leibniz’s account from two nearby (and often misunderstood) alternatives found in Descartes and Spinoza. It then examines Leibniz’s theory in detail, showing how, on his account, God’s ideas provide both truth-makers for possibilities and necessities and an ontological foothold for those truth-makers, thereby explaining modal truths. Along the way, it suggests several refinements and possible amendments to Leibniz’s grounding thesis. It then defends Leibniz against a pair of recent objections by Robert Merrihew Adams and Andrew Chignell that invoke the early work of Kant. I conclude that whereas Leibniz’s alternative avoids collapsing into yet another form of Spinozism, the alternatives proposed by Adams, Chignell, and the early Kant do not. (shrink)

Short‐term memory in vision is typically thought to divide into at least two memory stores: a short, fragile, high‐capacity store known as iconic memory, and a longer, durable, capacity‐limited store known as visual working memory (VWM). This paper argues that iconic memory stores icons, i.e., image‐like perceptual representations. The iconicity of iconic memory has significant consequences for understanding consciousness, nonconceptual content, and the perception–cognition border. Steven Gross and Jonathan Flombaum have recently challenged the division between iconic memory and VWM by (...) arguing against the idea of capacity limits in favor of a flexible resource‐based model of short‐term memory. I argue that, while VWM capacity is probably governed by flexible resources rather than a sharp limit, the two memory stores should still be distinguished by their representational formats. Iconic memory stores icons, while VWM stores discursive (i.e., language‐like) representations. I conclude by arguing that this format‐based distinction between memory stores entails that prominent views about consciousness and the perception–cognition border will likely have to be revised. (shrink)

William of Ockham (d. 1347) is well known for his commitment to parsimony and for his so-called ‘razor’ principle. But little is known about attempts among his own contemporaries to deflect his use of the razor. In this paper, I explore one such attempt. In particular, I consider a clever challenge that Ockham’s younger contemporary, Walter Chatton (d. 1343) deploys against the razor. The challenge involves a kind of dilemma for Ockham. Depending on how Ockham responds to this dilemma, his (...) razor will, Chatton argues, either prove unacceptably dull when it comes to determining ontological commitment or prove unacceptably sharp when it comes to determining commitments entailed by certain theological doctrines. While Chatton’s objection is subtle and interesting in its own right, the broader significance of the debate between these thinkers lies in the light it sheds on medieval approaches to issues surrounding metaphysical methodology. (shrink)

Should economics study the psychological basis of agents' choice behaviour? I show how this question is multifaceted and profoundly ambiguous. There is no sharp distinction between "mentalist'' answers to this question and rival "behavioural'' answers. What's more, clarifying this point raises problems for mentalists of the "functionalist'' variety (Dietrich and List, 2016). Firstly, functionalist hypotheses collapse into hypotheses about input--output dispositions, I show, unless one places some unwelcome restrictions on what counts as a cognitive variable. Secondly, functionalist hypotheses make some (...) risky commitments about the plasticity of agents' choice dispositions. (shrink)

Several complexity theorists draw a sharp and ontologically robust distinction between (merely) complicated systems and (genuinely) complex systems. I argue that this distinction does not hold. Upon fine-grained analysis, ostensibly complicated systems turn out to be complex systems. The purported boundary between the complicated and the complex appears to be vague rather than sharp. Systems are complex by degrees.

L.A. Paul calls “deep” the kind of essentialism according to which the essential properties of objects are determined independently of the context. Deep essentialism opposes “shallow essentialism”, of which David Lewis is said to be a prominent advocate. Paul argues that standard forms of deep essentialism face a range of issues (mainly based on an interpretation of Quinean skepticism) that shallow essentialism does not. However, Paul claims, shallow essentialism eliminates the very heart of what motivates essentialism, so it is better (...) to be deep than shallow. Accordingly, she proposes a very sharp novel account of essentialism, which, while attempting to preserve some of the advantages of shallow essentialism over the classical forms of deep essentialism, can be deemed to be deep. In this paper, I compare Paul’s proposal for a kind of deep essentialism with Lewis’s account, as it is presented by Paul. My aim is to show that the differences between the two approaches are not as significant as Paul takes them to be, and that Paul’s account can be taken to be deeper than Lewis’s only at the cost of sacrificing the very idea at the bottom of deep essentialism. This might be taken to suggest that, if Paul is correct in asserting that shallow essentialism is better equipped to address some skeptical challenges, but it is generally preferable to be deep than shallow, then Lewis’s account should be re-evaluated, since, as shallow as it can be, it might be deeper than it looks. (shrink)

Contemporary biology has inherited two key assumptions from the Modern Synthesis about the nature of population lineages: sexual reproduction is the exemplar for how individuals in population lineages inherit traits from their parents, and random mating is the exemplar for reproductive interaction. While these assumptions have been extremely fruitful for a number of fields, such as population genetics and phylogenetics, they are increasingly unviable for studying the full diversity and evolution of life. I introduce the “mixture” account of population lineages (...) that escapes these assumptions by dissolving the Modern Synthesis’s sharp line separating reproduction and development and characterizing reproductive integration in population lineages by the ephemerality of isolated subgroups rather than random mating. The mixture account provides a single criterion for reproductive integration that accommodates both sexual and asexual reproduction, unifying their treatment under Kevin de Queiroz’s generalized lineage concept of species. The account also provides a new basis for empirically assessing the effect of random mating as an idealization on the empirical adequacy of population genetic models. (shrink)