During the American Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King’s principal arguments reasoned from theological ethics, appealing to natural law, imago Dei, and agape love. Today in the United States, with the prevailing ideal of public reason, such arguments are unacceptable in the public square. In lieu of King’s theological arguments, are there philosophical principles or values adequate to sustain the cause of racial justice, establishing both a secure rational foundation for racial justice and providing sufficient moral incentive for citizens to (...) work self-sacrificially for this cause? I assess the prospects of the major philosophical alternatives, specifically utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, contractarianism, and the anti-theory option. I conclude that each of these approaches fails to provide the necessary conceptual resources to sustain the cause for racial justice. This presents a disconcerting dilemma: either we readmit theological considerations into the public square or surrender hope for the achievement of lasting racial justice in the United States. (shrink)

Paul Draper argues that given theism we should not expect the amount of pain and suffering we observe in the world. And since the prevalence of such evils is not surprising from a non-theistic perspective, we should reject the theistic hypothesis. But not all surprising observations are necessarily a demerit when it comes to the assessment of a given theoretical perspective. I propose that on Christian theism the prevalence of evil is a surprising feature that contributes to the overall aesthetic (...) merit of the theistic hypothesis. This element of surprise in the world, when considered as a divine drama, sets the stage for an even more surprising dramatic upswing where the work of God solves the central narrative riddle of human history, namely evil and how it can be conquered. (shrink)

It has become orthodox to read Nietzsche as proposing the ‘sublimation’ of troublesome behavioural impulses. On this interpretation, he is said to denigrate the elimination of our impulses, preferring that we master them by pressing them into the service of our higher goals. My thesis is that this reading of Nietzsche’s conception of self-cultivation does not bear scrutiny. Closer examination of his later thought reveals numerous texts that show him explicitly recommending an eliminatory approach to self-cultivation. I invoke his theory (...) of the will to power in order to explain why he persistently valorises both elimination and sublimation as preconditions of healthy subjective unity. I conclude that which of these two approaches he recommends in a given situation depends on whether or not the impulse in question can be put to use within the overall economy of our drives. (shrink)

Terraforming is a process of planetary engineering by which the extant environment of a planetary body is transformed into an environment capable of supporting human inhabitants. The question I would like to consider in this paper is whether there is any reason to believe that the terraforming of another planet—for instance, the terraforming of Mars—is morally problematic. Topics related to the human exploration of space are not often discussed in philosophical circles. Nevertheless, there exists a growing body of philosophical literature (...) dedicated to sorting out the moral implications of the use of resources from (and in) space. Most of this literature is produced as environmental philosophy. Questions of .. (shrink)

It is becoming increasingly common for authoritarian regimes to leverage digital technologies to surveil, repress and manipulate their citizens. Experts typically refer to this practice as digital authoritarianism (DA). Existing definitions of DA consistently presuppose a politically repressive agent intentionally exploiting digital technologies to pursue authoritarian ends. I refer to this as the intention-based definition. This paper argues that this definition is untenable as a general description of DA. I begin by illustrating the current predominance of the intention-based definition (Section (...) 2). Section 3 then presents four counterexamples to this definition: benign surveillance; digital sovereignty; attention-harvesting algorithms; and tech-induced loneliness. In each case, we witness authoritarianism being promoted by digital technologies without any evidence of this being intentionally caused by politically repressive agents. Based on these observations, I contend that the intention-based definition is underinclusive and is therefore unsustainable. Section 4 outlines an improved definition of DA – what I call the promotion-based definition. Since this more expansive definition does not posit intentional, politically repressive agency as a precondition of DA, it can accommodate the counterexamples discussed in Section 3. Moreover, it enables us to catch a broader spectrum of cases of DA, such as tech-induced loneliness, which those adhering to the intention-based definition are prone to overlook. After outlining further practical benefits of the promotion-based definition, I argue that we still need to distinguish between intentional and unintentional forms of DA since they call for distinct types of remedial action. -/- . (shrink)

Political leaders engage in alarmism when they inflate threats to the commonweal in order to influence citizens' behavior. A range of democratic theorists argue that alarmism is necessary to maintain political order, with some even contending that alarmism is particularly necessary in democratic polities. Yet there appear to be strong grounds for thinking that alarmism is incompatible with the democratic ethos, namely insofar as it contravenes the principle of collective self-determination. Prima facie, alarmism seems to violate this principle because it (...) involves deception and emotional manipulation, both of which are incompatible with a commitment to autonomous, collective decision-making. However, almost none of the democratic theorists who posit alarmism as a political necessity acknowledge this tension, let alone explore how it might be overcome. In this paper, I rebut the claim that alarmism is essentially anti-democratic and argue that under the right institutional conditions it is broadly compatible with the principle of collective self-determination. I argue that if leaders obtain community consent for their use of alarmism, then the apparent tension with collective autonomy dissolves. In the final section of the paper, I briefly sketch how this consent might feasibly be obtained. (shrink)

This article critically analyzes Rawls’s attitude toward envy. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls is predominantly concerned with the threat that class envy poses to political stability. Yet he also briefly discusses the kind of envy that individuals experience toward their social peers, which he calls particular envy, and which I refer to as peer envy. He quickly concludes, however, that particular envy would not present a serious risk to the stability of his just society. In this article, I contest (...) this claim by arguing that the principles that structure Rawls’s ideal society are likely to exacerbate particular envy to a politically risky extent. Section 1 reconstructs his account of envy, giving special attention to his belief that competition kindles envy between peers. Section 2 then examines the way in which Rawls often endorses rivalry within the body politic. I argue that the society governed by justice as fairness is, on account of this rivalry, likely to generate a politically problematic degree of particular envy. In Section 3, I invoke ancient Greece as an example of a society that was, as a result of its intense competitiveness, often imperiled by dangerously elevated levels of peer envy. I then survey the key institutional mechanisms by which the ancient Greeks sought to manage this hazardous emotion. It turns out, however, that most of these mechanisms would be unavailable to Rawls insofar as they starkly contravene his principles of justice. I conclude that if Rawlsians wish to establish a society that fosters rivalry, they would do well to reflect on the means by which peer envy can be effectively harnessed. (shrink)

At first glance, Fichte and Nietzsche might strike us as intellectual contraries. This impression is reinforced by Nietzsche’s disparaging remarks about Fichte. The dearth of critical literature comparing the two thinkers also could easily lead us to believe that they are, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant to one another. In this paper, however, I argue that their theories of subjectivity are in many respects remarkably similar and worthy of comparison. But I further explain how, despite this convergence, their normative (...) philosophies end up so conspicuously at odds with one another. After examining the resemblance between their denials of the substantial self, I respectively analyse Fichte’s and Nietzsche’s positive accounts of subjectivity, self-cultivation, and the political preconditions of self-cultivation. I locate the conceptual juncture at which their practical outlooks begin to part ways in their divergent drive psychologies and in their distinct conceptions of conscience. These apparently minor theoretical differences generate a large-scale disagreement regarding the political systems they believe best enable self-cultivation, with Fichte favouring a democratic regime, while Nietzsche opts for a markedly more aristocratic one. I close by sketching a possible way out of this dilemma. (shrink)

The ethics of immigration is currently marked by a division between realists and idealists. The idealists generally focus on formulating morally ideal immigration policies. The realists, however, tend to dismiss these ideals as far-fetched and infeasible. In contrast to the idealists, the realists seek to resolve pressing practical issues relating to immigration, principally by advancing what they consider to be actionable policy recommendations. In this article, I take issue with this conception of realism. I begin by surveying the way in (...) which it exemplifies what certain political theorists have recently called ‘problem-solving’ realism – a species of realism which they reject as incoherent. These theorists demonstrate that what counts as a ‘feasible’ solution is far harder to establish than most problem-solving realists would have us believe. Applying this general critique to the specific domain of immigration ethics turns out to radically undermine the notion of realism that prevails in this sphere of applied ethics. I conclude that we should therefore revise our conception of what constitutes a genuinely realist approach to the problem of immigration. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAccording to Nietzsche, both modern individuals and societies are pathologically fragmented. In this paper, I examine how he proposes we combat this affliction in his Untimely Meditations. I argue that he advocates a dual struggle involving both instrumental domination and eradication. On these grounds, I claim the following: 1. pace a growing number of commentators, we cannot categorise the species of conflict he endorses in the Untimely Meditations as agonistic; and 2. this conflict is better understood as analogous to the (...) species of struggle that Schopenhauer describes in his account of purposive organisation. (shrink)

Until recently, theorists of creativity have consistently maintained that two necessary conditions must be satisfied in order for us to legitimately ascribe creativity to a given phenomenon: a) that it exhibit novelty, and b) that it possess value. However, researchers investigating malevolent forms of creativity have claimed that the value condition is problematic insofar as we often ascribe creativity to products that are of entirely negative value for us. This has given rise to a number of modified conceptions of the (...) value condition, all of which I argue are inadequate (Sections 1 and 2). To address this issue, I advance a novel conception of creative value (Section 3). My contention is that even though malevolent creative products may be of net-negative value, they are nonetheless endowed with a degree of positive value for the predicating individual – that is, insofar as the salient originality of such products elicits an intrinsically-valuable affect of surprise. In Section 4 I then examine the way in which this affect promotes cultural flourishing and to that extent may be considered instrumentally valuable. The principal conclusion of these observations is that the existence of malevolent creativity does not genuinely controvert the standard view that creative products must possess positive value for the predicating individual. (shrink)

The problem of evil is an ideal topic for experimental philosophy. Suffering--which is at the heart of most prominent formulations of the problem of evil--is a universal human experience and has been the topic of careful reflection for millennia. However, interpretations of suffering and how it bears on the existence of God are tremendously diverse and nuanced. We might immediately find ourselves wondering why (and how!) something so universal might be understood in so many different ways. Why does suffering push (...) some people toward atheism while pushing others toward deeper faith? What cultural, psychological, or sociological differences account for this diversity of responses? And, importantly, what light might this diversity of responses shed on the problem of evil and how it has been formulated by philosophers in recent years? The primary aim of this paper is to highlight how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be fruitfully applied to the problem of evil. In the first section, we review some recent work in this area and describe the current state of this emergent body of literature. In the second section, we review the broader and more recent theoretical developments on the problem of evil. Finally, in the final section, we outline some potential areas of future empirical research that we see as especially promising given those developments. (shrink)

This article examines Nietzsche’s enduring influence on Deleuze by showing how the interpretation advanced in Nietzsche and Philosophy informs Deleuze’s later work with Guattari. I analyse Deleuze’s reading of the will to power as a typology of forces and his interpretation of the Overman as a pinnacle of creative activity with an eye towards demonstrating that these are not merely Deleuzian creations but are also defensible interpretations of Nietzsche; and I suggest how these portions of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche influence (...) his concepts of desiring-production and nomadism, respectively. By analysing Deleuze’s relation to Nietzsche as a longue durée, we can better appreciate how Deleuze’s early reading of Nietzsche is carried forward in his later work. (shrink)

I elaborate and defend a "necessitarian" interpretation of Kant's account of laws.

In his monumental work Das Gastmahl des Platon (1869) the artist Anselm Feuerbach depicted the scene in Plato’s Symposium in which a drunken Alcibiades, accompanied by a band of revelers, enters the dining chamber of the house of the poet Agathon. We have reason to attribute three aims to the artist: (1) to recreate a famous scene from ancient Greek literature, making extensive use of recent archaeological discoveries in southern Italy; (2) through the depiction of a senate and dignified Agathon, (...) to convey a sense of the nobility of the ancient Greeks; and (3) to express in visual terms the contrast of reason with desire. As he set out to accomplish these objectives Feuerbach displayed considerable indifference to the details in Plato’s depiction. Thus, what Das Gastmahl offers us is less Plato’s symposium and more Feuerbach’s symposium, a visually striking but in several respects unfaithful recreation of the Platonic original. -/- . (shrink)

Through engagement with key informants and review of ethical theories applicable to refugee policy, this paper examines the ethical and policy considerations that policy-level stakeholders believe should factor into setting the refugee resettlement ceiling. We find that the ceiling traditionally has been influenced by policy goals, underlying values, and practical considerations. These factors map onto several ethical approaches to resettlement. There is significant alignment between U.S. policy interests and ethical obligations toward refugees. We argue that the refugee ceiling should be (...) restored to historical norms, and that there exists a corresponding obligation to counter negative public perceptions about refugees and the costs of resettlement. (shrink)

In this research, an agent-based model was developed to study the propagation of physical climate shocks through supply chain networks. By combining supply chain and financial models, the study examines the effects of climate shocks on firms’ production capacities and their subsequent impacts on firm default risk. A comprehensive mathematical framework is presented for the simulation of physical risks, their subsequent up- and downstream impacts along the supply chain, and the translation of physical impacts into an increased level of default (...) risk. The results highlight the importance of supply chains as a transmission channel for physical climate risks and emphasize the effectiveness of implementing adaptation measures. Practical examples demonstrate the model’s behavior under different hypothetical climate scenarios and identify the sectors most vulnerable to increases in the frequency and intensity of climate events. Overall, this study provides insights into the transmission dynamics of climate shocks and emphasizes the need for resilience against climate events in supply chain networks. (shrink)

This is a primer on Steven James Bartlett's book CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON: HORIZONS OF POSSIBILITY AND MEANING. ●●●●● -/- Some books are long and complex. The Critique of Impure Reason is such a book. It is long enough and complex enough so that it may be a service to some readers to offer a primer to introduce and partially summarize the book’s objectives and method. Here, the author of Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning provides (...) such a guide, a vade mecum to accompany a reader should he or she embark on a study of the long and complex work. ●●●●● -/- The book is available in a printed edition, ISBN 978-0-578-88646-6, from online booksellers such as Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and through independent bookstores. The book is also available as an eBook, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5458352, through Zenodo, PhilSci, PhilPapers, HAL, and other online archives. (shrink)

This dissertation articulates and defends a conception of philosophical anthropology by reading Martin Heidegger’s ‘analytic of Dasein’ as an exemplary case of it and developing its account of anxiety and boredom. I define philosophical anthropology in distinction to empirical anthropology, which I argue is concerned with specificity and difference. Anthropology investigates human beings and their societies in their historical specificity, situated in context, thereby contributing to the understanding of the differences between human beings and their societies across the world and (...) throughout history. Philosophical anthropology, however, concerns the commonality between human beings. It questions at a more abstract level, asking what being a human being is like in general, what structures every case of human existence, what is common to all instances of it. It attempts to account for the structures of human existence and generate conceptual frameworks and vocabularies for describing and analyzing human life. I claim philosophical anthropology and empirical anthropology can complement, make use of and relate productively to each other, two sides of the same coin in the investigation of human existence. After outlining my conception of philosophical anthropology, I show how Heidegger engages in it in Being and Time’s ‘analytic of Dasein’ and other texts of the late 1920s that followed shortly after and continue this sort of project. Heidegger himself, emphatically and repeatedly throughout his career, opposed this reading of his work, but I will show that his most significant arguments in support of this opposition are unconvincing. I then critically develop one aspect of his analysis: its account of what I call the ‘revelatory moods’ of anxiety and boredom. Heidegger theorizes a variety of these moods as involving intense, profound experiences of total meaninglessness, with the very significance of the world receding from us. These experiences convey important insights to us about what it means to exist as human beings. In a brief passage, without arguing for it, Heidegger claims that joy is also a revelatory mood in the same sense, despite its seeming very different from anxiety and boredom. I critically develop Heidegger’s account to theorize joy as a revelatory mood, supplementing his analysis and deepening its usefulness as a philosophical anthropology. Heidegger gives us a conceptual framework for analyzing important human affective phenomena, interpreting their existential significance and their function in the context of our lives. I conclude with a corollary investigation into the relevance that my conception of philosophical anthropology might have to Cognitive Science. I argue, drawing on the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Mark Rowlands, that philosophical anthropology could aid Cognitive Science in the construction of what Imre Lakatos called a ‘hard core’ – something that has recently been argued to be problematically missing in Cognitive Science. A ‘hard core’ is a set of refutationresistant principles, conceptions or theories around which a coherent scientific research program can take place. I show that the work of philosophical anthropologists could be useful in debating and deciding what needs to be included in Cognitive Science’s hard core. (shrink)

Two opposed movements of thought threaten philosophy as an autonomous practice from the inside: scientific naturalism and quietism. Naturalism (qua methodological thesis) threatens to turn philosophy into a mere ancilla of the sciences, quietism understood as the prescription to remain silent in philosophy would not countenance any more "positive" philosophy. This book reconstructs naturalism and quietism such that it becomes clear naturalism does have the potential to end philosophy as an autonomous practice and that quietism, correctly understood, does not. To (...) this end, this book provides arguments against the prevailing orthodox status of naturalism and a heterogenous reading of Wittgenstein's metaphilosophical quietism as the rejection of a certain kind of theories in philosophy, namely quasi-scientific theories. (shrink)

A novel account of virtue signaling and what makes it bad has recently been offered by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke. Despite plausibly vindicating the folk’s conception of virtue signaling as a bad thing, their account has recently been attacked by both Neil Levy and Evan Westra. According to Levy and Westra, virtue signaling actually supports the aims and progress of public moral discourse. In this paper, we rebut these recent defenses of virtue signaling. We suggest that virtue signaling only (...) supports the aims of public moral discourse to the extent it is an instance of a more general phenomenon that we call norm signaling. We then argue that, if anything, virtue signaling will undermine the quality of public moral discourse by undermining the evidence we typically rely on from the testimony and norm signaling of others. Thus, we conclude, not only is virtue signaling not needed, but its epistemological effects warrant its bad reputation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Central to both James’s earlier psychology and his later philosophical views was a recurring distinction between percepts and concepts. The distinction evolved and remained fundamental to his thinking throughout his career as he sought to come to grips with its fundamental nature and significance. In this chapter, I focus initially on James’s early attempt to articulate the distinction in his 1885 article “The Function of Cognition.” This will highlight a key problem to which James continued to (...) return throughout his later philosophical work on the nature of our cognition, including in his famous “radical empiricist” metaphysics of “pure experience” around the turn of the century. We shall find that James grappled insightfully but ambivalently with the perceptual and conceptual dimensions of the “knowledge relation” or the “cognitive relation,” as he called it—or what, following Franz Brentano, philosophers would later call our object-directed thought or intentionality more generally. Some philosophers have once again returned to James’s work for crucial insights on this pivotal topic, while others continue to find certain aspects of his account to be problematic. What is beyond dispute is that James’s inquiries in this domain were both innovative and of lasting significance. (shrink)

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) identifies consciousness with having a maximum amount of integrated information. But a thing’s having the maximum amount of anything cannot be intrinsic to it, for that depends on how that thing compares to certain other things. IIT’s consciousness, then, is not intrinsic. A mereological argument elaborates this consequence: IIT implies that one physical system can be conscious while a physical duplicate of it is not conscious. Thus, by a common and reasonable conception of intrinsicality, IIT’s consciousness (...) is not intrinsic. It is then argued that to avoid the implication that consciousness is not intrinsic, IIT must abandon its Exclusion Postulate, which prohibits overlapping conscious systems. Indeed, theories of consciousness that attribute consciousness to physical systems, should embrace the view that some conscious systems overlap. A discussion of the admittedly counterintuitive nature of this solution, along with some medical and neuroscientific realities that would seem to support it, is included. (shrink)

This new critical edition is an examination of William James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism in light of the scientific naturalism prominent in James’s Principles of Psychology and the subsequent development of Darwinian, functional psychology and functionalism in psychology, the philosophy psychology and the philosophy of mind. This is sure to be a controversial look at James's late philosophy of "radical empiricism" and "pure experience." The critical perspective of the edition evokes realism of cognitive relations, contemporary empiricism and (...) recent developments in cognitive science and contemporary philosophy of mind. (shrink)

As a candidate theory of quantum gravity, the popularity of string theory has waxed and waned over the past four decades. One current source of scepticism is that the theory can be used to derive, depending upon the input geometrical assumptions that one makes, a vast range of different quantum field theories, giving rise to the so-called landscape problem. One apparent way to address the landscape problem is to posit the existence of a multiverse; this, however, has in turn drawn (...) heightened attention to questions regarding the empirical testability and predictivity of string theory. We argue first that the landscape problem relies on dubious assumptions and does not motivate a multiverse hypothesis. Nevertheless, we then show that the multiverse hypothesis is scientifically legitimate and could be coupled to string theory for other empirical reasons. Looking at various cosmological approaches, we offer an empirical criterion to assess the scientific status of multiverse hypotheses. (shrink)

Within contemporary philosophy of mind, it is taken for granted that externalist accounts of meaning and mental content are, in principle, orthogonal to the matter of whether cognition itself is bound within the biological brain or whether it can constitutively include parts of the world. Accordingly, Clark and Chalmers (1998) distinguish these varieties of externalism as ‘passive’ and ‘active’ respectively. The aim here is to suggest that we should resist the received way of thinking about these dividing lines. With reference (...) to Brandom’s (1994; 2000; 2008) broad semantic inferentialism, we show that a theory of meaning can be at the same time a variety of active externalism. While we grant that supporters of other varieties of content externalism (e.g., Putnam 1975 and Burge 1986) can deny active externalism, this is not an option for semantic inferentialists: On this latter view, the role of the environment (both in its social and natural form) is not ‘passive’ in the sense assumed by the alternative approaches to content externalism. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend an epistemic requirement on fitting hopes and worries: it is fitting to hope or to worry that p only if one’s epistemic position makes it rational to suspend judgment as to whether p. This view, unlike prominent alternatives, is ecumenical; it retains its plausibility against a variety of different background views of epistemology. It also has other important theoretical virtues: it is illuminating, elegant, and extensionally adequate. Fallibilists about knowledge have special reason to be friendly (...) to my view; it can help them explain why it can be unfitting to hold on to hope and worry in the face of overwhelming evidence, and it can also help them explain the sense in which knowledge that p and hope that –p are in tension with one another. (shrink)

Those sympathetic to the naturalistic side of James hope that his critique of ‘philosophical materialism’ can be separated from those elements of his thinking that are essential to his pragmatism. Such a separation is possible once we see that James’s critique of materialism grows out of his views about its incompatibility with the existence of objective values. Objective values (as James understands them) are incompatible, however, not with materialism in its most general form, but rather with materialism (...) that understood the ‘material world’ in terms of the sciences of the late nineteen hundreds. In particular, one could not defend the potential objectivity of value in the way that James hoped if one endorsed the particular ‘pessimistic’ cosmology characteristic of the sciences at the turn of the last century. Consequently, if one rejects certain ‘empirical assumptions’ associated with the science of James’s day, the possibility of a type of ‘melioristic materialism’ opens up, and this sort of materialist could still understand value in the way that James proposes. (shrink)

Hume is believed by many to hold an emotivist thesis, according to which all expressions of moral judgements are expressions of moral sentiments. However, most specialist scholars of Hume either deny that this is Hume's position or believe that he has failed to argue convincingly for it. I argue that Hume is an emotivist, and that his true arguments for emotivism have been hitherto overlooked. Readers seeking to understand Hume's theory of moral judgements have traditionally looked to the first section (...) of Book 3 of his Treatise, which discusses the relation between morality and reason. I argue that there is evidence elsewhere which better supports Hume's emotivist thesis. Hume's arguments for emotivism focus more on the causes of moral sentiments than on their relation to reason or belief, and he argues that moral sentiments are such as to arise whenever we contemplate morally relevant objects. He also holds that the presence of moral sentiments precludes any possibility of moral belief, because moral beliefs could only be less vivid copies of moral sentiments, and these cannot simultaneously exist. Hume concludes that all moral judgements must be expressions of sentiments. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger often and emphatically claimed that his work, especially in his masterpiece Being and Time, was not philosophical anthropology. He conceived of his project as ‘fundamental ontology’, and argued that because it is singularly concerned with the question of the meaning of Being in general (and not ‘human being’), this precluded him from being engaged in philosophical anthropology. This is a claim we should find puzzling because at the very heart of Heidegger’s project is an analysis of the structures (...) of the existence of ‘Dasein’, an entity that human beings are an instantiation of, the entity that has a relationship of concern towards its existence and which is capable of raising the question of the meaning of Being. Heidegger argues that because he only analyses human beings insofar as they are Daseins, he cannot be doing philosophical anthropology, but only fundamental ontology. In this paper, I refute this claim. I provide a sketch of philosophical anthropology which conceives it as the other side of anthropology’s coin. Where anthropology is concerned with understanding human difference, philosophical anthropology attempts to understand what is common to all instances of human existence and elucidate its significant features and structures. Whether he likes it or not, Heidegger is engaged in exactly this kind of project because anything that applies truly to Dasein applies truly to human beings. With this in mind, I examine Heidegger’s analysis of moods to demonstrate that Heidegger’s work is best understood as involving a kind of philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Despite drives’ importance for Nietzsche’s explanation of individuals’ values, controversies persist over how to interpret Nietzsche’s attribution of normative capacities to the drives themselves. On one reading, drives evaluate their aims and recognize the normative authority of other drives’ aims. On another, drives’ normative properties reduce to nonnormative, causal properties. Neither approach is satisfying. The former commits Nietzsche to the homuncular fallacy by granting drives complex cognitive capacities. The latter reading either commits Nietzsche to the naturalistic fallacy, having him derive (...) normative conclusions from descriptive premises, or eliminates normativity from his thought altogether. In response to this impasse, this article advances a Leibniz-informed interpretation of Nietzsche’s drive psychology. By construing the normative and efficient causal orders as parallel modes of explanation distinguished by one’s perspective, a Leibniz-informed reading captures the benefits of extant interpretations while avoiding their drawbacks. (shrink)

Several scholars align Nietzsche’s philosophy with Stoicism because of their naturalist approaches to ethics and doctrines of eternal recurrence. Yet this alignment is difficult to reconcile with Nietzsche’s criticisms of Stoicism’s ethical ideal of living according to nature by dispassionately accepting fate—so much so that some conclude that Nietzsche’s rebuke of Stoicism undermines his own philosophical project. I argue that affinities between Nietzsche and Stoicism belie deeper disagreement about teleology, which, in turn, yields different understandings of nature and human flourishing, (...) so that Nietzsche’s objections to Stoicism support his commitments to ethical naturalism and to affirming life’s eternal recurrence. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Hume’s account of an important class of causal belief which he calls “general rules”. I argue that he understands general rules, like all causal beliefs, as lively ideas which are habitually associated with our impressions or memories. However, I argue, he believes that they are unlike any reflectively produced causal beliefs in that they are produced quickly and automatically, such that they occur independently of any other processes of reasoning. Given this, I argue, Hume appears (...) to understand general rules as relatively simple beliefs, expressible only via generic sentences, like “birds lay eggs”. (shrink)

In Pragmatism, James promised his readers a theory of truth. However, many of his readers (even those sympathetic with other parts of James’s work) have concluded that James’s “theory” was little more than a tangle of mistakes. In this chapter, I offer an interpretation and defence of James’s theory of truth. I emphasize James’s truth pluralism.

Throughout history, almost all mathematicians, physicists and philosophers have been of the opinion that space and time are infinitely divisible. That is, it is usually believed that space and time do not consist of atoms, but that any piece of space and time of non-zero size, however small, can itself be divided into still smaller parts. This assumption is included in geometry, as in Euclid, and also in the Euclidean and non- Euclidean geometries used in modern physics. Of the few (...) who have denied that space and time are infinitely divisible, the most notable are the ancient atomists, and Berkeley and Hume. All of these assert not only that space and time might be atomic, but that they must be. Infinite divisibility is, they say, impossible on purely conceptual grounds. (shrink)

Peirce considered his esthetics to be one of a trio of normative sciences. Ostensibly, the sciences of logic, ethics and esthetics, would study the traditional norms of truth, goodness and beauty. Logic was normative in the sense that it studied how people ought to reason, if truth is to be the result. Similarly, ethics is the study of how we ought to conduct ourselves, if good is to happen. At the same time, Peirce seems to have difficulty fitting the study (...) of the beautiful into this sort of normative framework. As Peirce says, esthetics was handicapped by its definition as a theory of beauty. Instead, Peirce sees esthetics as bound up with a study of ends. Peirce argues that ends are essential to normative behavior, understood as the deliberate pursuit of a purpose, the latter serving to direct and correct the behavior. Ends may be ideals, ideas, standards, or goals. In this regard, the study of esthetics is bound up with what ought to be pursued. The key problem of the normative sciences is to discover which ends ought to be pursued. In Peirce’s formative accounts, he seems to waver between assigning this task to ethics at times and esthetics otherwise. In some places, he argues that ethics defines the ends to be pursued and studies the summum bonum. On the other hand, esthetics is claimed to be the study of ideals, that which is objectively admirable, and the conditions of attractive and repulsive ideas. To that extent, Peirce claims in a number of places that the ethically good rests on a notion of the esthetically good, the morally good being a species of the esthetically good. Although Peirce notes his neglect of the study of esthetics, he does provide a preliminary study of ends, which prove to be instructive in getting a sense of what he counts as admirable to pursue. I argue that besides this positive esthetics, which identifies ends and the conditions which makes them worthy of pursuit, he also suggests a negative esthetics, one that is does not work backwards from the ideal to the means to achieve it, but sees ends as something that evolves forward as human endeavor attempts to correct those pursuits that have led to error and misdirection. Peirce’s negative esthetics is modelled after the way in which he accounts for the ability of science to self-correct away from errant hypotheses to ones less subject to error, converging toward the truth. In the same way, the pursuit of ends is a matter of converging toward the right end through self-correction. (shrink)

Many philosophers have raised difficulties for any attempt to proportion punishment severity to crime seriousness. One reason for this may be that offering a full theory of proportionality is simply too ambitious. I suggest a more modest project: setting a lower bound on proportionate punishment. That is, I suggest a metric to measure when punishment is not disproportionately severe. I claim that punishment is not disproportionately severe if it imposes costs on a criminal wrongdoer which are no greater than the (...) costs which they intentionally caused to others. I flesh out the implications of this Lower bound by discussing how to measure the costs of crime. Methodologically, I claim that different costs should be compared by considering preferences. Substantively, I claim that many proportionality judgements undercount the costs of crime by focusing only on the marginal and not the average cost. I suggest that we may hold defendants causally responsible for their contribution to the costs of that type of crime. (shrink)

Amie Thomasson’s work provides numerous ways to rethink and improve our approach to metaphysics. This chapter is my attempt to begin to sketch why I still think the easy approach leaves room for substantive metaphysical work, and why I do not think that metaphysics need rely on any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge. After distinguishing two possible forms of deflationism, I argue that the easy ontologist needs to accept (implicitly or explicitly) that there are worldly constraints on what sorts of entities could (...) exist, and could co-exist. I argue this leaves room for a substantive role for metaphysics if (following the work of E.J. Lowe) we take metaphysics to be concerned with the possible ways that reality could be. I explain how this conception does not need to appeal to any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge, and need only make use of conceptual and/or empirical means to arrive at views on what could exist (and co-exist). Thus, the answer I propose to the question posed in the title, at least in my view, is no-one. Or, at least, no-one should be afraid of conceptual analysis. Not even metaphysicians. (shrink)

I begin by arguing that, for Kant, the pure category of substance has both a general content that is in play whenever we think of any entity as a substance as well as a more specific content that arises in conjunction with the thought of what Kant calls a positive noumenon. Drawing on this new “Dual Content” account of the pure category of substance, I offer new answers to two contested questions: What is the relation of the pure category to (...) phenomenal substance? What, if any, epistemic gains can we achieve when we apply the pure category to noumena? Regarding the first question, I argue that while phenomenal substance does not qualify as a substance according to the Inner-Simple Conception, it does qualify as one according to the Subsistence-Power Conception. Regarding the second question, I argue that, in the case of the substantiality of positive noumena, Kant’s account allows for justified conditional beliefs involving the Inner-Simple Conception. In the case of negative noumena, it allows for justified existential beliefs involving the Subsistence-Power Conception. (shrink)

Abstract:While the American pragmatist C. S. Peirce and the twelfth-century Confucian thinker Zhu Xi 朱熹 lived and worked in radically different contexts, there are nevertheless striking parallels in their view of inquiry. Both appeal to the fundamental nature of reality in order to draw conclusions about the way in which inquiry can be a component of the path toward moral perfection. Yet they prominently diverge in their account not only of the fundamental nature of reality, but also of the way (...) in which we have epistemic access to it. These connections between metaphysical fundamentality or structure and epistemology, it is proposed, have the potential to illuminate current debates in metaphysics. Contemporary approaches that appeal either to grounding relations or to joint-carving ideology in characterizing metaphysical structure, it is proposed, implicitly rest on distinct sets of epistemological presuppositions that resemble the respective views of Zhu Xi or Peirce. (shrink)

This article is the SECOND of several excerpts from my book The Nondual Mind: Vedānta, Kashmiri Pratyabhijñā Shaivism, and Spinoza (the full book is posted on this site). “I liked James H. Cumming’s The Nondual Mind a lot. It is beautifully written, thoughtful, and very clear.” (Prof. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University) “James H. Cumming’s scholarly interpretation of Spinoza’s works, persuasively showing how 17th century European ideas that ushered in the Enlightenment find (...) a precursor in 10th century Kashmir, is a masterpiece of reason and philosophy that will leave the reader with profound thoughts on the meaning of history, God, and life itself. As a senior staff attorney in my chambers for many years at the California Supreme Court and a top scholar of ethics and philosophy of law, Mr. Cumming never ceased to amaze me with his outstanding research and intellect. This scholarly book is a must read for all who want to know why Spinoza continues to influence contemporary philosophy and how his work is still relevant in today’s challenging, interconnected world.” (Hon. Ming W. Chin, Associate Justice (Retired), Supreme Court of California, 1996–2020). (shrink)

To the extent that William James had an account of ‘meaning,’ it is best captured in his “pragmatic maxim”, but James’s maxim has notoriously been open to many conflicting interpretations. It will be argued here that some of these interpretive difficulties stem from the fact that (1) James seriously understates the differences between his own views and those presented by Peirce in “How to Make our Ideas Clear”, and (2) James’s understanding of the maxim typically ties (...) meaning to truth, but since James takes “truth” talk to stretch from “temporary” to “absolute” truth, a similar ‘elasticity’ can be found in his conception of meaning. However, this ‘elasticity’ is found in our everyday talk of meaning as well, and James manages to capture it in a more cohesive way than more contemporary accounts that often try to do so by positing two completely distinct types of meaning or content. (shrink)

An Aristotelian Philosophy of Mathematics breaks the impasse between Platonist and nominalist views of mathematics. Neither a study of abstract objects nor a mere language or logic, mathematics is a science of real aspects of the world as much as biology is. For the first time, a philosophy of mathematics puts applied mathematics at the centre. Quantitative aspects of the world such as ratios of heights, and structural ones such as symmetry and continuity, are parts of the physical world and (...) are objects of mathematics. Though some mathematical structures such as infinities may be too big to be realized in fact, all of them are capable of being realized. Informed by the author's background in both philosophy and mathematics, but keeping to simple examples, the book shows how infant perception of patterns is extended by visualization and proof to the vast edifice of modern pure and applied mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

What, if anything, can justify public shaming? Philosophers who have written on this topic have pointed out the role of public shaming in enforcing valuable social norms. In this paper, I defend an alternate, supplementary justification for public shaming: as a form of moral self-defence. Moral self-defence is the defence of one’s moral standing – being recognized as an equal in the eyes of oneself and others – rather than the defence of one’s physical body or rights. Agents can engage (...) in moral self-defence by publicly criticizing, blaming, or expressing other negative feelings towards wrongdoers, which sometimes constitutes contributions to public shaming. (shrink)

James developed an evolutionary objection to epiphenomenalism that is still discussed today. Epiphenomenalists have offered responses that do not grasp its full depth. I thus offer a new reading and assessment of James’s objection. Our life-essential, phenomenal pleasures and pains have three features that suggest that they were shaped by selection, according to James: they are natively patterned, those patterns are systematically linked with antecedent brain states, and the patterns are “universal” among humans. If epiphenomenalism were true, (...) phenomenal patterns could not have been selected (because epiphenomenalism precludes phenomenal consciousness affecting reproductive success). So epiphenomenalism is likely false. (shrink)

In 1990, Gilles Deleuze publishedPostscript on the Societies of Control, an introduction to the potentially suffocating reality of the nascent control society. This thirty-year update details how Deleuze’s conception has developed from a broad speculative vision into specific economic mechanisms clustering around personal information, big data, predictive analytics, and marketing. The central claim is that today’s advancing control society coerces without prohibitions, and through incentives that are not grim but enjoyable, even euphoric because they compel individuals to obey their own (...) personal information. The article concludes by delineating two strategies for living that are as unexplored as control society itself because they are revealed and then enabled by the particular method of oppression that is control. (shrink)