This is one of several papers by the author that seek to throw light on the psychology of philosophers. In this paper, certain of the defining properties of clinical narcissism are discussed in their application to the ideological position-taking character of many philosophers and the philosophies they propound. ●●●●● -/- 2022 UPDATE: The approach of this paper has been updated and developed further in Chapters 1 and 2 of the author’s 2021 book _Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and (...) Meaning_. The book is available both in a printed edition (under ISBN 978-0-578-88646-6 from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and other booksellers) and an Open Access eBook edition (available under the book's title through Philpapers and other philosophy archives). (shrink)

In this essay, I review two earlier anti-Semitic propaganda films of 1939, to wit, Robert and Bertram, and Linen from Ireland. I begin by rehearsing some of Abram de Swann’s analysis of genocide and then discuss in greater detail a classic sociological analysis written during WWII by Hans Speier. Speier distinguished three broad kinds of war of increasing ferocity: instrumental war, agonistic war, and absolute war. While the first two sorts of war are relatively constrained, in absolute war the in-group (...) regards the out-group as inherently evil, and consequently the goal of such a war is to exterminate the out-group, with no limitation on methods. I suggest in the piece that the focus of these films is precisely to get the audience to view Jews as three different things: different (not Germans as “Aryans” are supposed to be); disgusting (loathsome, somehow degenerate); and dangerous (a threat to Aryan Germans by their very nature). I cover both films, pointing to the scenes that are crafted to engender in the audience exactly these feelings. To help explain how the various scenes manipulate the audience to push the regime’s Anti-Semitic narrative, I use Robert Cialdini’s theory of the use of psychological mechanisms in marketing. (shrink)

This essay is my critical review of Al Gini and Alexei Marcoux’s fine text, The Ethics of Business. Unlike most business ethics texts, Gini/Marcoux recognize that most businesses are small, and that business is not inherently immoral and always in need of reform. And they put their focus on using ethical theory to find action-guiding principles to help guide business behavior. Moreover, they adopt the Schumpeterian view that business is an entrepreneurial activity—one that not merely executes transactions, but seeks them (...) out. I critically probe a number of issues with their book such as their reliance upon virtue ethics as their main ethical theory, and their view that trust plays an overwhelming role in business. (shrink)

In this essay, I explore a documentary about the curious case of Charlie and his Orchestra. While swing music was outlawed in Nazi Germany as “degenerate,” the Nazi regime created a radio program called “Charlie and his Orchestra” for foreign consumption. The propaganda lay in the changes to the original lyrics of the songs played, making them convey the anti-Semitic and other themes of the Nazi ideology. The review discusses just how good the musicians were, and how popular the program (...) was. (shrink)

In this essay, I review in great detail Ian Garden’s outstanding book, The Third Reich’s Celluloid War. Garden begins by discussing propaganda theory and then discusses not just Nazi feature films and documentaries, but television as well. (The Nazis had the earliest TV network). All in all, the regime produced over 1,300 feature films during its time in power. Garden also compares Nazi propaganda films to British and American ones.

This paper, "The Ecological Pathology of Man," is an expanded excerpt from the author's book, "The Pathology of Man: A Study of Human Evil." ¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶ When taken as a serious and dispassionate object of study from the standpoint of the science of pathology, the human species is easily recognized as a global pathogen. Incontrovertible evidence on all sides tells us this, and yet we have steadfastly avoided an honest look in the mirror. We so often choose—willfully and with strong convictions (...) sustained by homocentric prejudice—to hide the facts from ourselves, and to proceed with untroubled ignorance to overlook the worldwide human and natural devastation for which our species is responsible. (shrink)

SummaryIn this paper, two different theoretical problems of induction are delineated. The first problem is addressed; the second problem is deferred to the sequel to this paper. The first problem of induction is taken to be the seemingly unformalizable nature of traditional inductive arguments. It is shown that the problem does not arise out of some particularly dubious argument form , but rather from the presupposition that inductive “logic” is, like deductive logic, assertoric. Rather , inductive logic is dialectical in (...) nature.RésuméDans cet article, deux problèmes théoriques de l'induction sont formulés. Le premier est traité, le second le sera dans une suite à cet article. Le premier problème de l'induction est ici la nature apparemment non formalisable des arguments inductifs traditionnels. L'auteur montre que le problème ne provient pas d'une forme d'argumentation particulièrement douteuse , mais au contraire de la présupposition que la «logique» inductive est, comme la logique déductive, assertorique. Il soutient au contraire qu'elle est par nature dialectique.ZusammenfassungIn der vorliegenden Arbeit werden zwei theoretische Probleme der Induktion formuliert, wovon das zweite in einem anderen Artikel behandelt werden soll. Das erste Problem betrifft die scheinbar nicht formalisierbare Natur der üblichen induktiven Argumente. Der Verfasser zeigt dass das Problem nicht von einer besonders zweifelhaften Argumentationsform herrührt , sondern von der Voraussetzung, dass die induktive «Logik» — wie die deduktive Logik — assertorisch sei. Es wird dagegen gezeigt, dass die induktive Logik dialektischer Natur ist. (shrink)

In this essay, I take up the question of why so many of the movies made by Hollywood are endless sequels, “prequels,” and remakes of prior blockbuster hits and so many are based on comic books (X-men, Superman, Batman, and so on). I tie the explanation in part to the aforementioned 1950 Supreme Court ruling prohibiting production companies, and in part to broader cultural changes. In particular, I argue that precisely because film producers can no longer make money from the (...) concessions (i.e., the purchases within the theater), but only of the ticket sales, the producers keep producing remakes of known popular movies, rather than make deeply original movies. (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to discuss what puns, metaphysically, are. I argue that the type-token view of words leads to an indeterminacy problem when we consider puns. I then outline an alternative account of puns, based on recent nominalist views of words, that does not suffer from this indeterminacy.

There is a standard quantificational view of generic sentences according to which they have a tripartite logical form involving a phonologically null generic operator called 'Gen'. Recently, a number of theorists have questioned the standard view and revived a competing proposal according to which generics involve the predication of properties to kinds. This paper offers a novel argument against the kind-predication approach on the basis of the invalidity of Generic Excluded Middle, a principle according to which any sentence of the (...) form ⌜Either Fs are G or Fs are not G⌝ is true. I argue that the kind-predication approach erroneously predicts that GEM is valid, and that it can only avoid this conclusion by either collapsing into a form of the quantificational analysis or otherwise garnering unpalatable metaphysical commitments. I also show that, while the quantificational approach does not validate GEM as a matter of logical form, the principle may be validated on certain semantic analyses of the generic operator, and so, such theories should be rejected. (shrink)

How is ethical knowledge possible? One of the most promising answers is the moral sense view: we can acquire ethical knowledge through emotional experience. But this view faces a serious problem. Emotions are unreliable guides to ethical truth, frequently failing to fit the ethical status of their objects. This threatens to render the habit of basing ethical beliefs on emotions too unreliable to yield knowledge. I offer a new solution to this problem, with practical implications for how we approach ethical (...) decision-making. I argue that an agent can have a reliable belief-forming habit despite having unreliable emotions, so long as she is suitably attentive to defeaters. In moderately virtuous agents, unfitting ethical emotions are frequently accompanied by warning signs, such as negative metaemotions, epistemic feelings, moods, and social cues. An agent who cultivates the attentional skill of noticing these signs can prevent many of her unfitting emotions from translating into false beliefs. For a moderately virtuous agent with this skill, the habit of basing ethical beliefs on emotions will be reliable. The upshot is that emotion-based ethical knowledge is possible even for people whose emotions are unreliable, but only if we cultivate the skill of spotting defeaters. (shrink)

This project has been supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (project number CS170100008); the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science; and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. ACOLA collaborates with the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and the New Zealand Royal Society Te Apārangi to deliver the interdisciplinary Horizon Scanning reports to government. The aims of the project which produced this report are: 1. Examine the transformative role that artificial intelligence may play in (...) different sectors of the economy, including the opportunities, risks and challenges that advancement presents. 2. Examine the ethical, legal and social considerations and frameworks required to enable and support broad development and uptake of artificial intelligence. 3. Assess the future education, skills and infrastructure requirements to manage workforce transition and support thriving and internationally competitive artificial intelligence industries. (shrink)

This paper examines the general prospects for conceptual role expressivism, expressivist theories that embrace conceptual role semantics. It has two main aims. The first aim is to provide a general characterisation of the view. The second aim is to raise a challenge for the general view. The challenge is to explain why normative concepts are not a species of defective concepts, where defective concepts are those that cannot meaningfully embed and participate in genuine inference. After rejecting existing attempts to answer (...) the challenge, I propose an alternative solution. However, the solution leaves conceptual role expressivism a far less distinctive and interesting position than its proponents claim. I conclude that we should be sceptical about how much expressivists gain by appealing to conceptual role semantics. (shrink)

If we define tradition too hastily we leave to one side the question of what the relevance of tradition is for us. Here the concept of tradition is opened up by considering the different views of it taken by Hannah Arendt, Michael Oakeshott and Alasdair MacIntyre. We see that each has put tradition into a fully developed picture of what our predicament is in modernity; and that each has differed in their assessment of what our relation to tradition is or (...) should be. Arendt sees tradition as something which no longer conditions action, Oakeshott sees tradition as something which conditions all action, and MacIntyre sees tradition as something which should condition right action. In each case, the view of tradition is clearly one element in an attempt to see how the most important constituent elements of human existence – variously called the human condition, human conduct, or human virtue – should be understood in a modernity which is ours because it has put the traditional concept of tradition into question. (shrink)

Jeremiah Carey presents a version of panentheism which he attributes to Gregory Palamas, as well as other Greek patristic thinkers. The Greek tradition, he alleges, is more open to panentheistic metaphysics than the Latin. Palamas, for instance, hold that God’s energies are participable, even if God’s essence is not. Carey uses Palamas’ metaphysics to sketch an account on which divine energies are the forms of created substances, and argues it is open to Orthodox Christians to affirm that God is in (...) all things as their formal cause. I argue Carey’s reading is premised on a superficial examination of the patristic literature. More importantly, Palamas’ metaphysics is opposed to that of Carey, since Palamas’ distinction aims to uphold that created persons are only contingent participants in God. On this, Palamas and the Latins are in complete accord. In conclusion, I propose panentheistic metaphysics begins from a false dilemma. (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)

The articles examines how failure, especially in so-called 'stochastic' arts or sciences like medicine and navigation stimulated reflections about the nature of the knowledge required of a genuine art (techne) or science.

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)

Call the following claim Asymmetry: rationality often requires a more steadfast response to pure moral disagreement than it does to otherwise analogous non-moral disagreement. This paper briefly motivates Asymmetry and explores its implications for meta-ethics. Some philosophers have thought that anti-realists are better-placed than realists to explain Asymmetry because, if anti-realism is true, disagreement cannot provide evidence against the reliability of one's thinking about objective moral facts. This paper argues that this simple diagnosis fails to support otherwise plausible anti-realisms. It (...) closes by discussing an alternative explanation for Asymmetry, which appeals to the moral importance of steadfastness. (shrink)

This study forms a part of a larger investigation of the influence of the philosophy of Heraclitus of Ephesus on modern poetry. T. S. Eliot, to mention the best known of the many poets inspired by Heraclitus, selected two Heraclitus fragments (B 2 and B 60) as epigraphs for his “Burnt Norton”, the first of his Four Quartets. Eliot explained that he was drawn to the fragments because of their ‘ambiguity’ and ‘extraordinary poetic suggestiveness’. Similarly, in ‘This Solitude of Cataracts’, (...) Wallace Stevens spoke of ‘the flecked river which kept flowing and never the same way twice’ and elsewhere noted the ‘inherently poetic quality’ of many Heraclitean sayings. To gain some sense of the nature and magnitude of Heraclitus’ legacy for modern poetry we must first explore his vision of ‘a fiery cosmos being kindled in measures and extinguished in measures’ and a river into which one cannot step twice. -/- . (shrink)

Arthur Danto argued from the premiss that artworks are essentially cognitive to the conclusion that they are incidentally aesthetic. I wonder why Danto, and the very many of us he persuaded, came to believe that the cognitive and the aesthetic oppose one another. I argue, contrary to Danto’s historical claims, that the cognitive and the aesthetic did not come into opposition until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and that they were brought into opposition for reasons of art-critical expediency (...) rather than philosophical necessity. I conclude that a robustly cognitive notion of the aesthetic remains an option for us. (shrink)

This paper argues for the following disjunction: either we do not live in a world with a branching temporal structure, or backwards time travel is nomologically impossible, given the initial state of the universe, or backwards time travel to our space-time location is impossible given large-scale facts about space and time. A fortiori, if backwards time travel to our location is possible, we do not live in a branching universe.

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)

In this article I address the neglected question of what kind of act keeping a secret is, and what Kant had to say about secret keeping. First, I provide a definition of keeping a secret, improving upon Sissela Bok's definition. I distinguish between keeping a secret and deception, incorporating Thomas Nagel. Then, I discuss what Kant had to say about keeping a secret, and advance an Kantian argument for the moral permissibility of secret-keeping.

Some reasons are thought to depend on relations between people, such as that of a promiser to a promisee. It has sometimes been assumed that all reasons that are relational in this way are moral obligations. I argue, via a counter example, that there are non-obligatory relational reasons. If true, this has ramifications for relational theories of morality.

When characterizing the content of a subject’s perceptual experience, does their seeing an object entail that their visual experience represents it as being a certain way? If it does, are they thereby in a position to have perceptually-based thoughts about it? On one hand, representationalists are under pressure to answer these questions in the affirmative. On the other hand, it seems they cannot. This paper presents a puzzle to illustrate this tension within orthodox representationalism. We identify several interesting morals which (...) may be drawn in response, each of which teaches us something interesting and important about perceptual experience and its interface with cognition and related phenomena. (shrink)

A model of metaphysics associated with EJ Lowe and Tuomas Tahko sees metaphysics as involving a priori knowledge of possible essences, or at least modal facts, and delimiting the actual ‘ontological categories,’ the ultimate and essential divisions of what exists, based on the results of a posteriori scientific investigation. Their approach to metaphysics has been criticized by those who argue that such metaphysics is unsuitably a priori, disconnected with empirical research in natural science, and ends up failing to provide meaningful (...) constraints on metaphysical theorization. I present different epistemological and semantic worries about these accounts to motivate an alternative perspective on which metaphysics centers on form, rather than possibility. This scholastic perspective is shown to incorporate the skeptical insights as constitutive of its approach to existence, by way of the position that ‘being’ is not a genus. Rather, ‘being’ is a determinable. The scholastic approach can thus provide responses to the skeptics, since it denies that ontological categories – in the Lowe/Tahko sense – are what metaphysicians investigate and proposes a different view of ontological categories as classes of forms. (shrink)

Expressivists about normative thought and discourse traditionally deny that there are nondeflationary normative propositions. However, it has recently been suggested that expressivists might avoid a number of problems by providing a theory of normative propositions compatible with expressivism. This paper explores the prospects for developing an expressivist theory of propositions within the framework of cognitive act theories of propositions. First, I argue that the only extant expressivist theory of cognitive propositions—Michael Ridge's ‘ecumenical expressivist’ theory—fails to explain identity conditions for normative (...) propositions. Second, I argue that this failure motivates a general constraint—the ‘unity requirement’—that any expressivist theory of propositions must provide a unified nonrepresentational explanation of that in virtue of which propositional attitudes have the content that they have. Third, I argue that conceptual role accounts of content provide a promising framework in which to develop an expressivist theory of cognitive propositions. (shrink)

In What Science Knows, the Australian philosopher and mathematician James Franklin explains in captivating and straightforward prose how science works its magic. It offers a semipopular introduction to an objective Bayesian/logical probabilist account of scientific reasoning, arguing that inductive reasoning is logically justified (though actually existing science sometimes falls short). Its account of mathematics is Aristotelian realist.

The curious case of Bronze Age Pervert (BAP, for short), of unfortunate name, or “handle,” in his world. Author of the self-published Bronze Age Mindset (2018), BAP is present in 4Chan discussion threads and on YouTube, and he produces weekly subscription-only podcasts with approximately 6,500 paying clients (I am among them). He was banned from Twitter but reinstated in December 2022, and he now has over 100,000 followers. A Google search turns up scores of articles addressing or discussing his work, (...) all written in palatable forms. But BAP’s own subjects and rhetoric are for adults only. Who is BAP, what does he espouse, and what compels the attention of orthodox Catholics? (shrink)

This article is the SIXTH 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)

In this paper, I argue that we face a challenge in understanding the relationship between the ‘value-oriented’ and ‘other-oriented’ dimensions of shame. On the one hand, an emphasis on shame's value-oriented dimension leads naturally to ‘The Self-Evaluation View’, an account which faces a challenge in explaining shame's other-oriented dimension. This is liable to push us towards ‘The Social Evaluation View’. However The Social Evaluation View faces the opposite challenge of convincingly accommodating shame's ‘value-oriented’ dimension. After rejecting one attempt to chart (...) a middle course between these extremes, I argue that progress can be made if we reject the widespread assumption that the other-oriented dimension of shame is best understood primarily terms of our concern with the way we appear to others. Instead, I outline an account which treats shame as manifesting our desire primarily for interpersonal connection and which elucidates the property of shamefulness in terms of merited avoidance. (shrink)

It is a plausible and compelling theoretical assumption that epistemic rationality is just a matter of having doxastic attitudes that are the correct responses to one’s epistemic reasons, or that all requirements of epistemic rationality reduce to requirements on doxastic attitudes. According to this idea, all instances of epistemic rationality are instances of rational belief. Call this assumption, and any theory working under it, _belief-centered_. In what follows, I argue that we should not accept belief-centered theories of epistemic rationality. This (...) is an argument in three acts. In the first, I present counterexamples that problematize the belief-centered assumption: cases whose protagonists (i) fail to meet any plausible requirements on belief but (ii) nevertheless appear epistemically rational. In the second act, I consider alternative explanations of the counterexamples, friendly to the belief-centered theorist, and find them wanting. In the third and final act, I show that there are significant theoretical benefits to acknowledging a distinct agent-centered dimension of epistemic rationality and sketch a candidate agent-centered approach: a view that grounds an agent’s epistemic rationality in the possession of _good epistemic policies_. In the end, we see that a complete theory of epistemic rationality is as much of a theory of rational _agents_ as it is of rational _belief_. (shrink)

Sometimes, a group of people can produce a morally bad outcome despite each person’s individual act making no difference to whether the outcome is produced. Since each person’s act makes no difference, it seems the effects of the act cannot provide a reason not to perform it. This is problematic, because if each person acts in accordance with their reasons, each will presumably perform the act—and thus, the bad outcome will be brought about. I suggest that the key to solving (...) this problem is to make it true of each person that their act would in fact make a difference to the relevant outcome. Fortunately, I contend, this can be accomplished by each person simply forming a particular type of attitude. I argue that each person has an obligation to form the relevant attitude in collective action cases, on pain of being immoral or irrational. (shrink)

Today, we find ourselves living during the most Religious era in all of human history. If this statement is true, it is also how we can predict the end of the human story.

The Münchhausen trilemma is the following: When trying to prove a fundamental truth, you run into one of, two of, or all three of the following issues: -/- 1: Circular reasoning 2: Infinite regress 3: An arbitrary starting point -/- But what if these are not in fact “problems”, but three different ways to observe the fundamental truth? Reconciling the three and showing how they function together is what I endeavor to articulate here.

I will argue that the natural law theory of morality, when extended into a political theory of justice, results in a picture of political justice much like that of public reason liberalism. However, natural law political theory, I argue, need not entail a natural law theory of morality. While facts about what societies ought to do supervene upon facts about what is good for human beings, there are distinct goods involved and distinct reasons for action. Rather, considerations taken from the (...) common good as guiding public policy results in a two-layer approach to public reasonability, resembling features of both consensus and convergence accounts of public reason. Consequently, the differences between natural law and classical public reason liberalism are significant but are not as significant as might have otherwise appeared. In fact, natural law political theory might be a more consistent development of the idea of a public reason than those of classical liberalism. (shrink)

This is an introduction to a special number of Midwest Studies discussing the 2008 global financial crisis and the ethical issues it raised. The immediate origins of the crisis are discussed, as are some of the exotic financial instruments involved, and some of the strategies for valuing and trading these instruments. This is necessary background for attributions of moral responsibility and blame to both individuals and institutions in the American financial system and its counterparts elsewhere in the developed world.

In this paper, I argue that the performance stories in the Zhuangzi, and the Butcher Ding story, emphasize an activity meditation practice that places the performer in a mindfulness flow zone, leading to graceful, efficacious, selfless, spontaneous, and free action. These stories are metaphors showing the reader how to attain a meditative state of focused awareness while acting freely in a flow experience. From my perspective, these metaphors are not about developing practical or technical skills per se. My argument challenges (...) a strict instrumental reading. Although instrumental reasoning can easily lead one to focus on the pragmatic outcomes depicted in these stories (See Eno, “Cook Ding’s Dao;” Callahan, “Cook Ding’s Life;” and Robins, “Beyond Skill”), the proposed pragmatic outcomes are merely a kind of collateral result of effortless, free actions, in the flow experience. The metaphors of Butcher Ding, the Lüliang rapids swimmer, the Wheelwright Bian, the Woodcarver Qing, the cicada catcher, the naked artist and so on are used to show the reader a way to engage in free and graceful action in the flow experience. Zhuangzi is not concerned about developing labour skills. He criticizes such skills; seen below when the Butcher claims to have “… left skill behind …” (進乎技矣) (Graham, Chuang-tzu, 63), and chapter five notes that “… skill is a peddler” (工為商) (Watson, Complete, 75). (shrink)

Why are natural theories pre-well-ordered by consistency strength? In previous work, an approach to this question was proposed. This approach was inspired by Martin's Conjecture, one of the most prominent conjectures in recursion theory. Fixing a reasonable subsystem $T$ of arithmetic, the goal was to classify the recursive functions that are monotone with respect to the Lindenbaum algebra of $T$. According to an optimistic conjecture, roughly, every such function must be equivalent to an iterate $\mathsf{Con}_T^\alpha$ of the consistency operator ``in (...) the limit'' within the ultrafilter of sentences that are true in the standard model. In previous work the author established the first case of this optimistic conjecture; roughly, every recursive monotone function is either as weak as the identity operator in the limit or as strong as $\mathsf{Con}_T$ in the limit. Yet in this note we prove that this optimistic conjecture fails already at the next step; there are recursive monotone functions that are neither as weak as $\mathsf{Con}_T$ in the limit nor as strong as $\mathsf{Con}_T^2$ in the limit. In fact, for every $\alpha$, we produce a function that is cofinally equivalent to $\mathsf{Con}^\alpha_T$ yet cofinally equivalent to $\mathsf{Con}_T$. (shrink)

Recently, Derek Parfit has offered a novel solution to the “Repugnant Conclusion” that compared with the existence of many people whose quality of life would be very high, there is some much larger number of people whose existence would be better but whose lives would be barely worth living. On this solution, qualitative differences between two populations will often entail that the populations are merely “imprecisely” comparable. According to Parfit, this fact allows us to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without violating (...) the transitivity of better than. In this paper, I argue that Parfit’s view nevertheless implies two objectionable conclusions. The first is an alternative version of the Repugnant Conclusion that, Parfit suggests, may not be all that repugnant. The second is a revised version of the first that is nearly identical to the Repugnant Conclusion. I conclude that Parfit’s view offers no escape from repugnance. (shrink)

Determining the precise nature of the connection between preference, choice, and welfare has arguably been the central project in the field of welfare economics, which aims to offer a proper guide for economists in the making of policy decisions that affect people’s welfare. The two leading approaches here historically – the revealed preference and latent preference approaches – seem equally incapable of so guiding economists. I argue that the deadlock here is due to welfare economists’ failure to recognize a crucial (...) distinction between two senses of “preference.” I analyze and defend these senses of “preference,” and argue that each shares a close connection with just one of choice and welfare. This analysis reveals how economists should conceive of both the connections between “preference,” choice, and welfare, and the proper roles of these concepts in welfare economics. I conclude by showing this analysis to best explain the plausibility of two leading alternative approaches from Hausman and Sugden. (shrink)

If there is pragmatic encroachment in epistemology, whether a person knows that p can vary with normative facts about her actions—including facts that do not bear on the truth or likelihood of p. This paper raises an underappreciated question for defenders of pragmatic encroachment: which of the many norms on action are distinctively connected to knowledge? To the extent that contemporary defenders of pragmatic encroachment address this question, they do so by citing norms of ‘practical rationality.’ I show that this (...) approach can only be made to work on the assumption that all immorality involves some form of incoherence. I then suggest a pluralist strategy for pragmatic encroachers who seek to answer my question without making this heavyweight metaethical assumption: they should agree that multiple distinct norms on action play a difference-making role in epistemology. I close the paper by sketching three ways in which pragmatic encroachers might pursue this strategy. (shrink)

In How We Get Along, philosopher David Velleman compares our social interactions to the interactions among improvisational actors on stage. He argues that we play ourselves - not artificially but authentically, by doing what would make sense coming from us as we really are. And, like improvisational actors, we deal with one another in dual capacities: both as characters within the social drama and as players contributing to the shared performance. In this conception of social intercourse, Velleman finds rational grounds (...) for morality, though not a rational guarantee. He maps a middle course between skepticism and rationalism, arguing that practical reasoning is 'pro-moral' without requiring moral action. The result is what he calls a 'Kinda Kantian metaethics'. How We Get Along is the summation of Velleman's thinking to date, incorporating and unifying previous work on agency, the self, the emotions, narrative and Kantian moral theory. (shrink)

In the past decade, a number of empirical researchers have suggested that laypeople have compatibilist intuitions. In a recent paper, Feltz and Millan have challenged this conclusion by claiming that most laypeople are only compatibilists in appearance and are in fact willing to attribute free will to people no matter what. As evidence for this claim, they have shown that an important proportion of laypeople still attribute free will to agents in fatalistic universes. In this paper, we first argue that (...) Feltz and Millan’s error-theory rests on a conceptual confusion: it is perfectly acceptable for a certain brand of compatibilist to judge free will and fatalism to be compatible, as long as fatalism does not prevent agents from being the source of their actions. We then present the results of two studies showing that laypeople’s intuitions are best understood as following a certain brand of source compatibilism rather than a “free-will-no-matter-what” strategy. (shrink)