(ENGLISH) In this paper I propose a concept of the self that allows us to address and solve some of the issues associated with problem of diachronic personal identity. That is, by virtue of what can we consider that I am today the same person I was yesterday? The problem of continuity in time of identity has a long history in analytic philosophy. I argue that the continuity of personal identity over time can be ensured by resorting to the concept (...) of "extended self as the center of gravity" presented here. My central argument is that a person does not know and is not in control of her personal identity. Identities are not dependent on particular individuals, but always extend outward toward others. Therefore, the continuity of my identity is guaranteed by the others. ------------- -/- (SPANISH) En este trabajo propongo un concepto del Yo que nos permite abordar y solucionar algunos de los problemas asociados con la identidad personal diacrónica. Esto es, en virtud de qué podemos considerar que hoy yo soy la misma persona que fui ayer. Este problema de la continuidad en el tiempo de la identidad personal tiene una larga historia en la filosofía analítica. Yo sostengo que la continuidad de la identidad personal en el tiempo se puede garantizar acudiendo al concepto del “yo extendido como centro de gravedad” que aquí presento. Mi argumento central es que una persona individual no conoce ni está en control de su identidad ya que las identidades no dependen de los individuos particulares, sino que siempre se extienden hacia fuera, hacia los otros. Es decir, la continuidad de mi identidad está garantizada por los otros. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se abordará la calidad de atención en las intervenciones psicológicas en los desastres, esto, con especial atención a la inclusión de crisis psicóticas en la intervención. Para ello, se tomarán en cuenta modelos hospitalarios para su replicación en la zona de desastre y modelos de intervención temprana en la psicosis. Asimismo, se intentará ampliar la explicación de la teoría de la crisis, desde una teoría de la crisis conforme al desarrollo y la oportunidad (Slaikeu, 1984) hasta (...) una teoría integral de la crisis en la psiquiatría psicodinámica (Lewis, 2008; Huerta et al, 2010; Tarrier y Taylor, 2014; Fernández y Carballal, 2017). Bajo las condiciones ya mencionadas, se propondrán modelos de prevención y seguimiento incluyendo pacientes psicóticos, estructurando un replanteamiento de la teoría del trauma fuera de la condición de funcionalidad. Finalmente, se señalarán las vetas para futuros trabajos. (shrink)

Emphasizing the human body in all of its forms, Beauty Unlimited expands the boundaries of what is meant by beauty both geographically and aesthetically. Peg Zeglin Brand and an international group of contributors interrogate the body and the meaning of physical beauty in this multidisciplinary volume. This striking and provocative book explores the history of bodily beautification; the physicality of socially or culturally determined choices of beautification; the interplay of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ethnicity within and on the (...) body; and the aesthetic meaning of the concept of beauty in an increasingly globalized world. Foreward by Carolyn Korsmeyer. Authors include Noel Carroll, Gregory Velazco Y Trianosky, Monique Roelofs, Whitney Davis, Eleanor Heartney, Diana Tietjens Meyers, Phoebe M. Farris, Mary Devereaux, Jo Ellen Jacobs, Karina L. Cespedes-Cortes and Paul C. Taylor, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Stephen Davies, Jane Duran, Valerie Sullivan Fuchs, Keith Lehrer, Allen Douglas, Cynthia Freeland, Eva Kit Wah Man, Mary Bittner Wiseman, and Peg Brand's essay, "ORLAN Revisited: Disembodied Virtual Hybrid Beauty.". (shrink)

Tradução para o português de "Uma espécie de história de minha vida" (A kind of history of my life), ou Carta a um médico (A Letter to a Physician), uma carta escrita por Hume (1711-1776), endereçada em março ou abril de 1734 a um médico não identificado (segundo Norton provavelmente John Arbuthnot ou George Cheyne), na qual Hume pede alguns conselhos para continuar com o seu trabalho filosófico. O título atual é extraído do primeiro parágrafo.A carta foi escrita em 1734, (...) um pouco antes de Hume viajar para Bristol, onde, “forçado a fazer uma rápida incursão em uma vida mais ativa”, conforme relata em sua autobiografia Minha vida, buscou empregar-se no comércio. A importância dessa carta reside no seu caráter autobiográfico e nos comentários que Hume faz sobre seu projeto filosófico. A carta foi publicada originalmente em Life and correspondence of David Hume, John Hill Burton(Ed.), Edinburgh 1846, v. 1, p. 30-39; ela foi reproduzida em The Letters of David Hume. Grey, J. Y. T. (ed.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932, 2v; v.1, n.3, p. 12-18, e pode ser encontrada também em The Cambridge companion to Hume, David Fate Norton, Jacqueline Taylor (ed.) 2 ed. Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 515-522. Para essa tradução consultamos o texto original conforme apresentado nas duas últimas edições aqui mencionadas. (shrink)

Over the past several decades environmental ethics has grown markedly, normative ethics having provided essential grounding in assessing human treatment of the environment. Even a systematic approach, such as Paul Taylor’s, in a sense tells the environment how it is to be treated, whether that be Earth’s ecosystem or the universe itself. Can the environment, especially the ecosystem, as understood through the study of ecology, in turn offer normative and applied ethics any edification? The study of ecology has certainly (...) increased awareness of the fact that it is not possible for a moral agent within the ecosystem to step outside its intricate mesh of actions and events, of causes and effects. That is, absolutely everything that an agent can do can have some, often unforeseeable, outcome in the environment. An incompletely snuffed-out match tossed out a car window can cause a forest fire, which causes biome destruction, which causes x, y, and z. In sum, the ecosystem can edify ethics in terms of the scope of ethics, which remains an unsettled, if too-often ignored, matter. By such an inclusive view of moral scope, as derived in part from ecology and as presented here, the scope of moral behavior would include—whether or not adventitiously—every action an agent may do. By this view, moral scope is, in essence, unlimited. The article offers some ramifications of this view of moral scope. (shrink)

Le rapport issu de la commission Bouchard-Taylor qualifie la laïcité qui s’est implantée au Québec comme étant « plus libérale que républicaine », car elle permet à tous les citoyens « d’exprimer leurs convictions religieuses dans la mesure où cette expression n’entrave pas les droits et libertés d’autrui ». Les régimes républicains y sont présentés comme ceux qui refoulent les différences ethnoculturelles, « en les laissant en marge », tandis que le multiculturalisme accorderait une place prioritaire à la diversité. (...) Dans cet essai, je présente la relation entre le républicanisme et le multiculturalisme sous un éclairage différent. (shrink)

This book presents Robert S. Hartman’s formal theory of value and critically examines many other twentieth century value theorists in its light, including A.J. Ayer, Kurt Baier, Brand Blanshard, Paul Edwards, Albert Einstein, William K. Frankena, R.M. Hare, Nicolai Hartmann, Martin Heidegger, G.E. Moore, P.H. Nowell-Smith, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Charles Stevenson, Paul W. Taylor, Stephen E. Toulmin, and J.O. Urmson.

There exists a huge number of numerical methods that iteratively construct approximations to the solution y(x) of an ordinary differential equation (ODE) y′(x) = f(x,y) starting from an initial value y_0=y(x_0) and using a finite approximation step h that influences the accuracy of the obtained approximation. In this paper, a new framework for solving ODEs is presented for a new kind of a computer – the Infinity Computer (it has been patented and its working prototype exists). The new computer is (...) able to work numerically with finite, infinite, and infinitesimal numbers giving so the possibility to use different infinitesimals numerically and, in particular, to take advantage of infinitesimal values of h. To show the potential of the new framework a number of results is established. It is proved that the Infinity Computer is able to calculate derivatives of the solution y(x) and to reconstruct its Taylor expansion of a desired order numerically without finding the respective derivatives analytically (or symbolically) by the successive derivation of the ODE as it is usually done when the Taylor method is applied. Methods using approximations of derivatives obtained thanks to infinitesimals are discussed and a technique for an automatic control of rounding errors is introduced. Numerical examples are given. (shrink)

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein cites the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Koehler almost as often as he cites William James in his posthumously published writings on the philosophy of psychology. Yet, few treatments of the Wittgenstein–Koehler relation in the philosophical literature could be called sustained discussions. Moreover, most of them treat Koehler as a mere whipping boy for Wittgenstein, one more opportunity to criticize the practice of psychologists. This article emphasizes how much the two thinkers agreed, and the extent to which some (...) of Wittgenstein’s work not only agreed with but also has a logical structure parallel to some of Koehler’s text. Both thinkers hold that the theoretician should strive to recognize and resist the impulse to step in and purify, distill, streamline, or exclude phenomena: common, everyday experience for Koehler and common, everyday uses of words for Wittgenstein. They both aim to counteract the tendency to discount and disparage what is ordinary and common. (shrink)

This thesis examines the relationship between character and intellectual or epistemic vices. The philosophical study of epistemic vices is called vice epistemology. To date, much of the work in this emerging field has focused on the nature and epistemological significance of particular intellectual vices such as close-mindedness or dogmatism. Far less has been said about how it is that people come to acquire and develop these intellectual vices. My aim in this thesis is to fill this lacuna by articulating how (...) this phenomenon occurs. Specifically, this thesis develops an account of epistemic corruption. (shrink)

The republican tradition has long been ambivalent about markets and commercial society more generally: from the contrasting positions of Rousseau and Smith in the eighteenth century to recent neorepublican debates about capitalism, republicans have staked out diverse positions on fundamental issues of political economy. Rather than offering a systematic historical survey of these discussions, this chapter will instead focus on the leading neo-republican theory—that of Philip Pettit—and consider its implications for market society. As I will argue, Pettit’s theory is even (...) friendlier to markets than most have believed: far from condemning commercial society, his theory recognizes that competitive markets and their institutional preconditions are an alternative means to limit arbitrary power across the domestic, economic, and even political spheres. While most republican theorists have focused on political means to limit such power—including both constitutional means (e.g., separation of powers, judicial review, the rule of law, federalism) and participatory ones (democratic elections and oversight)—I will examine here an economic model of republicanism that can complement, substitute for, and at times displace the standard political model. Whether we look at spousal markets, labor markets, or residential markets within federal systems, state policies that heighten competition among their participants and resource exit from abusive relationships within them can advance freedom as non-domination as effectively or even more effectively than social-democratic approaches that have recently gained enthusiasts among republicans. These conclusions suggest that democracy, be it social or political, is just one means among others for restraining arbitrary power and is consequently less central to (certain versions of) republicanism than we may have expected. So long as they counteract domination, economic inroads into notionally democratic territory are no more worrisome than constitutional ones. (shrink)

It is unlikely that when my the grandfather of Cometan, Derrick Taylor, sat down to participate in an interview with his good friend Judith Shean now almost thirty years ago that all those years later his grandson would have written a book analysing that very interview. On 22nd February 1995, Derrick Taylor agreed to participate in an interview at his home 222 Longmeanygate to reveal his experience as a Protestant turned Catholic. During the interview, Derrick Taylor provided (...) a realistic view of what his life had been like detailing loss, tragedy and suffering. By contrast, he also detailed his predisposition for experiencing interior locutions – divine communications to the ear – which filled him with great elation in times of spiritual crisis. This interview was titled Light a Candle for Me as based on Derrick Taylor's very first interaction with the Sacred Heart of Jesus when he was just seven years old in which he asked his friend's mother to light a candle for him as a metaphor for his journey to Catholicism. What we ultimately learn of Derrick Taylor's character in this 1995 interview is that he held such a dedication to the Catholic faith that he found it difficult to reconcile the fact that the world and the Church were changing. In this interview, which is now often titled the Sceptre Bulletin Interview, Derrick Taylor tells us in his own words what he thought of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. This book, the Catholic Conversion, is an exegetical work written by Derrick's grandson Cometan some 27 years later that develops his grandfather's words into a set of theological concepts that come to form Derrick Taylor's definitive approach to Catholicism. (shrink)

Recent develops in AI technology have led to increasingly sophisticated forms of video manipulation. One such form has been the advent of deepfakes. Deepfakes are AI-generated videos that typically depict people doing and saying things they never did. In this paper, I demonstrate that there is a close structural relationship between deepfakes and more traditional fake barn cases in epistemology. Specifically, I argue that deepfakes generate an analogous degree of epistemic risk to that which is found in traditional cases. Given (...) that barn cases have posed a long-standing challenge for virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge, I consider whether a similar challenge extends to deepfakes. In doing so, I consider how Duncan Pritchard’s recent anti-risk virtue epistemology meets the challenge. While Pritchard’s account avoids problems in traditional barn cases, I claim that it leads to local scepticism about knowledge from online videos in the case of deepfakes. I end by considering how two alternative virtue-theoretic approaches might vindicate our epistemic dependence on videos in an increasingly digital world. (shrink)

Deepfakes are extremely realistic audio/video media. They are produced via a complex machine-learning process, one that centrally involves training an algorithm on hundreds or thousands of audio/video recordings of an object or person, S, with the aim of either creating entirely new audio/video media of S or else altering existing audio/video media of S. Deepfakes are widely predicted to have deleterious consequences (principally, moral and epistemic ones) for both individuals and various of our social practices and institutions. In this introduction (...) to the Topical Collection, I first survey existing philosophical research on deepfakes (Sects. 2 and 3). I then give an overview of the papers that comprise the Collection (Sect. 4). Finally, I conclude with remarks on a line of argument made in a number of papers in the Topical Collection: that deepfakes may cause their own demise (Sect. 5). (shrink)

The vast literature on negative treatment of outgroups and favoritism toward ingroups provides many local insights but is largely fragmented, lacking an overarching framework that might provide a unified overview and guide conceptual integration. As a result, it remains unclear where different local perspectives conflict, how they may reinforce one another, and where they leave gaps in our knowledge of the phenomena. Our aim is to start constructing a framework to help remedy this situation. We first identify a few key (...) ideas for creating a theoretical roadmap for this complex territory, namely the principles of etiological functionalism and the dual inheritance theory of human evolution. We show how a “molecular” approach to emotions fits into this picture, and use it to illuminate emotions that shape intergroup relations. Finally, we weave the pieces together into the beginnings of a systematic taxonomy of the emotions involved in social interactions, both hostile and friendly. While it is but a start, we have developed the argument in a way that illustrates how the foundational principles of our proposed framework can be extended to accommodate further cases. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of philosophers have turned their attention to developments in Artificial Intelligence, and in particular to deepfakes. A deepfake is a portmanteau of ‘deep learning' and ‘fake', and for the most part they are videos which depict people doing and saying things they never did. As a result, much of the emerging literature on deepfakes has turned on questions of trust, harms, and information-sharing. In this paper, I add to the emerging concerns around deepfakes by drawing (...) on resources from vice epistemology. As deepfakes become more sophisticated, I claim, they will develop to be a source of online epistemic corruption. More specifically, they will encourage consumers of digital online media to cultivate and manifest various epistemic vices. My immediate focus in this paper is on their propensity to encourage the development of what I call ‘intellectual cynicism'. After sketching a rough account of this epistemic vice, I go on to suggest that we can partially offset such cynicism – and fears around deceptive online media more generally – by encouraging the development what I term a trained ‘digital sensibility'. This, I contend, involves a calibrated sensitivity to the epistemic merits of online content. (shrink)

What is the relationship between perception and mental imagery? I aim to eliminate an answer that I call perceptualism about mental imagery. Strong perceptualism, defended by Bence Nanay, predictive processing theorists, and several others, claims that imagery is a kind of perceptual state. Weak perceptualism, defended by M. G. F. Martin and Matthew Soteriou, claims that mental imagery is a representation of a perceptual state, a view sometimes called The Dependency Thesis. Strong perceptualism is to be rejected since it misclassifies (...) imagery disorders and abnormalities as perceptual disorders and abnormalities. Weak Perceptualism is to be rejected since it gets wrong the aim and accuracy conditions of a whole class of mental imagery–projected mental imagery–and relies on an impoverished concept of perceptual states, ignoring certain of their structural features. Whatever the relationship between perception and imagery, the perceptualist has it wrong. (shrink)

Recently, several authors have utilized the notion of dependence to respond to the traditional argument for the incompatibility of freedom and divine foreknowledge. However, proponents of this response have not always been so clear in specifying where the incompatibility argument goes wrong, which has led to some unfounded objections to the response. We remedy this dialectical confusion by clarifying both the dependence response itself and its interaction with the standard incompatibility argument. Once these clarifications are made, it becomes clear both (...) (1.) that the dependence response does not beg the question against the proponent of the incompatibility argument and (2.) that the dependence response advances the dialectic whether it is developed as a version of Ockhamism or as a version of multiple-pasts compatibilism. (shrink)

I argue that considerations pertaining to constitutive luck undermine historicism—the view that an agent’s history can determine whether or not she is morally responsible. The main way that historicists have motivated their view is by appealing to certain cases of manipulation. I argue, however, that since agents can be morally responsible for performing some actions from characters with respect to which they are entirely constitutively lucky, and since there is no relevant difference between these agents and agents who have been (...) manipulated into acting from a character bestowed upon them by their manipulators, we should give up historicism. After presenting this argument and defending it against some potential objections, I briefly criticize the standard structuralist alternative and propose a new structuralist position that is shaped by reflection on constitutive luck. (shrink)

Although convinced by Frankfurt-style cases that moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise, semicompatibilists have not wanted to accept a parallel claim about moral responsibility for omissions, and so they have accepted asymmetrical requirements on moral responsibility for actions and omissions. In previous work, I have presented a challenge to various attempts at defending this asymmetry. My view is that semicompatibilists should give up these defenses and instead adopt symmetrical requirements on moral responsibility for actions and omissions, (...) and in this paper I highlight three advantages of doing so: first, it avoids a strange implication of the truth of determinism; second, it allows for a principled reply to Philip Swenson’s recent ‘No Principled Difference Argument’; third, it provides a reason to reject a crucial inference rule invoked by Peter van Inwagen’s ‘Direct Argument’ for the incompatibility of moral responsibility and determinism. (shrink)

Aesthetic non-inferentialism is the widely-held thesis that aesthetic judgements either are identical to, or are made on the basis of, sensory states like perceptual experience and emotion. It is sometimes objected to on the basis that testimony is a legitimate source of such judgements. Less often is the view challenged on the grounds that one’s inferences can be a source of aesthetic judgements. This paper aims to do precisely that. According to the theory defended here, aesthetic judgements may be unreasoned, (...) insofar as they are immediate judgements made on the basis of, and acquiring their justification from, causally prior sensory states. Yet they may also be reasoned, insofar as they may be the outputs of certain inferences. Crucially, a token aesthetic judgement may be unreasoned and reasoned, simultaneously. A key reason for allowing inference a serious role in aesthetic judgements emerges from reflection upon the nature of aesthetic expertise. (shrink)

Predictive processing (PP) accounts of perception are unique not merely in that they postulate a unity between perception and imagination. Rather, they are unique in claiming that perception should be conceptualised in terms of imagination and that the two involve an identity of neural implementation. This paper argues against this postulated unity, on both conceptual and empirical grounds. Conceptually, the manner in which PP theorists link perception and imagination belies an impoverished account of imagery as cloistered from the external world (...) in its intentionality, akin to a virtual reality, as well as endogenously generated. Yet this ignores a whole class of imagery whose intentionality is directed on the actual environment—projected mental imagery—and also ignores the fact that imagery may be triggered crossmodally in a bottom-up, stimulus-driven way. Empirically, claiming that imagery and perception share neural circuitry ignores relevant clinical results in this area. These evidence substantial perception/imagery neural dissociations, most notably in the case of aphantasia. Taken together, the arguments here suggest that PP theorists should substantially temper, if not outright abandon, their claim to a perception/imagination unity. (shrink)

In response to the increasingly popular manipulation argument against compatibilism, some have argued that libertarian accounts of free will are vulnerable to parallel manipulation arguments, and thus manipulation is not uniquely problematic for compatibilists. The main aim of this article is to give this point a more detailed development than it has previously received. Prior attempts to make this point have targeted particular libertarian accounts but cannot be generalized. By contrast, I provide an appropriately modified manipulation that targets all libertarian (...) accounts of freedom and responsibility—an especially tricky task given that libertarian accounts are a motley set. I conclude that if manipulation arguments reveal any theoretical cost then it is one borne by all accounts according to which we are free and responsible, not by compatibilism in particular. (shrink)

Aphantasia is a condition characterised by a deficit of mental imagery. Since several psychopathologies are partially maintained by mental imagery, it may be illuminating to consider the condition against the background of psychological disorder. After outlining current findings and hypotheses regarding aphantasia and psychopathology, this paper suggests that some support for defining aphantasia as a lack of voluntary imagery may be found here. The paper then outlines potentially fruitful directions for future research into aphantasia in general and its relation to (...) psychopathology in particular, including rethinking use of the SUIS to measure involuntary imagery, whether aphantasia offers protection against addiction, and whether hyperphantasia is a potential risk factor for maladaptive daydreaming, among others. (shrink)

How tight is the conceptual connection between imagination and perception? A number of philosophers, from the early moderns to present-day predictive processing theorists, tie the knot as tightly as they can, claiming that states of the imagination, i.e. mental imagery, are a proper subset of perceptual experience. This paper labels such a view ‘perceptualism’ about the imagination and supplies new arguments against it. The arguments are based on high-level perceptual content and, distinctly, cognitive penetration. The paper also defuses a recent, (...) influential argument for perceptualism based on the ‘discovery’ that visual perception and mental imagery share a significant neural substrate: circuitry in V1, the brain’s primary visual cortex. Current neuropsychology is shown to be equivocal at best on this matter. While experiments conducted on healthy, neurotypical subjects indicate substantial neural overlap, there is extensive clinical evidence of dissociations between imagery and perception in the brain, most notably in the case of aphantasia. (shrink)

It is widely thought that, to be morally responsible for some action or omission, an agent must have had, at the very least, the general ability to do otherwise. As we argue, however, there are counterexamples to the claim that moral responsibility requires the general ability to do otherwise. We present several cases in which agents lack the general ability to do otherwise and yet are intuitively morally responsible for what they do, and we argue that such cases raise problems (...) for various kinds of accounts of moral responsibility. We suggest two alternative approaches to thinking about the connection between moral responsibility and abilities to do otherwise, one of which denies that there is any ability-to-do-otherwise requirement on moral responsibility and the other of which requires only an opportunity to do otherwise. We also argue that a general-ability-to-do-otherwise requirement not only faces counterexamples but also lacks positive motivation. (shrink)

Is moral responsibility essentially historical, or does an agent's moral responsibility for an action depend only on their psychological structure at that time? In previous work, I have argued that the two main (non‐skeptical) views on moral responsibility and agents’ histories—historicism and standard structuralism—are vulnerable to objections that are avoided by a third option, namely history‐sensitive structuralism. In this paper, I develop this view in greater detail and evaluate the view by comparing it with its three dialectical rivals: skepticism about (...) moral responsibility, historicism, and standard structuralism. Each comparison includes discussion of new work on moral responsibility and agents’ histories, and along the way I offer new arguments for preferring history‐sensitive structuralism, paying special attention to the view's explanatory power. (shrink)

What is the correct procedure for determining the contents of perception? Philosophers tackling this question increasingly rely on empirically-oriented procedures in order to reach an answer. I argue that this constitutes an improvement over the armchair methodology constitutive of phenomenal contrast cases, but that there is a crucial respect in which current empirical procedures remain limited: they are unimodal in nature, wrongly treating the senses as isolatable faculties. I thus have two aims: first, to motivate a reorientation of the admissible (...) contents debate into a multimodal framework, charting its various significances. The second is to explore whether any experimental studies of multimodal perception support a so-called Liberal (or ‘high-level’ or ‘rich’) account of perception’s admissible contents. I conclude that the McGurk effect and the ventriloquist effect are both explicable without the postulation of high-level content, but that at least one multimodal experimental paradigm may necessitate such content: the rubber hand illusion. One upshot of this argument is that Conservatives who claim that the Liberal view intolerably broadens the scope of perceptual illusions, particularly from the perspective of perceptual psychology, should pursue other arguments against that view. (shrink)

Jeremy Waldron has recently raised the question of whether there is anything approximating the creative self-authorship of personal autonomy in the writings of Immanuel Kant. After considering the possibility that Kantian prudential reasoning might serve as a conception of personal autonomy, I argue that the elements of a more suitable conception can be found in Kant’s Tugendlehre, or “Doctrine of Virtue”—specifically, in the imperfect duties of self-perfection and the practical love of others. This discovery is important for at least three (...) reasons: first, it elucidates the relationship among the various conceptions of autonomy employed by personal-autonomy theorists and contemporary Kantians; second, it brings to the surface previously unnoticed or undernoticed features of Kant’s moral theory; and third, it provides an essential line of defense against certain critiques of contemporary Kantian theories, especially that of John Rawls. (shrink)

It is widely thought that Atemporalism—the view that, because God is “outside” of time, he does not foreknow anything —constitutes a unique solution to the problem of freedom and foreknowledge. However, as I argue here, in order for Atemporalism to escape certain worries, the view must appeal to the dependence of God’s timeless knowledge on our actions. I then argue that, because it must appeal to such dependence, Atemporalism is crucially similar to the recent sempiternalist accounts proposed by Trenton Merricks, (...) Philip Swenson, and Jonathan Westphal, and I conclude by briefly sketching some implications of this result. (shrink)

Perceptual experience has representational content. My argument for this claim is an inference to the best explanation. The explanandum is cognitive penetration. In cognitive penetration, perceptual experiences are either causally influenced, or else are partially constituted, by mental states that are representational, including: mental imagery, beliefs, concepts and memories. If perceptual experiences have representational content, then there is a background condition for cognitive penetration that renders the phenomenon prima facie intelligible. Naïve realist or purely relational accounts of perception leave cognitive (...) penetration less well-explained, even when formulated with so-called ‘standpoints’ or ‘third relata.’. (shrink)

I argue that any account attempting to do away with resultant or circumstantial moral luck is inconsistent with a natural response to the problem of constitutive moral luck. It is plausible to think that we sometimes contribute to the formation of our characters in such a way as to mitigate our constitutive moral luck at later times. But, as I argue here, whether or not we succeed in bringing about changes to our characters is itself a matter of resultant and (...) circumstantial moral luck. I conclude with a dilemma, both horns of which require accepting some form of moral luck. (shrink)

Longstanding philosophical debate over the semantics of proper names has yet to examine the distinctive behavior of deadnames, names that have been rejected by their former bearers. The use of these names to deadname individuals is derogatory, but deadnaming derogates differently than other kinds of derogatory speech. This paper examines different accounts of this behavior, illustrates what going views of names will have to say to account for it, and articulates a novel version of predicativism that can give a semantic (...) explanation for this derogation. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a version of compatibilism against luck-related objections. After introducing the types of luck that some take to be problematic for moral responsibility, I consider and respond to two recent attempts to show that compatibilism faces the same problem of luck that libertarianism faces—present luck. I then consider a different type of luck—constitutive luck—and provide a new solution to this problem. One upshot of the present discussion is a reason to prefer a history-sensitive compatibilist account over (...) a purely nonhistorical structuralist account. (shrink)

This paper explores the details of Malebranche‘s philosophy of mind, paying particular attention to the mind-body relationship and the roles of the imagination and the passions. I demonstrate that Malebranche has available an alternative to his deontological ethical system: the alternative I expose is based around his account of the embodied aspects of the mind and the sensations experienced in perception. I briefly argue that Hume, a philosopher already indebted to Malebranche for much inspiration, read Malebranche in the positive way (...) that I here describe him. Malebranche should therefore be acknowledged as a serious influence on Enlightenment philosophy of sensibility. (shrink)

According to the causal theory of photography (CTP), photographs acquire their depictive content from the world, whereas handmade pictures acquire their depictive content from their makers’ intentional states about the world. CTP suffers from what I call the Problem of the Missing Agent: it seemingly leaves no room for the photographer to occupy a causal role in the production of their pictures and so is inconsistent with an aesthetics of photography. In this paper, I do three things. First, I amend (...) CTP with Fred Dretske’s distinction between triggering and structuring causes, thereby overcoming the Problem of the Missing Agent. Second, I argue that CTP so amended in fact illuminates two aesthetic interests that we may take in photographs, focussing on photographic portraiture and street photography. Third, I show how reflection on the aesthetics of photography serves to support aesthetic anti-empiricism: the view that the aesthetic value of artworks consists, at least in part, in achievement rather than sensory pleasure. (shrink)

This chapter sets out John Rawls’s conception of autonomy and considers the role that it plays in his thought across A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. I suggest that one distinctive but overlooked feature of this conception is that it takes seriously the threat to autonomy that arises from how individuals are shaped by their social and political institutions. After setting out this conception and tracing its connections to wider discussions of autonomy, I argue for two main conclusions. First, (...) that despite appearances to the contrary, Rawls’s autonomy-based commitments are broadly speaking consistent across his two main works. Second, that these autonomy-based commitments are not in fact disbarred from playing a grounding role in Political Liberalism. On the contrary, I suggest that Rawls’s conception of autonomy motivates his aim of finding principles of justice that can be stable, and that this in turn illuminates his later commitment to a political liberalism. (shrink)

Some compatibilists are internalists. On their view, whether an agent is morally responsible for an action depends only on her psychological structure at that time. Other compatibilists are externalists. On their view, an agent’s history can make a difference as to whether or not she is morally responsible. In response to worries about manipulation, some internalists have claimed that compatibilism requires internalism. Recently, Alfred Mele has argued that this internalist response is untenable. The aim of this paper is to vindicate (...) the claim that compatibilism requires internalism, showing where Mele’s argument goes wrong along the way. (shrink)

Sensorimotor expectations concern how visual experience covaries with bodily movement. Sensorimotor theorists argue from such expectations to the conclusion that the phenomenology of vision is constitutively embodied: objects within the visual field are experienced as 3-D because sensorimotor expectations partially constitute our experience of such objects. Critics argue that there are two ways to block the above inference: to explain how we visually experience objects as 3-D, one may appeal to such non-bodily factors as expectations about movements of objects, not (...) the perceiver, or to the role of mental imagery in visual experience. But instead of using sensorimotor expectations to explain how objects are experienced within the visual field, we can instead use them to explain our experience of the visual field itself and, in particular, our experience of its limits; that is, our ever-present visual sense of there being more to see, beyond what’s currently within the visual field. Crucially, this inference from sensorimotor expectations to the constitutive embodiment of visual phenomenology is not threatened by the above two challenges. I thus present here a sensorimotor theory of the phenomenology of the visual field, that is, our experience of our visual fields as such. (shrink)

Leddington (2016) remains the leading contemporary philosophical account of magic, one that has been relatively unchallenged. In this discussion piece, I have three aims; namely, to (i) criticise Leddington’s attempt to explain the experience of magic in terms of belief-discordant alief; (ii) explore the possibility that much, if not all, of the experience of magic can be explained by mundane belief-discordant perception; and (iii) argue that make-believe is crucial to successful performances of magic in ways Leddington at best overlooks and (...) at worst denies. (shrink)

Many scholars, including G. A. Cohen, Daniel Attas, and George Brenkert, have denied that a Kantian defense of self-ownership is possible. Kant's ostensible hostility to self-ownership can be resolved, however, upon reexamination of the Groundwork and the Metaphysics of Morals. Moreover, two novel Kantian defenses of self-ownership (narrowly construed) can be devised. The first shows that maxims of exploitation and paternalism that violate self-ownership cannot be universalized, as this leads to contradictions in conception. The second shows that physical coercion against (...) rational agents involves a profound status wrong--namely, their treatment as children or animals--and that this system of differential status and treatment (including self-ownership rights for rational agents) can be morally justified by our capacity for autonomy. (shrink)

This paper presents a new challenge to the thesis that moral responsibility for an omission requires the ability to do the omitted action, whereas moral responsibility for an action does not require the ability to do otherwise than that action. Call this the asymmetry thesis. The challenge arises from the possibility of cases in which an omission is identical to an action. In certain of such cases, the asymmetry thesis leads to a contradiction. The challenge is then extended to recent (...) variations of the asymmetry thesis defended by John Martin Fischer and Carolina Sartorio. Finally, a possible objection to the challenge is addressed. (shrink)

The received view about depression in the philosophical literature is that it is defined, in part, by epistemic irrationality. This status is undeserved. The received view does not fully reflect current clinical thinking and is motivated by an overly simplistic, if not false, account of depression’s phenomenal character. Equally attractive, if not more so, is a view that says depression can be instantiated either rationally or irrationally. This rival view faces challenges of its own: it appears to entail that there (...) are situations when not being depressed is rationally sub-optimal and that resilience to, and healthy coping strategies for avoiding, depression can be rationally remiss. I criticise an existing reply to these challenges before motivating a better one from the perspective of epistemic consequentialism. (shrink)

Kantian disinterest is the view that aesthetic judgement is constituted (at least in part) by a form of perceptual contemplation that is divorced from concerns of practical action. That view, which continues to be defended to this day, is challenged here on the basis that it is unduly spectator-focussed, ignoring important facets of art-making and its motivations. Beauty moves us, not necessarily to tears or rapt contemplation, but to practical action; crucially, it may do so as part and parcel of (...) its appreciation. This claim is defended via reflection on (i) the art of photography, (ii) the concepts of ‘attentional salience’ and ‘experienced mandates’, and (iii) a virtue-based account of aesthetic value. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that it is open to semicompatibilists to maintain that no ability to do otherwise is required for moral responsibility. This is significant for two reasons. First, it undermines Christopher Evan Franklin’s recent claim that everyone thinks that an ability to do otherwise is necessary for free will and moral responsibility. Second, it reveals an important difference between John Martin Fischer’s semicompatibilism and Kadri Vihvelin’s version of classical compatibilism, which shows that the dispute between them is (...) not merely a verbal dispute. Along the way, I give special attention to the notion of general abilities, and, though I defend the distinctiveness of Fischer’s semicompatibilism against the verbal dispute charge, I also use the discussion of the nature of general abilities to argue for the falsity of a certain claim that Fischer and coauthor Mark Ravizza have made about their account. (shrink)

An increasingly popular approach to reconciling divine foreknowledge with human freedom is to say that, because God’s beliefs depend on what we do, we are free to do otherwise than what we actually do despite God’s infallible foreknowledge. This paper develops a new challenge for this dependence response. The challenge stems from a case of backward time travel in which an agent intuitively lacks the freedom to do otherwise because of the time-traveler’s knowledge of what the agent will do, and (...) this is so despite the fact that the time-traveler’s knowledge depends on what the agent will do. (shrink)

Critics of synergism often complain that the view entails Pelagianism, and so, critics think, monergism looks like the only live option. Critics of monergism often claim that the view entails that the blame for human sin ultimately traces to God. Recently, several philosophers have attempted to chart a middle path by offering soteriological accounts which are monergistic but maintain the resistibility of God’s grace. In this paper, we present a challenge to such accounts of the resistibility of grace, namely that (...) they imply that human beings are praiseworthy for omitting to resist God’s grace. Even if such views escape Pelagianism as it is typically defined, they fail to avoid the worry at the heart of prominent criticisms of Pelagianism concerning the praise for a human being’s salvation. At the end of the paper, we suggest three possible solutions to this problem. (shrink)