(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)

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)

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)

A tacit assumption in the literature devoted to singular thought is that singular thought constitutes a unitary phenomenon, and so a correct account of it must encompass all instances. In this essay, I argue against such a unitary account. The superficial feature of singularity might result from ver y different deep-level phenomena. Following Taylor (2010) and Crane (2013), I distinguish between the referential fitness and the referential success of a thought. I argue that facts responsible for referential fitness (e.g., (...) mental files or individual concepts), as well as facts responsible for referential success (e.g., acquaintance conditions on referential success), are relevant in explaining the data pertaining to a theory of singular thought. What makes this approach particularly attractive is that there are good independent reasons to introduce both kinds of facts in theorizing about thought. (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)

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)

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.

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

This paper introduces a novel conceptualisation of mental imagery; namely, that is grease for the mind’s gears (MGT). MGT is not just a metaphor. Rather, it describes an important and overlooked higher-order function of mental imagery: that it aids various mental faculties discharge their characteristic functional roles. MGT is motivated by reflection on converging evidence from clinical, experimental and social psychology and solves at least two neglected conceptual puzzles about mental imagery. The first puzzle concerns imagery’s architectural promiscuity; that is, (...) its ability to assist diverse mental faculties and perform many different functions when doing so. The second puzzle concerns how to square imagery’s architectural promiscuity with its psychopathological relevance; that is, its being a maintaining cause, and possibly even a partial constituent, of several psychological disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. Mental imagery helps and harms human psychology to extreme degrees and this is something that calls for elucidation. MGT says that instead of facing perplexing heterogeneities here, we instead face a significant unity. On this score, MGT is argued to be superior to the currently dominant conception of imagery in the philosophical literature; namely, as a perception-like state of mind. (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

A distinctive position in contemporary political philosophy is occupied by those who defend the principle of public justification. This principle states that the moral or political rules that govern our common life must be in some sense justifiable to all reasonable citizens. In this article, I evaluate Gerald Gaus’s defence of this principle, which holds that it is presupposed by our moral reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation. He argues, echoing P.F. Strawson in ‘Freedom and Resentment’, that these attitudes are (...) so deep a part of us that we are unable to rationally reject them. I examine and reject this defence of the principle. Considering the nature of our commitment to the moral reactive attitudes, I argue that those attitudes need not be grounded in a commitment to public justification. The availability of alternative grounds for these attitudes shows, contra Gaus, that we can rationally reject the principle of public justification while maintaining a wholehearted commitment to the reactive attitudes. (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)

Olfaction represents odors, if it represents anything at all. Does olfaction also represent ordinary objects like cheese, fish and coffee-beans? Many think so. This paper argues that it does not. Instead, we should affirm an austere account of the intentional objects of olfaction: olfactory experience is about odors, not objects. Visuocentric thinking about olfaction has tempted some philosophers to say otherwise.

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)

One of the most fascinating and continually debated arguments in the philosophical literature on the badness of death comes from the work of Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus, circa 99-55 BCE). This chapter will focus on Lucretius’s famous Symmetry Argument. I will begin by saying more about what exactly Epicureanism teaches about death — and why Epicureans thought it could not be bad. After that, I will provide the passage from Lucretius’s epic poem that includes his reasons for thinking that death (...) cannot be bad and will show how Lucretius’s passage has been regimented into the Symmetry Argument against the badness of death. Next, I will discuss the lasting influence of Lucretius’s argument, summarizing some common ways of responding. Finally, I will turn to two other passages from Lucretius’s poem, both of which suggest that it is actually good (both for us and for the world) that our lives come to an end, and I will conclude by considering the implications of Lucretius’s thought for political policy. (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)

The lexical priority of fair equality of opportunity in John Rawls’s justice as fairness, which has been sharply criticized by Larry Alexander and Richard Arneson among others, is left almost entirely undefended in Rawls’s works. I argue here that this priority rule can be successfully defended against its critics despite Rawls’s own doubts about it. Using the few textual clues he provides, I speculatively reconstruct his defense of this rule, showing that it can be grounded on our interest in self-realization (...) through work. This reconstructed defense makes liberal use of concepts already present in A Theory of Justice , including the Aristotelian Principle (which motivates the achievement of increasing virtuosity) and the Humboldtian concept of social union (which provides the context for the development of such virtuosity). I also show that this commitment to self-realization, far from violating the priority of right in Rawls’s theory, stems directly from his underlying commitment to autonomy, which is the very foundation of the moral law in his doctrine of right. The reconstituted defense of this priority rule not only strengthens the case for justice as fairness but also has important and controversial implications for public policy. (shrink)

Rawls offers three arguments for the priority of liberty in Theory, two of which share a common error: the belief that once we have shown the instrumental value of the basic liberties for some essential purpose (e.g., securing self-respect), we have automatically shown the reason for their lexical priority. The third argument, however, does not share this error and can be reconstructed along Kantian lines: beginning with the Kantian conception of autonomy endorsed by Rawls in section 40 of Theory, we (...) can explain our highest-order interest in rationality, justify the lexical priority of all basic liberties, and reinterpret Rawls’ threshold condition for the application of the priority of liberty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this Kantian reconstruction will not work within the radically different framework of Political Liberalism. (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)

Seeing one’s laptop to be missing, hearing silence and smelling fresh air; these are all examples of perceptual experiences of absences. In this paper I discuss an example of absence perception in the tactual sense modality, that of tactually perceiving a tooth to be absent in one’s mouth, following its extraction. Various features of the example challenge two recently-developed theories of absence perception: Farennikova’s memory-perception mismatch theory and Martin and Dockic’s meta-cognitive theory. I speculate that the mechanism underlying the experience (...) is a body schema that has failed to update itself. (shrink)

Since at least the time of Epicurus, philosophers have debated whether death could be bad for the one who has died, since death is a permanent experiential blank. But a different puzzle about death’s badness arises when we consider the death of a person who is paradise-bound. The first purpose of this paper is to develop this puzzle. The second purpose of this paper is to suggest and evaluate several potential attempts to solve the puzzle. After rejecting two seemingly attractive (...) suggestions, I argue that there are two types of solution to the puzzle that can succeed. The first type of solution simply denies that death can be bad for the paradise-bound. I argue that the main worry for this type of solution, namely that it gives up the common-sense view about death’s badness, is only a prima facie worry. The second type of solution maintains that death can be bad for the paradise-bound because it can deprive her of certain goods, which allows those who are attracted to this type of solution to adopt the deprivation account of death’s badness. I consider three views of the relation between the paradise-bound and paradise that are consistent with the deprivation account, connecting my discussion of paradise with the extant literature on death’s badness. (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

With the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, John Rawls not only rejuvenated contemporary political philosophy but also defended a Kantian form of Enlightenment liberalism called “justice as fairness.” Enlightenment liberalism stresses the development and exercise of our capacity for autonomy, while Reformation liberalism emphasizes diversity and the toleration that encourages it. These two strands of liberalism are often mutually supporting, but they conflict in a surprising number of cases, whether over the accommodation of group difference, the design (...) of civic education, or the promotion of liberal values internationally. During the 1980’s, however, Rawls began to jettison key Kantian characteristics of his theory, a process culminating in the 1993 release of Political Liberalism and completing the transformation of justice as fairness into a Reformation liberalism. -/- Reconstructing Rawls argues that this transformation was a tragic mistake because it jeopardized the most important features of his theory, viz. the lexical priorities of right, liberty, and fair equality of opportunity as well as the difference principle. Controversially, this book contends that Rawls’s so-called “political turn,” motivated by a newfound interest in diversity and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has pushed liberalism more broadly towards cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. The book then demonstrates that the central elements of justice as fairness can only be defended within the context of a Kantian Enlightenment liberalism and that Rawls’s hope for a more pluralistic grounding for his theory, endorsed by a wide variety of belief systems present in modern democratic societies, is illusory. -/- Reconstructing Rawls is the first book to systematically compare Rawls’s and Kant’s theories and the first to offer an internal critique and reconstruction of justice as fairness, reconceiving it as a comprehensive, universalistic Kantian liberalism. By doing so, it gives us both the vision of a liberal world order—“a republicanism of all states, together and separately,” as Kant put it—and a mode of justification addressed to all men and women, not as members of particular nations, races, and faiths, but as human beings, as citizens of the world. In short, it reclaims Rawls for the Enlightenment. (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)

Historically, republicans were of different minds about markets: some, such as Rousseau, reviled them, while others, like Adam Smith, praised them. The recent republican resurgence has revived this issue. Classical liberals such as Gerald Gaus contend that neo-republicanism is inherently hostile to markets, while neo-republicans like Richard Dagger and Philip Pettit reject this characterization—though with less enthusiasm than one might expect. I argue here that the right republican attitude toward competitive markets is celebratory rather than acquiescent and that republicanism demands (...) such markets for the same reason it requires the rule of law: because both are essential institutions for protecting individuals from arbitrary interference. I reveal how competition restrains—and in the limit, even eradicates—market power and thereby helps us realize “market freedom,” i.e., freedom as non-domination in the context of economic exchange. Finally, I show that such freedom necessitates “Anglo-Nordic” economic policies. (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)

Matt King has recently argued that the manipulation argument against compatibilism does not succeed by employing a dilemma: either the argument infelicitously relies on incompatibilist sourcehood conditions, or the proponent of the argument leaves a premise of the argument undefended. This article develops a reply to King’s dilemma by showing that incompatibilists can accept its second horn. Key to King’s argument for the second horn’s being problematic is “the parallel manipulation argument.” I argue that King’s use of this argument is (...) problematic, but I suggest that a (modified) parallel manipulation argument is effective for a different, though more restricted, purpose. (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)

Essentialist facts, facts about what is essential to what, are explanatorily distinctive. They can often be appealed to in the course of metaphysically explaining some fact, while themselves serving as explanatory ends. In other words, when one arrives in the course of an explanation at an essentialist fact, it often seems like a legitimate place to stop. In certain contexts, they seem to provide a metaphysical backstop to making further explanatory demands. This paper defends the view that essentialist facts are (...) zero-grounded. Just as we can think of certain logical truths as truths derivable from the empty set of premises, we can think of the zero-grounded facts as the facts that obtain in virtue of the empty set of facts. On this picture, the essentialist facts are grounded, but they are grounded literally in nothing—grounded for free, automatically, and by default. -/- This view has been unpopular for many reasons, including concerns about the obscurity of the notion of zero-grounding. Concerns notwithstanding, I make the case that the zero-grounding view fares better than the alternative ground-theoretic accounts in making sense of certain explanatory roles essences plausibly play. After some preliminary remarks on how we should understand what an essentialist fact is as well as which ones serve as explanation stoppers, I introduce a widespread and attractive picture of what the essentialist facts are; they are domain fixing facts. I then argue that this feature of the essentialist facts well-positions them to serve as explanation stoppers. Afterwards, I argue that the zero-ground view best accommodates the domain-fixing conception of essence. (shrink)

We offer an account of the metaphysics of persons rooted in Latter-day saint scripture that vindicates the essentiality of origins. We then give theological support for the claim that prospects for the success of God’s soul making project are bound up in God creating particular persons. We observe that these persons would not have existed were it not for the occurrence of a variety of evils (of even the worst kinds), and we conclude that Latter-day saint theology has the resources (...) to endorse a strong soul-making non-identity theodicy. We then introduce two complications for this account rooted in the problem of horrendous evils. First, horrendous evils threaten to undermine our confidence that God is good to each created person within the context of their life. And second, horrendous evils raise concerns about the value of persons whose existence depends on the occurrence of those evils. We may wonder whether those whose existence depends on the occurrence of horrendous evils are valuable enough to motivate God’s allowance of those evils. We show that by attending to important structural features of a post-mortem, pre-eschatological state called the spirit world, Latter-day Saints can ameliorate these concerns about horrendous evils . (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)