I present an account of epistemic autonomy as a distinctively wide-ranging epistemic virtue, one that helps us to understand a range of phenomena that might otherwise seem quite disparate – from the appropriate selection of epistemic methods, stances and topics of inquiry, to the harms of epistemic oppression, gaslighting and related phenomena. The account draws on four elements commonly incorporated into accounts of personal autonomy: (i) self-governance, (ii) authenticity, (iii) self-creation and (iv) independence. I further argue that for a distinctively (...) epistemic virtue of autonomy; the above elements must ultimately reliably lead to valuable epistemic goods (for the agent herself and others). I then turn to the domains or ways in which epistemic autonomy so understood, can be made manifest. I suggest that epistemic autonomy is a virtue that allows us to appropriately choose (i) subject matters and areas of inquiry, (ii) methods, sources, and processes of belief formation, (iii) epistemic goals and (iv) epistemic stances or frameworks. So understood, epistemic autonomy has a role to play in shaping most every aspect of our epistemic lives. (shrink)

A longstanding philosophical tradition holds that the primary objects of hearing are sounds rather than sound sources. In this case, we hear sound sources by—or in virtue of—hearing their sounds. This paper argues that, on the contrary, we have good reason to believe that the primary objects of hearing are sound sources, and that the relationship between a sound and its source is much like the relationship between a color and its bearer. Just as we see objects in seeing their (...) colors, so we hear sound sources in hearing their sounds. (shrink)

AI chatbots are disseminating more and more of the Internet’s search engine activity, transforming the face of education, serving as personalized AIs in intellectual and emotional relationships with humans, becoming “digital workers” that may outmode us at work, and more. Indeed, the larger category of generative AI may be one of the most transformative technologies of this decade, or even this century. Given this, it is imperative that we understand the epistemological challenges that arise with the everyday use of LLM (...) chatbots. How will AI chatbots impact the way we come to know the world, and indeed, how will their use impact our very lives? In this piece, I articulate a major challenge that arises from their growing use, a problem which I call the “boiling frog problem.” According to the metaphor, if you boil a frog by putting it in scalding hot water, it will try to save itself. If you put the frog in a pot of tepid water, it will not notice it is boiling so it will not try to save itself. In both cases, the outcome is the same—the frog dies. In a similar fashion, the combination of factors I identify herein, over time, gives rise to unhealthy engagement with chatbots and ultimately, to diminished human agency. (shrink)

Background Retraction is a mechanism for alerting readers to unreliable material and other problems in the published scientific and scholarly record. Retracted publications generally remain visible and searchable, but the intention of retraction is to mark them as “removed” from the citable record of scholarship. However, in practice, some retracted articles continue to be treated by researchers and the public as valid content as they are often unaware of the retraction. Research over the past decade has identified a number of (...) factors contributing to the unintentional spread of retracted research. The goal of the Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda (RISRS) project was to develop an actionable agenda for reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science. This included identifying how retraction status could be more thoroughly disseminated, and determining what actions are feasible and relevant for particular stakeholders who play a role in the distribution of knowledge. -/- Methods These recommendations were developed as part of a year-long process that included a scoping review of empirical literature and successive rounds of stakeholder consultation, culminating in a three-part online workshop that brought together a diverse body of 65 stakeholders in October–November 2020 to engage in collaborative problem solving and dialogue. Stakeholders held roles such as publishers, editors, researchers, librarians, standards developers, funding program officers, and technologists and worked for institutions such as universities, governmental agencies, funding organizations, publishing houses, libraries, standards organizations, and technology providers. Workshop discussions were seeded by materials derived from stakeholder interviews (N = 47) and short original discussion pieces contributed by stakeholders. The online workshop resulted in a set of recommendations to address the complexities of retracted research throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem. -/- Results The RISRS recommendations are: (1) Develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information about retractions; (2) Recommend a taxonomy of retraction categories/classifications and corresponding retraction metadata that can be adopted by all stakeholders; (3) Develop best practices for coordinating the retraction process to enable timely, fair, unbiased outcomes; and (4) Educate stakeholders about pre- and post-publication stewardship, including retraction and correction of the scholarly record. -/- Conclusions Our stakeholder engagement study led to 4 recommendations to address inadvertent citation of retracted research, and formation of a working group to develop the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) Recommended Practice. Further work will be needed to determine how well retractions are currently documented, how retraction of code and datasets impacts related publications, and to identify if retraction metadata (fails to) propagate. Outcomes of all this work should lead to ensuring retracted papers are never cited without awareness of the retraction, and that, in public fora outside of science, retracted papers are not treated as valid scientific outputs. (shrink)

Given the significance of Nicholas of Cusa’s ecclesiastical career, it is no surprise that a good deal of academic attention on Nicholas has focused on his role in the history of the church. Nevertheless, it would also be fair to say that a good deal of the attention that is focused on the life and thought of Nicholas of Cusa is the legacy of prior generations of scholars who saw in his theoretical work an opportunity to define the most salient (...) features of transformations in the habits of thinking leading from the Middle Ages into the epoch of modernity. Thus, although contemporary scholars have not been able to achieve any clear consensus on the question of whether Nicholas belongs to the Middle Ages or to modernity, the field of Cusanus studies has become much more attentive to the possibility that the uniqueness and significance of Nicholas’s vision is a function of his ability to synthesize and redeploy a variety of strands in the Catholic intellectual tradition—strands that are as apt to involve practical matters of canon law and church reform as they are to hinge on a unique and richly developed mystical theology. Given the flourishing of the attention devoted to Nicholas in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the choices about which texts to include in this article were difficult ones. The rationale for this article’s predominant focus on scholarship of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is that, insofar as the recent studies listed here enter into the debates that have been shaped by their predecessors, the sources mentioned here will point readers to the prior work in the field not acknowledged here. (shrink)

Karl Christian Friedrich Krause and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel are two representatives of German Idealism, both of whom developed impressing category systems. At the core of both systems is the question of the relation of the Absolute to its determinations and the determinations of finite beings. Both idealists try to deduce their respective category systems from the immediacy of the Absolute. Both use combinatorial methods to get from known to new categories or constellations in the system, which then unfold in (...) the world. Krause is thereby considered the eponym of so-called panentheism, the doctrine that “Everything is in God.” Hegel is also often referred to as a panentheist. Through a comparison of the two systems of categories, in this essay the thesis will be advocated that Hegel was in no sense a panentheist. Krause is and remains the gold standard of panentheism. (shrink)

Paradiso 2’s sustained direct address warns readers unprepared for its complexities to “turn back to see your shores again…for perhaps losing me, you would be lost,” but then offers the “other few” who crave “the bread of angels” the promise of a marvel that would rival the deeds of the mythological hero Jason. I will argue that, by appearing to impose this choice on its readers, this direct address in fact activates the craving for the bread of angels (for (...) who, by obeying the interpretive imperative to make such a decision, would not also be one who thereby does choose to pursue the bread that is promised in return for this obedience?). In other words, the very act of interpreting the representation of readers as divided into those who are capable of allegorical interpretation and those who are not constructs and activates the will of a single readership for the Divine Comedy and, consequently, challenges us to provide an articulation of what it means even to read or to misread the Divine Comedy. (shrink)

In De interpretatione 9, Aristotle argues against the fatalist view that if statements about future contingent singular events (e.g. ‘There will be a sea battle tomorrow,’ ‘There will not be a sea battle tomorrow’) are already true or false, then the events to which those statements refer will necessarily occur or necessarily not occur. Scholars have generally held that, to refute this argument, Aristotle allows that future contingent statements are exempt from either the principle of bivalence, or the law of (...) excluded middle. This paper offers a new interpretation of Aristotle’s refutation of fatalism. According to this interpretation, each member of a pair of contradictory future contingent statements, in virtue of expressing modal necessity, is simply false. (shrink)

We propose the Prototime Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which claims that quantum entanglement occurs in a "prototemporal" realm which underlies spacetime. Our paper is tentative and exploratory. The argument form is inference to the best explanation. We claim that the Prototime Interpretation (PI) is worthy of further consideration as a superior explanation for perplexing quantum phenomena such as delayed choice, superposition, the wave-particle duality and nonlocality. In Section One, we introduce the Prototime Interpretation. Section Two identifies its advantages. Section Three (...) discusses several implications of the view, such as its deterministic nature and relation to the simulation hypothesis. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the recent explosion of literature on the epistemological role of emotions and other affective states by defending two claims. First, affective states might do more than position us to receive evidence or function as evidence. Affective states might be thought toappraiseevidence, in the sense that affective states influence what doxastic state is rational for someone given a body of evidence. The second claim is that affective evidentialism, the view that affective states function rationally in this way, (...) is not just possible but plausible and fruitful. We offer two arguments in favor of affective evidentialism. (shrink)

The essay is framed by conflict between Christianity and Darwinian science over the history of the world and the nature of human personhood. Evolutionary science narrates a long prehuman geological and biological history filled with vast amounts, kinds, and distributions of apparently random brutal and pointless suffering. It also strongly suggests that the first modern humans were morally primitive. This science seems to discredit Christianity's common meta-narrative of the Fall, understood as a story of Paradise Lost. The author contends that (...) this Augustinian story and its character of Adam as endowed with superhuman gifts, and yet as so fragile as to fall, as claimed, is implausible, at any rate, even apart from science. He proposes that Christians consider adopting a Supralapsarian metaphysics of divine purpose supported by the intuitions of Irenaeus, who depicted the first human beings as comparable to innocent, but morally undeveloped children. In this approach the existence of evils is part of the divine plan to "defeat" them in and through the Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection of Christ. Putting an "Irenaean Adam" in place of the "Augustinian" counterpart may not remove conflict with science completely, but at least reduces it, and leads to a Christian narrative that is more plausible, in the light of science. (shrink)

In this article, I set forth a theory of propaganda explaining what it is, how it relates to marketing, and the nature and types of ideology. I discuss the criteria by which we can judge the rationality or deceitfulness of propaganda. I defend the view that while propaganda can be perfectly rational, it rarely is, and I explain why that is the case. I finish by explaining why the question of the rationality or deceitfulness of propaganda is different from the (...) question of the morality of propaganda. I give two quick examples of how an ethicist might argue that deceptive propaganda might be ethical to use, and perfectly rational propaganda might be immoral to use. I conclude with the notion that the question of the ethics of marketing and propaganda is complex, and should be handled in a separate paper. (shrink)

Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which (...) put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach. (shrink)

In the midst of the De pace fidei’s imagined heavenly conference on the theme of the possibility of religious harmony, Nicholas of Cusa has Saint Peter acknowledge to the Persian interlocutor that it will be difficult to bring Jews to the acceptance of Christ’s divine nature because they refuse to accept the implicit meaning of their own history of revelation. What is peculiar about this line in the dialogue is not merely that it flies in the face of what Cusanus (...) scholars tend to regard as an ecumenical spirit in Nicholas’ call to interreligious dialogue and mutual toleration. Rather, the statement reveals a peculiar hermeneutic principle at work in Nicholas’ understanding of the tension between truth and doctrine and the way that this tension informs human practice. Accordingly, by grappling with Nicholas’ portrayal of an imagined failure of Jews to practice interpretation correctly, I hope to shed light on Nicholas’ philosophy of religion in a way that neither ignores his anti-Judaism nor reduces the significance of his views to one of its most unpleasant manifestations. (shrink)

This article examines two questions about scientists’ search for knowledge. First, which search strategies generate discoveries effectively? Second, is it advantageous to diversify search strategies? We argue pace Weisberg and Muldoon, “Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor”, that, on the first question, a search strategy that deliberately seeks novel research approaches need not be optimal. On the second question, we argue they have not shown epistemic reasons exist for the division of cognitive labor, identifying the errors that led (...) to their conclusions. Furthermore, we generalize the epistemic landscape model, showing that one should be skeptical about the benefits of social learning in epistemically complex environments. (shrink)

This paper is a companion piece to my earlier paper “Fallibilism and Concessive Knowledge Attributions”. There are two intuitive charges against fallibilism. One is that it countenances the truth (and presumably acceptability) of utterances of sentences such as “I know that Bush is a Republican, though it might be that he is not a Republican”. The second is that it countenances the truth (and presumably acceptability) of utterances of sentences such as “I know that Bush is a Republican, even though (...) I’m not certain that he is”, or “I know that Bush it a Republican, even though it isn’t certain that he is.” In “Fallibilism and Concessive Knowledge Attributions”, I argue that fallibilism in epistemology does not countenance the truth of utterances of sentences such as “I know that Bush is a Republican, though it might be that he is not a Republican”. In this paper, I argue that there are independent reasons for thinking that utterances of sentences such as “I know that Bush is a Republican, though I’m not certain that he is” and “I know that Bush is a Republican, though it’s not certain that he is” are unassertible. More specifically, I argue that these are simply instances of Moore’s Paradox, such as “Dogs bark, but I don’t know that they do.” The right account of Moore’s Paradox does not involve the falsehood of the semantic content of the relevant utterances, but rather their pragmatic unacceptability. So the anti-fallibilist intuitions turn out to have pragmatic, rather than semantic import, and therefore do not tell against the truth of fallibilism. Fallibilism in epistemology is often thought to be theoretically desirable, but intuitively problematic. My purpose with these two papers is to show that fallibilism is not intuitively problematic. (shrink)

Induced by intake of the psychedelic substances LSD, psilocybin, DMT and mescaline, psychedelic experiences have been extensively described by subjects as entailing a most unusual increase in the scope and quality of their consciousness. Accordingly, psychedelic experiences have been widely characterised as an “expansion of consciousness.” This article poses the following question, as yet unaddressed in contemporary philosophy and the tradition of phenomenology: to what exactly does “expansion of consciousness” refer as a general characterisation of psychedelic experiences, and what role (...) might attention play therein? On the basis of Aron Gurwitsch’s phenomenology of attention, the following thesis is presented: (a) “expansion of consciousness” refers to a particular restructuration of consciousness in psychedelic experiences. (b) This occurs by means of certain extreme transformations in direction, scope, mode and degree of attention. In order to explicate this thesis, the characteristic features of psychedelic experiences that pertain to expansion of consciousness and attention are first systematically identified from a survey of subject reports. Second, it is demonstrated that the few previous attempts to understand expansion of consciousness in terms of attention as a filter/reducing-valve, spotlight or zoom-lens each fail to explain how consciousness is structured in psychedelic experiences. Third, it is argued that psychedelic expansion of consciousness is a general restructuration of consciousness by means of extreme attentional transformations. In conclusion, brief consideration is given to the question of whether psychedelic expansion of consciousness can have epistemic and ethical value for life. (shrink)

Active and targeted reforms at the local and state levels have had success reducing youth incarceration rates. While most agree the work is not done, reform of the youth incarceration system has had important successes. At the same time, activists and advocates have increasingly rejected the goal of reforming youth prisons in favor of abolishing them. I outline some objections to prominent abolitionist arguments. Specifically, I show why arguments that focus on the racist historical origins of the incarceration system, structural (...) injustices within that system, or the inefficiency or harms of the current system justify reform of youth imprisonment practices, not complete elimination of them. By advancing these critiques, I do not claim to show that the reformist perspective is superior to the abolitionist one. Instead, I aim to identify an argumentative burden that abolitionists must address if they are to give reformers good reason to become abolitionists. (shrink)

Fictionalist approaches to ontology have been an accepted part of philosophical methodology for some time now. On a fictionalist view, engaging in discourse that involves apparent reference to a realm of problematic entities is best viewed as engaging in a pretense. Although in reality, the problematic entities do not exist, according to the pretense we engage in when using the discourse, they do exist. In the vocabulary of Burgess and Rosen (1997, p. 6), a nominalist construal of a given discourse (...) is revolutionary just in case it involves a “reconstruction or revision” of the original discourse. Revolutionary approaches are therefore prescriptive. In contrast, a nominalist construal of a given discourse is hermeneutic just in case it is a nominalist construal of a discourse that is put forth as a hypothesis about how the discourse is in fact used; that is, hermeneutic approaches are descriptive. I will adopt Burgess and Rosen’s terminology to describe the two different spirits in which a fictionalist hypothesis in ontology might be advanced. Revolutionary fictionalism would involve admitting that while the problematic discourse does in fact involve literal reference to nonexistent entities, we ought to use the discourse in such a way that the reference is simply within the pretense. The hermeneutic fictionalist, in contrast, reads fictionalism into our actual use of the problematic discourse. According to her, normal use of the problematic discourse involves a pretense. According to the pretense, and only according to the pretense, there exist the objects to which the discourse would commit its users, were no pretense involved. My purpose in this paper is to argue that hermeneutic fictionalism is not a viable strategy in ontology. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I discuss in detail several problematic consequences of any interesting application of hermeneutic fictionalism. Of course, if there is good evidence that hermeneutic fictionalism is correct in some cases, then some of these drastic consequences would have to be accepted.. (shrink)

Subjectivists about practical normativity hold that an agent’s favoring and disfavoring attitudes give rise to practical reasons. On this view, an agent’s normative reason to choose vanilla over chocolate ice cream ultimately turns on facts about what appeals to her rather than facts about what her options are like attitude-independently. Objectivists—who ground reasons in the attitude-independent features of the things we aim at—owe us an explanation of why it is rational to choose what we favor, if not because favoring is (...) a source of reasons. My aim in this paper is to supply such a story. The proposal is roughly that when an agent cannot base her choices on her judgments about what she has most reason to do, structural rationality extends to her a license to choose something just because she favors it, without imbuing favoring with the authority of a normative reason. (shrink)

In this essay, I want to explore one of the most ironic episodes in the history of propaganda, the attempt by various federal agencies to moderate American WWII anti-Japanese propaganda films. My texts will be four films, two produced by the military, and two by Hollywood: December 7th (1943), directed by Gregg Toland and revised by John Ford; Air Force (1943), directed Howard Hawks; Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), directed by Frank Capra; and Betrayal for the East (1945), directed by (...) William Berke. As all of these films are readily available on YouTube, I will be brief in my description of them. Instead, I will focus on how they served to intensify racial hatred of Japanese in general and Japanese-Americans in particular, and how the federal government tried to control that propaganda—but was limited by its own policies regarding Japanese-Americans. (shrink)

The article aims at formulating a philosophical framework and by this giving some means at hand to save human libertarian freedom, God’s omniscience and God’s ”eternity’. This threefold aim is achieved by 1) conceiving of an agent as having different possibilities to act, 2) regarding God’s knowledge -- with respect to agents -- not only as being ”propositional’ in character but also as being ”experiential’: God knows an agent also from the ”first person perspective’, as the agent knows herself, and, (...) 3), formulating ”eternity’ and ”temporality’ as being homeomorphically related to each other. This gives rise to a coherent interplay that saves both human libertarian freedom and God’s omniscient ”view from eternity’. (shrink)

If, relative to a context, what a sentence says is necessarily true, then what it says must be so. If, relative to a context, what a sentence says is possible, then what it says could be true. Following natural philosophical usage, it would thus seem clear that in assessing an occurrence of a sentence for possibility or necessity, one is assessing what is said by that occurrence. In this paper, I argue that natural philosophical usage misleads here. In assessing an (...) occurrence of a sentence for possibility or necessity, one is not assessing the modal status of the proposition expressed by that occurrence of the sentence. (shrink)

Alongside a revival of interest in Thomism in philosophy, scholars have realised its relevance when addressing certain contemporary issues in bioethics. This book offers a rigorous interpretation of Aquinas's metaphysics and ethical thought, and highlights its significance to questions in bioethics. Jason T. Eberl applies Aquinas’s views on the seminal topics of human nature and morality to key questions in bioethics at the margins of human life – questions which are currently contested in the academia, politics and the media (...) such as: When does a human person’s life begin? How should we define and clinically determine a person’s death? Is abortion ever morally permissible? How should we resolve the conflict between the potential benefits of embryonic stem cell research and the lives of human embryos? Does cloning involve a misuse of human ingenuity and technology? What forms of treatment are appropriate for irreversibly comatose patients? How should we care for patients who experience unbearable suffering as they approach the end of life? _Thomistic Principles and Bioethics_ presents a significant philosophical viewpoint which will motivate further dialogue amongst religious and secular arenas of inquiry concerning such complex issues of both individual and public concern. (shrink)

Simon Keller and Sarah Stroud have both argued that the demands of being a good friend can conflict with the demands of standard epistemic norms. Intuitively, good friends will tend to seek favorable interpretations of their friends’ behaviors, interpretations that they would not apply to strangers; as such they seem prone to form unjustified beliefs. I argue that there is no such clash of norms. In particular, I argue that friendship does not require us to form beliefs about our friends (...) in the biased fashion suggested by Stroud and Keller. I further argue that while some slight bias in belief-formation might be permitted by friendship, any such bias would fall within the bounds of epistemic propriety. (shrink)

This article discusses madness and saintliness in Dostoevsky’s novels and investigates how the madman and the saint discern between good and evil. I first explore the metaphysical, spiritual, and moral universe of Dostoevsky’s characters by drawing on William Desmond’s philosophy of the between. Second, I argue that the madman’s misconstrual of reality can be grasped as an idolatrous, divisive, and parodic imitation of the good. Third, I reflect on disembodied discernment. In some cases, due to the weakness of the moral (...) agent, the good cannot be properly embodied in space and time, even if a person exhibits ethically sound discernment. Fourth, I look at examples of holy discernment and examine how, through love, the genuinely good person is able to transform idolatry into a universal and cosmic sacramentalism. (shrink)

In this article, I explore how efficacious film can be in countering propaganda in film. To set up the discussion, I first sketch out a simple theory of propaganda, under which propaganda can be ranked from completely rational to very irrational, on six different dimensions. These are the degrees to which the propaganda is: evidence-based; truthful; broadly logical; transparent; properly targeted; and transparent. I then review in detail the main propaganda film, Gasland. This film was a highly successful documentary that (...) attacked the production of natural gas by hydrofracturing, called in America “fracking.” Gasland succeeded in organizing domestic opposition to fracking, actually blocking it in the Delaware River Basin system. The film was also influential abroad, leading to fracking bans in France, Bulgaria, and elsewhere in Europe. Next, I review in detail two counter-propaganda films—that is, in this case, two pro-fracking documentaries: Truthland and FrackNation. Truthland is a short documentary that aims at rebutting many of Gasland’s major claims. It was funded by the fracking industry and had limited distribution but it succeeded in refuting much of the longer and better-funded anti-fracking film. A much more successful film in terms of both general distribution and efficacy of rebuttal was the much longer pro-fracking documentary FrackNation. It critiques all of Gasland’s major points, in vivid detail. Since it was crowdfunded, it couldn’t be dismissed on the grounds that it was biased because of being industry-backed. I conclude by explaining why the pro-fracking documentaries did not result in a major change in public opinion. (shrink)

US citizens perceive their society to be one of the most diverse and religiously tolerant in the world today. Yet seemingly intractable religious intolerance and moral conflict abound throughout contemporary US public life - from abortion law battles, same-sex marriage, post-9/11 Islamophobia, public school curriculum controversies, to moral and religious dimensions of the Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street movements, and Tea Party populism. Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society develops an approach to democratic discourse and coalition-building across deep (...) moral and religious divisions. Drawing on conflict transformation in peace studies, recent American pragmatist thought, and models of agonistic democracy, Jason Springs argues that, in circumstances riven with conflict between strong religious identities and deep moral and political commitments, productive engagement may depend on thinking creatively about how to constructively utilize conflict and intolerance. The result is an approach oriented by the recognition of conflict as a constituent and life-giving feature of social and political relationships. (shrink)

Doing Practical Ethics supports the deliberate practice of philosophical skills relevant to understanding, evaluating, and developing arguments in forms commonly used in the field of practical ethics. Each chapter includes an explanation of a specific moral reasoning skill, demonstration exercises with sample solutions that offer students immediate feedback on their initial practice attempts, and extensive sets of practice exercises. It is suitable for any ethics course that centrally features argument from principle, argument from analogy, or inference to the best explanation. (...) It may be used as a standalone text in a debate-focused course. Paired with an anthology in a readings-focused course, it will help students develop the skills they need to understand and evaluate the arguments in the assigned readings. (shrink)

Some philosophers have argued for what I call the reason-giving requirement for conscientious refusal in reproductive healthcare. According to this requirement, healthcare practitioners who conscientiously object to administering standard forms of treatment must have arguments to back up their conscience, arguments that are purely public in character. I argue that such a requirement, though attractive in some ways, faces an overlooked epistemic problem: it is either too easy or too difficult to satisfy in standard cases. I close by briefly considering (...) whether a version of the reason-giving requirement can be salvaged despite this important difficulty. (shrink)

Practical wisdom is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live. As such, it is a lofty and important ideal to strive for. It is precisely this loftiness and importance that gives rise to important questions about wisdom: Can real people develop it? If so, how? What is the nature of wisdom as it manifests itself in real people? I argue that we can make headway answering these questions by modeling wisdom (...) on expert skill. Presenting the main argument for this expert skill model of wisdom is the focus of this paper. More specifically, I’ll argue that wisdom is primarily the same kind of epistemic achievement as expert decision-making skill in areas such as firefighting. Acknowledging this helps us see that, and how, real people can develop wisdom. It also helps to resolve philosophical debates about the nature of wisdom. For example, philosophers, including those who think virtue should be modeled on skills, disagree about the extent to which wise people make decisions using intuitions or principled deliberation and reflection. The expert skill model resolves this debate by showing that wisdom includes substantial intuitive and deliberative and reflective abilities. (shrink)

Despite increased philosophical and psychological work on practical wisdom, contemporary interdisciplinary wisdom research provides few specifics about how to develop wisdom (Kristjánsson 2022). This lack of practically useful guidance is due in part to the difficulty of determining how to combine the tools of philosophy and psychology to develop a plausible account of wisdom as a prescriptive ideal. Modeling wisdom on more ordinary forms of expertise is promising, but skill models of wisdom (Annas 2011; De Caro et al. 2018; Swartwood (...) 2013b; Tsai 2023) have been challenged on the grounds that there are important differences between wisdom and expert skills (Hacker-Wright 2015, p. 986; Kristjánsson 2015, pp. 98, 101; Stichter 2015, 2016, 2018). I’ll argue that we can both vindicate the promise of skill models of wisdom and begin to specify practically useful strategies for wisdom development by attending to a reflective process that I call Case-Based Critical Reflection. I begin by demonstrating the process as it arose in a notable example from everyday life, illustrating how the process can be usefully applied to a case study of interest to wisdom scientists, and explaining its philosophical pedigree. After isolating the key features that make it relevant to wisdom development, I argue that attending to the importance of Critical Reflection can defuse prominent objections to skill models of wisdom. (shrink)

Problem one: why, if God designed the human mind, did it take so long for humans to develop theistic concepts and beliefs? Problem two: why would God use evolution to design the living world when the discovery of evolution would predictably contribute to so much nonbelief in God? Darwin was aware of such questions but failed to see their evidential significance for theism. This paper explores this significance. Problem one introduces something I call natural nonbelief, which is significant because it (...) parallels and corroborates well-known worries about natural evil. Problems one and two, especially when combined, support naturalism over theism, intensify the problem of divine hiddenness, challenge Alvin Plantinga’s views about the naturalness of theism, and advance the discussion about whether the conflict between science and religion is genuine or superficial. (shrink)

It is argued that Nozick's experience machine thought experiment does not pose a particular difficulty for mental state theories of well-being. While the example shows that we value many things beyond our mental states, this simply reflects the fact that we value more than our own well-being. Nor is a mental state theorist forced to make the dubious claim that we maintain these other values simply as a means to desirable mental states. Valuing more than our mental states is compatible (...) with maintaining that the impact of such values upon our well-being lies in their impact upon our mental lives. (shrink)

Confirmational holism is at odds with Jeffrey conditioning --- the orthodox Bayesian policy for accommodating uncertain learning experiences. Two of the great insights of holist epistemology are that (i) the effects of experience ought to be mediated by one's background beliefs, and (ii) the support provided by one's learning experience can and often is undercut by subsequent learning. Jeffrey conditioning fails to vindicate either of these insights. My aim is to describe and defend a new updating policy that does better. (...) In addition to showing that this new policy is more holism-friendly than Jeffrey conditioning, I will also show that it has an accuracy-centered justification. (shrink)

Epistemologists often assume that an agent’s epistemic goal is simply to acquire as much knowledge as possible for herself. Drawing on an analogy with ethics and other practices, I argue that being situated in an epistemic community introduces a range of epistemic virtues (and goals) which fall outside of those typically recognized by both individualistic and social epistemologists. Candidate virtues include such traits as honesty, integrity (including an unwillingness to misuse one’s status as an expert), patience, and creativity. We can (...) understand such traits to be epistemic virtues insofar as they tend to produce knowledge – not for the agent alone, but for her community. Recognition of such ‘otherregarding epistemic virtues’ both broadens the area of inquiry of epistemology, and introduces new standards for the evaluation of epistemic agents. (shrink)

Leading versions of hedonism generate implausible results about the welfare value of very intense or unwanted pleasures, while recent versions of desire satisfactionism overvalue the fulfillment of desires associated with compulsions and addictions. Consequently, both these theories fail to satisfy a plausible condition of adequacy for theories of well-being proposed by L.W. Sumner: they do not make one’s well-being depend on one’s own cares or concerns. But Sumner’s own life-satisfaction theory cannot easily be extended to explain welfare over time, and (...) it makes mistaken (autonomous, informed) self-assessment impossible. A new account of well-being based on the stable realization of personal values enjoys the advantages claimed for these subjective theories while avoiding these problems. (shrink)

Despite their purported demographic and institutional decline, White evangelical voters were instrumental in the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and even more so in his 2020 loss. The story of Trump’s electoral successes among Christian voters in the last two elections is in large part the story of religious nationalism—and White Christian nationalism in particular—because Trump personifies the convergence of nationalism-infused forms of messianism and apocalypticism intrinsic to White evangelicalism, which culminate in QAnon cultic ideology. However, these same ethnoreligious/nationalist (...) patterns and logics extend much further back than Trump’s insurgent candidacy. This chapter traces the recurring, resurgent patterns of “zombie nationalism” among White evangelical Christians in the United States over the last half century that emerged in response to periods of significant societal change and certain recurring sociopolitical issues. In particular, alongside established elective affinities around ethnicity (whiteness) and religion (Christianity), this chapter makes the case for incorporating gender and sexual politics as key factors in the articulation and legitimation of religious nationalism in the United States. White Christian nationalism tends to reemerge as a salient political force during periods of rapid social change and diversification, driven by racialized religious grievances symptomatic of Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, or the paradoxical internalization and reprojection of a person’s or group’s perceived endangerment, victimhood, and/or suffering, in order to gain power. Drawing on examples of marriage equality and reproductive rights, this chapter demonstrates how an understanding of sexual politics is key to both apprehending and breaking the cyclical reanimation of White Christian nationalism. Escaping the nihilistic impulses driving these cycles will require White evangelicals to develop new hermeneutical tools capable of transforming the exclusionary patterns of racism, ethnocentrism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy that fuel the engine of ressentiment animating zombie nationalism. (shrink)

Over the last three decades, studies in microbiology have exposed a world of diverse and dynamic interactions. Through metagenomic sequencing, complex bacterial communities became visible and proved important for many biological phenomena. As a result of discovering the connection between microorganisms and organisms’ survival, the notion of the holobiont has become prominent and has been suggested as a biological individual. The view of the holobiont as an individual, commonly known as the Hologenome Theory, focuses on the interactions and relations between (...) the host and its symbionts in the host’s development and evolution. Today, the holobiont is at the heart of the debate on the nature of the biological individual, a debate which is connected to the same question about the nature of the individual organism. (shrink)

This paper attempts to explain the conceptual connections between happiness and well-being. It first distinguishes episodic happiness from happiness in the personal attribute sense. It then evaluates two recent proposals about the connection between happiness and well-being: (1) the idea that episodic happiness and well-being both have the same fundamental determinants, so that a person is well-off to a particular degree in virtue of the fact that they are happy to that degree, and (2) the idea that happiness in the (...) personal attribute sense can serve as a ‘‘proxy’’ for well-being, i.e., that a person’s degree of deep or robust happiness approximates their degree of well-being. It is argued that happiness in both these senses is conceptually, metaphysically, and empirically distinct from well- being. A new analysis of welfare, well-being as agential flourishing, can explain welfare’s real connection to happiness in both the episodic and personal attribute senses. It predicts that such happiness is only directly beneficial when it is valued, when it is a form of valuing, or when it underwrites (i.e., serves as the causal basis for) the disposition to realize one’s values. It is therefore a necessary—but not sufficient—condition for especially high levels of well-being. This analysis of welfare integrates many insights from the eudaimonic tradition of welfare and happiness research in psychology, and also addresses common criticisms of these eudaimonic models. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that what counts as the proper function of a trait is a matter of the de facto perspective that the biological system, itself, possesses on what counts as proper functioning for that trait. Unlike non-perspectival accounts, internal perspectivalism does not succumb to generality problems. But unlike external perspectivalism, internal perspectivalism can provide a fully naturalistic, mind-independent grounding of proper function and natural norms. The attribution of perspectives to biological systems is intended to be neither metaphorical (...) nor anthropomorphic: I do not mean to imply that such systems thereby must possess agency, cognition, intentions, concepts, or mental or psychological states. Instead, such systems provide the grounding for norms of performance when they internally enforce their own standard of (i.e., their own perspective on) what constitutes proper functioning or malfunctioning. By operating with a fixed, determinate level of generality, such systems provide the basis for an account of proper function that is immune to generality problems. (shrink)

Wisdom, long a topic of interest to moral philosophers, is increasingly the focus of social science research. Philosophers have historically been concerned to develop a rationally defensible account of the nature of wisdom and its role in the moral life, often inspired in various ways by virtue theoretical accounts of practical wisdom (phronesis). Wisdom scientists seek to, among other things, define wisdom and its components so that we can measure them. Are the measures used by wisdom scientists actually measuring what (...) philosophers have in mind when they discuss practical wisdom? I argue that they are not. Contemporary measures of wisdom and its components may pick out some necessary prerequisites of practical wisdom, but they do not measure a philosophically plausible practical wisdom or its components. After explaining the argument and defending it against objections, I consider its implications. Should wisdom scientists ignore the philosophical conception of practical wisdom in favor of other conceptions, revise their methods to try to measure it, or continue the interdisciplinary study of practical wisdom without expecting to measure it? I make a preliminary argument for the third option. (shrink)