This chapter offers an opinionated introduction to higher-order formal languages with an eye towards their applications in metaphysics. A simply relationally typed higher-order language is introduced in four stages: starting with first-order logic, adding first-order predicate abstraction, generalizing to higher-order predicate abstraction, and finally adding higher-order quantification. It is argued that both β-conversion and Universal Instantiation are valid on the intended interpretation of this language. Given these two principles, it is then shown how we can use pure higher-order logic to (...) ask, and begin to answer, metaphysical questions with non-trivial implications. In particular, while we must reject the popular idea that structural differences between sentences correspond to parallel distinctions in the logical structure of extra-linguistic reality, it may still be possible to give a purely logical characterization of objectual aboutness and related notions. (shrink)

I propose and articulate a novel theory of desire, called the Revised Reward Theory. As the name suggests, the theory is based—and expands—on Arpaly and Schroeder’s (2014) Reward Theory of Desire. The initial Reward Theory identifies desires with states of the reward learning system such that for an organism to desire some P is for its reward system to treat P as a reward upon receipt. The Revised Reward Theory identifies desires with a different state of the same system, such (...) that for an organism to desire some P is for its reward system to expect or predict that P will be rewarding (roughly) prior to receipt. The difference amounts to equating desires with what we ultimately find rewarding or satisfying versus those that underlie our motivations to obtain that which we take ourselves to desire. I argue that the structure of the reward system is incompatible with the original Reward Theory but compatible with the Revised Reward Theory. I demonstrate that this difference has important philosophical implications. I focus on moral responsibility and demonstrate Arpaly and Schroeder’s argument, that addiction can mitigate moral responsibility, turns on this precise difference. Arpaly, Schroeder, and I all ascribe to a meta-theory called ‘natural kindism’ which identifies mental kinds with neurocognitive kinds. This discussion, in addition to defending a theory of desire, is intended to act as a proof of concept for natural kindism as offering a powerful framework for relating empirical results to philosophical issues. (shrink)

Can testimony provide reasons to believe some proposition about an artwork’s aesthetic character? Can testimony bring an agent into a position where they can issue an aesthetic judgement about that artwork? What is the epistemic value of aesthetic communication? These questions have received sustained philosophical attention. More fundamental questions about aesthetic communication have meanwhile been neglected. These latter questions concern the nature of aesthetic communication, the criteria that determine when aesthetic communication is successful, and the frequency of communicative success in (...) aesthetic communication. The neglect of these questions is a serious oversight, not least because they bear directly on each of the other questions listed. This paper’s focus is the more fundamental set of questions. I argue for a restricted form of communicative pessimism. Discerning aesthetic communication about an artwork typically fails unless its recipient is both acquainted with that artwork and able to coordinate with the speaker on an aesthetic understanding of it. I arrive at this conclusion by challenging the standard conception of the nature of aesthetic communication that the literature presupposes, as well as an accompanying criterion of communicative success. I introduce an alternative view. In closing I relate my discussion to the former set of questions. (shrink)

We offer a general framework for theorizing about the structure of knowledge and belief in terms of the comparative normality of situations compatible with one’s evidence. The guiding idea is that, if a possibility is sufficiently less normal than one’s actual situation, then one can know that that possibility does not obtain. This explains how people can have inductive knowledge that goes beyond what is strictly entailed by their evidence. We motivate the framework by showing how it illuminates knowledge about (...) the future, knowledge of lawful regularities, knowledge about parameters measured using imperfect instruments, the connection between knowledge, belief, and probability, and the dynamics of knowledge and belief in response to new evidence. (shrink)

How is what we believe related to how we act? That depends on what we mean by ‘believe’. On the one hand, there is what we're sure of: what our names are, where we were born, whether we are sitting in front of a screen. Surety, in this sense, is not uncommon — it does not imply Cartesian absolute certainty, from which no possible course of experience could dislodge us. But there are many things that we think that we are (...) not sure of. For example, you might think that it will rain sometime this month, but not be sure that it will. Both what we're sure of and what we think have important normative connections to action. But the connections are quite different. This paper explores these issues with respect to assertion, inquiry, and decision making. We conclude by arguing that there is no theoretically significant notion of ‘full belief’ intermediate in strength between thinking and being sure. (shrink)

Plato is often acknowledged as the first philosophical critic of democracy and his Republic is regularly taken as a paradigm of an anti-democratic work. While it is true that Plato objected to much about the democracy of his own time, Plato’s political theorizing also reveals an interest in improving democratic institutions. This chapter explores three themes in Plato’s thinking about democracy: firstly, Plato's insistence that rulers should be knowledgeable and his claim that most people are politically incompetent (§1); secondly, Plato's (...) criticisms of oratory and the corrupting effects of public rhetoric (§2); thirdly, Plato's use of democratic institutions in the Laws (§3). Once we appreciate these different evaluations of democratic practices, we can see that Plato was not simply ‘anti-democratic’ or ‘pro-democratic’ but thought some democratic practices should be abandoned, some reformed, and some adopted. (shrink)

Proponents of the rule of law argue about whether that ideal should be conceived formalistically or in terms of substantive values. Formalistically, the rule of law is associated with principles like generality, clarity, prospectivity, consistency, etc. Substantively, it is associated with market values, with constitutional rights, and with freedom and human dignity. In this paper, I argue for a third layer of complexity: the procedural aspect of the rule of law; the aspects of rule-of-law requirements that have to do with (...) "natural Justice" or "procedural due process." These I believe have been neglected in the jurisprudential literature devoted specifically to the idea of the rule of law and they deserve much greater emphasis. Moreover procedural values go beyond elementary principles like the guarantee of an unbiased tribunal or the opportunity to present and confront evidence. They include the right to argue in a court about what the law is and what its bearing should be on one's situation. The provision that law makes for argument is necessarily unsettling, and so this emphasis on the procedural aspect highlights the point predictability should not be regarded as the be-all and end-all of the rule of law. (shrink)

Literary cognitivists claim that works of literature can have a significant cognitive value and can be effective in providing readers with opportunities for learning. Anti-cognitivists challenge cognitivists by questioning how literature can offer arguments or evidence for readers’ adoption of new knowledge or understanding. As a mode of side-stepping these objections, cognitivists have recently tended to make their claims more modest and claim only that literature clarifies knowledge readers already possess or provides the opportunity for the development of certain general (...) cognitive skills. In this chapter, I put forward a more bold account of literature’s cognitive value. I argue that a reader’s engagement with a literary work can lead to reconfiguration of their understanding of the subject matter with which the work deals. This bolder defence of literature’s cognitive value, and the account I offer of how readers can access such cognitive value, indicate how literature can form a significant part of character education. (shrink)

Did Plato intend the laws of the Laws to change? While most scholars agree that there is to be legal change in Magnesia, I contend that this issue has been clouded by confusing three distinct questions: (1) whether there are legal mechanisms for changing the law in Magnesia, (2) what the attitudes of Magnesian citizens towards innovation and legal change are, and (3) whether Plato thinks the law is always the ultimate political authority. Once we separate these issues and look (...) at the relevant texts more closely, we see that the Athenian Visitor is primarily concerned with supplementing the original lawgiver’s laws and that any innovation that occurs should be consistent with this lawcode. This does not settle the question about whether it is always right to act in accordance with the existing laws, though it does provide a valuable framework for understanding a central aspect of Platonic political philosophy. Thus, although Plato’s ideal places knowledge above the law, in practice the laws of Magnesia will be fixed and authoritative for those people living under them. (shrink)

This essay falls into three parts. Section 1 describes how Politics Book I, which includes Aristotle’s famous claims that the human being is by nature a political animal (politikon zōon) and that the polis (city-state) is natural and naturally prior to the individual, and his infamous claim that it is just to enslave those who are slaves by nature, may be connected with the rest of the Politics, which is about politeiai (constitutions). Section 2 examines Aristotle’s ideal politeia in Politics (...) VII-VIII in the light of his criticisms of other politeiai in Book II. Section 3 discusses non-ideal constitutions in Politics III-VI. (shrink)

Picturing is a poorly understood element of Sellars’s philosophical project. We diagnose the problem with picturing as follows: on the one hand, it seems that it must be connected with action in order for it to do its job. On the other hand, the representational states of a picturing system are characterized in descriptive and seemingly static terms. How can static terms be connected with action? To solve this problem, we adopt a concept from recent work in Sellarsian metaethics: the (...) idea of a material practical inference, which (we argue) features centrally in how we picture. The key distinction is that the picturing of nonhuman animals involves only Humean material practical inference, in which representational states are corrected only by feedback from the environment and not from discursive interactions. The resulting view shows that Sellars’s contributions to practical philosophy (especially theory of action and metaethics) cannot be separated from his contributions to philosophy of mind, language, and cognitive science. Further, the view makes it clear that picturing is neither a version of the Given, nor is it a fifth wheel to inferential role in explaining representation, but is essential to Sellars’s model of how animals—including humans—represent their environment. (shrink)

When should you engage with difficult arguments against your cherished controversial beliefs? The primary conclusion of this book is that your obligations to engage with counterarguments are more limited than is often thought. In some standard situations, you shouldn't engage with difficult counterarguments and, if you do, you shouldn't engage with them open-mindedly. This conclusion runs counter to aspects of the Millian political tradition and political liberalism, as well as what people working in informal logic tend to say about argumentation. (...) -/- Not all misleading arguments wear their flaws on their sleeve. Each step of a misleading argument might seem compelling and you might not be able to figure out what's wrong with it. Still, even if you can't figure out what's wrong with an argument, you can know that it's misleading. One way to know that an argument is misleading is, counterintuitively, to lack expertise in the methods and evidence-types employed by the argument. When you know that a counterargument is misleading, you shouldn't engage with it open-mindedly and sometimes shouldn't engage with it at all. You shouldn't engage open-mindedly because you shouldn't be willing to reduce your confidence in response to arguments you know are misleading. And you sometimes shouldn't engage closed-mindedly, because to do so can be manipulative or ineffective. -/- In making this case, Jeremy Fantl discusses echo chambers and group polarization, the importance in academic writing of a sympathetic case for the opposition, the epistemology of disagreement, the account of open-mindedness, and invitations to problematic academic speakers. (shrink)

Is the exemplar of modern ethical theory estranged from their intimates because the motive of duty dominates their motivational psychology? While this challenge against modern ethical theory is familiar, I argue that with respect to a certain strand of Kantian ethical theory, it does not so much as make sense. I explain the content and functional role of the motive of duty in the psychology of the moral exemplar, stressing in particular how that motive shapes and informs the content of (...) others, including those characteristic of intimacy. I argue that to the extent that a subject does not integrate their motive of duty with their other motives, their moral and intimate relationships are compromised, and on the same grounds, because intimate relationships are interpersonal relationships and the motive of duty just is the motive to respect another person as a separate person. (shrink)

This essay is about the relationship between the notions of practical reason, the will, and choice in Kant’s practical philosophy. Although Kant explicitly identifies practical reason and the will, many interpreters argue that he cannot really mean it on the grounds that unless they are distinct, irrational and, especially, immoral action is impossible. Other readers affirm his identification but distinguish the will from choice on the same basis. We argue that proper attention to Kant’s conception of practical reason as a (...) capacity reveals that these distinctions are neither textually grounded nor philosophically necessary. His moral psychology concerns a single capacity, practical reason, which is the will, and whose actualities in this or that individual fall under the title of choice. Practical reason is the will and choice because it is the rational faculty of desire: a rational being’s capacity to be, by means of her representations, the cause of the actuality of their objects. This, we argue, is entailed by his conception of rational action: action not just in accordance with, but in and through the representation of, principles. The possibility of irrational action is explained not by a distinction between capacities but by the finitude, and thereby the fallibility, of human reason. (shrink)

What explains why we are subjects for whom objects can have value, and what explains which objects have value for us? Axiologicians say that the value of humanity is the answer. I argue that our value, no matter what it is like, cannot perform this task. We are animals among others. An explanation of the value of objects for us must fit into an explanation of the value of objects for animals generally. Different objects have value for different animals. Those (...) differences depend on differences in animal natures and, in particular, on the diverse characteristic capacities of different animals. Once we invoke animal natures, there is nothing for the value of animality, including the value of humanity, to explain. (shrink)

This paper provides a method for characterizing space events using the framework of conceptual spaces. We focus specifically on estimating and ranking the likelihood of collisions between space objects. The objective is to design an approach for anticipatory decision support for space operators who can take preventive actions on the basis of assessments of relative risk. To make this possible our approach draws on the fusion of both hard and soft data within a single decision support framework. Contextual data is (...) also taken into account, for example data about space weather effects, by drawing on the Space Domain Ontologies, a large system of ontologies designed to support all aspects of space situational awareness. The framework is coupled with a mathematical programming scheme that frames a mathematically optimal approach for decision support, providing a quantitative basis for ranking potential for collision across multiple satellite pairs. The goal is to provide the broadest possible information foundation for critical assessments of collision likelihood. (shrink)

Nicholas Agar, Jeff McMahan and Allen Buchanan have all expressed concerns about enhancing humans far outside the species-typical range. They argue radically enhanced beings will be entitled to greater and more beneficial treatment through an enhanced moral status, or a stronger claim to basic rights. I challenge these claims by first arguing that emerging technologies will likely give the enhanced direct control over their mental states. The lack of control we currently exhibit over our mental lives greatly contributes to our (...) sense of vulnerability. I then argue moral status should be viewed in terms of vulnerability. The enhanced will slowly gain the ability to command their mental states, reducing their vulnerability. These radically enhanced beings will have greater capacities, and possibly an inner life more valuable than our own. They will also be less vulnerable, and as a result, their moral status will be subordinate to our own. (shrink)

Consider the sentence “Lois knows that Superman flies, but she doesn’t know that Clark flies”. In this paper we defend a Millian contextualist semantics for propositional attitude ascriptions, according to which ordinary uses of this sentence are true but involve a mid-sentence shift in context. Absent any constraints on the relevant parameters of context sensitivity, such a semantics would be untenable: it would undermine the good standing of systematic theorizing about the propositional attitudes, trivializing many of the central questions of (...) epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of action. In response to this problem, we prove a series of tenability results. We show that, given certain constraints on the parameters of context sensitivity, there is a broad class of principles of propositional attitude psychology whose good standing follows from corresponding claims about people’s mental representations. But these constraints also have some surprising consequences: they are jointly incompatible with coarse-grained theories of propositions, and they are in tension with a natural picture of how speakers and hearers coordinate on the interpretation of attitude ascriptions. In light of these consequences we explore different ways in which the contextualist picture might be developed, and argue that our preferred way compares favorably with Fregeanism and neo-Russellianism. (shrink)

This intra-view explores a number of productive junctions between contemporary Deleuzoguattarian and new materialist praxes via a series of questions and provocations. Productive tensions are explored via questions of epistemological, ontological, ethical, and political intra-sections as well as notions of difference, transversal contamination, ecosophical practices, diffraction, and, lastly, schizoanalysis. Various irruptions around biophilosophy, transduction, becomology, cartography, power relations, hyperobjects as events, individuation, as well as dyschronia and disorientation, take the discussion further into the wild pedagogical spaces that both praxes have (...) in common. -/- . (shrink)

Most of us believe that partiality applies in a broad range of relationships. One relationship on which there is much disagreement is co-nationality. Some writers argue that co-national partiality is not justified in certain cases, like killing in war, since killing in defense of co-nationals is intuitively impermissible in other contexts. I argue that this approach overlooks an important structural feature of partiality—namely, that its scope is sometimes restricted. In this essay, I show how some relationships that generate reasons of (...) partiality are restricted in scope—that is, they generate reasons within particular contexts or with respect to particular goods. I then argue that co-national partiality is scope restricted. I then show how this fact helps proponents of co-national partiality overcome the aforementioned objection to its application in cases like war. (shrink)

This paper describes an AFOSR-supported basic research program that focuses on developing a new framework for combining hard with soft data in order to improve space situational awareness. The goal is to provide, in an automatic and near real-time fashion, a ranking of possible threats to blue assets (assets trying to be protected) from red assets (assets with hostile intentions). The approach is based on Conceptual Spaces models, which combine features from traditional associative and symbolic cognitive models. While Conceptual Spaces (...) are revolutionary, they lack an underlying mathematical framework. Several such frameworks have attempted to represent Conceptual Spaces, but by far the most robust is the model developed by Holender. His model utilizes integer linear programming in order to obtain an overall similarity value between observations and concepts that support the formation of hypotheses. This paper will describe a method for building Conceptual Spaces models for threats that utilizes ontologies as a means to provide a clear semantic foundation for this inferencing process; in particular threat ontologies and space domain ontologies are developed and employed in this approach. A space situational awareness use-case is presented involving a kinetic kill scenario and results are shown to assess the performance of this fusion-based inferencing framework. (shrink)

The COVID-19 global pandemic has shone a light on several important ethical questions, ranging from fairness in resource allocation to the ethical justification of government mandates. In addition to these institutional issues, there are also several ethical questions that arise at the interpersonal level. This essay focuses on several of these issues. In particular, I argue that, despite the insistence in public health messaging that avoiding infecting others constitutes ‘saving lives’, virus transmission that results in death constitutes an act of (...) killing. Whether this killing is wrongful depends on several factors. I consider one intuitively plausible view—namely, that in many cases, killing via unintentional transmission is not wrongful, because the parties in question have implicitly waived their rights against this harm, often via reciprocal risk imposition. I argue that this view is mistaken, but that its central insight can be better captured by identifying the appropriate standards of blame that we ought to apply during a pandemic. I conclude by showing how these conclusions can be fruitfully applied to certain institutional questions, such as helping to justify restricting government mandates. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have insisted that evidence of underlying mechanisms is required to support claims about the effects of medical interventions. Yet evidence about mechanisms does not feature on dominant evidence-based medicine “hierarchies.” After arguing that only inferences from mechanisms (“mechanistic reasoning”)—not mechanisms themselves—count as evidence, I argue for a middle ground. Mechanistic reasoning is not required to establish causation when we have high-quality controlled studies; moreover, mechanistic reasoning is more problematic than has been assumed. Yet where the problems can (...) be overcome, mechanistic reasoning can and should be used as evidence. (shrink)

No contemporary compatibilist account of free will can be complete unless it engages with the consequence argument. I will argue that Wilfrid Sellars offered an ingenious version of compatibilism that can be used to refute the consequence argument. Unfortunately, owing to the opacity of Sellars’s writings on free will, his solution has been neglected. I will reconstruct his view here, demonstrating how it represents a powerful challenge to the consequence argument and tying it to some recent developments in the compatibilist (...) literature. (shrink)

What is the function of morality—what is it all about? What is the basis of morality—what explains our moral agency and patiency? This essay defends a unique Kantian answer to these questions. Morality is about securing our independence from each other by giving each other equal discretion over whether and how we interact. The basis of our moral agency and patiency is practical reason. The first half addresses objections that this account cannot explain the moral patiency of beings who are (...) not also moral agents such as infantile, elderly, and infirm human beings and the other animals who are not moral agents. The second half argues that this account is preferable, on grounds of consistency with the basic Kantian account of the function and content of morality, to the familiar account of our moral patiency, popular especially though not exclusively with contemporary Kantians, in terms of the value of humanity. (shrink)

In the last half century we have gone from storing data on 5-1/4 inch floppy diskettes to cloud and now fog computing. But one should ask why so much data is being collected. Part of the answer is simple in light of scientific projects but why is there so much data on us? Then, we ask about its “interface” through fog computing. Such questions prompt this chapter on the philosophy of big data and fog computing. After some background on definitions, (...) origins and contemporary applications, the main discussion begins with thinking about modern data collection, management, and applications from a complexity standpoint. Big data is turned into knowledge but knowledge is extrapolated from the past and used to manage the future. Yet it is questionable whether humans have the capacity to manage contemporary technological and social complexity evidenced by our world in crisis and possibly on the brink of extinction. Such calls for a new way of studying societies from a scientific point of view. We are at the center of the observation from which big data emerge and are manipulated, the overall human project being not only to create an artificial brain with an attendant mind but a society that might be able to survive what “natural” humans cannot. (shrink)

When people now talk about a relationship as being “Platonic”, they mean that the relationship is a non-sexual friendship. But what did Plato himself say about different kinds of relationship, and how did his name come to be associated with non-sexual relationships? While Plato’s Symposium has been the center of attention for his views on love, I argue that the Phaedrus and Laws VIII provide a much clearer account of Plato’s views. In these dialogues, Plato distinguishes between two kinds of (...) love and three kinds of lover. The two kinds of love are fundamentally oriented towards different objects: one kind of love is focused on the body of the beloved and seeks to extract as much bodily pleasure from them as possible, whereas the other kind of love is focused on the soul and seeks to benefit the beloved by improving their character. There is a lover for each kind of love, and a third kind of lover who is torn between these two opposing objects of love. Notably, in the kind of love directed towards the soul, the lovers will not engage in sexual activity. I argue that this is because Plato thinks that the natural function of sex is the procreation of good children and that engaging in such an intensely pleasurable activity risks making the lovers intemperate and lacking in self-control. Thus Plato thinks that the best kind of relationship is one of love (and not just friendship) but is nonetheless non-sexual. (shrink)

Fregeanism and Relationism are competing families of solutions to Frege’s Puzzle, and by extension, competing theories of propositional representation. My aim is to clarify what is at stake between them by characterizing and evaluating a Relationist argument. Relationists claim that it is cognitively possible for distinct token propositional attitudes to be, in a sense, qualitatively indistinguishable: to differ in no intrinsic representational features. The idea of an ‘intrinsic representational feature’ is not, however, made especially clear in the argument. I clarify (...) it here and, having done so, offer reason to doubt the argument. This will put us in a position to draw some lessons about the relation between object-directed and representation-internal aspects of cognitive significance. (shrink)

Frege's Puzzle is a founding problem in analytic philosophy. It lies at the intersection of central topics in the philosophy of language and mind: the theory of reference, the nature of propositional attitudes, the nature of semantic theorizing, the relation between semantics and pragmatics, etc. This chapter is an overview of the puzzle and of the space of contemporary approaches to it.

The purpose of this paper is to think about the various methods of attempting to make money in the capital markets (“investing”). I suggest that though running a betting system on a Roulette wheel is silly, running a betting system on the capital markets may be a good idea.

AI, in the form of artificial carers, provides a possible solution to the problem of a growing elderly population Yet, concerns remain that artificial carers ( such as care-or chat-bots) could not emphathize with patients to the extent that humans can. Utilising the concept of empathy perception,we propose a Turing-type test that could check whether artificial carers could do many of the menial tasks human carers currently undertake, and in the process, free up more time for doctors to offer empathy. (...) -/- . (shrink)

I argue that racism is essentially a civic character trait: to be a racist is to have a character that rationally reflects racial supremacist sociopolitical values. As with moral vice accounts of racism, character is my account’s primary evaluative focus: character is directly evaluated as racist, and all other racist things are racist insofar as, and because, they cause, are caused by, express or are otherwise suitably related to racist character. Yet as with political accounts of racism, sociopolitical considerations provide (...) my account’s primary evaluative standard: satisfying the sociopolitical standard of racial supremacy is what makes racist character racist. (shrink)

This paper is about how to interpret and evaluate purported evidence for predicativism about proper names. I aim to point out some underappreciated thorny issues and to offer both predicativists and non-predicativists some advice about how best to pursue their respective projects. I hope to establish three related claims: that non-predicativists have to posit relatively exotic, though not entirely implausible, polysemic mechanisms to capture the range of data that predicativists have introduced ; that neither referentialism nor extant versions of predicativism (...) can offer a very plausible account of the interpretive possibilities for singular unmodified definite descriptions containing names ; and that the most plausible version of predicativism would treat bare names as non-anaphoric definite descriptions. (shrink)

Frege's puzzle is a fundamental challenge for accounts of mental and linguistic representation. This piece surveys a family of recent approaches to the puzzle that posit representational relations. I identify the central commitments of relational approaches and present several arguments for them. I also distinguish two kinds of relationism—semantic relationism and formal relationism—corresponding to two conceptions of representational relations. I briefly discuss the consequences of relational approaches for foundational questions about propositional attitudes, intentional explanation, and compositionality.

Rationale and objectives: Medical humanities are becoming increasingly recognized as positively impacting medical education and medical practice. However, the extent of medical humanities teaching in medical schools is largely unknown. We reviewed medical school curricula in Canada, the UK and the US. We also explored the relationship between medical school ranking and the inclusion of medical humanities in the curricula. -/- Methods: We searched the curriculum websites of all accredited medical schools in Canada, the UK and the US to check (...) which medical humanities topics were taught, and whether they were mandatory or optional. We then noted rankings both by Times Higher Education and U.S. News and World Report and calculated the average rank. We formally explored whether there was an association between average medical school ranking and medical humanities offerings using Spearman's correlation and inverse variance weighting meta-analysis. -/- Results: We identified 18 accredited medical school programmes in Canada, 41 in the UK, and 154 in the US. Of these, nine (56%) in Canada, 34 (73%) in the UK and 124 (80%) in the US offered at least one medical humanity that was not ethics. The most common medical humanities were medical humanities (unspecified), history, and literature (Canada); sociology and social medicine, medical humanities (unspecified), and art (UK); and medical humanities (unspecified), literature and history (US). Higher ranked medical schools appeared less likely to offer medical humanities. -/- Conclusions: The extent and content of medical humanities offerings at accredited medical schools in Canada, the UK and the US varies, and there appears to be an inverse relationship between medical school quality and medical humanities offerings. Our analysis was limited by the data provided on the Universities' websites. Given the potential for medical humanities to improve medical education and medical practice, opportunities to reduce this variation should be exploited. (shrink)

Scholars have wrestled with "consciousness", a major scholar calling it the "hard problem". Some thirty-plus years after the Towards a Science of Consciousness, we do not seem to be any closer to an answer to "What is consciousness?". Seemingly irresolvable metaphysical problems are addressed by bootstrapping, provisional assumptions, not unlike those used by logicians and mathematicians. I bootstrap with the same ontology and epistemology applicable to everything we apprehend. Here, I argue for a version of the unity of opposites, a (...) form of neutral monism. Something exists because of what it is not; nothing can exist by itself, singularities (analogous to monads), expressing the model. Applying this most fundamental law to the consciousness problem, the physical (movement) comes into being simultaneously as the mental (stasis), each displayed by a field that is variegated (ranging from creative to entropic processes). Such is in keeping with how the singularity emerged as our universe, the same form that may account for sub-Planck-scale phenomena. Overall, like the most fundamental law, deep structures are imminent in our universe, both as objects and processes. (shrink)

Tracking representationalism explains the negative affective character of pain, and its capacity to motivate action, by reference to the representation of the badness for us of bodily damage. I argue that there is a more fitting instantiation of the tracking relation – the badness for us of extremely intense stimuli – and use this to motivate a non-reductive approach to the negative affective character of pain. The view of pain proposed here is supported by consideration of three related topics: the (...) pain caused when the body is damaged, reparative pain, and the messenger-shooting objection to tracking representationalism. (shrink)

Differential privacy (DP) aims to confer data processing systems with inherent privacy guarantees, offering strong protections for personal data. But DP’s approach to privacy carries with it certain assumptions about how mathematical abstractions will be translated into real-world systems, which—if left unexamined and unrealized in practice—could function to shield data collectors from liability and criticism, rather than substantively protect data subjects from privacy harms. This article investigates these assumptions and discusses their implications for using DP to govern data-driven systems. In (...) Parts 1 and 2, we introduce DP as, on one hand, a mathematical framework and, on the other hand, a kind of real-world sociotechnical system, using a hypothetical case study to illustrate how the two can diverge. In Parts 3 and 4, we discuss the way DP frames privacy loss, data processing interventions, and data subject participation, arguing it could exacerbate existing problems in privacy regulation. In part 5, we conclude with a discussion of DP’s potential interactions with the endogeneity of privacy law, and we propose principles for best governing DP systems. In making such assumptions and their consequences explicit, we hope to help DP succeed at realizing its promise for better substantive privacy protections. (shrink)

A person can appropriately manifest respect toward a world heritage ruin by developing a sensitive understanding of the ruin’s cultural and historical context and significance. In this paper, we link such respectful understanding to the question of the aesthetic appreciation of world heritage ruins. Our claim is that an aesthetic appreciation of a world heritage ruin qua world heritage ruin typically involves two things: first, the responsibility not to neglect the individuality of the object, and, second, a commitment to the (...) idea that it is the object—respectfully conceived—which must be the focus of our appreciation. (shrink)

It's often said that according to deflationary theories of truth, truth is not a ‘substantial’ property. While this is a fine slogan, it is far from transparent what deflationists mean (or ought to mean) in saying that truth is ‘insubstantial’. Focusing so intently upon the concept of truth and the word ‘true’, I argue, deflationists and their critics have been insufficiently attentive to a host of metaphysical complexities that arise for deflationists in connection with the property of truth. My aim (...) is to correct several misunderstandings as to what deflationists are after here—including some harboured by deflationists themselves—and to offer an account of the commitments about truth's nature that they ought to undertake. In developing this account, I focus particularly upon the issue of what metaphysics of truth a Horwichian minimalist ought to adopt. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’s ethical theory was rich and deeply innovative. On Sellars’s view, moral judgments express a special kind of shared intention. Thus, we should see Sellars as an early advocate of an expressivism of plans and intentions, and an early theorist of collective intentionality. He supplemented this theory with a sophisticated logic of intentions, a robust theory of the categorical validity of normative expressions, a subtle way of reconciling the cognitive and motivating aspects of moral judgment, and much more— all (...) within a strict nominalism that preserves Sellars’s commitment to naturalism. The Ethics of Wilfrid Sellars offers the first systematic treatment of this sadly neglected aspect of Sellars’s work and demonstrates that his ethical theory— just like his more widely discussed epistemology— has much to contribute to current debates. (shrink)

What can Stoicism offer to contemporary debates about forgiveness? Given their outright rejection of a reactive attitudes framework for responding to wrongdoing and their bold suggestions of how to revise our moral practices, the Stoics provide a valuable lens through which to re-evaluate various central claims in the debates about forgiveness. In this chapter, I highlight four common assumptions that the Stoics would consider problematic: firstly, that forgiveness is opposed to justice; secondly, that anger and resentment are necessary for registering (...) wrongdoing; thirdly, that anger and resentment are generally reliable at tracking the severity of wrongdoing; fourthly, that reconciliation with wrongdoers is an option rather than an imperative of virtue. Insofar as the Stoics provide defensible and often compelling alternatives to these positions, Stoicism offers a number of philosophical resources to re-conceptualize the way we think about forgiveness and suggests ways in which forgiveness might be better integrated into a virtue ethical framework. (shrink)

In this article, I attempt to provide a complete and exhaustive list of all of the offices and major political roles proposed within the constitution of Magnesia, detailing the title of the office, number of offices, method of appointment, age or gender restrictions, length of term, and explicit responsibilities assigned to that office. This tabulation is intended to be useful for new readers of the Laws and to scholars of various methodological approaches interested in the political arrangements of Magnesia.

Predicativists hold that proper names have predicate-type semantic values. They face an obvious challenge: in many languages names normally occur as, what appear to be, grammatical arguments. The standard version of predicativism answers this challenge by positing an unpronounced determiner in bare occurrences. I argue that this is a mistake. Predicativists should draw a distinction between two kinds of semantic type—underived semantic type and derived semantic type. The predicativist thesis concerns the underived semantic type of proper names and underdetermines a (...) view about the semantic type of bare occurrences. I’ll argue that predicativists should hold that bare names are derived individual-denoting expressions. I end by considering what this result means for the relationship between predicativism and other metalinguistic theories of names. (shrink)

In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP), Spinoza argues that an individual’s natural right extends as far as their power. Subsequently, in the Tractatus Politicus (TP), he offers a revised argument for the same conclusion. Here I offer an account of the reasons for the revision. In both arguments, an individual’s natural right derives from God’s natural right. However, the TTP argument hinges on the claim that each individual is part of the whole of nature (totius naturae), and for this reason inherits (...) part of the natural right of that whole. Using several analogous cases from the Ethics, I show that this form of argument from division is not compatible with Spinoza’s considered metaphysical views. The revised argument, by contrast, avoids the pitfalls of his earlier efforts. It also better reveals the deep roots by which the monistic metaphysics of the Ethics feeds into Spinoza’s conception of natural right. (shrink)

We show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Frege’s distinction between sense and reference does not reconcile a classical logic of identity with apparent counterexamples to it involving proper names embedded under propositional attitude verbs.