The principle of universal instantiation plays a pivotal role both in the derivation of intensional paradoxes such as Prior’s paradox and Kaplan’s paradox and the debate between necessitism and contingentism. We outline a distinctively free logical approach to the intensional paradoxes and note how the free logical outlook allows one to distinguish two different, though allied themes in higher-order necessitism. We examine the costs of this solution and compare it with the more familiar ramificationist approaches to higher-order logic. Our assessment (...) of both approaches is largely pessimistic, and we remain reluctantly inclined to take Prior’s and Kaplan’s derivations at face value. (shrink)

Francis Bacon was the youngest son of Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper of the great seal under Elizabeth I. He left Cambridge in 1575, studied law, and entered Parliament in 1581. Though roughly contemporary with Kepler, Galileo, and Harvey, Bacon’s grand schemes for the advancement of knowledge were not driven by their discoveries: he resisted the Copernican hypothesis, and did not give mathematics a central place in his vision of natural philosophy. His active public life, under both Elizabeth (...) and James I, was taken up with political business and legal reform. Bacon achieved high office as Lord Chancellor in 1618, until disgraced by corruption charges. His final years saw a furious spate of writing on natural philosophy, politics, and history. (shrink)

This work intentionally joins Stephen A. McKnight’s The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought in arguing that Sir Francis Bacon was more deeply religious than he is conventionally thought to have been. Though the book is full of interesting suggestions, a lack of breadth, rigor, and precision will leave many readers unconvinced. . . . Those who know the corpus and secondary literature enough to read critically will find here provocative suggestions and intriguing leads. Others will need to (...) be cautious about the book’s arguments and conclusions. (shrink)

In this well-structured monograph, Stephen A. McKnight seeks to correct the view that Francis Bacon’s use of religious motifs and tropes is “manipulative,” “cynical,” and “disingenuous,” a view McKnight considers the “prevailing” one. To accomplish his goal, McKnight subjects several of Bacon’s works to a close reading. He concludes that the “pervasiveness of religious motifs, scriptural references, and biblical doctrines” in Bacon’s writings “establish the central role religion plays in Bacon’s thought”. McKnight holds that Bacon’s (...) religiosity is not disingenuous, but sincere. . . . . In documenting religious motifs in several of Bacon’s writings, this book is a valuable success. In characterizing Bacon’s religious beliefs and how they influenced the rest of his thought, it is much less convincing. (shrink)

A revisionist account of how philosophical induction was conceived in the ancient world and how that conception was transmitted, altered, and then rediscovered. I show how philosophers of late antiquity and then the medieval period came step-by-step to seriously misunderstand Aristotle’s view of induction and how that mistake was reversed by humanists in the Renaissance and then especially by Francis Bacon. I show, naturally enough then, that in early modern science, Baconians were Aristotelians and Aristotelians were Baconians.

How induction was understood took a substantial turn during the Renaissance. At the beginning, induction was understood as it had been throughout the medieval period, as a kind of propositional inference that is stronger the more it approximates deduction. During the Renaissance, an older understanding, one prevalent in antiquity, was rediscovered and adopted. By this understanding, induction identifies defining characteristics using a process of comparing and contrasting. Important participants in the change were Jean Buridan, humanists such as Lorenzo Valla and (...) Rudolph Agricola, Paduan Aristotelians such as Agostino Nifo, Jacopo Zabarella, and members of the medical faculty, writers on philosophy of mind such as the Englishman John Case, writers of reasoning handbooks, and Francis Bacon. (shrink)

Aristotle said that induction (epagōgē) is a proceeding from particulars to a universal, and the definition has been conventional ever since. But there is an ambiguity here. Induction in the Scholastic and the (so-called) Humean tradition has presumed that Aristotle meant going from particular statements to universal statements. But the alternate view, namely that Aristotle meant going from particular things to universal ideas, prevailed all through antiquity and then again from the time of Francis Bacon until the mid-nineteenth century. (...) Recent scholarship is so steeped in the first-mentioned tradition that we have virtually forgotten the other. In this essay McCaskey seeks to recover that alternate tradition, a tradition whose leading theoreticians were William Whewell, Francis Bacon, Socrates, and in fact Aristotle himself. The examination is both historical and philosophical. The first part of the essay fills out the history. The latter part examines the most mature of the philosophies in the Socratic tradition, specifically Bacon’s and Whewell’s. After tracing out this tradition, McCaskey shows how this alternate view of induction is indeed employed in science, as exemplified by several instances taken from actual scientific practice. In this manner, McCaskey proposes to us that the Humean problem of induction is merely an artifact of a bad conception of induction and that a return to the Socratic conception might be warranted. (shrink)

Ideas about soul and body – about thinking or remembering, mind and life, brain and self – remain both diverse and controversial in our neurocentric age. The history of these ideas is significant both in its own right and to aid our understanding of the complex sources and nature of our concepts of mind, cognition, and psychology, which are all terms with puzzling, difficult histories. These topics are not the domain of specialists alone, and studies of emotion, perception, or reasoning (...) have never been isolated theoretical endeavours. As Francis Bacon described human philosophy or ‘the knowledge of ourselves’, within which he located the study of body, soul, and mind, it ‘deserveth the more accurate handling, by how much it toucheth us more nearly’ (1605/ 2000: 93). The history of ideas in these domains is particularly challenging given the practical dimensions and implications of theories of mind. Because theories of human nature and debates about body and mind do ‘touch us’ so ‘nearly’, they attract and can thus reveal, in specific historical contexts, interconnected discourses or associations which may be quite unlike our own. So there are no neat boundaries around a historical category of ‘seventeenth-century British philosophy of the soul’. The central topic of this chapter can be thought of either as pneumatology, the doctrine or science of spirits and souls, or as continuous with the ‘psychologia’ or psychology of Aristotelian traditions (Park and Kessler 1988; Hatfield 1995: 184-6). In neither case, however, should we expect any deep unity to be provided by history, geography, discipline, or subject-matter. (shrink)

The first part of this paper will provide a reconstruction of Francis Bacon’s interpretation of Academic scepticism, Pyrrhonism, and Dogmatism, and its sources throughout his large corpus. It shall also analyze Bacon’s approach against the background of his intellectual milieu, looking particularly at Renaissance readings of scepticism as developed by Guillaume Salluste du Bartas, Pierre de la Primaudaye, Fulke Greville, and John Davies. It shall show that although Bacon made more references to Academic than to Pyrrhonian (...) Scepticism, like most of his contemporaries, he often misrepresented and mixed the doctrinal components of both currents. The second part of the paper shall offer a complete chronological survey of Bacon’s assessment of scepticism throughout his writings. Following the lead of previous studies by other scholars, I shall support the view that, while he approved of the state of doubt and the suspension of judgment as a provisional necessary stage in the pursuit of knowledge, he rejected the notion of acatalepsia. To this received reading, I shall add the suggestion that Bacon’s criticism of acatalepsia ultimately depends on his view of the historical conditions that surround human nature. I deal with this last point in the third part of the paper, where I shall argue that Bacon’s evaluation of scepticism relied on his adoption of a Protestant and Augustinian view of human nature that informed his overall interpretation of the history of humanity and nature, including the sceptical schools. (shrink)

This chapter brings some much-needed conceptual clarity to the debate about Locke’s scientific methodology. Instead of having to choose between the method of hypothesis and that of natural history (as most interpreters have thought), he would resist prescribing a single method for natural sciences in general. Following Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle, Locke separates medicine and natural philosophy (physics), so that they call for completely different methods. While a natural philosopher relies on “speculative” (causal-theoretical) hypotheses together with natural-history making (...) to explicate phenomena, a medical practitioner must prioritize collecting data about what remedies tend to cure what diseases over hypothesizing about the causes of the latter. (shrink)

This paper tries to understand how three medieval philosophers (Roger Bacon, Albert the Great and John Buridan) developed the idea of a special logic for ethics, taking into account Aristotle's thesis according to which ethics does not need theoretical syllogisms and uses a special kind of scientific reasoning. If rhetoric is a good candidate, we find three different readings of this approach and then three different theories of ethical reasoning.

This paper argues that early modern experimental philosophy emerged as the dominant member of a pair of methods in natural philosophy, the speculative versus the experimental, and that this pairing derives from an overarching distinction between speculative and operative philosophy that can be ultimately traced back to Aristotle. The paper examines the traditional classification of natural philosophy as a speculative discipline from the Stagirite to the seventeenth century; medieval and early modern attempts to articulate a scientia experimentalis; and the tensions (...) in the classification of natural magic and mechanics that led to the introduction of an operative part of natural philosophy in the writings of Francis Bacon and John Johnston. The paper concludes with a summary of the salient discontinuities between the experimental/speculative distinction of the mid-seventeenth century and its predecessors and a statement of the developments that led to the ascendance of experimental philosophy from the 1660s. (shrink)

This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy is dedicated to Timothy Williamson's work on modality. It consists of a new paper by Williamson followed by papers on Williamson's work on modality, with each followed by a reply by Williamson. -/- Contributors: Andrew Bacon, Kit Fine, Peter Fritz, Jeremy Goodman, John Hawthorne, Øystein Linnebo, Ted Sider, Robert Stalnaker, Meghan Sullivan, Gabriel Uzquiano, Barbara Vetter, Timothy Williamson, Juhani Yli-Vakkuri.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Newton's Metaphysics: Essays by Eric SchliesserMarius StanEric Schliesser. Newton's Metaphysics: Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 328. Hardback, $99.90.Newton owes his high regard to the quantitative science he left us, but his overall picture of the world had some robustly metaphysical threads woven in as well. Posthumous judgment about the value of these threads has varied wildly. Christian Wolff thought him a metaphysical rustic, as did Hans (...) Reichenbach some two centuries later ("Die Bewegungslehre bei Newton, Leibniz und Huygens," Kant-Studien 29 [1924]: 416–38). In the 1960s, the tide would turn, as Howard Stein and James Edward McGuire separately began to show that Newton's metaphysics was not just sophisticated, but often more compelling than its early modern alternatives (see respectively "Newtonian Spacetime," Texas Quarterly 10 [1967]: 174–200; and Tradition and Innovation: Newton's Metaphysics of Nature [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995]). Eric Schliesser's book unfolds in that same register of appreciative, high scholarship, and it attests to the enduring attraction of its subject.The book grew out of previous discrete papers, to which he added a few more for this occasion. Accordingly, it does not come with a master argument. Rather, it is an in-depth exploration of some key metaphysical themes in Newton. As such, it befits its subject figure, who reflected on themes and concepts while stopping short of working out systems.The first major theme is Newton and Spinozism. The latter does not denote Spinoza's metaphysics. In fact, Schliesser explains, Newton shared with Spinoza some weighty commitments, for example, to space being actually infinite, and to substance monism: "for Newton, there is strictly speaking only one genuine substance," namely, God (33). Rather, "Spinozism" is an interpreter's category for a bundle of three theses: identifying God and nature; denying final causation in the physical world; and the assumption of "blind" metaphysical necessity. Some counted Hobbes and John Toland as Spinozist in this sense, and even Epicurus, avant la lettre. Newton and his followers argued vehemently against this package, as Schliesser shows in chapters 4, 5, and 8. Their chief complaint was that Spinozism is unable to account for the "origin of motion," for a certain type of order, and for the stability of cosmological structure—and to do so in a way that "meets the standards of Newtonian mechanics" (122). This interpretive lens allows Schliesser to draw Kant in, by reading his youthful Theory of Heaven as a possible Spinozist reply to their objections (chapter 3). [End Page 157]A second theme is the metaphysics of mechanics, where Schliesser weaves together several strands. One is the ontology of gravity, for which he offers a novel construal: for Newton, gravity counts as real, but in a qualified sense. Namely, it is not essential and not intrinsic: "even after creation, a lonely partless particle of matter in the universe would not be said to gravitate." And gravity is relational: a "shared quality" of two or more bits of matter, which obtains in virtue of their sharing a nature (19). Another strand is Newton's ontology of time—really, a subtle, difficult topic long neglected. Famously, Newton in Principia defends absolute, true, and mathematical time. The question is what these three qualifiers denote, and whether Newton thought they were synonymous. Schliesser in chapter 7 argues for the provocative view that "absolute" and "true" time are not identical concepts; rather, they pick out different entities. These entities share a common structure, namely, metric and topological. That makes them species of "mathematical" time (179). But, Schliesser contends, Newton has unequal warrant for his two concepts of time.Yet another theme is formal causation. It comes to the fore in chapter 5, which grapples with Newton's opaque idea that space is an "emanative effect." Schliesser explains that here, "emanation picks out a species of formal causation" (147), but in a novel, early modern sense that comes from Bacon, not Aristotle. If space has a formal cause, then so has its twin brother, time, the topic of chapter 7. God is their common formal cause. Then in chapter 6 (coauthored with Zvi Biener) Schliesser adds that, for Newton, laws... (shrink)

Isaac Newton is best known as a mathematician and physicist. He invented the calculus, discovered universal gravitation and made significant advances in theoretical and experimental optics. His master-work on gravitation, the Principia, is often hailed as the crowning achievement of the scientific revolution. His significance for philosophers, however, extends beyond the philosophical implications of his scientific discoveries. Newton was an able and subtle philosopher, working at a time when science was not yet recognized as an activity distinct from philosophy. He (...) engaged with the work of Rene Descartes and G.W. Leibniz, and showed sensitivity to the work of John Locke, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi and Henry More, to name just a few. In his time, Newton was not perceived as a scientific outsider, but as an active and knowledgeable participant in philosophical debates.... (shrink)

Robert Grosseteste.--Thomas of York.--Roger Bacon.--John Pecham.--Richard of Middleton.--Duns Scotus.--Conclusion.--Bibliography (p. [409]-412).

We accomplish three things in this paper. First, we provide evidence that the motivational internalism/externalism debate in moral psychology could be a false dichotomy born of ambiguity. Second, we provide further evidence for a crucial distinction between two different categories of belief in folk psychology: thick belief and thin belief. Third, we demonstrate how careful attention to deep features of folk psychology can help diagnose and defuse seemingly intractable philosophical disagreement in metaethics.

This paper presents an argument that certain AI safety measures, rather than mitigating existential risk, may instead exacerbate it. Under certain key assumptions - the inevitability of AI failure, the expected correlation between an AI system's power at the point of failure and the severity of the resulting harm, and the tendency of safety measures to enable AI systems to become more powerful before failing - safety efforts have negative expected utility. The paper examines three response strategies: Optimism, Mitigation, and (...) Holism. Each faces challenges stemming from intrinsic features of the AI safety landscape that we term Bottlenecking, the Perfection Barrier, and Equilibrium Fluctuation. The surprising robustness of the argument forces a re-examination of core assumptions around AI safety and points to several avenues for further research. (shrink)

O ensino de filosofia seguiu uma rota tortuosa desde a colônia até os tempos atuais. O breve histórico desse percurso tem o objetivo de reafirmar a necessidade dessa disciplina no currículo escolar, sobretudo porque sempre há aqueles que a consideram de pouca importância. No entanto, em um mundo cada vez mais pragmático, a formação exclusivamente técnica de nossos jovens dificulta o processo de conscientização crítica, além de desprezar a herança de uma sabedoria milenar. Os primeiros tempos No Brasil, desde o (...) século XVI, o ensino de filosofia fazia parte do chamado curso de artes oferecido pelos jesuítas aos filhos de colonos que concluíam o primeiro nível de letras humanas. É bem verdade que apenas alguns colégios dispunham desse curso, voltado exclusivamente para a elite colonial portuguesa. A base do ensino de filosofia era a tradição escolástica, e, mesmo durante os séculos seguintes, não houve interesse em abordar as conquistas das ciências modernas, já vigentes desde o século XVII, na perspectiva de Francis Bacon e das descobertas de Galileu Galilei. Do mesmo modo, não eram ensinadas as teorias de René Descartes e John Locke. Inspirado nos ideais da Contrarreforma, o ensino jesuítico reafirmava a autoridade da Igreja e dos clássicos, com o controle sobre as informações a que os alunos teriam acesso. No século XVIII, os fundamentos aristotélico-tomistas perduraram, com raras exceções, apesar de o marquês de Pombal ter expulsado os jesuítas. O próprio Pombal permitiu a divulgação de algumas dessas obras "esclarecidas", mas cuidou de elencar uma lista das proibidas. Contrariando o controle, as novas ideias circulavam no Brasil por meio de estudantes formados pela Universidade de Coimbra e também pela venda clandestina de panfletos e cópias manuscritas. Desse modo, nas aulas régias, instituídas por Pombal para substituir as escolas dos jesuítas, no geral foi mantida a educação elitista, livresca, desfocada da realidade brasileira durante o império e a república. Apesar do controle, havia exceções, nas poucas vezes em que intelectuais, professores e conhecedores de bibliografia atualizada ensinavam disciplinas como ciências modernas, filosofia e matemática. Algumas congregações religiosas, como a dos franciscanos, também se interessavam pelas contribuições científicas e filosóficas de seu tempo. Ensino de filosofia: entre facultativa e obrigatória A partir do século XIX, predominou um vaivém entre a filosofia como disciplina obrigatória ou facultativa. Com a criação de cursos jurídicos no Brasil, na década de 1820 - em São Paulo e Recife -, a filosofia tornou-se disciplina obrigatória do ensino médio, como pré- requisito para o ingresso ao curso superior, reforçando o caráter propedêutico daquele curso. Em 1915, uma reforma de ensino tornou a filosofia disciplina facultativa, mas o ministro Francisco Campos tentou reverter esse quadro em 1932, tornando-a novamente obrigatória. Conhecido pela atuação no movimento da Escola Nova, Campos aliou seus esforços aos de figuras importantes da pedagogia brasileira, como o sociólogo Fernando de Azevedo e o filósofo e educador Anísio Teixeira. A tendência escolanovista era renovadora e se fazia necessária diante da situação econômica do Brasil. Com o início da industrialização, surgia a necessidade de melhorar a escolarização, sobretudo para os segmentos urbanos. Francisco Campos introduziu as disciplinas de lógica, sociologia e história da filosofia no currículo escolar. Com a Reforma Capanema, em 19142, o ensino secundário dividiu-se em ginasial e colegial. Este último foi subdividido em científico, com ênfase no estudo de ciências, e clássico, que privilegiava a formação em humanidades. Nesse contexto, a filosofia se constituiu como disciplina obrigatória em um dos três anos do científico e em dois anos do curso clássico, com proposta de programa bastante extenso. No entanto, uma sequência de portarias reduziu gradativamente o número de horas-aula da disciplina, por fim, restrita ao último ano do colegial. Em 1961, foi promulgada a nossa primeira Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação (LDBJ, a Lei n. 4.024, ocasião em que o ensino de filosofia perdeu a obrigatoriedade. Período da ditadura militar Durante a ditadura militar no Brasil (1964-1985), as aulas de filosofia foram extintas pela Lei n. 5.692, de 1971. Essa lei reformou o então chamado ensino de 1º e 2º graus e introduziu o ensino profissionalizante, de acordo com a tendência tecnicista proposta pelos acordos entre militares e tecnocratas. Um dos objetivos era adequar a educação às exigências da sociedade industrial e tecnológica, com economia de tempo, esforços e custos. A educação tecnicista encontrava-se imbuída dos ideais de racionalidade, organização, objetividade, eficiência e produtividade, como se fosse uma empresa: esperava-se que, ao terminar cada um dos níveis, o aluno estivesse capacitado para ingressar no mercado como força de trabalho, caso necessário. Para implantar o projeto de educação proposto, o governo militar não revogou a LDB de 1961, mas introduziu alterações e fez atualizações. Enquanto a aprovação da LDB resultara de amplo debate na sociedade civil, o governo autoritário regulamentou as leis do ensino universitário (Lei n. 5.540/1968) e do ensino de 1º e 2º graus (Lei n. 5.692/1971) de maneira impositiva. Diversos acordos, conhecidos como MEC-Usaid (Ministério da Educação e Cultura e United States Agency for International Development), ofereceram assistência técnica e cooperação financeira para implantar a reforma. A habilitação profissional constituiu-se em um emaranhado de "ofertas" que chegavam a 130 habilitações profissionais distribuídas conforme os cursos e as regiões do país. Algumas disciplinas desapareceram, como a de filosofia, e outras foram aglutinadas. Por sua vez, a inclusão de Moral e Cívica no primeiro nível e de Organização Social e Política no segundo exerceu a clara intenção de doutrinamento político. Há controvérsias em torno da extinção da filosofia do currículo escolar. Para alguns, a extinção revelava a intenção explícita dos governos militares de evitarem o desenvolvimento do pensamento crítico. Outros analisam de modo diferente, alegando que, com raríssimas exceções, o ensino da filosofia reduzia-se à história da filosofia, com ênfase na memorização, não representando, portanto, nenhuma ameaça ao regime de exceção, por desempenhar papel submisso e nada subversivo. Além disso, de acordo com o viés tecnicista da reforma, havia necessidade de mais espaço para incluir disciplinas voltadas para a habilitação profissional. Já nas universidades, era possível notar o crescente desprestígio da filosofia, tendo ocorrido perseguição a professores, muitos deles exilados. Todavia, o propósito de formar profissionais, conforme propunha a nova lei, não se concretizou. A escola pública se fragilizou ainda mais, enquanto algumas boas escolas da rede particular encontraram meios de contornar a lei e oferecer um ensino de qualidade com os mesmos conteúdos que visavam desenvolver o espírito crítico e, portanto, a capacidade de seus alunos pensarem por si mesmos. Em 1982, no clima da abertura democrática, a Lei n. 7.01-114 permitiu a reinserção da filosofia no currículo como optativa, a critério do estabelecimento de ensino. Nada foi conseguido sem esforço, mas com trabalho intenso e pressão da sociedade civil. Associações especialmente criadas para esse fim aglutinaram professores de cursos secundários e superiores para promoverem encontros, movimentos de protesto e contatos com autoridades governamentais, no esforço conjunto para alcançar aquele objetivo. Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional (LDB) n. 9.394/1996 Após a aprovação da Constituição brasileira de 1988, restava elaborar a lei complementar para tratar das Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional. A primeira LDB, de 1961, levara muito tempo para ser aprovada e ofereceu no final um texto já envelhecido. Devido a esse fato, havia interesse em acelerar a regulamentação da nova LDB, o que ocorreu em dezembro de 1996, com a publicação da Lei n. 9.394. O primeiro projeto da nova LDB baseou-se em amplo debate, não só na Câmara, mas também na sociedade civil, além de várias entidades sindicais, científicas, estudantis e segmentos organizados da educação. O projeto original exigiu do relator Jorge Hage importante trabalho de finalização, já que a nova lei não resultaria de exclusiva iniciativa do Executivo, e sim do debate democrático da comunidade educacional. No entanto, com apoio do governo e do ministro da Educação, o senador Darcy Ribeiro apresentou outro projeto que começara a ser discutido paralelamente e que terminou por ser aprovado. Como ficou a situação do ensino de filosofia? Apesar do movimento consistente que continuava defendendo o retorno da filosofia ao ensino médio, foi grande a decepção. Vejamos por quê. Ao estabelecer as finalidades da educação básica e as diretrizes dos conteúdos curriculares, essa lei destacava a importância da formação para o exercício da cidadania, a difusão de valores fundamentais ao interesse social, aos direitos e deveres dos cidadãos e de respeito ao bem comum e à ordem democrática. Foi recomendado também o aprimoramento do educando como pessoa humana, por meio de formação ética e desenvolvimento da autonomia intelectual e do pensamento crítico. Conforme a LDB sob Lei 9.394/98: Art. 22. A educação básica tem por finalidades desenvolver o educando, assegurar-lhe a formação comum indispensável para o exercício da cidadania e fornecer-lhe meios para progredir no trabalho e em estudos posteriores. Art. 27. Os conteúdos curriculares da educação básica observarão, ainda, as seguintes diretrizes: I – a difusão de valores fundamentais ao interesse social, aos direitos e deveres dos cidadãos, de respeito ao bem comum e à ordem democrática; II – consideração das condições de escolaridade dos alunos em cada estabelecimento; III – orientação para o trabalho; IV – promoção do desporto educacional e apoio às práticas desportivas não- formais. Art. 35. O ensino médio, etapa final da educação básica, com duração mínima de três anos, terá como finalidades: I – a consolidação e o aprofundamento dos conhecimentos adquiridos no ensino fundamental, possibilitando o prosseguimento de estudos; II – a preparação básica para o trabalho e a cidadania do educando, para continuar aprendendo, de modo a ser capaz de se adaptar com flexibilidade a novas condições de ocupação ou aperfeiçoamento posteriores; III – o aprimoramento do educando como pessoa humana, incluindo a formação ética e o desenvolvimento da autonomia intelectual e do pensamento crítico; IV – a compreensão dos fundamentos científico-tecnológicos dos processos produtivos, relacionando a teoria com a prática, no ensino de cada disciplina. Por fim, ficou claro no artigo 36, parágrafo 1º, inciso III (revogado pela Lei n. 11.684, de 2008), que os conteúdos, as metodologias e as formas de avaliação deveriam ser organizados de tal maneira que ao final do ensino médio o educando demonstrasse "domínio dos conhecimentos de filosofia e de sociologia necessários ao exercício da cidadania". Embora a educação para a cidadania constituísse um objetivo visado por qualquer disciplina, com mais razão o professor de filosofia teria condições de abordá-la explicitamente, não só por tomá-la como um de seus conteúdos, mas principalmente pelo seu caráter problematizador e argumentativo, próprio da filosofia. Portanto, seria válido supor que o artigo 36 definisse a reinserção da filosofia no currículo, ministrada por profissional formado na área, o que de fato não se concretizou, e o ensino de filosofia permaneceu como não obrigatório. Posteriormente, conforme a Resolução CEB n. 3/1998, "as propostas pedagógicas das escolas deverão assegurar o tratamento interdisciplinar e contextualizado para os conhecimentos de filosofia e de sociologia necessários ao exercício da cidadania" (artigo 10, parágrafo 2º, alínea b]. Ou seja, professores de outras disciplinas seriam responsáveis por esses "temas transversais", orientação que prevaleceu nos Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais. Um pouco antes, em 1997, dando continuidade a anseios de educadores, o deputado federal Padre Roque Zimmermann apresentara projeto de lei para tornar obrigatório o ensino de filosofia e sociologia no currículo do ensino médio. Após sua aprovação no Senado, em 2001, o projeto foi vetado pelo então presidente Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Finalmente, em 2008, o artigo 36 da LDB sofreu alteração, tornando obrigatório o ensino de filosofia e de sociologia no currículo do ensino médio, por meio da Lei n. 11.684/2008. Na sequência da aprovação, continua em andamento a implantação desse projeto de ensino. Esperamos que o espaço conquistado não venha a sofrer mais tarde nova retração. REFERÊNCIAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS ARANHA, M. L. de A.; MARTINS, H. P. Filosofando: Introdução à Filosofia. 6ª ed. São Paulo: Moderna, 2016. BRASIL. Ministério de Educação e Cultura. Ciências humanas e suas tecnologias. In: Orientações Curriculares para o Ensino Médio. Brasília: Ministério da Educação; Secretaria de Educação Básica, 2006. ______________________________________. LDB - Lei nº 9394/96, de 20 de dezembro de 1996. Estabelece as diretrizes e bases da Educação Nacional. Brasília: MEC, 1996. Disponível em: Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional - Biblioteca do Senado. Acesso em: 11 Jun. 2019. ______________________________________. Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais. Ensino Médio: Bases Legais. Brasília: MEC, 1999. ______________________________________. Resolução CEB n° 3 de 1998. Institui as Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais para o Ensino Médio. Brasília: MEC, 1998. Disponível em: Resolução CEB n° 3 de 1998. Acesso em: 11 Jun. 2019. KOHAN, W. O. (Org.). Políticas do ensino de filosofia. Rio de Janeiro: DP6A, 2014. (shrink)

INTRODUÇÃO Para compreender como a Sociologia nasceu e se desenvolveu, é essencial analisar as transformações que ocorreram a partir do século XIV, na Europa ocidental, marcando a passagem da sociedade feudal para a sociedade capitalista, ou a passagem da sociedade medieval para a sociedade moderna. Para isso, é necessário realizar uma pequena viagem histórica, já que, para entender as ideias de um autor e de determinada época, é fundamental contextualizá-las historicamente. Em cada sociedade, em todos os tempos, os seres humanos (...) elaboraram explicações religiosas, míticas, culturais, étnicas etc. para as situações em que vivem. No século XIX, a busca por outro tipo de explicação para os fenômenos da sociedade – a explicação científica – deu origem à Sociologia. Para demonstrar como o pensamento social organizou-se historicamente e como a Sociologia estruturou o saber sobre a sociedade humana, este trabalho terá como objetivo estudar alguns autores que se sobressaíram no processo de desenvolvimento dessa ciência. PREMISSA A Sociologia surgiu como um corpo de ideias a respeito do processo de constituição, consolidação e desenvolvimento da sociedade moderna. É fruto da Revolução Industrial e, nesse sentido, é denominada “ciência da crise”, porque, com base nela, procurou-se dar respostas às questões sociais desencadeadas pelo processo revolucionário que, num primeiro momento, alterou a sociedade europeia e, depois, a maior parte do mundo. Como todas as ciências, a Sociologia não despontou de repente ou da reflexão de algum autor iluminado. Constituiu-se com base em conhecimentos sobre a natureza e a sociedade que se desenvolveram a partir do século XIV, acompanhando as mudanças que marcaram a transformação da sociedade feudal e a constituição da sociedade capitalista. Entre essas mudanças, a expansão marítima europeia e a ampliação do comércio ultramarino, a Reforma protestante e o desenvolvimento científico e tecnológico podem destacados. São o pano de fundo do movimento intelectual que alterou profundamente as formas de explicar a natureza e a sociedade. Essas mudanças estão todas vinculadas e não podem ser entendidas como eventos isolados. 1 A EXPANSÃO MARÍTIMA Com a circum-navegação da África e o descobrimento da rota para as Índias e para a América, a concepção de mundo dos europeus foi consideravelmente ampliada. A definição de um mundo territorialmente bem mais vasto, com outros povos, outras culturas e outros modos de explicar as coisas, requereu a reformulação da maneira de ver e de pensar dos europeus. Assim, ao mesmo tempo que conheciam novos povos e novas culturas, os europeus instalavam colônias na África, na Ásia e na América. Em razão disso, expandiu-se o comércio de mercadorias (sedas, especiarias e produtos tropicais, como açúcar, milho, tabaco e café) entre as metrópoles e as colônias, bem como entre os países europeus. Surgiu a possibilidade de um mercado muito mais amplo e com características mundiais. Este seria o primeiro grande movimento de globalização. A exploração de metais preciosos, principalmente na América, e o tráfico de escravos para suprir a mão de obra nas colônias deram grande impulso ao comércio, que não mais ficou restrito aos mercadores das cidades-repúblicas (Veneza, Florença ou Flandres), passando também para as mãos de grandes comerciantes e de soberanos dos Estados nacionais em formação na Europa. Toda essa expansão territorial e comercial acelerou o desenvolvimento da economia monetária, com a acumulação de capitais pela burguesia comercial, que, mais tarde, teve importância decisiva na gestação do processo de industrialização da Europa. 2 A REFORMA PROTESTANTE No século XVI, assistiu-se também ao movimento que ficaria conhecido como Reforma protestante. Os reformistas questionavam as condutas do clero, a estrutura da Igreja católica e a autoridade do Papa. Os líderes do movimento promoviam a valorização do indivíduo ao pregar a livre leitura das Escrituras Sagradas e dispensar a intermediação dos ministros da Igreja nas práticas religiosas e nos assuntos relativos à fé. A Reforma contribuiu, assim, para alimentar um movimento de resistência à autoridade e à tradição que desembocaria na Ilustração. Entre seus principais líderes figuram Martinho Lutero (1483-1546) e João Calvino (1509-1564). 3 O DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO A nova maneira de se relacionar com as coisas sagradas foi acompanhada de uma nova forma de analisar o universo e a vida em sociedade. A razão passou a ser considerada essencial para conhecer o mundo; com base nela, as pessoas se consideraram livres para julgar, avaliar, pensar e emitir opiniões sem se submeter a nenhuma autoridade transcendente ou divina. A análise do universo e da vida em sociedade com base no conhecimento racional, fundado na observação e na experimentação, difundiu-se de maneira lenta, entre os séculos XV e XVII. Os pensadores que adotaram essa forma de análise enfrentaram o dogmatismo e a autoridade da Igreja. Por meio do Concílio de Trento (1545-1563) e dos processos da Inquisição, por exemplo, os membros do clero procuraram impedir toda e qualquer manifestação que pudesse pôr em dúvida a autoridade eclesiástica, fosse no campo da fé, fosse no das explicações que se propunham para a sociedade e a natureza. Os principais representantes do pensamento racional nos séculos XV a XVII foram Nicolau Maquiavel (1469-1527), Erasmo de Roterdã (1466-1536), Nicolau Copérnico (1473- 1543), Galileu Galilei (1564 -1642), Thomas Hobbes (1588 -1679), Francis Bacon (1561- 1626), René Descartes (1596 -1650) e Baruch Spinoza (1632 -1677). Os conhecimentos desses precursores alimentaram outros pensadores, como John Locke (1632-1704), Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) e Isaac Newton (1643-1727), que propuseram novos princípios para a compreensão da sociedade e da natureza. Vale salientar, por fim, que os pensadores europeus dos séculos XV a XVII buscaram compreender os fenômenos da natureza e da sociedade por meio da observação e da experimentação. 4 AS TRANSFORMAÇÕES NO SÉCULO XVIII No final do século XVIII, na maioria dos países europeus, a burguesia comercial, formada basicamente por comerciantes e banqueiros, constituía uma classe poderosa, em razão, na maior parte das vezes, das ligações econômicas que mantinha com as monarquias. Além de sustentar o comércio entre os países europeus, a burguesia europeia lançava seus tentáculos a vários pontos do mundo, até onde pudesse chegar, comprando e vendendo mercadorias. O capital mercantil estendia-se também a outro ramo de atividade: gradativamente se organizava a produção manufatureira. A compra de matérias-primas e a organização da produção, por meio do trabalho domiciliar ou do trabalho em oficinas, levavam ao desenvolvimento de um novo processo produtivo em contraposição ao das corporações de ofício. Os organizadores das manufaturas passaram a se interessar cada vez mais pelo aperfeiçoamento das técnicas de produção, a fim de produzir mais com menos gente e aumentar significativamente seus lucros. Para tanto, procuraram financiar a invenção de máquinas que pudessem ser utilizadas no processo produtivo. Com a invenção das máquinas de tecer e de descaroçar algodão, e a aplicação industrial da máquina a vapor e de outros tantos inventos destinados a aumentar a produtividade do trabalho, desenvolveu-se o fenômeno que veio a ser chamado de maquinofatura. O trabalho que as pessoas faziam com as mãos ou com ferramentas passava, a partir de então, a ser realizado por máquinas, elevando muito o volume da produção de mercadorias. A utilização da máquina a vapor, que podia mover outras tantas, impulsionou a indústria construtora de máquinas e, consequentemente, a indústria voltada para a produção de ferro e, posteriormente, de aço. Nesse contexto de profundas alterações no processo produtivo, no qual a utilização do trabalho mecânico era cada vez mais frequente, o trabalho artesanal continuou a existir. A maquinofatura se completou com o trabalho assalariado, no qual eram utilizadas, numa escala crescente, a mão de obra feminina e a infantil. Longe da Europa, explorava-se ouro no Brasil, prata no México e algodão nos Estados Unidos da América e na Índia. A maioria dessas atividades era realizada com a utilização do trabalho escravo ou servil. Esses elementos, conjugados, asseguraram as bases do processo de acumulação necessária para a expansão da indústria na Europa. Essas mudanças, somadas à herança cultural e intelectual do século XVII, definiram o século XVIII como explosivo. Se no século anterior a Revolução Inglesa determinou novas formas de organização política, no século XVIII a Revolução Americana e a Francesa alteraram o quadro político ocidental e serviram de exemplo e parâmetro para as revoluções políticas posteriores. As transformações na esfera da produção, a emergência de novas formas de organização política e a exigência da representação popular conferiram características muito específicas a esse século, em que pensadores como Charles de Montesquieu (1689 -1755), Voltaire (1694 - 1778), Denis Diderot (1713 -1784), Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717 -1783), David Hume (1711 -1776), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 -1778), Adam Smith (1723 -1790) e Immanuel Kant (1724 -1804) procuraram, por caminhos às vezes divergentes, refletir sobre a realidade, na tentativa de explicá-la. (shrink)

Moral encroachment is the thesis that morality has an effect---unrecognized by traditional epistemology---on which doxastic states are epistemically appropriate. The thesis is increasingly popular among those who, in opposition to Gendler (2011), desire harmony between epistemic and moral demands on belief. This paper has three main goals. First, drawing on attractive structural principles concerning belief and justification, it is shown that a thoroughgoing harmony between moral and epistemic demands is implausible. This weakens the motivation for positing moral encroachment, but a (...) proponent might still hope that moral encroachment can have a significant effect, so that many of the central cases of apparent disharmony can be avoided. The next goal of the paper is to argue that any significant effect of moral encroachment would manifest itself in the credences which are most epistemically appropriate. Finally, it is shown that even a small effect of moral encroachment on credence is in tension with widely accepted basic constraints on epistemically appropriate credence. (shrink)

Super-Humeans argue that the most parsimonious ontology of the natural world compatible with our best physical theories consists exclusively of particles and the distance relations between them. This paper argues by contrast that Super-Humean reduction goes insufficiently far, by showing there to be a more parsimonious ontology compatible with physics: Ultimate-Humeanism. This novel view posits an ontology consisting solely of the particles and distance relations required for the existence of a single brain. Super-Humeans impose conditions on what counts as an (...) ontology of the natural world to avoid their view slipping into this kind of ontology, but these conditions are arbitrarily imposed and once this is exposed, Super-Humeans face a dilemma. Either they can embrace Ultimate-Humeanism as the minimal ontology of the natural world compatible with physics, or (more likely) they can rethink the methodology that got them there. Overall, this paper argues that Super-Humeanism currently lacks principled motivation, outlines a framework for naturalistic ontological reductions, and exposes the consequences of unchecked adherence to a simplicity-driven methodology. (shrink)

The paper begins by reviewing two problems for fallibilism: the lottery problem, or the problem of explaining why fallible evidence, though otherwise excellent, is not enough to know that one will lose the lottery, and Gettier problems. It is then argued that both problems can be resolved if we note an important illocutionary force of knowledge attributions: namely, that when we attribute knowledge to someone we mean to give the person credit for getting things right. Alternatively, to say that a (...) person knows is to say that she got things right due to her own abilities, efforts and actions, rather than due to dumb luck, or blind chance, or something else. (shrink)

Nearly all success is due to some mix of ability and luck. But some successes we attribute to the agent’s ability, whereas others we attribute to luck. To better understand the criteria distinguishing credit from luck, we conducted a series of four studies on knowledge attributions. Knowledge is an achievement that involves reaching the truth. But many factors affecting the truth are beyond our control and reaching the truth is often partly due to luck. Which sorts of luck are compatible (...) with knowledge? We find that knowledge attributions are highly sensitive to lucky events that change the explanation for why a belief is true. By contrast, knowledge attributions are surprisingly insensitive to lucky events that threaten but ultimately fail to change the explanation for why a belief is true. These results shed light on our concept of knowledge, help explain apparent inconsistencies in prior work on knowledge attributions, and constitute progress toward a general understanding of the relation between success and luck. (shrink)

The Metaphysics of Free Will provides a through statement of the major grounds for skepticism about the reality of free will and moral responsibility. The author identifies and explains the sort of control that is associated with personhood and accountability, and shows how it is consistent with causal determinism. In so doing, out view of ourselves as morally responsible agents is protected against the disturbing changes posed by science and religion.

The heart of Dewey’s call to humanize techno-industrial civilization was to conceive science and technology in the service of aesthetic consummations. Hence his philosophy suggests a way to reclaim and affirm technology on behalf of living more fulfilling lives. He remains a powerful ally today in the fight against deadening efficiency, narrow means-end calculation, “frantic exploitation,” and the industrialization of everything. Nonetheless, it is common to depict him as a philosopher we should think around rather than with. The first section (...) of this essay explores his philosophy of technology and environment in light of Bacon, Heidegger, and Borgmann. Most of the techno-industrial and vocational activities which we pretend are “instrumental,” Dewey argued, actually reduce “to a very minimum the esthetic aspect of experiences had in the course of the daily occupation.” It is argued that, insofar as cooperative intelligence can guide the direction of technological development, it does not honor contemplative life if we abdicate or downgrade that responsibility. The second section of this essay explores Dewey’s instrumentalism as a critique of vicious intellectualism. It is argued that, for Dewey, genuine progress serves the aesthetic dimension of experience. This assertion contrasts with the most common interpretive error among both critics and admirers of Dewey, namely that he is mostly a champion of science. Moreover, critics of Dewey’s instrumentalist theory of inquiry often mistake it as (a) an attack on any conception of intrinsic value, or (b) an attempt to collapse the value of means into the value of ends. In Dewey’s view, we habitually look for progress in the wrong place because we carry around with us some big idea of a final and ultimate good for measuring it. In his view, the ameliorative expansion of significance that emerges from our dealings with perplexing situations is the only place progress can really be found. (shrink)

Soon there will be sex robots. The creation of such devices raises a host of social, legal and ethical questions. In this article, I focus in on one of them. What if these sex robots are deliberately designed and used to replicate acts of rape and child sexual abuse? Should the creation and use of such robots be criminalised, even if no person is harmed by the acts performed? I offer an argument for thinking that they should be. The argument (...) consists of two premises. The first claims that it can be a proper object of the criminal law to regulate wrongful conduct with no extrinsically harmful effects on others. The second claims that the use of robots that replicate acts of rape and child sexual abuse would be wrongful, even if such usage had no extrinsically harmful effects on others. I defend both premises of this argument and consider its implications for the criminal law. I do not offer a conclusive argument for criminalisation, nor would I wish to be interpreted as doing so; instead, I offer a tentative argument and a framework for future debate. This framework may also lead one to question the proposed rationales for criminalisation. (shrink)

Contemporary critical instincts, in early modern studies as elsewhere in literary theory, often dismiss invocations of mind and cognition as inevitably ahistorical, as performing a retrograde version of anachronism. Arguing that our experience of time is inherently anachronistic and polytemporal, we draw on the frameworks of distributed cognition and extended mind to theorize cognition as itself distributed, cultural, and temporal. Intelligent, embodied action is a hybrid process, involving the coordination of disparate neural, affective, cognitive, interpersonal, ecological, technological, and cultural resources. (...) Because the diverse elements of such coupled systems each have their own histories and dynamics, many distinctive or competing times are built in to the very mechanisms of remembering and reasoning. We make this argument by means of two distinct case histories: a reading of the site-specific audio walk of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff; and an extended discussion of a famously anachronistic moment in William Shakespeare’s King Lear. These readings reveal the inherent polytemporalities of human mental and social life. (shrink)

Many philosophers favour the simple knowledge account of assertion, which says you may assert something only if you know it. The simple account is true but importantly incomplete. I defend a more informative thesis, namely, that you may assert something only if your assertion expresses knowledge. I call this 'the express knowledge account of assertion', which I argue better handles a wider range of cases while at the same time explaining the simple knowledge account's appeal. §1 introduces some new data (...) that a knowledge account of assertion well explains. §2 explains the simple knowledge account's advantage over two of its main competitors. §3 presents a problem for the simple account and offers a solution, which is to adopt the express knowledge account. §4 encapsulates the case for the express knowledge account, and offers a unifying vision for the epistemology of belief and assertion. §5 answers an objection. §6 briefly sums up. Even those who ultimately reject my conclusion can still benefit from the new data presented in §1, and learn an important lesson from the problem discussed in §3, which demonstrates a general constraint on an acceptable account of the norm of assertion. (shrink)

Can judging that an agent blamelessly broke a rule lead us to claim, paradoxically, that no rule was broken at all? Surprisingly, it can. Across seven experiments, we document and explain the phenomenon of excuse validation. We found when an agent blamelessly breaks a rule, it significantly distorts people’s description of the agent’s conduct. Roughly half of people deny that a rule was broken. The results suggest that people engage in excuse validation in order to avoid indirectly blaming others for (...) blameless transgressions. Excuse validation has implications for recent debates in normative ethics, epistemology and the philosophy of language. These debates have featured thought experiments perfectly designed to trigger excuse validation, inhibiting progress in these areas. (shrink)

The target of our paper is to articulate the grounds that legitimize the foundation of an African Traditional Religion as a distinct religious enterprise with its own philosophical fundamentals as well as its own tenets and framework. In this paper, we engage the relevant concepts that are crucial to the success to any paper that attempts to demonstrate the reality of African Traditional Religion (henceforth, ATR): specifically, we will engage the questions of the existence of a Supreme Being, the problem (...) of evil, and the structure of a properly ATR theodicy. (shrink)

The concept of practical knowledge is central to G.E.M. Anscombe's argument in Intention, yet its meaning is little understood. There are several reasons for this, including a lack of attention to Anscombe's ancient and medieval sources for the concept, and an emphasis on the more straightforward concept of knowledge "without observation" in the interpretation of Anscombe's position. This paper remedies the situation, first by appealing to the writings of Thomas Aquinas to develop an account of practical knowledge as a distinctive (...) form of thought that "aims at production" of things that lie within an agent's power; and then by showing how this Thomistic understanding of practical cognition seems to have been Anscombe's, too. Having done this, I question whether the thesis that agential knowledge is practical knowledge entails that an agent always has non-observational knowledge of what she is intentionally doing. I answer "Not": Anscombe's claims to the contrary rest on a misleading assimilation of human beings' finite agency to that of an infinite agent like God. (shrink)

An impressive case has been built for the hypothesis that knowledge is the norm of assertion, otherwise known as the knowledge account of assertion. According to the knowledge account, you should assert something only if you know that it’s true. A wealth of observational data supports the knowledge account, and some recent empirical results lend further, indirect support. But the knowledge account has not yet been tested directly. This paper fills that gap by reporting the results of such a test. (...) The knowledge account passes with flying colors. (shrink)

It is increasingly recognized that knowledge is the norm of assertion. As this view has gained popularity, it has also garnered criticism. One widely discussed criticism involves thought experiments about “selfless assertion.” Selfless assertions are said to be intuitively compelling examples where agents should assert propositions that they don’t even believe and, hence, don’t know. This result is then taken to show that knowledge is not the norm of assertion. This paper reports four experiments demonstrating that “selfless assertors” are viewed (...) as both believing and knowing the propositions they assert: this is the natural and intuitive way of interpreting the case. Thought experiments about selfless assertions do not threaten the knowledge account and they do not motivate weaker alternative accounts. The discussion also highlights a general lesson for philosophers: thought experiments intended to probe for mental state attributions should not conflict with basic principles that guide social cognition. (shrink)

If Australasian philosophers constitute the kind of group to which a collective identity or broadly shared self-image can plausibly be ascribed, the celebrated history of Australian materialism rightly lies close to its heart. Jack Smart’s chapter in this volume, along with an outstanding series of briefer essays in A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand (Forrest 2010; Gold 2010; Koksvik 2010; Lycan 2010; Matthews 2010; Nagasawa 2010; Opie 2010; Stoljar 2010a), effectively describe the naturalistic realism of Australian philosophy (...) of mind. In occasional semi-serious psychogeographic speculation, this long-standing and strongly-felt intellectual attitude has been traced back to the influences of our light, land, or lifestyle (Devitt 1996, x; compare comments by Chalmers and O’Brien in Mitchell, 2006). Australasian work in philosophy of mind and cognition has become more diverse in the last 40 years, but is almost all still marked, in one way or another, by the history of these debates on materialism. (shrink)

A woman is listening to Sinatra before work. As she later describes it, ‘suddenly from nowhere I could hear my mother singing along to it … I was there again home again, hearing my mother … God knows why I should choose to remember that … then, to actually hear her and I had this image in my head … of being at home … with her singing away … like being transported back you know I got one of those (...) … like shivery feelings really suddenly’ (Anderson 2004, 9-10). An older couple, discussing their honeymoon forty years ago, each say that they can’t remember the show they saw, until through iterative, puzzled cross-cuing they finally get there – ‘Desert Song, that’s it’ (Harris et al 2011, 292). An elderly English veteran of a prisoner of war camp in Japan, finishing up morning tea with a young Japanese social scientist interested in reconciliation, suddenly calls out loudly - in Japanese - ‘stand to attention’. He stands to attention in front of her: like many of the men she interviews, he physically re-enacts fragments of that long-past world of the camp, bringing that absent past into this new present context with a visceral shock (Murakami 2001, 2012; Middleton & Brown 2005, 133-136). (shrink)

Leading virtue epistemologists defend the view that knowledge must proceed from intellectual virtue and they understand virtues either as refned character traits cultivated by the agent over time through deliberate effort, or as reliable cognitive abilities. Philosophical situationists argue that results from empirical psychology should make us doubt that we have either sort of epistemic virtue, thereby discrediting virtue epistemology’s empirical adequacy. I evaluate this situationist challenge and outline a successor to virtue epistemology: abilism . Abilism delivers all the main (...) benefts of virtue epistemology and is as empirically adequate as any theory in philosophy or the social sciences could hope to be. (shrink)

I attempt to describe and defend an alternative definition of insanity. I claim that my definition follows from an adequate general understanding of legal excuse and that it describes correctly the question that jurors in the recent Andrea Yates case and others like it ought to be faced with. My essay has three parts. In the first, I briefly criticize M'Naghten- and Durham-inspired insanity statutes. In the second, I sketch and defend a general understanding of legal excuse and try to (...) show how an adequate insanity statute follows from it. Finally, in the third section, I describe and defend a rough version of the statute itself. In the course of doing so, I try to explain why I believe that statute is superior to the American Law Institute's various model insanity statutes. (shrink)

Two options are incommensurate in value if neither is better than the other, and if a small improvement or worsening of one does not necessarily make it determinately better or worse than the other. If a person faces a sequence of choices between incommensurate options, she may end up with a worse options than she could have had, even though none of her choices are irrational. Yet it seems that rationality should save her from this bad outcome. This is the (...) practical problem posed by incommensurability of values, and it may be solved by a new account of practical reasoning. (shrink)

It’s a cornerstone of epistemology that knowledge requires truth – that is, that knowledge is factive. Allan Hazlett boldly challenges orthodoxy by arguing thatthe ordinary concept of knowledge is not factive. On this basis Hazlett further argues that epistemologists shouldn’t concern themselves with the ordinary concept of knowledge, or knowledge ascriptions and related linguistic phenomena. I argue that either Hazlett is wrong about the ordinary concept of knowledge, or he’s right in a way that leaves epistemologists to carry on exactly (...) as they have, paying attention to much the same things they always did. (shrink)

The epistemic closure principle says that knowledge is closed under known entailment. The closure principle is deeply implicated in numerous core debates in contemporary epistemology. Closure’s opponents claim that there are good theoretical reasons to abandon it. Closure’s proponents claim that it is a defining feature of ordinary thought and talk and, thus, abandoning it is radically revisionary. But evidence for these claims about ordinary practice has thus far been anecdotal. In this paper, I report five studies on the status (...) of epistemic closure in ordinary practice. Despite decades of widespread assumptions to the contrary in philosophy, ordinary practice is ambivalent about closure. Ordinary practice does not endorse an unqualified version of the epistemic closure principle, although it might endorse a source-relative version of the principle. In particular, whereas inferential knowledge is not viewed as closed under known entailment, perceptual knowledge might be. (shrink)

Experiences of embodied remembering are familiar and diverse. We settle bodily into familiar chairs or find our way easily round familiar rooms. We inhabit our own kitchens or cars or workspaces effectively and comfortably, and feel disrupted when our habitual and accustomed objects or technologies change or break or are not available. Hearing a particular song can viscerally bring back either one conversation long ago, or just the urge to dance. Some people explicitly use their bodies to record, store, or (...) cue memories. Others can move skilfully, without stopping to think, in complex and changing environments thanks to the cumulative expertise accrued in their history of fighting fires, or dancing, or playing hockey. The forms of memory involved in these cases may be distinct, operating at different timescales and levels, and by way of different mechanisms and media, but they often cooperate in the many contexts of our practices of remembering. (shrink)

[Edited from Conclusion section:] We have looked at various challenging issues to do with getting connectionism to cope with high-level cognitive activities such a reasoning and natural language understanding. The issues are to do with various facets of generalization that are not commonly noted. We have been concerned in particular with the special forms these issues take in the arena of propositional attitude processing. The main problems we have looked at are: (1) The need to construct explicit representations of generalizations, (...) not just generalize correctly to individual cases; (2) The need to be able to match two or more complex short-term information structures, to enable rapid generalization from recent examples rather than from long-term memories; (3) The need to represent and reason with anomalous combinations of concepts; (4) The need to perform embedded reasoning. This presents special problems for systems using non-concatenative representations (as in mainstream connectionist approaches). We also touched on vague quantification in attitude report complements. Neither this topic nor that of analogies between short-term structures (point 2) has been adequately addressed in the symbolic framework, let alone in connectionism. -/- The opportunities and problems covered are put forward as things worth being optimistic about or pessimistic about, respectively. They are not put forward as decisive arguments for or against connectionism. The hope is that this chapter contributes to a greater understanding of the connectionist/symbolist gap by presenting some unusual issues and by throwing new light on some well known ones. (shrink)

Visualizing and mental imagery are thought to be cognitive states by all sides of the imagery debate. Yet the phenomenology of those states has distinctly visual ingredients. This has potential consequences for the hypothesis that vision is cognitively impenetrable, the ability of visual processes to ground perceptual warrant and justification, and the distinction between cognitive and perceptual phenomenology. I explore those consequences by describing two forms of visual ambiguity that involve visualizing: the ability to visually experience a picture surface as (...) flat after it has caused volumetric nonconceptual contents, and the ability to use a surface initially perceived as flat to visualize three-dimensional scenes. In both cases, the visual processes which extract viewer-centered volumetric shapes have to rely solely on monocular depth cues in the absence of parallax and stereopsis. Those processes can be cognitively penetrated by acts of visualizing, including ones that draw on conceptual information about kinds. However, the penetrability of the visual processes does not weaken their ability to provide perceptual warrant and justification for beliefs. The reason is that picture perceptions—whether they are stimulus -driven or based on acts of visualizing—are different to object perceptions both phenomenologically and in terms of their functional roles as states. Thus, although the penetrability of the visual processes does mean that subjects can have visual experiences with contradictory contents, perceptual belief is adopted at most towards one set of contents, and questions of warrant and justification are raised only for those contents. A rule-proving exception is provided by trompe-l’oeils. (shrink)

Most properties have comparatives, which are relations. For instance, the property of width has the comparative relation denoted by `_ is wider than _'. Let us say a property is reducible to its comparative if any statement that refers to the property has the same meaning as another statement that refers to the comparative instead. Width is not reducible to its comparative. To be sure, many statements that refer to width are reducible: for instance, `The Mississippi is wide' means the (...) same as `The Mississippi is wider than most rivers'. But some statements that refer to width are not reducible: for instance, `Electrons have zero width' is not. A property is not reducible to its comparative if it has absolute degrees, and specifically an absolute zero. A property's comparative relation places things in an order from those that have the property least to those that have it most. If there is an absolute zero point somewhere in this ordering, the property is not reducible to its comparative. For width, there is an absolute zero at one end of the ordering, so width is not reducible. The property of goodness is reducible to its comparative, betterness. In particular, there is no absolute zero of goodness. Things are ordered by betterness – some things are better than others – but nothing is absolutely good or absolutely bad. This is an exaggeration. In certain applications, goodness does have absolute degrees of a sort, and an absolute zero. For instance, it makes sense to say an event is good, and another event bad. These are absolute degrees of a sort, but they are themselves reducible to betterness. To say an event is good simply means the event is better than what would otherwise have happened. The goodness of lives has a different sort of absolute zero. Lives are ordered by betterness; some lives are better than others. We can make sense of the question `Where in this ordering is the division between lives that are good and those that are bad?' The division between good and bad lives is again reducible to betterness. To say a person's life is good means it is better that the person should continue living, rather than that she should die. Or it may mean it is better that her life should be lived rather than that it should never have been lived at all. As it is often put: a good life is a life worth living. Derek Parfit appears to attach a different sense to the idea of a good life. He appears to mean a life that contains a preponderance of good things (such as pleasure) over bad things (such as pain). If a life contains no good things and no bad things, it has zero goodness in this sense. In this sense, absolute goodness and the absolute zero of goodness are not reducible to betterness. However, this is a naturalistic sense of goodness, and it is subject to the open-question objection. If a life contains no good things and no bad things, it is an open question whether it has zero goodness. It might, for instance, be a bad thing that this life should be lived. In discussing the evil of death, some philosophers seem to have been searching for an absolute goodness that is not reducible to betterness. Thomas Nagel speaks of an asymmetry between what is good about life and what is bad about death. But if a person's life is good, that only means it would be better that she should continue living than that she should die. And if a person's death would be bad, that only means it would be worse that she should die than that she should continue living. So there can be no asymmetry. (shrink)

Sobre Filosofia clinica e Reflexões sobre o que é o humano.

This chapter presents a historical study of how science has developed and of how philosophical theories of many sorts – philosophy of science, theory of the understanding, and philosophical theology – both enable and constrain certain lines of development in scientific practice. Its topic is change in the legitimacy or acceptability of scientific explanation that invokes purposes, or ends; specifically in the argument from design, in the natural science field of physico-theology, around the start of the eighteenth century. ... The (...) context that produced physico-theology was clearly religious and political. It is unsurprising that a large body of Protestant intellectuals well-placed in a relatively peaceful society with a strong tradition of open speech, would develop links between science and critical discussion of both divinity and the Bible. There were also bounds to the discussion, as Newton, who chose to sit on the sidelines, knew well. Many others on Europe’s continent lived much more intimately with religious division as well as the reminder, in 1633, of Galileo’s failure to arrange a peaceable arrangement between science and religion. These aspects of the rise of physico-theology have not been the focus of this chapter, which has surveyed the philosophical and social origins found in the English context. Science, philosophy of science and other English philosophical currents – most particularly the theory of ideas and understanding that we are familiar with in its later development by John Locke – were formative for a field that might alternatively have been called ‘empirical natural theology.’ Prior shifts in religious sensibility that emptied the Book of Nature of much of its content also prepared the ground. Other philosophical and theological currents not discussed here – most notably theories of divine agency and predestination – and other philosophical trends – the rise of Spinoza’s challenge to such natural theology on the continent – also had both shaping and limiting influences upon the field. Finally, philosophers, including natural philosophers, did much more to promote physico-theology than just write about it: Boyle in particular provided a very important launch pad for the further development of an already healthy tradition of natural theology with his named lectureship, which drew the interest of others in the Royal Society, most notably Isaac Newton, and which spawned two of the most influential physico-theological tracts shortly before and shortly after the turn of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Morality seems important, in the sense that there are practical reasons — at least for most of us, most of the time — to be moral. A central theoretical motivation for consequentialism is that it appears clear that there are practical reasons to promote good outcomes, but mysterious why we should care about non-consequentialist moral considerations or how they could be genuine reasons to act. In this paper we argue that this theoretical motivation is mistaken, and that because many arguments (...) for consequentialism rely upon it, the mistake substantially weakens the overall case for consequentialism. We argue that there is indeed a theoretical connection between good states and reasons to act, because good states are those it is fitting to desire and there is a conceptual connection between the fittingness of a motive and reasons to perform the acts it motivates. But while some of our motives are directed at states, others are directed at acts themselves. We contend that just as the fittingness of desires for states generates reasons to promote the good, the fittingness of these act-directed motives generates reasons to do other things. Moreover, we argue that an act’s moral status consists in the fittingness of act-directed feelings of obligation to perform or avoid performing it, so the connection between fitting motives and reasons to act explains reasons to be moral whether or not morality directs us to promote the good. This, we contend, de-mystifies how there could be non-consequentialist reasons that are both moral and practical. (shrink)

Time in electromagnetism shares many features with time in other physical theories. But there is one aspect of electromagnetism's relationship with time that has always been controversial, yet has not always attracted the limelight it deserves: the electromagnetic arrow of time. Beginning with a re-analysis of a famous argument between Ritz and Einstein over the origins of the radiation arrow, this chapter frames the debate between modern Einsteinians and neo-Ritzians. It tries to find a clean statement of what the arrow (...) is and then explains how it relates to the cosmological and thermodynamic arrows, representing the most developed and sophisticated attack yet, in either the physics or philosophy literature, on the electromagnetic arrow of time. (shrink)