This article aims to provide a reassessment of the relationship between God and abstract objects. This reassessment will provide a new conceptualisation of this important relationship and will be formulated, first, within the theoretical framework of ‘Theistic Aspectivalism’, which is grounded on the notion of an aspect, proposed by Donald L.M. Baxter, which provides a means to ward off the ‘Bootstrapping Problem’. Second, within the theoretical framework of ‘Theistic Essentialism’, which is based on the notion of essence and essential (...) dependence, as proposed by Kit Fine, Jonathan Lowe, and Katherin Koslicki, which provides a metaphysical basis for the relationship between God and abstract objects to be further elucidated and for the position of 'Platonic Theism' to be free from the primary issues that are often raised against it. (shrink)

This dissertation answers the three value problems in epistemology. These three problems require an answer as to how knowledge is more valuable 1) than mere true belief, 2) any of the proper subsets of knowledge, and 3) in kind than that which falls short of knowledge. The methodology used to provide an answer to these problems relies on the arguments put forth in a rarely discussed paper from Ward Jones. In short, the Jonesian approach can be summed up as (...) the view that epistemic axiology and analysis ought to be kept separate. The Jonesian framework instead looks outside of the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge to find properties of knowledge which, though contingent, can explain the distinctive value of knowledge. Thisframework, though remarkably robust, requires going against what I consider to be the orthodox approach to the problems. This orthodox approach relies on two axiological assumptions. The first is that every component of an analysis on knowledge must provide independent value to knowledge. The second assumption is that the value of knowledge cannot be derived from factors excluded from an analysis of knowledge. Once these assumptions are appropriately discarded, the Jonesian view has a straightforward answer to the first problem. Answering the second requires assessing Jonathan Kvanvig’s claim that a satisfied Gettier condition contributes no independent value. While I agree with Kvanvig regarding a satisfied Gettier condition, I will argue that an unsatisfied Gettier condition is not likewise neutral; it contributes disvalue. With that distinction in place, a solution to the second problem follows immediately. The third value problem, however, is a different kind of problem altogether. Answering it requires not only the Jonesian framework, but also a novel account of how we determine final value. Once this account is offered, a Jonesian answer to the tertiary problem follows immediately. This dissertation closes by applying the Jonesian framework to an argument that claims there can be no modal conditions on knowledge due to such conditions failing to help answer the value problems. This claim will be found wanting. (shrink)

This volume considers challenges to forgiveness in the most difficult circumstances, such as in criminal justice contexts, when the victim is dead or when bystanders disagree, and when anger and resentment seem preferable and important. Contributing philosophers include Myisha Cherry, Jonathan Jacobs, Barrett Emerick, Alice MacLachlan, David McNaughton and Eve Garrard. Contributing psychologists include Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Robert D. Enright and Mary Jacqueline Song, C. Ward Struthers, Joshua Guilfoyle, Careen Khoury, Elizabeth van Monsjou, Joni Sasaki, Curtis Phills, Rebecca Young, (...) and Zdravko Marjanovic. (shrink)

Scientific hedges are communicative devices used to qualify and weaken scientific claims. Gregor Betz has argued—unconvincingly, we think—that hedging can rescue the value-free ideal for science. Nevertheless, Betz is onto something when he suggests there are political principles that recommend scientists hedge public-facing claims. In this article, we recast this suggestion using the notion of public justification. We formulate and reject a Rawlsian argument that locates the justification for hedging in its ability to forge consensus. On our alternative proposal, hedging (...) is often justified because it renders scientific claims as publicly accessible reasons. (shrink)

Clinical psychology is characterized by persistent disagreement about fundamental aspects of the discipline ranging from what mental disorders are to what constitutes effective treatment. Attempts to address the problem of epistemic disagreement have been frequently based on establishing the correct answer by fiat without identifying and addressing the sources of the disagreement. We argue that this strategy has not worked very well and the result is frequently ongoing and intractable disagreement, with each side in an argument convinced they are correct. (...) In this paper, we outline an epistemic disagreement procedural model intended to assist researchers and clinicians in the field of clinical psychology to identify, explore, and develop inquiry strategies that capitalize on situations where competing knowledge claims are made. The result is a flexible conceptual framework committed to a defensible epistemic pluralism, fallibilism, and contextualism, across the various research tasks constituting the field of clinical psychology. (shrink)

Discussions of sexual ethics often focus on the wrong of treating another as a mere object instead of as a person worthy of respect. On this view, the task of sexual ethics becomes putting the other’s subjectivity above their status as erotic object so as to avoid the harms of objectification. Ward and Anderson argue that such a view disregards the crucial, moral role that erotic objecthood plays in sexual encounters. Important moral features of intimacy are disclosed through the (...) experience of being an erotic object for another, as well as in perceiving another as an erotic object. Drawing on phenomenology, especially the insights of Simone de Beauvoir, Ward and Anderson argue that erotic encounters are shaped by the human condition of ambiguity, where being an object for others is intertwined with bodily agency. Because sexual agency is complex in this way, theories of sexual ethics and responsibility must widen their focus beyond transparent communication and authoritative expressions of will. (shrink)

Despite the growing attention to oppression and resistance in social and political philosophy as well as ethics, philosophers continue to struggle to describe and appropriately attribute agency under non-ideal circumstances of oppression and structural injustice. This chapter identifies some features of new accounts of non-ideal agency and then examines a particular problem for such theories, what Serene Khader has called the agency dilemma. Under the agency dilemma, attempts to articulate the agency of subjects living under oppression must on the one (...) hand avoid overemphasizing constraints on agency, and thereby producing paternalistic theories that “deny agency” for oppressed subjects, and on the other hand avoid failing to fully appreciate the effects of oppression on agency, thereby missing crucial features of how oppression unjustly shapes a person’s lived possibilities. This chapter traces this dilemma to a preoccupation with ascribing agency, which produces problematic descriptive and political effects for theorizing agency under oppression: what the author calls an asymmetry problem and a disenfranchisement problem. Finally, the chapter proposes that the agency dilemma might be ameliorated if theorists scrutinize more closely how moral, epistemic, and political agency interact and overlap in life under oppression. (shrink)

Audre Lorde’s account of the erotic is one of her most widely celebrated contributions to political theory and feminist activism, but her explanation of the term in her brief essay “Uses of the Erotic” is famously oblique and ambiguous. This article develops a detailed, textually grounded interpretation of Lorde’s erotic, based on an analysis of how Lorde’s essay brings together commitments expressed across her work. I describe four integral elements of Lorde’s erotic: feeling, knowledge, power, and concerted action. The erotic (...) is a way of feeling in the work a person does, which makes possible new knowledge about the self and the social environment— particularly to counteract epistemic oppression imposed by an unjust society. The erotic is a source of power by providing vision and energy for actions integrating a person’s multiple commitments and political interests. It facilitates concerted action and coalition by enhancing a person’s appreciation of their interests and values, while fostering embodied, personal connections that build trust on the basis of shared vulnerability. Thus, the erotic helps build coalitions where genuine differences of perspective and experience can be examined, in resistance against an oppressive society’s epistemic distortions. (shrink)

This introduction to a special issue of Topoi introduces and summarises the relationship between three main varieties of 'enactivist' theorising about the mind: 'autopoietic', 'sensorimotor', and 'radical' enactivism. It includes a brief discussion of the philosophical and cognitive scientific precursors to enactivist theories, and the relationship of enactivism to other trends in embodied cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

Throughout her work, Audre Lorde maintains that her self-preservation in the face of oppression depends on acting from the recognition and valorization of her feelings as a deep source of knowledge. This claim, taken as a portrayal of agency, poses challenges to standard positions in ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. This article examines the oppositional agency articulated by Lorde’s thought, locating feeling, poetry, and the power she calls “the erotic” within her avowed project of self-preservation. It then explores the implications (...) of taking seriously Lorde’s account, particularly for theorists examining ethics and epistemology under nonideal social conditions. For situations of sexual intimacy, for example, Lorde’s account unsettles prevailing assumptions about the role of consent in responsibility between sexual partners. I argue that obligations to solicit consent and respect refusal are not sufficient to acknowledge the value of agency in intimate encounters when agency is oppositional in the way Lorde describes. (shrink)

A long-form review essay on Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (2024) and the task of reading Audre Lorde as a philosopher.

Using two decades worth of experimental philosophy (aka x-phi), Edouard Machery argues in Philosophy within its Proper Bounds (OUP, 2017) that philosophers’ use of the “method of cases” is unreliable because it has a strong tendency to elicit different intuitive responses from non-philosophers. And because, as Machery argues, appealing to such cases is usually the only way for philosophers to acquire the kind of knowledge they seek, an extensive philosophical skepticism follows. I argue that Machery’s “Unreliability” argument fails because, once (...) its premises are percisified, they are either self-defeating or without justification. This is a significant result because Machery’s arguments are the most widely cited and discussed x-phi arguments for philosophical skepticism and many hold that Machery provides the most empirically informed, convincing, and thus best case for this kind of skepticism. So, if my arguments are sound, then the best x-phi argument for philosophical skepticism fails. I further argue that this result provides strong reason to believe the more general conclusion that “negative” x-phi is likely doomed: x-phi likely can never support a substantive philosophical skepticism. Ultimately, I argue for the broad conclusion that all empirically minded arguments for philosophical skepticism are likely to fail for the same reasons that Machery’s does, i.e. they are (likely) self-defeating. (shrink)

We present a specific elaboration and partial defense of the claims that cognition is enactive, embodied, embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. According to the view we will defend, the enactivist claim that perception and cognition essentially depend upon the cognizer’s interactions with their environment is fundamental. If a particular instance of this kind of dependence obtains, we will argue, then it follows that cognition is essentially embodied and embedded, that the underpinnings of cognition are inextricable from those of affect, that (...) the phenomenon of cognition itself is essentially bound up with affect, and that the possibility of cognitive extension depends upon the instantiation of a specific mode of skillful interrelation between cognizer and environment. Thus, if cognition is enactive then it is also embodied, embedded, affective and potentially extended. (shrink)

Most psychological research aims to uncover generalizations about the mind that hold across subjects. Philosophical discussions of scientific explanation have focused on such generalizations, but in doing so, have often overlooked an important phenomenon: variation. Variation is ubiquitous in psychology and many other domains, and an important target of explanation in its own right. Here I characterize explananda that concern individual differences and formulate an account of what it takes to explain them. I argue that the notion of actual difference (...) making, the only causal concept in the literature that explicitly addresses variation, cannot be used to ground such an account. Instead, I propose a view on which explaining individual differences involves identifying causes that could be intervened on to reduce the variability in the population. This account provides criteria of success for explaining variation and deepens our understanding of causal explanation. (shrink)

The idea that the brain is a representational organ has roots in the nineteenth century, when neurologists began drawing conclusions about what the brain represents from clinical and experimental studies. One of the earliest controversies surrounding representation in the brain was the “muscles versus movements” debate, which concerned whether the motor cortex represents complex movements or rather fractional components of movement. Prominent thinkers weighed in on each side: neurologists John Hughlings Jackson and F.M.R. Walshe in favor of complex movements, neurophysiologist (...) Charles Sherrington and neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in favor of movement components. This essay examines these and other brain scientists’ evolving notions of representation during the first eighty years of the muscles versus movements debate (c. 1873–1954). Although participants agreed about many of the superficial features of representation, their inferences reveal deep-seated disagreements about its inferential role. Divergent epistemological commitments stoked conflicting conceptions of what representational attributions imply and what evidence supports them. (shrink)

This chapter surveys a few of the central questions about philosophical perspectives on the ethics of belief, focusing especially on (1) questions about whether doxastic involuntarism is consistent with the normative approach to epistemology characteristic of any ethics of belief; (2) the status and interpretation of William Clifford's famous injunction against belief on "insufficient" evidence, and broader questions about the role of negative versus positive doxastic norms; (3) whether norms governing belief are distinctively epistemic norms, or are instead moral or (...) practical ones; and (4) how moral and political questions about belief bear on epistemic norms, including a discussion of doxastic wronging, racist beliefs, skepticism and rape culture, and epistemic partiality—whether, for instance, friendship requires beliefs that violate epistemic norms. (shrink)

Abstract: In The Imaginary Jean-Paul Sartre makes what will strike many as an implausibly strong claim, namely that perception and imagination are incompatible kinds of experience - I call this the exclusion claim. This paper offers a reconstruction of Sartre’s exclusion claim. First, it frames the claim in terms of cross-modal attention distribution, such that it is not possible to simultaneously attend to what one is imagining and what one is perceiving. However, this leaves it open that a subject can (...) simultaneously imagine and perceive on the condition that either the perceived or imagined objects are not attended to. While this is a philosophically plausible position it fails to do justice to Sartre’s intended position, which suggests a more radical exclusion between perception and imagination. In light of this section 3 develops a supplementary argument to remove one of the possible configurations of attention that the ban on divided attention leaves in place by arguing that the objects of imagining must be attended to, which follows from Sartre’s characterisation of imagination as spontaneous. The resulting exclusion is as follows: attentive perception excludes imagination (and vice versa), given that the latter is necessarily attentive, but attentive imagination can co-occur with non-attentive or background perception (in this sense the exclusion is asymmetric in a way that Sartre fails to recognise). In concluding I detail how from this exclusion we get an important consequence – which Sartre wants the exclusion claim to have – namely that it rules out an imagination-based solution to the problem of perceptual presence. (shrink)

Sentience is the capacity to have feelings, such as feelings of pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, warmth, joy, comfort and excitement. It is not simply the capacity to feel pain, but feelings of pain, distress or harm, broadly understood, have a special significance for animal welfare law. Drawing on over 300 scientific studies, we evaluate the evidence of sentience in two groups of invertebrate animals: the cephalopod molluscs or, for short, cephalopods (including octopods, squid and cuttlefish) and the decapod crustaceans or, (...) for short, decapods (including crabs, lobsters and crayfish). We also evaluate the potential welfare implications of current commercial practices involving these animals. (shrink)

Perhaps the most striking phenomenon of visual awareness is inattentional blindness (IB), in which a surprisingly salient event right in front of you may go completely unseen when unattended. Does IB reflect a failure of perception, or only of subsequent memory? Previous work has been unable to answer this question, due to a seemingly intractable dilemma: ruling out memory requires immediate perceptual reports, but soliciting such reports fuels an expectation that eliminates IB. Here we introduce a way of evoking repeated (...) IB in the same subjects and the same session: we show that observers fail to report seeing salient events’ not only when they have no expectation, but also when they have the wrong expectations about the events nature. This occurs when observers must immediately report seeing anything unexpected, even mid-event. Repeated IB thus demonstrates that IB is aptly named: it reflects a genuine deficit in moment-by-moment conscious perception, rather than a form of inattentional amnesia. (shrink)

This paper focuses on an underexplored challenge in infinite ethics. On realistic assumptions, if our universe is infinite, every nomologically possible history is actual and nothing we ever do makes a difference to the moral quality of the world as a whole. Call this thought Every History. This paper unpacks Every History and explores some of its ethical implications. Specifically, I argue that if Every History is true and the universe turns out to be infinite (1) our lives are globally (...) insignificant, (2) moral principles enjoining the promotion of value need to be given an appropriately scope-restricted interpretation, and (3) impersonal consequentialism faces a serious challenge. (shrink)

Is the brain really a computer? In particular, is our intelligence a computational achievement: is it because our brains are computers that we get on in the world as well as we do? In this paper I will evaluate an ambitious new argument to the contrary, developed in Landgrebe and Smith (2021a, 2022). Landgrebe and Smith begin with the fact that many dynamical systems in the world are difficult or impossible to model accurately (inter alia, because it is intractable to (...) find exact solutions to the differential equations that describe them—meaning we have to approximate—but at the same time they are such that small differences in starting conditions lead to big differences in final conditions, thwarting accurate approximation). Yet we manage to survive and thrive in a world full of such systems. Landgrebe and Smith argue from these premises that it is not because our brains are computers that we get on as well as we do: instead it is because of the various ways that we dynamically couple with such systems, these couplings themselves impossible to model well enough to emulate in silico. Landgrebe and Smith thus defend a dynamical systems model in the lineage of Gibson (1979), Van Gelder (1995), and Thompson (2007), though their focus is on decisively refuting the computationalist alternatives rather than developing the positive account. Here I will defend the claim that human intelligence is genuinely computational (and that whole brain emulation and others forms of AGI may be possible) against this argument. (shrink)

How does philosophy learn to speak a new language? That is, how does some particular language come to serve as the means for the expression of philosophical ideas? In this paper, I present an answer grounded in four historical case studies and suggest that this answer has broad implications for contemporary philosophy. I begin with Jonathan Rée’s account of philosophical translation into English in the sixteenth century, and the debate between philosopher-translators who wanted to acquire – wholesale or with (...) modifications – foreign terms, and those who wished to take existing words and transform them from their ordinary to a philosophical use. I sketch how these twin processes of ‘acquisition’ and ‘transformation’ manifested themselves in philosophical translations from Greek to Latin, Greek to Arabic and both Greek and Arabic to Gə’əz and argue that comparative work in this vein could yield interesting and significant results. I suggest that not only is Rée’s approach useful for thinking about philosophical translation historically, but that philosophical translation between very different languages is important for contemporary philosophy insofar as it reveals the linguistic presuppositions of philosophical theories expressed in some particular language, and that this constitutes an argument against the prevailing monolingualism in philosophy. (shrink)

According to an intriguing though somewhat enigmatic line of thought first proposed by Jonathan Bennett, if humanity went extinct any time soon this would be unfortunate because important business would be left unfinished. This line of thought remains largely unexplored. I offer an interpretation of the idea that captures its intuitive appeal, is consistent with plausible constraints, and makes it non-redundant to other views in the literature. The resulting view contrasts with a welfare-promotion perspective, according to which extinction would (...) be bad because it would come at a massive opportunity cost in terms of feasibly achievable welfare over the lifetime of our species. (shrink)

What is the epistemic function of imagination? Traditionally, philosophers have claimed that the epistemic function of imagination is exhausted by its ability to provide justification for modal beliefs, or that it is epistemically irrelevant. However, in recent years a number of philosophers have broken with the tradition by arguing that imagination can generate justification or knowledge about contingent empirical facts. This paper argues against this view by developing a new dilemma. The upshot of the argument is that although imagination does (...) have an important epistemic function that has evaded the traditional view, it cannot give rise to new empirical justification or knowledge. (shrink)

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (shrink)

In evolutionary medicine and other related fields, the concept of evolutionary mismatch is used to explain phenomena whereby traits reduce in adaptive value and eventually become maladaptive as the environment changes. This article argues that there is a similar problem of persistent adaptivity—what has been called the problem of evolutionary novelty—and it introduces the concept of mismatch resistance in order to explain phenomena whereby traits retain their adaptive value in novel environments that are radically different from the organisms’ environment of (...) evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). The possible role of variability selection in the evolution of mismatch-resistant traits is discussed, and it is suggested that mismatch resistance provides a useful tool for making progress on certain issues related to evolutionary theory, such as the modularity debate, cases of adaptivity outside of organisms’ ancestral environment, and the viability of naturalism as an overarching philosophical framework for understanding the natural world. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the Guam Department of Education's (GDOE) decolonization efforts and the potential role of Philosophy for Children (P4C) as a strategic tool for its advancement. I begin with a discussion of Guam's colonial context and its implications for contemporary education on the island. While the GDOE's current attempts to decolonize Guam's public education emphasize the need for an "official body of knowledge," many CHamoru scholars and activists have argued that it is not enough. This paper agrees (...) that such content-based reforms are insufficient and advocates for a more nuanced approach to education through P4C. Drawing on the P4C literature and decolonial education, I argue that while P4C alone may not bring about structural change, its pedagogical framework offers a promising alternative when adapted to indigenous contexts. The paper proposes that P4C can serve as a "Trojan Horse" within public schools, fostering decolonial acts of resurgence by elevating indigenous knowledge, welcoming indigenous masters, and empowering CHamoru students within a Westernized educational setting. (shrink)

How should accounts that stress the embodied, embedded and engaged character of human minds accommodate the role of rationality in human subjectivity? Drawing on Matthew Boyle’s contrast between ‘additive’ and ‘transformative’ conceptions of rationality, I argue that contemporary work on embodied cognition tends towards a problematic ‘additivism’ about the relationship between mature human capacities to think and act for reasons, and sensorimotor capacities to skillfully engage with salient features of the environment. Additivists view rational capacities to reason and reflect as (...) a distinct ‘layer’ or ‘storey’ of human cognition, with a normative structure that differs from that of the sensorimotor coping skills which support it. I argue that emphasizing the embodied and engaged character of human minds is better combined with a ‘transformative’ conception of rationality – one which holds that acquiring abilities to give and ask for reasons transforms the normative structure of our unreflective embodied dealings with the environment. And I argue that a transformative embodied cognitive science of human rationality is not only possible, but underway. Integrating existing work on embodied cognition with work on the cultural and developmental contexts that shape human minds suggests how human immersion in culture transforms the structure of sensorimotor engagements by bringing about the communicability and negotiability of the meanings to which those engagements attune us. (shrink)

Who should decide who gets to say what on online social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube? American legal scholars have often thought that the private owners of these platforms should decide, in part because such an arrangement is thought to serve valuable free speech interests. This standard view has come under pressure with the enactment of statutes like Texas House Bill 20, which forbids certain platforms from “censoring” user content based on viewpoint. Such efforts to regulate the speech (...) policies of online platforms have been challenged for undermining the editorial speech rights of these platforms and allowing the proliferation of hate speech. This Article develops a democratic theory of free speech, according to which one of the most important reasons for protecting robust free speech rights is that free speech can contribute not only to democratic elections but to a democratic culture more generally. To achieve robust cultural democracy, a community’s speech environment must enable people not only to rationally persuade one another about matters of public importance and convey mutual respect to one another as political equals but also allow people to influence each other in a less articulate and rational manner—to “democratically vibe” with one another. This theory yields a qualified normative defense of government regulation of the speech policies of large social media platforms that can help to realize cultural democracy, suggesting that First Amendment doctrine should focus to a greater extent on protecting the speech rights of platform users, rather than platform owners. Although far from a ringing endorsement of H.B. 20 or S.B. 7072, this Article suggests that First Amendment law should be friendlier to state regulation of platform speech than many critics have thought. (shrink)

The book develops and synthesises two main ideas: contextualism about knowledge ascriptions and a knowledge-first approach to epistemology. The theme of the book is that these two ideas fit together much better than it's widely thought they do. Not only are they not competitors: they each have something important to offer the other.

A dominant strand of philosophical thought holds that natural kinds are clusters of objects with shared properties. Cluster theories of natural kinds are often taken to be a late twentieth-century development, prompted by dissatisfaction with essentialism in philosophy of biology. I will argue here, however, that a cluster theory of kinds had actually been formulated by William Whewell (1794-1866) more than a century earlier. Cluster theories of kinds can be characterized in terms of three central commitments, all of which are (...) present in Whewell’s work on classification. Like contemporary cluster theorists, Whewell claims that kinds are united by similarity, that many kinds do not have essences, and that there are “gaps” between kinds. Moreover, Whewell advises taxonomists to look for consilience (roughly, convergence) between different classificatory schemes, a recommendation that reinforces the identification of natural classes with property clusters. Thus Whewell was not only an early cluster theorist, but one with important insights into what a cluster theory of kinds means for the practice of classification. (shrink)

The curious case of Bronze Age Pervert (BAP, for short), of unfortunate name, or “handle,” in his world. Author of the self-published Bronze Age Mindset (2018), BAP is present in 4Chan discussion threads and on YouTube, and he produces weekly subscription-only podcasts with approximately 6,500 paying clients (I am among them). He was banned from Twitter but reinstated in December 2022, and he now has over 100,000 followers. A Google search turns up scores of articles addressing or discussing his work, (...) all written in palatable forms. But BAP’s own subjects and rhetoric are for adults only. Who is BAP, what does he espouse, and what compels the attention of orthodox Catholics? (shrink)

Upshot: In our target article we claimed that, at least since Weber and Varela, enactivism has incorporated a theoretical commitment to one important aspect of Jonas’s philosophical biology, namely its anthropomorphism, which is at odds with the methodological commitments of modern science. In this general reply we want to clarify what we mean by anthropomorphism, and explain why we think it is incompatible with science. We do this by spelling out what we call the “Jonasian inference,” i.e., the idea that (...) we are entitled, based on our first-person experience of teleology, to take the appearance of teleology in other living beings at face value. (shrink)

Meyer and Brancazio make an important distinction between two enactivist projects: “utopian” and “scientific.” I agree that contemporary enactivists would benefit from more clearly distinguishing these projects and their success conditions. However, I wonder whether there are times when letting these projects merge with each other might be helpful, or even necessary.

Many think that it would be wrong to defend an individual from attack if he competently and explicitly refuses defensive intervention. In this paper, I consider the extent to which the preferences of victims affect the permissibility of defending groups or aggregates. These cases are interesting and difficult because there is no straightforward sense in which a group can univocally consent to or refuse defensive intervention in the same way that an individual can. Among those who have considered this question, (...) the dominant view is that that consent imposes only an extremely weak constraint on defending groups. I argue that this is mistaken and defend a much more robust requirement. Indeed, on the account that I develop there are cases in which the refusal of a single member of a victim is enough to make it impermissible to defend a much larger group. At the heart of my account is the idea that consent functions as an internal component of the broader requirement that defensive harms be proportionate: if a victim validly refuses defensive intervention, the fact that defence will benefit him cannot be used to justify harming innocents as the lesser-evil. An important implication of this view is that what constitutes sufficient consent from the members of a victim group will vary on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

This is a response to the nine commentaries on our target article “Unlimited Associative Learning: A primer and some predictions”. Our responses are organized by theme rather than by author. We present a minimal functional architecture for Unlimited Associative Learning that aims to tie to together the list of capacities presented in the target article. We explain why we discount higher-order thought theories of consciousness. We respond to the criticism that we have overplayed the importance of learning and underplayed the (...) importance of spatial modelling. We decline the invitation to add a negative marker to our proposed positive marker so as to rule out consciousness in plants, but we nonetheless maintain that there is no positive evidence of consciousness in plants. We close by discussing how UAL relates to development and to its material substrate. (shrink)

Skyrms, building on the work of Dretske, has recently developed a novel information-theoretic account of propositional content in simple signalling systems. Information-theoretic accounts of content traditionally struggle to accommodate the possibility of misrepresentation, and I show that Skyrms’s account is no exception. I proceed to argue, however, that a modified version of Skyrms’s account can overcome this problem. On my proposed account, the propositional content of a signal is determined not by the information that it actually carries, but by the (...) information that it would carry at the nearest separating equilibrium of the underlying evolutionary dynamics. I show that this amended account yields reasonable ascriptions of false propositional content in a well-known formal model of the evolution of communication , and close with a discussion of the serious but perhaps not insuperable difficulties we face in applying the account to examples of signalling in the real world. (shrink)

Reeder’s article offers a new and intriguing approach to the study of people’s ordinary understanding of freedom and constraint. On this approach, people use information about freedom and constraint as part of a quasi-scientific effort to make accurate inferences about an agent’s motives. Their beliefs about the agent’s motives then affect a wide variety of further psychological processes, including the process whereby they arrive at moral judgments. In illustrating this new approach, Reeder cites an elegant study he conducted a number (...) of years ago (Reeder & Spores, 1983). All subjects were given a vignette about a man who goes with his date to a pizza parlor and happens to come across a box that has been designated for charitable donations. In one condition, the man’s date then requests that he make a donation; in the other, she requests that he steal the money that is already in the box. In both conditions, the man chooses to comply with this request. The key question is how subjects will use his behavior to make inferences about whether he is a morally good or morally bad person. The results revealed a marked difference between conditions. When the man donated to charity, subjects were generally disinclined to conclude that he must have been a morally good person. It is as though they were thinking: ‘He didn’t just do this out of the goodness of his heart. (shrink)

Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief, which shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. Jonathan Ichikawa argues that a skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo.

What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G. E. M. Anscombe and David Velleman, among others, holds that agency depends on practical rationality—the ability to act for reasons, rather than being merely moved by causes. Over the past 25 years, Velleman has argued compellingly for a distinctive view of agency and the practical rationality with which he associates it. On Velleman’s conception, being an agent consists in having the capacity to be motivated by (...) a drive to act for reasons. Your bodily movements qualify as genuine actions insofar as they are motivated in part by your desire to behave in a way that makes sense to yourself. However, there are at least two distinct ways of spelling out what this drive towards self-intelligibility consists in, both present in Velleman’s work. It might consist in a drive towards intelligibility in causal-psychological terms: roughly, a drive to maximize the rational coherence of your psychological states. Alternatively, it might consist in a drive towards narrative intelligibility: a drive to make your ongoing activity conform to a recognizable narrative structure, where that structure is understood emotionally. Velleman originally saw these options as basically equivalent, but later came to prioritize the drive towards causal-psychological intelligibility over that towards narrative intelligibility. I argue that this gets things the wrong way round—we should instead understand our capacities to render ourselves intelligible in causal-psychological terms as built upon a bedrock of emotionally suffused narrative understanding. In doing so, we resolve several problems for Velleman’s view, and pave the way for an embodied, embedded and affective account of practical rationality and agency. According to the picture that emerges, practical rationality is essential to agency, narrative understanding is essential to practical rationality, and the rhythms and structures patterning the ebb and flow of our emotional lives are essential to narrative understanding. (shrink)

In both popular and scholarly discussions, sexual consent is gaining traction as the central moral consideration in how people should treat one another in sexual encounters. However, while the concept of consent has been indispensable to oppose many forms of sexual violence, consent-based sexual ethics struggle to account for the phenomenological complexity of sexual intimacy and the social and structural pressures that often surround sexual communication and behavior. Feminist structural critique and social research on the prevalence of violation even within (...) consensual sex suggest that consent is insufficient to ground responsibility; a more fundamental orientation toward the value of sexual agency provides a better foundation for sexual ethics. Using feminist critical theory, phenomenology, and black feminist thought, this dissertation develops a socially situated and relational notion of sexual agency and diagnoses how such agency is neglected in prevailing discussions of consent in moral philosophy and legal theory. I argue that the ethical question of responsibility to another in a sexual encounter—apart from juridical considerations—should be reframed around the value of each person’s socially situated practices of agency. Preceding and extending beyond the obligation to gain valid consent for an action, responsibility demands adapting one’s intentions and behaviors in response to the wider range of another’s communicative expressions of agency. However, communicative expressions can be ambiguous or overdetermined by social context and cultural norms; they often offer only provisional traces of agency. To address this inherent uncertainty in intimacy, I propose drawing on insights from Emmanuel Levinas about the dynamic, open-ended nature of relationality, responsibility, and communication. Responsibility toward another does not depend on securing certainty about their “yes” or “no,” but requires responding continuously under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, adapting behaviors and intentions to make room for another’s agency despite its opacity. (shrink)

In this paper, a metaphysics is proposed that includes everything that can be represented by a well-founded multiset. It is shown that this metaphysics, apart from being self-explanatory, is also benevolent. Paradoxically, it turns out that the probability that we were born in another life than our own is zero. More insights are gained by inducing properties from a metaphysics that is not self-explanatory. In particular, digital metaphysics is analyzed, which claims that only computable things exist. First of all, it (...) is shown that digital metaphysics contradicts itself by leading to the conclusion that the shortest computer program that computes the world is infinitely long. This means that the Church-Turing conjecture must be false. Secondly, the applicability of Occam’s razor is explained by evolution: in an evolving physics it can appear at each moment as if the world is caused by only finitely many things. Thirdly and most importantly, this metaphysics is benevolent in the sense that it organizes itself to fulfill the deepest wishes of its observers. Fourthly, universal computers with an infinite memory capacity cannot be built in the world. And finally, all the properties of the world, both good and bad, can be explained by evolutionary conservation. (shrink)

In the debates regarding the ethics of human organoid biobanking, the locus of donor autonomy has been identified in processes of consent. The problem is that, by focusing on consent, biobanking processes preclude adequate engagement with donor autonomy because they are unable to adequately recognise or respond to factors that determine authentic choice. This is particularly problematic in biobanking contexts associated with organoid research or the clinical application of organoids because, given the probability of unforeseen and varying purposes for which (...) a donor’s organoids could be employed and given the different ways in which a donor can relate to her biospecimens, a donor can value her organoids differently in different contexts and her reasons for autonomously permitting use of her cells and tissues in one case may not support an autonomous decision in another. In response, this paper has three aims: firstly, to make the case for why organoid biobanks ought to respect donor autonomy conceived as authentic choice; secondly, to explore the autonomy-respecting limits of established and widely prevalent models of biobank consent; and thirdly, to propose certain conditions that organoid biobanks ought to support or facilitate in order to respect donor autonomy. (shrink)

Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the (...) DSM's diagnostic categories. The main argument defended by Tsou is that genuine mental disorders are biological kinds with harmful effects. This argument opposes the dogma that mental disorders are necessarily diseases that result from biological dysfunction. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories. (shrink)

Susan Hurley (1998a, 2003a, 2008) argues that our capacities for perception, agency and thought are essentially interdependent and co-emerge from a tangle of sensorimotor processes that are both cause and effect of the web of interactive and communicative practices they weave us into. In this paper, I reconstruct this view and its main motivations, with a particular focus on three important aspects. First, Hurley argues that an essential aspect of conscious perception – its perspectival unity – constitutively depends on agency. (...) That is, agency is a transcendental condition on the possibility of perception (§3). Second, understanding why this dependence obtains involves understanding why perception and agency emerge together, and how they do so on the basis of a web of interrelated capacities for sensorimotor control (§2, §4). Third, understanding these first two aspects of Hurley’s view is the key to understanding the sophisticated interplay between i) her arguments for the causal interdependence of sensory input and motor output, and ii) her arguments for the essential interdependence of perception and agency. (shrink)

I briefly present and motivate a ‘skill hypothesis’ regarding the evolution of human normative cognition. On this hypothesis, the capacity to internally represent action-guiding norms evolved as a solution to the distinctive problems of standardizing, learning and teaching complex motor skills and craft skills, especially skills related to toolmaking. We have an evolved cognitive architecture for internalizing norms of technique, which was then co-opted for a rich array of social functions. There was a gradual expansion of the normative domain, with (...) ritual playing an important role in bridging the gap between concrete, enacted norms and general, abstract norms, such as kinship norms. I conclude by stating nine predictions arising from the skill hypothesis. (shrink)

This article responds to two arguments against ‘Epistemic Perceptualism’, the view that emotional experiences, as involving a perception of value, can constitute reasons for evaluative belief. It first provides a basic account of emotional experience, and then introduces concepts relevant to the epistemology of emotional experience, such as the nature of a reason for belief, non-inferentiality, and prima facie vs. conclusive reasons, which allow for the clarification of Epistemic Perceptualism in terms of the Perceptual Justificatory View. It then challenges two (...) arguments which purport to show that emotional experience is not a source of reasons for evaluative belief. The first argument claims that because normative why-questions are always appropriate in the case of emotions, then emotions can never be conclusive reasons for corresponding evaluative beliefs. The second purports to show that appeal to emotional experience as a source of reasons for evaluative beliefs renders emotions problematically self-justifying, and since emotions cannot be self-justifying, they cannot provide any sort of reason for corresponding evaluative beliefs. This article responds to these arguments, and in doing so shows there is still much to be learned about the epistemology of emotional experience by drawing analogies with perceptual experience. (shrink)

There are two central kinds of epistemological mistakes: believing things you shouldn’t, and failing to believe things that you should. The knowledge-first program offers a canonical explanation for the former: if you believe something without knowing it, you violate the norm to believe only that which you know. But the explanation does not extend in any plausible way to a story about what’s wrong with suspending judgment when one ought to believe. In this paper I explore prospects for a knowledge-centering (...) account of positive epistemic norms that describe epistemic duties to believe. (shrink)