Space exploration and the search for a better understanding of life have never been entirely separate from one another. This is not simply a matter of policy, a decision by political administrations to combine the two. Rather, it is a matter of the ways in which both draw upon the same scientific culture and upon overlapping societal influences. Some of the latter are the political influences of particular times and particular places, others are of a far broader nature. Progress in (...) one field has tended to be combined with advances in the other. It is a familiar point that, in the very year that NASA was founded, i.e. 1958, the American molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg won a Nobel Prize for his discovery that bacteria can exchange genetic material (a process now known as ‘bacterial conjugation’). This, in turn, was only six years after the classicMiller-Urey experiment to replicate the production of some of the chemical precursors of life. And the Miller-Urey experiment, in turn, overlapped in time with the work of Watson, Crick and Rosalind Franklin in England, on the structure of DNA. Major breakthroughs came in both fields (activity in space and research into life) within the same time-frame, and drew upon at least some of the same background influences and interests. When Lederberg went on to work with NASA on the early programs to look for life on Mars, the progression was, in an everyday sense, natural. Interest in space and interest in life went together. They have always tended to do so. (shrink)

The Visiting Scholars Programme talk for high school students on the question of why God allows suffering. The Exemplarist Theodicy is proposed in this talk as a solution to the problem.

An invited talk delivered at the Logos Institute of Analytic Theology at the University of St Andrews. The topic was on the coherence of the doctrine of the Incarnation. I sought to introduce my solution to the logical challenge against the doctrine of the incarnation and also my own metaphysical model of the incarnation (called the transformational model). This talk summarises my article on this topic published previously in IJPR (termed 'On the metaphysics of the incarnation'). Handouts for the talk (...) are included in the file. (shrink)

• It would be a moral disgrace for God (if he existed) to allow the many evils in the world, in the same way it would be for a parent to allow a nursery to be infested with criminals who abused the children. • There is a contradiction in asserting all three of the propositions: God is perfectly good; God is perfectly powerful; evil exists (since if God wanted to remove the evils and could, he would). • The religious believer (...) has no hope of getting away with excuses that evil is not as bad as it seems, or that it is all a result of free will, and so on. Piper avoids mentioning the best solution so far put forward to the problem of evil. It is Leibniz’s theory that God does not create a better world because there isn’t one — that is, that (contrary to appearances) if one part of the world were improved, the ramifications would result in it being worse elsewhere, and worse overall. It is a “bump in the carpet” theory: push evil down here, and it pops up over there. Leibniz put it by saying this is the “Best of All Possible Worlds”. That phrase was a public relations disaster for his theory, suggesting as it does that everything is perfectly fine as it is. He does not mean that, but only that designing worlds is a lot harder than it looks, and determining the amount of evil in the best one is no easy matter. Though humour is hardly appropriate to the subject matter, the point of Leibniz’s idea is contained in the old joke, “An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, and a pessimist thinks.. (shrink)

Though biologists identify individuals as ‘male’ or ‘female’ across a broad range of animal species, the particular traits exhibited by males and females can vary tremendously. This diversity has led some to conclude that cross-animal sexes (males, or females, of whatever animal species) have “little or no explanatory power” (Dupré 1986: 447) and, thus, are not natural kinds in any traditional sense. This essay will explore considerations for and against this conclusion, ultimately arguing that the animal sexes, properly understood, are (...) “historical explanatory kinds”: groupings that can be scientifically significant even while their members differ radically in their current properties and particular histories. Whether this makes them full-fledged natural kinds is a question I take up at the very end. (shrink)

Within the existing metaphilosophical literature on experimental philosophy, a great deal of attention has been devoted to the claim that there are large differences in philosophical intuitions between people of different demographic groups. Some philosophers argue that this claim has important metaphilosophical implications; others argue that it does not. However, the actual empirical work within experimental philosophy seems to point to a very different sort of metaphilosophical question. Specifically, what the actual empirical work suggests is that intuitions are surprisingly robust (...) across demographic groups. Prior to empirical study, it seemed plausible that unexpected patterns of intuition found in one demographic group would not emerge in other demographic groups. Yet, again and again, empirical work obtains the opposite result: that unexpected patterns found in one demographic group actually emerge also in other demographic groups. I cite 30 studies that find this sort of robustness. I then argue that to the extent that metaphilosophical work is to engage with the actual findings from experimental philosophy, it needs to explore the implications of the surprising robustness of philosophical intuitions across demographic differences. (shrink)

A foundational issue for the science and philosophy of consciousness concerns the function(s) of consciousness – what consciousness does for any particular aspect of psychological or neural processing. In spite of progress in consciousness science, false assumptions and a lack of clarity regarding how best to approach the functions of consciousness represent an ongoing and serious roadblock to progress. Misguided approaches to the function(s) of consciousness have the potential to mangle explanatory priorities, and divert attention, effort, and funding away from (...) useful questions and experimental paradigms. In this paper we offer a way forward: the capacity-based approach to the function(s) of consciousness. This approach flows out of a general explanatory approach that is influential in the philosophy of science and psychology (but not consciousness studies), according to which the mind is understood in terms of a structured collection of capacities. And capacities are explained by empirically discovered facts that identify functions (causal roles) played by empirically identified parts of a system. After elucidating this capacity-based approach to the mind, we show how consciousness fits within it. We then argue that this approach avoids problems that plague theory-based approaches to identifying the function(s) of consciousness, avoids mistakes endemic to the common strategy of looking for the function(s) of consciousness by asking what consciousness is necessary for, and re-orients explanatory priorities in a way that better focuses consciousness science, and that suggests fruitful avenues for experimentation. (shrink)

The late scholastics, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, contributed to many fields of knowledge other than philosophy. They developed a method of conceptual analysis that was very productive in those disciplines in which theory is relatively more important than empirical results. That includes mathematics, where the scholastics developed the analysis of continuous motion, which fed into the calculus, and the theory of risk and probability. The method came to the fore especially in the social sciences. In legal theory (...) they developed, for example, the ethical analyses of the conditions of validity of contracts, and natural rights theory. In political theory, they introduced constitutionalism and the thought experiment of a “state of nature”. Their contributions to economics included concepts still regarded as basic, such as demand, capital, labour, and scarcity. Faculty psychology and semiotics are other areas of significance. In such disciplines, later developments rely crucially on scholastic concepts and vocabulary. (shrink)

In this article, I apply Australian logician and ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, specifically its alternative logic of “the dance of interaction,” to a controversial community-engagement program in my home state of Alabama. At Rural Studio, Auburn University students design free housing and public works for one of the poorest regions in the United States, known as the “Black Belt.” Through the lens of Plumwood’s ecofeminist dancing logic, the marginalized source of Rural Studio’s survival is (...) revealed to be the resilience of the disempowered majority-Black community. Inspired thereby, I sketch an ecofeminist choreography with three “dancing” concepts (namely Plumwood’s “the master model,” Vandana Shiva’s “nature’s logic,” and Ariel Salleh’s “holding”), acknowledging the resilience of the disempowered as a necessary step toward an ethically-sustainable aesthetics. (shrink)

The interventionist account of causal explanation, in the version presented by Jim Woodward, has been recently claimed capable of buttressing the widely felt—though poorly understood—hunch that high-level, relatively abstract explanations, of the sort provided by sciences like biology, psychology and economics, are in some cases explanatorily optimal. It is the aim of this paper to show that this is mistaken. Due to a lack of effective constraints on the causal variables at the heart of the interventionist causal-explanatory scheme, as presently (...) formulated it is either unable to prefer high-level explanations to low, or systematically overshoots, recommending explanations at so high of a level as to be virtually vacuous. (shrink)

Both realist and anti-realist accounts of natural kinds possess prima facie virtues: realists can straightforwardly make sense of the apparent objectivity of the natural kinds, and anti-realists, their knowability. This paper formulates a properly anti-realist account designed to capture both merits. In particular, it recommends understanding natural kinds as ‘categorical bottlenecks,’ those categories that not only best serve us, with our idiosyncratic aims and cognitive capacities, but also those of a wide range of alternative agents. By endorsing an ultimately subjective (...) categorical principle, this view sidesteps epistemological difficulties facing realist views. Yet, it nevertheless identifies natural kinds that are fairly, though not completely, stance-independent or objective. (shrink)

The selected effects or ‘etiological’ theory of Proper function is a naturalistic and realist account of biological teleology. It is used to analyse normativity in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of medicine and elsewhere. The theory has been developed with a simple and intuitive view of natural selection. Traits are selected because of their positive effects on the fitness of the organisms that have them. These ‘selected effects’ are the Proper functions of the traits. Proponents argue that this (...) analysis of biological teleology has the unique advantage that the selected effect function of a trait is also a causal explanation of the trait: the trait exists because it performs this function. We show, however, that selected effect functions as currently defined explain the existence of traits only under highly restrictive assumptions about evolutionary dynamics. In many common scenarios in which traits evolve by natural selection, selected effect functions do not explain those traits. This is because definitions of selected effect function extract from any evolutionary scenario only the information that would be explanatorily relevant in the simple evolutionary scenario implicit in those definitions. When applied to more complex scenarios selected effect functions omit the key information that is explanatorily relevant in those scenarios. The assumptions required for selected effect functions to be explanatory are particularly unlikely to hold in the domain that its proponents care most about - the evolution of representation. A more adequate selected effects theory of Proper functions may be possible, but will require much greater attention to the structure of actual evolutionary explanations. (shrink)

An Aristotelian Philosophy of Mathematics breaks the impasse between Platonist and nominalist views of mathematics. Neither a study of abstract objects nor a mere language or logic, mathematics is a science of real aspects of the world as much as biology is. For the first time, a philosophy of mathematics puts applied mathematics at the centre. Quantitative aspects of the world such as ratios of heights, and structural ones such as symmetry and continuity, are parts of the physical world and (...) are objects of mathematics. Though some mathematical structures such as infinities may be too big to be realized in fact, all of them are capable of being realized. Informed by the author's background in both philosophy and mathematics, but keeping to simple examples, the book shows how infant perception of patterns is extended by visualization and proof to the vast edifice of modern pure and applied mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

En este artículo se presentan dos demostraciones del teorema de interpolación: Una para la lógica proposicional y otra para la lógica de primer orden. Ambas se realizan en el contexto de la teoría de modelos. El teorema de interpolación afirma que si A y B son fórmulas, donde A no es una contradicción, B no es válida, y B es una consecuencia lógica de A, entonces existe una fórmula C que esta escrita en el lenguaje común al de A y (...) de B, tal que C es una consecuencia lógica de A y B es una consecuencia lógica de C. El teorema de interpolación fue demostrado por primera vez para la lógica de primer orden por William Craig en 1957, y desde entonces se ha investigado la posibilidad de generalizarlo o aplicarlo. Dicho teorema tiene generalizaciones o aplicaciones en teoría de la demostración, teoría de modelos abstracta, ciencias de la computación, lógica modal, lógica intuicionista, etc. Se presentan ejemplos de aplicaciones o generalizaciones de la propiedad de interpolación relacionados con lógicas infinitarias, cuantificadores generalizados, segundo orden, no clásicas, abstractas, etc. También se ofrecen referencias de problemas abiertos sobre interpolación en el contexto de la teoría de modelos abstracta. (shrink)

David Stove was a philosopher strong on argument and polemic. His work on the logical intepretation of probability led to a defence of induction in The Rationality of Induction (1986). It resulted too in his denunciation of Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyeraband as irrationalists because of their "deductivism" (the thesis that the only logic is deductive logic). Stove also defended controversial views on the intelligence of women and on Darwinism. The article surveys his life and work.

This paper compares Joseph Rouse‘s perspective on the relation between naturalism, social normativity and ethics with the enactivist approaches of Shaun Gallagher and Hanne De Jaegher. Rouse and these enactivists draw from many of the same conceptual resources, including the philosophical insights of phenomenology , hermeneutics, the later Wittgenstein and feminist scholarship, in order to rethink naturalism in the direction of strong interdependence between the individual and their material and social environment. Rouse(2023) has expressed support for embodied, embedded, extended, and (...) enactive (4EA) approaches to cognition, saying his project “primarily intersects theirs in relations between organismic bodies and their developmental and selective environments.” Unlike Gallagher and De Jaegher, however, Rouse also incorporates the poststructuralist thinking of Nietzsche and Foucault. His proximity to the ideas of Foucault on power and subjectivity gives him a vantage on the radically socially situated nature of individual sense-making that is missing from enactivist writers’ accounts. Despite their emphasis on the primary role of intersubjectivity in the genesis and functioning of individual perceptual, affective and cognitive processes, the lingering vestiges of subjectivist volunterism and consequent reliance on individual moral blame inhabit their formulations of the ethics of social embodiment. Rouse has in the main applied his analyses to debates within philosophy of science and the post-analytic community (McDowell, Brandon, Haugeland, Rorty, Davidson, Sellars, Quine). In this paper I will instead direct Rouse’s poststructuralist articulation of naturalism toward a critical reading the recent forays into the terrain of ethics and justice by Gallagher and De Jaegher. (shrink)

Explains Aristotle's views on the possibility of continuous variation between biological species. While the Porphyrean/Linnean classification of species by a tree suggests species are distributed discretely, Aristotle admitted continuous variation between species among lower life forms.

Contributions to COVID-19 vaccination programmes promise valuable collective goods. They can support public and individual health by creating herd immunity and taking the pressure off overwhelmed public health services; support freedom of movement by enabling governments to remove restrictive lockdown policies; and improve economic and social well-being by allowing businesses, schools, and other essential public services to re-open. The vaccinated can contribute to the production of these goods. The unvaccinated, who benefit from, but who do not contribute to these goods (...) can be morally criticised as free-riders. In this paper defends the claim that in the case of COVID-19, the unvaccinated are unfair free-riders. I defend the claim against two objections. First, that they are not unfair free-riders because they lack the subjective attitudes and intentions of free-riders; second, that although the unvaccinated may be free-riders, their free-riding is not unfair. (shrink)

It seems obvious that phenomenally conscious experience is something of great value, and that this value maps onto a range of important ethical issues. For example, claims about the value of life for those in a permanent vegetative state, debates about treatment and study of disorders of consciousness, controversies about end-of-life care for those with advanced dementia, and arguments about the moral status of embryos, fetuses, and non-human animals arguably turn on the moral significance of various facts about consciousness. However, (...) though work has been done on the moral significance of elements of consciousness, such as pain and pleasure, little explicit attention has been devoted to the ethical significance of consciousness. In this book Joshua Shepherd presents a systematic account of the value present within conscious experience. This account emphasizes not only the nature of consciousness, but the importance of items within experience such as affect, valence, and the complex overall shape of particular valuable experiences. Shepherd also relates this account to difficult cases involving non-humans and those with disorders of consciousness, arguing that the value of consciousness influences and partially explains the degree of moral status a being possesses, without fully determining it. The upshot is a deeper understanding of both the moral importance of phenomenal consciousness and its relations to moral status. This book will be of great interest to philosophers and students of ethics, bioethics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science. (shrink)

Philosophers of experiment have acknowledged that experiments are often more than mere hypothesis-tests, once thought to be an experiment's exclusive calling. Drawing on examples from contemporary biology, I make an additional amendment to our understanding of experiment by examining the way that `wide' instrumentation can, for reasons of efficiency, lead scientists away from traditional hypothesis-directed methods of experimentation and towards exploratory methods.

This article aims to provide a consistent explication of the doctrine of Divine Simplicity. To achieve this end, a re-construal of the doctrine is made within an “aspectival trope-theoretic” metaphysical framework, which will ultimately enable the doctrine to be elucidated in a consistent manner, and the Plantingian objections raised against it will be shown to be unproblematic.

As COVID-19 spread, clinicians warned of mental illness epidemics within the coronavirus pandemic. Funding for digital mental health is surging and researchers are calling for widespread adoption to address the mental health sequalae of COVID-19. -/- We consider whether these technologies improve mental health outcomes and whether they exacerbate existing health inequalities laid bare by the pandemic. We argue the evidence for efficacy is weak and the likelihood of increasing inequalities is high. -/- First, we review recent trends in digital (...) mental health. Next, we turn to the clinical literature to show that many technologies proposed as a response to COVID-19 are unlikely to improve outcomes. Then, we argue that even evidence-based technologies run the risk of increasing health disparities. We conclude by suggesting that policymakers should not allocate limited resources to the development of many digital mental health tools and should focus instead on evidence-based solutions to address mental health inequalities. (shrink)

The concept of acting intentionally is an important nexus where ‘theory of mind’ and moral judgment meet. Preschool children’s judgments of intentional action show a valence-driven asymmetry. Children say that a foreseen but disavowed side-effect is brought about 'on purpose' when the side-effect itself is morally bad but not when it is morally good. This is the first demonstration in preschoolers that moral judgment influences judgments of ‘on-purpose’ (as opposed to purpose influencing moral judgment). Judgments of intentional action are usually (...) assumed to be purely factual. That these judgments are sometimes partly normative — even in preschoolers — challenges current understanding. Young children’s judgments regarding foreseen side-effects depend upon whether the children process the idea that the character does not care about the side-effect. As soon as preschoolers effectively process the ‘theory of mind’ concept, NOT CARE THAT P, children show the side-effect effect.idea.. (shrink)

In What Science Knows, the Australian philosopher and mathematician James Franklin explains in captivating and straightforward prose how science works its magic. It offers a semipopular introduction to an objective Bayesian/logical probabilist account of scientific reasoning, arguing that inductive reasoning is logically justified (though actually existing science sometimes falls short). Its account of mathematics is Aristotelian realist.

A polemical account of Australian philosophy up to 2003, emphasising its unique aspects (such as commitment to realism) and the connections between philosophers' views and their lives. Topics include early idealism, the dominance of John Anderson in Sydney, the Orr case, Catholic scholasticism, Melbourne Wittgensteinianism, philosophy of science, the Sydney disturbances of the 1970s, Francofeminism, environmental philosophy, the philosophy of law and Mabo, ethics and Peter Singer. Realist theories especially praised are David Armstrong's on universals, David Stove's on logical probability (...) and the ethical realism of Rai Gaita and Catholic philosophers. In addition to strict philosophy, the book treats non-religious moral traditions to train virtue, such as Freemasonry, civics education and the Greek and Roman classics. (shrink)

The rise of experimental philosophy has placed metaphilosophical questions, particularly those concerning concepts, at the center of philosophical attention. X-phi offers empirically rigorous methods for identifying conceptual content, but what exactly it contributes towards evaluating conceptual content remains unclear. We show how x-phi complements Rudolf Carnap’s underappreciated methodology for concept determination, explication. This clarifies and extends x-phi’s positive philosophical import, and also exhibits explication’s broad appeal. But there is a potential problem: Carnap’s account of explication was limited to empirical and (...) logical concepts, but many concepts of interest to philosophers are essentially normative. With formal epistemology as a case study, we show how x-phi assisted explication can apply to normative domains. (shrink)

The burgeoning science of ethics has produced a trend toward pessimism. Ordinary moral thought and action, we’re told, are profoundly influenced by arbitrary factors and ultimately driven by unreasoned feelings. This book counters the current orthodoxy on its own terms by carefully engaging with the empirical literature. The resulting view, optimistic rationalism, shows the pervasive role played by reason, and ultimately defuses sweeping debunking arguments in ethics. The science does suggest that moral knowledge and virtue don’t come easily. However, despite (...) the heavy influence of automatic and unconscious processes that have been shaped by evolutionary pressures, we needn’t reject ordinary moral psychology as fundamentally flawed or in need of serious repair. Reason can be corrupted in ethics just as in other domains, but a special pessimism about morality in particular is unwarranted. Moral judgment and motivation are fundamentally rational enterprises not beholden to the passions. (shrink)

Are properties perfectly natural (or not) relative to worlds, or are they perfectly natural (or not) tout court? That is, could there be a property P that is instanti-ated at worlds w1 and w2, and is perfectly natural at w1 but not at w2? Here, we offer an original argument for the non-world-relativity of perfect naturalness. Along the way, we reply to a prima facie compelling argument for the contin-gency of perfect naturalness, based upon the connection between natural prop-erties and (...) laws of nature. (shrink)

How were reliable predictions made before Pascal and Fermat's discovery of the mathematics of probability in 1654? What methods in law, science, commerce, philosophy, and logic helped us to get at the truth in cases where certainty was not attainable? The book examines how judges, witch inquisitors, and juries evaluated evidence; how scientists weighed reasons for and against scientific theories; and how merchants counted shipwrecks to determine insurance rates. Also included are the problem of induction before Hume, design arguments for (...) the existence of God, and theories on how to evaluate scientific and historical hypotheses. It is explained how Pascal and Fermat's work on chance arose out of legal thought on aleatory contracts. The book interprets pre-Pascalian unquantified probability in a generally objective Bayesian or logical probabilist sense. (shrink)

The extensive involvement of nonconscious processes in human behaviour has led some to suggest that consciousness is much less important for the control of action than we might think. In this article I push against this trend, developing an understanding of conscious control that is sensitive to our best models of overt action control. Further, I assess the cogency of various zombie challenges—challenges that seek to demote the importance of conscious control for human agency. I argue that though nonconscious contributions (...) to action control are evidently robust, these challenges are overblown. (shrink)

It is commonly accepted that clinicians are ethically obligated to disclose their use of medical machine learning systems to patients, and that failure to do so would amount to a moral fault for which clinicians ought to be held accountable. Call this ‘the disclosure thesis.’ Four main arguments have been, or could be, given to support the disclosure thesis in the ethics literature: the risk-based argument, the rights-based argument, the materiality argument and the autonomy argument. In this article, I argue (...) that each of these four arguments are unconvincing, and therefore, that the disclosure thesis ought to be rejected. I suggest that mandating disclosure may also even risk harming patients by providing stakeholders with a way to avoid accountability for harm that results from improper applications or uses of these systems. (shrink)

This paper critiques the new mechanistic explanatory program on grounds that, even when applied to the kinds of examples that it was originally designed to treat, it does not distinguish correct explanations from those that blunder. First, I offer a systematization of the explanatory account, one according to which explanations are mechanistic models that satisfy three desiderata: they must 1) represent causal relations, 2) describe the proper parts, and 3) depict the system at the right ‘level.’ Second, I argue that (...) even the most developed attempts to fulfill these desiderata fall short by failing to appropriately constrain explanatorily apt mechanistic models. -/- *This paper used to be called "The Emperor's New Mechanisms". (shrink)

Among the factors necessary for the occurrence of some event, which of these are selectively highlighted in its explanation and labeled as causes — and which are explanatorily omitted, or relegated to the status of background conditions? Following J. S. Mill, most have thought that only a pragmatic answer to this question was possible. In this paper I suggest we understand this ‘causal selection problem’ in causal-explanatory terms, and propose that explanatory trade-offs between abstraction and stability can provide a principled (...) solution to it. After sketching that solution, it is applied to a few biological examples, including to a debate concerning the ‘causal democracy’ of organismal development, with an anti-democratic (though not a gene-centric) moral. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of species have focused on multicellular, sexual animals and have often neglected to consider unicellular organisms like bacteria. This article begins to fill this gap by considering what species concepts, if any, apply neatly to the bacterial world. First, I argue that the biological species concept cannot be applied to bacteria because of the variable rates of genetic transfer between populations, depending in part on which gene type is prioritized. Second, I present a critique of phylogenetic bacterial species, (...) arguing that phylogenetic bacterial classification requires a questionable metaphysical commitment to the existence of essential genes. I conclude by considering how microbiologists have dealt with these biological complexities by using more pragmatic and not exclusively evolutionary accounts of species. I argue that this pragmatism is not borne of laziness but rather of the substantial conceptual problems in classifying bacteria based on any evolutionary standard. (shrink)

Research on dual character concepts has explored cases in which people think that a term applies to an object in a superficial sense but does not apply to that same object in a deeper sense. Most of this research has focused on cases of one particular type, namely, cases in which the object fails to embody the characteristic values of a particular category. However, there are also other types of cases in which we would be inclined to say that a (...) term does not apply in a deeper sense. For example, we might also say this if an object has acquired a certain status but it failed to acquire this status through a morally or legally legitimate process. Or we might say it if a person has certain emotions but these emotions are not rooted in the person’s true self. I argue that these apparently unrelated types of cases are surprisingly similar in a number of important respects. Thus, we should not be seeking a separate account for each separate type of case; we should be seeking an account that explains in a more general way what people mean when they say that a term does not apply in a deeper sense. (shrink)

It has often been suggested that people’s ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people’s moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the (...) relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people’s moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. It is argued that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first. (shrink)

Nearly all defences of the agent-causal theory of free will portray the theory as a distinctively libertarian one — a theory that only libertarians have reason to accept. According to what I call ‘the standard argument for the agent-causal theory of free will’, the reason to embrace agent-causal libertarianism is that libertarians can solve the problem of enhanced control only if they furnish agents with the agent-causal power. In this way it is assumed that there is only reason to accept (...) the agent-causal theory if there is reason to accept libertarianism. I aim to refute this claim. I will argue that the reasons we have for endorsing the agent-causal theory of free will are nonpartisan. The real reason for going agent-causal has nothing to do with determinism or indeterminism, but rather with avoiding reductionism about agency and the self. As we will see, if there is reason for libertarians to accept the agent-causal theory, there is just as much reason for compatibilists to accept it. It is in this sense that I contend that if anyone should be an agent-causalist, then everyone should be an agent-causalist. (shrink)

Throughout history, almost all mathematicians, physicists and philosophers have been of the opinion that space and time are infinitely divisible. That is, it is usually believed that space and time do not consist of atoms, but that any piece of space and time of non-zero size, however small, can itself be divided into still smaller parts. This assumption is included in geometry, as in Euclid, and also in the Euclidean and non- Euclidean geometries used in modern physics. Of the few (...) who have denied that space and time are infinitely divisible, the most notable are the ancient atomists, and Berkeley and Hume. All of these assert not only that space and time might be atomic, but that they must be. Infinite divisibility is, they say, impossible on purely conceptual grounds. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider two different attempts to make an end run around the experimentalist challenge to the armchair use of intuitions: one due to Max Deutsch and Herman Cappelen, contending that philosophers do not appeal to intuitions, but rather to arguments, in canonical philosophical texts; the other due to Joshua Knobe, arguing that intuitions are so stable that there is in fact no empirical basis for the experimentalist challenge in the first place. We show that a closer (...) attention to philosophical practices reveal, in turn, that we cannot make sense of these philosophical texts as arguments all the way down; and that our methods are so sensitive to error that even a modest amount of instability is enough to raise deep methodological concerns. (shrink)

Imagination plays a rich epistemic role in our cognitive lives. For example, if I want to learn whether my luggage will fit into the overhead compartment on a plane, I might imagine trying to fit it into the overhead compartment and form a justified belief on the basis of this imagining. But what explains the fact that imagination has the power to justify beliefs, and what is the structure of imaginative justification? In this paper, I answer these questions by arguing (...) that imaginings manifest an epistemic status: they are epistemically evaluable as justified or unjustified. This epistemic status grounds their ability to justify beliefs, and they accrue this status in virtue of being based on evidence. Thus, imaginings are best understood as justified justifiers. I argue for this view by way of showing how it offers a satisfying explanation of certain key features of imaginative justification that would otherwise be puzzling. I also argue that imaginings exhibit a number of markers of the basing relation, which further motivates the view that imaginings can be based on evidence. The arguments in this paper have theoretically fruitful implications not only for the epistemology of imagination, but for accounts of reasoning and epistemic normativity more generally. (shrink)

What is it about a person's becoming an adult that makes it generally inappropriate to treat that person paternalistically any longer? The Standard View holds that a mere difference in age or stage of life cannot in itself be morally relevant, but only matters insofar as it is correlated with the development of capacities for mature practical reasoning. This paper defends the contrary view: two people can have all the same general psychological attributes and yet the mere fact that one (...) person is at the beginning of a life and another in the middle of one can justify treating the younger person more paternalistically than the older one. Recognising the moral relevance of age, moreover, is crucial if one is to accommodate both the liberal moral ideal of respect for autonomy and our demanding educational aims, given that these otherwise come into conflict with one another. (shrink)

I argue that the neural realizers of experiences of trying are not distinct from the neural realizers of actual trying . I then ask how experiences of trying might relate to the perceptual experiences one has while acting. First, I assess recent zombie action arguments regarding conscious visual experience, and I argue that contrary to what some have claimed, conscious visual experience plays a causal role for action control in some circumstances. Second, I propose a multimodal account of the experience (...) of acting. According to this account, the experience of acting is a temporally extended, co-conscious collection of agentive and perceptual experiences, functionally integrated and structured both by multimodal perceptual processing as well as by what an agent is, at the time, trying to do. (shrink)

In this paper I identify and respond to four persistent objections to the idea of wilderness: empirical, cultural, philosophical and environmental. Despite having dogged the wilderness debate for decades, none of these objections withstands scrutiny; rather they are misplaced criticisms that hinder fruitful discussion of the philosophical ramifications of wilderness by needlessly complicating the idea itself. While there may be other justifiable concerns about the idea of wilderness, it is time to move beyond the four discussed in this paper.

This project was provoked by the almost nonexistent pushback from the Democratic liberal establishment to the (2020) exoneration of Kyle Rittenhouse, despite his acknowledged killing of two Black Lives Matters protesters against the police murder of George Floyd. It builds on three prior articles arguing for the revival of ancient Dionysian practice, Haitian Vodou, and Indigenous South American shamanism to empower leftist revolution. In essence, I propose an assemblage of spiritual practices that are accessible today for the neo-colonized 99% of (...) the global population, by synthesizing and reconstructing three democratic, lower-SES, Indigenous religions, all of which share a militant defiance of their respective tyrannical plutocracies. To avoid cultural appropriation, I center these reconstructed spiritual practices on the figure of the “mage,” a psychosocial healer loosely analogous to a shaman. And the mage’s signature activity, “magic,” I redefine naturalistically as free interpersonal performative action, practiced using two theoretical disciplines (philosophy and psychology) and two practical disciplines chosen by each mage. More precisely, Spirit/Dance channels the “spirits” of dead ancestors, historical figures, legendary heroes, mythical beings, and fictional characters, into the three ultimate objectives of “mindfulness” for psyches/souls, “liberation” for mindful bodies, and “social justice” for liberated communities, indirectly empowering long-term revolution. (shrink)

A problem for Aristotelian realist accounts of universals (neither Platonist nor nominalist) is the status of those universals that happen not to be realised in the physical (or any other) world. They perhaps include uninstantiated shades of blue and huge infinite cardinals. Should they be altogether excluded (as in D.M. Armstrong's theory of universals) or accorded some sort of reality? Surely truths about ratios are true even of ratios that are too big to be instantiated - what is the truthmaker (...) of such truths? It is argued that Aristotelianism can answer the question, but only a semi-Platonist form of it. (shrink)

An influential objection to the epistemic power of the imagination holds that it is uninformative. You cannot get more out of the imagination than you put into it, and therefore learning from the imagination is impossible. This paper argues, against this view, that the imagination is robustly informative. Moreover, it defends a novel account of how the imagination informs, according to which the imagination is informative in virtue of its analog representational format. The core idea is that analog representations represent (...) relations ‘for free,’ and this explains how the imagination can contain more information than is put into it. This account makes important contributions to both philosophy of mind, by showing how the imagination can generate new content that is not represented by a subject’s antecedent mental states, and epistemology, by showing how the imagination can generate new justification that is not conferred by a subject’s antecedent evidence. (shrink)

There are several important arguments in metaethics that rely on explanatory considerations. Gilbert Harman has presented a challenge to the existence of moral facts that depends on the claim that the best explanation of our moral beliefs does not involve moral facts. The Reliability Challenge against moral realism depends on the claim that moral realism is incompatible with there being a satisfying explanation of our reliability about moral truths. The purpose of this chapter is to examine these and related arguments. (...) In particular, this chapter will discuss four kinds of arguments – Harman’s Challenge, evolutionary debunking arguments, irrelevant influence arguments, and the Reliability Challenge – understood as arguments against moral realism. The main goals of this chapter are (i) to articulate the strongest version of these arguments; (ii) to present and assess the central epistemological principles underlying these arguments; and (iii) to determine what a realist would have to do to adequately respond to these arguments. (shrink)

I argue for the existence of imaginative beliefs: mental states that are imaginative in format and doxastic in attitude. I advance two arguments for this thesis. First, there are imaginings that play the functional roles of belief. Second, there are imaginings that play the epistemic roles of belief. These arguments supply both descriptive and normative grounds for positing imaginative beliefs. I also argue that this view fares better than alternatives that posit distinct imaginative and doxastic states to account for the (...) same phenomena. Along the way, I demonstrate the theoretical significance of imaginative beliefs by showing how they pose a challenge for standard taxonomies of the mind, clarify the sense in which imagination is occurrent and voluntary, explain the justificatory role of the imagination, and point to a deep but underappreciated symmetry between imagistic and non-imagistic thought. (shrink)

Necessarily, if S lacks the ability to exercise control, S is not an agent. If S is not an agent, S cannot act intentionally, responsibly, or rationally, nor can S possess or exercise free will. In spite of the obvious importance of control, however, no general account of control exists. In this paper I reflect on the nature of control itself. I develop accounts of control ’s exercise and control ’s possession that illuminate what it is for degrees of control (...) —that is, the degree of control an agent possesses or exercises in a given circumstance—to vary. Finally, I demonstrate the usefulness of the account on offer by showing how it generates a solution to a long-standing problem for causalist theories of action, namely, the problem of deviant causation. (shrink)