Results for 'Justin Evans'

674 found
Order:
  1. What's wrong with virtue signaling?James Fanciullo & Jesse Hill - 2023 - Synthese 201 (117).
    A novel account of virtue signaling and what makes it bad has recently been offered by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke. Despite plausibly vindicating the folk’s conception of virtue signaling as a bad thing, their account has recently been attacked by both Neil Levy and Evan Westra. According to Levy and Westra, virtue signaling actually supports the aims and progress of public moral discourse. In this paper, we rebut these recent defenses of virtue signaling. We suggest that virtue signaling (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  2. Virtue signalling and the Condorcet Jury theorem.Scott Hill & Renaud-Philippe Garner - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):14821-14841.
    One might think that if the majority of virtue signallers judge that a proposition is true, then there is significant evidence for the truth of that proposition. Given the Condorcet Jury Theorem, individual virtue signallers need not be very reliable for the majority judgment to be very likely to be correct. Thus, even people who are skeptical of the judgments of individual virtue signallers should think that if a majority of them judge that a proposition is true, then that provides (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  3. Symposium on Justin Remhof’s Nietzsche’s Constructivism: a Metaphysics of Material Objects.Justin Remhof - 2020 - Philosophia 49 (2):571-583.
    Symposium on Nietzsche's Constructivism (Routledge, 2018), replies to Adler, Cabrera, Doyle, Migotti, Sinhababu, Pedersen.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  4. Making Sense of Raw Input.Richard Evans, Matko Bošnjak, Lars Buesing, Kevin Ellis, David Pfau, Pushmeet Kohli & Marek Sergot - 2021 - Artificial Intelligence 299 (C):103521.
    How should a machine intelligence perform unsupervised structure discovery over streams of sensory input? One approach to this problem is to cast it as an apperception task [1]. Here, the task is to construct an explicit interpretable theory that both explains the sensory sequence and also satisfies a set of unity conditions, designed to ensure that the constituents of the theory are connected in a relational structure. However, the original formulation of the apperception task had one fundamental limitation: it assumed (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  5. Virtue Signaling and Moral Progress.Evan Westra - 2021 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 49 (2):156-178.
    ‘Virtue signaling’ is the practice of using moral talk in order to enhance one’s moral reputation. Many find this kind of behavior irritating. However, some philosophers have gone further, arguing that virtue signaling actively undermines the proper functioning of public moral discourse and impedes moral progress. Against this view, I argue that widespread virtue signaling is not a social ill, and that it can actually serve as an invaluable instrument for moral change, especially in cases where moral argument alone does (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  6. Teleosemantics, selection and novel contents.Justin Garson & David Papineau - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (3):36.
    Mainstream teleosemantics is the view that mental representation should be understood in terms of biological functions, which, in turn, should be understood in terms of selection processes. One of the traditional criticisms of teleosemantics is the problem of novel contents: how can teleosemantics explain our ability to represent properties that are evolutionarily novel? In response, some have argued that by generalizing the notion of a selection process to include phenomena such as operant conditioning, and the neural selection that underlies it, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   23 citations  
  7. Moral Grandstanding.Justin Tosi & Brandon Warmke - 2016 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 44 (3):197-217.
    Moral grandstanding is a pervasive feature of public discourse. Many of us can likely recognize that we have engaged in grandstanding at one time or another. While there is nothing new about the phenomenon of grandstanding, we think that it has not received the philosophical attention it deserves. In this essay, we provide an account of moral grandstanding as the use of public discourse for moral self-promotion. We then show that our account, with support from some standard theses of social (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   75 citations  
  8. Spinoza.Justin Steinberg & Valtteri Viljanen - 2020 - Cambridge: Polity. Edited by Valtteri Viljanen.
    Benedict de Spinoza is one of the most controversial and enigmatic thinkers in the history of philosophy. His greatest work, Ethics (1677), developed a comprehensive philosophical system and argued that God and Nature are identical. His scandalous Theological-Political Treatise (1670) provoked outrage during his lifetime due to its biblical criticism, anticlericalism, and defense of the freedom to philosophize. Together, these works earned Spinoza a reputation as a singularly radical thinker. -/- In this book, Steinberg and Viljanen offer a concise and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  9. Country Music and the Problem of Authenticity.Evan Malone - 2023 - British Journal of Aesthetics 63 (1):75-90.
    In the small but growing literature on the philosophy of country music, the question of how we ought to understand the genre’s notion of authenticity has emerged as one of the central questions. Many country music scholars argue that authenticity claims track attributions of cultural standing or artistic self-expression. However, careful attention to the history of the genre reveals that these claims are simply factually wrong. On the basis of this, we have grounds for dismissing these attributions. Here, I argue (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  10. A Generalized Selected Effects Theory of Function.Justin Garson - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (3):523-543.
    I present and defend the generalized selected effects theory (GSE) of function. According to GSE, the function of a trait consists in the activity that contributed to its bearer’s differential reproduction, or differential retention, within a population. Unlike the traditional selected effects (SE) theory, it does not require that the functional trait helped its bearer reproduce; differential retention is enough. Although the core theory has been presented previously, I go significantly beyond those presentations by providing a new argument for GSE (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   44 citations  
  11. Stereotypes, theory of mind, and the action–prediction hierarchy.Evan Westra - 2019 - Synthese 196 (7):2821-2846.
    Both mindreading and stereotyping are forms of social cognition that play a pervasive role in our everyday lives, yet too little attention has been paid to the question of how these two processes are related. This paper offers a theory of the influence of stereotyping on mental-state attribution that draws on hierarchical predictive coding accounts of action prediction. It is argued that the key to understanding the relation between stereotyping and mindreading lies in the fact that stereotypes centrally involve character-trait (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   30 citations  
  12. Moral Disagreement and Moral Semantics.Justin Khoo & Joshua Knobe - 2016 - Noûs:109-143.
    When speakers utter conflicting moral sentences, it seems clear that they disagree. It has often been suggested that the fact that the speakers disagree gives us evidence for a claim about the semantics of the sentences they are uttering. Specifically, it has been suggested that the existence of the disagreement gives us reason to infer that there must be an incompatibility between the contents of these sentences. This inference then plays a key role in a now-standard argument against certain theories (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   70 citations  
  13. A pluralistic framework for the psychology of norms.Evan Westra & Kristin Andrews - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (5):1-30.
    Social norms are commonly understood as rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to domain-specific adaptations for norm acquisition. In (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  14. The functional sense of mechanism.Justin Garson - 2013 - Philos Sci 80 (3):317-333.
    This article presents a distinct sense of ‘mechanism’, which I call the functional sense of mechanism. According to this sense, mechanisms serve functions, and this fact places substantive restrictions on the kinds of system activities ‘for which’ there can be a mechanism. On this view, there are no mechanisms for pathology; pathologies result from disrupting mechanisms for functions. Second, on this sense, natural selection is probably not a mechanism for evolution because it does not serve a function. After distinguishing this (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   51 citations  
  15. Margaret MacDonald’s scientific common-sense philosophy.Justin Vlasits - 2022 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30 (2):267-287.
    Margaret MacDonald (1907–56) was a central figure in the history of early analytic philosophy in Britain due to both her editorial work as well as her own writings. While her later work on aesthetics and political philosophy has recently received attention, her early writings in the 1930s present a coherent and, for its time, strikingly original blend of common-sense and scientific philosophy. In these papers, MacDonald tackles the central problems of philosophy of her day: verification, the problem of induction, and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  16. How to Be a Function Pluralist.Justin Garson - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (4):1101-1122.
    I distinguish two forms of pluralism about biological functions, between-discipline pluralism and within-discipline pluralism. Between-discipline pluralism holds that different theories of function are appropriate for different subdisciplines of biology and psychology. I provide reasons for rejecting this view. Instead, I recommend within-discipline pluralism, which emphasizes the plurality of function concepts at play within any given subdiscipline of biology and psychology.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  17. Symbolic belief in social cognition.Evan Westra - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):388-408.
    Keeping track of what others believe is a central part of human social cognition. However, the social relevance of those beliefs can vary a great deal. Some belief attributions mostly tell us about what a person is likely to do next. Other belief attributions tell us more about a person's social identity. In this paper, I argue that we cope with this challenge by employing two distinct concepts of belief in our everyday social interactions. The epistemic concept of belief is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  18. The Gap in the Evil God Challenge.Justin Mooney & Perry Hendricks - forthcoming - Analysis.
    We argue that the evil-god challenge is not an additional challenge for theists above and beyond the (much older) gap problem. One version of the evil-god challenge is merely a specific instance of the gap problem, and another is dependent on that specific instance of the gap problem. Therefore, the various solutions to the gap problem that theists have developed double as responses to the evil-god challenge, placing the evil-god challenge in a more vulnerable position than has been supposed.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19. Ageing and the goal of evolution.Justin Garson - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (1):1-16.
    There is a certain metaphor that has enjoyed tremendous longevity in the evolution of ageing literature. According to this metaphor, nature has a certain goal or purpose, the perpetuation of the species, or, alternatively, the reproductive success of the individual. In relation to this goal, the individual organism has a function, job, or task, namely, to breed and, in some species, to raise its brood to maturity. On this picture, those who cannot, or can no longer, reproduce are somehow invisible (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  20. Mindreading in conversation.Evan Westra & Jennifer Nagel - 2021 - Cognition 210 (C):104618.
    How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that are decoupled (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  21. There Are No Ahistorical Theories of Function.Justin Garson - 2019 - Philosophy of Science 86 (5):1146-1156.
    Theories of function are conventionally divided up into historical and ahistorical ones. Proponents of ahistorical theories often cite the ahistoricity of their accounts as a major virtue. Here, I argue that none of the mainstream “ahistorical” accounts are actually ahistorical. All of them embed, implicitly or explicitly, an appeal to history. In Boorse’s goal-contribution account, history is latent in the idea of statistical-typicality. In the propensity theory, history is implicit in the idea of a species’ natural habitat. In the causal (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  22. Meddlesome Blame and Negotiating Standing.Justin Snedegar - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Blaming others for things that are not our business can attract charges of meddling and dismissals of blame. It is well known that such charges are often contentious because the content and applicability of anti-meddling norms can be difficult to nail down. This paper argues that another important source of contention is that it is often not settled in advance whether some wrongdoing is or is not the business of a would-be blamer. Thinking about the grounds of anti-meddling norms—privacy, intimacy, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  23. Function, selection, and construction in the brain.Justin Garson - 2012 - Synthese 189 (3):451-481.
    A common misunderstanding of the selected effects theory of function is that natural selection operating over an evolutionary time scale is the only functionbestowing process in the natural world. This construal of the selected effects theory conflicts with the existence and ubiquity of neurobiological functions that are evolutionary novel, such as structures underlying reading ability. This conflict has suggested to some that, while the selected effects theory may be relevant to some areas of evolutionary biology, its relevance to neuroscience is (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  24. Becoming a Statue.Justin Mooney - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    ABSTRACT One simple but relatively neglected solution to the notorious coincidence puzzle of the statue and the piece of clay claims that the property of being a statue is a phase sortal property that the piece of clay instantiates temporarily. I defend this view against some standard objections, by reinforcing it with a novel counterpart-theoretic account of identity under a sortal. This proposal does not require colocation, four-dimensionalism, eliminativism, deflationism, or unorthodox theses about classical identity.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  25. David Lewis in the lab: experimental results on the emergence of meaning.Justin Bruner, Cailin O’Connor, Hannah Rubin & Simon M. Huttegger - 2018 - Synthese 195 (2):603-621.
    In this paper we use an experimental approach to investigate how linguistic conventions can emerge in a society without explicit agreement. As a starting point we consider the signaling game introduced by Lewis. We find that in experimental settings, small groups can quickly develop conventions of signal meaning in these games. We also investigate versions of the game where the theoretical literature indicates that meaning will be less likely to arise—when there are more than two states for actors to transfer (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  26. Nietzsche as Panpsychist.Justin Remhof - 2024 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 1 (5):1-23.
    This paper argues that Nietzsche is a panpsychist. Panpsychism holds that mental features are ubiquitous and fundamental in reality. I first argue that Nietzsche’s rejection of Cartesian dualism leads him to substance monism. To better understand his monism, I examine Nietzsche’s rejection of Newtonian atomism. Nietzsche holds that bundles of forces, or will to power, are more fundamental than hard, extended atoms. So, will to power is fundamental. I then investigate Nietzsche’s remarks on organic and inorganic nature to show that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  27. Getting to know you: Accuracy and error in judgments of character.Evan Westra - 2019 - Mind and Language 35 (5):583-600.
    Character judgments play an important role in our everyday lives. However, decades of empirical research on trait attribution suggest that the cognitive processes that generate these judgments are prone to a number of biases and cognitive distortions. This gives rise to a skeptical worry about the epistemic foundations of everyday characterological beliefs that has deeply disturbing and alienating consequences. In this paper, I argue that this skeptical worry is misplaced: under the appropriate informational conditions, our everyday character-trait judgments are in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  28. Modal Disagreements.Justin Khoo - 2015 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (5):511-534.
    It is often assumed that when one party felicitously rejects an assertion made by an- other party, the first party thinks that the proposition asserted by the second is false. This assumption underlies various disagreement arguments used to challenge contex- tualism about some class of expressions. As such, many contextualists have resisted these arguments on the grounds that the disagreements in question may not be over the proposition literally asserted. The result appears to be a dialectical stalemate, with no independent (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   45 citations  
  29. Putting History Back into Mechanisms.Justin Garson - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (4):921-940.
    Mechanisms, in the prominent biological sense of the term, are historical entities. That is, whether or not something is a mechanism for something depends on its history. Put differently, while your spontaneously-generated molecule-for-molecule double has a heart, and its heart pumps blood around its body, its heart does not have a mechanism for pumping, since it does not have the right history. My argument for this claim is that mechanisms have proper functions; proper functions are historical entities; so, mechanisms are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  30. Theological Determinism and God's Standing to Blame.Justin A. Capes - forthcoming - Faith and Philosophy.
    I argue that God lacks the standing to blame or punish people for their sin if theological determinism is true, and that this is so even if sinners deserve both blame and punishment for sins God determines them to commit (and thus even if theological determinism is compatible with human free will and moral responsibility). I then respond to two recent objections to this conclusion, one by John Ross Churchill, the other by Patrick Todd. I conclude by noting several implications (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  31. Triviality Results and the Relationship between Logical and Natural Languages.Justin Khoo & Matthew Mandelkern - 2019 - Mind 128 (510):485-526.
    Inquiry into the meaning of logical terms in natural language (‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘if’) has generally proceeded along two dimensions. On the one hand, semantic theories aim to predict native speaker intuitions about the natural language sentences involving those logical terms. On the other hand, logical theories explore the formal properties of the translations of those terms into formal languages. Sometimes, these two lines of inquiry appear to be in tension: for instance, our best logical investigation into conditional connectives may (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  32.  75
    "Existential Responsibility in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Chiang".Justin F. White - forthcoming - In David Friedell (ed.), The Philosophy of Ted Chiang. Palgrave MacMillan.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  33. Pragmatic Development and the False Belief Task.Evan Westra - 2017 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (2):235-257.
    Nativists about theory of mind have typically explained why children below the age of four fail the false belief task by appealing to the demands that these tasks place on children’s developing executive abilities. However, this appeal to executive functioning cannot explain a wide range of evidence showing that social and linguistic factors also affect when children pass this task. In this paper, I present a revised nativist proposal about theory of mind development that is able to accommodate these findings, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  34. Do transposable elements have functions of their very own?Justin Garson - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (3):1-18.
    Philosophers who study the problem of biological function often begin their deliberations by reflecting on the functions of parts of animals, or the behavior of animals. Applying theories of biological function to unconventional or borderline cases can help us to better evaluate and refine those theories. This is the case when we consider whether parts of transposable elements —bits of “selfish” DNA that move about within a host genome—have functions of their own, that is, whether the parts of TEs have (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  35. Criteria of identity without sortals.Justin Mooney - 2023 - Noûs 57 (3):722-739.
    Many philosophers believe that the criteria of identity over time for ordinary objects entail that such objects are permanent members of certain sortal kinds. The sortal kinds in question have come to be known as substance sortal kinds. But in this article, I defend a criterion of identity that is suited to phasalism, the view that alleged substance sortals are in fact phase sortals. The criterion I defend is a sortal‐weighted version of a change‐minimizing criterion first discussed by Eli Hirsch. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  36. Power, Bargaining, and Collaboration.Justin Bruner & Cailin O'Connor - 2017 - In Thomas Boyer-Kassem, Conor Mayo-Wilson & Michael Weisberg (eds.), Scientific Collaboration and Collective Knowledge. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    Collaboration is increasingly popular across academia. Collaborative work raises certain ethical questions, however. How will the fruits of collaboration be divided? How will the work for the collaborative project be split? In this paper, we consider the following question in particular. Are there ways in which these divisions systematically disadvantage certain groups? -/- We use evolutionary game theoretic models to address this question. First, we discuss results from O'Connor and Bruner (unpublished). In this paper, we show that underrepresented groups in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  37. How to Solve the Problem of Evil: A Deontological Strategy.Justin Mooney - 2019 - Faith and Philosophy 36 (4):442-462.
    One paradigmatic argument from evil against theism claims that, (1) if God exists, then there is no gratuitous evil. But (2) there is gratuitous evil, so (3) God does not exist. I consider three deontological strategies for resisting this argument. Each strategy restructures existing theodicies which deny (2) so that they instead deny (1). The first two strategies are problematic on their own, but their primary weaknesses vanish when they are combined to form the third strategy, resulting in a promising (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  38. Against Organizational Functions.Justin Garson - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (5):1093-1103.
    Over the last 20 years, several philosophers have developed a new approach to biological functions, the organizational approach. This is not a single theory but a family of theories based on the idea that a trait token can acquire a function by virtue of the way it contributes to a complex, organized system and thereby to its own continued persistence as a token. I argue that the organizational approach faces a serious liberality objection. I examine three different ways organizational theorists (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  39. Should CSR Give Atheists Epistemic Assurance? On Beer-Goggles, BFFs, and Skepticism Regarding Religious Beliefs.Justin L. Barrett & Ian M. Church - 2013 - The Monist 96 (3):311-324.
    Recent work in cognitive science of religion (CSR) is beginning to converge on a very interesting thesis—that, given the ordinary features of human minds operating in typical human environments, we are naturally disposed to believe in the existence of gods, among other religious ideas (e.g., seeAtran [2002], Barrett [2004; 2012], Bering [2011], Boyer [2001], Guthrie [1993], McCauley [2011], Pyysiäinen [2004; 2009]). In this paper, we explore whether such a discovery ultimately helps or hurts the atheist position—whether, for example, it lends (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  40. Action and Agency in Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Critique.Justin Nnaemeka Onyeukaziri - 2023 - Philosophia: International Journal of Philosophy (Philippine e-journal) 24 (1):73-90.
    The objective of this work is to explore the notion of “action” and “agency” in artificial intelligence (AI). It employs a metaphysical notion of action and agency as an epistemological tool in the critique of the notion of “action” and “agency” in artificial intelligence. Hence, both a metaphysical and cognitive analysis is employed in the investigation of the quiddity and nature of action and agency per se, and how they are, by extension employed in the language and science of artificial (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  41. Scepticism about the argument from divine hiddenness.Justin P. Mcbrayer & Philip Swenson - 2012 - Religious Studies 48 (2):129 - 150.
    Some philosophers have argued that the paucity of evidence for theism — along with basic assumptions about God's nature — is ipso facto evidence for atheism. The resulting argument has come to be known as the argument from divine hiddenness. Theists have challenged both the major and minor premises of the argument by offering defences. However, all of the major, contemporary defences are failures. What unites these failures is instructive: each is implausible given other commitments shared by everyone in the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   26 citations  
  42. TRUTH – A Conversation between P F Strawson and Gareth Evans (1973).P. F. Strawson & Gareth Evans - manuscript
    This is a transcript of a conversation between P F Strawson and Gareth Evans in 1973, filmed for The Open University. Under the title 'Truth', Strawson and Evans discuss the question as to whether the distinction between genuinely fact-stating uses of language and other uses can be grounded on a theory of truth, especially a 'thin' notion of truth in the tradition of F P Ramsey.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  43. The Matter of Coincidence.Justin Mooney - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (1):98-114.
    The phasalist solution to the puzzle of the statue and the piece of clay claims that being a statue is a phase sortal property of the piece of clay, just like being a child is a phase sortal property of a human being. Some philosophers reject this solution because it cannot account for cases where the statue seems to gain and lose parts that the piece of clay does not. I rebut this objection by arguing, contrary to the prevailing view, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  44. Nietzsche’s Perfectionism and the Ethics of Care: A Brief Treatment.Justin Remhof - 2023 - In McNeal Michael J. (ed.), Nietzsche on Women and the Eternal-Feminine: A Critique of Truth and Values. Bloomsbury. pp. 153-159.
    Nietzsche appears antithetical to care ethics. He often mocks human dependency, for instance, sometimes in ways that appear sexist, and he famously challenges the legitimacy of compassion. Nietzsche’s positive ethical position is arguably some form of anti-egalitarian perfectionism which holds that goodness is constituted by individual human excellence. Perfectionism, however, coupled with a rejection of the ethical significance of dependency and virtues like compassion, can seem dangerous to modern sensibilities—especially to those in the care tradition. I think we should put (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  45. The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe.Evan G. Williams - 2015 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (5):971-982.
    This article gives two arguments for believing that our society is unknowingly guilty of serious, large-scale wrongdoing. First is an inductive argument: most other societies, in history and in the world today, have been unknowingly guilty of serious wrongdoing, so ours probably is too. Second is a disjunctive argument: there are a large number of distinct ways in which our practices could turn out to be horribly wrong, so even if no particular hypothesized moral mistake strikes us as very likely, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  46. The Ontology and Aesthetics of Genre.Evan Malone - 2024 - Philosophy Compass 19 (1):e12958.
    Genres inform our appreciative practices. What it takes for a work to be a good work of comedy is different than what it takes for a work to be a good work of horror, and a failure to recognize this will lead to a failure to appreciate comedies or works of horror particularly well. Likewise, it is not uncommon to hear people say that a film or novel is a good work, but not a good work of x (where x (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  47. Spontaneous mindreading: a problem for the two-systems account.Evan Westra - 2017 - Synthese 194 (11):4559-4581.
    According to the two-systems account of mindreading, our mature perspective-taking abilities are subserved by two distinct mindreading systems: a fast but inflexible, “implicit” system, and a flexible but slow “explicit” one. However, the currently available evidence on adult perspective-taking does not support this account. Specifically, both Level-1 and Level-2 perspective-taking show a combination of efficiency and flexibility that is deeply inconsistent with the two-systems architecture. This inconsistency also turns out to have serious consequences for the two-systems framework as a whole, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  48.  85
    A Posthumanist Social Epistemology: On the Possibility of Nonhuman Epistemic Injustice.Justin Simpson - 2023 - Anthropos: Journal of Psychology and Philosophy 55 (2):195-213.
    This paper seeks to intervene in environmental ethics and social epistemology. Within a predominant strand of environmental ethics, one witnesses accounts based on nonhumans’ ability to suffer, and consequently, the passivity of nonhumans. On the other hand, social epistemology is often not social enough insofar as it does not include nonhumans. Seminal accounts of epistemic injustice often conceal or exclude the possibility that nonhumans can be subjects of knowledge and victims of epistemic injustice because of an anthropocentric bias that maintains (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  49. A Diversified Approach to Fission Puzzles.Justin Mooney - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophy.
    I introduce a new approach to fission puzzles called the Diversified Approach that proceeds by distinguishing different kinds of fission and assimilating each kind to a different ordinary phenomenon, such as breaking apart, replication, or part loss. To illustrate this approach, I apply it to the case of amoebic fission. The upshot is a novel account of amoebic fission according to which the dividing amoeba ceases to exist because it breaks apart. After developing this solution and highlighting some of its (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  50. Ordinary undetached parts.Justin Mooney - 2023 - Synthese 202 (4):1-18.
    One of the standard puzzles in ordinary-object metaphysics concerns what happens when an object and one of its undetached parts apparently begin to coincide. I distinguish two versions of this puzzle: the problem of extraordinary undetached parts and the problem of ordinary undetached parts. Then I present a novel phasalist solution to the problem of ordinary undetached parts. My solution is designed to supplement the recently-defended view that ordinary undetached parts exist but extraordinary ones do not.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
1 — 50 / 674