Results for 'Justin Sean Davis'

982 found
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  1. Reality Realism.Sean M. Carroll - manuscript
    In Morality & Mathematics, Justin Clarke-Doane argues that it is hard to imagine being "a realist about, for example, the standard model of particle physics, but not about mathematics." I try to explain how that seems very possible from the perspective of a physicist. What is real is the physical world; mathematics starts from descriptions of the natural world and extrapolates from there, but that extrapolation does not imply any independent reality. -/- Submitted to an Analysis Reviews symposium on (...)
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  2. Propositional or Non-Propositional Attitudes?Sean Crawford - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 168 (1):179-210.
    Propositionalism is the view that intentional attitudes, such as belief, are relations to propositions. Propositionalists argue that propositionalism follows from the intuitive validity of certain kinds of inferences involving attitude reports. Jubien (2001) argues powerfully against propositions and sketches some interesting positive proposals, based on Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment, about how to accommodate “propositional phenomena” without appeal to propositions. This paper argues that none of Jubien’s proposals succeeds in accommodating an important range of propositional phenomena, such as the (...)
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  3. Replies to Carroll, Horwich and McGrath.Justin Clarke-Doane - forthcoming - Analysis.
    I am grateful to Sean Carroll, Paul Horwich, and Sarah McGrath for their stimulating responses to Morality and Mathematics (M&M). Their arguments concern the reality of unapplied mathematics, the practical import of moral facts, and the deliberative and explanatory roles of evaluative theories. In what follows, I address their responses, as well as some broader issues.
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  4. 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.
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  5. What Emergence Can Possibly Mean.Sean M. Carroll & Achyuth Parola - manuscript
    We consider emergence from the perspective of dynamics: states of a system evolving with time. We focus on the role of a decomposition of wholes into parts, and attempt to characterize relationships between levels without reference to whether higher-level properties are “novel” or “unexpected.” We offer a classification of different varieties of emergence, with and without new ontological elements at higher levels. -/- Submitted to a volume on Real Patterns (Tyler Milhouse, ed.), to be published by MIT Press.
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  6. Digital Inheritance in Web3: A Case Study of Soulbound Tokens and the Social Recovery Pallet within the Polkadot and Kusama Ecosystems.Justin Goldston, Tomer Jordi Chaffer, Justyna Osowska & Charles von Goins Ii - manuscript
    In recent years discussions centered around digital inheritance have increased among social media users and across blockchain ecosystems. As a result digital assets such as social media content cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens have become increasingly valuable and widespread, leading to the need for clear and secure mechanisms for transferring these assets upon the testators death or incapacitation. This study proposes a framework for digital inheritance using soulbound tokens and the social recovery pallet as a use case in the Polkadot and (...)
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  7. 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, (...)
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  8. 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.
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  9. Demographic Objections to Epistocracy: A Generalization.Sean Ingham & David Wiens - 2021 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 49 (4):323-349.
    Several scholars have recently entertained proposals for "epistocracy," a political regime in which decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a society's most informed and competent citizens. These proposals rest on the claim that we can expect better political outcomes if we exclude incompetent citizens from participating in political decisions because competent voters are more likely to vote "correctly" than incompetent voters. We develop what we call the objection from selection bias to epistocracy: a procedure that selects voters on (...)
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  10. 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 (...)
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  11. 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 (...)
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  12. A Diversified Approach to Fission Puzzles.Justin Mooney - 2024 - Journal of Philosophy 121 (9):481-500.
    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 (...)
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  13. Music, Cage's Silence, and Art: An interview with Stephen Davies, PhD.Marcella Georgi & Stephen Davies - 2022 - Stance 15:120-142.
    Stephen Davies taught philosophy at the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. His research specialty is the philosophy of art. He is a former President of the American Society for Aesthetics. His books include Definitions of Art (Cornell UP, 1991), Musical Meaning and Expression (Cornell UP, 1994), Musical Works and Performances (Clarendon, 2001), Themes in the Philosophy of Music (OUP, 2003), Philosophical Perspectives on Art (OUP, 2007), Musical Understandings and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Music (OUP, 2011), The Artful (...)
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  14. 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 (...)
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  15. 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.
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  16. 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. (...)
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  17. A Phasalist Approach to Coincidence Puzzles.Justin Mooney - forthcoming - The Philosophical Quarterly.
    The phasalist solution to the classic puzzle of the statue and the piece of clay only works for some coincidence puzzles and not others. To address this limitation of phasalism, I develop a novel approach to coincidence puzzles that permits different kinds of coincidence puzzles to be solved in different ways, provided that each solution satisfies certain constraints inspired by the phasalist solution to the statue puzzle. I apply my approach to four different kinds of coincidence puzzles, and I argue (...)
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  18. 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 (...)
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  19. Explaining causal closure.Justin Tiehen - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (9):2405-2425.
    The physical realm is causally closed, according to physicalists like me. But why is it causally closed, what metaphysically explains causal closure? I argue that reductive physicalists are committed to one explanation of causal closure to the exclusion of any independent explanation, and that as a result, they must give up on using a causal argument to attack mind–body dualism. Reductive physicalists should view dualism in much the way that we view the hypothesis that unicorns exist, or that the Kansas (...)
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  20. 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 (...)
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  21. Is One More Powerful with Numbers on One's Side?Sean Ingham & Niko Kolodny - 2023 - Journal of Political Philosophy 31 (4):452-469.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.
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  22. Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space.Sean M. Carroll - 2022 - In Valia Allori, Quantum Mechanics and Fundamentality: Naturalizing Quantum Theory between Scientific Realism and Ontological Indeterminacy. Cham: Springer. pp. 211-224.
    I defend the extremist position that the fundamental ontology of the world consists of a vector in Hilbert space evolving according to the Schrödinger equation. The laws of physics are determined solely by the energy eigenspectrum of the Hamiltonian. The structure of our observed world, including space and fields living within it, should arise as a higher-level emergent description. I sketch how this might come about, although much work remains to be done.
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  23. 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 (...)
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  24. The Future for Fixing.Sean F. Johnston - 2020 - In Techno-Fixers: Origins and Implications of Technological Faith. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
    This concluding chapter of _Techno-Fixers: Origins and Implications of Technological Faith_ examines the widespread overconfidence in present-day and proposed 'technological fixes', and provides guidelines - social, ethical and technical - for soberly assessing candidate technological solutions for societal problems.
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  25. "Existential Responsibility in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Chiang".Justin F. White - 2025 - In David Friedell, The Philosophy of Ted Chiang. Palgrave MacMillan.
    In “Story of Your Life” and “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” Ted Chiang explores questions that would be at home in contemporary scholarship on free will, agency, and moral responsibility. In “Story of Your Life,” Chiang asks whether knowledge of the future is compatible with free will. And the prism technology in “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” prompts questions of whether we are responsible for out-of-character actions. If such actions were genuine anomalies, would we be less responsible for (...)
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  26. Explaining Loss of Standing to Blame.Justin Snedegar - 2023 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 21 (3-4):404-432.
    Both in everyday life and in moral philosophy, many think that our own past wrongdoing can undermine our standing to indignantly blame others for similar wrongdoing. In recent literature on the ethics of blame, we find two different kinds of explanation for this. Relative moral status accounts hold that to have standing to blame, you must be better than the person you are blaming, in terms of compliance with the norm. Fault-based accounts hold that those who blame others for things (...)
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  27. 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, (...)
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  28. Dismissing Blame.Justin Snedegar - 2024 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26 (3).
    When someone blames you, you might accept the blame or you might reject it, challenging the blamer’s interpretation of the facts or providing a justification or excuse. Either way, there are opportunities for edifying moral discussion and moral repair. But another common, and less constructive, response is to simply dismiss the blame, refusing to engage with the blamer. Even if you agree that you are blameworthy, you may refuse to engage with the blame—and, specifically, with blame coming from this particular (...)
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  29. Consciousness and the Laws of Physics.Sean M. Carroll - 2021 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (9-10):16-31.
    We have a much better understanding of physics than we do of consciousness. I consider ways in which intrinsically mental aspects of fundamental ontology might induce modifications of the known laws of physics, or whether they could be relevant to accounting for consciousness if no such modifications exist. I suggest that our current knowledge of physics should make us skeptical of hypothetical modifications of the known rules, and that without such modifications it’s hard to imagine how intrinsically mental aspects could (...)
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  30. Republican Freedom, Popular Control, and Collective Action.Sean Ingham & Frank Lovett - forthcoming - American Journal of Political Science.
    Republicans hold that people are dominated merely in virtue of others' having unconstrained abilities to frustrate their choices. They argue further that public officials may dominate citizens unless subject to popular control. Critics identify a dilemma. To maintain the possibility of popular control, republicans must attribute to the people an ability to control public officials merely in virtue of the possibility that they might coordinate their actions. But if the possibility of coordination suffices for attributing abilities to groups, then, even (...)
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  31. 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.
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  32. 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 (...)
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  33. Reasons, Competition, and Latitude.Justin Snedegar - 2021 - In Russ Shafer-Landau, Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 16. Oxford University Press.
    The overall moral status of an option—whether it is required, permissible, forbidden, or something we really should do—is explained by competition between the contributory reasons bearing on that option and the alternatives. A familiar challenge for accounts of this competition is to explain the existence of latitude: there are usually multiple permissible options, rather than a single required option. One strategy is to appeal to distinctions between reasons that compete in different ways. Philosophers have introduced various kinds of non-requiring reasons (...)
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  34. In Defense of the Agent and Patient Distinction: The Case from Molecular Biology and Chemistry.Davis Kuykendall - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    In this paper, I defend the agent/patient distinction against critics who argue that causal interactions are symmetrical. Specifically, I argue that there is a widespread type of causal interaction between distinct entities, resulting in a type of ontological asymmetry that provides principled grounds for distinguishing agents from patients. The type of interaction where the asymmetry is found is when one of the entities undergoes a change in kind, structure, powers, or intrinsic properties as a result of the interaction while the (...)
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  35. Meritocracy and the Tests of Virtue in Greek and Confucian Political Thought.Justin Tiwald & Jeremy Reid - 2024 - Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture 41:111–147.
    A crucial tenet of virtue-based or expertise-based theorizing about politics is that there are ways to identify and select morally and epistemically excellent people to hold office. This paper considers historical challenges to this task that come from within Greek and Confucian thought and political practice. Because of how difficult it is to assess character in ordinary settings, we argue that it is even more difficult to design institutions that select for virtue at the much wider political scale. Specifically, we (...)
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  36. Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience Research: Theologico-Philosophical Implications for the Christian Notion of the Human Person.Justin Nnaemeka Onyeukaziri - 2023 - Maritain Studies/Etudes Maritainiennes 39:85-103.
    This paper explores the theological and philosophical implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and Neuroscience research on the Christian’s notion of the human person. The paschal mystery of Christ is the intuitive foundation of Christian anthropology. In the intellectual history of the Christianity, Platonism and Aristotelianism have been employed to articulate the Christian philosophical anthropology. The Aristotelian systematization has endured to this era. Since the modern period of the Western intellectual history, Aristotelianism has been supplanted by the positive sciences as the (...)
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  37. The Epistemology of Genealogies.Justin P. McBrayer - 2018 - In Hans van Eyghen, Rik Peels & Gijsbert van den Brink, New Developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion - The Rationality of Religious Belief. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 157-169.
    Beliefs have genealogies. Can tracing a belief’s genealogy illuminate the epistemic quality of the belief? This paper sets out a general epistemology of genealogies. As it turns out, genealogies for beliefs come in two sorts: those that trace a belief to some mental event that doubles as evidence for the belief and those that do not. The former have the potential to undercut the belief, rebut the belief, or—importantly—both. The latter have the potential to reinforce the belief or rebut the (...)
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  38. 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 (...)
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  39. Every Man Has His Price.Sean Capener - 2023 - Philosophy Today 67 (4):889-905.
    Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy is organized around an exclusive disjunction of dignity or price, equality or equivalence. In his 1797 Doctrine of Right, however, Kant places enslaved black people on the wrong side of this disjunction when he speculates that their status as currency may offer insight into the origins of money. Recent work in black studies has begun to speculate on the link between blackness and money in modernity, and this paper draws attention to Kant’s role as an unlikely (...)
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  40. 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 (...)
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  41. Physics and the Principle of Sufficient Reason.Sean M. Carroll - manuscript
    The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) holds that, for everything that exists or occurs or holds true, there is a reason why that is the case. I consider three possible ways of relating physics to the PSR: past states as reasons for present states, reasons why the laws of physics take the form that they do, and reasons why there is anything at all. In each case I suggest that the PSR is not the best way of thinking about how (...)
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  42. The Puzzle of the Sophist.Justin Vlasits - 2023 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 105 (3):359-387.
    The many definitions of sophistry at the beginning of Plato’s Sophist have puzzled scholars just as much as they puzzled the dialogue’s main speakers: the Visitor from Elea and Theaetetus. The aim of this paper is to give an account of that puzzlement. This puzzlement, it is argued, stems not from a logical or epistemological problem, but from the metaphysical problem that, given the multiplicity of accounts, the interlocutors do not know what the sophist essentially is. It transpires that, in (...)
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  43. 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 (...)
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  44. 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.
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  45. Time Remains.Sean Gryb & Karim P. Y. Thébault - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (3):663-705.
    On one popular view, the general covariance of gravity implies that change is relational in a strong sense, such that all it is for a physical degree of freedom to change is for it to vary with regard to a second physical degree of freedom. At a quantum level, this view of change as relative variation leads to a fundamentally timeless formalism for quantum gravity. Here, we will show how one may avoid this acute ‘problem of time’. Under our view, (...)
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  46. The Dark Knowledge Problem: Why Public Justifications are Not Arguments.Sean Donahue - 2023 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 21 (3-4):298-332.
    According to the Public Justification Principle, legitimate laws must be justifiable to all reasonable citizens. Proponents of this principle assume that its satisfaction requires speakers to offer justifications that are representable as arguments that feature premises which reasonable listeners would accept. I develop the concept of dark knowledge to show that this assumption is false. Laws are often justified on the basis of premises that many reasonable listeners know, even though they would reject these premises on the basis of the (...)
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  47. Competing Reasons.Justin Snedegar - 2021 - In Jessica Brown & Mona Simion, Reasons, Justification, and Defeat. Oxford Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    This chapter investigates different ways that pro tanto reasons bearing on our options can compete with one another in order to determine the overall normative status of those options. It argues for two key claims: (i) any theory of this competition must include a distinct role for reasons against, in addition to reasons for, and (ii) any theory must allow for comparative verdicts about how strongly supported the options are by the reasons, rather than simply which options are permissible or (...)
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  48. Why Boltzmann Brains Are Bad.Sean M. Carroll - 2017 - In Shamik Dasgupta, Brad Weslake & Ravit Dotan, Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. London: Routledge. pp. 7-20.
    Some modern cosmological models predict the appearance of Boltzmann Brains: observers who randomly fluctuate out of a thermal bath rather than naturally evolving from a low-entropy Big Bang. A theory in which most observers are of the Boltzmann Brain type is generally thought to be unacceptable, although opinions differ. I argue that such theories are indeed unacceptable: the real problem is with fluctuations into observers who are locally identical to ordinary observers, and their existence cannot be swept under the rug (...)
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  49. The Stability of the Just Society: Why Fixed Point Theorems Are Beside The Point.Sean Ingham & David Wiens - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 23 (2):312-319.
    Political theorists study the attributes of desirable social-moral states of affairs. Schaefer (forthcoming) aims to show that "static political theory" of this kind rests on shaky foundations. His argument revolves around an application of an abstruse mathematical theorem -- Kakutani's fixed point theorem -- to the social-moral domain. We show that Schaefer has misunderstood the implications of this theorem for political theory. Theorists who wish to study the attributes of social-moral states of affairs should carry on, safe in the knowledge (...)
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  50. 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 (...)
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