Results for 'Kinds of Possibilities'

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  1. What kinds of alternative possibilities are required of the folk concept(s) of choice?Jason Shepard & Aneyn O’Grady - 2017 - Consciousness and Cognition 48:138-148.
    Our concept of choice is integral to the way we understand others and ourselves, especially when considering ourselves as free and responsible agents. Despite the importance of this concept, there has been little empirical work on it. In this paper we report four experiments that provide evidence for two concepts of choice—namely, a concept of choice that is operative in the phrase having a choice and another that is operative in the phrase making a choice. The experiments indicate that the (...)
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  2. Two kinds of metaphysical possibilities / Dois tipos de possibilidades metafísicas.Rodrigo Cid - 2010 - Theoria: Revista Eletrônica de Filosofia 2.
    In this article, I intend to show what the metaphysical possibility is, distinguishing it from the logical and the physical possibilities, and then to indicate that at least there is two kinds of metaphysical possibilities, i.e., the potentialities of the things and the possibilities of the events to occur. This is an important goal because it makes clearer the discussion about possibilities. To show what the metaphysical possibility is, I try to show that we need (...)
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  3. Two Kinds of Logical Impossibility.Alexander Sandgren & Koji Tanaka - 2020 - Noûs 54 (4):795-806.
    In this paper, we argue that a distinction ought to be drawn between two ways in which a given world might be logically impossible. First, a world w might be impossible because the laws that hold at w are different from those that hold at some other world (say the actual world). Second, a world w might be impossible because the laws of logic that hold in some world (say the actual world) are violated at w. We develop a novel (...)
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  4. What Kind of Inquiry Can Best Help Us Create a Good World?Nicholas Maxwell - 1992 - Science, Technology and Human Values 17:205-227.
    In order to create a good world, we need to learn how to do it - how to resolve our appalling problems and conflicts in more cooperative ways than at present. And in order to do this, we need traditions and institutions of learning rationally devoted to this end. When viewed from this standpoint, what we have at present - academic inquiry devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and technological know-how - is an intellectual and human disaster. We urgently need (...)
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  5. Kinds of Kinds: Normativity, Scope and Implementation in Conceptual Engineering.Sarah Sawyer - forthcoming - In Manuel Gustavo Isaac, Kevin Scharp & Steffen Koch (eds.), New Perspectives on Conceptual Engineering. Synthese Library.
    In this paper I distinguish three kinds of kinds: traditional philosophical kinds such as truth, knowledge, and causation; natural science kinds such as spin, charge and mass; and social kinds such as class, poverty, and marriage. The three-fold taxonomy I work with represents an idealised abstraction from the wide variety of kinds that there are and the messy phenomena that underlie them. However, the kinds I identify are discrete, and the three-fold taxonomy is (...)
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  6. Kinds of Consciousness.Jacob Berger - 2021 - In Benjamin D. Young & Carolyn Dicey Jennings (eds.), Mind, Cognition, and Neuroscience: A Philosophical Introduction. Routledge.
    Consciousness is central to our lived experience. It is unsurprising, then, that the topic has captivated many students, neuroscientists, philosophers, and other theorists working in cognitive science. But consciousness may seem especially difficult to explain. This is in part because the term “consciousness” has been used in many different ways. The goal of this chapter is to explore several kinds of consciousness: what theorists have called “creature,” “phenomenal,” “access,” “state,” “transitive,” “introspective,” and “self” consciousness. The basic distinctions among these (...)
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  7. Five Kinds of Perspectives on Legal Institutions.Corrado Roversi - manuscript
    There is at least one immediate sense in which legal discourse is perspectival: it qualifies acts and facts in the world on the basis of rules. Legal concepts are for the most part constituted by rules, both in the sense that rules define these concepts’ semantic content and that, in order to engage with legal practice, we must act according to those rules, not necessarily complying with them but at least having them in mind. This is the distinctive perspective of (...)
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  8. (1 other version)What Kind of Necessary Being Could God Be?Richard Swinburne - 2012 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4 (2):1--18.
    A logically impossible sentence is one which entails a contradiction, a logically necessary sentence is one whose negation entails a contradiction, and a logically possible sentence is one which does not entail a contradiction. Metaphysically impossible, necessary and possible sentences are ones which become logically impossible, necessary, or possible by substituting what I call informative rigid designators for uninformative ones. It does seem very strongly that a negative existential sentence cannot entail a contradiction, and so ”there is a God’ cannot (...)
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  9. Philosophical Perspectives on Imagination in the Western Tradition.Amy Kind - 2020 - In Anna Abraham (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination. Cambridge University Press.
    Philosophers in the Western tradition have both theorized about imagination and used imagination in their theorizing about other matters. In this chapter, I first provide a brief overview of philosophical theorizing about imagination with a special focus on its relation to other mental states such as belief and perception. I then turn to a discussion of the methodological role that imagination has played in philosophy. I here focus on the imaginability principle, i.e., the claim that the imaginability of a given (...)
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  10. Composition as a Kind of Identity.Phillip Bricker - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (3):264-294.
    Composition as identity, as I understand it, is a theory of the composite structure of reality. The theory’s underlying logic is irreducibly plural; its fundamental primitive is a generalized identity relation that takes either plural or singular arguments. Strong versions of the theory that incorporate a generalized version of the indiscernibility of identicals are incompatible with the framework of plural logic, and should be rejected. Weak versions of the theory that are based on the idea that composition is merely analogous (...)
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  11. Two concepts of possible worlds – or only one?Jiri Benovsky - 2008 - Theoria 74 (4):318-330.
    In his "Two concepts of possible worlds", Peter Van Inwagen explores two kinds of views about the nature of possible worlds : abstractionism and concretism. The latter is the view defended by David Lewis who claims that possible worlds are concrete spatio-temporal universes, very much like our own, causally and spatio-temporally disconnected from each other. The former is the view of the majority who claims that possible worlds are some kind of abstract objects – such as propositions, properties, states (...)
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  12. Love in the time of AI.Amy Kind - 2021 - In Barry Francis Dainton, Will Slocombe & Attila Tanyi (eds.), Minding the Future: Artificial Intelligence, Philosophical Visions and Science Fiction. Springer. pp. 89-106.
    As we await the increasingly likely advent of genuinely intelligent artificial systems, a fair amount of consideration has been given to how we humans will interact with them. Less consideration has been given to how—indeed if—we humans will love them. What would human-AI romantic relationships look like? What do such relationships tell us about the nature of love? This chapter explores these questions via consideration of several works of science fiction, focusing especially on the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” (...)
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  13. Kinds of Impenetrability.Olivier Massin - 2008 - Swiss Philosophical Preprints.
    Faced with the conflict between our intuition that no two things ever share a place at a time and these counterexamples to it, philosophers usually try to find a happy medium between sticking with the original intuition and rejecting all of its counterexamples or giving up the whole intuition and accepting all the counterexamples. Some counterexamples might be rejected on conceptual grounds : one may deny for instance that absolute space is in the same place that the entities located therein (...)
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  14. The Case Against Representationalism About Moods.Amy Kind - 2013 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind. New York, New York: Routledge.
    According to representationalism, the phenomenal character of a mental state reduces to its intentional content. Although representationalism seems plausible with respect to ordinary perceptual states, it seems considerably less plausible for states like moods. Here the problem for representationalism arises largely because moods seem to lack intentional content altogether. In this paper, I explore several possible options for identifying the intentional content of moods and suggest that none of them is wholly satisfactory. Importantly, however, I go on to argue that (...)
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  15. On the kinds of problems tackled by science, technology, and professions. Building foundations of science policy.Luis Marone - 2020 - Mεtascience: Scientific General Discourse 1:79-95.
    Science, technology, and professions form a system with strong interactions. Yet, these activities attack different kinds of problems which require different kinds of solutions. The problems that trigger scientific and technological research remain insufficiently solved or unsolved, therefore their possible solutions must be invented (i. e. they are partially or totally original) and, consequently, they should be tested against reality by researchers before considering them as true or useful. On the contrary, the problems that trigger professional inquiry are (...)
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  16.  78
    Distinguishing two kinds of fictionalism: metaphor, autism, and the imagination.Elek Lane - 2024 - Synthese 204 (4):1-23.
    Fictionalist theories of metaphor hold that metaphorical utterances aim at fictionality. Fictionalism successfully explains speaker judgments about the truth and aptness of metaphorical utterances, and it also accurately predicts the data around metaphor and autistic individuals (who have deficits in both imaginative play and metaphor comprehension). But fictionalism is not a viable theory of metaphor, despite these merits, because of (what I call) the problem of semantic entailment: semantic entailments that are normally valid fail under metaphorical interpretation, but fictionalism predicts (...)
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  17. What Kind of Revolutionary is Mr. Robot?Shane J. Ralston - 2017 - In Richard Greene & Rachel Robison-Greene (eds.), Mr. Robot and Philosophy: Beyond Good and Evil Corp. Open Court. pp. 73-82.
    Besides being the title of an EP by The (International) Noise Conspiracy, “Bigger cages, longer chains!” is an anarchist rallying cry. It’s meant to ridicule those political activists who compromise their ideals, make demands and then settle for partial concessions or, to put it bluntly, bargain with the Man. In the T.V. series Mr. Robot, Christian Slater plays the anarchist leader of a hacktivist group known as fsociety. Mr. Robot won’t negotiate with the FBI and E(vil) Corp for bigger cages (...)
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  18. Four Kinds of Boundary : From an Ontological Point of View.Daisuke Kachi - 2009 - Interdisciplinary Ontology 2:87-90.
    Casati and Varzi have developed a theory of boundary based on extensional mereotopology and the distinction between fiat and bona fide boundaries. Firstly, I point out some problems in their theory that are related to the contact of bodies. Next, I propose a way of classification of boundaries into four kinds based on substance ontology and an alternative distinction between potential and actual boundaries. Finally, I will show that my way of classification makes it possible to solve the problems (...)
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  19. The Kinds of Truth of Geometry Theorems.Michael Bulmer, Desmond Fearnley-Sander & Tim Stokes - 2001 - In Jürgen Jürgen Richter-Gebert & Dongming Wang (eds.), LNCS: Lecture Notes In Computer Science. Springer Verlag. pp. 129-142.
    Proof by refutation of a geometry theorem that is not universally true produces a Gröbner basis whose elements, called side polynomials, may be used to give inequations that can be added to the hypotheses to give a valid theorem. We show that (in a certain sense) all possible subsidiary conditions are implied by those obtained from the basis; that what we call the kind of truth of the theorem may be derived from the basis; and that the side polynomials may (...)
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  20. Two Kinds of ’Christian Philosophy’.Winfried Löffler - 2013 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5 (2):111--127.
    It is controversial whether ”Christian Philosophy’ is a useful or even consistent notion. After providing some historical background to the problem, I will distinguish and explicate two possible understandings of ”Christian Philosophy’ which should be kept apart: a ”Thomistic’ and an ”Augustinian’ one, of which the latter has garnered more attention in the recent literature. A sketch of the most prominent current ”Augustinian’ position leads to some considerations for why a ”Thomistic’ understanding of ”Christian Philosophy’ has more to recommend it, (...)
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  21. Propositions as (Flexible) Types of Possibilities.Nate Charlow - 2019 - In Chris Tillman & Adam Murray (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Propositions. Routledge. pp. 211-230.
    // tl;dr A Proposition is a Way of Thinking // -/- This chapter is about type-theoretic approaches to propositional content. Type-theoretic approaches to propositional content originate with Hintikka, Stalnaker, and Lewis, and involve treating attitude environments (e.g. "Nate thinks") as universal quantifiers over domains of "doxastic possibilities" -- ways things could be, given what the subject thinks. -/- This chapter introduces and motivates a line of a type-theoretic theorizing about content that is an outgrowth of the recent literature on (...)
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  22. (1 other version)Schiffer's Puzzle: A Kind of Fregean Response.Ray Buchanan - 2016 - In Gary Ostertag (ed.), Meanings and Other Things: Themes From the Work of Stephen Schiffer. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 128-148.
    In ‘What Reference Has to Tell Us about Meaning’, Stephen Schiffer argues that many of the objects of our beliefs, and the contents of our assertoric speech acts, have what he calls the relativity feature. A proposition has the relativity feature just in case it is an object-dependent proposition ‘the entertainment of which requires different people, or the same person at different times or places, to think of [the relevant object] in different ways’ (129). But as no Fregean or Russellian (...)
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  23. Two kinds of naturalism in ethics.Neil Sinclair - 2006 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 9 (4):417 - 439.
    What are the conditions on a successful naturalistic account of moral properties? In this paper I discuss one such condition: the possibility of moral concepts playing a role in good empirical theories on a par with those of the natural and social sciences. I argue that Peter Railton’s influential account of moral rightness fails to meet this condition, and thus is only viable in the hands of a naturalist who doesn’t insist on it. This conclusion generalises to all versions of (...)
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  24. It’s a kind of magic: Lewis, magic and properties.Daniel Nolan - 2020 - Synthese 197 (11):4717-4741.
    David Lewis’s arguments against magical ersatzism are notoriously puzzling. Untangling different strands in those arguments is useful for bringing out what he thought was wrong with not just one style of theory about possible worlds, but with much of the contemporary metaphysics of abstract objects. After setting out what I take Lewis’s arguments to be and how best to resist them, I consider the application of those arguments to general theories of properties and relations. The constraints Lewis motivates turn out (...)
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  25. Relativism and Two Kinds of Branching Time.Dilip Ninan - 2023 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (2):465-492.
    This essay examines the case for relativism about future contingents in light of a distinction between two ways of interpreting the ‘branching time’ framework. Focussing on MacFarlane (2014), we break the argument for relativism down into two steps. The first step is an argument for something MacFarlane calls the "Non-Determination Thesis", which is essentially the view that there is no unique actual future. The second step is an argument from the Non-Determination Thesis to relativism. I first argue that first step (...)
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  26. A causal ontology of objects, causal relations, and various kinds of action.Andrew Newman - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-28.
    The basic kinds of physical causality that are foundational for other kinds of causality involve objects and the causal relations between them. These interactions do not involve events. If events were ontologically significant entities for causality in general, then they would play a role in simple mechanical interactions. But arguments about simple collisions looked at from different frames of reference show that events cannot play a role in simple mechanical interactions, and neither can the entirely hypothetical causal relations (...)
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  27. Freedom as a Kind of Causality.Toni Kannisto - 2018 - In Violetta L. Waibel, Margit Ruffing & David Wagner (eds.), Natur und Freiheit: Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses. De Gruyter.
    Kant’s view that freedom is a “kind of causality” seems to conflict with his claim that the categories of the understanding – including causality – can only be applied objectively to sensible phaenomena, never to supersensible noumena, as freedom is only possible for the latter. I argue that only Kant’s theory of symbolic presentation, according to which the category of cause is applied merely analogically to freedom, can dispel this threatening inconsistency. Unlike it is commonly thought, one cannot here use (...)
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  28. A Strange Kind of Power: Vetter on the Formal Adequacy of Dispositionalism.David Yates - 2020 - Philosophical Inquiries 8 (1):97-116.
    According to dispositionalism about modality, a proposition <p> is possible just in case something has, or some things have, a power or disposition for its truth; and <p> is necessary just in case nothing has a power for its falsity. But are there enough powers to go around? In Yates (2015) I argued that in the case of mathematical truths such as <2+2=4>, nothing has the power to bring about their falsity or their truth, which means they come out both (...)
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  29. A New Kind of Action Explanation and The Life of Complex Action.Xingfei Zheng - 2021 - Journal of Human Cognition 5 (1):58-74.
    Ordinary action explanation formulated as "I am doing A because I am doing B" is explanation of an action in terms of another action-in-progress. According to Michael Thompson, the explained action is a teleological part of the explaining complex action, which is composed of different parts. Thompson's analysis focuses on the part-whole relation between the explained action and the explaining action, thus ignores a possibility: these two actions can be two different parts of a complex action. I shall argue that (...)
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  30. Nietzsche's Project of Reevaluation: What Kind of Critique?Daniel R. Rodriguez-Navas & Daniel R. Rodriguez Navas - 2020 - In María Del Del Rosario Acosta López & Colin McQuillan (eds.), Critique in German Philosophy: From Kant to Critical Theory. Albany: SUNY Press. pp. 237-262.
    Whether Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of morality is best understood as an internal or as an external critique remains a matter of controversy. On the internalist interpretation (Ridley, Owen, Merrick ), the genealogical enterprise takes as its starting point the perspective being criticized, gradually revealing it to be untenable ‘from within.’ On the externalist interpretation (Leiter, and arguably Geuss, Williams, and Janaway ), this constraint is lifted; the starting point of the critique need not be the perspective being criticized, but may (...)
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  31. Models of Introspection vs. Introspective Devices Testing the Research Programme for Possible Forms of Introspection.Krzysztof Dołęga - 2023 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 30 (9):86-101.
    The introspective devices framework proposed by Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) offers an attractive conceptual tool for evaluating and developing accounts of introspection. However, the framework assumes that different views about the nature of introspection can be easily evaluated against a set of common criteria. In this paper, I set out to test this assumption by analysing two formal models of introspection using the introspective device framework. The question I aim to answer is not only whether models developed outside of (...)
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  32. The Possibility of Democratic Autonomy.Adam Lovett & Jake Zuehl - 2022 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 50 (4):467-498.
    What makes democracy valuable? One traditional answer holds that participating in democratic self-government amounts to a kind of autonomy: it enables citizens to be the authors of their political affairs. Many contemporary philosophers, however, are skeptical. We are autonomous, they argue, when important features of our lives are up to us, but in a democracy we merely have a say in a process of collective choice. In this paper, we defend the possibility of democratic autonomy, by advancing a conception of (...)
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  33. The Possibility of Epistemic Nudging.Thomas Grundmann - 2023 - Social Epistemology 37 (2):208-218.
    Typically, nudging is a technique for steering the choices of people without giving reasons or using enforcement. In benevolent cases, it is used when people are insufficiently responsive to reason. The nudger triggers automatic cognitive mechanisms – sometimes even biases – in smart ways in order to push irrational people in the right direction. Interestingly, this technique can also be applied to doxastic attitudes. Someone who is doxastically unresponsive to evidence can be nudged into forming true beliefs or doxastic attitudes (...)
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  34. Kant's Panentheism: The Possibility Proof of 1763 and Its Fate in the Critical Period.Andrew Chignell - 2023 - In Ina Goy (ed.), Kant on Proofs for God's Existence. Boston: De Gruyter.
    This chapter discusses Kant's 1763 "possibility proof" for the existence of God. I first provide a reconstruction of the proof in its two stages, and then revisit my earlier argument according to which the being the proof delivers threatens to be a Spinozistic-panentheistic God—a being whose properties include the entire spatio-temporal universe—rather than the traditional, ontologically distinct God of biblical monotheism. I go on to evaluate some recent alternative readings that have sought to avoid this result by arguing that the (...)
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  35. Anscombe on the mesmeric force of ‘ought’ and a spurious kind of moral realism.Sergio Volodia Marcello Cremaschi - 2017 - Etica E Politica 19 (2):51-86.
    I discuss the second of the three theses advanced by Anscombe in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. The focus is the nature of entities to which – if Anscombe’s diagnosis is correct – ought and cognate modals are assumed by modern moral philosophers to refer. I reconstruct the alternative account offered by Anscombe of viable and justified ‘Aristotelian’ modals – as contrasted with mysterious and unjustified ‘Kantian’ modals; I discuss the nature and status of ‘Aristotelian necessity’ to which such legitimate modals refer (...)
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  36. Kant’s Account of Real Possibility and the German Philosophical Tradition.Michael Oberst - manuscript
    Kant’s postulate of possibility states that possible is whatever agrees with the formal conditions of experience. As has often been noted, this is a definition of real possibility. However, little attention has been paid to the relation of Kantian real possibility to the German philosophical tradition before him. I discuss three kinds of possibility present in this tradition – internal, external, and (Crusian) real possibility – and argue that Kant endorses internal and external possibility. Furthermore, I show, specifically with (...)
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  37. The possibility of a science of magic.Ronald A. Rensink & Gustav Kuhn - 2015 - Frontiers in Psychology 6:1576.
    The past few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the scientific study of magic. Despite being only a few years old, this “new wave” has already resulted in a host of interesting studies, often using methods that are both powerful and original. These developments have largely borne out our earlier hopes (Kuhn et al., 2008) that new opportunities were available for scientific studies based on the use of magic. And it would seem that much more can still be (...)
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  38. Determining the best of all possible worlds.Lloyd Strickland - 2005 - Journal of Value Inquiry 39 (1):37-47.
    The concept of the best of all possible worlds is widely considered to be incoherent on the grounds that, for any world that might be termed the best, there is always another that is better. I note that underlying this argument is a conviction that the goodness of a world is determined by a single kind of good, the most plausible candidates for which are not maximizable. Against this I suggest that several goods may have to combine to determine the (...)
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  39. Stuart Kauffman’s metaphysics of the adjacent possible: A critique.Ragnar Van Der Merwe - 2023 - Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 48 (1):49-61.
    Stuart Kauffman has, in recent writings, developed a thought-provoking and influential argument for strong emergence. The outcome is his Theory of the Adjacent Possible (TAP). According to TAP, the biosphere constitutes a non-physical domain qualitatively distinct from the physical domain. The biosphere exhibits strongly emergent properties such as agency, meaning, value and creativity that cannot, in principle, be reduced to the physical. In this paper, I argue that TAP includes various (explicit or implicit) metaphysical commitments: commitments to (1) scientific realism, (...)
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  40. Different Kinds and Aspects of Bullshit.Hans Maes & Katrien8 Schaubroeck - 2006 - In Hardcastle Reisch (ed.), Bullshit and Philosophy. Open Court.
    In this paper, we aim to show that there is a particular kind of bullshit that is not dealt with in Harry Frankfurt’s and G.A. Cohen’s critiques of bullshit. We also point out the evaluative complexity of bullshit. Frankfurt and Cohen both stress its negative and possibly destructive aspects, but one might wonder whether bullshit need always and necessarily be reprehensible. We will argue that there are positive or at least neutral aspects to some kinds of bullshit.
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  41. (1 other version)Identifying the Explanatory Domain of the Looping Effect: Congruent and Incongruent Feedback Mechanisms of Interactive Kinds.Tuomas Vesterinen - 2020 - Journal of Social Ontology 6 (2):159-185.
    Winner of the 2020 Essay Competition of the International Social Ontology Society. -/- Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained (...)
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  42. The Dangers of Re-colonization: Possible Boundaries Between Latin American Philosophy and Indigenous Philosophy from Latin America.Jorge Sanchez-Perez - 2023 - Comparative Philosophy 14 (2).
    The field of Latin American philosophy has established itself as a relevant subfield of philosophical inquiry. However, there might be good reasons to consider that our focus on the subfield could have distracted us from considering another subfield that, although it might share some geographical proximity, does not share the same historical basic elements. In this paper, I argue for a possible and meaningful conceptual difference between Latin American Philosophy and Indigenous philosophy produced in Latin America. First, I raise what (...)
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  43. The Possibilities of History.Daniel Nolan - 2016 - Journal of the Philosophy of History 10 (3):441-456.
    _ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 3, pp 441 - 456 Several kinds of historical alternatives are distinguished. Different kinds of historical alternatives are valuable to the practice of history for different reasons. Important uses for historical alternatives include representing different sides of historical disputes; distributing chances of different outcomes over alternatives; and offering explanations of why various alternatives did _not_ in fact happen. Consideration of counterfactuals about what would have happened had things been different in particular ways plays (...)
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  44. Gender as a historical kind: a tale of two genders?Marion Godman - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (3-4):21.
    Is there anything that members of each binary category of gender have in common? Even many non-essentialists find the lack of unity within a gender worrying as it undermines the basis for a common political agenda for women. One promising proposal for achieving unity is by means of a shared historical lineage of cultural reproduction with past binary models of gender. I demonstrate how such an account is likely to take on board different binary and also non-binary systems of gender. (...)
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  45. The Meaning of Life – And the Possibility of Human Illness – Prolegomena.Kiraly V. Istvan - 2011 - Philobiblon - Transilvanian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Humanities 16 (2).
    Abstract: The study investigates philosophically the issue of human illness and its organic pertinence to the meaning of human life starting from the recognition that the dangerous encounter with the experience of illness is an unavoidable – and as such crucial – experience of the life of any living being. As for us humans, there is probably no mortal man who has never suffered of some – any! – kind of disease from his birth to the end of his life… (...)
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  46. Can the Epistemic Value of Natural Kinds Be Explained Independently of Their Metaphysics?Catherine Kendig & John Grey - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (2):359-376.
    The account of natural kinds as stable property clusters is premised on the possibility of separating the epistemic value of natural kinds from their underlying metaphysics. On that account, the co-instantiation of any sub-cluster of the properties associated with a given natural kind raises the probability of the co-instantiation of the rest, and this clustering of property instantiation is invariant under all relevant counterfactual perturbations. We argue that it is not possible to evaluate the stability of a cluster (...)
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  47. (1 other version)Fine on the Possibility of Vagueness.Andreas Ditter - forthcoming - In Federico L. G. Faroldi & Frederik Van De Putte (eds.), Outstanding Contributions to Logic: Kit Fine. Springer.
    Fine (2017) proposes a new logic of vagueness, CL, that promises to provide both a solution to the sorites paradox and a way to avoid the impossibility result from Fine (2008). The present paper presents a challenge to his new theory of vagueness. I argue that the possibility theorem stated in Fine (2017), as well as his solution to the sorites paradox, fail in certain reasonable extensions of the language of CL. More specifically, I show that if we extend the (...)
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  48. (1 other version)On thinking of kinds: A neuroscientific perspective.Dan Ryder - 2006 - In Graham Macdonald & David Papineau (eds.), Teleosemantics: New Philo-sophical Essays. New York: Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 115-145.
    Reductive, naturalistic psychosemantic theories do not have a good track record when it comes to accommodating the representation of kinds. In this paper, I will suggest a particular teleosemantic strategy to solve this problem, grounded in the neurocomputational details of the cerebral cortex. It is a strategy with some parallels to one that Ruth Millikan has suggested, but to which insufficient attention has been paid. This lack of attention is perhaps due to a lack of appreciation for the severity (...)
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  49. Kant on the Possibility of Ugliness.Alix Cohen - 2013 - British Journal of Aesthetics 53 (2):199-209.
    In the recent literature on the issue, a number of commentators have argued that Kant’s aesthetic theory commits him to the position that nothing is ugly. For instance, in ‘Why Kant finds nothing ugly’, Shier argues that ‘within Kant’s aesthetics, there cannot be any negative judgments of taste’ (Shier (1998): 413). And in ‘Kant’s problems with ugliness’, Thomson claims that ‘Kant’s aesthetic theory precludes […] ugliness’ (Thomson (1992): 107). In other words, as it is presented in some of the literature, (...)
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  50. The Luckiest of All Possible Beings: Divine Perfections and Constitutive Luck.Andre Leo Rusavuk - 2024 - Sophia 63 (2):259-277.
    Many theists conceive of God as a perfect being, i.e., as that than which none greater is metaphysically possible. On this grand view of God, it seems plausible to think that such a supreme and maximally great being would not be subject to luck of any sort. Given the divine perfections, God is completely insulated from luck. However, I argue that the opposite is true: precisely because God is perfect, he is subject to a kind of luck called constitutive luck. (...)
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