Moral error theorists often claim to be strongly anti‑metaphysical in their moral scepticism and atheistic naturalists. This paper argues that pre‑ cisely this becomes a problem for them, when their metaethical and ontologi‑ cal commitments clash. I first outline how the known arguments against error theory face a problematic, yet rarely considered trade‑off : either they are very strong, then they are also very demanding in their assumptions or they are less demanding in their assumptions but rather weak in their (...) conclusions. In re‑ sponse to this challenge I then develop a new argument against error theory that exploits an overlooked inconsistency in the error theorists’ standard line of argumentation. I conclude that the implications of this inconsistency are less of a problem for fictionalist error theorists, but will render any eliminativism based on error theory circular. (shrink)

The zetetic turn in epistemology raises three questions about epistemic and zetetic norms. First, there is the relationship question: what is the relationship between epistemic and zetetic norms? Are some epistemic norms zetetic norms, or are epistemic and zetetic norms distinct? Second, there is the tension question: are traditional epistemic norms in tension with plausible zetetic norms? Third, there is the reaction question: how should theorists react to a tension between epistemic and zetetic norms? Drawing on an analogy to practical (...) philosophy, I develop a focal point view to resolve these motivating questions. On the focal point view, traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms answer different types of normative questions. There is nevertheless a familiar type of evaluative tension between traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms, but this tension is an unavoidable feature of the normative landscape and not a sign that traditional epistemic norms need revision. But if traditional epistemic norms are not zetetic norms, then in what sense is zetetic epistemology a project for epistemologists? I conclude by articulating a sense in which some nontraditional epistemic norms are zetetic norms, and in which zetetic epistemology is an important part of the study of theoretical rationality. (shrink)

ABSTRACT. Ecological philosophy requires a significant orientation to the role of hope in both theory and practice. I trace the limited presence of hope in ecological philosophy, and outline reasons why environmental hopelessness is a threat. I articulate and problematize recent environmental publications on the topic of hope, the most important worry being that current literature fails to provide the necessary psychological grounding for hopeful action. I turn to the psychology of hope to provide direction for conceptualizing hope and actualizing (...) hoped for states of affairs. If positive moral action is the goal, hope is a vital concept for underwriting ecological philosophy and a practice requiring considerably more attention. (shrink)

Our aim in this entry is to articulate the state of the art in the moral psychology of personal identity. We begin by discussing the major philosophical theories of personal identity, including their shortcomings. We then turn to recent psychological work on personal identity and the self, investigations that often illuminate our person-related normative concerns. We conclude by discussing the implications of this psychological work for some contemporary philosophical theories and suggesting fruitful areas for future work on personal identity.

Corruptionism is the view that following physical death, the human being ceases to exist but their soul persists in the afterlife. Survivalism holds that both the human being and their soul persist in the afterlife, as distinct entities, with the soul constituting the human. Each position has its defenders, most of whom appeal both to metaphysical considerations and to the authority of St Thomas Aquinas. Corruptionists claim that survivalism violates a basic principle of any plausible mereology, while survivalists tend to (...) reject the principle, though without as much detail as one would like. In this paper I examine both the key exegetical issues and the mereological question, arguing that Aquinas cannot be shown to have supported the principle in question, and that the principle should be rejected on independent grounds. If correct, some key planks in support of survivalism are established, with others to await further examination. (shrink)

Hylomorphists hold that substances are, in some sense, composites of matter and form. The form of a substance is typically taken to play a fundamental role in determining the unity or identity of the whole. Staunch hylomorphists think that this role is of a kind that precludes the ontological reduction of form to the physical and thus take their position to be inconsistent with physicalism. Forms, according to staunch hylomorphism, play a fundamental role in grounding their bearers’ proper parts and (...) that, it seems, rules out the physical grounding of form itself. I shall develop a physicalist version of hylomorphism that treats form as geometric structure and which, I shall argue, entails many of the central theses endorsed by staunch hylomorphists. Based on Shoemaker’s notion of conditional powers, I shall argue that the geometric structures of complex wholes are the conditions on at least some of the conditional powers of their bearers’ proper parts, transforming those powers into powers simpliciter. Thus, forms play a fundamental role in the dynamical evolution of the physical world, but without bestowing causal powers themselves and hence without violating the causal closure of the physical domain. If a substance’s proper parts are taken to be individuated by their powers simpliciter, then they derive their identities from their places in the substantial whole, which thus determines the identities of its proper parts without changing their intrinsic natures. (shrink)

Transdisciplinary research knits together knowledge from diverse epistemic communities in addressing social-environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss, climate crises, food insecurity, and public health. This paper reflects on the roles of philosophy of science in transdisciplinary research while focusing on Indigenous and other subaltern forms of knowledge. We offer a critical assessment of demarcationist approaches in philosophy of science and outline a constructive alternative of transdisciplinary philosophy of science. While a demarcationist focus obscures the complex relations between epistemic communities, transdisciplinary (...) philosophy of science provides resources for meeting epistemic and political challenges of collaborative knowledge production. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce the notion of ‘philosophy moves’: prominent tropes featured in contemporary academic philosophy. Moves are more than patterns – they are tools for advancing and enriching philosophical debates. By recognizing these patterns in the philosophical literature, we collect an ensemble of moves for deployment in novel contexts, each with the potential to forge new paths of philosophical investigation through a given topic. The moves featured in this paper are constructive and progressive, with the potential to push (...) past stalemates and open up a wider conceptual landscape. Following a presentation of five exemplars taken from the philosophy of biology literature, I show how different moves could be made within a current interdisciplinary debate. Overall, I aim to demonstrate that recognizing these patterns is insightful pedagogically and potentially useful when put to use as part of one’s philosophical methodology. (shrink)

Longtermists have recently argued that it is overwhelmingly important to do what we can to mitigate existential risks to humanity. I consider three mistakes that are often made in calculating the value of existential risk mitigation. I show how correcting these mistakes pushes the value of existential risk mitigation substantially below leading estimates, potentially low enough to threaten the normative case for existential risk mitigation. I use this discussion to draw four positive lessons for the study of existential risk. -/- (...) . (shrink)

Bounded rationality gets a bad rap in epistemology. It is argued that theories of bounded rationality are overly context‐sensitive; conventionalist; or dependent on ordinary language (Carr, 2022; Pasnau, 2013). In this paper, I have three aims. The first is to set out and motivate an approach to bounded rationality in epistemology inspired by traditional theories of bounded rationality in cognitive science. My second aim is to show how this approach can answer recent challenges raised for theories of bounded rationality. My (...) third aim is to clarify the role of rational ideals in bounded rationality. (shrink)

I argue that the debate concerning the nature of first-person moral judgment, namely, whether such moral judgments are inherently motivating or whether moral judgments can be made in the absence of motivation, may be founded on a faulty assumption: that moral judgments form a distinct kind that must have some shared, essential features in regards to motivation to act. I argue that there is little reason to suppose that first-person moral judgments form a homogenous class in this respect by considering (...) an ordinary case: student readers of Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. Neither internalists nor externalists can provide a satisfying account as to why our students fail to act in this particular case, but are motivated to act by their moral judgments in most cases. I argue that the inability to provide a satisfying account is rooted in this shared assumption about the nature of moral judgments. Once we consider rejecting the notion that first-person moral decision- making forms a distinct kind in the way it is typically assumed, the internalist/externalist debate may be rendered moot. (shrink)

This paper is an explication of Gadamer's idea of "application." I argue that the relation between the first and third persons in application contains a viable conception of the normativity of understanding. Application includes a measure for understanding. The thing that is to be understood must be allowed to address me, and such involvement responds to the text’s meaning. While this measure is not expressible in principled rules, application is normatively accountable both to the text’s third-person claim to meaning and (...) to my first-person involvement with the text. The participation of the interpreter with the item of her understanding forms a normative standard. (shrink)

The simulation hypothesis has recently excited renewed interest, especially in the physics and philosophy communities. However, the hypothesis specifically concerns {computers} that simulate physical universes, which means that to properly investigate it we need to couple computer science theory with physics. Here I do this by exploiting the physical Church-Turing thesis. This allows me to introduce a preliminary investigation of some of the computer science theoretic aspects of the simulation hypothesis. In particular, building on Kleene's second recursion theorem, I prove (...) that it is mathematically possible for us to be in a simulation that is being run on a computer \textit{by us}. In such a case, there would be two identical instances of us; the question of which of those is ``really us'' is meaningless. I also show how Rice's theorem provides some interesting impossibility results concerning simulation and self-simulation; briefly describe the philosophical implications of fully homomorphic encryption for (self-)simulation; briefly investigate the graphical structure of universes simulating universes simulating universes, among other issues. I end by describing some of the possible avenues for future research that this preliminary investigation reveals. (shrink)

There is an apparent tension in Shepherd’s accounts of space and time. Firstly, Shepherd explicitly claims that we know that the space and time of the unperceived world exist because they cause our phenomenal experience of them. Secondly, Shepherd emphasizes that empty space and time do not have the power to effect any change in the world. My proposal is that for Shepherd time has exactly one causal power: to provide for the continued existence of self-same or changing objects. Because (...) Shepherd takes causation to be a relation whereby two objects combine to form a third, their effect, whenever we perceive a continually existing object, since time is a proper part of such objects, our perception of time is caused by time itself. Likewise, space’s causal power is to provide for the possibility of the motion or rest of objects, and so when we perceive objects with space as a proper part, we come into causal contact with space. (shrink)

Dark matter has never been detected, yet it is a key part of the dominant theory of cosmology. An alternative theory, MOND, is empirically equivalent and more successful at making predictions. But the fact that it has no place for the existence of dark matter is a problem for scientific realists who see science as building on past theories.

The Quality of Thought develops and defends the thesis that thinking is a kind of experience, characterized by a sui generis (“cognitive”) phenomenology, determinates of which are thought contents—what I call the phenomenal intentionality of thought thesis. It draws out the implications of this thesis for issues in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and metaphysics. The view defended is radically internalist and intensionalist, and thus goes against received doctrines in philosophy of mind (externalism) and language (extensionalism). It also advocates (...) for a metaphysically neutral, non-naturalistic approach to the philosophical study of mind—what I call “Analytic Phenomenology”—in combination with agnosticism about the nature of the relationship between consciousness and physical reality. -/- The book identifies persistent problems with Dretske-inspired causal-informational-teleological theories of conceptual content, and diagnoses them as due to leaving out what it’s like to think a thought—to entertain or grasp a propositional (conceptual) content. It is thus a contribution to the increasingly influential Phenomenal Intentionality Research Program. It includes refutations of classic externalism (Putnam and Burge) and arguments that standard motivations for direct reference theories of names (Kripke), indexicals and demonstratives (Kaplan) are not inevitable, and alternative accounts of their (and their conceptual equivalents’) semantics. It also addresses outstanding challenges to the phenomenal intentionalist view of thought content, including the existence of unconscious thought, the elusiveness of conceptual phenomenology, the matching content problem, phenomenal compositionality, and the determination of conceptual reference. (shrink)

Consider the following two (hypothetical) generic causal claims: “Living in a neighborhood with many families with children increases purchases of bicycles” and “living in an affluent neighborhood with many families with children increases purchases of bicycles.” These claims not only differ in what they suggest about how bicycle ownership is distributed across different neighborhoods (i.e., “the data”), but also have the potential to communicate something about the speakers’ values: namely, the prominence they accord to affluence in representing and making decisions (...) about the social world. Here, we examine the relationship between the level of granularity with which a cause is described in a generic causal claim (e.g., neighborhood vs. affluent neighborhood) and the value of the information contained in the causal model that generates that claim. We argue that listeners who know any two of the following can make reliable inferences about the third: 1) the level of granularity at which a speaker makes a generic causal claim, 2) the speaker’s values, and 3) the data available to the speaker. We present results of four experiments (N=1,323) in the domain of social categories that provide evidence in keeping with these predictions. (shrink)

In virtue of what are later and an earlier group members of one and the numerically same tradition? Gallie was one of the few philosophers to have engaged with issues surrounding this question. My article is not a faithful exegesis of Gallie but develops a terminology in which to discuss issues surrounding the numerical identity of a tradition over time, based on some of his insights.

Epistemology has taken a zetetic turn from the study of belief towards the study of inquiry. Several decades ago, theories of bounded rationality took a procedural turn from attitudes towards the processes of inquiry that produce them. What is the relationship between the zetetic and procedural turns? In this paper, I argue that we should treat the zetetic turn in epistemology as part of a broader procedural turn in the study of bounded rationality. I use this claim to motivate and (...) clarify the zetetic turn in epistemology, as well as to reveal the need for a second zetetic turn within practical philosophy. (shrink)

The article discusses retributive justice and punitive restraint in response to the worst types of crime. I take the Breivik Case as a starting point. Anders Behring Breivik was sentenced to 21 years of preventive detention for killing 69 people, mainly youths, at Utøya and 8 people in Oslo on July 22nd, 2011. Retributivist theories as well as commonly held retributive intuitions suggest that much harsher punishment is required for such crimes. According to some retributivist theories, most notably on the (...) influential theories of Kant and Hegel, the death penalty is warranted for murderers like Breivik. This suggests that the rationale for punitive restraint in a case like the Breivik Case can only be found in forward- looking, consequentialist theories of punishment, or by adding to retributivist theories a side-constraint in the form of a principle of parsimony. However, I argue that if we look closer at the function of punishment in the retributivist theories of Kant and Hegel, they too imply a rationale for punitive restraint, even for such horrific crimes as here discussed. Against Kant and Hegel’s own views on the death penalty, I argue that their broader “freedom theories” of retributive justice do not imply the justice of the death penalty or life imprisonment. In the last part of the article, I explore differences in the concepts of freedom entailed by Kant and Hegel’s theories, and I relate these to some of the background factors relevant to the Breivik Case. (shrink)

Many epistemologists hold that an agent can come to justifiably believe that p is true by seeing that it appears that p is true, without having any antecedent reason to believe that visual impressions are generally reliable. Certain reliabilists think this, at least if the agent’s vision is generally reliable. And it is a central tenet of dogmatism (as described by Pryor (2000) and Pryor (2004)) that this is possible. Against these positions it has been argued (e.g. by Cohen (2005) (...) and White (2006)) that this violates some principles from probabilistic learning theory. To see the problem, let’s note what the dogmatist thinks we can learn by paying attention to how things appear. (The reliabilist says the same things, but we’ll focus on the dogmatist.) Suppose an agent receives an appearance that p, and comes to believe that p. Letting Ap be the proposition that it appears to the agent that p, and → be the material implication, we can say that the agent learns that p, and hence is in a position to infer Ap → p, once they receive the evidence Ap.1 This is surprising, because we can prove the following. (shrink)

What happens when someone acts? A familiar answer goes like this. There is something that the agent wants, and there is an action that he believes conducive to its attainment. His desire for the end, and his belief in the action as a means, justify taking the action, and they jointly cause an intention to take it, which in turn causes the corresponding movements of the agent's body. I think that the standard story is flawed in several respects. The flaw (...) that will concern me in this paper is that the story fails to include an agent-or, more precisely, fails to cast the agent in his proper role. (shrink)

My bedroom window is a part of my house, but it is not a partial house. A half-built house is a partial house, but there is no house it is a part of. Being a part of something—parthood—is a familiar topic of philosophical inquiry. Being a partial something—partialhood—is not. The neglect of partialhood is a shame because it is intrinsically interesting as well as metaphysically and semantically important. After using fractions and counting constructions to identify partialhood in §1, I give (...) a theory of the relation in §2-§4. Armed with this theory I turn to applications both in the domain of objects and object-related constructions as well as the domain of events and event-related constructions. In §5 I argue that partialhood allows us to identify a notion of distributivity that helps pinpoint the metaphysical basis of the mass/count distinction. In §6 I argue that the progressive morpheme expresses partialhood; in metaphysical terms, what it is for something to be happening is for there to be a partial event. (shrink)

Theorem (Will time machines be build?). The probability that in future a time machine that can travel to the past would be build is very low.

"The Moral Psychology of Anxiety brings a variety of disciplinary perspectives to examine anxiety, providing historical context and incorporating recent advances in philosophical and psychological research on anxiety's nature, causes, and consequences and on its possible benefits, virtuous aspects, and role in human inquiry"--.

The article is a plea for ethicists to regard probability as one of their most important concerns. It outlines a series of topics of central importance in ethical theory in which probability is implicated, often in a surprisingly deep way, and lists a number of open problems. Topics covered include: interpretations of probability in ethical contexts; the evaluative and normative significance of risk or uncertainty; uses and abuses of expected utility theory; veils of ignorance; Harsanyi’s aggregation theorem; population size problems; (...) equality; fairness; giving priority to the worse off; continuity; incommensurability; nonexpected utility theory; evaluative measurement; aggregation; causal and evidential decision theory; act consequentialism; rule consequentialism; and deontology. (shrink)

Matters of Certainty and Conviction. In the section on certainty, Shaw puts forth a proof of the external world, and considers topics such as change, difference, time, consciousness, substance and quality.

In the introduction to his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel speaks of metaphysics as “the entire range of the universal determinations of thought, as it were the diamond net into which everything is brought and thereby first made intelligible. Every educated consciousness has its metaphysics, an instinctive way of thinking”. Both Wittgenstein and Hegel see our many languages and forms of life as constituted by different diamond nets of categories/grammars. I argue that both Wittgenstein and Hegel take a non-reductive attitude toward (...) this plurality of local ontologies, but that they disagree about what that plurality implies for history and philosophy. Their disagreements come in part from their differing choice of examples, influenced by atomism and holism. Even more, their disagreements stem from divergent notions about the structure and mode of being of those diamond nets. During the discussion, I distinguish three uses of the word “ontology”, and I ask each thinker about what might improve the other’s philosophical project. (shrink)

Most accounts of cognitive scaffolding focus on ways that external structure can support or augment an agent’s cognitive capacities. We call cases where the interests of the user are served benign scaffolding and argue for the possibility and reality of hostile scaffolding. This is scaffolding which depends on the same capacities of an agent to make cognitive use of external structure as in benign cases, but that undermines or exploits the user while serving the interests of another agent. We develop (...) criteria for scaffolding being hostile and show by reference to examples including the design features of electronic gambling machines and casino management systems that hostile scaffolding exists and can be highly effective. In cases where the scaffolding is deep and permits the offloading of significant cognitive work, hostile scaffolding exploitatively manipulates cognitive processing itself. Given the extent of human reliance on scaffolding this is an important and neglected vulnerability. [This is an updated version of the paper, added in February 2023.]. (shrink)

This paper replies a number of objections brought against the solution to Jennifer Saul's puzzle of failure of substitutivity in transparent contexts presented in my 2001 paper "Alter Egos and Their Names".

From Hegel's philosophy of nature, this essay develops a critique of economic models and market society, based on Hegel's notion of what it takes for a formally described system to be embodied and real.

Contributors in the order of contributions: David Ebrey, Richard Kraut, T. H. Irwin, Leonard Brandwood, Eric Brown, Agnes Callard, Gail Fine, Suzanne Obdrzalek, Gábor Betegh, Elizabeth Asmis, Henry Mendell, Constance C. Meinwald, Michael Frede, Emily Fletcher, Verity Harte, Rachana Kamtekar, and Rachel Singpurwalla. -/- The first edition of the Cambridge Companion to Plato (1992), edited by Richard Kraut, shaped scholarly research and guided new students for thirty years. This new edition introduces students to fresh approaches to Platonic dialogues while (...) advancing the next generation of research. Of its seventeen chapters, nine are entirely new, written by a new generation of scholars. Six others have been thoroughly revised and updated by their original authors. The volume covers the full range of Plato's interests, including ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, religion, mathematics, and psychology. Plato's dialogues are approached as unified works and considered within their intellectual context, and the revised introduction suggests a way of reading the dialogues that attends to the differences between them while also tracing their interrelations. The result is a rich and wide-ranging volume which will be valuable for all students and scholars of Plato. (shrink)

"FICHTEANA Review of J.G. Fichte Research" is an online publication in English devoted to new scholarship on the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It publishes information and reviews of the latest Fichte editions, books, publications, conferences, and Calls for Papers. Originally founded by Daniel Breazeale in 1993, since issue 22 (2022), FICHTEANA has appeared in an expanded form with book reviews. It is co-edited by Daniel Breazeale and David W. Wood, with associate editor Kienhow Goh. -/- .

Fichte-Studien, volume 49 (Leiden: Brill/Rodopi Publishers, 8 April 2021), edited by David W. Wood, 471pp. -/- Presenting new critical perspectives on J.G. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, this volume of articles in English by an international group of scholars addresses the topic of first principles in Fichte’s writings. Especially discussed are the central text of his Jena period, the 1794/95 Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, as well as later versions like the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo (1796-99) and the presentations of 1804 and 1805. Also (...) included are new studies on the first principles of the particular sub-disciplines of Fichte’s system, such as the doctrines of aesthetics, nature, right, ethics, and history. The volume also contains a number of miscellaneous essays on Fichte research, as well as several book reviews. (shrink)

Der Sammelband umfasst Aufsätze zu den Grundfragen, Anwendungen und Grenzen des Unterrichts des Argumentierens, in allen Fächern und mit Fokus auf die Fächer Philosophie und Ethik. Dabei werden Fragen wie diese behandelt: Welchen Zielen dient das Argumentieren und welche verfolgt der Unterricht des Argumentierens? In welchem Verhältnis stehen diese zu anderen Zielen des Unterrichts? Welche Kenntnisse, Fähigkeiten und Tugenden des Argumentierens sollen eingeübt werden und wie? Die vorgeschlagenen Antworten sind nicht nur für Personen aus der Fachdidaktik, sondern auch aus der (...) Philosophie und der Schullehrpraxis aller Fächer interessant. Der Band trägt damit auch zur stärkeren Etablierung des Felds der Argumentationsdidaktik bei. (shrink)

In the pure powers ontology (PPO), basic physical properties have wholly dispositional essences. PPO has clear advantages over categoricalist ontologies, which suffer from familiar epistemological and metaphysical problems. However, opponents argue that because it contains no qualitative properties, PPO lacks the resources to individuate powers, and generates a regress. The challenge for those who take such arguments seriously is to introduce qualitative properties without reintroducing the problems that PPO was meant to solve. In this paper, I distinguish the core claim (...) of PPO: (i) basic physical properties have dispositional essences, from a hitherto unnoticed assumption: (ii) the dispositional essences of basic physical properties exclusively involve type-causal relations to other basic physical properties. I reject (ii), making room for a structuralist ontology in which all basic physical properties are pure powers, individuated by their places in a causal structure that includes not only other powers, but also physically realized qualitative properties such as shapes, patterns and structures. Such qualities individuate pure powers in the way that non-mental input and output properties individuate realized mental properties in functionalist theories of mind, except that here it is basic physical powers that are individuated by relations to realized non-powers. I distinguish one Platonic and two Aristotelian version of this theory, and argue that the Aristotelian versions require that grounding is not always a relative fundamentality relation, because the powers ground the qualities that individuate them. By considering ontic structural realism, I argue that symmetric grounding is the best way to make sense of relational individuation in structuralist ontologies, and is therefore no additional commitment of the one proposed here. (shrink)

Several different quantum gravity research programmes suggest, for various reasons, that spacetime is not part of the fundamental ontology of physics. This gives rise to the problem of empirical coherence: if fundamental physical entities do not occupy spacetime or instantiate spatiotemporal properties, how can fundamental theories concerning those entities be justified by observation of spatiotemporally located things like meters, pointers and dials? I frame the problem of empirical coherence in terms of entailment: how could a non-spatiotemporal fundamental theory entail spatiotemporal (...) evidence propositions? Solutions to this puzzle can be classified as realist or antirealist, depending on whether or not they posit a non-fundamental spacetime structure grounded in or caused by the fundamental structure. These approaches place different constraints on our everyday concepts of space and time. Applying lessons from the philosophy of mind, I argue that only realism is both conceptually plausible and suitable for addressing the problem at hand. I suggest a role functionalist version of realism, which is consistent with both grounding and causation, and according to which our everyday concepts reveal something of the true nature of emergent spacetime. (shrink)

The view that phenomenally conscious robots are on the horizon often rests on a certain philosophical view about consciousness, one we call “nomological behaviorism.” The view entails that, as a matter of nomological necessity, if a robot had exactly the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as a phenomenally conscious being, then the robot would be phenomenally conscious; indeed it would have all and only the states of phenomenal consciousness that the phenomenally conscious being in question has. We experimentally (...) investigate whether the folk think that certain (hypothetical) robots made of silicon and steel would have the same conscious states as certain familiar biological beings with the same patterns of dispositions to peripheral behavior as the robots. Our findings provide evidence that the folk largely reject the view that silicon-based robots would have the sensations that they, the folk, attribute to the biological beings in question. (shrink)

Do psychological traits predict philosophical views? We administered the PhilPapers Survey, created by David Bourget and David Chalmers, which consists of 30 views on central philosophical topics (e.g., epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language) to a sample of professional philosophers (N = 314). We extended the PhilPapers survey to measure a number of psychological traits, such as personality, numeracy, well-being, lifestyle, and life experiences. We also included non-technical ‘translations’ of these views for eventual use (...) in other populations. We found limited to no support for the notion that personality or demographics predict philosophical views. We did, however, find that some psychological traits were predictive of philosophical views, even after strict correction for multiple comparisons. Findings include: higher interest in numeracy predicted physicalism, naturalism, and consequentialism; lower levels of well-being and higher levels of mental illness predicted hard determinism; using substances such as psychedelics and marijuana predicted non-realist and subjectivist views of morality and aesthetics; having had a transformative or self-transcendent experience predicted theism and idealism. We discuss whether or not these empirical results have philosophical implications, while noting that 68% of our sample of professional philosophers indicated that such findings would indeed have philosophical value. (shrink)

The causal closure of the physical poses a familiar causal exclusion problem for the special sciences that stems from the idea that if closure is true, then fundamental physical properties do all the causal work involved in bringing about physical effects. In this paper I aim to show that the strongest causal closure principle that is not ruled out by some simple physics in fact allows for a certain kind of downward causation, which in turn makes room for robust special (...) science autonomy. I focus on the case of vector composition, arguing that it involves irreducibly multilevel causation. To give a complete causal explanation of what goes on in cases that involve the effects of multiple forces, we need to appeal not only to the fundamental properties that generate those forces, but also to geometric properties that determine how multiple vectors compose. However, if all the causal work involved in such cases were due to fundamental physical properties, there would be a one-level explanation available. Hence, I argue, it cannot be the case that fundamental physical properties do all the causal work. The extra causal work, I suggest, comes from the fact that the causal powers bestowed by fundamental physical properties have irreducibly geometric manifestation conditions. I defend the resulting form of downward causation as a solution to the problem of special science autonomy, and discuss two potential accounts of its source, in terms of the debate between kinematic and dynamic theories of the origins of spacetime symmetries. (shrink)

The late Middle Ages witnessed a recapitulation of medieval reflection on beauty. Jean Gerson is an important representative of these philosophical and theological contributions, although he has been largely neglected up to this time. A first dimension of his ideas on beauty is the incorporation of beauty (pulchrum) into the number of transcendentals, i.e., the concepts “convertible” with the notion of being (ens), that is, unity, truth, and goodness (unum, verum and bonum). This article revisits Monica Calma’s study on Gerson’s (...) theory of beauty and suggests new hypothetical sources that may have inspired this aspect of his thought. The second aspect emphasised here is Gerson’s classification of beauty, which entails some similarities to the one of Ulrich of Strasbourg, but also differs from it. Moreover, its incorporation of a division entirely devoted to artistic beauty is highly remarkable. (shrink)

Dispositional essentialists argue that physical properties have their causal roles essentially. This is typically taken to mean that physical properties are identical to dispositions. I argue that this is untenable, and that we must instead say that properties bestow dispositions. I explore what it is for a property to have such a role essentially. Dispositional essentialists argue for their view by citing certain epistemological and metaphysical implications, and I appeal to these implications to place desiderata on the concept of essence (...) involved. I argue that the traditional modal theory of essence meets these desiderata, but that the resulting theory wrongly implies that certain dispositions essential to mass are essential to charge, thereby offering a new argument against modal theories of essence. I argue that dispositional essentialism requires a primitive notion of essence, and develop a primitivist theory based on Kit Fine's views. I show that the primitivist theory has all the virtues of the modal alternative, and none of the vices. I develop a novel way of thinking about the relationship between properties, laws and dispositions, and argue that it has distinct advantages over standard dispositional essentialist formulations. (shrink)