Two prevalent assumptions in the philosophy of sport literature are that all sports are games and that all games are contests, meant to determine who is the better at the skills definitive of the sport. If these are correct, it would follow that all sports are contests and that a range of sporting activities, including nature sports, are not in fact sports at all. This paper first confronts the notion that sport and games must seek to resolve skill superiority through (...) consideration of sport activities that have no such aim. The reduction of sport to game is also shown to be untenable and due to misunderstanding the point of sport activities, specifically, why people engage in them. This leads to reconsideration of the dominance of an instrumental conception of sport and the pursuit of excellence as anthropomaximising efficiency. The Norwegian tradition of frilutsliv is explored as a counterpoint to both conventional and nature sport. (shrink)

This paper is an examination of the concept of recognition and its connection with identity and respect. This is related to the question of how women are or are not adequately recognised or respected for their achievements in sport and whether eliminating sex segregation in sport is a solution. This will require an analysis of the concept of excellence in sport, as well as the relationship between fairness and inclusion in an activity that is fundamentally about bodily movement. I argue (...) that attempts to address the problem of women’s recognition in sport need to do so in ways that neither eliminate sport as a fairness regulated system for developing individual excellence in bodily movement nor that prevent women’s achievement of sporting excellence, with the regard that belongs to them. Doing this requires us to decide whether sport is about champions or about individual excellence. (shrink)

This is an introductory article on sociobiology, particularly its relationship to eugenics. Sociobiology developed in the 1960s as a field within evolutionary biology to explain human social traits and behaviours. Although sociobiology has few direct connections to eugenics, it shares eugenics’ optimistic enthusiasm for extending biological science into the human domain, often with reckless sensationalism. Sociobiology's critics have argued that sociobiology also propagates a kind of genetic determinism and represents the zealous misapplication of science beyond its proper reach that characterized (...) the eugenics movement. More recently, evolutionary psychology represents a sophistication of sociobiology that attends to the mind as the "missing link" between evolution and behaviour (Cosmides and Tooby 1992, Pinker 1997). (shrink)

Jim Joyce argues for two amendments to probabilism. The first is the doctrine that credences are rational, or not, in virtue of their accuracy or “closeness to the truth” (1998). The second is a shift from a numerically precise model of belief to an imprecise model represented by a set of probability functions (2010). We argue that both amendments cannot be satisfied simultaneously. To do so, we employ a (slightly-generalized) impossibility theorem of Seidenfeld, Schervish, and Kadane (2012), who show that (...) there is no strictly proper scoring rule for imprecise probabilities. -/- The question then is what should give way. Joyce, who is well aware of this no-go result, thinks that a quantifiability constraint on epistemic accuracy should be relaxed to accommodate imprecision. We argue instead that another Joycean assumption — called strict immodesty— should be rejected, and we prove a representation theorem that characterizes all “mildly” immodest measures of inaccuracy. (shrink)

Individualists claim that wide explanations in psychology are problematic. I argue that wide psychological explanations sometimes have greater explanatory power than individualistic explanations. The aspects of explanatory power I focus on are causal depth and theoretical appropriateness. Reflection on the depth and appropriateness of other wide explanations of behavior, such as evolutionary explanations, clarifies why wide psychological explanations sometimes have more causal depth and theoretical appropriateness than narrow psychological explanations. I also argue for the rejection of eliminative materialism.

Dominant views of personal identity in philosophy take some kind of psychological continuity or connectedness over time to be criterial for the identity of a person over time. Such views assign psychological states, particularly those necessary for narrative memory of some kind, special importance in thinking about the nature of persons. The extended mind thesis, which has generated much recent discussion in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, holds that a person’s psychological states can physically extend beyond that person’s (...) body. Since “person” is a term of both metaphysical and moral significance, and discussions of both extended minds and personal identity have often focused on memory, this article explores the relevance of extended cognition for the identity of persons with special attention to neuroethics and memory. (shrink)

Where does the mind begin and end? Most philosophers and cognitive scientists take the view that the mind is bounded by the skull or skin of the individual. Robert Wilson, in this provocative and challenging 2004 book, provides the foundations for the view that the mind extends beyond the boundary of the individual. The approach adopted offers a unique blend of traditional philosophical analysis, cognitive science, and the history of psychology and the human sciences. The companion volume, Genes and (...) the Agents of Life, explores the theme in the biological sciences. Written with verve and clarity, this ambitious book will appeal to a broad swathe of professionals and students in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and the history of the behavioural and human sciences. You can download the table of contents here. (shrink)

Math prospective teachers must be able to think creatively and solve problems. The study looked into preservice teachers’ creative thinking and problem-solving abilities in statistics. The investigation was guided by a correlational design in a public university in the Philippines. Stratified random sampling was used to select the 103 study participants from two teacher education programs. Through google forms, data were collected using Torrance et al. (2008)’s tests of creative thinking and researcher-made statistics problem test. The findings revealed that preservice (...) teachers have commendable creative thinking, particularly fluency, flexibility, and elaboration skills. Still, they lack problem-solving skills in statistics, specifically with central tendency, dispersion, and position measures. The correlational analysis revealed no link between creative thinking and problem-solving. Still, creative thinking and problem-solving courses are recommended to help preservice teachers develop their fundamental skills as mathematics educators. (shrink)

This collection of original essays--by philosophers of biology, biologists, and cognitive scientists--provides a wide range of perspectives on species. Including contributions from David Hull, John Dupre, David Nanney, Kevin de Queiroz, and Kim Sterelny, amongst others, this book has become especially well-known for the three essays it contains on the homeostatic property cluster view of natural kinds, papers by Richard Boyd, Paul Griffiths, and Robert A. Wilson.

Leslie Allan demonstrates how human rights are unproblematic for utilitarian moral theory and how, upon consideration, utilitarianism turns out to be the best theory for justifying human rights. Using case studies of historical and contemporary human rights conventions and recent psychological research, he argues how our concept of human rights is founded on the satisfaction of fundamental human needs and the consequences for human happiness.

In the intersection between eugenics past and present, disability has never been far beneath the surface. Perceived and ascribed disabilities of body and mind were one of the core sets of eugenics traits that provided the basis for institutionalized and sterilization on eugenic grounds for the first 75 years of the 20th-century. Since that time, the eugenic preoccupation with the character of future generations has seeped into what have become everyday practices in the realm of reproductive choice. As Marsha Saxton (...) (2000) and Adrienne Asch (2000, 2003) have forcefully argued, the use of prenatal screening technologies to facilitate the selective abortion of fetuses with features that signify disabling traits—the paradigm here being trisomy 21 in a fetus indicating Down Syndrome in the child—express a negative view of such disabilities sufficient to warrant terminating an otherwise wanted pregnancy. The eliminative structure of what Rosemary Garland Thompson (2012) has called eugenic logic persists in contemporary practices governing reproductive choice, social inclusion, and democratic participation and their relationship to disability. The tie between eugenics and contemporary disability studies suggests that eugenics and reflection on its history can also play a more positive role in disability politics. After focusing on eugenics in the first half of the paper, we will shift in the second half of the paper to eugenic resonances in contemporary thought and practice, concluding with some thoughts about ongoing practices of silencing and the very idea of eradicating disability. (shrink)

Genes and the Agents of Life undertakes to rethink the place of the individual in the biological sciences, drawing parallels with the cognitive and social sciences. Genes, organisms, and species are all agents of life but how are each of these conceptualized within genetics, developmental biology, evolutionary biology, and systematics? The 2005 book includes highly accessible discussions of genetic encoding, species and natural kinds, and pluralism above the levels of selection, drawing on work from across the biological sciences. The book (...) is a companion to the author's Boundaries of the Mind (2004), also available from Cambridge, where the focus is the cognitive sciences. The book will appeal to a broad range of professionals and students in philosophy, biology, and the history of science. You can download the table of contents and the first chapter here. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Kevin Krein argues that the notion of self-competition is misplaced in adventure sports and of only limited application altogether, for two main reasons: (i) the need for a consistent and repeatable measure of performance; and (ii) the requirement of multiple competitors. Moreover, where an individual is engaged in a sport in which the primary feature with which they are engaged is a natural one, Krein argues that the more accurate description of their activity is not 'competition', (...) but an attempt at harmonious interaction. I raise a number of problems against both criteria and argue that traditional and adventure sports do both involve self-competition on at least two levels: bettering one's previous performance and resisting the desire to quit. I argue that self-reflexive competition is not so much with one's self (which is philosophically absurd), but within one's self, between conflicting motivations and desires. I explore what is involved in self-reflexive competition, particularly at a phenomenological, self-constituting level, and raise the question of whether it is appropriate for activity in wilder natural environments. (shrink)

This paper responds to Kevin Krein’s claim in that the particular value of nature sports over traditional ones is that they offer intensity of sport experience in dynamic interaction between an athlete and natural features. He denies that this intensity is derived from competitive conflict of individuals and denies that nature sport derives its value from internal conflict within the athlete who carries out the activity. This paper responds directly to Krein by analysing ‘intensity’ in sport in terms of the (...) relationship between attention and reflection and the interaction between self and environment. I reply directly to Krein’s rejection of self-competition as based on a mischaracterisation of internal struggle and argue that the weighing of incompatible desires does not involve a fragmented self. I argue that the unique intensity to which Krein refers is strongly comparable to the Kantian conception of the sublime and explore how sublime experience fits Krein’s account and outline some serious problems that such an ideal of experience poses for nature sport. (shrink)

Despite the fact that the history of eugenics in Canada is necessarily part of the larger history of eugenics, there is a special role for oral history to play in the telling of this story, a role that promises to shift us from the muddled middle of the story. Not only has the testimony of eugenics survivors already played perhaps the most important role in revealing much about the practice of eugenics in Canada, but the willingness and ability of survivors (...) to share their own oral histories makes the situation in western Canada almost unique. Conversely, I also discuss the role that oral history plays in “surviving a eugenic past”, trading on the ambiguity of this phrase to reflect both on the survivorship of those who have been viewed as subhuman via some kind of eugenic lens and on the collective legacy with which Canada’s eugenic past presents us. (shrink)

The social, behavioral, and a good chunk of the biological sciences concern the nature of individual agency, where our paradigm for an individual is a human being. Theories of economic behavior, of mental function and dysfunction, and of ontogenetic development, for example, are theories of how such individuals act, and of what internal and external factors are determinative of that action. Such theories construe individuals in distinctive ways.

1. The Situation in Cognition 2. Situated Cognition: A Potted Recent History 3. Extensions in Biology, Computation, and Cognition 4. Articulating the Idea of Cognitive Extension 5. Are Some Resources Intrinsically Non-Cognitive? 6. Is Cognition Extended or Only Embedded? 7. Letting Nature Take Its Course.

God seemingly had a duty to create minds each of infinite worth through possessing God-like knowledge. People might object that God’s own infinite worth was all that was needed, or that no mind that God created could have truly infinite worth; however, such objections fail. Yet this does not generate an unsolvable Problem of Evil. We could exist inside an infinite mind that was one among endlessly many, perhaps all created by Platonic Necessity. “God” might be our name for this (...) Necessity, or for the infinite mind inside which we existed, or for an infinite ocean of infinite minds. (shrink)

David Sloan Wilson has recently revived the idea of a group mind as an application of group selectionist thinking to cognition. Central to my discussion of this idea is the distinction between the claim that groups have a psychology and what I call the social manifestation thesis-a thesis about the psychology of individuals. Contemporary work on this topic has confused these two theses. My discussion also points to research questions and issues that Wilson's work raises, as well as (...) their connection to externalist conceptions of the mind familiar since the work of Putnam and Burge. (shrink)

This tutorial is for beginners wanting to learn the basics of propositional logic; the simplest of the formal systems of logic. Leslie Allan introduces students to the nature of arguments, validity, formal proofs, logical operators and rules of inference. With many examples, Allan shows how these concepts are employed through the application of three different methods for proving the formal validity of arguments.

Distinctions in fundamentality between different levels of description are central to the viability of contemporary decoherence-based Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM). This approach to quantum theory characteristically combines a determinate fundamental reality (one universal wave function) with an indeterminate emergent reality (multiple decoherent worlds). In this chapter I explore how the Everettian appeal to fundamentality and emergence can be understood within existing metaphysical frameworks, identify grounding and concept fundamentality as promising theoretical tools, and use them to characterize a system of explanatory (...) levels (with associated laws of nature) for EQM. This Everettian level structure encompasses and extends the ‘classical’ levels structure. The ‘classical’ levels of physics, chemistry, biology, etc. are recovered, but they are emergent in character and potentially variable across Everett worlds. EQM invokes an additional fundamental level, not present in the classical levels picture, and a novel potential role for self-location in interlevel metaphysics. When given a modal realist interpretation, EQM also makes trouble for supervenience-based approaches to levels. (shrink)

Essentialism is widely regarded as a mistaken view of biological kinds, such as species. After recounting why (sections 2-3), we provide a brief survey of the chief responses to the “death of essentialism” in the philosophy of biology (section 4). We then develop one of these responses, the claim that biological kinds are homeostatic property clusters (sections 5-6) illustrating this view with several novel examples (section 7). Although this view was first expressed 20 years ago, and has received recent discussion (...) and critique, it remains underdeveloped and is often misrepresented by its critics (section 8). (shrink)

Excellence in sport performance is normally taken to be a matter of superior performance of physical movements or quantitative outcomes of movements. This paper considers whether a wider conception can be afforded by certain kinds of nature based sport. The interplay between technical skill and aesthetic experience in nature based sports is explored, and the extent to which it contributes to a distinction between different sport-based approaches to natural environments. The potential for aesthetic appreciation of environmental engagement is found to (...) be strongly dependent on whether or not environmental engagement is exploited for the end of producing a quantifiable result or enhancing technical skill. It is also argued that an existential rather than spectatorial attitude to aesthetic experience is offered by specifically nature oriented sport. Aesthetic experience achieved in this way is therefore neither passive nor detached, but extends Berleant's concept of participatory environmental aesthetics and underpins both an alternate (wide) conception of excellence in sport activity and a richer experience of aesthetic engagement than more objectivised standpoints. (shrink)

This paper points to some problems for the position that D.M. Walsh calls "alternative individualism," and argues that in defending this view Walsh has omitted an important part of what separates individualists and externalists in psychology. Walsh's example of Hox gene complexes is discussed in detail to show why some sort of externalism about scientific taxonomy more generally is a more plausible view than any extant version of individualism.

It is widely accepted that there is a visual field, but the analogous notion of an auditory field is rejected by many philosophers on the grounds that the metaphysics or phenomenology of audition lack the necessary spatial or phenomenological structure. In this paper, I argue that many of the common objections to the existence of an auditory field are misguided and that, contrary to a tradition of philosophical scepticism about the spatiality of auditory experience, it is as richly spatial as (...) visual experience—and in some ways even more so. By carefully considering the spatiality and boundedness of audition, along with how sounds or their sources are experienced as occurring within the surrounding acoustic environment, we can gain a better understanding of (i) our auditory experience of space and (ii) the conditions for the existence of spatial sensory fields in general in a way that does not privilege vision over the other senses. (shrink)

The author mounts a case against the libertarian and hard determinist's thesis that free will is impossible in a deterministic world. He charges incompatibilists with misconstruing ordinary 'free will' talk by overlaying common language with their own metaphysical presuppositions. Through a review of ordinary discourse and recent developments in jurisprudence and the sciences, he draws together the four key factors required for an act to be free. He then puts his 4C theory to work in giving a credible account of (...) how caused human agents 'could have done otherwise'. (shrink)

The computational argument for individualism, which moves from computationalism to individualism about the mind, is problematic, not because computationalism is false, but because computational psychology is, at least sometimes, wide. The paper provides an early, or perhaps predecessor, version of the thesis of extended cognition.

This commentary continues an exchange on eugenics in Monash Bioethics Review between Anomaly (2018), Wilson (2019), and Veit, Anomaly, Agar, Singer, Fleischman, and Minerva (2021). The eponymous question, “Can ‘Eugenics’ be Defended?”, is multiply ambiguous and does not receive a clear answer from Veit et al.. Despite their stated desire to move beyond mere semantics to matters of substance, Veit et al. concentrate on several uses of the term “eugenics” that pull in opposite directions. I argue, first, that Veit (...) et al. (2021) makes much the same error as does Anomaly (2018) in characterizing eugenics; second, that the paper misunderstands the relationship between eugenics and enhancement; and third, that it distorts the views expressed in my “Eugenics Undefended”. (shrink)

In On the Plurality of Worlds (Lewis 1986), David Lewis imposes a condition on realist theories of modality which he calls ‘plenitude’. Lewis apparently assigns this condition considerable importance, and uses it to motivate his Humean principle of recombination, but he never says exactly what plenitude amounts to. This chapter first sets aside some obvious ways of reconstructing the plenitude criterion which do not fit with the textual evidence. An objection to modal realism due to John Divers and Joseph Melia (...) (Divers and Melia 2002) is diagnosed as equivocating between an overly-demanding plenitude constraint and a weaker constraint which fails to establish their conclusion. An alternative deflationary interpretation of the plenitude condition has it following from an application of standard theoretical virtues to a modal realist’s total theory; Lewis’ correspondence provides new evidence in support of this interpretation. The deflationary plenitude criterion also has broader application, beyond Lewisian modal realism. (shrink)

The conceptualisation of kinship and its study remain contested within anthropology. This paper draws on recent cognitive science, developmental cognitive psychology, and the philosophy of science to offer a novel argument for a view of kinship as progeneratively or reproductively constrained. I shall argue that kinship involves a form of extended cognition that incorporates progenerative facts, going on to show how the resulting articulation of kinship’s progenerative nature can be readily expressed by an influential conception of kinds, the homeostatic property (...) cluster view. Identifying the distinctive role that our extended cognitive access to progenerative facts plays in kinship delivers an integrative, progenerativist view that avoids standard performativist criticisms of progenerativism as being ethnocentric, epistemically naïve, and reductive. (shrink)

Philosophers of biology and biologists themselves for the most part assume that the concept of kin is progenerative: what makes two individuals kin is a direct or indirect function of reproduction. Derivatively, kinship might likewise be presumed to be progenerative in nature. Yet a prominent view of kinship in contemporary cultural anthropology is a kind of constructivism or performativism that rejects such progenerativist views. This paper critically examines an influential line of thinking used to critique progenerativism and support performativism that (...) cites cross-cultural diversity in what I will call kinmaking. I challenge several key assumptions made in moving from this appeal to ethnography to conclusions about kinship and progeneration, arguing that closer scrutiny of both the ethnographic record and inferences that draw on it in fact support progenerative views of both kinship and kinmaking. (shrink)

This volume of twelve specially commissioned essays about species draws on the perspectives of prominent researchers from anthropology , botany, developmental psychology , the philosophy of biology and science, protozoology, and zoology . The concept of species has played a focal role in both evolutionary biology and the philosophy of biology , and the last decade has seen something of a publication boom on the topic (e.g., Otte and Endler 1989; Ereshefsky 1992b; Paterson 1994; lambert and Spence 1995; Claridge, Dawah, (...) and Wilson 1997; Wheeler and Meier 1999; Howard and Berlocher 1998). (shrink)

Certain traits, such as intelligence and mental deficiency, have been the focus of eugenic research and propaganda. This focus on such eugenic traits builds on three commonsense ideas: (1) People differ with respect to some of their traits, such as eye-colour and height; (2) Many traits run in families, being passed on from parents to their children; (3) Some traits are desirable, while others are undesirable. These three ideas about traits—their variability, heritability, and desirability—fed the much more controversial eugenicist view (...) that some traits make a person of “good stock”, while others reflect the fact that she comes from “inferior stock”. In combination with the power to influence human reproduction, the systematic study of eugenic traits has thus been thought to provide the basis for human improvement across generations. Three sources reveal which traits were considered important to eugenicists, the public, and decision makers: the research publications of eugenicists, discussions of eugenics in public and popular media, and legislation. (shrink)

The Eugenic Mind Project is a wide-ranging, philosophical book that explores and critiques both past and present eugenic thinking, drawing on the author’s intimate knowledge of eugenics in North America and his previous work on the cognitive, biological, and social sciences, the fragile sciences. Informed by the perspectives of Canadian eugenics survivors in the province of Alberta, The Eugenic Mind Project recounts the history of eugenics and the thinking that drove it, and critically engages contemporary manifestations of eugenic thought, newgenics. (...) An accessible, original work of scholarship adopting what the author calls a standpoint eugenics, this book focuses on the roots of eugenic thinking past and present. It will provoke and enrich discussions about human nature and human diversity, the social uses of biotechnology, and social policy governing future generations. You can download the preface and acknowledgements here. (shrink)

While memory is conceptualized predominantly as an individual capacity in the cognitive and biological sciences, the social sciences have most commonly construed memory as a collective phenomenon. Collective memory has been put to diverse uses, ranging from accounts of nationalism in history and political science to views of ritualization and commemoration in anthropology and sociology. These appeals to collective memory share the idea that memory ‘‘goes beyond the individual’’ but often run together quite different claims in spelling out that idea. (...) This paper reviews a sampling of recent work on collective memory in the light of emerging externalist views within the cognitive sciences, and through some reflection on broader traditions of thought in the biological and social sciences that have appealed to the idea that groups have minds. The paper concludes with some thoughts about the relationship between these kinds of cognitive metaphors in the social sciences and our notion of agency. (shrink)

Donald Hoffman proposed a bold theory—that objects do not exist independently of us perceiving them and that all that really exists is conscious agents. In this critical review, Leslie Allan examines the three core components of Hoffman's new idealism. He proposes solutions to linguistic absurdities suffered by Hoffman's theory before considering its most serious problems. These include oversimplifications of evolutionary theory, self-refutation, heuristic sterility and dependence on scientific realism.

In his seminal essay, Harry Frankfurt argued that our exercise of free will and allocation of moral responsibility do not depend on us being able to do other than we did. Leslie Allan defends this moral maxim from Frankfurt's attack. Applying his character-based counterfactual conditional analysis of free acts to Frankfurt's counterexamples, Allan unpacks the confusions that lie at the heart of Frankfurt's argument. The author also explores how his 4C compatibilist theory measures up against Frankfurt’s conclusions.

As a non-cognitivist analysis of moral language, Charles Stevenson's sophisticated emotivism is widely regarded by moral philosophers as a substantial improvement over its historical antecedent, radical emotivism. None the less, it has come in for its share of criticism. In this essay, Leslie Allan responds to the key philosophical objections to Stevenson's thesis, arguing that the criticisms levelled against his meta-ethical theory rest largely on a too hasty reading of his works.

This paper begins by saying enough about eugenics to explain why disability is central to eugenics (section 2), then elaborates on why cognitive disability has played and continues to play a special role in eugenics and in thinking about moral status (section 3) before identifying three reasons why eugenics remains a live issue in contemporary bioethics (section 4). After a reminder of the connections between Nazi eugenics, medicine, and bioethics (section 5), it returns to take up two more specific clusters (...) of issues at the intersection of eugenics, disability, and bioethics. These concern questions of life, death, and reproductive value (section 6) and the value of standpoint theory and epistemology for understanding some of the tensions between bioethics and disability in light of a shared eugenic past (section 7). (shrink)

Previous discussions on the value of sport in remote locations have concentrated on 1) environmental and process concerns, with the rejection of competition and goal-directed or use oriented activity, or 2) the value of risk and dangerous sport for self-affirmation. It is argued that the value of risk in remote sport is in self-knowledge rather than self-affirmation and that risk in remote sport, while enhancing certain kinds of experience, is not necessary. The value of remote sport is in offering the (...) opportunity for experience that enhances the participants’ knowledge both of self and of the environment with which they interact. (shrink)

In the latter half of the twentieth century, philosophers of science have argued (implicitly and explicitly) that epistemically rational individuals might compose epistemically irrational groups and that, conversely, epistemically rational groups might be composed of epistemically irrational individuals. We call the conjunction of these two claims the Independence Thesis, as they together imply that methodological prescriptions for scientific communities and those for individual scientists might be logically independent of one another. We develop a formal model of scientific inquiry, define four (...) criteria for individual and group epistemic rationality, and then prove that the four definitions diverge, in the sense that individuals will be judged rational when groups are not and vice versa. We conclude by explaining implications of the inconsistency thesis for (i) descriptive history and sociology of science and (ii) normative prescriptions for scientific communities. (shrink)

This paper examines the standard view of realization operative incontemporary philosophy of mind, and proposes an alternative, generalperspective on realization. The standard view can be expressed, insummary form, as the conjunction of two theses, the sufficiency thesis andthe constitutivity thesis. Physicalists of both reductionist and anti-reductionist persuasions share a conception of realization wherebyrealizations are determinative of the properties they realize and physically constitutive of the individuals with those properties. Centralto the alternative view that I explore here is the idea that (...) the requisite,metaphysically robust notion of realization is ineliminably context-sensitive. I shall argue that the sufficiency and constitutivity theses aretypically not jointly satisfied by any one candidate realizer, and that goingcontext-sensitive in one's metaphysics is preferable to the standard view.The context-sensitive views developed here are implicit in a range ofcommon views in both the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of biology,even if they have not been explicitly articulated, and even though theyundermine other views that are commonly endorsed. (shrink)

Who is recognised as a philosopher and what counts as philosophy influence both the content of a philosophical education and academic philosophy’s continuing demographic skew. The “philosophical who” and the “philosophical what” themselves are a partial function of matters that have been passed over in collective silence, even if that now feels to some like a silence belonging to the distant past. This paper discusses some philosophical silences regarding race, gender, and disability in the context of reflection on philosophical education (...) and on philosophical practice in the public sphere. It focuses on Charles Mills’ writings on race, Susan Babbitt’s on race and gender, and on more collaboratively-generated work on eugenics and disability. (shrink)

This is the introductory essay for the 80 or so philosophy articles in MITECS, covering philosophy's contribution to the cognitive sciences.

This paper explores ludonarrative dissonance as it occurs in sport, primarily as the conflict experienced by participants between dominant narratives and self-generated interpretations of embodied experience. Taking self-narrative as a social rather than isolated production, the interaction with three basic categories of dominant narrative is explored: transformative, representing a spectrum from revelatory to distorting, bullying and colonising. These forms of dominant narrative prescribe interpretations of the player’s experience of play and of self that displace their own, with the end result (...) of dissonance and self-alienation. (shrink)

This is a critical response to "Defending Eugenics", published in MBR in 2018.

A Guide to Good Reasoning has been described by reviewers as “far superior to any other critical reasoning text.” It shows with both wit and philosophical care how students can become good at everyday reasoning. It starts with attitude—with alertness to judgmental heuristics and with the cultivation of intellectual virtues. From there it develops a system for skillfully clarifying and evaluating arguments, according to four standards—whether the premises fit the world, whether the conclusion fits the premises, whether the argument fits (...) the conversation, and whether it is possible to tell. (shrink)

This afterword to Species and Beyond provides some reflections on species, with special attention to what I think the most significant developments have been in the thinking of biologists and philosophers working on species over the past 25 years, as well as some bad jokes.

In this address, Leslie Allan shares his early experiences and how they shape his humanist outlook today. He then outlines what he considers to be the three core principles underlying the humanist world view and illustrates their application with historical and contemporary examples. He concludes by drawing upon each of these principles to tease out what it means to live a good life; a life of meaning and purpose.

Vision constitutes an interesting domain, or range of domains, for debate over the extended mind thesis, the idea that minds physically extend beyond the boundaries of the body. In part this is because vision and visual experience more particularly are sometimes presented as a kind of line in the sand for what we might call externalist creep about the mind: once all reasonable concessions have been made to externalists about the mind, visual experience marks a line beyond which lies a (...) safe haven for individualists. Here I want to put a little more pressure on such a view of visual experience, as well as to offer a more constructive, positive argument in defense of the idea of extended vision. (shrink)