In this paper, I discuss full-blooded Platonism (the claim that all possible mathematical objects exist) as a response to the skeptical problem in the philosophy of mathematics as to how empirical beings can cognize non-empirical mathematical objects. I then attempt to develop an analogous position regarding the applicability of concepts to reality in response to the skeptical problem regarding how we can cognize an objective reality through human-constructed concepts. If all concepts meeting certain minimal conditions structure reality under some aspect, (...) then objective knowledge is possible, regardless of how these concepts arose historically. (shrink)

This year's book award committee reviewed thirty nominated books. We identified seven finalists, each well worth our special attention: Milton Fisk's impressive Towards a Healthy Society, Gary Francione's feisty Introduction to Animal Rights, Timothy Gaffaney's engaging Freedom for the Poor, David Ingram's historically insightful Group Rights, Rachel Roth's poignant Making Women Pay, Karen Warren's finely articulated Ecofeminist Philosophy, and the eventual winning entry, Phillip Cole's Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration. We're here today to discuss this important (...) book. (shrink)

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in relativism. Proponents have defended various accounts that seek to model the truth-conditions of certain propositions along the lines of standard possible world semantics. The central challenge for such views has been to explain what advantage they have over contextualist theories with regard to the possibility of disagreement. I will press this worry against Max Kölbel’s account of faultless disagreement. My case will proceed along two distinct but connected lines. First, I (...) will argue that the sense of faultlessness made possible by his relativism conflicts with our intuitive understanding of disagreement. And second, that his meta-epistemological commitments are at odds with the socio-epistemic function of disagreement. This latter problem for relativistic accounts of truth has thus far been largely ignored in the literature. (shrink)

Various theorists contend that we may live in a computer simulation. David Chalmers in turn argues that the simulation hypothesis is a metaphysical hypothesis about the nature of our reality, rather than a sceptical scenario. We use recent work on consciousness to motivate new doubts about both sets of arguments. First, we argue that if either panpsychism or panqualityism is true, then the only way to live in a simulation may be as brains-in-vats, in which case it is unlikely that (...) we live in a simulation. We then argue that if panpsychism or panqualityism is true, then viable simulation hypotheses are substantially sceptical scenarios. We conclude that the nature of consciousness has wide-ranging implications for simulation arguments. (shrink)

Encampment continues to be one of the dominant modes of responding to refugee situations. I suggest that we would do well to conceive of the wrongfulness of refugee camps not just in terms of their effects, but also in terms of their function. I endorse the view that camps currently function primarily to contain displaced persons and develop a novel conception of the wrong of encampment in terms of that function. Drawing on Heidegger's account of the spatiality proper to different (...) entities, I argue that practices of containment reduce refugees to the status of objects to be, in effect, immobilized and stored away for an indeterminate amount of time. (shrink)

The notion of ‘durability’ plays a central role in the discourse, policies, and practices surrounding forced displacement. Yet, for all the talk of ‘durable solutions’ to refugee situations, durability is in many ways the quality most conspicuously absent in refugees' everyday lives and living spaces. As the world has grown progressively more inured to the practice of using provisional spaces of transit as permanent sites of residence, displaced persons are increasingly finding themselves trapped in spaces marked by a kind of (...) permanent temporariness. In this article, I sketch three different ways in which living for long periods of time in temporary spaces can harm inhabitants: first, I argue that non-durability in the home can undermine cognitive function; second, that it can attenuate various forms of agency; and third, that it fails to furnish a ground on which refugees can build meaningful lives and futures for themselves. I conclude by arguing that the deprivation of durable living conditions is not only harmful, but wrongful. (shrink)

Respiratory rhythms sustain biological life, governing the homeostatic exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Until recently, however, the influence of breathing on the brain has largely been overlooked. Yet new evidence demonstrates that the act of breathing exerts a substantive, rhythmic influence on perception, emotion, and cognition, largely through the direct modulation of neural oscillations. Here, we synthesize these findings to motivate a new predictive coding model of respiratory brain coupling, in which breathing rhythmically modulates both local and global neural (...) gain, to optimize cognitive and affective processing. Our model further explains how respiratory rhythms interact with the topology of the functional connectome, and we highlight key implications for the computational psychiatry of disordered respiratory and interoceptive inference. (shrink)

Democracy is the central political issue of our age, yet debates over its nature and goals rarely engage with feminist concerns. Now that women have the right to vote, they are thought to present no special problems of their own. But despite the seemingly gender-neutral categories of individual or citizen, democratic theory and practice continues to privilege the male. This book reconsiders dominant strands in democratic thinking - focusing on liberal democracy, participatory democracy, and twentieth century versions of civic republicanism (...) - and approaches these from a feminist perspective. Anne Phillips explores the under-representation of women in politics, the crucial relationship between public and private spheres, and the lessons of the contemporary women's movement as an experience in participatory democracy. (shrink)

This article first refines the question of Kant's relation to Hume's skepticism, and then considers the evidence for Kant's attitude toward Hume in three contexts: the A Critique, the Prolegomena, and the B Critique. My thesis is that in the A Critique Kant viewed skepticism positively, as a necessary reaction to dogmatism and a spur toward critique. In his initial statement of the critical philosophy Kant treated Hume as an ally in curbing dogmatism, but one who stopped short of what (...) was really needed: a full critique of reason, to establish the boundaries of metaphysical cognition. Kant found fault with Hume's analyses of cognition and experience, and specifically his failure to see the crucial importance of synthetic a priori cognition in metaphysics. In particular, he held that Hume's empiricist account of cognition could neither explain the synthetic a priori cognition actually found in mathematics and natural science, nor provide a principled account of the limits on what can be known--and what can be thought--through the pure concepts of the understanding. According to Kant, Hume therefore failed in his attempt to determine the limits of metaphysics, whereas Kant succeeded because his transcendental philosophy provided a thorough account of cognition, its structure and limits. In the Prolegomena and the B Critique Kant distinguished his position more sharply from Hume's. He also adopted a more negative attitude toward "skeptical idealism" than before; but he attributed such skepticism to Descartes, not Hume. Prior to the B Critique Kant did not see Hume as attacking natural science or ordinary cognition. In none of the three works was Kant's main aim to "answer the skeptic." His primary aim was what he said it was: to firmly establish the boundary of metaphysics, by discovering the elements of human cognition and fixing its proper domain. His purported discoveries about the limits of metaphysical cognition meant that the traditional objects of metaphysical knowledge, God, the soul, and the world as it is in itself, are unknowable, hence that traditional metaphysics itself is impossible. Besides settling the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics, his findings would also prevent the illegitimate extension of principles of sensibility to God and the noumenal self, an extension that would threaten the metaphysics of morals by incorrectly denying the thinkability of noumenal freedom, and that might otherwise lead to "materialism, fatalism, atheism, and freethinking unbelief" (B xxxiv). (shrink)

Joshua Greene argues that cognitive (neuro)science matters for ethics in two ways, the “direct route” and the “indirect route.” Greene illustrates the direct route with a debunking explanation of the inclination to condemn all incest. The indirect route is an updated version of Greene’s argument that dual-process moral psychology gives support for consequentialism over deontology. I consider each of Greene’s arguments, and I argue that neither succeeds. If there is a route from cognitive (neuro)science to ethics, Greene has not found (...) it. (shrink)

By means of a comprehensive and penetrating examination of the main elements of Epicurean ethics, Phillip Mitsis forces us to reevaluate this widely misunderstood figure in the history of philosophy.

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 (...) to identity are too weak to be interesting, lacking in metaphysical consequence. I defend a moderate version according to which composition is a kind of identity, and argue that the difference is metaphysically substantial, not merely terminological. I then consider whether the notion of generalized identity, though fundamental, can be elucidated in modal terms by reverse engineering Hume’s Dictum. Unfortunately, for realists about possible worlds, such as myself,... (shrink)

This essay is an analysis of the central arguments in Plato’s Crito. The dialogue shows, in a variety of ways, that the opinion of another person can have practical relevance in one’s deliberations about what to do – e.g. as an argument, as a piece of expert advice, as a threat. Especially important among these forms of practical relevance is the relevance of authoritative commands. In the dialogue, the Laws of Athens argue that Socrates must accept his sentence of death, (...) because he must regard the court’s verdict as a command from a practical authority – the city. The Laws’ arguments rely on special features of authority-reasons that many commentators have overlooked. This article explains why the Law’s arguments are unsuccessful. Finally, it is argued that Socrates’ description of ‘the many’ suggests that the city lacks the deliberative capacity necessary for possessing practical authority. (shrink)

According to the Desiderative Lockean Thesis, there are necessary and sufficient conditions, stated in the terms of decision theory, for when one is truly said to want. What one is truly said to want, it turns out, varies remarkably by context—and to an underappreciated degree. To explain this context-sensitivity, and closure properties of wanting, I advance a Desiderative Lockean view that is distinctive in having two context-sensitive parameters.

In learning chemistry at the entry level, many learners labor under misconceptions about the subject matter that are so fundamental that they are typically never addressed. A fundamental misconception in chemistry appears to arise from an adding of existing phenomenal concepts to newly-acquired chemical concepts, so that beginning learners think of chemical entities as themselves having the very same ‘macro’ properties that we observe through the senses. Those who teach or practice chemistry never acquire these misconceptions because they were able (...) to naturally pick up the nature of the subject to begin with. But as a result, they remain unaware of the foundational assumptions and understanding that they operate with and that many beginning learners persistently lack. Thus, a systematic picture of the workings of chemical theory as they relate to observable phenomena needs to be elucidated so that the attention of chemical educators is drawn to the fundamental understanding of the subject that they already possess and that beginning learners of chemistry lack, so that beginning learners can be given the opportunity to gain an understanding of how chemical explanations are in general related to observable phenomena. The ‘layered’ way in which chemical and physical entities are related to each other within chemical theory can also be clarified in this way. To afford this picture, the philosophical concepts of supervenience and emergence are explained and applied to chemistry, as philosophers of chemistry have already done. The result provides a model for teaching chemistry that, if consistently applied, has the potential to greatly enhance fundamental understanding of the subject matter. (shrink)

In her Natural Goodness, Philippa Foot argues both that a distinctive grammar of goodness applies to living things generally, and that moral goodness in human beings is a special instance of natural goodness. My goal in this chapter is to provide a sympathetic interpretation of Foots’ grammar of goodness, clarifying and expanding it in a few places, and defending it against some objections. I begin by sketching Foot’s grammar. As I understand it, that grammar includes four main notions: 1) THE (...) GOOD OF, 2) GOOD AS / GOOD IN, 3) GOOD FOR, and 4) GOODS / GOOD THINGS. I then consider the relation between GOOD FOR, on the one hand, and THE GOOD OF and GOOD AS, on the other. Is it always GOOD FOR a living thing to be GOOD AS the kind of thing it is? Could something be GOOD FOR an organism without being part of THE GOOD OF that kind of thing? I argue that GOOD FOR, GOOD AS, and THE GOOD OF are inseparable: what is GOOD FOR a living thing just is that which furthers or constitutes THE GOOD OF such a creature, and THE GOOD OF any creature is the actualization of those well-formed capacities that make it GOOD AS the kind of creature that it is. In the final part of this chapter, I consider how happiness fits into Foot’s grammar of goodness as applied to human beings, paying special attention to the idea that THE GOOD OF any living thing consists in a certain form of activity. (shrink)

A puzzling feature of paradigmatic cases of dehumanization is that the perpetrators often attribute uniquely human traits to their victims. This has become known as the “paradox of dehumanization.” We address the paradox by arguing that the perpetrators think of their victims as human in one sense, while denying that they are human in another sense. We do so by providing evidence that people harbor a dual character concept of humanity. Research has found that dual character concepts have two independent (...) sets of criteria for their application, one of which is descriptive and one of which is normative. Across four experiments, we found evidence that people deploy a descriptive criterion according to which being human is a matter of being a Homo sapiens; as well as a normative criterion according to which being human is a matter of possessing a deep-seated commitment to do the morally right thing. Importantly, we found that people are willing to affirm that someone is human in the descriptive sense, while denying that they are human in the normative sense, and vice versa. In addition to providing a solution to the paradox of dehumanization, these findings suggest that perceptions of moral character have a central role to play in driving dehumanization. (shrink)

Algorithms wield increasing control over our lives—over the jobs we get, the loans we're granted, the information we see online. Algorithms can and often do wield their power in a biased way, and much work has been devoted to algorithmic bias. In contrast, algorithmic neutrality has been largely neglected. I investigate algorithmic neutrality, tackling three questions: What is algorithmic neutrality? Is it possible? And when we have it in mind, what can we learn about algorithmic bias?

On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) over what would quickly become known as SARS-CoV- 2 or COVID- 19. This emergency status was officially ended in the United States in May 2023 amidst much dissent and debate. Although emergency conditions resulting from COVID- 19 will likely wax and wane over the coming years, there is good reason to think that the incidence of severe global pandemics will increase over the next (...) century, as will declarations of emergency. The declaration of an emergency calls for urgent action, but it just as urgently demands careful reflection. Official “emergency” status licenses unparalleled executive intervention, completely reorganizing the lives of those who live under its decree. Such official recognition, however, is heavily dependent on the social context in and from which the emergency arises. Highlighting which circumstances rise to the level of an official emergency clarifies our reigning assumptions about what threshold of active harm—and in relation to which groups of people—demands immediate intervention. (shrink)

In this essay, I want to explore one of the most ironic episodes in the history of propaganda, the attempt by various federal agencies to moderate American WWII anti-Japanese propaganda films. My texts will be four films, two produced by the military, and two by Hollywood: December 7th (1943), directed by Gregg Toland and revised by John Ford; Air Force (1943), directed Howard Hawks; Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), directed by Frank Capra; and Betrayal for the East (1945), directed by (...) William Berke. As all of these films are readily available on YouTube, I will be brief in my description of them. Instead, I will focus on how they served to intensify racial hatred of Japanese in general and Japanese-Americans in particular, and how the federal government tried to control that propaganda—but was limited by its own policies regarding Japanese-Americans. (shrink)

In this article, I set forth a theory of propaganda explaining what it is, how it relates to marketing, and the nature and types of ideology. I discuss the criteria by which we can judge the rationality or deceitfulness of propaganda. I defend the view that while propaganda can be perfectly rational, it rarely is, and I explain why that is the case. I finish by explaining why the question of the rationality or deceitfulness of propaganda is different from the (...) question of the morality of propaganda. I give two quick examples of how an ethicist might argue that deceptive propaganda might be ethical to use, and perfectly rational propaganda might be immoral to use. I conclude with the notion that the question of the ethics of marketing and propaganda is complex, and should be handled in a separate paper. (shrink)

Future-bias is preferring some lesser future good to a greater past good because it is in the future, or preferring some greater past pain to some lesser future pain because it is in the past. Most of us think that this bias is rational. I argue that no agents have future-biased preferences that are rationally evaluable—that is, evaluable as rational or irrational. Given certain plausible assumptions about rational evaluability, either we must find a new conception of future-bias that avoids the (...) difficulties I raise, or we must conclude that future-biased preferences are not subject to rational evaluation. (shrink)

Does possessing some human virtues make it impossible for a person to possess other human virtues? Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams both answered “yes” to this question, and they argued that to hold otherwise—to accept the harmony of the virtues—required a blinkered and unrealistic view of “what it is to be human.” In this essay, I have two goals: (1) to show how the harmony of the virtues is best interpreted, and what is at stake in affirming or denying it; (...) and (2) to provide a partial defense of the harmony of the virtues. More specifically, I show how the harmony of the virtues can be interpreted and defended within the kind of Aristotelian naturalism developed by philosophers such as Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Michael Thompson. I argue that far from being an embarrassing liability for Aristotelianism—based in an “archaic metaphysical biology”—the harmony thesis is an interesting and plausible claim about human excellences, supported by a sophisticated account of the representation of life, and fully compatible with a realistic view of our human situation. (shrink)

This article traces the historical origins of the modern concept of a private inner self., with precursors in Plato and Plotinus, its first full appearance in Augustine, its classic modern form in Locke, and its dissolution in postmodernism. The article elaborates the historical narrative given in my Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self (Oxford University Press, 2000).

The term ‘propaganda’ is normally taken in the pejorative sense of deceitful messaging. Propaganda is considered dubious if it is produced by a government agency, especially by a ministry of war or propaganda. In this article, I apply the theory of propaganda I sketched in a prior piece in these pages, under which propaganda is simply messaging intended to persuade others to do something or to support something. Under this theory, propaganda is reasonable if but only if it is evidence-based, (...) truthful, broadly logical, not coercive, targeted at mentally competent adults, and transparent—meaning that the audience should be aware that the message is intended to persuade them to do or support something. I then examine three WWII-era government propaganda films, one—A Defeated People (1946)—produced by the British military, and two—The Negro Soldier (1944) and Teamwork (1947)—produced by the American military. I explain first why I chose these particular films. I then analyze these films in some detail and show that while they were not perfectly rational, they all effectively conveyed the persuasive message that the respective militaries wanted to convey. And they did this by meeting all of the criteria for propaganda to be rational. (shrink)

In this chapter, I survey what I call Lewisian approaches to modality: approaches that analyze modality in terms of concrete possible worlds and their parts. I take the following four theses to be characteristic of Lewisian approaches to modality. (1) There is no primitive modality. (2) There exists a plurality of concrete possible worlds. (3) Actuality is an indexical concept. (4) Modality de re is to be analyzed in terms of counterparts, not transworld identity. After an introductory section in which (...) I motivate analyzing modality in terms of possible worlds, I devote one section to each of these four theses. For each thesis, I take Lewis’s interpretation and defense as my starting point. I then consider and endorse alternative ways of accepting the thesis, some of which disagree substantially with Lewis’s interpretation or defense. There is more than one way to be a Lewisian about modality. (shrink)

We claim that scientists working with deep learning (DL) models exhibit a form of pragmatic understanding that is not reducible to or dependent on explanation. This pragmatic understanding comprises a set of learned methodological principles that underlie DL model design-choices and secure their reliability. We illustrate this action-oriented pragmatic understanding with a case study of AlphaFold2, highlighting the interplay between background knowledge of a problem and methodological choices involving techniques for constraining how a model learns from data. Building successful models (...) requires pragmatic understanding to apply modelling strategies that encourage the model to learn data patterns that will facilitate reliable generalisation. (shrink)

The Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles , according to which two objects are identical if they share all the same properties, has come in for much criticism. Michael Della Rocca has recently defended PII on the grounds that it is needed to forestall the possibility that where there appears to be only one object present, there is actually a multiplicity of exactly-overlapping such objects. Katherine Hawley has criticized this approach for violating a plausible “ground rule” in applying rules of (...) indiscernibility to questions of identity: where there is putative duplication, it must be qualitatively significant. Hawley further suggests that with this rule in hand, one can tell the difference between the presence of one and two indiscernible objects without recourse to either PII or brute, nonqualitative individuation. In this paper, I critically examine Hawley’s contention and find that her appeal to “qualitatively significant duplication” fails since its application to distinct indiscernibles involves a difference that is primarily quantitative anyway. The upshot is a different proposed set of “ground rules” for applying the criterion of qualitative difference when seeking a grounding or explanation for distinctness and identity. (shrink)

This article re-examines the theoretical basis for environmental and heritage interpretation in tourist settings in the light of hermeneutic philosophy. It notes that the pioneering vision of heritage interpretation formulated by Freeman Tilden envisaged a broadly educational, ethically informed and transformative art. By contrast, current cognitive psychological attempts to reduce interpretation to the monological transmission of information, targeting universal but individuated cognitive structures, are found to be wanting. Despite growing signs of diversity, this information processing approach to interpretation remains dominant. (...) The article then presents the alternative paradigm of hermeneutics through the works of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer, to provide a broader interpretation of interpretation. This not only captures the essence of Tilden’s definition but construes heritage interpretation as a more inclusive, culturally situated, critically reflexive and dialogical practice. (shrink)

Invited review of the anthology of new papers _Philosophy of Chemistry: Growth of a New Discipline_.

The paper offers a running commentary on ps-Archytas’ On Intellect and Sense Perception (composed ca. 80 BCE), with the aim to provide a clear description of Hellenistic/post-Hellenistic Pythagorean epistemology. Through an analysis of the process of knowledge and of the faculties that this involves, ps-Archytas presents an original epistemological theory which, although grounded in Aristotelian and Platonic theories, results in a peculiar Pythagorean criteriology that accounts for the acquisition and production of knowledge, as well as for the specific competences of (...) each cognitive faculty. (shrink)

It is widely held that episodic memory is constitutively connected with space and time. In particular, many contend that episodic memory constitutively has spatial and/or temporal content: for instance, necessarily representing a spatial scene, or when a given event occurred, or at the very minimum that it occurred in the past. Here, I critically assess such claims. I begin with some preparatory remarks on the nature of episodic memory. I then ask: How, if at all, is episodic memory constitutively spatial? (...) And, how, if at all, is episodic memory constitutively temporal? In answer, I argue that episodic memory need not have any spatial content, nor (in any substantial sense) need it represent when its events occur, nor even that they occur in the past. Instead, only a relatively modest connection holds between episodic memory and time in virtue of the temporal structure of its objects. Finally, I critically assess whether considerations concerning the organization and encoding of episodic memory in creatures like us provide stronger reason to posit a constitutive link between our episodic memories and space or time. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the use of the name 'Pseudo-Archytas' to refer to two aspects of the reception of Archytas of Tarentum in antiquity: the 'author-inflection' and the 'authority-inflection'. In order to make progress on our understanding of authority and authorship within the Pythagorean tradition, it attempts to reconstruct Porphyry's views on the importance of Archytas as guarantor of Pythagorean authenticity in the former's lost work On the History of the Philosophers by considering a fragment preserved in Arabic by Ibn (...) Abī Uṣaybi‘a. The article finally argues that a range of problems attend our use of the term 'pseudo-Archytas', which is not fit for purpose when considering the evidence regarding authorship and authority in the Pythagorean tradition. It recommends a more critical approach to the notion of authenticity within the Pythagorean tradition and suggests a new term, 'Archytism', as a more useful point of reference. (shrink)

This chapter investigates the precise ways in which Antonio Gramsci engaged with ancient philosophy. A brief examination of the longest discussion in the Prison Notebooks of any ancient philosopher or text, Plato’s Republic (Q8, §22), raises many questions about Gramsci’s approach to ancient philosophy. These questions motivate an investigation into Gramsci’s surprisingly minimal discussion of ancient philosophy and philosophers, which is best explained in the light of his theoretical commitments to his distinctive species of historical materialism. Rather than responding to (...) specific critical insights advanced about politics or human nature by ancient philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, Gramsci is shown to appropriate ancient philosophy into a broad-spectrum project of the history of philosophy, which interrogates the specific conditions under which historical epochs and the philosophical ideas that characterise them emerge. Tracking the conditions and characteristic ideas is revealed to be the project of the ‘specialist philosopher’, who must grasp both general methodological principles and particular historical examples. Gramsci’s treatment of ancient philosophy reveals more about his universal theories of history, and his engagement with the ideas of his contemporaries (including Benedetto Croce), than a special concern with ancient philosophy itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A number of authors have recently advanced a ‘disjunctivist’ view of the rationalising explanation of action, on which rationalisations of the form ‘S A’d because p’ are explanations of a fundamentally different kind from rationalisations of the form ‘S A’d because she believed that p’. Less attempt has been made to explicitly articulate the case against this view. This paper seeks to remedy that situation. I develop a detailed version of what I take to be the basic argument against (...) disjunctivism, drawing on a framework of explanatory proportionality. The disjunctivist cannot reject this framework, I argue, because they need it to respond to another challenge, from psychological individualism. As I explain, however, the proportionality-based challenge is not in principle insurmountable, and I outline a number of ways in which a case for disjunctivism might be developed in response to it. The paper thus clarifies the dialectic around disjunctivism about the rationalisation of action and, specifically, what advocates of the view must do in order to make a compelling case for it. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Plantinga’s (1993, 2000, 2011) Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). While there has been much discussion about Plantinga’s use of probabilities in the argument, I contend that insufficient attention has been paid to the question of how we are to interpret those probabilities. In this paper, I argue that views Plantinga defends elsewhere limit the range of interpretations available to him here. The upshot is that the EAAN is more limited in its applicability than Plantinga alleges.

The term 'fascism' continues to be very much in currency in Philippines society. To the Filipino people, its meaning is often drawn from pained memory of wholesale deprivation of democratic rights and large-scale human rights abuses. Yet, to many, the fear of fascism has still to give way to a deeper understanding of this menace. This may hold true even among those belonging to the progressive movement. One Marxist philosopher and theoretician who gave extended treatment of the issues surrounding the (...) character and conditions giving rise to fascism was Nicos Poulantzas, whose theory is employed here to interrogate the debates about fascism in the post-Marcos Philippines context. (shrink)

When did kosmos come to mean *the* kosmos, in the sense of ‘world-order’? I venture a new answer by examining later evidence often underutilised or dismissed by scholars. Two late doxographical accounts in which Pythagoras is said to be first to call the heavens kosmos (in the anonymous Life of Pythagoras and the fragments of Favorinus) exhibit heurematographical tendencies that place their claims in a dialectic with the early Peripatetics about the first discoverers of the mathematical structure of the universe. (...) Likewise, Xenophon and Plato refer to ‘wise men’ who nominate kosmos as the object of scientific inquiry into nature as a whole and the cosmic ‘communion’ (koinônia) between all living beings, respectively. Again, later testimonies help in identifying the anonymous ‘wise men’ by associating them with the Pythagoreans and, especially, Empedocles. As Horky argues, not only is Empedocles the earliest surviving source to use kosmos to refer to a harmonic ‘world-order’ and to illustrate cosmic ‘communities’ between oppositional pairs, but also his cosmology realises the mutual correspondence of these aspects in the cycle of love and strife. Thus, if later figures posited Pythagoras as the first to refer to the universal ‘world-order’ as the kosmos, they did so because they believed Empedocles to have been a Pythagorean natural scientist, whose combined focus on cosmology and ethics exemplified a distinctively Pythagorean approach to philosophy. (shrink)

Descartes was both metaphysician and natural philosopher. He used his metaphysics to ground portions of his physics. However, as should be a commonplace but is not, he did not think he could spin all of his physics out of his metaphysics a priori, and in fact he both emphasized the need for appeals to experience in his methodological remarks on philosophizing about nature and constantly appealed to experience in describing his own philosophy of nature. During the 1630s, he offered empirical (...) support for the basic principles of his natural philosophy, while also promising to provide a metaphysical justification. He offered the metaphysical justification in the Meditations and Principles. and claimed absolute certainty for it. At the same time, he recognized that the particular postulated mechanisms of his natural philosophy did not reach that standard of certainty. These mechanisms were supported by empirical testing or confirming of causes through observed effects. (shrink)

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations ofbeliefs,which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations ofknowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, (...) we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibits a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind – one that is focused on understanding others' minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it. (shrink)

With his 1998 book, In Nature’s Interests? Gary Varner proved to be one of our most original and trenchant of environmental ethicists. Here, in the first of a promised two volume set, he makes his mark on another field, animal ethics, leaving an even deeper imprint. Thoroughly grounded in the relevant philosophical and scientific literatures, Varner is as precise in analysis as he is wide-ranging in scope. His writing is clear and rigorous, and he explains philosophical nuances with extraordinary (...) economy of expression. Never one to add an unnecessary clause to a sentence, Varner nonetheless constructs a formidable edifice while always dealing fairly with the authors he criticizes. His explication of the properties and moral status of what he calls near-persons is a crucial addition to the discussion of personhood initiated by Parfit in Reasons and Persons and subsequently applied to animals by McMahan in The Ethics of Killing. The comparison to McMahan is intentional for, to my mind, Varner vies with him as the most important animal ethicist since Singer and Regan. (shrink)

In this essay we take the view that too much reality has been afforded to the notion of ‘particles’ and to ‘flow of supercurrent,’ in the superconducting state. Instead we take the original point of view of Josephson that “ It is clear that intuition is of no great help in understanding the supercurrent as a flow of Cooper pairs “ which is more akin to, and in line with, a “telegraphing of amplitudes” approach. With this conception in mind, we (...) examine the results of Jillie et al and Smith et al. of two Josephson junctions connected in series by a superconducting join. We argue that their results can best be understood in terms of the entanglement of current elements via the interfering of amplitudes. We sketch an approach to calculating the current spanning two entangled Josephson junctions, which reduces to the relation for a single junction when the current is set zero in either of the pair, or the entanglement ceases. We speculate that if this interfering of amplitudes was found to persist, after the separation of the junctions in space, there still remaining a connection in their common past, then this would furnish, at least the possibility, of a new means of signalling without wires. Experiments are suggested. (shrink)

Meet Tega. Blue, fluffy, and AI-enabled, Tega is a relational robot: a robot designed to form relationships with humans. Created to aid in early childhood education, Tega talks with children, plays educational games with them, solves puzzles, and helps in creative activities like making up stories and drawing. Children are drawn to Tega, describing him as a friend, and attributing thoughts and feelings to him ("he's kind," "if you just left him here and nobody came to play with him, he (...) might be sad"). Scholars and members of the public alike have raised the alarm about relational robots, worrying that the relationships that people, and especially children, form with such robots are objectionably inauthentic. We, members of an interdisciplinary team that developed and studies Tega, make this inauthenticity worry precise and offer practical recommendations for addressing it. We distinguish two kinds of (in)authenticity -- inauthenticity as unreality, and inauthenticity as deception -- arguing that neither is just what others have thought it is. With our distinction in hand, we argue that the authenticity concern can be met only through co-design methods -- methods that give stakeholders of all kinds (e.g. parents, educators, and children themselves) a genuine say in how relational robots are built. (shrink)

Recently, I presented evidence that there are two broad kinds of dehumanization: descriptive dehumanization and normative dehumanization. An individual is descriptively dehumanized when they are perceived as less than fully human in the biological-species sense; whereas an individual is normatively dehumanized when they are perceived as lacking a deep-seated commitment to good moral values. Here, I develop the concept of normative dehumanization by addressing skepticism about two hypotheses that are widely held by dehumanization researchers. The first hypothesis is that dehumanization (...) is distinct from mere dislike and other non-dehumanizing attitudes. The second hypothesis is that dehumanization is an important predictor of intergroup hostility. Across four studies, I found evidence that normative dehumanization is distinct from mere dislike, and denials of ideal humanness. I also found that it is a unique predictor of intergroup hostility. These findings suggest that research into dehumanization and intergroup hostility will benefit from recognizing the distinction between descriptive and normative dehumanization. (shrink)

This essay is my analysis of Eamonn Butler’s fine book, Public Choice: a Primer. I suggest that Butler’s book is especially useful for philosophers, most of whom are to this day unfamiliar with public choice theory. This body of economics studies the role that universal self-interest plays in politics. This is an unpleasant truth for many philosophers, who have the Hegelian view of government as the realm of disinterested charity. Butler reviews the history of public choice economics, discusses the various (...) schools of the theory, and the major areas of application. (shrink)

It is often assumed that how we talk about the world matters a great deal. This is one reason why conceptual engineers seek to improve our linguistic practices by advocating novel uses of our words, or by inventing new ones altogether. A core idea shared by conceptual engineers is that by changing our language in this way, we can reap all sorts of cognitive and practical benefits, such as improving our theorizing, combating hermeneutical injustice, or promoting social emancipation. But how (...) do changes at the linguistic level translate into any of these worthwhile benefits? In this paper, we propose the nameability account as a novel answer to this question. More specifically, we argue that what linguistic resources are readily available to us directly affects our cognitive performance on various categorization-related tasks. Consequently, our performance on such tasks can be improved by making controlled changes to our linguistic resources. We argue that this finding supports and extends recent motivations for conceptual engineering, as categorization plays an important role in both theoretical and practical contexts. (shrink)

Standard ways of conceptualizing moral development and measuring pedagogical interventions in ethics classes privilege the growth of moral judgment over moral sensitivity, moral motivation, and moral habits by too often conflating improvement in moral judgment with holistic moral development. I argue here that if we care about students’ construction and cultivation of their ethical selves, our assessment design principles ought to take seriously the transformative possibilities of philosophy as a way of life and be based on a more robust and (...) holistic account of moral development. I illustrate these principles of assessment design through an examination of the Character Project, which I created to help students engage in their own deliberate ethical transformation through self-directed, individualized, and concentrated practice. Finally, I conclude with a discussion about how to appropriately and fairly assess this kind of deeply personal learning. (shrink)