In several lectures, interviews and essays from the early 1980s, Michel Foucault startlingly argues that he is engaged in a kind of critical work that is similar to that of Immanuel Kant. Given Foucault's criticisms of Kantian and Enlightenment emphases on universal truths and values, his declaration that his work is Kantian seems paradoxical. I agree with some commentators who argue that this is a way for Foucault to publicly acknowledge to his critics that he is not, as some of (...) them charge, attempting a total critique of Enlightenment beliefs and values, but is instead attempting to transform them from within. I argue further that Foucault's self-professed Kantianism can also productively be read as a means of encouraging change in his intellectual audience, a call to courage to take up the thread of Enlightenment thought that Foucault finds in Kant's essay, `What is Enlightenment?': that of directing one's philosophical efforts towards questioning and transforming one's own present in its historical specificity, for the sake of promoting the values of freedom and autonomy therein. Though much of Kant's philosophical work is focused on that which lies outside of history, Foucault locates in some of it a concern for what is happening here and now that, I argue, he encourages his audience to take up for themselves through tracing his own intellectual lineage to Kant. In so doing, he encourages contemporary philosophers to consider the value and effects of their work on the present social and political contexts in which they live. (shrink)

Presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Association for Core Texts and Courses, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, April 2010. -/- René Descartes’ Discourse on Method is paradoxical in several respects: it was published anonymously, yet is rich in autobiographical detail; further, Descartes insists that “the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false…is naturally equal in all men,” and also that “the world consists almost exclusively of … minds for whom [his method of reasoning] (...) is not at all suitable” (1, 9). The Discourse indicates both that the identity of a particular reasoning subject (such as the author of the text itself) does not matter—because all rational beings could come to the same conclusion if using their reason correctly—and yet also that who one is does indeed matter to showing that one counts as one of the select group of subjects who possess knowledge. The method and its results do not speak for themselves; rather, the author must speak for them, and legitimize his authority in the process. If it were the case that Descartes’ plan did not go beyond “trying to reform [his] own thoughts and building upon a foundation which is completely [his] own” (9), then he might rest content with his own convictions regarding the truth of his conclusions, but if he wants to be recognized by others as possessing knowledge then he must either appeal to existing standards of authority to legitimize his method and its conclusions, or argue for the validity of new ones. Either way, the Discourse demonstrates Michel Foucault’s claims that knowledge production is bound up in a social context that determines what counts as true knowledge and who has the authority to speak about it. Descartes’s text shows an author both boldly presenting revolutionary arguments and methods and revealing his awareness of the difficulties and dangers of resisting the accepted standards of knowledge. It can be used to spark discussion amongst students about whether, even if we believe anyone’s reason might produce knowledge, it is still the case today that only some count as “knowers” according to criteria that are socially determined (e.g., institutional affiliation, status within an institution, the acceptability of certain sorts of projects and methods as legitimate for knowledge). (shrink)

In this position paper, we describe a number of methodological and philosophical challenges that arose within our interdisciplinary Digital Humanities project CatVis, which is a collaboration between applied geometric algorithms and visualization researchers, data scientists working at OCLC, and philosophers who have a strong interest in the methodological foundations of visualization research. The challenges we describe concern aspects of one single epistemic need: that of methodologically securing (an increase in) trust in visualizations. We discuss the lack of ground truths in (...) the (digital) humanities and argue that trust in visualizations requires that we evaluate visualizations on the basis of ground truths that humanities scholars themselves create. We further argue that trust in visualizations requires that a visualization provides provable guarantees on the faithfulness of the visual representation and that we must clearly communicate to the users which part of the visualization can be trusted and how much. Finally, we discuss transparency and accessibility in visualization research and provide measures for securing transparency and accessibility. (shrink)

The latest news from our planet is threatening: climate change, pollution, forest loss, species extinctions. All these words are frightening and there is no sign of improvement. Simple logic leads to the conclusion that humanity has to react, for its own survival. But at the scale of a human being, it is less obvious. Organizing one’s daily life in order to preserve the environment implies self-questioning, changing habits, sacrificing some comfort. In one word, it is an effort. Then, what justifies (...) such an effort? The personal choice to act in order to preserve our environment is often made by simple altruism. This choice is based on our love for other human beings: our love for the others grounds our effort. Our moral values, our ethical reflections and our religious beliefs are the deep core of these choices. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15.12 NRSV). This Charter shows the moral and religious values that can help us react regarding the current environmental crisis and it should empower us to transcend the ideas of effort and sacrifice in order to consider the respect of the shared house, in a prophetic fulfillment of the being. (shrink)

It is often assumed that if the fetus is a person, then abortion should be illegal. Thomson1 laid the groundwork to challenge this assumption, and Boonin2 has recently argued that it is false: he argues that abortion should be legal even if the fetus is a person. In this article, I explain both Thomson’s and Boonin’s reason for thinking that abortion should be legal even if the fetus is a person. After this, I show that Thomson’s and Boonin’s argument for (...) legalised abortion fail; they have not given us good reason for thinking abortion should be legal.1 Finally, I argue that—if we play Boonin’s game—abortion should be illegal. When discussing the ethics and politics of abortion, whether the fetus is a person is usually central.3 4.2 However, Thomson1 long ago challenged this view. She argued that abortion is permissible even if the fetus is a person. To do so, she asks us to consider a case in which you are non-consensually taken to a hospital and hooked up to a famous violinist. The violinist, if he is to survive, needs to filter his blood through your body. After 9 months, he will be fine and you can unplug yourself and go on your way. If you unplug yourself prior to this, however, he will die. Is it permissible to unplug yourself? Thomson thinks the answer is ‘yes’. And this, she thinks, shows that abortion is permissible even if the fetus is a person. While the majority of her article focuses on the ethics of abortion, it is clear that she also aims to show that abortion should be legal if the fetus is a person; she would no doubt reject the view that the state is right to coerce you into …. (shrink)

In cases in which we must choose between either (i) preventing a woman from remaining unwillingly pregnant or (ii) preventing a fetus from being killed, we should prevent the fetus from being killed. But this suggests that in typical cases abortion is wrong: typical abortions involve preventing a woman from remaining unwillingly pregnant over preventing a fetus from being killed. And so abortion is typically wrong—and this holds whether or not fetuses are persons.

Abortion restrictions are particularly good for black women—at least in the United States. This claim will likely strike many as outlandish. And numerous commentaries on abortion restrictions have suggested otherwise: many authors have lamented the effects of abortion restrictions on women, and black women in particular—these restrictions are bad for them, these authors say. However, abortion restrictions are clearly good for black women. This is because if someone is prevented from performing a morally wrong action, it’s good for her. For (...) example, it’s good for Sarah if she’s prevented from driving home drunk. However, since abortion is morally wrong, it follows that it’s good for women when they are prevented from getting an abortion. And since black women get abortions at disproportionately high rates, abortion restrictions are good in particular for black women. Indeed, this is an example of a positive effect of intersectionality. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that sceptical theists have too narrow a focus: they consider only God’s axiological reasons, ignoring any non-axiological reasons he may have. But this is a mistake: predicting how God will act requires knowing about his reasons in general, and this requires knowing about both God’s axiological and non-axiological reasons. In light of this, I construct and defend a kind of sceptical theism—Deontological Sceptical Theism—that encompasses all of God’s reasons, and briefly illustrate how it renders irrelevant (...) certain charges of excessive sceptical and how it evaporates equiprobability objections. Furthermore, I put forth a simple argument in favor of Deontological Sceptical Theism, which shows that everyone (at least currently) ought to endorse it. (shrink)

Having a confirmation bias sometimes leads us to hold inaccurate beliefs. So, the puzzle goes: why do we have it? According to the influential argumentative theory of reasoning, confirmation bias emerges because the primary function of reason is not to form accurate beliefs, but to convince others that we’re right. A crucial prediction of the theory, then, is that confirmation bias should be found only in the reasoning domain. In this article, we argue that there is evidence that confirmation bias (...) does exist outside the reasoning domain. This undermines the main evidential basis for the argumentative theory of reasoning. In presenting the relevant evidence, we explore why having such confirmation bias may not be maladaptive. (shrink)

The integration of robotics in the education was one of the aspirations of the K-12 institution in the Philippines. The RoboTeach Extension Project was established to address the challenges associated with the implementation of robotics in K-12 education. This study explores the teachers’ perception of the efficacy in the implementation of the project which focused on training the Department of Education (DepEd) teachers in San Pablo City Laguna, Philippines on the basic concepts and applications of robotics and automation. The topics (...) and learning activities covered during the ten-day training were based on the self-assessment survey results on the level of knowledge of teachers. The study used a descriptive method of research using a quantitative approach and adopted the LSPU Extension Services Evaluation Survey Questionnaire to determine the respondents’ perception of the level of project efficacy. The data were obtained from twenty-five DepEd teachers and analyzed using descriptive statistics such as frequency count, per cent, weighted mean and ANOVA. The respondents were highly satisfied with meeting expectations to attain objectives, training and workshop contents, learning activities, methodologies, instructional materials used, resource person and trainers, training management team, and training management team and training facilities and services. Further, there was no significant difference among their level of satisfaction from day 1 to 5 of the training sessions. Respondents viewed the training as very successful, as evident from the consultation and culminating activity. Thus, the sustainability on the implementation of the project was highly recommended. (shrink)

Much of the discussion surrounding the ethics of abortion has centered around the notion of personhood. This is because many philosophers hold that the morality of abortion is contingent on whether the fetus is a person - though, of course, some famous philosophers have rejected this thesis (e.g. Judith Thomson and Don Marquis). In this article, I construct a novel argument for the immorality of abortion based on the notion of impairment. This argument does not assume that the fetus is (...) a person - indeed, I concede (for the sake of argument) that the fetus is not a person - and hence the morality of abortion is not contingent on whether the fetus is a person. I finish by answering a plethora of objections to my argument, concluding that none of them are successful. (shrink)

Perry Hendricks’ original impairment argument for the immorality of abortion is based on the impairment principle (TIP): if impairing an organism to some degree is immoral, then ceteris paribus, impairing it to a higher degree is also immoral. Since abortion impairs a fetus to a higher degree than fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and giving a fetus FAS is immoral, it follows that abortion is immoral. Critics have argued that the ceteris paribus is not met for FAS and abortion, and (...) so we proposed the Modified Impairment Principle (MIP) to avoid these difficulties. Dustin Crummett has responded, arguing that MIP is open to various counterexamples which show it to be false. He also shows that MIP can generate moral dilemmas. Here, we propose a modification to MIP that resolves the issues Crummett raises. Additionally, Alex Gillham has criticized our appropriation of Don Marquis’ ‘future like ours’ reasoning about the wrongness of impairment. We show that his objections have minimal implications for our argument. (shrink)

In this chapter, I consider personal and impersonal anti-theism and personal and impersonal pro-theism. I show that skeptical theism undermines arguments for personal anti-theism and impersonal anti-theism. Next, I show that (at least some) arguments for personal and impersonal pro-theism are not undermined by skeptical theism. This throws a wrench in debates about the axiology of theism: if skeptical theism is true, then it is very difficult to establish certain positions in answer to the axiological question about God.

The “Embryo Rescue Case” (ERC) refers to a thought experiment that is used to argue against the view that embryos have a right to life (i.e. are persons). I will argue that cognitive science undermines the intuition elicited by the ERC; I will show that whether or not embryos have a right to life, our mental tools will make it very difficult to believe that embryos have said right. This suggests that the intuition elicited by the ERC is not truth (...) indicative. The upshot of this is that we have an undercutting defeater for our intuition that embryos do not have a right to life. (shrink)

I’ve argued that those who endorse the argument from divine hiddenness must give up all pure de jure objections to theism, and this means that endorsing the argument is costly for atheists. Benjamin Curtis claims that this isn’t a significant cost for atheists. I show that—contrary to Curtis—there is a significant cost, and spell out why this is so. Furthermore, I show that my argument functions as a new argument for affirming reformed epistemology—the view that if theism is true, belief (...) in God is probably rational. (shrink)

P-zombies are creatures that are physically (functionally, behaviorally) like you and I and yet lack phenomenal consciousness. If such creatures are possible, it’s (typically) taken to show property dualism is true: phenomenal consciousness isn’t reducible to—nor does it supervene on—physical states. If inverted qualia are possible, it’s possible that you and I have identical physical states and yet you see tomatoes as green and I see tomatoes as red. If this is the case, then (again) property dualism is (typically) taken (...) to be true. In this article, I’ll show that p-zombies and inverted qualia—if they are actually possible—prove more than previously thought: if one thinks p-zombies or inverted qualia are possible, then she should endorse one of the four following theses: (i) substance dualism, (ii) we have even more reason to reject p-zombies and inverted qualia since they entail an even more radical conclusion than previously thought (i.e. substance dualism), (iii) eliminativism about selves, or (iv) friends of p-zombies and inverted qualia have homework: they need to show a relevant, plausible disanalogy between arguments for p-zombies and inverted qualia as traditionally stated and my parallel arguments that entail substance dualism. My purpose here isn’t to defend any of these particular options. Instead, my purpose is to highlight that these are the four options available to take. (shrink)

Trent Dougherty has argued that commonsense epistemology and skeptical theism are incompatible. In this paper, I explicate Dougherty’s argument, and show that (at least) one popular form of skeptical theism is compatible with commonsense epistemology.

De facto objections to theism purport to show that theism is false, whereas de jure objections to theism claim that, whether or not theism is true, belief in God is irrational. Divine hiddenness – the fact that there are people who non-resistantly lack belief in God – is sometimes used as an argument against theism. In this article I will show that accepting the argument from divine hiddenness carries a high cost: it eliminates all de jure objections to theism. So (...) atheists can either have de jure objections to theism or the objection from divine hiddenness, but they cannot have both. (shrink)

The pelvic exam is used to assess the health of female reproductive organs and so involves digital penetration by a physician. However, it is common practice for medical students to acquire experience in administering pelvic exams by performing them on unconscious patients without prior authorization. In this article, we argue that such unauthorized pelvic exams (UPEs) are sexual assault. Our argument is simple: in any other circumstance, unauthorized digital penetration amounts to sexual assault. Since there are no morally significant differences (...) between UPEs and other instances of digital penetration, UPEs are sexual assault. So, insofar as one is against sexual assault, one should be against UPEs. (shrink)

In my article "Even if the fetus is not a person, abortion is immoral: The impairment argument" (this journal), I defended what I called “The impairment argument” which purports to show that abortion is immoral. Bruce Blackshaw (2019) has argued that my argument fails on three accounts. In this article, I respond to his criticisms.

This article is a response to Stephen Law's article ‘The evil-god challenge’. In his article, Law argues that if belief in evil-god is unreasonable, then belief in good-god is unreasonable; that the antecedent is true; and hence so is the consequent. In this article, I show that Law's affirmation of the antecedent is predicated on the problem of good (i.e. the problem of whether an all-evil, all-powerful, and all-knowing God would allow there to be as much good in the world (...) as there is), and argue that the problem of good fails. Thus, the antecedent is unmotivated, which renders the consequent unmotivated. Law's challenge for good-god theists is to show that good-god theism is not rendered unreasonable by the problem of evil in the same way that evil-god theism is rendered unreasonable by the problem of good. Insofar as the problem of good does not render belief in evil-god unreasonable, Law's challenge has been answered: since it is not unreasonable to believe in evil-god (at least for the reasons that Law gives) it is not unreasonable to believe in good-god. Finally, I show that – my criticism aside – the evil-god challenge turns out to be more complicated and controversial than it initially appears, for it relies on the (previously unacknowledged) contentious assumption that sceptical theism is false. (shrink)

Skeptical theism is a popular response to arguments from evil. Recently, Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne, and Yoaav Isaacs have argued that the theses that ground skeptical theism are either false or limited in scope. In this article, I show that their objections rest on dubious assumptions about the nature of skeptical theism. Along the way, I develop and clarify the ambiguous parts of skeptical theism. The upshot of this is that—once the nature of skeptical theism is made clearer—it is (...) far more difficult to resist. (shrink)

Skeptical theism is a popular response to arguments from evil. Many hold that it undermines a key inference often used by such arguments. However, the case for skeptical theism is often kept at an intuitive level: no one has offered an explicit argument for the truth of skeptical theism. In this article, I aim to remedy this situation: I construct an explicit, rigorous argument for the truth of skeptical theism.

A discussion of Umberto Eco's notion of open and closed texts.

Critics of skeptical theism often claim that if it (skeptical theism) is true, then we are in the dark about whether (or for all we know) there is a morally justifying for God to radically deceive us. From here, it is argued that radical skepticism follows: if we are truly in the dark about whether there is a morally justifying reason for God to radically deceive us, then we cannot know anything. In this article, I show that skeptical theism does (...) not entail that we are in the dark about whether (or for all we know) there is a morally justifying reason for God to deceive us. And hence arguments against skeptical theism that make use of this assumption fail. (shrink)

Arguments from evil purport to show that some fact about evil makes it (at least) probable that God does not exist. Skeptical theism is held to undermine many versions of the argument from evil: it is thought to undermine a crucial inference that such arguments often rely on. Skeptical objections to skeptical theism claim that it (skeptical theism) entails an excessive amount of skepticism, and therefore should be rejected. In this article, I show that skeptical objections to skeptical theism have (...) a very limited scope: only those who reject certain (apparently) popular epistemological theories will be threatened by them. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to point out the diversity in post-Proppian plot analysis—and, more specifically, to argue that within it one can discern two fundamentally different conceptions of narrative structure. These are not merely different theoretical grids superimposed upon the same phenomena, but represent, in fact, two objectively different types of narrative structure. These two types will be referred to as dramatic structure and instrumental structure, and they may be succinctly characterized by the antonyms 'play' and 'work' respectively. (...) It will be argued that there is a basis in Propp for both conceptions of narrative structure and that Bremond and Greimas, in their efforts to 'generalize' Propp, have each only isolated one of two tendencies coexisting in his analytic approach. Our point of departure will be Propp's concept of the basic unit of plot structure, which he terms the function. This is a complex term. Two senses are distinguished, biological and mathematical-logical. (shrink)

Philosophers writing on moral responsibility inherit from P.F. Strawson a particular problem space. On one side, it is shaped by consequentialist accounts of moral criticism on which blame is justified, if at all, by its efficacy in influencing future behavior in socially desirable ways. It is by now a common criticism of such views that they suffer a "wrong kind of reason" problem. When blame is warranted in the proper way, it is natural to suppose this is because the target (...) deserves blame – thus opposing to consequentialist views of blame desert-based views. The latter, however, raise worries that blame is a form of retributive sanction whose justificatory burdens cannot be met. I evaluate T.M. Scanlon's recent attempt to maneuver this space. In doing so, I argue that although Scanlon’s relationship-impairment model of blame has clear advantages over consequentialist and desert-based alternatives, it fails: (1) to adequately appreciate the significance of person-focused emotional attitudes in constituting persons as agents subject to a nexus of normative expectations and demands, and (2) to recognize that a victim may owe nearly nothing *to* a blameworthy agent while nonetheless retaining unconditional moral obligations to act in certain ways (and forego acting in other ways) toward him. (shrink)

The structure of narrative discourse is the focus of much current research, but the classicist Walter Burkert argues for a revitalization of the historical approach to myth. He pushes the origins of myth beyond ritual to action patterns man shares with animals. His approach is evaluated in the context of Propp's historical analysis, which complements his 'morphological' approach to Russian folktales; and to Levi-Strauss's synchronic analysis of myth, which sees an ahistoric connection between the myths of North and South America.

Joona Räsänen, in his article ‘Ectogenesis, abortion and a right to the death of the fetus’, has argued for the view that parents have a right to the death of the fetus. In this article, I will explicate the three arguments Räsänen defends, and show that two of them have false or unmotivated premises and hence fail, and that the support he offers for his third argument is inconsistent with other views he expresses in his article. Therefore, I conclude that (...) there is no right to the death of the fetus—or, if there is one, Räsänen has not shown it. (shrink)

This article examines Richard Bauman's conception of oral narrative as performance and argues instead for a view of narrative texts as autonomous entities, analyzable in language-internal Saussurian terms. Plot is viewed as a matter of syntagmatic relations, and character as a matter of paradigmatic relations. A contrast is drawn between narrative truth (cohesion) and historical truth (correspondence). Alternatives to some of Bauman's analyses of narrative texts are proposed.

Despite contemporary moral philosophers' renewed attention to the moral significance of emotions, the attitudinal repertoire with which they equip the mature moral agent remains stunted. One attitude moral philosophers neglect (if not disown) is contempt. While acknowledging the nastiness of contempt, I here correct the neglect by providing an account of the moral psychology of contempt. In the process, I defend the moral propriety of certain tokens of properly person-focused contempt against some prominent objections -- among them, objections stemming from (...) Kantian worries that contempt is incompatible with the respect we owe to persons as such. (shrink)

This article aims at clarifying the notion of style, beginning with a distinction between poetics and stylistics. The notion of verbal style as expression of the same content in different ways) is explored. -/- .

According to the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness, consciousness results from the global broadcast of information throughout the brain. The global neuronal workspace is mainly constituted by a fronto-parietal network. The anterior insular cortex is part of this global neuronal workspace, but the function of this region has not yet been defined within the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness. In this review, I hypothesize that the anterior insular cortex implements a cross-modal priority map, the function of which is (...) to determine priorities for the processing of information and subsequent entrance in the global neuronal workspace. (shrink)

Lougheed argues that a possible solution to the problem of divine hiddenness is that God hides in order to increase the axiological value of the world. In a world where God exists, the goods associated with theism necessarily obtain. But Lougheed also claims that in such a world it’s possible to experience the goods of atheism, even if they don’t actually obtain. This is what makes a world with a hidden God more valuable than a world where God is unhidden, (...) and also more valuable than an atheistic world with no God. We show that Lougheed never considers the comparison between a world where God hides and an atheistic world. We argue that it’s possible for a person to experience theistic goods in a world where God does not exist, a possibility Lougheed never considers. If this is right it undermines his axiological solution to divine hiddenness. We conclude by showing how our discussion of the axiology of theism connects to the existential question of whether God exists; that is, we show that the axiological question is dependent on the existential question. (shrink)

Notes prises par Jacques Lagrange lors du cours d'anthropologie donné par Michel Foucault en 1954-1955 à l'École Normale Supérieure.

This chapter introduces a novel account of fake news and explains how it differs from other definitions on the market. The account locates the fakeness of an alleged news report in two main aspects related to its production, namely that its creators do not think to have sufficient evidence in favor of what they divulge and they fail to display the appropriate attitude towards the truth of the information they share. A key feature of our analysis is that it does (...) not require that fake news must be circulated with the intention to deceive one’s audience. In this way, our account overcomes a potential limitation of the current philosophical discussion about fake news, which appears to individuate the main problem with this phenomenon in the fact that fake news consumers are misled and misinformed. In contrast, the proposed analysis shows that an additional (and perhaps equally fundamental) problem uncovered by the spread of fake news is a widespread pathological relationship with information, one on which we consume information not to satisfy our interest in the truth but to strengthen our social identities and quench our hunger for social recognition. (shrink)

The premise that every work belongs to an art-kind has recently inspired a kind-centred approach to theories of art. Kind-centred analyses posit that we should abandon the project of giving a general theory of art and focus instead on giving theories of the arts. The main difficulty, however, is to explain what makes a given kind an art-kind in the first place. Kind-centred theorists have passed this buck on to appreciative practices, but this move proves unsatisfactory. I argue that the (...) root of this dissatisfaction stems not from the act of kicking the can down the road, but from not kicking it far enough. The missing ingredient, I argue, is a notion of convention which does the work of marking the difference between art and non-art for a given physical medium. (shrink)

This paper takes issue with the exemplarist strategy of fostering virtue development with the specific goal of improving its applicability in the context of education. I argue that, for what matters educationally, we have good reasons to endorse a liberal account of moral exemplarity. Specifically, I challenge two key assumptions of Linda Zagzebski’s Exemplarist Moral Theory (2017), namely that moral exemplars are exceptionally virtuous agents and that imitating their behavior is the main strategy for acquiring the virtues. I will introduce (...) and discuss the notions of enkratic exemplars and injustice illuminators and show that we have good reasons to consider them moral exemplars although they fail to satisfy (either of) the key assumptions. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Reuter, Seinhold and Sytsma put forward an implicature account to explain the intuitive failure of the pain-in-mouth argument. They argue that utterances such as ‘There is tissue damage / a pain / an inflammation in my mouth’ carry the conversational implicature that there is something wrong with the speaker’s mouth. Appealing to new empirical data, this paper argues against the implicature account and for the entailment account, according to which pain reports using locative locutions, such as (...) ‘There is a pain in my mouth’, are intuitively understood as entailing corresponding predicative locutions, such as ‘My mouth hurts.’ On this latter account, the pain-in-mouth argument seems invalid because the conclusion is naturally understood as entailing something which cannot be inferred from the premisses. Implications for the philosophical debate about pain are also drawn. (shrink)

The evil-god challenge is a challenge for theists to show that belief in God is more reasonable than belief in evil-god. In this article, I show that whether or not evil-god exists, belief in evil-god is unjustified. But this isn’t the case for belief in God: belief in God is probably justified if theism is true. And hence belief in God is (significantly) more reasonable than belief in evil-god, and the evil-god challenge has been answered.

As for most measurement procedures in the course of their development, measures of consciousness face the problem of coordination, i.e., the problem of knowing whether a measurement procedure actually measures what it is intended to measure. I focus on the case of the Perceptual Awareness Scale to illustrate how ignoring this problem leads to ambiguous interpretations of subjective reports in consciousness science. In turn, I show that empirical results based on this measurement procedure might be systematically misinterpreted.

East Asians and Westerners differ in various aspects of perception and cognition. For example, visual memory for East Asians is believed to be more influenced by the contextual aspects of a scene than is the case for Westerners (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). There are also differences in visual search: for Westerners, search for a long line among short is faster than for short among long, whereas this difference does not appear to hold for East Asians (Ueda et al., submitted). However, (...) it is unclear how these group-level differences originate. To investigate the extent to which they depend upon environment, we tested visual search and visual memory in East Asian immigrants who had lived in Canada for different amounts of time. Recent immigrants were found to exhibit no search asymmetry, unlike Westerners who had spent their lives in Canada. However, immigrants who had lived in Canada for more than two years showed performance comparable to that of Westerners. These differences could not be explained by the general analytic/holistic processing distinction believed to differentiate Westerners and East Asians, since all observers showed a strong holistic tendency for visual recognition. Results instead support the suggestion that exposure to a new environment can significantly affect the particular processes used to perceive a given stimulus. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Tyler Wunder’s ‘The modality of theism and probabilistic natural theology: a tension in Alvin Plantinga's philosophy’ (this journal). In his article, Wunder argues that if the proponent of the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) holds theism to be non-contingent and frames the argument in terms of objective probability, that the EAAN is either unsound or theism is necessarily false. I argue that a modest revision of the EAAN renders Wunder’s objection irrelevant, and that this (...) revision actually widens the scope of the argument. (shrink)

This commentary focuses on explaining the intuition of revelation, an issue that Chalmers (2018) raises in his paper. I first sketch how the truth of revelation provides an explanation for the intuition of revelation, and then assess a physicalist proposal to explain the intuition that appeals to Derk Pereboom’s (2011, 2016, 2019) qualitative inaccuracy hypothesis.

This article takes Propp’s work on Russian fairy tales as point of departure for a general theory of character. It is widely held that oral narratives lack complexity in characterization; but it is argued that all narratives can imply psychological traits. It is the case that Propp’s analysis is primarily in terms of ‘functions’-- generalized constant actions performed by various personages. However, one aspect of his study is devoted to how functions are distributed among the dramatis personae into ‘spheres of (...) action’. Seven are recognized, including hero, villain, helper, among others. These are comparable to roles in semantic (case) analysis of sentence structure, such as agent, patient, etc. Propp’s analysis is marred by a number of inconsistencies, with the consequence that his narrative roles are in need of extensive revision. Greimas has complained that Propp presented the roles as a simple inventory, stopping short of a systematic inquiry into relations among them. He offers his alternative ‘actantial model’. However, his model is inadequate in that it fails to recognize that two separate systems of narrative roles need to be recognized, one that holds for ‘dramatic’ narrative structure, the other for ‘instrumental’ narrative structure. (shrink)

Perry Hendricks’ impairment argument for the immorality of abortion is based on two premises: first, impairing a fetus with fetal alcohol syndrome is immoral, and second, if impairing an organism to some degree is immoral, then ceteris paribus, impairing it to a higher degree is also immoral. He calls this the impairment principle. Since abortion impairs a fetus to a higher degree than FAS, it follows from these two premises that abortion is immoral. Critics have focussed on the ceteris (...) paribus clause of TIP, which requires that the relevant details surrounding each impairment be sufficiently similar. In this article, we show that the ceteris paribus clause is superfluous, and by replacing it with a more restrictive condition, the impairment argument is considerably strengthened. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

We argue that the evil-god challenge is not an additional challenge for theists above and beyond the (much older) gap problem. One version of the evil-god challenge is merely a specific instance of the gap problem, and another is dependent on that specific instance of the gap problem. Therefore, the various solutions to the gap problem that theists have developed double as responses to the evil-god challenge, placing the evil-god challenge in a more vulnerable position than has been supposed.

Local theories of consciousness state that one is conscious of a feature if it is adequately represented and processed in sensory brain areas, given some background conditions. We challenge the core prediction of local theories based on long-lasting postdictive effects demonstrating that features can be represented for hundreds of milliseconds in perceptual areas without being consciously perceived. Unlike previous empirical data aimed against local theories, localists cannot explain these effects away by conjecturing that subjects are phenomenally conscious of features that (...) they cannot report. We also discuss alternative explanations that localists could offer. (shrink)