In the Republic, Socrates argues that morality (justice) is valuable both for itself and for what comes from it. In contemporary moral theory, this view is not widely accepted. However, contemporary empirical research in psychology reveals that what we experience is also what we come to expect. It follows from this that if we act in an immoral fashion, we will expect the same from others. The more often we act immorally, the more suspicion will be ingrained within us. Suspicion (...) quickly pervades our minds, corrodes our relationships, and increases our levels of stress, thereby dramatically decreasing our quality of life. Moral action, on the other hand, has the ability to strengthen our faith in others and create strong human relationships. Therefore,morality should be classified as having the highest type of value, just as Socrates contends.Moral behavior allows for healthy relations between persons (intrinsic value) and the wellbeing of the individual (extrinsic value). (shrink)

I defend the widely-held view that morally worthy action need not be motivated by a desire to promote rightness as such. Some have recently come to reject this view, arguing that desires for rightness as such are necessary for avoiding a certain kind of luck thought incompatible with morally worthy action. I show that those who defend desires for rightness as such on the basis of this argument misunderstand the relationship between moral worth and the kind of luck that their (...) argument employs. Consequently, the argument provides no reason to doubt the popular view that a desire for rightness as such is no part of virtue. I conclude by suggesting that a family of worries about merely accidentally right action presuppose one side of the recent debate about objectivism and perspectivism about moral rightness. (shrink)

In this candid autobiographical essay, Nathan Salmon recounts and assesses the impact of various philosophers and events on his philosophical development.

This paper outlines an analysis of the word ‘fun’, as it is used in everyday English sentences to describe various activities and asks why some things are labeled as fun while others seem unable to be properly described as such. One common unspoken idea, for example, is that a fun activity is deemed fun due to having a particular phenomenology, in a way that might be comparable to being in a ‘flow state’. Due to the trouble such psychological accounts of (...) fun have in explaining both the precise conditions of fun and also why some activities are thought to be enjoyable but not fun, a deflationary theory is instead introduced. This proposed alternative account suggests that the use of the word ‘fun’, when describing activities in English sentences, signals that the sentence is a generic sentence, an idea based on a semantic distinction made by Greg Carlson (1989). Further, it is argued that the words ‘pleasurable’ and ‘enjoyable’ are reserved for non-generic sentences, leaving the use of the word ‘fun’ to signal something akin to a grammar relation, rather than referring to a feeling or psychological state. (shrink)

I argue that there is moral luck, i.e., that factors beyond our control can affect how laudable or culpable we are.

Charles Carlini interviews Nathan Salmón about the philosophical work of his mentor and friend, the late Saul Kripke, one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th Century.

Nathan Salmon; XII*—How to Measure the Standard Metre, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 88, Issue 1, 1 June 1988, Pages 193–218.

Epistemic trespassers judge matters outside their field of expertise. Trespassing is ubiquitous in this age of interdisciplinary research and recognizing this will require us to be more intellectually modest.

The Quest for Understanding: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy is a fresh approach to teaching philosophy for a new millennium. It presents philosophy as a long conversation of people seeking to understand who we are, what the world is really like, and how we can build a better life. -/- Based on the author’s 20-plus years of teaching philosophy and seeing what works for students, the book is designed to connect with students to help them understand philosophy and why it (...) matters to them, regardless of their major. Its straightforward conversational presentation of philosophy is easy for students, instructors, and general readers to use. -/- Key unique benefits: -/- Never talks down to students but includes them in philosophy’s long conversation Gives a historical presentation that places philosophers in their historical context, showing how philosophers built on the ideas of their predecessors and responded to their times Avoids the disconnected and fragmented view offered by topically arranged textbooks by using a chronological, contextual approach Shows students how philosophy connects to their personal lives by explaining how innovations in philosophy have interacted with and changed history, leading to who we are today Focuses on explaining the ideas of the philosophers, allowing instructors to choose, at their option, primary texts from the plentifully available royalty-free sources Extensively covers vital areas of philosophy ignored by most textbooks, including phenomenology, social and political philosophy, postmodernism, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, and 21st century trends in philosophy Provides clear text unencumbered by bells and whistles and extraneous materials -/- The Quest for Understanding provides students with a clear and whole understanding of philosophy and its role in history and society. It shows that philosophy is not dry or obscure, but exciting and alive, and reveals how we are all philosophers. Related ISBN's: 9781792457609, 9781792460692 . (shrink)

Individuals in the Social Lifeworld is an analysis of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world by asking how an individual Dasein (a person) interacts with their fellow Dasein (other people). Acknowledging that mineness is fundamental to Dasein, the book’s analysis uncovers Being-sphere as the existential place of Dasein that is formed through a person’s interactions with and involvements with the world. Being-sphere does not express any form of idealism but is an acknowledgment of what Being-in-the-world means for perception and individual responses to the world. (...) -/- Being-sphere provides valuable tools for social and political philosophy by seeing interpersonal relations as a dynamic interaction of individual Being-spheres (people). Using the concept of Being-sphere in social philosophy explains how a person is embedded in the world and how the world is an integral part of a person. The concept of Being-sphere avoids the problems of the Cartesian subject while at the same time acknowledging the person as a dynamic self-constituting rational and moral agent not wholly determined. It shows how people gain beliefs and use them as the basis for their worldviews and actions. -/- Being-sphere improves Heidegger’s concepts of das Man and Befindlichkeit and provides a broader conception of Dasein and its projection into its possibilities. Because it takes seriously Heidegger’s observation that subjectivity is the true world of Dasein, it can explain the way that a person encounters and appropriates anything in the world, particularly other people. Being-sphere also explains how people experience and are affected and changed by their experiences, revealing new depths of a person’s situatedness in the world and their relationship with society. (shrink)

Following Axel Honneth, I accept that recognition is integral to individuals’ self-realization and to social justice and that instances of misrecognition are injustices that cause moral injuries. The change in approach to misrecognition that I advocate is to replace a macrosocial top-down picture of misrecognition, such as Honneth’s typology, with a fine-grained phenomenological picture of multiple dimensions in misrecognition behaviors that offers greater explanatory power. This paper explains why a multidimensional view of misrecognition is needed and explores the various ways (...) that engagement with pathological norms or disengagement from individuals lead to injustices of misrecognition and how understanding behaviors in terms of these two dimensions—norms and individuals—illuminates causes of injustice. The multidimensional view of misrecognition replaces Honneth’s binary view of misrecognition as the contrary to recognition without replacing Honneth’s conceptions of the value of recognition. (shrink)

I demonstrate that a "speech act" theory of meaning for imperatives is—contra a dominant position in philosophy and linguistics—theoretically desirable. A speech act-theoretic account of the meaning of an imperative !φ is characterized, broadly, by the following claims. -/- LINGUISTIC MEANING AS USE !φ’s meaning is a matter of the speech act an utterance of it conventionally functions to express—what a speaker conventionally uses it to do (its conventional discourse function, CDF). -/- IMPERATIVE USE AS PRACTICAL !φ's CDF is to (...) express a practical (non-representational) state of mind—one concerning an agent's preferences and plans, rather than her beliefs. -/- Opposed to speech act accounts is a preponderance of views which deny that a sentence's linguistic meaning is a matter of what speech act it is used to perform, or its CDF. On such accounts, meaning is, instead, a matter of "static" properties of the sentence—e.g., how it depicts the world as being (or, more neutrally, the properties of a model-theoretic object with which the semantic value of the sentence co-varies). On one version of a static account, an imperative 'shut the window!' might, for instance, depict the world as being such that the window must be shut. -/- Static accounts are traditionally motivated against speech act-theoretic accounts by appeal to supposedly irremediable explanatory deficiencies in the latter. Whatever a static account loses in saying (prima facie counterintuitively) that an imperative conventionally represents, or expresses a picture of the world, is said to be offset by its ability to explain a variety of phenomena for which speech act-theoretic accounts are said to lack good explanations (even, in many cases, the bare ability to offer something that might meet basic criteria on what a good explanation should be like). -/- I aim to turn the tables on static accounts. I do this by showing that speech act accounts are capable of giving explanations of phenomena which fans of static accounts have alleged them unable to give. Indeed, for a variety of absolutely fundamental phenomena having to do with the conventional meaning of imperatives (and other types of practical language), speech act accounts provide natural and theoretically satisfying explanations, where a representational account provides none. (shrink)

In (Owesen 2022), Owesen purportedly argues that pains are activations of nociceptors. In these comments I show that much of what Owesen says is consistent with pains being nociceptors themselves.

University of California, Santa Barbara.

Frege held that the bare demonstrative ‘that’ is incomplete, and that it is the word together with a gesture that serves as the designating expression, and likewise that it is the word ‘yesterday’ together with the time of utterance that designates the relevant day. David Kaplan’s original theory of indexicals holds that Frege’s supplementation thesis is correct about demonstratives but incorrect about ‘yesterday’. Kaplan’s account of demonstratives deviates from Frege’s in treating supplemented demonstratives as directly referential, hence rigid. It is (...) argued here that the gesture or other demonstration that accompanies an utterance of ‘that’ is not part of the designating expression but instead part of the utterance context. (shrink)

Inflicting harm is generally preferable to inflicting death. If you must choose between the two, you should generally choose to harm. But prenatal harm seems different. If a mother must choose between harming her fetus or aborting it, she may choose either, at least in many cases. So it seems that prenatal harm is particularly objectionable, sometimes on a par with death. This paper offers an explanation of why prenatal harm seems particularly objectionable by drawing an analogy to the all-or-nothing (...) problem. It then argues that this analogy offers independent support for the ‘voluntarist’ view that at least some parental role obligations are grounded in the choice to be a parent. (shrink)

This article evaluates an emerging element in popular debate and inquiry: DYOR. (Haven’t heard of the acronym? Then Do Your Own Research.) The slogan is flexible and versatile. It is used frequently on social media platforms about topics from medical science to financial investing to conspiracy theories. Using conceptual and empirical resources drawn from philosophy and psychology, we examine key questions about the slogan’s operation in human cognition and epistemic culture.

The Counterfactual Comparative Account of Harm says that an event is overall harmful for someone if and only if it makes her worse off than she otherwise would have been. I defend this account from two common objections.

The overarching theme of Locke’s Image of the World, by Michael Jacovides, is that Locke’s belief in the best science of his day shapes his philosophy in important ways. Jacovides contends that “by understanding the scientific background to Locke’s thoughts, we can better understand his work” (1), including both his positions and his arguments for those positions. To a lesser extent, Jacovides’s book also treats Locke as a case study in thinking about how much scientific theory should influence philosophy. While (...) much of the science Locke relies on is incomplete or problematic, and so leads him into errors, Jacovides is sympathetic to Locke’s approach of using the best scientific theories to help develop and justify his philosophical positions. Throughout the book Jacovides shows how science – Locke’s study of medicine, and later Boyle’s corpuscularianism, and then later Newton’s physics – influence Locke’s thinking on a variety of topics. The result is an impressive account of the history of science at a critical point in its development through the lens of one of the great philosophers of that time. (shrink)

Alonzo Church provided three criteria for “strict synonymy”, i.e., sameness of semantic content: Alternatives (0), (1), and (2)--in order of increasing course-grainedness of content. On (2) expressions are strictly synonymous iff they are logically equivalent. (1) is a significant improvement over (2). On (1) expressions are synonymous iff they are lambda-convertible. Even on (1), assuming the Millian account of proper names, ‘Tully admires Cicero’ is deemed synonymous with ‘Cicero is self-admiring’. On (0) expressions are strictly synonymous iff they are “synonymously (...) isomorphic” in Church’s sense. A fourth alternative, here called ‘(3)’, has been maintained by several philosophers. On (3) expressions are strictly synonymous iff they are co-intensional. In particular, sentences are strictly synonymous iff they are true with resect to the same possible worlds. This criterion’s notion of content is even more course grained than that of (2). Several objections to (3) are considered. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider a novel challenge to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza’s reasons-responsiveness theory of moral responsibility. According to their view, agents possess the control necessary for moral responsibility if their actions proceed from a mechanism that is moderately reasons-responsive. I argue that their account of moderate reasons-responsiveness fails to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for moral responsibility since it cannot give an adequate account of the responsibility of individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Empirical evidence suggests that (...) autistic individuals demonstrate impairments in counterfactual thinking, and these impairments, I argue, are such that they cast doubt on Fischer and Ravizza’s construal of moderate reasons-responsiveness. I then argue that modifying the view in order to accommodate individuals with ASD forces them to defend a strong reasons-responsive account despite the fact that they explicitly deny that such an account can adequately characterize what it is to be morally responsible for one’s actions. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Locke takes sensitive knowledge (i.e. knowledge from sensation) to be genuine knowledge that material objects exist. Samuel Rickless has recently argued that, for Locke, sensitive knowledge is merely an “assurance”, or a highly probable judgment that falls short of certainty. In reply, I show that Locke sometimes uses “assurance” to describe certain knowledge, and so the use of the term “assurance” to describe sensitive knowledge does not entail that it is less than certain. Further, (...) I show that sensitive knowledge includes the perception of a relation between ideas, and thus it satisfies Locke’s definition of knowledge. He also repeatedly claims that sensitive knowledge is certain. So, despite recent challenges to this interpretation raised in the secondary literature, Locke really does take sensitive knowledge to be certain knowledge. (shrink)

Arguments are nowadays often presented as soundbites: as slogans, tweets, memes and even gifs. Arguments developed in detail often meet the response TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read). This is unfortunate—especially when tackling the topic of abortion. Soundbites make many pro-life arguments seem stronger than they really are, while the complexities of pro-choice arguments can’t be readily reduced to soundbites.

Philosophers have recently come to focus on explaining the phenomenon of ​bad beliefs,​ beliefs that are apparently true and well-evidenced but nevertheless objectionable. Despite this recent focus, a consensus is already forming around a particular explanation of these beliefs’ badness called ​moral encroachment​, according to which, roughly, the moral stakes engendered by bad beliefs make them particularly difficult to justify. This paper advances an alternative account not just of bad beliefs but of bad attitudes more generally according to which bad (...) beliefs’ badness originates not in a failure of sufficient evidence but in a failure to respond adequately to reasons. I motivate this alternative account through an analogy to recent discussions of moral worth centered on the well-known grocer case from Kant’s ​Groundwork​, and by showing that this analogy permits the proposed account to generalize to bad attitudes beyond belief. The paper concludes by contrasting the implications of moral encroachment and of the proposed account for bad attitudes’ blameworthiness. (shrink)

I criticize an increasingly popular set of arguments for the justifiability of punishment. Some philosophers try to justify punishment by appealing to what Peter Strawson calls the reactive attitudes – emotions like resentment, indignation, remorse and guilt. These arguments fail. The view that these emotions commit us to punishment rests on unsophisticated views of punishment and of these emotions and their associated behaviors. I offer more sophisticated accounts of punishment, of these emotions and of their associated behaviors that are consistent (...) with Abolitionism, the view that punishment is unjustified. (shrink)

I argue that contemporary liberal theory cannot give a general justification for the institution or practice of punishment, i.e., a justification that would hold across a broad range of reasonably realistic conditions. I examine the general justifications offered by three prominent contemporary liberal theorists and show how their justifications fail in light of the possibility of an alternative to punishment. I argue that, because of their common commitments regarding the nature of justification, these theorists have decisive reasons to reject punishment (...) in favor of a non-punitive alternative. I demonstrate the possibility of this alternative by means of a careful examination of the nature of punishment, isolating one essential characteristic—the aim to impose suffering—and showing how this characteristic need not guide enforcement. There is logical space for a forceful and coercive, yet non-punitive method of enforcement. This fact poses difficulties for many classical and contemporary justifications of punishment, but it poses particularly crippling problems for general liberal justifications. (shrink)

In recent years there has been an explosion of philosophical work on blame. Much of this work has focused on explicating the nature of blame or on examining the norms that govern it, and the primary motivation for theorizing about blame seems to derive from blame’s tight connection to responsibility. However, very little philosophical attention has been given to praise and its attendant practices. In this paper, I identify three possible explanations for this lack of attention. My goal is to (...) show that each of these lines of thought is mistaken and to argue that praise is deserving of careful, independent analysis by philosophers interested in theorizing about responsibility. (shrink)

A puzzle concerning fractional and mixed numbers of things (e.g., two and a half oranges) is examined.

A fresh and original presentation that is easy and affordable for students, instructors, and general readers to use. This well-written, insightful history of philosophy is basic enough to be understood by those with no prior experience with philosophy but sophisticated enough to inform further those with some knowledge of philosophy. -/- Based on the author’s 20-plus years of teaching philosophy and learning what works for students, How We Are and How We Got Here is designed to connect with students to (...) help them understand philosophy and why it matters to them, regardless of their major. Its straightforward conversational presentation of philosophy includes readers in philosophy’s long conversation. Its chronological presentation places philosophers in their historical context, showing how philosophy is an ongoing interaction with society seeking practical knowledge useful to us in everyday life. -/- Key Features that fill multiple gaps in existing textbooks: -/- * Shows students how innovations in philosophy have interacted with and changed history, leading to how we are today. * Presents philosophy as a vital part of our lives, not as a set of isolated theoretical problems, avoiding the disconnected and fragmented silo approach of most textbooks. * Avoids the sink-or-swim approach of anthologies that plunges students into a hodgepodge of disjoint readings without adequate guidance. * Does not duplicate material covered in other introductory courses of ethics and logic but focuses on the rest of philosophy. * Focuses on explaining the ideas of the philosophers, allowing instructors to choose, at their option, primary texts from the plentifully available royalty-free sources. * Extensively covers vital areas of philosophy ignored by most textbooks, including pragmatism, phenomenology, social and political philosophy, postmodernism, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of race. * Always remains engaging and accessible to the reader. Neither dumbs down the material nor over complicates it. * Provides clear and direct text unencumbered by bells and whistles and other extraneous materials. -/- How We Are and How We Got Here provides students of all backgrounds with a clear and whole understanding of philosophy and its role in history and society, making the 2,400-year history of Western philosophy vital and relevant to today. It shows that philosophy is not a cold analytical academic procedure but exciting and alive, and reveals how we are all philosophers. (shrink)

The dogma that the propositional logic of metaphysical modality is S5 is rebutted. The author exposes fallacies in standard arguments supporting S5, arguing that propositional metaphysical modal logic is weaker even than both S4 and B, and is instead the minimal and weak metaphysical-modal logic T.

An expanded version of the author’s candid, autobiographical “My Philosophical Education”.

Peter van Inwagen proposes a criterion of philosophical success. He takes it to support an extremely pessimistic view about philosophy. He thinks that all philosophical arguments for substantive conclusions fail, including the argument from evil. I’m more optimistic on both counts. I’ll identify problems with van Inwagen’s criterion and propose an alternative. I’ll then explore the differing implications of our criteria. On my view, philosophical arguments can succeed and the argument from evil isn’t obviously a failure.

Some prominent scientists and philosophers have stated openly that moral and political considerations should influence whether we accept or promulgate scientific theories. This widespread view has significantly influenced the development, and public perception, of intelligence research. Theories related to group differences in intelligence are often rejected a priori on explicitly moral grounds. Thus the idea, frequently expressed by commentators on science, that science is “self-correcting”—that hypotheses are simply abandoned when they are undermined by empirical evidence—may not be correct in all (...) contexts. In this paper, documentation spanning from the early 1970s to the present is collected, which reveals the influence of scientists’ moral and political commitments on the study of intelligence. It is suggested that misrepresenting findings in science to achieve desirable social goals will ultimately harm both science and society. (shrink)

This article offers an interpretation of a controversial aspect of Frege’s The Foundations of Arithmetic, the so-called Julius Caesar problem. Frege raises the Caesar problem against proposed purely logical definitions for ‘0’, ‘successor’, and ‘number’, and also against a proposed definition for ‘direction’ as applied to lines in geometry. Dummett and other interpreters have seen in Frege’s criticism a demanding requirement on such definitions, often put by saying that such definitions must provide a criterion of identity of a certain kind. (...) These interpretations are criticized and an alternative interpretation is defended. The Caesar problem is that the proposed definitions fail to well-define ‘number’ and ‘direction’. That is, the proposed definitions, even when taken together with the extra-definitional facts, fail to fix unique semantic extensions for ‘number’ and ‘direction’, and thereby fail to fix unique truth-values for sentences like ‘Caesar is a number’ and ‘England is a direction’. A minor modification of the criticized definitions well-defines ‘0’, ‘successor’ and ‘number’, thereby avoiding the Caesar problem as Frege understands it, but without providing any criterion of number identity in the usual sense. (shrink)