Nicolas Malebranche holds that we see all things in the physical world by means of ideas in God (the doctrine of "vision in God"). In some writings he seems to posit ideas of particular bodies in God, but when pressed by critics he insists that there is only one general idea of extension, which he calls “intelligible extension.” But how can this general and “pure” idea represent particular sensible objects? I develop systematic solutions to this and two other putative difficulties (...) with Malebranche’s theory of sensory cognition by appealing to the notion of “seeing as” and to his doctrine that ideas in God have causal powers to affect the mind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.1 (2005) 55-81 [Access article in PDF] Self-Knowledge in Descartes and Malebranche Lawrence Nolan John Whipple 1. Introduction Descartes's notorious claim that mind is better known than body has been the target of repeated criticisms, but none appears more challenging than that of his intellectual heir Nicolas Malebranche.1 Whereas other critics—especially twentieth-century philosophers eager to use Descartes as their whipping boy—have often (...) been uncharitable, Malebranche accepts many of the fundamental Cartesian doctrines, including mind-body dualism. But he argues that Descartes's position on knowledge of the mind is internally inconsistent. Malebranche agrees with Descartes that the existence of the mind is better known than that of body, but he vehemently denies that the nature of the mind is better known. This denial is based on his view that we lack a clear idea of the mind.2 [End Page 55]Malebranche's polemic has attracted much attention in recent scholarship.3 The growing consensus among commentators is that Malebranche develops a devastating internal critique of Descartes's theory of the mind. For example, Nicholas Jolley writes: "In his case for his negative thesis [concerning knowledge of the mind] Malebranche mounted a powerful, even annihilating, critique of Descartes. This critique embodies the remarkable insight that there is a serious muddle at the heart of Descartes's whole theory of knowledge."4 In a book-length defense of Malebranche's critique, Tad Schmaltz also emphasizes its internal character: "the interpretation here of Malebranche's theory presents it as fundamentally Cartesian, and thereby serves to reinforce his own view that he has provided an authoritative interpretation of the account of mind in the writings of Descartes and other Cartesians."5 Schmaltz also asserts: "Malebranche took his negative thesis concerning our knowledge of the soul to involve not so much a rejection of Cartesianism as an internal correction of it."6We think such remarks misstate the case. Indeed, we argue in this paper that Malebranche's polemic fails as an internal critique of Descartes's theory of the mind. Although we do not here aspire to defend Descartes's strong thesis—that mind is better known than body—we do think he can consistently maintain that we have a clear and distinct idea of the mind, and thus that our knowledge of the mind's nature is at least on a par with our knowledge of corporeal nature.7 While Malebranche's rhetoric would encourage us to think that the debate between him and his predecessor is being fought on common or neutral ground, the fact is that Malebranche often appeals to assumptions and aspects of his own theory of "Vision in God" that Descartes would reject. Once more, he interprets Descartes's theory of knowledge in ways that are misguided and sometimes even uncharitable. If Malebranche's critique succeeds at all, it succeeds only against a straw man—Malebranche's Descartes and not the historical figure.Ours is not the first effort to defend Descartes against this particular attack. When Malebranche first published his critique in Book Three of his first great work, The Search After Truth (1674),8 Descartes had been dead for over two decades, [End Page 56] but he was ably defended by the famous Cartesian Antoine Arnauld in On True and False Ideas (1683). In the ensuing debate Arnauld was clearly the superior dialectician, but while winning several tactical points, he appears not to fully appreciate the crux of Malebranche's argument, or at least that is the view of Jolley and Schmaltz.9 We have a somewhat higher opinion of Arnauld's side of the debate. Granted, some of his defenses are facile and can be easily dismissed; others however are quite compelling when properly developed. In at least one instance, we attempt to provide that development. At the same time we think it is a mistake to treat Arnauld as Descartes's surrogate or as if he had issued the final salvo from the camp of the orthodox Cartesians. Arnauld was a... (shrink)

Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral Education presents what the late Lawrence Kohlberg regarded as the definitive statement of his educational theory. Addressing the sociology and social psychology of schooling, the authors propose that school culture become the center of moral education and research. They discuss how schools can develop as just and cohesive communities by involving students in democracy, and they focus on the moral decisions teachers and students face as they democratically resolve problems. As the authors put (...) it: "...we propose an educational renewal of our democratic society.... We have attempted to establish schools that do more than just teach about democratic citizenship, that are themselves democratic societies.". (shrink)

Examines the theories of Socrates, Kant, Dewey, Piaget, and others to explore the implications of Socrates' question "what is a virtuous man, and what is a virtuous school and society which educates virtuous men.".

The dispute about the role of class in understanding the life situations of people of color has tended to be overpolarized, between a class reductionism and an “it's only race” position. Class processes shape racial groups’ life situations. Race and class are also distinct axes of injustice; but class injustice informs racial injustice. Some aspects of racial injustice can be expressed only in concepts associated with class (e.g., material deprivation, inferior education). But other aspects of racial injustice or other harms, (...) such as racial discrimination or stigma, are not reducible to class concepts and cannot be fully addressed through class-focused policies. Overall, any attempt to fully secure racial justice for a racial group will require a combination of race-focused and class-focused policies. Anti-racist outlooks often neglect or downplay either the normative or the explanatory significance of class, or both—for example, by overlooking or downplaying the dignitary harms of class and the material harms of race; missing the historical dimension of class injustice; masking class by a narrowing of the complex normative structure of racial disparities; or not recognizing that a class-focused initiative (like raising the minimum wage) can address substantial racial justice concerns, even though not all of them. “Systemic racism” terminology recognizes class explanatorily but suppresses it normatively. Charles Mills's influential notion of “white supremacy,” while a powerful tool for conceptualizing and illuminating racial injustice, can also contribute to minimizing or masking the justice-related impact of class, as do some of Mills's specific discussions of class in various writings. (shrink)

Despite intensive exegetical work, Plato’s description of dialectic in the Sophist still raises many questions. Through a close reading of this passage that contextualizes it in the general organisation of the Sophist, this paper provides answers to these questions. After presenting the difficult text, I contend that the “vowel-kinds” are necessary conditions for the blending of kinds. Then, I interpret the “cause of divisions” mentioned by the Stranger as the kinds responsible of the dichotomous division in the first half of (...) the dialogue. In the next part, I show that 235d5-e2 does not describe a procedure of “meta-divison” as some commentators have it, but that it describes the method of division itself. Finally, I connect the difficulty and the obscurity of the passage to the fact that dialectic is the supreme science and I explain why dialectic is the science of free men. (shrink)

I argue that physicians can save women from life-threatening pregnancies by performing a craniotomy, placentectomy, or salpingotomy without intending death or harm. To support this conclusion, I defend the relevance thesis about intentions (a person intends X only if X explains the action). I then criticize the identity thesis (if a person intends X and knows that X is identical to Y then the person intends Y) and three mistakenly strict moral principles: (1) one may not intend something that is (...) a serious harm for an innocent person, (2) one may not intend to terminate pregnancy before viability, and (3) one may not act on a person’s body in a harmful way in order to benefit another person. (1) would prohibit procuring organs from living donors, (2) would prohibit treating hepatic pregnancies and other ectopic pregnancies, and (3) would prohibit procuring organs from living donors and performing many prenatal surgeries. (shrink)

Since the publication of Andrews Reath's “Two Conceptions of the Highest Good in Kant” (Journal of the History of Philosophy 26:4 (1988)), most scholars have come to accept the view that Kant migrated away from an earlier “theological” version to one that is more “secular.” The purpose of this paper is to explore the roots of this interpretative trend, re-assess its merits, and then examine how the Highest Good is portrayed in Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. As (...) will be argued, it is in this text more so than any other where Kant develops his most philosophically sophisticated account of the Highest Good. Because of the central significance of Kant’s doctrine of the Highest Good for both his ethical theory and philosophy of religion, this paper therefore seeks to provide an important corrective to the current received views. (shrink)

Most physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to “speak” of indeterminism, its inability to present us a worldview in which new information is created as time passes. In such a case, scientific determinism would only be an illusion due to the timeless mathematical language scientists use. To investigate this possibility it is necessary (...) to develop an alternative mathematical language that is both powerful enough to allow scientists to compute predictions and compatible with indeterminism and the passage of time. We suggest that intuitionistic mathematics provides such a language and we illustrate it in simple terms. (shrink)

We present in this paper a novel ontological theory of events whose central tenet is the Aristotelian distinction between the object that changes and the actual subject of change, which is what we call an individual quality. While in the Kimian tradition events are individuated by a triple ⟨ o, P, t ⟩, where o is an object, P a property, and t an interval of time, for us the simplest events are qualitative changes, individuated by a triple ⟨ o, (...) q, t ⟩, where q is an individual quality inhering in o or in one of its parts. Detaching the individuation of events from the property they exemplify results in a fine-grained theory that keeps metaphysics and semantics clearly separate, and lies between the multiplicative and the unitarian approaches. We discuss then the way language refers to events, observing that, in most cases, event descriptions refer to complex, cognitively relevant clusters of co-occurring qualitative changes, which exhibit a synchronic structure depending on the way they are described. Contra Bennett, who famously argued that the semantics of event names ultimately depends on “local context and unprincipled intuitions”, we show how the lexicon provides systematic principles for individuating such clusters and classifying them into kinds. Finally, we address some open challenges in the semantics of locative and manner modifiers. (shrink)

A survey of the similarities and differences between BFO and DOLCE, and of the mutual interactions between Nicola Guarino and Barry Smith.

Dominant views about the nature of health and disease in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine have presumed the existence of a fixed, stable, individual organism as the bearer of health and disease states, and as such, the appropriate target of medical therapy and ethical concern. However, recent developments in microbial biology, neuroscience, the philosophy of cognitive science, and social and personality psychology (Ickes...

The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of belief fixation: one that is automatic (...) and independent of belief rejection. Independent research supports the existence of a system of fragmented belief storage: one that relies on large numbers of causally isolated, context-sensitive stores of belief in memory. Finally, empirical and observational data support at least two systems of belief change. One system adheres, mostly, to epistemological norms of updating; the other, the psychological immune system, functions to guard our most centrally held beliefs from potential inconsistency with newly formed beliefs. Refining our under- standing of these systems can shed light on pressing real-world issues, such as how fake news, propaganda, and brainwashing exploit our psychology of belief, and how best to construct our modern informational world. (shrink)

Observers have noted a decline (in the US) in attributions of genetically-based inferiority (e.g. in intelligence) to Blacks, and a rise in attributions of culturally-based inferiority. Is this "culturalism" merely warmed-over racism ("cultural racism") or a genuinely distinct way of thinking about racial groups? The question raises a larger one about the relative place of biology and culture in racist thought. I develop a typology of culturalisms as applied to race: (1) inherentist or essentialist culturalism (inferiorizing cultural characteristics wrongly but (...) intelligibly regarded as inhering in the nature of racial groups). This view has an historical pedigree in the work of J.G. von Herder, and the tradition of "national racism." (2) non-inherentist culturalism (groups regarded as possessing changeable, malleable inferiorizing cultural characteristics). (3) colonalist culturalism (colonial subjects regarded as uncivilized but capable of becoming civilized under European tutelage). (4) neo-racism (cultures of former colonial subjects in or potentially immigrating to European countries are regarded in an inherentist manner and incompatible with but not inferior to European cultures). Non-inherentist culturalism (#2) can be put to either a racist or an anti-racist use. (shrink)

Neoliberalism is an approach to social policy, now globally influential, that applies market approaches to all aspects of social life, including education. Charter schools, privately operated but publicly funded, are its most prominent manifestation in the U.S. The neoliberal principles of competition, consumerism, and choice cannot serve as foundations of a sound and equitable public education system. Neoliberalism embraces socio-economic inequality overall and in doing so constricts any justice mission its adherents espouse in virtue of serving a relatively disadvantaged student (...) population, as charter schools often (by no means always) do. It constricts educational justice by (1) embracing a “human capital” approach as the primary good of education, (2) creating educational inequality through (unofficially) selecting a relatively advantaged segment of the disadvantaged demographic it serves, (3) denying the effect of poverty on educational performance, and (4) devaluing its students’ familial ethnic cultures. (shrink)

Stereotypes are false or misleading generalizations about groups, generally widely shared in a society, and held in a manner resistant, but not totally, to counterevidence. Stereotypes shape the stereotyper’s perception of stereotyped groups, seeing the stereotypic characteristics when they are not present, and generally homogenizing the group. The association between the group and the given characteristic involved in a stereotype often involves a cognitive investment weaker than that of belief. The cognitive distortions involved in stereotyping lead to various forms of (...) moral distortion, to which moral philosophers have paid insufficient attention. Some of these are common to all stereotypes—failing to see members of the stereotyped groups as individuals, moral distancing, failing to see subgroup diversity within the group. Other moral distortions vary with the stereotype. Some attribute a much more damaging or stigmatizing characteristic (e.g. being violent) than others (e.g. being good at basketball). But the characteristic in question must also be viewed in its wider historical and social context to appreciate its overall negative and positive dimensions. (shrink)

In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes makes a remarkable claim about the ontological status of geometrical figures. He asserts that an object such as a triangle has a 'true and immutable nature' that does not depend on the mind, yet has being even if there are no triangles existing in the world. This statement has led many commentators to assume that Descartes is a Platonist regarding essences and in the philosophy of mathematics. One problem with this seemingly natural reading is that (...) it contradicts the conceptualist account of universals that one finds in the Principles of Philosophy and elsewhere. In this paper, I offer a novel interpretation of the notion of a true and immutable nature which reconciles the Fifth Meditation with the conceptualism of Descartes' other work. Specifically, I argue that Descartes takes natures to be innate ideas considered in terms of their so-called 'objective being'. (shrink)

We aim to do two things in this article. On the positive end, our goal is to explain how some seemingly incompatible aspects of belief live together, by presenting distinct mechanistic explanations of each of them: in particular we want to show how belief can be discerning, credulous, rational, and irrational. After clarifying our positive view, we take aim at some competitor views in the second half of the paper, particularly offering critiques of epistemic vigilance and social marketplace accounts of (...) belief. We conclude by inviting proponents to provide an architecture for belief that can be tested against existing models. (shrink)

It is usual to identify initial conditions of classical dynamical systems with mathematical real numbers. However, almost all real numbers contain an infinite amount of information. I argue that a finite volume of space can’t contain more than a finite amount of information, hence that the mathematical real numbers are not physically relevant. Moreover, a better terminology for the so-called real numbers is “random numbers”, as their series of bits are truly random. I propose an alternative classical mechanics, which is (...) empirically equivalent to classical mechanics, but uses only finite-information numbers. This alternative classical mechanics is non-deterministic, despite the use of deterministic equations, in a way similar to quantum theory. Interestingly, both alternative classical mechanics and quantum theories can be supplemented by additional variables in such a way that the supplemented theory is deterministic. Most physicists straightforwardly supplement classical theory with real numbers to which they attribute physical existence, while most physicists reject Bohmian mechanics as supplemented quantum theory, arguing that Bohmian positions have no physical reality. (shrink)

Frege says, at the end of a discussion of formalism in the Foundations of Arithmetic, that his own foundational program “could be called formal” but is “completely different” from the view he has just criticized. This essay examines Frege’s relationship to Hermann Hankel, his main formalist interlocutor in the Foundations, in order to make sense of these claims. The investigation reveals a surprising result: Frege’s foundational program actually has quite a lot in common with Hankel’s. This undercuts Frege’s claim that (...) his own view is completely different from Hankel’s formalism, and motivates a closer examination of where the differences lie. On the interpretation offered here, Frege shares important parts of the formalist perspective, but differs in recognizing a kind of content for arithmetical terms which can only be made available via proof from prior postulates. (shrink)

We propose a novel ontological analysis of relations and relationships based on a re-visitation of a classic problem in the practice of knowledge repre- sentation and conceptual modeling, namely relationship reification. Our idea is that a relation holds in virtue of a relationship's existence. Relationships are therefore truthmakers of relations. In this paper we present a general theory or reification and truthmaking, and discuss the interplay between events and rela- tionships, suggesting that relationships are the focus of events, which emerge (...) from the context (the scene) they occur in. (shrink)

Successful athletic performance requires precision in many respects. A batter stands behind home plate awaiting the arrival of a ball that is less than three inches in diameter and moving close to 100 mph. His goal is to hit it with a ba­­t that is also less than three inches in diameter. This impressive feat requires extraordinary temporal and spatial coordination. The sweet spot of the bat must be at the same place, at the same time, as the ball. A (...) basketball player must keep a ball bouncing as she speeds from one end of the court to another, evading defensive players. She may never break pace as she lifts from the ground, throwing the ball fifteen feet toward a hoop that is eighteen inches in diameter. One task facing a psychologist involves explaining how the body does such things within the sometimes very demanding spatial and temporal constraints that a given task imposes. Part of the goal of this chapter is to sketch the commitments of an embodied approach to such an explanation. We shall see that an embodied account of motor skills draws concepts that depart radically from more traditional cognitivist theories of motor activity. Similarly, because an embodied approach to cognition introduces new ways to understand the human capacity for social interaction, it also promises to shed new light on how athletes coordinate their actions with each other. (shrink)

World food production is facing exorbitant challenges like climate change, use of resources, population growth, and dietary changes. These, in turn, raise major ethical and political questions, such as how to uphold the right to adequate nutrition, or the right to enact a gastronomic culture and to preserve the conditions to do so. Proposals for utopic solutions vary from vertical farming and lab meat to diets filled with the most fanciful insects and seaweeds. Common to all proposals is a polarized (...) understanding of food and diets, famously captured by Warren Belasco in the contraposition between technological fixes and anthropological fixes. According to the first, technology will deliver clean, just, pleasurable, affordable food; future generations will not need to adjust much of their dietary cultures. According to the second, future generations should dramatically change their dietary habits (what they eat and how they eat it) to achieve a sustainable diet. The two fixes found remarkably distinct perspectives over dietary politics and the ethics of food production and consumption. In this paper we argue that such polarized thinking rests on a misrepresentation of the ontological status of food, which in turn affects the underlying ethical and political issues. Food is a socially constructed object that draws in specific ways on habits, norms, traditions, geographical, and climatic conditions. Although this thesis seems somewhat obvious, its consequences on the ethical and political perspectives on the future of food have not been derived properly. After introducing the issue at stake (¤1), we point out the polarities that characterize food utopias (¤2) and their ontological faults (¤3). We hence suggest that a socio-ontological analysis of food can better deliver the principles for a foundation of food utopias (¤4). (shrink)

In this article we argue that the social value of health research should be conceptualized as a function of both the expected benefits of the research and the priority that the beneficiaries deserve. People deserve greater priority the worse off they are. This conception of social value can be applied for at least two important purposes: in health research priority setting when research funders, policy-makers, or researchers decide between alternative research projects; and in evaluating the ethics of proposed research proposals (...) when research ethics committees assess whether the social value of the research is sufficient to justify the risks and burdens to research participants and others. In assessing how far a proposed research project will advance the interests of people who are more disadvantaged, research priority setters and RECs should examine the diseases that the research targets and the type of research. Just as certain diseases impose a greater burden on people who are more disadvantaged, so certain types of intervention and forms of research are more likely to benefit people who are more disadvantaged. We outline which populations are likely to be representative of the global worst off and identify what types of health research, and which disease categories, are priorities for these populations. (shrink)

Politics never became a central intellectual interest of Murdoch’s, but she produced one important and visionary political essay in the ‘50’s, several popular writings on political matters, and a significant chapter in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals that echoes throughout that book. In the 1958 “House of Theory,” she sees the welfare state as having almost entirely failed to address the deeper problems of capitalist society, including a failure to create the conditions for values she saw as central to (...) the socialist tradition—equality, absence of exploitation, meaningful work, and a sense of community. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch abandons the idea that moral ideals provide a guide to constructing a good society. She retains from her earlier work that the individual-moral domain is governed by perfectionism, but society cannot be. ‘Society must be thought of as a bad job to be made the best of’, for example, through the liberal idea of rights. Murdoch had a lifelong engagement with Marxism as a philosophy, introduced to her as a member of the Communist Party in the late ‘30’s and ‘40’s, and continuing through her subsequent long Labour period, and even when she moved to the Right in the Thatcher era. Marx and Marxism were always part of her mental universe, and she continued to work out what she agreed and disagreed with in it. (shrink)

Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that a (...) recently influential response to the debunking challenge (the appeal to phenomenal introspection) fails. It also argues that a Nietzschean approach is well suited to support the challenge and is bolstered by the empirical literature. As strangers to ourselves, we cannot know whether suffering is really intrinsically bad for us. (shrink)

In this article, I show that the semantics one adopts for mass terms constrains the metaphysical claims one can make about mixtures. I first expose why mixtures challenge a singularist approach based on mereological sums. After discussing an alternative, non-singularist approach, I take chemistry into account and explain how it changes our perspective on these issues.

Unusual among Western philosophers, Schopenhauer explicitly drew on Hindu and especially Buddhist traditions inhis moral philosophy. He saw plurality, especially the plurality of human persons, as a kind of illusion; in reality all is one, and compassionate acts express an implicit recognition of this oneness. Max Scheler retains the transcendence of self aspect of compassion but emphasizes that the subject must have a clear, lived sense of herself as a distinct individual in order for that transcendence to take place properly. (...) This feature is absent in the Buddhist tradition. Feminist philosophers of the early second wave built on this insight (only occasionally drawing it from Scheler) to recognize ways women are often not socialized to develop this distinctive sense of self, therefore harming their ability to engage in compassion and other forms of care for others. Iris Murdoch adds a Freudian-inspired (though Freud influenced Scheler also) pessimism about the ability of humans to keep their identities sufficiently distinct from the other to allow a clear view of the other, and thus real care and help to the other to take place. But in her later work, Murdoch explicitly recognizes and draws on the Buddhist tradition of oneness and transcendence of the self. Group solidarities can partake of aspects of Buddhist oneness and self-transcendence, for example the sense of fellowship in a social justice movement in which Blacks draw on a shared identity to experience connection, compassion, empathy, and solidarity with one another. But social justice movements also allow for a solidarity across racial lines, grounded in the shared commitment to justice, including justice for one of the groups in the solidarity community. (All these issues are powerfully portrayed in the 2014 film, Selma.) None of these solidarities, however, express the universalistic dimension of Buddhist oneness. (shrink)

Do scientific theories limit human knowledge? In other words, are there physical variables hidden by essence forever? We argue for negative answers and illustrate our point on chaotic classical dynamical systems. We emphasize parallels with quantum theory and conclude that the common real numbers are, de facto, the hidden variables of classical physics. Consequently, real numbers should not be considered as ``physically real" and classical mechanics, like quantum physics, is indeterministic.

This article defends a relational account of personhood. I argue that the structure of personhood consists of dyadic relations between persons who can wrong or be wronged by one another, even if some of them lack moral competence. I draw on recent work on directed duties to outline the structure of moral communities of persons. The upshot is that we can construct an inclusive theory of personhood that can accommodate nonhuman persons based on shared community membership. I argue that, once (...) we unpack the internal relation between directed duties, moral status, and flourishing, relations can ground personhood and include nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Peer commentary on: Blumenthal-Barby, J. S. (2016). Biases and heuristics in decision making and their impact on autonomy. The American Journal of Bioethics, 16(5), 5-15.

Peer commentary on: Goering, S., Klein, E., Dougherty, D. D., & Widge, A. S. (2017). Staying in the loop: Relational agency and identity in next-generation DBS for psychiatry. AJOB Neuroscience, 8(2), 59-70.

There seems to be an inconsistency at the heart of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: a differentia is said both to presuppose its genus (in vii 12) and to be logically independent from it (in x 7). I argue that the relation of analogy resolves this inconsistency, restores the coherence of the concepts of differentia and species, and gives x 7 its rightful place in the development of the Metaphysics.

The idea that appearances provide justifications for beliefs—the principle of phenomenal conservatism—is self-evidently true. In the case of cognitive penetration, however, it seems that certain irrational etiologies of a belief may influence the epistemic quality of that belief. Susanna Siegel argues that these etiologies lead to ‘epistemic downgrade.’ Instead of providing us with a decisive objection, cognitive penetration calls for us to clarify our epistemic framework by understanding the formative parts of appearances. In doing so, the two different but inseparable (...) ideas of sensation and intellection provide us with a basis of our appearances. These appearances, in turn, provide us with the objective evidence needed to test our judgements. Thus, the extra-sensory concepts of intellectual identification and the appearances they help form become an epistemic groundwork. (shrink)

The claim that the observation of a violation of a Bell inequality leads to an alleged alternative between nonlocality and non-realism is annoying because of the vagueness of the second term.

Carl Gillett has defended what he calls the “dimensioned” view of the realization relation, which he contrasts with the traditional “flat” view of realization (2003, 2007; see also Gillett 2002). Intuitively, the dimensioned approach characterizes realization in terms of composition whereas the flat approach views realization in terms of occupiers of functional roles. Elsewhere we have argued that the general view of realization and multiple realization that Gillett advances is not able to discharge the theoretical duties of those relations (Shapiro (...) 2004, unpublished manuscript; Polger 2004, 2007, forthcoming). Here we focus on an internal objection to Gillett’s account and then raise some broader reasons to reject it. (shrink)

Animals who live in cities must coexist with us. They are, as a result, entitled to the conditions of their flourishing. This article argues that, as the boundaries of cities and urban areas expand, the boundaries of our conception of captivity should expand too. Urbanization can undermine animals’ freedoms, hence their ability to live good lives. I draw the implications of an account of “pervasive captivity” against the background of the Capabilities Approach. I construe captivity, including that of urban animals, (...) as affecting a range of animal capabilities, understood as freedoms, and I address some tensions within Nussbaum’s treatment of human-animal conflicts. Using the Capabilities Approach as a guide, I will attempt to motivate a convergence between habitat preservation in urbanized environments, urban design guided by justice, and the individual freedoms of animals. (shrink)

Mental representations remain the central posits of psychology after many decades of scrutiny. However, there is no consensus about the representational format(s) of biological cognition. This paper provides a survey of evidence from computational cognitive psychology, perceptual psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and social psychology, and concludes that one type of format that routinely crops up is the language-of-thought (LoT). We outline six core properties of LoTs: (i) discrete constituents; (ii) role-filler independence; (iii) predicate–argument structure; (iv) logical operators; (v) inferential (...) promiscuity; and (vi) abstract content. These properties cluster together throughout cognitive science. Bayesian computational modeling, compositional features of object perception, complex infant and animal reasoning, and automatic, intuitive cognition in adults all implicate LoT-like structures. Instead of regarding LoT as a relic of the previous century, researchers in cognitive science and philosophy-of-mind must take seriously the explanatory breadth of LoT-based architectures. We grant that the mind may harbor many formats and architectures, including iconic and associative structures as well as deep-neural-network-like architectures. However, as computational/representational approaches to the mind continue to advance, classical compositional symbolic structures – that is, LoTs – only prove more flexible and well-supported over time. (shrink)

This thesis modifies the wording of William Clifford’s 1877 evidence principle (that ‘it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’) to propose an explicitly moral principle, restricted to descriptive beliefs (about what is or is not the case) and excluding prescriptive beliefs (about what ought or ought not to be the case). It considers potential counter-examples, particularly William James’s 1896 defence of religious belief; and concludes that the modified principle survives unscathed. It then searches (...) for suitable criteria for ‘sufficient’ and ‘insufficient’ evidence, first within a Bayesian framework enriched by pragmatic considerations, and finally by returning to Clifford’s conception of our shared responsibilities to our shared epistemic asset. Combined with elements of Edward Craig’s (1990, 1999) ‘state-of-nature’ theory of knowledge this gets us to a minimum threshold to avoid insufficient evidence and an aspirational criterion of sufficient evidence. (shrink)

The picture of moral development defended by followers of Aristotle takes moral cultivation to be like playing a harp; one gets to be good by actually spending time playing a real instrument. On this view, we cultivate a virtue by doing the actions associated with that virtue. I argue that this picture is inadequate and must be supplemented by imaginative techniques. One can, and sometimes must, cultivate virtue without actually performing the associated actions. Drawing on strands in Buddhist philosophy, I (...) explain several methods of moral development that rely on imagination and visualization rather than overt action. These techniques are essential in cases where cultivating virtue the way one practices the harp is impossible. In particular, I focus on single-event virtues, first-time virtuous acts, and morally dangerous situations. (shrink)

Pinocchio is, above all, what he is not. His identity is often played to the limit, imagined by himself and everyone he meets along the way. Pinocchio is the name of life that is simultaneously inorganic, human and animal. For this reason, it is the possible name of a radical desertion: to identify at the same time with oneself and with someone other than oneself. One question that can be deduced from The Adventures of Pinocchio is whether such an intelligent (...) machine would like to become “human”? In fact, before Pinocchio becomes a real boy, he does everything that real boys do, including the disobedience to their parents. (shrink)