Bilattices, introduced by Ginsberg as a uniform framework for inference in artificial intelligence, are algebraic structures that proved useful in many fields. In recent years, Arieli and Avron developed a logical system based on a class of bilattice-based matrices, called logical bilattices, and provided a Gentzen-style calculus for it. This logic is essentially an expansion of the well-known Belnap–Dunn four-valued logic to the standard language of bilattices. Our aim is to study Arieli and Avron’s logic from the perspective of abstract (...) algebraic logic . We introduce a Hilbert-style axiomatization in order to investigate the properties of the algebraic models of this logic, proving that every formula can be reduced to an equivalent normal form and that our axiomatization is complete w.r.t. Arieli and Avron’s semantics. In this way, we are able to classify this logic according to the criteria of AAL. We show, for instance, that it is non-protoalgebraic and non-self-extensional. We also characterize its Tarski congruence and the class of algebraic reducts of its reduced generalized models, which in the general theory of AAL is usually taken to be the algebraic counterpart of a sentential logic. This class turns out to be the variety generated by the smallest non-trivial bilattice, which is strictly contained in the class of algebraic reducts of logical bilattices. On the other hand, we prove that the class of algebraic reducts of reduced models of our logic is strictly included in the class of algebraic reducts of its reduced generalized models. Another interesting result obtained is that, as happens with some implicationless fragments of well-known logics, we can associate with our logic a Gentzen calculus which is algebraizable in the sense of Rebagliato and Verdú . We also prove some purely algebraic results concerning bilattices, for instance that the variety of distributive bilattices is generated by the smallest non-trivial bilattice. This result is based on an improvement of a theorem by Avron stating that every bounded interlaced bilattice is isomorphic to a certain product of two bounded lattices. We generalize it to the case of unbounded interlaced bilattices. (shrink)

I Can we make promises to ourselves? This is a question that has not received much consideration in the large body of philosophical work on promising. And in what commentary there is, the answer is uniformly negative. I think this negativity is a mistake, and that the conventional view that we can't make reflexive promises is wrong. I also think that this has some important implications for promissory theory in general. In what follows, I will attempt to argue for the (...) first of these two claims, and to briefly outline my reasons for the second. (shrink)

People maintain a positive identity in at least two ways: They evaluate themselves more favorably than other people, and they judge themselves to be better now than they were in the past. Both strategies rely on autobiographical memories. The authors investigate the role of autobiographical memories of lying and emotional harm in maintaining a positive identity. For memories of lying to or emotionally harming others, participants judge their own actions as less morally wrong and less negative than those in which (...) other people lied to or emotionally harmed them. Furthermore, people judge those actions that happened further in the past to be more morally wrong than those that happened more recently. Finally, for periods of the past when they believed that they were very different people than they are now, participants judge their actions to be more morally wrong and more negative than those actions from periods of their pasts when they believed that they were very similar to who they are now. The authors discuss these findings in relation to theories about the function of autobiographical memory and moral cognition in constructing and perceiving the self over time. (shrink)

According to cognitive psychologists, moral decision-making is a dual-process phenomenon involving two types of cognitive processes: explicit reasoning and implicit intuition. Moral development involves training and integrating both types of cognitive processes through a mix of instruction, practice, and reflection. Serious games are an ideal platform for this kind of moral training, as they provide safe spaces for exploring difficult moral problems and practicing the skills necessary to resolve them. In this article, we present Morality Play, a model for the (...) design of serious games for ethical expertise development based on the Integrative Ethical Education framework from moral psychology and the Lens of the Toy model for serious game design. (shrink)

Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We demonstrate how plausibility (...) ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential ‘salience bias’. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox (‘argument from hallucination’). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods’ philosophical usefulness. (shrink)

Kant begins his Lectures on Pedagogy by stating, “[t]he human being is the only creature that must be educated” (Kant, 2007, 9:441), and he argues that it is through education that we can transform our initial “animal nature into human nature” (ibid. 2007, 9:441). Kant understands education as involving an ordered process of care, discipline, instruction and formation through enculturating, civilizing and moralizing (Formosa 2011). Further, Kant envisages that we should pursue as a species the “moral perfection” that is the (...) “final destiny of the human race” through education (Collins, 1997, 27:470; see Dean, 2014). However, to engage in this pursuit Kant believes that, through education and social change, we have to regulate our “animal nature” and counter the moral corruption of our species, which he calls the “radical innate evil in human nature (not any the less brought upon us by ourselves)” (Kant, 1998, 6:32). If humanity is to pursue its final destiny of moral perfection, then education will need to respond responsibly to the propensity to evil that is deeply rooted in us as finite and imperfect rational beings living in imperfect and at times even in morally corrupted social conditions. This paper outlines some of the relevant issues. (shrink)

It is still a live question in epistemology and philosophy of science as to what exactly evidence is. In my view, evidence consists in experiences called “seemings.” This view is a version of the phenomenal conception of evidence, the position that evidence consists in nonfactive mental states with propositional content. This conception is opposed by sense-data theorists, disjunctivists, and those who think evidence consists in physical objects or publicly observable states of affairs—call it the courtroom conception of evidence. Thomas Kelly (...) has recently argued that the phenomenal conception cannot play all the roles evidence plays and is thus inadequate. Having first explained the nature of seemings, in this essay I utilize Kelly’s own understanding of the four major roles of evidence and argue that the phenomenal conception can play each one. Experience is a good candidate for evidence. (shrink)

People seem more divided than ever before over social and political issues, entrenched in their existing beliefs and unwilling to change them. Empirical research on mechanisms driving this resistance to belief change has focused on a limited set of well-known, charged, contentious issues and has not accounted for deliberation over reasons and arguments in belief formation prior to experimental sessions. With a large, heterogeneous sample (N = 3,001), we attempt to overcome these existing problems, and we investigate the causes and (...) consequences of resistance to belief change for five diverse and less contentious socio-political issues. After participants chose initially to support or oppose a given socio-political position, they were provided with reasons favoring their chosen position (affirming reasons), reasons favoring the other, unchosen position (conflicting reasons), or all reasons for both positions (reasons for both sides). Our results indicate that participants are more likely to stick with their initial decisions than to change them no matter which reasons are considered, and that this resistance to belief change is likely due to a motivated, biased evaluation of the reasons to support their initial beliefs (prior-belief bias). More specifically, they rated affirming reasons more favorably than conflicting reasons—even after accounting for reported prior knowledge about the issue, the novelty of the reasons presented, and the reported strategy used to make the initial decision. In many cases, participants who did not change their positions tended to become more confident in the superiority of their positions after considering many reasons for both sides. (shrink)

I argue, contra Mohan Matthen, that at least some aesthetic pleasures arising from the appreciation of aesthetic features of artworks are what he calls ‘r-pleasures’ as opposed to ‘f-pleasures’—and moreover, that the paradigm aesthetic pleasure appears to be an r-pleasure on Matthen's terms. I then argue that talk of r- and f-pleasures does not distinguish different kinds, but two different features of pleasure; so this supposed distinction cannot be used to characterize a sui generis aesthetic pleasure.

Interpersonal aggregation involves the combining and weighing of benefits and losses to multiple individuals in the course of determining what ought to be done. Most consequentialists embrace thoroughgoing interpersonal aggregation, the view that any large benefit to each of a few people can be morally outweighed by allocating any smaller benefit to each of many others, so long as this second group is sufficiently large. This would permit letting one person die in order to cure some number of mild headaches (...) instead. Most non-consequentialists reject thoroughgoing interpersonal aggregation despite also believing it is permissible to let one person die in order to prevent many cases of paraplegia instead. Non-consequentialists defend this asymmetry largely on the basis of intuition, and some rely on the notion of relevance to formalize the grounding intuitions. This article seeks to clarify and strengthen the non-consequentialist notion of relevance by engaging with three objections to it. (shrink)

Having positive moral traits is central to one’s sense of self, and people generally are motivated to maintain a positive view of the self in the present. But it remains unclear how people foster a positive, morally good view of the self in the present. We suggest that recollecting and reflecting on moral and immoral actions from the personal past jointly help to construct a morally good view of the current self in complementary ways. More specifically, across four studies we (...) investigated the extent to which people believe they have changed over time after recollecting their own moral or immoral behaviors from the personal past. Our results indicate that recollecting past immoral actions is associated with stronger impressions of dissimilarity and change in the sense of self over time than recollecting past moral actions. These effects held for diverse domains of morality (i.e., honesty/dishonesty, helping/harming, fairness/unfairness, and loyalty/disloyalty), and they remained even after accounting for objective, calendar time. Further supporting a motivational explanation, these effects held when people recollected their own past actions but not when they recollected the actions of other people. (shrink)

In a previous work we studied, from the perspective ofAlgebraic Logic, the implicationless fragment of a logic introduced by O. Arieli and A. Avron using a class of bilattice-based logical matrices called logical bilattices. Here we complete this study by considering the Arieli-Avron logic in the full language, obtained by adding two implication connectives to the standard bilattice language. We prove that this logic is algebraizable and investigate its algebraic models, which turn out to be distributive bilattices with additional implication (...) operations. We axiomatize and state several results on these new classes of algebras, in particular representation theorems analogue to the well-known one for interlaced bilattices. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical literature on health inequalities seeks to establish the superiority of one or another conception of luck egalitarianism. In recent years, however, an increasing number of self-avowed egalitarian philosophers have proposed replacing luck egalitarianism with alternatives that stress the moral relevance of distinct relationships, rather than the moral relevance of good or bad luck. After briefly explaining why I am not attracted to luck egalitarianism, I seek in this chapter to distinguish and clarify three views that have (...) been characterized in the philosophical literature as forms of relational egalitarianism. I call these three relational views equality of treatment, equality of concern, and social egalitarianism. I will explain why each claims to be a form of egalitarianism and why these three views should not be seen as competitors. I will argue that each brand of relational egalitarianism describes a plausible plank of distributive justice that bears on the evaluation of health inequalities and on the political institutions that create, sustain, or exacerbate them. To illustrate this pluralistic relational egalitarian approach, I will draw on a case study by Horton and Barker (this volume) to discuss how each of the three planks might be brought to bear on the evaluation of oral health disparities among the children of migrant Latino farmworkers in California. (shrink)

We offer a brief characterization of creativity, followed by a review of some of the reasons people have been skeptical about the possibility of explaining creativity. We then survey some of the recent work on creativity that is naturalistic in the sense that it presumes creativity is natural (as opposed to magical, occult, or supernatural) and is therefore amenable to scientific inquiry. This work is divided into two categories. The broader category is empirical philosophy, which draws on empirical research while (...) addressing questions that have traditionally been regarded as philosophical. The second category is experimental philosophy, a special branch of empirical philosophy in which experiments are designed (by philosophers) with the explicit purpose of addressing philosophical questions. All of this highlights the relative theoretical neglect of creativity, while at the same time suggesting ample opportunity for experimentally minded philosophers to break new ground. (shrink)

This study examined the effectiveness of video-based instruction (VBI) as a learning remediation strategy in teaching Laws of Thermodynamics among Prospective Science Teachers at Bulacan State University. The researchers employed – a one-group pretest–posttest design to assess the 35 prospective science teachers who were purposively selected. More so, data was gathered through researcher-made pretest-posttest achievement tests and an adapted Likert survey questionnaire. The data was treated descriptively and inferentially. The findings showed that VBI as a learning remediation strategy positively affected (...) the preservice teachers’ achievement. In addition, data shows a significant difference between the pretest and posttest in teaching the laws of thermodynamics. The ease of use of VBI as learning remediation in teaching laws of thermodynamics in terms of pedagogical content, individual learning focus, ability to work at pace, and increased engagement was very effective. The learning achievement of the prospective science teachers was significantly related to the ease of use of VBI as a learning remediation. However, it was observed to have a high positive association. Future use of VBI can enhance the prospective science teacher’s competence in using VBI in teaching science subjects. (shrink)

Open-content communities that focus on co-creation without requirements for entry have to face the issue of institutional trust in contributors. This research investigates the various ways in which these communities manage this issue. It is shown that communities of open-source software—continue to—rely mainly on hierarchy (reserving write-access for higher echelons), which substitutes (the need for) trust. Encyclopedic communities, though, largely avoid this solution. In the particular case of Wikipedia, which is confronted with persistent vandalism, another arrangement has been pioneered instead. (...) Trust (i.e. full write-access) is ‘backgrounded’ by means of a permanent mobilization of Wikipedians to monitor incoming edits. Computational approaches have been developed for the purpose, yielding both sophisticated monitoring tools that are used by human patrollers, and bots that operate autonomously. Measures of reputation are also under investigation within Wikipedia; their incorporation in monitoring efforts, as an indicator of the trustworthiness of editors, is envisaged. These collective monitoring efforts are interpreted as focusing on avoiding possible damage being inflicted on Wikipedian spaces, thereby being allowed to keep the discretionary powers of editing intact for all users. Further, the essential differences between backgrounding and substituting trust are elaborated. Finally it is argued that the Wikipedian monitoring of new edits, especially by its heavy reliance on computational tools, raises a number of moral questions that need to be answered urgently. (shrink)

An important artistic topic of Italian Renaissance painting was the rendering of the human figure. As leading actors in a painted narrative, figures had to convince beholders of the reality of the matter depicted with appropriated attitudes and gestures. This article is about two ways of drawing or rather constructing the human figure artists developed to achieve this goal. The first was only an adaptation to an old method: because of the rather simple and coarse elements used, constructions often resulted (...) in faulty pictures and were for that matter often criticized. As this article will show, the second method involved a new and very successful drawing skill, which not just required a different kind of knowledge of visual forms but of procedures of moving the hand, too. (shrink)

Efficiency and equity are central concepts for the normative assessment of health policy. Drawing on the work of academic philosophers and philosophically sophisticated economists, this article identifies important philosophical questions implicated by the notions of efficiency and equity and then summarizes influential answers to them. Promising avenues for further philosophical research are also highlighted, especially in the context of health equity and its elusive ethical foundations.

Physics tells us that the world that we live in is “really” composed of vast numbers of tiny particles, defined and individuated by their mass, charge, velocity and position. That is all there is, the rest being empty space. In contrast the world that we interact with in our every day lives is composed of rooms with windows, people and cats, and plates filled with milk and cornflakes. It is a world of individual objects and stuffs, most of which can (...) be effortlessly identified and labelled as being of a particular kind. Like an illustration in a child’s reader, we could look around our environment and attach labels to all of the objects and kinds of things around us. (shrink)

This essay proposes that Socrates practiced various spiritual exercises, including meditation, and that this Socratic practice of meditation was habitual, aimed at cultivating emotional self-control and existential preparedness. Contemporary research in neurobiology supports the view that intentional mental actions, including meditation, have a profound impact on brain activity, neuroplasticity, and help engender emotional self-control. This impact on brain activity is confirmed via technological developments, a prime example of how technology benefits humanity. Socrates attains the balanced emotional self-control that Alcibiades describes (...) in the Symposium because of the sustained mental effort he exerts that directly impacts his brain and his emotional and philosophical life. The essay concludes that Socratic meditative practices aimed at manifesting true dignity as human beings within the complexities of a technological world offer a promising model of self-care worthy of embracing today. (shrink)

This addendum presents results that confound some commonly made claims about the sorts of environments in which the performance of TTB exceeds that of Franklin's rule, and vice versa.

How may human agents come to trust (sophisticated) artificial agents? At present, since the trust involved is non-normative, this would seem to be a slow process, depending on the outcomes of the transactions. Some more options may soon become available though. As debated in the literature, humans may meet (ro)bots as they are embedded in an institution. If they happen to trust the institution, they will also trust them to have tried out and tested the machines in their back corridors; (...) as a consequence, they approach the robots involved as being trustworthy (“zones of trust”). Properly speaking, users rely on the overall accountability of the institution. Besides this option we explore some novel ways for trust development: trust becomes normatively laden and thereby the mechanism of exclusive reliance on the normative force of trust (as-if trust) may come into play - the efficacy of which has already been proven for persons meeting face-to-face or over the Internet (virtual trust). For one thing, machines may evolve into moral machines, or machines skilled in the art of deception. While both developments might seem to facilitate proper trust and turn as-if trust into a feasible option, they are hardly to be taken seriously (while being science-fiction, immoral, or both). For another, the new trend in robotics is towards coactivity between human and machine operators in a team (away from making robots as autonomous as possible). Inside the team trust is a necessity for smooth operations. In support of this, humans in particular need to be able to develop and maintain accurate mental models of their machine counterparts. Nevertheless, the trust involved is bound to remain nonnormative. It is argued, though, that excellent opportunities exist to build relations of trust toward outside users who are pondering their reliance on the coactive team. The task of managing this trust has to be allotted to human operators of the team, who operate as linking pin between the outside world and the team. Since the robotic team has now been turned into an anthropomorphic team, users may well develop normative trust towards them; correspondingly, trusting the team in as-if fashion becomes feasible. (shrink)

Extant theoretical work on the political resource curse implies that dependence on resource revenues should decrease autocracies’ likelihood of democratizing but not necessarily affect democracies’ chances of survival. Yet most previous empirical studies estimate models that are ill-suited to address this claim. We improve upon earlier studies, estimating a dynamic logit model that interacts a continuous measure of resource dependence with an indicator of regime type using data from 166 countries, covering the period from 1816-2006. We find that an increase (...) in resource dependence at time t - 1 increases the likelihood of autocratic persistence at t, but has no appreciable effect on democratic survival. We go beyond existing empirical studies to show that increases in resource dependence have persistent and substantial cumulative effects on autocracies' likelihood of becoming democratic over the long-term, showing that the total effect of resource dependence on regime type is much larger than the short-term (one period) effect indicates. (shrink)

An important question about moral progress is what causes it. One of the most popular proposed mechanisms is moral reasoning: moral progress often happens because lots of people reason their way to improved moral beliefs. Authors who defend moral reasoning as a cause of moral progress have relied on two broad lines of argument: the general and the specific line. The general line presents evidence that moral reasoning is in general a powerful mechanism of moral belief change, while the specific (...) line tries to establish that moral reasoning can explain specific historical examples of moral progress. In this paper, we examine these lines in detail, using Kumar and Campbell’s (2022, A Better Ape: The Evolution of the Moral Mind and How It Made Us Human. Oxford University Press) model of rational moral progress to sharpen our focus. For each line, we explain the empirical assumptions it makes; we then argue that the available evidence supports none of these assumptions. We conclude that at this point, we have no idea if moral reasoning causes moral progress. (shrink)

The paper contains some algebraic results on several varieties of algebras having an (interlaced) bilattice reduct. Some of these algebras have already been studied in the literature (for instance bilattices with conflation, introduced by M. Fit- ting), while others arose from the algebraic study of O. Arieli and A. Avron’s bilattice logics developed in the third author’s PhD dissertation. We extend the representation theorem for bounded interlaced bilattices (proved, among others, by A. Avron) to un- bounded bilattices and prove analogous (...) representation theorems for the other classes of bilattices considered. We use these results to establish categorical equivalences between these structures and well-known varieties of lattices. (shrink)

Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the agricultural sector by enhancing productivity and sustainability. This paper explores the transformative impact of AI technologies on agriculture, focusing on their applications in precision farming, predictive analytics, and automation. AI-driven tools enable more efficient management of crops and resources, leading to improved yields and reduced environmental impact. The paper examines key AI technologies, including machine learning algorithms for crop monitoring, robotics for automated planting and harvesting, and data analytics for optimizing resource use. Additionally, (...) it addresses challenges such as data privacy, technology adoption barriers, and the ethical implications of AI in farming. By integrating AI into agricultural practices, the industry can achieve greater efficiency and sustainability, paving the way for future advancements. (shrink)

We propose in this article some new elements for the interpretation of Heraclitus' doctrine, concerning in particular the role of the opposition of contraries as generator of harmony, that results from Fragments 8DK and 51DK. This interpretation is based on the conceptual tool of matrices of concepts. After having described the basic elements that govern the latter, we set out to define in this conceptual framework the notions of opposition and contrary, as well as of harmony. This allows us to (...) give an interpretation and also a justification of Heraclitus' specific doctrine, according to which the opposition of opposites generates harmony. (shrink)

This paper does three interrelated things. First, it argues that the universalism that forms the target of criticism and attack by decolonial theorists from the Global South is a debased form of universalism, what might be termed “ethnocentric universalism.” Second, equipped with a conceptual grip on ethnocentric universalism, it shows that the picture on which ethnocentric universalism confers some innocuous epistemic privilege to members of dominant groups is not quite accurate—ethnocentric universalism is incompatible with the epistemic flourishing of members of (...) dominant groups. And third, based on that claim, and the additional consideration that ethnocentric universalism equally undermines the epistemic flourishing of members of historically marginalized groups, it proposes an emancipatory framework for engaging with it. (shrink)

“Applying the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to 21st Century Art” was delivered to the 2009 Congress of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) in Dublin as a guide to critical thinking through a paradigm shift. This new paper uncovers a new critical theory in the form of a formula that has been successfully applied to a universal appraisal of arts across all boundaries, whether they be gender, discipline or culture. The configuration predicted by Pauli as arising from under the collapsed (...) quantum wave is sourced in an ancient icon: the hieros gamos. As her functional role as newspaper critic shifted to a more esoteric passage as performance artist/curator/blogger, the author spent 14 years theorizing; and another 14 years applying a new critical theory to contemporary art. Her (R)evolution series for the Huffington Post places the containment of the hieros gamos at the forefront of contemporary art practice. The goal is the embodiment of Jean Gebser’s 360-degree aperspectival awareness, whereas the shadow is contacted and absorbed into the very body of art. This paper will reveal the strategy for determining holistic art forms containing the 21st century icon that Pauli understood would arise from under the collapsed quantum wave. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Elizabeth Anderson’s application of the epistemological idiom of mētis to the debate over the equal status of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge in the academic curriculum. Against the denial of this equal status by critics of indigenous knowledge or science, Anderson defends what one might term a conciliatory view, the view, roughly, that indigenous knowledge meets the criteria of scientific knowledge presupposed by the critics of the equal status of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge in the (...) academic curriculum, and it is continuous with agroecological form of mainstream scientific inquiry. I argue that the conciliatory view does not rest substantively on mētis as an epistemological idiom since the view is based on the direct conceptual relation between the notion of indigenous knowledge and the notion of scientific knowledge or inquiry. More importantly, the view amounts to appealing to the critics of the equal status of indigenous knowledge on the terms of those critics and leaves unchallenged those very core assumptions that ground their denial of the equal status of indigenous knowledge in the first place. Building on her fruitful analysis of mētis, I attempt a sketch of an alternative view that vindicates the equal status of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge in the academic curriculum, but which avoids those drawbacks. (shrink)

Should a principle of charity be applied to the interpretation of the colour concepts exercised in visual experience? We think not. We shall argue, for one thing, that the grounds for applying a principle of charity are lacking in the case of colour concepts. More importantly, we shall argue that attempts at giving the experience of colour a charitable interpretation either fail to respect obvious features of that experience or fail to interpret it charitably, after all. Charity to visual experience (...) is therefore no motive for resisting the natural, Galilean response to a scientific understanding of light and vision. The best interpretation of colour experience ends up convicting it of widespread and systematic error. (shrink)

In the replies to my critics that follow I offer a more detailed account of the specific papers that they discuss or examine. The papers that they are especially concerned with are: “The Material World and Natural Religion in Hume’s Treatise” (Ryan) [Essay 3], “Hume’s Skepticism and the Problem of Atheism” (Fosl) [Essay 12], and “Hume’s Philosophy of Irreligion and the Myth of British Empiricism (Gautier) [Essay 16].

Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy is a collection of essays that are all concerned with major figures and topics in the early modern philosophy. Most of the essays are concerned, more specifically, with the philosophy of David Hume (1711-1776). The sixteen essays included in this collection are divided into five parts. These parts are arranged under the headings of: (1) Metaphysics and Epistemology; (2) Free Will and Moral Luck; (3) Ethics, Virtue and Optimism; (4) Skepticism, Religion and Atheism; and (...) (5) Irreligion and the Unity of Hume’s Thought. A particularly important theme running through many of these essays is the subject of Hume’s irreligious aims and intentions. The fifth and final part of the collection is devoted to an articulation and defence of this specific understanding of Hume’s philosophical thought. (shrink)

For Rawls, the demands of justice compete with moral and religious obligations that are part of citizens’ comprehensive doctrines. The ways we love are shaped by our comprehensive doctrines; however, love can also stand in opposition to our moral and religious beliefs. I will argue that love – spousal, familial and associational – constitutes its own register of values along with its own set of obligations. For this reason love confronts not only our moral and religious beliefs, it also confronts (...) the demands and requirements of justice. Rawls has worked out a negotiated peace between the obligations of justice and the demands of citizens’ comprehensive doctrines in the form of an overlapping consensus on a free-standing political conception of justice. I will argue that in Rawls’s philosophy, justice has not yet made peace with love. (shrink)

Dans ce qui suit, je m'attache à présenter les éléments d'une doctrine philosophique, qui peut être définie comme un contextualisme dialectique. Je m'efforce tout d'abord de définir les éléments constitutifs de cette doctrine, à travers les dualités et pôles duaux, le principe d'indifférence dialectique et le biais d'uni-polarisation. Je m'attache ensuite à souligner l'intérêt spécifique de cette doctrine au sein d'un domaine particulier de la méta-philosophie : la méthodologie utilisée pour la résolution des paradoxes philosophiques. Je décris enfin une application (...) de cette dernière aux paradoxes suivants : le paradoxe de Hempel, le paradoxe de l'examen-surprise et l'argument de l'Apocalypse. (shrink)

The present article is published in Proche-Orient Chrétien, N.66, VOL.3-4, JAN. 2017, USJ: Beirut, pp. 425-430. It is a philosophical review of Philippe Capelle-Dumont and Yannick Courtel book “Religion et Liberté” that fetches the records of the First International Symposium of the Francophone Society of Philosophy of Religion about the two concepts Religion and Freedom. On one hand, religion has always been considered as a pole of practices and references contrary to freedom declining a dependence on a "binding doctrine"; on (...) the other hand, religion has undergone several political representations in the many spaces of cultural, social and international life which is urgent to re-examine. The article proposes a synthesis of the conferences of Philippe Capelle-Dumont, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean Greisch, Joseph O’Leary, François Chenet, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Francis Jacques, Pierluigi Valenza, Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Yannick Courtel and Jean Grondin who concludes with the “freedom to philosophize about religion”. (shrink)

English translation of an article originally published in French in Liber Amicorum Pascal Engel, J. Dutant, G. Fassio & A. Meylan (eds.), University of Geneva, 2014, pp. 581-608. In what follows, I strive to present the elements of a philosophical doctrine, which can be defined as dialectical contextualism. I proceed first to define the elements of this doctrine: dualities and polar contraries, the principle of dialectical indifference and the one-sidedness bias. I emphasize then the special importance of this doctrine in (...) one specific field of meta-philosophy: the methodology for solving philosophical paradoxes. Finally, I describe several applications of this methodology on the following paradoxes: Hempel's paradox, the surprise examination paradox and the Doomsday Argument. (shrink)

In a previous paper (Compléments pour une théorie des distorsions cognitives, Journal de Thérapie Comportementale et Cognitive, 2007), we did present some elements aimed at contributing to a general theory of cognitive distortions. The latter elements, based on the reference class, the duality and the system of taxa, are applied here to generalised anxiety disorder. This allows to describe, on the one hand, the specific distortions related to generalised anxiety disorder, consistently with recent work emphasising the role played by uncertain (...) situations with regard to future events. On the second hand, these elements allow to define one type of structured reasoning, of inductive nature, which contributes to the formation and maintenance of anxious ideas. (shrink)

This paper considers the question of “atheism” as it arises in Hume’s _Dialogues_. It argues that the concept of “atheism” involves several signficiant ambiguities that are indicative of philosophical and interpretive disagreements of a more substantial nature. It defends the view that Philo’s general sceptical orientation accurately represents Hume’s own “irreligious” and “atheistic” commitments, both in the _Dialogues_ and in his other (“earlier”) writings. While Hume was plainly a “speculative atheist”, his “practical atheism” was targeted more narrowly against “superstition” - (...) as opposed to deism or religion of a more “philosophical” kind. (shrink)

If the sun were to suddenly go out we wouldn't know it for 8 minutes. But if Alice is sitting in the middle of the sun and measures one of a pair of entangled particles and we measure the other one, what direction she measures her particle in has instantaneous effects on the one we measure. This is resolved in the Presentist Fragmentalist interpretation of QM.

In this paper, I give a brief overview of ideas from Reformed Epistemology, and the relationship between faith, evidence, and belief. I discuss what makes belief in God rationally warranted, and how reformed epistemology strikes a middle ground between fideism and evidentialism. In effect, reformed epistemology avoids the fideist idea that belief in God must be taken on "blind faith," but also avoids some of the epistemic issues present in evidentialism, such as its self-referential incoherence. The reformed epistemologist says belief (...) in God is rational, but not for the reasons demanded by evidentialists. (shrink)

What was René Girard’s attitude towards philosophy? What philosophers influenced him? What stance did he take in the philosophical debates of his time? What are the philosophical questions raised by René Girard’s anthropology? In this interview, Paul Dumouchel sheds light on these issues.

This is a contribution to a Book symposium on The Limits of Free Will: Selected Essays by Paul Russell. Russell provides replies to three critics of The Limits of Free Will. The first reply is to Robert Wallace and focuses on the question of whether there is a conflict between the core compatibilist and pessimist components of the "critical compatibilist" position that Russell has advanced. The second reply is to Angela Smith's discussion of the "narrow" interpretation of moral responsibility (...) responsibility (as defended by R. Jay Wallace) and how best to respond to it. The third and last reply is concerned with Christopher Bennett's criticism of Russell's views concerning "motivational scepticism" and the possibility of pure practical reasons. (shrink)

People more frequently select norm-violating factors, relative to norm- conforming ones, as the cause of some outcome. Until recently, this abnormal-selection effect has been studied using retrospective vignette-based paradigms. We use a novel set of video stimuli to investigate this effect for prospective causal judgments—i.e., judgments about the cause of some future outcome. Four experiments show that people more frequently select norm- violating factors, relative to norm-conforming ones, as the cause of some future outcome. We show that the abnormal-selection effects (...) are not primarily explained by the perception of agency (Experiment 4). We discuss these results in relation to recent efforts to model causal judgment. (shrink)

In the 6th century, Paul the Persian used his own pen to write a summary of Aristotle's Peri Hermeneias in the Persian language. Severus Sebokht translated it into Syriac. This book is a transcription and translation of the Syriac manuscript of Paul the Persian's Peri Hermeneias and a comparison of it with Aristotle's original Greek text.

Recent work in contemporary compatibilist theory displays considerable sophistication and subtlety when compared with the earlier theories of classical compatibilism. Two distinct lines of thought have proved especially influential and illuminating. The first developed around the general hypothesis that moral sentiments or reactive attitudes are fundamental for understanding the nature and conditions of moral responsibility. The other important development is found in recent compatibilist accounts of rational self-control or reason responsiveness. Strictly speaking, these two lines of thought have developed independent (...) of each other. However, in the past decade or so they have been fused together in several prominent statements of compatibilist theory. I will refer to theories that combine these two elements in this way as RS theories. RS theories face a number of familiar difficulties that relate to each of their two components. Beyond this, they also face a distinct set of problems concerning how these two main components relate or should be integrated. My concerns in this paper focus primarily on this set of problems. According to one version of RS compatibilism, the role of moral sentiments is limited to explaining what is required for holding an agent responsible. In contrast with this, the role of reason responsiveness is to explain what moral capacities are required for an agent to be responsible, one who is a legitimate or fair target of our moral sentiments. More specifically, according to this view, moral sense is not required for rational selfcontrol or reason responsiveness. There is, therefore, no requirement that the responsible agent has some capacity to feel moral sentiment. Contrary to this view, I argue that a responsible agent must be capable of holding herself and others responsible. Failing this, an agent’s powers of rational self-control will be both limited and impaired. In so far as holding responsible requires moral sense, it follows that being responsible also requires moral sense. (shrink)

An important aspect of moral expertise is moral sensitivity, which is the ability to be sensitive to the presence of morally salient features in a context. This requires being able to see and acquire the morally relevant information, as well as organise and interpret it, so that you can undertake the related work of moral judgement, focus (or motivation) and action. As a distinct but interrelated component of ethical expertise, moral sensitivity can and must be trained and educated. However, despite (...) its importance to moral education, there has been comparatively little discussion about the role of ethical sensitivity and the ways that it can be trained within the context of Kant’s, and Kantian, ethics. This paper seeks to address this gap. While Kant does not explicitly focus in detail on moral sensitivity, by breaking sensitivity down into seven distinct aspects through drawing on the Four Component Model, we are able to identify a wealth of resources in Kant’s work from which we can con- struct an account of moral sensitivity education that draws on his underlying moral theory. (shrink)