How social media impacts the autonomy of its users is a topic of increasing focus. However, much of the literature that explores these impacts fails to engage in depth with the philosophical literature on autonomy. This has resulted in a failure to consider the full range of impacts that social media might have on autonomy. A deeper consideration of these impacts is thus needed, given the importance of both autonomy as a moral concept and social media as a feature of (...) contemporary life. By drawing on this philosophical literature, we argue that autonomy is broadly a matter of developing autonomy competencies, having authentic ends and control over key aspects of your own life, and not being manipulated, coerced, and controlled by others. We show how the autonomy of users of social media can be disrespected and harmed through the control that social media can have over its users’ data, attention, and behaviour. We conclude by discussing various recommendations to better regulate social media. (shrink)

Stereotypes shape inferences in philosophical thought, political discourse, and everyday life. These inferences are routinely made when thinkers engage in language comprehension or production: We make them whenever we hear, read, or formulate stories, reports, philosophical case-descriptions, or premises of arguments – on virtually any topic. These inferences are largely automatic: largely unconscious, non-intentional, and effortless. Accordingly, they shape our thought in ways we can properly understand only by complementing traditional forms of philosophical analysis with experimental methods from psycholinguistics. This (...) paper seeks, first, to bring out the wider philosophical relevance of stereotypical inference, well beyond familiar topics like gender and race. Second, we wish to provide philosophers with a toolkit to experimentally study these ubiquitous inferences and what intuitions they may generate. This paper explains what stereotypes are, and why they matter to current and traditional concerns in philosophy – experimental, analytic, and applied. It then assembles a psycholinguistic toolkit and demonstrates through two studies how potentially questionnaire-based measures can be combined with process measures to garner evidence for specific stereotypical inferences and study when they ‘go through’ and influence our thinking. (shrink)

When a belief is self-fulfilling, having it guarantees its truth. When a belief is self-defeating, having it guarantees its falsity. These are the cases of “self-impacting” beliefs to be examined below. Scenarios of self-defeating beliefs can yield apparently dilemmatic situations in which we seem to lack sufficient reason to have any belief whatsoever. Scenarios of self-fulfilling beliefs can yield apparently dilemmatic situations in which we seem to lack reason to have any one belief over another. Both scenarios have been used (...) independently to challenge Evidentialism, on which what we may rationally believe is all and only what fits our current evidence. Here we tie the two scenarios together and explore what a knowledge-sensitive evidentialist approach to one implies for the other. (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)

Recent findings in experimental philosophy have revealed that people attribute intentionality, belief, desire, knowledge, and blame asymmetrically to side- effects depending on whether the agent who produces the side-effect violates or adheres to a norm. Although the original (and still common) test for this effect involved a chairman helping or harming the environment, hardly any of these findings have been applied to business ethics. We review what little exploration of the implications for business ethics has been done. Then, we present (...) new experimental results that expand the attribution asymmetry to virtue and vice. We also examine whether it matters to people that an effect was produced as a primary or side- effect, as well as how consumer habits might be affected by this phenomenon. These results lead to the conclusion that it appears to be in a businessperson’s self-interest to be virtuous. (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)

Animal ethicists have recently debated the ethical questions raised by disenhancing animals to improve their welfare. Here, we focus on the particular case of breeding hens for commercial egg-laying systems to become blind, in order to benefit their welfare. Many people find breeding blind hens intuitively repellent, yet ‘welfare-only’ positions appear to be committed to endorsing this possibility if it produces welfare gains. We call this the ‘Blind Hens’ Challenge’. In this paper, we argue that there are both empirical and (...) theoretical reasons why even those adopting ‘welfare-only’ views should be concerned about breeding blind hens. But we also argue that alternative views, which (for example) claim that it is important to respect the telos or rights of an animal, do not offer a more convincing solution to questions raised by the possibility of disenhancing animals for their own benefit. (shrink)

There has been a recent surge of research interest in videogames of moral engagement for entertainment, advocacy and education. We have seen a wealth of analysis and several theoretical models proposed, but experimental evaluation has been scarce. One of the difficulties lies in the measurement of moral engagement. How do we meaningfully measure whether players are engaging with and affected by the moral choices in the games they play? In this paper, we survey the various standard psychometric instruments from the (...) moral psychology literature and discuss how they might be applied in the evaluation of games. (shrink)

While Philosophy for/with Children (P4wC) provides a better alternative to the usual ‘banking’ model of education, questions have been raised regarding its applicability in non-western contexts. Despite its adherence to the ideals of democratic dialogue, not all members of a Community of Inquiry (COI) will be disposed to participate in the inquiry, not because they are incapable of doing so, but because they are positioned inferiorly within the group thereby affecting their efforts to speak out on topics that are meaningful (...) to them. In this article, I claim that it is essential to integrate positionality in P4wC research/practice. Aside from its role in helping a practitioner/researcher choose the appropriate method and materials that match the unique contexts of children, it also increases one’s awareness of the subtle forms of epistemic injustice that could leak in the COI, as well as the other subtle ways in which children are marginalized. In this regard, a P4wC researcher/practitioner must have a higher degree of sensitivity towards her positionality as this inevitably gets entangled with the positionality of children. I present some ‘areas’ in which the importance of positionality in the COI manifests, namely, restructuring classroom power relations, navigating a multi-ethnic classroom, facilitating meaning-making, and modeling reflective thinking. (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)

The basing demand on doxastic justification is a widely held and highly intuitive dogma of contemporary epistemology. In Silva [2015, AJP], I argued that the dialectical significance of this dogma is severely limited by our lack of independent grounds for endorsing it. Oliveira [2015, AJP] sought to defend the basing demand on doxastic justification. Here I explain why Oliveira’s attempted defense of the basing demand misses its mark. I also briefly suggest that there is an alternative way of defending the (...) basing demand. The alternative way is reconciliatory: it shows that most epistemologists may have been right to insist on such a demand, but perhaps still wrong to treat it as a dialectically powerful tool in the assessment of certain substantive epistemological theories. (shrink)

This article explores the notion of pedagogical authority as exercised in the Community of Inquiry, the method for facilitating Philosophy for Children (P4C). It argues that the teachers’ pedagogical authority in a Community of Inquiry is not predicated on their intellectual superiority or status. Rather it finds its legitimacy in their role as instigators of students’ thinking skills, which are assumed to be already possessed by the learners. This thesis is discussed in relation to Rancière’s concept of the dissociation of (...) the will and the intellect, which is treated here as conceptual complement to the existing interpretation of pedagogical authority as understood and practiced by scholars in the field of P4C. (shrink)

In this essay, we consider the formal and ontological implications of one specific and intensely contested dialectical context from which Deleuze’s thinking about structural ideal genesis visibly arises. This is the formal/ontological dualism between the principles, ἀρχαί, of the One (ἕν) and the Indefinite/Unlimited Dyad (ἀόριστος δυάς), which is arguably the culminating achievement of the later Plato’s development of a mathematical dialectic.3 Following commentators including Lautman, Oskar Becker, and Kenneth M. Sayre, we argue that the duality of the One and (...) the Indefinite Dyad provides, in the later Plato, a unitary theoretical formalism accounting, by means of an iterated mixing without synthesis, for the structural origin and genesis of both supersensible Ideas and the sensible particulars which participate in them. As these commentators also argue, this duality furthermore provides a maximally general answer to the problem of temporal becoming that runs through Plato’s corpus: that of the relationship of the flux of sensory experiences to the fixity and order of what is thinkable in itself. Additionally, it provides a basis for understanding some of the famously puzzling claims about forms, numbers, and the principled genesis of both attributed to Plato by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, and plausibly underlies the late Plato’s deep considerations of the structural paradoxes of temporal change and becoming in the Parmenides, the Sophist, and the Philebus. After extracting this structure of duality and developing some of its formal, ontological, and metalogical features, we consider some of its specific implications for a thinking of time and ideality that follows Deleuze in a formally unitary genetic understanding of structural difference. These implications of Plato’s duality include not only those of the constitution of specific theoretical domains and problematics, but also implicate the reflexive problematic of the ideal determinants of the form of a unitary theory as such. We argue that the consequences of the underlying duality on the level of content are ultimately such as to raise, on the level of form, the broader reflexive problem of the basis for its own formal or meta-theoretical employment. We conclude by arguing for the decisive and substantive presence of a proper “Platonism” of the Idea in Deleuze, and weighing the potential for a substantive recuperation of Plato’s duality in the context of a dialectical affirmation of what Deleuze recognizes as the “only” ontological proposition that has ever been uttered. This is the proposition of the univocity of Being, whereby “being is said in the same sense, everywhere and always,” but is said (both problematically and decisively) of difference itself. (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)

I explain why, from the perspective of knowledge-centric anti-luck epistemology, objective act consequentialist theories of ethics imply skepticism about the moral status of our prospective actions and also tend to be self-defeating, undermining the justification of consequentialist theories themselves. For according to knowledge-centric anti-luck epistemology there are modal anti-luck demands on both knowledge and justification, and it turns out that our beliefs about the moral status of our prospective actions are almost never able to satisfy these demands if objective act (...) consequentialism is true. This kind of applied moral skepticism introduces problematic limits on our ability to use objective act consequentialism’s explanatory power as evidence for its truth. This is, in part, a product of higher-order defeat as I explain in the final section. There is, however, a silver lining for objective act consequentialists. For there is at least one type of objective act consequentialism, prior existence consequentialism, that is poised to avoid at least some of the epistemic problems discussed in this paper. (shrink)

This paper surveys Bolzano's Beyträge zu einer begründeteren Darstellung der Mathematik (Contributions to a better-grounded presentation of mathematics) on the 200th anniversary of its publication. The first and only published issue presents a definition of mathematics, a classification of its subdisciplines, and an essay on mathematical method, or logic. Though underdeveloped in some areas (including,somewhat surprisingly, in logic), it is nonetheless a radically innovative work, where Bolzano presents a remarkably modern account of axiomatics and the epistemology of the formal sciences. (...) We also discuss the second, unfinished and unpublished issue, where Bolzano develops his views on universal mathematics. Here we find the beginnings of his theory of collections, for him the most fundamental of the mathematical disciplines. Though not exactly the same as the later Cantorian set theory, Bolzano's theory of collections was used in very similar ways in mathematics, notably in analysis. In retrospect, Bolzano's debut in philosophy was a remarkably successful one, though its fruits would only become generally known much later. (shrink)

_Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism_ is a classic critique of France's policies in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s and inspired much subsequent writing on colonialism, post-colonialism, politics, and literature. It includes Sartre's celebrated preface to Fanon's classic _Wretched_ _of the Earth. Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism _ had a profound impact on French intellectual life, inspiring many other influential French thinkers and critics of colonialism such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida.

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 special issue of Games and Culture focuses on the intersection between video games and ethics. This introduction briefly sets out the key research questions in the research field and identifies trends in the articles included in this special issue.

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.

What are the freedom-relevant conditions necessary for someone to be a morally responsible person? I examine several key authors beginning with Harry Frankfurt that have contributed to this debate in recent years, and then look back to the writings or Søren Kierkegaard to provide a solution to the debate. In this project I investigate the claims of semi-compatibilism and argue that while its proponents have identified a fundamental question concerning free will and moral responsibility—namely, that the agential properties necessary for (...) moral responsibility ascriptions are found in scenarios where the agent acts on her own as opposed to her action resulting from freedom undermining external causes such as manipulation, phobias, etc.—they have failed to show that the freedom-relevant agential properties identified in those actual-sequence scenarios are compatible with causal determinism. My argument is that only a voluntarist-libertarian theory can adequately account for the kinds of cases that the semicompatibilist identify. I argue that there are three freedom-relevant conditions necessary for someone to be a morally responsible person: a hierarchical understanding of human desires [specifically and mental states generally], an incompatibilist (non-deterministic) understanding of human action, and a historical understanding of character development. The ability to reflect critically about one’s own desires and emotions, and thus to have a kind of self-knowledge and understanding with regard to the springs of one’s own actions, is required to make it possible for the agent to be the “source” of her own actions and character. The non-deterministic understanding of human action is needed for a similar reason: if determinism is true, then every action a person performs can be ultimately traced to and exhaustively explained in terms of factors outside the agent’s control, thus making the agent’s responsibility for his actions an illusion. And finally,human nature must be such that, over time, one’s choices leave a dispositional residue self-understanding and motivation in the person’s self, out of which, in mature understanding and motivation, the person acts as a fully responsible agent. (shrink)

This essay is titled "Critique the Postulation of the Historical Law Theory and relate it to African Law. The postulation of the historical law school that law emanates from customs through an ordered pattern of systematized progress into a codified system in relation to African law forms the crust of this essay. To achieve this task, this essay adopts a critical method in exposing c postulation of the historical law school and the African Law (keeping in mind the Ukelle communal (...) Law System). This essay questions whether there can be an independent law made or promulgated without targeting a given people or that there can be a people-free law? This essay claims that like the historical law school, laws emanate from their ground norms but insists that unlike the historical law school, laws in Ukelle Traditional System do not necessarily have to submit to through the rigor of systematic and strict evolutionary pattern of progress. Like Herder, this essay avers that there is a unique character with each culture, and as such Ukelle Traditional Law does not have to submit to any universal character of law. (shrink)

Knowledge implies the presence of a positive relation between a person and a fact. Factual ignorance, on the other hand, implies the absence of some positive relation between a person and a fact. The two most influential views of ignorance hold that what is lacking in cases of factual ignorance is knowledge or true belief, but these accounts fail to explain a number of basic facts about ignorance. In their place, we propose a novel and systematic defense of the view (...) that factual ignorance is the absence of awareness, an account that both comes apart from the dominant views and overcomes their deficiencies. Given the important role that ignorance plays in moral and legal theory and our understanding of various epistemic injustices, a precise and theoretically unproblematic account of the nature of ignorance is important not only for normative epistemology, but also for law, ethics, and applied epistemology. (shrink)

After decades of attempts, comparisons between classical Chinese and Greco-Roman philosophy have had limited success. While there have been some productive lines of inquiry (for example, comparing early Confucian ethics to virtue ethics as represented by Aristotle), the overall record is disappointing because concepts such as Plato’s theory of forms or Aristotle’s emphasis on syllogism have proved incommensurable with most classical Chinese ways of thinking. But much of the problem can be attributed to the habit of comparing Chinese thinkers to (...) Plato and Aristotle without asking whether they are the most suitable philosophers for this purpose. For most of the twentieth century, Hellenistic philosophy was scarcely considered. Yet very recently, provocative similarities have been identified between Chinese philosophy and Stoicism, especially Epictetus. I shall argue that these parallels are even more significant than previous scholarship has recognized (I hope to convince the reader that some of them are indeed staggering), and conclude by asking why we find such parallels in the first place. My claim will not be direct or even indirect transmission; this is a case, to borrow a distinction from evolutionary biology, of analogous rather than homologous development. -/- . (shrink)

The article begins by describing two longstanding problems associated with direct inference. One problem concerns the role of uninformative frequency statements in inferring probabilities by direct inference. A second problem concerns the role of frequency statements with gerrymandered reference classes. I show that past approaches to the problem associated with uninformative frequency statements yield the wrong conclusions in some cases. I propose a modification of Kyburg’s approach to the problem that yields the right conclusions. Past theories of direct inference have (...) postponed treatment of the problem associated with gerrymandered reference classes by appealing to an unexplicated notion of projectability . I address the lacuna in past theories by introducing criteria for being a relevant statistic . The prescription that only relevant statistics play a role in direct inference corresponds to the sort of projectability constraints envisioned by past theories. (shrink)

Global poverty, hunger, and lack of access to save water raise problems of how to organize human society so that everyone's needs can be met. Philanthropic proposals, such as Peter Singer's and Peter Unger's, are based on a false analogy to duties of rescue and encourage philanthropic responses, thus closing the discourse to discussion of the causes and remedies of poverty. Radical criticism of capitalist social structures are put off the table, and this is a profound error.

Kant has often been accused of being far too “optimistic” when it comes to the extremes of evil that humans can perpetrate upon one another. In particular, Kant’s supposed claim that humans cannot choose evil qua evil has struck many people as simply false. Another problem for Kant, or perhaps the same problem in another guise, is his supposed claim that all evil is done for the sake of self-love. While self-love might be a plausible way to explain some instances (...) of evil, it seems to be an implausible way to explain instances where people imprudently act in senselessly destructive and even self-destructive ways. Can Kant handle such extreme cases of moral evil? I shall argue that Kant can handle such cases by: (1) defending Kant’s denial of the possibility of a devilish human being; (2) showing how Kant can conceptually account for agents who choose evil qua evil, and (3) putting Kant’s account of passions to work inorder to understand self-destructive evil. (shrink)

In a recent article, Joel Pust argued that direct inference based on reference properties of differing arity are incommensurable, and so direct inference cannot be used to resolve the Sleeping Beauty problem. After discussing the defects of Pust's argument, I offer reasons for thinking that direct inferences based on reference properties of differing arity are commensurable, and that we should prefer direct inferences based on logically stronger reference properties, regardless of arity.

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.

In this paper I pursue two closely related objectives. First, I articulate and describe the nature and character of Hume's theory of punishment. Second, in light of this account, I offer an assessment of the contem- porary interest and value of Hume's theory. Throughout my discus- sion I emphasize the relevance and importance of Hume's views on moral responsibility to his account of punishment.1 More specifically, I argue that Hume seeks to develop an account of punishment on the foundation of (...) a naturalistic theory of responsibility - that is, a theory which draws our attention to the role of moral sentiment in this sphere.2 Although this naturalistic aspect of Hume's theory of punishment has been largely overlooked by commentators, I maintain that it is, nevertheless, precisely this aspect of Hume's theory that is especially interesting from a contemporary pers. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between the formation of the self and the worldly horizon within which this self achieves its meaning. Our inquiry takes place from two perspectives: the first derived from the Nietzschean analysis of how one becomes what one is; the other from current developments in complexity theory. This two-angled approach opens up different, yet related dimensions of a non-essentialist understanding of the self that is none the less neither arbitrary nor deterministic. (...) Indeed, at the meeting point of these two perspectives on the self lies a conception of a dynamic, worldly self, whose identity is bound up with its appearance in a world shared with others. After examining this argument from the respective view points offered by Nietzsche and complexity theory, the article concludes with a consideration of some of the political and ethical implications of representing our situatedness within a shared human domain as a condition for self-formation. (shrink)

The ‘convergence conception’ of political liberalism has become increasingly popular in recent years. Steven Wall has shown that convergence liberals face a serious dilemma in responding to disagreement about whether laws are publicly justified. What I call the ‘conjunctive approach’ to such disagreement threatens anarchism, while the ‘non-conjunctive’ approach appears to render convergence liberalism internally inconsistent. This paper defends the non-conjunctive approach, which holds that the correct view of public justification should be followed even if some citizens do not consider (...) enacted laws to be publicly justified. My argument sheds light on the fundamental structure of convergence liberalism. (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)

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)

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].

Most discussion of the morality of abortion assume the central issue is whether the fetus is a person. I disagree. The central issue is better understood as whether the fetus is one's *baby* whom one has a duty to nurture (babies need not be persons). Understanding the central issue as centering on duties to nurture one's children allows us better to understand both liberal and conservative views about abortion.

It is argued in this paper that although much attention has been paid to causal chains and common causes within the literature on probabilistic causality, a primary virtue of that approach is its ability to deal with cases of multiple causation. In doing so some ways are indicated in which contemporary sine qua non analyses of causation are too narrow (and ways in which probabilistic causality is not) and an argument by Reichenbach designed to provide a basis for the asymmetry (...) of causation is refined. The importance of referring causal claims to an abstract model is also emphasized. (shrink)

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)

Various sexist and racist beliefs ascribe certain negative qualities to people of a given sex or race. Epistemic allies are people who think that in normal circumstances rationality requires the rejection of such sexist and racist beliefs upon learning of many counter-instances, i.e. members of these groups who lack the target negative quality. Accordingly, epistemic allies think that those who give up their sexist or racist beliefs in such circumstances are rationally responding to their evidence, while those who do not (...) are irrational in failing to respond to their evidence by giving up their belief. This is a common view among philosophers and non-philosophers. But epistemic allies face three problems. First, sexist and racist beliefs often involve generic propositions. These sorts of propositions are notoriously resilient in the face of counter-instances since the truth of generic propositions is typically compatible with the existence of many counter-instances. Second, background beliefs can enable one to explain away counter-instances to one’s beliefs. So even when counter-instances might otherwise constitute strong evidence against the truth of the generic, the ability to explain the counter-instances away with relevant background beliefs can make it rational to retain one’s belief in the generic despite the existence of many counter-instances. The final problem is that the kinds of judgements epistemic allies want to make about the irrationality of sexist and racist beliefs upon encountering many counter-instances is at odds with the judgements that we are inclined to make in seemingly parallel cases about the rationality of non-sexist and non-racist generic beliefs. Thus epistemic allies may end up having to give up on plausible normative supervenience principles. All together, these problems pose a significant prima facie challenge to epistemic allies. In what follows I explain how a Bayesian approach to the relation between evidence and belief can neatly untie these knots. The basic story is one of defeat: Bayesianism explains when one is required to become increasingly confident in chance propositions, and confidence in chance propositions can make belief in corresponding generics irrational. (shrink)

The distinction between propositional and doxastic justification is the distinction between having justification to believe P (= propositional justification) versus having a justified belief in P (= doxastic justification). The focus of this paper is on doxastic justification and on what conditions are necessary for having it. In particular, I challenge the basing demand on doxastic justification, i.e., the idea that one can have a doxastically justified belief only if one’s belief is based on an epistemically appropriate reason. This demand (...) has been used to refute versions of coherentism and conservatism about perceptual justification as well as to defend phenomenal “conservatism” and other views besides. In what follows I argue that there is virtually no reason to think there is a basing demand on doxastic justification. I also argue that even if the basing demand were true, it would still fail to serve the dialectical purposes for which it has been employed in arguments concerning coherentism, conservatism, and phenomenal “conservatism”. I conclude by discussing the fact that knowledge has a basing demand and show why this needn’t raise the same sort of problems for coherentism and conservatism that doxastic justification’s basing demand seemed to. (shrink)

In a piece provocatively entitled “Does Philosophy Matter?” Stanley Fish sets out to respond to my July 24, 2011 Stone column on moral relativism in the New York Times. His argument proceeds as follows. First, Fish changes the topic: instead of talking about the thesis I was discussing, he defines another thesis that, he claims, implausibly, also deserves to be called “moral relativism.” This thesis, he implies, is both more interesting and more defensible than the one I was criticizing. Second, (...) he argues that neither his thesis nor mine could make any difference to “real life,” because philosophical conclusions don’t travel outside the seminar room. His argument limps at both stages. Fish’s ‘relativism’ is neither relativism, nor interesting in its own right. And his claim that no philosophical or meta-ethical thesis can matter in real life is clearly false. (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.

Many philosophical debates take for granted that there is such a thing as ‘the’ common-sense conception of the phenomenon of interest. Debates about the nature of perception tend to take for granted that there is a single, coherent common-sense conception of vision, consistent with Direct Realism. This conception is often accorded an epistemic default status. We draw on philosophical and psychological literature on naïve theories and belief fragmentation to motivate the hypothesis that untutored common sense encompasses conflicting Direct Realist and (...) Indirect Realist conceptions: there is no such thing as ‘the’ common-sense conception of vision that could enjoy epistemic default status. To examine this hypothesis, a survey administered an agreement rating task with verbal and pictorial stimuli to lay participants. We found many laypeople simultaneously hold conflicting Direct Realist and Indirect Realist beliefs about vision. Against common assumptions, Direct Realist beliefs are not clearly dominant, and consistent adherence to Direct Realism is not the norm, but the exception. These findings are consistent with recent accounts of belief fragmentation. They forcefully challenge common methodology in philosophical debates about the nature of perception and beyond. (shrink)

THE PRINCIPLE OF SUPERPOSITION. The need for a quantum theory Classical mechanics has been developed continuously from the time of Newton and applied to an ...

In this paper, I look at Susan Stebbing’s articles and reviews that critically engage logical positivism. These appeared before the publication of A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic and helped shape the early British reception of logical positivism. I highlight Stebbing’s adoption of G.E. Moore’s tripartite distinction between knowing a proposition, understanding it, and giving an analysis of it and, in light of this distinction, her focus on whether the principle of verifiability can ground a plausible account of communication. Stebbing (...) thinks not, and I reconstruct her reasons, as well as her own account of communication. In doing this, I relate her criticisms to her rejection of methodological solipsism and her dissatisfaction with the logical positivist treatment of statements about other minds and the past. I also argue that Stebbing’s work provides a bridge to later criticisms of logical positivism from ordinary language philosophers. Foregrounding Stebbing’s engagement with logical positivism, especially her focus on communication, paints a fuller picture of how the logical positivists came to be part of analytic philosophy despite having different concerns than many of the British philosophers engaging their work. (shrink)

In this paper, I engage in a preliminary discussion to the thorny problem of analogous naming in Aquinas; namely, the Maimonidean problem of how ourconceptual content can relate to us any knowledge of God. I identify this problem as the First Semantic/Epistemic Problem (FSEP) of religious language. Theprimary determination of semantic content for Aquinas is what I call the Aristotelian Epistemic Principle (AEP). This principle holds that a belief is related tosome experience in order to be known. I show how (...) an examination of the extent the AEP engenders the problem and allows us to find a way out of the FSEP. Forexample, through such an analysis, we can see how the AEP relates to Aquinas’s use of the distinction between the res significata and the modus significandi; the latter which includes the intension of being a created being where the former does not. (shrink)

At the end of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Edinger completed the first comparative survey of the microscopic anatomy of vertebrate brains. He is regarded as the founder of the field of comparative neuroanatomy. Modern commentators have misunderstood him to have espoused an anti-Darwinian linear view of brain evolution, harkening to the metaphysics of the scala naturae. This understanding arises, in part, from an increasingly contested view of nineteenth-century morphology in Germany. Edinger did espouse a progressionist, though not strictly linear, view (...) of forebrain evolution, but his work also provided carefully documented evidence that brain stem structures vary in complexity independently from one another and across species in a manner that is not compatible with linear progress. This led Edinger to reject progressionism for all brain structures other than the forebrain roof, based on reasoning not too dissimilar from those his successors used to dismiss it for the forebrain roof. (shrink)

Overview of fundamental work in deontic logic.