Results for 'Russell Hardin'

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  1. Review of One for All by Russell Hardin[REVIEW]Charles Pigden - 1998 - Mind 107:482-485.
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  2. Responses to Ryan, Fosl and Gautier: SKEPSIS Book Symposium on 'Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy', by Paul Russell.Paul Russell - 2023 - Skepsis: A Journal for Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Research 14 (26):121-139.
    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].
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  3. Precis of Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy. SKEPSIS Book Symposium: Paul Russell, Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy, With replies to critics: Peter Fosl (pp. 77-95), Claude Gautier (pp. 96-111) , and Todd Ryan (pp.112-122).Paul Russell - 2023 - Skepsis: A Journal for Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Research 14 (26):71-73.
    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 (...)
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  4. On Two Arguments for Fanaticism.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2023 - Noûs 58 (3):565-595.
    Should we make significant sacrifices to ever-so-slightly lower the chance of extremely bad outcomes, or to ever-so-slightly raise the chance of extremely good outcomes? *Fanaticism* says yes: for every bad outcome, there is a tiny chance of extreme disaster that is even worse, and for every good outcome, there is a tiny chance of an enormous good that is even better. I consider two related recent arguments for Fanaticism: Beckstead and Thomas's argument from *strange dependence on space and time*, and (...)
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  5. (1 other version)On Denoting.Bertrand Russell - 1905 - Mind 14 (56):479-493.
    By a `denoting phrase' I mean a phrase such as any one of the following: a man, some man, any man, every man, all men, the present King of England, the present King of France, the center of mass of the solar system at the first instant of the twentieth century, the revolution of the earth round the sun, the revolution of the sun round the earth. Thus a phrase is denoting solely in virtue of its form. We may distinguish (...)
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  6. Infinite Prospects.Jeffrey Sanford Russell & Yoaav Isaacs - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (1):178-198.
    People with the kind of preferences that give rise to the St. Petersburg paradox are problematic---but not because there is anything wrong with infinite utilities. Rather, such people cannot assign the St. Petersburg gamble any value that any kind of outcome could possibly have. Their preferences also violate an infinitary generalization of Savage's Sure Thing Principle, which we call the *Countable Sure Thing Principle*, as well as an infinitary generalization of von Neumann and Morgenstern's Independence axiom, which we call *Countable (...)
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  7. Putting down the revolt: Enactivism as a philosophy of nature.Russell Meyer & Nick Brancazio - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13:948733.
    Enactivists frequently argue their account heralds a revolution in cognitive science: enactivism will unseat cognitivism as the dominant paradigm. We examine the lines of reasoning enactivists employ in stirring revolt, but show that none of these prove compelling reasons for cognitivism to be replaced by enactivism. First, we examine the hard sell of enactivism: enactivism reveals a critical explanatory gap at the heart of cognitivism. We show that enactivism does not meet the requirements to incite a paradigm shift in the (...)
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  8. Desire and motivation in desire theories of well-being.Atus Mariqueo-Russell - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (7):1975-1994.
    Desire theories of well-being claim that how well our life goes for us is solely determined by the fulfilment and frustration of our desires. Several writers have argued that these theories are incorrect because they fail to capture the harms of self-sacrifice and severe depression. In this paper, I argue that desire theories of well-being can account for the harm of both phenomena by rejecting proportionalism about desire and motivation. This is the view that desires always motivate proportionally to their (...)
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  9. Fancy loose talk about knowledge.Gillian Kay Russell - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (7):789-820.
    ABSTRACT This paper argues for a version of sceptical invariantism about knowledge on which the acceptability of knowledge-attributing sentences varies with the context of assessment.
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  10. Kant's Fantasy.Francey Russell - 2024 - Mind 133 (531):714-741.
    Throughout his lectures and published writings on anthropology, Kant describes a form of unintentional, unstructured, obscure, and pleasurable imaginative mental activity, which he calls fantasy (Phantasie), where we ‘take pleasure in letting our mind wander about in obscurity.’ In the context of his pragmatic anthropology, Kant was concerned not only to describe this form of mental activity as a fact of human psychology, but more importantly, to criticize and discourage it. But must we share Kant’s negative evaluation? Could fantasy play (...)
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  11. Indefinite Divisibility.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (3):239-263.
    Some hold that the lesson of Russell’s paradox and its relatives is that mathematical reality does not form a ‘definite totality’ but rather is ‘indefinitely extensible’. There can always be more sets than there ever are. I argue that certain contact puzzles are analogous to Russell’s paradox this way: they similarly motivate a vision of physical reality as iteratively generated. In this picture, the divisions of the continuum into smaller parts are ‘potential’ rather than ‘actual’. Besides the intrinsic (...)
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  12. Fixing Stochastic Dominance.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - forthcoming - The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Decision theorists widely accept a stochastic dominance principle: roughly, if a risky prospect A is at least as probable as another prospect B to result in something at least as good, then A is at least as good as B. Recently, philosophers have applied this principle even in contexts where the values of possible outcomes do not have the structure of the real numbers: this includes cases of incommensurable values and cases of infinite values. But in these contexts the usual (...)
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  13. Free Will and the Tragic Predicament: Making Sense of Williams.Paul Russell - 2022 - In András Szigeti & Matthew Talbert (eds.), Morality and Agency: Themes From Bernard Williams. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Usa. pp. 163-183.
    Free Will & The Tragic Predicament : Making Sense of Williams -/- The discussion in this paper aims to make better sense of free will and moral responsibility by way of making sense of Bernard Williams’ significant and substantial contribution to this subject. Williams’ fundamental objective is to vindicate moral responsibility by way of freeing it from the distortions and misrepresentations imposed on it by “the morality system”. What Williams rejects, in particular, are the efforts of “morality” to further “deepen” (...)
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  14. Non-Archimedean Preferences Over Countable Lotteries.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2020 - Journal of Mathematical Economics 88 (May 2020):180-186.
    We prove a representation theorem for preference relations over countably infinite lotteries that satisfy a generalized form of the Independence axiom, without assuming Continuity. The representing space consists of lexicographically ordered transfinite sequences of bounded real numbers. This result is generalized to preference orders on abstract superconvex spaces.
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  15. How to Prove Hume’s Law.Gillian Russell - 2021 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 51 (3):603-632.
    This paper proves a precisification of Hume’s Law—the thesis that one cannot get an ought from an is—as an instance of a more general theorem which establishes several other philosophically interesting, though less controversial, barriers to logical consequence.
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  16. The Limits of Free Will: Selected Essays.Paul Russell - 2017 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    The Limits of Free Will presents influential articles by Paul Russell concerning free will and moral responsibility. The problems arising in this field of philosophy, which are deeply rooted in the history of the subject, are also intimately related to a wide range of other fields, such as law and criminology, moral psychology, theology, and, more recently, neuroscience. These articles were written and published over a period of three decades, although most have appeared in the past decade. Among the (...)
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  17. Well-being and the problem of unstable desires.Atus Mariqueo-Russell - 2023 - Utilitas 35 (4):260-276.
    This paper considers a new problem for desire theories of well-being. The problem claims that these theories are implausible because they misvalue the effects of fleeting desires, long-standing desires, and fluctuations in desire strength on well-being. I begin by investigating a version of the desire theory of well-being, simple concurrentism, that fails to capture intuitions in these cases. I then argue that desire theories of well-being that are suitably stability-adjusted can avoid this problem. These theories claim that the average strength (...)
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  18. Dynamical causes.Russell Meyer - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (5):1-21.
    Mechanistic explanations are often said to explain because they reveal the causal structure of the world. Conversely, dynamical models supposedly lack explanatory power because they do not describe causal structure. The only way for dynamical models to produce causal explanations is via the 3M criterion: the model must be mapped onto a mechanism. This framing of the situation has become the received view around the viability of dynamical explanation. In this paper, I argue against this position and show that dynamical (...)
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  19. The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion.Paul Russell - 2008 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY PRIZE for the best published book in the history of philosophy [Awarded in 2010] _______________ -/- Although it is widely recognized that David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) belongs among the greatest works of philosophy, there is little agreement about the correct way to interpret his fundamental intentions. It is an established orthodoxy among almost all commentators that skepticism and naturalism are the two dominant themes in this work. The difficulty has been, (...)
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  20. Obscure representations from a pragmatic point of view.Francey Russell - 2024 - European Journal of Philosophy 32 (4):1068-1085.
    Kant's most sustained discussion of obscure representations can be found in the first book of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. What is puzzling is that in the middle of the section devoted to the topic, Kant asserts that “because this field can only be perceived in his passive side as a play of sensations, the theory of obscure representations belongs only to physiological anthropology, and so it is properly disregarded here.” So, do obscure representations belong to pragmatic (...)
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  21. Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility.Paul Russell - 1995 - New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
    In this book, Russell examines Hume's notion of free will and moral responsibility. It is widely held that Hume presents us with a classic statement of a compatibilist position--that freedom and responsibility can be reconciled with causation and, indeed, actually require it. Russell argues that this is a distortion of Hume's view, because it overlooks the crucial role of moral sentiment in Hume's picture of human nature. Hume was concerned to describe the regular mechanisms which generate moral sentiments (...)
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  22.  58
    Summer Experiments in Pedagogical Innovation.Russell Marcus - 2023 - Apa Studies in Teaching Philosophy 23 (1):2-6.
    An account of the experiments in pedagogical innovation at the Hamilton College Summer Program in Philosophy, Summer 2022.
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  23. (1 other version)Moral Psychology as Soul Picture.Francey Russell - forthcoming - The Philosophical Quarterly.
    Iris Murdoch offers a distinctive conception of moral psychology. She suggests that to develop a moral psychology is to develop what she calls a soul-picture; different philosophical moral psychologies are, as she puts it, “rival soul-pictures.” In this paper I clarify Murdoch’s generic notion of “soul-picture,” the genus of which, for example, Aristotle’s, Kant’s, Nietzsche’s, and Murdoch’s constitute rival species. Are all philosophical moral psychologies soul-pictures? If not, what are the criteria that a moral psychology must meet in order to (...)
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  24. On the Probability of Plenitude.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2020 - Journal of Philosophy 117 (5):267-292.
    I examine what the mathematical theory of random structures can teach us about the probability of Plenitude, a thesis closely related to David Lewis's modal realism. Given some natural assumptions, Plenitude is reasonably probable a priori, but in principle it can be (and plausibly it has been) empirically disconfirmed—not by any general qualitative evidence, but rather by our de re evidence.
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  25. Convergent evolution as natural experiment: the tape of life reconsidered.Russell Powell & Carlos Mariscal - 2015 - Interface Focus 5 (6):1-13.
    Stephen Jay Gould argued that replaying the ‘tape of life’ would result in radically different evolutionary outcomes. Recently, biologists and philosophers of science have paid increasing attention to the theoretical importance of convergent evolution—the independent origination of similar biological forms and functions—which many interpret as evidence against Gould’s thesis. In this paper, we examine the evidentiary relevance of convergent evolution for the radical contingency debate. We show that under the right conditions, episodes of convergent evolution can constitute valid natural experiments (...)
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  26. The Limits of Free Will: Replies to Bennett, Smith and Wallace.Paul Russell - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (1):357-373.
    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 (...)
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  27. Responsibility Skepticism and Strawson’s Naturalism: Review Essay on Pamela Hieronymi, Freedom, Resentment & The Metaphysics of Morals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).Paul Russell - 2021 - Ethics 131 (4):754-776.
    There are few who would deny that P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” (1962) ranks among the most significant contributions to modern moral philosophy. Although any number of essays have been devoted to it, Pamela Hieronymi’s 'Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals' is the first book-length study. The aim of Hieronymi’s study is to show that Strawson’s “central argument” has been “underestimated and misunderstood.” Hieronymi interprets this argument in terms of what she describes as Strawson’s “social naturalism”. Understood this (...)
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  28. “Picturing the Mind: Freud on Metapsychology and Methodology.” Die Seele abbilden. Über Freuds Methodologie und Metapsychologie.Francey Russell - 2022 - WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1.
    [please see my website for the English language version] What is the relationship between a philosophical or theoretical conception of mind, and the mind’s conception of itself? Should the latter constrain the former? And how does the mind itself understand a theory of mind, that is, a theory of itself? I raise these questions by means of Freud. Freud suggested that the mind cannot merely theoretically comprehend psychoanalytic concepts but must be able to “recognize” and “sympathize” with them. I call (...)
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  29. Kantian Self-Conceit and the Two Guises of Authority.Francey Russell - 2020 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (2):268-283.
    There is a debate in the literature as to whether Kantian self-conceit is intrapsychic or interpersonal. I argue that self-conceit is both. I argue that, for Kant, self-conceit is fundamentally an illusion about authority, one’s own and any authority one stands in relation to. Self-conceit refuses to recognize the authority of the law. But the law “shows up” for us in two guises: one’s own reason and other persons. Thus, self-conceit refuses to recognize both guises of the law. Hence self-conceit (...)
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  30. Strawson's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility.Paul Russell - 1992 - Ethics 102 (2):287-302.
    This article is concerned with a central strand of Strawson's well-known and highly influential essay “Freedom and Resentment” Strawson's principal objectives in this work is to refute or discredit the views of the "Pessimist." The Pessimist, as Strawson understands him/ her, claims that the truth of the thesis of determinism would render the attitudes and practices associated with moral responsibility incoherent and unjustified. Given this, the Pessimist claims that if determinism is true, then we must abandon or suspend these attitudes (...)
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  31. Groupthink.Jeffrey Sanford Russell, John Hawthorne & Lara Buchak - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (5):1287-1309.
    How should a group with different opinions (but the same values) make decisions? In a Bayesian setting, the natural question is how to aggregate credences: how to use a single credence function to naturally represent a collection of different credence functions. An extension of the standard Dutch-book arguments that apply to individual decision-makers recommends that group credences should be updated by conditionalization. This imposes a constraint on what aggregation rules can be like. Taking conditionalization as a basic constraint, we gather (...)
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  32. Temporary Safety Hazards.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2016 - Noûs 50 (4):152-174.
    The Epistemic Objection says that certain theories of time imply that it is impossible to know which time is absolutely present. Standard presentations of the Epistemic Objection are elliptical—and some of the most natural premises one might fill in to complete the argument end up leading to radical skepticism. But there is a way of filling in the details which avoids this problem, using epistemic safety. The new version has two interesting upshots. First, while Ross Cameron alleges that the Epistemic (...)
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  33. Quality and Quantifiers.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (3):562-577.
    I examine three ‘anti-object’ metaphysical views: nihilism, generalism, and anti-quantificationalism. After setting aside nihilism, I argue that generalists should be anti-quantificationalists. Along the way, I attempt to articulate what a ‘metaphysically perspicuous’ language might even be.
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  34. Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy: Selected Essays.Paul Russell - 2021 - New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press.
    In this collection of essays, philosopher Paul Russell addresses major figures and central topics of the history of early modern philosophy. Most of these essays are studies on the philosophy of David Hume, one of the great figures in the history of philosophy. One central theme, connecting many of the essays, concerns Hume's fundamental irreligious intentions. Russell argues that a proper appreciation of the significance of Hume's irreligious concerns, which runs through his whole philosophy, serves to discredit the (...)
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  35. Hume’s Optimism and Williams’s Pessimism From ‘Science of Man’ to Genealogical Critique.Paul Russell - 2018 - In Sophie Grace Chappell & Marcel van Ackeren (eds.), Ethics Beyond the Limits: New Essays on Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 37-52.
    Bernard Williams is widely recognized as belonging among the greatest and most influential moral philosophers of the twentieth-century – and arguably the greatest British moral philosopher of the late twentieth-century. His various contributions over a period of nearly half a century changed the course of the subject and challenged many of its deepest assumptions and prejudices. There are, nevertheless, a number of respects in which the interpretation of his work is neither easy nor straightforward. One reason for this is that (...)
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  36. General Dynamic Triviality Theorems.Jeffrey Sanford Russell & John Hawthorne - 2016 - Philosophical Review 125 (3):307-339.
    Famous results by David Lewis show that plausible-sounding constraints on the probabilities of conditionals or evaluative claims lead to unacceptable results, by standard probabilistic reasoning. Existing presentations of these results rely on stronger assumptions than they really need. When we strip these arguments down to a minimal core, we can see both how certain replies miss the mark, and also how to devise parallel arguments for other domains, including epistemic “might,” probability claims, claims about comparative value, and so on. A (...)
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  37. Possible Worlds and the Objective World.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2013 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (2):389-422.
    David Lewis holds that a single possible world can provide more than one way things could be. But what are possible worlds good for if they come apart from ways things could be? We can make sense of this if we go in for a metaphysical understanding of what the world is. The world does not include everything that is the case—only the genuine facts. Understood this way, Lewis's “cheap haecceitism” amounts to a kind of metaphysical anti-haecceitism: it says there (...)
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  38. Moral Responsibility and Existential Attitudes.Paul Russell - 2022 - In Dana Kay Nelkin & Derk Pereboom (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 519-543.
    We might describe the philosophical issue of human freedom and moral responsibility as an existential metaphysical problem. Problems of this kind are not just a matter of theoretical interest and curiosity: They address issues that we care about and that affect us. They are, more specifically, relevant to the significance and value that we attach to our lives and the way that we lead them. According to the orthodox view, there is a tidy connection between skepticism and pessimism. Skepticism threatens (...)
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  39. Locke on Express and Tacit Consent.Paul Russell - 1986 - Political Theory 14 (2):291-306.
    THE SUBJECT MATTER of this essay is Locke's well-known discussion of consent in sections 116-122 of the Second Treatise of Government.' I will not be concerned to discuss the place of consent in Locke's political philosophy 2 My concerns are somewhat narrower than this. I will simply be concerned to show that in important respects several recent discussions of Locke's political philosophy have misrepresented Locke's views on the subject of express and tacit consent. At theheart of these misinterpretations lie misunderstandings (...)
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  40. Bernard Williams: Ethics from a Human Point of View.Paul Russell - 2018 - Times Literary Supplement.
    When Bernard Williams died in June 2003, the obituary in The Times said that “he will be remembered as the most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time”. It goes on to make clear that Williams was far from the dry, awkward, detached academic philosopher of caricature. -/- Born in Essex in 1929, Williams had an extraordinary and, in some respects, glamorous life. He not only enjoyed a stellar academic career – holding a series of distinguished posts (...)
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  41. Responsibility and the Condition of Moral Sense.Paul Russell - 2004 - Philosophical Topics 32 (1-2):287-305.
    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 (...)
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  42. Possible Patterns.Jeffrey Sanford Russell & John Hawthorne - 2018 - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 11.
    “There are no gaps in logical space,” David Lewis writes, giving voice to sentiment shared by many philosophers. But different natural ways of trying to make this sentiment precise turn out to conflict with one another. One is a *pattern* idea: “Any pattern of instantiation is metaphysically possible.” Another is a *cut and paste* idea: “For any objects in any worlds, there exists a world that contains any number of duplicates of all of those objects.” We use resources from model (...)
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  43. The Value of Normative Information.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - forthcoming - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    This paper explores the idea that it is instrumentally valuable to learn normative truths. We consider an argument for "normative hedging" based on this principle, and examine the structure of decision-making under moral uncertainty that arises from it. But it also turns out that the value of normative information is inconsistent with the principle that learning *empirical* truths is instrumentally valuable. We conclude with a brief comment on "metanormative regress.".
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  44. I Want to Know More About You: On Knowing and Acknowledging in Chinatown.Francey Russell - 2018 - In Garry L. Hagberg (ed.), Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding. Springer Verlag. pp. 3-35.
    What is the difference between knowing someone and acknowledging them? Is it possible to want to be acknowledged while remaining unknown? And if one’s desire to know another person is too consuming, can this foreclose the possibility of acknowledgment? Cavell argues that we sometimes avoid the ethical problem of acknowledgment by (mis)conceiving our relations with others in terms of knowledge and that this epistemic misconception can actually amount to a form of ethical harm. I show that Polanski’s Chinatown helps us (...)
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  45. Of Gods and Clocks: Free Will and Hobbes-Bramhall Debate.Paul Russell - 2021 - In Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy: Selected Essays. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press. pp. 133-157.
    Contrary to John Bramhall and critics like him, Thomas Hobbes takes the view that no account of liberty or freedom can serve as the relevant basis on which to distinguish moral from nonmoral agents or explains the basis on which an agent becomes subject to law and liable to punishment. The correct compatibilist strategy rests, on Hobbes’s account, with a proper appreciation and description of the contractualist features that shape and structure the moral community. From this perspective human agents may (...)
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  46. David Hume and the Philosophy of Religion.Paul Russell - 2021 - In Stewart Goetz & Charles Taliaferro (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 1-20.
    David Hume (1711-1776) is widely recognized as one of the most influential and significant critics of religion in the history of philosophy. There remains, nevertheless, considerable disagreement about the exact nature of his views. According to some, he was a skeptic who regarded all conjectures relating to religious hypotheses to be beyond the scope of human understanding – he neither affirmed nor denied these conjectures. Others read him as embracing a highly refined form of “true religion” of some kind. On (...)
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  47. Actuality for Counterpart Theorists.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2013 - Mind 122 (485):85-134.
    The counterpart theorist has a problem: there is no obvious way to understand talk about actuality in terms of counterparts. Fara and Williamson have charged that this obstacle cannot be overcome. Here I defend the counterpart theorist by offering systematic interpretations of a quantified modal language that includes an actuality operator. Centrally, I disentangle the counterpart relation from a related notion, a ‘representation relation’. The relation of possible things to the actual things they represent is variable, and an adequate account (...)
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  48. Deep Responsibility and "Morality".Paul Russell - forthcoming - In Michael Frauchiger & Markus Stepanians (eds.), Themes from Wolf.
    This paper examines Susan Wolf's account of "the Reason View" of moral responsibility as articulated and defended in 'Freedom Within Reason' (OUP 1990). The discussion turns on two questions about the Reason View: -/- (1) Does the Reason View aim to satisfy what Bernard Williams describes as “morality” and its (“peculiar”) conception of responsibility and blame? -/- (2) If it does, how successful is the Reason View judged in these terms? -/- It is argued that if the Reason View aims (...)
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  49. True Religion and Hume's Practical Atheism.Paul Russell - 2021 - In Vicente Raga Rosaleny & Plínio Junqueira Smith (eds.), Sceptical Doubt and Disbelief in Modern European Thought. Cham: Springer. pp. 191-225.
    The argument and discussion in this paper begins from the premise that Hume was an atheist who denied the religious or theist hypothesis. However, even if it is agreed that that Hume was an atheist this does not tell us where he stood on the question concerning the value of religion. Some atheists, such as Spinoza, have argued that society needs to maintain and preserve a form of “true religion”, which is required for the support of our ethical life. Others, (...)
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  50. Qualitative Grounds.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2016 - Philosophical Perspectives 30 (1):309-348.
    Suppose that all non-qualitative facts are grounded in qualitative facts. I argue that this view naturally comes with a picture in which trans-world identity is indeterminate. But this in turn leads to either pervasive indeterminacy in the non-qualitative, or else contingency in what facts about modality and possible worlds are determinate.
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