Results for 'Russell Sparkes'

932 found
Order:
  1. The Tension in Critical Compatibilism.Robert H. Wallace - 2021 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (1):321-332.
    (Part of a symposium on an OUP collection of Paul Russell's papers on free will and moral responsibility). Paul Russell’s The Limits of Free Will is more than the sum of its parts. Among other things, Limits offers readers a comprehensive look at Russell’s attack on the problematically idealized assumptions of the contemporary free will debate. This idealization, he argues, distorts the reality of our human predicament. Herein I pose a dilemma for Russell’s position, critical compatibilism. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  2. Human-Centered AI: The Aristotelian Approach.Jacob Sparks & Ava Wright - 2023 - Divus Thomas 126 (2):200-218.
    As we build increasingly intelligent machines, we confront difficult questions about how to specify their objectives. One approach, which we call human-centered, tasks the machine with the objective of learning and satisfying human objectives by observing our behavior. This paper considers how human-centered AI should conceive the humans it is trying to help. We argue that an Aristotelian model of human agency has certain advantages over the currently dominant theory drawn from economics.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3. Can’t Buy Me Love.Jacob Sparks - 2017 - Journal of Philosophical Research 42:341-352.
    Critics of commodification often claim that the buying and selling of some good communicates disrespect or some other inappropriate attitude. Such semiotic critiques have been leveled against markets in sex, pornography, kidneys, surrogacy, blood, and many other things. Brennan and Jaworski (2015a) have recently argued that all such objections fail. They claim that the meaning of a market transaction is a highly contingent, socially constructed fact. If allowing a market for one of these goods can improve the supply, access or (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  4. (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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1260 citations  
  5. Is, Ought, and the Regress Argument.Jacob Sparks - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (3):528-543.
    Many take the claim that you cannot ‘get’ an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ to imply that non- moral beliefs are by themselves incapable of justifying moral beliefs. I argue that this is a mistake and that the position that moral beliefs are justified exclusively by non-moral beliefs—a view that I call moral inferentialism—presents an attractive non-sceptical moral epistemology.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  6. Anscombe's Relative Bruteness.Jacob Sparks - 2020 - Philosophical News 18:135-145.
    Ethical beliefs are not justified by familiar methods. We do not directly sense ethical properties, at least not in the straightforward way we sense colors or shapes. Nor is it plausible to think – despite a tradition claiming otherwise – that there are self-evident ethical truths that we can know in the way we know conceptual or mathematical truths. Yet, if we are justified in believing anything, we are justified in believing various ethical propositions e.g., that slavery is wrong. If (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  7. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   31 citations  
  8. 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].
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  10. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  11. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   43 citations  
  12. 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, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   45 citations  
  13. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  14. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  15. Prescribing the mind: how norms, concepts, and language influence our understanding of mental disorder.Jodie Louise Russell - 2024 - Dissertation, University of Edinburgh
    In this thesis I develop an account of how processes of social understanding are implicated in experiences of mental disorder, critiquing the lack of examination of this phenomena along the way. First, I demonstrate how disorder concepts, as developed and deployed by psychiatric institutions, have the effect of shaping the cognition of individuals with psychopathology through setting expectations. Such expectation-setting can be harmful in some cases, I argue, and can perpetuate epistemic injustices. Having developed this view, I criticise enactive accounts (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  16. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   34 citations  
  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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  18. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  19. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  20. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   51 citations  
  21. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  22. Russellian Analysis [review of Paul J. Hager, Continuity and Change in the Development of Russell's Philosophy ]. [REVIEW]Russell Wahl - 1996 - Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 16 (2).
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  23.  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.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  24. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  25. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  26. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  27. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  28. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  29. The Structure of Gunk: Adventures in the Ontology of Space.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2008 - In Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Volume 4. Oxford University Press UK. pp. 248.
    Could space consist entirely of extended regions, without any regions shaped like points, lines, or surfaces? Peter Forrest and Frank Arntzenius have independently raised a paradox of size for space like this, drawing on a construction of Cantor’s. I present a new version of this argument and explore possible lines of response.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  30. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  31. Quine on the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction.Russell Gillian - 2013 - In Ernie Lepore & Gilbert Harman (eds.), A Companion to W. V. O. Quine. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 181-202.
    A critical survey of Quine's arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  32. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  33. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  34. 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.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  35. (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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  36. 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” (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  37. On Where Things Could Be.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (1):60-80.
    Some philosophers respond to Leibniz’s “shift” argument against absolute space by appealing to antihaecceitism about possible worlds, using David Lewis’s counterpart theory. But separated from Lewis’s distinctive system, it is difficult to understand what this doctrine amounts to or how it bears on the Leibnizian argument. In fact, the best way of making sense of the relevant kind of antihaecceitism concedes the main point of the Leibnizian argument, pressing us to consider alternative spatiotemporal metaphysics.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  38. Selective hard compatibilism.Paul Russell - 2010 - In J. Campbell, M. O'Rourke & H. Silverstein (eds.), Action, Ethics and Responsibility: Topics in Contemporary Philosophy, Vol. 7. MIT Press. pp. 149-73.
    .... The strategy I have defended involves drawing a distinction between those who can and cannot legitimately hold an agent responsible in circumstances when the agent is being covertly controlled (e.g. through implantation processes). What is intuitively unacceptable, I maintain, is that an agent should be held responsible or subject to reactive attitudes that come from another agent who is covertly controlling or manipulating him. This places some limits on who is entitled to take up the participant stance in relation (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  39. 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.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  40. Free Will, Art and Morality.Paul Russell - 2008 - The Journal of Ethics 12 (3-4):307 - 325.
    The discussion in this paper begins with some observations regarding a number of structural similarities between art and morality as it involves human agency. On the basis of these observations we may ask whether or not incompatibilist worries about free will are relevant to both art and morality. One approach is to claim that libertarian free will is essential to our evaluations of merit and desert in both spheres. An alternative approach, is to claim that free will is required only (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  41. 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.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  42. Robots, Eldercare and Meaningful Lives.Russell J. Woodruff & Cholavardan Kondeti - 2023 - Humana Mente 16 (44):123-137.
    In this paper we examine how the use of robots in caring for elders can impact the meaningfulness of elders’ lives. We present a framework for understanding ‘meaningfulness in life’, and then apply that framework in discussing ways in which the use of robots to assist in activities of daily living can preserve, enhance or undermine the meaningfulness of elders’ lives. We conclude with a discussion of if and how having false beliefs about companion robots can affect meaningfulness in the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  43. The Philosophy of Free Will: Essential Readings From the Contemporary Debates.Paul Russell & Oisin Deery (eds.) - 2013 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    This collection provides a selection of the most essential contributions to the contemporary free will debate. Among the issues discussed and debated are skepticism and naturalism, alternate possibilities, the consequence argument, libertarian metaphysics, illusionism and revisionism, optimism and pessimism, neuroscience and free will, and experimental philosophy.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  44. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  45. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  46. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  47. Hume's Anatomy of Virtue.Paul Russell - 2013 - In Daniel C. Russell (ed.), The Cambridge companion to virtue ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 92-123.
    In his Treatise of Human Nature Hume makes clear that it is his aim to make moral philosophy more scientific and properly grounded on experience and observation. The “experimental” approach to philosophy, Hume warns his readers, is “abstruse,” “abstract” and “speculative” in nature. It depends on careful and exact reasoning that foregoes the path of an “easy” philosophy, which relies on a more direct appeal to our passions and sentiments . Hume justifies this approach by way of an analogy concerning (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  48. Pessimists, pollyannas, and the new compatibilism.Paul Russell - 2001 - In Robert Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press.
    THE aim of this chapter is to offer a critical examination of some recent contributions to compatibilist literature on freedom and responsibility that aim to provide broadly reasons-responsive accounts of moral agency. Although the views of several authors will be considered, discussion will be organized primarily around Daniel Dennett's "Elbow Room" (1984), an important work in the evolution of the "new compatibilism.".
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  49. 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 (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  50. Hume on Religion.Paul Russell - 2005 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    David Hume's various writings concerning problems of religion are among the most important and influential contributions on this topic. In these writings Hume advances a systematic, sceptical critique of the philosophical foundations of various theological systems. Whatever interpretation one takes of Hume's philosophy as a whole, it is certainly true that one of his most basic philosophical objectives is to unmask and discredit the doctrines and dogmas of orthodox religious belief. There are, however, some significant points of disagreement about the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
1 — 50 / 932