Michael Hunter, The Boyle Papers: Understanding the Manuscripts of Robert Boyle. With contributions by Edward B. Davis, Harriet Knight, Charles Littleton and Lawrence M. Principe. Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. xiii + 674. US$139.95/£70.00 HB. -/- The publication by Michael Hunter of this revised edition of the catalogue of the Boyle Papers contributes admirably to the renaissance in Boyle studies which has taken place over the past decade and a half. Robert Boyle (1627–91), arguably the most (...) influential British scientist of the late seventeenth century, was a pioneering experimenter, profound thinker, and figure-head of the new science in its early years of development. This volume brings together the materials necessary for understanding the Boyle archive, one of the most important archives from this period, which has been at the Royal Society since 1769. (shrink)

I am extremely grateful for the very thoughtful and stimulating comments by Daniel Drucker, Miriam Schleifer McCormick,1 and Mark Richard, and for the close attention they gave my book (Hunter 2022...

A report on Cornel West's Edinburgh Gifford Lectures 2024: "A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane".

This is a précis of my book for an author-meets-critics session forthcoming in Inquiry. The commenters are Daniel Drucker, Miriam Schleifer McCormick, and Mark Richard.

Patient RB has a peculiar memory impairment wherein he experiences his memories in rich contextual detail, but claims to not own them. His memories do not feel as if they happened to him. In this paper, I provide an explanatory model of RB’s phenomenology, the self-attentional model. I draw upon recent work in neuroscience on self-attentional processing and global workspace models of conscious recollection to show that RB has a self-attentional deficit that inhibits self-bias processes in broadcasting the contents of (...) episodic memories to the global workspace. Typically, self-related contents enjoy a higher salience level than other-related contents. Elimination of bias toward self-related contents diminishes the salience of those contents to the level of other-related contents. Because the typical high salience of self-related content is necessary for the feeling of ownership, RB lacks the feeling of ownership. I also discuss potential applications of the self-attentional model to other psychopathological cases. (shrink)

Did Donald Davidson agree with G.E.M. Anscombe that action requires a distinctive form of agential awareness? The answer is No, at least according to the standard interpretation of Davidson’s account of action. A careful study of Davidson’s early writings, however, reveals a much more subtle conception of the role of agential belief in action. While the role of the general belief in Davidson’s theory is familiar and has been much discussed, virtually no attention has been paid to the singular belief. (...) This essay makes a start on remedying this neglect. I begin, in section 1, by examining Davidson’s claim that for a desire or belief to rationalize and cause an action it must have a suitable generality. It must, he says, be ‘logically independent’ of the action itself. While he was clear about this requirement in the case of the desire that forms part of a person’s primary reason, I show in section 2 that his early treatment of belief confuses general and singular beliefs. This confusion reflects his failure clearly to distinguish the two roles belief can play in his account of action: as rationalizing cause and as agential awareness. Somewhat surprisingly, though, after he carefully drew the distinction and announced that intentional action requires practical knowledge, he pretty much ignored it. This may explain why some have assumed that Davidson parted ways with Anscombe on this. But a careful study of their writings shows that in fact they held remarkably similar views on the nature and need for practical knowledge. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of the nature of belief, at least in the western tradition, are framed in large part by two ideas. One is that believing is a form of representing. The other is that a belief plays a causal role when a person acts on it. The standard picture of belief as a mental entity with representational properties and causal powers merges these two ideas. We are to think of beliefs as things that are true or false and that interact (...) with desires, intentions, and emotions to bring about rational action. Both ideas, I think, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is a further blurring of the distinction between what is inside and what is outside our minds. Another is a shift towards a less mentalistic picture of the roots of rational action. (shrink)

Some embodied theories of concepts state that concepts are represented in a sensorimotor manner, typically via simulation in sensorimotor cortices. Fred Adams (2010) has advanced an empirical argument against embodied concepts reasoning as follows. If concepts are embodied, then patients with certain sensorimotor impairments should perform worse on categorization tasks involving those concepts. Adams cites a study with Moebius Syndrome patients that shows typical categorization performance in face-based emotion recognition. Adams concludes that their typical performance shows that embodiment is false. (...) Moebius patients must draw on amodal (non-embodied) emotion concepts. In this paper, I review face-based emotion recognition studies with Moebius patients yielding conflicting results and diagnose these conflicts as a difference in experimental design. When emotion labels are provided, patients have typical performance, but when labels are not provided patients are severely deficient. I then show how an embodied, psychological constructionist view of emotions predicts and explains these performance differences. The upshot is that embodied theories of concepts are vindicated. (shrink)

I will argue that a person is causally responsible for believing what she does. Through inference, she can sustain and change her perspective on the world. When she draws an inference, she causes herself to keep or to change her take on things. In a literal sense, she makes up her own mind as to how things are. And, I will suggest, she can do this voluntarily. It is in part because she is causally responsible for believing what she does (...) that there are things that she ought to believe, and that what she believes can be to her credit or discredit. I won’t pursue these ethical matters here, but will focus instead on the metaphysics that underpin them. (shrink)

Though largely neglected by philosophers, the concept of ineffability is integral to the Christian mystical tradition, and has been part of almost every philosophical discussion of religious experience since the early twentieth century. After a brief introduction, this article surveys the most important discussions of divine ineffability, observing that the literature presents two mutually reinforcing obstacles to a coherent account of the concept, creating the impression that philosophical reflection on the subject had reached an impasse. The article goes on to (...) survey some more recent work, which draws on the conceptual resources of existential phenomenology, pragmatism, and the later Wittgenstein. It shows that this work has made possible a new philosophical account of divine ineffability that surmounts the obstacles, overcomes the impasse and makes divine ineffability, once again, a live option in philosophy of religion. The article concludes with some brief remarks on how this alternative approach reflects recent trends in the discipline as a whole and has the potential to make a valuable contribution to live research questions in epistemology of religion. (shrink)

The following abstracts were selected by AJOB-Neuroscience judges as the best submitted to the International Neuroethics Society 2024 Annual Meeting based on merit, novelty, relevance, and contribution to the field of neuroethics. The scores were tallied and the top abstracts appear in alphabetical order by first author surname.

In this article, we explore various arguments against the traditional distinction between episodic and semantic memory based on the metaphysical phenomenon of transitional gradation. Transitional gradation occurs when two candidate kinds A and B grade into one another along a continuum according to their characteristic properties. We review two kinds of arguments—from the gradual semanticization of episodic memories as they are consolidated, and from the composition of episodic memories during storage and recall from semantic memories—that predict the proliferation of such (...) transitional forms. We further explain why the distinction cannot be saved from the challenges of transitional gradation by appealing to distinct underlying memory structures and applying our perspective to the impasse over research into ‘episodic-like’ memory in non-human animals. On the whole, we recommend replacing the distinction with a dynamic life cycle of memory in which a variety of transitional forms will proliferate, and illustrate the utility of this perspective by tying together recent trends in animal episodic memory research and recommending productive future directions. (shrink)

In the first two sections of this reply article, I provide a brief introduction to the topic of ineffability and a summary of Ineffability and Religious Experience. This is followed, in section 3, by some reflections in reply to the response articles by Professors Metz and Cooper. Section 4 presents some concluding remarks on the future of philosophy of religion in the light of the most recent philosophical work on ineffability.

This paper examines the question of whether Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT possess minds, focusing specifically on whether they have a genuine folk psychology encompassing beliefs, desires, and intentions. We approach this question by investigating two key aspects: internal representations and dispositions to act. First, we survey various philosophical theories of representation, including informational, causal, structural, and teleosemantic accounts, arguing that LLMs satisfy key conditions proposed by each. We draw on recent interpretability research in machine learning to support these (...) claims. Second, we explore whether LLMs exhibit robust dispositions to perform actions, a necessary component of folk psychology. We consider two prominent philosophical traditions, interpretationism and representationalism, to assess LLM action dispositions. While we find evidence suggesting LLMs may satisfy some criteria for having a mind, particularly in game-theoretic environments, we conclude that the data remains inconclusive. Additionally, we reply to several skeptical challenges to LLM folk psychology, including issues of sensory grounding, the "stochastic parrots" argument, and concerns about memorization. Our paper has three main upshots. First, LLMs do have robust internal representations. Second, there is an open question to answer about whether LLMs have robust action dispositions. Third, existing skeptical challenges to LLM representation do not survive philosophical scrutiny. (shrink)

Existing indexing systems used to arrange philosophical works have been shown to misrepresent the discipline in ways that reflect and perpetuate exclusionary attitudes within it. In recent years, there has been a great deal of effort to challenge those attitudes and to revise them. But as the discipline moves toward greater equality and inclusivity, the way it has indexed its work has unfortunately not. To course correct, we identify in this article some of the specific changes that are needed within (...) current indexing systems and propose a new model that could embody them. We use the Diversity Reading List in Philosophy as a case study and PhilPapers as a basis for comparison. The model we propose not only represents the discipline in a more inclusive and fair way, but it is also efficient, easy to use or implement, and adaptable for a variety of contexts. (shrink)

The ways in which Wittgenstein was directly influenced by William James (by his early psychological work as well his later philosophy) have been thoroughly explored and charted by Russell B. Goodman. In particular, Goodman has drawn attention to the pragmatist resonances of the Wittgensteinian notion of hinge propositions as developedand articulated in the posthumously edited and published work, On Certainty. This paper attempts to extend Goodman’s observation, moving beyond his focus on James (specifically, James’s Pragmatism) as his pragmatist reference point. (...) It aims to articulate the affinity between Wittgenstein’s thought on the topic of certainty and that of the neglected pragmatist thinker, George Santayana. -/- The paper draws on Duncan Pritchard’s recent reading of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty in order to articulate the concept of certainty involved in the notion of hinge propositions. It identifies two important and related points of affinity between this Wittgensteinian line of thought on certainty and the line of thought on the same topic articulated in Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith. The paper argues, firstly, that, both lines of thought reflect a pragmatist concept of certainty, according to which our most fundamental certainties are not conceived as purely theoretical objects of belief or knowledge but rather as thearational presuppositions of beliefs and practical action. Secondly, it examines the way inwhich the pragmatist concept of certainty functions, for the two thinkers as a response to scepticism. It argues that although the two thinkers’ responses are very different, they are mutually compatible and, together, point towards the possibility of a distinctively pragmatist response to scepticism, which involves an anti-epistemological model of the intimate relation of the human self to the world. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next twenty (...) or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

This article provides an historical account of Kant's political, legal, and religious thought in the context of the Prussian Enlightenment.

Which political principles should govern global politics? In his new book, Simon Caney engages with the work of philosophers, political theorists, and international relations scholars in order to examine some of the most pressing global issues of our time. Are there universal civil, political, and economic human rights? Should there be a system of supra- state institutions? Can humanitarian intervention be justified?

This paper models knowledge in cases where an agent has multiple experiences over time. Using this model, we introduce a series of observations that undermine the pretheoretic idea that the evidential significance of experience depends on the extent to which that experience matches the world. On the basis of these observations, we model knowledge in terms of what is likely given the agent’s experience. An agent knows p when p is implied by her epistemic possibilities. A world is epistemically possible (...) when its probability given the agent’s experiences is not significantly lower than the probability of the actual world given that experience. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the usefulness of pragmatism as a framework within which to develop the theological application of emergentist theory. I consider some philosophical issues relevant to the recent revival of interest, across various disciplines, in the concept of emergence and clarify some of the conceptual issues at stake in the attempts to formulate the philosophical position of emergentism and to apply it theologically. After highlighting some major problems arising from the main existing ways of formulating emergentism, (...) I build on the work of Sami Pihlström, outlining a less problematic, alternative proposal. I attempt to show that the philosophical problems can be circumvented by an appeal to the pragmatist tradition, which is a useful philosophical framework within which to develop an emergentist theory fit for theological application. (shrink)

An Editorial for issue 128.1 of the Expository Times.

This paper attempts to explain why Heidegger's thought has evoked both positive and negative reactions of such an extreme nature by focussing on his answer to the central methodological question “What is Philosophy?” After briefly setting forth Heidegger‟s answer in terms of attunement to Being, the centrality to it of his view of language and by focussing on his relationship with the word "philosophy‟ and with the history of philosophy, the author shows how it has led Heidegger to construct his (...) own work, itself linguistic, as a self-referential union of form and meaning. It is suggested that, from a Heideggerian perspective, this gives his work added argumentative force but, conversely, allows the critic no point of entry into his hermeneutical circle – hence the extreme reactions. This observation is then applied to address a related critical question; it is used to make sense of the apparent distinction, in Heidegger's work, between talking about attunement to Being and actually effecting such an attunement. The author argues that, for Heidegger, there is actually no distinction and that his apparent descriptions of attunement to Being at once describe and effect such an attunement. This union can therefore be conceived as one dimension of the intimacy, previously observed, between form and content and which is recognised to be a feature of Heidegger‟s work by both the acolyte and the critic. (shrink)

Scientific realism driven by inference to the best explanation (IBE) takes empirically confirmed objects to exist, independent, pace empiricism, of whether those objects are observable or not. This kind of realism, it has been claimed, does not need probabilistic reasoning to justify the claim that these objects exist. But I show that there are scientific contexts in which a non-probabilistic IBE-driven realism leads to a puzzle. Since IBE can be applied in scientific contexts in which empirical confirmation has not yet (...) been reached, realists will in these contexts be committed to the existence of empirically unconfirmed objects. As a consequence of such commitments, because they lack probabilistic features, the possible empirical confirmation of those objects is epistemically redundant with respect to realism. (shrink)

What are we to make of works of art whose apparent point is to convince us of the meaninglessness and absurdity of human existence? I examine, in this paper, the attempt of Albert Camus to provide philosophical justification of art in the face of the supposed fact of absurdity and note its failure as such with specific reference to Sartre’s criticism. Despite other superficial similarities, I contrast Camus’s concept of the absurd with that of his ‘existentialist’ colleagues, including Sartre, and (...) suggest that the latter concept is more philosophically viable. I conclude that existential phenomenology consequently provides a more promising philosophical justification for artistic creation in the light of the more viable conception of absurdity. (shrink)

Philosophers and cognitive scientists alike have recently been interested in whether cognition extends beyond the boundaries of skin and skull and into the environment. However, the extended cognition hypothesis has suffered many objections over the past few decades. In this paper, I explore the option of control extending beyond the human boundary. My aim is to convince the reader of three things: (i) that control can be implemented in artifacts, (ii) that humans and artifacts can form extended control systems, and (...) (iii) that perhaps extended control ought to be preferred over extended cognition. Using the objections to extended cognition as constraints on my own extended theorizing and the example of autofocus systems in cameras, I decompose and localize the components of an autofocus system that realize the central properties of control from a plausible theory of control in the literature. I then provide criteria according to which control can be extended in a system. Finally, I consider how this theory of extended control ought to be preferred to theories of extended cognition. (shrink)

The present religious constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany is the product of protracted historical conflicts and political settlements that began in the sixteenth century. The mediation of these conflicts and settlements and the piecemeal establishment of the constitution was the achievement of imperial public law and diplomacy. Germany’s religious constitution—a secular and relativistic juridical framework protecting a plurality of confessional religions—pre-dated liberalism and democracy, and owes nothing to normative philosophical constructions of individual freedoms and rights, or social justice (...) and moral community. Rather, it was the product of a political compromise between warring confessional blocs, and of the institutions of public law that were the instruments and effects of this compromise. (shrink)

Place-based education is founded on the idea that the student’s local community is one of their primary learning resources. Place-based education’s underlying educational principle is that students need to first have an experiential understanding of the history, culture, and ecology of the environment in which they are situated before tackling broader national and global issues. Such attempts are a step in the right direction in dealing with controversial issues in a democracy by providing resources for synthesising curriculum though theory (curriculum (...) content, including traditional subjects) and practice (practical learning as experiential education). Nevertheless, many place-based accounts discount Indigenous conceptions of place, which are integral to Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, especially in relation to the ontological relationship to Land and Country. Indigenous philosophy has the potential to inform what place-based education means by students developing a ‘sense of place’ when engaging with local communities as their ‘own’ place. In this article we re-imagine the community of inquiry as a place-responsive pedagogy by learning from Indigenous philosophy, and recentring Indigenous notions of place in experiential learning. In addition to exploring the pedagogical potential of a place-responsive account of the community of inquiry, we look to the implications for teacher preparation. (shrink)

Recent advances in natural language processing have given rise to a new kind of AI architecture: the language agent. By repeatedly calling an LLM to perform a variety of cognitive tasks, language agents are able to function autonomously to pursue goals specified in natural language and stored in a human-readable format. Because of their architecture, language agents exhibit behavior that is predictable according to the laws of folk psychology: they function as though they have desires and beliefs, and then make (...) and update plans to pursue their desires given their beliefs. We argue that the rise of language agents significantly reduces the probability of an existential catastrophe due to loss of control over an AGI. This is because the probability of such an existential catastrophe is proportional to the difficulty of aligning AGI systems, and language agents significantly reduce that difficulty. In particular, language agents help to resolve three important issues related to aligning AIs: reward misspecification, goal misgeneralization, and uninterpretability. (shrink)

Belief-in reports of the form 'S believes in O' have been taken to have at least two senses: factual and evaluative. I begin by briefly suggesting that there is no evidence for two distinct senses, then spend most of the paper developing a general semantics for belief-in reports. I explore, and use my semantics to explain, several features of belief-in reports: the context-dependence of what belief-that reports they entail, their widespread lack of equivalence with belief-that reports, and their neg-raising property. (...) Put roughly, my semantics says that 'S believes in O' a) asserts that, for some contextually salient property F, S believes that O has F and b) presupposes that S either has a belief that O has F for which they meet an affective and evidential requirement or has a belief that O doesn’t have F for which they meet an affective and evidential requirement. (shrink)

You omega know something when you know it, and know that you know it, and know that you know that you know it, and so on. This paper first argues that omega knowledge matters, in the sense that it is required for rational assertion, action, inquiry, and belief. The paper argues that existing accounts of omega knowledge face major challenges. One account is skeptical, claiming that we have no omega knowledge of any ordinary claims about the world. Another account embraces (...) the KK thesis, and identifies knowledge with omega knowledge. This position faces counterexamples, and struggles to make sense of inexact knowledge. The paper then develops a new account of knowledge, by proposing the principle of Reflective Luminosity: if you know that you know something, then you omega know it. I argue that Reflective Luminosity allows for omega knowledge while avoiding the problems for KK. (shrink)

At least since Anaximander’s apeiron, there have been philosophical questions about what, if anything, preceded the gods. But, as far as I know, the precise question that I address in this essay was first explicitly asked by Ronald W. Hepburn, in his essay ‘Restoring the Sacred: Sacred as a Concept of Aesthetics’. In his essay, Hepburn is interested in the actual and potential relationships between religious and aesthetic uses of the concept of the sacred. Which leads him to the question: (...) Does the concept have a valid meaning – an aesthetic meaning, say – that is logically independent of (and therefore might have preceded) the religious one, which seems most strongly associated with the metaphysical belief that God or the gods exist? In other words, is the sacred older than the gods? While he does not provide a definitive answer, Hepburn adumbrates his view on whether this claim is correct. In this essay, I set out my own answer within the guidelines that Hepburn’s sketch has laid out. (shrink)

This paper develops an information-sensitive theory of the semantics and probability of conditionals and statements involving epistemic modals. The theory validates a number of principles linking probability and modality, including the principle that the probability of a conditional If A, then C equals the probability of C, updated with A. The theory avoids so-called triviality results, which are standardly taken to show that principles of this sort cannot be validated. To achieve this, we deny that rational agents update their credences (...) via conditionalization. We offer a new rule of update, Hyperconditionalization, which agrees with Conditionalization whenever nonmodal statements are at stake but differs for modal and conditional sentences. (shrink)

Although digital breast tomosynthesis has higher sensitivity than digital mammography and at least as high specificity, digital mammography remains the most common method for conducting mammographic screening. At the same time, mammography systems are now delivered “DBT-ready” and can be used for either digital mammography or digital breast tomosynthesis. In this paper, we ask whether it is ethically permissible to use such equipment for digital mammography, given its lower sensitivity. We argue it is not, and that clinics are ethically required (...) to use their DBTready equipment to screen with digital breast tomosynthesis whenever this is practically possible. Our argument relies on a comparison between digital breast tomosynthesis and a hypothesized improvement in the image quality of digital mammography. (shrink)

The nature of experience has been held to be a major reason for accepting the A-theory of time. I argue, however, that experience does not favour the A-theory over the B-theory; and that even if the A-theory were true it would not be possible to perceive the passage of time. The main argument for this draws on the constraint that a satisfactory theory of perception must explain why phenomenal characters map uniquely onto perceived worldly features. Thus, if passage is perceived, (...) it must be explained what makes one phenomenal character rather than another a perception of passage; and it must also be explained why that phenomenal character is a perception of passage rather than of some other feature of the world. I argue that no such explanation can be given, and consequently that passage cannot be perceived. I conclude that the A-theory is rendered unintelligible, and should therefore be rejected. (shrink)

(DRAFT: I'll update when the book is published.) This started as a book about desire. I was hoping to complement what I had said about belief in my (2022). To believe something, I argued, is to be positioned to do, think and feel things in light of a possibility whose obtaining would make one right. I argued that believing is not representational, that belief states are not causes or causal powers, and that the objects of belief are ways the world (...) might be and not representations of things. Believing is not so much a response to the world as a way of being positioned in it, a way of having an environment, as Frege put it. (Frege 1956, 306) I was trying to put the believer as a rational agent positioned in a world at the heart of my account. I hoped an account of desire could round out this picture of a rational agent’s psychology. But as I thought about desire, I came to see that two ideas about the nature of goodness, one negative and one positive, were really at the heart of my thinking. The negative idea is that there is no such thing as what philosophers have variously called intrinsic goodness or simple goodness or absolute value. I guess I am a nihilist about that. The positive idea is that our world is rich in what I will call sortal quality, what others have called goodness-of-a-kind or attributive goodness. I came to think that sortal quality is at the heart not just of desire but also of pleasure and moral worth. A picture of moral psychology had come into view. And so I re-organised the book. I still say a lot about the nature of desire, or ‘wanting’ as I prefer to call it, and I think my view does complement my externalist view of belief. Wanting, I will argue, is a matter of falling short relative to a standard one falls under, failing to be as good as one could be. If believing is about having an environment to respond to, then desire is about fitting into it well. And so my book offers a comprehensive picture of a moral agent in a world where nothing is simply or absolutely good but where many kinds of things, including people, can be very good and even splendid. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to Richard Lauer’s “Is Social Ontology Prior to Social Scientific Methodology?” (2019) and an attempt to contribute to the meta-social ontological discourse more broadly. In the first part, I will give a rough sketch of Lauer’s general project and confront his pragmatist approach with a fundamental problem. The second part of my reply will provide a solution for this problem rooted in a philosophy of the social sciences in practice.

Artists rarely shy away from a drink and other psychoactive substances, yet it seems that there has never been much discussion on what aesthetic or artistic relevance this has to their works and their reception. I outline the scale of the phenomenon focusing on some prominent examples and distinguish a subset of what I call ‘high artworks’. In such artworks, I argue, drug experiences are encoded: their drug-related contextual and intrinsic properties or content are aesthetically or artistically relevant and should (...) be mentioned in any in-depth analysis. I then further argue that it is impossible or at least very difficult to fully appreciate or produce optimal evaluations of a high artwork, unless one has oneself had drug-induced experiences of the kind encoded in the work. This is because such experiences afford one the relevant phenomenal knowledge that is otherwise inaccessible, yet required to gain an adequate level of competence allowing one to fully grasp the work. (shrink)

Simon Cushing conducted the following interview with Elizabeth Anderson on 18 June 2014.

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 115, Issue 3pt3, Page 211-233, December 2015.

The descriptions 'good' and 'bad' are examples of thin concepts, as opposed to 'kind' or 'cruel' which are thick concepts. Simon Kirchin provides one of the first full-length studies of the crucial distinction between 'thin' and 'thick' concepts, which is fundamental to many debates in ethics, aesthetics and epistemology.

This paper explores the principle that knowledge is fragile, in that whenever S knows that S doesn’t know that S knows that p, S thereby fails to know p. Fragility is motivated by the infelicity of dubious assertions, utterances which assert p while acknowledging higher-order ignorance whether p. Fragility is interestingly weaker than KK, the principle that if S knows p, then S knows that S knows p. Existing theories of knowledge which deny KK by accepting a Margin for Error (...) principle can be conservatively extended with Fragility. (shrink)

Despite well-established results in survey methodology, many experimental philosophers have not asked whether and in what way conclusions about folk intuitions follow from people’s responses to their surveys. Rather, they appear to have proceeded on the assumption that intuitions can be simply read off from survey responses. Survey research, however, is fraught with difficulties. I review some of the relevant literature—particularly focusing on the conversational pragmatic aspects of survey research—and consider its application to common experimental philosophy surveys. I argue for (...) two claims. First, that experimental philosophers’ survey methodology leaves the facts about folk intuitions massively underdetermined; and second, that what has been regarded as evidence for the instability of philosophical intuitions is, at least in some cases, better accounted for in terms of subjects’ reactions to subtle pragmatic cues contained in the surveys. (shrink)

Under what conditions would an artificially intelligent system have wellbeing? Despite its clear bearing on the ethics of human interactions with artificial systems, this question has received little direct attention. Because all major theories of wellbeing hold that an individual’s welfare level is partially determined by their mental life, we begin by considering whether artificial systems have mental states. We show that a wide range of theories of mental states, when combined with leading theories of wellbeing, predict that certain existing (...) artificial systems have wellbeing. Along the way, we argue that there are good reasons to believe that artificial systems can have wellbeing even if they are not phenomenally conscious. While we do not claim to demonstrate conclusively that AI systems have wellbeing, we argue that there is a significant probability that some AI systems have or will soon have wellbeing, and that this should lead us to reassess our relationship with the intelligent systems we create. (shrink)

The notion of being-at-home-in-otherness is the distinctive way of thinking of freedom that Hegel develops in his social and political thought. When I am at one with myself in social and political structures they are not external powers to which I am subjected but are rather constitutive of my self-relation, that is my self-conception is mediated andexpandedthrough those objective structures. How successfully Hegel may achieve being-at-home-in-otherness with regard to these objective structures of right in thePhilosophy of Rightis arguable. What is (...) at issue in this paper is however to argue that there is a blind spot in the text with regard to nature. In Ethical Life the rational subject's passions and inclinations are brought into the subject such that she is ‘with herself’ in them; with regard to external nature no such reconciliation is achieved or even attempted. In Abstract Right external nature is effectively dominated by and subsumed into the will and it is never something in which one is with oneself. It remains outside the model of freedom that Hegel develops in thePhilosophy of Right. There is something troubling about this formulation, since it excludes nature from freedom, but also something accurate, as it reflects the unresolved attitude of moderns to the natural world. (shrink)

Recent research has identified a tension between the Safety principle that knowledge is belief without risk of error, and the Closure principle that knowledge is preserved by competent deduction. Timothy Williamson reconciles Safety and Closure by proposing that when an agent deduces a conclusion from some premises, the agent’s method for believing the conclusion includes their method for believing each premise. We argue that this theory is untenable because it implies problematically easy epistemic access to one’s methods. Several possible solutions (...) are explored and rejected. (shrink)

Ecological communities are seldom, if ever, biological individuals. They lack causal boundaries as the populations that constitute communities are not congruent and rarely have persistent functional roles regulating the communities’ higher-level properties. Instead we should represent ecological communities indexically, by identifying ecological communities via the network of weak causal interactions between populations that unfurl from a starting set of populations. This precisification of ecological communities helps identify how community properties remain invariant, and why they have robust characteristics. This respects the (...) diversity and aggregational nature of these complex systems while still vindicating them as units worthy of investigation. (shrink)

The question of whether there are laws of nature in ecology has developed substantially in the last 20 years. Many have attempted to rehabilitate ecology’s lawlike status through establishing that ecology possesses laws that robustly appear across many different ecological systems. I argue that there is still something missing, which explains why so many have been skeptical of ecology’s lawlike status. Community ecology has struggled to establish what I call a General Unificatory Theory. The lack of a GUT causes problems (...) for explanation as there are no guidelines for how to integrate the lower-level mathematical and causal models into a larger theory of how ecological assemblages are formed. I turn to a promising modern attempt to provide a unified higher-level explanation in ecology, presented by ecologist Mark Vellend, and advocate for philosophical engagement with its prospects for aiding ecological explanation. (shrink)

Here I propose an interpretation of the ancient Stoic psychological theory on which (i) the concepts that an adult human possesses affect the content of the perceptual impressions (φαντασίαι αἰσθητικαί) she forms, and (ii) the content of such impressions is exhausted by an ‘assertible’ (ἀξίωμα) of suitable complexity. What leads the Stoics to accept (i) and (ii), I argue, is their theory of assent and belief formation, which requires that the perceptual impression communicate information suitable to serve as the content (...) of belief. In arguing for (i), I reject a rival interpretation on which conceptualization occurs subsequently to the formation of a perceptual impression. In arguing for (ii), I deny that perceptual impressions have two kinds of content: one formulated in an assertible, the other sensory, featuring independently of this assertible. I explore the implications of (i) and (ii) for the Stoic theory of emotions, expertise, and rationality, and argue that they shed new light on the workings of impression, assent, and belief. (shrink)