WILLIAM DAVIS HAS MAINTAINED THAT A SUPER PLEASURE HELMET COULD IN PRINCIPLE SATISFY ALL HUMAN NEEDS, BUT THAT SUCH A MACHINE IS PROBABLY A PRACTICAL IMPOSSIBILITY. I ARGUE THAT THE SUPER PLEASURE HELMET IS CONCEPTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE BY ARGUING THAT A PERSON'S NEEDS CANNOT BE SATISFIED JUST BY BRINGING ABOUT CERTAIN PSYCHOLOGICAL STATES IN THAT PERSON.

What methodological approaches do research programs use to investigate the world? Elisabeth Lloyd’s Logic of Research Questions (LRQ) characterizes such approaches in terms of the questions that the researchers ask and causal factors they consider. She uses the Logic of Research Questions Framework to criticize adaptationist programs in evolutionary biology for dogmatically assuming selection explanations of the traits of organisms. I argue that Lloyd’s general criticism of methodological adaptationism is an artefact of the impoverished LRQ. My Ordered Factors Proposal extends (...) the LRQ to characterize approaches with sequences of questions and factors. I highlight the importance that ordering one’s investigation plays in approaches at the level of adaptationism by analyzing two research programs in community ecology: competitionists and neutralists. Competitionists and neutralists take opposed starting points and use explanatory and developmental heuristics to consider more factors in due time. On the Ordered Factors Proposal, these approaches are not only the ecological factors they are open to considering but also the order in which they will consider them. My disagreement with Lloyd’s over how to characterize methodological approaches reflects different views about methodological monism and pluralism. (shrink)

Leibniz claimed that the universe, if God-created, would be physically and morally optimal in this conjoint sense: Of all possible worlds, it would be richest in phenomena, but its richness would arise from the simplest physical laws and conditions. This claim raises two difficult questions. First, why would this “richest/simplest” world be morally optimal? Second, what is the optimal balance between these competing criteria? The latter question is especially hard to answer in the context of a multiverse or multi-domain universe. (...) Leibniz focused on goodness as God’s motive in creation. “This is the cause of the existence of the best: that his wisdom makes it known to God, his goodness makes him choose it, and his power lets him produce it.” This article suggests that love is God’s motive. Since love entails acting to both benefit and be with the beloved, limitless love would entail God’s becoming as much unified reality as possible. The physical laws that govern the universe and its vast richness of phenomena appear to be those that we should expect if this claim is true and there are ways of testing the closeness of this fit. The claim that God has become the world (pandeism) also offers a satisfying resolution to the problem of evil. (shrink)

Developments that suggest the universe is full of life make the Fermi paradox increasingly pressing, but our search for an extraterrestrial technological civilization (“ETC”) is handicapped by our ignorance of its probable nature and behavior. This paper offers a way around this problem by drawing on information theoretical concepts, including game theory and Bayesian probability. It argues that, whatever its ultimate goals, an ETC would have the same instrumental goals as other intelligent agents. Generically, these are self-preservation and the acquisition (...) of resources. For an advanced ETC, these generic goals imply the objectives of removing existential threats and acquiring strategic and non-strategic information. Since the most problematic existential threats for any ETC would be from other civilizations and planets hosting such civilizations would also be copious sources of information, these objectives would lead it to gather information from these locations and to protect itself against them. This dual-goals hypothesis resolves the Fermi paradox, redirects the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and makes testable predictions regarding ETC’s behavior on Earth if it is here. (shrink)

Pandeism is the belief that God chose to wholly become our Universe, imposing principles at this Becoming that have fostered the lawful evolution of multifarious structures, including life and consciousness. This article describes and defends a particular form of pandeism: living God pandeism (LGP). On LGP, our Universe inherits all of God's unsurpassable attributes—reality, unity, consciousness, knowledge, intelligence, and effectiveness—and includes as much reality, conscious and unconscious, as is possible consistent with retaining those attributes. God and the Universe, together “God-and-Universe,” (...) is also eternal into the future and the past. The article derives testable hypotheses from these claims and shows that the evidence to date confirms some of these while falsifying none. Theism cannot be tested in the same way. (shrink)

Leibniz said that the universe, if God-created, would exist at a unique, conjoint, physical maximum: Of all possible worlds, it would be richest in phenomena, but its richness would arise from the simplest physical laws and initial conditions. Using concepts of ‘‘variety’’ and algorithmic informational complexity, Leibniz’ claim can be reframed as a testable theory. This theory predicts that the laws and conditions of the actual universe should be simpler, and the universe richer in phenomena, than the presence of observers (...) would require. Tegmark has shown that inhabitants of an infinite multiverse would likely observe simple laws and conditions, but also phenomenal richness just great enough to explain their existence. Empirical observations fit the claim of divine choice better than the claim of an infinite multiverse. The future of the universe, including its future information-processing capacity, is predicted to be endless. -/- . (shrink)

This project continues our interdisciplinary research into computational and cognitive aspects of narrative comprehension. Our ultimate goal is the development of a computational theory of how humans understand narrative texts. The theory will be informed by joint research from the viewpoints of linguistics, cognitive psychology, the study of language acquisition, literary theory, geography, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. The linguists, literary theorists, and geographers in our group are developing theories of narrative language and spatial understanding that are being tested by the (...) cognitive psychologists and language researchers in our group, and a computational model of a reader of narrative text is being developed by the AI researchers, based in part on these theories and results and in part on research on knowledge representation and reasoning. This proposal describes the knowledge-representation and natural-language-processing issues involved in the computational implementation of the theory; discusses a contrast between communicative and narrative uses of language and of the relation of the narrative text to the story world it describes; investigates linguistic, literary, and hermeneutic dimensions of our research; presents a computational investigation of subjective sentences and reference in narrative; studies children’s acquisition of the ability to take third-person perspective in their own storytelling; describes the psychological validation of various linguistic devices; and examines how readers develop an understanding of the geographical space of a story. This report is a longer version of a project description submitted to NSF. This document, produced in May 2007, is a L ATEX version of Technical Report 89-07 (Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science, August 1989), with slightly.. (shrink)

We offer an account of the generic use of the term “porn”, as seen in recent usages such as “food porn” and “real estate porn”. We offer a definition adapted from earlier accounts of sexual pornography. On our account, a representation is used as generic porn when it is engaged with primarily for the sake of a gratifying reaction, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with the represented content. We demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of generic (...) porn by using it to isolate a new type of such porn: moral outrage porn. Moral outrage porn is representations of moral outrage, engaged with primarily for the sake of the resulting gratification, freed from the usual costs and consequences of engaging with morally outrageous content. Moral outrage porn is dangerous because it encourages the instrumentalization of one’s empirical and moral beliefs, manipulating their content for the sake of gratification. Finally, we suggest that when using porn is wrong, it is often wrong because it instrumentalizes what ought not to be instrumentalized. (shrink)

SNePS, the Semantic Network Processing System 45, 54], has been designed to be a system for representing the beliefs of a natural-language-using intelligent system (a \cognitive agent"). It has always been the intention that a SNePS-based \knowledge base" would ultimatelybe built, not by a programmeror knowledge engineer entering representations of knowledge in some formallanguage or data entry system, but by a human informing it using a natural language (NL) (generally supposed to be English), or by the system reading books or (...) articles that had been prepared for human readers. Because of this motivation, the criteria for the development of SNePS have included: it should be able to represent anything and everything expressible in NL; it should be able to represent generic, as well as speci c information; it should be able to use the generic and the speci c information to reason and infer information implied by what it has been told; it cannot count on any particular order among the pieces of information it is given; it must continue to act reasonably even if the information it is given includes circular de nitions, recursive rules, and inconsistent information. (shrink)

Sustainability science seeks to extend scientific investigation into domains characterized by a distinct problem-solving agenda, physical and social complexity, and complex moral and ethical landscapes. In this endeavor it arguably pushes scientific investigation beyond its usual comfort zones, raising fundamental issues about how best to structure such investigation. Philosophers of science have long scrutinized the structure of science and scientific practices, and the conditions under which they operate effectively. We propose a critical engagement between sustainability scientists and philosophers of science (...) with respect to how to engage in scientific activity in these complex domains. We identify specific issues philosophers of science raise concerning current sustainability science and the contributions philosophers can make to resolving them. In conclusion we reflect on the steps philosophers of science could take to advance sustainability science. (shrink)

We present a computational analysis of de re, de dicto, and de se belief and knowledge reports. Our analysis solves a problem first observed by Hector-Neri Castañeda, namely, that the simple rule -/- `(A knows that P) implies P' -/- apparently does not hold if P contains a quasi-indexical. We present a single rule, in the context of a knowledge-representation and reasoning system, that holds for all P, including those containing quasi-indexicals. In so doing, we explore the difference between reasoning (...) in a public communication language and in a knowledge-representation language, we demonstrate the importance of representing proper names explicitly, and we provide support for the necessity of considering sentences in the context of extended discourse (for example, written narrative) in order to fully capture certain features of their semantics. (shrink)

In the TACITUS project for using commonsense knowledge in the understanding of texts about mechanical devices and their failures, we have been developing various commonsense theories that are needed to mediate between the way we talk about the behavior of such devices and causal models of their operation. Of central importance in this effort is the axiomatization of what might be called commonsense metaphysics. This includes a number of areas that figure in virtually every domain of discourse, such as granularity, (...) scales, time, space, material, physical objects, shape, causality, functionality, and force. Our effort has been to construct core theories of each of these areas, and then to define, or at least characterize, a large number of lexical items in terms provided by the core theories. In this paper we discuss our methodological principles and describe the key ideas in the various domains we are investigating. (shrink)

This is a research report in which we present examples which should be of interest to those working on clausal embedding and dubitative verbs. Examples are presented which are relevant to the evaluation of claims and arguments in: (Karttunen 1977), (Uegaki 2021), (Huddleston 1994), (Biezma & Rawlins 2012), (Roelofsen; Herbstritt; & Aloni 2019), (Suñer 1993), and (Rawlins 2008). The examples are mostly from English, but we also present some examples from Italian, Spanish, and German.

In ‘The Pregnancy Rescue Case: why abortion is immoral’, Hendricks presents The Pregnancy Rescue Case. In this reply I argue that even if it would be better (i.e., less bad) for the abortion to be prevented in The Pregnancy Rescue Case, that does not mean that typical abortions are impermissible. I also argue that there is a possible explanation, consistent with the pro-choice view and empirically testable, as to why people would think it better for the abortion to be prevented (...) in The Pregnancy Rescue Case. (shrink)

I argue that contrary to their own intentions Casser and Schiller should think that their pain-in-mouth argument is invalid. I cast doubt on whether a hole must be in a host of it but show that the crux of Casser and Schiller’s proposal does not depend on this.

In (Owesen 2022), Owesen purportedly argues that pains are activations of nociceptors. In these comments I show that much of what Owesen says is consistent with pains being nociceptors themselves.

I draw attention to two questions which arise from: Frege’s underlining in a letter to Russell, some of his remarks in ‘Meine grundlegenden logischen Einsichten’/‘My basic logical insights’, and a plausible thesis regarding indirect Bedeutungen. Addressing these questions is necessary for a proper understanding of Frege’s account of „dass“-sentences/“that”-clauses.

The paper is written in response to those who fail to recognize the relation between a patient's mental competency and her state of pain. Some clinicians claim that a proper diagnosis can only be made in the absent of analgesia. Rather, the patient's state of pain directly affects her mental competency and thus her ability to give valid consent. Clinicians should rethink their approach to diagnosis when the patient is in pain.

In the last forty years Dummett, Hanks, Künne, and Bobzien have claimed that when Frege wrote ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question [Satzfrage] was not a thought [Gedanke] ((Dummett 1981: 307–308); (Hanks 2007: 142–143); (Künne 2010: 427–429); (Bobzien 2021: 163–164)). Recently, Textor has claimed that when Frege wrote ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question was not a question [Frage] (Textor 2021: 227 fn.2). I think it is possible that (...) when Frege wrote ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question was a question and a thought. To show that this possibility should not be overlooked, I have written a dialogue in which Frege responds to Dummett, Hanks, Künne, Bobzien, and Textor. -/- Bobzien seems to think that when Frege wrote ‘Die Verneinung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question was not a question (Bobzien 2021: 163–165). I think it is possible that when Frege wrote ‘Die Verneinung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question was a question and a thought. Hence, I have also written the dialogue to show that this possibility should not be overlooked either. (shrink)

Georgalis claimed that when Frege wrote ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ Frege thought that the indirect [ungerade] sense of an expression was identical to its normal [gewöhnlich] sense (Georgalis 2022: e.g. 4, 5, 13). In this paper, I present five arguments for the falsity of Georgalis’ claim which are based on three pieces of apparent counterevidence: a passage from Frege’s letter to Russell dated 28.12.1902; a passage from Frege’s letter to Russell dated 20.10.1902; and a passage from ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’. (...) I outline possible counter-arguments and responses. (shrink)

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

Cognitive agents, whether human or computer, that engage in natural-language discourse and that have beliefs about the beliefs of other cognitive agents must be able to represent objects the way they believe them to be and the way they believe others believe them to be. They must be able to represent other cognitive agents both as objects of beliefs and as agents of beliefs. They must be able to represent their own beliefs, and they must be able to represent beliefs (...) as objects of beliefs. These requirements raise questions about the number of tokens of the belief representation language needed to represent believers and propositions in their normal roles and in their roles as objects of beliefs. In this paper, we explicate the relations among nodes, mental tokens, concepts, actual objects, concepts in the belief spaces of an agent and the agent's model of other agents, concepts of other cognitive agents, and propositions. We extend, deepen, and clarify our theory of intensional knowledge representation for natural-language processing, as presented in previous papers and in light of objections raised by others. The essential claim is that tokens in a knowledge-representation system represent only intensions and not extensions. We are pursuing this investigation by building CASSIE, a computer model of a cognitive agent and, to the extent she works, a cognitive agent herself. CASSIE's mind is implemented in the SNePS knowledge-representation and reasoning system. (shrink)

Until recently, psychologists have conceptualised and studied trust in God (TIG) largely in isolation from contemporary work in theology, philosophy, history, and biblical studies that has examined the topic with increasing clarity. In this article, we first review the primary ways that psychologists have conceptualised and measured TIG. Then, we draw on conceptualizations of TIG outside the psychology of religion to provide a conceptual map for how TIG might be related to theorised predictors and outcomes. Finally, we provide a research (...) agenda for future empirical work in this area, as well as practical applications for counsellors and religious leaders. (shrink)

This paper is about the work of a long forgotten philosopher and his views which have surprising relevance to discussions in present-day philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I argue that, far from being a traditional idealist, Mitchell advanced a very subtle position best seen as marking a transition from idealist views and later materialist accounts, the latter popularly attributed to Australian philosophers in the second half of the 20th century.

The sense of form that provides the modern poet with a unique experience of the literary object has been crucial to various attempts to compare poetry to other cultural activities. In maintaining similar conceptions of the relationship between poetry and painting, Arthur Rimbaud and W. C. Williams establish a common basis for interpreting their creative work. And yet their poetry is more crucially concerned with the sudden emergence of visible "worlds" containing verbal objects that integrate a new kind of literary (...) text. This paper discusses the emergence of "aesthetic worlds" in the work of both poets and then examines how a common concern with Baroque form unites them in the phenomenological task of overcoming Cartesian dualism. (shrink)

How does microbiota research impact our understanding of biological individuality? We summarize the interdisciplinary summer school on "Microbiota, Symbiosis and Individuality: Conceptual and Philosophical Issues" (July 2019), which was supported by a European Research Council starting grant project "Immunity, DEvelopment, and the Microbiota" (IDEM). The summer school centered around interdisciplinary group work on four facets of microbiota research: holobionts, individuality, causation, and human health. The conceptual discussion of cutting-edge empirical research provided new insights into microbiota and highlights the value of (...) incorporating into meetings experts from other disciplines, such as philosophy and history of science. (shrink)

Understanding how biological organisms are autonomous—maintain themselves far from equilibrium through their own activities—requires understanding how they regulate those activities. In multicellular animals, such control can be exercised either via endocrine signaling through the vasculature or via neurons. In C. elegans this control is exercised by a well-delineated relatively small but distributed nervous system that relies on both chemical and electric transmission of signals. This system provides resources to integrate information from multiple sources as needed to maintain the organism. Especially (...) important for the exercise of neural control are neuromodulators, which we present as setting agendas for control through more traditional electrical signaling. To illustrate how the C. elegans nervous system integrates multiple sources of information in controlling activities important for autonomy, we focus on feeding behavior and responses to adverse conditions. We conclude by considering how a distributed nervous system without a centralized controller is nonetheless adequate for autonomy. (shrink)

William James' Radical Empiricist essays offer a unique and powerful argument for direct realism about our perceptions of objects. This theory can be completed with some observations by Kant on the intellectual preconditions for a perceptual judgment. Finally James and Kant deliver a powerful blow to the representational theory of perception and knowledge, which applies quite broadly to theories of representation generally.

I present Aristotle’s theory of causation in a way that privileges a comparison with contemporary discussion on causation. I do so by selecting in Aristotle’s theory points that are interesting to contemporary discussion and by translating Aristotle in the contemporary philosophical terminology. I compare Aristotle’s views with Mackie’s (1993/1965) and Sosa’s (1993/1980). Mackie is a humean regularist regarding the metaphysics of causal necessity, but his theory postulates some formal aspects of the causal relation which are similar to the Aristotelian theory. (...) By introducing the notion of causal field as a third causal relatum – a sample in which the cause must be picked out as a explanation coextensive to the effect –, Mackie holds a point very similar to Aristotle, inasmuch as both defend that the causal relation is triadic and both have the extensional desideratum. Sosa (1993/1980) defends that every cause necessitates its effect, arguing against classical Humeanism, and he also proposes a causal pluralism. Both these theses are clearly Aristotelian. Aristotle comprehends that the causal relation has three relata: a subjacent C, a property of that subjacent A and a cause B that explains why such property is attributed to that subjacent. The subjacent is similar to Mackie’s notion of causal field, for in regard to it the cause must be coextensive to the property. But Aristotle also says that for each explanandum (property attributed to a subjacent of which one aims to investigate a cause) there is only one cause, which necessitates it. Sosa and Aristotle are similar because both develop a causal pluralism from a theory of causes as having intrinsic necessitation. For Aristotle, causes/explanations [aitiai] are central for attaining scientific knowledge, and its triadic structure determines the syllogistic structure of scientific demonstrations. Aristotle’s theory of causation also involves comprehending the actualisation of capacities (dispositional properties of objects) affirming that the causal relation is resultant from intrinsic properties of the objects, and the cause B is the essence of the explanandum. (shrink)

John Maynard Keynes’s A Treatise on Probability is the seminal text for the logical interpretation of probability. According to his analysis, probabilities are evidential relations between a hypothesis and some evidence, just like the relations of deductive logic. While some philosophers had suggested similar ideas prior to Keynes, it was not until his Treatise that the logical interpretation of probability was advocated in a clear, systematic and rigorous way. I trace Keynes’s influence in the philosophy of probability through a heterogeneous (...) sample of thinkers who adopted his interpretation. This sample consists of Frederick C. Benenson, Roy Harrod, Donald C. Williams, Henry E. Kyburg and David Stove. The ideas of Keynes prove to be adaptable to their diverse theories of probability. My discussion indicates both the robustness of Keynes’s probability theory and the importance of its influence on the philosophers whom I describe. I also discuss the Problem of the Priors. I argue that none of those I discuss have obviously improved on Keynes’s theory with respect to this issue. (shrink)

John Searle once said: "The Chinese room shows what we knew all along: syntax by itself is not sufficient for semantics. (Does anyone actually deny this point, I mean straight out? Is anyone actually willing to say, straight out, that they think that syntax, in the sense of formal symbols, is really the same as semantic content, in the sense of meanings, thought contents, understanding, etc.?)." I say: "Yes". Stuart C. Shapiro has said: "Does that make any sense? Yes: Everything (...) makes sense. The question is: What sense does it make?" This essay explores what sense it makes to say that syntax by itself is sufficient for semantics. (shrink)

This article is a rebuttal to Robert G. Cavin and Carlos A. Colombetti’s article, “Assessing the Resurrection Hypothesis: Problems with Craig’s Inference to the Best Explanation,” which argues that the Standard Model of current particle physics entails that non-physical things (like a supernatural God or a supernaturally resurrected body) can have no causal contact with the physical universe. As such, they argue that William Lane Craig’s resurrection hypothesis is not only incompatible with the notion of Jesus physically appearing to (...) the disciples, but the resurrection hypothesis is significantly limited in both its explanatory scope and explanatory power. This article seeks to demonstrate why their use of the Standard Model does not logically entail a rejection of the physical resurrection of Jesus when considering the scope and limitations of science itself. (shrink)

“Critical thinking in higher education” is a phrase that means many things to many people. It is a broad church. Does it mean a propensity for finding fault? Does it refer to an analytical method? Does it mean an ethical attitude or a disposition? Does it mean all of the above? Educating to develop critical intellectuals and the Marxist concept of critical consciousness are very different from the logician’s toolkit of finding fallacies in passages of text, or the practice of (...) identifying and distinguishing valid from invalid syllogisms. Critical thinking in higher education can also encompass debates about critical pedagogy, i.e., political critiques of the role and function of education in society, critical feminist approaches to curriculum, issues related to what has become known as critical citizenship, or any other education-related topic that uses the appellation “critical”. Equally, it can, and usually does, refer to the importance and centrality of developing general skills in reasoning—skills that we hope all graduates possess. Yet, despite more than four decades of dedicated scholarly work “critical thinking” remains as elusive as ever. As a concept, it is, as Raymond Williams has noted, a ‘most difficult one’ (Williams, 1976, p. 74). (shrink)

A sloppy, smug, conceptually muddled, and tendentious Christian apologist's comparison of narrowly selected texts from Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Paul, Luke, and Justin Martyr. Following Alasdair MacIntyre, Rowe defends the traditionist view according to which Spirit-enhanced ‘supernatural’ discourse is intelligible only to those on the inside of Christian faith. Rowe argues that morality and religion are abstractions. Rowe presents his translations of Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus, Paul, Luke, and Justin into modern English while also being committed to the traditionist view that (...) such translations are doomed to inaccuracy and distortion. His views invite relativism and skepticism about all kinds of inquiry, including MacIntyre’s traditioned approach. (shrink)

The movement called Experimental Philosophy (‘x-Phi’) has now passed its tenth anniversary. Its central insight is compelling: When an argument hinges on accepting certain ‘facts’ about human perception, knowledge, or judging, the evoking of relevant intuitions by thought experiments is intended to make those facts seem obvious. But these intuitions may not be shared universally. Experimentalists propose testing claims that traditionally were intuition-based using real experiments, with real samples. Demanding that empirical claims be empirically supported is certainly reasonable; though experiments (...) are not necessarily the only means available. When experiments are conducted, adequately interpreting their results requires understanding the study’s design (and possibly flaws) that produced them. Experiment-based reports should document the design clearly. If Plato, writing his Meno, replaced accounts of Socrates demonstrating geometry to a slave-boy, with a survey of 100 real boys—some grasping his demonstrations, others not—what conclusions could be reached? Before answering, the reader needs details on key design questions, including (among others): (a) What population are these samples intended to represent? (E.g., ‘all slave boys’?; ‘math-ignorant people’?; ‘everyone’?) (b) What statistical tests were conducted, on what assumptions? (c) How was ‘significance’ of results determined? (d) Was the test instrument’s validity established? For readers wishing to explore x-Phi’s potentials, as contributors or as interpreters of their findings, this paper offers some cautionary considerations. Throughout their literature, examples can be found casting doubt on some experimentalists’ findings, due to design-related issues. Increased awareness of methodological questions would tighten the x-phi literature, going forward . (shrink)

S. C. Gibb holds that some mental events enable physical events to take place by acting as ‘double preventers’ which prevent other mental events from effecting change in the physical domain. She argues that this enables a dualist account of psychophysical interaction consistent with the causal relevance of mental events, their distinctness from physical events, the causal closure of the physical and the exclusion of systematic overdetermination. While accepting the causal powers metaphysic, this paper argues that: Closure is maintained only (...) on the assumption of an implausible pre-ordained harmony between preventing and double-preventing mental events. Distinctness is preserved only at the cost of positing brute unexplained powers of mental and physical events to causally interact with each other. Exclusion is systematically violated in a substantial number of everyday cases. The case for Relevance made by the Double Prevention model is accordingly too weak to sustain a dualist approach to mental causation. (shrink)

Kalam cosmological arguments have recently been the subject of criticisms, at least inter alia, by physicists---Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking---and philosophers of science---Adolf Grunbaum. In a series of recent articles, William Craig has attempted to show that these criticisms are “superficial, iII-conceived, and based on misunderstanding.” I argue that, while some of the discussion of Davies and Hawking is not philosophically sophisticated, the points raised by Davies, Hawking and Grunbaum do suffice to undermine the dialectical efficacy of kalam cosmological arguments.

C. Stephen Layman contends that an argument supporting theism over naturalism can be constructed based on three defensible, non–question-begging premises about the moral order. Previous critics of Layman’s argument have challenged the truth of these premises. We stipulate them arguendo but go on to show that there is a deeper problem: a fourth premise introduced to complete the argument—the “completion premise,” as we call it—is true only if we assume that God exists or we concede that there is no afterlife. (...) We close with suggestions for how Layman’s argument must be strengthened to meet with dialectical success. (shrink)

This paper explores some connections between depictions of mortality in portrait-painting and philosophical (and psychoanalytic) treatments of our need to be recognized by others. I begin by examining the connection that Georg Simmel makes in his philosophical study of Rembrandt between that artist’s capacity for depicting his portrait subjects as non-repeatable individuals and his depicting them as mortal, or such as to die. After noting that none of Simmel’s explanations of the tragic character of Rembrandt’s portrait subjects seems fully satisfactory, (...) I then turn to Rousseau’s writing on our need for the recognition of others in order to argue that (1) it is at least as sources for the satisfaction of this need that other persons figure for us as irreplaceable (in a way that contrasts with the kinds of satisfaction that intersubstitutable things afford us); and that (2) it is exactly this kind of irreplaceability that Simmel is gesturing at in connecting the concepts of individuality and mortality in his writing on Rembrandt’s portraits. For the remainder of the paper I argue that the foregoing ideas are in fact central to the psychoanalytic writing of Melanie Klein, and in particular (a) Klein’s understanding the infant’s apprehension of other persons as internally related to their anxieties about the possibility of those persons’ irretrievable loss; (b) her understanding that it is as sources of recognition that others’ personhood is made salient to us; and (c) her treatment of portrait-painting as an activity for working through those aforementioned anxieties. (shrink)

Quine (1960, "Word and object". Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ch. 2) claims that there are a variety of equally good schemes for translating or interpreting ordinary talk. 'Rabbit' might be taken to divide its reference over rabbits, over temporal slices of rabbits, or undetached parts of rabbits, without significantly affecting which sentences get classified as true and which as false. This is the basis of his famous 'argument from below' to the conclusion that there can be no fact of the (...) matter as to how reference is to be divided. Putative counterexamples to Quine's claim have been put forward in the past (see especially Evans (1975, "Journal of Philosophy", LXXII(13), 343-362. Reprinted in McDowell (Ed.), "Gareth Evans: Collected papers." Oxford: Clarendon Press.), Fodor (1993, "The elm and the expert: Mentalese and its semantics." Cambridge, MA: Bradford)), and various patches have been suggested (e. g. Wright (1997, The indeterminacy of translation. In C. Wright & B. Hale (Eds.), "A companion to the philosophy of language" (pp. 397-426). Oxford: Blackwell)). One lacuna in this literature is that one does not find any detailed presentation of what exactly these interpretations are supposed to be. Drawing on contemporary literature on persistence, the present paper sets out detailed semantic treatments for fragments of English, whereby predicates such as 'rabbit' divide their reference over four-dimensional continuants (Quine's rabbits), instantaneous temporal slices of those continuants (Quine's rabbitslices) and the simple elements which compose those slices (undetached rabbit parts) respectively. Once we have the systematic interpretations on the table, we can get to work evaluating them. (shrink)

Subjectivists about welfare face two problems that pull them in opposite directions. The Paradox Problem, outlined by Ben Bradley, is that, for an agent who desires that her life go badly, subjectivist theories are sometimes unable to give a determinate answer about how well her life goes. This problem demands that subjectivists choose a complex mental attitude to ground well-being. The Infant Problem, from Eden Lin, is that many subjective theories end up denying that infants (and some others) have welfare. (...) This problem demands that subjectivists choose a simple attitude to ground well-being. I argue that subjectivists should respond by adopting Disjunctive Subjectivism. Your welfare depends on your judgements that things are intrinsically good or bad for you (c.f. Dorsey), unless you are not capable of such judgements. In that case, it depends on your desires. I then defend DS against objections from Lin, and the potential charge of being ad hoc. (shrink)

In this chapter, I attempt to show that evil exists only if what I call Agent Causal Theism (ACT) is true. According to ACT, human beings are immaterial, conscious agents endued (by God) with a power of self-motion: the power to think, decide, and act for ends in light of reasons, but without being externally caused to do so (even by God himself). By contrast, I argue that there is no space for evil in the worldviews of naturalistic Darwinism or (...) theistic Calvinism. (shrink)

Spanish version of collaborative essay with Oaxaca-based Mexican experimental filmmaker Bruno Varela on his found footage project La máquina de futuro. Published on the website Los Experimentos together with the release of Varela's diptych Anáhuac contra los robots, consisting of the films La máquina de futuro and La ranura en el tiempo.

English version of collaborative text with Bruno Varela on his film La máquina de futuro (2024), published in the catalog of Umbrales experimental film section of the FICUNAM film festival.

Two extremely detailed accounts of temporal experience can be found in the work of C. D. Broad. These accounts have been subject to considerable criticism. I argue that, when we look more carefully at Broad’s work, we find that much of this criticism fails to find its target. I show that the objection that ultimately proves troubling for Broad stems from his commitment to two principles: i) the Thin-PSA, and ii) the ‘Overlap’ claim. I use this result to demonstrate that (...) we can learn two extremely important lessons from Broad’s work on temporal experience. -/- The first lesson is that there is a structural problem facing any account that commits to these two principles. This is significant given that a number of recent accounts of temporal experience are so committed. The second lesson is that the problem facing these accounts stems only from commitment to the Thin-PSA and ‘Overlap’, rather than to commitment to a particular conception of how experiences are to be individuated. This, I argue, gives us reason to reject Tye’s recent claim that the problems facing accounts of temporal experience can be dissolved simply by making stipulations about how experiences are to be individuated. (shrink)

It is my goal in this paper to offer a strategy for translating universal statements about utopia into particular statements. This is accomplished by drawing out their implicit, temporally embedded, points of reference. Universal statements of the kind I find troublesome are those of the form ‘Utopia is x’, where ‘x’ can be anything from ‘the receding horizon’ to ‘the nation of the virtuous’. To such statements, I want to put the questions: ‘Which utopias?’; ‘In what sense?’; and ‘When was (...) that, is that, or will that be, the case for utopias?’ Through an exploration of these lines of questioning, I arrive at three archetypes of utopian theorizing which serve to provide the answers: namely, utopian historicism, utopian presentism, and utopian futurism. The employment of these archetypes temporally grounds statements about utopia in the past, present, or future, and thus forces discussion of discrete particulars instead of abstract universals with no meaningful referents. (shrink)

In the middle of last century metaphysics was widely criticized, ridiculed, and committed to the flames. During this period a handful of philosophers, against several anti-metaphysical trends, defended metaphysics and articulated novel metaphysical doctrines. Donald C. Williams was one of these philosophers. But while his contributions to metaphysics are well known his defence of metaphysics is not and yet it played a key part in the development and revival of metaphysics. In this paper I present his defence of metaphysics in (...) its historical context. I also show how his defence is relevant in response to recent attacks on metaphysics. (shrink)

Concern about the ethics of clinical drug trials research on patients and healthy volunteers has been the subject of significant ethical analysis and policy development—protocols are reviewed by Research Ethics Committees and subjects are protected by informed consent procedures. More recently attention has begun to be focused on DNA banking for clinical and pharmacogenetics research. It is, however, surprising how little attention has been paid to the commercial nature of such research, or the unique issues that present when subjects are (...) asked to consent to the storage of biological samples. Our contention is that in the context of pharmacogenetic add-on studies to clinical drug trials, the doctrine of informed consent fails to cover the broader range of social and ethical issues. Applying a sociological perspective, we foreground issues of patient/subject participation or ‘work’, the ambiguity of research subject altruism, and the divided loyalties facing many physicians conducting clinical research. By demonstrating the complexity of patient and physician involvement in clinical drug trials, we argue for more comprehensive ethical review and oversight that moves beyond reliance on informed consent to incorporate understandings of the social, political and cultural elements that underpin the diversity of ethical issues arising in the research context. (shrink)

CATEGORY: Philosophy play; historical fiction; comedy; social criticism. -/- STORYLINE: Tim, a physics professor with a certain taste for young female university students, recently got a new appointment at a London university. But, as it turns out, he is still unsatisfied. Why? Is it because Rachael unexpectedly left him under strange circumstances? Or does it have to do with his sudden departure from another university? Or is it his research? When Tim meets Christianus for a brown-bag discussion on philosophy and (...) science, new facts and perspectives are revealed. -/- TOPICS: In the course of the play, Tim and Christianus discuss different metaphysical, epistemological, and ontological ideas. Many of these are either related to isssues in the philosophy of science (explanation, methodology, scientific investigation, etc.), or to issues in human psychology and the philosophy of mind (the self vs. the mind, dualism, ‘Who am I?’, etc.). In one scene, for example, Tim tries to invoke ‘Ockham’s Razor’ (or ‘Occam’s Razor’) to quickly dismiss some of Christianus’s metaphysical ideas (see Scene VII: Ockham’s Raisin; Scene XIII: The Raisin Tale Revisited); in another scene, Christianus introduces his ‘Postman’ scenario, and the idea that successful (‘scientific’) prediction or forecasting is not necessarily a sure sign of true understanding (see Scene XV: The Postman Always Turns Twice). -/- NOTES: This work features elaborate footnotes and comments (including full bibliographical references) by the author, to enhance the reader's experience of the play and its philosophizing characters. (shrink)