According to the “internal” conception (Quong), political liberalism aims to be publicly justifiable only to people who are reasonable in a special sense specified and advocated by political liberalism itself. One advantage of the internal conception allegedly is that it enables liberalism to avoid perfectionism. The paper takes issue with this view. It argues that once the internal conception is duly pitched at its fundamental, metatheoretical level and placed in its proper discursive context, it emerges that it comes at the (...) cost of public dogma. The paper examines this problem and argues that a plausible response to this problem is to go beyond the internal conception and adopt a more inclusive, dynamic conception. But this calls for a form of perfectionism. Thus, the internal conception of political liberalism, far from showing how liberalism can be had without perfectionism, effectively calls for perfectionism as a remedy for its problems. (shrink)

I argue that much current thinking on externalities—at least among “lay political economists” (but even, on occasion, among professional economists)—is saddled with two analytical errors. The first is what I call coextensivism: the conflation of public goods and externalities. The second error is what I call externality profligacy: the conflation of economic and “social” externalities. The principal dangers presented by these two “dogmas on externalities” are that, while in their grips, we are under-disposed to seek negotiated, market-based solutions (of (...) a broadly Coasean nature) to challenges posed by economic externalities, and over-disposed to seek coercive, state-based solutions (of a broadly Pigouvian nature) to challenges posed by social externalities. (shrink)

This single pdf includes ALL SEVEN of my Dogma Revue articles, which together comprise the entirety of my book The Nondual Mind: Vedānta, Kashmiri Pratyabhijñā Shaivism, and Spinoza (the full book in manuscript form is also posted on this site). The book compares Hindu nondual philosophy to that of Baruch Spinoza, demonstrating the similarity of Spinoza’s ideas to Kashmiri Pratyabhijñā Shaivism. The book is well researched, but it is written in an informal style suitable for both scholars and the (...) educated general public. There is already some scholarly literature comparing Spinoza’s philosophy to Śaṅkara’s Vedānta, but none of it has focused, as this book does, on philosophy of mind, and none of it has included nondual Kashmiri Shaivism in the comparison. Among other things, the important distinction between Śaṅkara’s Vedānta and nondual Kashmiri Shaivism is brought to the fore by looking at those two philosophies through the lens of Spinoza. “I liked James H. Cumming’s The Nondual Mind a lot. It is beautifully written, thoughtful, and very clear.” (Prof. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University) “James H. Cumming’s scholarly interpretation of Spinoza’s works, persuasively showing how 17th century European ideas that ushered in the Enlightenment find a precursor in 10th century Kashmir, is a masterpiece of reason and philosophy that will leave the reader with profound thoughts on the meaning of history, God, and life itself. As a senior staff attorney in my chambers for many years at the California Supreme Court and a top scholar of ethics and philosophy of law, Mr. Cumming never ceased to amaze me with his outstanding research and intellect. This scholarly book is a must read for all who want to know why Spinoza continues to influence contemporary philosophy and how his work is still relevant in today’s challenging, interconnected world.” (Hon. Ming W. Chin, Associate Justice (Retired), Supreme Court of California, 1996–2020). (shrink)

(Please note: the main ideas of this paper are restated in revised/developed form in: "On actualist and fundamental public justification in political liberalism" and "Patterns of justification: on political liberalism and the primacy of public justification". Both papers are available from philpapers.) The paper suggests the deep view of Rawls-type public justification as promising, non-ideal theory variant of an internal conception of political liberalism. To this end, I demonstrate how the deep view integrates a range of ideas, (...) views and commitments at the core of political liberalism’s justification structure, including pro tanto justification, full justification, political values and their priority, justificatory neutrality, the role of reasonable comprehensive views, the nature public reasons, the wide view of public political culture, the role of overlapping consensus and political legitimacy, and not least, the status of reflective equilibrium and the Original Position. I then contrast the deep view with Quong’s ideal theory variant if the internal conception, and argue that we should prefer the deep view. Thus, the prospects of political liberalism depend not so much on whether we find ways to make ideal theory relevant for non-ideal purposes. Rather, it depends on whether political liberalism can devise a credible response to the problem of public dogma. (shrink)

In this article we aim to open a new line of debate about religion in public schools by focusing on religious ideals. We begin with an elucidation of the concept ‘religious ideals’ and an explanation of the notion of reasonable pluralism, in order to be able to explore the dangers and positive contributions of religious ideals and their pursuit on a liberal democratic society. We draw our examples of religious ideals from Christianity and Islam, because these religions have most (...) adherents in Western liberal democracies that are the focus of this article. The fifth and most important section ‘‘Reasonable pluralism and the inclusion of religious ideals in public secondary schools’’ provides three arguments for our claim that public schools should include religious ideals, namely that they are important to religious people, that they are conducive for the development of pupils into citizens of a liberal democracy, and that the flourishing of pupils as adults is advanced by encountering religious ideals. We also offer a more practical reason: religious ideals can more easily be included within public education than religious dogmas and rules. (shrink)

This book compares Hindu nondual philosophy to that of Baruch Spinoza, demonstrating the similarity of Spinoza’s ideas to Kashmiri Pratyabhijñā Shaivism. The book is well researched, but it is written in an informal style suitable for both scholars and the educated general public. There is already some scholarly literature comparing Spinoza’s philosophy to Śaṅkara’s Vedānta, but none of it has focused, as this book does, on philosophy of mind, and none of it has included nondual Kashmiri Shaivism in the (...) comparison. Among other things, the important distinction between Śaṅkara’s Vedānta and nondual Kashmiri Shaivism is brought to the fore by looking at those two philosophies through the lens of Spinoza. “I liked James H. Cumming’s The Nondual Mind a lot. It is beautifully written, thoughtful, and very clear.” (Prof. Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University) “James H. Cumming’s scholarly interpretation of Spinoza’s works, persuasively showing how 17th century European ideas that ushered in the Enlightenment find a precursor in 10th century Kashmir, is a masterpiece of reason and philosophy that will leave the reader with profound thoughts on the meaning of history, God, and life itself. As a senior staff attorney in my chambers for many years at the California Supreme Court and a top scholar of ethics and philosophy of law, Mr. Cumming never ceased to amaze me with his outstanding research and intellect. This scholarly book is a must read for all who want to know why Spinoza continues to influence contemporary philosophy and how his work is still relevant in today’s challenging, interconnected world.” (Hon. Ming W. Chin, Associate Justice (Retired), Supreme Court of California, 1996–2020). (shrink)

We respond to Swinburne’s reply to our critique of his argument for the Resurrection by defending the relevance of our counterexamples to his claim that God does not permit grand deception. We reaffirm and clarify our charge that Swinburne ignores two crucial items of Negative Natural Theology (NNT)—that God has an exceptionally weak tendency to raise the dead and that even people with exemplary public records sometimes sin. We show, accordingly, that our total evidence makes it highly probable that (...) Jesus was not sinless, incarnate, or resurrected and that God has permitted massive deception regarding these defining Christian dogmas. (shrink)

ExtractIn a democracy people are free to express their opinions and question those of others. This is an important personal freedom, and also essential to the very idea of government by discussion. But it has also been held to be instrumentally important because in open public debate true ideas will conquer false ones by their merit, and the people will see the truth for themselves. In other words, democracy has an epistemic function as a kind of truth machine. From (...) this it follows that in a democracy there should be no dogma: no knowledge protected from public challenge and debate. Yet this whole argument is founded on embarrassing misconceptions of the nature of truth and of the working of democracy.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.DEMOCRACY IS NOT A TRUTH MACHINEVolume 12, Issue 33Thomas WellsDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175612000309Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. DEMOCRACY IS NOT A TRUTH MACHINEVolume 12, Issue 33Thomas WellsDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175612000309Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. DEMOCRACY IS NOT A TRUTH MACHINEVolume 12, Issue 33Thomas WellsDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175612000309Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

The paper discusses three aspects of belonging to religious systems of belief within a modern liberal society, namely (1) the sincerity and consistency of belief, (2) the possibility of exteriorization of belief through broader social interactions or transactions, and (3) the relationship between religious belief and the modern concept of affirmative tolerance, or affirmation of differences, which has become a pronounced public policy in multicultural liberal societies. The author argues that, while negative tolerance allows sincere religious belief to flourish (...) in the private sphere and for benevolence to be shown to those who are seen as mistaken in their beliefs, affirmative tolerance opens an array of logical issues. The demand to extend potential substantive validation to opposed beliefs produces the ricochet effect of de-validating one’s own beliefs. This creates difficulties for religious communities when issues at stake are beliefs that, in the respective belief-systems, are definitive of the moral goodness and moral badness. Upon a more careful examination of the logical relations between the soteriological promises characteristic of what is sometimes called the ‘substantive’ layer of religiousness, on the one hand, and the public expectation of a tolerant coexistence of religious communities on a social level, on the other hand, it becomes clear that the tolerance required can only be a negative tolerance. Any expectation of affirmative tolerance de-values the soteriological script of the respective system of religious belief, and is thus likely to lead to serious disturbances in a liberal context of multi-cultural coexistence. The author argues that the recent political announcements of a ‘failure of the multicultural experiment’ are caused by the aggressive pursuit of ‘affirmative tolerance’ rather than by any in-built intolerance of others in any of the large religious belief systems now prevalent in the liberal democratic world. (shrink)

A Troublesome Inheritance, by Nicholas Wade, should be read by anyone interested in race and recent human evolution. Wade deserves credit for challenging the popular dog­ma that biological differences between groups either don't exist or cannot ex­plain the relative success of different groups at different tasks. Wade's work should be read alongside another re­cent book, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. Together, these books represent a ma­jor turning point in the (...) class='Hi'>public debate about the speed with which relatively isolated groups can evolve: both books suggest that small genetic differences between members of different groups can have large impacts on their abilities and propensities, which in turn affect the outcomes of the societies in which they live. (shrink)

The article contains first complete and systematic analysis of the studies devoted to dogmatics and liturgy, the history and the modern state of Catholicism published by Kyiv Theological Academy professors and pupils in the journal “Trudy Kievskoi dukhovnoi akademii” starting from the 1860s to the beginning of 1900s. This paper considers the main problems, themes, ideas which became the subject of interest of the Kyiv thinkers in studying this Christian denomination as well as highlights the specificity of the approach of (...) the authors to certain aspects of the issue raised in the articles. The main directions of research on Catholicism are singled out, and an attempt is made to give a characteristic to each of these directions: 1) researches of dogmatic and canonical principles of the Catholic Church (these investigatios were of polemical and historical-critical character); 2) history of Catholicism – history of cathedrals, papacy, missionary and educational activity of monastic orders in Western European and Ukrainian territories and at the same time the history of certain prominent personalities of Catholicism (groundbreaking historical researches characterized by attracting a considerable amount of archival documents, handwritten and printed primary sources, multiplying a source of research on the history of Catholicism); 3) review and assessment of the religious life of Western Europe in the middle of the 19th – early 20th centuries through the prism of important events within the Catholic Church (coverage of the modern challenges faced by Catholicism and the response of the Catholic Church to them). -/- Consideration of the journal publications allows author to conclude that they present a rather fruitful experience of comprehending one of the most influential religious traditions of the Western Catholicism. (shrink)

Public reason liberals expect individuals to have justificatory reasons for their views of certain political issues. This paper considers how groups can, and whether they should, give collective public reasons for their political decisions. A problem is that aggregating individuals’ consistent judgments on reasons and a decision can produce inconsistent collective judgments. The group will then fail to give a reason for its decision. The paper considers various solutions to this problem and defends a deliberative procedure by showing (...) how it incentivizes information sharing and leads to outcomes most acceptable to the group members. (shrink)

Nearly everyone agrees that perception gives us justification and knowledge, and a great number of epistemologists endorse a particular two-part view about how this happens. The view is that perceptual beliefs get their justification from perceptual experiences, and that they do so by being based on them. Despite the ubiquity of these two views, I think that neither has very much going for it; on the contrary, there’s good reason not to believe either one of them.

In this article, I identify and critically examine 3 dogmas of normativity that support a commonly accepted ‘Passivist View' of rational agency. I raise some questions about these dogmas, suggest what we should believe in their place, and moot an alternative ‘Activist View' of what it is to be a rational agent that grows out of rejection of the 3 dogmas. Underwriting the dogmas and the Passivist View, I suggest, is a deeply held but mistaken assumption that the normative domain (...) is fundamentally akin to the nonnormative domain. Once we allow that the normative may be fundamentally unlike the nonnormative in certain key ways, a shift in our thinking about what it is to be rational becomes possible. I end by considering some implications of this paradigm shift in rationality from the passive to the active for various applied matters. (shrink)

Contemporary platonism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is the belief in a fundamental cleavage between intelligible but invisible Platonic forms that are real and eternal, and perceptible objects whose confinement to spacetime constitutes an inferior existence and about which knowledge is impossible. The other dogma involves a kind of reductionism: the belief that Plato’s unhypothetical first principle of the all is identical to the form of the good. Both dogmas, I argue, are ill-founded.

In this paper, I examine global public reason as a method of justifying a global state. Ultimately, I conclude that global public reason fails to justify a global state. This is the case, because global public reason faces an unwinnable dilemma. The global public reason theorist must endorse either a hypothetical theory of consent or an actual theory of consent; if she endorses a theory of hypothetical consent, then she fails to justify her principles; and if (...) she endorses a theory of actual consent, her theory will lead to a highly unstable political system. On either side of the dilemma, global public reason faces untenable implications. Although similar criticisms have been advanced against domestic public reason, my argument is not repeating points made before me. My argument is new, in that it raises these objections specifically against global public reason, and in that it shows how, due to increased diversity of belief in the global arena, these problems are more pressing for global public reason than they are for domestic public reason. (shrink)

There is a dogma about metaphysical realism that is well nigh universal: "If one is a metaphysical realist about the external world, then one ought to be a semantic realist about external- world statements". I argue that this dogma should be rejected. It is possible for a metaphysical realist to be a "semantic dualist", holding that some middle- sized object statements receive a realist interpretation, but that most such statements require an antirealist interpretation. To show that a semantically (...) dual language is at least possible, I describe a possible world whose inhabitants speak a version of English that is syntactically dual. Further I argue that English in the "actual world" is itself semantically dual. (shrink)

The problem with reductionism in biology is not the reduction, but the implicit attitude of determinism that usually accompanies it. Methodological reductionism is supported by deterministic beliefs, but making such a connection is problematic when it is based on an idea of determinism as fixed predictability. Conflating determinism with predictability gives rise to inaccurate models that overlook the dynamic complexity of our world, as well as ignore our epistemic limitations when we try to model it. Furthermore, the assumption of a (...) strictly deterministic framework is unnecessarily hindering to biology. By removing the dogma of determinism, biological methods, including reductive methods, can be expanded to include stochastic models and probabilistic interpretations. Thus, the dogma of reductionism can be saved once its ties with determinism are severed. In this paper, I analyze two problems that have faced molecular biology for the last 50 years—protein folding and cancer. Both cases demonstrate the long influence of reductionism and determinism on molecular biology, as well as how abandoning determinism has opened the door to more probabilistic and unconstrained reductive methods in biology. (shrink)

I contend that there are two dogmas that are still popular among philosophers of action: that agents can only desire what they think is good and that they can only intentionally pursue what they think is good. I also argue that both dogmas are false. Broadly, I argue that our best theories of action can explain the possibility of intentionally pursuing what one thinks is not at all good, that we need to allow for the possibility of intentionally pursuing what (...) one think is not at all good, and that if we can intentionally pursue what we think is not at all good then we can desire it on similar grounds. (shrink)

Most philosophical accounts on scientific theories are affected by three dogmas or ingrained attitudes. These dogmas have led philosophers to choose between analyzing the internal structure of theories or their historical evolution. In this paper, I turn these three dogmas upside down. I argue (i) that mathematical practices are not epistemically neutral, (ii) that the morphology of theories can be very complex, and (iii) that one should view theoretical knowledge as the combination of internal factors and their intrinsic historicity.

Millians about proper names typically claim that it is knowable apriori that Hesperus is Phosphorus. We argue that they should claim instead that it is knowable only aposteriori that Hesperus is Hesperus, since the Kripke-Putnam epistemic arguments against descriptivism are special cases of Quinean arguments that nothing is knowable apriori, and Millians have no resources to resist the more general Quinean arguments.

I offer a critical review of several different conceptions of the activity of foundational research, from the time of Gauss to the present. These are (1) the traditional image, guiding Gauss, Dedekind, Frege and others, that sees in the search for more adequate basic systems a logical excavation of a priori structures, (2) the program to find sound formal systems for so-called classical mathematics that can be proved consistent, usually associated with the name of Hilbert, and (3) the historicist alternative, (...) guiding Riemann, Poincaré, Weyl and others, that seeks to perfect available conceptual systems with the aim to avoid conceptual limitations and expand the range of theoretical options. I shall contend that, at times, assumptions about the foundational enterprise emerge from certain dogmas that are frequently inherited from previous, outdated images. To round the discussion, I mention some traits of an alternative program that investigates the epistemology of mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

The theme of this book is benchmarking in the public sector and part of the interest to analyze the importance that benchmarking has gained in the sector -as a tool for improvement and innovation of public management- where States commit efforts to achieve quality, efficiency and effectiveness in the services it provides. The study is exploratory and descriptive, employing a qualitative methodology that combines a bibliographic analysis for the elaboration of the theoretical framework and the definition of the (...) types and dimensions of benchmarking, with the identification and description of experiences from the empirical evidence surveyed. In a special chapter, the importance, scope and dimensions of benchmarking of product design (comparative evaluation of product design or industrial design) is discussed for the state assessment in design and development of new products for micro, small and medium producers. Our approach includes the different policies and actions to support Micro, Small and Medium Industries (MiPyMIs), which are undertaken from subnational states. RESUMEN. El tema de este libro es el benchmarking en el sector público y parte del interés por analizar la importancia que ha cobrado el benchmarking en el sector –como una herramienta de mejora e innovación de la gestión pública– donde los Estados comprometen esfuerzos para conseguir calidad, eficiencia y eficacia en los servicios que presta. El estudio es exploratorio y descriptivo, emplea una metodología cualitativa que combina un análisis bibliográfico para la elaboración del marco teórico y la definición de los tipos y dimensiones del benchmarking, con la identificación y descripción de experiencias a partir de la evidencia empírica relevada. En un capítulo especial se trata la importancia, alcances y dimensiones del benchmarking of product design (evaluación comparada de diseño de producto o diseño industrial) para el asesoramiento estatal en diseño y desarrollo de nuevos productos a micro, pequeños y medianos productores. Nuestro enfoque comprende a las distintas políticas y acciones de apoyo a las Micro, Pequeñas y Medianas Industrias (MiPyMIs), que se emprenden desde los Estados subnacionales. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that a truth functional account of conditional statements ‘if A then B’ not only is inadequate, but that it eliminates the very conditionality expressed by ‘if’. Focusing only on the truth-values of the statements ‘A’ and ‘B’ and different combinations of these, one is bound to miss out on the conditional relation expressed between them. But this is not a flaw only of truth functionality and the material conditional. All approaches that try to treat conditionals (...) as mere functions of their antecedents and consequents will end up in some sort of logical atomism where causal matters simply are reduced to the joint occurrence of A and B. What we need is a non-extensional approach to conditionals that can account for hypotheticality, potentiality, and dependency, none of which can be understood by looking to the antecedent or consequent per se. (shrink)

New Atheists and Anti-Theists (such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hutchins) affirm that there is a strong connection between being a traditional theist and being a religious fundamentalist who advocates violence, terrorism, and war. They are especially critical of Islam. On the contrary, I argue that, when correctly understood, religious dogmatic belief, present in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is progressive and open to internal and external criticism and revision. Moreover, acknowledging that human knowledge is finite and that (...) humans are fallible and have much to learn, dogmatic religious believers accept that they ought to value and seek to acquire moral and intellectual virtues, including the virtues of temperance and reasonability. (shrink)

I present a reconstruction of F.H.C. Crick's two 1957 hypotheses "Sequence Hypothesis" and "Central Dogma" in terms of a contemporary philosophical theory of causation. Analyzing in particular the experimental evidence that Crick cited, I argue that these hypotheses can be understood as claims about the actual difference-making cause in protein synthesis. As these hypotheses are only true if restricted to certain nucleic acids in certain organisms, I then examine the concept of causal specificity and its potential to counter claims (...) about causal parity of DNA and other cellular components. I first show that causal specificity is a special kind of invariance under interventions, namely invariance of generalizations that range over finite sets of discrete variables. Then, I show that this notion allows the articulation of a middle ground in the debate over causal parity. (shrink)

Sociology, as conceived by Comte, was to put an end to the anarchy of opinions characteristic of liberal democracy by replacing opinion with the truths of sociology, imposed through indoctrination. Later sociologists backed away from this, making sociology acceptable to liberal democracy by being politically neutral. The critics of this solution asked 'whose side are we on?' Burawoy provides a novel justification for advocacy scholarship in sociology. Public sociology is intended to have political effects, but also to be funded (...) by the politically neutral state. He argues that public sociology is institutionally neutral, but that committing to an organic relation with a social movement is legitimate as a matter of the sociologist's personal value choice. Although this produces side-taking sociology, by improving the case for particular standpoints it serves to improve democratic discussion generally, which is an appropriately neutral public aim. (shrink)

I criteri neurologici per accertare il decesso, da impiegare in alternativa a quelli cardiorespiratori se il paziente ha subìto lesioni cerebrali e si trova collegato alle apparecchiature per la ventilazione artificiale, sono entrati nell’uso comune della pratica medica occidentale da circa quarant’anni ed il consenso di cui essi godono nella comunità scientifica sembra, a prima vista, essere ancora oggi molto solido. Si diceva a prima vista, perché se si esamina con attenzione la letteratura dal 1992 ad oggi, si possono scoprire (...) i crescenti numeri del dissenso: ripensamenti e critiche provengono soprattutto da esperti di area medico-biologica, che associano le loro voci a quelle di filosofi, teologi, studiosi di etica. I motivi del dissenso sono molteplici, e l’ampia letteratura che li documenta riguarda la teoria scientifica posta a fondamento dei criteri neurologici, ed evidenzia le contraddizioni, teoriche ed applicative, derivanti dall’uso di quei criteri. (shrink)

Desire has not been at the center of recent preoccupations in the philosophy of mind. Consequently, the literature settled into several dogmas. The first part of this introduction presents these dogmas and invites readers to scrutinize them. The main dogma is that desires are motivational states. This approach contrasts with the other dominant conception: desires are positive evaluations. But there are at least four other dogmas: the world should conform to our desires (world-to-mind direction of fit), desires involve a (...) positive evaluation (the “guise of the good”), we cannot desire what we think is actual (the “death of desire” principle), and, in neuroscience, the idea that the reward system is the key to understanding desire. The second part of the introduction summarizes the contributions to this volume. The hope is to contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on this neglected, albeit crucial, aspect of the mind. (shrink)

Our everyday knowledge and the knowledge of the sciences are based on presuppositions of different fundamentality. The most general framework includes opinions about being, then the way a particular language sorts reality, precepts of logic, what Husserl called the natural attitude. Furthermore, specific content-related prerequisites and convictions are decisive in the individual sciences. Also modern readers of Aristotelian texts share some such specific convictions. I would like to speak of two of them here, since they are evidently false and considerably (...) hindering the understanding of the texts. The first conviction is that Aristotle developed a metaphysics of substance, the second that he thereby founded a theology with an ‘unmoved mover’ as its center, which can be identified with God. Since this text is a kind of pamphlet, I have summarized the remarks in endnotes. (shrink)

How can one be authentic, except with reference to some dogma? An answer to this query is philosophically important in light of the significance that individuals attach to traditions of thought and practice and to epistemic commitments articulated in the context of the political, which are characterized as ideological appeals. Here the thinking of Martin Heidegger is engaged as a way of evaluating the concept of dogma and the seemingly moral and political relevance of the concept of authenticity. (...) The point of the analysis is to conclude otherwise than is presupposed by the question, i.e., to conclude that one can be authentic without reference to some dogma. (shrink)

This paper reviews how research on the demarcation problem has developed, starting from Popper’s criterion of falsifiability and ending with recent naturalistically oriented approaches. The main differences between traditional and contemporary approaches to the problem are explicated in terms of six postulates called the traditional assumptions. It is argued that all of the assumptions can be dismissed without giving up on the demarcation problem and that doing so might benefit further discussions on pseudoscience. Four present-day research movements on evaluating the (...) boundaries of science are introduced: (1) philosophy of pseudoscience, (2) social epistemology of dissent, (3) agnotology, and (4) evaluation of expertise. Researchers working within these areas have abandoned some or all traditional assumptions. (shrink)

This paper examines the extent to which dispute resolvers in customary law systems provide widely understandable justifications for their decisions. The paper first examines the liberal-democratic reasons for the importance of publicity, understood to be wide accessibility of legal justification, by reviewing the uses of publicity in Habermas’ and Rawls’ accounts of the rule of law. Taking examples from Sierra Leone, the paper then argues that customary law systems would benefit from making local dispute resolution practices, such as “begging” from (...) elders, witchcraft, and customary law judgments, more widely accessible. The paper concludes that while legal pluralism is usually taken to be an analytical concept, it may have a normative thrust as well, and that publicity standards would also apply to formal courts in developing countries, which are also typically “defective” along this dimension. (shrink)

There are a number of important links and similarities between public health and safety. In this extended essay, Gregg D. Caruso defends and expands his public health-quarantine model, which is a non-retributive alternative for addressing criminal behavior that draws on the public health framework and prioritizes prevention and social justice. In developing his account, he explores the relationship between public health and safety, focusing on how social inequalities and systemic injustices affect health outcomes and crime rates, (...) how poverty affects brain development, how offenders often have pre-existing medical conditions (especially mental health issues), how involvement in the criminal justice system itself can lead to or worsen health and cognitive problems, how treatment and rehabilitation methods can best be employed to reduce recidivism and reintegrate offenders back into society, and how a public health approach could be successfully applied within the criminal justice system. Caruso's approach draws on research from the health sciences, social sciences, public policy, law, psychiatry, medical ethics, neuroscience, and philosophy, and he delivers a set of ethically defensible and practically workable proposals for implementing the public health-quarantine model. The essay begins by discussing recent empirical findings in psychology, neuroscience, and the social sciences that provide us with an increased understanding of the social and neurological determinants of health and criminal behavior. It then turns to Caruso's public health-quarantine model and argues that the model provides the most justified, humane, and effective approach for addressing criminal behavior. Caruso concludes by proposing a capability approach to social justice grounded in six key features of human well-being. He argues that we cannot successfully address concerns over public health and safety without simultaneously addressing issues of social justice—including the social determinants of health (SDH) and the social determinants of criminal behavior (SDCB)—and he recommends eight general policy proposals consistent with his model. (shrink)

Public reason as a political ideal aims to reconcile reasonable disagreement; however, is public reason itself the object of reasonable disagreement? Jonathan Quong, David Estlund, Andrew Lister, and some other philosophers maintain that public reason is beyond reasonable disagreement. I argue this view is untenable. In addition, I consider briefly whether or not two main versions of the public reason principle, namely, the consensus version and the convergence version, need to satisfy their own requirements. My discussion (...) has several important implications for the debate on public reason. (shrink)

The public rejection of scientific claims is widely recognized by scientific and governmental institutions to be threatening to modern democratic societies. Intense conflict between science and the public over diverse health and environmental issues have invited speculation by concerned officials regarding both the source of and the solution to the problem of public resistance towards scientific and policy positions on such hot-button issues as global warming, genetically modified crops, environmental toxins, and nuclear waste disposal. The London Royal (...) Society’s influential report “Public Understanding of Science”, which spearheaded the now-thriving area of science... (shrink)

Davidson's anomalous monism, his argument for the identity between mental and physical event tokens, has been frequently attacked, usually demanding a higher degree of physicalist commitment. My objection runs in the opposite direction: the identities inferred by Davidson from mental causation, the nomological character of causality and the anomaly of the mental are philosophically problematic and, more dramatically, incompatible with his famous argument against the third dogma of empiricism, the separation of content from conceptual scheme. Given the anomaly of (...) the mental and the absence of psychophysical laws, there are no conceptual resources to relate mental and physical predicates. We fall in the third dogma if we claim that the very same token event is mental and physical. One of the premises must be rejected: I will claim that we do not need a law to subsume cause and effect to be entitled to speak of causation. Davidson has never offered an argument to back this premise. Against such a dogma I will sketch some ideas pointing towards a different conception of causality, singularist and undetachable from explanatory practices. (shrink)

I consider the ‘inferentialist’ thesis that whenever a mental state rationally justifies a belief it is in virtue of inferential relations holding between the contents of the two states. I suggest that no good argument has yet been given for the thesis. I focus in particular on Williamson (2000) and Ginsborg (2011) and show that neither provides us with a reason to deny the plausible idea that experience can provide non-inferential justification for belief. I finish by pointing out some theoretical (...) costs and tensions associated with endorsing inferentialism. (shrink)

An influential tradition holds that thoughts are public: different thinkers share many of their thoughts, and the same applies to a single subject at different times. This ‘publicity principle’ has recently come under attack. Arguments by Mark Crimmins, Richard Heck and Brian Loar seem to show that publicity is inconsistent with the widely accepted principle that someone who is ignorant or mistaken about certain identity facts will have distinct thoughts about the relevant object—for instance, the astronomer who does not (...) know that Hesperus is Phosphorus will have two distinct thoughts Hesperus is bright and Phosphorus is bright. In this paper, I argue that publicity can be defended if we adopt a relational account on which thoughts are individuated by their mutual relations. I then go on to develop a specific relational theory—the ‘linking account’—and contrast it with other relational views. (shrink)

Frege’s distinction between force and sense is a central pillar of modern thinking about meaning. This is the idea that a self-standing utterance of a sentence S can be divided into two components. One is the proposition P that S’s linguistic meaning and context associates with it. The other is S’s illocutionary force. The force/sense distinction is associated with another thesis, the embedding principle, that implies that the only content that embeds in compound sentences is propositional content. We argue that (...) both the Force/Sense distinction and the principle of embedding are seriously challenged by figurative language, and irony in particular. We conclude that theorists need to go back to the drawing board about the nature of illocutionary acts. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that one of the core functions of government is to supply public goods that markets either fail to provide or cannot provide efficiently. I will suggest that arguments for government provision of public goods require fundamental moral judgments in addition to the usual economic considerations about the relative efficacy of markets and governments in supplying them. While philosophers and policymakers owe a debt of gratitude to economists for developing the theory of public goods, (...) the link between public goods and public policy cannot be forged without moral reflection on the proper function and scope of government power. (shrink)

This replies to Block 2019 (B19), which responds to Lester 2014 (L14). The main issues in the, varyingly sized, sections are as follows. 1 Further explanations of critical rationalism, the theory of liberty, and problems with the non-aggression principle. 2.1 The relationships among law, morality, and libertarianism. 2.2 The objective invasiveness of low-level radiation and that it is therefore an initiated imposition (albeit trivial) if someone inflicts it on non-consenting people. 2.3 The objective and subjective aspects of initiated impositions; and (...) how clashes can be resolved. 2.4 How liberty relates to risk and self-ownership. 2.5 Libertarian initial acquisition versus absolute property rights by labour-mixing. 2.6 Organisational note. 2.7 Libertarianism and mens rea. 2.8 Libertarian rectification versus lex-talionis doubling. 2.9 Indirectly clashing rights, self-preservation, trespasser-hiker, flagpole-grasper, and landmine-layer. 2.10 A logical point is not a moral point. 2.11 Pacifism and libertarianism. 3.1 A weak criticism of utilitarianism. 3.2 Hedonometers; approximate interpersonal comparisons of utility imply libertarianism; what a libertarian is; libertarian rankings. 4. Libertarian philosophy versus propertarian dogma. Coda: the need to take seriously the philosophical problems with propertarian-justificationist libertarianism. (shrink)

In his Edifying Discourses, Soren Kierkegaard published a sermon entitled ‘The Unchangeableness of God’ in which he reiterated the dogma which dominated Catholic, Protestant and even Jewish expressions of classical supernaturalist theology from the first century A.D. until the advent of process theology in the twentieth century. The dogma that as a perfect being, God must be totally unchanging in every conceivable respect was expressed by Kierkegaard in such ways as: He changes all, Himself unchanged. When everything seems (...) stable and in the overturn of all things, He remains equally unchanged; no change touches Him, not even the shadow of a change; in unaltered clearness He, the father of lights, remained eternally unchanged. 1. (shrink)

*Honorable Mention for the 2024 American Association of Philosophy Teachers (AAPT) Lenssen Prize*: In recent years, ‘philosophy as a way of life’ [PWOL] courses have emerged as an exciting new pedagogical approach. I explain what a PWOL-course is. Next, I argue that the standard method for teaching such courses—what I call the ‘Smorgasbord Model’—presents us with a basic problem: viz., the challenge of how to enable students in the context of the modern university to truly experience what a PWOL even (...) is. I propose a solution to this problem by exploring a PWOL that most teachers and students alike already find themselves immersed in, what I describe as political liberalism applied to the university classroom context. I show how this overlooked fact not only offers us a novel resource for teaching PWOL-courses. It also helps philosophy teachers—in a meta-pedagogical sense—to become more self-reflective about and appreciative of our fundamental ethical commitments when teaching philosophy. (shrink)

Current technology and surveillance practices make behaviors traceable to persons in unprecedented ways. This causes a loss of anonymity and of many privacy measures relied on in the past. These de facto privacy losses are by many seen as problematic for individual psychology, intimate relations and democratic practices such as free speech and free assembly. I share most of these concerns but propose that an even more fundamental problem might be that our very ability to act as autonomous and purposive (...) agents relies on some degree of privacy, perhaps particularly as we act in public and semi-public spaces. I suggest that basic issues concerning action choices have been left largely unexplored, due to a series of problematic theoretical assumptions at the heart of privacy debates. One such assumption has to do with the influential conceptualization of privacy as pertaining to personal intimate facts belonging to a private sphere as opposed to a public sphere of public facts. As Helen Nissenbaum has pointed out, the notion of privacy in public sounds almost like an oxymoron given this traditional private-public dichotomy. I discuss her important attempt to defend privacy in public through her concept of ‘contextual integrity.’ Context is crucial, but Nissenbaum’s descriptive notion of existing norms seems to fall short of a solution. I here agree with Joel Reidenberg’s recent worries regarding any approach that relies on ‘reasonable expectations’ . The problem is that in many current contexts we have no such expectations. Our contexts have already lost their integrity, so to speak. By way of a functional and more biologically inspired account, I analyze the relational and contextual dynamics of both privacy needs and harms. Through an understanding of action choice as situated and options and capabilities as relational, a more consequence-oriented notion of privacy begins to appear. I suggest that privacy needs, harms and protections are relational. Privacy might have less to do with seclusion and absolute transactional control than hitherto thought. It might instead hinge on capacities to limit the social consequences of our actions through knowing and shaping our perceptible agency and social contexts of action. To act with intent we generally need the ability to conceal during exposure. If this analysis is correct then relational privacy is an important condition for autonomic purposive and responsible agency—particularly in public space. Overall, this chapter offers a first stab at a reconceptualization of our privacy needs as relational to contexts of action. In terms of ‘rights to privacy’ this means that we should expand our view from the regulation and protection of the information of individuals to questions of the kind of contexts we are creating. I am here particularly interested in what I call ‘unbounded contexts’, i.e. cases of context collapses, hidden audiences and even unknowable future agents. (shrink)

In what way might public statues wrong people? In recent years, philosophers have drawn on speech act theory to answer this question by arguing that statues constitute harmful or disrespectful forms of speech. My aim in this paper will be add a different theoretical perspective to this discussion. I will argue that while the speech act approach provides a useful starting point for thinking about what is wrong with public statues, we can get a fuller understanding of these (...) wrongs by drawing on resources from recent work in situated affectivity. I will argue that public statues can be understood as affective artifacts and that this can both help us understand both the deep affective wrongs caused by public statues and offer a possible explanation as to why some people are so strongly opposed to their removal. (shrink)

In Liberalism without Perfection, Jonathan Quong develops what is perhaps the most comprehensive defense of the consensus model of public reason – a model which incorporates both a public-reasons-only requirement and an accessibility requirement framed in terms of shared evaluative standards. While the consensus model arguably predominates amongst public reason liberals, it is criticized by convergence theorists who reject both the public-reasons-only requirement and the accessibility requirement. In this paper, I argue that while we have good (...) reason to reject Quong’s call for a public-reasons-only requirement, all public reason liberals should endorse at least some shared evaluative standards and, hence, an accessibility requirement. (shrink)

We show how removing faith-based beliefs in current philosophies of classical and constructive mathematics admits formal, evidence-based, definitions of constructive mathematics; of a constructively well-defined logic of a formal mathematical language; and of a constructively well-defined model of such a language. -/- We argue that, from an evidence-based perspective, classical approaches which follow Hilbert's formal definitions of quantification can be labelled `theistic'; whilst constructive approaches based on Brouwer's philosophy of Intuitionism can be labelled `atheistic'. -/- We then adopt what may (...) be labelled a finitary, evidence-based, `agnostic' perspective and argue that Brouwerian atheism is merely a restricted perspective within the finitary agnostic perspective, whilst Hilbertian theism contradicts the finitary agnostic perspective. -/- We then consider the argument that Tarski's classic definitions permit an intelligence---whether human or mechanistic---to admit finitary, evidence-based, definitions of the satisfaction and truth of the atomic formulas of the first-order Peano Arithmetic PA over the domain N of the natural numbers in two, hitherto unsuspected and essentially different, ways. -/- We show that the two definitions correspond to two distinctly different---not necessarily evidence-based but complementary---assignments of satisfaction and truth to the compound formulas of PA over N. -/- We further show that the PA axioms are true over N, and that the PA rules of inference preserve truth over N, under both the complementary interpretations; and conclude some unsuspected constructive consequences of such complementarity for the foundations of mathematics, logic, philosophy, and the physical sciences. -/- . (shrink)

Although critics often argue that the new atheists are arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded and so on, there is currently no philosophical analysis of this complaint - which I will call 'the vice charge' - and no assessment of whether it is merely a rhetorical aside or a substantive objection in its own right. This Chapter therefore uses the resources of virtue epistemology to articulate this ' vice charge' and to argue that critics are right to imply that new atheism is intrinsically (...) epistemically vicious, and it ends with some remarks about the rationality of allowing such intrinsically vicious doctrines to feature within public debate about important matters concerning science, religion, and politics. (shrink)

Proponents of the public goods argument ('PGA') seek to ground the authority of the state on its putative indispensability as a means of providing public goods. But many of the things we take to be public goods – including many of the goods commonly invoked in support of the PGA – are actually what we might term publicized goods. A publicized good is any whose ‘public’ character results only from a policy decision to make some good (...) freely and universally available. This fact poses complications for the PGA, insofar as the set of possible publicized goods is quite extensive indeed. (shrink)