In this essay, I examine Robert Boyle's strategies for making imperceptible entities accessible to the senses. It is well known that, in his natural philosophy, Boyle confronted the challenge of making imperceptible particles of matter into objects of sensory experience. It has never been noted, however, that Boyle confronted a strikingly similar challenge in his natural theology – he needed to make an equally imperceptible God accessible to the senses. Taking this symmetrical difficulty as my starting point, I propose a (...) new approach to thinking about the interconnections between Boyle's natural philosophy and natural theology. For the most part, studies of science and religion in the early modern period work by seeking out the influence of explicitly stated religious beliefs on scientific ideas. I argue, by contrast, that we need to focus on Boyle's representational practices, using his attempts to represent imperceptible entities as a means of uncovering metaphysical and theological presuppositions that he did not always articulate when stating his religious beliefs. With new interpretations of bothA Discourse of Things Above Reason(1681) andSome Physico-Theological Considerations about the Possibility of the Resurrection(1675), I show that there were crucial similarities between Boyle's practices for representing both God and atoms. I go on to show, moreover, that Boyle used these practices to enact an ontological stance at odds with one of his most important professed beliefs. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders the links between medicine, connoisseurship, and aesthetic theory in early eighteenth-century Britain. Taking a satire on the body of the physician and collector John Woodward as its starting point, I show that medicine and connoisseurship shared a deep preoccupation with the possibility that the animal body could excessively influence the workings of the mind. Pursuing this line of argument, moreover, I will reconsider the place of mind–body dualism in eighteenth-century British medicine and aesthetics. With the exception of (...) materialists such as the philosopher-physician Bernard Mandeville, medics and aesthetic theorists tended to identify the exercise of judgment with the operations of a disembodied mind, unsullied by the embodied mechanisms of the lower body. In practice, however, the insistence that the most refined forms of judgment depended on the presence and activity of a disembodied, immaterial soul was less meaningful than it seems. When confronted by failures of judgment, medics and connoisseurs alike sought explanations in the mechanisms of the animal body. Whether or not they believed in the immateriality of the soul, they pictured the mind as a malfunctioning animal machine, to be cured through the material agency of medical therapeutics. (shrink)

By far the largest part of Nehemiah Grew?s account of a seventeenth?century collection of rarities, his Musæum Regalis Societatis (1685) is taken up with ?thick?, verbal descriptions of things in the Royal Society?s repository. Not only, Grew suggests, do his descriptions serve to signify the contents of his collection, but they enable us to discern among species and to think about the collection?s pieces in new ways. Verbal descriptions did not just signify things in the Royal Society?s collection, but had (...) the capacity to alter their meanings. The essay discusses the ?picturing? of natural things in Early Modern Europe with little direct reference to the contemporary media of graphic representation ? drawings, engravings, paintings etc. ? in order to highlight the role of the then most widely used, but now least discussed of these media, verbal descriptions. (shrink)

A major theme of the European Enlightenment was the rationalization of value, the use of reason to determine the value of things, from diamonds to civilizations. This view of the Enlightenment is well-established in the human sciences. It is ripe for extension to the natural sciences, given the rich recent literature on affect, evaluation, and subjectivity in early modern science. Meanwhile, in art history, the new history of connoisseurship provides a model for the historical study of the evaluation of material (...) things. Historians of natural history have already noted the connections between science, Enlightenment, and connoisseurship. The time has come to extend their insights to other areas of Enlightenment science. This means recognizing the breadth of connoisseurship – the social, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity of the practice – as understood in Europe in the eighteenth century and the latter part of the seventeenth century. An outline of the three papers in this special section gives an indication of how this historiographical project might be carried out. (shrink)

A major theme of the European Enlightenment was the rationalization of value, the use of reason to determine the value of things, from diamonds to civilizations. This view of the Enlightenment is well-established in the human sciences. It is ripe for extension to the natural sciences, given the rich recent literature on affect, evaluation, and subjectivity in early modern science. Meanwhile, in art history, the new history of connoisseurship provides a model for the historical study of the evaluation of material (...) things. Historians of natural history have already noted the connections between science, Enlightenment, and connoisseurship. The time has come to extend their insights to other areas of Enlightenment science. This means recognizing the breadth of connoisseurship – the social, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity of the practice – as understood in Europe in the eighteenth century and the latter part of the seventeenth century. An outline of the three papers in this special section gives an indication of how this historiographical project might be carried out. (shrink)

A major theme of the European Enlightenment was the rationalization of value, the use of reason to determine the value of things, from diamonds to civilizations. This view of the Enlightenment is well-established in the human sciences. It is ripe for extension to the natural sciences, given the rich recent literature on affect, evaluation, and subjectivity in early modern science. Meanwhile, in art history, the new history of connoisseurship provides a model for the historical study of the evaluation of material (...) things. Historians of natural history have already noted the connections between science, Enlightenment, and connoisseurship. The time has come to extend their insights to other areas of Enlightenment science. This means recognizing the breadth of connoisseurship – the social, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity of the practice – as understood in Europe in the eighteenth century and the latter part of the seventeenth century. An outline of the three papers in this special section gives an indication of how this historiographical project might be carried out. (shrink)

In a highly influential work, List and Pettit (Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents, Oxford University Press, 2011) draw upon the theory of judgement aggregation to offer an argument for the existence of nonreductive group agents; they also suggest that nonreductive group agency is a widespread phenomenon. In this paper, we argue for the following two claims. First, that the axioms they consider cannot naturally be interpreted as either descriptive characterisations or normative constraints upon group judgements, (...) in general. This makes it unclear how the List and Pettit argument is to apply to real world group behaviour. Second, by examining empirical data about how group judgements are made by a powerful international regulatory board, we show how each of the List and Pettit axioms can be violated in ways which are straightforwardly explicable at the level of the individual. This suggests that group agency may best be understood as a pluralistic phenomenon, where close inspection of the dynamics of intragroup deliberation can reveal that what prima facie appears to be a nonreductive group agent is, in fact, reducible. (shrink)

We investigate the notions of strict independence and strict non-forking, and establish basic properties and connections between the two. In particular, it follows from our investigation that in resilient theories strict non-forking is symmetric. Based on this study, we develop notions of weight which characterize NTP2, dependence and strong dependence. Many of our proofs rely on careful analysis of sequences that witness dividing. We prove simple characterizations of such sequences in resilient theories, as well as of Morley sequences which are (...) witnesses. As a by-product we obtain information on types co-dominated by generically stable types in dependent theories. For example, we prove that every Morley sequence in such a type is a witness. (shrink)

We show that if T is a trivial uncountably categorical theory of Morley Rank 1 then T is model complete after naming constants for a model.

The World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on 11th March 2020, recognising that the underlying SARS-CoV-2 has caused the greatest global crisis since World War II. In this chapter, we present a framework to evaluate whether and to what extent the use of digital systems that track and/or trace potentially infected individuals is not only legal but also ethical.

Can there be grounding without necessitation? Can a fact obtain wholly in virtue of metaphysically more fundamental facts, even though there are possible worlds at which the latter facts obtain but not the former? It is an orthodoxy in recent literature about the nature of grounding, and in first-order philosophical disputes about what grounds what, that the answer is no. I will argue that the correct answer is yes. I present two novel arguments against grounding necessitarianism, and show that grounding (...) contingentism is fully compatible with the various explanatory roles that grounding is widely thought to play. (shrink)

Whether or not quantum physics can account for molecular structure is a matter of considerable controversy. Three of the problems raised in this regard are the problems of molecular structure. We argue that these problems are just special cases of the measurement problem of quantum mechanics: insofar as the measurement problem is solved, the problems of molecular structure are resolved as well. In addition, we explore one consequence of our argument: that claims about the reduction or emergence of molecular structure (...) cannot be settled independently of the choice of a particular resolution to the measurement problem. Specifically, we consider how three standard putative solutions to the measurement problem inform our under- standing of a molecule in isolation, as well as of chemistry’s relation to quantum physics. (shrink)

While it might seem prima facie plausible that divine foreknowledge is all that is needed for prophecy, this seems incorrect. To issue a prophecy, God hasto know not just how someone will act, but how someone would act were the prophecy issued. This makes some think that Middle Knowledge is required.I argue that Thomas Flint’s two Middle Knowledge based accounts of prophecy are unsatisfactory, but one of them can be repaired. However the resources needed for repair also yield a sketch (...) of a foreknowledge-only account of prophecy. (shrink)

This is an expanded and thoroughly revised edition of the widely adopted introduction to the philosophical foundations of the human sciences. Ranging from cultural anthropology to mathematical economics, Alexander Rosenberg leads the reader through behaviorism, naturalism, interpretativism about human action, and macrosocial scientific perspectives, illuminating the motivation and strategy of each.Rewritten throughout to increase accessibility, this new edition retains the remarkable achievement of revealing the social sciences’ enduring relation to the fundamental problems of philosophy. It includes new discussions of (...) positivism, European philosophy of history, causation, statistical laws, quantitative models, and postempiricist social science, along with a completely updated literature guide that keys chapters to widely anthologized papers. (shrink)

Argues that Nietzsche tried to create a specific literary character in his writings and discusses the paradoxes of his work.

Discussion of the relevance of grounding to substantiveness, theory-choice, and “location problems” in metaphysics.

This book considers the place and value of knowledge in contemporary society. “Knowledge” is not a self-evident concept: both its denotations and connotations are historically situated. Since the Enlightenment, knowledge has been a matter of discovery through effort, and “knowledge for its own sake” a taken-for-granted ideal underwriting progressive education as a process which not only taught “for” and “about” something, but also ennobled the soul. While this ideal has not been explicitly rejected, in recent decades there has been a (...) tacit move away from a strong emphasis on its centrality, even in Higher Education. The authors address the values that inform knowledge production in its present forms, and seek to identify social and cultural factors that support these values.Against the background of increasingly restrictive conditions of academic work, the first section of this volume offers incisive critiques of Higher Education, with examples drawn from Australia and New Zealand. The second group of chapters considers how academics have viewed, and have tried to adapt to, present circumstances. The third section comprises papers that consider epistemological issues in the generation and promulgation of knowledge. The chapters in this volume are indicative of the work that needs to be done so that we can come to comprehend – and perhaps try and improve – our relationship to learning and knowledge in the 21st Century.This timely book will be of particular interest to workers in higher education; it should also inform and challenge all those who have concerns for the future of the intellectual life of our civilization. (shrink)

The origins of choice -- The reproductive rights debate that ignored reproduction -- Putting reproduction back into reproductive freedom -- Reproductive freedom and human evolution -- Enlisting men in support of reproductive freedom -- Defending reproductive freedom from the dangers of reproductive technology -- Ought there be a law? -- Beyond choice.

Some combinations of attitudes--of beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on--do not fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there are requirements of "structural rationality" that forbid us from being in these incoherent states. Yet a number of surprisingly difficult challenges arise for this idea. These challenges have recently led many philosophers to attempt to minimize or eliminate structural rationality, arguing that it is just a "shadow" of "substantive rationality"--that is, correctly responding to one's (...) reasons. -/- In *Fitting Things Together*, Alex Worsnip pushes back against this trend--defending the view that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality, distinct from and irreducible to substantive rationality, and tackling the most important challenges for this view. In so doing, he gives an original positive theory of the nature of coherence and structural rationality that explains how the diverse range of instances of incoherence can be unified under a general account, and how facts about coherence are normatively significant. He also shows how a failure to focus on coherence requirements as a distinctive phenomenon and distinguish them adequately from requirements of substantive rationality has led to confusion and mistakes in several substantive debates in epistemology and ethics. -/- Taken as a whole, Fitting Things Together provides the first sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine, autonomous, unified, and normatively significant phenomenon. (shrink)

Untimely knowledge -- The great transformation : ancient and modern economics -- Before alienation : the classical critique of modern society -- An aesthetic education : the failings of modern culture -- History as nightmare : conceptions of progress and decline -- Allusion and appropriation : the rhetorical uses of antiquity.

Naturalism in the philosophy of mathematics is the view that philosophy cannot legitimately gainsay mathematics. I distinguish between reinterpretation and reconstruction naturalism: the former states that philosophy cannot legitimately sanction a reinterpretation of mathematics (i.e. an interpretation different from the standard one); the latter that philosophy cannot legitimately change standard mathematics (as opposed to its interpretation). I begin by showing that neither form of naturalism is self-refuting. I then focus on reinterpretation naturalism, which comes in two forms, and examine the (...) only available argument for it. I argue that this argument, the so-called Failure Argument, itself fails. My overall conclusion is that although there is no self-refutation argument against reinterpretation naturalism, there are as yet no good reasons to accept it. Naturalism in mathematics The consistency of mathematical naturalism The failure argument Objections to the failure argument Philosophy as the default. (shrink)

Regulation is nothing without enforcement. This particularly holds for the dynamic field of emerging technologies. Hence, this article has two ambitions. First, it explains how the EU´s new Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) will be implemented and enforced by various institutional bodies, thus clarifying the governance framework of the AIA. Second, it proposes a normative model of governance, providing recommendations to ensure uniform and coordinated execution of the AIA and the fulfilment of the legislation. Taken together, the article explores how the (...) AIA may be implemented by national and EU institutional bodies, encompassing longstanding bodies, such as the European Commission, and those newly established under the AIA, such as the AI Office. It investigates their roles across supranational and national levels, emphasizing how EU regulations influence institutional structures and operations. These regulations may not only directly dictate the structural design of institutions but also indirectly request administrative capacities needed to enforce the AIA. (shrink)

In the late Middle Ages the philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that to know the truth you must be the truth. But how to be the truth? Eckhart's answer comes in the form of an imperative: release yourself, let be. Only then will you be able to understand that the deepest meaning of being is releasement. Only then will you become who you truly are. This book interprets Eckhart's Latin and Middle High German writings under the banner of an (...) imperative of releasement, and then shows how the twentieth-century thinker Martin Heidegger creatively appropriates this idea at several stages of his career. Heidegger had a lifelong fascination with Eckhart, referring to him as "the old master of letters and life." Drawing on archival material and Heidegger's marginalia in his personal copies of Eckhart's writings, Moore argues that Eckhart was one of the most important figures in Heidegger's philosophy. This book also contains previously unpublished documents by Heidegger on Eckhart, as well as the first English translation of Nishitani Keiji's essay "Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Meister Eckhart," which he initially gave as a presentation in one of Heidegger's classes in 1938. (shrink)

The causes and underlying natures of common mental disorders are, for the most part, quite mysterious. Our best taxonomies acknowledge this poverty of causal knowledge about minds, brains, society, and whatever else, to instead classify psychopathology based on clusters of detectable signs and symptoms: what it is to be, say, depressed, is simply to exhibit the minimum number of typical features for the right amount of time. Nothing in this approach references what causes and maintains a characteristic set of symptoms, (...) and so by conceptualizing disorders as syndromes psychiatry stands in stark contrast to somatic medicine, its close cousin, and other successful sciences that classify... (shrink)

A counterpossible is a counterfactual with an impossible antecedent. Counterpossibles present a puzzle for standard theories of counterfactuals, which predict that all counterpossibles are semantically vacuous. Moreover, counterpossibles play an important role in many debates within metaphysics and epistemology, including debates over grounding, causation, modality, mathematics, science, and even God. In this article, we will explore various positions on counterpossibles as well as their potential philosophical consequences.

This book provides an accessible, critical introduction to the three main approaches that dominated work in the philosophy of mathematics during the twentieth century: logicism, intuitionism and formalism.

A new speculative ontology of aesthetics. In Aesthesis and Perceptronium, Alexander Wilson presents a theory of materialist and posthumanist aesthetics founded on an original speculative ontology that addresses the interconnections of experience, cognition, organism, and matter. Entering the active fields of contemporary thought known as the new materialisms and realisms, Wilson argues for a rigorous redefining of the criteria that allow us to discriminate between those materials and objects where aesthesis (perception, cognition) takes place and those where it doesn't. (...) Aesthesis and Perceptronium negotiates between indiscriminately pluralist views that attribute mentation to all things and eliminative views that deny the existence of mentation even in humans. By recasting aesthetic questions within the framework of "epistemaesthetics," which considers cognition and aesthetics as belonging to a single category that can neither be fully disentangled nor fully reduced to either of its terms, Wilson forges a theory of nonhuman experience that avoids this untenable dilemma. Through a novel consideration of the evolutionary origins of cognition and its extension in technological developments, the investigation culminates in a rigorous reevaluation of the status of matter, information, computation, causality, and time in terms of their logical and causal engagement with the activities of human and nonhuman agents. (shrink)

In July 2017, China’s State Council released the country’s strategy for developing artificial intelligence, entitled ‘New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’. This strategy outlined China’s aims to become the world leader in AI by 2030, to monetise AI into a trillion-yuan industry, and to emerge as the driving force in defining ethical norms and standards for AI. Several reports have analysed specific aspects of China’s AI policies or have assessed the country’s technical capabilities. Instead, in this article, we focus on (...) the socio-political background and policy debates that are shaping China’s AI strategy. In particular, we analyse the main strategic areas in which China is investing in AI and the concurrent ethical debates that are delimiting its use. By focusing on the policy backdrop, we seek to provide a more comprehensive and critical understanding of China’s AI policy by bringing together debates and analyses of a wide array of policy documents. (shrink)

A collection of essays by Alexander Rosenberg, the distinguished philosopher of science. The essays cover three broad areas related to Darwinian thought and naturalism: the first deals with the solution of philosophical problems such as reductionism, the second with the development of social theories, and the third with the intersection of evolutionary biology with economics, political philosophy, and public policy. Specific papers deal with naturalistic epistemology, the limits of reductionism, the biological justification of ethics, the so-called 'trolley problem' in (...) moral philosophy, the political philosophy of biological endowments, and the Human Genome Project and its implications for policy. Rosenberg's important writings on a variety of issues are here organized into a coherent philosophical framework which promises to be a significant and controversial contribution to scholarship in many areas. (shrink)

Any serious student attempting to better understand the nature, methods, and justification of science will value Alex Rosenberg's and Lee McIntyre's updated and substantially revised Fourth Edition of Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction. Weaving lucid explanations with clear analyses, the volume is as a much-used, thematically-oriented introduction to the field.

When New Labour came into office in 1997, its commitment to 'education, education, education' captured the imagination of the public. This collection of humorous articles by Ted Wragg between 1998 to 2003 exposes the real state of education during this period, when educational policy was never far from the headlines. No one escapes Ted's sharp-shooting wit: from the 'blamers and shamers' who try to turn teacher-bashing into a national pastime to the 'pale policy wonks' in the Department of Education, who (...) issue regular hare-brained initiatives from the mysterious 'Tony Zoffis'. Split into seven issue-focused chapters, this hilarious collection will be a tonic for anyone finding themselves unsure whether to laugh or cry about recent developments in the world of education. (shrink)

Otto Neurath’s empiricist methodology of economics and his contributions to politi- cal economy have gained increasing attention in recent years. We connect this research with contemporary debates regarding the epistemological status of thought experiments by reconstructing Neurath’s utopias as linchpins of thought experiments. In our three reconstructed examples of different uses of utopias/dystopias in thought experiments we employ a reformulation of Häggqvist’s model for thought experiments and we argue that: (1) Our reformulation of Häggqvist’s model more adequately complies with many (...) uses of thought experiments, especially with the open-ended discussions of utopias and dys- topias in thought experiments. (2) As a strict logical empiricist, Neurath is committed to a strictly empiricist account of thought experiments. John Norton’s empiricist argument view can indeed account for the justifications of empirical beliefs and genuine discoveries targeted by scientific utopianism in three distinct (yet connected) ways, all of which Neur- ath already contemplated: (2.I) Dealing with utopias and thought experiments on a regular basis increases creativity and inventiveness. (2.II) Particular ways of presenting knowl- edge facilitate scientific discovery and social progress. (2.III) The use of utopias in thought experiments can prompt conceptual change and allow access to new phenomena. We con- clude by highlighting that, even though thought experiments support a positive attitude for exploring new social possibilities, Neurath points out that active decisions are unavoidable. The exploration of alternatives and the awareness of a need for decisions in policy discus- sion avert a technocratic outlook in social science. (shrink)

In The LEGO Movie, Vitruvius's notion of the "The Special" introduces what will be a central motif for the film. As it turns out, the one who finds this "Piece of Resistance" is not quite the hero he was expected to be. Emmet Brickowoski, a construction worker, will find this "Piece of Resistance". Throughout the film, others suggest to Emmet both implicitly and explicitly that he brings nothing of value to any particular individual or to society, and that consequently he (...) himself has no value. If one interpret The LEGO Movie as being driven by Emmet's quest for discovering his value, the real philosophical turning point in the film is not when Emmet's double‐decker couch permits the Master Builders to escape from the sinking submarine and they realize that Emmet's ideas actually are useful. Rather, it is when Emmet realizes their approval is irrelevant to his value. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of philosophers have promoted a quasi-realist (or projectivist) interpretation of Hume's theory of causation. In this paper, we argue against the quasi-realist interpretation of Hume, on the grounds that there is a direct clash between a fundamental element of Hume's system (his empiricist theory of content) and one of the main constraints that governs any form of quasi-realism (and so a fortiori, quasi-realism about causation).