The goal of this paper is to review and critically discuss the philosophical aspects of probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA). Given that estimates of seismic hazard are typically riddled with uncertainty, diferent epistemic values (related to the pursuit of scientifc knowledge) compete in the selection of seismic hazard models, in a context infuenced by non-epistemic values (related to practical goals and aims) as well. We frst distinguish between the diferent types of uncertainty in PSHA. We claim that epistemic and nonepistemic (...) considerations are closely related in the selection of the appropriate estimate of seismic hazard by the experts. Finally, we argue that the division of scientifc responsibility among the experts can lead to responsibility gaps. This raises a problem for the ownership of the results (“no one’s model” problem) similar to the “problem of many hands” in the ethics of technology. We conclude with a plea for a close collaboration between philosophy and engineering. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to clarify under what conditions a philosophical problem arises. I will describe two ways in which we might perceive a question as a problem. First, when we fnd ourselves inclined to believe in propositions that appear incompatible with each other. Second, when we fnd ourselves inclined to believe in propositions that seem incompatible with our desires. I will discuss both of these cases and articulate a didactic strategy – the Clash Strategy – which can (...) be used in order to plan and facilitate dialogic inquiry in the classroom. This strategy suggests introducing stimuli that will help students appreciate the clash that drives the philosophical question to be explored during the dialogue. In summary, this paper aims to ofer insights to all teachers interested in promoting dialogic inquiry, whether philosophical or otherwise, in education. (shrink)

This book discusses Aristotle’s notions of essence and substance as they are developed in Metaphysics ZH. I examine Aristotle's argument at length and defends an unorthodox interpretation according to which his motivation is to provide an answer against a conflation between criteria for existential priority (delivering substances as primary beings) and criteria for explanatory priority (delivering essences as primary principles).

Translation of Aristotle's Physics I-II into Portuguese, with commentaries. Tradução para o português dos livros I e II da Física de Aristóteles, com comentários.

In this essay we argue for the possibility to describe the co-presence of species in a community as a consortium built by acoustic codes, using mainly the examples of bird choruses. In this particular case, the consortium is maintained via the sound-tope that different bird species create by singing in a chorus. More generally, the formation of acoustic codes as well as cohesive communicative systems (the consortia) can be seen as a result of plastic adaptational behaviour of the specimen who (...) can solve and avoid conflicts both with conspecifics and with other species in the vicinity. Thus, sign-relations appear to resolve potential conflicts, and as a foundation for symbiotic aggregations. The spatio-temporal configuration of consortia—their chronotope—includes several eco-fields as respective to different functions of the participating organisms. Biological study is combined with a semiotic approach that, as we suggest, should be more often used together to effectively describe ecological processes. (shrink)

Orosius is generally considered Augustine’s companion in the debate with Pelagius; however, a careful analysis of his Liber Apologeticus shows that Orosius shares the main features of Jerome’s polemic against Pelagius, thus moving away from Augustine’s approach. Orosius and Jerome used the same source, unknown to Augustine. They depicted Pelagius as the heir of Christian heretics, such as Origen, Priscillian and Jovinian; they both employed offensive language; and, finally, they agreed on the main theological problems involved in the controversy. All (...) of these issues are at odds with what Augustine believed was the right approach against Pelagius. At the end of his Palestinian experience, Orosius was no longer Augustine’s disciple, but rather Jerome’s companion in the struggle against Pelagius. (shrink)

Agustín luchó en contra de los pelagianos por más de dos décadas, desde 411 hasta su muerte en 430, cuando dejó su inacabado y último trabajo contra Julián de Aeclanum. Durante este largo periodo, Agustín se opuso al movimiento pelagiano, principalmente, a través de tratados teológicos y sermones. En este artículo, dichas fuentes serán analizadas desde la perspectiva retórica: en particular, observaremos varios fragmentos en los cuales Agustín tilda el movimiento pelagiano de novedad, una técnica retórica que le abre varias (...) posibilidades para atacarlo. Estas tácticas retóricas específicas en contra del pelagianismo están orientadas hacia, al menos, tres objetivos: primero, Agustín identifica claramente sus propias enseñanzas, con la comunidad verdaderamente católica enraizada en la antigua tradición de la fe; segundo, Agustín desacredita definitivamente a su enemigo, pues los sitúa completamente por fuera de la antigua tradición de la Iglesia, ya que representan una novedad sin ninguna conexión con la verdadera y antigua fe; tercero, Agustín difunde entre su audiencia la doctrina del pecado original, que, al menos según él, concuerda perfectamente con la tradición de la Iglesia. Todas esas cuestiones serán exploradas en este artículo. (shrink)

This is an introductory handbook for some of the main themes around the notion of predication in Aristotle. It does not aim at being exhaustive, but only sketches some important lines about the subject; it contains an introductory essay, besides the translation (into Portuguese) and commentary of basic texts (such as Posterior Analytics I-22, Categories 1-5, Interpretation 1-6 etc.).

Translation of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics I into Portuguese, with a few notes, experimental glossary and introduction. The translation, which was made at 2003/4, was preliminary and its publication was intended to provide a didactic tool for courses as well as a provisional resource in research seminars. It needs some revision. I am currently working (slowly...) on the revision of the translation and a new revised one will surely appear at some point.

Translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics IV and VI, with notes. The translation is preliminary and intended as a provisional teaching tool to be also used in seminars and discussions with peers in order to reach a more elaborated version.

This book uses mathematical models of language to explain why there are certain gaps in language: things that we might expect to be able to say but can't. For instance, why can we say I ran for five minutes but not *I ran to the store for five minutes? Why is five pounds of books acceptable, but *five pounds of book not acceptable? What prevents us from saying *sixty degrees of water to express the temperature of the water in a (...) swimming pool when sixty inches of water can express its depth? And why can we not say *all the ants in my kitchen are numerous? The constraints on these constructions involve concepts that are generally studied separately: aspect, plural and mass reference, measurement, and distributivity. In this book, Lucas Champollion provides a unified perspective on these domains, connects them formally within the framework of algebraic semantics and mereology, and uses this connection to transfer insights across unrelated bodies of literature and formulate a single constraint that explains each of the judgments above. (shrink)

Translation of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics II into Portuguese, with a few notes, experimental glossary and introduction. The translation, which was made at 2002 (with a new printing in 2004), was preliminary and its publication was intended to provide a didactic tool for courses as well as a provisional resource in research seminars. It needs some revision. I am currently working (slowly...) on the revision of the translation and a new revised one will surely appear at some point.

Translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics I-III into Portuguese, with a few notes and introduction. The translation, which was made at 2007, is preliminary and its publication was intended to provide a didactic tool for courses as well as a provisional resource in research seminars. It needs some revision. I am currently working (slowly...) on the revision of the translation and a new revised one will surely appear at some point.

This note reproduces a brief article by Thomas Nixon Carver, a leading Progressive Era American economist on what was then called the ‘Negro Question’. This virtually unknown piece represents a striking in-stance of blaming the victim for her/his condition which is to be found in the economic literature of the period.

In this monograph we contrast two prominent models of education, Competence-Based Education (CBE), more recent and currently dominant in most school systems of the world, and Bildung-Oriented Education (BOE), once the basis of school systems of Northern Europe. CBE interprets learning as the acquisition of clearly definable and allegedly measurable competences, and is supported by supranational organisations, such as the OECD, which approach education from the perspective of the human capital theory. BOE instead characterises learning holistically as aimed at the (...) progressive articulation of a meaningful ‘big picture’ in the student’s mind. Emerged in Northern Europe under the influence of the ideals of the Enlightenment and Neo-Humanism of individual and collective autonomy and responsibility, BOE was subsequently enriched with a hermeneutical approach to teaching and socio-political objectives of emancipation and solidarity originating within Critical Theory. We argue that, in spite of its celebrated ‘scientificity’, CBE is internally incoherent and unreliable, contributes to structural forms of oppression and injustice, fosters social pathologies, and fails to provide students with the kind of intellectual autonomy they need as both human beings and citizens of our complex post-industrial societies. We also defend BOE from objections made by critical theorists, poststructuralists and postcolonial thinkers, and argue that it is a coherent and flexible model of education that endows students with autonomy and responsibility, and can help heal social pathologies. (shrink)

Tradução preliminar em pré-print. A Tradução definitiva é a de 2009.

In Posterior Analytics 71b9 12, we find Aristotle’s definition of scientific knowledge. The definiens is taken to have only two informative parts: scientific knowledge must be knowledge of the cause and its object must be necessary. However, there is also a contrast between the definiendum and a sophistic way of knowing, which is marked by the expression “kata sumbebekos”. Not much attention has been paid to this contrast. In this paper, I discuss Aristotle’s definition paying due attention to this contrast (...) and to the way it interacts with the two conditions presented in the definiens. I claim that the “necessity” condition ammounts to explanatory appropriateness of the cause. (shrink)

Translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX and X (Theta & Iota) into Portuguese, with a few notes, experimental glossary and introduction. The translation, which was made at 2004, is preliminary and its publication was intended to provide a didactic tool for courses as well as a provisional resource in research seminars. It needs some revision. I am currently working (slowly...) on the revision of the translation and a new revised one will surely appear at some point.

In this paper we focus on two claims, put forward by Feyerabend in his later writings , which constitute the metaphysical core of his view of scientific inquiry. The first, that we call the pliability thesis, is the claim that the world can be described by indefinitely many conceptual systems, none of them enjoying a privileged status. The second, that we call the resistance thesis, is the claim that the pliability of the world is limited, i.e., not all the different (...) conceptual systems that can be used to describe the world will be equally successful: the world offers resistance to some attempts to describe it. We show that, in spite of the later Feyerabend’s notorious antirealist leanings, the pliability thesis is fully compatible with a robustly realist view of science, and we suggest that, surprisingly, Feyerabend’s insights concerning the limited pliability of the world turn out to be those of a potential ally of sophisticated versions of scientific realism. (shrink)

This book examines phenomenal conservatism, one of the most influential and promising internalist conceptions of non-inferential justification debated in current epistemology and philosophy of mind. It also explores the significance of the findings of this examination for the general debate on epistemic justification. According to phenomenal conservatism, non-inferential justification rests on seemings or appearances, conceived of as experiences provided with propositional content. Phenomenal conservatism states that if it appears to S that P, in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has (...) some justification for believing that P. This view provides the basis for foundationalism and many ordinary epistemic practices. This book sheds new light on phenomenal conservatism by assessing objections to it and examining epistemological merits and advantages attributed to it. In a nutshell, phenomenal conservatism is actually compatible with Bayesian reasoning, and it is unaffected by bootstrapping problems and challenges that appeal to the cognitive penetrability of perception. Nevertheless, appearance-based justification proves unstable or elusive and its antisceptical bite is more limited than expected. These difficulties could be surmounted if phenomenal conservatism were integrated with a theory of inferential justification. The book appeals to scholars and postgraduates in the field of epistemology and philosophy of mind who are interested in the rational roles of appearances. (shrink)

The soundscape, which is defined as the entire acoustic environment of an area, is a relevant biosemiotic ingredient of environmental complexity. It is composed of geophonies, anthrophonies, and biophonies where, in temperate biomes, birds are the major producers of the latter. The soundscape is heterogeneous in terms of space and time, and is affected by landscape features such as vegetation cover. It also operates as a communication network in which intra- and inter-specific interactions create a complex, eavesdropping-broadcasting network, namely, the (...) soundtope. This acoustic context provides public information for tracking resources like territory, mates, food, safety, and roosting sites and it can be considered a multifunctional eco-field. The Acoustic Complexity Index is a new metric that is used to efficiently process the sound files that, when collected by sampling matrixes, return by interpolation the spatial distribution of a soundscape. High quality soundscapes are sought to guarantee the biosemiotic mechanisms among species, but polluted conditions degrade and mask biophonies, thus reducing communication efficiency, with severe consequences for both individual and collective fitness. Preserving high quality soundscapes is therefore an important conservation issue and a target to aim for if we are to assure animal and human wellbeing. (shrink)

Mindreading (or folk psychology, Theory of Mind, mentalizing) is the capacity to represent and reason about others’ mental states. The Simulation Theory (ST) is one of the main approaches to mindreading. ST draws on the common-sense idea that we represent and reason about others’ mental states by putting ourselves in their shoes. More precisely, we typically arrive at representing others’ mental states by simulating their mental states in our own mind. This entry offers a detailed analysis of ST, considers theoretical (...) arguments and empirical data in favour of and against it, discusses its philosophical implications, and illustrates some alternatives to it. (shrink)

Sets are central to mathematics and its foundations, but what are they? In this book Luca Incurvati provides a detailed examination of all the major conceptions of set and discusses their virtues and shortcomings, as well as introducing the fundamentals of the alternative set theories with which these conceptions are associated. He shows that the conceptual landscape includes not only the naïve and iterative conceptions but also the limitation of size conception, the definite conception, the stratified conception and the (...) graph conception. In addition, he presents a novel, minimalist account of the iterative conception which does not require the existence of a relation of metaphysical dependence between a set and its members. His book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in logic and the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

We use the primitive ontology framework of Allori et al. to analyze the quantum information-theoretic interpretation of Bub and Pitowsky. There are interesting parallels between the two approaches, which differentiate them both from the more standard realist interpretations of quantum theory. Where they differ, however, is in terms of their commitments to an underlying ontology on which the manifest image of the world supervenes. Employing the primitive ontology framework in this way makes perspicuous the differences between the quantum information-theoretic interpretation, (...) and the various realist interpretations of quantum theory. It also allows us to identify a sense in which the commitments of quantum information-theoretic interpretation are underspecified. Several possible ways of completing the interpretation are presented, and it is suggested that the most likely strategy would leave the information-theoretic interpretation such that it would fail to qualify as a theory, according to the primitive ontology approach. (shrink)

One of the most pressing challenges that occupy the Russellian panpsychist’s agenda is to come up with a way to reconcile the traditional argument from categorical properties (Seager, 2006; Alter & Nagasawa, 2015) with H. H. Mørch’s dispositionalism-friendly argument from the experience of causation (2014, 2018, 2020) — on the way to a unitary, all-encompassing case for the view. In this regard, Mørch claims that, via the commitment to the Identity theory of properties, one can consistently hold both panpsychist arguments (...) without contradiction (2020: 281) — I shall refer to such proposal as Reconciliation. In my paper, I shall argue that this is not the case. To this extent, I will first consider H. Taylor’s argument that the Identity theorists have the exact same resources as the dispositionalists (as, after careful enquiry, their views on the metaphysics of properties turn out to coincide (2018: 1438)), and thus contend that Reconciliation fails to obtain. Then, I will suggest that one can avoid the problem and reconcile the arguments by adopting a different version of the powerful qualities view, namely the Compound view — and thus advance a reformulated version of the claim, i.e. Reconciliation*. Finally, even though pursuing my proposed solution might expose Russellian panpsychism to the risk of epiphenomenalism, I shall conclude that such specific form of epiphenomenalism is a rather benign one, and thus that, via Reconciliation*, the constitution of a unitary case for panpsychism as a positive proposal (and not as a mere alternative to dualism and physicalism) can be achieved. (shrink)

We present epistemic multilateral logic, a general logical framework for reasoning involving epistemic modality. Standard bilateral systems use propositional formulae marked with signs for assertion and rejection. Epistemic multilateral logic extends standard bilateral systems with a sign for the speech act of weak assertion (Incurvati and Schlöder 2019) and an operator for epistemic modality. We prove that epistemic multilateral logic is sound and complete with respect to the modal logic S5 modulo an appropriate translation. The logical framework developed provides the (...) basis for a novel, proof-theoretic approach to the study of epistemic modality. To demonstrate the fruitfulness of the approach, we show how the framework allows us to reconcile classical logic with the contradictoriness of so-called Yalcin sentences and to distinguish between various inference patterns on the basis of the epistemic properties they preserve. (shrink)

According to constitutivism, we can justify the authority of aims and norms on the ground that they are inescapable. Constitutivist views divide between ambitious and modest ones. According to ambitious constitutivism, the inescapability of aims grounds their unconditional authority, whereas according to modest constitutivism, the inescapability of aims only grounds their conditional authority. Either way, both forms of constitutivism share the assumption that inescapability grounds authority, which in turn presupposes that at the foundation of normativity we find aims and norms (...) that can be evaluated as having or lacking authority. In this paper I shall defend a form of constitutivism that rejects this assumption. According to this view, which I shall call Hinge Constitutivism, at the foundation of epistemic normativity we find an aim, the truth-aim, that is altogether beyond the evaluation in terms of the ordinary notion of authority. Moreover, I shall argue that to aim at truth is a condition of possibility for justifying the authority of any other aims or norms. In this sense, to aim at truth is a hinge of deliberation. (shrink)

Translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics Lambda into Portuguese.

Tradução dos livros Z e H da Metafísica de Aristóteles, com introdução e notas. Translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics Books VII and VIII into Portuguese, with Introduction and Notes.

When two or more (groups of) researchers independently investigating the same domain arrive at the same result, a multiple discovery occurs. The pervasiveness of multiple discoveries in science suggests the intuition that they are in some sense inevitable—that one should view them as results that force themselves upon us, so to speak. We argue that, despite the intuitive force of such an “inevitabilist insight,” one should reject it. More specifically, we distinguish two facets of the insight and argue that: (a) (...) the profusion of multiple discoveries in scientific practice does not support the inevitabilist side of the inevitability/contingency of science controversy; and (b) the crucial role of background knowledge in scientific inquiry complicates the attempt to interpret the pervasiveness of multiple discoveries in realist terms. (shrink)

Translation of passages of Aristotle's De Anima into Portuguese. The passages are these: I.1, I.4 (the 'Rylean passage'); II.1-6; III.1-8. The translation is preliminary.

I discuss an important feature of the notion of cause in Post. An. 1. 13, 78b13–28, which has been either neglected or misunderstood. Some have treated it as if Aristotle were introducing a false principle about explanation; others have understood the point in terms of coextensiveness of cause and effect. However, none offers a full exegesis of Aristotle's tangled argument or accounts for all of the text's peculiarities. My aim is to disentangle Aristotle's steps to show that he is arguing (...) in favour of a logical requirement for a middle term's being the appropriate cause of its explanandum. Coextensiveness between the middle term and the attribute it explains is advanced as a sine qua non condition of a middle term's being an appropriate or primary cause. This condition is not restricted either to negative causes or to middle terms in second‐figure syllogisms, but ranges over all primary causes qua primary. (shrink)

This paper introduces the Monstrous Conclusion, according to which, for any population, there is a better population consisting of just one individual (the Monster). The Monstrous Conclusion is deeply counterintuitive. I defend a version of Prioritarianism as a particularly promising population axiology that does not imply the Monstrous Conclusion. According to this version of Prioritarianism, which I call Asymptotic Prioritarianism, there is diminishing marginal moral importance of individual welfare that can get close to, but never quite reach, some upper limit. (...) I argue that Asymptotic Prioritarianism faces a theoretical cost, that I call the Absolute Priority Principle. However, the Absolute Priority Principle is an extreme version of what I call the Trade-off Condition, an already noteworthy problem facing other (more widely endorsed) versions of Prioritarianism. I conclude that it is better for a theory to imply the Absolute Priority Principle and avoid the Monstrous Conclusion than to imply the Monstrous Conclusion and the Trade-off Condition. The potential for Asymptotic Prioritarianism is substantial. (shrink)

We discuss a well-known puzzle about the lexicalization of logical operators in natural language, in particular connectives and quantifiers. Of the many logically possible operators, only few appear in the lexicon of natural languages: the connectives in English, for example, are conjunction _and_, disjunction _or_, and negated disjunction _nor_; the lexical quantifiers are _all, some_ and _no_. The logically possible nand (negated conjunction) and Nall (negated universal) are not expressed by lexical entries in English, nor in any natural language. Moreover, (...) the lexicalized operators are all upward or downward monotone, an observation known as the Monotonicity Universal. We propose a logical explanation of lexical gaps and of the Monotonicity Universal, based on the dynamic behaviour of connectives and quantifiers. We define update potentials for logical operators as procedures to modify the context, under the assumption that an update by \( \phi \) depends on the logical form of \( \phi \) and on the speech act performed: assertion or rejection. We conjecture that the adequacy of update potentials determines the limits of lexicalizability for logical operators in natural language. Finally, we show that on this framework the Monotonicity Universal follows from the logical properties of the updates that correspond to each operator. (shrink)

ABSTRACTLinguistic evidence supports the claim that certain, weak rejections are less specific than assertions. On the basis of this evidence, it has been argued that rejected sentences cannot be premisses and conclusions in inferences. We give examples of inferences with weakly rejected sentences as premisses and conclusions. We then propose a logic of weak rejection which accounts for the relevant phenomena and is motivated by principles of coherence in dialogue. We give a semantics for which this logic is sound and (...) complete, show that it axiomatizes the modal logic KD45 and prove that it still derives classical logic on its asserted fragment. Finally, we defend previous logics of strong rejection as being about the linguistically preferred interpretations of weak rejections. (shrink)

First collected in Italy in 1985, _Art's Claim to Truth_ is considered by many philosophers to be one of Gianni Vattimo's most important works. Newly revised for English readers, the book begins with a challenge to Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, who viewed art as a metaphysical aspect of reality rather than a futuristic anticipation of it. Following Martin Heidegger's interpretation of the history of philosophy, Vattimo outlines the existential ontological conditions of aesthetics, paying particular attention to the works of (...) Kandinsky, which reaffirm the ontological implications of art. Vattimo then builds on Hans-Georg Gadamer's theory of aesthetics and provides an alternative to a rationalistic-positivistic criticism of art. This is the heart of Vattimo's argument, and with it he demonstrates how hermeneutical philosophy reaffirms art's ontological status and makes clear the importance of hermeneutics for aesthetic studies. In the book's final section, Vattimo articulates the consequences of reclaiming the ontological status of aesthetics without its metaphysical implications, holding Aristotle's concept of beauty responsible for the dissolution of metaphysics itself. In its direct engagement with the works of Gadamer, Heidegger, and Luigi Pareyson, _Art's Claim to Truth_ offers a better understanding of the work of Vattimo and a deeper knowledge of ontology, hermeneutics, and the philosophical examination of truth. (shrink)

I discuss in this paper the six requirements Aristotle advances at Posterior Analytics A-2, 71b20-33, for the premisses of a scientific demonstration. I argue that the six requirements give no support for an intepretation in terms of “axiomatization”. Quite on the contrary, the six requirements can be consistently understood in a very different picture, according to which the most basic feature of a scientific demonstration is to explain a given proposition by its appropriate cause.

I have two aims in this paper. First, I argue that, in Aristotle’s theory of the four causes, there is a basic and common feature by which all causes are causes: they all work in a triadic framework in which they explain why a given attribute holds of a given underlying thing. Secondly, I argue against a version of “compatibilism” according to which each kind of cause is complete in its own domain and does not compete with any other kind. (...) I claim that there are priority relations according to which some kinds of cause are subordinated to others, even if these relations do not hold in every cases. (shrink)

Sleep strengthens memories by repeatedly reactivating associated neuron ensembles. Our studies show that although long-term memory for a medium number of word-pairs benefits from sleep, a large number does not. This suggests an upper limit to the amount of information that has access to sleep-dependent declarative memory consolidation, which is possibly linked to the availability of reactivation opportunities. Due to competing processes of global forgetting that are active during sleep, we hypothesized that even larger amounts of information would enhance the (...) proportion of information that is actively forgotten during sleep. In the present study, we aimed to induce such forgetting by challenging the sleeping brain with vast amounts of to be remembered information. For this, 78 participants learned a very large number of 640 word-pairs interspersed with periods of quiet awake rest over the course of an entire day and then either slept or stayed awake during the night. Recall was tested after another night of regular sleep. Results revealed comparable retention rates between the sleep and wake groups. Although this null-effect can be reconciled with the concept of limited capacities available for sleep-dependent consolidation, it contradicts our hypothesis that sleep would increase forgetting compared to the wake group. Additional exploratory analyses relying on equivalence testing and Bayesian statistics reveal that there is evidence against sleep having a detrimental effect on the retention of declarative memory at high information loads. We argue that forgetting occurs in both wake and sleep states through different mechanisms, i.e., through increased interference and through global synaptic downscaling, respectively. Both of these processes might scale similarly with information load. (shrink)

The combination of panpsychism and priority monism leads to priority cosmopsychism, the view that the consciousness of individual sentient creatures is derivative of an underlying cosmic consciousness. It has been suggested that contemporary priority cosmopsychism parallels central ideas in the Advaita Vedānta tradition. The paper offers a critical evaluation of this claim. It argues that the Advaitic account of consciousness cannot be characterized as an instance of priority cosmopsychism, points out the differences between the two views, and suggests an alternative (...) positioning of the Advaitic canon within the contemporary debate on monism and panpsychism. (shrink)

According to Jim Pryor’s dogmatism, when you have an experience with content p, you often have prima facie justification for believing p that doesn’t rest on your independent justification for believing any proposition. Although dogmatism has an intuitive appeal and seems to have an antisceptical bite, it has been targeted by various objections. This paper principally aims to answer the objections by Roger White according to which dogmatism is inconsistent with the Bayesian account of how evidence affects our rational credences. (...) If this were true, the rational acceptability of dogmatism would be seriously questionable. I respond that these objections don’t get off the ground because they assume that our experiences and our introspective beliefs that we have experiences have the same evidential force, whereas the dogmatist is uncommitted to this assumption. I also consider the question whether dogmatism has an antisceptical bite. I suggest that the answer turns on whether or not the Bayesian can determine the priors of hypotheses and conjectures on the grounds of their extra-empirical virtues. If the Bayesian can do so, the thesis that dogmatism has an antisceptical bite is probably false. (shrink)

This paper has a twofold purpose. First, it aims at highlighting one difference in how counterfactuals work in general history, on the one hand, and in history of the natural sciences, on the other hand. As we show, both in general history and in history of science good counterfactual narratives need to be plausible, where plausibility is construed as appropriate continuity of both the antecedent and the consequent of the counterfactual with what we know about the world. However, in general (...) history it is often possible to imagine a consequent dramatically different from the actual historical development, and yet plausible; in history of science, due to plausibility concerns, imagining a consequent far removed from the results of actual science seems more complicated. The second aim of the paper is to assess whether and to what degree counterfactual histories of science can advance the cause of the so-called “contingency thesis,” namely, the claim that history of science might have followed a path leading to alternative, non-equivalent theories, as successful as the ones that we currently embrace. We distinguish various versions of the contingency thesis and argue that counterfactual histories of science support weak versions of the thesis. (shrink)

Collective volume with papers by alumni and students from the Campinas Aristotle Group.