_A deeply researched and poignant reflection on the practice of forgiveness in an unforgiving world__ “Broad in its philosophical sweep and fine in its literary analysis, this work redefines forgiveness as the modest yet heroic ability to hold pain and anger together with hope and nonviolence.”—Joie Szu-Chiao Chen, _Lion’s Roar__ Matthew Ichihashi Potts explores the complex moral terrain of forgiveness, which he claims has too often served as a salve to the conscience of power rather than as (...) an instrument of healing or justice. Though forgiveness is often linked with reconciliation or the abatement of anger, Potts resists these associations, asserting instead that forgiveness is simply the refusal of retaliatory violence through practices of penitence and grief. It is an act of mourning irrevocable wrong, of refusing the false promises of violent redemption, and of living in and with the losses we cannot recover. Drawing on novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, Marilynne Robinson, Louise Erdrich, and Toni Morrison, and on texts from the early Christian to the postmodern, Potts diagnoses the real dangers of forgiveness yet insists upon its enduring promise. Sensitive to the twenty-first-century realities of economic inequality, colonial devastation, and racial strife, and considering the role of forgiveness in the New Testament, the Christian tradition, philosophy, and contemporary literature, this book heralds the arrival of a new and creative theological voice. (shrink)

Emotions are ”feelings of bodily changes’, according to William James. This definition was the starting point of a debate that has been going on for more than a century now. James’ approach soon seemed empirically falsified by experimental psychologists and it was seriously undermined by philosophers who called his views untenable, because he seemed to reduce emotions to non-cognitive sensations. But time and again James rose from his grave. Today we witness his revival in the work of ”neo-Jamesians’ like Jesse (...) Prinz and ”neo-phenomenologists’ like Matthew Ratcliffe. In this article the main reactions to James’ ”feelings of bodily changes’ are examined. My conclusion is that both his critics and his supporters have started from an incomplete interpretation of the theory. James’ pragmatically embedded psychology of emotion as the experience of a dynamic, bodily self has until today received insufficient philosophical attention. (shrink)

Postcolonial science studies entails ostensibly contradictory critical and empirical commitments. Science studies scholars influenced by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers embrace forms of realist, radical empiricism, while postcolonial studies scholars influenced by Jacques Derrida trace the limits of the knowable. This essay takes their common use of the term cosmopolitics as an unexpected point of departure for reconciling Derrida’s program with Stengers’s and Latour’s. I read Derrida’s critique of hospitality and Stengers’s and Latour’s ontological politics as necessary complements for conceiving (...) a care-oriented subalternist cosmopolitics, a process of composing common worlds that remains attentive to the limits of representation. (shrink)

Suppose we consider knowledge to be valuable because of the role known propositions play in practical reasoning. This, I argue, does not provide a reason to think that knowledge is valuable in itself. Rather, it provides a reason to think that true belief is valuable from one standpoint, and that justified belief is valuable from another standpoint, and similarly for other epistemic concepts. The value of the concept of knowledge is that it provides an economical way of talking about many (...) epistemic concepts that are valuable in itself from one standpoint or another. In this way knowledge is like a Swiss Army Knife; a Swiss Army Knife is not useful as such on any occasion, but it provides an efficient way of carrying around different tools that are useful in themselves on different occasions. (shrink)

We review Potts’ influential book on the semantics of conventional implicature (CI), offering an explication of his technical apparatus and drawing out the proposal’s implications, focusing on the class of CIs he calls supplements. While we applaud many facets of this work, we argue that careful considerations of the pragmatics of CIs will be required in order to yield an empirically and explanatorily adequate account.

On the one hand, Hume accepts the view -- which he attributes primarily to Stoicism -- that there exists a determinate best and happiest life for human beings, a way of life led by a figure whom Hume calls "the true philosopher." On the other hand, Hume accepts that view -- which he attributes to Scepticism -- that there exists a vast plurality of good and happy lives, each potentially equally choiceworthy. In this paper, I reconcile Hume's apparently conflicting commitments: (...) I argue that Hume's "Sceptical" pluralism about the character of the happiest life need not conflict with his "Stoic" advocacy of the supreme happiness of the true philosopher, given Hume's flexible understanding of how one might live as a true philosopher. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics X.7–8, Aristotle defends a striking view about the good for human beings. According to Aristotle, the single happiest way of life is organized around philosophical contemplation. According to the narrowness worry, however, Aristotle's contemplative ideal is unduly Procrustean, restrictive, inflexible, and oblivious of human diversity. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle has resources for responding to the narrowness worry, and that his contemplative ideal can take due account of human diversity.

The “standard position” on organ donation is that the donor must be dead in order for vital organs to be removed, a position with which we agree. Recently, Robert Truog and Walter Robinson have argued that brain death is not death, and even though “brain dead” patients are not dead, it is morally acceptable to remove vital organs from those patients. We accept and defend their claim that brain death is not death, and we argue against both the US “whole (...) brain” criterion and the UK “brain stem” criterion. Then we answer their arguments in favour of removing vital organs from “brain dead” and other classes of comatose patients. We dispute their claim that the removal of vital organs is morally equivalent to “letting nature take its course”, arguing that, unlike “allowing to die”, it is the removal of vital organs that kills the patient, not his or her disease or injury. Then, we argue that removing vital organs from living patients is immoral and contrary to the nature of medical practice. Finally, we offer practical suggestions for changing public policy on organ transplantation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Institute of Medicine’s Report on Non-Heart-Beating Organ TransplantationRoger Herdman (bio), Tom L. Beauchamp (bio), and John T. Potts Jr. (bio)In December 1997, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report on medical and ethical issues in the procurement of non-heart-beating organ donors. This report had been requested in May 1997 by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). We will here describe the genesis of the (...) IOM report, the medical and moral concerns that led the DHHS to sponsor it, the process of producing it, and its conclusions. The analyses, findings, and recommendations of the report are also reviewed, in particular the central issues that led to suggestions for policy changes.Transplantation BackgroundAs a first step, some background in the relevant aspects of organ transplantation will prove useful. For the purposes of this analysis, “transplantation” involves the transfer of cells, tissues, or solid organs from one human to another to replace the structure or function of comparable body components that, through injury or disease, are defective or of inadequate function. The IOM report deals with solid organs, primarily kidneys and livers, whose blood supply is reconnected in the organ recipient, in contrast to cells, like bone marrow, and tissues, like corneas. A variety of donor types exists for organ transplantation, each with particular medical and scientific conditions.Living donors are healthy (and usually genetically related) individuals who volunteer to provide either a whole, paired organ such as a kidney or a section of an organ such as a liver. Cadaver donors are individuals who have died and from whom a full array of organs can be taken. “Heart-beating” cadaver donors are individuals who have suffered “brain death,” that is, irreversible cessation of function of the whole brain including the brain stem; and “non-heart-beating” donors (NHBDs) are individuals who are ill or injured, but not “brain dead,” and who have suffered cardiopulmonary death, that is, irreversible cessation of cardiac and respiratory function. NHBDs can be “controlled,” which means that [End Page 83] they can be sustained by artificial life support systems until a medical and family decision is made to terminate futile life support. This can be done at a scheduled time and in a controlled manner, and organs can then be recovered for transplantation. NHBDs can also be “uncontrolled,” which means that their hearts and breathing have stopped through disease or injury at an unexpected time or in an uncontrolled manner, and they cannot be resuscitated; the organs of some individuals of this description can be recovered for transplantation. The IOM report focused on both controlled and uncontrolled NHBDs and on problems specific to them.The questions that were asked and addressed in the IOM report became current and salient beginning in 1992 with the establishment of the University of Pittsburgh “Policy for the Management of Terminally Ill Patients Who May Become Organ Donors After Death.” This policy addressed controlled NHBDs and the ethical questions raised by their use; much of the discussion was reported in the June 1993 special issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. Public notice and anxiety about some of these concerns were sharpened and refocused by national and local media allegations of improper treatment of donors at the Cleveland Clinic in 1997, specifically premature—i.e., antemortem—recovery of organs and administration of drugs that allegedly might hasten donor death.The DHHS Request for StudyIt is not surprising that several federal actions would be taken in response to these events. Some, such as the results of a transplantation task force, remain largely internal to DHHS at this writing. Others are public, such as the IOM study of the NHBD situation. In May 1997, the DHHS initiated contacts with the IOM with the goal of exploring federal concerns about the medical and ethical treatment of NHBDs, in particular the allegations directed at the Cleveland Clinic.The DHHS response should be understood in at least three contexts. First, living donors and uncontrolled NHBDs were essentially the only donor types in the early days of transplantation in the United States. The technologies, ethics, and social acceptance of controlling and terminating life support for... (shrink)

In Plato’s Symposium, the mysterious Apollodorus recounts to an unnamed comrade, and to us, Aristodemus’ story of just what happened at Agathon’s drinking party. Since Apollodorus did not attend the party, however, it is unclear what relevance he could have to our understanding of Socrates’ speech, or to the Alcibiadean “satyr and silenic drama” (222d) that follows. The strangeness of Apollodorus is accentuated by his recession into the background after only two Stephanus pages. What difference—if any—does Apollodorus make to the (...) Symposium? Does his inclusion call the dramatic and philosophical unity of the work into question? I argue that despite initial appearances, Plato has important philosophical reasons for including Apollodorus as a character. Far from being an odd appendage to an otherwise complete narrative, the figure of Apollodorus is useful for our understanding of Socrates’s conception of eros later in the work. (shrink)

The impressive variation amongst biological individuals generates many complexities in addressing the simple-sounding question what is a biological individual? A distinction between evolutionary and physiological individuals is useful in thinking about biological individuals, as is attention to the kinds of groups, such as superorganisms and species, that have sometimes been thought of as biological individuals. More fully understanding the conceptual space that biological individuals occupy also involves considering a range of other concepts, such as life, reproduction, and agency. There has (...) been a focus in some recent discussions by both philosophers and biologists on how evolutionary individuals are created and regulated, as well as continuing work on the evolution of individuality. (shrink)

This book presents in translation writings by six medieval philosophers which bear on the subject of conscience. Conscience, which can be considered both as a topic in the philosophy of mind and a topic in ethics, has been unduly neglected in modern philosophy, where a prevailing belief in the autonomy of ethics leaves it no natural place. It was, however, a standard subject for a treatise in medieval philosophy. Three introductory translations here, from Jerome, Augustine and Peter Lombard, present the (...) loci classici on which subsequent discussions drew; there follows the first complete treatise on conscience, by Philip the Chancellor, while the two remaining translations, from Bonaventure and Aquinas, have been chosen as outstanding examples of the two main approaches which crystallised during the thirteenth century. (shrink)

Much earlier work claims that appositives and expressives are invariably speaker-oriented. These claims have recently been challenged, most extensively by Amaral et al. (Linguist and Philos 30(6): 707–749, 2007). We are convinced by this new evidence. The questions we address are (i) how widespread are non-speaker-oriented readings of appositives and expressives, and (ii) what are the underlying linguistic factors that make such readings available? We present two experiments and novel corpus work that bear directly on this issue. We find that (...) non-speaker-oriented readings, while rare in actual language use, are systematic. We also find that non-speaker-oriented readings occur even outside of attitude predications, which leads us to favor an account based in pragmatically-mediated perspective shifting over one that relies on semantic binding by attitude predicates. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories are a popular topic of conversation in everyday life but are often frowned upon in academic discussions. Looking at the recent spate of philosophical interest in conspiracy theories, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories looks at whether the assumption that belief in conspiracy theories is typically irrational is well founded.

The current practice of organ transplantation has been criticized on several fronts. The philosophical and scientific foundations for brain death criteria have been crumbling. In addition, donation after cardiac death, or non-heartbeating-organ donation (NHBD) has been attacked on grounds that it mistreats the dying patient and uses that patient only as a means to an end for someone else's benefit.

This paper attempts to explain what a protest is by using the resources of speech-act theory. First, we distinguish the object, redress, and means of a protest. This provided a way to think of atomic acts of protest as having dual communicative aspects, viz., a negative evaluation of the object and a connected prescription of redress. Second, we use Austin’s notion of a felicity condition to further characterize the dual communicative aspects of protest. This allows us to distinguish protest from (...) some other speech acts which also involve a negative evaluation of some object and a connected prescription of redress. Finally, we turn to Kukla and Lance’s idea of a normative functionalist analysis of speech acts to advance the view that protests are a complex speech act constituted by dual input normative statuses and dual output normative statuses. (shrink)

Traditionally, Aristotle is held to believe that philosophical contemplation is valuable for its own sake, but ultimately useless. In this volume, Matthew D. Walker offers a fresh, systematic account of Aristotle's views on contemplation's place in the human good. The book situates Aristotle's views against the background of his wider philosophy, and examines the complete range of available textual evidence. On this basis, Walker argues that contemplation also benefits humans as perishable living organisms by actively guiding human life activity, (...) including human self-maintenance. Aristotle's views on contemplation's place in the human good thus cohere with his broader thinking about how living organisms live well. A novel exploration of Aristotle's views on theory and practice, this volume will interest scholars and students of both ancient Greek ethics and natural philosophy. It will also appeal to those working in other disciplines including classics, ethics, and political theory. (shrink)

This book addresses a range of relevant theoretical issues, including the possibility of an interpersonally comparable measure of well-being, or “utility” metric; the moral value of equality, and how that bears on the form of the social welfare function; social choice under uncertainty; and the possibility of integrating considerations of individual choice and responsibility into the social-welfare-function framework. This book also deals with issues of implementation, and explores how survey data and other sources of evidence might be used to calibrate (...) both a utility metric and a social welfare function, and whether distributive goals are ever best pursued through regulation rather than the tax system. In working through this range of theoretical and practical issues, the book draws from a wide variety of literatures, including philosophical scholarship on equality, responsibility, the nature of well-being, and personal identity over time; the social choice literature within economics; applied economic literatures concerning the measurement of inequality and poverty; legal and policy-analysis scholarship on cost-benefit analysis, environmental justice, and the choice between regulation and taxation; and the burgeoning field of “happiness studies”. (shrink)

This chapter offers a complete account of Aristotle’s underexplored treatment of the virtue of wittiness (eutrapelia) in Nicomachean Ethics IV.8. It addresses the following questions: (1) What, according to Aristotle, is this virtue and what is its structure? (2) How do Aristotle’s moral psychological views inform Aristotle’s account, and how might Aristotle’s discussions of other, more familiar virtues, enable us to understand wittiness better? In particular, what passions does the virtue of wittiness concern, and how might the virtue (and its (...) attendant vices) be related to the virtue of temperance (and its attendant vices)? (3) How does wittiness, as an ethical virtue, benefit its possessor? (4) How can Aristotle resolve some key tensions that his introducing a virtue of wittiness apparently generates for his ethics? In addition to exploring these questions, this chapter challenges some commonly accepted accounts of Aristotle’s views on the nature of the laughable. (shrink)

This book revives the study of conventional implicatures in natural language semantics. H. Paul Grice first defined the concept. Since then his definition has seen much use and many redefinitions, but it has never enjoyed a stable place in linguistic theory. Christopher Potts returns to the original and uses it as a key into two presently under-studied areas of natural language: supplements and expressives. The account of both depends on a theory in which sentence meanings can be multidimensional. The (...) theory is logically and intuitively compositional, and it minimally extends a familiar kind of intensional logic, thereby providing an adaptable, highly useful tool for semantic analysis. The result is a linguistic theory that is accessible not only to linguists of all stripes, but also philosophers of language, logicians, and computer scientists who have linguistic applications in mind. (shrink)

By scholarly consensus, extant fragments from, and testimony about, Aristotle’s lost dialogue Eudemus provide strong evidence for thinking that Aristotle at some point defended the human soul’s unqualified immortality (either in whole or in part). I reject this consensus and develop an alternative, deflationary, speculative, but textually supported proposal to explain why Aristotle might have written a dialogue featuring arguments for the soul’s unqualified immortality. Instead of defending unqualified immortality as a doctrine, I argue, the Eudemus was most likely offering (...) a dramatically engaging propaedeutic to the sort of philosophical inquiry about the soul and its prospects that Aristotle pursues more scientifically in the De anima and Parva naturalia. (shrink)

Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham-on-Thames on 24 December 1822 as the eldest son of Dr Thomas Arnold and his wife Mary. He was educated at Winchester College, his father's old school; Rugby, where his father was headmaster; and Oxford. In 1851 he was appointed Inspector of Schools, pursuing this taxing career to support his wife and family until his retirement in 1886. He published his first volume of verse, The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems, in 1849 followed by (...) Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems (1852) and five further collections which appeared, with a diminishing number of new poems in each, between 1853 and 1867, after which his creative gift appeared to dwindle still further and he published little poetry. His career as a writer of prose began to take over after his election to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford in 1857. Stimulated by preparing his lectures, many of the earliest published in 1865 as Essays in Criticism (First Series), he turned increasingly to the vigorous and widely ranging polemical commentaries on culture, religion, and society which were to make him known at home and abroad as the foremost critic of his day. He died suddenly of heart failure on 15 April 1888 while awaiting at Liverpool the arrival of his married daughter from America. (shrink)

Surprisingly little has been written about hedged assertion. Linguists often focus on semantic or syntactic theorizing about, for example, grammatical evidentials or epistemic modals, but pay far less attention to what hedging does at the level of action. By contrast, philosophers have focused extensively on normative issues regarding what epistemic position is required for proper assertion, yet they have almost exclusively considered unqualified declaratives. This essay considers the linguistic and normative issues side-by-side. We aim to bring some order and clarity (...) to thinking about hedging, so as to illuminate aspects of interest to both linguists and philosophers. In particular, we consider three broad questions. 1) The structural question: when one hedges, what is the speaker’s commitment weakened from? 2) The functional question: what is the best way to understand how a hedge weakens? And 3) the taxonomic question: are hedged assertions genuine assertions, another speech act, or what? (shrink)

Using the example of recent attempts to engineer the concept of conspiracy theory, I argue that philosophers should be far more circumspect in their approach to conceptual engineering than we have been – in particular, that we should pay much closer attention to the history behind and context that surrounds our target concept in order to determine whether it is a site of what I have elsewhere called ‘conceptual domination’. If it is, we may well have good reason to avoid (...) engineering. In their recent ‘What is a Conspiracy Theory?’, M. Giulia Napolitano and Kevin Reuter argue that the disagreement between generalists and particularists in the literature on conspiracy theories is best characterized as a set of dueling conceptual engineering projects. While I agree with their turn to this metaphilosophical literature, I give a very different account of its applicability. Particularists, on my account, are better read as aiming to diagnose the ways in which many discussions of the concept of conspiracy theories are a form of conceptual domination, where this broader context should then prompt us to abandon or block any concept of conspiracy theory that treats its referents as inherently defective. Broader metaphilosophical lessons are drawn. (shrink)

The idea of the spherical world, poised in space, and encircled at different distances by the celestial bodies, was introduced by the early Greek cosmologists. With some modifications, it is still our Western world-picture. It differs fundamentally from that of other cultures, which all accept, in one version or another, the idea of a flat earth with the dome of the celestial vault above it. The Greek conception, however, entails the problem of falling. How to account for the earth's stability? (...) Why is it that the earth does not fall? This anxious question has already bothered the Presocratics. Aristotle provided the solution that was satisfying for many hundred of years. Falling, according to Aristotle, is not the problem, but the answer, as the earth, consisting of the heaviest of the elements, finds its natural place in the centre of the spherical universe. For the same reason the earth itself, according to Aristotle, has to be spherical. Thus, his main line of argumentation was what we now would call 'metaphysical'. Recently, some scholars have argued that the early Greek idea of a spherical earth was developed as a protoscientifie hypothesis, based on empirical reasoning and observation. In this article, we show this to be an example of the 'anachronistic fallacy' that seriously obscures our understanding of the ancient Greek philosophers. Aristotle's conception held for two millennia, until the work of Copernicus, Kepler, and Thomas Digges overthrew it. Consequently, Newton had to cope with the fear of falling again — a fear that still haunts our modern world-picture and that was brilliantly articulated by Blaise Pascal, in his Pensées. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a novel medium for interactions based on an interpersonal psychological approach referred to as ‘naïve psychology’. We adopt the visual assessment of clustering tendency (VAT) to naïve psychology for the visual understanding of other people. The VAT algorithm produces a visual display that can be used to assess clustering tendencies in a set of persons (notions) by reconstructing a digital image representation of a square relational dissimilarity matrix for its set. This algorithm clearly represents two (...) types of imbalanced situations in naïve psychology: crisp and fuzzy. The visual image of a balanced or imbalance situation is useful for a deeper human understanding. (shrink)

Grice coined the term ‘conventional implicature’ in a short passage in ‘Logic and conversation’. The description is intuitive and deeply intriguing. The range of phenomena that have since been assigned this label is large and diverse. I survey the central factual motivation, arguing that it is loosely uni- fied by the idea that conventional implicatures contribute a separate dimen- sion of meaning. I provide tests for distinguishing conventional implicatures from other kinds of meaning, and I briefly explore ways in which (...) one can incorporate multiple dimensions of meaning into a single theory. (shrink)

A response to Lee Basham's 'The Need for Accountable Witnesses: A Reply to Dentith'.

Ideal theory has been extensively contested on the grounds that it is ideology: namely, that it performs the distorting social role of reifying and enforcing unjust features of the status quo. Indeed, a growing number of philosophers adopt a nonideal methodology—which dispenses with ideal theory—because of this ideology critique. I argue, however, that such philosophers are confused about the ultimate dialectical upshot of this critique even if it succeeds. I do so by constructing a parallel—equally plausible—ideology critique of nonideal methodology; (...) specifically, I argue that capitalist and managerial social attitudes have commodified people’s conception of justice and induced suspicion of ideal theory, which is not construed as having direct practical value. Consequently, nonideal methodology performs the distorting role of reifying and enforcing the hegemonies of capitalism and managerialism. Ideal theory and nonideal methodology are, therefore, in symmetrically bad positions. (shrink)

Should we remain neutral between our interests and those of future generations? Or are we ethically permitted or even required to depart from neutrality and engage in some measure of intergenerational discounting? This Article addresses the problem of intergenerational discounting by drawing on two different intellectual traditions: the social welfare function (“SWF”) tradition in welfare economics, and scholarship on “prioritarianism” in moral philosophy. Unlike utilitarians, prioritarians are sensitive to the distribution of well-being. They give greater weight to well-being changes affecting (...) worse-off individuals. Prioritarianism can be captured, formally, through an SWF which sums a concave transformation of individual utility, rather than simply summing unweighted utilities in utilitarian fashion. The Article considers the appropriate structure of a prioritarian SWF in intergenerational cases. The simplest case involves a fixed and finite intertemporal population. In that case, I argue, policymakers can and should maintain full neutrality between present and future generations. No discount factor should be attached to the utility of future individuals. Neutrality becomes trickier when we depart from this simple case, meaning: (1) “non-identity” problems, where current choices change the identity of future individuals; (2) population-size variation, where current choices affect not merely the identity of future individuals, but the size of the world’s future population (this case raises the specter of what Derek Parfit terms “the repugnant conclusion,” i.e., that dramatic reductions in the average level of individual well-being might be compensated for by increases in population size); or (3) an infinite population. The Article grapples with the difficult question of outfitting a prioritarian SWF to handle non-identity problems, population-size variation, and infinite populations. It tentatively suggests that a measure of neutrality can be maintained even in these cases. (shrink)

Encyclopedia entry covering the growing literature on the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (and its rivals), the Knowledge Norm of Action (and pragmatic encroachment), the Knowledge Norm of Belief, and the Knowledge Norm of Disagreement.

Prioritarianism is an ethical theory that gives extra weight to the well-being of the worse off. In contrast, dominant policy-evaluation methodologies, such as benefit-cost analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and utilitarianism, ignore or downplay issues of fair distribution. Based on a research group founded by the editors, this important book is the first to show how prioritarianism can be used to assess governmental policies and evaluate societal conditions. This book uses prioritarianism as a methodology to evaluate governmental policy across a variety of (...) policy domains: taxation, health policy, risk regulation, education, climate policy, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also the first to demonstrate how prioritarianism improves on GDP as an indicator of a society's progress over time. Edited by two senior figures in the field with contributions from some of the world's leading economists, this volume bridges the gap from the theory of prioritarianism to its practical application. (shrink)

_Zoographies_ challenges the anthropocentrism of the Continental philosophical tradition and advances the position that, while some distinctions are valid, humans and animals are best viewed as part of an ontological whole. Matthew Calarco draws on ethological and evolutionary evidence and the work of Heidegger, who called for a radicalized responsibility toward all forms of life. He also turns to Levinas, who raised questions about the nature and scope of ethics; Agamben, who held the "anthropological machine" responsible for the horrors (...) of the twentieth century; and Derrida, who initiated a nonanthropocentric ethics. Calarco concludes with a call for the abolition of classical versions of the human-animal distinction and asks that we devise new ways of thinking about and living with animals. (shrink)

The problem of evil is the most prominent argument against the existence of God. Skeptical theists contend that it is not a good argument. Their reasons for this contention vary widely, involving such notions as CORNEA, epistemic appearances, 'gratuitous' evils, 'levering' evidence, and the representativeness of goods. We aim to dispel some confusions about these notions, in particular by clarifying their roles within a probabilistic epistemology. In addition, we develop new responses to the problem of evil from both the phenomenal (...) conception of evidence and the knowledge-first view of evidence. (shrink)

I distinguish two ways of explaining our capacity for ‘transparent’ knowledge of our own present beliefs, perceptions, and intentions: an inferential and a reflective approach. Alex Byrne (2011) has defended an inferential approach, but I argue that this approach faces a basic difficulty, and that a reflective approach avoids the difficulty. I conclude with a brief sketch and defence of a reflective approach to our transparent self-knowledge, and I show how this approach is connected with the thesis that we must (...) distinguish between a kind of self-knowledge that is of oneself as agent and another kind that is of oneself as patient. (shrink)

This collection of essays forms a lively debate over the fundamental characteristics of legal and moral rights. The essays examine whether rights fundamentally protect individuals' interests or whether they instead fundamentally enable individuals to make choices.

This paper critically examines coincidence arguments and evolutionary debunking arguments against non-naturalist realism in metaethics. It advances a version of these arguments that goes roughly like this: Given a non-naturalist, realist metaethic, it would be cosmically coincidental if our first order normative beliefs were true. This coincidence undermines any prima facie justification enjoyed by those beliefs.

John N. Williams (1994) and Matthew Weiner (2005) invoke predictions in order to undermine the normative relevance of knowledge for assertions; in particular, Weiner argues, predictions are important counterexamples to the Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA). I argue here that they are not true counterexamples at all, a point that can be agreed upon even by those who reject KAA.

The idea that science is or should be value-free, and that values are or should be formed independently of science, has been under fire by philosophers of science for decades. Science and Moral Imagination directly challenges the idea that science and values cannot and should not influence each other. Matthew J. Brown argues that science and values mutually influence and implicate one another, that the influence of values on science is pervasive and must be responsibly managed, and that science (...) can and should have an influence on our values. This interplay, he explains, must be guided by accounts of scientific inquiry and value judgment that are sensitive to the complexities of their interactions. Brown presents scientific inquiry and value judgment as types of problem-solving practices and provides a new framework for thinking about how we might ethically evaluate episodes and decisions in science, while offering guidance for scientific practitioners and institutions about how they can incorporate value judgments into their work. His framework, dubbed "the ideal of moral imagination," emphasizes the role of imagination in value judgment and the positive role that value judgment plays in science. (shrink)

This chapter delineates two types of ideal theory that are found in Rawls’s corpus of work. The first is ideal-method theory, which is theory constructed using idealizing assumptions that do not directly correspond with the actual world. The second is ideal-content theory, namely criteria for assessing whether something is a perfectly justice institution. The chapter provides an independent justification for both types of theory, arguing that ideal-method theory is valuable within certain parameters; for instance, the idealizing assumption of strict compliance (...) helps to clarify the distinction between distributive and retributive justice. The chapter illuminates the value of ideal-content theory by clarifying and defending Rawls’s claim that nonideal theory depends on ideal-content theory. In particular, it argues that in order to gain a systematic grasp of the more pressing problems of nonideal theory it is plausible to argue that ideal-content theory is necessary. -/- . (shrink)

Belief in conspiracy theories is typically considered irrational, and as a consequence of this, conspiracy theorists––those who dare believe some conspiracy theory––have been charged with a variety of epistemic or psychological failings. Yet recent philosophical work has challenged the view that belief in conspiracy theories should be considered as typically irrational. By performing an intra-group analysis of those people we call “conspiracy theorists”, we find that the problematic traits commonly ascribed to the general group of conspiracy theorists turn out to (...) be merely a set of stereotypical behaviours and thought patterns associated with a purported subset of that group. If we understand that the supposed prob- lem of belief in conspiracy theories is centred on the beliefs of this purported sub- set––the conspiracists––then we can reconcile the recent philosophical contribu- tions to the wider academic debate on the rationality of belief in conspiracy theories. (shrink)