This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

Due in part to a growing realization of the importance of the role that retailing plays in the marketing channel, and to the increasing numbers of college graduates being employed by retailers, growing attention is being placed on business students'' ethical perceptions of retailing practices. This study continues this focus by examining the ethical perceptions of collegiate business students attending two different universities which likely represent two different microcultures — conservative evangelical Protestant and secular.The results suggest that ethical perceptions may (...) vary between the students attending two universities which likely represent differing microcultures. The students attending the conservative evangelical Protestant university appear to possess ethical perceptions which are significantly more ethical than those of students attending the public university. Evidence was observed, therefore, which suggests that ethical perceptions may vary across students from differing microcultures. (shrink)

The case (Dawson et al. 2024) describes an Institutional Review Board (IRB) chair who seeks consultation about waiving the requirement that investigators obtain prospective, informed consent for collection of microbiome samples by swabbing the perianal region of severely burned patients shortly after their admission to an intensive care unit (ICU). We argue that it is ethically permissible to waive informed consent requirements for the perianal swab and that the IRB should approve a waiver as permitted by regulations.

Comments on Sukjae Lee's "Berkeley on the Activity of Spirits," presented at Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Baltimore, MD, December 2007.

A quantum algorithm succeeds not because the superposition principle allows ‘the computation of all values of a function at once’ via ‘quantum parallelism’, but rather because the structure of a quantum state space allows new sorts of correlations associated with entanglement, with new possibilities for information‐processing transformations between correlations, that are not possible in a classical state space. I illustrate this with an elementary example of a problem for which a quantum algorithm is more efficient than any classical algorithm. I (...) also introduce the notion of ‘pseudotelepathic’ games and show how the difference between classical and quantum correlations plays a similar role here for games that can be won by quantum players exploiting entanglement, but not by classical players whose only allowed common resource consists of shared strings of random numbers (common causes of the players’ correlated responses in a game). *Received October 2008. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Historical Dictionary of Kant and KantianismJeffrey L. WilsonHelmut Holzhey and Vilem Mudroch. Historical Dictionary of Kant and Kantianism. Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements, 60. Lanham, MD-Toronto-Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2005. Pp. xv + 374. Cloth, $75.00.The authors are emeritus professor and research associate (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at the University of Zurich. Although Holzhey is founding director of the Hermann Cohen Archive, Neokantianism is not disproportionately represented here. (...) The emphasis is on Kant, with supplementary treatment of Kant’s predecessors and successors adequate to grasp Kant’s role in various developments in the history of philosophy. At the same time, a reader interested in the various forms of Kantianism will find ample useful information here; for example, Kant’s influence on ethical socialism is documented from several different directions. Even without these supplements, this would be a formidably comprehensive treatment of the central terms in Kant’s writings from the pre-critical period through the Opus postumum. The authors include references to the Reflexionen (Notes and Fragments) where appropriate. They also helpfully adjudicate certain English translation problems from the perspective of native German speakers.A number of articles stand out as especially noteworthy. “Categories” traces this term from Kant’s 1770 Inaugural Dissertation through to its reception by Peirce and C. I. Lewis. “Copernican Revolution” gives in a brief article a surprisingly comprehensive treatment of Kant’s term and its probable origins that is based on very wide study of the scholarship. “Dimensions of Space” deftly clarifies Kant’s changing attitudes toward non-Euclidean geometries. “Ether” discusses Kant’s uses of the term in the Opus postumum against the background of his pre-critical works. “Hegel” is admirably balanced, summarizing Hegel’s encounter with Kant without trying to defend Kant against Hegel’s critique. “Mathematics” includes a breathtakingly concise overview of the philosophy of mathematics from Descartes through Hilbert. “Noumenon” provides a nuanced explication of this term and “thing in itself” based on the differing roles the two expressions play in Kant’s discourse. “Object” gives the clearest explanation of Kant’s use of this term the reviewer has seen anywhere. “Pre-Critical Philosophy” discusses every philosophically relevant aspect of this period of Kant’s writings and its significance for later developments. “Substance,” among other articles, highlights differences between the first and second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason. “World” outlines the developments in Kant’s views of the significance of this term for physics, astronomy, epistemology, ethics, and biology.Although one might assume that having only two authors for a reference work might result in a certain narrowness or bias, the presentation here is comprehensive and balanced. The dictionary has the feel of a project that has been ripening over the course of many years. The advantage of the two-author model is a consistency of voice that makes reading the dictionary through cover to cover pleasant and rewarding. The chronology and sketch of Kant’s life provide an excellent overview, and the judiciously selected bibliography is preceded by the best compact orientation to Kant scholarship available. The topical arrangement of the bibliography, while it creates some difficulty in locating a work cited in the text of the dictionary, allows a reader interested in one area of Kant to find the most important relevant secondary sources instantly.The reviewer is at pains to find something here to criticize. There is the occasional linguistic indiscretion, such as the unidiomatic “dignity to be happy.” The authors refer to Kant-Studien as “Kant Studies,” so that a reader might search in vain for a journal of this name. Such infelicities are notable because they are rare in this well-edited volume. Sometimes information might be better placed under another heading; the reviewer often noted defects in one article that were remedied in a related one. (Following up the cross-referenced terms was the solution in every case.) There are also occasional omissions. Distinguished Kant scholarship taking place in Latin America should be recognized. “Antinomy” overlooks the clearest definition of this term: a necessary conflict of reason with itself. “Cognition” neglects Kant’s puzzling references to “practical cognition” (praktische Erkenntnis). Christian August Crusius, mentioned in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 424-425 [Access article in PDF] Martin Beck Matustík. Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001. Pp. xxxvii + 341. Cloth, $85.00. Paper, $29.95.Martin Beck Matustík's Jürgen Habermas is arguably the most exciting contribution to critical theory debates and scholarship in the last decade. Not only does it provide an original and convincing portrayal of Habermas's life (...) and work to date, it shows Matustík as one of the pre-eminent twenty first-century critical theorists in his own right. And it confirms for radical social theorists that a confrontation with Habermas remains a productive encounter, for as with all of the greatest figures in the history of philosophy, we learn as much from his mistakes as from his successes.Matustík's brilliant innovation is to literally invent a new genre of philosophical biography. Studying the relationship between Habermas's life and his writings, Matustík distinguishes between authoring (the dramatic situations of one's life) and authorship (one's theoretical and political oeuvre). Taken separately, both Habermas's authoring and authorship demonstrate huge, sometimes culpable, blindnesses and aporias. Combined, they show him to be one of the most nuanced and provocative intellectuals of our age.Habermas's authorship is quite well known and academically influential, resulting recently in what some have called a critical theory industry. (Matustík previously explored this authorship in Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel [Guilford, 1993].) Through a fascinating account of his well-known major works combined with many lesser known (and untranslated) ones such as the Kleine Politische Schriften, Matustík convincingly describes Habermas's oeuvreas an integration of "the constitutional needs of 1945 with the revolutionary core of 1968, while searching for an audience and the procedurally supported life forms that would receive this historical integration" (91). Matustík's reconstruction of the existential dimension of Habermas's communicative turn continues to challenge more conservative third-generation critical theorists as well as those discontents who merely focus on his formalistic and legalistic turn since the publication of the monumental Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns. Left here, Jürgen Habermas would already constitute a major contribution.But all is not left here; the bulk of the text engages the dramatic, generational profiles that comprise Habermas's heretofore underthematized authoring, including:his "existentially motivated philosophical birthday," May 8, 1945;his 1953 public break with Heidegger, publishing "Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken";his participation in the anti-nuclear movement of the late 1950s;his "break" with the student movement after Benno Ohnesorg's murder by Berlin police in 1967;his involvement in the controversies around the German Autumn in 1977; andhis qualified support for the Gulf War in 1991, and then again for the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo/a.In the connection between authoring and authorship, Habermas's true richness as an intellectual emerges. For he has been involved in an intricate dance between what Matustík calls "learning by disaster" and "blindness by disaster" that captures the true heart of communicative ethics and critical social theory for a skeptical age. First his blindness: [Habermas] says yes only to those aspects of the student movement that fit within his horizon.... He misses the core of the worldwide student movements, the core inspired by the postcolonial turn and its constitutive liberation struggles by various oppressed gender, sex, race, and economic classes. His partial no to the student movement expresses his own blindness to this main student challenge. His no is born from his blindness by disaster—his blindness by the light of liberation in 1945. (252, italics in original) Still, from as early as 1945 Habermas's life is also marked by a constantly recurring struggle with "learning by disaster," for he is indeed cognizant of the possible invasion of communication by the "monstrously" or "traumatically" unspeakable (Auschwitz). Matustík sees Habermas's writings and profile as a form of witnessing to the disasters of the traumatic past... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 424-425 [Access article in PDF] Martin Beck Matustík. Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001. Pp. xxxvii + 341. Cloth, $85.00. Paper, $29.95.Martin Beck Matustík's Jürgen Habermas is arguably the most exciting contribution to critical theory debates and scholarship in the last decade. Not only does it provide an original and convincing portrayal of Habermas's life (...) and work to date, it shows Matustík as one of the pre-eminent twenty first-century critical theorists in his own right. And it confirms for radical social theorists that a confrontation with Habermas remains a productive encounter, for as with all of the greatest figures in the history of philosophy, we learn as much from his mistakes as from his successes.Matustík's brilliant innovation is to literally invent a new genre of philosophical biography. Studying the relationship between Habermas's life and his writings, Matustík distinguishes between authoring (the dramatic situations of one's life) and authorship (one's theoretical and political oeuvre). Taken separately, both Habermas's authoring and authorship demonstrate huge, sometimes culpable, blindnesses and aporias. Combined, they show him to be one of the most nuanced and provocative intellectuals of our age.Habermas's authorship is quite well known and academically influential, resulting recently in what some have called a critical theory industry. (Matustík previously explored this authorship in Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel [Guilford, 1993].) Through a fascinating account of his well-known major works combined with many lesser known (and untranslated) ones such as the Kleine Politische Schriften, Matustík convincingly describes Habermas's oeuvreas an integration of "the constitutional needs of 1945 with the revolutionary core of 1968, while searching for an audience and the procedurally supported life forms that would receive this historical integration" (91). Matustík's reconstruction of the existential dimension of Habermas's communicative turn continues to challenge more conservative third-generation critical theorists as well as those discontents who merely focus on his formalistic and legalistic turn since the publication of the monumental Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns. Left here, Jürgen Habermas would already constitute a major contribution.But all is not left here; the bulk of the text engages the dramatic, generational profiles that comprise Habermas's heretofore underthematized authoring, including:his "existentially motivated philosophical birthday," May 8, 1945;his 1953 public break with Heidegger, publishing "Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken";his participation in the anti-nuclear movement of the late 1950s;his "break" with the student movement after Benno Ohnesorg's murder by Berlin police in 1967;his involvement in the controversies around the German Autumn in 1977; andhis qualified support for the Gulf War in 1991, and then again for the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo/a.In the connection between authoring and authorship, Habermas's true richness as an intellectual emerges. For he has been involved in an intricate dance between what Matustík calls "learning by disaster" and "blindness by disaster" that captures the true heart of communicative ethics and critical social theory for a skeptical age. First his blindness: [Habermas] says yes only to those aspects of the student movement that fit within his horizon.... He misses the core of the worldwide student movements, the core inspired by the postcolonial turn and its constitutive liberation struggles by various oppressed gender, sex, race, and economic classes. His partial no to the student movement expresses his own blindness to this main student challenge. His no is born from his blindness by disaster—his blindness by the light of liberation in 1945. (252, italics in original) Still, from as early as 1945 Habermas's life is also marked by a constantly recurring struggle with "learning by disaster," for he is indeed cognizant of the possible invasion of communication by the "monstrously" or "traumatically" unspeakable (Auschwitz). Matustík sees Habermas's writings and profile as a form of witnessing to the disasters of the traumatic past... (shrink)

Combining the frameworks of multi-dimensional analysis and rhetorical structure theory, this study examines the linguistic co-occurrence patterns in the discourse of corporate annual reports and interprets their underlying functional dimensions. Our corpus consists of texts of corporate 10K reports from firms listed on New York Stock Exchange. Five functional dimensions are quantitatively extracted and qualitatively interpreted: expression of direct persuasion; expression of impersonal stance; subjective versus objective positioning; integrative expression of stance versus fragmented expression; and expression of reliability. All these (...) dimensions contribute to the communicative function of persuasion. The analysis of the rhetorical structures of excerpts with high concentrations of co-occurring linguistic features on each dimension further indicates the communicative strategy of persuasion. The proposed MD model is then applied to analyze the effect of firm performance on the linguistic variation in CAR discourse. We found that firm performance can significantly affect the linguistic variation in CAR discourse. CAR discourse from firms with good performance is more reliable. The result reveals managements’ use of concealment strategy in impression management. This study has implications for MD analysis, business discourse analysis, language pedagogy and accounting research. (shrink)

Christians frequently resist evolutionary theory, believing it to be incompatible with the core values of their tradition. But what exactly are the tensions between evolution and religious faith in the area of human morality? Evolution and Ethics examines the burning questions of human morality from the standpoint of Christian thought and contemporary biology, asking where the two perspectives diverge and where they may complement one another. -/- Representing a significant dialogue between world-class scientists, philosophers, and theologians, this volume explores the (...) central features of biological and religious accounts of human morality, introducing the leading theories and locating the key points of contention. Central to these discussions are the questions of whether human actions are ever genuinely selfless, whether there is something in the moral life that transcends biological function, and whether one can sensibly speak of an overall purpose to the course of evolution. (shrink)

Background There is continued need for enhanced medical ethics education across the United States. In an effort to guide medical ethics education reform, we report the first interprofessional survey of a cohort of graduate medical, nursing and allied health professional students that examined perceived student need for more formalized medical ethics education and assessed preferences for teaching methods in a graduate level medical ethics curriculum. Methods In January 2018, following the successful implementation of a peer-led, grassroots medical ethics curriculum, student (...) leaders under faculty guidance conducted a cross-sectional survey with 562 of 1357 responses received among students enrolled in the School of Medicine, College of Nursing, Doctor of Physical Therapy and BS/ MD Professional Scholars programs at The Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. An in person or web-based questionnaire was designed to measure perceived need for a more in-depth medical ethics curriculum. Results The majority of respondents were female, white and mid-20s in age. Almost half of respondents reported no prior medical ethics exposure or training in their previous educational experience, while 60% of students across all degree programs reported an interest in more medical ethics education and 92% noted that an understanding of medical ethics was important to their future career. Over a quarter of students were interested in pursuing graduate-level training in medical ethics, with case-based discussions, small group peer settings and ethics guest lectures being the most desired teaching methods. Conclusions The future physician, nursing and physical therapist workforce in our medical community demonstrated an unmet need and strong interest for more formal medical ethics education within their current coursework. Grassroots student-driven curricular development and leadership in medical ethics can positively impact medical education. Subsequent integration of interprofessional training in medical ethics may serve as a vital curricular approach to improving the training of ethically competent healthcare professionals and overcoming the current hierarchical clinical silos. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the Importance of Conceptual ContrastsMadness, Reason, and Mad PrideAwais Aftab, MD (bio)Garson (2023) offers an engaging historical and philosophical discussion around the importance Late Modern thinkers assigned to the task of differentiating madness from idiocy (or more specifically, to the tripartite distinction of sanity, madness, and idiocy). Based on this analysis, Garson’s identifies the need to offer a positive account of mental illness—one that does not define the (...) essence of mental illness exclusively as the absence, lack, or failure of the power of reasoning. Following the Late Modern thinkers (Locke, Kant, Wigan, and Heinroth), Garson concludes that madness is infused with reason, and what characterizes madness is the presence of reason in an altered and mutated form. This is all worth taking seriously. My own assessment of this historical and philosophical material nonetheless differs from that of Garson. To recognize madness as possessing reason within it in an altered form may be of less profound significance than he thinks it is. Garson’s discussion commendably highlights the importance of making conceptual contrasts explicit in definitional debates, and this should indeed lead us to search for contrasts that are more philosophically illuminating (what is better will depend on the context of inquiry). However, in my view, the recognition of madness as altered reason neither reframes the project of defining “mental disorder” nor does it provide an intellectual scaffolding for mad activism.The significance of “madness contains reason within in but in an altered or perverse form” is difficult to translate into contemporary scientific terms, and the fuzziness and historical baggage around the terms “madness,” “reason,” and “perversion” does not make it easy. “Mental disorder” or “psychopathology” means to us something quite different than what madness meant to Late Modern thinkers, and while “madness” remains a popular term in philosophical literature, there is no clarity on the nature of overlap between the domain of madness and the domain of conditions currently classified by the diagnostic manuals. Mental disorders, as currently conceptualized, include a motley of conditions that were previously characterized using terms such as idiocy, madness, neuroses, and psychopathic personalities. [End Page 297]From our contemporary vantage point, to compare idiocy and madness is to make a distinction within the domain of psychopathology. We are comparing two groups of psychiatric conditions. The lessons we derive from this comparison do not necessarily extrapolate well to a comparison of mental disorders with something outside the domain of psychopathology. To the extent that psychopathology is inclusive of both idiocy and madness, psychiatric disorders both contain and do not contain “reason” within them. The domain is heterogenous in this regard, and broad generalizations about the nature of reason in the mental disorders would be simplistic at best and inaccurate at worst. Other distinctions that we have made within the domain of psychopathology have included organic versus functional, neurosis versus psychosis, categories versus continua, and distinctions used within nosology have included operationalized criteria versus phenomenology, idiographic versus nomothetic, medical versus non-medical, description versus explanation, and so on (Aftab & Ryznar, 2021; Zachar, Banicki, & Aftab, 2023), all of which have the potential to offer a positive account of some aspect of psychopathology.It is worth nothing that the distinction between “absence of reason” versus “perversion of reason” is analogous to the common distinction between absence of function and altered function in patho-physiology. Such a distinction exists for almost every function that exists. Consider vision: absence of vision (blindness) and altered vision (illusions, distortions, hallucinations). Consider hypoesthesia (reduced sense of touch) and paraesthesia (altered sense of touch—tingling, pricking, burning, etc.). Garson alludes to diminished sexual capacity versus paraphilia as an analogy, but he does not seem to appreciate that the analogy applies much more broadly. Is the distinction between absence of reason versus perversion of reason of any greater significance than the distinction between blindness and hallucination? If we were to say, “What distinguishes hallucination from blindness is not the failure, absence, or lack of sight, but its presence—albeit in a perverse and mutated form,” how profound would it really be for our notions of disorder? Or imagine some Late Modern physician saying that a disturbance of speech and... (shrink)

Should we make significant sacrifices to ever-so-slightly lower the chance of extremely bad outcomes, or to ever-so-slightly raise the chance of extremely good outcomes? *Fanaticism* says yes: for every bad outcome, there is a tiny chance of extreme disaster that is even worse, and for every good outcome, there is a tiny chance of an enormous good that is even better. I consider two related recent arguments for Fanaticism: Beckstead and Thomas's argument from *strange dependence on space and time*, and (...) Wilkinson's *Indology* argument. While both arguments are instructive, neither is persuasive. In fact, the general principles that underwrite the arguments (a *separability* principle in the first case, and a *reflection* principle in the second) are *inconsistent* with Fanaticism. In both cases, though, it is possible to rehabilitate arguments for Fanaticism based on restricted versions of those principles. The situation is unstable: plausible general principles tell *against* Fanaticism, but restrictions of those same principles (with strengthened auxiliary assumptions) *support* Fanaticism. All of the consistent views that emerge are very strange. (shrink)

Jeffrey E. Brower presents and explains the hylomorphic conception of the material world developed by Thomas Aquinas, according to which material objects are composed of both matter and form. In addition to presenting and explaining Aquinas's views, Brower seeks wherever possible to bring them into dialogue with the best recent literature on related topics. Along the way, he highlights the contribution that Aquinas's views make to a host of contemporary metaphysical debates, including the nature of change, composition, material constitution, (...) the ontology of stuff vs. things, the proper analysis of ordinary objects, the truthmakers for essential vs. accidental predication, and the metaphysics of property possession. (shrink)

Eliminativists sometimes invoke evolutionary debunking arguments against ordinary object beliefs, either to help them establish object skepticism or to soften the appeal of commonsense ontology. I argue that object debunkers face a self-defeat problem: their conclusion undermines the scientific support for one of their premises, because evolutionary biology depends on our object beliefs. Using work on reductionism and multiple realizability from the philosophy of science, I argue that it will not suffice for an eliminativist debunker to simply appeal to some (...) object-free surrogate theory of evolution that results from converting any scientific proposition about some object K into a proposition about simples arranged K-wise. In the process, I examine some hazards peculiar to eliminative reductions of scientific theories, and propose a trilemma for eliminativists who attempt to recoup generality for ontologically sparse reducing theories by appealing to pluralities of simples arranged K-wise. The paper is intended to define and develop the object debunker’s self-defeat problem for further study, and to clarify some of the ways sparse and abundant ontologies interact with scientific theory. (shrink)

Lewis sender‐receiver games illustrate how a meaningful term language might evolve from initially meaningless random signals (Lewis 1969; Skyrms 2006). Here we consider how a meaningful language with a primitive grammar might evolve in a somewhat more subtle sort of game. The evolution of such a language involves the co‐evolution of partitions of the physical world into what may seem, at least from the perspective of someone using the language, to correspond to canonical natural kinds. While the evolved language may (...) allow for the sort of precise representation that is required for successful coordinated action and prediction, the apparent natural kinds reflected in its structure may be purely conventional. This has both positive and negative implications for the limits of naturalized metaphysics. (shrink)

Everett's relative-state formulation of quantum mechanics is an attempt to solve the measurement problem by dropping the collapse dynamics from the standard von Neumann-Dirac theory of quantum mechanics. The main problem with Everett's theory is that it is not at all clear how it is supposed to work. In particular, while it is clear that he wanted to explain why we get determinate measurement results in the context of his theory, it is unclear how he intended to do this. There (...) have been many attempts to reconstruct Everett's no-collapse theory in order to account for the apparent determinateness of measurement outcomes. These attempts have led to such formulations of quantum mechanics as the many-worlds, many-minds, many-histories, and relative-fact theories. Each of these captures part of what Everett claimed for his theory, but each also encounters problems. (shrink)

The Epistemic Objection says that certain theories of time imply that it is impossible to know which time is absolutely present. Standard presentations of the Epistemic Objection are elliptical—and some of the most natural premises one might fill in to complete the argument end up leading to radical skepticism. But there is a way of filling in the details which avoids this problem, using epistemic safety. The new version has two interesting upshots. First, while Ross Cameron alleges that the Epistemic (...) Objection applies to presentism as much as to theories like the growing block, the safety version does not overgeneralize this way. Second, the Epistemic Objection does generalize in a different, overlooked way. The safety objection is a serious problem for a widely held combination of views: “propositional temporalism” together with “metaphysical eternalism”. (shrink)

Epistemic Consequentialism Consequentialism is the view that, in some sense, rightness is to be understood in terms conducive to goodness. Much of the philosophical discussion concerning consequentialism has focused on moral rightness or obligation or normativity. But there is plausibly also epistemic rightness, epistemic obligation, and epistemic normativity. Epistemic rightness is often denoted with talk … Continue reading Consequentialism Epistemic →.

“There are no gaps in logical space,” David Lewis writes, giving voice to sentiment shared by many philosophers. But different natural ways of trying to make this sentiment precise turn out to conflict with one another. One is a *pattern* idea: “Any pattern of instantiation is metaphysically possible.” Another is a *cut and paste* idea: “For any objects in any worlds, there exists a world that contains any number of duplicates of all of those objects.” We use resources from model (...) theory to show the inconsistency of certain packages of combinatorial principles and the consistency of others. (shrink)

A common line of thought in contemporary metaethics is that certain facts about the evolutionary history of humans make moral realism implausible. Two of the most developed evolutionary cases against realism are found in the works of Richard Joyce and Sharon Street. In what follows, I argue that a form of moral realism that I call proper-function moral realism can meet Joyce and Street's challenges. I begin by sketching the basics of proper-function moral realism. I then present what I take (...) to be the essence of Street's and Joyce's objections, and I show how proper-function realism answers them. (shrink)

Theologians and philosophers of religion are increasingly interested in physics. From the fine-tuning of universal constants to quantum mechanics, relativity, and cosmology, physics is a surprisingly common subject where religion is involved. Bridging the gap between issues in religion and those in physics can be quite difficult, however. Fortunately, the philosophy of science provides a middle ground between the two disciplines. In this book, a philosopher of science provides a critical analysis of the ways in which physics is brought into (...) play in matters of religion. (shrink)

We prove a representation theorem for preference relations over countably infinite lotteries that satisfy a generalized form of the Independence axiom, without assuming Continuity. The representing space consists of lexicographically ordered transfinite sequences of bounded real numbers. This result is generalized to preference orders on abstract superconvex spaces.

Could space consist entirely of extended regions, without any regions shaped like points, lines, or surfaces? Peter Forrest and Frank Arntzenius have independently raised a paradox of size for space like this, drawing on a construction of Cantor’s. I present a new version of this argument and explore possible lines of response.

We consider two ways one might use algorithmic randomness to characterize a probabilistic law. The first is a generative chance* law. Such laws involve a nonstandard notion of chance. The second is a probabilistic* constraining law. Such laws impose relative frequency and randomness constraints that every physically possible world must satisfy. While each notion has virtues, we argue that the latter has advantages over the former. It supports a unified governing account of non-Humean laws and provides independently motivated solutions to (...) issues in the Humean best-system account. On both notions, we have a much tighter connection between probabilistic laws and their corresponding sets of possible worlds. Certain histories permitted by traditional probabilistic laws are ruled out as physically impossible. As a result, such laws avoid one variety of empirical underdetermination, but the approach reveals other varieties of underdetermination that are typically overlooked. (shrink)

Scientific revolution is a widely known concept. But does revolution really occur in science? Change through revolution means that present thinking does not retain anything from the past, because everything is thrown away due to the revolution. Does this pattern of change really correspond to the history of science? There is another pattern which is called evolution. This writing will show that process of evolution rather than revolution presents the real situation of scientific change. According to this concept, science grows (...) as an organic species grows in certain environment. An organism is different from its every former stage, yet it remains the same organism throughout its life. In the same way, we will find both change and continuity in scientific growth. (shrink)

The counterpart theorist has a problem: there is no obvious way to understand talk about actuality in terms of counterparts. Fara and Williamson have charged that this obstacle cannot be overcome. Here I defend the counterpart theorist by offering systematic interpretations of a quantified modal language that includes an actuality operator. Centrally, I disentangle the counterpart relation from a related notion, a ‘representation relation’. The relation of possible things to the actual things they represent is variable, and an adequate account (...) of modal language must keep track of the way it is systematically shifted by modal operators. I apply my account to resolve several puzzles about counterparts and actuality. In technical appendices, I prove some important logical results about this ‘representational’ counterpart system and its relationship to other modal systems. (shrink)

The existence of mereological sums can be derived from an abstraction principle in a way analogous to numbers. I draw lessons for the thesis that “composition is innocent” from neo-Fregeanism in the philosophy of mathematics.

The article reflects on where AI is headed and the world along with it, considering trust, ethics and safety. Implicit in artificial thinking and doomsday appraisals is the engineered divorce from reality of sublime human embodiment. Jeffrey White, Dietrich Brandt, Jan Soeffner, and Larry Stapleton, four scholars associated with AI & Society, address these issues, and more, in the following exchange.

-/- Some phenomena within nature exhibit such exquisiteness of structure, function or interconnectedness that many people have found it natural—if not inescapable—to see a deliberative and directive mind behind those phenomena. The mind in question, being prior to nature itself, is typically taken to be supernatural. Philosophically inclined thinkers have both historically and at present labored to shape the relevant intuition into a more formal, logically rigorous inference. The resultant theistic arguments, in their various logical forms, share a focus on (...) plan, purpose, intention and design, and are thus classified as teleological arguments (or, frequently, as arguments from or to design). -/- Although enjoying some prominent defenders over the centuries, such arguments have also attracted serious criticisms from a number of major historical and contemporary thinkers. Both critics and advocates are found not only among philosophers, but come from scientific and other disciplines as well. In the following discussion, major variant forms of teleological arguments will be distinguished and explored, traditional philosophical and other criticisms will be discussed, and the most prominent contemporary turns (cosmic fine tuning arguments, many-worlds theories, and the present Intelligent Design debate) will be tracked. Discussion will conclude with a brief look at one historically important non-inferential approach to the issue. (shrink)

There is one critical way we honor great tragedies: by never forgetting. Collective remembrance is as old as human society itself, serving as an important source of social cohesion, yet as Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows in this book, it has served novel roles in a modern era otherwise characterized by discontinuity and dislocation. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations of collective memory, he elaborates an important new philosophical basis for it, one that unveils profound limitations to its scope in relation (...) to the historical past. Crucial to Barash’s analysis is a look at the radical transformations that symbolic configurations of collective memory have undergone with the rise of new technologies of mass communication. He provocatively demonstrates how such technologies’ capacity to simulate direct experience—especially via the image—actually makes more palpable collective memory’s limitations and the opacity of the historical past, which always lies beyond the reach of living memory. Thwarting skepticism, however, he eventually looks to literature—specifically writers such as Walter Scott, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald—to uncover subtle nuances of temporality that might offer inconspicuous emblems of a past historical reality. (shrink)

“Pragmatic encroachers” about knowledge generally advocate two ideas: (1) you can rationally act on what you know; (2) knowledge is harder to achieve when more is at stake. Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne have recently argued that these two ideas may not fit together so well. I extend their argument by working out what “high stakes” would have to mean for the two ideas to line up, using decision theory.

Some philosophers respond to Leibniz’s “shift” argument against absolute space by appealing to antihaecceitism about possible worlds, using David Lewis’s counterpart theory. But separated from Lewis’s distinctive system, it is difficult to understand what this doctrine amounts to or how it bears on the Leibnizian argument. In fact, the best way of making sense of the relevant kind of antihaecceitism concedes the main point of the Leibnizian argument, pressing us to consider alternative spatiotemporal metaphysics.

I examine what the mathematical theory of random structures can teach us about the probability of Plenitude, a thesis closely related to David Lewis's modal realism. Given some natural assumptions, Plenitude is reasonably probable a priori, but in principle it can be (and plausibly it has been) empirically disconfirmed—not by any general qualitative evidence, but rather by our de re evidence.