It is widely held that, in his pre-Critical works, Kant endorsed a necessitation account of laws of nature, where laws are grounded in essences or causal powers. Against this, I argue that the early Kant endorsed the priority of laws in explaining and unifying the natural world, as well as their irreducible role in in grounding natural necessity. Laws are a key constituent of Kant’s explanatory naturalism, rather than undermining it. By laying out neglected distinctions Kant draws among types (...) of natural law, grounding relations, and ontological levels, I show that his early works present a coherent and sophisticated laws-first account of the natural order. (shrink)

n this article, I try to defend the thesis that imagination against reason, moral progress through imagination not the reason, the emergence of literary culture after philosophical culture from Hegel onwards, contingency of language, the usefulness of literature (poetry, novels and stories, etc.) in enhancing empathy with one another and ultimately reducing philosophy to poetry in Richard Rorty's writings point to one thing: the priority of literature to philosophy. The literary or post-physical culture that Rorty defends is (...) opposed to the Enlightenment and the philosophical and religious culture. Rorty prefers literary culture among the religious culture and philosophical culture. The literary culture Rorty envisages is a radically historicist and nominalist one. Rorty’s romanticised version of pragmatism aims precisely at dealing with this literary or post-physical culture or, in generally, the literature. (shrink)

Words appear to be denizens of the external world or, at any rate, not wholly mental, unlike our pains. It is the norm for philosophical accounts of words to reflect this appearance by offering various socio-cultural conditions to which an adequate account of wordhood must cleave. The paper argues, to the contrary, that an adequate account of word phenomena need avert to nothing other than individual psychology along with potential external factors that in-themselves do not count as linguistic. My principal (...) leverage will be that, by everyone’s lights, whatever words are, they are syntactically combinable and possess structural properties. But such conditions cannot be externally realised; instead, they are aspects of our internally realised cognitive capacity. It will also be argued, however, that the position is consistent with much of our common lore about words, albeit sans an externalist linguistic ontology. (shrink)

This monograph is a defence of the Fregean take on logic. The author argues that Frege ́s projects, in logic and philosophy of language, are essentially connected and that the formalist shift produced by the work of Peano, Boole and Schroeder and continued by Hilbert and Tarski is completely alien to Frege's approach in the Begriffsschrift. A central thesis of the book is that judgeable contents, i.e. propositions, are the primary bearers of logical properties, which makes logic embedded in (...) our conceptual system. This approach allows coherent and correct definitions of logical constants, logical consequence, and truth and connects their use to the practices of rational agents in science and everyday life. (shrink)

Michail Peramatzis presents a new interpretation of Aristotle's view of the priority relations between fundamental and derivative parts of reality, following ...

This essay reconstructs the steps by which Cassirer moved from the philosophy of language in the early 1920s to his more general theory of symbolism. The linguistic turn in philosophy overcame idealism without falling into naturalism or psychologism, but according to Cassirer proclaiming the primacy of language was one-sided. He claimed that language is but one symbolic form among many and, what is more, it is not the most fundamental kind of symbolism. The basic function of symbolism is (...) neither “reference” nor “pure signification,” but the unification of sensory phenomena in perception, a function he termed symbolic “Prägnanz.” The essay explains how Cassirer argued for a continuity of symbolic processes linking expressive perceptual qualities with scientific theory. (shrink)

This essay reconstructs the steps by which Cassirer moved from the philosophy of language in the early 1920s to his more general theory of symbolism. The linguistic turn in philosophy overcame idealism without falling into naturalism or psychologism, but according to Cassirer proclaiming the primacy of language was one-sided. He claimed that language is but one symbolic form among many and, what is more, it is not the most fundamental kind of symbolism. The basic function of symbolism is (...) neither "reference" nor "pure signification," but the unification of sensory phenomena in perception, a function he termed symbolic "Prägnanz." The essay explains how Cassirer argued for a continuity of symbolic processes linking expressive perceptual qualities with scientific theory. (shrink)

Consider a circle and a pair of its semicircles. Which is prior, the whole or its parts? Are the semicircles dependent abstractions from their whole, or is the circle a derivative construction from its parts? Now in place of the circle consider the entire cosmos (the ultimate concrete whole), and in place of the pair of semicircles consider the myriad particles (the ultimate concrete parts). Which if either is ultimately prior, the one ultimate whole or its many ultimate parts?

Priority monism is the view that the cosmos is the only independent concrete object. The paper argues that, pace its proponents, Priority monism is in conflict with the dependence of any whole on any of its parts: if the cosmos does not depend on its parts, neither does any smaller composite.

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 the priority view, or prioritarianism, it matters more to benefit people the worse off they are. But how exactly should the priority view be defined? This article argues for a highly general characterization which essentially involves risk, but makes no use of evaluative measurements or the expected utility axioms. A representation theorem is provided, and when further assumptions are added, common accounts of the priority view are recovered. A defense of the key idea behind the (...) priority view, the priority principle, is provided. But it is argued that the priority view fails on both ethical and conceptual grounds. (shrink)

In his early writings up unto his so-called “middle period” Schelling treats art as having a crucial role with respect to philosophy. Yet there is no consensus in the secondary literature as to the nature of this role, and the extent to which Schelling changed his mind on the subject. The paper will defend the claim that Schelling holds consistently, from his early texts to the Philosophy of Art, that philosophy is in some sense prior to art (...) while essentially dependent on it. The paper will explore the development of this position from various perspectives. This will shed light on Schelling’s view on both art and philosophy and his view that in the future the two will merge. (shrink)

In this note I test a specific thesis about the dependence of philosophy of science on science that Laudan presents in his Science and Hypothesis; namely, that the sciences were justificationally prior to the philosophy of science. I argue that Laudan's historical case studies show a justificational priority that goes the other way. I also argue that the justificational role that in Progress and Its Problems the history of science is alleged to play vis-à-vis competing conceptions of (...) scientific rationality is not apparent in Laudan's argumentation in favor of his suggested analysis in terms of problem-solving effectiveness. (shrink)

In this article, I address concerns that the ontological priority claims definitive of ontic structural realism are as they stand unclear, and I do so by placing these claims on a more rigorous formal footing than they typically have been hitherto. I first of all argue that Kit Fine’s analysis of ontological dependence furnishes us with an ontological priority relation that is particularly apt for structuralism. With that in place, and with reference to two case studies prominent within (...) the structuralist literature, I consider whether any of structuralism’s distinctive priority claims may be regarded as warranted. The discussion as a whole has largely negative implications for the radical structuralism of French and Ladyman (including their ‘eliminativist’ interpretation of it), largely positive implications for the moderate structuralism primarily advocated by Esfeld and Lam, and some broad lessons for contemporary fundamentalist metaphysics as a whole. 1 Introduction2 The Right Priority Relation for Structuralism: Supervenience or Dependence?3 Introducing Ontological Dependence4 Fine’s System5 The Priority of Structure 1: Entangled Quantum Particles6 The Priority of Structure 2: The Group-Theoretic Conception of Elementary Particles7 Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

Priority monism is roughly the view that the universe is the only fundamental object, that is, a concrete object that does not depend on any other concrete object. Schaffer, the main advocate of PM, claims that PM is compatible with dependence having two different directions: from parts to wholes for subcosmic wholes, and from whole to parts for the cosmic whole. Recently it has been argued that this position is untenable. Given plausible assumptions about dependence, PM entails that dependence (...) has only one direction, it always goes from wholes to parts. One such plausible assumption is a principle of Isolation. I argue that, given all extant accounts of dependence on the market, PM entails No Isolation. The argument depends upon a particular feature of the dependence relation, namely, necessitation and its direction. In the light of this, I contend that the argument is important, insofar as it suggests that we should distinguish dependence from other cognate notions, e.g. grounding. Once this distinction is made, I suggest we should also distinguish between two different notions of fundamentality that might turn out to be not-coextensive. (shrink)

This book provides a full treatment of an issue which is particularly pressing: when the claims of the nearest conflict with the claims of the neediest, as they constantly do, where should preference go? Professor Hallett focuses first on a specific, representative case, pitting the lesser need of a son against the greater need of starving strangers. He brings to bear on this single paradigm all the resources of theological and philosophical reflection - scriptures, patristic teaching, the Thomistic tradition, current (...) debates - and from this single example he sheds light on a wide range of comparable cases, both private and public. This distinctive strategy leads to distinctive and challenging results, and at the same time helps to clarify the traditional 'order of charity' and the celebrated 'preferential option for the poor'. (shrink)

In The Priority of the Person, world-class philosopher David Walsh advances the argument set forth in his highly original philosophic meditation Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being (2015), that "person" is the central category of modern political thought and philosophy. This book is divided into three main parts. Beginning with the political discovery of the inexhaustibility of persons, it then explores the philosophic differentiation of the idea of the "person," and finally traces its historical emergence (...) through art, science, and faith. Walsh argues that, although the roots of the idea of "person" are found in the Greek concept of the mind and in the Christian conception of the soul, this notion is ultimately a distinctly modern achievement, because it is only the modern turn toward interiority that illuminated the unique nature of persons as each being a world unto him or herself. As Walsh shows, it is precisely this feature of persons that makes it possible for us to know and communicate with others, for we can only give and receive one another as persons. In this way alone can we became friends and, in friendship, build community. In showing how the person is modernity's central preoccupation, and in demonstrating how it is only as persons that we can truly give ourselves to others and thus develop real community, David Walsh's The Priority of the Person makes an important contribution to current discussions in both political theory and philosophy. It will also appeal to students and scholars of theology and literature, and any groups interested in the person and personalism. (shrink)

Consider the kinds of macroscopic concrete objects that common sense and the sciences allege to exist: tables, raindrops, tectonic plates, galaxies, and the rest. Are there any such things? Opinions differ. Ontological liberals say they do; ontological radicals say they don't. Liberalism seems favored by its plausible acquiescence to the dictates of common sense abetted by science; radicalism by its ontological parsimony. Priority theorists claim we can have the virtues of both views. They hold that tables, raindrops, etc., exist, (...) but they aren't fundamental. The ontological liberal's ontology provides the correct inventory of existent individuals. The ontological radical's more restricted ontology provides the correct inventory of fundamental individuals. The priority theorist claims that the derivative individuals are "no addition in being" to the fundamental ones, so we can have our cake and eat it too. It would be nice if priority theorists were right. In this paper I argue, with regret, that they are not. One upshot is that the sort of explanations which underwrite the priority theorist's distinction between fundamental and derivative individuals do not mitigate our ontological commitments. Another is that we still have to choose between the charms of liberalism and radicalism. (shrink)

This paper motivates and develops a new theory of time: priority presentism. Priority presentism is the view according to which (i) only present entities exist fundamentally and (ii) past and future entities exist, but they are grounded in the present. The articulation of priority presentism is an exercise in applied grounding: it draws on concepts from the recent literature on ontological dependence and applies those concepts in a new way, to the philosophy of time. The result, (...) as I will argue, is an attractive position that can do much of the same work in satisfying our intuitions about time as presentism, but without the ontological cost. (shrink)

Many moral theories are committed to the idea that some kinds of moral considerations should be respected, whatever the cost to ‘lesser’ types of considerations. A person's life, for instance, should not be sacrificed for the trivial pleasures of others, no matter how many would benefit. However, according to the decision-theoretic critique of lexical priority theories, accepting lexical priorities inevitably leads us to make unacceptable decisions in risky situations. It seems that to operate in a risky world, we must (...) reject lexical priorities altogether. This paper argues that lexical priority theories can, in fact, offer satisfactory guidance in risky situations. It does so by equipping lexical priority theories with overlooked resources from decision theory. (shrink)

Prioritized bases, i.e., weakly ordered sets of sentences, have been used for specifying an agent’s ‘basic’ or ‘explicit’ beliefs, or alternatively for compactly encoding an agent’s belief state without the claim that the elements of a base are in any sense basic. This paper focuses on the second interpretation and shows how a shifting of priorities in prioritized bases can be used for a simple, constructive and intuitive way of representing a large variety of methods for the change of belief (...) states—methods that have usually been characterized semantically by a system-of-spheres modeling. Among the methods represented are ‘radical’, ‘conservative’ and ‘moderate’ revision, ‘revision by comparison’ in its raising and lowering variants, as well as various constructions for belief expansion and contraction. Importantly, none of these methods makes any use of numbers. (shrink)

The general idea that we have of artificial intelligence (AI) consists of the belief that machines will be able to develop conscious thoughts such as those possessed by human beings, and, as computing advances, such thinking will also advance until intelligence to surpass the human being, with which the advancement of AI represents ethical risks in the future. In reality, such a belief hides a cognitive assumption, which assumes that computational engineering explains human intelligence through the mind-computer metaphor. According to (...) this assumption, technology explains cognition, and philosophy, through ethics, reflects on the impact of said technology. However, in this article, I contradict such an assumption and defend that the philosophy in AI is not reduced to the ethics that is present after the use and impact of AI in the world. I intend to expose that a good ethics of AI is the one that reflects on the appropriate risks facing AI, and for this, philosophy, beforehand, must make a cognitive analysis about the possibilities that computing has to create intelligent machines, namely, whether or not the mindcomputer metaphor makes sense. My thesis consists in defending that the philosophical analysis about AI must be carried out both on a cognitive level and on an ethical level, but that the philosophical priority in the cognitive analysis over the ethical priority, since the ethical risks of AI depend of the possibilities of technology, and only the cognitive approach can account for this. (shrink)

Prioritarianism is the view that we ought to give priority to benefiting those who are worse off. Sufficientism, on the other hand, is the view that we ought to give priority to benefiting those who are not sufficiently well off. This paper concerns the relative merits of these two views; in particular, it examines an argument advanced by Roger Crisp to the effect that sufficientism is the superior of the two. My aim is to show that Crisp's argument (...) is unsound. While I concede his objections against the particular prioritarian views that he considers, I propose a different version of prioritarianism that is invulnerable to those objections. (shrink)

The number of positions identified with structural realism in philosophical debates about scientific knowledge has grown significantly in the past decade, particularly with respect to the metaphysical or ‘ontic’ approach (OSR). In recent years, several advocates of OSR have proposed a novel understanding of it in order to side-step a serious challenge faced by its original formulation, eliminative OSR. I examine the conceptual basis of the new, noneliminative view, and conclude that it too faces a serious challenge, resulting in a (...) dilemma for ontic structuralists regarding the ontological status of objects and properties, and the relative “ontological priority” of these entities with respect to the relations in which they stand. (shrink)

This paper aims to illuminate some issues in the equality, priority, or what debate. I characterize egalitarianism and prioritarianism, respond to the view that we should care about sufficiency or compassion rather than equality or priority, discuss the levelling down objection, and illustrate the significance of the distinction between prioritarianism and egalitarianism, establishing that the former is no substitute for the latter. In addition, I respond to Bertil Tungodden's views regarding the Slogan, the levelling down objection, the Pareto (...) Principle, leximin, the principle of personal good, strict moderate egalitarianism, the Hammond Equity Condition, the intersection approach, and non-aggregative reasoning. (shrink)

Argument that priority monism is best understood as being a contingent thesis.

Some of us believe in giving priority to people who are badly off in designing social policies and in acting ourselves to help others. As Thomas Nagel puts it, the badly off should be first in the queue when benefits are distributed. This idea is one way of explaining moral views that are called ‘egalitarian.’ Egalitarian moral views can depend either on the idea of valuing equality itself or on the idea of giving priority to the interests of (...) the badly off. This paper is concerned with the second kind of egalitarianism.The purest form of the idea explains the priority in this way: a benefit for someone badly off can be more important morally, or can have more value, than a benefit of the same size for someone better off. This is to suppose that the priority in question cannot be explained by thinking in utilitarian terms and accepting the principle of diminishing marginal utility. (shrink)

This monograph details a new solution to an old problem of metaphysics. It presents an improved version of Ostrich Nominalism to solve the Problem of Universals. This innovative approach allows one to resolve the different formulations of the Problem, which represents an important meta-metaphysical achievement. In order to accomplish this ambitious task, the author appeals to the notion and logic of ontological grounding. Instead of defending Quine’s original principle of ontological commitment, he proposes the principle of grounded ontological commitment. This (...) represents an entirely new application of grounding. Some metaphysicians regard Ostrich Nominalism as a rejection of the problem rather than a proper solution to it. To counter this, the author presents solutions for each of the formulations. These include: the problem of predication, the problem of abstract reference, and the One Over Many as well as the Many Over One and the Similar but Different variants. This book will appeal to anyone interested in contemporary metaphysics. It will also serve as an ideal resource to scholars working on the history of philosophy. Many will recognize in the solution insights resembling those of traditional philosophers, especially of the Middle Ages. (shrink)

John Rawls’s thesis that a certain package of basic liberties should be given lexical priority is of great interest for legal and political philosophy, but it has received relatively little defense from Rawls or his supporters. In this paper, I examine three arguments for the thesis: the first is based on the two ‘moral powers’; the second, on the social bases of self-respect; and the third, on a Kantian notion of autonomy. I argue none of these accounts successfully (...) establishes 1) the distinct claim of lexical priority, 2) for the complete package of basic liberties, on the basis of reasons that are appropriately public. In turn, I propose an alternative argument, in support of those two claims, based on the social or ‘relational’ conception of equality. (shrink)

I introduce and argue for a Priority Principle, according to which we exemplify certain of our mental properties in the primary or non-derivative sense. I then apply this principle to several debates in the metaphysics and philosophy of mind.

Steinberg has recently proposed an argument against Schaffer’s priority monism. The argument assumes the principle of Necessity of Monism, which states that if priority monism is true, then it is necessarily true. In this paper, I argue that Steinberg’s objection can be eluded by giving up Necessity of Monism for an alternative principle, that I call Essentiality of Fundamentality, and that such a principle is to be preferred to Necessity of Monism on other grounds as well.

'Everyone knows what attention is’ according to William James. Much work on attention in psychology and neuroscience cites this famous phrase only to quickly dismiss it. But James is right about this: ‘attention’ was not introduced into psychology and neuroscience as a theoretical concept. I argue that we should therefore study attention with broadly the same methodology that David Marr has applied to the study of perception. By focusing more on Marr's Computational Level of analysis, we arrive at a unified (...) answer to the question of what attention is, what role it plays in the mind, and why organisms like us have that capacity. I propose a methodology for studying attention at Marr's Computational Level that optimizes in a three-dimensional space: it should capture core aspects of our first-person experience of attention, be explanatorily powerful in psychology and neuroscience, and fertile in an interdisciplinary context. I show how this methodology leads to what I call the priority structure account of attention. Attention is what organizes current information to make it more useful for the organism. We can identify it by four features. Attention, in this way, helps a cognitive system to integrate its informational state with its current motivational state. I describe how this account improves on alternatives and shows why attention is a useful concept in many disciplines and for connecting them. -/- This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Psychological Capacities Psychology > Attention Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science. (shrink)

The (dis)information age represses questioning and distorts what we take to be genuine questioning. Most studies construe questions as “epistemic imperatives,” and critics reject it as exploitative. In its defense, this chapter isolates the significance of indeterminacy in questioning. It develops a hermeneutic of questioning to show its priority in receiving meanings, and exposes that shared questioning makes the questioners too indeterminate to claim one is exploiting the other. It also develops a phenomenology of questioning to identify what it (...) is people share when they share questions and reach an understanding through them. On the acting or noetic side, it is like the dehiscence of our bodies, where its openness consists in its both feeling and being felt. Questioning is dehiscent in that it opens understanding to enfold new meaning. On the content or noematic side, questioning expresses subject matters in the state of indeterminacy, where a topic is suspended in a network of predicative possibilities. Through questioning, we gain empowerment to determine things for ourselves, to take responsibility for our own answers. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to study the relationship between Epicureanism and pandemic priority-setting and to explore whether Epicurus's philosophy is compliant with the later developed utilitarianism. We find this aim interesting because Epicurus had a different way of valuing death than our modern society does: Epicureanism holds that death—understood as the incident of death—cannot be bad (or good) for those who die (self-regarding effects). However, this account is still consistent with the view that a particular death (...) can be bad for everyone else but those who die, such as family, friends, and society (other-regarding effects). During the pandemic, the focus has been on the number of deaths more than on the suffering and reduced well-being of those infected and the rest of society. However, since the pandemic requires prioritization, it is, on a utilitarian account, important to consider priorities that do the most good overall. In this article, we approach the harm of death from an Epicurean point of view, seeking to flesh out potential implications for pandemic priority-setting, and healthcare in general, using a case study of COVID-19 priority-setting. We also explore whether this would conflict with utilitarianism. We conclude that an Epicurean pandemic priority-setting approach would be different but, surprisingly, not radically different from many of the actual priority-setting decisions we saw under the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

A moral requirement R1 is said to be lexically prior to a moral requirement R2 just in case we are morally obliged to uphold R1 at the expense of R2 – no matter how many times R2 must be violated thereby. While lexical priority is a feature of many ethical theories, and arguably a part of common sense morality, attempts to model it within the framework of decision theory have led to a series of problems – a fact which (...) is sometimes spun as a ‘decision theoretic critique’ of lexical priority. In this paper, I develop an enriched decision theoretic framework that is capable of modelling lexical priority while avoiding all extant problems. This will involve introducing several new ingredients into the standard decision theoretic framework, including multidimensional utilities, de minimis risks, and the means to represent two different conceptions of risk. (shrink)

Adapting a terminology introduced by Brian Barry, I make a distinction between want-regarding and ideal-regarding principles and apply it to the norms and criteria put forward in environmental ethics. I argue that priority should be given to want-regarding principles over ideal-regarding ones because the former are universalizable while the latter are not, universalizable being understood in the sense of appealing to value premises for which universal assent can be secured. This sense is different both from R. M. Hare’s metaethical (...) concept of universalizability and J. L. Mackie’s “three stages of universalisation.”. (shrink)

Is the mind just a by-product of the brain? Or is mind the fundamental reality, which creates matter? This book is a defense of mind as prior to matter. It is a philosophical work, written in an accessible style, which explains idealism as the teaching of most classical philosophers, and as most consistent with modern science"-- Back cover.

The priority rule in science has been interpreted as a behavior regulator for the scientific community, which benefits society by adequately structuring the distribution of intellectual labor across pre-existing research programs. Further, it has been lauded as part of society's "grand reward scheme" because it fairly rewards people for the benefits they produce. But considerations about how news of scientific developments spreads throughout a scientific community at large suggest that the priority rule is something else entirely, which can (...) disadvantage historically underrepresented or otherwise marginalized social groups. (shrink)