In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to (...) engage in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people (...) spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

Recently, Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich have argued that there are different gender philosophical intuitions and that these differences may play a role in explaining the marginalization of women philosophers. To the contrary, I defend the view that intuitions are in part socially constructed and the product of stereotypical behaviours. My paper has two aims: firstly, to offer some speculations about the effect of Buckwalter and Stich’s hypothesis and to focus on whether “intuition” is a gendered notion; secondly, to argue (...) that Buckwalter and Stich’s approach is inadequate, by showing that the data in the studies they report are insufficient to support their conclusion and that their thesis does not comply with the view that gender differs from one society to another. (shrink)

In introducing the present issue, I clarify in which sense knowledge and philosophy can discriminate and marginalize some individuals. In the first part, I focus on the traditional exclusion of women from philosophy and explore some feminist projects of re-reading the philosophical canon. In my analysis, I pay particular attention to the gender gap in philosophy and the so-called “demographic problem” in academia. In the second part, I examine the best practices for remedying these forms of injustice and promoting diversity (...) in philosophy. (shrink)

Climate change is considered one of the most pressing problems for life on Earth. Climate engineering technologies, it is believed, can offer a potential response to climate change and effective solutions to deal with its effects. However, these technologies may also pose risks. This chapter explores the ethical issues raised by climate engineering. It is divided into two parts. The first part asks what the ethical constraints of the technology might be and how moral responsibility in climate engineering technologies might (...) be articulated. The second part explores the role that artificial intelligence (AI) in information and communication technologies (ICTs) could play in relation to climate change and mitigation and adaptation measures. (shrink)

Despite numerous publications on the philosophy of technology, little attention has been paid to the relationship between being and value in technology, two aspects which are usually treated separately. This volume addresses this issue by drawing connections between the ontology of technology on the one hand and technology's ethical and aesthetic significance on the other. The book first considers what technology is and what kind of entities it produces. Then it examines the moral implications of technology. Finally, it explores the (...) connections between technology and the arts. Enrico Terrone is Associate Professor at the University of Genoa, Italy. He works on philosophical issues concerning aesthetics, ontology and technology. His main area of research is philosophy of film. His most recent previous book (co-authored with Luca Bandirali) is Concept TV: An Aesthetics of Television Series (2021). Vera Tripodi is Assistant Professor at the University of Milan, Italy. She specializes in feminist philosophy and ethics, bioethics, ethics of technology, and social ontology. She is a Founding Member and Vice President of the SWIP ITALIA (The Society for Women in Philosophy - Italy). (shrink)

In Filosofia per dame, Maurizio Ferraris afferma che una donna non può vivere alla Sex and the City senza essere giudicata male. Questo breve saggio propone (con ironia e senza pretese) un vademecum per schivare questo rischio, vale a dire un prontuario per vivere come una delle protagoniste della celebre serie televisiva americana e non essere giudicate troppo male per la propria condotta sessuale.

Non è detto che ogni essere femminile sia una donna. Donna non si nasce, lo si diventa.Simone de Beauvoir, Il Secondo Sesso 1. Introduzione L’incredibile storia di Thomas Beatie, transessuale uomo ma con un sistema riproduttivo femminile, sembra mettere fortemente in discussione uno dei modi in cui convenzionalmente distinguiamo donne e uomini. Nato femmina, Thomas decide in età adulta di cambiare sesso e di sottoporsi a un intervento per la rimozione del seno e a una terapia ormonale. Volend...

The present article examines a recent proposal defended by Elizabeth Brake of a new and innovative form of marriage, that she labels «minimal marriage». According to Brake, the current marital laws are discriminatory as they are grounded on «heteronormativity», namely the idea that the dyadic heterosexual marriages are the family norm and the only model that is worth of social recognition, and «amatonormativity», the idea that the only dyadic intimate relationships involving romantic love are the nucleus of the family. In (...) the first part of the article, I show that dyadic monogamous relationships are essentially a form of adult caring relationship. In the second part, I analyse how the reform of the marriage laws allow other forms of caring relationship to receive social and institutional recognition. (shrink)