Derk Pereboom disagrees with P.F. Strawson that abandoning the reactive attitudes associated with praise and blame would come at the price of exiting our personal relationships. According to Pereboom, we can contain or modify our attitudes in ways that preserve, and perhaps even enrich interpersonal relationships. In a recent article, Seth Shabo defends “the inseparability thesis” in order to undermine Pereboom’s containment policy. Drawing on David Goldman’s work on non-antagonistic responses to wrongdoing, we defend Pereboom from Shabo’s critique.

I present and defend a unified, non-reductive analysis of the a priori and a posteriori. It is a mistake to remove all epistemic conditions from the analysis of the a priori (as, for example, Alvin Goldman has recently suggested doing). We can keep epistemic conditions (like unrevisability) in the analysis as long as we insist that a priori and a posteriori justification admit of degrees. I recommend making the degree to which a belief’s justification is a priori or a (...) posteriori solely dependent on the revisability relations that obtain among the faculties that deliver the belief and all other faculties. (shrink)

When should you engage with difficult arguments against your cherished controversial beliefs? The primary conclusion of this book is that your obligations to engage with counterarguments are more limited than is often thought. In some standard situations, you shouldn't engage with difficult counterarguments and, if you do, you shouldn't engage with them open-mindedly. This conclusion runs counter to aspects of the Millian political tradition and political liberalism, as well as what people working in informal logic tend to say about argumentation. (...) -/- Not all misleading arguments wear their flaws on their sleeve. Each step of a misleading argument might seem compelling and you might not be able to figure out what's wrong with it. Still, even if you can't figure out what's wrong with an argument, you can know that it's misleading. One way to know that an argument is misleading is, counterintuitively, to lack expertise in the methods and evidence-types employed by the argument. When you know that a counterargument is misleading, you shouldn't engage with it open-mindedly and sometimes shouldn't engage with it at all. You shouldn't engage open-mindedly because you shouldn't be willing to reduce your confidence in response to arguments you know are misleading. And you sometimes shouldn't engage closed-mindedly, because to do so can be manipulative or ineffective. -/- In making this case, Jeremy Fantl discusses echo chambers and group polarization, the importance in academic writing of a sympathetic case for the opposition, the epistemology of disagreement, the account of open-mindedness, and invitations to problematic academic speakers. (shrink)

Jeremy Waldron is one of the world's leading legal and political philosophers. This collection brings together thirteen of his most recent essays which, in the course of working the book up for publication, the author has revisited and thoroughly revised. He addresses central issues within the liberal tradition, focusing on the law and its role in a pluralistic state which experiences deep disagreements about values and rights, and about the role of the state itself.

At some point in the future – perhaps within the next few decades – it will be possible for foetuses to develop completely outside the womb. Ectogenesis, as this technology is called, raises substantial issues for the abortion debate. One such issue is that it will become possible for a woman to have an abortion, in the sense of having the foetus removed from her body, but for the foetus to be kept alive. We argue that while there is a (...) right to an abortion, there are reasons to doubt that there is a right to the death of the foetus. Our strategy in this essay is to consider and reject three arguments in favour of this latter right. The first claims that women have a right not to be biological mothers, the second that women have a right to genetic privacy, and the third that a foetus is one's property. Furthermore, we argue that it follows from rejecting the third claim that genetic parents also lack a right to the destruction of cryopreserved embryos used for in vitro fertilization. The conclusion that a woman possesses no right to the death of the foetus builds upon the claims that other pro-choice advocates, such as Judith Jarvis Thomson, have made. (shrink)

The epsilon calculus is a logical formalism developed by David Hilbert in the service of his program in the foundations of mathematics. The epsilon operator is a term-forming operator which replaces quantifiers in ordinary predicate logic. Specifically, in the calculus, a term εx A denotes some x satisfying A(x), if there is one. In Hilbert's Program, the epsilon terms play the role of ideal elements; the aim of Hilbert's finitistic consistency proofs is to give a procedure which removes such terms (...) from a formal proof. The procedures by which this is to be carried out are based on Hilbert's epsilon substitution method. The epsilon calculus, however, has applications in other contexts as well. The first general application of the epsilon calculus was in Hilbert's epsilon theorems, which in turn provide the basis for the first correct proof of Herbrand's theorem. More recently, variants of the epsilon operator have been applied in linguistics and linguistic philosophy to deal with anaphoric pronouns. (shrink)

This volume collects Jeremy Waldron's challenging and influential work on the moral, political and legal issues surrounding the response to terrorism since 9/11. The volume will be essential reading for all those engaged with contemporary politics and security law, and the continuing struggle for an ethical response to terrorism.

Deterministic physical theories are not beyond the reach of scientific discovery. From this fact I show that David Lewis was mistaken to think that small counterfactual perturbations from deterministic worlds involve violations of those world’s laws.

Pierre Jacob (2008) raises several problems for the alleged link between mirroring and mindreading. This response argues that the best mirroring-mindreading thesis would claim that mirror processes cause, rather than constitute, selected acts of mindreading. Second, the best current evidence for mirror-based mindreading is not found in the motoric domain but in the domains of emotion and sensation, where the evidence (ignored by Jacob) is substantial. Finally, simulation theory should distinguish low-level simulation (mirroring) and high-level simulation (involving pretense or imagination). (...) Jacob implies that bi-level simulationism creates an unbridgeable 'gap' in intention reading, but this is not a compelling challenge. (shrink)

Foucault and Religion seeks to unearth a new dimension of Foucault scholarship. Renowned Foucault scholar Jeremy Carrette reveals not simply how Foucault's work can be applied to religion but how a religious question at the heart of Foucault's own work offers a radical challenge to religious ideas. Carrette argues that Foucault offers a twofold critique of Christianity by bringing the body and sexuality into religious practice and exploring a political spirituality of the self. This first major commentary on Foucault (...) and religion opens up the diverse religious questions the philosopher raises in his work, and sheds new light on how Foucault challenges religious thinking and transforms religious understanding. (shrink)

We show that certain model-theoretic forcing arguments involving subsystems of second-order arithmetic can be formalized in the base theory, thereby converting them to effective proof-theoretic arguments. We use this method to sharpen the conservation theorems of Harrington and Brown-Simpson, giving an effective proof that WKL+0 is conservative over RCA0 with no significant increase in the lengths of proofs.

ArgumentThis paper examines the field network – linking together lay observers in geographically distributed locations with a central figure who aggregated their locally produced observations into more general, regional knowledge – as a historically emergent mode of knowledge production. After discussing the significance of weather knowledge as a vital domain in which field networks have operated, it describes and analyzes how a more robust and systematized weather observing field network became established and maintained on the ground in the early twentieth (...) century. This case study, which examines two Kansas City-based local observer networks supervised by the same U.S. Weather Bureau office, demonstrates some of the key issues involved in maintaining field networks, such as the role of communications infrastructure, especially the telegraph, the procedures designed to make local observation more systematic and uniform, and the centralized, hierarchical power relations that underpinned even a low-status example of knowledge production on the periphery. (shrink)

In 1837, Dirichlet proved that there are infinitely many primes in any arithmetic progression in which the terms do not all share a common factor. We survey implicit and explicit uses ofDirichlet characters in presentations of Dirichlet’s proof in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an eye toward understanding some of the pragmatic pressures that shaped the evolution of modern mathematical method.

Sometimes Always True aims to resolve, through a re-understanding of the nature of sense, three connected problems central to philosophical thought: that genuine pluralism must make room for outlooks that exclude pluralism, that philosophy ultimately explores sense as a whole and so must in some way step outside of sense, and that our experience of the deep questions of life therefore similarly involves suspensions of sense itself.

In Section 2, I survey some of the ways that computers are used in mathematics. These raise questions that seem to have a generally epistemological character, although they do not fall squarely under a traditional philosophical purview. The goal of this article is to try to articulate some of these questions more clearly, and assess the philosophical methods that may be brought to bear. In Section 3, I note that most of the issues can be classified under two headings: some (...) deal with the ability of computers to deliver appropriate “evidence” for mathematical assertions, a notion that is explored in Section 4, while others deal with the ability of computers to deliver appropriate mathematical “understanding,” a notion that is considered in Section 5. Final thoughts are provided in Section 6. (shrink)

Excerpt from Traites de Legislation Civile Et PenaleMais ce n'est pas un panegyrique que je fais. Il faut bien avouer que le soin d'arranger et de polir a peu d' attraits pour le genie de l'auteur. Tant qu'il est pousse par une force creatrice, il ne sent que le plaisir de la composition. S'agit-il de donner des formes, de rediger, de finir, il n'en sent plus que la fatigue. Que l'ouvrage soit interrompu, le mal est irreparable: le charme disparait, le (...) degout succede, et la passion eteinte ne se rallume que pour un objet nouveau.La meme disposition l'a eloigne de contribuer a la redaction que je donne au public; je n'ai pu Obtenir que rarement les eclaircissements et les secours dont j'avais besoin il lui en coutait tr0p de suspendre le cours actuel de ses idees pour revenir sur d'anciennes traces.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

A number of classical theories are interpreted in analogous theories that are based on intuitionistic logic. The classical theories considered include subsystems of first- and second-order arithmetic, bounded arithmetic, and admissible set theory.

Critical notice of Paul Faulkner, "Knowledge on Trust" (OUP 2011) and Benjamin McMyler, "Testimony, Trust, and Authority" (OUP 2011).

I wish to advance a certain program for doing metaphysics, a program in which cognitive science would play an important role.1 This proposed ingredient is absent from most contemporary metaphysics. There are one or two local parts of metaphysics where a role for cognitive science is commonly accepted, but I advocate a wider range of application. I begin by laying out the general program and its rationale, with selected illustrations. Then I explore in some detail a single application: the ontology (...) of events. I do not push hard for any particular ontological conclusion, about either events or any other topic. The focus is methodology, not a particular output of the methodology. Here is a recently published characterization of the metaphysical enterprise, one that probably captures orthodox practice pretty well and to which I take no exception. (shrink)

In standard models of decision making, participation in violent political action is understood as the product of instrumentally rational reasoning. According to this line of thinking, instrumentally rational individuals will participate in violent political action only if there are selective incentives that are limited to participants. We argue in favor of an alternate model of political violence where participants are motivated by moral commitments to collective sacred values. Correlative and experimental empirical evidence in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict strongly (...) supports this alternate view. (shrink)

This article is an investigation into G. E. M. Anscombe's suggestion that there can be cases where belief takes a personal object, through an examination of the role that the activity of teaching plays in Anscombe's discussion. By contrasting various kinds of ‘teachers’ that feature in her discussion, it is argued that the best way of understanding the idea of believing someone personally is to situate the relevant encounter within the social, conversational framework of ‘engaged reasoning’. Key features of this (...) framework are highlighted, and are used to characterise the distinctive kind of teaching and learning germane to Anscombe's suggestion. (shrink)

We develop fundamental aspects of the theory of metric, Hilbert, and Banach spaces in the context of subsystems of second-order arithmetic. In particular, we explore issues having to do with distances, closed subsets and subspaces, closures, bases, norms, and projections. We pay close attention to variations that arise when formalizing definitions and theorems, and study the relationships between them.

Belief is typically understood to be the success‐neutral counterpart of knowledge. But there is no success‐neutral counterpart of knowledge.

In May 1973 a new collaboration between NASA, the Indian Health Service, and the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company promised to transform the way members of the Papago (now Tohono O’odham) Tribe of southern Arizona accessed modern medicine. Through a system of state-of-the-art microwave relays, slow-scan television links, and Mobile Health Units, the residents of the third-largest American Indian reservation began to access physicians remotely via telemedical encounters instead of traveling to distant hospitals. Examining the history of the STARPAHC (Space (...) Technology Applied to Rural Papago Advanced Health Care) project from the perspective of NASA and its contractors, from the perspective of the Indian Health Service, and from the perspective of O’odham engineers and health professionals offers a new focus, emphasizing the American Indian reservation as a site of medical research and technological development in the late twentieth century, with specific attention to the promise of information technology to address health disparities and the role of American Indians as actors in the late twentieth-century history of science, technology, and medicine. (shrink)

Solovay has shown that if $\cal{O}$ is an open subset of $P(\omega)$ with code $S$ and no infinite set avoids $\cal{O}$ , then there is an infinite set hyperarithmetic in $S$ that lands in $\cal{O}$ . We provide a direct proof of this theorem that is easily formalizable in $ATR_0$.

Using a slight generalization, due to Palmgren, of sheaf semantics, we present a term-model construction that assigns a model to any first-order intuitionistic theory. A modification of this construction then assigns a nonstandard model to any theory of arithmetic, enabling us to reproduce conservation results of Moerdijk and Palmgren for nonstandard Heyting arithmetic. Internalizing the construction allows us to strengthen these results with additional transfer rules; we then show that even trivial transfer axioms or minor strengthenings of these rules destroy (...) conservativity over HA. The analysis also shows that nonstandard HA has neither the disjunction property nor the explicit definability property. Finally, careful attention to the complexity of our definitions allows us to show that a certain weak fragment of intuitionistic nonstandard arithmetic is conservative over primitive recursive arithmetic. (shrink)

Philosophical concerns rarely force their way into the average mathematician’s workday. But, in extreme circumstances, fundamental questions can arise as to the legitimacy of a certain manner of proceeding, say, as to whether a particular object should be granted ontological status, or whether a certain conclusion is epistemologically warranted. There are then two distinct views as to the role that philosophy should play in such a situation. On the first view, the mathematician is called upon to turn to the counsel (...) of philosophers, in much the same way as a nation considering an action of dubious international legality is called upon to turn to the United Nations for guidance. After due consideration of appropriate regulations and guidelines (and, possibly, debate between representatives of different philosophical factions), the philosophers render a decision, by which the dutiful mathematician abides. Quine was famously critical of such dreams of a ‘first philosophy.’ At the opposite extreme, our hypothetical mathematician answers only to the subject’s internal concerns, blithely or brashly indifferent to philosophical approval. What is at stake to our mathematician friend is whether the questionable practice provides a proper mathematical solution to the problem at hand, or an appropriate mathematical understanding; or, in pragmatic terms, whether it will make it past a journal referee. In short, mathematics is as mathematics does, and the philosopher’s task is simply to make sense of the subject as it evolves and certify practices that are already in place. In his textbook on the philosophy of mathematics (Shapiro, 2000), Stewart Shapiro characterizes this attitude as ‘philosophy last, if at all.’. (shrink)

The prime number theorem, established by Hadamard and de la Vallée Poussin independently in 1896, asserts that the density of primes in the positive integers is asymptotic to 1/ln x. Whereas their proofs made serious use of the methods of complex analysis, elementary proofs were provided by Selberg and Erdos in 1948. We describe a formally verified version of Selberg's proof, obtained using the Isabelle proof assistant.

The metamathematical tradition, tracing back to Hilbert, employs syntactic modeling to study the methods of contemporary mathematics. A central goal has been, in particular, to explore the extent to which infinitary methods can be understood in computational or otherwise explicit terms. Ergodic theory provides rich opportunities for such analysis. Although the field has its origins in seventeenth century dynamics and nineteenth century statistical mechanics, it employs infinitary, nonconstructive, and structural methods that are characteristically modern. At the same time, computational concerns (...) and recent applications to combinatorics and number theory force us to reconsider the constructive character of the theory and its methods. This paper surveys some recent contributions to the metamathematical study of ergodic theory, focusing on the mean and pointwise ergodic theorems and the Furstenberg structure theorem for measure preserving systems. In particular, I characterize the extent to which these theorems are nonconstructive, and explain how proof-theoretic methods can be used to locate their "constructive content.". (shrink)

Fogelin’s Wittgensteinian view of deep disagreement as allowing no rational resolution has been criticized from both argumentation theoretic and epistemological perspectives. These criticisms typically do not recognize how his point applies to the very argumentative resources on which they rely. Additionally, more extremely than Fogelin himself argues, the conditions of deep disagreement make each position literally unintelligible to the other, again disallowing rational resolution. In turn, however, this failure of sense is so extreme that it partly cancels its own meaning (...) as a failure of sense. Consequently, it paradoxically opens new possibilities for sense and therefore rationally unexpected resolutions. (shrink)

The paper argues that metaphysical thought, or thought in whose context our general framework of sense is under scrutiny, involves, legitimates, and requires a variety of informal analogues of the ‘true contradictions’ supported in some paraconsistent formal logics. These are what we can call informal ‘legitimate logical inadequacies’. These paradoxical logical structures also occur in deeply pluralist contexts, where more than one, conflicting general framework for sense is relevant. The paper argues further that these legitimate logical inadequacies are real or (...) inherent in sense itself rather than conventional, shows how they can feature in argumentative practice in these metaphysical and pluralist contexts, and discusses some of their implications for metaphysical truth and for philosophical inquiry and disagreement. (shrink)

This paper asks how we should regard the laws and customs of armed conflict, and specifically the rule prohibiting the targeting of civilians. What view should we take of the moral character and significance of such rules? Some philosophers have suggested that they are best regarded as useful conventions. This view is sometimes motivated by a "deep moral critique" of the rule protecting civilians: Jeff McMahan believes for example that the existing rules protect some who ought to be liable to (...) attack (on account of their having voluntarily contributed to the injustice or aggression being resisted). He thinks we would be better off with a different principle of discrimination in warfare. But McMahan acknowledges that for the time being we must stick with the rules that we have. The present paper does five things: (1) it explores and takes further some of McMahan's insights about the importance of existing positive law in this area; (2) it argues that some of the features that philosophers find problematic with the rule offering blanket protection to all civilians have to do with administrability; (3) it raises some questions about whether the rule protecting civilians can really be regarded as a convention (and it argues that certainly it cannot be regarded as a "Lewis-convention" in a strict sense); (4) to the extent that the rule can be regarded as conventional, the paper argues that it remains a deadly serious moral rule, partly because of the circumstances of death and destruction in which it operates and which it tries to ameliorate, and partly on account of its fragility. The fifth point is the most important. (5) The rule protecting civilians does not operate in circumstances in which, apart form positive law, civilians like everyone would be liable to attack. The rule operates against a moral background in which all deliberate killing is to be regarded as murder; some deliberate killings (of combatants) are privileged in warfare; but the rule about civilians reflects the fact that this is a strictly limited privilege and that those who target civilians do not get the benefit of it. Changing our view of the default position in this way enables us to better understand the distinctive work that this rule does. (shrink)

Many human rights charters contain prohibitions on inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners and detainees. Terms like “inhuman” and “degrading” are difficult to interpret, but they are certainly not meaningless. It is important to attend to attend to the meanings of the words themselves, as well as to the decisions that courts have made about particular practices. Reflection on the meanings of these highly-charged terms reveals important complexity, which we can unpack in a way that enables us to better focus (...) our debate about the proper treatment of prisoners and detainees. Focusing on the ordinary-language meaning of evaluative terms like “inhuman” and “degrading” also helps us approach the relation between rules and standards in law more thoughtfully, as we see why it is important not to let the evaluative meaning of these terms be superseded by the definitions established in the course of their application. (shrink)

From proofs in any classical first-order theory that proves the existence of at least two elements, one can eliminate definitions in polynomial time. From proofs in any classical first-order theory strong enough to code finite functions, including sequential theories, one can also eliminate Skolem functions in polynomial time.