Many people suspect it is morally wrong to watch the graphically violent horror films colloquially known as gorefests. A prominent argument vindicating this suspicion is the Argument from Reactive Attitudes (ARA). The ARA holds that we have a duty to maintain a well-functioning moral psychology, and watching gorefests violates that duty by threatening damage to our appropriate reactive attitudes. But I argue that the ARA is probably unsound. Depictions of suffering and death in other genres typically do no damage to (...) our appropriate reactive attitudes, and until we locate a relevant difference between these depictions in gorefests and in other genres, we should assume that the depictions in gorefests do no damage. I consider and reject three candidate differences: in artistic merit, meaningfulness, and audience orientation. Until genre skeptics identify a relevant difference, we should accept the taste for gory fictions as we would any other morally innocuous variation in taste. (shrink)

Luck permeates our lives, and this raises a number of pressing questions: What is luck? When we attribute luck to people, circumstances, or events, what are we attributing? Do we have any obligations to mitigate the harms done to people who are less fortunate? And to what extent is deserving praise or blame a ected by good or bad luck? Although acquiring a true belief by an uneducated guess involves a kind of luck that precludes knowledge, does all luck undermine (...) knowledge? And how accurate are our luck attributions anyway? The academic literature has seen growing, interdisciplinary interest in luck, and this volume brings together and explains the most important areas of this research. It consists of 39 newly commissioned chapters, written by an internationally acclaimed team of philosophers and psychologists, for a readership of students and researchers. Its coverage is divided into six sections: (i) The History of Luck, (ii) The Nature of Luck, (iii) Moral Luck, (iv) Epistemic Luck, (v) The Psychology of Luck, and (vi) Future Research. The chapters in these sections cover a wide range of topics, from the problem of moral luck, to anti-luck epistemology, to the relationship between luck attributions and cognitive biases, to meta-questions regarding the nature of luck itself, to a range of other theoretical and empirical questions currently being investigated by ethicists, epistemologists, and psychologists. By bringing this research together, the Handbook serves as both a touchstone for understanding the relevant issues and a first port of call for future philosophical and psychological research on luck. (shrink)

Two intellectual vices seem to always tempt us: arrogance and diffidence. Regarding the former, the world is permeated by dogmatism and table-thumping close-mindedness. From politics, to religion, to simple matters of taste, zealots and ideologues all too often define our disagreements, often making debate and dialogue completely intractable. But to the other extreme, given a world with so much pluralism and heated disagreement, intellectual apathy and a prevailing agnosticism can be simply all too alluring. So the need for intellectual humility, (...) open-mindedness, and a careful, humble commitment to the truth are apparent. In this book, Dr Church and Dr Samuelson explicate a robust and vibrant account of the philosophy and science of this most valuable virtue, and they highlight how it can be best applied and personally developed. (shrink)

A survey of Euclid's Elements, this text provides an understanding of the classical Greek conception of mathematics and its similarities to modern views as well as its differences. It focuses on philosophical, foundational, and logical questions — rather than strictly historical and mathematical issues — and features several helpful appendixes.

We critique two popular philosophical definitions of intellectual humility: the “low concern for status” and the “limitations-owning.” accounts. Based upon our analysis, we offer an alternative working definition of intellectual humility: the virtue of accurately tracking what one could non-culpably take to be the positive epistemic status of one’s own beliefs. We regard this view of intellectual humility both as a virtuous mean between intellectual arrogance and diffidence and as having advantages over other recent conceptions of intellectual humility. After defending (...) this view, we sketch remaining questions and issues that may bear upon the psychological treatment of intellectual humility such as whether evidence will help determine how this construct relates to general social humility on the one hand, and intellectual traits such as open-mindedness, curiosity, and honesty on the other. (shrink)

Philosophers have long struggled to understand our perceptual experience of temporal properties such as succession, persistence and change. Indeed, strikingly, a number have felt compelled to deny that we enjoy such experience. Philosophical puzzlement arises as a consequence of assuming that, if one experiences succession or temporal structure at all, then one experiences it at a moment. The two leading types of theory of temporal awareness—specious present theories and memory theories—are best understood as attempts to explain how temporal awareness is (...) possible within the constraints of this principle. I argue that the principle is false. Neither theory of temporal awareness can be made workable unless it is rejected. Our experience of temporal phenomena cannot be understood if we attempt to break experience down into instantaneous slices. In order to understand the perception of temporal properties we must look beyond the instant. (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to highlight, at least in short, how the resources of experimental philosophy could be fruitfully applied to the evidential problem of evil. To do this, we will consider two of the most influential and archetypal formulations of the problem: William L. Rowe’s article, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” (1979). and Paul Draper’s article, “Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists” (1989). We will consider the relevance of experimental philosophy (...) to Rowe’s 1979 argument in §1 and to Draper’s 1989 argument in §2. But in addition to exploring how the resources of experimental philosophy might apply to the problem of evil, it is also worth exploring what broader empirical factors might contribute to people having the intuitions that have—from someone’s affective state to someone’s need for closure. In §3, we want to very briefly elucidate a few areas where the psychology of philosophy might be productively explored in future empirical research. (shrink)

In an original and provocative study of suicide, Ian Marsh examines the historical and cultural forces that have influenced contemporary thought, practices and policy in relation to this serious public health problem. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, the book tells the story of how suicide has come to be seen as first and foremost a matter of psychiatric concern. Marsh sets out to challenge the assumptions and certainties embedded in our beliefs, attitudes and practices concerning suicide (...) and the suicidal, and the resulting account unsettles and informs in equal measure. The book will be of particular interest to researchers, professionals and students in psychology, history, sociology and the health sciences. (shrink)

Many philosophers and cognitive scientists claim that our everyday or "folk" understanding of mental states constitutes a theory of mind. That theory is widely called "folk psychology" (sometimes "commonsense" psychology). The terms in which folk psychology is couched are the familiar ones of "belief" and "desire", "hunger", "pain" and so forth. According to many theorists, folk psychology plays a central role in our capacity to predict and explain the behavior of ourselves and others. However, the nature and status of folk (...) psychology remains controversial. (shrink)

Food Sovereignty is a vibrant discourse in academic and activist circles, yet despite the many shared characteristics between issues surrounding food and public health, the two are often analysed in separate frameworks and the insights from Food Sovereignty are not sufficiently brought to bear on the problems in the public health discourse. In this paper, I will introduce the concept of 'self-organised community viability' as a way to link food and health, and to argue that what I call the 'Health (...) Security' paradigm requires a 'Health Sovereignty' response modelled on Food Sovereignty. (shrink)

One serious harm facing communities in the Anthropocene is epistemic loss. This is increasingly recognized as a harm in international policy discourses around adaptation to climate change. Epistemic loss is typically conceived of as the loss of a corpus of knowledge, or less commonly, as the further loss of epistemic methodologies. In what follows, I argue that epistemic loss also can involve the loss of epistemic self-determination, and that this framework can help to usefully examine adaptation policies.

While experimental philosophy has fruitfully applied the tools and resources of psychology and cognitive science to debates within epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, relatively little work has been done within philosophy of religion. And this isn’t due to a lack of need! Philosophers of religion frequently rely on empirical claims that can be either verified or disproven, but without exploring whether they are. And philosophers of religion frequently appeal to intuitions which may vary wildly according to education level, theological background, etc., (...) without concern for whether or not the psychological mechanisms that underwrite those intuitions are broadly shared or reliable. In this chapter, I explore some of the fruit and possibilities for the emerging field of experimental philosophy of religion. First, in Section 1, I will elucidate some of the historical grounding for experimental philosophy of religion. Then in Section 2, I briefly consider how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be fruitfully applied to a seminal topic within philosophy of religion, namely, the problem of evil. In Section 3, we’ll sketch some broader applications of experimental philosophy of religion. (shrink)

In this chapter, we will explore the luck at issue in Gettier-styled counterexamples and the subsequent problem it poses to any viable reductive analysis of knowledge. In the 1st section, we will consider the specific species of luck that is at issue in Gettier counterexamples, then, in the next section, I will briefly sketch a diagnosis of the Gettier Problem and try to explain why the relevant species of luck has proven to be extremely difficult to avoid. And finally, I (...) will consider a prominent objection to the proposed diagnosis of the Problem. (shrink)

Despite US policy documents which recommend that in areas of environmental risk, interaction between scientific experts and the public move beyond the so-called “Decide, Announce, and Defend model,” many current public involvement policies still do not guarantee meaningful public participation. In response to this problem, various attempts have been made to define what counts as sufficient or meaningful participation and free informed consent from those affected. Though defining “meaningfulness” is a complex task, this paper explores one under-examined dimension that concerns (...) the relationship between consent and the idea that citizens should be sufficiently informed: epistemic capacity. This paper will look at some of the work on meaningful participation and consent, give a definition of epistemic capacity, and argue that only a community with sufficient epistemic capacity can have the understanding and competence to give informed enough consent and thus participate meaningfully. (shrink)

Sidney Morgenbesser brought to attention cases of the following form: (MC1) Chump tosses an indeterministic coin and, whilst it is in mid-air, calls heads. The coin lands tails, and Chump loses. His betting was causally independent of the coin’s fall. Chump seems right to say: ‘If I had bet tails, I would have won.’1 (MC2).

We study a canonical modal logic introduced by Lemmon, and axiomatised by an infinite sequence of axioms generalising McKinsey’s formula. We prove that the class of all frames for this logic is not closed under elementary equivalence, and so is non-elementary. We also show that any axiomatisation of the logic involves infinitely many non-canonical formulas.

The task that Hume explicitly sets himself in 3.2 of the Treatise is to identify the motive that renders just actions virtuous and constitutes justice as a virtue. But surprisingly, he never provides a clear account of what this motive is. This is the problem of the missing motive. The goal of this paper is to explain this problem and offer a novel solution. To set up my solution, I analyze a recent proposal from Geoffrey Sayre-McCord and illustrate what it (...) gets right and what it gets wrong. I develop a solution that retains the benefits of his proposal while addressing its defects. The result is a significant advancement in our understanding of Hume’s theory of justice. (shrink)

This paper concerns the attempt to formulate an empirical version of the problem of evil, and the attempt to counter this version by what is known as ‘sceptical theism’. My concern is to assess what is actually achieved in these attempts. To this end I consider the debate between them against the backdrop of William Rowe's distinction between expanded standard theism and restricted standard theism (which I label E and R respectively). My claim is that the empirical version significantly fails (...) to challenge E in the way that a workable logical version would; and that sceptical theism significantly fails to defend R in the way that a workable theodicy would. My conclusion is that sceptical theism and the empirical argument play a significantly more limited role in the debate over evil than the arguments they are supposed to replace. (Published Online August 11 2004). (shrink)

The paper addresses itself to the "Homeric struggle" in the theory of meaning between those (e.g., Grice) who try to analyze declarative meaning in terms of an intention to induce a belief and those (e.g., Davidson) for who declarative meaning consists in truth conditions. (The point of departure is Strawson's celebrated discussion of this issue, in his Inaugural Lecture.) I argue that neither style of analysis is satisfactory, and develop a "hybrid" that may be-although what I take from the Gricean (...) side in the struggle is not the notion of an intention, but that of somebody's reason for speaking as he does. The paper applies the hybrid analysis to resolve certain problems connected with the rationale for compositional, truth-theoretic semantics. (shrink)

Science is often thought of as a methodical but dull activity. But the finest science, the breakthroughs most admired and respected by scientists themselves, is characterized by elegance." "What does elegance mean in the context of science? Economy is a considerable part of it; creativity too. Sometimes, a suggested solution is so simple and neat that it elicits an exclamation of wonder from the observer. The greatest science, whether primarily theoretical or experimental, reflects a creative imagination." "In this book, the (...) distinguished physiologist and writer Ian Glynn explores some of the finest examples of elegance in science: the delightful simplicity of the laws discovered by Kepler and Newton in the motion of the planets; Galileo's experiments with an inclined plane; the remarkable work of Thomas Young on light; dazzling insights into the counterintuitive workings of our perception demonstrated by Richard Gregory and Vilayanur Ramachandran; and the several breakthroughs that led to Crick and Watson's unravelling of the structure and function of DNA. The result is a fascinating tour through some of the most important episodes in the history of science."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

This article stages a critical-philosophical encounter between Derridean deconstruction and Peircean biosemiotic theory focussing on the role and status of metaphor within each. It argues that the biosemiotic understanding of metaphor as a structuring principle informing the sign-activity of living organisms and processes offers an alternative understanding of a generalised metaphoricity of life as such and an account of what might be called biological text, textuality or even, biosemiotic intertextuality. The article argues that biological textuality obeys a logic of semiotic (...) immanence that is distinct from the logic of différance and of the quasi-transcendental as thought by Derrida. On this basis it elaborates the way in which metaphor in biosemiotic theory, and also the generalised biological metaphoricity informing the text of life, function as radically non-representational, inferential, and hermeneutic operators which model the semiotic processes of life and thereby enable an epistemologically weak or, in a certain sense, non-philosophical realism. (shrink)

b>—Several paradigms (e.g. change blindness, inattentional blindness, transsaccadic integra- tion) indicate that observers are often very poor at reporting changes to their visual environment. Such evidence has been used to suggest that the spatio-temporal coherence needed to represent change can only occur in the presence of focused attention. However, those studies almost always rely on explicit reports. It remains a possibility that the visual system can implicitly detect change, but that in the absence of focused attention, the change does not (...) reach awareness and consequently is not reported. To test this possibility, we used a simple change detection paradigm coupled with a speeded orien- tation discrimination task. Even when observers reported being unaware of a change in an item’s orientation, its nal orientation effectively biased their response in the orientation discrimination task. Both in aware and unaware trials, errors were most frequent when the changed item and the probe had incongruent orientations. These results demonstrate that the _nature _of the change can be represented in the absence of awareness. (shrink)

Sustainability is commonly recognized as an important goal, but there is little agreement on what sustainability is, or what it requires. This paper looks at some common approaches to sustainability, and while acknowledging the ways in which they are useful, points out an important lacuna: that for something to be sustainable, people must be willing to work to sustain it. The paper presents a framework for thinking about and assessing sustainability which highlights people working to sustain. It also briefly discusses (...) Integrated Water Resource Management and the example of the California Water Plan to explore what such a perspective brings that is overlooked in other approaches, and how this approach might be pursued. Ultimately, this framework argues that a system can only be described as sustainable if people’s work to sustain the system is biophysically possible, socially possible, and if people would freely choose to do the sustaining work. -/- Read More: http://ascelibrary.org.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/doi/abs/10.1061/%28ASCE%29WR.1943-5452.0000526. (shrink)

This article explores the concept of corporate identity from a moral perspective. In it we argue that the reification and personification involved in attributing an identity to an organization has moral repercussions. Through a discussion of 'intentionality' we suggest that it is philosophically problematic to treat an abstraction of the corporation as possessing identity or acting as a conscious moral agent. The article moves to consider practical and ethical issues in the areas of organizational commitment, of health and safety, and (...) corporate social responsibility, and finds that the notion of identity can be abused, although it will no doubt continue to be used as it does have some practical utility. In conclusion, we argue that despite being meaningless from a philosophical stance, the concept of corporate identity need not be discarded, however, it is far from benign and intense moral scrutiny is necessary wherever it is applied. (shrink)

In this paper, we show how the problem of accounting for the semanticsof temporal preposition phrases (tPPs) leads us to some surprisinginsights into the semantics of temporal expressions ingeneral. Specifically, we argue that a systematic treatment of EnglishtPPs is greatly facilitated if we endow our meaning assignments with context variables, a device which allows a tPP to restrict domainsof quantification arising elsewhere in a sentence. We observe that theuse of context variables implies that tPPs can modify expressions intwo ways, and (...) we use this observation to predict the behaviour of tPPswhose complements are themselves modified by other tPPs. (shrink)

The aim of Dimitris Vardoulakis’s paper, ‘Toward a Critique of the Ineffectual: Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle and the Construction of an Action without Ends’, is to provide the foundation for a critique of aimless action by tracing its genesis to Heidegger’s putative misinterpretation of Aristotelian phronēsis (practical wisdom) in the 1920s. Inasmuch as ‘the ineffectual’—the name Vardoulakis gives to action devoid of ends—plays a crucial role in post-Heideggerian continental philosophy, he thereby seeks to diagnose and to provide an aetiology of (...) an illness afflicting contemporary thought. In my response, I will first argue that, while Vardoulakis is right to identify an emphasis on the ineffectual in Heidegger, he is mistaken about its origin. Heidegger does not strip phronēsis of instrumentality, nor does he mistranslate Nichomachean Ethics 1139a31–32. Second, I trace an alternative source for the ineffectual, which is not simply a negative alternative to technological machination but stems from a positive experience of what Meister Eckhart, and Heidegger in his wake, called life without why. Finally, I look at a couple of texts, including one discussed by Vardoulakis, in which even the later Heidegger is not entirely dismissive of calculative instrumentality but instead assigns the latter to a secondary, restricted site of competence. (shrink)

This paper presents a calculus for mereotopological reasoning in which two-dimensional spatial regions are treated as primitive entities. A first order predicate language ℒ with a distinguished unary predicate c(x), function-symbols +, · and - and constants 0 and 1 is defined. An interpretation ℜ for ℒ is provided in which polygonal open subsets of the real plane serve as elements of the domain. Under this interpretation the predicate c(x) is read as 'region x is connected' and the function-symbols and (...) constants are given their meaning in terms of a Boolean algebra of polygons. We give an alternative interpretation ������ base on the real closed plane which turns out to be isomorphic to ℜ. A set of axioms and a rule of inference are introduced. We prove the soundness and completeness of the calculus with respect to the given interpretation. (shrink)

During this article, I look at three images of thought which feature in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and consider their relevance to contemporary pedagogy. Deleuze and Guattari begin by discussing tree-like thought, which involves an insular depiction of the world. I suggest that the performative apparatus, which structures contemporary pedagogy in the comprehensive school, is also tree-like. Deleuze and Guattari’s second image of thought is the fascicular root. Here the principle root is aborted leading to a multiplicity, which (...) flows from it. With fascicular thought, the unity, which is aborted in the object, is returned to in the subject who gains control of multiplicities. In this section I provide a reading of a Classics lesson portrayed in The Secret History by Donna Tartt and go on to focus on Ronald Barnett’s contribution to a debate with Paul Standish, which features in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education. In the third section of the article, I consider Deleuze and Guattari’s third image of thought—the rhizome. Rhizomes grow by a process of cloning or lateral spreading; they do not have the central trunk of the tree, with roots and branches extending outwards from this. At the end of this section, I look at two Classics lessons that represent tree-like and rhizomatic pedagogies in turn. I attempt to enrich this discussion by providing a reading of a scene from The History Boys. (shrink)

In this exploratory paper, I consider how intellectual humility and epistemic injustice might contribute to the failure of testimonial exchanges. In §1, I will briefly highlight four broad ways a testimonial exchange might fail. In §2, I will very briefly review the nature of epistemic injustice. In §3, I will explore how both epistemic injustice and intellectual humility can lead to failures in testimonial exchange, and I’ll conclude by suggesting how intellectual humility and epistemic injustice might be related.

In this commentary on “Memory and Common Ground Processes in Language Use,” I draw attention to relevant work on mindreading. The concerns of research on common ground and mindreading have significant overlap, but these literatures have worked in relative isolation of each other. I attempt an assimilation, pointing out shared and distinctive concerns and mutually informative results.

This paper seeks to understand the treatment effect of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs on opioid prescription rates. Using county-level panel data on all opioid prescriptions in the U.S. between 2006 and 2015, we investigate whether state interventions like PDMPs have heterogeneous treatment effects at the sub-state level, based on regional and temporal variations in policy design, extent of urbanization, race, and income. Our models comprehensively control for a set of county and time fixed effects, countyspecific and time-varying demographic controls, potentially (...) endogenous time-series trends in prescription rates, and other state-level opioid interventions such as Naloxone Access and Good Samaritan laws, Medicaid expansion, and the provision of Methadone Assistance Treatment. We find that PDMPs are only effective in reducing prescription rates if they obligate doctors to check for patients' history prior to filling out a prescription, but the frequency at which a state requires its PDMP to be updated is irrelevant to its effectiveness. Moreover, the significant treatment effects of PDMPs are almost exclusively driven by urban and predominantly white counties, with the relatively more affluent regions showing greater responsiveness than their less affluent counterparts. (shrink)

In this short paper, I highlight two potential hurdles for teams of researchers conducting interdisciplinary research: “the translation problem” and the “academic isolation” problem. Along the way, I’ll note some ways those hurdles were overcome within the context of the “Science of Intellectual Humility” project.