How should we make choices where the values we subscribe to give conflicting recommendations? I will be defending a reduction of decision making under conflict to decision making under indeterminacy, in the spirit of Broome. To defend this, I set out and endorse the basic features of decision making under conflict that Ruth Chang identifies. I show that we find exactly those features in cases of decision making under indeterminacy not involving conflicting values. Further, my theory of decision making under (...) indeterminacy predicts and explains these features. Particular attention will be paid to the aspect that Chang emphasizes as the decisive problem for the Broomean reduction: the resolutional residue, or angst, that decision making under conflict evinces. (shrink)

Conc 2: Charitable reconstructions are available. Conc 3: But these lead to worrying results. (POM) Conc 4: Further weakening prevents it from playing the “survival is intrinsic” role in fission arguments.

such light matter as you fancy, or the work of light or chance persons; and Cratylus is right in thinking that things have names by nature, and that not every man is an artificer of names, but he only who looks to the name which each thing by nature.

Why care about being logical? Why criticize people for inconsistency? Must we simply take the normative significance of logic as brute, or can we explain it in terms of goals on which we have an independent grip: the merits of true (or knowledgeable) belief, for example? This paper explores Jim Joyce’s argument for probabilism in this light---arguing that it provides a plausible route for explaining the value of consistency.

 Nature: What indefiniteness is.  Logic: How to reason in the presence of indefiniteness  Mind: How indefiniteness fits into our cognitive life.

We consider a class of dynamic tournaments in which two contestants are faced with a choice between two courses of action. The first is a riskless option (“hold”) of maintaining the resources the contestant already has accumulated in her turn and ceding the initiative to her rival. The second is the bolder option (“roll”) of taking the initiative of accumulating additional resources, and thereby moving ahead of her rival, while at the same time sustaining a risk of temporary setback. We (...) study this tournament in the context of a jeopardy race game (JRG), extend the JRG to $N > 2$ contestants, and construct its equilibrium solution. Compared to the equilibrium solution, the results of three experiments reveal a dysfunctional bias in favor of the riskless option. This bias is substantially mitigated when the contestants are required to commit in advance how long to pursue the risky course of action. (shrink)

I propose a view that I call "Ersatz Metaphysical Vagueness" according to which the term "perfectly natural" can be semantically vague. As its name suggests, the view mimics traditional metaphysical vagueness without the radical metaphysical underpinnings. In particular, the ersatzer avoids a widely accepted argument schema (advanced by JRG Williams, Ted Sider, Cian Dorr, John Hawthorne and others) according to which, if there is no metaphysical vagueness, F-ness cannot be both perfectly natural and vague.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Robert R. Williams offers a bold new account of divergences and convergences in the work of Hegel and Nietzsche. He explores four themes - the philosophy of tragedy; recognition and community; critique of Kant; and the death of God - and explicates both thinkers' critiques of traditional theology and metaphysics.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This important collection of essays details some of the more significant methodological and philosophical differences that have separated the two traditions, as ...

The local opposes the global or the macro opposes the micro and vice versa, respectively. This dialectical relationship further exposes that scales are socially and politically constructed, representative of a phenomena that is relational, and is thus of important consideration in analysis beyond simple labeling. That is, scale represents more than ‘size’ and ‘complexity’, but also reveals the relational. It is the relational—the relationship between the ‘global’ and its contents or the ‘local’—which provides for or is wont for analytic complexity (...) and theorizing. (shrink)

A crucial test for the dominant Rawlsian ‘consensus’ brand of public reason is whether it is complete – sufficient in content, that is, to yield determinate answers to the political questions put before it. Yet while doubts about the incompleteness of Rawlsian public reason have been often voiced, critics have thus far carried out relatively little of the philosophical spadework needed to substantiate them. This paper contributes to remedying this omission, via a detailed analysis of the implications of Rawlsian public (...) reason for an important bioethical problem arising at the end of human life. This is the problem of how to define and diagnose the death of a person, or determine at what point the clinical and legal practices conventionally associated with death, such as the removal of vital organs, may take place. My thesis is that this is a matter on which Rawlsian public reason does indeed have a grave incompleteness problem: the model produces indeterminacy, I argue, between a broad range of legal definitions of death. I also aim to go beyond existing articulations of the incompleteness objection, moreover, by examining what Rawlsian consensus liberalism implies about how decision-makers ought to respond to indeterminacies in public reason. Insofar as the route to a reasoned choice between competing criteria of death is foreclosed, I contend, the Rawlsian view requires that selection among policy options proceed in an intolerably arbitrary fashion. The latter finding alters the cast of the familiar incompleteness objection, by closing the gap between it and what I have elsewhere called the ethical objection – the objection, that is, that public reason can in some cases generate determinate but morally unacceptable decisions. (shrink)

There are two distinct approaches to Bayesian modelling in cognitive science. Black-box approaches use Bayesian theory to model the relationship between the inputs and outputs of a cognitive system without reference to the mediating causal processes; while mechanistic approaches make claims about the neural mechanisms which generate the outputs from the inputs. This paper concerns the relationship between these two approaches. We argue that the dominant trend in the philosophical literature, which characterizes the relationship between black-box and mechanistic approaches to (...) Bayesian cognitive science in terms of the dichotomy between instrumentalism and realism, is misguided. We propose that the two distinctions are orthogonal: black-box and mechanistic approaches to Bayesian modelling can each be given either an instrumentalist or a realist interpretation. We argue that the current tendency to conflate black-box approaches with instrumentalism and mechanistic approaches with realism stems from unwarranted assumptions about the nature of scientific explanation, the ontological commitments of scientific theories, and the role of abstraction and idealization in scientific models. We challenge each of these assumptions to reframe the debates over Bayesian modelling in cognitive science. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction; 2. Peace; 3. Rule of law; 4. Human rights; 5. Democracy; 6. Liberty; 7. The institutional ethos of the EU; 8. Towards the EU as a just institution; 9. Concluding proposals.

This article presents a new approach to understanding ritual: embodied world construction. Informed by phenomenology and a philosophy of embodiment, this approach argues that rituals can (re)shape the structure of an individual's perceptual world. Ritual participation transforms how the world appears for an individual through the inculcation of new perceptual habits, enabling the perception of objects and properties which could not previously be apprehended. This theory is then applied to two case studies from an existing ethnographic study of North American (...) evangelicalism, indicating how the theory of embodied world construction can shed new light on how individuals are shaped by ritual practice. (shrink)

In Unnatural Doubts, Michael Williams constructs a masterly polemic against the very idea of epistemology, as traditionally conceived.

Neil E. Williams develops a systematic metaphysics centred on the idea of powers, as a rival to neo-Humeanism, the dominant systematic metaphysics in philosophy today. Williams takes powers to be inherently causal properties and uses them as the foundation of his explanations of causation, persistence, laws, and modality.

This paper provides a unification-based implementation of Binding Theory (BT) for the English language in the framework of feature-based lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar (LTAG). The grammar presented here does not actually coindex any noun phrases, it merely outputs a set of constraints on co- and contraindexation that may later be processed by a separate anaphora resolution module. It improves on previous work by implementing the full BT rather than just Condition A. The main technical innovation consists in allowing lists to appear (...) as values of semantic features. (shrink)

This chapter is about personhood in relation to ethics and to conciliar Christian theology, and how concepts of personhood may discriminate against profoundly cognitively disabled human beings. (By ‘conciliar Christian theology’ I mean the Christian theology that is articulated in, or endorsed by, the first seven ecumenical councils.) -/- I believe we can learn several things about personhood by looking at these two topics together. By examining ancient and medieval concepts of personhood and some modern conceptions of personhood we gain (...) a better grasp of the variety of concepts and what substantive work they were intended to do. By becoming familiar with (part of) the history of concepts of personhood we are better situated to appreciate and judge the theoretical work that these concepts were intended to do and what consequences they have in ethical and theological theorizing. -/- In the first section I tell a select history of moral philosophers theorizing about personhood and discuss these in relation to human beings with profound cognitive disability. I focus on John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Mary Anne Warren. In the “When Personhood Is Discriminatory” section I argue that concepts of personhood, especially modern concepts of personhood, are typically used in a manner that discriminates against human beings with profound cognitive disabilities. I give two arguments against discriminatory uses of personhood, the Moral Shift Argument and the Argument against Exclusive Personhood. Although the Moral Shift Argument is deductively valid, it probably has little persuasive power over those who do not share the moral belief that profoundly cognitively disabled human beings are equal members of the moral community. However, the Argument against Exclusive Personhood has more argumentative force because it denies the claims that personhood is “self-evident” and that it is “obvious” to everyone. In the following section I survey a select history of concepts of personhood in order to establish the claims that concepts of personhood are not self-evident and are not obvious to everyone. This history of personhood goes back to ancient and medieval Christian theorizing and debating about personhood. It shows that concepts of personhood are not “self-evident” but rather are theoretical posits that are posited in theory construction in order to explain certain putative theological facts. Given that personhood is a theoretical posit and is not “self-evident,” moral philosophers who aim to determine the extent of the moral community on the basis of a supposedly “self-evident” concept of personhood are not justified in doing so. Moreover, given the Argument against Exclusive Personhood, philosophical theologians who wish to articulate models of the Trinity or Incarnation that are consistent with the seven ecumenical councils will find that they, like moral philosophers, are not justified to assume, or to insist on, modern personhood for their models of the Trinity or Incarnation. My overall conclusion, then, is that modern personhood is bad for ethics and unnecessary for conciliar ecumenical Christian theology. (shrink)

Throughout his career, Deleuze developed a series of original philosophies of time and applied them successfully to many different fields. Now James Williams presents Deleuze's philosophy of time as the central concept that connects his philosophy as a whole. Through this conceptual approach, the book covers all the main periods of Deleuze's philosophy: the early studies of Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson and Spinoza, the two great philosophical works, Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, the Capitalism and Schizophrenia works (...) with Guattari, and the late influential studies of literature, film and painting.The result is an important reading of Deleuze and the first full interpretation of his philosophy of time. (shrink)

There are conceptual and ethical challenges to defining adolescents’ autonomy to access health care, and these can lead to health care norms and practices that could be maladjusted to the needs and preferences of adolescents. Particularly sensitive is access to sexual and reproductive health care services (SRHS). Yet, while there has been substantial conceptual work to conceptualize autonomy (e.g., as independence), there is a lack of empirical research that documents the perceptions of adolescents regarding on how they access or wish (...) to access health care services. The main objectives of this research were to (a) understand how adolescents in Colombia interpret the concept of “autonomy,” (b) describe how these adolescents articulate their autonomy (i.e., preferences) in accessing SRHS, and (c) analyze the ethical issues emerging from these data. Forty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants aged 14 to 23 years old in the Departments of Antioquia and Valle del Cauca in Colombia. Our study showed that participants’ understanding of autonomy was context-based and highly dependent on personal experiences, and these influenced their choice in how to access SRHS. Seen through the ethical lens of a reproductive justice framework, our results highlight the unequal opportunities for adolescents in terms of autonomy to access SRHS. (shrink)

This is a new release of the original 1925 edition.

This book puts forward a revisionist view of Japanese wartime thinking. It seeks to explore why Japanese intellectuals, historians and philosophers of the time insisted that Japan had to turn its back on the West and attack the United States and the British Empire. Based on a close reading of the texts written by members of the highly influential Kyoto School, and revisiting the dialogue between the Kyoto School and the German philosopher Heidegger, it argues that the work of Kyoto (...) thinkers cannot be dismissed as mere fascist propaganda, and that this work, in which race is a key theme, constitutes a reasoned case for a post-White world. The author also argues that this theme is increasingly relevant at present, as demographic changes are set to transform the political and social landscape of North America and Western Europe over the next fifty years. (shrink)

I clarify and defend the hypothesis that human belief formation is sensitive to social rewards and punishments, such that beliefs are sometimes formed based on unconscious expectations of their likely effects on other agents – agents who frequently reward us when we hold ungrounded beliefs and punish us when we hold reasonable ones. After clarifying this phenomenon and distinguishing it from other sources of bias in the psychological literature, I argue that the hypothesis is plausible on theoretical grounds and I (...) show how it illuminates and unifies a range of psychological phenomena, including confabulation and rationalisation, positive illusions, and identity-protective cognition. (shrink)

Buddhism enthusiasts that the tathAgatagarbha sources were themselves aware of the criticism that they simply taught an Atman in the same way that non- Buddhists did, and they rejected this accusation and defended themselves against the ...