An inviting alternative to traditional texts in introductory logic, The Art of Reasoning is widely acclaimed for its conversational tone and accessible exposition of rigorous logical concepts.

In this paper, I introduce the notion of ‘philosophy moves’: prominent tropes featured in contemporary academic philosophy. Moves are more than patterns – they are tools for advancing and enriching philosophical debates. By recognizing these patterns in the philosophical literature, we collect an ensemble of moves for deployment in novel contexts, each with the potential to forge new paths of philosophical investigation through a given topic. The moves featured in this paper are constructive and progressive, with the potential to push (...) past stalemates and open up a wider conceptual landscape. Following a presentation of five exemplars taken from the philosophy of biology literature, I show how different moves could be made within a current interdisciplinary debate. Overall, I aim to demonstrate that recognizing these patterns is insightful pedagogically and potentially useful when put to use as part of one’s philosophical methodology. (shrink)

An introductory logic textbook. The Art of Reasoning, 5e, shows students how logic can be applied to everyday life in each chapter, uses real-world examples to explain core concepts, and includes a new chapter on the cognitive biases and errors students are most likely to encounter in their own thinking.

Our goal is to analyze the distinction between factual statements and opinions from a philosophical—specifically an epistemological—perspective. Section 1 reviews the most common criteria for drawing the distinction, which while inadequate, as explained in Section 2, still plays an important cultural and political role. In Section 3, we argue that the difference between factual statements and opinions does not involve a single criterion. Instead, the conceptual structure of the terms ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’ is analogous to that of natural kinds—terms with (...) multiple dimensions. We expect that improved theory will lead to improvements in pedagogy, decision-making, and public discourse. But these consequences are not our chief focus. (shrink)

In this highly original of realism, David Kelley argues that perception is the discrimination of objects as entities, that the awareness of these objects is direct, and that perception is a reliable foundation for empirical knowledge. His argument relies on the basic principle of the 'primacy of existence, ' in opposition to Cartesian representationalism and Kantian idealism.

David Kelley presents empirical evidence of the welfare state’s effects on behavior, historical research on the origins of the welfare state, and philosophical clarification of such core ideas as freedom and rights. After a careful examination of the various arguments made on behalf of welfare rights, Kelley concludes that “the concept of welfare rights is invalid.”.

In a postscript to the second edition, Kelley reviews the growth in Objectivist scholarship and the influence of Rand's ideas over the past decade." "The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand is an engaging introduction to the Objectivist movement, its core ideas, and its central fissures. At the same time, it offers a case study in the sociology of intellectual movements and a frank discussion of the issues that arise whenever thinkers leave their studies to promote their ideas in the (...) public realm."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

Knowledge must be grounded in evidence in accordance with epistemological principles. This monograph distinguishes two kinds of principle: rules of evidence and rules of justification. -/- Rules of evidence, such the canons of inductive and deductive logic, specify what sort of evidence is relevant to what sort of conclusion. Rules of justification specify what a person's cognitive state must be if he is to be justified in accepting a conclusion. This distinction makes it possible to explain how our knowledge can (...) be fully justified all the way down to its foundations in perception. (shrink)

This paper is focused on the Sapient and Sentient Intelligence Value Argument or SSIVA and the ethics of how that applies to autonomous systems and how such systems might be governed by the extension of current regulation, as well as providing a computable model of ethics for AGI research. SSIVA is based on some static core definitions of "Intelligence" as defined by the measured ability to understand, use, and generate knowledge or information independently, all of which are a function of (...) sapience and sentience. The SSIVA logic places the value of any individual human and their potential for Intelligence, and the value of other systems to the degree that they are self-aware or "intelligent", as a priority. Further, the paper lays out the case for how the current legal framework could be extended to address issues with autonomous systems to varying degrees depending on the SSIVA threshold as applied to autonomous systems. Further, from a research standpoint it is important to have a descreet model to measure against without ambiguity, which the SSIVA theory provides. (shrink)

The High Line – a public park on a repurposed railway track in New York City – first opened to the public in 2009, and has been increasingly celebrated as a model public space, and as a democratic project directed by community. Artistic and amateur photographic practices have significantly informed the High Line’s design, landscaping, publicity, urban policy, use and constellations of community. This photo-conceptual essay critically considers the constitutive function of the photographic image, as photography produces, interpellates and defines (...) the public and public sphere of the High Line. However, these imaging practices have also taken increasingly regulated form, and endorse conservative forms of community, personhood and publicness. The new park’s imaging practices may be understood as supplementary to neoliberal forms of property accumulation, in fact diminishing public space even as they purport to represent it. Drawing from the historical avant-garde, feminist critiques of representation and anti-capitalist urban theory, the following photographic series critiques the High Line’s photographic apparatus, from within a practice of photography, and from a position within the field of contemporary art. (shrink)

David Kelley discusses the relationship between philosophy and sense of life and explains why he and William Thomas do not consider sense of life essential to the explanation of why art is a major human value, though it is essential to explaining how people create and experience art. Kelley also challenges the claim by Kamhi and Torres (in their article, "Critical Neglect of Ayn Rand's Theory of Art? Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Fall 2000) that aesthetics, as (...) a branch of philosophy, is logically prior to ethics and on a par with epistemology in fundamentality. (shrink)

David Kelley responds to Jonathan Jacobs' review of his The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand' Truth and Toleration in Objectivism ("A Contest of Wills," Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Fall 2001). He argues that his goal was not to provide a technical treatise on Objectivism, but to focus on a debate within Objectivism. Toward the former end, he provides a brief bibliography of relevant technical treatments of Objectivist epistemology and ethics.

Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek were notable 20th century advocates of libertarianism, and both of them based their political views, in part, on theories in epistemology. This paper discusses the radical difference in their views on a core epistemological issue, the nature of abstractions. Rand held that we form abstractions from the observation of particular, concrete things. Hayek held the opposite view that abstractions are primary; some are innate, some acquired from our cultural environment, but neither can be independently supported (...) by observation of concretes. Kelley will show why Hayek’s view is both false and inconsistent with a fully individualist moral and political theory. (shrink)

Our goal is to analyze the distinction between factual statements and opinions from a philosophical—specifically an epistemological—perspective. Section 1 reviews the most common criteria for drawing the distinction, which while inadequate, as explained in Section 2, still plays an important cultural and political role. In Section 3, we argue that the difference between factual statements and opinions does not involve a single criterion. Instead, the conceptual structure of the terms ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’ is analogous to that of natural kinds—terms with (...) multiple dimensions. We expect that improved theory will lead to improvements in pedagogy, decision-making, and public discourse. But these consequences are not our chief focus. (shrink)

One of the common refrains in commentary about the Islamic Middle East, especially since September 11, is that Islam needs a Reformation. The assumption is that modernist, tolerant, reformist Muslims are to the fundamentalists as the Protestants of the Christian Reformation were to the medieval Catholic Church. This is very nearly the exact opposite of the truth. The Islamists are reacting against the Enlightenment modernism of the West, which they see as a threat to Islamic culture; but their call for (...) a return to an imagined purer state of Islamic society is analogous to the Protestant goal of freeing Christianity from the worldly compromises and the scholasticism of the Church. Islam does not need a Reformation. The problem is that it’s having one now. What it needs is an Enlightenment. (shrink)

The words “liberty” and “liberalism” have a common root, reflecting the commitment of the original or classical liberals to a free society. Over the last century, the latter term has come to represent a political position that is willing to sacrifice liberty in the economic realm for the sake of equality and/or collective welfare. As a consequence, those who wish to reaffirm the classical version of liberalism – those who advocate liberty in economic as well as personal and intellectual matters (...) – have invented a new word from the old root; they call themselves libertarians. Both in doctrine and in etymology, then, partisans of this view define themselves by their allegiance to liberty. Yet they spend most of their day-to-day polemical energies defending property rights and the economic system of laissez-faire capitalism that is based upon such rights. Evidently there is a strong link between liberty and property at work here. What is that link? The history of political thought is full of ideas and controversies about precisely this question. My goal here is to raise the question in a specific form, one that I think captures a basic difference in approach between classical liberals and most libertarians today. The difference is not in the substance of the position – it is not a disagreement about how the ideal society would be constituted – but rather in the way the position is to be defended. The key question is: can the right to property be derived from the right to liberty? Of course a property right is a right to kind of freedom. (shrink)

The operating assumption in mostdiscussions of health policy is that governmenthas some responsibility for the health of itscitizens and that it may legitimately tax,subsidize, and regulate its citizens in theexercise of that responsibility. On thisassumption, public obligations to HIV/AIDSpatients are a function of their needs inrelationship to other health needs. This paperchallenges the operating assumption by arguingthat it cannot be grounded in the obligationsthat individuals have to each other.The paper rests on its own assumption: themoral theory of individualism. On this (...) theory,individuals are ends in themselves who have theright to choose their own actions and uses oftheir resources; they do not have unchosenobligations to help others. In regard toHIV/AIDS patients, consequently, individualshave no duty to help, nor any other obligationbeyond that of respecting their rights; andthere is no valid basis for governmentregulations or subsidies on their behalf.The paper argues against the two approachescommonly used to defend a more expansive viewof individual obligations and the role ofgovernment. The first is the assumption ofwelfare rights to goods and services; thesecond is the assumption that distributivejustice requires some redistribution of healthcare resources. (shrink)

Examines how the modern city is portrayed in art and literature, discusses modernism, futurism, and expressionism, and looks at the work of Rilke, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Brecht.

Koonin argues that CRISPR-Cas systems present the best-known case in point for Lamarckian evolution because they satisfy his proposed criteria for the specific inheritance of acquired adaptive characteristics. We see two interrelated issues with Koonin’s characterization of CRISPR-Cas systems as Lamarckian. First, at times he appears to confuse an account of the CRISPR-Cas system with an account of the mechanism it employs. We argue there is no evidence for the CRISPR-Cas system being “Lamarckian” in any sense. Second, it is unclear (...) whether the mechanism is more “Lamarckian” than many other forms of genetic change already well-characterized in Darwinian terms. We present three conceptually distinct senses in which the mechanism of IAC may be considered Lamarckian and argue that only the strongest sense of goal-directed IAC would be difficult to accommodate in a Darwinian account. As the CRISPR-Cas mechanism does not qualify as “Lamarckian” in this strong sense, we argue there is no conceptual value in calling it “Lamarckian”. Finally, we suggest that CRISPR-Cas systems do hold the potential for genuinely non-Darwinian, directed evolution in a way that Koonin did not discuss, involving their potential use as a human gene-editing tool. (shrink)

The influence of historiography on aspects of political thought in France, Italy and Germany. In recent years the overlap between political thought and historiography has changed the boundaries of intellectual history. Donald Kelley, the longtime editor of The Journal of the History of Ideas has played a leading part in this process. These essays by his friends and former students follow in his footsteps. The collection is divided into three parts: France, England [six essays], and Italy and Germany [four (...) essays]. Anthony Grafton and John Salmon provide an introduction, and the volume concludes with a bibliography of Donald Kelley's many works. Historians and Ideologues is designed for those with an interest in the contribution of historiography to political thought, and will be a timely addition to the growing reaction against the postmodern scepticism in historiographical research in this field. Contributors include Ann Blair, Julian Franklin, Kathleen Parrow, David Harris Sacks, Sarah Hanley, Daniel Woolf, Gordon Schochet, Joseph Levine, John Pocock, Perez Zagorin, William Connell, Donald Phillip Verene, and Michael Carhart. Anthony Grafton is a Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. John Salmon is the Marjorie Walter Goodheart Emeritus Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College. (shrink)

In this article we introduce and study hyperclass-forcing in the context of an extension of Morse-Kelley class theory, called MK∗∗. We define this forcing by using a symmetry between MK∗∗ models and models of ZFC− plus there exists a strongly inaccessible cardinal. We develop a coding between β-models ℳ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $$\mathcal {M}$$ \end{document} of MK∗∗ and transitive models M+ of SetMK∗∗ which will allow us to go from ℳ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} (...) \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $$\mathcal {M}$$ \end{document} to M+ and vice versa. So instead of forcing with a hyperclass in MK∗∗ we can force over the corresponding SetMK∗∗ model with a class of conditions. For class-forcing to work in the context of ZFC− we show that the SetMK∗∗ model M+ can be forced to look like Lκ∗[X]\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $$L_{\kappa ^*}[X]$$ \end{document}, where κ∗ is the height of M+, κ strongly inaccessible in M+ and X ⊆ κ. Over such a model we can apply definable class forcing and we arrive at an extension of M+ from which we can go back to the corresponding β-model of MK∗∗, which will in turn be an extension of the original ℳ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $$\mathcal {M}$$ \end{document}. Our main result combines hyperclass forcing with coding methods of Beller et al. and Friedman to show that every β-model of MK∗∗ can be extended to a minimal such model of MK∗∗ with the same ordinals. A simpler version of the proof also provides a new and analogous minimality result for models of second-order arithmetic. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper contrasts the research strategies of two women reformers, Florence Kelley and Ellen Swallow Richards, which entailed different strategies of social reform. In the early 1890s, social activist Florence Kelley used the social survey as a weapon for legal reform of the working conditions of women and children in Chicago’s sweatshop system. Kelley’s case shows that her surveys were most effective as “grounded” knowledge, rooted in a local community with which she was well acquainted. Her social (...) survey, re-enacted by lawmakers and the press, provided the evidence that moved her target audience to legal action. Chemist and propagator of the Home Economics Movement Ellen Richards situated the social problem, and hence its solution, not in exploitative working conditions, but in the inefficient and wasteful usage of available resources by the poor. Laboratory work, she argued, would enable the development of optimal standards, and educational programs should bring these standards to the household by means of models and exhibits. With this aim, she constructed public spaces that she ran as food laboratories and sanitary experiments. Kelley and Richards thus crossed the doorsteps of the household in very different ways. While Florence Kelley entered the household to change the living and working conditions of the poor by changing the law, Richards flipped the household inside out by bringing women into hybrid public laboratory spaces to change their behavior by experiment and instruction. (shrink)

The class forcing theorem, which asserts that every class forcing notion ${\mathbb {P}}$ admits a forcing relation $\Vdash _{\mathbb {P}}$, that is, a relation satisfying the forcing relation recursion—it follows that statements true in the corresponding forcing extensions are forced and forced statements are true—is equivalent over Gödel–Bernays set theory $\text {GBC}$ to the principle of elementary transfinite recursion $\text {ETR}_{\text {Ord}}$ for class recursions of length $\text {Ord}$. It is also equivalent to the existence of truth predicates for the (...) infinitary languages $\mathcal {L}_{\text {Ord},\omega }$, allowing any class parameter A; to the existence of truth predicates for the language $\mathcal {L}_{\text {Ord},\text {Ord}}$ ; to the existence of $\text {Ord}$ -iterated truth predicates for first-order set theory $\mathcal {L}_{\omega,\omega }$ ; to the assertion that every separative class partial order ${\mathbb {P}}$ has a set-complete class Boolean completion; to a class-join separation principle; and to the principle of determinacy for clopen class games of rank at most $\text {Ord}+1$. Unlike set forcing, if every class forcing notion ${\mathbb {P}}$ has a forcing relation merely for atomic formulas, then every such ${\mathbb {P}}$ has a uniform forcing relation applicable simultaneously to all formulas. Our results situate the class forcing theorem in the rich hierarchy of theories between $\text {GBC}$ and Kelley–Morse set theory $\text {KM}$. (shrink)

After reviewing various natural bi-interpretations in urelement set theory, including second-order set theories with urelements, we explore the strength of second-order reflection in these contexts. Ultimately, we prove, second-order reflection with the abundant atom axiom is bi-interpretable and hence also equiconsistent with the existence of a supercompact cardinal. The proof relies on a reflection characterization of supercompactness, namely, a cardinal κ is supercompact if and only if every Π11 sentence true in a structure M (of any size) containing κ in (...) a language of size less than κ is also true in a substructure m≺M of size less than κ with m∩κ∈κ. (shrink)

A response to critical commentaries. Crookston begins her commentary by noting that my book would have been better with answers to “the following three questions: (1) Why is the harm principle the right principle upon which to base a theory of toleration? (2) How is Cohen thinking of the concept of volenti? (p. x ) Is interference (i.e., the abandonment of toleration) ever morally required by the harm principle?” (p. x ). She is right, and I address these questions below (...) in Sections 2, 3, and 4. That is the bulk of this essay. I then turn to Kelley's issues in Sections 6, 7, and 8; these have to do with “the link between toleration and relativism,” the way I distinguish “the concepts of toleration and endurance,” and a “question about moral toleration” (p. x ). Despite much agreement, there are points of contention and I try to make my position clearer in response . (shrink)

We argue that subjective Bayesians face a dilemma: they must offend against the spirit of their permissivism about rational credence or reject the principle that one should avoid accuracy dominance.

Intentional action is often accompanied by knowledge of what one is doing---knowledge which appears non-observational and non-inferential. G.E.M. Anscombe defends the stronger claim that intentional action always comes with such knowledge. Among those who follow Anscombe, some have altered the features, content, or species of the knowledge claimed to necessarily accompany intentional action. In this paper, I argue that there is no necessary connection between intentional action and knowledge, no matter the assumed features, content, or species of the knowledge. Further, (...) rather than follow the usual methodology in this debate of arguing by counterexample, I present an argument that explains why we continue to find counterexamples: intentional action and knowledge are regulated by thresholds under distinct pressures; in particular, the threshold of control regulating intentional action is disparately influenced by the role of intentional action in practical normativity. (shrink)

Robust metanormative realists think that there are irreducibly normative, metaphysically heavy normative facts. One might wonder how we could be epistemically justified in believing that such facts exist. In this paper, I offer an answer to this question: one’s belief in the existence of robustly real normative facts is epistemically justified because so believing is indispensable to being a successful inquirer for creatures like us. The argument builds on Enoch's (2007, 2011) deliberative indispensability argument for Robust Realism but avoids relying (...) on an overly pragmatic account of the sources of basic epistemic justification. Instead, I suggest that the sources of basic epistemic justification are those belief-forming methods which are indispensable for zetetically indispensable projects, that is, projects which are constitutive of being a successful inquirer for embodied, agential creatures like ourselves. (shrink)