showing what makes causal facts both true and accessible enough for us to have the knowledge of them that we ordinarily take ourselves to have. Some current approaches to analyzing causation were once resisted. First, analyses that use the counterfactual conditional were viewed with suspicion because philosophers also sought (and still do seek) similar understanding of counterfactual facts. Since the same can be said for the other nomic concepts--causation, lawhood, explanation, chance, dispositions, and their conceptual kin--philosophy demonstrated a preference for (...) non-nomic definitions of causation, analytic completions of (S) with no nomic terms in the analysans. Recently, however, philosophers have been less demanding regarding what terms may be used. Attention has been given to analyzing causation in terms of chance, the counterfactual conditional, and lawhood. If we reserve the term ‘causal’ for the terms and concepts that have extremely obvious connections.. (shrink)

Some scientists try to discover and report laws of nature. And, they do so with success. There are many principles that were for a long time thought to be laws that turned out to be useful approximations, like Newton’s gravitational principle. There are others that were thought to be laws and still are considered laws, like Einstein’s principle that no signals travel faster than light. Laws of nature are not just important to scientists. They are also of great interest to (...) us philosophers, though primarily in an ancillary way. Qua philosophers, we do not try to discover what the laws are. We care about what it is to be a law, about lawhood, the essential difference between something’s being a law and something’s not being a law. It is one of our jobs to understand lawhood and convey our understanding to others. (shrink)

This chapter illustrates a theory that describes how certain modal statements, including counterfactual sentences, are dependent on context. Building on the work of Robert Stalnaker and David Lewis, its application to a familiar argument for fatalism and a recent exchange about time-traveler freedom between Kadri Vihvelin and Ted Sider is considered. This chapter presents a new perspective on the flaws and the seductiveness of both the fatalist argument and the freedom paradox. This new perspective may be applied to arguments for (...) incompatibilism advanced by Carl Ginet and Peter van Inwagen. The issue of the compatibility of free will and determinism is generally regarded as one of the most serious metaphysical issues about human freedom. Consequence arguments of the sort made famous by Inwagen and Ginet are the leading arguments in favor of incompatibilism. (shrink)

Introduction: liberal-rationalism and the progress model i This study stands primarily as an essay in morals. It is governed by Nietzsche's contention that ...

In order to avoid the implication that ‘mitochondrial replacement techniques’ (MRT) would produce ‘three parent babies’, discourses around these techniques typically dismiss the contribution of the mitochondria to genetic parenthood and personal identity. According to many participants in debates about MRT, ‘real parenthood’ is a matter of contributing nuclear DNA, which in turn implies that men and women make the same contribution to the embryo. Even when the importance of the mitochondria is acknowledged, an emphasis on mitochondrial DNA still has (...) the effect of valorizing the role of DNA (and thus the paternal contribution to conception) at the expense of the role played by the cytoplasm of the oocyte in the development of the embryo and placenta, and that of the mother’s body in gestation. In this way, discourses around MRT falsely imply that what men and women contribute to reproduction and parenthood is the same—nuclear DNA—and thus erase the distinctive contribution that women make to conception. The potential of MRT to reconfigure relationships between the sexes in the service of patriarchal norms is perhaps one of the most significant things about it and should, we argue, be counted in the discussion of the ethical and policy implications of legitimating these procedures. (shrink)

John Carroll; Authority and the Teacher, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 13, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 133–140, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.

John Carroll; Authority and the Teacher, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 13, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 133–140, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.

The self-visitation paradox is one paradox of time travel. As Ted Sider puts it, “Suppose I travel back in time and stand in a room with my sitting 10-year-old self. I seem to be both sitting and standing, but how can that be?” (2001, 101). So as not to beg any questions, let us label what is sitting B and what is standing C. The worry is about how B can be C in light of the looming contradiction that this (...) one person would be sitting and standing. Sider’s own approach is perdurantist, and holds that B is not C. My concern, though, is with solutions offered by, or on behalf of, endurantists–more 1 specifically, with solutions holding that B is C. The endurantist answer I shall criticize is a relativizer position maintaining that the sitting and the standing need to be relativized to the personal time or proper time of the time traveler. This manner of solution has been offered by Paul Horwich (1975, 433-435 ; 1987, 114-115) and also by Simon Keller and Michael Nelson (2001, 344). I will show that such a view has a linguistically suspect element and that there are three further reasons why relativizing only in this way falls short of solving the paradox. This will be enough to squash the relativizer position because it will not be clear how additional relativization could help, and furthermore any additional relativization would only make the linguistic matter worse. I will also present some considerations in favor of a non-contradiction endurantist alternative; this view eliminates the need for any relativization by denying that sitting and standing are contradictory properties. (shrink)

This article returns to the question of the foundations of Western culture. Many have trod this path before, notably Nietzsche. At issue is a theory of culture, and the classical Greek preoccupation with how humans can make sense of their lives, find direction and some sort of vindication — for that is what culture is, and does. Travelling Greece today, what surprises is the vitality of the ancient sites. Alive with their own cast of timeless enchantment, it is as if (...) they haven't changed over the millennia. Has this miraculous, enduring vitality something to do with the fact that the Western tree that Greece seeded continues to flourish? Or, is this just romantic illusion, a way to redeem the prosaic orders of modern everyday life; or, a fantasy aesthetico-religious culture to populate the disenchanted ruins of the Christian churchyard? (shrink)

Theory of Computation -- Computation by Abstracts Devices.

Humanism built Western civilization as we know it today. Its achievements include the liberation of the individual, democracy, universal rights, and widespread prosperity and comfort. Its ambassadors are the heroes of modern culture—Erasmus, Holbein, Shakespeare, Velázquez, Descartes, Kant, Freud. Those who sought to contain humanism’s pride within a frame of higher truth—Luther, Calvin, Poussin, Kierkegaard—could barely interrupt its torrential progress. Those who sought to reform humanism’s tenets from within—Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche—were tested by the success of their own prophecies. So (...) runs the approved view. It is not shared by John Carroll. Instead, Carroll articulates a disruptive and compelling alternative narrative of the course of Western civilization since the Renaissance and the Reformation contrived to unleash reason, will, and a superhuman man on the world. The West’s five-hundred-year experiment with humanism has failed, he maintains in this bracing study of humanism’s rise to preeminence and its headlong tumble into contradiction, because humans ultimately need some kind of contact with a higher, or metaphysical, order beyond the confines of their time-bound, mundane selves. And if this wasn’t entirely clear before September 11, 2001, Carroll concludes, it surely is now. His provocative and brilliant arguments will challenge received wisdom on every side. (shrink)

This six volume Routledge Library Edition set is dedicated to the work of key nineteenth-century German thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose hugely influential work in the field of philosophy continues to be felt to this day. The six volumes, published between 1948 and 1988, represent a truly wide-ranging analysis of Nietzsche’s life and work, offering an excellent overview of the cannon of critical analysis and interpretation on Nietzsche in the twentieth century. The collection covers Nietzsche’s perspectives and influence upon a variety (...) of sociological and philosophical debates, as well as placing his work in the context of contemporaries such as Richard Wagner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Max Stirner. (shrink)