In this paper I will present and evaluate Anandi Hattiangadi’s arguments for the conclusion that meaning is not intrinsically normative or prescriptive. I will argue that she misconstrues the way the thesis that meaning is normative is presented in the literature and that there is an important class of semantic rules that she fails to consider and rule out. According to Hattiangadi, defenders of meaning prescriptivity argue that speaking truthfully is a necessary condition for speaking meaningfully. I will maintain that (...) this is not how prescriptivity is construed by ‘normativists’ such as Kripke, Hacker and Baker, Brandom and Millar. I think that Hattiangadi misconstrues the prescriptivity thesis because she does not distinguish between the general notion of correctness of use and the specific notion of correctness of application. In other words, she does not distinguish between using a term correctly and applying it truthfully. In addition, I submit that there is an important class of semantic rules determining correct use that Hattiangadi does not consider. Following the later Wittgenstein, Hacker and Baker argue that accepted explanations of the meanings of words have the function of semantic rules. These rules are categorically prescriptive because following them is constitutive of being a speaker of a language. (shrink)

Nishi Shah has argued that the norm of truth is a prescriptive norm which regulates doxastic deliberation. Also, the acceptance of the norm of truth explains why belief is subject to norms of evidence. Steglich-Petersen pointed out that the norm of truth cannot be prescriptive because it cannot be broken deliberatively. More recently, Pascal Engel suggested that both the norms of truth and evidence are deliberately violated in cases of epistemic akrasia. The akratic agent accepts these norms but in some (...) cases he is not motivated by them. In this paper I will argue that Shah cannot use Engel's suggestion because, given his definition of doxastic deliberation, epistemic akrasia is impossible in the context of deliberation about belief. Furthermore, epistemic akrasia is in conflict with the phenomenon of doxastic transparency that Shah tries to explain. (shrink)

Nishi Shah has argued that the norm of truth is a prescriptive norm which regulates doxastic deliberation. Also, the acceptance of the norm of truth explains why belief is subject to norms of evidence. Steglich‐Petersen pointed out that the norm of truth cannot be prescriptive because it cannot be broken deliberatively. More recently, Pascal Engel suggested that both the norms of truth and evidence are deliberately violated in cases of epistemic akrasia. The akratic agent accepts these norms but in some (...) cases he is not motivated by them. In this paper I will argue that Shah cannot use Engel's suggestion because, given his definition of doxastic deliberation, epistemic akrasia is impossible in the context of deliberation about belief. Furthermore, epistemic akrasia is in conflict with the phenomenon of doxastic transparency that Shah tries to explain. (shrink)

Social conventions are those arbitrary rules and norms governing the countless behaviors all of us engage in every day without necessarily thinking about them, from shaking hands when greeting someone to driving on the right side of the road. In this book, Andrei Marmor offers a pathbreaking and comprehensive philosophical analysis of conventions and the roles they play in social life and practical reason, and in doing so challenges the dominant view of social conventions first laid out by David (...) Lewis. Marmor begins by giving a general account of the nature of conventions, explaining the differences between coordinative and constitutive conventions and between deep and surface conventions. He then applies this analysis to explain how conventions work in language, morality, and law. Marmor clearly demonstrates that many important semantic and pragmatic aspects of language assumed by many theorists to be conventional are in fact not, and that the role of conventions in the moral domain is surprisingly complex, playing mostly an auxiliary and supportive role. Importantly, he casts new light on the conventional foundations of law, arguing that the distinction between deep and surface conventions can be used to answer the prevalent objections to legal conventionalism. Social Conventions is a much-needed reappraisal of the nature of the rules that regulate virtually every aspect of human conduct. (shrink)

In Philosophy of Law, Andrei Marmor provides a comprehensive analysis of contemporary debates about the fundamental nature of law--an issue that has been at the heart of legal philosophy for centuries. What the law is seems to be a matter of fact, but this fact has normative significance: it tells people what they ought to do. Is the normative content of a law entirely determined by the facts that make it a law? Are there some normative moral constraints on (...) what the law can be? And can we fully characterize and define the law without assuming a moral conception about what the law ought to be? Finally, is the philosophy of law about describing what law is, or prescribing what it should be?Marmor argues that the myriad questions raised by the factual and normative features of law actually depend on the possibility of reduction--whether the legal domain can be explained in terms of something else, more foundational in nature. In addition to exploring the major issues in contemporary legal thought, Philosophy of Law provides a critical analysis of the people and ideas that have dominated the field in past centuries. It will be essential reading for anyone curious about the nature of law. (shrink)

In our paper, ‘Escaping hell: divine motivation and the problem of hell’, we defended a theory of hell that we called ‘escapism’. We argued that, given God's just and loving character, it would be most rational for Him to maintain an open-door policy to those who are in hell, allowing them an unlimited number of chances to be reconciled with God and enjoy communion with Him. In this paper we reply to two recent objections to our original paper. The first (...) is an argument from religious luck offered by Russell Jones. The second is an argument from Kyle Swan that alleges that our commitments about the nature of reasons for action still leaves escapism vulnerable to an objection we labelled the ‘Job objection’ in our original paper. In this paper we argue that escapism has the resources built into it needed to withstand the objections from Jones and Swan. (shrink)

According to traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic theism, God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect agent. This volume shows that philosophy of religion needs to take seriously alternative concepts of the divine, and demonstrates the considerable philosophical interest that they hold.

Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as “Lorches have purple feathers” as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence (...) levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than generic sentences that were similar but did not have these connotations. In addition to clarifying important aspects of generics’ meaning, these findings are applicable to a range of real-world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse. (shrink)

"As novelist and poet Andrei Codrescu points out in the essay that accompanies this selection of photographs from the Getty Museum's collection, Evans's photographs are the work of an artist whose temperament was distinctly at odds with Beals's impassioned rhetoric. Evans's photographs of Cuba were made by a young, still maturing artist who - as Codrescu argues - was just beginning to combine his early, formalist aesthetic with the social concerns that would figure prominently in his later work."--Jacket.

We propose that human reasoning relies on an inherence heuristic, an implicit cognitive process that leads people to explain observed patterns (e.g., girls wear pink) in terms of the inherent features of their constituents (e.g., pink is an inherently feminine color). We then demonstrate how this proposed heuristic can provide a unified account for a broad set of findings spanning areas of research that might at first appear unrelated (e.g., system justification, nominal realism, is–ought errors in moral reasoning). By revealing (...) the deep commonalities among the diverse phenomena that fall under its scope, our account is able to generate new insights into these phenomena, as well as new empirical predictions. A second main goal of this paper, aside from introducing the inherence heuristic, is to articulate the proposal that the heuristic serves as a foundation for the development of psychological essentialism. More specifically, we propose that essentialism—which is the common belief that natural and social categories are underlain by hidden, causally powerful “essences”—emerges over the first few years of life as an elaboration of the earlier, and more open-ended, intuitions supplied by the inherence heuristic. In the final part of the paper, we distinguish our proposal from competing accounts (e.g., Strevens' K-laws) and clarify the relationship between the inherence heuristic and related cognitive tendencies (e.g., the correspondence bias). In sum, this paper illuminates a basic cognitive process that emerges early in life and is likely to have profound effects on many aspects of human psychology. (shrink)

The book builds on recent work in pragmatics and speech-act theory to explain how, and to what extent, legal content is determined by linguistic considerations. At the same time, the analysis shows that some of the unique features of communication in the legal domain - in particular, its strategic nature - can be employed to put pressure on certain assumptions in philosophy of language. This enables a more nuanced picture of how semantic and pragmatic determinants of communication work in complex (...) and large-scale systems such as law. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive defence of legal positivism on the basis of a novel account of social conventions. Marmor argues that the law is founded on constitutive conventions, and that consequently moral values cannot determine what the law is.

The purpose of this essay is to explore some of the main pragmatic aspects of communication within the legal context. It will be argued that in some crucial respects, the pragmatics of legal language is unique, involving considerations that are not typically present in ordinary conversational contexts. In particular, certain normative considerations that are typically settled in a regular conversational context are unresolved and potentially contentious in the legal case. On the other hand, the essay also argues that a careful (...) distinction between various pragmatic aspects of language use enables us to offer some generalizations about types of pragmatic enrichment that could be taken to form, or not to form, part of what is actually determined by legal expressions. (shrink)

Viebahn (2018) has recently argued that several tests for ambiguity, such as the conjunction-reduction test, are not reliable as tests for polysemy, but only as tests for homonymy. I look at the more fine-grained distinction between regular and irregular polysemy and I argue for a more nuanced conclusion: the tests under discussion provide systematic evidence for homonymy and irregular polysemy but need to be used with more care to test for regular polysemy. I put this conclusion at work in the (...) context of the debate over the alleged referential-attributive ambiguity of the definite article. In reply to various criticisms, defenders of the ambiguity view argue that this is a case of polysemy. But opponents object that the dual use of the definite article fails tests for ambiguity. The debate seems to have come to stalemate, unless the relevance of the tests is determined for cases of alleged polysemy. I conclude that the balance of considerations incline towards rejecting the ambiguity thesis. (shrink)

The causal theory of action is widely recognized in the literature of the philosophy of action as the "standard story" of human action and agency -- the nearest approximation in the field to a theoretical orthodoxy. This volume brings together leading figures working in action theory today to discuss issues relating to the CTA and its applications, which range from experimental philosophy to moral psychology. Some of the contributors defend the theory while others criticize it; some draw from historical sources (...) while others focus on recent developments; some rely on the tools of analytic philosophy while others cite the latest empirical research on human action. All agree, however, on the centrality of the CTA in the philosophy of action. The contributors first consider metaphysical issues, then reasons-explanations of action, and, finally, new directions for thinking about the CTA. They discuss such topics as the tenability of some alternatives to the CTA; basic causal deviance; the etiology of action ; teleologism and anticausalism; and the compatibility of the CTA with theories of embodied cognition. Two contributors engage in an exchange of views on intentional omissions that stretches over four essays, directly responding to each other in their follow-up essays. As the action -oriented perspective becomes more influential in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science, this volume offers a long-needed debate over foundational issues. Contributors: Fred Adams, Jesús H. Aguilar, John Bishop, Andrei A. Buckareff, Randolph Clarke, Jennifer Hornsby, Alicia Juarrero, Alfred R. Mele, Michael S. Moore, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Josef Perner, Johannes Roessler, David-Hillel Ruben, Carolina Sartorio, Michael Smith, Rowland Stout The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket. (shrink)

Andrei Marga, Religia in era globalizarii Editura Fundatiei pentru Studii Europene, Cluj- Napoca, 2003.

Brings together images from the era most closely associated with Evans, the rural south in the 1930s, and also includes images of New York City, Chicago, and Havana.

This paper examines the ability of countries in Central and Eastern Europe to ensure appropriate protection of research participants in the field of increasingly globalizing biomedical research. By applying an analytical framework for identifying gaps in policies and programs for human subjects protection to four countries of CEE—Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, substantial gaps in the scope and content of relevant policies and major impediments to program performance have been revealed. In these countries, public policies on the protection of research (...) participants lack consistency and reliable mechanisms for their implementation. Impediments to program performance most often relate to inadequacies in the national research ethics systems with regard to organizational structure, budgetary support, supervision, and training. The level of research ethics capacity varies from country to country and depends on socio-economic and political factors of post-communist transition. The breadth and depth of the problems identified suggest that the current level of protection for research participants in CEE might be inadequate to the challenges posed by the globalization of biomedical research. In CEE countries, there is a need for strengthening research ethics capacity through modification of relevant policies and improvement of program management. The differences among the countries call for further research on identifying the best approaches for filling the gaps in the policies and programs aimed at ensuring effective protection of research participants. (shrink)

Mainstream political liberals hold that state coercion is legitimate only if it is justified on the grounds of reasons that all may reasonably be expected to accept. Critics argue that this public justification principle is self-defeating, because it depends on moral justifications that not all may reasonably be expected to accept. To rebut the self-defeat objection, I elaborate on the following disjunction: one either agrees or disagrees that it is wrong to impose one’s morality on others by the coercive power (...) of the state. Those who disagree reject PJP, they understand politics as war. Those who agree accept PJP, they understand politics as competition. Political competitors abide by PJP to avoid politics as war, by enforcing PJP on political combatants they engage in a war that is unavoidable. In both cases their exercise of political power has a justification that is reasonably acceptable to all. (shrink)

In her recent paper, “A Defense of Substance Causation,” Ann Whittle makes a case for substance causation. In this paper, assuming that causation is a generative or productive relation, I argue that Whittle’s argument is not successful. While substances are causally relevant in causal processes owing to outcomes being counterfactually dependent upon their role in such occurrences, the real productive work in causal processes is accomplished by the causal powers of substances.

The efficient markets hypothesis has been the central proposition in finance for nearly thirty years. It states that securities prices in financial markets must equal fundamental values, either because all investors are rational or because arbitrage eliminates pricing anomalies. This book describes an alternative approach to the study of financial markets: behavioral finance. This approach starts with an observation that the assumptions of investor rationality and perfect arbitrage are overwhelmingly contradicted by both psychological and institutional evidence. In actual financial markets, (...) less than fully rational investors trade against arbitrageurs whose resources are limited by risk aversion, short horizons, and agency problems. The book presents and empirically evaluates models of such inefficient markets. Behavioral finance models both explain the available financial data better than does the efficient markets hypothesis and generate new empirical predictions. These models can account for such anomalies as the superior performance of value stocks, the closed end fund puzzle, the high returns on stocks included in market indices, the persistence of stock price bubbles, and even the collapse of several well-known hedge funds in 1998. By summarizing and expanding the research in behavioral finance, the book builds a new theoretical and empirical foundation for the economic analysis of real-world markets. (shrink)

We propose a qualitatively new kind of governance for the emerging need to efficiently guide the densely interconnected, ever more complex world development, which is based on explicit and openly presented problem solutions and their interactive implementation practice within the versatile, but unified professional analysis of complex real-world dynamics, involving both the powerful central units and the attached creative worldwide network of professional representatives. We provide fundamental and rigorous scientific arguments in favour of introduction of just that kind of governance (...) at the modern development stage, after the complexity threshold in the real world dynamics evolution (sometimes intuitively designated as "globalisation"), where the traditional spontaneous-empirical kind of development and related administrative governance lose dramatically and inevitably their efficiency and the necessity of explicit consistent understanding and guidance of complex real-world dynamics becomes evident. (shrink)

Andrei Plesu, Comedii la portile Orientului (Farces at the Orient’s Gates) Humanitas Publishing House, Bucharest, 2005.

"[W]e must focus on what legalism, per se, means, and then ask why is it a good thing to have. Not less importantly, however, we must also realize that legalism can be excessive. Even if the rule of law is a good thing, too much of it may be bad. So the challenge for a theory of the rule of law is to articulate what the rule of law is, why is it good, and to what extent." "[T]he essense of (...) the ideal of the rule of law is that people ought to be governed by law. This general ideal has at least two main components. First, it requires that governments, namely, de facto political authorities, should rule, that is, guide their subjects' conduct, by law. Second, it requires that the law by which governments purport to rule should be such that it can actually guide human conduct." "The idea that governments should rule by law must be premised on the assumption that rule by law, regardless of the laws' specific content, is to be preferred to governance by other means of social control. And this immediately brings us to the second component of the rule of law, namely, that the law must be such that it can actually guide human conduct, and the further assumption that these necessary features of law embody certain virtues. In other words, unless we can first articulate what is unique about legal means of social control, and explain why those features promote certain goods, we cannot ground the idea that governments should rule by law." Discusses ways, following mainly Fuller, one can fail to make law. Notes that these are functional goods for the regulation of human behavior. They may have a connection to other things we value. We should not assume, though, that greater instantiation of these ideals is always better - sometimes ideals conflict such that more of one means less of another and "because such values, on their own grounds, set only a rough standard wherby gross deviations from it would be wrong." "Compliance with the generality-relevance principle is crucially important in safeguarding against such unjustified favoritism since it requires that the norm's subjects be those who qualify as such only on the basis of the reasons for enacting the norm in the first place." Though, we must recognize teh possibility of bad law in the sense of unjust discrimination. "It is part of the concept of law that the law purports to affect human behavior by introducing new norms and changing old ones. The concept of a norm and conduct-guidance by norms is an essential aspect of what the law is. Norms, as such, necessarily purport to provide reasons for action. A norm cannot provide a reason for action, however, unless its subjets are aware of the norm and regard it as a reason for action." Justifies some retroactivity in terms of the need for flexibility in any functioning legal system. "Legal positivism can accept the claim that law is, by its very nature or its essential functions in society, something good that deserves our moral appreciation. Nor is legal positivism forced to deny the plausible claim that wherever law exists, it must have a great many prescriptions which coincide with morality. There is probably a considerable overlap, and perhaps necessarily so, between the actual content of law and morality.". (shrink)

It has become increasingly popular to argue that legal positivism is actually a normative theory, and that it cannot be purely descriptive and morally neutral as H.L.A. Hart has suggested. This article purports to disprove this line of thought. It argues that legal positivism is best understood as a descriptive, morally neutral, theory about the nature of law. The article distinguishes between five possible views about the relations between normative claims and legal positivism, arguing that some of them are not (...) at odds with Hart’s thesis about the nature of jurisprudence, while the others are wrong, both as expositions of legal positivism or as critiques of it. Legal positivism does not necessarily purport to justify any aspect of its subject matter, nor is it committed to any particular moral or political evaluations. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to show that general jurisprudence is in no need of reinvention. The sentiment shared by many contemporary legal philosophers that theories about the nature of law...

The Slavophile movement cannot be properly understood and assessed without taking into account the movement to which it opposed itself, the Westernizers. It was in close contact with the Westernize...

Following the pioneering work of David Lewis, many philosophers believe that the rationale of following a convention consists in the fact that conventions are solutions to recurrent coordination problems. Margaret Gilbert has criticised this view, offering an alternative account of the nature of conventions and their normative aspect. In this paper I argue that Gilbert's criticism of Lewis and her alternative suggestions rest on serious misunderstandings. As between these two opposed views, Lewis's is closer to the truth, but I argue (...) only with respect to one type of convention. There is another, important type of conventions, whose normativity does not consist in the solution of coordination problems. The validity of conventions constituting (what I call) autonomous practices can only be derived from the values inherent in the practices they constitute and those values cannot be specified independently of the conventions themselves. (shrink)

In this paper I am concerned with the analysis of fragments of a discourse or text that express arguments suspected of being denials of the antecedent. I first argue that one needs to distinguish between two senses of ‘the argument expressed’. Second, I show that, with respect to one of these senses, given a Gricean account of the pragmatics of conditionals, some such fragments systematically express arguments that are valid.

We review the recently proposed universal concept of dynamic complexity and its new mathematics based on the unreduced interaction problem solution. We then consider its progress-bringing applications at various levels of complex world dynamics, including complex-dynamical nanometal physics and living condensed matter, unreduced nanobiosystem dynamics and the integral medicine concept, causally complete management of complex economical and social dynamics, and the ensuing concept of truly sustainable world governance.

My paper is a reply to Mr. Seungbae Park’s article, “Defence of Cultural Relativism”, which holds that no culture is better than another. In response,my paper challenges the author’s method, fairly popular amongst some postmodern thinkers, that tends to equate cultural relativism and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Firstly, I question the general rationale of establishing an analogy between relativity and relativism. In my opinion, the analogy fails to take into accountthe very large generic distance between physics and ethics. Secondly, I (...) try to demonstrate that the analogy can be construed in two opposite ways, so that, on theone hand, it might support relativism, while on the other, it might reinforce cultural absolutism. Therefore, one would rather dispense with so equivocal an analogy. Finally, I suggest that besides cultural absolutism and cultural relativism there is also another way of assessing different cultures – I used to call it intrinsic comparison – which is based on the second options of groups and individuals rather than on their first options. The issue of how to successfully compare cultures by avoiding both absolutism and relativism was extensively dealt with by me elsewhere. (shrink)

In this note we demonstrate that the results of observations in the EPR–Bohm–Bell experiment can be described within the classical probabilistic framework. However, the “quantum probabilities” have to be interpreted as conditional probabilities, where conditioning is with respect to fixed experimental settings. Our approach is based on the complete account of randomness involved in the experiment. The crucial point is that randomness of selections of experimental settings has to be taken into account within one consistent framework covering all events related (...) to the experiment. This approach can be applied to any complex experiment in which statistical data are collected for various experimental settings. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is twofold: to demystify the ancient concept of courage, making it more palpable for the modern reader, and to suggest the reasonably specific constraints that would restrict the contemporary tendency of indiscriminate attribution of this virtue. The discussion of courage will incorporate both the classical interpretations of this trait of character, and the empirical studies into the complex relation between the emotion of fear and behavior. The Aristotelian thesis that courage consists in overcoming the fear (...) of significant harm for a worthy cause will be further developed by exploring its relevance for military professionals today. Specific criteria will be offered in order to restrict the application of the term?courageous? to a certain type of action, as well as to demarcate this virtue from the related vices, such as recklessness. The normative aspect of our study aims to make sense of what could qualify as a worthy goal of a fearless action in the modern world. It will be argued that a courageous agent aims at alleviating or preventing harm for others in a situation of potential risk for the agent himself, while respecting the factual conditions that determine the probability of success. (shrink)

When Aristotle limits the manifestation of true courage to the military context only, his primary target is an overly inclusive conception of courage presented by Plato in the Laches. At the same time, Aristotle explicitly tries to demarcate his ideal of genuine courage from the paradigmatic examples of courageous actions derived from the Homeric epics. It remains questionable, though, whether Aristotle is truly earnest in his efforts to distance himself from Homer. It will be argued that Aristotle's attempt to associate (...) with Homer the two forms of specious courage—courage of the citizen troops and spirit-caused courage—fails to provide sufficient criteria for the demarcation in question. All the essential elements of the Aristotelian account of courage, such as a voluntary choice, a noble goal, and a thumos-driven reaction guided by reason are exemplified by a number of Homeric characters as well. It is thus likely that the philosopher's account of courage largely incorporates the poetic tradition at a new level, rather than supersedes it. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Defending the distinction between believing and accepting a proposition, I argue that cases where agents allegedly exercise direct voluntary control over their beliefs are instances of agents exercising direct voluntary control over accepting a proposition. The upshot is that any decision to believe a proposition cannot result directly in one’s acquiring the belief. Accepting is an instrumental mental action the agent performs that may trigger belief. A model of the relationship between acceptance and belief is sketched and defended. The (...) consequences of the distinction between belief and acceptance, and the model of belief control sketched are then applied to the recent case made by Carl Ginet in defense of the conceptual and psychological possibility of agents exercising direct voluntary control over their beliefs. n. (shrink)

In some recent work on omissions, it has been argued that the causal theory of action cannot account for how agency is exercised in intentionally omitting to act in the same way it explains how agency is exercised in intentional action. Thus, causalism appears to provide us with an incomplete picture of intentional agency. I argue that causalists should distinguish causalism as a general theory of intentional agency from causalism as a theory of intentional action. Specifically, I argue that, while (...) intentional actions may best be understood as the causal products or outcomes of causings, we should identify exercises of intentional agency with causal processes. With a causalist account of intentional agency sketched, I respond to the challenge to causalism from omissions. I argue that when an agent intentionally omits there is a causal process that has a zero-sum outcome. But the causal process is sufficient to make it true that the agent exercises intentional agency in intentionally omitting. (shrink)

The ways in which we exercise intentional agency are varied. I take the domain of intentional agency to include all that we intentionally do versus what merely happens to us. So the scope of our intentional agency is not limited to intentional action. One can also exercise some intentional agency in omitting to act and, importantly, in producing the intentional outcome of an intentional action. So, for instance, when an agent is dieting, there is an exercise of agency both with (...) respect to the agent’s actions and omissions that constitute her dieting behavior and in achieving the intended outcome of losing weight. In our mental lives we exercise intentional agency both in performing mental actions and when we intentionally produce certain outcomes at which our mental actions are aimed. The nature and scope of our intentional agency in our mental lives with respect to controlling the acquisition of mental states such as belief, desire, and intention is a topic that is of interest in its own right. In this essay, I will focus solely on our control over coming to believe. Understanding what sort of control we have our beliefs has far-reaching implications. For instance, theorizing about self-deception and wishful thinking is aided by theorizing about what if any intentional agency we can exercise with respect to acquiring beliefs. Another often mentioned concern that motivates thinking about doxastic agency comes from religion (when conversion requires a change of belief). We also hold persons morally and epistemically responsible for beliefs they have or fail to have. Finally, some deontological theories of epistemic justification require that agents be able to exercise a robust form of doxastic control. Fruitful work on any of these problems requires that we have an account of our intentional agency in acquiring beliefs. There are at least three loci of doxastic control. The first is over acquiring beliefs. The second is over maintaining beliefs. The third is over how we use our beliefs. I am chiefly concerned with the first locus of doxastic control in this essay, but I will say something about the second locus along the way. Also, I will only consider one way we might exercise control over acquiring beliefs. Specifically, I will present an argument against direct doxastic voluntarism (DDV). By “DDV” I mean to refer to the thesis that it is conceptually possible for agents to consciously exercise the same sort of direct voluntary control over coming to acquire a doxastic attitude—such as belief, suspension of belief, and disbelief—that they exercise over uncontroversial basic actions. If DDV is correct, then coming to believe can be a basic action-type. DDV, or something very close to it, was Bernard Williams’ target in his 1973 paper, “Deciding to Believe.” Williams’s argument is widely regarded as having been a failure. But I think that Williams was on to something in his paper. Hence, in this paper, while I do not attempt to resurrect Williams’s argument, I develop and defend a revised argument for a thesis that is quite close to Williams’s. I will proceed as follows. First, I will discuss Bernard Williams’ (1973) failed attempt at showing that DDV is conceptually impossible. This will be followed by a discussion of some constraints on our belief-forming activities. I will then clarify my target a bit more than Williams does in his original paper. Finally, I will present my own argument against the conceptual possibility of DDV. (shrink)

We argue that it is most rational for God, given God's character and policies, to adopt an open-door policy towards those in hell – making it possible for those in hell to escape. We argue that such a policy towards the residents of hell should issue from God's character and motivational states. In particular, God's parental love ought to motivate God to extend the provision for reconciliation with Him for an infinite amount of time.

A few decades ago, only isolated groups of philosophers counted the phenomenon of normativity as one of their principal interests. Rules and norms have always, of course, been in the purview of moral philosophers, who often took them as exceedingly abstract entities, if not directly metaphysical. Philosophers from the border territories of philosophy and social sciences, on the other hand, were interested in more concrete norms, namely those that emerge and survive within human societies. Philosophers of law stood between these (...) two extremes, studying law as a matter of socially instituted norms which, however, might be seen as a projection of something more esoteric. The research programs of these groups of philosophers had little overlap. And for philosophers of mind, of language, or of science (with the exception of a few philosophers of social sciences, such as Peter Winch), norms were at most only of marginal interest. This situation has changed hugely over recent decades. I think the catalyst was the interest in rules and norms within the philosophy of language, which was kindled by the ongoing reception of the later Wittgenstein. Other philosophers, like Michael Dummett and Wilfrid Sellars, also deserve part of the credit. Via philosophy of language, interest in norms invaded sections of philosophy of mind, too, and the previously isolated studies of various types of norms slowly became interconnected, if not directly integrated. No wonder that more and more general studies of the nature of rules and norms are now reaching the light of day. Andrei Marmor's Social Conventions is one of the most recent contributions. Marmor sees a social convention as a specific kind of norm characterized especially by its arbitrariness. More precisely, a rule is conventional, according to the author, iff (i) some people follow it; (ii) they have a reason to follow it; and (iii) there is an alternative rule that they could have followed for the same reason. The point of departure for Marmor's analysis is David Lewis's theory of convention F1F, which, however, he considers too narrow and hence extends it considerably. Lewis's idea is that norms result from certain spontaneous processes by which society reacts to coordination problems.. (shrink)

Tommie Shelby articulates a nonideal theory of black US ghettos that casts them as consequences of an intolerably unjust institutional structure. I argue that, despite some of its significant merits, Shelby’s theory is weakened by his rejection of integration as a principle for reforming disadvantaged ghettos and correcting structural injustices in the US. In particular, I argue that Shelby unwarrantedly downplays the socio-economic efficiency of integrationist policies and fails to consider some of the ways in which integration might count as (...) a duty of justice. (shrink)