The quantitative problem of old evidence is the problem of how to measure the degree to which e confirms h for agent A at time t when A regards e as justified at t. Existing attempts to solve this problem have applied the e-difference approach, which compares A's probability for h at t with what probability A would assign h if A did not regard e as justified at t. The quantitative problem has been widely regarded as unsolvable primarily on (...) the grounds that the e-difference approach suffers from intractable problems. Various philosophers have proposed that 'Bayesianism' should be rejected as a research strategy in confirmation theory in part because of the unsolvability of this problem. I develop a version of the e-difference approach which overcomes these problems and possesses various advantages (but also certain limitations). I develop an alternative 'theistic' approach which handles many cases that my development of the e-difference approach does not handle. I conclude with an assessment of the significance of the quantitative problem for Bayesianism and argue that this problem is misunderstood in so far as it is regarded as unsolvable, and in so far as it is regarded as a problem only for Bayesians. (shrink)

Over ten years ago Professor A. E. Taylor pointed out that one of the most unfortunate effects of that philosophical conquest of England by Germany in the nineteenth century was the almost complete neglect of the great line of British moralists from Cumberland to Price. Little has been done since then to remedy this defect. There is a widespread study of Bishop Butler by students in our Universities, but as regards the other members of the series, there appear no signs (...) of a renaissance. The selections of Mr. Selby-Bigge are admirable, but they serve, as all selections from the authors of a period must, to focus attention on historical similarities, not to stimulate to an examination of individual philosophies. (shrink)

Sherrilyn Roush's Tracking Truth provides a sustained and ambitious development of the basic idea that knowledge is true belief that tracks the truth. In this essay, I provide a quick synopsis of Roush's book and offer a substantive discussion of her analysis of scientific evidence. Roush argues that, for e to serve as evidence for h, it should be easier to determine the truth value of e than it is to determine the truth value of h, an ideal she refers (...) to as ‘leverage’. She defends a detailed method by which the value of p(h/e) is computed without ‘direct’ information about p(h) but only using evidence about the value of p(e), from which the value of p(h) is derived. She presents an example of how to use her leverage method, which I argue involves a certain critical mistake. I show how the leveraging method can be used in a way that is sound—I conclude with a few remarks about the importance of distinguishing clearly between prior and posterior probabilities. (shrink)

I argue, first, that the deprived individuals whose predicaments Nussbaum cites as examples of "adaptive preference" do not in fact prefer the conditions of their lives to what we should regard as more desirable alternatives, indeed that we believe they are badly off precisely because they are not living the lives they would prefer to live if they had other options and were aware of them. Secondly, I argue that even where individuals in deprived circumstances acquire tastes for conditions that (...) we regard as bad, they are typically better off having their acquired preferences satisfied. If they are badly off it is because they cannot get what we and they, would regard as more desirable alternatives. Preference utilitarianism explains why individuals in such circumstances are badly off whether they have adapted to their deprived circumstances or not. Even if they prefer the conditions of their lives to all other available alternatives, most would prefer alternatives that are not available to them which would, on the preferentist account, make them better off. And that, on the preferentist account, is the basis for a radical critique of unjust institutions that limit people's options and prevent them from getting what they want. (shrink)

Presence as ordinarily understood requires spatio-temporal proximity. If however Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is understood in this way it would take a miracle to secure multiple location and an additional miracle to cover it up so that the presence of Christ where the Eucharist was celebrated made no empirical difference. And, while multiple location is logically possible, such metaphysical miracles—miracles of distinction without difference, which have no empirical import—are problematic. I propose an account of Eucharist according to which Christ (...) is indeed really and objectively present in the religiously required sense, without benefit of metaphysical miracles. According to the proposed account, which draws upon Searle’s discussion of “social ontology” in The Construction of Social Reality and The Making of the Social World, the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is an institutional fact. I argue that such an account satisfies the requirements for a real presence doctrine. (shrink)

_Rabghūzī’s_ _Stories of the Prophets_, written in Khwarezmian Turkish (14th century) contains an account of the life of the biblical prophets and of the Prophet Muḥammed.

Nozick’s Experience Machine thought experiment is generally taken to make a compelling, if not conclusive, case against philosophical hedonism. I argue that it does not and, indeed, that regardless of the results, it cannot provide any reason to accept or reject either hedonism or any other philosophical account of wellbeing since it presupposes preferentism, the desire-satisfaction account ofwellbeing. Preferentists cannot take any comfort from the results of such thought experiments because they assume preferentism and therefore cannot establish it. Neither can (...) anyone else, since only a preferentist should accept the terms of the thought experiment. (shrink)

The doctrine that Christ is really present in the Eucharist appears to entail that Christ's body is not only multiply located but present in different ways at different locations. Moreover, the doctrine poses an even more difficult meta-question: what makes a theological explanation of the Eucharist a ‘real presence’ account? Aquinas's defence of transubstantiation, perhaps the paradigmatic account, invokes Aristotelian metaphysics and the machinery of Scholastic philosophy. My aim is not to produce a ‘rational reconstruction’ of his analysis but rather (...) to suggest a metaphysically innocent alternative that will ‘save the phenomena’ of religious belief and practice.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.The real presenceVolume 49, Issue 1H. E. BABER DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412512000121Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. The real presenceVolume 49, Issue 1H. E. BABER DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412512000121Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. The real presenceVolume 49, Issue 1H. E. BABER DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412512000121Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

It is difficult to reconcile claims about the Father's role as the progenitor of Trinitarian Persons with commitment to the equality of the persons, a problem that is especially acute for Social Trinitarians. I propose a metatheological account of the doctrine of the Trinity that facilitates the reconciliation of these two claims. On the proposed account, ‘Father’ is systematically ambiguous. Within economic contexts, those which characterize God's relation to the world, ‘Father’ refers to the First Person of the Trinity; within (...) theological contexts, which purport to describe intra-Trinitarian relations, it refers to the Trinity in toto-thus in holding that the Son and Holy Spirit proceed from the Father we affirm that the Trinity is the source and unifying principle of Trinitarian Persons. While this account is solves a nagging problem for Social Trinitarians it is theologically minimalist to the extent that it is compatible with both Social Trinitarianism and Latin Trinitarianism, and with heterodox Modalist and Tri-theist doctrines as well. Its only theological cost is incompatibility with the Filioque Clause, the doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son—and arguably that may be a benefit. (shrink)

Prima facie, relative identity looks like a perfect fit for the doctrine of the Trinity since it allows us to say that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each of which is a Trinitarian Person, are the same God but not the same Person. Nevertheless, relative identity solutions to logic puzzles concerning the doctrine of the Trinity have not, in recent years, been much pursued. Critics worry that relative identity accounts are unintuitive, uninformative or unintelligible. I suggest that the relative (...) identity account is worth a second look and argue that it provides a coherent account of the doctrine of the Trinity. (shrink)

Rabgūzī’s Stories of the Prophets , written in Khwarezmian Turkish contains an account of the life of the biblical prophets and of the Prophet Muḥammed.

Dion is a human person, Lefty is his left foot, and Theon is Lefty-Complement, a proper part of Dion. Lefty is annihilated and Dion survives left-footless. After Lefty’s annihilation Theon, if he survives, occupies the same region as Dion. I suggest that this scenario be understood as a fusion case in which Dion and Theon, initially overlapping but distinct, are identical after Lefty’s annihilation and propose an account of proper names that allows us to say that Dion and Theon have (...) ‘become identical’ without commitment to occasional identity or other controversial metaphysical doctrines. The proposed solution employs the semantics developed by Wolfgang Schwarz to address the ‘paradox of occasional identity’, posed by puzzle cases of fission, to deal with the problem of Dion and Theon, a body-minus puzzle. (shrink)

Is Utilitarianism Bad for Women? Philosophers and policy-makers concerned with the ethics, economics, and politics of development argue that the phenomenon of ‘adaptive preference’ makes preference-utilitarian measures of well-being untenable. Poor women in the Global South, they suggest, adapt to deprivation and oppression and may come to prefer states of affairs that are not conducive to flourishing. This critique, however, assumes a questionable understanding of preference utilitarianism and, more fundamentally, of the concept of preference that figures in such accounts. If (...) well-being is understood as preference-satisfaction it is easy to see why poor women in the Global South are badly off: even if they do not desire more favorable conditions they nevertheless prefer them, and that preference is not satisfied. Preferentism provides a rationale for improving economic conditions and dismantling the unjust institutions that prevent them from climbing higher on their preference-rankings. Utilitarianism, therefore, insofar as utility is understood as preference satisfaction, is good for women. (shrink)

Diachronic identity is understood as an identity holding between something existing at one time and something existing at another time. On the stage view, however, ordinary objects are instantaneous stages that do not exist at other times so diachronic identity is, at best, problematic. On account proposed here a name does not, as Sider and others suggest, denote a stage concurrent with its utterance. Rather, at any time, t, a name of an ordinary object designates a stage-at-t as its primary (...) referent and refers indeterminately over it and all and only those stages counterpart-related to it—its reference class at t. At any time, t, a at t1 is the same object as b at t2 iff for every stage x counterpart-related to a’s stage-at t and every stage y counterpart-related to b’s stage-at-t, x=y. Diachronic identity statements, therefore, assert strict identities—between concurrent stages. Ordinarily names select the same reference classes at every time so, in ordinary cases, identity statements are not ‘occasional’. In fission cases names select different reference classes at different times. Where a becomes b and c, at any pre-fission time ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’ have same the primary referent and so select the same reference class—therefore, before fission b is the same object as c. At any post-fission time ‘b’ and ‘c’ select different reference classes—so after fission b is not the same object as c. Identity is not occasional but, in extraordinary cases, identity statements are—because reference is. (shrink)

A certain familiar but “deep” joke, which might be called “The Tattletale’s Paradox,” embodies a logical confusion that figures crucially in some discussions of substantive philosophical issues. “I can’t tell you the secret,” it runs, “because if I did it wouldn’t be a secret.” It is easy enough to detect the trick involved here: to tell a secret is not to make known a piece of information that is a secret at the time that it is revealed, but rather to (...) tell a story which was a secret but ceases to be one in the telling. The air of paradox arises insofar as we confuse the two claims. (shrink)

Most contemporary societies are ethnically and culturally diverse. Responding to diversity is a challenge--for the United States, a 'nation of immigrants', for post-colonial states of the global south, cobbled together from diverse ethnic groups, and for European nations experiencing mass immigration.