À propos de la « pensée 68 » selon Serge AudierComme tous les dix ans, l’anniversaire de Mai 68 a donné lieu à un déluge de publications ; et, comme tous les dix ans, il fallait qu’émerge de la masse une poignée de titres qui dispenseraient de regarder les autres. Celui de Serge Audier fit partie de ceux-là, avec son titre accrocheur et toutes les apparences d’une grosse étude sérieuse sur un pan de l’histoire intellectuelle récen..

For a novice this book is a mathematically-oriented introduction to modal logic, the discipline within mathematical logic studying mathematical models of reasoning which involve various kinds of modal operators. It starts with very fundamental concepts and gradually proceeds to the front line of current research, introducing in full details the modern semantic and algebraic apparatus and covering practically all classical results in the field. It contains both numerous exercises and open problems, and presupposes only minimal knowledge in mathematics. A specialist (...) can use the book as a source of references. Results and methods of many directions in propositional modal logic, from completeness and duality to algorithmic problems, are collected and systematically presented in one volume. (shrink)

This new edition of Alexander Miller’s highly readable introduction to contemporary metaethics provides a critical overview of the main arguments and themes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century contemporary metaethics. Miller traces the development of contemporary debates in metaethics from their beginnings in the work of G. E. Moore up to the most recent arguments between naturalism and non-naturalism, cognitivism and non-cognitivism. From Moore’s attack on ethical naturalism, A. J. Ayer’s emotivism and Simon Blackburn’s quasi-realism to anti-realist and best opinion accounts (...) of moral truth and the non-reductionist naturalism of the ‘Cornell realists’, this book addresses all the key theories and ideas in this field. As well as revisiting the whole terrain with revised and updated guides to further reading, Miller also introduces major new sections on the revolutionary fictionalism of Richard Joyce and the hermeneutic fictionalism of Mark Kalderon. The new edition will continue to be essential reading for students, teachers and professional philosophers with an interest in contemporary metaethics. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that a distinction ought to be drawn between two ways in which a given world might be logically impossible. First, a world w might be impossible because the laws that hold at w are different from those that hold at some other world (say the actual world). Second, a world w might be impossible because the laws of logic that hold in some world (say the actual world) are violated at w. We develop a novel (...) way of modelling logical possibility that makes room for both kinds of logical impossibility. Doing so has interesting implications for the relationship between logical possibility and other kinds of possibility (for example, metaphysical possibility) and implications for the necessity or contingency of the laws of logic. (shrink)

The rule-following debate, in its concern with the metaphysics and epistemology of linguistic meaning and mental content, goes to the heart of the most fundamental questions of contemporary philosophy of mind and language. This volume gathers together the most important contributions to the topic, including papers by Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Graeme Forbes, Warren Goldfarb, Paul Horwich, John McDowell, Colin McGinn, Ruth Millikan, Philip Pettit, George Wilson, and José Zalabardo. This debate has centred on Saul Kripke's reading of the rule-following (...) sections in Wittgenstein and his consequent posing of a "sceptical paradox" that threatens our every day notions of linguistic meaning and mental content. These essays are attempts to respond to this challenge and represent some of the most important work in contemporary theory of meaning. They examine the notion of meaning; whether it is possible to find a suitable meaning-constituting fact from our previous behaviour or mental histories; objections to, and defenses of, dispositional accounts of meaning; the plausibility of non-factualism about meaning; our attempts to develop non-reductionist accounts of meaning; and the sources of the normativity which attaches to meaning, such as the linguistic practice of the community or the dispositions of the individual. With an introductory essay and a comprehensive guide to further reading the book is an excellent resource for courses in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, Wittgenstein, and metaphysics, as well as for all philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists with interests in these areas. Contributors include Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Graeme Forbes, Warren Goldfarb, Paul Horwich, John McDowell, Colin McGinn, Alexander Miller, Ruth Garrett Millikan, Philip Pettit, George. M. Wilson, Crispin Wright, and José L. Zalabardo. (shrink)

One powerful argument for dualism is provided by Chalmers: the ‘zombie’ or conceivability argument. This paper aims to establish that if one adopts the ‘Powerful Qualities’ account of properties developed by Martin and Heil, this argument can be resisted at the first premise: the claim that zombies are conceivable is, by the lights of Chalmers’ own account of conceivability, false. The Powerful Qualities account is outlined. Chalmers’ argument, and several distinctions which underlie it, are explained. It is argued that to (...) make sense of the claim that zombies are conceivable, some account of properties must be given. The paper’s central claim is presented and defended from potential responses: given the Powerful Qualities view, zombies are in fact inconceivable. Finally, an error theory is presented, which offers an explanation of why so many have taken the conceivability of zombies to be unproblematic, and the view is briefly contrasted with Russellian monism. (shrink)

Geach points out that some pairs of beliefs have a common focus despite there being, apparently, no object at that focus. For example, two or more beliefs can be directed at Vulcan even though there is no such planet. Geach introduced the label ‘intentional identity’ to pick out the relation that holds between attitudes in these cases; Geach says that ’[w]e have intentional identity when a number of people, or one person on different occasions, have attitudes with a common focus, (...) whether or not there actually is something at that focus’. In this paper, I propose a novel theory of intentional identity, the triangulation theory, and argue that it has considerable advantages over its principal rivals. My approach centers on agents’ metarepresentational beliefs about what it takes for intentional attitudes to be about particular objects. (shrink)

The willful ignorance doctrine says defendants should sometimes be treated as if they know what they don't. This book provides a careful defense of this method of imputing mental states. Though the doctrine is only partly justified and requires reform, it also demonstrates that the criminal law needs more legal fictions of this kind. The resulting theory of when and why the criminal law can pretend we know what we don't has far-reaching implications for legal practice and reveals a pressing (...) need for change. (shrink)

As the USA contends with another surge in COVID-19 cases, hospitals may soon need to answer the unresolved question of who lives and dies when ventilator demand exceeds supply. Although most triage policies in the USA have seemingly converged on the use of clinical need and benefit as primary criteria for prioritisation, significant differences exist between institutions in how to assign priority to patients with identical medical prognoses: the so-called ‘tie-breaker’ situations. In particular, one’s status as a frontline healthcare worker (...) has been a proposed criterion for prioritisation in the event of a tie. This article outlines two major grounds for reconsidering HCW prioritisation. The first recognises trust as an indispensable element of clinical care and mistrust as a hindrance to any public health strategy against the virus, thus raising concerns about the outward appearance of favouritism. The second considers the ways in which proponents of HCW prioritisation deviate from the very ‘ethics frameworks’ that often preface triage policies and serve to guide resource allocation—a rhetorical strategy that may undermine the very ethical foundations on which triage policies stand. By appealing to trust and consistency, we re-examine existing arguments in favour of HCW prioritisation and provide a more tenable justification for adjudicating on tie-breaker events during crisis standards of care. (shrink)

This paper concerns Kripke’s puzzle about belief. I have two goals in this paper. The first is to argue that two leading approaches to Kripke’s puzzle, those of Lewis and Chalmers, are inadequate as they stand. Both approaches require the world to supply an object that the relevant intentional attitudes pick out. The problem is that there are cases which, I argue, exhibit the very same puzzling phenomenon in which the world does not supply an object in the required way. (...) The second goal is to draw out a more general lesson about Kripke’s puzzle. I argue that Kripke’s puzzle should be understood as intimately related to a phenomenon known as ‘intentional identity’, and that an adequate account of Kripke’s puzzle should be extensible to cases in which the relevant attitudes are empty. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of results concerning embeddings of intuitionistic propositional logic and its extensions into various classical modal systems.

To understand the future of informed consent, we should pay attention to two ethical-legal sources in addition to the revised Common Rule. Physicians acting as investigators and patients serving as research subjects bring to that relationship a long history regarding consent to treatment, and everyone dealing with research ethics needs to be aware of the Nuremberg Code and other human-rights documents. These three streams make separate and distinctly different contributions to informed consent doctrine.

The ‘adjustment strategy’ currently seems to be the most common approach to incorporating objective elements into one's theory of well‐being. These theories face a certain problem, however, which can be avoided by a different approach – namely, that employed by ‘partially objective multi‐component theories.’ Several such theories have recently been proposed, but the question of how to understand their mathematical structure has not been adequately addressed. I argue that the most mathematically simple of these multi‐component theories fails, so I proceed (...) to investigate more sophisticated ways to formulate such a theory. I conclude that one of these – the Discount/Inflation Theory – is particularly promising. (shrink)

Despite the ever-changing field of artificial intelligence (AI) and its preponderance of pre-print articles, Cohen offers a timely, nuanced, and self-aware overview of ChatGPT and the world of Larg...

_Laruelle_ is one of the first books in English to undertake in an extended critical survey of the work of the idiosyncratic French thinker François Laruelle, the promulgator of non-standard philosophy. Laruelle, who was born in 1937, has recently gained widespread recognition, and Alexander R. Galloway suggests that readers may benefit from colliding Laruelle’s concept of the One with its binary counterpart, the Zero, to explore more fully the relationship between philosophy and the digital. In _Laruelle_, Galloway argues that (...) the digital is a philosophical concept and not simply a technical one, employing a detailed analysis of Laruelle to build this case while referencing other thinkers in the French and Continental traditions, including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant. In order to explain clearly Laruelle’s concepts such as the philosophical decision and the principle of sufficient philosophy, Galloway lays a broad foundation with his discussions of “the One” as it has developed in continental philosophy, the standard model of philosophy, and how philosophers view “the digital.” Digital machines dominate today’s world, while so-called digital thinking—that is, binary thinking such as presence and absence or self and world—is often synonymous with what it means to think at all. In examining Laruelle and digitality together, Galloway shows how Laruelle remains a profoundly non-digital thinker—perhaps the only non-digital thinker today—and engages in an extensive discussion on the interconnections between media, philosophy, and technology. (shrink)

Some use the need to explain communication, agreement, and disagreement to argue for two-dimensional conceptions of belief content. One prominent defender of an account of this sort is David Chalmers. Chalmers claims that beliefs have two kinds of content. The second dimension of belief content, which is tied to what beliefs pick out in the actual world, is supposed to help explain communication, agreement, and disagreement. I argue that it does not. Since the need to explain these phenomena is the (...) main stated motivation for the addition of the second dimension of belief content, my arguments also undermine the motivation for Chalmers’ two-dimensional account of belief content and theories like it. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of results concerning the disjunction property, Halldén-completeness, and other related properties of intermediate prepositional logics and normal modal logics containing S4.

Always connect—that is the imperative of today’s media. But what about those moments when media cease to function properly, when messages go beyond the sender and receiver to become excluded from the world of communication itself—those messages that state: “There will be no more messages”? In this book, Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark turn our usual understanding of media and mediation on its head by arguing that these moments reveal the ways the impossibility of communication is (...) integral to communication itself—instances they call excommunication. In three linked essays, _Excommunication_ pursues this elusive topic by looking at mediation in the face of banishment, exclusion, and heresy, and by contemplating the possibilities of communication with the great beyond. First, Galloway proposes an original theory of mediation based on classical literature and philosophy, using Hermes, Iris, and the Furies to map out three of the most prevalent modes of mediation today—mediation as exchange, as illumination, and as network. Then, Thacker goes boldly beyond Galloway’s classification scheme by examining the concept of excommunication through the secret link between the modern horror genre and medieval mysticism. Charting a trajectory of examples from H. P. Lovecraft to Meister Eckhart, Thacker explores those instances when one communicates or connects with the inaccessible, dubbing such modes of mediation “haunted” or “weird” to underscore their inaccessibility. Finally, Wark evokes the poetics of the infuriated swarm as a queer politics of heresy that deviates from both media theory and the traditional left. He posits a critical theory that celebrates heresy and that is distinct from those that now venerate Saint Paul. Reexamining commonplace definitions of media, mediation, and communication, _Excommunication_ offers a glimpse into the realm of the nonhuman to find a theory of mediation adequate to our present condition. (shrink)

American criminal law is committed to some version of the doctrine of double effect. In this paper, I defend a new variant of the agent-centered rationale for a version of DDE that is of particular relevance to the criminal law. In particular, I argue for a non-absolute version of DDE that concerns the relative culpability of intending a bad or wrongful state of affairs as opposed to bringing it about merely knowingly. My aim is to identify a particular feature of (...) the former in virtue of which it is pro tanto more culpable than the latter. Providing an agent-centered argument of this kind for a culpability version of DDE, I argue, is an especially attractive route to take for those who are interested in vindicating the way the criminal law actually encodes DDE. (shrink)

One recently popular way to characterise strong emergence is to say that emergent entities possess novel causal powers. However, there is little agreement concerning the nature of powers. One controversy involves whether powers are single- or multi-track; that is, whether each power has only one manifestation type, or whether a single power can be directed towards a number of distinct manifestations. Another concerns how powers operate: whether a lone power manifests when triggered by the presence of a suitable stimulus, or (...) whether powers operate mutually such that several powers must ‘work together’ to bring about a particular manifestation. This paper examines how these distinctions—which can be cross-combined to frame four distinct accounts of the nature of powers—bear on the debate between emergentists and reductionists. (shrink)

Hausman and McPherson defend welfare economics by claiming that even if welfare does not consist in preference satisfaction, preferences still provide good, if fallible, evidence of welfare. I argue that this strategy does not yet fully solve the problems for welfare economics stemming from the preference satisfaction theory of welfare. More work is needed to show that our self-interested preferences are sufficiently reliable, or in some other sense our best, evidence of well-being. Thus, my aim is to identify the challenges (...) that remain and clarify what additional work is needed before Hausman and McPherson's defence of welfare economics succeeds. (shrink)

This book explores a range of traditional and contemporary metaphysical themes that figure in the writings of E. J. Lowe, whose powerful and influential work was still developing at the time of his death in 2015. Leading philosophers present new essays on topics to do with ontology, necessity, existence, and mental causation.

The criminal law declines to punish merely for bad attitudes that are not properly manifested in action. One might try to explain this on practical grounds, but these attempts do not justify the law’s commitment to never punishing unmanifested mental states in worlds relevantly similar to ours. Instead, a principled explanation is needed. A more promising explanation thus is that one cannot be criminally culpable merely for unmanifested bad attitudes. However, the leading theory of criminal culpability has trouble making good (...) on this claim. This is the theory that an action is criminally culpable to the extent that it manifests insufficient regard for legally protected interests. The trouble is that this theory’s defenders have not adequately explained what it is for an action to manifest insufficient regard. In this paper, I aim to provide the required account of manifestation, thereby rendering the insufficient regard theory more defensible. This, in turn, allows the view to explain the broad range of doctrines that treat unmanifested mental states as irrelevant. The resulting theory of criminal culpability is both descriptively plausible and normatively attractive. Moreover, it highlights the continuity between criminal culpability and moral blameworthiness by showing how the former functions as a stripped-down analogue of the latter. (shrink)

Whether causing flash crashes in financial markets, purchasing illegal drugs, or running over pedestrians, AI is increasingly engaging in activity that would be criminal for a natural person, or even an artificial person like a corporation. We argue that criminal law falls short in cases where an AI causes certain types of harm and there are no practically or legally identifiable upstream criminal actors. This Article explores potential solutions to this problem, focusing on holding AI directly criminally liable where it (...) is acting autonomously and irreducibly. Conventional wisdom holds that punishing AI is incongruous with basic criminal law principles such as the capacity for culpability and the requirement of a guilty mind. -/- Drawing on analogies to corporate and strict criminal liability, as well as familiar imputation principles, we show how a coherent theoretical case can be constructed for AI punishment. AI punishment could result in general deterrence and expressive benefits, and it need not run afoul of negative limitations such as punishing in excess of culpability. Ultimately, however, punishing AI is not justified, because it might entail significant costs and it would certainly require radical legal changes. Modest changes to existing criminal laws that target persons, together with potentially expanded civil liability, are a better solution to AI crime. (shrink)

[Alan Weir] This paper addresses the problem of how to account for objective content-for the distinction between how we actually apply terms and the conditions in which we ought to apply them-from within a naturalistic framework. Though behaviourist or dispositionalist approaches are generally held to be unsuccessful in naturalising objective content or 'normativity', I attempt to restore the credibility of such approaches by sketching a behaviouristic programme for explicating objective content. /// [Alexander Miller] Paul Boghossian (1989, 1990) has argued, (...) on grounds concerning the holistic nature of belief fixation, that there are principled reasons for thinking that 'optimal conditions' versions of reductive dispositionalism about content cannot hope to satisfy a condition of extensional accuracy. I discern three separable strands of argument in Boghossian's work-the circularity objection, the open-endedness objection, and the certification objection-and argue that each of these objections fails. My conclusion is that for all that Boghossian has shown, 'optimal conditions' versions of reductive dispositionalism have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration and Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway, bertil.tungodden{at}nhh.no ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Liberal egalitarian theories of justice argue that inequalities arising from non-responsibility factors should be eliminated, but that inequalities arising from responsibility factors should be accepted. This article discusses how the fairness argument for redistribution within a liberal egalitarian framework is affected by a relocation of the cut between responsibility and non-responsibility factors. The article also discusses the claim (...) that equalization of some non-responsibility factors will reduce the ideal level of redistribution. Key Words: responsibility • liberal egalitarianism • redistribution. (shrink)

A country's right to levy taxes is a fundamental aspect of its sovereignty. Without the power to tax, a government would be unable to redistribute resources among its citizens and provide public goods. The question of how tax rights should be distributed is therefore one of the oldest and most important problems of tax theory. Increased international economic integration has made this question even more important, as a larger share of economic transactions take place across national borders, giving rise to (...) situations in which more than one country is able to tax the same base.How such conflicts are resolved affects both the ability of countries to redistribute resources domestically and the international distribution of tax revenues. The allocation of tax rights therefore raises important questions of distributive justice, questions that require a normative theory of the right to tax. This essay seeks to evaluate the current distribution of tax rights by examining whether it can in fact be justified within the main approaches to distributive justice. (shrink)

Science, and with it our understanding of evolutionary processes, is itself undergoing evolution. The evolutionary framework still most frequently used by the general public to describe and guide processes of societal development is erroneously grounded in Darwinian perspectives or, at the very least, draws facile analogies from biological evolution. The present inquiry incorporates fresh insights on the general systemic nature of developmental dynamics from the most recent advances in the transdisciplinary realm of the sciences of complexity (e.g., general evolution theory, (...) cybernetics, information and communication theory, chaos theory, dynamical systems theory, and nonequilibrium thermodynamics). The description of the evolutionary trajectory of complex dynamical systems as irreversible, periodically chaotic, and strongly nonlinear agrees with certain features of the historical processes of societal development. But there are additional features of the evolutionary dynamic of natural systems that are seldom portrayed as part of human developmental deportment. These features include elements such as the convergence of existing systems at progressively higher levels of organization, the increasingly efficient utilization of environmental energy, and the complexification of system structures in states that are progressively further removed from chemical and thermodynamic equilibria. The sciences of complexity offer insight into the laws and dynamics that govern the evolution of complex systems across a variety of disciplinary areas of investigation. Through a study of the isomorphisms across disciplinary constructs in the theoretical analyses of the principles governing the evolution of human societies, it is possible to enrich the account of developmental dynamics at the socio-civilizational level. Such an account would further our understanding of the phenomenon of societal development and provide the means for the purposeful guidance of this phenomenon in accordance with general evolutionary principles. This article sets forth the type of considerations, and outlines a general research agenda, for inquiry toward an operational model of the evolutionary development of social systems. (shrink)

Those inquiring into the nature of mind have long been interested in the foundations of mathematics, and conversely this branch of knowledge is distinctive in that our access to it is purely through thought. A better understanding of mathematical thought should clarify the conceptual foundations of mathematics, and a deeper grasp of the latter should in turn illuminate the powers of mind through which mathematics is made available to us. The link between conceptions of mind and of mathematics has been (...) a central theme running through the great competing philosophies of mathematics of the twentieth century, though each has refashioned the connection and its import in distinctive ways. The present collection will be of interest to students of both mathematics and of mind. Contents include: "Introduction" by Alexander George; "What is Mathematics About?" by Michael Dummett; "The Advantages of Honest Toil over Theft" by George Boolos; "The Law of Excluded Middle and the Axiom of Choice" by W.W. Tait; "Mechanical Procedures and Mathematical Experience" by Wilfried Sieg; "Mathematical Intuition and Objectivity" by Daniel Isaacson; "Intuition and Number" by Charles Parsons; and "Hilbert's Axiomatic Method and the Laws of Thought" by Michael Hallett. (shrink)

Courts commonly allow willful ignorance to satisfy the knowledge element of a crime. The traditional rationale for this doctrine is that willfully ignorant misconduct is just as culpable as knowing misconduct. But it is not obvious that this “equal culpability thesis” holds across the board. Is it true in all cases of willful ignorance or only some? This is the question I investigate here. -/- Specifically, I argue against several common versions of the equal culpability thesis before defending my own (...) restricted version. First, I argue that the broadest version of the thesis, adopted by many courts, is overinclusive. Then I argue against several restricted versions of the thesis offered by legal theorists including Doug Husak, David Luban, and Deborah Hellman. My own account, by contrast, is premised on a duty of reasonable investigation. If my account is on the right track, the widely employed willful ignorance doctrine stands in need of reform. (shrink)

The clinical clerkships in medical school are the first formal opportunity for trainees to apply bioethics concepts to clinical encounters. These clerkships are also typically trainees’ first sustained exposure to the “reality” of working in clinical teams and the full force of the challenges and ethical tensions of clinical care. We have developed a specialized, embedded ethics curriculum for Vanderbilt University medical students during their second year to address the unique experience of trainees’ first exposure to clinical care. Our embedded (...) curriculum is centered around core “ethics competencies” specific to the clerkship: for Medicine, advanced planning and end-of-life discussions; for Surgery, informed consent; for Pediatrics, the patient-family-provider triad; for Obstetrics and Gynecology, women’s autonomy, unborn child’s interests, and partner’s rights; and for Neurology/Psychiatry, decision-making capacity. In this paper, we present the rationale for these competencies, how we integrated them into the clerkships, and how we assessed these competencies. We also review the additional ethical issues that have been identified by rotating students in each clerkship and discuss our strategies for continued evolution of our ethics curriculum. (shrink)

When young children confront a vast array of adults' testimonial claims, they should decide which testimony to endorse. If they are unable to immediately verify the content of testimonial assertions, children adopt or reject their informants' statements on the basis of forming trust in the sources of testimony. This kind of trust needs to be based on some underlying reasons. The rational choice theory, which currently dominates the social, cognitive, and psychological sciences, posits that trust should be formed on a (...) rational basis, as a result of probabilistic assessments and utility‐maximizing calculations. In this paper, the predictions stemming from the rational choice approach to trust are systematically compared with the empirical evidence from the field of developmental psychology on how children establish their trust in testimonial statements. The results of this comparison demonstrate an obvious inadequacy of the rational choice explanation of the emergence and development of children's testimonial trust, regardless of which form of trust rationality—weighting, threshold, or ordering—is examined. As none of the three forms of rationality of children's trust in testimony squares with the empirical data, this paper introduces a new version of trust rationality, adaptively rational trust. It explores the compatibility of the concept of adaptively rational trust with the recent empirical findings in the area of developmental psychology and addresses some avenues for future research on the rationality of testimonial trust. (shrink)

An overview of the concept of Strong Emergence, and a summary of the papers within the special issue.