I defend the acceptance principle for testimony (APT), that hearers are justified in accepting testimony unless they have positive evidence against its reliability, against Elizabeth Fricker's local reductionist view. Local reductionism, the doctrine that hearers need evidence that a particular piece of testimony is reliable if they are to be justified in believing it, must on pain of scepticism be complemented by a principle that grants default justification to some testimony; I argue that (APT) is the principle required. I consider (...) two alternative weaker principles as complements to local reductionism; one yields counter-intuitive results unless we accept (APT) as well, while the other is too weak to enable local reductionism to avoid scepticism. (shrink)

The knowledge account of assertion holds that it is improper to assert that p unless the speaker knows that p. This paper argues against the knowledge account of assertion; there is no general norm that the speaker must know what she asserts. I argue that there are cases in which it can be entirely proper to assert something that you do not know. In addition, it is possible to explain the cases that motivate the knowledge account by postulating a general (...) norm that assertions would be true, combined with conversational norms that govern all speech acts. A theory on which proper assertions must be true explains the data better than a theory on which proper assertions must be known to be true. (shrink)

I defend the acceptance principle for testimony (APT), that hearers are justified in accepting testimony unless they have positive evidence against its reliability, against Elizabeth Fricker's local reductionist view. Local reductionism, the doctrine that hearers need evidence that a particular piece of testimony is reliable if they are to be justified in believing it, must on pain of scepticism be complemented by a principle that grants default justification to some testimony; I argue that (APT) is the principle required. I consider (...) two alternative weaker principles as complements to local reductionism; one yields counter-intuitive results unless we accept (APT) as well, while the other is too weak to enable local reductionism to avoid scepticism. (shrink)

Testimony is an indispensable way of gaining knowledge and also a voluntary act for which the teller can be held responsible. This dissertation analyzes these two aspects of testimony, the epistemological and the normative. Indeed, it argues that these two aspects cannot be separated: A satisfactory account of testimony's epistemology must allow for testimony's normative status, while an account of testimony's normative status can be derived from testimony's epistemology. ;Epistemologically, the general reliability of testimony should be treated differently from the (...) reliability of particular pieces of testimony. We are justified in believing that testimony is generally reliable, without needing evidence to that effect. This avoids the problems that would arise from attempting to gather evidence for testimony's general reliability. Particular pieces of testimony, however, can only provide a justification for belief by providing evidence for what is told. This view about particular pieces of testimony faces the problem of how the teller can present her testimony as evidence while accepting responsibility for it, and how the hearer can take testimony as evidence while holding the hearer responsible for it. ;To solve this problem, I give an account, based on inference to the best explanation, of the specific way testimony provides evidence for what is told. To see testimony as evidence for what is told, we must explain it in terms of the reasons people have for choosing to say one thing rather than another. On this account, the evidence that testimony provides depends on the teller's choice to assume responsibility for her testimony, rather than precluding that assumption of responsibility. ;On the other hand, the epistemology of testimony imposes certain norms on the act of telling someone something. The teller is responsible for the truth of her testimony, in that she stakes her future credibility on its truth. Loss of credibility would count as a sanction for violating the responsibility to tell the truth, because a teller ordinarily intends her testimony to be believed. This responsibility to tell the truth is derived from the epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

This essay critically examines the Assurance View of testimony as put forth by Angus Ross (1986) and Richard Moran (1999). The Assurance View holds that someone who offers testimony gives the hearer a non-evidential justification for belief by assuming responsibility for the truth of her testimony. I agree that testimonial justification depends on the teller’s assumption of her responsibility for her testimony, but argue that it is nevertheless evidential justification. Testimonial justification is a sort of evidence that is within the (...) teller’s power to create or withhold at will, and that power is essential to the justification. (shrink)

John N. Williams (1994) and Matthew Weiner (2005) invoke predictions in order to undermine the normative relevance of knowledge for assertions; in particular, Weiner argues, predictions are important counterexamples to the Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA). I argue here that they are not true counterexamples at all, a point that can be agreed upon even by those who reject KAA.

In this paper I argue against a criticism by Matthew Weiner to Grice’s thesis that cancellability is a necessary condition for conversational implicature. I argue that the purported counterexamples fail because the supposed failed cancellation in the cases Weiner presents is not meant as a cancellation but as a reinforcement of the implicature. I moreover point out that there are special situations in which the supposed cancellation may really work as a cancellation.

Recently attention has been paid to the epistemic requirements for proper assertion. The most popular account has been the knowledge account, that we can only properly assert what we know. Others have criticized the knowledge account and argued that the norm of assertion is truth, belief, or assertion of what it is reasonable to believe.

We suggest a rigorous theory of how objective single-case transition probabilities fit into our world. The theory combines indeterminism and relativity in the “branching space–times” pattern, and relies on the existing theory of causae causantes (originating causes). Its fundamental suggestion is that (at least in simple cases) the probabilities of all transitions can be computed from the basic probabilities attributed individually to their originating causes. The theory explains when and how one can reasonably infer from the probabilities of one “chance (...) set-up” to the probabilities of another such set-up that is located far away. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the neglected question of justice between states in the distribution of responsibility for refugees. I argue that a just distribution of refugees across states is an important normative goal and, accordingly, I attempt to rethink the normative foundations of the global refugee regime. I show that because dismantling the restrictive measures currently used by states in the global South to prevent the arrival of refugees will not suffice to ensure a just distribution of refugees between (...) states, a more detailed account of how responsibilities should be shared between states is required. To this end, I make three claims. First, I argue that the definition of ‘refugee’ must be broadened beyond those subjected to persecution to include harms of action or omission by states that seriously jeopardise personal security or subsistence needs. Second, I argue that allocating a fair share of refugees to states should be based on state’s integrative capacities. Finally, I argue that distributive justice between states must be balanced against the legitimate interests of refugees in their destination country and the duty of states to ensure they are settled in places where they are likely to flourish. (shrink)

Suppose we consider knowledge to be valuable because of the role known propositions play in practical reasoning. This, I argue, does not provide a reason to think that knowledge is valuable in itself. Rather, it provides a reason to think that true belief is valuable from one standpoint, and that justified belief is valuable from another standpoint, and similarly for other epistemic concepts. The value of the concept of knowledge is that it provides an economical way of talking about many (...) epistemic concepts that are valuable in itself from one standpoint or another. In this way knowledge is like a Swiss Army Knife; a Swiss Army Knife is not useful as such on any occasion, but it provides an efficient way of carrying around different tools that are useful in themselves on different occasions. (shrink)

This intelligent and often subtle introduction to rationalist metaphysics focuses on the development of the concept of substance in Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. After briefly reviewing the Aristotelian background in the introduction, Woolhouse spends the first three chapters presenting the broad outlines of each thinker’s account of substance. These are followed by three chapters devoted more specifically to the metaphysics of extended substance and to foundational issues in early modern physics. Next come two chapters on thinking substance and its relation (...) to extended substance, and finally a chapter on the relation between created and uncreated substance, which Woolhouse describes as "an organizing centre of the whole book". (shrink)

It has been claimed that justification, conceived traditionally in an internalist fashion, is not an epistemologically important property. I argue for the importance of a conception of justification that is completely dependent on the subject’s experience, using an analogy to advice. The epistemological importance of a property depends on two desiderata: the extent to which it guarantees the epistemic goal of attaining truth and avoiding falsehood, and the extent to which it depends only on the information available to the believer. (...) The traditional intermalist notion of justification completely satisfies the second desideratum and largely satisfies the first. (shrink)

The correspondence theory of truth is often thought to be supported by the intuition that if a proposition (sentence, belief) is true, then something makes it true. I argue that this appearance is illusory and is sustained only by a conflation of two distinct notions of truthmaking, existential and non-existential. Once the conflation is exposed, I maintain, deflationism is seen to be adequate for accommodating truthmaking intuitions.

In this paper, recent publications in the field of psychiatric nosology, classification, and diagnosis are reviewed. An attempt is made to group such writings into three broad themes: "essentialist/realist," "anti-essentialist/pragmatic," and "eliminative." The conceptual nature of these groupings is explored, and similarities between some elements of biological psychiatry and phenomenological psychiatry are outlined. The paper attempts to undercut current ways of thinking about psychiatric disorders by drawing on John McDowell's criticism of the idea of a value-free objective standpoint, and further (...) relates our difficulties in thinking about mental disorders to McDowell's wider diagnosis of problems in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This paper is a critical response to Eli Hirsch’s recent work in metaontology. Hirsch argues that several prominent ontological disputes about physical objects are verbal, a conclusion he takes to vindicate common sense ontology. In my response, I focus on the debate over composition (van Inwagen’s special composition question). I argue that given Hirsch’s own criterion for a dispute’s being verbal – a dispute is verbal iff charity requires each side to interpret the other sides as speaking the truth in (...) their own languages –his case for verbalness comes up short. Hirsch ignores an important facet of charity, which I call charity to expressibility, viz. that we ought ceteris paribus to interpret linguistic communities as not speaking expressively impoverished languages. In fact, I argue that given his criterion, the debate over composition turns out nonverbal. I close by suggesting that even if the dispute over composition is nonverbal, the sides can arrive at a kind of limited conciliation through charitable interpretation of one another. Each side ought to interpret a great many of the other sides claims as “factual” even if false. (shrink)

Under the assumption that anticipatory models are required for anticipatory behavior, an important question arises about the different manners in which organisms acquire anticipatory models. This article aims to articulate four different non-exhaustive ways that anticipatory models might possibly be acquired over both phylogenetic and ontogenetic timescales and explore the relationships among them. To articulate these different model-acquisition mechanisms, four schematics will be introduced, each of which represents a particular acquisition structure that can be used for the purposes of comparison, (...) analysis, and hypothesis formulation. By bringing to the fore the differences and similarities between each of the four ways that anticipatory models are acquired, a more complete picture of both anticipatory behavior and its pervasive role in biological self-maintenance can be offered. In doing so, this article helps not only to shed light on how anticipatory behavior might arise in the wide range of organisms that it has been observed in but also to throw into relief the subtle and often still overlooked causal interplay between ontogenetic and phylogenetic plasticity. (shrink)

This essay offers a defense of Lukács’s original formulation of the concept of reification, with a particular emphasis on defending the Marxist social-ontological commitments at work in that conception. An attempt will be made to demonstrate that these commitments cannot be summarily dismissed as they have been in Axel Honneth’s “rehabilitation” of the concept. Honneth’s project, it will be argued, consists in an attempt to dispense entirely with the Marxist character of the concept of reification, as well as an attempt (...) to reconstruct the concept in purely normative terms as a “forgetting” of the intersubjective recognition which he takes to be both logically and chronologically prior to the cognition of which reification participates. In outlining this project, a defense of Lukács’s original conception of reification will be offered by means of a critique of Honneth’s criticisms of Lukács’s Marxist commitments. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between two types of persuasive force arguments can have in terms of two different connections between arguments and inferences. First, borrowing from Pinto, an arguer's invitation to inference directly persuades an addressee if the addressee performs an inference that the arguer invites. This raises the question of how invited inferences are determined by an invitation to inference. Second, borrowing from Sorenson, an arguer's invitation to inference indirectly persuades an addressee if the addressee performs an inference guided by (...) the argument even though it is uninvited. This raises the question of how an invitation to inference can guide inferences that the arguer does not use the argument to invite. Focusing on belief-inducing inference, the primary aims here are to clarify what is necessary for an addressee's belief-inducing inference to be invited by an argument used as an instrument of persuasion; and to highlight the capacity of arguments to guide such inferences. The paper moves beyond Pinto's discussion by using Boghossian's Taking Condition in service of and in way that illustrates how epistemically bad arguments can rationally persuade addressees of their conclusions. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to retrieve the work presented in on the transcendent function and complexes as well as an ontological interpretation of Jung’s work on the Rosarium Philosophorum to project a new meaning of the phenomenology and ontology of the transcendent function. This article enables complexes and the Rosarium Philosophorum to be understood in connection to the ontology of the transcendent function that was presented in. This article can hermeneutically retrieve the transcendent function because when complexes and (...) the Rosarium Philosophorum are explained ontologically they unconceal new possibilities that were not available in. By retrieving the transcendent function in this way, this article will explain more detail of the phenomenological and ontological meaning of the transcendent function which will include complexes and the Rosarium Philosophorum. (shrink)

In Darwinism's Struggle for Survival Jean Gayon offers a philosophical interpretation of the history of theoretical Darwinism. He begins by examining the different forms taken by the hypothesis of natural selection in the nineteenth century and the major difficulties which it encountered, particularly with regard to its compatibility with the theory of heredity. He then shows how these difficulties were overcome during the seventy years which followed the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, and he concludes by analysing the major (...) features of the genetic theory of natural selection, as it developed from 1920 to 1960. This rich and wide-ranging study will appeal to philosophers and historians of science and to evolutionary biologists. (shrink)

In the spirit of Slavoj Žižek’s book, Hegel in a Wired Brain, this article asks how the questions central to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics are changed and complicated by the possibility of brain-to-brain communication and the datafication of thought made potential through brain-computer interfaces. By taking a phenomenological approach to understanding the nature of communication through a technology that does not require language for the transmission of ideas, this article explores how BCI communication confronts the ontological character of interpretation as (...) presented by Gadamer while also juxtaposing how the insights of Gadamer and Heidegger concerning temporality problematize materialist foundations of BCI communication. In the final analysis, it is argued that thought only becomes meaningful in accord with the temporality of Dasein and that hermeneutics remains central in BCI communication because the material replication of thought does not overcome the particular temporalities of historically effected consciousnesses. (shrink)

This paper argues, in response to Huw Price, that deflationism has the resources to account for the normativity of truth. The discussion centers on a principle of hyper-objective assertibility, that one is incorrect to assert that p if not-p. If this principle doesn't state a fact about truth, it neednt be explained by deflationists. If it does,, it can be explained.

I consider the well-known criticism of Quine's characterization of first-order logical truth that it expands the class of logical truths beyond what is sanctioned by the model-theoretic account. Briefly, I argue that at best the criticism is shallow and can be answered with slight alterations in Quine's account. At worse the criticism is defective because, in part, it is based on a misrepresentation of Quine. This serves not only to clarify Quine's position, but also to crystallize what is and what (...) is not at issue in choosing the model-theoretic account of first-order logical truth over one in terms of substitutions. I conclude by highlighting the need for justifying the belief that the definition of first-order logical truth in terms of models is superior to its definition in terms of substitutions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper is a critical response to Amy Allen’s The End of Progress: Decolonising the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. We take up her book’s call for a “problematizing” history which challenges “taken-for-granted” preconceptions in order to contest Allen’s own representation of the thought of the enlightenment. Allen accepts that all the enlighteners agreed upon a stadial, progressive account of history, which she critiques epistemically and normatively. But we show in Part 2, drawing on the work of Henri Vyverberg and (...) other historians of eighteenth century ideas, that a cyclical, rise and fall account of historical succession was more prominent than the progressive narrative in leading enlighteners such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Condillac, Jancourt, Grimm, and Raynal, all of whom Allen does not mention. In Part 3, we show that not all thinkers of the enlightenment were pro-colonial or pro-imperialist, as Allen also presupposes in The End of Progress. By examining Abbé Raynal’s History of The Two Indies in Part 3, and notably its Diderotian interpolations, we show that many enlighteners propounded fierce criticisms of European colonialism and the slave trade, even calling directly for armed resistance against European infractions. In critical theorists’ search for chastened normative foundations, our concluding remarks contend, there is a need to develop more accurate, balanced, post-postmodern reckonings of the enlightenment. (shrink)

This article has two aims. First, I offer a philological analysis of a key passage from Kant’s Logic: § 6. § 6 is widely regarded as the locus classicus for Kant’s theory of concept formation. However, I show that the part of this section that is most cited and discussed by scholars should not be attributed to Kant, as it is not corroborated by any of his Reflexionen. Second, I attempt to identify Jäsche’s source for this unsupported passage. Ultimately, I (...) conclude that the unsupported passage in § 6 was based on a set of student notes that was similar to the Wiener and Warschauer logic notebooks. However, I also argue that it would be a mistake to regard this passage as the final or definitive statement of Kant’s views about concept formation. (shrink)

A 47-year-old woman with a history of anxiety disorder is admitted to the hospital for shortness of breath. On the third day of hospitalization, she asks her physician for a copy of all documents pertaining to her care. What expectation should she have for full disclosure? Are there limits on her access to her medical records and do her physician's concerns about professional privilege matter?The virtues of transparency in medicine have been well described. As proponents of transparency, we favor patient (...) access to their medical records, but we are increasingly troubled by the ease and extent of disclosure in current practice as technology advances and... (shrink)

When a speaker states an argument in arguing—in its core sense—for the conclusion, the speaker asserts, as opposed to merely implies or implicates, the associated inference claim to the effect that the conclusion follows from the premises. In defense of this, I argue that how an inference claim is conveyed when stating an argument is constrained by constitutive and normative conditions for core cases of the speech of arguing for a conclusion. The speech act of assertion better reflects such conditions (...) than does implication, conversational implicature, or conventional implicature. (shrink)

The Condorcet Jury Theorem formalises the “wisdom of crowds”: binary decisions made by majority vote are asymptotically correct as the number of voters tends to infinity. This classical result assumes like-minded, expected utility maximising voters who all share a common prior belief about the right decision. Ellis : 865–895, 2016) shows that when voters have ambiguous prior beliefs—a set of priors—and follow maxmin expected utility, such wisdom requires that voters’ beliefs satisfy a “disjoint posteriors” condition: different private signals lead to (...) posterior sets with disjoint interiors. Both the original theorem and Ellis’s generalisation assume symmetric penalties for wrong decisions. If, as in the jury context, errors attract asymmetric penalties then it is natural to consider voting rules that raise the hurdle for the decision carrying the heavier penalty for error. In a classical model, Feddersen and Pesendorfer :23–35, 1998) have shown that, paradoxically, raising this hurdle may actually increase the likelihood of the more serious error. In particular, crowds are not wise under the unanimity rule: the probability of the more serious error does not vanish as the crowd size tends to infinity. We show that this “Jury Paradox” persists in the presence of ambiguity, whether or not juror beliefs satisfy Ellis’s “disjoint posteriors” condition. We also characterise the strictly mixed equilibria of this model and study their properties. Such equilibria cannot exist in the absence of ambiguity but may exist for arbitrarily large jury size when ambiguity is present. In addition to uninformative strictly mixed equilibria, analogous to those exhibited by Ellis : 865–895, 2016), there may also exist strictly mixed equilibria which are informative about voter signals. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper looks at the state of the literature surrounding Heidegger and Nazism today. Part 1 focusses on Hassan Givsan’s remarkable work, Une histoire consternante: pourquoi les philosophes se laissent corrompre par le “cas Heidegger”, which looks at the different, mutually inconsistent forms of “apologetics” denying that Heidegger had been a Nazi, or that this commitment could have been shaped by his philosophy. Part 2 looks at five themes that emerge from the 2014 French-language collection Heidegger, le sol, la communauté, (...) la race, edited by Emmanuel Faye: Heidegger’s anti-semitism, before and in the Black Notebooks; Sein und Zeit and “the political”; Heidegger and his estate’s post-war “rewriting” of his Nazi-era texts; Heidegger’s esotericism; and his intellectual proximities to other Nazi thinkers. Closing reflections touch on the state of the debate, calling for increased scholarly awareness of the evidence, and debate of its significance. (shrink)

This is an introduction to a special issue devoted to the black box metaphor in science and technology studies. The author briefly addresses the history of the metaphor and its use in the STS community and provides commentary on four papers contributed by Elizabeth Petrick, Rodolfo Alaniz, Caitlin Wylie, and Valentina Marcheselli.

Plagiarism by college and university faculty members has become a growing issue and concern in academia. This paper presents a case study of an extreme and clear case of such plagiarism. Yet an analysis of the legal and ethical contexts of such plagiarism, and the specific chronicle of this case, illustrate the complexities and difficulties in dealing with such situations. Implications for researchers, for colleges and universities, and for academic publishers and journals are offered.

There is an enigma that plagues the modern world. On the one hand, access to information is more abundant than ever. On the other, knowledge seems all the more difficult to come by. The world is divided on numerous fact-based questions regarding nutrition, exercise, public policy impact, sickness prevention, mental wellness, and more. What accounts for this phenomenon? Likely, these disagreements and difficulties cannot be accounted for by a single factor, and the elements in play vary from question to question (...) and subject to subject. This paper will focus on one possible factor: eroding trust in subject matter experts. (shrink)

This essay identifies epistemological, theoretical and methodological problems in a potentially influential subset of the interdisciplinary corporate responsibility literature, that which appears in the management literature. The received conceptualization of stakeholder analysis is criticised by identifying six sets of factors conventionally considered as promoting social responsibilities in the firm: inter-organizational factors, economic competitors, institutional investors, end-consumers, government regulators and non-governmental organizations. Each is addressed on conceptual grounds, its empirical salience in terms of the latest relevant research and prospects to be (...) a significant factor in promoting outcomes consistent with social welfare. Despite obvious antagonistic relations between organization centred economic objectives and extra-organizational-directed social considerations, the huge body of research we address drifts in a disengaged Sargasso Sea. The essay argues for appropriate directions for continuing business ethics/responsibility/corporate citizenship research, suggesting certain sociological works on moral leadership, moral courage, and academic leadership. (shrink)

Charity Law and the Liberal State considers questions relating to state action and public discourse that are raised by the law of charity. Informed by liberal philosophical commitments and of interest to both charity lawyers and political philosophers, it addresses themes and topics such as: the justifiability of the state's non-neutral promotion of charitable purposes; the role of altruism in charity law; charity law, the tax system and the demands of distributive justice; the proper treatment of religious and political purposes (...) in charity law; and the appropriate response of the liberal state to discrimination in the pursuit of charitable purposes. (shrink)

I argue that Kroedel's 'Simple Argument' for downward causation fails and that this failure has consequences for any attempt to establish the reality of downward causation by appealing to counterfactual theories thereof. A central premise in Kroedel's argument equivocates. On one reading, it is true but renders the argument invalid; on another, it renders the argument valid but is likely false. I dedicate most of my efforts to establishing the second of these two claims. I show that the purported physical (...) effects of mental properties do not counterfactually depend upon the total realizers of these properties. If counterfactual dependence is necessary for causation, it follows that mental properties are not causes. If counterfactual dependence is merely sufficient for causation, it follows that no appeal to counterfactuals will by itself succeed in showing that mental properties are causes. (shrink)

Recently, epistocrats have challenged the value of democracy by claiming that policy outcomes can be improved if the electorate were narrowed to empower only those with sufficient knowledge to inform competent policy decisions. I argue that by centering on contesting how well regimes employ extant knowledge in decision-making, this conversation has neglected to consider how regimes influence the production of knowledge over time. Science and technology studies scholars have long recognized that political systems impact the productivity of expert research. I (...) argue that in order to evaluate which regime is “smarter,” we must consider not only how well they employ existing knowledge in decision-making, but we must also assess how those regimes influence the ongoing production of policy-relevant knowledge. Thus, I offer an instrumental defense of democracy based on its capacity to encourage a superior pattern and quality of expert research to inform policy decisions over time. Epistocracy may be effective at employing extant knowledge in the short run, but in the long run, democracy is a superior environment for producing knowledge to inform policy decisions. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychologists attempt to infer our evolved psychology from the selection pressures present in our ancestral environments. Their use of this inference strategy—often called “adaptive thinking”—is thought to be justified by way of appeal to a rather modest form of adaptationism, according to which the mind's adaptive complexity reveals it to be a product of selection. I argue, on the contrary, that the mind's being an adaptation is only a necessary and not a sufficient condition for the validity of adaptive (...) thinking, and that evolutionary psychology's predictive project is in fact committed to an extremely strong and highly implausible form of adaptationism. According to this “strong adaptationism,” the macroevolutionary trajectory of a population is determined by, and therefore predictable on the basis of, the selection pressures acting upon it. Not only is this form of adaptationism prima facie highly implausible, it requires making a number of naïve and likely false assumptions concerning the nature of heritable phenotypic variation in natural populations. In particular, it assumes that phenotypic variation is inevitably small in its extent, unbiased in its direction, and copious in its quantity. Because it is unlikely that these conditions obtain as a general rule, and even more unlikely that they obtained in early human populations, I conclude that there is little reason to believe that adaptive thinking can be used to infer the current structure of our minds from evidence of past selection pressures. (shrink)

Some philosopher argue that the distinction between killing and letting die lacks moral significance, since the prima facie objections to both arise from a feature which killing and letting die share: Either way, an agent chooses a course of action resulting in someone's dying, when he could have chosen a course of action having the opposite result. I find this claim ambiguous. Does it mean that in either case, if the agent had chosen the alternative course of action, the victim (...) would not have died at all, at least not for some time yet? Or does it mean that if the agent had acted differently, the victim would have died a death numerically distinct from his actual death? ;I argue that killing is prima facie objectionable owing to the causal relation connecting the agent's action to the victim's token death. If an agent kills someone, his action is prima facie objectionable even if another agent would have killed the person moments later anyway. But failing to prevent a token death event is not in itself prima facie objectionable. On the whole, such a failure is prima facie objectionable only if preventing that token death event would have benefited the victim. And on the whole, preventing a token death event benefits the victim only if it prevents there from occurring any event of the type death of that person, at least for some time yet. ;I do not provide a positive rationale for attributing moral significance to the distinction between killing and letting die. Rather, I try to undermine skepticism about the possibility of providing such a rationale by demonstrating that the prima facie objections to killing and letting die cannot be accounted for in the same way. I also discuss the nature of killing and letting die, how both differ from enabling someone's death to occur, and the relationship between the concepts of harm and benefit. (shrink)

The style of weak thought associated with Gianni Vattimo involves positing that we are living after the death of God in an age of nihilism that is our ‘sole opportunity’. Nihilism, the lack of highest values, frees one from the ‘violence’ of metaphysics that silences one by reducing everything back to first principles. This article focuses on Vattimo’s return to Christianity, analysing in particular his use of terms found in the New Testament, kenosis and caritas. Vattimo sees the history of (...) the West as the secularisation of Christianity, reaching its culmination in the nihilism of late-modernity through the liberation of a plurality of interpretations from metaphysics. By analysing Vattimo’s notion of Being and use of Joachim of Fiore’s historical schema in relation to Paul’s distinction between the ‘spirit’ and the ‘letter’, it shall be argued that Vattimo’s understanding of Christianity does not involve the religion ‘superseding’ Judaism. However, this resolution comes at the cost of highlighting the lack of importance of Christianity for Vattimo if a broader understanding of Heidegger than Vattimo deploys is used to put Vattimo’s understanding of Being under scrutiny. (shrink)

We are happy to announce that Volume 8 of Libertarian Papers is now available in a print edition. This volume contains all Libertarian Papers articles for 2016, including contributions by scholars like Jan Narveson, Billy Christmas, Peter Lewin, Ryan Murphy, Aiden P. Gregg, and many others. It also covers a wide range of the most pressing and controversial topics in ….

Stage theory is the metaphysical view that everyday objects like you and the Eiffel tower are stages—instantaneous temporal parts. Existing defenses of stage theory by Katherine Hawley and Ted Sider quite explicitly include certain semantic claims. Thus Sider says that stages are.

This article offers a definition of medical humanism and identifies four key contemporary medical humanists in France. It then makes two claims about the historical provenance of their humanism. First, they define it in opposition to a process of iatric medicalization that they trace to certain conceptual errors made by Descartes. But second, they remain more Cartesian than they seem to realize because they accept Descartes's knotting together of humanity, ethics and language. By looking at Gori and Del Volgo, Roudinesco (...) and Ricoeur, the author is able to show how French medical humanism repeats the Cartesian gesture of locating humanity in language - thus facing the problem of the moral standing of so-called "marginal" human persons and non-human animal persons. The author concludes with a call to radicalize French medical humanism in pursuit of a more inclusive medical "personism". (shrink)

This paper argues for a rehabilitation of philosophical engagement with the question of whether revolution can be justified. Such a renewed engagement with the problem of revolution appears to be stymied by the intuition that we have strong moral arguments ruling out revolution in almost every case. I aim to show that we should abandon this intuition. I will argue that standard arguments against revolution are not strong enough to warrant the relative inattention the question of the justifiability revolution has (...) recently suffered, especially given the emergence of new potential justifications for revolution (appeals to principles of distributive justice, appeals to the international human rights regime) and the subtle but important shifts that we ought to make in our conceptions of sovereignty and revolution. Accordingly, this paper sketches six forms of argument against the justifiability of revolution. I assess each form of argument and I conclude that none of them are strong enough to makes further philosophical inquiry into the justification of revolution pointless. (shrink)

Despite the prominence of the concept of virtue in contemporary ethical theory, accounts of virtue have often left readers with the impression that the virtuous person is an unattainable ideal or is just psychologically implausible. This article argues that reviving the ancient Greek idea that virtues are like practical skills can help provide a more plausible account of virtue and the virtuous person. The moral knowledge of the virtuous person is analogous to the practical knowledge of the expert in a (...) skill. Instead of relying on a reconstruction of an ancient account of skills for the comparison to virtue, this paper adapts a modem account of skill acquisition developed by Hubert and Smart Dreyfus in their research on artificial intelligence and human expertise. The skill model of virtue offers a promising direction for virtue theory, by using the research on skills to illuminate the otherwise murky concept of virtue. (shrink)

We use a dynamic, context-sensitive approach to abductive interpretation to describe coordinated processes of understanding, generation and accommodation in dialogue. The agent updates the dialogue uniformly for its own and its interlocutors’ utterances, by accommodating a new context, inferred abductively, in which utterance content is both true and prominent. The generator plans natural and comprehensible utterances by exploiting the same abductive preferences used in understanding. We illustrate our approach by formalizing and implementing some interactions between information structure and the form (...) of referring expressions. (shrink)

I examine two strands in Locke's thought which seem to conflict with his corpuscularian sympathies: his repeated suggestion that natural philosophy is incapable of being made a science, and his claim that some of the properties of bodies--secondary qualities, powers of gravitation, cohesion and maybe even thought--are arbitrarily "superadded" by God. ;Locke often says that a body's properties flow from its real essence as the properties of a triangle flow from its definition. He is widely read as having thought that (...) if we had ideas of a body's real essence, we would be able to perceive a priori a necessary connection between that body's real essence and its observable properties. I argue that this leaves Locke's skepticism without any rationale, making it depend entirely upon our ignorance of corpuscular structures when in fact he never rules out the possibility of our acquiring ideas of corpuscular structures through improvements in microscopy. I argue that Locke's geometrical analogy is better understood as an endorsement of deductivism about scientific explanation. He thinks that knowledge of corpuscular structures is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for scientific knowledge of bodies. The deeper source of his skepticism is his view that we cannot have universal and certain knowledge of the laws of nature because they are contingent. ;I approach the subject of Locke's attitude toward mechanism by examining his superaddition doctrine. In contrast with M. R. Ayers, I attribute to Locke what I call strong voluntarism: the view that a body's powers to interact with other bodies are not fully determined by the essence of matter, and that they are at least partly determined by the will of God. I argue that Descartes and Boyle are also strong voluntarists, but that Locke's voluntarism differs in that he maintains that bodies have some powers which are not even partly explicable in terms of the motions of matter. Locke's position is thus incompatible with the mechanism of Descartes and Boyle. (shrink)

I argue for the epiphenomenality of functional properties by means of thought experiments and general principles. General principles suggest that an object’s causal powers nomologically supervene on its intrinsic properties and that its functional role does not. This implies that it is possible for an object to lose its functional role without undergoing any change to its intrinsic properties or causal powers. Nor is it difficult to conceive of such scenarios. Various thought experiments are introduced for just this purpose. But (...) properties that can vary independently of an object’s causal powers in this way are epiphenomenal, for their instantiation by an object at a time makes no difference to the causal processes the object is involved in at that time. The same processes would have occurred even if such properties hadn’t been instantiated. The intrinsicness thesis is controversial, but it is not controversial that it is true of productive causation, and many believe that productive causation is the only form of mental causation worth having. Nevertheless, in the paper’s final section I consider dependence-based accounts of causation, which do not presuppose the intrinsicness of causal powers, and show that they too have difficulties accounting for the efficacy of functional properties. (shrink)