Niklas Luhmann wrote a number of works which have decisively shaped the recent development of legal science as a theoretical discipline. Some basic elements of his theory have been widely appropriated by other legal theorists, such that it is difficult to imagine contemporary reflection in legal theory, and above all legal sociology, without Luhmann. This collection brings together the most important canonical and cutting-edge papers on Luhmann s legal thought. It is introduced in a comprehensive editorial piece by the editor (...) which locates the articles in context and explores the issues and topics at hand. ". (shrink)

This book sets out a new reading of the much-neglected philosophy of Karl Jaspers. By questioning the common perception of Jaspers either as a proponent of irrationalist cultural philosophy or as an early, peripheral disciple of Martin Heidegger, it re-establishes him as a central figure in modern European philosophy. Giving particular consideration to his position in epistemological, metaphysical and political debate, the author argues that Jaspers's work deserves renewed consideration in a number of important discussions, particularly in hermeneutics, anthropological reflections (...) on religion, the critique of idealism, and debates on the end of metaphysics. (shrink)

Democratic Crisis and Global Constitutional Law explains the current weakness of democratic polities by examining antinomies in constitutional democracy and its theoretical foundations. This book argues that democracy is usually analysed in a theoretical lens that is not adequately sensitive to its historical origins. The author proposes a new sociological framework for understanding democracy and its constitutional preconditions, stressing the linkage between classical patterns of democratic citizenship and military processes and arguing that democratic stability at the national level relies on (...) the formation of robust normative systems at the international level. On this basis, he argues that democracy is frequently exposed to crisis because the normative terms in which it is promoted and justified tend to simplify its nature. These terms create a legitimising space in which anti-democratic movements, typically with a populist emphasis, can take shape and flourish. (shrink)

Thornhill, John Among the thinkers who have helped me expand my intellectual horizons, Dawson has a unique place. From an early date, I became aware of the importance of situating the Church's expression of our faith tradition in its historical and cultural context. In time I was to find that Dawson's interpretation of cultural history made it possible to do this within the enlightening framework he provided.

Thornhill, John Shortly after completing my article, 'Reflections on the Gospel: after Reading Christopher Dawson', I read for the first time, C.H. Dodd's Gospel and Law, lectures given at Columbia University in 1950. This challenging work by a leading scholar prompted me to make the comparison between Protestant and Catholic approaches to the Gospel I have attempted in the present article.

We argue that the use of the term “supernatural” is problematic in philosophy of religion in general, and in the contribution by Thornhill-Miller and Millican in particular. We address the disturbing parallel between Hume’s case against the rationality of belief in miracles and his dismissal of reports of racial equality. We do not argue that because Hume was a racist therefore his view against miracles is faulty, but we draw attention to how Hume sets up a framework that, for (...) similar reasons, discounts evidence of black intelligence and divine intelligence. We go on to argue against TMM’s revision of Hume on miracles. We then argue that empirical testing on the veracity of petitionary belief is impossible for there is no control case and that empirical testing can no more evaluate the evidential merits of most religious experiences than it can assess the merits of any robust philosophical position in epistemology, metaphysics, value theory, logic and mathematics. We express doubts about the integrity and scope of how one might enjoy the good of religion without belief. In a final section we offer a defense of the rationality of believing in specific religious traditions based on religious experience along with what we refer to as sufficient philosophical reasoning. (shrink)

In Minimal Rationality, Christopher Cherniak boldly challenges the myth of Man the the Rational Animal and the central role that the "perfectly rational...

This study takes inquiry as the starting point for epistemological theorising. It uses this idea to develop new and systematic answers to some of the most fundamental questions in epistemology, including about the nature of core epistemic phenomena as well as their value and the extent to which we possess them.

The coherence objection to the doctrine of the Incarnation maintains that it is impossible for one individual to have both the attributes of God and the attributes of a human being. This article examines Thomas Aquinas’s answer to this objection. I challenge the dominant, mereological interpretation of Aquinas’s position and, in light of this challenge, develop and defend a new alternative interpretation of Aquinas’s response to this important objection to Christian doctrine.

Assertion is the central vehicle for the sharing of knowledge. Whether knowledge is shared successfully often depends on the quality of assertions: good assertions lead to successful knowledge sharing, while bad ones don't. In Sharing Knowledge, Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion investigate the relation between knowledge sharing and assertion, and develop an account of what it is to assert well. More specifically, they argue that the function of assertion is to share knowledge with others. It is this function that supports (...) a central norm of assertion according to which a good assertion is one that has the disposition to generate knowledge in others. The book uses this functionalist approach to motivate further norms of assertion on both the speaker and the hearer side and investigates ramifications of this view for other questions about assertion. (shrink)

Psychological adaptation underlies all human behavior. Thus, rape could either arise from a rape-specific psychological adaptation or it could be a side-effect of a more general psychological adaptation not directly related to rape. The rape-specific hypothesis and the incidental effect hypothesis are explained. Determining the specific environmental cues that men’s sexual psyche has been designed by selection to process will allow us to decide which of these two hypotheses is true. I focus on rape, and briefly look at other types (...) of sexual coercion, such as sexual harassment and incest. (shrink)

Highlights of a difficult history -- The preliminary identification of our topic -- Approaches -- Bradley's protest -- James's disjunctive theory -- The source of Bradley's dissatisfaction -- Behaviourism and after -- Heirs of Bradley in the twentieth century -- The underlying metaphysical issue -- Explanatory tactics -- The basic distinction -- Metaphysical categories and taxonomies -- Adverbialism, multiple realizability, and natural kinds -- Adverbialism and levels of explanation -- Taxonomies and supervenience relations -- Rejecting the process : first view (...) -- Supervenience-failure -- The modal commitments of the process : first view -- The interference argument : a putative problem for adverbialist accounts -- Cognitive unison -- The problem with attitude based adverbialism -- Gilbert Ryle and Alan White -- White's argument against disposition-based adverbialism -- The cognitive unison theory -- Tasks -- Cognitive processes -- Potential service of a task -- Superordinate tasks -- Some features of the theory -- Divided attention -- Degrees of attention and merely partial attention -- The causal life of attention -- Mental causation -- How to respond to mental causation objections -- The causal role of attention -- Attention as an enabling condition -- Counterfactuals -- The causal relevance of attention per se -- Counterfactuals and causally relevant properties -- Objections to counterfactual analysis of causation and of causal relevance -- The extrinsicness of unison -- The privative character of unison and the problem of absence causation -- Causal exclusion -- Consequences for cognitive psychology -- Psychology and metaphysics -- The metaphysical commitments of the process-identifying project -- The diverse explanatory construals of current psychological results -- Reasons for deflation -- Inductively unreliable properties -- Questions without answers -- The positive payoff -- Philosophical work for the theory of attention -- Putting attention to philosophical work -- Attention and reference -- Attention and consciousness -- Prospects for optimism. (shrink)

The ethics of autonomous cars and automated driving have been a subject of discussion in research for a number of years :28–58, 2016). As levels of automation progress, with partially automated driving already becoming standard in new cars from a number of manufacturers, the question of ethical and legal standards becomes virulent. For exam-ple, while automated and autonomous cars, being equipped with appropriate detection sensors, processors, and intelligent mapping material, have a chance of being much safer than human-driven cars in (...) many regards, situations will arise in which accidents cannot be completely avoided. Such situations will have to be dealt with when programming the software of these vehicles. In several instances, internationally, regulations have been passed, based on legal considerations of road safety, mostly. However, to date, there have been few, if any, cases of a broader ethics code for autonomous or automated driving preceding actual regulation and being based on a broadly composed ethics committee of independent experts. In July 2016, the German Federal Minister of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, Alexander Dobrindt, appointed a national ethics committee for automated and connected driving, which began its work in September 2016. In June 2017, this committee presented a code of ethics which was published in German and in English. It consists of 20 ethical guidelines. Having been a member of this committee, I will present the main ethical topics of these guidelines and the discussions that lay behind them. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the historicity of love requires an appreciation of the irreplaceability of the beloved. I do this through a consideration of ideas that were first put forward by Robert Kraut in “Love De Re” (1986). I also evaluate Amelie Rorty's criticisms of Kraut's thesis in “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” (1986). I argue that Rorty fundamentally misunderstands Kraut's Kripkean analogy, and (...) I go on to criticize her claim that concern over the proper object of love should be best understood as a concern over constancy. This leads me to an elaboration of the distinct senses in which love can be seen as historical. I end with a further defense of the irreplaceability of the beloved and a discussion of the relevance of recent debates over the importance of personal identity for an adequate account of the historical dimension of love. (shrink)

This handbook article gives a critical overview of recent discussions of epistemic authority. It favors an account that brings into balance the dictates of rational deference with the ideals of intellectual self-governance. A plausible starting point is the conjecture that neither should rational deference to authorities collapse into total epistemic submission, nor the ideal of mature intellectual self-governance be conflated with (illusions of) epistemic autarky.

Suppose you ask yourself whether your father's record collection includes a certain recording of The Trout and venture to find out. At that time, you embark on an inquiry into whether your father owns the relevant recording. Your inquiry is a project with a specific goal: finding out whether your father owns the recording. This fact about your inquiry generalizes: inquiry is a goal-directed enterprise. A specific inquiry can be individuated by the question it aims to answer and by who (...) aims to answer the question. Your inquiry into whether your father owns the recording differs from your inquiry into how many records your father owns because different questions are being asked. Your inquiry into whether your father owns the recording differs from my inquiry into whether he does because different people are inquiring. The goal of inquiry into a given question by an agent, α, can be characterized, neutrally, as α's having the answer to that question. I will here focus only on inquiries into whether questions and characterize the goal of inquiry into whether φ by α as α's having the answer to the question whether φ. (shrink)

This paper is built around a single, simple idea. It is widely agreed that there is a distinctive kind of awareness each of us has of his own bodily actions. This action-awareness is different from any perceptual awareness a subject may have of his own actions; it can exist in the absence of such perceptual awareness. The single, simple idea around which this paper is built is that the distinctive awareness that subjects have of their own mental actions is a (...) form of action-awareness. Subjects’ awareness of their own mental actions is a species of the same genus that also includes the distinctive awareness of bodily actions. More specifically, I claim. (shrink)

Christopher Hookway presents a series of essays on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1913), the 'founder of pragmatism' and one of the most important and original American philosophers.

Conditionalization is a widely endorsed rule for updating one’s beliefs. But a sea of complaints have been raised about it, including worries regarding how the rule handles error correction, changing desiderata of theory choice, evidence loss, self-locating beliefs, learning about new theories, and confirmation. In light of such worries, a number of authors have suggested replacing Conditionalization with a different rule — one that appeals to what I’ll call “ur-priors”. But different authors have understood the rule in different ways, and (...) these different understandings solve different problems. In this paper, I aim to map out the terrain regarding these issues. I survey the different problems that might motivate the adoption of such a rule, flesh out the different understandings of the rule that have been proposed, and assess their pros and cons. I conclude by suggesting that one particular batch of proposals, proposals that appeal to what I’ll call “loaded evidential standards”, are especially promising. (shrink)

In the target article, we presented the hypothesis that parasite-stress variation was a causal factor in the variation of in-group assortative sociality, cross-nationally and across the United States, which we indexed with variables that measured different aspects of the strength of family ties and religiosity. We presented evidence supportive of our hypothesis in the form of analyses that controlled for variation in freedom, wealth resources, and wealth inequality across nations and the states of the USA. Here, we respond to criticisms (...) from commentators and attempt to clarify and expand the parasite-stress theory of sociality used to fuel our research presented in the target article. (shrink)

How does good combine with bad? Most creatures are neither so blessed as to only enjoy good nor so cursed as to only suffer bad. Rather, the good and bad they receive throughout their lives combine to produce their overall quality of life. But it’s not just whole lives that have combined good and bad. Many stretches within contain both positive and negative occurrences whose value is joined to form the overall quality of that span of time. In a single (...) morning someone might wake up, brush their teeth, stub their toe groggily lumbering down the stairs, and have a sip of coffee that’s tasty but so hot they burn their tongue. These events are good and bad for them to various degrees, and their value comes together to form an overall value for them of that morning. A single moment, even, can have combined value from distinct pockets of good and bad that occur simultaneously. The tastiness of the coffee is good, but the pain of the heat is bad. They combine to form an overall value of the sipping moment – negative if the pain outweighed the flavor. Thus, wellbeing and illbeing combine. But how? How can someone rightly chastise themselves for sipping the overly hot coffee when it was, in fact, good because it was tasty? To pose the question starkly, a life can be bad, even so bad to not be worth living, and yet it can have many instances of good, where these goods are, in themselves, pure of any negativity. But how can good make something bad? (shrink)

Deference principles are principles that describe when, and to what extent, it’s rational to defer to others. Recently, some authors have used such principles to argue for Evidential Uniqueness, the claim that for every batch of evidence, there’s a unique doxastic state that it’s permissible for subjects with that total evidence to have. This paper has two aims. The first aim is to assess these deference-based arguments for Evidential Uniqueness. I’ll show that these arguments only work given a particular kind (...) of deference principle, and I’ll argue that there are reasons to reject these kinds of principles. The second aim of this paper is to spell out what a plausible generalized deference principle looks like. I’ll start by offering a principled rationale for taking deference to constrain rational belief. Then I’ll flesh out the kind of deference principle suggested by this rationale. Finally, I’ll show that this principle is both more plausible and more general than the principles used in the deference-based arguments for Evidential Uniqueness. (shrink)

Essentialists claim that at least some individuals or kinds have essences. This raises an important but little-discussed question: how do we come to know what the essence of something is? This paper examines Aristotle’s answer to this question. One influential interpretation (viz., the Explanationist Interpretation) is carefully expounded, criticized, and then refined. Particular attention is given to what Aristotle says about this issue in DA I.1, APo II.2, and APo II.8. It is argued that the epistemological claim put forward in (...) DA I.1 differs from that put forward in APo II.2 and II.8, contrary to what has been claimed by Explanationists, and that each of these distinct epistemological claims rests on a distinct non-epistemological thesis about essence. Consequently, an ‘Enriched Explanationist Interpretation’ is developed which takes into account both of the aforementioned elements in Aristotle’s epistemology of essence. The paper concludes by highlighting an insight the preceding exegetical discussion offers to contemporary essentialists seeking to explain how we come to know what something’s essence is. (shrink)

W. V. Quine famously defended two theses that have fallen rather dramatically out of fashion. The first is that intensions are “creatures of darkness” that ultimately have no place in respectable philosophical circles, owing primarily to their lack of rigorous identity conditions. However, although he was thoroughly familiar with Carnap’s foundational studies in what would become known as possible world semantics, it likely wouldn’t yet have been apparent to Quine that he was fighting a losing battle against intensions, due in (...) large measure to developments stemming from Carnap’s studies and culminating in the work of Kripke, Hintikka, and Bayart. These developments undermined Quine’s crusade against intensions on two fronts. First, in the context of possible world semantics, intensions could after all be given rigorous identity conditions by defining them (in the simplest case) as functions from worlds to appropriate extensions, a fact exploited to powerful and influential effect in logic and linguistics by the likes of Kaplan, Montague, Lewis, and Cresswell. Second, the rise of possible world semantics fueled a strong resurgence of metaphysics in contemporary analytic philosophy that saw properties and propositions widely, fruitfully, and unabashedly adopted as ontological primitives in their own right. This resurgence — happily, in my view — continues into the present day. -/- For a time, at any rate, Quine experienced somewhat better success with his second thesis: that higher-order logic is, at worst, confused and, at best, a quirky notational alternative to standard first-order logic. However, Quine notwithstanding, a great deal of recent work in formal metaphysics transpires in a higher-order logical framework in which properties and propositions fall into an infinite hierarchy of types of (at least) every finite order. Initially, the most philosophically compelling reason for embracing such a framework since Russell first proposed his simple theory of types was simply that it provides a relatively natural explanation of the paradoxes. However, since the seminal work of Prior there has been a growing trend to consider higher-order logic to be the most philosophically natural framework for metaphysical inquiry, many of the contributors to this volume being among the most important and influential advocates of this view. Indeed, this is now quite arguably the dominant view among formal metaphysicians. -/- In this paper, and against the current tide, I will argue in §1 that there are still good reasons to think that Quine’s second battle is not yet lost and that the correct framework for logic is first-order and type-free — properties and propositions, logically speaking, are just individuals among others in a single domain of quantification — and that it arises naturally out of our most basic logical and semantical intuitions. The data I will draw upon are not new and are well-known to contemporary higher-order metaphysicians. However, I will try to defend my thesis in what I believe is a novel way by suggesting that these basic intuitions ground a reasonable distinction between “pure” logic and non-logical theory, and that Russell-style semantic paradoxes of truth and exemplification arise only when we move beyond the purely logical and, hence, do not of themselves provide any strong objection to a type-free conception of properties and propositions. -/- Most of my arguments in §1 are largely independent of any specific account of the nature of properties and propositions beyond their type-freedom. However, I will in addition argue that there are good reasons to take propositions, at least, to be very fine-grained. My arguments are thus bolstered significantly if it can be shown that there are in fact well-defined examples of logics that are not only type-free but which comport with such a conception of propositions. It is the purpose of §2 to lay out a logic of this sort in some detail, drawing especially upon work by George Bealer and related work of my own. With the logic in place, it will be possible to generalize the line of argument noted above regarding Russell-style paradoxes and, in §3, apply it to two propositional paradoxes — the Prior-Kaplan paradox and the Russell-Myhill paradox — that are often taken to threaten the sort of account developed here. (shrink)

A number of cases involving self-locating beliefs have been discussed in the Bayesian literature. I suggest that many of these cases, such as the sleeping beauty case, are entangled with issues that are independent of self-locating beliefs per se. In light of this, I propose a division of labor: we should address each of these issues separately before we try to provide a comprehensive account of belief updating. By way of example, I sketch some ways of extending Bayesianism in order (...) to accommodate these issues. Then, putting these other issues aside, I sketch some ways of extending Bayesianism in order to accommodate self-locating beliefs. Finally, I propose a constraint on updating rules, the "Learning Principle", which rules out certain kinds of troubling belief changes, and I use this principle to assess some of the available options. (shrink)

A critical interrogation of elements of Hobbes's political and natural philosophy and its capacity to enrich our understanding of the natural of democratic life.

Forms and Concepts is the first comprehensive study of the central role of concepts and concept acquisition in the Platonic tradition. It sets up a stimulating dialogue between Plato s innatist approach and Aristotle s much more empirical response. The primary aim is to analyze and assess the strategies with which Platonists responded to Aristotle s (and Alexander of Aphrodisias ) rival theory. The monograph culminates in a careful reconstruction of the elaborate attempt undertaken by the Neoplatonist Proclus (6th century (...) AD) to devise a systematic Platonic theory of concept acquisition.". (shrink)

In this paper, I aim to develop a novel virtue reliabilist account of justified belief, which incorporates insights from both process reliabilism and extant versions of virtue reliabilism. Like extant virtue reliabilist accounts of justi- fied belief, the proposed view takes it that justified belief is a kind of competent performance and that competent performances require reliable agent abilities. However, unlike extant versions of virtue reliabilism, the view takes abilities to essentially involve reliable processes. In this way, the proposed takes (...) a leaf from process reliabilism. Finally, I will provide reason to believe that the view compares favourably with both extant versions of virtue reliabilism and process reliabilism. In particular, I will show that in taking abilities to essentially involve reliable processes, the view has an edge over extant versions of virtue reliabilism. Moreover, I will argue that the proposed view can either solve or defuse a number of classical problems of process reliabilism, including the new evil demon problem, the problem of clairvoyant cases and the generality problem. (shrink)

"Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. Plato's retelling of the discourses between Socrates and his friends on such subjects (...) as love and desire, truth and illusion, spiritual transcendence and the qualities of a good ruler, profoundly affected the ways in which we view human relationships, society and leadership - and shaped the whole tradition of Western philosophy."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

This book offers a broad-based critical survey of recent anti-realist arguments in the philosophy of science, cultural theory, hermeneutics, the sociology of knowledge and the interpretation of quantum-mechanics.

An adequate account of laws should satisfy at least five desiderata: it should provide a unified account of laws and chances, it should yield plausible relations between laws and chances, it should vindicate numerical chance assignments, it should accommodate dynamical and non-dynamical chances, and it should accommodate a plausible range of nomic possibilities. No extant account of laws satisfies these desiderata. This paper presents a non-Humean account of laws, the Nomic Likelihood Account, that does.

An influential thought-experiment by Derek Parfit sought to establish that people have a preference for unpleasant events to lie in the past rather than the future. In recent discussions of Parfit’s argument, this purported preference is modelled as a discounting phenomenon, as is the tensed emotion of relief, which Arthur Prior argued demonstrated that there is an objective metaphysical difference between the past and the future. Looking at recent work demonstrating some psychological past/future asymmetries that are more clearly instances of (...) discounting I argue that this existing philosophical literature fails to distinguish between what are clearly two quite different psychological phenomena. This affects recent attempts to respond to Prior’s metaphysical argument, because it is not clear that they have identified the right phenomenon to be explained. It also affects Parfit’s thought-experiment, because the purported unitary ‘preference’ may in fact be an amalgam of these two quite different psychological phenomena. (shrink)

ISBN 3110150077 (paperback) DEM 58.00 A collection of invited papers on the role of preferences and desires in practical reasoning: including rational decision making, the concept of welfare, and ethics. With a substantial introduction and a bibliographical survey. culture-specific and universal factors.

Can we discover morality in nature? Flowers and Honeybees extends the considerable scientific knowledge of flowers and honeybees through a philosophical discussion of the origins of morality in nature. Flowering plants and honeybees form a social group where each requires the other. They do not intentionally harm each other, both reason, and they do not compete for commonly required resources. They also could not be more different. Flowering plants are rooted in the ground and have no brains. Mobile honeybees can (...) communicate the location of flower resources to other workers. We can learn from a million-year-old social relationship how morality can be constructed and maintained over time. (shrink)

Introduction : war, politics, democracy -- Democratic security -- Citizens and soldiers : the difference uniforms make -- A modest case for symmetry : are soldiers morally equal? -- Leaders and the gambles of war : against political luck -- War, democracy, and sSecrecy : secret law -- Must a democracy be ruthless? : torture and existential politics -- Humanitarian intervention and the new democratic holy wars -- Drones and democracy -- Democracy and the death of norms -- Democratic states (...) in victory : vae victis? -- Looking backward : democratic transitions and the choice of justice. (shrink)

This article discusses Harvey Siegel’s general justification of the epistemological theory of argumentation in his seminal essay “Arguing with Arguments." On the one hand, the achievements of this essay are honoured—in particular, a thorough differentiation of the different meanings of ‘argument’ and ‘argumentation,’ the semantic justification of the fundamentality of arguments as sequences of propositions, and the detailed critiques of alternative theories of argumentation. On the other hand, suggestions for strengthening the theory are added to Siegel's expositions, which make different (...) perspectives within the epistemological theory of argumentation recognisable. (shrink)

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Standard decision theory has trouble handling cases involving acts without finite expected values. This paper has two aims. First, building on earlier work by Colyvan (2008), Easwaran (2014), and Lauwers and Vallentyne (2016), it develops a proposal for dealing with such cases, Difference Minimizing Theory. Difference Minimizing Theory provides satisfactory verdicts in a broader range of cases than its predecessors. And it vindicates two highly plausible principles of standard decision theory, Stochastic Equivalence and Stochastic Dominance. The second aim is to (...) assess some recent arguments against Stochastic Equivalence and Stochastic Dominance. If successful, these arguments refute Difference Minimizing Theory. This paper contends that these arguments are not successful. (shrink)

This chapter offers an interpretation of Jaspers’ distinction between explaining and understanding, which relates this distinction to that between general and singular causal claims. Put briefly, I suggest that when Jaspers talks about (mere) explanation, what he has in mind are general causal claims linking types of events. Understanding, by contrast, is concerned with singular causation in the psychological domain. Furthermore, I also suggest that Jaspers thinks that only understanding makes manifest what causation between one element of a person’s mental (...) life and another ultimately consists in – that is, the particular way in which one psychic event can emerge from or arise out of another. I contrast the resulting view both with a view on causation in psychiatry recently put forward by John Campbell, and also with another view that is the target of Campbell’s attack, which is due to Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett. (shrink)

Judges in multiple US states, such as New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, California, and Florida, receive a prediction of defendants’ recidivism risk, generated by the COMPAS algorithm. If judges act on these predictions, they implicitly delegate normative decisions to proprietary software, even beyond the previously documented race and age biases. Using the ProPublica dataset, we demonstrate that COMPAS predictions favor jailing over release. COMPAS is biased against defendants. We show that this bias can largely be removed. Our proposed correction increases overall (...) accuracy, and attenuates anti-black and anti-young bias. However, it also slightly increases the risk that defendants are released who commit a new crime before tried. We argue that this normative decision should not be buried in the code. The tradeoff between the interests of innocent defendants and of future victims should not only be made transparent. The algorithm should be changed such that the legislator and the courts do make this choice. (shrink)

The moral success or failure of our conduct is sometimes determined by the rationality of our practical decision making, and sometimes by the continence with which we act on the decisions that we have made. Both factors depend on the things that we find salient. And rather than making some culpable error in reasoning, or failing to resist some temptation, we often behave poorly just because some important aspect of the situation never became salient to us. We might also act (...) well only because the temptations that would have deterred us from doing so remained in the unattended background of our consciousness. These contributions of salience disappear from view if we model our practical reasoning in decision-theoretic terms. The writers who have emphasised their importance have typically done so in the course of literary writings, rather than philosophical ones. They have suggested that an agent's role in shaping which things will be salient to them is most clearly seen in the practice of prayer. Following some remarks of Iris Murdoch, and drawing on some results from experimental psychology, this paper considers a way in which this suggestion might be naturalised to a secular world view. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory predicts that humans should avoid incest because of the negative effects incest has on individual reproduction: production of defective offspring. Selection for the avoidance of close-kin mating has apparently resulted in a psychological mechanism that promotes voluntary incest avoidance. Most human societies are thought to have rules regulating incest. If incest is avoided, why are social rules constructed to regulate it? This target article suggests that incest rules do not exist primarily to regulate close-kin mating but to regulate (...) inbreeding between more distant kin and sexual relations between affinal relatives. Three evolutionary hypotheses about cousin marriage and affinal kin mating follow from this suggestion: Rules regulating mating between affinal kin are means of paternity protection. Cousin marriage is regulated because, if it occurs, it can concentrate wealth and power within families to the detriment of the powerful positions of rulers in stratified societies and the relatively equal social statuses of most men in egalitarian societies. Tests using the comparative method on a worldwide sample of 129 societies supported the three hypotheses. Two alternative anthropological hypotheses failed to be supported. (shrink)

Thomistic Hylomorphists claim that we human persons have rational or intellective souls which can continue to exist separately from our bodies after we die. Much of the recent scholarly discussion of Thomistic Hylomorphism has centered on this thesis and the question of whether human persons can survive death along with their souls or whether only their souls can survive in this separated, disembodied, post-mortem state. As a result, two rival versions of Thomistic Hyomorphism have been formulated: Survivalism and Corruptionism. This (...) chapter makes a new contribution to the debate between Survivalists and Corruptionists by identifying a heretofore undiscussed problem for Corruptionist Thomistic Hylomorphism. In particular, it is argued that if Corruptionists were right that human persons cannot survive their deaths along with their souls, this would undermine the grounds on which all Thomistic Hylomorphists, including Corruptionists, rely to justify their belief that our souls can continue to exist after our deaths. Given this, it is argued that Thomistic Hylomorphists have grounds for thinking that our souls can continue to exist after our deaths only if they allow, as Survivalists do and Corruptionists do not, that we human persons can continue to exist after our deaths, with souls but no bodies. (shrink)

A good definition of process tracing should highlight what is distinctive about process tracing as a methodology of causal inference. I look at eight criteria that are used to define process tracing in the methodological literature, and I dismiss all eight criteria as unhelpful (some because they are too restrictive, and others because they are vacuous). In place of these criteria, I propose four alternative criteria, and I draw a distinction between process tracing for the ultimate aim of testing a (...) start--end hypothesis versus process tracing as an ultimate end in itself. Although it is clear enough how the former method works, there is still much methodological work to be done in understanding the latter method as a distinctive method of causal inference, I argue. (shrink)

This paper aims to outline, and argue for, an approach to episodic memory broadly in the spirit of knowledge-first epistemology. I discuss a group of influential views of epsiodic memory that I characterize as ‘two-factor accounts’, which have both proved popular historically and have also seen a resurgence in recent work on the philosophy of memory. What is common to them is that they try to give an account of the nature of episodic memory in which the concept of knowledge (...) plays no explanatory role. I highlight some parallels between these two-factor accounts and attempts to give a reductive definition of knowledge itself. I then discuss some problems two-factor accounts of episodic memory face in explaining the distinctive sense in which episodic recollection involves remembering personally experienced past events, before sketching an alternative approach to episodic memory, which takes as basic the idea that episodic memory involves the retention of knowledge. I argue that we can give an exhaustive constitutive account of what episodic memory is, and how it differs from other types of mental states, by considering what particular type of knowledge is retained in episodic memory, and what exactly having that knowledge consists in. (shrink)