This book uses literary examples makes the case for understanding law and the legal system through the lens of philosophical pragmatism. For pragmatists, experience is everything; and they argue against understanding the world through any abstraction, maintaining that it is simply too complicated to fit into categories or theories. Legal pragmatism is the application of this philosophy to the making of law, the practice of law, and the practice of judging. This book maintains that the best way to understand legal (...) pragmatism is not through bare theoretical exegesis but through literature; that is, through stories that cast light on various pragmatic aspects of law. Engaging a range of literary sources, including works by Seamus Heaney, Hilary Mantel, Harper Lee and Ian McEwan, the book makes a compelling case for the contemporary relevance of pragmatism. This book will appeal to legal theorists, law and literature/humanities scholars; readers of literary criticism; and those with interests in pragmatist philosophy. (shrink)

Through close readings of the poems and prose essays of Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill, Defending Poetry makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry.

What are the philosophical views of professional philosophers, and how do these views change over time? The 2020 PhilPapers Survey surveyed around 2000 philosophers on 100 philosophical questions. The results provide a snapshot of the state of some central debates in philosophy, reveal correlations and demographic effects involving philosophers' views, and reveal some changes in philosophers' views over the last decade.

A leading political theorist’s groundbreaking defense of ideal conceptions of justice in political philosophy Throughout the history of political philosophy and politics, there has been continual debate about the roles of idealism versus realism. For contemporary political philosophy, this debate manifests in notions of ideal theory versus nonideal theory. Nonideal thinkers shift their focus from theorizing about full social justice, asking instead which feasible institutional and political changes would make a society more just. Ideal thinkers, on the other hand, question (...) whether full justice is a standard that any society is likely ever to satisfy. And, if social justice is unrealistic, are attempts to understand it without value or importance, and merely utopian? Utopophobia argues against thinking that justice must be realistic, or that understanding justice is only valuable if it can be realized. David Estlund does not offer a particular theory of justice, nor does he assert that justice is indeed unrealizable—only that it could be, and this possibility upsets common ways of proceeding in political thought. Estlund engages critically with important strands in traditional and contemporary political philosophy that assume a sound theory of justice has the overriding, defining task of contributing practical guidance toward greater social justice. Along the way, he counters several tempting perspectives, including the view that inquiry in political philosophy could have significant value only as a guide to practical political action, and that understanding true justice would necessarily have practical value, at least as an ideal arrangement to be approximated. Demonstrating that unrealistic standards of justice can be both sound and valuable to understand, Utopophobia stands as a trenchant defense of ideal theory in political philosophy. (shrink)

David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is the definitive statement of the greatest philosopher in the English language. His arguments in support of reasoning from experience, and against the "sophistry and illusion"of religiously inspired philosophical fantasies, caused controversy in the eighteenth century and are strikingly relevant today, when faith and science continue to clash. The Enquiry considers the origin and processes of human thought, reaching the stark conclusion that we can have no ultimate understanding of the physical world, or (...) indeed our own minds. In either sphere we must depend on instinctive learning from experience, recognizing our animal nature and the limits of reason. Hume's calm and open-minded skepticism thus aims to provide a new basis for science, liberating us from the "superstition" of false metaphysics and religion. His Enquiry remains one of the best introductions to the study of philosophy, and his edition places it in its historical and philosophical context. (shrink)

The zetetic turn in epistemology raises three questions about epistemic and zetetic norms. First, there is the relationship question: what is the relationship between epistemic and zetetic norms? Are some epistemic norms zetetic norms, or are epistemic and zetetic norms distinct? Second, there is the tension question: are traditional epistemic norms in tension with plausible zetetic norms? Third, there is the reaction question: how should theorists react to a tension between epistemic and zetetic norms? Drawing on an analogy to practical (...) philosophy, I develop a focal point view to resolve these motivating questions. On the focal point view, traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms answer different types of normative questions. There is nevertheless a familiar type of evaluative tension between traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms, but this tension is an unavoidable feature of the normative landscape and not a sign that traditional epistemic norms need revision. But if traditional epistemic norms are not zetetic norms, then in what sense is zetetic epistemology a project for epistemologists? I conclude by articulating a sense in which some nontraditional epistemic norms are zetetic norms, and in which zetetic epistemology is an important part of the study of theoretical rationality. (shrink)

By means of an example, shows the possibility of beliefs that are separately rational whilst together inconsistent.

One of the enduring concerns of moral philosophy is deciding who or what is deserving of ethical consideration. Much recent attention has been devoted to the "animal question" -- consideration of the moral status of nonhuman animals. In this book, David Gunkel takes up the "machine question": whether and to what extent intelligent and autonomous machines of our own making can be considered to have legitimate moral responsibilities and any legitimate claim to moral consideration. The machine question poses a (...) fundamental challenge to moral thinking, questioning the traditional philosophical conceptualization of technology as a tool or instrument to be used by human agents. Gunkel begins by addressing the question of machine moral agency: whether a machine might be considered a legitimate moral agent that could be held responsible for decisions and actions. He then approaches the machine question from the other side, considering whether a machine might be a moral patient due legitimate moral consideration. Finally, Gunkel considers some recent innovations in moral philosophy and critical theory that complicate the machine question, deconstructing the binary agent--patient opposition itself. Technological advances may prompt us to wonder if the science fiction of computers and robots whose actions affect their human companions could become science fact. Gunkel's argument promises to influence future considerations of ethics, ourselves, and the other entities who inhabit this world. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can (...) just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Time-Reversal Invariance 2. Thermodynamics 3. Statistical Mechanics 4. The Reversibility Objections and the Past-Hypothesis 5. The Scope of Thermodynamics 6. The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention 7. Quantum Mechanics Appendix: Gedankenexperiments with Heat Engines Index Reviews of this book: The foundations of statistical mechanisms are often presented in physics textbooks in a rather obscure and confused way. By challenging common ways of thinking about this subject, Time and Chance can do quite a lot to improve this situation. --Jean Bricmont, Science Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own...It has a surgical precision...and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn. --Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear...The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to. --Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan. (shrink)

How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.

In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Bernard Stiegler develops an account of the pedagogical responsibilities which follow from rhythmic intergenerational flows, involving the creation of milieus which care for and pay attention to the future, toward the creation of nootechnical milieus. Such milieus are defined by their objects of attention: intellectual life, spiritual life, and political life; taken together: noetic life. Such is the claim Alfred North Whitehead makes when arguing that the sole object of education is life (...) and the creation of an art of life which is itself a rhythmic adventure.The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, to clarify the importance of Stiegler’s reading of Aristotle’s notion of the noetic soul in our thinking about the role, purpose, and function of educational institutions in relation to intellective, spiritual, and political life. In this paper, I will fuse this discussion with a Whiteheadian approach to rhythm, developing what I call a ‘rhythmic nootechnics’ in the service of ‘nootechnical evolution’ as, I argue, Whitehead’s approach to rhythm allows to clarify and enrich Stiegler’s reading of Aristotle. Second, and as indicated, to explore the relationship between Whitehead and Stiegler, insofar as the former has become an increasing reference point for the latter, but this relationship remains unexplored in the literature. Third, to apply this concept of ‘rhythmic nootechnics’ to think about what transformations at the level of pedagogy and politics are necessary to reinvent the university from this Stieglerian and Whiteheadian perspective. (shrink)

I attempt to get as clear as possible on the chain of reasoning by which irreversible macrodynamics is derivable from time-reversible microphysics, and in particular to clarify just what kinds of assumptions about the initial state of the universe, and about the nature of the microdynamics, are needed in these derivations. I conclude that while a “Past Hypothesis” about the early Universe does seem necessary to carry out such derivations, that Hypothesis is not correctly understood as a constraint on the (...) early Universe’s entropy. (shrink)

As scientific objects, mummies were born of Europe’s encounter with two “ancient” bodily knowledges. The first is well known: the embalmed Egyptian dead who were ground into a materia medica named mumia and later were collected as “mummies” themselves. Yet mummies owe their global possibility—of ancient sciences of embalming and environmental manipulation apprehensible worldwide—to the sixteenth-century Spanish encounter with the Incas’ preserved dead, the yllapa. This article argues that their confiscation and display desecrated their sacred affect, but their recategorization as (...) “embalmed” bodies allowed Indigenous Peruvian writers to argue for the Incas’ lost medical sophistication. European scholars then used that sophistication to establish “mummies” as a comparative category. The original yllapas decayed, blurring both Inca sovereignty and the colonial Latin American sciences that anatomized it, but their imagined resurrection in the preserved bodies of other “ancient Peruvians” turned the “Inca mummy” into a highly collectible scientific object, embodying a newly national past of ancient learning and anti-imperial indictment. (shrink)

We start by presenting three different views that jointly imply that every person has many conscious beings in their immediate vicinity, and that the number greatly varies from person to person. We then present and assess an argument to the conclusion that how confident someone should be in these views should sensitively depend on how massive they happen to be. According to the argument, sometimes irreducibly de se observations can be powerful evidence for or against believing in metaphysical theories.

Worries about mental causation are prominent in contemporary discussions of the mind and human agency. Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how a mental substance (thought to be immaterial) could interact with a material substance, a body. Most philosophers nowadays repudiate immaterial minds, but the problem of mental causation has not gone away. Instead, focus has shifted to mental properties. How could mental properties be causally relevant to bodily behavior? How could something mental qua mental cause (...) what it does? After looking at the traditional Problem of Interaction, we survey various versions of the property-based problem and look at proposed solutions to them. (shrink)

It is advisable to treat some sorts of discourse about fiction with the aid of an intensional operator "in such-And-Such fiction...." the operator may appear either explicitly or tacitly. It may be analyzed in terms of similarity of worlds, As follows: "in the fiction f, A" means that a is true in those of the worlds where f is told as known fact rather than fiction that differ least from our world, Or from the belief worlds of the community in (...) which the fiction originated. (shrink)

1.1 Manifolds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.2 Tangent Vectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (...) . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.3 Vector Fields, Integral Curves, and Flows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 1.4 Tensors and Tensor Fields on Manifolds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 1.5 The Action of Smooth Maps on Tensor Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 1.6 Lie Derivatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 1.7 Derivative Operators and Geodesics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 1.8 Curvature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 1.9 Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 1.10 Hypersurfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 1.11 Volume Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96.. (shrink)

Unprecedented advances in medicine, genetic engineering, and demographic forecasting raise new questions that strain the categories and assumptions of traditional ethical theories. Heyd's approach resolves many paradoxes in intergenerational justice, while offering a major test case for the profound problems of the limits of ethics and the nature of value. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and (...) impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992. (shrink)

Our aim in this entry is to articulate the state of the art in the moral psychology of personal identity. We begin by discussing the major philosophical theories of personal identity, including their shortcomings. We then turn to recent psychological work on personal identity and the self, investigations that often illuminate our person-related normative concerns. We conclude by discussing the implications of this psychological work for some contemporary philosophical theories and suggesting fruitful areas for future work on personal identity.

Since the 1990s the so-called transparency of experience has played a crucial role in core debates in philosophy of mind. However, recent developments in the literature have made transparency itself quite opaque. The very idea of transparent experience has become quite fuzzy, due to the articulation of many different notions of transparency and transparency theses. Absent a unified logical space where these notions and theses can be mapped and confronted, we are left with an overall impression of conceptual chaos. This (...) is a problem, given the constant and ubiquitous references to transparency in the literature and its prominent position in the contemporary philosophy of mind. My goal in this paper is to restore clarity through proper analysis of the mutual relations between the different transparency theses. This allows me to uncover a unitary multidimensional logical space where existing (as well as possible) views can be properly singled out and located. (shrink)

: Written to help the practicing health professional and students in the health professions decide whether to act on the reports of research projects that affect their practice, the book is geared to the professional consumer of research, not the performer of research. Discusses how to sort out principal types of clinical investigations, describe their strengths and weaknesses, list the main difficulties likely to occur with each, and deal with informed consent, vulnerable subjects, patients' rights, professional responsibility, and other ethical (...) concerns. (shrink)

I provide a narrative analysis of the Apostles’ Creed as a suggested alternative to the traditional referential reading. The focus of temporal intentionality offers an analysis of the Creed which is radically dirferent from the apocalypticism of the traditional interpretations.

This text has already been published, in La Deleuziana – online journal of philosophy – n. 10 / 2019 – rhythm, chaos and nonpulsed man.: This paper explores the question of the relationship between art, rhythm, and life through a mobilisation of Giorgio Agamben's discussion, first, of Nietzsche and the active nihilist's relation-ship to art, and second, on his diagnosis of rhythm as pertaining to the “original structure” of the work of art in The Man Without Content. Agamben's notion - (...) Philosophie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Not a few scholars reject the notion of divine impassibility. Contemporary theodicists in particular often see impassibility as impotent in the face of evil and suffering. At best, it is assumed that impassibility has no contribution to make to pastoral practice. At worst, it is argued that impassibility has negative repercussions for sufferers and carers. The purpose of this article will be to argue that impassibility has the potential to positively impact pastoral practice. It will be proposed that a constructive (...) ‘impassibilist pastoral care’ arises from a well defined understanding of impassibility and an awareness of the weaknesses of passibility. Consequently, five principles of pastoral care will be identified. Relationality engenders practice which is mutual. Particularity resists the tendency in much care towards ‘normalisation’. Equivalence challenges the passibilist by submitting that the incarnation provides an ontologically equivalent divine suffering which stands in contrast to the so‐called ‘suffering of God’ thesis. Arationality affirms that human reason is limited and therefore prevents the carer from over rationalising suffering. Otherness arises from the belief that God is ontologically distinct and therefore he alone is the source of salvation. In light of these principles, the proposed understanding of ‘impassibilist pastoral care’ is brought into dialogue with the questions sufferers ask and a positive and effective definition of impassibility is submitted. In sum, this article seeks to bring together philosophical and theological defences of impassibility in order to submit a fresh approach to the care of those who suffer. (shrink)

1. The Shmagency Challenge to Constitutivism In metaethics – and indeed, meta-normativity – constitutivism is a family of views that hope to ground normativity in norms, or standards, or motives, or aims that are constitutive of action and agency. And mostly because of the influential work of Christine Korsgaard and David Velleman, constitutivism seems to be gaining grounds in the current literature. The promises of constitutivism are significant. Perhaps chief among them are the hope to provide with some kind (...) of answer to the skeptic about morality or perhaps practical reason, and the hope to secure for practical reason a kind of objectivity that is consistent with its practical, motivationally engaged nature. The former philosophical motivation for constitutivism – most clearly present in much of Korsgaard’s relevant work[1] – relies on the fact that constitutive norms seem to be less mysterious than not-clearly-constitutive norms. There arguably is nothing mysterious about, say, the norms of certain reasonably-well-defined activities, like building a house, or playing chess. And challenges by the relevant skeptic – the one asking "Why should I make sure the house I’m building can shelter people from the weather?" or "Why should I not castle when my king is checked?" – seem very rare, barely intelligible, and anyway remarkably easy to cope with. We should explain to the misguided skeptic that if he doesn’t even try to build something that can protect people from the weather, he’s not in the business of building a house at all; that if she doesn’t even try to play by the rules of chess, she’s not in the business of playing chess at all; and so on. It would be nice, the constitutivist hope seems to go, if we had something equally powerful by way of a response to the skeptic asking "Why be moral?". The other main motivation for constitutivism – most clearly present in David Velleman’s relevant work[2] – starts from a commitment to some rather strong kind of existence-internalism about reasons: An agent has a reason to?, according to such views ), only if she can come to?, or at least to be motivated to?, by sound deliberation starting from her actual motivational set. (shrink)

It is in the context of this auditory imagination that I wish to discuss the language of Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip Larkin. All of them return to an origin and bring something back, all three live off the hump of the English poetic achievement, all three, here and now, in England, imply a continuity with another England, there and then. All three are hoarders and shorers of what they take to be the real England. All three treat England (...) as a region—or rather treat their region as England—in different and complementary ways. I believe they are afflicted with a sense of history that was once the peculiar affliction of the poets of other nations who were not themselves natives of England but who spoke the English language. The poets of the mother culture, I feel, are now possessed of that defensive love of their territory which was once shared only by those poets whom we might call colonial—Yeats, MacDiarmid, Carlos Williams. They are aware of their Englishness as deposits in the descending storeys of the literary and historical past. Their very terrain is becoming consciously precious. A desire to preserve indigenous traditions, to keep open the imagination's supply lines to the past, to receive from the stations of Anglo-Saxon confirmations of ancestry, to perceive in the rituals of show Saturdays and race-meetings and seaside outings, of church-going and marriages at Whitsun, and in the necessities that crave expression after the ritual of church-going has passed away, to perceive in these a continuity of communal ways, and a confirmation of an identity which is threatened—all this is signified by their language. Seamus Heaney, recognized today as one of Ireland's leading poets, has received numerous honors, among them the E. C. Gregory Award, the Cholmondeley Award, the Irish Academy of Letters Award, the Denis Devlin Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences E. M. Forster Award. His published poems have been collected in four volumes: Death of a Naturalist , Door in the Dark , Wintering Out , and North . In another form this essay was delivered as the Beckham Lecture at Berkeley in the spring of 1976. He has also contributed to the Summer 1981 issue on “Current Unstated Assumptions about Poetry” for Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

This paper presents a new Symmetrical Interpretation (SI) of relativistic quantum mechanics which postulates: quantum mechanics is a theory about complete experiments, not particles; a complete experiment is maximally described by a complex transition amplitude density; and this transition amplitude density never collapses. This SI is compared to the Copenhagen Interpretation (CI) for the analysis of Einstein’s bubble experiment. This SI makes several experimentally testable predictions that differ from the CI, solves one part of the measurement problem, resolves some inconsistencies (...) of the CI, and gives intuitive explanations of some previously mysterious quantum effects. (shrink)

Perceptualists say that having a pain in a body part consists in perceiving the part as instantiating some property. I argue that perceptualism makes better sense of the connections between pain location and the experiences undergone by people in pain than three alternative accounts that dispense with perception. Turning to fellow perceptualists, I also reject ways in which David Armstrong and Michael Tye understand and motivate perceptualism, and I propose an alternative interpretation, one that vitiates a pair of objections—due (...) to John Hyman—concerning the meaning of ‘Amy has a pain in her foot’ and the idea of bodily sensitivity. Perceptualism, I conclude, remains our best account of the location of pains. (shrink)

We become ill in ways our parents and grandparents did not, with diseases unheard of and treatments undreamed of generations ago. This text tells the story of the modern experience of illness, linking ideas of illness, health, and postmodernism.

Dark matter is a fundamental component of the standard cosmological model, but in spite of four decades of increasingly sensitive searches, no-one has yet detected a single dark-matter particle in the laboratory. An alternative cosmological paradigm exists: MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics). Observations explained in the standard model by postulating dark matter are explained in MOND by proposing a modification of Newton's laws of motion. Both MOND and the standard model have had successes and failures – but only MOND has repeatedly (...) predicted observational facts in advance of their discovery. In this volume, David Merritt outlines why such predictions are considered by many philosophers of science to be the 'gold standard' when it comes to judging a theory's validity. In a world where the standard model receives most attention, the author applies criteria from the philosophy of science to assess, in a systematic way, the viability of this alternative cosmological paradigm. (shrink)

Epistemic Evaluation aims to explore and apply a particular methodology in epistemology. The methodology is to consider the point or purpose of our epistemic evaluations, and to pursue epistemological theory in light of such matters. Call this purposeful epistemology. The idea is that considerations about the point and purpose of epistemic evaluation might fruitfully constrain epistemological theory and yield insights for epistemological reflection. Several contributions to this volume explicitly address this general methodology, or some version of it. Others focus on (...) advancing some application of the methodology rather than on theorizing about it. The papers go on to explore the idea that purposes allow one to understand the conceptual demands on knowing, examine how purposeful epistemology might shed light on the debate between internalist and externalist epistemologies, and further develop the idea of purposeful epistemology. (shrink)

Two models of assertion are described and their epistemological implications considered. The assurance model draws a parallel between the ethical norms surrounding promising and the epistemic norms which facilitate the transmission of testimonial knowledge. This model is rejected in favour of the view that assertion transmits knowledge by expressing belief. I go on to compare the epistemology of testimony with the epistemology of memory.