Restrictive visitation policies produce inequities in healthcare that have meaningful consequences for patients’ health and well-being. There is a surplus of existing literature exploring the consequences of reduced visitation in the setting of pediatric patients lacking decision-making capacity, but relatively little scholarship addressing visitation restriction for less vulnerable adults possessing capacity. Here, we present the case of a patient who suffered serious complications of childbirth, during the delivery of her healthy newborn, leading to prolonged hospitalization. During her treatment course, she (...) was subsequently denied visitation with her newborn, who had been discharged from the hospital, and this had detrimental effects on her recovery. Hospital policies restricting visitation during the COVID-19 pandemic were intended to reduce the risk of disease exposure for both patients and staff, despite conflicting evidence demonstrating this benefit. In contrast, they often have negative effects on patient stress, mood, and physical recovery. The sequelae of this US-based case study argue the need for more holistic hospital visitation policies, placing a specific lens on adult patients receiving a visitation from their newborn children. (shrink)

Theatre practitioners use empathy formation techniques within their acting methodology to develop particular characters for the stage. Here, Ann Phelps and Dylan Brown argue that, when Constantin Stanislavski's seminal dramatic method is placed in conversation with exemplarist moral theory, acting can become a tool for moral formation. To illustrate this claim, they describe their work with the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University, where a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics framework is embodied and expanded using this dramatic (...) method. By using acting exercises to help students rehearse how their moral exemplars would respond to situations, Phelps and Brown challenge students to embody their exemplars instead of merely engaging with them as a passive intellectual exercise. Moral educators can achieve their pedagogical aim by expanding Stanislavski's dramatic “super-objective” to encompass a “moral meta-objective.” This neo-Aristotelian modification to Stanislavski's method might extend beyond the stage in ways that facilitate the embodiment of morally exemplary behavior, even after the curtain falls. (shrink)

In technological societies where excessive screen use and internet addiction are becoming constant temptations, the valuable yet intoxicating pleasures of digital technology suggest a need to recover and repurpose temperance, a virtue emphasized by ancient and medieval philosophers. This article reconstructs this virtue for our technological age by reclaiming the most relevant features of Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s accounts and suggesting five critical revisions needed to adapt the virtue for a contemporary context. The article then draws on this critical interpretation, along (...) with empirical research analyzing the value and dangers of digital technology, to construct a normative account of digital temperance, a virtue that finds a mean between “digital insensibility,” the vice of deficiency, and “digital overindulgence,” the vice of excess. We conclude by showing how this virtue of digital temperance can help to promote human flourishing in a world saturated with tempting technology. (shrink)

2021 marks Dylan's 80th birthday and his 60th year in the music world. It invites us to look back on his career and the multitudes that it contains. Is he a song and dance man? A political hero? A protest singer? A self-portrait artist who has yet to paint his masterpiece? Is he Shakespeare in the alley? The greatest living exponent of American music? An ironsmith? Internet radio DJ? Poet (who knows it)? Is he a spiritual and religious parking (...) meter? Judas? The voice of a generation or a false prophet, jokerman, and thief? Dylan is all these and none. The essays in this book explore the Nobel laureate’s masks, collectively reflecting upon their meaning through time, change, movement, and age. They are written by wonderful and diverse set of contributors, all here for his 80th birthday bash: celebrated Dylanologists like Michael Gray and Laura Tenschert; recording artists such as Robyn Hitchcock, Barb Jungr, Amy Rigby, and Emma Swift; and 'the professors’ who all like his looks: David Boucher, Anne Margaret Daniel, Ray Monk, Galen Strawson, and more. Read it on your toaster! (shrink)

This essay—originally a conference response to Glenn Hughes’ essay—explores how themes and notions in Lonergan’s philosophy of art extend in surprising and often unnoticed ways into the larger whole of Lonergan’s thought. By the same token, the broader framework of Lonergan’s philosophy sheds a great deal of interesting light on his philosophy of art. The essay explores this mutual illumination in the context of Hughes’ reflections on “ulterior significance.” For example, it relates Lonergan’s notion of art to his heuristic of (...) human development as an intertwining or interlocking of the organic, psychic, intellectual, and religious levels in human development. It also relates Lonergan’s notion of art, together with his recognition of the centrality of the symbolic in human living, to his treatment of the permanent human needs for liberation from “the ready-made world,” for the sense of the unknown, and for orientation into mystery—even for orientation into ultimate mystery. (shrink)

In this fine collection, Bob Dylan at 80, Gary Browning and Constantine Sandis have curated a book which is Janus-faced. It develops a simple premise, to reflect on the career of Dylan and the mult...

Despite their shared origins, medicine and dentistry are not always two sides of the same coin. There is a long history in medical philosophy of defining disease and various medical models have come into existence. Hitherto, little philosophical and phenomenological work has been done considering dental caries and periodontitis as examples of disease and illness. A philosophical methodology is employed to explore how we might define dental caries and periodontitis using classical medical models of disease – the naturalistic and normativist. (...) We identify shared threads and highlight how the features of these highly prevalent dental diseases prevent them fitting in either definition. The article describes phenomenology and the current thought around the phenomenology of illness, exploring how and why these dental illnesses might integrate into a phenomenological model. We discover that there are some features particular to dental caries and periodontitis: ubiquity, preventability and hyper-monitorablility. Understanding the differences that these dental diseases have compared to many other classically studied diseases leads us to ethical questions concerning how we might manage those who have symptoms and seek treatment. As dental caries and periodontitis are common, preventable and hyper-monitorable, it is suggested that these features affect the phenomenology of these illnesses. For example, if we experience dental illness when we have consciously made decisions that have led to it, do we experience them differently to those rarer illnesses that we cannot expect? Other diseases share these features are discussed. This paper highlights the central differences between the classical philosophical notion of disease in medicine and the dental examples of caries and periodontitis. It suggests that a philosophical method of conceptualising medical illness - phenomenology - should not be applied to these dental illnesses without thought. A phenomenological analysis of any dental illness is yet to be done and this paper highlights why a separate strand of phenomenology should be explored, instead of employing those that are extant. The article concludes with suggestions for further research into the nascent field of the phenomenology of dental illness and aims to act as a springboard to expose the dental sphere to this philosophical method of analysis. (shrink)

Corpus-driven Cognitive Semantics Introduction to the field Dylan Glynn Is quantitative empirical research possible for the study of semantics?1 More ...

The debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists depends in large part on what ordinary people mean by ‘free will’, a matter on which previous experimental philosophy studies have yielded conflicting results. In Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (2005, 2006), most participants judged that agents in deterministic scenarios could have free will and be morally responsible. Nichols and Knobe (2007), though, suggest that these apparent compatibilist responses are performance errors produced by using concrete scenarios, and that their abstract scenarios reveal the folk (...) theory of free will for what it actually is—incompatibilist. Here, we argue that the results of two new studies suggest just the opposite. Most participants only give apparent incompatibilist judgments when they mistakenly interpret determinism to imply that agents’ mental states are bypassed in the causal chains that lead to their behavior. Determinism does not entail bypassing, so these responses do not reflect genuine incompatibilist intuitions. When participants understand what determinism does mean, the vast majority take it to be compatible with free will. Further results indicate that most people’s concepts of choice and the ability to do otherwise do not commit them to incompatibilism, either, putting pressure on incompatibilist arguments that rely on transfer principles, such as the Consequence Argument. We discuss the implications of these findings for philosophical debates about free will, and suggest that incompatibilism appears to be either false, or else a thesis about something other than what most people mean by ‘free will’. (shrink)

Algorithms wield increasing control over our lives—over which jobs we get, whether we're granted loans, what information we're exposed to online, and so on. Algorithms can, and often do, wield their power in a biased way, and much work has been devoted to algorithmic bias. In contrast, algorithmic neutrality has gone largely neglected. I investigate three questions about algorithmic neutrality: What is it? Is it possible? And when we have it in mind, what can we learn about algorithmic bias?

The standard view in epistemology is that propositional knowledge entails belief. Positive arguments are seldom given for this entailment thesis, however; instead, its truth is typically assumed. Against the entailment thesis, Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (Noûs, forthcoming) report that a non-trivial percentage of people think that there can be propositional knowledge without belief. In this paper, we add further fuel to the fire, presenting the results of four new studies. Based on our results, we argue that the entailment thesis does not (...) deserve the default status that it is typically granted. We conclude by considering the alternative account of knowledge that Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel propose to explain their results, arguing that it does not explain ours. In its place we offer a different explanation of both sets of findings—the conviction account, according to which belief, but not knowledge, requires mental assent. (shrink)

Fallibilists claim that one can know a proposition on the basis of evidence that supports it even if the evidence doesn't guarantee its truth. Jessica Brown offers a compelling defence of this view against infallibilists, who claim that it is contradictory to claim to know and yet to admit the possibility of error.

In recent years, philosophers have identified a number of moral and psychological harms associated with the attention economy (Alysworth & Castro, 2021; Castro & Pham, 2020; Williams, 2018). Missing from many of these accounts of the attention economy, however, is what exactly attention is. As a result of this neglect of the cognitive science of attention, many of these accounts are not empirically credible. They rely on oversimplified and unsophisticated accounts of not only attention, but self- control, and addiction as (...) well. Of note are accounts of the attention economy that rely on the ‘brain disease’ rhetoric of addiction and subsequent control failures (Aylsworth & Castro, 2021; Bhargava & Velasquez, 2021), accounts that rely on a strict dichotomy of top-down vs. bottom-up attention (Williams, 2018; Aylsworth & Castro, 2021), and accounts that construe attention as a limited resource (Williams, 2018). -/- Drawing on recent work from the neuroscience and psychology of attention, I demonstrate the shortcomings of these accounts and sketch a way forward for an empirically grounded account of the attention economy. These accounts tend to uphold strict dichotomies of voluntary control (e.g., compulsion versus choice, dual-process models of self-control, and top-down versus bottom-up) that cannot account for the complexities of attentional control, mental agency, and decision-making. As such, these empirically and conceptually impoverished accounts cannot adequately address the current so-called crisis of attention. To better understand the harms associated with the attention economy, we need an empirically responsible account of the nature and function of attention and mental agency. (shrink)

According to the Desiderative Lockean Thesis, there are necessary and sufficient conditions, stated in the terms of decision theory, for when one is truly said to want. What one is truly said to want, it turns out, varies remarkably by context—and to an underappreciated degree. To explain this context-sensitivity—and closure properties of wanting—I advance a Desiderative Lockean view that is distinctive in having two context-sensitive parameters.

If someone brings about an outcome without intending to, is she causally and morally responsible for it? What if she acts intentionally, but as the result of manipulation by another agent? Previous research has shown that an agent's mental states can affect attributions of causal and moral responsibility to that agent, but little is known about what effect one agent's mental states can have on attributions to another agent. In Experiment 1, we replicate findings that manipulation lowers attributions of responsibility (...) to manipulated agents. Experiments 2–7 isolate which features of manipulation drive this effect, a crucial issue for both philosophical debates about free will and attributions of responsibility in situations involving social influence more generally. Our results suggest that “bypassing” a manipulated agent's mental states generates the greatest reduction in responsibility, and we explain our results in terms of the effects that one agent's mental states can have on the counterfactual relations between another agent and an outcome. (shrink)

Within philosophy of action, there are three broad views about what, in addition to beliefs, answer the question of “what to do?” and so determine an agent’s motivation: desires, judgments about values/reasons, or states of the will, such as intentions. We argue that recent work in decision theory vindicates the volitionalist. “What to do?” isn’t settled by “what do I value” or “what reasons are there?” Rational motivation further requires determining how to trade off the possibility of a good outcome (...) against the possibility of a bad one—i.e., determining how much of a risk to take. The risk attitudes that embody this tradeoff seem best understood as intentions: as self-governing policies to weight desires or reasons in certain ways. That we need to settle our risk attitudes before making most decisions corroborates Bratman’s claim that self-governing policies are required for resolving impasses of evaluative and normative underdetermination. Moreover, far from being rare or confined to tie-breakings, cases that are underdetermined but for one’s risk attitudes are typical of everyday decision-making. The will is required for most rational action. (shrink)

You want to see the concert, but don’t want to take a long drive (even though the concert is far away). Such *strongly conflicting desire ascriptions* are, I show, wrongly predicted incompatible by standard semantics. I then object to possible solutions, and give my own, based on *some-things-considered desire*. Considering the fun of the concert, but ignoring the drive, you want to see the concert; considering the boredom of the drive, but ignoring the concert, you don’t want to take the (...) drive. (shrink)

In a well-known paper, Nick Bostrom presents a confrontation between a fictionalised Blaise Pascal and a mysterious mugger. The mugger persuades Pascal to hand over his wallet by exploiting Pascal's commitment to expected utility maximisation. He does so by offering Pascal an astronomically high reward such that, despite Pascal's low credence in the mugger's truthfulness, the expected utility of accepting the mugging is higher than rejecting it. In this article, I present another sort of high value, low credence mugging. This (...) time, the mugger utilises research on existential risk and the long-term potential of humanity to exploit Pascal's expected-utility-maximising descendant. This mugging is more insidious than Bostrom's original as it relies on plausible facts about the long-term future, as well as realistic credences about how our everyday actions could, albeit with infinitesimally low likelihood, affect the future of humanity. (shrink)

The use of drones in public healthcare is suggested as a means to improve efficiency under constrained resources and personnel. This paper begins by framing drones in healthcare as a social experiment where ethical guidelines are needed to protect those impacted while fully realizing the benefits the technology offers. Then we propose an ethical framework to facilitate the design, development, implementation, and assessment of drones used in public healthcare. Given the healthcare context, we structure the framework according to the four (...) bioethics principles: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice, plus a fifth principle from artificial intelligence ethics: explicability. These principles are abstract which makes operationalization a challenge; therefore, we suggest an approach of translation according to a values hierarchy whereby the top-level ethical principles are translated into relevant human values within the domain. The resulting framework is an applied ethics tool that facilitates awareness of relevant ethical issues during the design, development, implementation, and assessment of drones in public healthcare. (shrink)

Hate speech law can be found throughout the world. But it is also the subject of numerous principled arguments, both for and against. These principles invoke a host of morally relevant features and practical considerations . The book develops and then critically examines these various principled arguments. It also attempts to de-homogenize hate speech law into different clusters of laws/regulations/codes that constrain uses of hate speech, so as to facilitate a more nuanced examination of the principled arguments. Finally, it argues (...) that it is morally fitting for judicial and legislative judgments about the overall warrant of hate speech law to reflect principled compromise. Principled compromise is characterized not merely by compromise over matters of principled concern but also by compromise which is itself governed by ideals of moral duty or civic virtue. (shrink)

Jacques Lacan's thinking revolutionised the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and had a major impact in fields as diverse as film studies, literary criticism, feminist theory and philosophy. Yet his writings are notorious for their complexity and idiosyncratic style. Emphasising the clinical basis of Lacan's work, _An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis_ is an ideal companion to his ideas for readers in every discipline where his influence is felt. The _Dictionary _features: * over 200 entries, explaining Lacan's own terminology and (...) his use of common psychoanalytic expressions * details of the historical and institutional context of Lacan's work * reference to the origins of major concepts in the work of Freud, Saussure, Hegel and other key thinkers * a chronology of Lacan's life and works. (shrink)

Part 1. Introduction -- Introduction: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm in Light of a Thirty-Five Year Debate -- Thirty-Five Year Climate Change Policy Debate -- Part 2. Priority Ethical Issues -- Ethical Problems with Cost Arguments -- Ethics and Scientific Uncertainty Arguments -- Atmospheric Targets -- Allocating National Emissions Targets -- Climate Change Damages and Adaptation Costs -- Obligations of Sub-national Governments, Organizations, Businesses, and Individuals -- Independent Responsibility to Act -- Part 3. The Crucial Role of Ethics in Climate (...) Change Policy Making -- Why Has Ethics Failed to Achieve Traction? -- Conclusion: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm. (shrink)

This original study examines Jean-François Lyotard's philosophical concept of the differend and details its unexplored implications for literature. it provides a new framework with which to understand the discourse itself, from its Homeric beginnings to postmodern works by authors such as Michael Ondaatje and Jonathan Safran Foer.

This paper locates a source of contingency for Leibniz in the fact that God can do otherwise, absolutely speaking. This interpretative line has been previously thought to be a dead-end because it appears inconsistent with Leibniz’s own conception of God, as the ens perfectissimum, or the most perfect being (Adams, 1994). This paper points out that the best argument on offer which seeks to demonstrate this inconsistency fails. The paper then argues that the supposition that God does otherwise implies for (...) Leibniz (at least) that God would not be praiseworthy, which is an absurd implication—or a violation of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR)—but that this is not, strictly speaking, an inconsistency—or a violation of the principle of contradiction (POC). While praiseworthiness is a perfection—and is compossible with God’s other perfections—and so God must instantiate it, this paper argues that, given the nature of praiseworthiness for Leibniz, it in fact makes sense to say that praiseworthiness is merely a contingent perfection of God. (shrink)

We discuss recent work in experimental philosophy on free will and moral responsibility and then present a new study. Our results suggest an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions. Most laypersons who take determinism to preclude free will and moral responsibility apparently do so because they mistakenly interpret determinism to involve fatalism or “bypassing” of agents’ relevant mental states. People who do not misunderstand determinism in this way tend to see it as compatible with free will and responsibility. We discuss why (...) these results pose a challenge to incompatibilists. (shrink)

I argue that believing that p implies having a credence of 1 in p. This is true because the belief that p involves representing p as being the case, representing p as being the case involves not allowing for the possibility of not-p, while having a credence that’s greater than 0 in not-p involves regarding not-p as a possibility.

Imaginative resistance refers to cases in which one’s otherwise flexible imaginative capacity is constrained by an unwillingness or inability to imaginatively engage with a given claim. In three studies, we explored which specific imaginative demands engender resistance when imagining morally deviant worlds and whether individual differences in emotion predict the degree of this resistance. In Study 1 (N = 176), participants resisted the notion that harmful actions could be morally acceptable in the world of a narrative regardless of the author’s (...) claims about these actions but did not resist imagining that a perpetrator of harm could believe their actions to be morally acceptable. In Study 2 (N = 167) we replicated the findings of Study 1 and showed that imaginative resistance is greatest among participants who experience more negative affect in response to imagining harm and are lower in either trait anxiety or trait psychopathy. In Study 3 (N = 210) we show that this is the case even when the harms assessed include both low-severity (i.e., emotional harm) and high-severity (i.e., killing) cases. Thus, people’s moral beliefs constrain their ability to imagine hypothetical moral alternatives, although this ability systematically varies on the basis of stable individual differences in emotion. (shrink)

In a new interpretation, Garrett Wallace Brown considers Kant's cosmopolitan thought as a form of international constitutional jurisprudence that requires minimal legal demands. He explores and defends topics such as cosmopolitan law, cosmopolitan right, the laws of hospitality, a Kantian federation of states, a cosmopolitan epistemology of culture and a possible normative basis for a Kantian form of global distributive justice.

Was love invented by European poets in the middle ages, as C. S. Lewis claimed, or is it part of human nature? Will winning the lottery really make you happy? Is it possible to build robots that have feelings? These are just some of the intriguing questions explored in this new guide to the latest thinking about the emotions. Drawing on a wide range of scientific research, from anthropology and psychology to neuroscience and artificial intelligence, Emotion: The Science of Sentiment (...) takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the human heart. Illustrating his points with entertaining examples from fiction, film, and popular culture, Dylan Evans ranges from the evolution of the emotions to the nature of love and happiness to the language of feelings, offering readers the most recent thinking on real life topics that touch us all. But Emotion is also a book filled with surprises. Readers will discover, for instance, that the basic emotions are felt the world over--whether we live in the shadow of Times Square or in the depths of the rain forest, we all feel the emotions of disgust, joy, surprise, anger, fear, and distress. We find out that, according to research, winning the lottery does not cause a lasting increase in happiness--a short-lived euphoria is followed in almost every case with a return to our usual emotional state, if not worse. And we meet Kismet, an MIT robot that can express a wide range of emotions, from fear to happiness. Fun to read and based on the latest scientific thinking, here is a stimulating look at our emotions. (shrink)

The early Epicurean revival in Florence and Italy -- Medicean Florence : Ficino and Bartolomeo Scala -- Republican Florence : the university lectures of Marcello Adriani -- Niccol Machiavelli and the influence of Lucretius -- Lucretian networks in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries -- Appendix : notes on Machiavelli's transcription of MS Vat. Rossi 884.

In this paper I argue for a doctrine I call ?infallibilism?, which I stipulate to mean that If S knows that p, then the epistemic probability of p for S is 1. Some fallibilists will claim that this doctrine should be rejected because it leads to scepticism. Though it's not obvious that infallibilism does lead to scepticism, I argue that we should be willing to accept it even if it does. Infallibilism should be preferred because it has greater explanatory power (...) than fallibilism. In particular, I argue that an infallibilist can easily explain why assertions of ?p, but possibly not-p? (where the ?possibly? is read as referring to epistemic possibility) is infelicitous in terms of the knowledge rule of assertion. But a fallibilist cannot. Furthermore, an infallibilist can explain the infelicity of utterances of ?p, but I don't know that p? and ?p might be true, but I'm not willing to say that for all I know, p is true?, and why when a speaker thinks p is epistemically possible for her, she will agree (if asked) that for all she knows, p is true. The simplest explanation of these facts entails infallibilism. Fallibilists have tried and failed to explain the infelicity of ?p, but I don't know that p?, but have not even attempted to explain the last two facts. I close by considering two facts that seem to pose a problem for infallibilism, and argue that they don't. (shrink)

Jecker and colleagues open (2024) a critical and needed dialogue about the ethics of international conferencing. In particular, they focus on proposing a set of principles in selecting the location...

In its attempt to deflate of the pretensions of ‘Western knowledge’, the epistemic decolonisation movement carries on the work of Socrates, who sought to persuade those who thought that they were wise but were not, that they were not. Yet in its determination to recover and elevate indigenous systems of thought, decolonisation seems opposed to this very work, which is always corrosive of inherited belief. Decolonisation both expresses and contradicts the spirit of Socratic philosophy.

Robert Pippin's Nietzsche, Psychology, & First Philosophy is a striking, lucid study of Nietzsche's thoughts on the vicissitudes of subjectivity and its constituent commitments. It is an invaluable read not only for Nietzsche specialists, who will find it a serious challenge to prevailing attitudes, but also for all philosophers, who will discover his relevance to contemporary subfields concerned with human intention and action. Nietzsche emerges as the philosopher who came the closest, in the face of the perils of modernity, to (...) offering a radically new picture of what it means to act as a free, authentic subject. (shrink)

By introducing the concept of “mental data,” Palermos (2023) highlights an underappreciated aspect of data ethics that policymakers would do well to heed. Sweeping artificial intelligence (AI) legi...

Ron Giere’s recent book Scientific perspectivism sets out an account of science that attempts to forge a via media between two popular extremes: absolutist, objectivist realism on the one hand, and social constructivism or skeptical anti-realism on the other. The key for Giere is to treat both scientific observation and scientific theories as perspectives, which are limited, partial, contingent, context-, agent- and purpose-dependent, and pluralism-friendly, while nonetheless world-oriented and modestly realist. Giere’s perspectivism bears significant similarity to earlier ideas of Paul (...) Feyerabend and John Dewey. Comparing these to Giere’s work not only uncovers a consilience of ideas, but also can help to fill out Giere’s account in places where it is not fully developed, as well as helping us understand the work of these earlier authors and their continuing relevance to contemporary concerns in philosophy of science.Keywords: Ronald Giere; Paul Feyerabend; John Dewey; Perspectivism; Pragmatism; Pluralism. (shrink)

The most widely endorsed philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness assume that it contributes a single functional capacity to an organism’s information processing toolkit. However, conscious processes are a heterogeneous class of psychological phenomena supported by a variety of neurobiological mechanisms. This suggests a plurality of functional contributions of consciousness (FCCs), in the sense that conscious experience facilitates different functional capacities in different psychological domains. In this paper, I first develop a general methodological framework for isolating the psychological functions that (...) are associated with conscious experience. I then use this to show that the leading accounts—Global Workspace Theories, Higher Order Thought Theory and Information Integration Theory—all fail to acknowledge this functional pluralism, which limits their applicability as theories of consciousness. (shrink)

Are properties perfectly natural (or not) relative to worlds, or are they perfectly natural (or not) tout court? That is, could there be a property P that is instanti-ated at worlds w1 and w2, and is perfectly natural at w1 but not at w2? Here, we offer an original argument for the non-world-relativity of perfect naturalness. Along the way, we reply to a prima facie compelling argument for the contin-gency of perfect naturalness, based upon the connection between natural prop-erties and (...) laws of nature. (shrink)

Virtue ethics prescribes cultivating global and behaviorally efficacious character traits, but John Doris and others argue that situationist social psychology shows this to be infeasible. Here, I show how certain versions of virtue ethics that ‘go mental’ can withstand this challenge as well as Doris’ further objections. The defense turns on an account of which psychological materials constitute character traits and which the situationist research shows to be problematically variable. Many situationist results may be driven by impulsive akrasia produced by (...) low-level , emotionally induced ignorance about one’s situation, and some may be driven by a further subtype: modal akrasia. Many subjects in the infamous Milgram experiments, e.g., seem to have recognized what the virtuous thing to do was and that they should do it, and only failed to do it because their emotions prevented them from seeing that they could. If the primary constituents of character traits are higher-level mental dispositions involved in deliberation, though, then the results don’t show that these psychological materials are problematically variable. (shrink)

Considers four apparent problems of eternal life--is heaven a mystical or social reality, is it other-worldly or this-worldly, is it static or dynamic, is it boring?--and shows how the teachings of Thomas Aquinas support more satisfying solutions than many contemporary philosophical and theological approaches.

Many contemporary philosophers argue that assertion is governed by an epistemic norm. In particular, many defend the knowledge account of assertion, which says that one should assert only what one knows. Here, I defend a non‐normative alternative to the knowledge account that I call the repK account of assertion. According to the repK account, assertion represents knowledge, but it is not governed by a constitutive epistemic rule. I show that the repK account offers a more straightforward interpretation of the conversational (...) patterns and intuitions that motivate the knowledge account. It does so in terms of ordinary normative principles that philosophers already accept, none of which are constitutive to assertion. I then contend that the repK account is preferable to the knowledge account because it is simpler, its implications are less contentious, and it avoids a problem for normative accounts of assertion recently raised by Peter Pagin. I also argue that the repK account offers a satisfying explanation of selfless assertion, a counterexample to the knowledge account posed by Jennifer Lackey. (shrink)