Shors & Matzel set up a straw man, that LTP is a memory storage mechanism, and knock him down without due consideration of the important relations among different levels of organization and analysis regarding LTP, learning, and memory. Assessing these relationships requires analysis and hypotheses linking specific brain regions, neural circuits, plasticity mechanisms, and task demands. The issue addressed by the authors is important, but their analysis is off target.

Summary A provocative examination of the consequences of Levinas’s and Adorno’s thought for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the “non-identity thinking” of Adorno and the “ethics of the Other” of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and “inhuman” material others such as environments and animals; the (...) bonds and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life. “This is an extremely impressive, original, and thorough treatment of two key twentieth-century thinkers and their applicability to the most pressing social and political issues of our time.” — Jeffrey A. Bernstein, author of Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History “This book is an excellent and timely contribution to political and environmental philosophy, located around a nuanced historical and philosophical approach to Levinas and Adorno. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with these figures or with the current moment.” — Martin Shuster, author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity. (shrink)

“What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems (...) and how these variations can help researchers taxonomize cognitive systems. (shrink)

Daoism and Environmental Philosophy explores ethics and the philosophy of nature in the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related texts to elucidate their potential significance in our contemporary environmental crisis. This book traces early Daoist depictions of practices of embodied emptying and forgetting and communicative strategies of undoing the fixations of words, things, and the embodied self. These are aspects of an ethics of embracing plainness and simplicity, nourishing the asymmetrically differentiated yet shared elemental body of life of the myriad things, (...) and being responsively attuned in encountering and responding to things. These critical and transformative dimensions of early Daoism provide exemplary models and insights for cultivating a more expansive ecological ethos, environmental culture of nature, and progressive political ecology. This work will be of interest to students and scholars interested in philosophy, environmental ethics and philosophy, religious studies, and intellectual history. (shrink)

Background:Complex and expensive treatment options have increased the frequency and emphasis of ethical decision-making in healthcare. In order to meet these challenges effectively, we need to identify how nurses contribute the resolution of these dilemmas.Aims:To identify the values, beliefs and contextual influences that inform decision-making. To identify the contribution made by nurses in achieving the resolution of ethical dilemmas in practice.Design:An interpretive exploratory study was undertaken, 11 registered acute care nurses working in a district general hospital in England were interviewed, (...) using semi-structured interviews. In-depth content analysis of the data was undertaken via NVivo coding and thematic identification.Participants and context:Participants were interviewed about their contribution to the resolution of ethical dilemmas within the context of working in an acute hospital ward. Participants were recruited from all settings working with patients of any age and any diagnosis.Ethical considerations:Ethical approval was obtained from the local National Research Ethics Committee.Findings:Four major themes emerged: ‘best for the patient’, ‘accountability’, ‘collaboration and conflict’ and ‘concern for others’. Moral distress was also evident in the literature and findings, with moral dissonance recognised and articulated by more experienced nurses. The relatively small, single-site sample may not account for the effects of organisational culture on the results; the findings suggested that professional relationships were key to resolving ethical dilemmas.Discussion:Nurses use their moral reasoning based on their beliefs and values when faced with ethical dilemmas. Subsequent actions are mediated though ethical decision-making frames of reference including deontology, consequentialism, the ethics of care and virtue ethics. Nurses use these in contributing to the resolution of these dilemmas. Nurses require the skills to develop and maintain professional relationships for addressing ethical dilemmas and to engage with political and organisational macro- and micro-decision-making.Conclusion:Nurses’ professional relationships are central to nurses’ contributions to the resolution of ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging and authoritative volume, leading scholars engage with the philosophy and writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, a key figure in nineteenth-century thought. Their chapters cover his innovative philosophical strategies and explore how they can be understood in relation to their historical situation, as well as presenting incisive interpretations of Dilthey's arguments, including their development, their content, and their influence on later thought. A key focus is on how Dilthey's work remains relevant to current debates around art and literature, the (...) biographical and autobiographical self, knowledge, language, science, culture, history, society, and psychology and the embodied mind. The volume will be important for researchers in hermeneutics, aesthetics, practical philosophy, and the history of German philosophy, providing a valuable introduction to Dilthey's work as well as detailed critical analysis of its ongoing significance. (shrink)

Arguments from disagreement against moral realism begin by calling attention to widespread, fundamental moral disagreement among a certain group of people. Then, some skeptical or anti-realist-friendly conclusion is drawn. Chapter 2 proposes that arguments from disagreement share a structure that makes them vulnerable to a single, powerful objection: they self-undermine. For each formulation of the argument from disagreement, at least one of its premises casts doubt either on itself or on one of the other premises. On reflection, this shouldn’t be (...) surprising. These arguments are intended to support very strong metaphysical or epistemological conclusions about morality. They must therefore employ very strong metaphysical or epistemological premises. But, given the pervasiveness of disagreement in philosophy, especially about metaphysics and epistemology, very strong premises are virtually certain to be the subject of widespread, intractable disagreement—precisely the sort of disagreement that proponents of these arguments think undermine moral claims. Thus, these arguments undermine their own premises. If Chapter 2’s argument is sound, it provides realists with a single, unified strategy for responding to any existing or forthcoming arguments from disagreement. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This article examines Harold Ramis’s 2005 noir comedy The Ice Harvest as the critically dystopian counter-panel to his beloved 1993 film Groundhog Day, a film frequently discussed within the paradigm of utopia. While starkly different in genre, tone, and reception, the two films comprise a dialectical dyad that registers the historical transition from the utopian cultural effervescence of the early 1990s to the tragic foreclosure of imaginative horizons and the dystopian transformation of economic, political, and social landscapes in the new (...) millennium. In The Ice Harvest, the author argues, this is achieved through a strategic reactivation of film noir as a variant of the critical dystopia. (shrink)

Un livre pour défaire le régime esthétique de l'image, en vue d'une nouvelle pensée diagrammatique, après Deleuze et Guattari, entre art et philosophie : un ouvrage introductif et spéculatif sans équivalent qui, partant de la rupture opérée par Matisse et Duchamp avec la phénoménologie picturale de l'image esthétique, constitue une archéologie de l'art contemporain qui passe par Daniel Buren, Gordon Matta-Clark, Günter Brus et le néoconcrétisme brésilien.

For critical legal scholars, the ongoing far-right assault upon the liberal status quo poses a distinct dilemma. On the one hand, the desire to condemn the far-right is overwhelming. On the other hand, such condemnations are susceptible to being appropriated as a validation of the very liberalism that critical theorists have long questioned. In seeking to transcend this dilemma, my focus is on the discourse of ‘white genocide’ — a commonplace belief amongst the far-right/white nationalists that ‘whites’, as a discrete (...) group, are facing demographic destruction as a result of deliberate policy choices. Such a belief has motivated acts of extreme violence. While libel to dismissal by experts on mainstream understandings of genocide, namely international criminal lawyers, I argue that this ‘white genocide’ discourse deserves careful scrutiny as a jurisprudential and socio-legal phenomenon that reveals key weaknesses in present modalities of liberal justification. Drawing upon an array of recent critical theories, I show how a liberalism unable to face its own decline enables the very far-right assertions it purports to oppose. Thus, given liberalism’s failure to act as a neutral arbiter, an alternative approach for those opposing the far-right is to develop a vision of politics and society that confront believers in ‘white genocide’ on a more substantive level. This, I argue, forces the far-right’s opponents to disavow liberal scepticism towards utopian transformation as well as the juridical understandings and institutions that allow this scepticism to durably persist. (shrink)

Contrary to Vaesen's argument that humans are unique with respect to nine cognitive capacities essential for tool use, we suggest that although such cognitive processes contribute to variation in tool use, it does not follow that these capacities arenecessaryfor tool use, nor that tool use shaped cognition per se, given the available data in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral biology.

Once again available in paperback, Plato is the first half of Eric Voegelin's Plato and Aristotle, the third volume of his five-volume Order and History, which ...

Do philosophy professors specializing in ethics behave, on average, any morally better than do other professors? If not, do they at least behave more consistently with their expressed values? These questions have never been systematically studied. We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, responsiveness to (...) student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues, we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with the self-reports. Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, such as vegetarianism and charitable donation. However, on no issue did ethicists show unequivocally better behavior than the two comparison groups. Our findings on attitude-behavior consistency were mixed: ethicists showed the strongest relationship between behavior and expressed moral attitude regarding voting but the weakest regarding charitable donation. We discuss implications for several models of the relationship between philosophical reflection and real-world moral behavior. (shrink)

It is widely held that every person is a person essentially, where being a person is having special mental properties such as intelligence and self-consciousness. It follows that nothing can acquire or lose these properties. The paper argues that this rules out all familiar psychological-continuity views of personal identity over time. It also faces grave difficulties in accounting for the mental powers of human beings who are not intelligent and self-conscious, such as foetuses and those with dementia.

One of the deepest and longest-lasting debates in ethics concerns a version of the Euthyphro question: are choiceworthy things choiceworthy because agents have certain attitudes toward them or are they choiceworthy independent of any agents’ attitudes? Reasons internalists, such as Bernard Williams, Michael Smith, Mark Schroeder, Sharon Street, Kate Manne, Julia Markovits, and David Sobel answer in the first way. They think that all of an agent’s normative reasons for action are grounded in facts about that agent’s pro-attitudes (e.g., her (...) desires, valuing states, normative judgments). According to the most popular brand of internalism, idealizing internalism, an agent’s reasons are grounded, not in her actual pro-attitudes, but rather in what her pro-attitudes would be in suitably idealized conditions. Idealizing internalists presuppose that, for any agent with an irrational set of attitudes, there is one uniquely rational set that that agent would have if she were to undergo the relevant idealizing process. I argue that this assumption is false and that it raises two puzzles for idealizing internalism: one about the existence of practical reasons and another about their normative weight. I argue that idealizing internalists have an adequate solution to the first puzzle but not the second. Indeed, when they try to solve the second puzzle, they confront a dilemma. This second puzzle and the associated dilemma thus constitutes a powerful, but so far unnoticed, difficulty for idealizing internalism. (shrink)

This paper explains Sophie de Grouchy’s philosophical debts to Adam Smith. I have three main reasons for this: first, it should explain why eighteenth-century philosophical feminists found Smith, who has—to put it mildly—not been a focus of much recent feminist admiration, a congenial starting point for their own thinking; second, it illuminates De Grouchy’s considerable philosophical originality, especially her important, overlooked contributions to political theory; third, it is designed to remove some unfortunate misconceptions that have found their way into Karin (...) Brown’s ‘Introduction’ to the recent and much-to-be-welcomed translation of Sophie de Grouchy’s Lettres Sur La Sympathie. While Brown claims that there are major ‘differences’ in their programs of ‘social reform’, I argue there are important commonalities between Smith and De Grouchy. In particular, I highlight how they share a common understanding of how human sensibilities are shaped by social institutions and I show that De Grouchy’s path-breaking analysis of negative and positive liberty is grounded in her extension of Smith’s political theory and moral psychology. (shrink)

Foundational theories of mental content seek to identify the conditions under which a mental representation expresses, in the mind of a particular thinker, a particular content. Normativists endorse the following general sort of foundational theory of mental content: A mental representation r expresses concept C for agent S just in case S ought to use r in conformity with some particular pattern of use associated with C. In response to Normativist theories of content, Kathrin Glüer-Pagin and Åsa Wikforss propose a (...) dilemma, alleging that Normativism either entails a vicious regress or falls prey to a charge of idleness. In this paper, I respond to this argument. I argue that Normativism can avoid the commitments that generate the regress and does not propose the sort of explanation required to charge that its explanation has been shown to be problematically idle. The regress-generating commitment to be avoided is, roughly, that tokened, contentful mental states are the product of rule-following. The explanatory task Normativists should disavow is that of explaining how it is that beliefs and other contentful mental states are produced. I argue that Normativism, properly understood as a theory of content, does not provide this kind of psychological explanation, and therefore does not entail that such explanations are to be given in terms of rule-following. If this is correct, Normativism is not the proper target of the dilemma offered by Glüer-Pagin and Wikforss. Understanding why one might construe Normativism in the way Glüer-Pagin and Wikforss must, and how, properly understood, it avoids their dilemma, can help us to appreciate the attractiveness of a genuinely normative theory of content and the importance of paying careful attention to the sort of normativity involved in norm-based theories of content. (shrink)

Although arguments for and against competing theories of vagueness often appeal to claims about the use of vague predicates by ordinary speakers, such claims are rarely tested. An exception is Bonini et al. (1999), who report empirical results on the use of vague predicates by Italian speakers, and take the results to count in favor of epistemicism. Yet several methodological difficulties mar their experiments; we outline these problems and devise revised experiments that do not show the same results. We then (...) describe three additional empirical studies that investigate further claims in the literature on vagueness: the hypothesis that speakers confuse ‘P’ with ‘definitely P’, the relative persuasiveness of different formulations of the inductive premise of the Sorites, and the interaction of vague predicates with three different forms of negation. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

In this article I examine several related views expressed by Robin Hendry concerning molecular structure, emergence and chemical bonding. There is a long-standing problem in the philosophy of chemistry arising from the fact that molecular structure cannot be strictly derived from quantum mechanics. Two or more compounds which share a molecular formula, but which differ with respect to their structures, have identical Hamiltonian operators within the quantum mechanical formalism. As a consequence, the properties of all such isomers yield precisely the (...) same calculated quantities such as their energies, dipole moments etc. The only means through which the difference between the isomers can be recovered is to build their structures into the quantum mechanical calculations, something that is carried out by the application of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. Consequently, it has been argued by many authors that molecular structure is written in ‘by hand’ rather than derived. Robin Hendry is one such author, but he goes a great deal further by proposing that this situation implies the existence of emergence and downward causation. In the current article I argue that there are alternative explanations which render emergence and downward causation redundant. Such an alternative lies in the notion of quantum decoherence and the appeal to work in the foundations of physics, which posits that the various isomers exist as a superposition until their wavefunctions are collapsed either by observation or by interacting with their environment. Hendry also alludes to a debate among chemists as to whether chemical bonds are real or not, in the sense of directional connections between two or more nuclei in any given molecule. I reject this view and propose that the structural and energetic views of chemical bonding, that have been discussed by some philosophers of chemistry including Hendry, do not refer to any essential ontological differences. I agree that chemists view bonding in a more realistic fashion and may consider bonds to be in some senses real, while physicists may consider bonding in more abstract energetic terms. However, I do not believe that such differences in scientific practice and attitudes should be considered to offer a window as to the ontological status of bonding or whether bonding is real. Finally, I discuss the kinetic energy school of chemical bonding which would seem to challenge any notion of bonds as directional entities, since bonding is no longer regarded as being primarily due to the build-up of electron density between nuclei. (shrink)

We propose capability as a universal or type intermediate between function and disposition. A capability is, broadly speaking, a disposition that is of a type whose instances can be evaluated on the basis of how well they are realized. A function, on the view we are proposing, is a capability the possession of which is the rationale for the existence of its bearer. To say for example that a water pump has the function to pump water is to say that (...) the pump exists because something was needed that would pump water. A water pump may have many capabilities, including: to be weatherproof, to run without lubricant, to be transportable, and so forth. But its function is to pump water. We focus here on capabilities possessed by humans – such as piano playing or language using – and we explore the relation between capabilities of these sorts and structures in the brain. (shrink)

From the time of Locke, discussions of personal identity have often ignored the question of our basic metaphysical nature: whether we human people are biological organisms, spatial or temporal parts of organisms, bundles of perceptions, or what have you. The result of this neglect has been centuries of wild proposals and clashing intuitions. What Are We? is the first general study of this important question. It beings by explaining what the question means and how it differs from others, such as (...) questions of personal identity and the mind-body problem. It then examines in some depth the main possible accounts of our metaphysical nature, detailing both their theoretical virtues and the often grave difficulties they face. The book does not endorse any particular account of what we are, but argues that the matter turns on more general issues in the ontology of material things. If composition is universal--if any material things whatever make up something bigger--then we are temporal parts of organisms. If things never compose anything bigger, so that there are only mereological simples, then we too are simples--perhaps the immaterial substances of Descartes--or else we do not exist at all (a view Olson takes very seriously). The intermediate view that some things compose bigger things and others do not leads almost inevitably to the conclusion that we are organisms. So we can discover what we are by working out when composition occurs. (shrink)

Self-deceptive projects are frequently supported by our social environment, with others influencing both our motives and capacities for self-deception. Digital spaces offer even more opportunities for interactive self-deception. Digital platforms are incentivized to sort us and capture our engagement, and online users also have desires to be sorted and engaged. The execution of self-deception is partially offloaded to algorithms and social networks that filter our evidence, selectively draw our attention to evidence, offer rationalizations, and give us repetitive and emotion-laden feedback. (...) Nevertheless, this is not so different from what we find in offline environments. Further, most of this offloading of information processing is willingly accepted by users and is in line with their desires. As such, responsibility for any motivationally biased beliefs largely lies with the individual internet user. (shrink)

This chapter explores Nagel’s polemics. It shows these have a two-fold character: (i) to defend liberal civilization against all kinds of enemies. And (ii) to defend what he calls ‘contextual naturalism.’ And the chapter shows that (i-ii) reinforce each other and undermine alternative political and philosophical programs. The chapter’s argument responds to an influential argument by George Reisch that Nagel’s professional stance represents a kind of disciplinary retreat from politics. In order to respond to Reisch the relationship between Nagel’s philosophy (...) of science and his politics is explored and this chapter shows how both are anchored in what Nagel once called his ‘contextual naturalism’—a metaphysics that resists imposing the unity of the world and treats all entities as embedded in a wider network of entities. Part of the argument traces out how Nagel’s views on responsible speech and professionalism reflect a distinct understanding of the political role of philosophers of science. (shrink)

Preface -- Introduction -- How to value democracy -- Paper stones, the ethics of participation -- Philosophers-citizens -- Superdeliberators -- What is it like to be a citizen? -- Democracy's ethics of belief -- The division of democratic labor -- Representing principles -- Democratic complicity -- Not in my name, macrodemocratic design.

Adam Smith was a famous economist and moral philosopher. This book treats Smith also as a systematic philosopher with a distinct epistemology, an original theory of the passions, and a surprising philosophy mind. The book argues that there is a close, moral connection between Smith's systematic thought and his policy recommendations.

Here is a thoroughly updated edition of a classic in palliative medicine. Two new chapters have been added to the 1991 edition, along with a new preface summarizing where progress has been made and where it has not in the area of pain management. This book addresses the timely issue of doctor-patient relationships arguing that the patient, not the disease, should be the central focus of medicine. Included are a number of compelling patient narratives. Praise for the first edition "Well (...) written. . .should be read by everyone in medical practice or considering a career in medicine."---JAMA. "Memorable passages, important ideas, and critical analysis. This is a book that clinicians and educators should read."---New England Journal of Medicine. (shrink)

Aristotle's account of external goods in Nicomachean Ethics I 8-12 is often thought to amend his narrow claim that happiness is virtuous activity. I argue, to the contrary, that on Aristotle's account, external goods are necessary for happiness only because they are necessary for virtuous activity. My case innovates in three main respects: I offer a new map of EN I 8-12; I identify two mechanisms to explain why virtuous activity requires external goods, including a psychological need for external goods; (...) and I show the relevance of Aristotle's distinction between wishing and choosing. On the view I attribute to Aristotle, our capacity to choose virtuously requires, first, that we wish for external goods (because virtue requires the right attitudes of evaluation) and, second, that these wishes are generally fulfilled (because the social consequences and psychological pain of unfulfilled wishes undermine our opportunity to act virtuously and to take pleasure in acting virtuously). I close with discussion of how Aristotelians should defend this approach. (shrink)

The Moral Foundations of Trust seeks to explain why people place their faith in strangers, and why doing so matters. Trust is a moral value that does not depend upon personal experience or on interacting with people in civic groups or informal socializing. Instead, we learn to trust from our parents, and trust is stable over long periods of time. Trust depends on an optimistic world view: the world is a good place and we can make it better. Trusting people (...) are more likely to give through charity and volunteering. Trusting societies are more likely to redistribute resources from the rich to the poor. Trust has been in decline in the United States for over 30 years. The roots of this decline are traceable to declining optimism and increasing economic inequality, which Uslaner supports by aggregate time series in the United States and cross-sectional data across market economies. (shrink)

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement‐clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief can be true or false, and whether this understanding affects children's choice of linguistic structure to describe the character's belief or to explain the character's belief‐based action. We also measured (...) children's understanding of false belief in explicit false‐belief tasks. English‐ and German‐speaking young 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds as well as English‐ and German‐speaking adult controls heard complement‐clause constructions in a story context where the belief mentioned in the complement clause (e.g., “He thinks thatshe's not feeling well”) turned out to be false, true, or was left open. After hearing the test question (“Why does he not play with her?”), all age groups were most likely to repeat the whole complement‐clause construction when the belief turned out to be false. That is, they tended to explicitly refer to the character's perspective and say “He thinks…” When the belief turned out to be true, participants often reverted to a simple clause (“She's not feeling well”). Furthermore, children with better short‐term memory were more likely to repeat the whole complement‐clause construction. However, children's performance in explicit false‐belief tasks showed no relation to their performance in our novel, more implicit/indirect, task. Whether or not the complement clause was introduced by athatcomplementizer only had a small effect on the German adults’ responses, where leaving out the complementizer also changes the word order of the complement clause. Overall, our results suggest that task characteristics and individual differences in short‐term memory affect children's ability to demonstrate false‐belief understanding and to express this understanding linguistically. (shrink)

Although arguments for and against competing theories of vagueness often appeal to claims about the use of vague predicates by ordinary speakers, such claims are rarely tested. An exception is Bonini et al. , who report empirical results on the use of vague predicates by Italian speakers, and take the results to count in favor of epistemicism. Yet several methodological difficulties mar their experiments; we outline these problems and devise revised experiments that do not show the same results. We then (...) describe three additional empirical studies that investigate further claims in the literature on vagueness: the hypothesis that speakers confuse ‘P’ with ‘definitely P’, the relative persuasiveness of different formulations of the inductive premise of the Sorites, and the interaction of vague predicates with three different forms of negation. (shrink)

It appears that there is an inconsistency in combining epistemic contextualism with a plausible closure principle for knowledge and the view that knowledge is factive. I discuss the proposal that in order to avoid inconsistency the contextualist should reject closure and retain factivity. The proposal offers an alternative to closure and an argument that warrant fails to transmit through inference in the relevant cases. I criticize both accounts. The proposed alternative to closure is not well motivated and leaves unresolved the (...) question of why standard closure should not hold. The argument that warrant does not transmit is based on an inaccurate model of warrant transmission. An important lesson that emerges is that known propositions themselves can serve as warrant for further propositions, which may be known provided they are competently deduced from the former. Indeed it is arguably the factivity of knowledge that accounts for the fact that known propositions themselves serve as warrant. Thus, the strategy of rejecting closure while retaining factivity is a bad one not merely because the proposed alternatives to standard closure are inadequate and transmission failure in relevant cases would not imply closure failure, but because factivity ensures that warrant transmission worries in the relevant cases are unfounded. (shrink)

Plato argues that four political arts—politics, kingship, slaveholding, and household-management—are the same. His argument, which prompted Aristotle’s reply in Politics I, has been universally panned. The problem is that the argument clearly identifies household-management with slaveholding, and household-management with politics, but does not fully identify kingship with any of the others. I consider and reject three ways of saving the argument, and argue for a fourth. On my view, Plato assumes that politics is identical with kingship, just as he does (...) elsewhere, but he begs no questions because the point of his argument is to identify the public arts of politics and kingship with the private arts of household-management and slaveholding. He does this successfully by answering three reasons why one might distinguish the private from the public arts. His argument leaves room for Aristotle to propose other reasons. One of them—involving differences among men and women and slaves—is unfortunate, but another is more promising. The Aristotelian can assume that political expertise is a matter of know-how gathered by experience of the particular actions which differ in the public and private arts. But Plato might well be right to reject this, and to insist that the essential difference between the expert and non-expert—the dividing line between good and bad rule—is not in experience but in their grasp of their goals. (shrink)

Some argue that the term “explanation” in science is ambiguous, referring to at least three distinct concepts: a communicative concept, a representational concept, and an ontic concept. Each is defined in a different way with its own sets of norms and goals, and each of which can apply in contexts where the others do not. In this paper, I argue that such a view is false. Instead, I propose that a scientific explanation is a complex entity that can always be (...) analyzed along a communicative dimension, a representational dimension, and an ontic dimension. But all three are always present within scientific explanations. I highlight what such an account looks like, and the potential problems it faces (namely that a single explanation can appear to have incompatible sets of norms and goals that govern it). I propose a solution to this problem and demonstrate how this account can help to dissolve current disputes in philosophy of science regarding debates between epistemic and ontic accounts of mechanistic explanations in the life sciences. (shrink)

Here I consider the two most venerated arguments about the existence of God: the Ontological Argument and the Argument from Evil. The Ontological Argument purports to show that God’s nature guarantees that God exists. The Argument from Evil purports to show that God’s nature, combined with some plausible facts about the way the world is, guarantees (or is very compelling grounds for thinking) that God does not exist. Obviously, both arguments cannot be sound. But I argue here that they are (...) both unsound for the very same reason. (shrink)

There are many alleged problems with trusting another person’s moral testimony, perhaps the most prominent of which is that it fails to deliver moral understanding. Without moral understanding, one cannot do the right thing for the right reason, and so acting on trusted moral testimony lacks moral worth. This chapter, however, argues that moral advice differs from moral testimony, differs from it in a way that enables a defender of moral advice to parry this worry about moral worth. The basic (...) idea is that an advisor and an advisee can together constitute a joint agent, and that this joint agent’s action can indeed have moral worth. So while the advisee himself might not do the right thing for the right reason (this because all alone he lacks the right reason), and while the advisor herself might not do the right thing for the right reason (this because all alone she does not do the right thing), they together do the right for the right reason. (shrink)

In this article I examine several related views expressed by Robin Hendry concerning molecular structure, emergence and chemical bonding. There is a long-standing problem in the philosophy of chemistry arising from the fact that molecular structure cannot be strictly derived from quantum mechanics. Two or more compounds which share a molecular formula, but which differ with respect to their structures, have identical Hamiltonian operators within the quantum mechanical formalism. As a consequence, the properties of all such isomers yield precisely the (...) same calculated quantities such as their energies, dipole moments etc. The only means through which the difference between the isomers can be recovered is to build their structures into the quantum mechanical calculations, something that is carried out by the application of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. Consequently, it has been argued by many authors that molecular structure is written in ‘by hand’ rather than derived. Robin Hendry is one such author, but he goes a great deal further by proposing that this situation implies the existence of emergence and downward causation. In the current article I argue that there are alternative explanations which render emergence and downward causation redundant. Such an alternative lies in the notion of quantum decoherence and the appeal to work in the foundations of physics, which posits that the various isomers exist as a superposition until their wavefunctions are collapsed either by observation or by interacting with their environment.Hendry also alludes to a debate among chemists as to whether chemical bonds are real or not, in the sense of directional connections between two or more nuclei in any given molecule. I reject this view and propose that the structural and energetic views of chemical bonding, that have been discussed by some philosophers of chemistry including Hendry, do not refer to any essential ontological differences. I agree that chemists view bonding in a more realistic fashion and may consider bonds to be in some senses real, while physicists may consider bonding in more abstract energetic terms. However, I do not believe that such differences in scientific practice and attitudes should be considered to offer a window as to the ontological status of bonding or whether bonding is real. Finally, I discuss the kinetic energy school of chemical bonding which would seem to challenge any notion of bonds as directional entities, since bonding is no longer regarded as being primarily due to the build-up of electron density between nuclei. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher has proposed a theory of explanation based on the notion of unification. Despite the genuine interest and power of the theory, I argue here that the theory suffers from a fatal deficiency: It is intrinsically unable to account for the asymmetric structure of explanation, and thus ultimately falls prey to a problem similar to the one which beset Hempel's D-N model. I conclude that Kitcher is wrong to claim that one can settle the issue of an argument's explanatory (...) force merely on the basis of considerations about the unifying power of the argument pattern the argument instantiates. (shrink)