Arguably no concept is more fundamental to science than that of causality, for investigations into cases of existence, persistence, and change in the natural world are largely investigations into the causes of these phenomena. Yet the metaphysics and epistemology of causality remain unclear. For example, the ontological categories of the causal relata have been taken to be objects (Hume 1739), events (Davidson 1967), properties (Armstrong 1978), processes (Salmon 1984), variables (Hitchcock 1993), and facts (Mellor 1995). (For convenience, causes and (...) effects will usually be understood as events in what follows.) Complicating matters, causal relations may be singular (Socrates’s drinking hemlock caused Socrates’s death) or general (Drinking hemlock causes death); hence the relata might be tokens (e.g., instances of properties) or types (e.g., types of events) of the category in question. Other questions up for grabs are: Are singular causes metaphysically and/or epistemologically prior to general causes or vice versa (or neither)? What grounds the intuitive asymmetry of the causal relation? Are macro-causal relations reducible to micro-causal relations? And perhaps most importantly: Are causal facts (e.g., the holding of causal relations) reducible to non-causal facts (e.g., the holding of certain spatiotemporal relations)? (shrink)

D. In doing x an agent acts incontinently if and only if: 1) the agent does x intentionally; 2) the agent believes there is an alternative action y open to him; and 3) the agent judges that, all things considered, it would be better to do y than to do x.

Machine generated contents note: Essay 1.

Problems of Rationality is the eagerly awaited fourth volume of Donald Davidson 's philosophical writings. From the 1960s until his death in August 2003 Davidson was perhaps the most influential figure in English-language philosophy, and his work has had a profound effect upon the discipline. His unified theory of the interpretation of thought, meaning, and action holds that rationality is a necessary condition for both mind and interpretation. Davidson here develops this theory to illuminate value judgements and (...) how we understand them; to investigate what the conditions are for attributing mental states to an object or creature; and to grapple with the problems presented by thoughts and actions which seem to be irrational. Anyone working on knowledge, mind, and language will find these essays essential reading. (shrink)

Pt. I. The apparent good. Evaluative cognition -- Perceiving the good -- Phantasia and the apparent good -- pt. II. The apparent good and non-rational motivation. Passions and the apparent good -- Akrasia and the apparent good -- pt. III. The apparent good and rational motivation. Phantasia and deliberation -- Happiness, virtue, and the apparent good -- Practical induction -- Conclusion : Aristotle's practical empiricism.

Is there a need for a distinctively diachronic conception of metaphysical emergence? Here I argue to the contrary. In the main, my strategy consists in considering a representative sample of accounts of purportedly diachronic metaphysical emergence, and arguing that in each case, the purportedly diachronic emergence at issue either can (and should) be subsumed under a broadly synchronic account of metaphysical emergence, or else is better seen as simply a case of causation. In addition, I consider and argue against the (...) suggestion that 'in-principle unpredictability' accounts of diachronic emergence support there being distinctively diachronic metaphysical emergence. (shrink)

Plato's Epistemology presents an original interpretation of one of the central topics in Plato's work: epistemology. Moss argues, against the grain of much modern scholarship, that Plato's epistemology is radically different from our own.

The author believes that large‐scale rationality on the part of the interpretant is essential to his interpretability, and therefore, in his view, to her having a mind. How, then are cases of irrationality, such as akrasia or self‐deception, judged by the interpretant's own standards, possible? He proposes that, in order to resolve the apparent paradoxes, one must distinguish between accepting a contradictory proposition and accepting separately each of two contradictory propositions, which are held apart, which in turn requires to conceive (...) of the mind as containing a number of semi‐independent structures of interlocking beliefs, desires, emotions, memories, and other mental states. (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.

did plato and aristotle have anything to say about belief? The answer to this question might seem blindingly obvious: of course they did. Plato distinguishes belief from knowledge in the Meno, Republic, and Theaetetus, and Aristotle does so in the Posterior Analytics. Plato distinguishes belief from perception in the Theaetetus, and Aristotle does so in the De anima. They talk about the distinction between true and false beliefs, and the ways in which belief can mislead and the ways in which (...) it can steer us aright. Indeed, they make belief a central component of their epistemologies.The view underlying these claims—one so widespread these days as to remain largely unquestioned—is that when Plato and Aristotle talk... (shrink)

Applies and extends the conclusions of the preceding chapters by examining cases of self‐deception of a puzzling sort emerging from cases of fantasizing and imagining, found in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The author is particularly interested in what can be described as the ‘divided mind of self‐deception’, the mind that produces an imagination due to its realising the state of the world that motivates the fantasy construct and the possessor's eventual acquisition (...) of the belief that the fantasy construct represents reality accurately. In the process of deceiving oneself, he holds, no clear line can be drawn between imaginative activities that are not yet self‐deceptive and those that are. (shrink)

Repr. as Essay 14 in Davidson, Donald, _Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation_, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK (Clarendon, 2001). 215-226.

According to a number of contemporary theorists, aesthetic reasons can invite or entice us but never compel us. In this paper, I develop a Kantian account of the normative force of aesthetic reasons. While Kant would likely agree that aesthetic reasons do not give rise to obligations, his account nevertheless gives us the resources for explaining how aesthetic reasons can still have more force than merely enticing reasons. This account appeals to the distinct normativity of aesthetic judgments on Kant's theory (...) and the way in which this kind of normativity structures aesthetic exchanges with other judging subjects. I argue that, in addition to the moral reasons we have for appreciating and preserving beauty, Kant’s account can accommodate distinctly aesthetic reasons for doing so that stem from our membership in aesthetic communities. (shrink)

I argue that the best explanation of the multiplicity of available frameworks for treating any given philosophical topic is that philosophy currently (though not insuperably) lacks fixed standards; I then go on to identify three barriers to philosophical progress associated with our present epistemic situation. First is that the lack of fixed standards encourages what I call “intra‐disciplinary siloing,” and associated dialectical and argumentative failings; second is that the lack of fixed standards makes room for sociological factors (including elite influence (...) and disciplinary inertia) to be determinative of which philosophical frameworks are embraced; third is that the lack of fixed standards encourages (implicit and/or explicit) bias. I close by offering some suggestions about how to move beyond these barriers, even in the absence of fixed standards. (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays written by Bob Hale (three co-authored), with a critical introduction from Kit Fine. They comprise Hale’s final years of work, adding to and extending beyond his landmark monograph Necessary Beings: An Essay on Ontology, Modality, and the Relations Between Them (OUP, 2013, 2nd edition 2015). The essays develop and consolidate several key themes in Hale’s work, most notably the notion of definition, especially as it extends beyond definition of a word to definition of (...) a thing more generally, and its relations to essence and existence; how the recently influential notion of truthmaking relates to and illuminates some of these issues; and ontological questions connected with Hale’s metaphysical commitments on the one hand, and his commitments in the foundations of mathematics on the other. Several of the essays engage with and respond to work by Kit Fine, and contributions to Being Necessary: Themes of Ontology and Modality from the Work of Bob Hale (OUP 2018). As such, these essays also demonstrate a rich and fruitful philosophical dialogue between Hale and his critics and friends. (shrink)

What are rules? -- Why are rules important? -- Rules for the classroom -- Rules at school -- Rules in the community -- Follow the law! -- Rules and laws must be fair -- All together now -- It's good to have rules.

O povo Kaingang é o mais populoso do Sul do Brasil e está entre os mais numerosos povos indígenas do país. Neste trabalho faz-se uma relação entre as informações encontradas na literatura e a atualidade na Terra Indígena Kaingang em relação ao conhecimento que possuem sobre o uso de plantas para a cura de doenças e como interpretam a ação da erva no organismo. Para isto, realizou-se uma pesquisa de campo em uma Terra Indígena Kaingang no Paraná, cujo entrevistas forneceram (...) confirmações históricas em relação aos etnoconhecimentos da etnia, da evolução dos aspectos químicos e das atitudes perante a química e os remédios de origem farmacêutica e natural. (shrink)

Horgan (1993) proposed that "superdupervenience" - supervenience preserving physicalistic acceptability - is a matter of robust explanation. I argued against him (1999) that (as nearly all physicalist and emergentist accounts reflect) superdupervenience is a matter of Condition on Causal Powers (CCP): every causal power bestowed by the supervenient property is identical with a causal power bestowed by its base property. Here I show that CCP is, as it stands, unsatisfactory,for on the usual understandings of causal power bestowal, it is trivially (...) satisfied or falsified. I offer a revision of CCP which incorporates the evident fact that causal powers are grounded in fundamental forces. (shrink)

Here I compare two accounts of metaphysical indeterminacy (MI): first, the 'meta-level' approach described by Elizabeth Barnes and Ross Cameron in the companion to this paper, on which every state of affairs (SOA) is itself precise/determinate, and MI is a matter of its being indeterminate which determinate SOA obtains; second, my preferred 'object-level' determinable-based approach, on which MI is a matter of its being determinate---or just plain true---that an indeterminate SOA obtains, where an indeterminate SOA is one whose constitutive object (...) has a determinable property, but no unique determinate of that determinable. In S1, I first note an important difference between our accounts, concerning whether MI is taken to induce propositional indeterminacy; in S2, I highlight and defend certain advantages of my account; in S3, I address certain of Barnes and Cameron's objections to my account. (shrink)

de Anima III.10 characterizes akrasia as a conflict between phantasia (“imagination”) on one side and rational cognition on the other: the akratic agent is torn between an appetite for what appears good to her phantasia and a rational desire for what her intellect believes good. This entails that akrasia is parallel to certain cases of perceptual illusion. Drawing on Aristotle's discussion of such cases in the de Anima and de Insomniis , I use this parallel to illuminate the difficult discussion (...) of akrasia in Nicomachean Ethics VII.3, arguing that its account of akrasia as involving ignorance is compatible with, and in fact crucially supplements, the more straightforward account we find elsewhere in the corpus of akrasia as a struggle between desires. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Notes.

The null morpheme POS -- The null morpheme EVAL -- Implicature : a brief review -- Evaluativity as implicature -- Extensions of the evaluativity implicature.

In this chapter, the authors aim to review what they take to be the primary philosophical claims or concerns of fat activism and introduce a framework for understanding a primary strategy of fat activism as public philosophy. Fat activism is a robust and important example of public philosophy. The authors also review the limited work done within mainstream philosophy on fat oppression. They use the theoretical apparatus of master narratives and counter‐stories to explore a primary strategy of fat activism as (...) public philosophy. Master narratives are pervasive and interlocking; the beliefs within the master narrative are knitted together to keep some people in power while others are subjugated under this power. The authors present the counter‐storytelling that seeks to undermine and disrupt the dominant narrative about fatness and fat people and highlight the organizations and public philosophers who both theorize and take action toward a fat‐liberated future. (shrink)

Drawing on the moving story of the last year of the life of her own treasured dog, Ody, she presents an in-depth exploration of the practical, medical, and moral issues that trouble pet owners confronted with the decline and death of their ...

Contemporary Bioethics: A Reader with Cases is the most cutting-edge bioethics anthology/casebook available. Incorporating introductions, readings, and cases that span the breadth of the discipline, this exceptional volume captures the spirit of bioethics as a rich, exciting, and continuously evolving field. Addressing all of the essential topics--including abortion, reproductive ethics, end-of-life care, research ethics, and the allocation of resources--it also moves beyond the "classic" approach of other books by extending into timely and provocative issues like terrorism, cosmetic surgery, immigration, genetic (...) manipulations, links between first- and third-world health, and--unique to this book--environmental sustainability and climate change. In addition, Contemporary Bioethics is the only book of its kind that includes both philosophical and religious perspectives.The text opens with a substantial introduction that presents key ethical principles, theories, and methods and shows students how to use these tools to frame and address ethical dilemmas in medicine. Covering the brief yet captivating history of the field, the introduction also considers the role of religion in the development of bioethics and examines differences between secular and religious modes of argumentation. Each of the seven topical chapters contains an in-depth introduction, a selection of concise readings representing a diverse range of moral perspectives, discussion questions, and a collection of full-length and provocative case studies that enable students to further explore the issues.Ideal for introductory courses in bioethics and biomedical ethics, Contemporary Bioethics is supplemented by a Instructor's Manual on CD and a Companion Website containing resources for both students and professors, including chapter summaries, additional cases with discussion questions, ideas for further reading, vocabulary flashcards, self-quizzes, and more. (shrink)

This is a comprehensive discussion of determinables, determinates, and their relation ('determination', for short), covering the historical development of these notions, the theoretical options for understanding them, and certain of their contemporary applications.

This summary paper explains why we are not constrained to start from a solipsistic, or first person point of view in considering the nature of thought. My aim here is to suggest the nature of an acceptable extemalism. According to this view, knowledge of other minds need not be a problem m addition to the problem of empirical knowledge. The essential step toward determining the content of someone else's thought is made by discovering what normally causes those thoughts. Hence I (...) believe that there could not be thoughts in one mind if there were not other thoughtful creatures with which the first mind shared a natural world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editor’s NoteJessica HeybachThis issue of education and culture offers readers theoretical in-sights and clarifications to social dilemmas as well as the concerns of the classroom. The authors contained in this issue take up questions of political literacy, moral judgment, the mathematics curriculum and classroom, and the social studies curriculum and classroom. If I had to offer a throughline within these articles, it is the pragmatist conception of judgment that (...) should be cultivated through social relations and classroom practices. These authors are concerned with citizens’ capacity for intelligent judgment within communities and society at large. Pushing back against prevailing logics, these authors offer corrective arguments by positioning Dewey’s thought and pragmatism in contrast to the current logics operating in classrooms and society.Charles Lowery takes up the consequences of modern society’s “conflation of an associated way of living with government, and government with politics, and politics with partisanship” on conceptions of community in his article, “The Role of Education in The Public and Its Problems: A Deweyan Perspective on Political Literacy.” Building on key authors that have previously advanced this line of inquiry central to Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, Lowery attends to how contemporary education and the development of a politically literate citizenry through democratic habits rather than knowledge accumulation should be centered as the central task of schooling. Lowery highlights current obstacles to cultivating political literacy in the schools such as dogma, disinformation, divisiveness, and de-democratization, and concludes by underscoring the work of school leaders as central to the task of political literacy.Davin Carr-Chellman puts forth a provocative argument which attends to the consequences of instrumental rationality and identity thinking on moral judgment in his article, “Education for Moral Judgment: Situational Creativity and Dewey’s Aesthetics.” Drawing from critical theory, Carr-Chellman emphasizes how dehumanization, moral indifference, and alienation are byproducts of instrumental rationality, measurability, and identity thinking. He then engages Dewey’s aesthetics and Joas’s concept of situational creativity as possible resources to reconstruct human experience and renew the human capacity for moral judgment. According to Carr-Chellman, small acts of creativity and relationship-building become essential to resisting human relations that have become “abstract, impersonal, vague, and competitive.” Thus, an education for moral judgment must humanize through authentic relationships and meaning-making learning opportunities that resist the alienation now culturally rampant. [End Page 1]Marshall Gordon argues that mathematics curriculum and classroom should be understood as a site for developing habits of mind that foster democracy in his article, “Teaching Mathematics with Democracy in Mind.” Gordon elaborates on the problematic persistence of abstracted, procedural mathematics which valorizes memorization and calls for mathematics to capitalize on the unrealized democratic potentials in the mathematics classroom. Drawing on Dewey’s claim in Democracy and Education that “Education is not an affair of ‘telling’ and being told, but an active and constructive process,” Gordon describes a mathematics for democracy. Gordon describes mathematics as a powerful force in the development of students’ reflective intelligence and their capacity for problem-solving by problem-clarifying strategies rather than problem-solving procedures (for example, “take things apart, make the problem simpler, reason by analogy, and tinker”) and collaboration through “multiple-centers” which capitalizes on shared-interest investigations.Dave Powell explores the relationship between inquiry and Dewey’s pragmatic epistemology to advance democratic citizenship education in the social studies classroom in his article, “Has Anybody Here Seen My Old Friend John? Making the Case for a More Pragmatic Social Studies.” In particular, Powell attends to educators’ stance on truth and how “reframing their epistemological orientations” opens up possibilities for different future actions. He begins by describing how pragmatist thinking and Dewey’s philosophical commitments of child-centeredness could shape conceptions of inquiry and allow a reflective practitioner to ask different kinds of questions associated with social studies. Through a rich discussion of what Deweyan thought makes possible in social studies, Powell advances the promise of a citizenry able to think pragmatically in a democracy. He argues that social studies can reject fixed notions of truth, foster trust among students as they exchange ideas, reject opportunities for reverse indoctrination, and cultivate intelligence, as practical... (shrink)

Stoics and Sceptics distinguish belief (doxa) from a representationally and functionally similar but sub-doxastic state: passive yielding to appearance. Belief requires active assent to appearances, that is, affirmation of the appearances as true. I trace the roots of this view to Plato's accounts of doxa in the Republic and Theaetetus. In the Republic, eikasia and pistis (imaging and conviction) are distinguished by their objects, appearances versus ordinary objects; in the Theaetetus, perception and doxa are distinguished by their objects, proper perceptibles (...) versus ‘commons’, including being. But underlying these ontological distinctions is a psychological one: the lower mental states are confined to their lower objects because they are passive; the higher mental states have access to higher objects because they result from questioning appearances and making active affirmations about how things are. This doctrine of doxa anticipates both the Hellenistic one and modern accounts of belief as ‘aiming at truth’; it also shows Plato's views of doxa to have more in their favour philosophically and to cohere better with one another than generally thought. (shrink)

A core principle of modern science holds that a scientific explanation must not attribute will or agency to natural phenomena.The Restless Clock examines the origins and history of this, in particular as it applies to the science of living things. This is also the story of a tradition of radicals—dissenters who embraced the opposite view, that agency is an essential and ineradicable part of nature. Beginning with the church and courtly automata of early modern Europe, Jessica Riskin guides us (...) through our thinking about the extent to which animals might be understood as mere machines. We encounter fantastic robots and cyborgs as well as a cast of scientific and philosophical luminaries, including Descartes and Leibnitz, Lamarck and Darwin, whose ideas gain new relevance in Riskin's hands. The book ends with a riveting discussion of how the dialectic continues in genetics, epigenetics, and evolutionary biology, where work continues to naturalize different forms of agency.The Restless Clock reveals the deeply buried roots of current debates in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Two studies tested whether observers could differentiate between two facets of pride—authentic and hubristic—on the basis of a single prototypical pride nonverbal expression combined with relevant contextual information. In Study 1, participants viewed targets displaying posed pride expressions in response to success, while causal attributions for the success (target's effort vs. ability) and the source of this information (target vs. omniscient narrator conveying objective fact) were varied. Study 2 used a similar method, but attribution information came from both the target (...) and an omniscient narrator; the congruence of these attributions was varied. Across studies, participants tended to label expressions as authentic pride, but were relatively more likely to label them as hubristic pride when (a) contextual information indicated that targets were arrogant and (b) no mitigating information about the target's potential value as a hard-working group member (i.e., that success was actually due to effort) was presented. (shrink)

In December 2019, President Trump pardoned Eddie Gallagher, a Navy Seal convicted of war crimes committed while serving in Iraq in 2017. Did Gallagher commit these crimes because he is a bad person, or were his actions the result of situational factors, such as stress and fatigue? These different explanations of Gallagher’s crimes reflect two ways of thinking about the causes of war crimes and how to prevent them: character-based views and situationist accounts. Character-based views attribute war crimes to failures (...) of individual military personnel to live up to military virtues, whereas situationist accounts focus on external factors (such as battlefield stress) as the primary cause of war crimes. While both situationist and character accounts highlight important aspects of the causes of war crimes, in this article I argue that they do not account for the fact that war crimes can (and have) come to be seen as compatible with military virtues. By not acknowledging this fact, these accounts of war crimes fail to address the fact that some of the most egregious war crimes occurred not because military personnel failed to embody the military virtues of their institution, but because they embodied them all too well. (shrink)