John Gibbons presents an original account of epistemic normativity. Belief seems to come with a built-in set of standards or norms. One task is to say where these standards come from. But the more basic task is to say what those standards are. In some sense, beliefs are supposed to be true. Perhaps they’re supposed to constitute knowledge. And in some sense, they really ought to be reasonable. Which, if any of these is the fundamental norm of belief? The (...) book argues against the teleological or instrumentalist conception of rationality that sees being reasonable as a means to our more objective aims, either knowledge or truth. And it tries to explain both the norms of knowledge and of truth in terms of the fundamental norm, the one that tells you to be reasonable. The importance of being reasonable is not explained in terms of what it will get you, or what you think it will get you, or what it would get you if only things were different. The requirement to be reasonable comes from the very idea of what a genuine requirement is. That’s where the built-in standards governing belief come from, and that’s what they are. (shrink)

John R. Schneider explores the problem that animal suffering, caused by the inherent nature of Darwinian evolution, poses to belief in theism. Examining the aesthetic aspects of this moral problem, Schneider focuses on the three prevailing approaches to it: that the Fall caused animal suffering in nature (Lapsarian Theodicy), that Darwinian evolution was the only way for God to create an acceptably good and valuable world (Only-Way Theodicy), and that evolution is the source of major, God-justifying beauty (Aesthetic Theodicy). (...) He also uses canonical texts and doctrines from Judaism and Christianity - notably the book of Job, and the doctrines of the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection - to build on insights taken from the non-lapsarian alternative approaches. Schneider thus constructs an original, God-justifying account of God and the evolutionary suffering of animals. His book enables readers to see that the Darwinian configuration of animal suffering unveiled by scientists is not as implausible on Christian theism as commonly supposed. (shrink)

John Passmore was a renowned Australian empirical philosopher and historian of ideas. In this book, which was originally published in 1952, Passmore's intention was to disentangle certain main themes in Hume's philosophy and to show how they relate to Hume's main philosophic purpose. Rather than offering a detailed commentary, the text provides an account based on specificity and critical scholarship, seeking to complement the other more comprehensive works on Hume's philosophy that had become available around the same time. This (...) book will be of value to anyone with an interest in perspectives on Hume and Passmore's philosophical approach. (shrink)

When and why are coercion, indoctrination, manipulation, deception, and bullshit morally wrongful modes of influence in the context of educating children? Answering this question requires identifying what valid claims different parties have against one another regarding how children are influenced. Most prominently among these, it requires discerning what claims children have regarding whether and how they and their peers are influenced, and against whom they have these claims. The claims they have are grounded in the weighty interests they each equally (...) have in their wellbeing, prospective autonomy and being regarded with equal concern and respect. Plausibly children have valid claims regarding the content and means of influence they themselves are subjected to. For instance, considerations of concern and respect for children confer duties on others enable them to know important information and develop important skills. Children also plausibly have valid claims to be free from certain means of influence including indoctrination. This is because indoctrinatory practices threaten to diminish both their capacity to reason soundly, thereby constituting a wrongful harm, and their opportunities to form judgements and choices in response to relevant evidence and reasons, thereby constituting a wrong of disrespect. (shrink)

I review recent empirical findings on knowledge attributions in lottery cases and report a new experiment that advances our understanding of the topic. The main novel finding is that people deny knowledge in lottery cases because of an underlying qualitative difference in how they process probabilistic information. “Outside” information is generic and pertains to a base rate within a population. “Inside” information is specific and pertains to a particular item’s propensity. When an agent receives information that 99% of all lottery (...) tickets lose (outside information), people judge that she does not know that her ticket will lose. By contrast, when an agent receives information that her specific ticket is 99% likely to lose (inside information), people judge that she knows that her ticket will lose. Despite this difference in knowledge judgments, people rate the likelihood of her ticket losing the exact same in both cases (i.e. 99%). The results shed light on other factors affecting knowledge judgments in lottery cases, including formulaic expression and participants’ own estimation of whether it is true that the ticket will lose. The results also undermine previous hypotheses offered for knowledge denial in lottery cases, including the hypotheses that people deny knowledge because they either deny justification or acknowledge a chance for error. (shrink)

In a fair, infinite lottery, it is possible to conclude that drawing a number divisible by four is strictly less likely than drawing an even number; and, with apparently equal cogency, that drawing a number divisible by four is equally as likely as drawing an even number.

Objectivity is a key concept both in how we talk about science in everyday life and in the philosophy of science. This Element explores various ways in which recent philosophers of science have thought about the nature, value and achievability of objectivity. The first section explains the general trend in recent philosophy of science away from a notion of objectivity as a 'view from nowhere' to a focus on the relationship between objectivity and trust. Section 2 discusses the relationship between (...) objectivity and recent arguments attacking the viability or desirability of 'value free' science. Section 3 outlines Longino's influential 'social' account of objectivity, suggesting some worries about drawing too strong a link between epistemic and ethical virtues. Section 4 turns to the value of objectivity, exploring concerns that notions of objectivity are politically problematic, and cautiously advocating in response a view of objectivity in terms of invariance. (shrink)

John Foster presents a penetrating investigation into the question: what is it to perceive a physical object? Is perceptual contact with a physical object, he asks, something fundamental, or does it break down into further factors? If the latter, what are these factors, and how do they combine to secure the contact? For most of the book, Foster addressed these questions in the framework of a realist view of the physical world. But the arguments which thereby unfold - arguments (...) which undermine direct realism and establish a version of the sense-datum theory - lead to the conclusion that we do no perceive physical objects at all. The only way to avoid this conclusion is by abandoning physical realism for a form of idealism, and this is the option which Foster finally embraces. The Nature of Perception makes an important contrbution to the ongoing debate: it sheds fresh light on the traditional issues, and breathes new life into positions which most current philosophers assumeto be dead. (shrink)

Broaching an understanding of nature in Platonic thought, John Sallis goes beyond modern conceptions and provides a strategy to have recourse to the profound sense of nature operative in ancient Greek philosophy. In a rigorous and textually based account, Sallis traces the complex development of the Greek concept of nature. Beginning with the mythical vision embodied in the figure of the goddess Artemis, he reanimates the sense of nature that informs the fragmentary discourses of Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles (...) and shows how Plato takes up pre-Socratic conceptions critically while also being transformed. Through Sallis’s close reading of the Theaetetus and the Phaedo, he recovers the profound and comprehensive concept of nature in Plato’s thought. (shrink)

Research Articles John Tomasi, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

Ever since humankind raised its head toward the heavens in search of universal understanding and spiritual fulfilment, wars, pogroms, persecution, prejudice, and contempt have been the means of resolving the many and varied disagreements that have arisen over matters religious. In his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke offers a compelling plea for freedom of conscience and religious expression. He outlines the limits of social and political incursion into the realm of personal belief or non-belief, discusses the dangers of mixing church and (...) state, and strikes hard at those who would use the power of the state to fulfil religious or political goals. Rational persuasion is always to be encouraged in the hope that wayward souls may find a moral direction in life, but the use of force in such matters is unwarranted and unacceptable. Locke also addresses the question of denominational infighting and relations among the major religions. Talk of heresy and schism should be set aside in favour of understanding and co-operation to achieve mutually desirable social ends. (shrink)

Following a brief summation of the phenomenological method, the paper considers three metaethical positions adopted by phenomenologists and the implications of those positions for a normative ethics. The metaethical positions combine epistemological and ontological viewpoints. They are non-intellectualism and strong value realism as represented by the axiological views of phenomenologists such as Scheler, Meinong, Reinach, Stein, Hartmann, von Hildebrand, and Steinbock; non-intellectualism and anti-realism as represented by the freedom-centered phenomenologies of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty; and weak intellectualism and weak value (...) realism as represented by Husserl and Drummond. The paper argues that only the third metaethical view can support a normative ethics that is consistent with the essential features of the phenomenological method, that allows for freedom in an agent’s choosing from a multiplicity of first-order goods, including vocational goods, practical identities, and life plans, available in the agent’s factical circumstances, and that provides norms governing the correctness of our actions and our obligations to others. The normative dimension is introduced, first, by the requirement that the fulfillment of first-order evaluations and choices be truthful, that is, that the evaluations be appropriate and the actions right. Second, transcendental considerations revealed in the phenomenological analysis of intentional experience disclose a notion of second-order goods of agency that universally bind agents in their exercise of freedom and their dealings with others. (shrink)

'John Toland's Letters to Serena' is one of the most important texts of the early Enlightenment. Synthesizing an array of European thought, the Letters was not only significant for Toland's own 'freethinking' cause, but also provided crucial foundations for the 'vitalist' materialism characterising later Enlightenment thought.

John Passmore was a renowned Australian empirical philosopher and historian of ideas. In this book, which was originally published in 1952, Passmore's intention was to disentangle certain main themes in Hume's philosophy and to show how they relate to Hume's main philosophic purpose. Rather than offering a detailed commentary, the text provides an account based on specificity and critical scholarship, seeking to complement the other more comprehensive works on Hume's philosophy that had become available around the same time. This (...) book will be of value to anyone with an interest in perspectives on Hume and Passmore's philosophical approach. (shrink)

In this awaited follow up to his book _Faithful Reason_, the well-known philosopher and Catholic thinker John Haldane brings his unrivalled insight to bear on questions of the existence of God and the nature and destiny of the human soul. His arguments weave elements drawn from philosophy of mind, epistemology and aesthetics, together with recurrent features of human experience to create a structure that simultaneously frames and supports ideas such as that the cosmos is a creation, human beings transcend (...) their material composition, and that human fulfilment lies beyond death. As in many of his other writings this volume blends themes from Aquinas with insights drawn from analytical philosophy and further establishes John Haldane as the leading 'analytical thomist'. (shrink)

The somewhat superannuated “problem of other minds” has unexpectedly risen from the dead, and, in its current incarnation, concerns the mental states of those who never lived.

According to reliabilist virtue epistemology, or virtue reliabilism, knowledge is true belief that is produced by intellectual excellence (or virtue), where intellectual excellence is understood in terms of reliable, truth-directed cognitive dispositions. This essay explains why virtue reliabilism is a form of epistemological externalism, is a moderately naturalized epistemology, and is distinct from virtue responsibilism. We explain virtue reliabilism’s answers to various forms of skepticism, its solution to the Gettier Problem, and its explanation of the value of knowledge. We also (...) describe several varieties of contemporary virtue reliabilism. Finally, we offer replies to two recently prominent objections to virtue reliabilism: that it is committed to an untenable epistemological individualism, and that there are empirical reasons to doubt whether people generally have the kinds of intellectual abilities that virtue reliabilism requires for knowledge. (shrink)

I review recent work from armchair and cross-cultural epistemology on whether humans possess a knowledge concept as part of a universal “folk epistemology.” The work from armchair epistemology fails because it mischaracterizes ordinary knowledge judgments. The work from cross-cultural epistemology provides some defeasible evidence for a universal folk epistemology. I argue that recent findings from comparative psychology establish that humans possess a species-typical knowledge concept. More specifically, recent work shows that knowledge attributions are a central part of primate social cognition, (...) used to predict others’ behavior and guide decision-making. The core primate knowledge concept is that of truth detection (across different sensory modalities) and retention (through memory) and may also include rudimentary forms of indirect truth discovery through inference. In virtue of their evolutionary heritage, humans inherited the primate social-cognitive system and thus share this core knowledge concept. (shrink)

John J. Stuhr, a leading voice in American philosophy, sets forth a view of pragmatism as a personal work of art or fashion. Stuhr develops his pragmatism by putting pluralism forward, setting aside absolutism and nihilism, opening new perspectives on democracy, and focusing on love. He creates a space for a philosophy that is liable to failure and that is experimental, pluralist, relativist, radically empirical, radically democratic, and absurd. Full color illustrations enhance this lyrical commitment to a new version (...) of pragmatism. (shrink)

John Wilson; Does Equality (of Opportunity) Make Sense in Education?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 25, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 27–32, https://.

The paper has two principal aims. First, Pietroski's sparse account of semantic composition will be favourably compared to the familiar full Frege hierarchy of composed semantic types. Second, I shall introduce the idea of a head as employed in linguistics and pose the problem of how to square Pietroski's compositional principles with the asymmetry entailed by headedness. The paper will leave the problem of headedness as an outstanding issue to be resolved.

In Force of Imagination, John Sallis develops an original systematic philosophical project from the vantage-point of philosophy at the limit, the point at which the classical distinction between the intelligible and the sensible is inverted ...

This collection of John Mackie's papers on topics in epistemology, some of which have not previously been published, deal with such issues as: incorrigible empirical statements; rationalism and empiricism; the philosophy of John Anderson; self-refutation; Plato's theory of idea; ideological explanation; problems of intentionality; Popper's third world;; mind, brain, and causation; Newcomb's Paradox and the direction of causation; induction; causation in concept, knowledge, and reality; absolutism; Locke and representative perception; and anti-realisms.

An understanding of the nature of theology comprises an account of its object, its cognitive principles, its ends and its practitioners. The object of theology is two-fold: principally God the Holy Trinity, and derivatively all things in relation to God. God is considered first absolutely, then relatively; all other things are treated relative to God, under the aspect of creatureliness. The objective cognitive principle of theology is God’s infinite knowledge, of which God communicates a fitting share to creatures; the subjective (...) cognitive principle of theology is the regenerate human intellect. The ends of theology are scientific, contemplative and practical. The practitioners of theology are regenerate persons in the church whose creaturely intellect is instructed by God and all of whose works are accompanied by the practices of religion. (shrink)

The question of whether any of us can truly be held responsible for what we do is an issue that occupied the ancient Greeks and continues to entertain our leading thinkers. Whether we can be held responsible for our health, or lack thereof, has additional layers of complexity because of the way in which what we do over time impacts our health. Those of us who have ever self-deceptively wondered about the apparent shrinking of our belt or at the fact (...) that the stairs seem to have multiplied are familiar with the idea that our health can change gradually over time as a result of successive choices that we have made. While there are one-off behaviours that can have an impact on health, for example, a single exposure to a very high level of radiation, in general, ill health develops over time, within an environment and complex set of interactions with other people. The implications of that complexity are central to this issue’s Feature Article by Brown and Savulescu.1 They note that there is debate over whether responsibility should play a role in the allocation of healthcare, and, rather than taking a view on that issue, make a number of suggestions about how the concept of responsibility used in healthcare can be enriched by attending to the complex relationship between behaviour and health. …. (shrink)

John Perry offers a rethinking of Frege's seminal contributions to philosophy of language, which had a dominant influence on the subject in the twentieth century. He argues that Frege's famous doctrine of indirect reference led philosophers on a detour, and he advocates a move to a new framework for understanding reference.

The ‘hard’ problem of consciousness is the seemingly intractable one of explaining the properties of consciousness in terms of the properties of physical objects. This is often seen mistakenly as a metaphysical problem, whereby the properties of physical things are of such a nature and so unlike mental properties that it is difficult to understand how the physical could ever explain consciousness. This view of the physical is not however the true reason for the hardness of the problem, rather it (...) is epistemic, that of defining the physical as those features of the world that may be known objectively, coupled with the contention that only those objectively known properties are real. This makes the explanation of subjective consciousness in terms physical properties not just hard but impossible. The answer is to hold that the world is indeed all physical, but have the physical no longer defined as what may be known only objectively, and hold that some physical properties may be known subjectively. This eliminates the hard problem of consciousness as it is no longer required that the explanation of subjective properties of physical things be in terms of the objective properties of physical things. (shrink)

In this lively book, John Macnamara shows how a number of important thinkers through the ages have approached problems of mental representation and the ...

The Things in Heaven and Earth develops and applies the American philosophical naturalist tradition of the mid-20th century, specifically the work of three of the most prominent figures of what is called Columbia Naturalism: John Dewey, John Herman Randall Jr., and Justus Buchler. The book argues for the philosophical value and usefulness of this underappreciated tradition for a number of contemporary theoretical and practical issues, such as the modernist/postmodernist divide and debates over philosophical constructivism. Pragmatic naturalism offers a (...) distinctive ontology of constitutive relations. Relying on Buchler's ordinal ontology and on the relationality implicit in Dewey's instrumentalism, the book gives a detailed account of this approach in chapters that deal with issues in systematic ontology, epistemology, constructivism and objectivity, philosophical theology, art, democratic theory, foreign policy, education, humanism, and cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

A central aim of education has to do with the promotion of the pupil's and other people's well-being. Recent work by John O'Neill locates the strongest justification of the market in an individualistic preference-satisfaction notion of well-being. His own preference for an objective theory of well-being allows us to make a clear separation of educational values from those of the market. Problems in O'Neill's account suggest a third notion of well-being which better supports the separation mentioned.

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 3, Page 293-305, September 2021.

In 2016, Discourse Studies published a special issue on the ‘epistemics of epistemics’ comprising six papers, all of which took issue with a strand of my research on how knowledge claims are asserted, implemented and contested through facets of turn design and sequence organization. Apparently coordinated through some years of discussion, the critique is nonetheless somewhat confused and confusing. In this article, I take up some of more prominent elements of the critique: my work is ‘cognitivist’ substituting causal psychological analysis (...) for the classic conversation analytic focus on the normative accountability of social action, my work devalues and indeed flouts basic tenets of CA methodology such as the ‘next-turn proof procedure’, my analysis of epistemic stance introduces unwarranted themes of conflict and hostility into CA thinking, various concepts that I have introduced involve the invocation of ‘hidden orders’ of social conduct that is inimical to the traditions of our field and that my work rests on an unwarranted ‘informationism’ – the discredited idea that much of human interaction is driven by a need to traffic in information. In this rebuttal, I refute all of these commentaries and correct many other ancillary mistakes of representation and reasoning that inhabit these papers. (shrink)

In Echoes, John Sallis mobilizes the figure of echo, used by Heidegger to characterize originary thinking, as the motif around which to organize a radical reading of Heidegger's most important texts.

Looking at the emergence recently of a New Hegelianism (Badiou, Bhaskar, Jameson, Žižek), in which Hegel’s dialectic is variously reassessed for its political and philosophical resistance to the prevailing ‘weak nihilisms’ of left and right, I argue with Žižek and Jameson against Badiou and Bhaskar for Hegel as, essentially, a philosopher of the ‘productive return’ and failure. In this sense, what emerges is a picture of Hegel as a profoundly nonlinear historical thinker, in which loss, dissolution, breakdown and the excremental (...) prevail. This means that the received notion of Hegel as a crude historicist is deeply problematic. But, more importantly, it means that Hegelian dialectic can find a renewed anti-teleological and non-synchronistic identity within the Marxist tradition. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 72-98 Authors John Roberts, University of Wolverhampton Journal Journal of Critical Realism Online ISSN 1572-5138 Print ISSN 1476-7430 Journal Volume Volume 12 Journal Issue Volume 12, Number 1 / 2013. (shrink)

Consistency is one of the key concepts of logic; logicians have put a great deal of effort into proving the consistency of many logics. Understanding what causes inconsistency is also important; some logicians have developed paraconsistent logics that, unlike classical logics, allow some contradictions without making all formulas provable. Another direction of research studies inconsistency by measuring the amount of inconsistency of sets of formulas. While the initial attempt in 1978 was too ambitious in trying to do this for first-order (...) logic, this research got a substantial boost when an inconsistency measure was proposed for propositional logic in 2002. Since then, researchers in logic and artificial intelligence have made many interesting proposals and found related issues. Almost all of this work has been done for propositional logic. The purpose of this paper is to extend inconsistency measures to logics that also contain operators, such as modal operators. We use the terminology “generalized propositional logic” for such logics. We show how to extend propositional inconsistency measures to sets of formulas in any such generalized propositional logic. Examples are used to illustrate how various modal operators, including spatial and tense operators, fit into this framework. We also show that the addition of operators leads to a weak type of inconsistency. In all cases, the calculations for several inconsistency measures are given. (shrink)

This is an interview by the Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics with John E. Roemer. The interview covers Roemer’s intellectual biography; his extensive writings on exploitation, egalitarianism, socialism, bargaining, and justice; his latest work on Kantian optimization, his vision for the future of socialism; and, finally, his methodological commitments and the value of interdisciplinarity.

From unemployment to Brexit to climate change, capitalism is in trouble and ill-prepared to cope with the challenges of the coming decades. How did we get here? While contemporary economists and policymakers tend to ignore the political and social dimensions of capitalism, some of the great economists of the past - Adam Smith, Friedrich List, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi and Albert Hirschman - did not make the same mistake. Leveraging their insights, sociologists John L. Campbell (...) and John A. Hall trace the historical development of capitalism as a social, political, and economic system throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They draw comparisons across eras and around the globe to show that there is no inevitable logic of capitalism. Rather, capitalism's performance depends on the strength of nation-states, the social cohesion of capitalist societies, and the stability of the international system - three things that are in short supply today. (shrink)

This collection of lectures by world-renowned philosopher Agnes Heller, edited and introduced by John Grumley, covers a range of political and cultural issues, from the highly topical to modern classics.

This article offers a critique of Ronald Dworkin’s article “A New Philosophy for International Law”, (Philos Public Aff 41: 1–30, 2013). It begins by showing that Dworkin’s moralised theory of law is built on two highly questionable background assumptions. On the one hand, a descriptively implausible characterisation of a positivist-voluntarist view of international law as the reigning “orthodoxy”. On the other hand, the methodologically questionable assumption that a theory of international law must discharge the dual function of explaining the validity (...) of international law in a manner that underwrites its presumptive legitimacy. In its core part, the article then offers a sustained criticism of Dworkin’s moralised account of the validity and legitimacy of international law. Various problems are identified with the “principle of salience” that Dworkin offers in place of consent as a ground for international law. A key concern is the difficulties that stem from Dworkin’s willingness to proceed on the “fantasy” assumption that his theory needs to get off the ground, i.e. that there is an international court with compulsory jurisdiction and reliable mechanisms for enforcing its judgements. Finally, the article concludes with some thoughts on how Dworkin’s “fantasy-based” approach led him to over-estimate the degree to which international law can be a vehicle for the global spread of liberal democratic values. More minimalist ambitions for international legal order, along the lines suggested by John Rawls inThe Law of Peoples, seem more realistic. (shrink)

John Macquarrie's classic study of existentialism and the work of two of its most important representatives: Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann.