Folk theories—untutored people’s (often implicit) theories about various features of the world—have been fashionable objects of inquiry in psychology for almost two decades now (e.g., Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994), and more recently they have been of interest in experimental philosophy (Nichols 2004). Folk theories of psy- chology, physics, biology, and ethics have all come under investigation. Folk meta- physics, however, has not been as extensively studied. That so little is known about folk metaphysics is unfortunate for (at least) two reasons. (...) First, folk metaphysics is almost certainly implicit, and it is likely to be our default way of thinking about metaphysical problems. Moreover, one’s metaphysical commitments can have pro- found consequences—in scientific, religious, and ethical contexts, for example. Thus, folk metaphysics ought to be dragged out into the open and exposed to criticism. As Peirce eloquently remarked (1994, 1.129; see also 1994, 7.579). (shrink)

Benedict de Spinoza, C.S. Peirce, and Gilles Deleuze delineate a trajectory through the history of ideas in the dialogue about the potentials and limitations of panpsychism, the view that world is fundamentally made up of mind. As a parallel trajectory to the panpsychism debate in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology, this approach can inform and enrich the discussion of the role and scope of mind in the natural world. The philosophies of mind developed by Deleuze and (...) class='Hi'>Peirce are Spinozistic in their natural monism but move beyond Spinoza to explain mind as a part of the natural world in semiotic terms. (shrink)

For nearly a century and a half after his death, Jonathan Edwards remained America's greatest philosopher. His rigorous, systematic vision coupled with a synthetic, creative imagination were unrivalled until the appearance of that great triumvirate of pragmatic philosophers—C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey—at the close of the nineteenth century.

For nearly a century and a half after his death, Jonathan Edwards remained America's greatest philosopher. His rigorous, systematic vision coupled with a synthetic, creative imagination were unrivalled until the appearance of that great triumvirate of pragmatic philosophers—C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey—at the close of the nineteenth century.

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method (...) over other methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

F. H. Bradley has assured us that where all is bad it must be good to know the worst. In the case before us the worst is that Jonathan Edwards, from whatever perspective he is viewed, represents an imposing enigma. I confess at the outset that the enigma is one I am unable entirely to dispel, although I am confident that I can explain what is enigmatic about his thought, his approach, his caste of mind, and that I can (...) do so "not through a glass darkly." The central problem is this: Edwards, on the one hand, accepted totally the tradition established by the Reformers with respect to the absolute primacy and authority of the Bible, and he could approach the biblical writings with that conviction of their inerrancy and literal truth which one usually associates with Protestant fundamentalism. On the other hand, Edwards insisted vigorously on the criteria of reason and experience, and he was without equal on the American scene up to the time of Charles Peirce in his capacity for philosophical analysis, for sustaining a logical argument, and for expressing his conclusions with the most painstaking attention to subtle nuances of meaning and rhetorical effectiveness. Moreover, he insisted on the use of philosophical concepts and principles in considering the "things of religion" and his speculations about creation, his estheticism, and pantheism caused deep anxiety in the minds of traditional Calvinists, whose theology was as literal as their biblical exegesis. This double-barrelled character of his approach has led critics to define him as a reactionary and "medieval" thinker who had lost touch with those currents of thought which would eventually lead to the "modern" point of view. Without pausing to evaluate that charge at this point, one thing at least is clear: in relation to his contemporaries Edwards was alone in his attempt to make the religious tradition intelligible in those philosophical terms first laid down by Augustine and Anselm in their enterprise of "faith seeking understanding.". (shrink)

Abstract:In their Anthology, Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience, Hatch and Stout argue that Edwards' strand of Christianity is more critical to the American experience than many modern thinkers may realize. They claim that this is because his "stern Calvinism is central" (5) to this country's historic identity and that his philosophy was not only "compatible with the theological needs of the new nation but the social and political needs as well." (7) In this paper I would like to (...) extend this argument. Not only was Edwards' philosophy necessary for the shaping of this country, it provided some of the moral justification necessary for a distinct kind of colonization that gave rise to settler colonialism in British America. To make this claim, this paper will be broken down into three parts. The first section will explore the historical elements of Jonathan Edwards' life in a settler colonial context. The second will be to explain and explore the framework of settler colonialism. Finally, this paper will argue that Edwards' life and philosophy meet all four proposed criteria of settler-colonialism and should therefore be understood as extending a legacy of violence here in the Americas. (shrink)

How should one understand knowledge-wh ascriptions? That is, how should one understand claims such as ‘‘I know where the car is parked,’’ which feature an interrogative complement? The received view is that knowledge-wh reduces to knowledge that p, where p happens to be the answer to the question Q denoted by the wh-clause. I will argue that knowledge-wh includes the question—to know-wh is to know that p, as the answer to Q. I will then argue that knowledge-that includes a contextually (...) implicit question. I will conclude that knowledge is a question-relative state. Knowing is knowing the answer, and whether one knows the answer depends (in part) on the question. (shrink)

Discovering someone disagrees with you is a common occurrence. The question of epistemic significance of disagreement concerns how discovering that another disagrees with you affects the rationality of your beliefs on that topic. This book examines the answers that have been proposed to this question, and presents and defends its own answer.

In this study of events and their places in our language and thought, Bennett propounds and defends views about what kind of item an event is, how the language of events works, and about how these two themes are interrelated. He argues that most of the supposedly metaphysical literature is really about the semantics of their names, and that the true metaphysic of events--known by Leibniz and rediscovered by Kim--has not been universally accepted because it has been tarred with the (...) brush of a false semantic theory. (shrink)

This first volume of the Logic of the Future edition collects Peirce's writings on the historical development, theory and application of his graphical method and diagrammatic reasoning. Its 28 selections of texts and extensive general and volume int.

" Here Jonathan Lear argues that irony is one of the tools we use to live seriously, to get the hang of becoming human.

Ichikawa and Jarvis offer a new rationalist theory of mental content and defend a traditional epistemology of philosophy. They argue that philosophical inquiry is continuous with non-philosophical inquiry, and can be genuinely a priori, and that intuitions do not play an important role in mental content or the a priori.

Conditional sentences are among the most intriguing and puzzling features of language, and analysis of their meaning and function has important implications for, and uses in, many areas of philosophy. Jonathan Bennett, one of the world's leading experts, distils many years' work and teaching into this Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, the fullest and most authoritative treatment of the subject. An ideal introduction for undergraduates with a philosophical grounding, it also offers a rich source of illumination and stimulation for graduate (...) students and professional philosophers. (shrink)

Color provides an instance of a general puzzle about how to reconcile the picture of the world given to us by our ordinary experience with the picture of the world given to us by our best theoretical accounts. The Red and the Real offers a new approach to such longstanding philosophical puzzles about what colors are and how they fit into nature. It is responsive to a broad range of constraints --- both the ordinary constraints of color experience and the (...) more theoretical constraints of color science, psychology, semantics, and ontology. (shrink)

Conciliationism is the family of views that rationality requires agents to reduce confidence or suspend belief in p when acknowledged epistemic peers (i.e. agents who are (approximately) equally well-informed and intellectually capable) disagree about p. While Conciliationism is prima facie plausible, some have argued that Conciliationism is not an adequate theory of peer disagreement because it is self-undermining. Responses to this challenge can be put into two mutually exclusive and exhaustive groups: the Solution Responses which deny Conciliationism is self-undermining and (...) attempt to provide arguments which demonstrate this; and the Skeptical Responses which accept that Conciliationism is self-undermining but attempt to mitigate this result by arguing this is either impermanent and/or not very worrisome. I argue that, by Conciliationism’s own lights, both kinds of responses (almost certainly) fail to save Conciliationism from being self-undermining. Thus, Conciliationism is (almost certainly) permanently self-undermining. This result is significant because it demonstrates that Conciliationism is likely hopeless: there is likely nothing that can save Conciliationism from this challenge. I further argue that Conciliationism, like any view, should be abandoned if it is (almost certainly) hopeless. (shrink)

Peirceana provides a forum for the best current work on Peirce worldwide. Besides monographs, the series will publish thematically unified anthologies and edited volumes with a defined topical focus and untranslated English selections of Peirce's writings.

Students of perception have long puzzled over a range of cases in which perception seems to tell us distinct, and in some sense conflicting, things about the world. In the cases at issue, the perceptual system is capable of responding to a single stimulus — say, as manifested in the ways in which subjects sort that stimulus — in different ways. This paper is about these puzzling cases, and about how they should be characterized and accounted for within a general (...) theory of perception. After rehearsing the sort of case at issue (§1), I’ll examine critically some of the strategies by which philosophers and perceptual psychologists have attempted to account for them (§2). Finally, I’ll present an alternative computational account of the puzzle cases, argue that this view is superior to its competitors, and examine some of its implications (§3). (shrink)

Davidson's account of weakness of will dependsupon a parallel that he draws between practicaland theoretical reasoning. I argue that theparallel generates a misleading picture oftheoretical reasoning. Once the misleadingpicture is corrected, I conclude that theattempt to model akratic belief on Davidson'saccount of akratic action cannot work. Thearguments that deny the possibility of akraticbelief also undermine, more generally, variousattempts to assimilate theoretical to practicalreasoning.

The boldest and most unsettling of the major early modern philosophers, Spinoza, had a much greater, if often concealed, impact on the international intellectual scene and on the early Enlightenment than philosophers, historians, and political theorists have conventionally tended to recognize. Europe-wide efforts to prevent the reading public and university students learning about Spinoza, the man and his work, in the years immediately after his death in 1677, dominated much of his early reception owing to the revolutionary implications of his (...) thought for philosophy, religion, practical ethics and lifestyle, Bible criticism, and political theory. Nevertheless, contrary to what has sometimes been maintained, his general impact was immediate, very widespread, and profound. One of the main objectives of the book is to show how early and how deeply Leibniz, Bayle, Arnauld, Henry More, Anne Conway, Richard Baxter, Robert Boyle, Henry Oldenburg, Pierre-Daniel Huet, Richard Simon, and Nicholas Steno, among many others, were affected by and led to wrestle with his principal ideas. (shrink)

Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief, which shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. Jonathan Ichikawa argues that a skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo.

The revised edition of this highly successful text provides a clear and accessible introduction to some of the most important questions of political philosophy. Organized around major issues, Wolff provides the structure that beginners need, while also introducing some distinctive ideas of his own.

I consider some hitherto unexplored examples of teleological language in the sciences. In explicating these examples, I aim to show (a) that such language is not the sole preserve of the biological sciences, and (b) that not all such talk is reducible to the ascription of functions. In chemistry and biochemistry, scientists explaining molecular rearrangements and protein folding talk informally of molecules rearranging “in order to” maximize stability. Evolutionary biologists, meanwhile, often speak of traits evolving “in order to” optimize some (...) fitness-relevant variable. I argue that in all three contexts such locutions are best interpreted as shorthands for more detailed explanations which, were we to spell them out in full, would show that the relevant process would robustly converge towards the same end-point despite variation in initial conditions. This suggests that, in biology, such talk presupposes a substantial form of adaptationism. The upshot is that such shorthands may be more applicable in the physical sciences than the biological. (shrink)

This volume presents a study edition of the lectures delivered by Charles Peirce to the Lowell Institute in Boston in the Fall of 1903. These previously unpublished lectures present a comprehensive and revised statement of his work on the methods of science. Offering mature reflection on a lifetime's thought and work, they represent the culmination of Peirce's research on scientific objectivity. Alongside the Cambridge Conferences Lectures (1898, edited by K. L. Ketner), the Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism (1903, edited (...) by P. A. Turrisi), and the The Logic of Interdisciplinarity (the project of Peirce's Monist Series 1891-1909, edited by E. Bisanz), the Lowell Lectures of 1903 presented here offer significant insights into Peirce's mature phase as an explorer of objective methods in interdisciplinary science. This collection will appeal to anyone interested in the work of this great thinker, the history of science, and the history of American intellectual life. (shrink)

Various scientists and philosophers have heavily criticized what they see as problematic forms of ‘nutritional reductionism’ or ‘nutritionism’ whereby studying food–health interactions at the level of isolated food components produces largely misguided science and misleading interpretations. However, the exact target of these diverse criticisms remains elusive, and its implications are overstated, which may hinder scientific understanding. To better identify the types of flaws supposedly hindering reductionist research, we disentangle three types of reductionist claims to better determine what the debate is (...) about and to propose ways to move it forward. We then present a qualified defence of the reductionist programme that hinges on the ability to identify nutritional causes that make a difference, which we illustrate through central examples in the history of nutrition. This defence is taken further by using insights from the philosophy of mechanisms to analyse how the field of nutritional ecology offers a synthetic framework to explain, generate, and test predictions about nutrient–organism interactions, which is premised on the biological mechanisms of nutrient-specific appetite regulation. The result, which we call ‘synthetic reductionism’, avoids many, though perhaps not all, of the challenges raised by anti-reductionists, and also highlights the potential of reductionism to identify nutritional difference makers. (shrink)

An examination of the philosophy of Anne Conway (1631-1679) and the main aspects of her fascinating work, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy.

Questions about the ontology of color matter because colors matter. Colors are extremely pervasive and salient features of the world. Moreover, people care about the distribution of these features: they expend money and effort to paint their houses, cars, and other possessions, and their clear preference for polychromatic over monochromatic televisions and computer monitors have consigned monochromatic models to the status of rare antiques. The apparent ubiquity of colors and their importance to our lives makes them a ripe target for (...) ontological questions such as the following: " • What is the nature of colors? " • Are they, as they seem to be, properties of objects? (shrink)

Causal claims are context sensitive. According to the old orthodoxy (Mackie 1974, Lewis 1986, inter alia), the context sensitivity of causal claims is all due to conversational pragmatics. According to the new contextualists (Hitchcock 1996, Woodward 2003, Maslen 2004, Menzies 2004, Schaffer 2005, and Hall ms), at least some of the context sensitivity of causal claims is semantic in nature. I want to discuss the prospects for causal contextualism, by asking why causal claims are context sensitive, what they are sensitive (...) to, and where they are sensitive to it. (shrink)

How do we know what's (metaphysically) possible and impossible? Arguments from Kripke and Putnam suggest that possibility is not merely a matter of (coherent) conceivability/imaginability. For example, we can coherently imagine that Hesperus and Phosphorus are distinct objects even though they are not possibly distinct. Despite this apparent problem, we suggest, nevertheless, that imagination plays an important role in an adequate modal epistemology. When we discover what is possible or what is impossible, we generally exploit important connections between what is (...) possible and what we can coherently imagine. We can often come to knowledge of metaphysical modality a priori. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of some recent debates about the relationship between reasons and rational requirements of coherence - e.g. the requirements to be consistent in our beliefs and intentions, and to intend what we take to be the necessary means to our ends.

This book demonstrates the originality and coherence of Jonathan Edwards' philosophical theology using his dynamic reconception of reality as the interpretive key. The author argues that what underlies Edwards' writings is a radical shift from the traditional Western metaphysics of substance and form to a new conception of the world as a network of dispositions: active and abiding principles that possess reality apart from their manifestations in actions and events. Edwards' dispositional ontology enables him to restate the Augustinian-Calvinist tradition (...) in theology in a strikingly modern philosophical framework. A prime example of Edwards' innovative reconstruction in philosophical theology is his conception of God as both eternal actuality and a disposition to repeat that actuality within God and also through creation. This view is a compelling alternative to the traditional Western doctrine of God as changeless actuality, on the one hand, and the recent process theologians' excessive stress on God's involvement in change, on the other. Edwards' achievement was that he saw dynamic movement as essential to God's own life without compromising the traditional Christian tenets of God's prior actuality and transcendence. The author of this volume also explicates the way in which Edwards' dynamic reconception of reality informs his theories of imagination, aesthetic perception, the knowledge of God, and the meaning of history. This expanded edition includes a new preface and a new appendix titled "Jonathan Edwards on Nature.". (shrink)

The flight from foundationalism in the earlier part of this century left several options in its wake. Distress over the possibility of foundationalist replies to the regress problem, coupled with consternation over the thought of circular reasoning mysteriously becoming acceptable as the circle gets large led to the attraction of holistic theories of a coherentist variety. Yet, such coherentisms seemed to leave the belief system cut off from the world, and perhaps a better idea was to abandon the approach to (...) epistemology that centered on the concepts of evidence and justificatory relations and focus instead on connections between our thoughts and the world which they are about, an idea leading to causal and reliability theories. (shrink)

I argue that “consent” language presupposes that the contemplated action is or would be at someone else’s behest. When one does something for another reason—for example, when one elects independently to do something, or when one accepts an invitation to do something—it is linguistically inappropriate to describe the actor as “consenting” to it; but it is also inappropriate to describe them as “not consenting” to it. A consequence of this idea is that “consent” is poorly suited to play its canonical (...) central role in contemporary sexual ethics. But this does not mean that nonconsensual sex can be morally permissible. Consent language, I’ll suggest, carries the conventional presupposition that that which is or might be consented to is at someone else’s behest. One implication will be a new kind of support for feminist critiques of consent theory in sexual ethics. (shrink)

The Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu is known for his critical contribution to Buddhist Abhidharma thought, his turn to the Mahayana tradition, and his concise, influential Yogacara-Vijñanavada texts. _Paving the Great Way_ reveals another dimension of his legacy: his integration of several seemingly incompatible intellectual and scriptural traditions, with far-ranging consequences for the development of Buddhist epistemology and the theorization of tantra. Most scholars read Vasubandhu's texts in isolation and separate his intellectual development into distinct phases. Featuring close studies of Vasubandhu's (...) _Abhidharmakosabhasya_, _Vyakhyayukti_, _Vimsatika_, and _Trisvabhavanirdesa_, among other works, this book identifies recurrent treatments of causality and scriptural interpretation that unify distinct strands of thought under a single, coherent Buddhist philosophy. In Vasubandhu's hands, the Buddha's rejection of the self as a false construction provides a framework through which to clarify problematic philosophical issues, such as the nature of moral agency and subjectivity under a broadly causal worldview. Recognizing this continuity of purpose across Vasubandhu's diverse corpus recasts the interests of the philosopher and his truly innovative vision, which influenced Buddhist thought for a millennium and continues to resonate with today's philosophical issues. An appendix includes extensive English-language translations of the major texts discussed. (shrink)

The larger philosophical world has on the whole turned from a mix of averted gaze and outright antipathy toward x‐phi, to a mix of grudging acceptance and enthusiastic embrace. This chapter explains that the experimental philosophy is relevant, and that it is dangerous, and explains some ways that people can do more to remain both. Experimental philosophy's semi‐official sigil of the burning armchair has advertised its dangerousness for the past decade and a half as well. The chapter explains that it (...) is a threat that is every bit as potently present in positive program x‐phi as it is in negative program work. To explore the idea that experimental philosophy's positive contributions will still be primarily negative in nature, the chapter interrogates the passage from Timothy Williamson. It focuses on the wheat‐from‐chaff project of separating signal from noise in the evidence produced by intuitions and the like. (shrink)

According to some critics, traditional armchair philosophical methodology relies in an illicit way on intuitions. But the particular structure of the critique is not often carefully articulated—a significant omission, since some of the critics’ arguments for skepticism about philosophy threaten to generalize to skepticism in general. More recently, some experimentalist critics have attempted to articulate a critique that is especially tailored to affect traditional methods, without generalizing too widely. Such critiques are more reasonable, and more worthy of serious consideration, than (...) are blunter critiques that generalize far too widely. I argue that a careful (empirical!) examination of extant philosophical practices shows that traditional philosophical methods can meet these more reasonable challenges. (shrink)