We develop a multi-agent deontic action logic to study the logical behaviour of two types of deontic conditionals: (1) conditional obligations, having the form "If group H were to perform action aH, then, in group F's interest, group G ought to perform action aG" and (2) conditional permissions, having the form "If group H were to perform action aH, then, in group F's interest, group G may perform action aG". First, we define a formal language for multi-agent deontic action logic (...) and a class of consequentialist models to interpret the formulas of the language. Second, we define a transformation that converts any strategic game into a consequentialist model. Third, we show that an outcome a* is a Nash equilibrium of a strategic game if and only if a conjunction of certain conditional permissions is true in the consequentialist model that results from the transformation of that strategic game. (shrink)

Profoundly important ethical and political controversies turn on the question of whether biological life is an essential aspect of a human person, or only an extrinsic instrument. Lee and George argue that human beings are physical, animal organisms - albeit essentially rational and free - and examine the implications of this understanding of human beings for some of the most controversial issues in contemporary ethics and politics. The authors argue that human beings are animal organisms and that their personal identity (...) across time consists in the persistence of the animal organisms they are; they also argue that human beings are essentially rational and free and that there is a radical difference between human beings and other animals; criticize hedonism and hedonistic drug-taking; present detailed defenses of the prolife positions on abortion and euthanasia; and defend the traditional moral position on marriage and sexual acts. (shrink)

There has been increasing attention in sociology and internet studies to the topic of ‘digital remains’: the artefacts users of social network services (SNS) and other online services leave behind when they die. But these artefacts also pose philosophical questions regarding what impact, if any, these artefacts have on the ontological and ethical status of the dead. One increasingly pertinent question concerns whether these artefacts should be preserved, and whether deletion counts as a harm to the deceased user and therefore (...) provides pro tanto reasons against deletion. In this paper, I build on previous work invoking a distinction between persons and selves to argue that SNS offer a particularly significant material instantiation of persons. The experiential transparency of the SNS medium allows for genuine co-presence of SNS users, and also assists in allowing persons (but not selves) to persist as ethical patients in our lifeworld after biological death. Using Blustein’s “rescue from insignificance” argument for duties of remembrance, I argue that this persistence function supplies a nontrivial (if defeasible) obligation not to delete these artefacts. Drawing on Luciano Floridi’s account of “constitutive” information, I further argue that the “digital remains” metaphor is surprisingly apt: these artefacts in fact enjoy a claim to moral regard akin to that of corpses. (shrink)

Abstract: There is no such thing as ‘the’ hylemorphic account of personal identity. There are several views that count as hylemorphic, and these views can be grouped into two main families—the corruptionist view, and the survivalist view. The differentiating factor is that the corruptionist view holds that the persistence of the soul is not sufficient for the persistence of the person, while the survivalist view holds that the persistence of the soul is sufficient for the persistence of the person. In (...) this paper, I argue that hylemorphists should prefer the corruptionist view. This project ought to be of interest to anyone working on issues of personal identity, not only because hylemorphic views are historically important, but also because they are currently receiving significant attention in the personal identity literature. (shrink)

Presents an historical analysis of social contract theory by considering the works of prominent philosophers.

Epistemic contextualism is a recent and hotly debated position. In its dominant form, EC is the view that the proposition expressed by a given knowledge sentence depends upon the context in which it is uttered. What makes this view interesting and controversial is that ‘context’ here refers, not to certain features of the putative subject of knowledge or his/her objective situation, but rather to features of the knowledge attributor' psychology and/or conversational-practical situation. As a result of such context-dependence, utterances of (...) a given such sentence, made in different contexts, may differ in truth value. (shrink)

A key argument of Dixon et al. in the target article is that prejudice reduction through intergroup contact and collective action work in opposite ways. We argue for a complementary approach focusing on extreme emotions to understand why people turn to non-normative collective action and to understand when and under what conditions extreme emotions may influence positive effects of contact on reconciliation.

Since St. Thomas Aquinas holds that death is a substantial change, a popular current interpretation of his anthropology must be mistaken. According to that interpretation – the ‘survivalist’ view – St. Thomas holds that we human beings survive our deaths, constituted solely by our souls in the interim between death and resurrection. This paper argues that St. Thomas must have held the ‘corruptionist’ view: the view that human beings cease to exist at their deaths. Certain objections to the corruptionist view (...) are also met. (shrink)

We examine cases of emergent behavior in physics, and argue for an account of emergence based on features of the phase space portraits of certain dynamical systems. On our account, the phase space portraits of systems displaying emergent behavior are topologically inequivalent to those of the systems from which they ‘emerge’. This account gives us an objective sense in which emergent phenomena are qualitatively novel, without involving the difficulties associated with downward causation and the like. We also argue that the (...) role of complexity in emergence has been overstated: emergent behavior can occur in very simple systems, and even when it occurs in complex systems it is the qualitative novelty of that behavior, rather that the complexity of the system, that matters for emergence. (shrink)

Moral latitude is only ever a matter of coincidence on the most popular decision procedure in the literature on moral uncertainty. In all possible choice situations other than those in which two or more options happen to be tied for maximal expected choiceworthiness, Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness implies that only one possible option is uniquely appropriate. A better theory of appropriateness would be more sensitive to the decision maker’s credence in theories that endorse agent-centred prerogatives. In this paper, we will develop (...) and defend a modified version of this view that allows for agent-centred prerogatives and supererogation as part of its verdicts about appropriateness. (shrink)

Incompatibilism about responsibility and determinism is sometimes directly construed as the thesis that if we found out that determinism is true, we would have to give up the reactive attitudes. Call this "the consequence". I argue that this is a mistake: the strict modal thesis does not entail the consequence. First, some incompatibilists (who are also libertarians) may be what we might call *resolute responsibility theorists* (or "flip-floppers"). On this view, if we found out that determinism is true, this would (...) not be to find out that no one is responsible; instead, what this would suggest is that incompatibilism is after all false. Second, some incompatibilists may instead deny the claim that if we found out that no one deserves the reactiveattitudes, we would have to give up the reactive attitudes. Call this position *innocent incompatibilism*. I explore several different reasons why the fact that no one deserves the reactive attitudes likely does not translate into a requirement for us to give up the reactive attitudes. The upshot: incompatibilism may be practically irrelevant, even if true. (shrink)

There is a growing discourse on “new sincerity,” and related terms like “quirky” and “metamodernism,” as a movement or sensibility in contemporary cinema developing from the late 1990s onward, exemplified by the work of filmmakers such as Wes Anderson and Charlie Kaufman. However, what this new concept means in the context of cinema has so far remained under-defined and requires further philosophical analysis. This article provides such an analysis by offering a reconceptualization of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist-phenomenological notions of good faith (...) and sincerity, which will be connected to developments in film and elaborated in relation to Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012). I propose, against Sartre's own preference for the problematic term “authenticity,” to understand sincerity as the reflective resumption of good faith's pre-reflective acceptance of human-reality. This conception of sincerity as reflective allows us to accurately understand the combination of self-awareness and affirmation that characterizes new sincerity cinema: its self-awareness does not serve the postmodernist strategy of endless self-ironization; instead, its portrayals affirm the meaningfulness of its filmic reality, while also being aware of film as a medium. An analysis of Frances Ha illustrates how this concept of sincerity might be seen to function both on the level of story world, characters and themes, and on that of narrative structure and audio-visual style, thereby showing how we can meaningfully speak of sincerity in and of film. (shrink)

It has been argued that St. Thomas Aquinas’s anthropological views fall prey to the problem of “Too Many Thinkers.” The worry, roughly, is that his views entail that I—a human person—am able to think, but that my soul—which is not a human person—is also able to think. Hence, too many thinkers: there are too many ofus having my thoughts. In this paper, I show why this is not a problem for St. Thomas. Along the way, I also address Peter Unger’s (...) argument for substance dualism. (shrink)

Individualists claim that collective obligations are reducible to the individual obligations of the collective’s members. Collectivists deny this. We set out to discover who is right by way of a deontic logic of collective action that models collective actions, abilities, obligations, and their interrelations. On the basis of our formal analysis, we argue that when assessing the obligations of an individual agent, we need to distinguish individual obligations from member obligations. If a collective has a collective obligation to bring about (...) a particular state of affairs, then it might be that no individual in the collective has an individual obligation to bring about that state of affairs. What follows from a collective obligation is that each member of the collective has a member obligation to help ensure that the collective fulfills its collective obligation. In conclusion, we argue that our formal analysis supports collectivism. (shrink)

At the most general level, "manipulation" refers one of many ways of influencing behavior, along with (but to be distinguished from) other such ways, such as coercion and rational persuasion. Like these other ways of influencing behavior, manipulation is of crucial importance in various ethical contexts. First, there are important questions concerning the moral status of manipulation itself; manipulation seems to be mor- ally problematic in ways in which (say) rational persuasion does not. Why is this so? Furthermore, the notion (...) of manipulation has played an increasingly central role in debates about free will and moral responsibility. Despite its significance in these (and other) contexts, however, the notion of manipulation itself remains deeply vexed. I would say notoriously vexed, but in fact direct philosophical treatments of the notion of manipulation are few and far between, and those that do exist are nota- ble for the sometimes widely divergent conclusions they reach concerning what it is. I begin by addressing (though certainly not resolving) the conceptual issue of how to distinguish manipulation from other ways of influencing behavior. Along the way, I also briefly address the (intimately related) question of the moral status of manipulation: what, if anything, makes it morally problematic? Then I discuss the controversial ways in which the notion of manipulation has been employed in contemporary debates about free will and moral responsibility. (shrink)

Veltman’s test semantics and developments thereof reject the canon about semantic contents and attitude ascriptions in favor of dynamic alternatives. According to these theories the semantic content of a sentence is not a proposition, but a context change potential (CCP). Similarly, beliefs are not taken to be relations between agents and propositions, but agents and CCPs. These deviations from the canon come at the cost of an elegant explanation about the correctness of belief. Standardly, it is taken that the content (...) of a belief is correct just in case the content of that belief is true. The proponent of the test semantics cannot appeal to this explanation since they hold that certain contents, namely epistemically modalized contents, do not express propositions, and are neither true nor false. After motivating the need for an account of the correctness of belief within the dynamic framework, I argue that the few extant accounts in the literature are unsatisfactory. A novel account is proposed that avoids the problems of competing views. (shrink)

I apply Kooi and Tamminga's (2012) idea of correspondence analysis for many-valued logics to strong three-valued logic (K3). First, I characterize each possible single entry in the truth-table of a unary or a binary truth-functional operator that could be added to K3 by a basic inference scheme. Second, I define a class of natural deduction systems on the basis of these characterizing basic inference schemes and a natural deduction system for K3. Third, I show that each of the resulting natural (...) deduction systems is sound and complete with respect to its particular semantics. Among other things, I thus obtain a new proof system for Lukasiewicz's three-valued logic. (shrink)

The good -- Common goods and the obligatory -- Is there a supreme good, a Summum bonum? -- Common goods and public goods -- Shared meaning as a common good -- Shared meaning as a global common good -- The common good in current international relations -- Collective action for global objectives -- The law of peoples -- Global justice as a global common good -- Global human rights as common goods.

If group members aim to fulfill a collective obligation, they must act in such a way that the composition of their individual actions amounts to a group action that fulfills the collective obligation. We study a strong sense of joint action in which the members of a group design and then publicly adopt a group plan that coordinates the individual actions of the group members. We characterize the conditions under which a group plan successfully coordinates the group members' individual actions, (...) and study how the public adoption of a plan changes the context in which individual agents make a decision about what to do. (shrink)

Two issues are addressed in this commentary: the universality and the “psychological reality” of locus equations as cues to place of articulation. Preliminary data collected in our laboratory suggest that locus equations do not reliably distinguish place of articulation for fricatives. Additionally, perception studies show that listeners can identify place of articulation based on much less temporal information than that required for deriving locus equations.

I argue that some perceptual experiences are vague. To do so, I identify a characteristic feature of vagueness and show that some perceptual experiences have this feature. These include blurry experiences, experiences of color under low lighting, and experiences of number, as in the case of the speckled hen. The conclusion that these experiences are vague has two noteworthy consequences. First, it presses us to see whether and how existing theories of vagueness can be extended to perceptual experience. Second, it (...) sheds light on several puzzles in the philosophy of perception. (shrink)

The details of St. Thomas Aquinas’s anthropological view are subject to debate. Some philosophers believe he held that human persons survive their deaths. Other philosophers think he held that human persons cease to exist at their death, but come back into being at the general resurrection. In this paper, I defend the latter view against one of the most significant objections it faces, namely, that it entails that God punishes and rewards separated souls for the sins or merits of something (...) else: the (non-existent) persons to whom those souls once belonged. The objector takes this entailment to be problematic. I argue that it fits in well with St. Thomas’s views about punishment and about persons. (shrink)

We use a deontic logic of collective agency to study reducibility questions about collective agency and collective obligations. The logic that is at the basis of our study is a multi-modal logic in the tradition of *stit* logics of agency. Our full formal language has constants for collective and individual deontic admissibility, modalities for collective and individual agency, and modalities for collective and individual obligations. We classify its twenty-seven sublanguages in terms of their expressive power. This classification enables us to (...) investigate reducibility relations between collective deontic admissibility, collective agency, and collective obligations, on the one hand, and individual deontic admissibility, individual agency, and individual obligations, on the other. (shrink)

This book defends the conjugal view of marriage. Patrick Lee and Robert P. George argue that marriage is a distinctive type of community: the union of a man and a woman who have committed to sharing their lives on every level of their beings (bodily, emotionally, and spiritually) in the kind of union that would be fulfilled by conceiving and rearing children together. The comprehensive nature of this union, and its intrinsic orientation to procreation as its natural fulfillment, distinguishes (...) marriage from other types of community and provides the basis for the norms of marital exclusivity and permanence. Lee and George detail how the basic moral norms regarding sexual acts follow from the ethical requirement to respect the good of marriage and explain how the law should treat marriage, given its conjugal nature, examining both the same-sex-marriage issue and civil divorce. (shrink)

Quine's holistic empiricist account of scientific inquiry can be characterized by three constitutive principles: *noncontradiction*, *universal revisability* and *pragmatic ordering*. We show that these constitutive principles cannot be regarded as statements within a holistic empiricist's scientific theory of the world. This claim is a corollary of our refutation of Katz's [1998, 2002] argument that holistic empiricism suffers from what he calls the Revisability Paradox. According to Katz, Quine's empiricism is incoherent because its constitutive principles cannot themselves be rationally revised. Using (...) Gärdenfors and Makinson's logic of belief revision based on epistemic entrenchment, we argue that Katz wrongly assumes that the constitutive principles are *statements* within a holistic empiricist's theory of the world. Instead, we show that constitutive principles are best seen as *properties* of a holistic empiricist's theory of scientific inquiry and we submit that, without Katz's mistaken assumption, the paradox cannot be formulated. We argue that our perspective on the status of constitutive principles is perfectly in line with Quinean orthodoxy. In conclusion, we compare our findings with van Fraassen's [2002] argument that we should think of empiricism as a stance, rather than as a doctrine. (shrink)

Le matérialisme que ce livre interroge et construit n'est pas une « philosophie », mais la condition de possibilité et l'outil de la connaissance objective. Historiquement, il se confond, de fait, avec l'élaboration de la science moderne s'affranchissant graduellement des contrats de parole qui l'asservirent longtemps à la métaphysique et à la théologie. Comment cette émancipation s'est-elle effectuée en des temps où une croyance instituée dictait sa loi théologico-politique aux efforts de la connaissance en leur imposant a priori la limite (...) de l'Inconnaissable? Comment d'autre part, face à cet affranchissement toujours inachevé, une métaphysique résiduelle impose-t-elle encore aux artisans de la connaissance objective, sans qu'ils s'en doutent, des cadres, des frontières, des démarches et des représentations? Ce livre montre qu'une analyse savante des complexes de discours dans l'histoire, à travers ce qu'elle explique du passé, peut permettre de comprendre et d'améliorer ce qui constitue proprement aujourd'hui l'acte de connaître. De redéfinir la « conscience ». De sortir des leitmotivs exténués sur le « hasard ». De penser plus authentiquement la singularité émergente du vivant. De s'éloigner d'un modèle strictement nécessitariste du « déterminisme ». De sortir des impasses avérées du réductionnisme. De résoudre les contradictions tacitement acceptées entre matérialisme et morale, ou entre déterminisme et conduites autonomes. D'entrevoir l'origine du symbolisme. De comprendre la nature originellement et fondamentalement politique de la religion. De penser l'articulation évolutive entre « nature » et « civilisation », et un lien cohérent et critique entre sciences de la nature et sciences de la société. D'identifier les comportements discursifs récurrents de ce que l'on nomme l'« idéologie ». Et d'édifier sur de nouvelles bases une histoire naturelle et sociale de la liberté. Revenant sur une part essentielle de son oeuvre, Patrick Tort invite ici à une véritable réforme logique de l'initiative de connaissance, et, simultanément, à instruire la méthode capable d'éclairer les mécanismes qui la favorisent et la combattent dans l'univers infini des discours. (shrink)

In its widest sense, public relations is about productively communicating with a broader audience, either directly or indirectly, such as through journalist interviews. Academic writing can be abstruse and lengthy, while media coverage can translate those difficult ideas into ordinary language in a more digestible form. Media articles are much easier to share; even as more paywalls are erected on media sites, they're still typically far cheaper than accessing academic journal articles, if not costless. Some initial groundwork is needed for (...) any media‐relations activities. This is about understanding the “rules of engagement” with the media, including who the right journalists are to approach and how. The chapter focuses on two main activities in media relations that might be relevant for philosophers: working with journalists on stories they're writing, and writing articles or op‐eds to be published in popular media. (shrink)

Visual forms of episodic memory and anticipatory imagination involve images that, by virtue of their perspectival organization, imply a notional subject of experience. But they contain no inbuilt reference to the actual subject, the person actually doing the remembering or imagining. This poses the problem of what (if anything) connects these two perspectival subjects and what differentiates cases of genuine memory and anticipation from mere imagined seeing. I consider two approaches to this problem. The first, exemplified by Wollheim and Velleman, (...) claims that genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations are phenomenally unselfconscious, with the co-identity of the notional and actual subjects secured by a determinate causal history. The second approach posits some distinctive phenomenal property that attaches to genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations and serves to experientially conflate the notional and actual subject. I consider a version of the second approach, derived from Kierkegaard’s discussions of phenomenal contemporaneity, and argue that this approach can better account for the possibility of affective alienation from the selves we were and will be: the way in which our sense of self and awareness of our causal history can sometimes come apart. (shrink)

This paper presents two systems of natural deduction for the rejection of non-tautologies of classical propositional logic. The first system is sound and complete with respect to the body of all non-tautologies, the second system is sound and complete with respect to the body of all contradictions. The second system is a subsystem of the first. Starting with Jan Łukasiewicz's work, we describe the historical development of theories of rejection for classical propositional logic. Subsequently, we present the two systems of (...) natural deduction and prove them to be sound and complete. We conclude with a ‘Theorem of Inversion’. (shrink)

C.S. Peirce's and Isaac Levi's accounts of the belief-doubt-belief model are discussed and evaluated. It is argued that the contemporary study of belief change has metamorphosed into a branch of philosophical logic where empirical considerations have become obsolete. A case is made for reformulations of belief change systems that do allow for empirical tests. Last, a belief change system is presented that (1) uses finite representations of information, (2) can adequately deal with inconsistencies, (3) has finite operations of change, (4) (...) can do without extra-logical elements, and (5) only licenses consistent beliefs. (shrink)

The power of some new entrants to the music industry derives from their position as brokers in computer-mediated environments. Brokers act instrumentally to exploit their position within a network which, in turn, depends on their ability to build and sustain links (and, in computer-mediated environments, hyperlinks). Bricolage in computer-mediated entrepreneurship refers to the intuitive manipulation of resources in order to achieve (perhaps tacit) goals. Without careful stewardship of the new intellectual wealth thus created, bricolage may profit neither the individual nor (...) the wider community. (shrink)

Social media is full of dead people. What should we do with all these digital souls? Can we delete them, or do they have a right to persist? Patrick Stokes claims that we have a moral duty towards the digital dead. Modern technology helps them to persist in various ways, but - with such developments as AI-driven chatbots simulating the dead - it also makes them vulnerable to new forms of exploitation and abuse. This provocative book explores a range (...) of questions about the nature of death, identity, grief, and the moral status of digital remains. (shrink)

We present a theory that copes with the dynamics of inconsistent information. A method is set forth to represent possibly inconsistent information by a finite state. Next, finite operations for expansion and contraction of finite states are given. No extra-logical element — a choice function or an ordering over (sets of) sentences — is presupposed in the definition of contraction. Moreover, expansion and contraction are each other's duals. AGM-style characterizations of these operations follow.