When one takes an intersectional perspective on patterns of oppression and domination, it becomes clear that familiar forms of systemic injustice, such as misogyny and anti-Black racism, are inseparable. Some feminist theorists conclude, from this, that the systems behind these injustices cannot be individuated—for example, that there isn’t patriarchy and white supremacy, but instead only white supremacist patriarchy. This chapter offers a different perspective. Philosophers have long observed that a statue and a lump of clay can be individuated although inseparable, (...) and that statues and lumps of clay do different explanatory and predictive work for the same causal outcomes. This chapter suggests that the same is true of systems such as patriarchy and white supremacy. These systems, like the injustices they produce, are inseparable. But they can be individuated, and when they are individuated, they do different explanatory and predictive work. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 4, April 2022.

Cryonics is the preservation of legally dead human bodies at the temperature of liquid nitrogen in the hope that future technologies will be able to revive them. In philosophical debates surrounding this practice, arguments often focus on prudential implications of cryopreservation, or moral arguments on a societal level. In this paper, we claim that this debate is incomplete, since it does not take into account a significant relational concern about cryonics. Specifically, we argue that attention should be paid to the (...) potential implications of cryopreservation for the mourning processes of surviving loved ones. Cryopreservation increases the likelihood of disruption of the practical and mental tasks involved in a successful mourning process, which can negatively impact survivors of the cryopreserved patient. To illustrate my argument, we will draw on a case study from the 2019 documentaryHope Frozen. We aim to introduce this concern, in order to gain a more complete view on the potential implications of cryopreservation. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes has recently been cast as one of the forefathers of political realism. This article evaluates his place in the realist tradition by focusing on three key themes: the priority of legitimacy over justice, the relation between ethics and politics, and the place of imagination in politics. The thread uniting these themes is the importance Hobbes placed on achieving a moral consensus around peaceful coexistence, a point which distances him from realists who view the two as competing goals of (...) politics. The article maintains that only a qualified version of the autonomy of the political position can be attributed to Hobbes, while arguing more generally that attending to the relation between ethics and politics is central to assessing his liberal credentials from a realist perspective. Against the prevalent reading of Hobbes as a hypothetical contract theorist, the article proceeds to show that the place of consent in his theory is better understood as part of his wider goal of transforming the imagination of his audience: a goal which is animated by concerns that realists share. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Setting Up the Argument The Evidence for Fine‐Tuning Epistemic Probability Determining k′ and the Comparison Range Justifying Premises (1) and (2) The Multiverse Hypothesis Miscellaneous Objections Conclusion: Putting the Argument in Perspective References.

Many thinkers believe that the next transformational change in human organisation will be the onset of human-level artificial intelligence, and that the most likely method of achieving this will come through brain emulations or "ems": the ability to scan human brains and program their connections into ever faster computers. Taking this as his starting point, Hanson describes what a world dominated by these ems will be like.

We consider the problem of finding and classifying representations in algebraic logic. This is approached by letting two players build a representation using a game. Homogeneous and universal representations are characterized according to the outcome of certain games. The Lyndon conditions defining representable relation algebras (for the finite case) and a similar schema for cylindric algebras are derived. Finite relation algebras with homogeneous representations are characterized by first order formulas. Equivalence games are defined, and are used to establish whether an (...) algebra is ω-categorical. We have a simple proof that the perfect extension of a representable relation algebra is completely representable. An important open problem from algebraic logic is addressed by devising another two-player game, and using it to derive equational axiomatisations for the classes of all representable relation algebras and representable cylindric algebras. Other instances of this approach are looked at, and include the step by step method. (shrink)

This is a condensed version of an in-process book on the fine-tuning argument for God’s existence. In this 48,000 word essay, I first develop a probabilistic framework for articulating the argument, and then use this framework to answer in detail many of the objections commonly raised against it. Along the way, I present some of the fine-tuning evidence itself and consider major objections against the evidence; further, there are two major sections dealing with the multiverse objection, particularly that based on (...) inflationary cosmology. (shrink)

What if we someday learn how to model small brain units, and so can "upload" ourselves into new computer brains? What if this happens before we learn how to make human-level artificial intelligences? The result could be a sharp transition to an upload-dominated world, with many dramatic consequences. In particular, fast and cheap replication may once again make Darwinian evolution of human values a powerful force in human history. With evolved values, most uploads would value life even when life is (...) hard or short, uploads would reproduce quickly, and wages would fall. But total wealth should rise, so we could all do better by accepting uploads, or at worse taxing them, rather than trying to delay or segregate them. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology is the definitive, comprehensive, and authoritative text on this burgeoning field. With contributions from over fifty experts in the field, the range and depth of coverage is unequalled. It will be an essential resource for students and researchers in psychology.

Clarence Sloat, Ora Matushansky, and Delia Graff Fara advocate a Syntactic Rationale on behalf of predicativism, the view that names are predicates in all of their occurrences. Each argues that a set of surprising syntactic data compels us to recognize names as a special variety of count noun. This data set, they say, reveals that names’ interaction with the determiner system differs from that of common count nouns only with respect to the definite article ‘the’. They conclude that this special (...) distribution of names is best explained by the-predicativism, the view that posits the existence of the null-determiner ‘the’ preceding bare singular names. This essay argues that they have incorrectly discerned the syntactic facts: their critical data point concerning the ungrammaticality of sentences like “The Katherine wants coffee” is mistaken. Such sentences’ grammaticality undermines the Syntactic Rationale and presents serious auxiliary problems for predicativism. (shrink)

Theories of slurs aim to explain how – via semantics, pragmatics, or other mechanisms – speakers who use slurs convey that targets are inferior persons. I present two novel problems. The Slur Creation Problem: How do terms come to be slurs? An expression ‘e’ is introduced into the language. What are the mechanisms by which ‘e’ comes to possess properties distinctive of slurs? The Bigotry Formation Problem: Speakers’ uses of slurs are a prime mechanism of bigotry formation, not solely bigotry (...) perpetuation. With a use of a slur, how are speakers able to introduce new bigoted attitudes and actions toward targets? I argue that expressivism offers powerful resources to solve the problems. (shrink)

One of the moral questions concerning autonomous vehicles (henceforth AVs) is the choice between types that differ in their built-in algorithms for dealing with rare situations of unavoidable lethal collision. It does not appear to be possible to avoid questions about how these algorithms should be designed. We present the results of our study of moral preferences (N = 2769) with respect to three types of AVs: (1) selfish, which protects the lives of passenger(s) over any number of bystanders; (2) (...) altruistic, which minimizes the number of casualties, even if this leads to death of passenger(s); and (3) conservative, which abstains from interfering in such situations. We differentiate between scenarios in which participants are to make their decisions privately or publicly, and for themselves or for their offspring. We aim to answer two research questions: (1) whether the public visibility of the choice of an AV type choice make this choice more altruistic and (2) which type of situation makes it more difficult to choose altruistically: when choosing for society as a whole, when choosing only for oneself, or when choosing only for one’s offspring. Our results show that respondents exhibit a preference for an altruistic strategy for AVs and that it is reinforced when signaled to others. The altruistic preference is strongest when applies to everybody else, weaker when it reflects a solely personal choice, and weakest when choosing for one’s own child. We conclude that a public choice is considerably more likely to pressure consumers into accepting a more socially beneficial solution. (shrink)

'Transgender’ is often described either as an identity, or else as the full spectrum of gender nonconformity. In this essay, I suggest that these descriptions do not align with the conceptual labor that we often ask ‘transgender’ to do: highlighting people who engage in forms of self-directed gender nonconformity that are heavily penalized.

The debate over the political power of business has witnessed a revival after the global financial crisis of 2007—2009. We begin by arguing that business political fragmentation or unity has important consequences for policy outcomes. The structure of the U.S. government is conducive to incremental policy changes, often in response to business pressures. In turn, these changes shape the political interests and alliances of business. We illustrate this dynamic through an analysis of the political processes leading to the enactment of (...) the Financial Modernization Act of 1999, which repealed Depression-era regulations and allowed commercial banks to enter the securities and insurance business and vice versa. The FMA condoned the emergence of largely unregulated diversified financial institutions, which proved “too big to fail” during the crisis. Several factors contributed to the FMA: political institutions, international competition, the ideological convergence of the Republican and Democratic parties, and the political interests of financial industry actors. (shrink)

Human behavior regarding medicine seems strange; assumptions and models that seem workable in other areas seem less so in medicine. Perhaps we need to rethink the basics. Toward this end, I have collected many puzzling stylized facts about behavior regarding medicine, and have sought a small number of simple assumptions which might together account for as many puzzles as possible.

The use of contingent valuation methods for estimating the economic value of environmental improvements and damages has increased significantly. However, doubts exist regarding the validity of the usual willingness to pay CV methods. In this article, we examine the CV approach in light of recent findings from behavioral decision research regarding the constructive nature of human preferences. We argue that a principal source of problems with conventional CV methods is that they impose unrealistic cognitive demands upon respondents. We propose a (...) new CV approach, based on the value-structuring capabilities of multiattribute utility theory and decision analysis, and discuss its advantages and disadvantages. (shrink)

An ambitious and wide-ranging synthesis of the history of environmental thought by a leading philosopher.

For Kant and Hill, self-respect is a morally central and morally powerful concern. Both have also had some things to say in moral praise of humility and in condemnation of arrogance, a trait widely regarded as the vice to which the virtue of humility is the prevention and cure. Arrogance can easily be seen as a failure to respect both other people and oneself. It might be thought, however, that humility and self-respect are in tension, if not at odds with (...) one another, for the one is widely thought to involve a low opinion of one’s worth and the other a high regard for it. My essay focuses on understanding, with the help of Kant and Hill, relations among various kinds of humility, arrogance, and self-respect. I argue that humility is not the virtue opposing arrogance, but rather, self-respect is, and that humility is at best an ancillary, instrumental, contextual virtue and the servant of self-respect; but at worst, it is as serious a vice as arrogance, indeed, an aspect of it. (shrink)

A world product time series covering two million years is well fit by either a sum of four exponentials, or a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) combination of three exponential growth modes: “hunting,” “farming,” and “industry.” The CES parameters suggest that farming substituted for hunting, while industry complemented farming, making the industrial revolution a smoother transition. Each mode grew world product by a factor of a few hundred, and grew a hundred times faster than its predecessor. This weakly suggests that (...) within the next century a new mode might appear with a doubling time measured in days, not years. (shrink)

The Conjectural Body combines continental philosophy with musicology, popular music studies, and feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories to offer a unique perspective on issues of gender, race, and the philosophy of music. It is one of the few books in philosophy to take popular music seriously, and is one of the few books in continental feminism to privilege music over the visual.

While many of the phenomenological currents in philosophy allegedly utilize a peculiar method, the type under consideration here is characterized by Franz Brentano s ambition to make philosophy scientific by adopting no other method but that of natural science. Brentano became particularly influential in teaching his students (such as Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Alexius Meinong, and Edmund Husserl) his descriptive psychology, which is concerned with mind as intentionally directed at objects. As Brentano and his students continued in their investigations in (...) descriptive psychology, another side of Austrian phenomenology, namely object theory, became more and more prominent. The philosophical orientation under consideration in this collection of essays is accordingly a two-sided discipline, concerned with both mind and objects, and applicable to various areas of philosophy such as epistemology, philosophy of language, value theory, and ontology.". (shrink)

One of the most important students of Franz Brentano was Anton Marty, who made it his task to develop a philosophy of language on the basis of Brentano’s analysis of mind. It is most unfortunate that Marty does not receive the attention he deserves, primarily due to his detailed and distracting polemics. In the analysis presented here his philosophy of language and other aspects of his thought, such as his ontology , are examined first and foremost in their positive rather (...) than critical character. The analysis is moreover supplemented by translations of four important works by Marty, including his entire work On the Origin of Language. These are in fact the first English translations of any substantial writings by him. The resulting picture that emerges from the analysis and translations is that Marty has much to say that proves to be of enduring interest for the philosophy of language on a range of topics, especially the meanings of statements, of emotive expressions, and of names as regards both their communicative and their ontological aspects. The volume will be of interest not only to philosophers and historians of philosophy, but also to historians of linguistics and psychology. (shrink)

SummaryR. G. Collingwood presented his major work of political philosophy, The New Leviathan, as an updated version of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. However, his reasons for taking Hobbes's great work as his inspiration have puzzled and eluded many Collingwood scholars, while those interested in the reception of Hobbes's ideas have largely neglected the New Leviathan. In this essay I reveal what Collingwood saw in Hobbes's political philosophy and show how his reading of Hobbes both diverges from other prominent interpretations of the (...) time and invites us to reassess Hobbes's complex association with the origins of liberalism. In doing so, I focus on Collingwood's science of mind, his ideas on society and authority, and his dialectical theory of politics, in each case showing how he engaged with Hobbes in order to elucidate his own vision of civilisation. That vision is based on the development of social consciousness, which involves people coming to understand the body politic as a joint enterprise whereby they confer authority upon those who rule. (shrink)

For every finite n ≥ 4 there is a logically valid sentence φ n with the following properties: φ n contains only 3 variables (each of which occurs many times); φ n contains exactly one nonlogical binary relation symbol (no function symbols, no constants, and no equality symbol): φ n has a proof in first-order logic with equality that contains exactly n variables, but no proof containing only n - 1 variables. This result was first proved using the machinery of (...) algebraic logic developed in several research monographs and papers. Here we replicate the result and its proof entirely within the realm of (elementary) first-order binary predicate logic with equality. We need the usual syntax, axioms, and rules of inference to show that φ n has a proof with only n variables. To show that φ n has no proof with only n - 1 variables we use alternative semantics in place of the usual, standard, set-theoretical semantics of first-order logic. (shrink)

This thesis examines the nature of the supplementary relationship between Husserlian phenomenology and deconstruction. Chapter 1 gives an account of the strategies and aims of deconstruction, determining these to be an attempt to respond, using ‘other names’, to the other which is excluded by phenomenology/philosophy in its attempts to master its own limits. In Chapter 2, it is found that alterity is encountered by phenomenology on its own thresholds, informing the genetic turn in phenomenology which is necessitated as a result (...) of the inquiries into the temporal constitution which founds the possibility of an object’s being given as such to consciousness. Furthermore, it is shown how the possibility of the genetic turn resides in the indication relation examined in the phenomenology of signification. Chapter 3 focusses on the deconstruction of phenomenology, and investigates the double movement in phenomenology which the deconstruction reveals, taking time and language as guiding threads. On the one hand, the genetic turn appears to reveal a founding alterity, which, on the other hand, phenomenology strives to suppress in accordance with its adherence to its own ‘principle of principles’. It is argued that the deconstruction aims to accord phenomenological respect to the alterity uncovered by phenomenological descriptions. This is done through thematising certain operative concepts, concepts which remain unthemtised in phenomenology precisely because such thematisation would reveal a founding non-presence intolerable to phenomenology. Deconstruction supplements phenomenology to the extent that it attempts to name, on the fissured margins of phenomenology, the radical alterity uncovered by phenomenology in a way which does not reduce the very otherness of the alterity. However, in the final Chapter, it is argued, from the perspective of Levinas, that Derrida does not in fact manage to find a sense for founding alterity in phenomenology which is ‘beyond metaphysics’. The thesis concludes by arguing that, in order to achieve its strategic aims, as detailed in Chapter 1, the deconstruction of phenomenology needs to be ethically supplemenred, one example of such an ethically supplemented deconstructive reading of Husserl being found in some of the most recent texts of Levinas. (shrink)

The pace of scientific progress may be hindered by the tendency of our academic institutions to reward being popular rather than being right. A market-based alternative, where scientists can more formally 'stake their reputation', is presented here. It offers clear incentives to be careful and honest while contributing to a visible, self-consistent consensus on controversial scientific questions. In addition, it allows patrons to choose questions to be researched without choosing people or methods. The bulk of this paper is spent in (...) examining potential problems with the proposed approach. After this examination, the idea still seems to be plausible and worthy of further study. (shrink)

Giving money to others feels good. In the past years, this claim has received strong empirical support from psychology and neuroscience. It is now standard to use the label ‘warm glow feelings’ to refer to the pleasure people take from giving, and many explanations of apparently altruistic behavior appeal to these internal rewards. But what exactly are warm glow feelings? Why do people experience them? In order to further our understanding of the phenomenon, we ran two studies: a recall task (...) in which participants were asked to remember a donation they made, and a donation task in which participants were given the opportunity to make a donation before reporting their affective states. In both studies, correlational and experimental evidence converge towards the conclusion that, if the nature of the warm glow is straightforward, its source is multifaceted. Regarding the nature of ‘warm glow’, the pleasure people took in giving was mainly predicted by one particular positive emotion (‘joyful feelings’) and was indeed described by participants as a ‘warm’ sensation. Regarding the underlying psychological mechanisms, ‘warm glow’ feelings were elicited both by positive appraisals regarding the donor’s moral character and positive appraisals regarding the actual impact of the donor’s donation on the welfare of others. We discuss the implications of these findings for the role of positive emotions in explaining why people give. (shrink)

We prove, for each 4⩽ n ω , that S Ra CA n+1 cannot be defined, using only finitely many first-order axioms, relative to S Ra CA n . The construction also shows that for 5⩽n S Ra CA n is not finitely axiomatisable over RA n , and that for 3⩽m S Nr m CA n+1 is not finitely axiomatisable over S Nr m CA n . In consequence, for a certain standard n -variable first-order proof system ⊢ m (...) , n of m -variable formulas, there is no finite set of m -variable schemata whose m -variable instances, when added to ⊢ m , n as axioms, yield ⊢ m , n +1. (shrink)

The effectiveness of decision rules depends on characteristics of both rules and environments. A theoretical analysis of environments specifies the relative predictive accuracies of the “take-the-best” heuristic (TTB) and other simple strategies for choices between two outcomes based on binary cues. We identify three factors: how cues are weighted; characteristics of choice sets; and error. In the absence of error and for cases involving from three to five binary cues, TTB is effective across many environments. However, hybrids of equal weights (...) (EW) and TTB models are more effective as environments become more compensatory. As error in the environment increases, the predictive ability of all models is systematically degraded. Indeed, using the datasets of Gigerenzer et al. (1999, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, New York: Oxford University Press), TTB and similar models do not predict much better than a naïve model that exploits dominance. Finally, we emphasize that the results reported here are conditional on binary cues. (shrink)

The rapid implementation and continuing expansion of forensic DNA databases around the world has been supported by claims about their effectiveness in criminal investigations and challenged by assertions of the resulting intrusiveness into individual privacy. These two competing perspectives provide the basis for ongoing considerations about the categories of persons who should be subject to non-consensual DNA sampling and profile retention as well as the uses to which such profiles should be put. This paper uses the example of the current (...) arrangements for forensic DNA databasing in England and Wales to discuss the ways in which the legislative and operational basis for police DNA databasing is reliant upon continuous deliberations over these and other matters by a range of key stakeholders. We also assess the effects of the recent innovative use of DNA databasing for “familial searching” in this jurisdiction in order to show how agreed understandings about the appropriate uses of DNA can become unsettled and reformulated even where their investigative effectiveness is uncontested. We conclude by making some observations about the future of what is recognized to be the largest forensic DNA database in the world. (shrink)