The present paper advances an analogy between cases of extra-mathematical explanation and cases of what might be termed ‘extra-logical explanation’: the explanation of a physical fact by a logical fact. A particular case of extra-logical explanation is identified that arises in the philosophical literature on time travel. This instance of extra-logical explanation is subsequently shown to be of a piece with cases of extra-mathematical explanation. Using this analogy, we argue extra-mathematical explanation is part of a broader class of non-causal explanation. (...) This has important implications for extra-mathematical explanation, for time travel and for theories of explanation more generally. (shrink)

Standard approaches to counterfactuals in the philosophy of explanation are geared toward causal explanation. We show how to extend the counterfactual theory of explanation to non-causal cases, involving extra-mathematical explanation: the explanation of physical facts by mathematical facts. Using a structural equation framework, we model impossible perturbations to mathematics and the resulting differences made to physical explananda in two important cases of extra-mathematical explanation. We address some objections to our approach.

ABSTRACT Our goal in this paper is to extend counterfactual accounts of scientific explanation to mathematics. Our focus, in particular, is on intra-mathematical explanations: explanations of one mathematical fact in terms of another. We offer a basic counterfactual theory of intra-mathematical explanations, before modelling the explanatory structure of a test case using counterfactual machinery. We finish by considering the application of counterpossibles to mathematical explanation, and explore a second test case along these lines.

We argue that explanations appealing to logical impossibilities are genuine explanations. Our defense is based on a certain picture of impossibility. Namely, that there are impossibilities and that the impossibilities have structure. Assuming this broad picture of impossibility we defend the genuineness of explanations that appeal to logical impossibilities against three objections. First, that such explanations are at odds with the perceived conceptual connection between explanation and counterfactual dependence. Second, that there are no genuinely contrastive why-questions that involve logical impossibilities (...) and, third, that explanations appealing to logical impossibilities rule nothing out. (shrink)

Tim travels back in time and tries to kill his grandfather before his father was born. Tim fails. But why? Lewis's response was to cite "coincidences": Tim is the unlucky subject of gun jammings, banana peels, sudden changes of heart, and so on. A number of challenges have been raised against Lewis's response. The latest of these focuses on explanation. This paper diagnoses the source of this new disgruntlement and offers an alternative explanation for Tim's failure, one that Lewis would (...) not have liked. The explanation is an obvious one but controversial, so it is defended against all the objections that can be mustered. (shrink)

While much is written about reading aloud to children, and as a teaching tool, far less is known about the oral reading that adults do at home, at work or in the community. This article presents the results of a national survey into whether, what, how and why adults across Britain may read aloud rather than in silence. Analysing data from 529 questionnaire responses, the article examines the frequency with which different text types are read aloud, the formations in which (...) this is done – alone, with one other person or in a group – and the purposes of reading aloud and being read to, with attention to differences according to gender and age. Findings suggest that reading aloud happens in a number of different ways and for different purposes, across contexts and life domains, and that it has a significant relationship with aspects of the lifecourse and with identity formation and performance. (shrink)

Despite the prevalence of beliefs across religions regarding repentance and divine forgiveness and their recognition in theoretical and religious studies, these constructs are relatively understudied phenomena in the social sciences. Furthermore, in recent years, multiple scholars have argued for the need for research to systematically study and highlight the experience and processes of repentance and divine forgiveness. Subsequently, this study explored processes of repentance, antecedents and motivations of repentance, resources to aid in repentance, and outcomes of repentance that should be (...) further examined. This analysis was done using in-depth qualitative interviews with 15 emerging adult religious exemplars identifying with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The authors used NVivo 12 and team-based qualitative coding processes to identify themes. Repentance processes included personal change, took various lengths of time, were a part of participants’ religious identity, were recurrent processes, and were influenced by participants’ view of God. Antecedents and motivations included religious practices and rituals, emotions, interpersonal interactions, and their relationship with God. Resources that aided in repentance included religious practices and rituals, interpersonal relationships, and a relationship with God. Finally, participants reported experiencing personal changes in their behavior and character, positive emotions (including feelings of divine forgiveness), improved interpersonal relationships, and a better relationship with God. These processes align with some previously discovered and theorized findings on repentance, contribute a number of novel findings, and offer future direction regarding the motivations, resources, and transformative experiences that participants reported in their personal repentance and experience of forgiveness. (shrink)

The idea of forgiveness is omnipresent in the transitional justice literature, yet this body of work, taken as a whole, is marked by conceptual, terminological and argumentative imprecision. Equivocation is common, glossing moral, theological, therapeutic and legal considerations, while arguments proceed from political, apolitical and even antipolitical premises. With forgiveness as a praxis linked to reconciliation processes in at least ten countries, concerns have grown over its negative implications for the relationship between the state and victims of state-authored injustices. Many (...) of these debates reference Hannah Arendt. Drawing from a range of Arendt’s published and unpublished work, this article challenges the academic claim that forgiveness has no place in the politics of reconciliation. Through this ‘returning to the source’, it presents a promising mode of thinking about political forgiveness in contemporary Settler-colonial states. (shrink)

Reality Making By JagoMarkOxford University Press, 2016, vi + 200 pp.

The distinction between perception and cognition frames countless debates in philosophy and cognitive science. But what, if anything, does this distinction actually amount to? In this introductory article, we summarize recent work on this question. We first briefly consider the possibility that a perception-cognition border should be eliminated from our scientific ontology, and then introduce and critically examine five positive approaches to marking a perception–cognition border, framed in terms of phenomenology, revisability, modularity, format, and stimulus-dependence.

This paper refines a controversial proposal: that core systems belong to a perceptual kind, marked out by the format of its representational outputs. Following Susan Carey, this proposal has been understood in terms of core representations having an iconic format, like certain paradigmatically perceptual outputs. I argue that they don’t, but suggest that the proposal may be better formulated in terms of a broader analogue format type. Formulated in this way, the proposal accommodates the existence of genuine icons in perception, (...) and avoids otherwise troubling objections. (shrink)

According to Brentano, mentality is essentially intentional in nature. Other philosophers have emphasized the phenomenal-qualitative aspect of conscious experiences as core to the mind. A recent philosophical wave – the ‘phenomenal intentionality programme’ – seeks to unite these conceptions in the idea that mental content is grounded in phenomenal qualities. However, a philosophical and scientific current, which includes Freud and contemporary cognitive science, makes widespread use of the posit of unconscious mentality/mental content. I aim to reconcile these disparate, influential strands (...) of thought concerning mentality’s essence, by defending a conception of the mark of the mental as consisting in content-carrying qualitative character (or mental qualities) – but understood as properties that can exist both in conscious (i.e. phenomenal) form and unconsciously. I describe this conception, deal with major historical objections to the notions of unconscious qualitative character and mentality, and explain the virtues of construing the mark of the mental in this way. (shrink)

Number Nativism is the view that humans innately represent precise natural numbers. Despite a long and venerable history, it is often considered hopelessly out of touch with the empirical record. I argue that this is a mistake. After clarifying Number Nativism and distancing it from related conjectures, I distinguish three arguments which have been seen to refute the view. I argue that, while popular, two of these arguments miss the mark, and fail to place pressure on Number Nativism. Meanwhile, (...) a third argument is best construed as a challenge: rather than refuting Number Nativism, it challenges its proponents to provide positive evidence for their thesis and show that this can be squared with apparent counterevidence. In response, I introduce psycholinguistic work on The Tolerance Principle (not yet considered in this context), propose that it is hard to make sense of without positing precise and innate representations of natural numbers, and argue that there is no obvious reason why these innate representations couldn’t serve as a basis for mature numeric conception. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Ratzinger's Republic:Communio's Postliberal TurnSam Zeno Conedera S.J. and Vincent L. Strand S.J.Is the political future of the West a postliberal one? For the past decade, numerous prominent thinkers in America and Europe have been debating this question. Matters that not long ago were merely of historical interest, such as Pope Gelasius I's understanding of the relation between sacral authority and royal power, Thomas Aquinas's thought on monarchy and (...) Robert Bellarmine's theory of the pope's indirect authority in temporal matters are now increasingly studied for their potential answers to contemporary political questions. This development, which would have been nearly unimaginable just a decade earlier, unsurprisingly has been led by Catholics. We say "unsurprisingly" in view of the long pre-modern tradition of Catholic political thought, as well as the Church's long struggle against liberalism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the current postliberal writers explicitly connect themselves to both of these aspects by using the term "integralist" to describe their position.1 [End Page 889]This "new integralism" represents a radical departure from the mainstream of Catholic political discourse of the last half century, which has largely sought rapprochement with Western liberalism. A group of writers, led by John Courtney Murray, George Weigel, Michael Novak, and Robert George, have held that the American constitutional order is rooted in the natural law tradition, and therefore is basically friendly to Catholic political thought. The Church's role in American life, they say, is upholding the natural law as a public moral philosophy, while embracing the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment as a matter of principle, in accordance with the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. This "Whig Thomism," which for decades represented the predominant outlook of conservative American Catholics, must now face the challenge of a different sort of Thomism represented by the integralists.2While the engagement between Whig Thomists and integralists has received most of the attention from scholars and journalists alike, another postliberal option has emerged in recent years. Its source is a group of Catholic thinkers associated with the Communio theological movement. Their political vision, which has no single name or label, has a complex and subtle relationship with the thought of earlier Communio writers, most of whom shared the Whig Thomist desire for reconciliation with Western liberalism. [End Page 890] The appearance of a Communio postliberalism therefore represents a significant development within this intellectual tradition. The most important representative of the earlier Communio perspective on political questions is Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI, who has recently been lauded as the "most important Catholic thinker of the twentieth century" on matters at the intersection of theology and politics.3In an article titled "Ratzinger's Republic" that appeared in these pages in 2020, we identified a significant tension in his thought about the Church's contribution to political life.4 Exploring Ratzinger's writings on natural law, we demonstrated that two currents are present. In accord with his fundamental theological commitments about nature and grace and about faith and reason, Ratzinger often questioned the effectiveness of arguments from natural law. He claimed that, since reason is historically conditioned, and therefore in the current order marked by sin, reason needs grace and faith to function properly. Yet, on other occasions, Ratzinger strongly endorsed arguments from natural law, highlighting its role as the foundation of a just democratic political order. We traced this ambivalence about natural law back to a dilemma at the heart of Ratzinger's political thought. On the one hand, in accord with his thinking about the relations of nature and grace and faith and reason, Ratzinger argued that the state needs the Church to supply moral values that the state cannot furnish on its own. On the other hand, he believed it belongs to the very nature of the Church to be separate from the state, and he endorsed nonconfessional, religiously pluralistic states.5 In light of these two commitments, Ratzinger argued that the contribution Christians are to make to the state is to supply moral values that were discerned under the influence of grace and divine revelation but... (shrink)

This article theorizes the biopolitical production of embodiment through a consideration of biopolitical metaphor. It is argued that much recent theoretical work on biopower fails to provide an adequate account of embodiment, and particularly the question of the habitualization of bodily experience. However, read through the lens of biopolitical metaphor, and drawing on the works of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, a dynamic account of the biopolitical shaping of bodily memory and embodied habit becomes possible. Moreover, it is argued (...) that a theory of biopolitical metaphor provides provocative openings for thinking together the recent discursively oriented work on biopower and other approaches associated with the affective turn, specifically around the problems of mimesis and supplement. New research directions are proposed, centered on common experiences of biopolitical domination among marginalized groups drawn from shared experiences of habit and embodiment. (shrink)

Reverse mathematics is a program in the foundations of mathematics founded by Friedman and developed extensively by Simpson and others. The aim of RM is to find the minimal axioms needed to prove a theorem of ordinary, that is, non-set-theoretic, mathematics. As suggested by the title, this paper deals with the study of the topological notions of dimension and paracompactness, inside Kohlenbach’s higher-order RM. As to splittings, there are some examples in RM of theorems A, B, C such that A (...) ↔, that is, A can be split into two independent parts B and C, and the aforementioned topological notions give rise to a number of splittings involving highly natural A, B, C. Nonetheless, the higher-order picture is markedly different from the second-one: in terms of comprehension axioms, the proof in higher-order RM of, for example, the paracompactness of the unit interval requires full second-order arithmetic, while the second-order/countable version of paracompactness of the unit interval is provable in the base theory RCA 0. We obtain similarly “exceptional” results for the Urysohn identity, the Lindelöf lemma, and partitions of unity. We show that our results exhibit a certain robustness, in that they do not depend on the exact definition of cover, even in the absence of the axiom of choice. (shrink)

Continuous sedation until death (CSD), the act of reducing or removing the consciousness of an incurably ill patient until death, often provokes medical-ethical discussions in the opinion sections of medical and nursing journals. A content analysis of opinion pieces in medical and nursing literature was conducted to examine how clinicians define and describe CSD, and how they justify this practice morally. Most publications were written by physicians and published in palliative or general medicine journals. Terminal Sedation and Palliative Sedation are (...) the most frequently used terms to describe CSD. Seventeen definitions with varying content were identified. CSD was found to be morally justified in 73 % of the publications using justifications such as Last Resort, Doctrine of Double Effect, Sanctity of Life, Autonomy, and Proportionality. The debate over CSD in the opinion sections of medical and nursing journals lacks uniform terms and definitions, and is profoundly marked by ‘charged language’, aiming at realizing agreement in attitude towards CSD. Not all of the moral justifications found are equally straightforward. To enable a more effective debate, the terms, definitions and justifications for CSD need to be further clarified. (shrink)

Every society has its own ways of marking the transition from childhood to adulthood. Education is central to childhood experience. Early on, parents play a key role in this regard, explicitly instructing children in principles of right and wrong and implicitly modeling good and, perhaps unwittingly, bad behavior. For Confucius, from birth to fifteen can be taken as a pre‐moral period. Morality is a function of learning, and before fifteen this kind of self‐conscious and engaged instruction had yet to take (...) place. This is Confucian childhood: the period of life before moral understanding has taken hold and, therefore, also before personal responsibility can be assigned. Daoists have a very different notion of childhood. In a sense, they reverse the relationship asserted by Confucians: children are not morally imperfect adults‐in‐training but, rather, adults, if they want to get closer to Way, need to learn from the simple purity of children. (shrink)

Enlightenment optimism over mankind's progress was often voiced in terms of botanical growth by key figures such as John Millar; the mind's cultivation marked the beginning of this process. For agriculturists such as Arthur Young cultivation meant an advancement towards virtue and civilization; the cultivation of the mind can similarly be seen as an enlightenment concept which extols the human potential for improvable reason. In the course of this essay I aim to explore the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘cultivation’ through (...) botanical metaphor. By using the recurring motif of the mind's cultivation as a site from which to explore enlightenment views on female understanding, I investigate how far concerns with human progress extended to the female mind. I examine the language of botany and cultivation in texts by authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia Barbauld alongside that of Rousseau and Millar. Wollstonecraft's appropriation and subsequent inversion of the conventional cultivation metaphor, for example, demonstrates her desire to draw attention to society's neglect of women's educational potential by substituting images of enlightened growth with those of luxuriant decay. By pushing this analogy further she indicates how society has cultivated women rearing them like exotic flowering plants or ‘luxuriants’ where ‘strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty’. I discuss the antipastoral rationalism which enables her to unmask the false sentiment behind this traditional metaphoric association between women and flowers arguing that such familiar tropes are the language of male desire and are indicative of women's problematic relationship to culture. (shrink)

A philosopher considers whether the scientific and philosophical arguments against free will are reason enough to give up our belief in it. In our daily life, it really seems as though we have free will, that what we do from moment to moment is determined by conscious decisions that we freely make. You get up from the couch, you go for a walk, you eat chocolate ice cream. It seems that we're in control of actions like these; if we are, (...) then we have free will. But in recent years, some have argued that free will is an illusion. The neuroscientist (and best-selling author) Sam Harris and the late Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner, for example, claim that certain scientific findings disprove free will. In this engaging and accessible volume in the Essential Knowledge series, the philosopher Mark Balaguer examines the various arguments and experiments that have been cited to support the claim that human beings don't have free will. He finds them to be overstated and misguided. Balaguer discusses determinism, the view that every physical event is predetermined, or completely caused by prior events. He describes several philosophical and scientific arguments against free will, including one based on Benjamin Libet's famous neuroscientific experiments, which allegedly show that our conscious decisions are caused by neural events that occur before we choose. He considers various religious and philosophical views, including the philosophical pro-free-will view known as compatibilism. Balaguer concludes that the anti-free-will arguments put forward by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists simply don't work. They don't provide any good reason to doubt the existence of free will. But, he cautions, this doesn't necessarily mean that we have free will. The question of whether we have free will remains an open one; we simply don't know enough about the brain to answer it definitively. (shrink)

“Only a God can save us.” So says Martin Heidegger in his pessimistic assessment of merely human philosophy’s ability to change the world. The thought is not unique to Heidegger: another thinker who arrived at a similar conclusion was Heidegger’s contemporary and sometime admirer, Carl Schmitt, in his idea of “political theology.” I take up Schmitt’s version of the idea and use it to examine the New Atheism, a relatively recent polemical critique of religion by an informal coalition of English-speaking (...) scientists, philosophers, and writers. Taking Sam Har­ris’s book The End of Faith (2005) as my test case, I ask whether the New Atheism can instructively be read as a Schmittian “political theology”, not least because of its strongly anti-liberal implications for toleration of religious belief and practice. I close by posing the question of what sort of theory would deserve to be called an atheistic political theology and whether such a theory exists, or could exist. (shrink)

In his arguments that science itself can answer moral questions, Sam Harris often appeals to our intuitions about the badness of suffering. If we share these intuitions, Harris argues, we’ve taken a significant step in conceding to a basically utilitarian worldview. In this chapter, I critically assess Harris’ arguments and find them deeply wanting.

Mark Coeckelbergh (Int J Soc Robot 1:217–221, 2009) argues that robot ethics should investigate what interaction with robots can do to humans rather than focusing on the robot’s moral status. We should ask what robots do to our sociality and whether human–robot interaction can contribute to the human good and human flourishing. This paper extends Coeckelbergh’s call and investigate what it means to live with disembodied AI-powered agents. We address the following question: Can the human–AI interaction contribute to our (...) moral development? We present an empirically informed philosophical analysis of how the AI personal assistant Siri changes its users’ way of life, based on the responses obtained from 20 semi-directive individual interviews with Siri users. We identify changes in the users’ social interaction associated with the adoption of Siri. These changes include: (1) the indirect effect of reducing opportunities of human interaction, (2) the second-order effect of diminished expectations toward each other in a community, and (3) the acquired preference to obtain hassle-free interaction with Siri over human interaction. We examine them in relation to concerns that are voiced in the current debates over the rise of AI, namely the suspicion that humans could become overly reliant on AI (Danaher 2019) and the worry that social AI could impede on moral development (Fröding and Peterson, Ethics Inf Technol 23:207–214, 2012; Li, Ethics Inf Technol 23:543–550, 2021). We analyze the ethical costs that come from these changes in light of virtue ethics and address potential objections along the way. We end by offering directions for thinking about how to live with AI personal assistant while preserving favorable conditions for moral development. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

When Thomas Nagel originally coined the expression “moral luck,” he used the term “luck” to mean lack of control. This use was a matter of stipulation, as Nagel’s target had little to do with luck itself, but the question of how control is related to moral responsibility. Since then, we have seen several analyses of the concept of luck itself, and recent contributors to the moral luck literature have often assumed that any serious contribution to the moral luck debate must (...) begin with a robust concept of luck simpliciter. I argue here that this assumption is a mistake, on the basis of three reasons: the issue was originally conceived as an issue about responsibility and control, analyses of luck tend to distort and needlessly to complicate what is at issue when shoehorned into the moral luck debate, and these analyses have very little (if anything) to contribute to the discussion. (shrink)

:Academic Medical Centers offer patient care and perform research. Increasingly, AMCs advertise to the public in order to garner income that can support these dual missions. In what follows, we raise concerns about the ways that advertising blurs important distinctions between them. Such blurring is detrimental to AMC efforts to fulfill critically important ethical responsibilities pertaining both to science communication and clinical research, because marketing campaigns can employ hype that weakens research integrity and contributes to therapeutic misconception and misestimation, undermining (...) the informed consent process that is essential to the ethical conduct of research. We offer ethical analysis of common advertising practices that justify these concerns. We also suggest the need for a deliberative body convened by the Association of American Medical Colleges and others to develop a set of voluntary guidelines that AMCs can use to avoid in the future, the problems found in many current AMC advertising practices. (shrink)

Philosophy of science has traditionally focused on the epistemological dimensions of scientific practice at the expense of the ethical and political questions scientists encounter when addressing questions of policy in advisory contexts. In this article, I will explore how an exclusive focus on epistemology and theoretical reason can function to reinforce common, yet flawed assumptions concerning the role of scientific knowledge in policy decision making when reproduced in philosophy courses for science students. In order to address this concern, I will (...) argue that such courses should supplement the traditional focus on theoretical reason with an analysis of the practical reasoning employed by scientists in advisory contexts. Later sections of this paper outline a teaching strategy by which this can be achieved that consists of two steps: the first examines idealized examples of scientific advising in order to highlight the irreducible role played by moral reasoning in justifying policy recommendations. The second employs argument analysis to reveal implicit moral assumptions in actual advisory reports that form the basis for class discussion. This paper concludes by examining some of the wider benefits that can be expected from adopting such an approach. (shrink)

A specific issue for argumentation theory is whether information and communication technologies play any role in governing argument — that is, as parties engage in practical activities across space and time via ICTs, does technology matter for the interplay of argumentative content and process in managing disagreement? The case made here is that technologies do matter because they are not merely conduits of communication but have a role in the pragmatics of communication and argumentation. In particular, ICTs should be recognized (...) as communication-information services that are delegated degrees of responsibility for managing disagreements arising from practical activities. These services are organized around practical theories for designing disagreement space. However, recognizing this relationship between argument and technology requires accounting for procedures, techniques, or rules and speech acts that are not argumentative propositions in any strict sense but that are consequential for what becomes argumentation in any setting. An account about designing disagreement space, grounded in Jackson and Jacobs’s theory of Disagreement Management, is put forward to address these issues while more generally contributing to understanding argument in context. (shrink)

In 2004, Sam Harris published The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason which became a major bestseller. This marked the first of a series of series of bestsellers that took a harder line against religion than has been the custom among secularists: Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris (2006), The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006), Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett (2006), God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science (...) Shows That God Goes Not Exist by Victor J. Stenger (2007), and God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) by Christoper Hitchens. (shrink)

For centuries philosophers have wrestled with the dichotomy between individual freedom on the one hand and collective solidarity on the other. Yet today there is a growing realization that this template is fundamentally flawed. In this book, Mark Young embraces and advocates a more holistic concept of freedom; one which is not merely defined negatively but which positively provides the preconditions for individuals to actively exercise their autonomy and to flourish as human beings in the process. Young posits the (...) idea of 'freedom in community' and traces its origin back to Aristotle. Taking as his premise that humans are deeply social beings who live their lives intricately interwoven with each other, he examines what type of political community is relevant for us in this post-Classical, post-Enlightenment and, indeed, post-Existential world. Identifying the failure of traditional 'statist' models of politics, Young instead argues for a civil society: a globally interlinked and free set of liberal communities as the best context for nourishing human flourishing. In this way we can achieve a proper setting for Eudaimonia in a modern sense. (shrink)

When infrastructural technology is functioning correctly, it is often considered to recede from view and become invisible. According to this perspective, visibility is restored in cases of breakdown and malfunction, which for this reason, are often understood to represent important epistemic opportunities for grasping previously hidden aspects of infrastructure. This article seeks to outline the limitations of the idea that infrastructural failure has a positive epistemic function by distinguishing between two fundamentally different ways in which the nature of technological function (...) can be conceptualised; the first understands function as stemming primarily from the way a technology was designed and produced, the second as a process sustained by constant human activities of maintenance and repair. After illustrating how a number of recent studies of infrastructure build upon insights granted by the latter process perspective, this article aims to demonstrate how the experience of breakdown itself does little to facilitate a shift towards understanding infrastructure in this way. For this reason, this article ends with a suggestion for a shift in emphasis in studies of infrastructure, away from breakdown and towards a sustained examination of everyday practices of maintenance, repair and modification of infrastructural technologies. (shrink)

Frege is now regarded as one of the world's greatest philosophers, and the founder of modern logic. Mark Sainsbury argues that we must depart considerably from Frege's views if we are to work towards an adequate conception of natural language. This is an outstanding contribution to philosophy of language and logic and will be invaluable to all those interested in Frege and the philosophy of language.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, mathematics' traditional domains of 'number and figure' became vigorously displaced by altered settings in which former verities became discarded as no longer sacrosanct. And these innovative recastings appeared everywhere, not merely within the familiar realm of the non-Euclidean geometries. How can mathematics retain its traditional status as a repository of necessary truth in the light of these revisions? The purpose of this Element is to provide a sketch of this developmental history.

This article discusses the composition and transmission of early Buddhist texts with specific reference to sutras. After briefly summarizing the main reasons why it is likely that these oral compositions were designed to be memorized and transmitted verbatim, I will discuss the main types of changes that these texts underwent in the course of their transmission and the reasons such changes occurred, then attempt to give an account of the challenge that change, particularly intentional change, posed to the oral transmission (...) of fixed, memorized texts. (shrink)

I argue that recent interpretations of Nietzsche's political theory that make him out to be a Machiavellian elitist are misguided. While Nietzsche's philosophy advocates a return to an order of rank among individuals, it does not entail the domination of the few over the many. Rather, it is meant to benefit all individuals, whatever their rank. To this end, I examine several Machiavellian interpretations and demonstrate the inadequacy of their exegetical evidence. I then turn to Nietzsche's educational theory and show (...) the ways it supports and expands his political vision for the flourishing of the few and the many. (shrink)

We argue that libertarianism (roughly, the thesis that we have indeterministic, libertarian free will) is compatible with God’s infallible foreknowledge. We use eternalism (roughly, the thesis that reality is a 4-dimensional block and that past, present, and future objects exist) as an explanatory stepping stone between libertarianism and God’s foreknowledge: eternalism entails that (and comes close to explaining how) an omniscient God would know what we decide in the future even if we have libertarian free will. This account also explains (...) what is wrong with standard fatalist arguments for the incompatibility of free will and God’s foreknowledge. (shrink)