Tom Moylan is perhaps most famous as a literary critic of science fiction: his two most well-known collections of reviews were Demand the Impossible, published in 1986 and reissued in 2014 with a number of critical reactions appended, and Scraps of the Untainted Sky, originally published in 2000. At any rate, the topic with Becoming Utopian is utopia, utopia as an abstract notion, influenced by the writings of Ernst Bloch, Ruth Levitas, Fredric Jameson, and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. (...) Moylan's focus in these books is consistently upon the defamiliarization promoted by certain ideas of utopia, opening to the reader the possibility of conceiving different subject positions. As the preface to Scraps... (shrink)

Can an agent's intelligence level be negative? We extend the Legg-Hutter agent-environment framework to include punishments and argue for an affirmative answer to that question. We show that if the background encodings and Universal Turing Machine (UTM) admit certain Kolmogorov complexity symmetries, then the resulting Legg-Hutter intelligence measure is symmetric about the origin. In particular, this implies reward-ignoring agents have Legg-Hutter intelligence 0 according to such UTMs.

I argue that Spinoza endorses "conceptual dependence monism," the thesis that all forms of metaphysical dependence (such as causation, inherence, and existential dependence) are conceptual in kind. In the course of explaining the view, I further argue that it is actually presupposed in the proof for his more famed substance monism. Conceptual dependence monism also illuminates several of Spinoza’s most striking metaphysical views, including the intensionality of causal contexts, parallelism, metaphysical perfection, and explanatory rationalism. I also argue that this priority (...) of the conceptual does not commit Spinoza to forms of idealism or mentalism. The question of how to understand different kinds of metaphysical dependence is quite controversial in Spinoza studies; I address major alternative readings in the notes. But there I also try to draw connections to the growing debate in contemporary discussions about metaphysical dependence, as this topic is a happy point of shared interest between Spinoza and contemporary metaphysicians alike. (shrink)

This book is a collection of eleven essays by one of the most interesting moral philosophers currently writing. It examines challenges to liberal thought posed by the changing circumstances of the modern world such as the conflicting tendencies toward global integration, and greater ethnic and communal identification. The author considers whether liberal principles of justice can accommodate social and global interdependencies while reaffirming the importance of individual responsibility and acknowledging the significance of people's diverse personal and communal allegiances.

I am writing on moral knowledge in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. There are two basic parts. In the first part, I articulate and attack a predominant interpretation of the Essay . This interpretation attributes to Locke the view that he did not write in the Essay anything that would be inconsistent with his early views in the Questions Concerning the Laws of Nature that there exists a single, ultimate, moral standard, i.e., the Law of Nature. For example, John Colman, (...) in his book John Locke's Moral Philosophy , argues that even though Locke explains in the Essay that we arbitrarily create our moral notions, they are still objective since they are bound together with the Law of Nature. Colman explains that the features of human nature relevant to the derivation of the Law of Nature are universally shared needs and concerns . I argue that this presupposes a view of Locke which assumes that there are essences of species independent of our beliefs about them. However, I attempt to show from the text of the Essay that this view cannot be supported. ;In the second part, I argue that the text of the Essay supports two alternative theses. The first is that given the kind of metaphysical world-view presupposed by the corpuscular method of science employed within the Essay, coupled with Locke's commitment to the possibility of moral knowledge, he was left with only one option with reference to ethics, viz., to make moral goodness or evil a mind-dependent relation between a rule and an action, instead of a property of an action or person which exists independently of our moral beliefs. This view is logically inconsistent with the existence of the Law of Nature. The second is that Locke has a semantical view of moral claims which is consistent with his relational view of moral goodness, viz., the primary function of moral judgments is to recommend behavior for ourselves and others. I described. However, Locke explains in the Essay that the opposite takes place with respect to our moral notions: events and persons must conform to the moral notion. ;On the account that I offer, Locke's views on moral epistemology are much closer to David Hume's than many have supposed, and correspondingly, anticipate the more skeptical views of moral epistemology in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Taking the title of his book from Isaiah Berlin's famous essay distinguishing a negative concept of liberty connoting lack of interference by others from a positive concept involving participation in the political realm, Samuel Fleischacker explores a third definition of liberty that lies between the first two. In Fleischacker's view, Kant and Adam Smith think of liberty as a matter of acting on our capacity for judgment, thereby differing both from those who tie it to the satisfaction of our (...) desires and those who translate it as action in accordance with reason or "will." Integrating the thought of Kant and Smith, and developing his own stand through readings of the Critique of Judgment and The Wealth of Nations, Fleischacker shows how different acting on one's best judgment is from acting on one's desires--how, in particular, good judgment, as opposed to mere desire, can flourish only in favorable social and political conditions. At the same time, exercising judgment is something every individual must do for him- or herself, hence not something that philosophers and politicians who reason better than the rest of us can do in our stead. For this reason advocates of a liberty based on judgment are likely to be more concerned than are libertarians to make sure that government provides people with conditions for the use of their liberty--for example, excellent standards of education, health care, and unemployment insurance--while at the same time promoting a less paternalistic view of government than most of the movements associated for the past thirty years with the political left. (shrink)

In 2011, Hibbard suggested an intelligence measure for agents who compete in an adversarial sequence prediction game. We argue that Hibbard’s idea should actually be considered as two separate ideas: first, that the intelligence of such agents can be measured based on the growth rates of the runtimes of the competitors that they defeat; and second, one specific (somewhat arbitrary) method for measuring said growth rates. Whereas Hibbard’s intelligence measure is based on the latter growth-rate-measuring method, we survey other methods (...) for measuring function growth rates, and exhibit the resulting Hibbard-like intelligence measures and taxonomies. Of particular interest, we obtain intelligence taxonomies based on Big-O and Big-Theta notation systems, which taxonomies are novel in that they challenge conventional notions of what an intelligence measure should look like. We discuss how intelligence measurement of sequence predictors can indirectly serve as intelligence measurement for agents with Artificial General Intelligence (AGIs). (shrink)

In this collection of essays Samuel Wheeler discusses Derrida and other “deconstructive” thinkers from the perspective of an analytic philosopher willing to treat deconstruction as philosophy, taking it seriously enough to look for and analyze its arguments. The essays focus on the theory of meaning, truth, interpretation, metaphor, and the relationship of language to the world. Wheeler links the thought of Derrida to that of Davidson and argues for close affinities among Derrida, Quine, de Man, and Wittgenstein. He also (...) demonstrates the propinquity of Plato and Derrida and shows that New Criticism shares deconstruction’s conception of language. Of the twelve essays in the collection, four are published here for the first time. The fundamental resemblance between Derrida and such analytic thinkers as Quine, Wittgenstein, and Davidson, the author argues, is that they deny the possibility of meanings as self-interpreting media constituting thoughts and intentions. Derrida argues that some form of magic language has determined the very project of philosophy, and his arguments work out the consequences of denying that there are such self-interpreting mental contents. In addition, Derrida and Davidson agree in denying any “given.” Without a given, questions about realism and idealism cease to have a point. Derrida and Davidson are both committed to the textuality of all significant marks, whether in neurons or on paper. They argue that there is no mode of representation more direct than language. (shrink)

Inspired by recent progress in multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (RL), in this work we examine the collective intelligent behaviour of theoretical universal agents by introducing a weighted mixture operation. Given a weighted set of agents, their weighted mixture is a new agent whose expected total reward in any environment is the corresponding weighted average of the original agents' expected total rewards in that environment. Thus, if RL agent intelligence is quantified in terms of performance across environments, the weighted mixture's intelligence is (...) the weighted average of the original agents' intelligences. This operation enables various interesting new theorems that shed light on the geometry of RL agent intelligence, namely: results about symmetries, convex agent-sets, and local extrema. We also show that any RL agent intelligence measure based on average performance across environments, subject to certain weak technical conditions, is identical (up to a constant factor) to performance within a single environment dependent on said intelligence measure. (shrink)

A variation of Fitch’s paradox is given, where no special rules of inference are assumed, only axioms. These axioms follow from the familiar assumptions which involve rules of inference. We show (by constructing a model) that by allowing that possibly the knower doesn’t know his own soundness (while still requiring he be sound), Fitch’s paradox is avoided. Provided one is willing to admit that sound knowers may be ignorant of their own soundness, this might offer a way out of the (...) paradox. (shrink)

Music comprises a diverse category of cognitive phenomena that likely represent both the effects of psychological adaptations that are specific to music (e.g., rhythmic entrainment) and the effects of adaptations for non-musical functions (e.g., auditory scene analysis). How did music evolve? Here, we show that prevailing views on the evolution of music – that music is a byproduct of other evolved faculties, evolved for social bonding, or evolved to signal mate quality – are incomplete or wrong. We argue instead that (...) music evolved as a credible signal in at least two contexts: coalitional interactions and infant care. Specifically, we propose that (1) the production and reception of coordinated, entrained rhythmic displays is a co-evolved system for credibly signaling coalition strength, size, and coordination ability; and (2) the production and reception of infant-directed song is a co-evolved system for credibly signaling parental attention to secondarily altricial infants. These proposals, supported by interdisciplinary evidence, suggest that basic features of music, such as melody and rhythm, result from adaptations in the proper domain of human music. The adaptations provide a foundation for the cultural evolution of music in its actual domain, yielding the diversity of musical forms and musical behaviors found worldwide. (shrink)

Mintz examines seventeenth-century reactions to the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.

Spinoza studies have seen a renaissance of interest in his views on modality, from which considerable disagreement has emerged about Spinoza's modal commitments. Much of this disagreement stems from larger interpretive disagreements about Spinoza's metaphysics. After a brief introduction, this SEP article begins with Spinoza's views on the distribution of modal properties, which quickly leads the heart of Spinoza's metaphysics, intersecting his views on causation, inherence, God, ontological plenitude and the principle of sufficient reason. Although the question of whether Spinoza (...) was a necessitarian is the predominant topic of discussion in the recent secondary literature on Spinoza's modal views, Spinoza also sketches interesting accounts of the nature of modality and the ground of modality that shed fresh light on his modal commitments. Though understudied by recent interpreters, these latter topics were of interest to Spinoza's peers and remain vibrant research questions in contemporary metaphysics of modality. (shrink)

Stephen Hawking, among others, has proposed that the topological stability of a property of space-time is a necessary condition for it to be physically significant. What counts as stable, however, depends crucially on the choice of topology. Some physicists have thus suggested that one should find a canonical topology, a single ‘right’ topology for every inquiry. While certain such choices might be initially motivated, some little-discussed examples of Robert Geroch and some propositions of my own show that the main candidates—and (...) each possible choice, to some extent—faces the horns of a no-go result. I suggest that instead of trying to decide what the ‘right’ topology is for all problems, one should let the details of particular types of problems guide the choice of an appropriate topology. (shrink)

Mind wandering is typically operationalized as task-unrelated thought. Some argue for the need to distinguish between unintentional and intentional mind wandering, where an agent voluntarily shifts attention from task-related to task-unrelated thoughts. We reveal an inconsistency between the standard, task-unrelated thought definition of mind wandering and the occurrence of intentional mind wandering (together with plausible assumptions about tasks and intentions). This suggests that either the standard definition of mind wandering should be rejected or that intentional mind wandering is an incoherent (...) category. Solving this puzzle is critical for advancing theoretical frameworks of mind wandering. (shrink)

In this paper, I confront Parfit’s Mixed Maxims Objection. I argue that recent attempts to respond to this objection fail, and I argue that their failure is compounded by the failure of recent attempts to show how the Formula of Universal Law can be used to demarcate the category of obligatory maxims. I then set out my own response to the objection, drawing on remarks from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals for inspiration and developing a novel account of how the Formula (...) of Universal Law can be employed to determine the deontic status of action tokens, action types, and maxims. (shrink)

Liberalism generally holds that legitimate political power is limited and is to be impartially exercised, only for the public good. Liberals accordingly assign political priority to maintaining certain basic liberties and equality of opportunities; they advocate an essential role for markets in economic activity, and they recognize government's crucial role in correcting market breakdowns and providing public goods. Classical liberalism and what I call “the high liberal tradition” are two main branches of liberalism. Classical liberalism evolved from the works of (...) Adam Smith and the classical utilitarian economists; its major 20th century representatives include Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The high liberal tradition developed from John Stuart Mill's works, and its major philosophical representatives in the 20th century are John Dewey and, later, John Rawls. This paper discusses the main distinguishing features of the classical and the high liberal traditions and their respective positions regarding capitalism as an economic and social system. Classical liberals, unlike high liberals, regard economic liberties and rights of private property in productive resources to be nearly as important as basic liberties. They conceive of equality of opportunity in more formal terms, and regard capitalist markets and the price system as essential not only to the allocation of production resources, but also as the fundamental criterion for the just distribution of income, wealth, and economic powers. High liberals, by contrast, regard the economic liberties as subordinate to the exercise of personal and civic liberties. They are prepared to regulate and restrict economic liberties to achieve greater equality of opportunities, reduce inequalities of economic powers, and promote a broader conception of the public good. And while high liberals endorse markets and the price system as essential to allocation of productive resources, they do not regard markets as the fundamental criterion for assessing just distributions of income, wealth, and economic powers and positions of responsibility. The paper concludes with some reflections upon the essential role that dissimilar conceptions of persons and society play in grounding the different positions on economic justice that classical and high liberals advocate. (shrink)

The leading reductive approaches to shared agency model that phenomenon in terms of complexes of individual intentions, understood as plan-laden commitments. Yet not all agents have such intentions, and non-planning agents such as small children and some non-human animals are clearly capable of sophisticated social interactions. But just how robust are their social capacities? Are non-planning agents capable of shared agency? Existing theories of shared agency have little to say about these important questions. I address this lacuna by developing a (...) reductive account of the social capacities of non-planning agents, which I argue supports the conclusion that they can enjoy shared agency. The resulting discussion offers a fine-grained account of the psychological capacities that can underlie shared agency, and produces a recipe for generating novel hypotheses concerning why some agents do not engage in shared agency. (shrink)

"Have the courage to use your own understanding! - that is the motto of enlightenment." - Immanuel Kant The Enlightenment is one of the most important and contested periods in the history of philosophy. The problems it addressed, such as the proper extent of individual freedom and the challenging of tradition, resonate as much today as when they were first debated. Of all philosophers, it is arguably Kant who took such questions most seriously, addressing them above all in his celebrated (...) short essay, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? In this engaging and lucid book, Samuel Fleischacker first explains and assesses Kant’s philosophy of Enlightenment. He then considers critics of Kant’s views - from Burke and Hegel to Horkheimer and Adorno - and figures he regards as having extended Kant’s notion of enlightenment, such as Feuerbach, Marx, Habermas, Foucault, and Rawls. Throughout, he demonstrates how Kant holds two distinct theories of enlightenment. On the one hand, Kant proposes a ‘minimal’ view, where to be enlightened is simply to engage in critical public discussion, allowing diversity of opinion to flourish. On the other, he argues that Kant elsewhere calls for a ‘maximal’ view of enlightenment, where, for example, an enlightened person cannot believe in a traditional religion. With great skill Fleischacker shows how these two views are taken in a multitude of directions by both critics and advocates of Kant’s philosophy. Arguing that Kant’s minimal enlightenment is a precondition for a healthy proliferation of cultures, religious faiths and political movements, What is Enlightenment? is a fascinating introduction to a key aspect of Kant’s thought and a compelling analysis of philosophical thinking about the Enlightenment. Including helpful chapter summaries and guides to further reading, it is ideal for anyone studying Kant or the philosophy of the Enlightenment, as well as those in related disciplines such as politics, history and religious studies. (shrink)

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2008v12n1p35 This paper aims to show that Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism, such as it is expounded in The Scientific Image , ends up in considerable difficulties in the philosophy of science. The main problem would be the exclusion of mathematics from the conception of science, given its clear absence of empirical adequacy, which is the most important requirement of his formulation. In this sense, it is suggested a more inclusive formulation of scientific theory, aroused from the notion of Da (...) Costa’s (1999) simple structure , considering the notion of scientific discovery in a strict sense, and the validity limit of a theory and the formalism used in a temporal context. (shrink)

O presente trabalho tem por objetivo apresentar os principais aspectos do Empirismo Construtivo de Bas C. van Fraassen, particularmente no que diz respeito ao problema do sucesso científico. Nesse contexto, serão examinadas as noções de observável e inobservável e suas relações com o ‘argumento do milagre’ e da ‘coincidência cósmica’, ambos criticados por van Fraassen. As respostas de autores que defendem o Realismo Científico serão então apresentadas, contrapondo-se aos argumentos do Empirismo Construtivo. Finalmente, possíveis dificuldades do Empirismo Construtivo serão ainda (...) examinadas e uma proposta para superá-las será apresentada. (shrink)

Upon first encountering Immanuel Kant’s 1766 essay Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics, one is immediately struck by its literary style. Indeed, Dreams constitutes a unique moment in Kant’s literary development—never before had he thrown himself with such fervor into the attempt to express his thoughts in a provocative manner, and never again would he indulge his poetic tendencies with such reckless abandon. Unsurprisingly, then, Kant’s poetic rhetoric in Dreams has long puzzled readers. Immediately following the essay’s (...) publication, Moses Mendelssohn voiced his perplexity about Kant’s mode of writing in it. In the early twentieth century, Ernst Cassirer noted this essay’s unorthodox... (shrink)

The history of philosophy is like an epic novel. There are revered ancestors who, through great suffering, establish traditions for the betterment of their descendants. There are black sheep of the family who stir up trouble, embarrass their brothers and sisters, and sometimes even invite the wrath of political and religious authorities. There are bitter feuds between families that last generations, often with no clear victor ever emerging. As the saga passes from one era to another, there is some feeling (...) of progress. Old-fashioned ways are discarded and replaced with new-although sometimes faddish-ones. Thus, the history of philosophy is an "adventure of ideas," to use the words of one great philosopher. This book attempts to describe a major thread of that drama. (shrink)

According to Phenomenal Conservatism (PC), if it seems to a subject S that P, S thereby has some degree of (defeasible) justification for believing P. But what is it for P to seem true? Answering this question is vital for assessing what role (if any) such states can play. Many have appeared to adopt a kind of non-reductionism that construes seemings as intentional states which cannot be reduced to more familiar mental states like beliefs or sensations. In this paper I (...) aim to show that reductive accounts need to be taken more seriously by illustrating the plausibility of identifying seemings and conscious inclinations to form a belief. I briefly close the paper by considering the implications such an analysis might have for views such as PC. (shrink)

Marxism has often been associated with two different legacies. The first rests on a strong exposition and critique of the logic of capitalism, grounded in a systematic analysis of the laws of motion of capitalism as a system. The second legacy refers to a strong historicist perspective grounded in a conception of social relations that emphasises the centrality of power and social conflict to the analysis of history. This article challenges the prominence of structural accounts of capitalism by showing how (...) the tension between these legacies has played out within Political Marxism, both orientations already having co-existed, somewhat uneasily, within Robert Brenner’s original contributions to the Transition Debate. Through this internal critique and re-formulation of Political Marxism, we wish to open a broader debate within Marxism on the need for a more agency-based account of capitalism, which builds more explicitly on the concept of social relations, to recover the historicist legacy of Marxism. (shrink)

How can inferences from models to the phenomena they represent be justified when those models represent only imperfectly? Pierre Duhem considered just this problem, arguing that inferences from mathematical models of phenomena to real physical applications must also be demonstrated to be approximately correct when the assumptions of the model are only approximately true. Despite being little discussed among philosophers, this challenge was taken up by mathematicians and physicists both contemporaneous with and subsequent to Duhem, yielding a novel and rich (...) mathematical theory of stability with epistemological consequences. (shrink)

The clock hypothesis of relativity theory equates the proper time experienced by a point particle along a timelike curve with the length of that curve as determined by the metric. Is it possible to prove that particular types of clocks satisfy the clock hypothesis, thus genuinely measure proper time, at least approximately? Because most real clocks would be enormously complicated to study in this connection, focusing attention on an idealized light clock is attractive. The present paper extends and generalized partial (...) results along these lines with a theorem showing that, for any timelike curve in any spacetime, there is a light clock that measures the curve’s length as accurately and regularly as one wishes. (shrink)

Aristotle analyses a large range of objects as composites of matter and form. But how exactly should we understand the relation between the matter and form of a composite? Some commentators have argued that forms themselves are somehow material, that is, forms are impure. Others have denied that claim and argued for the purity of forms. In this paper, I develop a new purist interpretation of Metaphysics Z.10-11, a text central to the debate, which I call 'hierarchical purism'. I argue (...) that hierarchical purism can overcome the difficulties faced by previous versions of purism as well as by impurism. Roughly, on hierarchical purism, each composite can be considered and defined in two different ways: From the perspective of metaphysics, composites are considered only insofar as they have forms and defined purely formally. From the perspective of physics, composites are considered insofar as they have forms and matter and defined with reference to both. Moreover, while the metaphysical definition is a definition in the strict sense of 'definition', the physical definition is a definition in a loose sense. Analogous points hold for intelligible composites and geometry. Finally, neither sort of definitional practice implies that, for Aristotle, forms are impure. (shrink)

Proponents of the utilitarian animal welfare argument (AWA) for veganism maintain that it is reasonable to expect that adopting a vegan diet will decrease animal suffering. In this paper I argue otherwise. I maintain that (i) there are plausible scenarios in which refraining from meat-consumption will not decrease animal suffering; (ii) the utilitarian AWA rests on a false dilemma; and (iii) there are no reasonable grounds for the expectation that adopting a vegan diet will decrease animal suffering. The paper is (...) divided into four sections. In the first, I set out the utilitarian AWA in its original form. I give some background and I distinguish it from other, related arguments. In the second, I discuss the causal impotence objection, a popular objection to the utilitarian AWA. I explain how the objection works by means of a conceptual distinction between consumers and producers. In the third, I explain how proponents of the utilitarian AWA respond to this objection. In particular, I set out in some detail what I call the expected utility response. In the fourth and final section, I use the three objections noted above to explain why I do not find this response convincing. (shrink)

In this article, we describe four theoretical and methodological problems that have impeded implicit attitude research and the popular understanding of its findings. The problems all revolve around assumptions made about the relationships among measures, constructs, cognitive processes, and features of processing. These assumptions have confused our understandings of exactly what we are measuring, the processes that produce implicit evaluations, the meaning of differences in implicit evaluations across people and contexts, the meaning of changes in implicit evaluations in response to (...) intervention, and how implicit evaluations predict behavior. We describe formal modeling as one means to address these problems, and provide illustrative examples. Clarifying these issues has important implications for our understanding of who has particular implicit evaluations and why, when those evaluations are likely to be particularly problematic, how we might best try to change them, and what interventions are best suited to minimize the effects of implicit evaluations on behavior. (shrink)

Can an AGI create a more intelligent AGI? Under idealized assumptions, for a certain theoretical type of intelligence, our answer is: “Not without outside help”. This is a paper on the mathematical structure of AGI populations when parent AGIs create child AGIs. We argue that such populations satisfy a certain biological law. Motivated by observations of sexual reproduction in seemingly-asexual species, the Knight-Darwin Law states that it is impossible for one organism to asexually produce another, which asexually produces another, and (...) so on forever: that any sequence of organisms (each one a child of the previous) must contain occasional multi-parent organisms, or must terminate. By proving that a certain measure (arguably an intelligence measure) decreases when an idealized parent AGI single-handedly creates a child AGI, we argue that a similar Law holds for AGIs. (shrink)