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)

How should we decide which inequalities between people are justified, and which are unjustified? One answer is that such inequalities are only justified where there is a corresponding variation in responsible action or choice on the part of the persons concerned. This view, which has become known as 'luck egalitarianism', has come to occupy a central place in recent debates about distributive justice. This book is the first full length treatment of this significant development in contemporary political philosophy. Each of (...) its three parts addresses a key question concerning the theory. Which version of luck egalitarian comes closest to realizing luck egalitarian objectives? Does luck egalitarianism succeed as a view of egalitarian justice? And is it sound as an account of distributive justice in general? The book provides a distinctive answer to each of these questions, along the way engaging with the leading theorists identified in the literature as luck egalitarians, such as Richard Arneson, G. A. Cohen, and Ronald Dworkin, as well as the most influential critics, including Elizabeth Anderson, Marc Fleurbaey, Susan Hurley, Samuel Scheffler, and Jonathan Wolff. (shrink)

We argue that C. Darwin and more recently W. Hennig worked at times under the simplifying assumption of an eternal biosphere. So motivated, we explicitly consider the consequences which follow mathematically from this assumption, and the infinite graphs it leads to. This assumption admits certain clusters of organisms which have some ideal theoretical properties of species, shining some light onto the species problem. We prove a dualization of a law of T.A. Knight and C. Darwin, and sketch a decomposition (...) result involving the internodons of D. Kornet, J. Metz and H. Schellinx. A further goal of this paper is to respond to B. Sturmfels’ question, “Can biology lead to new theorems?”. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

For about a hundred years there has been an intermittent but sometimes vigorous debate1 on the question whether Quintus Smyrnaeus and Tryphiodorus directly used the Second Aeneid as a source for their epic descriptions “of the capture and destruction of Troy. Heyne thought that they did not; but towards the end of the nineteenth century it appeared more likely that they did. Heinze opposed the general belief: but it was reaffirmed for Quintus by Paschal and Becker4 and for Tryphiodorus by (...) Dr. E. Cesareo on internal evidence. Meanwhile Professor Samuel E. Bassett had concluded that Quintus was not after all dependent on Vergil: and still more recently Dr. J. W. Mackail, reviewing Cesareo's monograph, has maintained with emphasis that the Aeneid is certainly not the source of the late epic. Accordingly the controversy cannot even now be considered closed. (shrink)

For about a hundred years there has been an intermittent but sometimes vigorous debate1 on the question whether Quintus Smyrnaeus and Tryphiodorus directly used the Second Aeneid as a source for their epic descriptions “of the capture and destruction of Troy. Heyne thought that they did not; but towards the end of the nineteenth century it appeared more likely that they did. Heinze opposed the general belief: but it was reaffirmed for Quintus by Paschal and Becker4 and for Tryphiodorus by (...) Dr. E. Cesareo on internal evidence. Meanwhile Professor Samuel E. Bassett had concluded that Quintus was not after all dependent on Vergil: and still more recently Dr. J. W. Mackail, reviewing Cesareo's monograph, has maintained with emphasis that the Aeneid is certainly not the source of the late epic. Accordingly the controversy cannot even now be considered closed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Pleasure of the PlayDeborah KnightThe Pleasure of the Play, by Bert O. States; 226 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, $34.50, cloth, $12.95, paper.I am an Aristotelian about narrative structure. This is not always a fashionable position, and in some company I know just what to expect: a pop deconstructivist dressing down by those who assume that I must have simply missed the point of poststructuralism and (...) postmodernism. Surely, the nay-sayers claim, no one believes in beginnings, middles, and ends anymore—certainly not since Godard taught us that we don’t need to put them in that order. Isn’t it just obvious (they continue) that we must reject the ideology of wholeness and unity, and opt instead for fragmentation, or self-reflexivity, or other violations of Aristotelian form? And there is no mistaking that, in some quarters, notions like mimesis and catharsis haven’t received much good press lately.But there are still kindred Aristotelians, and Bert O. States is one. His The Pleasure of the Play takes the Poetics as its pivotal text and sets in motion around it a lively discussion of plays from, yes, Oedipus Rex to The Real Inspector Hound, stopping along the way to consider Shakespeare, Chekhov, Brecht, Handke (among others), before concluding with an essay on Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe, a play dedicated to Václav Havel. States adopts an open rather than a closed view of what the Poetics has to say about tragedy, expanding the discussion well beyond tragedy itself, out toward drama and, indeed, comedy. But he is clearly unwilling to go as far as another group of Aristotelians, notably Paul Ricoeur, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Jerome Bruner, who treat narrative as a mode of actual lived existence. States’s objective is to show the continued vitality of the Poetics, especially in terms of what it can tell us about drama in cultural contexts much removed from the one which offered Aristotle his range of primary textual material. [End Page 272]To be clear, then, States doesn’t claim to be doing either Poetics “scholarship” or exegesis. Indeed, this book is not what one might typically think of as a philosophical examination of the Poetics. Anyone looking for such a thing would do well to consult the excellent but unmistakably philosophical Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty. States is doing something else here. Like Aristotle, he is showing how dramatic structures work.The book is engaging. It features wonderfully turned phrases, examples that immediately illuminate a point, and nicely interwoven references to a range of theorists and philosophers who only rarely are found in each other’s company, for example: Richard Boyd, Martin Heidegger, Douglas Hofstadter, Wolfgang Iser, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Francis Sparshott, Tzvetan Todorov. Some of States’s more delightful examples might offend Aristotle purists. Hard cheese to them. Consider how States uses Roland Barthes’s analysis of the newspaper feature story, or fait divers, to illuminate the structure of the great dramatic plots. In States’s examples—GENERAL SACRIFICES DAUGHTER IN WEDDING CEREMONY (Iphigenia at Aulis) or WIFE FORCED INTO ADULTERY BY HUSBAND, MOTHER, PRIEST (Mandragola) or, to use Aristotle’s own example, MAN’S STATUE AVENGES HIS MURDER (pp. 67-68)—what each mock headline captures is the peculiar, often ironic, internal logic of drama. For States, this peculiar logic is characterized by events which are simultaneously improbable, unthinkable, unanticipatable, yet—given the unfolding course of actions—uncannily probable after all.Central to understanding this internal logic is the Aristotelian notion of peripety, the critical “divulging event” (p. 49) which turns out to be just the reverse of what one intended (as for example Oedipus killing his father and marrying his mother). Where Aristotle seems to treat peripety as a mere plot device, States considers it “a principle of plot development.” Thus, the status of peripety as a crucial dramatic plot device is “really a symptom” of its more basic function (p. 86). Peripety as a principle of plot development helps to show why it makes little sense to claim that what narratives imitate is “reality”—peripety is just what “open life” lacks (p... (shrink)

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)

Intertheoretic reduction in physics aspires to be both to be explanatory and perfectly general: it endeavors to explain why an older, simpler theory continues to be as successful as it is in terms of a newer, more sophisticated theory, and it aims to relate or otherwise account for as many features of the two theories as possible. Despite often being introduced as straightforward cases of intertheoretic reduction, candidate accounts of the reduction of general relativity to Newtonian gravitation have either been (...) insufficiently general or rigorous, or have not clearly been able to explain the empirical success of Newtonian gravitation. Building on work by Ehlers and others, I propose a different account of the reduction relation that is perfectly general and meets the explanatory demand one would make of it. In doing so, I highlight the role that a topology on the collection of all spacetimes plays in defining the relation, and how the selection of the topology corresponds with broader or narrower classes of observables that one demands be well-approximated in the limit. (shrink)

Metaphysics-first approaches dominate the current literature in the epistemology of modality. According to metaphysics-firsters, metaphysical theses have an important role in the justification of modal epistemologies. For example, the thesis that essentialist truths constitute the metaphysical grounds of modal truths is meant to have an important role in the justification of essentialist modal epistemologies. In this article, we argue against this approach. We first pick up some of the groundwork on behalf of the metaphysics-firsters and explicitly spell out potential arguments (...) for their view. However, despite some initial plausibility, these arguments are ultimately found wanting. We conclude that the metaphysics-first approach lacks motivation and puts far too stringent demands upon modal epistemologists. (shrink)

Descartes is widely portrayed as the arch proponent of “the epistemological transparency of thought” (or simply, “Transparency”). The most promising version of this view—Transparency-through-Introspection—says that introspecting (i.e., inwardly attending to) a thought guarantees certain knowledge of that thought. But Descartes rejects this view and provides numerous counterexamples to it. I argue that, instead, Descartes’s theory of self-knowledge is just an application of his general theory of knowledge. According to his general theory, certain knowledge is acquired only through clear and distinct (...) intellection. Thus, in his view, certain knowledge of one’s thoughts is acquired only through clear and distinct intellection of one’s thoughts. Introspection is a form of intellection and it can be clear and distinct. Ordinarily, however, introspection isn’t clear and distinct but is instead confused with dubitable perceptions of bodies. To make introspection clear and distinct, we need to “sharply separate” it from all perceptions of bodies by doubting all perceptions of bodies. Without such radical doubt, introspection remains confused and we lack certain knowledge not just of the specific features of our thoughts, but even of the minimal claim that a thought exists. Far from being the high priest of Transparency, Descartes is radically opposed to it. (shrink)

Philosophical work in the ethics of thought focuses heavily on the ethics of belief, with, in recent years, a particular emphasis on the ways in which we might wrong other people either through our beliefs about them, or our failure to believe what they tell us. Yet in our own lives we often want not merely to be believed, but rather to be understood by others. What does it take to understand another person? In this paper, I provide an account (...) of interpersonal understanding that speaks to this widespread human desire to be understood by others. On the view I defend, to be understood by another person is for them to see our motivating reasons as justifying reasons, whether or not they actually take our reasons to have that normative force. I then provide an explanation of why such understanding is valuable in our lives, which emphasizes how being understood by another person is a way of being more fully with them. (shrink)

Loyalty is considered central to people’s moral life, yet little is known about how people think about what it means to be loyal. We used a prototype approach to understand how loyalty is represented in Colombia and the United States and how these representations mediate attributions of loyalty and moral judgments of loyalty violations. Across 7 studies (N = 1,984), we found cross-cultural similarities in the associative meaning of loyalty (Study 1) but found differences in the centrality of features associated (...) with loyalty (Study 2) and the latent structure of loyalty representations (Study 3). Colombians represent loyalty in terms of more general moral characteristics, while US participants represent loyalty in terms of interpersonal commitment, both in contrast with current approaches to loyalty. By comparing representations of loyalty and honesty, we establish that difference in loyalty conceptualizations reflect a different way of thinking about loyalty rather than morality more generally (Study 4). Further, Colombians attributed greater loyalty to individuals with general moral characteristics compared to participants from the United States sample (Study 5) and were more likely to classify non-loyal values as loyalty-related (Study 6). While the centrality of prototypical features predicts categorizing norm violations as loyalty-related, differences in prototypical structure account for differences in the severity of moral judgment for such violations (Study 7), which suggests that loyalty representations have similar functions even though these representations differ in structural characteristics. (shrink)

In “History of the Lie: Prolegomena,” Derrida criticizes Arendt’s commitment to the “great resiliency” of factual truth against all lies in her essay “Truth and Politics,” claiming that she reintroduces a teleological account of history that clashes with her anti-totalitarian and anti-systematic thinking. By focussing on her understanding of truth-telling as action, this article shows that Arendt does not turn truth into a permanently stable ground for politics. Instead, Arendt’s theory of self-deception constitutes a lie capable of ending all truth. (...) Set in opposition to the nihilism of self-deception, Arendt understands truth-telling as an exemplary act that preserves the possibility of truthfulness and future actions. (shrink)

The ethics of citation has attracted increased attention in recent discussions of research and publication ethics, fraud and plagiarism. Little attempt has been made, however, to situate specific citation misbehaviors in terms of broader ethical practices and principles. To investigate researchers’ perceptions of citation norms, we surveyed active US researchers receiving federal funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Participants (_n_ = 257) were asked about citation (...) norms they endorse (norm reports), the behaviors they perceive others to engage in (peer reports), and their own citation behaviors (self-reports). Our analyses showed that while considerable discrepancies exist between norm reports, peer reports and self-reports, respondents’ discipline has no significant effect on these. Participants indicated that their own practices and that of their peers falls short of the norms they endorse, but that their own behavior is much less ethically deficient than that of their peers. An exploratory factor analysis revealed that ethically questionable citation behaviors could be grouped usefully into three categories: strategic citations, neglectful citations, and blind citations. Contrary to our hypothesis, the survey showed that greater experience does not always result in better citation practices. A particularly divisive issue pertained to intentionally citing authors from underrepresented demographic groups for reasons of social justice, but broad support for this practice is lacking, although arts and humanities scholars are slightly more supportive. Most researchers view questionable citation practices as negatively affecting their disciplines. Our findings suggest the need for clearer articulations of the citation norms and improved guidance and training about citations. (shrink)

The new edition of this introductory text presents, in an accessible way, classical and contemporary readings on topics central to and representative of all major periods of the Western philosophical tradition. The book presents 55 readings (23 of which are new to the fourth edition) on seven topics: epistemology, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, personal identity and immortality, free will and determinism, ethics, and political and social philosophy. Pedagogical features make these readings accessible and interesting to beginning students. All the introductions (...) and biographical sketches have been revised for the fourth edition, as have the study questions and glossary. The explanatory footnotes and the stylistic modernization of texts are new to the fourth edition. (shrink)

This paper examines the interplay of semantics and pragmatics within the domain of film. Films are made up of individual shots strung together in sequences over time. Though each shot is disconnected from the next, combinations of shots still convey coherent stories that take place in continuous space and time. How is this possible? The semantic view of film holds that film coherence is achieved in part through a kind of film language, a set of conventions which govern the relationships (...) between shots. In this paper, we develop and defend a new version of the semantic view. We articulate it for a pair of conventions that govern spatial relations between viewpoints. One such rule is already well-known; sometimes called the "180° Rule," we term it the X-Constraint; to this we add a previously unrecorded rule, the T-Constraint. As we show, both have the effect, in different ways, of limiting the way that viewpoint can shift through space from shot to shot over the course of a film sequence. Such constraints, we contend, are analogous to relations of discourse coherence that are widely recognized in the linguistic domain. If film is to have a language, it is a language made up of rules like these. (shrink)

Gils-Schmidt and Salloch recognise that human and climate health are inextricably linked, and that mitigating healthcare-associated climate harms is essential for protecting human health.1 They argue that physicians have a duty to consider how their own practices contribute to climate change, including during their interactions with patients. Acknowledging the potential for conflicts between this duty and the provision of individual patient care, they propose the application of Korsgaard’s neo-Kantian account of practical identities to help navigate such scenarios. In this commentary, (...) we argue that by focusing attention on this physician–patient level, the authors overlook the complexity of climate change, both within the healthcare sector and beyond. We recognise the importance of individual agency in tackling this issue, and we also recognise that the authors do briefly acknowledge the importance of considering these broader complexities; however, we emphasise the need for climate and health discussions/action to be situated in a wider framework of systemic change. Our concern is that overemphasis on patient-level interactions risks normalising the prioritisation of individual-level approaches to addressing climate change, detracting from such a broader approach. Physician training emphasises the need for trust, confidentiality and shared decision-making in the doctor–patient relationship. …. (shrink)

Emotions and moods have been distinguished in the literature. If they are distinct, we may expect emotion regulation and mood regulation to be distinct too. We show that although emotion regulation and mood regulation are considered theoretically distinct, they are often confounded empirically. We review characteristics proposed to distinguish emotions from moods by different theoretical approaches to emotion. We also review challenges to these propositions, suggesting that one valid distinction involves intentionality. Building on the above, we discuss possible differences between (...) emotion regulation and mood regulation. Finally, we encourage the use of accurate terminology, argue for the importance of empirically testing hypotheses regarding distinctions between emotion regulation and mood regulation, and discuss possible implications. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed growing controversy over the “wisdom of the multitude.” As epistemic critics drawing on vast empirical evidence have cast doubt on the political competence of ordinary citizens, epistemic democrats have offered a defense of democracy grounded largely in analogies and formal results. So far, I argue, the critics have been more convincing. Nevertheless, democracy can be defended on instrumental grounds, and this article demonstrates an alternative approach. Instead of implausibly upholding the epistemic reliability of average voters, I (...) observe that competitive elections, universal suffrage, and discretionary state power disable certain potent mechanisms of elite entrenchment. By reserving particular forms of power for the multitude of ordinary citizens, they make democratic states more resistant to dangerous forms of capture than non-democratic alternatives. My approach thus offers a robust defense of electoral democracy, yet cautions against expecting too much from it—motivating a thicker conception of democracy, writ large. (shrink)

Legg and Hutter, as well as subsequent authors, considered intelligent agents through the lens of interaction with reward-giving environments, attempting to assign numeric intelligence measures to such agents, with the guiding principle that a more intelligent agent should gain higher rewards from environments in some aggregate sense. In this paper, we consider a related question: rather than measure numeric intelligence of one Legg- Hutter agent, how can we compare the relative intelligence of two Legg-Hutter agents? We propose an elegant answer (...) based on the following insight: we can view Legg-Hutter agents as candidates in an election, whose voters are environments, letting each environment vote (via its rewards) which agent (if either) is more intelligent. This leads to an abstract family of comparators simple enough that we can prove some structural theorems about them. It is an open question whether these structural theorems apply to more practical intelligence measures. (shrink)

We define a notion of the intelligence level of an idealized mechanical knowing agent. This is motivated by efforts within artificial intelligence research to define real-number intelligence levels of compli- cated intelligent systems. Our agents are more idealized, which allows us to define a much simpler measure of intelligence level for them. In short, we define the intelligence level of a mechanical knowing agent to be the supremum of the computable ordinals that have codes the agent knows to be codes (...) of computable ordinals. We prove that if one agent knows certain things about another agent, then the former necessarily has a higher intelligence level than the latter. This allows our intelligence no- tion to serve as a stepping stone to obtain results which, by themselves, are not stated in terms of our intelligence notion (results of potential in- terest even to readers totally skeptical that our notion correctly captures intelligence). As an application, we argue that these results comprise evidence against the possibility of intelligence explosion (that is, the no- tion that sufficiently intelligent machines will eventually be capable of designing even more intelligent machines, which can then design even more intelligent machines, and so on). (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)

Many people have long-term commitments that require coordination and cooperation with others. To achieve this, we construct plans to settle when, how, and for how long to pursue certain goals rather than others. This raises an interesting cognitive problem, namely that individuals can, at any given moment, manage significantly less information than they will need to accomplish their goals. Call this the Problem of Scarce Information. The solution requires a special self-regulatory system that strategically manages the varying informational demands of (...) one's activity. This paper argues that vigilance has structural and functional characteristics that make it apt to play this role. This paper illuminates both crucial aspects of temporally extended agency, but also the unique practical norms that structure how we act over time. (shrink)

I consider what prima facie attractive communitarian ethical perspectives salient among indigenous African peoples entail for distributive justice within a state, and I argue that they support a form of economic egalitarianism that differs in several important ways from varieties common in contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy. In particular, the sort of economic egalitarianism I advance rivals not only luck-oriented variants from the likes of Ronald Dworkin, G. A. Cohen and theorists inspired by them such as Richard Arneson, Carl Knight (...) and Nir Eyal, but also more ‘social’ kinds advocated by Elizabeth Anderson, Samuel Scheffler and Jonathan Wolff. Although I do not argue that these broadly Kantian egalitarianisms are less plausible than the Afro-communitarian version, I do aim to establish that it should be taken as seriously as they, at this stage of the debate. (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.

L’article part de l’observation que la recherche sur les théories du complot est actuellement en plein développement, mais qu’elle est également fragmentée. En particulier, il y a une division croissante entre les disciplines aux approches culturelles et qualitatives, telles que l’histoire, les études culturelles et l’ethnologie, et les disciplines aux approches quantitatives et empiriques telles que la psychologie et la science politique. L’article affirme que ce « grand fossé » doit être comblé pour que la recherche arrive à une compréhension (...) authentique des théories du complot. Comme première étape dans ce processus de rapprochement, l’article examine, du point de vue des études américanistes, des recherches conduites de l’autre côté du « grand fossé », en psychologie et science politique. Il résume les travaux conduits dans ces domaines et en fait une évaluation critique, se centrant sur la méthodologie, les hypothèses considérant les croyances conspirationnistes comme dysfonctionnelles, les arguments parfois circulaires, le centrage sur les aspects individuels plutôt que sociaux et collectifs, l’indifférence quant à la définition du phénomène et l’ignorance des différences culturelles et historiques. L’article conclut en présentant des recommandations pour de futurs projets de recherches en collaboration. (shrink)

We present a game mechanic called pseudo-visibility for games inhabited by non-player characters (NPCs) driven by reinforcement learning (RL). NPCs are incentivized to pretend they cannot see pseudo-visible players: the training environment simulates an NPC to determine how the NPC would act if the pseudo-visible player were invisible, and penalizes the NPC for acting differently. NPCs are thereby trained to selectively ignore pseudo-visible players, except when they judge that the reaction penalty is an acceptable tradeoff (e.g., a guard might accept (...) the penalty in order to protect a treasure because losing the treasure would hurt even more). We describe an RL agent transformation which allows RL agents that would not otherwise do so to perform some limited self-reflection to learn the training environments in question. (shrink)

Liberalism and Distributive Justice discusses liberalism, capitalism, distributive justice, and John Rawls's difference principle. Chapters are organized in a narrative arc: from liberalism as the dominant political and economic system, to the laws governing interpersonal transactions in liberal society, to basic economic and political institutions that determine distributive justice.

I provide an analysis of sentences of the form ‘To be F is to be G’ in terms of exact truth-maker semantics—an approach that identifies the meanings of sentences with the states of the world directly responsible for their truth-values. Roughly, I argue that these sentences hold just in case that which makes something F is that which makes it G. This approach is hyperintensional, and possesses desirable logical and modal features. These sentences are reflexive, transitive and symmetric, and, if (...) they are true, then they are necessarily true, and it is necessary that all and only Fs are Gs. I close by defining an asymmetric and irreflexive notion of analysis in terms of the reflexive and symmetric one. (shrink)

After generalizing the Archimedean property of real numbers in such a way as to make it adaptable to non-numeric structures, we demonstrate that the real numbers cannot be used to accurately measure non-Archimedean structures. We argue that, since an agent with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) should have no problem engaging in tasks that inherently involve non-Archimedean rewards, and since traditional reinforcement learning rewards are real numbers, therefore traditional reinforcement learning probably will not lead to AGI. We indicate two possible ways (...) traditional reinforcement learning could be altered to remove this roadblock. (shrink)

In this article, I explicate Kant’s position on the wide right to abortion. That is, I explore the extent to which, according to Kant’s practical philosophy, abortion is punishable, even if it involves an unjust infringement of the right to life. By focusing on the state’s right to punish, rather than the right to life or the onset of personhood, I use Kant to expose a novel range of issues and questions about the legal status of abortion (and criminal punishment (...) more generally). The article is divided into four sections. In the first, I lay the groundwork for Kant’s theory of rights and briefly canvass some of the literature on Kantian approaches to abortion. In the second, I look at Kant’s discussion of equivocal rights. In the third, I turn to Kant’s discussions of capital punishment and suicide. In the fourth, I examine Kant on honor killings, and I use his position on infanticide in order to extrapolate and explain his ideas about the right to punish in the context of abortion. (shrink)

Skepticism in epistemology refers to the supposedly irrational attitude of suspending judgment about all beliefs, particularly those taken for granted. The skeptical attitude presses philosophy to investigate the conditions under which knowledge and justification rather than accidental truths can be arrived at. In the first chapter, we will investigate how to construct a form of radical skepticism known as Pyrrhonian skepticism; we will see how Agrippa's Trilemma builds three ways of skeptical defense to object to three possible conditions in the (...) structuring of epistemic justification. In the second chapter, we will examine infinitism as a possible answer to the trilemma, as well as the conceptual bases that make possible the existence of this possible solution to the skeptical challenge. In the third, the main objection to infinitism known as the finite mind problem will be analyzed. In the fourth chapter, we will look at an alternative formulation of the trilemma, as well as the challenges this approach poses to the anti-skeptical response. (shrink)

In terms of income and wealth (and a variety of other measures), citizens of the United States are significantly less equal than their peers in Canada and Europe. In addition, American society is becoming increasingly less equal. Some theorists argue that this inequality is inefficient. Others claim that is unjust. Many Americans, however, are less concerned with the potential inefficiency and injustice of growing inequality. Distinguishing as Milton Friedman does between equality of result and equality of opportunity, many claim that (...) American inequality is greater because our social and political institutions hold individuals responsible for their decisions. There is nothing unjust about holding individuals responsible for their choices or preferences. This political philosophy builds from the popular idea that, in the words of Dennis Prager of the Heritage Foundation, “American individualism and the Judeo-Christian notion of personal accountability gave us the extraordinary nation that we built here.” At least since the publication of the Republican Party’s Contract with America, every prominent Republican (and many Democrats) has affirmed the importance of personal responsibility. The idea of personal responsibility plays a central role in debates over how to structure U.S. society. For these reasons, this paper considers a group of theories that Elizabeth Anderson labels “luck egalitarian.” These theories remain the most influential philosophical attempts to incorporate personal responsibility into a theory of justice. This essay takes as its staring point Anderson’s widely discussed criticisms for these theorists, and considers several of the best and most sustained responses to these criticisms (and related claims by Samuel Scheffler, Jonathan Wolff, and others). The goal is not to provide a summary of different luck egalitarian accounts of justice, a task others have performed admirably (Knight 2009, Knight and Stemplowska 2011). Furthermore, this paper will not attempt to decide which luck egalitarian theory best withstands these criticisms. Instead, this paper makes a philosophically and empirically informed case regarding how policy makers ought to utilize a principle that plays a prominent role in current American public policy debates: the role of personal responsibility. In order to make this case, I must weave normative and empirical analysis, and consider the ways in which social position in the status quo United States does not trace personal responsibility. From this analysis, I suggest three policy priorities for those interested in redeeming the oft-celebrated claim about American society: that an individual is responsible for her social position. This work promises to be of interest to any theorist or policy maker concerned with the practical implications of recent work in the moral and political philosophy of personal responsibility, or, really, anyone interested in making American society comparatively just. (shrink)

Master Sorai's Responsals was to eighteenth-century Japan what The Prince was to Renaissance Italy. Like Machiavelli, Ogyu Sorai was a humanist scholar who served a prince and drew on his experiences as a house philosopher and on his vast knowledge of history and political affairs in his work. In 1720, when he began to write the letters that comprise this text, the Tokugawa regime was more than a hundred years old and beset with grave administrative and fiscal problems, about which (...) Sorai had much to say.Samuel Yamashita's impressive translation of this work offers modern readers a rare glimpse of the prevailing political discourse of the day and the specific concepts that rulers had at their disposal as they struggled to manage their domains, find talented men for their bureaucracies, create new sources of revenue, and keep their subjects well fed and happy.Sorai himself, of course, is a presence in the text. He is by tunes earnest, frank, impatient, utterly confident, and occasionally condescending. Unlike his Renaissance counterpart, he is something of an optimist: he was convinced that the introduction of archaic Chinese culture and institutions to Japan would solve its myriad problems.Well-versed in Chinese history, philosophy, religion, medicine, and belles lettres, Sorai holds forth on everything from archaic Chinese divination to Sung poetry and prose. He offers advice on how to become a Confucian gentleman, how to learn to read classical Chinese, and which books to read and which to avoid. He even discusses his belief in a sentient, Chinese-style "heaven," a topic not well understood by modern scholars. Long regarded as one of Sorai's best works, Master Sorai's Reponsals bristles with the sharp and clear opinions of the most influential thinker of Tokugawa Japan. (shrink)

This morning I intended to get out of bed when my alarm went off. Hearing my alarm, I formed the intention to get up now. Yet, for a time, I remained in bed, irrationally lazy. It seems I irrationally failed to execute my intention. Such cases of execution failure pose a challenge for Mentalists about rationality, who believe that facts about rationality supervene on facts about the mind. For, this morning, my mind was in order; it was my action that (...) apparently made me irrational. What, then, should Mentalists say about the phenomenon of execution failure? The phenomenon of execution failure, and the puzzle it raises for Mentalists, have rarely been discussed. This paper addresses the puzzle in two parts. First, it argues that execution failure is a real phenomenon. It is possible for agents to irrationally fail to act on their present-directed intentions. It follows that Mentalists in the philosophy of action must solve the puzzle of explaining what is irrational about cases of execution failure. Second, this paper begins the search for such a solution. It considers six possible resolutions to the puzzle, arguing that none is obviously the most attractive. These resolutions include a requirement of overall conative consistency, an appeal to the norm of intention consistency, a form of Volitionalism, an appeal to factive mental states, and a proposal due to Garrett Cullity, and a novel requirement of proper functioning. (shrink)