Four- Dimensionalism defends the thesis that the material world is composed of temporal as well as spatial parts. This defense includes a novel account of persistence over time, new arguments in favour of the four-dimensional ontology, and responses to the challenges four- dimensionalism faces." "Theodore Sider pays particular attention to the philosophy of time, including a strong series of arguments against presentism, the thesis that only the present is real. Arguments offered in favour of four- dimensionalism include novel arguments (...) based on time travel, the debate between spacetime substantivalists and relationalists, and vagueness. Also included is a comprehensive discussion of the paradoxes of coinciding material objects, and a novel resolution of those paradoxes based on temporal counterpart theory. In conclusion Sider replies to prominent objections to four- dimensionalism, including discussion of the problem of the rotating homogenous disk. (shrink)

Ted Sider’s paper “Hell and Vagueness” challenges a certain conception of Hell by arguing that it is inconsistent with God’s justice. Sider’s inconsistencyargument works only when supplemented by additional premises. Key to Sider’s case is a premise that the properties upon which eternal destinies superveneare “a smear,” i.e., they are distributed continuously among individuals in the world. We question this premise and provide reasons to doubt it. The doubts come from two sources. The first is based on (...) evidential considerations borrowed from skeptical theism. A related but separate consideration is that supposing it would be an insurmountable problem for God to make just (and therefore non-arbitrary) distinctions in morally smeared world, God thereby has sufficient motivation not to actualize such worlds. Yet God also clearly has motivation only to actualize some member of the subset of non-smeared worlds which don’t appear non-smeared. For if it was obvious who was morally fit for Heaven and who wasn’t, a new arena of great injustice is opened up. The result is that if there is a God, then he has the motivation and the ability to actualize from just that set of worlds which are not smeared but which are indiscernible from smeared worlds. (shrink)

Ted Sider’s book makes a beautifully presented and compellingly argued case for four dimensionalism. Most of the arguments for four dimensionalism to be found in the literature seem to me to be uncompelling. Ted’s argument from vagueness, given in the last section of chapter 4, is a notable exception. After discussing that argument I will respond to his objections in section 5 chapter 5 to my own temporary identity view.

The hit American TV show The Good Place has garnered quite a following in recent years. Its main premise implies a scorekeeping view of the afterlife. People who have collected enough credits in their earthly lives will make the cut and go to the Good Place, while those who do not will be banished to the Bad Place. We suggest that such a premise would have to come to terms with Ted Sider's puzzle about the compatibility of a binary (...) afterlife with God's divine attributes. (shrink)

According to one prominent view, current metaphysics is hopelessly disconnected from the implications of modern science and as a result should be abandoned forthwith (Ladyman and Ross 2007). Others have taken a more conciliatory stance, suggesting that the metaphysicians’ toolbox may yet yield devices that could prove useful to the philosopher of science (French and McKenzie 2012). In this book, Sider aims to contribute to the metaphysics of science by setting out an array of such tools and indicating which (...) are up to the job. More particularly, he wants to demonstrate the usefulness of certain ‘postmodal’ concepts, such as fundamentality, which is a promising tack, given that (Callender 2011), for example, has argued that it was the modal turn initiated by the likes of Kripke that is ultimately responsible for the disconnect. To illustrate his overall claim that the tools we deploy may help frame the issues that we take to be central to the metaphysics of science, Sider chooses to analyse various forms of structuralism, the view that we should take structure to be primary and the relevant entities to be secondary : nomic essentialism, which takes properties to be ‘bound up’ with laws (ibid., p. 23); structural realism, which holds, in its epistemic form, that all that we know about the world is its structure and, in the ontic alternative, that the world is, in some sense, structure; and comparativism about quantities, whereby quantities are ascribed to objects comparatively or relationally (ibid., p. 122). His conclusions are that no postmodal sense can be made of the first two, and so much the worse for them, whereas comparativism about quantities can unproblematically be stated in such terms (ibid., p. 119), and indeed, when it comes to ‘fundamentality’, at least, may well be this concept’s ‘Waterloo’ (ibid., p. 166). The worry some philosophers of science will have is that Sider’s arguments are driven more by his metaphysics than the relevant science and the issues that he identifies don’t quite map onto those they take to be central. (shrink)

This article explores process mereology, the theory of part-whole relations. I compare and contrast the mereology of Theodore Sider with that of Alfred North Whitehead, broadly favoring the latter’s approach for allowing us to take seriously an evolutionary structure in metaphysics.

According to one prominent view, current metaphysics is hopelessly disconnected from the implications of modern science and as a result should be abandoned fort.

In (2001), (2003), and elsewhere, Ted Sider presents two arguments concerning the existential quantifier which are justly central to the recent discussion of metaontology. What we will call Sider's indeterminacy argument is an attempted reductio of the suggestion that the existential quantifier might be semantically indeterminate. What we will call Sider's naturalness argument is an argument for the claim that the semantic value of the existential quantifier is the most eligible existence-like meaning there is, à la David (...) Lewis' eligibility theory of meaning. We will argue that these arguments cannot be jointly maintained: Sider must give up at least one. Before arguing this, we will present Sider's two arguments in a bit more detail, and discuss their relationship. A few remarks on the broader significance of our conclusions are in order at the outset. One may think that since one successful argument for a given conclusion is sufficient the point that Sider's arguments cannot both work is purely academic. But we think that Sider's two arguments at bottom reflect different ways of thinking about metaphysics. Moreover, we think that it is only the naturalness argument that promises to deliver all that Sider wants when it comes to metaontology, and it is only the indeterminacy argument that promises to deliver all that Sider wants when it comes to ontology. (shrink)

Ted Sider has shown that my indeterminism argument for comparativist theories of quantity also applies to Mundy's absolutist theory. This is because Mundy's theory posits only "pure" relations, i.e. relations between values of the same quantity (between masses and other masses, or distances and other distances). It is straightforward to solve the problem by positing additional mixed relations.

There is a puzzle about divine justice stemming from the fact that God seems required to judge on the basis of criteria that are vague. Justice is proportional, however, it seems God violates proportionality by sending those on the borderline of heaven to an eternity in hell. This is Ted Sider’s problem of Hell and Vagueness. On the face of things, this poses a challenge only to a narrow class of classical Christians, those that hold a retributive theory of (...) divine punishment. We show that this puzzle can be extended to the picture of divine judgement and the afterlife found in Mormon theology. This is significant because at first glance, the Mormon picture of the afterlife looks like it fails to co-operate with Sider’s puzzle. In Mormon theology, there are not two afterlife states, but three: a low, a middle, and a high kingdom. There is no afterlife state quite like Hell, and the states that function similarly to Hell aren’t places of eternal suffering. We argue that appearances are misleading. While it may be true that no place in the Mormon afterlife is bad in the sense that its inhabitants suffer eternal bodily harm, it is true that many of the places in the Mormon afterlife are bad in the sense that their inhabitants lack access to significant goods. This allows Sider’s puzzle to re-engage as a puzzle about distributive Justice. After setting out this alternative version of the puzzle, we argue that Mormon theology has sufficient resources to reject proportionality as a constraint on divine judgment by adopting a nuanced version of universalism called escapism. (shrink)

Ted Sider argues that a binary afterlife is inconsistent with a proportionally just God because no just criterion for placing persons in such an afterlife exists. I provide a possible account whereby God can remain proportionally just and allow a binary afterlife. On my account, there is some maximum amount of people God can allow into Heaven without sacrificing some greater good. God gives to all people at least their due but chooses to allow some who do not deserve (...) Heaven to enter out of grace. Although this model implies a precise cutoff between those who enter Heaven and those who do not, I have argued that there is a precise point where God best serves justice and some greater good. Although God’s actions may appear arbitrary and ‘whimsically generous,’ it is merely because we are ignorant of the precise cutoff point that best serves his purposes. (shrink)

An important trend in contemporary metaphysics denies that the structure of natural language is an important datum for investigating fundamental structure. Ted Sider proceeds on this basis to propose a metaphysical semantics for natural language. Within this framework he argues that natural language and a fundamental, ‘jointcarving’, language could be subject to distinct logics. Developing an argument of Hartry Field’s, I show that Sider’s preferred option of fundamental classicality combined with non-fundamental non-classicality trivialises within the framework of Siderian (...) metaphysical semantics. The position can be saved only by revising key claims about truth and metaphysical semantics. This has serious implications for methdology in the metaphysics of logic. (shrink)

There is currently debate between deflationists and anti-deflationists about the ontology of persisting objects. Some deflationists think that disputes between, for example, four-dimensionalists (e.g. Ted Sider and David Lewis) and quasi-nihilists (e.g. Peter Van Inwagen and Trenton Merricks) are merely verbal disputes. Anti-deflationists deny this. Eli Hirsch is a deflationist who maintains that many ontological disputes are merely verbal. Theodore Sider maintains that the disputes are not merely verbal. Hirsch and Sider are thus engaged in a metaontological (...) dispute. In this paper, I argue that Hirsch's metaontological dispute with Sider is, by Hirsch's own lights, itself merely verbal. I conclude that the mere verbalness of his metaontological dispute with Sider suggests that Hirsch's account of what makes a dispute merely verbal may be problematic. (shrink)

I’ll start by giving a very brief summary of Sider’s position and will identify some points on which my own position differs from his. I’ll then raise four issues, viz., how to articulate the 3-dimensionalist view, the trade-offs between Ted’s stage view of persistence and endurance with respect to intrinsic properties, the endurantist’s response to the argument from vagueness, and finally more general questions about what’s at stake in the debate. I don’t believe that anything I say raises insurmountable (...) problems for Sider’s view; and in fact, I’m sure he’s in a better position to defend his view more convincingly than I’m able to defend mine. However, there is plenty worth discussing further. (shrink)

Metaphysics is sensitive to the conceptual tools we choose to articulate metaphysical problems. Those tools are a lens through which we view metaphysical problems; the same problems look different when we change the lens. There has recently been a shift to "postmodal" conceptual tools: concepts of ground, essence, and fundamentality. This shift transforms the debate over structuralism in the metaphysics of science and philosophy of mathematics. Structuralist theses say that patterns are "prior" to the nodes in the patterns. In modal (...) terms this would mean that the nodes cannot vary independently of the pattern. But its postmodal meaning is unclear. Does it mean, e.g., that a fundamental account of reality somehow speaks only of patterns? What would that mean? Three structuralist positions are examined through a postmodal lens: nomic/causal/dispositional essentialism, structuralism about individuals (e.g., structural realism, e.g., ante rem mathematical structuralism), comparativism about quantities. The question of when theories are equivalent, and how that impacts the debate over structuralism, is also discussed. (shrink)

I critically evaluate the notion of structure Ted Sider presents in Writing the Book of the World. A prerequisite to understanding Sider's notion of structure is understanding Sider's take on ideology and ontology. In Section II, I discuss this. In Section III, I consider arguments in favor of structure. In Section IV, I examine one debate that is considered by Sider to be nonsubstantive: the debate over modality. I conclude, in Section V, by examining the reception (...) Writing the Book of the World has received in the philosophical community. (shrink)

To what extent, and on what grounds, can we ethically evaluate art from a generative context that is at some significant distance from our present reception context – at enough distance, at least, so that the two contexts differ, in important ways, in aspects of their moral outlooks? This paper has four aims. The modest task of the paper is to show that this question is much more difficult than has been recognised. The somewhat more ambitious goal is a methodological (...) intervention: it is to highlight the need for interdisciplinary research that illuminates the socio-historical specificities of remote generative contexts in a way that allows us to see the relevant ways in which the moral outlooks overlap with ours (or do not). In relation, the third aim of the paper is to argue, with reference to Bernard Williams’s ‘relativism of distance’, that there are some cases in which the moral outlooks of a work’s generative and reception contexts differ so significantly that the warrant for our moral judgments of remote artworks is attenuated – if it exists at all. Finally, we try to demonstrate how the sort of interdisciplinary collaboration we’re advocating might inform our moral judgments of art – more specifically, in a way that invites a degree of quietude or uncertainty about remote artworks that are deeply morally troubling in our present reception context. We do this with reference to the paintings of Titian and the music composed for and sung by the castrati. (shrink)

A property, F, is maximal iff, roughly, large parts of an F are not themselves Fs.' Maximality makes trouble for a recent analysis of intrinsicality by Rae Langton and David Lewis.

Abstract This paper develops an explanationist treatment of the problem of the criterion. Explanationism is the view that all justified reasoning is justified in virtue of the explanatory virtues: simplicity, fruitfulness, testability, scope, and conservativeness. A crucial part of the explanationist framework is achieving wide reflective equilibrium. I argue that explanationism offers a plausible solution to the problem of the criterion. Furthermore, I argue that a key feature of explanationism is the plasticity of epistemic judgments and epistemic methods. The explanationist (...) does not offer any fixed judgments or methods to guide epistemic conduct; even the explanatory virtues themselves are subject to change. This feature of explanationism gives it an advantage over non-explanationist views that offer fixed epistemic judgments and epistemic methods. The final section of this paper responds to objections to explanationism. (shrink)

According to four dimensionalism, the material world is divided into momentary stages. In a four-dimensional world, which objects are the ordinary things, the things we normally name and quantify over? Aggregates of stages, according to most four-dimensionalists, but according to stage theorists (or exdurantists), ordinary objects are instead to be identified with the stages themselves. (A temporal counterpart theoretic account of de re temporal predication is then given.) This paper argues that a stage theorist is best positioned to accept David (...) Lewis's argument from temporary intrinsics for four-dimensionalism, since stage theorists are the only four-dimensionalists who attribute monadic temporary intrinsic properties to ordinary things. (shrink)

Ted T. Aoki, the most prominent curriculum scholar of his generation in Canada, has influenced numerous scholars around the world. Curriculum in a New Key brings together his work, over a 30-year span, gathered here under the themes of reconceptualizing curriculum; language, culture, and curriculum; and narrative. Aoki's oeuvre is utterly unique--a complex interdisciplinary configuration of phenomenology, post-structuralism, and multiculturalism that is both theoretically and pedagogically sophisticated and speaks directly to teachers, practicing and prospective. Curriculum in a New Key: The (...) Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki is an invaluable resource for graduate students, professors, and researchers in curriculum studies, and for students, faculty, and scholars of education generally. (shrink)

A certain conception of Hell is inconsistent with God's traditional attributes. My argument is novel in focusing on considerations involving vagueness. God is in charge of the selection procedure, so the selection procedure must be just; any just procedure will have borderline cases; but according to the traditional conception, the afterlife is binary and has no borderline cases.

In "Sider on Existence" (Noužs, 2007), David Liebesman and Matti Eklund argue that my "indeterminacy argument", according to which quantifiers are never vague, clashes with my "naturalness argument", according to which quantifiers "carve at the joints". There is, I argue, no outright inconsistency. But Liebesman and Eklund have shown that my arguments are not as independent as it may have appeared. The best defense of the indeterminacy argument is via the naturalness argument.

Disagreement is common: even informed, intelligent, and generally reasonable people often come to different conclusions when confronted with what seems to be the same evidence. Can the competing conclusions be reasonable? If not, what can we reasonably think about the situation? This volume examines the epistemology of disagreement. Philosophical questions about disagreement arise in various areas, notably politics, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion: but this will be the first book focusing on the general epistemic issues arising from informed (...) disagreement. Ten leading philosophers offer specially written essays which together will offer a starting-point for future work on this topic. (shrink)

A COMPANION TO MOTION PICTURES AND PUBLIC VALUE A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value brings together original essays by world-renowned scholars investigating the varied intersections of the moving image and the public good. Covering a wide range of types and genres of cinema, this unprecedented volume explores the past, present, and possible future contributions of motion pictures to public value. With a cross-disciplinary approach, the text presents original conceptual work, global perspectives, philosophical arguments, historical discussion, empirical research, and (...) specific case studies of the direct and indirect public value developed through motion pictures. Organized into seven thematic sections, this Companion identifies and discusses the various kinds of values that motion pictures can deliver, including artistic and aesthetic, ethical and moral, spiritual and religious, cultural, environmental, political, and cognitive. Throughout the text, readers are provided with deep insight into the issue of public value as it relates to cinema and its positive impact on human life and society. A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value is an ideal textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, and is a valuable resource for scholars across a variety of disciplines. (shrink)

We are often uncertain how to behave morally in complex situations. In this controversial study, Ted Lockhart contends that moral philosophy has failed to address how we make such moral decisions. Adapting decision theory to the task of decision-making under moral uncertainly, he proposes that we should not always act how we feel we ought to act, and that sometimes we should act against what we feel to be morally right. Lockhart also discusses abortion extensively and proposes new ways to (...) deal with the ethical and moral issues which surround it. (shrink)

Violence for Equality, first published in 1989, questions the morality of political violence and challenges the presuppositions, inconsistencies and prejudices of liberal-democratic thinking. This book should be of interest to teachers and students of philosophy and politics.

The Memory of the World argues for a new philosophy of time that takes seriously the multiple, pleated, and entangled temporal events spanning cosmic, geological, evolutionary, and human durations. Ted Toadvine contends that our obsession with the world's precarity relies on a flawed understanding of time that neglects the past and present with the goal of managing the future, misleading sustainability efforts and diminishing our encounters with the world and with human and nonhuman others.

Becoming Marxist offers a series of studies that take up the importance of philosophy for the development of an open and critical Marxism.

This paper investigates links between social capital and symbolic capital and responsible entrepreneurship in the context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The source of the primary data was 144 ‘Business Profiles’, written by the owner-managers of small businesses in application for a Small Business Awards competition in 2005. Included in each of these narratives were claims relating to the firms’ contributions to wider society, relationships with customers, employees and stakeholders. These narratives were coded and classified in a framework drawn (...) from Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s (1998, Academy of Management Review 23(2), 242–266) categorisation of social capital. The analysis revealed a range of strategic orientations towards the development of social and symbolic capital, along a conceptual continuum ranging from being responsible for oneself to being responsible for others. Overall, the evidence demonstrates the significance of the power inherent in the social relations of SMEs as a force for ethical behaviour, and suggests that normative theories of the development of social capital may provide ‘competitive advantage’ through responsible behaviour for small business in the global economy. (shrink)

In this paper, we compare and contrast two methods for the revision of qualitative beliefs. The first method is generated by a simplistic diachronic Lockean thesis requiring coherence with the agent’s posterior credences after conditionalization. The second method is the orthodox AGM approach to belief revision. Our primary aim is to determine when the two methods may disagree in their recommendations and when they must agree. We establish a number of novel results about their relative behavior. Our most notable finding (...) is that the inverse of the golden ratio emerges as a non-arbitrary bound on the Bayesian method’s free-parameter—the Lockean threshold. This “golden threshold” surfaces in two of our results and turns out to be crucial for understanding the relation between the two methods. (shrink)

Bayesian approaches to rationality require that a person’s degrees of belief be coherent. Among other implications, coherence requires that a person has the same degree of belief in every logically equivalent proposition. However, a person can have evidence for a claim without having evidence for all its propositional equivalences. This paper explores this conflict and argues that a person may be perfectly rational by virtue of responding to their evidence, even if their credences are not coherent. The paper also challenges (...) the idea that it is always better to have more coherent credence, highlighting the fundamental role that evidence plays in rational belief. (shrink)

is an important principle, worthy of serious scrutiny. Its truth or falsity bears on the question of whether moral rightness, obligatoriness, etc., are a matter of factors “internal” to an agent, or whether “external” factors are relevant to determining the moral normative status of acts. Moreover, Access enjoys considerable intuitive support. If I destroy Greensboro in professor Sorensen’s example by pushing the wrong button, I seem to have a good excuse to give to anyone who would accuse me of wrongdoing: (...) “I had no way of knowing that this action would be wrong!” But if I have a good excuse, then pushing the button doesn’t seem wrong; and if that action isn’t wrong, then I had no obligation to refrain from pushing that button. A principle distinct from, but analogous to, Access also deserves our attention. (shrink)

In order to perfectly describe the world, it is not enough to speak truly. One must also use the right concepts - including the right logical concepts. One must use concepts that "carve at the joints", that give the world's "structure". There is an objectively correct way to "write the book of the world". Much of metaphysics, as traditionally conceived, is about the fundamental nature of reality; in the present terms, this is about the world's structure. Metametaphysics - inquiry into (...) the status of metaphysical questions - turns on structure. The question of whether ontological, causal, or modal questions are "substantive" is in large part a question of whether the world has ontological, causal, and modal structure - whether quantifiers, causal relations, and modal operators carve at the joints. (shrink)

The current dominant perspective on addiction as a brain disease has been challenged recently by Marc Lewis, who argued that the brain-changes related to addiction are similar to everyday changes of the brain. From this alternative perspective, addictions are bad habits that can be broken, provided that people are motivated to change. In that case, autonomous choice or “free will” can overcome bad influences from genes and or environments and brain-changes related to addiction. Even though we concur with Lewis that (...) there are issues with the brain disease perspective, we also argue that pointing to black swans can be important, that is: there can be severe cases where addiction indeed tips over into the category of brain disease, but obviously that does not prove that every case of addiction falls into the disease category, that all swans are black. We argue that, for example, people suffering from Korsakoff’s syndrome, can be described as having a brain disease, often caused by alcohol addiction. Moreover, the brain changes occurring with addiction are related to choice-behaviour, habit formation and insight, hence essential mental abilities to break the addiction. We argue for a more graded perspective, where both black swans and white swans are rare, and most cases of addiction come as geese in different shades of gray. (shrink)

Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson's influential article "Knowing How" argues that knowledge-how is a species of knowledge-that. One objection to their view is that knowledge-how is significantly different than knowledge-that because Gettier cases afflict the latter but not the former. Stanley and Williamson argue that this objection fails. Their response, however, is not adequate. Moreover, I sketch a plausible argument that knowledge-how is not susceptible to Gettier cases. This suggests a significant distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how.

This is the first separate edition and commentary on Philodemos of Gadara since 1885, containing an introduction on Philodemos' life, poetic theory, metrical practice, and the place of the epigrams within the Greek Anthology. Thirty-six genuine and two spurious epigrams are printed with full critical apparatus, translation, and commentary. Also included is the text of a recently published papyrus containing traces of many known and previously unknown epigrams by Philodemos.

Intellectualism about knowledge-how is the view that practical knowledge is a species of propositional knowledge. I argue that this view is undermined by a difference in properties between knowledge-how and both knowledge-that and knowledge-wh. More specifically, I argue that both knowledge-that and knowledge-wh are easily transmitted via testimony while knowledge-how is not easily transmitted by testimony. This points to a crucial difference in states of knowledge. I also consider Jason Stanley's attempt to subsume knowledge-how under an account of de se (...) knowledge. I argue that there are crucial differences between de se knowledge and knowledge-how. Thus, this paper advances both the discussion of intellectualism and the literature on the nature of de se knowledge. (shrink)

This paper articulates a way to ground a relatively high prior probability for grand explanatory theories apart from an appeal to simplicity. I explore the possibility of enumerating the space of plausible grand theories of the universe by using the explanatory properties of possible views to limit the number of plausible theories. I motivate this alternative grounding by showing that Swinburne’s appeal to simplicity is problematic along several dimensions. I then argue that there are three plausible grand views—theism, atheism, and (...) axiarchism—which satisfy explanatory requirements for plausibility. Other possible views lack the explanatory virtue of these three theories. Consequently, this explanatory grounding provides a way of securing a nontrivial prior probability for theism, atheism, and axiarchism. An important upshot of my approach is that a modest amount of empirical evidence can bear significantly on the posterior probability of grand theories of the universe. (shrink)

Reason and Explanation develops a new explanationist account of epistemic justification. Poston argues that the explanatory virtues provide a plausible account of necessary and sufficient conditions for justification. The justification of a subject's belief consists in the explanatory virtue of her entire beliefs compared with other sets of beliefs she could have. Poston's argument for coherentism involves a defense of the epistemic value of background beliefs, the development of a novel framework view of reasons, and the articulation of a mentalism (...) evidentialist account of coherentism. Poston argues against foundationalist views that ground justification in sense experience apart from supporting background beliefs. He extends the argument against foundationalism by examining a coherentist view of a priori knowledge. Finally, he articulates a compatiblist position regarding Bayesianism and inference to the best explanation. (shrink)