Doxastic normativism is the thesis that norms are constitutive of or essential to belief, such that no mental state not subject to those norms counts as a belief. A common normativist view is that belief is essentially governed by a norm of truth. According to Krister Bykvist and Anandi Hattiangadi, truth norms for belief cannot be formulated without unpalatable consequences: they are either false or they impose unsatisfiable requirements on believers. I propose that we construe the fundamental norm of belief (...) as a knowledge norm, rather than a truth norm. I argue that a specific kind of knowledge norm—one that has a subject's obligation to believe that p depend on her being in a position to know that p—might avoid the well-known formulation problems with truth norms. (shrink)

Normativists about belief hold that belief formation is essentially rule- or norm-guided. On this view, certain norms are constitutive of or essential to belief in such a way that no mental state not guided by those norms counts as a belief, properly construed. In recent influential work, Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss develop novel arguments against normativism. According to their regress of motivations argument, not all belief formation can be rule- or norm-guided, on pain of a vicious infinite regress. I (...) argue that the regress of motivations argument is unsuccessful: an appeal to the notion of blind rule-following, drawn from a plausible interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following, stops the regress of motivations in its tracks. (shrink)

BackgroundThere is increasing need for peer reviewers as the scientific literature grows. Formal education in biostatistics and research methodology during residency training is lacking. In this pilot study, we addressed these issues by evaluating a novel method of teaching residents about biostatistics and research methodology using peer review of standardized manuscripts. We hypothesized that mentored peer review would improve resident knowledge and perception of these concepts more than non-mentored peer review, while improving review quality.MethodsA partially blinded, randomized, controlled multi-center study (...) was performed. Seventy-eight neurology residents from nine US neurology programs were randomized to receive mentoring from a local faculty member or not. Within a year, residents reviewed a baseline manuscript and four subsequent manuscripts, all with introduced errors designed to teach fundamental review concepts. In the mentored group, mentors discussed completed reviews with residents. Primary outcome measure was change in knowledge score between pre- and post-tests, measuring epidemiology and biostatistics knowledge. Secondary outcome measures included level of confidence in the use and interpretation of statistical concepts before and after intervention, and RQI score for baseline and final manuscripts.ResultsSixty-four residents (82%) completed initial review with gradual decline in completion on subsequent reviews. Change in primary outcome, the difference between pre- and post-test knowledge scores, did not differ between mentored (−8.5%) and non-mentored (−13.9%) residents (p = 0.48). Significant differences in secondary outcomes (using 5-point Likert scale, 5 = strongly agree) included mentored residents reporting enhanced understanding of research methodology (3.69 vs 2.61; p = 0.001), understanding of manuscripts (3.73 vs 2.87; p = 0.006), and application of study results to clinical practice (3.65 vs 2.78; p = 0.005) compared to non-mentored residents. There was no difference between groups in level of interest in peer review (3.00 vs 3.09; p = 0.72) or the quality of manuscript review assessed by the Review Quality Instrument (RQI) (3.25 vs 3.06; p = 0.50).ConclusionsWe used mentored peer review of standardized manuscripts to teach biostatistics and research methodology and introduce the peer review process to residents. Though knowledge level did not change, mentored residents had enhanced perception in their abilities to understand research methodology and manuscripts and apply study results to clinical practice. (shrink)

This book brings together an international group of scholars to discuss the ramifications of Heidegger's Black Notebooks for philosophy and the humanities. In contrast to both those who seek to exonerate Heidegger and those who simply condemn him, they urge careful reading and rereading of his work to turn Heideggerian thought against itself.

Attribution theorists assume that character information informs judgments of blame. But there is disagreement over why. One camp holds that character information is a fundamental determinant of blame. Another camp holds that character information merely provides evidence about the mental states and processes that determine responsibility. We argue for a two-channel view, where character simultaneously has fundamental and evidential effects on blame. In two large factorial studies (n = 495), participants rate whether someone is blameworthy when he makes a mistake (...) (burns a cake or misses a bus stop). Although mental state inferences predict blame judgments, character information does not. Using mediation analyses, we find that character information influences responsibility via two channels (Studies 3–4; n = 447), which are sensitive to different kinds of information (Study 5; n = 149). On the one hand, forgetfulness increases judgments of responsibility, because mental lapses manifest an objectionable character flaw. On the other hand, forgetfulness decreases judgments of state control, which in turn decreases responsibility judgments. These two channels cancel out, which is why we find no aggregate effect of forgetfulness on responsibility. Our results challenge several fundamental assumptions about the role of character information in moral judgment, including that good character typically mitigates blame. (shrink)

Causal models of agents have been used to analyse the safety aspects of machine learning systems. But identifying agents is non-trivial -- often the causal model is just assumed by the modeler without much justification -- and modelling failures can lead to mistakes in the safety analysis. This paper proposes the first formal causal definition of agents -- roughly that agents are systems that would adapt their policy if their actions influenced the world in a different way. From this we (...) derive the first causal discovery algorithm for discovering agents from empirical data, and give algorithms for translating between causal models and game-theoretic influence diagrams. We demonstrate our approach by resolving some previous confusions caused by incorrect causal modelling of agents. (shrink)

It is often claimed that social media accelerate political extremism by employing personalization algorithms that filter users into groups with homogenous beliefs. While an intuitive position, recent research has shown that social media users exhibit self-filtering tendencies. In this paper, I apply Hannah Arendt’s theory of political judgment to hypothesize a cause for self-filtering on social media. According to Arendt, a crucial step in political judgment is the imagination of a general standpoint of distinct yet equal perspectives, against which individuals (...) compare their own judgments in order to test their defensibility. I argue that social media inhibit this step by gamifying the pursuit of social status, which encourages users to consider the perspectives of others not for the sake of a general standpoint but for the sake of improving their social status, resulting in self-filtering. Consequently, ameliorating political extremism on social media requires not just reforming the algorithms that deliver content to users, but the interfaces on which users present their social identities. (shrink)

In the heart of southeast Texas, an industrial powerhouse often referred to as the 'Golden Triangle', the oil refineries and petrochemical plants stand as stalwart testaments to the region's economic evolution. Interestingly, before the discovery of oil at Spindletop, the lumber and cattle industries powered this region's economy. A profound shift occurred when the Lucas Gusher, a fountain of oil spurting thousands of feet into the air, struck the lands of Spindletop Hill on January 10, 1901. This remarkable discovery of (...) the Spindletop oilfield on a slat dome formation south of Beaumont, Texas, marked the birth of the modern petroleum industry and fundamentally transformed the region's geopolitical, economic, and cultural landscapes. People from all over the country relocated to Gladys City and Beaumont in search of work and new opportunities, creating a boomtown as the town's population swelled from 10,000 to 50,000. The newfound urbanization brought by the oil industry transformed the town and the surrounding areas, creating a ripple effect across the region that would be felt for generations to come. The surge in oil-driven economic activity transmuted the region into a vibrant nexus of commerce, with the oil industry emerging as a critical architect of growth and advancement. This newfound affluence incited by the petroleum sector ushered in an era of economic diversification, laying the groundwork for industrialization’s further evolution. The Spindletop Oil Fields not only underscored the United States’ ascent as the foremost petroleum-producing nation but also signaled the nation’s initiation into the Petroleum Age. It was Spindletop that solidified its position as America’s first significant oil field, becoming an enduring symbol of its industrial might. By 1985, over 153,000,000 barrels of oil had been produced and extracted from the Spindletop oil fields, underscoring the magnitude of this extraordinary resource. (shrink)

Prolegomena to Pure Logic (1900) is the definitive statement of Husserl’s early logic. But what does it say that logic is? I argue that Husserl in the Prolegomena thinks logic is its own discipline, namely the “doctrine of science” (Wissenschaftslehre), but has two conflicting ideas of what that is. One idea—expressed by the book’s general argument, and which I call Husserl’s Austrian Semanticism about logic—is that the Wissenschaftslehre is the positive science explaining what science is (which turns out just to (...) be the study of meaning) plus the dependent art that, applying the science, teaches us how to scientifically know. The other idea—expressed by the book’s opening chapter, and which I call Husserl’s German Idealism about logic—is that the Wissenschaftslehre is the purely reflective self-knowing of science, independent of science’s positive expansion. These two ideas are incompatible. Thus, the Prolegomena is ambivalent on what logic is. But since the ambivalence only deepens the significance of Husserl’s early logic, the ambivalence should be embraced. (shrink)

Part intellectual history, part critical theory, The Last Man Takes LSD challenges the way we think about both Michel Foucault and modern progressive politics. One fateful day in May 1975, Foucault dropped acid in the southern California desert. In letters reproduced here, he described it as among the most important events of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. That trip helped redirect Foucault's thought and contributed to a tectonic shift in the intellectual (...) life of the era. He came to reinterpret the social movements of May '68 and reposition himself politically in France, embracing anti-totalitarian currents and becoming a critic of the welfare state. Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora examine the full historical context of the turn in Foucault's thought, which included studies of the Iranian revolution and French socialist politics, through which he would come to appreciate the possibilities of autonomy offered by a new force on the French political scene that was neither of the left nor the right: neoliberalism. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Literature, Fiction, and Truth Literary Cognitivism Thought Experiments Genres Learning by Supposing De se Suppositions.

Metaphysics is largely an a priori business, albeit a business that is sensitive to the findings of the physical sciences. This chapter has two aims. The first is to defend a particular conception of the methodology of a priori metaphysics by, in part, exemplifying that methodology and revealing its results. The second is to present a new account of holes. These two aims dovetail nicely. The chapter provides a better analysis of the concept ′hole′ that yields a more plausible metaphysical (...) story about holes. The authors defend a new, functionalist, analysis of holes, which, unlike its rivals, neither misidentifies nor renders them implausibly eliminativist about holes under various different metaphysical suppositions about the nature of space. In the process, the authors set out the complex relations between the intension of "hole," and its extension at various worlds under different suppositions about the nature of space. (shrink)

Ismael aims for an understanding of the nature of an embedded perspective of agents in a world. If successful, this would explain a cluster of ways in which from an embedded perspective, we experience the world in an array of temporally asymmetric ways. Moreover, these are ways that have led many philosophers to rather metaphysically inflationary views about the nature of time, according to which time itself really is dynamical, and is characterized by the movement of an objectively (i.e., non-perspectival) (...) present. Ismael aims to explain these features of our experience without positing any such metaphysical picture. She argues that there are constraints which prevent us from taking this Olympian conception of the world and our place in it, and that these, jointly, explain why we experience the world in these temporally asymmetric ways. We take up two related questions. First, what it would mean to say that these constraints are not merely epistemic, and second, how far these constraints get us in explaining why we experience the world in these ways. (shrink)

Future-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for negatively valenced events be located in the past rather than the future, and positively valenced ones to be located in the future rather than the past. Strong risk aversion is the preference to pay some cost to mitigate the badness of the worst outcome. People who are both strongly risk averse and future-biased can face a series of choices that will guarantee them more pain, for no compensating benefit: they will be (...) pain pumped. Thus, combining these preferences is rationally impermissible. Dougherty (2011) argues that this gives us reason to think that future-bias is rationally impermissible. This argument, and a similar one presented by Greene and Sullivan (2015), relies on the idea that if several preferences are not rationally combinable, then in the absence of some explanation of why they are not combinable, we should conclude that (at least) one of them is rationally impermissible. We take up this question by, inter alia, reflecting on the empirical results of a study we ran that probes people’s risk averse and future-biased preferences. We argue that the data, in conjunction with other considerations, suggests that we should not infer from the irrationality of the combination of these preferences to the irrationality of one of the preferences singly. We also argue that given the descriptive data about these preferences, there is no reason to think that, if one of them is rationally impermissible, then it is future-bias. (shrink)

Source [1] Andrew E. P. Mitchell, Federica Galli, Sondra Butterworth. (2023). Editorial: Equality, diversity and inclusive research for diverse rare disease communities. Front. Psychol., vol. 14. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1285774. "It is also important to recognize that certain mental health disorders are classified as rare conditions and have their own cultural concepts of distress, as defined in the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)" and require “equal attention and support for individuals and their families, both physically and emotionally”. [1].

Many of us have encountered a version of what Zachary Horton calls the "cosmic zoom"--a visual journey through the many scales of the universe, from the microscopic to the cosmic. Most of our daily perception operates at a level of scale somewhere between that of quarks and galaxies, and it is this comfort with the immediately visible everyday world that the cosmic zoom unsettles. In Mediating Scale, Horton uses the history of the cosmic zoom to explore how that scale (...) itself has been constructed over the past seventy years. How has cosmic zoom media influenced scientific and popular understanding of the unseen world and how it may be known, accessed, and exploited? Horton insists that scale is the key to understanding and addressing major contemporary issues including climate change and big data, but people working on issues of scale in various disciplines often talk past each other. Horton starts by sketching four common ways of thinking about scale derived from cartography, physics, engineering/biology, and mathematics. He then shows how these concepts operate in various disciplines, explains why they don't fit together, and puts forth a new, transdisciplinary theory and vocabulary of scale, one that links the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences. In this ambitious work, scale becomes a foundation for rethinking the relationships between knowledge, mediation, and environment. (shrink)

Environmental ethics has persistently aspired to be public philosophy. The decades between the philosophers’ crisis of conscience and present‐day activities witnessed a proliferation of professional practices that blur the boundaries between public and academic philosophy, between what environments are worthy of moral consideration and which are mere human artifacts, and between what we call philosophy versus anthropology, or educational research, or sustainability science. The authors also focus on currents motivated by “wicked” environmental problems, practiced in the “field,” and advanced in (...) service to environmental justice. Although these headwaters each offer insights for public environmental philosophers, their confluence is what promises a watershed moment. (shrink)

When confronting the unexplained, it is helpful to consider it from many different points of view. In an essay published in 2004, entitled "Sensors, Filters, and the Source of Reality," Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne of Princeton University's PEAR laboratory proposed that consciousness constructs its reality by ordering the information it derives from the external world through an array of physiological, psychological, and cultural filters. This thesis has now been considered by nineteen distinguished scholars who here present their commentaries from (...) a broad spectrum of professional and personal perspectives. Drawn from such diverse backgrounds as art, Buddhism, evolutionary biology, fantasy, out-of-body experiences, philosophy, physics, psychology, semiotics, and systems engineering, among others, these contributions offer an assortment of unique and fascinating glimpses of how our experiences and their styles of representation are reflected through these filters of consciousness. (shrink)

The propensity interpretation of fitness (PIF) holds that evolutionary fitness is an objectively probabilistic causal disposition (i.e., a propensity) toward reproductive success. I characterize this as the conceptual foundation of the PIF. Reproductive propensities are meant to explain trends in actual reproductive outcomes. In this paper, I analyze the minimal theoretical and ontological commitments that must accompany the explanatory power afforded by the PIF’s foundation. I discuss three senses in which these commitments are less burdensome than has typically been recognized: (...) the PIF’s foundation is (i) compatible with a principled pluralism regarding the mathematical relationship between measures of individual and trait reproductive success; (ii) independent of the propensity interpretation of probability; and (iii) independent of microphysical indeterminism. The most substantive ontological commitment of the PIF’s foundation is to objective modal structures wherein macrophysical probabilities and causation can be found, but I hedge against metaphysically inflationary readings of this modality. (shrink)

For decades, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have questioned the appropriateness and utility of prior review of their research by human subjects' ethics committees. This essay seeks to organize thematically some of their published complaints and to serve as a brief restatement of the major critiques of ethics review. In particular, it argues that 1) ethics committees impose silly restrictions, 2) ethics review is a solution in search of a problem, 3) ethics committees lack expertise, 4) ethics committees (...) apply inappropriate principles, 5) ethics review harms the innocent, and 6) better options exist. (shrink)

Technikphilosophie reflektiert ein charakteristisches Oszillieren zwischen Technikfaszination und Technikskepsis moderner Gesellschaften und prüft so die Möglichkeiten eines verantwortungsbewussten kritisch bejahenden Gebrauchs von Technik. Zu diesen Aspekten im Umgang mit Technik hat zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts Max Scheler (1874-1928) aigene Ansätze vorgelegt, die im Vergleich zu entsprechenden Argumentationen Husserls und Heideggers damals kaum rezipiert worden sind. Wichtige Merkmale der Technikdeutung Schelers sind die wertphilosophische Orientierung und lebensphilosophische Implementierung. Dazu gehört die Frage, inwieweit Technikgebrach mehr sein sollte als ein Faktor der (...) Selbsterhaltung und deshalb seiner Einbettung in die Formen menschlicher Selbsttraszendenz bedarf"--Back cover. (shrink)

Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: surveying the landscape and defining terms -- The seventeenth-century denigration of tradition and a nineteenth-century response -- Michael oakeshott and the epistemic role of tradition -- Alasdair macintyre's tradition-constituted inquiry -- Michael polanyi and role of tacit knowledge -- The incoherence of liberalism and the response of tradition -- Afterword: a conservatism worth conserving, or conservatism as stewardship -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Articulating an Augustinian treatment of the nature, limits, meaning, and end of work, this volume will push Augustinian studies toward a more-detailed engagement with issues of political economy. Settle argues that we inhabit a culture that insists that our life's meaning is bound up in our work; we experience constant pressures at work to be more efficient and productive; and we know the ways in which our work-structures contribute to a seemingly ever-growing, corrosive system of poverty and oppression. These cultural (...) assumptions regarding work, along with a cluster of other labor-related problems (i.e. automation, wage depression, wage theft, the rise of a flexible labor force, a lack of worker representation, over-work, and productivism) have rightfully raised a number of questions about the nature, meaning, and limits of our working lives and working structures. This book sets out the ways in which St. Augustine offers us-in piecemeal fashion-elements with which we can assemble an alternative vision. For example, by examining his understanding of the role of work in the context of the monastery, we see his understanding of both the ways we should undertake our work and the ends toward which we should direct that work during our lives in a sinful world. Settle draws on these piecemeal treatments of work scattered throughout St. Augustine's varied writings in order to develop and articulate a unified theology of work. (shrink)

Although mind-wandering occupies up to half of our waking thoughts, it is seldom discussed in philosophy. My paper brings these neglected thoughts into focus. I propose that mind-wandering is unguided attention. Guidance in my sense concerns how attention is monitored and regulated as it unfolds over time. Roughly speaking, someone’s attention is guided if she would feel pulled back, were she distracted from her current focus. Because our wandering thoughts drift unchecked from topic to topic, they are unguided. One motivation (...) for my theory is what I call the “Puzzle of the Purposeful Wanderer”. On the one hand, mind-wandering seems essentially purposeless; almost by definition, it contrasts with goal-directed cognition. On the other hand, empirical evidence suggests that our minds frequently wander to our goals. My solution to the puzzle is this: mind-wandering is purposeless in one way—it is unguided—but purposeful in another—it is frequently caused, and thus motivated, by our goals. Another motivation for my theory is to distinguish mind-wandering from two antithetical forms of cognition: absorption and rumination. Surprisingly, previous theories cannot capture these distinctions. I can: on my view, absorption and rumination are guided, whereas mind-wandering is not. My paper has four parts. Section 1 spells out the puzzle. Sections 2 and 3 explicate two extant views of mind-wandering—the first held by most cognitive scientists, the second by Thomas Metzinger. Section 4 uses the limitations of these theories to motivate my own: mind-wandering is unguided attention. (shrink)

Don't fence me in : Rorty and Sartre -- On freedom and action : Dewey and Sartre -- A (neo) American in Paris : Bourdieu and Mead -- Mead on cosmopolitanism, sympathy, and war -- W.E.B. Du Bois : double-consciousness, Jamesian sympathy, and the cosmopolitan -- Self-concept in the new sociology of ideas : reflections on Neil Gross's Richard Rorty : the making of an American philosopher -- Eros and self-determination -- What if Hegel's master and slave were women?

Inspired by the practice of dialogue in ancient philosophical schools, the Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL) Project at the University of Notre Dame has sought to put dialogue back at the center of philosophical pedagogy. Impromptu philosophical dialogue, however, can be challenging for students who are new to philosophy. Anticipating this challenge, the Project has created a series of manuals to help instructors conduct dialogue groups with novice philosophy students. Using these guidelines, we incorporated PWOL-style dialogue groups into (...) our Spring 2021 course “The Philosophy of Race, Class, and Gender” with the hope that, through having conversations about these challenging topics, our students would both be able to practice having philosophical dialogues as well as form their views on race and gender in light of contributions from their diverse peers. This article examines several strategies for how instructors can seek to incorporate similar dialogues into their own introductory classroom. (shrink)

Descartes maintains that we can love God and that it is pleasant and morally beneficial to do so. In this essay, I examine the necessary conditions for such an intellectual love of God. I argue that the intellectual love of God is incited by a judgment that we are joined to God in reality, which is constitutive of an intellectual joy. I go on to show that the intellectual love of God is, itself, constituted by a stripping of our private (...) interests in favor of God’s divine will. (shrink)

The propensity interpretation of fitness (PIF) holds that evolutionary fitness is an objectively probabilistic causal disposition (i.e., a propensity) toward reproductive success. I characterize this as the conceptual foundation of the PIF. Reproductive propensities are meant to explain trends in actual reproductive outcomes. In this paper, I analyze the minimal theoretical and ontological commitments that must accompany the explanatory power afforded by the PIF’s foundation. I discuss three senses in which these commitments are less burdensome than has typically been recognized: (...) the PIF’s foundation is (i) compatible with a principled pluralism regarding the mathematical relationship between measures of individual and trait reproductive success; (ii) independent of the propensity interpretation of probability; and (iii) independent of microphysical indeterminism. The most substantive ontological commitment of the PIF’s foundation is to objective modal structures wherein macrophysical probabilities and causation can be found, but I hedge against metaphysically inflationary readings of this modality. (shrink)

Over the last two decades J.N. Williams has developed an account of the absurdity of such utterances as Its raining but I dont believe it that is both intuitively plausible and applicable to a wide variety of forms that this so-called Moorean absurdity can take. His approach is also noteworthy for making only minimal appeal to principles of epistemic or doxastic logic in its account of such absurdity. We first show that Williams places undue emphasis upon assertion and belief: It (...) is similarly absurd for a person to accept a proposition P as a supposition for the sake of argument while denying that her state of mind is one of supposing P, yet Williams has no account of this. Williams approach is then modified to account for such a case. That modification employs a principle of doxastic logic that is at least plausible as the one on which Williams relies, while being unlike his principle in applying to cases other than belief. (shrink)

Presenting an understanding of the mind, emotions, and communication, Calm, Clear, and Loving invites an understanding of the transformation of mind, both in a meditative and therapeutic context. It is relevant to those dealing with histories of abuse and trauma, for those in the fields of mental health, and for those on meditative and spiritual evolution.

A biblically informed guidebook for Christians facing difficult health care decisions, from the making of life (infertility, organ donation, cloning) and taking of life (abortion, euthanasia) to the technologically driven faking of life (genetic engineering, etc.).

A biblically informed guidebook for Christians facing difficult health care decisions, from the making of life (infertility, organ donation, cloning) and taking of life (abortion, euthanasia) to the technologically driven faking of life (genetic engineering, etc.).

In this article we frame a set of important issues in the emerging field of Mind, Brain, and Education in terms of three broad headings: methods, models, and morality. Under the heading of methods we suggest that the need for synthesis across scientific and practical disciplines entails the pursuit of usable knowledge via a catalytic symbiosis between theory, research, and practice. Under the heading of models the goal of producing usable knowledge should shape the construction of theories that provide comprehensive (...) accounts of human learning and development spanning multiple levels of analysis. Under the heading of morality usable knowledge must be put to good use: Its application and dissemination ought to be infused with moral considerations gleaned from dialogue among all those potentially affected. Generally, the field should be shaped not only by its constituent scientific disciplines but also by its applications to education and learning. Thus we argue for the adoption of a kind of pragmatism that would be best actualized by building research‐school collaborations between researchers and practitioners. (shrink)

Perhaps the central question in action theory is this: what ingredient of bodily action is missing in mere behavior? But what is an analogous question for mental action? I ask this: what ingredient of active, goal-directed thought is missing in mind-wandering? My answer: attentional guidance. Attention is guided when you would feel pulled back from distractions. In contrast, mind-wandering drifts between topics unchecked. My unique starting point motivates new accounts of four central topics about mental action. First, its causal basis. (...) Mind-wandering is a case study that allows us to tease apart two causes of mental action––guidance and motivation. Second, its experiential character. Goals are rarely the objects of awareness; rather, goals are “phenomenological frames” that carve experience into felt distractions and relevant information. Third, its scope. Intentional mind-wandering is a limit case of action where one actively cultivates passivity. Fourth, my theory offers a novel response to mental action skeptics like Strawson. (shrink)

Arguments from Silence have been used many times in attempts to discredit the foundations of religions. In this project, I demonstrate how one might judge the epistemic value of such arguments. To begin, I lay out for examination a specific argument from silence given by Walter Richard Cassels in his work Supernatural Religion. I then discuss a recently developed Bayesian approach for dealing with arguments from silence. Finally, using Cassels’s work and the work of some of the critics who replied (...) to his argument, I argue for what probabilities might be applied in the use of the Bayesian method for testing the epistemic value Cassels’s argument and demonstrate how one might respond to similar arguments. (shrink)

Andrew Simester’s new book, Fundamentals of Criminal Law: Responsibility, Culpability, and Wrongdoing, is a masterful analysis of the doctrines of the general part of the criminal law and the multiple, overlapping functions that those doctrines serve. Along the way, Simester makes explicit what criminal law theorists routinely presuppose—that the ordinary words “blameworthiness” and “culpability” pick out the same moral concept. This essay argues that this assumed equivalence is mistaken: two concepts are in play, not one. Roughly, to be blameworthy is (...) to be justly liable to blaming practices in virtue of being at fault, and to be culpable is to act in a fashion that manifests or issues from insufficient concern for morally weighty interests. Culpability is not identical to blameworthiness, but rather a ground of blameworthiness: to be culpable is one way to be at fault, thus one way to be blameworthy. More importantly, culpability is not the exclusive ground of blameworthiness; an agent can be at fault, hence blameworthy, without being culpable. This essay defends these conceptual claims and draws forth some implications for two theses that Simester advances: that it is morally permissible to punish persons for criminal negligence and that it is unjust to punish persons who don’t deserve it. (shrink)

This chapter examines Davidson's treatment of emotions as complexly bound up with cognitive states such as belief, rather than as being essentially opposed to such states. Emotions on Davidson's view can be justified, and can be both causes of and reasons for action. We also consider Davidson's elucidation and defense of David Hume's analysis of pride and similar affective states. Objections to that elucidation and defense are discussed, and it is explained how Davidson could rebut those objections. Davidson's theory is (...) then discussed in light of unconscious emotions, irrational emotions, and the possibility of nonhuman animals possessing emotions. (shrink)

ROOTS OF WISDOM, Seventh Edition, invites students to explore universal and current philosophical issues through a rich tapestry of perspectives including the ideas and traditions of men and women from the West, Asia, the Americas, and Africa. No other book offers such breadth of multicultural coverage coupled with a clear, concise, and approachable writing style. Mitchell presents striking images to illustrate our diverse cultural inheritance, using fine art, cartoons, poetry, movies, current events, and popular music to bring the issues (...) of philosophy to life for students. This edition includes a new discussion of logos and mythos as laid out by Karen Armstrong, material on calculative vs. meditative thinking from Heidegger, expanded treatment of sovereignty and citizenship with new discussion on the so-called Arab Spring, and more. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version. (shrink)

The worlds of Dune forbid the creation of “thinking machines,” due to an ancient war, called the Butlerian Jihad, which was fought to keep humans from using such machines. The relationship between humanity and forbidden technology in Dune touches on two basic possibilities for the relationship of humans and technology: social construction of technology and technological determinism. Life on Arrakis and under the Imperium is filled with technologies that range from the very realistic to the fantastical. Societies in the Dune (...) universe tend to value a variety of everyday and cutting‐edge technologies. Understanding the reasons why some technology is forbidden in Dune depends on understanding how Herbert views human beings. The cultures of the Dune universe place great cultural value on technology in its importance for everyday lives. (shrink)

Paul Griffiths and John Matthewson argue that selected effects play the key role in determining whether a state is pathological. In response, it is argued that a selected effects account faces a number of difficulties in light of modern genomic research. Firstly, a modern history approach to selection is problematic as a basis for assigning function to human traits in light of the small population sizes in the hominin lineage, which imply that selection has played a limited role in shaping (...) these genomes in the evolutionarily recent past. Secondly, determining both the genetic basis of disease and selective histories of the various alleles involved may be experimentally intractable. Thirdly, the existence of “selected disorders” is well supported, and yet on the other hand many other common diseases may not reduce evolutionary fitness. In summary, the biological ends promoted by natural selection, as best modeled in recent research, do not adequately ground a concept of dysfunction that aligns well with the interests of human health. (shrink)