bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Causation in the Argument for Anomalous Monism
Authors: Yalowitz Steven
Published: June 2016

Donald Davidson has two central aims in his celebrated paper ‘Mental Events.’ First, he argues for the impossibility of ‘strict … laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained’ (ME, 208). I shall call the resulting view ‘mental anomalism.’ Second, he argues, based partially on this impossibility, for a version of monism which holds that every (causally interacting) mental event is token-identical with some physical event. This second aim puts constraints on how the argument for mental anomalism can plausibly proceed. That argument cannot assume anything that presupposes monism or adversely affects the argument for it. When elaborated, this constraint by itself rules out otherwise attractive conceptions of how the argument for mental anomalism works. More generally, in order to be compelling, the overall argument for anomalous monism ought not to incorporate excessively controversial presuppositions even if they do not themselves beg any questions about monism. The argument needs to be built upon relatively intuitive premises.
C.S. Peirce: Belief, Truth, and Going from the Known to the Unknown
Authors: Wiggins David
Published: June 2016

The third philosophical stratagem for cutting off inquiry consists in maintaining that this, that, or the other element of science is basic, ultimate, independent of aught else and utterly inexplicable- not so much from any defect in our knowing as because there is nothing beneath it to know. The only type of reasoning by which such a conclusion could be reached is retroduction.Now nothing justifies a retroductive inference except its affording an explanation of the facts. It is, however, no explanation at all of a fact to pronounce it inexplicable.That, therefore, is a conclusion which no reasoning can ever justify or excuse. (Peirce, Collected Papers 1.139)

Abduction consists in studying facts and devising a theory to explain them. Its only justification is that, if we are ever to understand things at all, it must be in that way. (Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.145)

[Scientific procedure] will at times find a high probability established by a single confirmatory instance, while at others it will dismiss a thousand as almost worthless. (Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), p. 16)
Peirce's Double-Aspect Theory of Truth
Authors: Migotti Mark
Published: June 2016

The idea of a double-aspect approach to a philosophical conundrum is familiar in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and has been recently introduced as well into epistemology. As a class, double-aspect theories attempt, as it might be put, reconciliation by reorientation. Matter and mind, for double-aspect theorists, are not independent substances, whose co-presence in a single entity such as a human person might be deeply mysterious; they are different aspects of a single substance — a person in modest versions of the theory like Strawson's, the universe as a whole in Spinoza's more ambitious case. Similarly, according to Susan Haack, the epistemic justification of a belief of a given subject is not something conceptually isolated from a causal explanation of its presence, but rather epistemic justification has two aspects, a causal one concerned with what a subject's evidence for a belief is, and an evaluative one concerned with how good the subject's evidence is.
Pragmatism and Change of View
Authors: Levi Isaac
Published: June 2016

Foundationalism in epistemology imposes two demands on the beliefs of intelligent inquirers: (1) thatcurrentbeliefs be justified, and (2) that there be foundational premisses and principles of reasoning that are self-certifying on the basis of which the merits of other current beliefs and principles may be derived. Many anti-foundationalists give up (2) but not (1). They demand that current beliefs be justified by showing these beliefs to be integrated into a systematically satisfactory network of beliefs. Pragmatists belong among those who give upboth(2) and (1).

Pragmatists do not think that the project of justifying current beliefs is implementable. In this respect, they are sceptics. Such scepticism does not imply that because agentXat timetcannot justify his current beliefs, he should cease having them. Scepticism about reasons does not imply scepticism with respect to belief. In “The Fixation of Belief” Peirce explicitly dismissed doxastic scepticism when he observed that merely writing down a question challenging some current assumption is not sufficient to create the sort of doubt that should occasion an inquiry.
Respect for Persons
Authors: Buss Sarah
Published: June 2016

We believe we owe one another respect. We believe we ought to pay what we owe by treating one another ‘with respect.’ If we could understand these beliefs we would be well on the way to understanding morality itself. If we could justify these beliefs we could vindicate a central part of our moral experience.

Respect comes in many varieties. We respect some people for their upright character, others for their exceptional achievements. There are people we respect as forces of nature: we go to great lengths to accommodate their moods, wiles, and demands. Finally, most of us seem to respect people simply because they are people. This is the sort of respect of special interest to moral theory.

In order to be worthy of this last sort of respect, it is not only sufficient but necessary that one be a person. We can, of course, take a similar attitude towardnonpersons.
Toward ‘Perfect Collections of Properties’: Locke on the Constitution of Substantial Sorts
Authors: Shapiro Lionel
Published: June 2016

Summing up the lessons of the final book of hisEssay Concerning Human Understanding,Locke describes two ‘ways to enlarge our Knowledge,as far as we are capable.’ One involves the cultivation of our capacity for demonstrative reasoning, the other the proper framing of the ideas from which any such reasoning must issue and on which mere ‘experimental Knowledge’ (IV .iii.29: 560) is likewise founded. Under the latter heading, we are urged to aim not only for ‘clear’ and ‘distinct’ ideas, but also for ‘perfect’ ones. Finally, a laconic insertion in the fourth edition specifies how the perfection of one class of ideas is to be pursued:

And if they bespecificIdeas ofSubstances,we should endeavor also to make them as complete as we can, whereby I mean, that we should put together as many simple Ideas, as being constantly observed to co-exist, may perfectly determine theSpecies…. (IV.xii.14: 648)
Was Wittgenstein an Anti-Semite? The Significance of Anti-Semitism for Wittgenstein's Philosophy
Authors: Szabados Béla
Published: June 2016

pour l'autre en nous et parmi nous

An apologia seeks to cover up the revolutionary moments in the course of history. The establishment of continuity is dear to its heart. It only gives importance to those elements of a work that have already generated an after-effect. It misses those points at which the transmission breaks down and thus misses those jags and crags that offer a handhold to someone who wishes to move beyond them.

I am all the same convinced that these notes [in Culture and Value] can be properly understood and appreciated only against the background of Wittgenstein’ s philosophy and, furthermore, that they make a contribution to our understanding of that philosophy.
Liberalism, Culture, Aboriginal Rights: In Defence of Kymlicka
Authors: Murray Robert
Published: June 2016

In their 1969 so-calledWhite Paper on Indian Policy,Pierre Trudeau's government argued that it was time to abolish the group-specific rights differentiating Aboriginal people from other Canadians, including, in some Aboriginal societies, the group-specific right to restrict voting, residency, public office, and other social goods, to their Aboriginal members. Given the negative impact the loss of such so-called collective or group rights would have on the security of their cultures, Aboriginal people were incensed, and, consequently, the federal liberals backed down. More recently, Gordon Campbell maintained as a 1996 election promise that, were his provincial liberal party to be elected in British Columbia, he would oppose group-specific rights for Aboriginal people in British Columbia. Both Trudeau and Campbell argued that it is wrong for Aboriginal people to have group-specific rights by appeal to the idea that such collective rights are discriminatory because they assign opportunities to individuals on the basis of culture or race. Political elites are not alone in thinking that collective rights override individual rights. In fact, it has become a national motif that Section 15 (1) of the Canadian Charter, which makes it illegal to discriminate on the grounds that citizens are to be guaranteed equal protection of the law, is incompatible with group-specific rights for Aboriginal people.
Moral Anchors and Control
Authors: Haji Ishtiyaque
Published: June 2016

Determinism is the thesis that ‘there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future.’ When various compatibilists discuss determinism and moral responsibility, they champion the view that although determinism is inconsistent with freedom to do otherwise, it is nevertheless consistent with responsibility. Determinism, then, does not, in the view of these compatibilists, threaten one sort of moral appraisal — the sort we make, for example, when we say that someone is blameworthy for some deed. Call moral deontic normative statuses like those of being morally right, wrong, or obligatory, ‘moral anchors.’ A key objective of this paper is to show that even if compatibilists can secure moral responsibility against the threat of determinism, possibly, by establishing that freedom to do otherwise is not the right sort of freedom required for responsibility, they will not be able to secure the very anchors of morality by any similar line of reasoning. Specifically, I argue that if certain principles of moral obligation are true, nothing can be morally right, wrong, or obligatory in a world in which we lack alternative possibilities. Thus, whereas unfreedom to do otherwise may be compatible with responsibility, it is incompatible with moral anchorage.
Relative Identity and Cardinality
Authors: Blanchette Patricia
Published: June 2016

Peter Geach famously holds that there is no such thing as absolute identity. There are rather, as Geach sees it, a variety of relative identity relations, each essentially connected with a particular monadic predicate. Though we can strictly and meaningfully say that an individual a is the same man as the individual b, or that a is the same statue as b, we cannot, on this view, strictly and meaningfully say that the individual a simply is b.

It is difficult to find anything like a persuasive argument for this doctrine in Geach’s work. But one claim made by Geach is that his account of identity is the account most naturally aligned with Frege's widely admired treatment of cardinality. And though this claim of an affinity between Frege's and Geach's doctrines has been challenged, the challenge has been resisted. William Alston and Jonathan Bennett, indeed, go further than Geach to argue that Frege's doctrine implies Geach's.
The Limits of Neutrality: Toward a Weakly Substantive Account of Autonomy
Authors: Kristinsson Sigurdur
Published: June 2016

Leading accounts of personal autonomy arecontent-neutral:they insist that there are noa prioriconstraints on the content of the desires or values that might motivate an autonomous action. In Gerald Dworkin's provocative words, ‘the autonomous person can be a tyrant or a slave, a saint or sinner, a rugged individualist or champion of fraternity, a leader or follower.’ ‘There is nothing in the idea of autonomy that precludes a person from saying, “I want to be the kind of person who acts at the command of others. I define myself as a slave and endorse those attitudes and preferences. My autonomy consists in being a slave.” ’ John Christman similarly claims that ‘any desire, no matter how evil, self-sacrificing, or slavish it might be’ could be autonomously formed. The same seems to apply to Harry Frankfurt's view, that actions are autonomous if they stem from second-order volitions that reflect what the agent cares about; it puts no constraints on the content of what a person might care about. All of these accounts hold that the mere content of a desire or value is never sufficient to rule out that it might be autonomously acted on by someone.
Mind and Sign: Method and the Interpretation of Mathematics in Descartes's Early Work
Authors: Schmitter Amy M.
Published: June 2016

Method may be second only to substance-dualism as the best-known among Descartes's enthusiasms. But knowing that Descartes wants to promote good method is one thing; knowing what exactly he wants to promote is another. Two views seem fairly widespread. The first rests on the claim that Descartes endorses a purely procedural picture of reason, so that right reasoning is a matter of proprieties of operation, rather than (say) respect for its objects. On this view, a method for regulating our reason would offer general rules of procedure, abstracted as much as possible from the content of particular problems. Second is the view that Descartes maintains what we might call an ‘intellectualist’ approach to method, one that restricts right reasoning to operations internal to the mind, and allows the use of external bodily resources (such as sensory perceptions, activities in the corporeal imagination, or written notes) only as initial inputs or as helpful props— convenient, but marginal to the procedure and readily eliminated from it.
Outline of a Theory of Reasonable Deliberation
Authors: Laden Anthony Simon
Published: June 2016

Theories of rational choice focus on the question of how to choose what to do. They are, that is, concerned with the selection of one among a set of possible actions. Furthermore, they tell us how to make such a choice rationally. They accomplish this aspect of their task by telling us how to choose ‘in order to achieve our aims as well as possible.’

Theories of reasonable deliberation, as I describe them in this paper, analyze a different domain of reasoning in the service of action. First, their subject matter is the deliberation that leads to action, rather than the final selection of the action itself. Second, they ask about the intrinsic character of a deliberative path, rather than its likely outcome. That is, they are theories of the reasonableness of deliberation, rather than its rationality. To see the distinctiveness of this theoretical domain, it helps to approach it by backing away from the domain of rational choice theories one step at a time.
Moral Naturalism and the Normative Question
Authors: Babbitt Susan E.
Published: June 2016

Moral naturalism, as I use the term here, is the view that there are moral facts in the natural world – facts that are both natural and normative – and that moral claims are true or false in virtue of their corresponding or not to these natural facts. Moral naturalists argue that, since moral claims are about natural facts, we can establish the truth about moral claims through empirical investigation. Moral knowledge, on this view, is a form of empirical knowledge.

One objection to this metaethical view is that even if moral naturalists are correct in their claims about truth, they cannot answer the question of normativity. Jean Hampton, for instance, argues that it is not enough to explain the conduct's wrongness by showing it to be a property that necessarily supervenes on natural properties. For nothing in this analysis explains the relationship between these properties andus.The question is why should peoplecareabout these properties. Christine Korsgaard claims that moral realists take the normative question to be one about truth and knowledge.
The Biological Basis and Ideational Superstructure of Morality
Authors: Wilson Catherine
Published: June 2016

If moral epistemology can be naturalized, there must be genuine moral knowledge, knowledge of what it is morally right for someone or even everyone to do in a particular situation. The naturalist hopes to explain how such knowledge can be acquired by ordinary empirical means, without appealing to a special realm of moral facts separate from the rest of nature, and a special faculty equipped to detect them. Various learning mechanisms for acquiring moral knowledge have been proposed. Most, however, have the following deficiency: What they actually explain is moral acculturation with respect to accepted or author-preferred moral norms, not the acquisition of moral knowledge. Of course, an additional premise to the effect that accepted moral norms or author-preferred norms embody moral truths would deal nicely with this problem, but at the expense of the distinction between opinion and knowledge, or true belief, in which epistemologists are necessarily interested.
Word and Action: Reconciling Rules and Know-How in Moral Cognition
Authors: Clark Andy
Published: June 2016

Recent work in cognitive science highlights the importance of exemplar- based know-how in supporting human expertise. Influenced by this model, certain accounts of moral knowledge now stress exemplarbased, non-sentential know-how at the expense of rule-and-principle based accounts. I shall argue, however, that moral thought and reason cannot be understood by reference to either of these roles alone. Moral cognition — like other forms of ‘advanced’ cognition — depends crucially on the subtle interplay and interaction of multiple factors and forces andespecially(or so I argue) between the use of linguistic tools and formulations and more biologically basic forms of thought and reason.
Darwin's Algorithm, Natural Selective History, and Intentionality Naturalized
Authors: Hanson Philip
Published: June 2016

Dan Dennett and Jerry Fodor have recently offered diametrically opposed estimations of the relevance of the theory of natural selection to an adequate theory of intentionality. In this paper, I show,first,how this opposition can be traced largely to differences both in their respective understandings of what the theory of natural selection includes, and in their respective ‘pre-theoretic’ takes on thedatumto be explained by a theory of intentionality. These differences, in tum, have been ‘pre-selected’ by contrasting outlooks on the general nature of the explanatory enterprise. While no final adjudication of these large issues is attempted, I argue,second,that it is important to distinguish two rather different questions about the relevance of natural selection to the nature of intentionality, and that, having done so, one can see that, from standpoints purelyinternalto their respective projects, Dennett and Fodor each in his own way misconstrues the relevance of natural selection.
Adapted Minds
Authors: Shapiro Larry
Published: June 2016

Minds are obscure things. This is especially obvious and especially onerous to those interested in understanding the mind. One way to begin an investigation of mind, given its abstruseness, is to explore the implications of something we believe must be true of minds. This is the approach I take in this paper. Whatever uncertainties we have about the mind, it's a safe bet that the mind is an adaptation. So, I begin with this truth about minds: minds are the product of evolution by natural selection. In what follows, I trace some of the consequences of this fact. Doing so will take us some distance toward answering a variety of questions about the mind.

In exploring the consequences of the mind's origin I will speak of the mind generally. While I grant that this adds an element of vagueness to the project at hand, it does not in any way cast doubt on the conclusions I draw. This is so because the inferences I make about minds follow not from any assumptions about the nature of mind but are derived purely from the nature of adaptation.
Teleosemantics and the Epiphenomenality of Content
Authors: Saidel Eric
Published: June 2016

The naturalistically inclined philosopher of mind faces two related challenges: (1) show how mental content could be part of the natural world, and (2) show how content can be one of the factors responsible for producing (causing) behaviour, that is, show that content is not epiphenomenal. One might pursue the first goal with the intent of showing that mental content is epiphenomenal, but it is more likely that the philosopher concerned with showing how content can be naturalized also expects content to be causally efficacious. Indeed, why pursue the first challenge while holding that content is epiphenomenal? Thus these two challenges overlap: show how content can be naturalized without making content epiphenomenal.
Our Knowledge of Colour
Authors: Matthen Mohan
Published: June 2016

Scientists are often bemused by the efforts of philosophers essaying a theory of colour: colour science sports a huge array of facts and theories, and it is unclear to its practitioners what philosophy can or is trying to contribute. Equally, philosophers tend to be puzzled about how they can fit colour science into their investigations without compromising their own disciplinary identity: philosophy is supposed to be an a priori investigation; philosophers do not work in psychophysics labs – not in their professional capacity, anyway.

These inter-disciplinary barriers arise out of misunderstanding. Philosophers should not so much attempt to contribute to empirical theories of colour, as to formulate philosophical theories of colour. Philosophy is concerned with appearance and reality, object and property, function and representation, and other such fundamental categories of ontology and epistemology. Philosophical theories attempt to fit colour into these categories; such theories do not compete with colour science. However, fitting colour into philosophical theories means dealing with colour as it really is – and one cannot know what it is without consulting the psychologists. That is why philosophers need an up-to-date understanding of psychological theories of colour.
Unmasking Descartes's Case for the Bête Machine Doctrine
Authors: Newman Lex
Published: June 2016

Among the more notorious of Cartesian doctrines is thebête machinedoctrine — the view that brute animals lack not only reason, but any form of consciousness (having no mind or soul). Recent English commentaries have served to obscure, rather than to clarify, the historical Descartes's views. Standard interpretations have it that insofar as Descartes intends to establish thebête machinedoctrine his arguments are palpably flawed. One camp of interpreters thus disputes that he even holds the doctrine. As I shall attempt to show, not only does Descartes affirm the doctrine, his supporting arguments are not palpably flawed — even if they ultimately come up short. It will indeed emerge that, in making his case, Descartes employs interesting argumentative strategies that have not been duly appreciated.
From the Nature of Persons to the Structure of Morality
Authors: Noggle Robert
Published: June 2016

Intuitionism—in some form or another—is the most widely recognized and thoroughly discussed method of justification for moral theories. It rests on the claim that a moral theory must not deviate too much from our pre-theoretical moral convictions (or at least those that we are prepared to hold on reflection). In some form or another, this methodology goes back at least as far as Aristotle, and has been discussed, refined, and defended by such contemporary philosophers as John Rawls and Norman Daniels.

There is, however, another methodology for constructing and defending moral theories. It draws on premises about human nature or the nature of persons to support conclusions about the nature and structure of morality. This method—which I will call thenature to morality methodology—evaluates a moral claim or moral theory on the basis of its relation to some (alleged) facts about the kind of beings we are. For brevity, I will use the term ‘nature-claims’ to refer to claims about human nature or the nature of persons, and the term ‘nature-facts’ to refer to true nature-claims. The nature-claims that have been used to support or criticize various moral theories include claims about human motivation, personal identity, the human soul, and the conceptual features of personhood or rational agency.
Consciousness, Experience, and Justification
Authors: Langsam Harold
Published: June 2016

A belief must have justification if it is to count as knowledge. And it is a commonplace thought that in certain circumstances experiences can serve as justifications for beliefs. Moreover, many have thought that there is something distinctive about the wayin which experiences justify beliefs, and that there is something distinctive about experiences which accounts for the distinctive way in which they justify beliefs. In this paper, I seek to elucidate views about experience and justification that can make sense of these thoughts and that can show us why so many have been attracted to them.

I think it is important to try to make sense of these thoughts concerning the justificatory role of experiences, for I suspect that we are losing the ability to see why philosophers have traditionally been attracted to such thoughts. Coherentism and reliabilism, perhaps the two most currently popular theories of epistemic justification, appear simply to reject the idea that experiences can justify beliefs.
Welfare and Outcome
Authors: Shaver Robert
Published: June 2016

In Inequality, Larry Temkin attacks ‘The Slogan’: ‘One Situation cannot be [morally] worse (or better) than another in any respect if there is no one for whom it is worse (or better) in any respect.’ Temkin notes that the Slogan has great intuitive appeal. It underlies, for example, the conviction that it is irrational to prefer a Pareto-inferior outcome; the transition from egalitarianism to the difference principle; Robert Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain example; defense of appropriation under the Lockean proviso; and Derek Parfit's Mere Addition Paradox. As an egalitarian, Temkin's main concern with the Slogan is the support it gives to the ‘leveling down objection’ to egalitarianism: the egalitarian finds it to be in some respect an improvement that the better-off are leveled down to the position of the worse-off, without any gain to the worse-off. The Slogan condemns this: leveling down cannot be better in any respect, since there is no one for whom it is better in any respect.
Origins Are Not Essences in Evolutionary Systematics
Authors: Matthen Mohan
Published: June 2016

Natural selection explains why humans have eyes: eyes are useful for getting around in an illuminated world; without them we would get around a lot less effectively, at much greater risk, and with a great deal less appreciation of potential mates. One might think, therefore, that natural selection explains why you or I—humans as we are—have eyes. But the inference has been contested by a number of able philosophers, starting with Elliott Sober and going to Joel Pust. The disputants divide as follows. Sober, Denis Walsh, and Pust hold that though natural selection explains why humans as a species have eyes, it doesn't explain why particular humans have them.
Varieties of Visual Representation
Authors: Dilworth John
Published: June 2016

By a ‘visual representation’ I mean roughly an item that is both visible itself, and which purports to represent some actual subject (that in paradigm cases is also visible), in such a way that the representing item is in some way similar to, or recognizable as, the purported actual subject; and which item has a representational content or subject matter that may or may not accurately characterize any actual subject. Pictorial representation is one species of visual representation. However, one of my main concerns in this paper will be to argue that there are no less than three additional varieties or species of visual representation, none of which are currently adequately recognized, and which together comprise a category of visual representation distinct from that of pictorial representation.
How Can Intentions Make Actions Rational?
Authors: Mintoff Joe
Published: June 2016

Rational agents, it seems, are capable of adopting intentions which make actions rational and which they would otherwise have no reason to do, or even have reason not to do. Howard Sobel imagines the following, uncontroversial but somewhat contrived, example: ‘I'll give you a nickel if you now intend to hand me the red [pencil] in five minutes. I'll give you the nickel now. I don't care if you do hand me the red one when the five minutes are up. The nickel will be yours whether or not you do that then, if you manage now to intend to do it then’ (Sobel, 242-3, emphasis in original).
Laws and Criteria
Authors: Bird Alexander
Published: June 2016

Debates concerning the analysis of the concept of law of nature must address the following problem. On the one hand, our grasp of laws of nature is via our knowledge of their instances. And this seems not only an epistemological truth but also a semantic one. The concept of a law of nature must be explicated in terms of the things that instantiate the law. It is not simply that a piece of metal that conducts electricity is evidence for a law that metals conduct electricity.
Feminism, Friendship, and Philosophy
Authors: Jeske Diane
Published: June 2016

In recent years, more and more philosophical work has come to be done under the rubric of ‘feminist philosophy.’ In particular, more and more work in philosophical ethics has come to be identified by both those who produce it and those who read it as within the domain of ‘feminist ethics.’ As a philosophical ethicist and a feminist, the question naturally arises as to whether I do feminist ethics. The question seems particularly natural in my case, because a great deal of my research has focussed on the nature of intimate relationships, the types of reasons to which such relationships give rise, and how moral theory ought to accommodate such relationships and their attendant reasons. Intimacy, after all, has been one of the areas to which feminist ethicists have paid a great deal of attention in their attempts to carve out a peculiarly’ feminist’ ethics, arguing that traditional or canonical theories need, at the very least, a great deal of revision if they are to respond appropriately to the ‘data’ acquired as the result of the inclusion and responsiveness to the experience of women.
From Human Nature to Moral Philosophy
Authors: Thalos Mariam
Published: June 2016

In recent times the conception of the human being, particularly in Western moral philosophy, has been of an intellectual center, installed in a biological vessel like a “ghost in the machine”—according to Gilbert Ryle's haunting image. To be sure the machine in this image is fashioned of biological matter and governed by biological laws, but it is also subject to the “higher” law of the will, no less than to fundamental laws of physics. It is also the manifest image of the self in Western society outside the academy—the image a person procures by dint of growing up in a distinctive human climate—the image that each of us, in an increasingly wider circle centered on Europe, must master if we are to maneuver successfully in the contemporary legal and social milieu. It makes some sense to invoke such an image for the purposes of certain traditional moral theories. For the image, or something very like it, easily renders talk of individual responsibility sensible.
Kant's Ethical Duties and their Feminist Implications
Authors: Denis Lara
Published: June 2016

If feminist ethics is to be “identified by its explicit commitment to challenging perceived male bias in ethics,” as Alison Jaggar states, then Kant's moral theory must be considered non-feminist. Indeed, many feminist philosophers have considered Kant's ethics to be anti-feminist. Some of these philosophers have noted such things as Kant's ascription, in his political theory, of all women to the class of passive citizens, and such reflections, in his writings about human nature, as “I hardly believe that the fair sex is capable of principles.” Other feminist critics have argued that Kant's ethics is scarred by male-bias at a fundamental level. For example, Sally Sedgwick has argued that Kant's conception of autonomous, rational agency, embodied in the categorical imperative's universal law tests, is inherently masculinist. Kant's ethics, however, has its feminist proponents as well. Jean Hampton endorses“ a Kantian conception of worth,” according to which “one must respect the value not only of others but also of oneself, and must therefore reject any roles, projects, or occupations which would be self-exploitative”; she develops her own “feminist form of Kantian contractarian theory” as an expression and elaboration of this Kantian notion of respect.
Equality Analysis in a Global Context: A Relational Approach
Authors: Koggel Christine M.
Published: June 2016

Samantha Brennan notes in her survey article, “Recent Works in Feminist Ethics,” that “the reshaping of moral concepts in light of feminist critiques of individualism and feminist development of relational alternatives represents significant progress in feminist ethics, indeed in ethics at large.” Two suggestions in this claim serve as a starting point for my application of a relational approach to inequalities in a global context. First, equality is a moral concept that has been and continues to be central to Western liberal theory. The global context reveals liberalism's dominance on the world scene as well as increases in inequalities of wealth both within and across borders. I claim that this context calls for renewed vigilance in the “reshaping of moral concepts” that are central to liberal theory. To clarify, I do not argue that feminists must work with these concepts. Rather I hold that some concepts, one of them being equality, have enduring moral value and this makes continued feminist analyses of them important, particularly in the contemporary global context.
The Motive of Duty and the Nature of Emotions: Kantian Reflections on Moral Worth
Authors: Weber Michael
Published: June 2016

It is unclear in the Groundwork exactly what Kant takes to be necessary for an act to be morally good or worthy. Traditionally it has been thought that for Kant there are two conditions: it is 1) done in accord with duty, or the moral law, and 2) done for the sake of duty alone. The second condition is commonly thought to entail that an act is not morally good if the agent has a ‘supporting inclination’ or desire to do what is right — be it an inclination of self-interest, or one stemming from some emotion of ‘fellow feeling,’ such as sympathy, compassion, or love. Recent Interpreters, however, claim that Kant is not so strict, because for him the mere presence of a supporting inclination does not necessarily impugn the moral goodness of a dutiful act.
Reidian Moral Perception
Authors: Cuneo Terence
Published: June 2016

It is a common antirealist strategy to reject realism about some domain of entities for broadly epistemological reasons. When this strategy is applied to realism about moral facts, it takes something like the following form:

The moral realist believes that there are full-blooded, irreducible moral facts. But if there are moral facts of this sort, then we shall have no plausible story to tell about how we have epistemic access to them. After all, how can facts about what ought to be the case impinge upon our cognitive faculties so as to produce the corresponding states of knowledge? Indeed, rather than give us any plausible story about how we have epistemic access to moral facts, the realist posits a moral faculty by which we are supposed to ‘intuit’ or ‘see’ moral facts. But in doing so, the realist offers us an overly mysterious epistemology in addition to an already mysterious ontology. But any good theory ought not to multiply mysteries. So, all other things being equal, we ought to reject moral realism.
Logic, Vagueness, and the Use Theory
Authors: Daniel Steven G.
Published: June 2016

In numerous essays over the years, and most recently in his Meaning, Paul Horwich has worked to articulate and defend a version of the use theory of meaning. At the heart of his project is the idea that the meaning of a word is constituted by a regularity in speakers’ use of it — i.e., by a regularity in speakers’ dispositions to accept as true, to reject as false, or neither to accept nor to reject sentences containing it. A ‘use regularity,’ thus construed, is a dispositional acceptance property distinctive of a particular word and, derivatively, of sentences containing the word.
Political Legitimacy and the Duty to Obey the Law
Authors: Durning Patrick
Published: June 2016

A growing number of political and legal theorists deny that there is a widespread duty to obey the law. This has lent a sense of urgency to recent disagreements about whether a state's legitimacy depends upon its ‘subjects’’ having a duty to obey the law. On one side of the disagreement, John Simmons, Robert Paul Wolff, David Copp, Hannah Pitkin, Leslie Green, George Klosko, and Joseph Raz hold that a state could only be legitimate if the vast majority of its subjects have a duty to obey the law. On the other side, M.B.E. Smith, Jeffrey Reiman, Kent Greenawalt, Christopher Morris, Rolf Sartorius, Jeremy Waldron, Christopher Wellman, William Edmundson and Allen Buchanan claim that a state could be legitimate even if its subjects lacked a duty to obey the law.

This disagreement contains two separate disputes. One is a linguistic dispute about the meaning of ‘legitimacy,’ or about what it means to call something a ‘legitimate state.’ The other is a Substantive dispute about whether the various aspects of legitimacy are linked together. Since discussing the linguistic dispute will help us examine the Substantive dispute, let us consider it first.
Kant on Sensibility and the Understanding in the 1770s
Authors: Laywine Alison
Published: June 2016

The Duisburg Nachlaβ is a bundle of Kant's handwritten notes (R4674- 4684 in volume 17 of the Academy Edition). These notes almost certainly go back to some time in 1775. Though very obscure, they replay issues in Kant's early metaphysics just as clearly as they anticipate issues in the Critique of Pure Reason. This makes them an important way-station in Kant's philosophical development — all the more important, because he published nothing in the 1770s and left no other extended writings in his own hand. A proper understanding of the Duisburg Nachlaβ might therefore explain some of Kant's later ideas: their origins in his earlier thinking and their philosophical motivations. The purpose of this paper is to lay the groundwork for such an explanation—at least a partial one. I shall argue that Kant's efforts in the Duisburg Nachlaβ to correct certain difficulties in the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 anticipate and naturally lead to the crucial claim in the Critique of Pure Reason that the understanding legislates laws to nature (A125-128; B163-165).
Reconsidering Structural Realism
Authors: McArthur Dan
Published: June 2016

In the lengthy debate over the question of scientific realism one of the least discussed positions is structural realism. However, this position ought to attract critical attention because it purports to preserve the central insights of the best arguments for both realism and anti-realism. John Worrall has in fact described it as being ‘the best of both worlds’ that recognizes the discontinuous nature of scientific change as well as the ‘no-miracles’ argument for scientific realism. However, the validity of this claim has been called into question by Stathis Psillos. He questions its ability to correctly account for the examples of scientific change that its supporters, like Worrall (following Poincaré), claim ought to be understood in a structural realist light.

In this paper I examine these arguments for and against structural realism and demonstrate that neither Worrall nor Psillos is fully correct. I agree with Psillos’ claim that realism with regards to a theory ought not to be ‘all or nothing,’ that one should not always take the whole of a theory to be true or else commit only to the belief in its directly empirical content.
Non-Cognitivist Pragmatics and Stevenson's ‘Do so as well!’
Authors: Ridge Michael
Published: June 2016

Meta-ethical non-cognitivism makes two claims—a negative one and a positive one. The negative claim is that moral utterances do not express beliefs which provide the truth-conditions for those utterances. The positive claim is that the primary function of such utterances is to express certain of the speaker's desire-like states of mind. Non-cognitivism is officially a theory about the meanings of moral words, but non-cognitivists also maintain that moral states of mind are themselves at least partially constituted by desire-like states to which moral utterances give voice. Non-cognitivists need a plausible account of what distinguishes whims, addictions and cravings from genuinely moral judgments. For while non-cognitivists maintain that in a suitably broad sense moral judgments just are constituted by desire-like states they also insist that not any old desire constitutes a genuinely moral judgment. Since the challenge is to demarcate what is distinctive about moral attitudes we might usefully call this the demarcation challenge.
Phenomenological Claims and the Myth of the Given
Authors: Roy Jean-Michel
Published: June 2016

Over the past twenty years, Husserlian phenomenology has increasingly drawn the attention of the cognitive community, thereby leading to the emergence of what might be called a phenomenological trend within contemporary cognitive studies. What this phenomenological trend really amounts to is however a matter of debate. The reason is that it embodies, in fact, a multifaceted reflection about the relevance of Husserlian phenomenology to the current efforts towards a scientific theory of cognition, and, to a lesser degree, about the reciprocal relevance of these efforts to the fate of the Husserlian tradition. Indeed, it covers a wide array of perspectives on these questions, ranging from tentative demonstrations of the cognitively misleading character of Husserl's ideas, inasmuch as they would incarnate the same foundational errors as cognitivism (Hall and Dreyfus 1982), to diametrically opposed views arguing that the naturalist bent of contemporary cognitive science is ill-conceived, and that only the brand of transcendentalism defended by Husserl can provide it with adequate foundations (cf., for instance, Villela-Petit 1999).
Intentionality and Phenomenality: A Phenomenological Take on the Hard Problem
Authors: Zahavi Dan
Published: June 2016

In his bookThe Conscious MindDavid Chalmers introduced a now-familiar distinction between the hard problem and the easy problems of consciousness. The easy problems are those concerned with the question of how the mind can process information, react to environmental stimuli, and exhibit such capacities as discrimination, categorization, and introspection (Chalmers 1996, 4; 1995, 200). All of these abilities are impressive, but they are, according to Chalmers, not metaphysically baffling, since they can all be tackled by means of the standard repertoire of cognitive science and explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. This task might still be difficult, but it is within reach. In contrast, the hard problem — also known astheproblem of consciousness (Chalmers 1995, 201) — is the problem of explaining why mental states have phenomenal or experiential qualities. Why is it like something to ‘taste coffee,’ to ‘touch an ice cube,’ to ‘look at a sunset,’ etc.? Why does it feel the way it does? Why does it feel like anything at all?
Neurophenomenology and the Spontaneity of Consciousness
Authors: Hanna Robert , Thompson Evan
Published: June 2016

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really
intractable (Nagel1980, p. 150).

My reading of the situation is that our inability to come up
with an intelligible conception of the relation between mind and
body is a sign of the inadequacy of our present concepts, and that
some development is needed (Nagel1998, p. 338).

Mind itself is a spatiotemporal pattern that molds the
metastable dynamic patterns of the brain (Kelso 1995, p.
288).
Empathy and Openness: Practices of Intersubjectivity at the Core of the
Science of Consciousness
Authors: Depraz Natalie , Cosmelli Diego
Published: June 2016

The general framework of this paper relies on the observation that the
practice of science as an experimental research program involves a social
network of subjects working together (Latour 1988; Stengers 1994), both as
co-researchers and as co-subjects of experiments. We want to take this basic
observation seriously in order to explore how the objectivity of scientific
results obtained thereby is highly affected and dependent on multifarious
‘intersubjective regulations.’ By intersubjective regulations we mean the
different ways in which each subject/ researcher is able to account for his
or her experience and share it with other subjects/researchers (comparing
it, differentiating between each of them, seeing similarities and even
identities, but also producing conflictive accounts) to the point of giving
way to a re-styled objectivity founded on such ruled inter-individual
practices (Husserl1954, 1973; Depraz 1995; Varela 1999):

More specifically, ‘third-person’ protocols are not neutral,
that is, true independently of the very situatedness of each subject
in its own individuated space and time (Bitbol 2002), but must take
into consideration ‘first-person’ accounts and furthermore are
inherently dependent on specific ‘second-person’
validations.
Berkeley's Epistemic Ontology: The Principles
Authors: Flage Daniel E.
Published: June 2016

Since the Mind, in all its Thoughts and Reasonings, hath no other immediate Object but its own Ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident, that our Knowledge is only conversant about them. (Locke, Essay 4.1.1)

Berkeley's Principles is a curious work. The nominal topic is epistemic. The actual topic is ontological. And it is not uncommon to suggest that ‘Berkeley's System presents us with unique puzzles, particularly at its foundation.’

If, as many commentators suggest, Berkeley's principal arguments for idealism are weak, this might suggest that we are approaching his works from a set of assumptions Berkeley did not share. In this paper I explore such a possibility.
The Context-Insensitivity of ‘Knowing More’ and ‘Knowing Better’
Authors: Douven Igor
Published: June 2016

This paper argues that if epistemological contextualism is correct, then not only have knowledge-ascribing sentences context-sensitive truth conditions, certain comparative and superlative constructions involving ‘know’ have context-sensitive truth conditions as well. But not only is there no evidence for the truth of the latter consequence, the evidence seems to indicate that it is false.

The position I aim to criticize has been defended by, most notably, Stewart Cohen, Keith DeRose, and David Lewis. While the contextualist theories offered by these authors differ in their details, the problem to be presented seems to arise irrespective of these details. And though in most of the illustrations below I rely on Lewis's account, I could have made essentially the same points in terms of any of the other accounts.