bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Remarks on Relational Theories of Motion
Authors: Earman John
Published: June 2016

In a recent article in this journal, Barbara Lariviere offers a very useful distinction between two ways of understanding the claims that Leibniz, or relational theorists in general, might wish to make about the nature of motion and the structure of space and time; viz.,

(L1) There is no real inertial structure to space-time.

and

(L2) There is a real inertial structure to space-time, but it is dynamical rather than absolute.

Citing the authority of Weyl, the author argues that L1 is untenable; indeed, the argument purports to show that if L1 were true, then there would be no coherent basis for a theory of motion, not even a relational theory. My main goal in this note is to point out why this argument is mistaken while at the same time sketching the real reason why the relational conception of motion is untenable. In addition I will offer a few remarks about the relevance of L2 to the absolute-relational controvery.
Descartes’ Exercises
Authors: Vendler Zeno
Published: June 2016

The influence of St. Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises on Descartes’ work, including the Meditations, has been recognized and discussed by many historians. I just mention a few fairly recent and easily accessible instances. In The Metaphysics of Descartes (Oxford: Clarendon 1965), J. L. Beck suggests that the literary form of the Meditations is most likely due to the Ignatian meditations to which Descartes had been exposed during his training at the Jesuit college of LaFlèche (31). Arthur Thomson in ‘Ignace de Loyola et Descartes’ traces some elements in Descartes’ method and psychology to Ignatian sources, mainly focusing on the Discourse.
Subjective Justification
Authors: de Pierris Graciela
Published: June 2016

I wish to discuss in this paper some of the problems involved in determining whether subjects on particular occasions are justified in coming to believe a proposition. I will argue that in attributing actual justification to a particular subject–subjective justification–we have to take into account factual-psychological questions and that these are the source of fundamental difficulties. These factual-psychological questions concern the beliefs someone uses in the process of acquiring another belief and the actual connections she makes among her beliefs.

But why should epistemologists be interested in making attributions of actual justification to particular subjects? After all, if the central goal of epistemology is to guide us in choosing rational strategies for supporting our beliefs, or to assess whether theories are well grounded or acceptable, epistemologists should be concerned with the justification a theory or proposition might have independently of anyone actually coming to believe it. This may be so, but it has to be shown that it is so. Moreover, the consideration of the factual-psychological questions involved in attributions of subjective justification seems to be necessary in some recent hybrid forms of naturalized epistemology. I call them ‘hybrid’ because, unlike Quine’s naturalized epistemology, they include in the epistemological task more than naturalistic explanations of how we acquire our language and beliefs. Besides taking into consideration the actual processes of our coming to believe or accept sentences, they also make use of epistemic notions like justification, warrant, relevant or right connection among beliefs, and so forth.
Consequentialism and History
Authors: Gomberg Paul
Published: June 2016

John Stuart Mill wrote in the opening chapter ofUtilitarianism, ‘A test of right and wrong must be the means, one would think, of ascertaining what is right or wrong,’ thus explaining why he thought the work to follow was practically important. In Chapter 3, ‘On the Ultimate Sanction of the Principle of Utility,’ he answers the question, ‘What are the motives to obey the principle of utility?’ This principle is presented as a morality to beadopted. Yet before the nineteenth century was over Henry Sidgwick was proposing that it may well be best, from a utilitarian view, that the utilitarian doctrine is not too widely adopted. Perhaps it should be an esoteric morality.

Moreover, Sidgwick argues, it seems contrary to self interest to adhere to an impartially benevolent morality. Devotion to utilitarian duty seems to require that the agent sacrifice his or her own happiness in a devotion to the relief of others that can only ‘partially mitigate’ their distress (502-3). Such a morality seems impossibly demanding. Sidgwick’s argument challenges Mill's claim that there is an adequate sanction for adoption of utilitarian morality.
Rationality and Alienation
Authors: Ripstein Arthur
Published: June 2016

Two decades ago, problems of alienation and fetishism were the focus of most English speaking studies of Marx’s philosophy. More recent work on Marx and Marxist themes has tended to avoid these questions in favor of discussions of explanation, exploitation, distributive justice and problems of class formation and co-ordination. The latter set of problems seem more readily addressable, if not always more tractable, using contemporary tools drawn from the philosophy of science, as well as methods of decision theory, game theory, and welfare economics. But the change in emphasis has not been without costs; gains in clarity and rigor have come at the price of abandoning Marx's most fundamental criticism of capitalism as a way of life. I shall argue that it is no coincidence that the shift to ‘rational choice’ Marxism has had precisely that cost.
Kitcher’s Circumlocutionary Structuralism
Authors: Hand Michael
Published: June 2016

Philip Kitcher has proposed an account of mathematical truth which he hopes avoids platonistic commitment to abstract mathematical objects. His idea is that the truth-conditions of mathematical statements consist in certain general structural features of physical reality. He codifies these structural features by reference to various operations which are performable on objects: the world is structured in such a way that these operations are possible. Which operations are performable cannot be known a priori; rather, we hypothesize, conjecture, idealize, and eventually wind up with theories which are true of the world (taking into account our idealizations), just as we do in the sciences. Kitcher argues that mathematical and physical knowledge are continuous, in that they concern the same subject matter (the physical world) and are subject to the same epistemological and methodological constraints.
Weakness of Will as a Species of Executive Cowardice
Authors: Swanton Christine
Published: June 2016

In this paper, I am concerned to show that a wide and interesting range of phenomena commonly described as ‘weakness of will’ should be understood as manifesting a defect of what I shall call ‘executive cowardice’ rather than a strong kind of irrationality. More specifically, I claim that such cases should not be understood as an irrational bypassing of an all-things-considered judgment about the thing to do—a view succinctly described by Peacocke thus:

The akrates is irrational because although he intentionally does something for which he has some reason, there is a wider set of reasons he has relative to which he does not judge what he does to be rational.
Government in Foucault
Authors: Allen Barry
Published: June 2016

The forms and specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. (Foucault [SP, 224])

According to a commonplace in the critical discussion of Foucault's later work, he is supposed to have decided to take up Nietzsche's interpretation of power asWille zur Macht, ‘will to power.’ For instance, Habermas believes he has criticized Foucault when he says, ‘Nietzsche’s authority, from which this [Foucault’s] utterly unsociological concept of power is borrowed, is not enough to justify its systematic usage.’ Charles Taylor finds in Nietzsche ‘a doctrine which Foucault seems to have made his own,’ viz., that ‘there is no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life.
Aristotle and Aquinas on Cognition
Authors: Owens Joseph
Published: June 2016

There is little need today to be apologetic about making Aristotle the basis for a philosophical discussion on human cognition. Interest in the Stagirite is in fact on the upsurge: interest in Aristotle not merely as a great thinker who lived in a particular epoch of time, but more pointedly as a philosopher who has much to offer for the promotion of serious thinking in our own day. In this regard I might merely refer to some straws that are indicative of the direction in which the winds are blowing. One was a series of four lectures given by Richard Sorabji in the spring of 1990 at the University of Toronto, in which the relevance of Aristotle for understanding current philosophical problems became strikingly apparent to those who listened to or took part in the discussions. Another was the conference held at the University of Alberta the same year on Aristotle and his medieval commentators. A third is the reprinting of John Herman Randall’s book Aristotle, which is scheduled to appear shortly in the collection entitled The Easton Press Library of Great Lives.
Aristotle and the Sacrament of the Altar: A Crisis in Medieval Aristotelianism
Authors: Adams Marilyn McCord
Published: June 2016

In the Anglican theological circles in which I move, the doctrine of transubstantiation is apt to be declared guilty by association with its Aristotelian underpinnings, most notably its ‘out-moded’ substanceaccident ontology. These negative assessments, based as they usually are on cursory acquaintance with the theory’s most enthusiastic medieval exponent, Thomas Aquinas, abstract from historical complications. For eleventh-century theologians had already debated the manner of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist: whether it was merely symbolic (as Berengar of Tours was accused of holding) and/or spiritual (as some passages of St. Augustine would suggest); or whether the Body and Blood of Christ were really present in the Eucharist under the forms of bread and wine? Once the Church pronounced in favor of ‘the real presence,’ several competing theories were advanced to explain it: (i) ‘impanation,’ according to which the Body of Christ assumed the substance of the bread, the way the Divine Word assumes Christ’s human nature; (ii) ‘annihilation,’ according to which the substance of the bread is annihilated; (iii) ‘consubstantiation,’ which stipulates that the substance of the bread remains and the Body of Christ coexists with it; and (iv) ‘transubstantiation,’ which says the bread is neither annihilated nor remains, but is converted into the Body of Christ.
A Riddle Regarding Omissions
Authors: Haji Ishtiyaque
Published: June 2016

John Martin Fischer has recently proposed that actions and omissions are asymmetric with respect to the requirement of alternative possibilities for moral responsibility: whereas moral responsibility for an action does not require freedom to refrain from performing the action, moral responsibility for failure to perform an action does require freedom to perform the action. In what follows, I first critically assess Fischer's asymmetry principle. In arguing against the principle, I raise some concerns about Fischer's association of responsibility with control. I then motivate a riddle regarding omissions: some cases appear to show that a person is not responsible for failing to bring about something in virtue of the fact that the person could not bring about that thing. Other cases, though, seemingly show that a person is responsible for failing to bring about something even though the person could not bring about that thing. What explains the asymmetry in responsibility attributions in these cases involving omissions? Third, I consider some answers to this riddle and explain why they are inadequate. Finally, I sketch my own answer.
The Constitutive A Priori
Authors: De Pierris Graciela
Published: June 2016

The modem rationalist tradition initiated by Descartes has as one of its central tenets the independence of the human understanding from the senses. Regardless of the different ways in which independence from experience is understood, there is much common ground among the modem views on the a priori. Yet Kant, culminating this tradition, introduces an entirely new conception of the a priori never before articulated in the history of philosophy. This is the notion of elements in knowledge which are independent of experience but nevertheless closely connected, in a special way, with experience.

Although for Kant the a priori has a privileged position in the structure of knowledge - as it has for other modem rationalist philosophers - one of the most striking, and often neglected, aspect of his conception of the a priori is the great extent to which it is opposed to foundationalism.
The Concept of a Cause of the Universe
Authors: Smith Quentin
Published: June 2016

I shall argue in this paper that extant definitions of causality are incorrect since they do not cohere in the proper way with the concept of a cause of the universe. This lack of coherence is twofold. (i) For some extant definitions of a cause, there are possible instances of the concept of a cause of the universe that do not satisfy the definitions. (ii) For these or other extant definitions, there are entities or occurrences (in some possible world) that are not instances of the concept of a cause of the universe but that count as causes of the universe according to the definitions. This failure of coherence between extant definitions of causality and the concept of a cause of the universe entails either that there is some other (as yet unformulated) definition of a cause that is correct or that causality is indefinable. I shall suggest in the conclusion of this paper that it is more plausible to believe that causality is indefinable.
History and Personal Autonomy
Authors: Mele Alfred
Published: June 2016

John Christman, in ‘Autonomy and Personal History,’ advances a novel genetic or historical account of individual autonomy. He formulates ‘the conditions of the [i.e., his] new model of autonomy’ as follows:

(i) A person P is autonomous relative to some desire D if it is the case that P did not resist the development of D when attending to this process of development, or Pwould not haveresisted that development had P attended to the process;

(ii) The lack of resistance to the development of D did not take place (or would not have) under the influence of factors that inhibit self-reflection;

and

(iii) The self-reflection involved in condition (i) [sic] is (minimally) rational and involves no self-deception. (11)
Virtues and Vices of Virtue Epistemology
Authors: Greco John
Published: June 2016

In recent years, virtue epistemology has won the attention of a wide range of philosophers. A developed form of the position has been expounded forcefully by Ernest Sosa and represents the most plausible version of reliabilism to date. Through the person of Alvin Plantinga, virtue epistemology has taken philosophy of religion by storm, evoking objections and defenses in a wide variety of journals and volumes. Historically, virtue epistemology has its roots in the work of Thomas Reid, and the explosion of Reid scholarship in the last few years is perhaps both a cause and an effect of recent interest in the position.

In this paper I want to examine the virtues and vices of virtue epistemology. My conclusion will be that the position is correct, when qualified appropriately. The central claim of virtue epistemology is that, Gettier problems aside, knowledge is true belief which results from a cognitive virtue. In section one I will clarify this claim with some brief remarks about the nature of virtues in general, and cognitive virtues in particular. In section two I will consider two objections to the theory of knowledge which results. In section three of the paper I will argue that virtue epistemology can be qualified so as to avoid the objections raised in section two. Finally, I will argue that the amendments which solve the objections of section two also allow us to solve a version of the dreaded generality problem.
Deconstruction and Reconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory1
Authors: McCarthy Thomas
Published: June 2016

There is widespread agreement among critical theorists that reason has to be understood as culturally mediated and interwoven with social practice. The embeddedness and variability of basic categories, principles, standards, and procedures mean that the critique of reason has henceforth to be carried out in conjunction with social, cultural, and historical analysis. We can no longer hope to fathom its 'nature, scope, and limits' through an introspective survey of the contents of consciousness, but have to study the acts and products, utterances and texts, practices and institutions in which it is embodied. That is to say, 'self-reflection' has now to proceed through the interpretation and critique of the socio-historical world.
Lewis on ‘Might’ and ‘Would’ Counterfactual Conditionals
Authors: DeRose Keith
Published: June 2016

Letting denote ‘would’ counterfactual conditionals like

(A) If I had looked in my pocket, I would have found a penny and letting denote ‘might’ counterfactual conditionals like

(B) If I had looked in my pocket, I might have found a penny,

David Lewis’s thesis (LT) regarding the connection between these two types of conditionals is that
Religion's ‘Foundation in Reason’: The Common Sense of Hume's Natural History
Authors: Ferreira M. Jamie
Published: June 2016

David Hume’s critique of religion reveals what seems to be a vacillation in his commitment to an argument-based paradigm of legitimate believing. On the one hand, Hume assumes such a traditional (argumentbased) model of rational justification of beliefs in order to point to the weakness of some classical arguments for religious belief (e.g., the design argument), to chastise the believer for extrapolating to a conclusion which outstrips its evidential warrant. On the other hand, Hume, ‘mitigated’ or naturalist skeptic that he is, at other times rejects an argumentbased paradigm of certainty and truth, and so sees as irrelevant the traditional or ‘regular’ model of rational justification; he places a premium on instinctive belief, as both unavoidable and (usually) more reliable than reasoning. On this view, a forceful critique of religion would have to fault it, not for failing to meet criteria of rational argument (failing to proportion belief to the evidence), but (as Hume sometimes seems to) for failing to be the right sort of instinct.
Evil and Explanation
Authors: Sturgeon Nicholas L.
Published: June 2016

In the first part of this paper I want to consider the relation between two familiar philosophical views that have not to my knowledge been considered in any depth together, even by philosophers who are well known for defending each separately. These views have a certain natural affinity, in that each has been attractive to philosophers of a generally naturalistic bent. Thus, since I intend to argue that there is a difficulty in reconciling them, I will be pointing out a difficulty, not, I think, in philosophical naturalism, but nevertheless in one package often accepted by naturalists. One of the views is that the problem of evil is, at the very least, a serious theoretical difficulty for theism. The other is nihilism about value, the thesis that there are no real values in the world and that statements ascribing values to things are never true. I hope it is obvious why there is at least aprima faciedifficulty in combining these views: how can someone who thinks that nothing is really good or evil also think that we find in the world more evil than we would expect if theism were correct?
Are Thought Experiments Just What You Thought?
Authors: Norton John D.
Published: June 2016

Whatever the original intent, the introduction of the term ‘thought experiment’ has proved to be one of the great public relations coups of science writing. For generations of readers of scientific literature, the term has planted the seed of hope that the fragment of text they have just read is more than mundane. Because it was a thought experiment, does it not tap into that infallible font of all wisdom in empiricist science, the experiment? And because it was conducted in thought, does it not miraculously escape the need for the elaborate laboratories and bloated budgets of experimental science?

These questions in effect pose the epistemological problem of thought experiments in the sciences:

Thought experiments are supposed to give us information about our physical world. From where can this information come?

One enticing response to the problem is to imagine that thought experiments draw from some special source of knowledge of the world that transcends our ordinary epistemic resources.
Monkish Virtues, Artificial Lives: On Hume's Genealogy of Morals
Authors: Lottenbach Hans
Published: June 2016

The merchant's toil, the sage's indolence,

The monk's humility, the hero's pride,

All, all alike, find Reason on their side.

(Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle II, 172-4)

Hume's moral philosophy is often interpreted as an example of a naturalistic approach to ethics. J.L. Mackie, for instance, writes that in Hume the questions of moral philosophy are answered ‘in sociological and psychological terms, by constructing and defending a causal hypothesis.’ Similarly, Páll S. Árdal claims that Hume ‘is concerned with an attempt to discover those psychological laws that explain human emotions (including moral emotions) and the behaviour of people in society.’ I argue in this essay that if Hume is read in this way as developing a general explanatory theory of moral sentiments, he faces an inescapable dilemma. Section I presents the dilemma. In sections II and ill, I argue why for Hume — interpreted as a proponent of general psychological laws — there is no way out of this dilemma.
On Singular Propositions
Authors: Cartwright Richard L.
Published: June 2016

A designator a of an object x is rigid in Kripke's sense if and only if (i) for every possible world w, if x exists in w, then a designates x with respect to w and (ii) there is no possible world with respect to which a designates something other than x. Alternatively, but to the same effect, a is rigid just in case neither the sentence:

a might have existed and not have been a

nor the sentence:

Something other than a might have been a

has an interpretation on which it is true. This alternative seems to me preferable: the concept of designation with respect to a world is difficult and occasions certain problems (about which something will be said later), but these problems do not arise on this explanation.
How Ethnic Enmities End
Authors: Moore Barrington
Published: June 2016

This essay will discuss the feelings and behaviour of presumably oppressed ethnic, national, and religious minorities. I will set aside definitions of ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ for the moment, trusting that their meaning will become clear as the argument proceeds. The literature on this topic is, of course, enormous. I once pressed the button for ‘nationalism’ on Widener's new computer catalogue and got back the answer that there were some four thousand items on this topic in Widener's holdings. That response brought to mind a remark of Anton Chekhov, who was trained as a doctor. He said that if a disease has many cures, that is a sign that the disease is incurable. Perhaps we should transfer this little gem of wisdom to the social sciences and history. If there are many books about a problem, that is a sign that the problem is insoluble.
Noumenal Causality Reconsidered: Affection, Agency, and Meaning in Kant
Authors: Westphal Kenneth R.
Published: June 2016

The lead question of Kant's firstCritique,indeed his whole Critical Philosophy is ‘How is Metaphysics as a Science Possible?’ Neo-Kantian and recent Anglophone interpretations of Kant's epistemology have concentrated on the ‘Transcendental Analytic’ of the firstCritique,and have taken Kant's positive and legitimate sense of metaphysics to concern the necessary conditions of our knowledge of mathematics, natural science, and of course, our common sense knowledge of a spatio-temporal world of objects and events. However, in the ‘Canon of Pure Reason’ in the firstCritiqueKant indicates quite clearly that, although two of the leading sub-questions of metaphysics — ‘What should I so?’ and ‘What may I hope?’ — cannot be answered on theoretical grounds, they may be answered on practical grounds (A804-05=B832-33). Those practical grounds are elaborated and supplemented (mainly) in the latter twoCritiquesand theReligion.In each case, however, a definite and positive answer to a metaphysical question involves giving ‘objective reality’ to a concept, e.g., the concepts of freedom or immortality. ‘Objective reality’ involves possible reference to an object, where ‘possible reference’ involves more than merely describing a logical possibility.
Kantian Tunes on a Humean Instrument: Why Hume is not Really a Skeptic About Practical Reasoning
Authors: Radcliffe Elizabeth S.
Published: June 2016

The theory that practical reasoning is wholly instrumental says that the only practical function of reason is to tell agents the means to their ends, while their ends are fixed by something other than reason itself. In this essay I argue that Hume has an instrumentalist theory of practical reasoning. This thesis may sound as unexciting as the contention that Kant is a rationalist about morality. For who would have thought otherwise? After all, isn't the ‘instrumentalist’ line in contemporary discussions of this topic descended directly from Hume himself? Contrast the following recent comment from Robert Audi's book on practical reasoning, holding the standard line, with the comment from Christine Korsgaard following it:

Hume's conception of practical reasoning, so far as we can formulate it, can be located within … the foundationalist account of motivation in which reason plays the instrumentalist role … by virtue of arousing and directing our desires.
Toleration and the Skeptical Inquirer in Locke
Authors: Black Sam
Published: June 2016

It is a noteworthy achievement of Western liberal democracies that they have largely relinquished the use of force against citizens whose lifestyles offend their members’ sensibilities, or alternatively which violate their members’ sense of truth. Toleration has become a central virtue in our public institutions. Powerful majorities are given over to restraint. They do not, by and large, expect the state to crush eccentrics, nonconformists, and other uncongenial minorities in their midst. What precipitated this remarkable evolution in our political culture?

The road to toleration originates in the debates provoked by religious dissent in the early modem period. This road was paved in part by a grudging appreciation of the necessity forpragmaticaccommodation. The wars of religion that had devastated the Continent educated the political classes about the costs of persecution. A policy of state-imposed religious intolerance was widely understood to beimprudent.

In the early modem period there occurs, however, a shift in the arguments adduced in support of the duty of toleration.
Cognitivism and Explanantory Relativity
Authors: Hershfield Jeffrey
Published: June 2016

In much of his writing in the philosophy of mind, John Searle has been highly critical of what N. Block refers to as ‘The Computer Model of the Mind’ — the approach that treats the mind as a symbol-manipulating device akin in spirit, if not detail, to the modem computer. Searle refers to this philosophical approach as ‘cognitivism.’ The extent of his skepticism and animus toward the computer model of the mind is plainly apparent in the following quotation from Searle: ‘I used to believe that as a causal account, the cognitivist's theory was at least false, but I am now having difficulty formulating a version of it that is coherent even to the point where it could be an empirical thesis at all’ (The Rediscovery of the Mind [Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1992], 215). In what follows, I shall attempt to show that this charge of incoherence is unfounded.
Truth and Ends in Dewey's Pragmatism
Authors: Richardson Henry S.
Published: June 2016

Dewey's voluminous writings, spanning decades and reflecting the contrasting national moods of different historical periods, abound with tensions, not to say contradictions. In highlighting and working with a conflict within Dewey's commitments, then, I do not mean to be catching him out or correcting a mistake. The tension on which I focus is one with which he struggled for most of his philosophical career and one that he never satisfactorily resolved, yet it is also one that goes to the heart of what it is to be a pragmatist. It involves the role of final ends in a philosophy that places practical reasoning at the heart of all knowledge. I will argue that while Dewey had powerful philosophical prejudices that prevented him from adequately dealing with this problem himself, a solution is nonetheless forthcoming that maintains, and perhaps even deepens, the main themes of his pragmatism. Setting out this solution will lead me, in the end, to a novel formulation of the pragmatist theory of truth.
A Pragmatist Theory of Convergence
Authors: Heath Joseph
Published: June 2016

One of the defining characteristics of pragmatism over the years has been its commitment to the primacy of practical over theoretical rationality. This has often been motivated by doubts about the adequacy of the “representationalist paradigm” that has dominated philosophy of mind and epistemology in the modern period. Thus, many pragmatists have sought to replace the notion of representation with one or another explanatory concept derived from the analysis of action or behaviour. But this strategy has encountered persistent difficulties, and precisely where one might expect. Without some primitive notion of representation, it is difficult to provide an account of the conceptualcontentof our beliefs, the standards ofcorrectnessthat govern our practices of inference, or the expectation ofconvergencethat informs scientific inquiry. These difficulties, which pertain to the analysis of meaning, justification, and truth respectively, have done a lot to keep pragmatism more a set of promissory notes than a coherent philosophical program.
Autonomy beyond Voluntarism: In Defense of Hierarchy
Authors: Cuypers Stefaan E.
Published: June 2016

We haveconflictingpre-philosophical intuitions about what it means ‘to be true to ourselves.’ On the one hand, autonomy and authenticity seem closely connected to the lucidity of reflectiveness; on the other, they seem tightly interwoven with the immediacy of unreflectiveness. As opposed to a ‘Platonic’ intuition about the inferiority of the unexamined life, we have an equally strong ‘Nietzschean’ intuition about the corrosiveness of the examined life. Broadly speaking, the first intuition is more akin to the tradition of the Enlightenment, and the second, more to that of Romanticism; the one is reminiscent of Descartes and Hume, the other of Rousseau and Herder.

The use of the technical term ‘autonomy’ and the concomitant term ‘self’ is primarily limited to philosophy, while in daily life ‘freedom’ and ‘person,’ respectively, are used instead. Unfortunately, in their deployment of these technical terms philosophers have generally failed to acknowledge the two modes of ‘being true to ourselves’ associated with the Enlightenment and Romanticism, for they usually employ the concept of autonomy in a unitary way.
Four Epistemological Challenges to Ethical Naturalism: Naturalized Epistemology and the First-Person Perspective
Authors: Copp David
Published: June 2016

Ethical naturalism is the doctrine that moral properties, such as moral goodness, justice, rightness, wrongness, and the like, are among the “natural” properties that things can have. It is the doctrine that moral properties are “natural” and that morality is in this sense an aspect of “nature.” Accordingly, it is a view about the semantics and metaphysics of moral discourse. For example, a utilitarian naturalist might propose that wrongness is the property an action could have of being such as to undermine overall happiness, where happiness is taken to be a psychological property. Unfortunately, it is unclear what the naturalist means by a “natural” property. For my purposes in this paper, I shall assume that natural properties are such that our knowledge of them is fundamentally empirical, grounded in observation. More precisely, a property is “natural” just in case any synthetic proposition about its instantiation can be known onlya posteriori,or with the aid of experience.
Naturalizing, Normativity, and Using What “We” Know in Ethics
Authors: Walker Margaret Urban
Published: June 2016

The provenance of “naturalized epistemology,” so called, is too recent for the hand of Quine not to be still heavily upon it. But like its older relative, “naturalism,” it is an idea rich enough to be coveted, and protean enough to be claimed, by diverse comers with different things in mind. While Quine's version of naturalized epistemology of science inevitably furnishes the backdrop for current discussion of naturalizing moral epistemology, it is important to pause over what “naturalized epistemology” can and should mean in ethics. To what extent is Quine's example of an epistemologyofscience that helps itselfto sciencethe model for understanding knowledge of and in morality? Does it require a view of moral knowledge as reducible to, or in a fundamental way furnished by, science? Or a view of moral theory as sciencelike in some way? I argue that the appropriate analogy is instead a holistic and reflexive epistemology of morality that helps itself to moral judgments and standards seen as answerable to the experience of the kinds of shared lives they make possible and necessary. This approach neither privileges nor rejects wholesale what scientific inquiries might have to say.
The Excesses of Teleosemantics
Authors: Davies Paul Sheldon
Published: June 2016

Teleosemantics asserts that mental content is determined by natural selection. The thesis is that content is fixed by the historical conditions under which certain cognitive mechanisms – those that produce and those that interpret (respond to) representational states – were selectively successful. Content is fixed by conditions of selective success. The thesis of this paper is that teleosemantics is mistaken, that content cannot be fixed by conditions of selective success, because those conditions typically outnumber the intentional objects within a given representational state. To defend against this excess, advocates of teleosemantics must attempt to privilege some conditions of success while ignoring others. This results in selective explanations that aread hoc,thereby depriving teleosemantics of the virtues it hoped to inherit from the theory of evolution by natural selection, including its alleged naturalistic credentials.
Why Vision is More than Seeing
Authors: Goodale Melvyn A.
Published: June 2016

Vision is so closely identified with visual phenomenology that we sometimes forget that the visual system does more than deliver our experience of the world. Vision also plays a critical role in the control of our movements, from picking up our coffee cups to playing tennis. But the visual control of movement has, until recently, been relatively neglected. Indeed, traditional accounts of vision, while acknowledging the role of vision in motor control, have simply regarded such control as part of a larger function – that of constructing an internal model of the external world. Even though such accounts might postulate separate ‘modules’ for the processing of different visual features, such as motion, colour, texture, and form, in most of these accounts there is an implicit assumption that, in the end, vision delivers a single representation of the external world – a kind of simulacrum of the real thing that serves as the perceptual foundation for all visually driven thought and action.
Parfit on Pains, Pleasures, and the Time of their Occurrence
Authors: Moller Dan
Published: June 2016

Consider our attitude toward painful and pleasant experiences depending on when they occur. A striking but rarely discussed feature of our attitude which Derek Parfit has emphasized is that we strongly wish painful experiences to lie in our past and pleasant experiences to lie in our future. Our asymmetrical attitudes toward future and past pains and pleasures can be forcefully illustrated by means of a thought-experiment described by Derek Parfit which I will paraphrase as follows:

You are in the hospital to have an extremely painful but completely safe Operation for which you can be given no anesthetic. In order to ease recovery, you know that the hospital will give you drugs that cause you to forget your Operation as soon as it is completed. You wake up, not remembering having gone to sleep, and ask the nurse if your Operation has been completed. She tells you that there were two patients for this Operation and she cannot remember which you are: either you already had your Operation and it was the longest such Operation ever performed, lasting ten hours, or else you are the other patient in which case your Operation is imminent, but will last only one hour.
Pierre Bayle, Matter, and the Unity of Consciousness
Authors: Schachter Jean-Pierre
Published: June 2016

Proving the immortality of the soul was a common challenge for the religious metaphysical writers of the seventeenth century. One attractive line of argument was premised on the ‘unity,’ ‘simplicity,’ or ‘indivisibility’ of consciousness (‘mind,’ or ‘soul’). While the religious issue of the soul's immortality dropped to a lower place on the philosophical agenda in the eighteenth century, the question of the unity of consciousness continued to run high as philosophers attempted to apply material atomism to mind and to vital phenomena in general.
Expanding the Limits of Universalization: Kant's Duties and Kantian Moral Deliberation
Authors: Glasgow Joshua M.
Published: June 2016

Despite all the attention given to Kant's universalizability tests, one crucial aspect of Kant's thought is often overlooked. Attention to this issue, I will argue, helps us resolve two serious problems for Kant's ethics. Put briefly, the first problem is this: Kant, despite his stated intent to the contrary, doesn't seem to use universalization in arguing for duties tooneself, and, anyway, it is not at all clear why duties to oneself, should be grounded on a procedure that envisions a world in whicheveryonewills the contrary of those duties.
The New Berkeley
Authors: Hight Marc , Ott Walter
Published: June 2016

Throughout his mature writings, Berkeley speaks of minds as substances that underlie or support ideas. After initially flirting with a Humean account, according to which minds are nothing but ‘congeries of Perceptions’ (PC 580), Berkeley went on to claim that a mind is a ‘perceiving, active being … entirely distinct’ from its ideas (P 2). Despite his immaterialism, Berkeley retains the traditional category of substance and gives it pride of place in his ontology. Ideas, by contrast, are ‘fleeting and dependent beings’ (P 89) that must be supported by a mental substance. There is no doubt that Berkeley's conception of the relationship between minds and ideas is non-traditional, but that fact does not undercut his commitment to the traditional conception of substance.
Bursting Bealer's Bubble: How the Starting Points Argument Begs the Question of Foundationalism Against Quine
Authors: Shaffer Michael J. , Warnick Jason A.
Published: June 2016

In his 1993 article George Bealer offers three separate arguments that are directed against the internal coherence of empiricism, specifically Quine's version of empiricism. In doing so, Bealer identifies three fundamental principles of Quine's empiricism. First, the principle of empiricism states that:

(i) A person's experiences and/or observations comprise the person'sprima facieevidence.

Second, the principle of holism states that:

(ii) A theory is justified (acceptable, more reasonable than its competitors, legitimate, warranted) for a person if and only if it is, or belongs to, the simplest comprehensive theory that explains all, or most, of the person'sprima facieevidence.
Spinoza and thea priori
Authors: Miller Jon
Published: June 2016

Scorned by analytic philosophers for much of the twentieth Century, thea priorihas been newly befriended in recent years. This development is healthy but there is reason to be concerned about how it is unfolding. In particular, it is largely characterized by a certain historical myopia: contemporary philosophers are able to see back to Kant but not much beyond him. While it may be true that thea priorichanged with Kant, this in itself provides us with a reason to go back before him. For other conceptualizations of thea priori,all but forgotten now, might help us to meet worries about it that Kant's familiar version cannot.
Reading One's Own Mind: Self-Awareness and Developmental Psychology
Authors: Nichols Shaun , Stich Stephen
Published: June 2016

The idea that we have special access to our own mental states has a distinguished philosophical history. Philosophers as different as Descartes and Locke agreed that we know our own minds in a way that is quite different from the way in which we know other minds. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, this idea carne under serious attack, first from philosophy (Sellars 1956) and more recently from developmental psychology. The attack from developmental psychology arises from the growing body of work on “mindreading,” the process of attributing mental states to people (and other organisms). During the last fifteen years, the processes underlying rnindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states toother people.However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states tooneself.This process ofreading one's own mindorbecoming self-awarewill be our primary concern in this paper.
What is Doubt and When is it Reasonable?
Authors: Thagard Paul
Published: June 2016

Descartes contended that “I am obliged in the end to admit that none of my former ideas are beyond legitimate doubt” (1964, 64). Accordingly, he adopted a method of doubting everything: “Since my present aim was to give myself up to the pursuit of truth alone, I thought I must do the very opposite, and reject as if absolutely false anything as to which I could imagine the least doubt, in order to see if I should not be left at the end believing something that was absolutely indubitable” (1964, 31). Similarly, other philosophers have raised doubts about the justifiability of beliefs concerning the external world, the existence of other minds, and moral principles; philosophical skepticism has a long history (Popkin 1979).
Democratic Equality and Relating as Equals
Authors: Arneson Richard J.
Published: June 2016

Imagine a democratic society in which all members are full citizens and citizens relate to each other as equals. Social arrangements bring it about, to the maximum possible extent, that all adults are full functioning members of society. The society is not marred by caste hierarchies, invidious status distinctions, or unequal power relations. No one is able to dominate others. Moreover, the urge to dominate over others does not loom large in social life. Each person's relations with others manifest the belief, shared by all, that each person is fundamentally the equal of all others and that this equality calls for treating others with civility and mutual respect and forbearance. Each is viewed as having the right to live as she chooses, within broad constraints of morality. This individual entitlement to freedom establishes a strong presumption against paternalism, restricting a person's liberty against her will for her own good. Regarding distributive justice, the norm is that each should be enabled to have enough by way of resources and opportunities to sustain herself as a full functioning member of democratic society.
The use of useless knowledge: Bergson against the pragmatists
Authors: Allen Barry
Published: June 2016

Henri Bergson and William James were great admirers of each other, and James seemed to think he got valuable ideas from Bergson. But early critics were right to see in Bergson the antithesis of pragmatism. Unfolding this antithesis is a convenient way to study important concepts and innovations in Bergson's philosophy. I concentrate on his ideas of duration and intuition, and show how they prove the necessity of going beyond pragmatism. The reason is because knowledge itself goes beyond the utilitarian limitations in which pragmatism confines it. Knowledge is more than utility, more than adaptation, more than pragmatism, because our cognitive powers prove capable of more than any naturally selected service to survival.
Acts, ideas, and objects in Berkeley's metaphysics
Authors: Frankel Melissa
Published: June 2016

Berkeley holds that objects in the world are constituted of ideas. Some commentators argue that for Berkeley, ideas are identical to acts of perception; this is taken to proceed from his view that ideas are like pains. In this paper, I evaluate the identity claim. I argue that although it does not follow from the pain analogy, nonetheless the texts suggest that Berkeley does think ideas and acts are identical. I show how Berkeley can account for objects persisting over time and being perceivable by multiple observers, even if the ideas that constitute them are intermittent and dependent on particular actors.
In the beginning was the doing: the premises of the practical syllogism
Authors: Wiland Eric
Published: June 2016

If practical reasoning deserves its name, its form must be different from that of ordinary (theoretical) reasoning. A few have thought that the conclusion of practical reasoning is an action, rather than a mental state. I argue here that if the conclusion is an action, then so too is one of the premises. You might reason your way from doing one thing to doing another: from browsing journal abstracts to reading a particular journal article. I motivate this by sympathetically re-examining Hume's claim that a conclusion about what ought to be done follows only from an argument one of whose premises is likewise about what ought to be done.
Influence of cold-rolling and annealing treatments on microstructure and mechanical properties of friction stir-welded Al–Cu joints
Authors: Deng Qinghong , Fu Ruidong , Jing Lei , Wang Yunpeng
Published: June 2016

The influence of post-weld cold-rolling (PWCR) and annealing treatments on microstructure and mechanical properties of the friction stir-welded Al–Cu joints were investigated in detail. The tensile fractures along at the Al–Cu interface in as-welded (AW) joint was effectively inhibited by PWCR. Accordingly, the strength of the dissimilar Al–Cu butt joints significantly increased from 79 MPa to 384 MPa for the AW state and the post-weld cold-rolled treated state, respectively. By the annealing treatment after the PWCR, the elongation of the dissimilar joints was increased from 1.0% to 17.5%, companied with an acceptable decrement of the strength. The optimised distribution of the intermetallic compounds layer at the Al–Cu interface, the reduced property gradients as well as the microstructure refinements, accounts for the improvement of the mechanical performances of the dissimilar Al–Cu joint.