bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Demarcating Philosophy
Authors: Passmore John
Published: June 2016

In most colleges and universities nowadays we find a group of academics who are officially designated as together constituting a department of philosophy. They teach students who are officially designated as studying philosophy; they write books which are reviewed as being philosophy, which are listed under that head in publisher's catalogues, which are put into that category by librarians. Or they write for journals which are similarly categorized by librarians and which as often as not describe themselves, either in their title or their sub-title, as being devoted to philosophical problems.
Strategies for Radical Rorty ('… but is it progress?')
Authors: Ramberg Bjørn T.
Published: June 2016

How is Richard Rorty's liberal utopia connected to his critique of epistemology and metaphysics? This has, naturally, been a central issue for those in Rorty's audience who are unhappy with what they take to be the socio-political thrust of his writings over the last decade.
The Unreality of Knowledge1
Authors: Williams Michael
Published: June 2016

Attempts to philosophize about human knowledge lead inevitably to skepticism. So Hume taught and so some influential contemporary philosophers would have us believe. But what are we to make of this fact, assuming that it is one? Should we treat it as bad news about our chances of obtaining knowledge? Or should we rather see its importance as primarily meta-philosophical? That is, should we take the real significance of skepticism's seeming inevitability to lie in what it tells us about the idea of understanding knowledge philosophically?
Une philosophie empiriste des mathématiques est-elle possible?
Authors: Vuillemin Jules
Published: June 2016

L'activité mathématique peut-elle être réduite à un prolongement de l'expérience sensible? Le peut-elle si l'expérience sensible est elle-même insérée dans le langage naturel? On examinera deux versions de l‘empirisme, l‘empirisme aristotélicien et l‘empirisme logique, qui répondent positivement à ces questions. Aucune des réponses n’étant satisfaisante, on examiner a une troisième version de l‘empirisme, incorporée à l‘expérience spécifique du mathématicien et l‘on en esquissera la portée et les limites.
Hume’s Self-Interest Requirement
Authors: Shaver Robert
Published: June 2016

Having explained the moralapprobationattending merit or virtue, there remains nothing but briefly to consider our interestedobligationto it, and to inquire whether every man, who has any regard to his own happiness and welfare, will not best find his account in the practice of every moral duty. (E 278)

[W]hat theory of morals can ever serve any useful purpose, unless it can show, by a particular detail, that all the duties which it recommends, are also the true interest of each individual? (E 280)
Le Nominalisme de Spinoza
Authors: Rice Lee C.
Published: June 2016

Spinoza semble adopter une position pleinement nominaliste lorsqu'il discue des notions universelles dansYEthique,mais on y trouve aussi plusieurs arguments ou, semble-t-il, des universaux sont presupposes. La solution avance par plusieurs commentateurs, y compris Haserot, est que le systeme spinoziste est d'inspiration platoniste, et qu'il faut reinterpreter les passages d'apparence nominaliste pour les accorder avec le platonisme ou l'essentialisme. J'argumente qu'un tel procede n'est justify ni par le texte ni par la structure du systeme de Spinoza. L'interpretation du spinozisme que je propose le place dans le cadre logique du nominalisme contemporain,kl'instar du systeme de Nelson Goodman, par exemple.
Self-Ownership, Reciprocity, and Exploitation, or Why Marxists Shouldn't Be Afraid of Robert Nozick
Authors: Warren Paul
Published: June 2016

A common theme of libertarians is that there is a conflict between the values of liberty and equality. Achieving equality, so libertarians often argue, would require frequent interference in individuals’ lives, creating constraints on freedom and obstacles to the development of individuality. Although not himself endorsing a libertarian conception of liberty, Oxford philosopher G.A. Cohen recently has advanced the surprising thesis that there is a tension in Marxist normative thought that in an interesting way parallels the often heard libertarian challenge to egalitarianism.
Perverse Preference: Self-Beguilement Or Self-Division?
Authors: Pugmire David
Published: June 2016

Human folly, it seems, traces not only to ignorance and impulsiveness but also to the power of wishes that the erring agent acknowledges as unfit to motivate him. The possibility of genuinely perverse preference can be either denied or explained. To explain it, sense must be made of how a person’s understanding of the choices before him could fail to decide his preference—how what convinces could fail to persuade. The question is how the influence a given consideration has over a person’s choice can be other than a function of the beliefs he holds about its merits, so that as between competing considerations the one esteemed best doesn’t win, despite continuing to be esteemed best.
Hacking's Experimental Realism
Authors: Resnik David B.
Published: June 2016

Traditional debates about scientific realism tend to focus on issues concerning scientific representation (broadly speaking) and de-emphasize issues concerning scientific intervention. Questions about the relation between theories and the world, the nature of scientific inference, and the structure of scientific explanations have occupied a central place in the realism debate, while questions about experimentation and technology have not. Ian Hacking's experimental realism attempts to reverse this trend by shifting the defense of realism away from representation to intervention. Experimental realism, according to Hacking, does not require us to believe that our theories are true (or approximately true), nor does its defense depend on inference to the best explanation. For Hacking, the strongest proof for realism is that we can manipulate objects: 'So far as I'm concerned, if you can spray them, then they are real' (ibid., 23).
Feminism, Fundamentalism, and Liberal Legitimacy
Authors: Exdell John
Published: June 2016

In recent years feminist philosophers have criticized mainstream liberal theory for ignoring issues of justice within the gender structured family and for failing to see how male privilege in this sphere works to deny women equality in economic and political life. Some argue that the source of this failure is liberalism's commitment to the distinction between domestic and public life, and the idea that the family is inherently a private institution to which standards of justice do not apply. In Political Liberalism Rawls briefly acknowledges these concerns, andreassures his readers that within his theoretical framework 'the alleged difficulties in discussing problems of gender and the family can be overcome. To satisfy these critics Rawls would have to respond to Susan Okin's Justice, Gender, and the Family, which carefully examines both the shortcomings and feminist potential of his earlier writings. In Political Liberalism he does not. After his passing remark in the book's introduction, Rawls has nothing more to say on the subject. He assumes 'that in some form the family is just,' and focuses on the traditional issues of liberal political theory in the hope that this approach will 'at least provide guidelines for addressing further questions' (ibid.).
Nonreductive Materialism and Mental Causation
Authors: Marras Ausonio
Published: June 2016

I take nonreductive materialism to be the conjunction of two theses, the first ontological, the second epistemological. The ontological thesis - token physicalism- is that mental events (processes, states, etc.) are tokenidentical to physical events; the epistemological thesis is that psychology is not reducible to physical theory in the classic sense of 'reduction,' according to which we reduce a theory to a another theory by deriving the laws of the former from the laws of the latter via 'bridge principles' linking the predicates of the reducing theory with the predicates of the reduced theory.
On the Designated Student and Related Induction Paradoxes
Authors: Jacquette Dale
Published: June 2016

Roy A. Sorensen has advanced an ingenious variation of the prediction or surprise event paradox, which he calls the designated student paradox. Sorensen reduces the temporal dimension of the problem by eliminating reference to future occasions on which an announced surprise event might occur, and substituting a surprise location to which epistemic agents have progressively limited spatial-perceptual access, in order to sidestep what he regards as inessential solutions to the standard formulation.
Niccolò Machiavelli — Adviser of Princes
Authors: Kain Philip J.
Published: June 2016

In Plato'sRepublic,Socrates argued that true artisans work not in their own interest but for the good of that upon which they practice their art. So the true ruler is one who works for the good of the city or the citizens, not the ruler's own self-interest. Many would hold, with Leo Strauss, that Machiavelli contends the very opposite — that for him the true prince ruthlessly seeks self-interest and personal power. I think this is too simple a reading of Machiavelli.

I do not want to argue that Machiavelli is not a Machiavellian — that he does not counsel evil. But I do want to argue that Machiavelli's advice to the prince is toavoidself-interest. The prince is encouraged to act for the good of the state. It is true that in Machiavelli's opinion this will often require doing evil, and it is also true, one must admit, that Machiavelli does not really expect the prince to succeed in avoiding self-interest.
Gaps and Gluts: Reply to Parsons
Authors: Priest Graham
Published: June 2016

1 Introduction

Numerous solutions have been proposed to the semantic paradoxes. Two that are frequently singled out and compared are the following. The first is that according to which paradoxical sentences are neither true nor false — as it is sometimes put, they are semantic gaps. The second is that according to which paradoxical sentences are both true and false — as it is sometimes put, they are semantic gluts (dialetheias). Calling the first of these a solution is, in fact, somewhat misleading: it is rather like calling an opening gambit a game of chess. For the solution runs into severe problems almost immediately, and so can be only the first of a series of (often ad hoc) moves made to defend the original weak opening. Nonetheless, the symmetry involved in the gap and glut solutions is obvious enough to make the comparison a natural one.
Gauthier, Property Rights, and Future Generations
Authors: Sauvé Kevin
Published: June 2016

In Morals by Agreement David Gauthier proposes four criteria for classifying a society's advancement toward ‘higher stages of human development.' Significantly, these criteria — material well-being, breadth of opportunity, average life-span, and density of population — do not include as an equally valuable achievement the society's capacity to sustain its standard of living (288). Nonetheless Gauthier presents three arguments intended to show that a community founded on his distributive theory will view depletionary resource policies as unreasonable and unacceptable. I shall contend that these arguments do not succeed in motivating sustainable rates of resource exploitation. Furthermore, I argue that if truly just and rational resource use policies can be arrived at, such policies could only succeed by employing a conception of property rights substantially different from Gauthier's.
Putnam's Brain-Teaser
Authors: Davies David
Published: June 2016

1. Metaphysical Realists have traditionally relied upon the skeptic to give substance to the idea that truth is, in the words of Hilary Putnam, 'radically non-episternic,’ forever outstripping, in principle at least, the reach of justification. What better model of truth so conceived, after all, than the skeptic's contention that even our firmest convictions might be mistaken in that we might be the victims of demonic deception or the machinations of an evil scientist? But the availability of this favorite model of Realist truth, encapsulated in the claim that we might be ‘brains in avat,’has been called into question by Putnam in the opening chapter ofReason, Truth, and History.Putnam contends that, if we grant the Realist notion of truth, as referentially mediated correspondence to THE WORLD, then, given certain plausible constraints on reference, we can know that we arenotbrains in a vat (or, more accurately, ‘brains in avat'of a particular kind, as we shall see).
Foundationalism for Moral Theory
Authors: Brandt Richard B.
Published: June 2016

It seems to be generally agreed that a foundationalist view of any area of justified beliefs is the affirmation that there are some (basic) beliefs which are to some degree credible for a person independently of reflection on logical relations to any others of his beliefs, and that any other beliefs of his are justified because of appropriate logical relations to these basic beliefs — thus contrary to the coherentist thesis that beliefs can only be justified by appeal to their relation to other beliefs of a person, independently of whether these other beliefs are themselves independently credible. Thus, for the area of moral beliefs, foundationalism is the view that there is at least a subset of a person's moral beliefs which are either justified independently of logical relations to any other beliefs, or are justified by their logical relations to some other beliefs, either independently credible moral beliefs, or independently credible non-moral ones.

I am here restricting ‘ethical’ beliefs to moral beliefs, as distinct from beliefs that something is a good thing or intrinsically good or good for a person.
Off on the Wrong Foot
Authors: Hare R.M.
Published: June 2016

Professor Foot's Hart Lecture, now published (1995), is largely devoted to an attack on people she calls ‘subjectivists’ and ‘noncognitivists', among whom she includes myself, although she is so good as to allow me, in a footnote, to reject thenames.She seems to imply thereby that this is a mere matter of nomenclature or terminology. But in truth her use of these terms makes one suspect that she has not fully understood either the issues or what I have said about them.

It may therefore be useful to explain yet again why I reject these descriptions. I have done so already in a paper to a conference in Moscow which she heard, and to which she kindly refers (Hare 1993a). These explanations would not be important if she were the only person to be confused about this matter; but the confusions are so widespread, even among professional philosophers who should know better, and are so often taught to succeeding generations of students, that it is worth while to make yet another attempt to clear them up - though the confusions are so insidious that I have not much hope that they will ever be eradicated.
Attacking Morality: A Metaethical Project
Authors: Wood Allen W.
Published: June 2016

Metaethics is the philosophical study of what morality is. It differs from ethical theory, which attempts to systematize (and possibly ground) moral judgments, and also from practical or applied ethics, which reflects on particular moral issues or problems. As it has been done in this century, metaethics has usually involved three interrelated projects: ametaphysicalinvestigation into the nature of moral facts and properties, asemanticinquiry into the meaning of moral assertions, and anepistemologicalaccount of the nature of moral knowledge. In all three areas, the questions raised by twentieth-century metaethics have apparently been radical, and the dominant position was even openly nihilistic. In metaphysics it was antirealist, maintaining that there are no moral facts, in epistemology noncognitivist, denying that there is moral knowledge, and in semantics emotivist or prescriptivist, holding that moral assertions aren't assertions at all, but are speech acts utterly devoid of truth conditions.
Eliminative Induction and Bayesian Confirmation Theory
Authors: Vineberg Susan
Published: June 2016

In his recent bookThe Advancement of Science,Philip Kitcher endorses eliminative induction, or the view that confirmation of hypotheses proceeds by the elimination of alternatives. My intention here is to critically examine Kitcher's eliminativist view of confirmation, and his rejection of the widely held Bayesian position, according to which an hypothesis H is confirmed by evidence E just in case the probability of H conditional on E is greater than the simple unconditional probability of H [i.e. p(H/E) > p(H)]. Here, I will maintain that while there are aspects of the eliminative approach which Bayesianism must incorporate, as has been argued by John Earman, the eliminativism advocated by Kitcher is unsatisfactory. In addition, I will suggest that Kitcher's reasons for rejecting Bayesian confirmation theory are unconvincing and depend on an overly restrictive version of the position and that indeed Bayesianism has resources needed by an eliminativist account of confirmation.
What's Wrong with Social Norms? An Alternative to Elster's Theory
Authors: van Zetten Frans
Published: June 2016

Is guidance by social norms compatible with rationality? Jon Elster has argued inThe Cement of Societythat there is a fundamental contrast between rationality and conformity to social norms. The context of study is the problem of collective action, with special emphasis on collective wage bargaining. In such negotiations, the appeal to social norms rather than to self-interest can block agreement. Suppose one union is committed to the norm of equal pay for equal work; another one appeals to the norm of equal pay for everybody, regardless of the type of work. ‘In the presence of competing norms that favor different groups, the self-righteousness conferred by belief in a norm can lead to a bargaining impasse.'

In confrontations between individuals, codes of honor can produce similar problems. It is in no one's interest to face a colleague over the barrel of a gun because one has made a nasty remark about his latest book, but if the code demands that one fight it out, the challenge must be accepted.
Is de re Belief Reducible to de dicto?
Authors: Salmon Nathan
Published: June 2016

Yes and no. It depends on the meaning of the question. Traditionally, those on the affirmative side — predominantly neo-Fregeans — hold that Ralph's believing about Ortcutt, de re, that he is a spy is identical with, or otherwise reducible to, Ralph's believing some proposition or other of the form The such-and-such is a spy, for some concept the such-and-such that is thoroughly conceptual or qualitative (or perhaps thoroughly qualitative but for the involvement of constituents of Ralph's consciousness or of other mental particulars), and that uniquely determines, or is uniquely a concept of, Ortcutt (in Alonzo Church's sense of ‘determines’ and ‘concept of’). Concerns over Ralph's believing that whoever is shortest among spies is a spy while not suspecting anyone in particular have led some neo-Fregeans (not all) to qualify their affirmative response by requiring that the concept the such-and-such and its object bear some connection that is epistemologically more substantial than that between the shortest spy and the shortest spy.
On Some Untamed Anaphora1
Authors: Wilson George M.
Published: June 2016

A sentence of the form

(1)

Either Jones or Smith entered the room, and he saw the Maltese Falcon,

has some notable properties due largely to the sprightly behavior of the pronoun in its second conjunct. For instance, that pronoun can not be a pronoun of laziness for the disjunctive noun phrase, ‘Jones or Smith,’ since (1) patently does not express the thought that

(1’) Either Jones or Smith entered the room, and either Jones or Smith saw the Maltese Falcon.

(1’), but not (1), would be true if Jones entered the room but didn't see the Maltese Falcon, and Smith saw the Maltese Falcon but never entered the room.
Skepticism about Meaning: Indeterminacy, Normativity, and the Rule-Following Paradox
Authors: Soames Scott
Published: June 2016

Quine and Kripke's Wittgenstein both present “skeptical” arguments for the conclusion that there are no facts about meaning. In each case the argument for the conclusion is that (i) if there are facts about meaning (and propositional attitudes), then they must be determined by some more fundamental facts, but (ii) facts about meaning (and propositional attitudes) are not determined by any such facts. Consequently there are no facts about meanings (or propositional attitudes). Within this overall framework, Quine and Kripke's Wittgenstein differ substantially — both in their reasons for thinking that facts about meaning (and propositional attitudes) are not determined by other facts, and in their responses to the alleged elimination of these facts. Despite this, I believe that their arguments fail for essentially the same reason; each equivocates about what it means for one set of facts to determine another. Once the equivocation is eliminated, the arguments lose their plausibility.
Is Nationalism Legitimate? A Sociological Perspective on a Philosophical Question
Authors: Greenfeld Liah
Published: June 2016

To answer, or even consider, the question ‘Is nationalism legitimate?', whether from the sociological or ethical, philosophical point of view, it is first necessary to define what nationalism is or, in other words, to understand its nature and the source of its appeal. As concerns nationalism's definition, there are several points, in regard to which there exists among the students of the phenomenon more or less general agreement, but which, nevertheless, should be emphasized at the outset:

Nationalism is a modem phenomenon: for most of its recorded history humanity has not known it; it emerged quite recently and therefore cannot be seen as an automatic response to some universal need; its very historicity presupposes that it is essentially a cultural and not a psychological phenomenon, and that, as any cultural phenomenon, it can develop, take various forms within certain limits, and disappear.
Democracy and Nationalism
Authors: Putte André Van De
Published: June 2016

In 1789 Sieyès defined the nation as “un corps d'associés vivant sous une loi commune et représentés par la même législature.”In so doing, he gave expression to an idea that would follow a remarkable historical course and develop a complex and ambiguous logic. In this study we attempt to clarify this ambiguity, thereby gaining some insight into the complicated relationship between democracy and nationalism.

The revolutionary idea of the nation, expressed by Sieyès, did not come out of thin air, but arose within a process of social and political transformation which began long before the French Revolution. By attempting to establish its sovereign power and found a state, the French monarchy came into conflict with regional and other traditional powers with whom it had previously shared power asprimus inter pares.The absolutist state founders discovered how important it was to have the community united behind them, so they sought to create feelings of national unity that would transcend the old regional loyalties and make France a ‘patria’ in the minds of the people, with the king as its incarnation and guarantor.
Just Nationalism: The Future of an Illusion
Authors: Levine Andrew
Published: June 2016

Until quite recently, political philosophers routinely ignored nationalism. Nowadays, the topic is very much on the philosophical agenda. In the past, when philosophers did discuss nationalism, it was usually to denigrate it. Today, nationalism elicits generally favorable treatment. I confess to a deep ambivalence about this turn of events. On the one hand, much of what has emerged in recent work on nationalism appears to be on the mark. On the other hand, the anti- or extra-nationalist outlook that used to pervade political philosophy seems as sound today as it ever was, and perhaps even more urgent in the face of truly horrendous eruptions of nationalist hostilities in many parts of the world. What follows is an effort to grapple with this ambivalence. My aim will be to identify what is defensible in the nationalist idea and then to reflect on the flaws inherent in even the most defensible aspects of nationalist theory and practice.
National Identity, Multiculturalism, and Aboriginal Rights: An Australian Perspective
Authors: Poole Ross
Published: June 2016

My main concern in this paper will be with questions of national identity, multiculturalism, and aboriginal rights as they have emerged in Australia, especially over the past twenty or so years. The issues are not, of course, unique to Australia: similar questions have arisen in other places, including Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. However, each place has specific problems, and while I hope that much of what I say has relevance to these countries, I will not try to establish this here.

The paper falls into two parts. In the first, I argue for certain limits on the practice of multiculturalism. The basis of this argument is a concern for national identity – especially for what I will call ‘national sovereignty.’ This is a familiar conservative position; however, I hope to show that it is one which liberals and those on the left should take seriously. In the second part of the paper, I distinguish the issue of Aboriginal (or indigenous) rights from multiculturalism, and try to establish that the basis of these rights is a principle very similar to the notion of national sovereignty.
Social Movements as Nationalisms or, On the Very Idea of a Queer Nation
Authors: Walker Brian
Published: June 2016

Given the immense mobilizing power possessed by the rhetoric of nationalism, as well as the many resources which can be tapped by groups which successfully establish national claims, it is not surprising that we have recently seen such a resurgence in nationalist discourse. One of the things which may surprise us, however, is the growing breadth in thetypesof groups which now launch such claims. No longer is the discourse of nationalism limited to use by ethnic groups and territorial populations. Recently it has come to be deployed by groups which we would normally tend to look upon as social movements. There has been a growing realization of the way in which constituencies such as Blacks, gays and lesbians, Chicano/as, and so on, make up distinct peoples, with cultures, public institutions, dialects, tastes, and social practices that set them off from the people or peoples around them.
What is Frege's Relativity Argument?
Authors: Yourgrau Palle
Published: June 2016

Sets are multitudes which are also unities. It is surprising that the fact that multitudes are also unities leads to no contradictions: this is the main fact of mathematics.

Kurt Gödel (Hao Wang,A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy)

In what sense can something be at the same time one and many? The problem is familiar since Plato (for example,Republic524e). In recent times, Whitehead and Russell, inPrincipia Mathematica,have been struck by the difficulty of the problem: ‘If there is such an object as a class, it must be in some senseoneobject, yet it is only of classes that many can be predicated. Hence, if we admit classes as objects, we must suppose that the same object can be both one and many, which seems impossible.' It is, however, in Frege's great work,The Foundations of Arithmetic(henceforth,Grundlagen),that many see the final resolution of the old question: how can something be at the same time one and many?
The Involvement of Our Identity in Experiential Memory
Authors: Persson Ingmar
Published: June 2016

On many accounts, the criterion of our diachronic identity or persistence consists in or comprises some psychological conditions. As on Locke's account, these conditions often include one's appealing to the relation of remembering having an experience of. Contemporary theorists are unlikely to claim simply that a necessary condition for Pm at tm being the same person as Pn at a later time, tn, is that Pn remembers having experiences had by Pm at tm. They are more likely to appeal, as does Derek Parfit, to a ‘continuity of memory’ or ‘overlapping chains’ of memories, that is, to assert that Pn must at least remember having experiences had by somebody, Pn-1, existing at some time in-between tm and tn, that Pn-1 in turn must remember having experiences had by somebody Pn-2 … and so on back to Pm.
Schiller's Critique of Kant's Moral Psychology: Reconciling Practical Reason and an Ethics of Virtue
Authors: Gauthier Jeffrey A.
Published: June 2016

Mention of the name of Friedrich Schiller among both critics and defenders of Kant's moral philosophy has most often been with reference to the well known quip:

“Gladly I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure.

Hence I am plagued with doubt that I am not a virtuous person.“

“Sure, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely,

And then with aversion to do what your duty enjoins you.''

This attention, however, has served to obscure the fact that Schiller truly intended his remark as a joke, representing a serious, if understandable, misinterpretation of Kantian morality. Though Schiller's various attempts to articulate a theory of moral motivation include important divergences from Kant's account, they represent a response to a set of problems that arise in the context of Kantian moral theory. As such, they may be of greatest interest to moralists who are working within the Kantian tradition. In this paper, I clarify certain points of Schiller's critique of Kant's account of moral motivation and place them in the context of his broader project of reconciling Kantianism and an ethics of virtue.
Metaphysical Presuppositions of Scientific Practice: ‘Atomism’ vs. ‘Wholism’
Authors: Rueger Alexander , Sharp W. David
Published: June 2016

A certain order or stability of nature has often been seen as a necessary presupposition of many of our scientific practices, in particular of our use of information gained in one kind of circumstance to explain or predict what happens in quite different situations. John Maynard Keynes and, more recently, Nancy Cartwright have argued that these practices commit us to the existence of stable ‘atoms’ or ‘natures’ or ‘tendencies.’ The phenomena we observe in nature are, on this view, the result of superimposing the invariable, context-independent effects of all the different tendencies involved.
Disjunction and Disjunctive Syllogism
Authors: Milne Peter
Published: June 2016

The validity of argument by disjunctive syllogism (henceforth, DS) has been denied by proponents of relevant and paraconsistent logic (who are sometimes one and the same). DS is stigmatised for its role in inferences — most notably C.I. Lewis's derivation of that fallacy of irrelevance ex falso quodlibet (EFQ) — that involve both it and other rules of inference governing disjunction, or, to speak more precisely, other rules of inference taken to apply to the very same disjunction that obeys DS. In avoiding these inferences the road less travelled is to deny the identity rather than to deny DS: what follows is, then, an exercise in disjoining disjunctions.
La source du paradoxe de Wittgenstein à propos des règles
Authors: Sauvé Denis
Published: June 2016

Une question très discutée chez les interprètes de Wittgenstein est celle de savoir comment comprendre le paradoxe au sujet des règles dont il parle dans le paragraphe 201 des Recherches philosophiques. Ilécrit: ‘Notre paradoxe était le suivant: une règle ne pourrait déterminer aucune conduite parce que n'importe quelle conduite pourrait être mise en accord avec la règle’ (PU § 201). Un peu plus haut, il faisait dire à son interlocuteur: ‘“Mais comment une règle peut-elle m'apprendre ce que je dois faire en ce point? Peu importe ce que je fais, cela pourra s’ accorder suivant une interprétation ou une autre avec la règle “’ (PU § 198).
An Asymmetry Concerning Virtue and Vice
Authors: Montmarquet James A.
Published: June 2016

In this paper I want to explore, and suggest a theoretical explanation of, an apparent asymmetry governing some of our most basic ethical judgments. I also want to use this asymmetry to probe into the relative plausibility of ‘moral character’ and ‘volition’ based accounts of moral responsibility. Briefly, my argument will be that, with suitable modifications, the latter type of account succeeds just where the former, the more Aristotelian approach, breaks down.

Consider, first, a series of acts exemplifying the same vice.A person, say, is repeatedly late or is consistently selfish. Now our tendency here, surely, would be to view such acts as increasingly blameworthy — increasingly worthy, one might say, of some form of punishment (or, perhaps better to say, worthy of increasingly severe punishments) — as they are repeated.
Pragmatism and Moral Knowledge
Authors: Bakhurst David
Published: June 2016

In the last twenty years there has been a dramatic revival of interest in the idea that there can be genuine moral knowledge. The noncognitivist assumptions that dominated so much twentieth-century ethical theory no longer seem the obvious truths they once did to so many thinkers. It is now common to hear the claim that moral values are genuine constituents of the furniture of the world - or at least of its upholstery- and that moral deliberation and judgment legitimately aspire to truth. Morality, it is frequently argued, is a realm of discovery rather than invention, and moral reasoning, and the play of moral imagination, must be constrained by how the moral facts stand.

Such “realist” or “cognitivist” views in ethics take many forms. This essay considers whether a pragmatist account of moral knowledge might fruitfully be developed. My project will recommend itself only to those who believe that pragmatist insights serve to support relatively robust conceptions of truth and justification.
Democratic Deliberations, Equality of Influence, and Pragmatism
Authors: Baker Judith
Published: June 2016

Democracy is committed to procedures of decision-making which express the values of both political equality and truth. One current program, that of strong or deliberative democracy, explicitly defends institutions which reflect the dual commitments to truth and equality. Like many other political theorists, however, deliberative democrats do not address the issue of a minority group which always loses the vote. The presumption is that free and equal deliberation by agents who think in terms of the common good is sufficient for political equality. I will argue, however, that the proposed deliberative procedures do not preclude persistent failure for a minority, and that this problem should lead us to acknowledge that power relations can underpin decision-making arrangements even within the ideal framework of deliberative democracy. Political equality and effective political equality seem to come apart.

In order to come closer to the idea of effective political equality, this paper will look at the notion of equality of influence. It may seem tautological, and so redundant, to argue that political egalitarians and particularly deliberative democrats need to recognize equality of influence.
Inherited Obligations and Generational Continuity
Authors: Thompson Janna
Published: June 2016

Those who believe that they have special obligations to their community — to their family, state or nation, clan, tribe, or cultural group — often insist that they have duties not merely to present and future members. They also claim to have responsibilities to, or in respect to, their predecessors. David Miller, in his defence of ‘nationality,’ claims that the existence of a nation as a historical community is one of the features which make it ‘a community of obligation.’ ‘“Because our forebears have toiled and spilt their blood to build and defend the nation, we who are born into it inherit an obligation to continue their work….’” Being a member of a nation, says Yael Tamir, requires individuals to keep faith with its history. Annette Baier thinks that if we fail to pass on our inherited public goods to our descendants we can be blamed not only for harming their interests but also for not carrying out the intentions of our forebears.
Fodor's Very Deep Thought
Authors: Montminy Martin
Published: June 2016

Pooh rubbed his nose with his paw, and said that the Heffalump might be walking along, humming a little song, and looking up at the sky, wondering if it would rain, and so he wouldn't see the Very Deep Pit until he was half-way down, when it would be too late. (A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh)

Jerry Fodor is loath to have content be constituted, even in part, by inferential relations. This loathing, I will argue, gets him into trouble. In his latest book, Concepts, Fodor contrasts informational atomism, his view of concepts and their content, with inferential role theory. The latter, he argues, is almost certainly false. This strikes cognitive science at its core, he adds, since the major theories of concepts currently in vogue in cognitive science are all variants on inferential role theory.
The Reasonable in Justice as Fairness
Authors: Mandle Jon
Published: June 2016

The publication ofPolitical Liberalismhas allowed John Rawls to bring to the fore issues that remained in the background ofA Theory of Justice.His explicit attention to the concept of ‘the reasonable’ is a welcome development. In a more recent publication, he affirms the importance of this concept, ‘while [granting] that the idea of the reasonable needs a more thorough examination thanPolitical Liberalismoffers.’ In this paper, I will present a critical exposition of the senses of the reasonable on which justice as fairness relies. Rawls employs the term in four main contexts. I will outline these various senses and argue that in each case, a controversy in the secondary literature can be resolved by close attention to the concept of the reasonable. In three of these contexts, Rawls relies on what I will call a ‘strong’ sense of the reasonable, while in one he sometimes seems to rely on a ‘weak’ sense. I argue that justice as fairness is best served by relying on a strong sense throughout.
Comment l'Urne de Carter et Leslie se Déverse dans celle de Hempel
Authors: Franceschi Paul
Published: June 2016

Le philosophe mit le pied sur la première marche du futurotron. C'était la première fois qu'il utilisait cet appareil pour ses recherches. Bien qu'il vienne seulement d'être mis au point et qu'il ne soit encore qu'à l'état de prototype, ce futurotron pouvait décidément rendre de grands services. De nombreux chercheurs de différentes disciplines l'avaient d'ailleurs déjà utilisé de manière très fructueuse.
Kant on Welfare
Authors: LeBar Mark
Published: June 2016

Contemporary debate over public welfare policy is often cast in Kantian terms. It is argued, for example, that respect for the dignity of the poor requires public aid, or that respect for their autonomy forbids it. In some recent political discourse, the views of Kant himself have been invoked in defense of public welfare provision. Some have argued that his moral theory mandates welfare as an expression of our duty to be beneficent, or that Kant's commitments to freedom require public provision of aid to those in need. These implications are thought to be reflected in his political theory in a variety of ways.

However, at no point in his political works does Kant explicitly argue for the public provision of welfare on the basis of either beneficence or freedom. These omissions are the more striking because he does explicitly endorse the public provision of welfare. But the rationale for welfare he offers is that it is instrumentally necessary for the security and the stability of the state. This approach is very different from one grounded in moral duties of beneficence or respect for freedom, and may perhaps be disappointing to those who would like to establish some more hortatory moral rationale for welfare. But if Kant is to be enlisted in the cause of public welfare provision for the sake of beneficence or freedom, then an explanation is required why he offers no argument to that effect.
Defending Non-Tuism
Authors: Dimock Susan
Published: June 2016

Hobbes's central insight about ethics was that it should not be understood to require that we make ourselves a prey for others. It is this insight that both varieties of contractarianism [Hobbesian and Kantian] respect. Consider a relationship between two human beings that exists for reasons of either love or duty; let us also suppose that it is a relationship that can be instrumentally valuable to both parties. In order for that relationship to receive our full moral endorsement, we must ask whether either party uses the duty or the love connecting them in a way that affects the other party's ability to realize the instrumental value from that relationship. To be sure, good marriages and good friendships ought not to be centrally concerned with the question of justice, but they must also be, at the very least, relationships in which love or duty are not manipulated by either party in order to use the other party to her detriment.
Alienation and Externality
Authors: Schroeder Timothy , Arpaly Nomy
Published: June 2016

Picture a heroin addict of the sort frequently found in philosophical work on freedom and responsibility. In Harry Frankfurt's terms, she is an unwilling addict. She wishes she were not an addict, has attempted to break her addiction but failed, and hopes to escape from the demands of the drug — but in spite of her will to resist, she satisfies her craving in the end. The unwilling addict does not merely have a conflict of desires: she experiences herself as surrendering to a desire which is not really hers, a desire with respect to which she feels a passive observer or an active opponent. Her desire strikes her as alien, incomprehensible. There are at least two striking features of such an addict. The first is what we will call herakrasia.(We use the term ‘akrasia’ here in a broad sense, to mean ‘ acting against one's better judgment,’ and assume for this paper that akrasia in this form exists.) Her better judgment recommends not taking heroin, indeed ending the habit, yet she takes heroin anyway. The second is what we will call heralienationfrom her desire to use the drug.
Making Do: Troubling Stoic Tendencies in an Otherwise Compelling Theory of Autonomy
Authors: Zimmerman David
Published: June 2016

Nothing can kill a promising research program in ethics more quickly than a plausible argument to the effect that it is committed to a morally repellent consequence. It is especially troubling when a theory one favors is jeopardized in this way. I have this worry about Harry Frankfurt's theory of free will, autonomous agency and moral responsibility, for there is a very plausible argument to the effect that aspects of his view commit him to a version of the late Stoic thesis that acting freely is a matter of ‘making do,’ that is, of bringing oneself to be motivated to act in accordance with the feasible, so that personal liberation can be achieved by resigning and adapting oneself to necessity. In this paper I try to determine whether the theory does in fact commit Frankfurt (and adherents like me) to this result and, if so, what can be done to prevent it.
Could Experience Disconfirm the Propositions of Arithmetic?
Authors: Wilson Jessica M.
Published: June 2016

I regard the whole of arithmetic as a necessary, or at least a natural, consequence of the simplest arithmetical act, that of counting…

Richard Dedekind

Albert Casullo has argued that the propositions of arithmetic could be experientially disconfirmed, with the help of an invented scenario wherein experiences involving our standard counting procedures, as applied to collections of objects, seem to indicate that 2+2≠4. Our best response to this scenario would be, Casullo suggests, to accept the results of our standard counting procedures as correct, and give up our standard arithmetical theory. This suggestion, interestingly enough, is not as bizarre as it initially appears. But indeed a problem lies in the assumption, common to Casullo’s scenario and to his suggested resolution, that our arithmetical theory might possibly be independent of our standard counting procedures. Here I show that this assumption is incoherent, whether the independence at issue is supposed to make room for the genuine possibility that 2+2≠4, or the merely epistemic possibility that we could rationally believe that 2+2≠4: given our standard counting procedures, then (on pain of irrationality) our arithmetical theory follows.
The Disappearance of Analogy in Descartes, Spinoza, and Regis
Authors: Schmaltz Tad M.
Published: June 2016

In the course of a lengthy interview, Descartes is reported to have claimed that ‘the axiom is common and true: the effect is similar to the cause’(AT 5:156). There has been much discussion in the recent secondary literature about whether Descartes’ various causal principles require a sort of resemblance between cause and effect that rules out the interaction of substances as distinct in nature as mind and body. However, it is clear from the record of the Descartes interview that the axiomatic principle that effects are similar to their causes- call this the ‘Similarity Principle'- applies primarily to the case of God's production of created substances, and of created minds in particular. This record thus provides one reason for the focus here on that particular case. Another is that a consideration of this case broaches difficulties for the Similarity Principle that have an interesting though somewhat neglected role in the history of Cartesianism.
Personal Concern
Authors: Kelly Erin
Published: June 2016

Recent moral philosophy has been characterized by some serious attempts to show that both Kantian and utilitarian moralities leave us with insufficient room to pursue our personal projects and relationships. These moralities have been charged with demanding a kind of impartiality that leaves us with too little space for developing ourselves and our friendships, family relations, communities, and nations in the ways best suited for us. Critics claim these theories implausibly maintain that if our personal relationships and affinities do not further the ends of moral duty or maximum utility, they are of no value and hence we lack reason to devote ourselves to them. In what follows, I will assume that a conception of morality would indeed be implausible if it were to demand impartiality in the strong sense that it would be impermissible to favor our own projects and ambitions, to care especially about the welfare of certain persons rather than others, and sometimes to give preference to those we care most about, even when we could benefit strangers more.
Does Continuous Creation Entail Occasionalism? Malebranche (and Descartes)
Authors: Pessin Andrew
Published: June 2016

‘God needs no instruments to act,’ Malebranche writes in Search 6.2.3; “it suffices that He wills in order that a thing be, because it is a contradiction that He should will and that what He wills should not happen. Therefore, His power is His will” (450). After nearly identical language in Treatise 1.12, Malebranche writes that “[God's] wills are necessarily efficacious … His power differs not at all from His will” (116). God exercises His causal power, here, via His volitions; what He causes depends not merely on the fact that He wills, but specifically (since volitions are intentional states) on the content of His volitions, on “what He wills.” Yet despite the obviously key role the ordinary notion of volitional content plays for Malebranche, recent writers have paid surprisingly little attention either to it or its exegetical implications. I hope partly to rectify this situation here.

The plan of this paper is this:

(I) to borrow current work in the philosophy of mind to sketch the notion of an incomplete volition, i.e. one whose content is ‘incomplete’ in a sense to be explained;

(II) to note that Malebranche accepts and uses something like this notion;