bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Locke on Slavery and Inalienable Rights
Authors: Welchman Jennifer 
Published: June 2016

Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that ‘tis hardly to be conceived, that anEnglishman,much less aGentleman,should plead for't.So begins the first of Locke'sTwo Treatises of Government.But this Englishman, gentleman, and self-styled ‘lover of liberty’ was not himself above pleading for slavery when it suited him. That plea has been an embarrassment to his admirers ever since. Locke attempted to legitimize slavery by portraying it as a form of punishment for crimes committed where no central political authority or justice system exists. If a victim of an assault is entitled to take his attacker's life in self-defense, Locke reasoned, he must also be entitled to take his attacker's liberty.
Abstraction and the Real Distinction Between Mind and Body
Authors: Thomas Bruce M. 
Published: June 2016

Descartes contends that he, or his mind, is really distinct from his body. Many philosophers have little patience with this claim. What could be more obvious than that the mind depends on the body? But their impatience often dissolves when they recognize that Descartes only asserts ade remodal statement. To say that one thing is really distinct from another is to say that each can exist apart from the other (AT VII 162: CSM II 114). But should we grant Descartes thisde remodal claim itself?Descartes's argument for the real distinction is based on the assumption that clear and distinct conception provides a reliable guide to possibility.
The Revisionist Difference Principle
Authors: Williams Andrew D. 
Published: June 2016

John Rawls's famous difference principle is capable of at least four distinct statements, each of which occurs inA Theory of Justice.According to what I shall term the Crude Principle it is a necessary and sufficient condition for the justice of an institutional scheme which expands social and economic inequality that, subject to the satisfaction of more weighty principles, it increases the level of advantage of the least advantaged. Expressing this principle Rawls writes that,Assuming the framework of institutions required by equal liberty and fair equality of opportunity, the higher expectations of those better situated are just if and only if they work as part of a scheme which improves the expectations of the least advantaged members of society. The intuitive idea is that the social order is not to establish and secure the more attractive prospects of those better off unless doing so is to the advantage of those less fortunate.
Moral Obligation and Moral Motivation
Authors: Copp David 
Published: June 2016

'Internalism’ in ethics is a cluster of views according to which there is an ‘internal’ connection between moral obligations and either motivations or reasons to act morally; ‘externalism’ says that such connections are contingent. So described, the dispute between internalism and externalism may seem a technical debate of minor interest. However, the issues that motivate it include deep problems about moral truth, realism, normativity, and objectivity. Indeed, I think that some philosophers view externalism as undermining the ‘dignity’ of morality. They might say that if morality needs an ‘external sanction’ - if the belief that one has an obligation is not sufficient motive or reason to do the right thing- then morality is debased in status. Even an arbitrary system of etiquette could attract an external sanction under appropriate conditions.Although I believe that the more interesting internalist theses are false, there are important truths that internalism is attempting to capture. The most important of these is the fact that moral judgments are intrinsically ‘normative’ or ‘choice-guiding,’ that they are, very roughly, relevant to action or choice because of their content.
Postmodern Argumentation and Post-Postmodern Liberalism, with Comments on Levinas, Habermas, and Rawls
Authors: Reiman Jeffrey 
Published: June 2016

The Paradox of PostmodernismModernism is, roughly speaking, the Enlightenment belief in a single unified rational perspective, founded on some indubitable evidence given in human experience – either innate conceptsà laDescartes and the rationalists, or sensationsà laLocke and the empiricists – and elaborated according to reliable logical rules. This view was first attacked for its ‘foundationalism.’ Philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Dewey, Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein, denied that there is any indubitable given upon which truth can be founded. There is no experience, no testimony of the senses or of reason that blazons forth the undeniable truth. Rather the ‘given’ is, so to speak, constructed - which is to say, not given to us, but made by us. Some experience or other evidence is interpreted as this or that with this or that epistemological status, on the basis of beliefs that one already has about, say, space or mathematics or sense perception or the nature of what is ultimately real. Postmodernism is an intensification of this attack, with a distinctive political spin.
Farewell to Binary Causation
Authors: Hitchcock Christopher Read 
Published: June 2016

Causation is a topic of perennial philosophical concern. As well as being of intrinsic interest, almost all philosophical concepts — such as knowledge, beauty, and moral responsibility — involve a causal dimension. Nonetheless, attempts to provide a satisfactory account of the nature of causation have typically led to barrages of counterexamples. I hope to show that a number of the difficulties plaguing theories of causation have a common source.Most philosophical theories of causation describe abinaryrelation between cause and effect, or at any rate, a relation that reduces to such a binary relation when certain background information is held fixed. Indeed, most theories provide the same general account of when this relation holds: in order to evaluate whether C causesE,we must make a comparison between two cases, which we may neutrally label as C and ∼C. Where theories of causation differ, of course, is in precisely what is being so compared. Regularity theories of causation require a comparison between what actually happens whenever C occurs, and what actually happens, elsewhere and elsewhen, when C does not occur.
The Sentimental Self
Authors: Kupfer Joseph 
Published: June 2016

Sentimentality is usually thought of as a mild vice. Unlike such vices as cruelty, dishonesty, or contemptuousness, sentimentality appears to affect only the individuals who have it, and then, not very adversely. So what if we indulge our taste for prematurely dying heroines or stoic, sweet-natured children? Shedding a tear or feeling a diffuse affection does not seem to hurt anyone, not even ourselves. But because of its impact on the self, sentimentality is a more serious vice than might be suspected.Regardless of the immediate object of our sentimental gaze, the self is also sentimentalized. The self is not only the subject engaged in sentimentalizing activity, but also its mediated object. A sentimentalized sense of self discourages activity and keeps us from dealing with the world directly. The distortion of and absorption in the self is dangerous for sentimental individuals and those with whom they interact. To see why, we must examine the structuring of perception, thought, and emotion which makes up sentimentality. Our inquiry will be sharpened by reference to literary depictions which reflect or encourage sentimental response. Versing us in the ways of sentimentality, some literature may generate our everyday patterns of sentimentalized thought and feeling.
Realists Without a Cause: Deflationary Theories of Truth and Ethical Realism
Authors: Tenenbaum Sergio 
Published: June 2016

In ‘The Status of Content,’ Paul Boghossian points out an embarrassment in which A.J. Ayer finds himself in his extensive irrealism. Ayer embraces both an emotivist theory of ethics and a deflationary theory of truth. According to an emotivist theory, sentences that look like perfectly good declarative sentences, such as ‘One ought not to kill,’ should be interpreted as non-declarative sentences. According to a deflationary theory of truth, ‘truth’ is not a predicate of sentences, and sentences of the form ‘“p” is true’ are equivalent to sentences of the form ‘p.’ Boghossian argues that emotivism and deflationism turn out to be incompatible.Boghossian's criticism should not be presented before we ask this question: What motivates Ayer's subversion of surface grammar? A typical motivation to provide an analysis of a certain region of discourse is to find a way in which patterns of inference and compositionality could be more perspicuously presented.
Internal Relations and Analyticity: Wittgenstein and Quine
Authors: Hymers Michael 
Published: June 2016

Since Russell and Moore forsook idealism, it has often been assumed that only analytic truths can express internal relations — relations which, in Russell's words, are ‘grounded in the natures of the related terms.’ An object,a,is internally related to another object,b, if and only ifais related tobin virtue ofa'spossessing some property,P.So ifahas the property of being a branch, then it is internally related to some tree,b,as part to whole. In turn, ‘A branch is a part of some tree’ is (at least a plausible candidate for) an analytic truth. It is true in virtue of the meanings of its terms, or because the concept of the predicate contains the concept of the subject.Quine's critique of analyticity has thus made the pragmatically minded wary of talk of internal relations.
Intergenerational Cooperation and Distributive Justice
Authors: Heath Joseph 
Published: June 2016

Kevin Sauvé has recently argued in this journal that David Gauthier's conception of ‘morals by agreement’ is inimical to the development of long-term productive investment and sustainable levels of resource exploitation. According to Sauvé, this is because society is confronted with an intergenerational interaction problem whose strategic equilibrium is suboptimal (a ‘Prisoner's Dilemma’). However, unlike the ‘contemporaneous Prisoner's Dilemma’ that Gauthier analyzes, the intergenerational version cannot be solved by an appeal to constrained maximization. As a result, Sauvé claims, Gauthier cannot effectively address the question of intergenerational justice.The portion of Sauvé's argument that concerns me is the following:Gauthier solves the contemporaneous Prisoner's Dilemma by ensuring that each person will cooperate only if all others cooperate, and indeed his conception of morality is aimed at ensuring that all individuals incur the costs as well as the benefits of social cooperation. But the contemporaneous solution cannot be applied to the Intergenerational Dilemma: if each generation will save for the next only if the previous generations have also saved, none will ever save. (170)
Inscrutability
Authors: Richard Mark 
Published: June 2016

Pick what seems a correct scheme of reference for a language, German say. Perhaps you have picked one which tells us such things as that‘Katz’ refers in German to cats (and nought else)‘Hund’ refers in German to dogs (and nought else).Your scheme, given that it also accounts for German devices of sentence compounding such as ‘und,’ ‘nicht,’ and ‘alle,’ assigns truth conditions to German sentences.Quine reminds us that it is possible to permute your reference scheme in such a way that the result assigns the same truth values to all German sentences, even though the permutation changes the reference of all of German's terms. For example, we can take ‘Katz’ to refer to undetached cat parts, ‘Hund’ to undetached dog parts, ‘lauft’ to be true of undetached parts of things that run, ‘ist identische mit’ to name the relation undetached object parts stand in when they are parts of the same object, and so on. Quine observes that it seems possible to do this without effecting the ‘observational consequences’ of German theories: a theory in German will be seen, under one interpretation, to be confirmed by some evidence iff it is so confirmed under the other.
Nations and Social Complexity
Authors: Ware Robert 
Published: June 2016

In the last three decades, we in the West have seen nationalism turn from an apparently progressive force, as in Cuba, Vietnam, and many countries in Africa, into a negative force of degenerating chaos, as in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Sri Lanka, and Rwanda. Elsewhere, during the same decades, the record of nationalism has been, or at least been perceived to have been, more mixed, for example in Belgium, Canada, and India. The assessments themselves are uncertain and suspect, however. Maybe nationalism was not so clearly progressive or so clearly retrogressive where we had previously thought it so. Maybe we misjudge its ambivalence elsewhere. Maybe we are not even dealing with the same kind of phenomenon.More generally, we have yet to understand the role of nationalism in two world wars and countless imperialist incursions. We have only the vaguest ideas of its connection to social ideologies and movements like racism, fascism, and Nazism and little understanding of its relevance to economic systems like capitalism and socialism.
What Good is Consciousness?
Authors: Dretske Fred 
Published: June 2016

If consciousness is good for something, conscious things must differ in some causally relevant way from unconscious things. If they do not, then, as Davies and Humphreys conclude, too bad for consciousness: ‘psychological theory need not be concerned with this topic.’Davies and Humphreys are applying a respectable metaphysical idea — the idea, namely, that if an object's having a property does not make a difference to what that object does, if the object's causal powers are in no way enhanced (or diminished) by its possession of this property, then nothing the object does can be explained by its having that property. A science dedicated to explaining the behavior of such objects would not have to concern itself with that property. That is why being an uncle is of no concern to the psychology (let alone the physics) of uncles. I am an uncle, yes, but my being so does not (causally speaking ) enable (or prevent) me to do anything I would not otherwise be able to do.
Science and Moral Skepticism in Hobbes
Authors: Black Sam 
Published: June 2016

Here lyes that mighty Man of SenseWho, full of years, departed hence,To teach the other world Intelligence,This was the prodigious Man,who vanquish’ d Pope and Puritan,By the Magic of Leviathan.Had he not Controversy wanted,His deeper Thoughts had not been scanted;Therefore good Spirits him transplant:Wise as he was, he could not tellWhether he went to Heaven or Hell.Beyond the Tenth Sphere, if there be a wide place,He'll prove by his Art there's no infinite space:And all good Angels may thank him, for thatHe has prov’ d they are something, tho men know not what.Hobbes's Epitaph (Anon 1680)
Closet Dualism and Mental Causation
Authors: Leiter Brian , Miller Alexander 
Published: June 2016

Serious doubts about nonreductive materialism — the orthodoxy of the past two decades in philosophy of mind — have been long overdue. Jaegwon Kim has done perhaps the most to articulate the metaphysical problems that the new breed of materialists must confront in reconciling their physicalism with their commitment to the autonomy of the mental. Although the difficulties confronting supervenience, multiple-realizability, and mental causation have been recurring themes in his work, only mental causation — in particular, the specter of epiphenomenalism — has really captured the interest of philosophers in general in recent years.This growing attention has spawned a large body of literature, which it is not our aim here to explore or assess. Rather, we want to call attention to what we believe is a new and quite different argumentative strategy against epiphenomenalism voiced in some recent articles by Tyler Burge and Stephen Yablo. Each has challenged two central assumptions of the existing mental causation debate.
Truth: A Traditional Debate Reviewed
Authors: Wright Crispin 
Published: June 2016

Every student of English-speaking analytical metaphysics is taught that the early twentieth century philosophical debate about truth confronted the correspondence theory, supported by Russell, Moore, the early Wittgenstein and, later, J.L. Austin, with the coherence theory advocated by the British Idealists. Sometimes the pragmatist conception of truth deriving from Dewey, William James, and C.S. Peirce is regarded as a third player. And as befits a debate at the dawn of analytical philosophy, the matter in dispute is normally taken to have been the proper analysis of the concept.No doubt this conception nicely explains some of the characteristic turns taken in the debate. Analysis, as traditionally conceived, has to consist in the provision of illuminating conceptual equivalences; and illumination will depend, according to the standard rules of play, on the analysans’ utilizing only concepts which, in the best case, are in some way prior to and independent of the notion being analyzed — or, if that's too much to ask, then concepts which at least permit of some form of explication which does not in turn take one straight back to that notion.
Mechanism and the Representational Nature of Sensation in Descartes
Authors: Keating Laura 
Published: June 2016

Commentators have argued that along with adopting a mechanical view of nature, Descartes developed two innovative views concerning sensation: sensation occurs without the involvement of an entity resembling the sensation, and sensations represent features of objects but without resembling them. When Descartes is interpreted as making both of these claims, it appears that in removing resemblance from the causal process of sensation, Descartes preserves the notion that sensations represent features of objects and that he does this by introducing a new conception of representation — one not requiring resemblance.It is important to recognize that the two claims are distinct. The first claim, that the physical process of sensation does not involve something resembling the qualitative content of the sensation, does not in and of itself entail anything about the representational nature of the sensation. Or rather, what it does entail is thatifsensations do represent their causes in objects, then it cannot be by presenting those causes to the mind as they exist in objects.
Freedom, Foreknowledge, and the Principle of Alternate Possibilities
Authors: Vihvelin Kadri 
Published: June 2016

For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.T.S. Eliot,Four QuartetsFew arguments in contemporary philosophy have had more influence than Harry Frankfurt's ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsiblity.’ In that famous paper Frankfurt noted that all parties to the traditional debate about the compatibility of free will and moral responsibility with determinism had subscribed to a common assumption. They had assumed the truth of something Frankfurt called ‘the Principle of Alternate Possibilities,’ which he expressed as follows:(PAP) A person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise.In the traditional debate incompatibilists argued that if determinism is true, then no one can ever do otherwise, while compatibilists argued that there is a morally relevant sense in which even a deterministic agent can do otherwise. Frankfurt proposed to show that PAPis false, thereby undercutting the traditional debate.
Prediction, Probability, and Pragmatics
Authors: Eells Ellery 
Published: June 2016

Along with such criteria as truth, comprehensiveness, explanatory adequacy, and simplicity (as well as others), philosophers of science usually also mention predictive accuracy as a criterion of theory choice. But while philosophers have devoted attention to the problem of the logical structure of scientific prediction, it seems that little attention has been devoted to the difficult question of what precisely constitutes predictive accuracy, at least ‘predictive accuracy’ in the sense in which I will discuss it here.I will in this paper discuss the role of predictive accuracy in theory choice. But before that, I will address the problem of what constitutes predictive accuracy more generally and independently of its role in theory choice. I will approach the problem of predictive accuracy from a pragmaticpoint of view, and then try to assess the role of predictive accuracy in theory choice from that perspective.
Self-directed Agents
Authors: Christensen W. D. , Hooker C. A. 
Published: June 2016

In this paper, we outline a theory of the nature of self-directed agents. What is distinctive about self-directed agents is their ability to anticipate interaction processes and to evaluate their performance, and thus their sensitivity to context. They can improve performance relative to goals, and can, in certain instances, construct new goals. We contrast self-directedness with reactive action processes that are not modifiable by the agent, though they may be modified by supra-agent processes such as populational adaptation or external design.Self-directedness lies at the nexus of issues concerning the evolution and nature of intentionality, intelligence, and agency. It provides some insight into the evolution of intelligence because it helps explain how organisms are able to manage variable interaction processes, e.g., a hunting strategy that varies with prey type, ground condition, and hunger level. Simple self-directed organisms like bumblebees manage variability in one or a few dimensions.
Korsgaard's Kantian Arguments for the Value of Humanity
Authors: Kerstein Samuel J. 
Published: June 2016

In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard affirms that Enlightenment morality is true: humanity is valuable. To many of us few claims seem more obvious. Yet Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant do not limit themselves to affirming that humanity is valuable. They appeal to reason in an effort to establish it. They try to show that, in some sense, we are rationally compelled to recognize the value of humanity. Korsgaard joins in this effort. She champions the claim that unless we take humanity to be valuable, we condemn ourselves to complete practical skepticism, i.e., to the view that we have no reason to do anything at all.Korsgaard discusses two arguments that, she believes, support this claim. The first she attributes directly to Kant in a series of influential papers on his ethics. The second argument, which she calls a ‘fancy new model’ of the first, she constructs under her own name in The Sources of Normativity. I will defend the view that neither of these arguments succeeds. In doing so, I will not be trying to show that we are mistaken in believing humanity to be valuable.
Fictionalism and Moore's Paradox
Authors: Szabó Zoltán Gendler 
Published: June 2016

Many philosophers strive for a thin ontology but are nevertheless unwilling to curtail ordinary and scientific talk that carries apparent commitment to the entities they reject. As Carnap put it, such a philosopher speaks with an uneasy conscience, ‘like a man who in his everyday life does with qualms many things which are not in accord with the high moral principles he professes on Sundays.’ To appear less hypocritical he may, of course, tell us openly what he is doing and invite us to join him. But then it is hard to see why he is not advocating the absurd position that we should assent to sentences of the form ‘There areFs but I don't believe that there areFs.’This is a simple objection, and there is a simple answer to it. But the answer is not available to everyone. I will argue that defenders of a particular version of fictionalism are in trouble with Moore's paradox. The bad news for fictionalism in general is that this particular version is the one that best deals with the Quine-Putnam challenge.