In this paper, I outline the historical context of C.C.E. Schmid's doctrine of intelligible fatalism. By doing so, I show the development of this influential doctrine and sketch Schmid's apparent revision of it in light of contemporary criticisms.

C.C.E. Schmid’s doctrine of intelligible fatalism was immensely influential in the immediate reception of Kant’s philosophy. Existing treatments of this doctrine, largely neglected by modern scholarship, echo uncharitable interpretations espoused by Schmid’s contemporaries. I demonstrate that Schmid’s intelligible fatalism is more coherent and philosophically robust than hitherto recognized. I argue for a novel interpretation of Schmid’s account of rational agency, showing that intelligible fatalism is compatible with his conceptions of freedom, obligation, and imputation. Specifically, (...) I argue that the role of consciousness in this account carves out conceptual space for a distinction between the theoretical and the practical that is sufficient to render intelligible fatalism consistent with these conceptions. (shrink)

At current rates, almost all U.S. public universities could reach a point of zero state subsidy within the next fifty years. What is a public university without public funding? In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz considers the future of public universities, drawing upon the analysis provided in John Dewey's Democracy and Education. Knight Abowitz conducts an initial institutional analysis through two broad prisms: that of the political landscape that authorizes universities as public institutions, and that of the present political–economic context (...) of public education in general and public universities in particular. Dewey's conception of democratic education is then explored; his arguments regarding aims, experience, thinking, and social intelligence provide important tools for imagining the democratic futures of public universities today. (shrink)

The notion of “responsibility gap” with artificial intelligence (AI) was originally introduced in the philosophical debate to indicate the concern that “learning automata” may make more difficult or impossible to attribute moral culpability to persons for untoward events. Building on literature in moral and legal philosophy, and ethics of technology, the paper proposes a broader and more comprehensive analysis of the responsibility gap. The responsibility gap, it is argued, is not one problem but a set of at least four interconnected (...) problems – gaps in culpability, moral and public accountability, active responsibility—caused by different sources, some technical, other organisational, legal, ethical, and societal. Responsibility gaps may also happen with non-learning systems. The paper clarifies which aspect of AI may cause which gap in which form of responsibility, and why each of these gaps matter. It proposes a critical review of partial and non-satisfactory attempts to address the responsibility gap: those which present it as a new and intractable problem (“fatalism”), those which dismiss it as a false problem (“deflationism”), and those which reduce it to only one of its dimensions or sources and/or present it as a problem that can be solved by simply introducing new technical and/or legal tools (“solutionism”). The paper also outlines a more comprehensive approach to address the responsibility gaps with AI in their entirety, based on the idea of designing socio-technical systems for “meaningful human control", that is systems aligned with the relevant human reasons and capacities. (shrink)

Dive into the moral philosophy at the heart of all four seasons of NBC’s The Good Place, guided by academic experts including the show’s philosophical consultants Pamela Hieronymi and Todd May, and featuring a foreword from creator and showrunner Michael Schur Explicitly dedicated to the philosophical concepts, questions, and fundamental ethical dilemmas at the heart of the thoughtful and ambitious NBC sitcom The Good Place Navigates the murky waters of moral philosophy in more conceptual depth to call into question what (...) Chidi’s ethics lessons—and the show—get right about learning to be a good person Features contributions from The Good Place’s philosophical consultants, Pamela Hieronymi and Todd May, and introduced by the show’s creator and showrunner Michael Schur Engages classic philosophical questions, including the clash between utilitarianism and deontological ethics in the “Trolley Problem,” Kant’s categorical imperative, Sartre’s nihilism, and T.M Scanlon's contractualism Explores themes such as death, love, moral heroism, free will, responsibility, artificial intelligence, fatalism, skepticism, virtue ethics, perception, and the nature of autonomy in the surreal heaven-like afterlife of the Good Place Led by Kimberly S. Engels, co-editor of Westworld and Philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Early Critics on Freedom of the Will ed. by Jörg Noller and John WalshDai HeideJörg Noller and John Walsh, editors. Kant’s Early Critics on Freedom of the Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xlvii + 297. Hardback, $105.00; paperback, $32.99.This volume collects new (and in many instances the first) English translations of eighteen works—by Johann Fichte, Salomon Maimon, Karl Reinhold, August Heydenreich, and Hermann Pistorius, among (...) others—that engage with Kant’s critical theory of freedom as it is encountered in his three Critiques and other writings from the late 1780s and early 1790s. The essays were written between 1786 and 1800. Noller and Walsh open the volume with a thorough and penetrating introduction to Kant’s historical context, Kant’s theory of freedom, and the newly translated essays themselves. Given how central Kant’s theory of freedom is to every aspect of his systematic philosophy, and how intensely scholars have focused upon it in recent decades, this volume is a welcome addition to the existing literature. Not only is it important to have these essays translated into English, but it is also helpful to have them collected in a single volume. This volume will thus be an invaluable resource, and not merely for English-speaking scholars of Kant. For considerations of space, I cannot discuss every essay in the volume. Instead, I emphasize those contributions that strike me as especially noteworthy or relevant to contemporary discussion.The standout of the first group of essays, on “Freedom and Determinism,” is the contribution by Hermann Andreas Pistorius (1730–98), which reinforces his status as one of Kant’s most trenchant Leibnizian critics. Pistorius subjects Kant’s account of “the concept of freedom itself, its origin, its content, and its objective validity” to a withering critique, contending that this is “the most obscure aspect of his system” (5). Pistorius raises the now familiar worry that Kant’s relegation of transcendental freedom to things in themselves violates his own epistemic strictures. He goes on to argue that even if this worry can be evaded, we must “assume that the human being’s actually free actions (which likewise are things in themselves) appear as necessary to him, as a thing in itself ” (8). In other words, our representations of deterministic sequences are representations of things in themselves “obscured and distorted by the fog of sensibility,” which renders Kant’s philosophy ultimately a version of “the Leibnizian idealism which the author so strongly rejects” (8). Also of note here is the set of careful objections by Johann August Heinrich Ulrich (1746–1813) to the notion of timeless agency that appears to be required for Kant’s account of transcendental freedom, an issue that remains alive and well in contemporary discussions of transcendental freedom.The section on “Freedom and Imputability” begins with two contributions by Carl Christian Erhard Schmid (1762–1812), who contends that only morally good actions are imputable, a claim he takes to be grounded in the doctrine of intelligible fatalism: “the [End Page 669] assertion of the natural necessity of all actions of a rational being according to laws of the causality of things in themselves” (78). Johann Christoph Schwab (1743–1821) responds directly to Schmid’s intelligible fatalism in two essays published in the Philosophisches Archiv. The first essay criticizes Schmid’s endorsement of Kant’s appeal to “a supersensible I in addition to the empirical I” (84, emphasis in original). He contends that this requires Schmid “to attribute predicates to the rational I that elevate it to the rank of the deity” (86). In the second essay, Schwab responds directly to Schmid’s intelligible fatalism, arguing that intelligible fatalism is not superior to ordinary determinism. He concludes by speculating that Schmid’s intelligible fatalism is “at bottom identical with Leibnizian-Wolffian determinism” (91). This section of the book concludes with the attack moved by Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823) against intelligible fatalism, which Reinhold sees as incompatible with fundamental aspects of the critical philosophy.Each of the essays in the third section, on “Freedom and Consciousness,” takes up Kant’s discussion of the “fact of reason” in his... (shrink)

Kant’s solution for the problem of freedom of the will rests on his transcendental idealism and its differentiation of appearances and things in themselves. Human beings, with their bodies and observable inner and outer activities, are objects of perception (empirical intuition) and therefore appearances. These are only the appearances of their noumenal selves. Human beings are determined by laws of nature in all their perceivable alterations which include all their actions, but their noumenal selves, not being in time, are not (...) determined by the necessity of causal laws of nature, but can be determined by the moral law of their pure practical reason which they give to themselves. The actions of the will, observable volitions and external actions, can therefore, at the same time, be under the necessitating law of nature, i.e. be unfree, and, as appearances of the self-determination of their noumenal will (by fulfilling the demands of the moral law), be free. Two professors of Jena University, Ulrich and Schmid, accept part of Kant’s transcendental idealism but contend that the many transgressions of the moral law in human acting must have their noumenal reason in the agent’s intelligible character or in the intelligible substrate of nature. This theory is called “intelligible fatalism”. (shrink)

I. Introduction In Groundwork III and in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant famously asserted that “Freiheit und unbedingtes praktisches Gesetz weisen […] wechselsweise auf einander zurück.” Kant's thesis of the analyticity of freedom and practical reason was rejected by his prominent early readers. In the eighth of his influential Letters on Kant's Philosophy of 1786–1787, Karl Leonhard Reinhold argued that the identification of the will with practical reason excluded the possibility of ascribing freedom to immoral and amoral actions. Reinhold (...) proposed that free will consequently be defined in libertarian terms, as the free capacity to satisfy one of two fundamental drives at the expense of the other: either ‘den uneigennützigen Trieb’ equivalent to Kant's ‘Triebfeder der reinen praktischen Vernunft’, or ‘den eigennützigen Trieb’ equivalent to Kant's ‘Begierde und Neigungen’ or ‘Eigenliebe’. Most first-generation commentators followed Reinhold in rejecting Kant's assertion of an analytical relationship between freedom and practical reason, but several came out on the other side, denying freedom in order to secure the identity of will and practical reason. Leonhard Creuzer thus concurred with Reinhold that immoral conduct could not be imputed to the causality of pure reason, or by extension, to the rational agent, but then developed a theory of “transcendental fatalism” according to which immoral actions were the effects of forces from the realm of nature intervening upon, and outweighing, the force of the intelligible ground. Nearly a century later, Hermann Cohen dismissed libertarian freedom as incoherent in itself and as incompatible with autonomy. Across the channel Henry Sidgwick withheld judgment on the coherence of libertarian freedom, but he, too, claimed that such freedom is, at all events, incompatible with the causality of practical reason. More recently, Gerold Prauss has suggested that the perennial difficulties posed by Kant's account of the relationship between freedom and practical reason might be resolved by construing the relationship as a synthetic rather than analytic one. This view has found supporters across the Atlantic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Contemplative Classroom, or Learning by Heart in the Age of GoogleBarbara NewmanIn his provocative essay “Slow Knowledge,” David Orr outlines the countervailing assumptions of what he calls “the culture of fast knowledge.” Among these are the widely shared, though rarely examined, beliefs that “only that which can be measured is true knowledge; the more knowledge we have, the better; there are no significant distinctions between information and knowledge; (...) and wisdom is an undefinable, hence unimportant category.”1 If all this were true, it would follow that computers are fast overtaking humans as the next intelligent species. Or, to put it differently, the two species have been colluding for some time to produce smarter machines and dumber people, as we humans abdicate more and more of our mental tasks. Moreover, when it comes time to weigh values—to ask not how quickly or efficiently some task can be done, but whether it ought to be done at all—we are strangely disinclined to challenge digital fatalism, which has become the default logic of late capitalism. Whenever a new digital option appears, we assume that if it can be done and someone somewhere is doing it, then it should be done and we ought to do it too. So even the local hardware store has to be on Facebook so customers can “like” it, and the AAR needs a Twitter account to send weekly tweets. We seldom pause to ask questions about means and ends, unintended consequences, or the sheer mindless clutter of our lives—let alone the implications of this or that new app for our descendants down to the seventh generation, or the enlightenment of all sentient beings. Surface obliterates depth; instant stimulation trumps mature reflection; short-term profit overrules the long-range good.Computers themselves are of course morally neutral. Nonetheless, it is useful to recall why contemplation is the antithesis of the fast knowledge they promote. Contemplative practice is grounded in such values as presence, mindfulness, inwardness, and the integration of mind and body. The last point is worth stressing, for all knowledge, even the most spiritual, is embodied; we are still biological beings, not cyborgs. Though contemplatives of the past have often been fierce ascetics, even the most emaciated hermit could scarcely despise the body to the degree that we find in [End Page 3] some contemporary Internet addicts. Consider the following, reported in July 2012 in Newsweek:When the new DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] is released next year, Internet Addiction Disorder will be included for the first time, albeit in an appendix tagged for “further study.” China, Taiwan, and Korea recently accepted the diagnosis, and began treating problematic Web use as a grave national health crisis. In those countries,... the story is sensational front-page news. One young couple neglected its infant to death while nourishing a virtual baby online. A young man fatally bludgeoned his mother for suggesting he log off (and then used her credit card to rack up more hours). At least 10 ultra-Web users, serviced by one-click noodle delivery, have died of blood clots from sitting too long.2Even short of such extremes, numerous studies have linked excessive Internet use in the United States with increased rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Teens admit to being exhausted by the constant need to update their Facebook status and answer countless texts, yet they are afraid to log off for fear that some excitement may pass them by. There is even a new acronym, FOMO, for the fear of missing out. If a central aim of contemplative practice is to dismantle and disengage from the “false self,” there is no better tool for constructing false selves than social media. In her book Alone Together, the social psychologist Sherry Turkle quotes a young man who told her, “What I learned in high school was profiles, profiles, profiles, how to make a me.”3 Another student said he maintained four avatars onscreen at all times, along with his email, video games, and—yes—coursework. His “real life,” he said, was “just one more window,... not usually my best one.”4But social... (shrink)

One of the main goals of sport psychology is to identify those psychological factors that are relevant for sport performance as well as possibilities of their development. The aim of the study was to determine whether the set of specific psychological characteristics [generalized self-efficacy, time perspective, emotional intelligence, general achievement motivation, and personality dimensions] makes the distinction between athletes based on their -participation in the senior national team, that is, their belonging to the subsample of elite or non-elite athletes depending (...) on this criterion. According to the group centroids it can be said that elite athletes are characterized by a positive high score in self-efficacy, emotionality, present fatalistic time perspective, past positive time perspective, and openness to experience. They are also characterized by low past negative time perspective, emotional competence, and future time perspective. Non-elite athletes have the opposite traits. The results have been discussed in the context of their application in the process of talent selection and development in sport as well as the development of life skills in athletes. (shrink)

In 1866, the young John Venn published The Logic of Chance, motivated largely by the desire to correct what he saw as deep fallacies in the reasoning of historical determinists such as Henry Buckle and in the optimistic heralding of a true social science by Adolphe Quetelet. Venn accepted the inevitable determinism implied by the physical sciences, but denied that the stable social statistics cited by Buckle and Quetelet implied a similar determinism in human actions. Venn maintained that probability statements (...) were intelligible solely as projections of the ultimate frequency of an outcome in an unlimited series of trials and therefore led to no inferences about free will. An issue here was Venn's claim that although the aggregate probability may be stable, the individual events were completely irregular and, in fact, displayed randomness. Venn's concept of randomness was really apparent, or pseudo-, randomness, which could be totally determined. Ironically, Venn's frequentist position was very useful to the growing field of statistics, which could develop correlations and predictive models empirically without having to address implications for personal freedom or fatalism. (shrink)

Kant talks about a transcendentally necessary mind and, less often, about an intelligible mind. The two characterizations of the mind have similarities. However, there are also important differences. The properties grouped under ‘transcendental’ are cognitive, those grouped under ‘intelligible’ are conative. The properties grouped under ‘transcendental’ are nearly all congenial to cognitive science. Many grouped under ‘intelligible are not.

Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? Making AI Intelligible shows that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they illustrate ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved. The questions addressed in the book are not only theoretically interesting, but the answers have pressing practical (...) implications. Many important decisions about human life are now influenced by AI. In giving that power to AI, we presuppose that AIs can track features of the world that we care about (for example, creditworthiness, recidivism, cancer, and combatants). If AIs can share our concepts, that will go some way towards justifying this reliance on AI. This ground-breaking study offers insight into how to take some first steps towards achieving Interpretable AI. (shrink)

1. Modern science in historical perspective -- On the origins of modern science -- The post-Renaissance revolution : the New Science -- Frank Sherwood Taylor : the man who was converted by Galileo -- The limits of science -- Proofs and demonstrations -- On the intelligibility of Quantum Mechanics -- Uncertainty, incompleteness, chance, and design -- A Finite, Open and Contingent Universe -- 2. On the origin and development of life -- A brief history of evolutionary thought -- Life's (...) class='Hi'>intelligible design -- What are the contributions of Genetics to the understanding of life? -- On the Human Genome in contrast to the Great Apes Genome -- On The Evolution Controversy -- Scientific critiques of Darwinism -- 3. Beyond nature and history -- The religion of Darwinism -- On the riddle of man's origin -- On science, history and free will -- Science and Faith -- Concluding remarks. (shrink)

Saint Maximus the Confessor’s voluminous corpus constitutes a coherent and lucid philosophical and theological system, notwithstanding the existence of obscure, difficult, and at times even contradictory passages. A question stemming from Maximus’ work is whether the “intelligible creation” is imperishable or corruptible, which would have important implications for a number of other issues like the created / uncreated distinction, Maximus’ relationship to Neoplatonism, et al. However, Maximus provides us with contradictory passages concerning this subject, characterizing the noēte ktisis as (...) both corruptible and imperishable. While in certain passages of the Ambigua ad Ioannem he states that created intelligible beings move “according to corruption,” excluding the possibility of natural incorruptibility for them, in other passages he states that the noēte ktisis possesses imperishability by nature, and not merely by grace. In this paper I will attempt to examine this apparent inconsistency on the basis of these two examples and to discuss which of both positions should be considered as Maximus’ “primary” position. (shrink)

This paper explores the ontology of Malebranche's notion of "intelligible extension", the archetypal divine idea of matter which he believed to be the immediate object of our own minds in all of our thoughts about corporeal things. Building on this account of its ontology, and through an examination of a form of isomorphism between intelligible extension and the created spatial world, the paper also attempts to explain the manner in which it could fulfill its epistemological role of representing (...) all possible bodies and supplying us with our abstract knowledge of geometry. (shrink)

Argues that Aquinas's views on intelligible matter and abstraction, as they relate to mathematics, are considerably more developed than those of Aristotle.

I argue that intelligible matter, for Aristotle, is what makes mathematical objects quantities and divisible in their characteristic way. On this view, the intelligible matter of a magnitude is a sensible object just insofar as it has dimensional continuity, while that of a number is a plurality just insofar as it consists of indivisibles that measure it. This interpretation takes seriously Aristotle's claim that intelligible matter is the matter of mathematicals generally – not just of geometricals. I (...) also show that intelligible matter has the same meaning in all three places where it is explicitly invoked: Z.10, Z.11, and H.6. Since the H.6 passage involves a mathematical definition, this requires determining what the mathematician defines and how she defines it. I show that, as with natural scientific definitions, there must be a matterlike element in mathematical definitions. This element is not identical with, but rather refers to, intelligible matter. (shrink)

Dans le Timée, Platon considère le vivant intelligible comme modèle du vivant parfait qu’est le monde. La notion pose cependant plusieurs difficultés, qui tournent autour de la possibilité d’une vie au niveau intelligible. Dans un premier temps, j’examine donc ce qu’il faut entendre par intelligible (noèton) chez Platon, à savoir moins un objet qu’une relation cognitive d’un type particulier, principielle, de l’âme à cet objet. Dans un second temps, j’explore le type de vie propre à ce vivant (...) intelligible, comme le principe d’organisation qui associe les Formes de tous les vivants. (shrink)

At the beginning of a new reign it seems appropriate to re-assess the meaning of monarchy in modern Britain. The new King heads a fractured royal family, a divided nation, and a disaffected Commonwealth. How can we as scholars make sense of where the monarchy has been, and where it might be going? This article suggests a new scholarly approach is required. Through a critical analysis of three classic studies of monarchy: Walter Bagehot’s The English constitution (1867), Kingsley Martin’s The (...) magic of monarchy (1937) and Tom Nairn’s The enchanted glass (1988), the lecture traces the lineage of modern interpretations of the British monarchy and points up their limitations. Preoccupied with the symbolism of monarchy, conventional scholarship neglects its important political functions. As the lecture argues, in the era of Brexit at home and populist regimes around the world, modern democracies may actually need monarchy more than ever before. (shrink)

The role and precise significance of Intelligible Matter in the philosophy of Plotinus has been neglected or dismissed with many questions unanswered. In view of the fact that, unless this role can be properly understood, the whole doctrine of the procession of the Second Hypostasis must remain mysterious, this paper is intended to shed light on two important aspects of that Hypostasis: the nature of Intelligible Matter itself and the relation of that Matter to the Forms.

This paper surveys some themes of Allison's Kant's Theory of Freedom, and then raises a problem for his presentation of Kant's Reciprocity Thesis. Allison argues that a transcendentally free agent is bound to the moral law as follows. Rational agents fall under a justification requirement, and when transcendental freedom is added to the concept of rational agency, the justification requirement extends to the choice of fundamental maxims. Since facts about one's nature cannot justify the adoption of fundamental maxims, all that (...) remains are considerations that anyone can recognize as valid. Thus a transcendentally free agent must conform to unconditional laws. The problem is that it is unclear how a transcendentally free agent can make a reasoned choice of fundamental principles; but if it can, why can't it choose the Principle of Happiness? I suggest that a stronger version of this argument results from adopting a richer notion of a transcendentally free agent as an autonomous sovereign will with an interest in expressing its sovereignty. (shrink)

Arthur Danto argued from the premiss that artworks are essentially cognitive to the conclusion that they are incidentally aesthetic. I wonder why Danto, and the very many of us he persuaded, came to believe that the cognitive and the aesthetic oppose one another. I argue, contrary to Danto’s historical claims, that the cognitive and the aesthetic did not come into opposition until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and that they were brought into opposition for reasons of art-critical expediency (...) rather than philosophical necessity. I conclude that a robustly cognitive notion of the aesthetic remains an option for us. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an arts-based posthumanist cartography of a theatre play, Apple Time performed by deaf youth in Regina, Saskatchewan. This play was co-constructed by deaf youth performers, two deaf adults, a hearing teacher, and a hearing director. Apple Time premiered in Regina, Saskatchewan on June 2, 2018, and was remounted again at the Globe Theatre (Regina) in February 2019 and again at the SoundOff Festival in Edmonton, Alberta. The arts-based cartography examines intelligibility as a methodological problem as (...) posited by Graif (2018), in which the actions of deaf children and youth often remain invisible due to the ontological position that perception of the world is predicated upon the ability to hear. Intelligibility as a methodological problem poses a challenge to the deficit perspective commonly held by families and service providers working with deaf children and youth (Glickman & Hall, 2019). The performers in this play were able to re-align audience perceptions through the presentation of their inner worlds and preoccupations, thereby making their multiple deaf worlds more intelligible. (shrink)

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