This chapter contains sections titled: The Place of Habit in Human Life Habits in Current Philosophy of Action The Habit ‐ Friendly Tradition Analyzing Habit Philosophy of Habit: Benefits and Challenges References.

The burgeoning literature on jus post bellum has repeatedly reaffirmed three positions that strike me as deeply implausible: that in the aftermath of wars, compensation should be a priority; that we should likewise prioritize punishing political leaders and war criminals even in the absence of legitimate multilateral institutions; and that when states justifiably launch armed humanitarian interventions, they become responsible for reconstructing the states into which they have intervened – the so called “Pottery Barn” dictum, “You break it, you own (...) it.” Against these common positions, this chapter argues that compensation should be subordinate to reconstruction, with resources going where they are most needed and can do the most good, rather than to the most aggrieved. Just punishment, meanwhile, presupposes just multilateral institutions – the victor cannot be trusted to mete out punishment fairly. And just interveners, who have already taken on such a heavy burden, are entitled to expect the international community to contribute to reconstruction after they have made the first and vital steps. After presenting each of these objections in greater depth, the chapter proceeds to draw some tentative inferences from the threads running through each, and suggest that they illustrate a distinctive flaw in the way in which jus post bellum is addressed by many just war theorists, who not only see the war as the grounds of post bellum duties, but also take it to specify their content: Specifically, they take the rights violations with which wars are imbued to be the basis for post-war action, but take the content of post-war duties to be focused on rectifying those rights violations, rather than the more forward-looking goal of establishing a lasting peace. This backward-looking orientation unduly confines these theorists to making attributions of fault, to a limited palette of normative concepts, and to a focus on the belligerents rather than the international community as a whole. Undoubtedly warfare creates a distinctive normative relationship between belligerent states (though we must question how much of this devolves to the citizens of those states). War does generate grounds for post-war duties – but there are other grounds for those duties too, moreover the grounds should not determine the content. It of course matters that the citizens of two states harmed one another in violation of their rights. But when the war is done, peacebuilding should be the priority, not raking over the wrongs of both sides. Sections 2–4 present the objections, Section 5 offers the tentative analysis and proposes a shift in focus toward an ethics of peacebuilding, and Section 6 concludes. (shrink)

Skepticism about moral responsibility, or what is more commonly referred to as moral responsibility skepticism, refers to a family of views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings are never morally responsible for their actions in a particular but pervasive sense. This sense is typically set apart by the notion of basic desert and is defined in terms of the control in action needed for an agent to be truly deserving of blame (...) and praise. Some moral responsibility skeptics wholly reject this notion of moral responsibility because they believe it to be incoherent or impossible. Others maintain that, though possible, our best philosophical and scientific theories about the world provide strong and compelling reasons for adopting skepticism about moral responsibility. What all varieties of moral responsibility skepticism share, however, is the belief that the justification needed to ground basic desert moral responsibility and the practices associated with it—such as backward-looking praise and blame, punishment and reward (including retributive punishment), and the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation—is not met. Versions of moral responsibility skepticism have historically been defended by Spinoza, Voltaire, Diderot, d’Holbach, Priestley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Clarence Darrow, B.F. Skinner, and Paul Edwards, and more recently by Galen Strawson, Derk Pereboom, Bruce Waller, Neil Levy, Tamler Sommers, and Gregg D. Caruso. -/- Critics of these views tend to focus both on the arguments for skepticism about moral responsibility and on the implications of such views. They worry that adopting such a view would have dire consequences for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law. They fear, for instance, that relinquishing belief in moral responsibility would undermine morality, leave us unable to adequately deal with criminal behavior, increase anti-social conduct, and destroy meaning in life. Optimistic skeptics, however, respond by arguing that life without free will and basic desert moral responsibility would not be as destructive as many people believe. These optimistic skeptics argue that prospects of finding meaning in life or of sustaining good interpersonal relationships, for instance, would not be threatened. They further maintain that morality and moral judgments would remain intact. And although retributivism and severe punishment, such as the death penalty, would be ruled out, they argue that the imposition of sanctions could serve purposes other than the punishment of the guilty—e.g., it can also be justified by its role in incapacitating, rehabilitating, and deterring offenders. (shrink)

Section II of this article originated as a commentary on Véronique Munoz-Dardé’s “The Distribution of Numbers and the Comprehensiveness of Reasons.” I have delivered subsequent versions of this article at the University of Reading, UCLA, the University of Bristol, the University of Leeds, and the University of Oxford, and thank all who commented on those occasions. I am also grateful to G. A. Cohen, Iwao Hirose, Véronique Munoz-Dardé, Alex Voorhoeve, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for (...) class='Hi'>their written comments. (shrink)

Drawing on new empirical data, a group of experimental philosophers have argued that one of the most popular and influential forms of skepticism is much less interesting and much less worrisome than philosophers have thought. Contrary to this claim, I argue that this brand of skepticism remains as threatening as ever. My argument also reveals an important limitation of experimental philosophy and sheds light on the way professional philosophers should go about the business of doing (...) class='Hi'>philosophy. (shrink)

My topic is recent scientific skepticism about free will. A leading argument for such skepticism features the proposition—defended by Daniel Wegner (2002, 2008) and Benjamin Libet (1985, 2004) among others that conscious intentions (and their physical correlates) never play a role in producing corresponding overt actions. This chapter examines alleged scientific evidence for the truth of this proposition.

TV-Philosophy in Action is inspired by philosopher and series-devotee Sandra Laugier’s monthly columns published in the French journal Libération. It is her contribution to the collective reflection on TV series produced by critics, theorists, and the vast mass of individual watchers who evaluate and discuss these programmes every day. The book brings together a selection of articles from Libération, as well as longer pieces, to demonstrate ‘TV-Philosophy in action’: Laugier’s response as a philosopher-viewer to a range (...) of particularly salient TV shows from the last 20 years, and their relationship to social and political issues of our times. Arranged under a number of important themes—relating to politics, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves about our world—the book shows how TV series provide a rich resource for thinking about our lives, and places them centre-stage as works of art, and of thought, in their own right. (shrink)

Richard Popkin’s seminal study on the revival of skepticism from the late Renaissance onwards gave a prominent role to Pyrrhonism, rediscovered through the translation of Sextus Empiricus’s writings into Latin and their usage in Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, among other works. Maia Neto’s new book aims to reassess this interpretation, claiming that Montaigne’s disciple, Pierre Charron, in his La sagesse, displayed a distinctively Academic skeptical wisdom that became central in the philosophical debate of the period. Such wisdom, according (...) to Maia Neto, is conceived as refraining from “opinion” as a way of avoiding error, and thereby arriving at “intellectual integrity,” that is, human perfection insofar... (shrink)

Much of the time, human beings seem to rely on habits. Habits are learned behaviours directly elicited by context cues, and insensitive to short-term changes in goals: therefore they are sometimes irrational. But even where habitual responses are rational, it can seem as if they are nevertheless not done for reasons. For, on a common understanding of habitual behaviour, agents’ intentions do not play any role in the coming about of such responses. This paper discusses under what (...) conditions we can say that habitual responses are, after all, done for reasons. We show how the idea that habitual behaviour cannot be understood as ‘acting for reasons’ stems from a widely but often implicitly held theoretical framework: the causal theory of action. We then propose an alternative, Anscombean understanding of intentional action, which can account for habitual responses being done for reasons. (shrink)

A new kind of skepticism about philosophy is articulated and argued for. The key premise is the claim that many of us are well aware that in the past we failed to have good responses to substantive objections to our philosophical beliefs. The conclusion is disjunctive: either we are irrational in sticking with our philosophical beliefs, or we commit some other epistemic sin in having those beliefs.

Suppose that each of the following four conditions obtains: 1. You can save either a greater or a lesser number of innocent people from (equally) serious harm. 2. You can do so at trivial cost to yourself. 3. If you act to save, then the harm you prevent is harm that would not have been prevented if you had done nothing. 4. All other things are equal. A skeptic about saving the greater number rejects the common-sensical claim that you (...) have a duty to save the greater number in such circumstances. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Hume's Skepticism about Inductive Inference N. SCOTT ARNOLD IT HAS BEEN A COMMONPLACE among commentators on Hume's philosophy that he was a radical skeptic about inductive inference. In addition, he is alleged to have been the first philosopher to pose the so-called problem of induction. Until recently, however, Hume's argument in this connection has not been subject to very close scrutiny. As attention has (...) become focused on this argument, a debate has been shaping up concerning just what Hume intended to establish here. The principal purpose of this article is to settle this interpretive issue as decisively as the texts permit. I should also like to locate Hume's main argument about induction in the larger context of his discussion of skepti- cism in book 1 of the Treatise. I shall suggest that arguments for the radical skepticism commonly attributed to Hume can be found only very late in book 1 of the Treatise and that the most famous argument about inductive inference establishes and is intended to establish only a relatively modest form of skepticism. The argument under consideration can found in book l, part 3, section 6 of the Treatise. It can also be found in essays 4 and 5 of the Enquiries and in the abstract of the Treatise published anonymously by Hume. I shall concen- trate on the Treatise version since it is the first and perhaps most explicit formulation of the argument and because part of my purpose is to place this argument in the larger context of book 1 of the Treatise. The received opinion concerning Hume's argument has it that Hume was highly skeptical about the mind's claims to knowledge about the future (or, more generally, about the unobserved). All beliefs arrived at via inductive I should like to thank M. G. Anderson, John Bahde, Jon Nordy, and Robert Paul Wolff, as well as David Fate Norton and a referee for the Journal of the History of Philosophy, for helpful comments on earlier drafts on this article. 32 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY inferences are unreasonable or unjustified. The alternative interpretation, to be defended below, is that Hume held that no such belief is or can be rendered certain relative to past experience and that such beliefs are not, upon that account, unreasonable or unjustified. Something like this inter- pretation has been defended by Tom L. Beauchamp, Thomas Mappes, and Alexander Rosenberg. ~ My view differs from theirs in that I shall argue that Hume did offer arguments for the more radical skepticism commonly attri- buted to him (though it is unclear whether he regarded them as decisive). These arguments, however, come at the end of book ~ of the Treatise and are independent of the more famous argument to be discussed below. Defenders of the received view are both numerous and distinguished. Versions of this interpretation of the main argument can be found in the writings of Karl Popper, Wesley Salmon, F. L. Will, and Norman Kemp Smith; most recently a variation on the standard interpretation has been defended by Barry Stroud. The fullest and most elaborate defense of the standard interpretation can be found in a monograph by D. C. Stove. '~ Stove's discussion is perhaps the most impressive because of his painstaking efforts to lay bare the structure of Hume's reasoning and to give a line-by- line analysis of the argument. This has the effect of bringing more clearly into focus the main grounds for the standard view. If this standard interpre- tation is correct, then Hume's position is that scientific method is epistemically no better than "superstition" and "enthusiasm." And, Hume would be among those for whom this claim, if true, would be very bad news, because one of his primary purposes in the Treatise is to construct a science of man. Thus, this argument is of considerable internal significance because, if my opponents are correct, Hume appears to have cut the ground out from under what he took to be one of his most important projects -- the construc- tion of a science of man. The other feature of this argument that makes it worthy of serious con- sideration is that it is philosophically... (shrink)

Benefiting from recent work in neuroscience, this paper rebuts a pair of neuroscience-based arguments for the non-existence of free will. Well-known neuroscientific experiments that have often been cited in support of skepticism about free will are critically examined. Various problems are identified with attempts to use their findings to support the claim that free will is an illusion. It is argued on scientific grounds that certain assumptions made in these skeptical arguments are unjustified—namely, assumptions about the (...) times at which decisions are made and the times at which the point of no re­turn for the making of a decision is reached. It is argued as well that alleged findings about decisions of the kind featured in these experiments—arbitrary decisions made in the absence of conscious reasoning about what to do—fail to support certain crucial claims about non-arbitrary decisions made after careful deliberation. The paper also examines a fallback position for skeptics about free will. Some scientific skeptics about free will contend that free will, by definition, depends on the existence of immaterial souls. Survey-style studies that bring free will down to earth are brought to bear on this contention. (shrink)

This article offers a novel interpretation of enacted knowledge through the lens of Wang Yangming’s theory of the unity of knowledge and action. By framing Wang’s concept of knowledge within an enactive model, it advances a holistic perspective that integrates mind, body, and world, as well as knowledge and action, into a unified whole. To bridge historical analysis with contemporary philosophical discourse, this article engages in dialogue with Harvey Lederman’s introspective model, offering a complementary framework that, together, provides (...) a more precise and comprehensive understanding of Wang’s philosophy. Moving beyond Lederman’s dichotomy of correspondence and identity, I introduce a third interpretation of ‘unity’: the Continuum Thesis. This interpretation places a more fundamental focus on the original condition of moral knowledge, presenting it as a singular entity that inherently integrates the distinct aspects of knowledge and action. By asserting that ‘action just is knowledge’, Wang indeed affirmed their original unity. (shrink)

In any given day, I do many things. I perspire, digest and age. When I walk, I place one foot ahead of the other, my arms swinging gently at my sides; if someone bumps into me, I stumble. Perspiring, digesting, aging, placing my feet, swaying my arms and stumbling are all things I do, in some sense. Yet I also check my email, teach students and go to the grocery store. Those sorts of doings or behaviors seem distinctive; they are (...) things I do intentionally. -/- What exactly is an intentional action? How does it differ from other things we do? -/- In this essay, I motivate and sketch an answer to those questions. On this view, an intentional action is a behavior that essentially alters what the actor is rationally accountable for, what she is rationally permitted or obliged to do, think, or feel. On this view, acting intentionally essentially involves a normative expectation that one has reasons for what one does. I call this view Normative Functionalism. -/- I begin in §2 by presenting a different, somewhat intuitive and popular view of intentional action, the so-called Causal Theory of Action. While that view does seem plausible, I allege that it doesn’t seem to accommodate the apparent fact that actors are accountable for their intentional actions. That motivates Normative Functionalism, which I sketch in §3. I conclude in §4 by offering an interim assessment of the discussion. (shrink)

Critics of utilitarianism and other forms of consequentialism often reject the aggregation of goods and bads across different individuals. This chapter critically examines their arguments against interpersonal aggregation. It begins by offering a clear definition of interpersonal aggregation and elucidating its theoretical structure. Then it argues against two types of objections to aggregation. The first is the argument from counterexamples and the other is the argument from the separateness of persons. The chapter then surveys the recent literature on the (...) number problem, provoked by John Taurek’s seminal paper, to show skepticism about interpersonal aggregation implies counterintuitive conclusion. However, the chapter argues that there are two nonaggregative solutions to the problem. (shrink)

Some societies used to impose liability on inanimate objects, a practice we’d now regard as silly and confused. When we punish corporations today, are we making similar mistakes? Here I consider some important sources of philosophical skepticism about imposing criminal liability on corporations, and I argue that they admit of answers, which places punishing corporations on stronger footing than punishing inanimate objects. First, I consider the eligibility challenge, which asserts that corporations are not the right kind of thing (...) to be punished. Second, the reductionist challenge insists that corporate culpability always reduces to individual culpability. I suggest that progress can be made in addressing these challenges by asking the right law-focused questions and attending to recent developments in criminal law theory and moral philosophy. (shrink)

This is an important new book about human motivation, about the reasons people have for their actions. What is distinctively new about it is its focus on how people see or understand their situations, options, and prospects. By taking account of people's understandings, Professor Schick is able to expand the current theory of decision and action. The author provides a perspective on the topic by outlining its history. He defends his new theory against (...) criticism, considers its formal structure, and shows at length how it resolves many currently debated problems: the problems of conflict and weakness of will, Allais' problem, Kahneman and Tversky's problems, Newcomb's problem, and others. The book will be of special interest to philosophers, psychologists, and economists. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that arguments from skeptical hypotheses for external world skepticism derive their support from a skeptical argument from the distinction between appearance and reality. This skeptical argument from the appearance/reality distinction gives the external world skeptic her conclusion without appealing to skeptical hypotheses and without assuming that knowledge is closed under known entailments. If this is correct, then this skeptical argument from the appearance/reality distinction poses a new skeptical challenge that cannot be resolved by (...) denying skeptical hypotheses or knowledge closure. (shrink)

There are many different oughts. There is a moral ought, a prudential ought, an epistemic ought, the legal ought, the ought of etiquette, and so on. These oughts can prescribe incompatible actions. What I morally ought to do may be different from what I self-interestedly ought to do. Philosophers have claimed that these conflicts are resolved by an authoritative ought, or by facts about what one ought to do simpliciter or all-things-considered. However, the only coherent notion of an (...) ought simpliciter has preposterous first-order normative commitments. It is more reasonable to reject the ought simpliciter in favor of the form of normative pluralism advocated in (Tiffany 2007). (shrink)

I defend the relatively orthodox view that reasons for action are premises in good practical reasoning, against recent counterexamples that suggest that, like “government house” moral justifications, some reasons are to be ignored in deliberation. I also explain, positively, what is right about the orthodoxy. Unless reasons are premises in good practical reasoning, reasons cannot be normative in the way they are usually taken to be, and relatedly, are unfit to play certain familiar theoretical and related everyday roles (...) that give many appeals to reasons their distinctive point. (shrink)

Skeptical theses in general claim that we cannot know what we think we know. Content skepticism in particular claims that we cannot know the contents of our own occurrent thoughtsat least not in the way we think we can. I argue that an externalist account of content does engender a mild form of content skepticism but that the condition is no real cause for concern. Content externalism forces us to reevaluate some of our assumptions about introspective knowledge, (...) but it is compatible with privileged access and the distinctive epistemic character of introspective judgments. (shrink)

Less discussed than Hume’s skepticism about what grounds there could be for projecting empirical hypotheses is his concern with a skeptical regress that he thought threatened to extinguish any belief when we reflect that our reasoning is not perfect. The root of the problem is the fact that a reflection about our reasoning is itself a piece of reasoning. If each reflection is negative and undermining, does that not give us a diminution of our original belief to (...) nothing? It requires much attention to detail, we argue, to determine whether or not there is a skeptical problem in this neighborhood. Consider that if we subsequently doubt a doubt we had about our reasoning, that would suggest a restoration of some of the force of our original belief. We would then have instead of runaway skepticism an alternating sequence of pieces of skeptical reasoning that cancel each others’ effects on our justification in the original proposition, at least to some degree. We will argue that the outcome of the sequence of reflections Hume is imagining depends on information about a given case that is not known a priori. We conclude this from the fact that under three precise, explanatory, and viable contemporary reconstructions of what this kind of reasoning about reasoning could be like and how it has the potential to affect our original beliefs, a belief-extinguishing regress is not automatic or necessary. (shrink)

Ethnomethodology is in trouble, its conceptual apparatus prone to indifference or misunderstanding both from "conventional" sociologists and from its own practitioners. This article describes some of these loci of confusion and suggests that they have a common root in the relationship between ethnomethodology and conventional sociology. Ethnomethodologists' desire to find a principled theoretical framework for dealing with this relationship is shown to be the common basis for subsequent confusion, and some of the corollaries of their putative solution(s) are elaborated (...) with regard to their philosophical and programmatic implications. Key Words: ethnomethodology • social constructionism • situated action • social structures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Academic Skepticism in Early Modern PhilosophyJosé R. Maia NetoAncient skepticism was more influential in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than it had ever been before. Thanks to the groundwork of Charles B. Schmitt and Richard H. Popkin on the influence of ancient skepticism in early modern philosophy and to the extensive research that followed their lead, skepticism is now recognized as having played (...) a major role in the rise of modern thought. 1There were two ancient skeptical schools, Academic skepticism and Pyrrhon-ism. Were both equally influential? Until the sixteenth century, Pyrrhonism was scarcely known. Only a few copies of Sextus’s books (the only surviving primary source of ancient Pyrrhonism) have been discovered in medieval libraries. By contrast the main source of Academic skepticism, Cicero’s Aca-demica, was occasionally referred to by medieval authors and was the object of some commentaries and criticism in the Renaissance. 2 Academic skepticism was preserved from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance not only through Cicero’s Academica, but also through Lactantius’s Divinae Institutiones and [End Page 199] Augustine’s Contra Academicos. 3 This situation changed when Sextus’s works were translated to latin and published in 1562 and 1569. Sextus presents a much more complete and detailed account and defense of ancient skepticism than that of Cicero’s Academica. Sextus presents Pyrrhonism as a coherent form of skepticism and Academic skepticism as a kind of negative dogmatism. 4 It was thus natural that the ancient skepticism that fascinated some (and troubled so many) early modern thinkers was mostly Pyrrhonian. Because of the publication of Sextus’s works, according to Schmitt, the increasing influence of Cicero’s Academica in the Renaissance was halted. Sextus’s Hypotyposes and Adversus Mathematicos took the place of Cicero’s Academica and drastically increased the influence of ancient skepticism. 5 The skeptical crisis at the dawn of modern philosophy is called “pyrrhonienne” not “academicienne.”While the appearance of Sextus’s works in Latin turned him and Pyrrhonism into the main source and influence of ancient skepticism in early modern philosophy, further research on the history of skepticism in the period has shown that the role of Cicero’s Academica and of Academic skepticism in general continued to be considerable. First, Cicero’s works were important items in the university curricula. Although Cicero’s works of rhetoric and morals were those more read, the students could certainly learn about Academic skepticism through at least some of them. Second, many editions of De Natura Deorum, a work of Cicero’s in which Academic skepticism is quite central, were published during the seventeenth century. Third, features of Academic skepticism, exhibited above all in Cicero’s Academica, are basic to the skepticism revived in the late Renaissance by Montaigne and Charron; were related to the new science in the first half of the seventeenth century by Gassendi; were used in the anti-Cartesian reaction of the late seventeenth century by Rapin, Huet, Bayle, and above all Foucher; and were radicalized in the eighteenth century by Hume. Despite the Academic features of Montaigne’s, Charron’s, and Gassendi’s skepticisms, it does seem that from the publication of Sextus’s works to the mid-seventeenth century, Academic skepticism was secondary to Pyrrhonism. But the appearance of Descartes and the development of Cartesianism in the second half of the seventeenth century set conditions for a complete revamping of Academic skepticism, bringing about what Schmitt thought was precluded by the appearance of Sextus in the modern scene, namely, a “full flowering of the Academica as a work to inspire new directions of philosophical thought.” 6 [End Page 200]Montaigne’s Apologie pour Raimond Sebond is rightly considered the first major result of the revival of ancient Pyrrhonism in modern thought. 7 Montaigne never cites the name of Sextus nor acknowledges his source and, by contrast, fills his Apology with passages from Cicero on the Academic skeptics. It is clear, however, that Montaigne follows closely Sextus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism in the central part of the Apology where he gives a detailed and sympathetic exposition of ancient skepticism.After dwelling on the evils and problems arising from knowledge and science, Montaigne... (shrink)

Content skepticism about practical reason is doubt about the bearing of rational considerations on the activities of deliberation and choice. Motivational skepticism is doubt about the scope of reason as a motive. Some people think that motivational considerations alone provide grounds for skepticism about the project of founding ethics on practical reason. I will argue, against this view, that motivational skepticism must always be based on content skepticism. I will not address (...) the question of whether or not content skepticism is justified. I want only to establish the fact that motivational skepticism has no independent force. (shrink)

:In this essay, I critically engage with a methodological approach in contemporary political theory — unconstrained utopianism — which holds that we can only determine how we should live by first giving an account of the principles that would govern society if people were perfectly morally motivated. I provide reasons for being skeptical of this claim. To begin with I query the robustness of the principles unconstrained utopianism purportedly delivers. While the method can be understood as offering existence proofs, because (...) we can devise other situations in which morally flawless decision making would unearth alternative sets of principles, I argue that such proofs tell us surprisingly little about how we should live in general. Drawing on this point, I contend that normative models that wish away certain phenomena that are uncontroversially central to any account of politics cannot plausibly claim to tell us how we should live in political society. I conclude by offering a more positive sketch of why avoiding this brand of utopianism might not represent a problematic capitulation to the morally nonideal and suggest that theorizing in light of certain constraints may be a precondition of good normative theorizing itself. (shrink)

Skepticism is one of the perennial problems of philosophy: from antiquity, to the early modern period of Descartes and Hume, and right through to the present day. It remains a fundamental and widely studied topic and, as Annalisa Coliva and Duncan Pritchard show in this book, it presents us with a paradox with important ramifications not only for epistemology but also for many other core areas of philosophy. In this book they provide a thorough grounding in contemporary (...) debates about skepticism, exploring the following key topics: the core skeptical arguments, with a particular focus on Cartesian and Humean radical skepticism. the epistemic principles that are held to underlie skeptical arguments, such as the closure and underdetermination principles. the content externalism of Putnam, Davidson and Chalmers, and how it might help us respond to radical skepticism. the epistemic externalism/internalism distinction and how it relates to the skeptical problematic. contextualism in epistemology and its anti-skeptical import. the various interpretations of a Wittgensteinian hinge epistemology. the viability of epistemological disjunctivism, including whether it can be combined with hinge epistemology as part of a dual response to radical skepticism. liberal and conservative responses to the Humean skeptical paradox. Both authors are themselves prominent figures who work on skepticism, and so one novelty of the book is that it provides an insight into their own contrasting responses to this philosophical difficulty. With the addition of annotated further reading and a glossary this is an ideal starting point for anyone studying the philosophy of skepticism, along with students of epistemology, metaphysics and contemporary analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This paper discusses the distinction between disability and handicap as it is proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in their publication International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicaps (WHO, 1993 (first published, 1980)). Following criticism of this an attempt to salvage the distinction by Nordenfelt (1993, 1983) is discussed. It is argued that neither the WHO nor Nordenfelt are successful in their attempts to preserve the distinction between disability and handicap in a theoretically wellmotivated manner. Contrary to (...) the WHO, it is argued that what they term ‘disabilities’ and ‘handicaps’ both have external causes. And contrary to Nordenfelt's position it is shown that “basic actions” do not provide a firm theoretical foundation for the concept of disability. Moreover, the criticisms of these two sets of views reveal that attempts to describe the phenomenon of disablement which focus on the individual suffer from a serious methodological shortcoming. (shrink)

Adam Morton, Stephen de Wijze, Hillel Steiner, and Eve Garrard have defended the view that evil action is qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. By this, they do not that mean that evil actions feel different to ordinary wrongs, but that they have motives or effects that are not possessed to any degree by ordinary wrongs. Despite their professed intentions, Morton and de Wijze both offer accounts of evil action that fail to identify a clear qualitative difference (...) between evil and ordinary wrongdoing. In contrast, both Steiner's and Garrard's accounts of evil do point to qualitative distinctions between kinds of action, but it is implausible that either account correctly characterizes evil. The most plausible accounts maintain that evil actions have a necessary connection to extreme harms, and this suggests that evil is not qualitatively distinct from ordinary wrongdoing. (shrink)

Hume, Don Garrett’s new book—long anticipated and well worth the wait—is a tour de force. Garrett’s impressive ability to weave a coherent philosophical account of Hume’s ideas, even when they seem most muddled or contradictory, is here fully displayed, linking together Hume’s thought as a whole and finding systematic themes within it whose potential richness has escaped other commentators. As a great admirer of Garrett’s work, from which I have learned so much over the years, I found it fascinating to (...) see how his overall interpretation of Hume pulls together a variety of strands that are by now very familiar to me, but whose potential close interconnections I had not fully appreciated. Although the book... (shrink)

Skepticism and naturalism bear important connections with one another. Do they conflict or are they different sides of the same coin? In this paper, by considering the ways in which Sextus and Hume have examined these issues, I offer a Pyrrhonian response to Penelope Maddy's attempt to reject skepticism within the form of naturalism that she calls “second philosophy” (Maddy, 2007, 2017) and to Timothy Williamson's attempt to avoid skepticism from emerging within his knowledge‐first approach (Williamson, (...) 2000). Some lessons about Pyrrhonism result. (shrink)

Providing a decolonial, action-focused account of Yoga philosophy, this practical work from Dr. Shyam Ranganathan, pioneering scholar in the field of Indian moral philosophy, focuses on the South Asian tradition to explore what Yoga was like prior to colonization. It challenges teachers and trainees to reflect on the impact of Western colonialism on Yoga as well as understand Yoga as the original decolonial practice in a way that is accessible. -/- This book is accessible but thought provoking (...) in its approach, but it will also challenge the way you think. Each chapter takes the reader through a journey of sources and traditions, beginning with an investigation into the colonial -Platonic and Aristotelian- approaches to pedagogy in colonized yoga spaces, through contrary, ancient philosophies of South Asia, such as Jainism, Buddhism, Sankhya, and various forms of Vedanta, to sources of Yoga, including the Upanisads, Yoga Sutra, Bhagavad Gita and Hatha Yoga Pradipika. With discussions of the precolonial philosophy of Yoga, its relationship to social justice, and modern postural yoga's relationship with colonial trauma, this is a comprehensive guide for any yoga teacher or trainee to activate and synergize their practice. (shrink)

Confucian scholars express skepticism about rights. This skepticism is relevant to managers who face issues about the recognition of workplace rights in a Confucian culture. My essay examines the foundations of this skepticism, and the cogency of potential leading Western liberal responses to it. I conclude that Confucian skepticism is more formidable than liberals have recognized. I attempt to craft an argument that defuses Confucian skepticism about workplace rights while at the same (...) time respecting the moral depth of Confucianism. (shrink)

This book is another interesting contribution to the pool of literature on skepticism from the last twenty years which succeeds in finding a/some truth in skepticism, while in the end remaining antiskeptical. Whether we may yet receive a work which finds external world skepticism more than half-true remains to be seen, though we may certainly hope so.

There is much to admire in John Pittard’s recent book on the epistemology of disagreement. But here we develop one concern about the role that rational insight plays in his project. Pittard develops and defends a view on which a party to peer disagreement can show substantial partiality to his own view, so long as he enjoys even moderate rational insight into the truth of his view or the cogency of his reasoning for his view. Pittard argues that this (...) may happen in ordinary cases of religious disagreement—cases in which it’s a live skeptical possibility that one is misdescribing his insight, or not having insight at all—and therefore one need not be strongly conciliatory even in the face of peer disagreement. Yet Pittard agrees that one should be strongly conciliatory in cases of disagreement involving, e.g., visual perception and dim rational insight, since the sort of fallible, corrigible evidence involved in such cases may be counterbalanced by symmetrical evidence on the part of one’s disagreeing peer. We worry that there’s an inconsistency here. If it’s unreasonable to show partiality to one’s visual experience (or dim rational insight) in cases like “Horse Race” and “Restaurant Check,” it’s likewise unreasonable to show partiality in religious disagreements to one’s moderate rational insight, fallible and corrigible as it is. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the epistemological positions of Philo and Cleanthes in the Dialogues. I find that Philo's attitude towards skepticism mirrors that of the first Enquiry, most notably in its endorsement of mitigated skepticism, and its treatment of religious reasoning as distinctly discontinuous with science and philosophy. Meanwhile, Cleanthes's epistemological framework corresponds to that of the Treatise, most notably in its adoption of something like the Title Principle, and its treatment of some forms of religious (...) reasoning as broadly continuous with science and philosophy. It is not merely that the epistemological systems of the Treatise and Enquiry are echoed in Cleanthes's and Philo's positions respectively; these frameworks seem to clarify, provide a substantive basis for, and render more complete their somewhat piecemeal statements on this topic in the Dialogues. Thus, Philo's and Cleanthes's dispute is not limited to the theological, but extends to the epistemological. -/- . (shrink)

Epistemic circularity occurs when a subject forms the belief that a faculty F is reliable through the use of F. Although this is often thought to be vicious, externalist theories generally don't rule it out. For some philosophers, this is a reason to reject externalism. However, Michael Bergmann defends externalism by drawing on the tradition of common sense in two ways. First, he concedes that epistemically circular beliefs cannot answer a subject's doubts about her cognitive faculties. But, he argues, (...) subjects don't have such doubts, so epistemically circular beliefs are rarely called upon to play this role. Second, following Thomas Reid, Bergmann argues that we have noninferential, though epistemically circular, knowledge that our faculties are reliable. I argue, however, that Bergmann's view is undermined by doubts a subject should have and that there is no plausible explanation for how we can have noninferential knowledge that our faculties are reliable. (shrink)

Recently, a number of authors have suggested that the epistemic condition on moral responsibility makes blameworthiness much less common than we ordinarily suppose, and much harder to identify. This paper argues that such epistemically based responsibility skepticism is mistaken. Section 2 sketches a general account of moral responsibility, building on the Strawsonian idea that blame and credit relates to the agent’s quality of will. Section 3 explains how this account deals with central cases that motivate epistemic skepticism and (...) how it avoids some objections to quality of will accounts recently raised by Gideon Rosen. But an intuitive worry brought out by these objections remains. Section 4 spells out this remaining worry and argues that, like traditional metaphysical responsibility skepticism, it has its source in a non-standard explanatory perspective on action, suggesting that strategies for explaining away the intuitive pull of traditional skepticism are applicable in this case too. (shrink)

The ‘error theory’ holds that all normative claims are false. Of course, if there is any reason to believe the error theory then, since it would be a reason to believe something, that would show the error theory itself to be false. A recent book (Streumer, 2017) tries to block this argument by arguing on the basis of the claim that the error theory itself can’t be believed that there can be no reason to believe it. This is a paradoxical (...) conclusion since it leaves the possibility that the error theory is true even though it is impossible to believe it and we can have no reason to believe it. In this paper I argue for a different paradox. Even if we can believe the error theory, we are committed to rejecting it, but this still leaves normative skepticism unanswered. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish two ways of raising a sceptical problem of others' minds: via a problem concerning the possibility of error or via a problem concerning sources of knowledge. I give some reason to think that the second problem raises a more interesting problem in accounting for our knowledge of others’ minds and consider proposed solutions to the problem.

There are some tantalizing suggestions that Pyrrhonian skepticism has its roots in ancient India. Of them, the most important is Diogenes Laertius’s report that Pyrrho accompanied Alexander to India, where he was deeply impressed by the character of the “naked sophists” he encountered (DL IX 61). Influenced by these gymnosophists, Pyrrho is said to have adopted the practices of suspending judgment on matters of belief and cultivating an indifferent composure amid the vicissitudes of ordinary life. Such conduct, and the (...) attitudes that it embodied, became inspirations to later skeptical thinkers. It is a fact that practices of the sort attributed to Pyrrho are richly evident in a number of ancient Indian philosophical and ascetic movements. On this basis, attempts have been made to determine the identity of these gymnosophists and, further, to pinpoint the dialectical tropes within Pyrrhonism that may have their basis in Indian thought. But despite these attempts, and in the absence of any new discoveries, these suggestions will likely remain just that. The paucity of the historical data and the problematic nature of the data itself prevent us from reconstructing a solid bridge between ancient India and Greek skepticism that may serve as the basis of robust historical theorizing. Classical India does, however, lay claim to a sophisticated and diverse culture of epistemological reflection, which includes a number of innovative skeptical thinkers deserving study on their own merits. This chapter is meant to provide such a study, or perhaps more accurately, a prolegomena for such. After some initial ground-laying, I will discuss three leading Indian skeptics and situate them historically and conceptually within the network of competing schools that comprise classical Indian philosophy. They are Nāgārjuna (c. 150 CE), the founder of Madhyamaka Buddhism, Jayarāśi (c. 800), associated with the Indian materialist tradition, and Śrīharṣa (c. 1150), a thinker connected to the school of Nondual (Advaita) Vedānta. (shrink)

Aryeh Botwinick argues for the recovery of a radical democratic tradition that emphasizes the role of individual participation in the development and control of social and political institutions. Such involvement implies philosophical skepticism—the assumption that the truth about what is the best course of action cannot be known with certainty and that, therefore, every person’s opinion has an equal claim to be considered. The crucial stumbling block to reappropriating this radical egalitarian tradition is the supposed unviability of (...) a consistent skepticism. In an effort to chart a new course of philosophical inquiry into political matters, Botwinick grapples with the formulation of a consistent version of skepticism, claiming that it provides "a continually renewing impetus for the expansion of political participation." Twentieth-century philosophers have, for the most part, opted for some version of mitigated skepticism, which, the author argues, "has blinded them to the radical political implications of skepticism." Underscoring a pattern of convergence between Anglo-American and Continental philosophy, Botwinick proposes a number of strategies to rehabilitate the rationality of participatory democratic political institutions by articulating an acceptable version of consistent skepticism. (shrink)

I evaluate three replies to skepticism, drawing conclusions about the meaning of "justified", the viability of foundationalism, the value of knowledge, and the role of belief in rational action. ;In the first chapter, I examine the following skeptical argument: Something is justified only if justified by a justified thing; circular and infinite chains of justification are illegitimate; therefore, no belief is justified. A linguistic investigation reveals that this argument contains two ambiguities not yet noticed by epistemologists. The (...) linguistic observations favor foundationalism about justification, showing how the foundationalist can maintain his view, while explaining away the force of the skeptical argument. However, in the second chapter, I argue that foundationalism is unsatisfactory, for non-skeptical reasons. If a foundationalist tries to explain how some things can be basic, then she must endorse a certain kind of circularity. But a foundationalist should not endorse this circularity. ;Dissecting a single skeptical argument is an interesting although limited endeavour. In the third chapter, I argue that an entire class of skeptical arguments can be avoided. Distinguishing rational action from rational belief change, I claim that certain changes in belief cannot occur during a rational act. In particular, I argue, some skeptical conclusions cannot be accepted while performing an ordinary rational act. The main conclusion of this chapter is: to avoid acting irrationally, it is rational to avoid certain skeptical arguments. ;Sometimes it is better to concede to skepticism than to flee. In the fourth chapter, I argue that knowledge is no more valuable than stable true belief. This surprising claim supports the conclusion that skepticism about knowledge is harmless. Even if we cannot know anything about the external world---or even if we cannot know anything at all---we may have something just as valuable as knowledge: stable true beliefs. (shrink)

This is a three paper dissertation. ;for paper 1. Quine held that quantifying into modal contexts is illegitimate. It is sometimes thought that if he is right about this, then essentialist claims make no sense. Perhaps as a consequence of this thought together with the current prominence of essentialist views, there have been two good fairly recent attacks on Quine's argument against quantifying into modal contexts: Neale's revival of Smullyan's points and Kaplan's paper "Opacity". I first argue that Quine's (...) view is not refuted by Neale or Kaplan. I next explain that nonetheless, essentialists need not surrender in the face of Quine's injunction against quantifying in. Quine's work does not rule out the intelligibility of essentialist theses; it does however issue a challenge to explain the mysterious notion of metaphysical necessity. ;Abstract for paper 2. I examine the case that has been made for origin essentialism and find it wanting. I focus on the arguments of Salmon and Forbes. Like most origin essentialists, they have been concerned to respect the intuition that slight variation in the origin of an artifact or organism is possible. But, I argue, both of their arguments fail to respect this intuition. Salmon's argument depends on a sufficiency principle for crossworld identity, which should be rejected, if---as Salmon concedes---a given artifact might have been originally made from slightly different material. Similarly, Forbes's argument succeeds only if essentially the same argument can be used to establish a claim that---by his own admission---is too strong, namely that no variation, however slight, in an organism's origin is possible. ;Abstract for paper 3. Chisholm's Paradox suggests that origin essentialism is incompatible with the view that some variation in the origin of a given thing is possible. Since the latter view is strongly supported by intuition, origin essentialists have been eager to offer solutions to the paradox. In this paper I look at three allegedly different solutions to the paradox: Forbes's, Salmon's, and Lewis's. I give new criticisms of Forbes's view and offer new defenses of what I call the "Salmon-Lewis solution". (shrink)

This article rejects Gideon Rosen's skeptical argument that attributions of blameworthiness are never epistemically justified. Granting Rosen's controversial claim that an act is blameworthy only if it is either akratic or the causal upshot of some akratic act, I show that we can and should resist his skeptical conclusion. I show, first, that Rosen's argument is, at best, hostage to a much more global skepticism about attributions of praiseworthiness, doxastic justification, and other phenomena which essentially involve causal‐historical facts (...) about mental states. I then show how, equipped with proper background knowledge, we can justifiedly attribute blameworthiness. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the weakness of current action languages for sensing actions with respect to modeling domains with multi-valued fluents. To address this problem, we propose a language with sensing actions and multi-valued fluents, called AMK, provide a transition function based semantics for the language, and demonstrate its use through several examples from the literature. We then define the entailment relationship between action theories and queries in AMK, denoted by ⊧AMK, and discuss some properties (...) about AMK. (shrink)

Hanna Pitkin has made key contributions to the field of political philosophy, pushing forward and clarifying the ways that political theorists think about action as the exercise of political freedom. In so doing, she has offered insightful studies of the problems of modern politics that theorists are called to address, and has addressed them herself in a range of theoretical genres. She is an innovator in bringing conceptual work inspired by ordinary language philosophy to the field (...) of political philosophy, as well as a penetrating and exacting interpreter of texts who draws on the insights of psychoanalysis, gender, and historical study. This collection of her works approaches each of these dimensions of Pitkin's contributions in turn, recognizing that she typically blends these modes of engagement in much of her political theorizing. The Modern Condition and the Impetus to Theorize. At several moments in her career, Pitkin has offered sustained reflection on what aspects of modern political life prompt the impulse to theorize politics. She has also drawn out with great nuance the pitfalls that modern life and philosophy also present for that enterprise, for example, in attempts to naturalize human community or in turning to theoretical abstraction. Her study of Wittgenstein in particular structured her most penetrating study of these questions. Pitkin suggests an agenda for political theorizing to engage the dilemmas of modernity in ways that grasp the importance of paradox as a portal of insight into the modern condition, and eschews attempts at easy resolution. In keeping with this, Pitkin has herself explored a variety of conceptual paradoxes that arise in the work of other theorists (e.g., regarding freedom, interest, and obligation), each as symptomatic of modern dilemmas. In each encounter, Pitkin offers a clearer picture of the problems of political modernity and the outlines of political responses to them. Moral Philosophy, Judgment, Justice: Pitkin has turned at several points in her career to the concept of justice as one that particularly brings together questions of agency and responsibility, the insights of moral philosophy, and judgment. Characteristic of her work, her engagements with justice have drawn upon a variety of methodological resources and theoretical inspirations. Her work engages ordinary language philosophy, pedagogical practice, and textual study, to yield a complex and subtle set of observations, all of which open moral philosophy and matters of judgment to questions of action and responsibility in the exercise of political freedom. Action: Political agency and its obstacles are a key theme in Pitkin's work and a main area of her theoretical innovation. She has approached the question of political agency from several directions. In some works, she has examined the appeal of autonomy as a picture of political agency, probing in particular the gendered dimension of the fantasy of autonomy. In other works - perhaps most famously, in her work on representation - Pitkin has explored the ways that the institutional arrangements of modern liberal societies attempt to link of individual and political agency--and the pitfalls of these approaches. Finally, Pitkin has offered a picture of political freedom as maintaining the tension, between individual "parts" and collective "wholes," that these modern institutional arrangements attempt to resolve. Finally, through her groundbreaking and definitive work on Hannah Arendt, Pitkin has meditated on the political and social conditions that most impede our ability to grasp agency as a practice of political freedom, and gestured to paths that may lead forward. (shrink)

In recent European philosophy, and especially in Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, and Badiou, the distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary, or between normality and “event,” has played a very prominent role. In the present paper, I raise a challenge to this distinction, a challenge inspired by Deleuze’s conception of repetition and difference. Is it not the case that every occurrence in some ways reproduces and in some ways deviates from the past, such that nothing is entirely extraordinary and nothing (...) completely normal? The purpose of the paper is to examine whether the ordinary/extraordinary distinction—or the notion of event, respectively—can be defended against this challenge, i.e., whether it can be given a rigorous definition. Drawing on and departing from the named philosophers, I show that there are three alternative responses—the route of subjective experience, of transcendence, and of negation—and assess their respective merits. (shrink)