In this paper I argue against one variety of contextualism about aesthetic predicates such as “beautiful.” Contextualist analyses of these and other predicates have been subject to several challenges surrounding disagreement. Focusing on one kind of contextualism— individualized indexical contextualism —I unpack these various challenges and consider the responses available to the contextualist. The three responses I consider are as follows: giving an alternative analysis of the concept of disagreement ; claiming that speakers suffer from semantic blindness; and claiming that (...) attributions of beauty carry presuppositions of commonality. I will argue that none of the available strategies gives a response which both satisfactorily explains all of the disagreement -data and is plausible independent of significant evidence in favor of contextualism. I conclude that individualized indexical contextualism about the aesthetic is untenable, although this does not rule out alternative contextualist approaches to the aesthetic. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of how democratic governance is possible. It analyses democracy as a laminated system consisting of three interdependent levels – the political/institutional, the social/interactional, and the psychological/intrapsychic – each of which is necessary for the others to exist. Each level is subject to a regulatory principle that is necessary for it to function appropriately. At the political/institutional level, competing political parties must be governed by the regulatory principle of ‘loser’s consent,’ in which the losing party must (...) agree to cede power to the winning party. At the social/interactional level individuals from opposing political parties must be governed by the regulatory principle of a superordinate identity as citizen, which allows them to transcend their partisan political identities. At the psychological/intrapsychic level individuals must be governed by the regulatory principle of mutuality/thirdness which allows the possibility of an alternative to the binary identities that result from the doer/done-to position. (shrink)

This paper first distinguishes three alternative views that adherents to both incompatibilism and PAP may take as to what constitutes an agent''s determining or controlling her action (if it''s not the action''s being deterministically caused by antecedent events): the indeterministic-causation view, the agent-causation view, and "simple indeterminism." The bulk of the paper focusses on the dispute between simple indeterminism - the view that the occurrence of a simple mental event is determined by its subject if it possesses the "actish" phenomenal (...) quality and is undetermined by antecedent events - and Timothy O''Connor''s agent-causation view. It defends simple indeterminism against O''Connor''s objections to it and offers objections to O''Connor''s view. (shrink)

Understanding the 'making-up' relations, to put things neutrally, posited in mechanistic explanations the sciences is finally an explicit topic of debate amongst philosophers of science. In particular, there is now lively debate over the nature of the so-called 'realization' relations between properties posited in such explanations. Despite criticism (Gillett, Analysis 62: 316-323, 2002a), the most common approach continues to be that of applying machinery developed in the philosophy of mind to scientific concepts in what is known as the 'Flat' or (...) 'Subset' model of 'realization' (Kim, Mind in a physical world, 1998; Shapiro, J Philos XCVII: 635-654, 2000; Clapp, J Philos XCVIII: 111-136,2001 ; Wilson, Philos Stud 145: 149-169,2009). My primary goal in this paper is to show in still more detail that the Subset model of realization is inadequate for the descriptive task of describing the 'making-up' relations posited between properties or their instances in mechanistic explanations in the higher sciences. And my secondary goal is to highlight why this critique of the Subset view as a first-order descriptive account also shows there are deep difficulties in using the Subset account to address second-order issues in the philosophy of science as well. (shrink)

The fifteen essays in this volume represent the state of the art when it comes to the contemporary study of medieval philosophy of mind. The contributors are well-established scholars in the field who build on their previous work, and most advance an original argument in these essays. The focus is on western Christian philosophers and theologians from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and “the intricacies and varieties of the conceptual relationships among intentionality, cognition, and mental representation” in their thought. As (...) editor Gyula Klima points out, intentionality plays a role in non-cognitive as well as cognitive processes for the medievals. But when these thinkers attempted to explain the.. (shrink)

Jonathan Weisberg claims that certain probability assessments constructed by Jeffrey conditioning resist subsequent revision by a certain type of after-the-fact defeater of the reasons supporting those assessments, and that such conditioning is thus “inherently anti-holistic.” His analysis founders, however, in applying Jeffrey conditioning to a partition for which an essential rigidity condition clearly fails. Applied to an appropriate partition, Jeffrey conditioning is amenable to revision by the sort of after-the-fact defeaters considered by Weisberg in precisely the way that he demands.

Le Poidevin’s ‘new agnosticism’ concerns partaking in religious life while being uncertain whether religious discourse is fictional or not. Le Poidevin has offered two distinct versions of the new agnosticism, ‘semantic agnosticism’ and ‘meta-linguistic agnosticism’. I suggest that the first, ‘semantic agnosticism’, should be rejected, mainly because it involves a highly questionable view of truth and fails to properly distinguish fictional existence from real existence. The second, ‘meta-linguistic agnosticism’ seems acceptable as a view of religious discourse but not as a (...) foundation for a religious life. A meta-linguistic agnostic will not be able to take the proper attitude towards religious propositions, since what is the proper attitude varies greatly between realism and fictionalism. Even more importantly, she will not know when it is rationally permissible to perform religious actions, because she will not know whether real-life concerns should take precedence or not. Le Poidevin’s meta-linguistic agnostic is also a truth-agnostic, and I conclude that adding meta-linguistic agnosticism to truth-agnosticism only complicates matters without offering any benefits. (shrink)

This article examines implications of computer-sifted information: What happens when that information is reshuffled and used for other purposes than originally intended? Historical concepts of the philosophy of privacy are examined, essentially to demonstrate that a lack of clear precedent further confuses a fast-changing situation. The author argues that, a 100-odd years ago, advancing media technology prompted Louis Brandeis to proclaim a right to be let alone - but in the intervening years we have not been particularly effective in developing (...) proactive ethics and policy to deal with privacy issues. One case, a bill to restrict access to motor vehicle information, is cited as an example of proactive legislation; without advocating specific legislation, the author calls for increased foresight in the issue of technology and privacy. (shrink)

A mutual fund family incubates a fund when it creates a privately subsidized fund not available to the general investing public. It destroys unsuccessful incubator funds. The few successful funds will report higher incubation returns than the market return in advertisements intended to attract money from individual investors. This practice is currently allowed by the SEC. The evidence is that incubation returns are not a good predictor of subsequent fund performance and likely serve to mislead unsuspecting investors.

By quantifying over properties we cannot create new properties any more than by quantifying over individuals we can create new individuals. Someone murdered Jones, and the murderer is either Smith or Jones or Wang. That “someone,” who murdered Jones, is not a person in addition to Smith, Jones, and Wang, and it would be absurd to posit a disjunctive person, Smith‐or‐Jones‐or‐Wang, with whom to identify the murderer. The same goes for second‐order properties and their realizers. (Kim 1997a, 201).

As the two comprehensive humanistic disciplines, philosophy and history have a complex interface. By ‘comprehensive’, I mean that only philosophy and history have the prerogative of being immediately and justifiably relevant to all domains of human endeavor. Thus, there is the history and philosophy of mathematics, the history and philosophy of art, the history and philosophy of religion, the history and philosophy of politics, not to mention the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, and, in qualified senses, the history (...) of history and the philosophy of philosophy. History is always immediately relevant to human endeavor because the latter aims at a coherence beyond simple behavior, yet necessarily leaves a spatio-temporal trace; philosophy is always immediately relevant because all forms of human endeavor have their primary principles—noetic, ethical, and metaphysical. Philosophy and history are necessarily interconnected not only because both are themselves human endeavors, but also because history’s orientation about coherence and philosophy’s about primacy both face, at a fundamental level, the dialectic of universal and particular induced by the hunt for intelligibility. The two are therefore led to quarrel about which really is the magistra vitæ, for both hope to be wise, i.e., intelligent and accomplished, about τἀνθρώπινα, the human things. (shrink)

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Richard Jeffrey’s “Conditioning, Kinematics, and Exchangeability” is one of the foundational documents of probability kinematics. However, the section entitled “Successive Updating” contains a subtle error regarding the applicability of updating by so-called relevance quotients in order to ensure the commutativity of successive probability kinematical revisions. Upon becoming aware of this error, Jeffrey formulated the appropriate remedy, but he never discussed the issue in print. To head off any confusion, it seems worthwhile to alert readers of Jeffrey’s “Conditioning, Kinematics, and Exchangeability” (...) to the aforementioned error and to document his remedy, placing it in the context of both earlier and subsequent work on commuting probability kinematical revisions.1. (shrink)

volume 1. The critical philosophy and its roots.