The trend towards postponement of childbearing has seen increasing numbers of women turning towards oocyte banking for anticipated gamete exhaustion (AGE banking), which offers a realistic chance of achieving genetically connected offspring. However, there are concerns around the use of this technology, including social/ethical implications, low rate of utilisation and its cost-effectiveness. The same societal trends have also resulted in an increased demand and unmet need for donor oocytes, with many women choosing to travel overseas for treatment. This has its (...) own inherent social, medical, financial and psychological sequelae. We propose a possible pathway to address these dual realities. The donation of oocytes originally stored in the context of AGE banking, with appropriate compensatory mechanisms, would ameliorate AGE banking concerns, while simultaneously improving the supply of donor oocytes. This proposed arrangement will result in tangible benefits for prospective donors, recipients and society at large. (shrink)

The paper by Savulescu et al is timely and the concepts illuminated deserve further reflection.1 Reproductive tissue which includes sperm, oocytes and embryos are commonly treated differently to other human tissue, even when the reproductive potential of these has no possibility of being realised. This unnecessary exceptionalism hampers research in human reproduction, disadvantaging patients and delaying life-changing treatments from being incorporated into clinical practice. In jurisdictions where embryo creation is permitted for clinical purposes, such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF), supernumerary (...) embryos are routinely discarded once they are no longer required to attempt pregnancy. We contend that research on such embryos, which will never realise their reproductive potential, is not substantially different to any other human tissue research and should not require any additional ethical or regulatory oversight. The only individuals who can possibly be harmed by such research are the tissue providers and their interests, including confidentiality and informed consent provision, should be protected. This protection once again is no different in its scope to any other type of research involving human cells and tissues. Most Western societies have moved away from the concept that ‘every sperm is sacred’ and it is time that the regulators and scientific community aligned with the prevailing communal norms and stop treating gametes and embryos as somehow holding higher moral value, compared with other human cell/tissue lines, provided that there is no intention to attempt a pregnancy …. (shrink)

The Illusion of Doubt confronts one of the most important questions in philosophy and beyond: what can we know? The radical sceptic's answer is 'not very much' if we cannot prove that we are not subject to deception. For centuries philosophers have been impressed by the radical sceptic's move, but this book shows that the radical sceptical problem turns out to be an illusion created by a mistaken picture of our evidential situation. This means that we don't need to answer (...) the radical sceptical problem 'head on', but rather to undermine the philosophical assumptions that it depends on. For without these assumptions, radical scepticism collapses all by itself. This result is highly significant, as it manages to dissolve one of the most intractable philosophical problems that has bedevilled some of the greatest minds until the present day. (shrink)

According to “disjunctivist neo-Mooreanism”—a position Duncan Pritchard develops in a recent book—it is possible to know the denials of radical sceptical hypotheses, even though it is conversationally inappropriate to claim such knowledge. In a recent paper, on the other hand, Pritchard expounds an “überhinge” strategy, according to which one cannot know the denials of sceptical hypotheses, as “hinge propositions” are necessarily groundless. The present article argues that neither strategy is entirely successful. For if a proposition can be known, it can (...) also be claimed to be known. If the latter is not possible, this is not because certain propositions are either “intrinsically” conversationally inappropriate or else “rationally groundless”, but rather that we are dealing with something that merely presents us with the appearance of being an epistemic claim. (shrink)

In a series of recent articles, Duncan Pritchard argues for a ‘neo-Moorean’ interpretation of John McDowell’s anti-sceptical strategy. Pritchard introduces a distinction between ‘favouring’ and ‘discriminating’ epistemic grounds in order to show that within the radical sceptical context an absence of ‘discriminating’ epistemic grounds allowing one to distinguish brain-in-a-vat from non-brain-in-a-vat scenarios does not preclude possessing knowledge of the denials of sceptical hypotheses. I argue that Pritchard’s reading is mistaken for three reasons. First, the distinction between ‘favouring’ and ‘discriminating’ epistemic (...) grounds only works for ‘mules-disguised-as zebras’ examples, but breaks down in the radical sceptical case. Second, McDowellian disjunctivism neutralizes the radical sceptical threat, but does not refute it. Third, any attempt to refute scepticism is confronted by the following dilemma: either one accepts the ‘highest common factor’ conception of perceptual experience thus rendering radical scepticism in principle irrefutable, or one discards it in favour of the disjunctive conception, but then there is no radical sceptical scenario left to refute. So, whichever horn of this dilemma Pritchard grasps, refutation is either impossible or superfluous. (shrink)

As well as contributing to contemporary debate about how to read Kierkegaard's and Wittgenstein's work, A Confusion of the Spheres addresses issues which not ...

A new explanation for the fairness of lotteries is presented. The explanation draws on elements of John Broome's and Richard Bradley's accounts, but is distinct from both of them. I start with Broome's idea that the fairness of lotteries has something to do with satisfying claims in a way which is proportional to their strength. I present an intuitive explication of.

We present a minimal pragmatic restriction on the interpretation of the weights in the “Equal Weight View” regarding peer disagreement and show that the view cannot respect it. Based on this result we argue against the view. The restriction is the following one: if an agent, $$\hbox {i}$$ i, assigns an equal or higher weight to another agent, $$\hbox {j}$$ j,, he must be willing—in exchange for a positive and certain payment—to accept an offer to let a completely rational and (...) sympathetic $$\hbox {j}$$ j choose for him whether to accept a bet with positive expected utility. If $$\hbox {i}$$ i assigns a lower weight to $$\hbox {j}$$ j than to himself, he must not be willing to pay any positive price for letting $$\hbox {j}$$ j choose for him. Respecting the constraint entails, we show, that the impact of disagreement on one’s degree of belief is not independent of what the disagreement is discovered to be. (shrink)

It has been argued by several philosophers that a morally motivated rational agent who has to make decisions under conditions of moral uncertainty ought to maximize expected moral value in his choices, where the expectation is calculated relative to the agent's moral uncertainty. I present a counter-example to this thesis and to a larger family of decision rules for choice under conditions of moral uncertainty. Based on this counter-example, I argue against the thesis and suggest a reason for its failure (...) – that it is based on the false assumption that inter-theoretical comparisons of moral value are meaningful. (shrink)

It is well known that there is a conflict between three intuitive principles for the evaluation of risky prospects in distributional contexts, Ex-Post Egalitarianism, Ex-Ante Pareto and Dominance. In this paper, I return to Peter Diamond’s suggestion that we reject Dominance as a principle of rationality in distributional contexts and present a new argument in support of this position. The argument is based on an observation regarding the right way for a distributor to weigh reasons for actions. In some cases, (...) I argue, reasons for action that are grounded in the interests of one of the patients ought to be disregarded by the distributor. These cases share the following property: it is in the patient’s overall interest that the distributor disregards them. I show that Dominance does not permit distributors to disregard such reasons and use this observation to argue against the claim that Dominance is a principle of rationality in distributional contexts. (shrink)

We present a new justification for methodological triangulation (MT), the practice of using different methods to support the same scientific claim. Unlike existing accounts, our account captures cases in which the different methods in question are associated with, and rely on, incommensurable theories. Using a nonstandard Bayesian model, we show that even in such cases, a commitment to the minimal form of epistemic conservatism, captured by the rigidity condition that stands at the basis of Jeffrey’s conditionalization, supports the practice of (...) MT. (shrink)

: In some cases in which rational and moral agents experience moral uncertainty, they are unable to assign exact degrees of moral value—in a non-arbitrary way—to some of the different acts available to them, and so are unable to choose with certainty the best act. This article presents a new justification for the use of lotteries in this kind of situation. It is argued that sometimes the only rational thing for a morally motivated agent to do here is to use (...) a lottery. (shrink)

This article clarifies the puzzling lack of adequate human environmental behavior, the primary driver of the ongoing climate crisis. It advocates using Wittgensteinian attitude analysis as an investigative framework and argues that attitudes toward nature are crucial yet understudied factors in shaping environmental behavior. The study focuses on the Romantic attitude toward nature as wilderness (understood as the negation of extractivism) and reveals its profound yet often misunderstood adverse impact on environmental behavior. This leads to a reflection on which attitude (...) toward nature could foster more adequate environmental behavior, suggesting kinship as its core. (shrink)

Interview of David Rozen with Jakub Mácha.

The overarching aim of this paper is to persuade the reader that radical scepticism is driven less by independently plausible arguments and more by a fear of epistemic limitation which can be overcome. By developing the Kierkegaardian insight that knowledge requires courage, I show that we are not, as potential knowers, just passive recipients of a passing show of putatively veridical information, we also actively need to put ourselves in the way of it by learning to resist certain forms of (...) epistemic temptation: the Cartesian thought that we could be ‘imprisoned’ within our own representations, and, hence permanently ‘out of touch’ with an ‘external’ world, and the Reasons Identity Thesis, which has us believe that whether we are in the good case or in the bad case, our epistemic grounds are the same. (shrink)

I show that accepting Moss’s claim that features of a rational agent’s credence function can constitute knowledge, together with the claim that a rational agent should only act on the basis of reasons that he knows, predicts and explains evidential decision theory’s failure to recommend the right choice for the Newcomb problem. The Newcomb problem can be seen, in light of Moss’s suggestion, as a manifestation of a Gettier case in the domain of choice. This serves as strong evidence for (...) both Moss’s claim and the knowledge-based action approach. (shrink)

The paper discusses the notion of reasoning with comparative moral judgements (i.e judgements of the form “act a is morally superior to act b”) from the point of view of several meta-ethical positions. Using a simple formal result, it is argued that only a version of moral cognitivism that is committed to the claim that moral beliefs come in degrees can give a normatively plausible account of such reasoning. Some implications of accepting such a version of moral cognitivism are discussed.

_ Source: _Volume 6, Issue 2-3, pp 165 - 181 Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘hinge propositions’—those propositions that stand fast for us and around which all empirical enquiry turns—remains controversial and elusive, and none of the recent attempts to make sense of it strike me as entirely satisfactory. The literature on this topic tends to divide into two camps: either a ‘quasi-epistemic’ reading is offered that seeks to downplay the radical nature of Wittgenstein’s proposal by assimilating his thought to more mainstream (...) epistemological views, or a non-epistemic, ‘quasi-pragmatic’ conception is adopted that goes too far in the opposite direction by, for example, equating ‘hinge propositions’ with a type of ‘animal’ certainty. Neither interpretative strategy, I will argue, is promising for the reason that ‘hinges’ are best not conceived as certainties at all. Rather, what Wittgenstein says in respect to them is that doubt is “logically” excluded, and where there can be no doubt, I contend, there is no such thing as knowledge or certainty either. (shrink)

I show that David Lewis’s principal principle is not preserved under Jeffrey conditionalization. Using this observation, I argue that Lewis’s reason for rejecting the desire as belief thesis and Adams’s thesis applies also to his own principal principle. 1 Introduction2 Adams’s Thesis, the Desire as Belief Thesis, and the Principal Principle3 Jeffrey Conditionalization4 The Principal Principles Not Preserved under Jeffrey Conditionalization5 Inadmissible Experiences.

I argue—from a Humean perspective—for the falsity of what I call the “Admissibility of Historical Information Thesis”. According to the AHIT, propositions that describe past events are always admissible with respect to propositions that describe future events. I first demonstrate that this thesis has some counter-intuitive implications and argue that a Humean can explain the intuitive attractiveness of the AHIT by arguing that it results from a wrong understanding of the concept of chance. I then demonstrate how a Humean “best (...) system” analysis of chance predicts the existence of inadmissible historical information and discuss the implications of this conclusion to the debate between Humeans and non-Humeans. (shrink)

I present a puzzle about the epistemic role beliefs about experts' beliefs play in a rational agent's system of beliefs. It is shown that accepting the claim that an expert's degree of belief in a proposition, A, screens off the evidential support another proposition, B, gives to A in case the expert knows and is certain about whether B is true, leads in some cases to highly unintuitive conclusions. I suggest a solution to the puzzle according to which evidential screening (...) off is rejected, but show that the price of this solution is either giving up on the mere idea of deferring to expert's opinion or giving up on Bayesian conditionalization. (shrink)

I discuss the trilemma that consists of the following three principles being inconsistent: 1. The Common Principle: if one distribution, A, necessarily brings a higher total sum of personal value that is distributed in a more egalitarian way than another distribution, B, A is more valuable than B. 2. (Weak) ex-ante Pareto: if one uncertain distribution, A, is more valuable than another uncertain distribution, B, for each patient, A is more valuable than B. 3. Pluralism about attitudes to risk (Pluralism): (...) the personal value of a prospect is a weighted sum of the values of the prospect’s outcomes, but the weight each outcome gets might be different from the probability the prospect assigns to the outcome. (shrink)

It is the object of this paper to investigate the parallels discernible between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings. While such attempts have, in the past, generally focussed on either trying to show that Kierkegaard’s notion of paradox is similar to Wittgenstein’s concept of the ineffable or that both thinkers seek to undermine the idea that there are things that cannot be put into words, I argue here that we must look for the affinities between the two philosophers in an (...) altogether different place, namely, in Kierkegaard’s and Wittgenstein’s concerted endorsement of an anti-consequentialist, quasi-religious conception of ethics. (shrink)

In the contemporary literature Wittgenstein has variously been labelled a fideist, a non-cognitivist and a relativist of sorts. The underlying motivation for these attributions seems to be the thought that the content of a belief can clearly be separated from the attitude taken towards it. Such a ”factorization model’ which construes religious beliefs as consisting of two independent ”factors’ -- the belief’s content and the belief-attitude -- appears to be behind the idea that one could, for example, have the religious (...) attitude alone or that religious content will remain broadly unaffected by a fundamental change in attitude. In this article I will argue that such a ”factorization model’ severely distorts Wittgenstein’s conception of religious belief. (shrink)

The Illusion of Doubt shows that radical scepticism is an illusion generated by a Cartesian picture of our evidential situation—the view that my epistemic grounds in both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ cases must be the same. It is this picture which issues both a standing invitation to radical scepticism and ensures that there is no way of getting out of it while agreeing to the sceptic’s terms. The sceptical problem cannot, therefore, be answered ‘directly’. Rather, the assumptions that give (...) rise to it, need to be undermined. These include the notion that radical scepticism can be motivated by the ‘closure’ principle for knowledge, that the ‘Indistinguishability Argument’ renders the Cartesian conception compulsory, that the ‘New Evil Genius Thesis’ is coherent, and the demand for a ‘global validation’ of our epistemic practices makes sense. Once these dogmas are undermined, the path is clear for a ‘realism without empiricism’ that allows us to re-establish unmediated contact with the objects and persons in our environment which an illusion of doubt had threatened to put forever beyond our cognitive grasp. (shrink)

In this paper I develop an account of Wittgenstein's conception of what it is to understand religious language. I show that Wittgenstein's view undermines the idea that as regards religious faith only two options are possible – either adherence to a set of metaphysical beliefs (with certain ways of acting following from these beliefs) or passionate commitment to a ‘doctrineless’ form of life. I offer a defence of Wittgenstein's conception against Kai Nielsen's charges that Wittgenstein removes the ‘content’ from religious (...) belief and renders the religious form of life ‘incommensurable’ with other domains of discourse, thus immunizing it against rational criticism. (shrink)

Chinese cities are increasingly using digital technologies to address urban problems and govern society. However, little is known about how this digital transition has been implemented. This study explores the introduction of digital governance in Shenzhen, one of China's most advanced smart cities. We show that, at the local level, the successful implementation of digital systems faces numerous hurdles in long-standing data management and bureaucratic practices that are at least as challenging as the technical problems. Furthermore, the study finds that (...) the digital systems in Shenzhen entail a creeping centralisation of data that potentially turns lower administrative government units into mere users of the city-level smart platforms rather than being in control of their own data resources. Smart city development and big data ambitions thereby imply shifting stakeholder relations at the local level and also pull non-governmental stakeholders, such as information technology companies and research institutions, closer to new data flows and smart governance systems. The findings add to the discussion of big data-driven smart systems and their implications for governance processes in an authoritarian context. (shrink)

I argue for the falsity of what I call the "Admissibility of Historical Information Thesis". According to the AHIT propositions that describe past events are always admissible with respect to propositions that describe future events. I first demonstrate that this demand has some counter-intuitive implications and then argue that the source of the counter-intuitiveness is a wrong understanding of the concept of chance. I also discuss the relation between the failure of the AHIT and the existence of contrastive explanations for (...) chancy events. (shrink)

Abstract: “Resolute readings” initially started life as a radical new approach to Wittgenstein's early philosophy, but are now starting to take root as a way of interpreting the later writings as well—a trend exemplified by Stephen Mulhall's Wittgenstein's Private Language (2007) as well as by Phil Hutchinson's “What's the Point of Elucidation?” (2007) and Rom Harré's “Grammatical Therapy and the Third Wittgenstein” (2008). The present article shows that there are neither good philosophical nor compelling exegetical grounds for accepting a resolute (...) reading of the later Wittgenstein's work. It is possible to make sense of Wittgenstein's philosophical method without either ascribing to him an incoherent conception of “substantial nonsense” or espousing the resolute readers' preferred option of nonsense austerity. If the interpretation here is correct, it allows us to recognize Wittgenstein's radical break with the philosophical tradition without having to characterize his achievements in purely therapeutic fashion. (shrink)

One of the most intractable issues in Kierkegaard scholarship continues to be the question of what one is to make of the relation between infinite resignation and faith in Fear and Trembling. Most commentators follow Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author in claiming that progression to faith is a “linear” process that requires infinite resignation as a first step. The problem with such a reading is that it leads to paradox: It seems to require attributing to the “knight of faith” two inconsistent belief‐attitudes (...) simultaneously—on the one hand, the willingness to resign one's heart's desires (infinite resignation) and, on the other, the conviction that one will somehow receive back what one has resigned. But this is a confused way of thinking about faith. I will show that faith's alleged paradoxicality is only apparent and that the element of resignation that constitutes an aspect of it actually bears some striking similarities to what the aesthete has in mind when he speaks, in Either/Or, of throwing hope overboard in order to make possible a truly artistic way of life. Hence, on my interpretation, the knight of faith does not need to adopt two contradictory attitudes at the same time (or constantly to “annul” one of them), but must rather practice a form of spiritual discipline in many ways analogous to the aesthete's endeavour to become a “poet of possibility.”. (shrink)

The thesis explores the question of how should a rational moral agent reason and make choices when he finds himself accepting inconsistent moral judgments. It is argued that it is both conceptually and psychologically justified to describe such an agent as suffering from uncertainty. Such uncertainty, however, is not uncertainty regarding the truth of some descriptive claim, but rather uncertainty regarding the truth of a normative claim. Specifically it is uncertainty regarding the truth of a moral judgement. In the literature (...) this is sometimes called “moral uncertainty”. Two different lines of philosophical literatures that explore the idea of moral uncertainty are discussed. The first line – the one that originated from David Lewis‟ argument against the “Desire as Belief Thesis” – explores the mere possibility of moral uncertainty, while the second line explores the question how ought a rational moral agent choose in face of moral uncertainty. The discussion of these two lines of research leads to the conclusion that a consistent account of moral decision making under conditions of moral uncertainty that will be applicable to the kind of cases that the thesis explores, must make use of degrees of beliefs in comparative moral judgements and of them alone. Specifically, no references to degrees of moral value should be made. An attempt to present such an account in the framework of an extension of Leonard Savage‟s model for decision making is carried out. This attempt leads to a problematic result. Several implications of the result to ethic and meta-ethics are discussed as well as possible ways to avoid it. The conclusion is partly positive and partly negative: While a plausible account of moral decision making under conditions of moral uncertainty is presented, an account of moral reasoning that aims at finding a complete moral theory is shown to be a very difficult – if not impossible - aim to achieve. (shrink)

In the context of two recent yet distinct philosophical debates—over choice under conditions of moral uncertainty and over transformative choices—several philosophers have implicitly adopted a thesis about how to evaluate alternatives of uncertain value. The thesis says that the value a rational agent ought to attach to an alternative under the hypothesis that the value of this alternative is x, ought to be x. I argue that while in some contexts this thesis trivially holds, in the context of the two (...) debates in which the thesis has been adopted, it does not. I also discuss several implications of this failure. (shrink)

A triviality result for what Lewis called “the Desire by Necessity Thesis” and Broome : 265–267, 1991) called “the Desire as Expectation Thesis” is presented. The result shows that this thesis and three other reasonable conditions can be jointly satisfied only in trivial cases. Some meta-ethical implications of the result are discussed. The discussion also highlights several issues regarding Lewis ’ original triviality result for “the Desire as Belief Thesis” that have not been properly understood in the literature.

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I am going to propose a new reading of Wittgenstein’s cryptic talk of ‘accession or loss of meaning’ in the Notebooks that draws both on Wittgenstein’s later work on aspect-perception, as well as on the thoughts of a thinker whom Wittgenstein greatly admired: Søren Kierkegaard. I will then go on to argue that, its merits apart, there is something existentially problematic about the conception that Wittgenstein is advocating. For the renunciation of the comforts of the world that (...) Wittgenstein proposes as a way of coping with the brute contingencies of life seems only to come as far as what Kierkegaard calls ‘infinite resignation’, and this falls far short of the joyful acceptance of existence that appears necessary for inhabiting what Wittgenstein calls a happy world. That is to say, I will show that what Wittgenstein’s proposal lacks is a way of reconnecting with the finite after one has renounced it – the kind of transformation of existence achieved by the person Kierkegaard calls the ‘knight of faith’. (shrink)

Kierkegaard’s influence on Wittgenstein’s conception of religious belief was profound, but this hasn’t so far been given the attention it deserves . Although Wittgenstein wrote comparatively little on the subject, while the whole of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre has a religious theme, both philosophers have become notorious for refusing to construe religious belief in either of the two traditional ways: as a ‘propositional attitude’ on the one hand or as a mere ‘emotional response’ with no reference to the ‘real world’ on the (...) other. This refusal to play by the orthodox dichotomies, as it were, has led to gross misrepresentation of their thought by numerous commentators. Neither Wittgenstein nor Kierkegaard has been immune to allegations of both ‘relativism’ and ‘fideism’, although neither charge could be wider of the mark. It is not that Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard reject the role that reason has to play in both religion and philosophy, but that they try to undermine from within certain common assumptions about the nature of both religious faith and the point of philosophical activity that make us believe that the traditional dichotomies exhaust all the available options. What I hope to show in this paper is that more sense can be made of Wittgenstein’s controversial remarks on religion, if we juxtapose them with Kierkegaard’s religious thought, especially that of Kierkegaard’s pseudonym , Johannes Climacus, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The focal point of this paper is going to be the attempt to read what little Wittgenstein has to say about this topic through the lens of Climacus’ claim that ‘objectively there is no truth; an objective knowledge about the truth or the truths of Christianity is precisely untruth.’ I will begin by giving a brief exposition of Climacus’ views, will then sketch out what Wittgenstein has to say on the matter and will then attempt to bring the two together. In the remainder of the paper I will assess the implications of Wittgenstein’s and Kierkegaard’s conception as well as address some of the problems that their account might be said to engender. (shrink)

I show that David Lewis’s principal principle is not preserved under Jeffrey conditionalization. Using this observation, I argue that Lewis’s reason for rejecting the desire as belief thesis and Adams’s thesis applies also to his own principal principle. 1 Introduction2 Adams’s Thesis, the Desire as Belief Thesis, and the Principal Principle3 Jeffrey Conditionalization4 The Principal Principles Not Preserved under Jeffrey Conditionalization5 Inadmissible Experiences.

In this paper I respond to the objections and comments made by Ranalli, Williams, and Moyal-Sharrock, participants in a symposium on my book on scepticism called The Illusion of Doubt.

Many philosophers in the field of meta-ethics believe that rational degrees of confidence in moral judgments should have a probabilistic structure, in the same way as do rational degrees of belief. The current paper examines this position, termed “moral Bayesianism,” from an empirical point of view. To this end, we assessed the extent to which degrees of moral judgments obey the third axiom of the probability calculus, ifP(A∩B)=0thenP(A∪B)=P(A)+P(B), known as finite additivity, as compared to degrees of beliefs on the one (...) hand and degrees of desires on the other. Results generally converged to show that degrees of moral judgment are more similar to degrees of belief than to degrees of desire in this respect. This supports the adoption of a Bayesian approach to the study of moral judgments. To further support moral Bayesianism, we also demonstrated its predictive power. Finally, we discuss the relevancy of our results to the meta-ethical debate between moral cognitivists and moral non-cognitivists. (shrink)

When an agent that accepts transitivity of preferences as a principle of rationality finds himself expressing intransitive preferences, he has to change some of his expressed preferences so that transitivity will be restored. When such an agent also believes in the existence of some independent betterness relation among the alternatives over which he forms his preferences, it is reasonable to demand that the way he changes his intransitive expressed preferences will be sensitive to his beliefs regarding this betterness relation. It (...) is shown that under two natural conditions for such sensitivity, in case there are infinitely many alternatives, the agent must end up being indifferent between all alternatives except two. Some implications of this result for ethics are discussed. (shrink)

Mozart's great opera, Don Giovanni, poses a number of significant philosophical and aesthetic challenges, and yet it remains, for the most part, little discussed by contemporary philosophers. A notable exception to this is Bernard Williams's important paper, ‘Don Juan as an Idea’, which contains an illuminating discussion of Kierkegaard's ground-breaking interpretation of the opera, ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic’, in Either/Or. Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author's approach here is, in some respects, reminiscent of a currently rather fashionable narrative-inspired moral philosophy, (...) of which Williams himself is perhaps the most impressive recent exponent. In the light of this apparent methodological confluence, Williams's disagreement with A about the meaning of Don Giovanni's final two scenes seems particularly significant. By offering an interpretation of Don Giovanni that both retains A's fundamental ideas and manages to get round the problems in Williams's account, I will show that the greatness of Mozart's opera is largely a function of the challenge it presents to the ‘morality system’. (shrink)

1. In this exciting and ambitious book, Duncan Pritchard defends a novel conception of perceptual epistemic grounds, which can both be factive and reflectively available to the agent. Pritchard calls this position the ‘holy grail’ of epistemology for its power to undercut two of contemporary epistemology’s most central problems: the epistemic internalism/externalism controversy and radical scepticism. While Pritchard’s book manages to make a convincing case for why one should accept epistemological disjunctivism (ED), the ‘neo-Moorean’ anti-sceptical strategy that he derives from (...) it is less compelling. This is not because ED does not provide us with the materials for a plausible anti-sceptical strategy, however, but rather because Pritchard misidentifies where ED’s real power lies, namely, in its potential to prevent the radical sceptical problem from arising in the first place. If I am right, then there is no need to establish Moore-type anti-sceptical theses with the ground rules for doing so set by scepticism. For once (and as McDowell has maintained) the thought has been undermined that my perceptual epistemic grounds can only ever consist of the ‘highest common factor’ between the ‘good case’ and the ‘bad case’, the traditional route to radical scepticism is blocked. (shrink)

This introduction provides an overview of the content of the papers published in the special issue on epistemic vice and forms of scepticism.

Books Reviewed:Kristin Kaufmann,Annemarie Pieper, Søren Kierkegaard.