How can we invent new certain knowledge in a methodical manner? This question stands at the heart of Salomon Maimon's theory of invention. Chikurel argues that Maimon's contribution to the ars inveniendi tradition lies in the methods of invention which he prescribes for mathematics. Influenced by Proclus' commentary on Elements, these methods are applied on examples taken from Euclid's Elements and Data. Centering around methodical invention and scientific genius, Maimon's philosophy is unique in an era glorifying the artistic genius, known (...) as Geniezeit. Invention, primarily defined as constructing syllogisms, has implications on the notion of being given in intuition as well as in symbolic cognition. Chikurel introduces Maimon's notion of analysis in the broader sense, grounded not only on the principle of contradiction but on intuition as well. In philosophy, ampliative analysis is based on Maimon's logical term of analysis of the object, a term that has yet to be discussed in Maimonian scholarship. Following its introduction, a new version of the question quid juris? arises. In mathematics, Chikurel demonstrates how this conception of analysis originates from practices of Greek geometrical analysis. (shrink)

In this article, I address an uncharted topic in the scholarship on Salomon Maimon – the great influence that Bacon's philosophy had on Maimon. I suggest that by considering Maimon as a Baconian, we achieve a better understanding of Maimon's work, especially in three respects: (i) his use of natural histories to achieve philosophical insights, (ii) the employment of induction to find new propositions and establish known ones as certain but not as objectively necessary and (iii) a probabilistic view of (...) science, wherein we acknowledge that we can achieve higher degrees of certainty attributed to propositions but are unable to show that empirical propositions are objectively necessary. It is in this context that I propose to use the term ‘ladder of certainty’ and discuss how it is connected to Maimon's skeptical stance. (shrink)

The article examines how Salomon Maimon’s concept of number as ratio can be used to demonstrate that arithmetical judgments are analytical. Based on his critique of Kant’s synthetic a priori judgments, I show how this notion of number fulfills Maimon’s requirements for apodictic knowledge. Moreover, I suggest that Maimon was influenced by mathematicians who previously defined number as a ratio, such as Wallis and Newton. Following an analysis of the real definition of this concept, I conclude that within the framework (...) of Maimon’s philosophy, arithmetical judgments cannot be analytical, nor is arithmetic an objectively necessary science, but rather only subjectively necessary. We should also cast doubt on his claim that we can create real objects from pure concepts of the understanding. (shrink)

Despite Hannah Arendt’s scepticism about psychoanalysis, this essay shows the relevance of Freud’s psychoanalytic notions of love and sublimation for Arendt. In her rejection of a political relevance of love, Arendt does not take into consideration the libidinal aspects of collective bonds, nor does she give an account of the passionate aspect of being together despite the crucial role of amor mundi in her work. Following Freud, I demonstrate that love and sublimation are fundamental to worldliness, central to our understanding (...) of forgiveness and the making of promises, all of which is pivotal to understanding Hannah Arendt's political thought. In Freud’s writing love and sublimation expand knowledge and creativity and enable community building. By negotiating between Arendt’s and Freud’s writings on love and politics, this article demonstrates that sublimated love mediates between the private and public spheres. The ultimate question I ask concerns the relation between love of the world and its negation by radical evil. (shrink)

This article examines the sceptical dimension of Salomon Maimon’s theory of invention. It suggests the following: (i) Most of Maimon’s methods are intended to increase the degree of certainty that we can attribute to propositions, but not to achieve apodictic certainty. (ii) Maimon’s various forms of scepticism, for example, doubt and the antinomies, should be considered as belonging to a scale of doubt wherein degrees of certainty and probability can increase and decrease. (iii) His methods of invention offer various means (...) for increasing the degree of certainty, such as finding more connections to other propositions and analyzing whether a condition expressed in a proposition is true or whether it is only a pseudo-condition. (iv) The method of transforming problematic propositions into true propositions indicates that Maimon’s sceptical stance sometimes made way for rational dogmatic thought, since this transformation is in the opposite direction of what is usually advocated by sceptics. (shrink)

Prenatal screening pathways, as nowadays offered in most Western countries consist of similar tests. First, a risk-assessment test for major aneuploides is offered to pregnant women. In case of an increased risk, invasive diagnostic tests, entailing a miscarriage risk, are offered. For decades, only conventional karyotyping was used for final diagnosis. Moreover, several foetal ultrasound scans are offered to detect major congenital anomalies, but the same scans also provide relevant information for optimal support of the pregnancy and the delivery. Recent (...) developments in prenatal screening include the application of microarrays that allow for identifying a much broader range of abnomalities than karyotyping, and non-invasive prenatal testing that enables reducing the number of invasive tests for aneuploidies considerably. In the future, broad NIPT may become possible and affordable. This article will briefly address the ethical issues raised by these technological developments. First, a safe NIPT may lead to routinisation and as such challenge the central issue of informed consent and the aim of prenatal screening: to offer opportunity for autonomous reproductive choice. Widening the scope of prenatal screening also raises the question to what extent ‘reproductive autonomy’ is meant to expand. Finally, if the same test is used for two different aims, namely detection of foetal anomalies and pregnancy-related problems, non-directive counselling can no longer be taken as a standard. Our broad outline of the ethical issues is meant as an introduction into the more detailed ethical discussions about prenatal screening in the other articles of this special issue. (shrink)

Prenatal screening pathways, as nowadays offered in most Western countries consist of similar tests. First, a risk‐assessment test for major aneuploides is offered to pregnant women. In case of an increased risk, invasive diagnostic tests, entailing a miscarriage risk, are offered. For decades, only conventional karyotyping was used for final diagnosis. Moreover, several foetal ultrasound scans are offered to detect major congenital anomalies, but the same scans also provide relevant information for optimal support of the pregnancy and the delivery.Recent developments (...) in prenatal screening include the application of microarrays that allow for identifying a much broader range of abnomalities than karyotyping, and non‐invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) that enables reducing the number of invasive tests for aneuploidies considerably. In the future, broad NIPT may become possible and affordable.This article will briefly address the ethical issues raised by these technological developments. First, a safe NIPT may lead to routinisation and as such challenge the central issue of informed consent and the aim of prenatal screening: to offer opportunity for autonomous reproductive choice. Widening the scope of prenatal screening also raises the question to what extent ‘reproductive autonomy’ is meant to expand. Finally, if the same test is used for two different aims, namely detection of foetal anomalies and pregnancy‐related problems, non‐directive counselling can no longer be taken as a standard. Our broad outline of the ethical issues is meant as an introduction into the more detailed ethical discussions about prenatal screening in the other articles of this special issue. (shrink)

Spinoza's heritage has been occluded by his incorporation into the single, western, philosophical canon formed and enforced by theologico-political condemnation, and his heritage is further occluded by controversies whose secular garb shields their religious origins. By situating Spinoza's thought in a materialist Aristotelian tradition, this book sheds new light on those who inherit Spinoza's thought and its consequences materially and historically rather than metaphysically. By focusing on Marx, Benjamin, and Adorno, Idit Dobbs-Weinstein explores the manner in which Spinoza's radical (...) critique of religion shapes materialist critiques of the philosophy of history. Dobbs-Weinstein argues that two radically opposed notions of temporality and history are at stake for these thinkers, an onto-theological future-oriented one and a political one oriented to the past for the sake of the present or, more precisely, for the sake of actively resisting the persistent barbarism at the heart of culture. (shrink)

This paper discusses Spinoza's critique of religion as a visible moment of a radically occluded materialist Judeo-Arabic Aristotelian philosophical tradition. While the prevailing (Christo-Platonic) tradition begins with the familiar gesture to metaphysics as first philosophy, Spinoza's thought (and thus, this Other Tradition) takes politics as its point of departure with its concrete emphasis on a critique of dogma. This paper will show-by way of differing readings of Spinoza-how this materialist tradition becomes occluded by the prevailing tradition, even in the work (...) of such careful materialist Spinoza commentators as Etienne Balibar. (shrink)

This paper explores Benjamin’s and Adorno’s materialist critique of the philosophy of history as a metaphysical fiction which harbors and shields the barbarism at the heart of culture. Each undertakes a radical critique of ontological, future-oriented notions of temporality and history, proposing instead a political understanding oriented to the past for the sake of the present or, more precisely, for the sake of actively resisting the persistent barbarism. The more culture insists on its progress beyond barbarism, the more it claims (...) to have overcome the past, the more insidious and invidious are its forms of oppression. I follow the consequences of Benjamin’s emphasis on the nihilism constitutive of philosophy of history by analyzing his claim that even the dead are not safe from the threat of annihilation. Second, I argue that Adorno’s radical critique of a culture and politics oriented toward the future, or rather to overcoming the past, constitutes an active resistance to the insidious barbarism at the heart of democracy. (shrink)

A cursory review of studies of Spinoza’s thought discloses that diverse and often opposed religious, philosophical, historical, even literary traditions have claimed and disclaimed his debt to them as well as theirs to him. A Jewish, Christian, pantheist, and atheist Spinoza vies with a rationalist and a mystic, a realist and a nominalist, an analytic and a continental, an historicist and an a-historical one. And this list is far from exhaustive of the dazzling array of further, nuanced debates and interpretations (...) within each tradition. The irony exhibited by the history of Spinoza scholarship is especially poignant insofar as the debates and controversies surrounding his thought are rather heated or affective, this in relation to a thinker who strove to control, circumscribe, and transform the passions by the intellect. Following Spinoza’s motto caute, I shall attempt to evade the fray by disclaiming the possibility of a definitive interpretation not only because it is premature, but also and especially because I believe that Spinoza’s writings deliberately resist direct appropriation and translation into philosophically “respectable” language. In addition, while it is possible to identify Spinoza’s very few, explicit successors, e.g., Schelling, Lessing, Hölderlin, Hegel, and Nietzsche, it is exceedingly difficult to limit the list of his predecessors for two main reasons: he is both reticent to name and misleading in naming his predecessors—the latter only in the sense that he is sooner ready to identify an adversarial position than to acknowledge debt to the same thinker in other respects; and Spinoza’s debt to his varied predecessors is neither consistent nor systematic, for his diverse discussions are informed by different considerations, positions, and thinkers, at times only in a negative way. In fact, one of the common problems characterizing contemporary Spinoza scholarship is the resolve to ignore or dismiss the significance of such “negative” influences. For these reasons alone, we should be wary of attempts to systematize Spinoza’s thought or to regard him as a system builder, despite such attempts by his late-eighteenth and nineteenth century disciples, especially Schelling and Hegel. But, in addition, in the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, Spinoza cautions the reader to refrain from judgments concerning the truth or falsity of philosophical discussions on the basis of some paradoxical statements. (shrink)

This book shows that Maimonides and St. Thomas reached strikingly similar conclusions regarding the limits of reason and that these limits, in turn, show the dimensions of philosophical understanding.

The thesis investigates the philosophical dimension of providence as the manifestation of human perfection in the thought of Moses Maimonides and St. Thomas Aquinas. In contrast to most studies of providence, which question the possibility of affirming human freedom in the light of divine knowledge, the thesis examines the function of providence in human existence. I argue that principally the concept becomes intelligible only if God is understood as providens rather than praevidens, since, for both Maimonides and Aquinas, understanding the (...) ontological and noetic aspects comprising man's relation to providence is a prerequisite to apprehending the nature of divine knowledge. ;In addressing not only the Guide of the Perplexed and the Summa Theologiae but also biblical and philosophical commentaries, I both explore Maimonides' and Aquinas' philosophical hermeneutics and address the question of the consistency and coherence of their works. ;The thesis examines the full scope of the relations between providence and human perfection in order to demonstrate that the rational assent consequent upon intellectual pursuit is the condition for human perfection. Moreover, I attempt to demonstrate that although the first principle informing their metaphysics is a creator and provident God, neither Maimonides nor Aquinas base their accounts of human perfection upon unexamined assent to revelation. Rather, insisting upon the unity and universality of truth, both thinkers strive to establish truths known through revelation by means of demonstration, or of probable reasoning in subjects wherein the former methods' cannot be applied. ;In conclusion, I demonstrate why the recognition of the limitations of demonstrative reasoning is the condition for intellectual perfection, or active participation in providence, rather than a passive resignation to an unknowable providential order. In fact, I argue that participative activity--the manifestation of the proper understanding of providence--is an ethical activity characterized by excess and hence, that it is true imitatio Dei. (shrink)

The works of Gersonides encompass science, philosophy, and biblical exegesis. The majority of the philosophical writings are constituted by supercommentaries on Averroes’s commentaries on Aristotle’s works, whereas his magnum opus, The Wars of the Lord, encompasses all three genres. Since these works engage his preeminent predecessors, Maimonides and Averroes, and since Gersonides explains the motivation to composing the Wars as a concern for human flourishing, the absence of a supercommentary on the Nicomachean Ethics is striking.The Virtue Ethics of Levi Gersonides (...) is a bold attempt to provide an account of Gersonides’s ethics as a significant departure from his preeminent... (shrink)

This paper examines the question of whether Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT possess minds, focusing specifically on whether they have a genuine folk psychology encompassing beliefs, desires, and intentions. We approach this question by investigating two key aspects: internal representations and dispositions to act. First, we survey various philosophical theories of representation, including informational, causal, structural, and teleosemantic accounts, arguing that LLMs satisfy key conditions proposed by each. We draw on recent interpretability research in machine learning to support these (...) claims. Second, we explore whether LLMs exhibit robust dispositions to perform actions, a necessary component of folk psychology. We consider two prominent philosophical traditions, interpretationism and representationalism, to assess LLM action dispositions. While we find evidence suggesting LLMs may satisfy some criteria for having a mind, particularly in game-theoretic environments, we conclude that the data remains inconclusive. Additionally, we reply to several skeptical challenges to LLM folk psychology, including issues of sensory grounding, the "stochastic parrots" argument, and concerns about memorization. Our paper has three main upshots. First, LLMs do have robust internal representations. Second, there is an open question to answer about whether LLMs have robust action dispositions. Third, existing skeptical challenges to LLM representation do not survive philosophical scrutiny. (shrink)

Under what conditions would an artificially intelligent system have wellbeing? Despite its clear bearing on the ethics of human interactions with artificial systems, this question has received little direct attention. Because all major theories of wellbeing hold that an individual’s welfare level is partially determined by their mental life, we begin by considering whether artificial systems have mental states. We show that a wide range of theories of mental states, when combined with leading theories of wellbeing, predict that certain existing (...) artificial systems have wellbeing. Along the way, we argue that there are good reasons to believe that artificial systems can have wellbeing even if they are not phenomenally conscious. While we do not claim to demonstrate conclusively that AI systems have wellbeing, we argue that there is a significant probability that some AI systems have or will soon have wellbeing, and that this should lead us to reassess our relationship with the intelligent systems we create. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that existing artificial systems are not phenomenally conscious, and that the construction of phenomenally conscious artificial systems would require significant technological progress if it is possible at all. We challenge this assumption by arguing that if Global Workspace Theory (GWT) — a leading scientific theory of phenomenal consciousness — is correct, then instances of one widely implemented AI architecture, the artificial language agent, might easily be made phenomenally conscious if they are not already. Along the way, (...) we articulate an explicit methodology for thinking about how to apply scientific theories of consciousness to artificial systems and employ this methodology to arrive at a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for phenomenal consciousness according to GWT. (shrink)

Foreword by Oliver Sacks Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) was already an established neuropsychologist when he emigrated from Germany to the United States in the 1930s. This book, his magnum opus and widely regarded as a modern classic in psychology and biology, grew out of his dissatisfaction with traditional natural science techniques for analyzing living beings. It offers a broad introduction to the sources and ranges of application of the "holistic" or "organismic" research program that has since become a standard part (...) of biological thought. Goldstein was especially concerned with the breakdown of organization and the failure of central controls that take place in catastrophic responses to situations such as physical or mental illness. But he was equally attuned to the amazing powers of the organism to readjust to such catastrophic losses, if only by withdrawal to a more limited range that it could manage by a redistribution of its reduced energies, thus reclaiming as much wholeness as new circumstances allowed. Goldstein's theses in The Organism have had an important impact on philosophical and psychological thought throughout the twentieth century, as evidenced in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, Ernst Cassirer, and Ludwig Binswanger. (shrink)

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 109 of Psychological Review. Due to circumstances that were beyond the control of the authors, the studies reported in "Models of Ecological Rationality: The Recognition Heuristic," by Daniel G. Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer overlap with studies reported in "The Recognition Heuristic: How Ignorance Makes Us Smart," by the same authors and with studies reported in "Inference From Ignorance: The Recognition Heuristic". In addition, Figure 3 in the Psychological Review (...) article was originally published in the book chapter and should have carried a note saying that it was used by permission of Oxford University Press.] One view of heuristics is that they are imperfect versions of optimal statistical procedures considered too complicated for ordinary minds to carry out. In contrast, the authors consider heuristics to be adaptive strategies that evolved in tandem with fundamental psychological mechanisms. The recognition heuristic, arguably the most frugal of all heuristics, makes inferences from patterns of missing knowledge. This heuristic exploits a fundamental adaptation of many organisms: the vast, sensitive, and reliable capacity for recognition. The authors specify the conditions under which the recognition heuristic is successful and when it leads to the counter-intuitive less-is-more effect in which less knowledge is better than more for making accurate inferences. (shrink)

This paper develops an information-sensitive theory of the semantics and probability of conditionals and statements involving epistemic modals. The theory validates a number of principles linking probability and modality, including the principle that the probability of a conditional If A, then C equals the probability of C, updated with A. The theory avoids so-called triviality results, which are standardly taken to show that principles of this sort cannot be validated. To achieve this, we deny that rational agents update their credences (...) via conditionalization. We offer a new rule of update, Hyperconditionalization, which agrees with Conditionalization whenever nonmodal statements are at stake but differs for modal and conditional sentences. (shrink)

Recent advances in natural language processing have given rise to a new kind of AI architecture: the language agent. By repeatedly calling an LLM to perform a variety of cognitive tasks, language agents are able to function autonomously to pursue goals specified in natural language and stored in a human-readable format. Because of their architecture, language agents exhibit behavior that is predictable according to the laws of folk psychology: they function as though they have desires and beliefs, and then make (...) and update plans to pursue their desires given their beliefs. We argue that the rise of language agents significantly reduces the probability of an existential catastrophe due to loss of control over an AGI. This is because the probability of such an existential catastrophe is proportional to the difficulty of aligning AGI systems, and language agents significantly reduce that difficulty. In particular, language agents help to resolve three important issues related to aligning AIs: reward misspecification, goal misgeneralization, and uninterpretability. (shrink)

Recent research has identified a tension between the Safety principle that knowledge is belief without risk of error, and the Closure principle that knowledge is preserved by competent deduction. Timothy Williamson reconciles Safety and Closure by proposing that when an agent deduces a conclusion from some premises, the agent’s method for believing the conclusion includes their method for believing each premise. We argue that this theory is untenable because it implies problematically easy epistemic access to one’s methods. Several possible solutions (...) are explored and rejected. (shrink)

This paper offers a new argument against the KK thesis, which says that if you know p, then you know that you know p. We argue that KK is inconsistent with the fact that anyone denies the KK thesis: imagine that Dudley says he knows p but that he does not have 100 iterations of knowledge about p. If KK were true, Dudley would know that he has 100 iterations of knowledge about p, and so he wouldn’t deny that he (...) did. We consider several epicycles, and also explore whether the argument type also challenges other structural conditions on knowledge, such as closure under deduction. (shrink)

This paper explores the principle that knowledge is fragile, in that whenever S knows that S doesn’t know that S knows that p, S thereby fails to know p. Fragility is motivated by the infelicity of dubious assertions, utterances which assert p while acknowledging higher-order ignorance whether p. Fragility is interestingly weaker than KK, the principle that if S knows p, then S knows that S knows p. Existing theories of knowledge which deny KK by accepting a Margin for Error (...) principle can be conservatively extended with Fragility. (shrink)

Bohmian mechanics, which is also called the de Broglie-Bohm theory, the pilot-wave model, and the causal interpretation of quantum mechanics, is a version of quantum theory discovered by Louis de Broglie in 1927 and rediscovered by David Bohm in 1952. It is the simplest example of what is often called a hidden variables interpretation of quantum mechanics. In Bohmian mechanics a system of particles is described in part by its wave function, evolving, as usual, according to Schrödinger's equation. However, the (...) wave function provides only a partial description of the system. This description is completed by the specification of the actual positions of the particles. The latter evolve according to the.. (shrink)

You omega know p when you possess every iteration of knowledge of p. This book argues that omega knowledge plays a central role in philosophy. In particular, the book argues that omega knowledge is necessary for permissible assertion, action, inquiry, and belief. Although omega knowledge plays this important role, existing theories of omega knowledge are unsatisfying. One theory, KK, identifies knowledge with omega knowledge. This theory struggles to accommodate cases of inexact knowledge. The other main theory is skeptical, claiming that (...) we do not omega know any ordinary claims about the world. This book develops and critically compares three new theories of omega knowledge. (shrink)

From the acclaimed writer and thinker--whose award-winning books include both fiction and non-fiction--a dazzlingly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden but essential role in today's debates on love, religion, politics, and science. Imagine that Plato came to life in the 21st century and set out on a multi-city speaking tour: How would he handle a host on Fox News who challenges him on religion and morality? How would he mediate a debate on the best way to (...) raise a child between a Freudian psychoanalyst and a Tiger Mom? How would he answer a neuroscientist who, about to scan Plato's brain, argues that all his philosophical problems can be solved by our new technologies? What would he make of Google, and the idea that knowledge can be crowdsourced rather than reasoned out by experts? With a philosopher's depth and a novelist's imagination, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein probes the deepest issues confronting us--from sexuality and child-rearing to morality and the meaning of life--by allowing us to eavesdrop on Plato as he encounters the modern world. By reviving the Platonic art of the dialogue for the 21st century, she demonstrates that the questions he first posed continue to confound and enlarge us. (shrink)

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Boltzmann explained how irreversible macroscopic laws, in particular the second law of thermodynamics, originate in the time-reversible laws of microscopic physics. Boltzmann’s analysis, the essence of which I shall review here, is basically correct. The most famous criticisms of Boltzmann’s later work on the subject have little merit. Most twentieth century innovations – such as the identification of the state of a physical system with a probability distribution on its phase space, (...) of its thermodynamic entropy with the Gibbs entropy of , and the invocation of the notions of ergodicity and mixing for the justification of the foundations of statistical mechanics – are thoroughly misguided. (shrink)

That all pleasure is good and all pain bad in itself is an eternally true ethical principle. The common claim that some pleasure is not good, or some pain not bad, is mistaken. Strict particularism (ethical decisions must be made case by case; there are no sound universal normative principles) and relativism (all good and bad are relative to society) are among the ethical theories we may refute through an appeal to pleasure and pain. Daniel Dennett, Philippa Foot, R M (...) Hare, Gilbert Harman, Immanuel Kant, J. L. Mackie, and Jean-Paul Sartre are among the many philosophers addressed. (shrink)

You omega know something when you know it, and know that you know it, and know that you know that you know it, and so on. This paper first argues that omega knowledge matters, in the sense that it is required for rational assertion, action, inquiry, and belief. The paper argues that existing accounts of omega knowledge face major challenges. One account is skeptical, claiming that we have no omega knowledge of any ordinary claims about the world. Another account embraces (...) the KK thesis, and identifies knowledge with omega knowledge. This position faces counterexamples, and struggles to make sense of inexact knowledge. The paper then develops a new account of knowledge, by proposing the principle of Reflective Luminosity: if you know that you know something, then you omega know it. I argue that Reflective Luminosity allows for omega knowledge while avoiding the problems for KK. (shrink)

Laurence Goldstein gives a straightforward and lively account of some of the central themes of Wittgenstein's writings on meaning, mind, and mathematics.

Many defend the thesis that when someone knows p, they couldn’t easily have been wrong about p. But the notion of easy possibility in play is relatively undertheorized. One structural idea in the literature, the principle of Counterfactual Closure (CC), connects easy possibility with counterfactuals: if it easily could have happened that p, and if p were the case, then q would be the case, it follows that it easily could have happened that q. We first argue that while CC (...) is false, there is a true restriction of it to cases involving counterfactual dependence on a coin flip. The failure of CC falsifies a model where the easy possibilities are counterfactually similar to actuality. Next, we show that extant normality models, where the easy possibilities are the sufficiently normal ones, are incompatible with the restricted CC thesis involving coin flips. Next, we develop a new kind of normality theory that can accommodate the restricted version of CC. This new theory introduces a principle of Counterfactual Contamination, which says roughly that any world is fairly abnormal if at that world very abnormal events counterfactually depend on a coin flip. Finally, we explain why coin flips and other related events have a special status. A central take home lesson is that the correct principle in the vicinity of Safety is importantly normality-theoretic rather than (as it is usually conceived) similarity-theoretic. (shrink)

Bohmian mechanics is arguably the most naively obvious embedding imaginable of Schr¨ odinger’s equation into a completely coherent physical theory. It describes a world in which particles move in a highly non-Newtonian sort of way, one which may at first appear to have little to do with the spectrum of predictions of quantum mechanics. It turns out, however, that as a consequence of the defining dynamical equations of Bohmian mechanics, when a system has wave function ψ its configuration is typically (...) random, with probability density ρ given by |ψ|2, the quantum equilibrium distribution. It also turns out that the entire quantum formalism, operators as observables and all the rest, naturally emerges in Bohmian mechanics from the analysis of “measurements.” This analysis reveals the status of operators as observables in the description of quantum phenomena, and facilitates a clear view of the range of applicability of the usual quantum mechanical formulas. (shrink)