In this article, I defend a conception of bitterness as a moral emotion and offer an evaluative framework for assessing when instances of bitterness are morally justified. I argue that bitterness is a form of unresolved anger involving a loss of hope that an injustice or other moral wrong will be sufficiently acknowledged and addressed. Orienting the discussion around instances of bitterness in response to social and political injustices, I argue that bitterness is sometimes morally justified even if it is (...) ultimately undesirable to bear. I then suggest that focusing only on the harms and risks of bitterness can distract from its positive role as a moral reminder about a past or persistent injustice, indicating that there is still moral and often political work left to do. Finally, I address the concern that bearing bitterness may lead to despair and inaction. I respond by arguing that moral agents can and do persist in their moral and political struggles with bitterness, and without hope that their efforts will be successful. (shrink)

A Brief History of the Paradox is the first narrative history of paradoxes. Sorenson draws us deep inside the tangles of riddles, paradoxes and conundrums by answering the questions which are seemingly unanswerable. Can God create a stone too heavy for him to lift? Can time have a beginning? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Filled with illuminating anecdotes, A Brief History of the Paradox is vividly written and will appeal to anyone who finds trying to answer unanswerable (...) questions a paradoxically pleasant endeavour. (shrink)

Most ethicists agree that at least some nonhumans have interests that are of direct moral importance. Yet with very few exceptions, both climate ethics and climate policy have operated as though only human interests should be considered in formulating and evaluating climate policy. In this paper I argue that the anthropocentrism of current climate ethics and policy cannot be justified. I first describe the ethical claims upon which my analysis rests, arguing that they are no longer controversial within contemporary ethics. (...) Next, I review work in climate ethics and policy, demonstrating the absence of consideration of nonhuman interests in both domains. Finally, I consider five possible justifications for omitting nonhuman interests in the evaluation climate policy options, arguing that none of these arguments succeeds. (shrink)

This article argues that common intuitions regarding (a) the specialness of ‘use-novel’ data for confirmation and (b) that this specialness implies the ‘no-double-counting rule’, which says that data used in ‘constructing’ (calibrating) a model cannot also play a role in confirming the model’s predictions, are too crude. The intuitions in question are pertinent in all the sciences, but we appeal to a climate science case study to illustrate what is at stake. Our strategy is to analyse the intuitive claims in (...) light of prominent accounts of confirmation of model predictions. We show that on the Bayesian account of confirmation, and also on the standard classical hypothesis-testing account, claims (a) and (b) are not generally true; but for some select cases, it is possible to distinguish data used for calibration from use-novel data, where only the latter confirm. The more specialized classical model-selection methods, on the other hand, uphold a nuanced version of claim (a), but this comes apart from (b), which must be rejected in favour of a more refined account of the relationship between calibration and confirmation. Thus, depending on the framework of confirmation, either the scope or the simplicity of the intuitive position must be revised. (shrink)

The Vedanta of conciousness : transcendence, enlightenment and everyday life -- The alienated self and the Kabbala of transformation -- The Zen of creativity and the critique of the discursive intellect -- The Tao of love and unconditionality in commitment -- The yoga of action and effortless efficiency -- The nous of perception and the re-enchantment of the tree of life -- The gnosis of freedom and the Fana of fulfilment.

A few years ago, it was common for philosophers to begin inquiry into hope by noting that the subject has received little attention in the philosophical literature. But our ability to make this claim is quickly coming to an end; hope has been earning increasing recognition in the discipline, with philosophers exploring important questions related to the nature of hope, what makes hope rational, and how hope is connected to human wellbeing and agency. Despite this recent interest, however, there remains (...) very little discussion of the social and political dimensions of hope. My aim in this paper is to demonstrate the importance of a feminist perspective in bringing these dimensions into fuller view. I argue that feminist insights into the relational nature of the self, which call attention to where selves are socially situated in relation to others, enable a richer understanding of the nature and value of hope. (shrink)

In “Properties and the Interpretation of Second-Order Logic” Bob Hale develops and defends a deflationary conception of properties where a property with particular satisfaction conditions actually exists if and only if it is possible that a predicate with those same satisfaction conditions exists. He argues further that, since our languages are finitary, there are at most countably infinitely many properties and, as a result, the account fails to underwrite the standard semantics for second-order logic. Here a more lenient version of (...) the view is explored, which allows for the possibility of countably infinite predicates understood as the product of linguistic supertasks. This enriched deflationist account of properties—the Infinitary Deflationary Conception of Existence—supports the standard semantics for models with countable first-order domains, and allows one to prove the categoricity of the second-order Peano axioms. (shrink)

By considering the new notion of theinversesof syllogisms such asBarbaraandCelarent, we show how the rule ofIndirect Proof, in the form (no multiple or vacuous discharges) used by Aristotle, may be dispensed with, in a system comprising four basic rules of subalternation or conversion and six basic syllogisms.

The Enlightenment has often been written about as a sequence of disembodied 'great ideas'. The aim of this book is to put the beliefs of the Enlightenment firmly into their social context, by revealing the national soils in which they were rooted and the specific purposes for which they were used. It brings out the regional divergences of the Enlightenment experience, shaped by different local intellectual and economic priorities. At the same time it also shows how central concerns were shared (...) everywhere, and how the writings of certain key areas came to be influential elsewhere. The thirteen essays, each written by a historian specialising in the particular country, examine national contexts from Sweden to Italy, from Russia to North America. As well as focusing attention on the interplay of thought and action, ideology and society, the book offers important insights into the place of the intelligentsia in the modern world. (shrink)

This chapter summarizes research on free will. Progress has been made by discarding outmoded philosophical notions in favor of exploring how ordinary people understand and use the notion of free will. The concept of responsible autonomy captures many aspects of layperson concepts of free will, including acting on one's own (i.e., not driven by external forces), choosing, using reasons and personal values, conscious reflection, and knowing and accepting consequences and moral implications. Free will can thus be understood as form of (...) volition (action control) that evolved to enable people to live in cultural societies. Much work has shown that belief in free will (as opposed to disbelief) is associated with actions that are conducive to functioning well in culture, including helpfulness, restraint of aggression, learning via counterfactual analysis, thinking for oneself, effective job performance, and appropriate gratitude. Belief in free will increases in response to misdeeds by others, thus emphasizing the link to personal responsibility. Research on volition indicates that self-regulation, intelligent reasoning, decision making, and initiative all deplete a (common) limited energy source, akin to the folk notion of willpower and linked to the body's glucose supplies. Free will is thus not an absolute or constant property of persons but a variable, fluctuating capability—one that is nonetheless highly adaptive for individuals and society. -/- The notion that people have free will has been invoked in multiple contexts. Legally and morally, it explains why people can be held responsible for their actions. Theologically, it was used to explain why a supposedly kind and omniscient god would send most of the people he created to hell (Walker, 1964). Yet, for such an important concept, there remains wide-ranging disagreement and confusion over its existence and its nature. For example, philosophers still debate whether humans truly have free will and, if so, under what conditions human volition deserves to be considered free (Kane, 2011). In psychology, most theorists believe that humans engage in self-control, rational choice, planning, initiative, and related acts of volition. The debate is not whether these things occur but merely whether these should be called free will. -/- This chapter will provide an overview of recent psychology experiments concerned with free will. There are three main and quite distinct sets of problems, each with associated lines of research. The first is concerned with how people understand the idea of free will. The second concerns the causes and consequences of believing in free will. The third focuses on the actual volitional processes that guide human action. (shrink)

Long-lasting interference effects in picture naming are induced when objects are presented in categorically related contexts in both continuous and blocked cyclic paradigms. Less consistent context effects have been reported when the task is changed to semantic classification. Experiment 1 confirmed the recent finding of cumulative facilitation in the continuous paradigm with living/non-living superordinate categorization. To avoid a potential confound involving participants responding with the identical superordinate category in related contexts in the blocked cyclic paradigm, we devised a novel set (...) of categorically related objects that also varied in terms of relative age – a core semantic type associated with the adjective word class across languages. Experiment 2 demonstrated the typical interference effect with these stimuli in basic level naming. In Experiment 3, using the identical blocked cyclic paradigm, we failed to observe semantic context effects when the same pictures were classified as younger–older. Overall, the results indicate the semantic context effects in the two paradigms do not share a common origin, with the effect in the continuous paradigm arising at the level of conceptual representations or in conceptual-to-lexical connections while the effect in the blocked cyclic paradigm most likely originates at a lexical level of representation. The implications of these findings for current accounts of long-lasting interference effects in spoken word production are discussed. (shrink)

Some people believe more than others in free will, and researchers have both measured and manipulated those beliefs. Disbelief in free will has been shown to cause dishonest, selfish, aggressive, and conforming behavior, and to reduce helpfulness, learning from one’s misdeeds, thinking for oneself, recycling, expectations for occupational success, and actual quality of performance on the job. Belief in free will has been shown to have only modest or negligible correlations with other variables, indicating that it is a distinct trait. (...) Belief in free will has correlated positively with life satisfaction and finding life meaningful, with self‐efficacy and self‐control, with low levels of stress, and (though not entirely consistently) with internal locus of control. High belief in free will has been linked to a punitive attitude toward wrongdoers and lower forgiveness toward them. The belief seems to involve a sense of agency and expecting others to behave in morally responsible fashion. (shrink)

Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology features a sophisticated analysis of the ways by which social forces influence processes of technological design, production and use. While Feenberg is foremostly read as a critical theorist, this essay argues that his call to democratize technology stands on distinct phenomenological grounds. This is based on the way he illustrates the role of experience in subtending potentials for the progressive transformation of the sociotechnical sphere. Against this background, this essay identifies an important shift in (...) the way Feenberg articulates experience, from relating it to lifelong processes of learning and identity-construction (Bildung) to an emphasis on visceral immediacy (Erlebnis). This shift manifests a newfound focus on material, embodied meanings over-against linguistic ones, and results in a considerable tension between Feenberg’s appeal to experiential self-evidence and his critical position toward technology. The discussion of the two modes of experience exemplifies the current that underlies Feenberg’s work, namely the creation of traffic between ontological and ontic accounts of sociotechnical entities, practices and relations. (shrink)

Creationists believe that C. K. Chesterton created Father Brown in his detective stories. Since creating implies a creation, Father Brown exists. Atheists object that the same reasoning could prove the existence of God. But creationists such as Jonathan Schaffer insist atheists do believe that God exists. Serious metaphysics rarely concerns existence. The disagreement between the theist and the atheist is about the nature of God, not His existence. Schaffer underestimates the religious imagination. There could be a religion that explicitly regarded (...) God as a fictional character. The tenets of this, presently hypothetical, religion are developed in a dialogue. (shrink)

Lectures delivered by the author at Indian Institute of Advanced Study in October 2002.

This paper investigates the new form of writing—the fragmentary project—that Friedrich Schlegel developed in response to Kant’s systematic philosophy.The fragments, I argue, are not anti-systematic; rather, they elucidate the idea that philosophy, like the modern work of art, no longer represents the unity of a closed system but a unity beyond the system. The fragmentary project is an ambitious attempt to find a form of philosophical coherence beyond the compulsion of a system. In contrast to the traditional view which regards (...) the fragment as expressing relativistic, skeptic, and at bottom, anarchic sentiments, this account views the fragment as a figure of writing that does not represent but itself enacts the movement toward greater coherence and communication. (shrink)

Many examples of calibration in climate science raise no alarms regarding model reliability. We examine one example and show that, in employing Classical Hypothesis-testing, it involves calibrating a base model against data that is also used to confirm the model. This is counter to the "intuitive position". We argue, however, that aspects of the intuitive position are upheld by some methods, in particular, the general Cross-validation method. How Cross-validation relates to other prominent Classical methods such as the Akaike Information Criterion (...) and Bayesian Information Criterion is also discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze Simone de Beauvoir’s goals for women expressed in The Second Sex and compare these goals to the opportunities created by the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate. Though the contraceptive mandate advances Beauvoir’s goal of concrete equality by supporting economic independence and recognizing women’s sexual freedom, there are social and political limitations to these advancements.

Humanoid robots used for sexual purposes are beginning to look increasingly lifelike. It is possible for a user to have a bespoke sexbot created which matches their exact requirements in skin pigmentation, hair and eye colour, body shape, and genital design. This means that it is possible—and increasingly easy—for a sexbot to be created which bears a very high degree of resemblance to a particular person. There is a small but steadily increasing literature exploring some of the ethical issues surrounding (...) sexbots, however sexbots made to look like particular people is something which, as yet, has not been philosophically addressed in the literature. In this essay I argue that creating a lifelike sexbot to represent and resemble someone is an act of sexual objectification which morally requires consent, and that doing so without the person’s consent is intrinsically wrong. I consider two sexbot creators: Roy and Fred. Roy creates a sexbot of Katie with her consent, and Fred creates a sexbot of Jane without her consent. I draw on the work of Alan Goldman, Rae Langton, and Martha Nussbaum in particular to demonstrate that creating a sexbot of a particular person requires consent if it is to be intrinsically permissible. (shrink)