What is structural rationality? Specifically, what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? Some philosophers have argued, roughly, that the distinctive feature of structural requirements is coherence. But what does coherence mean, exactly? Or, at least, what do structuralists about rationality have in mind when they claim that structural rationality is coherence? This issue matters for making progress in various active debates concerning rationality. In this paper, I analyze three strategies for figuring out what coherence means in the (...) debates on structural rationality. I argue that these strategies face problems. (shrink)

Many epistemologists have argued that there is some degree of independence between individual and collective reliability (e.g., Kitcher 1990; Mayo-Wilson, Zollman, and Danks 2011; Dunn 2018). The question, then, is: To what extent are the two independent of each other? And in which contexts do they come apart? In this paper, I present a new case confirming the independence between individual and collective reliability optimization. I argue that, in voting groups, optimizing individual reliability can conflict with optimizing collective reliability. This (...) can happen even if various conditions are held constant, such as: the evidence jurors have access to, the voting system, the number of jurors, some independence conditions between voters, and so forth. This observation matters in many active debates on, e.g., epistemic dilemmas, the wisdom of crowds, independence theses, epistemic democracy, and the division of epistemic labour. (shrink)

If a potential person would have a good life if he were to come into existence, can we coherently regard his coming into existence as better for him than his never coming into existence? And can we regard the situation in which he never comes into existence as worse for him? In this paper, we argue that both questions should be answered affirmatively. We also explain where prominent arguments to differing conclusions go wrong. Finally, we explore the relevance of our (...) answers to issues in population ethics. (shrink)

Who hasn't wondered what it's like to be a dog or bird? Such questions seem unanswerable because we have no way of getting into an animal's mind. Marc Bekoff's work on animal behavior and mind draws world-wide attention for its originality and its probing into what animals might know as well as what skills are needed to live life successfully as a member of a particular species. Convinced that individuals of every species have some level of self-awareness, Bekoff embarks (...) on fascinating observations of animals playing, leaving and detecting scent-marks, solving problems, and behaving fairly toward each other.Animal Passions and Beastly Virtuesbrings together some of his path-breaking research papers, essays on science and ethics, and popular articles in order to reveal a remarkable range of animal behaviors but also to argue that the ethical treatment of animals is an especially significant issue now. (shrink)

When considering the social valuation of a life-year, there is a conflict between two basic intuitions: on the one hand, the intuition of universality, according to which the value of an additional life-year should be universal, and, as such, should be invariant to the context considered; on the other hand, the intuition of complementarity, according to which the value of a life-year should depend on what this extra-life-year allows for, and, hence, on the quality of that life-year, because the quantity (...) of life and the quality of life are complement to each other. This paper proposes three distinct accounts of the intuition of universality, and shows that those accounts either conflict with a basic monotonicity property, or lead to indifference with respect to how life-years are distributed within the population. Those results support the abandon of the intuition of universality. But abandoning the intuition of universality does not prevent a social evaluator from giving priority, when allocating life-years, to individuals with the lowest quality of life. (shrink)

Some mathematical proofs explain why the theorems they prove hold. This paper identifies several challenges for any counterfactual account of explanation in mathematics (that is, any account according to which an explanatory proof reveals how the explanandum would have been different, had facts in the explanans been different). The paper presumes that countermathematicals can be nontrivial. It argues that nevertheless, a counterfactual account portrays explanatory power as too easy to achieve, does not capture explanatory asymmetry, and fails to specify why (...) certain proofs are explanatory and others are not. Greater informativeness about counterfactual dependence can even yield less explanatory power. (shrink)

Freedom and compassion in the anthropocene -- Can science save animals? -- Who we eat -- Fat rats and lab cats -- Charismatic, caged, and occasionally crazy: zooed animals -- Captive and companion -- Born to be wild? -- Coexistence in the anthropocene and beyond: compassion and justice for all.

Do we suddenly become justified in treating robots like humans by positing new notions like “artificial moral agency” and “artificial moral responsibility”? I answer no. Or, to be more precise, I argue that such notions may become philosophically acceptable only after crucial metaphysical issues have been addressed. My main claim, in sum, is that “artificial moral responsibility” betokens moral responsibility to the same degree that a “fake orgasm” betokens an orgasm.

Jordan Peterson gave a series of lectures on the Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories. His first lecture lasted two hours. In that time, Peterson managed to cover only a single line from the Bible. This lopsided gloss-to-text ratio, I argue, entails that the rational explanations actually do all the work while the Bible is dispensable.

The human relationship to nature is a deeply ambiguous one. Human animals are both a part of nature and distinct from it. They are part of nature in the sense that, like other forms of life, they were brought into existence by natural processes, and, like other forms of life, they are dependent on their environment for survival and success. Yet humans are also reflective animals with sophisticated cultural systems. Because of their immense power and their ability to wield it (...) intentionally, humans have duties and responsibilities that other animals do not. (shrink)

"We are omniscient but confused," says Leibniz. He also says that we live in the best of all possible worlds, yet do not causally interact. So what are we? Leibniz is known for many things, including the ideality of space and time, calculus, plans for a universal language, theodicy, and ecumenism. But he is not known for his ideas on the self and personal identity. This book shows that Leibniz offers an original, internally coherent theory of personal identity, a theory (...) that stands on its own even next to Locke's contemporaneous and more famous version. This book will appeal not only to students of Leibniz's thought but also to philosophers and psychologists interested in methodological problems in understanding or formulating theories of self and personal identity. (shrink)

This paper describes how bodily positions and gestures were used to teach argument diagramming to a student who cannot see. After listening to short argumentative passages with a screen reader, the student had to state the conclusion while touching his belly button. When stating a premise, he had to touch one of his shoulders. Premises lending independent support to a conclusion were thus diagrammed by a V-shaped gesture, each shoulder proposition going straight to the conclusion. Premises lending dependent support were (...) diagrammed by a T-shaped gesture, the shoulder premises meeting at the collar bone before moving down to the belly button. Arguments involving two pairs of entailments were diagrammed by an I-shaped gesture, going from the collar bone to a mid-way conclusion above the abdomen before travelling to the final conclusion at the belly button. The student’s strong performance suggests that placing propositions at different locations on the body and uniting them with gestures can help one discern correct argumentative structures. (shrink)

The essays explore virtually all of Johnson's writings: each of his novels, his numerous short stories, the range of his nonfiction essays, his many book ...

Dans « L’éternel retour et la pensée de la mort », la pensée nietzschéenne de la mort est interrogée dans l’horizon de sa promesse. Il s’agit de mettre en évidence comment la « prophétie » de l’éternel retour, si elle existe, n’est rien d’autre que l’annonce d’un autre rapport à la mort – d’une autre façon, plus qu’humaine, d’affronter simultanément l’expérience de la finitude et l’épreuve du deuil.In der folgenden Ueberlegung über « Ewige Wiederkiehr und Denken über den Tod » (...) wird die Gesinnung Nietzsche’s über Tod in der Perspektive seines Versprechens. Es handelt sich dabei auszulegen, dass die « Prophezeiung » der ewigen Wiederkehr, wenn sie besteht, nichts anderes ist, als die Verkündung eines anderen Verhältnisses zum Tode nach einer mehr als menschlichen, verschiedenen Weise, welche erlaubt, sich dem Erlebnis der Endlichkeit und der Probe des Trauerns zugleich zu stellen. (shrink)

Using the Western tradition of metaphysical and political thought as a backdrop, Critique of Sovereignty (a work in 4 volumes) re-examines the concept of sovereignty in order to better understand why our ethical values and technical capacities often seem so divorced from our lived realities. On the one hand, ostensibly self-enclosed entities like the nation-state and the person are rhetorically bolstered as sites of technical agency and/or moral responsibility. On the other hand, these same entities appear fragile -- if not (...) purely fictional -- in relation to ever ongoing tidal processes such as the migration, diffusion, and conglomeration of bodies, capital, ideas, etc. While some of our institutions might work some of the time, they always seem to work differently than we like to think they do. Accordingly, the forging of more humane institutions might very well entail if not require ways of thinking that strive to undo the self-imagined binds, exceptions, and sureties of thought for the sake of embracing a continuity with all that withers, decays, and falls away. Book I, "Contemporary Theories of Sovereignty," compares the varied interpretations of sovereignty given by a range of 20th-century political theorists (Maritain, Foucault, Derrida, Schmitt, Agamben, Hardt, and Negri) with Jean Bodin's initial outline of the concept, rendered at the outset of modern political thought in the 16th century. The analytic framework of sovereignty encountered in these comparative readings provides an initial point of departure for unfolding a method of critique appropriate to the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty is an ideal starting point for a critique of the deadlocks between thought and reality for a simple reason: it doesn't actually exist. When it serves as a guide to action, sovereignty may be regarded as a particularly captivating fantasy. The closer it appears, the further it recedes, and, too often, the more vigorously it is pursued. (shrink)

Some epistemologists think that the Bayesian ideals matter because we can approximate them. That is, our attitudes can be more or less close to the ones of our ideal Bayesian counterpart. In this paper, I raise a worry for this justification of epistemic ideals. The worry is this: In order to correctly compare agents to their ideal counterparts, we need to imagine idealized agents who have the same relevant information, knowledge, or evidence. However, there are cases in which one’s ideal (...) counterpart cannot have one’s information, knowledge, or evidence. In these situations, agents cannot compare themselves to their ideal counterpart. (shrink)

What is the relationship between Immodesty and Permissivism? For permissivists, epistemically rational agents are sometimes permitted to take incompatible doxastic attitudes towards P. Immodesty is a requirement governing our estimations or beliefs about our own credences and standards. If agents believe that their standards and credences are not among the most truth-conducive ones available to them, they are not immodest. Some philosophers think that Immodesty is incompatible with Intrapersonal Permissivism :41–56, 2014, J Philos 116:237–262, 2019). Others think that Immodesty can (...) be used to respond to some objections against Interpersonal Permissivism :193–218). In this paper, we argue that Immodesty neither supports nor disproves Permissivism. (shrink)

It seems impossible for a human being not to have some point of view concerning nonhuman animal (hereafter animal) welfare. Many people make decisions about how humans are permitted to treat animals using speciesist criteria, basing their decisions on an individual's species membership rather than on that animal's individual characteristics. Although speciesism provides a convenient way for making difficult decisions about who should be used in different types of research, we argue that such decisions should rely on an analysis of (...) individual characteristics and should not be based merely on species membership. We do not argue that the concept of species is never useful or important. To make our points, we present a conversation among a skeptic, an agnostic, and a proponent of the view that our moral obligations to an animal must be based on an analysis of that individual's characteristics. In the course of the discussion, concepts such as personhood, consciousness, cognitive ability, harm, and pain are presented, because one's understanding of these concepts informs his or her ethical decisions about the use of animals by humans. (shrink)

This thought-provoking collection sheds light on the plight of our nonhuman primate cousins--and what we can do to help.