George Fletcher, a foremost scholar in the fields of comparative and international criminal law, was a friend and colleague of Herbert Morris, a renowned scholar and teacher of law and philosophy at the UCLA School of Law. To commemorate and honor the late Herbert Morris, who died in 2022, Fletcher has assembled and edited the selection of essays in this book. Many of the contributors knew Morris on a personal and an academic level. Others only knew of (...) Morris by reputation. The essays fall into four categories: Criminal Law and Theory, Personal Reflections, Art and Literary Criticism, and Law and Religion. This commemorative volume reflects Fletcher's respect and admiration for his friend's accomplishments and lifetime achievements. "In two essays, the late Professor Herbert Morris addresses the fundamental issue in criminal law, whether thoughts alone could constitute a basis of criminal liability. The first essay was "Punishment for Thoughts" and the second, "Persons and Punishment". I consider these two of the most important articles ever published on the theory of criminal law." George Fletche. (shrink)

Burt's critique of using polygenic scores in social science conflates the “scientific costs” of sociogenomics with “sociopolitical and ethical” concerns. Furthermore, she paradoxically enlists recent advances in controlling for environmental confounding to argue such confounding is scientifically “intractable.” Disinterested social scientists should support ongoing efforts to improve this technology rather than obstructing progress and excusing genetically confounded research.

The concept of truthmaking, the idea that when a statement is true, there is typically something about the world in virtue of which it is true, has garnered much interest in recent metaphysics. Often, the motivation has been the thought that truthmaking can provide a new perspective on an important issue. This paper evaluates the claim that truthmaking can play a substantive role in defining an unproblematic notion of emergence. For despite playing an important role in philosophical discourse over the (...) past 100 years, it has often been thought that there is something mysterious about the notion of emergence. It has recently been argued, however, that once emergent properties are characterized as those that, while “ontologically dependent” are yet needed as truthmakers emergence and emergent properties prove unproblematic. In response, I argue that there is reason to doubt that truthmaking can play an important role in formulating an unproblematic yet recognizable notion of emergence. I argue that it is consistent with truthmaking being unable to play a substantive role in emergentism that truthmaking can play a more significant role in characterizing an attractive middle ground between reductive and nonreductive physicalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading As Poets Read: Following Mark StrandCharles BergerFor close to a decade now, in the third or fourth phase of his career, Mark Strand has been giving us poem after poem marked by his familiar voice—luminous, deceptively casual, witty, allusive—as he builds up a body of work that thinks and sings ever more deeply about the poet’s unavoidable life of allegory. This growing summa of poetic knowledge and readerly (...) pleasure demands, as the best lyric poetry always does, that readers give themselves over to the rigorous joys of figurative reading, figurative argument. You stare and stare at the poem until something flashes—linkages, interpretive genealogies, a conjunction of words that opens up arguments. Wittgenstein asked: “How can that which we understand in a flash, be put to a use?” Literary criticism, I think, provides an answer.Reading a poet like Strand shouldn’t send you running to the library for secondary source material; instead, you let your memory for poetry run. This assumes that you indeed possess a memory for poetry. Nowadays—enter the polemics—poems are not considered to be sufficient contexts for critical discourse. They need to be supplemented, bolstered, by “wider” cultural texts. The remarkable poetry being written around us counts for very little in the precincts of academic debate, even though so much of this poetry speaks directly to issues of great polemical importance. And it should go without saying that the deep pleasures of tracking poetic language, wherever you will let it take you, wherever you will take it, goes untasted. The poems Mark Strand has recently been writing show him, I think, at the height of his [End Page 177] power, as he thinks through the question of his place in poetry, the place of poetry in his life and ours, and the strange institution of poetry: so gripping in its hold on those who practice it as readers and writers, so hard to locate among the public monuments. The cultural critics don’t seem to understand how one is chosen by poetry, and how the kind of poetry you choose to read, to write, to teach, to remember, constitutes a deep part of your public and private being.At the same time, we should never espouse a defense of reading that limits us to the “poem-in-itself,” as if poems were not already layered, as if it were so easy to distinguish between imagination and interpretation. Poems have memories, as Rosanna Warren demonstrated so powerfully in her discussion of the formal genealogy of Auden’s Freud elegy. A poet like Mark Strand displays a ghostlier kind of memory that signals to us a little less overtly, but no less hauntingly. This is never more apparent than in the three new poems of his that I will now discuss: “Our Masterpiece is the Private Life,” “The Next Time,” and, briefly, “Great Dog Poem No. 2.” Since these poems have yet to be published in a volume, I need to quote them in their entirety.Our Masterpiece is the Private LifeIIs there something down by the water keeping itself from us, Some shy event, some secret of the light that falls upon the deep, Some source of sorrow that does not wish to be discovered yet? Our happiness says we should not care, that desire Could cast its rainbow over the coarse porcelain of the world’s skin And with its measures fill the air. Why look for more? Why not in the brightness of this weather allow ourselves to be Astonished by the music and the privilege of our passing?IIAnd now, my love, while the advocates of awfulness and sorrow [End Page 178] Push their dripping barge up and down the beach, let’s eat Our brill, and sip this beautiful white Beaune. True, the light is artificial, and we are not well-dressed. So what. We like it here. We like the bullocks in the field next door, We like the sound of wind passing over grass. The way you speak, In that low voice, our late night disclosures... why live For anything else? Our masterpiece is the private life.IIIStanding on... (shrink)

It is often assumed that perceptual experience provides evidence about the external world. But much perception can occur unconsciously, as in cases of masked priming or blindsight. Does unconscious perception provide evidence as well? Many theorists maintain that it cannot, holding that perceptual experience provides evidence in virtue of its conscious character. Against such views, I challenge here both the necessity and, perhaps more controversially, the sufficiency of consciousness for perception to provide evidence about the external world. In addition to (...) motivating and defending the idea that unconscious perception can and does often provide evidence, I observe that whether or not perceptual phenomenology is relevant to the evidentiary status of perception depends on the nature of consciousness. And I argue that a well-supported theory of consciousness—higher-order thought theory—invites a striking conclusion: that perceptual phenomenology is not on its own sufficient to provide for evidence of the external world. (shrink)

I submit that the intimations of "inner meanings" as presented in this novel should be reread as a transpositions from the language of sexual intercourse to the language of idealized consciousness, that is, from physical sensation to felt thought. Consider the imagery employed when Mrs. Dalloway reminds herself of her experiences of love: It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to (...) the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over - the moment. [p. 47]What is implied by the phrase "inner meaning" - secret, hidden, private - discoverable only by letting go of the protecting, preserving defenses of the self merged in the most fulfilling involvement with another, through rhythmic participation and withdrawal, is expressed in the superb image of "a match burning in a crocus." The ecstatic, climatic moment bursts into the vision of a flower, even a common flower, a crocus, seen, first as an object of beauty only: for flowers are felt to be useless, as having no use for us other than as objects for aesthetic contemplation, and then, as a match - straight, hard in the center - burning. Thus, the vividness of the visual perception is combined with the thrill of a danger involved, the inherent destructive potential of fire. Thereby, the flower image is experienced as an event, a performance, not a useful means to an end other than itself but of use only as expressive of consummatory pleasure, an end in itself. Expressions of such moments of insight characterize culminating experiences in answer to the question: "What will ever be enough?" to make life worth living.Morris Philipson is the author of Outline of a Jungian Aesthetics, a satirical novel, Bourgeois Anonymous, and a biography of Tolstoy, The Count Who Wished He Were a Peasant, winner of the Clara Ingram Judson award. He has also edited a number of books including Aesthetics Today and Aldous Huxley on Art and Artists. (shrink)

The main difficulty utilitarians have faced is the problem of reconciling the dictates of utility with what seem clearly to be moral duties, but based on considerations of Justice. John Stuart Mill addressed this problem in his essay,Utilitarianism,and the result has not served to silence the critics of utilitarianism on this score. In part, this is due to the fact that Mill's position in the chapter on Justice is not entirely clear, nor is it entirely convincing where it is clear. (...) Still, I do not think Mill's views on Justice have been given their due. In this essay, I shall try to show that Mill anticipated recently defended principles that rely on appeal to a notion of fairness or fair play, and that these can be given a utilitarian foundation. (shrink)

I motivate and defend a previously underdeveloped functionalist account of the metaphysics of color, a view that I call ‘quality-space functionalism’ about color. Although other theorists have proposed varieties of color functionalism, this view differs from such accounts insofar as it identifies and individuates colors by their relative locations within a particular kind of so-called ‘quality space’ that reflects creatures’ capacities to discriminate visually among stimuli. My arguments for this view of color are abductive: I propose that quality-space functionalism best (...) captures our commonsense conception of color, fits with many experimental findings, coheres with the phenomenology of color experience, and avoids many issues for standard theories of color such as color physicalism and color relationalism. (shrink)

According to Rosenthal's higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, one is in a conscious mental state if and only if one is aware of oneself as being in that state via a suitable HOT. Several critics have argued that the possibility of so-called targetless HOTs—that is, HOTs that represent one as being in a state that does not exist—undermines the theory. Recently, Wilberg (2010) has argued that HOT theory can offer a straightforward account of such cases: since consciousness is a (...) property of mental state tokens, and since there are no states to exhibit consciousness, one is not in conscious states in virtue of targetless HOTs. In this paper, I argue that Wilberg's account is problematic and that Rosenthal's version of HOT theory, according to which a suitable HOT is both necessary and sufficient for consciousness, is to be preferred to Wilberg's account. I then argue that Rosenthal's account can comfortably accommodate targetless HOTs because consciousness is best understood as a property of individuals, not a property of states. (shrink)

A riddle or a joke? I regret having made light of both myself and the reader. However, the concept of complexity has been explored with such intensity and pedantry, has been analyzed from so many points of view – the mathematical, linguistic, physical, chemical, political, psychological, sociological, physiological, algorithmic, logical, religious, and metaphysical – that nothing, not even the title of this piece, can escape it. Indeed the situation has reached the point where we grow misty-eyed over the very thought (...) of the discrete charms of yesterday's simplicity. Sometimes we dream that complexity itself, after having given us so much, muses – now that its task is fulfilled – of flying up miraculously into the sky, like the Virgin Mother (the Assumption); or ourselves wish to experience – for those spirits who prefer to keep their feet on the ground(!) – the “dissolution” with which entropy begins. Isn't it true that certain words, marked by the spirit of their age, are themselves in fact carried away by the spirit of the age? (shrink)

Part One. In our strife to express the meanings of moral terms, we have neglected the one transparently built?in meaning: ?A man ought to keep his promises? could mean ?A man owes it to other men to keep his promises. Such is his debt and duty ? just what is due or owed?. This proposal is supported by the evidence of major languages of the world, ancient and modern, in all of which identical or closely related words serve to express (...) both the idea of material debt and that of moral obligation. But on study the revealing model and analogue of ?moral debt? is found, not in debts of exchange, the simplest and most obvious class of debts, but in debts of shared responsibility. Working from such models we conclude that ?A ought to do X? means X is part of A's share in the cost of the good community, the common cause and stake of all mankind? (shrink)

One debate that occupied Pratyabhijñā philosophers and their Buddhist interlocutors was the question of the reality of _sambandha_, or relation. A central treatise on the topic is Utpaladeva’s (∼10th c.) _Sambandhasiddhi_ [SS] (‘_Proof of Relation_’), a response to Dharmakīrti’s (∼7th c.) _Sambandhaparīkṣā_ [SP] (‘_Analysis of Relation_’). As the contrasting titles suggest, Dharmakīrti held that relations are merely conceptual constructions (_kalpanā_), inferred _post hoc_ from discrete perceptual cognitions (_pratyakṣa_)—and thus ultimately _unreal_. Utpaladeva, on the other hand, attempted to ‘prove’ (_siddhi_) the (...) truth (_satya_) of relation as a genuine ‘division-non-division,’ or ‘unity-in-diversity’ (_bhedābheda_). In this article, I reconstruct Utpala’s ‘proof’ as a pragmatic argument to the effect that Dharmakīrti, in virtue of his nominalist metaphysics, mistakenly treats the general form of relation as an inferential _concept_, rather than the mode of ‘intentional’ _action_ (_śakti_) manifest in reflexive judgment (_vimarśa_). In doing so, Utpala suggests that Dharmakīrti inadvertently renders the relational conditions for the recognition of determinate intentional content unintelligible. (shrink)

It is plausible to think that the epistemic benefit of having an explanation is understanding. My focus in this article is on the extent to which explanatory understanding, perhaps unlike knowledge, is compatible with certain forms of luck—the extent to which one can understand why something is the case when one is lucky to truly believe an explanatorily relevant proposition. I argue, contra Stephen Grimm ([2006]) and Duncan Pritchard ([2008], [2009]), that understanding quite generally is compatible with luckily believing a (...) true, explanatorily relevant proposition. My strategy is to argue that various intuitions that seem to rule against lucky understanding can be explained away, and thus do not compel us to reject the thesis that, in general, understanding tolerates luck. In arriving at this conclusion, I address some salient issues regarding the testimony of others, and also draw out the consequences of my discussions for the status of understanding as a cognitive achievement. (shrink)

I offer here a new hypothesis about the nature of implicit attitudes. Psy- chologists and philosophers alike often distinguish implicit from explicit attitudes by maintaining that we are aware of the latter, but not aware of the former. Recent experimental evidence, however, seems to challenge this account. It would seem, for example, that participants are frequently quite adept at predicting their own perfor- mances on measures of implicit attitudes. I propose here that most theorists in this area have nonetheless overlooked (...) a commonsense distinction regarding how we can be aware of attitudes, a difference that fundamentally distinguishes implicit and explicit attitudes. Along the way, I discuss the implications that this distinction may hold for future debates about and experimental investigations into the nature of implicit attitudes. (shrink)

This book consists thematically of three broad sections: a lengthy introduction in which Grünbaum critically assesses the hermeneutic construal of psychoanalysis, as represented in the work of Habermas, G. S. Klein, and Ricoeur; a critical examination of Popper's assessment of both psychoanalysis and inductivism; and a logical analysis of core psychoanalytic ideas that constitute the foundation for much of psychoanalytic theory. This last section is, in my view, the heart of the book and therefore, it is that section on which (...) I will focus in this review. (shrink)

Scientific explanations are widely recognized to have instrumental value by helping scientists make predictions and control their environment. In this paper I raise, and provide a first analysis of, the question whether explanatory proofs in mathematics have analogous instrumental value. I first identify an important goal in mathematical practice: reusing resources from existing proofs to solve new problems. I then consider the more specific question: do explanatory proofs have instrumental value by promoting reuse of the resources they contain? In general, (...) I argue that the answer to this question is “no” and demonstrate this in detail for the theory of mathematical explanation developed by Marc Lange. (shrink)

L. M. de Rijk supposed in 1982 that two anonymous logical tracts in the Viennese Codex 4698, fol. 18r–27v, may be the work of Martinus Anglicus to whom a tract on consequences and one on obligations are ascribed in that codex. The tract on supposition of which the Viennese codex hands down only a fragment of the beginning is contained completely in Hs I 613 of the Stadtbibliothek Mainz, fol. 20vb–21vb. This finding ensures the authorship of Martinus Anglicus and allows (...) to ascribe an Introduction into Logic in some seven parts to him. Martin’s tract on supposition and the more detailed one by Thomas Manlevelt show some resemblances in structure and content, the first being presumably the later one. This paper presents an edition of Martin’s Tractatus de suppositione from the Mainz manuscript and an introduction regarding the author and his work. (shrink)

This paper proposes a reading of Kelsen’s basic norm based on Kant’s regulative ideas. I begin by exposing Kant’s conception of the principles of reason. Then I criticize an interpretation of the basic norm along the same lines made by Stanley Paulson. Thirdly I analyze two theses from Hermann Cohen that influenced Kelsen greatly and reinforce my stance on the basic norm. Lastly, I explain how the Kelsenian tenet that the basic norm is the transcendental grounding of the normativity of (...) law can be comprehended based on the role the ideas of reason play in the systematization of knowledge. (shrink)

Many have claimed that epistemic rationality sometimes requires us to have imprecise credal states (i.e. credal states representable only by sets of credence functions) rather than precise ones (i.e. credal states representable by single credence functions). Some writers have recently argued that this claim conflicts with accuracy-centered epistemology, i.e., the project of justifying epistemic norms by appealing solely to the overall accuracy of the doxastic states they recommend. But these arguments are far from decisive. In this essay, we prove some (...) new results, which show that there is little hope for reconciling the rationality of credal imprecision with accuracy-centered epistemology. (shrink)

In Morris I presented in outline a new interpretation of the famous ‘substance argument’ in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The account I presented there gave a distinctive view of Wittgenstein’s main concerns in the argument, but did not explain in detail how the argument works: how its steps are to be found in the text, and how it concludes. I remain convinced that the interpretation I proposed correctly identifies the main concerns which lie behind the argument. I return to the argument (...) here in order to elaborate in fuller detail the relation between those concerns and the actual course of the text. (shrink)

In the history of philosophy as well as in most recent discussions, empathy is held to be a key concept that enables a basic understanding of the other while at the same time acting as the foundation of our moral emotionality. In this paper I want to show why empathy is the wrong candidate for both of these tasks. If we understand empathy as projection, i.e. a process of imaginary self-transposition, we are bound to presuppose a fully established interpersonal sphere. (...) If we consider empathy as synonymous with compassion it is highly questionable if we ever reach the other person in his or her otherness. Max Scheler and other early phenomenologists offer very fruitful approaches to both problems without resorting to empathy. I will present some of their thoughts and focus especially on Scheler’s claim about the connection between the experience of the real other and the intentionality of compassion. (shrink)

I discuss here the nature of nonconscious mental states and the ways in which they may differ from their conscious counterparts. I first survey reasons to think that mental states can and often do occur without being conscious. Then, insofar as the nature of nonconscious mentality depends on how we understand the nature of consciousness, I review some of the major theories of consciousness and explore what restrictions they may place on the kinds of states that can occur nonconsciously. I (...) close with a discussion of what makes a state mental, if consciousness is not the mark of the mental. (shrink)

Representationalism holds that a perceptual experience's qualitative character is identical with certain of its representational properties. To date, most representationalists endorse atomistic theories of perceptual content, according to which an experience's content, and thus character, does not depend on its relations to other experiences. David Rosenthal, by contrast, proposes a view that is naturally construed as a version of representationalism on which experiences’ relations to one another determine their contents and characters. I offer here a new defense of this holistic (...) representationalism, arguing that some objections to atomistic views are best interpreted as supporting it. (shrink)