The immeasurable impact of Pascal is rarely appreciated or understood by contemporary thinkers. On the one hand, Pascal is lauded by literary critics for his writing style while his philosophical contributions are overlooked. On the other hand, Pascal is trivialized by analytic philosophers who view his wager argument as but a poor instance of decision theory. Nicholas Reseller's book is distinctive in that it takes Pascal seriously as a philosopher in light of past and present theological modes of (...) argumentation. As a distinguished historian of pragmatic philosophy, Rescher understands Pascal to be the great innovator of the major philosophical trends of our day: the theological use of practical reason, the diversity of modes of rationality, and the focus on praxis in contemporary hermeneutics. (shrink)

The success of a piece of behaviour is often explained by its being caused by a true representation (similarly, failure falsity). In some simple organisms, success is just survival and reproduction. Scientists explain why a piece of behaviour helped the organism to survive and reproduce by adverting to the behaviour’s having been caused by a true representation. That usage should, if possible, be vindicated by an adequate naturalistic theory of content. Teleosemantics cannot do so, when it is applied to simple (...) representing systems (Godfrey-Smith 1996). Here it is argued that the teleosemantic approach to content should therefore be modified, not abandoned, at least for simple representing systems. The new ‘infotel-semantics’ adds an input condition to the output condition offered by teleosemantics, recognising that it is constitutive of content in a simple representing system that the tokening of a representation should correlate probabilistically with the obtaining of its specific evolutionary success condition. (shrink)

According to Fumerton in his "How Does Perception Justify Belief?", it is misleading or wrong to say that perception is a source of justification for beliefs about the external world. Moreover, reliability does not have an essential role to play here either. I agree, and I explain why in section 1, using novel considerations about evil demon scenarios in which we are radically deceived. According to Fumerton, when it comes to how sensations or experiences supply justification, they do not do (...) so on their own, and instead only do so only in conjunction with support for background beliefs about how the sensations or experiences are best explained. Here I disagree. In section 2, I first clarify the question of whether sensations or experiences provide justification on their own. I then respond to Fumerton’s arguments that use considerations about concept-possession and about how to close possible gaps between experience and truth. In section 3, I develop my main concern about his positive view, where that concern also brings out some of the merits of the view that experiences do justify beliefs about the external world on their own. (shrink)

Anna Smajdor and Joona Räsänen argue that we have good reason to classify pregnancy as a disease. They discuss five accounts of disease and argue that each account either implies that pregnancy is a disease or if it does not, it faces problems. This strategy allows Smajdor and Räsänen to avoid articulating their own account of disease. Consequently, they cannot establish that pregnancyisa disease, only that plausible accounts of disease suggest this. Some readers will dismiss Smajdor and Räsänen’s claims as (...) counterintuitive. By analogy, if a mathematical proof concludes ‘2+2=5’, readers will know—without investigation—that an error occurred. Rather than dismiss Smajdor and Räsänen’s work, however, the easiest way to undermine their argument is to describe at least one plausible account of disease that (1) excludes pregnancy and (2) avoids the problems they raise for it. This is our strategy. We focus on dysfunction accounts of disease. After outlining Smajdor and Räsänen’s main arguments against dysfunction accounts, we explain why pregnancy is not a disease on these accounts. Next, we defend dysfunction accounts against the three problems that Smajdor and Räsänen raise. If successful, then contra Smajdor and Räsänen, at least one plausible account of disease does not imply that pregnancy is a disease. We suspect that defenders of other accounts can respond similarly. Yet, we note that insofar as dysfunction accounts align with the commonsense intuition that pregnancy is not a disease, this, all else being equal, seems like a point in their favour. (shrink)

The two great philosophical figures at the culminating point of the Enlightenment are Thomas Reid in Scotland and Immanuel Kant in Germany. Reid was by far the most influential across Europe and the United States well into the nineteenth century. Since that time his fame and influence have been eclipsed by his German contemporary. This important book by one of today's leading philosophers of knowledge and religion will do much to reestablish the significance of Reid for philosophy today. Nicholas (...) Wolterstorff has produced the first systematic account of Reid's epistemology. Relating Reid's philosophy to present-day epistemological discussions the author demonstrates how they are at once remarkably timely, relevant, and provocative. No other book both uncovers the deep pattern of Reid's thought and relates it to contemporary philosophical debate. This book should be read by historians of philosophy as well as all philosophers concerned with epistemology and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Francis Fukuyama's controversial new book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, has elicited varied reactions, but like it or not, it seems likely to be influential. Here are three opinions. —Ed.

The rapid developments in technologies -- especially computing and the advent of many 'smart' devices, as well as rapid and perpetual communication via the Internet -- has led to a frequently voiced view which Nicholas Agar describes as 'radical optimism'. Radical optimists claim that accelerating technical progress will soon end poverty, disease, and ignorance, and improve our happiness and well-being. Agar disputes the claim that technological progress will automatically produce great improvements in subjective well-being. He argues that radical optimism (...) 'assigns to technological progress an undeserved pre-eminence among all the goals pursued by our civilization'. Instead, Agar uses the most recent psychological studies about human perceptions of well-being to create a realistic model of the impact technology will have. Although he accepts that technological advance does produce benefits, he insists that these are significantly less than those proposed by the radical optimists, and aspects of such progress can also pose a threat to values such as social justice and our relationship with nature, while problems such as poverty cannot be understood in technological terms. He concludes by arguing that a more realistic assessment of the benefits that technological advance can bring will allow us to better manage its risks in future. (shrink)

I hope I have convinced the reader that DR theory offers at least some exciting potential when applied to the semantics of belief reports. It differs considerably from other approaches, and it makes intuitively acceptable predictions that other theories do not. The theory also provides a novel approach to the semantics of other propsitional attitude reports. Further, DR theory enables one to approach the topic of anaphora within belief and other propositional attitude contexts in a novel way, thus combining the (...) semantics developed here with one of the theory's original motivations (Kamp, 1981a). However, these are unfortunately topics that I must reserve for another time. (shrink)

Exploring the early development of an area of medical literature can inform contemporary medical debates. Different methods of inference include deduction, induction, abduction, and inference to the best explanation. I argue that early shaken baby research is best understood as using abduction to tentatively suggest that infants with unexplained intracranial and ocular bleeding have been assaulted. However, this tentative conclusion was quickly interpreted, by some at least, as a general rule that infants with these pathological signs were certainly cases of (...) abuse. Rather than focusing on inductive arguments, researchers today may be better off focusing on making a compelling inference to the best explanation. (shrink)

By analysing original sources and evaluating conceptual frameworks, this book discusses the idea proclaimed in the Preamble to the Constitution that Australia is a federal commonwealth. Taking careful account of the influence which the American, Canadian and Swiss Constitutions had upon the framers of the Australian Constitution, the author shows how the framers wrestled with the problem of integrating federal ideas with inherited British traditions and their own experiences of parliamentary government. In so doing, the book explains how the Constitution (...) came into being in the context of the groundswell of federal ideas then sweeping the English-speaking world. In advancing an original argument about the relationship between the formation of the Constitution, the representative institutions, configurations of power and amending formulas contained therein, fresh light is shed on the terms and structure of the Constitution and a range of problems associated with its interpretation and practical operation are addressed. (shrink)

Although philosophers sympathetic to Peter Strawson's view in “Freedom and Resentment” tend to be compatibilists, they need not be. This paper develops a recent suggestion that Strawson's view can be read as consistent with libertarianism by showing that an important distinction Strawson makes between personal and moral reactive attitudes leaves room to be a Strawsonian compatibilist with respect to personal responsibility and a Strawsonian incompatibilist with respect to moral responsibility. Understanding this possibility reveals a potential gap within Strawson's argument that (...) should be of interest to both Strawsonians and their critics. (shrink)

Can a person privileged in some respect understand what it is like to be disprivileged in that respect? Some say yes; some say no. I argue that both positions are correct, because ‘understand what it is like to be disprivileged’ is ambiguous. Sometimes, it means grasp of the character of particular experiences of disprivileged people. Privileged people can achieve this. Sometimes, it means grasp of the general character shared by experiences of disprivileged people. Privileged people cannot achieve this. However, there (...) is a general kind of understanding that they can achieve: understanding of why individual experiences have their character, in relation to privilege and disprivilege. This understanding is a skill, not knowledge. It is difficult and discomforting for the privileged to acquire and is easily conflated with knowledge of general experiential character. Distinguishing and characterizing these kinds of understanding clarifies whether, and how, the privileged might understand what it is like to be disprivileged. (shrink)

How to: win an argument, defend a case, recognize a fallacy, see through deception, persuade a skeptic, turn defeat into victory.

This article examines Abu Nasr al-Farabı (c. 872–950/1) on the topic of intentionality, with particular focus on how intentionality is integral for the constitution of the intellect within his psychology. Unfortunately, targeted study of al-Farabı’s doctrine of intentionality has been largely neglected since Kwame Gyekye’s 1971 essay, The Terms ‘Prima Intentio’ and ‘Secunda Intentio’ in Arabic Logic. Gyekye showed that the Arabic (and thus the Latin) doctrine of first and second intention originated within the texts of al-Farabı,not the texts of (...) Avicenna, as had been previously thought. In response, this article aims to show three things. First, while the doctrine of first and second intention appears in al-Farabı’s texts, it is not as clearly developed or defined as is presented in Gyekye’s 1971 article. al-Farabı both lacks consistent technical terminology for the doctrine (as he discusses it across disparate sciences, in unrelated contexts) and develops it far too little to fully flesh out his doctrine. Second, even given the fact that al-Farabı’s discussion of intentionality is underdeveloped, Gyekye was right to credit the doctrine to him. And third, al-Farabı’s doctrine of first and second intention is not merely important to understand his positions regarding signification and universals; they play a pivotal role in the constitution of the human intellect. (shrink)

David DeGrazia1 offers, to my mind, a decisive response to the bioconservative suggestion that moral bioenhancement threatens human freedom or undermines its value. In this brief commentary, I take issue with DeGrazia's way of defining MB. A different concept of MB exposes a danger missed by his analysis.Two ways to define MBDeGrazia presents MB as a form of enhancement directed at moral capacities. There are, in the philosophical literature, two broad approaches to defining human enhancement. Simplifying somewhat, one account identifies (...) enhancement with improvement. DeGrazia joins other advocates of MB in preferring this type of account, defining a human enhancement as ‘any deliberate intervention that aims to improve an existing capacity, select for a desired capacity, or create a new capacity in a human being.’1An alternative approach relativises enhancement to human norms.2 ,3 In this view, improvements up to levels of functioning properly considered normal for humans are therapy, not enhancement. Improvements beyond those levels are enhancements. The injection of synthetic erythropoietin by someone suffering from anaemia is therapy. When healthy Tour de France competitors inject EPO, it is enhancement.We can minimise philosophical disputes about word meanings by endorsing a conceptual pluralism that acknowledges the need for more than one concept of human enhancement to address the hugely varied ways in which technology may alter humans. In the debate about biomedical moral improvements there would be enhancement as improvement and enhancement beyond human norms.DeGrazia effectively deploys the concept of enhancement as improvement to …. (shrink)

This paper raises puzzles concerning our grasp of others’ aesthetic selves. I first articulate a conception of an aesthetic self, understood as an autonomously adopted orientation to objects of aesthetic value, encompassing the embrace of aesthetic reasons and the qualitative appreciative states that follow. This articulation is motivated by the commonplace observation that people’s aesthetic identities are important to them. Given this importance, we might think it salutary to grasp other people’s aesthetic selves, under the general auspices of ‘interpersonal understanding’. (...) Given the conception of aesthetic selves, we might think that empathy is an appropriate way to do so. But, second, I argue that you can’t find out about another’s aesthetic self via empathy. We might instead think that aesthetic conversation is the way to grasp aesthetic selves. However, third, I argue that the aim of finding out about others’ aesthetic selves is at odds with the ostensible aims of aesthetic conversation, which are to do with effacing individuality and creating commonality. So aesthetic selves seem hard to grasp. I finally briefly canvass some ways of solving this problem, without settling on a firm answer, and consider how the thoughts might extend to practical identities more generally. (shrink)

Steven Landsburg argues that from a legal perspective, “most abortions should be unrestricted.” This conclusion, he claims, follows from combining insights from Judith Jarvis Thomson (1971) with a “careful Rawlsian analysis,” where “Rawlsianism is the industry-standard approach” for settling conflicts like those that arise in debates over abortion policy. If correct, then “the right approach to policy questions” implies that abortion access should remain relatively open. Here, I argue that Landsburg has drawn from Rawlsian tools the wrong conclusion about abortion. (...) I defend what he terms “naive Rawlsian”: the view that as a matter of justice, “many abortions . . . should be prohibited.” If correct, then “the industry-standard approach” for settling conflicts (as Landsburg calls it) should lead society to prohibit abortion in most cases. Proponents of abortion who wish to avoid this outcome, therefore, should abandon the “industry standard” approach to conflict resolution. (shrink)

Emerging evidence suggests that the long-established distinction between habit-based and goal-directed decision-making mechanisms can also be sustained in humans. Although the habit-based system has been extensively studied in humans, the goal-directed system is less well characterized. This review brings to that task the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual representational mechanisms. Conceptual representations are structured out of semantic consituents - the use of which requires an ability to perform some language-like syntactic processing. Decision making - as investigated by neuroscience and psychology (...) - is normally studied in isolation from questions about concepts as studied in philosophy and cognitive psychology. We ask what role concepts play in the "goal-directed" decision-making systems. We argue that one fruitful way of studying this system in humans is to investigate the extent to which it deploys conceptual representations. (shrink)

1. People standardly communicate by uttering phrases or sentences with certain intonation patterns, accompanied by facial expressions, eye contact and often a variety of gestures. If all goes well...

While basic income (BI) has long been advocated for its social benefits, some scholars also propose it in response to the ecological crises. However, the empirical evidence to support this position is currently lacking and the concept of an ecological BI (EBI) is underdeveloped. Part one of this paper attempts to develop such a concept, arguing that an EBI should seek to reduce aggregate material throughput, improve human needs satisfaction, reduce inequalities, rebalance productive activity towards social activities in the autonomous (...) sphere, and promote societal values of cooperation and sufficiency. Part two examines how BI interventions consider the principles of an EBI in their designs and discusses what their findings infer about BI’s ecological credentials. The results find that while ecological considerations are largely absent from BI intervention designs, their findings suggest that interventions aligned with the principles of an EBI could play a role in addressing the ecological crises. (shrink)

What does it mean to refer to the enlightenment as ‘moderate’? One answer to this question, and the one which abounds in historiography of enlightenment in the past two decades, is that of Jonathan Israel. For Israel, the ‘moderate enlightenment’ is the half-baked counterpart to the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. Where the Radical Enlightenment, in Israel’s version of events, was the crucible within which progressive modernity was forged, the ‘moderate enlightenment’ was the regressive vehicle for accommodating elements of this agenda within the (...) social, political and intellectual structures of the ancien regime. This essay, and the special issue it introduces, seeks alternative ways to understand the prospect of a moderate enlightenment by inviting reflection on currents of moderation in eighteenth-century Europe. Turning the tables on moderate enlightenment, and framing it as an episode in a history of moderation, it proposes a range of lenses onto the intellectual culture of eighteenth-century Europe. (shrink)

The structure of this discussion will be tripartite. First it will set out a way of distinguishing between rhetoric and strictly rational argumentation. Next it will consider some of the ramifications of this proposed way of looking at the matter – in particular what its implications are for rationality and for rhetoric, respectively. Finally it examines how this perspective bears on the project of philosophizing. The paper's ultimate aim, accordingly, is to consider what light such an analysis can shed upon (...) philosophy and philosophizing. (shrink)

Governments are increasingly using wellbeing frameworks as a primary way to measure economic and social progress. These frameworks aim to measure a population’s wellbeing in order to develop policies that improve its wellbeing. However, there’s strong disagreement as to what wellbeing consists in, both among philosophers and the general public. So, what is it exactly that governments should be trying to promote when they aim to measure and promote wellbeing? My method is to identify the primary conditions for an account (...) of wellbeing for wellbeing frameworks and find the account of wellbeing that best meets those conditions. When we do this, we find that no existing account of wellbeing used for this purpose is satisfactory. I describe an account of wellbeing that has not been used in wellbeing frameworks, which I call the Reflective Value account. I argue this account succeeds in meeting our conditions and so is the best account of wellbeing for this purpose. (shrink)

To date no investigation has sought to interpret key themes in Aristotle’s writings on metaphysics, e.g., substance, potentiality, actuality, proximate cause, etc., within the context of a temporal logic or logic of events. Essentially, what follows is a programmatic effort to interpret aspects of Aristotle’s insights in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics in terms of recent advances in the development of a temporal logic, while being attentive to the sense of the original text as far as possible. The significance of (...) such an enterprise lies in unearthing and clarifying conceptual interconnections in Aristotle’s metaphysical writings which would be difficult to fathom through other means. This project, however exploratory in its present form, seems feasible partly because of the fact that at numerous points in Aristotle’s thesis process metaphors from the study of biology are strikingly evident. Also, there is additional justification for the suggested analysis in that his work involves repeated references to the “lived” activity of one’s inquiring into the nature of things. Thus a view of Aristotle’s pronouncements which presupposes a logic of events, where events are analysed pragmatically, i.e., in terms of a language-user and the extension of whatever is claimed to have occurred, is not alien to the mode of expression with which he presents his views. (shrink)