In the early exploration and colonization of the Americas, Europeans encountered unfamiliar climates that challenged received ideas from classical geography. This experience drove innovative efforts to understand and explain patterns of weather and seasons in the New World. A close examination of three climatic puzzles (the habitability of the tropics, debates on the likelihood of a Northwest Passage, and the unexpectedly harsh weather in the first North American colonies) illustrates how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century observers made three intellectual breakthroughs: conceiving of (...) climates as a distinct subject of inquiry, crossing the hitherto-separated disciplines of geography and meteorology, and developing new theories regarding the influence of prevailing winds on patterns of weather and seasons. While unquantified and unsystematic, these novel approaches promoted a new understanding of climates critical to the emergence of climate science. This study offers new insights into the foundations of climatology and the role of the New World in early modern science. (shrink)

Frank Jackson's knowledge argument imagines a super-smart scientist, Mary, forced to investigate the mysteries of human colour vision using only black and white resources. Can she work out what it is like to see red from brain-science and physics alone? The argument says no: Mary will only really learn what red looks like when she actually sees it. Something is therefore missing from the science of the mind, and from the 'physicalist' picture of the world based on science. This (...) powerful and controversial argument remains as pivotal as when it was first created in 1982, and this volume provides a thorough and incisive examination of its relevance in philosophy of mind today. The cutting-edge essays featured here break new ground in the debate, and also comprehensively set out the developments in the story of the knowledge argument so far, tracing its impact, past, present, and future. (shrink)

Is it possible for an individual that has gone out of being to come back into being again? The English Aristotelian, Thomas White, argued that it is not. Thomas Hobbes disagreed, and used the case of the Ship of Theseus to argue that individuals that have gone out of being may come back into being again. This paper provides the first systematic account of their arguments. It is doubtful that Hobbes has a consistent case against White. Still his (...) criticism may have prompted White to clarify his views on identity over time in his later work. (shrink)

This collection of Charles Mills’ writings includes his famous “White Ignorance” and “Kant’s Untermenschen,” along with his most extensive engagement with the writings of John Rawls. Fleischacker’s review endorses and expands Mills’ critique of what Rawls calls “ideal theory,” while disputing Mills’ characterization of Kant’s moral theory as intrinsically racist. It proposes a different way of understanding how Kant and other philosophers have been able to maintain egalitarian principles while still being racist.

This article analyses the legacy of Marsha P. Johnson as a heroine through the notion of labour, emphasising how heroine narratives are both a product of labour as well as a form of labour. After offering a short account of Marsha P. Johnson’s role in the Stonewall riots and STAR, we explore the development of trans communities’ ability to create, sustain and disseminate heroine narratives, emphasising Tourmaline’s pivotal archival role in establishing Johnson’s legacy. Then, we elucidate the role of heroine (...) narratives in creating and sustaining a collective identity. We argue that community attachment to Marsha P. Johnson reclaims the place of trans communities in LGBTQ+ history but is often done in a manner that obscures the whiteness of mainstream trans advocacy. We suggest that the recent increase in interest towards the life-sustaining labour of STAR House reflects the evolution of trans collective identity in the post-visibility era. (shrink)

Background There is continued need for enhanced medical ethics education across the United States. In an effort to guide medical ethics education reform, we report the first interprofessional survey of a cohort of graduate medical, nursing and allied health professional students that examined perceived student need for more formalized medical ethics education and assessed preferences for teaching methods in a graduate level medical ethics curriculum. Methods In January 2018, following the successful implementation of a peer-led, grassroots medical ethics curriculum, student (...) leaders under faculty guidance conducted a cross-sectional survey with 562 of 1357 responses received among students enrolled in the School of Medicine, College of Nursing, Doctor of Physical Therapy and BS/ MD Professional Scholars programs at The Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. An in person or web-based questionnaire was designed to measure perceived need for a more in-depth medical ethics curriculum. Results The majority of respondents were female, white and mid-20s in age. Almost half of respondents reported no prior medical ethics exposure or training in their previous educational experience, while 60% of students across all degree programs reported an interest in more medical ethics education and 92% noted that an understanding of medical ethics was important to their future career. Over a quarter of students were interested in pursuing graduate-level training in medical ethics, with case-based discussions, small group peer settings and ethics guest lectures being the most desired teaching methods. Conclusions The future physician, nursing and physical therapist workforce in our medical community demonstrated an unmet need and strong interest for more formal medical ethics education within their current coursework. Grassroots student-driven curricular development and leadership in medical ethics can positively impact medical education. Subsequent integration of interprofessional training in medical ethics may serve as a vital curricular approach to improving the training of ethically competent healthcare professionals and overcoming the current hierarchical clinical silos. (shrink)

In conversation, we often do not acknowledge what we jointly know to be true. My aim in this paper is to identify a distinctive kind of non-acknowledgment norm, open secrecy, and analyze how such norms constrain our speech. I argue that open secrecy norms are structurally different from other everyday non-acknowledgment norms. Open secrecy norms iterate: when p is an open secret, then there’s a norm not to acknowledge that p, and this norm is itself an open secret. The non-acknowledgment (...) at issue in open secrecy norms, I argue, motivates a more complex understanding of discourse. When interlocutors are conforming to open secrecy norms, they rely on at least two disjoint common grounds, one of which has a privileged status. To understand why and how it is privileged, I develop Erving Goffman’s notion of defining a social interaction. Finally, I show how strategic speakers can exploit the structure of open secrecy in order to both communicate about the open secret and shield themselves from retaliation for what they communicate. (shrink)

Existing regulation of end-of-life care is flawed. Problems include poorly-designed laws, policies, ethical codes, training, and funding programs, which often are neither effective nor helpful in guiding decision-making. This leads to adverse outcomes for patients, families, health professionals, and the health system as a whole. A key factor contributing to the harms of current regulation is a siloed approach to regulating end-of-life care. Existing approaches to regulation, and research into how that regulation could be improved, have tended to focus on (...) a single regulatory instrument (e.g., just law or just ethical codes). As a result, there has been a failure to capture holistically the various forces that guide end-of-life care. This article proposes a response to address this, identifying “regulatory space” theory as a candidate to provide the much-needed holistic insight into improving regulation of end-of-life care. The article concludes with practical implications of this approach for regulators and researchers. (shrink)

It has been hypothesized that our believing that, or its seeming to us as though, the world is in some way dynamical partially explains (and perhaps rationalizes) future-bias. Recent work has, in turn, found a correlation between future-bias and near-bias, suggesting that there is a common explanation for both. Call the claim that what partially explains our being both future- and near-biased is our believing/it seeming to us as though the world is dynamical, the dynamical explanation. We empirically test two (...) versions of the dynamical explanation. The first is the moving ego explanation—according to which it is our belief that the ego moves, or our phenomenology as of the ego moving, that jointly (partially) explains future- and near-bias. The second is the moving time explanation—according to which it is our belief that time robustly passes, or our phenomenology as of robust passage, which jointly (partially) explain future- and near-bias. We found no evidence in favour of either explanation. (shrink)

Many philosophers have thought that our folk, or pre-reflective, view of persistence is one on which objects endure. This assumption not only plays a role in disputes about the nature of persistence itself, but is also put to use in several other areas of metaphysics, including debates about the nature of change and temporal passage. In this paper, we empirically test three broad claims. First, that most people (i.e. most non-philosophers) believe that, and it seems to them as though, objects (...) persist by enduring rather than perduring. Second, that most people have a view of change on which enduring but not perduring objects count as changing. Third, that one reason why the folk represent time as dynamical is because it seems to them, and they believe that, they endure through time. We found no evidence to support these claims. While there are certainly plenty of ‘folk’ endurantists in the population we tested, there are also plenty of ‘folk’ perdurantists. We did not find robust evidence that a majority of people believed that, or it seemed to them as though, objects endure rather than perdure. We conclude that many arguments in favour of endurantism that appeal to folk beliefs about, or experiences of, persisting objects and change rest on views about those beliefs and experiences that are empirically unsupported. There is no evidence to suggest that endurantism is the folk friendly view of persistence, and so we should stop treating it as such without argument. (shrink)

In Contested Reproduction, John Evans outlines the results of a major piece of sociological research he has conducted. Evans suspects that reproductive genetic technologies will be a significant issue in coming cultural conflicts in the United States and that religious perspectives will play an important role in determining the shape these conflicts take. If one believes that we are hopelessly and bitterly divided on such issues, then the shape of our future conflicts may simply pit one entrenched side against another. (...) Evans’ findings suggest that ordinary religious believers in the United States have rather complex views about these technologies—more shades of gray than black or white. He concludes that the coming conflicts may be neither as insuperable nor as hopeless as we sometimes suppose. Serious exchange, and not just caricature or dismissal, may characterize even our deep disagreements. Perhaps so. But a reading of Progress in Bioethics, a collection of essays edited by Jonathan D. Moreno and Sam Berger, might give one pause here, and not because of anything it reveals about the views of religious believers. (shrink)

This paper introduces a novel theory of vagueness. Its main aim is to show how naïve judgments about tolerance and indeterminacy can be preserved while departing from classical logic only in ways which are independently motivated. -/- The theory makes use of a bilateral approach to acceptance and rejection. Combined with a standard account of validity, this approach gives rise to an entailment relation which is non-transitive. I argue that this is desirable: it is both pre-theoretically plausible and provides a (...) compelling solution to a number of longstanding puzzles. The theory aims to preserve the naïve picture of vagueness. It combines tools from expressivist and dynamic treatments of information in conversation to show how principles which are generally assumed to be in tension are compatible. The resulting logic departs from classical logic in precisely those places we should expect it to. -/- . (shrink)

Presentism faces a serious challenge from truthmaker theory. Standard solutions to the truthmaker objection against presentism proceed in one of two ways. Easy road presentists invoke new entities to satisfy the requirements of truthmaker theory. Hard road presentists, by contrast, flatly refuse to give in to truthmaker demands. Recently, a third way has been proposed. This response seeks to address the truthmaking problem by tensing our truthmaker principles. These views, though intuitive, are under-developed. In this paper, I get serious about (...) a fundamentally tensed approach to truthmaking by sketching out the underlying ontological picture needed to make sense of tensed truthmaker theory. (shrink)

Number Nativism is the view that humans innately represent precise natural numbers. Despite a long and venerable history, it is often considered hopelessly out of touch with the empirical record. I argue that this is a mistake. After clarifying Number Nativism and distancing it from related conjectures, I distinguish three arguments which have been seen to refute the view. I argue that, while popular, two of these arguments miss the mark, and fail to place pressure on Number Nativism. Meanwhile, a (...) third argument is best construed as a challenge: rather than refuting Number Nativism, it challenges its proponents to provide positive evidence for their thesis and show that this can be squared with apparent counterevidence. In response, I introduce psycholinguistic work on The Tolerance Principle (not yet considered in this context), propose that it is hard to make sense of without positing precise and innate representations of natural numbers, and argue that there is no obvious reason why these innate representations couldn’t serve as a basis for mature numeric conception. (shrink)

The modality of normality distinguishes states of affairs which are normal from those which are abnormal. Existing work on the modality of normality assumes that it is a restriction of metaphysical modality. In this paper, we argue that this assumption is inappropriate and explore the consequences of abandoning it. -/- After preliminary discussion (§1), we introduce the dominant framework for reasoning about normality (§2) and argue that it ascribes implausibly strong structural properties to the modality. In its place, we propose (...) a new framework, which avoids this commitment (§§3-5). This account has a number of interesting features, which we explore in both an informal and formal setting. If correct, it implies that the modality of normality occupies a distinctive place in the space of modalities. Before concluding, we consider some of the wider implications of our account (§6), focusing on the role normality has played in epistemic theorizing. (shrink)

Due to their reliance on constitutive higher-order representing to generate the qualities of which the subject is consciously aware, I argue that the major existing higher-order representational theories of consciousness insulate us from our first-order sensory states. In fact on these views we are never properly conscious of our sensory states at all. In their place I offer a new higher-order theory of consciousness, with a view to making us suitably intimate with our sensory states in experience. This theory relies (...) on the idea of ‘quoting’ sensory qualities, so is dubbed the ‘quotational higher-order thought theory’. I argue that it can capture something of the idea that we are ‘acquainted’ with our conscious states without slipping beyond the pale for naturalists, whilst also providing satisfying treatments of traditional problems for higher-order theories concerning representational mismatch. The theory achieves this by abandoning a representational mechanism for mental intentionality, in favour of one based on ‘embedding’. (shrink)

Many prominent critiques of philosophical methods proceed by suggesting that some method is unreliable, especially in comparison to some alternative method. In light of this, it may seem natural to conclude that these (comparatively) unreliable methods should be abandoned. Drawing upon work on the division of cognitive labour in science, we argue things are not so straightforward. Rather, whether an unreliable method should be abandoned depends heavily on the crucial question of how we should divide philosophers’ time and effort between (...) different methods, in order to maximise our prospects of achieving epistemic success. We show that, in a range of cases, even a (comparatively) unreliable method deserves to be allocated some of these resources. (shrink)

Since the late 2000s trans pregnancy has received increasing public and academic attention, and stories of the ‘pregnant man’ have become a media staple. Existing research has critiqued such spectacularization and the supposed tension between maleness, masculinity, and pregnancy that underpins it. Extending that work, this article draws on interview data from an international study of trans reproductive practices and analyzes participants' experiences of being, and expecting themselves to be, perceived in public space not as spectacularly ‘pregnant men’, but as (...) fat men. As a starting point we take the experience of one participant whose heavily pregnant participation in a five-kilometer race prompted the question: ‘Why is the chubby guy running?’ Using Judith Butler's concept of the cultural intelligibility of gender, we ask why the question asked was not: ‘Why is the pregnant guy running?’ We further consider the degree to which pregnant trans people manage their unintelligibility within the matrix of pregnancy, fatness, and trans/gender and how this reveals the limits of gender intelligibility itself. (shrink)

We know a lot about what the world is like. We know less, it seems, about what we know about what the world is like. According to a common thought, it is easier for us to come to know about the state of the world than to come to know about the state of our own knowledge. What explains this gap? An attractively simple hypothesis is that our ignorance about what we know is explained by our ignorance about the world. (...) There are things we fail to know about what we know about the world because there are things we fail to know about the world. This hypothesis is often motivated by the idea that knowledge requires a margin‐for‐error. In this paper, I'll argue that this simple hypothesis is inadequate. Not all our ignorance of our knowledge can be explained by our ignorance about the world. In this sense, at least some of our ignorance about what we know is brute. (shrink)

Kinship terminologies are basic cognitive semantic systems that all human societies use for organizing kin relations. Diversity in kinship systems and their categories is substantial, but constrained. Rácz, Passmore, and Jordan explore hypotheses about such constraints from learning theories and social pressures, testing the impact of a community‐size driven learning bottleneck against the social coordination demands of different kinds of marriage and resource systems.

2) Philosophy in an important sense has no special subject-matter which stands to it as other subject-matters stand to other special disciplines…. What is characteristic of philosophy is not a special subject-matter, but the aim of knowing one’s way around with respect to the subject-matters of all the special disciplines. [370] [BB: It is not clear how this sits with the distinction between being a researcher (in a special discipline) and being an intellectual (caring about how it all fits together). (...) For, surely, not all intellectuals are philosophers, nor vice versa. One possibility is that he thinks that our research specialty is being intellectuals. But this is not plausible: sociologists, historians, journalist-pundits, culture critics, and so on have an equal claim to that distinction. WS might be thinking of philosophers as exclusively concerned with the cognitive enterprise, allowing intellectuals more generally to worry about, e.g., politics. But this is a pre- Hegelian way of thinking about things that is very implausible. I have my own take on this (cf. “Reason, Expression, and the Philosophic Enterprise”, Ch. 4 of RiP).]. (shrink)

As central as the method of forcing is within set theory, it has yet to be incorporated into the philosopher's toolbox. That strikes me as a shame, since it may well have important applications within philosophy. One barrier is that typical presentations of forcing are overly dry and technical and make it seem inherently bound up with its applications within set theory. The purpose of this note is to try to rectify this. In particular, I will explain how the method (...) of forcing can be seen as a way of constructing a certain kind of intensional model that philosophers are already interested in: namely, possibility models. (shrink)

The articles in this special issue of Environmental Values have a shared significance. In one way or another, all of them reflect contemporary concerns about issues of trust, risk, uncertainty, and the cultural shaping of science.These are matters of mounting significance for the politics of the environment in countries like Britain, and indeed for politics more generally, as we have seen in a succession of recent controversies. The Brent Spar oil platform farrago, the hugely costly BSE-CJD upsets, the continuing uproars (...) around genetically modified plants and foods ­ central in all of these have been challenges to the political authority of official patterns of scientifically-backed reassurance, concerning the impacts of deep and open-ended trajectories of technological transformation.To understand what is likely to be at stake in such matters for the politics of industrial democracies in the 21st century, there is now an urgent need to develop richer pictures than those currently dominant, of the cultural and epistemological architecture on which our regulatory institutions have been coming to rely. The contributions to this special issue can be pictured as building blocks in such a process.The present article offers a complementary perspective ­ one grounded in a degree of more hands-on personal experience of related matters. (shrink)

The historiography of Greek ethics has, since the days of Winckelmann, Schiller, and Hegel, been shaped by an effort to use it in modern debates. Kantians believed that the Greeks ignored the notion of morality. Hegelians by contrast thought that they understood how to show that one's own happiness is compatible with the happiness of others and conformity to ethical norms—either through inclusivism or fusionism.

A fragmented and unfirnished exploration into the realist and anti-realist debate in mathematics. And the subsequent exploration of how novelty and creation works on a fundemental epistemic scale. The paper puts forth two major frameworks that attempt to bridge realism and anti-realism and provides a novel solution to the epistemic problem of true novelty and idea generation.

Assumptions about the tirocinium fori are based on claims by Joachim Marquardt that it was a form of training for young elite Romans at about the age of 16, that it lasted for one year, and that it consisted of mentorship by a distinguished elder. Though there is little evidence to support these claims, the theory of a tirocinium fori continues to influence discussions of oratory in the age of Cicero, where it gives a false picture of the process by (...) which aspiring young orators made the transition from the school of rhetoric to practice in the courts. (shrink)

I believe that Moore's appeal to common sense has been misunder-stood both by his defenders and his critics. Besides the mistakes of the latter, there is one enormous howler which, in my opinion, the former have committed. This is to confuse or coalesce two quite distinct appeals which he made, namely the appeal to common sense and the appeal to ordinary language.

Visual illusions provide a means of investigating the rules and principles through which approximate number representations are formed. Here, we investigated the developmental trajectory of an important numerical illusion – the connectedness illusion, wherein connecting pairs of items with thin lines reduces perceived number without altering continuous attributes of the collections. We found that children as young as 5 years of age showed susceptibility to the illusion and that the magnitude of the effect increased into adulthood. Moreover, individuals with greater (...) numerical acuity exhibited stronger connectedness illusions after controlling for age. Overall, these results suggest the approximate number system expects to enumerate over bounded wholes and doing so is a signature of its optimal functioning. (shrink)