Several philosophers claim that the greenhouse gas emissions from actions like a Sunday drive are so miniscule that they will make no difference whatsoever with regard to anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC) and its expected harms. This paper argues that this claim of individual causal inefficacy is false. First, if AGCC is not reducible at least in part to ordinary actions, then the cause would have to be a metaphysically odd emergent entity. Second, a plausible (dis-)utility calculation reveals that such (...) actions have a not-insignificant amount of expected harm. One upshot is that the near-exclusive focus in the literature on AGCC as a collective action problem is too restricted. The paper also provides several moral psychological explanations of why it is so difficult to comprehend individual responsibility with regard to global phenomena, including a reappraisal of Thomas Nagel’s view of the absurd. (shrink)

There is some consensus that for S to know that p, it cannot be merely a matter of luck that S’s belief that p is true. This consideration has led Duncan Pritchard and others to propose a safety condition on knowledge. In this paper, we argue that the safety condition is not a proper formulation of the intuition that knowledge excludes luck. We suggest an alternative proposal in the same spirit as safety, and find it lacking as well.

In this article, we re-examine Pascal’s Mugging, and argue that it is a deeper problem than the St. Petersburg paradox. We offer a way out that is consistent with classical decision theory. Specifically, we propose a “many muggers” response analogous to the “many gods” objection to Pascal’s Wager. When a very tiny probability of a great reward becomes a salient outcome of a choice, such as in the offer of the mugger, it can be discounted on the condition that there (...) are other symmetric, non-salient rewards that one may receive if one chooses otherwise. (shrink)

How a group G can know that p has been the subject of much investigation in social epistemology in recent years. This paper clarifies and defends a form of non-supervenient, non-summative group knowledge: G can know that p even if none of the members of G knows that p, and whether or not G knows that p does not locally supervene on the mental states of the members of G. Instead, we argue that what is central to G knowing that (...) p is whether G has an epistemic structure that is functioning appropriately in accord with the action-related purposes of the group, and this structure may include non-agential elements such as devices that retain or process information. We argue that recent objections to non-summative group knowledge given by Jennifer Lackey do not in fact succeed in undermining the view, but do help to clarify the nature of non-summative group knowledge. The main upshot of our response to Lackey’s objections is that groups put their knowledge into action in ways that often differ from how individuals do so, and social epistemologists should be careful to notice these differences, especially insofar as groups often structure themselves by employing various epistemically-relevant devices. (shrink)

Mounting evidence suggests that participation in clinical trials confers neither advantage nor disadvantage on those enrolled. Narrow focus on the question of a “trial effect,” however, distracts from a broader mechanism by which patients may benefit from ongoing clinical research. We hypothesize that the existence of clinical trials infrastructure—the organizational culture, systems, and expertise that develop as a product of sustained participation in cooperative clinical trials research—may function as a quality improvement lever, improving the quality of care and outcomes of (...) all patients within an institution or region independent of their individual participation in trials. We further contend that this “infrastructure effect” can yield particular benefits for patients in low- and middle-income countries. The hypothesis of an infrastructure effect as a quality improvement intervention, if correct, justifies enhanced research capacity in LMIC as a pillar of health system development. (shrink)

John Nolt argues in ‘How harmful are the average American's greenhouse gas emissions?’ that, on average, individual Americans are responsible for the severe suffering and/or death of...

Richard Feldman and William Lycan have defended a view according to which a necessary condition for a doxastic agent to have knowledge is that the agent’s belief is not essentially based on any false assumptions. I call this the no-essential-false-assumption account, or NEFA. Peter Klein considers examples of what he calls “useful false beliefs” and alters his own account of knowledge in a way which can be seen as a refinement of NEFA. This paper shows that NEFA, even given Klein’s (...) refinement, is subject to counterexample: a doxastic agent may possess knowledge despite having an essential false assumption. Advocates of NEFA could simply reject the intuition that the example is a case of knowledge. However, if the example is interpreted as not being a case of knowledge, then it can be used as a potential counterexample against both safety and sensitivity views of knowledge. I also provide a further case which, I claim, is problematic for all of the accounts just mentioned. I then propose, briefly, an alternative account of knowledge which handles all these cases appropriately. (shrink)

This paper contributes to a growing body of literature analyzing the social responsibilities of SMEs (Sarbutts, 2003, Journal of Communication Management 7(4), 340-347; Castka et al., 2004, Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management 11, 140-149; Enderle, 2004, Business Ethics: A European Review 14(1), 51-63; Fuller and Tian, 2006, Journal of Business Ethics 67, 287-304; Jenkins, 2006, Journal of Business Ethics 67, 241-256; Lepoutre and Heene, 2006, Journal of Business Ethics 67, 257-273; Roberts, 2003, Journal of Business Ethics 44(2), 159-170; Williamson (...) et al., 2006, Journal of Business Ethics 67, 317-330) by designing a conceptual framework based on the Strategic Management Theory, which links social issues to the creation of sustained competitive advantages for SMEs. Firstly, the paper reviews literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and especially on the creation of social capital for SMEs. An exploration of Strategic Management Theory follows, focusing on the Positioning and Competence Based Schools, with the objective to find an answer to the question: how do social and environmental issues fit in the logic of creation of competitive advantage and what role do they play during strategic planning? The contributions of Hart (natural resourced based view) and Porter and Kramer (development of strategic intent in social responsible actions) are then related to the framework of possible growth paths of SMEs (Hong and Jeong, 2006, Journal of Enterprise Information Management 19(3), 292-302) in order to answer this question. Strategies that could trigger or lever these growth paths are then discussed. Following the recommendation Thompson and Smith (1991, Journal of Small Business Management 29(1), 30-44) gave to focus on the "study of CSR behaviors instead of perceptions," a medium-sized Austrian company in the food producing industry has been identified for an exploratory case study analysis to test the applicability of this theoretical framework for the description of the actual responsible business behavior (RBB) of an SME. This company is typical of one of the 250.000 SMEs which account for 99.6% of the Austrian economy. Based on the findings and the discussion, this paper presents a strategic planning tool for SMEs aiming to embed RBB into the corporate strategy. (shrink)

We have long lived in a world made by global connections. Our products, our travels, our ideas--all of these have their origins in places and peoples both near and far. But when scholars narrate the history of the modern self, they ignore these connections and focus on changes in European science and philosophy. In this provocative new book, Avram Alpert argues that we need to rethink the story of the modern self as a global history. He first shows how (...) canonical European thinkers like Michel de Montaigne, René Descartes, and Immanuel Kant explicitly formed their ideas of selfhood in relation to the travel accounts flooding into Europe from colonial missionaries. He then pushes this history beyond Europe, showing how a diverse series of writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Léopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and D.T. Suzuki, critiqued these ideas of global selfhood with their own creative responses. Spanning four continents and four centuries, the book argues that all of these writers partake of a shared global history forged in the violence of colonial rule. The resulting narrative shows that the modern self is not a European invention, but a global, evolving, and fraught attempt to make ourselves the kinds of beings who can live with the complexity of a world that is at once connected and never fully knowable. (shrink)

To what extent do we value future generations? It may seem from our behavior that we don’t value future generations much at all, at least in relation to how much we value present generations. However, in his book _Death and the Afterlife_, Samuel Scheffler argues that we value the future even _more_ than we value the present, even though this is not immediately apparent to us. If Scheffler’s argument is sound, then it has important ramifications: It would give us a (...) strong motivation to put more energy into abating environmental crises like climate change, and it supports at least a limited form of ethical _longtermism_. However, in this paper, I show that Scheffler’s argument is fallacious. Scheffler claims that we do not regard the fact that we in the present generation will all die relatively soon as a catastrophe, but we do regard the non-existence of future generations as a catastrophe. But the particular scenario used by Scheffler to illustrate this point—the plot of the book _The Children of Men_—is one in which _both_ the present generation will perish _and_ there will be no future generations, and it is this _conjunction_ that is catastrophic, thus giving no information about which is worse. I suggest other ways to compare our valuations of present and future generations, and recommend that philosophers who are interested in the moral psychology of how we value future generations ought to engage with social science, as it is an empirical issue. (shrink)

There has been much work on ontological dependence in recent literature. However, relatively little of it has been dedicated to the ways in which individual physical objects may depend on other distinct, non-overlapping objects. This paper gives several examples of such object-dependence and distinguishes between different types of it. The paper also introduces and refines the notion of an n-tet. N-tets (typically) occur when there are object-dependence relations between n objects. I claim that the identity (or, rather, what I call (...) the n-dentity) conditions for n-tets are not grounded in the individual identity conditions of each of the n objects, but instead are metaphysically basic. The paper then briefly discusses some ramifications of accepting object-dependence (and n-tets) on the philosophy of biology, ethics, and logic. (shrink)

Suppose we are asked to draw up a list of things we take to exist. Certain items seem unproblematic choices, while others (such as God) are likely to spark controversy. The book sets the grand theological theme aside and asks a less dramatic question: should mathematical objects (numbers, sets, functions, etc.) be on this list? In philosophical jargon this is the ‘ontological’ question for mathematics; it asks whether we ought to include mathematicalia in our ontology. The goal of this work (...) is to answer this question in the affirmative, by drawing on considerations on the the applicability of mathematics to natural science. (shrink)

Arguing for mathematical realism on the basis of Field’s explanationist version of the Quine–Putnam Indispensability argument, Alan Baker has recently claimed to have found an instance of a genuine mathematical explanation of a physical phenomenon. While I agree that Baker presents a very interesting example in which mathematics plays an essential explanatory role, I show that this example, and the argument built upon it, begs the question against the mathematical nominalist.

How an acceptance of our limitations can lead to a more fulfilling life and a more harmonious society We live in a world oriented toward greatness, one in which we feel compelled to be among the wealthiest, most powerful, and most famous. This book explains why no one truly benefits from this competitive social order, and reveals how another way of life is possible—a good-enough life for all. Avram Alpert shows how our obsession with greatness results in stress and (...) anxiety, damage to our relationships, widespread political and economic inequality, and destruction of the natural world. He describes how to move beyond greatness to create a society in which everyone flourishes. By competing less with each other, each of us can find renewed meaning and purpose, have our material and emotional needs met, and begin to lead more leisurely lives. Alpert makes no false utopian promises, however. Life can never be more than good enough because there will always be accidents and tragedies beyond our control, which is why we must stop dividing the world into winners and losers and ensure that there is a fair share of decency and sufficiency to go around. Visionary and provocative, The Good-Enough Life demonstrates how we can work together to cultivate a good-enough life for all instead of tearing ourselves apart in a race to the top of the social pyramid. (shrink)

The question of how disability affects wellbeing has occupied a number of philosophers in recent years. However, this literature has proceeded without a careful examination of the fairly vast empirical research on the topic. In this paper, I review the scholarly literature and discuss some philosophically-relevant aspects of it. On average, those with disabilities have a significantly lower level of wellbeing than those without disabilities. Furthermore, there is strong evidence that this reduction in wellbeing is not due entirely to ableist (...) factors. Hence, I argue that it shows that the Mere Difference View of disability is most likely false. However, the literature indeed shows that disabled people typically live good lives. Thus, despite its rejection of the Mere Difference View, it still upholds a disability-affirmative view. These findings allow for a measured critique of some of Peter Singer’s writings on disability. (shrink)

Gignac and Zajenkowski (2020) find that “the degree to which people mispredicted their objectively measured intelligence was equal across the whole spectrum of objectively measured intelligence”. This Comment shows that Gignac and Zajenkowski’s (2020) finding of homoscedasticity is likely the result of a recoding choice by the experimenters and does not in fact indicate that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is a mere statistical artifact. Specifically, Gignac and Zajenkowski (2020) recoded test subjects’ responses to a question regarding self-assessed comparative IQ onto a (...) linear IQ scale when a normal IQ scale would likely have been more appropriate. More generally, researchers studying self-assessed intelligence should be aware of potential measurement problems that may arise when transforming an ordinal scale onto an interval scale. (shrink)

All ordinary decisions involve some risk. If I go outside for a walk, I may trip and injure myself. But if I don’t go for a walk, I slightly increase my chances of cardiovascular disease. Typically, we disregard most small risks. When, for practical purposes, is it appropriate for one to ignore risk? This issue looms large because many activities performed by those in wealthy societies, such as driving a car, in some way risk contributing to climate harms. Are these (...) activities morally appropriate? -/- In this paper, I first summarize and respond to some arguments that purport to show that it is appropriate to ignore or discount very small risks. I argue that because our rationality is bounded, it is impossible for us to include every small risk in our decision-making process, and so we may reasonably use heuristics to guide many decisions. However, contrary to some thinkers, I argue that this does not violate the spirit of expected value theory; it merely shows that we should adopt a so-called "two-level" view. Our use of heuristics allows for the reasonable ignoring of some risks, and this perhaps explains why one might be inclined to think that individual climate-related risks are negligible. However, virtually all greenhouse-gas emitting activities in fact have some climate risk on the negative side of the ledger, and the use of heuristics does not permit the general ignoring of climate-change-related risk by individuals on grounds of expediency of judgment and decision-making. (shrink)

Jesper Kallestrup has provided an insightful response to our paper, “Epistemic Structure in Non-Summative Social Knowledge”. Kallestrup identifies some important issues pertaining to our non-summative, non-supervenient account of group knowledge which we did not address in our original paper. Here, we develop our view further in light of Kallestrup’s helpful reply.

Can there be mathematical explanations of physical phenomena? In this paper, I suggest an affirmative answer to this question. I outline a strategy to reconstruct several typical examples of such explanations, and I show that they fit a common model. The model reveals that the role of mathematics is explicatory. Isolating this role may help to re-focus the current debate on the more specific question as to whether this explicatory role is, as proposed here, also an explanatory one.

Thomas Hurka, in his book Virtue, Vice, and Value, and elsewhere, develops a recursive analysis of higher-order pleasures and pains. The account leads Hurka to some potentially controversial conclusions. For instance, Hurka argues on its basis that some states are both good and evil and also that the view he calls the conditionality view is false. In this paper, I argue that Hurka’s formulation of the recursive account is unusual and inelegant, and that Hurka reaches his conclusions only because of (...) its peculiar aspects. I provide an alternative recursive account which is similar in spirit to Hurka’s but which is theoretically elegant and does not entail those conclusions. (shrink)

According to standard (quantum) statistical mechanics, the phenomenon of a phase transition, as described in classical thermodynamics, cannot be derived unless one assumes that the system under study is infinite. This is naturally puzzling since real systems are composed of a finite number of particles; consequently, a well‐known reaction to this problem was to urge that the thermodynamic definition of phase transitions (in terms of singularities) should not be “taken seriously.” This article takes singularities seriously and analyzes their role by (...) using the well‐known distinction between data and phenomena , in an attempt to better understand the origin of the puzzle. *Received April 2009; revised July 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: University of Cambridge, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RH, United Kingdom; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

The articulation of an overarching account of scientific explanation has long been a central preoccupation for the philosophers of science. Although a while ago the literature was dominated by two approaches—a causal account and a unificationist account—today the consensus seems to be that the causal account has won. In this paper, I challenge this consensus and attempt to revive unificationism. More specifically, I aim to accomplish three goals. First, I add new criticisms to the standard anti-unificationist arguments, in order to (...) motivate the need for a revision of the doctrine. Second, and most importantly, I sketch such a revised version. Then I argue that, contrary to widespread belief, the causal account and this revised unificationist account of explanation are compatible. Moreover, I also maintain that the unificationist account has priority, since a most satisfactory theory of explanation can be obtained by incorporating the causal account, as a sub-component of the unificationist account. The driving force behind this reevaluation of the received view in the philosophy of explanation is a reconsideration of the role of scientific understanding. (shrink)

This chapter summarizes consequentialist theory in its application to environmental ethics. It discusses several types of consequentialist theories, including classical utilitarianism, biocentric consequentialism, and ecocentric consequentialism. It contrasts consequentialist environmental ethics with deontological, virtue theoretic, and pragmatist alternatives, and it offers some reasons for favoring a consequentialist environmental ethic while discussing challenges that consequentialist theories must meet in order to properly account for environmental issues. Although there are significant challenges for the development of consequentialist environmental ethics, it is in many (...) respects a new field of inquiry, and there is hope that with further development it can be fleshed out more completely. (shrink)

La révision d'un règlement sacré de Callatis (F. Sokolowski, LSCG 90) a conduit à une tout autre disposition des deux fragments qui composent l'inscription. Selon la nouvelle restitution, il s'agit d'un règlement sacré (IIe s. av. J.-C.) concernant le régime des sacrifices offerts à Dionysos et le partage des victimes sacrifiées à l'occasion de différentes fêtes. Le sanctuaire attesté (Δασυλλεΐον) tire son nom de l'épiclèse mégarienne de Dionysos (Pausanias, I 43,5). Commentaires sur les sacrifices, la distribution des portions des victimes (...) immolées et les interdictions. (shrink)

The question as to whether there are mathematical explanations of physical phenomena has recently received a great deal of attention in the literature. The answer is potentially relevant for the ontology of mathematics; if affirmative, it would support a new version of the indispensability argument for mathematical realism. In this article, I first review critically a few examples of such explanations and advance a general analysis of the desiderata to be satisfied by them. Second, in an attempt to strengthen the (...) realist position, I propose a new type of example, drawing on probabilistic considerations. 1 Introduction2 Mathematical Explanations2.1 ‘Simplicity’3 An Average Story: The Banana Game3.1 Some clarifications3.2 Hopes and troubles for the nominalist3.3 New hopes?3.4 New troubles4 Conclusion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing by Jeanne-Marie JacksonAvram AlpertThe African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing, by Jeanne-Marie Jackson; 232 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.The world of postcolonial literary studies harbors a well-earned suspicion of claims to promoting liberal ideals like civility, rationality, and individuality. The liberal worldview, after all, arose in (...) the same era as European colonial expansion. To many critics, this was not a coincidence: liberal ideals were often crafted in opposition to the peoples that Europeans were encountering around the world. Whereas these other peoples were supposedly bound to collective myths, unaware of the primacy of the individual, and condemned to violent passions, liberals claimed that Europeans used rationality to perceive the value of individual life, and, in so doing, had unlocked the key to promoting civilizational harmony. All that everyone else had to do to experience this new way of life was, in one of history's most wretched paradoxes, to succumb to colonial violence and join the empire of liberty. It is thus quite logical that anticolonial criticism would call into question the basic features of the liberal worldview.But in recent years, an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars—including Sankar Muthu in political science, Sanjay Subrahmanyam in history, Mukti Lakhi Mangharam in literary studies, and Ato Sekyi-Otu in philosophy—have come to question this consensus.1 Their challenge rests on an ironic problem of the critique of ideologies associated with colonialism: by criticizing topics like civility, rationality, and individuality as such, do we not play into the very Eurocentric idea that these ideas were invented by Europeans in the first place? As these scholars have shown across various disciplines, geographies, and time periods, this critique risks giving modern Europe too much credit. Ideals often associated with liberalism have antecedents around the world. Sometimes they are used to advance general equality and well-being; sometimes they subvert these ideals. As Jeanne-Marie Jackson argues in her trenchant new book intervening in these debates, The African Novel of Ideas, we thus need a criticism that is as much attuned to the critique of "false universalisms" as it is open to "the promise of one that is true" (p. 189).Throughout her book, Jackson argues that a reconstructed liberalism is not only fundamental to literature from Africa but that the critical neglect of this fact has distorted the general understanding of literature today. Critics—especially but not exclusively in the West—have become so accustomed to sniffing out hints of liberal, individualist ideology that they routinely cast aside the ways in which African philosophers and novelists have themselves sought to explore and transform these ideals. Jackson's argument is not that liberalism, as it stands, is a noble philosophy that has been unfairly jettisoned. Rather, she posits that African writers are developing a fundamental innovation by considering how they—who were so long exploited by European ideals—can nonetheless find [End Page 495] meaning in both alternative and emergent versions of these very same ideals. What their work emphasizes is the "process of getting from an African locality to its universal resonance" (p. 185). In other words, whereas Europeans had simply presumed that their view of the world should apply everywhere, the contemporary novelists and philosophers discussed in this book engage in thorough intellectual and conceptual labor to tease out how ideas generated in one place might speak (without force) to peoples around the world.Jackson advances this argument through an innovative mix of philosophy and literature. Rather than evoking the standard series of French philosophers summoned to explicate literature, Jackson frames her readings through the work of philosophers such as Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Emmanuel Eze. This allows her to shift the focus of her readings of literature from questions of language and close reading to underanalyzed topics in philosophy and literature, especially about how African literature enacts philosophical questions. She discusses topics ranging from the nature of the self and the meaning of rationality to a meta-interrogation on the purpose of philosophizing itself (pp. 16–17). That purpose... (shrink)

Knowing the level of quality from which the context is no longer valuable in a Context-Aware Data Mining (CADM) system is an important information. The main goal of this research is to study the variations of the predictions in case of different levels of noise and missing context data in practical scenarios for predicting soil moisture. The research has been performed on two locations from the Transylvanian Plain, Romania and two locations from Canada. The values predicted for the soil moisture (...) were compared in mixed scenarios that vary the quantity of noise and missing context data. The studied behavior was performed using Deep Learning, Decision Tree and Gradient Boosted Tree machine learning algorithms. It has been shown that when using the air temperature as context for predicting soil moisture, variations of noise and missing data do not influence the results proportionally with the levels of noise and missing data applied. Also, Gradient Boosted Tree algorithm proves to be the best algorithm from the ones studied, to be considered when predicting soil moisture with the CADM approach. (shrink)

In this essay I return to the difficult relation between the ethics and politics of Emmanuel Levinas through his critique of "paganism" and "primitivism." I argue that Levinas' central philosophical claims are fundamentally constituted by his problematic conceptions of so-called primitive life. Thus unlike current scholarship which has tried to put a wedge between Levinas' ethics and his politics, I suggest that one way to make Levinas' contributions meaningful in a global world is to unhinge the philosophy from the beginning. (...) Building on the dialogue between Levinas and Derrida, as well as contemporary anthropology, I argue that we can make an orginary agnostic moment prior to his work, which might allow us to think through a plurality of ethical subjectivities. (shrink)

In this article, the author argues that the works of Immanuel Kant and Henry David Thoreau can help reframe current political discussions about violence and nonviolence within revolutionary movements. For both of them, the means and ends of political change must coincide. Since they seek a nonviolent state of affairs, each argues against violent political change. However, they are also concerned to articulate a relationship between armed and unarmed struggle. After all, Kant and Thoreau worked to find what was positive (...) in violent acts: the French Revolution and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, respectively. They suggest that one of the ethical acts of revolutionary nonviolence is the sympathetic spectatorship of comrades in struggle who have chosen violent means. This opens up a theory of revolutionary nonviolence as a dual injunction to remain resolutely opposed to violence, but also to be capable of finding within violent acts a deeper desire for the end of violence. (shrink)

Les auteurs publient huit tablettes de malédiction de plomb conservées d'une manière plus ou moins fragmentaire, trouvées fortuitement dans la nécropole tumulaire d'Istros et datant du IVe siècle av. J.-C. La première est manifestement une defixio iudiciaria, les nos 2-4 sont des listes de noms (sans doute toujours des defixiones iudiciariae), les nos 5-7 sont presque illisibles, alors que le n° 8 est un couvercle de plomb inscrit. Le texte le plus important est révélé par le n° 1. Le commentaire (...) porte surtout sur le verbum devotorium γράφειν, la forme συνεπιόντων, les personnes concernées par la malédiction et leurs noms. Les nos 2-3 révèlent plusieurs anthroponymes plutôt rares commentés en détail. Le n° 8 semble être un fragment d'une cassette de plomb qui aurait pu abriter une « figurine vaudou ». On ne connaissait jusqu'ici que cinq cassettes de ce genre : quatre en Attique et une en mer Noire. (shrink)

Can we speak about a specific real-virtual spatiality in the contexts offered by the post-desktop technological philosophy and practice? Does Augmented Reality have the potential to produce a different type of space in which private and public converge up to the point of their cross identification? More exactly, to create, what media theoretician Jenny Edbauer Rice names a “zone of public intimacy”? The goal of this essay is to explore the possible answers to these questions. At the core of my (...) analysis is the idea that the hybrid character of Augmented Reality is effected by two conditions. On the one hand, by the process of converging real and virtual spaces into a single – although discontinuous – “multimedia” space-image and, on the other, by the tensions existent between private perception and public engagement. My conclusion is that by creating a hybrid convergent space of inclusions and exchanges, AR raises not only the prospect of a new sensorium, but, what is more, it confirms the possibility of a distinct aesthetic paradigm as well as of a different way to articulate social relations. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 230-233, June 2012.

[Author's note: I am posting this dissertation since it may be of interest to some people working on vagueness and related topics. It does not represent my current views on the topic. I have never attempted to publish any of this work, though I hope some day to return to it.] -/- Philosophers have devoted a lot of attention to vagueness in recent years, but there is still no general consensus about how to resolve the Sorites paradox. Timothy Williamson‘s epistemic (...) view, which claims that our vague terms have unknown sharp boundaries, is the most popular and most controversial current account. No one has shown exactly what is wrong the epistemic view and no one has provided a satisfying alternative to it. These two projects – articulating what is wrong with the epistemic view, and providing a plausible alternative – are the primary goals of this dissertation. -/- Additionally, I survey ordinary intuitions that underlie Sorites paradoxes, and I note how these intuitions inform, and are informed by, a number of deeper philosophical debates in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and ethics. In part, this serves as an explanation of why the Sorites paradox has remained so difficult to resolve. -/- The most common objection to the epistemic view – that it provides an unsatisfactory account of the connection between meaning and use – has not been successful in undermining the view. My own objection is a metaphysical, and not a semantic, objection: the epistemic view fails to provide the best explanation of what objects and properties exist. Instead, an eliminativist account of macro-level objects and properties, according to which there are no mountains and there is no property of being lavender-colored, is a better metaphysical account than one that claims that there are mountains and color properties that have sharp boundaries. -/- Of course, this eliminativist view is intuitively unappealing, and to show how statements in ordinary language can in some way be taken to be true, I introduce the normative choice account. According to this view, although non-normative facts about linguistic behavior and about the external world do not determine a precise reference for our terms, our choices may do so. I claim that this provides all that is needed for there to be semantic normativity. First, we are still guided in our choices to some extent by psychological tendencies, and second, there are resources in semantic deliberation to respond to aberrant uses of language. (shrink)

In his early writings, Kant regarded the autonomy of the will as the supreme principle of morality, as well as the sole principle of all moral laws and of the duties conforming to them. Nevertheless, this impressively sounding principle gradually disappeared from the later Kant’s texts, and there is not much in the literature to explain why. Pauline Kleingeld’s purpose, in the two articles I consider here, is to address this lacuna and to show that there are good philosophical reasons (...) for this principle’s gradual disappearance from the Kantian framework. One of my aims, in this paper, is to formulate and argue for several reservations about Kleingeld’s argument; however, even if these reservations turn out to be apposite, my claim is not that Kant did not actually abandon the Principle of Autonomy; instead, I argue that, even if Kleingeld were right and Kant had abandoned the Principle of Autonomy, he would still not have needed to. (shrink)

In his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein claims, puzzlingly, that ‘the proof creates a new concept’ (RFM III-41). This paper aims to contribute to clarifying this idea, and to showing how it marks a major break with the traditional conception of proof. Moreover, since the most natural way to understand his claim is open to criticism, a secondary goal of what follows is to offer an interpretation of it that neutralizes the objection. The discussion proceeds by analysing a (...) well-known geometrical proof. (shrink)

The Principle of Indifference is a central element of the ‘classical’ conception of probability, but, for all its strong intuitive appeal, it is widely believed that it faces a devastating objection: the so-called (by Poincare´) ‘Bertrand paradoxes’ (in essence, cases in which the same probability question receives different answers). The puzzle has fascinated many since its discovery, and a series of clever solutions (followed promptly by equally clever rebuttals) have been proposed. However, despite the long-standing interest in this problem, an (...) important assumption, necessary for its generation, has been overlooked. My aim in this paper is to identify this assumption. Since what it claims turns out to be prima facie problematic, I will urge that the burden of proof now shifts to the objectors to PI; they have to provide reasons why this assumption holds. (shrink)

I present a reconstruction of Eugene Wigner’s argument for the claim that mathematics is ‘unreasonable effective’, together with six objections to its soundness. I show that these objections are weaker than usually thought, and I sketch a new objection.

My main aim is to sketch a certain reading (‘genealogical’) of later Wittgenstein’s views on logical necessity. Along the way, I engage with the inferentialism currently debated in the literature on the epistemology of deductive logic.