Many philosophers are impressed by the progress achieved by physical sciences. This has had an especially deep effect on their ontological views: it has made many of them physicalists. Physicalists believe that everything is physical: more precisely, that all entities, properties, relations, and facts are those which are studied by physics or other physical sciences. They may not all agree with the spirit of Rutherford's quoted remark that 'there is physics; and there is stamp-collecting',' but they all grant physical science (...) a unique ontological authority: the authority to tell us what there is. Physicalism is now almost orthodox in much philosophy, notably in much recent philosophy of mind. But although often invoked, it is rarely explicitly defined. It should be. The claim that everything is physical is not as clear as it seems. In this paper, we examine a number of proposed definitions of physicalism and reasons for being a physicalist. We will argue both that physicalism lacks a clear and credible definition, and that in no non-vacuous interpretation is it true. We are concerned here only with physicalism as a doctrine about the empirical world. In particular, it should not be confused with nominalism, the doctrine that there are no universals.2 Nominalism and physicalism are quite independent doctrines. Believers in universals may as consistently assert as deny that the only properties and relations are those studied by physical science. And nominalists may with equal consistency assert or deny that physical science could provide enough predicates to describe the world. That is the question which concerns physicalists, not whether physical predicates name real universals. (We will for brevity write as if they do, but we do not need that assumption.). (shrink)

Much recent discussion has focused on the nature of artifacts, particularly on whether artifacts have essences. While the general consensus is that artifacts are at least intention-dependent, an equally common view is function essentialism about artifacts, the view that artifacts are essentially functional objects and that membership in an artifact kind is determined by a particular, shared function. This paper argues that function essentialism about artifacts is false. First, the two component conditions of function essentialism are given a clear and (...) precise formulation, after which counterexamples are offered to each. Second, ways to handle the counterexamples suggested by Randall Dipert and Simon Evnine are considered and rejected. Third, I then consider the prospects for restricting function essentialism to so-called technical artifacts, as Lynne Baker does, and argue that this, too, fails. This paper thereby consolidates the scattered literature on function essentialism and shows that, despite the seeming plausibility of the thesis, it should be rejected as an account of artifact essences. (shrink)

This paper sketches a taxonomy of forms of substantivalism and relationism concerning space and time, and of the traditional arguments for these positions. Several natural sorts of relationism are able to account for Newton's bucket experiment. Conversely, appropriately constructed substantivalism can survive Leibniz's critique, a fact which has been obscured by the conflation of two of Leibniz's arguments. The form of relationism appropriate to the Special Theory of Relativity is also able to evade the problems raised by Field. I survey (...) the effect of the General Theory of Relativity and of plenism on these considerations. (shrink)

Some machine learning models, in particular deep neural networks (DNNs), are not very well understood; nevertheless, they are frequently used in science. Does this lack of understanding pose a problem for using DNNs to understand empirical phenomena? Emily Sullivan has recently argued that understanding with DNNs is not limited by our lack of understanding of DNNs themselves. In the present paper, we will argue, _contra_ Sullivan, that our current lack of understanding of DNNs does limit our ability to understand with (...) DNNs. Sullivan’s claim hinges on which notion of understanding is at play. If we employ a weak notion of understanding, then her claim is tenable, but rather weak. If, however, we employ a strong notion of understanding, particularly explanatory understanding, then her claim is not tenable. (shrink)

The mind-body problem in contemporary philosophy has two parts: the problem of mental causation and the problem of consciousness. These two parts are not unrelated; in fact, it can be helpful to see them as two horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, the causal interaction between mental and physical phenomena seems to require that all causally efficacious mental phenomena are physical; but on the other hand, the phenomenon of consciousness seems to entail that not all mental phenomena are (...) physical.2 One may avoid this dilemma by adopting an epiphenomenalist view of consciousness, of course; but there is little independent reason for believing such a view. Rejecting epiphenomenalism, then, leaves contemporary philosophers with their problem: mental causation inclines them towards physicalism, while consciousness inclines them towards dualism. (shrink)

Viewed from a certain perspective, nothing can seem more secure than introspection. Consider an ordinary conscious episode—say, your current visual experience of the colour of this page. You can judge, when reflecting on this experience, that you have a visual experience as of something white with black marks before you. Does it seem reasonable to doubt this introspective judgement? Surely not—such doubt would seem utterly fanciful. The trustworthiness of introspection is not only assumed by commonsense, it is also taken for (...) granted by many of theorists about the mind. Within both philosophy and the science of consciousness it is widely held that introspection is generally reliable, at least with respect to the question of one’s current (or immediately prior) conscious states. Without this assumption, we could not make sense of theorists’ widespread use of introspection, both in support of their own position and to undermine that of their opponents. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that being in an intentional state is a matter of being related to a sentence in a mental language-a 'Language of Thought' (see especially Fodor 1975, 1987 Appendix; Field 1978). According to this view-which I shall call 'the LT hypothesis'-when anyone has a belief or a desire or a hope with a certain content, they have a sentence of this language, with that content, 'written' in their heads. The claim is meant quite literally: the mental representations that (...) make up the items of this language have semantic and syntactic properties. This is why, according to this view, cognitive psychology does, and should, treat that part of the mind which deals with intentional states as a semantic and a syntactic 'engine'. (shrink)

I call into question a pair of closely related assumptions that are almost universally shared in the literature on predicates of taste. The assumptions are, first, that predicates of taste – words like ‘tasty’ – are semantically evaluative. In other words, that it is part of the meaning of a word like ‘tasty’ to describe an object as in some sense good, or to say that it is pleasing. And second, that the meaning of predicates of taste is in some (...) way relativized to an experiencer or standard – the person that the object is pleasing to or the standard according to which the object is good. Parties to the literature on these terms tend to disagree about the role of context in determining the truth of claims involving predicates of taste, or in determining which proposition is expressed. But they agree that to call some dish ‘tasty’ is to say something positive about that dish, to suggest that someone or other finds, or is disposed to find, the dish pleasing. I suggest instead that ‘tasty’, and indeed... (shrink)

Much recent discussion has focused on the nature of artifacts, particularly on whether they have essences. While it is often held that artifacts are intention-dependent and necessarily have functions, it is equally commonly held, though far less discussed, that artifacts are the result of physical modification of some material objects. This paper argues that the physical modification condition on artifacts is false. First, it formulates the physical modification condition perspicuously for the first time. Second, it offers counterexamples to this condition, (...) both concrete and abstract. Third, it considers, and rejects, two responses to these counterexamples, one which appeals to the distinction between being a K and being used as a K and another which argues that the counterexamples are merely of functional, not artifactual, kinds. Finally, it considers, and rejects, a more general objection that appropriation makes artifact creation too easy. As a consequence, artifacts can be created by appropriating pre-existing objects and it sketches some success conditions for such appropriation. (shrink)

The following bare-bones story introduces the idea of a cumulative hierarchy of pure sets: 'Sets are arranged in stages. Every set is found at some stage. At any stage S: for any sets found before S, we find a set whose members are exactly those sets. We find nothing else at S.' Surprisingly, this story already guarantees that the sets are arranged in well-ordered levels, and suffices for quasi-categoricity. I show this by presenting Level Theory, a simplification of set theories (...) due to Scott, Montague, Derrick, and Potter. (shrink)

Desires move us to action, give us urges, incline us to joy at their satisfaction, and incline us to sorrow at their frustration. Naturalistic work on desire has focused on distinguishing which of these phenomena are part of the nature of desire, and which are merely normal consequences of desiring. Three main answers have been proposed. The first holds that the central necessary fact about desires is that they lead to action. The second makes pleasure the essence of desire. And (...) the third holds that the central necessary fact about desires is that they open us to reward-based learning. (shrink)

Some philosophers have argued recently that introspective evidence provides direct support for an intentionalist theory of visual experience. An intentionalist theory of visual experience treats experience as an intentional state, a state with an intentional content. (I shall use the word ’state’ in a general way, for any kind of mental phenomenon, and here I shall not distinguish states proper from events, though the distinction is important.) Intentionalist theories characteristically say that the phenomenal character of an experience, what it is (...) like to have the experience, is exhausted by its intentional content. Visual experience, and on some views sense-experience generally, does not involve the awareness of ’qualia’, intrinsic, non-intentional features of the experience. According to Gilbert Harman and Michael Tye, support for this view comes from introspecting on experience. Tye describes his ’argument from introspection’ as follows: Standing on the beach in Santa Barbara a couple of summers ago on a bright sunny day, I found myself transfixed by the intense blue of the Pacific Ocean. Was I not here delighting in the phenomenal aspects of my visual experience? And if I was, doesn’t this show that there are visual qualia? I am not convinced. It seems to me that what I found so pleasing in the above instance, what I was focusing on, as it were, were a certain shade and intensity of the colour blue. I experienced blue as a property of the ocean not as a property of my experience. My experience itself certainly wasn’t blue. Rather, it was an experience which represented the ocean as blue. What I was really delighting in, then, were specific aspects of the content of the experience. Tye goes on to suggest that this might have been the sort of thing Moore meant when he said that the sensation of blue is ’diaphanous’, and glosses this as follows: When one tries to focus on it in introspection one cannot help but see right through it so that what one actually ends up attending to is the real colour blue. 1An early version of this paper was presented at the conference, Mental Phenomena III in Dubrovnik, Croatia.. (shrink)

We have various everyday measures for identifying the presence of consciousness, such as the capacity for verbal report and the intentional control of behavior. However, there are many contexts in which these measures are difficult to apply, and even when they can be applied one might have doubts as to their validity in determining the presence/absence of consciousness. Everyday measures for identifying consciousness are particularly problematic when it comes to ‘challenging cases’—human infants, people with brain damage, nonhuman animals, and AI (...) systems. There is a pressing need to identify measures of consciousness that can be applied to challenging cases. This paper explores one of the most promising strategies for identifying and validating such measures—the natural-kind strategy. The paper is in two broad parts. Part I introduces the natural-kind strategy, and contrasts it with other influential approaches in the field. Part II considers a number of objections to the approach, arguing that none succeeds. (shrink)

An influential idea in the epistemology of testimony is that people often acquire justified beliefs through testimony, in contexts too informationally poor for the justification to be evidential. This has been described as the Scarcity of Information Objection (SIO). It is an objection to the reductive thesis that the acceptance of testimony is justified by evidence of general kinds not unique to testimony. SIO hinges on examples intended to show clearly that testimonial justification arises in low-information contexts; I argue that (...) the common examples show no such thing. There is a great deal of information available in testimonial contexts, including in the examples alleged to show otherwise – enough information to render SIO implausible. Purported SIO examples tend to give a wrong impression about the informational richness of testimonial contexts, I argue, due to the lack of detail in which they are presented. (shrink)

Cognitive neuroscientists frequently talk about the brain representing the world. Some philosophers claim that this is a confusion. This paper argues that there is no confusion, and outlines one thing that might mean, using the notion of a model derived from the philosophy of science. This description is then extended to make apply to propositional attitude attributions. A number of problems about propositional attitude attributions can be solved or dissolved by treating propositional attitudes as models.

Is consciousness multisensory? Obviously it is multisensory in certain ways. Human beings typically possess the capacity to have experiences in at least the five familiar sensory modalities, and quite possibly in a number of other less commonly recognised modalities as well. But there are other respects in which it is far from obvious that consciousness is multisensory. This chapter is concerned with one such respect. Οur concern here is with whether consciousness contains experiences associated with distinct modalities at the same (...) time. We will describe those who endorse a positive answer to this question as endorsing a multisensory view (MSV) of the structure of consciousness, and those who endorse a negative answer to this question as having a unisensory view (USV) of the structure of consciousness. (shrink)

In his 1996 paper Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem, Francisco Varela called for a union of Husserlian phenomenology and cognitive science. Varela''s call hasn''t gone unanswered, and recent years have seen the development of a small but growing literature intent on exploring the interface between phenomenology and cognitive science. But despite these developments, there is still some obscurity about what exactly neurophenomenology is. What are neurophenomenologists trying to do, and how are they trying to do it? To (...) what extent is neurophenomenology a distinctive and unified research programme? In this paper I attempt to shed some light on these questions. (shrink)

The on-going debate over the ‘admissible contents of perceptual experience’ concerns the range of properties that human beings are directly acquainted with in perceptual experience. Regarding vision, it is relatively uncontroversial that the following properties can figure in the contents of visual experience: colour, shape, illumination, spatial relations, motion, and texture. The controversy begins when we ask whether any properties besides these figure in visual experience. We argue that ‘ensemble properties’ should be added to the list of visually admissible properties. (...) Ensemble properties are features that belong to a set of perceptible objects as a whole as opposed to the individuals that constitute that set. They include such features as the mean size of an array of shapes or the average emotional expression of an array of faces. Recent work in vision science has yielded compelling evidence that the visual system routinely encodes such properties. We argue that epistemological considerations provide strong reasons to think that these properties figure in visual experience. Judgements about ensemble properties are immediately warranted by our perceptual experience, and the only plausible way that a perceptual experience could confer this warrant is if it confers awareness of ensemble properties. (shrink)

A central debate in the philosophy of perception concerns the range of properties that can be represented in perceptual experience. Are the contents of perceptual experience restricted to ‘low-level’ properties such as location, shape and texture, or can ‘high-level’ properties such as being a tomato, being a pine tree or being a watch also be represented in perceptual experience? This paper explores the bearing of gist perception on the admissible contents debate, arguing that it provides qualified support for the claim (...) that certain kinds of high-level properties—such as being a natural scene —can be perceptually represented. (shrink)

Richard Healey argues that the Aharonov- Bohm effect demands the recognition of either nonlocal or nonseparable physics in much the way that violations of Bell's inequality do. A careful examination of the effect and the arguments, though, shows that Healey's interpretation of the Aharonov- Bohm effect depends critically on his interpretation of gauge theories, and that the analogy with violations of Bell's inequalities fails.

Although worship has a pivotal place in religious thought and practice, philosophers of religion have had remarkably little to say about it. In this paper we examine some of the many questions surrounding the notion of worship, focusing on the claim that human beings have obligations to worship God. We explore a number of attempts to ground our supposed duty to worship God, and argue that each is problematic. We conclude by examining the implications of this result, and suggest that (...) it might be taken to provide an argument against God's existence, since theists generally regard it is a necessary truth that we ought to worship God. (shrink)

The term disinformation is generally used to refer to information that is false and harmful, by contrast with misinformation (false but harmless) and malinformation (harmful but true); disinformation is also generally understood to involve coordination and to be intentionally false and/or harmful. However, particular studies rarely apply all these criteria when discussing cases. Doing so would involve applying at least three distinct problem framings: an epistemic framing to detect that a proposition in circulation is false, a behavioural framing to detect (...) the coordinated efforts at communicating that proposition, and a security framing to identify threats or risks of harm attendant on widespread belief in the proposition. As for the question of intentionality, different kinds of clues can be picked up within each framing, although none alone is likely to be conclusive. Yet particular studies tend to centre on or prioritise a single framing. Many today aim to make policy recommendations about combatting disinformation, and they prioritise security concerns over the demands of epistemic diligence. This carries a real risk of disinformation research being ‘weaponised’ against inconvenient truths. Against combative approaches, this article argues for a critical approach which recognizes the importance of epistemic diligence and transparency about normative assumptions. (shrink)

Consciousness has a number of puzzling features. One such feature is its unity: the experiences and other conscious states that one has at a particular time seem to occur together in a certain way. I am currently enjoying visual experiences of my computer screen, auditory experiences of bird-song, olfactory experiences of coffee, and tactile experiences of feeling the ground beneath my feet. Conjoined with these perceptual experiences are proprioceptive experiences, experiences of agency, affective and emotional experiences, and conscious thoughts of (...) various kinds. These experiences are unified in a variety of ways, but the kind of unity that I’m interested in here concerns their phenomenal character. Take just two of these experiences: the sound of bird-song and the smell of coffee. There is something it is like to have the auditory experience, there is something it is like to have the olfactory experience, and there is something it is like to have both the auditory and olfactory experiences together. These two experiences occur as parts or components or aspects of a larger, more complex experience. And what holds of these two experiences seems to hold – at least in normal contexts – of all of one’s simultaneous experiences: they seem to be subsumed by a single, maximal experience.2 We could think of this maximal experience as an experiential perspective on the world. What it is like to be me right now is (or involves) an extremely complex conscious state that subsumes the various simpler experiences that I outlined above (seeing my computer screen, hearing bird-song, smelling coffee, and so on). I will follow recent literature in using the term “co-consciousness” for the relation that a set of conscious states bear to each other when they have a complex phenomenology (Bayne and Chalmers 2003; Dainton 2000; Hurley 1998; Lockwood 1989). (shrink)

People are often inaccurate in their predictions of performance on a variety of cognitive tasks. We tested whether receptivity to bullshit – the tendency to perceive meaningless statements as profound – would relate to the accuracy of metacognitive judgments on several problem-solving tasks. Individuals who were highly receptive to bullshit were less accurate in their predictions of performance on creative problem-solving tasks, but not on verbal analogy or recall tasks. Further, individuals with high BS receptivity were less able to discriminate (...) between solvable and unsolvable problems when making metacognitive judgments. These findings support the possibility that the tendency to perceive semantic connections where none exist, as indicated by high bullshit receptivity, may lead to inaccurate predictions of performance on tasks that require noticing and utilizing distant semantic connections. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In “Temporal Passage and the ‘No Alternate Possibilities Argument’”, Jonathan Tallant takes up one objection based on the observation that if time passes at the rate of one second per second there is no other possible rate at which it could pass. The argument rests on the premise that if time passes at some rate then it could have passed at some other rate. Since no alternative rate seems to be coherent, one concludes that time cannot pass at all. (...) The obvious weak point of the NAP is the premise itself. (shrink)

Any empirical physical theory must have implications for observable events at the scale of everyday life, even though that scale plays no special role in the basic ontology of the theory itself. The fundamental physical scales are microscopic for the “local beables” of the theory and universal scale for the non-local beables. This situation creates strong demands for any precise quantum theory. This paper examines those constraints, and illustrates some ways in which they can be met.

On a common view of scenario-based sceptical arguments sceptical scenarios are error-possibilities, i.e. their point is to introduce the possibility of having only false beliefs. However, global error is impossible for purely logical/conceptual reasons: Even if one’s beliefs are consistent, the negations of one’s beliefs need not be consistent as well. My paper deals with the question of what the consequences of this result are. Two attempts at repairing scenario-based sceptical arguments within the framework of understanding sceptical scenarios as error-possibilities (...) are found wanting. Instead, what should be given up is the assumption that sceptical scenarios are error-possibilities. What is thought-provoking about the scenario of the brain in a vat is not that none of its empirical beliefs are true, but that all of its empirical beliefs fall short of knowledge at the same time. Hence, sceptical scenarios are not error-possibilities, but ignorance possibilities. If this is so, both the closure argument and the underdetermination argument commit a subtle mistake and should be replaced by slightly different arguments. The principle of excluded ignorance-possibilities turns out to be an epistemological principle that is faithful to scepticism’s tenets without misinterpreting sceptical scenarios as error-possibilities. (shrink)

What does it matter if the climate changes? This kind of question does not admit of a scientific answer. Natural science can tell us what some of its biophysical effects are likely to be; social scientists can estimate what consequences such effects could have for human lives and livelihoods. But how should we respond? The question is, at root, about how we think we should live—and different people have myriad different ideas about this. The distinctive task of ethics is to (...) bring some clarity and order to these ideas. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Aidan Lyon and Mark Colyvan have proposed an explanation of the structure of the bee's honeycomb based on the mathematical Honeycomb Conjecture. This explanation has instantly become one of the standard examples in the philosophical debate on mathematical explanations of physical phenomena. In this critical note, I argue that the explanation is not scientifically adequate. The reason for this is that the explanation fails to do justice to the essentially three-dimensional structure of the bee's honeycomb.

In a lifelog, data from various sources are combined to form a record from which one can retrieve information about oneself and the environment in which one is situated. It could be considered similar to an automated biography. Lifelog technology is still at an early stage of development. However, the history of lifelogs so far shows a clear academic, corporate and governmental interest. Therefore, a thorough inquiry into the ethical aspects of lifelogs could prove beneficial to the responsible development of (...) this field. This article maps the main ethically relevant challenges and opportunities associated with the further development of lifelog technologies as discussed in the scholarly literature. By identifying challenges and opportunities in the current debate, we were able to identify other challenges and opportunities left unmentioned. Some of these challenges are partly explained by a blind spot in the current debate. Whilst the current debate focuses mainly on lifelogs held by individuals, lifelogs held by governmental institutions and corporations pose idiosyncratic ethical concerns as well. We have provided a brief taxonomy of lifelog technology to show the variety in uses for lifelogs. In addition, we provided a general approach to alleviate the ethical challenges identified in the critical analysis. (shrink)

Unlike surrogacy and cloning, reproduction via gamete donation is widely assumed to be morally unproblematic. Recently, a number of authors have argued that this assumption is mistaken: gamete donors, they claim, have parental responsibilities that they typically treat too lightly. In this paper I argue that the ‘parental neglect’ case against gamete donation fails. I begin by examining and rejecting the view that gamete donors have parental responsibilities; I claim that none of the current accounts of parenthood provides good reason (...) for ascribing parenthood to gamete donors. I then argue that even if gamete donors do have parental responsibilities for ‘their’ children, it is not clear that they treat these responsibilities too lightly. I conclude the paper by examining the wider question of just what kind of responsibilities gamete donors might have towards the children that they have a role in creating. (shrink)

While the challenges workers face in the gig economy are now well-known, reflections on emancipatory solutions in political philosophy are still underdeveloped. Some have pleaded for enhancing workers' bargaining power through unionisation; others for enhancing exit options in the labour market. Both strategies, however, come with unin-tended side-effects and do not exhaust the full potential for worker self-government present in the digital gig economy. Using the republican theory of freedom as non-domination , I argue that G.D.H. Cole's 20th-century defence of (...) guild socialism offers a promising avenue for enhancing worker autonomy in the gig economy. Platform companies rely on relational and structural domination to undermine worker autonomy, but Cole's guild socialism was specifically designed to enhance autonomy in the workplace. Following Cole's advice today would amount to a defence of worker-owned cooperative platforms. By putting workers in control of platform design and governance, cooperative platforms create new opportunities for worker autonomy. However, platform coopera-tivism faces serious challenges if it plans on becoming a realistic alternative to the traditional gig economy. (shrink)

The UK-based deliberations that led up to the legalisation of two new ‘mitochondrial donation’ techniques in 2015, and which continued after that time as regulatory details were determined, featured a division of advisory labour that is common when decisions are made about new technologies. An expert panel was convened by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, charged with assessing the scientific and technical aspects of these techniques. Meanwhile, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics addressed the ethical issues. While this division of (...) labour was undertaken in the name of thoroughness, I argue here that it can have the unintended consequence that hybrid questions that simultaneously involve ethical and technical aspects—especially questions about where to set evidential thresholds for the acceptance of new technology—do not receive enough attention. (shrink)

Thomas Morris and Richard Swinburne have recently defended what they call the ‘two-minds’ model of the Incarnation. This model, which I refer to as the ‘inclusion model’ or ‘inclusionism’, claims that Christ had two consciousnesses, a human and a divine consciousness, with the former consciousness contained within the latter one. I begin by exploring the motivation for, and structure of, inclusionism. I then develop a variety of objections to it: some philosophical, others theological in nature. Finally, I sketch a variant (...) of inclusionism which I call ‘restricted inclusionism’ (RI); RI can evade many, but not all, of the objections to standard inclusionism. (shrink)

The present paper provides an analysis of Euler’s solutions to the Königsberg bridges problem. Euler proposes three different solutions to the problem, addressing their strengths and weaknesses along the way. I put the analysis of Euler’s paper to work in the philosophical discussion on mathematical explanations. I propose that the key ingredient to a good explanation is the degree to which it provides relevant information. Providing relevant information is based on knowledge of the structure in question, graphs in the present (...) case. I also propose computational complexity and logical strength as measures of relevant information. (shrink)

This article describes the conditions under which it is possible for neoliberalism to render itself invisible to the economic field that created it, allowing that field to define the discourse as a paranoid construction of the left. In addressing the issue, the text aims to extend the reach of Bourdieu’s field theory by infusing it with aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis. This construction facilitates the use of the example of neoliberal economics to suggest wider principles of field functionality. It is suggested (...) that the main purpose of any field is not the generation of new knowledge but the preservation of its doxa, which is protected by a series of self-legitimation strategies. In the example of neoliberal economics, the strength of these systems has allowed that field to close its eyes to the catastrophic failure of its knowledge. (shrink)

In the beginning God created the elementary particles. Bosons, electrons, protons, quarks and the rest he created them. And they were without form and void, so God created the fundamental laws of physics - the laws of mechanics, electromagnetism, thermodynamics and the rest - and assigned values to the fundamental physical constants: the gravitational constant, the speed of light, Planck's constant and the rest. God then set the Universe in motion. And God looked at what he had done, and saw (...) that it was physicalistically acceptable. (shrink)

In the early modern period one can find unity of consciousness arguments in the writings of Rene Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, and in the recent literature they have been defended by David Barnett, William Hasker, and Richard Swinburne (among others). Descartes's unity of consciousness argument for dualism is to be found in the sixth of his Meditations on First Philosophy. Descartes claims that his unity of consciousness argument was itself sufficient to establish substance dualism. Swinburne's central line of argument (...) involves deploying a number of puzzle cases. He argues that our intuitions about these cases can be accommodated only by adopting a “further fact” view of the self, according to which the continued existence of a person over time consists in the continued existence of a mental substance, and “it is metaphysically possible that the substance acquires a totally new body, totally new apparent memories, and character”. (shrink)

I criticize an account of perceptual warrant proposed by [Burge, Tyler. 2003. “Perceptual Entitlement.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (3): 503–548]. Burge contends that a subject's beliefs are entitled only if that subject's perceptual system represents its normal environment in a reliably veridical manner. The normal environment, according to Burge, is the environment in which the contents of the subject's perceptual experiences were fixed. I present a case that shows that the contents of a subject's perceptual experiences can remain fixed (...) while features of its perceptual system relevant to its representational reliability change. This leads to problematic consequences for Burge's view. (shrink)

It is often acknowledged that public policies can constrain people's procreative opportunities, in some cases even infringing their procreative rights. However, a topic that is not often discussed is how the procreative choices of one generation can affect the procreative opportunities of later generations. In this article, we argue that the demographic fact that childbearing above the replacement fertility level is eventually unsustainable supports two constraints on universal procreation rights: a compossibility constraint and an egalitarian constraint. We explore the implications (...) of these two constraints and suggest that there are reasons to think of procreative opportunity as a finite resource that can be distributed more or less equally across generations. We also briefly discuss possible ways of meeting demands of intergenerational justice with respect to procreative opportunity. (shrink)

The context or manner of an utterance can alter or nullify the speech-act that would normally be performed by utterances of that sort. Coercive contexts have this effect on some kinds of seeming assertions: they end up being non-assertoric, and are merely capitulations. An earlier version of this view is clarified, defended, and extended partly in response to a useful critique by Roy Sorensen. I examine some complications that arise regarding resistance to speaking under coercion when ideological or religious commitments (...) are implicated. (shrink)

In "The Disunity of Consciousness," Gerard O'Brien and Jon Opie argue that human consciousness is not synchronically unified. They suggest that the orthodox conception of the unity of consciousness admits of two readings, neither of which they find persuasive. According to them, "a conscious individual does not have a single consciousness, but several distinct phenomenal consciousnesses, at least one for each of the senses, running in parallel." They call this conception of consciousness the _multi-track account. I make three points in (...) reply: (1) O'Brien and Opie's characterization of the orthodox conception of the unity of consciousness is problematic; (2) their arguments in support of the multitrack account are unpersuasive; and (3) the phenomenon of intersensory integration suggests that O'Brien and Opie are wrong to claim that "the only sense in which it is correct to talk of a 'unified' consciousness (...) is that in which the representational contents of the various components coincide.". (shrink)

Craig Callender [2022] provides a novel challenge to the non-arbitrariness principle. His challenge plays an important role in his argument for the rational permissibility of a non-exponential temporal discounting rate. But the challenge is also of wider interest: it raises significant questions about whether we ought to accept the non-arbitrariness principle as a constraint on rational preferences. In this paper, I present two reasons to resist Callender’s challenge. First, I present a reason to reject his claim that the non-arbitrariness principle (...) only targets pure time preferences. Second, I criticize the inference Callender draws from a modest claim to a much stronger claim. The modest claim is that it can be hard to reveal the contents of an agent’s preferences. The stronger claim is that this provides us with a reason to reject a certain kind of normative constraint on rational preferences. I argue that the modest claim doesn’t motivate the stronger claim. The upshot of my two arguments is good news for those sympathetic to the non-arbitrariness principle: Callender’s challenge can be overcome, at least as it currently stands. (shrink)