The counterfeits of this blessed frame -- The true principle of a tender heart -- The proper ingredients of this tenderness of heart -- How God brings about this frame of heart -- The evidences and tokens of a tender conscience -- How this holy frame evidences itself to God -- Why this frame of heart finds acceptance with God -- The application -- The conclusion -- The necessity and advantage of an early victory over Satan -- The excellency of (...) the Protestant faith -- Conversion to God -- Cleaving to Christ -- Consolation in Christ. (shrink)

On method, discursive logics, and epistemology -- Questions of medieval discursive practice -- From the middle ages to the (w)hole of Utopia -- Kepler, his Dream, and the analysis and pattern of thought -- Campanella and Bacon: concerning structures of mind -- The masculine birth of time -- Cyrano and the experimental discourse -- The myth of sun and moon -- The difficulty of writing -- Crusoe rights his story -- Gulliver's critique of Euclid -- Emergence, consolidation, and dominance of (...) a discourse. (shrink)

Until recently, many philosophers took Causal Decision Theory to be more successful than its rival, Evidential Decision Theory. Things have changed, however, with a renewed concern that cases involving an extreme form of decision instability are counterexamples to CDT :392–403, 1984; Egan in Philos Rev 116:93–114, 2007). Most prominent among those cases of extreme decision instability is the Psychopath Button, due to Andy Egan; in that case, CDT recommends a seemingly absurd act that almost certainly results in your death. This (...) renewed attention to decision instability has spurned an array of modifications to and rejections of CDT. I argue, however, that the Psychopath Button and its ilk are no counterexamples to CDT. That is, given the causalist’s commitments in Newcomb Problems, they already have the tools to justify CDT’s verdict in Egan-style cases of extreme decision instability. I first argue that there is no reason to think the Psychopath Button is a counterexample to CDT; in particular, many philosophers have placed too much weight on pre-theoretic intuition in Egan-cases, and apart from pre-theoretic intuition, arguments against CDT in cases of extreme decision instability are flawed. My second claim is that the causalist can provide good reasons for following CDT in cases of extreme decision instability. I present a new case, the Two Button Defense, that highlights precisely why the causalist can reasonably follow CDT in even the Psychopath Button. CDT therefore stands as a viable decision theory, without need for modification, restriction, or rejection. (shrink)

What is the epistemological structure of situations where many small risks amount to a large one? Lottery and preface paradoxes and puzzles about quantum-mechanical blips threaten the idea that competent deduction is a way of extending our knowledge. Seemingly, everyday knowledge involves small risks, and competently deducing the conjunction of many such truths from them yields a conclusion too risky to constitute knowledge. But the dilemma between scepticism and abandoning MPC is false. In extreme cases, objectively improbable truths are known. (...) Safety is modal, not probabilistic, in structure, with closure and factiveness conditions. It is modelled using closeness of worlds. Safety is analogous to knowledge. It suggests an interpretation of possible worlds semantics for epistemic logic. To avoid logical omniscience, a relation of epistemic counterparthood between formulas is introduced. This supports a safety conception of knowledge and formalizes how extending knowledge by deduction depends on logical competence. (shrink)

The five commentators on my paper ‘Gettier Cases in Epistemic Logic’ (GCEL) demonstrate how fruitful the topic can be. Especially in Brian Weatherson's contribution, and to some extent in those of Jennifer Nagel and Jeremy Goodman, much of the material constitutes valuable development and refinement of ideas in GCEL, rather than criticism. In response, I draw some threads together, and answer objections, mainly those in the papers by Stewart Cohen and Juan Comesaña and by Goodman.

The paper criticizes the truthmaker principle that every truth is made true by something. If we interpret ‘something’ as quantifying into sentence position, we can interpret the principle as a harmless logical truth, but that is not what advocates of the principle intend. They interpret ‘something’ as quantifying into name position, and the principle as requiring the existence of truthmaking individuals. The paper argues that we have no reason to believe the principle on this interpretation. Moreover, the converse Barcan formula (...) is inconsistent with the existence of truthmaking individuals for contingent truths. Considerations about our ability to count possible truthmaking individuals are used to argue that we should prefer the converse Barcan formula. (shrink)

When I take off my glasses, the world looks blurred. When I put them back on, it looks sharpedged. I do not think that the world really was blurred; I know that what changed was my relation to the distant physical objects ahead, not those objects themselves. I am more inclined to believe that the world really is and was sharp-edged. Is that belief any more reasonable than the belief that the world really is and was blurred? I see more (...) accurately with my glasses on than off, so visual appearances when they are on have some cognitive priority over visual appearances when they are off. If I must choose which kind of visual appearance to take at face value, I will choose the sharp-edged look. But what should I think when I see a mist, which looks very blurred however well I am seeing? Indeed, why choose to take any of the looks at face value? Why not regard all the choices as illegitimate projections of ways of seeing the world onto the world itself? (shrink)

This paper is a tribute to Delia Graff Fara. It extends her work on failures of meta-rules for validity as truth-preservation under a supervaluationist identification of truth with supertruth. She showed that such failures occur even in languages without special vagueness-related operators, for standards of deductive reasoning as materially rather than purely logically good, depending on a context-dependent background. This paper extends her argument to: quantifier meta-rules like existential elimination; ambiguity; deliberately vague standard mathematical notation. Supervaluationist attempts to qualify the (...) meta-rules impose unreasonable cognitive demands on reasoning and underestimate her challenge. (shrink)

This response takes up some of the editorial comments for further clarification and critique. My point has been that ‘politics’ is as much a modern invention as ‘religion’. We cannot understand the rhetorical function of ‘religion’ if we treat it as a stand-alone category referring to some supposed object or objects in the world. I am especially concerned here to keep in view the oscillating binary categories of which ‘religion' forms one parasitic half, and ‘politics' or ‘science' the other. This (...) critical problematization of the liberal categories of the understanding opposes and challenges their current institutionalization in the liberal academy, where they now serve the Neoliberal agenda and the reproduction of the dominant, globalising imperatives of private property. (shrink)

We show that any partial order with a Σ3 enumeration can be effectively embedded into any partial order obtained by imposing a strong reducibility such as ≤tt on the c. e. sets. As a consequence, we obtain that the partial orders that result from imposing a strong reducibility on the sets in a level of the Ershov hiearchy below ω + 1 are co-embeddable.

We report the results of an experiment designed to determine the effects of psychological proximity—proxied by awareness of pain and friendship—on moral reasoning. Our study tests the hypotheses that a moral agent’s emphasis on justice decreases with proximity, while his/her emphasis on care increases. Our study further examines how personality, gender, and managerial status affect the importance of care and justice in moral reasoning. We find support for the main hypotheses. We also find that care should be split into two (...) components, one related to protection and the other to the preservation of relationships. Although gender does not affect moral reasoning directly, we find that it does so indirectly via personality, controlling for age, professional status, and professional background. We do not find a significant effect of managerial status on ethics of justice, but do find that holding a managerial position has a negative impact on ethics of care. Regarding personality, we detect significant positive effects of conscientiousness on ethics of justice and of neuroticism on ethics of care. (shrink)

This paper is a response to “Inferential Evidence” by Jeffrey Dunn, in which he argues that my account of evidence is internally inconsistent, and that any form of Bayesian epistemology excludes evidence gained by inductive inference (which my account allows). In response, I show how the alleged inconsistency dissolves once the process of gaining evidence by inductive inference is fully articulated into the relevant stages, with due attention to the potential role of recognitional capacities.

My agreement with Hilary Kornblith goes deeper than any remaining disagreement. We agree that armchair methods have a legitimate place in philosophy, for instance in logic. We agree that appeals to experimental data also have a legitimate place in philosophy, for instance in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of time, and that those branches study mind and time themselves, not just our concepts of them. We agree that the proper balance between armchair and other methods cannot be fully (...) determined in advance, but should to some extent emerge from the future development of the discipline. Nevertheless, as Kornblith says, we are not placing quite the same bets on what that balance will be. I expect armchair methods to play legitimately a more dominant role in future philosophy than he expects them to – of course, such differences in emphasis can result in widening divergence in practice.The Philosophy of Philosophy welcomes a significant degree of methodological diversity short of ‘Anything goes’, for often the best long-run way to evaluate a philosophical method is for many able philosophers to use it for many years . That includes methods that make heavy use of experimental data. The book is not an attack on experimental philosophy, in which I have even dabbled myself . I could hardly object to Kornblith's suggestion that experimental psychology should contribute to epistemology, since in discussing the epistemology of logic I appeal to experimental data from the psychology of reasoning . Indeed, it would be a grave failure of philosophy in its current state of development if it neglected to explore the philosophical applications of experimental data far more extensively than has hitherto been done. It is work that needs doing and surely will be done, although I do not expect to …. (shrink)

Blend classically beautiful illustrations with the wisdom of the ages to awaken your inner being as never before. Read this collection from cover to cover, and then concentrate on applying the different thoughts on your daily life. Start with first light, going with the flow, detachment, and harmony. Turn to a quote each day as a focus for meditations like these: Being a good listener spares one the burden of giving advice. Peace and knowledge will be yours!

Michael Oakeshott reflected on the character of religious experience in various writings throughout his life. In Experience and Its Modes (1933) he analyzed science as a distinctive "mode," or account of experience as a whole, identifying those assumptions necessary for science to achieve its coherent account of experience in contrast to other modes of experience whose quests for coherence depend on different assumptions. Religious experience, he thought, was integral to the practical mode. The latter experiences the world as interminable tension (...) between what is and what ought to be. The question, Is there a conflict between science and religion? is, in Oakeshott's approach, the question, Is there a conflict between the scientific mode of experience and the practical mode? Insofar as we tend to treat every question as a practical one, these questions seem to make sense. But Oakeshott's analysis leads to the view that scientific experience and religious experience are categorically different accounts of experience abstracted from the whole of experience. They are voices of experience that may speak to each other, but they are not ordered hierarchically. Nor can either absorb the other without insoluble contradictions. (shrink)

The spectacular success of Empire and Multitude has brought Antonio Negri's writing to a new and wider audience. Negri'as work is singular in its depth and expression. It can be difficult to grasp the complexity of his ideas as they are rooted in the history of philosophy. This book offers an introduction to his thinking and is ideal for readers who want to come to grips with his key themes. Contributors include Pierre Macherey, Daniel Bensai;d, Charles Wolfe, Alex Callinicos, Miguel (...) Vatter, Jason Read, Alberto Toscano, Mamut Mutman, Ted Stolze, and Judith Revel. Written with dynamism and originality, the book will appeal to anyone interested in the evolution of Negri's thought, and especially to students of political philosophy, international studies, and literary theory. This book is the sequel to The Philosophy of Antonio Negri, Volume One: Resistance in Practice , but can be read entirely independently. (shrink)

Spinoza is in a potentially untenable position. On the one hand, he argues that those who claim to see harmony in the universe are badly mistaken; they are falsely imagining rather than properly reasoning. On the other hand, harmony is positively discussed in his ethical writings and even serves as the basis for his vision of society. How can both be maintained? In this chapter l argue that this prima facie conflict between the two treatments of harmony is resolvable, but (...) that in resolving it, a new set of questions for Spinoza is raised. In doing so, I explore how harmony was used in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, which will help us better situate Spinoza. In doing so, we can recognize new possibilities and new connections between Spinoza and philosophers who are not often discussed in connection with him. (shrink)

The marketing of unproven direct-to-consumer stem cell interventions is becoming widespread in Canada. There is little evidence supporting their use and they have been associated with a range of harms. Canada has been slower to act against clinics offering these interventions than other jurisdictions, including the United States. Here, we outline the regulatory and policy tools available in Canada to address this growing problem. Health Canada’s regulations governing cell therapies are complex, but recent statements make it clear that Health Canada (...) believes it has jurisdiction over many of the currently marketed stem cell interventions. Still, further regulatory clarity is needed from Health Canada, as are increased directed enforcement efforts on interventions that fall within their scope. The Competition Bureau, via the Competition Act, prohibits advertisers from making materially false or misleading promotional representations. The Competition Bureau could collaborate with the scientific community to analyze the claims of existing clinics in Canada, and impose sanctions upon those who breach the established standard. Professional regulators, including provincial colleges of physicians and surgeons, have considerable power over what products and services their members can offer. Every college of physicians in Canada requires, via policy and codes of ethics, that doctors maintain evidence-based practices. This requirement is incompatible with offering many unproven stem cell interventions. Litigation may be another tool, including the use of fraud, misrepresentation and/or negligence claims for failing to meet the required standard of care. Finally, political pressure on federal and provincial lawmakers could encourage changes to marketing, cell therapy and professional regulations that would allow a more comprehensive response. In sum, there are many existing tools that can be used to protect the public from unproven stem cell interventions. Increased bureaucratic will and grassroots efforts are needed in order to effect a positive policy response. (shrink)

This critical review focuses on the problems of modernity as outlined by Žižek and Milbank in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? It argues that both Žižek’s nihil-a-theology and Milbank’s radical orthodoxy cannot provide satisfactory resolutions to the problem of the universal and the particular in both its epistemic and ethical inflections on account of being unable to make intelligible the deeper problem of order and chaos. Both authors generate a flat actualist ontology characteristic of the epistemic fallacy, and (...) hold to some form of either perspectival realism or superidealism. It is argued that it is only by affirming something like a dialectical critical realist ontology that these problems are able to be addressed while maintaining the intelligibility of scientific understanding, paradox, progress, the universal and the particular and our ethical relation to the Other. (shrink)

“The gift of bread from my mouth” serves as a byword for “Levinasian ethics,” the precise meaning of which is often taken for granted. It is not at all clear that a prescriptive ethics could ever be derived from these passages; it is also a hyperbole for responsibility. Discussion of this figure almost universally ignores the parallel, and explicitly ethical, discussion of Isaiah 58, where the breaking of bread represents the perplexity of hunger, the rejection of oppression, and the proximity (...) of God. The breaking of bread is not a self-standing account of ethics but is paralleled by the ethics of the broken fast. The “gift of bread from my mouth” helps to explain the repeated references to fasting throughout Levinas’s authorship. The varying figures of the broken bread frame an ontological drama: sensibility, separation, proximity, and diachrony—and presses the sense that possession and the ego are ethically futile, as the alterity of hunger is proximal or “at the core” of the subject. (shrink)

The main result of this paper is that KT is closed under a cancellation principle. This result extends to KTG1, but it does not extend to modal systems associated with the provability interpretation of L, such as KW and KT4Grz. Following Williamson, these results are applied to philosophical concerns about the proper form for theories of meaning, via the interpretation of L as some kind of veriflability. The cancellation principle can then be read as saying that verifilability conditions and falsiflability (...) conditions jointly determine truth conditions. (shrink)

I reply to critical discussions by Majda Trobok, Nenad Smokrović, and Nenad Miščević on theses and arguments from my book The Philosophy of Philosophy. I take issue with them on matters such as the following. Should philosophical questions apparently about the world be taken at face value, or are they implicitly metalinguistic or metaconceptual? Are there ‘epistemologically analytic’ sentences that one can understand only if one has a disposition to accept them? Can ‘philosophical intuitions’ be explained as the products of (...) separable domain-specific competencies? (shrink)

In Merleau-Ponty’s later work we find certain themes and conceptions that show an overlap with the theory and above all the practice of mindfulness. These include the reversibility of the flesh, the richness of things in the perceived world that draw us towards them, and the emphasis on painting as that medium that brings this world of perception to light, the ways in which we perceive it and better ways of perceiving it. In this paper I argue that many of (...) these themes are also found in his earlier work. In Phenomenology of Perception especially he characterises the essentially embodied subject as at once an essentially projective existent. It does not live in a world of proximate opportunities and threats, but is situated in the further and virtual future, or rather futures. This is due to productive imagination and the skilled and schematised body with its motor intentional schematisations of postures and perceptual fields. Yet Merleau-Ponty does not see projection in exclusively imaginative and volitional terms, that is, as the choosing of authentic and self-transformative courses of action. Many of our projects are solicited by the things themselves as determinable indeterminacies that draw us closer, not to command them, but to appreciate their singularities or perceptual styles. In his descriptions of living amongst and towards the things he proffers a kind of mindfulness that evokes much of the magic of childhood and that enjoins a more centred existence in adulthood. (shrink)

Should parents be able to select the sexual orientation of their children, if that were possible through prenatal interventions? _Ethics, Sexual Orientation, and Choices about Children_ reviews the history of this debate which started in the 1970s and has been invigorated by scientific reports about the origins of sexual orientation. This book describes the debate and offers an evaluation of key issues in parental rights, children's rights, and family welfare.

Views of fire in the contemporary physical sciences arguably accord with Heraclitus’ proposal that ‘all things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.’ Fire is a media, as John Durham Peters has stated, a species of transformative biochemical reactions between the flammable gases found in air, such as oxygen, and those found in fuels, such as plants. Inspired by an ignition source, these materials react and transform themselves and their (...) surrounds into light and heat energy, carbon dioxide, water vapour, char and much else besides. Fire is conjunctural, durational and transformative. Fire is a dialectician, at once consuming living and dead organic matter and providing both the space and ingredients for new and renewed organic life. In this article, we draw upon our experience of combustible contexts—Australia, Canada and the Philippines—to consider the diverse ways in which fire is today framed as a social problem, an ecological process, an ancient tool, a natural disaster, a source of economic wealth and much more. In this way, we seek to explore the value and limits of ‘elemental thinking’ in relation to the planetary predicaments described by ‘the Anthropocene’. (shrink)

The dissertation examines Davidson and Heidegger's rejections of correspondence truth, as well as their claims that truth is theoretically primitive. Truth is primitive in the sense that it cannot be reduced to, nor defined in terms of, some other more theoretically basic concepts, such as those offered in correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic accounts of truth. The fact that truth cannot be defined in terms of more basic concepts does not mean that there are not important and meaningful things to say (...) about truth; Davidson and Heidegger's agreement that there is more to say about truth distinguishes them from minimalist approaches to truth. Davidson and Heidegger make explicit truth's conceptual relationship to other important areas of inquiry such as language, subjectivity, and ontology. The dissertation claims that the two philosophers agree, despite radically different background texts and methodologies, on the fundamental relationship between self, other, and world. The dissertation moves beyond mere comparison by showing that Davidson's own position commits him to a Heideggerian treatment of truth, or something like it. I argue that understanding the similarities and supplemental arguments offered by each philosopher leads to a better overall account of truth than that offered by each philosopher individually. Moreover, I argue that although Heidegger and Davidson offer primarily transcendental arguments, their theories can accommodate naturalistic theories of language and concept acquisition. (shrink)

While a considerable amount of effort has been expended in an attempt to understand Ludwig Wittgenstein’s enigmatic comments about silence and the mystical at the end of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , very little attention has been paid to the implications of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations for the study of ineffability. This paper first argues that, since Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations problematizes private language, emphasizes the description of actual language use, and recognizes the rule-governed nature of language, it contains significant implications for the study (...) of ineffability, inviting investigations of the ways in which putative ineffability actually gets expressed rather than speculation about whether there are ineffable objects or experiences. It then undertakes such an investigation in the Dionysian corpus, finding therein not only grammatical techniques that express inexpressibility at the referential, illocutionary, and semiotic levels but also rules that underlie and govern these techniques. Finally, it shows how a recovery of the ordinary uses of ineffability might help dissolve the metaphysical problem of ineffability, thereby bringing ineffability back to the everyday. (shrink)

Roy Sorensen's criticism of my use of margin for error principles to explain ignorance in borderline cases fails because it misidentifies the relevant margin for error principles. His alternative explanation in terms of truth-maker gaps is briefly criticized.

A case in point is Frank Jackson’s talk of “conceptual possibility” and “conceptual necessity.” He writes as if the issue between us is the relative methodological priority for philosophy of conceptual modalities and metaphysical modalities. In addition to the uncritical reliance on conceptual modality, another fallacy is surfacing. Paul Boghossian developed an epistemology of logic based on understanding‐assent links corresponding to fundamental rules of logic. His paradigm was modus ponens: a necessary condition for understanding “if” was supposed to be willingness (...) to assent to inferences by modus ponens involving “if.” Boghossian objects that Simon’s tolerance of assent to gappy statements undermines the presumption that he is assenting to them as true. In Nenad Miscevic paper, such competencies are postulated for the linguistic, spatial‐geometric, mathematical, metaphysical, epistemological, and moral domains. Thus Miscevic auxiliary modularity‐independent characterization offers little help in demarcating a useful category of intuition. (shrink)