Recently, philosophers have turned their attention to the question, not when a given agent is blameworthy for what she does, but when a further agent has the moral standing to blame her for what she does. Philosophers have proposed at least four conditions on having “moral standing”: -/- 1. One’s blame would not be “hypocritical”. 2. One is not oneself “involved in” the target agent’s wrongdoing. 3. One must be warranted in believing that the target is indeed blameworthy for the (...) wrongdoing. 4. The target’s wrongdoing must some of “one’s business”. -/- These conditions are often proposed as both conditions on one and the same thing, and as marking fundamentally different ways of “losing standing.” Here I call these claims into question. First, I claim that conditions (3) and (4) are simply conditions on different things than are conditions (1) and (2). Second, I argue that condition (2) reduces to condition (1): when “involvement” removes someone’s standing to blame, it does so only by indicating something further about that agent, viz., that he or she lacks commitment to the values that condemn the wrongdoer’s action. The result: after we clarify the nature of the non-hypocrisy condition, we will have a unified account of moral standing to blame. Issues also discussed: whether standing can ever be regained, the relationship between standing and our "moral fragility", the difference between mere inconsistency and hypocrisy, and whether a condition of standing might be derived from deeper facts about the "equality of persons". (shrink)

At least since Aristotle’s famous 'sea-battle' passages in On Interpretation 9, some substantial minority of philosophers has been attracted to the doctrine of the open future--the doctrine that future contingent statements are not true. But, prima facie, such views seem inconsistent with the following intuition: if something has happened, then (looking back) it was the case that it would happen. How can it be that, looking forwards, it isn’t true that there will be a sea battle, while also being true (...) that, looking backwards, it was the case that there would be a sea battle? This tension forms, in large part, what might be called the problem of future contingents. A dominant trend in temporal logic and semantic theorizing about future contingents seeks to validate both intuitions. Theorists in this tradition--including some interpretations of Aristotle, but paradigmatically, Thomason (1970), as well as more recent developments in Belnap, et. al (2001) and MacFarlane (2003, 2014)--have argued that the apparent tension between the intuitions is in fact merely apparent. In short, such theorists seek to maintain both of the following two theses: (i) the open future: Future contingents are not true, and (ii) retro-closure: From the fact that something is true, it follows that it was the case that it would be true. It is well-known that reflection on the problem of future contingents has in many ways been inspired by importantly parallel issues regarding divine foreknowledge and indeterminism. In this paper, we take up this perspective, and ask what accepting both the open future and retro-closure predicts about omniscience. When we theorize about a perfect knower, we are theorizing about what an ideal agent ought to believe. Our contention is that there isn’t an acceptable view of ideally rational belief given the assumptions of the open future and retro-closure, and thus this casts doubt on the conjunction of those assumptions. (shrink)

How can anyone be rational in a world where knowledge is limited, time is pressing, and deep thought is often an unattainable luxury? Traditional models of unbounded rationality and optimization in cognitive science, economics, and animal behavior have tended to view decision-makers as possessing supernatural powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and endless time. But understanding decisions in the real world requires a more psychologically plausible notion of bounded rationality. In Simple heuristics that make us smart (Gigerenzer et al. 1999), we (...) explore fast and frugal heuristics – simple rules in the mind's adaptive toolbox for making decisions with realistic mental resources. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices quickly and with a minimum of information by exploiting the way that information is structured in particular environments. In this précis, we show how simple building blocks that control information search, stop search, and make decisions can be put together to form classes of heuristics, including: ignorance-based and one-reason decision making for choice, elimination models for categorization, and satisficing heuristics for sequential search. These simple heuristics perform comparably to more complex algorithms, particularly when generalizing to new data – that is, simplicity leads to robustness. We present evidence regarding when people use simple heuristics and describe the challenges to be addressed by this research program. Key Words: adaptive toolbox; bounded rationality; decision making; elimination models; environment structure; heuristics; ignorance-based reasoning; limited information search; robustness; satisficing; simplicity. (shrink)

In this paper we critically evaluate Trenton Merricks’s recent attempt to provide a “new” way of defending compatibilism about divine foreknowledge and human freedom. We take issue with Merricks’s claim that his approach is fundamentally different from Ockhamism. We also seek to highlight the implausibility of Merricks’s rejection of the assumption of the fixity of the past, and we also develop a critique of the Merricks’s crucial notion of “dependence.”.

The nature of the general connection between emotion and value, and of the various connections between specific emotions and values, lies at the heart of philosophical discussion of the emotions. It is also central to some accounts of the nature of value itself, of value in general but also of the specific values studied within particular philosophical domains. These issues all form the subject matter of this article, and they in turn are all connected by two main questions: (i) How (...) do emotions disclose or create values? (ii) What are the epistemic credentials of emotion in justifying evaluative thought and discourse? This second question obviously presupposes some answer to the first question concerning the way in which emotions reveal, constitute, or create value. (shrink)

This paper argues that even the most virtuous people living in affluent Western countries share responsibility for injustices suffered by poor people living in developing countries. The argument of the paper draws on a moral principle that underlies the law of restitution: the principle of unjust enrichment. The paper argues that denizens of affluent Western countries have benefited unjustly from injustices suffered by poor people living in developing countries and that they have a moral responsibility to pay back their unjust (...) gains. (shrink)

Theological fatalists contend that if God knows everything, then no human action is free, and that since God does know everything, no human action is free. One reply to such arguments that has become popular recently— a way favored by William Hasker and Peter van Inwagen—agrees that if God knows everything, no human action is free. The distinctive response of these philosophers is simply to say that therefore God does not know everything. On this view, what the fatalist arguments in (...) fact bring out is that it was logically impossible for God to have known the truths about what we would freely do in the future. And this is no defect in God’s knowledge, for infallible foreknowledge of such truths is a logical impossibility. It has commonly been assumed that this position constitutes an explanation of where the fatalist argument goes wrong. My first goal is to argue that any such assumption has in fact been a mistake; Hasker and van Inwagen have in effect said only that something does go wrong with the argument, but they have not explained what goes wrong with it. Once we see this result, we’ll see, I think, that they need such an account—and that no such account has in fact been provided. The second goal of this paper is therefore to develop— and to criticize— what seems to be the most promising such account they might offer. As I see it, this account will in fact highlight in an intuitively compelling new way what many regard to be the view’s chief liability, namely, that the truths about the future which God is said not to know will now appear even more clearly (and problematically)‘ungrounded’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper explores the role of aesthetic judgements in mathematics by focussing on the relationship between the epistemic and aesthetic criteria employed in such judgements, and on the nature of the psychological experiences underpinning them. I claim that aesthetic judgements in mathematics are plausibly understood as expressions of what I will call ‘aesthetic-epistemic feelings’ that serve a genuine cognitive and epistemic function. I will then propose a naturalistic account of these feelings in terms of sub-personal processes of representing and (...) assessing the relation between cognitive processes and certain properties of the stimuli at which they are directed. (shrink)

There is a problem about the compatibility of Reid's commitment to both a sign theory of sensations and also direct realism. I show that Reid is committed to three different senses of the claim that mind independent bodies and their qualities are among the immediate objects of perception, and I then argue that Reid's sign theory conflicts with one of these. I conclude by advocating one proposal for reconciling Reid's claims, deferring a thorough development and defence of the proposal to (...) another paper. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper responds to Vanessa Andreotti’s keynote address. In it, I draw out some educational implications of facing the everyday denials of the climate emergency. In particular, I mobilise Bruno Latour’s phrase ‘landing on Earth’ to indicate that the very terms through which we understand education, particularly as it relates to the future, require a profound shift.

Themistius ran his philosophical school in Constantinople in the middle of the fourth century A.D. His paraphrases of Aristotle's writings are unlike the elaborate commentaries produced by Alexander of Aphrodisias, or the later Neoplatonists Simplicius and Philoponus. His aim was to provide a clear and independent restatement of Aristotle's text which would be accessible as an elementary exegesis. But he also discusses important philosophical problems, reports and disagrees with other commentaries including the lost commentary of Porphyry, and offers interpretations of (...) Plato. Themistius' paraphrase of Aristotle's On the Soul is his most important and influential work. It is also the first extant commentary on this work of Aristotle to survive from antiquity. A rival to that of Alexander of Aphrodisias, it represents one of the main interpretations of Aristotle's theory of the intellect, which was debated throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It continues to be an important text for the reconstruction of Aristotle's philosophical psychology today. (shrink)

This paper explores the connections between Kant’s theory of hierarchical racial difference, on the one hand, and his cosmopolitanism and conceptions of moral and political progress, on the other. I argue that Kant’s racial biology plays an essential role in maintaining national-cultural differences, which he views as essential for the establishment of the cosmopolitan union. Unfortunately, not only are these views racist, they also complicate Kant’s ability to consistently think through the prospect of the human species’ moral progress. Thus, while (...) in the abstract, Kant’s attempts to understand the prospects for moral and political progress as rooted in historical reality, and his insistence that such progress is necessarily connected to the persistence of cultural difference, is appealing, his own way of carrying this out is decidedly not, being so intimately connected to racial hierarchy as a basic source of difference. (shrink)

This groundbreaking volume casts light on the long shadow of naturalistic monism in modern thought and culture. When monism's philosophical proposition - the unity of all matter and thought in a single, universal substance - fused with scientific empiricism and Darwinism in the mid-nineteenth century, it led to the formation of a powerful worldview articulated in the work of figures such as Ernst Haeckel. The compelling essays collected here, written by leading international scholars, investigate the articulation of monism in science, (...) philosophy, and religion and its impact on a range of social movements, from socialism and early feminism to imperialism and eugenics. The result is a broad and comprehensive chronological, disciplinary, and geographic map of a century of monism, as well as a bellwether for innovative new directions in the interdisciplinary study of science, religion, philosophy, and culture. (shrink)

The critical theory tradition has, since its inception, sought to distinguish its perspective on society from more purely descriptive or normative approaches by maintaining that persons have a deep-seated interest in the free development of their personality—an interest that can only be realized in and through the rational organization of society, but which is systematically stymied by existing society. Yet it has struggled to specify this emancipatory interest in a way that avoids being either excessively utopian or overly accommodating to (...) existing society. Despite the fact that Hegel’s concept of reconciliation is normally thought to run aground on the latter horn of this dilemma, this book argues that reconciliation is the best available conceptualization of this emancipatory interest. It presents Hegel’s idea of freedom as something actualized in individuals’ lives through their becoming reconciled to how society shapes their roles, prospects, and sense of self; it presents reconciliation as being less a matter of philosophical cognition, and more of inclusion in a responsive, transparent political process. It then introduces the concept of reification, which—through its development in Marx and Lukács, through Horkheimer and Adorno—substantiates an increasingly cogent critique of reconciliation as something unachievable within the framework of modern society. Giving equal attention to psychoanalysis and legal theory, the second half critically appraises the writings of Rawls, Honneth, and Habermas as efforts to spell out what a concept of reconciliation more democratic and inclusive than Hegel, yet sensitive to the reifying effects of legal systems, might mean. (shrink)

A well-known critic of Freud discusses in frank terms the features of psychoanalysis that still attract scholarly interest, and the polemics that deform research and defames criticism. The author defends Freud criticism from ad hominem charges and outlines serious problems with scholarship in the field, including fraud, bad faith, and a disregard for professional standards. But he also indulges and explores the supposedly “pathological” undercurrents of Freud criticism. His surprising conclusion: in a way the field of Freud Studies is sick, (...) and does bring out the worst in everyone. (shrink)

We investigate pseudopowers of singular cardinals and deduce some consequences for covering numbers at singular cardinals of uncountable cofinality.

This paper presents a lesson plan originally designed for applied ethics classes filled with primarily white, conservative students. In an environment where students used the terminology of “reverse discrimination” and “quotas” rather than “Affirmative Action,” the author employs a fictionalized example of a claim jumper and the rightful owner’s entitlement to the claim in order to present basic arguments for compensatory justice. These arguments are extended by analogy to the issue of Affirmative Action in order to deliver several key points: (...) First, the “discrimination” of Affirmative Action programs is restitution, even if modern white people are not responsible for the privilege they possess, and thus Affirmative Action is not the same as the discrimination suffered by African-Americans. Second, an extraordinarily high number of African-Americans are still suffering as a result of past injustices. Third, while theoretical opportunity may exist for African-Americans today, true equal opportunity does not. Appended to this paper are a number of statistics relevant to the Affirmative Action debate and an Affirmative Action bibliography. (shrink)

In his classic paper, The Serpent Beguiled Me And I Did Eat, Gerald Dworkin makes the case that, without probable cause, the useof Proactive Law Enforcement Techniques (PALETs) is morally impermissible. Call this prohibition Dworkin’s Rule (DR). Here we argue that there are two reasonable exceptions to DR—the use of PALETs, without probable cause, is justifi ed when employed against High Level Government Officials (HLGOs) and High Level Business Officials (HLBOs). Moreover, these exceptions are consistent with Dworkin’s notion of Ideal (...) Criminal Sanctioning. Finally, if society were to endorse the use of PALETs on HLBOs, we might be able to dispose of the current bane of American business, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and let business get back to the business of business. (shrink)

It is natural to suppose that honey tastes the way it does because it is sweet. Democritus, Plato and Aristotle all agree that this explanation is superficial and lacks causal depth; they attempt to explain gustatory phenomena by invoking explanatorily fundamental features of the world. As they work out their causal stories, do they give up on the common-sense explanation of why honey tastes the way it does? In other words, do they deny that sweetness and other sensible qualities are (...) causally efficacious features of the world around us? ;Our sources for Democritus' thinking on this issue present a problematic picture. On the one hand, Aristotle and Theophrastus suppose that Democritus wants to identify colors and flavors with causally efficacious features of the world around us. On the other hand, Theophrastus and others find Democritus defending the view that colors and flavors do not belong to the world around us. This tension, first pointed out by Theophrastus, is merely apparent, if, as certain texts suggest, Democritus distinguishes the colors and flavors which we experience from the colors and flavors which figure in his scientific explanations. ;In the Timaeus, Plato frequently says things like "What is capable of producing such and such effects on the gustatory region has the name 'bitter' thinspace". On Theophrastus' interpretation, Plato is offering definitions of the sensible qualities: flavors are identical with powers to produce certain physiological effects on the sense-organs. Theophrastus reasonably complains that sensible qualities will lack causal efficacy if they are identified with these powers of external objects, but Theophrastus' interpretation is mistaken: Plato is not defining the sensible qualities; he is fixing the reference of our sensible-quality terms. Recent historical work on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities has often emphasized the extent to which the authors of this distinction were motivated by an interest in supplanting prevalent, Peripatetic assumptions about the nature of sensible qualities, but Aristotle's theory does not differ significantly from that of Descartes: both identify colors with causally efficacious properties whose natures are revealed by scientific investigation. (shrink)

Operant conditioning is not a selection process. According to Hull et al., selection processes require entities that reproduce to form lineages. However, since operant behaviors do not reproduce, operant conditioning is not a selection process.

It's not uncommon for scientists to give different explanations of the same phenomenon, but we currently lack clear guidelines for deciding whether to treat such accounts as competitors. This article discusses how science studies can help create tools and guidelines for thinking about whether explanations compete. It also specifies how one family of discourse rules enables there to be differing accounts that appear to compete but don't. One hopes that being more aware of the linguistic mechanisms making compatible accounts appear (...) to compete will prevent people from wasting resources trying to show which account is right. (shrink)

Presents the game-changing power of citizenship in sports, including what it is, what can happen when players are or are not good citizens, and how it can affect individuals.

Demonstrates the game-changing power of perseverance. Through action-filled stories, captivating spreads, and a character-building quiz, readers will consider their own character and be encouraged to take it to the next level.

The Quran’s sacred myth of the primordial covenant recounted at Q 7:172, it is suggested here, is the most immediate source for the distinctive and sometimes otherwise puzzling technical term al-aʿyān al-thābita in the ontological discourse of Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-shaykh al-akbar.

James's moral philosophy is a valuable resource for environmental philosophy because it reveals and impugns some deep, unhelpful assumptions about the relationship between moral theory and the moral life. In particular, James's ethics demonstrates that the debates in environmental ethics are better regarded as disputes about ideals of the kind of self and world we want, rather than as disputes over abstract propositions about the intrinsic value of nature.