The author investigates whether Anthony J. Steinbock, in his book Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience, succeeds in overcoming the difficulties and objections which the phenomenology of religion traditionally comes up against. Among these are, most importantly, the problem of going beyond immanence and the question of whether the investigation of religion from a phenomenological point of view is in fact possible.

I intend to argue that good friendship sometimes requires epistemic irresponsibility. To put it another way, it is not always possible to be both a good friend and a diligent believer.

Scientific realism driven by inference to the best explanation (IBE) takes empirically confirmed objects to exist, independent, pace empiricism, of whether those objects are observable or not. This kind of realism, it has been claimed, does not need probabilistic reasoning to justify the claim that these objects exist. But I show that there are scientific contexts in which a non-probabilistic IBE-driven realism leads to a puzzle. Since IBE can be applied in scientific contexts in which empirical confirmation has not yet (...) been reached, realists will in these contexts be committed to the existence of empirically unconfirmed objects. As a consequence of such commitments, because they lack probabilistic features, the possible empirical confirmation of those objects is epistemically redundant with respect to realism. (shrink)

I here defend microphysical manyism. According to microphysical manyism, each composite or higher-level object is a mere plurality of microphysical particles. After clarifying the commitments of the view, I offer two physicalist-friendly arguments in its favour. The first argument appeals to the Canberra Plan. Here I argue that microphysical particles acting in unison play the theoretical roles associated with composite objects - that they do everything that we think of composite objects as doing - and thus that composite objects are (...) to be identified with pluralities of microphysical particles. Along the way I rebut the objections that pluralities of particles don’t display the right emergent, ‘lingering’, or modal properties to be good candidates for identification with higher-level objects. In the second argument I claim that microphysical manyism is uniquely able to capture a compelling and widespread physicalist intuition concerning the intimate nature of the relationship between higher-level, composite objects and the microphysical world. (shrink)

The return to religion has perhaps become the dominant cliche of contemporary theory, which rarely offers anything more than an exaggerated echo of a political reality dominated by religious war. Somehow, the secular age seems to have been replaced by a new era, where political action flows directly from metaphysical conflict. The Faith of the Faithless asks how we might respond. Following Critchley's Infinitely Demanding, this new book builds on its philosophical and political framework, also venturing into the questions of (...) faith, love, religion and violence. Should we defend a version of secularism and quietly accept the slide into a form of theism--or is there another way? From Rousseau's politics and religion to the return to St. Paul in Taubes, Agamben and Badiou, via explorations of politics and original sin in the work of Schmitt and John Gray, Critchley examines whether there can be a faith of the faithless, a belief for unbelievers. Expanding on his debate with Slavoj Zizek, Critchley concludes with a meditation on the question of violence, and the limits of non-violence. (shrink)

Climate change is projected to have very severe impacts on future generations. Given this, any adequate response to it has to consider the nature of our obligations to future generations. This paper seeks to do that and to relate this to the way that inter-generational justice is often framed by economic analyses of climate change. To do this the paper considers three kinds of considerations that, it has been argued, should guide the kinds of actions that one generation should take (...) if it is to treat both current and future people equitably. In particular it examines the case for what has been termed pure time discounting, growth discounting and opportunity cost discounting; and it assesses their implications for climate policy. It argues that none of these support the claims of those who think they give us reason to delay aggressive mitigation policies. It also finds, however, that the second kind of argument can, in certain circumstances, provide support for passing on some of the costs of mitigation to future generations. (shrink)

We propose developing AIs whose only final goal is being shut down. We argue that this approach to AI safety has three benefits: (i) it could potentially be implemented in reinforcement learning, (ii) it avoids some dangerous instrumental convergence dynamics, and (iii) it creates trip wires for monitoring dangerous capabilities. We also argue that the proposal can overcome a key challenge raised by Soares et al. (2015), that shutdown-seeking AIs will manipulate humans into shutting them down. We conclude by comparing (...) our approach with Soares et al.'s corrigibility framework. (shrink)

LLMs have dramatically improved in capabilities in recent years. This raises the question of whether LLMs could become genuine agents with beliefs and desires. This paper demonstrates an in principle limit to LLM agency, based on their architecture. LLMs are next word predictors: given a string of text, they calculate the probability that various words can come next. LLMs produce outputs that reflect these probabilities. I show that next word predictors are exploitable. If LLMs are prompted to make probabilistic predictions (...) about the world, these predictions are guaranteed to be incoherent, and so Dutch bookable. If LLMs are prompted to make choices over actions, their preferences are guaranteed to be intransitive, and so money pumpable. In short, the problem is that selecting an action based on its potential value is structurally different then selecting the description of an action that is most likely given a prompt: probability cannot be forced into the shape of expected value. The in principle exploitability of LLMs raises doubts about how agential they can become. This exploitability also offers an opportunity for humanity to safely control such AI systems. (shrink)

Dialog is a joint action at different levels. At the highest level, the goal of interlocutors is to align their mental representations. This emerges from joint activity at lower levels, both concerned with linguistic decisions (e.g., choice of words) and nonlinguistic processes (e.g., alignment of posture or speech rate). Because of the high‐level goal, the interlocutors are particularly concerned with close coupling at these lower levels. As we illustrate with examples, this means that imitation and entrainment are particularly pronounced during (...) interactive communication. We then argue that the mechanisms underlying such processes involve covert imitation of interlocutors’ communicative behavior, leading to emulation of their expected behavior. In other words, communication provides a very good example of predictive emulation, in a way that leads to successful joint activity. (shrink)

In this paper, we use the case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe to address the question of what kind of knowledge we should incorporate into public health policy. We show that policy-making during the COVID-19 pandemic has been biomedicine-centric in that its evidential basis marginalised input from non-biomedical disciplines. We then argue that in particular the social sciences could contribute essential expertise and evidence to public health policy in times of biomedical emergencies and that we should thus strive for (...) a tighter integration of the social sciences in future evidence-based policy-making. This demand faces challenges on different levels, which we identify and discuss as potential inhibitors for a more pluralistic evidential basis. (shrink)

I argue against the claim that there are principled as well as pragmatic reasons for compromise in politics, even within the context of reasonable moral disagreements such as the abortion controversy.

Mereological nihilists typically employ a paraphrase strategy in order to mitigate the apparent absurdity of their denial of the existence of composite objects. I argue here that the nihilist's paraphrase strategy is incomplete, because no schema for generating nihilistically acceptable paraphrases of sentences concerning material constitution has ever been given. Nor can an adequate schema be arrived at by generalising things that nihilists have already said. I fill this lacuna in the nihilist's account by developing and defending a novel paraphrase (...) schema that makes essential reference to the determinable‐determinate relation that holds between arrangement‐properties instantiated by the simples. (shrink)

Within collective epistemology, there is a class of theories that understand the epistemic status of collective attitude ascriptions, such as ‘the college union knows that the industrial action is going to plan’, or ‘the jury justifiedly believes that the suspect is guilty’, as saying that a sufficient subset of group member attitudes have the relevant epistemic status. In this paper, I will demonstrate that these summativist approaches to collective epistemology are incompatible with epistemic permissivism, the doctrine that a single body (...) of evidence may rationalize multiple doxastic attitudes. In particular, I will make use of epistemic permissivism to provide a general recipe for generating so-called divergence cases, which demonstrate situations in which rationality requires group-level and member-level attitudes to diverge. I will call this class of cases permissive divergence cases. While other divergence cases have been discussed in the literature, permissive divergence cases prove themselves to be less susceptible to many of the worries raised against their competitors, while being directly built on an often-defended epistemological thesis. (shrink)

While most large companies around the world now have a code of ethics, reported ethical malpractice among some of these does not appear to be abating. The reasons for this are explored, using academic studies, survey reports as well as insights gained from the Institute of Business Ethics' work with large corporations. These indicate that there is a gap between the existence of explicit ethical values and principles, often expressed in the form of a code, and the attitudes and behaviour (...) of the organisation. The paper suggests that two basic reasons appear to be at the heart of the problem: ineffective ethics programmes and deficiencies in corporate culture. The paper concludes that successfully embedded corporate ethical values requires well-designed ethics policies, sustained ethical leadership and incorporation of ethics in organisational processes and strategy as part of an ethical culture at all levels of the organisation. It makes some practical suggestions on how this can be achieved. (shrink)

I argue that alternative-denoting expressions interact with their semantic context by taking scope. With an empirical focus on indefinites in English, I show how this approach improves on standard alternative-semantic architectures that use point-wise composition to subvert islands, as well as on in situ approaches to indefinites more generally. Unlike grammars based on point-wise composition, scope-based alternative management is thoroughly categorematic, doesn’t under-generate readings when multiple sources of alternatives occur on an island, and is compatible with standard treatments of binding. (...) Unlike all in situ treatments of indefinites, relying on a true scope mechanism prevents over-generation when an operator binds into an indefinite. My account relies only on function application, some mechanism for scope-taking, and two freely-applying type-shifters: the first is Karttunen’s :3–44, 1977. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00351935) proto-question operator, aka Partee’s Studies in discourse representation theory and the theory of generalized quantifiers, Foris, Dordrecht, 1986) IDENT, and the second can be factored out of extant approaches to the semantics of questions in the tradition of Karttunen. These type-shifters form a decomposition of LIFT, the familiar function mapping values into scope-takers. Exceptional scope of alternative-generating expressions arises via scopal pied-piping: indefinites take scope over their island, which then itself takes scope. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the shapelessnesss hypothesis, which is often referred to and relied on by certain sorts of ethical and evaluative cognitivist, and which they use primarily in arguing against a certain, influential form of noncognitivism. I aim to (i) set out exactly what the hypothesis is; (ii) show that its original and traditional use is left wanting; and (iii) show that there is some rehabilitation on offer that might have a chance of convincing neutrals.

According to some, free will requires alternative possibilities. But not any old alternative possibility will do. Sometimes, being able to bring about an alternative does not bestow any control on an agent. In order to bestow control, and so be directly relevant qua alternative to grounding the agent's moral responsibility, alternatives need to be robust. Here, I investigate the nature of robust alternatives. I argue that Derk Pereboom's latest robustness criterion is too strong, and I suggest a different criterion based (...) on the idea that what agents need to be able to do is keep open the possibility of securing their blamelessness, rather than needing to directly ensure their own blamelessness at the time of decision. (shrink)

We examine physicists’ charge of ad hocness against the Higgs mechanism in the standard model of elementary particle physics. We argue that even though this charge never rested on a clear-cut and well-entrenched definition of “ad hoc”, it is based on conceptual and methodological assumptions and principles that are well-founded elements of the scientific practice of high-energy particle physics. We further evaluate the implications of the recent discovery of a Higgs-like particle at the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider for the charge (...) of ad hocness against the Higgs mechanism. (shrink)

We notice a number of interesting overlaps between the views on personhood of Ifeanyi Menkiti and Marya Schechtman. Both philosophers distance their views from the individualistic ones standard in western thought and foreground the importance of extrinsic or relational features to personhood. For Menkiti, it is ‘the community which defines the person as person’; for Schechtman, being a person is to have a place in person-space, which involves being seen as a person by others. But there are also striking differences. (...) Schechtman sees this aspect as expanding the scope of personhood to infants and those who are severely mentally disabled. Menkiti thinks that there is a line to be drawn at some point between those humans that are persons and those who are not. We consider the cases offered in questioning how the dispute between the two views should be resolved. (shrink)

A key question of the ‘maverick’ tradition of the philosophy of mathematical practice is addressed, namely what is mathematical progress. The investigation is based on an article by Penelope Maddy devoted to this topic in which she considers only contributions ‘of some mathematical importance’ as progress. With the help of a case study from contemporary mathematics, more precisely from tropical geometry, a few issues with her proposal are identified. Taking these issues into consideration, an alternative account of ‘mathematical importance’, broadly (...) within the framework of progress Maddy offers, is developed with a special focus on mathematicians’ peer-review practice. (shrink)

We study the handicap principle in terms of the Sir Philip Sidney game. The handicap principle asserts that cost is required to allow for honest signalling in the face of conflicts of interest. We show that the significance of the handicap principle can be challenged from two new directions. Firstly, both the costly signalling equilibrium and certain states of no communication are stable under the replicator dynamics ; however, the latter states are more likely in cases where honest signalling should (...) apply. Secondly, we prove the existence and stability of polymorphisms where players mix between being honest and being deceptive and where signalling costs can be very low. Neither the polymorphisms nor the states of no communication are evolutionarily stable, but they turn out to be more important for standard evolutionary dynamics than the costly signalling equilibrium. (shrink)

Gopal Sreenivasan’s “hybrid theory” states that a moral duty is directed toward an individual because her interests justify the assignment of control over the duty. An alternative “plain theory” states that the individual’s interests justify the duty itself. I argue that a strong moral status constraint explains Sreenivasan’s instrumentalization objection to a Razian plain theory but that his own model violates this constraint. I suggest how both approaches can be reformulated to satisfy the constraint, and I argue that a reformulated (...) plain theory can also avoid an insufficiency objection. The hybrid approach consequently has no clear advantage over the plain approach. (shrink)

Constitution is the relation between something and what it is made of. Composition is the relation between something and its parts. I examine three different approaches to the relation between constitution and composition. One approach, associated with neo-Aristotelians like Mark Johnston and Kathrin Koslicki, identifies constitution with composition. A second, popular with those sympathetic to classical mereology such as Judith Thomson, defines constitution in terms of parthood. A third, advocated strongly by Lynne Baker, takes constitution to be somehow inconsistent with (...) relations of parthood. All of these approaches, I argue, face serious problems. I conclude, tentatively, that constitution and composition have nothing to do with each other. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to Richard Lauer’s “Is Social Ontology Prior to Social Scientific Methodology?” (2019) and an attempt to contribute to the meta-social ontological discourse more broadly. In the first part, I will give a rough sketch of Lauer’s general project and confront his pragmatist approach with a fundamental problem. The second part of my reply will provide a solution for this problem rooted in a philosophy of the social sciences in practice.

This paper argues that research on normative issues in the life sciences will benefit from a tighter integration of philosophy of science. We examine research on ethical, legal and social issues in the life sciences (“ELSI”) and discuss three illustrative examples of normative issues that arise in different areas of the life sciences. These examples show that important normative questions are highly dependent on epistemic issues which so far have not been addressed sufficiently in ELSI, RRI and related areas of (...) research. Accordingly, we argue for the integration of research on the epistemic aspects of the relevant areas of science into ELSI research to provide a better basis for addressing normative questions. (shrink)

Based on two qualitative case studies undertaken in Switzerland, this article compares the positioning of Climate Strike activists and construction workers on questions of climate change, so as to analyse the impact of work practices on environmental orientations. Building on a praxeological approach, the article argues that communities of practice in workplaces and educational institutions influence environmental orientations. Everyday practice in schools and universities fosters the scientific environmental knowledge that is central to the orientations of climate activists. By contrast, the (...) practice of construction workers inculcates an embodied environmental knowledge which accompanies an orientation that takes environmental problems as not primarily a question of conservation, but rather as inherently linked to workplace matters. By way of conclusion, the article argues for an expanded notion of environmental concerns, beyond the acceptance of scientific facts on ecological crisis and towards embracing the embodied environmental knowledge more broadly prevalent among manual workers. (shrink)

Over the past few years the use of stimulants such as methylphenidate and modafinil among the student population has attracted considerable debate in the pages of bioethics journals. Under the rubric of cognitive enhancement, bioethicists have discussed this use of stimulants—along with future technologies of enhancement—and have launched a sometimes forceful debate of such practices. In the following paper, it is argued that even if we focus solely upon current practices, the term cognitive enhancement encompasses a wide range of ethical (...) considerations that can usefully be addressed without the need for speculation. In taking this position it is suggested that we divide cognitive enhancement into a series of empirically-constructed frameworks—medical risks and benefits, self-medication and under-prescription, prescription drug abuse and over-medication, and finally, the intention to cognitively enhance. These are not mutually exclusive frameworks, but provide a way in which to identify the scope of the issue at hand and particular ethical and medical questions that may be relevant to enhancement. By a process of elimination it is suggested that we can indeed talk of cognitive enhancement as an observable set of practices. However, in doing so we should be aware of how academic commentaries and discussion may be seen as both capturing reality and reifying cognitive enhancement as an entity. (shrink)

A mental state is luminous if, whenever an agent is in that state, they are in a position to know that they are. Following Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits, a wave of recent work has explored whether there are any non-trivial luminous mental states. A version of Williamson’s anti-luminosity appeals to a safety- theoretic principle connecting knowledge and confidence: if an agent knows p, then p is true in any nearby scenario where she has a similar level of confidence (...) in p. However, the relevant notion of confidence is relatively underexplored. This paper develops a precise theory of confidence: an agent’s degree of confidence in p is the objective chance they will rely on p in practical reasoning. This theory of confidence is then used to critically evaluate the anti-luminosity argument, leading to the surprising conclusion that although there are strong reasons for thinking that luminosity does not obtain, they are quite different from those the existing literature has considered. In particular, we show that once the notion of confidence is properly understood, the failure of luminosity follows from the assumption that knowledge requires high confidence, and does not require any kind of safety principle as a premise. (shrink)

Hegel’s philosophy of history is fundamentally concerned with how shapes of life collapse and transition into new shapes of life. One of the distinguishing features of Hegel’s concern with how a shape of life falls apart and becomes inadequate is the role that habit plays in the transition. A shape of life is an embodied form of existence for Hegel. The animating concepts of a shape of life are affectively inscribed on subjects through complex cultural processes. This paper examines the (...) argument Hegel puts forward in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History for why civilizations come to atrophy and examines the decisive role habit plays in this process. The paper concludes with a discussion of the way in which the central role of second nature in historical transitions and norm formation conflicts with Brandom’s account of norm formation in Hegel’s thought. (shrink)

This essay attempts to sharpen significantly the critical debate around Levinas’s work by focussing on the question of politics, which is, it is argued, Levinas’s Achilles’heel. Five problems in Levinas’s treatment of politics are identified and discussed: fraternity, monotheism, and rocentrism, the family, and Israel. It is argued that Levinas’s ethics is terribly compromised by his conception of politics. In order to save Levinasian ethics from this compromise, two possibilities are explored: first, to follow Derrida’s separation of ethical form from (...) political content in his recent reading of Levinas, which allows for a notion of political invention linked to ethical responsibility, and second, to link Levinas’s conception of ethics to what is called in the essay the anarchistic disturbanceof politics. In conclusion, this anarchistic experience of ethics in linked to a quite different understanding of politics as the dissensual space of democracy. (shrink)

This paper transforms a development of an argument against pantheism into an objection to the usual account of God within contemporary analytic philosophy. A standard criticism of pantheism has it that pantheists cannot offer a satisfactory account of God as personal. My paper will develop this criticism along two lines: first, that personhood requires contentful mental states, which in turn necessitate the membership of a linguistic community, and second that personhood requires limitation within a wider context constitutive of the ’setting’ (...) of the agent’s life. Pantheism can, I argue, satisfy neither criterion of personhood. At this point the tables are turned on the Swinburnian theist. If the pantheist cannot defend herself against the personhood-based attacks, neither can the Swinburnian, and for instructively parallel reasons: for neither doctrine is God in the material world; in the pantheist case God is identical with the world, in the Swinburnian case God transcends it. Either way both the pantheist and the Swinburnian are left with a dilemma: abandon divine personhood or modify the doctrine of God so as to block the move to personhood. (shrink)

Readings of Derrida’s work on law and justice have tended to stress the distinction between them. This stress is complicated by Derrida’s own claim that it is not ‘a true distinction’. In this essay I argue that ordinary experiences of the inadequacy of existing laws do indeed imply a claim about what would be more just, but that this claim only makes sense insofar as one can appeal to another more adequate law. Exploring how Derrida negotiates a subtle path between (...) classical Platonism and classical conventionalism about justice, the attempt is made to take seriously Derrida’s aim to affirm the idea of a ‘mystical’ foundation of the authority of laws by taking ‘the use of the word “mystical” in what I venture to call a rather Wittgensteinian direction’. (shrink)

Discussions of habit in Hegel’s thought usually focus on his subjective spirit since this is where the most extended discussion of this issue takes place. This paper argues that habit is also important for understanding Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The discussion of habit and second nature occur at a critical juncture in the text. This discussion is important for understanding his notion of ethical life and his account of freedom.

I highlight a tension within the moral error theoretic stance. Although I do not show that it is fatal, I believe the tension is problematic. In stating the tension I outline a conception of the common moral background against which it arises. I also discuss aspects of the similar error theories developed by John Mackie and Richard Joyce in order to show the tension at work.

ProblemAn estimated 100,000–500,000 migrant care workers provide live-in care in German households, many of them caring for older people with dementia. Social research has identified a wide range of structural social problems associated with live-in care. However, a systematic ethical analysis and discussion is still missing.ArgumentsThis article explores the moral conflicts that arise in the microsetting of live-in arrangements for people with dementia. For this purpose, we conduct an ethical analysis of the expectations of relatives towards live-in care for people (...) with dementia based on a qualitative content analysis of 182 contributions from three German-language online forums. These expectations address live-ins as service providers, professional nurses, moral agents, and family members.ConclusionThe diverse and often disappointed expectations of relatives are an expression of problematic and partly contradictory claims regarding live-in care for people with dementia. An ethical analysis of their legitimacy and coherence can help to improve the individual arrangement, the institutional organisation, and the moral framing and legal regulation of live-in care. (shrink)

I argue that mass produced artifacts are ontologically distinctive. If we think of the making of an artifact as the imposition of a creative intention on to some matter, usually through intentional manipulation of the matter, then in the case of mass production, one could say that there is not enough mind to go around! Batches of mass produced objects will have a distinctive essence, lying in the creative act by which they are made, but within a batch, the objects (...) will be distinct from each other, but not essentially distinct. (shrink)