Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 48-69, March 2022.

I explain why Ross Cameron's definition of ultimate ontological basis is incorrect, and propose a different definition in terms of ontological dependence, as well as a definition of reality's fundamental layer. These new definitions cover the conceptual possibility that self-dependent entities exist. They also apply to different conceptions of the relation of ontological dependence.

I articulate a functional characterisation of the concept of evidence, according to which evidence is that which allows us to make inferences that extend our knowledge. This entails Williamson's equation of knowledge with evidence.

Ann M. Blair -- Lorraine Daston -- Benjamin Elman -- Anthony Grafton -- Jill Kraye -- Peter N. Miller -- Jean-Louis Quantin -- Quentin Skinner.

Austrian economist Ludwig Mises’s central role in the socialist calculation debates has been consensually acknowledged since the early 1920s. Yet, only recently Nemeth, O’Neill, Uebel, and others have drawn particular attention to Mises’s encounter with logical empiricist Otto Neurath. Despite several surprising agreements, Neurath and Mises certainly provide different answers to the questions “what is meant by rational economic theory” (Neurath) and whether “socialism is the abolition of rational economy” (Mises). Previous accounts and evaluations of the exchange between Neurath and (...) Mises suffer from attaching little regard to their idiosyncratic uses of the term “rational.” The paper at hand reconstructs and critically compares the different conceptions of rationality defended by Neurath and Mises. The author presents two different resolutions to a detected tension in Mises’s deliberations on rationality: the first is implicit in Neurath’s, O’Neill’s, and Salerno’s reading of Mises and faces several interpretational problems; the author proposes a divergent interpretation. Based on the reconstructions of Neurath’s and Mises’s conceptions of rationality, the author suggests some implications with respect to Viennese Late Enlightenment and the socialist calculation debates. (shrink)

An account, based principally on Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society, of his concept of enlightened governance, and of the relation between that concept and his concept of human nature.

Several proponents of the interventionist theory of causation have recently argued for a neo-Russellian account of causation. The paper discusses two strategies for interventionists to be neo-Russellians. Firstly, I argue that the open systems argument – the main argument for a neo-Russellian account advocated by interventionists – fails. Secondly, I explore and discuss an alternative for interventionists who wish to be neo-Russellians: the statistical mechanical account. Although the latter account is an attractive alternative, it is argued that interventionists are not (...) able to adopt it straightforwardly. Hence, to be neo-Russellians remains a challenge to interventionists. (shrink)

Gerard of Abbeville's inception speech, which he delivered during the 1250s as a graduating master in theology at the University of Paris, stands out among the extant principia. While many thirteenth-century inception speeches drew clear distinctions between philosophy and theology, and metaphysics and revealed theology in particular, Gerard - who was the foremost secular master of his day - adopted a different strategy in order to establish the preeminence of theology with regard to all other sciences. Consciously avoiding to pit (...) theology against philosophy, he proposed to redefine the relations between both within the conceptual frame of sapiential knowledge. The article analyses how Gerard argues in favor of a supreme wisdom, capable of accommodating Aristotle's first philosophy and Christian theology. Showing that Gerard's approach did not remain uncontested, it traces the remarkable influence of his principium. (shrink)

Kim’s model of ‘functional reduction’ of properties is shown to fail in a class of cases from physics involving properties at different spatial levels. The diagnosis of this failure leads to a non-reductive account of the relation of micro and macro properties.

Consequential historical decisions that shaped transportation systems and their influence on society have many valuable lessons. The decisions we learn from and choose to make going forward will play a key role in shaping the mobility landscape of the future. This is especially pertinent as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more prevalent in the form of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Throughout urban history, there have been cyclical transport oppressions of previous-generation transportation methods to make way for novel transport methods. These cyclical oppressions (...) can be identified in the baroque and modernist periods, and a third oppression may occur in the contemporary period. To explore the idea of a third oppression, we focus on the bicycle and outline the history of cycling to understand how historical mode oppression unfolded. We then present several social and political factors that contributed to the oppression of cycling and share recommendations for how to avoid future oppressions including political, social, and design actions for researchers and policymakers to take. This paper argues that priorities for AI-enabled mobility and cyclist needs be advanced in proportion to the extent that they contribute to societal goals of urban containment, public realm, and proximal cities. Additionally, future mobility evolutions should prioritise mobility justice and mode choice over inducing a singular transportation method. (shrink)

Evolutionary game theoretic accounts of justice attempt to explain our willingness to follow certain principles of justice by appealing to robustness properties possessed by those principles. Skyrms (1996) offers one sketch of how such an account might go for divide-the-dollar, the simplest version of the Nash bargaining game, using the replicator dynamics of Taylor and Jonker (1978). In a recent article, D'Arms et al. (1998) criticize his account and describe a model which, they allege, undermines his theory. I sketch a (...) theory of evolutionary explanations of justice which avoids their methodological criticisms, and develop a spatial model of divide-the-dollar with more robust convergence properties than the models of Skyrms (1996) and D'Arms et al. (1998). (shrink)

Changes in healthcare financing increasingly rely upon patient cost-sharing to control escalating healthcare expenditures. These changes raise new challenges for physicians that are different from those that arose either under managed care or traditional indemnity insurance. Historically, there have been two distinct bases for arguing that physicians should not consider costs in their clinical decisions—an “aspirational ethic” that exhorts physicians to treat all patients the same regardless of their ability to pay, and an “agency ethic” that calls on physicians to (...) be trustworthy advisors to their patients. In the setting of greater patient cost-sharing, physicians' aspiration and agency roles increasingly conflict. Satisfactorily navigating the new terrain of consumer-driven healthcare requires physicians to consider these two roles and how they can best be reconciled so as to maximize quality of care while respecting the heterogeneity of patients' financial resources and willingness to pay. (shrink)

The article shows that Kuhn's concept of incommensurability emphasizes mainly the objective dimension of communication. To the thesis about the incommensurability of the meanings of scientific concepts in competing paradigms, we oppose the idea of a three-dimensional space of communicative dimensions. We supplement the objective dimension of communication, within which the environmental evolutionary selection of the best knowledge is carried out, with equal social and temporal horizons.

Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics published in 1871 is usually regarded as the founding document of the Austrian School of economics. Many of the School’s prominent representatives, including Friedrich Wieser, Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig Mises, Hans Mayer, Friedrich August Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Oskar Morgenstern, and Gottfried Haberler, as well as Israel Kirzner, Ludwig Lachmann, Murray Rothbard, and Don Lavoie, advanced and modified Menger’s research program in sometimes conflicting ways. Yet, some characteristics of the Austrian School remain (nearly) consensual from its foundation (...) through to contemporary neo-Austrian economists. In eight sections, we will briefly discuss some of the philosophical and methodological characteristics of Austrian economics: Austrian action theory and interpretative understanding, a relatively thoroughgoing subjectivism, methodological individualism, ontological individualism, apriorism, essentialism, an often overstated rejection of formal methods, and alertness to economic semantics. (shrink)

Crispin Wright is widely recognised as one of the most important and influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This volume is a collective exploration of the major themes of his work in philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and philosophy of mathematics. It comprises specially written chapters by a group of internationally renowned thinkers, as well as four substantial responses from Wright. In these thematically organized replies, Wright summarizes his life's work and responds to the contributory essays collected (...) in this book. In bringing together such scholarship, the present volume testifies to both the enormous interest in Wright's thought and the continued relevance of Wright's seminal contributions in analytic philosophy for present-day debates. (shrink)

We show that many principles of first-order arithmetic, previously only known to lie strictly between [Formula: see text]-induction and [Formula: see text]-induction, are equivalent to the well-foundedness of [Formula: see text]. Among these principles are the iteration of partial functions of Hájek and Paris, the bounded monotone enumerations principle by Chong, Slaman, and Yang, the relativized Paris–Harrington principle for pairs, and the totality of the relativized Ackermann–Péter function. With this we show that the well-foundedness of [Formula: see text] is a (...) far more widespread than usually suspected. Further, we investigate the [Formula: see text]-iterated version of the bounded monotone iterations principle, and show that it is equivalent to the well-foundedness of the -height [Formula: see text]-tower [Formula: see text]. (shrink)

In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, this work presents a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept photographs for the darkest month of the year. It includes stories drawn from modern history and the contemporary moment, from mythology, and even from meteorology.

We prove existence of mixed strategy equilibria for a class of discontinuous two-player games with non-compact strategy sets. As a corollary of our main results, we obtain a continuum of mixed strategy equilibria for the first- and second-price two-bidder auctions with toeholds. We also find Klemperer’s (2000) result about the existence of mixed strategy equilibria in the classical Bertrand duopoly.

The existence of experts raises a host of interesting questions in social, legal, and political epistemology. This article introduces and discusses interested experts – people who are experts on some topic, but who also have a distinct set of values and preferences regarding that topic, so that they are not well-described as “disinterested” parties. Interested experts raise several distinct problems in social, legal, and political epistemology. Some general questions arise: can we rationally or justifiably form beliefs relying on interested expert (...) testimony? Do they constitute knowledge? Under what circumstances? This article focuses on a specific question in legal epistemology: should interested experts be allowed to serve on juries and, if so, should it be permissible for lawyers to strike them from the pool of potential jurors? My hope is that concentrating on this question will provide insight into the more general questions concerning the epistemology of testimony with respect to interested experts, while also providing concrete recommendations for jury reform to improve the epistemic performance of juries. (shrink)

Building on Nozick's invariantism about objectivity, I propose to define scientific objectivity in terms of counterfactual independence. I will argue that such a counterfactual independence account is (a) able to overcome the decisive shortcomings of Nozick's original invariantism and (b) applicable to three paradigmatic kinds of scientific objectivity (that is, objectivity as replication, objectivity as robustness, and objectivity as Mertonian universalism).

This chapter focuses on the ontological nature of the past and our experience of the present in relation to the actual. It is argued that philosophers mistakenly equate the real with the actual. The actual is what is presented to us in experience, but what is presented to us in experience is confined to the present; so one might think that it follows that only the present is real. This presentist theory is subsequently rejected. Past, present and future are real (...) and certain mental acts such as memories of the past and expectations of the future have as their content objects at those times; these objects are just as real as the objects of present experiences. This paves the way for a distinctive brand of eternalism that is defended in the remainder of this chapter. (shrink)

The paper raises some difficulties for the typical motivations behind set reductionism, the view that sets are reducible to entities identified independently of set theory.

Oakeshott’s theory of poetry was a pure theory. But it was so pure a theory it emptied out most of what we would normally mean by poetry, it ignored the history of poetry in extracting a meaning out of it, and it left to one side most of the questions about poetry which are of interest to poets, critics or indeed anyone. This chapter places Oakeshott’s theory of poetry in the context of theories of poetry from Aristotle through Johnson, Wordsworth (...) and Shelley through to figures as varied as Wittgenstein, Leavis, Eliot and Auden in order to suggest that Oakeshott theory was, as a theory of poetry, a provocation, and, as a theory of something undoubtedly worth thinking about, not a theory of poetry at all. (shrink)

Academic staff owe a duty of fidelity to uphold institutional standards of integrity. They also have their own values and conceptions of integrity as well as personal responsibilities and commitments. The question of how academic practitioners address or reconcile conflicting values and responsibilities has been underexplored in the literature. Before we can examine effectiveness of academic integrity strategies and develop best practices, we need to examine the breadth of integrity decisions. To this end we posited the academic integrity problem as (...) a set of seven dilemmas and presented them to post-secondary education staff (N = 80) located in Europe, North America, Oceania, and Asia. We asked the participants to recommend a solution to each dilemma. This yielded a modest sample of 498 themes across 30 categories. We expected the responses to fall on a binary scale where decisions either support the integrity or ignore it. However, the data suggests that academic integrity decisions are better suited to continuum where participants aim to reconcile personal and institutional obligations. We further argue that academic integrity decisions are predicated on personal experience and therefore pose a challenge for policy standardization and enforcement. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the findings for practice. (shrink)

The article analyzes the main parameters of the modern world development, its architectonics and the most important development trends. Modern communications and principles of interaction of various social systems are also considered. As a result, the most significant cultural-cum-civilizational systems are distinguished – the West, China, the Islamic world and Russia, which represent four global trends or four vectors of power that fundamentally affect the current state and prospects of world development. It is emphasized that the West and China have (...) a global strategy, provided by objective circumstances. The Islamic world and Russia occupy an important geopolitical position and also have a special status in the global world. (shrink)

Christianity has understood the environment as a gift to nurture and steward, a book of divine revelation disclosing the divine mind, a wild garden in need of cultivation and betterment, and as a resource for the creation of a new Eden. This Cambridge Companion details how Christianity, one of the world's most important religions, has shaped one of the existential issues of our age, the environment. Engaging with contemporary issues, including gender, traditional knowledge, and enchantment, it brings together the work (...) of international scholars on the subject of Christianity and the Environment from a diversity of fields. Together, their work offers a comprehensive guide to the complex relationship between Christianity and the environment that moves beyond disciplinary boundaries. To do this, the volume explains the key concepts concerning Christianity and the environment, outlines the historical development of this relationship from antiquity to the present, and explores important contemporary issues. (shrink)

Interest in esoteric and mystical aspects of Islam in present-day Russia and its Soviet and tsarist predecessors is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. The article starts with a critical discussion of Aleksandr Dugin’s interpretations of Sufism in his ambitious intellectual project Noomachia: Wars of the Intellect [and] Civilizations of Borderlands. The author then compares Dugin’s conceptualizations of Sufism with those of several Russian writers who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century and whose portrayal of Sufism and its (...) followers is similar to Dugin’s in some important respects. These ideologically driven constructions of Sufism stand in sharp contrast to the self-consciously objective scholarly ones that emerged in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century within the Russian academic and teaching institutions specializing in Eastern religions, languages, and cultures. The author argues that Russian academic conceptualizations of Sufism mirrored those of the fin-de-siècle German Islamology and then proceeds to examine the profound changes in Russian attitudes to Sufism, and Islam generally, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the rise of the Soviet state that based its legitimacy on the Marxist-Leninist concept of history with its pervasive atheism, materialism, and emphasis on class struggle. It shaped Soviet-era academic and nonacademic approaches to Sufism until the mid-1980s, when Soviet scholars began to question the Marxist-Leninist certainties of the previous six decades. (shrink)