In recent years, Ingrid Robeyns and several others have argued that, whatever the correct complete account of distributive justice looks like, it should include a Limitarian requirement. The core Limitarian claim is that there is a ceiling – a limit – to the amount of resources that it is permissible for any individual to possess. While this core claim is plausible, there are a number of important questions about precisely how the requirement should be understood, and what its implications are (...) regarding the obligations of various agents, that have not been adequately addressed in the discussions thus far. In this paper, I focus on questions about the relationship between the grounds for the Limitarian requirement and its role in generating obligations of justice for different agents. I argue that the plausible grounds for the requirement are incompatible with the widely accepted view, deriving from John Rawls, that the principles of justice apply directly to the institutions of what Rawls calls the “basic structure of society,” but do not apply directly to the conduct of individuals and other possible agents acting within that structure. If my argument succeeds, then Limitarians must accept that if the grounds that they have offered in defense of Limitarian policy interventions are compelling, then individuals are obligated to voluntarily direct any resources that they possess above the threshold in ways that will promote the same goals that justify Limitarian policies. (shrink)

I defend the view that Cicero writes the Academica from the perspective of an aspirationalist radical skeptic. In section 2 I examine the textual evidence regarding the nature of Cicero’s skeptical stance in the Academica. In section 3 I consider the textual evidence from the Academica for attributing aspirationalism to Cicero. Finally, in section 4 I argue that while aspirationalist radical skepticism is open to a number of philosophical objections, none of those objections is decisive.

Reinforcement schemes are a class of non-Markovian stochastic processes. Their non-Markovian nature allows them to model some kind of memory of the past. One subclass of such models are those in which the past is exponentially discounted or forgotten. Often, models in this subclass have the property of becoming trapped with probability 1 in some degenerate state. While previous work has concentrated on such limit results, we concentrate here on a contrary effect, namely that the time to become trapped may (...) increase exponentially in 1/x as the discount rate, 1− x, approaches 1. As a result, the time to become trapped may easily exceed the lifetime of the simulation or of the physical data being modeled. In such a case, the quasi-stationary behavior is more germane. We apply our results to a model of social network formation based on ternary (three-person) interactions with uniform positive reinforcement. (shrink)

Proponents of pragmatic encroachment in epistemology claim that a variety of epistemic matters, such as knowledge and epistemic virtue, are sensitive to practical factors, and so the pragmatic encroaches on the epistemic. After surveying pragmatist views that have been presented in the literature, we find that while these pragmatist views are superficially relativistic, they reject a central tenet of epistemic relativism,that competing epistemic frameworks are incommensurable and cannot be compared from a neutral standpoint. Thus, I conclude the discussion by exploring (...) a novel pragmatist view about measures of epistemic strength and propose that this radical position may be attractive to both anti-skeptical infallibists and epistemic relativists. (shrink)

Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance; Debora K. Shuger; Princeton University Press; ISBN - 9780691067360Rhetorics of Reason and Desire: Vergil, Augustine, and the Troubadours; Sarah Spence; Cornell University Press; ISBN - 9780801421297.

This collection contains hitherto unknown letters exchanged between Wittgenstein and the most important of his Cambridge friends and includes editorial notes based on archival material not previously explored. Incorporates many previously undiscovered unique and significant letters. A powerful record and intimate insight into Wittgenstein's life and thought. Extensive editorial annotations.

First published in 1979, this book considers the culture of a multi-racial community through the eyes of six children about to start school. Each child is from a different background but all live in the same street in a town in the north of England. Following the children from home into school, their six separate lives are unveiled, illustrating the manner in which their six separate worlds are in some ways grounded in their own respective cultures, and in others interwoven (...) with the common experience of school. These Children enter school in search of a multi-cultural society, and a sympathetic appraisal is made of what happens to them as they face such initially daunting prospects as the classroom, television and the playground. The most compelling element in this book is the way in which education is shown to be able to derive benefit from this cultural diversity. The research was commissioned by the Social Sciences Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust, and will be of particular interest to those working in social work and education. (shrink)

Review and response to Gimbel’s Isn’t That Clever.

Political institutions can be transparent or secret. If they are transparent, then we have access to information about how agents act within them. If they are secret, then we do not have access to this information. The presence and extent of transparency has tremendous impact on how political institutions function. The purpose of this article is to offer a brief overview of what political philosophers have thus far had to say about transparency as it pertains to political institutions. In doing (...) so, I hope to connect philosophical questions about transparency to relevant social scientific work and to highlight areas where more work needs to be done. (shrink)

Jean bodin (b. 1530, Angers, France—d. June 1596, Laon, France) Jean Bodin was a French political philosopher whose exposition of the principles of stable government was widely influential in Europe at a time when medieval systems were ...

The central thesis of this paper is that fake news and related phenomena serve as defeaters for knowledge transmission via journalistic channels. This explains how they pose a threat to democracy; and it points the way to determining how to address this threat. Democracy is both intrinsically and instrumentally good provided the electorate has knowledge (however partial and distributed) of the common good and the means of achieving it. Since journalism provides such knowledge, those who value democracy have a reason (...) to protect it. Hostile agents, however, can undermine both the effectiveness of democratic decision-making and faith in democracy itself, by deliberately promulgating fake news and hyper-partisan views; moreover, these effects can come about unintentionally on social media. I conclude that we may need to change, not just the way we process information online, but also the informational environment in which we operate. (shrink)

ABSTRACT American Transcendentalism, as a nineteenth-century intellectual and social movement, can inform both the academic debate surrounding post-liberalism and the social, political, and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global capitalism, and globalization more generally, defined the era subsequent to World War II until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The manifestation of global capitalism/globalization took place as a function of the rejection, whether conscious or unconscious, of the values embodied in American Transcendentalism as a modern reincarnation of immaterial and (...) idealist Platonism. For example, American Transcendentalism valued renunciation, nature, and spirituality as the means for attaining an ideal personal life while also providing the building blocks for the attainment of a higher form of government and politics at the collective level. As a climactic global modern development, the COVID-19 pandemic provides empirical evidence for the diminishing returns that are inherent to the hegemonic commitment to materialist economy at the expense of corresponding devaluation of commitments to the ideals of transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo Emerson forecast the realization of such diminishing returns, in which he asserted the longevity of the impact of transcendentalism would be greater than that of the materialism in his era. Immediately prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, American youth as a generation exhibited “transcendentalist” attributes such as decreasing commitments to religious and partisan affiliations and a trajectory of disillusionment with political participation. American Transcendentalism can be considered and applied as a source of inspiration to inform nascent deliberations on post-liberalism that invoke Platonism and the “transcendental.” In the context of the confluence of demographic changes, calls for post-liberalism, and the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, transcendentalism and its prospective popular reincarnation in the twenty-first century can be applied to generate a new and heretofore hidden transcendental “end of history” narrative as an alternative to the bipolarity of the “end of history” debate. (shrink)

Ever since Chomsky, language has been considered primarily as an individual cognitive capacity. Even linguists who reject Chomsky's hypotheses accept this assumption. Daniel Dor proposes instead that language is a socially invented communication technology. It differs from all other animal communication systems, including human nonverbal communication, in that it can instruct the imaginations of others about things not shared with the speaker in the here and now. Dor's proposal solves the problem of the evolution of language, assigns a key role (...) to individual differences in language evolution, change, diversity, acquisition, and use, unifies the many divided branches of linguistics, and solves or points toward solutions in many central areas of the subject, from semantics and syntax to pragmatics and the relation between language and thought. It promises not only to change the face of the language sciences, but also to have profound implications for anthropology, biology, cultural studies, literary studies, philosophy, politics, and religion, and for our understanding of human experience. (shrink)

Disasters in sociotechnical systems are caused by many factors. For example, the tragic chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, was caused by a leaky valve and a maintenance error. Safety scientists and investigators call these proximate factors. But the tragedy was also caused by what experts call systemic factors, which include the facility’s design, the organization of its workforce, and the safety culture of the plant and surrounding community. Other disasters share a similarly complex causality, depending on a multitude of proximate (...) and systemic factors. Investigators and scientists distinguish between these different types of factors because they think each has distinctive causal features and also because they often think some factors are more significant causes of disasters than others. In this dissertation, I analyze these distinctions and the reasoning experts use when selecting important causes of disasters in cases like the Bhopal gas tragedy and the Challenger shuttle loss. Using James Woodward’s interventionist theory of causation, I explicate three causal concepts that can be used to distinguish among causal factors: amplifying/damping, causal inertia, and causal delay. I employ these concepts to elaborate and clarify the causal features safety scientists identify to draw distinctions among different types of causal factors, and their reasons for thinking some causes are more important than others for understanding disasters. My dissertation takes a pragmatic approach to causal selection. Although philosophers have emphasized John Stuart Mill’s remark that selecting individual causal factors is “capricious,” I base my approach on Mill’s deeper thinking about the logic of causal selection and the philosophical challenge it poses. I show that selections of causal factors in investigations of disasters and the surrounding discussions of safety are motivated primarily by the dual aim of preventing future disasters and making systems safer. Considering these purposes is essential to understand why investigators single out causes with certain features. Analyzing causal selection in terms of why certain types of causes with certain kinds of features are more useful than others for particular purposes clarifies vital reasoning about the important causes of disasters and enriches our understanding of causal knowledge. (shrink)

Molyneux’s Question, also known as Molyneux’s Problem, soon became a fulcrum for early research in the epistemology of concepts, challenging common intuitions about how our concepts originate, whether sensory features differentiate concepts, and how concepts are utilized in novel contexts. It was reprinted and discussed by a wide range of early modern philosophers, including Gottfried Leibniz, George Berkeley, and Adam Smith, and was perhaps the most important problem in the burgeoning discipline of psychology of the 18th Century. The question has (...) since undergone various stages of development, both as a mental exercise and as an experimental paradigm, garnering a variety of both affirmative and negative replies in the next three centuries of debate and deliberation. (shrink)

Not long ago, under the influence of Michel Foucault, one spoke of the conjunction of knowledge and power, but in this post-truth era power appears singularly uninterested in knowledge, even as the supporters of Donald Trump claim that he alone of all politicians speaks the truth. This essay proposes to examine the relations of power and knowledge under the present populist assault. This analysis begins in the work of Claude Lefort, who spoke of the separation of knowledge and power in (...) democracy’s symbolic regime, and is then counterposed to Ernesto Laclau’s understanding of ‘populist reason’ in order to explore the present torsion of this relation to the point where power can appear not just separated from, but opposed to knowledge. It will be argued that it is less a question of post-truth than of different forms of truth with different truth claims, borne by different imperatives, and tied to different forms of representation – truth claims that can, in relation to each other, be indifferent, complementary, or conflictual. With this in mind, the essay asks: what is the relation of the people to truth? Do those who claim to represent the people seek possession of a different kind of truth? What is the relation of populism to ideology? And what is populism’s relation to ‘post-modernism’? (shrink)

If you grade enough papers, you will find some consistent pitfalls, especially in the writing of students who are coming to philosophy for the first time. I wrote up the following tips a couple of years ago when I was a teaching assistant for an introductory philosophy class at Yale led by Daniel Greco called ‘Problems in Philosophy’. The tips were intended, then, for college students, many of them right out of high school, and most of whom had never written (...) a philosophy paper before. So the focus is on clarity and mastering the basics. With that in mind, I hope you will find these tips helpful for teaching or writing in philosophy. (shrink)

Barrett and Artzenius posed a problem concerning infinite sequences of decisions. It appeared that the strategy of making the rational choice at each stage of the game was, in some circumstances, guaranteed to lead to lower returns than the strategy of making the irrational choice at each stage. This paper shows that there is only the appearance of paradox. The choices that Barrett and Artzenius were calling ‘rational’ cannot be economically justified, and so it is not surprising that someone who (...) makes them ends up with sub-optimal returns. A solution to the more general problem they pose is also advanced. (shrink)

Past debates surrounding wilderness have not led to constructive dialogue but instead have created a rift between dueling sides. Far from academic, this debate has important ethical, policy, and pr...

In this discussion note we argue, contrary to the thrust of a recent article by Jenann Ismael, that resolving the paradox of predictability does not require denying the possibility of a natural oracle, and thus stands in no need of the response that she proposes.

Discover how pressing contemporary moral issues can be approached and discussed in a distinct and coherently theological fashion. This book displays a more direct approach that has the distinct advantage of being approachable, dramatic, and contemporary. Each chapter approaches its subject matter by demonstrating how the sources of Christian moral reasoning-Scripture and church doctrine-can be imaginatively brought to bear on contemporary moral perplexities. This mode of teaching shows in tangible ways how the Christian gospel does in fact reveal our moral (...) world in clear and penetrating ways. (shrink)