The following annotated bibliography contains a reasonably complete survey of contemporary work in the philosophy of astrophysics. Spanning approximately 40 years from the early 1980s to the present day, the bibliography should help researchers entering the field to acquaint themselves with its major texts, while providing an opportunity for philosophers already working on astrophysics to expand their knowledge base and engage with unfamiliar material.

The discipline of philosophy has been critiqued from both within and outside itself. One brand of external critique is associated with Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), the view that human cognition is partially structured by pervasive and automatic mappings between conceptual domains. Most notably, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) claimed that many central philosophical concepts and arguments rely on an unacknowledged metaphorical substructure, and that this structure has sometimes led philosophy astray. The purpose of this paper is to argue that Lakoff and (...) Johnson's critique is anticipated by the work of post‐Tractarian Wittgenstein and his student, Margaret MacDonald. In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein outlines a method for identifying and resolving philosophical puzzles generated by misused grammatical analogies, although his discussion lacks a precise characterization of exactly how and why such analogies lead to trouble. In a 1938 paper, MacDonald offers such a characterization, which I outline and then connect back to Wittgenstein. In addition to this interpretive work, I supplement Wittgenstein and MacDonald's diagnosis using evidence from CMT which suggests that linguistic metaphors and analogies often originate in or are motivated by more fundamental analogical mappings in cognition. The supplemented account carries implications for how philosophical arguments ought to be formulated and critiqued. (shrink)

Recent work in social psychology suggests that people harbor “implicit race biases,” biases which can be unconscious or uncontrollable. Because awareness and control have traditionally been deemed necessary for the ascription of moral responsibility, implicit biases present a unique challenge: do we pardon discrimination based on implicit biases because of its unintentional nature, or do we punish discrimination regardless of how it comes about? The present experiments investigated the impact such theories have upon moral judgments about racial discrimination. The results (...) show that different theories differ in their impact on moral judgments: when implicit biases are defined as unconscious, people hold the biased agent less morally responsible than when these biases are defined as automatic (i.e., difficult to control), or when no theory of implicit bias is provided. (shrink)

When a person at risk of having a child with a genetic illness or disease wishes to have an unaffected child, this can involve difficult choices. If the pregnancy is established by sexual intercourse, the fetus can be tested early in pregnancy, and if affected a decision can be made to abort in the hope that a future pregnancy with an unaffected fetus ensures. Alternatively, preimplantation genetic diagnosis can be used after in vitro fertilisation to select and implant an unaffected (...) embryo that hopefully will proceed to term and produce a healthy baby. We are aware that many individuals at risk regard the latter as ethically more acceptable than the former, and examine whether there is an ethical difference between these options. We conclude that PGD and implantation of an unaffected embryo is a more acceptable choice ethically than prenatal diagnosis followed by abortion for the following reasons: Choice after PGD is seen as ethically neutral because a positive result balances a negative result simultaneously . While there is usually the intention to establish a healthy pregnancy after an abortion, this is not simultaneous; A woman sees abortion as a personal physical violation of her integrity, and as the pregnancy proceeds she increasingly identifies with and gives ethical status to the embryo/fetus as it develops in utero and not in the laboratory; Many people see aborting a fetus as “killing”, whereas in the case of PGD the spare embryos are “allowed to die”. We argue that this difference of opinion gives further weight to our conclusion, but note that this has been addressed and debated at length by others. (shrink)

For most of the 20th century, it was possible to regard fertilisation as the identifiable point when life begins, because this moment could be defined unequivocally and was thought to be the single most essential biological step in the establishment of a new human entity. Since the successful reproductive cloning of Dolly and other mammals, it is clear that any human cell has the potential to supply the full genome of an embryo, and hence a person, without going through fertilisation. (...) At what point in time do such embryos acquire the respect accorded to human beings? The authors argue that the time of implantation is the most useful point at which the potential and the intention to create a new person are translated into reality, because from that point a new life develops. Implantation differentiates a somatic cell in culture from a human entity that has acquired its own identity and developmental potential. The authors examine the value of quickening or viability as alternative developmental stages in the process of acquiring respect for the Dolly embryo. (shrink)

For A. J. Ayer, the occurrence of delusions confutes the notion that we perceive the world directly. He argues instead that perceptions are caused by immaterial “sense data” which somehow represent the properties of material things to us in our experiences. J. L. Austin systematically rejects Ayer’s claims, arguing that the occurrence of delusions does not preclude the possibility of direct perception, and that, indeed, our normal perception is direct. I challenge both philosophers’ ideas by examining how they deal with (...) the phenomenon of colour. (shrink)

The extraordinary success of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) on a diverse array of tasks has led to an explosion of scientific and philosophical theorizing aimed at explaining how they do what they do. Unfortunately, disagreement over fundamental theoretical issues has led to stalemate, with entrenched camps of LLM optimists and pessimists often committed to very different views of how these systems work. Overcoming stalemate requires agreement on fundamental questions, and the goal of this paper is to address one such (...) question, namely: is LLM behavior driven partly by representation-based information processing of the sort implicated in biological cognition, or is it driven entirely by processes of memorization and stochastic table look-up? This is a question about what kind of algorithm LLMs implement, and the answer carries serious implications for higher level questions about whether these systems have beliefs, intentions, concepts, knowledge, and understanding. I argue that LLM behavior is partially driven by representation-based information processing, and then I describe and defend a series of practical techniques for investigating these representations and developing explanations on their basis. The resulting account provides a groundwork for future theorizing about language models and their successors. (shrink)

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 2, Page 132-150, April 2022. Limited research has been done among pregnant people participating in investigational drug trials. To enhance the ethical understanding of pregnant people’s perspectives on research participation, we sought to describe motives and risk perceptions of participants in a phase 1 trial of ledipasvir/sofosbuvir treatment for chronic Hepatitis C virus during pregnancy. Pregnant people with chronic HCV infection enrolled in an open-label, phase 1 study of LDV/SOF participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews to (...) explore their reasons for participation and experiences within the study. Pregnant people took 12 weeks of LDV/SOF and were interviewed at enrollment and at the end of study. We recorded the interviews, transcribed them verbatim, coded them using NVivo software, and performed inductive thematic analysis. Nine women completed the study yielding 18 interview transcripts. We identified two themes regarding motives and one regarding risk perception. Motives— Women conceptualized study participation as part of the caregiving role they associate with motherhood; participating was viewed as an act of caregiving for their infants, their families, themselves, and other pregnant women with chronic HCV. Women also noted that they faced multiple barriers to treatment prior to pregnancy that created a desire to receive therapy through trial participation. Risk perception— Women acknowledged personal and fetal risk associated with participation. Acceptance of risk was influenced by women’s concepts of motherhood, preexisting knowledge of HCV and medical research, family members, intimate partners, or by the study design. Women enrolled in a phase 1 trial for chronic HCV therapy during pregnancy acknowledged risks of participation and were motivated by hopes for fetal and personal benefit and by lack of prenatal access to treatment. Ethical inclusion of pregnant people in research should acknowledge structural factors that contribute to vulnerability and data deficiencies for treatment in pregnancy. (shrink)

Critics of animal modeling have advanced a variety of arguments against the validity of the practice. The point of one such form of argument is to establish that animal modeling is pointless and therefore immoral. In this article, critical arguments of this form are divided into three types, the pseudoscience argument, the disanalogy argument, and the predictive validity argument. I contend that none of these criticisms currently succeed, nor are they likely to. However, the connection between validity and morality is (...) important, suggesting that critical efforts would be instructive if they addressed it in a more nuanced way. (shrink)

Retaliation against whistleblowers is a well-recognized problem, yet there is little explanation for why uninvolved peers choose to retaliate through ostracism. We conduct two experiments in which participants take the role of a peer third-party observer of theft and subsequent whistleblowing. We manipulate injunctive norms and descriptive norms. Both experiments support the core of our theoretical model, based on social intuitionist theory, such that moral judgments of the acts of wrongdoing and whistleblowing influence the perceived likeability of each actor and (...) ultimately influence intention to ostracize each actor and indicate more willingness to ostracize the whistleblower than the wrongdoer. When we vary norms for the wrongdoing in Experiment 1, we find that descriptive and injunctive norms indirectly influence intentions to ostracize both the wrongdoer and whistleblower. These relationships are serially mediated by the observers’ moral judgments of the act and likeability of the actor. When we vary norms for whistleblowing in Experiment 2, the injunctive norm manipulation affected moral judgment of the action of whistleblowing, and we do not observe any other significant effects of the norm manipulations on moral judgments of the actions of wrongdoing or whistleblowing. (shrink)

How should we determine the distribution of psychological traits—such as Theory of Mind, episodic memory, and metacognition—throughout the Animal kingdom? Researchers have long worried about the distorting effects of anthropomorphic bias on this comparative project. A purported corrective against this bias was offered as a cornerstone of comparative psychology by C. Lloyd Morgan in his famous “Canon”. Also dangerous, however, is a distinct bias that loads the deck against animal mentality: our tendency to tie the competence criteria for cognitive capacities (...) to an exaggerated sense of typical human performance. I dub this error “anthropofabulation”, since it combines anthropocentrism with confabulation about our own prowess. Anthropofabulation has long distorted the debate about animal minds, but it is a bias that has been little discussed and against which the Canon provides no protection. Luckily, there is a venerable corrective against anthropofabulation: a principle offered long ago by David Hume, which I call “Hume’s Dictum”. In this paper, I argue that Hume’s Dictum deserves a privileged place next to Morgan’s Canon in the methodology of comparative psychology, illustrating my point through a discussion of the debate over Theory of Mind in nonhuman animals. (shrink)

We report on the small-scale (0.5 13 h - 1M, a large-scale bias of ~2.0 and a satellite fraction of 12 ± 2 per cent. Thus, these galaxies occupy haloes with average masses in between those of the higher redshift BOSS CMASS sample and the original SDSS I/II luminous red galaxy sample © 2012 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society © doi:10.1093/mnras/sts314.

The story of Atlantis, inspiration of more than 20,000 books, rests entirely on an elaborate Platonic myth , allegedly based on a private, oral tradition deriving from Solon. Solon himself is supposed to have heard the story in Egypt; a priest obligingly translated it for him from hieroglyphic inscriptions in a temple in Sais. It might be added that Plato is less concerned with Atlantis than with her rival and conqueror, the Athens of that antediluvian age 9600 B.C. That Plato (...) himself made the whole story up is indeed virtually demonstrable. This is not the place for such a demonstration , but it is at any rate possible to eliminate completely one of the crucial props on which belief has always leaned. (shrink)

The term 'covert mixed quotation' describes cases in which linguistic material is interpreted in the manner of mixed quotation — that is, used in addition to being mentioned — despite the superficial absence of any commonly recognized conventional devices indicating quotation. After developing a novel theory of mixed quotation, I show that positing covert mixed quotation allows us to give simple and unified treatments of a number of puzzling semantic phenomena, including the projective behavior of conventional implicature items embedded in (...) indirect speech reports and propositional attitude ascriptions, so-called 'c-monsters,' metalinguistic negation, metalinguistic negotiation, and 'in a sense' constructions. (shrink)

Interactionism has emerged as a promising approach to moral character in the wake of the situationist challenge and the character-situation debate. This paper will consider whether interactionism is troubled by a familiar problem from the philosophy of mind: the coupling-constitution or causal-constitution fallacy. In relation to character, this issue pertains to whether the external factors featured in interactionist models are partly constitutive of the agent’s character, or whether they merely play a causal role. In contrast to some other interactionist theorists, (...) I argue that interactionism doesn’t need to make distinctions regarding causation and constitution, and would be better off without attempting to do so. Making such claims would only add metaphysical baggage to interactionism that won’t aid in its goal of providing an empirically adequate moral psychology of character. Interactionists are thus better off evading the C-C fallacy challenge, rather than attempting to meet it head-on. (shrink)

In C.Q. N.S. xv, 293 f., in a discussion of the popularity of theyounger Pliny's Letters in the late fourth century, I adduced three passages of St. Jerome which reveal acquaintance with the Letters. The list may be extended.

What we consider “nature” is always historical and relational, shaped in contingent configurations of representational and social practices. In the early twentieth century, the English ecologist A.G. Tansley lamented the pervasive problem of international misunderstandings concerning the nature of “nature.” In order to create some consensus on the concepts and language of ecological plant geography, Tansley founded the International Phytogeographical Excursion, which brought together leading plant geographers and botanists from North America and Europe. The first IPE in August 1911 started (...) with the Norfolk Broads. It was led by Marietta Pallis, Tansley’s former student at Cambridge. This trip and the work of Pallis, neglected in other accounts of this early period of the history of ecology, influenced the relations between Tansley and important American ecologists H.C. Cowles and F.E. Clements. Understanding “place” as a network of relations, our regional focus shows how taking international dialogue, travel and interchange into account enriches understanding of ecological practice. (shrink)

La révolution par d’autres moyensLa politique féministe en tant que réinstitution dans la pensée de Merleau-PontyCet essai est une tentative pour surmonter l’impasse qui a été relevée par de nombreuses critiques féministes de Merleau-Ponty, à savoir que sa dernière ontologie bloque certaines perspectives de changement politique. De fait, comme le soutenait Luce Irigaray, l’ontologie de la chair semble être un discours normalisant et totalisant dépourvu de toute différence. « Il n’y a pas d’Autre, écrit-elle, pour garder le monde ouvert ». (...) Étant donné que Merleau-Ponty développe une ontologie qui opère en amont du niveau des personnes et des choses proprement dites, on a souvent supposé prima facie que les projets féqministes, qui cherchent à fournir des fondements pour éliminer l’oppression basée sur le genre, n’y ont rien à faire.Malgré la longue tradition de débat féministe avec la centralisation du corps dans des textes tels que la Phénoménologie de la perception, je cherche ici à rediriger les philosophes féministes vers la dernière ontologie de Merleau-Ponty. Je le fais en lisant son ouvrage politique trop souvent négligé, Les aventures de la dialectique, ainsi que les notes de cours, récemment traduites en anglais, de l’année 1954-1955 sur L’institution et la Passivité. Non seulement, ces textes émergent à un moment critique dans le corpus merleau-pontien, mais encore, ils contiennent des possibilités politiques qui résultent de ce moment particulier. Dans ces textes et à travers eux, je propose une réexamen de l’engagement féministe dans l’oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty, libéré du discours sur le corps et dirigé, en revanche, vers un désir de changement politique enraciné dans le cadre institutionnel que l’on pourrait appeler aussi l’« intermonde ». Pour ce faire, lepremier pas, comme je le montre dans cet essai, est de prendre au sérieux le concept de “revolution” et ses développements dans l’ensemble du corpus merleau-pontien.La rivoluzione con altri mezziLa politica femminista come reistituzione nel pensiero di Merleau-PontyQuesto saggio è un tentativo di chiarire come molte critiche rivolte a Merleau-Ponty da parte del femminismo rischino di condurre in un vicolo cieco. Il problemafondamentale è il seguente: se la tarda ontologia di Merleau-Ponty precluda, o meno, le strade del cambiamento politico. Effettivamente, come Luce Irigaray ha argomentato, l'ontologia della carne sembra essere un discorso tristemente normalizzatore e totalizzatore della differenza. “Non [c'è] nessun Altro,” scrive Irigaray, “capace di tenere il aperto mondo.” Dato che Merleau-Ponty sviluppa un'ontologia che opera al di sotto del livello delle persone e delle cose, molti hanno presunto prima facie che i progetti femministi, che si mettono in cerca di una fondazione in grado di cancellare l’oppressione basata sull’identità di genere, non possano in alcun modo appartenerle.Nonostante l’ormai lunga serie di critiche che il femminismo ha mosso all’accentramento del corpo che Merleau-Ponty opererebbe in testi come Fenomenologia della Percezione, cercheremo in questa sede di reindirizzare il pensiero femminista verso la tarda ontologia di Merleau-Ponty a partire da un suo testo politico largamente trascurato, Avventure della dialettica, e dalle notes de cours del 1954-1955, recentemente tradotte col titolo Istituzione e Passività. Questi testi non solo emergono ad una svolta critica nel corpus di Merleau-Ponty, nel corso della quale egli muove dal primato della percezione alla dimensione dell’istituzione, ma contengono possibilità politiche direttamente derivanti da questo slittamento teorico. È in questi testi e attraverso questi testi che proponiamo di riavviare il dibattito femminista su Merleau-Ponty, mostrando come il pensatore francese risulti, in questa fase della sua opera, libero dai vincoli del discorso sul corpo e incamminato in direzione di un pensiero del cambiamento politico radicato nella struttura istituzionale di quello che potremmo chiamare l’“intermondo.” Il primo passo per fare questo, come mostreremo in questo saggio, consiste nel prendere sul serio il concetto di rivoluzione ed i suoi sviluppiall’interno dell’intero corpus merleau-pontyano. (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

forthcoming in R. Cameron, B. Hale and A. Hoffmann (ed.s), The Logic, Epistemology and Metaphysics of Modality, Oxford University Press. Presents a concept-grounding account of modal knowledge.

Cameron and Williamson have provided a provocative and timely review of the ethical questions prompted by the birth of Dolly. The question Cameron and Williamson seek to address is “In the world of Dolly, when does a human embryo acquire respect?”. Their initial discussion sets the scene by providing a valuable overview of attitudes towards the embryo, summarising various religious, scientific, and philosophical viewpoints. They then ask, “What has Dolly changed?” and identify five changes, the first being that (...) fertilisation is no longer required to create an embryo. Following this analysis they then ask when an embryo created other than by fertilisation begins to acquire respect. This paper explores the ethical and legal issues highlighted by Cameron and Williamson’s paper. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to invigorate debate concerning the nature of analogy, and to broaden the scope of current conceptions of analogy. We argue that analogizing is not a single or even a fundamental cognitive process. The argument relies on an analysis of the history of the concept of analogy, case studies on the use of analogy in scientific problem solving, cognitive research on analogy comprehension and problem solving, and a survey of computational mechanisms of analogy comprehension. Analogizing (...) is regarded as a macrocognitive phenomenon having a number of supporting processes. These include the apperception of resemblances and distinctions, metaphor, and the balancing of semantic flexibility and inference constraint. Psychological theories and computational models have generally relied on (a) a sparse set of ontological concepts (a property called “similarity” and a structuralist categorization of types of semantic relations), (b) a single form category (i.e., the classic four-term analogy), and (c) a single set of morphological distinctions (e.g., verbal vs. pictorial analogies). This article presents a classification based on a “naturalistic” exploration of the variety of uses of analogical reasoning in pragmatically distinct contexts. The resultant taxonomy distinguishes pre-hoc, ad-hoc, post-hoc, pro-hoc, contra-hoc, and trans-hoc analogy. Each will require its own macrocognitive modeling, and each presents an opportunity for research on phenomena of reasoning that have been neglected. (shrink)

Ancient Egypt, by L. Bull.--Ancient Mesopotamia, by E.A. Speiser.--Ancient Persia, by G.G. Cameron,--Ancient Israel, by M. Burrows.--The Hellenistic Orient, by C.B. Welles.--Earliest Christianity, by E. Dinkler.--Patristic Christianity, by R.H. Bainton.--Early Islam, by J. Obermann.--The twentieth-century West and the ancient Near East, by P. Schubert.