The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 4, Page 731-741, July 2022.

There exists a family of views concerning the foundations of epistemic normativity that all travel under the heading “epistemic instrumentalism”. These views are unified by their attempt to explain epistemic normativity in terms of instrumental normativity. Very roughly, they all say that we have reason to respond to truth-related considerations when forming and maintaining doxastic attitudes since regulating our doxastic attitudes in this way helps us satisfy our aims, interests, or goals. Thus, according to epistemic instrumentalists, truth-related considerations constitute reasons (...) for belief, but they only do so because regulating our beliefs on their basis is an effective way to satisfy our ends. I will first try to clarify the question that epistemic instrumentalism is supposed to answer. I will then identify a plausible normative commitment and show that the main varieties of epistemic instrumentalism fail to vindicate it. I will conclude by arguing that this provides us with prima facie grounds for rejecting epistemic instrumentalism. (shrink)

Recently, a view I refer to as “hypothetical continuism” has garnered some favour among philosophers, based largely on empirical research showing substantial neurocognitive overlaps between episodic memory and imagination. According to this view, episodically remembering past events is the same kind of cognitive process as sensorily imagining future and counterfactual events. In this paper, I first argue that hypothetical continuism is false, on the basis of substantive epistemic asymmetries between episodic memory and the relevant kinds of imagination. However, I then (...) propose and defend an alternative form of continuism, according to which episodic memory is continuous with a capacity I call “actuality-oriented imagination.” Because of the deep epistemic affinities between episodic memory and actuality-oriented imagination, it makes sense to think of them as cognitive processes of the same kind. (shrink)

Are the properties of communicative acts grounded in the intentions with which they are performed, or in the conventions that govern them? The latest round in this debate has been sparked by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone (2015), who argue that much more of communication is conventional than we thought, and that the rest isn’t really communication after all, but merely the initiation of open-ended imaginative thought. I argue that although Lepore and Stone may be right about many of the (...) specific cases they discuss, their big-picture, conventionalist conclusions don’t follow. My argument focuses on four phenomena that present challenges to conventionalist accounts of communication: ambiguity, indirect communication, communication by wholly unconventional means, and convention acquisition. (shrink)

In this classic work by one of America's most distinguished historians, Daniel Boorstin enters into Thomas Jefferson's world of ideas.

According to illusionism, phenomenal consciousness is an introspective illusion. The illusion problem is to explain the cause of the illusion, or why we are powerfully disposed to judge—erroneously—that we are phenomenally conscious. I propose a theory to solve the illusion problem. I argue that on the basis of three hypotheses about the mind—which I call introspective opacity, the infallibility intuition, and the justification constraint—we can explain our disposition, on introspection, to draw erroneous unconscious inferences about our sensory states. Being subject (...) to the illusion of phenomenal consciousness consists in having this disposition. I explain our ‘problem intuitions’ about consciousness —that our sensory states bear phenomenal properties that are qualitatively like something with which we are directly acquainted that is ineffable, atomic, intrinsic, private, and non-physical. I also address the illusion meta-problem, which is to explain why illusionism seems especially counterintuitive. (shrink)

A reconstruction of F.W.J. Schelling's philosophy of language based on a detailed reading of §73 of Schelling's lectures on the Philosophy of Art.

Non-Reductive Physicalism is similar in many ways with, what I will call, Orthodox Theism. This strongly suggests that Non-Reductive Physicalist solutions to the Supervenience Argument can be adapted to offer Orthodox Theistic solutions to the Conservation is Continuous Creation Argument. One particular Non-Reductive Physicalist solution will be examined in detail and then applied in the debate over Occasionalism.

A large and growing body of research in computational psychiatry draws on Bayesian modelling to illuminate the dysfunctions and aberrations that underlie psychiatric disorders. After identifying the chief attractions of this research programme, we argue that its typical focus on abstract, domain-general inferential processes is likely to obscure many of the distinctive ways in which the human mind can break down and malfunction. We illustrate this by appeal to psychosis and the social phenomenology of delusions.

ABSTRACT Moral hazards are ubiquitous. Green ones typically involve technological fixes: Environmentalists often see ‘technofixes’ as morally fraught because they absolve actors from taking more difficult steps toward systemic solutions. Carbon removal and especially solar geoengineering are only the latest example of such technologies. We here explore green moral hazards throughout American history. We argue that dismissing (solar) geoengineering on moral hazard grounds is often unproductive. Instead, especially those vehemently opposed to the technology should use it as an opportunity to (...) expand the attention paid to the underlying environmental problem in the first place, actively invoking its opposite: ‘inverse moral hazards’. (shrink)

There are two likely paths for philosophers to follow in their encounters with Artificial Life: they can see it as a new way of doing philosophy, or simply as a new object worthy of philosophical attention using traditional methods. Is Artificial Life best seen as a new philosophical method or a new phenomenon? There is a case to be made for each alternative, but I urge philosophers to take the leap and consider the first to be the more important and (...) promising. (shrink)

A thorny question surrounding the meaning of ought concerns a felt distinction between deontic uses of ought that seem to evaluate a state of affairs versus those that seem to describe a requirement or obligation to perform an action, as in and, respectively. There ought not be childhood death and disease. You ought to keep that promise. Various accounts have been offered to explain the contrast between “agentive” and “non-agentive” ought sentences. One such account is the Agency-in-the-Prejacent theory, which traces (...) the difference to a particular kind of ambiguity in the prejacent. This theory has been criticized as linguistically unviable. Indeed, I level a few novel complaints against AIP myself in the present paper. But AIP has a kernel of genuine insight which allows us to explain the contrast—that the distinction between agentive and non-agentive ought sentences owes in part to the way natural language encodes information about agency. I develop this idea into a novel account that, like AIP, traces the contrast to an ambiguity in the complement of the modal. However, according to the view I propose, the Coercion View, a linguistically-motivated coercion operation produces the necessary grammatical conditions for agentive ought, which in turn allow a kind of variadic function operator in the style of to produce the semantic effect we see on display in agentive readings of ought. Having explained the mechanism by which we get this structure, I show that it corroborates some of the central intuitions underwriting agentive ought. I submit that the Coercion View offers an explanation of agentive ought to take at least as seriously as any of its competitors. (shrink)

While solid organ transplantation for patients with substance use issues has attracted ethical discussion, a typology of the ethics themes has not been articulated in the literature. We conducted a scoping review of peer-reviewed literature on solid organ transplantation and substance use published between January 1997 and April 2016. We aimed to identify and develop a typology of the main ethical themes discussed in this literature and to identify gaps worthy of future research. Seventy articles met inclusion criteria and underwent (...) inductive content analysis. Four main ethical themes were identified: (1) personal responsibility; (2) utility; (3) moral character; and (4) fairness. Each theme had multiple sub-themes and there was substantial overlap between themes. This scoping review identified a disproportionate emphasis in the literature regarding personal responsibility, which was referenced by each of the other themes, and a narrow focus on alcohol and liver. We recommend future research further investigate these connections between ethical themes and focus on ethical issues associated with transplants from organ groups other than liver for patients who use substances other than alcohol. (shrink)

Hardly known twenty years ago, exclusion from public space has today become a standard tool of state intervention. Every year, tens of thousands of homeless individuals, drug addicts, teenagers, protesters and others are banned from parts of public space. The rise of exclusion measures is characteristic of two broader developments that have profoundly transformed public space in recent years: the privatisation of public space, and its increased control in the 'security society'. Despite the fundamental problems it raises, exclusion from public (...) space has received hardly any attention from legal scholars. This book addresses this gap and comprehensively explores the implications that this new form of intervention has for the constitutional essentials of liberal democracy: the rule of law, fundamental rights, and democracy. To do so, it analyses legal developments in three liberal democracies that have been at the forefront of promoting exclusion measures: the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland. (shrink)

The authors examined how a perceiver’s identification of a target person’s actions covaries with attributions of mind to the target. The authors found in Study 1 that the attribution of intentionality and cognition to a target was associated with identifying the target’s action in terms of high-level effects rather than low-level details. In Study 2, both action identification and mind attribution were greater for a liked target, and in Study 3, they were reduced for a target suffering misfortune. In Study (...) 4, it was again found that action identification and mind attribution were greater for a liked target, but like that for the self or a liked other, positive actions were identified at higher levels than negative actions, with the reverse being true for disliked others. In Study 5, the authors found that instructing participants to adopt the target’s perspective did not affect mind attribution but did lead to higher level identifications of the.. (shrink)

The ancient background -- Weiss and the pursuit of bodily excellence -- Huizinga and the homo ludens hypothesis -- Feezell, moderation, and irony -- The process of becoming virtuous.

Francisco Suárez is arguably the most important Neo-Scholastic philosopher and a vital link in the chain leading from medieval philosophy to that of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Long neglected by the Anglo-Saxon philosophical community, this sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian is now an object of intense scholarly attention. In this volume, Daniel Schwartz brings together essays by leading specialists which provide detailed treatment of some key themes of Francisco Suárez's philosophical work: God, metaphysics, meta-ethics, the human soul, action, ethics and (...) law, justice and war. The authors assess the force of Suárez's arguments, set them within their wider argumentative context and single out influences and appraise competing interpretations. The book is a useful resource for scholars and students of philosophy, theology, philosophy of religion and history of political thought and provides a rich bibliography of secondary literature. (shrink)

In this dissertation I advance a Jaspersian account of the formation and possession of irrational attitudes. This account stands in opposition to two competing views – externalism and internalism with respect to rational and irrational attitudes. According to externalism, a subject’s attitudes are irrational when they fail to satisfy standards or criteria independent of the subject, such as laws of logic, methods for evidence acquisition, and rules of decision theory. According to internalism, a subject’s attitudes are irrational when they are (...) not supported by reasons selected by the subject. In this dissertation, I take Donald Davidson’s theory of rational and irrational attitudes to be a case of externalism and John Searle’s theory of rational and irrational attitudes to be a case of internalism. While articulating and identifying the merits of externalism and internalism with respect to rational or irrational attitudes, I argue that each account ends up in difficulties: Davidson’s externalism cannot account for the experience of freedom, an individual’s subjectivity, and is unable to avoid an infinite regress of rules; Searle’s internalism struggles to avoid solipsism and an infinite regress of reasons. Karl Jaspers’ account of rational and irrational attitude formation, I argue, avoids the pitfalls of Davidson’s and Searle’s views while preserving the merits of each. On Jaspers’ account, a subject possesses rational attitudes insofar as that subject holds those attitudes to be always open to revision while, at the same time, using those attitudes to bring unity to all manner of phenomena and other attitudes. Irrationality, by contrast, occurs, on the Jaspersian view, when a subject holds onto attitudes with complete and absolute resolution and interprets all else according to these attitudes. Having defined a Jaspersian account of rational and irrational attitudes, I show how it accounts for the irrationality of delusional beliefs and the irrationality of certain worldviews. On Jaspers’ view, I argue, delusions and worldviews are irrational insofar as they are held with absolute conviction, are unamenable to modification, and are used to understand all available evidence, views, and opinions. (shrink)

Mary Kate McGowan’s Just Words offers an interesting account of exercitives. On McGowan’s view, one of the things we do with words is change what’s permitted, and we do this ubiquitously, without any special authority or specific intention. McGowan’s account of exercitives is meant to identify a mechanism by which ordinary speech is harmful, and which justifies the regulation of such speech. It is here that I part ways. I make three main arguments. First, McGowan’s focus on harm is misguided; (...) that ordinary speech is harmful is harder to support, and in turn does not less to support conclusions about whether it is wrong and warrants regulation, than Just Words suggests. Second, if the speech is harmful, McGowan’s account of exercitives is ill-suited to explain why; the relevant instances of ordinary speech seem to express speakers’ views about moral norms, not change social norms. Third, McGowan’s argument for why ordinary speech should be regulated because it is a form of discrimination presupposes a great deal that is controversial about what makes discrimination wrong and legally actionable, and even if it is right it may license the regulation of more speech than many, including McGowan, would deem acceptable. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between Machiavelli's The Prince and Sallust's War with Catiline. In particular, I will argue that Sallust's War with Catiline, and especially the debate between Cato and Caesar over the treatment of the Catilinarian conspirators, provide both a model and a source for portions of Machiavelli's The Prince often held to be most inconsistent with classical thought. Moreover, I will argue that Machiavelli, in describing his ideal prince and the attributes he should adopt, recreates the rhetorical (...) and deliberative context faced by Cato in his debate with Caesar before the Roman senate concerning the treatment of the Catilinarian conspirators. This context, marked by a confusion of moral language and a misunderstanding of virtue, enables Machiavelli's prince, like Sallust's Cato, to appear to depart from conventional virtue and to criticize would- be Caesars. (shrink)