This book is a defense of modal realism; the thesis that our world is but one of a plurality of worlds, and that the individuals that inhabit our world are only a few out of all the inhabitants of all the worlds. Lewis argues that the philosophical utility of modal realism is a good reason for believing that it is true.

Dilthey’s moral writings have received scant attention over the years, perhaps due to his apparent tendency toward relativism. This essay offers a unified look at Dilthey’s moral writings in the context of his Kantian-styled “Critique of Historical Reason.” I present the Dilthey of the moral writings as an observer of reason in the spirit of Kant, watching practical reason devolve into error when it applies itself beyond the bounds of possible experience. Drawing on moral writings from across Dilthey’s corpus, I (...) retrace Dilthey’s argument that moral theories from Kantianism and utilitarianism to natural law theory suffer significant motivational problems because of the way they transcend the “synthesis” of moral perception. Dilthey’s argument suggests that abstract moral theory is always bound to seem unmotivating and unreal from the standpoint of lived experience, and perhaps that, to avoid this, moral philosophy should confine itself to more situated, case-specific judgments. (shrink)

I present evidence for a systematic complexity-coherence tradeoff in cognition. I show how feasible strategies for increasing cognitive complexity along three dimensions come at the expense of a heightened vulnerability to incoherence. I discuss two normative implications of the complexity-coherence tradeoff: a novel challenge to coherence-based theories of bounded rationality and a new strategy for vindicating the rationality of seemingly irrational cognitions. I also discuss how the complexity-coherence tradeoff sharpens recent descriptive challenges to dual process theories of cognition.

David B. Wong proposes that there can be a plurality of true moralities, moralities that exist across different traditions and cultures, all of which address facets of the same problem: how we are to live well together. Wong examines a wide array of positions and texts within the Western canon as well as in Chinese philosophy, and draws on philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, history, and literature, to make a case for the importance of pluralism in moral life, and to (...) establish the virtues of acceptance and accommodation. Wong's point is that there is no single value or principle or ordering of values and principles that offers a uniquely true path for human living, but variations according to different contexts that carry within them a common core of human values. We should thus be modest about our own morality, learn from other approaches, and accommodate different practices in our pluralistic society. (shrink)

It is shown how a diagram on the reverse of a Greek coin of Aegina of the fifth century b.c.e., is simply constructed with the help of Proposition 36 of Euclid’s Book on Divisions [of Figures], and it is conjectured in the absence of contemporary evidence that, since Euclid expressly designated this proposition to be the last in the book, he may have had in mind the diagram, which, some 200 years after its appearance on the coinage, may still have (...) played a significant role in geometry. (shrink)

Between the body and the breathing earth : on the phenomenology of depth perception -- To praise again : phenomenology and the project of ecopsychology -- Postphenomenology and the lifeworld : interconnections, relationships, and environmental wholes : a phenomenological ecology of natural and built worlds.

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comAllen Fromherz has already written a very useful book on the Almohads, and he now attempts to set his work on their remarkable empire within a much wider setting, from the seventh century, when Islam reached the Maghreb, all the way to the fifteenth century, and in the entire western Mediterranean. His thesis is that we should (...) think of western Mediterranean civilization in the Middle Ages as a shared culture and experience, embracing the much-ignored history of what are now Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia alongside the study of Spanish, Italian and other histories, predominantly Christian. Close attention to the Christian shores of the western Mediterranean has, he avers, created a narrative of worlds apart: Christians on the northern flanks who had little in common... (shrink)

How should we understand the fundamental difference between objective and subjective theories of well-being? Authors typically presuppose some understanding of the divide but don’t do much to explain why that understanding is better than its rivals or gets at the heart of the distinction. We explicate criteria for a better account of the divide and use such criteria to critique extant understandings of the divide. We then propose and defend a new understanding of the divide, one that characterizes subjectivism in (...) terms of the normative role it grants to warrantless attitudes in grounding benefits to subjects. (shrink)

The advent of AI calls for an existential self-redefinition of humanity. It necessitates the establishment of a pluralistic global humanist culture that enables us to coexist in the new world of active media and autopoietic technology. In this paper, related philosophical questions give rise to the proposal of a novel metaculture that elevates human heritages and cultural memories to the plane of a digital AI- based infrastructure. I argue for a balanced and holistic approach to human-to-human and human–AI interactions and (...) metaculture that can be developed in the form of combinatorial “metagames” that reflect the potential of human consciousness, transcend the boundaries between technology, human embodiment and biology, the arts, sciences and humanities, and philosophy, and, finally, include the element of meaningful coincidence and spontaneity “in the second potency.” Hermann Hesse’s final novel, The Glass Bead Game, offers a key to understanding this basic idea. His vision is extremely relevant today. Based on this, the concept of cultivating global cultural memories through innovative aesthetic-epistemic “Glass Bead Games 2.0” is discussed further from a systematic angle. To complement this, reference is also made to Hesse’s own source of inspiration: Novalis’s “encyclopedist” approach interlinks aesthetic and epistemic productivity in a way that could become a major starting point to create a new holistic metaculture in the Age of AI. (shrink)

On one possible view of practical reason, that capacity is subject to a standard of correctness determined by independently obtaining facts. This view has recently come under attack, notably in Jeremy Fix’s ‘Intellectual Isolation’. The relevant view, he claims, treats practical reason as a species of theoretical reason and is unable to account for the role that practical reason plays in rational agency. His case relies, however, on a certain conception of theoretical reason: a contemplative conception according to which theoretical (...) reason is practically inert. By embracing that conception, he is led to suppose that exercises of a capacity with an external standard of correctness could not, by themselves, move a subject to act. But the contemplative conception is hardly compulsory. A view according to which practical reason is subject to an external standard need not take the shape, nor involve the corollaries, that Fix, and others, assume it must. Or so I argue. (shrink)

The question of who possesses the moral rights of creative works made using the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) is not fully resolved. In particular, the relationship between moral rights and moral agency in the production of creative works has been under-investigated in the literature. I explore these topics and argue that moral agency, intentionality and values-based reasoning are crucial for the entitlement of moral rights and hence the assignment of authorship. I conclude that, despite their great power to produce (...) creative works, current generative AI systems cannot be the moral author of such works due to the absence of intentionality with values-based reasoning. Instead, the human end-user of a generative AI system is the moral author in most cases. (shrink)

Everyone suspects that nudging offends against the nudged’s autonomy. But it has proved rather difficult to say why. In this paper I offer a new diagnosis of the tension between even the best cases of nudging and the value of autonomy. Relying on the distinction between autonomy as sovereignty and autonomy as non-alienation, I show that nudging need not offend against either. But it does sever the tie between them, it undermines the possibility of achieving non-alienation *in virtue of* having (...) sovereignty. Analogies to common themes in virtue epistemology help to establish this point. If true, this diagnosis improves our understanding of nudging, of course, but it also improves our understanding of the value of autonomy—the full value of autonomy has the structure that is shared by many other achievements—that of an objective element, a subjective one, and the appropriate relations between the two. (shrink)

How should we assess systems whose mnemonic status is contested? There are, for instance, debates over whether immune memory is “really” memory, or akin to memory as ordinarily attributed to human cognition. In this paper, I challenge two arguments often given by detractors in this debate. The first is that the system does not exhibit errors exemplified in human memory. The second is that it can be described and explained in causal terms alone. I argue that our limited knowledge of (...) the causal basis of immunological phenomena and human memory undercuts our ability to conclude that one is merely causal while the other is not. By consequence, it is unclear why we should reject that the immune system exhibits these errors. With my challenges, I question whether we are consistent in assessing alleged mnemonic systems. Though we have schematic causal accounts of both systems, we have differing expectations of what we can conclude about them. Yet, it is unclear what might warrant appeals to these expectations. (shrink)

In recent work, Benjamin Ferguson and Sebastian Köhler take interest in the claim that permissible acts are always morally better than impermissible acts ( bop ). They argue that bop is both commonsensical and supported by powerful theoretical considerations. They then present a series of cases in which common moral claims appear to conflict with bop. In this paper, I first show that some of the conflicts Ferguson and Köhler identify are merely apparent, as they arise only given theoretical commitments (...) regarding the value of actions that supporters of the relevant claims can and do reject. In the second half of the paper, I address two other cases Ferguson and Köhler discuss. I argue that the conflicts with bop in these cases are genuine, but also to be expected, because these cases involve supererogation, and our best theories of supererogation are in tension with Ferguson and Köhler’s case for bop. (shrink)

In proof-theoretic semantics, model-theoretic validity is replaced by proof-theoretic validity. Validity of formulae is defined inductively from a base giving the validity of atoms using inductive clauses derived from proof-theoretic rules. A key aim is to show completeness of the proof rules without any requirement for formal models. Establishing this for propositional intuitionistic logic raises some technical and conceptual issues. We relate Sandqvist’s (complete) base-extension semantics of intuitionistic propositional logic to categorical proof theory in presheaves, reconstructing categorically the soundness and (...) completeness arguments, thereby demonstrating the naturality of Sandqvist’s constructions. This naturality includes Sandqvist’s treatment of disjunction that is based on its second-order or elimination-rule presentation. These constructions embody not just validity, but certain forms of objects of justifications. This analysis is taken a step further by showing that from the perspective of validity, Sandqvist’s semantics can also be viewed as the natural disjunction in a category of sheaves. (shrink)

The making of mistakes by organisms and living systems generally is an underexplored way of conceptualising biology and organising experimental research. We set out an informal account of biological mistakes and why they should be taken seriously in biological investigation. We then give an indirect defence of their importance by applying the concept of mistake-making to three kinds of activity: timing, calculation, and communication. We give a range of examples to show that mistakes in these kinds of behaviour can be (...) found across a diversity of scales and systems. We also suggest ideas for empirical research that naturally arise from these cases. The reality and potential for mistake-making across such a wide range of biological entities shows that it is not a purely human phenomenon. Getting it wrong seems to be central to biology as a whole, and to be a potentially productive organising principle for generating novel research questions and experimental hypotheses. (shrink)

In the First Analogy, Kant argues that because we mark the passage of time on the objects of experience, in order to represent the unity of time, we must represent the world as consisting of a single substance that can never be created or destroyed. We must rule out gaps in time's passage, and incommensurable timelines. It is argued here that Mary Shepherd likewise holds that we mark the passage of time on the objects of experience, but that she meets (...) Kant's criteria for representing the unity of time with ontological holism rather than his required monism. (shrink)

_The Gift of Death_, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book _Given Time_ about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s _Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History _and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard. One of Derrida’s major works, _The Gift of Death_ resonates with (...) much of his earlier writing, and this highly anticipated second edition is greatly enhanced by David Wills’s updated translation. This new edition also features the first-ever English translation of Derrida’s _Literature in Secret_. In it, Derrida continues his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, which leads to bracing meditations on secrecy, forgiveness, literature, and democracy. He also offers a reading of Kafka’s _Letter to His Father_ and uses the story of the flood in Genesis as an embarkation point for a consideration of divine sovereignty. “An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion... [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida.”—_Booklist_, on the first edition. (shrink)

Terry Eagleton is the foremost Marxist cultural theorist of our time. In the first book-length study of this highly influential figure, David Alderson provides detailed discussions of Eagleton's Marxism and his engagements with postmodernism, as well as an evaluation of his interventions in Irish Studies. Each of the chapters in this important intervention in current theoretical debates offers accessible contextualization of the key issues and provides detailed analyses of Eagleton's literary criticism. Alderson shows that the complex relations between nature, (...) culture and ideology, body, subjectivity and authority are at the heart of Eagleton's ethical and political concerns. He goes on to demonstrate that these relations inform the theorist's critical examinations of such literary works as Wuthering Heights and The Merchant of Venice, and his treatment of W.B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde. (shrink)

The Berkson effect shows that two independent diseases, A and B, become negatively correlated if they are confined within the walls of a hospital. We explain that, simply by adding a third disease, C, the negative correlation may flip into a positive one, and we identify the point where this happens. That leads to a necessary and sufficient condition for a positive as well as a negative correlation between A and B. We further explain that a flip from negative to (...) positive is impossible if C is independent of A, of B, and of the disjunction of A and B: with these three independences in place, the Berkson effect remains in force. However, if only two of the three independences hold, the effect is not guaranteed. (shrink)

In this paper I take another look at the view, defended by C. Nino, that we may punish criminals because, by knowingly breaking a law, they have consented to becoming liable to the prescribed punishment. I will first rebut the criticisms usually aimed at this view in the literature, aiming to show that they are inconclusive. They are all efforts to show that criminal offenders in fact do not consent to becoming liable to punishment simply by committing crimes. I then (...) turn to a different line of criticism, which I find more promising. I argue that the moral power of effecting normative changes by consenting reflects the power holder’s value as a person, and show how this idea makes sense of how refusal to recognize that power wrongs a person. I then argue that the “power” of consenting to punishability does not fit that model, and is better explained as reflecting the value of other people, whom the offender has wronged. Hence the power of consenting is not involved in typical cases of wrongdoing. (shrink)

Central to the ethics of harm is the project of developing a theory of when and why persons forfeit rights to not be harmed. I argue that standard accounts of forfeiture are too coarse-grained to make sense of a range of cases involving “merely apparent attackers.” Making sense of these cases requires that we distinguish between the forfeiture of rights and the forfeiture of the contingent, moral “perks” of those rights. Appreciating this distinction has various upshots for the theory of (...) forfeiture and may also bear fruit in other domains of moral philosophy. (shrink)

The cognitivist environmental-aesthetic theory of Positive Aesthetics—that holds that nature untouched by humans, known through the lens of science, is always aesthetically good—is not relevant to gardens. Nonetheless, I argue that every garden (with one possible exception) is aesthetically positive, that true summative aesthetic judgements about (bona fide) gardens are always on balance positive, and that every garden possesses more aesthetically positive features than negative ones. I offer three arguments for this thesis: (1) once a garden has more negative than (...) positive aesthetic properties, it loses both its design and its purpose; (2) once a garden has more negative than positive aesthetic properties, standard or typical gardening practices are no longer useful for maintaining the garden; and (3) a particular garden that has more negative than positive aesthetic properties is no longer the garden that it was; to bring it back, so to speak, is to redesign and reinstall a new garden. (shrink)

The Illusion of the Body: Introducing the Body Alive Principle is the divinely inspired work of author David Almeida. This book opens the door to a new understanding in metaphysical thinking. The author draws on the philosophy of panpsychism to support his contention that an unseen ocean of consciousness exists all around us, and within our own bodies (i.e. cells, organs, and systems). The author refers to the Body Alive Principle as “panpsychic healing.” This text offers proven techniques for (...) communicating with the body intelligences the author terms the “little minds.” This process is intended to bring healing to those with both minor and severe medical conditions. Some of the most common medical complaints treated by the Body Alive Principle includes:1. Back or neck pain2. Allergies3. Arthritis/rheumatism4. Difficulty walking5. Headaches6. Lung problems7. Digestive8. Gynecological9. Anxiety disorders10. Heart conditionsThe author contends that even the most nefarious medical issues are curable or can be successfully managed using the Body Alive Principle. This is accomplished through the action of human “super mind”, which will at times consciously supervise the activities of the little minds. The Illusion of the Body instructs its Body Alive practitioners to approach their recovery using several time-tested techniques. Three widely recognized methods are employed in the application of the panpsychic healing philosophy. These modalities are creative visualization and empathetic listening followed by affirmative commands. Each technique is essential to the effectiveness of the Body Alive Principle.This book also discusses guilt and its deleterious effect on the body. True guilt has a beneficial quality when it prevents us from repeating an unacceptable behavior. Beyond this, guilt causes us to become ineffectual. The author holds that this antiquated form guilt needs to be purged, so that we may move on with our lives. A step-by-step process for liberating oneself from the chains of guilt is provided.There is also a section dedicated to trauma because of its potential to immobilize an affected person. Traumatic experiences suddenly unleashed on the body may produce waves of acute anxiety, which wreak havoc on its finely tuned systems. The author recounts his personal experience of negotiating the discharge of negative experiences with the entities supporting them.The Body Alive Principle promotes the importance of adhering to high moral standards in order to maintain homeostasis within ourselves. Integrity is of the outmost importance to the little minds. The author emphasizes the necessity for one to act within the domain of moral excellence. However, the author makes it clear that integrity is a process we work to perfect throughout our lives.The Illusion of the Body represents the author's many years of metaphysical study and experimentation. The author hopes to generate a greater awareness and appreciation of our precious bodily intelligences. The organic vessels that contain our consciousness are alive. They are almost countless in number. If we, the super mind can learn to communicate with the little minds in a positive way, we can ensure ourselves of a more comfortable journey. (shrink)

Instead of the half-century old foundational feud between set theory and category theory, this paper argues that they are theories about two different complementary types of universals. The set-theoretic antinomies forced naïve set theory to be reformulated using some iterative notion of a set so that a set would always have higher type or rank than its members. Then the universal u F = {x | F(x)} for a property F(.) could never be self-predicative in the sense of uF ∈ (...) uF. But the mathematical theory of categories, dating from the mid-twentieth century, includes a theory of always-self-predicative universals – which can be seen as forming the “other bookend” to the never-self-predicative universals of set theory. The self-predicative universals of category theory show that the problem in the antinomies was not self-predication per se, but negated self-predication. They also provide a model (in the Platonic Heaven of mathematics) for the self-predicative strand of Plato’s Theory of Forms as well as for the idea of a “concrete universal” in Hegel and similar ideas of paradigmatic exemplars in ordinary thought. (shrink)

I offer a modified definition of sport. Some have claimed that it is impossible to define sport. I believe it is possible to give a definition, understood as articulating intuitive views about what correct usage of the word is. Through an examination of competitive cooking and Esports, I argue that a common definition of sport as a game of physical skill needs to be modified to account for why these should not be considered sports. Although cooking involves physical skill, what (...) is judged in a cooking competition is a product, not physical skill itself. Esports do involve physical skill, but I claim that the common use of sport requires gross motor activity that uses most of the body, whereas the popular Esports only require hand and arm movement. My modified definition is that sports are games of gross motor skill which do not produce a product distinct from the skill itself. I conclude with consideration of some borderline cases. (shrink)

Axel Honneth is, without a doubt, heir to a tradition of social and political thought that was decisive in the Marxist debates of the 20th century; critical theory. As an outstanding disciple of Jürgen Habermas, he denounced a sociological deficit in his teacher's theory of communicative action, while continuing a certain recovery of Hegel that Habermas made evident in his text: Work and interaction: notes on Hegelian philosophy of the Jena period (1986). Honneth deepened the Hegelian reading of Habermas, going (...) from mere reading notes to a system of understanding the social based on recognition and ethics. (shrink)

Presentamos las contribuciones de Einstein a la termodinámica y la mecánica estadística y su resonancia en ramas de la física que han conducido hasta la consideración actual de lo complejo. Nos referimos especialmente al uso de las fluctuaciones y de la entropía como marco común y nexo de unión entre luz y materia, que le conducen a algunas de sus aportaciones fundamentales (efecto fotoeléctrico, movimiento browniano, calor específico de los sólidos, emisión estimulada de la luz, condensación de Bose-Einstein). Consideramos también (...) algunas facetas del estilo de investigación de Einstein, que se manifiestan con especial claridad en este campo: extrapolaciones, analogías, simplificaciones. Destacamos especialmente la importancia de la relación entre luz y materia en sus investigaciones. (shrink)

More philosophical effort is spent articulating evolutionary rationales for the development of belief-like capacities than for precursors of desires or preferences. Nobody, though, seriously expects naturally evolved minds to be disinterested world-modellers. We agree that world-representing states will not pay their way without supporting capacities that prioritise from an organism’s available repertoire of activities in light of stored (and occurrent) information. Some concede that desire-like states would be one way of solving this problem. Taking preferences as my starting point instead (...) of belief-like states, I defend two conclusions. First, psychologically real preference states, which approximately token expected utilities, have a quite general evolutionary rationale. They are a solution to the problem of efficiently allocating capacities with incompatible uses. This argument is a version of the environmental complexity thesis. Second, preferences can plausibly function and naturally evolve without belief-like states, even though the converse claim is incredible. Preferences, that is, can mediate between discriminations of occurrent states (whether “internal” or “external”) and the processes selecting activity without mediation by stored indicative representations. By tracking expected utilities of actions conditional on discriminated states, they can increase the rate at which the “right thing” is done at appropriate times, and they can do this without the support of belief-like, world-representing states. Preferences, even incomplete and noisy sets of them, are a fuel for success that will tend to be favoured when environments are complex in ways that matter to an organism, and when the organisms have complex behavioural repertoires with heterogenous returns and costs. (shrink)

Reflecting on the rapid growth of epistemic injustice scholarship, this article proposes an ‘active alignment account’ for relating epistemic and social justice. The account contains both critical and constructive elements. The critical aim of the article is to argue that debates about epistemic and social justice are commonly misaligned. A focus on epistemic injustice can distort social justice agendas and epistemic recognition can be actively turned against the material interests of epistemically recognized actors. The constructive aim of the article is (...) to show that epistemic justice nonetheless remains central to many social justice agendas. Recognizing both distortions and centrality leads to the demand of ‘active alignment’ according to which epistemic justice needs to be proactively connected with material conditions of social justice. (shrink)