Sharon Street (2006) has argued that, given certain plausible evolutionary considerations, normative realism leads to normative skepticism. Street calls this ‘the Darwinian dilemma’. This paper considers the two most popular responses to the Darwinian dilemma and argues that both are problematic. According to the naturalist response, the evolutionary account of our normative dispositions reveals that there was selection for normative dispositions that were reliable with respect to normative truth. According to the minimalist response, the evolutionary account reveals that there was (...) selection of normative dispositions that were reliable with respect to normative truth. This paper argues that the minimalist response is in principle unacceptable, and that the naturalist response faces a very serious difficulty. (shrink)

This chapter argues that we are irremediably ignorant about the identities of the fundamental properties that figure in the actual realization of the true final theory. Of the three published responses to Lewis’s work, each argues that even if Lewis’s metaphysical assumption, the thesis known as “quidditism,” is accepted, we need not accept his epistemic conclusion, the thesis of Humility. The aim of this chapter is to defend Lewis against these critics. Ann Whittle attempts to refute Humility by an appeal (...) to a more lenient account of identification. Following is a defense of Lewis carried by showing that his taxing account of identification is a perfectly good account of at least one perfectly legitimate sense of identification. (shrink)

According to a number of recent philosophers, knowledge has an intimate relationship with rationality. Some philosophers hold, in particular, that rational agents do things for good motivating reasons, and that p can be one’s motivating reason for -ing (acting/believing/fearing/etc.) only if one knows that p. This paper argues against this view and in favor of the view that p cannot be one’s motivating reason for -ing—in the relevant sense—unless there is an appropriate explanatory connection between the fact that p and (...) one’s -ing. I argue that this view offers a better account of the cases alleged to support the knowledge view. (shrink)

Dustin McWherter defends the possibility of critical ontology by pitting Roy Bhaskar's attempt to rehabilitate ontology in the philosophy of science against Kant's attempt to replace traditional ontology with an account of cognitive experience.

Using the example of classical electrodynamics, I argue that the concept of fields as mediators of particle interactions is fundamentally flawed and reflects a misguided attempt to retrieve Newtonian concepts in relativistic theories. This leads to various physical and metaphysical problems that are discussed in detail. In particular, I emphasize that physics has not found a satisfying solution to the self-interaction problem in the context of the classical field theory. To demonstrate the superiority of a pure particle ontology, I defend (...) the direct interaction theory of Wheeler and Feynman against recent criticism and argue that it provides the most cogent formulation of classical electrodynamics. (shrink)

We discuss Boltzmann’s probabilistic explanation of the second law of thermodynamics providing a comprehensive presentation of what is called today the typicality account. Countering its misconception as an alternative explanation, we examine the relation between Boltzmann’s H-theorem and the general typicality argument demonstrating the conceptual continuity between the two. We then discuss the philosophical dimensions of the concept of typicality and its relevance for scientific reasoning in general, in particular for understanding the reduction of macroscopic laws to microscopic laws. Finally, (...) we reply to various common criticisms of the typicality account. (shrink)

Nick Bostrom has famously defended the credibility of the simulation hypothesis – the hypothesis that we live in a computer simulation. Barry Dainton has recently employed the simulation hypothesis to defend the ‘simulation solution’ to the problem of natural evil. The simulation solution claims that apparently natural evils are in fact the result of wrong actions on the part of the people who create our simulation. In this way, it treats apparently natural evils as actually being moral evils, allowing them (...) to be explained via the free will theodicy. Other theodicies which assimilate apparently natural evils to moral ones include Fall theodicies, which attribute apparently natural evils to the biblical Fall, and diabolical theodicies, which attribute them to the activity of demons. Unfortunately, Dainton fails to give compelling reasons for preferring the simulation solution to Fall or diabolical theodicies. He gives one argument against diabolical theodicies, but it has no force against their best version, and he does not discuss Fall theodicies at all. In this article, I attempt to rectify this. I discuss several problems faced by Fall and diabolical theodicies which the simulation solution avoids. These provide some reason to prefer the simulation solution to these alternatives. (shrink)

In this book, Dustin Peone analyzes the role of shame and fame in the contemporary world, showing that these ideas have lost their roots in social virtue. He then criticizes the technological mentality, demonstrating its responsibility for changing the human condition.

This book critiques Ayn Rand’s secular philosophy of religion while simultaneously highlighting the fundamental contradiction of the Tea Party movement’s dual basis, that is, Randian economics and conservative Christianity.

The authors explore the simulating, philosophical question, "What is the importance of parks and recreation to the quality of life?". Asked by students, educators and practitioners alike, the answer to the question is the core of one's philosophy in the field of recreation. The text has been written so that it is easy to comprehend. The authors present the material in a first person plural and without gender biased language. Each section contains probing questions and a list of references.

In a recent paper, Werndl and Frigg discuss the relationship between the Boltzmannian and Gibbsian framework of statistical mechanics, addressing in particular the question when equilibrium values calculated in both frameworks coincide. In this comment, I point out serious flaws in their work and try to put their results into proper context. I also clarify the concept of Boltzmann equilibrium, the status of the "Khinchin condition" and their connection to the law of large numbers.

In this general introduction to ethical theory, Chapter I introduces the reader to philosophical thinking, philosophy's domain, the value of philosophy, and the nature of philosophical ethics. The second chapter examines various impediments to ethical theory including nihilism, determinism, skeptism, relativism, emotivism, egoism, and divine command theory.

Why is it hard to solve the climate crisis, and what can we do? This book answers these questions, which are of interest to the public, academics, and businesspeople. Using stories from the front lines of the energy transition, we show how to unlock the climate impasse.

Propositions are more than the bearers of truth and the meanings of sentences: they are also the objects of an array of attitudes including belief, desire, hope, and fear. This variety of roles leads to a variety of paradoxes, most of which have been sorely neglected. Arguing that existing work on these paradoxes is either too heavy-handed or too specific in its focus to be fully satisfactory, I develop a basic intensional logic and pursue and compare three strategies for addressing (...) the paradoxes, one employing truth-value gaps, one restricting propositional quantification, and one restricting our ability to have attitudes like belief and desire. This results in four distinct resolutions of the paradoxes, all but one of which are novel and all of which receive novel and general implementations. While resolving the paradoxes is of course the ultimate goal, I do not here argue that any one of the resolutions is superior. These paradoxes have been so little studied that my primary goal is only to identify the most fundamental costs and benefits of the various approaches one can take to addressing them. Each resolution I develop has significant drawbacks, which I argue highlight tensions between the different roles propositions play. Past researchers have skirted these tensions, and the issues raised by these paradoxes more generally, by focusing on non-propositional paradoxes, such as the most familiar forms of the Liar paradox. At the least, then, I hope this dissertation establishes that the propositional paradoxes deserve attention not only because of their consequences for intensional logic, but also because of their consequences for our understanding of content, truth, quantification, and a host of mental attitudes. (shrink)

"The Critical Theory of Religion: From the Frankfurt School to Emancipatory Islamic Thought" is a collection of essay of Dr. Dustin J. Byrd, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Olivet College. The book concerns the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory of Society and how it relates to religion, especially Islam, in the contemporary world.

When we engage in practical deliberation, we sometimes engage in careful probabilistic reasoning. At other times, we simply make flat out assumptions about how the world is or will be. A question thus arises: when, if ever, is it rationally permissible to engage in the latter, less sophisticated kind of practical deliberation? Recently, a number of authors have argued that the answer concerns whether one knows that p. Others have argued that the answer concerns whether one is justified in believing (...) that one knows that p. Against both of these, this paper argues that the answer concerns whether p is ‘practically certain’—that is, whether the actual epistemic probability that p differs from epistemic certainty that p only in ways that are irrelevant to the decision one currently faces. (shrink)

We identify a class of paradoxes that is neither set-theoretical nor semantical, but that seems to depend on intensionality. In particular, these paradoxes arise out of plausible properties of propositional attitudes and their objects. We try to explain why logicians have neglected these paradoxes, and to show that, like the Russell Paradox and the direct discourse Liar Paradox, these intensional paradoxes are recalcitrant and challenge logical analysis. Indeed, when we take these paradoxes seriously, we may need to rethink the commonly (...) accepted methods for dealing with the logical paradoxes. (shrink)

In Being Another Way, Dustin Klinger recounts the history of how medieval Arabic philosophers in the Islamic East grappled with the logical role of the copula 'to be,' an ambiguity that has bedeviled Western philosophy from Parmenides to the analytic philosophers of today. Working from within a language that has no copula, a group of increasingly independent Arabic philosophers began to critically investigate the semantic role that Aristotle, for many centuries their philosophical authority, invested in the copula as the (...) basis of his logic. Drawing on extensive manuscript research, Klinger breaks through the thicket of unstudied philosophical works to demonstrate the creativity of postclassical Islamic scholarship as it explored the consequences of its intellectual break with the past. Against the still widespread view that intellectual ferment all but disappeared during the period, Klinger shows how these intellectuals over the centuries developed and refined a sophisticated philosophy of language that speaks to core concerns of contemporary linguistics and philosophy. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of health, disease, and illness -- Disability perspectives: critical insights and questions -- Theological resources for understanding health and disease -- Theological theses concerning health, disease, and illness.

First, I introduce the concept of a “non-agential subject,” where a non-agential subject exists within an organism and has phenomenally conscious experiences in a morally significant way, but is not morally responsible for the organism's voluntary actions. Second, I argue that it's a live possibility that typical adult humans contain non-agential subjects. Finally, I argue that, if there are non-agential subjects, this has important and surprising implications for a variety of ethical issues. Accordingly, ethicists should pay more attention to whether (...) there are non-agential subjects and what their implications for ethics would be. (shrink)

Perry Hendricks’ original ‘impairment argument’ against abortion relied on ‘the impairment principle’ (TIP): ‘if it is immoral to impair an organism O to the nth degree, then,ceteris paribus, it is immoral to impair O to the n+1 degree.’ Since death is a bigger impairment than fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), Hendricks reasons that, by TIP, if causing FAS is immoral, then,ceteris paribus, abortion is immoral. Several authors have argued that this conclusion is uninteresting, since theceteris paribusclause is not satisfied in actual (...) cases of abortion: women have reasons for wanting abortions which do not apply to drinking during pregnancy, so all else is not equal, and the conclusion is irrelevant to the morality of actual abortions. In a recent article in this journal, Hendricks and Bruce Blackshaw try to evade this criticism by replacing TIP with the ‘modified impairment principle’ (MIP): ‘if it is immoral to impair an organism O to the nth degree for reason R, then, provided R continues to hold (or is present), it is immoral to impair O to the n+1 degree.’ MIP allows us to derive theultima faciewrongness of abortion (not just itsceteris paribuswrongness) because MIP lacks aceteris paribusclause. But I argue that this lack also renders MIP false: MIP faces counterexamples and implausibly produces genuine moral dilemmas. Since the moral principle on which it relies is false, the modified impairment argument fails. I close by considering what a principle would need to do for the impairment argument to succeed. (shrink)

A collaborative undertaking between an artist and a philosopher, this monograph attempts to deepen our understanding of "contemplative seeing" by addressing the works of Plato, Thoreau, Heidegger, and more. The authors explore what it means to "see" reality and contemplate how viewing reality philosophically and artfully is a form of spirituality. In this way, by developing a new conception of active visual engagement, the authors propose a way of seeing that unites both critical scrutiny and spiritual involvement, as opposed to (...) simple passive reception. (shrink)

The article addresses the debate about the empirical status of particles versus wave functions in Bohmian quantum mechanics. It thereby clarifies questions and misconceptions about the role of the...

This volume is about the many ways we perceive. Contributors explore the nature of the individual senses, how and what they tell us about the world, and how they interrelate. They consider how the senses extract perceptual content from receptoral information. They consider what kinds of objects we perceive and whether multiple senses ever perceive a single event. They consider how many senses we have, what makes one sense distinct from another, and whether and why distinguishing senses may be useful. (...) They consider the extent to which the senses act in concert, rather than as discrete modalities, and whether this influence is epistemically pernicious, neutral, or beneficial. They explore both the familiar five sense modalities and other candidate sense modalities, including a sense for flavour, inner senses (e.g., a sense for pain), and various senses that may result from using sensory substitution devices. Contributors often represent competing views, and the methods they deploy sometimes differ from one essay to the next—with some drawing upon the sciences and engineering and others relying upon conceptual analysis. All contributors agree, nonetheless, that traditional theorizing about the senses is hampered by a neglect of the senses other than vision, and by the misconception that vision is a passive receptacle for an image thrown by a lens. And many contributors believe that it is unduly restrictive to think of perception as a collation of contents provided by individual sense modalities; they think that to understand perception properly, we need to build into our accounts the idea that the senses work together. The ambition of the volume is to begin to develop better paradigms for understanding the senses, and thereby to move toward a better understanding of perception. (shrink)

Using a recent example from US politics as representative of contemporary liberal democracies, this chapter highlights how public opinion is shaped through the exploitation of our epistemic interdependence and partisan bias. Climate change was an important issue leading into the 2010 US mid-term elections. Public opinion on climate change was subject to a number of willfully disseminated distorting influences, having a significant impact on the election’s outcome and subsequent political discourse surrounding climate change policies. One impact of this type of (...) exploitation is that it has epistemically compromising effects on the electorate, which in turn undermines democratic legitimacy. In the interest of defending democratic legitimacy, this chapter suggests we re-evaluate and update those liberal institutions necessary for informed public opinion surrounding our current political epistemic needs. (shrink)

Tento článek zkoumá roli digitálních her jako virtuálních laboratoří pro řešení ekologických problémů a problémů souvisejících se změnou klimatu. Článek začíná zkoumáním průniku občanské vědy a digitálního hraní, konkrétně iniciativ, které umožnily globálním komunitám přispět k úsilí o zachování ekosystémů prostřednictvím společného sběru dat, analýzy a řešení problémů, které byly zásadní pro monitorování mořských biotopů. V návaznosti na tento vývoj prozkoumáme, jak digitální hry sdílejí paralely s mezokosmy, pokusíme se lépe vysvětlit jevy ekologických systémů a zároveň přispějeme k současným debatám (...) o biodiverzitě, ztrátě druhů a změně klimatu. Jedním z hlavních bodů je, že digitální herní světy rozšířily svůj záběr nad rámec jednoduchých ekologických simulací a zahrnují složité klimatické modely spolu se sociálními, politickými a historickými prvky, aby vytvořily detailní vyvíjející se virtuální prostředí, která se pokoušejí odrážet křehké propojení systémů v planetárním měřítku. (shrink)

Andrew Bacon, John Hawthorne, and Gabriel Uzquiano have recently argued that free logics—logics that reject or restrict Universal Instantiation—are ultimately not promising approaches to resolving a family of intensional paradoxes due to Arthur Prior. These logics encompass ramified and contextualist approaches to paradoxes, and broadly speaking, there are two kinds of criticism they face. First, they fail to address every version of the Priorean paradoxes. Second, the theoretical considerations behind the logics make absolutely general statements about all propositions, properties of (...) propositions, etc., but because this sort of intensional quantification is always restricted in the logics, they cannot even express those considerations. I present a novel sort of free logic, which rejects the standard Universal Instantiation but validates a restricted form of the rule, and which addresses both kinds of criticism by allowing some propositions to be unrestricted in their quantification. (shrink)

The belief bias in reasoning occurs when individuals are more willing to accept conclusions that are consistent with their beliefs than conclusions that are inconsistent. The present study...

This paper offers a novel conversational implicature account of the pragmatic sensitivity of knowledge attributions. Developing an account I first suggested elsewhere and independently proposed by Lutz, this paper explores the idea that the relevant implicatures are generated by a constitutive relationship between believing a proposition and a disposition to treat that proposition as true in practical deliberation. I argue that while this view has a certain advantage over standard implicature accounts of pragmatic sensitivity, it comes with a significant concession (...) to proponents of pragmatic encroachment. On the account offered here, knowledge attributions have locally-pragmatically-sensitive implicatures because they have non-locally-pragmatically-sensitive entailments. The view thus represents a unique and powerful hybrid of these two approaches to the pragmatic sensitivity of knowledge attributions. (shrink)

Oswald Spengler (1880 - 1936) war ein deutscher Geschichtsphilosoph und Kulturhistoriker. Das hier vorliegende Werk August Messers über Spengler erscheint nur wenige Jahre nachdem Spengler mit seiner Zyklentheorie, die sich gegen eine lineare Geschichtsschreibung ausspricht, an die Öffentlichkeit getreten ist. Messer reflektiert diese und spürt den philosophischen Grundanschauungen Spenglers in ihrem innersten Zusammenhange nach. Auf diese Weise gelingt es Messer, ein sensibles und differenziertes Bild Oswald Spenglers und seiner Ideenwelt zu zeichnen. Sorgfältig bearbeiteter Nachdruck der Originalausgabe von 1924.

Contemporary philosophy has adopted an increasingly tragic point of view. Tragedy, though, is only a partial truth of the human condition. Comedy is another partial truth. The nature of human existence is neither wholly the one nor the other, but tragi-comic. Philosophy must be attuned to both despair and laughter if it is to understand its own world. In Making Philosophy Laugh, the philosopher Dustin Peone makes an apology for the comic side of existence and its use in philosophy. (...) He demonstrates the social and moral uses of humor and analyzes its significance for speculative thinking. Folly and irony are shown to be vital facets of dialectical philosophy. The reader is introduced to the comical side of Socrates and Homer, Descartes and Vico, Kant and Hegel, and many others. Finally, a doctrine of the tragi-comic sense of life is presented that does justice to all aspects of human existence and liberates the spirit from the grimness of serious thought. (shrink)

This paper takes up the problem of correlationism from a phenomenological perspective. Speculative realists, such as Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman, seek to establish new forms of Continental realism largely because, in their view, phenomenology cannot adequately account for the real. To counter these claims, I will use what I call a “critical phenomenological approach”, which critically delimits the real from the intentional relation, and thus makes possible a phenomenological theory of the real. This approach to realism establishes not only (...) that the real is independent from the intentional relation but also that the intentional relation itself is contingent with regard to the real. Furthermore, it also shows that the human being is exposed to the real in an originary way that calls into question the adequacy of Meillassoux’s and Harman’s forms of realism. (shrink)