What is at stake when students sell the highly sought-after basketball tickets they receive for free through a university’s lottery system? This article discusses a case in applied ethics taken from the experience of college students and extrapolates from that to the distribution of other scarce resources using lotteries. By examining an event relevant to the actual experience of students, we challenge them to see how normative moral theory may be used and what values are central to moral decision-making. The (...) case includes four analyses from different perspectives and a teaching note. (shrink)

Recently, Doolittle and Inkpen formulated a thought provoking theory, asserting that evolution by natural selection was responsible for the sideways evolution of two radically different kinds of selective units (also called Domains). The former entities, termed singers, correspond to the usual objects studied by evolutionary biologists (gene, genomes, individuals, species, etc.), whereas the later, termed songs, correspond to re‐produced biological and ecosystemic functions, processes, information, and memes. Singers perform songs through selected patterns of interactions, meaning that a wealth of critical (...) phenomena might receive novel evolutionary explanations. However, this theory did not provide an empirical approach to study evolution in such a broadened context. Here, we show that analyzing songs and singers, using patterns of interaction networks as a common ontology for both, offers a novel, actionable, inclusive and mathematical way to analyze not only the re‐production but also the evolution and fitness of biological and ecosystemic interconnected processes. (shrink)

This paper explains Sophie de Grouchy’s philosophical debts to Adam Smith. I have three main reasons for this: first, it should explain why eighteenth-century philosophical feminists found Smith, who has—to put it mildly—not been a focus of much recent feminist admiration, a congenial starting point for their own thinking; second, it illuminates De Grouchy’s considerable philosophical originality, especially her important, overlooked contributions to political theory; third, it is designed to remove some unfortunate misconceptions that have found their way into Karin (...) Brown’s ‘Introduction’ to the recent and much-to-be-welcomed translation of Sophie de Grouchy’s Lettres Sur La Sympathie. While Brown claims that there are major ‘differences’ in their programs of ‘social reform’, I argue there are important commonalities between Smith and De Grouchy. In particular, I highlight how they share a common understanding of how human sensibilities are shaped by social institutions and I show that De Grouchy’s path-breaking analysis of negative and positive liberty is grounded in her extension of Smith’s political theory and moral psychology. (shrink)

Differing views on reduction are briefly reviewed and a suggestion is made for a working definition of 'approximate reduction'. Ab initio studies in quantum chemistry are then considered, including the issues of convergence and error bounds. This includes an examination of the classic studies on CH2 and the recent work on the Si2C molecule. I conclude that chemistry has not even been approximately reduced.

Trust me: my chair isn't big enough for two. You may doubt that every rational, conscious being is a person; perhaps there are beings that mistakenly believe themselves to be people. If so, read ‘rational, conscious being’ or the like for 'person'.

There is much to admire in this book. It is written in a pleasingly straightforward style, and offers insight on a wide range of important issues.

The prosaic content of these sayings is that events change from future to present and from present to past. Your next birthday is in the future, but with the passage of time it draws nearer and nearer until it is present. 24 hours later it will be in the past, and then lapse forever deeper into history. And things get older: even if they don’t wear out or lose their hair or change in any other way, their chronological age is (...) always increasing. These changes are universal and inescapable: no event could ever fail to be first future, then present, then past, and no persisting thing can avoid growing older. We call this process time’s passage. (shrink)

A Non-Technical Introduction to Ethnomethodological Investigations of the Foundations of Mathematics through the Use of a Theorem of Euclidean Geometry* I ...

E. J. Lowe and others argue that there can be 'uncountable' things admitting of no numerical description. This implies that there can be something without there being at least one such thing, and that things can be identical without being one or nonidentical without being two. The clearest putative example of uncountable things is portions of homogeneous stuff or 'gunk'. The paper argues that there is a number of portions of gunk if there is any gunk at all, and that (...) the possibility of uncountable things is inadequately supported. (shrink)

I develop an account of counterfactual conditionals using “causal models”, and argue that this account is preferable to the currently standard account in terms of “similarity of possible worlds” due to David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker. I diagnose the attraction of counterfactual theories of causation, and argue that it is illusory.

The aesthetic theory of Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) revolves around the concept of allure, a nonliteral experience of an object’s displacement from its qualities that draws attention to a deeper reality. But applying allure to aesthetic interpretation is hampered in two ways. First, OOO necessarily moves between the constrained viewpoint of experience and a more global perspective. Yet mixing these “inside” and “outside” views can risk ambiguity. Second, the phenomenological difference between the parts and qualities of an object must (...) be clarified before Harman’s model of wholes and parts can be incorporated into OOO aesthetics. Addressing these two ambiguities will make it possible to further develop OOO’s resources for aesthetic commentary. For instance, one conclusion is that allure itself has two varieties: a tension between the object and its qualities (“allusion”) and a tension between the whole and its parts (“collusion”). These options parallel Harman’s twofold critique of reductionism. Another conclusion is that the literal needs an explanation within the framework of OOO insofar as it is a genuine feature of experience. (shrink)

What is a temporal part? Most accounts explain it in terms of timeless parthood: a thing's having a part without temporal qualification. Some find this hard to understand, and thus find the view that persisting things have temporal parts--fourdimensionalism--unintelligible. T. Sider offers to help by defining temporal parthood in terms of a thing's having a part at a time. I argue that no such account can capture the notion of a temporal part that figures in orthodox four-dimensionalism: temporal parts must (...) be timeless parts. This enables us to state four-dimensionalism more clearly. (shrink)

Recent work in the cognitive sciences has argued that beliefs sometimes acquire signaling functions in virtue of their ability to reveal information that manipulates “mindreaders.” This paper sketches some of the evolutionary and design considerations that could take agents from solipsistic goal pursuit to beliefs that serve as social signals. Such beliefs will be governed by norms besides just the traditional norms of epistemology. As agents become better at detecting the agency of others, either through evolutionary history or individual learning, (...) the candidate pool for signaling expands. This logic holds for natural and artificial agents that find themselves in recurring social situations that reward the sharing of one’s thoughts. (shrink)

Any time you have philosophers working on a problem, you know you’ve got troubles. If a question has attracted the attention of the philosophers that means that either it is intractably difficult with convolutions and labyrinthine difficulties that would make other researchers blanch, or that it is just flat out impossible to solve. Impossible problems masquerade as intractable problems until someone either proves the problem is impossible (which can only happen in mathematics), or someone shows all solutions to the problem (...) violate laws of physics (like the perpetual motion machine, for example), or until enough people fail so that declaring defeat is a reasonable move. The problem of consciousness is prototypical of this latter case. Indeed, one might say that it is the Platonic ideal of such a problem. The mere fact that philosophers wrestle with the problem of consciousness should be regarded by psychologists of all stripes as extremely bad news. If the philosophers can’t make any headway, psychologists are doomed. (shrink)

The notion of digital virus covers, in our view, two points: computer viruses that infect our computers and technological solutionism, the unreasonable passion that consists in considering that the solution to all social problems lies in the digital world. Yet the digital world is as vulnerable as the biological world. Moreover, it is dangerous because it pushes us into a digital bondage that undermines democracy. The solution to the crisis is not less democracy, but more democracy. More precisely, we will (...) argue that digital devices do not strengthen democratic communication, they promote a digital connection that hinders deliberation and threatens the very idea of democracy. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish four methods of empirical inquiry in eighteenth century natural philosophy. In particular, I distinguish among what I call, the mathematical-experimental method; the method of experimental series; the method of inspecting ideas; the method of natural history. While such a list is not exhaustive of the methods of inquiry available, even so, focusing on these four methods will help in diagnosing a set of debates within what has come to be known as ‘empiricism’; throughout the eighteenth (...) century there was a methodological reaction against the hegemonic aspirations of mathematical natural philosophy associated with the authority of Newton.In particular, I argue that the methods of inspecting ideas and natural history remained attractive to ‘empiricist’ thinkers with reservations about aspects of Newtonianism. Moreover, I show that the language of experimentalism meant different things to researchers with different attitudes toward Newton’s legacy. In order to illustrate and make more precise these claims, I embed my taxonomic treatment of the four methods within a narrative in which I primarily focus on Colin Maclaurin, Isaac Newton, David Hume, and Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon. (shrink)

The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind. . ???aop.label???

This English translation of _Sorel’s Study on Vico_ opens the way to a radical re-evaluation not only of Sorel’s trajectory, but of his French intellectual contexts, and the anarcho-syndicalism he is sometimes said to represent.

I argue that it is rational and appropriate for atheists to give thanks to deep impersonal agents for the benefits they give to us. These agents include our evolving biosphere, the sun, and our finely-tuned universe. Atheists can give thanks to evolution by sacrificially burning works of art. They can give thanks to the sun by performing rituals in solar calendars. They can give thanks to our finely-tuned universe, and to existence itself, by doing science and philosophy. But these linguistic (...) types of thanks-giving are forms of non-theistic contemplative prayer. Since these behaviors resemble ancient pagan behaviors, it is fair to call them pagan. Atheistic paganism may be part of an emerging ecosystem of naturalistic religions. (shrink)

"Jazz, the wound" : negative identity, culture, and the shadow of race -- America, or the stranger -- Negative identities of the subject in wartime America -- Critical theory goes to war : the critique of positive identity and positive science -- Negative modeling : objectivity, normativity, and the refusal of the universal -- Subject/object and disciplinarity.

Philosophers often talk as if what it takes for a person to persist through time were up to us, as individuals or as a linguistic community, to decide. In most ordinary situations it might be fully determinate whether someone has survived or perished: barring some unforeseen catastrophe, it is clear enough that you will still exist ten minutes from now, for example. But there is no shortage of actual and imaginary situations where it is not so clear whether one survives. (...) Here reasonable people may disagree. There are "fission" cases where each of one's cerebral hemispheres is transplanted into a different head; Star-Trek-style "teletransportation" stories; actual cases of brain damage so severe that one can never again regain consciousness, even though one's circulation, breathing, digestion, and other "animal" functions continue; and stories where one's brain cells are gradually removed and replaced by cells from someone else, to name only a few favorites. (shrink)

Some collective irrationalities, like epistemically and pragmatically reckless Covid skepticism, are especially dangerous. While we normally have incentives to avoid dangerous beliefs, there are cases in which the danger of a belief is valuable. This is not captured by most accounts of motivated reasoning. I argue that Covid skepticism can function as a costly signal (handicap) so as to more effectively communicate social identity and commitment.

Violations of the Bell inequalities in EPR-Bohm type experiments have set the literature on the metaphysics of microscopic systems to flirting with some sort of metaphysical holism regarding spatially separated, entangled systems. The rationale for this behavior comes in two parts. The first part relies on the proof, due to Jon Jarrett [2] that the experimentally observed violations of the Bell inequalities entail violations of the conjunction of two probabilistic constraints. Jarrett called these two constraints locality and completeness. We prefer (...) the terminology of locality and factorizability.[3] The first part of the rationale for metaphysical holism urges that only Jarrett’s locality allows for “peaceful coexistence” between any model of EPR-Bohm type experiments and special relativity. Factorizability, it is suggested, must be jettisoned. (shrink)

The historical development of the electronic configuration model is traced and the status of the model with respect to quantum mechanics is examined. The successes and problems raised by the model are explored, particularly in chemical ab initio calculations. The relevance of these issues to whether chemistry has been reduced to quantum mechanics is discussed, as are some general notions on reduction.