Many critics and defenders of P. F. Strawson’s approach to moral responsibility in ‘Freedom and Resentment’ have attributed to Strawson a claim of psychological incapacity or impossibility with respect to our (in)ability to abandon or radically change the framework of reactive attitudes that constitute (at least) an important part of our responsibility practices. In this essay I show that commentators have conflated two distinct arguments within Strawson’s discussion in a way that increases his susceptibility to a challenge of empirical implausibility. (...) I argue, further, that recognizing the difference between the two arguments has an additional important implication for Strawson’s overall argument, as it reveals that his view involves two types of objectivity. I end by discussing some consequences for both broad applications of Strawson’s moral psychology and narrow discussions within the free will literature. (shrink)

One assumption of the new mechanistic approach is that there are two kinds of mechanistic explanations: etiological and constitutive ones. While the former explain phenomena in terms of their preceding causes, the latter are supposed to refer to mechanisms that constitute phenomena. Based on arguments by Kaiser and Krickel (Br J Philos Sci 68(3):745–779, 2017) and Krickel (The mechanical world, vol. 13, Springer International Publishing, 2018), I will show that this view is too narrow. Indeed, three different types of (...) explanation are usually subsumed under the label “constitutive explanation”. However, one of those types of explanation is not a version of constitutive explanation. Rather it is a variant of etiological explanation. As a result, I will show that there are four types of mechanistic explanation, two variants of etiological explanation—which I will call output mechanistic explanations and input-output mechanistic explanations—and two variants of constitutive explanation—which I will call filler mechanistic explanations and dimensioned mechanistic explanations. Keeping these apart is crucial as they come with different ontological implications. An evaluation of the mechanistic approach regarding its stance on reduction, levels, and interlevel causation crucially depends on which notion of mechanistic explanation one has in mind. (shrink)

I discuss two problems for the standard Anglo-American account of recklessness, and the distinctions between intention, recklessness, and negligence. One problem concerns the over-breadth of recklessness as thus defined—that it covers agents whose actions display different kinds of culpability. The other problem concerns the importance attached to awareness of risk in distinguishing recklessness from negligence—that one who is unaware of the risk that he takes or creates sometimes displays just the same kind of fault as an advertent risk-taker. We can (...) work towards solutions to these problems by contrasting the Anglo-American schema with the German schema: this distinguishes intention from negligence. Dolus eventualis, properly understood, constitutes a distinctive kind of fault, which should be distinguished from advertent negligence within the category of what the Anglo-American schema counts as recklessness: this helps to solve the first problem, of over-breadth. As for the second problem, we can see why the difference between advertent and inadvertent risk-taking is not always normatively significant by noticing that an agent’s failure to realise the risk he is creating can itself display a significant fault in the structure of the practical reasoning that informs his action—just the same kind of fault as that displayed by an advertent risk-taker. The upshot of this discussion is a new schema of types of criminal fault; I finally note some problems with the practicability of such a new schema. (shrink)

I propose a theory of domination derived from republican political theory that is in contrast to the neo-republican theory of domination as arbitrary interference and domination as dependence. I suggest that, drawing on of the writings of Machiavelli and Rousseau, we can see two faces of domination that come together to inform social relations. One type of domination is extractive dominance where agents are able to derive surplus benefit from another individual, group, or collective resource, natural or human. Another is (...) what I call constitutive domination where the norms, institutions, and values of the community shape the rationality of subjects to accept forms of power and social relations and collective goals as legitimate forms of authority. Each of these make up two faces of a broader theory of social domination that is more concrete and politically compelling than that put forth by contemporary neo-republican theory. I argue that this understanding of domination should be seen as a kind of ‘radical... (shrink)

For the claim that the satisfaction of certain conditions is sufficient for the application of some concept to serve as part of the (`reductive') analysis of that concept, we require the conditions to be specified without employing that very concept. An account of the application conditions of a concept not meeting this requirement, we call analytically circular. For such a claim to be usable in determining the extension of the concept, however, such circularity may not matter, since if the concept (...) figures in a certain kind of intensional context in the specification of the conditions, the satisfaction of those conditions may not itself depend on the extension of the concept. We put this by saying that although analytically circular, the account may yet not be inferentially circular. (shrink)

Does the effective protection of constitutional rights require a system of robust judicial review? This differs from the question of whether judicial review is democratically legitimate, although the two are often merged. The dominant liberal constitutional discourse concerning the requirement of judicial review has arguably suffered from a degree of insensitivity to the actual effects of specific judicial review systems. In contrast to a fact‐insensitive approach, I suggest that the ‘matrix’ of rights‐protection in any specific system of judicial constitutional review (...) must incorporate two types of calculation. The first must compare incidences of the invalidation of ‘wrong’ statutes (on the ‘gains’ side) with invalidations of ‘right’ statutes and cases of upholding ‘wrong’ statutes (on the ‘losses’ side). The second looks at the gains and losses resulting from the very existence of the system of judicial review (rather than the specific cases that have been upheld or invalidated). It thus recognizes the deep disagreement between individuals about their preferred interpretations of constitutional rights. Under some conditions, the results of this matrix may be modified by arguments about an overlap in preferred articulations of constitutional rights, prudence, and the deliberative nature of the courts that exercise constitutional review, and the paper concludes with a discussion of how this can occur. We do not have to have a court that will strike down laws—a court with the power of judicial review—to have a vibrant language of fundamental rights available to us. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I present a novel account of the components that have a peculiar epistemic role in our scientific inquiries, since they contribute to establishing a form of coordination. The issue of coordination is a classic epistemic problem concerning how we justify our use of abstract conceptual tools to represent concrete phenomena. For instance, how could we get to represent universal gravitation as a mathematical formula or temperature by means of a numerical scale? This problem is particularly pressing when (...) justification for using these abstract tools comes, in part or entirely, from knowledge which is not independent from them, thus leading to threats of circularity. Achieving coordination between some abstract conceptual tools and the concrete phenomena that they are supposed to represent is usually a complex process, which involves several epistemic components. Some of these components eventually provide stable conditions for applying those abstract representations to concrete phenomena. It is in this sense of providing certain conditions of applicability that different philosophical traditions, as well as some contemporary reappraisals, view these components as constitutive or a priori. In this work, I present a new gradualist, contextualist, and relational approach to understand these constitutive components of scientific inquiry. It is gradualist inasmuch as the degree to which some component is constitutive depends on three quantifiable features: quasi-axiomaticity, generative potential, and empirical shielding. Since the quantification of these three features impinges on the history and practice of using these components in a scientific context, my approach is a contextualist one. Finally, my approach is relational in a double sense: first, it identifies ordinal relationships among epistemic components with respect to their constitutive character; second, these relationships are relative to a scientific framework of inquiry. After introducing my account and a classic example of constitutively a priori principles, i.e., Friedman’s (2001) analysis of Newtonian mechanics, I turn to my own case studies to demonstrate the advantages of my approach. Firstly, I discuss Okasha’s (2018) view of endogenization as a pervasive theoretical strategy in evolutionary biology and suggest that the constitutive character of the core Darwinian principles progressively increases with endogenization. Secondly, I apply a conceptual distinction between two varieties or scopes of coordination – general coordination and coordination in measurement – to Ohm’s work on electrical conductivity. This distinction allows me to pinpoint to what extent components along different dimensions (e.g., instrumentation, measurement, theorising, etc.) were constitutive of the forms of coordination which Ohm relied on. Thirdly, I discuss the epistemic function of the Hardy-Weinberg principle in the history and practice of population genetics. I assess this principle in terms of my account and identify approximation and stability as two components that are highly constitutive, in that they contribute to justifying its use in population genetics. Finally, applying my account to these case studies enables me to identify at least three qualitatively different types of constitutive components: domain-specific theoretical principles, material components, and domain-independent assumptions underlying reasoning abilities. In the light of my results, I draw some general conclusions on epistemic justification and scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This thesis examines procedures for ascribing ambiguity to particular sentences and words of a language. My discussion focuses on theories advanced by Keith Donnellan, Saul Kripke and David Kaplan regarding the alleged referential/attributive ambiguity of definite descriptions, and on arguments offered by Paul Ziff, David Wiggins and Jerrold Katz concerning the ambiguity of the word 'good'. I distinguish two kinds of semantic ambiguity, which I call "strong" and "weak", and develop a theoretical model of the former. Using this model, I (...) devise and evaluate a number of theoretically related practical tests designed to detect the presence of ambiguity in concrete cases. I argue against direct appeals to our intuitions of meaning, to Occam's Razor, to grammatical analyses and to foreign languages in settling disputed ascriptions of ambiguity. I favor procedures which indirectly test our intuitions of meaning by isolating the linguistic effects of mixing and shifting senses. My tests rely on the assumption that the effects which accompany the use of truly ambiguous expressions are distinguishable from the mere pragmatic uncertainty which permeates general language use. Semantically ambiguous terms are viewed as awkward linguistic devices whose use, for example, will occasionally produce humor, as in the case of a pun, or deceptively bad reasoning. The account I develop rests heavily on the traditional theory of meaning , and to the extent that the standards I erect furnish better evidence for an ascription of semantic ambiguity, to that extent they ratify the classical analysis of meaning. (shrink)

In some languages every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based: for example, whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from someone else. This grammatical reference to information source is called 'evidentiality', and is one of the least described grammatical categories. Evidentiality systems differ in how complex they are: some distinguish just two terms (eyewitness and noneyewitness, or reported and everything else), while (...) others have six or even more terms. Evidentiality is a category in its own right, and not a subcategory of epistemic or some other modality, nor of tense-aspect. Every language has some way of referring to the source of information, but not every language has grammatical evidentiality. In English expressions such as I guess, they say, I hear that, the alleged are not obligatory and do not constitute a grammatical system. Similar expressions in other languages may provide historical sources for evidentials. True evidentials, by contrast, form a grammatical system. In the North Arawak language Tariana an expression such as "the dog bit the man" must be augmented by a grammatical suffix indicating whether the event was seen, or heard, or assumed, or reported. This book provides the first exhaustive cross-linguistic typological study of how languages deal with the marking of information source. Examples are drawn from over 500 languages from all over the world, several of them based on the author's original fieldwork. Professor Aikhenvald also considers the role evidentiality plays in human cognition, and the ways in which evidentiality influences human perception of the world.. This is an important book on an intriguing subject. It will interest anthropologists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, as well as linguists. (shrink)

On the analogy of the colloquial register in some modern languages, where narrative and argument may be punctuated by oaths and exclamations in order to maintain a high affective level and compel the hearer's attention, it is reasonable to postulate that Attic conversation also was punctuated by oaths, that this ingredient in comic language was drawn from life, and that the comparative frequency of ║ M M Δ in comedy is sufficiently explained thereby. There are obvious affinities between some passages (...) of comedy, relaxed conversation in Plato and Xenophon, and the forceful, man-to-man tone which Demosthenes sometimes adopts to such good effect . Compare, for instance, Ar. V. 133 f. στιν δ' νομα ⋮ τ μν γέροντι ⋮ Φιλοκλέων / να μ Δία, τ δ' υε κτλ., where the oath is a response to imagined incredulity, and X. Smp. 4.27 ατν δ σέ, η, γ εδον να μ τν πόλλω, τε κτλ. . It is also important that the commonest oaths fit, in most of their forms, the end of an iambic trimeter: μ τν Δία, ν Δία,ν τούς θεούς, μ τος θεούς. Add that in Aristophanic dialogue over half the iambic trimeters end with major pause, and half the remainder with minor pause, and we can see why Δ / established itself early as a distinctive comic pattern. Out of 105 examples of M M Δ cited from comedy in Section II above, 59 have the oath at verse-end. In the case of πάνυ, which was almost exclusively Attic and — to judge from its great rarity in tragedy — felt by Athenian poets to be prosaic, we lack evidence on its functions in the colloquial register; it may or may not have served as affective punctuation. In prose, we have to reckon with the fact that π Mπ and Mπ π constituted a genuine stylistic choice as far back as the evidence will take us, since the two earliest instances in prose are [X.] Ath. 2.3 πάνυ δι χρείαν and ibid. 3.5 πολλ τι πάνυ. The oath, as treated by the comic poets on the basis of colloquial usage, is bound to have served as a model for πάνυ, exerting an influence which pulled πάνυ to the end of the verse, but there was also a powerful metrical constraint. As a dibrach ending in a vowel which could not be elided or enter into crasis, πάνυ was especially appropriate for verse-end. That in itself was enough both to establish Mπ π as the dominant pattern in comedy and to promote Mπ … π. Out of the total of 104 examples of Mπ π in comedy, 93 have πάνυ at verse-end, which makes Mπ π / one of the hallmarks of comic style. Mπ … π does not occur in prose in association with any other feature identified as colloquial, but it should be noted that Aiskhines and Demosthenes are much fonder of Mπ π than other prose authors. In some cases one can see that the order Mπ π avoids a succession of short syllables or hiatus or both , but there are other cases in which it has the opposite effect . The possibility of comic influence on oratorical language cannot be dismissed out of hand. It is also possible that someone will find positive determinants which will explain all the cases of Mπ π in prose. σόδρα, which, like πάνυ, is peculiarly Attic, is metrically more tractable than πάνυ, since it can be elided; even so, out of the 80 comic examples of Mσ σ no less than 58 have σόδρα at verse-end, and of those 58 there are 22 at major pause, 8 at presumed major pause and 9 at minor pause. The comic treatment of σόδρα is thus comparable with the treatment of πάνυ, and Timokles 222.4 τηρεν…σόδρα is in fact the closest analogy we have to Ar. Pl. 234 f. χθομαι…πάνυ. δέ and γάρ are a different matter, and in some significant respects different from each other. Postponement of δέ is especially prominent in Aeschylus and then abundant in fourth-century comedy. It is much less common in Euripides , rare in Sophocles and Aristophanes , and virtually limited in prose to the categories which I labelled –. There is as yet no evidence to associate postponement of δέ with colloquial language; on the contrary, it seems to have begun as a feature of poetic language and to have been taken up and exploited by fourth-century comedy. If, in addition to being Aeschylean, it was colloquial in the fourth century, what happened to it afterwards? Except for such an isolated and inexplicable case as Diod. xx85.1 — in a military narrative — it is not a feature of the Koine at literary, documentary or subliterate level. Postponement of γάρ was no doubt encouraged by postponement of δέ, but it is not itself notably poetic ). One can see how it could possibly have developed in the spoken language of the fourth century, extending the function of γάρ as an explanatory particle in a way which makes it comparable with the English ‘you see’ in ‘He didn't dare pick it up. He hurt his back last year, you see’. For an extension of this kind we may compare the current extension of the English genitive affix in ‘Then the girl whose place she was taking's mother turned up’ and ‘The man that Christopher liked's Introduction is much better’. Moreover, postponed γάρ appears in a segment of conversation constructed in indirect speech by Theophrastus in Char. 8.9 τ πργμα βοσθαι γάρ . Again we must ask: what happened to it afterwards? A couple of cases in Theophrastus' botanical works could be a reflex of the influence of comedy on literary language at Athens. The influence was plainly short-lived, since it did not affect the Koine. It is not hard to see why serious poetry in the fifth century and earlier should have experimented occasionally with the postponement of δέ and γάρ: treatment of M M q as a valid alternative to M q M is metrically very convenient. No poet, however, could afford to use common words in a bizarre, un-Greek way merely to save himself time and trouble in constructing a verse. Linguistic innovation is normally analogical, proceeding by extension from a starting-point already there, and the most obvious starting-point for postponement of δέ and γάρ is constituted by my class . This consideration provides comic postponement with a pedigree, but does not deny it individuality. The remarkable scale and frequency with which comedy exploited a phenomenon which tragedy used with restraint and prose hardly at all gives comic postponement the right to be regarded as a quite distinctive artificial feature of comedy. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to compare two models of reality construction and their applicability to explain the various effects of the digitalization process. The evolution of the constructivist ideas about reality is reconstructed in the context of the dispute among realists and constructivists, which was one of the most significant events in the epistemology and philosophy of science of the 20th century. The author points out the differences between the intellectual and the social construction of reality, and carries (...) out a comparative analysis of the philosophical theories and concepts describing the aforementioned alternatives. The intellectual construction of reality, which often takes place in theoretical physics at different stages of its development, is also analyzed. Particular consideration is given to the philosophic-scientific contexts generated by the sociology of knowledge, the theory of speech acts, and the actor-network theory. The article also shows a distinction between the construction and the constitution of reality. The constitution of reality within various types of non-theoretical thinking, fixed using the means and methods of phenomenological philosophy of science, allows identifying and describing the main contexts through which the word reality acquires significance and is endowed with meaning in the present-day intellectual and social practices. Special attention is paid to the concepts of virtual reality and digital reality. The features of the intellectual construction of virtual reality are described. The difference between the intellectual and the social construction of digital reality is substantiated as between two alternative practices, which determine the meaning, and the prospects of digitalization. This distinction may be of particular interest to those who design digital platforms and implement digitalization in various areas of human life and society, especially in as education, legal procedure, management, economics, and business. Today, when partly spontaneous, partly controlled digitalization is taking place in these spheres, the results of this study make it possible not only to understand the logic of the changes taking place but also to apply forecasting and planning methods actively, i.e., constructing the digital reality. (shrink)

die). In recent years the problem of moral dilemmas has received the attention of a number of philosophers. Some authors1 argue that moral dilemmas are not conceptually possible (i.e., that they are incoherent, given the nature of the concepts involved) because they are ruled out by certain valid principles of deontic logic. Other authors2 insist that moral dilemmas are conceptually possible, and argue that therefore the principles of deontic logic that rule them out must be rejected. In arguing for or (...) against the conceptual possibility of moral dilemmas authors have been almost exclusively concerned with obligation dilemmas, i.e., situations in which more than one action is obligatory. Almost no one has been explicitly concerned with prohibition dilemmas, i.e., situations in which no feasible action is permissible.3 I shall argue that the two types of dilemmas are distinct, and that a much stronger case can be made against the conceptual possibility of obligation dilemmas than against the conceptual possibility of prohibition dilemmas. (shrink)

In this paper, I look to draw novel connections between critiques of drill and epistemic injustice by addressing the question of whether the critical scrutiny of drill constitutes an epistemic injustice. I argue that these critiques constitute two types of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. We see testimonial injustice in how courts and police do not give credibility to drill artists’ testimonies about the storylike nature of their songs, and these credibility deficits are based in racist stereotypes (...) about black criminality and believability. We see contributory injustice in how courts and police, through wilful ignorance, see drill music as violent and criminal rather than expressive and fictional – as drill artists do – which thwarts drill artists’ ability to contribute to shared knowledge. (shrink)

I develop a distinction between two types of psychological hedonism. Inferential hedonism (or “I-hedonism”) holds that each person only has ultimate desires regarding his or her own hedonic states (pleasure and pain). Reinforcement hedonism (or “R–hedonism”) holds that each person's ultimate desires, whatever their contents are, are differentially reinforced in that person’s cognitive system only by virtue of their association with hedonic states. I’ll argue that accepting R-hedonism and rejecting I-hedonism provides a conciliatory position on the traditional altruism debate, (...) and that it coheres well with the neuroscientist Anthony Dickinson’s theory about the evolutionary function of hedonic states, the “hedonic interface theory.” Finally, I’ll defend R-hedonism from potential objections. (shrink)

Epistemic instrumentalism views epistemic norms and epistemic normativity as essentially involving the instrumental relation between means and ends. It construes notions like epistemic normativity, norms, and rationality, as forms of instrumental or means-end normativity, norms, and rationality. I do two main things in this paper. In part 1, I argue that there is an under-appreciated distinction between two independent types of epistemic instrumentalism. These are instrumentalism about epistemic norms and instrumentalism about epistemic normativity. In part 2, I argue that (...) this under-appreciated distinction matters for the debate surrounding the plausibility of EI. Specifically, whether we interpret EI as norm-EI or as source-EI matters for the widely discussed universality or categoricity objection to EI, and for two important motivations for adopting EI, namely naturalism and the practical utility of epistemic norms. I will then conclude by drawing some lessons for epistemic instrumentalism going forward. (shrink)

My target article did not attribute a pervasive ontological significance to phenomenology, so it escapes Bogdan's “epistemological illusion.” Pust correctly pinpoints an ambiguity between content-inclusive and content-exclusive forms of folk functionalism. Contrary to Fodor, however, only the former is plausible, and hence my third argument against functionalism remains a threat. Van Brakel's charity approach to first-person authority cannot deal with authority vis-a-vis sensations, and it has some extremely odd consequences.

According to structuralism, all natural properties are individuated by their roles in causal/nomological structures. According to quidditism, at least some natural properties are individuated in some other way. Because these theses deal with the identities of natural properties, this distinction cuts to the core of a serious metaphysical dispute: Are the intrinsic natures of all natural properties essentially causal/nomological in character? I'll argue that the answer is ‘no’, or at least that this answer is more plausible than many critics of (...) quidditism have recognized. In section 1, I distinguish between two versions of quidditism. Bare quidditism holds that worlds with distinct properties and isomorphic structures must be qualitatively identical in the following sense: inhabiting one world would be indistinguishable from inhabiting the other. In contrast, qualitative quidditism allows such worlds to have qualitative differences. In section 2, I discuss an epistemological position that allows us to bett... (shrink)

It is a fundamental intuition about truth that the conditions under which a sentence is true are given by what the sentence asserts. My aim in this paper is to show that this intuition captures the concept of truth completely and correctly. This is conceptual deflationism, for it does not go beyond what is asserted by a sentence in order to define the truth status of that sentence. This paper, hence, is a defense of deflationism as a conceptual account of (...) truth. This defense is developed in four stages. In the first stage I present a distinction between two types of deflationism, conceptual and metaphysical. This is the central stage of the argument and its main conclusion is that conceptual deflationism when joined with the principle of bivalence is inconsistent with metaphysical deflationism, that is, conceptual deflationism together with bivalence entails a non-deflationary metaphysical account of truth. In the second and third stages of the argument I argue that the totality of the Tarskian biconditionals, when interpreted as definitional biconditionals, offers a description of the nature of truth. In the fourth, and final, stage of the argument I advance a positive case for conceptual deflationism. I explain how the revision theory of truth provides this sort of deflationism with its best evidence: a clear demonstration of its consistency and a compelling argument for its material adequacy. (shrink)

In section I the notions of logical and inductive probability will be discussed as well as two explicanda, viz. degree of confirmation, the base for inductive probability, and degree of evidential support, Popper's favourite explicandum. In section II it will be argued that Popper's paradox of ideal evidence is no paradox at all; however, it will also be shown that Popper's way out has its own merits.

I comment on two problems in Glover's account. First, semantic representations are not always available to awareness. Second, some functional properties, the affordances of objects, should be encoded in the dorsal system. Then I argue that the existence of Glover's two types of representations is supported by studies on “object-centered” attention. Furthermore, it foreshadows a nondescriptive causal reference fixing process.

This paper distinguishes two types of qualia theory, which I call Galilean and non-Galilean qualia theories. It also offers considerations against each type of theory. To my mind the considerations are powerful. In any case, they bring out the importance of distinguishing the two types of theory. For they show that different considerations come into play—or considerations come into play in quite different ways—in assessing the two types of theory.

In the first part ("Determination"), I consider different notions of determination, contrast and compare modal with non-modal accounts and then defend two a-modality theses concerning essence and supervenience. I argue, first, that essence is a a-modal notion, i.e. not usefully analysed in terms of metaphysical modality, and then, contra Kit Fine, that essential properties can be exemplified contingently. I argue, second, that supervenience is also an a-modal notion, and that it should be analysed in terms of constitution relations between (...) properties. In the second part ("A Theory of Truthmaking"), I first review the literature on ontological commitment, and argue that the notion of truthmaking is better suited to play its explanatory rôle. I then argue that we should take truthmaker theory seriously, and that we should provide actual truthmakers for all truths there are. In the last chapter of this part, I review Armstrong's truthmaker theories and argue that they are unsatisfactory. I generalise my criticism to an argument against truthmaker necessitarianism, the view that truthmakers necessarily make true the truths they are truthmakers of. In the third part ("Properties and their Kind(s)"), I discuss qualitative determination. I present and endorse the truthmaker argument for universals, and defend universalism against friends of tropes, states of affairs and facts. I then give a novel characterisation of the important class of intrinsic properties, building on Lewis' work. With a workable notion of intrinsicness at hand, I argue that relations are ontologically – but not "ideologically" – dispensable: qualitative determination in general is a matter of intrinsic structure. In the future, I plan to add two parts and to publish my thesis as a book: In the fourth part ("Exemplification"), I argue for the existence of an exemplification relation tying universals and particulars together. I derive theoretical benefits from this relation by providing adverbialist theories of modality and tense and identify exemplification with a type of parthood. In the fifth part ("Qua qua qua"), I investigate the curious and interesting ontological category of so-called "qua-objects" (Picasso-as-a-painter, for example) and argue that they exist, are not identical with transworld indidivuals or modal parts and that they provide (contingent) truthmakers for all true predications. (shrink)

Debunking arguments are arguments that seek to undermine a belief or doctrine by exposing its causal origins. Two prominent proponents of such arguments are the utilitarians Joshua Greene and Peter Singer. They draw on evidence from moral psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory in an effort to show that there is something wrong with how deontological judgments are typically formed and with where our deontological intuitions come from. They offer debunking explanations of our emotion-driven deontological intuitions and dismiss complex deontological theories (...) as products of confabulatory post hoc rationalization. Through my discussion of Greene and Singer’s empirically informed debunking of deontology, I introduce the distinction between two different types of debunking arguments. The first type of debunking argument operates through regular undercutting defeat, whereas the second type relies on higher-order evidence. I argue that the latter type of debunking argument, of which the argument from confabulation is an example, is objectionably sloppy and therefore inadmissible in academic discussion. (shrink)

The standard opinion is that the force of the constitution hinges on the fact that it is willingly endorsed by the people or, at least representative of the people. This Article challenges this view. More specifically, I differentiate between two types of legitimation: representational legitimation and non-representational or reason-based legitimation. While representational legitimation rests on the fact that the constitution is representative of who the people are or what they want, reason-based constitutions are based on the judgement (...) that the constitution is just or, at least grounded in reason. I also show that some of the puzzles in constitutional theory can be resolved by acknowledging the significance of the latter type of legitimation. For instance, I illustrate that constitutions that were not adopted freely by the nations and could not have been characterized as representative of the people such as the German Constitution can still be legitimate. To put it provocatively: the legitimation of a constitution need not rest on the conviction that it represents the people whom it governs; it may simply rest on the belief that it is a good or just constitution. Representational legitimacy is only one form of legitimacy but not the only one. (shrink)

The article by Alexander Soldatov contains a new view to solving the problem of autocephaly in the context of the desire of the Orthodox Churches in Ukraine to the attainment of the autocephalous status. Analyzing the canon law, the statements of the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church and the historical experience of Orthodoxy, the author comes to the conclusion that there are two types of autocephaly in the Orthodox tradition - old and new one. These types are (...) different in the scope of authority of the church authorities and in the mode of origin. Author's concept is related to the ancient principle Pentarchy, i.e. the primacy in the Universal Orthodoxy five ancient patriarchates that are exclusive carriers autocephaly completeness. Only they, with certain reservations and limitations, have the right to grant autocephalous status of the other local Churches. The Moscow Patriarchate is not a member of Pentarchy, this right it does not have, which removes from the agenda the question of the very possibility of obtaining autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from Moscow. In this regard, the article addresses some lesser known aspects of "resubordination" of the Kyiv Metropolis to Moscow Patriarchate from Constantinople in the end of the XVIIth century. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish two types of mental causation, called 'higher-level causation' and 'exploitation'. These notions superficially resemble the traditional problematic notions of supervenient causation and downward causation, but they are different in crucial respects. My new distinction is supported by a radically externalist competitor of the so-called Standard View of mental states, i.e. the view that mental states are brain states. I argue that on the Alternative View, the notions of 'higher-level causation' and 'exploitation' can in combination (...) dissolve the problem of mental causation as standardly discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 33 (winter 2013–14): 173–90 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036–01631; online 1913–8032 c:\users\kenneth\documents\type3302\rj 33,2 114 red.docx 2014-01-31 8:29 PM oeviews MODES AND LEVELS OF PERPLEXITY I. Grattan-Guinness Middlesex U. Business School Hendon, London nw4 4bt, uk [email protected] John Ongley and Rosalind Carey. Russell: a Guide for the Perplexed. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Pp. ix, 212. isbn: 978-0-8264-9753-6. £45 (hb), (...) £14.99 (pb); us$80 (hb), us$24.95 (pb). i his book is the 41st in a series of guides to the work of various philosophers and philosopher groups, written at a level of readability for students. The authors survey the course of Bertrand Russell’s philosophical career, starting out with his work on logic and mathematics. The main philosophical tools are presented: in logic, they are term, proposition, proposition function, relation, paradox, and first- vis-à-vis higher-order logic. Then, moving on to epistemology, the principal philosophical notions are presented, such as sense-data, facts related to language, Russell’s overriding preference for positivistic philosophies and suspicions of metaphysics, knowledge by acquaintance and by description, theories of truth, logical atomism, percept, events, meaning, and inference in the context of scientific theories. It is nice to have many of the principal components of Russell’s philosophy exhibited together, including the later works An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth and Human Knowledge. The perplexed reader would like to be given precise references for Russell’s assertions on various points, especially when he was so prolific. A cited short item does not need more precision; but the two main chapters that cover the logic and epistemology story often seem to invoke The Principles of Mathematics or Principia Mathematica and yet contain only one precise citation of a longer text in their 64 pages (p. 85). The other chapters of the book are somewhat better in this respect. The index is excellent, though W. V. Quine was missed at pp. 29–30. The table of contents would have benefited from including the titles of the sections. q= 174 Reviews c:\users\kenneth\documents\type3302\rj 33,2 113 red.docx 2014-01-15 10:04 ii Much ground is covered; however, the account is mitigated by the failure to provide a biographical factual survey that should have constituted the opening chapter. Little or no description or explanation is given of, among others, Cambridge University, its mathematical tripos, Russell’s research fellowship in 1895, the philosophical journals Mind and The Monist, Russell’s conversion from neo-Hegelian to positivistic philosophy following G. E. Moore around 1899, the start of personal contacts with Giuseppe Peano in 1900, the gradual involvement of A. N. Whitehead from around 1902, the financial rescue of Principia Mathematica by the grant from the Royal Society in 1909, the serious mistake in Volume 2 detected by Whitehead in 1911 while it was in press, the initial contact with Ludwig Wittgenstein from 1911, Russell’s switch from logic to epistemology in the early 1910s, Whitehead’s intentions for the fourth volume of Principia that was abandoned in 1918, the circumstances of the second edition published in the mid-1920s, Russell’s partial return to serious philosophical writings from the mid-1930s onwards, or the Trinity fellowship from 1944. Presumably the authors have made most of these omissions intentionally ; but the target audience is the loser. The opening “introduction” does mention some of these events and publications ; but its purpose is to provide a preliminary look at some of the main features of Russell’s logic, including the comprehension axiom “that every predicate defines a class” (p. 3), type theory, definite descriptions, “the noclass theory of classes” (p. 10), and the status and role of “analysis”. Why do these features need prologues when the others do not? When they are re-discussed in the later chapters on logic and epistemology, several near-repetitions occur. Furthermore, quantification does not receive sufficient consideration in the book; and the logical connectives and rules of inference none at... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS JOHN F. CROSBY, III Franciscan University of Steubenville Steubenville, Ohio I PROPOSE TO explore the idea that persons do not exist as replaceable specimens of or as mere instances of an ideal or type, but rather exist in some sense for their own sakes, each existing as incommunicably his or her own.1 I undertake this study in the conviction that the incommunicability of persons (...) is profoundly characteristic for them precisely as persons, and has a major role to play in any philosophy of the person. And there is an entirely different reason which attracts me to this subject. I think that most of what I have to say here can find acceptance across a broad spectrum of philosophical positions. At a time when thinkers are increasingly suspicious of universally valid truth about man, when many of them think that a vision of man is proper only to some tradition and valid only within that tradition and not beyond it, one can offer a salutary challenge to one's contemporaries by showing a centrally important truth about persons which, as I say, can be accepted by philosophers coming from the most various points of view. Suppose that you were to minimalize the death of someone by saying that at least the human species did not die with him or her, as if the immortality of the species more than compensated for the mortality of this individual : everyone understands that you would thereby radically depersonalize the deceased. Or suppose that you were grieving over the death of someone dear to you, and a friend tried to comfort you with the thought that the 1 My thanks to Josef Seifert, William Frank, Damian Fedoryka, and Katryna Fedoryka for their comments on earlier drafts of this study. The text of this article forms Chapter Two of my book, Essay on Personal Selfhood, which is close to completion. 403 404 JOHN F. CROSBY, III particular excellences of the deceased, which awakened your love, also exist in other human beings who are still living, as if you could continue to love in them what you had loved in the deceased. Again, everyone understands that if you treat people having excellences as if they were replaceable specimens of those excellences, then you lose your grip on them as persons. But why is this? Why is personhood driven out of human beings as soon as their species-membership, or their particular excellences, are thought to predominate in them? What is that incommunicability of each person which is obscured as soon as persons are thought to be only specimens? One commonly thinks that this aspect of personal selfhood has been recognized only in modern thought; in fact it was recognized already by St. Thomas Aquinas. Creatura autem rationalis divinae providentiae substat sicut secundum se gubernata et provisa, non solum propter speciem, ut aliae corruptibiles creaturae : quia individuum quod gubernatur solum propter speciem, non gubernatur propter seipsum; creatura autem rationalis propter seipsam gubernatur, ut ex dictis manifestum est. Sic igitur solae rationales creaturae directionem a Deo ad suos actus accipiunt non solum propter speciem, sed secundum individuum.2 Notice that Aquinas teaches here the metaphysical ultimacy of personal incommunicability; it exists even before God in the sense 2 " Now, a rational creature exists under divine providence as a being governed and provided for in himself, and not simply for the sake of his species, as is the case with other corruptible creatures. For the individual that is governed only for the sake of the species is not governed for its own sake, but the rational creature is governed for his own sake, as is clear from what we have said (ch. 112). And so, only rational creatures receive direction from God in their acts, not only for the species, but for the individual." Summa Contra Gentiles, III, ch. 113 (Bourke translation). By the way, Chapters 111-114 of Book III seem to me to constitute the most " personalist " passage' in the entire corpus of St. Thomas. The modern reader sees to his amazement that St. Thomas here has already made his own the Kantian idea that each person in a sense exists for his... (shrink)

BackgroundWe review original papers on ovarian-hormone status in two areas of emotional processing: facial emotion recognition and emotional memory. Ovarian-hormone status is operationalized by the levels of the steroid sex hormones 17β-estradiol and progesterone, fluctuating over the natural menstrual cycle and suppressed under oral contraceptive use. We extend previous reviews addressing single areas of emotional processing. Moreover, we systematically examine the role of stimulus features such as emotion type or stimulus valence and aim at elucidating factors that reconcile the inconsistent (...) results.MethodsWe followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines and included papers published until September 2020 indexed in PubMed and Web of Science databases. Search terms were MeSH terms AND AND with representing our separately searched areas, resulting in, and. To be included, articles had to be written and published in English, examine healthy, non-pregnant adult women in their reproductive age, and measure or at least estimate levels of E2 and P4. In PubMed, the search was limited to humans and to the search term present in the title or abstract.ResultsFeatures of the provided stimulus material constitute a relevant influence that interacts with E2- and P4-related ovarian-hormone status. For instance, recognition of basic emotions appears to be more related to P4- than E2-levels. Quite consistent, OC intake was accompanied by impaired recognition accuracy of basic and also complex emotions, although not in a recent large-sample study assessing complex emotions. Memory recall of negative content was mainly enhanced by P4, especially after having been stressed.Discussion and ConclusionWe document the methodological diversity in the field, presumably contributing to the heterogeneity of results. More studies explicitly contrasting the early follicular phase, mid-cycle phase, mid-luteal, and OC intake while standardizing tasks are needed. Research would take advantage of using within-subject designs and accounting for the recognition of complex emotions. (shrink)

This thesis is a study on the nature of modality in Hegel’s Logic and contemporary modal metaphysics. The thesis has two aims: Firstly, it examines Lewisian modal realism, as well as the post-Lewisian modal metaphysical accounts of modal actualism and modal essentialism in order to reveal that each position appeals to a non-modal foundation to make modal concepts explicit. Each position thus falls under what Hegel regards as pre-critical metaphysics by suggesting a modally unaccountable ground for modal concepts. The very (...) idea of a foundation to modality is problematic because as a foundation, it is necessarily assumed without further justification, and it directs our attention away from the nature of modality itself to its supposed foundations. These non-modal foundational take the form of possible worlds for modal realism, the form of properties for modal actualism and the form of essence for modal essentialism. To eschew foundationalism in modal metaphysics and provide a less questionable basis for modality, the thesis suggests Hegel’s treatment of modality as a viable alternative in virtue of its being free from the concerns stemming from the pre-critical way of doing metaphysics. The thesis situates Hegel in contemporary modal metaphysics by undertaking two types of exposition. By examining Hegel's treatment of essence and property, the thesis will show negatively that essence and property cannot be a foundation for modality, while by examining Hegel’s treatment of modality, the thesis positively proves that modal concepts are analysable and explainable within the domain of actuality, a domain that can only be made explicit by modal determinations. These two expositions provide an idea of a self-sustaining and self-explanatory modal metaphysics without appealing to non-modal foundationalist metaphysical commitments. More precisely, I argue that Hegel’s logical derivation of modal concepts constitutes a Hegelian modal metaphysics, which contains a comprehensive account of modal concepts that does not rely on any non-modal primitive. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that there is an inductive and a non-inductive argument from position to know, and will characterise the latter as an argument from authority because of providing content-independent reasons. I will also argue that both types of argument should be doubt-preserving: testimony cannot justify a stronger cognitive attitude in the arguer than the expert herself expresses when she testifies. Failure to appreciate this point undercuts Mizrahi’s claim that arguments from expert opinion are weak.

In this paper I argue that because Churchland does not adequately address the distinction between high-level cognitive theories and low-level embodied theories, Churchland's claims for theory-laden perception lose their epistemological significance. I propose that Churchland and others debating the theory-ladenness of perception should distinguish carefully between two main ways in which perception is plastic: through modifying our high-level theories directly and through modifying our low-level theories using training experiences. This will require them to attend to two very different types (...) of constraints on the modification of our perceptions. (shrink)

This article examines types of abductive inference in Hegelian philosophy and machine learning from a formal comparative perspective and argues that Robert Brandom’s recent reconstruction of the logic of recollection in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit may be fruitful for anticipating modes of collaborative abductive inference in human/A.I. interactions. Firstly, the argument consists of showing how Brandom’s reading of Hegelian recollection may be understood as a specific type of abductive inference, one in which the past interpretive failures and errors of (...) a community are explained hypothetically by way of the construction of a narrative that rehabilitates those very errors as means for the ongoing successful development of the community, as in Brandom’s privileged jurisprudential example of Anglo-American case law. Next, this Hegelian abductive dynamic is contrasted with the error-reducing backpropagation algorithms characterizing many current versions of machine learning, which can be understood to perform abductions in a certain sense for various problems but not (yet) in the full self-constituting communitarian mode of creative recollection canvassed by Brandom. Finally, it is shown how the two modes of “error correction” may possibly coordinate successfully on certain types of abductive inference problems that are neither fully recollective in the Hegelian sense nor algorithmically optimizable. (shrink)

In Morality and Socially Constructed Norms, Laura Valentini poses and answers this overall question: When and why, if at all, are socially constructed norms morally binding? Valentini develops an original account, the agency-respect view, that offers an answer to this general question by offering a moral criterion in terms of agency respect. I agree with the criterion proposed by the agency-respect view, given the account of socially constructed norms that it assumes. However, its account of socially constructed norms seems too (...) narrow to answer the general question. More specifically, I argue that the account of social norms is too narrow, even according to Valentini’s own standard, since it does not account for teleological social norms, which are about standards of excellence rather than standards of behavior. Taking teleological social norms into account calls the moral criterion proposed by the agency-respect view into question: it is plausible concerning the type of social norm assumed by the agency-respect view, but not for teleological social norms. Hence, the general question has not been fully answered. (shrink)

Philosophers’ intuitions about what constitutes autonomy are largely driven by the exemplars or paradigms that we recognize. There are indefinitely many exemplars, inasmuch as there are relatively private personae that serve as autonomy exemplars such as our parents, third grade teacher, or, for the megalomaniac, oneself. But among Western philosophers there are doubtless some exemplars that are widely shared and broadly influential. Philosophical exemplars include Socrates, Aristotle’s magnanimous man, Kant’s noumenal self that is perfectly attuned to the moral law, Mill’s (...) anti-authoritarian non-conformist, Marx’s manin-society, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and Sartre’s authentic youth who must decide whether to join the French resistance or stay at home for the sake of his mother. Exemplars from outside of philosophy include Antigone, Christ, Faust, Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, Winston Churchill, and even figures from popular culture such as the baseball player Ted Williams, the free spirited flower children of the 1960s, and practically any character that John Wayne ever played. (shrink)

Although the idea that sexual violence is a “structural” problem is not new, the lack of specification as to what that entails blocks effective responses to it. This paper illustrates the concept of sexual violence as structural in the sense of containing a type of moral wrong called “structural wrong” and discusses its practical implications. First, I introduce a distinction between two types of moral wrongs—interactional wrongs and structural wrongs—and I argue that the moral problem of sexual violence includes (...) both types, each of which calls for a different set of moral responses. Second, drawing on Iris Marion Young’s social connection model of responsibility, I argue that recognizing the structural-wrong element of sexual violence does not reduce individual perpetrators’ responsibility for it. Instead, it implies that a broader group of agents are required to join collective actions to reform the social structure. I conclude by evaluating some preventive programs against sexual violence through the lens of structural wrongs and providing directions to advance them. (shrink)

This article discusses “explaining away” arguments in the cognitive science of religion. I distinguish two rather different ways of explaining away religion, one where religion is shown to be incompatible with scientific findings and one where supernatural entities are rendered superfluous by scientific explanations. After discussing possible objections to both varieties, I argue that the latter way offers better prospects for successfully explaining away religion but that some caveats must be made. In a second step, I spell out how CSR (...) can be used to spell out an argument of the second kind. One argument renders religion superfluous by claiming that it results from a cognitive bias and one does the same by claiming religion was a useful evolutionary adaptation. I discuss some strengths and weaknesses of both arguments. (shrink)

This article argues that what Grice termed ‘particularized conversational implicatures’ can be divided into two types. In some cases, it is possible to reconstruct the inference from the explicit content of the utterance to the implicature without employing a premise to the effect that that the speaker expressed that content (by means of an utterance). I call these ‘material implicatures’. Those whose reconstruction relies on a premise about the speaker's verbal behaviour, by contrast, I call ‘behavioural implicatures’. After showing (...) that the division is theoretically significant, I ask whether current pragmatic theory is able to accommodate it. I conclude that, while (neo)-Gricean pragmatics cannot do so straightforwardly, the distinction is already implicit in Relevance Theory. The article ends by considering the question of whether, in the light of previous discussion, speaker meaning really is always an instance of non-natural meaning. (shrink)

Among the tasks of modern political philosophy is to develop a favored conception of the relations among modern citizens, among people who can know little or nothing of one another individually and yet are deeply reciprocally dependent. One might think of this as developing a favored conception of civic friendship. In this essay I sketch two candidate conceptions. The first derives from the Kantian tradition, the second from the 1844 Marx. I present the two conceptions and then describe similarities and (...) differences. My approach is both taxonomic and programmatic. My taxonomic goal is to provide an initial sketch of the conceptual territory. My programmatic goal is to provide reasons to think that the conception derived from Marx is both appealing and feasible. (shrink)

According to the received view in metaethics, a Neo-Humean theory of rationality entails that there cannot be any objective moral reasons, i.e. moral reasons that are independent of actual desires. In this paper, I argue that there is a version of this theory that is compatible with the existence of objective moral reasons. The key is to distinguish between (i) the process of rational deliberation that starts off in an agent's actual desires, and (ii) the rational principle that an agent (...) employs in such a process. I maintain that it is the latter which explains why it is rational for an agent to have a certain desire, not the former. As a result, there might be two types of principles. The second type of principle leaves room for objective moral reasons. (shrink)

The two books on which this study is based represent the two branches of linguistic philosophy. One an anthology, the other an original work, they differ also in kind. In Logic and Language A.G.N. Flew has collected and ably prefaced nine essays by British analysts, the earliest of which, Ryle's "Systematically Misleading Expressions," appeared exactly twenty years ago. Nelson Goodman's The Structure of Appearance is a new reconstruction; not to recognize its vigor and impressiveness would be most ungracious even if (...) one rejects as radically as I do this particular Aufbau. Naturally, I shall say more about Goodman's book than about the essays. Yet I shall begin with the latter and say about Ryle's as much as about all the rest together. To justify this strategy I must put my own cards on the table, indicating where I stand on this controversy or near controversy between formalists and antiformalists. To my mind, then, it is gray against gray, not white against black. Both sides agree, and I agree with them, that there is no experience or, if you please, no experiment that decides what is presumably at issue between phenomenalists and realists. In this important sense, both sides agree, and I agree with them, that all philosophical problems are verbal. But in another equally important sense they are not verbal. This sense both formalists and antiformalists have lost or stand in danger of losing if what they do is no better than what they say they do. Now for my reasons for singling out and starting off with the essay that marks Ryle's sober-eyed and reluctant conversion to the linguistic philosophy. It so happens that he there states very aptly a body of doctrine on which both sides could still agree and from which they in fact branched off at about the time the paper was first published. Also, the doubts and dissatisfactions to which he there confessed contain the starting points of the peculiar dialectics by which both formalists and antiformalists may be driven to extremes. Even better than that, I believe I can make use of these hesitancies to lend color to my own argument for a middle position which, as one is tempted to say on such occasions, does justice to both sides. That Ryle himself has in the meantime become a hero of the antiformalists is merely a piquant detail and does not deter me. (shrink)

In 1982, Wolniewicz proposed a formal ontology of situations based on the lattice of elementary situations (cf. [7, 8]). In [3], I constructed some types of formal structure Porphyrian Tree Structures (PTS), Concepts Structures (CS) and the Structures of Individuals (U) that formally represent ontologically fundamental categories: species and genera (PTS), concepts (CS) and individual beings (U) (cf. [3, 4]). From an ontological perspective, situations and concepts belong to different categories. But, unexpectedly, as I shall show, some variants of (...) CS and Wolniewicz’s lattice are similar. The main theorem states that a subset of a modified concepts structure (called CS+) based on CS fulfils the axioms of Wolniewicz’ lattice. Finally, I shall draw some philosophical conclusions and state some formal facts. (shrink)

In his fifth Logical Investigation, Husserl intensely scrutinizes three possible significations of the concept of consciousness. In these analyses, he also strives to clearly delineate between two types of consciousness: psychological and phenomenological. The goal of this paper is to show that the way in which the (psychical) act is conceived and defined, according to the Husserlian approach, as a lived, intentional experience plays an essential role in clarifying the distinction between the empirical-psychological level of consciousness (where the act (...) as a lived experience manifests itself) and its eidetic or ideal level (wherein any type of objectivity is constituted as such). Moreover, I shall try to argue that the notion of act conceived in this manner had influenced and decisively determined the development of the entire Husserlian phenomenology and theory of knowledge exactly because it explains how knowledge in general is constituted from an objective point of view. Another highly relevant distinction that needs to be dealt with in this context is the difference that Husserl establishes between the descriptive and intentional contents of the act. I shall try to show that this distinction presupposes in fact a previous conceptual determination of the noema (undertaken jointly with the analysis of the noetical components of consciousness at this level), and that the way in which the relationship between these two strands of consciousness is described determines further and in a fundamental manner the development of the idea of intentionality itself. (shrink)

The notion of a rigid designator was originally introduced with respect to a modal semantics in which only one world, the world of evaluation, is shifted. Several philosophical applications employ a modal semantics which shifts not just the world of evaluation, but also the world considered as actual. How should the notion of a rigid designator be generalized in this setting? In this note, I show that there are two options and argue that, for the currently most popular application of (...) two-dimensional modal semantics, proper names ought to be treated as rigid relative to the world considered as actual. (shrink)

While it is widely accepted that human vision represents objects, it is less clear which of the various philosophical notions of ‘object’ adequately characterizes visual objects. In this paper, I show that within contemporary cognitive psychology visual objects are characterized in two distinct, incompatible ways. On the one hand, models of visual organization describe visual objects in terms of combinations of features, in accordance with the philosophical bundle theories of objects. However, models of visual persistence apply a notion of visual (...) objects that is more similar to that endorsed in philosophical substratum theories. Here I discuss arguments that might show either that only one of the above notions of visual objects is adequate in the context of human vision, or that the category of visual objects is not uniform and contains entities properly characterized by different philosophical conceptions. (shrink)

Traditionally, constitutionalists have offered just one notion of constitution to analyse the relation that an object, such as a statue or a chain, bears to the object/s from which it is made: let us say, a piece of marble in the first case or a piece of metal in the second. Robert Wilson proposes to differentiate two notions of constitution and, in this way, to offer constitutionalists a more varied range of metaphysical tools. To justify the introduction of (...) the difference, he presents several phenomena and problems, the explanation of which would justify the distinction he makes. In this paper I argue that Wilson’s proposal would not increase the explanatory power of a theory of constitution as it has traditionally been understood, only its complexity. Increasing the complexity without increasing the explanatory power of a theory, I defend, goes against one, at least prima facie, basic theoretical virtue: parsimony. In my argumentation I crucially use, for the case of Wilson’s first three arguments, the existence of principles of existence−persistence, which constitutionalists, Wilson among them, usually accept. In arguing against Wilson’s fourth argument I use a slightly modified version of Lynne Rudder Baker’s theory of constitution. (shrink)

Recalling the Greek origins of philosophy and its attachment to science as universal knowledge: “thinking and being are one”. Contrast with the challenge of Levinas’ conception of philosophy as significance of signification via encounter with irreducible alterity of the vulnerable other person through moral responsibility. Challenge to science as first philosophy by ethics – morality and justice – as first philosophy. The intelligibility of the latter explicated in terms of the “saying” of the “said”, i.e., the origination of meaning in (...) the moral communication situation of the face-to-face. Thus science, knowledge, truth, unable to ground themselves by themselves, receive grounding – justification – in ethics. (shrink)

In this paper, I highlight the significance of practices of _refutation_ in philosophical inquiry, that is, practices of showing that a claim, person or theory is wrong. I present and contrast two prominent approaches to philosophical refutation: refutation in ancient Greek dialectic (_elenchus_), in its Socratic variant as described in Plato’s dialogues, and as described in Aristotle’s logical texts; and the practice of providing counterexamples to putative definitions familiar from twentieth century analytic philosophy, focusing on the so-called Gettier problem. Moreover, (...) I discuss Lakatos’ method of proofs and refutations, as it offers insightful observations on the dynamics between arguments, refutations, and counterexamples. Overall, I argue that dialectic, in particular in its Socratic variant, is especially suitable for the philosophical purpose of questioning the obvious, as it invites reflection on one’s own doxastic commitments and on the tensions and inconsistencies within one’s set of beliefs. By contrast, the counterexample-based approach to philosophical refutation can give rise to philosophical theorizing that is overly focused on hairsplitting disputes, thus becoming alienated from the relevant human experiences. Insofar as philosophical inquiry treads the fine line between questioning the obvious while still seeking to say something significant about human experiences, perhaps a certain amount of what Lakatos describes as ‘monster-barring’—a rejection of overly fanciful, artificial putative counterexamples—has its place in philosophical argumentation. (shrink)

A certain theory of substance, one that grows out of Aristotelian philosophy but which has adherents today as well, draws a distinction between the features a substance has by instantiating a universal and the features it has by possessing a trope. An adherent of this theory might say that a certain cat is red because it possesses a redness-trope, but that it is a cat because it instantiates the universal CAT. A problem that must be faced by philosophers who hold (...) this sort of view is the following: Which features are which? In other words, which features are the ones had in virtue of trope-possession, and which are the ones had in virtue of instantiation? In this paper I discuss this problem, consider and reject a competing view, and propose my own Aristotelian solution. I also raise and answer an objection. (shrink)