This paper explores the grounds upon which moral judgment of a person's beliefs is properly made. The beliefs in question are non-moral beliefs and the objects of moral judgment are individual instances of believing. We argue that instances of believing may be morally wrong on any of three distinct grounds: (i) by constituting a moral hazard, (ii) by being the result of immoral inquiry, or (iii) by arising from vicious inner processes of belief formation. On this way of articulating the (...) basis of moral judgment of belief it becomes clear that rational and epistemic norms do not exhaust the kinds of normative judgment properly made of a person's state of believing. We argue that there are instances of believing that are both rational and true and yet morally wrong. (shrink)

Abstract This paper defends an argument from interpretation against the possibility of massive error. The argument shares many important features with Donald Davidson's famous argument, but also key differences. I defend the argument against claims that it begs the question against scepticism and that it leaves the sceptic with an obvious means of escape.

This chapter is devoted to criticisms of the views of propositions defended by my co-authors, Jeff King and Scott Soames. The focus is on criticism of their attempts to explain the representational properties of propositions. The criticisms are varied, but one theme is a tension between their view that our actions can explain the representational properties of propositions and their commitment to the idea that propositions have their representational properties essentially.

One of the greatest challenges in teaching an introductory philosophy course is convincing students that there are, indeed, reliable standards for the evaluation of arguments. Too often introductory students criticize an argument simply by contesting the truth of one of its claims. And far too often, the only claim in an argument that meets serious objections is its conclusion. For many students, the idea that an argument displays a structure which can be evaluated on its own terms is not very (...) difficult to grasp. Unfortunately, the idea is grasped only in an abstract way, with insufficient appreciation of how structural problems manifest themselves in concrete arguments, and without the vocabulary for formulating structural criticisms. But this paper is not simply about teaching logic, it is about pedagogy. Our task is to instill in the student the habit of clear thinking. When we send our students out into the world, we have to ensure that they are prepared for it. (shrink)

The philosophical literature contains at least three formulations of the problem of causal exclusion. Although each of the three most common formulations targets theories according to which some effects have ‘too many determiners’, no one is reducible to either of the others. This article proposes two ‘new’ exclusion problems and suggests that exclusion is not a single problem but a family of problems unified by the situations they problematize. It is shown, further, that for three of the most popular attempts (...) to solve one or another of the ‘old’ problems, each remains vulnerable to one of the ‘new’ exclusion problems. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article documents the reasoning in a mathematical work by Mei Wending, one of the most prolific mathematicians in seventeenth-century China. Based on an analysis of the mathematical content, we present Mei’s systematic treatment of this particular genre of problems,fangcheng, and his efforts to refute the traditional practices in works that appeared earlier. His arguments were supported by the epistemological values he utilized to establish his system and refute the flaws in the traditional approaches. Moreover, in the context of the (...) competition between the Chinese and Western approaches to mathematics, Mei was motivated to demonstrate that the genre offangchengproblems was purely a “Chinese” achievement, not discussed by the Jesuits. Mei’s motivations were mostly expressed primarily in the prefaces to his works, in his correspondence with other scholars, in synopses of his poems, and in biographical records of some of his contemporaries. (shrink)

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.The Deweyan call for democracy as a way of life is a call to bring together ethics and politics. There is the temptation to think of this vision of democracy as a single "way of life"—an ethos with well-defined values such that the democratic thinker, the democratic community, and the democratic citizen can be identified as living out this democratic way (...) of life. However, it is important not to misconstrue the radical nature of Dewey's conception of democratic ethics.The challenge of producing a philosophical account of a democratic ethics is not, as in a more traditional approach to ethics, to .. (shrink)

Physicalism is an empirical theory of the mind and its place in nature. So the physicalist must show that current neuroscience does not falsify physicalism, but instead supports it. Current neuroscience shows that a nervous system is what I call a vector function system. I provide a brief outline of the resources that empirical research has made available within the constraints of the vector function approach. Then I argue that these resources are sufficient, indeed apt, for the physicalist enterprise, by (...) offering a vector functional, hence physicalist, theory of the percept--the perceptual experience itself, a paradigm of phenomenally immediate, introspectively accessible consciousness. (shrink)

A great deal has been written over the past decade defending ‘higher-level’ causes by arguing that overdetermination is more complex than many philosophers initially thought. Although two shooters overdetermine the death of a firing squad victim, a baseball and its parts do not overdetermine the breaking of a window. But while these analyses of overdetermination have no doubt been fruitful, the focus on overdetermination—while ignoring other varieties of causal relation—has limited the discussion. Many of the cases of interest resemble joint (...) causes or a cause necessitating a simultaneous epiphenomenon as much as they resemble overdeterminers. If we are to fully understand higher-level causation, we need to distinguish it from these causal relations as well. This paper is dedicated to the task, focusing especially on the ‘threat’ that higher-level causes are epiphenomena necessitated by lower-level causes. (shrink)

In Sounds, Ecologies, Musics, authors pose exciting challenges and provide fresh opportunities for scholars, scientists, environmental activists, and musicians to consider music and sound from ecological standpoints. The book covers topics such as how environment enables music and sound, how music and sound relate to Western environmental science, and mutidisciplinary collaborations among scholars.

David Brophy’s translation of this classic East Turkistani hagiography is an extraordinary achievement and a model of the translator’s art. His challenging Chag.

There are many algorithm texts that provide lots of well-polished code and proofs of correctness. Instead, this book presents insights, notations, and analogies to help the novice describe and think about algorithms like an expert. By looking at both the big picture and easy step-by-step methods for developing algorithms, the author helps students avoid the common pitfalls. He stresses paradigms such as loop invariants and recursion to unify a huge range of algorithms into a few meta-algorithms. Part of the goal (...) is to teach the students to think abstractly. Without getting bogged with formal proofs, the book fosters a deeper understanding of how and why each algorithm works. These insights are presented in a slow and clear manner accessible to second- or third-year students of computer science, preparing them to find their own innovative ways to solve problems. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to establish—and explore—James Baldwin’s significance for educational theory. Through a close reading of ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, I show that Baldwin’s thinking is an important precursor to the work of Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond, and is relevant to a number of problems that are educationally significant, in particular problems of race and racism.

The semantics of noun phrases (NPs) is of crucial importance for both philosophy and linguistics. Throughout much of the history of the debate about the semantics of noun phrases there has been an implicit assumption about how they are to be understood. Basically, it is the assumption that NPs come only in two kinds. In this paper we would like to make that assumption explicit and discuss it and its status in the semantics of natural language. We will have a (...) look at how the assumption is to be understood more precisely, what its methodological status should be, whether it has been abandoned in recent work in semantics, and whether it should be abandoned in future work. To do all this, it’s best to start with some historical context. (shrink)

I argue that the best way to solve Russell's problem of the relationship between propositions and their constituents is to think of propositions as properties of worlds. I argue that this view preserves the strengths and avoids some of the weaknesses of the view of the metaphysics of propositions defended by Jeff King in his _The Nature and Structure of Content_, and that it provides an explanation of the representational properties of propositions and the nature of indexical belief. I (...) conclude by discussing some problems about how to think about the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions, if a view of this sort is correct. (shrink)

It is in the Corinthian letters that the all-important evidence for a Christian interpretation of King Lear lies; for the major theme is love.