The Anthropocene is a radical reconceptualisation of the relationship between humanity and nature. It posits that we have entered a new geological epoch in which the human species is now the dominant Earth-shaping force, and it is rapidly gaining traction in both the natural and social sciences. This article critically explores the scientific representation of the concept and argues that the Anthropocene is less a scientific concept than the ideational underpinning for a particular worldview. It is paradigm dressed as epoch. (...) In particular, it normalises a certain portion of humanity as the ‘human’ of the Anthropocene, reinserting ‘man’ into nature only to re-elevate ‘him’ above it. This move promotes instrumental reason. It implies that humanity and its planet are in an exceptional state, explicitly invoking the idea of planetary management and legitimising major interventions into the workings of the earth, such as geoen-gineering. I conclude that the scientific origins of the term have diminished its radical potential, and ask whether the concept's radical core can be retrieved. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’s ethical theory was rich and deeply innovative. On Sellars’s view, moral judgments express a special kind of shared intention. Thus, we should see Sellars as an early advocate of an expressivism of plans and intentions, and an early theorist of collective intentionality. He supplemented this theory with a sophisticated logic of intentions, a robust theory of the categorical validity of normative expressions, a subtle way of reconciling the cognitive and motivating aspects of moral judgment, and much more— all (...) within a strict nominalism that preserves Sellars’s commitment to naturalism. The Ethics of Wilfrid Sellars offers the first systematic treatment of this sadly neglected aspect of Sellars’s work and demonstrates that his ethical theory— just like his more widely discussed epistemology— has much to contribute to current debates. (shrink)

This volume makes available one of the central texts in the development of utilitarian tradition, in the authoritative 1977 edition prepared by Professors Burns and Hart as part of Bentham's Collected Works. Certain that history was on his side, Bentham sought to rid the world of the hideous mess wrought by legal obfuscation and confusion, and to transform politics into a rational, scientific activity, premised on the fundamental axiom that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is (...) the measure of right and wrong.". (shrink)

This paper presents a new argument for necessitism, the claim that necessarily everything is necessarily something. The argument appeals to principles about the metaphysics of quantification and predication which are best seen as constraints on reality’s fineness of grain. I give this argument in section 4; the impatient reader may skip directly there. Sections 1-3 set the stage by surveying three other arguments for necessitism. I argue that none of them are persuasive, but I think it is illuminating to consider (...) my argument in light of the others and vice versa. These interconnections should be of interest even to those who reject necessitism; of particular interest may be the new conception of validity proposed in section 5. (shrink)

This volume collects Jeremy Waldron's challenging and influential work on the moral, political and legal issues surrounding the response to terrorism since 9/11. The volume will be essential reading for all those engaged with contemporary politics and security law, and the continuing struggle for an ethical response to terrorism.

In a wide range of fields, the word “modular” is used to describe complex systems that can be decomposed into smaller systems with limited interactions between them. This essay argues that mathematical knowledge can fruitfully be understood as having a modular structure and explores the ways in which modularity in mathematics is epistemically advantageous.

Picturing is a poorly understood element of Sellars’s philosophical project. We diagnose the problem with picturing as follows: on the one hand, it seems that it must be connected with action in order for it to do its job. On the other hand, the representational states of a picturing system are characterized in descriptive and seemingly static terms. How can static terms be connected with action? To solve this problem, we adopt a concept from recent work in Sellarsian metaethics: the (...) idea of a material practical inference, which (we argue) features centrally in how we picture. The key distinction is that the picturing of nonhuman animals involves only Humean material practical inference, in which representational states are corrected only by feedback from the environment and not from discursive interactions. The resulting view shows that Sellars’s contributions to practical philosophy (especially theory of action and metaethics) cannot be separated from his contributions to philosophy of mind, language, and cognitive science. Further, the view makes it clear that picturing is neither a version of the Given, nor is it a fifth wheel to inferential role in explaining representation, but is essential to Sellars’s model of how animals—including humans—represent their environment. (shrink)

"Arguing that debates over legitimacy, political violence, freedom, and justice would benefit greatly from cross-tradition theorizing, this book shows how putting analytic and continental political theory in conversation would help us to overcome these intractable problems"--.

Niche construction theory (NCT) can be applied to examine the influence of culturally constructed learning environments on the acquisition and retention of beliefs, values, role expectations, and skills. Thus, NCT provides a quantitative framework to account for cultural-historical contingency affecting development and cultural evolution. Learning in a culturally constructed environment is of central concern to many sociologists, cognitive scientists, and sociocultural anthropologists, albeit often from different perspectives. This article summarizes four pertinent theories from these fields—situated learning, activity theory, practice theory, (...) and distributed cognition. As a basis for interdisciplinary investigation, the article considers how these theories may be addressed using a cultural niche-construction framework, including the utility of an embedded model that explicitly accounts for effects of the constructed learning environment on within-individual learning dynamics in an evolutionary framework. (shrink)

Recent defenders of the divine command theory like Adams and Alston have confronted the Euthyphro dilemma by arguing that although God’s commands make right actions right, God is morally perfect and hence would never issue unjust or immoral commandments. On their view, God’s nature is the standard of moral goodness, and God’s commands are the source of all obligation. I argue that this view of divine goodness fails because it strips God’s nature of any features that would make His goodness (...) intelligible. An adequate solution to the Euthyphro dilemma may require that God be constrained by a standard of goodness that is external to Himself -- itself a problematic proposal for many theists. (shrink)

Why and how have lay people participated in scientific observation? And on what terms have they collaborated with experts and professionals? We have become accustomed to the involvement of lay observers in the practice of many branches of science, including both the natural and human sciences, usually as subordinates to experts. The current surge of interest in this phenomenon, as well as in the closely related topic of how expertise has been constructed, suggests that historians of science can offer a (...) valuable contribution to these vital questions. A historical approach to lay participation allows us to better understand the making of expert-lay relations in science, and it offers a broader, long-term perspective on contemporary debates about that boundary. (shrink)

The idea that the form of a word reflects information about its meaning has its roots in Platonic philosophy, and has been experimentally investigated for concrete, sensory-based properties since the early 20th century. Here, we provide evidence for an abstract property of ‘boundedness’ that introduces a systematic, iconic bias on the phonological expectations of a novel lexicon. We show that this abstract property is general across events and objects. In Experiment 1, we show that subjects are systematically more likely to (...) associate sign language signs that end with a gestural boundary with telic verbs (denoting events with temporal boundaries, e.g., die, arrive) and with count nouns (denoting objects with spatial boundaries, e.g., ball, coin). In Experiments 2–3, we show that this iconic mapping acts on conceptual representations, not on grammatical features. Specifically, the mapping does not carry over to psychological nouns (e.g. people are not more likely to associate a gestural boundary with idea than with knowledge). Although these psychological nouns are still syntactically encoded as either count or mass, they do not denote objects that are conceived of as having spatial boundaries. The mapping bias thus breaks down. Experiments 4–5 replicate these findings with a new set of stimuli. Finally, in Experiments 6–11, we explore possible extensions to a similar bias for spoken language stimuli, with mixed results. Generally, the results here suggest that ‘boundedness’ of words' referents (in space or time) has a powerful effect on intuitions regarding the form that the words should take. (shrink)

Although forgiveness is often taken to bear a close connection to the value of reconciliation, there is a good deal of scepticism about its role in situations where there is no consensus on the moral complexion of the past and no admission of guilt on the part of the perpetrator. This scepticism is typically rooted in the claims that forgiveness without perpetrator acknowledgement aggravates the risk of recidivism; yields a substandard and morally compromised form of political accommodation; and comes across (...) as patronizing and offensive to the recipient, thereby causing further alienation. In this article, my aim is to show, firstly, that none of these arguments is decisive and, secondly, that forgiveness is a suitable object of political concern in the absence of cross-community consensus on the rights and wrongs of a conflict. In this way, I aim to demonstrate that forgiveness deserves to be taken seriously as a means to civic reconciliation in a broader range of situations than many have allowed. (shrink)

As the most prominent initiative in the open education movement, the Massive Open Online Course is often claimed to disrupt established educational models through the use of innovative technologies that overcome geographic and economic barriers to higher education. However, this paper suggests that the MOOC project, as a typical example of initiatives in this field, fails to engage with a theory of the subject. As such, uncritical and problematic forms of humanism tend to be assumed in the promotion and delivery (...) of these courses: the expectation of rational and self-directing individuals, with a universal desire for education. This fundamental orthodoxy limits both the understanding of technology and the possibilities for a concept of ‘openness’ in education. Given the global scale of the MOOC, and its high-profile associations with elite universities, the need for critical alternatives is pressing. In this paper I draw on critical posthumanism—an umbrella term for a range of philosophical and theoretical positions—for two purposes. Firstly and principally as a perspective through which to critique the educational reliance on humanism that is maintained in the project of the MOOC, and secondly to suggest alternative frameworks for thinking about the intermingling of humans and technologies in education. Space and time are considered as the two principal sites with which technological change is realised, and the promotion of the MOOC is shown to mask spatial and temporal conditions through adherence to an underlying humanist framework. (shrink)

In Section 2, I survey some of the ways that computers are used in mathematics. These raise questions that seem to have a generally epistemological character, although they do not fall squarely under a traditional philosophical purview. The goal of this article is to try to articulate some of these questions more clearly, and assess the philosophical methods that may be brought to bear. In Section 3, I note that most of the issues can be classified under two headings: some (...) deal with the ability of computers to deliver appropriate “evidence” for mathematical assertions, a notion that is explored in Section 4, while others deal with the ability of computers to deliver appropriate mathematical “understanding,” a notion that is considered in Section 5. Final thoughts are provided in Section 6. (shrink)

No contemporary compatibilist account of free will can be complete unless it engages with the consequence argument. I will argue that Wilfrid Sellars offered an ingenious version of compatibilism that can be used to refute the consequence argument. Unfortunately, owing to the opacity of Sellars’s writings on free will, his solution has been neglected. I will reconstruct his view here, demonstrating how it represents a powerful challenge to the consequence argument and tying it to some recent developments in the compatibilist (...) literature. (shrink)

Sometimes Always True aims to resolve, through a re-understanding of the nature of sense, three connected problems central to philosophical thought: that genuine pluralism must make room for outlooks that exclude pluralism, that philosophy ultimately explores sense as a whole and so must in some way step outside of sense, and that our experience of the deep questions of life therefore similarly involves suspensions of sense itself.

This paper offers a new critical evaluation of the Rawlsian model of global public reason (‘GPR’), focusing on its ability to serve as a normative standard for guiding international diplomacy and deliberation in matters of war. My thesis is that, where war is concerned, the model manifests two fatal weaknesses. First, because it demands extensive neutrality over the moral status of persons – and in particular over whether they possess equal basic worth or value – out of respect for the (...) beliefs of inegalitarian yet ‘decent’ societies, or ‘peoples’, Rawlsian GPR renders calculations of proportionality in war impossible. Second, because its content is provided by a conception of global justice (the so-called ‘Law of Peoples’) whose injunctions are addressed exclusively to peoples, as corporate agents, Rawlsian GPR pushes the moral evaluation of the independent wartime choices of individuals off the agenda of the global public forum altogether. (shrink)

One important strand of Sellars’s attack on classical foundationalism from Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is his thesis about the priority of is-talk over looks-talk. This thesis has been criticized extensively in recent years, and classical foundationalism has found several contemporary defenders. I revisit Sellars’s thesis and argue that is-talk is epistemically prior to looks-talk in a way that undermines classical foundationalism. The classical foundationalist claims that epistemic foundations are constituted by the agent’s set of looks-judgments. However, I argue (...) that only a subset of these looks-judgments are even candidates to serve as foundations for the agent’s empirical knowledge, and membership in this subset is determined by the agent’s theory of how the world is. Thus, the epistemic force of the looks-judgments in this subset is dependent on the agent’s theory of how the world is. This means that these looks-judgments aren’t foundational at all, as the agent’s theory of how the world is is epistemically is prior to the epistemic status of these looks-judgments. This is the sense in which judgments about how the world is are epistemically prior to judgments about how things look. This conclusion allows concrete elaboration of another of Sellars’s well-know claims: “I do wish to insist that the metaphor of ‘foundation’ is misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is a logical dimension in which other empirical propositions rest on observation reports, there is another logical dimension in which the latter rest on the former”. (shrink)

Critical notice of Paul Faulkner, "Knowledge on Trust" (OUP 2011) and Benjamin McMyler, "Testimony, Trust, and Authority" (OUP 2011).

Plantinga famously argues against evidentialism that belief in God can be properly basic. But the epistemology of cognitive faculties such as perception and memory which produce psychologically non-inferential beliefs shows that various inferentially justified theoretical beliefs are epistemically prior to our memory and perceptual beliefs, preventing the latter from being epistemically basic. Plantinga's analogy between the sensus divinitatis and these cognitive faculties suggests that the deliverances of the sensus divinitatis cannot be properly basic either. Objections by and on behalf of (...) Plantinga to this argument are considered. (shrink)

It is often suggested that, since the state of affairs in which God creates a good universe is better than the state of affairs in which He creates nothing, a perfectly good God would have to create that good universe. Making use of recent work by Christine Korgaard on the relational nature of the good, I argue that the state of affairs in which God creates is actually not better, due to the fact that it is not better for anyone (...) or anything in particular. Hence, even a perfectly good God would not be compelled to create a good universe. (shrink)

We describe a model-theoretic approach to ordinal analysis via the finite combinatorial notion of an α-large set of natural numbers. In contrast to syntactic approaches that use cut elimination, this approach involves constructing finite sets of numbers with combinatorial properties that, in nonstandard instances, give rise to models of the theory being analyzed. This method is applied to obtain ordinal analyses of a number of interesting subsystems of first- and second-order arithmetic.

While social epistemology is a diverse field, much of it still understands knowledge as an individual status—albeit an individual status that crucially depends on various social factors (such as testimony). Further, the literature on group knowledge until now has primarily focused on limited, specialized groups that may be said to know this or that as a group. I wish to argue, to the contrary, that all knowledge-attributions ascribe a collective status; and that this follows more or less directly from an (...) essential function of entitlement-ascriptions: Ascriptions of knowledge and entitlement serve a primarily social function in that they facilitate coordination by maintaining consensus around true beliefs, true theories, and truth-producing methodologies. This conclusion will shed light on ways in which traditional theories of knowledge (such as foundationalism and coherentism) fail to capture a central function of our epistemic practice. (shrink)

An alethic holding is any speech act that functions to hold another person to acting for reasons that they already had prior to the performance of a speech act with this function. Although it is tempting to think of such acts as either informing another person of extant reasons for acting or as creating new reasons for that person to so act, a central goal of this paper is to suggest that this temptation should be resisted. First, alethic speech acts (...) are situated within the broader terrain of performances that strive to hold others responsible. Second, the precise sense of ‘holding’ to reason that characterizes an alethic speech act is explicated, in a manner that distinguishes such acts from either those designed to inform one of extant norms or to add new norms. Third, an account that attempts to explain how a speech act can achieve this holding function is offered, one based on the idea of a self-conscious interpersonal, transaction. Finally, it is suggested that the terrain of holding other’s responsible sketched at the outset looks different once this account of alethic holdings is in view. (shrink)

Using a slight generalization, due to Palmgren, of sheaf semantics, we present a term-model construction that assigns a model to any first-order intuitionistic theory. A modification of this construction then assigns a nonstandard model to any theory of arithmetic, enabling us to reproduce conservation results of Moerdijk and Palmgren for nonstandard Heyting arithmetic. Internalizing the construction allows us to strengthen these results with additional transfer rules; we then show that even trivial transfer axioms or minor strengthenings of these rules destroy (...) conservativity over HA. The analysis also shows that nonstandard HA has neither the disjunction property nor the explicit definability property. Finally, careful attention to the complexity of our definitions allows us to show that a certain weak fragment of intuitionistic nonstandard arithmetic is conservative over primitive recursive arithmetic. (shrink)

This article is an investigation into G. E. M. Anscombe's suggestion that there can be cases where belief takes a personal object, through an examination of the role that the activity of teaching plays in Anscombe's discussion. By contrasting various kinds of ‘teachers’ that feature in her discussion, it is argued that the best way of understanding the idea of believing someone personally is to situate the relevant encounter within the social, conversational framework of ‘engaged reasoning’. Key features of this (...) framework are highlighted, and are used to characterise the distinctive kind of teaching and learning germane to Anscombe's suggestion. (shrink)

Susan Hurley's shared circuits model (SCM) rightly begins in action and progresses through a series of layers; but it fails to reach action understanding because it relies on mirroring as a driving force, draws on heavily criticized theories, and neglects the need for shared experience in our grasp of social understanding.

Legal and Political Philosophy , edited by Enrique Villanueva, is the first volume in the series Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy , published by Rodopi also under his editorship. It contains six original essays by leading political philosophers and philosophers of law , along with critical papers on those essays, and replies. This is cutting edge work that elicits sharp responses already as it is published, with the debate joined as the authors reply. Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy is a (...) new book series, edited by Enrique Villanueva, and published by Rodopi Publishers as part of Rodopi Philosophical Studies . The series will publish collections of new essays on topics in social or political or legal philosophy. New volumes will be published approximately every year or every other year. (shrink)

Fogelin’s Wittgensteinian view of deep disagreement as allowing no rational resolution has been criticized from both argumentation theoretic and epistemological perspectives. These criticisms typically do not recognize how his point applies to the very argumentative resources on which they rely. Additionally, more extremely than Fogelin himself argues, the conditions of deep disagreement make each position literally unintelligible to the other, again disallowing rational resolution. In turn, however, this failure of sense is so extreme that it partly cancels its own meaning (...) as a failure of sense. Consequently, it paradoxically opens new possibilities for sense and therefore rationally unexpected resolutions. (shrink)

Recent analyses of food sharing in small-scale societies indicate that reciprocal altruism maintains interhousehold food transfers, even among close kin. In this study, matrix-based regression methods are used to test the explanatory power of reciprocal altruism, kin selection, and tolerated scrounging. In a network of 35 households in Nicaragua’s Bosawas Reserve, the significant predictors of food sharing include kinship, interhousehold distance, and reciprocity. In particular, resources tend to flow from households with relatively more meat to closely related households with little, (...) as predicted by kin selection. This generalization is especially true of household dyads with mother-offspring relationships, which suggests that studies of food sharing may benefit from distinctions between lineal and collateral kin. Overall, this analysis suggests that exchanges among kin are primarily associated with differences in need, not reciprocity. Finally, although large game is distributed widely, qualitative observations indicate that hunters typically do not relinquish control of the distribution in ways predicted by costly signaling theory. (shrink)

Concord describes a natural language phenomenon in which a single logical meaning is expressed syntactically on multiple lexical items. The canonical example is negative concord, in which multiple negative expressions are used, but a single negation is interpreted. Formally similar phenomena have been observed for the redundant marking of distributivity and definiteness. Inspired by recent dynamic analyses of these latter two phenomena, we extend a similar dynamic analysis to negative concord. We propose that negative concord items introduce a discourse referent, (...) but then test that no discourse referent has been introduced in any assignment. These apparently contradictory requirements are licensed with split scope around negation: introduction occurs below negation; the test appears above it. The analysis successfully predicts that negative concord items must be licensed by a sufficiently local negative operator. We further show that modulation of what is at-issue can account for cases in which NC items themselves carry negative force. (shrink)

In his book Mind and World, John McDowell grapples with the problem that the world must and yet seemingly cannot constrain our empirical thought. I first argue that McDowell’s proposed solution to the problem throws him onto the horns of his own, intractable dilemma, and thus fails to solve the problem of rational constraint by the world. Next, I will argue that Wilfrid Sellars, in a series of articles written in the 1950s and 1960s, provides the tools to solve the (...) dilemma McDowell sets before us. We will see how, borrowing from Sellars and certain neo-Sellarsians, we can solve the problem of rational constraint by perception without resorting to a McDowellian quasi-enchantment of the world. (shrink)

This article looks at the problems of the co-determination of the political within western metaphysics and political reflection, and considers solutions that are figured in terms of failure and incompletion. The focus is on the relation of the political to political modernity, its defenders and attackers, and those who seek to overcome the opposition.

We use model-theoretic methods described in [3] to obtain ordinal analyses of a number of theories of first- and second-order arithmetic, whose proof-theoretic ordinals are less than or equal to Γ0.

The divine purpose theory —according to which that human life is meaningful to the extent that it fulfills some purpose or plan to which God has directed us—encounters well-known Euthyphro problems. Some theists attempt to avoid these problems by appealing to God’s essential goodness, à la the modified divine command theory of Adams and Alston. However, recent criticisms of the modified DCT show its conception of God’s goodness to be incoherent; and these criticisms can be shown to present an analogous (...) set of problems for the DPT. Further, the argument can be extended to any account of meaningfulness according to which the value of what humans do can only be conferred by God. Thus, it would seem that there is no tenable version of the view that meaningfulness is conferred on human life by some act or attitude of God’s. (shrink)

An efficient variant of the double-negation translation explains the relationship between Shoenfield’s and G¨odel’s versions of the Dialectica interpretation.

Most philosophers now concede that libertarianism has failed as an account of free will. Assuming the correctness of this concession, that leaves compatibilism and hard determinism as the only remaining choices in the free will debate. In this paper, I will argue that hard determinism turns out to be a form of compatibilism, and therefore, compatibilism is the only remaining position in the free will debate. I will attempt to establish this conclusion by arguing that hard determinists will end up (...) punishing or rewarding the same acts (and omissions) that the compatibilists punish and reward. Next, I will respond to several objections that attempt to pry apart hard determinism and compatibilism. It will emerge not only that hard determinism and compatibilism are identical at the practical level, but also that the key terms employed by the hard determinist have the same meaning as equivalent terms ("free," "morally responsible," and "retributive punishment") employed by the compatibilist. I conclude that hard determinism genuinely is a form of compatibilism. (shrink)