This seems to me to be a metaphysically significant feature of CEM. If CEM is correct — if all its theorems are true, then metaphysicians have a choice to make in how we understand the mereological nature of the world. We may think of the mereological relation either as a relation of part to whole, or as a relation of overlap; for if we give a metaphysical theory about one, we thereby give a metaphysical theory about the other. We may (...) choose which we think of as more metaphysically fundamental, for the they are interdefinable. However, if CEM is not correct, then perhaps we do not have this choice. Perhaps part-whole cannot be defined in terms of overlap; in which case we must choose part-whole as the metaphysical fundamental mereological relation (if any relation is). (shrink)

In this moderate realist account of the whole range of issues facing contemporary analytic philosophy, J. K. Swindler aims to fill the gap in the literature between extreme realism and extreme nominalism. He discusses such fundamental concepts as existence, property, universality, individual, and necessity; analyzes the paradoxes of negative existentials and the substitutivity of co-referential terms; and defends objectivity in philosophy. The study moves through three phases: first, an argument that objective philosophical truth is attainable; second, an extended realist (...) analysis of fundamental ontological concepts; and finally, a demonstration of advantages of this ontology over leading alternatives. Weaving: An Analysis of the Constitution of Objects will be of interest to all philosophers working in contemporary philosophy, philosophy of language, logic, and metaphysics, and will serve as an excellent text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in metaphysics. (shrink)

Josh Wilburn examines the relationship between Plato's views on psychology and his political philosophy. Focusing on his reflections on the spirited part of the tripartite soul, or thumos, and spirited motivation, he explores the social and political challenges that occupy Plato throughout his works.

At the outset of the Republic, Polemarchus advances the bold thesis that “justice is the art which gives benefit to friends and injury to enemies”. He quickly rejects the hypothesis, and what follows is a long tradition of neglecting the ethics of enmity. The parallel issue of how friendship affects the moral sphere has, by contrast, been greatly illuminated by discussions both ancient and contemporary. This article connects this existing work to the less explored topic of the normative significance of (...) our negative relationships. I explain how negative partiality should be conceptualized through reference to the positive analogue, and argue that at least some forms of negative partiality are justified. I further explore the connection between positive and negative relationships by showing how both are justified by ongoing histories of encounter. However, I also argue that these relationships are in some important ways asymmetrical. (shrink)

The following quotation, from Frank Jackson, is the beginning of a typical exposition of the debate between those metaphysicians who believe in temporal parts, and those who do not: The dispute between three-dimensionalism and four-dimensionalism, or more precisely, that part of the dispute we will be concerned with, concerns what persistence, and correllatively, what change, comes to. Three-dimensionalism holds that an object exists at a time by being wholly present at that time, and, accordingly, that it persists if it is (...) wholly present at more than one time. For short, it persists by enduring. Four-dimensionalism holds that an object exists at a time by having a temporal part at that time, and it persists if it has distinct temporal parts at more than one time. For short, it persists by perduring. In the light of these comments, some readers will perhaps find the question that forms the title of this paper a little puzzling. They may have learned to use the terms ‘fourdimensionalism’ ‘perdurantism’ and ‘belief in temporal parts’ interchangeably; or perhaps even to define one in terms of the other. Such a usage, however, is inapposite. We might imagine a Flatland-like world of two spatial dimensions and one temporal, whose philosophers are divided between a theory of persistence on which they persist by having temporal parts, and a theory on which they persist by being wholly located in each of several times. This is just the same issue we face, but at least the label ‘four-dimensionalism’ seems inapposite: the four-dimensionalist Flatlanders believe in only three dimensions! (shrink)

Accounts of scientific explanation disagree about what’s required for a cause, law, or other fact to be a reason why an event occurs. In short, they disagree about the conditions for explanatory relevance. Nonetheless, most accounts presuppose that claims about explanatory relevance play a descriptive role in tracking reality. By rejecting the need for this descriptivist assumption, I develop an expressivist account of explanatory relevance and explanation: to judge that an answer is explanatory is to express an attitude of _being (...) for being satisfied by that answer_. I show how expressivism vindicates ordinary scientific discourse about explanation, including claims about the objectivity and mind-independence of explanations. By avoiding commitment to ontic relevance relations, I rehabilitate an irrealist conception of explanation. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore two contrasting conceptions of the social character of language. The first takes language to be grounded in social convention. The second, famously developed by Donald Davidson, takes language to be grounded in a social relation called triangulation. I aim both to clarify and to evaluate these two conceptions of language. First, I propose that Davidson’s triangulation-based story can be understood as the result of relaxing core features of conventionalism pertaining to both common-interest and diachronic stability—specifically, (...) Davidson does not require uses of language to be self-perpetuating, in the way required by conventionalism, in order to be bona fide components of linguistic systems. Second, I argue that Davidson’s objections to conventionalism from language innovation and language variation fail, and that certain kinds of negative data in language use require an appeal to diachronic social relations. However, I also argue that recent work on communication in the a.. (shrink)

In Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals, I explore a range of overlooked practical questions in animal ethics and the philosophy of food, developing a new approach to animal ethics. According to the position I defend, animals have negative rights based on their possession of normatively significant interests, and we have positive obligations towards (and concerning) animals based on our normatively salient relationships with them. Gary O’Brien, Angie Pepper, Clare Palmer, and Leon Borgdorf offer a range of insightful challenges (...) to my framework and its applications. Here, I respond to them around five themes: extensionism, agency, predation, interventionism, and environmentalism. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that certain injustices faced by mentally disabled persons are epistemic injustices by drawing upon epistemic injustice literature, especially as it is developed by Miranda Fricker. First, I explain the terminology and arguments developed by Fricker, Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr., and Kristie Dotson that are useful in theorizing epistemic injustices against mentally disabled people. Second, I consider some specific cases of epistemic injustice to which mentally disabled persons are subject. Third, I turn to a discussion of severely (...) mentally disabled persons who, because they are unable to share information or develop interpretations of shared social experiences, may fall outside Fricker’s discussion of epistemic injustice. Fourth and finally, following arguments given by Kristie Dotson and Christopher Hookway, I define and explain a type of epistemic injustice: intimate hermeneutical injustice that I believe supplements other discussions of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Nevertheless, any competent speaker will know what it means. What explains our ability to understand sentences we have never before encountered? One natural hypothesis is that those novel sentences are built up out of familiar parts, put together in familiar ways. This hypothesis requires the backing hypothesis that English has a compositional semantic theory.

Animal lovers who feed meat to other animals are faced with a paradox: perhaps fewer animals would be harmed if they stopped feeding the ones they love. Animal diets do not raise problems merely for individuals. To address environmental crises, health threats, and harm to animals, we must change our food systems and practices. And in these systems, animals, too, are eaters. -/- Looking beyond what humans should eat and whether to count animals as food, Just Fodder answers ethical and (...) political questions arising from thinking about animals as eaters. Josh Milburn begins with practical dilemmas about feeding the animals closest to us, our pets or animal companions. The questions grow more complicated as he considers relationships with more distance - questions about whether and how to feed garden birds, farmland animals who would eat our crops, and wild animals. Milburn evaluates the nature and circumstances of our relationships with animals to generate a novel theory of animal rights. -/- Looking past arguments about what we can and cannot do to other beings, Just Fodder asks what we can, should, and must do for them, laying out a fuller range of our ethical obligations to other animals. (shrink)

War is harmful to animals, but few have considered how such harm should affect assessments of the justice of military actions. In this article, we propose a way in which concern for animals can be included within the just-war framework, with a focus on necessity and proportionality. We argue that counting animals in war will not make just-war theory excessively demanding, but it will make just-war theory more humane. By showing how animals can be included in our proportionality and necessity (...) assessments, we provide a crucial first step towards developing an animal-inclusive account of just-war theory. (shrink)

An important objection to the "higher-order" theory of consciousness turns on the possibility of higher-order misrepresentation. I argue that the objection fails because it illicitly assumes a characterization of consciousness explicitly rejected by HO theory. This in turn raises the question of what justifies an initial characterization of the data a theory of consciousness must explain. I distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic characterizations of consciousness, and I propose several desiderata a successful characterization of consciousness must meet. I then defend the (...) particular extrinsic characterization of the HO theory, the "transitivity principle," against its intrinsic rivals, thereby showing that the misrepresentation objection conclusively falls short. (shrink)

Destined to be classic: a tale from the Buddhist sutras told in the memorable and engaging rhyming verse in the tradition of Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. Children and their parents will both love it, and be encouraged. Illustrated in a style that brings both humor and tradition, by the renowned and award-winning illustrator of Wisdom's Illustrated Lotus Sutra, and many other books. I See You, Buddha will help children (and their parents) difficulty with patience and learn to see the (...) good in everyone-including themselves! I See You, Buddha is based on a chapter in the Lotus Sutra, one of the most influential Buddhist texts worldwide-a classical scripture that has inspired a whole genre of works, especially in Japan, known as Lotus Literature. The Lotus Sutra teaches the Way of the Bodhisattva-beings engaged in compassionate, enlightened activity in the service of all-by offering examples of what this activity might look like in the world. One such model in the text is Bodhisattva Never Disrespectful (or Never Disparaging), who, despite troubling encounters with and even harsh treatment from others, bows down respectfully to everyone, recognizing their Buddha Nature and honoring their own journeys along the bodhisattva path to enlightenment-whether they know they're future Buddhas or not! (shrink)

The first time I saw 30 Rock, I was struck by how often it fails to be funny. This is not to say that 30 Rock is never funny—sometimes it is very funny indeed. But what stood out most to me was how strikingly not funny it often is. The show is, nevertheless, very entertaining. And it is curious that a sitcom—a show that is ostensibly designed to entertain through the use of humor—could entertain so successfully while being so unsuccessful (...) at making its audience laugh. This curiosity is the subject of this paper. My purpose is to offer a theory that explains three features of 30 Rock: first, how it sometimes achieves comedic effect; second, why its. (shrink)

Esports competitions have become a world-wide phenomenon with millions of viewers and fans. Learn about how esports competitions deal with things from gambling to cheating software. Aligned with curriculum standards, these books also highlight key 21st Century content including information, media, and technology skills. Engaging content and hands-on activities encourage creative and design thinking. Book includes table of contents, glossary, index, author biography, and sidebars.

In The Ant Trap, Brian Epstein proposes a bold new systematic strategy for developing social ontology. He explores the history and current state of the art and provides pointed critiques of leading theories in the field. His framework, incompassing frames that provide principles for grounding social facts, is developed in some detail across a variety of social practices and applied to revealing real world as well as hyporthetical examples. If Epstein's account holds, it should provide new directions and standards of (...) inquiry in both social sciecne and social philiosophy. (shrink)

Over the last quarter century or so, no one has done more to shape debate in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science than Jerry Fodor. He is best known for championing the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM), the view that thinking consists of computations over syntactically structured mental representations (Fodor, 1975). He has also developed the idea that the mind is partially made up of isolated mechanisms called “modules” that employ innate databases informationally encapsulated from the rest of the (...) mind (Fodor, 1983). (shrink)

In a wide-ranging study, Josh Cohen argues that the American fixation with image - literally celebrating the surface, the visual, the spectacular spaces of the cinema and the city - has produced a crisis of literary perception, with crucial cultural and political consequences.

Continental Philosophy Beyond "the" Continent / Brian Treanor -- Prometheus' Gift of Fire and Technics: Contemplating the Meaning of Fire, Affect, and Californian Pyrophytes in the Pyrocene / Marjolein Oele -- The West as Slaughterbench: Thinking without Revolutions in the American West / Christopher Lauer -- The End of the West: The Time of Apocalypse in the Westerns of Cormac McCarthy / Amanda Parris -- The Trees of the West: Our Elders, Our Teachers / Andrew Jussaume -- Thinking Wolves / (...) Thomas Thorpe -- Robert Smith, Entropic Art, and the West / Shannon M. Mussett -- "Westering" and "BreakingThrough": Zen Buddhism on Cannery Row / Gerard Kuperus -- Life in Interregnum: Deleuze, Guattari, and Atleo / Russell Duvernoy -- Monstrous Topologies: Edward Abbey, Reiner Schürmann, and the Fate of the American West / Josh Hayes -- Turtle Island Anarchy / Jason Wirth. (shrink)

The same-order representation theory of consciousness holds that conscious mental states represent both the world and themselves. This complex representational structure is posited in part to avoid a powerful objection to the more traditional higher-order representation theory of consciousness. The objection contends that the higher-order theory fails to account for the intimate relationship that holds between conscious states and our awareness of them--the theory 'divides the phenomenal labor' in an illicit fashion. This 'failure of intimacy' is exposed by the possibility (...) of misrepresentation by higher-order states. In this paper, I argue that despite appearances, the same-order theory fails to avoid the objection, and thus also has troubles with intimacy. (shrink)

What we could call ‘relational non-interventionism’ holds that we have no general obligation to alleviate animal suffering, and that we do not typically have special obligations to alleviate wild animals’ suffering. Therefore, we do not usually have a duty to intervene in nature to alleviate wild animal suffering. However, there are a range of relationships that we may have with wild animals that do generate special obligations to aid—and the consequences of these obligations can be surprising. In this paper, it (...) is argued that we have special obligations to those animals we have historically welcomed or encouraged into our spaces. This includes many wild animals. One of the consequences of this is that we may sometimes possess obligations to actively prevent rewilding—or even to dewild—for the sake of welcomed animals who thrive in human-controlled spaces. (shrink)

This paper considers how to put together two popular ideas in the philosophy of time: detenserism and perdurantism (the view that objects persist through time by having temporal parts. On the most obvious way of doing this, certain problems arise. I argue that to deal with these problems we need a tool that is unfamiliar to most detensers and perdurantists - the distinction between sortal and non-sortal predicates.

Cognitivism about imperatives is the thesis that sentences in the imperative mood are truth-apt: have truth values and truth conditions. This allows cognitivists to give a simple and powerful account of consequence relations between imperatives. I argue that this account of imperative consequence has counterexamples that cast doubt on cognitivism itself.

IN THE beginning Parmenides sought to deny the void. But he found himself trapped by his language and his thought into admitting what he sought to deny. Wisely, he counseled others to avoid the whole region in which the problem arises, lest they too be unwarily ensnared. Plato, being less easily intimidated and grasping for the first time the urgency of the paradox, unearthed each snare in turn until he felt he had found a safe path through the forbidden terrain (...) in a new conception of being and the derivation of its linguistic consequences in the Sophist. Aristotle evidently took Parmenides’ advice; and save for a few groping scholastics, perhaps Leibniz, Brentano, and Meinong, and Frege only in passing, no one else attempted the crossing before Russell made his spectacular dash through the posted ground from the completely new direction of linguistic reference. Again the problem lay dormant for half a century until Strawson constructed a new low road through ordinary language and Quine improved Russell’s high algebraic pass. Refinements of these routes have been forthcoming, especially from Searle and Kripke, until today it might appear that there are two super highways through Parmenides’ forbidden country of nonbeing. In this essay I will first argue that these new linguistic highways are no more than flimsy camouflage hiding but not resolving the old paradoxes. I will then show how Plato’s ontological way out, though more difficult, is the straight and narrow path. (shrink)

The Wigner--Eckart theorem is central to the application of symmetry principles throughout atomic, molecular, and nuclear physics. Nevertheless, the theorem has a puzzling feature: it is dispensable for solving problems within these domains, since elementary methods suffice. To account for the significance of the theorem, I first contrast it with an elementary approach to calculating matrix elements. Next, I consider three broad strategies for interpreting the theorem: conventionalism, fundamentalism, and conceptualism. I argue that the conventionalist framework is unnecessarily pragmatic, while (...) the fundamentalist framework requires more ontological commitments than necessary. Conceptualism avoids both defects, accounting for the theorem's significance in terms of how it epistemically restructures the calculation of matrix elements. Specifically, the Wigner--Eckart theorem modularizes and unifies matrix element problems, thereby changing what we need to know to solve them. (shrink)

Sententialism: An adequate semantic theory for a language assigns semantic values to complex expressions (typically on the basis of the semantic values of the syntactic parts of those complex expressions), with the assignment process culminating in the assignment of appropriate semantic values (typically propositions or truth conditions) to entire sentences. Sententialism is so-called because it takes the task of semantic theory proper to be exhausted once semantic values have been assigned to full sentences. Beyond the sentence may lay further linguistic (...) phenomena broadly construed, such as various discourse properties and relations, but any such phenomena are relegated to the pragmatics. Sententialism thus typically goes hand-in-hand with a larger philosophical perspective according.. (shrink)

This intuition may be contrasted with the incompatible intuitions that might support, say, average utilitarianism. According to average utilitarianism we should bring about that outcome which has the highest average utility. That someone would have a higher than average level of utility is, therefore, ceteris paribus a reason to act so that that person exists. Because of this, the basic intuition is a reason for rejecting average utilitarianism.

Interpreters of Robert Nozick’s political philosophy fall into two broad groups concerning his application of the ‘Lockean proviso’. Some read his argument in an undemanding way: individual instances of ownership which make people worse off than they would have been in a world without any ownership are unjust. Others read the argument in a demanding way: individual instances of ownership which make people worse off than they would have been in a world without that particular ownership are unjust. While I (...) argue that the former reading is correct as an interpretive matter, I suggest that this reading is nonetheless highly demanding. In particular, I argue that it is demanding when it is expanded to include the protection of nonhuman animals; if such beings are right bearers, as more and more academics are beginning to suggest, then there is no nonarbitrary reason to exclude them from the protection of the proviso. (shrink)

The growing number of older adults in America will result in an increasing demand for psychotherapists familiar with their psychological needs. To treat this population in an ethical manner, practitioners need to be aware of the unique characteristics of the aging process, especially in regards to age-related vulnerabilities, such as cognitive decline. Unfortunately, recent research has shown that those currently in practice do not have sufficient knowledge of the aging process and age specific issues of older adults. To address these (...) deficits the American Psychological Association published a report outlining six general concepts: attitudes, general knowledge about adult development, clinical issues, assessment, intervention, and education. These concepts are described. Furthermore, this article extends the current thinking on ethical issues regarding older adults by addressing their vulnerabilities. In addition, ethical issues such as informed consent, confidentiality, and elder abuse are addressed as they apply to both clinical and research situations. In addition, methods of resolving these important issues are suggested throughout the article. A depiction of the ethical issues of psychologists working with older adults is provided and practical procedures to help psychologists perform with high ethical standards of care for this age group are offered. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI offer a simple‐minded analysis of presupposition in which if a sentence has a presupposition, then both that sentence and its negation logically entail the presupposition; and in which sentence with failed presuppositions are neither true nor false. This account naturally generates an analysis of what it takes to disagree and what it takes to be at fault in a disagreement. A simple generalization gives rise to the possibility of disagreements in which no party is at fault, as is required (...) by leading theories on predicates of taste. (shrink)

Each of us, right now, is having a unique conscious experience. Nothing is more basic to our lives as thinking beings and nothing, it seems, is better known to us. But the ever-expanding reach of natural science suggests that everything in our world is ultimately physical. The challenge of fitting consciousness into our modern scientific worldview, of taking the subjective “feel” of conscious experience and showing that it is just neural activity in the brain, is among the most intriguing explanatory (...) problems of our times. -/- In this book, Josh Weisberg presents the range of contemporary responses to the philosophical problem of consciousness. The basic philosophical tools of the trade are introduced, including thought experiments featuring Mary the color-deprived super scientist and fearsome philosophical “zombies”. The book then systematically considers the space of philosophical theories of consciousness. Dualist and other “non-reductive” accounts of consciousness hold that we must expand our basic physical ontology to include the intrinsic features of consciousness. Functionalist and identity theories, by contrast, hold that with the right philosophical stage-setting, we can fit consciousness into the standard scientific picture. And “mysterians” hold that any solution to the problem is beyond such small-minded creatures as us. -/- Throughout the book, the complexity of current debates on consciousness is handled in a clear and concise way, providing the reader with a fine introductory guide to the rich philosophical terrain. The work makes an excellent entry point to one of the most exciting areas of study in philosophy and science today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MACINTYRE'S REPUBLIC J. K. SWINDLER Westminster College Fulton, Missouri CONTRARY TO HIS own evident intentions and perceptions, in After Virtue A'lasdair Macinty!l.·e is much more of a Ptlatonist 1than the A1 ristotelian he aims to be. I hase this judgment both on the positive evidence that Macintyre and Plato (in the Republic) m1gue for and against the same crucial theses and on the negative evidence that Plato has (...) read answers to the very issues which Macintyre finds 1 intractable from an AristoteHan point of viiew. My thesis can be made out in terms of a half dozen issues which Maclntyire takes as crucial to his case: (1) Can there he a science of government? (2) Is there an answer to the sophist's chaillenge to morality? (3) How oan the fragmentation of the modern self he theoretically overcome? (4) What are the hi1stocical and social determinants of morality? (5) Is there a unity of virtue in addition to individual virtues? (6) Can we reconcile ourselves to teleofogy, the absence of the polis, and the tragedy of human 1:ife? I will consider each of these in turn. I. Wisdom Plato defines wisdom as knowledge of how to rule, and Aristotle (in the Nichomachean Ethics) distinguishes between theoretical and practical wisdom, 1suggesting thereby an interesting ambiguity in Plato's view, an ambiguity of which Macintyre makes a great deal. One may rule eithecr hy law or by judgment. In his attack on the Enlightenment, MacIntyre showis quite clearly tha;t the idea of a social science that would p11ovide laws of human behavior, which could in 343 344 J. K. SWINDLER turn be used by il"ulers and managers to predict and therefore manipulate!human action, was an invention of the eighteenth century. He offers an extensive 1oritique o.f this conception of socirul science, grounded primarily in the claim that human.behavior is essentially unlawful, at least if we judge it by the standards of the physical sciences. There is in human affairs a farge 1and uneliminwble element of fortiuna which makes it impossrible rto.formulate laws of human nature or behavior that would he exceptionless and therefore underwrite predictions of behavior. For there is nothing to be done about the unpredictability of innovations or, from one's own point of view, of one's own future actions; nor can the uncertainties of gametheoretie decisions and 1 the general contingency of the outcomes of ruction,be remedied. There is therefore no possibility of a social science in the sense in which Hume tried to imitate Newton. So much for Marx and Weber and the horde of modern.social scientists. This is not to say that life is completely uncertain; on the contrary, there are genuine and general regularities in society, some natural, some social, ·some statistical, some causal, wihich make life bearable. But these provide a,ground for the Aristotelian idea, endorsed by MacIntyre, that the principles of conduct, such as they might be, hold only for the most part and not universa1ly. There is therefore in Maclntyre's view no justification for 1a mora;l oode in the modern sense, nor ev;en of moral principles of the kind we are used to from Kant ·and Mill, Rawls and Nozick, which purport to istand as a sufficient criterion of right in all cases. But, importantly, we do not find any such rules or codes in Pla.to either. For Plato, too, insists on the mixed reign of chaos and logos in the materia;l world and in our Jives and concludes that judgment is essential to· determining right conduct. He tellrs us that wise rule comes only &om good oharructer and good institutions, that legislating in such detaii1 as to eliminate judgment is "cut:ting off the heads of a hy:dra." One cannot help hut think that tMs (essentially Hemclitean) point is something Aristotle ~earned at his MACINTYRE'S REPUBLIC 345 master's knee. And both aspects of Plato's :point ~e ipresent in Aristotle, viz., that s~nce the:ve is chance in nature, there is luck (good 'and had) in life, and since no rule can capture the particularity of conorete situations right... (shrink)

Our ordinary assertions are often imprecise, insofar as the way we represent things as being only approximates how things are in the actual world. The phenomenon of assertoric imprecision raises a challenge to standard accounts of both the norm of assertion and the connection between semantics and the objects of assertion. After clarifying these problems in detail, I develop a framework for resolving them. Specifically, I argue that the phenomenon of assertoric imprecision motivates a rejection of the widely held belief (...) that a semantic theory for a language associates a single semantic value with each of the simple and complex expressions of that language, relative to the contexts in which they occur. Instead, I propose that we adopt a framework I call semantic pluralism. (shrink)

The idea of ‘Western Philosophy’ is the product of a legitimation project for European colonialism, through to post-second world war Pan-European identity formation and white supremacist projects. Thus argues Ben Kies (1917-1979), a South African public intellectual, schoolteacher, trade unionist, and activist-theorist. In his 1953 address to the Teachers’ League of South Africa, The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World Civilisation, Kies became one of the first people to argue explicitly that there is no such thing as ‘Western philosophy’. (...) In this paper, I introduce Kies as a new figure in the historiography of philosophy with important insights, relevant today. I outline his three key arguments: that ‘Western Philosophy’ is the product of political mythmaking, that it is a recent, largely mid-twentieth century fabrication, and that there is an alternative to ‘Histories of Western Philosophy’, namely ‘mixed’ or entangled histories. I show that Kies’ claims are supported both by contemporary scholarship and bibliometric analysis. I thus argue that Kies is right to claim that the idea of a distinctive, hermetically sealed ‘Western Philosophy’ is a recent, political fabrication and should be abandoned. We should instead develop global, entangled historiography to make sense of philosophy and its history today. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider whether tenses, temporal indexicals, and other indexicals are contextually dependent on the context of assessment (or a-contextual), rather than, as is usually thought, contextually dependent on the context of utterance (u-contextual). I begin by contrasting two possible linguistic norms, governing our use of context sensitive expressions, especially tenses and temporal indexicals (??2 and 3), and argue that one of these norms would make those expressions u-contextual, while the other would make them a-contextual (?4). I then (...) ask which of these two norms are followed by English speakers (?5). Finally, I argue that the existence of a-contextuality does not in any sense entail ?relativism? about truth (?6). (shrink)

Arguments from fission cases, most notably made by Parfit, have historically been utilized in discussions of Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM) in an attempt to illuminate details of familiar accounts in which an agent ‘splits’. Whilst such imagery is often seen as an innocuous depiction of Everett's theory, it is in fact a poisoned chalice. I argue firstly that the fission case analogy is responsible for the conceptual foundations of probability arguments in EQM and secondly, following a number of disanalogies between (...) fission cases and Everettian branching, I argue that the analogy is unfounded. I conclude that much of the discussion of the probability problem over the past 20 years has been predicated on a problematic analogy and its effects are still apparent today. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Donald Davidson :3–17, 1984, The philosophical grounds of rationality, 1986, Midwest Stud Philos 16:1–12, 1991) developed a powerful argument against the claim that linguistic conventions provide any explanatory purchase on an account of linguistic meaning and communication. This argument, as I shall develop it, turns on cases of what I call lexical innovation: cases in which a speaker uses a sentence containing a novel expression-meaning pair, but nevertheless successfully communicates her intended meaning to her audience. (...) I will argue that cases of lexical innovation motivate a dynamic conception of linguistic conventions according to which background linguistic conventions may be rapidly expanded to incorporate new word meanings or shifted to revise the meanings of words already in circulation. I argue that this dynamic account of conventions both resolves the problem raised by cases of lexical innovation and that it does so in a way that is preferable to those who—like Davidson—deny important explanatory roles for linguistic conventions. (shrink)

It’s well known that one way to cure a hangover is by a “hair of the dog” — another alcoholic drink. The drawback of this method is that, so it would appear, it cannot be used to completely cure a hangover, since the cure simply induces a further hangover at a later time, which must in turn either be cured or suffered through.

The debate between A-theory and B-theory in the philosophy of time is a persistent one. It is not always clear, however, what the terms of this debate are. A-theorists are often lumped with a miscellaneous collection of heterodox doctrines: the view that only the present exists, that time flows relentlessly, or that presentness is a property (Williams 1996); that time passes, tense is unanalysable, or that earlier than and later than are defined in terms of pastness, presentness, and futurity (Bigelow (...) 1991); or that events or facts (as opposed to language) are “tensed” (Mellor 1993). B-theorists then argue that the A-theory is incoherent, using variants on J.M.E. McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time (McTaggart 1927, ch. 33). (shrink)

Following Robert Adams's account of idolatry, this paper develops the concept of epistemic idolatry. Where there is devotion belonging to truth but given to a particular epistemic good, there we find epistemic idolatry. With this concept in hand, motivationalist virtue epistemologists gain two theoretical advantages: their list of defective motives can include intellectual motivation in excess without the implausible claim that, intellectually, one can be too motivated by truth; and the disvalue of many intellectual vices, including some putative counterexamples to (...) their theory of intellectual vice, can be explained in terms of epistemic idolatry. (shrink)