The article first discusses the presence among Christians in Roman Africa of "biblical" writings that are not found in the current canon of Scripture. This is followed by a review of what is known of the Manichaean use of extra-canonical material in general, particularly within the Roman Empire, and especially of the pseudepigraphical Acts of the Apostles. Finally, the article focuses on the use among Manichaeans in Roman Africa of this pseudepigraphic literature, especially the Acts of the Apostles. In all (...) cases, the article focuses on cases of a confirmed pseudepigraphic presence, rather than on mere conjectures about it. (shrink)

We are grateful to the commentators for taking the time to respond to our article. Too many interesting and important points have been raised for us to tackle them all in this response, and so in the below we have sought to draw out the major themes. These include problems with both the term ‘ultimate causation’ and the proximate-ultimate causation dichotomy more generally, clarification of the meaning of reciprocal causation, discussion of issues related to the nature of development and phenotypic (...) plasticity and their roles in evolution, and consideration of the need for an extended evolutionary synthesis. (shrink)

Bayesian reasoning has been applied formally to statistical inference, machine learning and analysing scientific method. Here I apply it informally to more common forms of inference, namely natural language arguments. I analyse a variety of traditional fallacies, deductive, inductive and causal, and find more merit in them than is generally acknowledged. Bayesian principles provide a framework for understanding ordinary arguments which is well worth developing.

Theoretical Computer Science, 383: 270-289, 2007.

: Bioethics has focused on the areas of individual ethical choices--patient care--or public policy and law. There are, however, important arenas for ethical choices that have been overlooked. Health care is populated with intermediate arenas such as hospitals, nursing homes, hospices, and health care systems. This essay argues that bioethics needs to develop a language and concepts for institutional ethics. A first step in this direction is to think about institutional conscience.

The Lottery Paradox has been thought to provide a reductio argument against probabilistic accounts of inductive inference. As a result, much work in artificial intelligence has concentrated on qualitative methods of inference, including default logics, which are intended to model some varieties of inductive inference. It has recently been shown that the paradox can be generated within qualitative default logics. However, John Pollock's qualitative system of defeasible inference, does avoid the Lottery Paradox by incorporating a rule designed specifically for that (...) purpose. I shall argue that Pollock's system instead succumbs to a worse disease: it fails to allow for induction at all. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a series of papers read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society through the 1820s, the Cambridge mathematician George Peacock laid the foundation for a natural history of arithmetic that would tell a story of human progress from counting to modern arithmetic. The trajectory of that history, Peacock argued, established algebraic analysis as a form of universal reasoning that used empirically warranted operations of mind to think with symbols on paper. The science of counting would suggest arithmetic, arithmetic would suggest (...) arithmetical algebra, and, finally, arithmetical algebra would suggest symbolic algebra. This philosophy of suggestion provided the foundation for Peacock's “principle of equivalent forms,” which justified the practice of nineteenth-century English symbolic algebra. Peacock's philosophy of suggestion owed a considerable debt to the early Cambridge Philosophical Society culture of natural history. The aim of this essay is to show how that culture of natural history was constitutively significant to the practice of nineteenth-century English algebra. (shrink)

Explanation and evidence are related in one way that is uncontroversial: evidence can confirm or disconfirm explanations. One explanation of Sally’s cold is that she has a virus; another is that she has a bacterial infection. The available evidence confirms the virus explanation because the evidence supports that colds are caused by viruses, not bacteria. A more interesting question concerns whether explanatory facts themselves provide evidence. That is to say, do we get evidence for p simply by realizing that p, (...) if true, would explain some data? Explanationists answer this question affirmatively, maintaining that explanatoriness is evidence of truth. (shrink)

I have applied a fairly general, learning theoretic perspective to some questions raised by Reichenbach's positions on induction and discovery. This is appropriate in an examination of the significance of Reichenbach's work, since the learning-theoretic perspective is to some degree part of Reichenbach's reliabilist legacy. I have argued that Reichenbach's positivism and his infatuation with probabilities are both irrelevant to his views on induction, which are principally grounded in the notion of limiting reliability. I have suggested that limiting reliability is (...) still a formidable basis for the formulation of methodological norms, particularly when reliability cannot possibly be had in the short run, so that refined judgments about evidential support must depend upon measure-theoretic choices having nothing to do in the short run with the truth of the hypothesis under investigation. To illustrate the generality of Reichenbach's program, I showed how it can be applied to methods that aim to solve arbitrary assessment and discovery problems in various senses. In this generalized Reichenbachian setting, we can characterize the intrinsic complexity of reliable inductive inference in terms of topological complexity. Finally, I let Reichenbach's theory of induction have the last say about hypothetico-deductive method. (shrink)

Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain that war is a vast and reciprocal swearing on the body, with corporeality key not only to its brutal prosecution but also to the eventual ending of the political ‘crisis of substantiation’ that war entails. However, her work has not been extensively explored with reference to significant transformations in the embodied experiences of contemporary warfare. This article thus analyses a particular articulation of late modern warfare that I term predatory war, whose current (...) signature motif is the drone strike, through the lens of Scarry’s work. Here, the associated modes of embodiment are radically non-reciprocal, the woundscapes of conflict are profoundly asymmetric, and the affective mediation of bodily injury does not substantiate any ending to the conflict. As such, I argue that the ontology and phenomenology of predatory war increasingly resembles what Scarry identifies as the underlying structure of torture. (shrink)

Was David Hume radically sceptical about our attempts to understand the world or was he merely approaching philosophical problems from a scientific perspective? Most philosophers today believe that Hume's outlook was more scientific than radically sceptical and that his scepticism was more limited than previously supposed. If these philosophers are correct, then Hume's approach to philosophy mirrors the approach of many contemporary philosophers. This similarity between Hume and many aspects of contemporary philosophy suggests that we should try to understand Hume (...) not as an historical relic but as a partner in a continuing philosophical dialogue. When we look closely at Hume's thoughts about human understanding, we find that Hume's scepticism emerges very insistently in the context of Hume's scientific approach. This book tries to come to terms with Hume's scepticism in a way that sheds light on contemporary philosophy and its relationship to science. (shrink)

Researchers have long debated the extent to which an individual’s skin tone influences their perceived race. Brooks and Gwinn demonstrated that the race of surrounding faces can affect the perceived skin tone of a central target face without changing perceived racial typicality, suggesting that skin lightness makes a small contribution to judgments of race compared to morphological cues. However, the lack of a consistent light source may have undermined the reliability of skin tone cues, encouraging observers to rely disproportionately on (...) morphological cues instead. The current study addresses this concern by using 3D models of male faces with typically Black African or White European appearances that are illuminated by the same light source. Observers perceived target faces surrounded by White faces to have darker skin than those surrounded by Black faces, particularly for faces of intermediate lightness. However, when asked to judge racial typicality, a small assimilation effect was evident, with target faces perceived as more stereotypically White when surrounded by White than when surrounded by Black faces at intermediate levels of typicality. This evidence of assimilation effects for perceived racial typicality despite concurrent contrast effects on perceived skin lightness supports the previous conclusion that perceived skin lightness has little influence on judgments of racial typicality for racially ambiguous faces, even when lighting is consistent. (shrink)

Contemporary society very often asks of individuals and/or corporate entities that they perform actions connected in some way with the immoral actions of other individuals or entities. Typically, in the attempt to determine what would be unacceptable cooperation with such immoral actions, Christian scholars and authorities refer to the distinction, which appears in the writings of Alphonsus Liguori, between material and formal cooperation, the latter being connected in some way with the cooperator's intention in so acting. While expressing agreement with (...) most of Alphonsus's determinations in these regards, Cooperation with Evil also argues that the philosophical background to these determinations often lacks coherence, especially when compared to related passages in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Having compared the philosophical approaches of these two great moralists, Cooperation with Evil then describes a number of ideas in Thomas's writings that might serve as more effective tools for the analysis of cases of possible immoral cooperation. The book also includes, as appendixes, translations of relevant passages in both Alphonsus and Thomas. (shrink)

Wittgenstein was centrally concerned with the puzzling nature of the mind, mathematics, morality and modality. He also developed innovative views about the status and methodology of philosophy and was explicitly opposed to crudely "scientistic" worldviews. His later thought has thus often been understood as elaborating a nuanced form of naturalism appealing to such notions as "form of life", "primitive reactions", "natural history", "general facts of nature" and "common behaviour of mankind". And yet, Wittgenstein is strangely absent from much of the (...) contemporary literature on naturalism and naturalising projects. This is the first collection of essays to focus explicitly on the relationship between Wittgenstein and naturalism. The volume is divided into four sections, each of which addresses a different aspect of naturalism and its relation to Wittgenstein's thought. The first section considers how naturalism could or should be understood. The second section deals with some of the main problematic domains—consciousness, meaning, mathematics—that philosophers have typically sought to naturalise. The third section explores ways in which the conceptual nature of human life might be continuous in important respects with animals. The final section is concerned with the naturalistic status and methodology of philosophy itself. This book thus casts a fresh light on many classical philosophical issues and brings Wittgensteinian ideas to bear on a number of current debates-for example experimental philosophy, neo-pragmatism and animal cognition/ethics-in which naturalism is playing a central role. (shrink)

We further develop the mathematical theory of causal interventions, extending earlier results of Korb, Twardy, Handfield, & Oppy, (2005) and Spirtes, Glymour, Scheines (2000). Some of the skepticism surrounding causal discovery has concerned the fact that using only observational data can radically underdetermine the best explanatory causal model, with the true causal model appearing inferior to a simpler, faithful model (cf. Cartwright, (2001). Our results show that experimental data, together with some plausible assumptions, can reduce the space of viable explanatory (...) causal models to one. (shrink)

My point of departure is the idea that Wittgenstein's work, especially his later work with its explicit emphasis on practices, seeks to engage a reader who is likely to come to philosophy with a certain cast of mind that includes unexamined commitments from a particular cultural context. I show how a substantial number of remarks by Wittgenstein in which he addresses cultural topics bring out the importance of the quite specific connections he saw between the philosophical problems with which he (...) grappled and the historical cultural context in which those problems have arisen. Not only is a grasp of this aspect of his writing integral to a proper understanding of Wittgenstein as a thinker, bringing out these connections serves to put these remarks into a coherent conceptual framework. In assessing the relation of Wittgenstein's cultural concerns to his engagement with metaphysics, I show how his development of Spengler's thought is an important connecting link. Particularly important for this analysis will be my discussion of Wittgenstein's understanding and employment of the concept of a Betrachtungsform , as well as a few closely related concepts. I then offer an interpretation of what I believe to be the significance of the connection in his later thought between his philosophical activity and his views about the modern West. (shrink)

The paper assumes for its starting point the basic correctness of the so-called “resolute” reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, a reading first developed by Cora Diamond and James Conant. The main part of the paper concerns the consequences this interpretation will have for our understanding of Wittgenstein's well-known remark in a letter to a prospective publisher that the point or aim of his book was an ethical one. I first give a sketch of what, given the committments of the resolute reading, (...) the ethical point of the book will be, and then argue that given these committments and Wittgenstein's own philosophical biases at the time he wrote the Tractatus, the book cannot serve the ethical purpose for which it was written. (shrink)

A finite data set is consistent with infinitely many alternative theories. Scientific realists recommend that we prefer the simplest one. Anti-realists ask how a fixed simplicity bias could track the truth when the truth might be complex. It is no solution to impose a prior probability distribution biased toward simplicity, for such a distribution merely embodies the bias at issue without explaining its efficacy. In this note, I argue, on the basis of computational learning theory, that a fixed simplicity bias (...) is necessary if inquiry is to converge to the right answer efficiently, whatever the right answer might be. Efficiency is understood in the sense of minimizing the least fixed bound on retractions or errors prior to convergence. (shrink)

This paper concerns the widely discussed exchange between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell that took place a few years back. The author first provides a brief sketch of how McDowell’s practice of philosophy for the last twenty or so years is best described as “quietist” in the spirit of the later Wittgenstein. Next, he shows that this exchange with Dreyfus is best understood as carried on largely in this spirit as well, even though McDowell somewhat inexplicably fails to acknowledge this (...) point in the course of the dispute. Finally and most importantly, the author shows how, somewhat ironically, the dispute takes a turn that suggests a remaining tension in McDowell’s own thought about the nature of philosophy. This tension comes out in his unwillingness to relinquish, or at least set aside temporarily, important parts of the traditional philosophical vocabulary that seem to be getting in the way in his dispute with Dreyfus. At the broadest level, the paper concerns difficulties with attempts to overcome the metaphysical tradition, and the role of the tradition’s vocabulary in such attempts, even in a discussion between two skilled philosophers who both have great sympathy for such a project. (shrink)