Probabilism is committed to two theses: 1) Opinion comes in degrees—call them degrees of belief, or credences. 2) The degrees of belief of a rational agent obey the probability calculus. Correspondingly, a natural way to argue for probabilism is: i) to give an account of what degrees of belief are, and then ii) to show that those things should be probabilities, on pain of irrationality. Most of the action in the literature concerns stage ii). Assuming that stage i) has been (...) adequately discharged, various authors move on to stage ii) with varied and ingenious arguments. But an unsatisfactory response at stage i) clearly undermines any gains that might be accrued at stage ii) as far as probabilism is concerned: if those things are not degrees of belief, then it is irrelevant to probabilism whether they should be probabilities or not. In this paper we scrutinize the state of play regarding stage i). We critically examine several of the leading accounts of degrees of belief: reducing them to corresponding betting behavior (de Finetti); measuring them by that behavior (Jeffrey); and analyzing them in terms of preferences and their role in decision-making more generally (Ramsey, Lewis, Maher). We argue that the accounts fail, and so they are unfit to subserve arguments for probabilism. We conclude more positively: ‘degree of belief’ should be taken as a primitive concept that forms the basis of our best theory of rational belief and decision: probabilism. (shrink)

Objectification is a notion central to contemporary feminist theory. It has famously been associated with the work of anti-pornography feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, and more recently with the work of Martha Nussbaum. However, objectification is a notion that has not yet been adequately defined. It has been used rather vaguely to refer to a broad range of cases involving, in some way or another, the treatment of a person as an object. My purpose in this paper is to (...) offer a plausible understanding of objectification. I do that by focusing on the work of four prominent thinkers: Immanuel Kant, and contemporary feminists Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and Martha Nussbaum. Through drawing on these thinkers' conceptions of objectification, I am finally led to a more complete and coherent understanding of this notion. (shrink)

Kant has famously argued that monogamous marriage is the only relationship where sexual use can take place "without degrading humanity and breaking the moral laws." Kantian marriage, however, has been the target of fierce criticisms by contemporary things: it has been regarded as flawed and paradoncal, as being deeply at odds with feminism, and, at best, as plainly uninteresting. In this paper, I argue that Kantian marriage can indeed survive these criticisms. Finally, the paper advances the discussion beyond marriage. Drawing (...) on Kant 's conception of friendship, I suggest that he might have overlooked the possibility of sex being morally permissible in yet another context. (shrink)

Recently, there has been much research into conceptual engineering in connection with feminist inquiry and activism, most notably involving gender issues, but also sexism and misogyny. Our paper contributes to this research by explicating, in a principled manner, a series of other concepts important for feminist research and activism, to wit, feminist political identity terms. More specifically, we show how the popular Conceptual Spaces Framework (CSF) can be used to identify and regiment concepts that are central to feminist research, focusing (...) especially on feminism in France. According to the CSF, concepts can be represented geometrically, as regions in similarity spaces. A particular strength of the CSF framework is its empirically-focused methodology, which allows researchers to infer the boundaries of concepts from empirical data, thus eliminating the need to strongly rely on intuitions about meanings. This is shown to be especially valuable for the explication of concepts relating to feminist political identity, given that the intuitions of feminist scholars and activists about what would appear to be core concepts in the area tend to be poorly aligned or even conflicting. We report the results from an empirical categorization study conducted among French feminists and show how they support the view that the CSF can contribute to both the conceptual engineering project and our understanding of the structure of social reality. (shrink)

Network explanations raise foundational questions about the nature of scientific explanation. The challenge discussed in this article comes from the fact that network explanations are often thought to be non-causal, i.e. they do not describe the dynamical or mechanistic interactions responsible for some behaviour, instead they appeal to topological properties of network models describing the system. These non-causal features are often thought to be valuable precisely because they do not invoke mechanistic or dynamical interactions and provide insights that are not (...) available through causal explanations. Here, I address a central difficulty facing attempts to move away from causal models of explanation; namely, how to recover the directionality of explanation. Within causal models, the directionality of explanation is identified with the direction of causation. This solution is no longer available once we move to non-causal accounts of explanation. I will suggest a solution to this problem that emphasizes the role of conditions of application. In doing so, I will challenge the idea that sui generis mathematical dependencies are the key to understand non-causal explanations. The upshot is a conceptual account of explanation that accommodates the possibility of non-causal network explanations. It also provides guidance for how to evaluate such explanations. (shrink)

The history of the church, inter-confessional relations and religious policies of the state is one of the developing areas of today's historical studies. An increasing number of special historical researches, papers, articles devoted to these issues, covering different periods in the history of our country, were a proof to that. Such interest is well justified as Ukraine is a country with complex ethnical and confessional set-up. This calls for deep insight into the history of relations between different confessions in the (...) past. The article analyses specific features of the church policies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the four year parliament (Sejm) of 1788-1791, acts of law adopted in that period that set legal grounds for the status of the Orthodox Church in the state, and studies the interpretation of those events and documents by church historian V. Bednov. Special attention was paid to the analysis of the actions of the Polish authorities to be avoided in today's church policies or, alternatively, to be encouraged today to maintain public peace and inter-confessional dialogue in the country. In his work, V. Bednov described in details all clauses of the Resolution of the General Congregation held in Pinsk, which were later legitimised by the Polish parliament (1791) and confirmed in the special Sejm constitution. This document was intended to dramatically change the status of the Orthodox Church in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Yet, time was lost, and prejudices that prevented the document from being adopted without limitations became one of the factors further resulting in the disappearance of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as an independent state after the second (1793) and third (1795) partitions. These prejudices did not help to resolve controversies between Catholic, Uniate and Orthodox Christians either. The work of V. Bednov analysing the above issues was highly praised by his contemporaries. Yet, the scholar never returned to this topic in his studies, which makes this area very promising for modern researchers. (shrink)

The paper’s target is the historically influential betting interpretation of subjective probabilities due to Ramsey and de Finetti. While there are several classical and well-known objections to this interpretation, the paper focuses on just one fundamental problem: There is a sense in which degrees of belief cannot be interpreted as betting rates. The reasons differ in different cases, but there’s one crucial feature that all these cases have in common: The agent’s degree of belief in a proposition A does not (...) coincide with her degree of belief in a conditional that A would be the case if she were to bet on A, where the belief in this conditional itself is conditioned on the supposition that the agent will have an opportunity to make such a bet. Even though the two degrees of belief sometimes can coincide (they will coincide in those cases when the bet has no expected causal bearings on the proposition A and the opportunity to bet have no evidential bearings on that proposition), it is the latter belief rather than the former that guides the agent’s rational betting behaviour. The reason is that this latter belief takes into consideration potential interferences that bet opportunities and betting itself might create with regard to the proposition to be betted on. It is because of this interference problem that the agent’s degree of belief in A cannot be interpreted as her betting rate for A. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently suggested that some abstract, plausibly non-causal and/or mathematical, explanations explain in a way that is radically dif- ferent from the way causal explanation explain. Namely, while causal explanations explain by providing information about causal dependence, allegedly some abstract explanations explain in a way tied to the independence of the explanandum from the microdetails, or causal laws, for example. We oppose this recent trend to regard abstractions as explanatory in some sui generis way, and argue (...) that a prominent ac- count of causal explanation can be naturally extended to capture explanations that radically abstract away from microphysical and causal-nomological details. To this end, we distinguish di erent senses in which an explanation can be more or less abstract, and analyse the connection between explanations’ abstractness and their explanatory power. According to our analysis abstract explanations have much in common with counterfactual causal explanations. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 8 Heft: 2 Seiten: 246-252.

This commentary considers the idea of collective responsibility in conjunction with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on the works of Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt, I define a grounding for the political necessity of (self-)blaming the whole Russian nation for the crimes of this war. Researching in more detail the theological compounds of Jaspers’ views, I propose to consider the imposition of collective guilt on a nation as a form of archaic curse. I claim that the idea of metaphysical/national (...) responsibility essentially becomes a grip of death that manipulates the promise of renewal to reload hierarchical power cycles. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Our aim in this article is to offer a new justification for preferring theories that are more quantitatively parsimonious than their rivals. We discuss cases where it seems clear that those involved opted for more quantitatively parsimonious theories. We extend previous work on quantitative parsimony by offering an independent probabilistic justification for preferring the more quantitatively parsimonious theories in particular episodes of theory choice. Our strategy allows us to avoid worries that other considerations, such as pragmatic factors of computational (...) tractability and so on, could be the driving ones in the historical cases under consideration. _1_ Introduction _2_ Three Desiderata _2.1_ Limiting _2.2_ Robustness _2.3_ Breadth _2.3.1_ A limited success for Baker _2.3.2_ Rejecting Baker’s analysis _2.4_ The proposal _3_ Probabilistically Additive Hypotheses and a Bayesian Account: The Limpid Rationale Relativized and Reconsidered _3.1_ Neutrinos and beta decay _3.2_ Avogadro’s hypothesis _3.3_ Postulation of Neptune _4_ Conclusion. (shrink)

Sección I. Aportes desde las epistemologías feministas -- Sección II. Posturas éticas en las antropologías feministas -- Sección III. Protagonistas diversas, voces multisituadas -- Sección IV. La antropología y el feminismo: narraciones en primera persona sobre experiencias de investigación y docencia -- Sección V. Expresiones contemporáneas de la violencia.

Uno de los temas de estudio de la filosofía de las matemáticas tiene que ver con cómo accedemos al conocimiento de los objetos de las matemáticas, al ser objetos abstractos. En este artículo mostraremos que esta forma de "acceso" es la intuición, entendida como un proceso dinámico que requiere de la experiencia de los matemáticos, cuyos efectos se verán en el mundo concreto. Partiendo del dilema expuesto por Benacerraf, revisaremos cómo la intuición es una posible solución y ha tenido un (...) papel protagónico en la epistemología de las matemáticas. Finalmente, revisaremos el papel de las ideas de Kitcher frente a la teoría del conocimiento matemático y el papel de la intuición. (shrink)

This article discusses Leo Tolstoy’s view of the Russian revolutionary movement. Taking as a focal point the writer’s lifelong interest in the Decembrist uprising of 1825 and particularly in the personalities of the gentry revolutionaries, the article argues that Tolstoy’s fascination for these figures was due to their superior moral qualities, rather than to their political and socioeconomic doctrines. Following Alexander Herzen, Tolstoy came to regard the Decembrists as full-fledged individualities and “beautiful souls”. Thus, Tolstoy’s much debated “conversion” and subsequent (...) attempts to transform literary art into a medium of religious and moral reform can also be viewed as extensions of his project of self-understanding and self-formation according to the model of kalokagathia provided by Russia’s aristocratic revolutionaries. (shrink)

The article aims to shed light on the connection between rhetoric and politics, and its dissemination in the sophistic and philosophical tradition. The argumentation is based on the conceptions of two contemporary philosophers – Barbara Cassin and Hans Blumenberg, who appear as the protagonists of positions according to which rhetoric takes up a significant place in political life. Since Plato, the sophists were treated as other pre-Socratics, as demagogs, who do not hold the truth but spread a false opinion. The (...) philosophers share a conviction that speech immediately expresses reality, and they also prohibited following the way of non-Being (Parmenides). The sophists (Gorgias, Protagoras) shared the position that speech expresses only itself, but not reality. Two opposite (but related) ways of thinking are best seen in M. Heidegger’s and H. Arendt’s philosophies. Keeping in mind the main theme, Blumenberg’s philosophical position includes logos as the mean of distancing, the art of politics is determined by the ability to delay decisions and soften conflicts by rhetorical means, while Cassins’ logology is understood as the ontology. (shrink)

In 2016, Davis and Zhang surveyed 71 Chinese engineers to investigate the claim that the concept of “profession” may have a far wider range than the term. They concluded that China seems to have a profession of engineering even though the Chinese still lacked an exact translation of the English term. In part, the survey reported here simply continues the work of Davis and Zhang. It confirms their result using a much larger, better educated, demographically different pool of 229 Chinese (...) engineers. But, in part too, it does something else. It investigates the concept professional competence—the perceived knowledge, skill, and judgment that those surveyed attribute to themselves and other engineers. The article has four parts. The first part describes the basics of the survey. The second part describes some important features of the survey’s questions, explaining how the questions closely track both the concept of profession and the concept of professional competence. The third part reports and interprets the results relevant to the presence or absence of the concepts of profession and professional competence. The fourth part reports the conclusions. (shrink)

This article proposes that thinking of scientific instruments as playthings or philosophical toys offers a method for looking at the ways in which we learn from made things and from the act of making in investigating the world. Rather than approaching artefacts as stable ob- jects, definable and categorisable in terms of their function, this method puts forward the instability and mobility of artefacts on several levels: in terms of their movements between hands, social contexts and systems of knowledge, in (...) terms of their physical articulations and of their changing functions, and in terms of the flows and processes of materials at work within and through them. (shrink)

In the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the fast and equitable distribution of effective vaccines worldwide is one of the challenges faced by international institutions in charge, as global equity in vaccine supply has not yet been achieved. Our paper explains the current state of ethical research on equity in global COVID-19 vaccine allocation, focusing on the COVAX Facility established by the WHO, acting as the global vaccine distributor. The article presents a detailed analysis of the first year of (...) COVAX allocation in 2021 identifying problematic aspects of its allocation framework regarding the implementation of COVAX’s fundamental allocation principles. We argue that the COVAX Facility has developed a proper concept to deal with global vaccine allocation—but to address uncovered defaults, we introduce the ‘Prioritized Distribution of Equal Shares’ model—a both ethical and practically feasible alternative allocation framework to protect the value of human lives in both high- and low-income countries through fair and fast global vaccine distribution in health emergencies. Nonetheless, we argue that the COVAX Facility remains the main organization to provide equitable access to vaccines. Yet, the global community has to consider further aspects such as patent protection, vaccine production and the lack of power of global structures to address the inequities that have arisen. Since new wars and further crises have arisen, a shift in public global attention endangers the processing of COVID-19-related issues. That is why now more than ever extensive efforts to achieve vaccine equity are needed. (shrink)

The notions of ground and ontological dependence have made a prominent resurgence in much of contemporary metaphysics. However, objections have been raised. On the one hand, objections have been raised to the need for distinctively metaphysical notions of ground and ontological dependence. On the other, objections have been raised to the usefulness of adding ground and ontological dependence to the existing store of other metaphysical notions. Even the logical properties of ground and ontological dependence are under debate. In this article, (...) I focus on how to account for the judgements of non-symmetry in several of the cases that motivate the introduction of notions like ground and ontological dependence. By focusing on the notion of explanation relative to a theory, I conclude that we do not need to postulate a distinctively asymmetric metaphysical notion in order to account for these judgements. (shrink)

This paper examines the relations between stubbornness and weakness of will, adopting Holton’s definition of weakness of will as an over-readiness to revise one’s resolutions. It posits that both stubbornness and weakness of will are responses to pessimism – the negative perception of a task or its outcome. Contrary to naive judgement, stubbornness is not merely the opposite of weakness; rather, it serves as a preventive behaviour stemming from a fear of weakness of will. Weakness of will and stubbornness can (...) be viewed as two facets of the same phenomenon, both influenced by pessimism. The paper explores the implications of this unified account, particularly at the therapeutic level, suggesting that enhancing self and other trust could reduce both weak and stubborn behaviours. (shrink)

The problem of explanatory non-symmetries provides the strongest reason to abandon the view that laws can figure in explanations without causal underpinnings. I argue that this problem can be overcome. The solution that I propose starts from noticing the importance of conditions of application when laws do explanatory work, and I go on to develop a notion of nomological dependence that can tackle the non-symmetry problem. The strategy is to show how a strong notion of counterfactual dependence as guaranteed by (...) the laws is a plausible account of what we aim towards when we give law-based explanations. The aim of this project is not to deny that causal relations can do explanatory work but to restore laws of nature as capable of being explanatory even in the absence of any knowledge of causal underpinnings. (shrink)

The most recent major contribution to the literature on justice as mutual advantage is Peter Vanderschraaf’s book Strategic Justice. In this book, he develops a theory of justice as convention, where justice is those principles that rational, self-interested agents would choose to solve problems of partially conflicting interest. His theory is thus a kind of theory of justice as mutual advantage. A common criticism of theories of justice as mutual advantage is the Vulnerability Objection: if the principles of justice require (...) that resources are only shared with those that are net-contributors to a cooperative surplus, then those that are not net-contributors to that cooperative surplus (so-called vulnerable people) have no claim of justice to any share of the resources. But, the objection states, surely justice cannot exclude people simply because they are vulnerable. Vanderschraaf argues that his theory of justice as convention successfully answers the Vulnerability Objection. However, in this paper, I argue that although Vanderschraaf’s theory successfully demonstrates that it can be to the mutual advantage of rational, self-interested people to agree to share equally even when some people contribute more than others, the problem remains of why such people would share with those that can never contribute more to the cooperative surplus than what they would withdraw from it. Vanderschraaf’s solution is to weaken the requirement that people actually contribute. But that, I argue, undermines the claim that his theory is a theory of justice as mutual advantage. (shrink)