From political scandals at the highest levels to inflated repair bills at the local garage, we are seemingly surrounded with unethical behavior, so why should we behave any differently? Why should we go through life anchored down by rules no one else seems to follow? Writing with wit and elegance, Simon Blackburn tackles such questions in this lively look at ethics, highlighting the complications and doubts and troubling issues that spring from the very simple question of how we ought (...) to live. Blackburn dissects many common reasons why we are skeptical about ethics. Drawing on all-too-familiar examples from history, politics, religion and everyday personal experience, he shows how cynicism and self-consciousness can paralyze us into considering ethics a hopeless pursuit. But ethics is neither futile nor irrelevant, he assures us, but an intimate part of the nitty gritty issues of living--of birth, death, happiness, desire, freedom, pleasure, justice. Indeed, from moral dilemmas about abortion and euthanasia, to our obsession with personal rights, to our longing for a sense of meaning in life, our everyday struggles are rife with ethical issues, whether we notice it or not. Blackburn distills the arguments of Hume, Kant and Aristotle down to their essences, to underscore the timeless relevance of our voice of conscience, the pitfalls of complacency, and our concerns about truth, knowledge and human progress. Blackburn's rare combination of depth, rigor and sparkling prose, and his distinguished ranking among contemporary philosophers, mark Being Good as an important statement on our current disenchantment with ethics. It challenges us to take a more thoughtful reading of our ethical climate and to ponder more carefully our own standards of behavior. (shrink)

Geach's problem, the problem of accounting for the fact that judgements expressed using moral terms function logically like other judgements, stands in the way of most noncognitive analyses of moral judgements. The non-cognitivist must offer a plausible interpretation of such terms when they appear in conditionals that also explains their logical interaction with straightforward moral assertions. Blackburn and Gibbard have offered a series of accounts each of which interprets such conditionals as expressing higher order commitments. Each then invokes norms (...) for the coherent acceptance of attitudes to explain why we hold certain combinations inconsistent. Against these accounts the paper presses two related objections: (1) The norms needed to do the explanatory work cannot be strong enough to do that work without also ruling clearly consistent attitudes inconsistent. And (2), the norms of rational attitude acceptance do not neatly track the distinction between consistent and inconsistent attitudes. (shrink)

According to noncognitivists, when we say that stealing is wrong, what we are doing is more like venting our feelings about stealing or encouraging one another not to steal, than like stating facts about morality. These ideas challenge the core not only of much thinking about morality and metaethics, but also of much philosophical thought about language and meaning. _Noncognitivism in Ethics_ is an outstanding introduction to these theories, ranging from their early history through the latest contemporary developments. Beginning with (...) a general introduction to metaethics, Mark Schroeder introduces and assesses three principal kinds of noncognitivist theory: the speech-act theories of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare, the expressivist theories of Blackburn and Gibbard, and hybrid theories. He pays particular attention both to the philosophical problems about what moral facts could be about or how they could matter which noncognitivism seeks to solve, and to the deep problems that it faces, including the task of explaining both the nature of moral thought and the complexity of moral attitudes, and the ‘Frege-Geach’ problem. Schroeder makes even the most difficult material accessible by offering crucial background along the way. Also included are exercises at the end of each chapter, chapter summaries, and a glossary of technical terms - making _Noncognitivism in Ethics_ essential reading for all students of ethics and metaethics. (shrink)

Nondescriptivist views in many areas of philosophy have long been associated with the commitment that in contrast to other domains of discourse, there are no propositions in their particular domain. For example, the ‘no truth conditions’ theory of conditionals1 is understood as the view that conditionals don’t express propositions, noncognitivist expressivism in metaethics is understood as advocating the view that there are not really moral propositions,2 and expressivism about epistemic modals is thought of as the view that there is no (...) such thing as the proposition that Jack might be at home, over and above the proposition that Jack is at home.3 Of course, it is nearly always acknowledged that advocates of a nondescriptivist theory need not deny that there are conditional, moral, or modal propositions ‘at the end of the day’ – for if they also endorse a deflationary reading of talk about propositions, as famously advocated by Simon Blackburn, then they can employ such deflationary talk just as much as the rest of us. They just don’t appeal to propositions to do any of the work in their theories. Rather, they ‘earn the right’ to talk about propositions.4 It is the aim of this paper to upset this way of thinking about the proper attitude of nondescriptivists toward propositions, and to advocate a more constructive and in some ways more radical alternative on behalf of the nondescriptivist. I will begin by introducing and developing a set of problems that are faced by any nondescriptivist theory which tries to do without propositions. All of these problems are easily solved by any view which postulates propositions across the board, but none of them are solved by merely deflationary talk about propositions – their most promising solutions require propositions to do real theoretical work, and therefore the problems themselves remind us of and illustrate some of the important reasons why it is worth positing propositions in the first place.. (shrink)

The basic idea of expressivism is that for some sentences ‘P’, believing that P is not just a matter of having an ordinary descriptive belief. This is a way of capturing the idea that the meaning of some sentences either exceeds their factual/descriptive content or doesn’t consist in any particular factual/descriptive content at all, even in context. The paradigmatic application for expressivism is within metaethics, and holds that believing that stealing is wrong involves having some kind of desire-like attitude, with (...) world-tomind direction of fit, either in place of, or in addition to, being in a representational state of mind with mind-to-world direction of fit. Because expressivists refer to the state of believing that P as the state of mind ‘expressed’ by ‘P’, this view can also be described as the view that ‘stealing is wrong’ expresses a state of mind that involves a desire-like attitude instead of, or in addition to, a representational state of mind. According to some expressivists - unrestrained expressivists, as I’ll call them - there need be no special relationship among the different kinds of state of mind that can be expressed by sentences. Pick your favorite state of mind, the unrestrained expressivist allows, and there could, at least in principle, be a sentence that expressed it. Expressivists who seem to have been unrestrained plausibly include Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic, and Simon Blackburn in many of his writings, including his [1984], [1993], and.. (shrink)

In nearly forty years’ of work, Simon Blackburn has done more than anyone to expand our imaginations about the aspirations for broadly projectivist/expressivist theorizing in all areas of philosophy. I know that I am far from alone in that his work has often been a source of both inspiration and provocation for my own work. It might be tempting, in a volume of critical essays such as this, to pay tribute to Blackburn’s special talent for destructive polemic, by (...) seeking to take down that by which I’ve been most provoked over the years. But Blackburn’s biting wit has both more wit and more bite than I could hope to emulate. So instead I’ll try to emulate here what I’ve admired the most about Blackburn – the constructive vein of much of his work. (shrink)

Despite its many advantages as a metaethical theory, moral expressivism faces difficulties as a semantic theory of the meaning of moral claims, an issue underscored by the notorious Frege-Geach problem. I consider a distinct metaethical view, inferentialism, which like expressivism rejects a representational account of meaning, but unlike expressivism explains meaning in terms of inferential role instead of expressive function. Drawing on Michael Williams’ recent work on inferential theories of meaning, I argue that an appropriate understanding of the pragmatic role (...) of moral discourse—the facilitation of coordinated social behavior—suggests the kind of inferences we should expect terms with this function to license. I offer a sketch of the inferential roles the moral ‘ought’ plays, and argue that if we accept that the relevant inferential roles are meaning-constitutive, we will be in a position to solve the Frege-Geach problem. Such an inferentialist solution has advantages over those forwarded by expressivists such as Blackburn and Gibbard. First, it offers a more straightforward explanation of the meaning of moral terms. It also gives simple answers to at least two semantic worries that have vexed contemporary expressivists—the “problem of permissions” and the commitment to “mentalism”, both of which I argue are problems that don’t get traction with an inferentialist approach. I conclude by considering ways in which this approach can be expanded into a more robust semantic account. (shrink)

Metaethical expressivists claim that we can explain what moral words like ‘wrong’ mean without having to know what they are about – but rather by saying what it is to think that something is wrong – namely, to disapprove of it. Given the close connection between expressivists’ theory of the meaning of moral words and our attitudes of approval and disapproval, expressivists have had a hard time shaking the intuitive charge that theirs is an objectionably subjectivist or mind-dependent view of (...) morality. Expressivism, critics have charged over and again, is committed to the view that what is wrong somehow depends on or at least correlates with the attitudes that we have toward it. Arguments to this effect are sometimes subtle, and sometimes rely on fancy machinery, but they all share a common flaw. They all fail to respect the fundamental idea of expressivism: that ‘stealing is wrong’ bears exactly the same relationship to disapproval of stealing as ‘grass is green’ bears to the belief that grass is green. In this paper I rehearse the motivations for the fundamental idea of expressivism and show how the arguments of Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit [1998], Russ Shafer-Landau [2003], Jussi Suikkanen [2009], and Christopher Peacocke [2004] all fail on this same rock. In part 1 I’ll rehearse the motivation for expressivism – a motivation which directly explains why it does not have subjectivist consequences. Then in each of parts 2-5 I’ll illustrate how each of Jackson and Pettit’s, Peacocke’s, Shafer-Landau’s, and Suikkanen’s arguments work, respectively, and why each of them fails to respect the fundamental parity at the heart of expressivism. Though others have tried before me to explain why expressivism is not committed to any kind of subjectivism or mind-dependence – prominently including Blackburn [1973], [1998], Horgan and Timmons [2006], and, in response to Pettit and Jackson, Dreier [2004] and Smith and Stoljar [2003], the explanation offered in this article is distinguished by its scope and generality.. (shrink)

In Moral Knowledge? New Readings in Moral Epistemology, editors Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons bring together eleven specially commissioned essays by distinguished moral philosophers exploring the nature and possibility of moral knowledge. Each essay represents a major position within the exciting field of moral epistemology in which a proponent of the position presents and defends his or her view and locates it vis-a-vis competing views. The authors include established philosophers such as Peter Railton, Robert Audi, Richard Brandt, and Simon (...) Blackburn, as well as newer voices in the field. Topics covered include moral skepticism, moral truth, projectivism, contractarianism, coherentism, feminist views, quasi-realism, and pragmatism. The lively and clear selections do not presuppose specialized knowledge of philosophy, and the philosophical vocabulary used throughout the anthology is uniform, in order to facilitate understanding by those not familiar with the field. The first chapter includes a sustained critical discussion of the major views represented in the following chapters, thereby furnishing beginning students with appropriate background to understand the selections. The volume is further enhanced by an index and an extensive bibliography. An excellent text for undergraduate and graduate courses, Moral Knowledge provides the most up-to-date work on moral knowledge and justification. (shrink)

In this paper, I use an example from the history of philosophy to show how independently defining each side of a pair of contrary predicates is apt to lead to contradiction. In the Euthyphro, piety is defined as that which is loved by some of the gods while impiety is defined as that which is hated by some of the gods. Socrates points out that since the gods harbor contrary sentiments, some things are both pious and impious. But “pious” and (...) “impious” are contrary predicates; they cannot simultaneously characterize the same thing. Euthyphro changes his definition, but the problem of recognizing emotional ambivalence is only side-stepped. I go on to show how contemporary philosophers run into a similar problem. According to Prinz, something is good if and only if we harbor positive sentiments towards it and bad if and only if we harbor negative sentiments towards it. Thus, if we are ambivalent towards something (if we harbor both positive and negative sentiments towards it), then it is both good and bad. Like “pious” and “impious”, “good” and “bad” are contraries. Next, according to the fitting-attitude theory first elaborated by Brentano and favored by contemporary meta-ethicists like Blackburn, Brandt, Ewing, Garcia, Gibbard, McDowell, and Wiggins, something is good if and only if it is a fitting (appropriate) object of approbation, and something is bad if and only if it is a fitting (appropriate) object of disapprobation. I argue that moral ambivalence is sometimes appropriate, i.e., that the correct response to some things is to both love and hate them. Hence, according to the fitting-attitudes theory, some things are both good and bad. I conclude by discussing a variety of ways in which the problem of ambivalence may be solved, suggesting that attitudes of approbation and disapprobation be further individuated by the reasons for them. (shrink)

When it comes to evaluating reductive hypotheses in metaphysics, supervenience arguments are the tools of the trade. Jaegwon Kim and Frank Jackson have argued, respectively, that strong and global supervenience are sufficient for reduction, and others have argued that supervenience theses stand in need of the kind of explanation that reductive hypotheses are particularly suited to provide. Simon Blackburn's arguments about what he claims are the specifically problematic features of the supervenience of the moral on the natural have also (...) been influential. But most discussions of these arguments have proceeded under the strong and restrictive assumptions of the S5 modal logic. In this paper we aim to remedy that defect, by illustrating in an accessible way what happens to these arguments under relaxed assumptions and why. The occasion is recent work by Ralph Wedgwood, who seeks to defend non-reductive accounts of moral and mental properties together with strong supervenience, but to evade both the arguments of Kim and Jackson and the explanatory challenge by accepting only the weaker, B, modal logic. In addition to drawing general lessons about what happens to supervenience arguments under relaxed assumptions, our goal is therefore to shed some light on both the virtues and costs of Wedgwood's proposal. (shrink)

In Moral Knowledge?: New Readings in Moral Epistemology, editors Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons bring together eleven newly written essays by distinguished moral philosophers exploring the nature and possibility of moral knowledge. Each essay represents a major position within the exciting field of moral epistemology in which a proponent of the position presents and defends his or her view and locates it vis-a-vis competing views. The first chapter, written by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, provides a framework for understanding the basic concepts (...) and viewpoints in moral epistemology and presents a limited skeptical challenge to the justification of moral beliefs. The following essays represent various options in response to moral skepticism. Peter Railton and Simon Blackburn take different stances on moral truth and realism, Robert Audi defends a version of intuitionism, and Geoffrey Sayre-McCord adopts coherentism, while R.M. Hare combines elements of both foundationalism and coherentism. Richard Brandt discusses the relevance of empirical science to moral knowledge, Christopher Morris develops a contractarian account of moral justification, and David Copp bases moral knowledge on rational choices by societies. Margaret Urban Walker aruges for a feminist perspective on moral knowledge, and Mark Timmons expounds contextualism in moral epistemology. The lively and clear selections do not presuppose specialized knowledge of philosophy, and the philosophical vocabulary used throughout the anthology is uniform, in order to facilitate understanding by those not familiar with the field. The first chapter includes a sustained critical discussion of the major views represented in the following chapters, thereby furnishing beginning students with appropriate background to understand the selections. The volume is further enhanced by an index and an extensive bibliography, which is divided into sections corresponding to the chapters of the book. Moral Knowledge provides the most up-to-date work on moral knowledge and justification and serves as an excellent text for undergraduate and graduate courses. (shrink)

This second edition of the book contains a new chapter on the notions of natural-kind words and natural kinds.

This paper examines how professionals (N = 32) working on artificial intelligence (AI) view structural AI ethics challenges like injustices and inequalities beyond individual agents' direct intention and control. This paper answers the research question: What are professionals’ perceptions of the structural challenges of AI (in the agri-food sector)? This empirical paper shows that it is essential to broaden the scope of ethics of AI beyond micro- and meso-levels. While ethics guidelines and AI ethics often focus on the responsibility of (...) designers and the competencies and skills of designers to take this responsibility, our results show that many structural challenges are beyond their reach. This result means that while ethics guidelines and AI ethics frameworks are helpful, there is a risk that they overlook more complicated, nuanced, and intersected structural challenges. In addition, it highlights the need to include diverse stakeholders, such as quadruple helix (QH) participants, in discussions around AI ethics rather than solely focusing on the obligations of AI developers and companies. Overall, this paper demonstrates that addressing structural challenges in AI is challenging and requires an approach that considers four requirements: (1) multi-level, (2) multi-faceted, (3) interdisciplinary, and (4) polycentric governance. (shrink)

Lately, philosophers of mathematics have been exploring the notion of mathematical explanation within mathematics. This project is supposed to be analogous to the search for the correct analysis of scientific explanation. I argue here that given the way philosophers have been using “ explanation,” the term is not applicable to mathematics as it is in science.

The turn to descriptive studies of ethics is inspired by the sense that our ethical theorizing needs to engage ethnography, history, and literature in order to address the full complexity of ethical life. This article examines four books that describe the cultivation of virtue in diverse cultural contexts, two concerning early China and two concerning Islam in recent years. All four emphasize the significance of embodiment, and they attend to the complex ways in which choice and agency interact with the (...) authority of tradition. In considering these books, this article examines the relations between our academic claims concerning the self and ethics, conceptual or theoretical claims made in the elite writings of traditions, and the lived experiences of the people we study. The conclusion turns to our methodological foundations for studying these topics both comparatively and constructively. (shrink)

Offers managers new tools to deal with the tough problems businesses face today. Reveals how analyzing the ethical dimensions of problems actually offers competitive advantages. Offers illustrative case examples from internally recognized companies showing that high ethics and high profits go hand in hand--and identifies the factors responsible for these companies' success.

In this chapter, I outline dynamic models of motivation and emotion. These turn out not to be autonomous subsystems, but, instead, are deeply integrated in the basic interactive dynamic character of living systems. Motivation is a crucial aspect of particular kinds of interactive systems -- systems for which representation is a sister aspect. Emotion is a special kind of partially reflective interaction process, and yields its own emergent motivational aspects. In addition, the overall model accounts for some of the crucial (...) properties of consciousness. (shrink)

A final version of this paper is in press as: Bickhard, M. H.. The Dynamic Emergence of Representation. In H. Clapin, P. Staines, P. Slezak Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation. Praeger.

Among the powers of living beings are intentional psychic powers, psychic powers that are of something. Thus, there is something seen, just as there is something feared or known. A puzzle arises when we consider whether these psychic powers might also be reflexive. Can these psychic powers be applied to themselves, or at least their exercise, such that the powers themselves, or their exercise, are their intentional objects? So, for example, in seeing what one does, and so being aware from (...) within that one thus sees, does one thereby see the seeing of it? An initial difficulty is that, in a range of familiar cases, the intentional object is distinct from the power and its exercise. The scene is distinct from the sight or seeing of it. Should this be a general feature of intentionality, then intentional powers are irreflexive. There is a potential tension, then, between the intentional character of psychic powers and their alleged reflexivity. This tension forms the basis of a puzzle or aporia that is at the heart of the Charmides. Part of what is at stake here is the coherence of perceptual self-consciousness, at least on an understanding of it. (shrink)

In the first two volumes of On What Matters Derek Parfit argues that there are objective moral truths, and other normative truths about what we have reasons to believe, and to want, and to do. In defending his view, Parfit argues that if there are no objective normative truths, nihilism follows, and nothing matters. He criticizes many leading contemporary philosophers working on ethics, including Simon Blackburn, Stephen Darwall, Allen Gibbard, Frank Jackson, Peter Railton, Mark Schroeder, Michael Smith, and (...) Sharon Street. Does Anything Really Matter? gives these philosophers an opportunity to respond to Parfit, and includes essays by Richard Chappell, Andrew Huddleston, Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, Bruce Russell, and Larry Temkin. A third volume of On What Matters, in which Parfit engages with his critics and breaks new ground in finding significant agreement between his own views and theirs, is appearing as a separate companion volume. (shrink)

The last two decades have stood witness to a quiet revolution in epistemology. We used to think of ethics and epistemology as quite distinct areas of inquiry – ethics concerned with action, and epistemology concerned with belief. While ethics is the domain of values, epistemology is the domain of facts – the facts that we must get right, and get right first, in order to know how to pursue our values in ethics. The only competing values in epistemology, we were (...) taught, were those of acquiring truth and avoiding error. But proponents of the revolution have pushed us to find values in the stronghold of truth. They have argued that rationality, justification, and even knowledge can depend on what is practically or even morally at stake, so that we can't do epistemology without thinking about values. And some have gone further, arguing that ethics is not just about action, after all, but also includes distinctively moral, and not just epistemological, questions about what to believe. The revolution in our understanding of the relationship between ethics and epistemology is well underway. -/- Yet as in all revolutionary movements, there comes a moment when the revolutionaries must decide amongst themselves whether what they seek is reform or annihilation of the received world order. The reformists seek calculated interventions in the order of things. But the radicals want to go farther. They believe that more of the old must be thrown out, before the new can be ushered in. This is a chaotic period, when the revolution can yet be lost, if and as the alternative begins to look like total anarchy. And many possible visions of the future remain in play. This paper is a contribution toward working through these issues amongst the revolutionaries in epistemology. Let there be no surprises in this paper: I am of a reformist mindset, and the aim of this paper is to hold the line on cautious, calculated intervention, even in the pursuit of bold results. (shrink)

This book is a must-read for researchers interested in taking a high-level, non-mechanistic approach to answering age-old fundamental questions in the brain ...

Pragmatism has enjoyed a major resurgence in Anglo-American philosophy over the course of the last decade or two, and Robert Brandom’s work – particularly his 1994 tome Making it Explicit (MIE) – has been at the vanguard of this resurgence (Brandom 1994).2 But pragmatism comes in several surprisingly distinct flavours. Authors such as Hubert Dreyfus find their roots in certain parts of Heidegger and in phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and they privilege embodied, preconceptual skills as opposed to discursive practices as (...) the basic sites of meaning and agency (Dreyfus 1991; Dreyfus 1992; Todes 2001). With strong inheritances from Dewey and Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty has championed a pragmatism whose core emphasis is on the rejection of transcendental truth and high metaphysical theorizing (Rorty 1982), and this anti-theoretical banner has been taken up by several prominent ethicists, among others. For his part, Brandom, who purports to offer a systematic theory of language and meaning grounded on a foundation of pragmatic normative relationships between speakers, looks back instead to Sellars and Quine for his stripe of pragmatism. Near the start of MIE, he writes: The explanatory strategy pursued here is to begin with an account of social practices, identify the particular structure they must exhibit in order to qualify as specifically linguistic practices, and then consider what different sorts of semantic contents those practices can confer on states, performances, and expressions caught up in them in suitable ways. (Brandom 1994, xiii) Despite his professed pragmatism, Brandom is no foe of high theory or metanarratives, and he is vastly more interested in language and theoretical reason than in the rest of human bodily activity. For Brandom, inferentially articulated discourse forms an autonomous domain of normativity, while our bodily encounters with the world in perception and in action serve as language entry and exit points respectively.. (shrink)

Does infantile amnesia exist? Can children accurately recall traumatic events? Do memory's organizing, storage, and retrieval mechanisms change during childhood development? Through a thorough examination of recent scientific evidence, The Fate of Early Memories divorces fact from fiction regarding the nature, durability, and fallibility of memory.

This book scrutinizes recent work in phonological theory from the perspective of Chomskyan generative linguistics and argues that progress in the field depends on taking seriously the idea that phonology is best studied as a mental computational system derived from an innate base, phonological Universal Grammar. Two simple problems of phonological analysis provide a frame for a variety of topics throughout the book. The competence-performance distinction and markedness theory are both addressed in some detail, especially with reference to phonological acquisition. (...) Several aspects of Optimality Theory, including the use of Output-Output Correspondence, functionalist argumentation and dependence on typological justification are critiqued. The authors draw on their expertise in historical linguistics to argue that diachronic evidence is often mis-used to bolster phonological arguments, and they present a vision of the proper use of such evidence. Issues of general interest for cognitive scientists, such as whether categories are discrete and whether mental computation is probabilistic are also addressed. The book ends with concrete proposals to guide future phonological research.The breadth and depth of the discussion, ranging from details of current analyses to the philosophical underpinnings of linguistic science, is presented in a direct style with as little recourse to technical language as possible. (shrink)

Dieser Aufsatz analysiert Leibniz' Begriff der Expression. Er ist eine Vorstudie zu einer umfassenden Untersuchung der Lehre, daß jede einfache Substanz das ganze Weltall ausdrückt. Leibnizens Beispiele und Definitionen von Expression werden besprochen, und dann wird die Analyse des Begriffs in zwei Stufen entwickelt.

We consider how to discern whether or not evolution is taking place in an observed system. Evolution will be characterized in terms of a particular macroscopic behavior that emerges from microscopic organismic interaction. We de ne evolutionary activity as the rate at which useful genetic innovations are absorbed into the population. After measuring evolutionary activity in a simple model biosphere, we discuss applications to other systems. We argue that evolutionary activity provides an objective, quantitative interpretation of the intuitive idea of (...) biological teleology. We also propose using evolutionary activity in a test for life. (shrink)

Wie geartet ist das Verhältnis zwischen den zentralen Begriffen „Bewußtsein“ und „Reflexion“ in Lockes Essay? Sind diese Begriffe für Locke identisch oder voneinander verschieden? Falls sie verschieden sind, wie ist der Unterschied genau zu bestimmen? Diese Arbeit untersucht die Fragen, unter Berücksichtigung der unterschiedlichen Deutungen in der Sekundärliteratur; sie sichtet und prüft den Text des Essays sorgfältig und breitet ein breites Spektrum philosophischer Implikationen von Lockes Ausführungen über das „Bewußtsein“ und „Reflexion“ aus. Der abschließende Teil legt dar, daß Locke niemals (...) eine feste Position gegenüber dem Verhältnis zwischen den beiden Begriffen eingenommen hat, sondern daß er zwischen verschiedenen Positionen schwankte -als Resultat der starken philosophischen Kräfte, die ihn bald in die eine, bald in die andere Richtung zogen. (shrink)

The scope of this book is to revisit the ancient Aristotelian and Plotinian philosophical and metaphysical problem of dualism and monism with respect to the first principle. Essentially, it defends Aristotle’s position of the primacy of an intelligible first principle over the Plotinian philosophical move to affirm a principle above Intellect.

This paper is a contribution to a symposium on Herman Cappelen’s 2023 book The Concept of Democracy: An Essay on Conceptual Amelioration and Abandonment. In that book, Cappelen develops a theory of abandonment—a theory of why and how to completely stop using particular linguistic expressions—and then uses that theory to argue for the general abandonment of the words “democracy” and “democratic”. In this paper, I critically discuss Cappelen’s arguments for the abandonment of “democracy” and “democratic” in political theory specifically.

Philosophical interest in ecology is relatively new. Standard texts in the philosophy of biology pay little or no attention to ecology (though Sterelny and Griffiths 1999 is an exception). This is in part because the science of ecology itself is relatively new, but whatever the reasons for the neglect in the past, the situation must change. A good philosophical understanding of ecology is important for a number of reasons. First, ecology is an important and fascinating branch of biology with distinctive (...) philosophical issues that arise from its study. Second, ecology is only one small step away from urgent political, ethical, and management decisions about how best to live in an apparently increasingly-fragile environment. Third, philosophy of ecology, properly conceived, can contribute directly to both our understanding of ecology and help with its advancement. Philosophy of ecology can thus be seen as part of the emerging discipline of “biohumanities”, where biology and humanities disciplines together advance our understanding and knowledge of biology (Stotz and Griffiths forthcoming). In this paper, we focus primarily on this third role of the philosophy of ecology and consider a number of places where philosophy can play an important role in ecology. In the process, we.. (shrink)

We investigate differences between a simple Dominance Principle applied to sums of fair prices for variables and dominance applied to sums of forecasts for variables scored by proper scoring rules. In particular, we consider differences when fair prices and forecasts correspond to finitely additive expectations and dominance is applied with infinitely many prices and/or forecasts.