What methodology should philosophers follow? Should they rely on methods that can be conducted from the armchair? Or should they leave the armchair and turn to the methods of the natural sciences, such as experiments in the laboratory? Or is this opposition itself a false one? Arguments about philosophical methodology are raging in the wake of a number of often conflicting currents, such as the growth of experimental philosophy, the resurgence of interest in metaphysical questions, and the use of formal (...) methods. This outstanding collection of specially-commissioned chapters by leading international philosophers discusses these questions and many more. It provides a comprehensive survey of philosophical methodology in the most important philosophical subjects: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, philosophy of science, ethics, and aesthetics. A key feature of the collection is that philosophers discuss and evaluate contrasting approaches in each subject, offering a superb overview of the variety of methodological approaches - both naturalistic and non-naturalistic - in each of these areas. They examine important topics at the heart of methodological argument, including the role of intuitions and conceptual analysis, thought experiments, introspection, and the place that results from the natural sciences should have in philosophical theorizing. The collection begins with a fascinating exchange about philosophical naturalism between Timothy Williamson and Alexander Rosenberg, and also includes contributions from the following philosophers: Lynne Rudder Baker, Matt Bedke, Greg Currie, Michael Devitt, Matthew C. Haug, Jenann Ismael, Hilary Kornblith, Neil Levy, E.J. Lowe, Kirk Ludwig, Marie McGinn, David Papineau, Matthew Ratcliffe, Georges Rey, Jeffrey W. Roland, Barry C. Smith, Amie L. Thomasson, Valerie Tiberius, Jessica Wilson, and David W. Smith. (shrink)

I argue that the completeness of physics is composed of two distinct claims. The first is the commonly made claim that, roughly, every physical event is completely causally determined by physical events. The second has rarely, if ever, been explicitly stated in the literature and is the claim that microphysics provides a complete inventory of the fundamental categories that constitute both the causal features and intrinsic nature of all the events that causally affect the physical universe. After showing that these (...) claims are distinct, I argue that they can be used to solve a difficulty with existing responses to the exclusion problem—namely, that these existing responses also undermine the powerful causal argument for physicalism. Recognizing that there are two kinds of completeness opens up room for the nonreductive physicalist to solve the exclusion problem while also endorsing a modified, cogent causal argument for a kind of physicalism compatible with her position. (shrink)

ONE Victims or Culprits? Reflections on Women's Behaviour My title, 'Victims or Culprits?', with its interrogatory inflection, may appear somewhat inane. ...

In this paper, I answer a fundamental question facing any view according to which natural selection is a population‐level causal process—namely, how is the causal process of natural selection related to, yet not preempted by, causal processes that occur at the level of individual organisms? Without an answer to this grounding question, the population‐level causal view appears unstable—collapsing into either an individual‐level causal interpretation or the claim that selection is a purely formal, statistical phenomenon. I argue that a causal account (...) of realization provides an answer to the grounding question. By applying this account of realization to the natural selection of melanism in rock pocket mice, I show how an alternative, formal account of realization, favored by proponents of the statistical interpretation, misses biologically important features. More generally, this paper shows how metaphysical issues about realization normally discussed in the philosophy of mind apply to debates in philosophy of biology. Thus, it is a first step toward fleshing out the oft‐noted similarities between debates in these areas. (shrink)

There are a number of competing psychological accounts of the placebo effect, and much of the recent debate centers on the relative importance of classical conditioning and conscious beliefs. In this paper, I discuss apparent problems with these accounts and with?disjunctive? accounts that deny that placebo effects can be given a unified psychological explanation. The fact that some placebo effects seem to be mediated by cognitive states with content that is consciously inaccessible and inferentially isolated from a subject's beliefs motivates (...) an account of the placebo effect in terms of subdoxastic cognitive states. I propose that aliefs, subdoxastic cognitive states that are associative, automatic, and arational, can provide a unified psychological account of the placebo effect. This account also has the potential to illuminate interesting connections to other psychological phenomena. (shrink)

This article points out problems in current dynamic treatments of anaphora and provides a new account that solves these by grafting Muskens' Compositional Discourse Representation Theory onto a partial theory of types. Partiality is exploited to keep track of which discourse referents have been introduced in the text (thus avoiding the overwrite problem) and to account for cases of anaphoric failure. Another key assumption is that the set of discourse referents is well-ordered, so that we can keep track of the (...) order in which they have been introduced, allowing a semantic characterization of anaphoric accessibility across stretches of discourse. Unlike other dynamic approaches, the system defines semantic values for unresolved anaphors. This leads to a clear separation of monotonic and non-monotonic content (in this case anaphoric resolution) and arguably provides a sound basis for a non-monotonic theory of anaphoric resolution. (shrink)

Parue en août 2016 en allemand, la thèse de Kohei Saito apporte enfin une justification philologique solide aux entreprises écosocialistes, qui oscillent depuis les années 1970 entre une interprétation hétérodoxe ou orthodoxe de l’œuvre de Marx. Faut-il purger cette dernière d’une tendance prométhéenne propre au xixe siècle industriel, ou au contraire en faire l’expression première – et donc la plus pure – de la sensibilité écologique naissante à cette époque? Comme Saito le montre avec brio...

This article views capitalism not only as a mode of production, but also as a mediation of the reproduction of life, following the concept of ‘social metabolism’ that Marx employs to analyze the interaction between the individuals composing a society and their natural environment. Insofar as the ‘value-form’ is the distinctive social relation of capitalism, it appears necessary to ask whether the metabolic process of reproduction can be fully subsumed under this form. Marx takes for granted the idea that the (...) reproduction of labor-power consists only in the consumption of commodities resulting from abstract labor, thus omitting the appropriation of unpaid domestic work, mostly performed by women. Feminist criticism clarifies how capitalism always depends on some reproductive work being appropriated for the accumulation of surplus-value without being integrated in the value-form. Following Jason W. Moore, I attempt to indicate that the same logic is at work for the reproduction... (shrink)

John Rawls' bog En teori om retfærdighed er blandt de absolut vigtigste værker i det 20. århundredes politiske filosofi. Det udkom første gang i 1971 og markerede et brud med en udbredt skepsis over for normative politiske teorier, det vil sige teorier, om hvorledes samfundet bør være indrettet. Med en sofistikeret version af klassisk kontraktteori argumenterer Rawls for en socialliberal vision om retfærdighed, hvor enhver sikres en frihed, der er forenelig med alles tilsvarende frihed, hvor de økonomisk dårligst stillede skal (...) stilles bedst muligt. I nærværende antologi diskuterer en række forskere vigtige temaer i såvel det nævnte hovedværk, som hans øvrige forfatterskab. Bidragene introducerer derved ikke blot til Rawls' politiske filosofi, men også til diskussioner, der står helt centralt i nyere politisk teori såsom vores forhold til fremtidige generationer, civil ulydighed og global retfærdighed. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Spinoza's political philosophy played an important role in the fact that the mature Leibniz was a strict anti-Spinozist. Leibniz's reading of Spinoza's political texts developed from an initial mixed reaction of both interest and scandal towards a curious exclusion of the Spinozist possibility. Indeed, there is not a single text by the mature Leibniz addressing Spinoza's political philosophy. In order to overcome this textual problem, and establish the parameters for a confrontation between the two philosophers on (...) the issue of political philosophy, the chapter considers how Leibniz and Spinoza respectively approached Hobbes' theory of natural right and contract theory. This interpretive triangulation allows determining with some plausibility what stance Leibniz took with regard to Spinoza's political philosophy in spite of the fact that he never actually stated it explicitly. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 19 Heft: 1 Seiten: 135-152.

This volume collects contributions from leading scholars of early modern philosophy from a wide variety of philosophical and geographic backgrounds. The distinguished contributors offer very different, competing approaches to the history of philosophy.

In this paper, I am interested in the conception of toleration that can be gleaned from the political and theological texts of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. I argue that Leibniz did not defend a notion of toleration comparable to a standard modern conception. The modern conception is very often traced back to a constellation of writers contemporary with Leibniz including Locke, Bayle, and Spinoza. It involves an inclusive embrace of diversity, religious and otherwise, and an affirmation of toleration as a fundamental (...) value in and by itself, intrinsically linked to an equally fundamental imperative of freedom of expression allowing such diversity to flourish publicly. Leibniz, however, understood toleration as a political tool to be employed in order to facilitate the reunion of the Christian churches; he did not consider it a constitutive value, or a value in and by itself, but rather saw it as a means to an end; he did not establish any intrinsic link between toleration and freedom of expression but promoted moderate forms of censorship. Most importantly, however, while clearly seeing it as something positive, he also detected deep ambiguities in the concept from which we have much to learn in our own assessment of modern toleration. (shrink)

Crowdsourcing is an increasingly popular method for researchers in the social and behavioral sciences, including experimental philosophy, to recruit survey respondents. Crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), have been seen as a way to produce high quality survey data both quickly and cheaply. However, in the last few years, a number of authors have claimed that the low pay rates on MTurk are morally unacceptable. In this paper, I explore some of the methodological implications for online experimental philosophy (...) research if, in fact, typical pay practices on MTurk are morally impermissible. I argue that the most straightforward solution to this apparent moral problem—paying survey respondents more and relying only on “high reputation” respondents—will likely increase the number of subjects who have previous experience with survey materials and thus are “non-naïve” with respect to those materials. I then discuss some likely effects that this increase in experimental non-naivete will have on some aspects of the “negative” program in experimental philosophy, focusing in particular on recent debates about philosophical expertise. (shrink)

This paper discusses Baruch de Spinoza’s cosmological argument for the existence of God (CA) as it can be found in ’Ethics’, I, proposition 11, demonstration 3. The aim of the article is to provide a reconstruction of the argument by developing the underlying metaphysical framework governing it. It is partly motivated by Michael Della Rocca’s attempt to account of fundamental principles of Spinoza’s philosophy. According to him, all dependence relations in Spinoza can be reduced to conceptual ones. I argue to (...) the contrary that Spinoza’s theories of causation and power are more fundamental than his theory of concepts. I discuss the CA as a point of departure for arguing this, and for suggesting what I consider to be a more faithful approach to Spinoza’s metaphysics as a whole. (shrink)

In this chapter, I explore this complex and somewhat neglected tradition of the early modern common notion. I focus on three thinkers, two of them innatist in some sense, one of them not; all (mostly) products of the English context; all arguably part of the background for Locke’s critique of common notions and innate ideas in the first book of the Essay; and all related to each other in various and complicated ways. They are: Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1582–1648), Kenelm (...) Digby (1603–1665), and Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–1651). I show how they deployed three different theories of common notions that we can describe, respectively, as gnoseological, rhetorical, and allegorical. (shrink)

Huw Price has argued that naturalistic philosophy inevitably leads to a deflationary approach to ontological questions. In this paper, I rebut these arguments. A more substantive, less language-focused approach to metaphysics remains open to naturalists. However, rebutting one of Price’s main arguments requires rejecting Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment. So, even though Price’s argument is unsound, it reveals that naturalists cannot rest content with broadly Quinean, “mainstream metaphysics,” which, I suggest, naturalists also have independent reasons to reject.

In this paper, I critically discuss recent work on the role that the principle of tolerance plays in Rudolf Carnap's philosophy. Specifically, I consider how two prominent interpretations of Carnap's principle of tolerance can be used to argue for Carnap's anti-metaphysical views. I then argue that there are serious problems with these arguments, and I diagnose those problems as resulting, in part, from a tension between competing goals of Carnap's philosophical project.

A Reply P. Flensted-Jensen/M. H. Hansen: Pseudo-Skylax' Use of the Term Polis M. H. Hansen: City-Ethnics as Evidence for Polis Identity .

In 1955, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna was returned to Germany following its removal from Dresden in anticipation of the city being bombed. That same year Heidegger wrote a short paper titled “Über die Sixtina,” likely to commemorate the painting’s return. The goal of this article is to bring the largely overlooked “Über die Sixtina” into discussions about Heidegger’s philosophy of art. While brief, Heidegger’s paper makes clear that the Sistine Madonna is an important work to consider when deliberating about his philosophy (...) of art in general. This article elaborates on the topics Heidegger discusses in “Über die Sixtina,” particularly the image-being of the Sistine Madonna, the image as a window painting, and the place of the painting. (shrink)

We characterize preservation of superstability and ω-stability for finite extensions of abelian groups and reduce the general case to the case of p-groups. In particular we study finite extensions of divisible abelian groups. We prove that superstable abelian-by-finite groups have only finitely many conjugacy classes of Sylow p-subgroups.

In this article, I discuss Leibniz’s interpretation of the cosmological argument for the existence of God. In particular, I consider whether Leibniz’s position on this point was developed partly in reference to Spinoza’s position. First, I analyze Leibniz’s annotations from 1676 on Spinoza’s letter 12. The traditional cosmological argument, as found in Avicenna and Saint Thomas for example, relies on the Aristotelian assumption that an actual infinite is impossible and on the idea that there can be no effect without a (...) cause. From these premises, the argument concludes that God must be the uncaused first cause of all things. In letter 12, Spinoza follows Chasdai Crescas and rejects this proof. Instead, he develops a variant of the cosmological argument which depicts God as the self-caused ground of all causes or things. In his annotations, Leibniz agrees with Spinoza about the inadequacy of the traditional argument, but remains ambiguous as to Spinoza’s conception of God as a self-caus. (shrink)