Grounding pluralism is the view that there are multiple kinds of grounding. In this essay, I motivate and defend an explanation-theoretic view of grounding pluralism. Specifically, I argue that there are two kinds of grounding: why-grounding—which tells us why things are the case—and how-grounding—which tells us how things are the case.

In this paper, I consider the implications of grief for philosophical theorising about absence experience. I argue that whilst some absence experiences that occur in grief might be explained by extant philosophical accounts of absence experience, others need different treatment. I propose that grieving subjects' descriptions of feeling as if the world seems empty or a part of them seems missing can be understood as referring to a distinctive type of absence experience. In these profound absence experiences, I will argue, (...) the absence of a person as a condition on various possibilities is made manifest in the structure of experience over time. Thus, by paying close attention to grief, we can see that even accounts of absence experience that are presented as in competition with one another may not be so, and that to explain all kinds of absence experience we sometimes need to appeal to something overlooked in other accounts, and which is neither straightforwardly perceptual or cognitive. I also suggest that we would have good reason to take such experiences to be part of and not merely psychological effects of grief. (shrink)

It is common to think that grounding is necessary in the sense that: if P grounds Q, then necessarily: if P, then Q. Though most accept this principle, some give counterexamples to it. Instead of straightforwardly arguing for, or against, necessity, I explain the sense in which grounding is necessary and contingent. I argue that there are two kinds of grounding: what-grounding and why-grounding, where the former kind is necessary while the latter is contingent.

Articles in the popular media and testimonies collected in empirical work suggest that many people who have not been bereaved have nevertheless grieved over pandemic-related losses of various kinds. There is a philosophical question about whether any experience of a non-death loss ought to count as grief, hinging upon how the object of grief is construed. However, even if one accepts that certain significant non-death losses are possible targets of grief, many reported cases of putative pandemic-related grief may appear less (...) plausible. For instance, it might be argued that many of these losses are temporary or minor and therefore unlikely to be grieved, and that the associated experiences are phenomenologically dissimilar to grief. In this article, as well as discussing the more general question about the coherence of the idea of non-bereavement grief, we address these obstacles to taking reports of pandemic non-bereavement grief to be literal and true. In particular, we argue that some may have experienced grief over even apparently minor losses during the pandemic. This is generally so, we suggest, only insofar as experiences of such losses form part of an overarching grief process directed at some broader significant loss. Thus, we cast light on both the nature of non-bereavement grief and the kinds of disruption and loss experienced during the pandemic. (shrink)

There is often substantial disparity between philosophical ideals and scientific practice. Philosophical reductionism is motivated by a drive for ontological austerity. The vehicle is conceptual parsimony: the fewer our conceptual primitives, the less are our ontological commitments. A general moral to be drawn from my “Functionalism and Reductionism” is that scientific reduction does not, and should not be expected to, facilitate conceptual economy; yet reduction it still is, and in the classical mold. Those who press for the irreducibility of a (...) functional psychology have been seduced by an inadequate account of scientific reduction. Patricia Kitcher is unhappy with my argument because it fails to live up to her philosophical ideals. “The claim that psychology is irreducible to neurophysiology,” she suggests, “rests to a large extent on the fact that, even in principle, neurophysiology is not capable of carrying out the explanatory work of a functional psychology”. (shrink)

The concept of efficient causation originates with Aristotle, who states that the types of cause include ‘the primary source of the change or rest’. For Medieval Aristotelians, the scope of efficient causality includes creative acts. The Islamic philosopher Avicenna is an important contributor to this conceptual change. In his Metaphysics, Avicenna defines the efficient cause or agent as that which gives being to something distinct from itself. As previous studies of Avicenna's ‘metaphysical’ conception of the efficient cause attest, it takes (...) God as a model agent. This essay considers whether Avicenna's ‘metaphysical’ conception of the efficient cause applies to natural agents. It ultimately argues that Avicenna offers a unified view of the efficient cause, which includes both divine and natural agents. On this view, an efficient cause gives being to another and is simultaneous with its effect. While Avicenna's defence of this view is an important chapter in the history of the concept of the efficient cause, it is also of interest in its own right. By appeal to a version of the principle of sufficient reason, it challenges a widespread view that causes are temporally prior to their effects. (shrink)

This study brings together a number of related critical issues, including the causal laws that attempt to govern fictional worlds, the reader's implication in the causal dilemmas that confront major characters, and the philosophical and ideological ascriptions of cause that are variously embodied, interrogated, or parodied. One of the most significant features of this study is its disclosure of just how fundamental and widespread causal issues are in complex narratives - and how insistently they are thematized in twentieth-century works.

Bounded rationality is a fundamental feature of cognition. We make choices between alternatives in light of our goals, relying on incomplete information and limited resources. As a consequence, PROBLEM SOLVING cannot be exhaustive: we cannot explore all the possibilities which confront us, and search must be constrained in ways that facilitate search efficiency even at the expense of search effectiveness. If we think of problem solving as a search through the space of possibilities as it was conceptualized by Allen Newell (...) and Herbert A. Simon, limitations on search entail that for all but the simplest problems we can investigate at most a small proportion of the possibilities. Moreover, our evaluation of these possibilities will be uncertain and incomplete. We must rely on heuristic methods for pruning the tree of possibilities and for evaluating the possibilities we consider. In medical diagnosis, for example, the problem is one of inferring what disease is present from a given set of symptoms, when no one symptom is invariably present with a given disease, and the same symptom can have various causes. Moreover, patients can be suffering from more than one disease, a fact which compounds the difficulties of accurate diagnosis. Given that symptoms cannot generally be assumed to be independent and are noisy indicators of the underlying disease, the size of the search space turns out to be large, and inference concerning underlying diseases is inevitably uncertain. One solution is to limit the range of the search, eliminating some candidates as implausible; that is, we may adopt assumptions limiting the range of diseases considered to a narrow range of those antecedently likely. Good diagnosticians evidently narrow the range to no more than a handful of candidates. Search must be limited in order to be efficient. (shrink)

This Element offers a new account of the philosophical significance of logical empiricism that relies on the past forty years of literature reassessing the project. It argues that while logical empiricism was committed to empiricism and did become tied to the trajectory of analytic philosophy, neither empiricism nor logical analysis per se was the deepest philosophical commitment of logical empiricism. That commitment was, rather, securing the scientific status of philosophy, bringing philosophy into a scientific conception of the world.

Collected and edited by Noah Levin -/- Table of Contents: -/- UNIT ONE: INTRODUCTION TO CONTEMPORARY ETHICS: TECHNOLOGY, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, AND IMMIGRATION 1 The “Trolley Problem” and Self-Driving Cars: Your Car’s Moral Settings (Noah Levin) 2 What is Ethics and What Makes Something a Problem for Morality? (David Svolba) 3 Letter from the Birmingham City Jail (Martin Luther King, Jr) 4 A Defense of Affirmative Action (Noah Levin) 5 The Moral Issues of Immigration (B.M. Wooldridge) 6 The (...) Ethics of our Digital Selves (Noah Levin) -/- UNIT TWO: TORTURE, DEATH, AND THE “GREATER GOOD” 7 The Ethics of Torture (Martine Berenpas) 8 What Moral Obligations do we have (or not have) to Impoverished Peoples? (B.M. Wooldridge) 9 Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing (Nathan Nobis) 10 An Argument Against Capital Punishment (Noah Levin) 11 Common Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) 12 Better (Philosophical) Arguments about Abortion (Nathan Nobis & Kristina Grob) -/- UNIT THREE: PERSONS, AUTONOMY, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND RIGHTS 13 Animal Rights (Eduardo Salazar) 14 John Rawls and the “Veil of Ignorance” (Ben Davies) 15 Environmental Ethics: Climate Change (Jonathan Spelman) 16 Rape, Date Rape, and the “Affirmative Consent” Law in California (Noah Levin) 17 The Ethics of Pornography: Deliberating on a Modern Harm (Eduardo Salazar) 18 The Social Contract (Thomas Hobbes) -/- UNIT FOUR: HAPPINESS 19 Is Pleasure all that Matters? Thoughts on the “Experience Machine” (Prabhpal Singh) 20 Utilitarianism (J.S. Mill) 21 Utilitarianism: Pros and Cons (B.M. Wooldridge) 22 Existentialism, Genetic Engineering, and the Meaning of Life: The Fifths (Noah Levin) 23 The Solitude of the Self (Elizabeth Cady Stanton) 24 Game Theory, the Nash Equilibrium, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Douglas E. Hill) -/- UNIT FIVE: RELIGION, LAW, AND ABSOLUTE MORALITY 25 The Myth of Gyges and The Crito (Plato) 26 God, Morality, and Religion (Kristin Seemuth Whaley) 27 The Categorical Imperative (Immanuel Kant) 28 The Virtues (Aristotle) 29 Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche) 30 Other Moral Theories: Subjectivism, Relativism, Emotivism, Intuitionism, etc. (Jan F. Jacko). (shrink)

We explore the possibility that a priori philosophical commitments continue to result in a narrowing of inquiry in moral psychology and education where theistic worldviews are concerned. Drawing from the theories of Edward L. Thorndike and John Dewey, we examine naturalistic philosophical commitments that influenced the study of moral psychology and moral education in the USA. We then address the question of whether these foundational naturalistic commitments can be rendered as compatible with theistic commitments, using both modernist and postmodern philosophical (...) approaches that might be viewed as attempts at compatibility. Arguing that these attempts at compatibility fail, we draw from contemporary approaches to moral psychology and education in order to illustrate how naturalistic commitments might prevent these approaches from adequately addressing theistic understandings and experiences of morality. (shrink)

There is one nautical term which has been neglected by those who have written about the Greek ship—for the very good reason that it had ceased to be used literally by the time our records, literary and epigraphic, begin. This is a pity, since the silence of experts has resulted in an absurdity, or at least obscurity, appearing in the dictionaries. An unattested original meaning ‘under-rower’ has been universally assumed for the word ujnjpenjs . This assumption not merely requires proof (...) but is in sore need of explanation. What is an ‘under-rower’? And why did the term pass out of use in that sense? (shrink)

This chapter begins with a discussion of the “opposition” between beauty and truth, and the way Nietzsche seems to divide his loyalty between them. It then considers Nietzsche's genealogy and argues that Nietzsche wants us to redesign our aesthetic aims once again, by “self selecting” them. This fourth locus of Darwinism in Nietzsche is probably the most surprising of all.

This article explores a phenomenological foundation for the study of emotion and contrasts that approach with behavioral and cognitive paradigms. The paper attempts to reveal the inadequacy of those more mainstream contemporary paradigms and to establish the superiority of a phenomenological approach. In the history of psychology there have been many ways of explaining emotion, and this article will offer critiques of some of these significant paradigms. In presenting a phenomenological starting point as more adequate, the approaches of Magda Arnold (...) and James Hillman will be explored to uncover valuable ways of describing and conceptualizing this complex human phenomenon. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In spite of wars, the armament race, pollution, poverty, and other evils, a Christian view of progress is one of optimism, but qualified and realistic.

Fieldwork experiences in the summer of 2003 resulted in confusion regarding the ethical positioning of myself (the interviewer) in relation to the multiple 'actants' that constituted the research subject(s). This paper explores some of these personal issues and conflicts in order to clarify, gain perspective on and critique the nature (and indeed the 'Nature') of my fieldwork. The multiple positioning of participants within networks of agricultural and social ethics is addressed. I borrow Lewis Holloway's idea of relational ethical identity, in (...) order to resituate and rethink the interviews in terms of actor-network theory. This paper argues that ethical identities and ethical 'natures' can be understood as relationally constructed and constituted within networks. The ways in which notions of (un)ethical agricultural relations shaped each interview experience are also explored. Specifically, how did my ideas of (un)ethical farming influence my 'ethical take' on how different farmers operated? I also argue that all encounters are ethically charged and, as such, encounters result in emotional tensions. (shrink)

Fast delivery to customers required Amazon fulfillment center employees to meet high daily productivity quotas. In some of the centers, robots and people worked together. The efficiency of the robots and the company’s productivity standards, made it challenging for workers to avoid injury. Candace accepted a position in a center utilizing robots and was injured on the job, just like hundreds of others. Her injuries and lack of workplace accommodations prevented her from meeting productivity quotas and consequently jeopardized her job. (...) She wondered if customers understood the human cost incurred to achieve such fast delivery and if it was ethical to subject employees to such work environments. Students are asked to analyze the situation from various ethical perspectives and offer their opinions to Candace. During their analysis they will learn about ethics, ethical standards, stakeholders, and corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

Much else was done by Rose and Sullivan in their possibly conclusive attempt to restore sense to the rebus passage, but the reading super scorpionem locustam was Gaselee's, as Rose and Sullivan clearly acknowledge. This seems unluckily to have escaped B. Baldwin, otherwise he would have noticed that Gaselee also fancied in his correction an allusion to the poisoner Locusta. For those who may have difficulty in obtaining Gaselee's collotype reproduction, I quote the relevant part: ‘But what have lobsters to (...) do with poisoners? Is it permissible to see a more or less open reference to Locusta, the queen of all poisoners? If so, we have here another little piece of evidence which will help us to date the Satyricon.’. (shrink)

Discusses concepts of agency and free will from the perspective of clinical practice and feminism. Following a definition of agency that locates it in a relational context , the problematized nature of subjective experience is explored from both a feminist and a psychoanalytic perspective. These considerations set the stage for examining the contradictions and dilemmas of clinical practice devoted to individual change and improving lives as well as political values and ideology devoted to social change, suggesting the history of incest (...) in Western culture and practice as an example. The need to act/practice despite uncertainty is acknowledged, relating the position of the practitioner to the responsibilities of being a parent. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The experiences of students taking the same courses in the humanities by distance learning were compared when tutorial support was provided conventionally or online . The Course Experience Questionnaire and the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory were administered in a postal survey to 1264 students taking two different courses with the UK Open University. There were no significant differences between the students who received face-to-face tuition and those who received online tuition either in their perceptions of the academic quality of (...) their courses or in the approaches to studying that they adopted on those courses. Provided that tutors and students receive appropriate training and support, course designers in the humanities can be confident about introducing online forms of tutorial support in campus-based or distance education. (shrink)