"This volume contains two brief works by Isaiah Berlin, an acclaimed philosopher and thinker of the 20th century. "The first" is a short fictional piece he wrote when he was twelve reflecting his belief that the idea of a perfect society cannot justify the cruelties he saw in the Russian Revolution. "The last" is an essay he wrote the year before he died synthesizing his thoughts on topics such as freedom, determinism, and pluralism. Also included are several tributes to Berlin's (...) friendship, conversation, and thought."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This remarkable collection contains Isaiah Berlin's appreciations of seventeen people of unusual distinction in the intellectual or political world, sometimes both.

Few today can escape exposure to mass art. Nevertheless, despite the fact that mass art provides the primary source of aesthetic experience for the majority of people, mass art is a topic that has been neglected by analytic philosophers of art. The Philosophy of Mass Art addresses that lacuna. It shows why philosophers have previously resisted and/or misunderstood mass art and it develops new frameworks for understanding mass art in relation to the emotions, morality, and ideology.

Truthmaker theory is commonly thought to pose a challenge for presentism. Presentism seems to lack the ontological and ideological resources required to adequately underwrite the truth of propositions concerning the past. That is because if presentism is true, then the past does not exist. According to the standard response to this challenge, the truth of propositions concerning the past supervenes on surrogate entities that ‘stand proxy’ for past things. I argue that in order for the standard response to the truthmaker (...) challenge to succeed these surrogate entities must stand in necessary connections to the past. I go on to argue that because the standard response is already committed to denying the existence of cross-temporal modal connections of this kind, by its own lights that response is in error.1. (shrink)

An examination of the controversial "theory of mind" hypothesis, which states that children with autism are unable to comprehend other people's mental states. The theory relates to the most fundamental questions of normal development as well as to autism i.

This paper offers a new way to evaluate counterfactual conditionals on the supposition that actually, there is no time. We then parlay this method of evaluation into a way of evaluating causal claims. Our primary aim is to preserve, at a minimum, the assertibility of certain counterfactual and causal claims once time has been excised from reality. This is an important first step in a more general reconstruction project that has two important components. First, recovering our ordinary language claims involving (...) notions such as persistence, change and agency and, second, recovering enough observational evidence so that any timeless metaphysics is not empirically self-refuting. However, the project of investigating causation in a timeless setting has a greater relevance than its application to timeless physical theory alone. For, as we show, it can be used to model the assertibility conditions of causal claims more generally. (shrink)

We develop a new version of the causal theory of spacetime. Whereas traditional versions of the theory seek to identify spatiotemporal relations with causal relations, the version we develop takes causal relations to be the grounds for spatiotemporal relations. Causation is thus distinct from, and more basic than, spacetime. We argue that this non-identity theory, suitably developed, avoids the challenges facing the traditional identity theory.

This paper offers a new account of metaphysical explanation. The account is modelled on Kitcher’s unificationist approach to scientific explanation. We begin, in Sect. 2, by briefly introducing the notion of metaphysical explanation and outlining the target of analysis. After that, we introduce a unificationist account of metaphysical explanation before arguing that such an account is capable of capturing four core features of metaphysical explanations: irreflexivity, non-monotonicity, asymmetry and relevance. Since the unificationist theory of metaphysical explanation inherits irreflexivity and non-monotonicity (...) directly from the unificationist theory of scientific explanation that underwrites it, we focus on demonstrating how the account can secure asymmetry and relevance. (shrink)

The anglophone philosophy profession has a well-known problem with gender equity. A sig-nificant aspect of the problem is the fact that there are simply so many more male philoso-phers than female philosophers among students and faculty alike. The problem is at its stark-est at the faculty level, where only 22% - 24% of philosophers are female in the United States (Van Camp 2014), the United Kingdom (Beebee & Saul 2011) and Australia (Goddard 2008).<1> While this is a result of the (...) percentage of women declining at each point through-out the standard career trajectory, recent large-scale studies in the United States (Paxton et al. 2012) and Australia (Goddard et al. 2008) have identified a key drop-off point as the transi-tion between taking introductory classes and majoring in philosophy. So why do dispropor-tionately few female students choose to major in philosophy? (shrink)

One of the major difficulties facing presentism is the problem of causation. In this paper, I propose a new solution to that problem, one that is compatible with intrinsic, fundamental causal relations. Accommodating relations of this kind is important because (i) according to David Lewis (2004), such relations are needed to account for causation in our world and worlds relevantly similar to our own, (ii) there is no other strategy currently available that successfully reconciles presentism with relations of this kind (...) and (iii) resolving the problem of causation by accommodating intrinsic, fundamental causal relations provides the presentist with a far more general solution to the problem of causation than those currently on offer. (shrink)

Windelband, réputé comme chef de l'école néokantienne de Bade, s'oppose comme Bergson au relativisme et au positivisme. Pour lui, comprendre Kant, c'est le dépasser, et ce, dans la direction de Hegel ; lire Bergson, c'est retrouver le sens de l' événement dans une métaphysique de l'irrépétable, qui, en montrant l'insuffisance du criticisme, ouvre la porte aux sciences historiques. Cela est l'interprétation positive de Bergson. Mais la critique est qu'il faut séparer totalement la psychologie de la philosophie, contrairement à la tradition (...) philosophique française, encore observée par Bergson. Mais le volontarisme bergsonien apparaît comme représentatif de l'esprit de la philosophie du tournant du XIXe au XXe siècle. Mieux encore, avec Bergson, la philosophie retrouve l'ambition d'être une vision globale du monde. Windelband, well-known for being the leader of the Neo-Kantian School of Bade, together with Bergson, is opposed to both relativism and positivism. According to him, understanding Kant means going further than the latter and, more, in Hegel's direction. Reading Bergson means finding again the meaning of event within metaphysics of what may not be repeated which, by showing the insufficiency of criticism, opens a new way towards historical sciences. Such is the positivie interpretation of Bergson. But the criticism is such as one should imperatively separate psychology from philosophy, contrary to the French philosophical tradition, still observed by Bergson. But Bergsonian voluntarism appears as some kind of representative of the spirit of philosophy at the turn of the 19th-20th century. Better further, with Bergson philosophy recaptures its ambition to become a global vision of the world. (shrink)

What distinguishes causation from grounding? One suggestion is that causation, but not grounding, occurs over time. Recently, however, counterexamples to this simple temporal criterion have been offered. In this paper, we situate the temporal criterion within a broader framework that focuses on two aspects: locational overlapping in space and time and the presence of intermediaries in space and time. We consider, and reject, the idea that the difference between grounding and causation is that grounding can occur without intermediaries. We go (...) on to use the fact that grounding and causation both involve intermediaries to develop a better temporal criterion for distinguishing causation from grounding. The criterion is this: when a cause and effect are spatially disjoint, there is always a chain of causal intermediaries between the cause and the effect that are extended in time. By contrast, when the grounds and the grounded are spatially disjoint, there is always a chain of grounding intermediaries, but the chain need not be extended in time, it can be purely spatial. The difference between grounding and causation, then, is that causation requires time for chaining in a way that grounding does not. (shrink)

The counterfactual approach to explainable AI (XAI) seeks to provide understanding of AI systems through the provision of counterfactual explanations. In a recent systematic review, Chou et al. (Inform Fus 81:59–83, 2022) argue that the counterfactual approach does not clearly provide causal understanding. They diagnose the problem in terms of the underlying framework within which the counterfactual approach has been developed. To date, the counterfactual approach has not been developed in concert with the approach for specifying causes developed by Pearl (...) (Causality: Models, reasoning, and inference. Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Woodward (Making things happen: A theory of causal explanation. Oxford University Press, 2003). In this paper, I build on Chou et al.’s work by applying the Pearl-Woodward approach. I argue that the standard counterfactual approach to XAI is capable of delivering causal understanding, but that there are limitations on its capacity to do so. I suggest a way to overcome these limitations. (shrink)

Why do we so often care about the outcomes of games when nothing is at stake? There is a paradox here, much like the paradox of fiction, which concerns why we care about the fates and threats of merely fictional beings. I argue that the paradox threatens to overturn a great deal of what philosophers have thought about caring, severing its connection to value and undermining its moral weight. I defend a solution to the paradox that draws on Kendall Walton's (...) solution to the paradox of fiction, developing his idea that it be extended to games. The solution takes games to involve make‐believe: in particular, players and spectators make‐believe that the outcome of the game matters. I also explore how the phenomenon extends beyond games. And I explore some moral implications: in particular, my view preserves the idea that we have reason not to impede others in their pursuit of what they care about. (shrink)

Mathematics appears to play a genuine explanatory role in science. But how do mathematical explanations work? Recently, a counterfactual approach to mathematical explanation has been suggested. I argue that such a view fails to differentiate the explanatory uses of mathematics within science from the non-explanatory uses. I go on to offer a solution to this problem by combining elements of the counterfactual theory of explanation with elements of a unification theory of explanation. The result is a theory according to which (...) a counterfactual is explanatory when it is an instance of a generalized counterfactual scheme. (shrink)

Time is woven into the fabric of our lives. Everything we do, we do in and across time. It is not just that our lives are stretched out in time, from the moment of birth to the moment of our death. It is that our lives are stories. We make sense of ourselves, today, by understanding who we were yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that; by understanding what we did and why we did it. Our memories (...) shape our present selves, since we are the product of who we were, and who we remember being. Yet who we are lasts for but a moment. It is who we will be that demands attention. We are forever projecting ourselves into the future. We painstakingly plan for the needs of our future selves, all the while knowing that while what we do will make those future selves who they are, still, our future selves are elusive. So it is not simply that we happen to live our lives in time, the way, say, one might happen to live in Australia, or Singapore. It is hard to fathom how things could be otherwise. What would it be to live a life without time? Yet time itself is intangible. Though we are keenly aware of what has been ‒ of pain and loss, regret and pride ‒ and of what might be ‒ of anticipation, and dread, and longing ‒ time itself seems unaffected by anything we do. Though we can anticipate a future birthday cake, time itself cannot be tasted. Though we can dread a future dentist’s appointment, time itself cannot be touched. Though we remember the crunching of leaves this past autumn, time itself cannot be heard. How can it be that something so central to each of us, to who we are, and what we care about, can be so spectral? What, in the end, is time? Is time real, like a substance in which each of us, like insects in amber, finds ourselves trapped? Is time a dimension through which we can move? Is time not a thing at all, but some connection between events? If time is real, what is it like? Does it flow like a river, taking each of us prisoner in its current, washing us ever closer to the end of our lives? Is time like a cresting wave, coming ever closer to each of us from the future, engulfing us, and then receding into the past? Or is time static? Like a one-way road that each of us might wander, with no chance to turn back? Or perhaps time is like none of these things. Perhaps time is more like space; something we can navigate freely, so that we can visit different times just like we visit different places. Perhaps we can we travel in time the way we can travel in space. These questions, and many more, are the focus of this book. Now, you might wonder what philosophers are doing writing a book about time. Surely that’s a job for physicists! It is true: a great deal of what we know about time stems from our understanding of physics. However, even in physics we find that there are questions about time that go unanswered. Moreover, increasingly, physicists are turning to philosophers for help in understanding the role that time plays in current physical theories. Our goal is to get the reader up to speed on some of the central issues that influence our understanding of time so that they too may play a role in this ongoing discussion between science and philosophy. We hope that in doing so it will become clear what philosophy can bring to the study of time. There is a natural narrative in philosophy regarding the study of time, and we have chosen to organise this book according to that narrative. However, the book may also be approached in a ‘choose-your-own adventure’ spirit. While later chapters build on material introduced in earlier chapters, you can skip around, reading the book in any order you choose. For the instructor, this means that she can design her course around this book in any number of ways, depending on the particular topic she wishes to focus on. (shrink)

Friends as well as foes of Kant have long been uneasy over his emphasis on duty, but lately the view that there is something morally repugnant about acting from duty seems to be gaining in popularity. More and more philosophers indicate their readiness to jettison duty and the moral 'ought' and to conceive of the perfectly moral person as someone who has all the right desires and acts accordingly without any notion that (s)he ought to act in this way. Elsewhere' (...) I have argued that such a picture of the perfectly moral person is flawed. In this paper I examine the claim that acting from duty is morally repugnant. There is some truth to this charge, but, I argue, the repugnance attaches not to acting from duty as such, but only to certain ways of acting from duty. In isolating the objectionable elements of acting from duty, I hope not only to vindicate the skeletal concept but also to offer illumination on the question of just how we should understand morally good conduct. (shrink)

Plans to automate killing by using robots armed with lethal weapons have been a prominent feature of most US military forces? roadmaps since 2004. The idea is to have a staged move from ?man-in-the-loop? to ?man-on-the-loop? to full autonomy. While this may result in considerable military advantages, the policy raises ethical concerns with regard to potential breaches of International Humanitarian Law, including the Principle of Distinction and the Principle of Proportionality. Current applications of remote piloted robot planes or drones offer (...) lessons about how automated weapons platforms could be misused by extending the range of legally questionable, targeted killings by security and intelligence forces. Moreover, the alleged moral disengagement by remote pilots will only be exacerbated by the use of autonomous robots. Leaders in the international community need to address the difficult legal and moral issues now, before the current mass proliferation of development reaches fruition. (shrink)

In this essay I trace the role of history in the philosophy of art from the early twentieth century to the present, beginning with the rejection of history by formalists like Clive Bell. I then attempt to show how the arguments of people like Morris Weitz and Arthur Danto led to a re-appreciation of history by philosophers of art such as Richard Wollheim, Jerrold Levinson, Robert Stecker and others.

Is time necessary for causation? We argue that, given a counterfactual theory of causation, it is not. We defend this claim by considering cases of counterfactual dependence in quantum mechanics. These cases involve laws of nature that govern entanglement. These laws make possible the evaluation of causal counterfactuals between space-like separated entangled particles. There is, for the proponent of a counterfactual theory of causation, a possible world in which causation but not time exists that can be reached by ‘stripping out’ (...) time from the actual world, leaving quantum mechanical laws intact. (shrink)

COVID-19 has disproportionately affected ethnic minorities and migrants, not only through an increased risk of infection and death (Pan et al. 2020), but also through experiences of harassment, mar...

Justifications and excuses are defenses that exculpate. They are therefore much more like each other than like such defenses as diplomatic immunity, which does not exculpate. But they exculpate in different ways, and it has proven difficult to agree on just what that difference consists in. In this paper I take a step back from justification and excuse as concepts in criminal law, and look at the concepts as they arise in everyday life. To keep the task manageable, I focus (...) primarily on excuses and excusing activities, distinguishing them from justifications as well as from other close relatives, in particular, forgiving and pardoning. I draw upon J.L. Austin’s classic A Plea for Excuses, but expand on his account, suggesting that we offer excuses for reasons besides those he mentions. My hope is that my examination of excuses and excusing activities will help us rethink our views on just how justifications and excuses differ, views which often are worked out without much attention to how these concepts function in everyday life and to the connection between offers of excuses and justifications and the rules of civility. (shrink)

There have been several recent attempts to account for the special authority of self-knowledge by grounding it in a constitutive relation between an agent's intentional states and her judgments about those intentional states. This constitutive relation is said to hold in virtue of the rationality of the subject. I argue, however, that there are two ways in which we have self-knowledge without there being such a constitutive relation between first-order intentional states and the second-order judgments about them. Recognition of this (...) fact thus represents a significant challenge to the rational agency view. (shrink)

Enhanced indispensability arguments seek to establish realism about mathematics based on the explanatory role that mathematics plays in science. Idealizations pose a problem for such arguments. Idealizations, in a similar way to mathematics, boost the explanatory credentials of our best scientific theories. And yet, idealizations are not the sorts of things that are supposed to attract a realist attitude. I argue that the explanatory symmetry between idealizations and mathematics can potentially be broken as follows: although idealizations contribute to the explanatory (...) power of our best theories, they do not carry the explanatory load. It is at least open however that mathematics is load-carrying. To give this idea substance, I offer an analysis of what it is to carry the explanatory load in terms of difference-making and counterfactuals. (shrink)

There is an old meta-philosophical worry: very roughly, metaphysical theories have no observational consequences and so the study of metaphysics has no value. The worry has been around in some form since the rise of logical positivism in the early twentieth century but has seen a bit of a renaissance recently. In this paper, I provide an apology for metaphysics in the face of this kind of concern. The core of the argument is this: pure mathematics detaches from science in (...) much the same manner as metaphysics and yet it is valuable nonetheless. The source of value enjoyed by pure mathematics extends to metaphysics as well. Accordingly, if one denies that metaphysics has value, then one is forced to deny that pure mathematics has value. The argument places an added burden on the sceptic of metaphysics. If one truly believes that metaphysics is worthless (as some philosophers do), then one must give up on pure mathematics as well. (shrink)

A great deal has been written about 'would' counterfactuals of causal dependence. Comparatively little has been said regarding 'would' counterfactuals of ontological dependence. The standard Lewis-Stalnaker semantics is inadequate for handling such counterfactuals. That's because some of these counterfactuals are counterpossibles, and the standard Lewis-Stalnaker semantics trivializes for counterpossibles. Fortunately, there is a straightforward extension of the Lewis-Stalnaker semantics available that handles counterpossibles: simply take Lewis's closeness relation that orders possible worlds and unleash it across impossible worlds. To apply the (...) extended semantics, an account of the closeness relation for counterpossibles is needed. In this paper I offer a strategy for evaluating 'would' counterfactuals of ontological dependence that understands closeness between worlds in terms of the metaphysical concept of grounding. (shrink)

A number of approaches to quantum gravity (QG) seem to imply that spacetime does not exist. Philosophers are quick to point out, however, that the loss of spacetime should not be regarded as total. Rather, we should interpret these approaches as ones that threaten the fundamentality but not the existence of spacetime. In this paper, I argue for two claims. First, I argue that spacetime realism is not forced by QG; spacetime eliminativism remains an option. Second, I argue that eliminativism (...) provides a useful framework for developing two existing approaches to the metaphysics of QG, involving functionalism and mereology respectively. (shrink)

Tim travels back in time and tries to kill his grandfather before his father was born. Tim fails. But why? Lewis's response was to cite "coincidences": Tim is the unlucky subject of gun jammings, banana peels, sudden changes of heart, and so on. A number of challenges have been raised against Lewis's response. The latest of these focuses on explanation. This paper diagnoses the source of this new disgruntlement and offers an alternative explanation for Tim's failure, one that Lewis would (...) not have liked. The explanation is an obvious one but controversial, so it is defended against all the objections that can be mustered. (shrink)

Hobbes's manuscript refutation of Thomas White bears no title. Some modern scholars have proposed, on the basis of references to it by Mersenne, that the work was entitled 'De motu, loco et tempore', and the abbreviated version of this, 'De motu', has become current in modern scholarship. This research note analyses Mersenne's references, and concludes that this apparent title was a descriptive phrase introduced by Mersenne himself. The full description included the term 'philosophia' ; this suggests a double focus, not (...) only on the manuscript text, but also on Hobbes's 'body' of natural philosophy more generally. (shrink)

I introduce an argument for Platonism based on intra-mathematical explanation: the explanation of one mathematical fact by another. The argument is important for two reasons. First, if the argument succeeds then it provides a basis for Platonism that does not proceed via standard indispensability considerations. Second, if the argument fails it can only do so for one of three reasons: either because there are no intra-mathematical explanations, or because not all explanations are backed by dependence relations, or because some form (...) of noneism-the view according to which non-existent entities possess properties and stand in relations-is true. The argument thus forces a choice between nominalism without noneism, intra-mathematical explanation and a backing conception of explanation. You can have any two, but not all three. (shrink)

I argue that there is nothing about the structure of inference to the best explanation (IBE) that prevents it from establishing a contradiction in general, though there are some potential limitations on when it can be used for this purpose. Studying the relationship between IBE and contradictions is worthwhile for three reasons. First, it enhances our understanding of IBE. We see that, in many cases, IBE does not require explanations to be consistent, though there are some cases where consistency may (...) be required. Second, the argument has implications for the debate over scientific realism. Many scientific theories appear to be inconsistent. The best argument for scientific realism, however, appeals to IBE. My argument thus shows that a certain kind of realist faces a threat from inconsistent theories. Third, the argument is important for dialetheism. Dialetheists maintain that some contradictions are true. Many of the arguments in favour of dialetheism appeal to explanatory considerations. What I say here provides support for defending dialethism using an IBE-based methodology. (shrink)

In their recent paper ‘Is pregnancy a disease?’, Anna Smajdor and Joona Räsänen argue in the affirmative, highlighting features shared by both pregnancy and paradigmatic diseases. In particular, they point to the harmful symptoms and side effects of pregnancy, and the provision of medical treatment to both pregnant patients and those aiming to avoid pregnancy. They consider both subjectivist and objectivist approaches taken by philosophers of health in defining disease, and point out that neither approach convincingly excludes pregnancy. Finally, they (...) present a normative case for treating pregnancy as a disease, suggesting that this attitude could promote preventive provision of contraception and abortion, and encourage respect for (and better treatment of) patients’ suffering during pregnancy. In this response, I challenge various parts of Smajdor and Räsänen’s argument, and cast doubt on the normative benefits of their approach. (shrink)