This paper illuminates the history and design process of the various President’s Flags of the United States of America between 1915 and 1959, in particular focusing on the efforts to produce such a banner for President Harry S. Truman in 1945.

This paper reports the results of a pilot study of differences in ethical evaluations between business faculty and students at a Southern university. Data were collected from 137 business students (46 freshmen and 67 seniors) and 34 business faculty members. Significant differences were found in 7 of the 30 situations between freshmen and faculty and four situations between seniors and faculty. When the combined means for each group were tested, there was no significant difference in the means at the 0.05 (...) level of significance. A trend was revealed, however, in that the majority of the time faculty members were the most ethically oriented followed by seniors and then freshmen. (shrink)

Although the concept of intelligence is difficult to define, research has provided evidence for a significant genetic component. Attempts are now being made to use molecular genetic approaches to identify genes contributing to intelligence, and to determine the ways in which they interact with environmental variables. This research is then likely to determine the developmental pathways of intelligence, in an effort to understand mental handicap and learning disorders and develop new treatment strategies. This paper reviews research on the genetic basis (...) of intelligence, and discusses the ethical concerns, including the role of genetic information, the value we place on intelligence and the allocation of resources. It will be argued that the objections raised are problematic, and that because of the value of this knowledge and the prospect of improving lives, this research is morally required. We will then provide a brief analysis of the issues raised by enhancement of intelligence using genetic technology, and will argue that there is no intrinsic difference between this and other means of optimising intelligence. (shrink)

In several texts, Kant announces that there are three distinct mental faculties: cognition, desire, and feeling. This trinitarian commitment should give us pause, for many people operate instead with a dualist model of reason and emotion, where desire and feeling are usually squished together under emotion. Here, as elsewhere, the Kantian model is more complicated. On Kant's view, each of the three faculties has its own specific work to do and generates its own kinds of representations. We do not simply (...) have emotions that... (shrink)

Although not universally accepted at the time, the atomic hypothesis during the 19th century provided a definite ordering scheme for certain relatively sophisticated chemical phenomena. As such, it was conceptually responsible for the formulation and precise articulation of important seminal ideas in chemical studies. In this paper we will explore this claim with regard to the views of the British chemist Alexander W. Williamson.

InSuppose and Tell, Williamson makes a new and original attempt to defend the material conditional account of indicative conditionals. His overarching argument is that this account offers the best explanation of the data concerning how people evaluate and use such conditionals. We argue that Williamson overlooks several important alternative explanations, some of which appear to explain the relevant data at least as well as, or even better than, the material conditional account does. Along the way, we also show (...) that Williamson errs at important junctures about what exactly the relevant data are. (shrink)

Philosophers such as Robert Nozick have argued that knowledge must be sensitive, in roughly the sense that if what one knew had been false, one would not have believed it. Such a counterfactual constraint has been used to explain the appeal of scepticism. This chapter argues that no version of the constraint is correct. It also criticizes the variant of Nozick's approach developed by Keith DeRose on which the standard for the application of the word ‘know’ depends on the (...) conversational context. A version of the argument given by Hilary Putnam that if one was a brain in a vat, one could not think that one was constructed using perceptual demonstrative expressions. (shrink)

Audi defends his views in epistemology against the challenges raised by Laurence BonJour, Timothy Williamson, and William Alston in Part II, “Knowledge, Justification, and Acceptance.” Specifically, Audi addresses his concerns about the sorts of beliefs that can be noninferentially justified, the sense in which the grounds of justification may be internal, and the range of attitudes that admit of justification and rationality.

0. Logic is sometimes conceived as metaphysically neutral, so that nothing controversial in metaphysics is logically valid. That conception devastates logic. Just about every putative principle of logic has been contested on metaphysical grounds. According to some, future contingencies violate the law of excluded middle; according to others, the set of all sets that are not members of themselves makes a contradiction true. Even the structural principle that chaining together valid arguments yields a valid argument has been rejected in response (...) to sorites paradoxes. In each case, a deviant metaphysics corresponds to the deviant logic. Of course, if one is trying to persuade deviant metaphysicians of the error of their ways, one is unlikely to get far by relying on logical principles that they reject. But that obvious dialectical exigency stably marks out no realm of logic. Each logical principle has persuasive force in some dialectical contexts and not in others. We do better to admit that logic has metaphysically contentious implications, and embrace them ─ if we know what they are. (shrink)

I argue against ‘right reason’ style accounts of how we should manage our beliefs in the face of higher-order evidence. I start from the observation that such views seem to have bad practical consequences when we imagine someone acting on them. I then catalogs ways that Williamson, Weatherson, and Lasonen-Aarnio have tried to block objections based on these consequences; I argue all fail. I then move on to offer my own theoretical picture of a rational ‘should believe,’ and show (...) that, if such a picture is right, it can neatly explain why right reason isn't. I close by arguing that the extent to which anti-luminosity arguments motivate right reason has been overstated; the positive picture developed here, despite rejecting right reason, is nonetheless consistent with luminosity failures. (shrink)

This paper considers what distinguishes speech acts such as asserting, stating and claiming from related ones such as suggesting, hinting and conversationally implicating. The distinction cannot be that assertion et al. have a word-to-world direction of fit, since suggesting, hinting, etc., do so as well. The same point applies to attempting to draw the distinction in terms of intentions to induce beliefs, etc. Our proposal, drawing on important ideas from Dummett and Williamson, is that assertion is intimately tied to (...) declara­tive sentences, and to the knowledge norm -albeit in a more roundabout way than they imagined. In particular, declaratives are those devices purpose-built to trigger the knowledge norm; and to assert is to achieve the level of norma­tive commitment, “normative risk”, that one would have achieved had one used a declarative. (shrink)

Contingentism is the view that it is contingent which things exist. Despite its plausibility, advocates of contingentism face a well-known ‘challenge’ to demonstrate that they can draw what appear to be intelligible modal distinctions (Williamson Modal Logic as Metaphysics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). In this article, I argue that if certain controversial modal principles fail, the challenge contingentists face becomes much more difficult. Whereas extant challenges concern contingentists’ inability to draw quite theoretical second-order modal distinctions, I present a (...) challenge which concerns contingentists’ inability to draw simpler first-order distinctions. This indicates that in certain modal settings there may well be significant first-order barriers to maintaining contingentism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay defends a qualified version of Quine's thesis of universal revisability against Chalmers's recent conditionalization-based criticisms of it. It is argued that an embodied view of cognitive processing undermines Chalmers's account of nonrevisable a priori justification, which presupposes that concepts prefigure the confirmation-relations into which they enter, so as to make such relations rationally accessible to anyone who possesses those concepts. On the view developed here, bodily interaction with the world and the accompanying subconscious processing can change subjects' (...) dispositions to apply their concepts, in ways that are not rationally accessible to them, even given a complete description of that interaction, and do not constitute a change in the content of the concepts involved. Thus a subject who treats a proposition as indefeasibly justified a priori might nevertheless significantly lower her credence in that proposition, in ways that are not accessible to the subject on the basis of her grasp of the content of the relevant concepts. This discussion has further implications concerning the role of the a priori in the philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy is dedicated to Timothy Williamson's work on modality. It consists of a new paper by Williamson followed by papers on Williamson's work on modality, with each followed by a reply by Williamson. -/- Contributors: Andrew Bacon, Kit Fine, Peter Fritz, Jeremy Goodman, John Hawthorne, Øystein Linnebo, Ted Sider, Robert Stalnaker, Meghan Sullivan, Gabriel Uzquiano, Barbara Vetter, Timothy Williamson, Juhani Yli-Vakkuri.

For over thirty years, Robert Audi has produced important work in ethics, epistemology, and the theory of action. This volume features thirteen new critical essays on Audi by a distinguished group of authors: Fred Adams, William Alston, Laurence BonJour, Roger Crisp, Elizabeth Fricker, Bernard Gert, Thomas Hurka, Hugh McCann, Al Mele, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Raimo Tuomela, Candace Vogler, and Timothy Williamson. Audi's introductory essay provides a thematic overview interconnecting his views in ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of action. The volume (...) concludes with his comprehensive response essay that yields an illuminating dialog with all his critics and often extends his previous work. (shrink)

This paper is a study of higher-order contingentism – the view, roughly, that it is contingent what properties and propositions there are. We explore the motivations for this view and various ways in which it might be developed, synthesizing and expanding on work by Kit Fine, Robert Stalnaker, and Timothy Williamson. Special attention is paid to the question of whether the view makes sense by its own lights, or whether articulating the view requires drawing distinctions among possibilities that, (...) according to the view itself, do not exist to be drawn. The paper begins with a non-technical exposition of the main ideas and technical results, which can be read on its own. This exposition is followed by a formal investigation of higher-order contingentism, in which the tools of variable-domain intensional model theory are used to articulate various versions of the view, understood as theories formulated in a higher-order modal language. Our overall assessment is mixed: higher-order contingentism can be fleshed out into an elegant systematic theory, but perhaps only at the cost of abandoning some of its original motivations. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson has provided damaging counterexamples to Robert Nozick’s sensitivity principle. The examples are based on Williamson’s anti-luminosity arguments, and they show how knowledge requires a margin for error that appears to be incompatible with sensitivity. I explain how Nozick can rescue sensitivity from Williamson’s counterexamples by appeal to a specific conception of the methods by which an agent forms a belief. I also defend the proposed conception of methods against Williamson’s criticisms.

The authors use empirical research into the environmental practices of 31 manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to show that ‚business performance’ and ‚regulation’ considerations drive behaviour. They suggest that this is inevitable, given the market-based decision-making frames that permeate and dominate the industry in which manufacturing SMEs operate. Since the environment is a pillar of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the findings have important implications for CSR policy, which promotes voluntary actions predicated on a business case. It is argued that (...) this approach will not alter the behaviour of manufacturing SMEs significantly because CSR practice will be regarded as an optional and costly ‚extra’ affecting core business activity. Consequently, the use and development of existing regulatory structures, providing minimum standards for many activities covered by CSR, remains the most effective means through which the behaviour of manufacturing SMEs will be changed in the short to medium-term. Another feature of the paper is the distinction made between ‚business performance’ and the ‚business case’ argument. Business performance emphasises cost reductions and efficiency whereas the business case accentuates the benefits to shareholders of good practices as their firms become more attractive to stakeholders and society. Manufacturing SMEs␣try to improve business performance because of the pressures placed on them by market-dominated decision-making frames. These frames do not encourage manufacturing SMEs to undertake voluntary actions for the benefit of wider stakeholders and society. (shrink)

Operational epistemology is, to a first approximation, the attempt to provide cognitive rules such that one is in principle always in a position to know whether one is complying with them. In Knowledge and its Limits, I argue that the only such rules are trivial ones. In this paper, I generalize the argument in several ways to more thoroughly probabilistic settings, in order to show that it does not merely demonstrate some oddity of the folk epistemological conception of knowledge. Some (...) of the generalizations involve a formal semantic framework for treating epistemic probabilities of epistemic probabilities and expectations of expectations. The upshot is that operational epistemology cannot work, and that knowledge-based epistemology has the right characteristics to avoid its problems. (shrink)

While climate change involves spatial, epistemological, social, and temporal remoteness, each type of distance can be bridged with strategies unique to it that can be borrowed from analogous moral problems. Temporal, or intergenerational, distance may actually be a motivational resource if we look at our natural feelings of hope for the future of the world, via Kant’s theory of political history, and for our children. Kant’s theory of hope also provides some basis for including future generations in a theory of (...) justice. (shrink)

Die Fragestellungen der Metaphysik, so scheint es, sind nicht mehr zeitgemäß. Der Begriff erinnert an abgehobene Systeme ohne jeden Realitätssinn. Dabei gibt es kein Denken ohne Metaphysik. Unter Bezugnahme auf die Traditionen der Phänomenologie und der französischen Philosophie versteht Robert Hugo Ziegler Endlichkeit als eine positive Auszeichnung, während der Begriff der Zeitlichkeit die erste Dimension von Sein beschreibt. Sein grundlegender Beitrag zur Reflexion über Mensch und Welt zeigt, wie sich die Philosophie selbstbewusst einer Erneuerung der Metaphysik stellen kann.

The full-text of this article is not currently available in ORA, but the original publication is available at springerlink.com.

Public policy on alcohol in the UK relies on health promotion campaigns that encourage individuals who misuse alcohol to make healthier choices about their drinking. Individuals with alcohol-dependence syndrome have an impaired capacity to choose health. As a result, individuals with the worst alcohol misuse problems lie largely outside the reach of choice-based policy. However, such policy has been widely criticized and efforts to reform it are underway. This paper argues that the British Medical Association's recent attempt to improve policy (...) on alcohol in the UK by introducing strategies which have been shown to control drinking within populations still gives insufficient attention to alcohol dependence. This is because it fails accurately and consistently to characterize alcohol dependence and gives insufficient attention to the social challenges it presents. (shrink)

Wir sind Teil einer Natur, die uns übersteigt - Grund genug, die Natur wieder zum Gegenstand philosophischer Reflexionen zu machen. Durch den Essentialismus-Verdacht schien der Begriff bereits für die Philosophie disqualifiziert. Doch Robert Hugo Ziegler zeigt, gestützt unter anderem auf Lukrez und Spinoza, dass die Natur, sobald man sie ernsthaft ins Auge fasst, alles andere als essentialistisch ist. Er ordnet das philosophische Problem der Natur damit in eine Wiederentdeckung metaphysischer Fragestellungen ein, die er originell vorantreibt - und beweist, dass (...) sich die Philosophie dadurch nicht nur zur bloßen Kommentatorin der Naturwissenschaften machen muss. (shrink)

This latest volume of _The Philosopher's Annual_ presents the ten best articles published in the field during 2001. No limitations are placed on the articles' sources, subject matter or mode of treatment, providing for a diverse collection of engaging, high-caliber work that stands as a valuable sample of contemporary philosophy. This year's volume includes papers by Robert Bernasconi, Hans Halvorson, Christopher Hitchcock, Ignacio Jane, Brian Leiter, Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, Joel Pust, Alison Simmons, Jason Stanley and Timothy (...) class='Hi'>Williamson, and Crispin Wright. (shrink)

Things could have been different, but could it also have been different what things there are? It is natural to think so, since I could have failed to be born, and it is natural to think that I would then not have been anything. But what about entities like propositions, properties and relations? Had I not been anything, would there have been the property of being me? In this thesis, I formally develop and assess views according to which it is (...) both contingent what individuals there are and contingent what propositions, properties and relations there are. I end up rejecting these views, and conclude that even if it is contingent what individuals there are, it is necessary what propositions, properties and relations there are. -/- Call the view that it is contingent what individuals there are first-order contingentism, and the view that it is contingent what propositions, properties and relations there are higher-order contingentism. I bring together the three major contributions to the literature on higher-order contingentism, which have been developed largely independently of each other, by Kit Fine, Robert Stalnaker, and Timothy Williamson. I show that a version of Stalnaker's approach to higher-order contingentism was already explored in much more technical detail by Fine, and that it stands up well to the major challenges against higher-order contingentism posed by Williamson. -/- I further show that once a mistake in Stalnaker's development is corrected, each of his models of contingently existing propositions corresponds to the propositional fragment of one of Fine's more general models of contingently existing propositions, properties and relations, and vice versa. I also show that Stalnaker's theory of contingently existing propositions is in tension with his own theory of counterfactuals, but not with one of the main competing theories, proposed by David Lewis. -/- Finally, I connect higher-order contingentism to expressive power arguments against first-order contingentism. I argue that there are intelligible distinctions we draw with talk about "possible things", such as the claim that there are uncountably many possible stars. Since first-order contingentists hold that there are no possible stars apart from the actual stars, they face the challenge of paraphrasing such talk. I show that even in an infinitary higher-order modal logic, the claim that there are uncountably many possible stars can only be paraphrased if higher-order contingentism is false. I therefore conclude that even if first-order contingentism is true, higher-order contingentism is false. (shrink)

'Modernity' has come to refer both to a contested historical category and to an even more contested philosophical and civilisational ideal. In this important collection of essays Robert Pippin takes issue with some prominent assessments of what is or is not philosophically at stake in the idea of a modern revolution in Western civilisation, and presents an alternative view. Professor Pippin disputes many traditional characterisations of the distinctiveness of modern philosophy. In their place he defends claims about agency, freedom, (...) ethical life and modernity itself, all of which are central to the German idealist philosophical tradition, and in particular, to the writings of Hegel. Having considered the Hegelian version of these issues the author explores other accounts as found in Habermas, Strauss, Blumenberg, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. (shrink)

An exploration of the theories, histories, practices, and contradictions of liberalism today. What does it mean to be a liberal in neoliberal times? This collection of short essays attempts to show how liberals and the wider concept of liberalism remain relevant in what many perceive to be a highly illiberal age. Liberalism in the broader sense revolves around tolerance, progress, humanitarianism, objectivity, reason, democracy, and human rights. Liberalism's emphasis on individual rights opened a theoretical pathway to neoliberalism, through private property, (...) a classically minimal liberal state, and the efficiency of “free markets.” In practice, neoliberalism is associated less with the economic deregulation championed by its advocates than the re-regulation of the economy to protect financial capital. Liberalism in Neoliberal Times engages with the theories, histories, practices, and contradictions of liberalism, viewing it in relation to four central areas of public life: human rights, ethnicity and gender, education, and the media. The contributors explore the transformations in as well as the transformative aspects of liberalism and highlight both its liberating and limiting capacities. The book contends that liberalism—in all its forms—continues to underpin specific institutions such as the university, the free press, the courts, and, of course, parliamentary democracy. Liberal ideas are regularly mobilized in areas such as counterterrorism, minority rights, privacy, and the pursuit of knowledge. This book contends that while we may not agree on much, we can certainly agree that an understanding of liberalism and its emancipatory capacity is simply too important to be left to the liberals Contributors Alejandro Abraham-Hamanoiel, Patrick Ainley, Abdullahi An-Na'im, Michael Bailey, Haim Bresheeth, Başak Çalı, David Chandler, William Davies, Costas Douzinas, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman, Roberto Gargarella, Priyamvada Gopal, Jonathan Hardy, John Holmwood, Ratna Kapur, Gholam Khiabany, Ray Kiely, Monika Krause, Deepa Kumar, Arun Kundnani, Colin Leys, Howard Littler, Kathleen Lynch, Robert W. McChesney, Nivedita Menon, Toby Miller, Kate Nash, Joan Pedro-Carañana, Julian Petley, Anne Phillips, Jonathan Rosenhead, Annabelle Sreberny, John Steel, Michael Wayne, Milly Williamson. (shrink)