I provide a manipulation-style argument against classical compatibilism—the claim that freedom to do otherwise is consistent with determinism. My question is simple: if Diana really gave Ernie free will, why isn't she worried that he won't use it precisely as she would like? Diana's non-nervousness, I argue, indicates Ernie's non-freedom. Arguably, the intuition that Ernie lacks freedom to do otherwise is stronger than the direct intuition that he is simply not responsible; this result highlights the importance of the denial of (...) the principle of alternative possibilities for compatibilist theories of responsibility. Along the way, I clarify the dialectical role and structure of “manipulation arguments”, and compare the manipulation argument I develop with the more familiar Consequence Argument. I contend that the two arguments are importantly mutually supporting and reinforcing. The result: classical compatibilists should be nervous—and if PAP is true, all compatibilists should be nervous. (shrink)

In the literature on free will, fatalism, and determinism, a distinction is commonly made between temporally intrinsic (‘hard’) and temporally relational (‘soft’) facts at times; determinism, for instance, is the thesis that the temporally intrinsic state of the world at some given past time, together with the laws, entails a unique future (relative to that time). Further, it is commonly supposed by incompatibilists that only the ‘hard facts’ about the past are fixed and beyond our control, whereas the ‘soft facts’ (...) about the past needn’t be. A substantial literature arose in connection with this distinction, though no consensus emerged as to the proper way to analyze it. It is time, I believe, to revisit these issues. The central claim of this paper is that the attempts to analyze the hard/soft fact distinction got off on fundamentally the wrong track. The crucial feature of soft facts is that they (in some sense) depend on the future. Following recent work on the notion of dependence, however, I argue that the literature on the soft/hard distinction has failed to capture the sense of dependence at stake. This is because such attempts have tried to capture softness in terms of purely modal notions like entailment and necessitation. As I hope to show, however, such notions cannot capture the sort of asymmetrical dependence relevant to soft facthood. Arguing for this claim is the first goal of this paper. My second goal is to gesture towards what an adequate account of soft facthood will really look like. (shrink)

There is a longstanding argument that purports to show that divine foreknowledge is inconsistent with human freedom to do otherwise. Proponents of this argument, however, have for some time been met with the following reply: the argument posits what would have to be a mysterious non-causal constraint on freedom. In this paper, I argue that this objection is misguided – not because after all there can indeed be non-causal constraints on freedom (as in Pike, Fischer, and Hunt), but because the (...) success of the incompatibilist's argument does not require the real possibility of non-causal constraints on freedom. I contend that the incompatibilist's argument is best seen as showing that, given divine foreknowledge, something makes one unfree – and that this something is most plausibly identified, not with the foreknowledge itself, but with the causally deterministic factors that would have to be in place in order for there to be infallible foreknowledge in the first place. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce a problem to the philosophy of religion – the problem of divine moral standing – and explain how this problem is distinct from (albeit related to) the more familiar problem of evil (with which it is often conflated). In short, the problem is this: in virtue of how God would be (or, on some given conception, is) “involved in” our actions, how is it that God has the moral standing to blame us for performing those (...) very actions? In light of the recent literature on “moral standing”, I consider God’s moral standing to blame on two models of “divine providence”: open theism, and theological determinism. I contend that God may have standing on open theism, and – perhaps surprisingly – may also have standing, even on theological determinism, given the truth of compatibilism. Thus, if you think that God could not justly both determine and blame, then you will have to abandon compatibilism. The topic of this paper thus sheds considerable light on the traditional philosophical debate about the conditions of moral responsibility. (shrink)

A prominent recent strategy for advancing the thesis that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism has been to argue that agents who meet compatibilist conditions for responsibility could nevertheless be subject to certain sorts of deterministic manipulation, so that an agent could meet the compatibilist’s conditions for responsibility, but also be living a life the precise details of which someone else determined that she should live. According to the incompatibilist, however, once we became aware that agents had been manipulated (...) or ‘set up’ in the relevant way, we should no longer judge that they are responsible for their behavior, nor should we hold them responsible for it by blaming them, in case what they did was wrong. In this paper, I aim to shift the debate to different terrain. The focus so far has been simply on what we may or may not permissibly say or do concerning manipulated agents. But I believe a powerful new incompatibilist argument can be mounted from considering whether the manipulators themselves can justifiably blame the agents they manipulate in compatibilist-friendly ways. It seems strikingly counterintuitive to suppose that they may do so. The argument of this paper, however, is that, given the right story, incompatibilism provides the best explanation for why this is so. In short, the compatibilist must say that, while such manipulated agents are still responsible, the manipulators lack the moral standing to blame them. But I argue that, on compatibilist assumptions, this explanation ultimately fails. (shrink)

In this paper, I articulate an argument for incompatibilism about moral responsibility and determinism. My argument comes in the form of an extended story, modeled loosely on Peter van Inwagen’s “rollback argument” scenario. I thus call it “the replication argument.” As I aim to bring out, though the argument is inspired by so-called “manipulation” and “original design” arguments, the argument is not a version of either such argument—and plausibly has advantages over both. The result, I believe, is a more convincing (...) incompatibilist argument than those we have considered previously. (shrink)

A central question, if not the central question, of philosophy of perception is whether sensory states have a nature similar to thoughts about the world, whether they are essentially representational. According to the content view, at least some of our sensory states are, at their core, representations with contents that are either accurate or inaccurate. Tyler Burge’s Origins of Objectivity is the most sustained and sophisticated defense of the content view to date. His defense of the view is problematic in (...) several ways. The most significant problem is that his approach does not sit well with mainstream perceptual psychology. (shrink)

Перевод статьи: Davies T., Chandler R. Online deliberation design: Choices, criteria, and evidence // Democracy in motion: Evaluating the practice and impact of deliberative civic engagement / Nabatchi T., Weiksner M., Gastil J., Leighninger M. (eds.). -- Oxford: Oxford univ. press, 2013. -- P. 103-131. А. Кулик. -/- Вниманию читателей предлагается обзор эмпирических исследований в области дизайна онлайн-форумов, предназначенных для вовлечения граждан в делиберацию. Размерности дизайна определены для различных характеристик делиберации: назначения, целевой аудитории, разобщенности участников в пространстве и во времени, (...) среды коммуникации и организации делиберативного процесса. После краткого обзора критериев оценки вариантов дизайна рассматриваются эмпирические данные, соотносящиеся с каждым из вариантов. Эффективность онлайн-делиберации зависит от того, насколько условия коммуникации соотносятся с заданиями делиберации. Компромиссы, как, например, между анонимным или идентифицируемым участием, предполагают различные дизайны в зависимости от цели делиберации и состава участников. Выводы исследования получены на материале существующих технологий и могут измениться по мере коэволюции технологий и пользователей. (shrink)

A common objection to representationalism is that a representationalist view of phenomenal character cannot accommodate the effects that shifts in covert attention have on visual phenomenology: covert attention can make items more visually prominent than they would otherwise be without altering the content of visual experience. Recent empirical work on attention casts doubt on previous attempts to advance this type of objection to representationalism and it also points the way to an alternative development of the objection.

A central goal of philosophy of perception is to uncover the nature of sensory capacities. Ideally, we would like an account that specifies what conditions need to be met in order for an organism to count as having the capacity to sense or perceive its environment. And on the assumption that sensory states are the kinds of things that can be accurate or inaccurate, a further goal of philosophy of perception is to identify the accuracy conditions for sensory states. In (...) this paper I recommend a novel approach to these core issues, one that draws heavily on game-theoretic treatments of signaling in nature. A benefit of the approach is that it helps us to understand why biologists attribute sensory powers to such a diverse range of organisms, including plants, fungi, and algae. (shrink)

This paper introduces a hybrid model that unifies connectionist, symbolic, and reinforcement learning into an integrated architecture for bottom-up skill learning in reactive sequential decision tasks. The model is designed for an agent to learn continuously from on-going experience in the world, without the use of preconceived concepts and knowledge. Both procedural skills and high-level knowledge are acquired through an agent’s experience interacting with the world. Computational experiments with the model in two domains are reported.

There is a strong impetus in international agricultural development to close ‘gender gaps’ in agricultural productivity. The goal of empowering women is often framed as the solution to closing these gaps, stimulating the proliferation of new indicators and instruments for the targeting, measurement, and tracking of programmatic goals in research for agricultural development. Despite these advances, current measurements and indices remain too simplified in terms of unit and scope of analysis, as well as being fundamentally flawed in how they aim (...) to capture the relevance of ‘gender’ in diverse local contexts. We propose that the impulse to apply exogenously defined and weakly validated ‘women’s empowerment’ measures to diverse local contexts risks prioritizing practical expedience over scientific accuracy and societal relevance. Furthermore, the application of such measures risks creating the impression that programmatic “gender targets” are being achieved, while simultaneously undermining substantive gender transformative goals. The authors conclude that a different methodological approach grounded in participatory and qualitative methods is needed to create more meaningful metrics for assessing progress towards women’s empowerment. (shrink)

Re-Imagining Relationships in Education re-imagines relationships in contemporary education by bringing state-of-the-art theoretical and philosophical insights to bear on current teaching practices. Introduces theories based on various philosophical approaches into the realm of student teacher relationships Opens up innovative ways to think about teaching and new kinds of questions that can be raised Features a broad range of philosophical approaches that include Arendt, Beckett, Irigaray and Wollstonecraft to name but a few Includes contributors from Norway, England, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, (...) and the U.S. (shrink)

Many compelling examples have recently been provided in which people can achieve impressive epistemic success, e.g. draw highly accurate inferences, by using simple heuristics and very little information. This is possible by taking advantage of the features of the environment. The examples suggest an easy and appealing naturalization of rationality: on the one hand, people clearly can apply simple heuristics, and on the other hand, they intuitively ought do so when this brings them high accuracy at little cost.. The ‘ought-can’ (...) principle is satisfied, and rationality is meaningfully normative. We show, however, that this naturalization program is endangered by a computational wrinkle in the adaptation process taken to be responsible for this heuristics-based (‘ecological’) rationality: for the adaptation process to guarantee even minimal rationality, it requires astronomical computational resources, making the problem intractable. We consider various plausible auxiliary assumptions in attempt to remove this obstacle, and show that they do not succeed; intractability is a robust property of adaptation. We discuss the implications of our findings for the project of naturalizing rationality. (shrink)

There is widely thought to be a proportionality constraint on harming others in self-defense, such that an act of defensive force can be impermissible because the harm it would inflict on an attacker is too great relative to the harm to the victim it would prevent. But little attention has been given to whether a corresponding constraint exists in the ethics of compensation, and, if so, what the nature of that constraint is. This article explores the issue of proportionality as (...) it applies to the liability to compensate. The view that some perpetrators are not liable to pay full compensation because doing so would be disproportionately burdensome is clarified and defended, and it is asked what view we should adopt instead. A key step in that inquiry is an argument that someone is liable to bear the cost of compensating for an injury if and only if she would have been liable to bear that same cost in defense against that same injury ex ante. (shrink)

This paper sets out to reimagine education through a cultural perspective and explores education as a performative practice that establishes certain borders of ‘public’ belonging. Wide-spread debates about the public dimension of schools and universities have focused on how economic rationales need to be replaced with alternative visions of education. This paper seeks to contribute to this revisioning of the public in education by reclaiming education as a specifically cultural endeavour, one tied to practices that are at once both performative (...) and aesthetic. To this end, I draw on theoretical notions of publicity that highlight its performative character. I then offer a reading of a socially engaged art project in order to suggest ways in which this performative character of publicity can be seen to be educational. This paper argues that education itself emerges through various cultural enactments that delineate the contours of who counts as a public and who does not. (shrink)

If reification is the projection of a false, thing-like appearance onto society, what is de-reifying critique supposed to reveal? After distinguishing between versions of reification based on a social ontology of will from those that think of the social as a normatively constituted domain, I argue that Lukács’ work on reification fudges this distinction through his account of class. I then turn to the debate between Schmitt and Kelsen, where the will-versus-norm issue is central. I argue that the consonance between (...) ideas about reification and will-based theories like Schmitt’s is superficial, as the latter relies on identification with authority for its account of normativity, making Kelsen’s ideas about normativity stemming from an orientation toward intersubjective process more convivial. I note, however, that norm-based accounts are less amenable to radical change than will-based ones, making the link between de- reification and radical politics less direct than is often thought. (shrink)

This chapter reviews empirical evidence bearing on the design of online forums for deliberative civic engagement. Dimensions of design are defined for different aspects of the deliberation: its purpose, the target population, the spatiotemporal distance separating participants, the communication medium, and the deliberative process to be followed. After a brief overview of criteria for evaluating different design options, empirical findings are organized around design choices. Research has evolved away from treating technology for online deliberation dichotomously (either present or not) toward (...) nuanced findings that differentiate between technological features, ways of using them, and cultural settings. The effectiveness of online deliberation depends on how well the communicative environment is matched to the deliberative task. Tradeoffs, e.g. between rich and lean media and between anonymous and identifiable participation, suggest different designs depending on the purpose and participants. Findings are limited by existing technologies, and may change as technologies and users co-evolve. (shrink)

Understanding Buddhism provides a series of case studies of Asian and modern Western Buddhists, spanning history, gender, and class, whose lives are representative of the ways in which Buddhists throughout time have embodied the tradition. Portrays the foundational principles of Buddhist belief through the lives of believers, illustrating how the religion is put into practice in everyday life. Takes as its foundation the inherent diversity within Buddhist society, rather than focusing on the spiritual and philosophical elite within Buddhism. Its compelling (...) biographical genre reveals how individuals have negotiated the choices, tensions, and rewards of living in a Buddhist society. Case studies have been carefully chosen to cover a range of Asian and modern Western Buddhists. The text convey a full sample of possible Buddhist orientations in contemporary and historical contexts. (shrink)

Leadership has been shown to be a fundamental factor influencing the performance of sport teams. Within these teams, leadership can be provided by coaches, formal athlete leaders, such as team captains, and other ‘informal’ athlete leaders. The role of the athlete leader in a team, either formal or informal, has been consistently reported over the last 10 years to have a significant impact upon a teams’ functioning and effectiveness, as well as teammates’ general health and mental wellbeing. As such, cultivating (...) the provision of this leadership within a team has emerged as an important focus for managers, coaches, sport psychologists and scholars alike. While the recognition of the importance of athlete leadership is well established, there has been a lag in the development of systematic approaches to enhance and develop the leadership skills and capabilities of the athletes within sport teams. As a result, this paper seeks to review contemporary examples and current understanding of approaches to athlete leadership development. The paper will also highlight future areas for research and applied practice development. (shrink)

This paper defends a broadly Aristotelean account of character friendship that maintains that the impersonal value of acquiring a virtuous character is the ultimate basis for our reasons for caring about friends. This view of friendship appears to conflict with the entrenched intuition that viewing our connections to particular friends as merely contingent occasions for the cultivation of virtue is alienating and undesirable. I argue that far from being an alienating feature of character friendships, a focused appreciation of the contingent (...) nature of friendships represents a morally sound attitude of honest self-acceptance. On my account, honest selfacceptance is an impersonal value—an ideal that anyone has a reason to cultivate. Although the ideal is impersonal, its content specifi es that we appreciatively acknowledge the particular contributions that friends make to the development of virtue. (shrink)

Though the film does not have as its goal reestablishing authentic temporality asHeidegger understands it, Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener nonethelesstakes Heidegger’s exploration of the link between ideology and temporality as its point ofdeparture. The film depicts the politicisation of Justin Quayle through anarrative structure that breaks from an everyday or ideological conception of time.Politicisation occurs, the film implies, through an encounter with feminine enjoyment, anencounter that transforms the subject’s relationship to time and facilitates the subject’sentrance into a non-ideological temporality (...) or what one might call a temporality of the real.Justin’s romance with Tessa entails navigating her enjoyment, and the processof doing so alters his sense of time andtransforms him into a political being. This is the transformation that the film, through itstemporal structure and narrative form, attempts to effect on the spectator as well. Romancethus becomes the vehicle for political awakening rather than the path, as we see in itstraditional cinematic deployment, to an apolitical retreat. (shrink)

Gray's neuropsychological model of consciousness uses a hierarchical feedback loop framework that has been extensively discussed by many others in psychology. This commentary therefore urges Gray to integrate with, or at least acknowledge previous models. It also points out flaws in his feedback model and suggests directions for further theoretical work.

Dune, released in 1984 and directed by David Lynch, from his own adaptedscreenplay of Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel, provides a rich examplefor a reception study on ideas of authorship. On the one hand, Herbert’s 1960scult bestseller has evolved into a franchise and is thus regarded by Duneenthusiasts as a sacrosanct text. From a Lynch perspective, though, the film isusually seen as his least personal work – an event movie no less – and as such itholds the rank of the (...) most uncared for text in his filmic canon. It is the goal ofthis paper to analyse Dune’s meanings in relation to critical writings foundedupon the tenets of early auteurism so we might explore its function as areception preference for the predisposed reader. But rather than simply dismissauteurism as humanist idealism , the outcome of this paper seeks to also take account ofthe writing pleasures the author might bring to the interpretation of filmed texts. (shrink)