In this paper, I’ll look at the implications of Richard Foley’s epistemology for two different kinds of religious disagreement. First, there are those occasions onwhich a stranger testifies to me that she holds disagreeing religious beliefs. Typically, I’m dismissive of such religious disagreement, and I bet you are too. Richard Foley gives reasons to think that we need not be at all conciliatory in the face of stranger disagreement, but I’ll explain why his reasons are insufficient. After that, (...) I’ll look at those types of religious disagreement that occur between epistemic peers. Foley has argued for a conciliatory position. I worry that his position leads to what some in the literature have called “spinelessness.” I also worry that his view is self-defeating, and vulnerable to some apparent counterexamples. I’ll end the paper by sketching my own, non-Foleyan, solution to those problems. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that our ordinary English words man and woman are “gender terms,” and gender is distinct from biological sex. That is, they believe womanhood and manhood are not defined even partly by biological sex. This sex/gender distinction is one of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century on the broader culture, both popular and academic. Less well known are the reasons to think it’s true. My interest in this paper is to show that, upon investigation, the arguments (...) for the sex/gender distinction have feet of clay. In fact, they all fail. We will survey the literature and tour arguments in favor of the sex/gender distinction, and then we’ll critically evaluate those arguments. We’ll consider the argument from resisting biological determinism, the argument from biologically intersex people and vagueness, the argument from the normativity of gender, and some arguments from thought experiments. We’ll see that these arguments are not up to the task of supporting the sex/gender distinction; they simply don’t work. So, philosophers should either develop stronger arguments for the sex/gender distinction, or cultivate a variety of feminism that’s consistent with the traditional, biologically-based definitions of woman and man. (shrink)

Many contemporary epistemologists hold that a subject S’s true belief that p counts as knowledge only if S’s belief that p is also, in some important sense, safe. I describe accounts of this safety condition from John Hawthorne, Duncan Pritchard, and Ernest Sosa. There have been three counterexamples to safety proposed in the recent literature, from Comesaña, Neta and Rohrbaugh, and Kelp. I explain why all three proposals fail: each moves fallaciously from the fact that S was at epistemic risk (...) just before forming her belief to the conclusion that S’s belief was formed unsafely. In light of lessons from their failure, I provide a new and successful counterexample to the safety condition on knowledge. It follows, then, that knowledge need not be safe. Safety at a time depends counterfactually on what would likely happen at that time or soon after in a way that knowledge does not. I close by considering one objection concerning higher-order safety. (shrink)

Do the facts of evolution generate an epistemic challenge to moral realism? Some think so, and many “evolutionary debunking arguments” have been discussed in the recent literature. But they are all murky right where it counts most: exactly which epistemic principle is meant to take us from evolutionary considerations to the skeptical conclusion? Here, I will identify several distinct species of evolutionary debunking argument in the literature, each one of which relies on a distinct epistemic principle. Drawing on recent work (...) in epistemology, I will show that most of these initially plausible principles are false, spoiling the arguments that rely on them. And we will see that each argument threatens only one popular view of moral psychology: a “Representationalist” view on which our moral judgments rely crucially on a mental intermediary—e.g. a sentiment, gut reaction, or affect-laden intuition—delivered by our evolved moral faculty. In the end, only one evolutionary debunking argument remains a menace: an “ Argument from Symmetry ” that I will introduce to the literature. But we will see that it should worry only all naturalists, pressuring them into a trilemma: give up moral realism, accept a rationalism that is incongruous with naturalism, or give up naturalism. Non-naturalists are free and clear. (shrink)

Modalists think that knowledge requires forming your belief in a “modally stable” way: using a method that wouldn't easily go wrong, or using a method that wouldn't have given you this belief had it been false. Recent Modalist projects from Justin Clarke-Doane and Dan Baras defend a principle they call “Modal Security,” roughly: if evidence undermines your belief, then it must give you a reason to doubt the safety or sensitivity of your belief. Another recent Modalist project from Carlotta Pavese (...) and Bob Beddor defends “Modal Virtue Epistemology”: knowledge is a belief that is maximally modally robust across “normal” worlds. We'll offer new objections to these recent Modalist projects. We will then argue for a rival view, Explanationism: knowing something is believing it because it's true. We will show how Explanationism offers a better account of undermining defeaters than Modalism, and a better account of knowledge. (shrink)

What is a woman? The definition of this central concept of feminism has lately become especially controversial and politically charged. “Ameliorative Inquirists” have rolled up their sleeves to reengineer our ordinary concept of womanhood, with a goal of including in the definition all and only those who identify as women, both “cis” and “trans.” This has proven to be a formidable challenge. Every proposal so far has failed to draw the boundaries of womanhood in a way acceptable to the Ameliorative (...) Inquirists, since not all those who identify as women count as women on these proposals, and some who count as women on these proposals don’t identify as women. This is the Trans Inclusion Problem. Is there any solution? Can there be? Recently, Katharine Jenkins, pointing to the work of Mari Mikkola, suggests that the Trans Inclusion Problem can be “deflated” rather than solved. We will investigate this proposal, and show that, unfortunately, Jenkins is mistaken: Mikkola’s project will not help us answer the Trans Inclusion Problem. After that, we’ll look at Robin Dembroff’s suggestion that we “imitate” the linguistic practices of trans inclusive and queer communities, and we will evaluate whether this would help us solve the Trans Inclusion Problem. Unfortunately, this strategy also fails to solve the problem. By the end, we’ll have a better appreciation of the challenges faced by Ameliorative Inquirists in their project of redefining “woman,” and clearer view of why the Trans Inclusion Problem cannot, in fact, be solved. That’s primarily because, no matter what it means to be a woman, it’s one thing to be a woman, and another thing to identify as a woman. (shrink)

Feminism has long grappled with its own demarcation problem—exactly what is it to be a woman?—and the rise of trans-inclusive feminism has made this problem more urgent. I will first consider Sally Haslanger’s “social and hierarchical” account of woman, resulting from “Ameliorative Inquiry”: she balances ordinary use of the term against the instrumental value of novel definitions in advancing the cause of feminism. Then, I will turn to Katharine Jenkins’ charge that Haslanger’s view suffers from an “Inclusion Problem”: it fails (...) to class many trans women as women. Jenkins offers a novel norm-relevancy account of woman to avoid the Inclusion Problem. Unfortunately, Jenkins’ account has serious internal problems, i.e. problems by Jenkins’ own lights: it is unintelligible, or it suffers from an Inclusion Problem of its own. After that, I will develop novel arguments for the conclusion that the project of Ameliorative Inquiry is both incoherent and also impossible to complete—at least, impossible to complete in a trans-inclusive way. Trans-inclusive feminism, therefore, would do well to move beyond Ameliorative Inquiry. Insofar as that’s not possible, trans-inclusive feminism inherits the incoherence of Ameliorative Inquiry. (shrink)

Some philosophers believe that when epistemic peers disagree, each has an obligation to accord the other's assessment the same weight as her own. I first make the antecedent of this Equal-Weight View more precise, and then I motivate the View by describing cases in which it gives the intuitively correct verdict. Next I introduce some apparent counterexamples – cases of apparent peer disagreement in which, intuitively, one should not give equal weight to the other party's assessment. To defuse these apparent (...) counterexamples, an advocate of the View might try to explain how they are not genuine cases of peer disagreement. I examine David Christensen's and Adam Elga's explanations and find them wanting. I then offer a novel explanation, which turns on a distinction between knowledge from reports and knowledge from direct acquaintance. Finally, I extend my explanation to provide a handy and satisfying response to the charge of self-defeat. (shrink)

‘Gender identity’ was clearly defined sixty years ago, but the dominant conceptions of gender identity today are deeply obscure. Florence Ashley’s 2023 theory of gender identity is one of the latest attempts at demystification. Although Ashley’s paper is not fully coherent, a coherent theory of gender identity can be extracted from it. That theory, we argue, is clearly false. It is psychologically very implausible, and does not support ‘first­person authority over gender’, as Ashley claims. We also discuss other errors and (...) confusions in Ashley’s paper. (shrink)

Some philosophers believe that, when epistemic peers disagree, each has an obligation to accord the other’s assessment equal weight as her own. Other philosophers worry that this Equal-Weight View is vulnerable to straightforward counterexamples, and that it requires an unacceptable degree of spinelessness with respect to our most treasured philosophical, political, and religious beliefs. I think that both of these allegations are false. To show this, I carefully state the Equal-Weight View, motivate it, describe apparent counterexamples to it, and then (...) explain away the apparent counterexamples. Finally, I adapt those explanations to cases of religious disagreement. In the end, we reach the surprising conclusion that—even if the Equal-Weight View is true—in very many cases of religious disagreement between apparent epistemic peers, the parties to the disagreement need not be conciliatory. And what goes for religious beliefs goes for political and philosophical beliefs as well. This strongly suggests that the View does not demand an unacceptable degree of spinelessness. (shrink)

In the standard thought experiments, dualism strikes many philosophers as true, including many non-dualists. This ‘striking’ generates prima facie justification: in the absence of defeaters, we ought to believe that things are as they seem to be, i.e. we ought to be dualists. In this paper, I examine several proposed undercutting defeaters for our dualist intuitions. I argue that each proposal fails, since each rests on a false assumption, or requires empirical evidence that it lacks, or overgenerates defeaters. By the (...) end, our prima facie justification for dualism remains undefeated. I close with one objection concerning the dialectical role of rebutting defeaters, and I argue that the prospects for a successful rebutting defeater for our dualist intuitions are dim. Since dualism emerges undefeated, we ought to believe it. (shrink)

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama televizija bei informacinės technologijos egzistencinės kūrybos perspektyvoje. Keliamas klausimas, ar medijuoti vaizdai gali tapti egzistencinės kūrybos veiksniais. Autorius priešina gyvenseną ir gyvenimo stilių. Pirmoji siejama su mąstymo ir egzistencijos dialektika, antrasis – su medijuotų vaizdų niveliuojančiu poveikiu. Teigiama, kad egzistencijos sąranga – ne tik kalbinė, bet ir vaizdinė. Pasak autoriaus, kūrybinė aplinka palaikoma skirtingos prigimties egzistencinių vaizdų sąšaukos dėka. Iškeliama didžioji tezė: mūsų egzistencinis projektas formuojasi skirtingų vaizdiškumo plotmių sąveikos žaizdre. Ši tezė seka iš prielaidos, kad mūsų gyvenamasis (...) pasaulis ir egzistencija jame – vaizdiški. Mažosios tezės: reginiai vertintini pagal jų vietą egzistenciniame vaizde; ekrano reginiai padeda žiūros išsklaidai; reginiai šiapus ir anapus ekrano išbandomi egzistencijos fenomenų aplinkoje. (shrink)

There is much to admire in John Pittard’s recent book on the epistemology of disagreement. But here we develop one concern about the role that rational insight plays in his project. Pittard develops and defends a view on which a party to peer disagreement can show substantial partiality to his own view, so long as he enjoys even moderate rational insight into the truth of his view or the cogency of his reasoning for his view. Pittard argues that this may (...) happen in ordinary cases of religious disagreement—cases in which it’s a live skeptical possibility that one is misdescribing his insight, or not having insight at all—and therefore one need not be strongly conciliatory even in the face of peer disagreement. Yet Pittard agrees that one should be strongly conciliatory in cases of disagreement involving, e.g., visual perception and dim rational insight, since the sort of fallible, corrigible evidence involved in such cases may be counterbalanced by symmetrical evidence on the part of one’s disagreeing peer. We worry that there’s an inconsistency here. If it’s unreasonable to show partiality to one’s visual experience (or dim rational insight) in cases like “Horse Race” and “Restaurant Check,” it’s likewise unreasonable to show partiality in religious disagreements to one’s moderate rational insight, fallible and corrigible as it is. (shrink)

Motherese is a form of affective prosody injected automatically into speech during caregiving solicitude. Affective prosody is the aspect of language that conveys emotion by changes in tone, rhythm, and emphasis during speech. It is a neocortical function that allows graded, highly varied vocal emotional expression. Other mammals have only rigid, species-specific, limbic vocalizations. Thus, encephalization with corticalization is necessary for the evolution of progressively complex vocal emotional displays.

Phenomenological analysis yields three characteristics of human dignity: elevation, intimacy and autonomy. Philosophy describes human dignity as the superior good of the absolute. And ontology locates such nobility in the peculiar subsistence of the human subject that receives its own actus essendi in the spiritual soul, both immortal and necessary.

Nowadays, modernization, development and adaptation in society is more and more linked to primarily dromocratic teletopy, i.e. the ability and readiness to connect to networks. The process of modernization received a new and powerful impetus over the last decade. This impetus is increasing the speed of information translation (transfer). However inseparable from networks and meta-networks speed is, it can be studied relatively independently in a given context, as indicated by P. Virilio in his dromologic research. Dromologic research of “man’s status (...) in the world” shows that man – his perception, his language as well as his thinking is substantially changed by the speed of information translation. Virilio devoted a considerable part of his work to the changes of perception of reality. He studied how a new way of perception of reality is created owing to ever increasing speed of sequential information transfer, how new aesthetics – aesthetics of disappearing – is formed thanks to cinematographic (i.e. visualized) division. The following text aims at showing that ethics, those issues concerning moral values, ethical standpoints and substantiations of various social dilemmas and conflicts overnight have rapidly ended up in a new element created by the speed of information transfer in networks. (shrink)

The article deals with the relation between body and its environment. According to the author the body is not only a centre of orientation, but also a factor of creative interaction. The role of the senses is analysed, drawing from the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. On the background of Levinas ideas the body is conceived as the source of the ethical relationships between the inhabitants of the environment, which is paralelly created by them. The body is interpreted in the (...) context of phenomenological and hermeneutical cultural studies. The author raises the thesis that the body is implicit in the existential creation conceived as an interaction between us and our environment. The phenomenology of culture is conceived as an interaction between different existential layers , where the body lays an important role. The theses, raised in the article, are illustrated by the examples from multi-layer art. (shrink)

En este artículo se derivan y proponen seis recomendaciones: 1. Brigadas de capacitación, de aprendizaje y de aprehendizaje. 2. Reconversión de los directivos y superiores. 3. Sistema de información y comunicación multinivel. 4. Autogestión escolar. 5. Interculturalidad e inclusión. 6. Solventar cien por ciento de las necesidades básicas de infraestructura.

Most philosophers, including all materialists I know of, believe that I am a complex thing?a thing with parts?and that my mental life is (or is a result of) the interaction of these parts. These philosophers often believe that I am a body or a brain, and my mental life is (or is a product of) brain activity. In this paper, I develop and defend a novel argument against this view. The argument turns on certainty, that highest epistemic status that a (...) precious few of our beliefs enjoy. For example, on the basis of introspection, I am certain that I am not in fierce pain right now. But if I am a complex thing like a body or a brain, then introspection might be a causal series of events extended in time. And any such process could go awry. So, if introspection is such a process, then I could gain good evidence that the introspective process has gone awry and that I am, contrary to appearances, feeling fierce pain right now. Therefore, the view that I am a complex thing like a body or a brain forces open the possibility that I cannot be certain that I am not feeling fierce pain right now. Since that is clearly not an open possibility, it follows that I am not a complex thing. I conclude by responding to three objections. (shrink)

This article presents an analysis of how a male convert to Islam incorporates events from his life history into a narrative structure in order to construct and maintain a Muslim identity. The study focuses on how the individual and in particular a person's life history becomes social and universal, and how the social and universal becomes particularized and individualized, in the narration of life. The results of the analysis showed that the valued endpoint determines the selection and ordering of different (...) episodes, and the causal connections that are made between them. Many episodes in this convert's life story is similar to other converts' narratives, for example, descriptions of absent significant others during childhood, an inclusion of a Christian phase in life, and the importance attributed to the Qur'an in the process of conversion. The incorporation of these episodes in one's life story and the way the narratives are structured are interpreted as influences from collective narratives. Moreover, the analysis revealed that the selected episodes have important social, individualizing and sedative functions in the flux of discourses in postmodern society. Thus, the individual's Muslim identity is an amalgamation of the particular and the universal and the importance of the narratives lies in the fact that they can integrate particular experiences into a universal structure that gives them a meaning. (shrink)

The article deals with the concepts of matter and form. These concepts belong to the Aristotelian theory of hylomorphism which was very influential in the Middle-Ages and in the early modern second-scholastic cosmology. At present, this theory is discussed by authors of both scholastic and analytical backgrounds. The article presents and discusses some of the recent commentaries on this topic.

I begin by retracing an argument from Aristotle for final causes in science. Then, I advance this ancient thought, and defend an argument for a stronger conclusion: that no scientific explanation can succeed, if Naturalism is true. The argument goes like this: (1) Any scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural regularity. Next, I argue that (2) any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls out for explanation but lacks (...) one. From (1) and (2) it follows that (3) a scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural regularity, and this regularity does not call out for explanation while lacking one. I then argue that (4) if Naturalism is true, then all natural regularities call out for explanation but lack them. From (3) and (4) it follows that (5) if Naturalism is true, then no scientific explanation can be successful. If you believe that scientific explanation can be (indeed, often has been) successful, as I do, then this is a reason to reject Naturalism. (shrink)

Human life ends with death, but not necessarily in all its forms. In the paper, I recall two basic ways in which it does not end and discuss in detail one in particular which persists in the further development of the projects, ideas and events which the dead person was identified with during his lifetime. I then show how this possible form of afterlife is ambivalently present in Patočka’s thought: Patočka specifies that what we have after death is a metaphysical (...) quality of the dead, while on the other hand he calls for the interpretative decipherment of the life of the dead, that is, against an unchanging core of the deceased (a metaphysical essence), he acknowledges an interpretation that implies the possible change or development of the dead person. In the next section, I support the discussion of the form of postmortal life by mentioning a sketch of the concept of man in process philosophy and ancient Greek thought (using an interpretation advocated by Patočka himself). Finally, I revisit some death-related motifs in Patočka’s Heretical Essays, with the help of Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of these essays. (shrink)

According to informal logic, the possibilities of deductive logic as a tool for analysing and evaluating ordinary arguments are very limited. While I agree with this claim in general, I question it in the case of the argument from cause to effect. In this paper I first show, on the basis of carefully chosen examples, that we usually react differently to falsification of the conclusion of the argument from cause to effect than we do to the falsification of the conclusion (...) of other defeasible arguments. I then identify general conditions and assumptions under which the causal argument from cause to effect can be reconstructed as deductive. Finally, I compare the causal argument with the expert argument, which is a typical example of a defeasible argument in the narrower sense. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that the disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists about the compatibility of free will with determinism is merely verbal, since although one side of the dispute claims that free will is compatible with determinism while the other denies it, they actually ascribe a different meaning to the term "free will". One can therefore accept both the compatibilist thesis and the incompatibilist thesis, since the two are not contradictory. My method is to analyse the (...) meaning of the phrase "being an ability to do otherwise" as a property of abilities and the meaning of the phrase "having an ability to do otherwise" as a property of agents. The result of this analysis allows me to make an unbiased comparison of the necessary conditions that compatibilists and incompatibilists expect to hold if agents are to have the ability to do otherwise. It is shown, as expected, that these conditions are not the same. (shrink)

The chapter discusses the rejuvenation of an interest in Mach in the recent metaphysics and philosophy of mind. In the early twentieth century, Mach had been interpreted as a phenomenalist, but phenomenalism fell out of favor in the 1950s. In the later decades, he received praise for his naturalism, but his contributions to metaphysics or philosophy of mind were regarded as misbegotten or irrelevant. With the search for a monistic alternative to both materialism and dualism in the recent philosophy of (...) consciousness, however, Mach attracts a fresh attention. For example, the contemporary philosopher Sam Coleman develops a version of a monistic metaphysic called “panqualityism,” which resembles Mach’s view to a large extent. Like most contemporary monists, however, Coleman works much more closely from Russell’s The Analysis of Matter, than Mach’s The Analysis of Sensations. The chapter details the circumstances that have led to the recent rise of monism; the varieties of Russellian monism; Coleman’s panqualityism; and the similarities and differerences between panqualityism and Machian monism. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The ethical criticism of art has recently begun to address the subject of immoral artists, with two questions seeming to dominate discussion. How does moral misconduct on the part of artists affect their work’s aesthetic value? How should the art world respond to cases of artists who have been accused of morally outrageous behaviour? Such value and policy debates are important, but they leave aside a pressing question towards which this article proposes a reorientation: What is the possible impact of (...) an artist’s moral ill repute on how we understand the meaning of their work? I argue in this paper that an artist’s bad moral reputation can lead (i) to participatory resistance to an art work, as viewers abstain from a response to the work’s illocutionary force, (ii) to the isolation of the work from the ‘quality context’ that normally allows propositions expressed by the work to be taken as sincere, (iii) to the reinterpretation of the work’s propositional content against the background of new knowledge about the author, and (iv) to the perception of the work as a lie. To illustrate, I look at works by Chuck Close and Jan Fabre, contemporary artists whose reputation has been affected by a scandal. (shrink)

Straipsnyje aptariami pagrindinių fizinio ugdymo koncepcijų filosofiniai aspektai pabrėžiant filosofijos kaip temiškai neredukuoto mokslo tarpdalykinę reikšmę. Fizinio ugdymo tikslų ir metodų konceptualizavimas neišvengiamai suponuoja vienokią ar kitokią kūno sampratą. Straipsnio autoriai remiasi principine nuostata, kad filosofinei refleksijai sportas ir fizinis aktyvumas atsiskleidžia kaip tam tikros žmogaus saviaktualizacijos formos. Straipsnyje atskleidžiama fizinio ugdymo koncepcijų kaitos sąsaja su filosofinio požiūrio į kūną pokyčiais, išryškinami holistinio požiūrio į individą ir jo ugdymą formavimosi esminiai etapai.

The aim of the paper is twofold. First, it expounds the thesis of ‘conceptual relativity’ propounded in a series of writings of the well-known philosopher Hilary Putnam and indicates the alleged manner in which the thesis, according to Putnam, undermines the foundations of metaphysical realism (understood in a peculiar way spelled out in the paper). Second, a critical examination of Putnam’s anti-metaphysical-realist argument is offered. It is argued that Putnam offers examples only of a trivial, so-called indexical relativity, and that (...) his strategy leaves the foundations of metaphysical realism intact. (shrink)

Chapter I Modern Suicidism I WAS not yet ten years old when, for the first time, I began to think a great deal about suicide. Perhaps I had heard something ...

INTRODUCTION Substance of the modern ideal of humanity — Development of this ideal since the Reformation and the Renaissance — The ideal of naturalness and ...

1. Praktická filozofie na základě sociologie : etika --.