The 'Why ain'cha rich?' argument for one-boxing in Newcomb's problem allegedly vindicates evidential decision theory and undermines causal decision theory. But there is a good response to the argument on behalf of causal decision theory. I develop this response. Then I pose a new problem and use it to give a new 'Why ain'cha rich?' argument. Unlike the old argument, the new argument targets evidential decision theory. And unlike the old argument, the new argument is sound.

The crucial premise of the standard argument for two-boxing in Newcomb's problem, a causal dominance principle, is false. We present some counterexamples. We then offer a metaethical explanation for why the counterexamples arise. Our explanation reveals a new and superior argument for two-boxing, one that eschews the causal dominance principle in favor of a principle linking rational choice to guidance and actual value maximization.

The conduct of prior ethics review of human research projects helps to protect vulnerable groups or populations from potential negative impacts of research. Contemporary considerations in human research considers the concept of vulnerability in terms of access to research opportunities, impacts on the consenting process, selection bias, and the generalisability of results. Recent work questions the validity of using enumerated lists as a check box approach to protect research participants from exploitation. Through the use of broad categories to treat cohorts (...) of human research participants as homogenous classes and label some participants as vulnerable merely because they are members of a particular class, some ethics reviewers have used the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research to strip individuals of their “ethical equality”. Labelling people as vulnerable does not help researchers or human research ethics committee members develop an understanding of the complexities of applying the principles of respect and of justice in ethical decision-making. Conversely, defining specific cohorts of research participants as needing nuanced ethical consideration, due to their vulnerable nature, may imply that other population groups need not be considered vulnerable. We contend that this assumption is erroneous. This paper explores the way that human research ethics guidance documents treat vulnerability within the Australian context and draws on contemporary discussion to focus an alternative perspective based on the principles in the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research for researchers and human research ethics committee members to consider. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms may radically improve our ability to diagnose and treat disease. For moral, legal, and scientific reasons, it is essential that doctors and patients be able to understand and explain the predictions of these models. Scalable, customisable, and ethical solutions can be achieved by working together with relevant stakeholders, including patients, data scientists, and policy makers.

We consider a modal language for affine planes, with two sorts of formulas (for points and lines) and three modal boxes. To evaluate formulas, we regard an affine plane as a Kripke frame with two sorts (points and lines) and three modal accessibility relations, namely the point-line and line-point incidence relations and the parallelism relation between lines. We show that the modal logic of affine planes in this language is not finitely axiomatisable.

The following argument is widely assumed to be invalid: there is a pain in my finger; my finger is in my mouth; therefore, there is a pain in my mouth. The apparent invalidity of this argument has recently been used to motivate the conclusion that pains are not spatial entities. We argue that this is a mistake. We do so by drawing attention to the metaphysics of pains and holes and provide a framework for their location which both vindicates the (...) argument's validity and explains why it appears invalid. To this end, we show that previously proposed explanations for the apparent invalidity of the argument fail. Moreover, we show that our account accommodates and explains seemingly opposing linguistic data. We conclude that the ‘pain-in-mouth argument’ does not undermine the view that pains are spatial entities. (shrink)

An intro. to Didaktic (the heart of thinking about teaching/teacher educ in Germany) for English-speaking readers, drawing on a range of writings assoc. w/ this tradition. Throws light on assumptions, characteristics, & weaknesses of curriculum thought.

An expanded & revised version of Religion in an Age of Science. Three new chapters on physics & metaphysics in the 18th century and biology & theology in the 19th century. Other new sections included.

Religion and Science is a comprehensive examination of the major issues between science and religion in today's world. With the addition of three new historical chapters to the nine chapters (freshly revised and updated) of Religion in an Age of Science, winner of the Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in 1991, Religion and Science is the most authoritative and readable book on the subject, sure to be used by science and religion courses and discussion groups and to become the (...) introduction of choice for general readers. (shrink)

The moment when a person’s actual relationships fall short of desired relationships is commonly identified as the etiological moment of chronic loneliness, which can lead to physical and psychological effects like depression, worse recovery from illness and increased mortality. But, this etiology fails to explain the nature and severe impact of loneliness. Here, we use philosophical analysis and neuroscience to show that human beings develop and maintain our world-picture (our sense of what is true, important, and good) through joint attention (...) and action, motivated by friendship, in the Aristotelian sense of “other selves” who share a sense of the true and the good, and desire the good for each other as much as for themselves. The true etiological event of loneliness is the moment one’s world-picture becomes unshared. The pathogenesis is a resultant decay of our world-picture, with brain and behavior changes following as sequelae. (shrink)

Introduction -- Evidence from children -- Evidence form infants and non-human animals -- Evidence from neuroimaging and neuropsychology -- Evidence from adults -- The cognitive basis of mindreading -- Elaborating and applying the theory.

First published 1966 Includes index Includes bibliographical references Campion Collection.

Philosophers have lately seized upon Sperling's partial report technique and subsequent work on iconic memory in support of controversial claims about perceptual experience, in particular that phenomenology overflows cognitive access. Drawing on mounting evidence concerning postdictive perception, I offer an interpretation of Sperling's data in terms of cue-sensitive experience which fails to support any such claims. Arguments for overflow based on change-detection paradigms (e.g. Landman et al., 2003; Sligte et al., 2008) cannot be blocked in this way. However, such paradigms (...) are fundamentally different from Sperling's and, for rather different reasons, equally fail to establish controversial claims about perceptual experience. (shrink)

It is often said that one person or society is `freer' than another, or that people have a right to equal freedom, or that freedom should be increased or even maximized. Such quantitative claims about freedom are of great importance to us, forming an essential part of our political discourse and theorizing. Yet their meaning has been surprisingly neglected by political philosophers until now. Ian Carter provides the first systematic account of the nature and importance of our judgements about degrees (...) of freedom. He begins with an analysis of the normative assumptions behind the claim that individuals are entitled to a measure of freedom, and then goes on to ask whether it is indeed conceptually possible to measure freedom. Adopting a coherentist approach, the author argues for a conception of freedom that not only reflects commonly held intuitions about who is freer than who but is also compatible with a liberal or freedom-based theory of justice. (shrink)

Luck permeates our lives, and this raises a number of pressing questions: What is luck? When we attribute luck to people, circumstances, or events, what are we attributing? Do we have any obligations to mitigate the harms done to people who are less fortunate? And to what extent is deserving praise or blame a ected by good or bad luck? Although acquiring a true belief by an uneducated guess involves a kind of luck that precludes knowledge, does all luck undermine (...) knowledge? And how accurate are our luck attributions anyway? The academic literature has seen growing, interdisciplinary interest in luck, and this volume brings together and explains the most important areas of this research. It consists of 39 newly commissioned chapters, written by an internationally acclaimed team of philosophers and psychologists, for a readership of students and researchers. Its coverage is divided into six sections: (i) The History of Luck, (ii) The Nature of Luck, (iii) Moral Luck, (iv) Epistemic Luck, (v) The Psychology of Luck, and (vi) Future Research. The chapters in these sections cover a wide range of topics, from the problem of moral luck, to anti-luck epistemology, to the relationship between luck attributions and cognitive biases, to meta-questions regarding the nature of luck itself, to a range of other theoretical and empirical questions currently being investigated by ethicists, epistemologists, and psychologists. By bringing this research together, the Handbook serves as both a touchstone for understanding the relevant issues and a first port of call for future philosophical and psychological research on luck. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONE IDEOLOGY AND CONFUSION Among political concepts none is more muddled or more fraught than ideology. This is not for the want of theories to ...

Many epistemologists have recently defended views on which all evidence is true or perceptual reasons are facts. On such views a common account of basic perceptual reasons is that the fact that one sees that p is one’s reason for believing that p. I argue that that account is wrong; rather, in the basic case the fact that p itself is one’s reason for believing that p. I show that my proposal is better motivated, solves a fundamental objection that the (...) received view faces, and illuminates the nature of reasons for belief. (shrink)

How do we know when one person or society is 'freer' than another? Can freedom be measured? Is more freedom better than less? This book provides the first full-length treatment of these fundamental yet neglected issues, throwing new light both on the notion of freedom and on contemporary liberalism.

Two intellectual vices seem to always tempt us: arrogance and diffidence. Regarding the former, the world is permeated by dogmatism and table-thumping close-mindedness. From politics, to religion, to simple matters of taste, zealots and ideologues all too often define our disagreements, often making debate and dialogue completely intractable. But to the other extreme, given a world with so much pluralism and heated disagreement, intellectual apathy and a prevailing agnosticism can be simply all too alluring. So the need for intellectual humility, (...) open-mindedness, and a careful, humble commitment to the truth are apparent. In this book, Dr Church and Dr Samuelson explicate a robust and vibrant account of the philosophy and science of this most valuable virtue, and they highlight how it can be best applied and personally developed. (shrink)

The conviction that Gilles Deleuze is doing something radical in his work has been accompanied by a corresponding anxiety as to how to read it. In this rigorous and lucid work, Ian Buchanan takes up the challenge by answering the following questions: How should we read Deleuze? How should we read _with_ Deleuze? To show us how Deleuze’s philosophy works, Buchanan begins with Melville’s notion that “a great book is always the inverse of another book that could only be written (...) in the soul, with silence and blood.” Buchanan demonstrates that the figure of two books—one written in ink and the other written in blood—lies at the center of Deleuze’s hermeneutics and that a special relation must be established in order to read the second book from the first. This relation is Deleuzism. By explicating elemental concepts in Deleuze—desire, flow, the nomad—Buchanan finds that, despite Deleuze’s self-declared moratorium on dialectics, he was in several important respects a dialectician. In essays that address the “prehistory” of Deleuze’s philosophy, his methodology, and the utopic dimensions of his thought, Buchanan extracts an apparatus of social critique that arises from the philosopher’s utopian impulse. _Deleuzism_ is a work that will engage all those with an interest in the twentieth-century’s most original philosopher. (shrink)

Philosophers have long struggled to understand our perceptual experience of temporal properties such as succession, persistence and change. Indeed, strikingly, a number have felt compelled to deny that we enjoy such experience. Philosophical puzzlement arises as a consequence of assuming that, if one experiences succession or temporal structure at all, then one experiences it at a moment. The two leading types of theory of temporal awareness—specious present theories and memory theories—are best understood as attempts to explain how temporal awareness is (...) possible within the constraints of this principle. I argue that the principle is false. Neither theory of temporal awareness can be made workable unless it is rejected. Our experience of temporal phenomena cannot be understood if we attempt to break experience down into instantaneous slices. In order to understand the perception of temporal properties we must look beyond the instant. (shrink)

A great achievement makes one’s life go better independently of its results, but what makes an achievement great? A simple answer is—its difficulty. I defend this view against recent, pressing objections by interpreting difficulty in terms of competitiveness. Difficulty is determined not by how hard the agent worked for the end but by how hard others would need to do in order to compete. Successfully reaching a goal is a valuable achievement because it is difficult, and it is difficult because (...) it is competitive. Hence, both virtuosic performances and lucky successes can be valuable achievements. (shrink)

A survey of Euclid's Elements, this text provides an understanding of the classical Greek conception of mathematics and its similarities to modern views as well as its differences. It focuses on philosophical, foundational, and logical questions — rather than strictly historical and mathematical issues — and features several helpful appendixes.

Why are some people more mentally able than others? In an authoritative, critical and intergrated series of review essays Professor Ian Deary inquires after the cognitive and biological foundations of human mental ability differences. Many accounts of intelligence have examined the structure and number of human mental ability differences and whether they can predict sucess in education,work and social life. Few books have taken psychometric intelligence differences as a starting point and brought together the reductionistic attempts to explain them.New to (...) the highly acclaimed Oxford Psychology Series, Looking Down on Human Intelligence appraises the search for the origins of psychometric intelligence differences in terms of brain function parameters. The book provides an original and thought provoking guide to ancient and modern research on one of the most compelling questions in human psychology. (shrink)

Introductions to the theory of knowledge are plentiful, but none introduce students to the most recent debates that exercise contemporary philosophers. Ian Evans and Nicholas D. Smith aim to change that. Their book guides the reader through the standard theories of knowledge while simultaneously using these as a springboard to introduce current debates. Each chapter concludes with a “Current Trends” section pointing the reader to the best literature dominating current philosophical discussion. These include: the puzzle of reasonable disagreement; the so-called (...) “problem of easy knowledge”; the intellectual virtues; and new theories in the philosophy of language relating to knowledge. Chapters include discussions of skepticism, the truth condition, belief and acceptance, justification, internalism versus externalism, epistemic evaluation, and epistemic contextualism. Evans and Smith do not merely offer a review of existing theories and debates; they also offer a novel theory that takes seriously the claim that knowledge is not unique to humans. Surveying current scientific literature in animal ethology, they discover surprising sophistication and diversity in non-human cognition. In their final analysis the authors provide a unified account of knowledge that manages to respect and explain this diversity. They argue that animals know when they make appropriate use of the cognitive processes available to animals of that kind, in environments within which those processes are veridically well-adapted. _Knowledge_ is a lively and accessible volume, ideal for undergraduate and post-graduate students. It is also set to spark debate among scholars for its novel approaches to traditional topics and its thoroughgoing commitment to naturalism. (shrink)

Block () highlights two experimental studies of neglect patients which, he contends, provide ‘dramatic evidence’ for unconscious seeing. In Block's hands this is the highly non-trivial thesis that seeing of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur outside of phenomenal consciousness. Block's case for it provides an excellent opportunity to consider a large body of research on clinical syndromes widely held to evidence unconscious perception. I begin by considering in detail the two studies of neglect to which (...) Block appeals. I show why their interpretation as evidence of unconscious seeing faces a series of local difficulties. I then explain how, even bracketing these issues, a long-standing but overlooked problem concerning our criterion for consciousness problematizes the appeal to both studies. I explain why this problem is especially pressing for Block given his view that phenomenal consciousness overflows access consciousness. I further show that it is epidemic—not only affecting all report-based studies of unconscious seeing in neglect, but also analogous studies of the condition most often alleged to show unconscious seeing, namely blindsight. (shrink)

Why save endangered species without clear aesthetic, economic, or ecosystemic value? This book takes on this challenging question through an account of the intrinsic goods of species. Ian A. Smith argues that a species’ intrinsic value stems from its ability to flourish—its organisms continuing to reproduce successfully and it avoiding extinction—which helps to demonstrate a further claim, that humans ought to preserve species that we have endangered. He shows our need to exercise humility in our relations with endangered species through (...) the preservation of their intrinsic goods, which in turn rectifies our degradation of their importance. Unique in its appeal to virtue ethics and to species concepts, _The Intrinsic Value of Endangered Species_ is an important resource for scholars working in environmental ethics and the philosophy of biology. (shrink)

The theory of rationality has traditionally been concerned with the investigation of the norms of rational thought and behaviour, and with the reasoning pro‐cedures that satisfy them. As a consequence, the investigation of irrationality has largely been restricted to the behaviour or thought that violates these norms. There are, how‐ever, other forms of irrationality. Here we propose that the delusions that occur in schizophrenia constitute a paradigm of irrationality. We examine a leading theory of schizophrenic delusion and propose that some (...) delusions can be traced to a violation of a condition on thought we call egocentricity. We argue that the violation of egocen‐tricity leads to irrational states that cannot be explained by the traditional categories of irrationality and conclude, therefore, that these states belong in a new branch of the theory of irrationality, that of experiential irrationality. (shrink)

A familiar and enduring controversy surrounds the question of whether our phenomenal experience “overflows” availability to cognition: do we consciously see more than we can remember and report? Both sides to this debate have long sought to move beyond naïve appeals to introspection by providing empirical evidence for or against overflow. Recently, two notable studies—Bronfman, Brezis, Jacobson, and Usher and Vandenbroucke, Sligte, Fahrenfort, Ambroziak, and Lamme —have purported to provide compelling evidence in favor of overflow. Here I explain why the (...) data from both studies are wholly consistent with a “no overflow” interpretation. Importantly, when framed purely in representational or informational terms, this “no overflow” interpretation agrees with the interpretations respectively offered by both Bronfman et al. and Vandenbroucke et al.. The difference only emerges when additional assumptions are made concerning which representations correspond to elements in consc.. (shrink)

This original, contemporary synthesis between phenomenology and Marx’s late work begins from Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology to chart a new program for Socratic phenomenology in the current confrontation between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity.

In days past, epistemologists expended a good deal of effort trying to analyze the basing relation—the relation between a belief and its basis. No satisfying account was offered, and the project was largely abandoned. Younger epistemologists, however, have begun to yearn for an adequate theory of basing. I aim to deliver one. After establishing some data and arguing that traditional accounts of basing are unsatisfying, I introduce a novel theory of the basing relation: the dispositional theory. It begins with the (...) pedestrian observation that beliefs stand or fall with their bases. The theory I offer is an elucidation and refinement of this thought. (shrink)