Here's the place to be critical!  Anything that can help me develop this argument is much appreciated.  This is something I develop a bit in my dissertation and the hope is to develop it more here and eventually have something worthy of publication.

Hi Matt,

This is a very interesting paper.  I am in agreement with the basic premise, namely, that we should be suspicious of moral intuitions which are highly contingent or "flippable".  However, I have one or two questions about the argument.

In one section, you're dealing with the problem of "typing" mechanisms.  The point, as I understand it, is to show that your argument defeats demandingness intuitions but does not defeat other moral intuitions (such as those concerning the wrongness of slavery).  You say:

Given these considerations, how generally should we type the testimonial process behind my moral belief that slavery is wrong? The reliability of (say) my mother’s anti-racist moral testimony in the actual world should not necessarily be impugned by the unreliability of her moral testimony were she a racist bigot, for her epistemic situation (i.e., her foundational moral beliefs) in the latter case would be radically mistaken. The two types of testimonial processes, then, are plausibl ... (read more)

Hi Professor Demetriou,

I've just read the draft of your paper, and I really enjoyed it, especially the bits where you complicate the somewhat simplistic just-so cultural-evolutionary story provided by Ross and Nisbett.  One rarely sees such deep engagement with actual anthropological data in moral-philosophical papers about disagreement, and I think your reflections here are a valuable contribution to this literature.

However, I have a question about the "pluralism" that is on offer, which is "a view urging the moral correctness of  multiple and mutually irreducible comprehensive ethical  outlooks , each suited to  its own dimension  of social life ."  A familiar worry emerges here, which is that you are covertly drawing on a kind of monism which serves to make each of the competing moral systems appear attractive.  The trouble begins with the word "suited": what does it mean to say that a moral outlook is "suited" t ... (read more)

Heritage of the Yoga Philosophy and Transcendental Phenomenology:

 The Interlocution of  Knowledge and Wisdom across Two Traditions of Philosophy

 

Koshy Tharakan

Associate Professor

Department of Philosophy

 Goa University

koshy@unigoa.ac.in

 

Abstract  Comparative philosophy has been subjected to much criticism in the latter half of the last century, though some of these criticisms were appropriate and justified. However, in our present cultural milieu, where traditions and culture transcend their geographical boundaries, seeping through the global network of views and ideas, it seems to be a legitimate enterprise to understand one’s own traditions and culture through the critical lens of the ‘other culture’. It is such cross-cultural understanding that paved the way towards legitimizing “human rights” as a universal discourse. So also, the discourse on “environmental ethics” has gained acceptance in a similar manner across cultures and traditions.  The paper attempts at an understan ... (read more)

Thank you very much for creating PhilJobs.

Would it be possible to add a widget creation wizard for PhilJobs (just as there is one for PhilEvents)?

Thank you very much for creating PhilEvents and for providing a widget creation widget.

For the purpose of the third-party website that I help creating it would be very useful to have a widget with a location filter that does not filter on the basis of a certain distance from a certain city but on the basis of a world region (e.g., Europe). Would it be possible to add this feature?

This was a solid paper guys I really must commend you for the excellent work. With that said, I do agree with you about Raz's arguments. They seemed to possess little to no substance whatsoever and his argument of self-interest towards the end seemed to be more of a forfeiture of his premise than anything else. I will at least credit him for attempting to untangle the knots in this complex field we call moral philosophy but I had some major objections while reading. Please do correct me if I speak ignorantly or from a misinformed position.

1. Raz says to be moral is to see value in others and one's self. This value is derived from the virtue of being a person. Are we to take it that the recognition of this value disregards how we cultivate that value through action which subsequently has consequences? If I see value in someone, but still decide to take away their life because I perceive myself to be more valuable, am I moral or not.

2. A refutation of point 1 would be that to see value ... (read more)

One of the correlations I find interesting in the survey is of a predominance (among the target group) of atheists with a predominance of moral cognitivists. This conforms to the several books that have come out in the last decade by so-called New Atheists who nevertheless continue staunchly to defend morality (and often as well their particular moral take on things). While the correlation in the survey is therefore not surprising to me, it is surprising to me in a kind of normative sense, in that I have latterly come to see morality as but a relic of "that old time religion." Of course the correlation has an honored and ancient pedigree, beginning with Plato's "Euthyphro." But isn't it about time that the analytic consensus moved towards a robust moral abolitionism, in the manner of, say, Richard Garner, rather than forever attempting to salvage a way of speaking that perpetuates attitudes we seem more than happy to discard in the case of religion?

This may be a commonplace in statistical science, but it came as a pleasant surprise to me to see "It is surprising" operationally defined in this paper, namely as reaching a level of dashed expectation by philosophers who took the metasurvey. "It is surprising" is one of countless expressions that, in my view, are used to subtly and illicitly but powerfully and even unawares used to bring others around to seeing things the way oneself does. I described an example in this passage: 

The point I want to make in the present chapter is that the natural tendency to objectify what is essentially subjective is pervasive in our experience, even beyond morality. Consider the seemingly innocuous sentence, “The results were surprising,” which I quote from a book about the physiology and psychology of marine animals. The context is the discussion of an experiment to determine whether crustaceans can feel pain. The subjects were hermit crabs living inside abandoned snail shells that had been outfitt ... (read more)

Occasionally I have been asked by students what I myself believe, especially when it come to more sensitive topics dealing with a  religious outlook.  My answer typically is that I do not want to influence their own classroom discussion by intruding my personal outlook.  In this way I can continue to play Socrates,constantly challenging positions put forward without having to defend any stand of my own.

The truth of the matter, though, is that I am very uncomfortable with that term "belief."  Again, in the classroom, I will often cite as an axiom the idea from William James that beliefs are rules for action so that the content of a belief matters less to me than how it determines someone's behavior.  Consequently, I am far less interested in many of the standard debates dealing with metaphysical or epistemological issues than I am with discussions involving ethics and political theory.   At the same time, though, I understand full well that there are certa ... (read more)

The majority of the correlational research published in the experimental psychology journals is based on correlations with r values ranging from .40 upwards. According to the authors of the popular elementary book Psychology—Gleitman, Gross, and Reisberg—these numbers reflect relationships strong enough to produce recognizable patterns in the data. When we are working with r values much less than .40, we begin to grasp at straws. However rock solid the inferential statistical analysis in this paper, the foundation of the inferences is the correlations. When we have correlations that are drastically below the r values acceptable for publication in the experimental journals, one should seriously question what to make of inferential analyses of them. Using inferential statistics to make any broad claims based on such low r values is bad, and I worry that people unacquainted with statistical research will use the analysis provided in the paper for more than satisfying their curiosity. If&n ... (read more)

Dear authors,

Thank you for this very interesting and illuminative paper and a chance to get acquainted with it. I'm interested in one particular moment. How many philosophers did describe themselves as a 'followers' of Wittgenstein? I'm investigating the problem of unpopularity of Wittgenstein in contemporary Analytic philosophy and I would very appreciate if you could make the result of your survey on the question stated above available.


Thank you in advance.

Sincerely yours,
Iurii Kozik

What possible significance could this article have? I'm surprised that it has even been accepted for publication. If it is publishable anywhere, it belongs in a sociology journal. Its methods are sociological, not philosophical, and terminally flawed by their lack of comprehensiveness with regard to formulating the survey.

Its questions are simplistic, dichotomous, and non-exhaustive. Moreover, many of these dichotomies are false, e.g., "analytic" vs. "continental" juxtaposes a conceptual category with a geographical category, i.e., it should be either "analytic" vs. "speculative" or "Anglo-American" vs. "continental."

Another example: "Theistic" vs. "atheistic" made me laugh. There are just so many other unmentioned options here. Maybe the high-school-educated-person-in-the-street could answer that question, but how could a philosopher answer it?

I must commend you both on a well written and superbly organized piece. Though I must confess I did not read the entirety of the work (Due largely to the fact that I am still a neophyte as it pertains to the majority of philosophical concepts surveyed among the participants.) it is clear that you two put forth much effort and time into this piece. What I actually did want to discuss though were two particular results that captured my interest. The first being that 72.8% of respondents are Atheist. Now doing the math, we see that 72.8% of the 931 philosophers who responded to this survey equates to 678 people rounding up. Though I did not formally submit a survey I belong to this camp. These results are surely indicative that philosophical thought has all but breezed past the likes of Kant, Spinoza, Aquinas, etc.
     The result that I found far more fascinating and admittedly somewhat perplexing, was the popularity of Egalitarianism. 34.8% of people partake in Egalit ... (read more)

I have only just skimmed the paper. I noticed that det/indeterminism is not a category. Is this because determinism is viewed as subsumed under the other categories (free will, physicalism, laws of nature, etc)? 
Again, I have only just skimmed the paper, so there may be discussion on this I missed. 

Kind regards,
Clint Ballinger 

(I am interested as your work will be very useful when I get the chance to update "Determinism and the Antiquated Deontology of the Social Sciences" 

We've written an article based on the PhilPapers Survey of professional philosophers: What Do Philosophers Believe?. It covers the popularity of various views; correlations with age, gender, and geography; a factor analysis that tries to isolate important underlying factors; and discussion of the results of the Metasurvey, bringing out just how surprising some of the survey results are. There are various goodies along the way that haven't been previously revealed. The article is forthcoming in Philosophical Studies. We'll be submitting the final version soon, but in the meantime all comments are welcome in the article's discussion forum (see "discussion" at the bottom of the page linked above).

I have found quite many philosophical texts about the "Resurrection of Jesus". I suggest that we need a leaf category for this under "Christianity" with an alias under "Miracles". They do not fit into "Resurrection" because that is about human life after death. (The articles that should be in "Resurrection" in my view could all be in "Afterlife".)
Daniel

There isn't a category that perfectly suits this question, but here it goes. Could someone give me some advice on how to make diagrams or figures for a paper, of the sort you find frequently in science articles and the odd time in philosophy articles? I'd like to create a diagram consisting of circles, lines with arrows, and some text, though I've no idea how to do it.
Kevin.

For anyone interested, I've written up a brief critique of this paper at Philosophy, et cetera.

Good day,
My leaf category ‘Miracles, Misc.‘ contains already 261 texts, and I will find more. I propose a few new leaf categories:
* The definition of the concept of a miracle (or omit 'The definition of')

* The possibility and nature of miracles (or omit 'and nature') (for all the discussions about whether and how there is room for miracles, about whether in a miracle God makes the wave function collapse, etc.)

* Epistemological questions about miracles.
Yours,
Daniel